Books,

[Andrew Robinson]

Not sure about ebook availability here either, but I'd agree with
Jay's Neal Stephenson recommendation (but qualify it with a suggestion
that the Baroque Cycle isn't the best place to start, especially as
you specified sci-fi - try 'the diamond age' first).

Has anyone said Iain M Banks yet? He's right up there with PKD,
Setphenson and Gibson in my opinion, try anything with the M (his non
sci-fi is credited to just plain Iain Banks), but not Feersum Endjinn
unless you can read the first page of chapter 2 in the bookshop
without getting a headache (one of the main character's PoV is written
in obfuscated phonetics, for reasons too complicated to go into here).

having said all that, if there's just 1 book I'd hype to Barians info
SciFI, it's "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge. His future world rings a
lot more true than the usual flights of virtual reality fancy. It's a
world where kids have grown up with wearable computers and seamless
overlays of graphics over reality, where school (and commerce) are
more about marshalling online data and sticking people together across
disciplines to make new things than about learning facts - google has
rendered that irrelevant. Robert Gu was a famous poet, before
Alzheimers took him to the brink of death... before a cure was found.
Coming back to full health, he's sent back to the remedial class at
school to learn to cope with the way the world works. He's roped into
a fight against the destructive digitisation of the university library
and it's recreation as a haptic simulation, which in turn becomes a
clash between 2 conflicting virtual reality overlays and a cover for a
sinister plot to produce something very scary in the local biotech
lab.

- Andy_R