Favorite Science Fiction Ive Read Lately
Discover must-read science fiction favorites, from Christopher Priest's *Inverted World* and Audrey Niffenegger's *The Time Traveler's Wife* to Robert J. Sawyer's *Hominids*. Explore this curated list of captivating sci-fi books, including classic and modern novels about time, robots, and life on other planets.
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Earth Abides
by George Rippey Stewart
Returning from a field trip, Isherwood Williams discovers that a mysterious plague has destroyed human civilization during his absence and makes his way to San Francisco, where he finds a few survivors who build a small community, living like their pioneer ancestors. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.
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Inverted World
by Christopher Priest
Featured in Science Fiction: The Best 100 Novels Winner of the British Science Fiction Award Nominated for the Hugo Award The “devilishly entertaining” masterpiece of hard science fiction, set in a city moving through a strange, dystopian world—from the multi-award-winning author of The Prestige (Time Out New York) The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city’s engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the “optimum” into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death. The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in crèches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. And yet the city is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the population is dwindling, and the rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum. Helward Mann is a member of the city’s elite. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the city’s continued existence. But the world—he is about to discover—is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.
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Way Station
by Clifford D. Simak
The long talks Enoch Wallace, a Civil War veteran, enjoys with interstellar travelers may cease when war threatens the earth and his way station may be closed
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The Ring of Charon
by Roger MacBride Allen
The first book in the Hunted Earth series, published to tie in with the hardcover publication of its sequel, The Shattered Sphere. The Earth has disappeared, but was it destroyed by an unauthorized gravity experiment, or was the planet kidnapped by an alien race? Humanity must discover the answer before it's too late.
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Between the Strokes of Night
by Charles Sheffield
Published more than a decade ago, this classic novel by the Hugo and Nebula award-winning author has been extensively revised and expanded.
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Orphan of Creation
by Roger MacBride Allen
An anthropologist stumbles across a stunning secret that will put the very definition of humanity suddenly in doubt. Are the bone she discovers buried on a old Mississippi plantation the remains of humans, or apes -- or something else? The answer will turn her life, and the world, upsidedown. What the critics said about ORPHAN OF CREATION Allen's attention to detail is sterling...totally believable...well portrayed...dead accurate.... This book goes a long way toward doing for anthropology what Timescape did for high-energy particle physics: humanizing it, making its real workings accessible to a new audience. Anyone who likes good hard science in their fiction will have to go a long way to find a better-done book.' --Locus 'a novel that reminds us that moral and social evolution depends not only on our knowing where we are going, but remembering where we have been.' --Christian Science Monitor 'Allen's writing technique is a well-balanced blend of dialogue, action, description and narrative-each in proper proportion to the other... a fine read ... word of mouth will bring acclaim that is more than deserved.' --Otherrealms Orphan of Creation takes an interesting scientific premise and lets it loose upon real human beings revealing to the reader a higher level of understanding of the world. Orphan is science and fiction; in examining the human condition, it does what both ideally intend to do.' --The New York Review of Science Fiction Mr.Allen has found an idea worthy of his talent. The book has that unmistakably correct feel of authenticity. A very readable as well as thoughtful story. Bravo to Mr.Allen for writing this risky book. Read it. Then pass it on to your mundane friends. With any luck, it will drive them crazy.' --Lan's Lantern FoxAcre Press is proud to present its books on the Google Play store.
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Cold As Ice
by Charles Sheffield
Nine sleeping infants, once nestled in pods and ejected from a doomed ship, have grown up to become the key to an extraordinary race.
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Dark as Day
by Charles Sheffield
In this sequel to his novel "Cold as Ice, " Sheffield returns to the human-settled solar system in the years after the Great War that nearly wiped out the human race. Original.
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The City, Not Long After
by Pat Murphy
Jax and Danny-Boy, scrambling to get by in a near-future San Francisco ravished by plague, become fellow artists in their united struggle to stop a tyrannical general from taking over
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The Dark Beyond the Stars
by Frank M. Robinson
A powerful epic of interstellar travel, alternate sexuality, and overpoweringobsession, "The Dark Beyond the Stars" is currently in development by FrancisFord Coppola for a major motion picture project.
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The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger
A Magical love story that is as sad as it is joyous.
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A Place Without a Postcard
by James Brush
Paul Reynolds, a photographer who creates fake photos for tabloid magazines, wakes up with no idea where he is or how he got there. He can t even recall his name. A strange man lurks nearby, breathing heavily and slowly flipping through a book. Paul hears the man s breath, but he cannot see him. He realizes with mounting panic that his eyes no longer function. He remembers racing down a desolate West Texas highway. He remembers a cop who pulled him over for speeding. He remembers a shotgun-brandishing cook chasing him out of a diner. And he remembers a life abandoned, but he cannot put together the jigsaw puzzle that brought him where he is: blind, wanted by the law, and in the company of this invisible stranger. In the backcountry town of Armbister, Texas, where temperatures hover around a hellish 110 degrees, Paul s memory, intangible as a heat mirage, lies just beyond his reach, and God may be a coyote.
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Hominids
by Robert J. Sawyer
In a parallel world in which Neanderthals, rather than homo sapiens, became the dominant intelligent species, a dangerous scientific experiment traps a Neanderthal physicist on Earth.
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Humans
by Robert J. Sawyer
Robert J. Sawyer, the award-winning and bestselling writer, hits the peak of his powers in Humans, the second book of The Neanderthal Parallax, his trilogy about our world and parallel one in which it was the Homo sapiens who died out and the Neanderthals who became the dominant intelligent species. This powerful idea allows Sawyer to examine some of the deeply rooted assumptions of contemporary human civilization dramatically, by confronting us with another civilization, just as morally valid, that has made other choices. In Humans, Neanderthal physicist Ponter Boddit, a character you will never forget, returns to our world and to his relationship with geneticist Mary Vaughan, as cultural exchanges between the two Earths begin. As we see daily life in another present-day world, radically different from ours, in the course of Sawyer's fast-moving story, we experience the bursts of wonder and enlightenment that are the finest pleasures of science fiction. Humans is one of the best SF novels of the year, and The Neanderthal Parallax is an SF classic in the making. Humans is a 2004 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel.
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Vectors
by Michael P. Kube-McDowell
From one of the most original voices in imaginative fiction comes a stunning novel of suspense and speculation, as a scientist seeking to uncover the mystery of human consciousness finds himself in a desperate search for immortality. Dr. Jonathan Briggs is a gifted neuroscientist researching the existence of the human soul. Working at one of the world’s top facilities, he has access to the latest technology. He also has the enthusiastic support of his lover, Alynn Reed, who made her fortune as a creator of virtual reality games that have broken every barrier. Alynn believes in reincarnation, which Jonathan scoffs at--until he begins to note strange anomalies in his research. Then Jonathan’s life is suddenly, shockingly turned upside down. No longer the dispassionate scientist, he begins a fevered, reckless effort to go beyond belief to proof. Ridiculed by his colleagues and the tabloid media, hounded by the police, Jonathan finds himself in a frenzied race against time, memory, and his own mortality. As he journeys deeper into the labyrinth of the human psyche, he moves nearer the place where past and future intersect, identities mingle, and death is the beginning of the most amazing adventure of all.
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Dies the Fire
by S. M. Stirling
When a strange electrical storm over the island of Nantucket suddenly causes all electronic devices to cease functioning, the world is faced with an unimaginable transformation, one that is complicated by some individuals' ruthless quest for ultimate domination. Reprint.
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Rite of Passage
by Alexei Panshin
In 2198 man lives precariously on hastily-established colony worlds and in seven giant starships. Mia Haveros ship tests its children by casting them out to live or die in a month of Trial in the hostile wilds of a colony world. Her trial is fast approaching and she must learn not only the skills that will keep her alive but the deeper courage to face herself and her world.
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More Than Human
by Theodore Sturgeon
In this genre-bending novel—among the first to have launched sci-fi into the arena of literature—one of the great imaginers of the twentieth century tells a story as mind-blowing as any controlled substance and as affecting as a glimpse into a stranger's soul. There's Lone, the simpleton who can hear other people's thoughts and make a man blow his brains out just by looking at him. There's Janie, who moves things without touching them, and there are the teleporting twins, who can travel ten feet or ten miles. There's Baby, who invented an antigravity engine while still in the cradle, and Gerry, who has everything it takes to run the world except for a conscience. Separately, they are talented freaks. Together, they compose a single organism that may represent the next step in evolution, and the final chapter in the history of the human race. As the protagonists of More Than Human struggle to find out who they are and whether they are meant to help humanity or destroy it, Theodore Sturgeon explores questions of power and morality, individuality and belonging, with suspense, pathos, and a lyricism rarely seen in science fiction. Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and International Fantasy Awards
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Godbody
by Theodore Sturgeon
Here is a masterpiece of fiction--a haunting, meaningful and at times erotic novel that describes a wondrous transformation that takes place in an American town when a charismatic, Christ-like figure mysteriously appears in its midst.
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The Planet of the Jews
by Philip Graubart
Suddenly Judah, a Manhattan comic book editor, is caught up in an enchanting sci-fi fable of the future, a time when Jews, once again, are persecuted and driven not only out of their lands, but off Earth and onto a strange new world. Not only do the characters of this story (and its sequels) mirror Judah's life, but they provide him with materials that become the best selling comic novels of all time.
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Manifold: Time
by Stephen Baxter
Reid Malenfant redoubles his efforts to become an astronaut when it becomes clear that the future of the universe depends on the colonization of space to solve Earth's devastating problems.
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Red Thunder
by John Varley
Seven suburban misfits are constructing a spaceship out of old tanker cars. The plan is to beat the Chinese to Mars--in under four days at three million miles an hour. It would be history in the making if it didn't sound so insane.
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Time Storm
by Gordon R. Dickson
"A masterful science fiction story told by a masterful science fiction writer".--Milwaukee Journal. A time storm has devastated the Earth, and only a small fraction of humankind remains. From the rubble, three survivors form an unlikely alliance: a young man, a young woman, and a leopard.
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The Life of the World to Come
by Kage Baker
In this newest novel of the Company series, a time-traveling botanist is stranded 150,000 years in the past. Grieving for the lover she lost twice, Mendoza meets a reincarnation of her love again.
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Air
by Geoff Ryman
What happens when the whole world goes online . . . through the air? A brilliant literary SF novel by the author of 253.
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Seeker
by Jack McDevitt
After the disappearance of an entire colony, antiquities dealer Alex Benedict finds a cup that appears to be from one of the colony's ships, and, in attempting to establish its provenance, follows a trail that leads to the ship.
