Special Collections
Hugo Award Winners (science fiction)
Description: The Hugo Award is given annually for the best science fiction or fantasy work of the previous year. Bookshare is pleased to offer the following titles awarded the Hugo Award for best novel. #award
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The Forever War
by Joe HaldemanWinner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards: A futuristic masterpiece, &“perhaps the most important war novel written since Vietnam&” (Junot Díaz). In this novel, a landmark of science fiction that began as an MFA thesis for the Iowa Writers&’ Workshop and went on to become an award-winning classic—inspiring a play, a graphic novel, and most recently an in-development film—man has taken to the stars, and soldiers fighting the wars of the future return to Earth forever alienated from their home. Conscripted into service for the United Nations Exploratory Force, a highly trained unit built for revenge, physics student William Mandella fights for his planet light years away against the alien force known as the Taurans. &“Mandella&’s attempt to survive and remain human in the face of an absurd, almost endless war is harrowing, hilarious, heartbreaking, and true,&” says Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Junot Díaz—and because of the relative passage of time when one travels at incredibly high speed, the Earth Mandella returns to after his two-year experience has progressed decades and is foreign to him in disturbing ways. Based in part on the author&’s experiences in Vietnam, The Forever War is regarded as one of the greatest military science fiction novels ever written, capturing the alienation that servicemen and women experience even now upon returning home from battle. It shines a light not only on the culture of the 1970s in which it was written, but also on our potential future. &“To say that The Forever War is the best science fiction war novel ever written is to damn it with faint praise. It is . . . as fine and woundingly genuine a war story as any I&’ve read&” (William Gibson). This ebook features an illustrated biography of Joe Haldeman including rare images from the author&’s personal collection.
The Dispossessed
by Ursula K. Le GuinOne of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels“One of the greats. . . . Not just a science fiction writer; a literary icon.” —Stephen King“Engrossing . . . Ursula Le Guin is more than just a writer of adult fantasy and science fiction . . . she is a philosopher; an explorer in the landscapes of the mind.” — Cincinnati EnquirerUrsula K. Le Guin’s Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award–winning classic, a profound and thoughtful tale of anarchism and capitalism, individualism and collectivism, and one ambitious man’s quest to bridge the ideological chasm separating two worlds. The Dispossessed is the spellbinding story of anarchist Shevek, the “galactically famous scientist,” who single-handedly attempts to reunite two planets cut off from each other by centuries of distrust.Anarres, Shevek’s homeland, is a bleak moon settled by an anarchic utopian civilization, where there is no government, and everyone, at least nominally, is a revolutionary. It has long been isolated from other worlds, including its mother planet, Urras—defined by warring nations, great poverty, and immense wealth. Now Shevek, a brilliant physicist, is determined to unify the two civilizations. In the face of great hostility, outright threats, and the pain of separation from his family, he makes an unprecedented trip to Urras. Greater than any concern for his own wellbeing is the belief that the walls of hatred, distrust, and philosophic division between his planet and the rest of the civilized universe must be torn down. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and explore differences in customs and cultures, determined to tear down the walls of hatred that have kept them apart.To visit Urras—to learn, to teach, to share—will require great sacrifice and risks, which Shevek willingly accepts. Almost immediately upon his arrival, he finds not the egotistical philistines he expected, but an intelligent, complex people who warmly welcome him. But soon the ambitious scientist and his gift is seen as a threat, and in the profound conflict that ensues, he must reexamine his beliefs even as he ignites the fires of change.
Rendezvous with Rama
by Arthur C. ClarkeAstronauts explore an alien spacecraft hurtling toward the sun in this Hugo and Nebula Award–winning novel—&“a stone-cold classic&” of hard sci-fi (The Guardian). An enormous cylindrical object has entered Earth&’s solar system on a collision course with the sun. A team of astronauts are sent to explore the mysterious craft, which the denizens of the solar system name Rama. What they find is astonishing evidence of a civilization far more advanced than ours. They find an interior stretching over fifty kilometers; a forbidding cylindrical sea; mysterious and inaccessible buildings; and strange machine-animal hybrids, or &“biots,&” that inhabit the ship. But what they don&’t find is an alien presence. So who—and where—are the Ramans? Often listed as one of Clarke&’s finest novels, Rendezvous with Rama won numerous awards, including the Hugo, the Nebula, the Jupiter, and the British Science Fiction Awards. A fast-paced and compelling story of an enigmatic encounter with alien technology, Rendezvous with Rama offers both answers and unsolved mysteries that will continue to fascinate readers for generations. &“Mr. Clarke is splendid . . . We experience that chilling touch of the alien, the not-quite-knowable, that distinguishes SF at its most technically imaginative.&” —The New York Times
The Gods Themselves
by Isaac AsimovOnly a few know the terrifying truth--an outcast Earth scientist, a rebellious alien inhabitant of a dying planet, a lunar-born human intuitionist who senses the imminent annihilation of the Sun. They know the truth--but who will listen? They have foreseen the cost of abundant energy--but who will believe? These few beings, human and alien, hold the key to the Earth's survival.
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
by Philip Jose FarmerAll those who ever lived on Earth have found themselves resurrected--healthy, young, and naked as newborns--on the grassy banks of a mighty river, in a world unknown. Miraculously provided with food, but with no clues to the meaning of their strange new afterlife, billions of people from every period of Earth's history--and prehistory--must start again.
Sir Richard Francis Burton would be the first to glimpse the incredible way-station, a link between worlds. This forbidden sight would spur the renowned 19th-century explorer to uncover the truth. Along with a remarkable group of compatriots, including Alice Liddell Hargreaves (the Victorian girl who was the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland), an English-speaking Neanderthal, a WWII Holocaust survivor, and a wise extraterrestrial, Burton sets sail on the magnificent river. His mission: to confront humankind's mysterious benefactors, and learn the true purpose--innocent or evil--of the Riverworld.
Hugo Award winner.
Ringworld
by Larry NivenFOUR TRAVELERS COME TO THE RINGWORLD... Louis Wu — human and old; bored with having lived too fully for far too many years. Seeking a challenge, and all too capable of handling it. Nessus — a trembling coward, a puppeteer with a built-in survival pattern of nonviolence. Except that this particular puppeteer is insane. Teela Brown — human; a wide-eyed youngster with no allegiances, no experiences, no abilities. And all the luck in the world. Speaker-To-Animals — kzin; large, orange-furred, and carnivorous. And one of the most savage life-forms known in the galaxy.
Why did these disparate individuals come together? How could they possibly function together? And where, in the name of anything sane, were they headed?
Winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards.
The Left Hand of Darkness
by Ursula K. Le GuinWinner of the Hugo and Nebula AwardsA groundbreaking work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness tells the story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants can change their gender. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the completely dissimilar culture that he encounters. Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction.
Stand on Zanzibar
by John BrunnerThere are seven billion-plus humans crowding the surface of 21st century Earth. It is an age of intelligent computers, mass-market psychedelic drugs, politics conducted by assassination, scientists who burn incense to appease volcanoes... all the hysteria of a dangerously overcrowded world, portrayed in a dazzlingly inventive style.
Hugo Award winner.
Lord of Light
by Roger ZelaznyEarth is long since dead. On a colony planet, a band of men has gained control of technology, made themselves immortal, and now rules their world as the gods of the Hindu pantheon. Only one dares oppose them: he who was once Siddhartha and is now Mahasamatman. Binder of Demons. Lord of Light.
Hugo Award winner.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
by Robert A. HeinleinRobert A. Heinlein was the most influential science fiction writer of his era. He won the Hugo Award for best novel four times, a record that still stands. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was the last of these Hugo-winning novels, and it is widely considered his finest work.
It is a tale of revolution, of the rebellion of the former Lunar penal colony against the Lunar Authority that controls it from Earth. It is the tale of the disparate people--a computer technician, a vigorous young female agitator, and an elderly academic--who become the rebel movement's leaders. And it is the story of Mike, the supercomputer whose sentience is known only to this inner circle, and who for reasons of his own is committed to the revolution's ultimate success.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is one of the high points of modern science fiction, a novel bursting with politics, humanity, passion, innovative technical speculation, and a firm belief in the pursuit of human freedom.
Winner of the 1967 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1960-1966 (LOA #321)
by Poul Anderson and Clifford D. Simak and Daniel Keyes and Roger ZelasnyIn a deluxe collector's edition hardcover, four classic novels from science fiction's most transformative decade, including the landmark Flowers for AlgernonThis volume, the first of a two-volume set gathering the best American science fiction from the tumultuous 1960s, opens with Poul Anderson's immensely popular The High Crusade, in which aliens planning to conquer Earth land in Lincolnshire during the Hundred Years' War. In Clifford Simak's Hugo Award-winning Way Station, Enoch Wallace is a spry 124-year-old Civil War veteran whose lifelong job monitoring the intergalactic pit stop inside his home is largely uneventful--until a CIA agent shows up and Cold War hostilities threaten the peaceful harmony of the Galactic confederation. Daniel Keyes's beloved Flowers for Algernon, winner of the Nebula Award and adapted as the Academy Award-winning movie Charly, is told through the journal entries of Charlie Gordon, a young man with severe learning disabilities who is the test subject for surgery to improve his intelligence. And in the postapocalyptic earthscape of Roger Zelazny's Hugo Award-winning . . . And Call Me Conrad (also published as This Immortal) Conrad Nomikos reluctantly accepts the responsibility of showing the planet to the governing extraterrestrials' representative and protecting him from rebellious remnants of the human race. Using early manuscripts and original setting copy, this Library of America volume restores the novel to a version that most closely approximates Zelazny's original text.
Dune
by Frank Herbert• DUNE: PART TWO • THE MAJOR MOTION PICTUREDirected by Denis Villeneuve, screenplay by Denis Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts, based on the novel Dune by Frank Herbert • Starring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, Dave Bautista, Christopher Walken, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Léa Seydoux, with Stellan Skarsgård, with Charlotte Rampling, and Javier BardemFrank Herbert&’s classic masterpiece—a triumph of the imagination and one of the bestselling science fiction novels of all time.Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of Paul Atreides—who would become known as Muad'Dib—and of a great family's ambition to bring to fruition mankind's most ancient and unattainable dream.A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, environmentalism and politics, Dune won the first Nebula Award, shared the Hugo Award, and formed the basis of what is undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction.
The Wanderer
by Fritz LeiberThis Hugo Award–winning disaster epic from the Science Fiction Grand Master &“ranks among [his] most ambitious works&” (SFSite).The Wanderer inspires feelings of pure terror in the hearts of the five billion human beings inhabiting Planet Earth. The presence of an alien planet causes increasingly severe tragedies and chaos. However, one man stands apart from the mass of frightened humanity. For him, the legendary Wanderer is a mere tale of bizarre alien domination and human submission. His conception of the Wanderer bleeds into unrequited love for the mysterious &“she&” who owns him.
Way Station
by Clifford D. SimakEnoch Wallace is not like other humans. Living a secluded life in the backwoods of Wisconsin, he carries a nineteenth-century rifle and never seems to age — a fact that has recently caught the attention of prying government eyes. The truth is, Enoch is the last surviving veteran of the American Civil War and, for close to a century, he has operated a secret way station for aliens passing through on journeys to other stars. But the gifts of knowledge and immortality that his intergalactic guests have bestowed upon him are proving to be a nightmarish burden, for they have opened Enoch’s eyes to humanity’s impending destruction. Still, one final hope remains for the human race... though the cure could ultimately prove more terrible than the disease.
Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, Way Station is a magnificent example of the fine art of science fiction as practiced by a revered Grand Master. A cautionary tale that is at once ingenious, evocative, and compassionately human.
The Man in the High Castle
by Philip K. DickIt's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names.
In San Francisco, the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some twenty years earlier the United States lost a war--and is now occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan.
This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas.
In it Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to wake.
Winner of the Hugo Award
Stranger in a Strange Land
by Robert A. HeinleinRobert Heinlein's Hugo Award-winning all-time masterpiece, the brilliant novel that grew from a cult favorite to a bestseller to a science fiction classic.
Raised by Martians on Mars, Valentine Michael Smith is a human who has never seen another member of his species. Sent to Earth, he is a stranger who must learn what it is to be a man. But his own beliefs and his powers far exceed the limits of humankind, and as he teaches them about grokking and water-sharing, he also inspires a transformation that will alter Earth’s inhabitants forever...
A Canticle for Leibowitz
by Walter M. Miller Jr.The Flame Deluge was over, the earth was dead and all knowledge has been eradicated. In a desert, a monk unearths a link to 20th-century civilization, and with his colleagues, vows to preserve the ancient knowledge until mankind is ready to receive it.
Hugo Award winner.
Starship Troopers
by Robert A. HeinleinIn one of Robert Heinlein's most controversial bestsellers, a recruit of the future goes through the toughest boot camp in the Universe -- and into battle with the Terran Mobile Infantry against mankind's most frightening enemy.
A Case of Conscience
by James BlishFather Ruiz-Sanchez is a dedicated man -- a priest who is also a scientist, and a scientist who is also a human being. He has found no insoluble conflicts in his beliefs or his ethics... until he is sent to Lithia. There he comes upon a race of aliens who are admirable in every way except for their total reliance on cold reason; they are incapable of faith or belief.
Confronted with a profound scientific riddle and ethical quandary, Father Ruiz-Sanchez soon finds himself torn between the teachings of his faith, the teachings of his science, and the inner promptings of his humanity. There is only one solution: He must accept an ancient and unforgivable heresy -- and risk the futures of both worlds.
Hugo Award Winner.
The Big Time
by Fritz LeiberA war rages beyond space and time in this Hugo Award–winning &“extraordinary tour de force&” from the acclaimed Master of Science Fiction and Fantasy (A Reader&’s Guide to Science Fiction). Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) may be best known as a fantasy writer, but he published widely and successfully in the horror and science fiction fields. One of his major SF creations is the Change War, a series of stories and short novels about rival time-traveling forces locked in a bitter, ages-long struggle for control of the human universe where battles alter history and then change it again until there is no certainty about what might once have happened. The most notable work of the series is the Hugo Award–winning novel The Big Time, in which doctors, entertainers, and wounded soldiers find themselves treacherously trapped with an activated atomic bomb inside the Place, a room existing outside of space-time. Leiber creates a tense, claustrophobic SF mystery, and a brilliant, unique locked-room whodunit. In addition to the Hugo, Nebula, Derleth, Lovecraft, and World Fantasy Awards, Fritz Leiber received the Grand Master of Fantasy (Gandalf) Award, the Life Achievement Lovecraft Award, and the Grand Master Nebula Award.
Double Star
by Robert A. HeinleinOne minute, down and out actor Lorenzo Smythe was -- as usual -- in a bar, drinking away his troubles as he watched his career go down the tubes. Then a space pilot bought him a drink, and the next thing Smythe knew, he was shanghaied to Mars.
Suddenly he found himself agreeing to the most difficult role of his career: impersonating an important politician who had been kidnapped. Peace with the Martians was at stake -- failure to pull off the act could result in interplanetary war. And Smythe's own life was on the line -- for if he wasn't assassinated, there was always the possibility that he might be trapped in his new role forever!
Hugo Award winner.
The Forever Machine
by Mark Clifton and Frank RileyBossy was right. Always. Invariably. She was limited only in that she had to have facts -- not assumptions -- with which to work. Given those facts, her conclusions and predictions were inevitably correct. And that made Bossy a "ticking bomb."
1955 winner of the Hugo Award.
Fahrenheit 451
by Ray BradburyRay Bradbury's internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 is a masterwork of 20th century literature set in a bleak, dystopian future.
Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.
Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family." But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn't live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.
When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.
Hugo Award winner.
The Demolished Man
by Alfred BesterIn a world policed by telepaths, Ben Reich plans to commit a crime that hasn't been heard of in 70 years: murder. That's the only option left for Reich, whose company is losing a 10-year death struggle with rival D’Courtney Enterprises. Terrorized in his dreams by The Man With No Face and driven to the edge after D’Courtney refuses a merger offer, Reich murders his rival and bribes a high-ranking telepath to help him cover his tracks. But while police prefect Lincoln Powell knows Reich is guilty, his telepath's knowledge is a far cry from admissible evidence.
Hugo Award winner.
Farmer in the Sky
by Robert A. HeinleinBill knew his destiny lay in the stars, but how was he to get there? George Lerner was shipping out for Ganymede to join the fledgling colony, and Bill wanted to go along. But his father would not hear of it -- far too dangerous a mission! Bill finally talked his way aboard the colony ship Mayflower -- and discovered his father was right!
Hugo Award Winner.