The Shockwave Rider

The Shockwave Rider, by John Brunner. Read it, compare it to the Internet we have today, and marvel at all he was able to foresee back in 1975.

I'm sure there are many, but a few that jump to mind, in no particular order, and spanning both fiction and non-fiction: The Selfish Gene - Dawkins A New Kind of Science - Wolfram The Singularity is Near - Kurzweil Gödel, Escher, Bach - Hofstadter Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies - Hofstadter Atlas Shrugged - Rand The Fountainhead - Rand Nineteen Eighty-Four - Orwell The Trouble With Physics - Lee Smolin Time Reborn - Lee Smolin Ambient Findability - Peter Morville Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software - Steven Johnson Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age - Duncan Watts Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life - Albert-laszlo Barabasi Artificial Life - Steven Levy The Four Steps To The Epiphany - Steve Blank The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman not a book, but the various writings of Douglas Engelbart - http://www.dougengelbart.org/library/library.html Glasshouse - Charles Stross Permutation City - Greg Egan Neuromancer - William Gibson The Shockwave Rider - John Brunner The Society of Mind - Marvin Minsky…

A book that often escapes even cyberpunk fans is John Brunner's "The Shockwave Rider". It was written in 1975 but is eerily prescient - at least I thought so when I read it in the 90's. Of course, I also recommend Gibson's books. And "Ender's Game"/"Ender's Shadow", even though they're not cyberpunk/cyber thrillers.

If you're going to mention John Brunner, you can't forget The Shockwave Rider. I found it very prescient when I read it in the '90s. If William Gibson is the father of cyberpunk, I think that makes Brunner the grandfather.