I read a lot — mostly heavyweight sci-fi and non-fiction on strategy, systems, and human behaviour. This is where I write up my reactions. Not summaries. Not ratings out of 10 (okay, sometimes ratings out of 10). Just honest notes on what landed and what didn’t.
If you want to know my taste: I like dense, complex, philosophical, and dark. If the protagonist solves everything with optimism and engineering, I’ll probably put it down. If the author makes me feel slightly uncomfortable about the human condition, I’m in.
Favourite authors: Gene Wolfe, Peter Watts, Iain Banks, Neal Stephenson, Cixin Liu, Nassim Taleb, Robert Caro.
This was an amazing read. It follows generations of two families in California’s Salinas Valley from the Civil War era into the early twentieth century — and underneath the family saga is a sustained meditation on the nature of good and evil.
The central idea — timshel, “thou mayest” — is that humans have the choice to overcome their nature. Not that they will. Not that it’s easy. Just that the choice exists. Steinbeck builds the entire novel around this single Hebrew word, and by the time it pays off at the end, it hits like a freight train.
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There aren’t many authors with universal acclaim across the sci-fi reading community. Iain Banks is one of them, and the Culture series is his masterpiece.
The Culture is a post-scarcity civilisation run by benevolent AI “Minds” — and the series explores what happens when that civilisation interacts with ones that are messier, more violent, more recognisably ours. It’s utopia written by someone smart enough to know that utopia is boring — so every book finds the cracks.
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This was the book that put Chinese sci-fi on my radar. The setup is deceptively simple: alien civilisation detects Earth, plans invasion. But Liu Cixin layers in the horrors of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the psychology of civilisational despair, and some genuinely unsettling physics.
What I liked most was how the book imagines society’s reaction to the news — the fracture between those who welcome the invasion and those who resist. The Trisolaran “sophon” concept (subatomic AI spies that block fundamental physics research) is one of the most creative hard sci-fi ideas I’ve encountered.
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