Others: Leaning positive His eyes flash like steel in his weathered face. His worn spacer's leathers tell a tale of challenge met, hardship endured. Engraved on his memory are the secrets of a hundred ancient alien races. Here is the mystery and glory of the universe. Here is a legend come to life. Here is Northwest Smith. Contents: Shambleau. Black Thirst. The Tree of Life. Scarlet Dream. Dust of the Gods. Lost Paradise. Julhi. The Cold Gray God. Yvala. Song in a Minor Key.
Genres: science fiction
Lists: …
Harry Harrison
1978 · 191 pages · 1 review
Others: PositiveAfter saving the world, diGriz is called on to save the universe. Liberating his two, now teenage, twin sons from a military boarding school and penitentiary, diGriz sets out to free his wife, who has been arrested by the tax men. But the family is soon fighting an enemy of a different sort when the humans-only galaxy of the League is invaded by all manner of hideous aliens. The Rat, disguised in the most hideous combination of alien physical features, is sent into the centre of the aliens' stronghold, where he finds himself the object of desire among the aliens. His task is to stop the aliens, who plan to wipe out every human in the universe.
What made the match, strongest first
Terry Brooks
1982 · 570 pages · 1 review
Others: NegativeAncient, ultimate evil threaterned the Elves and the Races of Man. For the Ellcrys, the tree created by long-lost elven magic, was dying, losing the spell of Forbidding that locked the hordes of ravening Demons away from Earth. Already the Reaper, most fearsome of demons, was free. Only one source of protection was powerful enough to stop it: The Elfstones of Shannara. The stones and the right to use them belonged to Wil Olmsford, given him by his grandfather Shea. Allanon, legendary Druid guardian, summoned him from his studies in Storlock to protect Amberle, the elven girl who must carry a sees of the tree to the mysterious Bloodfire, life-source of earth, there to be quickened and to creat a new Ellcrys. While Allanon and the Elves fight a hopeless war against the emerging demons, Wil and Amberle plunge forward in a seemingly impossible quest to find the Bloodfire.
What made the match, strongest first
Jack Vance
1981 · 2 reviews
Others: MixedA short story collection originally published as Future Tense by one of SF's greatest authors, Jack Vance. Contents: - Dust of Far Suns (1962) - Dodkin's Job (1959) - Ullward's Retreat (1958) - The Gift of Gab (1955)
What made the match, strongest first
Emily St. John Mandel
1999 · 248 pages · 12 reviews
Others: Mostly positiveEdwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core. Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him. When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe. A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.
What made the match, strongest first
John Wyndham
1955 · 204 pages · 6 reviews
Others: Mostly positiveThis book is about a post apocalyptic world returned back to the times of the horse and carriage seen through the eyes of a young boy. Deviations are punished or destroyed and what few books remained govern the way people think about change and the differences from the norm. The twists and turns in this rather short book as bought me back to it many times over the years, which is very unusual for me. It would make a great Spielberg movie with the authors descriptions of the scarred landscape and the characters being fantastic. you could really picture the trials and tribulations of these people. When the young boy David finds his closest friend has a sixth toe on each foot and is asked to keep it a secret from his god fearing tyrant of a father, he comes to question his own secrets and what would happen to him if anyone found out. I wont tell you the twist, but definitely recommend this read to anyone, young or old.
What made the match, strongest first
Philip K. Dick
1981 · 249 pages · 6 reviews
Others: MixedVALIS is the first book in Philip K. Dick's incomparable final trio of novels (the others being The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer). This disorienting and bleakly funny work is about a schizophrenic hero named Horselover Fat; the hidden mysteries of Gnostic Christianity; and reality as revealed through a pink laser. VALIS is a theological detective story, in which God is both a missing person and the perpetrator of the ultimate crime.
What made the match, strongest first
MixedThis is not my favorite pulp writing, and it's also not my favorite cosmic horror, but I don't not recommend it. I think that this portraiture of Northwest Smith is definitely interesting, but I think it's a pretty flimsy skeleton and it's something that is only paid out after you've already committed a lot of attention to reading through these stories that for the most part are very redundant, formulaic, and boring.
Loved itfor sheer you know Spaceway enjoyment and all the color and all the romance and the violence and the sensuality you need Northwest Smith
