• A wonderful four issue sci-fi series, Vonda N. MacIntyre's Starfarers series (Starfarers, Transition, Metaphase & Nautilus) is a look at a future where some, but not all, of our problems have been solved. Discussions of alternative lifestyles, military interventions, scientist's rights, international, interspecies and interplanetary relations surround the story of a group of people and their dreams.

• Donald E. Westlake writes some excellent, humour-filled stories featuring the world's most unlucky burglar, John Archibald Dortmunder (The Hot Rock, Bank Shot, Jimmy the Kid, Nobody's Perfect, Why Me, Good Behaviour, Drowned Hopes & Don't Ask), a habitual criminal specializing in habitual crimes. The Hot Rock was made into a movie starring Robert Redford that more or less follows the book, but the book was better. Westlake also writes a number of other series, including the comic crime novels that made him famous.

• Jack McKinney's Black Hole Travel Agency (Event Horizon, Artifact of the System, Free Radicals & Hostile Takeover) is a humourous sci-fi series about a theme park worker lost in the Universe and caught up in a hostile corporate takeover of the Earth. Memorable for it's creative use of language, as well as it's unique look at the future, this is a series you should definitely read. By the same men who wrote the Robotech series which did such a marvelous job of explaining all the things that Carl Macek screwed up.

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy series (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Life, the Universe and Everything, So Long, and Thanks For all the Fish & Mostly Harmless) by Douglas Adams, a series that stretches the bounds of logic and expands the limits of humour. The first three are brilliant, the fourth is excellent, but by the fifth I think he just wanted to kill off all the characters so he wouldn't be asked to write a sixth. You've probably heard of this one before, but if you haven't, look for it.

• Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul, also by Douglas Adams, possibly the strangest detective stories ever written. Time travel, gods, trips to Fiji, looking for a cat, and dead people as main characters. Not to mention saving the world. And don't even ask about the Electric Monk.

• Possibly the best action writer ever, Alistair MacLean has written too many books to name here (look here instead) and all of them good. A surprising number of his books have been made into movies (Where Eagles Dare, Force 10 from Navarone, Puppet on a String & Ice Station Zebra).

  And finally two series that are simply unbelievable:

• Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar/Serpentwar series' (Magician (Apprentice/Master), Silverthorn, A Darkness at Sethanon, Prince of the Blood, The King's Buccaneer, Shadow of a Dark Queen, Rise of a Merchant Prince, and with Janny Wurts: Daughter of the Empire, Servant of the Empire, & Mistress of the Empire) an incredible group of series centred on the twin worlds of Midkemia and Kelewan. The inspiration and basis for the excellent Computer RPG "Betrayal at Krondor". I absolutely love this series, please, please, please, read it.
  Here are some places to learn a little more about Raymond E. Feist:
  
  • A Feist Homepage
    
  • Another Feist Homepage
    
  • A Feist FAQ
    

• And Finally Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, a series so good it has to have it's own page to fit in everything I want to say.

© 1996 James A. Welsh (with apologies to Robert Jordan)

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