One sort of “rationalist” book is the kind whose story depends on a lot of plotting and strategizing. It’s one of the few ways that fiction can actually be challenging to understand in a technical sense. And it’s a way that you can show characters being actually smarter than the reader, and give the reader a sense of what it might feel like to be smarter.
Ender’s Game, Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Trilogy, and the G.R.R. Martin books are what comes to mind, though certainly any book where geopolitics is involved could be strategy-heavy. Narrative history, of course, has the same quality, especially military and diplomatic history.
For a long time, I actually avoided these books, because competitive strategy tended to confuse me. Now I’m starting to find it fascinating.
One sort of “rationalist” book is the kind whose story depends on a lot of plotting and strategizing. It’s one of the few ways that fiction can actually be challenging to understand in a technical sense. And it’s a way that you can show characters being actually smarter than the reader, and give the reader a sense of what it might feel like to be smarter.
Ender’s Game, Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Trilogy, and the G.R.R. Martin books are what comes to mind, though certainly any book where geopolitics is involved could be strategy-heavy. Narrative history, of course, has the same quality, especially military and diplomatic history.
For a long time, I actually avoided these books, because competitive strategy tended to confuse me. Now I’m starting to find it fascinating.