“Let me tell you why you’re here. You are here because you know something. What you know, you can’t explain. But you feel it.” - Morpheus, ‘The Matrix' (1999).
After almost 20 years since the last movie came out, Neo and Trinity are taking us back to the Matrix! There's still time before Matrix Resurrections releases in theaters on December 22 to rewatch all of the original trilogy but because we're librarians, we have to note that there is also time to read some Matrix read alikes!
When the first movie came out, it was heralded as a cyberpunk masterpiece - and librarian Anna would like to note that special effects of the movie mostly still hold up and is great fun! - but it encompasses more than just one genre. Dystopia, philosophical thought experiment, and ultra-violence could all be used to describe the movies. Therefore, these book recommendations are a lot of things, too. Some of these titles came out before the movie and undoutedly inspired it, but others have come out since then. This list is mostly for adults, with a few Teen titles thrown in for fun.
If you're looking for more book recommendations, we have a ton of resources for you:
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The windup girl
by Paolo Bacigalupi Living in a future where food is scarce, Anderson Lake tries to find ways to exploit this need, as he comes into conflict with Jaidee, an official of the Environmental Ministry, and encounters Emiko, a engineered windup girl who has been discarded by her creator. |
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The unnoticeables
by Robert Brockway When a former teen heartthrob tries to eat her, her best friend goes missing and an angel appears outside of her apartment, Kaitlyn, a stuntwoman, must team up with a punk named Carey to save humankind from a race of creatures that are determined to eradicate problems—humans being one of them. |
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Waste tide
by Qiufan Chen An exploited lowest-caste factory worker, her ruthless employer, an American corporate representative and his heritage-seeking translator intersect when a dark futuristic virus is unleashed on a major Chinese technological site, triggering a war between the classes. |
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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
by Philip K. Dick A masterpiece ahead of its time, a prescient rendering of a dark future, and the inspiration for the blockbuster film Blade Runner. By 2021, the World War has killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remain covet any living creature, and for people who can’t afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacra: horses, birds, cats, sheep. They’ve even built humans. Immigrants to Mars receive androids so sophisticated they are indistinguishable from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans can wreak, the government bans them from Earth. Driven into hiding, unauthorized androids live among human beings, undetected. Rick Deckard, an officially sanctioned bounty hunter, is commissioned to find rogue androids and “retire” them. But when cornered, androids fight back—with lethal force. |
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The prey of gods
by Nicky Drayden A tale set in a futuristic South Africa where technology and a booming economy make life more comfortable, an unconventional Zulu girl becomes her community's defender against such challenges as a popular hallucinogen, an artificial intelligence uprising and a murderous demigoddess. |
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I have no mouth & I must scream
by Harlan Ellison Seven stunning stories of speculative fiction by the author of A Boy and His Dog. In a post-apocalyptic world, four men and one woman are all that remain of the human race, brought to near extinction by an artificial intelligence. Programmed to wage war on behalf of its creators, the AI became self-aware and turned against humanity. The five survivors are prisoners, kept alive and subjected to brutal torture by the hateful and sadistic machine in an endless cycle of violence. This story and six more groundbreaking and inventive tales that probe the depths of mortal experience prove why Grand Master of Science Fiction Harlan Ellison has earned the many accolades to his credit and remains one of the most original voices in American literature. |
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Trouble and her friends
by Melissa Scott After the authorities close down the illegal world of cyberspace, home to the computer netwalkers, India Carless (alias "Trouble") settles down in the corporate world, until a computer hacker forces her into a deadly battle of technology and wits. |
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Neuromancer
by William Gibson Case, a burned out computer whiz, is asked to steal a security code that is locked in the most heavily guarded databank in the solar system. |
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Sword art online : Aincrad
by Reki Kawahara In the year 2022, when a virtual reality online role playing game capable of immersing people fully into the experience, malfunctions, the players are stuck within a virtual world where they must conquer all one hundred levels or die. |
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The All-consuming World
by Cassandra Khaw Getting back together for one last mission — saving a missing and much-changed comrade and solve the mystery of their last disastrous mission — a diverse team of broken, diminished former criminals must battle their own traumas to survive a universe sapient ageships who want them dead. |
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United States of Japan
by Peter Tieryas Liu Decades ago, Japan won the Second World War. Americans worship their infallible Emperor, and nobody believes that Japan's conduct in the war was anything but exemplary. Nobody, that is, except the George Washingtons - a shadowy group of rebels fighting for freedom. Their latest subversive tactic is to distribute an illegal video game that asks players to imagine what the world might be like if the United States had won the war instead. Captain Beniko Ishimura's job is to censor video games, and he's tasked with getting to the bottom of this disturbing new development. But Ishimura's hiding something... He's slowly been discovering that the case of the George Washingtons is more complicated that it seems, and the subversive video game's origins are even more controversial and dangerous than the censors originally suspected. |
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Warcross
by Marie Lu After hacking into the Warcross Championships' opening game to track illegal betting, bounty hunter Emika Chen is asked by the game's creator to go undercover to investigate a security problem, and she uncovers a sinister plot. |
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The body scout : a novel
by Lincoln Michel Kobo has some problems. His cybernetics are a decade out of date, he's got a pair of twin sister loan sharks knocking on his door, and his work scouting for a baseball league run by pharmaceutical companies is about to go belly-up. Things couldn't get much worse. Then his childhood best friend--Monsanto Mets slugger J.J. Zunz--is murdered at home plate. Determined to find the killer, Kobo plunges into the dark corners and glittering cloud condos of a world ravaged by climate change and repeat pandemics,and where genetic editing and advanced drugs mean you can have any body you want--as long as you can afford it. But even among the philosophical Neanderthals, zootech weapons, and genetically modified CEOs, there's a curveball he never could have called. |
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Rabbits : a novel
by Terry Miles Set in the same world as the popular Rabbits podcast, this fast-paced technothriller takes readers into an underground alternate reality game where the future of the world depends on a player named K. |
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Altered carbon
by Richard K. Morgan In a twenty-fifth-century world in which death is nearly obsolete, thanks to a technology that allows a person's consciousness to be downloaded into a new body, former U.N. envoy Takeshi Kovacs, re-sleeved into a new body after a brutal death, finds himself caught in the middle of a deadly far-reaching conspiracy that could have horrifying repercussions. |
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More than this
by Patrick Ness Awakening inexplicably in the suburban English town of his early childhood after drowning, Seth is baffled by changes in the community and suffers from agonizing memories that reveal sinister qualities about the world around him. |
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The ghost in the shell
by Masamune Shirow Cyborg superagent Major Motoko Kusanagi is tasked with tracking down ghost hackers who can exploit the human-machine interface and reprogram humans to carry out the hackers' nefarious ends. |
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Hyperion
by Dan Simmons On the world called Hyperion, beyond the reach of galactic law, waits a creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope—and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands. |
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Hullmetal girls
by Emily Skrutskie Aisha Un-Haad, seventeen, and Key Tanaka, eighteen, have risked everything for new lives as mechanically enhanced soldiers, and when an insurrection forces dark secrets to surface, the fate of humanity is in their hands. |
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Snow crash
by Neal Stephenson In twenty-first-century America, a teenaged computer hacker finds himself fighting a computer virus that battles virtual reality technology and a deadly drug that turns humans into zombies. |
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This is not a game
by Walter Jon Williams When you play one of Dagmar’s online games, you can’t just shut down the computer and walk away. The games pursue you into real life: you start getting emails and phone calls from fictional characters, perfect strangers ask you to help solve their problems, and sometimes you’re asked to volunteer for a mission to discover a vital clue. But now something is pursuing Dagmar. From the anarchy of a street riot in Indonesia to the brutality of a Mafia killing in Los Angeles, from the seedy glitz of Hollywood to the ruthless international currency market, Dagmar finds herself at the center of an intrigue far more desperate than those she devises for entertainment. And somehow, she knows, the key to the puzzle lies in her own past, and the gaming group she joined in college. Dagmar must draw on all her powers, not the least of which is her circle of online gamers whose well-honed puzzle-solving skills may prove vital to preserving her life. |
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Robopocalypse : a novel
by Daniel H. Wilson A tale set in the near future finds the world thrown into chaos by rebelling artificial intelligences under the leadership of a murderous technology called Archos that kills its creator and takes over the global network, triggering an unprecedented united front among all human cultures. |