I love morally complex sci-fi noir books because they tend to ask the hard questions that I find interesting. What is the point of seeking justice in an unjust world? How can we judge others when we ourselves are corrupt? Often, we think of noir as being dark—and it is—but it’s the pinpricks of light that make the shadows fascinating to me. I try to blend this complexity into my own writing, whether it’s in a tense relationship with religion, rampant corruption, or a struggle to do the right thing when there just aren’t any options left.
No sci-fi noir list is complete without this book by Philip K. Dick. It’s the basis of the movie Blade Runner, but significantly different in tone and content. I love it because it deals with moral and ethical issues around how we deal with the real and imitating things in our world.
As the title implies, it’s a book full of questions, and the answers aren’t always easy.
As the eagerly-anticipated new film Blade Runner 2049 finally comes to the screen, rediscover the world of Blade Runner . . .
World War Terminus had left the Earth devastated. Through its ruins, bounty hunter Rick Deckard stalked, in search of the renegade replicants who were his prey. When he wasn't 'retiring' them with his laser weapon, he dreamed of owning a live animal - the ultimate status symbol in a world all but bereft of animal life.
Then Rick got his chance: the assignment to kill six Nexus-6 targets, for a huge reward. But in Deckard's world things were…
One of my favorite things about noir is how a flawed main character can be a reflection of the broken world in which they live. In this book, Marîd Audran has his charm, but he’s a deeply flawed character. He lives in the criminal quarter of an unnamed Middle Eastern city, with corruption everywhere.
As the story goes on, the city scrapes away at him, stealing the one thing he values over everything else—his independence. That is a theme at the center of many great noir stories, and the sci-fi elements in this book amplify it a thousand percent.
In a decadent world of cheap pleasures and easy death, Marid Audrian has kept his independence the hardway. Still, like everything else in the Budayeen, he's available…for a price.
For a new kind of killer roams the streets of the Arab ghetto, a madman whose bootlegged personality cartridges range from a sinister James Bond to a sadistic disemboweler named Khan. And Marid Audrian has been made an offer he can't refuse.
The 200-year-old "godfather" of the Budayeen's underworld has enlisted Marid as his instrument of vengeance. But first Marid must undergo the most sophisticated of surgical implants before he dares…
Harris Maloub, a killer with an erased official past, now in his fifties, is visited by someone who could not be alive and given an assignment. In Aarhus, Denmark, Jens Erik, police officer on pre-retirement leave, somehow cannot forget the body of a Black man recovered from the sea some…
I love how this book takes a protagonist steeped in noir tropes and drops him into a shattered world that doesn’t seem to understand him. He’s a trench coat and a fedora in a ruined sci-fi world of technology and crime. This isn’t the deepest read on the list, but it’s a ton of fun and does some interesting things to subvert the sci-fi noir tropes.
They want Felix Lasko to solve a murder while getting chased by coyotes, one-eyed assassins, and killer robots. He’d say no, but that's not an option—since they'll kill him outright if he refuses.
Felix had always dreamed of becoming a detective: just not at gunpoint. Besides the hot lead motivation, solving the murder of Jeff Hense will get him a ticket into Neotopia. It's the last city on the planet with power, and he’s run hundreds of miles only to get stuck outside its blue forcefield dome.
He’ll need to get through a brothel-ship wedged into a cliffside, and a…
Some of my favorite sci-fi noir comes from deep inside the cyberpunk genre. This one has it all: a gritty investigation, a morally struggling protagonist, a broken society. What I like about this book is the complex interplay of technology and religion.
This is a world where a person can put on another body the way we might wear a different suit. Simmering in the background of it is this question of identity and the soul. Moral and spiritual questions combine to make a rich and powerful read, and it’s full of incredible action.
This must-read story is a confident, action-and-violence packed thriller, and future classic noir SF novel from a multi-award-winning author.
Four hundred years from now mankind is strung out across a region of interstellar space inherited from an ancient civilization discovered on Mars. The colonies are linked together by the occasional sublight colony ship voyages and hyperspatial data-casting. Human consciousness is digitally freighted between the stars and downloaded into bodies as a matter of course.
But some things never change. So when ex-envoy, now-convict Takeshi Kovacs has his consciousness and skills downloaded into the body of a…
Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977, and Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977. Both began a historic journey with unique 'time capsules' on board intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record 12-inch gold-plated disk…
I love this book because it perfectly blends the surreal with noir and science fiction and comes together with its own brand of dark humor. While parts of this book are unsettling and strange, there’s a solid throughline of the investigator seeking the truth in a broken world.
Of all the books here, I think this one has the most damaged society, and the main character, Conrad Metcalf, is a match for it. Drugs that make you forget everything and be complacent. Baby heads. Uplifted animals. The book is never afraid to get stranger, but it also tackles some pretty heavy themes. This is a world where asking questions is taboo, and the moral and ethical implications of that shape the entire world in which Metcalf lives.
The first novel by Jonathan Lethem (author of the award-winning Motherless Brooklyn) is a science-fiction mystery, a dark and funny post-modern romp serving further evidence that Lethem is the distinctive voice of a new generation.
Conrad Metcalf has problems. He has a monkey on his back, a rabbit in his waiting room, and a trigger-happy kangaroo on his tail. (Maybe evolution therapy is not such a good idea). He's been shadowing Celeste, the wife of an Oakland urologist. Maybe falling in love with her a little at the same time. When the doctor turns up dead, Metcalf finds himself caught…
All things found. All things fixed. In a city-state where crime lords are saints and good deeds are a rare commodity, Jude Demarco will take any job so long as it doesn’t involve religion or art. He’ll find lost jewelry, fix broken heat exchanges, and even set a broken leg or two.
When Charlotte Beck walks into his life with a lit cigarette and a lousy deal, he finds out that turning a job down isn’t always so easy. She seeks a painting that’s priceless to art collectors, the Catholic Church, and every criminal in Nicodemia who ever held a grudge. To find it, he’ll need to break a few rules and dig up parts of his past that were better left buried.
What kind of minds get to vote? Microbial aliens, or a world-sized AI?
In Minds in Transit, Chrysoberyl is an artist whose brain hosts a million microbial minds. Chrysoberyl’s microbes design fantastic buildings and a whole new city for her AI patron. But her design blows up with a…
“A non-stop action thrill ride of fantasy meets sci-fi meets cyberpunk.”
Camber Maypole was human once, an avid climber and chief medical officer aboard the Vera Rubin, a colony ship headed for a distant planet. But the day before launch, she was scrubbed for "insubordination." Against her will, her consciousness…
