Best Science Fiction Novels

paradoxosalpha: Specifically the first, shorter edition. Avoid the posthumous reversion of the author's edits that created the inferior book released in the 1990s.

paradoxosalpha: I was an adolescent when I learned about apotheosis from this book.

paradoxosalpha: I read this as a novel, and only learned long afterwards that it was written as a cycle of novellas.

paradoxosalpha: One of Dick's most head-on approaches to his metaphysical conundrums. Written with an eye to the screen, and the pacing and characterizations reflect that.

paradoxosalpha: a 666-page magical operation thinly disguised as a science-fiction police procedural

paradoxosalpha: Arguably not a novel, but I'm including it anyway, as I think it benefits from being read as one.

paradoxosalpha: Pace marycloseburn, there are no supernatural elements in this highly science-fictional alternate history. The metaphysical conceit that frames the story does not make it "fantasy."

marycloseburn : Enjoyable, but alternate history with fantasy elements rather than science fiction.

paradoxosalpha: The only reason I haven't re-read this book in recent years is that I've been reading other Delany instead.

paradoxosalpha: highlights an assortment of post-human types in a three-week story set in the mid-21st century

paradoxosalpha: interrogates received ideas about gender and sex with an awareness of the tragic aspects of human interaction and an assertion of the redemptive power of love

paradoxosalpha: reflects on social and technological change outside the myth of progress

paradoxosalpha: satirical theodicy skirting the edge of nihilism in an anti-fantasy of espionage and authoritarianism

paradoxosalpha: an enormously clever religious satire, much more incisive than Morrow's routinely lauded Towing Jehovah--but I'll probably never re-read it, because the story is just too goddamned sad

paradoxosalpha: key themes include epidemiology, perception of time, control in urban societies, and messianic mythopoeia

paradoxosalpha: Lafferty's book is clearly not addressed to the facile enjoyment of "the vulgar." He could say with Nietzsche, "I obviously do everything to be 'hard to understand' myself!"

paradoxosalpha: waking/sleep dialectic intimating mysticism, people destined for companionship, foreboding of illusion in consensual phenomena, and reflections on the urge to engender praeterhumanity in our children

paradoxosalpha: In the sterile land of numbers, only the Devil can save your soul.

paradoxosalpha: the paragon of sword & planet

paradoxosalpha: maddeningly metatextual initiatory fantasy, Masonic-Rosicrucian psychopharmaceutical philosophy to make steampunks cry, a hollow earth odyssey with laboratory experiments you can try at home, a vision of the End from which all arises

paradoxosalpha: Inferior to the shorter first edition. The posthumous reversion of the author's own edits is a crime against the work, leaving it bloated without added value.

sturlington : Already on the list