2007

Michael Chabon . The Yiddish Policemen's Union

A murder mystery based on the premise that a Jewish settlement was created in Alaska following World War II. In the small town of Sitka, Alyeska, Detective Meyer Landsman finds the body of a prominent town figure who has ties to organized crime. As Landsman digs deeper, he discovers that this is only the tip of the iceberg--and all signs point to a greater danger lurking in the shadows.

2006

Jack McDevitt. Seeker

Thousands of years after an entire colony disappears, antiquities dealer Alex Benedict comes into possession of a cup that seems to be from one of the colony's ships. The discovery raises more questions than answers and draws him into the very heart of danger.

2005

Joe Haldeman. Camouflage

The artifact is found seven miles below the surface of the sea and beneath forty more feet of sand. The Navy's efforts to raise a wrecked submarine uncover it - and set in motion a scientific race to retrieve it, to discover just what it is and where it came from. Denser than any substance known to man, it has broken every drill bit they've tried on it and will not budge an inch. It resists every effort to breach it - or communicate with it. So the governmenet turns to marine biologist Russell Sutton for help.

2004

Lois McMaster Bujold. Paladin of Souls

Three years have passed since the widowed Dowager Royina Ista found release from the curse of madness that kept her imprisoned in her family's castle of Valenda. Her newfound freedom is costly, bittersweet with memories, regrets, and guilty secrets - for she knows the truth of what brought her land to the brink of destruction. And now the road - escape - beckons.... A simple pilgrimage, perhaps. Quite fitting for the Dowager Royina of all Chalion.

2003

Elizabeth Moon. The Speed of Dark

Written with love and expertise by the mother of an autistic teenager, "The Speed of Dark" is a riveting exploration into the mind of an autistic man as he struggles with the question of whether he should risk a medical procedure that could make him "normal."

2002

Neil Gaiman. American Gods

Shadow is a man with a past and wants nothing more now than to live a quiet life with his wife. When his wife is killed in a terrible accident, Shadow flies home for the funeral. As a raging storm rocks the plane, the strange man in the seat next to Shadow introduces himself as Mr. Wednesday. He knows more about Shadow than is possible--and he warns Shadow an even bigger storm is coming.

2001

Catherine Asaro. The Quantum Rose

Kamoj Argali is the young ruler of an impoverished province on a backward planet. To keep her people from starving, she has agreed to marry Jax Ironbridge, the boorish and brutal ruler of a prosperous province. But before Argali and Ironbridge are wed, a mysterious stranger from a distant planet sweeps in and forces Kamoj into marriage, throwing her world into utter chaos.

2000

Greg Bear. Darwin's Radio

Molecular biologist Kaye Lang's theory--that ancient diseases encoded in the DNA of humans can return to life--has become a chilling reality. The shocking evidence: a "virus-hunter" has tracked down a flu-like disease that kills expectant mothers and their offspring.

1999

Octavia E. Butler. Parable of the Talents

It is 2032, where a society whose very fabric has been torn, and where the basic physical and emotional needs of people seem almost impossible to meet.

1998

Joe Haldeman. Forever Peace

2043 A.D.: The Ngumi War rages. A burned-out soldier and his scientist lover discover a secret that could put the universe back to square one--not a terrifying prospect, but a tempting one.

1997

Vonda N. McIntyre. The Moon and the Sun

In 17th-century France, King Louis XIV manages to obtain a rare sea monster. The king considers the shrieking creature to be the key to immortality, but for Marie-Josephe de la Croix, it is something much more. The mysterious sea animal's gaze and haunting cries foretell a different future--one in which Marie-Josephe will find herself challenging her most fundamental loyalties.

1996

Nicola Griffith. Slow River

She awoke in an alley to the splash of rain. She was naked, a foot-long gash in her back was still bleeding, and her identity implant was gone. Lore Van de Oest had been the daughter of one of the world's most powerful families...and now she was nobody, and she had to hide.

1995

Robert J. Sawyer. The Terminal Experiment

To test his theories of immortality and life after death, Dr. Peter Hobson has created three electronic simulations of his own personality. The first has all knowledge of physical existence edited out, to simulate life after death. The second is without knowledge of aging or death, to simulate immortality. The third is unmodified, a control. Now they are free. One is a killer.

1994

Greg Bear. Moving Mars

In a scenario based on the colonization of our neighboring planet by corporate interests, discontent on the part of the second and third generations of the original colonists lays the groundwork for a revolution destined to last for decades.

1993

Kim Stanley Robinson. Red Mars

John Boone, Maya Toitovna, Frank Chalmers, and Arkady Bogdanov lead a mission whose ultimate goal is the terraforming of Mars in order to release moisture onto their desolate landscape.

1992

Connie Willis. Doomsday Book

A time-traveling history student is trapped in the Middle Ages, dangerously close to the onset of the Black Plague. Her rescuers in 21st-century Oxford battle their own deadly epidemic to reach her in time.

1991

Michael Swanwick. Stations of the Tide

1990

Ursula K Le Guin. Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea

When Sparrowhawk, the Archmage of Earthsea , returns from the dark land stripped of his magic powers, he finds refuge with the aging widow Tenar and a crippled girl child who carries an unknown destiny.

1989

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. The Healer’s War

Her tour of duty at China Beach puts Army nurse Kathleen McCulley through the usual mixture of empathy for the Vietnamese and anger at the indifference or outright racism of army personnel. The unanticipated twist is a hallucinatory journey through the jungle with a one-legged Vietnamese boy, a battle-seasoned but crazy soldier and a magic amulet given her by a dying holy man.

1988

Lois McMaster Bujold. Falling Free

Leo Graf is an effective engineer. Safety Regs aren't just the rule books he swears by, he'd helped write them. All that changes on his assignment to the Cay Habitat. Leo is profoundly uneasy with the corporate exploitation of his bright new students--'til that exploitation turns to something much worse. He has never anticipated a situation where the right thing to do is neither safe nor in the rules.

1987

Pat Murphy. The Falling Woman

1986

Orson Scott Card. Speaker for the Dead

Years after the terrible war, only the Speaker for the Dead has the courage to confront the truth when a second alien race is discovered.

1985

Orson Scott Card. Ender’s Game

The story of Ender Wiggin, a boy genetically engineered to be a superior military mind, and bred to win Earth's long war with an alien insectoid race by completely destroying their homeworld.

1984

William Gibson. Neuromancer

Case was the best interface cowboy who ever ran in earth's computer matrix. Then he doublecrossed the wrong people...

1983

David Brin. Startide Rising

The Terran exploration vessel Streaker has crashed on the uncharted water world of Kithrup, bearing one of the most important discoveries in galactic history. Below, a handful of her human and dolphin crew battles a hostile planet to safeguard her secret--the fate of the Progenitors.

1982

Michael Bishop. No Enemy But Time

1981

Gene Wolfe. The Claw of the Conciliator

Gene Wolfe's science fiction masterpiece The Book of the New Sun is now available for the first time in this decade. This critically acclaimed work won both the World Fantasy and Nebula Awards. The saga centers around an orphan whose lifelong quest transforms him from ruthless monster to savior of a world.

1980

Gregory Benford. Timescape

1979

Arthur C. Clarke. The Fountains of Paradise

Vannemar Morgan's dream of linking Earth with the stars requires a 24,000-mile-high space elevator. But first he must solve a million technical, political, and economic problems while allaying the wrath of God.

1978

Vonda McIntyre. Dreamsnake

An award-winning novel set in the post-apocalyptic future follows a young woman who travels the earth healing the sick with the help of her alien companion, the dreamsnake, pursued by two implacable followers.

1977

Frederik Pohl. Gateway

The first book of the Heechee saga. Gateway opens on all the wealth of the Universe--and on reaches of unimaginable horror. The humans who rode the alien Heechee spacecraft stored on the planetoid couldn't know whether the trip would make them millionaires or corpses!

1976

Frederik Pohl. Man Plus

1975

Joe Haldeman. The Forever War

Private William Mandella is a hero in spite of himself -- a reluctant conscript drafted into an elite military unit, and propelled through space and time to fight in a distant thousand-year conflict.  Although he never wanted to go to war, he performs his duties without rancor.  The true test will come when he returns to Earth.  While he's been aging months, centuries have passed on Earth.

1974

Ursula K. Le Guin. The Dispossessed

Unwilling to accept that his anarchist world must be separated from the rest of the civilized universe, Shevek, a brilliant physicist, risks his life by traveling to the utopian mother planet of Urras.

1973

Arthur C. Clarke. Rendezvous with Rama

When a space probe confirms that the celestial object, that astronomers dubbed Rama, is an interstellar space craft, Earth prepares for it's first encounter with alien intelligence.

1972

Isaac Asimov. The Gods Themselves

In the twenty-second century, Earth obtains limitless, free energy from an alien source. But the process will eventually lead to the destruction of Earth.

1971

Robert Silverberg. A Time of Changes

Three thousand years after Earth's colonization of the planet Borthan, stories of self-serving hypocrisy that occurred among the first arrivals have bred a culture that forbids emotional sharing and denies the naturally human concept of 'self.' Kinnall Darival breaks the strict code of the Covenant to record the sordid details of his rebellious life from the days of his royal youth to self-appointed prophet of love.

1970

Larry Niven. Ringworld

A new place is being built, a world of huge dimensions, encompassing millions of miles, stronger than any planet before it. There is gravity, and with high walls and its proximity to the sun, a livable new planet that is three million times the area of the Earth can be formed. We can start again!

1969

Ursula K. Le Guin. The Left Hand of Darkness

The story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants can change their gender.

1968

Alexei Panshin. Rite of Passage

After the destruction of Earth, humanity has established itself precariously among a hundred planets. Between them roam the vast Ships, doling out scientific knowledge in exchange for raw materials. On one of the Ships lives Mia Havero. Belligerent soccer player, intrepid explorer of ventilation shafts, Mia tests all the boundaries of her insulated world. She will soon be tested in turn.

1967

Samuel R. Delany. The Einstein Intersection

The surface story tells of the problems a member of an alien race, Lo Lobey, has assimilating the mythology of earth, where his kind have settled among the leftover artifacts of humanity. The deeper tale concerns, however, the way those who are "different" must deal with the dominant cultural ideology.

1966

Samuel R. Delany. Babel-17

1966

Daniel Keyes. Flowers for Algernon

Mentally retarded Charlie Gordon participates in an experiment which turns him into a genius but only temporarily.

1965

Frank Herbert. Dune

Set on the desert planet Arrakis begins the story of a great family's plan to bring to fruition an unattainable dream.