Vast
10 best books like Vast (Linda Nagata): The Golden Transcendence, The Sky Road, The Wall Around Eden, Queen City Jazz, The Web Between the Worlds, Superluminal, Finity, Aristoi, Signal to Noise, The Space Opera Renaissance
| Author | John C. Wright |
| ISBN | 0765349086 |
Begun with The Golden Age, continued with The Phoenix Exultant, and now concluding in The Golden Transcendence, The Golden Age trilogy is Grand Space Opera, an SF adventure saga in the tradition of A. E. Van Gogt, Roger Zelazny and Cordwainer Smith. It is an astounding story of super-science, a thrilling...
| 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...
This is an odd one for me. I'm giving it three stars because even though I thought some aspects of it were well done and other aspects of it are things I really respect, I also didn't enjoy reading it. Part of that is due to one of the things I paradoxically respect: the author spent a LOT of time and energy making...
| Author | Kathleen Ann Goonan |
| ISBN | 0765307510 |
In Verity's world, nanotech plagues decimated the population after an initial renaissance of utopian nanotech cities. Growing up on an isolated farm, she finds her happy life changing course when Blaze, the only young man in the community and Verity's best friend, is shot. With Blaze's body wrapped...
| Author | Charles Sheffield |
| ISBN | 0671319736 |
WHAT SF SHOULD BE ALL ABOUT. -- KliattRob Merlin was the best engineer who had ever lived. That was why The King of Space had to have him for the most spectacular construction project ever -- even though Rob was a potentially fatal threat to his power...Thus begins a breakthrough novel by the former President...
| Author | Tony Daniel |
| ISBN | 0061020265 |
The future is at war for the soul of humankind ...
It is a time when civilization has extended itself far into the outer reaches of the solar system, and in doing so has developed into something remarkable. But humanity's progeny -- the nanotechnological artificial intelligences called "free...
| Author | John Barnes |
| ISBN | 0812571452 |
Lyle Peripart is reasonably content with his quiet life as an expatriate American academic in New Zealand, a pleasant backwater in a world ruled by the Twelve Reichs. Until he accepts a plum job offer from a billionaire industrialist -- and he's roughed up by the Gestapo in Surabaya, shot at in Saigon,...
| Author | Walter Jon Williams |
| ISBN | 0812514092 |
Read this one recently on the strength of a friend's recommendation, and was rather glad I did; it's one of the more unusual SF novels I've had the pleasure of reading. Aristoi is set in the far future, when humanity has unlocked the ability to manipulate matter at the molecular level and has spread out...
| Author | Eric S. Nylund |
| ISBN | 0380792923 |
Jack Potter puts computer cryptography to work for the highest bidder: sometimes for private corporations, sometimes for the government. Sometimes the work is legal; if not, Jack simply raises his price. But one day, Jack discovers something cloaked in the hiss of background radiation streaming...
| Author | Kathryn Cramer |
| ISBN | 0765306174 |
"Space opera", once a derisive term for cheap pulp adventure, has come to mean something more in modern SF: compelling adventure stories told against a broad canvas, and written to the highest level of skill. Indeed, it can be argued that the "new space opera" is one of the defining streams of modern SF.
Now,...
| Author | Wilhelmina Baird |
| ISBN | 0441121632 |
Read for the LGBTQ Speculative Fiction Reading Challenge, the Second Best Reading Challenge, and the Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge.
I originally chose to read this book because I needed to read women I had not read for the Women of Genre Fiction challenge, this one had been nominated...
| Author | Ian McDonald |
| ISBN | 0553374354 |
I read this book a few years ago, but was reminded of it today. In looking it up just now I realised that it was also known as Evolution's Shore, but I definitely read the Chaga edition.
The weird thing is that there's a lot to recommend about this book. It's an interesting concept that's full of imaginative...
In the year 2270, with travel to the nearby planets well established, a bizarre discovery is made on Callisto, the eighth moon of Jupiter. Dozens upon dozens of strange wheeled artifacts ("wheelers"), hundreds of thousands of years old, are found buried beneath the icy surface. What were they used...
| Author | Wil McCarthy |
| ISBN | 0345424654 |
A++, amazingly good. Very likely his masterwork. Pretty near flawless.
It's been twenty years since humanity was driven from Earth and the Inner System by a runaway Bloom of mycora, a [nano] "technologically generated lebensform" (TGL) that's eaten all of Earth's life, and most of its crust....
Salt is a crystal compound of Sodium and Chlorine; faceted and transparent. Simple and pure. What life could there be without salt? It is known as God's diamond, by which we should be aware of the infinite variability of scale for the divine perspective. Every grain is a landscape, a world.
And...
| Author | John Varley |
| ISBN | 0441006434 |
Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, John Varley is truly one of the "greats" of science fiction, comparable only to Heinlein, Herbert, Asimov, and Clark. Now the all-time master returns -- with his long-awaited epic novel of life beyond the great beyond...All the universe is a stage, and Sparky Valentine...
| Author | Julian May |
| ISBN | 0345395107 |
From Julian May, the acclaimed author who created the incredible worlds of The Many-Colored Land and The Golden Torc, comes a bold new science fiction adventure!
When rebellious Asahel Frost was expelled from the Interstellar Commerce Secretariat on trumped-up charges, he lost it all:...
| Author | Robert J. Sawyer |
| ISBN | 0889953031 |
Robert J. Sawyer - called the dean of Canadian science fiction by the Ottawa Citizen and just about the best science fiction writer out there these days by the Rocky Mountain News - won the World Science Fiction Society's Hugo Award for his novel Hominids and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of...
IN A WORLD OVERFLOWING WITH IMAGES, HOW CAN YOU TELL WHO YOU REALLY ARE?
Marlene Moore wasn't even sure why she accepted the job, except that it gave her the chance to just get in her car and drive. To escape from grief, to keep moving, to maybe find a destination for herself. Now she's journeying...
| Author | Kristine Smith |
| ISBN | 0060503599 |
Ever since contact was first made between humans and the alien idomeni, tensions between the two races have been frequent and bloody. As the first genetically altered human-idomeni hybrid, former Captain Jani Kilian serves as a lightning rod for the anger, outrage, and hatreds of both sides. And now...
| Author | Morgan Howell |
| ISBN | 0345503988 |
BLOOD WILL TELL
Seventeen years have passed since Yim, an ex-slave blessed by the benevolent goddess Karm, sacrificed her body—and perhaps her very soul—to Lord Bahl, avatar of the evil Devourer. In that selfless act, Yim stripped Lord Bahl of his power but became pregnant with his...
| Author | Joan D. Vinge |
| ISBN | 0812576365 |
Joan D. Vinge returns to Tiamat, the world of her Hugo Award-winning novel The Snow Queen and its bestselling sequel The Summer Queen..
Set during the time of The Snow Queen, BZ Gundhalinu is a by-the-book "Blue" on the trail of high corruption within the force. When a police raid goes horribly...
The Science Fiction Century
| Author | David G. Hartwell |
| ISBN | 0312863381 |
"Science fiction is the characteristic literary genre of the century. It is the genre that stands in opposition to literary modernism." So says David G. Hartwell in his introduction to The Science Fiction Century, an anthology spanning a hundred years of science fiction, from its birth in the 1890s...
Zoya Kundara has lived on the space vessel Star Road for two hundred fifty years. As its Ship Mother, kept alive in a state of pseudoimmortality, she has provided wisdom and counsel to succeeding generations of its crew, self-exiled survivors of earth’s great plague.
But now, to escape the...
