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250 pages, Paperback
First published November 8, 2016
Having your fantasies become reality is always better than living in reality and wishing you were somewhere else. - The Singularity is in Your Hair, Matthew Kressel
Cybernetics. Neuroscience. Nanotechnology. Genetic engineering. Hacktivism. Transhumanism. The world of tomorrow is already here, and the technological changes we all face have inspired a new wave of stories to address our fears, hopes, dreams, and desires as Homo sapiens evolve—or not—into their next incarnation.Cyber World is a collection of this new wave of cyber-inspired tales, that should appeal to a wide audience. There's part of me that wants to write a paragraph or two on each story -- well, most of them -- but I don't have the time for that, and I can't imagine many of you would read it. So I'll opt for brevity. As I read through this collection, I noticed that my notes had a theme, I'd consistently remark on three aspects of the stories: 1. The Premise/Cyber-Conceit; 2. The Story/Characters; 3. The Language Used/Way of telling the story. Now, this actually sounds like a pretty decent strategy to approaching these, but I'm not clever enough to do that deliberately, apparently. Almost every story here nailed two, if not three, of these aspects.
But this is New York City, and there can be traffic jams or terrorist threats or flash plagues to contend with..."flash plagues." I love that concept. There's just so much -- probably a novel if someone wanted it, in those two words. The rest of the story was pretty weird and disturbing, and though provoking on its own, but those two words (for me) sealed it as a favorite.