The Ragged Astronauts
10 best books like The Ragged Astronauts (Bob Shaw): A Secret History, The Sky Road, Unquenchable Fire, Helliconia Winter, Felaheen, On Wings of Song, The Year of the Quiet Sun, Blind Voices, Star Light, Take Back Plenty
| Author | Mary Gentle |
| ISBN | 0380788691 |
There Is More Than One History Of The World...
In the mid-fifteenth century there was Burgundy, the jewel of Europe - opulant and powerful, the undisputed center of an uncivilized world.
In an epoch of war and madness there was Ash. A girl born in mud and dung, she slew her first men while...
| Author | Ken MacLeod |
| ISBN | 0812577590 |
Centuries after the catastrophic Deliverance, humanity is again reaching into space. And Clovis, a young scholar working in the spaceship-construction yard, could make the difference between success and failure. For his mysterious new lover, Merrial, has seduced him into the idea of extrapolating...
| Author | Rachel Pollack |
| ISBN | 0879515309 |
It's uncomfortable to be chosen for Great Things. A lot of fantasists admit that, but Pollack's Jennie Mazdan shows us just how uncomfortable it can be. This is suburban fantasy, reminiscent of Philip K. Dick's suburban SF, and the protagonist is a nice suburban middle-class person who, in a recognizable...
| 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 | Jon Courtenay Grimwood |
| ISBN | 0553383787 |
In a world where secrets kill, an ex-cop discovers he's got the biggest secret of all. . . .
Set in a 21st-century Ottoman Empire, Jon Courtenay Grimwood's acclaimed Arabesk series is a noir action-thriller with an exotic twist. Here an ex-cop with nothing to lose finds himself on the trail of...
| Author | Thomas M. Disch |
| ISBN | 0881844438 |
The human society is in the terrible decline and On Wings of Song is a kind of cultural dystopia… Thomas M. Disch writes with so many realistic details that it starts appearing that the dystopia is now…
“They say we’re very conformist, don’t they?”
“Yes, that’s certainly one...
| 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 | Colin Greenland |
| ISBN | 0380763958 |
A fast-moving space adventure featuring mysterious aliens, a journey to a de-populated planet, a mad run from space cops, a ship captain in trouble, and her AI (Artificially Intelligent) companion/ship's computer. Winner of both the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel of the year...
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 | Michael Bishop |
| ISBN | 0553569430 |
For seventeen-year-old Danny Boles, a 5'5" shortstop out of Tenkiller, Oklahoma, the summer of 1943 would be a season to remember. The country's at war, and professional baseball needs able-bodied men. Danny's headed for Highbridge, Georgia - home of the Goober Pride peanut butter factory and the...
| Author | John Barnes |
| ISBN | 0812551613 |
Welcome to the Thousand Cultures--in which humanity's hundreds of settled worlds are finally coming back together, via the recently invented technology of instantaneous travel. And in which Giraut and Margaret work as professional diplomats, helping to finesse the stresses and strains of so much...
| Author | Christopher Priest |
| ISBN | 0684816326 |
British-born Teresa Simons returns to England after the death of her husband, an FBI agent, who was killed by an out-of-control gunman while on assignment in Texas. A shocking coincidence has drawn her to the run-down south coast town of Bulverton, where a gunman's massacre has haunting similarities...
Something has gone very seriously wrong with Tik-Tok's "asimov circuits." They should keep him on the straight and narrow, following Asimov's first law of robotics: A robot shall not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm. But, that's not what's happening. Although...
| Author | John Brunner |
| ISBN | 0575070528 |
Matthew Flamen, the last of the networks' spoolpigeons, is desperate for a big story. He needs it to keep his audience and his job. And there is no shortage of possibilities: the Gottschalk cartel is fomenting trouble among the knees in order to sell their latest armaments to the blanks; which ties in...
| Author | Paul J. McAuley |
| ISBN | 0380778203 |
The Renaissance has both blessed and cursed the great Florentine Republic - ushering in a glorious new age of artistic and scientific achievement...while drowning the powerful Mediterranean city/state in polluted rain and the filthy, tainted air that spews from its foundries and manufactories....
| 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...
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 | Michael Swanwick |
| ISBN | 0380974444 |
The acclaimed novels of award-winning author Michael Swanwick have been praised for their "heady mix of wild ideas and images" (San Francisco Chronicle) and "extraordinary richness and scope" (Kirkus Reviews). But nothing that has come before can quite compare to this, Swanwick's finest creation...
| Author | Sean McMullen |
| ISBN | 0765344572 |
The great Calculor of Libris was forced to watch as Overmayor Zarvora had four of its components lined up against a wall and shot for negligence. Thereafter, its calculations were free from errors, and that was just as well-for only this strangest of calculating machines and its two thousand enslaved...
