Best Comedic Sci-Fi Books
Top 10 Best Comedic Sci-Fi Books
: Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, The Sirens of Titan, Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings, Phule's Company, Bellwether, A Civil Campaign, The Princess Bride, Bill, The Galactic Hero
| Author | Kurt Vonnegut |
| ISBN | 0385333846 |
There are some terrible reviews of SH5 floating around Goodreads, but one particularly awful sentiment is that Slaughterhouse-Five isn't anti-war.
This is usually based on the following quote.
"It had to be done," Rumfoord told Billy, speaking of the destruction of Dresden.
"I...
| Author | Kurt Vonnegut |
| ISBN | 0140285601 |
Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it ...
Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding 'fathers' of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For...
Callahan's Crosstime Saloon
| Author | Spider Robinson |
| ISBN | 0812572270 |
Callahan's Place is the neighborhood tavern to all of time and space, where the regulars are anything but. Pull up a chair, grab a glass of your favorite, and listen to the stories spun by time travelers, cybernetic aliens, telepaths...and a bunch of regular folks on a mission to save the world, one customer...
| Author | Kurt Vonnegut |
| ISBN | 1857988841 |
The Sirens of Titan is an outrageous romp through space, time, and morality. The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant worlds with a beautiful woman at his side. Of course there's a catch to the invitation—and a prophetic vision...
Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings
Just why do humpback whales sing? That's the question that has marine behavioral biologist Nate Quinn and his crew poking, charting, recording, and photographing very big, wet, gray marine mammals. Until the extraordinary day when a whale lifts its tail into the air to display a cryptic message spelled...
WIllard Phule is the heir to a super-rich munitions company, and also an officer in the Legion. Unfortunately he gets a little too gung-ho during a peace treaty, and catches the ire of his higher-ups. They can't court-martial him, so instead they try to get him to quit by shipping him off to a remote swamp...
| Author | Connie Willis |
| ISBN | 0553562967 |
Pop culture, chaos theory and matters of the heart collide in this unique novella from the Hugo and Nebula winning author of Doomsday Book.
Sandra Foster studies fads and their meanings for the HiTek corporation. Bennet O'Reilly works with monkey group behavior and chaos theory for the same...
| Author | Lois McMaster Bujold |
| ISBN | 0671578855 |
Miles Vorkosigan has a problem: unrequited love for the beautiful widow Ekaterin Vorsoisson, violently allergic to marriage after her first exposure. If a frontal assault won't do, Miles thinks, try subterfuge. He has a cunning plan... Lord Mark Vorkosigan, Miles' brother, also has a problem: his...
| Author | William Goldman |
| ISBN | 0345418263 |
What happens when the most beautiful girl in the world marries the handsomest prince of all time and he turns out to be...well...a lot less than the man of her dreams?
As a boy, William Goldman claims, he loved to hear his father read the S. Morgenstern classic, The Princess Bride. But as a grown-up...
| Author | Harry Harrison |
| ISBN | 0743487079 |
It was the highest honor to defend the Empire against the dreaded Chingers, an enemy race of seven-foot-tall lizards. But Bill, a Technical Fertilizer Operator from a planet of farmers, wasn't interested in honor-he was only interested in two things: his chosen career, and the shapely curves of Inga-Maria...
| Author | Spider Robinson |
| ISBN | 0812572289 |
Human or otherwise, regardless of race, creed or dimension of origin, if you're looking for a good time in a place where the beer is always flowing, and the stories always out of this world, step up to the bar at Callahan's. There'll be tales--Oh, are there tales! Like the one about a loud-mouthed time traveler...
| Author | Douglas Adams |
| ISBN | 0434009199 |
Dirk Gently is a detective - well, a sort of detective. There is a long and honourable tradition of great detectives and Dirk Gently does not belong to it. Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Dirk Gently,...
| Author | Philip José Farmer |
| ISBN | 0352398469 |
Simon Wagstaff is the Space Wanderer, a seeker of truth and electric banjo player who narrowly escapes the Deluge that destroys Earth when he happens upon an abandoned Chinese spaceship, the Hwang Ho. A man without a planet, he gains immortality from an elixir drunk during a sexual interlude with a cat-like...
| Author | Spider Robinson |
| ISBN | 0812572297 |
Callahan's Place is open for business, and all of the "regulars" are here--a talking dog, an alcoholic vampire, and two telepaths--enhancing their joys by drowning their sorrows. Everyone, that is, but Mickey Finn, a seven-foot tall alien in danger of enslavement at the hands of a traveller from across...
| Author | Spider Robinson |
| ISBN | 0812539370 |
Callahan's Crosstime Saloon is the neighborhood tavern to all of time and space, where the regulars are anything but: time travelers, talking dogs, alcoholic vampires, cybernetic aliens--and a group of people who really, truly care about each other. It's the rare kind of place where bad pun are as...
| Author | Keith Laumer |
| ISBN | 0671318578 |
Publisher's Note: The stories and novel herein have previously appeared in parts in Envoy To New Worlds, Galactic Diplomat, and Retief's War. This is the first unitary edition.
Contents:
p. 1 • Extraordinary Diplomats (Retief!) • (2002) • essay by David Drake
p....
| Author | Piers Anthony |
| ISBN | 0345354915 |
On the technological, decadent world of Proton, someone was trying to destroy Stile, serf and master Gamesman. His only escape lay in Phaze, a world totally ruled by magic. Soon he learned that his alternate self had already been murdered, and that he was next. On Proton, his fate depended on winning...
| Author | Harry Harrison |
| ISBN | 0553276115 |
After saving the world, diGriz is called on to save the universe. Liberating his two, now teenage, twin' sons from a military boarding school and penitentiary, diGriz sets out to free his wife, who has been arrested by the tax men. But the family is soon fighting an enemy of a different sort, when the humans-only...
| Author | Spider Robinson |
| ISBN | 0743435788 |
Despite his employer's doubts that he is an authentic detective, Quigley is called in to investigate Lady Sally's establishment, a reputable place that caters to adults of all species and tastes. Lady Sally was the wife of the proprietor of Callahan's Place, the bar where human and other beings from...
| Author | Robert Lynn Asprin |
| ISBN | 0441662536 |
I learned a lot about casinos and how they are run from this one. Not entirely sure that's what Asprin was trying to impart to the reader, but there you go.
I liked that the story was able to delve more into some of the peripheral characters from the first book. I laughed out loud at the depictions...
| Author | Harry Harrison |
| ISBN | 1857984994 |
DiGriz and Angelina are happily married and expecting the birth of their sons. The planet Cliaand is waging interstellar war, and against the odds, its Grey Men are invading and taking over planet after planet. The Rat is sent to Cliaand to start a one-man guerrilla campaign to put a stop to the plans of...
| Author | Fredric Brown |
| ISBN | 0345298535 |
THEY WERE GREEN
THEY WERE LITTLE
THEY WERE
BALD AS BILLIARD BALLS
AND THEY WERE
EVERYWHERE
Luke Devereaux was a science-fiction writer, holed up in a desert shack waiting for inspiration. He was the first man to see a Martian...but he wasn't the last!
It was estimated...
From outside it was simply an ordinary-looking London pub, a place you'd have to be guided to more than once before you memorized its location, somewhere between Fleet Street and the Embankment. But if, by chance, an insider led you to the White Hart on a Wednesday night, you would have found yourself...
| Author | Christopher Stasheff |
| ISBN | 0441873022 |
The book starts off as typical sci-fi/fantasy fodder: An undercover agent, Rodney Gallowglass, discovers an entire planet of earth-descended espers who cut off communications with their home planet centuries before. By the time Rodney finds them they've structured their civilization based on...
| Author | James H. Schmitz |
| ISBN | 1416509151 |
Blazing interstellar adventure by the creator of Telzey Amberdon and Trigger Argee.
Captain Pausert thought his luck had finally turned-but he did not yet realize it was a turn for the worse. On second thought, make that a turn for the disastrous! Pausert thought he had made good with his battered...
Transmetropolitan, Vol. 1: Back on the Street
| Author | Warren Ellis |
| ISBN | 1563894459 |
After years of self-imposed exile from a civilization rife with degradation and indecency, cynical journalist Spider Jerusalem is forced to return to a job that he hates and a city that he loathes. Working as an investigative reporter for the newspaper The Word, Spider attacks the injustices of his...
| Author | Spider Robinson |
| ISBN | 0671318314 |
A HOUSE OF "HEALTHY" REPUTE...Welcome to Lady Sally's, the House that "is" a home -- the internationally (hell, interplanetarily) notorious bordello. At Lady Sally's House, the customer doesn't necessarily come first: even the staff are genuinely enjoying themselves.
Wife of time traveling...
| Author | Robert Sheckley |
| ISBN | 0765315602 |
In the future, interstellar travel to alien worlds will be too expensive for most ordinary people. It certainly is for Marvin, a college student who wants to take a really good vacation. And so he signs up for what he can afford, a mindswap, in which your consciousness is swapped into the body of an alien...
| Author | John Scalzi |
| ISBN | 0765328542 |
Jack Holloway works alone, for reasons he doesn't care to talk about. Hundreds of miles from ZaraCorp's headquarters on planet, 178 light-years from the corporation's headquarters on Earth, Jack is content as an independent contractor, prospecting and surveying at his own pace. As for his past,...
| Author | Robert Lynn Asprin |
| ISBN | 0441006582 |
Robert Asprin books must be read for their fun factor and not for well-reasoned story-telling. For example, in the prior book in this series Captain Phule and company were ordered to guard a casino, resulting in Capt. Phule being taken hostage. In spite of this lesson in personal security this book begins...
| Author | Christopher Moore |
| ISBN | 0060590270 |
Charlie Asher is a pretty normal guy with a normal life, married to a bright and pretty woman who actually loves him for his normalcy. They're even about to have their first child. Yes, Charlie's doing okay—until people start dropping dead around him, and everywhere he goes a dark presence whispers...
| Author | Rob Reid |
| ISBN | 0345534417 |
An alien advance party was suddenly nosing around my planet.
Worse, they were lawyering up. . . .
In the hilarious tradition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Rob Reid takes you on a headlong journey through the outer reaches of the universe—and the inner workings of...
| Author | Robert Lynn Asprin |
| ISBN | 0441007910 |
More Phulishness from the warped minds of Robert Asprin and Peter Heck. The usual cast of characters are given the task of finding an invisible "enemy" on the Zenobian home world. As usual, Gen. Blitzkrieg is out to destroy our intrepid hero while Col. Battleaxe is trying to defend him and his company...
| Author | Spider Robinson |
| ISBN | 0441001335 |
Once again, I find myself wishing that I liked the Callahan’s books more than I do. Robinson tries for a much more obviously optimistic view of the world than most other authors and he obviously holds dear the concepts of acceptance of those who differ from ourselves, true friendship, and solid romantic...
| Author | David Gerrold |
| ISBN | 1932100237 |
This funny and insightful science fiction classic introduces Shoogar, the greatest wizard ever known in his village. His spells can strike terror in the hearts of even his most powerful enemies. But the enemy he faces now is like none he has ever seen before. The stranger has come from nowhere and is ignorant...
| Author | Eric Frank Russell |
| ISBN | 0575070951 |
The war has raged for nearly a year and Earth desperately needs an edge to overcome the Sirian Empire's huge advantage in personnel and equipment. That's where James Mowry comes in. Intensively trained, his appearance surgically altered, Mowry secretly lands on one of the Empire's planets. His mission:...
| Author | Toby Frost |
| ISBN | 1905802137 |
In the 25th Century the British Space Empire faces the gathering menace of the evil ant-soldiers of the Ghast Empire hive, hell-bent on galactic domination and the extermination of all humanoid life. Isambard Smith is the square-jawed, courageous, and somewhat asinine new commander of the battle...
The Ultimate Inferior Beings
| Author | Mark Roman |
| ISBN | 1477492208 |
The End of the Universe is nigh ...
Landscape architect jixX is way out of his depth when mistakenly appointed captain of a dangerous space mission. He’s never flown a spaceship before, but at least he’s not alone; none of his crewmembers have, either. To make matters worse, the ship’s...
| Author | Spider Robinson |
| ISBN | 0553580604 |
Nobody blends good science with bad puns as brilliantly as Spider Robinson, as his legion of devoted fans will attest. Now he's back with the latest chapter of the Callahan saga -- an improbable tale of impending doom, a road trip, space, drugs, and rock 'n' roll.
The universe is in desperate...
