By Elizabeth Bear First Published: 2005 “She wasn’t born for this mission. She was modified for it.” The year is 2062, and after years on the run, Jenny Casey is back in the Canadian armed forces. Those who were once her enemies are now her allies, and at fifty, she’ s been handpicked for the most important mission of her life—a mission for which her…
By Elizabeth Bear First Published: 2004 “She was engineered for combat—in a world that is running out of time.” Once Jenny Casey was somebody’s daughter. Once she was somebody’s enemy. Now Jenny Casey, a retired master corporal in the Canadian special forces, is just scrapping by on the mean streets of Hartford, Connecticut. Her world is populated by drug dealers, petty criminals, and the occasional…
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…
By William Gibson First Published: 1993 Rating: Classic. 2005: Welcome to NoCal and SoCal, the uneasy sister-states of what used to be California. The millennium has come and gone, leaving in its wake only stunned survivors. In Los Angeles, Berry Rydell is a former armed-response rentacop now working for a bounty hunter. Chevette Washington is a bicycle messenger turned pickpocket who impulsively snatches a pair…
By Marianne De Pierres First Published: 2004 Rating: Excellent. The Tert–a toxic strip of humanity outside the city limits–is no longer big enough for bodyguard Parrish Plessis and her sadistic boss, Jamon Mondo. So with Mondo’s dingoboys on her tail, Parrish cuts a deal with a rival gang lord to steal some files that could send Mondo to death row. At the same time, she’s…
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 Andrew Swann First Published: 1994 It is 21st-century and Angelica Lopez is a Moreau, a genetically-engineered individual who is half-human, half-animal. Descended from genetically alter rabbit stock, Angel gets by in the most unlikely of career choices. She’s a street fighter. That is until she finds refuge and a new life in San Francisco working as a waitress. All is well until Byron, fox-hybrid,…
By Andrew Swann First Published: 1993 Set in Cleveland 100 years in the future, this debut novel is the story of Nohar Rajasthan, Private Eye, who’s a moreau–descended from genetically manipulated tiger stock. When Nohar is hired by a being illegally created from human stock to look into a murder, he finds himself caught up in a conspiracy of awesome proportions.
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…
By KC Alexander First Published: 2016 Street thug Riko has some serious issues—memories wiped, reputation tanked, girlfriend turned into a tech-fueled zombie. After street thug Riko escapes from a lab she doesn’t remember entering, abandoning her tech-corrupted girlfriend, she’s got some serious issues to handle. First, how did she and her girlfriend get there? Second, how can she convince her team to help her find…
By Anne Harris First Published: 1998 Anne Harris returns with an outstanding look at the near future. Never before has her technological insight been so acute, or her portrayal of sex and gender issues more startling or insightful. A bio-technology corporation has created a new species, intelligent, four-armed, humanoid “tetras” who can live in the vats in which “the company” grows biopolymers. Both the tetras…
By Steve Perry First Published: 1995 Abandoning his life on Earth after his lover is murdered, Venture Silk starts over on New Earth with Zia, a beautiful spy who is hunted by enemy agents for the secret she holds–the key to eternal life. Venture Silk and Zia Rélanj have fled Earth for her homeworld of E2 — it was run or be arrested. They love…
By Steve Perry First Published: 2000 In the not-so-distant future, Venture Silk is a media spindoc and a pro at twisting the news to serve his corporate masters. When Silk is pulled into a web of lies and intrigue beyond the kind he has learned to spin, his life become a lot more interesting and dangerous. Now spies, rogue agents, and religious fanatics are around…
By Edward Ashton First Published: 2020 Rating: Good, but flawed. Anders Jensen is having a bad month. His roommate is a data thief, his girlfriend picks fights in bars, and his best friend is a cyborg…and a lousy tipper. When everything is spiraling out of control, though, maybe those are exactly the kind of friends you need. In a world divided between the genetically engineered…
By Melissa Scott First Published: 1994 India Carless, alias Trouble, managed to stay one step ahead of the feds until she retired from life as a hacker and settled down to run a small network for an artist’s co-op. Now someone has stolen her pseudonym and begun to use it for criminal hacking. So Trouble returns. Once the fastest gun on the electronic frontier, she…
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…
By WT Quick First Published: 1989 He is the master of information retrieval. A genius at finding out anything that anyone needs to know. All you have to do is call Josh Tower and have the loot in hand and you will discover the answer to any question you may have. Once upon a time he was working for the Defense Intelligence Agency, the deadly…
By William Gibson First Published: 1988 Rating: Very Good, but flawed. Enter Gibson’s unique world – lyrical and mechanical, erotic and violent, sobering and exciting – where multinational corporations and high tech outlaws vie for power, traveling into the computer-generated universe known as cyberspace. Into this world comes Mona, a young girl with a murky past and an uncertain future whose life is on a…
By Walter Jon Williams First Published: 1989 Rating: Very Good. “ORPHANS OF DEEP SPACE . . .” Ubu Roy and Beautiful Maria, two orphans genetically engineered to be expert star pilots, live by their wits on the fringes of human space. But when their luck fails, Ubu and Maria flee to the outer reaches of space where they risk everything in a gamble to win…
By Walter Jon Williams First Published: 1986 Rating: Very Good. Steward is a Beta—a clone. In his memories, he’s an elite commando for an Orbital Policorp— but because his Alpha never did a brain-scan update, Steward’s memories are fifteen years out of date…and in those fifteen years, everything has changed. An interstellar war destroyed the company that held his allegiance. His wife has divorced him,…
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…
By Steven Barnes First Published: 1994 Streetfighter, fugitive, hero … Aubry Knight is now a powerful man with powerful friends. And someone wants to kill him. Their opening shot is the death of one of Aubry’s dearest friends. Their next attack is on Aubry’s child. Knight is drawn inexorably toward New Africa, toward the mysteries of his own past, and toward a future that may…
By Steven Barnes First Published: 1989 IN THE NIGHTMARE FUTURE OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY ONLY THE STRONGEST SURVIVE… Raised on the streets of a devastated twenty-first century torn by plagues, riots, and social decay, Aubry Knight was trained to be a lethal killing machine. Betrayed by those who created him, Knight turns his awesome powers on those who made him the man he is. But…
By Steven Barnes First Published: 1983 Rating: Very Good. Los Angeles is a teeming metropolis with a rotten core: Deep Maze, where the Thai-VI ghouls—the disease-spreading Spiders—roam. Here the all-powerful Ortegas rule over their empire of drugs, prostitution and black-market human organs “donated” by their helpless victims. Disgusted with his life as enforcer for the Ortegas and their bloody empire of drugs, prostitution, and black…
By Emily Devenport First Published: 1994 Rating: Good, but hampered by excessive sex. She’s a sexy, hard-boiled, ex-prostitute with the face of a goddess, sculpted double-E breasts, and a brilliant mind to match. She’s Scorpianne, and she’s caught in a high-stakes game of cutting-edge technology and interstellar warfare that has her determined to unravel deadly secrets of illegal biotech research.
By Emily Devenport First Published: 1993 Rating: Excellent. HOOK A mean, backwater mining planet where the alien Q’rin rule. Taking the wrong side can get you killed and humans have little hope for escape. LARISSA A young woman with a talent for sports…and knives. She’s beating the aliens at their own particularly harsh game until someone dies. Now she must flee Hook. OFF-PLANET The stakes…
By Joseph H. Delaney First Published: 1984 If being human means to experience love, fear, joy… …then Valentine is human. She is also a computer program- the single self-aware being on the vast unliving network. Her only friend is Celeste Hackett, the programmer extraordinaire who accidentally brought Valentina to life. Valentina is enslaved… …but escapes to freedom. She is attacked… …but defends herself. She is…
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,…
By Michael McQuay First Published: 1982 Swain wasn’t betting on his future. He’d returned home, wasted and flat broke, to find the city ravaged by a deadly plague. But when an old friend got fried before his eyes, Swain was back in business. The stakes were life and death for millions, including Swain’s long-lost love. Odds were he’d die catching the murderer–if the plague didn’t…
By Michael McQuay First Published: 1981 The 21st century’s toughest private eye in a future that’s running down like a dime-store watch. Where the line between rich and poor is a DMZ and they clean the streets with meat wagons. If your not tough in a world like that, you’re dead. Swain is always first in line. this time it starts with a desperate Moon-to-Earth…