cool hard edge cyberpunk sci fi

The cyberpunk sci-fi books listed below are dazzeling good and some of them I've read more then once. Others are still on my wish list. Since cyberpunk started in the 80's it evolved and transformed science fiction literature. The English writers like Iain M Banks and Peter F Hamilton do have there roots in the cyberpunk genre of Gibson, Sterling and Philip K Dick.

The science fiction genre changed our perception of the world. How we use the internet, what hackers are capable of and how secure our privacy is. Questions that were asked in the early days of cyberpunk sci-fi.

Only Forward

Spares

Neuromancer

Revelation Space

Redemption Ark

Snow Crash

Cryptonomicon

Consider Phlebas

Surface Detail

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Blade Runner is a top notch cyberpunk sci-fi film directed by Ridley Scott. It was one of the first cyberpunk films made and has become the symbol of the cyberpunk movie genre.

The film is based on the cyberpunk book of Philip K. Dick. "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep".

The film Blade Runner is not a traditional movie in the sense that it has a social theme and tells us about the value of life and the importance of making most out of it. One of the other thems of this sci-fi classic is woven around the question : what is more valuable - humans without emotions or machines with emotions ?

Synopsis

In the year 2019 (not so far away anymore, but the movie was made in 1982...) Los Angelos is a city full of chaos and debris. There are some replicants on the loose, artificially created humans for hard labor in the colonies.
Rick Deckeard is a Blade Runner, a bount hunter, a police man of the future who hunts down and terminates escaped replicants. Replicants were declared illegal after a bloody mutiny on an Off-World Colony, and are to be terminated upon detection. Man's obsession with creating a being equal to himself has back-fired.
This film questions what it is to be human, and why life is so precious. A classic under the cyberpunk sci-fi films.

In the early 80's, cyberpunk was used as a label to describe a new fresh form of science fiction. Before the hard edge cyberpunk sci-fi, science fiction was about utopias, dreamy worlds, ufo's and space colonies in a future far away.
5 writers in particular though changed the traditional sci-fi. They started to write about a nearby future where technologies changed the social environment. They where more visionaries and set there stories in a world not completely alien to the present day world.

William Gibson started the cyberpunk genre and had a big impact on the movement with his novel Neuromancer. Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley and Lewis Shiner helped to bring the sci-fi genre to the public.

Neuromancer

Yes, the latest book of Alastair Reynolds is now out and in the stores. It's a start of a magnificent series.
It is set in Africa, but not the Africa as we know it today. The date isone hundred and fifty years from now, in a world where Africa is the dominant technological and economic power, and where crime, war, disease and poverty have been banished to history,
The protoganist Geoffrey Akinya wants only one thing: to be left alone on a quite place, so that he can continue his studies about elephants.. But his family, the vast Akinya business empire, has other ideas. After the death Geoffrey's grandmother some secrets are on the brink of being exposed on the Moon, and Geoffrey is asked "nicely"... - to go up there and make sure the family's name stays suitably unblemished. But little does Geoffrey realise - or anyone else in the family, for that matter - what he's about to unravel. Eunice's ashes have already have been scattered in sight of Kilimanjaro. But the secrets she died with are about to come back out into the open, and they could change everything. Or shatter this near-utopia into shards ...

It's an interesting book, with Africa not in the role as a poor continent. Africa is a cultural, economical and scientifically strong continent, and one of the main characters of Blue Remembered Earth is African and speak Swahili. Luckily for us, the book is in plain English!!

Alastair Reynolds was born in Barry, South Wales, in 1966. He studied at Newcastle and St Andrews Universities and has a Ph.D. in astronomy. He gave up working as an astrophysicist for the European Space Agency to become a full-time writer.
He wrote a impressive series of cool hard edge science fiction, some being placed in a fast universe but always based upon technology and cyberpunk. A great writer who won the English Science Fiction Award. Alastair Reynolds has been nominated three times for the Arthur C. Clarke Award as well, for his novels Revelation Space, Pushing Iceand House of Suns.

Asimovs Science Fiction

Analog Science Fiction & Fact

Fantasy & Science Fiction
(print edition)

Neo-Opsis Science Fiction Magazine