SETH W. JAMES

My Top Five Cyberpunk Novels List Now Appears on Shepherd.com

October 1, 2023

By Seth W. James

To coincide with the launch of Ethos of Cain, I collaborated with the folks at Shepherd.com to create a new recommendation list: The best cyberpunk novels that launched and defined the subgenre.  If you haven’t been to their site yet, Shepherd is a book recommendation source—with a twist.  Rather than aggregating users’ lists, Shepherd collects recommendations from authors: each list includes one recent work by the author and then five works that the author loved or that inspired their work or contributed to a genre, a moment in history, or other interest.

You can find my Shepherd list here: https://shepherd.com/best-books/cyberpunk-that-launched-and-defined-the-subgenre

I chose to focus on the golden-age cyberpunk novels, starting with City Come A-Walkin’ by John Shirley—cyberpunk’s “patient zero,” as William Gibson calls him—and continuing through the subgenre’s first years of existence.  These are great books, not only enjoyable and thought-provoking to read, but important to the history of cyberpunk and science fiction, generally.

Shepherd has other cyberpunk-related lists, too, which you can find here: https://shepherd.com/bookshelf/cyberpunk.  And, of course, lists on any other genre or subject you might want to explore, by authors you know or may discover for the first time.

I hope you enjoy The best cyberpunk novels that launched and defined the subgenre list and Ethos of Cain.

Happy reading!