What Are Your Fiction Book Recommendations?

00:00:05.000 | The question is, recently you mentioned on a podcast some of the fiction books you were reading.

00:00:12.000 | And you mentioned Andy Weal's Hail Mary. I'm halfway through it. Absolutely brilliant.

00:00:16.000 | I can see why you would geek out on all the math and science. Fantastic books.

00:00:20.000 | So the question is, any other similar books that you might recommend?

00:00:24.000 | Any other fiction books you've read over the last year or two?

00:00:27.000 | And the idea would be to potentially have Andy on as a guest on the podcast.

00:00:33.000 | I'm sure there'd be a way to tie it to the show, talking about his productivity and routines and where he gets his ideas from potentially.

00:00:41.000 | But I just think the two of you geeking out on math and science would be fascinating to listen to.

00:00:46.000 | Thanks again for everything that you do. Love your work. Bye.

00:00:50.000 | Well, first of all, I love that idea of getting Andy on the show because I have this dream I've talked about before where I want to write a novel in Andy's style.

00:01:02.000 | So that style where it's not hard sci-fi, it's, I call it blackboard sci-fi.

00:01:08.000 | So you actually work through, you know, he works through the actual physics of his story with real world physics to understand how everything works.

00:01:16.000 | And I think it would be really cool from a computer science perspective to write a novel about the moment in which you cross.

00:01:25.000 | There's a term for this I don't know. So listeners who know, let me know if there's a specific term I should know here.

00:01:30.000 | But there's a threshold that artificial intelligence could cross where it is able to act independently outside of the specific intended purposes given to it of the people who created it.

00:01:43.000 | Like there's some sort of threshold that probably has a cool name.

00:01:46.000 | And it'd be cool to write a novel about that. A tight novel, quick moving.

00:01:52.000 | I like the structure of Michael Crichton's The Terminal Man. It's a very quick moving, takes place in near real time.

00:01:58.000 | It's over like two days. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Limited set of characters, limited set of locations.

00:02:03.000 | But bring in an Andy Weir style blackboard sci-fi where you really get into like how would that actually happen?

00:02:09.000 | Like this is it was running, you know, we're at this type of deep learning neural net and we're in the Google cluster and the scale got to this and like really working through.

00:02:19.000 | Because I think there would be a public interest aspect to this, a way of bringing people into the world of AI technology.

00:02:26.000 | And don't hold punches like this is complicated technology, but let's get into it.

00:02:29.000 | I think that'd be such a cool book. And I think it'd be fun to write.

00:02:32.000 | I have no time to write something like that, but it's part of my aspiration that my life should be, my life should get to a point where I could write something like that.

00:02:40.000 | Like that's a scheduling dream of mine. I have too much going on right now.

00:02:43.000 | How would I know that I have the right mix that I could write a book like that?

00:02:47.000 | So I should bring Andy on to talk about that. Like how does he write? How does he work it through? What's his process?

00:02:54.000 | He has a cool story, by the way. I don't know if you know it, but he was working for NASA when he wrote The Martian.

00:03:00.000 | And he was not even self-publishing. He was posting chapters on the web.

00:03:07.000 | You know, it was just going to a website. Like, let me work through what's going on.

00:03:12.000 | It was also another great example of slow productivity in action.

00:03:16.000 | He was just working through chapter by chapter at a completely slow, because it's just him, completely slow pace.

00:03:21.000 | Just he thought this was fun. The main character's name is Mark.

00:03:25.000 | Like what's the challenge Mark is facing next and how would he work it out?

00:03:28.000 | He was just publishing these things on a website and people loved it.

00:03:32.000 | And then at some point a publisher said we should put this into a book. We should sell it as a book.

00:03:36.000 | But what classic slow productivity, right? It wasn't this stressful. I'm on a book deadline. I have to get this thing done.

00:03:41.000 | He was just working on this thing, crafting it. And that's what made it work.

00:03:45.000 | He could take his time and work out the math and it wasn't stressful and it became a huge seller.

00:03:50.000 | So I want to get Andy on. I want to talk about that. And I want to talk about how do you write a book like that?

00:03:56.000 | And then I just have to figure out how to take like 17 out of 26 things that I'm currently committed to do off my schedule.

00:04:05.000 | And that should free up, I think like a tight 15 minutes a week I could work on this,

00:04:10.000 | which means by the time the book comes out, we would already be enslaved by artificial intelligence.

00:04:15.000 | So it'd be relevant. Gotta have relevance to what's going on.

00:04:19.000 | Okay. In terms of fiction recommendations, don't come to me to fiction recommendations.

00:04:23.000 | I'm a terrible fiction reader. I grew up with genre books, right?

00:04:28.000 | Because I began reading at a very early age, adult fiction and the books my mom would get me from the library.

00:04:36.000 | She's like, I don't know what books to get an eight year old. So she would just get me genre fiction books.

00:04:40.000 | And so I have a weird, nostalgic childhood affection for genre nonfiction fiction.

00:04:46.000 | I read so much nonfiction for my work that I don't have, I use fiction reading as a escape or relaxation.

00:04:55.000 | So it's all embarrassing. All of my suggestions are embarrassing because it's all just,

00:04:59.000 | it's genre fiction writers for which I have some sort of childhood connection.

00:05:04.000 | And I enjoy, you know, getting some crackers and reading it on the couch or something like this.

00:05:10.000 | Like for example, at the moment, I'm reading Wilbur Smith's very first book that he wrote in the 1960s.

00:05:17.000 | Smith died a few weeks ago. He was a British or maybe African writer of, I don't even know what you call it.

00:05:27.000 | It's genre, it's adventure. He writes a couple different topics, but sort of like adventure.

00:05:33.000 | It's not thriller, but more like adventure books, epics, and it's none of it's good literature.

00:05:38.000 | And it's all of its time and incredibly anachronistic. But I grew up on these things.

00:05:43.000 | And he'd write books like, he wrote one, I think called Gold Mine.

00:05:46.000 | It would just be about a gold mine in Africa. And there'd be some protagonist and antagonist,

00:05:52.000 | and there'd be some drama. And he wrote a book, I think it was called something like Hungry as the Sea.

00:05:58.000 | And it was about a salvage boat captain, you know, and like they're trying to salvage a boat.

00:06:04.000 | And then bad guys get involved and try to hold them hostage. I don't know.

00:06:08.000 | There's usually some adventure in it or something like that.

00:06:10.000 | And so I was like, oh, let me go back and read his very first book.

00:06:14.000 | It's called When the Lions Feed, and it's an epic of some, this family, the Courtney's,

00:06:19.000 | and it's in South Africa, I think. And it's set in the 1800s.

00:06:23.000 | And, you know, again, it's of its time and very anachronistic, but not great literature.

00:06:28.000 | But I love first books. He wrote in the '60s. And so I'm enjoying that.

00:06:32.000 | It's a crazy book. It takes place over a whole lifetime.

00:06:38.000 | And I don't know, there are these two boys on this farm in colonial South Africa,

00:06:44.000 | and the one shoots the other one's leg off. So like this sets off this whole dynamic between them.

00:06:49.000 | And there's a war at some point, and the dad gets killed in the war.

00:06:53.000 | And the one brother gets estranged from the other, and he leaves and takes off his money

00:06:58.000 | and gets involved in a gold field, and that gold field develops and becomes Johannesburg,

00:07:03.000 | comes out of this, and now the brother is like a tycoon.

00:07:07.000 | And Smith, Wilbur Smith will just be like, let's get into the mechanics of how the land acquisition would happen

00:07:13.000 | if you're trying to build up a gold mine empire in South Africa in the 1800s.

00:07:18.000 | So anyways, it's all to say I have terrible fiction recommendations, but I love this whole genre stuff.

00:07:23.000 | So I'm reading Wilbur Smith right now. But more importantly, let's get Andy here.

00:07:27.000 | I'm looking at Jesse. Jesse, let's get Andy in here, Jesse, okay?

00:07:31.000 | Take care of that for me, and we'll figure that out.

00:07:34.000 | [music]

What Are Your Fiction Book Recommendations?

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