The Fantasy Review’s list of 6 Classic Science Fiction Books That Will Make Your Mind Spin.
The Female Man by Joanna Russ
From the blurb:
Living in an altered past that never saw the end of the Great Depression, Jeannine, a librarian, is waiting to be married. Joanna lives in a different version of reality: she’s a 1970s feminist trying to succeed in a man’s world. Janet is from Whileaway, a utopian earth where only women exist. And Jael is a warrior with steel teeth and catlike retractable claws, from an earth with separate-and warring-female and male societies. When these four women meet, the results are startling, outrageous, and subversive.
Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
From the blurb:
Genetic engineering is routine, corporations have usurped democracy, technology governs human relationship, and mass-marketed psychosomatic drugs keep billions docile. The systems of the United States are universal in reach and out of control. Every citizen is its victim. . . and its creator…
The Overman Culture by Edmund Cooper
From the blurb:
A boy’s struggle to grasp the forbidden truth about his world…
Michael was quite young when he discovered that some of his playmates bled if they cut themselves, and some didn’t. For a long time he didn’t think about it. Nor did it seem strange to see Zeppelins being attacked by jet fighters above London’s force field, or glimpse Queen Victoria walking with Winston Churchill in the Mall. Not at first...
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm
From the blurb:
The Sumner family can read the signs: the droughts and floods, the blighted crops, the shortages, the rampant diseases and plagues, and, above all, the increasing sterility all point to one thing. Their isolated farm in the Appalachian Mountains gives them the ideal place to survive the coming breakdown, and their wealth and know-how gives them the means. Men and women must clone themselves for humanity to survive. But what then?…
Nightflyers by George R.R. Martin
From the blurb:
When a scientific expedition is launched to study a mysterious alien race, the only ship available is the Nightflyer, a fully autonomous vessel manned by a single human. But Captain Royd Eris remains locked away, interacting with his passengers only as a disembodied voice—or a projected hologram no more substantial than a ghost…
Titan (Gaea, #1) by John Varley
From the blurb:
It begins with humankind’s exploration of a massive satellite orbiting Saturn. It culminates in a shocking the satellite is a giant alien being. Her name is Gaea. Her awesome interior is mind-boggling—because it is a mind. A mind that calls out to explorers, transforming all who enter…
