David Pringles 100 Best Science Fiction Novels (71-100)
Explore David Pringle's top Science Fiction novels (71-100) in this curated list of must-read books. Discover the best sci-fi classics and hidden gems for your next adventure!
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The Embedding
by Ian Watson
Ian WatsonÂżs brilliant debut novel was one of the most significant publications in British sf in the 1970s. Intellectually bracing and grippingly written, it is the story of three experiments in linguistics, and is driven by a searching analysis of the nature of communication. Fiercely intelligent, energetic and challenging, it immediately established Watson as a writer of rare power and vision, and is now recognized as a modern classic.
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The Centauri Device
by M. John Harrison
John Truck was to outward appearances just another lowlife spaceship captain. But he was also the last of the Centaurans - or at least, half of him was - which meant that he was the only person who could operate the Centauri Device, a sentient bomb which might hold the key to settling a vicious space war. M. John Harrison's classic novel turns the conventions of space opera on their head, and is written with the precision and brilliance for which is famed.
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The Dispossessed
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Shevek, a brilliant physicist, decides to take action. he will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have isolated his planet of anarchists from the rest of the civilized universe. To do this dangerous task will mean giving up his family and possibly his life. Shevek must make the unprecedented journey to the utopian mother planet, Anarres, to challenge the complex structures of life and living, and ignite the fires of change.
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Inverted World
by Christopher Priest
Featured in Science Fiction: The Best 100 Novels Winner of the British Science Fiction Award Nominated for the Hugo Award The “devilishly entertaining” masterpiece of hard science fiction, set in a city moving through a strange, dystopian world—from the multi-award-winning author of The Prestige (Time Out New York) The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city’s engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the “optimum” into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death. The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in crèches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. And yet the city is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the population is dwindling, and the rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum. Helward Mann is a member of the city’s elite. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the city’s continued existence. But the world—he is about to discover—is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.
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High-rise
by J. G. Ballard
An eerie glimpse into the future, a spine-tingling fable of the concrete jungle.
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The Female Man
by Joanna Russ
Living in an altered past that never saw the end of the Great Depression, Jeannine, a librarian, is waiting to be married. Joanna lives in a different version of reality: she's a 1970s feminist trying to succeed in a man's world. Janet is from Whileaway, a utopian earth where only women exist. And Jael is a warrior with steel teeth and catlike retractable claws, from an earth with separate-and warring-female and male societies. When these four women meet, the results are startling, outrageous, and subversive.
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Orbitsville
by Bob Shaw
When the young son of Elizabeth Lindstrom, the autocratic president of Starflight, falls to his death, Vance Garamond, a flickerwing commander, is the obvious target for ElizabethÂżs grief and anger. Which, since Elizabeth is not a forgiving employer, leaves Garamond little choice but to flee. And fleeing ElizabethÂżs wrath means leaving the Solar System far behind, for ever, and hiding somewhere in deep space. Pursued remorselessly by EarthÂżs space fleet, the somewhere that Garamond finds is an unimaginably vast, alien-built, spherical structure which could just change the destiny of the human race...
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The Alteration
by Kingsley Amis
Taking part in the 1976 requiem for Stephen III of England, a boy soprano is unaware that his faultless voice has led his elders to select him as a castrato
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Woman on the Edge of Time
by Marge Piercy
"This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc."--T.p. verso.
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Man Plus
by Frederik Pohl
The award-winning account of a man changed beyond all recognition so that he can be part of a bold experiment to live on Mars Ill luck made Roger Torraway the subject of the Man Plus Programme, but it was deliberate biological engineering which turned him into a monster - a machine perfectly adapted to survive on Mars. For according to computer predictions, Mars is humankind's only alternative to extinction. But beneath his monstrous exterior, Torraway still carries a man's capacity for suffering.
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Michaelmas
by Algis Budrys
Newsman Laurent Michaelmas and Domino, the master computer he created, are faced with a threat to their power when the dead start to reappear on the earth
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The Miracle Visitors
by Ian Watson
John Deacon uses hynosis to research altered states of consciousness. One of his subjects, Michael Peacocke, is unusually susceptible and in their fist session together he recalls a Close Encounter. Deacon is sceptical of UFOs and dismisses the story as an adolescent sexual fantasy. But then inexplicable things happen and Deacon is forced to reconsider. Could UFOs be symbols projected from the collective unconscious? Are they messages from the biomatrix? Does the mind have the ability to project tulpas, objects and people which are physically real yet somehow illusory?
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The Walking Shadow
by Brian Stableford
In a story incorporating the sweeping omniscience of time-travel, a pop-star messiah-figure, favored by the media, freezes in and out of time zones, taking his adoring followers along
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Wild Seed
by Octavia E. Butler
Doro is an entity who changes bodies like clothes, killing his hosts by reflex -- or design. He fears no one -- until he meets Anyanwu. Anyanwu is a shapeshifter who can absorb bullets and heal with a kiss...and savage anyone who threatens those she loves. She fears no one -- until she meets Doro. From African jungles to the colonies of America, Doro and Anyanwu weave together a pattern of destiny that not even immortals can imagine.
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Riddley Walker, Expanded Edition
by Russell Hoban
This acclaimed story is set in an England that has suffered a nuclear holocaust. Society has regressed to an Iron Age, semi-literate state represented by the special language that the author created especially for this book.
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The Unreasoning Mask
by Philip Jose Farmer
One of the most daring, innovative, and prolific writers in the science fiction genre, Philip Jose Farmer has long been hailed for his soaring imagination and compelling storytelling. The Unreasoning Mask, first published in 1981, is Farmer at his best: it's a fast-paced, mystical, high-action adventure. Ramstan is the captain of al-Buraq, a rare model starship of which three have been built. Each is capable of alaraf drive: instantaneous travel between two points in space. When one of the ships mysteriously disappears, it is discovered that an unidentifiable "creature" is marauding through the universe, destroying intelligent life on planet after planet. Ramstan, a thoughtful and moral man, becomes a fascinated yet reluctant pawn in the hands of the strange forces which arise to fight the deadly destroyer. But what price must he pay for becoming the savior of intelligent-kind?
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The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica
by John Calvin Batchelor
A group of American expatriates and their children, living in Sweden, find themselves battling for survival with desperate guerrilla bands on forbidding archipelagos in Antarctica and South America
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Neuromancer
by William Gibson
Case, a burned-out computer whiz, is asked to steal a security code that is locked in the most heavily guarded databank in the solar system, in a special twentieth anniversary edition of the influential Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel.