Influential Books

1. The Books

1.1. Roadside Picnic — Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

The first book Cain discusses is Roadside Picnic, which he calls "weird, really cool, and really well written — unlike anything I've ever read before or since." What he loves most is that the aliens are truly alien: incomprehensible, unexplained, with no insight into their motivations or origins. The title's metaphor is the core concept — aliens stopped on Earth for a roadside picnic, and humans are the ants picking through the remains. Some remnants are useful, others are lethal, and the aliens never thought twice about any of it. Cain notes you can see "fall-outy influences" in the book's DNA, along with the related film Stalker and video game series.

1.2. Empire of the East — Fred Saberhagen

Cain's copy is so old the cover has fallen off, but he'll never sell it. He first read it in high school, again in college and grad school, and again recently. It's a trilogy with "fantastic world-building" that reads like a fantasy novel but turns out to actually be science fiction — a genre mix that Cain loves. He later connected it to Saberhagen's Lost Swords series, though he considers the original trilogy sufficient.

1.3. The Dying Earth — Jack Vance

Cain owns a collected edition containing Eyes of the Overworld, Cugel the Clever, Rhialto the Marvellous, and the associated short fiction. What sets Vance apart for Cain is the prose: "I don't care how much I study, how good I get, how much I practice — I will never even be remotely as good as Jack Vance." He highlights Vance's ability to create memorable, distinct characters without resorting to sarcasm — a pet peeve of Cain's regarding modern narrative design. Vance invents words freely (like Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"), making his prose challenging even for native English speakers. Cain loves these settings so much he bought the Dungeon Crawl Classics tabletop RPG adaptations of both Dying Earth and Empire of the East.

1.4. The Book of the New Sun — Gene Wolfe

A series Cain found "exceptionally well written" and another example of genre-mixing: it reads as medieval, then fantasy with magic, then reveals itself as science fiction with aliens. What Cain both loved and hated was the unreliable narrator — a character who claims to have an eidetic memory but whose account the reader increasingly doubts. "You will never know" what's true, Cain says, finding that simultaneously compelling and maddening.

1.5. Excession — Iain M. Banks

Cain's favorite Culture novel. He loves Banks's writing in general, but Excession grabbed him because of its prologue and the way it demonstrates a highly advanced civilization confronting something even more powerful. The opening — told from the perspective of a drone aboard a ship being overwhelmed by vastly superior technology — pulls the reader in immediately. Cain connects this theme to his own game design: in Vampire: The Masquerade, he loved the idea that vampires are supernatural but "not at the top of the heap." The Culture, despite being far above humanity, is "nowhere near the top" either.

1.6. Blindsight — Peter Watts

A book Cain went into knowing nothing about, and it "will really make you think — literally." Watts postulates that self-aware, self-conscious intelligence isn't necessarily needed or desirable, presenting probably non-self-aware aliens who are far more capable than humans. The book forces the reader to question the nature of consciousness itself: "What is thinking? When you think, what is thinking? Who's the 'I' doing the thinking?" Watts also includes vampires as an example of non-human intelligence humans can understand — another layered twist.

1.7. The Left Hand of Darkness — Ursula K. Le Guin

Cain loves all of Le Guin's work but singles out this novel for her mastery of the "what if" approach. The premise: what if gender wasn't fixed? What kind of society would develop among humans who periodically switch genders, and how would they interact with a gendered civilization? The dual perspective — from both a gendered outsider and members of the genderless society — makes it exceptionally well-crafted. Cain also recommends the Earthsea series and essentially "anything from Le Guin."

1.8. The Night Land — William Hope Hodgson

A very old sci-fi novel from the early 20th century, "very dark and very mystical." Set so far in the future that the sun has gone out, humanity survives in a giant pyramid protected by a force field called "the air clog" — technology so old its inhabitants no longer understand how it works. Cain loves that the narrator describes advanced concepts without comprehending them: robots are described as "tall men who somehow communicated without talking." He suspects even the author didn't fully understand the technology he was depicting, which adds to its strange power.

1.9. Last and First Men — Olaf Stapledon

A sweeping history of humankind spanning millions of years, from present-day humanity ("the first men") to the last humans living on Neptune. It's told almost entirely through events rather than characters — an approach that works for Cain though he acknowledges it's not for everyone. He also recommends the Tilda Swinton film adaptation.

2. Additional Recommendations

Beyond the core list, Cain recommends three Space Opera authors whose work embodies the "big ideas, cosmic ideas" he loves:

• Peter F. Hamilton — especially the Commonwealth Saga
• Alastair Reynolds — especially the Revelation Space series
• Iain M. Banks — anything in the Culture series

He also previously dedicated an entire video to Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light and its potential as an RPG setting.

3. Common Threads

Cain identifies several themes running through all his influential books that directly shaped his game design philosophy:

• Dark settings — bad things happening, bad people, or entire worlds that feel evil, dark, and hopeless
• Mixed genres — fantasy and sci-fi blended together, sometimes without the reader (or narrator) even realizing it
• Big cosmic ideas — Space Opera scale, sweeping concepts, civilizations far beyond human comprehension
• "What if" premises — a single speculative change explored to its logical consequences (the core of Arcanum: "what if an industrial revolution happened in the middle of a fantasy world?")
• Narrators who don't understand — characters and readers left to interpret events without full knowledge, never getting complete answers
• Not being at the top — characters and civilizations discovering they are not the most powerful force in their universe

These themes are visible across Cain's career: Fallout's post-apocalyptic wasteland with incomprehensible pre-war technology, Arcanum's genre collision, and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines' supernatural hierarchy all reflect the literary DNA he describes.

4. References

• Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUxCRABoZng