The Jagged Orbit
10 best books like The Jagged Orbit (John Brunner): Crescent City Rhapsody, Helliconia Winter, The Ragged Astronauts, Juniper Time, The Year of the Quiet Sun, The Embedding, Tower of Glass, The Computer Connection, Eternity's End, The Exile Waiting
| 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 | Brian W. Aldiss |
| ISBN | 0743445163 |
This is the final volume of the Helliconia Trilogy -- a monumental saga that goes beyond anything yet created by this master among today's imaginative writers. The centuries-long winter of the Great Year on Helliconia is upon us, and the Oligarch is taking harsh measures to ensure the survival of the...
| Author | Bob Shaw |
| ISBN | 0708882277 |
Land and Overland - twin worlds a few thousand miles apart. On Land, humanity faces a threat to its very survival - an airborne species, the ptertha, has declared war on humankind, and is actively hunting for victims. The only hope lies in migration. Through space to Overland. By balloon. The Ragged Astronauts...
| 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 | Robert Silverberg |
| ISBN | 0575070978 |
Simeon Krug has a vision--and the vast wealth necessary to turn dream into reality. What he wishes is to communicate with the stars, to answer signals from deep space. The colossal tower he's constructing for this purpose soars above the Arctic tundra, and the seemingly perfect androids building it...
| 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...
| Author | Jeffrey A. Carver |
| ISBN | 0812534433 |
Jeffrey A. Carver, author of The Infinity Link and The Rapture Effect, returns with a new science fiction epic set against a sweeping backdrop of interstellar war, space piracy, and star-spanning conspiracy.After seven years of captivity at the hands of interstellar pirates, Star Rigger Renwald...
| 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,...
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 | 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 | 0671558994 |
Ten years ago the world's governments collapsed, and now the corporations are in control. Houston's Pulsystems has sent an expedition to the lost Martian colony of Frontera to search for survivors. Reese, aging hero of the US space program, knows better. The colonists are not only alive, they have...
| 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...
‘In the early twenty-first century, a team of scientists has done the impossible – ripped apart the fabric of space-time and created a brand new universe… one million-millionth the size of our own. Now they’re going to see where it takes them.
PICOVERSE
A big bang of and adventure’
Blurb...
| 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 | 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 | 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...
