The Sword of the Lictor
10 best books like The Sword of the Lictor (Gene Wolfe): Stations of the Tide, Mockingbird, Madouc, Death's Master, On Wings of Song, The Year of the Quiet Sun, The Embedding, Shadrach in the Furnace, A Storm of Wings, Blind Voices
| Author | Michael Swanwick |
| ISBN | 0380817616 |
This was some kind of amazing. The main character, who was never referred to as anything but Bureaucrat, was hardly my definition of a bureaucrat. He was part outcast, part superspy, part magician's apprentice, and part avenger. He wears so many hats during this superb little gem that I never slow down...
| Author | Sean Stewart |
| ISBN | 1931520097 |
Elena Beauchamp used magic the way other people used credit cards, and now that she's dead, her daughters Toni and Candy have a debt to pay. Set in modern-day Houston, Texas, this is a funny and moving novel of voodoo, pregnancy, and family ties. While Toni sorts out the mess that Elena left behind, she...
| Author | Jack Vance |
| ISBN | 0441505325 |
The World Fantasy Award-winning third volume of the Lyonesse trilogy brings attention to the faerie changeling Madouc. Where princess Suldrun once meekly endured the proprieties of Castle Haidion, Madouc defends herself with rotten fruit. Vexed, King Casmir arranges a contest to marry her off,...
| Author | Tanith Lee |
| ISBN | 0879974419 |
"The soul is a magician. Only living flesh hampers it."
-- from Death's MasterDeath's Master, winner of the August Derleth Award for Fantasy, is the second book of the stunning arabesque high fantasy series Tales from the Flat Earth, which, in the manner of the One Thousand and One Nights, portrays...
| 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...
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 | 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...
| Author | M. John Harrison |
| ISBN | 0722144423 |
IN THE WASTELANDS OF A FUTURE WORLD, THE PASTEL CITY STRUGGLES IN THE GRIP OF THE SIGN OF THE LOCUST...
Viriconium: The Pastel City was the last bastion of the civilized world where Queen Methvet Nian ruled supreme. Now she watched, helpless, as the Time of the Locust became a monstrous reality,...
| 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 | 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,...
| 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 | 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 | 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 | Michael Moorcock |
| ISBN | 0060130024 |
In which we find Jherek Carnelian, one of the small population of hedonistic immortals remaining on earth at the end of time, still obsessively in love with Mrs. Amelia Underwood, a reluctant time-traveler from Victorian England. After narrowly escaping death in nineteenth-century London, Jherek...
| Author | Patricia A. McKillip |
| ISBN | 0283985828 |
A riddle is a tale so familiar you no longer see it; it's simply there, like the air you breathe, the ancient names of Kings echoing in the corners of your house, the sunlight in the corner of your eye; until one day you look at it and something shapeless, voiceless in you opens a third eye and sees it as you have...
| Author | Tim Powers |
| ISBN | 0812555198 |
A young woman possessed by a ghost has slain the Fisher King of the West, Scott Crane. Now, temporarily freed from that malevolent spirit, she seeks to restore the King to life.
But Crane's body has been taken to the magically protected home of Pete and Angelica Sullivan, and their adopted son,...
| Author | R.A. Lafferty |
| ISBN | 0441245900 |
Fourth Mansions was inspired by Teresa of Ávila's Interior Castle, & contains quotations from the book, which quotations Lafferty uses as chapter headings. The Interior Castle is a metaphor for an individual's soul; its different rooms, different states of the soul. In the middle of the Castle...
