I have been an avid reader for my entire life, as well as someone trained extensively in technology (master’s degree in electrical engineering). About twenty years ago, I became seriously drawn to writing and, quite naturally, gravitated toward technology-centric stories. Reading technology-based stories (novels and short stories) as well as nonfiction scientific articles provides a perpetual source of new ideas. And keeping up with the latest domestic and international news keeps me apprised of all the ways technology affects the world, for better and for worse.
I really enjoyed this book firstly because of the complete plausibility of the scenario, an extraterrestrial pathogen that comes to earth about which we are powerless to do anything.
Crichton’s medical background is on solid display here, and it is intriguing to experience the author’s very first fiction effort, knowing, as we do, the many great stories to come in the ensuing years (Jurassic Park, etc.). I also very much enjoyed the idea of a group of talented people from a wide range of disciplines working together to tackle a challenge of immense importance.
From the author of Jurassic Park, Timeline, and Sphere comes a captivating thriller about a deadly extraterrestrial microorganism, which threatens to annihilate human life.
Five prominent biophysicists have warned the United States government that sterilization procedures for returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere. Two years later, a probe satellite falls to the earth and lands in a desolate region of northeastern Arizona. Nearby, in the town of Piedmont, bodies lie heaped and flung across the ground, faces locked in frozen surprise. What could cause such shock and fear? The terror has begun, and…
This is easily Dave Eggers’ best novel. It is a terrific and fast-moving story of what can happen when rapidly developing technology combines with a leader who possesses a very loose moral sense and the ability to inculcate such morals in underlings.
Eggers is wonderful at creating believable characters who have a lot at stake from the story’s challenges and outcomes. In this case, the primary challenge is being forced to live in a world of round-the-clock surveillance of all one’s activities. The CEO bases his desire to create (and profit massively from) this world on the always-flawed notion that “if you’re not doing anything wrong, you should have no fear of being constantly surveilled.”
The most frightening aspect of the book is that the rapid advance of real-world technology makes the novel’s fundamental premise entirely plausible, indeed likely.
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE starring Tom Hanks, Emma Watson and John Boyega
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - a dark, thrilling and unputdownable novel about our obsession with the internet
'Prepare to be addicted' Daily Mail
'A gripping and highly unsettling read' Sunday Times
'The Circle is 'Brave New World' for our brave new world... Fast, witty and troubling' Washington Post
When Mae is hired to work for the Circle, the world's most powerful internet company, she feels she's been given the opportunity of a lifetime. Run out of a sprawling California campus, the Circle links users' personal emails,…
The Oracle of Spring Garden Road
by
Norrin M. Ripsman,
The Oracle of Spring Garden Road explores the life and singular worldview of “Crazy Eddie,” a brilliant, highly-educated homeless man who panhandles in front of a downtown bank in a coastal town.
Eddie is a local enigma. Who is he? Where did he come from? What brought him to a…
One of Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s finest novels (among many), this book, imagines an alternative world in which humans are cloned as a source of organ donations for the wealthy.
The novel is unique in that it does not dwell at length (in fact, hardly at all) on the actual technology underlying the story’s premise. Rather, it is primarily the story of well-developed characters and their relationships with one another as they navigate their way through this nightmarish world.
I became deeply invested in the fates of the three main characters, while also imagining what life would be like in such a world.
One of the most acclaimed novels of the 21st Century, from the Nobel Prize-winning author
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense…
This is a seminal story about the relationship between real and synthetic humans. It is a foundational component of the ensuing 50 or so years of sci-fi fiction.
What I particularly enjoy about the story is the ongoing struggle to clearly define what it means to be human. Dick addresses numerous important aspects of this struggle, ranging from the mundane to the theological.
As the eagerly-anticipated new film Blade Runner 2049 finally comes to the screen, rediscover the world of Blade Runner . . .
World War Terminus had left the Earth devastated. Through its ruins, bounty hunter Rick Deckard stalked, in search of the renegade replicants who were his prey. When he wasn't 'retiring' them with his laser weapon, he dreamed of owning a live animal - the ultimate status symbol in a world all but bereft of animal life.
Then Rick got his chance: the assignment to kill six Nexus-6 targets, for a huge reward. But in Deckard's world things were…
Disgraced British anthropologist Nigel Rowe hopes his YouTube adventure channel will be just the treat to redeem him, but vengeful treasure hunters have other plans! Seeking a legendary Jesuit mission in Baja, Nigel saves his producer’s life when the man takes a bullet meant for him.
I enjoyed this book for its excellent character development and frightening plausibility, particularly in our current political climate. The novel’s principal focus on one main character (Winston Smith) enables Orwell to delve deeply into the many potential causes and consequences of totalitarianism, which only increases the power of the narrative.
This novel has been a classic since its 1949 publication, and it remains as salient today as it was after the conclusion of WW2.
1984 is the year in which it happens. The world is divided into three superstates. In Oceania, the Party's power is absolute. Every action, word, gesture and thought is monitored under the watchful eye of Big Brother and the Thought Police. In the Ministry of Truth, the Party's department for propaganda, Winston Smith's job is to edit the past. Over time, the impulse to escape the machine and live independently takes hold of him and he embarks on a secret and forbidden love affair. As he writes the words 'DOWN WITH BIG…
My book tells the story of an agricultural research company that develops a line of genetically modified seeds designed to increase crop yields and resist drought, pests, and disease, with the goal of reducing hunger in Third-World countries. During testing, reports emerge of bizarre observations linked to domestic animal slaughter and, eventually, the deaths of several people. The seeds’ high-growth genetic enhancements have been transferred into local insects through their ingestion of the test crops.
These strains of “super” insects are larger, more aggressive, and more resistant to pesticides and disease than their natural counterparts. As the insects become more plentiful and widespread, the company’s scientists, entomologists, and field operatives work to eradicate the species and deal with the fallout of mankind’s apathy toward environmental meddling.
Elsie has two feet in the 20th century. Smith has one foot in the 19th. Their marriage, founded on physical attraction, is built on sand as all around them the earth of Europe also starts to quake. Prised apart by emotional conflict and the loss of two children they are…
Noam Chomsky has been praised by the likes of Bono and Hugo Chávez and attacked by the likes of Tom Wolfe and Alan Dershowitz. Groundbreaking linguist and outspoken political dissenter—voted “most important public intellectual in the world today” in a 2005 magazine poll—Chomsky inspires fanatical devotion and fierce vituperation.
