Hey guys, I'm new here.  I recently got stabbed with 90s nostalgia.  I was born in '88.  I wasn't a teen during the 90s, but I think my sense of culture solidified during that period.

I'm wondering: are there any fictional books you guys think of that have a lot of 90s culture in them?

Thanks.

Hey guys, I'm new here.  I recently got stabbed with 90s nostalgia.  I was born in '88.  I wasn't a teen during the 90s, but I think my sense of culture solidified during that period.

I'm wondering: are there any fictional books you guys think of that have a lot of 90s culture in them?

Thanks.


This isn't precisely what you'd asked for, but the first book that popped into mind was Snow Crash.

To take it one step further, ponder the following cyberpunk trilogy:  If William Gibson's Neuromancer was the 80s version of what the near future was going to look like, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash did the same for the 90s, and Vernor Vinge's Ranbows End did it for the 00s.

Cool.  I've heard of the Neuromancer book :).  I should check it out, along with the rest perhaps.  Thank you.

All three are worth reading.  If you don't like one, read one of the others.  The three authors are very different in style.

Without giving anything away, Neuromancer was set in a world similar to that of Blade Runner.  (And unlike Blade Runner, you can skip the movie.)  The neural interfaces described in the novel are still in their infancy, but are being developed.  The virtual reality environments were the foundation for several experiments in augmented reality in the 90s. 

Snow Crash takes some of the ideas in Neuromancer one step further -- by the time it was written, we'd figured out that brain-computer interfaces were extremely hard to do, but a virtual world wasn't much of a technological stretch.  The first experiments of this nature took place shortly before Snow Crash was written; the present-day "game" of Second Life is a real-world implementation of a concept inspired by this novel.

Rainbows End combines these ideas with Web 2.0; as opposed to everyone sharing one virtual reality, most people self-select an overlay via social networks and agument their reality.  We've got most of the technologies for augmented reality today (glasses, wireless connectivity, eye-tracking hardware, and a laptop), and social networking (Facebook, everyone carrying a wireless phone, and using Twitter to keep up with your friends' moment-to-moment activities) but augmented reality isn't sufficiently ubiquitous (or even commonplace) for the multiplier effects of social networks to kick in.