The Godwhale
10 best books like The Godwhale (T.J. Bass): Drowning Towers, Crescent City Rhapsody, The Devil Is Dead, Juniper Time, The Year of the Quiet Sun, The Embedding, Blind Voices, The Computer Connection, To Crush the Moon, The Exile Waiting
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 | Kathleen Ann Goonan |
| ISBN | 1857988884 |
What would it feel like to live through a biological revolution? Many science fiction writers chronicling a vast technological shift lose sight of the people who would have to deal with it. Not so Kathleen Ann Goonan, whose Crescent City Rhapsody is the third of her Nanotech Cycle novels. Each of her...
| Author | R.A. Lafferty |
| ISBN | 1880448955 |
This tells of an astonishing band of adventurers seeking the Devil himself. It is a tale of demons and changelings, monsters and mermaids--and of how it is not always serious to die, the first time it happens.
The Devil is Dead Trilogy:
-Archipelago ('79): 1st book of trilogy. Manuscript Press,...
| 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 | 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...
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 | 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 | Alfred Bester |
| ISBN | 0743487133 |
A band of immortals recruit a new member, the brilliant Cherokee physicist Sequoya Guess. Dr. Guess, with the group's help, gains control of Extro, the super-computer that controls all mechanical activity on Earth. They plan to rid Earth of political repression and to further Guess's researches-which...
In the conclusion to this epic interstellar adventure by Nebula Award nominee Wil McCarthy, humanity stands at a crossroads as the heroes who fashioned a man-made heaven must rescue their descendants from eternal damnation….
TO CRUSH THE MOON
Once the Queendom of Sol was a glowing...
| Author | Vonda N. McIntyre |
| ISBN | 0575021896 |
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,...
| Author | John Kessel |
| ISBN | 0312931786 |
George Eberhart is dead. Or was. The newsnet he works for has illegally revived him. But he finds himself examining the sensationalist stories he has been reporting on - for evidence that there are Aliens among us.
Lucky Eberhart, George's wife, loses her job for her role in reviving him, and finds...
| Author | John Barnes |
| ISBN | 0812532384 |
Melpomene Murray's concerns are those of any teenager: homework, friends, dates. But Melpomene lives on the Flying Dutchman, an asteroid colony located thousands of miles from an Earth almost destroyed by disease, war, and pollution. She and her spaceborn classmates are humanity's last hope, and...
| 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 | Poul Anderson |
| ISBN | 0451152999 |
THE SECRET OF THE SIGMAN
Skip Wayburn, artist drifter, sigaroon, gulped down his food with nothing on his mind but a long evening of lovemaking.
Far above him, the first emissary from interstellar space continued to orbit the globe. For three years it had been there, and still there...
| Author | Lewis Shiner |
| ISBN | 0553354574 |
Years ago, Eddie Yates disappeared into the rainforests of the Yucatan, a burned-out visionary in search of cosmic truth. A mysterious photo sends Lindsey, his ex-wife, on a quest to bring him back and puts her on a collision course with Eddie's brother Thomas, whose desire for her has never faded. Their...
| Author | Gregory Benford |
| ISBN | 0553290053 |
A gripping, masterfully written adventure set against the violent beauty of a planet in the throes of cataclysmic transformation, Against Infinity is Gregory Benford's timeless portrait of a young man's coming of age.On the poisonous, icy surface of Ganymede, a man and a boy are on a deadly hunt. Their...
| Author | Paul Park |
| ISBN | 0312862857 |
I can't tell if I liked this or not.
It truly makes us humans look the most inhumane than any other sci-fi book I've ever read.
Simon, a kind of attache to the gov't, is sent to a party in place of his boss. Katharine is an altered human, a native to the planet who has taken drugs and surgery...
| Author | Joanna Russ |
| ISBN | 0425041352 |
His name was Jai Vedh; he was an Earthman. But his ship had blown up on a star voyage and now he was a castaway on an uncharted Earth-like planet.
There were people here: humans, apparently an Earth colony that had lost contact with the home world centuries before. They had developed telepathy,...
| Author | Kevin J. Anderson |
| ISBN | 0553299212 |
Nebula Award Nominee. The crew of Moonbase Columbus make an amazing discovery on the far side of the Moon a massive alien structure is erecting itself, built up atom by atom by living machines, microscopically small, intelligent, and unstoppable, consuming everything they touch. The mysterious...
| Author | George Alec Effinger |
| ISBN | 0759225923 |
Doctor, watch out! As Dore stood by, he saw the Doctor backing slowly into the corner where he would meet his fate. Initially defending himself with a torch, the Doctor searched frantically for a new method of defense. The crimson mass is lunging forward using long, tentacle-like attachments: what...
| Author | A.A. Attanasio |
| ISBN | 0553254065 |
A young man's odyssey of self discovery in a world eerily alien, yet hauntingly familiar. Set thirteen centuries in the future, A. A. Attanasio meticulously creates a brilliantly realized Earth, rich in detail and filled with beings brought to life with intense energy. In this strange and beautiful...
| Author | Norman Spinrad |
| ISBN | 0312868251 |
In the Second Starfaring Age, humans travel the universe via a technology they barely understand, propelled by a space drive consisting of mysteriously complex mechanisms and, symbiotically linked to it, a living woman, the Void Pilot. Pilots are rare, and the ability to be a Pilot also entails physical...
