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The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin

This is very classic sci-fi book also known as The Garin Death Ray or The Death Box. Writen by Aleksey Tolstoy in 1926, before the invention of laser came out, the book describes the device that can eminate concentrated light rays. The rays so powerful that it can destroy military ships on the horizon. The main character Garin, the gifted engineer, is not only able to design and construct these devices but also has his dark plans to use it to become the world dictator. A little operation to your brain makes you a slave, willing to work hard just for food alone, so the chosen ones might live a life of pleasure. This is also one of Garin's plans to establish his absolute power throughout the world.

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The Lost Face: Best Science Fiction from Czechoslovakia

Josef Nesvadba is my favorite Czech science fiction writer. This book is a collection of his famous fantasy stories. The author's characters are the unacknowledged genius inventors (usually mad), Nazis looking for the ultimate weapon, shady skillful surgeons carrying out the horror-like surgeries, and many more. His stories are rather examining morality, ethics, and philosophy then the feats of any future technology. The reader will find a mix of horror, science fiction, and comedy. The book is named after one of the stories in which the criminal forcibly, with help of the skillful surgeon, acquires the face of the dead priest. The removed criminal's face is preserved in a special liquid. Later on the surgeon himself has to hide and to avoid prosecution he chooses to have the criminal's face implanted. Both the criminal and the surgeon start acquiring the other persons' face qualities, the criminal becomes the priest and the surgeon becomes the criminal. But at the end of the story when these two characters are to decide life-and-death conflict their true original characteristics surface. Their changes in behaviors were just transitional and it is concluded that people's natures are not changed by having a different face.

The Magellanic Cloud

This is a classic sci-fi novel describing the adventures of interstellar travel. Again this is my favorite sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem and the book was published in 1955. It is set in the 32nd century when humankind lives in a perfect world without any hunger or wars. Men don't know anything about greed or hatred, they are only driven by their creativity or curiosity. 227 men and women aboard a vessel called Gaia embark on a long and never-tried-before voyage to the Proxy Centauri star system. This is our nearest neighboring star at 4.22 light years distance. The purpose is to find existence of any life on its planets. The voyage will take 15 years. The whole story is as if narrated by the ship's physician. The ship crew will finally reach the destination and find out that one of the planets is inhabited by an advanced civilization. This is also the ending of the book.

The novel was filmed by the Czechoslovakian director Jindrich Polak in 1963 with the name Ikarie XB 1 (aka Voyage to the end of the Universe) and the movie became a cult sci-fi flick of that era (released in 1964 in USA).

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Who would not know Captain Nemo and his famous submarine Nautilus? I believe that this classic book written by the French author Jules Verne in 1870 still has its appeal to all readers of sci-fi nowadays. Verne was quite prophetic about many technological inventions he described in his books. The first US nuclear powered submarine was named Nautilus.
The novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea has all important parts that keep any reader interested. Together with professor Aronnax, his faithful assistant Conseil, hotheaded harpooner Ned Land, and of course with mysterious Captain Nemo and his ship crew you will travel around the world seas in a comfortable and roomy submarine ship. You will admire colorful underwater world and its incredible inhabitants, fight huge squids, discover sunk remnants of legendary Atlantis, visit tropical islands, and ponder what the secret vengeance of the Captain Nemo is and why he can be sometimes so cruel. This story of Captain Nemo and his ship Nautilus made it to the movies several times. I liked the Disney's movie adaption of the book and their view of the submarine design is splendid.
Verne’s descriptions of underwater world are very vivid and definitely touch the reader’s explorer side. I have to say that Verne discovered a new beautiful world for me, full of peculiar creatures I didn’t know it existed. Captain Nemo became my favorite hero, and, that is funny, I also started thinking about building my own underwater vehicle (I was 12 years old). Fortunately I only got to extracting some electrical motor from old washing-machine and for a lack of other parts didn’t proceed to real underwater experiments.

Path into the Unknown - The Best Soviet SF

This is the best of the Soviet (former name for the Russian country) science fiction, and it was written in 1966. The book is a collection of short stories, and includes authors like brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, G. Gor, Ilya Varsahvsky, S. Gansovsky, and so on. It is a good bedtime reading, the short stories are excellent, and I managed to read one story per day. You will find out about future problems with our kids emotionally attached to robots, living spores in cosmic space that when inside a spaceship hatch into undestroyable 8-leg flies, 300-year long cosmic journeys to distant stars, and many more. It is seven stories from seven authors. Each story is actually a short philosophical essay based on a fantasy or sci-fi tale, and it makes a reader ponder what if.

The Cat Who Walks Through Walls

This book written by R. Heinlein in 1985 is about paradoxes, multiple time universes, and self-aware computers. The book is fast paced, action packed story of Colonel Colin Campbell and his partner, a beautiful and sophisticated lady, Gwen Novak. The story is situated sometime in the future when humans live in space colonies and they have already colonized the Moon. Our two characters are descendents of the Methuselah's Children (also name of another Heinlein’s book), a new generation of long-lived breed of humans with their life span between several hundred to several thousands years. Ok, it will get even more complicated. Heinlein is representing his idea of so called Pantheistic solipsism, the theory that universes are created by the act of imagining them. For example the Land of Oz is somewhere real. They are not only real but also they can coexist simultaneously on different time lines. Our two characters take part in Time Corps, the organization that travels between those parallel universes, manipulates the time and thus adjusts the events to keep all these universes in peace. We should not forget the self-aware computers. The computers of the future can self-program, self-upgrade, and self-improve themselves. We should not be surprised that some of them after several thousand years of this self-development process reach self-consciousness similar to the human one. These self-aware computers are important key for time-travel between the parallel universes. In this book there are a lot of characters and ideas used in other Heinlein’s works and the author seemed to pack them nicely all together. The cat in the book refers to famous Schrödinger's cat from quantum mechanics.

Monday Begins on Saturday

This is another book from the Russian writing sci-fi workshop of brothers Strugatsky. It can be labeled as a fantasy book but I would describe it as an absurd or comedy sci-fi. It has many comedian and interesting characters. Sasha, a young programmer meets on his vacation two strangers and is offered a programming job in highly classified "Scientific Research Institute of Sorcery and Wizardry" located in some fictional Russian town. This science institute is inhabited by various scientists and you may start guessing correctly that not the ordinary ones. The front desk person is vampire Alfred, the head of the department of prediction is Merlin, and many more. You will find out that the Sorcery and Wizardry computer programming is very similar to the regular one except the programming syntax is different and the computers can get easily upset and sometimes even violent and can dismember the bad programmer. All employees are supposed to work hard willingly and if they don’t the hair start growing from their ears. There are also many funny unanimated characters, as for example Sasha describes in his words “two spider-like mechanisms of smaller size suddenly jumped out of an alley. Before I could begin to react one of them quickly shined my shoe and the other washed and pressed my handkerchief.” Everybody can create his or her doubles to do some simple work like doing the laundry or shopping (I would like that) but they can mess things up since they are not very intelligent. This book is a satire on the Russian bureaucracy and use a lot of Russian classic fairy-tale characters and it is fun to read.

Brave New World

Welcome to the utopian Brave New World of Aldous Huxley! Word dystopian is also used which by Wikipedia means the “vision of a society that is the opposite of utopia.” This famous novel was written in 1931 has lost nothing in truthful description of any totalitarian regime nowadays or in the future. This novel is often paired with George Orwell’s 1984. I haven’t read 1984 but saw the movies 1984 (with the same name) and Brazil that were based on the books. The Aldous Huxley’s story is a twisted reality of some utopian everyday life in the year of 2540. In this fictious reality the most of the world is unified into a peaceful society of so called World State where people are born from glass-tubes. The human embryonic egg development is conditioned and people are divided into castes. The lowest ones have lower intelligence and growth and the highest one can fully develop. Everybody uses some drug called “soma” and recreational sex that sometimes changes into a mass orgy is an integral part of this society. But there are still some people who live in so called savage reservations where these rules don’t apply. Now John, one of those savages, accidentally gets into this World State society and the power of this book is that the reader experiences all John's adventures. I was surprised that after reading this book I couldn’t help comparing our society to this utopian (dystopian) one.

I, Robot

I remember when I read this classic Isaac Asimov’s collection of short stories my book was confiscated by our high school teacher (more then 20 years ago). That is to say I read it during the class under my school desk and it was found out. I was to get this book back at the end of the school year. This was a customary punishment in the Czech Republic high schools. Fortunately she brought my book back in about two weeks and said that she was really surprised how those stories were beautiful, human, and very readable. I definitely agree! It seems to be about robots, their laws, and their impact on the humanity, but it is all about our humanity. There were even several movies based on those stories. The latest one was filmed in 2004 and a lead role of a detective Spooner plays W. Smith. He investigates the mysterious murder of one of the employees of U. S. Robotics and the suspect is a robot. By the way this international word “robot” was invented by the Czech writer K. Capek and first appeared in his futuristic novel R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) in 1921. The movie with the name “I, Robot” kind of mixes two or three of the stories from the book. The book that was written in 1950 is much better though. It is how robots have to deal with humans, and humans with robots. Robots are depicted very humanoid, they have human shapes, they talk and think with their positronic brains (Star Trek borrowed this idea for its character Data) but they have to obey Asimov’s famous three robotic laws that I couldn’t help not to cite here:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

It seems that they have to obey them but it may not be so. There are other stories that may the reader even move emotionally. “Robbie” is one of them. All stories are good and you will feel sad when reading the last page of the book.

Stranger in a Strange Land

Do you grok? You might have heard this expression somewhere and it was invented by an American sci-fi author and futurologist Robert A. Heinlein. Cited from his most famous book Stranger in a Strange Land: “grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed.” The book opens with “once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.” All right, we know now that there are no Martians and probably no life at all on Mars, but the story is really interesting and it is not about planet Mars. And how come that the Martian has an English name? The story starts with the second expedition to Mars, the first one failed for unknown reasons. This second one which is happening many years after is more like a rescue operation. Upon successful landing on Mars surprisingly they find not only one survivor but also that the planet is inhabited by Martians. The survivor’s name is Valentine Michael Smith and he is our main character in this book. Smith was born on Mars to the couple from the first expedition. He was orphaned when the crew died and then raised by the Martians only. Now he is in his adulthood and came back “home” to Earth. The story is about how Smith adjusts himself to our culture, tries to understand it and also how people try to understand him. Is he more an Earthman or a Martian? Martians taught Smith some really useful tricks, he can levitate, slow down his metabolism and stay underwater for hours, converse telepathically, and many more. And he is able to teach us all of this! But we are not so easy to understand other cultures not to mention other extraterrestrial ones. It is a good read!

Solaris

This is another book by Stanislaw Lem my favorite sci-fi author and philosopher. Solaris was filmed twice, by the Russian director Tarkovsky in 1972 and also had its American remake in 2002 where the main character was played by George Clooney. As in most of the Lem’s novels this story makes the reader ponder how our human biased ideas about the purpose of other intelligent life may be totally wrong. Also I think that Lem is using the sci-fi story just as a tool to show that it is actually us humans who have the long way to understand our own purpose of life. The scientific space station orbits the distant planet that is all covered by some kind of ocean. It shows signs of intelligence by creating mysterious symmetric formations on its surface and it seems to try to communicate. Lem is really good in describing the planet, its alienness, and creating a feeling of loneliness and mystery at the same time. Scientists think that they are exploring the planet but later they discover that it may be actually the opposite and they are the ones who are being observed and studied. The ocean can read the scientists minds during their sleep and then it materializes their dreams into the physical replications of humans or maybe even something else depending on the dreamer’s experiences. Some of these replications are not even revealed by the scientists since this is a very private matter and are only hinted in the story. Since the main character a psychologist Chris Kelvin is just recovering from the loss of his beloved wife Rheya it is actually her who suddenly appears on the space station. To make things more psychological these replications are indistinguishable from humans, they behave and talk like them and they even realize that they may be a tool or a creation of the ocean and they dislike this idea. Scientists may later discover what physical forces the ocean is using to create these replications but still they are totally lost when trying to communicate with the ocean or get some information about it.

Roadside Picnic

Another mind-boggling book would be the Roadside Picnic by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. It made it to the movie theaters in 1979 with the name Stalker. Also recent quite successful PC game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl uses some ideas taken from this novel. The story of the book is based on existence of some kind of Zone a wilderness area that is cordoned by the government. Nobody knows how this Zone came to existence but it is dangerous and the gravity or other physical laws are twisted there and can kill the visitor. But it is worth of going there even that the special police forces guarding the Zone can shoot and kill any trespasser. There are so called artifacts that can be sold and also it is rumored that there is a room where all wishes can be fulfilled. There is no mention of the Zone being created by some E.T. but it is being speculated upon. The book is worth reading!

My best Sci-Fi book

Yes, nobody can say there is only one best book! But I would try anyway. I was incredibly dragged into the story and puzzled by the book ending when reading Fiasco by Stanislaw Lem. It was probably that combination of tragicomical personal story of the space ship pilot, beautiful descriptions of unearthly nature of Saturn's moon Titan and finally the crescendo of the end of the book when humans encountered other intelligent life form.