Here are 84 books that Streetlethal fans have personally recommended if you like
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From early on, I found myself captivated by the concept of a dystopic future for humanity. Years later, a 20+ year police career cemented the notion that people are not inherently good and that if a dystopic future is at all possible–we as a species will make it a reality. My love of science fiction, especially all forms of dystopia, combined with a hard-earned street-level grit and a love of action. Whether writing solo or with my amazing co-author, Dr. Gareth Worthington, I often inject these elements into my stories. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I did!
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!
The book that defined the cyberpunk movement, inspiring everything from The Matrix to Cyberpunk 2077.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
William Gibson revolutionised science fiction in his 1984 debut Neuromancer. The writer who gave us the matrix and coined the term 'cyberspace' produced a first novel that won the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick Awards, and lit the fuse on the Cyberpunk movement.
More than three decades later, Gibson's text is as stylish as ever, his noir narrative still glitters like chrome in the shadows and his depictions of…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
Growing up in the ‘80s, I discovered cyberpunk just when the subgenre acquired its name and was instantly hooked. While its style and action were certainly engaging, it was cyberpunk’s message about the surveillance state, corporate power, fascism, and corruption, which contrasted so violently from mainstream science fiction, that kept me turning pages. 40 years later, after writing novels for 25 years, completing 12 books, I’m still fascinated by what cyberpunk can do. In an age where Humanity is mortally threatened by climate change and inequality, we need cyberpunk now more than ever, with its action and adventure and a little something for us to think about, too.
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.
Stu Cole is struggling to keep his nightclub, Club Anesthesia, afloat in the face of mob harassment when he's visited by a manifestation of the city of San Francisco, crystallized into a single enigmatic being. This amoral superhero leads him on a terrifying journey through the rock and roll demimonde as they struggle to save the city.
Growing up in the ‘80s, I discovered cyberpunk just when the subgenre acquired its name and was instantly hooked. While its style and action were certainly engaging, it was cyberpunk’s message about the surveillance state, corporate power, fascism, and corruption, which contrasted so violently from mainstream science fiction, that kept me turning pages. 40 years later, after writing novels for 25 years, completing 12 books, I’m still fascinated by what cyberpunk can do. In an age where Humanity is mortally threatened by climate change and inequality, we need cyberpunk now more than ever, with its action and adventure and a little something for us to think about, too.
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.
The creator of the first robots with real brains, Cobb Anderson finds himself another aged "pheezer" with a bad heart, and when he is offered immortality by his creations, he risks his body and his world. Reissue.
This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to…
Growing up in the ‘80s, I discovered cyberpunk just when the subgenre acquired its name and was instantly hooked. While its style and action were certainly engaging, it was cyberpunk’s message about the surveillance state, corporate power, fascism, and corruption, which contrasted so violently from mainstream science fiction, that kept me turning pages. 40 years later, after writing novels for 25 years, completing 12 books, I’m still fascinated by what cyberpunk can do. In an age where Humanity is mortally threatened by climate change and inequality, we need cyberpunk now more than ever, with its action and adventure and a little something for us to think about, too.
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.”
The criminal and resistance undergrounds of a high-tech future earth merge to wage war against the corporate Orbitals who rule the planet from their sterile space platforms
Why do I have expertise in end-of-the-world scenarios? Well, I am a person living in the 2020s who reads too much. But more than that, I’ve had an interest in space exploration and history for as long as I can remember. While those two might seem like completely unrelated fields, it gives me a wider view of our world in the sense of where we are and where we are going. Civilization is not always a straight line upward. And when it dips down… well interesting things happen. Saturnius Mons specifically blends my love of Roman history with my interest in humanity’s future.
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.
NEW YORK TIMES bestseller * 2005: Welcome to NoCal and SoCal, the uneasy sister-states of what used to be California.
The millennium has come and gone, leaving in its wake only stunned survivors. In Los Angeles, Berry Rydell is a former armed-response rentacop now working for a bounty hunter. Chevette Washington is a bicycle messenger turned pickpocket who impulsively snatches a pair of innocent-looking sunglasses. But these are no ordinary shades. What you can see through these high-tech specs can make you rich-or get you killed. Now Berry and Chevette are on the run, zeroing in on the digitalized heart…
Peter Warren Singer is a strategist at New America, a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University, and a Principal at Useful Fiction LLC. No author, living or dead, has more books on the professional US military readings lists. August Cole is an author exploring the future of conflict through fiction and other forms of “FICINT” [Fictional Intelligence] storytelling. His talks, short stories, and workshops have taken him from speaking at the Nobel Institute in Oslo to presenting on future warfare at SXSW Interactive to lecturing at West Point.
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?’
“ONE OF THE MOST VISIONARY, ORIGINAL, AND QUIETLY INFLUENTIAL WRITERS CURRENTLY WORKING”* returns with a sharply imagined follow-up to the New York Times bestselling The Peripheral.
William Gibson has trained his eye on the future for decades, ever since coining the term “cyberspace” and then popularizing it in his classic speculative novel Neuromancer in the early 1980s. Cory Doctorow raved that The Peripheral is “spectacular, a piece of trenchant, far-future speculation that features all the eyeball kicks of Neuromancer.” Now Gibson is back with Agency—a science fiction thriller heavily influenced by our most…
Tina Edwards loved her childhood and creating fairy houses, a passion shared with her father, a world-renowned architect. But at nine years old, she found him dead at his desk and is haunted by this memory. Tina's mother abruptly moved away, leaving Tina with feelings of abandonment and suspicion.
The theme of this list is so important to me as an independently published author. Ever since I was about 14 years old I knew I wanted to tell stories, and my way, so even then I was looking into indie publishing. The idea of offering my books up to the traditional publishing chopping block, to be edited and mulled into what’s most marketable, scared me so much! I didn’t want to tell my stories another person’s way. So here we are, and I’m giving you guys a list of indie recommendations whose authors feel very much the same way. We just want to tell our stories. And have control over how that’s done. ;)
I really love deep, living worlds. CE Clayton does such an amazing job of building you into her cyberpunk fantasy that you can easily believe you’re there. Add in the characters you can’t help but root for, and this book is a staple in my library. Ellinor, the protagonist, struggles with the very real emotions behind grief, loss, and the bitterness that comes with a life that feels entirely out of one’s control. Resistor has action, laughs, and again, a slow-burn romance that I simply inhaled.
Ellinor Rask has wanted one thing for the past eight years: vengeance. But when Ellinor is captured, she finds herself dragged back into the world she walked away from, entangled once more with friends she would rather forget.
As if that weren’t humiliating enough, Ellinor learns first hand that her magic can be stripped away by a piece of bio-tech—and her ex-boss is happy to leash her with the technology in order to get what he wants. If Ellinor behaves, the device will be removed. All she has to do is deliver a package. One containing a creature created from…
From the first time I snagged a romance book off my mother's shelf as a teenager, I've always been a hopeless romantic. I'm fascinated by love stories that feel like real life, entwined with the good, bad, and sometimes ugly. This is why I enjoy exploring the duality of life and love in my own novels as a romantic suspense author.
I fell for this book from startup. I had never read an android-themed romance novel until I discovered Roxie McClaine. Seeing a futuristic world that's not too different from ours but with lots of interesting nuance and action was fun.
I enjoyed the many ways the android Codi becomes human through a different lens.
Growing up, I commonly read a sci-fi or fantasy novel a day. I craved freshly innovative stories, not megastar copycats. Innovation lacking, I stopped reading. I loved Salvatore’s invention of the Drow and favored groundbreaking stories where authors build on a predecessor’s shoulders rather than writing formulaic remakes for easy sales. Devastatingly, when I began writing, publishers, agents, and literary voices unitedly screamed at authors to “stay in their genre.” Write sci-fi or fantasy, never both. That wasn’t me, so I wrote about what happens when technology clashes with magic. The result? Mosaic Digest recently dubbed me “one of speculative fiction’s most inventive voices.”
This book takes the tired and worn trope surrounding mankind’s search for the fountain of youth, twists it violently, and asks, “What if this were viable, although exorbitantly expensive, tech?” I loved not only this fresh, original angle, but Morgan’s thoughtful treatment of it.
With immersive world-building and a gritty protagonist, Altered Carbon dragged me through a truly surprising and original murder mystery that kept me guessing through the final reveal – though it wasn’t the murder plot that kept me hanging on.
Morgan’s not-particularly-likeable protagonist not only darkened the story, he pressured me to revisit difficult moral questions and to reconsider them from his perspective. He pulled me into the story, shook my moral compass, and then made me believe that perspective was standard in his world.
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…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
Between Blade Runner and The Terminator, I was hooked on Cyberpunk. Throw in some Ghost in the Shell and Black Mirror, and the obsession was complete. With the rise of Synthwave as a musical genre and as a retro-futuristic aesthetic, I had both the soundtrack and the visual cues to which I could write Cyberpunk. I also feel strongly about our increasing reliance on technology and the blurring lines between biology and technology. This is something I explore in my writing.
This book is a thrilling, action-packed ride through a merciless world ruled by nefarious corporations and filled with deadly, genetically enhanced super-humans. As well as Cyberpunk aficionados, Early Adopters will also appeal to fans of comics as well as lovers of action and espionage. No Mary-Sues here, though. Morally grey, gritty, and grueling!
Praise For Early Adopters: Rogue Elements - Amazon Reviews
"A thumping good read."
"This is my favourite Superhero Universe now."
"Everything I wanted from The Watchmen movie and didn't get."
Over a decade ago now, a group of misfits underwent genetic editing under the auspices of scientific research. They thought they could make a difference. They thought they were going to be superheroes, but MiliTech turned them into their own living, breathing weapons.
Outside of their honeymoon period, they are disavowed and relentlessly…
