I read Camus as a young teenager too and he probably got me thinking about how large aspects of social cues and traditions are constructed. I also read Vonnegut and LeGuin. Octavia Butler too and a bunch of cyberpunk books, like Gibson and Melissa Scott. Honestly those just got me thinking about stuff, not really pushing me in one direction. The only author who firmly made me a socialist was Marx himself. He pushed me directly over the border.

One book that really stuck out was Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller. I have no idea what his politics are and I don’t care. That book in particular kind of pushed me into thinking about how a society could collapse and replicate aspects of its former self without necessarily trying, but rather, being forced by the conditions they live in. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic future America that reverts to feudal social and cultural relations. The main character’s job is copying blueprints for electrical diagrams, which are now interpreted as religious relics. So from that I started to have the idea that maybe pure technical knowledge isn’t what drives a society, but there also needs to be some social apparatus in place to make sense of it. The book describes a pre-industrial society with all the instructions on how to industrialize right in front of them, but they can’t yet, because they haven’t yet formed the social capacity to do anything with it.

Also honestly Ayn Rand pushed me by complete accident. It was back when I didn’t fully understand her politics. All I could tell was she was describing some type of oppositional defiance to something, but I was a dumbass teenager still so couldn’t exactly tell what. She was the first overtly political author I read and I somehow thought she was on the left from the text alone. That’s how stupid I was. Then I read Marx’s books and became normal. Thank god.