Here are 97 books that The Warm Machine fans have personally recommended if you like
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Because sometimes I think they go further than the formulas set by traditional publishing. I love fantasy and similar genres because there are no limits for the imagination. The books I’ve chosen fulfill what I think is important – world-building, imagination, thought-provoking, intelligent, and wonderful characters on a mission of some kind.
This is my favourite series by Michael Robertson; its world-building is so real that it’s scary because this dystopian world could really exist. The world has its defined structure and the characters within it are believable, even if not all likable. It’s a complex series and yet is simple in its reading; compelling at the very least.
In Edin, when you turn eighteen, you have to do national service.
Six-months outside the city's walls, fighting the diseased hordes.
Only half the recruits survive.
Spike refuses to be just another statistic.
Beyond These Walls is a post-apocalyptic epic. Join Spike, Matilda, and their friends as they leave their city for the first time to face the brutal reality of national service. Some of them won’t return, and for those who do, their lives will never be the same again.
Because sometimes I think they go further than the formulas set by traditional publishing. I love fantasy and similar genres because there are no limits for the imagination. The books I’ve chosen fulfill what I think is important – world-building, imagination, thought-provoking, intelligent, and wonderful characters on a mission of some kind.
I’ve read all of this author’s work and the Rushed series is my favourite because although it’s a sinister paranormal fantasy, it is filled with humour. The world-building for each book is amazing – certainly daunting and nasty in parts, yet believable.
There are remarks in reviews that it’s confusing and weird, so maybe you have to be odd to understand and appreciate it. I did, so I must be.
Eric can't remember the recurring dream that keeps waking him in the middle of the night with an overwhelming urge to leave, yet he spends each day feeling as if he desperately needs to be somewhere. With no idea how to cure himself of this odd compulsion, he decides to let it take its course and go for a drive, hoping that once he proves to himself that there is nowhere to go, he can return to his normal life. Instead, he finds himself hurled headlong into a nightmare adventure across a fractured Wisconsin as the dream reveals itself one…
Because sometimes I think they go further than the formulas set by traditional publishing. I love fantasy and similar genres because there are no limits for the imagination. The books I’ve chosen fulfill what I think is important – world-building, imagination, thought-provoking, intelligent, and wonderful characters on a mission of some kind.
I like all of Maria Savva’s books because she has great insight into how people think and why they act as they do. She creates worlds that are ‘normal’ and yet pitches her characters into unusual situations, which make the worlds strange and eerie; especially in The Spider stories.
'No one's ever come out of that house alive. . .' What lurks behind the door of 8 Goldfern Road? Are you brave enough to step inside? By entering the sinister house, George and Glen become entangled in a dangerous battle of wills. "The Spider" is a story of obsession, infidelity, and broken dreams. This darkly humorous mystery will appeal to fantasy and romance readers as well as those who love to hate spiders!
Because sometimes I think they go further than the formulas set by traditional publishing. I love fantasy and similar genres because there are no limits for the imagination. The books I’ve chosen fulfill what I think is important – world-building, imagination, thought-provoking, intelligent, and wonderful characters on a mission of some kind.
This author is a ‘master’ at creating fantasy worlds; his writing is intelligent and gripping. This particular series focuses on a battle between two immense powers with amazing descriptions, yet it is character-driven, making it relatable and believable. It’s thought-provoking and immerses you into a world that feels very real, its descriptions potent, its characters intriguing – I loved it.
For thousands of years they have sought the world from which they were cast out. Now, at last, Aona has been found. The younger races of this world will all be swept up in a struggle for survival, as their ancient, malevolent masters, guardians of all Aona's secrets, rise to do battle with their foes, remorseless destroyers of world after world throughout the known Existence.
Between Blade Runner and The Terminator, I was hooked on Cyberpunk. Throw in some Ghost in the Shell and Black Mirror, and the obsession was complete. With the rise of Synthwave as a musical genre and as a retro-futuristic aesthetic, I had both the soundtrack and the visual cues to which I could write Cyberpunk. I also feel strongly about our increasing reliance on technology and the blurring lines between biology and technology. This is something I explore in my writing.
This book stands out because of its great world-building, terrific characters (Chicken Thumbs and Patchwork are personal favourites), and brilliant action—this is cyberpunk at its best. The attention to detail, such as the names of corporations and logos is impressive. There are also a couple of well-conceived and executed twists (no spoilers!).
When a corporate lacky discovers a terrible secret that exposes his illusions, will his hidden fire dwindle or ignite a rebellion?
Orphaned and alone, Moss is happy to have found a place in the world. But his humdrum working routines take a terrifying turn when a mysterious woman breaks into his apartment and hands him a data chip from his dead parents. Suddenly hearing messages revealing his benevolent employer has a far darker side, he braves the dangerous megacity streets in search of the truth.
Surrounded by outcasts and criminals and running on instinct, Moss stumbles onto a rebel group…
Although I write Fantasy, I’m a Cyberpunk enthusiast who mentally lives in the high-tech effed-up future authors and artists imagined in the ‘80s. My imagination has been so influenced by Cyberpunk since I watched (and eventually read) Akira as a kid that I ended up creating a Fantasy world with a retro-futuristic, low-life/high-tech vibe, and a lot of motorcycles. An awful lot. I’m also a rebel by heart and a queer person, hence my stories always feature a fight against society and LGBTQ+ characters. I like reading about dystopias, morally grey characters, and dark content. This is what I read, and this is what I write about.
More a space opera than a full-fledged Cyberpunk story, Schismatrix is a masterpiece with incredible worldbuilding and socio-political commentary. This book impacted mine on many levels; it features an initially hopeless protagonist who eventually fights for a cause, a revolution with struggling factions, a dystopian tyranny, futuristic pirates. It’s a visionary book permeated with deep reflections on human essence and transhumanism, one that’ll make you wonder where humanity is heading, what our purpose is, and what our search for growth and change will entail.
The Nebula-nominated novel of “abrave new world of nearly constant future shock”—plus all the short fiction of the Shaper/Mechanist universe (The Washington Post).
Acclaimed science fiction luminary and a godfather of the genre’s remarkable offspring—cyberpunk—Bruce Sterling carries readers to a far-future universe where stunning achievements in human development have been tainted by a virulent outbreak of prejudice and hatred.
Many thousands of years in the future, the human race has split into two incompatible factions. The aristocratic Mechanists believe that humans can only achieve their greatest potential through technology and enhancing their bodies with powerful prosthetics. The rebel Shapers view…
I’m a writer/artist inspired by a lifetime of reading graphic novels. A visual artist at heart with a BFA in Industrial Design I have worked over a decade in conceptual thinking for research and development in the manufacturing sector. I love the experimentation that breaks the boring norms of industry standards. I wanted to use my talent, experience, and passion to create a sci-fi graphic novel, Bear Serum, and break the medium norms. I wrote and drew it to satiate my own wild ideas in the sci-fi category to push the medium further.
Before a Friday night drink, turn on some heavy metal (or hard rock) and decide if you want to, “Become a cop or die.”
This indie sci-fi graphic novel has style with thought-provoking themes that will make you wonder about our lives in the near future.
The monochromatic color palette is not only stylistically cool but it frames emotion perfectly well. I loved the raw indie art by Ziritt, feels like a classic tattoo artist took his inks and drew inside comic panels. He frames a lot of statuesque and memorable moments with his violent, dystopian characters.
As an indie artist and writer, it’s awesome to see another indie story. Indie at its core is unfiltered, which is what makes it great. It isn’t watered down to hit the right tone to sell a lot of copies. It’s the creator’s voice being heard.
Night Hunters is a pulsing cyberpunk classic that tells the tale of two brothers who have to navigate the futuristic dystopian world of Venezuela, 100 years in the future.
How far would you go for your family? Would you enlist in a corrupt police department and slowly sell your body-parts for cyborg replacements so that your aging father can have a roof over his head? The only answer is pick up your gun and put one foot in front of the other.
This sci-fi epic by indie comics all-stars Alexis Ziritt (Space Riders, Tarantula) and Dave Baker (F*** Off Squad,…
Although I write Fantasy, I’m a Cyberpunk enthusiast who mentally lives in the high-tech effed-up future authors and artists imagined in the ‘80s. My imagination has been so influenced by Cyberpunk since I watched (and eventually read) Akira as a kid that I ended up creating a Fantasy world with a retro-futuristic, low-life/high-tech vibe, and a lot of motorcycles. An awful lot. I’m also a rebel by heart and a queer person, hence my stories always feature a fight against society and LGBTQ+ characters. I like reading about dystopias, morally grey characters, and dark content. This is what I read, and this is what I write about.
Pat Cadigan is one of my favourite authors. Mindplayers is a short book, bizarre and strange but fascinating as per Cadigan’s style. The main setting here is the human mind. The protagonist is forced to become a Mindplayer, a sort of state-controlled psychologist who jacks into people’s minds in order to cure them. This book makes you wonder how vast the world inside your head is, and if your thoughts and memories really belong to you once a government takes control of them. There’s even Brain Police involved, what can be more dystopian than this?
Allie Haas only did it for a dare - the kind of dare you know is a mistake but you do it anyway because it's Mistake Yime. But putting on the madcap that Jerry Wirerammer has 'borrowed' was a very big mistake. The psychosis itself was quite conventional, a few paranoid delusions, but it didn't go away when she took the madcap off. Jerry did the decent thing and left her at an emergency room for dry-cleaning but then the Brain Police took over. Straightened out by a professional mindplayer, Allie thinks she's left mind games behind for good but…
I’m a novelist and game designer from Bangalore. I’ve been a lifelong reader of science fiction and fantasy. Growing up, I almost never encountered futures that included people like me—brown women, from a country that isn’t the UK/ US, and yet, who are in sync with the rapidly changing global village we belong to. Over the last decade, though, I've found increasing joy in more recent science fiction, in which the future belongs to everyone.The Ten Percent Thiefis an expression of my experiences living in dynamic urban India, and represents one of our many possible futures.
I picked this novel because, for lack of a better phrase, it’s too real. In an entirely believable and horrifying future lies Silicon Isle, an island made of trash. It’s where the world dumps all its electronic waste, for generations of poor, marginalized people to sort through, while pollutants make the tiny world they call home uninhabitable and hostile.
It also happens to be where a powerful biological weapon is hidden, unknowingly discovered by Mimi, one of the novel’s protagonists. It transforms her. Class disparities come to the fore, leading to revolution. This is classic cyberpunk, refreshingly set in a future outside the UK/ US, translated from the original Chinese by Ken Liu.
She's a 'waste girl', a scavenger picking through towering heaps of hazardous electronic detritus. Along with thousands of other migrant workers, she was lured to Silicon Isle, off the southern coast of China, by the promise of steady work and a better life.
But Silicon Isle is where the rotten fruits of capitalism and consumer culture come to their toxic end. The land is hopelessly polluted, the workers utterly at the mercy of those in power. And now a storm is gathering, as ruthless local…
Ever since childhood, I’ve been dazzled by the idea of virtual worlds described by pixels, first in ancient computer games, and then in novels that gave the rudimentary graphics of decades past a vivid new life—from the hallucinatory realities in Philip K. Dick’s novels to William Gibson’s Neuromancer to most of all, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. As a young writer, I stepped sideways into a dream assignment: Helping make the Metaverse real. After writing about it for two decades, however, I’m still learning about it now.
The OG Metaverse novel is still as smart, hilarious, rollicking, and inspirational as it was 30 years ago.
I’m amazed at how many technologists talking about the concept have not read it and realized how influential and prophetic it actually is, envisioning scenes of virtual life that have since become commonplace for millions of Internet denizens.
Often pigeonholed as a standard dystopian sci-fi tale, Snow Crash is too sly, satirical, and kinetic to fit that category. And reading it will clarify why so many people in tech have yearned to build something like the Metaverse for decades, even referencing it during development discussions—including me!
The “brilliantly realized” (The New York Times Book Review) breakthrough novel from visionary author Neal Stephenson, a modern classic that predicted the metaverse and inspired generations of Silicon Valley innovators
Hiro lives in a Los Angeles where franchises line the freeway as far as the eye can see. The only relief from the sea of logos is within the autonomous city-states, where law-abiding citizens don’t dare leave their mansions.
Hiro delivers pizza to the mansions for a living, defending his pies from marauders when necessary with a matched set of samurai swords. His home is a shared 20 X 30…
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