Ilium
10 best books like Ilium (Dan Simmons): Darwin's Radio, The Chronoliths, Chasm City, Sea of Silver Light, Accelerando, The Golden Transcendence, A Deepness in the Sky, Dark Light, The Neutronium Alchemist, Johnny Mnemonic: The Screenplay and the Story
| Author | Greg Bear |
| ISBN | 0345459814 |
So I keep on reading Bear novels, feeling disappointed, waiting a while, then rinse and repeat.
This time I've clarified why I am so ambivalent about this guy: he has fascinating ideas then writes dull books about them. The premise here is an extreme example. Our "junk" DNA turns out to be a collection...
| Author | Robert Charles Wilson |
| ISBN | 0812545249 |
Scott Warden is a man haunted by the past-and soon to be haunted by the future.
In early twenty-first-century Thailand, Scott is an expatriate slacker. Then, one day, he inadvertently witnesses an impossible event: the violent appearance of a 200-foot stone pillar in the forested interior....
| Author | Alastair Reynolds |
| ISBN | 0441010644 |
The once-utopian Chasm City -a doomed human settlement on an otherwise inhospitable planet- has been overrun by a virus known as the Melding Plague, capable of infecting any body, organic or computerized. Now, with the entire city corrupted -from the people to the very buildings they inhabit- only...
| Author | Tad Williams |
| ISBN | 0641645473 |
This book, the fourth in a four-book fantasy series, is an amazing example of how a good idea can be stretched and diluted until it is no longer pleasurable to read. There is nothing particularly wrong with the Otherland series. The ideas are interesting, the execution is fairly creative, some of the...
| Author | Charles Stross |
| ISBN | 0441014151 |
The Singularity. It is the era of the posthuman. Artificial intelligences have surpassed the limits of human intellect. Biotechnological beings have rendered people all but extinct. Molecular nanotechnology runs rampant, replicating and reprogramming at will. Contact with extraterrestrial...
| Author | John C. Wright |
| ISBN | 0765349086 |
Begun with The Golden Age, continued with The Phoenix Exultant, and now concluding in The Golden Transcendence, The Golden Age trilogy is Grand Space Opera, an SF adventure saga in the tradition of A. E. Van Gogt, Roger Zelazny and Cordwainer Smith. It is an astounding story of super-science, a thrilling...
| Author | Vernor Vinge |
| ISBN | 0812536355 |
Alternative Cover Edition can be found here.
After thousands of years searching, humans stand on the verge of first contact with an alien race. Two human groups: the Qeng Ho, a culture of free traders, and the Emergents, a ruthless society based on the technological enslavement of minds.
The...
| Author | Ken MacLeod |
| ISBN | 1841491098 |
Better than the previous novel, but very uneven. The shifting perspectives in the last novel was annoying and in this one, the use of the present tense format is often irritating. I stick with this series simply because it is an interesting concept. The last chapter was really the worst of it all, which...
| Author | Peter F. Hamilton |
| ISBN | 0330351435 |
Not every fallen angel comes from heaven...
The ancient menace has finally escaped from Lalonde, shattering the Confederation's peaceful existence. Those who succumbed to it have acquired godlike powers, but now follow a far from divine gospel as they advance inexorably from world to world.
On...
"I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though,...
| Author | Robert Silverberg |
| ISBN | 0743487117 |
The world's most distinguished author of the literature of the fantastic presents his most extraordinary stories of worlds lost and dreams fulfilled... In his illustrious forty-five year career as a novelist and author of short fiction, Robert Silverberg has belonged in the company of the best writers...
| Author | Philip K. Dick |
| ISBN | 0722129629 |
Billed as a complete novel along with a selection of shorts, The Variable Man itself is more of a novella these days. A man is pulled accidentally from his own time into the 22nd century where his very existence is a variable factor that the computers planning the war against Centarus can't plan for.
This...
| Author | Karl Schroeder |
| ISBN | 0812576357 |
After terrifying and titanic struggles, a godlike artificial intelligence gone rogue has finally been destroyed. But not before it scattered seeds of itself throughout the galaxy.
On the terraformed planet Ventus, benign AIs -- the godlike Winds – which shaped and guarded its transformation,...
