The most recommended cyberpunk books

Seth Rain has a knack for building believable worlds, then inserting brain-teasers to make you wonder if this could happen. The writing is fast-paced and hooks you from the start. This particular series made me wonder what is real and what is not: who really is in charge? I’m sure that people who like to think, will love this series.

Sure, this book was written way back in 1956, but its dark tale of “mind reading” police is still just as captivating and relevant today. In Dick’s imagined future, three mutants are able to foresee crime before it occurs, allowing the cops to stop crime before it gets started. Like the mutants, today’s neural imaging machines are heralded as ways to see what people are thinking, revealing what they can’t or won’t voluntarily describe. The novel explores questions about expectations of privacy, the dangers of authoritarian regimes controlling invasive technologies, and the nature of free will—all issues that society will need to wrestle with as our understanding of the brain advances. 

Cyberfunk! Anthology extends a new conversation in black speculative fiction by offering cyberpunk with an Afrocentric flavour. Taking stories from Africa and the diaspora, this anthology integrates light and darkness, social justice, and inclusion in black hero/ines as you’ve never seen them before. Each story invites openness and expands the interpretation of black writing and the rising power of the black voice. Featuring stories from Hannibal Tabu, John Jennings, Balogun Ojetade, and edited by a keen-sighted pioneer author, editor, and publisher Milton J. Davis. Find out how to play the odds in a twisted world.   

Autonomous is one of those books you finish reading and then just want to sit and stare off into space for a while.

The story takes place in a future world where Big Pharma runs basically the entire show. The main character is a drug pirate, fabricating expensive drugs to provide them to the population on the cheap… but when one of her fabbed drugs causes some horrible side effects, it kicks off a domino effect of chaos and death.

Other characters include a military agent sent to hunt our drug pirate down and his robotic, AI-powered partner. Every character is riddled with absolutely deal-breaking flaws, so if you’re looking for heroes, you’ve come to the wrong place. The story raises questions about morality, freedom, AI, and more. I can’t recommend it enough! 

Although Murakami is perhaps best known for his ambitious novels such as Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka by the Shore, and IQ84, this book stands out in his catalog for its unapologetic weirdness. In tandem, his split-brained narrator explores two different yet thematically overlapping worlds.

I teach sci-fi, but reluctantly admit that much sci-fi is, well, bad: formulaic or cheesy geekiness, and impenetrably long book series. I am surprised how well Dick's 1968 novel holds up, and how good it is. What appears to be a formulaic noir-detective pastiche turns into a deeply problematic rumination on what, exactly, is human? In a post-nuclear setting of ruins, few people, and so few animals that consuming them has become horrendously unthinkable, what is left of civilization is augmented by artificial animal pets as well as semi-reanimated human-robot-androids ("andys," renamed "replicants" in the 1982 Bladerunner adaptation). As his job leads him into increasingly thorny ethical decisions, Decker gradually questions how he is any better or distinguished from these various life (life?) forms. The movie is thinky. The book is thinkier. Like any good fiction, "Androids" both entertains and poses complex questions to the reader.

As we continue our journey into the future, things that people thought would change to our advantage have not turned out the way. I like P. K. Dick's stories because he was a master at understanding how the future would upend traditional lifestyles, jobs, and housing.

This book is about a man who makes highly creative weapons for the government designed to keep the country in power. The kicker is that none of the weapons actually work. On the other side, his counterpoint is doing the same thing, making ridiculous super weapons. When real aliens show up, they find themselves trying to work together to make something that works for real while still superstitiously battling each other under the guise of a white flag.

I don’t care about baseball at all, but I love stories with cybernetic implants, reluctant detectives, and corporate machinations and this book has all of those… plus cyborg baseball. I loved Kobo, the down-on-his-luck baseball scout barely scraping by on his implant maintenance fees, and the mystery he’s sucked into when his childhood best friend (and major league baseball star) dies in the middle of a game. This is the best kind of onion mystery, with layers upon layers of twists and turns, and it’s full of the brain-busting science fictional ideas I love—biological and technological augmentation and their consequences.

As a reader, I am drawn to both noir and science fiction because they are both puzzles. They present a mystery seeking an answer, whether it is a question about the rules of a strange new world, or the question of who killed who and how. In Far from the Light of Heaven, we start with a locked room murder mystery set on an interstellar vessel. The seemingly impossible crime is enough to keep one reading to the end, but then the book provides other, more enticing mysteries that grow in scale and scope the deeper the story goes.

The world of Otherland is Earth, and the people are human, but woven into that familiar landscape is a virtual world that hasn’t quite happened yet. Imagine a virtual, digital world in which your avatar can ‘feel’. Why would you ever want to leave?

I first read Otherland soon after I started playing MMORPGs [Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games]. MMORPGs provide a ‘persistent’ world in which your character can fight, craft, build, or just socialize with other players. As such, it can become very immersive, and that’s just through the power of the imagination and some pixels on a screen. Now, imagine how immersive a virtual world would be. And how dangerous. 

Otherland started me thinking about technology and how humans relate to new innovations. It also inspired some of my own writing.