SETH W. JAMES

A New Year, A New List of Favorite Books

December 13, 2024

By Seth W. James

As 2024 nears its end, Shepard.com has released its next big list of Authors’ favorite books.  And, of course, mine are all cyberpunk.

For this year’s list, I focused on a few of the subgenre’s classics, which are sometimes overlooked by new readers:

1. Eclipse, book 1 of The Eclipse Trilogy, by John Shirely.  Some of John’s best work and eerily predictive of what our world has become today.
2. Synners, by Pat Cadigan.  Pat’s magnum opus, a wild psychedelic ride through realities both virtual and otherwise.
3. Schismatrix, by Bruce Sterling.  Who says cyberpunk has to be Earthbound or exclude aliens?  Certainly not Bruce Sterling!

I’ll leave my fuller analysis of each book to Shepard’s site.  Suffice it to say that these are good—and a couple of them quite challenging—books, worthy of any true cyberpunk reader’s bookshelf.

That’s all for now, but I will say that a series update for The Cain Series will come out in January, giving a few new insights into how the series will progress as we head toward book 3’s publication in June. Until then, thanks for reading and have a happy holiday!