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Interstellar by Greg Keyes
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Altered Carbon
Richard K. Morgan - 2002
The colonies are linked together by the occasional sublight colony ship voyages and hyperspatial data-casting. Human consciousness is digitally freighted between the stars and downloaded into bodies as a matter of course.But some things never change. So when ex-envoy, now-convict Takeshi Kovacs has his consciousness and skills downloaded into the body of a nicotine-addicted ex-thug and presented with a catch-22 offer, he really shouldn't be surprised. Contracted by a billionaire to discover who murdered his last body, Kovacs is drawn into a terrifying conspiracy that stretches across known space and to the very top of society.
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Cory Doctorow - 2003
He's lived long enough to see the cure for death and the end of scarcity, to learn ten languages and compose three symphonies...and to realize his boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World.Disney World! The greatest artistic achievement of the long-ago twentieth century. Now in the keeping of a network of "ad-hocs" who keep the classic attractions running as they always have, enhanced with only the smallest high-tech touches.Now, though, the "ad hocs" are under attack. A new group has taken over the Hall of the Presidents, and is replacing its venerable audioanimatronics with new, immersive direct-to-brain interfaces that give guests the illusion of being Washington, Lincoln, and all the others. For Jules, this is an attack on the artistic purity of Disney World itself. Worse: it appears this new group has had Jules killed. This upsets him. (It's only his fourth death and revival, after all.) Now it's war....
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Gene Roddenberry - 1979
But Kirk, McCoy, Scotty and the crew join forces again on the Enterprise to thwart an incredibly destructive power—a threat to earth and the human race. This novel is written by the creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry.
The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead
Max Brooks - 2003
Fully illustrated and exhaustively comprehensive, this book covers everything you need to know, including how to understand zombie physiology and behavior, the most effective defense tactics and weaponry, ways to outfit your home for a long siege, and how to survive and adapt in any territory or terrain.Top 10 Lessons for Surviving a Zombie Attack 1. Organize before they rise! 2. They feel no fear, why should you?3. Use your head: cut off theirs.4. Blades don’t need reloading.5. Ideal protection = tight clothes, short hair.6. Get up the staircase, then destroy it. 7. Get out of the car, get onto the bike.8. Keep moving, keep low, keep quiet, keep alert!9. No place is safe, only safer. 10. The zombie may be gone, but the threat lives on. Don’t be carefree and foolish with your most precious asset—life. This book is your key to survival against the hordes of undead who may be stalking you right now without your even knowing it. The Zombie Survival Guide offers complete protection through trusted, proven tips for safeguarding yourself and your loved ones against the living dead. It is a book that can save your life.
Jennifer Government
Max Barry - 2002
It's a globalised, ultra-capitalist free market paradise! Hack Nike is a lowly merchandising officer who's not very good at negotiating his salary. So when John Nike and John Nike, executives from the promised land of Marketing, offer him a contract, he signs without reading it. Unfortunately, Hack's new contract involves shooting teenagers to build up street cred for Nike's new line of $2,500 trainers. Hack goes to the police—but they assume that he's asking for a subcontracting deal and lease the assassination to the more experienced NRA. Enter Jennifer Government, a tough-talking agent with a barcode tattoo under her eye and a personal problem with John Nike (the boss of the other John Nike). And a gun. Hack is about to find out what it really means to mess with market forces.
Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength
C.S. Lewis - 1938
Lewis's ill-informed and terrified victim who leaves Earth much against his will and who, in the first book of the trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, published by the Bodley Head in 1938, encounters the imaginary and delightful world of Macalandra. In the second book, Perelandra (1943), Ransom is transported to a world of sweet smells and delicious tastes, a new Garden of Eden in which is enacted, with a difference, the story of Temptation. That Hideous Strength (1945) completes the trilogy and finds Dr Ransom returned from his travels in space and living in an English university town - where the Senior Common Room is given a mysterious depth, a more than earthly dimension which such things, in the author's view, always have in life.C.S. Lewis believed that popular science was the new mythology of his age, and in The Cosmic Trilogy he ransacks the uncharted territory of space and makes that mythology the medium of his spiritual imagination.
Hold Back the Stars
Katie Khan - 2017
‘We’re going to be fine.’ He looks around, but there’s nothing out here: nothing but the bottomless black universe on their left, the Earth suspended in glorious technicolour to their right.Carys and Max have ninety minutes of air left.None of this was supposed to happen.But, perhaps this doesn’t need to be the end…Adrift in space with nothing to hold on to but each other, Carys and Max can’t help but look back at the well-ordered world they have left behind – at the rules they couldn’t reconcile themselves to, and a life to which they might now never return.For in a world where love is banned, what happens when you find it?Hold Back the Stars is a love story like no other.
The Lost Years
J.M. Dillard - 1989
Spock, and Dr. McCoy struggle to establish new lives apart from each other and the starship. The newly-promoted Admiral Kirk is placed in charge of a specially-created Starfleet division and attempts to defuse a critical hostage situation; Mr. Spock, who, in the midst of a teaching assignment on Vulcan, finds the one thing he least expected; and Dr. McCoy, whose unerring instinct for trouble lands him smack in the middle of an incident that could trigger an interstellar bloodbath.
Central Station
Lavie Tidhar - 2016
Cultures collide in real life and virtual reality. The city is literally a weed, its growth left unchecked. Life is cheap, and data is cheaper.When Boris Chong returns to Tel Aviv from Mars, much has changed. Boris’s ex-lover is raising a strangely familiar child who can tap into the datastream of a mind with the touch of a finger. His cousin is infatuated with a robotnik—a damaged cyborg soldier who might as well be begging for parts. His father is terminally-ill with a multigenerational mind-plague. And a hunted data-vampire has followed Boris to where she is forbidden to return.Rising above them is Central Station, the interplanetary hub between all things: the constantly shifting Tel Aviv; a powerful virtual arena, and the space colonies where humanity has gone to escape the ravages of poverty and war. Everything is connected by the Others, powerful alien entities who, through the Conversation—a shifting, flowing stream of consciousness—are just the beginning of irrevocable change.At Central Station, humans and machines continue to adapt, thrive...and even evolve.
The Dark Fields
Alan Glynn - 2001
A drug that made you focused, charming, fast, even attractive. Eddie Spinola is on such a drug. It's called MDT-48, and it's Viagra for the brain-a designer drug that's redesigning his life. But while MDT is helping Eddie achieve the kind of success he's only dreamed about, it's also chipping away at his sanity-splitting headaches, spontaneous blackouts, violent outbursts. And now that he's hooked and his supply is running low, Eddie must venture into the drug's dark past to feed his habit. What he discovers proves that MDT, once a dream come true, has become his worst nightmare.
A World Out of Time
Larry Niven - 1976
Once he was outbound, where the Society that ruled Earth could not reach him, he headed his starship toward the galactic core, where the unimaginable energies of the Universe wrenched the fabric of time and space and promised final escape from his captors.Then he returned to an Earth eons older than the one he'd left...a planet that had had 3,000,000 years to develop perils he had never dreamed of -- perils that became nightmares that he had to escape...somehow!
Neverwhere
Neil Gaiman - 1996
A city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, knights in armour and pale girls in black velvet. This is the city of the people who have fallen between the cracks.Richard Mayhew, a young businessman, is going to find out more than enough about this other London. A single act of kindness catapults him out of his workday existence and into a world that is at once eerily familiar and utterly bizarre. And a strange destiny awaits him down here, beneath his native city: Neverwhere.
City of Golden Shadow
Tad Williams - 1996
Kids, including her brother Stephen, have logged into the net, and cannot escape. Clues point to a mysterious golden city called Otherland, but investigators all end up dead.
Red Rising
Pierce Brown - 2014
"That they will be what they like. That they will own the land their father gave them.""I live for you," I say sadly.Eo kisses my cheek. "Then you must live for more."Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations.Yet he spends his life willingly, knowing that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children.But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity already reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and sprawling parks spread across the planet. Darrow—and Reds like him—are nothing more than slaves to a decadent ruling class.Inspired by a longing for justice, and driven by the memory of lost love, Darrow sacrifices everything to infiltrate the legendary Institute, a proving ground for the dominant Gold caste, where the next generation of humanity's overlords struggle for power. He will be forced to compete for his life and the very future of civilization against the best and most brutal of Society's ruling class. There, he will stop at nothing to bring down his enemies... even if it means he has to become one of them to do so.
Arcadia
Iain Pears - 2015
He finds an unlikely confidante in Rosie, an inquisitive young neighbor who, while chasing after Lytten's cat one day, stumbles through a doorway in his cellar and into a stunning and unfamiliar bucolic landscape—remarkably like the fantasy world Lytten is writing about. There she meets a young boy named Jay who is about to embark on a journey that will change both their lives. Elsewhere, in a distopian society where progress is controlled by a corrupt ruling elite, the brilliant scientist Angela Meerson has discovered the potential of a powerful new machine. When the authorities come knocking, she will make an important decision—one that will reverberate through all these different lives and worlds.