The Listeners
10 best books like The Listeners (James E. Gunn): New Maps Of Hell: A Survey Of Science Fiction, What Mad Universe, Night Walk, Dark Universe, The Paradox Men, The Stochastic Man, Floating Worlds, Fury, They Walked Like Men, Search the Sky
| Author | Kingsley Amis |
| ISBN | 0405063210 |
I could barely put down this wonderful essay by the late Kingsley Amis, who turns out to have had exactly the same prejudices about science-fiction as I do. From the identity of the first known SF story (Plato's Critias, what else?), glancing at The Tempest with its astonishingly durable mad-scientist-and-beautiful-daughter...
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 | Bob Shaw |
| ISBN | 0575039876 |
For 'refusing to co-operate' the Emm Luther Special Police took out Earth agent Sam Tallon's eyes and imprisoned him on a dark and eerie swamp from which nobody ever escaped.
But then Tallon invented a way of seeing - ludicrous, agonizing, yet still a way to make escape possible. He 'saw' through...
| Author | Daniel F. Galouye |
| ISBN | 0575071370 |
The above rating graphic provides a pretty good assessment of my opinion of the story...which stands to reason in a "DUH, thank you Col. Obvious" sorta way since I created it. Well, at the risk of raining down obvious all over you, let me add that this is certainly a book on which I would recommend...
| 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...
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 | Cecelia Holland |
| ISBN | 0575071427 |
2000 years in the future, runaway pollution has made the Earth uninhabitable except in giant biodomes. The society is an anarchy, with disputes mediated through the Machiavellian Committee for the Revolution. Mars, Venus and the Moon support flourishing colonies of various political stripes....
| 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...
| Author | Clifford D. Simak |
| ISBN | 0532959302 |
Money was worthless; it had no value! It couldn't buy housing, clothing, or food. Someone with enormous quantities of cash was buying houses and tearing them down, buying stores and closing them.
Perhaps a few people could have stopped the transactions before it was too late. They could have...
| Author | Frederik Pohl |
| ISBN | 0345016602 |
Quite a decent piece of SF satire, set (roughly) in the same universe as
The Marching Morons
. I liked the planet with the gerontocracy. The hero gets to participate in an election: they wheel out the candidates, all of whom are over 100 and with tubes coming out of their noses. With great fanfare of trumpets,...
| Author | Arthur C. Clarke |
| ISBN | 1884214371 |
A spaceship crew from an advanced alien civilization notices that Earth faces imminent destruction as its sun begins to explode. With time rapidly ticking down, the crew desperately searches a now-desolate planet for any possible human survivors.
This is a dramatisation of the very first...
| Author | Wilson Tucker |
| ISBN | 0340250879 |
THE WRONG SIDE OF THE RIVER
Corporal Russell Gary - operator-angle man-black marketeer, junior grade-liberator of anything loose - veteran of Salerno and Normandy - a man who knew how to live by his wits and a gun.
Celebrating ten years in khaki, Gary went on a monumental binge...
While...
Contents:
8 · Introduction · Martin H. Greenberg · in
11 · I, Robot [Adam Link] · Eando Binder · ss Amazing Jan ’39
25 · The Strange Flight of Richard Clayton · Robert Bloch · ss Amazing Mar ’39
35 · Trouble with Water · Horace L. Gold · ss Unknown Mar ’39
56 · Cloak...
| Author | John Sladek |
| ISBN | 0575071168 |
Wompler's Walking Babies once put Millford, Utah, on the map. But they aren't selling like they used to. In fact, they aren't selling at all and the only alternative to winding the company up is to tap the government for a research grant. And so Wompler Research Laboratories and Project 32 come into being....
In his 1955 collection entitled "Men, Martians and Machines," English sci-fi author Eric Frank Russell told, via one short story and three novellas, some of the adventures of a starship crew that strongly suggested nothing less than a proto-"Star Trek" ensemble. The collection featured visits to...
| Author | Jack Vance |
| ISBN | 0812500938 |
Vast, beautiful, untamed, Big Planet lay beyond the frontier of terrestrial law. Its inhabitants were eccentric misfits, descended from the original refugees from Earth.
Those that ran the showboats up and down the rivers knew that each port of call hid its own sinister threat. Apollon Zamp...
Final Blackout: A Futuristic War Novel
| Author | L. Ron Hubbard |
| ISBN | 1592120679 |
London 1975. As the great World War grinds to a halt a force more sinister than Hitler's Nazis has seized control of Europe and is systematically destroying every adversary -- except one.In the heart of France a crack unit of British soldiers survive, overcoming all opposition under the leadership...
| Author | Jack Williamson |
| ISBN | 0425032949 |
It was the greatest empire of them all, spanning light-years, gathering in the stars with a golden net. World after world - start after star - all were snared together in a web of shimmering, golden tracery. Each gleaming strand was a tube, the communications that turned the harsh, metallic planet of...
| Author | Theodore Sturgeon |
| ISBN | 0375703721 |
Up until one minute ago, Gurlick was merely a specimen of homo sapiens, and a substandard specimen at that. But now this craven, seething, barely literate drunk has ingested a spore that travelled light years before touching down on our planet. A spore that has in turn ingested Gurlick - turned him into...
The Stone That Never Came Down
| Author | John Brunner |
| ISBN | 0385037163 |
Europe in the 21st Century is a stricken continent. Cities crumble with neglect. Governments topple to military coups. But one man may have the answer. It is a viral drug that drastically alters the human mind, a cure for depression, unemployment, war, madness, national hatreds, prejudice, crime...
| Author | Philip José Farmer |
| ISBN | 0451075773 |
Farmer's jungle adventure novel (he wrote a couple toying with classics like Tarzan & Doc Savage) has a multimillionaire madman create an isolated jungle valley as a laboratory for trying to raise a real-life Tarzan. In Ras Tyger, he's had partial success, using hired talet to impersonate ape-parents....
