A Life for the Stars
10 best books like A Life for the Stars (James Blish): Three Tales, Behold the Man, The Black Tulip, Camp Concentration, More Than Human, Last and First Men, The Wanderer, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Thorns, The Great Explosion
| Author | Gustave Flaubert |
| ISBN | 0140448004 |
First published in 1877, these three stories are dominated by questions of doubt, love, loneliness, and religious experience; together they confirm Flaubert as a master of the short story. A Simple Heart (also published as A Simple Soul), relates the story of Félicité, an uneducated serving-woman...
| Author | Michael Moorcock |
| ISBN | 1585677647 |
Karl Glogauer is a disaffected modern professional casting about for meaning in a series of half-hearted relationships, a dead-end job, and a personal struggle. His questions of faith surrounding his father's run-of-the-mill Christianity and his mother's suppressed Judaism lead him to a bizarre...
| Author | Alexandre Dumas |
| ISBN | 0140448926 |
'To have discovered the black tulip, to have seen it for a moment...then to lose it, to lose it forever!'
Cornelius von Baerle, a respectable tulip-grower, lives only to cultivate the elusive black tulip and win a magnificent prize for its creation. But after his powerful godfather is assassinated,...
| Author | Thomas M. Disch |
| ISBN | 0375705457 |
Flowers for Algernon has become a minor classic, and, thanks to the movie, even people who haven't read it often know the story. Poor Charlie Gordon is given an operation which turns him from a mentally subnormal dishwasher into a genius, but the treatment turns out to be flawed. It's a great weepie, and...
| Author | Theodore Sturgeon |
| ISBN | 0375703713 |
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...
| Author | Olaf Stapledon |
| ISBN | 0486466825 |
"No book before or since has ever had such an impact upon my imagination," declared Arthur C. Clarke of Last and First Men. This masterpiece of science fiction by British philosopher and writer Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) is an imaginative, ambitious history of humanity's future that spans billions...
| Author | Fritz Leiber |
| ISBN | 0575071125 |
All eyes were watching the eclipse of the Moon when the Wanderer--a huge, garishly colored artificial world--emerged. Only a few scientists even suspected its presence, and then, suddenly and silently, it arrived, dwarfing and threatening the Moon and wreaking havoc on Earth's tides and weather....
| Author | Gene Wolfe |
| ISBN | 0312890206 |
Back in print for the first time in more than a decade, Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus is a universally acknowledged masterpiece of science fiction by one of the field's most brilliant writers.
Far out from Earth, two sister planets, Saint Anne and Saint Croix, circle each other in an...
| Author | Robert Silverberg |
| ISBN | 0853911320 |
Duncan Chalk is a monstrous media mogul with a vast appetite for other people's pain. He feeds off it, and carefully nurtures it in order to feed it to the public. It is inevitable that Chalk should home in on Minner Burris, a space traveller whose body was taken apart by alien surgeons and then put back together...
In his 1955 collection entitled "Men, Martians and Machines," English sci-fi author Eric Frank Russell told, via one short story and three novellas, some of the adventures of a starship crew that strongly suggested nothing less than a proto-"Star Trek" ensemble. The collection featured visits to...
| Author | Henrik Ibsen |
| ISBN | 1406953539 |
'There! I have given it him in earnest now; I don't think he will forget that thrashing! What do you say?--And I say that you are an injudicious mother! You make excuses for him, and countenance any sort of rascality on his part--Not rascality? What do you call it, then? Slipping out of the house at night,...
| Author | Frederik Pohl |
| ISBN | 0345016610 |
Every now and then I like to re-read an SF classic, and there are rarely safer hands to be in than those of Pohl and Kornbluth. I was surprised as I got into it that I couldn't remember a thing about this book - I suspect it's because despite featuring a number of 'adventure' scenes, it is so cerebral. And that...
