Thursday, April 21, 2016

Science Fiction Books You Should Read Book List

Are you looking for a good science fiction book? Want something different? Check out this book list...





1) "Ancillary Justice" by Anne Leckie

In which a zombie imperialist space cop gets caught up in a complex plot to—well, this enjoyable sci-fi outing gets even more complicated than all that.

Those who have seen the film Event Horizon will remember that a starship that got caught up in a time-space-continuum eddy got all, well, weird—or, as its creator puts it, “[w]hen she crossed over, she was just a ship. But when she came back—she was alive!” Debut novelist Leckie’s premise dips into the same well, only her spaceship has become, over thousands of years, a sort-of human that is also a sort-of borg made up of interchangeable-parts-bearing dead people. Breq, aka One Esk, aka Justice of Toren, has his/her/its work cut out for him/her/it: There’s a strange plot afoot in the far-flung Radch, and it’s about to make Breq violate the prime directive, or whatever the Radchaai call the rule that says that multisegmented, ancillary humanoids are not supposed to shoot their masters, no matter how bad their masters might be. Leckie does a very good job of setting this complex equation up in not many pages, letting detail build on detail, as when Breq finds—well, let’s say “herself” for the moment—in an increasingly tangled conspiracy that involves the baddest guy of all, the even more multifaceted head honcho of the Radch. As the action picks up, one just knows there’s going to be some battering and bruising out on the shoulder of Orion.

Leckie’s novel cast of characters serves her well-plotted story nicely. This is an altogether promising debut.

Book One of Three





2) "Perdido Street Station" by China Mieville

Doorstopper steampunk fantasy from the author of King Rat (1999). In the stinking, teeming, rotting city of New Crobuzon, magic, science, and alchemy all work. Humans, aliens, sentient floor-mops, and other entities even more bizarre maintain an uneasy coexistence; criminals may be sentenced to have their heads grafted on to coal-burning machines. Overweight, talented but erratic scientist Isaac—his girlfriend is a khepri, with the red-skinned body of human female and a head resembling a huge scarab—accepts the flying humanoid Yagharek as a client. Yagharek, having had his wings hacked from his body as punishment for a crime Isaac cannot comprehend, desperately yearns to fly again. Isaac considers the magical grafting of new wings, or mechanical devices to reproduce flight. To assist his research, he gathers samples of every imaginable creature capable of flight—including a mysterious giant caterpillar that feeds only on “dreamshit,” a weird new drug that’s ravaging the city. Finally, Isaac makes a scientific breakthrough in the field of crisis energy, but, meanwhile, the caterpillar matures and escapes. The creature, a slake-moth, frees others of its kind kept by the hideous gangster Motley as a source of the drug. The slake-moths are desperately hard to kill and, with their hypnotic powers, feed by consuming dreams, leaving their victims mindless drooling hulks. Soon the city quakes in terror. Somehow the slake-moths must be destroyed—but even the devil himself declines to assist. . . .

Earthy, sometimes outright disgusting—imagine finding your toilet blocked up by diamonds—but, amazingly in a book of this length, flawlessly plotted and relentlessly, stunningly inventive: a conceptual breakthrough of the highest order.

Book One of Three




3) "Red Rising" by Pierce Brown

Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.

In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.

A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.

Book One of Three





4) "Spin" by Robert Charles Wilson

Another character-oriented, surpassingly strange SF yarn from the ever-reliable author of , most recently, Blind Lake (2003).

As ten-year-old Tyler Dupree sits with his friends Jason and Diane Lawton in the back yard of their Big House near Washington, DC, the stars go out. The “sun” that rises the next day is but an image: a barrier now encloses the Earth, generated by huge artifacts hovering over the poles. Weirder yet, time passes one hundred million times more swiftly outside the barrier, so that the sun itself may last only another 40 subjective years. Tyler becomes a doctor; Diane, with whom Tyler is never quite able to develop a satisfactory relationship, marries apocalyptic cultist Simon Townsend; Jason, a brilliant scientist, founds the Perihelion Center in Florida to research the effects of the Spin, as it becomes known. Later, Jason develops an incurable form of multiple sclerosis and asks Tyler, now his personal physician, to conceal the illness from the public and his staff. The staggering time differential turns out to have certain advantages: the terraforming of Mars, for instance, takes only a subjective year or two, and a handful of intrepid colonists rapidly develop an advanced civilization—before another barrier appears around Mars. A visitor from Mars, Wun Ngo Wen, brings advanced knowledge and medical techniques—they may save Jason’s life—together with a plan to seed the distant, iceball-filled Kuiper Belt with slow-growing, living machines capable of investigating the activities of the so-called Hypotheticals. Others, however, suspect Wun has a hidden agenda.

A far-fetched yet fascinating time-odyssey that pushes the envelope in every direction.

Book One of Three




5) "Daemon" by Daniel Suarez

Computer programs left behind by a dying inventor of video games spread dark mischief around the world, pitting gamers and enabled losers against the most powerful government agencies and businesses, with the geeks holding the best hands.

How do you really mess things up after you’re dead: tricky wills? entailments? trusts? Posthumous legal meddling is so last millennium. The modern way to carry out your wishes is to use a daemon, a computer program that lies dormant until other factors set it in motion. That’s precisely what mastermind Matthew Sobol did. Before he died of brain cancer, Sobol perfected a brilliant string of programming instructions that soon begin to claim victims. The first are a couple of high-level employees at CyberStorm, the Southern California corporation that controls and distributes Sobol’s hugely popular games. Detective Sergeant Peter Sebeck of the Ventura County sheriff’s department quickly learns (without exactly understanding how) that newspaper headlines can activate the Daemon, which throws switches that electrocute and decapitate. Seback and a growing number of state and federal forces follow the forensics to the late inventor’s mansion, which is murderously booby-trapped with a robotic Hummer and gasoline-spewing sprinkler heads. It becomes evident that Sobol’s Internet games are a herd of Trojan horses. When the Daemon turns on Sebeck and sticks him with the blame for this mess, the officer’s only backers are a brilliant NSA scientist and a Russian-born gamer.

Originally self-published, Suarez’s not-just-for-gamers debut is a stunner, with an ending that promises sequels to come.





6) "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro

An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).

Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.

A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.










7) "Reamde" by Neal Stephenson

Who lives by the joystick dies by the joystick: Noir futurist Stephenson (Anathem, 2008, etc.) returns to cyberia with this fast-moving though sprawling techno-thriller.

Richard Forthrast is a middle-aged videogame tycoon with a problem on his hands: Bad guys have figured out a way to hack his new shooter splatfest with a virus that “took advantage of a buffer overflow bug in Outlook to inject malicious code into the host operating system and establish root-level control of the computer.” Richard has other problems, some big enough to pose a threat to the world currency market. Eek! Fortunately, nepotism be damned, he’s hired his adopted niece to do a little consulting, and she turns out to have the wherewithal to give Geena Davis and Uma Thurman a run for the money in the hot-chicks-with-mad-ninja-skills department. Young Zula has solid possibilities. For one thing, she’s babelicious, “black/Arab with an unmistakable hint of Italian.” For another, she’s got dual degrees in geology and computer science, which come in very handy when she has to scale impenetrable mountains on the hunt for renegade computer jocks. A bonus: She’s quick to learn her way around a shotgun, and her boyfriend isn’t too shabby, either, even though they have a habit of getting into bad predicaments: “As minutes went by and the novelty of being on a private jet wore off, Zula began to understand the same thing that Peter did, which was that they were not meant to get out of this alive.” There are bad guys aplenty, and they’re more diverse than an IHOP menu: There are Russians and Chinese, mutually distrustful, and a small army of very bad jihadists, the kind who give good Muslims a bad name. There are hackers and counterhackers, spies versus spies. And then there are Richard’s kinfolk, the Brothers Karamazov with heavy weapons.

Who’ll prevail? We don’t know till the very end, thanks to Stephenson’s knife-sharp skills as a storyteller. An intriguing yarn—most geeky, and full of satisfying mayhem.




8) "Blindsight" by Peter Watts

Alien-contact tale in which humans are at least as weird as the aliens.

Eighty years from now, denizens of Earth become aware of an alien presence when the sky fills with bursts of light from dying Fireflies, tiny machines that signal to a supergiant planet far beyond the edge of the solar system. With orders to investigate, the vessel Theseus carries an artificial intelligence as its captain, along with expedition leader Jukka Sarasti, a brooding, sociopathic and downright scary vampire; Isaac Szpindel, a biologist so mechanized he can barely feel his own skin; the Gang of Four, a schizophrenic linguist; curiously passive warrior Major Amanda Bates; and observer-narrator Siri Keeton, a synthesist with half a brain (the remainder destroyed by a virus) enhanced by add-ons and advanced algorithms. They meet a huge alien vessel that calls itselfRorschach and talks eagerly but says nothing of consequence. Indeed, the Gang of Four suspects that the alien voice isn’t truly sentient at all. As Keeton begins to hallucinate, Sarasti orders a team to break into the alien vessel despite its lethal radiation levels. Still unable to decide whether the aliens are hostile, Sarasti devises a plan to capture one of the creatures that apparently thrive within Rorschach’s peculiar environment. They succeed in grabbing two specimens. These scramblers, dubbed Stretch and Clench, resemble huge, bony, multi-limbed starfish. They have no brains but show evidence of massive information-processing capability, which brings Theseus’ crew to the crucial question: Can intelligence exist without self-awareness?

Watts (ßehemoth: Seppuku, 2005, etc.) carries several complications too many, but presents nonetheless a searching, disconcerting, challenging, sometimes piercing inquisition.




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