Damo’s top scifi novels to rewire your consciousness.

The great psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna called scifi the “gateway drug to enlightenment”. It’s a description that perfectly expresses the role scifi has played in my life. If If see the world differently from many people today, it’s because of the scifi books I read from a young age.

These are the scifi books that have, over the years, rewired my consciousness.

We shouldn’t be surprised that stories can have such a profound effect on us. After all, all of the world’s great religions are communicated as stories, and a couple of those religious myths made it onto my list. In a very real way, consciousness IS a story. The story we tell ourselves about reality. As we learn new stories, our story changes.

Many of these stories are what Joseph Campbell called the “Heroes Journey”, archetypal stories of change. Like Frank Herbert’s Dune, they take a young hero on the journey to enlightenment, to a new understanding of the world. These are powerful stories, especially for young imaginations.

Others, like Ghostwritten by David Mitchell, or Dhalgren by Samuel Delany, are stories of the unreality of reality. How our mode and model of thinking defines our reality as much, or more, than the shape of the physical world. These are stories for people who have reached the boundaries of reality, and are beginning to wonder what lies beyond them.

Politics is the expression of individual consciousness in mass behavior. Stories like Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan or Orwell’s 1984 show us the lies and delusions of mainstream political consciousness, and change the world as they change our minds.

But I think the most powerful stories on this list are the ones that dive deep, deep inside the intimate details of ordinary lives. When all the big ideas are done, that is where we really grow. I’ll leave to decide which ones those are!

Read the full list here.

(A work in progress. Leave comment below or on Twitter and I’ll add books I forgot to the list.)