Speaker for the Dead is a 1986 science fiction novel by American writer Orson Scott Card, an indirect sequel to the 1985 novel Ender's Game. The book takes place around the year 5270, some 3,000 years after the events in Ender's Game. However because of relativistic space travel at near-light speed Ender himself is only about 35 years old.
Riverworld is a fictional planet and the setting for a series of five science fiction novels (1971–1983) by Philip José Farmer (1918–2009). Riverworld is an artificial "Super-Earth" environment where all humans are reconstructed. The books explore interactions of individuals from many different cultures and time periods. Its underlying theme is quasi-religious. The motivations of alien intelligences operating under ultra-ethical motives are also explored.
Xenocide (1991) is a science fiction novel by American writer Orson Scott Card, the third book in the Ender's Game series. It was nominated for both the Hugo and Locus Awards for Best Novel in 1992. The title is a combination of 'xeno-', meaning alien, and '-cide', referring to the act of killing, together meaning the act of killing populations of aliens; comparable to genocide.
Henry Beam Piper was an American science fiction writer. He wrote many short stories and several novels. He is best known for his extensive Terro-Human Future History series of stories and a shorter series of "Paratime" alternate history tales.
Dinotopia is a series of illustrated fantasy books, created by author and illustrator James Gurney. It is set in the titular Dinotopia, an isolated island inhabited by shipwrecked humans and sapient dinosaurs who have learned to coexist peacefully as a single symbiotic society. The first book was published in 1992 and has "appeared in 18 languages in more than 30 countries and sold two million copies." Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time and Dinotopia: The World Beneath both won Hugo awards for best original artwork.
Kamandi is a fictional comic book character created by artist Jack Kirby and published by DC Comics. The bulk of Kamandi's appearances occurred in the comic series Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth, which ran from 1972 to 1978. He is a young hero living in a post-apocalyptic future. Following the Great Disaster, humans have backslid to savagery in a world ruled by intelligent, highly evolved animals.
The Uplift Universe is a fictional universe created by American science fiction writer David Brin. A central feature in this universe is the process of biological uplift.
In Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey series, Monoliths are machines in black cuboids whose sides extend in the precise ratio of 1 : 4 : 9 (12 : 22 : 32) built by an unseen extraterrestrial species whom Clarke dubbed the Firstborn and who he suggests are the earliest highly intelligent species to evolve in the Milky Way. In the series of novels (and the films based on these), three Monoliths are discovered in the Solar System by australopithecines and their human descendants. The response of the characters to their discovery drives the plot of the series. It also influences the fictional history of the series, particularly by encouraging humanity to progress with technological development.
The zoo hypothesis speculates on the assumed behavior and existence of technologically advanced extraterrestrial life and the reasons they refrain from contacting Earth. It is one of many theoretical explanations for the Fermi paradox. The hypothesis states that alien life intentionally avoids communication with Earth to allow for natural evolution and sociocultural development, and avoiding interplanetary contamination, similar to people observing animals at a zoo. The hypothesis seeks to explain the apparent absence of extraterrestrial life despite its generally accepted plausibility and hence the reasonable expectation of its existence. A variant on the zoo hypothesis suggested by the former MIT Haystack Observatory scientist John Allen Ball is the "laboratory" hypothesis, in which humanity is being subjected to experiments, with Earth serving as a giant laboratory.
Anvil of Stars is a science fiction novel by American writer Greg Bear, a sequel to The Forge of God. The book was initially released in 1992.
"Goldilocks and the Three Bears" is a 19th-century English fairy tale of which three versions exist. The original version of the tale tells of an impudent old woman who enters the forest home of three anthropomorphic bachelor bears while they are away. She eats some of their porridge, sits down on one of their chairs and breaks it, and sleeps in one of their beds. When the bears return and discover her, she wakes up, jumps out of the window, and is never seen again. The second version replaces the old woman with a young girl named Goldilocks, and the third and by far best-known version replaces the bachelor trio with a family of three.
Acorna: The Unicorn Girl (1997) is a science fantasy novel by American writers Anne McCaffrey and Margaret Ball. It was the first published in the Acorna Universe series. McCaffrey and Ball wrote the sequel Acorna's Quest after which McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough extended the series almost annually from 1999 to 2007.
Nathaniel "Natty" Bumppo is a fictional character and the protagonist of James Fenimore Cooper's pentalogy of novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales.
The Sky People is an alternate history science fiction novel by American writer S. M. Stirling. It was first published by Tor Books in hardcover in November 2006, with a book club edition co-published with the Science Fiction Book Club following in December of the same year. Tor issued paperback, ebook, and trade paperback editions in October 2007, April 2010, and May 2010 respectively. Audiobook editions were published by Tantor Media in January 2007.
Dinotopia is a television miniseries co-produced by Walt Disney Television and Hallmark Entertainment. It is based on the Dinotopia book series by James Gurney, that depicts a fictional utopia in which sapient dinosaurs and humans coexist. The miniseries serves as a sequel to the Dinotopia books, Dinotopia (1992) and Dinotopia: The World Beneath (1995). The main characters of the story are two American teenage boys from contemporary times. The boys' father's plane crashes into the sea and they get stranded on Dinotopia, where they must adjust to a new society. The story in the film contains references to many of the characters in the book series, with some of their descendants occupying key roles in the plot. The original score was composed by Trevor Jones. This score is performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Geoffrey Alexander.
Fuzzy Nation is a 2011 novel by John Scalzi, described as a reboot of H. Beam Piper's 1962 novel Little Fuzzy.
Fuzzy Ergo Sum is a 2011 science fiction novel by Wolfgang Diehr as a sequel to H. Beam Piper's Fuzzy trilogy: Little Fuzzy, Fuzzy Sapiens, and Fuzzies and Other People. The trilogy concerns the discovery of a primitive species of small, childlike but sapient furry creatures on Zarathustra, a frontier planet with valuable mineral deposits, and the subsequent conflicts this generates between the Fuzzies, the humans who befriend them, and those who would exploit the Fuzzies and their land. Fuzzy Ergo Sum begins shortly after the conclusion of the trilogy, involving characters from those books in further adventures and conflicts. The story ends in a cliffhanger, and is concluded in Diehr's Caveat Fuzzy.
Joseph Francis Rinn (1868–1952) was an American magician and skeptic of paranormal phenomena.
