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Foundation

Isac Asimov, 1951



For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Sheldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future—to a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years. To preserve knowledge and save mankind, Seldon gathers the best minds in the Empire—both scientists and scholars—and brings them to a bleak planet at the edge of the Galaxy to serve as a beacon of hope for a fututre generations. He calls his sanctuary the Foundation.But soon the fledgling Foundation finds itself at the mercy of corrupt warlords rising in the wake of the receding Empire. Mankind's last best hope is faced with an agonizing choice: submit to the barbarians and be overrun—or fight them and be destroyed.

Isac Asimov (Wikipedia)

Foundation (Wikipedia)
Foundation (Amazon)
Foundation (Barnes and Noble)

Dune

Frank Herbert, 1965



The Duke of Atreides has been manoeuvred by his arch enemy, Baron Harkonnen, into administering the desert planet of Dune. Although it is almost completely without water, Dune is a planet of fabulous wealth, for it is the only source of a drug prized throughout the Galactic Empire. The Duke and his son, Paul, are expecting treachery and it duly comes - but from a shockingly unexpected place. Then, when Paul succeeds his father, he becomes a catalyst for the native people of Dune, whose knowledge of the ecology of the planet gives them vast power. They have been waiting for a leader like Paul Atreides, a leader who can harness that force...

Frank Herbert (Wikipedia)

Dune (Wikipedia)
Dune (Amazon)
Dune (Barnes and Noble)

Only Forward

Michael Marshall Smith, 1994



Stark is a troubleshooter. He lives in The City - a massive conglomeration of self-governing Neighbourhoods, each with their own peculiarity. Stark lives in Colour, where computers co-ordinate the tone of the street lights to match the clothes that people wear. Close by is Sound where noise is strictly forbidden, and Ffnaph where people spend their whole lives leaping on trampolines and trying to touch the sky. Then there is Red, where anything goes, and all too often does.

At the heart of them all is the Centre - a back-stabbing community of 'Actioneers' intent only on achieving - divided into areas like 'The Results are what Counts sub-section' which boasts 43 grades of monorail attendant. Fell Alkland, Actioneer extraordinaire has been kidnapped. It is up to Stark to find him. But in doing so he is forced to confront the terrible secrets of his past. A life he has blocked out for too long.

Michael Marshall Smith (homepage)
Michael Marshall Smith (Wikipedia)

Only Forward (Wikipedia)
Only Forward (Amazon)

The Stone Canal

Ken MacLeod, 1996



Life on New Mars is tough for humans, but death is only a minor inconvenience. The machines know their place, the free market rules all, and only the Abolitionists object.

Then a stranger arrives on New Mars, a clone who remembers life on Earth as Jonathan Wilde, the anarchist with a nuclear capability who was accused of losing World War III. That stranger remembers David Reid, New Mars's leader...and the women they fought over and ideals they once shared.

Ken MacLeod (Wikipedia)

The Stone Canal (Amazon)
The Stone Canal (Barnes and Noble)

Use of Weapons

Ian M. Banks, 1990



The man known as Cheradenine Zakalwe was one of Special Circumstances' foremost agents, changing the destiny of planets to suit the Culture through intrigue, dirty tricks or military action.

The woman known as Diziet Sima had plucked him from obscurity and pushed him towards his present eminence, but despite all their dealings she did not know him as well as she thought.

The drone known as Skaffen-Amtiskaw knew both of these people. It had once saved the woman's life by massacring her attackers in a particularly bloody manner. It believed the man to be a burnt-out case. But not even its machine intelligence could see the horrors in his past.

Ian M Banks (homepage)
Ian M Banks (Wikipedia)

Use of Weapons (Wikipedia)

Red Mars, Mars Trilogy

Kim Stanley Robinson, 1992



In his most ambitious project to date, award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson utilizes years of research and cutting-edge science in the first of three novels that will chronicle the colonization of Mars. For eons, sandstorms have swept the barren, desolate landscape of the red planet. For centuries, Mars has beckoned to mankind to come and conquer its hostile climate. Now, in the year 2026, a group of one hundred colonists is about to fulfill that destiny. John Boone, Maya Toitovna, Frank Chalmers, and Arkady Bogdanov lead a mission whose ultimate goal is the terraforming of Mars. For some, Mars will become a passion driving them to daring acts of courage and madness; for others it offers an opportunity to strip the planet of its riches. And for the genetic "alchemists," Mars presents a chance to create a biomedical miracle, a breakthrough that could change all we know about life...and death. The colonists place giant satellite mirrors in Martian orbit to reflect light to the planet's surface. Black dust sprinkled on the polar caps will capture warmth and melt the ice. And massive tunnels, kilometers in depth, will be drilled into the Martian mantle to create stupendous vents of hot gases. Against this backdrop of epic upheaval, rivalries, loves, and friendships will form and fall to pieces - for there are those who will fight to the death to prevent Mars from ever being changed. Brilliantly imagined, breathtaking in scope and ingenuity, Red Mars is an epic scientific saga, chronicling the next step in human evolution and creating a world in its entirety. Red Mars shows us a future, with both glory and tarnish, that awes with complexity and inspires with vision.

Kim Stanley Robinson (Wikipedia)

Red Mars (Wikipedia)
Red Mars (Barnes & Noble)
Red Mars (Bokfynd)

The Forever War

Joe Haldeman, 1974



Private William Mandella is a hero in spite of himself -- a reluctant conscript drafted into an elite military unit, and propelled through space and time to fight in a distant thousand-year conflict. He never wanted to go to war, but the leaders on Earth have drawn a line in the interstellar sand -- despite the fact that their fierce alien enemy is unknowable, unconquerable, and very far away. So Mandella will perform his duties without rancor and even rise up through the military's ranks . . . if he survives. But the true test of his mettle will come when he returns to Earth. Because of the time dilation caused by space travel the loyal soldier is aging months, while his home planet is aging centuries -- and the difference will prove the saying: you never can go home. . .

Joe Haldeman (homepage)
Joe Haldeman (Wikipedia)

The Forever War (Wikipedia)

Hyperion

Dan Simmons, 1989



On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope—and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands.

Dan Simmons (homepage)
Dan Simmons (Wikipedia)

Hyperion (Wikipedia)
Hyperion (Amazon)
Hyperion (Barnes & Noble)
Hyperion (Bokfynd)

The Martian Chronicles

Ray Bradbury, 1950

Man, was a a distant shore, and the men spread upon it in wave... Each wave different, and each wave stronger.

Ray Bradbury is a storyteller without peer, a poet of the possible, and, indisputably, one of America's most beloved authors. In a much celebrated literary career that has spanned six decades, he has produced an astonishing body of work: unforgettable novels, including Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes; essays, theatrical works, screenplays and teleplays; The Illustrated Mein, Dandelion Wine, The October Country, and numerous other superb short story collections. But of all the dazzling stars in the vast Bradbury universe, none shines more luminous than these masterful chronicles of Earth's settlement of the fourth world from the sun.

Bradbury's Mars is a place of hope, dreams and metaphor-of crystal pillars and fossil seas-where a fine dust settles on the great, empty cities of a silently destroyed civilization. It is here the invaders have come to despoil and commercialize, to grow and to learn -first a trickle, then a torrent, rushing from a world with no future toward a promise of tomorrow. The Earthman conquers Mars ... and then is conquered by it, lulled by dangerous lies of comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of an ancient, mysterious native race.

Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is a classic work of twentieth-century literature whose extraordinary power and imagination remain undimmed by time's passage. In connected, chronological stories, a true grandmaster once again enthralls,delights and challenges us with his vision and his heart-starkly and stunningly exposing in brilliant spacelight our strength, our weakness, our folly, and our poignant humanity on a strange and breathtaking world where humanity does not belong.

Ray Bradbury (homepage)
Ray Bradbury (Wikipedia)

The Martian Chronicles (Wikipedia)
The Martian Chronicles (Amazon)
The Martian Chronicles (Barnes & Noble)
The Martian Chronicles (Bokfynd)

Macrolife

George Zebrowski, 1979



Subtitled, A Mobile Utopia, this pioneering novel about the meaning of space habitats for human history, presents spacefaring as no work did in its time, and since. A utopian novel like no other, presenting a dynamic utopian civilization that transcends the failures of our history.

Epic in scope, Macrolife opens in the year 2021. The bulero family owns one of Earth's richest corporations. As the Buleros gather for a reunion at the family mansion, an industrial accident plunges the corporation into a crisis, which eventually brings the world around them to the brink of disaster. Vilified, the Buleros flee to a space colony where young Richard Bulero gradually realizes that the only hope for humanity lies in macrolife--mobile, self-reproducing space habitats.

A millennium later, these mobile communities have left our sunspace and multiplied. Conflicts with natural planets arise. John Bulero, a cloned descendant of the twenty-first century Bulero clan, falls in love with a woman from a natural world and experiences the harshness of her way of life. He rediscovers his roots when his mobile returns to the solar system, and a tense confrontation of three civilizations takes place.

One hundred billion years later, macrolife, now as numerous as the stars, faces the impending death of nature. Regaining his individuality by falling away from a highly evolved macrolife, a strangely changed John Bulero struggles to see beyond a collapse of the universe into a giant black hole.

Inspired by the possibilities of space settlements, projections of biology and cosmology, and basic human longings, Macrolife is a visionary speculation on the long-term future of human and natural history. Filled with haunting images and memorable characters, this is a vivid and brilliant work.

George Zebrowski (Wikipedia)

Macrolife (Wikipedia)
Macrolife (Amazon)
Macrolife (Barnes & Noble)
Macrolife (Bokfynd)

Macrolife (review at SF Site)
Macrolife (review at SFFWorld)

A Fire Upon the Deep

Vernor Vinge, 1992



Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures and technology can function. Nobody knows what strange force partitioned space into these "regions of thought," but when the warring Straumli realm use an ancient Transcendent artifact as a weapon, they unwittingly unleash an awesome power that destroys thousands of worlds and enslaves all natural and artificial intelligence.

Fleeing the threat, a family of scientists, including two children, are taken captive by the Tines, an alien race with a harsh medieval culture, and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle. A rescue mission, not entirely composed of humans, must rescue the children-and a secret that may save the rest of interstellar civilization.

Vernor Vinge (Wikipedia)
Vernor Vinge (Salon article, 1999)

A Fire Upon the Deep (Wikipedia)
A Fire Upon the Deep (Amazon)
A Fire Upon the Deep (Barnes & Noble)
A Fire Upon the Deep (Bokfynd)

Woken Furies

Richard Morgan, 2005



This is the latest Takeshi Kovacs novel and it's better than Broken Angels but not as good as Altered Carbon.

Once a gang member, then a marine, then a galaxy-hopping Envoy trained to wreak slaughter and suppression across the stars, a bleeding, wounded Kovacs was chilling out in a New Hokkaido bar when some so-called holy men descended on a slim beauty with tangled, hyperwired hair. An act of quixotic chivalry later and Kovacs was in deep: mixed up with a woman with two names, many powers, and one explosive history.

In a world where the real and virtual are one and the same and the dead can come back to life, the damsel in distress may be none other than the infamous Quellcrist Falconer, the vaporized symbol of a freedom now gone from Harlan’s World. Kovacs can deal with the madness of AI. He can do his part in a battle against biomachines gone wild, search for a three-centuries-old missing weapons system, and live with a blood feud with the yakuza, and even with the betrayal of people he once trusted. But when his relationship with “the” Falconer brings him an enemy specially designed to destroy him, he knows it’s time to be afraid.

After all, the guy sent to kill him is himself: but younger, stronger, and straight out of hell.

Richard Morgan (homepage)
Richard Morgan (Wikipedia)

Woken Furies (Wikipedia)
Woken Furies (Amazon)
Woken Furies (Barnes & Noble)
Woken Furies (Bokfynd)

Woken Furies (review at SF Reviews)

Fallen Dragon

Peter F. Hamilton, 2001



I'd say that this is Hamilton's best book. And it's only a single volume as well!

As a child, Lawrence Newton wanted nothing more than to fly starships and explore the galaxy, like his fictional heroes. But on the colony world of Amethi in the twenty-fourth century, Lawrence is living in the wrong era: the age of human starflight is drawing to a close. So, like many another teenage hothead, he rebels and runs away.

Twenty years later, he's the seargent of a washed-out platoon taking part in the bungled invasion of another world. The giant corporations who own the remaining starships euphamistically call such campaigns 'asset realization'. In practice it's simple piracy.

But while he's on the ground, being shot at and firebombed by disturbingly effective resistance forces, Lawrence hears stories about the Temple of the Fallen Dragon - the holy place of a sect devoted to the worship of a mythical creature that fell from the sky millenia before the arrival of humans. More importantly, its priests are said to guard a hoard of treasure large enough to buy lifelong happiness for any man, and that information alone is enough to prompt him to mount a small private-enterprise operation of his own.

Peter F. Hamilton (homepage)
Peter F. Hamilton (Wikipedia)

Fallen Dragon (Wikipedia)
Fallen Dragon (Amazon)
Fallen Dragon (Barnes & Noble)
Fallen Dragon (Bokfynd)

City

Clifford D. Simak, 1952



Far, far in the future, Man is but a myth. The ruling race on the Earth are the Dogs. Not warhounds, mind you; intelligent, caring dogs. And the legend of Man is passed among dogs from father to son, in eight stories that are more likely to be legend than truth - or so the dogs think, anyway.

Clifford D. Simak (Wikipedia)

City (Wikipedia)
City (Amazon)
City (Barnes & Noble)
City (Bokfynd)

City (review by Tal Cohen)

Look to Windward

Iain M. Banks, 2000



It was one of the less glorious incidents of the Idiran wars that led to the destruction of two suns and the billions of lives they supported. Now, eight hundred years later, the light from the first of those ancient deaths has reached the Culture's Masaq' Orbital. For the Hub Mind, overseer of the massive bracelet world, its arrival is particularly poignant. But it may still be eclipsed by events from the Culture's more recent past.
When the Chelgrian Ziller, a composer of great renown now living in self-imposed exile, learns that an emissary from his home world is being sent to Masaq' Orbital, he fears the worst: that the Chelgrians want him to return. A considerable debt is owed to the Chelgrians, but Ziller is an honoured guest on their world and the Culture would not force him to leave.They know that they are facing a slight diplomatic problem. However, Ziller is not the only thing on the Chelgrian emissary's mind. If his mission is successful, it will illuminate the Culture's future as well as its past.

Ian M Banks (homepage)
Ian M Banks (Wikipedia)

Look to Windward (Wikipedia)
Look to Windward (Amazon)
Look to Windward (Barnes & Noble)
Look to Windward (Bokfynd)

Look to Windward (review NYTimes)
Look to Windward (review SF site)
Look to Windward (review Strange Horizons)