Others: Positive It's 1974 and Willow Greenwood is out of jail, free after being locked up for one of her endless series of environmental protests: attempts at atonement for the sins of her father's once vast and violent timber empire. It's 1934 and Everett Greenwood is alone, as usual, in his maple syrup camp squat when he hears the cries of an abandoned infant and gets tangled up in the web of a crime that will cling to his family for decades. And throughout, there are trees: thrumming a steady, silent pulse beneath Christie's effortless sentences and working as a guiding metaphor for withering, weathering, and survival. A shining, intricate clockwork of a novel, Greenwood is a rain-soaked and sun-dappled story of the bonds and breaking points of money and love, wood and blood—and the hopeful, impossible task of growing toward the light.
Genres: science fiction
Lists: …
Alfred Bester
1951 · 208 pages · 6 reviews
Others: Mostly positiveIn a world in which the police have telepathic powers, how do you get away with murder? Ben Reichs heads a huge 24th century business empire, spanning the solar system. He is also an obsessed, driven man determined to murder a rival. To avoid capture, in a society where murderers can be detected even before they commit their crime, is the greatest challenge of his life.
What made the match, strongest first
Jonathan Lethem
1998 · 280 pages · 1 review
Others: PositiveThe heroine is fourteen-year-old Pella Marsh, whose mother dies just as her family flees a postapocalyptic Brooklyn for the frontier of a recently discovered planet. Hating her ineffectual father, and troubled by a powerful attraction to the virile but dangerous loner who holds sway over the little colony, Pella sets out on a course of discovery that will have tragic and irrevocable consequences for the humans in the community, as well as the odd and exotic natives. Girl in Landscape is a daring exploration of the violent nature of sexual awakening, a meditation on language and perception, and a homage to the great American tradition of the western.
What made the match, strongest first
Samuel R. Delany
1968 · 220 pages · 5 reviews
Others: Overwhelmingly positiveThese are at least some of the ways you can read NOVA: as a fast-action farflung interstellar adventure; as archetypal mystical/mythical allegory (in which the Tarot and the Grail both figure prominently); as modern myth told in the S-F idiom... the reader observes, recollects, or participates in a range of personal experience including violent pain and disfigurement, sensory deprivation and overload, man-machine communion, the drug experience, the creative experience - and inter-personal relationships which include incest and assassination, father-son, leader-follower, human-pet, and lots more! The balance of galactic power in the 31st century revolves around Illyrion, the most precious energy source in the universe. The varied and exotic crew who sign up with Captain Lorq van Ray know their mission is dangerous, and they soon learn that they are involved in a deadly race with the charismatic but vicious leader of an opposing space federation. But they have no idea of Lorq's secret obsession: to gather Illyrion at the source by flying through the very heart of an imploding star.
What made the match, strongest first
Liu Cixin
2025 · 560 pages · 6 reviews
Others: Overwhelmingly positiveSoon to be a Netflix Original Series! "Wildly imaginative." —President Barack Obama on The Three-Body Problem trilogy This near-future trilogy is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience this multiple-award-winning phenomenon from Cixin Liu, China's most beloved science fiction author. In The Dark Forest, Earth is reeling from the revelation of a coming alien invasion-in just four centuries' time. The aliens' human collaborators may have been defeated, but the presence of the sophons, the subatomic particles that allow Trisolaris instant access to all human information, means that Earth's defense plans are totally exposed to the enemy. Only the human mind remains a secret. This is the motivation for the Wallfacer Project, a daring plan that grants four men enormous resources to design secret strategies, hidden through deceit and misdirection from Earth and Trisolaris alike. Three of the Wallfacers are influential statesmen and scientists, but the fourth is a total unknown. Luo Ji, an unambitious Chinese astronomer and sociologist, is baffled by his new status. All he knows is that he's the one Wallfacer that Trisolaris wants dead.
What made the match, strongest first
Thomas Pynchon
1973 · 776 pages · 2 reviews
Others: Overwhelmingly positiveWhat made the match, strongest first
Robert Sheckley
2012 · 396 pages · 1 review
Others: PositivePresents a collection of short stories by the famed science fiction author.
What made the match, strongest first
Loved ita marvelous Russian doll of a novel, family saga spanning more than a century, following some really intriguing mystery, the development of some characters, the way their lives take all sorts of unexpected twists, all of it underneath the broader team of the theme of this family's relationship with the natural world and especially with the trees of Canada. If you're a fan of Richard Powers The Overstory, this is just as great.
