More like Tanglefoot
anchored on:steampunkalternate earth19th centuryscience fictionrobotsadventurous
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- The Difference Engine
William Gibson & Bruce Sterlingstandalone novel1990
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The computer age arrives a century early with Babbage's perfection of his 'analytical engine'. The industrial revolution is accelerated by the development of steam-driven cybernetic 'Engines'. An advanced Great Britain prepares to better the world's lot. An example of the 'steampunk' sub-genre of the cyberpunk movement.
- The Door Into Summer
Robert A. Heinleinstandalone novel1957
similar byrobotsadventurousscience fiction
From the first page of the Signet 6th printing: "An electronics engineer invents a wizard robot... only to find himself shanghaied by his ruthless partner and his gold-digging fiancee. The crafty pair forces him to submit to the "long sleep" - suspended animation for thirty years. But when he wakes up in the year 2000 A.D. the inventor makes a startling discovery. He learns that it is possible now to twist time forwards or backwards. And so he returns to the past bent on a mission... of revenge."
- Blade Runner Universe
series6 books1968
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Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? follows bounty hunter Rick Deckard as he tracks escaped androids through an irradiated, near-abandoned San Francisco, using the hunt to probe questions of empathy and what separates human from machine. The novel became the basis for Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner, and Marvel Comics later published an illustrated adaptation of that film. Together the two trace the story's path from prose original to screen and comic-page adaptation.
- Man Plus
series2 books1976
similar byrobotsscience fictiontense
Frederik Pohl's Man Plus follows Roger Torraway, who is surgically and cybernetically rebuilt into a post-human organism able to survive unprotected on the Martian surface, as part of a crash program to colonize Mars ahead of a predicted global crisis. The 1976 novel, which won the Nebula Award, is a clinical, unsentimental look at what such a transformation costs a person's sense of self. Thomas T. Thomas wrote the sequel Mars Plus, continuing the story of the Martian colony years later.
- Clockwork Century Universe
series8 books2008
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Boneshaker opens Cherie Priest's Clockwork Century, a steampunk alternate history that reimagines Seattle after a mining disaster releases a toxic gas that turns people into the walking dead, forcing survivors behind a massive wall around the poisoned city. The series expands out from that starting point across the American Civil War era, following different characters and cities in each book (Clementine, Dreadnought, Ganymede, The Inexplicables, Fiddlehead, Jacaranda) rather than one continuous plot. Boneshaker was nominated for the Nebula Award and won the 2010 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
- A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!
Harry Harrisonstandalone novel1972
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Tunnel Through the Deeps is a 1972 alternate history/science fiction novel by American writer Harry Harrison. It was serialized in Analog magazine beginning in the April 1972 issue.
- Berserker (Fred Saberhagen)
series59 books1963
similar byrobotsscience fictiontense
The Berserker series is a series of space opera science fiction short stories and novels by Fred Saberhagen, in which robotic self-replicating machines strive to destroy all life.
- Special Deliverance
Clifford D. Simakstandalone novel1982
similar byrobotsadventurousscience fiction
A professor finds himself teamed with men, women, and a robot from parallel versions of earth, transported to a planet and sent on a quest of which none of them know the purpose or the details.
- The Leviathan Trilogy
series3 books2009
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Set in an alternate First World War, Leviathan splits the belligerents into Clankers, who fight with mechanical walkers, and Darwinists, who fight with fabricated living creatures built from spliced DNA. Scott Westerfeld follows a British girl disguised as a boy to serve on a living airship and the exiled heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne as their paths collide, continuing across Behemoth and Goliath. Keith Thompson's illustrations are integral to all three books, alternating text chapters with illustrated sequences.
- Transformers movie prequels
series2 books2007
part of The Transformers
similar byrobotsadventurousscience fictiontense
- Oswald Bastable
series5 books1971
part of Moorcock's Multiverse
similar byadventurousalternate earthsteampunkscience fiction
Oswald Bastable follows an Edwardian-era British soldier flung into a series of alternate futures where the First World War never happened, opening with The Warlord of the Air (1971). Across the trilogy he drifts between rival empires and airship wars, an early and influential example of what would later be called steampunk. Michael Moorcock's A Nomad of the Time Streams trilogy sits within his wider multiverse of linked worlds and recurring avatars of the Eternal Champion.
- Destiny Doll
Clifford D. Simakstandalone novel1971
similar byrobotsadventurousscience fiction
A group of space travelers is trapped on a planet that lured them to land. The story involves their adventures on the planet and the discovery of friendly aliens, robots, and not-so-friendly life forms. There is the alternate reality possibility toward the end of the story.
- Hunchback Assignments / Modo: Mission Clockwork
series5 books2009
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- George Dower / Infernal Devices
series3 books1987
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K. W. Jeter's trilogy, whose 1987 original helped coin the term 'steampunk,' follows clockmaker George Dower as he's dragged into escalating Victorian conspiracies involving mechanical devices, secret societies, and inventions that shouldn't work but do. Infernal Devices, Fiendish Schemes, and Grim Expectations mix dark comedy with the gears-and-brass aesthetic the series helped establish before it had a name.
- Foundation Universe
universe123 books1940
Start hereFoundation · Start here
similar byrobotsscience fiction
There is a science that reads the future of quadrillions the way an astronomer reads the orbits of stars. It is called psychohistory, and its equations foresee something the ruling Galactic Empire cannot admit: the throne is rotting, and thirty thousand years of barbarism are coming. One man, Hari Seldon, cannot stop the fall. He can only shorten it — by seeding a Foundation of scholars at the rim of the galaxy, a fragile institution built to carry knowledge across the dark and cut the interregnum to a single millennium. This is a universe told in the register of history itself: the long view, the calm of deep time, empires measured in centuries and men measured against them. The spine is Asimov's original trilogy — Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation — followed decades later by the sequels Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth and the prequels Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation. Late in life Asimov braided this in with his other future histories: the Robot novels of detective Elijah Baley and his humaniform partner R. Daneel Olivaw (The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn, Robots and Empire) and the early Galactic Empire novels (Pebble in the Sky and its kin), until one continuous chronicle ran from the first thinking robots to the Second Empire. Other hands extend it — the Second Foundation Trilogy by Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, and David Brin, and shared-world spinoffs such as Robot City — so the corpus sprawls beyond a single author's tidy shelf. What distinguishes it is that the drama is intellectual: crises resolved by insight, nerve, and dialogue rather than fleets and blades, each turn hinging on the hidden logic of the Seldon Plan. Begin where readers have always begun — with Foundation, and the original trilogy in publication order. The rest opens outward from there.
- The Questor Tapes
D. C. Fontanastandalone novel1974
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On back cover: "The gripping story of an artificial man ... a fast-paced adventure moving from the Los Angeles freeways to the bustling London metropolis ... and on to the distant peaks of Mount Ararat for a spectacular climax!"
