David Pringles Best 100 Science Fiction Novels (31-70)
Explore David Pringle's top science fiction novels (31-70) in this curated list of must-read books. Discover classic and hidden gem sci-fi titles for every fan!
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The Sirens of Titan
by Kurt Vonnegut
“[Kurt Vonnegut’s] best book . . . He dares not only ask the ultimate question about the meaning of life, but to answer it.”—Esquire Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read The Sirens of Titan is an outrageous romp through space, time, and morality. The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant worlds with a beautiful woman at his side. Of course there’ s a catch to the invitation–and a prophetic vision about the purpose of human life that only Vonnegut has the courage to tell. “Reading Vonnegut is addictive!”—Commonweal
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Venus Plus X
by Theodore Sturgeon
The Ledom have made a world without war, without fear -- a world in which each individual is free to love, to create, to explore. This gentle and kindly new race have made their twentieth-century guest, Charlie Johns, welcome to their paradise, where Charlie thinks he is in heaven. But when he finds out where and when he is, all that may change. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
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The Man in the High Castle
by Philip K. Dick
It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. the few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some 20 years earlier the United States lost a war--and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan. This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to awake.
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Cat's Cradle
by Kurt Vonnegut
“A free-wheeling vehicle . . . an unforgettable ride!”—The New York Times Cat’s Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet’s ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Cat’s Cradle is one of the twentieth century’s most important works—and Vonnegut at his very best. “[Vonnegut is] an unimitative and inimitable social satirist.”—Harper’s Magazine “Our finest black-humorist . . . We laugh in self-defense.”—Atlantic Monthly
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Nova Express
by William S. Burroughs
Nova Express takes William S. Burroughs's nightmarish future one step beyond The Soft Machine. The diabolical Nova criminals have gained control and plan on wreaking untold destruction. It's up to Inspector Lee of the Nova Police to attack and dismantle the word-and-imagery machine of these control addicts” before it's too late.
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Martian Time-slip
by Philip K. Dick
Although Manfred Steiner is doomed to death and exiled to Mars as a human defective, Arnie Knott discovers that the young boy can be manipulated and his strange powers controlled so that he can travel in the future.
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The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
by Philip K. Dick
In this wildly disorienting funhouse of a novel, populated by God-like--or perhaps Satanic--takeover artists and corporate psychics, Philip K. Dick explores mysteries that were once the property of St. Paul and Aquinas. His wit, compassion, and knife-edged irony make The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch moving as well as genuinely visionary.
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Norstrilia
by Cordwainer Smith
This is the only novel Cordwainer Smith ever wrote during his distinguished career. It tells the story of a boy form the planet Old North Australia (where rich, simple farmers grow the immortality drug Stroon), how he bought Old Earth, and how his visit to Earth changed both him and Earth itself. "Vividly drawn and wonderfully suggestive...confirms that Cordwainer Smith was one of science fiction's most original writers." -- "Science Fiction: The Best 100 Novels" "Better than any writer we've yet seen, Smith represents the sense of awe and wonder that is the heart of science fiction." -- Scott Edelman, "Science Fiction Age"
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Dr. Bloodmoney
by Philip K. Dick
Dr. Bloodmoney is a post-nuclear-holocaust masterpiece filled with a host of Dick's most memorable characters. Epic and alluring, this brilliant novel is a mesmerizing depiction of Dick's undying hope in humanity.
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Dune
by Frank Herbert
• DUNE: PART TWO • THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE Directed by Denis Villeneuve, screenplay by Denis Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts, based on the novel Dune by Frank Herbert • Starring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, Dave Bautista, Christopher Walken, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Léa Seydoux, with Stellan Skarsgård, with Charlotte Rampling, and Javier Bardem Frank Herbert’s classic masterpiece—a triumph of the imagination and one of the bestselling science fiction novels of all time. Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of Paul Atreides—who would become known as Muad'Dib—and of a great family's ambition to bring to fruition humankind's most ancient and unattainable dream. A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, environmentalism and politics, Dune won the first Nebula Award, shared the Hugo Award, and formed the basis of what is undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction.
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The Crystal World
by J. G. Ballard
On his way into the African jungle to visit his friends, Dr. Sanders becomes increasingly aware of the forest's bizarre petrification.
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Nova
by Samuel R. Delany
Given that the suns of Draco stretch almost sixteen light years from end to end, it stands to reason that the cost of transportation is the most important factor of the 32nd century. And since Illyrion is the element most needed for space travel, Lorq von Ray is plenty willing to fly through the core of a recently imploded sun in order to obtain seven tons of it. The potential for profit is so great that Lorq has little difficulty cobbling together an alluring crew that includes a gypsy musician and a moon-obsessed scholar interested in the ancient art of writing a novel. What the crew doesn’t know, though, is that Lorq’s quest is actually fueled by a private revenge so consuming that he’ll stop at nothing to achieve it. In the grandest manner of speculative fiction, Nova is a wise and witty classic that casts a fascinating new light on some of humanity’s oldest truths and enduring myths.
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Oxford Bookworms Library: Stage 5: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
by Philip K. Dick
Word count 31,300
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The Left Hand of Darkness
by Ursula K. Le Guin
50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION—WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY DAVID MITCHELL AND A NEW AFTERWORD BY CHARLIE JANE ANDERS Ursula K. Le Guin’s groundbreaking work of science fiction—winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards. A lone human ambassador is sent to the icebound planet of Winter, a world without sexual prejudice, where the inhabitants’ gender is fluid. His goal is to facilitate Winter’s inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the strange, intriguing culture he encounters... Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction.
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Bug Jack Barron
by Norman Spinrad
Lover and hero Jack Barron, the sold-out media god of the Bug Jack Barron Show, has one last chance to hit it big when he meets Benedict Howards, the power-mad man with the secret to immortality.
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Tau Zero
by Poul Anderson
The epic voyage of the spacecraft Leonora Christine will take her and her fifty-strong crew to a planet some thrity light-years distant. But, because the ship will accelerate to close to the spped of light, for those on board subjective time will slow and the journey will be of only a few yearsÂż duration. Then a buffeting by an interstellar dustcloud changes everything. The shipÂżs deceleration system is damaged irreperably and soon she is gaining velocity. When she attains light-speed, tau zero itself, the disparity between ship-time and external time becomes almost impossibly great. Eons and galaxies hurtle by, and the crew of the Leonora Christine speeds into the unknown.
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Downward to the Earth
by Robert Silverberg
One man must make a journey across a once colonised alien planet. Abandoned by man when it was discovered that the species there were actually sentient, the planet is now a place of mystery.A mystery that obsesses the lone traveller Gundersen and takes him on a long trek to attempt to share the religious rebirthing of the aliens. A journey that offers redemption from guilt and sin.This is one of Silverbergs most intense novels and draws heavily on Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It puts the reader at the heart of the experience and forces them to ask what they would do in the circumstances.
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334
by Thomas M. Disch
Number 334, the city street address of a place in which time pivots forward and backward, becomes the setting for a unique odyssey through human history. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.
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The Fifth Head of Cerberus
by Gene Wolfe
First published in 1972, this SF masterpiece has been out of print for most of a decade. Now, this "subtle, ingenious, and poetic book" (Ursula Le Guin) entertains a new generation of readers with the story of two far-flung sister planets and a man's quest to find remnants of a lost.
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Crash
by J. G. Ballard
In this hallucinatory novel, an automobile provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a "TV scientist" turned "nightmare angel of the highways," experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister than the last. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens rapidly toward his own demise in an internationally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor. A classic work of cutting-edge fiction, Crash explores both the disturbing implications and horrific possibilities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations.
