Philip K. Dick published Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in 1968, and it has since become one of the most important novels in science fiction. Set in a post-nuclear-war San Francisco, the book follows Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter whose job is to “retire” rogue androids. Six Nexus-6 models have escaped from Mars and…
Arthur Dent’s house is being demolished to make way for a bypass when he learns that the Earth is also scheduled for demolition — to make way for a hyperspace bypass — and that his friend Ford Prefect is not, in fact, from Guildford, but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse….
Charlie Gordon is 32 years old and has an IQ of 68. He works as a janitor at a bakery in New York, takes reading and writing classes at the Beekman College Center for Retarded Adults, and wants, more than anything, to be smart. When he is selected for an experimental brain surgery — a…
Dan Simmons published Hyperion in 1989, and the science fiction community has been arguing about where it ranks among the best the genre has produced ever since. The argument usually ends with it near the top. The novel is the first book in the Hyperion Cantos series, and it won the Hugo Award for Best…
Suite Française arrives as an extraordinary document before it arrives as a novel. Irène Némirovsky began writing it in the autumn of 1940, in a French village where she was hiding with her family under German occupation. She completed the first two parts between then and the summer of 1942. In July of that year,…
Cloud Atlas comprises six nested stories spanning roughly five centuries, from a mid-19th century Pacific voyage to a post-collapse Hawaii. Each narrative is interrupted at its midpoint and resumed in reverse order: the novel opens a story, opens another, opens another, keeps opening, reaches the center, then unfolds back out. The stories include a Victorian…
Jacob Jankowski tells his story from two vantage points. In one, he is 23 years old: a Cornell veterinary student whose parents die in a car accident the week before his final exams, leaving him broke, adrift, and with no plan except the one that appears when he stumbles onto a moving circus train. In…
Susie Salmon is fourteen years old when her neighbor George Harvey rapes and murders her. From a personal heaven — a place shaped like a wishful version of high school, populated by others who share the things she loved — Susie watches her family fracture and slowly reconstruct in the years following her death. She…
Pi Patel grows up in Pondicherry, India, the son of a zookeeper who tends a menagerie of animals that will later save his son’s life — and nearly end it. Pi is an endlessly curious boy who practices Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam simultaneously, to the mild bafflement of everyone around him. When his family emigrates…
When Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a young man at the Tübingen seminary in the early 1790s, he filled notebooks with fragments: compressed observations on religion, politics, love, and moral life that he never intended for publication. “Aphorisms on Love and Law” gathers some of the most striking of these early fragments alongside related short…
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