Veeky Forums book thread

How about a book thread? What are some books that have inspired your settings or given you great ideas for story telling? I just finished pic related and I'm craving some more great cyberpunk stories.

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Im like a third of the way into the first Dune novel, and it's pretty great.
I'm amazed at how quickly the book deconstructs concepts that it had just introduced to the reader, and how fucking DEEP the lore is. The politics of the setting are so fucking interesting.

I completely forgot about Dune! I'll definitely be picking up next. I also remember this particular series here. It's a great read if you enjoy military fantasy.

Yeah, I'm defintely reading Black Company eventually. Right now I'm going through my space sci-fi backlog though, I'm reading Foundation trilogy and then Culture series after I'm done with Dune.

I loved the everloving fuck out of Hannu Rajaniemi's Quantum Thief books, but that is not a setting that would hold up as an RPG setting unless you went super narrative or very light. Actual posthuman stuff where such things as copying and editing your mind a few dozen times to help solve a task are commonplace... fucking hell.

The closest you could get is the city of Oubliette on Mars, where you've got people who choose to live as close to human as possible, but who use "time" as a currency. You spend your time on things, and when you have none left, your mind gets sent to become a worker drone for the city and earn time again.

And they're still beset by mind-pirates from other civilisations with nanotendril mind upload fingers, and shit like that.

>Actual posthuman stuff where such things as copying and editing your mind a few dozen times to help solve a task are commonplace... fucking hell.

Eclipse Phase is literaly that. You should check it out, and also read the Takeshi Kovacs novels.

CYBERPUNK NOVELS
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester (source of Wired Reflexes, natch)
The Shockwave Rider, John Brunner
Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
Hardwired, Walter Jon Williams
When Gravity Fails, George Alec Effinger
Fairyland, Paul McAuley
Synners, Pat Cadigan
Islands in the Net, Bruce Sterling
Schismatrix, Bruce Sterling

"Core Readings"
William Gibson (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties)
Bruce Sterling (The Artificial Kid, Schismatrix Plus)
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"The Cyberpunk Movement"
Greg Bear (Blood Music)
Pat Cadigan (Mindplayers, Synners, Fools, Tea From an Empty Cup)
Marc Laidlaw (Dad's Nuke)
Tom Maddox (Halo)
Rudy Rucker (Software, Wetware, Freeware, Realware)
Lewis Shiner (Frontera)
John Shirley (City Come A-Walkin')
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"Post-Cyberpunk"
Wilhelmina Baird (CrashCourse, ClipJoint, PsyKosis)
Bruce Bethke (Cyberpunk - where the term came from, Headcrash)
Simon Ings (Hot Head, Hotwire, Headlong)
Richard Kadrey (Metrophage)
Kim Newman (The Night Mayor)
Marge Piercy (He, She, and It/Body of Glass)
Justina Robson (Silver Screen)
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, Interface, The Diamond Age)
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"Cyberpunk Flavoured"
Jeff Noon (Vurt, Pollen, Nymphomation)
Greg Egan (Quarantine, Permutation City)
Jon Courtenay Grimwood (neoAddix, Lucifer's Dragon, reMix, redRobe)
Gwyneth Jones (Escape Plans, Kairos)
Shariann Lewitt (Memento Mori)
Tricia Sullivan (Someone To Watch Over Me, Dreaming In Smoke)
Jack Womack (Dryco)

I've read and run eclipse phase, and while the setting is relatively advanced in some ways, the quantum thief trilogy *is* posthuman stuff while EP is still very much mostly about civilisations mired in humanity.

I don't want to give too many spoilers about the quantum thief on account of it being a damn good read, but it's got the ascent of posthuman cyberdeities down to a fine art, and also the no-longer-human civilisations they inspire and run.

good idea. is there an actual Veeky Forums-approved literature trove?

I think there's some lists out there, but I haven't seen them. Maybe we could start making one ourselves.

Hm, sounds very neat. I'll check it out.

>Culture series
I just read consider phlebas and it was kind of lame. The tech is nice but the MC is like a Gary Stu in that he's always perfect and never in danger. Then it felt like the author realized he actually needed to end the book and aborted as quickly as possible.

Foundation is good (I only read the first one). It has some actual depth and social commentary to it while Consider Phlebas was basically a space adventure romp. I guess Consider Phlebas has the warring ideologies thing but it's not very compelling.

>Vurt, and probably most of the others
In no library near me ever

>consider phlebas
Not the best place to start in the Culture series.

For a more conventional story, try Excession.

For a really amazing mind-fuck story, Use of Weapons.

>Vurt
>library

This is Gibson's cyberspace, here's some neon graffiti:
e-reading.club/bookbyauthor.php?author=19460

Enjoy, user.

Dune's great, the following books are a mixed bag depending on your personal tastes. But for the love of God, only stick to the Frank Herbert ones. Pretend the KJA/Brian Herbert ones don't exist.

Trilogy owns and I reread it about once a year. Definitely something where if you were going to go and make a game you'd want to really focus on a specific thing/area to avoid overwhelming.

Reading EP just makes me wish we could have an actual UN Protectorate-based game instead.

Culture stuff is kind of in that category of sci-fi where actually good writing is very much optional. I love it, but I wouldn't blame anyone for not liking them.

that category including asimov, among others.

>the following books are a mixed bag depending on your personal tastes

Themes/characters/plot aside, is Frank's writing in the sequels still as good as it was in the first novel? I'm halfway through the first novel and I'm loving his style and the way the builds up the setting and its details.

I've been reading CJ Cherryh stuff and it's giving me a Traveller itch like only Poul Anderson used to.

>No River of Gods

It's probably my favorite SF book

check the otherland series by tad williams, it's labeled sience fiction but imho there's enough low live, high technology and net/cyber stuff to almost call it cyberpunk

just keep reading user, it's like says. idk where you're from but i bought all of them in thriftstores/carboothsales. if you don't like them you hav'nt invested to much and if you do it's nice to complete the series

>Pretend the KJA/Brian Herbert ones don't exist.

yes and no user. i did read the entires series, the house triology is nice enough. but i just finished reading the butlerian jihad and it took me ages. part 7 and 8 are only there to finish the story and they where also good enough, altough i did'nt really like the ending

>CJ Cherryh

Mah nigga

Pride of Chanuur makes me think it should be an anime. Or a softcore hentai.

Illuminatus! Trilogy- Robert Anton Wilson
The Prince- Machiavelli
The Crusades- Harold Lamb
A History of Warfare- John Keegan
The Face of Battle- John Keegan
Beowulf- Seamus Heaney translation
Anabasis- Xenophon
The Simple Sabotage Field Manual- US OSS
Necronomicon- HP Lovecraft
History of Rome- Garrett Fagan
Decisive Battles of the Ancient World- Garrett Fagan
The Sword of Truth Series- Terry Goodkind
33 Strategies of War- Robert Greene
Area 51- Annie Jacobson
When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops- George Carlin
Art of Invisibility- Kevin Mitnick
The Early Kings of Norway- Thomas Carlyle
Catch 22- Joseph Heller
Commentaries on the Gallic War- Julius Caesar
Hell's Angels- Hunter S Thompson
Packing For Mars- Mary Roach (The greatest space horror with no scifi elements)
Origins of War- Arthur Ferill
Collected Works of Shakespeare
Orcs Series- Stan Nichols
The Martian Chronicles- Ray Bradbury
The Vikings- Else Roesdahl
The Picture of Dorian Gray- Oscar Wilde
A Clockwork Orange- Anthony Burgess
Haunted- Chuck Palahniuk
Conan Series- Robert E. Howard
Battlefield Earth or Mission Earth (if you can stomach dry satire) - L Ron Hubbard
The Iron Dream- Norman Spinrad
Starship Troopers- Robert Heinlein
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress- Robert Heinlein
Pantropy Series- James Blish
The Collected Works of E.E. "Doc" Smith
Naked Lunch- William S Burroughs
The Big Sleep- Raymond Chandler
The Maltese Falcon- Dashiel Hammett
The Dane Curse- Dashiel Hammett (possibly the weirdest thing he's written)
Dracula- Bram Stoker
1984- George Orwell
Brave New World- Aldous Huxley
On War- Carl Von Clausewitz
The Thirty Years War- Celia Veronica Wedgewood
The Creative Thinker's Toolkit- Gerard Puccio
A Scanner Darkly- Phillip K. Dick

Have fun!

>The tech is nice but the MC is like a Gary Stu in that he's always perfect and never in danger. Then it felt like the author realized he actually needed to end the book and aborted as quickly as possible.

Well get used to it, because every Culture novel follows this formula. Even Player of Games, which takes place outside the loving arms of the Minds, ends with the reveal that there were never any stakes, the protagonist was never in danger, and that everything was being controlled from behind the scenes by godlike computers.