Discuss @ Carroll County Public Library discussion

When I was a kid, I found my dad's paperback copy of Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles and fell in love with sci-fi. I highly recommend it! I haven't read it in probably 25 years so I am planning on picking it up again and see how I feel about it. Wish I still had that old paperback!

For this challenge, I chose to read Rapture by David Sosnowski. An interesting fact about this book is that it started out as a short story called "Useless Things," which won the 1994 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize. I thought that was a unique coincidence, what with Bryan recommending short stories and all! It's about a strange new virus in America that results in people sprouting massive wings. People who have them are called Angels, but they can still die. The randomness of who gets wings and who doesn’t results in social friction and discord. The story follows two characters: Cassie, the famous Angel therapist, and Zander, the first Angel to "come out" publicly. I found it to be a really intriguing, fascinating book with lots of social commentary on typical human and world problems like disparity, bias and stereotyping. I wouldn't call this your regular sci-fi, but it's certainly a great read!

Sorry I'm late to the game here, but I wanted to mention the last great sci fi book I read, "The City and the City" by China Mieville. It's a sci fi book for those who aren't necessarily into sci fi. There's no gadgets, no time travel, no alien worlds. But the story has you thinking of reality as something that is all about perception and what you choose to experience. It's hard to even explain, but the Goodreads reviews do a better job of it than I'm doing here. I'm eager to read Mieville's other works (though, Bryan graciously lent me a comic series he worked on which was also fantastic). He's got a uniquely weird voice and paints a setting with his words that's very like our own, but off-the-mark enough to make you consider it long after you've finished the book.

I picked up Hunt the Space Witch: Seven Adventures in Time and Space, by Robert Silverberg. It is a collection of stories originally published in the late 50's in one of the pulp magazines Bryan mentioned.
I was not familiar with the author and have not read much science fiction. The stories were surpisingly fun to read and I can imagine it must be a kick write science fiction. If you are good enough, you can make anything believable! I'd read more of Silverberg and also try some of the title mentioned here.

I tried to read The Voyage of the Space Beagle by A. E. van Vogt and found adult scifi to be hard to digest. It's a category, that for me, would require quiet and concentration to really get into it. That said, I did enjoy what I read of it and plan to hit it again in the summer. This book was taking me entirely too long to finish so I had to put it down.