Bibrary.com TG Sci-Fi Essentials
Discover must-read sci-fi essentials curated by Bibrary, featuring Iain M. Banks' The Player of Games, John Varley's Steel Beach, and more genre-defining classics in this essential books list.
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The Player of Games
by Iain M. Banks
The Culture - a human/machine symbiotic society - has thrown up many great Game Players, and one of the greatest is Gurgeh. Jernau Morat Gurgeh. The Player of Games. Master of every board, computer and strategy. Bored with success, Gurgeh travels to the Empire of Azad, cruel and incredibly wealthy, to try their fabulous game...a game so complex, so like life itself, that the winner becomes emperor. Mocked, blackmailed, almost murdered, Gurgeh accepts the game, and with it the challenge of his life - and very possibly his death. Praise for Iain M. Banks: "Poetic, humorous, baffling, terrifying, sexy -- the books of Iain M. Banks are all these things and more" -- NME "An exquisitely riotous tour de force of the imagination which writes its own rules simply for the pleasure of breaking them." -- Time Out
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Dark Water's Embrace
by Stephen Leigh
Winner of the Specturm Award. Often compared to Ursula Le Guinn's ground-breaking "The Left Hand of Darkness," "Dark Water's Embrace" is a fascinating look at issues of human (and alien) sexuality. Stephen Leigh creates a rich world with elaborate care and uses this alien backdrop to delve into issues of survival, sexuality and the meaning of life itself. *****"The fact is that Stephen Leigh's new novel is a fine piece of work and one that deserves to reach a wide readership."--NY Review of Science Fiction*****
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Steel Beach
by John Varley
The moon colony, Luna, is a virtual paradise where every need is provided for: food, prolonged lifespans, digital memories, and instant sex-changes. But the pointlessness of this easy life is making the inhabitants suicidal--including the central computer that monitors their existence. As humanity teeters on the edge of self-destruction, newspaper reporter Hildy Johnson sets out to find a new frontier.