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You learned that good meant unpleasant, dreary and depressing crap that was difficult to read. You never consented to read it. That great old cannon-fodder was forced upon you.
The Forbidden Garden: The SF Classic of Hard Science and Romance - Kindle edition by John Taine. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC. The Saturday Review, April 2, , pp. The Forbidden Garden (). John Taine. The SF Classic of Hard Science and Romance. 2 Reviews, 1 Readable.
One day, long after that teacher is purged from your brain, you are standing in front of your overly crowded shelves of series science fiction and you know you've been eating burgers and it's time for a meal to blow your senses and you realize, you want one of those books. The evil, the dreaded, the too thick brick of a novel that your geek friends have warned you is one of those abominations - a great science fiction book.
You can view the crowd-ranked version of this list and vote on the entries at the bottom of this page. It combines noir, dystopia, and a persistent thread of hopelessness in the face of greed, power and ego. Snow Crash is easier to read than most, but Stephenson will grab you by the short hairs and drag you into the story without much mercy. As with any great book, Snow Crash captivates the mind - it's about something and as a human being the reader recognizes that thing as magnificently and horrifyingly important on a very personal level. It whispers of a truth you may have always heard on the very edge of your mind.
This is what propels Snow Crash into top spot. It arrived in and didn't win squat in the awards categories. Cyberpunk seldom wins awards. Doesn't matter when awards committees get it wrong. You will find Snow Crash in virtually every best ever list of science fiction. Because you will remember it 50 years later. And, what it talks about will inform your thinking for the rest of your life. That's kick ass good.
Sometimes a book races up the charts like it is blasted out of a rocket. This is that book. It began life already famous and then got more famous. Heinlein is one of the big three giants of mid-century science fiction along with Arthur C. Clarke and Issac Asimov. Published in this novel won the Hugo award. It's also a book that challenges money, sexuality, religion, monogamy and concepts on death.
Clarke was well known for his adventurous personal explorations long before they were made popular in mainstream culture. In fact, Clarke had his part in creating that popularity and by stimulating dialogue about forbidden subjects.
This is the kind of book that still pushes buttons and possibly that's the best reason to read it, because you want to have your buttons pushed. You've erased files from your computer. You probably didn't think much about it. But, maybe you had a moment where you accidentally deleted something you really loved and now you can't get it back. That is the beginning of a science fiction story long before computers were accessible to anyone but a top government employee. In Bester won the very first Hugo award for his ground-breaking novel.
Part police-procedural, part future fantasy with the unmistakable early signs of future cyberpunk science fiction, Bester gave us a world of telepaths and a general population unable to commit murder because their brain would be heard plotting the crime before they could do the dirty deed. Except, of course someone decides to be a murderer anyway even when they know the consequence if they are caught is to be demolished.
It seems worth it. A successful venture capitalist with billions in the bank, Mike Cohen has it all figured out. Brainocytes transform the human experience, making you smarter, faster, and more powerful. With enemies at every turn, Mike must use his newly enhanced capabilities to save his family, his friends, and ultimately, the world. This novel is like taking a swan dive off the high bar into big, juicy, all-encompassing science fiction space opera.
A space opera has everything like: Vinge does it about as good as it can be done in this novel. Published in it won the Hugo. Vinge is that most rare of science fiction writers, he's a real scientist. This means that he tends to get his science more right than most.
He is also a real writer and that means that he is good at creating characters and situations we care about. That makes his book really good. It satisfies those who like their science fiction all gushy with romance and those who eschew love and demand good hard science. No one can complain. Okay, so you can whine a little over how he can cram so much good stuff into one book. When this story first came out video games were still in their infancy with games like Zelda, Mario Brothers and Donkey Kong topping the popularity charts. No one had really written a science fiction story about a child.
No one had conceived of a child in quite the way that Card did. This is militaristic science fiction. It is so good that the United States Marine Corp. It won both the Hugo and Nebula in and was optioned for a movie that will be released in the fall of Some novels find their way to the top by breaking through a genre barrier that no one knew existed prior to the moment the novel hit the shelves. This is that kind of break-through novel. It sticks with you long after you read it.
You've probably noticed a bit of list failure happening here. See, you can't compare science fiction books as if all of them are apples from the same tree. What you have here are multiple sub-genres and books that are the very best in their genre. This means you've been reading a list of number ones no matter what number is in front of their title. Nothing is better than Haldeman's The Forever War as militaristic science fiction. It's a novel about relationships over time, about being a human being and about the Vietnam War filtered through space opera.
Published in this novel won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards. But it transcends these awards by winning the hearts and minds of nearly every science fiction fan who reads it. Don't plan on doing anything but read when you buy this book. Find a quiet corner, lie to your friends and family and turn off your cell phone.
You're in for a bumpy ride with some of the best science fiction ever written. Big Brother is watching. You pull up to a stoplight noting the camera looking down from the cross bar. At every moment a camera watches -; you. Government can collectively access any of these camera feeds, sometimes in real time. Your car has a GPS tracker, your cell phone is tracked by signal feeds, you can be followed almost everywhere. In the dying George Orwell frantically wrote his novel describing this world of increasing loss of privacy.
His political dystopic novel should scare the crap out of you because it has been getting things mostly right for more than 60 years. That's what great science fiction often does -; it tells you that monsters are real and we are creating them by telling ourselves such intrusions will make us feel more safe. This book is periodically banned, censured, and called subversive -; as recently as where versions of this book were deleted by amazon.
Most best book lists have this book in the top ten of all literary fiction. One of the best ways to identify really bad-ass books is by their degree of controversy. You've heard of Dick. He wrote the novel that became the Harrison Ford movie, Bladerunner. Dick is the inspiration that prompted other writers to create cyberpunk. Many people view Dick as pre-cyberpunk. He was writing this Hugo-winning novel in It falls into yet another category called alternate history science fiction. It's dystopic, bleak, and powerful.
Dick liked to explore the nature of reality by tugging on common beliefs and inverting them in disturbing ways. This is the kind of book that will worry you long after you've read it and thought you solved it and moved on.
Guess what, it will keep returning to your thinking years later. Great novels reflect the era when they were written. Yes I know that we are talking science fiction and distant make-believe planets, aliens and starships but under all of the surface differences is a novel about real people on Earth. The readers, and the challenges we are currently facing. No one does this better than LeGuin. Before she wrote The Left Hand of Darkness most science fiction centered on male issues from male writers.
Or is she something else? Are there non-feral vampires? Is he, himself, a legend? Other movie adaptations have been less entertaining. Anyone who attempts to unearth such dangerous knowledge faces punishment — up to and including being stoned to death. Len and Esau discover that legends of Bartorstown — a thriving technological utopia — may in fact be true. So they head out, on a long journey, to find it. Traveling down the Ohio River to the Mississippi, our heroes encounter dangers and marvels… but will Bartorstown be everything they hope?
Charlie Jane Anders, of io9. Picking up where A. Though not a YA novel, The Chrysalids is a bildungsroman: During a war between the inner planets and the outer satellites, the Nomad , a merchant spaceship, is destroyed; the only survivor, a directionless loser named Gully Foyle, is cast adrift. Another Stapledonian epic, which illustrates two points: He discovers that Earthlings once traveled the stars, only to be forced back to their planet by aliens; and once offworld, Alvin discovers civilizations and entities that beggar belief.
Will he keep going? Or return to Diaspar, as a prophet? Yes, this is The Prisoner of Zenda in space; hokey material, but Heinlein handles it very well. Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction and published in hardcover the same year. Premarital sex is now taboo, not to mention cursing, drunkenness, even pulp fiction. In this updating of J. Which kills off the cattle, as well. With their families in tow, John Custance and his friend, Roger Buckley, make their way across a brutal, chaotic England. It was adapted, under that title, as a British-American science fiction movie directed by Cornel Wilde.
Also, a child with your name died in that town, years ago. Why does the town drunk remember the town the way Ted does? Who are the incorporeal Wanderers haunting the town?
Although he struggles to make sense of these eerie incongruities, before long Ted finds himself in the midst of a cosmic struggle stretching far beyond Virginia or even Earth. The Zoroastrian demigods Ohrmuzd and Ahriman might have something to do with all this. The title refers to a Bible passage First Corinthians In the near future of , nuclear fallout from World War III has eradicated all human and animal life in the Northern Hemisphere, and air currents are steadily carrying the same fate to the Southern Hemisphere.
Perhaps someone is still alive? Moira, meanwhile, copes by drinking heavily. Peter Holmes, an Australian scientist, cannot persuade his wife to believe in the impending disaster. Another member of the submarine crew, Osborne, spends all of his time driving a racecar. As the radiation reaches Melbourne, how will each character face his or her final moments?
Originally serialized in the London weekly periodical Sunday Graphic April Is that what you want to know? Having entered an advertising jingle writing contest on a lark, high-schooler Kip Russell wins a functional, but obsolete spacesuit. At which point, a UFO materializes. During World War II, Heinlein was a civilian aeronautics engineer working at a laboratory where pressure suits were being developed for use at high altitudes.
Why is their world made of plastic and steel? What lies beyond the jungle? The Big Time is a far-out example of what I have elsewhere called the Crackerjack sub-genre of adventure — in which consummate professionals team up for a common purpose. An immediate predecessor is, for example, The Guns of Navarone []. Here, however, our crackerjacks are ten warriors from various eras of Earth and non-Earth history: Each of these characters was snatched out of his or her own time at the moment of his or her death, and shanghaied into the service of alien factions — known colloquially as the Spiders and the Snakes — who send them into battles across time and space, in an ongoing effort to alter the course of history.
Here, characters fall in and out of love, make speeches, and… deal with a time bomb set ticking by a saboteur! Originally serialized in Galaxy March—Aril The terrific Hasbro boardgame Heroscape — seems directly influenced by this book. Ragle Gumm lives with his sister and her husband in a quiet suburb; the year is But his brother-in-law begins to notice reality-discrepancies, too.
Still, Gumm stubbornly investigates. A minimally sci-fi novel about false reality; an important turning point in the Philip K. It reminded me of the idea that Van Vogt had dealt with, of artificial memory, as occurs in The World of Null-A [] where a person has false memories implanted. A lot of what I wrote, which looks like the result of taking acid, is really the result of taking Van Vogt seriously! In this semi-autobiographical sci-fi detective novel and work of pornography and political satire, William Lee, a drug dealer and addict, flees from the police to Mexico.
He is instinctively determined to avoid the normalizing apparatuses of the police, psychiatrists, and government. In Mexico, however, is assigned to the sadistic Dr. First published by Olympia Press, in Paris. The American edition, from Grove Press, was one of the last books to be banned in Boston. If Rumford and his dog, Kazak were to materialize on Earth and other planets, at various points in history, would he for some reason instigate a Martian invasion? Hello, Ozymandias from The Watchmen.
A mostly bleak and ironic mini-epic, post-Olaf Stapledon and pre-Douglas Adams. The movie was never made. He does menial work for a living, and attends reading and writing classes at the Beekman College Center for Retarded Adults. Two Beekman researchers have succeeded in dramatically increasing the intelligence of a lab mouse Algernon , through experimental brain surgery; and Charlie is selected as their first human subject.
How will he choose to live, now? The novel version was joint winner, with Babel , of the Nebula. Cliff Robertson won the Oscar for his portrayal of Charlie in the film Charly. In the second section, set in , a new Renaissance is beginning: One of my favorite science fiction novels of all time. Soon enough, the English warriors, led by Sir Roger, have captured the spaceship… at which point it takes off, heading back to a Wersgor colony planet — where the battle of old-fashioned virtues and valor against advanced technology continues.
In , the TSR-published magazine Ares adapted the novel into a wargame: Bombarded by cosmic rays, the quarrelsome crew are transformed: In their first outing, the Fantastic Four jet to Monster Isle, the source of subterranean attacks on atomic plants around the world. There, they discover that the Mole Man, who seeks revenge on humankind for having ridiculed him, plans to invade the surface world with an army of monsters! Lee and Kirby upended the superhero conventions of previous eras by eschewing secret identities, and allowing their characters to have real-life problems and interpersonal conflicts.
He infiltrates the Mayan slave laborers, who are mind-controlled by sounds recorded on magnetic tape — by the priestly caste — and embedded in books the famous Mayan calendar. In addition to time travel, The Soft Machine circles around themes of media bombardment, sexuality, and out-of-body travel. The Rat falls in love with the master criminal — a beautiful, but sociopathic woman — and tries to reform her.
The brilliant, independent female character is a sociopath, it turns out, because… she was born unattractive. Still, without Slippery Jim, would we have the charming rogue Han Solo? Chronologically, this is the fourth title in the series. After a year mission exploring a black hole, astronaut Hal Bregg returns to Earth — where nearly years have passed, due to time dilation.
Space exploration is now seen as youthful adventurism, too dangerous to continue. Return from the Stars predicts e-readers: The bookstore resembled, instead, an electronic laboratory. The books were crystals with recorded contents. They can be read the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers.
At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it. One of the most famous, and most infuriating science fiction books ever. Its premise is a promising one: Valentine Michael Smith, a human raised by cosmically wise Martians and endowed with psychic and telekinetic powers, is brought back to Earth — whose social, cultural, economic, sexual, and psychological customs he finds bewildering and strange. With the aid of Jubal Harshaw, a Socrates-like philosopher, physician, lawyer, and sybarite, Smith becomes a controversial champion of free love, open-mindedness, and pacifism.
The book became a cult hit later in the Sixties, for obvious reasons; however, it is firmly anchored in Fifties culture too. Each chapter is prefaced with an advertisement for Ubik, salvation in a spray can. John Lennon, at one point, was interested in adapting the film version. A Duty-Dance with Death During the Battle of the Bulge in , he is captured and transported to Dresden. Like them, Billy becomes a philosophical ironist because — thanks to his time-traveling — the entire human experience strikes him as absurd.
Is he crazy, or a visionary? As a prisoner of war in , Vonnegut experienced the Dresden firebombing; the narrator of Slaughterhouse-Five is the author, speaking in his own voice. Efforts have been mounted to re-establish a galactic civilization; some eighty planets have organized themselves into a union called the Ekumen. In this novel, Genly Ai, an agent of The Ekumen, has spent a frustrating couple of years as an envoy to the frozen planet Gethen.
The Left Hand of Darkness is one of the first feminist sci-fi novels, though some feminists have argued that it does not go far enough in critiquing gender stereotypes.
Harold Bloom said, of this book, which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards: Our narrator, Rat, is an unpleasant, misogynistic character who runs a tiny London boarding house and brothel. An exceedingly difficult book to find! Social norms have collapsed. Colin Charteris, a young Serbian who has been working in UN refugee camps in Italy, travels to England… where he falls under the influence of the hallucinogenics and finds himself hailed as a prophet by the pharmaceuticalized populace.
Preaching a trippy Gurdjieffian gospel, Charteris could usher in a utopian social order… or perhaps his movement will help European civilization utterly devolve. In this experimentalist, poetic work, a year-old boy rescues a baby girl when her mother dies in childbirth. He raises her in a world devoid of other humans. Are Sam and An being studied by them? Who is leaving them messages — and what do the messages mean? As An grows older, sexuality introduces itself to this strange idyll. The first novel by Saxton, who is also remembered for Vector for Seven: One by one, fourteen human colonists, none of whom understands their collective mission, are transferred to the planet Delmak-O — which is populated by gelatinous cubes who offer advice in the form of I Ching-like anagrams.
A naturalist, a linguist, a geologist, a theologian, a physician, a pyschologist, and so forth: They are each eccentric and disgruntled, particularly once they begin to die off. What is the factory-like building towards which they are drawn? Are they trapped in a maze — being observed and experimented upon? Lost fans, read this one. Except for Ubik , this is the book Dick most frequently references in his Exegesis. In the near future Bob Shairp, writer and dreamer and government worker, agrees to be a guinea-pig in a military experiment — to determine whether a human being can be reconstituted like orange juice.
However, as his persona is being uploaded to computer tapes in the form of data, his body is accidentally destroyed. The pieces collected here had appeared elsewhere, in various forms, previously. The first US edition was published in by Grove Press, after an earlier edition was cancelled because the publisher feared lawsuits.
The book inspired the Joy Division song of the same name from their album Closer. As riots break out in the streets, the government introduces psychoactive drugs into the drinking water; Tichy escapes to the sewers beneath the hotel, only to be evacuated several times — each of which turns out to be a hallucination — and then shot, and placed by doctors into a cryogenic coma. He wakes up in a transformed world; Lem is affectionately parodying H. Has the world become an overpopulated hellscape threatened by a new Ice Age?
First published along with a collection of short stories shown above. Operating under the influence of Philip K. Dick, LeGuin wrote an uncanny, thought-provoking novella about George Orr, a Portland, Oregon man who has begun self-medicating in an attempt to prevent himself from dreaming. For everyone else, things have always been the way they are now.
Visiting the well-meaning psychologist and sleep researcher Dr. For example, in an effort to dream about peace on Earth, Orr conjures up a fleet of invading alien spacecraft… which does unite humankind, but at what cost? The protagonist of this proto-postmodernist philosophical novel, Dr. In the near future of the s, politics have become fragmented to the point of neo-tribalism, mainline churches have become secularized to the point of banality or else overly dogmatic, and liberals and conservatives alike are prone to shocking acts of what they imagine to be justified violence.
Meanwhile, African Americans stage an armed uprising, and college-educated young whites gather in swamp communes. When chaos engulfs Paradise, More retreats to an abandoned motel… with three beautiful women. A certain type of Episcopal girl has a weakness that comes on them just past youth…. They fall prey to Gnostic pride, commence buying antiques, and develop a yearning for esoteric doctrine. When Jack Kirby left Marvel Comics for DC in , he launched a science-fictional epic revolving around aliens with superhuman abilities arriving on Earth.
These proto-postmodernist comics are a volatile admixture of religion the character Izaya evokes the biblical Isaiah , ancient-astronaut theories, sci-fi technology the Boom Tube, the Mobius Chair, the Mother Box , and s culture the Forever People are cosmic hippies. The Fourth World storyline was intended to be a finite series, which would end with the deaths of the characters Darkseid and Orion.
In the distant future, a medieval-style way of life has risen from the ashes of civilization. Scavengers scour the ruins for power blades, energy cannons, and airboats. When news comes that the North plans to deploy scavenged alien automata against the South, a brooding poet-warrior, Lord tergeus-Cormis, travels with a mercenary, Birkin Grif, in search of a mad dwarf who is expert in ancient weaponry. The adventurers encounter mechanical birds, brain eaters, and a wizard of sorts; and they discover that a complex, lethal technology from the past lives on.
One race, the Eddorians, influences Earthlings to fail; but the Arisians influences Earthlings to transcend their limitations. Majipoor is, one might argue, direct offspring of Vance's Big Planet 3 in this list ; a large planet with Earth gravity, settled by a whole bunch of alien races and humans for millennia. The novel was Hugo nominated in and won the Nebula in Hugo nominated in We love them too much not to! Unlike Big Planet, Majipoor has a governmental structure, combining an uneasy arrangement between the various races.
This is an affectionate, but also sardonic reimagining of the fantasy genre — nothing is resolved, things get murkier instead of more clear, heroes are unheroic. After the incidents, universally assumed to have been an alien visitation, bizarre artifacts have been discovered. So he embarks on one last mission, a quixotic effort to make everything come out right. Roadside Picnic was refused publication in book form in the Soviet Union for eight years due to government censorship.
Three subtly interlinked stories set on Ste. Croix — twin Earth-colony planets circling one another. Though not his first novel, Wolfe considered it his first good one. Raw materials are running out, and insects and micro-organisms have become resistant to efforts to eradicate them. Disaster could be averted if world governments and the wealthy were willing to make sacrifices; instead, the rich live obliviously in gated communities while the right-wing US administration, headed by an idiot president, is in thrall to corporations seeking only to maximize shareholder value.
The media, meanwhile, focuses on entertainment and delivers fake news. Environmental and social-justice activists are dismissed as un-American hippies. We learn all of this through fractured vignettes about multiple characters, headlines, reports. As both government and corporate services break down, and as food is poisoned, rioting and civil unrest sweep the United States. This is true in two senses: Cause and effect are out of whack, here; ambiguity is the whole point. He does stop a peace conference — violently — though. There are other Cornelius stories, too. Selig has failed to develop meaningful relationships, or to carve a purposeful place for himself in society.
Evans, the surviving astronaut, in an insane asylum — and interrogates him. He killed the Captain; the Captain tried to kill him; Venusians killed the Captain; there are no Venusians; he is the Captain, disguised as Evans. Was there a Captain, in the first place? Or is he just insane? Beyond Apollo won the inaugural John W. Detractors claimed that this was an insult to the memory of Campbell, the Golden Age sci-fi author and editor whose name was synonymous with the wonder of space exploration.
Vaughan, a car-wreck enthusiast who heads up a kind of sex cult of fellow fetishists. What does Margherita Erdmann, former star of a traveling sado-masochistic sex show, know about the device? Why do the Schwarzkommando, African rocket technicians brought to Europe by German colonials, worship the V-2? Slothrop discovers that he may have been experimented on, as an infant; does this have something to do with German occult warfare shenanigans? A typically dystopian, disorienting, and dashed-off Philip K.
The year is ; in the aftermath of a Civil War, the USA has become a police state; African-Americans have been all but exterminated; college students have become underground guerrillas; people use their smartphones to seek hook-ups via the Phone-Grid Transex Network and advice via Cheerful Charlie, an app ; and recreational drug use has been normalized.
Winner of the John W. Shevek, a brilliant young physicist, lives on the peaceful anarchistic planet Anarres, whose inhabitants value voluntary cooperation, local control, and mutual tolerance. The downside of this utopia is an entrenched bureaucracy that stifles innovation, particularly if it seems to challenge the prevailing political and social ethos. So he relocates to Urras, a nearby world Annares is its moon where disruptive new theories and technologies are welcomed.
When Helward leaves the city, he discovers how truly strange the outside world is; time itself works differently, within the city vs. Also, he finds himself pulled southward by a mysterious, ever-increasing force.