A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

Some people are cruel. I knew guys in high school that joined the football team so they could hurt people on the field. I knew guys after high school that joined the military so they could kill people on the field of duty. Some of the human desire to hurt is a tricky, somewhat skewed part of regularly functioning human nature. We evolved with the pressure to defend our tribe against attack. We are supposed to be ready to hurt others when safety and survival requires radical action. But people can get warped by abuse and other traumas, and the abused learn to abuse.

Old Man's War - John Scalzi

Old Man's War by John Scalzi is a fantasy of medical and male proportions. Mankind longs for a fountain of youth found in emerging medical science. Aging men wish for the tumescent wood of their youth, for the fountain like discharge of their teenage years. 

Ubik - Philip K Dick

1967 is the year the first human was cryogenically frozen. Cryo is from Greek, meaning frost. Geneo, also Greek, refers to birth, beginning. Cryonics forged ahead with freezing bodies, hedging bets on the hope that medical techniques of the future will learn to revive frozen bodies and grant longer, if not eternal, life. The goal of cryonics is that it would offer its adherents a frozen fountain of youth.

The Diamond Age – Neal Stephenson

Science Fiction is something of a didactic literature, keeping readers up-to-date with the latest advances in science and technology and offering a vision of what might be possible in our near and far-flung futures. But The Diamond Age is didactic in a literal way. A teaching primer is tied into the narrative arc of the book. Not only is the book a bildungsroman—Nell grows up and out of a life of abuse at the hands of her mother’s degenerate boyfriend, Bud—but Nell’s development comes as a result of an interactive teaching primer aided by a ractor, a virtual teacher that takes on roles of personalities in the book to better interact and instruct the reader.

Ringworld - Larry Niven

In the first blush of my love of science fiction, Ringworld's gently curving steel reflected beauty like a brightly burning star. The idea of harvesting space flotsam and jetsam, the material from planets, moons, and asteroids of multiple star systems, to make a ring one AU out from the center of a solar system is insane in scope, fascinating, and bold as hell. I was amazed, at first. But then I started to wonder about a land with nearly nothing where everything reflects a brutal sameness. Big and cool, the ringworld is an image of the sublime, but it reflects the fantasies of a relatively newly minted colonial power: America.