Cyberpunk: Wired Weirdness in the Library
"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. For Kovacs, the shell that blew a hole in his chest was only the beginning. . . ."
Taking place both in World War II and in present times, Cryptonomicon tells the story of a group of US cryptologists trying to break Axis codes, while in present times their grandchildren work together to create a new company and maybe find gold hidden since the War.
A product of illegal genetic engineering, Oscar is a political spin doctor assigned by an almost totally corrupt Washington to investigate a scientific lab in east Texas known as the Collaboratory.
Having been barred from using computers until his 18th birthday, Dade Murphy moves to New York with his mother. There he joins the new Hacker culture and works to fight an evil corporate network administrator bent on causing a global ecological disaster.
While a member of the music group Lo/Rez’s fan club goes looking into why one of the duo has decided to marry a virtual celebrity, a data specialist reveals a secret to the public and their paths unexpectedly intersect.
Mona and Angie, a girl who has been able to go into cyberspace without a computer since childhood, are part of a shadowy group’s kidnapping plot toward darker intentions.
Cayce is a “cool hunter” who is obsessed with bits of strange footage which pop up at odd intervals across the Web. As she looks for patterns in the images she sees, her job and her obsession collide when a rich megalomaniac hires her to find the creator of this footage to exploit for commercial purposes.
When one of the best friends of Hiro Protagonist, hacker, samurai swordsman and pizza deliveryman, overdoses on a new designer drug called Snow Crash, he begins to investigate in a postmodern world where our Internet is known as the Metaverse and where every institution is privately controlled, even the government and the police.
A brilliant nanotech engineer designs a completely interactive book, “A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer," to educate his daughter. However, the book instead falls into the hands of streetwise though uneducated youth who gives it to his sister.
This "alternative history" imagines a Victorian England run by steam-powered computing engines, and governed by an intellectual elite led by Prime Minister Byron. When an ambitious young paleontologist comes into possession of a dangerous set of program cards he begins running for his life....
Written in 1981, this is story of remarkable prescience which tells of a virtual world in which people live and commit crimes, in which the more power one has in the virtual world, the more power one has in the real world.
The first person narrative of S.T., an environmental watchdog who, while investigating the potent contamination of Boston Harbor, finds the contamination suddenly disappears, while the dangers are suddenly more than he can handle.
