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• Turings Cathedral - The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson Toggle Details
  Genre: Nonfiction; History; Technology

  Summary: A compelling historical account focusing on the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton during the 1940s and 1950s, where John von Neumann and a small team built a computer that transformed theoretical ideas into practical digital architecture.

• Valor’s Choice by Tanya Huff Toggle Details
  Genre: Science Fiction; Military SF; Space Opera

  Summary: Staff Sergeant Torin Kerr must navigate interstellar politics and high-stakes military action when her platoon of space marines is assigned to protect a diplomatic mission to a newly discovered, highly aggressive alien species.

• Valor’s Trial by Tanya Huff Toggle Details
  Genre: Science Fiction; Military SF; Space Opera

  Summary: After being cut off from her unit and presumed dead, Torin Kerr wakes up in a brutal, subterranean prisoner of war camp and must organize a massive breakout of multi-species inmates.

• Velocity weapon by Megan E. O’Keefe Toggle Details
  Genre: Science Fiction; Space Opera; Military SF

  Summary: A young starship gunner wakes up from centuries of cryo-stasis to find her home system destroyed, her brother missing, and herself trapped alone on an advanced, rogue enemy smart-ship with its own dark agenda.

• Venomous lumpsucker by Ned Beauman.
• Venus on the Half-Shell by Kilgore Trout Toggle Details
  Genre: Science Fiction; Satire; Humorous SF

  Summary: Following the complete destruction of Earth by space-cleaning aliens, an eccentric traveler roams the cosmos in a cigar-shaped ship asking bizarre philosophical questions to every bizarre species he encounters.

• Viriconium by M. John Harrison Toggle Details
  Genre: Science Fiction; Dying Earth; Fantasy

  Summary: An omnibus collection of speculative tales set in a decaying, surreal metropolis built upon the crumbling, forgotten technology layers of a multi-millennia succession of dead civilizations.

• Vurt by JEFF NOON
• W A K E by Robert J. Sawyer Toggle Details
  Genre: Science Fiction; Hard SF; Technothriller

  Summary: A brilliant blind teenager receives an experimental neural implant designed to restore her sight, inadvertently allowing her to perceive the vast, nascent consciousness awakening inside the global infrastructure of the internet.

• Walkaway by Cory Doctorow Toggle Details
  Genre: Science Fiction; Cyberpunk; Post-Scarcity Dystopia

  Summary: In a near-future dominated by ultra-wealthy corporate elites, a group of citizens walk away from society to build a gift-economy utopia using industrial 3D printing.

• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy Toggle Details
  Genre: Fiction; Historical Fiction; Classics

  Summary: A monumental historical epic tracking the complex interconnected lives of five aristocratic Russian families during the turbulent era of the Napoleonic Wars and the dramatic French invasion of Moscow.

• WE ARE LEGION (We are Bob) Book 1 of the Bobiverse by Dennis E. Taylor Toggle Details
  Genre: Science Fiction; Space Opera; Hard SF

  Summary: A deceased tech entrepreneur wakes up uploaded into a self-replicating von Neumann space probe, tasked with exploring the cosmos and saving the remnants of humanity.

• WHAT DO YOU CARE WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK? by Richard P. Feynman Toggle Details
  Genre: Nonfiction; Biography; Science

  Summary: A charming biographical collection featuring personal reflections on the author's early life, his first wife, and his role investigating the technical system failures behind the Challenger disaster.

• What Is Relativity? by Michael Schirber Toggle Details
  Genre: Nonfiction; Science; Physics

  Summary: An introductory overview breaking down Einstein's twin theories of relativity, explaining how speed alters time dilation and how mass warps the flat geometry of space-time.

• White holes by Carlo Rovelli Toggle Details
  Genre: Nonfiction; Science; Physics

  Summary: A poetic, highly theoretical journey into the heart of a collapsing black hole to explore the concept of white holes, where space and time invert and everything that fell inside is violently bounced back out.

• Will Save the Galaxy for Food by Yahtzee Croshaw Toggle Details
  Genre: Science Fiction; Humorous SF; Satire

  Summary: A washed-up star pilot fallen on hard times after the invention of instant teleportation tech resorts to masquerading as a notorious space hero to secure a high-paying corporate contract.

• WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME by Marge Piercy
• Words and rules : the ingredients of language by Steven Pinker Toggle Details
  Genre: Nonfiction; Science; Linguistics

  Summary: An elegant cognitive analysis explaining how human speech combines an associative memory system for irregular words with an automated, algebraic rule system for regular grammatical extensions.

• Xeelee: An Omnibus by STEPHEN BAXTER Toggle Details
  Genre: Science Fiction; Hard SF; Cosmicism

  Summary: An expansive collection of hard science fiction stories detailing the multi-billion-year war between humanity and the unimaginably advanced, cosmic-engineering Xeelee.

• XENOCIDE by ORSON SCOTT CARD Toggle Details
  Genre: Science Fiction; Philosophical; Hard SF

  Summary: On the planet Lusitania, human and alien inhabitants race against time to stop an existential galactic super-virus while a devastating star-fleet approaches with orders to incinerate the world.

• Year Zero by Rob Reid Toggle Details
  Genre: Science Fiction; Humorous SF; Satire

  Summary: An entertainment lawyer discovers that the entire cosmos is fanatically obsessed with Earth's pop music, but the resulting alien copyright fines threaten to bankrupt the universe.

• ZOE’S TALE by John Scalzi Toggle Details
  Genre: Science Fiction; Military SF; Space Opera

  Summary: A compelling parallel narrative retelling the dangerous colonization events of The Last Colony through the observant eyes, personal stakes, and distinct voice of teenage protagonist Zoe Boutin.