{"id":1692,"date":"2017-12-26T13:21:01","date_gmt":"2017-12-26T21:21:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/?p=1692"},"modified":"2017-12-26T13:22:54","modified_gmt":"2017-12-26T21:22:54","slug":"for-fans-of-black-mirror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/2017\/for-fans-of-black-mirror\/","title":{"rendered":"For Fans of Black Mirror"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Woman<\/a>
Photo courtesy Sebastiaan ter Burg<\/a> on Flickr under CC License<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Series 4 of Black Mirror<\/em>, the cult hit anthology series will be released this Friday, December 29 on Netflix. If you already have the weekend booked for binging the too short series, stop by the library and pick up one of these stories perfect for fans of the eerie, sci-fi show\u00a0to dive into once you’ve finished<\/span>. Much like Black Mirror<\/em>, these books and movies explore the ways that humans interact with technology in new and strange directions.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>The Circle<\/strong><\/em><\/a> by Dave Eggers<\/p>\n

When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world\u2019s most powerful internet company, she feels she\u2019s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users\u2019 personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company\u2019s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can\u2019t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world\u2014even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman\u2019s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>The Status of All Things<\/strong><\/em><\/a> by\u00a0Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke<\/p>\n

Kate is a thirty-five-year-old woman who is obsessed with social media. So when her fianc\u00e9, Max, breaks things off at their rehearsal dinner\u2014to be with Kate\u2019s close friend and coworker, no less\u2014she goes straight to Facebook to share it with the world. But something\u2019s changed. Suddenly, Kate\u2019s real life starts to mirror whatever she writes in her Facebook status. With all the power at her fingertips, and heartbroken and confused over why Max left her, Kate goes back in time to rewrite their history.<\/p>\n

Kate’s two best friends, Jules and Liam, are the only ones who know the truth. In order to convince them she\u2019s really time traveled, Kate offers to use her Facebook status to help improve their lives. But her attempts to help them don\u2019t go exactly as planned, and every effort to get Max back seems to only backfire, causing Kate to wonder if it\u2019s really possible to change her fate.<\/p>\n

\"Never<\/a>Never Let Me Go<\/strong><\/em><\/a> by Kazuo Ishiguro<\/p>\n

As a child, Kathy\u2013now thirty-one years old\u2013lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory.<\/p>\n

And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed\u2013even comforted\u2013by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham\u2019s nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood\u2013and about their lives now.<\/p>\n

\"Infomocracy<\/a>Infomocracy<\/strong><\/em><\/a> by Malka Older<\/p>\n

It’s been twenty years and two election cycles since Information, a powerful search engine monopoly, pioneered the switch from warring nation-states to global micro-democracy. The corporate coalition party Heritage has won the last two elections. With another election on the horizon, the Supermajority is in tight contention, and everything’s on the line.<\/p>\n

With power comes corruption. For Ken, this is his chance to do right by the idealistic Policy1st party and get a steady job in the big leagues. For Domaine, the election represents another staging ground in his ongoing struggle against the pax democratica. For Mishima, a dangerous Information operative, the whole situation is a puzzle: how do you keep the wheels running on the biggest political experiment of all time, when so many have so much to gain?<\/p>\n

\"Version<\/a>Version Control<\/strong><\/em><\/a> by\u00a0Dexter Palmer<\/p>\n

Rebecca Wright has gotten her life back, finding her way out of grief and depression following a personal tragedy years ago. She spends her days working in customer support for the Internet dating site where she first met her husband. However, she has a persistent, strange sense that everything around her is somewhat off-kilter: she constantly feels as if she has walked into a room and forgotten what she intended to do there; on TV, the President seems to be the wrong person in the wrong place; and each night she has disquieting dreams that may or may not be related to her husband Philip’s pet project. Philip’s decade-long dedication to the causality violation device (which he would greatly prefer you do not call a “time machine”) has effectively stalled his career and made him a laughingstock in the physics community. But he may be closer to success than either of them knows or imagines . . .<\/p>\n

\"Children<\/a>Children of the New World: Stories<\/strong><\/em><\/a> by Alexander Weinstein<\/p>\n

Children of the New World<\/em> introduces readers to a near-future world of social media implants, memory manufacturers, dangerously immersive virtual reality games, and alarmingly intuitive robots. Many of these characters live in a utopian future of instant connection and technological gratification that belies an unbridgeable human distance, while others inhabit a post-collapse landscape made primitive by disaster, which they must work to rebuild as we once did millennia ago.<\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Cartographers,\u201d the main character works for a company that creates and sells virtual memories, while struggling to maintain a real-world relationship sabotaged by an addiction to his own creations. In \u201cSaying Goodbye to Yang,\u201d the robotic brother of an adopted Chinese child malfunctions, and only in his absence does the family realize how real a son he has become.<\/p>\n

Children of the New World<\/em> grapples with our unease in this modern world and how our ever-growing dependence on new technologies has changed the shape of our society. Alexander Weinstein is a visionary new voice in speculative fiction for all of us who are fascinated by and terrified of what we might find on the horizon.<\/p>\n

DVDs<\/h3>\n

\"Eternal<\/a>Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

When Joel discovers that his girlfriend, Clementine, has had their tumultuous relationship erased from her mind through an experimental scientific procedure, he decides to ease his own pain by getting the same treatment. But, as each memory of Clementine is systematically eliminated, Joel suddenly realizes how much he still loves her and desperately attempts to reverse the process.<\/p>\n

\"Ex<\/a>Ex Machina<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Caleb, a coder at the world’s largest Internet company, wins a competition to spend a week at a retreat belonging to the company’s reclusive CEO, Nathan. But when Caleb arrives he finds that he will have to participate in a fascinating experiment with the world’s first true artificial intelligence, housed in the body of a beautiful robot woman, Ava. Truths, emotions, and motives are blurred as the relationship between Caleb, Ava, and Nathan intensifies.<\/p>\n

\"Her<\/a>Her<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Set in Los Angeles in the slight future, Her follows Theodore…, a complex, soulful man who makes his living writing touching personal letters for other people. Heartbroken after the end of a long relationship, he becomes intrigued with a new, advanced operating system, which promises to be an intuitive and unique entity in its own right. Upon initiating it, he is delighted to meet ‘Samantha’, a bright, female voice … who is insightful, sensitive and surprisingly funny. As her needs and desires grow, in tandem with his own, their friendship deepens into an eventual love for each other.<\/p>\n

\"Mr.<\/a>Mr. Robot<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Cyber-security engineer by day and vigilante hacker by night, Elliot (Rami Malek, The Pacific) finds himself at a crossroads when the mysterious leader (Christian Slater, Very Bad Things) of an underground hacker group recruits him to destroy the firm he is paid to protect. Compelled by his personal beliefs, Elliot struggles to resist the chance to take down the multinational CEOs he believes are running (and ruining) the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Series 4 of Black Mirror, the cult hit anthology series will be released this Friday, December 29 on Netflix. If you already have the weekend booked for binging the too […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":1694,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"Layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[58,44,183],"class_list":["entry","author-","post-1692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-book-lists","tag-movies","tag-science-fiction","tag-technology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/11\/files\/sites\/11\/2017\/12\/Black-Mirror-2.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p71KTL-ri","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1692"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1699,"href":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1692\/revisions\/1699"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}