Type: StandaloneNovel

Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds

Related Posts
The Martian

Rich Man’s Sky

A NEW NOVEL OF REAL SF FROM WIL McCARTHY When billionaires control the space program, where does that leave the rest of us? Space: a tycoon’s playground. From a space station full of women to a monastery on the Moon, Read more

Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds
Date:
MainCategory:
Type:
Genre:
Lenght:
Author:
Narrator:

Pushing Ice is the brilliant tale of extraordinary aliens, glittering technologies, and sweeping space opera from award-winning science fiction author Alastair Reynolds.
2057. Humanity has raised exploiting the solar system to an art form. Bella Lind and the crew of her nuclear-powered ship, the Rockhopper, push ice. They mine comets. And they’re good at it.
The Rockhopper is nearing the end of its current mission cycle, and everyone is desperate for some much-needed R & R, when startling news arrives from Saturn: Janus, one of Saturn’s ice moons, has inexplicably left its natural orbit and is now heading out of the solar system at high speed. As layers of camouflage fall away, it becomes clear that Janus was never a moon in the first place. It’s some kind of machine — and it is now headed toward a fuzzily glimpsed artifact 260 light-years away.
The Rockhopper is the only ship anywhere near Janus, and Bella Lind is ordered to shadow it for the few vital days before it falls forever out of reach. In accepting this mission, she sets her ship and her crew on a collision course with destiny — for Janus has more surprises in store, and not all of them are welcome.

Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds

Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds
Date:
MainCategory:
Type:
Genre:
Lenght:
Author:
Narrator:
Protagonist:

Part science fiction thriller, part interstellar adventure, and part noir crime, Century Rain is an astonishing international bestseller of “blistering powers and style” (SF Revu).

Three hundred years from now, Earth has been rendered uninhabitable due to the technological catastrophe known as the Nanocaust. Archaeologist Verity Auger specializes in the exploration of its surviving landscape. Now, her expertise is required for a far greater purpose. Something astonishing has been discovered at the far end of a wormhole: mid-20th-century Earth, preserved like a fly in amber.

Somewhere on this alternate planet is a device capable of destroying both worlds at either end of the wormhole. And Verity must find the device, and the man who plans to activate it, before it’s too late – for the past and the future of two worlds.

The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks

The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks
Date:
MainCategory:
Type:
Lenght:
Author:
Narrator:

For short-lived ‘quick’ races like humans, space is dominated by the complicated, grandiose Mercatoria, whose rule is both military and religious. To the Dwellers who may live billions of years, the galaxy consists of their gas-giant planets – the rest is debris.

Our human hero, Fassin Taak, is a Slow Seer privileged to work with the Dwellers of the gas-giant Nasqueron in his home system Ulubis. His work consists of rummaging for data in their vast, disorganised memories and libraries. Unfortunately, without knowing it, he’s come close to an ancient secret of unimaginable importance….

The Man Who Used the Universe

The Man Who Used the Universe
Date:
MainCategory:
Type:
Genre:
Lenght:
Author:

A notorious criminal pursues peace—and power—with alien enemies in this sci-fi novel from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Damned Trilogy.

No one knows the true motives of Kees vaan Loo-Macklin. He’s a mastermind criminal who gave up his place at the head of the dark underworld to become a legitimate member of Evenwaith’s cities. But soon he was reaching out to powerful enemies—-the slimy aliens called the Nuel. Loo-Macklin negotiates an illusory peace agreement and gains precious alien secrets in the process. Is he after peace, power or pure evil? With enemy starships beginning to amass, we won’t have to wait long to find out.

Splinter of the Mind’s Eye (original star wars sequel never filmed)

Splinter of the Mind's Eye (original star wars sequel never filmed)
Date:
MainCategory:
Type:
Genre:
Lenght:
Universe:
Author:

Alan Dean Foster is the uncredited ghostwriter for Lucas novelization of Star Wars
Splinter of the Mind’s Eye was the second novel to be used as a basis for a low-budget sequel to Star Wars in case the film was not successful
but by the time it was published, Star Wars had broken box office records. The film adaptation of Splinter of the Mind’s Eye was abandoned in favor of Lucas’s vision of a big-budget sequel (The Empire Strikes Back)

 

Luke Skywalker expected trouble when he volunteered to follow Princess Leia on her mission to the planet Circarpous. But he discovered that hidden on the planet was the Kaiburr crystal, a mysterious gem that would give the one who possessed it such powers over the Force that he would be all but invincible. In the wrong hands, the crystal could be deadly. So Luke had to find this treasure and find it fast….

Features a bonus section following the novel that includes a primer on the Star Wars expanded universe, and over half a dozen excerpts from some of the most popular Star Wars books of the last thirty years!

The Ministry of Fear

The Ministry of Fear
Date:
MainCategories: ,
Period:
Type:
Genre:
Lenght:
Author:

In London during the Blitz, an amnesiac must outwit a twisted Nazi plot in this “master thriller” of espionage, murder, and deception (Time).

On a peaceful Sunday afternoon, Arthur Rowe comes upon a charity fete in the gardens of a Cambridgeshire vicarage where he wins a game of chance. If only this were an ordinary day. Britain is under threat by Germany, and the air raid sirens that bring the bazaar to a halt expose Rowe as no ordinary man. Recently released from a psychiatric prison for the mercy killing of his wife, he is burdened by guilt, and now, in possession of a seemingly innocuous prize, on the run from a nest of Nazi spies who want him dead.

Pursued on a dark odyssey through the bombed-out streets of London, he becomes enmeshed in a tangle of secrets that reach into the dark recesses of his own forgotten past. And there isn’t a soul he can trust, not even himself. Because Arthur Rowe doesn’t even know who he really is.

“A storyteller of genius,” Graham Greene composed his serpentine mystery of authentic wartime espionage—and one the author’s personal favorites—while working for MI6 (Evelyn Waug

Kim by Rudyard Kipling

Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Date:
MainCategories: ,
Period:
Type:
Genres: ,
Lenght:
Author:
Reception:

1901 (the first) edition. illustrated

“Kim” is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning English author Rudyard Kipling. “Kim” is listed on the BBC’s The Big Read poll of the UK’s “best-loved novel.”Book is considered by many to be Kipling’s masterpiece, one of the best stories in English about India.It is a tale of adventure, a drama of a boy, a mystical story that unfolds against the backdrop of “The Great Game”, the political conflict between Russia and Britain in Central Asia. Story is set after the Second Afghan War (ended 1881).

The story is set after the Second Afghan War (which ended in 1881), but before the Third (fought in 1919)

Kim (Kimball O’Hara) is the orphaned son of an Irish soldier and a poor Irish mother, living a vagabond existence in India under British rule in the late 19th century. Kim earns his living by begging and running small errands on the streets of Lahore. He becomes lama’s disciple, is trained as an English spy, travels around the India, performs spy missions.

 

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
Date:
MainCategory:
Period:
Type:
Genre:
trope:
Lenght:
Author:

‘Listen. You’re a patriotic Englishman. Highly respected. Been here for years. A wide circle of influential friends. It is important that we have our man in Havana, Mr Wormwold.’

Jim Wormwold, an under-employed vacuum cleaner salesman living in 1950s Cuba, is struggling to pay for his teenage daughter’s increasingly extravagant lifestyle. So when the British Secret Service asks him to become their ‘man in Havana’ he can’t afford to say no. There’s just one problem… he doesn’t know anything! To avoid suspicion, he begins to recruit non-existent sub-agents, concocting a series of intricate fictions. Soon, he’s apparently deciphering incomprehensible codes, passing along sketches of secret weapons that look suspiciously like vacuum parts, and claiming to recruit fellow operatives from his country club, all to create the perfect picture of intrigue.

But Wormwold soon discovers that his stories are closer to the truth tan he could ever have imagined…

When MI6 dispatches a secretary to oversee his endeavors, Wormold fears his carelessly fabricated world will come undone. Instead, it all comes true. Somehow, he’s become the target of an assassin, and it’s going to take more than a fib to get out of Cuba alive. Her Majesty’s man in Havana may have to resort to spying.

A hapless salesman in Cuba is recruited into Cold War spy games in Greene’s classic “comical, satirical, atmospherical” novel (The Daily Telegraph).
Named one of the 20 Best Spy Novels of All Time by the Telegraph and adapted into the classic 1959 comedy starring Alec Guinness, Our Man in Havana is “high-comic mayhem . . . weirdly undated . . . [and] bizarrely prescient” (Christopher Buckley, New York Times–bestselling author).

I Am a Barbarian by Edgar Rice Burroughs

I Am a Barbarian by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Date:
MainCategory:
Period:
Type:
Genre:
trope:
Lenght:
Author:

written in 1941 but was not published until after the author’s death

The story is pitched as a free translation of the memoirs of Britannicus, serving for 25 years as the slave of Caligula, emperor of Rome from AD 37 to 41 who is historically known for being insane. It treats a number of different supposed facets of Caligula’s life, including his popular early acts as emperor and his descent into madness.

The Outlaw of Torn by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Outlaw of Torn by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Date:
MainCategory:
Period:
Type:
Genre:
Lenght:
Author:
Narrator:

The Outlaw of Torn is a historical novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, originally published as a five-part serial in New Story Magazine from January to May 1914, and first published in book form by A. C. McClurg in 1927.

It was Burroughs’ second novel, his first being the science fiction work A Princess of Mars. His third was Tarzan of the Apes.
The Outlaw of Torn is one of only two historical novels Burroughs wrote.

The other, I Am a Barbarian, set in the Rome of Caligula, was not published until 1967, seventeen years after his death.
Odin’s Library Classics is dedicated to bringing the world the best of humankind’s literature from throughout the ages.

Carefully selected, each work is unabridged from classic works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or drama.