Books and culture

What I’m reading

John Quiggin13 Comments

I just reread “The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia” (Ursula K. Le Guin), which I enjoyed as much as ever. There are a bunch of other books I should be reading, most of them weighty tomes on network theory, real options and so on, but Mark Bahnisch has kindly pointed me to a nearly endless source of distraction, China Miéville’s list of Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read. Le Guin is on the list, of course, along with many of my favorites (though many of the books recommended are new to me) and classics like Bellamy’s Looking Backwards and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

13 thoughts on “What I’m reading”

  1. Interesting. I’ve read a bit of Le Guin. Some years ago I started collecting Dick’s works, which are worth trawling through for their innovative and unusual ideas.

    Haven’t read much science fiction lately. Reminds me that I really should get back into it again! 😉

  2. One of my favourites.

    Try Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. Forget the rest. Enders game in my opinion is the best sci-fi book.

  3. I don’t know whether Frankenstein is a book that a socialist should read, though the Frankenstein title has been misappropriated by the Green movement in their critique of GM foods (‘Frankenfood’)

  4. I found a cheap compendium edition of five of Dick’s novels a few months back. Great reading. I also enjoyed Ender’s Game.

  5. This is slightly off topic; but John’s post seemed a good opportunity to ask a question that has long intrigued me in the hope that there are many SF fans who read this blog. What was the earliest piece of science fiction that proposed something like the WWW or the internet?

  6. Ron,

    There are probably earlier examples but Asimov’s short stories from the 40’s and 50’s featuring Univac are noteworthy. while Univac is described as “a” caomputer it is actually a gigantic network of computers spread across the solar system (and later te glaxy) which human characters use to retrieve information etc.

    Clifford Simak’s “City” series from aroudn the same time features humanoid robots run from a centralised computer system which also function as a reference and communication device.

    John Brunner’s Shockwave Rider from the mid-1970’s coems very close to describign the internet. Of course, Usenet was already operating by then.

  7. And Ron, while it’s not SF per se,
    http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/194507/bush
    is generally regarded as one of the first attempts to map out the concept of an internet (and the web too) in the public mind and had a lot of influence on SF writers like Simak and on Asimov’s Univac stories mentioned above.

    And I seem to recall a short story by Eric Frank Russell from the same time that revolved around people playing games with a universally accessible and interactive database like wikipedia.

    Tim Berners-Lee is also apparently on record somewhere for saying Arthur C Clarke’s 1965 short story “Dial F for Frankenstein” got him thinking about the internet’s potential.

    The problem though Ron, is that SF has long been full of futures where people communicate and exchange data in near real time with whizzy technologies. So it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when such technologies started manifesting the form and features we’d think of as “yes, that’s the internet we know.”

    As Ian said, “Shockwave Rider” (why isn’t it back in print?)” is often regarded as one turning point in identifying the outline and applications of the internet as it is now.

  8. Ian and Nabokov

    Thank you very much for these references, which I will try to chase up and read. (I have already been able to obtain the article from the Atlantic, as well as another one they identified under ‘Prophets of the Computer Age’. Although I have been a subscriber for some time, I was not aware of either).

  11. Given that this blog is a such a reliable source of information on so many issues, the people who contribute must be trustworthy: If you have recommendations about REALLY GOOD recent SF books, please go ahead.

    I must say that I am often disapointed by the SF I read, even by books that have good reviews (recently, a Greg Bear whose title I forgot, and a non indispensable sequel by Joe Hadelman). When you have limited time and cannot read everything, it is so good when you run into the greatest stuff. (I am talking about stuff like Hadelman’s Forever War, Kim Stanley”s Robinson’s red Mars and yes, Ender’s game… books that prevent you from working or doing anything until you are through).

  12. From some recent reviews I came across, Ballantyne’s “Recursion” appears to be good. Unfortunately it hasn’t reached Australia yet.

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