The Culture series

sharing a few books I recommended in my annual list (recommend reading!) https://rohitjha.com/blog/reading-highlights-2025/ Non Fiction: - Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang (2025) - How to Live an Extraordinary Life by Anthony Pompliano (2024) Fiction: - The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester (1956) - Consider Phlebas (Culture Series #1) by Iain M. Banks (1987) - The Way of Kings (2010, Stormlight #1) & Words of Radiance (2014, Stormlight #2) by Brandon Sanderson

The Culture series, by Ian M. Banks

William Gibson. The Bridge trilogy and the Sprawl trilogy, at a minimum. They still feel like maps to the future even now. You have to work at it, the map is not the territory after all, but the realisations about the impact of technology, progress, and the choices we make when we let society work a certain way have been profound, for me at least. Also The Peripheral, and Gibson’s essay in Wired about undersea cables, and... yeah. Having read Gibson feels like a superpower. As others have said: - The Hitch Hiker’s Guide - Stepehnson’s Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, Seveneves, Anathem (aside: totally surprised how much love there is for Anathem, I remember it not being received very kindly at the time by people around me, though I liked it.) - The Culture series (special shout out to The Player of Games.)

One of my favourite series of books. In many ways quite dark, but with a thread of ironic optimism rarely found in other sci fi books.

He's the guy for whom the Sapir-Whorf hypotheis - that the languages we use can themselves shape what we say and even how we think, an idea I think is 100% true. Which brings me to one of my favourite scifi epics - the Culture series, the titular people (and machines) of which consciously designed their language Marain to encode desirable aspects of reasonableness and peaceableness according to that very hypothesis. Nice connection!

Any of the The Culture novels by Iain M. Banks. You can start with the first, "Consider Phlebas". They're space opera with a lot of dark wit.