Altered Carbon (Richard Morgan)

This blend of cyberpunk SF and hardboiled noir detective novel worked for me. Although I sometimes lost the thread of a very complex plot with lots of characters, the strength of the main characters and the fascinating action kept me engaged. Kovacs is a man with many special skills, including guns, martial arts, empathy bordering on psi, and conditioning to deal with blood-freezing torture others would need years of therapy to get over. He is bloodthirsty but also has a core of loyalty and compassion. He lives in a world where people's personal identity can be stored indefinitely and downloaded with ease into a new body, either a synthetic one or one from whom someone else's personality has been extracted. He was put in storage for committing what others defined as a crime, and wakes up on another planet in a strange body, revived by an ancient man of limitless wealth to solve his murder. Along the way he meets whores, drug dealers, prize fighters, cynical police officers, and gangster bosses: all the familiars of detective stories, weirdly morphed by the future they live in. There is a lot of violence, but there's a central humanity that kept it from becoming too dark for me.

Heft (Liz Moore)

This is a lovely story, alternately heartbreaking and heartwarming, unflinching and touching. Arthur was wounded years ago when a delicate romance fell apart, and withdrew into a cocoon. He has not left his home in many years, even to step outside, but spends his time watching TV and eating. His only comfort is letters he exchanges with his old flame, in which he lies about his life. Kel is a high-school senior whose father left when he was four and whose mother is sinking into alcohol and mental illness, and who cares about nothing so much as sports. Their lives are linked, though they don't know it. Each is wounded but perhaps not broken; each is rescued in unexpected ways. I loved it.

Ready Player One (Ernest Cline)

This is a story for young adults, focusing on a massively multiplayer online game, that I really enjoyed. The protagonist is a young man in a bleak future world where the environment, the economy, and the nation are all falling apart, but at least there is this really wonderful online world you can go to where things are much better. The creator of this world has just died, and left all his billions to whoever can solve a series of puzzles using clues he buried inside the world. Because the popular culture of the 1980s was his passion, all the games and clues are based on comic books, video games, TV shows, and movies of that era, so it's a lot of fun for those of us who remember that decade! The antagonist in the story is pretty cardboard: an evil multinational corporation bent on stifling all individuality and turning the game world into a cash cow, and not above torture and murder to get the prize. On the other hand, the protagonist and his friends are rather amazingly good. Still, I enjoyed the action and the rapid-fire cultural references. Fun!

Unseen Academicals (Terry Pratchett)

More Discworld zaniness. A long-forgotten rule says that the Unseen University, where magicians in Ankh-Morpork train, must field a team to play the traditional game of foot and ball, something very distantly related to football (or soccer, for American readers). The magicians are not known for their athletic prowess, but fortunately there is an odd young man in the cellar who has strange abilities, perhaps including skill at football.  Actually, two young men in the cellar. And two very unusual cooks in the kitchen as well. It all comes out well in the end, as these stories generally do, but with many unexpected turns along the way. Very enjoyable.

For the Win (Cory Doctorow)

I didn't hate this book, but I gave up halfway through. It is about the gold farmers in online games - people, generally poor people in developing countries, who work long hours inside the games gathering treasure or leveling-up characters so that their bosses can sell them to rich, lazy players who don't want to work for their status. In the entire book (so far anyway) there is nobody we meet who is actually playing any of these games for fun. They are all either downtrodden, oppressed workers or cruel, tyrannical bosses. I know the book was written for a young-adult market, but even so this level of oversimplification was too much for me. That's not even to mention the frequent lengthy passages lecturing on economics, in the world and in the games. It is all one big sermon on the importance of unions, which is appropriate for Labor Day Weekend, I guess, but I've had enough now.

The Forever War (Joe Haldeman)

This is a classic, from 1974, but it is still compelling. The central character is one of the first drafted into interstellar war in the early 2005, and with all the relativistic time-dilation effects, he makes it to the end of the war in 3143. Along the way technology and human nature both change, but he remains much the same, giving the reader a consistent viewpoint with which to view time going by. It is a combination of war story, with high-casualty battles and high-tech weaponry (with few false steps to remind us that it was written before ubiquitous computers and the Internet), and social commentary. I enjoyed it a lot.

Snuff (Terry Pratchett)

Sam is dragged away on a vacation in the country by his determined wife, away from his beloved city streets, and anticipates two weeks of mind-numbing boredom until his sensitive cop's nose detects a whiff of crime. Before he has unraveled the whole sordid ball of string, he has been proved a hero yet again, on land and sea, solved crimes of murder and smuggling, and helped to recognize an entire new race of sapient creatures. Just his kind of vacation!  In the hilarious, fantastical world that is Discworld, the subset of Sam Vines books put less emphasis on madcap hijinks and more on an examination of what it means to be a good cop in a chaotic world. Not to imply that there isn't plenty of hilarity to go around! Still, much of the story is about how to make things right within the law. I enjoyed it quite a lot.