Entertaining Books for Spaced-out STEM Majors

It's Okay to Have Fun Reading

Sometimes you want to take a break from putting in work for your people and just relax..

I know our sphere loves a lot of very high quality literature and I agree 100%. I’m named after a Pynchon novel. But I recently talked books with an irl friend of mine who complained that nothing really seemed to keep his attention so he never read. He’s a software engineer and an intelligent, thoughtful person so I asked him what he was usually picking up that was boring him so much. The reply was very “grown-up,” in that it was a lot of non-fiction, serious tomes, or weighty literature full of heft and deep considerations. Which is fine, but it’s clear that to him, fun happened on a screen and work was what happened when he opened a book. This is a problem that I think many people have, and fortunately the solution is to read books that are just fun to get yourself into the habit of quiet reading. Reading is a skill that you develop like anything else, you didn’t start squatting 3 plates.

So I lent him “Eversion” by Alastair Reynolds, which is a pretty standard weird sci-fi mystery story with a fun couple of twists to it. He devoured it, I was glad, he read the whole thing in like a day. Clearly the problem wasn’t with his ability; it was that he needed more palatable reads. So with that in mind I’m collating a list of similar books for all of you to just enjoy. It’s a list that will probably appeal to STEMfagns like me who are interested in fun weird takes on what could be within the bounds of possibility.

In no particular order, here are some authors and works to consider.:

• “Eversion” by Alastair Reynolds.

  • This book in particular is very good as a nice introduction to Reynolds’ weirder character-driven side. The Inhibitor series of his is also good but it has some pacing issues that make it drag. His one-shots are more interesting and readable in my opinion. Other hits by AR to consider are “Terminal World,” “The Prefect,” “Chasm City,” and “Galactic North,” which is a collection of short stories. “House of Suns” is probably my favorite by him. Reynolds is really good at keeping the reader in suspense and always moving you towards that next breadcrumb, which makes his books very easy to lose many hours to without realizing. He also has a flair for huge cosmic sci-fi set pieces like “Turns out one of the moons of Saturn is actually artificial and some ancient race left it as a great big civilizational IQ test for whoever comes along. (Pushing Ice)”

• “The Player of Games” by Iain M. Banks.

  • It’s hard to pick just one Culture novel, so I’ll say you should just read all the others. I read them in college all in one shot and did it without any deliberate order since they’re pretty self-contained. Everyone who knows sci-fi already knows these are great, but if you don’t know them you should read them, they’re all good and very entertaining. His spaceship names are Elon Musk’s favorite meme, so take that however you think it should be taken. I think that there should be an elite division of bodybuilder frog commandos named “Special Circumstances.”

• “A Fire Upon the Deep,” followed by “A Deepness in the Sky” and then “The Children of the Sky” by Vernor Vinge.

  • Vinge is great, even though I think he’s some sort of bizarre singularitarian who offers rams at the altar of Big Yud or whatever. I think these three books (The Zones of Thought series) are easily the best he’s done. He has a real unique talent for modeling alien cultures, lifeways, intelligence etc as emergent properties of their radically different biology. These books might additionally act as potent and secret redpills if your intended target hasn’t considered thought as being confined to a biological substrate before, but I doubt that anyone who can read these will have missed that. “Rainbows End” was also a banger and I recommend it.

• “Ringworld” and “The Ringworld Engineers” by Larry Niven.

  • Niven really knows how to write a book, so it’s strange to me that except for a handful of books he always writes in collaboration with others. These books are entirely his own, though, and are classics defined by very strong characters and a wry sense of humor. He invented Halo in these books, you owe him a great debt if you’ve ever enjoyed a warthog run.

• “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” by Robert Heinlein.

  • This is a recommendation that will probably get disapproval from every conceivable angle; the trads will call you a satanist because of “line marriage.” The anime hellenists will call you a fag also because of line marriage, plus one of the main good guy characters is a Puebla Group-type Latinx dismantler anarchist. Heinlein is the classic sci-fi politics boomer, the guy who thought it was totally fine to take evil people at their word because after all the truth wins for no reason, right? But some of his stuff is required reading. TMiaHM is very readable and happens to contain the perfect illustration of a secure communication system for any type of underground group in Mike’s 3D cell hierarchy. It also demonstrates the gruesome bureaucratic cruelty that would result from a true “one world government.”

  • Other must-reads by Heinlein are “Starship Troopers,” which has nothing at all to do with the movie, and “Stranger in a Strange Land.” Some of his juveniles are also very good, like better Flash Gordon-type stuff. “Glory Road,” “Farmer in the Sky,” “The Star Beast,” Tunnel in the Sky,” are all great for a quick read or to safely provide your son with some interest.

Anything I missed, put in the comments.