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Monument by Lloyd Biggle Jr.


science-fiction
sci-fi
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The Prefect


Alastair Reynolds - 2007
    His force is Panoply, and his beat is the multi-faceted utopian society of the Glitter Band, that vast swirl of space habitats orbiting the planet Yellowstone. These days, his job is his life.A murderous attack against a Glitter Band habitat is nasty, but it looks to be an open-and-shut case - until Dreyfus starts looking under some stones that some very powerful people would really rather stayed unturned. What he uncovers is far more serious than mere gruesome murder...

The Stars My Destination


Alfred Bester - 1956
    The Stars My Destination is a classic of technological prophecy and timeless narrative enchantment by an acknowledged master of science fiction.

Cities in Flight


James Blish - 1970
    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 world where cities roam the Galaxy looking for work and a sustainable way of life.In the first novel, They Shall Have Stars, man has thoroughly explored the Solar System, yet the dream of going even further seems to have died in all but one man. His battle to realize his dream results in two momentous discoveries anti-gravity and the secret of immortality. In A Life for the Stars, it is centuries later and anti-gravity generations have enabled whole cities to lift off the surface of the earth to become galactic wanderers. In Earthman, Come Home, the nomadic cities revert to barbarism and marauding rogue cities begin to pose a threat to all civilized worlds. In the final novel, The Triumph of Time, history repeats itself as the cities once again journey back in to space making a terrifying discovery which could destroy the entire Universe. A serious and haunting vision of our world and its limits, Cities in Flight marks the return to print of one of science fiction's most inimitable writers.A Selection of the Science Fiction Book Club

The Terminal Experiment


Robert J. Sawyer - 1995
    Peter Hobson has created three electronic simulations of his own personality. The first has all knowledge of physical existence edited out, to simulate life after death. The second is without knowledge of aging or death, to simulate immortality. The third is unmodified, a control. Now they are free. One is a killer.

Artifact


Gregory Benford - 1985
    And the miracle it contains does not belong on this Earth.It is mystery and madness -- an enigma with no equal in recorded history. It is mankind's greatest discovery ... and worst nightmare.It may have already obliterated a world. Ours is next.

Inherit the Stars


James P. Hogan - 1977
    They called him Charlie. He had big eyes, abundant body hair and fairly long nostrils. His skeletal body was found clad in a bright red spacesuit, hidden in a rocky grave. They didn't know who he was, how he got there, or what had killed him. All they knew was that his corpse was 50,000 years old; and that meant that this man had somehow lived long before he ever could have existed!

Feersum Endjinn


Iain M. Banks - 1994
    His only clues point to a conspiracy that reaches far beyond his own murder, and survival lies in discovering other fugitives who know the truth about the ultimate weapon of chaos and salvation. Reprint.

Rogue Moon


Algis Budrys - 1960
    It was a 1961 Hugo Award nominee, losing to Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz. A novella-length version of the story was included in the anthology The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume 2, edited by Ben Bova.Before 1969, every science fiction writer wrote his or her own version of the first Moon landing. Few carry the horror of Budrys' unsettling story.During all recorded history, the Moon has hovered above our heads, a timeless symbol for lovers' ecstasy. Goddesses & Gibson Girls have tripped the light fantastic of her beams while sonneteers & scientists have scanned her changing phases. Now humans had actually reached the Moon, & on it the explorers found a structure, a formation so terrible & incomprehensible that it couldn't even be described in human terms. It was a thing that devoured people; that killed them again & again in torturous, unfathomable ways.Earthbound are the only two men who could probe the thing: Al Barker, a reckless thrill-seeker, whose loving mistress was death, & Dr. Edward Hawks, a scientific murderer, whose greatest mission was rebirth.

The Cosmic Puppets


Philip K. Dick - 1957
    But upon entering the sleepy, isolated little hamlet, Ted is distraught to find that the place bears no resemblance to the one he left behind—and never did. He also discovers that in this Millgate Ted Barton died of scarlet fever when he was nine years old. Perhaps even more troubling is the fact that it is literally impossible to escape. Unable to leave, Ted struggles to find the reason for such disturbing incongruities, but before long, he finds himself in the midst of a struggle between good and evil that stretches far beyond the confines of the valley.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.From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Kraken Wakes


John Wyndham - 1953
    Strange fireballs race through the sky above the deepest trenches of the oceans. Something is about to show itself, something terrible and alien, a force capable of causing global catastrophe.

More Than Human


Theodore Sturgeon - 1953
    There's Janie, who moves things without touching them, and there are the teleporting twins, who can travel ten feet or ten miles. There's Baby, who invented an antigravity engine while still in the cradle, and Gerry, who has everything it takes to run the world except for a conscience. Separately, they are talented freaks. Together, they compose a single organism that may represent the next step in evolution, and the final chapter in the history of the human race.In this genre-bending novel - among the first to have launched scifi into the arena of literature - one of the great imaginers of the twentieth century tells a story as mind-blowing as any controlled substance and as affecting as a glimpse into a stranger's soul. For as the protagonists of More Than Human struggle to find who they are and whether they are meant to help humanity or destroy it. Theodore Sturgeon explores questions of power and morality, individuality and belonging, with suspense, pathos, and a lyricism rarely seen in science fiction.

Sargasso of Space


Andre Norton - 1955
    In Sargasso of Space, the Solar Queen free traders win exclusive rights to trade with the planet Limbo, but the crew arrives to find most of the planet’s surface charred, with little signs of life. They find a valley with life, but others may still lurk. Worse yet, a strange force threatens to cripple the Queen. They must solve the planet’s mysteries if they hope to escape not only with tradable goods, but their lives.First of the "Solar Queen" adventures, originally published under the pseudonym "Andrew North." This is the second ace edition.

Night Lamp


Jack Vance - 1996
    Found as a child with no memory of his past, adopted by a scholarly couple who raised him as their own, Jaro never quite fit into the rigidly defined Society of Thanet.When his foster parents are killed in a mysterious bombing, Jaro Fath sets out to discover the truth of his origins--a quest that will take him across light-years and into the depths of the past.

Patterns of Chaos


Colin Kapp - 1972
    He wreaks havoc and destruction as surely as a hurricane wherever he goes. Commando Central has planted an electrode transmitter-receiver deep inside his brain and infiltrated him into the Destroyer Spacefleet to prevent it from gaining absolute mastery of the galaxy. But Bron's own brand of chaos is lethally unpredictable. And when whole planets are annihilated by monster hellburner bombs set on course seven hundred million years ago from distant Andromeda, aimed directly at Bron himself, both sides realise that something more colossal, more threatening and infinitely more powerful is taking a hand in Bron's weird destiny...The Patterns of Chaos is SF in the grand style-a mighty tale of galactic intrigue and destruction.

Farthest Star


Frederik Pohl - 1975
    It was a doomed ship.Yet from that mission came Ground Station One, peopled by tachyon transmission, its crew impatient to explore the menace of Cuckoo.Towards them flee a young nomadic wingman, a redbearded giant, and a replicate Ben Yale Pertin intent only on survival, until a frightened girl screams for help…