Summer Reading List 2026: The Books That Inspired Our Imagination (Part 1)

Summer in Tempe is hot, and so is the case for putting down your phone and picking up a book you actually own. In Part 1 of our annual Summer Reading List, Sean and Andrew trade the doorstop novels, dog-eared paperbacks, and prized first editions that have shaped how they think about technology and what it means to be human. This isn't a posturing list of impressive-sounding titles — it's escapism with teeth, the kind of reading that takes you somewhere strange and quietly rewires how you see the world you came back to. The conversation moves through the cyberpunk bedrock of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and William Gibson's Neuromancer — books that imagined the metaverse and cyberspace decades before Silicon Valley borrowed the vocabulary and, the hosts argue, missed the satire. It winds through Iain M. Banks and the moral vertigo of Surface Detail, where civilizations build virtual heavens and, inevitably, virtual hells, and the gentler doorway of The Player of Games. It lingers on Douglas Adams, whose original radio scripts Andrew counts among his prized possessions and whose wit, he insists, anticipated our anxieties about AI with personality long before the chatbots arrived. And it lands on Cory Doctorow's Enshittification, a nonfiction reckoning with why the once-glorious internet curdled — and what it means that a physical book printed in 1980 still opens and reads without a license, an update, or permission. A recurring tension runs underneath it all: in an age of cognitive technologies and editable digital pasts, what do we actually own, and what owns us? Part 2 arrives next week. Until then, keep imagining the future. -----Modem Futura is a production of the Future of Being Human initiative at Arizona State University. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. To learn more about the Future of Being Human initiative and all of our other projects visit - https://futureofbeinghuman.asu.eduSubscribe to our YouTube Channel: @ModemFuturaFollow us on Instagram: @ModemFuturaHost Bios:Sean M. Leahy, PhD - ASU BioSean is an internationally recognized technologist, futurist, and educator innovating humanistic approaches to emerging technology through a Futures Studies approach. He is the Executive Director for the Future of Being Human Initiative and Research Scientist for the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and Senior Global Futures Scholar with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University.Andrew Maynard, PhD - ASU BioAndrew is a scientist, author, thought leader, and Professor of Advanced Technology Transitions in the ASU School for the Future of Innovation in Society. He is the founder of the ASU Future of Being Human initiative, Director of the ASU Risk Innovation Nexus, and was previously Associate Dean in the ASU College of Global Futures.-----