Humble Bundle is one of my favorite places to get ebooks inexpensively. While I am not a fan of every deal they offer, many are pretty great. That said, the latest Humble Book Bundle: Adventures in Science Fiction is the real deal.
While there are a few authors I've never heard of, the current bundle features a lot of great writers in the field. Here are the few that I am most excited about:
Greg Bear – The Forge of God: I haven't read Forge, but I read Bear's Eon awhile back and I liked it quite a bit. While Bear tends to get pulled into present day politics (I'd rather see extrapolative politics based on the future world he builds), both his science and the storytelling are done very well. Forge is one of Bear's best known works, having been a nominee for the Nebula Award. (Though Darwin's Radio is probably better known.)
Harlan Ellison – "The City on the Edge of Forever" (Star Trek episode): Ellison is best known for his somewhat wacky and experimental sci-fi, including stories like "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" and "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream." Abrasive and argumentative throughout his life, Ellison pushed the envelope and encouraged others to do so as well by editing anthologies like Dangerous Visions and Again Dangerous Visions (a third volume was put together but never published). The book included in this bundle is his original screenplay for an episode of Star Trek (TOS) that Ellison claims Gene Roddenberry and others rewrote. Both the script and the final version of the episode won (different) Writers Guild Awards.
Robert Silverberg – Across a Billion Years: While I have never read anything by Silverberg, you cannot journey through the realm of sci-fi literature very long without running across his named. A true-blue Grand Master of SF, Silverberg has multiple Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards under his belt. Prolific as all get-out, at one point it was estimated that he wrote a quarter of a million words per month. Across a Billion Years was published in 1969 and tells the story of space archaeologists who make a startling discovery.
Timothy Zahn – Blackcollar: I have been a fan of Zahn since I first picked up his Thrawn trilogy of Star Wars books as a high school kid in the early 1990s. While I have not delved into many of his non-Star Wars books, I did read his Conquerer trilogy on the merit of the Thrawn trilogy, and recall liking them. Blackcollar appears to be a combination of two novels he wrote titled The Blackcollar (1983) and The Backlash Mission (1986); a third novel in the series, The Judas Solution, was published in 2006.
Bruce Sterling – Schismatrix Plus: The only thing I've read by the Godfather of Cyberpunk is actually a non-fiction book: The Hacker Crackdown. As a co-creator of the cyberpunk genre alongside with William Gibson (the two even co-authored a book, The Difference Engine, which was nominated for a bunch of awards), I probably should've picked up more of his stuff along the way. Schismatrix was published in 1985 and was nominated for both a Nebula and a British Science Fiction Association Award.
Octavia Butler – Dawn: I first read Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower a few years ago when I took a course in dystopian literature at Signum University, taught by the inestimable Amy H. Sturgis. (I also read Butler's "Speech Sounds" in another of Dr. Sturgis' classes.) I've since become a big fan of Butler, though I have not yet read Dawn, the first of her Xenogenesis trilogy written in the late 1980s. As a whole, the series has receive a lot of academic attention, and each of the books in it was nominated for a Locus Award, though none of them won.
Joe Haldeman – All My Sins Remembered: I read Haldeman's classic tale of future battle The Forever War within the last few years, and I wished immediately that I had read it long ago so that I could have re-read it many times by now. Haldeman has gone on to write many award-winning novels and stories, many of them also stemming from his experiences in the Vietnam War. All My Sins Remembered was written a few years after Forever War, and it deals with an intergalactic assassin who must come to grips with the atrocities he commits.
These aren't all the books in the bundle, but they are certainly the ones I am most looking forward to. If you are a fan of science fiction stories, it's definitely worth the $18 to get everything offered here. Of course, you can donate more to support the Bundle and its charities as well.
Visit Humble Book Bundle: Adventures in Science Fiction
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