Zack Lightman has spent his life dreaming. Dreaming that the real world could be a little more like the countless science-fiction books, movies, and videogames he’s spent his life consuming. Dreaming that one day, some fantastic, world-altering event will shatter the monotony of his humdrum existence and whisk him off on some grand space-faring adventure. But hey, there’s nothing wrong with a little escapism, right? After all, Zack tells himself, he knows the difference between fantasy and reality. He knows that here in the real world, aimless teenage gamers with anger issues don’t get chosen to save the universe. And then he sees the flying saucer. Even stranger, the alien ship he’s staring at is straight out of the videogame he plays every night, a hugely popular online flight simulator called Armada—in which gamers just happen to be protecting the earth from alien invaders.  No, Zack hasn’t lost his mind. As impossible as it seems, what he’s seeing is all too real. And his skills—as well as those of millions of gamers across the world—are going to be needed to save the earth from what’s about to befall it. It’s Zack’s chance, at last, to play the hero. But even through the terror and exhilaration, he can’t help thinking back to all those science-fiction stories he grew up with, and wondering: Doesn’t something about this scenario seem a little…familiar? At once gleefully embracing and brilliantly subverting science-fiction conventions as only Ernest Cline could, Armada is a rollicking, surprising thriller, a classic coming of age adventure, and an alien invasion tale like nothing you’ve ever read before—one whose every page is infused with the pop-culture savvy that has helped make Ready Player One a phenomenon.

2015 science fiction novel by Ernest Cline

Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. Now, he’s sure he’ll be the first person to die there.After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive—and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive. Chances are, though, he won’t have time to starve to death. The damaged machinery, unforgiving environment, or plain-old “human error” are much more likely to kill him first. But Mark isn’t ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills — and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit — he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?

An extraordinary debut novel of love that survives the fires of hell and transcends the boundaries of time.The narrator of The Gargoyle is a very contemporary cynic, physically beautiful and sexually adept, who dwells in the moral vacuum that is modern life. As the book opens, he is driving along a dark road when he is distracted by what seems to be a flight of arrows. He crashes into a ravine and suffers horrible burns over much of his body. As he recovers in a burn ward, undergoing the tortures of the damned, he awaits the day when he can leave the hospital and commit carefully planned suicide—for he is now a monster in appearance as well as in soul. A beautiful and compelling, but clearly unhinged, sculptress of gargoyles by the name of Marianne Engel appears at the foot of his bed and insists that they were once lovers in medieval Germany. In her telling, he was a badly injured mercenary and she was a nun and scribe in the famed monastery of Engelthal who nursed him back to health. As she spins their tale in Scheherazade fashion and relates equally mesmerizing stories of deathless love in Japan, Iceland, Italy, and England, he finds himself drawn back to life—and, finally, in love. He is released into Marianne's care and takes up residence in her huge stone house. But all is not well. For one thing, the pull of his past sins becomes ever more powerful as the morphine he is prescribed becomes ever more addictive. For another, Marianne receives word from God that she has only twenty-seven sculptures left to complete—and her time on earth will be finished. Already an international literary sensation, the Gargoyle is an Inferno for our time. It will have you believing in the impossible.

Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias set out—with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes—to breed their own exhibit of human oddities. There’s Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious—and dangerous—asset.As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.

Probably I read it wrong.I don’t know how else to explain my reaction to a book so many enjoy. I was looking forward to some space-faring sci-fi: I recently read Dune, and with plenty of news about The Expanse, the sci-fi series based on Leviathan Wakes, crossing my feed, I’ve been feeling nostalgic about space travel and unfamiliar planets. Unfortunately, this a disappointment and a chore to complete.Aurora begins with Freya and her father sailing on Long Pond. It turns out Long Pond is in the Nova Scotia biome of a spaceship. Narration follows Freya, and the reader knows only as much as she does. It is a clever introduction to a complex scenario, allowing the reader to see the world through child’s eyes, and providing for–somewhat–suspension of disbelief. Freya’s mother, Devi, is the head engineer, and we learn about various problems the ship and its people face through Devi’s troubleshooting. I found myself alternately fascinated by ship logistics and bored by the simplistic structure of the narrative:“Evenings at home are the best. Creche is over and done, her time with all the kids she lives with so much, spending more time with them than she does with her parents, if you don’t count sleeping, it gets so tiresome to make it through all the boring hours, talking, arguing, fighting, reading alone, napping. All the kids are smaller than she is now, it’s embarrassing. It’s gone on so long. They make fun of her, if they think she isn’t listening to them. They take care with that, because once she heard them making those jokes and she ran over roaring and knocked one of them to the ground and beat on his raised arms. She got in trouble for it, and since then they are cautious around her, and a lot of the time she keeps to herself.”I tried to stay patient, though character and language are two components key to keeping me intrigued. I thought maybe KSR was attempting something interesting with narrative voice and plot–how does a limited colony integrate the cognitively disabled when everything is calculated, almost down to the last molecule? But no–the next section begins with Devi trying to teach the ship narration. Again, interesting device; a clever way to give the reader the technical background on a 159 year old ship that holds two thousand, one hundred twenty-two people. The ship gains a grasp of storytelling and goes back to Freya, now wandering the biomes in a rite of passage common to many residents. She works as a Good For Anything laborer, meeting many of the 3oo people in each biome. Again, fascinating way to show the reader the ship and the way of life, although I found myself starting to wonder about the agrarian way of life Freya was encountering.Throughout the story, plot oriented narration is frequently interrupted by Ship’s philosophical musings. What is metaphor? What is consciousness? What is risk? Once again, ideas with the potential to be interesting, but they are so overt, so clearly interrupting the story as commentary that it’s the literary version of a public service announcement. We witness the situation and then the ship analyzes it in the narrative, as if the reader is twelve year-old Freya. When the ship started learning metaphor, I couldn’t help but feel frustrated, recalling the far more sophisticated story in China Miéville’s Embassytown. I remembered how much thought I had to put into reading it, and suddenly realized that KSR was spoon-feeding interpretation. He wasn’t content to create his art and let the viewer define meaning; he wants to control the reader’s conclusions. Does he not trust his story? His skill? The reader?Section Three centers on arriving at their new home, and it is here that Freya takes a background role as we focus on Euan, one of her childhood friends that is planet-side. Descriptions of the planet are outstanding and lyrical, and I was once again caught in the story as the settlers attempted to create a home. Nostalgia set in as I remembered Anne McCaffrey’s Pern settlement books, but this section didn’t last nearly as long as I hoped.Further section analysis would no doubt include spoilers, but I will say that Section Four displayed a dismal view of humanity, Section Five is when I hit my ceiling on suspension of disbelief, and Section Six would be better served by reading Wikapedia entries on language, AI and cognition. Colony structure and science that were so painstakingly explained earlier became almost irrelevant as people scurried around reacting like kindergartners during a fire drill. It became a chore to read, thematically and logically, with a character displaying TSTL traits in the final chapter worthy of the worst paranormal romances.I find that I am irritated with almost everything about this book. The plot is picked up or discarded according to what KSR needs to happen to make particular points. Characterization is limited at best. When I first read reviews, I thought, “wow, that says something for the author’s skill if the most interesting character is a ship,” but I didn’t realized how ironic that would prove.The scientific information underlying the story seems interesting and valid. However, like the plot, the science content is mostly there to create situations for humans to react and prove the author’s points. The “printers” are a giant creative crutch. I expect that great science fiction takes the world we know and throws it in the future, exploring the human experience through the unfamiliar, but this just took the amazing and gave it the same behavioral reactions I’d find in the local mall. I wanted the version of this book that explored the behavior of 2000 people isolated for six generations, or, failing that, the experience of colonizing a planet away from any renewable resources. Frankly, skip this–you’d be better off reading The Martian.

The year is 2312. Scientific and technological advances have opened gateways to an extraordinary future. Earth is no longer humanity's only home; new habitats have been created throughout the solar system on moons, planets, and in between. But in this year, 2312, a sequence of events will force humanity to confront its past, its present, and its future.The first event takes place on Mercury, on the city of Terminator, itself a miracle of engineering on an unprecedented scale. It is an unexpected death, but one that might have been foreseen. For Swan Er Hong, it is an event that will change her life. Swan was once a woman who designed worlds. Now she will be led into a plot to destroy them.

For Kivrin, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received.But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin--barely of age herself--finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history's darkest hours.Connie Willis draws upon her understanding of the universalities of human nature to explore the ageless issues of evil, suffering, and the indomitable will of the human spirit.

On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest. Once, she was the Justice of Toren - a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy. Now, an act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with one fragile human body, unanswered questions, and a burning desire for vengeance.

"I live for the dream that my children will be born free," she says. "That they will be what they like. That they will own the land their father gave them.""I live for you," I say sadly.Eo kisses my cheek. "Then you must live for more."Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations.Yet he spends his life willingly, knowing that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children.But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity already reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and sprawling parks spread across the planet. Darrow—and Reds like him—are nothing more than slaves to a decadent ruling class.Inspired by a longing for justice, and driven by the memory of lost love, Darrow sacrifices everything to infiltrate the legendary Institute, a proving ground for the dominant Gold caste, where the next generation of humanity's overlords struggle for power. He will be forced to compete for his life and the very future of civilization against the best and most brutal of Society's ruling class. There, he will stop at nothing to bring down his enemies... even if it means he has to become one of them to do so.

It's the twenty-fifth century, and advances in technology have redefined life itself. A person's consciousness can now be stored in the brain and downloaded into a new body (or "sleeve"), making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen. Onetime U.N. Envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Resleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats existence as something that can be bought and sold. For Kovacs, the shell that blew a hole in his chest was only the beginning.

In AD 2600 the human race is finally beginning to realize its full potential. Hundreds of colonized planets scattered across the galaxy host a multitude of prosperous and wildly diverse cultures. Genetic engineering has pushed evolution far beyond nature's boundaries, defeating disease and producing extraordinary spaceborn creatures. Huge fleets of sentient trader starships thrive on the wealth created by the industrialization of entire star systems. And throughout inhabited space the Confederation Navy keeps the peace. A true golden age is within our grasp.But now something has gone catastrophically wrong. On a primitive colony planet a renegade criminal's chance encounter with an utterly alien entity unleashes the most primal of all our fears. An extinct race which inhabited the galaxy aeons ago called it "The Reality Dysfunction." It is the nightmare which has prowled beside us since the beginning of history.

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SitOnA Rick

Just when you thought you'd heard it all... Best of the best and highly recommended! 

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Deathgrass/Gothic Americana/Dark Country for the Uninitiated

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