Hacker News Books

Sounds like the plot of Oryx and Crake (I did not like the book, but it was an interesting plot):

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46756.Oryx_and_Crake

Have you read some dystopian fiction? For example, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake?

I'm excited to see what we can do with CRISPR, but we should do it fully aware of the ways things could go wrong (so that we can prevent those things from happening).

Elysium doesn't sound too different from the book Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. They both do sound like very possible futures for the human race.

>does her work [have] any lasting value?

'Oryx and Crake' and 'Handmaids Tale' are some of the most vivid and impactful speculative fiction that I have ever read. Margaret Atwood will forever go down in history for both the prose and scope of her literature.

The Feynman Lectures on Physics

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

A Latin/English dictionary for new company names

For a book which explores this, and similar ideas, try "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood.

These new biotechnologies are eerily reminiscent of what's in the novel "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood. In a subplot, an inner circle of biohackers compete to drive species to complete extinction for fun. It's worth a read

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

Read Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. It has a few high-impact suggestions that you or someone you know might be able to put into action.

A good article on the importance of fiction from a scientifically validated point of view: http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2012/04/28/why-fiction-good...

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
L'Etranger - Albert Camus
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Metamorphosis - Ovid
Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
The Picadilly Papers - Charles Dickens
Permutation City - Greg Egan

Fiction allows us to experience the most intimate thoughts of people we've never met in a way we cannot emulate in reality. We can visit places we've never been to and experience situations we'd try our best to avoid. We sit for hours hallucinating vividly reading these stories as we download these characters, concepts, and ideas into our meat. And if the story resonated with us we walk away a different person: new connections in our synapses, reinforced signals in existing ones. Stories are one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal; perhaps even more so than mathematics or computation.

+1 for reading novels. You may have to try a few before you find one you really like, but once you become invested in a story, it's pretty easy to spend a few hours a day reading. In my experience, it's been a pretty effective way of breaking the scattered thoughts/quick reward cycle. Some novels I've enjoyed recently: the Southern Reach trilogy, and Oryx and Crake.

Meditation is also great, but I think the barrier to entry is pretty high for someone already struggling to focus. Certain types of yoga (Iyengar/Hatha) can be good gateways into meditation.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Any of Ursula K Le Guin's books, but particularly The Left Hand of Tomorrow.

Ancillary Justice.

Anything by Peter Watts or Iain M Banks.

My favorite sci-fi and fantasy books are those that come up with a world different from ours and then take that difference and explore its effects on society. I'd like to offer some examples:

- "Hello Summer, Goodbye" by Michael Coney

- "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood (the first book in the Maddaddam trilogy)

- "The Fifth Season" by N. K. Jemisin (the first book in the Broken Earth trilogy)

- "The Mechanical" by Ian Tregillis (the first book in the Alchemy Wars trilogy)

- "Nexus" by Ramez Naam (the first book in the Nexus trilogy)

- "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson

- "Pandora's Star" by Peter F. Hamilton (part of the Commonwealth Saga)

- "Hyperion" and "Fall of Hyperion" by Dan Simmons

- "Lock In" by John Scalzi

- "Blindsight" by Peter Watts

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, and the rest of the Maddaddam Trilogy. I read it a few years ago, but still think about it all the time. The writing is vivid and visceral, and the characters have an emotional and spiritual depth that you almost never find in dystopian scifi. There are also some spooky parallels to what's happening now.

Yes, "We" is also wonderful, though I don't see that "Anthem" was a ripoff...it's just another take on the same idea, which many others have taken a stab at over the years. And Brave New World and 1984 are completely different from the former to, and from each other. I love dystopian fiction, so I've read tons of it. My current favorite writer in the genre is Margaret Atwood ("Handmaid's Tale" and "Oryx and Crake"). So I guess if you don't really enjoy reading speculative fiction with a gloomy outlook on the future, maybe you only need to read one of them (probably 1984, since it's the one everybody knows), but otherwise, they're all a lot of fun.

"We, the Living", I didn't care for. The language is stilted (even more than Atlas and Fountainhead). It was her first real writing in English, and it shows. I never recommend WTL to folks who don't already like Ayn Rand, and most of the folks I know who've started it never finished it. I did, but I would never re-read it. (I've re-read Fountainhead and Atlas, minus the Galt speech, a couple of times, and Anthem at least four or five times.)

She has made the remark repeatedly, over the years, in different contexts. It's not a throwaway.

As for baseless hyperbole, I object to Atwood on this issue because she is 'borrowing' ideas from a genre that she is then disassociating herself from. Delany and Walton could expect their readers to have read Melville and Greek myth, but Atwood is delivering SF a nice little kicking while borrowing the ideas from the genre and transporting them to a more respectable context.

Apparently The Man in the High Castle is still SF, probably because Dick didn't strain at the oars to get shelved out of SF. Probably because he was a repeat offender with talking squids in outer space and worse - telepathic slime molds from Ganymede, IIRC.

Partly it's also a matter of taste. For someone so 'literary', I'd say that Atwood loves herself some serious schlock. It felt like every third character in the Oryx and Crake trilogy was Torn From the Headlines of whatever outrage articles that Atwood had read in the previous year... I keep dutifully reading each book - there's always something interesting in them - but I've got to say I feel both dirtier (Oryx and Crake trilogy) and stupider (the trilogy + Heart Goes Last) after each one.

A couple books that I'd recommend for their attention to biology and genetics as the scientific driver:

Julie Czerneda's Species Imperative Trilogy:
Survival, Migration, and Regeneration.

Maragaret Atwood, anything, but recently the MaddAddam trilogy:
Oryx and Crake, Year of the Flood, and Maddaddam.

Nancy Kress' Sleepless series:
Beggars in Spain, Beggars and Choosers, and Beggars Ride.