This page contains a list of books that I have personally read and enjoyed. Feel free to email me (TonyL@pec.co.nz) with your own recommendations, but don't expect to see them here unless and until I have read them and decided I like them. All titles can be purchased through Amazon.com. Out-of-print items can be ordered pending availability, or you can check the second-hand market through Bibliofind. (Note: all links off this page are to off-site locations.)
| The Seventh Enemy by Ronald Higgins. | This guy's name sounds like a bureaucrat, and in fact he was a career diplomat in the British Foreign Office. Don't be put off by that - he has a very easy-to-read style. The book is sub-titled The Human Factor In The Global Crisis. He writes from first-hand observation of many of the personal foibles, cockups and bureaucrap which have shaped the history of the twentieth century. |
| Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language by Robin Dunbar. | An excellent book, which attempts to explain the development of language as a way of maintaining the required interpersonal bonds in human and pre-human groups which were growing ever larger. The size of a group of primates is related to the size of their cerebral cortex. Humans, of course, have the largest of both; however, the maximum size of a human band is still only about 150. This seems to be the largest size that, for instance, a corporation can grow, before informal means of coordination have to give way to some form of bureaucracy. This may explain a lot about modern society. |
| The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein. | This book is one of my all-time favourites. If you're looking for just one Heinlein book to start with, try this. It's the story of Manuel Garcia O'Kelly, a Loonie (descendent of prisoners transported to the prison colony of Luna), and his good friend Mycroft Holmes, who happens to be a computer. But revolution is brewing, and Man and Mike get involved... |
| Babel 17 by Samuel Delany. | A rollicking, imaginative galactic adventure, and a mystery story in which the secret is a whole language. This is one of a select group of SF tales which deal with the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Others include The Languages of Pao by Jack Vance and The Game-Players of Zan by M. A. Foster. |
| True Names - and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier by Vernor Vinge. | True Names is one of the seminal books of the Cyberpunk genre, from before the term Cyberpunk was invented. Unlike William Gibson, Vinge actually knows what he's talking about, and net-heads will recognise the true feel of the Internet - in a novella written in 1981! This edition is a reprint, and includes articles by Richard Stallman, John Markoff, Hans Moravec, Patricia Maes, Timothy May, and other actual cyberspace pioneers - the people who created the Internet. |
| The Flight of the Dragonfly by Robert Forward. | Robert Forward is a practising (and famous!) physicist who also writes an entertaining story. This one contains a truly bizarre pair of egg-shaped planets that orbit within each other's Roche limits and share an atmosphere. It has the only hard-sf description (that I know of) of an interplanetary voyage by sailplane. |
| Courtship Rite by Donald Kingsbury.
(Out of print! But try the Bibliofind second-hand list.) |
In my opinion, Donald Kingsbury doesn't write nearly enough. Courtship Rite is one of the best sf books - indeed, one of the best books - ever written. Some time in the far past a human colony was established on a poisonously alien planet, the only edible things being what they brought with them: the "Sacred Eight" food plants, bees -- and human beings. Now, dispersed over the planet and divided into a number of selectively-bred clans, their society has become truly alien. They are ruled by geneticist-priests, their bodies are covered with decorative scars (except for the Liethe, a clan of cloned prostitutes...), and in times of famine the Low on the List are invited to make their Contribution to the Race -- in the temple kitchens. They worship the spaceship that brought them to Geta as a god. Then someone recovers an ancient recording device, and God begins talking to them... The language used in the book is marvellously evocative, even whimsical at times: "A tug on his hair would lift off his head at the smile line." I found myself caught up in the problems of the Maran family as they struggled against foreign invaders, priest-killing heretics, and an alien ecology. If you can only read one book this year, read this one. |
| The Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold. | This book introduces Miles Vorkosigan, who was destined to be a big, strong aristocrat on a primitive planet, recently re-contacted by interstellar civilisation. But his mother took a dose of poison gas while he was still in the womb, and he has grown up stunted, twisted, and with brittle bones. The heir to a count, but regarded as a mutant in a society where a hare lip is grounds for infanticide, he must survive by his wits. Fortunately he is well-supplied with them.
This is the first of a whole collection of tales about Miles. They could be called Space Opera, but so what? They're brilliant and funny. I buy each one as it comes out. |
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