Book picks similar to
Flatland / Sphereland by Edwin A. Abbott
fiction
science-fiction
sci-fi
math
Peace and War
Joe Haldeman - 2006
But his greatest test will come when he returns to Earth. Relativity means that everey time he returns home after a few months' tour of duty, centuries have passed on Earth, making him and his fellows ever more isolated from the world for whose future they are fighting.FREEWhen Mandella returns for the last time he finds humanity has evolved into a group mind called Man. Living a dull life in an autocratic and intrusive society, missing the certainties of combat and feeling increasingly alienated, the veterans plan an escape. But when their ship starts to fail, their journey becomes a search for the unknown.PEACE2043. The Ngumi War rages, fought by 'soldierboys', indestructible machines operated remotely by soldiers hundreds of miles away. Julian Class is one of those soldiers, and for him war is truly hell. But he and his companion, Dr Amelia Harding, have discovered something that could literally take the universe back to square one. For Julian, the discovery isn't so much terrifying as tempting...
H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (Graphic Novel)
Ian Edginton - 2005
Book by Edginton, Ian
Behold the Man
Michael Moorcock - 1969
His questions of faith surrounding his father's run-of-the-mill Christianity and his mother's suppressed Judaism lead him to a bizarre obsession with the idea of the messiah. After the collapse of his latest affair and his introduction to a reclusive physics professor, Karl is given the opportunity to confront his obsession and take a journey that no man has taken before, and from which he knows he cannot return.Upon arriving in Palestine, A.D. 29, Glogauer finds that Jesus Christ is not the man that history and faith would like to believe, but that there is an opportunity for someone to change the course of history by making the ultimate sacrifice.First published in 1969, Behold the Man broke through science fiction's genre boundaries to create a poignant reflection on faith, disillusion and self-sacrifice. This is the classic novel that established the career of perhaps contemporary science fiction's most cerebral and innovative author.
Terminal World
Alastair Reynolds - 2009
Clinging to its skin are the zones, a series of semi-autonomous city-states, each of which enjoys a different—and rigidly enforced—level of technology. Horsetown is pre-industrial; in Neon Heights they have television and electric trains . . .Following an infiltration mission that went tragically wrong, Quillon has been living incognito, working as a pathologist in the district morgue. But when a near-dead angel drops onto his dissecting table, Quillon's world is wrenched apart one more time, for the angel is a winged posthuman from Spearpoint's Celestial Levels—and with the dying body comes bad news.If Quillon is to save his life, he must leave his home and journey into the cold and hostile lands beyond Spearpoint's base, starting an exile that will take him further than he could ever imagine. But there is far more at stake than just Quillon's own survival, for the limiting technologies of the zones are determined not by governments or police, but by the very nature of reality—and reality itself is showing worrying signs of instability . . .Terminal World is a snarling, drooling, crazy-eyed mongrel of a book: equal parts steampunk, western, planetary romance, and far-future SF.
Solaris
Stanisław Lem - 1961
Others examining the planet, Kelvin learns, are plagued with their own repressed and newly corporeal memories. The Solaris ocean may be a massive brain that creates these incarnate memories, though its purpose in doing so is unknown, forcing the scientists to shift the focus of their quest and wonder if they can truly understand the universe without first understanding what lies within their hearts.
Armor
John Steakley - 1984
The military sci-fi classic in a striking new packageFelix is an Earth soldier, encased in special body armor designed to withstand Earth's most implacable enemy-a bioengineered, insectoid alien horde. But Felix is also equipped with internal mechanisms that enable him, and his fellow soldiers, to survive battle situations that would destroy a man's mind.This is a remarkable novel of the horror, the courage, and the aftermath of combat--and how the strength of the human spirit can be the greatest armor of all.
Cosmicomics
Italo Calvino - 1965
He makes his characters out of mathematical formulae and simple cellular structures. They disport themselves among galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms, and even have a love life.During the course of these stories Calvino toys with continuous creation, the transformation of matter, and the expanding and contracting reaches of space and time. He succeeds in relating complex scientific concepts to the ordinary reactions of common humanity.William Weaver's excellent translation won a National Book Award in 1969“Naturally, we were all there," old Qfwfq said, "where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?”The distance of the moon --At daybreak --A sign in space --All at one point --Without colors --Games without end --The aquatic uncle --How much shall we bet? --The dinosaurs --The form of space --The light-years --The spiral.
The Hyperion Omnibus
Dan Simmons - 1990
Invasion by the warlike Ousters looms, and the mysterious schemes of the secessionist AI TechnoCore bring chaos ever closer.On the eve of disaster, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set fourth on a final voyage to the legendary Time Tombs on Hyperion, home to the Shrike, a lethal creature, part god and part killing machine, whose powers transcend the limits of time and space. The pilgrims have resolved to die before discovering anything less than the secrets of the universe itself.THE FALL OF HYPERIONThe mysterious Time Tombs are opening and the Shrike that has risen from them may well control the fate of all mankind. The Ousters are laying siege to the Hegemony of Man and the AIs we created have turned against us to build the Ultimate Intelligence; God. The God of Machines. His genesis could mean annihilation for man.Something is drawing the Hegemony, the Ousters, the Als, the entire universe to the Shrike.Here is a superb vision of future technology and ancient religions, of scientific revelation and timeless mystery, of transcendent joy and mind-bending horror. Here is a Hugo Award-winning landmark in Science Fiction.
Little Fuzzy
H. Beam Piper - 1962
Their charter was for a Class III uninhabited planet, which Zarathustra was, and it meant they owned the planet lock stock and barrel. They exploited it, developed it and reaped the huge profits from it without interference from the Colonial Government. Then Jack Holloway, a sunstone prospector, appeared on the scene with his family of Fuzzies and the passionate conviction that they were not cute animals but little people.
Ambush at Corellia
Roger MacBride Allen - 1995
One thing is clear: the five inhabited worlds of the sector are on the brink of civil war and the once peaceful coexistence of the three leading races -- human, Selonian, and Drallan -- has come to an end.
Machines Like Me
Ian McEwan - 2019
In a world not quite like this one, two lovers will be tested beyond their understanding.Machines Like Me occurs in an alternative 1980s London. Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. With Miranda’s assistance, he co-designs Adam’s personality. This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong and clever – a love triangle soon forms. These three beings will confront a profound moral dilemma. Ian McEwan’s subversive and entertaining new novel poses fundamental questions: what makes us human? Our outward deeds or our inner lives? Could a machine understand the human heart? This provocative and thrilling tale warns of the power to invent things beyond our control.
The Worthing Saga
Orson Scott Card - 1990
Some people, anyway. The rich, the powerful--they lived their lives at the rate of one year every ten. Somec created two societies: that of people who lived out their normal span and died, and those who slept away the decades, skipping over the intervening years and events. It allowed great plans to be put in motion. It allowed interstellar Empires to be built.It came near to destroying humanity.After a long, long time of decadence and stagnation, a few seed ships were sent out to save our species. They carried human embryos and supplies, and teaching robots, and one man. The Worthing Saga is the story of one of these men, Jason Worthing, and the world he found for the seed he carried.Orson Scott Card is "a master of the art of storytelling" (Booklist), and The Worthing Saga is a story that only he could have written.
The Inheritors
William Golding - 1955
But this year strange things were happening, terrifying things that had never happened before. Inexplicable sounds and smells; new, unimaginable creatures half glimpsed through the leaves. What the people didn't, and perhaps never would, know, was that the day of their people was already over.From the author of Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors is a startling recreation of the lost world of the Neanderthals, and a frightening vision of the beginning of a new age.
Heroes and Villains
Angela Carter - 1969
Rational civilization rests with the Professors in their steel and concrete villages; marauding tribes of Barbarians roam the surrounding jungles; mutilated Out People inhabit the burnt scars of cities. But Marianne, a Professor's daughter, is carried away into the jungle--a grotesque vegetable paradise--where she will become the captive bride of Jewel, the proud and beautiful Barbarian. There she will witness the savage rituals of the snake worshippers, indulge her voluptuous, virginal fantasies, taste the forbidden fruit of chaos... Erotic, exotic, and bizarre, HEROES AND VILLAINS is a post-apocalyptic romance, a gripping adventure story, a colourful embroidery of religion and magic and, not least, a dispassionate vision of life beyond our brave nuclear world.
Miles, Mystery, and Mayhem
Lois McMaster Bujold - 2001
Admiral Naismith of the Dendarii Free Mercenaries, is a young man of many parts.Miles and his handsome cousin Ivan are called upon to play a simple diplomatic role on the capital world of Barrayar's old enemy until murder and deceit thrust them into Cetagandan internal politics at the highest levels, and Miles discovers the secrets of the haut-women's biological domain to be very complicated indeed.Commander Elli Quinn, sent by Miles on the trail of those secrets, meets a man who marches to the beat of a very different drummer. Dr. Ethan Urquhart, obstetrician from a planet forbidden to women, is on a quest at cross-purposes to Elli's mission - or is it?Consequences of Cetagandan bioengineering continue to play out, this time on a Dendrii sortie to the crime planet of Jackson's Whole. When he encounters a genetically altered super-soldier, Miles's routine rescue strike takes a sudden hard turn for the unanticipated.Contents: CetagandaEthan of AthosLabyrinth.