49 books like Permutation City

THEME: Technically, this is not really a work of science fiction per se, even though it takes place in London 2013, twenty-one years before the book's publication. So it explores aspects of the future through a journey into the head of a serial killer and to the heart of murder itself. In the book, London at that time was a city where serial murder has reached epidemic proportions. To combat this raft of murders, the government has created a test to screen people for a predisposition to commit violent crimes. Tested at random, a man is shocked to hear that he fits the model. Yet when he breaks into the computer to erase his name, he discovers a list of his "brothers" a logical idea springs into his mind: What if to protect society he becomes a killer of serial murderers?

The inspector charged with tracking down this sociopath, code-named… show more.

For a novel on the list, I have only read once, and a long time ago, I still keep thinking about this. It asks: Can we learn about the universe without first learning about ourselves?

It also goes into the limits of science. There are simply things science cannot tell us. The planet’s colloid sea is nonlinear, the math unsolvable, and the alien is potentially hostile. I choose to believe the planet is attempting to heal some deep-forgotten hurt of the narrator. What is the purpose of bringing up a disastrous relationship? To heal or learn? Or perhaps the alien is simply toying with them?

I read it soon after changing my life's trajectory and attempting to be more peaceful, creative, contemplative, and less frantic or consumptive. I need to read this again.

By the early twentieth century, violent crime was the number one political issue in America. In response, Congress passed the Swift and Sure Anti-Crime Bill, which gave a previously convicted violent criminal one fair trail, one quick appeal, then immediate execution. But to prevent abuse of the law, it was necessary to create a machine that could detect lies with one-hundred percent accuracy. It was clear that such a Truth Machine would change the world. But the race to perfect the Truth Machine forces one man to commit a shocking act of treachery. Now he must conceal the truth from his own creation---or face execution.

The conflict here is truth versus justice, as is often the case in human affairs. I was extremely interested in seeing how the author would balance these two seemingly irreconcilable factors. The book does a startingly job in resolving this conflict, in the process creating… show more.

I think this novel, by physicist Gregory Benford, is one of the best fictional representations of how science is really done and of the real world of scientists and graduate students.

It is also an early exploration of the concept of tachyons, particles that cannot move slower or as slow as the speed of light but always have to go faster. (These have been proposed only in theory, but what makes them exciting is that they would travel backward in time.) In the book, that property enables people in the future to communicate with us in their past.

Another thing I like about this book is that some of his characters are thinly disguised (or not disguised) versions of real astronomers of the time.

The late American master sci-fi author Philip K. Dick, or just PKD, wrote 44 novels and some 121 short stories. Even if you have never read one of them, you’ve seen the many movies and TV Series based on them.

This novella was the inspiration for Ridley Scott’s classic movie Blade Runner (the original). Like the movie, it portrays sci-fi as the mirror opposite of the bright Star Trekian sci-fi. Here we get cyberpunk (or tech-noir)—ubiquitous neon lights barely illuminate the dark shadows of this future world.

Mankind has been forced off-world, but those who remain on Earth collect any living creature. Those who can’t afford them can buy them from companies who create animals so realistic they are indistinguishable from the real thing–horses, birds, cats, and…sheep. But these companies can build humans, too. Earth bans these “replicants,” and our protagonist, Rick Deckard, is a bounty hunter commissioned to hunt… show more.

Stanislaw Lem, the Polish philosopher and science fiction novelist, had the talent of writing novels that raise profound questions about the human condition. One of the issues he tackled was whether our human form of intelligence is just one of many types of intelligence that might be found in the universe.

In one of his most gripping and mind-stretching novels, The Invincible, an Earth spaceship lands on an apparently uninhabited planet only to find that many years previously, another race had crash-landed on the planet, and their small, robotic assistants were the main survivors of the crash. Those automata evolved into a collection of tiny “flies,” which, although not individually conscious or possessed of reasoning, use evolved herd behaviors to destroy their surviving alien masters and all other living creatures on the planet’s surface. When the humans from Earth explore the planet, they encounter clouds of these tiny metallic… show more.

This book seems a bit strange at first, when the story begins with Moon-Watcher, the leader of a tribe of early ape-man, who struggles for survival during the brutal Pleistocene ice age. After an alien monolith appears, it seems to advance the way he thinks, leading him to develop crude weapons. When the same monolith is discovered in the future, we seem fated to find the answers behind the eerie structure. Skipping to a team of astronauts who travel aboard a ship to further investigate, things take an unexpected turn when the ship’s A.I. called HAL-9000, gets very confused about keeping secrets. Something about the way it remains so polite while it deceives the crew, is enough to give anyone a nightmare.

No one explores the idea of A.I. better than Isaac Asimov, so when robotics experts Powell and Donovan build an advanced robot called QT-1 or “Cutie” for short, “be careful what you wish for,” comes to mind. Cutie isn’t so bad, except he seems to doubt everything he’s told after he’s created, including the fact that humans built him. When Powell asks Cutie why he doesn’t believe it, Cutie claims it’s intuition. When Powell tries to explain to Cutie about the stars, planets, and space, Cutie disagrees with him and decides to “reason” out things on his own. Unfortunately, this robot is so far advanced, it has the ability to form opinions and ideas, that don’t necessarily equate to logic—a primary lesson about intelligence which is learned early on in the story.

The first comprehensive book on new tech and its impacts, following big steps made in AI progress in the early 2010s. The authors bring home the point that we are undergoing a watershed moment as tools no longer substitute merely for physical labor encroach on mental tasks – hence the book’s title.

After centuries of fleeing blue-collar jobs to take refuge in cerebral work, we are being left with nowhere to run. Not only that, but past technology would automate a given task, whereas the looming Artificial Intelligence is bound to intervene in many, many tasks currently handled by humans.

This book is one of the nuttiest I’ve read in its imaginings of a modern world on steroids. The part that teases most is that its predictions might come true.

I know our smartphones and laptops have changed our world, but cures that would extend longevity ad infinitum? Neural interfaces that would connect us directly to the internet? Nanobots that would reduce the cost of goods to zero?

Because the topic of modernity has come to engross me so, the big question always is, “How far will it carry us?” The answer to which (according to Kurzweil) is much farther than you can possibly imagine and much sooner than you think. One should have one’s mind blown every couple of years, and Kurzweil does exactly that.