Engine Summer

Author

George Turner

Francis Conway is Swill—one of the millions in the year 2041 who must subsist on the inadequate charities of the state. Life, already difficult, is rapidly becoming impossible for Francis and others like him, as government corruption, official blindness and nature have conspired to turn Swill...

Author	Brian W. Aldiss
ISBN	0755100638

A quote from The Twinkling of an Eye, Brian Aldiss' autobiography:

P D James, ordinarily a bestselling middle-class thriller writer, set The Children of Men in the future. The novel was published in 1992. I began to worry about her novel when readers wrote to me, pointing out many similarities...

Author	Karel Čapek
ISBN	0575099453

Two dystopian satires from one of the most distinguished writers of 20th-century European science fiction. R.U.R. is the work that first introduced the word 'robot' into popular usage.
Written against the background of the rise of Nazism, War With the Newts concerns the discovery in the South...

Author	Gene Wolfe
ISBN	0312890206

Back in print for the first time in more than a decade, Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus is a universally acknowledged masterpiece of science fiction by one of the field's most brilliant writers.

Far out from Earth, two sister planets, Saint Anne and Saint Croix, circle each other in an...

Author	Rachel Pollack
ISBN	0879515309

It's uncomfortable to be chosen for Great Things. A lot of fantasists admit that, but Pollack's Jennie Mazdan shows us just how uncomfortable it can be. This is suburban fantasy, reminiscent of Philip K. Dick's suburban SF, and the protagonist is a nice suburban middle-class person who, in a recognizable...

Author	Kate Wilhelm
ISBN	0671436848

Juniper Time is a 1st-rate sf novel. Kate Wilhelm has done her usual excellent job of weaving an intricate plot & sympathetically portraying believable & complex characters in settings that are described with force & clarity. This '79 novel is set in the not-too-distant future, when...

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	Robert Sheckley
ISBN	0575041226

Tomorrow... and the day after. Citizens worship the Almighty Machine. Passion is a beatnik, love the new frontier. Both God and Satan have been driven underground. The insane are treated by making their delusions real. Jail is a place to break into. Government is lost in the mapless Octagon. And science...

Author	Philip José Farmer
ISBN	1585677159

It is capable of alaraf drive: instantaneous travel between two points of space. Three of these special ships were built to explore and make contact with the many sentient races inhabiting the universe. Suddenly, one of the ships mysteriously disappears. And then it is discovered that an unidentifiable...

Author

Ian Watson

Not really science-fiction, more linguistics-fiction - if you're a linguist who is the least bit interested in SF, this is a must, whether or not it happens to make sense. Super-intelligent aliens arrive on Earth in a giant spaceship. Their mission is find visitors from another dimension ("The Change...

Author	Algis Budrys
ISBN	0425038122

Cover Artist: Don Brautigam

The eponymous protagonist, Laurent Michaelmas, is an ex-hacker who had, early in the computer era, left back doors in many key pieces of software which run vital government & commercial computers. As a result, by the turn of the millennium, he's become one...

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...

Author	John Calvin Batchelor
ISBN	0805037861

It was... a difficult birth.

John Calvin Batchelor's The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica begins in Stockholm, Sweden—not quite as far away from Antarctica as one can get while still remaining on planet Earth, but almost. Published in 1983, this discursive and oblique novel's...

Author	William Tenn
ISBN	0345295234

Giant, technologically superior aliens have conquered Earth, but humankind survives - even flourishes in a way. Men and women live like mice in burrows in the massive walls of the huge homes of the aliens, scurrying about under their feet, stealing from them. A complex social and religious order has...

Author	Colin Greenland
ISBN	0380763958

A fast-moving space adventure featuring mysterious aliens, a journey to a de-populated planet, a mad run from space cops, a ship captain in trouble, and her AI (Artificially Intelligent) companion/ship's computer. Winner of both the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel of the year...

Author	M.J. Engh
ISBN	0312879105

Arslan is a young Asian general who conquers the world in a week without firing a shot and shortly thereafter sets up his headquarters in a small town in Illinois.

A masterpiece of political science fiction and a book to challenge such works as Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed, Arslan is a...

Author	Cecelia Holland
ISBN	0575071427

2000 years in the future, runaway pollution has made the Earth uninhabitable except in giant biodomes. The society is an anarchy, with disputes mediated through the Machiavellian Committee for the Revolution. Mars, Venus and the Moon support flourishing colonies of various political stripes....

Author	Michael Bishop
ISBN	0575028335

The Hugo- & Nebula-nominated novella “Death & Designation Among the Asadi” (Worlds of If, '73) forms the 1st part of Transfigurations, a novel published in 1979 by Berkley Putnam. The story continues when the daughter of the anthropologist who studied the Asadi, a hominid-like race...

Author	D.G. Compton
ISBN	0575118318

A forgotten SF classic that exposed the pitfalls of voyeuristic entertainment decades before the reality show craze.

A few years in the future, medical science has advanced to the point where it is practically unheard of for people to die of any cause except old age. The few exceptions provide...

Author	T.J. Bass
ISBN	0345246357

A novel of dystopian future in the tradition of SOYLENT GREEN and H.G. Wells' THE TIME MACHINE, with an introduction by Ken MacLeod. This is the second printing, with cover artists The Brothers Hildebrandt.

Tinker was a good citizen of the Hive - a model worker. But when he was allowed sexual...

Author	Barry N. Malzberg
ISBN	0989239144

There is a spectre haunting the science fiction genre-the spectre of Barry N. Malzberg . . . In a genre that, with one hand, claimed to be the ultimate storehouse of innovation, and with the other, leveled strict rules for writing and codes of narrative conduct onto its authors, Malzberg stuck out like...

Author	James K. Morrow
ISBN	0156002086

I think that for all of us who read regularly to the point where we can't imagine a life without doing it, there are one or two books that feel like they're Ours. Things we found without prompting, discoveries we made ourselves with no help or guidance from anyone or anything, but which change us in a way and...