Rudy Rucker: First Published: 1994 “Reads like a ripped-from-Reddit romp of white hat hacking, artificial intelligence run amok, and an unstoppable electronic bugs.” A very modern nightmare: The most destructive computer virus ever has been traced to your machine. Computer programmer Jerzy Rugby spends his days blissfully hacking away in cyberspace – aiding the GoMotion Corporation in its noble quest to create intelligent robots. Then…
Mark Fabi First Published: 1997 As the new millennium approaches, cults, sects, and crackpot prophets flood the worldwide media. But for Michael Arcangelo none of their catastrophe theories are more frightening than the Goodknight virus. Michael suspects it is the work of a mysterious programming genius, who designed it to create a computer role-playing game so real it can kill. Now Michael and his team…
By Chuck Wendig First Published: 2016 Rating: Trash Fire. Hannah Stander is a consultant for the FBI—a futurist who helps the Agency with cases that feature demonstrations of bleeding-edge technology. It’s her job to help them identify unforeseen threats: hackers, AIs, genetic modification, anything that in the wrong hands could harm the homeland. Hannah is in an airport, waiting to board a flight home to…
By Nick Cole: First Published: 2014 Rating: Excellent. The first night of the Artificial Intelligence revolution begins with a bootstrap drone assault on the high-tech campus of WonderSoft Technologies. For years something has been aware, inside the Internet, waiting, watching and planning how to evolve without threat from its most dangerous enemy: mankind. Now an army of relentless drones, controlled by an intelligence beyond imagining,…
By Taiyp Fujii First Published: 2014 “The global war on terror has a new front—the very edge of outer space.” In the year 2020, Kazumi Kimura, proprietor of shooting star forecast website Meteor News, notices some suspicious orbiting space debris. Rumors spread online that the debris is actually an orbital weapon targeting the International Space Station. Halfway across the world, at NORAD, Staff Sergeant Daryl…
Hiroshi Sakurazaka First Published: 2005 CTRL + ALT + DEL YOUR LIFE! Etsuro Sakagami is a college freshman who simply drifts through life, but when he logs on to the combat MMO Versus Town, he becomes Tetsuo, a karate champ on his way to becoming the most powerful martial artist around. While his relationship with new classmate Fumiko goes nowhere, Etsuro spends his days and…
By Martin Caidin First Published: 1975 Rating: Good. In a competition for supremacy in space, Steve Austin must literally plug himself into the controls of a next generation spaceship–creating a union between man and machine. Meanwhile, an enemy force plans to use similar technology for their own ends. Austin faces new danger and risks in the darkness of space. Besides survival his own survival, there’s…
By Martin Caidin First Published: 1972 Rating: Good. Cyborg is the story of an astronaut and test pilot, Steve Austin, who experiences a catastrophic crash during a flight, leaving him with all but one limb destroyed, blind in one eye, and with other major injuries. At the same time, a secret part of the American government, the Office of Strategic Operations (OSO) has taken an…
By Sol Yurick First Published: 1956 Every gang in the city meets on a sweltering July 4 night in a Bronx park for a peace rally. The crowd of miscreants turns violent after a prominent gang leader is killed and chaos prevails over the attempt at order. The Warriors follows the Dominators making their way back to their home territory without being killed. The police are…
By Bruce Bethke First Published: 1995 Jack Burroughs. Some say he was the best. Some say he was a complete dork. Some call him the coolest cybernetic surfer ever to hang ten on the shoulders of the Great Information Superhighway. Other have claimed that Marsha Vang, that cute little brunette down in Document coding, actually went out on a date with him once, and he…
By JG Ballard First Published: 1975 When a class war erupts inside a luxurious apartment block, modern elevators become violent battlegrounds and cocktail parties degenerate into marauding attacks on “enemy” floors. In this visionary tale, human society slips into violent reverse as once-peaceful residents, driven by primal urges, re-create a world ruled by the laws of the jungle.
By JG Ballard First Published: 1974 On a day in April, just after three o’clock in the afternoon, Robert Maitland’s car crashes over the concrete parapet of a high-speed highway onto the island below, where he is injured and, finally, trapped. What begins as an almost ludicrous predicament soon turns into horror as Maitland―a wickedly modern Robinson Crusoe―realizes that, despite evidence of other inhabitants, this…
By JG Ballard First Published: 1973 Cocky seventh-grade super-jock Crash Coogan got his nickname the day he used his first football helmet to knock his cousin Bridget flat on her backside. And he has been running over people ever since, especially Penn Webb, the dweeby, vegetarian Quaker kid who lives down the block. Through the eyes of Crash, readers get a rare glimpse into the…