Curated Collections of Excellent Products for Subreddits

Sci Fi

The best Sci Fi books out there, with an emphasis on obscure titles

Wool
Hugh Howey
Lowest Price: $10.20

What would you do

if the world outside was deadly,

and the air you breathed could kill?

And you lived in a place

where every birth required a death,

and the choices you made could save lives

-- or destroy them.

This is Jules's story.

This is the world of Wool.

This Perfect Day: A Novel
Ira Levin
Lowest Price: $8.82

Considered one of the great dystopian novels - alongside Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World - Ira Levin's frightening glimpse into the future continues to fascinate readers even forty years after publication.

The story is set in a seemingly perfect global society. Uniformity is the defining feature; there is only one language and all ethnic groups have been eugenically merged into one race called "The Family." The world is ruled by a central computer called UniComp that has been programmed to keep every single human on the surface of the earth in check. People are continually drugged by means of regular injections so that they can never realize their potential as human beings, but will remain satisfied and cooperative. They are told where to live, when to eat, whom to marry, when to reproduce. even the basic facts of nature are subject to the UniComp's will - men do not grow facial hair, women do not develop breasts, and it only rains at night.

With a vision as frightening as any in the history of the science fiction genre, This Perfect Day is one of Ira Levin's most haunting novels.

Labyrinths
Jorge Luis Borges
Lowest Price: $9.37

Dealing with the nature of time, memory, technology, and with impossible realities, Borges' short stories can easily hold their own against other sci-fi works.

Borges enthusiast William Gibson has contributed a new introduction bringing Borges' influence and importance into the twenty-first century.

The groundbreaking trans-genre work of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) has been insinuating itself into the structure, stance, and very breath of world literature for well over half a century. Multi-layered, self-referential, elusive, and allusive writing is now frequently labeled Borgesian. Umberto Eco's international bestseller, The Name of the Rose, is, on one level, an elaborate improvisation on Borges' fiction "The Library," which American readers first encountered in the original 1962 New Directions publication of Labyrinths.

This new edition of Labyrinths, the classic representative selection of Borges' writing edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (in translations by themselves and others), includes the text of the original edition (as augmented in 1964) as well as Irby's biographical and critical essay, a poignant tribute by André Maurois, and a chronology of the author's life. Borges enthusiast William Gibson has contributed a new introduction bringing Borges' influence and importance into the twenty-first century.

The Philip K. Dick Collection
Philip K. Dick
Lowest Price: $69.27

Philip K. Dick's work is just freaking awesome. These are his best novels:

  • The Man in the High Castle
  • The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
  • Ubik ? Martian Time-Slip
  • Dr. Bloodmoney
  • Now Wait for Last Year
  • Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
  • A Scanner Darkly
  • A Maze of Death
  • VALIS
  • The Divine Invasion
  • The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
Foundation (Foundation Novels)
Isaac Asimov
Lowest Price: $7.58

For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Sheldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future?to a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years. To preserve knowledge and save mankind, Seldon gathers the best minds in the Empire?both scientists and scholars?and brings them to a bleak planet at the edge of the Galaxy to serve as a beacon of hope for a fututre generations. He calls his sanctuary the Foundation.

But soon the fledgling Foundation finds itself at the mercy of corrupt warlords rising in the wake of the receding Empire. Mankind's last best hope is faced with an agonizing choice: submit to the barbarians and be overrun?or fight them and be destroyed.

The Day of the Triffids
John Wyndham
Lowest Price: $7.20

In 1951 John Wyndham published his novel The Day of the Triffids to moderate acclaim. Fifty-two years later, this horrifying story is a science fiction classic, touted by The Times (London) as having "all the reality of a vividly realized nightmare.?

Bill Masen, bandages over his wounded eyes, misses the most spectacular meteorite shower England has ever seen. Removing his bandages the next morning, he finds masses of sightless people wandering the city. He soon meets Josella, another lucky person who has retained her sight, and together they leave the city, aware that the safe, familiar world they knew a mere twenty-four hours before is gone forever.

But to survive in this post-apocalyptic world, one must survive the Triffids, strange plants that years before began appearing all over the world. The Triffids can grow to over seven feet tall, pull their roots from the ground to walk, and kill a man with one quick lash of their poisonous stingers. With society in shambles, they are now poised to prey on humankind. Wyndham chillingly anticipates bio-warfare and mass destruction, fifty years before their realization, in this prescient account of Cold War paranoia.

A Stainless Steel Trio
Harry Harrison
Lowest Price: $13.24

One of SF's most beloved rogues: the Stainless Steel Rat!

Slippery Jim DiGriz is the Stainless Steel Rat: the galaxy's greatest interstellar thief and con artist. For novel upon novel, the Rat has outfoxed the forces of conventionality, cutting a stylish swathe through dozens of star systems-and stealing the hearts of thousands of readers.

Now three of the Rat's greatest exploits are collected in a single volume. In A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born, we see the origin and early days of Jim DiGriz's brilliant criminal career, as our underworld hero is forced to work for the Good Guys. Conscripted again in The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted, this time into a planetary army, the Rat must avenge the murder of his mentor-in-crime. And in The Stainless Steel Rat Sings the Blues, Slippery Jim must retrieve a missing alien artifact, while disguised as a futuristic rock-and-roller...or forfeit his life.

Alif the Unseen
G. Willow Wilson
Lowest Price: $14.76

In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker shields his clients -- dissidents, outlaws, Islamists, and other watched groups -- from surveillance and tries to stay out of trouble.

He goes by Alif, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and a convenient handle to hide behind. The aristocratic woman Alif loves has jilted him for a prince chosen by her parents, and his computer has just been breached by the State's electronic security force, putting his clients and his own neck on the line. Then it turns out his lover's new fiancé is the head of State security, and his henchmen come after Alif, driving him underground. When Alif discovers The Thousand and One Days, the secret book of the jinn, which both he and the Hand suspect may unleash a new level of information technology, the stakes are raised and Alif must struggle for life or death, aided by forces seen and unseen.

With shades of Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, and The Thousand and One Nights, Alif the Unseen is a tour de force debut -- a sophisticated melting pot of ideas, philosophy, religion, technology and spirituality smuggled inside an irresistible page-turner.

Dune, 40th Anniversary Edition (Dune Chronicles, Book 1)
Frank Herbert
Lowest Price: $7.99

Here is the novel that will be forever considered a triumph of the imagination. Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, who would become the mysterious man known as Muad'Dib. He would avenge the traitorous plot against his noble family--and would bring to fruition humankind's most ancient and unattainable dream. A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, environmentalism and politics, Dune won the first Nebula Award, shared the Hugo Award, and formed the basis of what it undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction.

Monster Hunter International
Larry Correia
Lowest Price: $4.00

Cthulhu, guns, B-movie action -- hell yes! Monster Hunter International is a surprisingly well-written page-turner.

Five days after Owen Zastava Pitt pushed his insufferable boss out of a fourteenth story window, he woke up in the hospital with a scarred face, an unbelievable memory, and a job offer. It turns out that monsters are real. All the things from myth, legend, and B-movies are out there, waiting in the shadows. Officially secret, some of them are evil, and some are just hungry. On the other side are the people who kill monsters for a living. Monster Hunter International is the premier eradication company in the business. And now Owen is their newest recruit.

It's actually a pretty sweet gig, except for one little problem. An ancient entity known as the Cursed One has returned to settle a centuries old vendetta. Should the Cursed One succeed, it means the end of the world, and MHI is the only thing standing in his way. With the clock ticking towards Armageddon, Owen finds himself trapped between legions of undead minions, belligerent federal agents, a cryptic ghost who has taken up residence inside his head, and the cursed family of the woman he loves.

Business is good ...

Welcome to Monster Hunter International.

The Quantum Thief
Hannu Rajaniemi
Lowest Price: $10.00

Jean le Flambeur is a post-human criminal, mind burglar, confidence artist, and trickster. His origins are shrouded in mystery, but his exploits are known throughout the Heterarchy -- from breaking into the vast Zeusbrains of the Inner System to stealing rare Earth antiques from the aristocrats of Mars.

Now he's confined inside the Dilemma Prison, where every day he has to get up and kill himself before his other self can kill him. Rescued by the mysterious Mieli and her flirtatious spacecraft, Jean is taken to the Oubliette, the Moving City of Mars, where time is currency, memories are treasures, and a moon-turnedsingularity lights the night.

What Mieli offers is the chance to win back his freedom and the powers of his old self?in exchange for finishing the one heist he never quite managed. As Jean undertakes a series of capers on behalf of Mieli and her mysterious masters, elsewhere in the Oubliette investigator Isidore Beautrelet is called in to investigate the murder of a chocolatier, and finds himself on the trail of an arch-criminal, a man named le Flambeur.

The Quantum Thief is a crazy joyride through the solar system several centuries hence, a world of marching cities, ubiquitous public-key encryption, people communicating by sharing memories, and a race of hyper-advanced humans who originated as MMORPG guild members. But for all its wonders, it is also a story powered by very human motives of betrayal, revenge, and jealousy. It is a stunning debut.The Quantum Thief is a Kirkus Reviews Best of 2011 Science Fiction & Fantasy title.One of Library Journal's Best SF/Fantasy Books of 2011

Starship Troopers
Robert A. Heinlein
Lowest Price: $4.96

The historians can't seem to settle whether to call this one "The Third Space War" (or the fourth), or whether "The First Interstellar War" fits it better. We just call it "The Bug War." Everything up to then and still later were "incidents," "patrols," or "police actions." However, you are just as dead if you buy the farm in an "incident" as you are if you buy it in a declared war...

In one of Robert A. Heinlein's most controversial bestsellers, a recruit of the future goes through the toughest boot camp in the Universe -- and into battle with the Terran Mobile Infantry against mankind's most alarming enemy.

The Giver (Giver Quartet)
Lois Lowry
Lowest Price: $10.75

The Giver, the 1994 Newbery Medal winner, has become one of the most influential novels of our time. The haunting story centers on twelve-year-old Jonas, who lives in a seemingly ideal, if colorless, world of conformity and contentment. Not until he is given his life assignment as the Receiver of Memory does he begin to understand the dark, complex secrets behind his fragile community. Lowry has written three companion novels to The Giver, including Gathering Blue, Messenger, and now Son, published in October 2012.

The Wrinkle in Time Quintet Boxed Set
Madeleine L'Engle
Lowest Price: $17.53

The Time Quintet consists of A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time. The digest box set features the art of Taeeun Yoo.

A Wrinkle in Time is one of the most significant novels of our time. This fabulous, ground-breaking science-fiction and fantasy story is the first of five in the Time Quintet series about the Murry family.

A Wind in the Door: When Charles Wallace falls ill, Meg, Calvin, and their teacher, Mr. Jenkins, must travel inside C.W. to make him well, and save the universe from the evil Echthros.

A Swiftly Tilting Planet: The Murry and O'Keefe families enlist the help of the unicorn, Gaudior, to save the world from imminent nuclear war.

Many Waters: Meg Murry, now in college, time travels with her twin brothers, Sandy and Dennys, to a desert oasis that is embroiled in war.

An Acceptable Time: While spending time with her grandparents, Alex and Kate Murry, Polly O'Keefe wanders into a time 3,000 years before her own.

The Earthsea Quartet
Ursula K. Le Guin
Lowest Price: $10.73

A superb four-part fantasy, comparable with the work of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, the "Earthsea" books follow the fortunes of the wizard Ged from his childhood to an age where magic is giving way to evil. As a young dragonlord, Ged, whose use-name is Sparrowhawk, is sent to the island of Roke to learn the true way of magic. A natural magician, Ged becomes an Archmage and helps the High Priestess Tenar escape from the labyrinth of darkness. But as the years pass, true magic and ancient ways are forced to submit to the powers of evil and death.

Ender's Game
Orson Scott Card
Lowest Price: $3.54

In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race's next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program but didn't make the cut--young Ender is the Wiggin drafted to the orbiting Battle School for rigorous military training.

Ender's skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle Room, where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers, Ender suffers greatly from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of the alien invaders. His psychological battles include loneliness, fear that he is becoming like the cruel brother he remembers, and fanning the flames of devotion to his beloved sister.

Is Ender the general Earth needs? But Ender is not the only result of the genetic experiments. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway for almost as long. Ender's two older siblings are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If the world survives, that is.

Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

MetaGame
Sam Landstrom
Lowest Price: $8.97

Speculative science fiction at its finest, MetaGame by Sam Landstrom is a 'future gamers? field guide and a philosophical cyberpunk adventure. In this original and disturbingly irreverent prospective world, gaming is more than a diversion?and gamers are, literally, in it for life. The OverSoul, an enigmatic, unifying force, offers winners points that add up to currency. Reigning champs are given the gift of immortality?while losers are condemned to aging and death. DLight is one of the best players in his Family and will do anything to win, even if it means committing murder. When he?s invited to a MetaGame?an exclusive, high-stakes competition?he jumps at the chance. But after the first quest, DLight?s overly ambitious ways brand him a renegade. With a warped sense of freewill that is needed to prevail, D_Light must either kill someone he?s grown to love?or lose everything.

Fahrenheit 451: A Novel
Ray Bradbury
Lowest Price: $5.64

Ray Bradbury?s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451is a masterwork of twentieth-century literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.

Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family.? But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn?t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.

When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.

1984
George Orwell
Lowest Price: $7.54
Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
Vladimir Nabokov
Lowest Price: $9.87

Published two weeks after his seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of Nabokov's greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest. But more: it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat.

This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.

Cryptonomicon
Neal Stephenson
Lowest Price: $5.00

With this extraordinary first volume in what promises to be an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century.

In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse?mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. Navy - is assigned to detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Waterhouse and Detachment 2702-commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe-is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. It is a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces.

Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia - a place where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe's tough-as-nails granddaughter, Amy, to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi submarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat. But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy with its roots in Detachment 2702 linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty...or to universal totalitarianism reborn.

A breathtaking tour de force, and Neal Stephenson's most accomplished and affecting work to date, Cryptonomicon is profound and prophetic, hypnotic and hyper-driven, as it leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, hinting all the while at a dark day-after-tomorrow. It is a work of great art, thought, and creative daring; the product of a truly icon

Neuromancer
William Gibson
Lowest Price: $12.60

Twenty years ago, it was as if someone turned on a light. The future blazed into existence with each deliberate word that William Gibson laid down. The winner of Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, Neuromancer didn't just explode onto the science fiction scene -- it permeated into the collective consciousness, culture, science, and technology.

Today, there is only one science fiction masterpiece to thank for the term "cyberpunk," for easing the way into the information age and Internet society. Neuromancer's virtual reality has become real. And yet, William Gibson's gritty, sophisticated vision still manages to inspire the minds that lead mankind ever further into the future.

2001: A Space Odyssey
Arthur C. Clarke
Lowest Price: $3.84

2001: A Space Odyssey is the classic science fiction novel that changed the way we looked at the stars and ourselves....

2001: A Space Odyssey inspired what is perhaps the greatest science fiction film ever made--brilliantly imagined by the late Stanley Kubrick....

2001 is finally here....

The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood
Lowest Price: $16.10

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

A gripping vision of our society radically overturned by a theocratic revolution, Margaret Atwood?s The Handmaid's Tale has become one of the most powerful and most widely read novels of our time.

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, serving in the household of the enigmatic Commander and his bitter wife. She may go out once a day to markets whose signs are now pictures because women are not allowed to read. She must pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, for in a time of declining birthrates her value lies in her fertility, and failure means exile to the dangerously polluted Colonies. Offred can remember a time when she lived with her husband and daughter and had a job, before she lost even her own name. Now she navigates the intimate secrets of those who control her every move, risking her life in breaking the rules.

Like Aldous Huxley?s Brave New World and George Orwell?s Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Handmaid's Tale has endured not only as a literary landmark but as a warning of a possible future that is still chillingly relevant.

The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams
Lowest Price: $10.11

**At last in paperback in one complete volume, here are the five classic novels from Douglas Adams?s beloved Hitchiker series. ** **_The Hitchhiker?s Guide to the Galaxy **Seconds before the Earth is demolished for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is saved by Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised Guide_. Together they stick out their thumbs to the stars and begin a wild journey through time and space.

**_The Restaurant at the End of the Universe _ **Facing annihilation at the hands of warmongers is a curious time to crave tea. It could only happen to the cosmically displaced Arthur Dent and his comrades as they hurtle across the galaxy in a desperate search for a place to eat.

**_Life, the Universe and Everything _ **The unhappy inhabitants of planet Krikkit are sick of looking at the night sky? so they plan to destroy it. The universe, that is. Now only five individuals can avert Armageddon: mild-mannered Arthur Dent and his stalwart crew.

**_So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish _ **Back on Earth, Arthur Dent is ready to believe that the past eight years were all just a figment of his stressed-out imagination. But a gift-wrapped fishbowl with a cryptic inscription conspires to thrust him back to reality. So to speak.

**_Mostly Harmless **Just when Arthur Dent makes the terrible mistake of starting to enjoy life, all hell breaks loose. Can he save the Earth from total obliteration? Can he save the Guide_ from a hostile alien takeover? Can he save his daughter from herself?

Frankenstein
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Lowest Price: $7.88

A young Swiss student discovers the secret of animating lifeless matter and, by assembling body parts, creates a monster who vows revenge on his creator after being rejected from society.

The Island of Dr. Moreau
H. G. Wells
Lowest Price: $3.09

Tor Classics are affordably-priced editions designed to attract the young reader. Original dynamic cover art enthusiastically represents the excitement of each story. Appropriate "reader friendly" type sizes have been chosen for each title?offering clear, accurate, and readable text. All editions are complete and unabridged, and feature Introductions and Afterwords.

This edition of The Island of Dr. Moreau includes a Foreword, Biographical Note, and Afterword by Elisabeth Engstrom.

After a collision between two ships in rough seas, a "private gentlemen"--the wreck's sole survivor--languished for eight days under a merciless sun. With neither food to eat nor water to drink, death seemed a certainty. But miraculously, Edward Prendick survived.

Yet what he was to encounter in the days ahead was more horrible and terrifying than any death he could ever have imagined. For the island on which he landed was the home of the infamous Dr. Moreau.

Exiled from England because of his gruesome experiments in vivisection, Moreau has taken up residence in this remote paradise in order to continue his work. His goal: To create a new, superior race of beings! His legacy, however, would prove to be a nightmare beyond comprehension...

H. G. Wells Complete Short Story Omnibus
H. G. Wells
Lowest Price: $21.70

This collection of short stories by H. G. Wells is the most comprehensive yet, and showcases the hugely fertile imagination of the great author, whose ideas and storylines remain hugely relevant to this day.

Jules Verne Collected Novels
Jules Verne
Lowest Price: $8.99

This superb volume of classic science fiction and adventure represents the best of Jules Verne, the master of imaginative literature who has been called "The Father of Science Fiction". The stories in this volume are complete and unabridged-- the original novels as they were first published -- illustrated by hundreds of rare, exciting and atmospheric 19th century French engravings.

The books of Jules Verne created characters and formulated ideas which have stimulated and entertained countless readers since they first appeared. They have been the subject of films, radio dramatizations and have even been presented on ice! Read the originals now and one of the world's greatest ever story tellers will give you hours of pleasure and enjoyment.

Stories included are: Around the World in 80 Days, The Clipper of the Clouds, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. This volume makes an excellent gift for any reader, any lover of science fiction, or any collector of classic literature.

H. P. Lovecraft: Tales (Library of America)
H. P. Lovecraft
Lowest Price: $22.99
Stranger in a Strange Land
Robert A. Heinlein
Lowest Price: $7.80

Here at last is the complete, uncut version of Heinlein's all-time masterpiece, the brilliant novel that grew from a cult favorite to a bestseller to a classic in a few short years. It is the story of Valentine Michael Smith, the man from Mars who taught humankind grokking and water-sharing. And love.

Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel
Kurt Vonnegut
Lowest Price: $6.74

Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world's great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we fear most.

Timequake
Kurt Vonnegut
Lowest Price: $7.15

There's been a timequake. And everyone -- even you -- must live the decade between February 17, 1991 and February 17, 2001 over again. The trick is that we all have to do exactly the same things as we did the first time -- minute by minute, hour by hour, year by year, betting on the wrong horse again, marrying the wrong person again. Why? You'll have to ask the old science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout. This was all his idea.

A Canticle for Leibowitz
Walter M. Miller Jr.
Lowest Price: $6.00

Winner of the 1961 Hugo Award for Best Novel and widely considered one of the most accomplished, powerful, and enduring classics of modern speculative fiction, Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz is a true landmark of twentieth-century literature -- a chilling and still-provocative look at a post-apocalyptic future.

In a nightmarish ruined world slowly awakening to the light after sleeping in darkness, the infant rediscoveries of science are secretly nourished by cloistered monks dedicated to the study and preservation of the relics and writings of the blessed Saint Isaac Leibowitz. From here the story spans centuries of ignorance, violence, and barbarism, viewing through a sharp, satirical eye the relentless progression of a human race damned by its inherent humanness to recelebrate its grand foibles and repeat its grievous mistakes. Seriously funny, stunning, and tragic, eternally fresh, imaginative, and altogether remarkable, A Canticle for Leibowitz retains its ability to enthrall and amaze. It is now, as it always has been, a masterpiece.

Solaris
Stanislaw Lem
Lowest Price:

New 2011 English Translation.

The cult-classic by Stanislaw Lem that spawned the movie is now available for your Kindle! Until NOW the only English edition was a 1970 version, which was translated from French and which Lem himself described as a "poor translation." This wonderful new English translation (by Bill Johnston) of Lem's classic Solaris is a must-have for fans of Lem's classic novel.

Telling of humanity's encounter with an alien intelligence on the planet Solaris, the 1961 novel is a cult classic, exploring the ultimate futility of attempting to communicate with extra-terrestrial life.

When Kris Kelvin arrives at the planet Solaris to study the ocean that covers its surface, he finds a painful, hitherto unconscious memory embodied in the living physical likeness of a long-dead lover. Others examining the planet, Kelvin learns, are plagued with their own repressed and newly corporeal memories. The Solaris ocean may be a massive brain that creates these incarnate memories, though its purpose in doing so is unknown, forcing the scientists to shift the focus of their quest and wonder if they can truly understand the universe without first understanding what lies within their hearts.

The John Carter of Mars Series (5 Books)
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Lowest Price: $24.99

5 "John Carter of Mars" novels in one volume: A Princess of Mars p.5 The Gods of Mars p. 143 Warlord of Mars p. 326 Thuvia, Maid of Mars p. 454 The Chessmen of Mars p.574

The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith
Cordwainer Smith
Lowest Price: $23.99

Includes 33 stories that represent Cordwainer Smiths entire SF works except for the novel Norstrilia. These stories are "classics" of the field such as "The Dead Lady of Clown Town," "The Game of Rat and Dragon," "Scanners Live in Vain," and "A Planet Named Shayol." Appearing for the first time in print are "Himself in Anachron" and the completely rewritten adult version of his high school story "War No. 81-Q." Introduction by John J. Pierce.

Inverted World (New York Review Books Classics)
Christopher Priest
Lowest Price: $8.94

The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city?s engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the "optimum? into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death. The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in crèches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. And yet the city is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the population is dwindling, and the rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum. Helward Mann is a member of the city?s elite. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the city?s continued existence. But the world?he is about to discover?is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.

Flowers for Algernon
Daniel Keyes
Lowest Price: $4.44

With more than five million copies sold, Flowers for Algernon is the beloved, classic story of a mentally disabled man whose experimental quest for intelligence mirrors that of Algernon, an extraordinary lab mouse. In poignant diary entries, Charlie tells how a brain operation increases his IQ and changes his life. As the experimental procedure takes effect, Charlie's intelligence expands until it surpasses that of the doctors who engineered his metamorphosis. The experiment seems to be a scientific breakthrough of paramount importance--until Algernon begins his sudden, unexpected deterioration. Will the same happen to Charlie? An American classic that inspired the award-winning movie Charly.

The Space Merchants
Frederik Pohl, C. M. Kornbluth
Lowest Price: $8.93

In a vastly overpopulated near-future world, businesses have taken the place of governments and now hold all political power. States exist merely to ensure the survival of huge transnational corporations. Advertising has become hugely aggressive and boasts some of the world?s most powerful executives.

Through advertising, the public is constantly deluded into thinking that all the products on the market improve the quality of life. However, the most basic elements are incredibly scarce, including water and fuel.

The planet Venus has just been visited and judged fit for human settlement, despite its inhospitable surface and climate; colonists would have to endure a harsh climate for many generations until the planet could be terraformed.

Mitch Courtenay is a star-class copywriter in the Fowler Schocken advertising agency and has been assigned the ad campaign that would attract colonists to Venus, but a lot more is happening than he knows about. Mitch is soon thrown into a world of danger, mystery, and intrigue, where the people in his life are never quite what they seem, and his loyalties and core beliefs will be put to the test.

We
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Lowest Price: $6.64

Translated by Natasha Randall Foreword by Bruce Sterling

Written in 1921, We is set in the One State, where all live for the collective good and individual freedom does not exist. The novel takes the form of the diary of mathematician D-503, who, to his shock, experiences the most disruptive emotion imaginable: love. At once satirical and sobering?and now available in a powerful new translation? We is both a rediscovered classic and a work of tremendous relevance to our own times.

The Stars My Destination
Alfred Bester
Lowest Price: $11.31

\#5 in the Millennium SF Masterworks series, a library of the finest science fiction ever written.

"Science fiction has only produced a few works of actual genius, and this is one of them"-Joe Haldeman

"Bester at the peak of his powers is, quite simply, unbeatable" -James Lovegrove

Marooned in outer space after an attack on his ship, Nomad, Gulliver Foyle lives to obsessively pursue the crew of a rescue vessel that had intended to leave him to die. When it comes to pop culture, Alfred Bester (1913-1987) is something of an unsung hero. He wrote radio scripts, screenplays, and comic books (in which capacity he created the original Green Lantern Oath). But Bester is best known for his science-fiction novels, and The Stars My Destination may be his finest creation. With its sly potshotting at corporate skullduggery, The Stars My Destination seems utterly contemporary, and has maintained its status as an underground classic for fifty years. (Bester fans should also note that iPicturebooks has reprinted The Demolished Man, which won the very first Hugo Award in 1953.) Alfred Bester was among the first important authors of contemporary science fiction. His passionate novels of worldly adventure, high intellect, and tremendous verve, The Stars My Destination and the Hugo Award winning The Demolished Man, established Bester as a s.f. grandmaster, a reputation that was ratified by the Science Fiction Writers of America shortly before his death. Bester also was an acclaimed journalist for Holiday magazine, a reviewer for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and even a writer for Superman.

Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
Vladimir Nabokov
Lowest Price: $10.58

Published two weeks after his seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of Nabokov's greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest. But more: it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat.

This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.

John Dies at the End
David Wong
Lowest Price: $9.30

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE

STOP.

You should not have touched this book with your bare hands.

NO, don't put it down. It's too late.

They're watching you.

My name is David Wong. My best friend is John. Those names are fake. You might want to change yours.

You may not want to know about the things you'll read on these pages, about the sauce, about Korrok, about the invasion, and the future. But it's too late. You touched the book. You're in the game. You're under the eye.

The only defense is knowledge. You need to read this book, to the end. Even the part with the bratwurst. Why? You just have to trust me.

The important thing is this:

The drug is called Soy Sauce and it gives users a window into another dimension.

John and I never had the chance to say no.

You still do.

Unfortunately for us, if you make the right choice, we'll have a much harder time explaining how to fight off the otherworldly invasion currently threatening to enslave humanity.

I'm sorry to have involved you in this, I really am. But as you read about these terrible events and the very dark epoch the world is about to enter as a result, it is crucial you keep one thing in mind:

None of this is was my fault.

2001: A Space Odyssey
Arthur C. Clarke
Lowest Price: $3.87

2001: A Space Odyssey is the classic science fiction novel that changed the way we looked at the stars and ourselves....

2001: A Space Odyssey inspired what is perhaps the greatest science fiction film ever made--brilliantly imagined by the late Stanley Kubrick....

2001 is finally here....

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John Carter: Barsoom Series (7 Novels)
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Lowest Price: $0.99

When John Carter goes to sleep in a mysterious cave in the Arizona dessert, he wakes up on the planet Mars. There he meets the fifteen foot tall, four armed, green men of mars, with horse-like dragons, and watch dogs like oversized frogs with ten legs. His adventures continue as he battles great white apes, fights plant men, defies the Goddess of Death, and braves the frozen wastes of Polar Mars. In other adventures, the Prince of Helium encounters a race of telepathic warriors, the Princess of Helium confronts the headless men of Mars, Captain Ulysses Paxton learns the secret of human immortality, and Tan Hadron's idealized notion of love is tested as he fights off gigantic spiders and cannibals.

Edgar Rice Burroughs vision of Mars was loosely inspired by astronomical speculation of the time, especially that of Percival Lowell, who saw the red planet as a formerly Earth-like world now becoming less hospitable to life due to its advanced age. Burroughs predicted the invention of homing devices, radar, sonar, autopilot, collision detection, television, teletype, genetic cloning, living organ transplants, antigravity propulsion, and many other concepts that were well ahead of his time.