Recs

[brigdh]

I really love the idea of cyberpunk. It seems to hit far too many of my story kinks to not love the genre: hackers and virtual reality and drugs and thieves and crumbling skyscrapers against polluted skies. But I've yet to find a book of it that I love. All of it that I've tried just seems a little... meh. I want to blame it on a focus on plot when I'd rather read about characters, but I'm not sure that's entirely accurate.

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is the closest thing I've ever read to what I'm looking for, while most of Gibson's stuff kind of bores me, to give you an example of my taste.

So, o flist which tends to hold the accumulated knowledge of the universe, what cyberpunk books would you rec me?

Comments

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

The Fortunate Fall by Raphael Carter. It is brilliant, I think out of print, but worth a special order. Also probably in libraries.

Other than that... I don't usually like cyberpunk. Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter is not actually cyberpunk, but would probably hit a lot of your buttons anyway. Ditto for Walter Jon Williams Aristoi.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Hey! I was going to rec The Fortunate Fall. So yeah.

I think Stations of the Tide probably has more in common with cyberpunk than The Iron Dragon's Daughter.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Thanks anyway! It must be very good to inspire two recs; I think I'll have to check that one out first.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Thank you! The description of The Fortunate Fall looks fascinating, as does The Iron Dragon's Daughter, especially since changelings are another kink of mine (though not one I ever expected to see crossed over with cyberpunk).

Also: when I log in to Amazon, the home page shows me posts of yours! That's cool; I've never seen it do something similar before.

[weirdquark]

I have no recs, but watching the Errol Flynn version of Robin Hood made me want to write a cyberpunk version.

Little John as a cyborg! And light weapons!

I don't think I'll ever do anything with it because I know nothing about cyberpunk, but there it is.

Swashbuckling --> CyberpunkWTF?

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Hee!

I think a cyberpunk Robin Hood would be really cool, actually.

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

I have much the same problem with cyberpunk, so I'm not going to rec you anything that actually belongs to the genre.

I am, however, going to seize upon that "virtual reality" thing to go off on a tangent and rec Kim Stanley Robinson's The Memory of Whiteness, which is completely different from his Mars books. It's an amazing work, and it does have virtual reality in it. Among other things, like music and Shakespeare and sense of wonder and gorgeous writing, not to mention the single best description of the Mercury orbit anomaly I've ever read. And it sometimes seems as if nobody but me has ever read it, so I never get to talk about it.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I have! Twice even. But it's not my favorite KSR novel.

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

Okay, I'll bite. Which one is your favorite?

I haven't read every one of his books, in part because I'm trying to save some in case another one of them blows me away the way The Memory of Whiteness did. But of the ones I have read, sadly for me, none had anything like the same effect. They were admirable, but the hit-between-the-eyes thing just wasn't happening.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I have much the same problem with cyberpunk

Heh. I wonder how many other people do too, then? Maybe if I could manage to write a novel myself, I'd tap into all these people who've just been waiting for a cyberpunk book of a different streak.

Of course, that would involve me actually being able to write anything over 5,000 words...

That sounds like a fascinating book. Also, hey: it's the author of The Years of Rice and Salt, which I've been meaning to read for years.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I'm always seeing those in bookstores, but I'd thought they were fantasy and not cyberpunk. They look really interesting, though, and now I have even more of an excuse to buy them. Thanks!

[iilii.livejournal.com]

Hrm, it's been a while since I've read any cyberpunk. I know I've read more than what's actually on my shelf.

Norman Spinrad is one of my favorite authors. Deus X is pretty good and has sort of a religion-meets-technology angle. I'm certain I read something of his with a rock-and-roll bit, back in the '80s, but I don't remember what it was. The descriptions of a lot of his books (Child of Fortune, A World Between, Mind Game) on Amazon.com all sound vaguely familiar, but I'm not sure which one I'm thinking of. I think a lot of his older books are out of print, but I see you can pick them up used at Amazon.com.

Joan D. Vinge is pretty good. Psion and Catspaw are worth picking up. I haven't been able to make it through the third book in that series, but that may be because I don't reach much (or any) cyberpunk anymore.

Signal to Noise is the only thing I've read recently... it's pretty sharp and well-written. A lot of virtual reality stuff.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Ooo, thank you. The Spinrad ones sound very good; I'll be sure to check them out.

[iilii.livejournal.com]

Eek, I just realized the rock-and-roll one I'm thinking of may be Synners by Pat Cadigan. I think Fools may be the same series. Both are pretty good.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Cool, thanks! I just finished a short stort by Pat Cadigan which was interesting, so I'd like to see what she does with a longer work. Especially if it involves rock-and-roll. *grins*

[redshoeson.livejournal.com]

Did Light not hit it for you? Man, I thought I had a good one. White Apples isn't really cyberpunk, though it is fairly good. The ending really squished it. :/

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

No, I liked Light, I just wouldn't call it cyberpunk. Maybe the one plotline about the guy who was addicted to the tanks, but overall I think it was just a regular hard sci-fi book.

That always sucks, when a book's good right up till the end.

[redshoeson.livejournal.com]

*squees on you for entirely unrelated reasons*

^^

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Eeeeeeeeeeeee!

[childofatlantis.livejournal.com]

hackers and virtual reality and drugs and thieves and crumbling skyscrapers against polluted skies.

... that's weird. My definition of cyberpunk is "hackers and virtual reality and flying cars and gleaming skyscrapers under a glass dome with ice blue skies above". Maybe that's why I don't like the books in the genre...

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I suppose you could argue it either way- there's so many books and authors and genres of postcyberpunk and neocyberpunk and whatever, that you could probably find examples that fit both our definitions.

But I've always thought of cyberpunk as being very gritty, very much about the underbelly of the future- which is generally pretty distopic overall- and the protagonists are never important people like commanders or leading scientists or politicians, just poor, regular people living in the equivalent of today's ghettos or slums, scrapping by and making a day-to-day existence on the edge of the law. Which is why I like it, ironically, heh.