We have flipped literary evolutions — I only read science fiction and fantasy until it became too embarrassing to be carrying around any book with a spaceship on the cover, now I rarely read what’s considered genre fiction.

You’ll be referred to or find the classics on your own, so I’d just recommend a couple ideas from the slightly lesser known tiers. Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series blew my young mind with its creeping tentacles touching on everything from perception and identity to proto-genetic manipulation. Frederick Pohl’s Gateway seemed so very adult when I first read it, and it looks at human nature after human beings wrecked everything and were left clinging to inherited technology no one understands. So maybe a guide for the future.

I owe Philip K. Dick for helping me transition from the geekiest paperbacks into the still geeky world of pulp detective novels. He can be very hit or miss but at his best he was essentially writing about the grit and grime of back alleys, just slightly futuristic ones. A Scanner Darkly remains my favorite of his.