The 10th Victim


Robert Sheckley - 1965
    It is based on Robert Sheckley's 1953 short story "Seventh Victim". He published a novelization of the film in 1966. The film begins with a man chasing a woman thru the streets whilst shooting at her. He's stopped by a policeman for questioning. The man shows his licence to kill. The policeman allows him to continue. Scenes switch between the pursuit & a narrator explaining the rules & justification of the game. In the near future, big wars are avoided by giving violence-prone individuals a chance to kill in the Big Hunt. The Hunt is the world's most popular form of entertainment, attracting participants seeking fame & fortune. It includes ten rounds for each competitor, five as hunter & five as victim. The survivor of the ten rounds becomes the ultimate champion. Caroline Meredith is the huntress armed with a high caliber Bosch Shotgun looking for her 10th victim. Marcello Poletti is the victim. He's reluctant to kill Meredith as he's unsure she's his hunter. Killing the wrong person would get him locked up in prison for 30 years. To maximize her financial gain, Meredith wants to get a perfect kill in front of the cameras as she's negotiated a major sponsor from the Ming Tea Company.

Search the Sky


Frederik Pohl - 1954
    Where was everybody? It was almost as if humankind, when separated by cosmic distances from Mother Earth, could not survive.

The Dreaming Earth


John Brunner - 1963
    Here is a novel to equal Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End. It tells with frightening clarity of a desperately stricken earth-wracked by overpopulation and plagued by famine and despair. It tells, too, of a new breed of men and women--21st century lotus eaters caught up in a mysterious euphoria which will ultimately threaten all life on this planet; the drug-induced world of "happy dreams." Do these "happy dreamers" herald the end of the human species--or the next extraordinary step in the evolution of humanity?

Heart of the Comet


David Brin - 1986
    An odyssey of discovery, from a shattered society through the solar system with a handful of men and women who ride a cold, hurtling ball of ice to the shaky promise of a distant, unknowable future.

Nightwings


Robert Silverberg - 1969
    It was Avluela the Flier's scarlet and ebony wings that lead the Watcher to the seven hills of the ancient city, leaving the skies and deep space unguarded. And so the invaders came and conquered and Avluela became lost in the turmoil.

Starman Jones


Robert A. Heinlein - 1953
    To get into space you either needed connections, a membership in the Guild, or a whole lot more money than Max, the son of a widowed, poor mother, was every going to have. What Max does have going for him are his uncle’s prized astrogation manuals—book on star navigation that Max literally commits to memory word for word, equation for equation. From the First Golden Age of Heinlein, this is the so-called juvenile (written, Heinlein always claims, just as much for adults) that started them all and made Heinlein a legend for multiple generations of readers.

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!

The Green Brain


Frank Herbert - 1966
    Using deadly foamal bombs and newly developed vibration weapons, men like Joao Martinho and his co-workers fought to clear the green hell of the Mato Grosso.But somehow those areas which had been completely cleared were becoming reinfested, despite the impenetrable vibration barriers. And tales came out of the jungles . . . of insects mutated to incredible sizes . . . of creatures who seemed to be men, but whose eyes gleamed with the chitinous sheen of insects. . . .A fascinating examination of the fragile balance between consciousness, man and insect from one of the best-loved science fiction creators of all time.

All My Sins Remembered


Joe Haldeman - 1977
    The only problem is that the Confederacion needs him as one of its twelve Prime Operators for its secret service, the TBII. The TBII wants him as a spy, thief & assassin. It's not, of course, a problem for the Confederacion, which simply uses immersion therapy & hypnotic personality overlay for Otto's training, then sends him out in deep cover, encased in plastiflesh, on a variety of dangerous missions on a number of bizarre worlds. But for him, it's a different matter: what he has to witness & what he's forced to do take a terrible toll. Always he returns to his original self--his conscience stabbed by the memory of all those he'd killed in the service of interstellar harmony.

Venus on the Half-Shell


Philip José Farmer - 1974
    A man without a planet, he gains immortality from an elixir drunk during a sexual interlude with a cat-like alien queen in heat. Now, with his pet owl, his dog Anubis and a sexy robot companion, Simon charts a 3,000-year course to the most distant corners of a multiverse full of surprises to seek out the answers to the questions no one can seem to answer.

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...

Now Wait for Last Year


Philip K. Dick - 1966
    Eric Sweetscent has problems. His planet is enmeshed in an unwinnable war. His wife is lethally addicted to a drug that whips its users helplessly back and forth across time -- and is hell-bent on making Eric suffer along with her. And Sweetscent's newest patient is not only the most important man on the embattled planet Earth but quite possibly the sickest. For Secretary Gino Molinari has turned his mortal illness into an instrument of political policy -- and Eric cannot tell if his job is to make the man better or to keep him poised just this side of death.Now Wait for Last Year bursts through the envelope between the impossible and the inevitable. Even as it ushers us into a future that looks uncannily like the present, it makes the normal seem terrifyingly provisional -- and compels anyone who reads it to wonder if he really knows what time it is.

All Judgment Fled


James White - 1968
    He has an extraordinary talent for creating believable but utterly alien extra-terrestrials.In ALL JUDGEMENT FLED, he considers the critically important 'first contact' between humans and others - and of how political expediency could make this a bloodbath for mankind.

A Fall of Moondust


Arthur C. Clarke - 1961
    Now the abscess was about to burst. Captain Harris had left the controls on autopilot and was talking to the front row of passengers as the first tremor shook the boat. For a fraction of a second he wondered if a fan blade had hit some submerged obstacle; then, quite literally, the bottom fell out of his world.It fell slowly, as all things must upon the Moon. The sea was alive and moving . . . Every stage of that nightmare transformation was pitilessly illuminated by the earth light, until the crater was so deep that its firewall was completely lost in shadow, and it seemed as if Selene were racing into a curving crescent of utter blackness – an arc of annihilation.In darkness and in silence, they were sinking into the Moon. . . .

The Tranquillity Alternative


Allen M. Steele - 1996
    Today, they will be taken over by corporate interests. Tomorrow, they will be activated.