Some Science Fiction
Explore the best science fiction books with 'Some Science Fiction.' Discover thrilling reads, top authors, and must-have titles for every sci-fi enthusiast.
Book
The Shadow Year
by Jeffrey Ford
In New York's Long Island, in the unpredictable decade of the 1960s, a young boy laments the approaching close of summer and the advent of sixth grade. Growing up in a household with an overworked father whom he rarely sees, an alcoholic mother who paints wonderful canvases that are never displayed, an older brother who serves as both tormentor and protector, and a younger sister who inhabits her own secret world, the boy takes his amusements where he can find them. Some of his free time is spent in the basement of the family's modest home, where he and his brother, Jim, have created Botch Town, a detailed cardboard replica of their community, complete with clay figurines representing friends and neighbors. And so the time passes with a not-always-reassuring sameness—until the night a prowler is reported stalking the neighborhood. Appointing themselves ad hoc investigators, the brothers set out to aid the police—while their little sister, Mary, smokes cigarettes, speaks in other voices, inhabits alternate personas . . . and, unbeknownst to her older siblings, moves around the inanimate residents of Botch Town. But ensuing events add a shadowy cast to the boys' night games: disappearances, deaths, and spectral sightings capped off by the arrival of a sinister man in a long white car trawling the neighborhood after dark. Strangest of all is the inescapable fact that every one of these troubling occurrences seems to correspond directly to the changes little Mary has made to the miniature town in the basement. Not since Ray Bradbury's classic Dandelion Wine has a novel so richly evoked the dark magic of small-town boyhood. At once a hypnotically compelling mystery, a masterful re-creation of a unique time and place, a celebration of youth, and a poignant and disquieting portrait of home and family—all balancing on a razor's edge separating reality from the unsettlingly remarkable—The Shadow Year is a monumental new work from one of contemporary fiction's most fearless and inventive artists.
Book
About the Size of it
by Thomas M. Disch
Tom Disch's first collection of poems for ten years presents a dazzling variety show of inventive wit. His serious gift for humour permeates poems by turn lyric and narrative, satirical, rebellious, ribald, uncompromising and honest. Too idiosyncratic and various a poet to belong to any poetic grouping, he is simply, in the late Donald Davie's phrase, consistently entertaining and intelligent'. Tom Disch was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1940. He moved to New York, where he still lives, in 1957. A critically acclaimed and award-winning science fiction author (writing as Thomas M. Disch), he has published many novels, collections of short stories and of poetry, as well as children's fiction and two works of poetry criticism. He has contributed poems regularly to Hudson Review, Light, Paris Review, Poetry (Chicago) and the Times Literary Supplement; he writes reviews for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation and others.
Book
Neighboring Lives
by Tom Disch
Set within a few square blocks along the Thames, in Chelsea, Neighboring Lives is a glorious re-creation, based on historical fact, of the private and working lives of many of the nineteenth century's greatest writers and artists.
Book
Tales of the Dying Earth
by Jack Vance
All four books in "The Dying Earth" science fiction series are now available in single volume.
Book
The Demon Princes, Vol. 1
by Jack Vance
Kirth Gersen, his family and home planet destroyed in the Mount Pleasant Massacre, sets out on a mission of revenge to find and eliminate the five Demon Princes responsible.
Book
Troublemakers
by Harlan Ellison
In a career spanning more than 50 years, Harlan Ellison has written or edited 75 books, more than 1700 stories, essays, articles and newspaper columns, two dozen teleplays, and a dozen movies. Now, for the first time anywhere, Troublemakers presents a collection of Ellison's classic stories--chosen by the author--that will introduce new readers to a writer described by the New York Times as having the spellbinding quality of a great nonstop talker, with a cultural warehouse for a mind.
Book
The Naked Sun
by Isaac Asimov
A millennium into the future, two advancements have altered the course of human history: the colonization of the Galaxy and the creation of the positronic brain. On the beautiful Outer World planet of Solaria, a handful of human colonists lead a hermit-like existence, their every need attended to by their faithful robot servants. To this strange and provocative planet comes Detective Elijah Baley, sent from the streets of New York with his positronic partner, the robot R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve an incredible murder that has rocked Solaria to its foundations. The victim had been so reclusive that he appeared to his associates only through holographic projection. Yet someone had gotten close enough to bludgeon him to death while robots looked on. Now Baley and Olivaw are faced with two clear impossibilities: Either the Solarian was killed by one of his robots--unthinkable under the laws of Robotics--or he was killed by the woman who loved him so much that she never came into his presence!
Book
Asimov's Guide to the Bible: The New Testament
by Isaac Asimov
Illuminates the events of the Old Testament through discussion of the historical, geographical and biographical aspects.
Book
Fragile Things
by Neil Gaiman
A mysterious circus terrifies an audience for one extraordinary performance before disappearing into the night. . . . In a Hugo Award–winning story, a great detective must solve a most unsettling royal murder in a strangely altered Victorian England. . . . Two teenage boys crash a party and meet the girls of their dreams—and nightmares. . . . These marvelous creations and more showcase the unparalleled invention and storytelling brilliance—as well as the terrifyingly dark and entertaining sense of humor—of the incomparable Neil Gaiman. By turns delightful, disturbing, and diverting, Fragile Things is a gift of literary enchantment from one of the most original writers of our time.
Book
Neverwhere
by Neil Gaiman
Richard Mayhew is a young man with a good heart and an ordinarylife, which is changed forever when he stops to help a girl he finds bleeding on a London sidewalk. His small act of kindness propels him into a world he never dreamed existed. There are people who fall through the cracks, and Richard has become one of them. And he must learn to survive in this city of shadows and darkness, monsters and saints, murderers and angels, if he is ever to return to the London that he knew.
Book
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.
Book
Under My Roof
by Nick Mamatas
The world of twelve-year-old telepath Herbert Weinberg explodes into chaos when his single father implants a nuclear device within a garden gnome on their front yard, an act of defiance after which their home becomes a sanctuary for malcontents and a target for government troops. Original.
Book
The Orphan's Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice
by Catherynne Valente
Catherynne M. Valente enchanted readers with her spellbinding In the Night Garden. Now she continues to weave her storytelling magic in the next book of Orphan’s Tales—an epic of the fantastic and the exotic, the monstrous and mysterious, that will transport you far away from the everyday. . . . Her name and origins are unknown, but the endless tales inked upon this orphan’s eyelids weave a spell over all who listen to her read her secret history. And who can resist the stories she tells? From the Lake of the Dead and the City of Marrow to the artists who remain behind in a ghost city of spice, here are stories of hedgehog warriors and winged skeletons, loyal leopards and sparrow calligraphers. Nothing is too fantastic, anything can happen, but you’ll never guess what comes next in these intimately linked adventures of firebirds and djinn, singing manticores, mutilated unicorns, and women made entirely of glass and gears. Graced with the magical illustrations of Michael Kaluta, In the Cities of Coins and Spice is a book of dreams and wonders unlike any you’ve ever encountered. Open it anywhere and you will fall under its spell. For here the story never ends and the magic is only beginning. . . .
Book
Mainspring
by Jay Lake
In a world in which the planets are run by a sophisticated clockwork solar system that connects everyday people to the Creator, a young clockmaker's apprentice is appointed by the Archangel Gabriel to rewind the Earth's Mainspring to prevent a disaster.
Book
River of Gods
by Ian McDonald
As Mother India approaches her centenary, nine people are going about their business — a gangster, a cop, his wife, a politician, a stand-up comic, a set designer, a journalist, a scientist, and a dropout. And so is Aj — the waif, the mind-reader, the prophet — when she one day finds a man who wants to stay hidden. In the next few weeks, they will all be swept together to decide the fate of the nation. River of Gods teems with the life of a country choked with peoples and cultures — one and a half billion people, twelve semi-independent nations, nine million gods. Ian McDonald has written the great Indian novel of the new millennium, in which a war is fought, a love betrayed, a message from a different world decoded, as the great river Ganges flows on.
Book
The Broken Land
by Ian McDonald
Bold, sweeping, and magical, The Broken Land is a novel as mysteriously evocative as last night's dreams - and as shockingly real as tomorrow's headlines.
Book
The Terminal Experiment
by Robert J. Sawyer
To test his theories of immortality, Dr. Peter Hobson creates three electronic clones of himself, who escape from his computer into the international electronic matrix, where one of them begins to kill. Original.
Book
Hybrids
by Robert J. Sawyer
Ponter Boddit, a Neanderthal physicist from a parallel Earth, and his lover, geneticist Mary Vaughan, are torn between two worlds, struggling to find a way to make their relationship work.