Shock: Bibliography

[Kaare_Berg]

If anything he deserves a place on your list.

Why?

Given its been a while since I read these books.
Take the latest: The Algebraist
Issues: Religous Intolerance and Human Greed
Shocks: Faster than light, impending war and AI persecution and mysterious aliens reluctant to share technology.

And that is of the top of my head, I am not a literary critic.

[Hisho]

I have one Book to add that is absolutly a big inspiration for Shock: and for me the one that delivers the kind of sci-fi with a social twist I was after for the last four years.

Richard Morgan's "Altered Carbon"

It's his debut novel and I read it in 3 days, i read it and thought that this is the way I imagine a story of shock.

The shock would be that personalities are digitaly saved on a chip in the back of your head and in the case of your death you will be uploaded into a new body (except in cases where heavy firepower is used to destroy the data-stack)

There is a hint of another shock (something that is described in the second or third novel by Richard Morgan... both are on my must buy list )
The data on the stacks - short D.H.F. Digital Human Fright can be send to the stars... and the Protagonist is from another Planet.

It is at the core some kind of brutal and violent noir detekive story where the Protagonist Tekeshi Lev Kovacs has to solve the murder of a rich methusalem named Bancroft. THe intersting thing is, police says it was suicide, but the victim does not think so... Bancroft has an 24 hour backup system instaled into his head and is still alive... problem is that his stack was destroyed during the killing and that short befor the new backup.

Takeshi now has to solve the case and find the solution to the riddle why someone like Bancroft would kill himself or who killed him. Every fact points toward the suicide-theory but Bancroft is sure about one thing "there is nothing that would have lead him into killing himself in 24 hours"

It has so many cool little infos where I thought... wow this is how Minutia should be played. Street Riots of Catholics who are against a special resolution because they belief in final death and the fact that the soul can not be saved... a lot of other things.

shocks:
People's Minds get stored as data / Digital Human Fright (there are even virtual rooms you can enter with your stack-system)

Space Colonisation / Instant Travel (called Neddlecast... not realy explained but people, if they have the money just upload themselves in New York and get downloaded into a body in Singapore to do business deals in person... as already said there are also virtual rooms)

Issues:
Strange Philosophies (there a lot of cool inserts about different philosophie about the colonies)

Methusalems

Catholics Rights (only on earth)

Violence

The worth of the Human Soul

So, everyone who loves good Sci-Fi, Detective Novels and Technologie where the Author really makes the world a living breathing thing with a lot of details... I have to say check that out

For me it is the "new" Cyberpunk... while I think Neuromancer was a bit slow (and I have my problems with it that don't belong here) this novel seems to move in a pace I would compare to Formula-1 racing (or Nascar).

It has a lot of Issues to explore, a Shock (or Shocks) I totaly love and so many details (Minutia) that I could definitly say: "This is my Shock:-Novel"

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

Neat!

It sounds surprisingly like Asimov's robot stories: "OK, we have these incontrovertible rules, but how have they been circumvented?"

I'm itching for some reading. This sounds like something exciting! Thanks!

[Old Man Qfwfq]

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

Old Man Qfwfq! That's from Cosmicomics, right? Playing bocce with quarks and first sensing color in the nipples of his companion?

Final Cut is one of my favorite SF movies, actually. Good call.

I've also heard that Alphaville is good. I'll check it out! I didn't know that Murakami had written some SF. I'll have to check that out, too!

[TempvsMortis]

Have you seen the movie Videodrome? It's a little much for some people, but its really trippy and fascinating.

Shocks: Television-reality

Issues: Subjective reality, Media homogenization

It takes place in modern day.

Also, there's an author I think is great called Robert Reed, but he's really obscure so you'd probably have to find his stuff on the internet. My favorite book of his that I've read so far (he has quite a few) is Sister Alice. (He has a novella too that I love, but there are only 300 copies and they all cost $40.)

Shocks: God-like aristocracy, Cloned aristocracy, Immortality, Selective genetics

Issues: Inequality,  Aristocracy above the law, Will to power, (There's one more but its a spoiler)

[Gabriel Lopes Anaya]

 I would like to recommend Bloodchild from Octavia E. Butler. There you go some thoughts about how  some ideas in Bloodchild can give amazing elements we can use play Shock.

To explain these elements I like to use some words of Nicholas Whyte review about Bloodchild (http://www.nicholaswhyte.info/sf/bch.htm). If you read the complete review you can ruin some awesome surprises. I just quoted some ideas from the original review (no spoiler risk) here to explain the Bloodchild related Shocks!

`The story is set on a world dominated by the insect-like Tlic, whose reproduction system includes laying eggs inside a living host; the larvae then hatch and eat their way out. However the mammal-like animals native to the Tlic world have evolved a natural defence which poisons the eggs before they hatch. Fortunately for the Tlic, humans also live on the planet and are ideal hosts for their eggs. The Tlic have moved from a period of time when humans were basically kept as brood animals for the eggs, to a social system of adopting humans into their family; with any luck, the newly hatched larvae can be removed from their human host before too much damage is caused (...)
  Helford describes the Tlic power structure as "a metaphor for human gender relations under patriarchy", as illustrated by "men suffering the pains of childbearing (and when 'birth' means removing grubs from around your internal organs, the pain can be intense)"(...) She sees pointers to the slave-owning society of the Old South in the implantation scene, the widespread use of narcotics to control the humans (...)  And she also hints that the treatment of humans as animals by the Tlic goes beyond the usual categories of class and race...`

Suggested Shock.

Human families used as living hosts by the Tlic species.

Suggested Issues

Survival
Moral abuse
Physical dependence
Love
Self-sacrifice
Stockholm syndrome

Suggested Praxis Scale

Revulsion - Lure
Pattern - Deviation
Zeal - Survival
Brutality - Finesse
Nourish - Enfeeble

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

That's pretty hot. I'll have to check it out.

I wish I could read faster. I'm still chewing on Cyteen, which is really excellent.