Odd John
10 best books like Odd John (Olaf Stapledon): Drowning Towers, Rogue Moon, Greybeard, Venus Plus X, R.U.R. & War with the Newts, Emphyrio, Life During Wartime, Dark Benediction, Unquenchable Fire, Downward to the Earth
Francis Conway is Swill—one of the millions in the year 2041 who must subsist on the inadequate charities of the state. Life, already difficult, is rapidly becoming impossible for Francis and others like him, as government corruption, official blindness and nature have conspired to turn Swill...
| 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 | Brian W. Aldiss |
| ISBN | 0755100638 |
A quote from The Twinkling of an Eye, Brian Aldiss' autobiography:
P D James, ordinarily a bestselling middle-class thriller writer, set The Children of Men in the future. The novel was published in 1992. I began to worry about her novel when readers wrote to me, pointing out many similarities...
| Author | Theodore Sturgeon |
| ISBN | 0375703748 |
Charlie Johns has been snatched from his home on 61 North 34th Street and delivered to the strange future world of Ledom. Here, violence is a vague and improbable notion. Technology has triumphed over hunger, overpopulation, pollution, even time and space. But there is a change Charlie finds even more...
| Author | Karel Čapek |
| ISBN | 0575099453 |
Two dystopian satires from one of the most distinguished writers of 20th-century European science fiction. R.U.R. is the work that first introduced the word 'robot' into popular usage.
Written against the background of the rise of Nazism, War With the Newts concerns the discovery in the South...
| 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 | 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 | Rachel Pollack |
| ISBN | 0879515309 |
It's uncomfortable to be chosen for Great Things. A lot of fantasists admit that, but Pollack's Jennie Mazdan shows us just how uncomfortable it can be. This is suburban fantasy, reminiscent of Philip K. Dick's suburban SF, and the protagonist is a nice suburban middle-class person who, in a recognizable...
| Author | Robert Silverberg |
| ISBN | 0451044975 |
Who knoweth the spirit of men that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth? -Ecclesiastes 3:21
Okay, they did resemble elephants, it can't be denied. That led many people to underestimate the Nildoror and their obviously more fearsome commensals, the Sulidoror.
But...
| 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...
| Author | Christopher Priest |
| ISBN | 0684816148 |
Posted at Heradas
I genuinely can't decide if I liked this or not. I certainly enjoyed reading it, but doing so was somewhat like losing my mind. I also have a suspicion that Priest crafted the novel precisely to elicit this effect on the reader, which makes me respect him even more in an odd way....
| Author | William Tenn |
| ISBN | 0345295234 |
Giant, technologically superior aliens have conquered Earth, but humankind survives - even flourishes in a way. Men and women live like mice in burrows in the massive walls of the huge homes of the aliens, scurrying about under their feet, stealing from them. A complex social and religious order has...
| Author | Eric Frank Russell |
| ISBN | 0575070951 |
The war has raged for nearly a year and Earth desperately needs an edge to overcome the Sirian Empire's huge advantage in personnel and equipment. That's where James Mowry comes in. Intensively trained, his appearance surgically altered, Mowry secretly lands on one of the Empire's planets. His mission:...
| Author | Colin Greenland |
| ISBN | 0380763958 |
A fast-moving space adventure featuring mysterious aliens, a journey to a de-populated planet, a mad run from space cops, a ship captain in trouble, and her AI (Artificially Intelligent) companion/ship's computer. Winner of both the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel of the year...
| Author | M.J. Engh |
| ISBN | 0312879105 |
Arslan is a young Asian general who conquers the world in a week without firing a shot and shortly thereafter sets up his headquarters in a small town in Illinois.
A masterpiece of political science fiction and a book to challenge such works as Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed, Arslan is a...
| Author | Cecelia Holland |
| ISBN | 0575071427 |
2000 years in the future, runaway pollution has made the Earth uninhabitable except in giant biodomes. The society is an anarchy, with disputes mediated through the Machiavellian Committee for the Revolution. Mars, Venus and the Moon support flourishing colonies of various political stripes....
| Author | Michael Bishop |
| ISBN | 0575028335 |
The Hugo- & Nebula-nominated novella “Death & Designation Among the Asadi” (Worlds of If, '73) forms the 1st part of Transfigurations, a novel published in 1979 by Berkley Putnam. The story continues when the daughter of the anthropologist who studied the Asadi, a hominid-like race...
| Author | D.G. Compton |
| ISBN | 0575118318 |
A forgotten SF classic that exposed the pitfalls of voyeuristic entertainment decades before the reality show craze.
A few years in the future, medical science has advanced to the point where it is practically unheard of for people to die of any cause except old age. The few exceptions provide...
| Author | T.J. Bass |
| ISBN | 0345246357 |
A novel of dystopian future in the tradition of SOYLENT GREEN and H.G. Wells' THE TIME MACHINE, with an introduction by Ken MacLeod. This is the second printing, with cover artists The Brothers Hildebrandt.
Tinker was a good citizen of the Hive - a model worker. But when he was allowed sexual...
| Author | John Crowley |
| ISBN | 0425031632 |
Swordplay, sorcery, strange visitations, unspoken secrets, and unsuspected truths are the components of this fantastical tale set in a mythical world -- a world supported by a huge pillar which is poised in the center of the vast an mysterious Deep. In this world the Protectors own the land and are constantly...
| Author | Frank Herbert |
| ISBN | 0765317729 |
America is a police state, and it is about to be threatened by the most hellish enemy in the world: insects.
When the Agency discovered that Dr. Hellstrom's Project 40 was a cover for a secret laboratory, a special team of agents was immediately dispatched to discover its true purpose and its...
| 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...
