Grok This: Forget The Business Books, Go Sci-Fi To Stoke Your Imagination
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Good sci-fi is speculative fiction, but bad sci-fi is just "a story told in a sci-fi setting".
This is a good way of distinguishing between Dune by Frank Herbert (which speculates about many things, including the kind of universe that exists after a computer AI suppresses the human race and is then overthrown) and Hunters of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, which is a crap book that speculates about very little in a sci-fi setting.
If you think about it, starting a company that makes a new product is basically speculating about a world that is unlike our current world because of your product! Also, you should be speculating about how other technologies and products will affect our world, so you can adapt your company before it becomes extinct...
I worked at a company where the President loved, Loved, LOVED pop business books. He hopped on every trend, told Seth Godin's stories as if they were his own (has a purple cow w\ the company logo, etc), and even tried to create a style of management based on Survivor.
When "seeking" knowledge he looked away from rigorous research and observation to the Amazon top lists.
I've never seen unhappier employees.
Any given idea in sci-fi (are they going to make us refer to it as syfy now?) may or may not be particularly useful in and of itself. Most ideas is sci-fi are completely impractical anyway, so why fret about it?
Art / literature / music / what have you are not resources that can be mined. You can't freebase Heinlein (though I like the thought) or take a bump of Ernst.
Follow your interests, experience works as a whole, and don't expect to be changed.
I would argue that the difference between sci-fi and pop business is that few people truly enjoy business books (not to mention the fact that most business books have a shelf-life of 12 minutes.)
They read them because they believe that they will put them on the path to, well, I don't know what. True there's wisdom to be had out there, but, you usually can't buy it for $19.99+S/H, regardless of genre.
You can read "Time Enough For Love" or just the "Notebooks of Lazarus Long."
You can drink wine with your friends or dash your brains out with 190-proof Everclear.
The value is in the experience, not the proof.
1) Live life.
2) Don't be a douche.
3) Stop thinking about money.
4) Be genuinely interested in what you do.
5) Profit.
"Yield to temptation; it may not pass your way again."
jesus
(Do, but be prepared for a very dystopian and worryingly likely feeling future)
I'd add a couple of modern authors to the list. Vernor Vinge has been mentioned. Another interesting one is Charles Stross (I recently came out of reading Accelerando... full of interesting ideas). I found Paulo Di Filippo's short stories generally great too.
Ultimately, you have to make your own list, from your own personal tastes and journeys. This is definitely a good starting point, though (at least as far as Science Fiction is concerned).
When I last re-read parts of the Foundation series (I didn't get through the whole of it), there were so many things there which seemed... passé. Part of it was the language, and part of it was, I guess, the technology.
I think this is the curse of science fiction. Because it gambles on predicting the future, and predicting the future is so damn hard, it invariably diverges from the real future more and more as time passes. And the more it diverges, the more the science seems pointless and outdated.
I shudder to think how "hard sf" novels like "Red Mars" will read in 30 years, when another bunch of major technological revolutions will have come to pass...
(And I don't mean to imply that's the endpoint of electronic development either, it's just something I can definitively say that the future, that is, "now", definitively already possesses.)
Now hard sci-fi faces the other side, which is that there's no evidence that it's going to stop before completely rewriting the universe as we know it (see endtime's link to Accelerando).
Asimov lived long enough to ret-con a sort of explanation in, as I understand it ("Robots suppressed computers!", although that still preserves the weird way in which robots were invented long before computers in his universe which makes no sense at all), but the lack of computers is still shot through his fiction and all fiction of that era, with just a few fragmentary exceptions here and there.
Star Trek TOS had computers galore. Tricorders, medical bays, the ships main talking computer, I'd argue all those screens and buttons and that thingy Spock looked into were all computers. Not to mention all the computer antagonists and various backdrop pieces.
They also had cell phones.
But go back and watch some of the episodes; it's still thin compared to the reality of today, let alone the reality of the future. Communicators that are like cell phones, sure, except that they only do voice transmission. My real-life cell phone is more powerful than my first couple of computers and has the apps to boot... and I have a piece of crap generic cheap cell phone, not even an iPhone. Talking computers that get asked very simple questions and are "working" for several loud seconds. No computer graphical enhancement of anything on the viewscreen (until the movies). Mainframes that generally need to be walked up to and used. The feel of the tech is very different.
Please understand I'm not complaining. This is one place where Star Trek has a legitimate claim to being ahead of the curve (although they pretty much jammed in that one spot and are now way behind) and I tend to be down on Star Trek at this point as my parenthetical shows; my point is that even so, the computers aren't as well integrated into people's lives as they are even today. Obviously, in the 1960s the special effects technology wouldn't have been there even if a time traveler from the real-life 21st century came back and tried to do it right with local tech and on a budget.
I find that whole era/style of sci-fi silly, dated, and Heinlein in particular to be a chauvinist pig. These writers, many of them (wannabe)scientists, believed in and wrote about scientist super men. Lone men(always men) of bulky IQ and suave manners. Who save the world/universe/multiverse/timeline/whatever and get a girl as reward in the end.
Basically whatever would appeal(read sell books) to pubescent teenage nerds and adults who never grew out of that phase.
The other freely available (this one under copyright) great post-singularity work of sci-fi is The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/mopiidx.html
Also, I've never understood the popularity of "Stranger in a Strange Land". I've always been a big Heinlein fan, but Stranger in a Strange Land always struck me as a book that was important and shocking and ground-breaking once upon a time.
Often a novel is a thought experiment. If you read Vernor Vinge's _Rainbows End_, you will find a plausible and well thought out speculation on wearable computing. This is the kind of thinking we have to do in a startup - we take the current state of things and extrapolate.
I am, literally, at the point where I don't even get a rise out of any book unless it's humorous. And Douglas Adams is dead.
And in general, an art of faraway countries, even movies and translated books is a very big deal.