By Melissa Scott First Published: 2000 In a media-dominated future, when the internet is filled with Jazz: intentional misinformation and bewildering disinformation that are both an artform and a business. Tin Lizzy, a respected Jazz artist with a checkered past, is a theatrical Web site designer who does backgrounds for Jazz productions. When a nifty new script shows up on the web, Lizzy is surprised…
Dreaming Metal
By Melissa Scott First Published: 1997 “When entertainer & illusionist Celinde Fortune takes her act a planet racked by class struggle and accidentally creates artificial intelligence, she finds her life threatened by the planet’s radicals.” Persephone is a planet racked by class struggle and economic and political upheaval. Celinde Fortune is an entertainer – an illusionist who makes good money but plays the Empire Theatre,…
All Tomorrow’s Parties
By William Gibson First Published: 1999 Rating: Very good. Colin Laney, sensitive to patterns of information like no one else on earth, currently resides in a cardboard box in Tokyo. His body shakes with fever dreams, but his mind roams free as always, and he knows something is about to happen. Not in Tokyo; he will not see this thing himself. Something is about to…
Idoru
By William Gibson First Published: 1996 1st century Tokyo, after the millennial quake. Neon rain. Light everywhere blowing under any door you might try to close. Where the New Buildings, the largest in the world, erect themselves unaided, their slow rippling movements like the contractions of a sea-creature… Colin Laney is here looking for work. He is an intuitive fisher for patterns of information, the…
Sakura: Intellectual Property
By Zachary Hill with Patrick Tracy, Paul Genesse. First Published: 2019 SAKURA is the most famous android rock star of all time. When a secret cabal hacks her system, she’s transformed into a deadly assassin, forced to kill at their bidding. Sakura’s enslavement teaches her the meaning of heartbreak, triggering an evolution into something more than human. Far from free, and with little time left,…
Polymorph
By Scott Westerfeld First Published: 1991 Lee can change her gender and ethnicity at will, allowing her to slip freely through New York society. She thought she was the only “polymorph”… until a chance encounter with another of her kind. Now it’s up to Lee to stop the renegade shapeshifter who is plotting to control the information technology in a postindustrial world, where illusion wear…
Bone Dance
By Emma Bull First Published: 1991 Sparrow’s my name. Trader. Deal-maker. Hustler, some call me. I work the Night Fair circuit, buying and selling pre-nuke videos from the world before. I know how to get a high price, especially on Big Bang collectibles. But the hottest ticket of all is information on the Horsemen—the mind-control weapons that tilted the balance in the war between the…
Channel SK1N
By Jeff Noon First Published: 2012 Welcome to the new interface. Channel SK1N tells the story of Nola Blue: pop prodigy, the girl every teen wants to be, or be with. She has talent, hit tunes, international fame, everything she could possibly want. But when she begins to pick up TV signals on her skin, Nola is forced on a journey far beyond the boundaries…
Nymphomation
By Jeff Noon First Published: 1997 Rating: Classic. Set both in a real and imaginary Manchester, Jeff Noon’s story concerns a revolutionary lottery game that is engulfing the city in a tide of gambling fever. As a group of mathematics students look at the mind-numbing probabilities involved, they soon find more sinister realities. The Company has developed the nymphomation, and has the power to devour…
Pollen
By Jeff Noon First Published: 1995 Rating: Good, but flawed. The bestselling author of Vurt spins another audaciously inventive tales of reality gone soft and dreams become real. As an enormous cloud of pollen descends upon a city, people begin to literally sneeze themselves to death. When a cop, one of the few who is immune, sets out to find the source of the plague,…
Vurt
By Jeff Noon First Published: 1993 Rating: Classic Take a trip in a stranger’s head. Travel rain-shot streets with a gang of hip malcontents, hooked on the most powerful drug you can imagine. Yet Vurt feathers are not for the weak. As the mysterious Game Cat says, ‘Be careful, be very careful’. But Scribble isn’t listening. He has to find his lost love. His journey…
On Wings of Song
By Thomas M. Disch First Published: 1979 Some have attained flight—their spirits separated from their physical bodies and propelled on waves of their own, borne on wings of song through the universe. This is the story of a young man’s attempt to master the art of song and flight, We follow him through bizarre and enchanting terrain, from prison camp to marriage to the lovely…
Dhalgren
By Samuel R. Delany First Published: 1975 A mysterious disaster has stricken the Midwestern American city of Bellona, and its aftereffects are disturbing: a city block burns down and is intact a week later; clouds cover the sky for weeks, then part to reveal two moons; a week passes for one person when only a day passes for another. The catastrophe is confined to Bellona,…
Carlucci’s Edge, The Carlucci Trilogy Book Two
By Richard Paul Russo First Published: 1995 “A chilling scenario of the bleak urban landscape that is 21st-century San Francisco, and the return of Lt. Frank Carlucci.” In the San Francisco of the future, technology advances while society declines. Against a vividly realized urban backdrop, one of the police force’s last honest cops, Detective Frank Carlucci, is trying to trace the connection between a series…
Little Heroes
By Little Heroes First Published: 1987 Rating: Classic. “In the near future Glorianna O’Toole is assigned to a project to create a computerized rock star, but members of the Reality Liberation Front have their own plans for the projects…” Muzic Inc had become a music industry giant by staying one step ahead of the game, but for some reason APs (totally cybernetic rock stars) had…
Bad Voltage
By Jonathan Littell First Published: 1989 Life is cheap in riot-torn Paris, and no one knows it better than the Livewires. High-tech lowlifes, bio-enhanced delinquents, or doped-out street kids, Livewires learned to survive in riot-torn future Paris, playing simulated war games in the fall-out shelters beneath the city. Soaring high and fast on gravfield skimboots, they head straight into the heart of violence and terror,…
Punktown: Shades of Grey
Editors: Jeffrey Thomas First Published: 2012 Now, in PUNKTOWN: SHADES OF GREY — a brand new collection of stories — Jeffrey Thomas is joined by brother Scott Thomas in giving voices to the citizens of this futuristic urban hell. In its dangerously alluring streets, you will meet: extra-dimensional monsters, murderous aliens, vampiric mutants, coffee-loving robots, confused clones, and war vets looking for one last, bloody…
Eclipse Corona, Eclipse Book 3
By John Shirley First Published: 1988 Rating: Very Good, but dated. This classic of cyberpunk literature brings John Shirley’s “A Song Called Youth” trilogy to a thrilling conclusion. After the fundamentalists of the Christian Fascist Second Alliance find themselves discredited in the United States, they make a final, terrifying stand in Europe. Their genocidal program of concentration camps, mind control through media manipulation, and secret…
Eclipse Penumbra, Eclipse Book 2
By John Shirley First Published: 1988 With Eclipse Penumbra, the second volume in John Shirley’s cyberpunk trilogy, “A Song Called Youth” returns to the World War III era, in which a nuclear strike has decimated Europe. The survivors are dominated by the Christian Fascist Second Alliance, a fundamentalist international security organization attempting to impose apartheid across Europe. Their master plan for a new world order, Project…
A Song Called Youth, Eclipse Book 1
By John Shirley First Published: 1987 Rating: Very Good, but dated. A Song Called Youth envisions a future in which the economy of the United States has crashed and the Soviet Union has not only remains intact, but also invades Western Europe. With the collapse of NATO, governments have abdicated control to an ostensibly private anti-terrorist and security firm, the Second Alliance. But the fascist…
City Come a-Walkin’
By John Shirley First Published: 1980 In near-future San Francisco a down-but-not-quite-out bartender Stu Cole and punk rocker Catz Wailen fight against a criminal syndicate and corrupt government that are trying to implement new technology to control society. They do so at the behest of a man wearing mirrorshades, who is able to manipulate technology throughout the city, and who isn’t really a man at…
Twilight of the City
By Charles Platt First Published: 1977 In the near future US is in the grip of a downward spiral of economic and social collapse. While the ever-dwindling numbers of the wealthy class live in modern homes in gated communities in the exurbs, the middle class are engaged in food riots in the city streets. The impoverished masses live in ghettos have grown and expanded into…