The Fantasy Review’s list of 10 Cyberpunk Books That Are Thought-Provoking.
Virtual Light (Bridge, #1) by William Gibson
From the blurb:
The millennium has come and gone, leaving in its wake only stunned survivors. In Los Angeles, Berry Rydell is a former armed-response rentacop now working for a bounty hunter. Chevette Washington is a bicycle messenger turned pickpocket who impulsively snatches a pair of innocent-looking sunglasses. But these are no ordinary shades. What you can see through these high-tech specs can make you rich—or get you killed…
Nexus (Nexus, #1) by Ramez Naam
From the blurb:
Mankind gets an upgrade
In the near future, the experimental nano-drug Nexus can link humans together, mind to mind. There are some who want to improve it. There are some who want to eradicate it. And there are others who just want to exploit it…
Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs, #1) by Richard K. Morgan
From the blurb:
In the twenty-fifth century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself. Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person’s consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body (or “sleeve”) making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen…
Moxyland by Lauren Beukes
From the blurb:
Lauren Beukes’s frighteningly persuasive, high-tech fable follows four narrators living in a dystopian near-future.
Kendra, an art-school dropout, brands herself for a nanotech marketing program. Lerato, an ambitious AIDS baby, plots to defect from her corporate employers. Tendeka, a hot-headed activist, is becoming increasingly rabid. Toby, a roguish blogger, discovers that the video games he plays for cash are much more than they seem…
Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling
From the blurb:
Two decades into the twenty-first century, the world’s nations are becoming irrelevant. Corporations are the true global powers, with information the most valuable currency, while the smaller island nations have become sanctuaries for data pirates and terrorists. A globe-trotting PR executive for the large corporate economic democracy Rizome Industries Group, Laura Webster is present when a foreign representative is assassinated on Rizome soil during a conference for offshore data havens…
Titanium Noir (Titanium Noir, #1) by Nick Harkaway
From the blurb:
Cal Sounder is a detective working for the police on certain very sensitive cases. So when he’s called in to investigate a homicide at a local apartment, he’s surprised by the routineness of it all. But when he arrives on scene, Cal soon learns that the victim—Roddy Tebbit, an otherwise milquetoast techie—is well over seven feet tall. And although he doesn’t look a day over thirty, he is ninety-one years old. Tebbit is a Titan—one of this dystopian, near-future society’s genetically altered elites. And this case is definitely Cal’s thing…
Eclipse (A Song Called Youth, #1) by John Shirley
From the blurb:
The Russians didn’t use the big nukes.
The ongoing Third World War leaves parts of Europe in ruins. Into the chaos steps the Second Alliance, a multinational eager to impose its own kind of New World Order.
In the United States … in FirStep, the vast space colony … and on the artificial island Freezone — the SA shoulders its way to power, spinning a dark web of media manipulation, propaganda, and infiltration…
Trouble and Her Friends by Melissa Scott
From the blurb:
After the authorities close down the illegal world of cyberspace, home to the computer netwalkers, India Carless (alias “Trouble”) settles down in the corporate world, until a computer hacker forces her into a deadly battle of technology and wits.
Mindplayers by Pat Cadigan
From the blurb:
For Allie, putting on the madcap that Jerry borrowed was a very big mistake. The psychosis itself was quite conventional, but it didn’t go away when she took the madcap off, so the Brain Police took over leaving her with a choice – go to jail as a mind criminal or become a mindplayer.
Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1) by William Gibson
From the blurb:
Case was the sharpest data-thief in the matrix—until he crossed the wrong people and they crippled his nervous system, banishing him from cyberspace. Now a mysterious new employer has recruited him for a last-chance run at an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, a mirror-eyed street-samurai, to watch his back, Case is ready for the adventure that upped the ante on an entire genre of fiction…
