2001: A Space Odyssey
Half of the most influential SF artefact of the twentieth century.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is Non-Stop about?
Roy Complain, hunter of a tribe that farms hydroponic tangle in endless corridors, joins a renegade priest's expedition through Deadways towards the legendary Forwards — and the discovery, assembled clue by clue, of what the corridors actually are and how long the journey has lasted. Aldiss's first SF novel takes the generation-starship premise (known to insiders from Heinlein's 'Universe') and gives it a distinctly British inflection: entropy, dwarfed humanity and authority telling structural lies. Published in America, with vandalous helpfulness, as Starship.
Why it matters
The classic British generation-ship novel and an announcement that a major writer had arrived; its DNA shows in everything from Silent Running to Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
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Chasm City
BSFA Award winner; a standalone noir that many readers rate the most purely enjoyable Revelation Space novel, and proof the universe could carry any genre dropped into it.