Four tech thrillers rooted in the tensions between technology and human nature

Sara Sligar is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. Her first novel, Take Me Apart, was a Kirkus Best Book of the Year and a finalist for the Ned Kelly Award for Best International Crime Fiction. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.Phil. in Modern European History from the University of Cambridge. Her new novel is Vantage Point.

At CrimeReads Sligar tagged four books that "are living on the blade edge of progress, using fiction’s vast possibilities to imagine what comes next, for tech and for the people who use it." One title on the list:

Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

I learned about Ken Liu’s work from one of my students, Luis Ferrer, who wrote his senior thesis on Liu this fall. This collection pulls together eighteen stories and a novel excerpt, some of which take place in fantasy worlds or distant futures. But the collection also features other stories that speak to more specific present fears. There’s a series of several linked stories beginning with “The Gods Will Not Be Chained”—the series Luis focused on, and which was also the inspiration for the TV show Pantheon—set in a world where it has become possible to upload individuals’ brains to computers, turning them into digital consciousnesses and effectively allowing their minds to “live” forever. In another story, “Byzantine Empathy,” cryptocurrency-literate nonprofits begin turning real atrocities into violent VR experiences to shock users into donating.

The story that hit me a little too close to home was “Real Artists,” in which an aspiring filmmaker learns that the films she loves are secretly made by artificial intelligence. An advanced algorithm called “Big Semi” tracks audiences’ real-time responses and creates countless story iterations until it reaches the “exact emotional curve guaranteed to make them laugh and cry in the right places”—then uses this information to make “perfect films.” When Big Semi’s film studio offers the protagonist a job, she discovers that in this world (as in our own), AI’s success depends on the exploitation of human creative expertise.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue