Reamde, 2011

Consider Phlebas, 1987

Cat's Cradle, 1963

At The Mountains of Madness, 1936

Read At The Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft

Crash (1973)

The Hunger Games (2008)

Rocannon's World, 1966

I have become a big fan of Ursula K. LeGuin's work recently. Her prose is so tense and emotional, and the story backgrounds in her first novels (the so-called Hainish series) are pretty cool: most of the stories take place on colonized worlds far in the future, some of them savage but with some remnants of the old Earth civilization and technologies. So these societies usually are based on medieval or barbaric culture mixed with ultra-advanced technologies like faster-than-light drives, laserguns, antigrav gliders, etc.

It's hard to choose a favorite story, her first three novels Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile and City of Illusions are all similarly great. The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974) both won the Hugo and Nebula award and are also bold pieces of fiction. Don't forget The Word for World is Forest (1975) which will be re-released soon, and which must have been a substantial influence for James Cameron's Avatar.

Le Guin's World - Hainish Encyclopedia

Under the dome, 2009

Rarely we feature current books, but the latest Stephen King novel Under The Dome is really worth reading. It's the story of a small town called Chester's Mill that finds itself under a "dome" of transparent, yet impermeable material. In the cut-off society that rapidly develops into a near dictatorship, all hell breaks loose.

While most of his King's past efforts in the oughties ranged from so-so (Duma Key, Lisey's Story, the final Dark Tower books) to downright horrible (Cell), this one really really has a lot going for it and is really suspenseful, like older classic King.

Apparently this is a rewrite from a story idea he had already worked on in the 1970s, which might explain the better pace of the novel. The only gripe I have with this is the ending-- King randomly kills of big parts of his cast, and for most characters we never even learn their eventual fate.

Check out one of the numerous viral fake sites for Chester's Mill, the town under the Dome, below.

Welcome to Chester's Mill

Catch-22, 1961

Joseph Heller's Catch-22 indeed is one of the best war novels, or even one of the best novels of the twentieth century, for that matter. The novel recounts the events surrounding an American bombing squad based in Italy in the late stages of World War II. Yossarian, the main character, desperately wants to get grounded for fear of his life, and tries to approach the unit's doctor about that. He's told that he can be grounded and sent home but "there's a catch" (and that's also where the title of the book comes from): Catch-22 is the situation in which any pilot that asks to be grounded is in a "no-win" or "double-bind" situation:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.

Through a repetitive prose often bordering on slapstick, the hilarious antics of the characters and also the absurdity of the military hierarchy and the processes involved in it are laid out. Heller can turn from light-hearted comedy to gory war drama in a second, and all characters in his book have been affected by the insanity of war in some way: some become reclusive, others manic, still others psychotic like the protagonist himself.

Read Joseph Heller's Catch-22

Ringworld, 1970

Well hell-loo: I remembered Ringworld by Larry Niven as a real classic, but picking it up after a long time, I once again realized what a truly amazingly imaginative piece of fiction this is: it introduces the concept of the Ringworld, an artificial ring one million miles wide, circumfering a sun at the same orbit as the Earth, therefore creating livable space of 3 million times the Earth's surface.

The technology Niven uses in the book is cool, the action is dense, the main character is fun and the aliens he's traveling with are hilarious -- an enormously fantastic read!

Read Ringworld online

The Gone-Away World, 2008

This was a really good debut novel by Nick Harkaway, son of John Le Carré, also a great author. The Gone-Away World takes place in a world that has been savaged by Go-Away Bombs, supposedly "clean" bombs that destroy by pulling information from matter. The book has some awesome settings, fast-paced kung-fu action, and I bet the surprise revelation in the middle of the book you didn't see coming. Well worth a read!

The Forever War, 1974

Here's another book that has me coming back for more every now and then: The Forever War by Joe Haldeman is an account of a space war against an alien race, fought with super advanced weapons. Due to the faster-than-light travel through so-called collapsars, the Earth ships are able to reach far-off galaxies, but because of the time-dilation that slows down their subjective ship-time, they never know if they are going to meet an enemy with seriously far-advanced technology, or old-school weapons. It is all very cleverly built up and the tone of the novel is great.

“Tonight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.” The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn’t look five years older than me. So if he’d ever killed a man in combat, silently or other wise, he’d done it as an infant.

I already knew eighty ways to kill people, but most of them were pretty noisy. I sat up straight in my chair and assumed a look of polite attention and fell asleep with my eyes open. So did most everybody else. We’d learned that they never scheduled anything important for these after-chop classes.

Alas, Babylon, 1959

Alas, Babylon is a novel by American writer Pat Frank, first published in 1959. It takes place in small community in Florida which is spared the nuclear bomb attacks and subsequent fallout. This novel leaves out a few of the more grueling effects, namely radiation disease and nuclear winter, but what's more important is the depiction of life in the small town after it's separated from the rest of the country, and there the novel really shines. (Jericho and Battlestar Galactica, we caught you copying huge portions of the plot here.) This comes from the same period as A Canticle For Leibowitz and On The Beach, both of which are also excellent.

In Fort Repose, a river town in Central Florida, it was said that sending a message by Western Union was the same as broadcasting it over the combined networks. This was not entirely true. It was true that Florence Wechek, the manager, gossiped. Yet she judiciously classified the personal intelligence that flowed under her plump fingers, and maintained a prudent censorship over her tongue. The scandalous and the embarrassing she excised from her conversation. Sprightly, trivial, and harmless items she passed on to friends, thus enhancing her status and relieving the tedium of spinsterhood. If your sister was in trouble, and wired for money, the secret was safe with Florence Wechek. But if your sister bore a legitimate baby, its sex and weight would soon be known all over town.

Burma Boy, 2007

A fairly unknown book by UK-based Nigerian writer Biyi Bandele, Burma Boy is a short and stark tale of a company of Nigerian soldiers stationed in Burma, fighting in the Second World War against the Japanese forces. It juxtaposes occasional comedy in the form of the strange antics of some of its characters with cruel descriptions of the intense fighting in the jungle. It's an exciting read but it's much too short! Clocking in at just 200 pages in huge type, I'd say it's about 1/20 the length of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, another contemporary take on WWII and right now the defining work of art on the topic for me.

Two years into the war, on a day so hot and stifling the usually bustling thoroughfares of Cairo were all but deserted, a spare, disheveled looking Englishman with a stooping gait staggered through the city’s dark alleyways and bazaars, jostling with horses, camels, bicycles, mopeds, pushcarts, pedestrians and cars, looking, he said, for a chemist. To every hawker he approached and tried to speak to, on narrow, congested streets wafting with the odour of ginger, cumin, sandalwood and mint; and at every shisha-pipe-smoke-filled coffee house he wandered into, it seemed, as he struggled to speak but seemed only to slur, that he was looking for something which existed only in his fever-sapped imagination; that much was clear, that this strange man, dressed in a British army uniform that hung loosely on his shrunken frame, and wearing a major’s rank, was in the grips of a fierce and crippling fever. He shivered under the blistering heat, his teeth clattering as if he were in the deep chill of an English winter’s day.

Burma Boy by Biyi Bandele

The Weapon Makers, 1952

Alongside Slan, this is another of the strokes of genius by A.E. van Vogt. It's a sequel to The Weapon Shops of Isher. Both books are action-packs and extremely rich of ideas, introducing and incorporating concepts like immortality, teleportation, time-travel, bullet-time-like superfast motion, invisibility and other skills with ease and playfulness. Van Vogt's imagination is superb and thrilling, and the books do not show their age.

Earth Abides, 1949

One of the great novels set in a post-apocalyptic world, George R. Stewart's Earth Abides, first published in 1949, has been harvested for ideas countless times. Among the most striking examples of works inspired by this book are The Stand by Stephen King and the movie Quiet Earth.

Earth Abides tells the story of Ish Williams, one of the very few survivors of a deadly epidemic that wipes out nearly the whole human population. He and the group he starts building ("The Tribe) have to decide which course to take in the new world they are facing, in which most technological and civilizational skills cannot be maintained by a humanity that turns back to bow-shooting and superstitious cult religion.

Just as he pulled himself up to the rock ledge, he heard a sudden rattle, and felt a prick of fangs. Automatically he jerked back his right hand; turning his head, he saw the snake, coiled and menacing. It was not a large one, he noted, even at the moment when he raised his hand to his lips and sucked hard at the base of the index finger, where a little drop of blood was oozing out.

“Don’t waste time by killing the snake!” he remembered.

He slid down from the ledge, still sucking. At the bottom he saw the hammer lying where he had left it. For a moment he thought he would go on and leave it there. That seemed like panic; so he stooped and picked it up with his left hand, and went on down the rough trail.

Burning Chrome, 1986

William Gibson, Burning Chrome, published 1986. One of the classic 80ies science fiction short story collections, this was put out shortly after Gibson's successful first novel Neuromancer. Collecting his early work, some of it set in the same setting as his novels, such as Burning Chrome and Johnny Mnemonic, it also features a couple of stories written in a different style and setting.

It was hot, the night we burned Chrome. Out in the
malls and plazas, moths were batting themselves to
death against the neon, but in Bobby's loft the only light
came from a monitor screen and the green and red
LEDs on the face of the matrix simulator. I knew every
chip in Bobby's simulator by heart; it looked like your
workaday Ono-Sendai VII. the "Cyberspace Seven,"
but I'd rebuilt it so many time that you'd have had a
hard time finding a square millimeter of factory cir-
cuitry in all that silicon.

We waited side by side in front of the simulator
console, watching the time display in the screen's lower
left corner.

"Go for it," I said, when it was time, but Bobby
was already there, leaning forward to drive the Russian
program into its slot with the heel of his hand. He did it
with the tight grace of a kid slamming change into an ar-
cade game, sure of winning and ready to pull down a
string of free games.

William Gibson aleph - Sprawl series - Burning Chrome (1986)

Read William Gibson's Burning Chrome

A Canticle for Leibowitz, 1960

A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, published 1960. Considered one of the classics of apocalyptic fiction, it focuses on the abbey of Saint Leibowitz 600 years after the Third World War. The novel continues to two more settings, hundreds of years in the future, but the most compelling part of the book is the first chapter. Picture the monks in the abbey conserving what little remains of pre-war knowledge, copying blueprints, memos, conversation logs and other random data labourously by hand. Essential apocalypse reading.

Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice's Lenten fast in the desert.

Never before had Brother Francis actually seen a pilgrim with girded loins, but that this one was the bona fide article he was convinced as soon as he had recovered from the spine-chilling effect of the pilgrim's advent on the far horizon, as a wiggling iota of black caught in a shimmering haze of heat. Legless, but wearing a tiny head, the iota materialized out of the mirror glaze on the broken roadway and seemed more to writhe than to walk into view, causing Brother Francis to clutch at the crucifix of his rosary and mutter an Ave or two. The iota suggested a tiny apparition spawned by the heat demons who tortured the land at high noon, when any creature capable of motion on the desert (except the buzzards and a few monastic hermits such as Francis) lay motionless in its burrow or hid beneath a rock from the ferocity of the sun. Only a thing monstrous, a thing preternatural, or a thing with addled wits would hike purposefully down the trail at noon this way.

Brother Francis added a hasty prayer to Saint Raul the Cyclopean, patron of the misborn, for protection against the Saint's unhappy proteges.

Read the first chapter of A Canticle for Leibowitz

The Martian Chronicles, 1950

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, published 1950. If I were ever pressed to name my favorite book, to save my life, it would most certainly be this one. In The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury tells of the conquest of Mars by man, the demise of the indigenious Martians, and the later loss of the human colony because of the breakout of a world war back on Earth.

In this book, Bradbury manages to convey a lot of emotions, mostly sadness and loss, while also telling some of the most twisted and entertaining stories. Many episodes from the book, endlessly ripped of and remade in other works, immediately spring to mind, but one of the most ingenious scenes from the book is the meeting of a Martian and a human in the desert, each in their own time, both convinced that the other is an apparition. They part, friendly and in peace, but both sure that only their own view of the world can be true. The Martian Chronicles is, in each individual chapter, an enormous piece of fiction and ever so strong.

One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing every roof, children skiing on slopes, housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets.

And then a long wave of warmth crossed the small town. A flooding sea of hot air; it seemed as if someone had left a bakery door open. The heat pulsed among the cottages and bushes and children. The icicles dropped, shattering, to melt. The doors flew open. The windows flew up. The children worked off their wool clothes. The housewives shed their bear disguises. The snow dissolved and showed last summer's ancient green lawns.

Rocket summer. The words passed among the people in the open, airing houses. Rocket summer.

World War Z, 2006

World War Z by Max Brooks, published in 2006. I rarely post current books but to me World War Z has already established itself as a classic. It recounts the so called "Zombie War", caused by a virus called "Solanum" that reanimates corpses to mindless beings with immense bloodlust (that's what you call zombies usually). The book introduces a great many settings and characters, all of which tell their story in a fictional oral history of the cause of the outbreak, initial panic and aftermath of the crisis.

The Zombie Survival Guide, Brooks' first book, was a fun read, but with this novel he takes his obvious Zombie-obsession to a whole new level and creates, as has already been mentioned, a future classic.

It goes by many names: "The Crisis," "The Dark Years," "The Walking Plague," as well as newer and more "hip" titles such as "World War Z" or "Z War One." I personally dislike this last moniker as it implies an inevitable "Z War Two." For me, it will always be "The Zombie War," and while many may protest the scientific accuracy of the word zombie, they will be hardpressed to discover a more globally accepted term for the creatures that almost caused our extinction. Zombie remains a devastating word, unrivaled in its power to conjure up so many memories or emotions, and it is these memories, and emotions, that are the subject of this book.

This record of the greatest conflict in human history owes its genesis to a much smaller, much more personal conflict between me and the chairperson of the United Nation's Postwar Commission Report. My initial work for the Commission could be described as nothing short of a labor of love. My travel stipend, my security access, my battery of translators, both human and electronic, as well as my small, but nearly priceless voice activated transcription "pal" (the greatest gift the world's slowest typist could ask for), all spoke to the respect and value my work was afforded on this project. So, needless to say, it came as a shock when I found almost half of that work deleted from the report's final edition.

Read World War Z by Max Brooks