The Lucky Strike

Combining dazzling speculation with a profoundly humanist vision, Kim Stanley Robinson, is known as not only the most literary, but also the most progressive (read "radical") of today's top rank SF authors. His bestselling Mars Trilogy tells the epic story of the future colonization of the red planet, and the revolution that inevitably follows. The Years of Rice and Salt, is based on a devastatingly simple idea: If the medieval plague had wiped out all of Europe, what would our world look like today? His novel Galileo's Dream is a stunning combination of historical drama and far-flung space opera, in which the ten dimensions of the universe itself, are rewoven to ensnare history's most notorious torturers.