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Originally Posted by Vorph  William Gibson. He created cyberpunk, but others have done it better (like Neal Stephenson). His stuff is basically all downhill after Neuromancer imo. I read Pattern Recognition not too long ago and it was boring to the point where I almost didn't even finish it.
As for suggestions, I'd give my highest possible recommendation for Richard K. Morgan and his Takeshi Kovacs series. He writes of a future in which humans have colonized many new worlds and now possess technology which makes it possible to transfer one's consciousness across space and into a new body. The first book, Altered Carbon, is part sci-fi and part noir/detective story that takes place on Earth. The second one, Broken Angels, is more pure sci-fi (with a little horror on the side) and takes place in the middle of a war out on a distant colonized planet. The third one, Woken Furies, is another genre shift, but I'm still waiting on it to get here for me to read.
Anyone who liked Snow Crash should pick up Morgan's stuff asap. |
Morgan is great. Bruce Sterling deserves a major nod too for
Holy Fire, which IMO is fucking prophetic about the biomedical revolution we're just creeping up on, also for
Difference Engine which he co-wrote with William Gibson in 1989---which dates it as one of the earliest examples of steampunk, which is the rave nowadays.
But I'm a giant Neal Stephenson fanboi and I really can't emphasize reading
Cryptonomicon enough to anyone who's even vaguely into the history of technology, computing and information theory. It's this sweeping multi-generational epic about the birth of information theory, the titanic historical forces that forced the birth of computing, psychotic meme-freak luddites and the care and feeding of Capn Crunch cereal.
It's obvious Stephenson cares about his subject (he was an early mac engineer) and his meticulous historical research pays off in the
Baroque Cycle, also recommended.