*2018 LOCUS AWARD WINNER OF BEST SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL* *2018 HUGO AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST NOVEL* “John Scalzi is the most entertaining, accessible writer working in SF today.” —Joe Hill, author of The Fireman The first novel of a new space-opera sequence set in an all-new universe by the Hugo Award-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Redshirts and Old Man's War Our universe is ruled by physics. Faster than light travel is impossible—until the discovery of The Flow, an extradimensional field available at certain points in space-time, which can take us to other planets around other stars. Riding The Flow, humanity spreads to innumerable other worlds. Earth is forgotten. A new empire arises, the Interdependency, based on the doctrine that no one human outpost can survive without the others. It’s a hedge against interstellar war—and, for the empire’s rulers, a system of control. The Flow is eternal—but it’s not static. Just as a river changes course, The Flow changes as well. In rare cases, entire worlds have been cut off from the rest of humanity. When it’s discovered that the entire Flow is moving, possibly separating all human worlds from one another forever, three individuals—a scientist, a starship captain, and the emperox of the Interdependency—must race against time to discover what, if anything, can be salvaged from an interstellar empire on the brink of collapse. "Fans of Game of Thrones and Dune will enjoy this bawdy, brutal, and brilliant political adventure" —Booklist on The Collapsing Empire "Political plotting, plenty of snark, puzzle-solving, and a healthy dose of action...Scalzi continues to be almost insufferably good at his brand of fun but think-y sci-fi adventure." —Kirkus Reviews on The Collapsing Empire “Scalzi is one of the slickest writers that SF has ever produced.” —The Wall Street Journal on The Human Division The Interdependency Series 1. The Collapsing Empire 2. The Consuming Fire At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
New York Times bestselling and Alex, Nebula, and Hugo-Award-winning author Seanan McGuire introduces readers to a world of amoral alchemy, shadowy organizations, and impossible cities in the standalone fantasy, Middlegame. Meet Roger. Skilled with words, languages come easily to him. He instinctively understands how the world works through the power of story. Meet Dodger, his twin. Numbers are her world, her obsession, her everything. All she understands, she does so through the power of math. Roger and Dodger aren’t exactly human, though they don’t realise it. They aren’t exactly gods, either. Not entirely. Not yet. Meet Reed, skilled in the alchemical arts like his progenitor before him. Reed created Dodger and her brother. He’s not their father. Not quite. But he has a plan: to raise the twins to the highest power, to ascend with them and claim their authority as his own. Godhood is attainable. Pray it isn’t attained. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
The Kaiju Preservation Society is John Scalzi's first standalone adventure since the conclusion of his New York Times bestselling Interdependency trilogy. When COVID-19 sweeps through New York City, Jamie Gray is stuck as a dead-end driver for food delivery apps. That is, until Jamie makes a delivery to an old acquaintance, Tom, who works at what he calls “an animal rights organization.” Tom’s team needs a last-minute grunt to handle things on their next field visit. Jamie, eager to do anything, immediately signs on. What Tom doesn't tell Jamie is that the animals his team cares for are not here on Earth. Not our Earth, at least. In an alternate dimension, massive dinosaur-like creatures named Kaiju roam a warm, human-free world. They're the universe's largest and most dangerous panda and they're in trouble. It's not just the Kaiju Preservation Society who have found their way to the alternate world. Others have, too. And their carelessness could cause millions back on our Earth to die. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Ray Bradbury's remarkable collection of stories - all told on the skin of a man. Now part of the Voyager Classics collection. If El Greco had painted miniatures in his prime, no bigger than your hand, infinitely detailed, with his sulphurous colour and exquisite human anatomy, perhaps he might have used this man's body for his art... Yet the Illustrated Man has tried to burn the illustrations off. He's tried sandpaper, acid, a knife. Because, as the sun sets, the pictures glow like charcoals, like scattered gems. They quiver and come to life. Tiny pink hands gesture, tiny mouths flicker as the figures enact their stories - voices rise, small and muted, predicting the future. Here are sixteen tales: sixteen illustrations... the seventeenth is your own future told on the skin of the Illustrated Man.
The classic postapocalyptic thriller with “all the reality of a vividly realized nightmare” (The Times, London). Triffids are odd, interesting little plants that grow in everyone’s garden. Triffids are no more than mere curiosities—until an event occurs that alters human life forever. What seems to be a spectacular meteor shower turns into a bizarre, green inferno that blinds everyone and renders humankind helpless. What follows is even stranger: spores from the inferno cause the triffids to suddenly take on a life of their own. They become large, crawling vegetation, with the ability to uproot and roam about the country, attacking humans and inflicting pain and agony. William Masen somehow managed to escape being blinded in the inferno, and now after leaving the hospital, he is one of the few survivors who can see. And he may be the only one who can save his species from chaos and eventual extinction . . . With more than a million copies sold, The Day of the Triffids is a landmark of speculative fiction, and “an outstanding and entertaining novel” (Library Journal). “A thoroughly English apocalypse, it rivals H. G. Wells in conveying how the everyday invaded by the alien would feel. No wonder Stephen King admires Wyndham so much.” —Ramsey Campbell “One of my all-time favorite novels. It’s absolutely convincing, full of little telling details, and that sweet, warm sensation of horror and mystery.” —Joe R. Lansdale
A young man arrives in the anarchic city of Bellona, in a near future USA. This world has two moons but could otherwise be our own. The man, known only as 'the Kid' begins to write a novel called Dhalgren that begins where it ends. Dhalgren is about the possibilites of fiction and aboout the special demands and pleasures of youth culture.
A remarkable alien technology could have devastating consequences for humanity in this novel by the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author of The Forever War. In the far future, the accidental scientific breakthrough known as the Levant-Meyer Translation changes everything. Suddenly people can leap instantaneously across the universe, albeit temporarily, enabling teams of Tamers to explore far-flung worlds and prepare them for possible human habitation. But one expedition doesn’t make it back alive. Jacque Lefavre achieves his lifelong dream of becoming a Tamer when he joins the Agency for Extraterrestrial Development. On his first exploratory mission to a planet known as Groombridge, Lefavre and his team encounter something truly extraordinary: a small, nonsentient creature that, when joined with another of its kind, creates a telepathic “bridge.” But exploiting this psychic link could bring unanticipated perils, for it is about to bring Lefavre and his team into dangerously close contact with the L’vrai, an ancient, advanced, and hostile race of star travelers—an encounter that could prove to be the first step in humankind’s salvation . . . or its doom. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Joe Haldeman including rare images from the author’s personal collection.
The epic that began with the HUGO and NEBULA Award-winning classic DUNE continues ... The sand-blasted world of Arrakis has become green, watered and fertile. Old Paul Atreides, who led the desert Fremen to political and religious domination of the galaxy, is gone. But for the children of Dune, the very blossoming of their land contains the seeds of its own destruction. The altered climate is destroying the giant sandworms, and this in turn is disastrous for the planet's economy. Leto and Ghanima, Paul Atreides's twin children and his heirs, can see possible solutions - but fanatics begin to challenge the rule of the all-powerful Atreides empire, and more than economic disaster threatens ... Read the series which inspired the 2021 Denis Villeneuve epic film adaptation, Dune, starring Oscar Isaac, Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya and Josh Brolin.
A classic novel of man's future and fate, written by the eminent American physicist and award-winning author of Timescape. 2034. An indistinguishable sound is heard from the depths of space and one member of the search and survey team, Nigel, believes he knows its origins. 15 years earlier, he was the astronaut sent to implode a firey comet as it hurtled toward the Asian subcontinent. Once inside the fissure he made an unlikely discovery: an abandoned alien ship. Against his better judgment, Nigel carried out his mission, destroying the vessel-but not before clandestinely removing alien data and technology from on board. Now, as the team sets forth on a new adventure of discovery, Nigel's past will collide with the present, introducing him to wonders beyond human comprehension.
When Louis Wu returns to Ringworld as a captive of the Hindmost, he discovers the world is no longer stable, and he must locate the control center of the legendary engineers who first built the planet.
The first volume of the Chanur saga, set in the Alliance-Union universe, featuring the alien crew of spaceship The Pride of Chanur and the human Tully. No one at Meetpoint Station had ever seen a creature like the Outsider. Naked-hided, blunt toothed and blunt-fingered, Tully was the sole surviving member of his company of humans―a communicative, spacefaring species hitherto unknown―and he was a prisoner of his discoverers and captors―the sadistic, treacherous kif―until his escape onto the hani ship, The Pride of Chanur. Little did he know when he threw himself upon the mercy of The Pride and her crew that he put the entire hani species in jeopardy and imperiled the peace of the Compact itself...for the information this fugitive held could be the ruin or glory of any of the species at Meetpoint Station.
Joshua Kampa is torn between two worlds-the Early Pleistocene Africa of his dreams and the twentieth-century reality of his waking life. These worlds are transposed when a government experiment sends him over a million years back in time. Here, John builds a new life as part of a tribe of protohumans. But the reality of early Africa is much more challenging than his fantasies. With the landscape, the species, and John himself evolving, he reaches a temporal crossroads where he must decide whether the past or the future will be his present.
Helliconia ist eine Welt in einem Doppelsternsystem, auf dem ein Jahr über zweitausend irdische Jahre dauert. Nun, nach einem langen Frühling und einem zweihundert Jahre währenden Sommer, verblasst das Licht der lebensspendenden Sonne Freyr wieder. Die stierköpfigen Phagoren, die im Winter über Helliconia herrschen, werden immer aggressiver und greifen die Städte der Menschen an. Zudem grassiert unter den Nachfahren jener Forscher von der Erde, die Helliconia einst entdeckt haben, eine Seuche – eine Folge der sinnlosen Kriege des Sommers. Der Winter hält Einzug. Er dauert 16 Jahrhunderte ...
A Philip K. Dick Award Winner from “a brilliant writer”: In a ravaged California, a man tries to rescue his lost love from a soul-devouring religious cult (William Gibson). In the twenty-second century, the City of Angels is a tragic shell of its former self, having long ago been ruined and reshaped by nuclear disaster. Before he was in a band in Ellay, Gregorio Rivas was a redeemer, rescuing lost souls trapped in the Jaybirds cult of the powerful maniac Norton Jaybush. Rivas had hoped those days were behind him, but a desperate entreaty from a powerful official is pulling him back into the game. The rewards will be plentiful if he can wrest Urania, the official’s daughter and Gregorio’s first love, from Jaybush’s sinister clutches. To do so, the redeemer reborn must face blood-sucking hemogoblins and other monstrosities on his way to discovering the ultimate secrets of this neo-Californian civilization. One of the most ingeniously imaginative writers of our time, Tim Powers dazzles in an early work that displays his unique creative genius, earning him a nomination for the Nebula Award. Alive with wit, intelligence, and wild invention, Dinner at Deviant’s Palace is a mad adventure across a dystopian future as only Tim Powers could have imagined it. This ebook features an original introduction by the author.
Winner of the Nebula Award: “A lovely and literate exploration of the dark moment where myth and science meet” (Samuel R. Delany). When night falls over the Yucatan, the archaeologists lay down their tools. But while her colleagues relax, Elizabeth Butler searches for shadows. A famous scientist with a reputation for eccentricity, she carries a strange secret. Where others see nothing but dirt and bones and fragments of pottery, Elizabeth sees shades of the men and women who walked this ground thousands of years before. She can speak to the past—and the past is beginning to speak back. As Elizabeth communes with ghosts, the daughter she abandoned flies to Mexico hoping for a reunion. She finds a mother embroiled in the supernatural, on a quest for the true reason for the Mayans’ disappearance. To dig up the truth, the archaeologist who talks to the dead must learn a far more difficult skill: speaking to her daughter.
