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SF Masterworks by Orion Publishing Group

Top 10 SF Masterworks by Orion Publishing Group : The Left Hand of Darkness, Childhood's End, The Dispossessed, The Forever War, Babel-17, The Rediscovery of Man, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Stand on Zanzibar, VALIS & Later Novels: A Maze of Death / VALIS / The Divine Invasion / The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Nova

The Left Hand of Darkness
AuthorUrsula K. Le Guin
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...
Childhood's End
AuthorArthur C. Clarke
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?...
The Dispossessed
AuthorUrsula K. Le Guin
ISBN0061054887
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...
The Forever War
AuthorJoe Haldeman
ISBN0060510862
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...
Babel-17
AuthorSamuel R. Delany
ISBN0839823282
Babel-17 is all about the power of language. Humanity, which has spread throughout the universe, is involved in a war with the Invaders, who have been covertly assassinating officials and sabotaging spaceships. The only clues humanity has to go on are strange alien messages that have been intercepted...
The Rediscovery of Man
AuthorCordwainer Smith
ISBN1857988191
This is the 1999 British edition from Gollancz that includes 12 of the most famous short stories from Cordwainer Smith's "Instrumentality of Mankind" universe. His complete stories are collected in the 1993 NESFA edition called "The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer...
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
AuthorRobert A. Heinlein
ISBN0340837942
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...
Stand on Zanzibar
AuthorJohn Brunner
ISBN1857988361
Norman Niblock House is a rising executive at General Technics, one of a few all-powerful corporations. His work is leading General Technics to the forefront of global domination, both in the marketplace and politically—it's about to take over a country in Africa. Donald Hogan is his roommate,...
VALIS & Later Novels: A Maze of Death / VALIS / The Divine Invasion / The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
AuthorPhilip K. Dick
ISBN1598530445
This volume, the third in The Library of America gathering the novels of Philip K. Dick —following Four Novels of the 1960s and Five Novels of the 1960s and 70s—brings together four books from the later phase of Dick’s career, when religious revelation, always an element of his fiction, became...
Nova
AuthorSamuel R. Delany
ISBN0375706704
These are [at least some of] the ways you can read NOVA: as a fast-action farflung interstellar adventure; as archetypal mystical/mythical allegory (in which the Tarot and the Grail both figure prominently); as modern myth told in the S-F idiom... the reader observes, recollects, or participates...
The Space Merchants
AuthorFrederik Pohl
ISBN0575075287
An alternate cover edition can be found here.

It is the 22nd Century, an advertisement-drenched world in which the big ad agencies dominate governments and everything else. Now Schoken Associates, one of the big players, has a new challenge for star copywriter Mitch Courtenay. Volunteers...
Lord of Light
AuthorRoger Zelazny
ISBN0060567236
Prince Siddhartha attained enlightenment at the foot of the Bodhi tree and became the Buddha: his teachings swept across India, striking at the roots of decadent Brahmanism. The Hindu priests were understandably alarmed, but were helpless against the doctrine of the eightfold path as the stale air...
Cities in Flight
AuthorJames Blish
ISBN1585676020
Originally published in four volumes nearly fifty years ago, Cities in Flight brings together the famed "Okie novels" of science fiction master James Blish. Named after the migrant workers of America's Dust Bowl, these novels convey Blish's "history of the future," a brilliant and bleak look at a...
Ringworld
AuthorLarry Niven
ISBN0575077026
The artefact is a circular ribbon of matter six hundred miles long and ninety million miles in radius. Pierson's puppeteers, the aliens who discovered it, are understandably wary of encountering the builders of such an immense structure and have assembled a team of two humans, a mad puppeteer and a...
The Day of the Triffids
AuthorJohn Wyndham
ISBN0812967127
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...
I Am Legend and Other Stories
AuthorRichard Matheson
Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth...but he is not alone. Every other man, woman, and child on Earth has become a vampire, and they are all hungry for Neville's blood.

By day, he is the hunter, stalking the sleeping undead through the abandoned ruins of civilization. By night, he barricades...
Last and First Men/Star Maker
AuthorOlaf Stapledon
ISBN0486219623
This review is only for Last and First Men as I have not yet read Star Maker.

Last and First Men

4.0 stars. WOW, this book is in a class all by itself for originality, imagination and scope. I can not believe I have not heard more about this book as being one of the true "classics" of science...
Behold the Man
AuthorMichael Moorcock
ISBN1585677647
Karl Glogauer is a disaffected modern professional casting about for meaning in a series of half-hearted relationships, a dead-end job, and a personal struggle. His questions of faith surrounding his father's run-of-the-mill Christianity and his mother's suppressed Judaism lead him to a bizarre...
Timescape
AuthorGregory Benford
ISBN0553297090
The Coolness—

• This book won the Nebula in 1980! Pretty cool for it and the author, Gregory Benford. It would have been nice for Hilary Foister to share in the credit, though, considering she supposedly co-wrote this with Benford.

• It deals with tachyons! (once in a while)

•...
A Case of Conscience
AuthorJames Blish
ISBN0345438353
Father Ruiz-Sanchez is a dedicated man--a priest who is also a scientist, and a scientist who is also a human being. He has found no insoluble conflicts in his beliefs or his ethics . . . until he is sent to Lithia. There he comes upon a race of aliens who are admirable in every way except for their total reliance...
Non-Stop
AuthorBrian W. Aldiss
ISBN1585676837
Curiosity was discouraged in the Greene tribe. Its members lived out their lives in cramped Quarters, hacking away at the encroaching ponics. As to where they were - that was forgotten. Roy Complain decides to find out. With the renegade priest Marapper, he moves into unmapped territory, where they...
Blood Music
AuthorGreg Bear
ISBN1596871067
I HAVE BEEN TOLD THIS REVIEW IS SPOILERY!! BEWARE!!

(dude, you seriously want an audio version of this??)

so i read this because bird-brian told me to.

i don't know that i am the best person to review sci-fi books. i have zero background in the genre, but for whatever reason,...
Jem
AuthorFrederik Pohl
ISBN8445074679
En un futuro muy lejano, la Tierra vive un equilibrio precario: la población crece inversamente a los recursos, y una suerte de guerra fría divide el mundo en tres bloques irreconciliables. Con el descubrimiento de Jem, un planeta rico y habitable, surge la oportunidad de empezar de cero. Sin embargo,...
The Complete Roderick
AuthorJohn Sladek
ISBN1585675873
Roderick is a robot and this is his autobiography. Educated by watching television, he is adopted by an elderly couple in Kansas and tries to adjust to American society. Sladek conveys, with great sensitivity and insight, the innocence of an artificial intelligence and asks profound questions about...
Grass
AuthorSheri S. Tepper
ISBN1857987985
Generations ago, humans fled to the cosmic anomaly known as Grass. But before humanity arrived, another species had already claimed Grass for its own. It too had developed a culture......

Now a deadly plague is spreading across the stars, leaving no planet untouched, save for Grass. But the...
Downward to the Earth
AuthorRobert Silverberg
ISBN0451044975
Who knoweth the spirit of men that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth? -Ecclesiastes 3:21

Okay, they did resemble elephants, it can't be denied. That led many people to underestimate the Nildoror and their obviously more fearsome commensals, the Sulidoror.

But...
A Maze of Death
AuthorPhilip K. Dick
ISBN0679752986
Fourteen strangers come to Delmak-O. Thirteen of them were transferred by the usual authorities. One got there by praying. But once they arrived on that treacherous planet, whose very atmosphere seemed to induce paranoia and psychosis, the newcomers tound that even prayer was useless. For on Delmak-O,...
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
AuthorKate Wilhelm
ISBN0060146540
David Sumner has a problem: the world as he knows it is about to end. what's a brilliant young man and his equally brilliant family to do? why, bring back members of that extended family, store supplies, circle the wagons, and build a lab which will eventually help the Sumner family to repopulate the...
Gateway
AuthorFrederik Pohl
ISBN0345475836
Gateway opened on all the wealth of the Universe... and on reaches of unimaginable horror.

When prospector Robinette Broadhead went out to Gateway on the Heechee spacecraft, he decided he would know which was the right mission to make him his fortune. Three missions later, now famous and permanently...
The Fifth Head of Cerberus
AuthorGene Wolfe
ISBN0312890206
Back in print for the first time in more than a decade, Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus is a universally acknowledged masterpiece of science fiction by one of the field's most brilliant writers.

Far out from Earth, two sister planets, Saint Anne and Saint Croix, circle each other in an...
Mockingbird
AuthorWalter Tevis
ISBN0345431626
I could tell with in the first few paragraphs of this book I was really going to like it. The story starts with Robert Spofforth, a very special robot, in fact a Make Nine robot, whistling as he walks down the street. Now to me whistling is a very distinctive human trait. I know some birds can be taught to whistle...
Dark Benediction
AuthorWalter M. Miller Jr.
ISBN0575079770
Distinguished short story collection produced by one of the best writers in the science fiction world, previously published as The Best of Walter M. Miller Jr in 1980. This essential collection contains fourteen short stories from the 1950's: 'You Triflin' Skunk!', 'The Will', 'Anybody Else Like...
Life During Wartime
AuthorLucius Shepard
ISBN0575077344


look inside, young soldier. look inside your fellow soldier, see the nothing there, see the nothing that has been put there as a reason why, see the nothing that has become a something, a reason for being a reason for acting a reason for dying. look inside your own self, young soldier. see the...
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