Learning the World: A Scientific Romance

Author	Richard K. Morgan
ISBN	0575084812

A dark lord will rise. Such is the prophecy that dogs Ringil Eskiath—Gil, for short—a washed-up mercenary and onetime war hero whose cynicism is surpassed only by the speed of his sword. Gil is estranged from his aristocratic family, but when his mother enlists his help in freeing a cousin sold into...

Author

Larry Niven

Very entertaining, interesting, intriguing, thought provoking, etc.

Good science fiction.

Robert A. Heinlein himself is quoted as saying something to the effect that this was the best science fiction novel he had ever read. I don’t know that I’d go that far, but this was very...

Author

William Gibson

1855: The Industrial Revolution is in full and inexorable swing, powered by steam-driven cybernetic Engines. Charles Babbage perfects his Analytical Engine and the computer age arrives a century ahead of its time. And three extraordinary characters race toward a rendezvous with history - and the...

Author	Charles Stross
ISBN	1841493341

In the twenty-first century man created the Eschaton, a sentient artificial intelligence. It pushed Earth through the greatest technological evolution ever known, while warning that time travel is forbidden, and transgressors will be eliminated.

Distant descendants of this ultra high-tech...

Author	Iain M. Banks
ISBN	1597800449

It is 4034. Humanity has made it to the stars. Fassin Taak, a Slow Seer at the Court of the Nasqueron Dwellers, will be fortunate if he makes it to the end of the year. The Nasqueron Dwellers inhabit a gas giant on the outskirts of the galaxy, in a system awaiting its wormhole connection to the rest of civilization....

Author	Richard K. Morgan
ISBN	0345485254

The future isn’t what it used to be since Richard K. Morgan arrived on the scene. He unleashed Takeshi Kovacs–private eye, soldier of fortune, and all-purpose antihero–into the body-swapping, hard-boiled, urban jungle of tomorrow in Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies, winning...

Author	Ian McDonald
ISBN	1591024366

As Mother India approaches her centenary, nine people are going about their business--a gangster, a cop, his wife, a politician, a stand-up comic, a set designer, a journalist, a scientist, and a dropout. And so is Aj--the waif, the mind reader, the prophet--when she one day finds a man who wants to stay...

Author	Michael Swanwick
ISBN	0380812894

World-renowned paleontologist Richard Leyster's universe changedforever the day a stranger named Griffin walked into his office with a remarkable job offer . . . and an ice cooler containing the head of a freshly killed Stegosaurus. For Leyster and a select group of scientific colleagues an impossible...

Author

Robert L. Forward

"In science fiction there is only a handful of books that stretch the mind--and this is one of them."--Arthur C. Clarke

In a moving story of sacrifice and triumph, human scientists establish a relationship with intelligent lifeforms--the cheela--living on Dragon's Egg, a neutron star where...

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	Maureen F. McHugh
ISBN	0380791226

Mission Child is an expansion of Maureen McHugh's "The Cost to Be Wise," a fascinating novella from the original anthology Starlight 1.

Janna's world was colonized long ago by Earth and then left on its own for centuries. When "offworlders" return, their superior technology upsets the balance...

Author	Richard K. Morgan
ISBN	0345457749

A coup in Cambodia. Guns to Guatemala. For the men and women of Shorn Associates, opportunity is calling. In the superheated global village of the near future, big money is made by finding the right little war and supporting one side against the other–in exchange for a share of the spoils. To succeed,...

Author	Joe Haldeman
ISBN	0575071141

The discovery of a remarkable alien technology light years from Earth could have devastating consequences for humanity in this science fiction classic by the author of the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning novel The Forever War

In the far future, the accidental scientific breakthrough known...

Author	Frederik Pohl
ISBN	0345446674

In Book Two of the Heechee Saga, Robinette Broadhead is on his way to making a fortune by bankrolling an expedition to the Food Factory--a Heechee spaceship that can graze the cometary cloud and transfor the basic elements of the universe into untold quantities of food. But even as he gambles on the breakthrough...

Author	Geoffrey A. Landis
ISBN	0812576489

By the middle of the 21st century, humanity has finally landed men on Mars-only to watch helplessly as the first two missions end in catastrophe and death.

With resources running out, a third-and perhaps final-mission to Mars is hastily mounted, with a crew of four men and two women. But from...

Author	Arthur C. Clarke
ISBN	0446356018

In 1994, the Marines test a new missile. After launch it mysteriously disappears. If it reaches civilian areas they'll be in big trouble. Carol Dawson, a journalist, is alerted by an unusual sight of whales in the Miami area & decides to write about it.
Armed with equipment provided by her friend,...

Author	Tom Robbins
ISBN	0553383531

Known for his meaty seriocomic novels, Tom Robbins’s shorter work has appeared in publications ranging from Esquire to Harper’s, from Playboy to the New York Times. Collected here for the first time in paperback, the essays, articles, observations—and even some untypical country-music...