Best Cyberpunk Books

A beautiful, vibrant memoir about growing up motherless in 1970s and ’80s San Francisco with an openly gay father.

After his wife dies in a car accident, bisexual writer and activist Steve Abbott moves with his two-year-old daughter to San Francisco. There they discover a city in the midst of revolution, bustling with gay men in search of liberation—few of whom are raising a child.

Steve throws himself into San Francisco’s vibrant cultural scene. He takes Alysia to raucous parties, pushes her in front of the microphone at poetry readings, and introduces her to a world of artists, thinkers, and writers. But the pair live like nomads, moving from apartment to apartment, with a revolving cast of roommates and little structure. As a child Alysia views her father as a loving playmate who can transform the ordinary into magic, but as she gets older Alysia wants more than anything to fit in. The world, she learns, is hostile to difference.

In Alysia’s teens, Steve’s friends—several of whom she has befriended—fall ill as AIDS starts its rampage through their community. While Alysia is studying in New York and then in France, her father tells her it’s time to come home; he’s sick with AIDS. Alysia must choose whether to take on the responsibility of caring for her father or continue the independent life she has worked so hard to create.

Reconstructing their life together from a remarkable cache of her father’s journals, letters, and writings, Alysia Abbott gives us an unforgettable portrait of a tumultuous, historic time in San Francisco as well as an exquisitely moving account of a father’s legacy and a daughter’s love.

10 illustrations

Allie Haas only did it for a dare - the kind of dare you know is a mistake but you do it anyway because it's Mistake Yime. But putting on the madcap that Jerry Wirerammer has 'borrowed' was a very big mistake. The psychosis itself was quite conventional, a few paranoid delusions, but it didn't go away when she took the madcap off. Jerry did the decent thing and left her at an emergency room for dry-cleaning but then the Brain Police took over. Straightened out by a professional mindplayer, Allie thinks she's left mind games behind for good but then comes the fazer: she can either go to jail as mind criminal or she can train as a mindplayer herself...

The next twenty years will be completely unlike the last twenty years.

The world is in economic crisis, and there are no easy fixes to our predicament. Unsustainable trends in the economy, energy, and the environment have finally caught up with us and are converging on a very narrow window of time—the "Twenty-Teens." The Crash Course presents our predicament and illuminates the path ahead, so you can face the coming disruptions and thrive--without fearing the future or retreating into denial. In this book you will find solid facts and grounded reasoning presented in a calm, positive, non-partisan manner.

Our money system places impossible demands upon a finite world.  Exponentially rising levels of debt, based on assumptions of future economic growth to fund repayment, will shudder to a halt and then reverse. Unfortunately, our financial system does not operate in reverse. The consequences of massive deleveraging will be severe.

Oil is essential for economic growth. The reality of dwindling oil supplies is now internationally recognized, yet virtually no developed nations have a Plan B.  The economic risks to individuals, companies, and countries are varied and enormous. Best-case, living standards will drop steadily worldwide. Worst-case, systemic financial crises will toss the world into jarring chaos.

This book is written for those who are motivated to learn about the root causes of our predicaments, protect themselves and their families, mitigate risks as much as possible, and control what effects they can. With challenge comes opportunity, and The Crash Course offers a positive vision for how to reshape our lives to be more balanced, resilient, and sustainable.

From the Author: Warning Signs for the Planet

Author Dr. Chris Martenson

Warning signs for our minerals and energy supply:
• Oil discoveries peaked in 1964
• New oil discoveries have been outpaced by oil consumption by nearly 4 to 1 each year
• Known deposits of several critical minerals will be completely exhausted within 20 years, assuming the energy is there to extract them. Others will peak all on their own soon thereafter, and even sooner if Peak Oil limits our ability to obtain them.
• New ore deposits are getting harder to find, more remote, deeper down, more dilute, and/or all of the above.

Warning signs for our food and water supply:
• World population will climb to 9.5 billion by 2050.
• Nearly all high-quality arable land is already under production.
• Food yields are heavily dependent on fertilizers, which are either energy intensive to make or are being depleted and will someday peak.
• Soils are being mined by the practice of removing essential nutrients without replacing them.

Warning signs for our environment:
• 40% decline in oceanic phytoplankton since 1950
• Birds, bees, and bats in serious population decline over the past few years
• Fisheries collapsing all over the globe
• Mercury levels in marine mammals so high that the EPA would treat their carcasses as toxic waste
• Sterilized soils and advancing deserts
• Species extinction rates that rival anything in geologic records