Top Five

1. ‘Brave New World’ (Aldous Huxley). This book is like ‘1984’ on steroids. A bleak, paranoid projection of a future in which humans are manufactured and have their life's path chosen for them. Not only is it a perfect piece of social commentary, it's also beautifully and poetically written, plus it's nerdy as hell. My perfect book.

2. ‘1984’ (George Orwell). Classic. Orwell seems like he'd be a rad guest at a dinner party. He's radical, funny, wise and humane. ‘1984’ is one of the few sci-fi novels that are revered by sci-fi heads and literati alike and for good reason.

3. ‘Counter Clock World’ (Philip K Dick). Philip K Dick was a crazy bastard and a sci-fi king. He wrote stories that later became films like ‘Bladerunner’, ‘Minority Report’, ‘Total Recall’, ‘A Scanner Darkly’, ‘Screamers’, ‘The Adjustment Bureau’, the list goes on. This was my favourite, about a world where time runs backwards. So you're born in your grave, then get younger and younger until you get unborn. Trippy as hell.

4. ‘Neuromancer’ (William Gibson). Gibson and his homies were like the Sex Pistols of sci-fi. They made it dirty and sexy and probably pissed a lot of people off. Gibson helped to coin terms and ideas like cyberspace, a global internet, the matrix. This was all in the early ‘80s, well before the world wide web or Keanu Reeves movies.

5. ‘War Of The Worlds’ (HG Wells).This book was written in the 1800s and it's about snail-like aliens that invade Earth via thousands of meteorites, then take over the world using sophisticated tripod-like death machines equipped with impenetrable forcefields and heat-rays that vapourise humans in a fraction of a second. The 1800s! Either HG was a genius beyond compare, or he was on the best drugs known to man. Possibly both.

Mantra Performs At Sprung Festival At The RNA Showgrounds Sat. Nov. 10.