More like Ascending
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- 2312
Kim Stanley Robinsonstandalone novel2012
similar byreflectivefar futurescience fictiongenetic engineeringspaceother star systems+1 more
In the eponymous year, when Earth's ecology is degraded and humanity has settled throughout the solar system by terraforming and genetic engineering, mysterious disasters strike some human communities and an assortment of human types from throughout the system seek to find and eliminate the cause.
- The Chrysalids
John Wyndhamstandalone novel1955
similar byreflectivefar futurescience fictiongenetic engineeringsurvival
The Chrysalids is a science fiction novel by British writer John Wyndham, first published in 1955 by Michael Joseph. It is the least typical of Wyndham's major novels, but regarded by some as his best. An early manuscript version was entitled Time for a Change.
- Tau Zero
Poul Andersonstandalone novel1970
similar byreflectivefar futurescience fictionspace operasurvival
During an epic voyage to a planet 30 light years away, the engines of the starship the 'Leonora Christine' are damaged. Unable to slow down, it attains light speed (the tau zero of the title). The disparity between time for those on board and external time becomes impossibly great. Eons and galaxies hurtle by, as the crew speed helplessly into the great unknown.
- Teixcalaan
series2 books2019
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Arkady Martine's space opera duology follows Mahit Dzmare, ambassador from the small, independent Lsel Station, as she arrives in the vast Teixcalaanli Empire to investigate her predecessor's death and finds herself caught up in the empire's own succession crisis. A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace pair court intrigue with Mahit's conflicted, outsider fascination with an empire she can't help admiring.
- Dune
series20 books1963
part of Dune Universe
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Frank Herbert's Dune Chronicles opens with 1965's Dune, set on the desert planet Arrakis where House Atreides takes control of the only source of the vital spice melange and young Paul Atreides is pulled into a struggle over its politics and religion. Herbert carried the story forward across five further novels — Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune — following Paul's line over the following millennia, before Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson later extended the saga. Many other editions of these six novels are omnibus and box-set repackagings rather than separate stories.
- Imperial Radch
series7 books2012
part of Radchaai Universe
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Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy (Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, Ancillary Mercy, 2013-2015) follows Breq, the sole surviving fragment of an AI that once inhabited both a troop-transport starship and dozens of soldier bodies, now alone and hunting for revenge inside the vast, expansionist Radch empire. Breq's quest widens across the trilogy into a conflict with the empire's own fractured ruler, and the books use her alien difficulty perceiving gender to unsettle the space-opera conventions around her.
- Implied Spaces
Walter Jon Williamsstandalone novel2008
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Implied Spaces is a 2008 space opera novel by American author Walter Jon Williams. It explores themes of transhumanism, artificial intelligence and ontology.
- Beyond This Horizon
Robert A. Heinleinstandalone novel1948
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From the front flap of a 2001 Baen reprint: "Utopia has been achieved. For centuries, disease, hunger, poverty, and war have been things found only in the history tapes. And applied genetics has given men and women the bodies of athletes and a lifespan of over a century. They should all have been very happy... But Hamilton Felix is bored. And he is the culmination of a star line, each of his last thirty ancestors chosen for superior genes. Hamilton is, as far as genetics can produce one, the ultimate man. And this ultimate man can see no reason why the human race should survive, and has no intention of continuing the pointless comedy. However, Hamilton's life is about to become less boring. A secret cabal of revolutionaries who find utopia not just boring, but desperately in need of leaders who know just What Needs to be Done, are planning to revolt and put themselves in charge. Knowing of Hamilton's disenchantment with the modern world, they have recruited him to join their Glorious Revolution. Big mistake! The revolutionaries are about to find out that recruiting a superman was definitely not a good idea..."
- The City and the Stars
Arthur C. Clarkestandalone novel1956
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The City and the Stars is a science fiction novel by British writer Arthur C. Clarke, published in 1956. This novel is a complete rewrite of Clarke's earlier Against the Fall of Night, his first novel, which had been published in Startling Stories magazine in 1948 after being rejected by the editor of Astounding Science-Fiction, according to the author.
- Learning the World
Ken MacLeodstandalone novel2005
similar byreflectivefar futurescience fictionspace operaother star systemsspace
From the front flap of the Tor first printing: "Humanity has spread to every star within 500 light-years of its half-forgotten origin, coloring the sky with a haze of habitats. Societies rise and fall. Incautious experiments burn fast and fade. On the fringes, less modified humans get on with the job of settling a universe that has, so far, been empty of intelligent life. The ancient starship But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky! is entering orbit around a promising new system after a four hundred year journey. For its long-lived inhabitants, the centuries have been busy. Now a younger generation is eager to settle the system. The ship is a seed-pod ready to burst. Then they detect curious electromagnetic emissions from the system's Earth-like world. As the nature of the signals becomes clear, the choices facing the humans become stark. On Ground, second world from the sun, a young astronomer searches for his system's outermost planet. A moving point of light thrills, then disappoints him. It's only a comet. His physicist colleague Orro takes time off from trying to invent a flying-machine to calculate the comet's trajectory. Something is very odd about that comet's path. They are not the only ones for whom the world has changed. "We are not living in the universe we thought we lived in yesterday. We have to start learning the world all over again.""
- Hainish
series33 books1964
completed
similar byreflectivefar futurescience fictionother star systems
The Hainish Cycle consists of a number of science fiction novels and stories by Ursula K. Le Guin. The cycle is set in a future history that features civilizations of human beings on planets orbiting a number of nearby stars, including Terra ("Earth"); these humans are contacting each other for the first time and establishing diplomatic relations, as well as setting up a confederacy under the guidance of the oldest of the human worlds, the peaceful planet Hain. In this history, human beings did not evolve on Earth, but they were instead the result of interstellar colonies planted by Hain in the distant past, after which interstellar travel ceased for an extended period. Some of the human races have new genetic traits, a result of ancient Hainish experiments in genetic engineering; this includes people who can dream while awake, and a world of hermaphroditic people who only enter active sexuality once per month, not knowing which sex will manifest in them. In keeping with Le Guin's narrative approach, she uses varied social and environmental settings to explore the anthropological and sociological outcomes of human evolution in those environments. The author often discounted the characterization of a so-called "Hainish Cycle".
- Remnant Population
Elizabeth Moonstandalone novel1996
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From the dust jacket front flap of the Baen first edition: Alone at last... People had always told Ofelia what to do; for once she was going to do what she wanted. She refused to get on the cryo ships, refused to leave the only world she could call home. And when they finally came for her, she hid, not that the authorities looked all that hard for one crazy old woman. Now Ofelia is alone, content to live with no more demands on her self or her time, the only remaining settler on an abandoned planet. The new settlers arrive. At first she fears that they have come to reoccupy the settlement she has come to think of as hers - but they land far away. And as Ofelia secretly listens, they are slaughtered to the last child by stone-age aliens no one knew were there. Now it will be up to Ofelia to save the aliens from Earth's wrath...
- The Songs of Distant Earth
Arthur C. Clarkestandalone novel1986
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The Songs of Distant Earth is a 1986 science fiction novel by British writer Arthur C. Clarke, based upon his 1958 short story of the same title. Of all of his novels, Clarke stated that this was his favourite. Prior to the publishing of the novel, Clarke also wrote a short step outline with the same title, published in Omni magazine and anthologised in The Sentinel in 1983.
- The Stars My Destination
Alfred Besterstandalone novel1956
similar byfar futurescience fictionspace operasurvivalspaceother star systemsidentity
When a passing spaceship refuses to rescue the lone survivor from the drifting wreck of another ship, he dedicates his life to discovering who made that decision and exacting his revenge, in the process altering human history and his own character.
- Aurora
Kim Stanley Robinsonstandalone novel2015
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Aurora is a 2015 novel by American science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson. The novel concerns a generation ship built in the style of a Stanford torus, traveling to Tau Ceti to start a human colony. The novel's primary narrative voice is that of the starship's artificial intelligence. Aurora was well received by critics.
- A Time of Changes
Robert Silverbergstandalone novel1971
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A Time of Changes is a 1971 science fiction novel by American writer Robert Silverberg. It won the Nebula Award for that year, and was also nominated for the 1972 Hugo and Locus Awards.
- The Face of the Waters
Robert Silverbergstandalone novel1991
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On the ocean world of Hydros -- a planet with no land beyond a scatter of artificial floating islands -- the human settlers of Sorve commit an offense against the native aquatic Hydrans serious enough to get their community banished, forbidden from settling on any other island. With nowhere else to go, Sorve's people set out across the water in a makeshift flotilla, chasing rumors of a mythical island called the Face of the Waters that may or may not exist, forced to reckon with what they owe the world they've spent generations treating as theirs. A Robert Silverberg novel of exile and search, told through Sorve's displaced islanders.
- Cycle of Fire
Hal Clementstandalone novel1957
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After his ship crashed on the inhospitable planet Abyorman, Nils Kruger had spent weeks wandering across the face of the planet.suffering from blistering heat, the searing cold of an alien climate. Now he had found a fellow wanderer, Dar, an alien castaway. They may both die. The human opts to do something about it. Dar, who knows the time of his death in advance, opts to do nothing. Which of them is right? Perhaps both
- The Man in the Maze
Robert Silverbergstandalone novel1969
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The Man in the Maze is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert Silverberg, originally serialized in the magazine Worlds of If in April and May 1968, and published in bookstores the following year. It tells the tale of a man rendered incapable of interacting normally with other human beings by his uncontrollable psychic abilities. The novel is inspired by Sophocles' play Philoctetes, with the roles of Odysseus, Neoptolemus and Philoctetes played by Boardman, Rawlins, and Muller, respectively.
- Manseed
Jack Williamsonstandalone novel1982
similar byreflectivefar futurescience fictionother star systemsgenetic engineeringspace
In the decades since i've read this novel somehow i forgot almost everything about it, except the powerful force it had on me. However, the the following description from http://www.fictiondb.com/author/jack-williamson~manseed~117359~b.htm seems to match my long ago reading experience: Egan Drake was a wealthy but unhappy visionary who died early and left behind only a powerful dream. He proposed to spread Mankind among the stars. Then there was Megan Drake. She took her brother's vision and made it real. At the Raven Foundation's New Mexico headquarters, she gathered around her experts in astronautics, biology, computer science, defense, and fusion propulsion. The project was simple in design yet grandiose in its aim: a thousand tiny ships would crawl to the stars; each that landed on an Earth-type planet would produce several dozen colonists; each colonist would be a product of the genes derived from Megan and her experts. Every ship would manufacture cyborgs for repairs and self-protection. But much of the technology was new and untried; no one could predict what might really occur at a millennia-long journey's end if, say, a cyborg fell in love or aliens were met or...
- Ender Wiggin
series14 books1977
part of Ender's Game Universe
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Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game (1985, expanded from his 1977 novella) follows child prodigy Andrew "Ender" Wiggin as he is recruited into a military training program built to prepare Earth's defenses for an anticipated third war against an insectoid alien species known as the Formics. The saga continues years later through Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide, following an older Ender as he confronts the moral weight of his role in that earlier conflict, and concludes the core arc in Children of the Mind, with Ender in Exile filling in the years between the first two books. Set within the wider Ender's Game universe, the series shifts from military coming-of-age story to slower, more philosophical science fiction as it progresses.
- Dune Universe
universe78 books1963
Start hereDune · Start here
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Arrakis. Dune. The desert planet, where empire runs on a single substance: the spice melange, which folds space, prolongs life, and unlocks prescience, and which exists nowhere else in the known universe. Frank Herbert's saga is a meditation dressed as an adventure — feudal houses and a secret sisterhood, engineered messiahs and the patient ecology of a world without water, all turning on the terrible gravity of who commands the spice. It reads like scripture and schemes like a war room, ten thousand years hence, among people who have outlawed the thinking machine and made instruments of themselves instead. At its heart stand Herbert's original six — Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, Chapterhouse: Dune — a single deepening arc across millennia, arguing the whole way between prophecy and free will. Around that spine his son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have raised a vast prequel architecture: Prelude to Dune, tracing the great houses a generation before Paul; Legends of Dune, reaching back to the crusade that broke the machines; the Schools of Dune cycle on the founding of Bene Gesserit, Mentat, and Navigator; the Caladan Trilogy and Heroes of Dune filling years the originals left in shadow. Many hands, dozens of volumes, one desert. What sets Dune apart is its refusal of the simple: religion is manufactured, heroes are hazards, and the sand itself — worm, water, ecology — acts as a political power. Begin where the universe did, with Frank Herbert's Dune (1965), and read the original six in order; you need nothing else to feel the full weight. The prequels are a country to explore afterward, taken by era. Beginnings are delicate times.
- Imperial Earth
Arthur C. Clarkestandalone novel1975
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Imperial Earth is a science fiction novel by British writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke, published in 1975 by Gollancz Books. The plot follows the protagonist, Duncan Makenzie, on a trip to Earth from his home on Titan, in large part as a diplomatic visit to the U.S. for its quincentennial in 2276, but also to have a clone of himself produced. The book was published in time for the U.S. bicentennial in 1976.
- Downward to the Earth
Robert Silverbergstandalone novel1969
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Edmund Gunderson was the Terran administrator of the colony world of Belzagor, and he returns to it after it has gained independence, feeling a sense of guilt for the way he has treated its dominant species, the elephant-like nildoror, whose animalistic appearance had kept Gunderson from taking them seriously as sentient beings. On his return, he feels a new sense of kinship with the natives, perhaps more than for the Terran tourists. The nildoror undergo a process of rebirth, and Gunderson's greatest guilt comes from having denied rebirth to seven nildoror to make them help him repair flood damage.(From Wikipedia)
