The Big Time

10 best books like The Big Time (Fritz Leiber): Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, Stations of the Tide, The Snow Queen, Cyteen, Double Star, This Immortal, The Mule: From Foundation And Empire, A Case of Conscience, They'd Rather Be Right, Venus Plus X

AuthorKate Wilhelm
ISBN0060146540
David Sumner has a problem: the world as he knows it is about to end. what's a brilliant young man and his equally brilliant family to do? why, bring back members of that extended family, store supplies, circle the wagons, and build a lab which will eventually help the Sumner family to repopulate the...
AuthorMichael Swanwick
ISBN0380817616
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...
AuthorJoan D. Vinge
ISBN0446676640
This reissue of a modern classic of science fiction, the Hugo and Locus Award-winning and Nebula-nominated The Snow Queen, marks the first time the book has been reprinted in fifteen years.The imperious Winter colonists have ruled the planet Tiamat for 150 years, deriving wealth from the slaughter...
AuthorC.J. Cherryh
ISBN0446671274
A brilliant young scientist rises to power on Cyteen, haunted by the knowledge that her predecessor and genetic duplicate died at the hands of one of her trusted advisors. Murder, politics, and genetic manipulation provide the framework for the latest Union-Alliance novel by the author of Downbelow...
AuthorRobert A. Heinlein
ISBN0345330137
One minute, down and out actor Lorenzo Smythe was — as usual — in a bar, drinking away his troubles as he watched his career go down the tubes. Then a space pilot bought him a drink, and the next thing Smythe knew, he was shanghaied to Mars.

Suddenly he found himself agreeing to the most difficult...
AuthorRoger Zelazny
ISBN0671698486
Conrad Nomikos has a long, rich personal history that he'd rather not talk about. And, as Arts Commissioner, he's been given a job he'd rather not do. Escorting an alien grandee on a guided tour of the shattered remains of Earth is not something he relishes- especially when it is apparent that this places...
AuthorIsaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov was a Russian-born, American author, a professor of biochemistry, and a highly successful writer, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books.

Professor Asimov is generally considered one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written...
AuthorJames Blish
ISBN0345438353
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...
AuthorMark Clifton
ISBN0898651654
Bossy was right. Always. Invariably. She was limited only in that she had to have facts -- not assumptions -- with which to work. Given those facts, her conclusions and predictions were inevitably correct.

And that made Bossy a 'ticking bomb.'

Bossy had been designed as a servomechanism...
AuthorTheodore Sturgeon
ISBN0375703748
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...
AuthorSamuel R. Delany
ISBN0819563366
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....
AuthorPat Murphy
ISBN0312854064
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...
AuthorElizabeth Ann Scarborough
ISBN0553282522
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...
AuthorCatherine Asaro
ISBN0812568834
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...
AuthorMichael Bishop
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...
AuthorCharles L. Harness
ISBN0450029964
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...
AuthorWilson Tucker
ISBN0020298951
‘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...
AuthorRobert 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...
AuthorJames E. Gunn
For fifty years Project scientists had listened from their backwater Puerto Rican outpost for some sign of other intelligent life in the universe. In 2025, a Message from Capella was received! And suddenly, Robert MacDonald, Project Director, faced one of mankind's greatest challenges. He had to...
AuthorVonda N. McIntyre
ISBN0575021896
The time is the distant future. Earth has been rendered uninhabitable for much of the year by terrible storms during which its only city, Center, constructed around a natural cave system, is sealed from the outside.

Mischa, a young thief whose capabilities are enhanced by hereditary mutation,...
AuthorAlgis Budrys
DAMMIT FELLOW SF FANS...how does Algis Budrys fly so silently under your radar?

The more sublimely penetrating stories I read by this quiet magician, the greater my bowel irritation that he isn't given his propers as a maestro of thoughtful, intelligent SF like this:

 
This...
AuthorKeith Laumer
ISBN0812543793
When Brion Bayard was kidnapped and brought to the alternate world where Earth's history took a different turn, it was not a pleasant experience. It was, however, a startling experience. Here was a world that was just like the Earth he was taken from--with just a few subtle changes. On top of all this,...
AuthorNorman Spinrad
ISBN0765301555
This is the most ragingly 1960s book I've ever read that wasn't produced by '72. Somehow, it took Spinrad till the mid-'80s to sum it ALL up in the form of an idealized coming-of-age-in-space story set in a culture with a pronounced "journeyman" phase that's celebrated as the cornerstone of identity-building;...
AuthorFrederik Pohl
ISBN0671655582
Writing: 4
Story: 3
Satisfaction: 2

The Starchild Trilogy is very well written and the worldbuilding is immersive. The story lines are also interesting and well built out but unfortunately each leaves with an unsatisfying conclusion. The way that the story is told, it builds up this...
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