Dark light by Ken MacLeod

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Embassytown
China Miéville
2011 · 350 pages · 4 reviews
Others: Overwhelmingly positive
Embassytown: a city of contradictions on the outskirts of the universe. Avice is an immerser, a traveller on the immer, the sea of space and time below the everyday, now returned to her birth planet. Here on Arieka, Humans are not the only intelligent life, and Avice has a rare bond with the natives, the enigmatic Hosts - who cannot lie. Only a tiny cadre of unique human Ambassadors can speak Language, and connect the two communities. But an unimaginable new arrival has come to Embassytown. And when this Ambassador speaks, everything changes. Catastrophe looms. Avice knows the only hope is for her to speak directly to the alien Hosts. And that is impossible.
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A Fire upon the Deep
Vernor Vinge
1992 · 613 pages · 19 reviews
Others: Mostly positive
Thousands of years in the future, humanity is no longer alone in a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures, and technology, can function. Nobody knows what strange force partitioned space into these "regions of thought," but when the warring Straumli realm use an ancient Transcendent artifact as a weapon, they unwittingly unleash an awesome power that destroys thousands of worlds and enslaves all natural and artificial intelligence. Fleeing this galactic threat, Ravna crash lands on a strange world with a ship-hold full of cryogenically frozen children, the only survivors from a destroyed space-lab. They are taken captive by the Tines, an alien race with a harsh medieval culture, and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle.
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Color of Distance
Amy Thomson
1995 · 431 pages · 3 reviews
Others: Leaning positive
The award-winning author of Virtual Girl creates a strange new world of infinite possibilities where honor, sacrifice, and friendship between humans and aliens can mean many different things at once. Reprint.
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Starman Jones
Robert A. Heinlein
1953 · 257 pages · 1 review
Others: Positive
When his stepmother's remarriage drives him from home, Max and a hobo fake their way into the Space Stewards, Cooks, and Purser's Clerks brotherhood to get an opportunity for space travel in an age when only the wealthy are privileged.
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The forge of God
Greg Bear
1987 · 474 pages · 2 reviews
Others: Positive
A vanished moon of Jupiter, a 500-foot -high cinder cone in Death Valley never before seen, and an enormous granite mountain in Australia also never seen before all point the way to an alien invasion of planet Earth.
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In the Ocean of Night
Gregory Benford
1977 · 327 pages · 2 reviews
Others: Positive
From the back cover Warner paperback February 2004: 2019: NASA astronaut Nigel Walmsley is sent on a mission to intercept a rogue asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Ordered to destroy the comet, he instead discovers that it is actually the shell of a derelict space probe -- a wreck with just enough power to emit a single electronic signal... 2034: Then a reply is heard. Searching for the source of this signal that comes from outside the solar system, Nigel discovers the existence of a sentient ship. When the new vessel begins to communicate directly with him, the astronaut learns of the horrors that await humanity. For the ship was created by an alien race that has spent billions and billions of years searching for intelligent life... to annihilate it.
Why?
What made the match, strongest first
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72%
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16%
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12%
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