Hannah Stander is a consultant for the FBI—a futurist who helps the Agency with cases that feature demonstrations of bleeding-edge technology. It’s her job to help them identify unforeseen threats: hackers, AIs, genetic modification, anything that in the wrong hands could harm the homeland.

Hap Thompson works the gray area between truth and lies. He works for REMtemp, taking on other people's memories. It's illegal, but usually harmless. Maybe a petty criminal wants to pass a lie detector test. Or an unfaithful spouse wants to enjoy a guiltless affair. All Hap has to do is carry the memories for a couple of hours. It's easy money. Until a beautiful young woman who committed murder leaves her memory with Hap and won't take it back.

Twenty years ago, the robots designed to fight our wars abandoned the battlefields. Then they turned their weapons on us. Only a few escaped the robot revolution of 2071. Kevin, Nick, and Cass are lucky —they live with their parents in a secret human community in the woods. Then their village is detected and wiped out. Hopeful that other survivors have been captured by bots, the teens risk everything to save the only people they have left in the world—by infiltrating a city controlled by their greatest enemies.

Edie Sha'nim is a cypherteck, and the best in the galaxy. It's what she's been trained to do: manipulate biocyph to terraform alien worlds, while the Crib - her employer - drains the Fringe populations dry. When a band of rovers kidnaps her, Edie can't decide if it's a blessing or a curse. Until they leash her to her new bodyguard, Finn - a serf whose past isn't clear to anyone. If she strays from his side, he dies; if she fails to cooperate, the rovers will kill them both. The deal worsens when Edie finds they're taking her to her one failure... a planet called Scarabaeus. The world itself has a few surprises in store for Edie.

Janelle Monáe and an incredible array of talented collaborating creators have written a collection of tales comprising the bold vision and powerful themes that have made Monáe such a compelling and celebrated storyteller. Dirty Computer introduced a world in which thoughts—as a means of self-conception—could be controlled or erased by a select few. And whether human, A.I., or other, your life and sentience was dictated by those who’d convinced themselves they had the right to decide your fate.

Based on the ideas in the book Future Shock by Alvin Toffler, the novel shows a dystopian early 21st century America dominated by computer networks, and is considered by some critics to be an early ancestor of the "cyberpunk" genre. The hero, Nick Haflinger, is a runaway from Tarnover, a government program intended to find, educate and indoctrinate highly gifted children to further the interests of the state in a future where quantitative analysis backed by the tacit threat of coercion has replaced overt military and economic power as the deciding factor in international competition. In parallel with this, the government has become a de facto oligarchy whose beneficiaries are members of organised crime.

Humanity is split into the App World and the Real World—an extravagant virtual world for the wealthy and a dying physical world for the poor. Years ago, Skylar Cruz’s family sent her to the App World for a chance at a better life.