A short story in a collection, but it counts: “Mother’s People,” by Stephen Baxter, in the collection “Evolution.”

This story is about the first human to invent religion, an early human with, as the omniscient narrator describes, a touch of schizophrenia that leads her to ascribe human motivations to inanimate objects. Her village is going through a drought and her son dies of illness; she concludes that the sky is angry at her neighbor (who just happens to not like her), and she kills her. After one more murder, the blood seeps into the ground and the rain starts falling. Her neighbors are astounded, and immediately follow her logic. The unifying power of the tribe’s religion gives them more success than their neighbors–they fear death less once they start believing in an afterlife.

But what really got me is the narrator’s meditation on how the same impulse that lead to this animistic religion ties into human complex tool use. If things are people, they can be reasoned with, bargained with, made to do what you want–our complex tool use comes from applying our brains’ natural social capabilities to non-human entities. But the story goes on to give a dark side to it–if things are people, people are things; other people can be abused to do what you want as well.

Now, you might laugh at this point, but growing up autistic, I always struggled to understand social interactions, why I should abide by social norms, the like, and wasn’t interested in making the effort to do so. But reading this story in my adolescence, it finally hit me.

People are things, and can be manipulated. They can be learned. I don’t need that empathy stuff that just comes naturally to other people, and I don’t have to despair because I lack it–I can learn it the same way I learn any other subject! And this was an epiphany for me!

I radically changed my behavior, becoming much more civil, polite, emotionally-restrained, better-dressed, closely watching how others acted to learn, and after a while I actually started, for the first time in my life, to enjoy the company of other people.

And it’s all thanks to this one somewhat-grimdark tale of a cavewoman inventing human sacrifice.

Of course, some people wouldn’t say the changes were entirely positive. I’ve got, overall, a fairly cynical view of human relations as a result of reading this book in my adolescence, and others in the same spirit I read later. I can’t help but view so much of normal human behavior as a well-dressed version of chimpanzee dominance games.

The Far Side of Evil by Sylvia Louise Engdahl really made me think about space exploration and colonization and how war could stop if the world had a common goal to focus on instead of ever-shifting claims on various pieces of land.

Elfquest is a series of graphic novels, a fantasy story about a community of elves and other fictional species who struggle to survive and coexist on a primitive Earth-like planet with two moons.

My older brother was reading them, so I started them as well, and they really changed by worldview for the better. The artwork is really, really beautiful, and the idea of a group of elves who commune with wolves to survive in an alien environment is such a cool idea. The books made me feel transported to another, wilder place.

There are no villains in these books, at least not in the standard sense. Some characters do horrible things, but because they are flawed, misunderstood, traumatised or misguided. The humans who torture and kill elves have their reasons. The trolls, who enslave rock-shaper elves, have their reasons. Some elves want to subjugate their own kind and annihilate elves with ‘mixed blood’, and even they have their reasons. Understanding that made me better understand the world I live in. and made me more empathetic.

If anyone wants to read these books, the creators have put most of the series online for free.

The Road

Lord of the Flies had an impact on me. I read it in class and saw the movie at Berkeley. At the U, there was a guy shouting at passersby. Someone in my class said the guy was high. I was 15 at the time. The story and the adventure to the U have stayed in my memory for nearly fifty years.

The Phantom Tollbooth taught me to really see the world instead of hurrying to the next whatever. The Tao of Pooh helped reinforce that, trying to avoid being a Busy Backson. Snow Crash broadened the heck out of my horizons, and kicked my curiosity into gear.

Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. It teaches me to broaden my perspective about life and love. And failures and successes are both necessary. That it’s okay to be big and small. It teaches me about balance. It teaches me that all things are one and that all is well.

Some books that together helped give me a certain orientation to the future and to how human society works/doesn’t work:

The Dispossessed - Ursula le Guin. The greatness, awfulness and simultaneous impossibility of anarchy as a workable system.

Holy Fire - (Bruce Sterling), ie what really happens as the population ages and as people start to believe in medical immortality

Beggars In Spain - (Nancy Kress) What happens when technology enables so much inequality that we essentially get a speciation event. What is due to the losers?

The First Immortal - (James Halperin) Another book about the changes wrought by medical technology and anti-aging research. Amateurish writing, but blasts those ideas out fast and cogently, so I don’t mind so much.

Also, I don’t much like Cory Doctorow’s novels, but holy hell, if you get to listen to him speak on a podcast or something, I’ve rarely ever heard some speak with such cogent clarity on complex topics.

And I’d say The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant changed me in more foundational ways that would be hard for me to articulate, but it has something to do why I reject the idea that anyone is unworthy of compassion.

Endymion by Dan Simmons

James Joyce made me realise the sounds words make are different to the meanings we add to them.

The kite runner by khaled hosseni Sita by Amish Tripathi

A Canticle for Leibowitz lives in my head full time. My dad recommended it to me years ago and I love sci-fi so I picked it up and it just blew me away. The discussions about human nature, theology, and the pitfalls of technological advancement without similar moral advancement, as well as the exploration of differing and opposed belief systems without painting anyone as “right” or “wrong” made a lasting impression on me. I can’t recommend the book enough to anyone who hasn’t read it.

Slaughterhouse Five when he mentions “they will all want dignity I suppose” and damn that stuck with me. Everyone wants dignity and it’s silly but I think it made me more empathetic.

The Giver I read as a child and it made me look for the magic in moments. I’ve never lost that. Just stopping and appreciating the small magic of that very moment in time.

"It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realised, somehow, through the screaming of my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is an universe of possibility. And the choice you make between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.”

• Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
• I reread it in a secondhand bookstore while tripping on LSD, and it dawned on me that the first paragraph (above) was something I needed to internalize.
• I wept, having realized that I had to forgo the path of hateful vengeance which I had been spiraling down for years. I have not yet attained the grace necessary to forgive, but I have at least turned away from hate.
• I didn’t murder a woman-beating rapist former friend of mine and go to prison.

Mine would probably be easy to guess

Catch 22 very much shaped my world veiw and humor Questioning systems and why they function the way they do. And of course, the absurdism that is all around us.