TAMARA KEEL: “The other weekend I read of a dystopian cyberpunk future full of powerful tech companies that were effectively states unto themselves, balkanizing nations facing crises of governmental legitimacy, wars carried out by mercenaries and contractors serving as cutouts to hide the origins of their paymasters, all set in a world menaced by global plague. I also reread Robert Heinlein’s 1982 novel Friday.”

An underrated work. I agreee that it basically invented cyberpunk. I don’t think it got the attention it deserved because it came after the justly-panned Number of the Beast, written while Heinlein had a clogged carotid artery and had a brain that was basically oxygen starved. Post surgery he wrote Friday, which is much better. And yeah, it fits the present better than I’d like, except that we don’t have suborbital flights and beanstalks.