Downbelow Station
10 best books like Downbelow Station (C.J. Cherryh): Dreamsnake, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, Mirror Dance, The Snow Queen, Rainbows End, The Uplift War, The Sword of Rhiannon, Double Star, This Immortal, The Mule: From Foundation And Empire
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 | Kate Wilhelm |
ISBN | 0060146540 |
David Sumner
has a problem: the world as he knows it is about to end. what's a brilliant young man and his equally brilliant family to do? why, bring back members of that extended family, store supplies, circle the wagons, and build a lab which will eventually help the Sumner family to repopulate the...
Author | Lois McMaster Bujold |
ISBN | 0671876465 |
The dwarfish, fetally-damaged yet brilliant Miles Vorkosigan has more than his share of troubles. Having recently escaped an assassination plot whose tool was a brainwashed clone of himself, Miles has set the clone, Mark, free for a new chance at life. But when he decides to let his clone brother assume...
Author | Joan D. Vinge |
ISBN | 0446676640 |
This reissue of a modern classic of science fiction, the Hugo and Locus Award-winning and Nebula-nominated The Snow Queen, marks the first time the book has been reprinted in fifteen years.The imperious Winter colonists have ruled the planet Tiamat for 150 years, deriving wealth from the slaughter...
Author | Vernor Vinge |
ISBN | 0812536363 |
Robert Gu is a recovering Alzheimer's patient. The world that he remembers was much as we know it today. Now, as he regains his faculties through a cure developed during the years of his near-fatal decline, he discovers that the world has changed and so has his place in it. He was a world-renowned poet....
Author | David Brin |
ISBN | 0553279718 |
David Brin's Uplift novels are among the most thrilling and extraordinary science fiction ever written. Sundiver, Startide Rising, and The Uplift War--a New York Times bestseller--together make up one of the most beloved sagas of all time. Brin's tales are set in a future universe in which no species...
Author | Leigh Brackett |
ISBN | 0441791425 |
Since I have been reading a lot of Leigh Brackett recently, I decided it might be fun to watch the first half of "Eldorado" again--one of my all-time favorite Westerns--for which Brackett wrote the screenplay. I was struck--as always--by how elegantly and efficiently the first half is constructed,...
Author | Robert A. Heinlein |
ISBN | 0345330137 |
One minute, down and out actor Lorenzo Smythe was — as usual — in a bar, drinking away his troubles as he watched his career go down the tubes. Then a space pilot bought him a drink, and the next thing Smythe knew, he was shanghaied to Mars.
Suddenly he found himself agreeing to the most difficult...
Author | Roger Zelazny |
ISBN | 0671698486 |
Conrad Nomikos has a long, rich personal history that he'd rather not talk about. And, as Arts Commissioner, he's been given a job he'd rather not do. Escorting an alien grandee on a guided tour of the shattered remains of Earth is not something he relishes- especially when it is apparent that this places...
Isaac Asimov was a Russian-born, American author, a professor of biochemistry, and a highly successful writer, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books.
Professor Asimov is generally considered one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written...
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 | 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 | Mark Clifton |
ISBN | 0898651654 |
Bossy was right. Always. Invariably. She was limited only in that she had to have facts -- not assumptions -- with which to work. Given those facts, her conclusions and predictions were inevitably correct.
And that made Bossy a 'ticking bomb.'
Bossy had been designed as a servomechanism...
Author | Nancy Kress |
ISBN | 0312875835 |
Earth is an environmental disaster area when humanity gains new hope: a star gate is discovered in the solar system, built by a long-gone alien race. Earth establishes extrasolar colonies and discovers alien races--including the warlike Fallers, the only spacefaring race besides humans. Mysterious,...
Author | Samuel R. Delany |
ISBN | 0819563366 |
The surface story tells of the problems a member of an alien race, Lo Lobey, has assimilating the mythology of earth, where his kind have settled among the leftover artifacts of humanity. The deeper tale concerns, however, the way those who are 'different' must deal with the dominant cultural ideology....
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 | 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...