Cyber punk reading material please.

[J T]

So, I read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash a couple years ago and I really loved it, even if it is a tad bit dated now. I like the cyber punk style and I love how reading it unfolds like an action movie. I was wondering if anyone had some good recommendations for something in a similar vein?

[otaku]

stephenson wrote a number of other excellent books and had one come out earlier this year. Bruce sterling and william gibson's books are excellent and can be had on the cheap even for new copies and of course libraries have them to. Love this genre and these writers. John shirley writes good stuff to. and if you like short stories and want more author ideas check out the magazine flurb (its entirely online)

[Pulsar_t]

Philip K Dick's Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep come highly recommended, though neither is technically cyberpunk. The same can be said for Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination. Also, Rudy Rucker's Ware novels are a good read since they're wittily written.

[AmishSamurai]

Tad William's Otherland series has some cyberpunk elements to it. Four very long books, all very good. Should keep you occupied for a while.

[bobbynewmarkiii]

Gibson's Neuromancer and it's sequels are the cyberpunk bible. Neuromancer was the genesis of the cyberpunk sub-genre. It is sometimes argued that cyberpunk also finished there...

[bobbynewmarkiii]

...also check out some anime if you want to get into the genre, you may even work out where my username comes from...

I've noticed there's an occasional Wintermute81 on these forums...

[noiseredux]

I 2nd PK Dick and Wm Gibson.

[timewarpgamer]

It falls more into sci-fi/fantasy realm than cyberpunk, but I highly recommend the Dan Simmons 4-part series:

Hyperion
Fall of Hyperion
Endymion
Rise of Endymion

As has already been suggested, though, Neuromancer is the closest fit to what you're looking for. Personally, I'd recommend that before Dick. Dick's got brilliant concepts and stories, but the actual craft of his prose is--oh boy i can see the flame replies coming now--a little underwhelming.

I read Snow Crash a few years ago, and while I thought it was really clever and exciting, I found that it lacked something in the human character. It was hard to relate to any of the characters, and I certainly never feared for any of them. It reminded me a lot of Quentin Tarantino's flashy characters.

[RyaNtheSlayA]

I 2nd PK Dick and Wm Gibson.

Those are the 2 big ones for me. I love PK Dick though, he's amazing.

[wip3outguy7]

Cyberpunk is pretty much all I read.

Please, for the love of God read something other than Snow Crash if you haven't already. There is much better cyberpunk out there and the popularity of this broken book baffles me.

Suggestions:

Gibson's "Sprawl" series - Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive (don't forget the Burning Chrome short stories collection)

Halting State - Charles Stross (if cyberpunk were to take off again, this is the direction it desperately needs to head in)

The Atrocity Archives - Charles Stross (this one is kind of a "what if H.P. Lovecraft wrote cyberpunk?")

Looking Glass - James R. Strickland

Crossover/Breakaway/Killswitch - Joel Shepherd (I'm about 58 pages into Crossover right now and it is classic Sci Fi style heavily influenced by cyberpunk)

Pattern Recognition - William Gibson (though I can't quite call it cyberpunk, it's a damned good book)