Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction
10 best books like Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (Brian W. Aldiss): Who Goes There?, The Castle of Otranto, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Elric of Melniboné, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, R.U.R., The Girl Who Was Plugged In, More Than Human, Last and First Men, The Space Merchants
| Author | John W. Campbell Jr. |
| ISBN | 0982332203 |
"Who Goes There?" The novella that formed the basis of "The Thing" is the John W. Campbell classic about an antarctic research camp that discovers and thaws the ancient, frozen body of a crash-landed alien. The creature revives with terrifying results, shape-shifting to assume the exact form of animal...
| Author | Horace Walpole |
| ISBN | 0192834401 |
First published pseudonymously in 1764, The Castle of Otranto purported to be a translation of an Italian story of the time of the crusades. In it Walpole attempted, as he declared in the Preface to the Second Edition, "to blend the two kinds of romance: the ancient and the modern." Crammed with invention,...
| Author | Walter M. Miller Jr. |
| ISBN | 0060892994 |
Winner of the 1961 Hugo Award for Best Novel and widely considered one of the most accomplished, powerful, and enduring classics of modern speculative fiction, Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz is a true landmark of twentieth-century literature—a chilling and still provocative...
| Author | Michael Moorcock |
| ISBN | 0441203981 |
It is the colour of a bleached skull, his flesh; and the long hair that flows below his shoulders is milk-white. From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and moody....He is Elric, Emperor of Melnibone, cursed with a keen and cynical intelligence, schooled in the art of sorcery...
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
One of the greatest satires in American literature, Mark Twain's 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' begins when Hank Morgan, a skilled mechanic in a nineteenth-century New England arms factory, is struck on the head during a quarrel and awakens to find himself among the knights and magicians...
| Author | Karel Čapek |
| ISBN | 0486419266 |
R.U.R.--written in 1920--garnered worldwide acclaim for its author and popularized the word "Robot." Mass-produced, efficient and servile labor, Čapek's Robots remember everything, but lack creative thought, and the Utopian life they provide ultimately lacks meaning. When the Robots revolt,...
The Girl Who Was Plugged In
James Tiptree, Jr. (aka Alice Sheldon) is primarily renowned for her short fiction, but this piece, which won the Hugo for best novella in 1974, is also top-notch. It imagines a future completely ruled by corporations, where advertising is illegal, because life is advertising—companies use celebrities...
| 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 | Frederik Pohl |
| ISBN | 0575075287 |
An alternate cover edition can be found here.
It is the 22nd Century, an advertisement-drenched world in which the big ad agencies dominate governments and everything else. Now Schoken Associates, one of the big players, has a new challenge for star copywriter Mitch Courtenay. Volunteers...
| Author | Alfred Bester |
| ISBN | 1857988221 |
In a world in which the police have telepathic powers, how do you get away with murder?
Ben Reichs heads a huge 24th century business empire, spanning the solar system. He is also an obsessed, driven man determined to murder a rival. To avoid capture, in a society where murderers can be detected...
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
| Author | H.P. Lovecraft |
| ISBN | 1450562795 |
”One night I had a frightful dream in which I met my grandmother under the sea. She lived in a phosphorescent palace of many terraces, with gardens of strange leprous corals and grotesque brachiate efflorescences, and welcomed me with a warmth that may have been sardonic. She had changed--as those...
Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction
| Author | Alec Nevala-Lee |
| ISBN | 0062571966 |
“[Astounding] is a major work of popular culture scholarship that science fiction fans will devour.” — Publishers Weekly
"Alec Nevala-Lee has brilliantly recreated the era. . . . A remarkable work of literary history." — Robert Silverberg
"Science fiction has...
| Author | Olaf Stapledon |
| ISBN | 0824014375 |
John Wainwright is a freak - a human mutation with an extraordinary intelligence which is both awesome and frightening to all who come into contact with him. Ordinary humans were just playthings to John - subjects for an endless chain of experiments. Their feelings, and sometimes even their lives,...
| Author | Tzvetan Todorov |
| ISBN | 0801491460 |
In The Fantastic, Tzvetan Todorov seeks to examine both generic theory and a particular genre, moving back and forth between a poetics of the fantastic itself and a metapoetics or theory of theorizing, even as he suggest that one must, as a critic, move back and forth between theory and history, between...
