aswalsh asked: So I've read enough to know that you're an aficionado of Fringe and Star Trek. But how far down the sci-fi rabbit hole do you go? As a partisan of Star Wars, Doctor Who, and Spider-Man, I think the public might like to know the extent of your geekery.
Oh, goodness. Honestly, I’m not so much for Star Wars, I’ve never seen Doctor Who, and my exposure to Spider-Man is really limited. As far as television goes, it’s primarily just Star Trek (especially the three 1990s series) and Fringe at the moment.
For books, it’s a little broader. Here are my top three authors right now:
- Like basically every economist ever, I grew up on Asimov and thought psychohistory was the coolest concept ever. (Hopefully the link between economics and psychohistory is pretty clear.)
- Also hugely enjoyed the Kim Stanley Robinson Mars trilogy (and to a lesser extent the same author’s alternate-universe no-Europeans The Years of Rice and Salt). At one point in the Mars trilogy there’s a ten-page digression on how to make soil when terraforming a planet, and it somehow manages to be totally engrossing and in-character despite the fact that it’s just straight-up scientific exposition with no dialogue or anything. Beautiful.
- While he annoys me like 90% of the time, I love Neal Stephenson’s more ambitious work. Obviously the Baroque Cycle was the grandest and most ambitious part of that, even though it’s not really science fiction. More… pre-steam historically-reasonable steampunk. Windmillpunk? I also absolutely loved Anathem, both for the deep and rich world-building and for the sharp commentary on the inability of academics to deal with the world outside the ivory tower. His more libertarian stuff like Cryptonomicon is totally unreadable though.
I realize this list is all what tumblr would call Problematic, in that it’s all white guys from the US (because Asimov immigrating at age three doesn’t really count). And yeah, would be really grateful for suggestions as to other authors. I guess in general I like broad world-building, where technological change has explicitly led to changes in society overall. Not many science-fiction authors do that, and even fewer do it well.
