Book picks similar to
Needle by Hal Clement


science-fiction
sci-fi
sf
fiction

In the Days of the Comet


H.G. Wells - 1906
    But mankind is too busy hating, stealing, scheming, and killing to care. As luminous green trails of cosmic dust and vapor stream across the heavens, blood flows beneath: nations wage all-out war, bitter strikes erupt, and jealous lovers plot revenge and murder. The earth slips past the comet by the narrowest of margins, but all succumb to the gases in its tail. When mankind wakes up, everyone is completely and profoundly different. An ill-fated romance between Willie Leadford and Nettie Stuart unfolds in a world buried in misery and bent on its own destruction. After the earth passes through the comet's tail, suffering, pettiness, and injustice melt away. Willie, Nettie, and everyone around them are reborn. They now see themselves and their world in a dramatically new and wonderful way.

The Many-Coloured Land


Julian May - 1981
    Each sought his own brand of happiness. But none could have guessed what awaited them. Not even in a million years....

Helliconia Spring


Brian W. Aldiss - 1982
    Helliconia is emerging from its centuries-long winter. The tribes of the equatorial continent emerge from their hiding places and are again able to dispute possession of the planet with the ferocious phagors. In Oldorando, love, trade and coinage are being redisovered,This is the first volume of the Helliconia Trilogy -- a monumental saga that goes beyond anything yet created by this master among today's imaginative writers.

The Faded Sun Trilogy


C.J. Cherryh - 1978
    For aeons this golden-skinned, golden-eyed race had provided the universe mercenary soldiers of almost unimaginable ability. But now the mri have faced an enemy unlike any other - an enemy whose only way of war is widespread destruction. These "humans" are mass fighters, creatures of the herd, and the mri have been slaughtered like animals.Now, in the aftermath of war, the mri face extinction. It will be up to three individuals to save whatever remains of this devastated race: a warrior - one of the last survivors of his kind; a priestess of this honorable people; and a lone human - a man sworn to aid the enemy of his own kind. Can they retrace the galaxy-wide path of this nomadic race back through millennia to reclaim the ancient world which first gave them life?

Dying Inside


Robert Silverberg - 1972
    With reckless abandon, he used his talent in the pursuit of pleasure. Then, one day, his power began to die... Universally acclaimed as Robert Silverberg's masterwork, Dying Inside is a vivid, harrowing portrait of a man who squandered a remarkable gift, of a superman who had to learn what it was to be human.

The Sheep Look Up


John Brunner - 1972
    In this nightmare society, air pollution is so bad that gas masks are commonplace. Infant mortality is up, and everyone seems to suffer from some form of ailment.

Immortality, Inc.


Robert Sheckley - 1959
    Yes, that seemed normal enough---but what was this talk about "death trauma"?Thus was Thomas Blaine introduced to the year 2110, where science had discovered the technique of transferring a man's consciousness from one body to another. Where a man's mind could be snatched from the past, when his body was at the point of death, and brought forward into a "host body" in this fantastic future world. But that was only a small part of it. For the future had proved the reality of life after death, and discovered worlds beyond or simultaneous with our own---worlds where, through scientific techniques, a man could live again, in another body, when he died here. And in the process, the reality of ghosts, poltergeists, and zombies was also established. What did it all mean? How had this discovery of what they called the "hereafter" shaped the world of 2110? Thomas Blaine found himself living in a future where the discoveries and techniques imagined by people of his time, while having come about, were completely overwhelmed by discoveries no one had ever dreamed of.

Singularity Sky


Charles Stross - 2003
    It pushed Earth through the greatest technological evolution ever known, while warning that time travel is forbidden, and transgressors will be eliminated.Distant descendants of this ultra high-tech Earth live in parochial simplicity on the far-flung worlds of the New Republic. Their way of life is threatened by the arrival of an alien information plague known as the Festival. As forbidden technologies are literally dropped from the sky, suppressed political factions descend into revolutionary turmoil.A battle fleet is sent from Earth to destroy the Festival, but Spaceship engineer Martin Springfield and U.N. diplomat Rachel Mansour have been assigned rather different tasks. Their orders are to diffuse the crisis or to sabotage the New Republic's war-fleet, whatever the cost, before the Eschaton takes hostile action on a galactic scale.

This Immortal


Roger Zelazny - 1966
    And, as Arts Commissioner, he's been given a job he'd rather not do. Escorting an alien grandee on a guided tour of the shattered remains of Earth is not something he relishes- especially when it is apparent that this places him at the center high-level intrigue that has some bearing on the future of Earth itself.

Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000


L. Ron Hubbard - 1982
    Earth has been dominated for 1,000 years by an alien invader—and man is an endangered species. From the handful of surviving humans a courageous leader emerges—Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, who challenges the invincible might of the alien Psychlo empire in a battle of epic scale, danger and intrigue with the fate of the Earth and of the universe in the tenuous balance.

The Crack in Space


Philip K. Dick - 1966
    Jim Briskin, campaigning to be the first black president of the United States, thinks alter-Earth is the solution to the chronic overpopulation that has seventy million people cryogenically frozen; Tito Cravelli, a shadowy private detective, wants to know why Dr Lurton Sands is hiding his mistress on the planet; billionaire mutant George Walt wants to make the empty world all his own. But when the other earth turns out to be inhabited, everything changes.Winner of both the Hugo and John W. Campbell awards for best novel, widely regarded as the premiere science fiction writer of his day, and the object of cult-like adoration from his legions of fans, Philip K. Dick has come to be seen in a literary light that defies classification in much the same way as Borges and Calvino. With breathtaking insight, he utilizes vividly unfamiliar worlds to evoke the hauntingly and hilariously familiar in our society and ourselves.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers


Jack Finney - 1955
    Miles Bennell discovered an insidious, horrifying plot. Silently, subtly, almost imperceptibly, alien life-forms were taking over the bodies and minds of his neighbors, his friends, his family, the woman he loved—the world as he knew it. First published in 1955, this classic thriller of the ultimate alien invasion and the triumph of the human spirit over an invisible enemy inspired three major motion pictures.

Refugee


Piers Anthony - 1983
    1 RefugeeCALIGULA OF THE STARSThough he was later accused of every crime and sexual perversion in the galaxy, Hope Hubris began as an innocent. Because he defended his older sister against the violent lusts of a wealthy scion, Hope and his peasant family were forced to flee Callisto, one of the moons of Jupiter. Pursued by the bloodthirsty scions across the airless desert, they barely escaped with their lives. The illegal space bubble was overcrowded with refugees, all hoping to reach Jupiter for asylum.But the space travelers had not reckoned on the terrible threat of high space-the pirates, barbaric men who rape, rob, and murder, with no thought but to satisfy their bestial appetites. It will take all Hope's ingenuity to survive, but the atrocities he witnesses will never die. There is only one way he can be rid of them . . . REVENGE

Armor


John Steakley - 1984
    The military sci-fi classic in a striking new packageFelix is an Earth soldier, encased in special body armor designed to withstand Earth's most implacable enemy-a bioengineered, insectoid alien horde. But Felix is also equipped with internal mechanisms that enable him, and his fellow soldiers, to survive battle situations that would destroy a man's mind.This is a remarkable novel of the horror, the courage, and the aftermath of combat--and how the strength of the human spirit can be the greatest armor of all.

House Atreides


Brian Herbert - 1999
    By his death in 1986, Herbert had completed six novels in the series, but much of his vision remained unwritten. Now, working from his father's recently discovered files, Brian Herbert and bestselling novelist Kevin J. Anderson collaborate on a new novel, the prelude to Dune—where we step onto the planet Arrakis…decades before Dune's hero, Paul Muad'Dib Atreides, walks its sands.Here is the rich and complex world that Frank Herbert created, in the time leading up to the momentous events of Dune. As Emperor Elrood's son plots a subtle regicide, young Leto Atreides leaves for a year's education on the mechanized world of Ix; a planetologist named Pardot Kynes seeks the secrets of Arrakis; and the eight-year-old slave Duncan Idaho is hunted by his cruel masters in a terrifying game from which he vows escape and vengeance. But none can envision the fate in store form them; one that will make them renegades—and shapers of history.