Man Plus
10 best books like Man Plus (Frederik Pohl): Tau Zero, Timescape, Stations of the Tide, Mission of Gravity, Camouflage, Seeker, A Case of Conscience, Emphyrio, Life During Wartime, The Einstein Intersection
Poul Anderson's Tau Zero is an outstanding work of science fiction, in part because it combines two qualities that are often at odds in this genre: an interest in the emotional lives of its characters and a fascination with all things technological and scientific. In Tau Zero these components are not...
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 | Michael Swanwick |
ISBN | 0380817616 |
This was some kind of amazing. The main character, who was never referred to as anything but Bureaucrat, was hardly my definition of a bureaucrat. He was part outcast, part superspy, part magician's apprentice, and part avenger. He wears so many hats during this superb little gem that I never slow down...
Author | Hal Clement |
ISBN | 0515034797 |
Cover Artist: Ed Emshwiller
Mission of Gravity is an sf novel by Hal Clement. The title is a play on words, one meaning "the force which pulls" & the other being "extremely serious or important". It was serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, 4–7/53. Its 1st cloth publication was in '54....
Author | Joe Haldeman |
ISBN | 0441012523 |
Camouflage: Species meets The Abyss - not in a good way
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
How did Joe Haldeman’s Camouflage beat Susanna Clarke’s monumental work Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell for the Nebula Award in 2005? Granted, I haven’t read that book, but I have read many...
Author | Jack McDevitt |
ISBN | 0441013759 |
The Barnes & Noble Review
Alex Benedict and his executive assistant, Chase Kolpath -- ambitious antiquities dealers from Jack McDevitt's A Talent for War (1989) and, more recently, Polaris -- are back in Seeker, a story in which the two antiquarians search for a legendary lost colony that...
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 | Jack Vance |
ISBN | 0440023459 |
Halma, a world where humans were ruled by a race of effete and arrogant lords; where a neo-feudal system banned all work by machines; where a mock welfare state rewarded painful hand labor with a pitiful dole.Young Ghyl Tarvok was a rebel. In a pirated spaceship, he began his search through the civilizations...
Author | Lucius Shepard |
ISBN | 0575077344 |
look inside, young soldier. look inside your fellow soldier, see the nothing there, see the nothing that has been put there as a reason why, see the nothing that has become a something, a reason for being a reason for acting a reason for dying. look inside your own self, young soldier. see the...
Author | Samuel R. Delany |
ISBN | 0819563366 |
The surface story tells of the problems a member of an alien race, Lo Lobey, has assimilating the mythology of earth, where his kind have settled among the leftover artifacts of humanity. The deeper tale concerns, however, the way those who are 'different' must deal with the dominant cultural ideology....
An alternate cover for this isbn can be found here.
John Truck was to outward appearances just another lowlife spaceship captain. He peddled drugs when they were available, carried cargo when they weren't. But he was also the last of the Centaurans - or at least, half of him was - which meant that...
Author | Walter M. Miller Jr. |
ISBN | 0575079770 |
Distinguished short story collection produced by one of the best writers in the science fiction world, previously published as The Best of Walter M. Miller Jr in 1980. This essential collection contains fourteen short stories from the 1950's: 'You Triflin' Skunk!', 'The Will', 'Anybody Else Like...
Author | Pat Murphy |
ISBN | 0312854064 |
Elizabeth Waters, an archaeologist who abandoned her husband and daughter years ago to pursue her career, can see the shadows of the past. It's a gift she keeps secret from her colleagues and students, one that often leads her to incredible archaeological discoveries and the realization that she might...
Author | Alexei Panshin |
ISBN | 0978907825 |
In 2198, one hundred and fifty years after the desperate wars that destroyed an overpopulated Earth, Man lives precariously on a hundred hastily-established colony worlds and in the seven giant Ships that once ferried men to the stars. Mia Havero's Ship is a small closed society. It tests its children...
Author | Robert J. Sawyer |
ISBN | 0061053104 |
To test his theories of immortality and life after death, Dr. Peter Hobson has created three electronic simulations of his own personality. The first has all knowledge of physical existence edited out, to simulate life after death. The second is without knowledge of aging or death, to simulate immortality....
Author | Robert Silverberg |
ISBN | 0586039953 |
In the far future, Earth is a worn-out backwater and humanity is spread across the galaxy on worlds that began as colonies, but now feel like home, each with its own long history of a thousand years or more, and each with its own unique culture. One of the strangest is on Borthan, where the founding settlers...
Author | Vonda N. McIntyre |
ISBN | 0671567659 |
In seventeenth-century France, Louis XIV rules with flamboyant ambition. In his domain, wealth and beauty take all; frivolity begets cruelty; science and alchemy collide. From the Hall of Mirrors to the vermin-infested attics of the Chateau at Versailles, courtiers compete to please the king,...
Author | Greg Bear |
ISBN | 0765318237 |
Moving Mars is a story of human courage and love set within the greater saga of a planetary liberation movement. Mars is a colonial world, governed by corporate interests on Earth. The citizens of Mars are hardworking, but held back by their lack of access to the best education, and the desire of the...
Author | Elizabeth Ann Scarborough |
ISBN | 0553282522 |
A novel of the Vietnam War, with a magical, mystical twist.
Lt. Kitty McCulley, a young and inexperienced nurse tossed into a stressful and chaotic situation, is having a difficult time reconciling her duty to help and heal with the indifference and overt racism of some of her colleagues and...
Author | Catherine Asaro |
ISBN | 0812568834 |
Here are a few reasons why it may have won the Nebula:
* The entire novel is an allegory for quantum scattering theory. This is a clever and unexpected device.
* The series brings back the old "space opera" style of science fiction. (Think "Star Wars.")
* The technology described...
Joshua Kampa, the illegitimate son of a mute Spanish whore and a black serviceman, has always dreamed of Africa. But his dreams are of an Africa far in the past and are so vivid and in such hallucinatory detail that he is able to question the understanding of eminent palaeontologists. As a result, Joshua...
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...