Computers in Fiction

Neuromancer

By William Gibson

Case, a nerve-damaged data thief, is recruited by a new employer for a last-chance run against a powerful artificial intelligence.

Transformed into an electronic code, a Copy must discover an alternate way out, back into its real body, because the original avenue of escape has been cut off by the human version from which its was originally copied. Original.

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Microserfs

By Douglas Coupland

Young people working for Microsoft decide to make a bid for freedom by founding their own software company. The novel--narrated as an online journal by danielu@microsoft.com--describes the ups and downs of raising money for a new business. By the author of Generation X.

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Snow Crash

By Neal Stephenson

The “brilliantly realized” (The New York Times Book Review) breakthrough novel from visionary author Neal Stephenson, a modern classic that predicted the metaverse and inspired generations of Silicon Valley innovators 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.

Giles Goat-Boy

By John Barth

From the author of National Book Award-nominated Lost in the Funhouse, comes an outrageously farcical adventure that challenges our notions of technology, power, and human nature. "[Barth] ran riot over literary rules and conventions, even as he displayed, with meticulous discipline, mastery of and respect for them." —The New York Times Giles Goat-Boy tells the story of a human boy raised as a goat who comes to believe that he is humanity's prophesied messiah. In an absurdist universe that takes the form of a unversity--divided into an authoritarian East Campus and a more open West Campus--young George Giles rises to assume the title of Grand Tutor, the spiritual leader of the world and heroic defender of his people against the threat of a tyrannical computer system. Hailed as a "fantasy of theology, sociology, and sex" (Time magazine), Giles Goat-Boy has long been one of John Barth's most popular and multi-layered narratives.

The City and the Stars

By Arthur C. Clarke

Men had built cities before, but never such a city as Diaspar; for millennia its protective dome shutout the creeping decay and danger of the world outside. Once, it held powers that rules the stars. But then, as legend had it, The invaders came, driving humanity into this last refuge. It takes one man, A Unique to break through Diaspar¿s stifling inertia, to smash the legend and discover the true nature of the Invaders.

Player Piano

By Kurt Vonnegut

“A funny, savage appraisal of a totally automated American society of the future.”—San Francisco Chronicle Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a supercomputer and run completely by machines. Paul’s rebellion is vintage Vonnegut—wildly funny, deadly serious, and terrifyingly close to reality. Praise for Player Piano “An exuberant, crackling style . . . Vonnegut is a black humorist, fantasist and satirist, a man disposed to deep and comic reflection on the human dilemma.”—Life “His black logic . . . gives us something to laugh about and much to fear.”—The New York Times Book Review

The Cyberiad

By Stanislaw Lem

Trurl and Klaupacius are constructor robots who try to out-invent each other. They travel to the far corners of the cosmos to take on freelance problem-solving jobs, with dire consequences for their employers. The most completely successful of his books ... here Lem comes closest to inventing a real universe (Boston Globe). Translated by Michael Kandel.