You can just read 25 sci-fi books
a16z Infra · November 2025 · Science fiction, tiered — the fantasy and non-fiction sections are omitted
Reading this list added 6 works to the catalogue.
- 1895 The Time Machine · Enforced idleness
- 1954 The Caves of Steel · Obsolescence
- 1974 The Dispossessed · Allocated labour
- 1988 The Player of Games · Play as vocation
- 1994 Permutation City · Play as vocation
- 1995 The Diamond Age · Manufactured scarcity
How it was compiled. A team reading list, grouped by author or series and sorted into rough tiers rather than ranked. Entries are audited at the level the compilers gave them, against the representative title they named.
What it brings. Broad and canonical, assembled by people who read science fiction as engineering literature. Everything it surfaced was already catalogued, which is a useful thing for a source to confirm: the canon has been read.
| Work | Year | AGI | Answers | What people do all day |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Dune series Frank Herbert | 1965 | Banned | Partial | Full employment by prohibition: Mentats, Guild Navigators, Bene Gesserit, spice harvesting. |
| Philip K. Dick Philip K. Dick | 1968 | Yes | Partial | Across the named works: mood organs, precrime analysts, memory implant salesmen — professions invented by one technology apiece. |
| The Culture series Iain M. Banks | 1988 | Yes | Yes | Compose, study, design ships that will never be built, gland recreational drugs, play games at a professional standard. A minority join Contact because meddling abroad is the last real risk. |
| The Sprawl trilogy William Gibson | 1984 | Yes | Partial | Hustle. The Sprawl automated everything except crime, so the work that remains is theft, smuggling and freelance violence. |
| The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series Douglas Adams | 1979 | Yes | Partial | Nothing coherent. Marvin, with a brain the size of a planet, is asked to open doors. |
| Ender's Saga Orson Scott Card | 1985 | Partial | Partial | Children train for war through simulated games, believing it is play. |
| Isaac Asimov Isaac Asimov | 1954 | Yes | Yes | In the Robot series, Earth's Cities run on ration and status ratings, and the anti-robot riots are explicitly about jobs. |
| Robert Heinlein Robert A. Heinlein | 1966 | Yes | Partial | Penal-colony labour on Luna: mine ice, grow wheat, ship it to Earth at a loss, while a sentient computer runs the revolution. |
| H. G. Wells H. G. Wells | 1895 | No | Yes | The Eloi do nothing at all: eat fruit, play, decorate. The Morlocks run the machinery below. |
| Jules Verne Jules Verne | 1870 | No | No | Explore, measure, and turn engineers into heroes. |
| Ursula K. Le Guin Ursula K. Le Guin | 1974 | No | Yes | On Anarres nobody is compelled to work and a computer posts people to jobs anyway. Almost everyone goes. |
| Arthur C. Clarke Arthur C. Clarke | 1968 | Yes | Partial | Bowman jogs the centrifuge, watches recorded news from home, and minds a ship that does not need minding. |
| Neal Stephenson Neal Stephenson | 1995 | Partial | Yes | The neo-Victorians cultivate hand-craftsmanship precisely because it is economically pointless. Matter compilers made everything else free. |
| Remembrance of Earth's Past Liu Cixin | 2008 | No | Partial | Centuries of planning under a countdown, with an economy organised around a war four hundred years away. |
| Zones of Thought Vernor Vinge | 1992 | Yes | Partial | Trade under a technological ceiling set by which region of the galaxy you happen to be in. |
| Takeshi Kovacs Richard K. Morgan | 2002 | Partial | Partial | Bodies are rented. The rich never die; the poor are stored on a disk between shifts of being alive. |
| The Expanse James S. A. Corey | 2011 | No | Partial | Belters haul ice and air on contract, in a system where water and oxygen are the wage. |
| Red Rising Pierce Brown | 2014 | No | Partial | Reds mine helium-3 a kilometre down, believing they are terraforming Mars for descendants. Mars was terraformed generations ago. |
| Revelation Space Alastair Reynolds | 2000 | Yes | Partial | Archaeology, ship-board politics, and Ultras whose bodies have been rebuilt around the machinery they crew. |
| Imperial Radch Ann Leckie | 2013 | Yes | Partial | Ancillaries are human bodies operated by a ship's AI. Below them, ordinary citizens serve houses and hold assigned stations. |
| Children of Time Adrian Tchaikovsky | 2015 | Yes | Partial | An uploaded scientist supervises a spider civilisation while the human remnant sleeps in shifts aboard a decaying ark. |
| Teixcalaan Arkady Martine | 2019 | Partial | Partial | An ambassador carries a predecessor's recorded personality in her skull. Court life is a full-time occupation of poetry and protocol. |
| Permutation City Greg Egan | 1994 | Yes | Yes | Copies run at whatever speed they can afford, and the QIPS exchange sets the price of being awake. |
Linked titles are in the catalogue. Partial means the work gestures at the question without sustaining it.
Source
This list was not compiled with this question in mind, which is the point of using it. The verdicts and the daily-life summaries are mine and arguable: the Answers column has no bright line, andPartial is where the disagreement lives.