Books like Streetlethal — picked by fans

I don’t think cyberpunk as we know it would exist without William Gibson’s Neuromancer. If PKD jump-started the genre, then Gibson advanced it in ways previously unimaginable.

I love the tone and texture of this book. Written in a gritty urban style, the mixture of atmosphere and wacky characters vividly paints the concept of high-tech and low-life that underpins the cyberpunk genre. Plus, it has “street samurai”–I mean, let’s go!

City Come A-Walkin’ is it, the beginning, the first true cyberpunk novel. 

As William Gibson famously said in the forward to the 15-year anniversary edition, “John Shirley is cyberpunk’s patient zero.” Debuting in 1980, City follows Stu Cole, a streetwise nightclub owner who angered San Francisco’s political and criminal elite, bringing down the full weight of their power; his only hope, the enigmatic construct known only as, “City.” 

A proto-AI, City was a conglomeration of the computer, surveillance, and data infrastructure that took on a life of its own, becoming sapient and dangerous. To ten-year-old me, it was the coolest book I had ever read (and it didn’t hurt that the school library refused to order it for me) and really put the punk in cyberpunk.

Software is a zany romp through a 1983 vision of 2020, with sapient AIs living on the moon and maybe invading South Florida. 

Like its author, Software is a rich amalgamation of disparate elements: on the one side, the book is campy fun, while on the other, it’s a legitimate exploration of Artificial Intelligence and identity. Back when I was first getting into cyberpunk, this was another difficult find, despite having won the Philip K. Dick award; I actually didn’t read it until the late ‘90s! 

The author’s life is nearly as interesting as his books, too: his full name is Rudolf von Bitter Rucker, a descendant of German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel, though he grew up in Louisville, KY, and he would eventually develop his own literary movement, Transrealism.

For the last book on our list, we look at Hardwired, by Walter John Williams because, in my humble opinion, it marks the completion of cyberpunk’s subgenre formation. 

Published in 1986, Hardwired follows a protagonist named Cowboy as he connects his brain to various machines through a hardwire and fights the evil orbital corporations that own the world. Awesome. It stands out to me in the history of golden-age cyberpunk novels in that it calls upon elements from previous cyberpunk works more-so than its predecessors, solidifying the subgenre’s obligations. 

To say it another way, Hardwired alludes to earlier cyberpunk works to effectively place the story within the reader’s literary experience. And that presupposed cyberpunk experience demarcates the subgenre, a clarion signal that the subgenre was here to stay.”

What can you say about the book that kicked off a whole new genre?

Widely regarded as the first ‘cyberpunk’ novel, reading Virtual Light today is beyond eery. It takes place in the dystopian future year of 2006 (the book was written in 1994) and is set in San Francisco during a time when the middle class has disappeared and the only people left are either disgustingly rich or living on the street. And as I look around at what San Francisco, and many other cities have become, it makes me think that Gibson might be the Cassandra of the modern world. 

William Gibson’s latest novel Agency is as prophetic as his establishment of cyberspace and cyberpunk culture in the 80s and 90s. His latest novel chronicles reality-busting skirmishes among gangsterish multi-generational families based in a glitzy post-apocalyptic 22nd century London. In this future, nano-machines conjure luxuries from nothing while sky-high scrubbers struggle to restore a ravaged atmosphere after the jackpot, a global environmental catastrophe. Agency tells a heist-type story about the emergence of Eunice, a sentient AI born in our stub out of American special operations research. Leading a cross-dimensional band of techies, publicists, hipsters, and hackers, ace software designer Verity fights to introduce Eunice to her world in order to save it. Yet Gibson is telling us about today's ecological and technological forces. He writes of pre-jackpot life in our era: “‘Did we ever come to terms with the sheer cluelessness of it?’

Bubbles in Space couldn’t be more different than the two books above. It features a humoristic approach to the genre and doesn’t take itself too seriously. We follow Bubbles, a pink-haired detective on her adventures in Holo City. Like me, S.C. Jensen is one of the very few female authors in the cyberpunk genre. I recommend checking her books out if you’re looking for something not as grim and dramatic as most cyberpunk books.

This is a cyberpunk novel, and while most books in that genre focus more on characters like criminals or rebels, this one narrows in on a former police detective and private security contractor. This is one of the few books in the genre that looks at the working stiffs of the cyberpunk future, instead of the punks with mohawks & machine guns or the corporate suits with their android bodyguards and elegant penthouses.

Swipe Right for Murder is a thriller with LGBT themes that will gobble up every moment you can spare for reading. Set in 2019, the book nonetheless has a raucous, cyberpunk feel. Main character Aidan, through the use of a Grindr-style hook-up app on his senior Spring Break, stumbles into an unfortunate series of events that lead him into close contact with a domestic terrorist organization bent on killing homophobes. Swipe Right for Murder is a page-turner if there ever was one, and it’s fucking funny. Seriously, there are some legit laugh-out-loud moments in this book—generally a tough order for a written medium. If you’re looking for a smart thriller that is turned up to eleven at all points, then this book is an absolute must-read.

Matthew and I were on an author panel in the past. I’m all into supporting fellow authors, especially those in a similar sub-genre.

In this story, the orphaned protagonist, Moss, has finally found his place in the world with his employer. But everything is turned upside down when a mysterious woman breaks into his apartment and hands him a data chip from his dead parents. All is not as he believed, and to find the truth, he must venture out into the dangerous megacity streets filled with outcasts and criminals. Here, he meets a rebel group intent on exposing their corrupt oppressors, including his old boss, who now wants him dead.