I am old enough to remember when drug stores had revolving wire racks filled with inexpensive paperbacks. Mostly genre novels, maybe with a few classics (usually with more than usually lurid covers) thrown in. One of the books you always saw on those racks was a Doc Savage novel. Read more
Space opera but almost totally lacking in shots fired. Those fired are key to the plot but, notably, the protagonists never fire back.
A good ensemble piece that steals greatly, but not badly, from Firefly (but with aliens). Read more
A loan from a friend from my D&D group who thought I’d like and I did. Read more
Edmond Hamilton’s The Sun Smasher is a surprisingly slow paced (but not boring nor lacking in excitement) novel for something barely one hundred pages. A man on earth is told his life is a lie and he’s actually the brainwashed heir to an old empire. Swift, but not blunt hints are dropped that maybe that old empire wasn’t so great. An apocalyptic weapon too powerful to ever use. Oh, and giant psychic spiders. Read more
He lost me. Seven hundred odd pages culminating in some poorly explained gobbledygook that reminded me of a lot of earlier gobbledygook, albeit less densely packed, that I had deigned to overlook. Read more
I can’t remember where this was recommended to me as an excellent fantasy novel by a female writer whose work is in danger of being overlooked these days, but it made enough of an impression that I bought this when I saw it at library book sale near my house. Unfortunately, Ms. Bujold will boy get royalties on the dollar I gave the Southeast library. Fortunately, I did get a good book. I devoured it as quickly as I could over the first few days that I had it. Read more
I no longer remember where I heard about this book, but it stuck in my mind as something I should read if I got the chance.
I spoke to a fellow aficionado with very specific tastes. Among other features of his personality, he really only considers so-called hard science fiction to be genuine science fiction; the rest is just fantasy with space ships.
By those standards, The Engines of God is not science fiction, but it is closer and I recommended it to him.
It is a science fiction (by my lights) novel, but centered around discovery and investigation and despite having one action sequence with ‘blasters’ (here called pulsers), a sequence that is gritty, unnerving, and realistic in feel, it resolutely not an action book. There are alien ruins but the aliens are long gone.
The highest praise I can give is that it makes a semi-sentient, apocalyptic space cloud seem realistic and explainable.
Thank you, Uncle Phil for giving these to our little one!
Philip K. Dick is deeply weird, but the Ace Double packaging (the other side is Leigh Brackett’s 
the coffee philosopher 