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Just cause it's fun rather then it being relevant to PersonalTelco .... Everygeek has their favorite Sci/Fi books and authors. Free free to chat about whatever seems interesting., especially if they are predicting community wireless :-)  Just cause it's fun rather then it being relevant to PersonalTelco .... Everygeek has their favorite Sci/Fi books and authors. Free free to chat about whatever seems interesting., especially if they are predicting community wireless :-)
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Greg Egan can be pretty OK. YMMV :) --CatonGates

Just cause it's fun rather then it being relevant to PersonalTelco .... Everygeek has their favorite Sci/Fi books and authors. Free free to chat about whatever seems interesting., especially if they are predicting community wireless :-)

Bruce Sterling

One of the early gods of cyberpunk, these days he largely spends his time being a technological pundit and trying to do cool stuff. He earlier work (pre-early ninties) was cutting edge, political, relevant etc. IMHO his writing has lost his edge a bit these days and is mostly going over old ideas in more details without a whole lot new to say. His also has lots of short stories which are really good. Favorites are The Bicycle Repair Man and the one about the cat thing in Japan. What the hell was that one called ... -- AdamShand

  • Involution Ocean - Great, but a first book not overly profound, mostly just fun.

  • The Artificial Kid - The first half is great, the second half spirals down into bizarness.

  • Schismatrix - My all time favoite Sci/Fi boook.

  • The Hacker Crackdown - A non-fiction book about the hacker crackdown by the feds in the 80's. Documentary style and no longer as relevant, at the time it was a hugely important book.

  • The Difference Engine - An amazingly cool idea (what if the Victorians had developed an information age basic on the Babbage engine). Unfortunately it's mostly written by William Gibson and suffers accordingly :-)

  • Islands in the Net - Good but a little more wordy and less intense then past books. A great view into a world controlled by corporations (but not the normal dark cyberpunk view).

  • Heavy Weather - His last really good book. Has precursors to his [http://www.viridiandesign.org/ Viridian] thinking.

    • I thought Zeitgeist and Distraction were both really cool, but not as idea dense as his previous stuff. more for sterling's excellent dialog and style. --AndrewWoods

Neal Stephenson

The current cyberpunk god. Writes great, but typically long, books that are also pretty technical and accurate. Often his books desperatly need an editor to whack out a couple hundred pages but are good enough that they survived that flaw.

  • The Big U - A first book and it shows. It's been out of print for a long time because Neal hated it and it was worth hundreded of dollars on Ebay. It was recently re-released (he decided that it was worse that people were paying obscene prices for it then to make more copies of it) so you can find it in book stores cheap. For those of us that had a copy off Ebay this really sucks.

  • Zodiac - Great, fun and fast paced. It bills itself as an ecological thriller, despite that it's a fun read.

  • Snow Crash - The book that put him on the map. Great ideas, great story, well worth reading.

  • The Diamond Age - Amazing ideas and thoughts about culture and nano-technology. However I thought it wasn't as well written and gets a little lost towards the end.

  • Cryptonomicon -- Long, overly long, in fact really needed about 300 pages removed from it, but still good. Basically it's like a geek soap opera, so if you're into geek stuff (especially WWII and crypto) it's pretty damn cool.

William Gibson

Acknowledged as one of (if not "the") originators of cyberpunk. Personally I think he has kickass ideas which are ruing by his absolutely dry and boring writing style. But that's just me :-) -- AdamShand

  • Neuromancer- I know I should read it, but I can just never stomach it. I've never made it more then half way through.

    • You might like the bridge trilogy (virtual light, idoru, all tomorrow's parties) a bit more, but some people have a problem with the holographic pop icon character. It's a little more coherent and makes a bit more sense than the sprawl stories.

Personally, I think cyberpunk as a genre is mostly dead, but the works of its writers are still extremely important. well, for SF, anyway. Sterling had a [http://lonestar.texas.net/~dub/sterling/cheap.html zine] back in the 80s, that basically cast the cyberpunk-led groundswell against the old hackish space opera crap. He makes a good point. The battle continues. --AndrewWoods

Vernor Vinge

Mostly recognized in cypher/cyberpunk circles for his novella, True Names. Published 3 years before Neuromancer, TN establishes several important concepts, like immersive virtual reality, the importance of anonymity, the dangers and consequences of excessive governmental power, etc. etc. It was out of print for quite a long time, and was recently collected along with a bunch of essays by the likes of Marvin Minsky, Tim May, Chip Morningstar, and Eric S. Raymond. I have a copy floating around somewhere, if anybody wants to borrow it. He's also a promulgator of the technological singularity, and his other books are above-average hard SF space stories.

Greg Egan

Greg Egan is a worthless hack. Permutation City is the worst possible attempt to cash in on the cyberpunk trend. ugh.

Greg Egan can be pretty OK. YMMV :) --CatonGates

Greg Bear

The other greg's written some good stuff, Eon (and its sequels), Blood Music, and Slant, first among them. Slant's his most cyberpunkish book that i've read.

Melissa Scott

SF Writer that happens to deal with gender/sexuality issues in an intelligent way. Personal favorite is Trouble and her Friends, though it's been a while since I've read it.

Philip K. Dick

Is God.


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ScienceFiction (last edited 2007-11-23 18:02:23 by localhost)