Brittle Innings
10 best books like Brittle Innings (Michael Bishop): The Privilege of the Sword, The Innkeeper's Song, Soldier of the Mist, A Midsummer Tempest, Only Begotten Daughter, Glimpses, On Wings of Song, Orbitsville, The Year of the Quiet Sun, Davy
| Author | Ellen Kushner |
| ISBN | 0553382683 |
Welcome to Riverside, where the aristocratic and the ambitious battle for power in the city's ballroom, brothels and boudoirs. Into this alluring world walks Katherine, a well-bred country girl versed in the rules of conventional society. Her mistake is thinking that they apply. For Katherine's...
| Author | Peter S. Beagle |
| ISBN | 0451452887 |
The Innkeeper’s Song is the story of young Tikat’s search for the lover whose death and resurrection he witnessed. It is a search that will lead him into a world of magic and mystery beyond his comprehension, for his wild ride sets him on the trail of three women who are blessed—or cursed—to undertake...
| Author | Gene Wolfe |
| ISBN | 0812558154 |
Gene Wolfe has turned to the fantastic historical world of Greece, in 479 B.C., when the gods walked the Earth. Latro, a mercenary soldier from the north, has suffered a head wound in battle and has been separated from his compatriots. He has not only lost the memory of who he is and where he is from, he has...
| Author | Poul Anderson |
| ISBN | 0812530799 |
"What if Shakespeare were a historian & his world a mortal one of men & elves? Somewhere, spinning thru another universe is a history almost like ours except for the result of a revolution or two & the earlier incidence of a few inventions. A prince called Hamlet has lived in Denmark. The English...
| Author | James K. Morrow |
| ISBN | 0156002434 |
I received this book as a gift from my boyfriend's parents, who read it for a literary program through their Unitarian Universalist Church. The premise of the novel: What if a modern Messiah was born? What if a celibate man brought forth a daughter of God through a combination of miracle and modern science?...
| Author | Lewis Shiner |
| ISBN | 0312267436 |
Ray Shackleford lives in the ruins of the idealistic 1960s. Veteran of failed garage bands, he works as a repairman of stereo equipment, tending the dying embers of his marriage, and dreaming of bygone days and the music that almost was.
When he finds the music he dreams of has been mysteriously recorded...
| Author | Thomas M. Disch |
| ISBN | 0881844438 |
The human society is in the terrible decline and On Wings of Song is a kind of cultural dystopia… Thomas M. Disch writes with so many realistic details that it starts appearing that the dystopia is now…
“They say we’re very conformist, don’t they?”
“Yes, that’s certainly one...
| Author | Bob Shaw |
| ISBN | 0575070986 |
[He] was a man who had looked on many worlds in his lifetime, yet his face was the face of a man in shock.
You’ll be forgiven if Orbitsville reminds you a lot of Ringworld. Both deal with megastructures around a star. Around a star, just in case you missed that part; these things are huge. Where...
| Author | Wilson Tucker |
| ISBN | 0020298951 |
‘Chaney fitted two keys into the twin locks and shoved. A bell rang somewhere behind him. The operations door rolled easily on rolamite tracks. He stepped outside into the chill of the future…’
The first real test of the Time Displacement Vehicle – and Chaney still uncertain why he...
Davy is set in the far future of our world, in the fourth century after the collapse of what we describe as the twentieth-century civilisation. In a land turned upside-down and backwards by the results of scientific unwisdom, Davy and his fellow Ramblers are carefree outcasts, whose bawdy, joyous adventures...
| Author | Bradley Denton |
| ISBN | 0380718766 |
It doesn't have quite the same rocking energy that his first novel, Wrack and Roll, contained, but this is a very well written good book in the semi-quirky tradition of Rudy Rucker and the best of Avram Davidson. The characterization is especially well-drawn, and the plot, while a little hard to completely...
| Author | Charles Sheffield |
| ISBN | 0671721410 |
So this follows the life of a man from birth to his end. If you like Job, which I did, then this makes for a compelling read. The world building is perhaps the best dystopian can offer. The world feels chillingly real and possible to me. The situations are not generic but layered and nuanced and help you to...
| Author | Donald Kingsbury |
| ISBN | 0671460897 |
A vast alien landscape, a human culture based on our own, yet evolved in strange ways by the forces of an inimical nature provide a panoramic backdrop for the romantic adventures of a large cast of memorable & attractive characters.
Courtship Rite is a sf novel by American writer Donald Kingsbury,...
| Author | Tim Powers |
| ISBN | 0812555198 |
A young woman possessed by a ghost has slain the Fisher King of the West, Scott Crane. Now, temporarily freed from that malevolent spirit, she seeks to restore the King to life.
But Crane's body has been taken to the magically protected home of Pete and Angelica Sullivan, and their adopted son,...
| Author | Troy Soos |
| ISBN | 1575664089 |
The lazy days of June 1921 are dark ones for baseball fans as the trial of the Chicago "Black Sox" players accused of throwing the 1919 World Series begins. But utility infielder Mickey Rawlings thinks he has something to cheer about -- playing for the team that won that series, the Cincinnati Reds. Until...
| Author | Patrick O'Leary |
| ISBN | 0312864035 |
A story within a story, The Gift is a story of innocence betrayed and magic rejected. Tim is robbed of his childhood, and Simon is tormented by hearing made too acute. Both are victims of The Usher of the Night, once a boy like them, now pathetically twisted by his own ambition and by Tomen, a malevolent creature...
| Author | Cordwainer Smith |
| ISBN | 0515039691 |
Storyline: 2/5
Characters: 2/5
Writing Style: 2/5
World: 3/5
Every now and then a little golden age science fiction found its way back into a genre that was on its way to abandoning it. Not that science fiction ever completely outgrew its pulp adolescence, but by 1964 it was becoming...
| Author | Ian R. MacLeod |
| ISBN | 1906301212 |
Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award: A future world of unrelenting change, strangeness, and uncertainty, experienced through the passions and memories of one remarkable old woman
Roushana Maitland has known great fame and great sorrow throughout...
| Author | Thomas Burnett Swann |
| ISBN | 0583123945 |
Lost Monsters
Thea watched their torch-bearing captors recede into the distance and leave them to the cave's darkness. Her brother Icarus whispered "forgive me - I wanted to come to the Country of the Beasts, not to the Cave of the Minotaur".
Then they heard the soft padding of feet...
| Author | James P. Blaylock |
| ISBN | 0441004903 |
In the dead of night, a man climbs the tower of St. Anthony's Church, driven by a compulsive urge to silence the bells. In a deserted alley, a seemingly random victim is consumed by a torrent of flames. And in the deceptive light of day, a mail-order businessman named Walt Stebbins receives a bizarre artifact--a...
