Nebula Award Finalist: A “brilliantly crafted, engrossing” dystopian novel of environmental disaster by the Hugo Award–winning author of Stand on Zanzibar (The Guardian). In a near future, the air pollution is so bad that everyone wears gas masks. The infant mortality rate is soaring, and birth defects, new diseases, and physical ailments of all kinds abound. The water is undrinkable—unless you’re poor and have no choice. Large corporations fighting over profits from gas masks, drinking water, and clean food tower over an ineffectual, corrupt government. Environmentalist Austin Train is on the run. The “trainites,” a group of violent environmental activists, want him to lead their movement; the government wants him dead; and the media demands amusement. But Train just wants to survive. More than a novel of science fiction, The Sheep Look Up is a skillful and frightening political and social commentary that takes its place next to other remarkable works of dystopian literature, such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and George Orwell’s 1984.
Norman Spinrad's 1972 alternate history, gives us both a metafictional what-if novel and a cutting satire of one of the 20th century's most evil regimes . . . In 1919, a young Austrian artist by the name of Adolf Hitler immigrated to the United States to become an illustrator for the pulp magazines and, eventually, a Hugo Award-winning SF author. This volume contains his greatest work, Lord of the Swastika: an epic post-apocalyptic tale of genetic 'trueman' Feric Jagger and his quest to purify the bloodline of humanity by ruthlessly slaughtering races of the genetically impure - a quest Norman Spinrad expertly skewers through ironic imagery and over-the-top rhetoric. Spinrad hoped to expose some unpalatable truths about much of SF and Fantasy literature and its uncomfortable relationship with fascist ideologies - an aim that was not always apparent to neo-fascist readers. In order to make his aims clear to the hard-of-understanding, Spinrad added an imaginary critical analysis by a fictional literary scholar, Homer Whipple, of New York University.
A post-apocalyptic dystopian fable by the acclaimed author of HALF PAST HUMAN, with an introduction by Ken MacLeod Rorqual Maru was a cyborg - part organic whale, part mechanised ship - and part god. She was a harvester - a vast plankton rake, now without a crop, abandoned by earth society when the seas died. So she selected an island for her grave, hoping to keep her carcass visible for salvage. Although her long ear heard nothing, she believed that man still lived in his hive. If he should ever return to the sea, she wanted to serve. She longed for the thrill of a human's bare feet touching the skin of her deck. She missed the hearty hails, the sweat and the laughter. She needed mankind. But all humans were long gone ... or were they?
The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city’s engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the “optimum” into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death. The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in crèches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. And yet the city is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the population is dwindling, and the rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum. Helward Mann is a member of the city’s elite. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the city’s continued existence. But the world—he is about to discover—is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.
In this classic science fiction adventure, a fiery doomsday threatens an alien world—and the human colonists who have made it their home. Firetime is coming to Ishtar. This once-in-a-millennium event occurs when one of the planet’s three suns encroaches on Ishtar’s surface, to disastrous effect. The nightmare rapidly approaching, barbaric tribes have declared war on their more civilized brethren in hopes of avoiding a natural extermination. Standing between the opposing forces are the colonists who settled on Ishtar after abandoning their home planet, Earth. But in this time of chaos and destruction, there is little the humans can do to aid their Ishtarian allies in the desperate fight for survival. The Terran powers, engaged in their own terrible conflict with a hostile alien race, will offer no help to the endangered planet. With a fiery doomsday on the way, the humans can do nothing but watch and wait—and pray for a miracle that will forestall the inevitable apocalypse. A stunning work of speculative invention from one of the all-time masters of science fiction and fantasy, Poul Anderson’s classic Fire Time is a richly imagined tale of war, alien contact, and environmental catastrophe that brilliantly questions the concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, and heroism and villainy.
Four alternate selves from radically different realities come together in this “dazzling” and “trailblazing work” (The Washington Post). Widely acknowledged as Joanna Russ’s masterpiece, The Female Man is the suspenseful, surprising, darkly witty, and boldly subversive chronicle of what happens when Jeannine, Janet, Joanna, and Jael—all living in parallel worlds—meet. Librarian Jeannine is waiting for marriage in a past where the Depression never ended, Janet lives on a utopian Earth with an all-female population, Joanna is a feminist in the 1970s, and Jael is a warrior with claws and teeth on an Earth where male and female societies are at war with each other. When the four women begin traveling to one another’s worlds, their preconceptions on gender and identity are forever challenged. With “palpable anger . . . leavened by wit and humor” (The New York Times), Russ both employs and upends genre conventions to deliver a wickedly satiric and exhilarating version of when worlds collide and women get woke. This ebook includes the Nebula Award–winning bonus short story “When It Changed,” set in the world of The Female Man.
Through realms of oriental splender and superhuman conflict, a beautiful woman warrior and a fierce man-god journey to challenge a being more awesome than the gods for a magical sword that holds the power of death ... and the key to enlightenment.
**Winner of the Ditmar International Science Fiction Award** **Finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novel** Let Anne McCaffrey, storyteller extraordinare and New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author, take you on a journey to a whole new world: Pern and discover not only its flora, fauna, population and cultural hierarchy, but the history of an entire civilization. If you like David Eddings, David Gemmell and Douglas Adams, you will love this. 'Anne McCaffrey, one of the queens of science fiction, knows exactly how to give her public what it wants' - THE TIMES 'One of McCaffrey's best!'-- ***** Reader review 'You cannot fail to be totally immersed in this fantastic story, thrilling to the extreme.' -- ***** Reader review 'If you have never tried the series, do. You won't regret it.' -- ***** Reader review ******************************************************************************* A BOND IS FORMED THAT CANNOT BE BROKEN... Never had there been as close a bonding as the one that existed between the young Lord Jaxom and his extraordinary white dragon, Ruth. Pure white and incredibly agile, Ruth possessed remarkable qualities. Not only could he communicate with the iridescent, fluttering fire lizards, but he could fly. Back in time to any WHEN with unfailing accuracy. Nearly everyone else on Pern thought Ruth was a runt who would never amount to anything, but Jaxom knew his dragon was special. In secret they trained to fight against the burning threads from the Red Planet, to fly Back in time as well as Between, and finally their close and special union was to result in the most startling and breathtaking discovery of all... THE WHITE DRAGON is one of the most unforgettable episodes in Anne McCaffrey's world-famous Chronicles of Pern... The Dragonriders of Pern series continues in Dragondrums.
Though Morgon the Riddle-Master was reunited with his beloved Raederle, his purpose in life and the reason for the stars on his forehead remained a mystery. All around him, the realm shook with war as mysterious shape-changers battled against mankind. Without the missing High One, Morgon must assume responsibility for all his world.
A vampire living in modern-day America, Dr. Edward Weyland discovers that it is a world he can manipulate with ease, despite a stoic South African widow who discovers his true identity and an occultist who seeks to acquire his power. Reprint.
A futuristic tale set in a world where reading is forbidden, citizens are drugged from childhood on and machines dominate humans, focuses on two people who teach themselves how to read and how to think independently
'This is what literature is meant to be' Anthony Burgess 'O what we ben! And what we come to...' Wandering a desolate post-apocalyptic landscape, speaking a broken-down English lost after the end of civilization, Riddley Walker sets out to find out what brought humanity here. This is his story. 'Funny, terrible, haunting and unsettling, this book is a masterpiece' Observer 'A timeless portrayal of the human condition ... frightening and uncanny' Will Self 'A book that I could read every day forever and still be finding things' Max Porter
Haywood Floyd, director of the original Discovery mission, sets out to discover what happened to HAL 9000 and comes face to face with something claiming to be Dave Bowman
Episcopal bishop Timothy Archer is haunted by the suicides of his son and mistress and must cope with the implications of the discovery of a religious artefact. These events drive him into a quest for the identity of Christ. THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER is Philip K Dick's last completed novel and a learned, moving investigation of the paradoxes of belief.
In the skies over Oakland, California, a DC-10 and a 747 are about to collide. But in the far distant future, a time travel team is preparing to snatch the passengers, leaving prefabricated smoking bodies behind for the rescue teams to find. And in Washington D.C., an air disaster investigator named Smith is about to get a phone call that will change his life...and end the world as we know it.
Welcome aboard the sex-drive void ship . . . Captain Genro commands the giant spaceship Dragon Zephyr - on board are ten thousand passengers in electrocoma, a smaller number of conscious passengers eagerly utilising the ship's dream chambers - and a Pilot. In the context of space travel, the Pilot is merely a biological component in the machine. Always a woman, her function is to launch the ship into the Jump by means of a cosmic orgasm. She is a pariah, shunned by all. Void Captain Genro should never even have spoken to his Pilot, let alone tried to embark on a relationship with her. When he did so, the result was every space traveller's nightmare. A Blind Jump into the Void . . .
A gripping, masterfully written adventure set against the violent beauty of a planet in the throes of cataclysmic transformation, Against Infinity is Gregory Benford's timeless portrait of a young man's coming of age. -- On the icelands of Ganymede, a man and a boy hunt for the Aleph-an alien artifact that ruled Ganymede for countless millenia, Infinitely dangerous, the Aleph haunts men's dreams and destroys all efforts to terraform Ganymede into a habitable planet. Now an ancient struggle is joined, as a boy seeks manhood, a man seeks enlightenment, and a society seeks to survive. Reviews of Against Infinity "Likely to be considered one of the best SF novels of the year...a powerfully evocative book."-Algis Budrys "Benford is a rarity: a scientist who writes with verve and insight not only about black holes and cosmic strings, but about human desires and fears."-The New York Times Book Review "Typical Benford virtues...a gritty, three-dimensional future, a believable hero, a real flair for the alien."-Publishers Weekly "A confident grasp of the workings and consequences of bio technics, a gift for action scenes and an ability to conceive of a creature as awesome and wondrous as his Aleph. A worthy successor to Timescape."-Booklist
