Earth Made of Glass
10 best books like Earth Made of Glass (John Barnes): Queen City Jazz, The Exile Kiss, The Ragged Astronauts, The Cassini Division, Days of Atonement, Destroying Angel, Year's Best SF 13, Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas, Ivory, Engineman
| Author | Kathleen Ann Goonan |
| ISBN | 0765307510 |
In Verity's world, nanotech plagues decimated the population after an initial renaissance of utopian nanotech cities. Growing up on an isolated farm, she finds her happy life changing course when Blaze, the only young man in the community and Verity's best friend, is shot. With Blaze's body wrapped...
| Author | George Alec Effinger |
Marîd Audran has risen from hustling on the streets of the decadent Budayeen ghetto to being the right-hand man of one of the Maghreb's most feared men. As an enforcer for the powerful Friedlander Bey, Marîd is just beginning to enjoy his newfound wealth and privilege, when he and Bey are betrayed by...
| Author | Bob Shaw |
| ISBN | 0708882277 |
Land and Overland - twin worlds a few thousand miles apart. On Land, humanity faces a threat to its very survival - an airborne species, the ptertha, has declared war on humankind, and is actively hunting for victims. The only hope lies in migration. Through space to Overland. By balloon. The Ragged Astronauts...
| Author | Ken MacLeod |
| ISBN | 0812568583 |
Ellen May Ngewthu is a soldier and leader of the Cassini Division, the elite defense force of the utopian Solar Union. Here in the twenty-fourth century, the forts of the Division, in orbit around Jupiter, are the front line in humanity's long standoff with the unknowable post-humans godlike beings...
| Author | Walter Jon Williams |
| ISBN | 0812501802 |
early work by an sf writer i really like. bit too early, maybe - he doesn't quite pull it off, though in its own way it's plenty ambitious, juggling alternate history, quantum theory, the western genre, psychological thrillers, and a biblical theme to make its mean. the result is interesting, but the...
| Author | Richard Paul Russo |
| ISBN | 0441142737 |
Read this a century ago but I remember liking it.
Similar in vein to Blade Runner, Destroying Angel is a cyberpunk tale set in mid-twenty-first-century San Francisco.
It's got cyborgs, serial murders, sexy vixens, and a gritty world not all that removed from our own.
...
| Author | David G. Hartwell |
| ISBN | 0061252093 |
The thirteenth annual collection of the previous year's finest short-form sf is at hand. Once again, award-winning editors and anthologists David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have gathered together a stunning array of science fiction that spans a veritable universe of astonishing visions and...
| Author | Michael Bishop |
| ISBN | 0312890028 |
It is 1982. The United States has a permanent Moonbase. Richard M. Nixon is in the fourth term of the "imperial presidency." And an eccentric novelist named Philip K. Dick has just died in California.
Or has he? Psychiatrist Lia Pickford, M.D., is nonplussed when Dick walks into her office...
In the year 6303, when earth is bare of anything larger than an insect or a mouse and most people have left for the stars, Duncan Rojas receives a most unusual visitor. His name is Bukoba Mandaka, and he is the last of the Maasai.
Mandaka wants Rojas, senior researcher for Braxton's Records of Big...
| Author | Eric Brown |
| ISBN | 0330330438 |
Once they pushed big ships through the cobalt glory of the Nada-Continuum. But faster than light isn't fast enough anymore. The interfaces of the Keilor-Vincicoff Organisation bring planets light years distant a simple step away. Then a man with half a face offers ex-engineman Ralph Mirren the chance...
Rating: "A-". A stirring saga of science, Mars, and life, marred by a weak ending, but well-worth your attention.
Paul McAuley's usual topics and tropisms are well-employed in this biotech SF-thriller. In 2026 a Martian microbe, secretly brought back to Earth by a Chinese expedition, is...
Salt is a crystal compound of Sodium and Chlorine; faceted and transparent. Simple and pure. What life could there be without salt? It is known as God's diamond, by which we should be aware of the infinite variability of scale for the divine perspective. Every grain is a landscape, a world.
And...
Human society on Jevlen was falling apart -- and it looked as if JEVEX, the immense super-computer that managed all Jevlenese affairs, was at the heart of the matter. Except that the problems didn't stop when JEVEX was shut down. People were changing -- or being changed. It was almost as if the Jevlenese...
| Author | Robert Silverberg |
| ISBN | 0061058106 |
Colorful, beautifully-written but thin planetary romance
This is Silverberg's sixth Majipoor book, and it's a bit thin. I've read and liked the previous five -- this is Jack Vance "Big Planet" country: big, colorful landscapes, strange flora & fauna, teeming cities, richly-caparisoned...
| Author | Melissa Scott |
| ISBN | 0312858760 |
Scott returns to the world of her earlier novel, Dreamships, and, as in several of her novels, takes up the theme of artificial intelligence. Persephone is a planet racked by class struggle and economic and political upheaval. Celinde Fortune is an entertainer - an illusionist who makes good money...
| Author | Steven Gould |
| ISBN | 0812571096 |
The author of Jumper returns with a near-future SF novel, set in an America whose coastline has been drowned by melting Antarctic ice.
In the world where hundreds of millions of people have been displaced from their homes by the Deluge--a hundred-foot-rise in sea level from melting ice caps--Partricia...
The Blue-Haired Bombshell
Still ridiculous in the most amazing of ways, but some minor irks makes this the only book of the series I've given four stars to.
Ah, where to start? If you've read the four books that preceded this one, there is simply no point in telling you why this is awesome. If you've not read the other four...
| Author | Emma Bull |
| ISBN | 0441225691 |
His life is a race against time. And time is winning.
He was a prince, until his world was plunged into civil war. He was a son, until he discovered his mother’s secret. He was an exile, until he became Niki Falcon, piloting a ship linked to his nervous system, crossing light-years in a breath,...
| Author | Frederik Pohl |
| ISBN | 0812577833 |
Dan Dannerman has been through hell. Caught in the middle of an interstellar war that will end only with the death of the universe, he's been captured by aliens who call themselves the Beloved Leaders, cloned repeatedly, torn from his wife, and brutally tortured.
Sitting in a prison cell on...
| Author | Jeffrey A. Carver |
| ISBN | 0812533275 |
In the year 2034, a young woman named Mozelle Moi learns that her work as a test subject in a top-secret tachyon transmission project will soon be terminated. The purpose of the project has never been revealed to her; she only knows she is in love with David Kadin, a man she has met only through the tachyon...
| Author | Kim Stanley Robinson |
| ISBN | 0312890370 |
2027: Southern California is a developer's dream gone mad, an endless sprawl of condos, freeways, and malls. Jim McPherson, the affluent son of a defense contractor, is a young man lost in a world of fast cars, casual sex, and designer drugs. But his descent into the shadowy underground of industrial...
