I am especially fond of near-future scifi. Reading Stross, Stephenson, and Vinge always leaves me with a feeling of wonder - their novels are brimming with technological & sociological insight.

Often a novel is a thought experiment. If you read Vernor Vinge's _Rainbows End_, you will find a plausible and well thought out speculation on wearable computing. This is the kind of thinking we have to do in a startup - we take the current state of things and extrapolate.