The High Crusade
10 best books like The High Crusade (Poul Anderson): Lest Darkness Fall, What Mad Universe, The Big Time, An Alien Heat, Venus Plus X, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, Shadrach in the Furnace, Doorways in the Sand, All My Sins Remembered, The Pirates of Ersatz
| Author | L. Sprague de Camp |
| ISBN | 0515608173 |
When am I? Padway asked himself after the lightning-flash knocked him down. He knew where he was--Rome. He was there to study archaeology, and even though the lightning had left him dazed, he could see the familiar Roman buildings. But the buildings looked newer and the crowds in the street were wearing...
Fredric Brown was a true ubermensch of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, and his short stories are still among the best ever written in the genre. I mean that. Best...Ever...Written.
What Mad Universe is one of only a handful of SF novels that he wrote, a tear-inducing shame given...
| Author | Fritz Leiber |
| ISBN | 0312890788 |
Have you ever worried about your memory, because it doesn't seem to recall exactly the same past from one day to the next? Have you ever thought that the whole universe might be a crazy, mixed-up dream? If you have, then you've had hints of the Change War.
It's been going on for a billion years and...
| Author | Michael Moorcock |
| ISBN | 0380017490 |
An alien named Yusharisp comes to Earth to warn its remaining inhabitants that the universe is coming to an end; his own planet has already disappeared, and the Earth is sure to follow. Earth's inhabitants are unfazed as they believe him to be yet another doomsayer; the End of the Earth has been predicted...
| 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...
The Paratime Police patrolled the vast number of alternate time dimensions. Their aim was to keep the existence of the alternative Earths a secret and prevent these Earths from mixing and destroying each other.
But the Time Police made mistakes, and they made a big one when a seemingly ordinary...
| Author | Robert Silverberg |
| ISBN | 0743458478 |
The year is 2012. The world lies ravaged by biological warfare, its population decimated by a ferocious genetically-transmitted disease known as the organ rot. And presiding over the ruins is a ninety-three-year-old tyrant, preserved in a state of youth by a series of organ transplants: the self-styled...
The most humorous – and arguably the finest – novel by the master of inventive science fiction.
Humanity is not alone in the cosmos. The aliens have given a precious relic to the people of Earth: star-stone. But the harmony of the galaxy is endangered when they discover that the star-stone...
| Author | Joe Haldeman |
| ISBN | 0575072814 |
Otto McGavin is peacefully idealistic by nature, an Anglo-Buddhist, who seeks employment with the Confederacion because he believes in its mission to protect human & nonhuman rights. The only problem is that the Confederacion needs him as one of its twelve Prime Operators for its secret service,...
Bron is the offspring of infamous space pirates but instead of following in the family footsteps he decides to become an electronic engineer. Unfortunately, every time he tries to get out, something pulls him back in. This is a tongue-in-cheek space adventure along the lines of the Stainless Steel...
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...
| Author | Henry Kuttner |
| ISBN | 0575071419 |
Classic SF from '47. It isn't bad and it has a solid plot thread and a very streamlined theme, from breaking off the yoke of immortals only to realize you are one, to founding a rebellion allowing all the people to earn their own immortality and a place in the sun. (On Venus, nonetheless.)
I don't...
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 | Clifford D. Simak |
| ISBN | 0413424200 |
Without setting foot on another planet, people like Shep Blaine were reaching out to the stars with their minds, telepathically contacting strange beings on other worlds. But even Blaine was unprepared for what happened when he communed with the soul of an utterly alien being light years from Earth....
| Author | John Brunner |
| ISBN | 0020302754 |
Gerald Howson didn't look powerful. His body was deformed at birth, leaving him with a face so ugly people didn't want to look at him, and crippled legs that would never let him be as other men. But his mind was one in a billion - gifted with the ability to send and receive thoughts more powerfully than any...
| Author | Eric Flint |
| ISBN | 1416555854 |
The planet Miran had sent a spaceship to rendezvous with the enormous vessel that was approaching their star system. The vessel’s design was odd—a multitude of separate globular habitats in a framework—and most of the alien team that entered one of the habitats were slaughtered by savage creatures...
| Author | Cordwainer Smith |
| ISBN | 0515039691 |
Storyline: 2/5
Characters: 2/5
Writing Style: 2/5
World: 3/5
Every now and then a little golden age science fiction found its way back into a genre that was on its way to abandoning it. Not that science fiction ever completely outgrew its pulp adolescence, but by 1964 it was becoming...
| Author | Jack Vance |
| ISBN | 0575071176 |
The objective of the mission from Earth: to stop the ruthless Barjarnum of Beaujolais from expanding his empire on the Big Planet...and prevent the world from falling under this tyrant's domination. Then sabotage forces the craft to crash land, and the survivors face an epic 40,000-mile trek across...
Escaping the religious tyranny of a 31st-century Earth by a fluke assignment to the planet Ozagen, linguist Hal Yarrow found that the worst of Earth had followed him - Pornsen, his personal Guardian Angel, vigilant for any evidence of sin or wrong thinking.
Conditioned by a lifetime of submission,...
| Author | A.E. van Vogt |
| ISBN | 0765300974 |
The classic novel of non-Aristotelian logic and the coming race of supermen
Science Fiction Grandmaster A. E. van Vogt was one of the giants of the 1940s, the Golden Age of classic SF. Of his masterpieces, The World of Null-A is his most famous and most influential. Published in 1949 it was the...
