I first stumbled on the idea of colonizing space when I read Adrian Berry's The Next Ten Thousand Years and T.A. Heppenheimer's Colonies in Space, back in the late 1970s. In those post-Apollo, pre-Space Shuttle years, colonizing outer space seemed inevitable. I was hooked: this stuff was real, and it was going to happen. It might even happen to me. But living in space isn't very exciting to read about. Of course, just a few years after reading those books I was watching Indiana Jones dodge deathtraps in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Combine the two: space colonies full of danger and surprises are much better!
Solana is a Scarab, salvaging abandoned space habitats among the Billion Worlds of the Tenth Millennium. Along with a raven, a cyborg, and a dinosaur mercenary, she boards the derelict colony Safdaghar hoping to score some loot before the colony gets catapulted into the outer rim of the Solar System. But Solana and the Scarabs come face to face with a gang of vicious pirates looking for slaves and treasure, and a mysterious stranger intent on preserving an explosive secret. Solana must overcome her own horrifying past to survive and escape before it's too late. But there's an even greater threat lurking in the dark passages and ruined buildings of Safdaghar...
Rama is a spaceship, not a space station, but it's huge and ancient, and at first appears to be abandoned. Then the human explorers realize it's just sleeping. This is a prime example of science fiction's "sense of wonder" at the strangeness of the Universe. When I read it, at about age 14, it utterly blew me away with its combination of rock-hard science and utter weirdness. It also has the best final line ever.
In the year 2130, a mysterious and apparently untenanted alien spaceship, Rama, enters our solar system. The first product of an alien civilisation to be encountered by man, it reveals a world of technological marvels and an unparalleled artificial ecology.
This novel kicked off the Cyberpunk revolution in SF in the 1980s. Though most of it takes place in a crowded and dystopian future Earth, the final section is set aboard a space colony, the Villa Straylight, controlled by a creepy inbred family of billionaires and a rogue artificial intelligence. The basic plot is a "caper story" about a team of professionals putting together a plan to get into Straylight—but then they discover that getting out is a bigger problem.
The book that defined the cyberpunk movement, inspiring everything from The Matrix to Cyberpunk 2077.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
William Gibson revolutionised science fiction in his 1984 debut Neuromancer. The writer who gave us the matrix and coined the term 'cyberspace' produced a first novel that won the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick Awards, and lit the fuse on the Cyberpunk movement.
More than three decades later, Gibson's text is as stylish as ever, his noir narrative still glitters like chrome in the shadows and his depictions of…
Another one of modern science fiction's keystone texts, written at the height of Niven's powers. The Ringworld turns everything up to eleven. It's a space habitat with as much room as a million Earths—not just a megastructure but a gigastructure. Traversing it on foot or by aircraft is daunting, and the team of shipwrecked explorers looking for a way off are constantly encountering new wonders. In my own work I try to keep the same sense that all the amazing things could really happen. To me that makes it more amazing.
Pierson's puppeteers, strange, three-legged, two-headed aliens, have discovered an immense structure in a hitherto unexplored part of the universe. Frightened of meeting the builders of such a structure, the puppeteers set about assembling a team consisting of two humans, a puppeteer and a kzin, an alien not unlike an eight-foot-tall, red-furred cat, to explore it. The artefact is a vast circular ribbon of matter, some 180 million miles across, with a sun at its centre - the Ringworld. But the expedition goes disastrously wrong when the ship crashlands and its motley crew faces a trek across thousands of miles of…
Revenger is a ripping space pirate yarn, but grounded in solid science. Amid all the yo-ho-ho tropes it includes a gripping section in which a rag-tag crew of scavengers penetrate into a sealed asteroid tomb-world. They must survive perils, find what they're looking for, and get out before it seals itself up again. I expect this book will be considered a classic in future decades.
The galaxy has seen great empires rise and fall. Planets have shattered and been remade. Amongst the ruins of alien civilisations, building our own from the rubble, humanity still thrives.
And there are vast fortunes to be made, if you know where to find them . . .
Captain Rackamore and his crew do. It's their business to find the tiny, enigmatic worlds which have been hidden away, booby-trapped, surrounded with layers of protection - and to crack them open for the ancient relics and barely-remembered technologies inside. But while they ply their risky trade with integrity, not everyone is…
In Varley's breakout novel, a team of NASA astronauts discover that one of Saturn's moons is a giant artificial structure—and in the process get trapped inside. The bizarre environment holds creatures genetically created by a godlike intelligence gone mad. With their spaceship reduced to scrap, there's no escape for the explorers, so instead of getting out they have to find a place for themselves in an alien society. Varley wrote two sequels, building expertly on this book and revealing new secrets.
My book recommendations reflect an abiding passion for Japanese literature, which has unquestionably influenced my own writing. My latest literary interest involves Japanese poetry—I’ve recently started a project that combines haiku and prose narration to describe my experiences as a part-time resident in a 1300-year-old Japanese hot spring town that Bashō helped make famous in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. But as a writer, my main focus remains novels. In late 2023 the second in a planned series of novels set in Ishikawa prefecture will be published. I currently live in Kanazawa, but have also been lucky to call Sapporo, Akita, Tokyo, and Fukui home at different times.
Emmitt’s plans collapse when his wife, Mirai, suddenly backs out of purchasing their dream home. Disappointed, he’s surprised to discover her subtle pursuit of a life and career in Tokyo.
In his search for a meaningful life in Japan, and after quitting his job, he finds himself helping his mother-in-law translate Kanazawa’s most famous author, Izumi Kyoka, into English. He becomes drawn into the mysterious death of a friend of Mirai’s parents, leading him and his father-in-law to climb the mountain where the man died. There, he learns the somber truth and discovers what the future holds for him and his wife.
Packed with subtle literary allusion and closely observed nuance, Kanazawa reflects the mood of Japanese fiction in a fresh, modern incarnation.
In Kanazawa, the first literary novel in English to be set in this storied Japanese city, Emmitt's future plans collapse when his wife, Mirai, suddenly backs out of negotiations to purchase their dream home. Disappointed, he's surprised to discover Mirai's subtle pursuit of a life and career in Tokyo, a city he dislikes.
Harmony is further disrupted when Emmitt's search for a more meaningful life in Japan leads him to quit an unsatisfying job at a local university. In the fallout, he finds himself helping his mother-in-law translate Kanazawa's most famous author, Izumi Kyoka, into English.
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