Briefly share your experience of reading science fiction book
Answers
I started reading sci-fi to pass the time. I had good memories of reading Jurassic Park as a kid. I continued because I noticed that it gave me something: a stronger imagination, a disrespect for the merely possible.
I started noticing I had different ideas, ideas you can’t find by reading the same TechCrunch articles, Medium posts, and Hacker News digests as everyone else in Silicon Valley. I am in the business of selling ideas, and found these books both a treasure trove and a toolkit.
As futurist Jason Silva says, “Imagination allows us to conceive of delightful future possibilities, pick the most amazing one, and pull the present forward to meet it.” I believe reading these books has helped me both in the conceiving and the pulling.
Every good sci-fi story is, at it’s core, a thought experiment, and I’d like to run one of my own now:
What if these books represented a fair guess at what the future will be like?
It’s not so far-fetched. Reading the early classics by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, what strikes me is not how much they got wrong, but how much they got right. I drew my selections mostly from this listof the top 100 sci-fi works of all time, so these books represent what we consider the best (or at least the most interesting) ideas out there.
Here is the future we are headed for, as predicted by our greatest sci-fi writers.
Answer:
Over the past two years I’ve read 100 sci-fi novels, averaging about one per week. See the full list here, with my favorites.
I started reading sci-fi to pass the time. I had good memories of reading Jurassic Park as a kid. I continued because I noticed that it gave me something: a stronger imagination, a disrespect for the merely possible.
I started noticing I had different ideas, ideas you can’t find by reading the same TechCrunch articles, Medium posts, and Hacker News digests as everyone else in Silicon Valley. I am in the business of selling ideas, and found these books both a treasure trove and a toolkit.
As futurist Jason Silva says, “Imagination allows us to conceive of delightful future possibilities, pick the most amazing one, and pull the present forward to meet it.” I believe reading these books has helped me both in the conceiving and the pulling.
Every good sci-fi story is, at it’s core, a thought experiment, and I’d like to run one of my own now:
What if these books represented a fair guess at what the future will be like?
It’s not so far-fetched. Reading the early classics by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, what strikes me is not how much they got wrong, but how much they got right. I drew my selections mostly from this listof the top 100 sci-fi works of all time, so these books represent what we consider the best (or at least the most interesting) ideas out there.
Here is the future we are headed for, as predicted by our greatest sci-fi writers.