Here’s a bargain alert for fans of science fiction: all of the following titles are Hugo award winners, they’re all rated a minimum of 4/5 stars, and they’re all priced at $6 or less!
Speaker for the Dead – Orson Scott Card (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $5.99)
In the aftermath of his terrible war, Ender Wiggin disappeared, and a powerful voice arose: The Speaker for the Dead, who told the true story of the Bugger War.
Now, long years later, a second alien race has been discovered, but again the aliens’ ways are strange and frightening…again, humans die. And it is only the Speaker for the Dead, who is also Ender Wiggin the Xenocide, who has the courage to confront the mystery…and the truth.
Speaker for the Dead, the second novel in Orson Scott Card’s Ender Quintet, is the winner of the 1986 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the 1987 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
The Forever War – Joe Haldeman (4/5 stars, currently priced at $4.95)
A THOUSAND YEAR CONFLICT. ONE SOLDIER LIVES THROUGH IT ALL. CAN HE MAINTAIN HIS HUMANITY?
The Forever War is a science fiction classic that chronicles the life of William Mandella. Due to the time distortion associated with deep space travel, he is present during both the first and the last battle of a thousand year old conflict with the alien Taurans. A masterpiece of not just science fiction, The Forever War illustrates the futility of all wars and their effect on the human soul.
The Forever War won all major science fiction awards including the Hugo, Nebula and Locus. Ridley Scott, director of Blade Runner and Alien, is currently adapting this classic for film.
This is the author’s preferred version and includes a foreword by John Scalzi, author of Old Man’s War.
REVIEWS
“If there was a Fort Knox for science fiction, we’d have to lock Joe Haldeman up and throw away the key.” — Steven King
“The Forever War is brilliant-one of the most influential war novels of our time. That it happens to be set in the future only broadens and enhances its message.” — Greg Bear
“The Forever War is not just a great science fiction novel, it’s a great Vietnam war novel—and a great war novel, without qualification—that is also science fiction. A classic to grace either genre.” — Iain Banks
Zoe’s Tale – John Scalzi (4/5 stars, currently priced at $5.99)
How do you tell your part in the biggest tale in history?
I ask because it’s what I have to do. I’m Zoe Boutin Perry: A colonist stranded on a deadly pioneer world. Holy icon to a race of aliens. A player (and a pawn) in a interstellar chess match to save humanity, or to see it fall. Witness to history. Friend. Daughter. Human. Seventeen years old.
Everyone on Earth knows the tale I am part of. But you don’t know my tale: How I did what I did — how I did what I had to do — not just to stay alive but to keep you alive, too. All of you. I’m going to tell it to you now, the only way I know how: not straight but true, the whole thing, to try make you feel what I felt: the joy and terror and uncertainty, panic and wonder, despair and hope. Everything that happened, bringing us to Earth, and Earth out of its captivity. All through my eyes.
It’s a story you know. But you don’t know it all.
The Dispossessed – Ursula K. Le Guin (4/5 stars, currently priced at $5.69)
Centuries ago, the moon Anarres was settled by utopian anarchists who left the Earthlike planet Urras in search of a better world, a new beginning.
Now a brilliant physicist, Shevek, determines to reunite the two civilizations that have been separated by hatred since long before he was born.
The Dispossessed is a penetrating examination of society and humanity — and one man’s brave undertaking to question the unquestionable and ignite the fires of change.
Spin – Robert Charles Wilson (4/5 stars, currently priced at $5.99)
One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives.
The effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk–a heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not only have the world’s artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered remains are pitted and aged, as though they’d been in space far longer than their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, space probe reveals a bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the barrier than inside–more than a hundred million years per day on Earth. At this rate, the death throes of the sun are only about forty years in our future.
Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader who’s forged a new religion out of the fears of the masses.
Earth sends terraforming machines to Mars to let the onrush of time do its work, turning the planet green. Next they send humans…and immediately get back an emissary with thousands of years of stories to tell about the settling of Mars. Then Earth’s probes reveal that an identical barrier has appeared around Mars. Jason, desperate, seeds near space with self-replicating machines that will scatter copies of themselves outward from the sun–and report back on what they find.
Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.