Kiln People

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	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	Vernor Vinge
ISBN	0765308835

The Peace War is quintessential hard-science adventure. The Peace Authority conquered the world with a weapon that never should have been a weapon--the "bobble," a spherical force-field impenetrable by any force known to mankind. Encasing governmental installations and military bases in bobbles,...

Author	Peter F. Hamilton
ISBN	0330480065

Deploying invulnerable twenty-fifth-century soldiers called Skins, Zantiu-Braun's corporate starships loot entire planets. But as the Skins invade bucolic Thallspring, Z-B's strategy is about to go awry, all because of: Sgt. Lawrence Newton, a dreamer whose twenty years as a Skin have destroyed...

Author	Iain M. Banks
ISBN	1857230310

She came from one of the more disreputable aristocratic families.

Sharrow was once the leader of a personality-attuned combat team in one of the sporadic little commercial wars in the civilization based around the planet Golter. On an island with a glass shore - relic of some even more ancient...

Author	James Blish
ISBN	1585676020

Originally published in four volumes nearly fifty years ago, Cities in Flight brings together the famed "Okie novels" of science fiction master James Blish. Named after the migrant workers of America's Dust Bowl, these novels convey Blish's "history of the future," a brilliant and bleak look at a...

Author	Ben Bova
ISBN	0812532473

2.5 stars

Even though there are many interesting ideas in this book, the story itself was a bit of a chore to finish.

The story is basically that of Good versus Evil ... except that Good doesn't really know what it is doing, and Evil isn't really all that Evil at all. Even the Gods are a bit...

Author	Ursula K. Le Guin
ISBN	0152057706

Young Gav can remember the page of a book after seeing it once, and, inexplicably, he sometimes "remembers" things that are going to happen in the future. As a loyal slave, he must keep these powers secret, but when a terrible tragedy occurs, Gav, blinded by grief, flees the only world he has ever known....

Author

Ryan Boudinot

From the “wickedly talented” (Boston Globe) and “darkly funny” (New York Times Book Review) Ryan Boudinot, Blueprints of the Afterlife is a tour de force.

It is the Afterlife. The end of the world is a distant, distorted memory called “the Age of F***ed Up Shit.” A sentient glacier...

Author

Robert A. Metzger

‘In the early twenty-first century, a team of scientists has done the impossible – ripped apart the fabric of space-time and created a brand new universe… one million-millionth the size of our own. Now they’re going to see where it takes them.

PICOVERSE

A big bang of and adventure’

Blurb...

Author	M.A.R. Barker
ISBN	0879979402

Tékumel is a distant world populated by both humans and aliens, who have built a vast and intricate civilization over thousands of years. Ruled by the upper clans of the land, the planet's culture is based upon the teachings of gods and demons, upon the ways and wiles of alien races, and upon the layered...