Reddit mentions of The High Crusade

Along these same lines is the book "The High Crusade" by Poul Anderson. The good guys in the book use halberds in zero-g close combat and ship boarding actions.
BTW, that book is totally awesome and fun(or was when I was a teenager...)

Fantasy: The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner. The first book is good, but the second and third are fantastic.


Non-fiction: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human by Richard Wrangham. Flat-out the most fascinating book I've ever read. About evolution and shit.

Literary Fiction: Orsinian Tales by Ursula K. Le Guin. The writing is so beautiful, moving, exquisite, all that good stuff. Le Guin's best work, imo.

Science Fiction: The High Crusade by Poul Anderson. Sooooo awesome. Has some elements of fantasy in it (the medieval part anyway.) Basically, knights vs. aliens.

The human mind has an incredible ability to rationalize cognitive dissonance, so I think whatever kind of life we discover, even intelligent life, we'll still have people who believe in religion, rationalizing how it all fits into the ambiguous texts of the Bible or Koran.

I highly recommend a very amusing book by Poul Anderson called The High Crusade.

The book chronicles medieval Europeans' reactions to encountering alien life, and the resulting Crusade they pursue. It's very funny, but also really interesting.

The Memory of Earth by Orson Scott Card isn't quite it, but it's good. The first of a trilogy, then another trilogy, I think.

The Family Trade by Charles Stross isn't far future, but looks into the idea of a person from our world traveling back and forth to a medieval world and explores all the ramifications. He makes the main character smart as a whip, too.

The High Crusade by Poul Anderson. This one is hilariously tongue in cheek, and really terrific. An alien ship tries to invade an medieval English town preparing for a crusade to the Holy Land; the knights manage to defeat the aliens, accidently launch the ship back to it's home planet with the entire town on board, and the knights eventually form a galactic empire with their unorthodox tactics.