 | Tau Zero (S.F. Masterworks) by Poul Anderson
Buy new: £4.48 / Used from: £1.70 Stunning hard sci-fi novel about a starship that is sent rocketing far into the future when an accident wrecks its deceleration system. Millions of years pass in the blink of an eye.
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 | Encounter with Tiber by Buzz Aldrin
Buy used from: £0.01 Half the book is about man's transformation into a starfaring race, the other half about an alien race's exploration and its attempt to survive a catastrophic disaster. All of it is engaging.
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 | Consider Phlebas (The Culture) by Iain M. Banks
Buy new: £5.96 / Used from: £0.01 First of the 'Culture' novels, this is set on the background of a galactic war and features huge artifical stations, devastating weapons and sentient space craft. An epic space opera classic.
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 | Quarantine by Greg Egan
Buy new: £5.15 / Used from: £0.56 Humanity has been quarantined from the rest of the universe, but why? This complex tale is lacking in characterisation but the grand concept and mind-expanding plot revelation mean it's never boring.
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 | Last And First Men (S.F. Masterworks) by Olaf Stapledon
Buy new: £4.98 / Used from: £2.19 A true sci-fi classic that follows humanity over five billion years, from first men to last.
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 | The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke
Buy new: £5.37 / Used from: £0.01 Wormhole cameras are invented that allow the viewer to see anything, anywhere, and eventually any-when. Definitely a case of concept over characters, but the idea is so good you won't care.
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 | The Forever War (S.F. Masterworks) by Joe Haldeman
Buy new: £4.98 / Used from: £1.89 A soldier in a war with aliens becomes increasingly disconnected from humanity as the effects of relativity mean a few months tour of duty equals centuries on Earth.
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 | A Fire Upon The Deep (Gollancz S.F.) by Vernor Vinge
Buy used from: £1.93 Vinge's 'zones of thought' is a brilliant concept, but it's only one of the many great ideas in this fantastic novel. One of the finest space operas ever written.
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 | Across Realtime by Vernor Vinge
Buy used from: £2.00 Another Vinge classic, this compilation is centered around a technology that can enclose people and objects within an impenetrable bubble. A classic of the singularity sub-genre.
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 | Tomorrow and Tomorrow (Bantam Spectra Book) by Charles Sheffield
Buy new: £11.60 / Used from: £1.07 The reader follows one man billions of years into the future. What begins as a quest to save his dying wife takes us to the very end of everything, the 'Omega Point'.
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 | Gateway (S.F. Masterworks) by Frederik Pohl
Buy new: £4.48 / Used from: £1.29 All that remains of the Heechee are scattered artefacts, the most fantastic of which is Gateway, a station filled with automated craft that could lead to riches or death for its crew.
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 | Eon (S.F. Masterworks) by Greg Bear
Buy new: £5.98 / Used from: £0.52 What looks at first like an impressively large habitat formed from an asteroid turns out to be a never-ending corridor that stretches along infinite parallel universes.
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 | Time by Stephen Baxter
Buy new: £4.98 / Used from: £0.01 An epic and absorbing tale of time travel and multiple universes from a master of the genre.
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