August 2013 MobileRead Book Club Vote
Help us choose a book as the August 2013 eBook for the MobileRead Book Club. The poll will be open for 5 days.
There will be no runoff vote unless the voting results a tie, in which case there will be a 3 day run-off poll. This is a
visible poll: others can see how you voted. It is
multiple-choice: you may cast a vote for each book that appeals to you.
We will start the discussion thread for this book on August 20th. Select from the following
Official Choices with three nominations each:
• Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
Amazon US /
Barnes & Noble /
Kobo /
Sony
• A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Patricia Clark Memorial Library: ePub |
Kindle /
Scott Dutton Design & Illustration: ePub
• Lost Horizon by James Hilton
Patricia Clark Memorial Library: ePub |
Kindle
• Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks
Amazon UK /
Amazon US
• Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky
Amazon US /
Barnes & Noble
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Amazon US /
Kobo
• Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Amazon Canada /
Amazon UK /
Amazon US /
Barnes & Noble US /
Bookworld Australia
Spoiler:
From Amazon:
Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards
In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race's next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program but didn't make the cut—young Ender is the Wiggin drafted to the orbiting Battle School for rigorous military training.
Ender's skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle Room, where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers Ender suffers greatly from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of the alien invaders. His psychological battles include loneliness, fear that he is becoming like the cruel brother he remembers, and fanning the flames of devotion to his beloved sister.
Is Ender the general Earth needs? But Ender is not the only result of the genetic experiments. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway for almost as long. Ender's two older siblings are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If, that is, the world survives.
Ender's Game is the winner of the 1985 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the 1986 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
• Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
Amazon Canada /
Amazon UK /
Amazon US /
Barnes & Noble /
Kobo /
Sony Reader Store
Spoiler:
Alastair Reynolds's critically acclaimed debut has redefined the space opera with a staggering journey across vast gulfs of time and space to confront the very nature of reality itself.
Available at libraries everywhere!
Amazon.com Review:
Alastair Reynolds's first novel is "hard" SF on an epic scale, crammed with technological marvels and immensities. Its events take place over a relatively short period, but have roots a billion years old--when the Dawn War ravaged our galaxy.
Sylveste is the only man ever to return alive and sane from a Shroud, an enclave in space protected by awesome gravity-warping defenses: "a folding a billion times less severe should have required more energy than was stored in the entire rest-mass of the galaxy." Now an intuition he doesn't understand makes him explore the dead world Resurgam, whose birdlike natives long ago tripped some booby trap that made their own sun erupt in a deadly flare.
Meanwhile, the vast, decaying lightship Nostalgia for Infinity is coming for Sylveste, whose dead father (in AI simulation) could perhaps help the Captain, frozen near absolute zero yet still suffering monstrous transformation by nanotech plague. Most of Infinity's tiny crew have hidden agendas--Khouri the reluctant contract assassin believes she must kill Sylveste to save humanity--and there are two bodiless stowaways, one no longer human and one never human. Shocking truths emerge from bluff, betrayal, and ingenious lies.
The trail leads to a neutron star where an orbiting alien construct has defenses to challenge the Infinity's planet-wrecking superweapons.
At the heart of this artifact, the final revelations detonate--most satisfyingly. Dense with information and incident, this longish novel has no surplus fat and seems almost too short. A sparkling SF debut. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
• Solaris by Lem Stanislaw
Amazon UK /
Amazon US /
B&N (US) /
Diesel /
Google Play (AUS)
• Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
Amazon Canada /
Amazon UK /
Amazon US /
Barnes & Noble US /
Bookworld Australia /
Nook UK /
Kobo UK
Spoiler:
From Amazon:
Winner of both the Hugo Award for Best Novel and the Nebula Award for Best Novel.
For Kivrin, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received.
But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin -- barely of age herself -- finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history's darkest hours.
Five years in the writing by one of science fiction's most honored authors, Doomsday Book is a storytelling triumph. Connie Willis draws upon her understanding of the universalities of human nature to explore the ageless issues of evil, suffering and the indomitable will of the human spirit.
From Publishers Weekly:
This new book by Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning author Willis ( Lincoln's Dreams ) is an intelligent and satisfying blend of classic science fiction and historical reconstruction. Kivrin, a history student at Oxford in 2048, travels back in time to a 14th-century English village, despite a host of misgivings on the part of her unofficial tutor. When the technician responsible for the procedure falls prey to a 21st-century epidemic, he accidentally sends Kivrin back not to 1320 but to 1348--right into the path of the Black Death. Unaware at first of the error, Kivrin becomes deeply involved in the life of the family that takes her in. But before long she learns the truth and comes face to face with the horrible, unending suffering of the plague that would wipe out half the population of Europe. Meanwhile, back in the future, modern science shows itself infinitely superior in its response to epidemics, but human nature evidences no similar evolution, and scapegoating is still alive and well in a campaign against "infected foreigners."p. 204 This book finds villains and heroes in all ages, and love, too, which Kivrin hears in the revealing and quietly touching deathbed confession of a village priest.