Necrotech

What Hacker News says

1. julianeonJul 2025
   When I think of who's carrying the genre today, in books, I think of Cameron Hurley (God's War) and K.C. Alexander (Necrotech). Hurley's books capture its spirit especially well.
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2. kcartlidgeMar 2024
   Only recent in relation to the classics, but I really enjoyed the following (the years are approximate). There are others, but I've listed these ones specifically because those others have already been recommended elsewhere in the thread whereas these may get missed.

   - Adam Roberts: New Model Army (2010?)

   - Hiroshi Sakurazaka: All You Need is Kill (2005?)

   - Mike Resnick: The Dark Lady (2015?)

   - KC Alexander: Necrotech (2015?)

   - Gary Gibson: Stealing Light, Nova War, and Empire of Light (2013?)

   - Linda Nagata: The Last Good Man (2015?)

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3. kcartlidgeMay 2023
   Multiple re-reads:

   - Saga of the Exiles by Julian May, which merges science fiction with folklore/fantasy in Pliocene Earth

   - Hyperion by Dan Simmons, excellent SF with a feel of the Canterbury Tales about it

   - Neuromancer by William Gibson, plus the follow-ups (all the Sprawl) are very good too

   - The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner, about the eco collapse of the US in the 1980s (10 years after it was written) and which William Gibson called a "brilliant novel"

   And a couple of guilty pleasures:

   - Venus Equilateral by George O Smith, 1940s stories based around a three mile long space station at the L4 point in space, a bit like Babylon 5 meets DS9 in the era of vacuum tubes

   - Necrotech by KC Alexander, a brutal and obscene body-mod cyberpunk dystopia (the sequel of which, Nanoshock, has a superbly offensive opening sentence)

   - Halcyon Drift by Brian Stableford, about a corporate dystopia and a pilot who hooks up his body to merge with his ship (a bit blase now but less so then, especially as I had read far less at the time)

   - Bio of a Space Tyrant by Piers Anthony, a 6 book series following the rise of a refugee to becoming the Tyrant of Jupiter

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4. kcartlidgeDec 2022
   For sheer entertainment value: I've just finished KC Alexander's two "SINless" books - Necrotech and Nanoshock. Both were excellent reads. Nothing heavy, just some extremely filthy and brutal transhumanist SciFi with a hint of cyberpunk in there too (not enough to make it that genre). Fast, frantic, gritty.

   Great writing by a young bi-polar feminist writer with a great future.

   Also, the introduction and the first few chapters of "Letters from the Desert" by Carlo Carretto.

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5. mindcrimeAug 2022
   Necrotech and Nanoshock by K.C. Alexander might suit you.
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6. mindcrimeDec 2020
   I read about 20% of the titles I wanted to

   I can relate. My goal for this year was to read 75 books, and I think I'm at 33 or 34 right now. The main one that has stood out to me so far was The Universe Speaks In Numbers by Graham Farmelo. Explaining why this book stood out to me would take a lot of words, and I plan to write a blog post on it at some point. But briefly, it comes down to it getting me excited about math again.

   And as something of a counter-point to that book, I also read Lost in Math by Sabine Hossenfelder, which was also very good.

   Others that were definitely worth reading:

   Analogy Making As Perception by Melanie Mitchell

   Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky (re-read)

   Engineering General Intelligence, Part 1 by Ben Goertzel

   The AGI Revolution by Ben Goertzel

   And on a lighter note, some fun - if bizarre - cyberpunk styled novels I read were Necrotech and Nanoshock by K.C. Alexander.

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