Book picks similar to
5 Stars by Louise Blackwick
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Made in Korea
Jeremy Holt - 2022
Socially awkward, yet equipped with a seemingly encyclopedic brain, the young girl’s journey through the complexities of race, gender, and identity hits a fork in the road when she discovers she’s not entirely human…yet.Adolescence just got a lot more emotional for the world’s first true A.I. system.Collects MADE IN KOREA #1-6
Blame!, Vol. 1
Tsutomu Nihei - 1998
He wanders an endless labyrinth of cyberdungeons filled with concrete and steel, fighting off cyborgs and other bizarre silicate creatures. Everyone is searching for the Net Terminal Genes, but no one is quite certain what kind of power they contain. The answer may lie hidden among the scattered human settlements of this vast and desolate future world.
Blindsight
Peter Watts - 2006
The heavens have been silent since - until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us. Who to send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn't want to meet? Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder, and a biologist so spliced to machinery he can't feel his own flesh. Send a pacifist warrior, and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find - but you'd give anything for that to be true, if you knew what was waiting for them.
The Robots of Gotham
Todd McAulty - 2018
One quarter of the country is under foreign occupation. Manhattan has been annexed by a weird robot monarchy, and in Tennessee, a permanent peace is being delicately negotiated between the battered remnants of the U.S. government and an envoy of implacable machines.Canadian businessman Barry Simcoe arrives in occupied Chicago days before his hotel is attacked by a rogue war machine. In the aftermath, he meets a dedicated Russian medic with the occupying army, and 19 Black Winter, a badly damaged robot. Together they stumble on a machine conspiracy to unleash a horrific plague—and learn that the fabled American resistance is not as extinct as everyone believes. Simcoe races against time to prevent the extermination of all life on the continent . . . and uncover a secret that America’s machine conquerors are desperate to keep hidden.
WWW: Wake
Robert J. Sawyer - 2009
When she receives an implant to restore her sight, instead of seeing reality she perceives the landscape of the World Wide Web-where she makes contact with a mysterious consciousness existing only in cyberspace.
Repo Virtual
Corey J. White - 2020
White's debut novel Repo Virtual blurs the lines between the real and virtual in an action-packed cyberpunk heist story.An Amazon and Kobo Best Book of April!The city of Neo Songdo is a Russian doll of realities -- augmented and virtual spaces anchored in the weight of the real. The smart city is designed to be read by machine vision while people see only the augmented facade of the corporate ideal. At night the stars are obscured by an intergalactic virtual war being waged by millions of players, while on the streets below people are forced to beg, steal, and hustle to survive.Enter Julius Dax, online repoman and real-life thief. He's been hired for a special job: stealing an unknown object from a reclusive tech billionaire. But when he finds out he's stolen the first sentient AI, his payday gets a lot more complicated.
Expelled
Ell Leigh Clarke - 2019
Jayne Austin wasn’t always the galaxy’s number one spy.
She was expelled from spy school for uncovering a double-agent because apparently, that’s what happens to spies that accomplish great things.Given a choice between going back to her planet or selling her one-way ticket for starting capital she thought long and hard about her choices.
All of fifteen seconds.
Then, she created ‘the Plan.’
It was a great plan. A worthy plan.
A noble plan that meant she could start up her own spy agency, and show them precisely who they’ve expelled.
However, when her first case comes in, she begins to wonder if perhaps she bit off too much.
With the fate of the planet in the hands of terrorists, Jayne is forced to up her game and go to lengths she never thought she dared.
She’s going to need *FRIENDS*.
If you love space opera you’re going to love Spy for Hire: a literary triumph of majestic accomplishments a laugh-out-loud, spew-your-coffee-over-your kindle swashbuckling page turner that follows the shenanigans and best efforts of a somewhat cavalier ex-government spy, Jayne Austin.
Download it now.
You’ll be glad you gave it a try…
The Metabarons: Ultimate Collection
Alejandro Jodorowsky - 2003
A multi-generational tale of family, sacrifice, and survival told within an immense universe, both in scope and originality. A true classic in the pantheon of graphic storytelling and science fiction as a whole. Omnibus content includes The Metabarons #1-4 trades + 30 pages of bonus material (including two Metabaron short stories), presented in its original size and color and in a limited and numbered print run of 999 copies only.
Cyberpunk City Book One: The Machine Killer
D.L. Young - 2020
He couldn't be more wrong.Forced by a powerful executive to steal a priceless dataset, Maddox uncovers the shocking truth of a secret war between AIs, raging inside the digital universe known as virtual space. Plunged headlong into the deadly conflict, he’ll have to use every trick he’s ever learned—and a few he’s never tried before—if he wants to survive.Sprawling megacities, rogue AIs, black market tech, modded mercenaries, and a pulse-pounding story filled with unexpected twists. If you love gritty, hardcore cyberpunk, you won’t want to miss this series!
Elvissey
Jack Womack - 1993
They are on a desperate mission to kidnap the young Elvis Presley and bring him back to the present day to serve as a ready-made cult leader. He proves, however, to be a reluctant messiah, and things do not work out quite as planned.
Neuromancer
William Gibson - 1984
But now a new and very mysterious employer recruits him for a last-chance run. The target: an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence orbiting Earth in service of the sinister Tessier-Ashpool business clan. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, mirror-eyed street-samurai, to watch his back, Case embarks on an adventure that ups the ante on an entire genre of fiction.The winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, Neuromancer was the first fully-realized glimpse of humankind’s digital future—a shocking vision that has challenged our assumptions about our technology and ourselves, reinvented the way we speak and think, and forever altered the landscape of our imaginations.
The Night Sessions
Ken MacLeod - 2008
In this enlightened age there's no persecution. But the millions who still believe and worship are a marginal and mistrusted minority - and now someone is killing them.
The Budayeen Cycle: When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, and The Exile Kiss
George Alec Effinger - 2017
R. Martin). Praised as “a perfect example of how exciting the subgenre can and should be,” George Alec Effinger’s Budayeen Cycle is a towering and timeless science fiction achievement that continues to amaze, shock, and captivate readers (SF Signal). When Gravity Fails: Set in a high-tech near future featuring an ascendant Muslim world and divided Western superpowers, this cult classic takes readers into a world with mind- or mood-altering drugs for any purpose, brains enhanced by electronic hardware, and surgically altered bodies. Street hustler Marîd Audran has always prided himself on his independence, free from commitments, connections, and even cybernetic modifications. But when a string of brutal murders lands him on the radar of Friedlander Bey, the most powerful and dangerous man in the decadent Arab ghetto, the Budayeen, Audran is forced to change his loner ways, or risk losing his life . . . A Fire in the Sun: Once a small-time smuggler, Marîd Audran has, to his chagrin, moved up in the ranks of the criminal underworld to become a lieutenant in Friedlander Bey’s shadowy empire. Tasked with being Bey’s eyes and ears inside local law enforcement, Audran finds himself tracking yet another serial killer through the streets of the Budayeen. And the closer he gets to his target, the more embroiled he becomes in the deadly political machinations hidden behind the city’s façade. The Exile Kiss: Marîd Audran is finally learning to appreciate the wealth and benefits that come from being on Friedlander Bey’s payroll when a powerful enemy does the unthinkable, and gets both Audran and Bey exiled from the Budayeen. Abandoned in the lifeless and lethal Arabian Desert, Audran and Bey have only one option: survive long enough to exact revenge on the man responsible.
Nascent
Tony Corden - 2017
From the age of six, she decided that she wanted more and with the help of her local gang-leader she learned the skills to escape the relentless pressure to mediocrity. On her sixteenth birthday, she was inadvertently implanted with a Neural Enhancement Chip instead of the free Government provided basic level personal AI. This mistake not only removed the limits placed on the AI but also broke some of the Government instigated control parameters. Leah’s life rapidly becomes a battle, both in the virtual-multiverse and in real life. On the Stork Tower by Wáng Zhīhuàn Along the mountains sink the last rays of sun, Towards the sea, the Yellow River does forward go. If you would fain command a thousand miles in view, To a higher storey, you are expected to go.
The Turing Option
Harry Harrison - 1992
Before he can perfect the machine, terrorists steal his research and put a bullet through his brain. Miraculously revived by methods he pioneered, he must find his lost memory and discover who is trying to kill him.