Envy my bookshelf Pt.2 - sf/f gems awaiting me
Discover envy-worthy sci-fi & fantasy bookshelf gems awaiting me in Pt.2! Explore must-read SFF novels that’ll inspire your next literary adventure.
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The Stone Gods
by Jeanette Winterson
What begins as a witty, satirical futurist adventure deepens into a dazzling exploration of humankind's relationship to environment, power, and technology, and to what defines us as humans.
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The Dragons of Babel
by Michael Swanwick
A war-dragon of Babel crashes in the idyllic fields of a post-industrialized Faerie and, dragging himself into the nearest village, declares himself king and makes young Will his lieutenant. Nightly, he crawls inside the young fey's brain to get a measure of what his subjects think. Forced out of his village, Will travels with female centaur soldiers, witnesses the violent clash of giants, and acquires a surrogate daughter, Esme, who has no knowledge of the past and may be immortal. Evacuated to the Tower of Babel--infinitely high, infinitely vulgar, very much like New York City--Will meets the confidence trickster Nat Whilk. Inside the Dread Tower, Will becomes a hero to the homeless living in the tunnels under the city, rises as an underling to a haint politician, meets his one true love–a high-elven woman he dare not aspire to. You've heard of hard SF: This is hard fantasy from a master of the form.
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The Peace War
by Vernor Vinge
The novel that garnered Vinge his first "Best Novel" Hugo Finalist nomination, back in print after thirteen years. With a combination of hard-SF concepts, tight plotting, and appealing characters, Vinge tells a now-classic story of the Few triumphing over the Many. The Peace Authority, wielding a new state-of-the-art weapon, takes over the world, and claims to be "maintaining the peace" while really controlling the scattered survivors of the new world. The inventor of their weapon, which was never meant to be a weapon at all, leads a resistance of high-tech "tinkers" who fight to defeat the "Peace."
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Mindscape
by Andrea Hairston
MINDSCAPE takes us to a future in which the world itself has been literally divided by the Barrier, a phenomenon that will not be ignored. For 115 years this extraterrestrial, epidimensional entity has divided the earth into warring zones. Although a treaty to end the interzonal wars has been hammered out, power-hungry politicians, gangsters, and spiritual fundamentalists are determined to thwart it. Celestina, the treaty's architect, is assassinated, and her protegee, Elleni, a talented renegade and one of the few able to negotiate the Barrier, takes up her mantle. Now Elleni and a motley crew of allies risk their lives to make the treaty work. Can they repair their fractured world before the Barrier devours them completely?
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Sun of Suns
by Karl Schroeder
It is the distant future. The world known as Virga is a fullerene balloon three thousand kilometers in diameter, filled with air, water, and aimlessly floating chunks of rock. The humans who live in this vast environment must build their own fusion suns and "towns" that are in the shape of enormous wood and rope wheels that are spun for gravity. Young, fit, bitter, and friendless, Hayden Griffin is a very dangerous man. He's come to the city of Rush in the nation of Slipstream with one thing in mind: to take murderous revenge for the deaths of his parents six years ago. His target is Admiral Chaison Fanning, head of the fleet of Slipstream, which conquered Hayden's nation of Aerie years ago. And the fact that Hayden's spent his adolescence living with pirates doesn't bode well for Fanning's chances.
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The Algebraist
by Iain M. Banks
“Banks is a phenomenon…Wildly successful, fearlessly creative.”—William Gibson, author of Neuromancer, winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards It is 4034 AD. Humanity has made it to the stars. Fassin Taak, a Slow Seer at the Court of the Nasqueron Dwellers, will be fortunate if he makes it to the end of the year. The Nasqueron Dwellers inhabit a gas giant on the outskirts of the galaxy, in a system awaiting its wormhole connection to the rest of civilization. In the meantime, they are dismissed as decadents living in a state of highly developed barbarism, hoarding data without order, hunting their own young and fighting pointless formal wars. Seconded to a military-religious order he's barely heard of — part of the baroque hierarchy of the Mercatoria, the latest galactic hegemony — Fassin Taak has to travel again amongst the Dwellers. He is in search of a secret hidden for half a billion years. But with each day that passes a war draws closer — a war that threatens to overwhelm everything and everyone he's ever known. Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
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Warring States
by Susan R. Matthews
The Ragnarok's legal status has been ambiguous since it shot its way out of Taisheki Station to escape a threat against the lives of its innocent crew. Ship's Inquisitor Andrej Koscuisko hopes to take advantage of this period of chaos and unrest to see his bond-involuntary Security slaves somehow freed and sent to Gonebeyond space. The personal conflict he is experiencing has surprised and distressed him, and yet he cannot afford to let his private agonies interfere with his purpose. But an incident that happened years ago in a dark cold street in Port Rudistal - the site of the Domitt Prison - has bound Koscuisko to a man who, all unknowingly, holds the key to a murder that's changed the course of history. More alone than he has ever been in his life, Andrej must face the deadliest threat he has ever encountered - the unknown enemy who murdered the First Secretary at Chilleau Judiciary, and set all of Jurisdiction Space into anarchy and horror.
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Fledgling
by Octavia E. Butler
"A master storyteller, Butler casts an unflinching eye on racism, sexism, poverty, and ignorance and lets the reader see the terror and beauty of human nature." - The Washington Post This is the story of an apparently young, amnesiac girl whose alarmingly unhuman needs and abilities lead her to a startling conclusion: She is in fact a genetically modified, 53-year-old vampire. Forced to discover what she can about her stolen former life, she must at the same time learn who wanted-and still wants-to destroy her and those she cares for and how she can save herself.
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Speaking Dreams
by Severna Park
A tautly-told lesbian science fiction tale of slavery and spiritual freedom, power and resistance, love and destiny.
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Games of Command
by Linnea Sinclair
The universe isn’t what it used to be. With the new Alliance between the Triad and the United Coalition, Captain Tasha “Sass” Sebastian finds herself serving under her former nemesis, biocybe Admiral Branden Kel-Paten—and doing her best to hide a deadly past. But when an injured mercenary winds up in their ship’s sick bay—and in the hands of her best friend, Dr. Eden Fynn–Sass’s efforts may be wasted. Wanted rebel Jace Serafino has information that could expose all of Sass’s secrets, tear the fragile Alliance apart—and end Sass’s career if Kel-Paten discovers them. But the biocybe has something to hide as well, something once thought impossible for his kind to possess: feelings . . . for Sass. Soon it’s clear that their prisoner could bring down everything they once believed was worth dying for—and everything they now have to live for.
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The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
by José Saramago
A wry, fictional account of the life of Christ by Nobel laureate Jos Saramago A brilliant skeptic, Jos Saramago envisions the life of Jesus Christ and the story of his Passion as things of this earth: A child crying, the caress of a woman half asleep, the bleat of a goat, a prayer uttered in the grayish morning light. His idea of the Holy Family reflects the real complexities of any family, and--as only Saramago can--he imagines them with tinges of vision, dream, and omen. The result is a deft psychological portrait that moves between poetry and irony, spirituality and irreverence of a savior who is at once the Son of God and a young man. In this provocative, tender novel, the subject of wide critical discussion and wonder, Saramago questions the meaning of God, the foundations of the Church, and human existence itself.
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Against the Day
by Thomas Pynchon
A tale spanning the years between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the end of World War I features characters who are caught up in such events as the labor troubles of Colorado, the Mexican revolution, and the heyday of silent-movie Hollywood.
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Aye, and Gomorrah
by Samuel R. Delany
A father must come to terms with his son's death in the war. In Venice an architecture student commits a crime of passion. A white southern airport loader tries to do a favor for a black northern child. The ordinary stuff of ordinary fiction--but with a difference! These tales take place twenty-five, fifty, a hundred-fifty years from now, when men and women have been given gills to labor under the sea. Huge repair stations patrol the cables carrying power to the ends of the earth. Telepathic and precocious children so passionately yearn to visit distant galaxies that they'll kill to go. Brilliantly crafted, beautifully written, these are Samuel Delany's award-winning stories, like no others before or since.
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Dhalgren
by Samuel R. Delany
In one of the most profound and bestselling science fiction novels of all time, Samuel R. Delany has produced a novel "to stand with the best American fiction of the 1970s" (Jonathan Lethem, bestselling author of Fortress of Solitude). Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there.... The population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. Into this disaster zone comes a young man—poet, lover, and adventurer—known only as the Kid. Tackling questions of race, gender, and sexuality, Dhalgren is a literary marvel and groundbreaking work of American magical realism.
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Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
by James Tiptree
These 18 darkly complex short stories and novellas touch upon human nature and perception, metaphysics and epistemology, and gender and sexuality, foreshadowing a world in which biological tendencies bring about the downfall of humankind. Revisions from the author's notes are included, allowing a deeper view into her world and a better understanding of her work. The Nebula Award?winning short story Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death, the Hugo Award?winning novella The Girl Who Was Plugged In, and the Hugo and Nebula Award?winning novella Houston, Houston, Do You Read? are included.
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Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick
by Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick was a master of science fiction, but he was also a writer whose work transcended genre to examine the nature of reality and what it means to be human. A writer of great complexity and subtle humor, his work belongs on the shelf of great twentieth-century literature, next to Kafka and Vonnegut. Collected here are twenty-one of Dick's most dazzling and resonant stories, which span his entire career and show a world-class writer working at the peak of his powers. In "The Days of Perky Pat," people spend their time playing with dolls who manage to live an idyllic life no longer available to the Earth's real inhabitants. "Adjustment Team" looks at the fate of a man who by mistake has stepped out of his own time. In "Autofac," one community must battle benign machines to take back control of their lives. And in "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon," we follow the story of one man whose very reality may be nothing more than a nightmare. The collection also includes such classic stories as "The Minority Report," the basis for the Steven Spielberg movie, and "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," the basis for the film Total Recall. Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick is a magnificent distillation of one of American literature's most searching imaginations.