The Pirates of Ersatz
10 best books like The Pirates of Ersatz (Murray Leinster): Venus Plus X, The Ragged Astronauts, Dark Universe, The Year of the Quiet Sun, Blind Voices, Star Light, Thorns, Who?, Davy, Courtship Rite
| 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...
| 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 | 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 | 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...
| 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 | Hal Clement |
| ISBN | 0345273583 |
Dhrawn was a giant rockball, more than 3,000 times the mass of Earth. Perhaps a planet, perhaps a nearly dead star, these 17 billion square miles of mystery cried out for investigation. But its corrosive atmosphere and crushing gravity assured that no human would ever set foot on its surface.
Those...
| Author | Robert Silverberg |
| ISBN | 0853911320 |
Duncan Chalk is a monstrous media mogul with a vast appetite for other people's pain. He feeds off it, and carefully nurtures it in order to feed it to the public. It is inevitable that Chalk should home in on Minner Burris, a space traveller whose body was taken apart by alien surgeons and then put back together...
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...
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 | Donald Kingsbury |
| ISBN | 0671460897 |
A vast alien landscape, a human culture based on our own, yet evolved in strange ways by the forces of an inimical nature provide a panoramic backdrop for the romantic adventures of a large cast of memorable & attractive characters.
Courtship Rite is a sf novel by American writer Donald Kingsbury,...
| Author | Robert Sheckley |
| ISBN | 0812519310 |
First published in 1959 as a startling, revolutionary novel of the future, then pushed to new cinematic limits as the feature film adaptation FREEJACK in 1992, Robert Sheckley's unsettling vision of Tomorrow now arrives in ebook format for the 21st century.
Thomas Blaine awoke in a white...
| 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 | 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 | Clifford D. Simak |
| ISBN | 0283988819 |
The return of Simak's favorite themes--including esp, robots & religion--in a thoughtful, gentle, delightfully original treatment. On the remote planet End of Nothing, a colony of advanced robots has established project Vatican-17: the building of an infallible computerized pope whose...
| Author | E.E. "Doc" Smith |
| ISBN | 0586039465 |
Dick Seaton and Marc DuQuesne are the deadliest enemies in the Universe--their feud has blazed among the stars and changed the history of a thousand planets. But now a threat from outside the Galaxy drives them into a dangerous alliance as hordes of strange races drive to a collision with Mankind!
Seaton...
| Author | Thomas Burnett Swann |
| ISBN | 0583123945 |
Lost Monsters
Thea watched their torch-bearing captors recede into the distance and leave them to the cave's darkness. Her brother Icarus whispered "forgive me - I wanted to come to the Country of the Beasts, not to the Cave of the Minotaur".
Then they heard the soft padding of feet...
| 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...
Chester Anderson’s The Butterfly Kid is listed as the number one weirdest science fiction novel ever written. With the likes of such bizarre sf whoppers as Dr. Bloodmoney, Ubic, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer, A Voyage to Arcturus, Panda...
| Author | Randall Garrett |
| ISBN | 0441816975 |
Storyline: 2/5
Characters: 2/5
Writing Style: 3/5
World: 3/5
Though originally serialized in a 1960s-era science fiction magazine, this was a novel rather than a short story collection. I thought that Garrett had managed the magazine novella handily, and I was unsure whether...
| Author | Mark Phillips |
| ISBN | 1434401561 |
"Mark Phillips" was the pseudonym of two well-known science fiction writers: Randall Garrett and Laurence M. Janifer. Their joint pen-name, derived from their middle names (Philip and Mark), was coined soon after their original meeting, at a science-fiction convention. Both men were drunk at the...
| Author | Poul Anderson |
| ISBN | 0671653393 |
The time is the 23rd century, and ships are crawling outward from Earth into the interstellar depths. It will take them centuries to reach even the nearest stars - but once they do, future travel will be instantaneous, because the ships carry matter transmitters that are not subject to the limitations...
Once in a generation, a man is born with a heightened sense of empathy. Brion Brandd used this gift to win the Twenties, an annual physical and mental competition among the best and smartest people on Anvhar. But scarcely able to enjoy his victory, Brandd is swept off to the hellish planet Dis where he must...
| Author | Marion Zimmer Bradley |
| ISBN | 9997506863 |
Lew Alton was returning to Darkover - returning at the command of men who had once been all too glad to see him leave. For Lew, a Darkovan on his father's side, and a Terran on his mother's, had always walked between two worlds, accused by each of belonging to the other, and trusted by neither. Yet Lew alone...
