Zer0es (Chuck Wendig)

The Zeroes are a motley group of hackers and trolls dragged to a prison compound by a mysterious government organization and put to work on various hacker-related tasks that don't seem to make much sense. They gradually figure out that there's a powerful and dangerous force that's taking over the Internet, causing death and mayhem, and they band together to escape and fight this power. I enjoyed the geeky references to tech and pop culture, but ultimately the story didn't really work for me. The characters never came alive, but remained cardboard stand-ins for stock people. The story also had two basic flaws that dragged my disbelief to the ground. One is that if a computer takes over the Internet then it can take direct control over any interconnected digital device, from the GPS in an airplane to your car's radio. The other, even more implausible, is that it is possible to throw someone down on a table, drill a hole in their skull, and shove in a cable that allows the computer to both download all their memories and upload a command program that turns them into a remote-controlled zombie. I'm sorry, but no.

Echopraxia (Peter Watts)

I admired Watts's earlier Blindsight for its intelligence, its mind-blowing ideas, and its frequent reference to ideas that are square in the center of my own professional areas of interest. Echopraxia is more of the same, and even more so. It takes place in the same universe as the earlier book, focusing on what's going on back home while Humanity's heroes are engaging in a deeply mysterious first Contact. The main character, a biologist of the old school who eschews most forms of direct brain augmentation, gets caught up in an increasingly challenging set of circumstances as he fights to save himself and humanity from vampires, scientific mystics, military zombies, and alien slime mold. It's not clear whether or not he is successful. I admire the brilliance of his thinking and world-building. I love that I know about little bits of psychological research he tosses out. I was impressed with how he gave one character a unique voice, a sense of rapid delivery and impatience, simply by leaving out commas. Still, I can't say that I loved either book, and I'm afraid that it's because I'm not smart enough to read Peter Watts. I had the constant feeling that I didn't quite know what's actually happening, and kept going in the belief that it would become clear eventually, but it never did. If you loved Blindsight and you're smart enough to follow down the rabbit hole, you will probably love this one as well.

The Martian (Andy Weir)

This book and Age of Miracles (Karen Thompson Walker) are a study in opposites. Whereas Miracles was strong on characterization and relationships but weakened by stomach-clenching bad science, this one is all science, all the time, propped up with some cardboard characters in invisible relationships. I'm comfortable with what it says about me to say that I loved this one. Its narrator, Mark, is a smart, determined guy with a good sense of humor, but no deep personality beyond that, and nobody else registers much on the human meter. But then Mark finds himself stranded on Mars with no means of communication, in a habitat meant to keep six people alive for 31 days and possible rescue four years off, and he sets out to keep himself alive. He forces machinery to do things its designers would be afraid to have nightmares about. He applies chemistry, biology, and physics like an acid trip. All the science is rock-solid, while still being surprising and creative. I couldn't wait to find out what Mark, and Mars, would come up with next. Much recommended for any science nerds.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (David Shafer)

A rollicking spy-versus-spy kind of novel, with some loosely connected misfits who wind up working together against a terrible global force of 007 dimensions out to dominate the world. The Committee is bent on capturing and owning all the world's information: everything people do, say, buy, download, comment, or otherwise engage in anywhere in the vicinity of a smart device. Once they own it all, they can charge people to access it, or use it for extortion (pay up or say goodbye to the access codes to your bank account!). The people opposing them are a little too good to be true (gentle hippies who literally find the answer in hemp plants), but it's still fun to see how our merry band of drunken, crazy, ineffective losers actually manage to bring the bad guys down. I had to suspend belief so hard I think I pulled something, but I think it was worth it.

You (Austin Grossman)

A team of eccentric young geniuses work for a small video game company, developing games based on the vision of the most eccentric, most brilliant of them all. Buried in the code, ported from system to system, is a bug that crops up occasionally and wreaks havoc before the game completely crashes. This is the story of where that bug came from and how it can be found and fixed. Even more, though, it is the story of what video games are and how they become so important. In each game there are characters and worlds to choose from, but at the core you are still you, and that core of you-ness can never got away. Do we want it to? What, after all, is the ultimate game? I liked this story, but didn't get as engaged in it as much as in Grossman's original novel (Soon I Will Be Invincible) which is much less realistic but somehow more real.

The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces (Ray Vukcevich)

This is a standard detective story. The hardboiled detective with relationship issues and an addiction that leads to blackouts, the lovely woman who comes in to beg for his help, the touchy interaction with the cops, the killer who has to be stopped before he kills again -- all there. Only the detective is an individual with multiple personalities, and his addiction is to tap dancing, and the killer - well, I won't reveal too much. This story is several degrees out of kilter, and it is a zany, rollicking ride. I really enjoyed it, though from time to time the roller coaster lost me. I always got back on, and if the ending was a little contrived, still it lived up to the rest of the book (including an email to one character we never actually met, asking what it was like to be a loose end). It wasn't flawless, but the story was so much fun I forgave the problems.

Machine Man (Max Barry)

This is a strange story, darkly humorous, and I loved it. The first-person narrator is an engineer working for a soulless corporation dedicated to making whatever technology will bring in the most money. He is brilliant and rational and very bad at social relationships and fuzzy thinking, and has always had a feeling of connection to machines. When an industrial accident costs him a leg, he is disappointed in the poor quality of the prostheses available and dedicates himself to the project of building a better leg in the lab. He does--but it doesn't stop there. Behind the humor and absurdity of the steadily-increasing mayhem is an exploration of what it means to be human, of whether we are our bodies or whether all our parts are just inefficiently engineered biological components we can replace with something better, and what it would mean if we did.

Anathem (Neal Stephenson)

This huge novel covers a whole lot of territory - almost enough to justify its 900+ pages. The action takes place on Arbre, a world that is specifically not Earth but is inhabited by people that are indistinguishable from humans. Why they are so similar to us is actually explained about 2/3 of the way through in a mind-blowing philosophy of the nature of the universe. The main character lives in what amounts to a monastery in a church dedicated, not to religion, but to science and natural philosophy. The dialog of these characters all sounds like they are all in one of Plato's Dialogues, even when they are just hanging out, even the people who don't live in the monastery, so I was not impressed with this aspect. In many ways it all felt distant from me, but the story and the ideas carried the book anyway.

The Most Human Human (Brian Christian)

This is the story of the Loebner Prize, a real-life Turing test competition in which various computer systems compete against actual humans to prove they can converse just like a person. A team of judges have 7-minute instant-message type conversations with others and have to vote for which ones they think are humans and which ones are computer programs. Each year the program that gets the most human votes wins the prize for Most Human Computer - and the human who gets the most human votes wins Most Human Human. The author of the book, who has degrees in both computer science and poetry (!), competed in 2009 and was determined to be voted the Most Human Human. In this book he wanders through a delightful landscape of concepts related to what makes someone human, and how you can tell. He talks about computer chess (of course), pick-up lines, information theory, Zen, compression, and inattentional blindness, among many other topics. I was constantly sharing nuggets of fascination with others. Very much recommended, especially for the nerdy among us.

Idoru (William Gibson)

This complex near-future tale entwines media and celebrity with technology and the Internet in unexpected ways, but it still feels familiar. Much of the story takes place in a post-earthquake Tokyo; the rest in various virtual venues. Gibson, who invented (or at least named) cyberspace, brings it home to a 14-year-old fangirl and a disgraced former data analyst. They are both linked with a rock star beloved by pubescent girls around the world when he announces that he intends to marry an idoru - a synthetic AI with her own career in music. She is not actually a person, but instead is a corporate creation designed to appeal to fans, but somehow she has become much more, and their intention to marry has created a firestorm into which smugglers, Russian mobsters, media moguls, and ex-felon bodyguards have all been drawn. I enjoyed the ride.

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.

Reamde (Neal Stephenson)

Wow.  This book is massive (1042 pages in hard cover) but it never slows down. I was about a third of the way through when I realized is was expecting it to end shortly because it felt like the grand climax. After that, it just kept ratcheting the intensity higher and higher. Reamde is the name of a computer virus designed to siphon cash out of players in a hugely popular multiplayer world. The virus triggers a sequence of events dragging in the developer of this world, his niece, Russian mobsters, Islamic terrorists, Chinese hackers and a tea distributor, American fundamentalists, M16 agents, and sundry others before all is done. The plot is insanely complicated and intricately worked out, and it grabbed me by the throat and wouldn't let go. If you like thrillers with lots of intelligent characters, and lots of detail about computers, guns, boats, and undercover operations, you will love this one.

The Windup Girl (Paolo Bacigalupi)

In the future, genetic modification, climate change, and short-sighted agricultural policy have caused the world food supply to crash. Bangkok is a city under siege, with giant levees to keep out the ocean and strong barriers to keep out unnatural things - including windups. These "New People" are genetically designed and creche-grown, and one of them ends up abandoned in Bangkok when her Japanese owner tires of her. She is just one of the people trying to survive in this dystopian future. Others are a calorie man, secretly working for an American company making its money providing food to starving people. One is a displaced Chinese man whose family all died in a wave of riots in Malaysia. One is an official taking seriously the attempt to keep dangerous products out of the city, and his unsmiling assistant. How these various people deal with the corruption, physical and psychological, that surrounds them makes for a complex and moving story.

Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson)

This is a big book with an amazing number of threads: math, computers, cryptography, World War II, treasure hunting, data security, hacking, and more. At first, the two halves of the story (WWII and present day) seem connected only by the last names of some of the characters and the general theme of cryptography, but by the end everything has come together. I enjoyed all the science geekery, presented in a way that is accessible but also accurate, and was completely caught up in the personal stories of loyalty, trust, and love. Highly recommended.

The Dervish House (Ian McDonald)

Reading this sprawling, convoluted story wasn't easy, but it was worth it. In a near-future Istanbul, the lives of several people living in the same house come together in unexpected ways. One is a high-powered financial trader working on an almost-legal plan to earn millions. One is a trader in antiquities drawn into the mystical search for a legendary artifact. One is a retired professor of economics and former activist. One is a 9-year-old boy with a disability and a nearly magical robot. One is a woman who came to the city from a small agrarian community determined to make a name for herself in business. One is an empty-hearted drug user who begins seeing visions of djinni and saints. Their story begins with an explosion on a tram, and ends with a monstrous terrorist attack on the city. It was slow going, especially at first, but came together into a thrilling and satisfying conclusion.

Rule 34 (Charles Stross)

I've liked Charles Stross's  work, but I would have picked this one up for the title alone! Rule 34 is one of the supposed rules of the Internet: If it exists, there is pornography of it. In the Scotland of the future, there is a special police unit that monitors the Internet to try to separate people's fantasies from actual crimes. An unusual attracts attention, and proves to be just the tip of a very strange iceberg. I enjoyed the story, with its exotic twists and turns and Stross's usual dropping of pop-culture references at every opportunity. The writing was odd, though. It was in present tense, which is fine, but I didn't love the fact that it was written in second person. If immediacy is what you're after, why not use first person? Still, it was a fun ride.

A Fire Upon the Deep (Vernor Vinge)

This is one of my very favorite science fiction books of all time. Vinge has created an amazing, mind-blowing universe, filled it with fascinating aliens, set up a truly epic battle between good and evil, and laid it all on the shoulders of characters, human and non-human, you really come to care about. There is action ranging from galaxy-wide cataclysms to up-close-and-personal betrayals. There is technology ranging from the literally unimaginably godlike to muzzle-loading cannon and wheeled carts. Highly recommended.

The Information (James Gleick)

A fascinating examination of what information is (knowledge, uncertainty, meaning, and bits) and how our understanding of and relationship to information has changed over time. It starts with the pre-literate communication of word and talking drums and works its way up, through writing, printing, telegraphy, radio, computers, and the Internet, to Google and Wikipedia. There is much to enjoy here. I loved learning about how talking drums actually talk, about the Analytical Engines of Babbage (never quite realized) and MIT (which took up a room and actually worked to solve differential equations). The controversies over whether information has a thermodynamic cost or whether Wikipedia should include a page on one screw in one particular bicycle were a delight to behold. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in this sort of history and philosophy of ideas.

Daemon (Daniel Suarez)

Matthew Sobol, a brilliant computer genius and online game designer, dies and unleashes the Daemon - an autonomous, web-based system that resides in bazillions of fragments distributed around the world, reading newsfeeds and responding to events in ways that he had pre-programmed, to make the world into what Sobol wanted. For example, he doesn't like spammers, so they are murdered in their thousands, and while I approve of the goal, I strongly disapprove of his methods. The Daemon is untraceable and unstoppable, because it is everywhere and nowhere and none of its many minions know its plans or what their part in those plans are. They get messages that, for instance, they are to go to X location, pick up an object from Y person, attach it to another object they already had, and deliver to Z person, and they never know why. I found the book frustrating, since the characters who were sympathetic and positive stand against the Daemon, but the overall message seemed to be that the Daemon is not only inevitable but is in fact a force for good overall. There's a cold calculus we are expected to accept, that the horrific murder of thousands (and the collateral deaths of more thousands who are in the wrong place at the wrong time) is OK because if the Daemon doesn't take over there will be a worse calamity in some abstract future. I also had trouble with the idea that one man's genius could really be that awesomely perfect, to have anticipated so much and planned in such detail as to be completely unstoppable. While the details of the technology are no doubt accurate and could really happen, no system is that perfect and free of bugs and glitches! So while I am glad I read this, and it gave me some interesting ideas to talk about, I didn't really enjoy it or buy it completely..

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larsson)

This mystery thriller, set in Sweden, starts out slowly with a focus on a journalist involved in financial reporting, but a few hundred pages in suddenly takes off with the investigation of a decades-old missing person case and a deeply dysfunctional but powerful family. The violence was intense, graphic, and appalling, but it made for gripping reading. Though the focus was on the journalist, the most fascinating character was "the girl with the dragon tattoo," a thoroughly intriguing, kick-ass, flawed but stalwart young woman. I will definitely read the other books in the series to learn more about her and her background.