Leisure Reading — Literature

A military satellite launched to collect organisms in the upper atmosphere comes down in Arizona. Within a few hours, almost everyone in a nearby town is dead. A team of scientists is assembled to investigate.

Here is the novel that will be forever considered a triumph of the imagination. Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, who would become the mysterious man known as Muad'Dib. He would avenge the traitorous plot against his noble family--and would bring to fruition humankind's most ancient and unattainable dream.

For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Sheldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future—to a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years. To preserve knowledge and save mankind, Seldon gathers the best minds in the Empire—both scientists and scholars—and brings them to a bleak planet at the edge of the Galaxy to serve as a beacon of hope for a future generations. He calls his sanctuary the Foundation.

How shall we begin? This is the story of a book called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--not an Earth book, never published on Earth and, until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or even heard of by any Earthman. This is the story of Arthur Dent, who, seconds before Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, is plucked off the planet by his friend, Ford Prefect, who has been posing as an out-of-work actor for the last fifteen years but is really a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Together they begin a journey through the galaxy aided by quotes from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with the words don't panic written on the front. ("A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.")

In a future North America, where the rulers of Panem maintain control through an annual televised survival competition pitting young people from each of the twelve districts against one another, sixteen-year-old Katniss's skills are put to the test when she voluntarily takes her younger sister's place.

On a quiet fall evening in the small, peaceful town of Mill Valley, California, Dr. Miles Bennell discovered an insidious, horrifying plot. Silently, subtly, almost imperceptibly, alien life-forms were taking over the bodies and minds of his neighbors, his friends, his family, the woman he loved-- the world as he knew it. First published in 1955, this classic thriller of the ultimate alien invasion and the triumph of the human spirit over an invisible enemy inspired three major motion pictures.

Composed in a tantalizing style of New Age-sci-fi-magical realism, the tale is set in the year 2200, when astroanalyst Azucena Martinez, who lives in Mexico City, has been permitted at last to meet her twin soul, Rodrigo Sanchez, the man with whom she is to experience the ecstasy of perfect romantic union. And not a moment too soon; not only is Azucena terribly lonely, but she has finally paid off all the karmic debts accumulated in her 14,000 past lives. Alas for her, Rodrigo is not as karmically pure, and the day after their night of bliss, he is framed for murder and deported to the penal planet of Korma. As it turns out, this is all part of a divine plan: Azucena's quest to be reunited with her lover sets in motion a chain of events that will lead to the restoration of the law of Love on planet Earth.

With citizens violently polarized along racial, political, and social lines, and a fifteen-year war still raging abroad, America is crumbling quickly into ruin. The country’s one remaining hope is Dr. Thomas More, whose “lapsometer” is capable of diagnosing the spiritual afflictions—anxiety, depression, alienation—driving everyone’s destructive and disastrous behavior. But such a potent machine has its pitfalls. As Dr. More soon learns, in the wrong hands, the powerful lapsometer could lead to open warfare, pushing America into anarchy at full-speed.

Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it.

From H.G. Wells's "The Land Ironclads" (1903) to David Brin's "Piecework" (1990), this collection of 30 sf stories gives a chronological sampling of 20th-century speculative fiction.

In 2019, humanity finally finds proof of extraterrestrial life when a listening post in Puerto Rico picks up exquisite singing from a planet which will come to be known as Rakhat. While United Nations diplomats endlessly debate a possible first contact mission, the Society of Jesus quietly organizes an eight-person scientific expedition of its own. What the Jesuits find is a world so beyond comprehension that it will lead them to question the meaning of being "human." When the lone survivor of the expedition, Emilio Sandoz, returns to Earth in 2059, he will try to explain what went wrong.

Here at last is the complete, uncut version of Heinlein's all-time masterpiece, the brilliant novel that grew from a cult favorite to a bestseller to a classic in a few short years. It is the story of Valentine Michael Smith, the man from Mars who taught humankind grokking and water-sharing. And love.

A first-person narrative of an unnamed protagonist from Surrey who lives through the invasion of southern England being by Martians. A canister drops from the sky in a sudden explosion and lands near the narrator’s home, opening to reveal an alien who has grey skin with large eyes and tentacles. As more and more of these canisters drop, a human delegation forms and approaches the Martians while waving white flags of peace, but the Martians vaporize the humans immediately. As the British military arrives, the humans of southern England engage in a war to try and stop the Martians from assembling their unknown machinery, but the military cannot match the might of the Martians and their technology.