SciFi and Fantasy Book Club Bookshelf
Top 10 SciFi and Fantasy Book Club Bookshelf
: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Handmaid's Tale, Dragonflight, Stranger in a Strange Land, I, Robot, Slaughterhouse-Five, Watership Down, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Princess Bride, Doomsday Book
| Author | Ursula K. Le Guin |
| ISBN | 0553383043 |
”The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.”
The Folio Society edition is superbly illustrated by David Lupton.
The boy is born on the island of Gont in the archipelago of Earthsea. This is a world infused with magic. Not everyone can control this magic, but those...
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant,...
| Author | Anne McCaffrey |
| ISBN | 0345484266 |
HOW CAN ONE GIRL SAVE AN ENTIRE WORLD?
To the nobles who live in Benden Weyr, Lessa is nothing but a ragged kitchen girl. For most of her life she has survived by serving those who betrayed her father and took over his lands. Now the time has come for Lessa to shed her disguise—and take back her stolen...
Stranger in a Strange Land
| Author | Robert A. Heinlein |
| ISBN | 0441788386 |
Apparently a classic of the sci-fi cannon, I'd never heard of this book until it came up on a book club here. It took me a long time to read only because of lack of time, and a rather annoying trait the author has that I'll go into later.
This is one of those books that tells us more about the period it...
| Author | Isaac Asimov |
| ISBN | 0553803700 |
The three laws of Robotics:
1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2) A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as...
| 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...
Librarian's note: See alternate cover edition of ISBN13 9780380395866 here.
Set in England's Downs, a once idyllic rural landscape, this stirring tale of adventure, courage and survival follows a band of very special creatures on their flight from the intrusion of man and the certain destruction...
The Left Hand of Darkness
A groundbreaking work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness tells the story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants can choose—and change—their gender. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must...
| 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 | Connie Willis |
| ISBN | 0553562738 |
For Kivrin, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking...
| Author | Neil Gaiman |
| ISBN | 0060530928 |
Bod is an unusual boy who inhabits an unusual place-he's the only living resident of a graveyard. Raised from infancy by the ghosts, werewolves, and other cemetery denizens, Bod has learned the antiquated customs of his guardians' time as well as their timely ghostly teachings-like the ability to...
| Author | Jacqueline Carey |
| ISBN | 0330493744 |
The land of Terre d'Ange is a place of unsurpassing beauty and grace. It is said that angels found the land and saw it was good... and the ensuing race that rose from the seed of angels and men live by one simple rule: Love as thou wilt.
Phèdre nó Delaunay is a young woman who was born with a scarlet...
| Author | China Miéville |
| ISBN | 0345459407 |
Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies the city of New Crobuzon, where the unsavory deal is stranger to no one--not even to Isaac, a gifted and eccentric scientist who has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research. But when a half-bird, half-human creature known...
| Author | Walter M. Miller Jr. |
| ISBN | 0060892994 |
Winner of the 1961 Hugo Award for Best Novel and widely considered one of the most accomplished, powerful, and enduring classics of modern speculative fiction, Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz is a true landmark of twentieth-century literature—a chilling and still provocative...
| Author | Naomi Novik |
| ISBN | 0345481283 |
Aerial combat brings a thrilling new dimension to the Napoleonic Wars as valiant warriors ride mighty fighting dragons, bred for size or speed. When HMS Reliant captures a French frigate and seizes the precious cargo, an unhatched dragon egg, fate sweeps Captain Will Laurence from his seafaring life...
| Author | Joe Haldeman |
| ISBN | 0060510862 |
The Earth's leaders have drawn a line in the interstellar sand—despite the fact that the fierce alien enemy that they would oppose is inscrutable, unconquerable, and very far away. A reluctant conscript drafted into an elite Military unit, Private William Mandella has been propelled through space...
The Shadow of the Torturer
| Author | Gene Wolfe |
| ISBN | 0671540661 |
Wolfe has an almost legendary status amongst fellow authors; Gaiman called him 'a ferocious intellect', Swanwick said he's "the greatest writer in the English language alive today", and Disch called this series "a tetralogy of couth, intelligence, and suavity".
You can rarely trust the...
| Author | Ursula K. Le Guin |
| ISBN | 0061054887 |
Shevek, a brilliant physicist, decides to take action. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have isolated his planet of anarchists from the rest of the civilized universe. To do this dangerous task will mean giving up his family and possibly...
| Author | Guy Gavriel Kay |
| ISBN | 0451457765 |
A masterful epic of magic, politics, war, and the power of love and hate—from the renowned author of The Fionavar Tapestry and Children of Earth and Sky.
Tigana is the magical story of a beleaguered land struggling to be free. It is the tale of a people so cursed by the black sorcery of a cruel...
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
| Author | Max Brooks |
| ISBN | 0307346609 |
The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that...
| Author | Isaac Asimov |
| ISBN | 0586008357 |
A millennium into the future two advancements have altered the course of human history: the colonization of the galaxy and the creation of the positronic brain. Isaac Asimov's Robot novels chronicle the unlikely partnership between a New York City detective and a humanoid robot who must learn to work...
The Overlords appeared suddenly over every city--intellectually, technologically, and militarily superior to humankind. Benevolent, they made few demands: unify earth, eliminate poverty, and end war. With little rebellion, humankind agreed, and a golden age began.
But at what cost?...
| Author | Terry Goodkind |
| ISBN | 0765346524 |
In the aftermath of the brutal murder of his father, a mysterious woman, Kahlan Amnell, appears in Richard Cypher's forest sanctuary seeking help . . . and more.
His world, his very beliefs, are shattered when ancient debts come due with thundering violence. In a dark age it takes courage to...
| Author | Margaret Atwood |
| ISBN | 0385721676 |
Oryx and Crake is at once an unforgettable love story and a compelling vision of the future. Snowman, known as Jimmy before mankind was overwhelmed by a plague, is struggling to survive in a world where he may be the last human, and mourning the loss of his best friend, Crake, and the beautiful and elusive...
| Author | China Miéville |
| ISBN | 0345497511 |
When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have imagined.
Borlú...
| Author | Robert A. Heinlein |
| ISBN | 0340837942 |
It is a tale of revolution, of the rebellion of a former penal colony on the Moon against its masters on the Earth. It is a tale of a culture whose family structures are based on the presence of two men for every woman, leading to novel forms of marriage and family. It is the story of the disparate people, a computer...
The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
| Author | Neal Stephenson |
| ISBN | 0553380966 |
The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is a postcyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson. It is to some extent a science fiction coming-of-age story, focused on a young girl named Nell, and set in a future world in which nanotechnology affects all aspects of life. The novel deals with themes...
| Author | Neil Gaiman |
| ISBN | 1563892278 |
New York Times best-selling author Neil Gaiman's transcendent series SANDMAN is often hailed as the definitive Vertigo title and one of the finest achievements in graphic storytelling. Gaiman created an unforgettable tale of the forces that exist beyond life and death by weaving ancient mythology,...
Substance D is not known as Death for nothing. It is the most toxic drug ever to find its way on to the streets of LA. It destroys the links between the brain's two hemispheres, causing, first, disorientation and then complete and irreversible brain damage.
The undercover narcotics agent who...
| Author | Paolo Bacigalupi |
| ISBN | 1597801577 |
Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's Calorie Man in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history's lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko...
Emiko is the Windup...
| Author | Raymond E. Feist |
| ISBN | 0586217835 |
Raymond E. Feist's classic fantasy epic, Magician, has enchanted readers for over twenty years. The revised edition was prepared to celebrate the tenth anniversary of its publication, and incorporates over 15,000 words of text omitted from previous editions.
At Crydee, a frontier outpost...
| Author | Fritz Leiber |
| ISBN | 1595820795 |
For the first time-the story of how the greatest heroes in fantastic literature first met.
'The two thieves had themselves been robbed by two youths, who eyed each other suspiciously over the sprawled, senseless bodies.
Fafhrd said: 'Our motives for being here seem identical.'...
The Word for World is Forest
Centuries in the future, Terrans have established a logging colony & military base named "New Tahiti" on a tree-covered planet whose small, green-furred, big-eyed inhabitants have a culture centered on lucid dreaming. Terran greed spirals around native innocence & wisdom, overturning...
| Author | Connie Willis |
| ISBN | 0553803190 |
Oxford in 2060 is a chaotic place, with scores of time-traveling historians being sent into the past. Michael Davies is prepping to go to Pearl Harbor. Merope Ward is coping with a bunch of bratty 1940 evacuees and trying to talk her thesis adviser into letting her go to VE-Day. Polly Churchill’s next...
| Author | Cherie Priest |
| ISBN | 0765318415 |
In the early days of the Civil War, rumors of gold in the frozen Klondike brought hordes of newcomers to the Pacific Northwest. Anxious to compete, Russian prospectors commissioned inventor Leviticus Blue to create a great machine that could mine through Alaska’s ice. Thus was Dr. Blue’s Incredible...
| Author | John Wyndham |
| ISBN | 0812967127 |
In 1951 John Wyndham published his novel The Day of the Triffids to moderate acclaim. Fifty-two years later, this horrifying story is a science fiction classic, touted by The Times (London) as having “all the reality of a vividly realized nightmare.”
Bill Masen, bandages over his wounded...
| 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...
| Author | Joan D. Vinge |
| ISBN | 0446676640 |
This reissue of a modern classic of science fiction, the Hugo and Locus Award-winning and Nebula-nominated The Snow Queen, marks the first time the book has been reprinted in fifteen years.The imperious Winter colonists have ruled the planet Tiamat for 150 years, deriving wealth from the slaughter...
| Author | Lois McMaster Bujold |
| ISBN | 0743468406 |
Between the seemingly impossible tasks of living up to his warrior-father's legend and surmounting his own physical limitations, Miles Vorkosigan faces some truly daunting challenges.
Shortly after his arrival on Beta Colony, Miles unexpectedly finds himself the owner of an obsolete...
| Author | Kim Stanley Robinson |
| ISBN | 0553560735 |
In his most ambitious project to date, award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson utilizes years of research & cutting-edge science in the 1st of a trilogy chronicling the colonization of Mars:
For eons, sandstorms have swept the desolate landscape. For centuries, Mars has beckoned...
| 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 | Vernor Vinge |
| ISBN | 0812515285 |
Alternate Cover Edition can be found here.
A Fire upon the Deep is the big, breakout book that fulfills the promise of Vinge's career to date: a gripping tale of galactic war told on a cosmic scale.
Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit a universe where a mind's potential is determined...
| Author | Barbara Hambly |
| ISBN | 0345361326 |
Alternate Cover Edition can be found here.
At the turn of the twentieth century, a former spy is called into service to hunt down a vampire killer...
Once a spy for Queen Victoria, James Asher has fought for Britain on every continent, using his quick wits to protect the Empire at all...
