Book picks similar to
Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen by H. Beam Piper
science-fiction
alternate-history
fiction
fantasy
The Voyage of the Space Beagle
A.E. van Vogt - 1950
The saga of the Space Beagle, mankind's first effort to reach another galaxy. And what strange life-forms are encountered!
In the Garden of Iden
Kage Baker - 1997
In the 24th century, the Company preserves works of art and extinct forms of life (for profit of course). It recruits orphans from the past, renders them all but immortal, and trains them to serve the Company, Dr. Zeus. One of these is Mendoza the botanist. She is sent to Elizabethan England to collect samples from the garden of Sir Walter Iden. But while there, she meets Nicholas Harpole, with whom she falls in love. And that love sounds great bells of change that will echo down the centuries, and through the succeeding novels of The Company.
The Peace War
Vernor Vinge - 1984
The Peace Authority conquered the world with a weapon that never should have been a weapon--the "bobble," a spherical force-field impenetrable by any force known to mankind. Encasing governmental installations and military bases in bobbles, the Authority becomes virtually omnipotent. But they've never caught Paul Hoehler, the maverick who invented the technology, and who has been working quietly for decades to develop a way to defeat the Authority. With the help of an underground network of determined, independent scientists and a teenager who may be the apprentice genius he's needed for so long, he will shake the world, in the fast-paced hard-science thriller that garnered Vinge the first of his four Hugo nominations for best novel.
Bring the Jubilee
Ward Moore - 1953
Trapped in 1877, a historian writes an account of an alternative history of America in which the South won the Civil War. Living in this alternative timeline, he was determined to change events at Gettysburg.When he's offered the chance to return to that fateful turning point his actions change history as he knows it, leaving him in an all too familiar past.
The End of Eternity
Isaac Asimov - 1955
But when Harlan meets and falls for a non-Eternal woman, he seeks to use the awesome powers and techniques of the Eternals to twist time for his own purposes, so that he and his love can survive together.
Dorsai!
Gordon R. Dickson - 1960
The ultimate warriors, they are known for their deadly rages, unbreakable honor, and fierce independence. No man rules the Dorsai, but their mastery of the art of war has made them the most valuable mercenaries in the known universe. Donal Graeme is Dorsai, taller and harder than any ordinary man. But he is different as well, with talents that maze even his fellow Dorsai. And once he ventures out into the stars, the future will never be the same.
River of Gods
Ian McDonald - 2004
And so is Aj--the waif, the mind reader, the prophet--when she one day finds a man who wants to stay hidden. In the next few weeks, they will all be swept together to decide the fate of the nation. River of Gods teems with the life of a country choked with peoples and cultures--one and a half billion people, twelve semi-independent nations, nine million gods. Ian McDonald has written the great Indian novel of the new millennium, in which a war is fought, a love betrayed, a message from a different world decoded, as the great river Ganges flows on.
Sassinak
Anne McCaffrey - 1990
That made her just the right age: old enough to be used, young enough to be broken. Or so the slavers thought. But Sassy turned out to be a little different from your typical slave girl. Maybe it was her unusual physical strength. Maybe it was her friendship with the captured Fleet crewman. Maybe it was her spirit. Whatever it was, it wouldn't let her resign herself to the life of a slave. She bided her time, watched for her moment. Finally it came, and she escaped.But that was only the beginning for Sassinak. Now she's a Fleet Captain with a pirate-chasing ship of her own, and only one regret in her life: not enough pirates.
Version Control
Dexter Palmer - 2016
She spends her days working in customer support for the internet dating site where she first met her husband. But she has a strange, persistent sense that everything around her is somewhat off-kilter: she constantly feels as if she has walked into a room and forgotten what she intended to do there; on TV, the President seems to be the wrong person in the wrong place; her dreams are full of disquiet. Meanwhile, her husband's decade-long dedication to his invention, the causality violation device (which he would greatly prefer you not call a “time machine”) has effectively stalled his career and made him a laughingstock in the physics community. But he may be closer to success than either of them knows or can possibly imagine.Version Control is about a possible near future, but it’s also about the way we live now. It’s about smart phones and self-driving cars and what we believe about the people we meet on the Internet. It’s about a couple, Rebecca and Philip, who have experienced a tragedy, and about how they help — and fail to help — each other through it.
Eifelheim
Michael Flynn - 2006
Tom, a contemporary historian, and his theoretical physicist girlfriend Sharon, become interested. Tom indeed becomes obsessed. By all logic, the town should have survived, but it didn't and that violates everything Tom knows about history. What's was special about Eifelheim that it utterly disappeared more than 600 years ago? Father Dietrich is the village priest of Oberhochwald, the village that will soon gain the name of Teufelheim, in later years corrupted to Eifelheim, in the year 1348, when the Black Death is gathering strength across Europe but is still not nearby. Dietrich is an educated man, knows science and philosophy, and to his astonishment becomes the first contact between humanity and an alien race from a distant star when their interstellar ship crashes in the nearby forest. It is a time of wonders, in the shadow of the plague.Tom and Sharon, and Father Dietrich, have a strange and intertwined destiny of tragedy and triumph in this brilliant SF novel by the winner of the Robert A. Heinlein Award.
The Light of Other Days
Arthur C. Clarke - 2000
It amounts to the sudden and complete abolition of human privacy--forever. Then, as society reels, the same technology proves able to look backwards in time as well. What happens next is a story only Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter could tell. The Light of Other Days is a novel that will change your view of what it is to be human.
Logan's Run
William F. Nolan - 1967
your life is over! Logan-6 has been trained to kill; born and bred from conception to be the best of the best. But his time is short and before his life ends he's got one final mission: Find and destroy Sanctuary, a fabled haven for those that chose to defy the system. But when Logan meets and falls in love with Jessica, he begins to question the very system he swore to protect and soon they're both running for their lives. When Last Day comes, will you lie down and die... or run!
Final Blackout: A Futuristic War Novel
L. Ron Hubbard - 1939
As the great World War grinds to a halt a force more sinister than Hitler's Nazis has seized control of Europe and is systematically destroying every adversary -- except one.In the heart of France a crack unit of British soldiers survive, overcoming all opposition under the leadership of a hardened military strategist highly trained in every method of combat and known only as The Lieutenant.Ordered to return to British Headquarters, the Lieutenant is torn between obeying the politicians in London or doing what he knows is right for his country, regardless of the price.
The Technicolor Time Machine
Harry Harrison - 1967
Why pay for costumes, scenery, props or actors when the most brilliant drama of all time is unfolding before your very eyes, in vivid color - in 1050 A.D.? Just the film crew of that stupendous motion picture saga Viking Columbus as they journey back in time to capture history in the making.The story first appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact Magazine, where it was serialized in three parts in the March–May 1967 issues, under the title "The Time Machined Saga".
The Chronoliths
Robert Charles Wilson - 2001
In early twenty-first-century Thailand, Scott is an expatriate slacker. Then, one day, he inadvertently witnesses an impossible event: the violent appearance of a 200-foot stone pillar in the forested interior. Its arrival collapses trees for a quarter mile around its base, freezing ice out of the air and emitting a burst of ionizing radiation. It appears to be composed of an exotic form of matter. And the inscription chiseled into it commemorates a military victory--twenty years in the future.Shortly afterwards, another, larger pillar arrives in the center of Bangkok-obliterating the city and killing thousands. Over the next several years, human society is transformed by these mysterious arrivals from, seemingly, our own near future. Who is the warlord "Kuin" whose victories they note? Scott wants only to rebuild his life. But some strange loop of causality keeps drawing him in, to the central mystery and a final battle with the future. The Chronoliths is a 2002 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel and the winner of the 2002 John W. Campbell Memorial Award.