Seven years after Neuromancer, three strangers are drawn through a fractured near-future: a corporate mercenary sent to extract a defecting scientist, a teenage hacker nearly killed by a black-market program, and an art expert hunting the maker of strange boxes. Their paths converge as something new moves through cyberspace.
The Orbital Corporations won the war and now run the world. Cowboy, a hardwired ex-pilot who smuggles contraband across the Line, and Sarah, a cyborged gun for hire, are both betrayed by their employers and forced into an uneasy alliance while they fight the Orbitals.
In a future Los Angeles split between franchised city-states, a hacker and a teenage skateboard courier chase a drug that works on both computers and human minds. The trail runs from the neon Metaverse to ancient languages and a plan to reshape civilisation.
In a world split between rich enclaves and crowded cities, an engineer builds an interactive book meant to teach his daughter. It changes hands until it reaches Nell, an orphan whose slow education becomes the key to something larger.
Case is a washed-up computer hacker living in a Japanese city, until a mysterious employer hires him for one more job. Working with a street samurai and a woman with mirrored eyes, he is drawn into a scheme far larger than the theft he was promised.
Nickie Haflinger is the only person ever to escape Tarnover, a secret programme that raises hyper-intelligent children to keep the state in power. Hunted across a continent bound together by computer networks, he keeps reinventing his identity while looking for a way to fight back.
Abelard Lindsay is a trained diplomat moving between two posthuman factions, the Shapers and the Mechanists, as humanity spreads across space. His long career of alliances and betrayals carries him across a changing solar system.
Marid Audran survives in the Budayeen, a crowded quarter of a future Middle Eastern city where people can buy and wear other personalities as implants. When a killer starts murdering with the minds of psychopaths, the local crime boss forces Marid to hunt him down.
A covert agent is recalled from leave when a flying saucer lands in Iowa and parasitic slugs begin attaching themselves to human hosts. The slugs control their victims' bodies while drawing on their memories, and the agent and a small team race to expose the invasion before the people in charge are no longer human.
Gully Foyle survives a wrecked spaceship and swears revenge on the vessel that left him for dead. His hunt across a future where people can teleport by thought turns him into a wealthy, dangerous man chasing a weapon that could end the war.
In a polluted future, most people escape into the OASIS, a vast virtual world. When its creator dies, he leaves his fortune to whoever finds the hidden egg, and teenager Wade joins a hunt that turns deadly.
A prisoner named Takeshi Kovacs is downloaded into a new body and sent to Earth to solve the death of a wealthy man. His search through the powerful Bay City elite uncovers a wider conspiracy about who is allowed to live forever.
Four women cross into Area X, a coastal region sealed off for decades, to survey it as the twelfth expedition. The biologist records the abandoned bunker, the writing on its walls and the animals that seem almost aware. She also knows her husband went in before her and came back changed.
Carlota Moreau grows up on her father's remote estate in the Yucatán, where he creates human-animal hybrids. Sheltered and loyal, she begins to question his work as money troubles, a suitor, and the arrival of outsiders threaten the estate and the careful life he has built around her.
After a virus makes all animal meat deadly, Argentina legalises the farming of humans for food. Marcos works the slaughter line and keeps his feelings out of it, until he is given a live woman as a gift and begins to treat her as a person.
In a flooded, calorie-poor Bangkok kept alive by genetic engineering, an American trader hunts for lost seed banks while a manufactured woman bred as a servant tries to survive. Their paths cross with corporate enforcers and a city about to boil over.
A detective on Ceres and an ice-hauler's executive officer are thrown together when a missing woman and a derelict ship point to something buried on an asteroid. Their search uncovers a conspiracy that could ignite war between Earth, Mars and the Belt.
A Penguin Classics selection of Lovecraft's stories, from 'Dagon' and 'The Picture in the House' to 'The Call of Cthulhu', 'The Colour Out of Space' and 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth'. Scholars, sailors and dreamers glimpse buried civilisations and vast indifferent forces, and the knowledge slowly takes their minds apart.
In a galaxy where thought and technology work differently at its edges, a human expedition releases an ancient menace from a lost archive. Two children stranded on a medieval world and a crew racing to stop the Blight are drawn into the same crisis.
After a car crash in a snowstorm, novelist Paul Sheldon wakes in the remote home of Annie Wilkes, who calls herself his number one fan. She nurses him back to health, then learns he has killed off her favourite character, and will not let him leave until he writes her a new book.
Five boys and their scoutmaster camp on a remote island for a weekend. A starving stranger arrives by boat, carrying a parasite that turns the body against itself. As the infection spreads, the small group's most immediate danger becomes one of the boys themselves.
The first hundred colonists arrive on Mars in 2026 to build a new world, a mission split between those who want to preserve the planet and those who want to change it. Over decades their disagreements grow into open conflict with Earth.
An actress's young daughter falls ill with symptoms no doctor can explain, and the doctors eventually suggest a religious explanation. A priest trained in exorcism is asked to help, and he must confront both the thing in the room and his own wavering faith.
Alex Easton travels to the Ushers' decaying manor to see a childhood friend who is dying. Madeline's body is changing in ways the doctors cannot explain, down to the hairs on her arms, the local hares behave strangely, and the tarn beside the house seems to be watching.
Start with “Count Zero”, “Hardwired”, “Snow Crash”: they are the closest to “Synners” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “Synners” these are Cyberpunk, Body Horror, Survival), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “Ready Player One”, “Altered Carbon”, “Annihilation”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
