here is the thing - i'm not that guy who read a bunch of sci-fi books when they were like 15, neither i'm the one who is being obsessed about them now. however after silly con valley made me read douglas adams, then andy weir, then i started hearing casual references to bodies of work that i not even familiar with in various niche tech optimist gatherings it made me curious whether am i truly missing out on something cool in my life. (of course, it also made me question wether i am even authentic enough to hang out in those cirles but i decided to slide that illiteracy to the highly progress-isolated enviroment i grew up in and that it is never late to catch up on some reading)

at that point i started chatting with claude about what i found interesting in those space tech lectures i saw, about douglas adams, andy weir, and previous things i read, asking him to get me onboardded to all the foundational sci-fe i missed and i got the result that i really enjoeyd that grouped those works in categories i find very reflective of how people name drop things in real life in diffreent social scenarios

hereby i present you:

tiers of sci-fi

tier 0: foundational

good to reference, but quoting them doesn't impress anyone

Isaac Asimov – Foundation, Robot series
Arthur C. Clarke – Rendezvous with Rama, 2001: A Space Odyssey
Philip K. Dick – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ubik
Frank Herbert – Dune
Ray Bradbury – Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles

tier 1: authentic flex

this is the Stephenson / Vinge / Egan zone — VCs eat this up

Neal Stephenson – Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age
Vernor Vinge – A Fire Upon the Deep, Rainbows End
William Gibson – Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition
Bruce Sterling – Schismatrix Plus, Islands in the Net
Greg Egan – Permutation City, Diaspora
Charles Stross – Accelerando, Glasshouse
Iain M. Banks – The Culture series
Peter Watts – Blindsight, Echopraxia
Liu Cixin – Three-Body Problem trilogy
Ramez Naam – Nexus trilogy

tier -10.5: transhumanist online**

dropping these names gets nods from the very online transhumanist crowd

Ted Chiang – Stories of Your Life, Exhalation
Stanislaw Lem – Solaris, The Cyberiad
Samuel R. Delany – Dhalgren, Nova
Olaf Stapledon – Star Maker
J.G. Ballard – Crash, High-Rise
John Brunner – Stand on Zanzibar

tier 42: guilty pleasures

great reads, but referencing them feels normie / pop-sci

Andy Weir – The Martian, Project Hail Mary
Douglas Adams – Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Orson Scott Card – Ender's Game
Michael Crichton – Jurassic Park, Prey

surely, at that point i have gained anough dopamine hits from categorising shit and talking about work (reading) instead of of doing it so i lost all interest in reading it.

luckly - there is one thing that saves me - i'm deeply untrusting person towards AI and I cant let this slide without verifying that those vibe tiers are actually reflective of vibes i'll be truly getting from each of the books. after all - image how terrifiling it would be to name drop Vernor Vinge thinking you are slithering the epitomes of hard takeoff singularitarianism only to reaslise that you are scaraping the burned pot of utopian libertarian think-tank fiction

this and solely because of this fact i'm commited to read them all in pseudo chronological, techno-futurist evolutionary progression

i dontknow how long will it take, but rest asured below will be the diffs of tiers for each books after i'm done with it:

guilty pleasures, confirmed:

Andy Weir – The Martian
Andy Weir - Project Hail Mary (thats right, i guess i'm a normie after all)
Douglas Adams – Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams – Restaurant at the End of the Universe

foundational tier, confirmed:

Ray Bradbury – Fahrenheit 451