Hothouse
10 best books like Hothouse (Brian W. Aldiss): Timescape, Lest Darkness Fall, Make Room! Make Room!, The Sheep Look Up, The Death of Grass, Rogue Moon, Damnation Alley, A Maze of Death, A Case of Conscience, Man Plus
Author | Gregory Benford |
ISBN | 0553297090 |
The Coolness—
• This book won the Nebula in 1980! Pretty cool for it and the author, Gregory Benford. It would have been nice for Hilary Foister to share in the credit, though, considering she supposedly co-wrote this with Benford.
• It deals with tachyons! (once in a while)
•...
Author | L. Sprague de Camp |
ISBN | 0515608173 |
When am I? Padway asked himself after the lightning-flash knocked him down. He knew where he was--Rome. He was there to study archaeology, and even though the lightning had left him dazed, he could see the familiar Roman buildings. But the buildings looked newer and the crowds in the street were wearing...
Author | Harry Harrison |
ISBN | 0553564587 |
Color me happy and more than a little surprised to be decorating this review with as many stars as I am because I went into this novel with pretty subdued expectations. I would say expectations on par with those I hold for the latest cinematic embarassment by Mr. Dickoless Cage. I know that's not very nice,...
Author | John Brunner |
ISBN | 1932100016 |
I think I might DNF this one.
Honestly, I feel like I'm reading the newspaper and the Sierra Club's journal on a particularly bad day. Knowing that this was written forty years ago makes it even worse; you mean we knew these problems were coming and still didn't fix them? We start with gas masks...
Author | John Christopher |
ISBN | 0722122977 |
The Chung-Li virus has devastated Asia, wiping out the rice crop and leaving riots and mass starvation in its wake. The rest of the world looks on with concern, though safe in the expectation that a counter-virus will be developed any day. Then Chung-Li mutates and spreads. Wheat, barley, oats, rye:...
Author | Algis Budrys |
ISBN | 0380389509 |
Rogue Moon is a short sf novel by Algis Budrys, published in 1960. It was a 1961 Hugo Award nominee, losing to Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz. A novella-length version of the story was included in the anthology The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume 2, edited by Ben Bova.
Before...
Author | Roger Zelazny |
ISBN | 0743486625 |
Hell Tanner isn't the sort of guy you'd mistake for a hero: he's a fast-driving car thief, a smuggler, and a stone-cold killer. He's also expendable - at least in the eyes of the Secretary of Traffic for the Nation of California. Tanner doesn't care much for those eyes. You'd also never mistake Hell Tanner...
Author | Philip K. Dick |
ISBN | 0679752986 |
Fourteen strangers come to Delmak-O. Thirteen of them were transferred by the usual authorities. One got there by praying. But once they arrived on that treacherous planet, whose very atmosphere seemed to induce paranoia and psychosis, the newcomers tound that even prayer was useless. For on Delmak-O,...
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 | Frederik Pohl |
ISBN | 1857989465 |
Ill luck made Roger Torraway the subject of the Man Plus Programme, but it was deliberate biological engineering which turned him into a monster -- a machine perfectly adapted to survive on Mars. For according to computer predictions, Mars is humankind's only alternative to extinction. But beneath...
Author | J.G. Ballard |
ISBN | 0374520968 |
J. G. Ballard's fourth novel, which established his reputation as a writer of extraordinary talent and imaginative powers, tells the story of a physician specializing in the treatment of leprosy who is invited to a small outpost in the interior of Africa. Finding the roadways blocked, he takes to the...
Author | John Wyndham |
ISBN | 0140010750 |
I will probably always nod to Wyndham's Day of the Triffids as a crowning piece of SF, but The Kraken Wakes takes on a very similar tone, albeit very different problems.
The two both have a heavy focus on science and rationality in the face of unfathomable problems. Triffids had mass blindness...
Author | Henry Kuttner |
ISBN | 0575071419 |
Classic SF from '47. It isn't bad and it has a solid plot thread and a very streamlined theme, from breaking off the yoke of immortals only to realize you are one, to founding a rebellion allowing all the people to earn their own immortality and a place in the sun. (On Venus, nonetheless.)
I don't...
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...
Author | Poul Anderson |
ISBN | 0345325214 |
Prolific Grand Master Poul Anderson earned his place of honor within the hallowed halls of science fiction’s best and brightest. His work may not be as engagingly readable as Asimov, or as accessibly impactful as Clarke. He was never as politically-minded as Heinlein and his prose is not as slick...
Author | William Golding |
ISBN | 0571225462 |
Dean Jocelin has a vision: that God has chosen him to erect a great spire on his cathedral. His mason anxiously advises against it, for the old cathedral was built without foundations. Nevertheless, the spire rises octagon upon octagon, pinnacle by pinnacle, until the stone pillars shriek and the ground...
Author | Lloyd Biggle Jr. |
ISBN | 1587150514 |
Lost Eden
It was a world of dazzling but deadly beauty, where pleasure was man's most precious birthright. In this lost colony the inhabitants had forgotten the very existence of earth. Only one man remembered. He foresaw the awesome consequences if this paradise were ever rediscovered.
Monument
The...