December 23, 2012

Top 10 Fictional Transhumanism Books

My current top ten list of fictional books with transhuman related topics and characters. Some are newer and have become instant favorites while others have been around for more than 10 years and still love to this day. There is a mixture of hard and soft sci-fi.(Hard-lots of techie talk, Soft-non techie talk). So I hope you enjoy my list. If you have an favorites of your own let me know.

1)CONSIDER PHLEBAS CULTURE #1
-I first found this book while getting my degree in molecular biology in university. Strange as it seemed it was
a favorite among my classmates like star trek. We like our sci-fi very close to the way science really works otherwise it just seems ridiculous. The Culture trilogy is definitely hands-down my favorite.
54 reviews give it an avg rating of 4.2 of 5 at amazon
You can buy "Consider Phlebas (Culture)" at Amazon now


2)THE PLAYER OF GAMES CULTURE#2
The second book by Iain M Banks.  The Culture - a human/machine symbiotic society - has thrown up many
 great Game Players, and one of the greatest is Gurgeh. Jernau Morat Gurgeh. The Player of Games. Master of every board, computer and strategy. Bored with success, Gurgeh travels to the Empire of Azad, cruel and incredibly wealthy, to try their fabulous game...a game so complex, so like life itself, that the winner becomes emperor
 117 reviews give it an 4.5 of 5 at amazon
 You can buy "The Player of Games (Culture)" at Amazon now


3)THE QUANTUM THIEF
It is the first in a planned trilogy. Just recently came out in 2010. Definitely one
of the most complex sci-fi books I've read in a while. This one you will have to pay  lots of attention to. There are so many inventive original ideas it may take you a while to fully grasp the ideas within.
114 reviews on amazon gave it a 3.5?
 You can buy "The Quantum Thief" at Amazon now


4)ECLIPSE PHASEThe best sci-fi RPG ever as far as I am concerned  
You can buy Eclipse Phaseat Amazon now





5)WOKEN FURIES 
The final book in the takeshi kovacs trilogy. The cyberpunk series is still my favorite to date although the Quantum thief trilogy may give it a run for its money
83 reviews on amazon gave it a 4 of 5 stars

You can buy Woken Furies here at Amazon now




6)SINGULARITY SKY
Sometime in the mid 21st century an artificial intelligence arises out of Earth's computer networks. This intelligence scatters the land with strange structures, causes nine tenths of the population to disappear and issues three commandments. Flash forward a few centuries, the missing nine tenths of earth's population were transmitted via wormholes to star systems up to 3000 light years away, travelling one year back in the past for every light year travelled. Earth has recovered from the events of this singularity and is now a sort of central clearing house for trade and information under a reconstituted United Nations.
92 reviews on amazon gave it a 3.5 of 5 stars
Buy "Singularity Sky" at Amazon now

7)IRON SUNRISE
The second book in this series with the featuring the character Rachel Mansour dives right in the story line and focusing much less on setting the background and assumes you have had experience reading the first volume. It's a little more complex read with multiple story lines which eventually lead back to the main plot. Rachel Mansour is an interesting heroine
Buy "Iron Sunrise" at Amazon now



8)TRANSMETROPOLITAN
My favorite (comic book)graphic novel series. The is the first in the series by Warren Ellis who has a futuristic,dark,funny sense of humor in the writing.Essentially its about a journalist similar to hunter thompson all drugged out that has to return to a crazy futuristic city to gain inspiration to finish writing some books he owes to a publisher. He finds his inspiration from a group of halfhuman/half alien transients that want to start a rebellion.
Buy "Transmetropolitan, Vol. 1: Back on the Street" at Amazon now



9)GLASSHOUSE
Another great outing from Charles Stross. The censorship wars"during which the Curious Yellow virus devastated the network of wormhole gates connecting humanity across the cosmos"are finally over at the start of Hugo-winner Stross's brilliant new novel, set in the same far-future universe as 2005's Accelerando. Robin is one of millions who have had a mind wipe, to forget wartime memories that are too painful"or too dangerously inconvenient for someone else. To evade the enemies who don't think his mind wipe was enough, Robin volunteers to live in the experimental Glasshouse, a former prison for deranged war criminals that will recreate Earth's "dark ages" 
Buy Glasshouse at Amazon now

10)DOWN AND OUT IN THE MAGIC KINGDOM
interesting and sometimes very funny book from an editor at "boing boing" blog. Interesting in that the main location of the story taking place is in the Disney land and that he is being murdered over an amusement park ride.
Avg rating 3.5 of 5 at amazon
Buy "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" at Amazon now



11)ACCELERANDO
Ok so there is an eleventh entry here, so sue me. Its hard to condense things you love into a top 10 list. I listed an Older book by charles stross that has tons of original ideas about how technology will impact our future. The book gets a little weirder as it goes on. Stross (Singularity Sky) explores humanity's inability to cope with molecular nanotechnology run amok in this teeming near-future SF stand-alone. In part one, "Slow Takeoff," "free enterprise broker" Manfred Macx and his soon-to-be-estranged wife/dominatrix, Pamela, lay the foundation for the next decade's transhumans. In "Point of Inflection," Amber, their punky maladjusted teenage daughter, and Sadeq Khurasani, a Muslim judge, engineer and scholar, try to escape the social chaos that antiaging treatments have wreaked on Earth by riding a tin can–sized starship via nanocomputerization to a brown dwarf star called Hyundai. The Wunch, trade-delegation aliens evolved from uploaded lobster mentalities, and Macx's grandson, Sirhan, roister through "Singularity," in which people become cybernetic constructs. Stross's three-generation experiment in stream-of-artificial-consciousness impresses, but his flat characters and inchoate rapid-fire explosions of often muzzily related ideas, theories, opinions and nightmares too often resemble intellectual pyrotechnics—breathtakingly gaudy but too brief, leaving connections lost somewhere in outer/inner/cyber space.
119 reviews on amazon gave it a rating of 4.5 of 5
 Buy "Accelerando" at Amazon now

Article by J5un for Emerging Tech Trends for Transhumanism

1 comment:

  1. May I also suggest "Memories with Maya"- The Dirrogate to the list of Transhumanism fiction?

    Cover blurb:
    "EMOTIONS ARE LIKE A VIRUS, a common cold...disrupting the flow of logic in the mind." Daniel reminds himself.

    Dan's work involves creating commercially viable AR solutions. The recession and an explosion of data-cops is drying out his streams of income.
    He turns to close friend, Krish, a researcher in Artificial Intelligence, in the hope that they can come up with ideas for the Entertainment market. His girlfriend, Maya, and her family return to their homeland after her father passes away.

    Dan and Maya continue their relationship via Dirrogates (Digital Surrogates), experiencing human touch through haptics. Krish gets a job at the prestigious A.I.R.I. Using AIRI's lab, Krish and Dan, create an advanced visor with Augmented Intelligence built in.
    They dub it "Wizer". A Board member at AIRI sees potential in the Wizer other than what Dan and Krish have in mind.

    At a test in a nightclub, things go wrong... Can the Wizer "insure memories" and be a catalyst to accelerate the journey toward eventual Singularity?

    Cutting through genres, Memories With Maya touches on today's hard science focus: Artificial Intelligence, the Singularity, Transhumanism and Augmented Reality and how they will affect human emotions, relationships and evolution. The story also has enough 'hard' romance to keep every kind of audience satisfied.

    Memories with Maya on Amazon:
    http://www.amazon.com/dp/1482514885

    ReplyDelete