On Wings of Song

Author

George Turner

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	Kate Wilhelm
ISBN	0671436848

Juniper Time is a 1st-rate sf novel. Kate Wilhelm has done her usual excellent job of weaving an intricate plot & sympathetically portraying believable & complex characters in settings that are described with force & clarity. This '79 novel is set in the not-too-distant future, when...

Author	Kingsley Amis
ISBN	0881844322

In Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history it is 1976 but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass (Mozart’s...

Author	Charles L. Harness
ISBN	0450029964

The Paradox Men is a science-fiction classic of its kind - a full-blooded adventure story of derring-do and distressed damsels, set after the Third Great War when North and South America are united into one country: Imperial America. A slave state run by a small noble elite who flaunt their wealth by...

Author	Bob Shaw
ISBN	0575070986

[He] was a man who had looked on many worlds in his lifetime, yet his face was the face of a man in shock.

You’ll be forgiven if Orbitsville reminds you a lot of Ringworld. Both deal with megastructures around a star. Around a star, just in case you missed that part; these things are huge. Where...

Author	Robert Sheckley
ISBN	0575041226

Tomorrow... and the day after. Citizens worship the Almighty Machine. Passion is a beatnik, love the new frontier. Both God and Satan have been driven underground. The insane are treated by making their delusions real. Jail is a place to break into. Government is lost in the mapless Octagon. And science...

Author	Norman Spinrad
ISBN	1585675857

With over a hundred million viewers, Jack Barron is a media star of the highest celebrity—think Jerry Springer crossed with Ted Koppel—and his call-in talk show is the perfect platform for reform. But every man has his price, and when a cryogenics millionaire makes Jack an offer he can't refuse—immortality—anything...

Author	Philip José Farmer
ISBN	1585677159

It is capable of alaraf drive: instantaneous travel between two points of space. Three of these special ships were built to explore and make contact with the many sentient races inhabiting the universe. Suddenly, one of the ships mysteriously disappears. And then it is discovered that an unidentifiable...

Author	Wilson Tucker
ISBN	0020298951

‘Chaney fitted two keys into the twin locks and shoved. A bell rang somewhere behind him. The operations door rolled easily on rolamite tracks. He stepped outside into the chill of the future…’

The first real test of the Time Displacement Vehicle – and Chaney still uncertain why he...

Author

Ian Watson

Not really science-fiction, more linguistics-fiction - if you're a linguist who is the least bit interested in SF, this is a must, whether or not it happens to make sense. Super-intelligent aliens arrive on Earth in a giant spaceship. Their mission is find visitors from another dimension ("The Change...

Author	Algis Budrys
ISBN	0425038122

Cover Artist: Don Brautigam

The eponymous protagonist, Laurent Michaelmas, is an ex-hacker who had, early in the computer era, left back doors in many key pieces of software which run vital government & commercial computers. As a result, by the turn of the millennium, he's become one...

Author	John Calvin Batchelor
ISBN	0805037861

It was... a difficult birth.

John Calvin Batchelor's The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica begins in Stockholm, Sweden—not quite as far away from Antarctica as one can get while still remaining on planet Earth, but almost. Published in 1983, this discursive and oblique novel's...

Author

Robert Silverberg

In a not-too-distant future, the assassination of an all-powerful New York City Mayor has plunged the five boroughs back into a dangerous cesspool of crime, drugs, and prostitution. Professional prognosticator Lew Nichols joins the campaign team of a fast-rising politico running for the city's...

Author	Tom Reamy
ISBN	0809533081

"It was a time of pause, a time between planting and harvest when the air was heavy, humming with its own slow warm music." So begins an extraordinary fantasy of the rural Midwest by a winner of the John W. Campbell, Jr., Award for best young science fiction writer. One summer day in the 1920s, Haverstock's...

Author

Edgar Pangborn

Davy is set in the far future of our world, in the fourth century after the collapse of what we describe as the twentieth-century civilisation. In a land turned upside-down and backwards by the results of scientific unwisdom, Davy and his fellow Ramblers are carefree outcasts, whose bawdy, joyous adventures...

Author	Charles Sheffield
ISBN	0671721410

So this follows the life of a man from birth to his end. If you like Job, which I did, then this makes for a compelling read. The world building is perhaps the best dystopian can offer. The world feels chillingly real and possible to me. The situations are not generic but layered and nuanced and help you to...

Author	Frederik Pohl
ISBN	0671460471

Frederik Pohl, one of the most honored science fiction writers of our time, gives us an extraordinary vision of a New York yet to come - from the wounded, struggling behemoth of tomorrow to the domed, atmospherically controlled megalopolis of the twenty-first century. In Pohl's prophetic novel, a...

Author	Barry N. Malzberg
ISBN	0881845515

MYSTERY IN SPACE!



a mystery in space of How Did the Captain of the Venusian Expedition Die? is not the mystery in space the mystery in space is the mystery of the inner space the mystery of the confined madman and hopeful author and failed husband and tragic victim and master...

Author	Michael Bishop
ISBN	0553569430

For seventeen-year-old Danny Boles, a 5'5" shortstop out of Tenkiller, Oklahoma, the summer of 1943 would be a season to remember. The country's at war, and professional baseball needs able-bodied men. Danny's headed for Highbridge, Georgia - home of the Goober Pride peanut butter factory and the...

Author	Richard Cowper
ISBN	0708881955

On the Eve of the Fourth Millennium a slowly-building civilization, struggling out of the rubble of the Drowning, was crushed beneath the sceptor of a powerful and repressive Church. But on the Eve of the Fourth Millennium the sound of a magical pipe was heard, and the air was filled with songs of freedom...

Author	John Brunner
ISBN	0575070528

Matthew Flamen, the last of the networks' spoolpigeons, is desperate for a big story. He needs it to keep his audience and his job. And there is no shortage of possibilities: the Gottschalk cartel is fomenting trouble among the knees in order to sell their latest armaments to the blanks; which ties in...

Author	R.A. Lafferty
ISBN	0441653030

The golden planet of Astrobe, made in the image of Utopia, now faced a crisis which could destroy it forever; & yet, no one could understand it:
In a world where wealth & comfort were free to everyone, why did so many desert the golden cities for the slums of Cathead & the Barrio? Why did...