Joan Slonczewski: 6 books

“In Joan Slonczewski’s Brain Plague...a starving artist on the planet Veledon agrees to let a colony of “brain enhancers” occupy her skull. These microscopic creatures live in the brain’s outer linings, causing bursts of genius—or irreparable harm. The creatures themselves are like tiny...

Joan Slonczewski, author of Daughter of Elysium, and A Door into Ocean, is one of the field's leading writers of biological SF. Her new novel, The Children Star, is an ambitious adventure set on the planet Prokaryon -- a world that is only habitable to humans who have been genetically altered. But...

One of the most respected writers of hard SF, it has been more than ten years since Joan Slonczewski's last novel. Now she returns with a spectacular tour de force of the college of the future, in orbit. Jennifer Ramos Kennedy, a girl from a rich and politically influential family (a distant relation...

A Door into Ocean is the novel upon which the author's reputation as an important SF writer principally rests. A ground-breaking work both of feminist SF and of world-building hard SF, it concerns the Sharers of Shora, a nation of women on a distant moon in the far future who are pacifists, highly...

The pristine city of Elysium floats on the water world of Shora, inhabited by "immortals" who have succeeded in unlocking the secrets of life. Outsider Blackbear Windclan wants to share the secret of immortality with his own people, but can he, and the City of Elysium, survive the corruption...

Only children can colonize the planet Prokaryon, genetically modified for a world whose chemistry kills unaltered adults. A colony of orphans struggles to survive, and finds the planet hides strange secrets. The Prokaryan landscape is ordered, as if by unseen gardeners, hidden "masters"...