Books in the Genre Science Fiction
List of recommended books of the genre science fiction, with author and brief synopsis of each book.
(arranged alphabetically)
Featured books for the genre Science Fiction
Book: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Author: Jules Verne
Description: A huge sea monster has attacked and wrecked several ships from beneath the sea. Professor Arronax bravely joins a mission to hunt down the beast.
He goes aboard the Nautilus, a secret submarine helmed by the mysterious Captain Nemo. At first, the mission is exciting, as Nemo takes Arronax on a voyage around the underwater world. But when things start to go wrong, Arronax finds there's no escape from the Nautilus. He is now Captain Nemo's captive--20,000 leagues under the sea!
Trapped aboard the fantastic... (keep reading...)
Book: Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales
Author: Ray Bradbury
Description: The one hundred stories in this volume were chosen by Bradbury himself, and span a career that blossomed in the pulp magazines of the early 1940s and continues to flourish in the new millennium. Here are representatives of the legendary author's finest works of short fiction, including many that have not been republished for decades, all forever fresh and vital, evocative and immensely entertaining.
This is Bradbury at his very best -- golden visions of tomorrow, poetic memories of yesterday, dark ... (keep reading...)
Book: Dandelion Wine
Author: Ray Bradbury
Description: In the unusual world of Green Town, Illinois, a twelve-year-old discovers the wonders of reality and the power of imagination...
Dandelion Wine stands out in the Bradbury literary canon as the author's most deeply personal work, a semi-autobiographical recollection of a magical small-town summer in 1928. Ray Bradbury's moving recollection of a vanished golden era remains one of his most enchanting novels.
Twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding knows Green Town, Illinois, is as vast and deep as the whole... (keep reading...)
Book: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Author: Douglas Adams
Description: There is a long tradition of Great Detectives, and Dirk Gently does not belong to it.
But his search for a missing cat uncovers a bewildered ghost, a secret time traveller, and a devastating secret that threatens the future of humanity.
Detective Gently's bill for saving the human race from extinction: NO CHARGE.
Douglas Adams died in May 2001 at the age of 49. Aside from the bestselling Dirk Gently novels (Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency; The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul), he was the author of... (keep reading...)
Book: Farenheit 451
Author: Ray Bradbury
Description: The system was simple. Everyone understood it. Books were for burning, along with the houses in which they were hidden.
Guy Montag was a fireman whose job it was to start fires, and he enjoys his job. He had been a fireman for ten years, and never questioned the pleasure of the midnight runs nor the joy of watching pages consumed by flames.
He never questioned anything until he met a seventeen-year-old girl who told him of a past when people were not afraid and a professor who told him of a future in... (keep reading...)
Book: Farewell Summer
Author: Ray Bradbury
Description: Celebrating the final days of summer, thirteen-year-old Douglas Spaulding and his friends declare war on the stuffy older set of their community who would put an end to their wild ways, an effort for which the boys plot to stop the courthouse building clock as a means of staying young forever...
One of the most acclaimed and beloved of American storytellers, Ray Bradbury has come home, revisiting the verdant landscape of one of his most adored works, Dandelion Wine. More than fifty years in the making, the... (keep reading...)
Book: Journey to the Center of the Earth
Author: Jules Verne
Description: An impetuous German geologist discovers an encoded manuscript in which a sixteenth-century explorer claims to have found a passageway to the center of the earth.
The intrepid Professor Lindenbrock embarks upon the strangest expedition of the nineteenth century: a journey down an extinct Icelandic volcano to the Earth's very core.
In his quest to penetrate the planet's primordial secrets, the geologist, together with his quaking nephew Axel and their devoted guide, Hans, discovers an astonishing... (keep reading...)
Book: Life, the Universe and Everything
Author: Douglas Adams
Description: The third installment of the zany Hitchhiker series finds Arthur Dent, reluctant space and time traveler, and his wacky entourage on a mission to prevent the destruction of the universe by killer robots...
The unhappy inhabitants of planet Krikkit are sick of looking at the night sky above their heads--so they plan to destroy it. The universe, that is.
Now only five individuals stand between the white killer robots of Krikkit and their goal of total annihilation.
They are Arthur Dent, a mild-mannered... (keep reading...)
Book: Mostly Harmless
Author: Douglas Adams
Description: Adams is back with the amazing, unprecedented, logic-defying, but-why-stop-now fifth novel in the Hitchhiker Trilogy. Here is the epic story of Random, the daughter of Arthur Dent, who has grown up on a remote world at the edge of the universe and now sets out on a transgalactic quest to find the planet of her ancestors...
It's easy to get disheartened when your planet has been blown up, the woman you love has vanished in a misundertanding about space/time, the spaceship you are crashes on a remote and... (keep reading...)
Book: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Author: Douglas Adams
Description: Reluctant galactic wanderer Arthur Dent finds himself back on Earth, which has been restored after having been demolished for a hyperspace bypass, and again sets out on his travels with a girl who went mad at the Earth's destruction...
Back on Earth with nothing more to show for his long, strange trip through time and space than a ratty towel and a plastic shopping bag, Arthur Dent is ready to believe that the past eight years were all just a figment of his stressed-out imagination.
But a gift-wrapped fishbowl... (keep reading...)
Book: Something Wicked This Way Comes
Author: Ray Bradbury
Description: What if someone discovers your secret dream, that one great wish you would do anything for? And what if that someone suddenly makes your dream come true--before you learn the price you have to pay? Something Wicked This Way Comes is the story of two boys who encounter the sinister wonders of Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show. They will soon discover the show's awful mystery--a mystery that will change the life of every person it touches--in this stunning masterwork of dark fantasy by Ray Bradbury...
Few... (keep reading...)
Book: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Author: Douglas Adams
Description: Seconds before the Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor.
Together this dynamic pair begin a journey through space aided by quotes from The Hitchhiker's Guide ("A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have") and a galaxy-full of fellow... (keep reading...)
Book: The Illustrated Man
Author: Ray Bradbury
Description: The Illustrated Man is classic Bradbury --a collection of tales that breathe and move, animated by sharp, intaken breath and flexing muscle. Here are eighteen startling visions of humankind's destiny, unfolding across a canvas of decorated skin--visions as keen as the tattooist's needle and as colorful as the inks that indelibly stain the body.
"He was a riot of rockets and fountains and people, in such intricate detail and color that you could hear the voices murmuring, small and muted, from the crowds that... (keep reading...)
Book: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Author: Douglas Adams
Description: When a passenger check-in desk at London's Heathrow Airport disappears in a ball of orange flame, the explosion is deemed an act of God. But which god, wonders holistic detective Dirk Gently? What god would be hanging around Heathrow trying to catch the 3:37 to Oslo? And what has this to do with Dirk's latest--and late-- client, found only this morning with his head revolving atop the hit record "Hot Potato"? Amid the hostile attentions of a stray eagle and the trauma of a very dirty refrigerator, super-sleuth Dirk... (keep reading...)
Book: The Martian Chronicles
Author: Ray Bradbury
Description: Leaving behind a world on the brink of destruction, man came to the Red planet and found the Martians waiting, dreamlike. Seeking the promise of a new beginning, man brought with him his oldest fears and his deepest desires.
Man conquered Mars and in that instant, Mars conquered him. The strange new world with its ancient, dying race and vast, red-gold deserts cast a spell on him, settled into his dreams, and changed him forever. Here are the captivating chronicles of man and Mars, the modern classic by the... (keep reading...)
Book: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Author: Douglas Adams
Description: In the sequel to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur Dent joins his strange entourage on a hilarious search for the current ruler of the universe, answers about life, the universe, and... the perfect place to eat in space...
Facing annihilation at the hands of the warlike Vogons is a curious time to have a craving for tea. It could only happen to the cosmically displaced Arthur Dent and his curious comrades in arms as they hurtle across space aboard a stolen Improbability Drive ship -- and desperately... (keep reading...)
Book: The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
Author: Douglas Adams
Description: On Friday, May 11, 2001, the world mourned the untimely passing of Douglas Adams, beloved creator of The Hitchhiker?s Guide to the Galaxy, dead of a heart attack at age forty-nine. Thankfully, in addition to a magnificent literary legacy which includes 7 novels and 3 co-authored works of nonfiction, Douglas left us something more. This book was rescued from his four computers, culled from an archive of chapters from his long-awaited novel-in-progress, as well as his short stories, speeches, articles, interviews,... (keep reading...)