The Year of the Quiet Sun
10 best books like The Year of the Quiet Sun (Wilson Tucker): Mother of Storms, Black Easter, Juniper Time, No Enemy But Time, The Alteration, Dark Universe, The Paradox Men, On Wings of Song, Orbitsville, Bug Jack Barron
| Author | John Barnes |
| ISBN | 0812533453 |
In the middle of the Pacific, a gigantic hurricane accidentally triggered by nuclear explosions spawns dozens more in its wake.
A world linked by a virtual-reality network experiences the devastation first hand, witnessing the death of civilization as we know it and the violent birth of...
| Author | James Blish |
| ISBN | 0380595680 |
Black Easter is a Nebula Award-nominated fantasy novel by James Blish in which an arms dealer hires a black magician to unleash all the Demons of Hell on earth for a single day. It was first published in 1968. The sequel is The Day After Judgment. Together, those two very short novels form the third part...
| 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...
Joshua Kampa, the illegitimate son of a mute Spanish whore and a black serviceman, has always dreamed of Africa. But his dreams are of an Africa far in the past and are so vivid and in such hallucinatory detail that he is able to question the understanding of eminent palaeontologists. As a result, Joshua...
| Author | Kingsley Amis |
| ISBN | 0881844322 |
In Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history it is 1976 but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass (Mozart’s...
| 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...
| 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 | Bob Shaw |
| ISBN | 0575070986 |
[He] was a man who had looked on many worlds in his lifetime, yet his face was the face of a man in shock.
You’ll be forgiven if Orbitsville reminds you a lot of Ringworld. Both deal with megastructures around a star. Around a star, just in case you missed that part; these things are huge. Where...
| Author | Norman Spinrad |
| ISBN | 1585675857 |
With over a hundred million viewers, Jack Barron is a media star of the highest celebrity—think Jerry Springer crossed with Ted Koppel—and his call-in talk show is the perfect platform for reform. But every man has his price, and when a cryogenics millionaire makes Jack an offer he can't refuse—immortality—anything...
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...
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 | Poul Anderson |
| ISBN | 0451079000 |
An oddly Heinleinian offering by Poul Anderson.
True, the two grandmasters share an affinity for the physical and the libertarian, and both have a natural talent for world building – but Anderson steers this ship clearly along the Missourians path. This is similar to The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress...
| 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...
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 | Charles Sheffield |
| ISBN | 0671721410 |
So this follows the life of a man from birth to his end. If you like Job, which I did, then this makes for a compelling read. The world building is perhaps the best dystopian can offer. The world feels chillingly real and possible to me. The situations are not generic but layered and nuanced and help you to...
| Author | Barry N. Malzberg |
| ISBN | 0881845515 |
MYSTERY IN SPACE!
a mystery in space of How Did the Captain of the Venusian Expedition Die? is not the mystery in space
the mystery in space is the mystery of the inner space
the mystery of the confined madman and hopeful author and failed husband and tragic victim and master...
| Author | T.J. Bass |
| ISBN | 0345246357 |
A novel of dystopian future in the tradition of SOYLENT GREEN and H.G. Wells' THE TIME MACHINE, with an introduction by Ken MacLeod. This is the second printing, with cover artists The Brothers Hildebrandt.
Tinker was a good citizen of the Hive - a model worker. But when he was allowed sexual...
| 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 | 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...
