Comedy Fiction Humor Sci-fi Sci-Fi Fantasy Space Opera

Bill, the Galactic Hero #1

Bill, The Galactic Hero

Name: Bill, The Galactic Hero
Rating: 3.61 (4814 reviews)
Author: Harry Harrison

Harry Harrison January 1, 1965

3.61 4.8k Ratings

Ongoing Status

33 Views

Start Reading

Synopsis

It was the highest honor to defend the Empire against the dreaded Chingers, an enemy race of seven-foot-tall lizards. But Bill, a Technical Fertilizer Operator from a planet of farmers, wasn’t interested in honor-he was only interested in two things: his chosen career, and the shapely curves of Inga-Maria Calyphigia. Then a recruiting robot shanghaied him with knockout drops, and he came to in deep space, aboard the Empire warship Christine Keeler. And from there, things got even worse.

Books similar to Bill, The Galactic Hero

Unseen Academicals

★ 4.01

Terry Pratchett

Football has come to the ancient city of Ankh-Morpork - not the old-fashioned, grubby pushing and shoving, but the new, fast football with pointy hats for goalposts and balls that go going. And now the wizards of Unseen University must win a football match without using magic, so they're going to try everything else.

The Big Match draws in an urchin with a gift for kicking a tin can, a maker of jolly good pies, a dim but beautiful young woman, who might turn out to be the greatest fashion model ever, and the mysterious Mr Nutt. (No one knows much about Mr Nutt, not even Mr Nutt).

As the match approaches, four lives are changed forever. Because the thing about football - the important thing about football - is that it is not just about football.

Here we go! Here we go! Here we go!

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Four Parts

★ 4.5

Douglas Adams

Charting the whole of Arthur Dent's odyssey through space are:

THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY.
One Thursday lunchtime the Earth gets unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. For Arthur Dent, who has only just had his house demolished that morning, this seems already to be more than he can cope with. Sadly, however, the weekend has only just begun, and the Galaxy is a very very very large and startling place.

THE RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE.
When all questions of space, time, matter and the nature of being have been resolved, only one question remains --- "Where shall we have dinner?" The Restaurant at the End of the Universe provides the ultimate gastronomic experience, and for once there is no morning after to worry about.

LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING.
In consequence of a number of stunning catastrophes, Arthur Dent is surprised to find himself living in a hideously miserable cave on prehistoric Earth. However, just as he thinks that things cannot possibly get any worse, they suddenly do. He discovers that the Galaxy is not only mind-boggling big and bewildering but also that most of the things that happen in it are staggeringly unfair.

SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH.
Just as Arthur Dent's sense of reality is in its dickiest state he suddenly finds the girl of his dreams. He finds her in the last place in the Universe in which he would expect to find anything at all, but which 3,976,000 people will find oddly familiar. They go in search of God's Final Message to His Creation and, in a dramatic break with tradition, actually find it.

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

★ 4.04

Douglas Adams

When a passenger check-in desk at London's Heathrow Airport disappears in a ball of orange flame, the explosion is deemed an act of God. But which god, wonders holistic detective Dirk Gently? What god would be hanging around Heathrow trying to catch the 3:37 to Oslo? And what has this to do with Dirk's latest--and late-- client, found only this morning with his head revolving atop the hit record "Hot Potato"? Amid the hostile attentions of a stray eagle and the trauma of a very dirty refrigerator, super-sleuth Dirk Gently will once again solve the mysteries of the universe...

Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers

★ 4.08

Grant Naylor

8 hours, 15 minutes

Nominated for the Audiobook Download of the Year, 2008.

When Lister got drunk, he really got drunk!

After celebrating his birthday with a Monopoly-board pub crawl around London, he came to in a burger bar on one of Saturn's moons, wearing a lady's pink crimplene hat and a pair of yellow fishing waders, with no money and a passport in the name of "Emily Berkenstein."

Joining the Space Corps seemed a good idea. Red Dwarf, a clapped out spaceship, was bound for Earth. It never made it, leaving Lister as the last remaining member of the human race, three million light years from Earth, with only a dead man, a senile computer, and a highly evolved cat for company.

They begin their journey home. On the way, they'll break the light barrier. They'll meet Einstein, Archimedes, God, and Norman Wisdom...and discover an alternative plane of reality.

All These Worlds

★ 4.4

Dennis E. Taylor

Being a sentient spaceship really should be more fun. But after spreading out through space for almost a century, Bob and his clones just can't stay out of trouble.

They've created enough colonies so humanity shouldn't go extinct. But political squabbles have a bad habit of dying hard, and the Brazilian probes are still trying to take out the competition. And the Bobs have picked a fight with an older, more powerful species with a large appetite and a short temper.

Still stinging from getting their collective butts kicked in their first encounter with the Others, the Bobs now face the prospect of a decisive final battle to defend Earth and its colonies. But the Bobs are less disciplined than a herd of cats, and some of the younger copies are more concerned with their own local problems than defeating the Others.

Yet salvation may come from an unlikely source. A couple of eighth-generation Bobs have found something out in deep space. All it will take to save the Earth and perhaps all of humanity is for them to get it to Sol - unless the Others arrive first.

Phule’s Company

★ 4.00

Robert Lynn Asprin

In the novel that started all the phulishness, meet the soldiers of Captain Willard Phule's Company—a handful of military rejects able to do more damage before 9 a.m. than most people do all day. Threatened by an alien enemy, Earth's military sends Phule and his soldiers to a distant planet. But now, the aliens have chosen a new target of war . . . Phule's Company.

Our Blue Orange

★ 4.21

A.R. Merrydew

When inventor Godfrey Davis arrived at the ministry that Monday morning he had his first experience of the new phenomenon. There was something wrong with the aging android fleet that served the colony. Since when did they ever have names?

The president’s visit to his office later that morning gave credence to his earlier experience in the foyer, and somehow his long deceased father now seemed implicated. As Godfrey’s week spiralled out of control the future of the colony was now in jeopardy, and it was all because of him. He should never have left his latest piece of technology unattended.

If only he could find his father’s secret invention and turn back the clock then maybe he could redeem himself and save their society. But the past was about to collide with the present and the future now seemed very uncertain indeed.

The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat

★ 4.12

Harry Harrison

Contains the 1st 3 Stainless Steel Rat books:
The Stainless Steel Rat (1961): DiGriz is caught during one of his crimes & recruited into the Special Corps. Boring, routine desk work during his probationary period results in his discovering that someone is building a battleship, thinly disguised as an industrial vessel. In the peaceful League no one has battleships any more, so the builder of this one would be unstoppable. DiGriz' hunt for the guilty becomes a personal battle between himself & the beautiful but deadly Angelina, who is planning a coup on one of the feudal worlds. DiGriz' dilemma is whether he will turn Angelina over to the Special Corps, or join with her, since he's fallen in love with her.
The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge (1970): DiGriz & Angelina are happily married, expecting the birth of sons. The planet Cliaand is waging interstellar war. Against the odds, its Grey Men are invading & taking over planet after planet. The Rat is sent to Cliaand to start a one-man guerrilla campaign to put a stop to the plans of the planet's leader, Kraj. He is aided by the Amazons, a force of liberated freedom fighters, & eventually by his wife who arrives to help him win the war & keep him out of the arms of the Amazons.
The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World (1972): The villainous He has travelled back in time to humankind's distant past on the legendary planet Earth ('Dirt') of '84, where he's altering events so that people who opposed him in the Rat's present cease to exist, Angelina amongst them. Using the Helix, a time-travel device invented by the Special Corps' Prof. Coypu, diGriz travels to '84 America, then to Napoleonic France where tanks & aircraft are helping bring about Napoleon's victory.