We can build you (1972)

Galactic pot-healer

Philip K. Dick

1969 · 177 pages · 2 reviews

Others: Positive

Galactic Pot-Healer is a science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick, first published in 1969. The novel deals with a number of philosophical and political issues such as repressive societies, fatalism, and the search for meaning in life. Dick also wrote a children's book set in the same universe, Nick and the Glimmung, in 1966. It was published posthumously in 1988. The story concerns a man who thanklessly heals pots in a totalitarian future Earth, only to be summoned by a godlike alien known as Glimmung, who has recruited him as part of a multispecies specialist team sent to "Plowman's Planet" (or Sirius Five) for a mystical quest, which is to raise the sunken cathedral of Heldscalla from a surreal alien ocean.

The Man Who Japed

Philip K. Dick

1956 · 172 pages · 1 review

Others: Positive

The Man Who Japed is a science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick, first published in 1956. Although one of Dick's lesser-known novels, it features several of the ideas and themes that recur throughout his later works. The "jape[s]" or practical jokes of the novel begin with a statue's unconventional decapitation. The Man Who Japed was first published by Ace Books as one half of Ace Double D-193, bound dos-à-dos with The Space Born by E. C. Tubb.

Moderan

David R. Bunch

1971 · 240 pages · 3 reviews

Others: Leaning positive

The Reefs of Earth

R. A. Lafferty

1968 · 164 pages · 2 reviews

Others: Positive

A PLAGUE OF DEMONS —that's what the people of Lost Haven called the six children (seven, if you counted Bad John) of the Dulanty family. They looked like normal Earth children... except when they flicked their ears like animals, or made their eyes glow with a green fire... and if you looked at them sideways they did look strangely like nightmarish gargoyles. The truth these children are Pucas, aliens from a strange planet. And they have taken it upon themselves to reduce the world to a population of six (seven, if you counted Bad John). Wishing will make it so, for by making up an appropriate death-rhyme, they can destroy their victims. These frightening, far-out kids take a black delight in destroying their neighbors, and the Earth people are defenseless against them....

The Cormorant

Stephen Gregory

1986 · 147 pages · 2 reviews

Others: Overwhelmingly positive

A young family receives a surprise when old Uncle Ian dies and leaves them a cottage in north Wales. For Ian’s nephew and his wife Ann, it seems a stroke of incredible good fortune, enabling them to leave their life in the city for a newfound freedom in the remote seaside cottage. There’s just one catch. Uncle Ian’s will has an unusual condition: the couple must care for his pet cormorant or forfeit the bequest. The will’s provision seems harmless enough at first, but when their young son Harry develops a strange fascination for the increasingly sinister and malevolent bird, they soon find that Uncle Ian’s gift may not be a blessing, but a curse.

Don't bite the sun

Tanith Lee

1976 · 158 pages · 3 reviews

Others: Positive

(The first book in the Four-BEE series) It's jang to be wild and sexy and reckless. It's jang to change your body, or your gender. It's jang to do daredevil tricks, and even get killed a few times..you can always come alive again. And it's jang to try to sabotage your robot-run world. But when the madcap chase for pleasure begins to drag and you start looking for a real life to live, you find the robots have left you nothing worthwhile to do. Searching for a way out of this pointless existence you make a lot of painful and stupid mistakes. But you fight your way free and start a new life - in exile. ..and you find you have to cope with sightseers and hangers-on, all uninvited and now exiled with you - and finally come face to face with the greatest and most deadly threat of all.