Items9The creator’s order
  1. 1A Memory Called Empire (2019)A Memory Called Empire (2019) 8.2/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 2019The politics here is seduction. Mahit Dzmare comes to the Teixcalaanli capital as ambassador for Lsel, a small independent mining station, steeped in the empire's language and verse, and that fluency is both her best tool and her danger, because Teixcalaan wants Lsel and its courtiers make politics…0
  2. 2The Traitor Baru Cormorant (Baru Cormorant #1) (2015)The Traitor Baru Cormorant (Baru Cormorant #1) (2015) 7.4/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 2015The decisive weapon in this book is a ledger. Baru watches the Masquerade take her island through trade treaties, schools, medicine and planned epidemics, and she sets out to master its methods: Seth Dickinson's 2015 debut sends her, a star of its schools, as Imperial Accountant to Aurdwynn, a…0
  3. 3The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) 8.5/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 1969A diplomat who cannot read the culture he is sent to persuade is the whole tension of Le Guin's 1969 novel. Genly Ai is the lone envoy of the Ekumen, a league of worlds, sent to invite Gethen to join it: an ice-age planet whose people have no fixed sex and are neither male nor female for most of…0
  4. 4The Dispossessed (1974)The Dispossessed (1974) 9.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 1974Anarres is an arid moon where scarcity writes the rules, and Le Guin is as unsentimental about it as Herbert is about water. Anarchists left the rich planet Urras for it about 170 years before the story begins. Nobody there owns anything, the language discourages possessives, and a drought can send…0
  5. 5The Goblin Emperor (2014)The Goblin Emperor (2014) 7.9/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 2014Can a kind ruler carry a political novel? Katherine Addison's fantasy says yes. Maia, the unwanted half-goblin son of the elven emperor, has grown up in exile far from court, until an airship crash kills his father and the three sons ahead of him and leaves the throne to an eighteen-year-old who…0
  6. 6Too Like the Lightning (2016)Too Like the Lightning (2016) 7.1/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 2016Ada Palmer, a historian of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, imagines an Earth whose centuries of peace rest on a few powerful people and the bargains between them. By 2454 flying cars cross the planet in hours, so nations have given way to seven Hives that people join by choice, and since the…0
  7. 7Ancillary Justice (2013)Ancillary Justice (2013) 7.8/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 2013Ann Leckie's debut is about the manners of empire as much as its machinery. Its narrator, Breq, was once the mind of a troopship, spread through many captured human bodies; now she is down to one and has a grievance against the Lord of the Radch, who rules an annexing empire through thousands of…0
  8. 8Foundation (1951)Foundation (1951) 8.2/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 1951Salvor Hardin, the first mayor of Terminus, holds that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, and the book shares his conviction. The Galactic Empire is dying, and the mathematician Hari Seldon's psychohistory, a statistics of whole populations, predicts thirty thousand years of barbarism…0
  9. 9Red Mars (1992)Red Mars (1992) 7.3/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 1992If the Fremen plan to make Arrakis green was your favourite thread in Dune, Kim Stanley Robinson gives the same argument a whole planet. His Nebula-winning novel, the first of a trilogy, follows the first hundred colonists sent to settle Mars, and their deepest quarrel is about rock: the geologist…0