Books like Burning Chrome — picked by fans

The book offers an in-depth exploration of how an anarchist, anti-capitalist society without money or government would work and juxtaposes it against a more familiar, wasteful, capitalist world. It's thought-provoking and can be a great tool for self-exploration because this world isn’t easy to live in and has its own challenges.
Even though it took me a long time to get into the story, once I did, I was fascinated by all the details. It's unlike other stories. It offers ideas that don't often get explored in speculative fiction, and it left me with a lot to think about.

This book tells a strong story about censorship and has perhaps a "light" dystopian feel.

I liked this book because Bradbury’s characters are well drawn and, like Orwell, he creates a strong story. It reminded me of past events in the 30’s. A fireman, following orders to confiscate and destroy books because the authority does not want people to develop constructive thinking. Gradually turning against his boss, the fireman kills his boss and joins a group of people who memorise books and store content for the future.

I found this a thought-provoking story and hope that, considering the censorship laws we have today at home and in countries like Russia and Iran, this is one story that does not come true.

Multidimensional books tend to focus on either the existence of higher and lower dimensions, or on parallel universes. The Dark Forest (book 3), like my novel, is one of very few that take the string theory approach rather than show parallel universes.

The Three-Body Problem is an epic three-novel series that takes you from the cultural revolution in the ’60s, all the way to…well, the end. There’s a lot of cryogenic freezing to get the main character through time. 

The final theme of the series, introduced in The Dark Forest, is the unfolding and collapsing of dimensions. In the first book, a radio telescope operator finds out that we aren’t alone. A battle with the alien species ensues, including a scene in the Panama Canal that convinced me to spend a few days visiting the modern marvel. It’s well worth the 1500+ pages.

Pohl drew heavily on his experience as an advertising copywriter in this, perhaps his most famous novel co-written with C.M. Kornbluth. Although not directly set on a colonized world, it’s easily one of the darkest takes on the subject as the protagonist, a ‘star-class copysmith’ is given the job of selling people on the idea of emigrating to Venus…while carefully avoiding the reality of Venus being barely, if at all, habitable, with nothing to promise but a harsh existence and generations of toil before the planet can be fully terraformed.

I loved everything about this book: the dreamy New York co-op apartment setting, the relatable main female character Clementine (a book publicist!), the lovable main male character Iwan (a chef!), and the fact that they lived seven years apart. I found it had the perfect balance of witty banter, romantic yearning, depth of feeling, and a sense of place. It also deals with tougher issues, such as grief in Clementine’s loss of her beloved aunt and a sense of self in Clementine’s search for her future path and the aunt’s own background. 

And, like every true romance novel should have, that incandescently happy ending! This is my favorite book I’ve read so far this year.

In between other projects, I have been conducting research for a non-fiction book about the particular kinds of parallel universe that every story world creates. And that's how I came across Reality+.

The question as to whether we are living in a simulation is beloved of moviegoers, stoners, and undergraduates (quite a large intersection in that Venn diagram). It's also worthy of serious philosophical and scientific inquiry. David J Chalmers is a philosopher, and his book treats the question with entertaining rigour.

The book goes beyond the simulation hypothesis, though, to examine the philosophical implications of our inevitable colonisation of the virtual realm. At the heart of Chalmers' argument is a rejection of the opposition between the real and the simulated.

Lived experience, Chalmers claims, is real experience, as freighted with value and possibility in the virtual world as it is out here in the probably real, possibly simulated universe.

Anyone in the education world likely hears about STEM all the time.

We know, intuitively, that science and technology matter. But rarely does anyone so beautifully make the case for what great STEM learning can look like.

In What STEM Can Do for Your Classroom, author Jason McKenna provides practical advice; turnkey activities; and helpful, plainspoken research that can help teachers change students’ lives through STEM—just as McKenna’s teachers did for him.

This book changed how I think about money.

I used to think of non-cash (credit cards, PayPal, and crypto) as a vague construct that wasn’t real, unlike cash. Now I think of money as a system. I saw the difference between what I was taught about finance and how digital money moves. 

More importantly, this book forced me to think hard about resilience because my desmoid tumor, which I had fought for years and thought was gone, grew back. And I've spent years building a brand without getting paid. I wondered for four years what I was doing wrong. I now see navigating modern financial systems isn’t about knowledge but about resilience instead. I must adapt, be aware, and be resilient.

Diamandis’ book is one of hope, sort of like applying Kurzweil’s futurism to pure business. And like his friend Kurzweil, the author’s enthusiasm is contagious: one emerges from this book ready to march forth and change the world.

Peter insists that while we may look back at the successes of Zuckerberg or Musk, the best is yet to come; that looking back a few decades from now, people will think: “this was a formidable time to set out and start a business”.

Indeed that was the case at the first stages of every industrial revolution, and the 4th should bear no different. Unless entrepreneurship is suffocated by Big Tech incumbents and overly cautious regulators. 

As it turns out, the Germans never got close to building an atomic bomb—largely because of some major mistakes at the outset (one of them made by their top nuclear chemist because of a crisis in his love life). Powers, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, created some controversy because of his portrayal of the man who didn’t build the German bomb. That controversy continues. 

I once had to physically separate the author from his critics and threaten to remove disruptive protesters from the audience when I moderated a session on the history of the German bomb at the Smithsonian.