Book Club - 2nd book suggestions end on June 14th

[3LVI5]

Who’s ready for book 2!?

First, let me introduce myself, I go by 3LVI5 and I’m here to help Nikita and The Dark Tangent out with the book club. While I don’t bring much to the table, I love this idea and I hope we see the book club community grow!

Everyone interested please:

• Suggest a book (name / title / link)
• Tell us a non-spoiler summary (Back of book, from Amazon description, etc)
• Tell us why you like it, what speaks to you

Then come Sunday evening (June 14th) we will create a poll for everyone to vote on all the suggestions and a book will be selected.
Here are a few books that have already been mentioned so far:

The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
Little Brother – Cory Doctorow
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Dome City Blues – Jeff Edwards
Freedom (TM) – Daniel Suarez (Sequel to Daemon)

Can't wait to see everyone’s suggestions!

[Dark Tangent]

I'll suggest a series of books by Cory Doctorow:

Little Brother from 2010. It is now on the reading list for West Point and captures some of the energy of the current moment:

"Marcus, a.k.a "w1n5t0n," is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school's intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they're mercilessly interrogated for days."


He wrote a sequel, HOMELAND, that I have not read yet, but am interested in:

It's based a few years after Little Brother and the economy has collapsed in San Francisco.

"In Cory Doctorow's wildly successful Little Brother, young Marcus Yallow was arbitrarily detained and brutalized by the government in the wake of a terrorist attack on San Francisco―an experience that led him to become a leader of the whole movement of technologically clued-in teenagers, fighting back against the tyrannical security state.

A few years later, California's economy collapses, but Marcus's hacktivist past lands him a job as webmaster for a crusading politician who promises reform. Soon his former nemesis Masha emerges from the political underground to gift him with a thumbdrive containing a Wikileaks-style cable-dump of hard evidence of corporate and governmental perfidy. It's incendiary stuff―and if Masha goes missing, Marcus is supposed to release it to the world. Then Marcus sees Masha being kidnapped by the same government agents who detained and tortured Marcus years earlier."


Finally he also wrote Walkaway in 2017 and William Gibson praises it. That's enough for me. 😁

"Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza―known to his friends as Hubert, Etc―was too old to be at that Communist party.

But after watching the breakdown of modern society, he really has no where left to be―except amongst the dregs of disaffected youth who party all night and heap scorn on the sheep they see on the morning commute. After falling in with Natalie, an ultra-rich heiress trying to escape the clutches of her repressive father, the two decide to give up fully on formal society―and walk away.

After all, now that anyone can design and print the basic necessities of life―food, clothing, shelter―from a computer, there seems to be little reason to toil within the system."

[Luk4]

I definitely second this. Cory Doctorow's Little Brother would definitely be a good read given the situation we're currently in.

[_whelmed]

I absolutely love those books. I hadn’t read them in a while so I reread “Lawful Interception” and given the protests going on now, it’s so timely.

[Dark Tangent]

Is that a book suggestion you are making? In for a penny in for a pound!

[3LVI5]

Even if none of the books in this collection win the vote I'm still reading them. They sound so good!

[Loving_Grayce]

A collection of short stories exploring Cyberpunk thinking in it's formative years.

"With Cyberpunk, I find it tends to fall in a scale from optimistic, like in Trouble and her friends, to full blown dystopia like Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller. This falls a little from column A and a little from Column B. Some had a tinge of hope at the end and others wanted to see the world burn. It's a good read and a great stepping point to introduce people to other writers in the genre beyond Gibson, Stephenson, and Sterling."

[3LVI5]

Now this one is interesting. Almost like a Cyberpunk themed Black Mirror. That’s probably a bad description though haha. Great suggestion!

[3LVI5]

Don’t forget, book suggestions end tomorrow night!

[K1ller Monkeez]

Two recommendations:

Found Audio by N.J. Campbell

"Amrapali Anna Singh is an historian and analyst capable of discerning the most cryptic and trivial details from audio recordings. One day, a mysterious man appears at her office in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, having traveled a great distance to bring her three Type IV audio cassettes that bear the stamp of a library in Buenos Aires that may or may not exist.

On the cassettes is the deposition of an adventure journalist and his obsessive pursuit of an amorphous, legendary, and puzzling "City of Dreams." Spanning decades, his quest leads him from a snake-hunter in the Louisiana bayou to the walled city of Kowloon on the eve of its destruction, from the Singing Dunes of Mongolia to a chess tournament in Istanbul. The deposition also begs the question: Who is making the recording, and why?

Despite being explicitly instructed not to, curiosity gets the better of Singh and she mails a transcription of the cassettes with her analysis to an acquaintance before vanishing. The man who bore the cassettes, too, has disappeared. The journalist was unnamed."

Masters of Deception: The Gang that Ruled Cyberspace by Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner

"The bestselling account of a band of kids from New York who fought an electronic turf war that ranged across some of the nation's most powerful computer systems."

[tank88]

I recommend reading Leviathan Wakes and all 8 books. It has cyberpunk elements that are the most realistic of what the real near future might look like. With plans to land a person on Mars by 2030 this book is a good view 200 years from now of how people might live. It also confronts diversity, virus, and forces of colonization that we on Earth are dealing with today in 2020. I cannot imagine a better book for Defcon reading given current events. COVID19 v. Protomolecule, Masters v. Towchu, and all the Inyalowda suffocation of Beltalowda Ereluf.

[_whelmed]

I'm gonna go ahead an nominate Lawful Intercept by Cory Doctorow. It's the 3rd story of Marcus from Little Brother and Homeland. It's a short story at only 56 pages but I think it's worth throwing into the mix with understanding of tactics used against protesters.

An all-new tale of Marcus Yallow, the hero of the bestselling novels Little Brother and Homeland -- as he deals with the aftermath of a devastating Oakland earthquake, with the help of friends, hacker allies, and some very clever crowdsourced drones.