Babel-17
10 best books like Babel-17 (Samuel R. Delany): Dreamsnake, Timescape, Slow River, Stations of the Tide, Pavane, Camouflage, A Case of Conscience, The Rediscovery of Man, Man Plus, Emphyrio
| Author | Vonda N. McIntyre |
| ISBN | 0553296590 |
While this book gets docked a point or two for the cheesy 70s cover and the title, it deserves a place among the classics of the genre. I first read the Nebula-winning novella "Of Mist, And Grass, And Sand," in middle school, but I never realized that McIntyre had expanded it to novel length. It's a thoughtful...
| Author | Gregory Benford |
| ISBN | 0553297090 |
The Coolness—
• This book won the Nebula in 1980! Pretty cool for it and the author, Gregory Benford. It would have been nice for Hilary Foister to share in the credit, though, considering she supposedly co-wrote this with Benford.
• It deals with tachyons! (once in a while)
•...
| Author | Nicola Griffith |
| ISBN | 0345395379 |
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...
| Author | Michael Swanwick |
| ISBN | 0380817616 |
This was some kind of amazing. The main character, who was never referred to as anything but Bureaucrat, was hardly my definition of a bureaucrat. He was part outcast, part superspy, part magician's apprentice, and part avenger. He wears so many hats during this superb little gem that I never slow down...
| Author | Keith Roberts |
| ISBN | 0345440919 |
In the year 1588, Queen Elizabeth was assassinated. That single tragedy set off a whole series of events, resulting in the Spanish Armada's defeat of England and subsequent demise of Protestantism. Now it's the 20th century, and the Church of Rome reigns supreme. People live a pastoral existence of...
| Author | Joe Haldeman |
| ISBN | 0441012523 |
Camouflage: Species meets The Abyss - not in a good way
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
How did Joe Haldeman’s Camouflage beat Susanna Clarke’s monumental work Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell for the Nebula Award in 2005? Granted, I haven’t read that book, but I have read many...
| Author | James Blish |
| ISBN | 0345438353 |
Father Ruiz-Sanchez is a dedicated man--a priest who is also a scientist, and a scientist who is also a human being. He has found no insoluble conflicts in his beliefs or his ethics . . . until he is sent to Lithia. There he comes upon a race of aliens who are admirable in every way except for their total reliance...
| Author | Cordwainer Smith |
| ISBN | 1857988191 |
This is the 1999 British edition from Gollancz that includes 12 of the most famous short stories from Cordwainer Smith's "Instrumentality of Mankind" universe. His complete stories are collected in the 1993 NESFA edition called "The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer...
| Author | Frederik Pohl |
| ISBN | 1857989465 |
Ill luck made Roger Torraway the subject of the Man Plus Programme, but it was deliberate biological engineering which turned him into a monster -- a machine perfectly adapted to survive on Mars. For according to computer predictions, Mars is humankind's only alternative to extinction. But beneath...
| Author | Jack Vance |
| ISBN | 0440023459 |
Halma, a world where humans were ruled by a race of effete and arrogant lords; where a neo-feudal system banned all work by machines; where a mock welfare state rewarded painful hand labor with a pitiful dole.Young Ghyl Tarvok was a rebel. In a pirated spaceship, he began his search through the civilizations...
| Author | Lucius Shepard |
| ISBN | 0575077344 |
look inside, young soldier. look inside your fellow soldier, see the nothing there, see the nothing that has been put there as a reason why, see the nothing that has become a something, a reason for being a reason for acting a reason for dying. look inside your own self, young soldier. see the...
An alternate cover for this isbn can be found here.
John Truck was to outward appearances just another lowlife spaceship captain. He peddled drugs when they were available, carried cargo when they weren't. But he was also the last of the Centaurans - or at least, half of him was - which meant that...
| Author | Pat Murphy |
| ISBN | 0312854064 |
Elizabeth Waters, an archaeologist who abandoned her husband and daughter years ago to pursue her career, can see the shadows of the past. It's a gift she keeps secret from her colleagues and students, one that often leads her to incredible archaeological discoveries and the realization that she might...
| Author | Alexei Panshin |
| ISBN | 0978907825 |
In 2198, one hundred and fifty years after the desperate wars that destroyed an overpopulated Earth, Man lives precariously on a hundred hastily-established colony worlds and in the seven giant Ships that once ferried men to the stars. Mia Havero's Ship is a small closed society. It tests its children...
| Author | Robert J. Sawyer |
| ISBN | 0061053104 |
To test his theories of immortality and life after death, Dr. Peter Hobson has created three electronic simulations of his own personality. The first has all knowledge of physical existence edited out, to simulate life after death. The second is without knowledge of aging or death, to simulate immortality....
| Author | Robert Silverberg |
| ISBN | 0586039953 |
In the far future, Earth is a worn-out backwater and humanity is spread across the galaxy on worlds that began as colonies, but now feel like home, each with its own long history of a thousand years or more, and each with its own unique culture. One of the strangest is on Borthan, where the founding settlers...
| Author | Greg Bear |
| ISBN | 0765318237 |
Moving Mars is a story of human courage and love set within the greater saga of a planetary liberation movement. Mars is a colonial world, governed by corporate interests on Earth. The citizens of Mars are hardworking, but held back by their lack of access to the best education, and the desire of the...
| Author | Elizabeth Ann Scarborough |
| ISBN | 0553282522 |
A novel of the Vietnam War, with a magical, mystical twist.
Lt. Kitty McCulley, a young and inexperienced nurse tossed into a stressful and chaotic situation, is having a difficult time reconciling her duty to help and heal with the indifference and overt racism of some of her colleagues and...
| Author | Catherine Asaro |
| ISBN | 0812568834 |
Here are a few reasons why it may have won the Nebula:
* The entire novel is an allegory for quantum scattering theory. This is a clever and unexpected device.
* The series brings back the old "space opera" style of science fiction. (Think "Star Wars.")
* The technology described...
Joshua Kampa, the illegitimate son of a mute Spanish whore and a black serviceman, has always dreamed of Africa. But his dreams are of an Africa far in the past and are so vivid and in such hallucinatory detail that he is able to question the understanding of eminent palaeontologists. As a result, Joshua...
| Author | John Sladek |
| ISBN | 1585675873 |
Roderick is a robot and this is his autobiography. Educated by watching television, he is adopted by an elderly couple in Kansas and tries to adjust to American society. Sladek conveys, with great sensitivity and insight, the innocence of an artificial intelligence and asks profound questions about...
