Recommended Reading: Cyberpunk

Having recently read Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (see my review here), which William Gibson credits as the birth of cyberpunk, I have been tempted to explore the genre (or subgenre) in greater detail.

Stubby the Rocket, over at Tor.com, has come out with a listicle of great cyberpunk titles Are You 1337 Enough for these Cyberpunk Tales?. Although a few are obvious, there are some other ones that I had not heard of before and look forward to picking up:

1. True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier—Vernor Vinge
2. Neuromancer—William Gibson
3. Trouble and her Friends—Melissa Scott
4. Snow Crash—Neal Stephenson
5. Halting State—Charles Stross
6. The Quantum Thief—Hannu Rajaniemi
7. Schismatrix Plus—Bruce Sterling
8. The Shockwave Rider—John Brunner
9. Corsair—James L. Cambias
10. Alif the Unseen—G. Willow Wilson
11. Gridlinked—Neal Asher
12. Equations of Life: Book 1, Samuil Petrovitch—Simon Morden
13. Mindplayers—Pat Cadigan
14. The Ware Tetralogy—Rudy Rucker
15. Little Brother—Cory Doctorow

I seem to be coming across recommendations to read Charles Stross from all kinds of places these days (see here and here). The synopsis for Halting State sounds pretty interesting:

In the year 2018, a daring bank robbery has taken place at Hayek Associates. The suspects are a band of marauding orcs, with a dragon in tow for fire support, and the bank is located within the virtual reality land of a MMORPG called Avalon Four. But Sergeant Sue Smith discovers that this virtual world robbery may be linked to some real world devastation. To foil the crime, she’ll need to team with an intrepid insurance fraud investigator named Elaine Barnaby, and hapless, recently laid-off programmer and MMORPG expert, Jack Reed. Will they learn the truth, or are the orcs going to win this one?

I had not heard of Alif the Unseen before; the synopsis makes it sound pretty cool:

In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker shields his clients—dissidents, outlaws, Islamists, and other watched groups—from surveillance and tries to stay out of trouble. He goes by Alif—the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and a convenient handle to hide behind. The aristocratic woman Alif loves has jilted him for a prince chosen by her parents, and his computer has just been breached by the state’s electronic security force, putting his clients and his own neck on the line. Then it turns out his lover’s new fiancé is the “Hand of God,” as they call the head of state security, and his henchmen come after Alif, driving him underground. When Alif discovers The Thousand and One Days, the secret book of the jinn, which both he and the Hand suspect may unleash a new level of information technology, the stakes are raised and Alif must struggle for life or death, aided by forces seen and unseen.

You can read the rest of the synopses at the original site.