Science fiction recommendations
Elon Musk · Compiled to August 2024 · The science fiction subset of 80 books he has mentioned publicly
Reading this list added 5 works to the catalogue. Of its 13 entries, 2 could not be assessed — unreleased or unread — and are marked with a dash rather than guessed at.
- 1909 The Machine Stops · Enforced idleness
- 1957 Atlas Shrugged · Play as vocation
- 1961 The Stainless Steel Rat · Play as vocation
- 1988 The Player of Games · Play as vocation
- 2006 Daemon · Allocated labour
How it was compiled. Recommentions collated 166 public mentions and ranked the resulting 80 books by how often each came up. Only the science fiction is audited here, in that order; the histories, biographies, rocketry manuals and political economy are omitted. The four AI books he repeatedly cites — Bostrom, Tegmark, Russell, Barrat — are non-fiction and fall outside this site's scope, though they are arguably the most on-topic things on his list.
What it brings. A mention count rather than a recommendation list — several entries are books he was disparaging. Short, and worth reading anyway: it produced The Stainless Steel Rat, whose premise is that a perfectly administered society has no use for talent and has to invent one.
| Work | Year | AGI | Answers | What people do all day |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Foundation Isaac Asimov | 1951 | No | Partial | Compile an encyclopedia, run trade routes, staff a religion nobody believes in. Most work exists to serve a plan its workers cannot see. |
| The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams | 1979 | Yes | Partial | Nothing coherent. Marvin, with a brain the size of a planet, is asked to open doors. |
| The Culture series Iain M. Banks | 1987 | 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 interfering abroad is the last real risk. |
| The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress Robert A. Heinlein | 1966 | Yes | Partial | Penal-colony labour: mine ice, grow wheat, ship it to Earth at a loss, while a sentient computer runs the revolution. |
| Dune Frank Herbert | 1965 | Banned | Partial | Full employment by prohibition: Mentats, Guild Navigators, Bene Gesserit, spice harvesting. |
| The Machine Stops E. M. Forster | 1909 | Yes | Yes | People sit alone in hexagonal cells, message constantly, and give lectures about other people's lectures. Nobody has business anywhere. |
| Stranger in a Strange Land Robert A. Heinlein | 1961 | No | No | Found a church, hold water ceremonies, argue about property. |
| Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand | 1957 | No | Yes | The productive withdraw their labour and disappear to a hidden valley, where each does work they chose. The society they left cannot run its own railways. |
| The Stainless Steel Rat Harry Harrison | 1961 | Partial | Yes | Computers and automation made society so orderly that crime is nearly extinct, so the few people with the talent for it commit crimes out of boredom — and the state hires them as police for the same reason. |
| Daemon Daniel Suarez | 2006 | Yes | Yes | A distributed program hires people through a game interface, ranks them, advances them, and never explains what any task is for. Most of them prefer it to the employer they had before. |
| The Lost Planet Rachel Searles | 2013 | No | No | A boy wakes with no memory on a planet he does not recognise, and runs. |
| Starhammer Christopher B. Rowley | 1986 | — | — | Not assessed — unread. |
| The Quickening Talulah Riley | 2022 | — | — | Not assessed — unread. |
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.