I can't really read books anymore, but on any platform I am statutorily obligated to encourage people to read The Fortunate Fall, the most important and best work in cyberpunk science fiction.
Jo Walton has a very good review of it.
“You’re always talking about getting past people’s surfaces to what’s inside, and that’s what you call real. But you can’t just break through a person’s defenses like that; the defenses are part of the person, they are the person. It’s our nature to have hidden depths. It’s like –” my eyes searched the room for a metaphor “–like skinning a frog and saying, ‘Now I understand this frog, because I’ve seen what’s inside it.’ But when you skin it, it dies. You haven’t understood a frog, you’ve understood a corpse.”
(Cameron Reed, The Fortunate Fall, p. 157)
