Top 10 computer novels

Jeffery Deaver's many novels and two short story collections include the newly released Roadside Crosses.

For the Guardian, he named his top ten novels featuring the internet or computers.

One novel on his list:

A Maze of Death by Philip K Dick

I don't write science fiction, though I read much of it growing up. No top 10 of computer-oriented novels would be complete without something by Dick, as the devices figure in one way or another in all of his stories. His Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the basis for the movie Blade Runner) and Ubik are more frequently mentioned, but Maze is my favorite. It's less relentlessly bleak than some (that is a compliment, by the way) and it speeds along like a classic thriller. A disparate group of colonists end up on a distant planet and are forced to fend for themselves in a world where reality and perception blur. I consider this a computer novel because of the mysterious "tenches," part oracle, part circuitry, part Jell-O.

Read about the other nine novels on Deaver's list.

--Marshal Zeringue