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 

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.

Like what you're reading?

If you're enjoying this list of cyberpunk 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 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.