As a follow-up to my earlier post last month, Scifi for Summer Reading, here are three more great titles to consider as the warm season continues:

Robert J. Sawyer’s WWW: Wake tells the contemporary story of teenager Caitlin, born blind but possessing a keen intellect. After receiving an experimental implant she gains the ability to see far more than anyone expected. The book explores the emergence of consciousness at many levels and is the first of a planned trilogy.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow is a cautionary tale set in an alternate San Francisco changed by a terrorist attack. Parallels to Orwell’s 1984 can be seen as the central teenagers in the story are moved to act against the Department of Homeland Security when the teens feel the Bill of Rights is being ignored. The novel is also available as a free download on Doctorow’s website under the Creative Commons license.

Humans are extinct and the solar system is populated by our robotic creations in Saturn’s Children. Charles Stross describes a steamy vision of the future where pleasure android Freya finds herself on the run from planet to planet. Echos of New Wave science fiction can be heard at times, but mostly this is a straight up thriller that takes the reader along for the ride.

The books I previously suggested are listed below for added convenience:

• Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl takes you to a future Thailand where calories are a commodity and new food sources exist to be exploited.
• Boneshaker by Cherie Priest offers Civil War–era steampunk adventure with strong female characters and zombies!
• For something truly out of this world check out Alastair Reynolds’ House of Suns set 6.4 million years in the future. You really can’t “get away” much farther than that.