Leslie Berlin is the author of
Troublemakers: How a Generation of Silicon Valley Upstarts Invented the Future. One of her
top ten books about high-tech, as shared at the
Guardian:
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
My first fiction pick. A novel set in the near future, this book was published in 2011 and already feels more like a blueprint than a work of fiction. Characters here are never without their “äppäräts”, electronic devices that they wear around their necks. The äppäräts tell them about the people and places they encounter and tell others – including the government – about them. Targeted advertising, near-transparent “onionskin” jeans, hotness scores, the substitution of the virtual for the real and images for words: Shteyngart has called it thus far. I hope he is not right about what awaits us.
Read about
another entry on the list.
Super Sad True Love Story appears on
Corey J. White's list of five books about the collapse of New York City,
Ginni Chen's list of seven books that belong on your social media–obsessed friend’s shelf,
Molly Schoemann-McCann's list of five of the best--and more familiar--tropes in fiction, Charlie Jane Anders's lists of
ten great science fiction novels, published since 2000, that raise huge, important questions and
ten satirical novels that could teach you to survive the future, and
Nicholas Carr's list of five notable books on the impact of the Information Age.
--Marshal Zeringue
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