Unashamedly elitist science fiction

The Girl in the Golden Atom by Ray Cummings (1887-1957) is one of the early classics of American science fiction. It was originally published in the pulp magazine All-Story Weekly in 1919. Book publication followed in 1922. It was an immediate success and the basic idea was one that the author retuned to rather obsessively in his subsequent incredibly prolific career.

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Philip Francis Nowlan’s novella Armageddon - 2419 A.D. appeared in the November 1928 issue of Amazing Stories and marked the first appearance in print of Buck Rogers, making it something of a pop culture landmark.

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Humans encounter a planet-sized alien intelligence in this philosophical Polish sci-fi classic.

At last, one of the world’s greatest works of science fiction is available - just as author Stanislaw Lem intended it.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Solaris, Audible, in cooperation with the Lem Estate, has commissioned a brand-new translation - complete for the first time, and the first ever directly from the original Polish to English. Beautifully narrated by Alessandro Juliani (Battlestar Galactica), Lem’s provocative novel comes alive for a new generation.

In Solaris, Kris Kelvin arrives on an orbiting research station to study the remarkable ocean that covers the planet’s surface. But his fellow scientists appear to be losing their grip on reality, plagued by physical manifestations of their repressed memories. When Kelvin’s long-dead wife suddenly reappears, he is forced to confront the pain of his past - while living a future that never was. Can Kelvin unlock the mystery of Solaris? Does he even want to?

( Psychological science fiction of great sophistication and little excitement. )

Verdict: If you like the conjunction of philosophy + psychology + science fiction, and especially if you like Big Dumb Object SF where you get many questions but few answers, then Solaris is the best example of its kind. A thoughtful but very slow-paced novel, one that deserves its literary credibility, but it's easy to see why it's not exactly a genre favorite. Without the trippiness of Heinlein, the science-and-tech wizardry of Asimov, or the engineering geekery of Clarke, it's still a good read for aficionados of classic sci-fi.

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My complete list of book reviews.

At the Earth's Core, published in 1922, was the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar novels. I’ve always found his books to be highly entertaining and ingenious in their imagining of strange worlds and that’s certainly the case with this one.

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x-posted to sf_with_bite

The best known of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s science fiction novels is of course The Lost World, chronicling the adventures of the extraordinary Professor Challenger. Professor Challenger featured in several of Conan Doyle’s other stories. Most are collected in the Wordsworth paperback volume The Lost World and Other Stories. I’ve reviewed The Lost World and The Poison Belt elsewhere, but the final two stories in this volume, The Disintegration Machine and When the World Screamed, are also not without interest.

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Hugo Gernsback as the inventor of science fiction? What do you think? I'm ashamed to say I don't think I've ever read a Gernsback story.

Eugene Thébault’s 1929 science fiction novel Radio-Terror (Radio-Terreur, Grand Roman du Mystère) is pure pulp fiction fun.

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A time traveler kills to preserve the Perfect Present of the future, in a smart techno-thriller set in Washington, D.C.




Mulholland Books, 2011, 400 pages

A fast-paced literary thriller that recalls dystopian classics such as 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, from the award-winning author of The Last Town on Earth.

Zed is an agent from the future. A time when the world's problems have been solved. No hunger. No war. No despair.

His mission is to keep it that way. Even if it means ensuring every cataclysm throughout history runs its course-especially The Great Conflagration, an imminent disaster in our own time that Zed has been ordered to protect at all costs.

Zed's mission will disrupt the lives of a disgraced former CIA agent; a young Washington lawyer grieving over the loss of her brother, a soldier in Iraq; the oppressed employee of a foreign diplomat; and countless others. But will he finish his final mission before the present takes precedence over a perfect future? One that may have more cracks than he realizes?

The Revisionists puts a fresh spin on today's global crises, playing with the nature of history and our own role in shaping it. It firmly establishes Mullen as one of the most exciting and imaginative writers of his generation.

( This is the kind of book Dan Brown would write if Dan Brown could write. )

Verdict: Time travel is the hook, not the plot. This is some good literary SF for your non-SF-loving friends, with shades of dystopian fiction but no shades of YA. Very contemporary, and fast-paced despite the multitude of issues it raises, The Revisionists is an excellent stand-alone novel with a bittersweet ending that will leave you thinking. This one has made me interested in checking out what else Mullen has written.

America is a crapsack world in this grim, dark dystopia.



Seven Stories Press, 1998, 365 pages

Environmental devastation and economic chaos have turned America into a land of horrifying depravity. Assault, theft, sexual abuse, slavery, and murder are commonplace. Taking advantage of the situation, a zealous, bigoted tyrant wins his way into the White House.

Directly opposed is Lauren Olamina, founder of Earthseed - a new faith that teaches "God Is Change". Persecuted for "heathen" beliefs as much as for having a black female leader, Earthseed's followers face a life-and-death struggle to preserve their vision.

Best-selling author Octavia Butler's fluid writing and keen observations about race, gender, politics, and religion make for a moving parable that will be pondered for generations. A powerful reading from three standout narrators captures the multi-generational sweep of this poignant tale.

Butler's acclaimed novels have won numerous awards, and she is a recipient of a "genius" grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Parable of the Talents was selected as one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly.

( The scariest dystopias are the believable ones. )

Verdict: Genuinely brutal without much blood, and without the candy-coated glam of the YA dystopias so fashionable right now, this book will make you squirm the way a dystopia should. There aren't a lot of sci-fi gimmicks, but it's still solidly sci-fi with social commentary, and the character voices are so vivid you will believe they are real. Even though this book is a sequel, you can read it without reading the first one (though the first is equally worth reading).

Also, honestly, these books would make a great movie. But I doubt we'll ever see it. (Or if we do, the books will be absolutely gutted.)

Also by Octavia Butler: My review of Parable of the Sower

Thea von Harbou is best known today as the wife of the great film director Fritz Lang and his close collaborator on most of his early German masterpieces. She not only co-wrote the scripts, she also turned several of them into novels, including perhaps the most famous of all, Metropolis.

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