A partial space science fiction reading list.

• Author: Benford, Gregory
• Position: List

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As NASA's manned space efforts shrank, starships became more the stuff of science fiction. The following envision different paths to expansion into space.

Voyage, by Stephen Baxter (1996): An epic saga of America's might-have-been. If President John F. Kennedy had lived, we could have sent a manned mission to Mars in the 1980s.

Coyote, by Allen Steele (2002): Gallant misfits, led by a spaceship captain named Robert E. Lee, steal a starship. They flee a declining Earth rife with dictatorship and technophobia to found a new society on a new world.

Time for the Stars, by Robert A. Heinlein (1956): Identical twins are enlisted to be the human radios that will keep starships in contact with Earth, but one of them has to stay behind while the other explores the depths of space. Einstein intervenes.

Earth, by David Brin (1990): A small black hole escapes from the lab that made it, and Earth is in danger of being hollowed out. Wracked by gravity lasers from core to pole, Earth explores whether humanity and freedom can survive.

Hull Zero Three, by Greg Bear (2010): Interstellar planet hunting on an enormous damaged starship. Strange things have come to live in the starship's vast corridors on the long voyage.

The Highest frontier, by Joan Slonczewski (2011): College in an orbital space habitat. Global climate change and advanced...