My Favorite Cyberpunk Reads of All Time — Share Your Own
If you love cyberpunk, then you’ve no doubt got a list of all time faves kicking around in your skull. I know I do and I figured I’d share…
If you love cyberpunk, then you’ve no doubt got a list of all time faves kicking around in your skull. I know I do and I figured I’d share mine. You’ll probably agree with some of them and think I missed on others. Everyone’s top tier is a little different. After you check out my list go ahead and let me know yours in the comments!
We’ll kick it off with a classic: Neuromancer. That was the first cyberpunk book I ever got my hot little hands on and it absolutely blew me away. Until that very moment, I didn’t know you could write sci-fi that ran along the razor’s edge. This was gritty, violent, dark sci-fi with lowlifes and outlaws as the central characters. All the sci-fi I’d seen before had glittering buildings and pristine cities with the rich and powerful as the stars of the show. And yet here was a book about hackers, drug dealers, prostitutes, crime bosses and the Special Forces. Awesome. It also had this little thing called cyberspace. Frankly, the Internet has never been as cool as the visual, psychedelic matrix of the Sprawl! Maybe the dawning of the VR era with HTC and Oculus will change all that soon? There’s always hope.
I recently re-read the Neuromancer 20th Anniversary Edition. I’m happy to say it’s aged like fine wine. Well mostly. In the introduction, Gibson wrote that his favorite moment was when a hacker made a line of pay phones ring! When was the last time you saw a payphone? My personal favorite is when someone tries to sell 4MB of “hot RAM.” I’m guessing that would fetch him about half a cent if he were lucky, that is if someone doesn’t turn it into a necklace or use it for a coaster.
And yet, even with some outdated tech much of the book’s themes are still terribly relevant today: the massive power of corporations; rampaging pollution and environmental damage; increasingly invasive and ubiquitous technology. None of these trends have changed and they aren’t slowing down. They’re accelerating. If we’re not careful we’ll end up living in a burned out, neon lit world that looks a lot like Chiba City. Some places already do. Much of China where I’ve set my latest series, a nanopunk epic called The Jasmine Wars, looks and feels like something ripped right out of the pages of Gibson. You have seething, smog-choked mega-cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong, where people wear filtration masks everywhere they go. The pollution got so bad recently that Beijing issued a red alert and shut down the ENTIRE city for five days. Some of the pictures look like still frames from the latest Bladerunner movie where environmental devastation has run rampant.
One of the greatest moments in my career was when a reviewer said that my novel, The Scorpion Game, “gave me the feeling of reading Neuromancer all over again.” I was still grinning a few days later because I’d hoped to do just that for readers while still delivering something fresh and exciting.
Now there are a few books on my list that don’t officially qualify as cyberpunk, but I’m sticking them on there anyway, namely The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man, both by Alfred Bester. Sadly, Bester only wrote two sci-fi novels before moving on to other things, but both of them are classics unlike anything else I’ve ever read. They contain some magical tech but don’t forget that Bester was writing pre-computer so he gets a bit of a pass. Even so, all the major themes of cyberpunk saturate his work, from big mega-corporations, to societal alienation. If you haven’t read either book, go grab them right now because you’ll love them. When he died, Bester earned the 9th Grandmaster award by the Science Fiction Writers of America. That’s an amazing feat for someone with only two books to his name. Although someone in the cyberpunk culture FB group just told me he has a sci-fi short story collection that I never knew about and I can’t wait to dig into it.
Another novel from early 80s cyberpunk that really charged me up was Schismatrix Plus, by Bruce Sterling. The story centers on a Cold War like rift between Shapers and Mechanists, post-human factions that embrace genetics or prosthetics as a path to human potential acceleration. The Plus edition adds a number of fantastic short stories, including one of my favorites to this day, Swarm, about a bio-hacking Shaper looking to take over an insect like alien colony by manufacturing fake hormones and enzymes to take control of the hive. It doesn’t go exactly as planned.
Schismatrix covers a single character that lives over a hundred years and we watch the technology develop as the novel progresses. It goes from very hardwired 80's cyberpunk tech, to wetware and biotech, to planet shaping megatech in the course of a 100K words.
It’s incredibly hard to capture the sweep of societal change over time as well as this book does. The best sci-fi shows how society changes. That’s one of the key themes underlying The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephnson, one of the best writers in the biz today. He’s written so many different types of books. He’s always pushing himself to write in new styles, but two of his works fit the cyberpunk mold, Snow Crash and Diamond Age. Actually Snow Crash is generally considered post-cyberpunk. The novel plays with and even pokes fun at the dystopian themes of the classics of the 80s. Frankly, I’m not a huge fan of Snow Crash. (I tend to duck after I say that to a sci-fi audience.) It just didn’t do it for me. I know. I know. It’s a classic, that’s super-awesome and fuses Sumerian myth with hacker culture and blah blah blah. For me it’s a no go, because of its tongue in cheek tone. From a world building perspective it worked beautifully and it was obviously hugely influential to the early Internet and even VR, since Stephenson was the first to use the term “avatar” which is now the default term for online personae. Still, I love the darker edge of cyberpunk and I don’t think it mixes all that well with humor. I know I am in the minority there.
On the other hand, The Diamond Age really stuck in my memory. Stephenson envisioned the era of post 3D printing, with atomic printers, as well as micro-economies and rise of nanotech before most folks were even dreaming about it. The novel has a revolutionary edge, with a poor girl looking to unleash the knowledge of the elites for everyone. There is a decidedly democratic uprising woven through its themes that is relevant today with our ever-growing rift between the 99% and the 1%.
Last up on the list is Accelerando by Charles Stross. It’s probably a stretch to call it cyberpunk, but it was born out of a Slashdot reading Linux lover in Stross and it moves at the frenetic pace of cyberpunk even as it covers an incredible sweep of history. The themes of dystopian and utopian AI are right in line with the other novels on this list. I devoured that book and if you haven’t checked it out, add that to your list too.
So that’s it. This list could be a lot longer or even shorter but I wanted to cover the books that really mattered the most to me. Everyone has one or two books that really stick out for them. I know you’ve got some too.
Agree with what I wrote? Think it’s crap? Think I forgot something that absolutely, positively has to be on here? Go ahead and let me know about it!
A bit about me: I’m an author, engineer and serial entrepreneur. During the last two decades, I’ve covered a broad range of tech from Linux to virtualization and containers. You can check out my latest novel, an epic Chinese sci-fi civil war saga where China throws off the chains of communism and becomes the world’s first direct democracy, running a highly advanced, artificially intelligent decentralized app platform with no leaders. You can also check out the Cicada open source project based on ideas from the book that outlines how to make that tech a reality right now and you can get in on the beta.