Five 21st-century cyberpunk books about the now

Corey J. White's new novel is Repo Virtual.

At Tor.com he tagged "five 21st Century cyberpunk books that resonate with the now," including:

Infomocracy by Malka Older

It would be easy to make an argument for Infomocracy to be the most relevant cyberpunk thriller of the past few years, considering its heavy focus on politics, and our (seemingly increasing) obsession with the same. In the near-future setting of the book, nation states have given way to a world split up into 100,000 person centenals, with various local and multinational governments vying for control of these, and a few notable parties aiming to use fair means and foul to secure a global supermajority. That might sound like a dry setting for a cyberpunk thriller, but Older makes it work by focusing on operatives at work on the ground, including Ken, who gathers data undercover for the aptly-named but dry Policy1st, and Mishima, a bad-ass agent of the ubiquitous Wikipedia-analogue simply named Information, which serves to provide exactly that—cutting through the lies and misinformation of advertising, politics, and the like, to give people the unadulterated truth.

But despite the work of Mishima and others, misinformation runs rife—the punchy libel far more interesting and entertaining than the screeds of text Information provides in rebuttal. This is one way that Infomocracy speaks to our present moment: we’ve all seen first-hand the ways that misinformation, rumours, and outright lies will capture people’s attention, going viral across social media, and even tying up the mainstream media for months on end.

Sadly, there’s another element of Infomocracy that speaks to the now—the way the book details the slow rise of an aggressive quasi-fascist politics, the siren call of authoritarianism, and (even localized) prejudicial dog-whistling.

Read about another entry on the list.

Infomocracy is among Rob Hart's five top books about humans making a mess of things, Jeff Somers's eighteen SFF novels that get serious about economics and fifty science fiction essentials written by women, Emily Wenstrom's eight science fiction novels that explore the human dilemma, Joel Cunningham's twelve science fiction & fantasy books for the post-truth era, and Sam Reader's six most intriguing political systems in fantasy and science fiction.

The Page 69 Test: Infomocracy.

--Marshal Zeringue