The Peripheral

Nomi Prins, All the Presidents Bankers, and also Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World. Those two books illustrate the financialization of the US and global economy over time, and although dense, are well worth the effort. She has a new book out as of Oct, "Permanent Distortion: How Financial Markets Abandoned the Real Economy Forever." Peter Anderas, Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America A very fun historical read, covering everything from textile machinery smuggling from Britain to the American colonies, to rum and whiskey smuggling into Indian Country in the 19th century, to opium smuggling to China, to Prohibition and the modern Drug War, cotton smuggling by the South to Europe to finance the South's Civil War army, and the smuggling of people from slaves to immigrants. Very eye-opening, a lot of America's 'wealthy families' got their first pool of capital in this manner. Also: Junji Ito, Uzumaki and No Longer Human William Gibson, The Peripheral and Agency

William Gibson. The Bridge trilogy and the Sprawl trilogy, at a minimum. They still feel like maps to the future even now. You have to work at it, the map is not the territory after all, but the realisations about the impact of technology, progress, and the choices we make when we let society work a certain way have been profound, for me at least. Also The Peripheral, and Gibson’s essay in Wired about undersea cables, and... yeah. Having read Gibson feels like a superpower. As others have said: - The Hitch Hiker’s Guide - Stepehnson’s Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, Seveneves, Anathem (aside: totally surprised how much love there is for Anathem, I remember it not being received very kindly at the time by people around me, though I liked it.) - The Culture series (special shout out to The Player of Games.)

How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan. Turing's Vision: The Birth of Computer Science, Chris Bernhardt. The Peripheral, William Gibson. Lila, Robert Pirsig. (re-read)

Isaac Asimov is one of the classics, of course. I'm particularly fond of the robot novels (all four of the Elijah Baley ones especially) and the entire Foundation series. Of course, you also can't miss the robot short stories. Oh, and The End of Eternity! At some point I found Charles Stross' Accelerando, which is freely available online (along with a bunch of other short stories), and found everything I've read (which is most of it at this point, I think) enjoyably fast-paced. In particular the Laundry series (of which I've bought every iteration as soon as they came out over the past few years) -- though arguably these maybe cross-over from SF into fantasy a bit -- and the Halting State trilogy.…

Return of a King (William Dalrymple 2013) - A book about the Anglo-Afghan wars of the 19th century. To paraphrase Mark Twain: History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes Being Mortal (Atul Gawande, 2014) - Powerful book about old age and confronting the mortality of our loved ones The Dark Forest (Cixin Liu, 2014) - Wonderful science fiction from China The Peripheral (William Gibson, 2015) - Bleak, near future science fiction. The Water Knife (Paolo Bacigalupi, 2015) - More bleak, near future science fiction.

Neuromancer - William Gibson REAMDE- Neal Stephenson Pattern Recognition / Zero History / Spook Country - William Gibson The Peripheral - William Gibson Not exactly the same thing, but I'll also throw in Glasshouse by Charles Stross. And since we're talking Charles Stross, also add Halting State to the list. Oh, and VALIS by Philip K. Dick. Definitely worth a read.

Anything by Alastair Reynolds - his Revelation Space series is great, and House of Suns is a fantastic one-off. He's probably the closest to Ian Banks in creating galaxy-spanning civilisations across eons of time. Ian MacDonald is another good one. My favourite of his is The Dervish House, but his others are definitely worth reading. Charles Stross is good. Didn't get on with Accelerando, but his Laundry books are a fun mix of HP Lovecraft/Len Deighton/IT Crowd. Halting State and Rule 34 are good explorations of pervasive augmented reality and intelligent algorithms. Also Glasshouse as an exploration of post-singularity society. Never managed to finish a Cory Doctorow book though. I found William Gibson's Bigend trilogy a slog, but I really enjoyed The Peripheral - it's a fun read. Enders Game and Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card are fantastic, but the remaining books suffer from diminishing returns (with the possible exception of Ender's Shadow). There are a lot of books in the series, but basically, the series finishes wherever you get bored reading it. Anything by China Mieville is well worth your time.…

I recently read William Gibson's "The Peripheral" and I really liked it. I think it's one of his best.