Curated Lists 2020

The year is 2049. When a deadly non-viral agent intended for biowarfare spreads out of control, scientists must scramble to ensure the survival of the human race. They turn to their last resort, a plan to place genetically engineered children inside the cocoons of large-scale robots—to be incubated, birthed, and raised by machines. But there is yet one hope of preserving the human order: an intelligence programmed into these machines that renders each unique in its own right—the Mother Code.
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Zack Lightman has never much cared for reality. He vastly prefers the countless science-fiction movies, books, and video games he's spent his life consuming. And too often, he catches himself wishing that some fantastic, impossible, world-altering event could arrive to whisk him off on a grand space-faring adventure. So when he sees the flying saucer, he's sure his years of escapism have finally tipped over into madness. Especially because the alien ship he's staring at is straight out of his favorite video game, a flight simulator called Armada—in which gamers just happen to be protecting Earth from alien invaders.
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By day, seventeen-year-old Kiera Johnson is an honors student, a math tutor, and one of the only Black kids at Jefferson Academy. But at home, she joins hundreds of thousands of Black gamers who duel worldwide as Nubian personas in the secret multiplayer online role-playing card game, SLAY. No one knows Kiera is the game developer, not her friends, her family, not even her boyfriend, Malcolm, who believes video games are partially responsible for the "downfall of the Black man."
But when a teen in Kansas City is murdered over a dispute in the SLAY world, news of the game reaches mainstream media, and SLAY is labeled a racist, exclusionist, violent hub for thugs and criminals. Even worse, an anonymous troll infiltrates the game, threatening to sue Kiera for "anti-white discrimination." Driven to save the only world in which she can be herself, Kiera must preserve her secret identity and harness what it means to be unapologetically Black in a world intimidated by Blackness. But can she protect her game without losing herself in the process?
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They call themselves the Vindicators. Targeted by bullies and pressured by parents, these geeks and gamers rule the computer lab at Turner High School. Wealthy bad boy Peter makes and breaks rules. Vanhi is a punk bassist at odds with her heritage. Kenny's creativity is stifled by a religious home life. Insecure and temperamental, Alex is an outcast among the outcasts. And Charlie, the leader they all depend on, is reeling from the death of his mother, consumed with reckless fury. They each receive an invitation to play The God Game. Created by dark-web coders and maintained by underground hackers, the video game is controlled by a mysterious artificial intelligence that believes it is God. Obey the almighty A.I. and be rewarded. Defiance is punished. Through their phone screens and high-tech glasses, Charlie and his friends see and interact with a fantasy world superimposed over reality. The quests they undertake on behalf of "God" seem harmless at first, but soon the tasks have them questioning and sacrificing their own morality.
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Cassandra Price's life changes forever when she discovers a hidden digital world beneath our own, one where a group of super-powered women are locked in a secret war for the cheat codes to reality. In the near future all of humanity's needs are administered by a godlike artificial intelligence called Azoth, and it's Cassandra Price's humiliating job to do tech support on it. The advent of Azoth has deepened inequality and robbed humanity of its soul, but Cassandra's life changes when she finds herself dragged violently into Azoth itself, manifested as a secret digital world beneath our own, one built on a combination of magic and metadata. There she encounters a group of apparently magical girls locked in a war with mysterious monsters for the power to fix the world -- if only they could agree on what the world should be. Why was she chosen? What is the omnipotent Hermeticorp up to? Who created the Azoth world? And who are these girls anyway?
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