Esquire wrote a list of the 75 best sci-fi books of all time – all such lists are by nature subjective, but I think they do a fairly good job of arguing why each is worth reading.

As a sci-fi reader, who has been bad at reading much the last few years, I love such lists. It allows me to see what I have missed, and to agree or disagree with the choices.

I have copied the list below, starting with number 75 moving towards 1. I will bold the books I have read, mark books I already wanted to read with italics. Books I own will be marked with a star *. I will add occasional remarks as well.

75 The Echo wife – Sarah Gailey
74 The calculating stars – Mary Robinette Kowal *
73 Redshirts – John Scalzi *
72 Beautyland – Marie-Helene Bertino
71 The ten percent thief – Lavanya Lakshminarayan
70 Midnight robber – Nalo Hopkinson
69 Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson *
68 Star Maker – Olaf Stapledon
67 Contact – Carl Sagan
66 Under the skin – Michael Faber
65 Way station – Clifford D Simak *
64 Sea of rust – C Robert Cargill
63 What mad universe – Fredric Brown – I have read his fantastic Martians, Go Home! and his haunting short story “With Folded Hands”, both of which leads me to want to read anything he has written.
62 The book of phoenix – Nnedi Okorafor
61 Semiosis – Sue Burke
60 Excession – Iain M Banks
59 The Claw of the conciliator – Gene Wolfe * – Dark and complex, but certainly worthy on being on the list.
58 Lord of light – Roger Zelazny * – A masterpiece by a master of science fiction. I have in the past heard of Zelazny that is is probably more read by sci-fi authors than by the general sci-fi audience. If that is true, it is a pity.
57 This is how you lose the time war – Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone * – I am actually currently reading this. For me it is interesting, but a bit of a slog.
56 The Resisters – Gish Jen
55 Rosewater – Tade Thompson
54 Children of time – Adrian Tchaikovsky
53 Solaris – Stanislaw Lem
52 A Clockwork orange – Anthony Burgess
51 The Moon is a harsh mistress – Robert Heinlein *
50 A Wrinkle in Time – Madeline L’Engle – A much beloved classic which I didn’t think much off. It is one of those books that probably blows you away if you read it at the right age, but if you read it when you are older, is heavy handed, and is of dubious morality.
49 The Time Machine – HG Wells
48 The Body Scout – Lincoln Michael
47 An unkindness of ghosts – Rivers Solomon
46 The mountain in the sea – Ray Nayler
45 Neuromancer – William Gibson *
44 The stars my destination – Alfred Bester
43 The sparrow – Maria Doria Russell
42 The Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy – Douglas Adams * – I have reread this book more times than I can count.
41 A Canticle for Leibowitz – Walter M Miller Jr * – Read it as both the brilliant short story, and the novel, which was a lesser work, in my opinion.
40 Project Hail Mary – Andy Weir
39 Zone one – Colson Whitehead – I didn’t know about this book before, but after reading the description I definitely want to pick it up.
38 The long way to a small angry planet – Becky Chambers
37 Engine Summer – John Crowley
36 The Children of Men – PD James
35 Radiance – Catherynne Valente
34 The City & The City – China Mieville *
33 A memory called empire – Arkady Martine *
32 Ancillary Justice – Ann Leckie *
31 The Stand – Stephen King
30 In Ascension – Martin MacInnes
29 Dhalgren – Samuel R Delany *
28 The Forever War – Joe Haldeman *
27 1Q84 – Haruki Murakami
26 Future home of a living god – Louise Erdrich
25 Ammonite – Nicola Griffith
24 Annihilation – Jeff Vandermeer *
23 Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood *
22 Hyperion – Dan Simmons * – I got the book long before Dan Simmons turned out to be such rightwinged asshole. I plan on reding the book one day, but I won’t buy more of his work.
21 Red Mars – Kim Stanley Robinson *
20 Shikasta – Doris Lessing
19 The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut
18 Roadside Picnic – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
17 Childhood’s End – Arthur C Clarke
16 The Complete Robot – Isaac Asimov – I find these books rather dated
15 How to live safely in a science fictional universe – Charles Yu
14 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley – This one has been on my to-read list for longer than I care to admit.
13 The Employees – Olga Ravn – A, for me, new Danish author that I hear really great stuff about
12 1984 – George Orwell *
11 The Three-Body Problem – Cixin Liu *
10 Do Androids dream of electric sheep? – Philip K Dick
9 Station Eleven – Emily St John Mandel
8 Exhalation – Ted Chiang
7 Never let me go – Kazuo Ishiguro
6 The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K Le Guin * – I am unsure if I have read it in my youth
5 Kindred – Octavia Butler *
4 The Fifth Season – NK Jemisin *
3 The Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury *
2 Dune – Frank Herbert *
1 Frankenstein – Mary Shelly *

There are a lot of new books for me on the list, and I will definitely check most of them out and some stage.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/kriswager/2024/07/28/796/

Book review: The Patient Assassin

On 13 March 1940, Udham Singh shot and killed Michael O’Dwyer, the former lieutenant governor of the Punjab in India. This was done in revenge of the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

Anita Anand’s The Patient Assassin, A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge and the Raj from 2019 tells the tale of what happened during the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, and how it led to Udham Singh’s life mission of taking revenge on the men responsible for the massacre.

Anita Anand not only covers the massacre and the assassination, but also explains the environment that allowed the massacre to happen in the first place, gives us a glimpse into the thoughts and feelings of the men responsible, while walking the tightrope of not dismissing their monstrous actions, but at the same time allowing us to understand how they could have acted the way they did. The majority of the book, however, is dedicated to Udham Singh and his life, both before the massacre, and after the massacre, tracing his movement across the globe, until that fateful day in 1940. It also covers the trial after the assassination.

The book paints a nuanced and as detailed a picture of Udham Singh as is possible. Udham Singh was in many ways a deeply flawed man, who did a lot of harm to a lot of people on his way to his revenge. This is covered, as is his work towards an independent India, and even his interactions with local Indian populations in England and the US. It gives us a glimpse into the man, and not just the assassin that the English saw, nor just the martyr-hero, honored in his home country after his death, and especially after their independence.

I highly recommend this book, as an introduction to how the British Raj treated the Indians, and how the Indian independence movement became a geo-political tool for the different countries (including Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union) in their political maneuvering, as well as a historical account of both the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the life of Udham Singh. It also gives a glimpse into how Indians were treated in England and the US in the twenties and thirties.

I first became aware of the book through the HistoryExtra podcasts episode about the book.

 

 

Book review: Range by David Epstein

Around Christmas, I read Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein, which is a book which really speaks to me, since I have had a somewhat uneven path to my current career. Something which I think is a strength – which Epstein’s book definitely backs me up on.

The first part of the book, takes on both the idea of focused children becoming child prodigies and the 10,000 hour rule, which says that it takes 10,000 hours of intense training to become a world expert on something. Regarding child prodigies, Epstein points out that training children to become focused on one area, and thus become child prodigies in those areas only works on areas with well defined problem areas, e.g. chess, golf and to some degree classical music, while in areas which are more chaotic (most other sports, and other things interacting with other people), it doesn’t work. This is because the later areas are so-called wicked problems. Here a broadness of experience and range is a plus.

This means that world leaders in areas which can be considered wicked problems, usually haven’t just focused on those areas. Rather they have touched a number of different areas, before starting to focus on that particular area. One example Epstein mentions is that most Olympic competitors have usually dabbled in a number of sports before choosing their discipline.

From speaking of world experts in different areas, and their path to become so, Epstein broadens the subject to discuss career paths in general. He takes on the idea that people should choose their path from a young age, and that changing career paths later in life is somehow bad. He, rightfully, points out that the earlier you make your choices, the less options are you aware of – heck, the less options might exist.

This rings true to me. The job I do now, working as a business analyst in software projects, didn’t really exist when I had to choose my path after high school. I instead started studying business management and later switched to economics, before becoming aware that computer programming was something I found interesting. Now, I have again moved away from doing actual programming, and instead work with the business, ensuring that the end system will be useful. One of the reasons I am effective at this job, is my technical background, but it is certainly also helped by my early years studying business management and economics.

One other factor Epsteins mentions, when it comes to choosing a career path early, is the fact that peoples’ brains keep developing, and that you are different person when you are older than when you were younger. This should make you pause – think of all the decisions you made back then, which you have since changed as you have lived more years, experienced more things – why should your career path be any different?

If you change career path in your later life, you have both the advantage of having a wider range of experience to base the decision on, and you will still have your toolbox from your old career to use in the new career. This means that you might be able to solve problems which other people in the field can’t, since they simply lack the required tools.

Much the same can be said about focusing on diversity in teams. It has been shown again and again that the more diverse a team, the better they are at problem solving. Again, because they bring a more diverse set of tools to solve the problems, and not just the same tools that they have all learned in school.

I have simplified the arguments a bit, but I hope you get the general gist. Epstein also provides a lot of concrete examples of cases where range and diversity has helped over narrow expertise.

All in all, I highly recommend the book, and I hope the message of the book is taken to heart.

Book review: Accelerate

Book review of Accelerate: The Science Behind DevOps – Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren, PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim.

If you have been at any programming or agile related conference within the last 8 months or so, you will probably have heard people recommend Accelerate. One of the reasons it is often recommended is that it explains the importance of DevOps for high performing tech organizations. This is not really anything new, but what Accelerate does, is base it on actual science, and not just anecdotes and opinions – something we see all too often in the tech field.

The findings of Accelerate is based upon the survey data collected through the yearly survey “State of DevOps” in the years 2014-2017. Those data clearly demonstrated that a high performing organization performed much better than a low performing organization, but they could also be used to explain what caused this differences in performance.

The book is split into 3 parts, a conclusion, and some appendixes. The first part explains the findings, the second part, the science used, and the third part is a case study contributed by Steve Bell and Karen Whitley Bell. I will go through each part separately below.

The first part of the book is called “What we found”, and what they found is certainly noteworthy. They looked at some key indicators of software delivery performance, and found that a high performance organization had the following performance compared to low performance organizations:

  • 46 times more frequent deployments
  • 440 faster lead time from commit to deploy
  • 170 times faster mean time to recover from downtime
  • 5 times lower change failure rate

These numbers are from page 10 of the book, and show a much greater difference than most would expect, no matter how big a proponent of DevOps.

The rest of the first part of the book goes through their other findings, which identifies “24 key capabilities that drive improvement in software delivery performance, and, in turn, organizational performance”. According to the authors, “[t]hese capabilities are easy to define, measure, and improve”.

I won’t include the list here, but many of them relate to DevOps practices and lean management practices, though there are a couple related other things, such as architecture. One thing I will mention, is that the findings indicate that while culture has an influence on the use of DevOps techniques, the use of DevOps techniques also have an influence on culture, which changes as a result of that.

None of the mentioned capabilities are new, but here we have, for the first time, evidence that they actually work, and help improve performance.

The second part of the book, “The Research”, goes into how the research was conducted, and why survey data was suitable for the research. It doesn’t include the actual data, which would have been nice, but I can understand why that isn’t the case (breach of confidentiality etc).

I can’t recall seeing a similar chapter in any other book on programming/systems development, and I highly applaud it. I also think it was a smart move to put it in the second part, rather than the first part, as most people will be more interested in the findings, rather than the methods behind finding them.

The third part of the book, the case study contributed by Steve Bell and Karen Whitley Bell, is called “Transformation”. They takes us to Ing Netherlands, a world-wide bank, where they have been involved in a cultural change, started and lead by the IT manager, enabling the organization to become high-performance.

To be honest, I find this part to be the weakest part of the book, both in content and in presentation, but it does provide a nice overview of practices on the team, management, and leadership level (it can be found online here).

All in all, the findings of the book should not be shocking to people who has worked with agile, DevOps etc., but it is nice to have a list of proven capabilities to focus on. It is also a useful tool when debating with management about these subjects.

I highly recommend the book to people working in any aspect of software engineering – be it as a programmer, a project manager, in a leadership position, or in any other capacity.