Book picks similar to
Slaves of the Klau by Jack Vance
science-fiction
sci-fi
fiction
sf
Deathworld 1
Harry Harrison - 1960
They had to be. For their business was murder...It was up to Jason dinAlt, interplanetary gambler, to discover why Pyrrus had become so hostile during man's brief habitation...
Against a Dark Background
Iain M. Banks - 1993
On an island with a glass shore - relic of some even more ancient conflict - she discovers she is to be hunted by the Huhsz, a religious cult which believes she is the last obstacle before their faith's apotheosis. She has to run, knowing her only hope of finally escaping the Huhsz is to find the last of the ancient, apocalyptically powerful but seemingly cursed Lazy Guns. But that is just the first as well as the final step on a search that takes her on an odyssey through the exotic Golterian system and results in both a trail of destruction and a journey into her own past, as well as that of her family and the system itself; a journey that changes everything.
Odyssey
Michael P. Kube-McDowell - 1987
His only chance for survival is locked within a band of mining robots who are dutifully searching the surface for a mysterious object known as the Key to Perihelion. His name is Derec. His journey will take him to a city different from any he has ever known. A fantastic metropolis beyond his dreams: Robot City.
The Risen Empire
Scott Westerfeld - 2003
Enemy Rix are machine-augmented humans who worship AI compound minds. Separated by light years, bound by an unlikely love, Zai and pacifist senator Nara Oxham face the Rix and hold the fate of the empire.
A Coming of Age
Timothy Zahn - 1984
but the planet had a horrifying effect on their children. Babies born there developed frightening telekinetic powers at the age of five. No one could control them -- and as the changelings grew and became aware of their abilities they initiated a bloodbath of chaos and violence that nearly destroyed the planet.Two centuries after the Lost Generation, Tigrins have learned to cope with their strange planet and its effects. But a new threat is rising. In secret a medical researcher is experimenting with the TK ability. His guinea pigs are stolen children; his object, to extend their powers past adolescence and into adulthood. If he succeeds, Tigris faces disintegration.
Slan
A.E. van Vogt - 1940
Editor John W. Campbell, Jr., discovered and promoted great new writers such as A.E. van Vogt, whose novel Slan was one of the works of the era.Slan is the story of Jommy Cross, the orphan mutant outcast from a future society prejudiced against mutants, or slans. Throughout the forties and into the fifties, Slan was considered the single most important SF novel, the one great book that everyone had to read. Today it remains a monument to pulp SF adventure, filled with constant action and a cornucopia of ideas.This edition has a new introduction by Kevin J. Anderson.
Men, Martians and Machines
Eric Frank Russell - 1955
This set of linked stories describes a part of the epic voyage of the Marathon, powered by the Flettner Drive, seeking new worlds for humanity to spread onto. One planet is inhabited by only machines, survivors perhaps of a civilization in which the machine-makers had perished. Another contains a race of master hypnotists, who make the crew see only what they wish to see! Included is the classic, oft-anthologized novella Jay Score."One of my own all-time favorites, is Men, Martians and Machines... I re-read this one at least once a year, with as much delight and amusement as I got from it the first time."- Bud Webster"A rousing inventive space adventure; and the first story remains a technical marvel. I know of few surprise-ending stories in any category that are so rereadable and so absolutely fair - and what other trick short ever had enough un-tricky meat to it to serve as the foundation for a series?" - Anthony Boucher in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction"A substantial space opera." - Galaxy"Good fun to read, an old and popular formula, happily applied." - P. Schuyler Miller in Astounding
The Time Ships
Stephen Baxter - 1995
But the journey has a terrible cost. It alters not only the future but the "present" in which we live.A century after the publication of H. G. Wells' immortal The Time Machine, Stephen Baxter, today's most acclaimed new "hard SF" author, and the acknowledged Clarke, returns to the distant conflict between the Eloi and the Morlocks in a story that is at once an exciting expansion, and a radical departure based on the astonishing new understandings of quantum physics.
Downward to the Earth
Robert Silverberg - 1969
That led many people to underestimate the Nildoror and their obviously more fearsome commensals, the Sulidoror.But aliens should never be judged by human standards, as the Company learned to its cost when Holman's World, now once again known as Belzagor, was given back to the natives and the Company sent packing. Now Edmund Gunderson, once head of the Company's operation on this world, has come back across the galaxy to settle old scores with the Nildoror. If he can even get them to acknowledge his existence. Cover Artist: Gene Szafran
David Starr, Space Ranger
Paul French - 1952
The vital foodstuffs supplied by its Martian colony are being poisoned. Working in secret, the ruling Council of Science sends David Starr, its youngest member, to the Martian farmlands to discover the truth behind the murders...
Eon / Eternity
Greg Bear - 1999
The inner dimensions are at odds with the outer; there are different chambers to be breached, some containing deserted cities; and the furthest chamber contains the greatest mystery ever to confront the Stone's scientists.EternityHere, from the other side of time, come: THISTLEDOWN, the asteroid starship of a future that is not quite our future; GAIA, a parallel reality where Alexander the Great's empire has ruled for two thousand years; and THE WAY, an infinite corridor through space-time which traverses and encompasses whole universes. And as the strands of these mysteries are unravelled, so the ordering and the end of mankind -- and our entire Universe -- come into question.
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 Toynbee Convector
Ray Bradbury - 1988
A stunning collection of the kind of fiction that has only one source--the unparalleled Ray Bradbury.