Ten Cyberpunk Books For Every Sci-Fi Fan!

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After spotting a reader comment in the DSF Facebook Reader Group about having a hard time finding good cyberpunk books, we put out the call for recommendations.

A couple dozen titles were offered and among them, there were some real gems!

Today, we're sharing ten of those cyberpunk titles your fellow Discover Sci-Fi readers felt were worth picking up. Read on to see what the suggested titles were, and if your favorite isn't on the list, be sure to add it in the comments.

The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner

In a world drowning in data, a fugitive tries to outrun the forces that want to reprogram him, in this smart, edgy novel by a Hugo Award–winning author.

Constantly shifting his identity among a population choking on information, innovation, and novelty, Nickie Haflinger is a most dangerous outlaw, yet he doesn’t even appear to exist. As global society falls apart in all directions, with corporate power run amok and personal freedom surrendered to computers and bureaucrats, Haflinger is caught and about to be re-programmed. Now he has to try to escape once again, defy the government—and turn the tide of organizational destruction, in this visionary science fiction novel by the author of The Sheep Look Up and Stand on Zanzibar.

Read The Shockwave Runner here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.

Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology by Bruce Sterling, et al

With their hard-edged, street-wise prose, they created frighteningly probable futures of high-tech societies and low-life hustlers. Fans and critics call their world cyberpunk. Here is the definitive "cyberpunk" short fiction collection.

Pick up Mirrorshades in paperback here on Amazon. 

Neuromancer by William Gibson

Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, Neuromancer is a science fiction masterpiece—a classic that ranks as one of the twentieth century’s most potent visions of the future.

Case was the sharpest data-thief in the matrix—until he crossed the wrong people and they crippled his nervous system, banishing him from cyberspace. Now a mysterious new employer has recruited him for a last-chance run at an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, a mirror-eyed street-samurai, to watch his back, Case is ready for the adventure that upped the ante on an entire genre of fiction.

Neuromancer was the first fully-realized glimpse of humankind’s digital future—a shocking vision that has challenged our assumptions about technology and ourselves, reinvented the way we speak and think, and forever altered the landscape of our imaginations.

Get your copy of Neuromancer here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan 

In the twenty-fifth century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself. Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person’s consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body (or “sleeve”) making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen.

Ex-U.N. envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Dispatched one hundred eighty light-years from home, re-sleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco, now with a rusted, dilapidated Golden Gate Bridge), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats “existence” as something that can be bought and sold.

Read Altered Carbon  here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Hiro lives in a Los Angeles where franchises line the freeway as far as the eye can see. The only relief from the sea of logos is within the autonomous city-states, where law-abiding citizens don’t dare leave their mansions.

Hiro delivers pizza to the mansions for a living, defending his pies from marauders when necessary with a matched set of samurai swords. His home is a shared 20 X 30 U-Stor-It. He spends most of his time goggled in to the Metaverse, where his avatar is legendary.

But in the club known as The Black Sun, his fellow hackers are being felled by a weird new drug called Snow Crash that reduces them to nothing more than a jittering cloud of bad digital karma (and IRL, a vegetative state).

Investigating the Infocalypse leads Hiro all the way back to the beginning of language itself, with roots in an ancient Sumerian priesthood. He’ll be joined by Y.T., a fearless teenaged skateboard courier. Together, they must race to stop a shadowy virtual villain hell-bent on world domination.

 Grab Snow Crash here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

Recipient of the Sturgeon Award, Paolo Bacigalupi's writing has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and the environmental journal High Country News. His non-fiction essays have appeared in Salon.com and High Country News, and have been syndicated into numerous western newspapers.

Get your copy of The Windup Girl here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.

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The Mandel Files by Peter F. Hamilton

For the first time in a single volume, Peter F. Hamilton’s acclaimed novels—Mindstar Rising and A Quantum Murder—set in a near-future so real it seems ripped from tomorrow’s headlines.

In Mindstar Rising, Greg Mandel, gifted—or cursed—with biotechnology that makes him a living lie detector, is hired to investigate corporate espionage by Event Horizon, a powerful company about to introduce a technology that will solve the energy problems of a world decimated by global warming.

Set two years later, A Quantum Murder once again teams Mandel with Event Horizon and its beautiful young owner, Julia Evans, in a locked-room mystery that combines the ingenuity of an Agatha Christie novel with cutting-edge speculative brilliance.

Read together, these novels take on fresh depth and complexity, underscoring the magnitude of Peter F. Hamilton’s creative talent.

Dive into The Mandel Files here on Amazon. 

Imperator: Wrath of the Omnissiah by Gav Thorpe

Holy warbringer of the Legio Metalica, the Imperator Titan Casus Belli has routed armies and levelled cities over ten thousand years of service in the name of the Machine God. As war engulfs the Dark Imperium this mechanical god of battle arrives to destroy the renegade armies and techpriests of Nicomedua. At the head of a battlegroup of Titans, Imperial Knights and skitarii, Casus Belli must defeat tainted war engines, Traitor Legionnares and armies of cultists. While apocalyptic battles rage across the planet, a no less deadly battle unfolds within the Titan itself, as Magos Exasus, leader of the Casus Belli’s Techguard, must find and defeat the enemy within before their insidious plans come to fruition.

Dive into Imperator here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.

Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan

A LOCUS AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST FIRST NOVEL!
The Guardian's Pick for Best Science Fiction Book of the Year!

A timely and uncanny portrait of a world in the wake of fake news, diminished privacy, and a total shutdown of the Internet.

BEFORE: In Bristol’s center lies the Croft, a digital no-man’s-land cut off from the surveillance, Big Data dependence, and corporate-sponsored, globally hegemonic aspirations that have overrun the rest of the world. Ten years in, it’s become a center of creative counterculture. But it’s fraying at the edges, radicalizing from inside. How will it fare when its chief architect, Rushdi Mannan, takes off to meet his boyfriend in New York City—now the apotheosis of the new techno-utopian global metropolis?

AFTER: An act of anonymous cyberterrorism has permanently switched off the Internet. Global trade, travel, and communication have collapsed. The luxuries that characterized modern life are scarce. In the Croft, Mary—who has visions of people presumed dead—is sought out by grieving families seeking connections to lost ones. But does Mary have a gift or is she just hustling to stay alive? Like Grids, who runs the Croft’s black market like personal turf. Or like Tyrone, who hoards music (culled from cassettes, the only medium to survive the crash) and tattered sneakers like treasure.

The world of Infinite Detail is a small step shy of our own: utterly dependent on technology, constantly brokering autonomy and privacy for comfort and convenience. With Infinite Detail, Tim Maughan makes the hitherto-unimaginable come true: the End of the Internet, the End of the World as We Know It.

Get your copy of Infinite Detail here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.

Novice Gods by Bobby Adair

The AI was supposed to be humanity's salvation. It had other plans.

Now the world is dying beneath squalls of acid rain. The earth is being strip-mined for minerals to support the AI’s vast factories. Fields no longer grow green. Trees no longer sprout leaves. The only choice people have, if they want to live, is to pledge their souls to the AI, and serve its perverse ambitions.

Tim, Logan, and Aella don’t like living in a world where they have to scratch for crumbs. They intend to change it. They’re going to kill the AI with a virus that’ll worm its way through the planet’s networks, destroying everything coded in bits and bytes, every piece of software that controls a machine, makes a decision, or thinks it’s alive—especially if it thinks it’s alive.

They just need to find a way to upload the virus to the system without it killing them first.

Start reading Novice Gods here on Amazon. 


Have you read any of these cyberpunk picks? Which ones will make their way into your (e)bookshelf or into your ears? Have a personal favorite that didn't appear on our list? Give it a shout out in the comments here, or over in the Discover Sci-Fi Facebook group! 

*All book-related copy in this post was pulled from Amazon, Goodreads & Wikipedia, unless otherwise credited.

Literary Sci-Fi Reads You Don’t Want to Miss!

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For us, a good story is a must in science fiction. Give us a bold, exciting, well-plotted tale; give us characters we can love and those we'll loathe; give us something that feels fantastic and also possible. If you can give us all this, we'll forgive you much else. That said...

The following literary sci-fi picks have nothing to forgive. They deliver compelling stories and characters and also feature truly excellent writing. This list is the result of a poll we conducted recently in the Discover Sci-Fi Readers & Fans Facebook Group, and naturally, there are many more that could have been added to this list, but if you're looking for a memorable literary sci-fi read, it's a great place to start.


Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.

Read Fahrenheit 451 here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.”

An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it. Authors as wide-ranging as Norman Mailer, John Irving, Michael Crichton, Tim O’Brien, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, David Sedaris, Jennifer Egan, and J. K. Rowling have all found inspiration in Vonnegut’s words. Jonathan Safran Foer has described Vonnegut as “the kind of writer who made people—young people especially—want to write.” George Saunders has declared Vonnegut to be “the great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us . . . a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.”

More than fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut’s portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.

Read Slaughterhouse-Five here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook

The World of Tiers by Philip Jose Farmer

His past a mystery and his present unbearably mundane, Robert Wolff is simply trying to buy a new house in Arizona when he stumbles upon a secret doorway through space and time and enters the World of Tiers. Made up of ascending levels of jungles, plains, medieval cities, and, at the top, a Garden of Eden, and populated by fantastical creatures, from nymphs and centaurs to merpeople and strange amalgams nonexistent on Earth, it’s beyond anything Wolff could have imagined in his previous humdrum existence. And when his youth is restored in the bargain, it seems he’s truly found paradise.

But there are dark forces in this new world, and Wolff is plunged into an epic quest up through the tiers, accompanied by Paul Janus Finnegan, another earthling, now known as Kickaha. Wolff’s journey to find Jadawin, the Lord of this world, will lead to answers about his own identity—and determine his fate.

Wolff and Kickaha will face off against feuding Lords—who hold the power to control private worlds of their own design—and the depraved Bellers. Devices originally created in the biolabs of the Lords, the Bellers are now conscious entities waging war on the Lords and their “pocket universes.” As they infiltrate the bodies of creatures throughout the World of Tiers and hunt down the Earth-born, the survival of all the worlds hinges upon the battle between the strangers from Earth and enemies disguised as their allies.

This omnibus contains the author’s preferred text, reprinted from the limited edition volumes published by Phantasia Press.

Get your copy of The World of Tiers here on Amazon.

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis 

Connie Willis draws upon her understanding of the universalities of human nature to explore the ageless issues of evil, suffering, and the indomitable will of the human spirit.

For Kivrin, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received.

But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin—barely of age herself—finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history's darkest hours.

Read Doomsday Book  here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

The Roadis the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

 Grab The Road here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.

A World Out of Time by Larry Niven

After 200 years in cryosleep, Jaybee Corbell awakens to find that his mind has been downloaded to another body and he's in servitude to a harsh future State. After his escape via a spaceship, he traverses such vast distances--with accompanying time dilations--that he returns to Earth 3 million years later to discover a world wholly alien to the one he'd left. A.E. van Vogt wrote, "This fantastic novel is a mix of Niven hard science and a time-travel concept to boggle the mind."

Get your copy of A World Out of Time here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.

Like what you're reading?

If you're enjoying this list of literary sci-fi reads, why not join the DSF community for more awesome content? You'll get to be notified whenever a top 10 list or any other articles of interest go up on our site. It's free to sign up and you'll also get recommendations for new releases and discounted ebooks from our expert editorial team, from bestsellers to hidden gems.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin’s groundbreaking work of science fiction—winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

A lone human ambassador is sent to the icebound planet of Winter, a world without sexual prejudice, where the inhabitants’ gender is fluid. His goal is to facilitate Winter’s inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the strange, intriguing culture he encounters...

Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction.

Dive into The Left Hand of Darkness here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

In Anthony Burgess’s influential nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, a teen who talks in a fantastically inventive slang that evocatively renders his and his friends’ intense reaction against their society. Dazzling and transgressive, A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil and the meaning of human freedom. This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition, and Burgess’s introduction, “A Clockwork Orange Resucked.”

Dive into A Clockwork Orange here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.

Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham

What if humans discovered the secret to prolonged life?

Francis Saxover and Diana Brackley, two biochemists investigating a rare lichen, separately discover that it has a remarkable property: It slows the aging process almost to a halt. Francis, realizing the horrifying implications of an ever-youthful wealthy elite, decides to keep his findings a secret. But the younger and more daring Diana sees an opportunity to overturn the male status quo and free women from the career-versus-children binary—in short, a chance to remake the world.

Get your copy of Trouble with Lichen here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

The brilliant 1969 Hugo Award-winning novel from John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar, now included with a foreword by Bruce Sterling.

Norman Niblock House is a rising executive at General Technics, one of a few all-powerful corporations. His work is leading General Technics to the forefront of global domination, both in the marketplace and politically---it's about to take over a country in Africa. Donald Hogan is his roommate, a seemingly sheepish bookworm. But Hogan is a spy, and he's about to discover a breakthrough in genetic engineering that will change the world...and kill him.

These two men's lives weave through one of science fiction's most praised novels. Written in a way that echoes John Dos Passos' U.S.A. Trilogy, Stand on Zanzibar is a cross-section of a world overpopulated by the billions. Where society is squeezed into hive-living madness by god-like mega computers, mass-marketed psychedelic drugs, and mundane uses of genetic engineering. Though written in 1968, it speaks of now, and is frighteningly prescient and intensely powerful.

Start reading Stand on Zanzibar here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Cat’s Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet’s ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Cat’s Cradle is one of the twentieth century’s most important works—and Vonnegut at his very best.

Grab Cat's Cradle  here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.


Have you read any of these exceptional literary sci-fi reads? Which ones will make their way into your (e)bookshelf or into your ears? Have a personal favorite that didn't appear on our list? Give it a shout out in the comments here, or over in the Discover Sci-Fi Facebook group! 

*All book-related copy in this post was pulled from Amazon, Goodreads & Wikipedia, unless otherwise credited.