Search Results for: masterworks

The war had been going on for nearly a year and the Sirian Empire had a huge advantage in personnel and equipment. Earth needed an edge. Which was where James Mowry came in.

If a small insect buzzing around in a car could so distract the driver as to cause that vehicle to crash, think what havoc one properly trained operative could wreak on an unsuspecting enemy. Intensively trained, his appearance surgically altered, James Mowry is landed on Jaimec, the 94th planet of the Sirian Empire. His mission is simple: sap morale, cause mayhem, tie up resources, wage a one-man war on a planet of eighty million.

In short, be a wasp.

First published in 1957, WASP is generally regarded as Eric Frank Russell’s finest novel, a witty and exciting account of a covert war in the heart of enemy territory.

1588: Queen Elizabeth is felled by an assassin’s bullet. Within the week, the Spanish Armada had set sail, and its victory changed the course of history.

1968: England is still dominated by the Church of Rome. There are no telephones, no television, no nuclear power. As Catholicism and the Inquisition tighten their grip, rebellion is growing.

John Wainwright is a freak, a human mutation with an extraordinary intelligence which is both awesome and frightening to behold. Ordinary humans are mere playthings to him. And Odd John has a plan to create a new order on Earth, a new supernormal species. But the world is not ready for such a change …

Trapped in 1877, a historian writes an account of an alternate history of America in which the South won the Civil War.

Living in this alternate timeline, he was determined to change events at Gettysburg. When he’s offered the chance to return to that fateful turning point his actions change history as he knows it, leaving him in an all too familiar past.

The Styths, a powerful and aggressive mutant race from the Gas Planets, Uranus and Saturn, have been launching pirate raids on ships from Mars. Earth’s Committee for the Revolution has been asked to mediate, to negotiate a truce between the Middle Planets and the Styth Empire. The task of conducting the talks falls to an intelligent, resourceful and unpredictable young woman, Paula Mendoza. Her initial meetings with the Styth warlord and his unruly band of bodyguards and advisers are not promising.

But then Paula adopts a less conventional approach. The consequences for her are considerable and she finds herself on the Gas Planets, the only tenuous link between Earth and the Styth Empire …

Sirius is Thomas Trelone’s great experiment – a huge, handsome dog with the brain and intelligence of a human being. Raised and educated in Trelone’s own family alongside Plaxy, his youngest daughter, Sirius is a truly remarkable and gifted creature. His relationship with the Trelones, particularly with Plaxy, is deep and close, and his inquiring mind ranges across the spectrum of human knowledge and experience. But Sirius isn’t human and the conflicts and inner turmoil that torture him cannot be resolved.

Roderick is a robot and this is his autobiography. Sladek conveys, with great sensitivity and insight the innocence of an artificial intelligence and asks profound questions about mankind’s right to manipulate others. It also portrays how a numerological mind might structure a narrative.

Inventive, funny yet melancholy this is one of SF’s greatest creative geniuses writing at his thought-provoking best.

Pierson’s puppeteers, strange, three-legged, two-headed aliens, have discovered an immense structure in a hitherto unexplored part of the universe. Frightened of meeting the builders of such a structure, the puppeteers set about assembling a team consisting of two humans, a puppeteer and a kzin, an alien not unlike an eight-foot-tall, red-furred cat, to explore it. The artefact is a vast circular ribbon of matter, some 180 million miles across, with a sun at its centre – the Ringworld. But the expedition goes disastrously wrong when the ship crashlands and its motley crew faces a trek across thousands of miles of the Ringworld’s surface.

Giant, technologically superior aliens have conquered Earth, but humankind survives – even flourishes in a way. Men and women live, like mice, in burrows in the massive walls of the huge homes of the aliens, and scurry about under their feet, stealing from them. A complex social and religious order has evolved, with women preserving knowledge and working as healers, and men serving as warriors and thieves.

For the aliens, men and women are just a nuisance, nothing more than vermin. Which, ironically, may just be humankind’s strength and point the way forward.

A masterly tale of political deception from the most significant writer of SF in the 20th century

World War III is raging – or so the millions of people crammed in their underground tanks believe. For fiteen years, subterranean humanity has been fed on daily broadcasts of a never-ending nuclear destruction, sustained by a belief in the all powerful Protector.

Now someone has gone to the surface and found no destruction, no war. The authorities have been telling a massive lie. Now the search begins to find out why.

It is the 20th Century, an advertisement-drenched world in which the big ad agencies dominate governments and everything else. Now Schoken Associates, one of the big players, has a new challenge for star copywriter Mitch Courtenay. Volunteers are needed to colonise Venus. It’s a hellhole, and nobody who knew anything about it would dream of signing up. But by the time Mitch has finished, they will be queuing to get on board the spaceships.

Fourteen people arrive on the strange planet of Delmak-O; they have nothing in common other than a desire to make a fresh start. And they have no idea why they are there and no way of escaping. And then the first murder takes place …

A prescient tale of political satire set in a near future America by a master of the genre

A few years from now the President of the USA will be an android and his entire government a fraud. Everyone in the country is maladjusted. Doesn’t seem possible, does it? Welcome to the world of Dr. Superb, the sole remaining psychotherapist.

Philip K. Dick tells a story of desperate love, lethal body odour and an attempted fascistic takeover of the USA and shows that there is always another layer of conspiracy beneath the one we see.

Ragle Gumm is an ordinary man leading an ordinary life, except that he makes his living by entering a newspaper contest every day – and winning, every day.

But he gradually begins to suspect that his life – indeed his whole world – is an illusion, constructed around him for the express purpose of keeping him docile and happy. But if that is the case, what is his real world like, and what is he actually doing every day when he thinks he is guessing ‘Where Will The Little Green Man Be Next?’

A powerful novel about what happens when the magic leaves our lives.

Imagine what it would be like if you could tell what the innermost thoughts and feelings of those around you were. Imagine if, as you reached middle age, you lost that ability.

What would it do to you to be like everyone else?

The Sumner family can read the signs: the droughts and floods, the blighted crops, the shortages, the rampant diseases and plagues, and, above all, the increasing sterility all point to one thing. Their isolated farm in the Appalachian Mountains gives them the ideal place to survive the coming breakdown, and their wealth and know-how gives them the means. Men and women must clone themselves for humanity to survive. But what then?

In a semi-tropical London, surrounded by paddy-fields, the people feed off the sun like plants, the young are raised in Child Gardens and educated by viruses, and the Consensus oversees the country, ‘treating’ non-conformism. Information, culture, law and politics are biological functions.

But Milena is different: she is resistant to viruses and an incredible musician, one of the most extraordinary women of her age. This is her story and that of her friends, like Lucy the immortal tumour and Joseph the Postman whose mind is an information storehouse for others, and Rolfa, genetically engineered as a Polar Bear, whose beautiful singing voice first awakens Milena to the power of music.

The critically acclaimed and bestselling sequel to HYPERION, from the Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning author of The Terror, which is now a chilling TV show.

The mysterious Time Tombs are opening and the Shrike that has risen from them may well control the fate of all mankind. The Ousters are laying seige to the Hegemony of Man and the AIs we created have turned against us to build the Ultimate Intelligence; God. The God of Machines. His genesis could mean annihilation for man.

Something is drawing the hegemony, the Ousters, the AIs, the entire universe to the Shrike.

Christopher Priest is the Arthur C. Clarke Award and World Fantasy Award-winning author of THE SEPARATION, THE GLAMOUR, THE DREAM ARCHIPELAGO and THE PRESTIGE, which was filmed by Christopher Nolan and starred Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale. THE AFFIRMATION is his compulsive and original novel of an autobiography that isn’t – partly a thriller, partly a haunting study of schizophrenia, it is the mark of one of Britain’s finest novelists at the very height of his powers.

Peter Sinclair is tormented by bereavement and failure. In an attempt to conjure some meaning from his life, he embarks on an autobiography, but he finds himself writing the story of another man in another, imagined, world, whose insidious attraction draws him even further in …


Christopher Priest is a genre-leading author of SFF fiction. His novel, THE PRESTIGE, won a number of awards and was adapted into a critically acclaimed, Oscar-nominated film directed by Christopher Nolan (TENET, INCEPTION) starring Hugh Jackman (THE GREATEST SHOWMAN, X-MEN), Christian Bale (THE BIG SHORT, BATMAN BEGINS), Michael Caine (THE ITALIAN JOB) and Scarlett Johansson (MARRIAGE STORY, THE AVENGERS).

Two 19th century stage illusionists, the aristocratic Rupert Angier and the working-class Alfred Borden, engage in a bitter and deadly feud; the effects are still being felt by their respective families a hundred years later.

Working in the gaslight-and-velvet world of Victorian music halls, they prowl edgily in the background of each other’s shadowy life, driven to the extremes by a deadly combination of obsessive secrecy and insatiable curiosity.

At the heart of the row is an amazing illusion they both perform during their stage acts. The secret of the magic is simple, and the reader is in on it almost from the start, but to the antagonists the real mystery lies deeper. Both have something more to hide than the mere workings of a trick.

******

‘I can’t believe how far the two of them went to prolong their feud of pranks. It was great seeing two professionals unwilling to harm their craft still work around all the little niceties to get at one another.’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

‘Duelling illusionists’ ongoing battle in the late Victorian era has consequences for future generations. This is a masterpiece of epistolary style writing. The Prestige explores issues relating to social class and gender, artistry vs science. One of the best novels in a structural sense that I’ve read. Well worth the time.’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

‘Gripping, eerie, hard to put down. Every time I thought I had a good sense of what was going on, Priest pulled the rug out of from under his plot and I’m still not sure what actually happened. Demands a re-read.’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

‘A suspenseful and gripping story, Christopher Priest demonstrates his storytelling skill in this compelling tale of two turn-of-the-century competing British stage magicians and their feud that trickles down through their descendants.’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

‘The setting is in present day, with descendants of two famous magicians trying to figure out what happened to their great-grandfathers. They do this by reading the journals/books of their forefathers. What they find out will really amaze you. This book will keep you guessing, and once the guessing stops, things get really weird. But it’s a good kind of weird.’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Walter Tevis is the acclaimed author of The Hustler, The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Queen’s Gambit.
‘A moral tale that has elements of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Superman and Star Wars‘ LA TIMES

‘A moving examination of people discovering the wonders of human thought and human love’ PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

The future is a grim place in which the declining human population wanders, drugged and lulled by electronic bliss. It’s a world without art, reading and children, a world where people would rather burn themselves alive than endure.

Even Spofforth, the most perfect machine ever created, cannot bear it and seeks only that which he cannot have – to cease to be. But there is hope for the future in the passion and joy that a man and woman discover in love and in books, hope even for Spofforth.

A haunting novel, reverberating with anguish but also celebrating love and the magic of a dream.

Helliconia is a planet that, due to the massively eccentric orbit of its own sun around another star, experiences seasons that lasts eons. Whole civilisations grow in the Spring, flourish in the Summer and then die in the brutal winters. The human-like inhabitants have been profoundly changed by their experience of this harsh cycle.

In orbit above the planet a terran mission struggles to observe and understand the effects on society of such a massive climatic impact.

Massive, thoroughly researched, minutely organised, full of action, pulp references and deep drama this is a classic trilogy.

A uniquely powerful novel of a society in decay. On a planet whose very nature is a mystery a massive decrepit city is pulled along a massive railway track, laying the line down before it as it progresses into the wilderness.

The society within toils under an oppressive regime, its structures always on the point of collapse, the lives of its individuals lived in misery. No one knows where they are going, why they are going or what they will find when they get there.

The ending of the novel provides one of the most profound twists in SF.

Written against the background of the rise of Nazism, War With the Newts concerns the discovery in the South Pacific of a sea-dwelling race, which is enslaved and exploited by mankind. In time they rebel, laying siege to the strongholds of their former masters in a global war for supremacy.

R.U.R., or Rossum’s Universal Robots, seen by many as a modern interpretation of the ‘golem’ myth, is regarded as the most important play in the history of SF. It introduced the word ‘robot’ and gave the genre one of its most enduring tropes.