October Recommendations-

When Making these recommendations I was driven by two principles. Firstly the book should not be more than 400 pages. While some of my best friends are really long sci-fi novels, all too often the really long novels seem to be a function of loose writing rather than overwhelming amounts of things to say. Short books can be finished even if they aren't perfect. My life is not quite over, but I'm playing the back nine. If a book I'm reading for pleasure can't get to the point in 200-300 pages, I don't have the time to find out if it all comes together in the end. My second principle is, no parallel plots that come together at the end. I've had it with that and won't personally be reading anymore books where one doesn't find out to the last page how the two plots are related. My advice to such authors- write two books.

I overwhelmingly recommend my first pick. Clarke writes well, the book is interesting and the Orwell essay ties in really tightly with the subject matter. I would be really curious to know if Clarke was familiar with the essay. For the record, Orwell is a superb essay writer.

1) Childhoods End by Arthur Clarke + “Can Socialist Be Happy ?” by Orwell.

The Orwell is a short essay about what is utopia and what makes human beings happy. It speaks to the very points explored in Childhood's End and makes marvelous companion reading. It is very short and is freely available on the web.

Below is from a review of Childhood's End-

"Childhood's End" was first published in 1953, a time when the cold war was in full form and people were beginning to truly look towards the stars for other life and possibilities for exploration. "Childhood's End" tapped into that fertile imagination to craft a story of profound scale and meaning. It begins one day when numerous spaceships suddenly appear in the sky above Earth. They are flown by an alien species referred to as the Overlords. The purpose of their journey to third planet of the Solar System is subject to much speculation and fear. These aliens seem to be a benevolent race that only wants to help humanity solve the problems that plague it. In fifty years, these Overlords will end ignorance, poverty, war, and disease. To what end do they do this, though? The absence of any obstacles and struggles renders humanity complacent and inert.

2) Man in the High Castle by Phillip Dick. I was widely blamed, err credited with picking Ubik. I didn't. But this is supposed to be a much better book and should give us an idea of whether we think he is worth reading or not. From Amazon-

Dick's Hugo Award-winning 1962 alternative history considers the question of what would have happened if the Allied Powers had lost WWII. Some 20 years after that loss, the United States and much of the world has now been split between Japan and Germany, the major hegemonic states. But the tension between these two powers is mounting, and this stress is playing out in the western U.S. Through a collection of characters in various states of posing (spies, sellers of falsified goods, others with secret identities), Dick provides an intriguing tale about life and history as it relates to authentic and manufactured reality. Tom Weiner reveals an impressive vocal range that delivers the host of characters with distinct culture, class and gender personas, which helps to sort the various plot strands. His prose reading is engaging, though sometimes lacks sufficient emphasis and energy. From the Inside Flap

It'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 20 years earlier the United States lost a war--and is now occupied jointly 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 awake. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

3) Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan. I read this recently upon the high recommendation of a good friend who is an avid, but discriminating reader of sci-fi. Highly enjoyable. It's a modern noir novel. It won't leave you pondering the meaning of life or whether time travel is possible. It should leave you going- hmm. From Amazon-

In the twenty-fifth century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself. Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person’s consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body (or “sleeve”) making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen.
Ex-U.N. envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Dispatched one hundred eighty light-years from home, re-sleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco, now with a rusted, dilapidated Golden Gate Bridge), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats “existence” as something that can be bought and sold. For Kovacs, the shell that blew a hole in his chest was only the beginning. . . .

4) Madd Mcadam – vol 3 of the Oryx and Crake trilogy. In for a dime, in for a dollar.