They even list a couple of ideal locations including I believe Kenya.

TLDR: The moon colony will be able to make its own rules and keep earth at bay.

Brave New World, Huxley

Animal Farm, Orwell

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Heinlein

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Persig

Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut

Catch-22, Heller

The first 3-4 books of the Foundation Series, Asimov

The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

However, this kind of thing: "Most significantly, when children are born, the father may have little or no responsibility for his offspring..." -- that's terrible.

That WP paragraph "Walking marriages" somehow reminds me of Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". Harsh indeed.

1. https://archive.org/stream/TheMoonIsAHarshMistress_201701/Th...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress

Your comment was opaque, but was the first thing I thought of too

Those books are probably what made me into a self-sufficient human being who wants to stand on his own and keep living the best he can.

TANSTAAFL != Anarchy

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein - The moon is a colony of misfits and is suffering increasingly unreasonable demands from earth (1776 in space). One of the computer systems managing part of the colony is discovered to be sentient and is gradually befriended by a sysadmin.

http://www.quora.com/How-feasible-would-the-catapults-from-t...

The ideas around TANSTAAFL were what really drove me to believe in the value of hard work and being wary of the easy path to "success".

But how difficult would it be to intercept the payload safely outside the atmosphere? Seems it would be easier than intercepting an ICBM.

See also: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

- 'The Selfish Gene' - Richard Dawkins

Grokking the concept changed the way I thought about life forever.

- 'Quantum Reality' - Nick Herbert

One of the best introductory level books on quantum physics mysteries. No nonsense.

- Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig

The book that introduced me to Kant, Hume and philosophy of science. Just for that, I'm forever indebted to it.

Some favorite fiction books -

- Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
Loved 'Snowcrash' too.

- 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' - Robert Heinlein

- Anything by Kurt Vonnegut, Milan Kundera, Somerset Maugham

Just read Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", published in '66, and there are a couple of mentions of "neural nets".

"Manuel, once there was a man who held a political make-work job like so many here in this Directorate, shining brass cannon around a courthouse."

"Why would courthouse have cannon?"

"Never mind. He did this for years. It fed him and let him save a bit, but he was not getting ahead in the world. So one day he quit his job, drew out his savings, bought a brass cannon--and went into business for himself . "

"Sounds like idiot."

"No doubt. And so were we, when we tossed out the Warden."

"Neuromancer" and sequels by William Gibson

"Slaughterhouse 5" by Kurt Vonnegut

I've read all of them dozens of times over. Hard to explain why, they speak my language, and help me understand myself and the world around me, kind of like my favorite bands do. Hard to put into words.

This meme was actually popularized by Robert Heinlein in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, ten years earlier than Milton Friedman started using it.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - R.A. Heinlein

The Foundation Trilogy - Isaac Asimov

I have tried. It simply doesn't work. Proudly censorious authoritarian leftists. They see themselves as the good guys saving the world, and if that means free speech has to go, then so be it.

I'm reminded of this quote:

>“There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.”

― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

But there was a recent story on here that a single reasonably sized asteroid would net about $1 Trillion worth of materials. It seems like a very profitable exercise.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress

As for Ringworld, I didn't enjoy it, but would be willing to give Niven another try if given a strong and specific recommendation. Maybe something that has more of a plot. Wandering around a big empty construction in space where nothing happens didn't really do it for me.

The author of this list and I seem to have very similar tastes. Most of his favorites are mine as well. The only favorite of mine that comes to mind as being left off this list is Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It's also striking that he hasn't listed any of the Culture series by Iain Banks.

TANSTAAFL is from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, basically a libertarian manifesto. Heinlein had range. Add Stranger in a Strange Land, the hippie manifesto, and you have the trifecta.

That's probably one reason why I read.

To say that Pound's translation of the Analects was more profoundly important than the Tao and Faulkner's The Town and Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and The Hobbit from my youth and The Three Little Pigs read nearly nightly to a child doesn't make sense.

Sometimes I walk through Castaneda's world.

Sometimes Knuth's.

Other's I am in my head with Vonnegut.

Profoundness is out in the world.

And many books point to it.

I remember reading the serialization of the first few chapters of Number of the Beast in Omni magazine, and thinking how great it was. Then I got the book and read the rest, and was sad.

Don't get me started on _Friday_.

Ian MacDonald is another good one. My favourite of his is The Dervish House, but his others are definitely worth reading.

Charles Stross is good. Didn't get on with Accelerando, but his Laundry books are a fun mix of HP Lovecraft/Len Deighton/IT Crowd. Halting State and Rule 34 are good explorations of pervasive augmented reality and intelligent algorithms. Also Glasshouse as an exploration of post-singularity society. Never managed to finish a Cory Doctorow book though.

I found William Gibson's Bigend trilogy a slog, but I really enjoyed The Peripheral - it's a fun read.

Enders Game and Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card are fantastic, but the remaining books suffer from diminishing returns (with the possible exception of Ender's Shadow). There are a lot of books in the series, but basically, the series finishes wherever you get bored reading it.

Anything by China Mieville is well worth your time.

Oh, I also really enjoyed Elizabeth Bear's Jacobs Ladder trilogy, set on a generation ship where the inhabitants have forgotten who they are and where they're going.

For some older stuff:

The Stars my Destination by Alfred Bester – I was surprised at how good it is and how well it stands up. I couldn't believe it was written nearly 50 years ago.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein - possibly my favourite of his. I want to start a lunar revolution with a sentient mainframe...

I'm currently working my way through all the Hugo Award winners, from 1953 up, and there's some real gems there.

In practice, a rocket goes up (out of most of the atmosphere) before going fast. A projectile fired out of a railgun would be going at its fastest while still in the atmosphere, and would thus be very hot / inefficient at the gun's "muzzle"

Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" discusses such a solution for sending mined material back from the moon, which seems like a more feasible application.

The whole system is indeed possible, though. See this discussion:

http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/35139/what-is-the...

For example, in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (written in 1966, set in 2075), space travel and colonization is much more advanced than it is in 2014. Artificial intelligence is also far superior. But digital electronics and computer networking are much more primitive. A portable audio recorder has only an hour or two capacity, and it transmits data by playing the audio sped up through the telephone. PCs don't appear to exist, and computer monitors and terminals are rare. There doesn't appear to be cellular phones or an equivalent. And there's no Internet. An AI system reads books with a scanner and a robotic page-turner.

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

Foundation Trilogy -Isaac Asimov

The Game: Penetrating The Secret Society of Pickup Artists - Neil Strauss

The Law - Frédéric Bastiat

Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzsche

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress - Robert Heinlein

Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier - Katie Hafner & John Markoff

It's Not How Good You Are, Its How Good You Want to Be: The World's Best Selling Book - Paul Arden

Are ones that stand out. I'm sure a lot of other books helped shape my worldview though, especially ones I read as a kid. The "Tom Swift Jr." adventures, the "Three Investigators" stories, the "Nancy Drew" and "The Hardy Boys" ones, and those "Encyclopedia Brown" books all stand out in my memory as probably being influential. And later in life, I'd say Dean Koontz' work has had something of an impact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunno_on_the_Moon#Lunar_capita...

I read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as a teenager. Part of the techno-anarchy-libertarian (or whatever we call it) corpus for us nerds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress

Now I want to read both, compare and contrast, against each other, and against the real world.

I hope you are encouraged by all the great reasons listed in the rest of the comments. I for one live to read!

Also See: Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", which features space colonists seeking to break away from Earth dropping rocks on us to persuade us to let them go.

Does anyone know if there is some reason why this technology seems to get ignored? According to wikipedia it seems like a big win. Why aren't we doing this right now?

Vernor Vinge, True Names

Thomas P Ryan, The Adolescence of P1

Algis Budrys, Michaelmas

Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

David Gerrold, When Harlie Was One

Obviously, SF involving computers is pretty extensive, and there is a fuzzy line between "cyberpunk" and "this story involves computers at some level." My criteria are: Are computers major characters in the story, and secondarily, are they helping other characters break lots of rules? :-)

Moon is a Harsh Mistress is my favorite of his, because it is a fun multi layered story. And we are almost at the day that Adam Selene could exist. I saw a Simon Jester reference the other day, made me laugh. I have read BattleField Earth a couple times, it is a massive book. L. Ron writes in the introduction that he wrote the book for himself, that he let his imagination run wild. L. Ron has quite an imagination (see Xenu), and the book is a long fast roller-coaster.

Has anyone else noticed the similarity between DD Harriman (The man who sold the moon) and Elon Musk?

Also he had a version of the internet thought out in 1938 "For us the living" which relied on an intercontinental series of tubes. Maybe Ted Stevens got his information from that. That book has many of his major plot lines jammed into one book. Not the best, but interesting to see the V1.0 of what became the Future History ideas. I read it right after the banking problems in 2008, so it was timely to read Heinlein rant about banking in the book (he disliked fractional reserve banking)

/fanboyoff now.

The saving grace is as the CEO comments:

“The shooter’s got to pull the rifle’s trigger, and the shooter is responsible for making sure it’s pointed in a safe direction. It’s my responsibility to make sure my scope is pointed where my gun is pointing,” McHale says. “The fundamentals of shooting don’t change even if the gun is hacked.”

As long as you're following the Four Rules (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Cooper#Firearms_safety) at worst these hacks will brick your rifle or make you miss, but in practice they wouldn't make you hit something you're not willing to hit.

Certainly SpaceX has an air of "tool builders" about them -- they'll build the shovels and pick axes of the space economy. As evidenced by their current economic successes, they're banking on the evolution of the industry -- not a quantum leap 100 years hence.

A great (related) scifi novel: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein

The way it is now, everything is geared towards "doing" things, and credit is received for "accomplishments". Its usually much harder to undo things. It would be refreshing to have specialists in undoing things.

I never saw much in the way of social conservatism in his writing (the religious right would probably be horrified by some of his work), but he was clearly opposed to collectivism.

However.

Farnham's Freehold was just ubermensch porn coupled with some really weird racism. He used more hackneyed "I can do everything" stereotypes than an Ayn Rand novel, which is something he was always guilty of but it really came to a head here. The multiculturalism and openness that was so explicitly prevalent in Starship Troopers, Stranger, and Harsh Mistress (the main character of Starship Troopers is a bisexual South American) vanishes, replaced with this weird fear of black people - "they seem nice, but they'll turn on you when they get the chance" is the message the Joe character imparts.

Just a very weird book.

"Ender's Game" and "Speaker for the Dead" by O.S.Card. (Do not touch Xenocide without a hazmat suit. And if you do, burn it before reading.)

"Snow Crash" by Neil Stephenson.

"Rendez-vouz with Rama" by Arthur C. Clarke.

If you're up for some thought-provoking stuff, "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Heinlein. Not the easiest read but your carve-out basically rules out "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".

"Embassytown" by China Mieville.

EDIT: I forgot "Hyperion" by Dan Simmons.

Heck, Heinlein discussed this sort of thing in his 1966 The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Science from a new perspective is excellent, but it's also such an interesting window on the many people who have struggled against really difficult problems to move humanity forward.

Also, make sure you go play Bioshock (the first one) for a sobering counterpoint on Randian thought. Atlas Shrugged is awesome, until you remember that you can't trust any group of people to maintain their rational behavior in the face of personal gains. Great story, and it'll drag you back from Randroid town (it did me, anyway). Either way, the kid in me would still love to have dinner in Galt's Gulch.

If you'd like to read eye-opening fiction, I heartily recommend The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein. It's an incredible exploration of what it is to be free and how modern societies evolve at the expense of their citizens' personal liberties. One of the most thought-provoking pieces of fiction I've ever read, and lots of fun character-wise as well. (Incidentally, Heinlein was a fan of Ayn Rand, so if you liked Atlas Shrugged, you may find this even more interesting.)

Of course, it depended on trinary circuits and Loglan (a logic based programming language), neither of which exist in the form mentioned.

There are some modern attempts to develop an AI. I would argue that Watson is not anything close to Mycroft, in purpose, nor in design.

[] its been nearly 40 years since I read it

It gets really wild when you can generatively create a movie just from the screenplay description and perhaps a set of storyboards. That will make the amount of crap video available explode uncontrollably.

This is still a fairly common phrasing, and in general, people around me generally take it mean "roughly" or "plus or minus a few," which is how one character interprets it. Another character then explains that its actual meaning is, paraphrased, "probably not less than 5 years or more than 500 years."

While I had a vague awareness that "on the order of" was not mathematically equivalent to "roughly", I don't remember learning the concept in such a memorable way. Similarly, an order of magnitude are commonly understood as "a lot more than", when they also have a precise mathematical definition.

I think that reason we are terrible at estimating the time something will take is that humans struggle to think in terms of timespans that are actually representative of the variance in an estimate, not to mention the fact that as additional variables are introduced, that variance will almost certainly increase (even if the midpoint decreases). I'm not sure of the causal direction here, but our misunderstanding of terms meant to succinctly express "somewhere between" sure doesn't help things.

(side note: there's also a discussion about designing a revolutionary organization that really clarified my rudimentary understanding of circuits. The book is truly stunning at times.)

"The Dispossessed" by Ursula K. Le Guin

"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert A. Heinlein

These two give two radically different, perspectives of what such a society, with implicit rules and norms basically enforced by on-the-spot consensus, might look like.

(Note, I'm not saying that societies depicted in these books are likely, or even possible. It's fiction, after all, and arguably utopian fiction at that. But it does help in putting a more concrete image to the abstract concept of anarchism.)

It is called a paradox because seeing it in action usually catches people by surprise. And this is true whether you're talking about the consumption of coal to power factories, or the consumption of electricity to power computing (and in each case the myriad of new uses that efficiency promoted).

In Science Fiction over and over again the trope was of a giant computer that acted like an oracle. You see that in Asimov's work, in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and so on. Basically nobody anticipated ubiquitous computing. For instance in the Foundation series you see that a computer run by the Second Foundation can predict the future course of history...and people are calculating their courses with slide rules.

As for the killer app of computing, email, I'm only aware of one pre-1970 work correctly anticipating what it would be actually like. (James H. Schmitz has a memorable scene in one of his Telzy stories where she catches up on her messages at a terminal. He doesn't say "email", but the scene is notable for unobtrusively getting it right.)

I’m thinking of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It had group marriages, but the marriage practices were ordained by custom and tradition. Not 20th century custom and tradition, but custom and tradition none the less.

  William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy

  Frank Herbert's Dune series

  Isaac Asimov's Foundation series

  Frederik Pohl's "Gateway"

  Robert Heinlein's "The Moon is a harsh Mistress"

  E.E. Doc Smith's Lensman series

  David Brin's Uplift series

  Peter F. Hamilton's Greg Mandel trilogy and The Night's 

  Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game"

  George R. Dickson's "Dorsai!"

>modifying the culture of the enemy so it is more easily defeated

>everything you do is known instantly by the enemy

Good stuff! Also, this is tickling my brain so hard; I feel like I've read one or two books or short stories that play with the second concept with very effective results, but I can't remember what they were. The later books in the Ender's Game series? Something by Neal Stephenson? Heinlen's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress? In any case, I look forward to Liu's take on it.

I do speak French, as luck would have it, so thanks for those recommendations, too. This sub-thread has mentioned several books that I haven't read but look very interesting. What a gold mine!

https://mycroft.ai/blog/why-name-it-mycroft/

Edit: Google cache has a copy[1]:

> Mycroft is named in honor of Mike, the supercomputer in Robert A. Heinlein’s classic novel “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”. Heinlein’s Mycroft was a High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor, Mark IV, Mod. L” – a HOLMES FOUR. Mycroft’s friend Manuel named him “Mycroft” after Sherlock’s elder brother Mycroft Holmes. This was later shortened to Mike.

[1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?ei=mwx-XrKxLauV...

Indeed the Scientific American mention of Loglan was 1960 -- after the invention of Cobol, Fortran, and Lisp (and 50's crud like autocoder), but before most everything else.

Probably most hear of it for the first time from its prominent mention in Heinlein's Hugo Award-winning "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", where it is the "language" used to program the strong AI that is a major character.

I ran a Loglan study group in college, and later studied Lojban, before abandoning conlangs (when I discovered that the strong version of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis is misguided at best -- although conlangs can be interesting for other reasons).

> Is there a benefit to Loglan or Lojban over Esperanto?

I am no longer so sure that the case is any different for conlangs than for natural languages.

If I ask if there's a benefit of French versus Mandarin, people will chime in with their personal favorites and rationalizations for why one is better than the other, but objectively they are both very fine languages for literature and poetry.

Pretty similar recommendation was given in Halacha (Jewish law). Since observance of commandments is time based, this question arises already on Earth, for example in the polar regions, which don't have regular night / day cycle. In orbit and etc. Those are all cases within Earth vicinity though.

More interesting question would be, what happens during an interplanetary space flight. What about other planets altogether, like Moon or even Mars? And then of course what about interstellar deep space flights? So far this wasn't discussed extensively, but quite possible some of those soon won't be theoretical questions anymore.

Interestingly, this topic is mentioned by Robert Heinlein in "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress"[1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress

Also, while I have no use whatsoever for Stross's "Singularity" stuff, his Laundry Files series excels, especially for an inveterate old Lovecraft fan such as myself. If you want a taste, there are some shorts available online -- "Overtime" and "Funny Farm" are good places to start; "Equoid" is the most recent, but it's not representative, and it's also the weakest entry in the series as a whole due to its poor characterization and reliance on shock and gruesomeness rather than the more insidious sort of horror in which the rest of the series specializes.

I'm sort of surprised to see that no one has yet mentioned Heinlein; I know he's a politically divisive figure in the fandom, to say the least, but he's also the great granddaddy of the modern field, and such prominence deserves recognition. (Hell, he was pushing the Rapture of the Nerds before any of its modern adherents was even born!) Granted that his later works tend to bog down in self-referentiality and author tracts on the evils of Communism and the benefits of casual nudism; in his prime, though, he was an author and storyteller practically beyond compare.

In particular, his The Moon is a Harsh Mistress remains a classic among classics; The Puppet Masters even more so, to the extent of spawning practically a whole subgenre of second-rate imitations; and, for a lighter entry, his oft-overlooked The Door into Summer is a sweet story in which all's well that ends well and the importance of feline companionship in a well-rounded life is not overlooked.

Not sure how old you are, i.e. did you live through the '70s "Limits to Growth" Zeitgeist era? If not try, say, watching the 1973 movie Soylent Green, where the two protagonists just marvel at a jar of strawberry preserves they found in the dwelling of a rich person, and then go to your favorite grocery store's jams and jellies section....

Maybe someday we'll see that future you envision, but having already lived through at least one cycle of this, not to mention the ongoing global cooling -> global warming -> climate change one, I don't worry quite so much (and by now have a lot more than just these surface level observations to base that on).

ADDED: And this was a major theme of Heinlein in his '50s juveniles, most directly his 4th, published in 1950, Farmer in the Sky, but also see his last really good book, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress in 1966, where it was plot significant that the moon colony (or was it colonies?) grew wheat and shot it back to the Earth using a mass driver.

— Robert Heinlein, The Moon is A Harsh Mistress

Isaac Asimov - Foundation (and the rest of the trilogy)

Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land / Starship Troopers / The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man / The Stars My Destination

Jack Vance - The Dying Earth

Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep / The Man in the High Castle

Larry Niven - Ringworld

etc. etc.

A list of Hugo Award winners[1] might come in helpful.

Another advantage of having read "the greats" is that if some critic says that new author X writes "in the style of Y" you have a slightly better idea if you might like it.

Tastes vary, of course. Personally I never got what's supposed to be so great about Ender's Game. Teen Mary Sue geek power fantasy with questionable morals. Then again, lots of people said similar things about Heinlein…

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel

By the way, if one wants to read a quick standalone sci-fi novel, I just finished Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and I can't recommend it strongly enough.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress

The colony is dug underground in the moon and various resources are shot back to earth with a large catapult. And a super computer plays a large role in the plot.

My hope is that a private company may find profit in something like this, even if it is subcontracting for NASA or as part of the efforts of getting people to Mars.

I was trying to inform the parent commenter of the 'opposite' of "polygamy", but this was apparently unappreciated on HN. On that note, I think I will no longer be commenting on HN, due to the aggressive downvoting. I am aware of the guideline about commenting on downvotes, but I no longer care.

This is an odd view of communication. It works for whole stories, e.g. you can decouple Heinlein from his books and claim that The Moon is a Harsh Mistress primarily says something other than Heinlein actually had in mind, artistically speaking, but it's a very odd stance for single words. Communication is two-way, it has everything to do with both the speaker and listener. Words don't have any meaning except for what the speaker and listener assign to them. There is no "what the author actually said", there is only what they intended to say (and how it was interpreted).

In the role of listener/reader, your whole job is to figure out what the author intended. Otherwise I'm not sure we agree on what reading even is.

Which is not to say I endorse all of the ideas in those books. Disagreeing vociferously with Heinlein, or just asking "how in the heck would that actually work?!" is part of the fun!

Robert Heinlein's books are great. Some come to mine are The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers (much better than the movies), Stranger in a Strange Land, Double Stars, and The Puppet Masters.

Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness is amazing. The Earthsea series are fun read if you want to get beyond SciFi.

Myers-Brigs Model for Personality

"Four Steps to the Epiphany" by Steve Blank

John Boyd's OODA Loop as a model for competitive decision making

Decision Analysis techniques: in particular decision trees, expected value of perfect information, and good decision bad outcome

BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) concept for negotiation planning

"Secrets of Consulting" by Gerald M. Weinberg

"Bionomics" by Michael Rothschild

SimCity computer game

Analysis of Competing Hypotheses methodology

wiki (social process) model for small team collaborative document development

community of practice model for knowledge management

"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein (in particular TANSTAAFL)

activation energy, catalyst, and phase change concepts from physics/chemistry

Amplify Positive Deviance model from Jerry Sternin (Save the Children)

"The Empowered Manager" by Peter Block, in particular his trust vs. agreement matrix

"Crossing the Chasm" & "Inside the Tornado" by Geoffrey Moore

"Maneuver Warfare Handbook" by William Lind

"Change Your Brain, Change Your Life" by Daniel Amen

"Micromotives and Macrobehavior" by Thomas Schelling

Appreciative Inquiry Techniques

Then again, I couldn't get through Friday back then, but found the description of the role that big data would play in the future prescient a few years ago. Likewise, understanding Stranger in a Strange Land in the context of Heinlien's relationship with Hubbard was beyond me in high-school [Hubbard's BattleField Earth is worth a read or at least a try, even if the movie isn't. He was a talented writer among other things].

On a more general level, “The Dispossessed” is a good example of the paradigm shift that Le Guin (and some other writers of her generation) introduced to science fiction writing, because the book compares so directly to Heinlein’s “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” written less than ten years earlier. Both are about experimental societies on a moon, but there’s a huge difference in approach.

Heinlein’s book is basically the last hurrah of the pulpy, swashbuckling post-war style of sci-fi novels. It’s an enormously entertaining book, but the characters have practically negative depth — they just do whatever the plot requires at any given point — and the future society is a charmingly naïve macho fantasy of a resourceless American West where nobody has anything, yet everybody behaves their best because that’s just what people do (and when a couple of black thugs show up, they get thrown out of the airlock — crime problem solved forever).

Although it’s easy to misread “The Dispossessed” as singing the praises of a particular style of anarchic communism, Le Guin avoids Heinlein’s stilted political prescriptiveness by focusing on people — they get mistreated by the system as often as they get lifted up by it. In the end she makes the explicit point that this is just one possible way of organizing human societies among a nearly infinite set of possibilities. Le Guin’s sci-fi is almost as soft as it gets, and the genre has been so much better for it.

In 1993 I started sketching some ideas for a novel loosely - very loosely! - inspired by it.

I kept poking at the ideas, and tried to write the book several times. I never got much traction, but did end up writing and publishing several non-fiction articles in national magazines in this time.

In 2011 I started. I wrote 160,000 words and created a fairly epic (in scope) science fiction novel that tied in moon colonization, desktop manufacturing, genetic uplift, AI, open source software, and more.

In 2012 I kept going. I wrote a second draft, and it reached 180,000 words, and was a MUCH better novel. In September 2012 I kept going and wrote the third draft, splitting it into two novels.

Right now I'm taking a one month hiatus before writing the fourth (and final?) draft.

I hope to publish it later this year.

So far I've sunk over 2,000 hours into this project, and it's one of the things that I'm proudest of in my life.

All of which is to say: yes, hang onto your crazy side projects; you'll be glad you did.

I just look past the details and for Foundation Series it is worth it. "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" to me wasn't worth it, but I really liked "Starship Troopers" and think that is Heinlein's one book I recommend to everyone.

I would add that the bone and muscle problems are very well known to just about everyone who has done as much as read a science fiction book. Heinlein went into the subject in detail in his 1966 novel "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", and more recent writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson have written about it too.

Author glosses over Watchmen, Stranger in a Strange Land, Neuromancer, The Stand, Snowcrash, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The Left Hand of Darkness, and several others that actually had some very interesting things to say on gender roles and treatment of minorities.

Author also ignores entirely the actual depiction of homosexuality and gender roles in The Forever War, and the various ways the protagonist treats (and is treated by!) them.

Author was clearly looking to be offended, and in their zeal ignored both things that countered their position (not surprising) and things that would've substantiated it!

Lucifer's Hammer, for example, can be read to literally depict African Americans and urban youths as savage cannibals. It's a good story otherwise, but there is certainly some facepalming in there.

Moreover, even traditional well-known Western fiction has had diversity in characters. I am Indian, and off the cuff, can recall the following "historical" Indian figures/settings in Western scifi:

- Captain Nemo, in "20000 Leagues Under the Sea", was the erstwhile Maharaja of Bundelkhand, India

- "Around the World in 80 days" - Phileas Fogg, the main character, rescues and later marries an Indian, "Aouda".

- The programmer of HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, is Dr. Chandra, from UIUC

- One of the most famous antagonists in the Star Trek universe is Khan Noonein Singh, a Sikh character

- One of the five scientists in Carl Sagan's "Contact" is Indian (Devi?)

- "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein has Agra, India as a pivotal plot venue.

The protagonist's arrangement was a "line marriage", wherein the family partnership would marry in younger people at regular intervals to maintain approximate male-female parity and to keep property continuity as the older partners died off. At one point in the book, it was considered a big deal when an adult child of an older couple in the line marriage married back into it as a spouse.

There was also a "group marriage" which sounded a bit like everyone in your high school graduating class marrying each other, or like a cross between a marriage and a tontine.

In case of divorce, the remaining spouses would keep all the real property and the separating spouse would be paid off with cash. But divorce required unanimous approval, either of all the other spouses or all the spouses of the opposite sex, depending on how the thing was originally set up.

  The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson
  Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
  Gridlinked - Neal Asher
  Neuromancer - William Gibson
  The Reality Dysfunction - Peter F. Hamilton
  The Dreaming Void - Peter F. Hamilton
  Fallen Dragon - Peter F. Hamilton
  Altered Carbon - Richard Morgan
  Market Forces - Richard Morgan
  Blindsight - Peter Watts
  The Electric Church - Jeff Somers
  Tunnel in the Sky - Robert A. Heinlein
  The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Robert A. Heinlein
  1984 - George Orwell