Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Eight tales of technology run amok

Jeff Somers is the author of the Avery Cates series, The Ustari Cycle, Lifers, and Chum (among many other books) and numerous short stories.

At the B&N Reads blog he tagged eight accounts of technology run amok, including:
Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

The idea of extending your life always seems like a good one. If you could have some replacement organs grown so that your spoiled kidney, liver, or heart could be swapped out without any chance of rejection, why wouldn’t you? Except, of course, when you think about the sad, short lives of your clones, born and raised solely to keep your replacement parts warm until you need them. A lot of sci-fi presents technology as clean and sterile—encased in Apple-like white boxes. But the real horror of technology gone mad will be the visceral blood-and-guts cost.
Read about another entry on the list.

Never Let Me Go is on a list of five books that shaped Jason Gurley's Eleanor, Anne Charnock's list of five favorite books with fictitious works of art, Jeff Somers's top seven list of speculative works for those who think they hate speculative fiction, Esther Inglis-Arkell's list of nine great science fiction books for people who don't like science fiction, Sabrina Rojas Weiss's list of ten favorite boarding school novels, Allegra Frazier's top four list of great dystopian novels that made it to the big screen, James Browning's top ten list of boarding school books, Jason Allen Ashlock and Mink Choi's top ten list of tragic love stories, Allegra Frazier's list of seven characters whose jobs are worse than yours, Shani Boianjiu's list of five top novels about coming of age, Karen Thompson Walker's list of five top "What If?" books, Lloyd Shepherd's top ten list of weird histories, and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best men writing as women in literature and ten of the best sentences as titles.

--Marshal Zeringue