Science Fiction: Mind Space Reality and Knowing
Explore the best science fiction books on mind, space, reality, and knowing. Dive into thought-provoking fiction that challenges perception and reality.
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Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
by Samuel R. Delany
"Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a science fiction masterpiece about the inexplicability of sexual attractiveness, and a story that foresaw the World Wide Web. Originally published in 1984, its central issues - technology, globalization, gender, sexuality, and multiculturalism - have only become more pressing with the passage of time." "The novel's topic is information itself. What are the repercussions of the discovery, once it has been made public, that two individuals have been found to be each other's perfect erotic object out to "point nine-nine-nine and several nines percent more"? What will it do to the individuals involved, to the city they inhabit, to their geosector, and to their entire world society, especially when one is an illiterate worker, the sole survivor of a world destroyed by "cultural fatigue," and the other is - you!"--BOOK JACKET.
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Hyperion
by Dan Simmons
A stunning tour de force filled with transcendent awe and wonder, Hyperion is a masterwork of science fiction that resonates with excitement and invention, the first volume in a remarkable epic by the multiple-award-winning author of The Hollow Man. On the world called Hyperion, beyond the reach of galactic law, waits a creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope—and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands. Praise for Dan Simmons and Hyperion “Dan Simmons has brilliantly conceptualized a future 700 years distant. In sheer scope and complexity it matches, and perhaps even surpasses, those of Isaac Asimov and James Blish.”—The Washington Post Book World “An unfailingly inventive narrative . . . generously conceived and stylistically sure-handed.”—The New York Times Book Review “Simmons’s own genius transforms space opera into a new kind of poetry.”—The Denver Post “An essential part of any science fiction collection.”—Booklist
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Endymion
by Dan Simmons
The multiple-award-winning science fiction master returns to the universe that is his greatest triumph--the world of Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion --with a novel even more magnificent than its predecessors. Dan Simmons's Hyperion was an immediate sensation on its first publication in 1989. This staggering multifaceted tale of the far future heralded the conquest of the science fiction field by a man who had already won the World Fantasy Award for his first novel (Song of Kali) and had also published one of the most well-received horror novels in the field, Carrion Comfort. Hyperion went on to win the Hugo Award as Best Novel, and it and its companion volume, The Fall of Hyperion, took their rightful places in the science fiction pantheon of new classics. Now, six years later, Simmons returns to this richly imagined world of technological achievement, excitement, wonder and fear. Endymion is a story about love and memory, triumph and terror--an instant candidate for the field's highest honors.
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The Naked God
by Peter F. Hamilton
Part I of the long-awaited finale to the epic science fiction series that began with The Reality Dysfunction (a USA Today bestseller) & The Neutronium Alchemist.
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Eternity
by Greg Bear
Opposing groups clash over control of the Corridor, an access point to alternative worlds in the past, present, and future
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Queen of Angels
by Greg Bear
In twenty-first-century Los Angeles, three dissimilar sleuths--therapist Martin Burke, ambitious cop Mary Choy, and Richard Fettle, the killer's offbeat colleague--investigate diverse reasons why poet Emanuel Goldsmith would senselessly murder several close friends
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The Giants Novels
by James P. Hogan
Discover the first three books in the ground-breaking 21st century hard-science fiction saga by James P. Hogan: INHERIT THE STARS The skeletal remains of a human body are found on the moon. His corpse is 50,000 years old, and nobody knows who he was, how he got there, or what killed him. THE GENTLE GIANTS OF GANYMEDE A long-ago wrecked ship of alien giants is discovered by Earth's scientists on a frozen satellite of Jupiter. Then, spinning out of the vastness of space, a ship of the same strange, humanoid giants has returned.... GIANTS' STAR Humans finally thought they comprehended their place in the universe...until Earth found itself in the middle of a power struggle between a benevolent alien empire and a cunning race of upstart humans who hated Earth!
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Slow River
by Nicola Griffith
She awoke in an alley to the splash of rain. She was naked, a foot-long gash in her back was still bleeding, and her identity implant was gone. Lore Van Oesterling had been the daughter of one of the world's most powerful families...and now she was nobody, and she had to hide. Then out of the rain walked Spanner, predator and thief, who took her in, cared for her wound, and taught her how to reinvent herself again and again. No one could find Lore now: not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who had left her in that alley to die. She had escaped...but the cost of her newfound freedom was crime and deception, and she paid it over and over again, until she had become someone she loathed. Lore had a choice: She could stay in the shadows, stay with Spanner...and risk losing herself forever. Or she could leave Spanner and find herself again by becoming someone else: stealing the identity implant of a dead woman, taking over her life, and creating a new future. But to start again, Lore required Spanner's talents--Spanner, who needed her and hated her, and who always had a price. And even as Lore agreed to play Spanner's game one final time, she found that there was still the price of being a Van Oesterling to be paid. Only by confronting her family, her past, and her own demons could Lore meld together who she had once been, who she had become, and the person she intended to be...
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Neuromancer
by William Gibson
Case, a nerve-damaged data thief, is recruited by a new employer for a last-chance run against a powerful artificial intelligence.
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Dream of Glass
by Jean Mark Gawron
Alexa remembers a grandmother with icy blue eyes. An unmanned ship that came to their mountain village from the sky, bringing technological wonders from the Galactics. Security troops with laser guns who took villagers away. She remembers her proud years at the Academy, her work on the open Net doing glass. Then there was the war, the explosion, the hospital. Alexa is not Alexa now but Ivy ... or is she Augustine? Psychologists lecture her, hallucinations visit her. Mr. Existence, frowning, gives advice; Needle, silent and smiling in his panama hat, offers death. All Augustine knows for sure is that the extraordinary talent she once possessed is even stronger now, and that the Guardians of the Rose need her desperately. They want her to contact the Galactics. Jean Mark Gawron creates a haunting world where information is God and artificial intelligences have joined ranks with misfit hackers to undermine a fascist state.
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Extremely funny . . . inspired lunacy . . . [and] over much too soon.”—The Washington Post Book World SOON TO BE A HULU SERIES • Now celebrating the pivotal 42nd anniversary of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy! Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read It’s an ordinary Thursday morning for Arthur Dent . . . until his house gets demolished. The Earth follows shortly after to make way for a new hyperspace express route, and Arthur’s best friend has just announced that he’s an alien. After that, things get much, much worse. With just a towel, a small yellow fish, and a book, Arthur has to navigate through a very hostile universe in the company of a gang of unreliable aliens. Luckily the fish is quite good at languages. And the book is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . . . which helpfully has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large, friendly letters on its cover. Douglas Adams’s mega-selling pop-culture classic sends logic into orbit, plays havoc with both time and physics, offers up pithy commentary on such things as ballpoint pens, potted plants, and digital watches . . . and, most important, reveals the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything. Now, if you could only figure out the question. . . .
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Signal to Noise
by Eric S. Nylund
Jack Potter puts computer cryptography to work for the highest bidder: sometimes for private corporations, sometimes for the government. Sometimes the work is legal; if not, Jack simply raises his price. But one day, Jack discovers something cloaked in the hiss of background radiation streaming past the Earth from deep space: a message from an alien civilization. One that's eager to do business with humanity -- and its representative. Before he knows it, Jack has entered into a partnership that will open a Pandora's Box of potential profit and loss. The governments, the multinationals, and mysterious players more powerful still, all want a piece of the action -- and they're willing to kill, even wage war, to get it. Now Jack is entangled shifting web of deceit and intrigue in which no one, not even his closest friends, can be trusted. For Earth's cloak-and-dagger business practices are writ large in the heavens...and hostile takeovers are just as common across light years as they are across boardroom tables.