Everyone in Tech Should Read Fiction. Here's Why

For many in today's tech world, novel reading is a luxury — something you might do once or twice a year, if you're lucky. It's often the first thing that goes out the window when times are busy.

Perhaps, if you're in the industry, you've convinced yourself that fiction doesn't matter. Isn't your reading time better spent with Flipboard or Zite or Instapaper, catching up on all those important articles and assorted long reads? Shouldn't you make sure you've read both of this month's major Jack Dorsey articles?

But if you're purely in the nonfiction realm, you're starving yourself and your work of an important resource. I was reminded of this when author Neil Gaiman gave a stunning lecture earlier this week (you can read the whole thing here.)

Gaiman offered this intriguing anecdote, one that suggests the entire global tech sector depends on the geekiest of guilty pleasures:

I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? Science fiction had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?


Gaiman admits he's biased as an author and a long-time lover of libraries, though he's certainly no technophobe — he is about to release his first video game. He is well placed to explain the importance of imagination in innovation:



The Circle Game

So if you're convinced, and you haven't picked up a novel in a while, and you're worried about your attention span, where to start? Is there something you can read that you can convince yourself is closely connected to the tech world, so you don't feel too guilty about it? Yes, as it happens, there is.

I can highly recommend author Dave Eggers' first foray into tech-inspired fiction, a relatively quick read called The Circle.

You may have heard that Eggers' novel is loosely based on life at Google, though that's not quite it. You may have also read reviews from respected tech publications claiming that Eggers doesn't "get" the Internet; that his portrayal of social media is unrealistic.

To which I say: well, duh. Not all novels are aiming for a dry, mimetic realism. Fiction at its most inspirational is often a funhouse mirror, a fantastic reflection that changes your perspective on something you see, but don't necessarily see, every day.

The protagonist of The Circle, Mae Holland, is required at her prestigious tech firm job to answer hundreds of customer service requests an hour, and never to let her customer satisfaction rating drop below 95%. That's just for starters. She is then "encouraged" by HR to send out hundreds of "Zings" (tweets) a day, to RSVP to hundreds of ridiculous corporate events, to add "smiles" and "frowns" to thousands of posts, to spend nights and weekends raising her "PartiRank" until she is seen as one of the elite top 200 most social people on a campus where, increasingly, there is no need to leave.

The number of screens on Mae's desk steadily increase, as do the number of health-monitoring bands on her wrists. She gains a voice recognition headset that asks her hundreds of questions an hour and a necklace camera that broadcasts everything she sees. Little of what happens is plausible in isolation. It is part of the novelist's skill to layer it on, so that it's just believable enough, in the manner of a dream that accelerates into nightmare territory.

Whether you agree with it or not, whether you treat it as darkly humorous satire or prophetic warning, The Circle will give you a fresh perspective on old debates over privacy in the social media age — a perspective from outside. If it had been an essay, you would have rolled your eyes and clicked away after the first few paragraphs. Instead, it taps into nameless anxieties that lie deep within us all. It's hard to look at Twitter, or Google Glass, the same way again after reading it.

And maybe, just maybe, you'll be inspired to come up with something altogether new.

Image: Michael Buckner, Getty Images Entertainment