Recommended Material

Wings of Creation

By Brenda Cooper

Heading home on a spaceship, genetically augmented Joseph, his sister Chelo, and his beloved Alicia, along with their extended “family,” receive warning from Joseph’s mentor, Marcus, that war is looming, and Joseph is wanted by the port authority and the planetary police. Instead of home, they go to the supposedly peaceful planet of Lopali, whose people fly with genetically engineered wings but now have difficulty walking. Joseph is welcomed as the Maker and, with Marcus’ help, must learn to work internal changes in the fliers to enable them to reproduce and be freed from those who have enslaved them. Joseph and company become fraught with danger. They are forced into hiding and to face a battle with fliers who want to maintain the status quo. The sequel to The Silver Ship and the Sea (2007) and Reading the Wind(2008).

Reading the Wind

By Brenda Cooper

The colony planet of Fremont was supposed to be free of all genetically altered beings–a new home for a pure race. So when Chelo and her brother Joseph, along with two other genetically altered teenagers, were abandoned on Fremont, they were not welcome. They vowed to get off the planet by any means necessary. Joseph and the others managed to escape, but Chelo was left behind with her new found love, forced to live underground. Joseph and the others find that their homeworld is full of vengeance. Believing that the people of Fremont killed the teenaged castaways, they sent a technologically advanced mercenary team to Fremont to eliminate the entire planet’s population. With the help of Joseph’s father, the youngsters head back to Fremont to try to save Chelo.

The Silver Ship and the Sea

By Brenda Cooper

The colony planet Fremont is joyous, riotous, and very wild. Its grasses can cut your arms and legs to ribbons, the rinds of its precious fruit can skewer your thumbs, and some of the predators are bigger than humans. Meteors fall from the sky and volcanoes erupt. Fremont is verdant, rich, beautiful, and dangerous. Fremonts single town, Artistos, perches on a cliff below rugged mountains. Below Artistos lie the Grass Plains, which lead down to the sea. And in the middle of the Grass Plains, a single silver spaceship lies quiet and motionless. The seasons do not dull it, nor do the winds scratch it, and the fearful citizens of Aristos wont go near it. Chelo Lee, her brother Joseph, and four other young children have been abandoned on the colony planet. Unfortunate events have left them orphaned in a human colony that abhors genetic engineering and these six young people are genetically enhanced. With no one to turn to, Chelo and the others must now learn how to use their distinct skills to make this unwelcome planet home, or to find a way off it.

Building Harlequin’s Moon

By Larry Niven and Brenda Coope

From Publishers Weekly:
Fans of both hard and softer, psychological SF will welcome veteran Niven and newcomer Cooper’s well-written tale of a 60,000-year layover in space, in which physical challenges of world building are matched by social challenges of collaboration among disparate groups. After arriving in an inhospitable solar system, the Earth Born, colonists on an interstellar journey, need to refuel their ship, John Glenn, with antimatter.

Since they lack laborers, the Earth Born construct a moon where they can build a particle collider and raise a work force, the Moon Born. Destined to be abandoned, the Moon Born struggle to gain as much knowledge and technology as they can before the Earth Born depart. Some of the technology includes artificial intelligences, whose unrestricted use caused the Earth Born to flee Earth in the first place. Niven and Cooper provide complicated characters, particularly the AI, which struggle with realistic moral dilemmas. If the novel loses a bit of its emotional credibility in a compressed climax, it errs on the side of telling a rich story completely in a single volume.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s series on Climate Change

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson’s series on climate change, which includes Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting. These are well-researched works that do a nice job of showing the complexity of both the problem and the possible solutions. It is a sobering but at least slightly hopeful series.
These are not page turners, but they are a much easier and more interesting way to absorb some of the intricacies of the possible effects of climate change than reading reports. I do recommend reading this series in order – there are engaging characters that will travel from book to book with you.

Recommended for: Everyone.

Lady of Mazes

Karl Schroeder

Canadian writer Karl Schroeder explores a layered set of virtual and physical worlds inLady of Mazes. His thinking is audacious and interesting. This book is a great way to explore consensual world-building and the nature of belief in reality.

Recommended For: People who are at least slightly self-describable as “computer-geeks” and who have gamed or built a second-life avatar or otherwise experienced virtual realities. It’s reasonably accessible to anyone, but it’s a very, very bright book that requires following some very interesting but conceptually new ideas. I loved it, but had to stop and think a few times.

Rainbow’s End

Vernor Vinge

Vernor Vinge’s near-future tale, Rainbows End, is a true delight. The entire background of the book (as well as the main story, of course) is firmly set in an imaginable future. Almost every page is a lesson about at the future, and about what it will be like to be human there.
Vinge doesn’t flinch from real problems like Alzheimer’s in this book that in turn explores becoming young again, the meaning of family, and a 1984-style threat to human independent thought.

Recommended for: Everyone

Darwin’s Radio

Greg Bear

Greg Bear’s award winning duology, Darwin’s Radio and Darwin’s Children, explores uncommon frontier in science fiction: biology. Like Kim Stanley Robinson, Greg does a lot of research and shares his knowledge so it goes down easy with a good twist of entertainment. Both of these books are page turners, and will be tough to put down.

Recommended for: Everyone

Snowcrash

Neil Stephenson

Neil Stephenson’s Snowcrash is spoken of as the father of the virtual world, Second Life. Written nearly twenty years ago, it was sweetly prophetic in many ways, and missed the mark in a few other, quaint ones. Stephenson invented fictional skateboards that my son still wants (and which are now a little bit available, but not as cool as the ones in the book) and a number of words from the book – such as descriptor for minivans — are still in our family vocabulary even though we read it shortly after it came out.

Recommended for: Everyone, including teens. Best for computer geeks, but there’s value for all.

1984

George Orwell

George Orwell’s fabulous 1984: The quintessential cautionary science fiction tale. So deep in our culture, it hasn’t been shelved with science fiction for a long time. Look for it in the “classics” section of most bookstores. Should be recommended or required reading in a high school and college classes. I’ve read it a few times, haven’t done it for a few years, and I think it’s time again….

Recommended for: Everyone

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. Anyone remember that when the Iraq war started we were told the way to support the troops was to keep the economy strong and consumer spending up? Notice a lot of us spend a lot more time playing games, watching television, or seeking some other form of entertainment than thinking deep thoughts? Like all of our classics, this one missed some major marks, but Brave New World hit us so close to the bone in some ways that it hurts.

Recommended for: Everyone