What Not To Skip For Adult Summer Reading

What Not to Skip...Science Fiction

Science Fiction or "Sci Fi" stories are about or based upon real or imagined scientific theories or technology (Gale CENGAGE Learning). Settings can include the future, outer space with alien creatures, time travel, or alternative realities and parallel dimensions.

Science Fiction differs from fantasy in that fantasy is rooted in mythology, folklore, or the supernatural. However, many stories incorporate both fantasy and sci-fi.

Space travel, computers, telecommunications, surveillance, robots, cloning...interestingly, what was once science fiction is now reality.

Dare to indulge yourself in the possibilities of the future by reading one of the sci-fi books listed below:

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
A stunning and provocative new novel by the internationally celebrated author ofThe Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize Margaret Atwood’s new novel is so utterly compelling, so prescient, so relevant, so terrifyingly-all-too-likely-to-be-true, that readers may find their view of the world forever changed after reading it. This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers. For readers ofOryx and Crake, nothing will ever look the same again. The narrator of Atwood's riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigoons and wolvogs ravage the pleeblands, where ordinary people once lived, and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As he tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Why is he left with nothing but his haunting memories? Alone except for the green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster, he explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he takes - into his own past, and back to Crake's high-tech bubble-dome, where the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief. With breathtaking command of her shocking material, and with her customary sharp wit and dark humour, Atwood projects us into an outlandish yet wholly believable realm populated by characters who will continue to inhabit our dreams long after the last chapter. This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers.



Gravity by Tess Gerritsen
An organism harmless on earth where it is subject to gravity terrorizes a research station in space. Scientists die violently and from their insides spill creatures that are part human, part frog and part mouse. A medical thriller by the author of Bloodstream.




True Believer by Nicholas Sparks
As a science journalist with a regular column in Scientific American, Jeremy Marsh specializes in debunking the supernatural and has a real nose for the strange and unusual. A born skeptic, he travels to the small town of Boone Creek, North Carolina, determined to find the real cause behind the ghostly apparitions that appear in the town cemetery. What he doesn't plan on, however, is meeting and falling hopelessly in love with Lexie Darnell, granddaughter of the town psychic. Now, if the young lovers are to have any kind of future at all, Jeremy must make a difficult choice: return to the life he knows, or do something he could never do before-take a giant leap of faith.




Ilium by Dan Simmons
From the Hugo Award-winning author of the Hyperion Cantos comes the first book of a breathtaking new saga based on the themes of Homer's "The Iliad" and Shakespeare's "The Tempest"--a groundbreaking work from a "magnificently original" ("Denver Post") writer.