Alas Babylon by Pat Frank

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EXECUTION CHANNEL
Ken MacLeod
2007 · 307 pages · 1 review
Others: Positive
"It's after 9/11. After the bombing. After the Iraq War. After 7/7. After the Iran War. After the nukes. After the flu. After the Straits. After Rosyth. It's the day when the world changes all the way down to its fundamental assumptions." "In a world just down the road from our own, online bloggers vie with old-line political operatives and new-style police to determine just where reality lies. And on every cable system, the mysterious Execution Channel broadcasts deaths from around the world, around the clock." "James Travis is a British patriot and a French spy. On the day the Big One hits, Travis and his daughter must strive to make sense of the nuclear bombing of Scotland and the political repercussions of a series of terrorist attacks. With the information war in full swing, the only truth they have is what they're able to see with their own eyes. They know that everything else is - or may be - a lie." "For in this near future - our near future - day-to-day life becomes much like real intelligence work today: a world in which everything has meaning, and nothing has meaning, and the meanings change as lies build on lies, until someone who intends to lie is finally telling the truth."--BOOK JACKET.
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Man Plus
Frederik Pohl
1976 · 215 pages · 2 reviews
Others: Positive
From back cover Orb Trade paperback May 2011: Earth is in crisis. There simply isn't enough water and arable land to support the burgeoning population. As the threat of nuclear war looms, the United States looks to Mars for the precious resources that could save humanity. But somebody must actually journey to the Red Planet to effect a solution, and it would be far too difficult and costly to change Mars to suit man; therefore man must be changed to suit Mars. Roger Torraway didn't plan to be Man Plus, the man who must undergo the surgeries and shaping necessary to enable someone to survive the hostile Martian environment. When he volunteered to serve as an understudy to astronaut Willy Hartnett, Roger never thought he'd actually be called upon. But when Willy dies in a freak accident, Roger becomes humanity's last hope. With every new step toward becoming Man Plus, Roger becomes less and less the man he was to those around him, and more and more something new, something strange and alien. Nothing about him is spared, not even his mind, which must adapt to being... different... if he is to survive. All the while, he is constantly reminded that he must succeed in surviving on Mars -- there's no time to start over before war breaks out -- because the fate of humanity rests on his increasingly nonhuman shoulders. Years after it won the Nebula Award, Man Plus is now, more than ever, a powerful, affecting novel about the worldwide environmental crisis that approaches, and the timeless questions of what makes us human.
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Yellow Blue Tibia
Adam Roberts
2009 · 326 pages · 1 review
Others: Positive
A group of Soviet authors are shocked to watch the science fiction story they wrote 40 years ago slowly come to life, beginning with Chernobyl.
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The inverted world
Christopher Priest
1974 · 272 pages · 10 reviews
Others: Mostly positive
The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city's engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the "optimum" into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death. The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in creches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. And yet the city is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the population is dwindling, and the rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum. Helward Mann is a member of the city's elite. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the city's continued existence. But the world--he is about to discover--is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.
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Fairyland
Paul McAuley
1996 · 376 pages · 1 review
Others: Positive
In a near-future Europe, gene-hacker Alex Sharkey has created a new life form: fairies - genetically-altered dolls with human intelligence. As the fairies develop their own societies, it become apparent that one group has sinister intentions, and Sharkey must try and put an end to their plans.
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Semiosis
Sue Burke
2018 · 333 pages · 6 reviews
Others: Mostly positive
"Colonists from Earth wanted the perfect home, but they'll have to survive on the one they found. They don't realize another life form watches...and waits...Only mutual communication can forge an alliance with the planet's sentient species and prove that humans are more than tools."--
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