Search Results for: masterworks

The space-pirates of Boskone raided at will, menacing the whole structure of interstellar civilization. Master-minded by a super-scientist, their conquering fleets outgunned even the mighty space cruisers of the Galactic Patrol.

When Lensman Kim Kinnison of the Patrol discovered the secret Boskonian base, it was invulnerable to outside attack. But where a battle-fleet would meet insuperable resistance, a single infiltrator might penetrate the Boskonian defenses – if he had the guts to take on million-to-one odds. Kinnison had guts enough to take on the odds – even with the future of the civilized Universe riding on his shoulders . . .

Galactic Patrol is the first self-contained novel in E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s epic Lensman series, one of the all-time classics of adventurous, galaxy-spanning science fiction.

Somewhere among the galaxies is the stronghold of Boskone – a network of brilliant space-criminals whose hunger for conquest threatens the continued existence of all known civilisation.

But where is this stronghold? Boskonian bases are scattered across the universe – hidden by gigantic thought-screens that defy penetration. The best minds in the Galactic Patrol have tried. And failed. Now it is up to Lensman Kim Kinnison, using his fantastic powers, to infiltrate the Boskonian strongholds, find the location of the enemy’s Grand Base – and smash it forever.

But Kinnison doesn’t know that the power of Boskone reaches further than anyone dreamed – into the Galactic Patrol itself . . .

Grey Lensman is the fourth self-contained novel in E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s Lensman series, one of the all-time classics of adventurous, galaxy-spanning science fiction.

Kim Kinnison, Number One man of his time, had faced challenges before – but rarely one as daunting as this. To him fell the perilous task of infiltrating the inner circle of Boskone, stronghold of galactic civilization’s most deadly foe. Kinnison had to become a loyal Boskonian in every gesture, deed and thought. He had to work his way up through the ranks of an alien enemy organization, right into the highest echelons of power. Then it would be he who issued the orders – orders that would destroy his own civilization . . .

Second Stage Lensmen is the fifth self-contained novel in E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s epic Lensman series, one of the all-time classics of adventurous, galaxy-spanning science fiction.

It was beginning to look as though no one could prevent the annihilation of the civilized Universe. For a weird intelligence was directing the destruction of all civilization from the icy depths of outer space.

Kim Kinnison of the Galactic Patrol was one of the few men who knew how near the end was. And in the last desperate stratagem to save the Universe from total destruction, he knew he had to use his children as bait for the evil powers of the hell-planet Ploor . . .

Children of the Lens is the sixth self-contained novel in E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s epic Lensman series, one of the all-time classics of adventurous, galaxy-spanning science fiction.

Kalypso Deed is a shotgun, riding the interface between the AI Ganesh and human scientists who solve problems through cyberassisted Dreams. But she’s young and a little careless; she’d rather mix drinks and play jazz. Azamat Marcsson is a colorless statistician: middle-aged, boring, and obsessed with microorganisms. A first-class nonentity – until one of his Dreams implodes, taking Kalypso with it.

Now Ganesh is crashing, and nothing could be worse. For on the planet T’nane, it is the AI alone that keeps the colonists alive, eking out a grim existence in an environment inimical to human life. To save the colony, Kalypso must persuade Marcsson to finish the Dream that is destroying Ganesh. But Marcsson has gone mad, and T’nane itself has plans for them both that will alter their minds-and their world – forever.

A literary masterpiece from one of the great writers of our time: ‘Ursula Le Guin is a chemist of the heart’ David Mitchell

‘Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new’

Two people, until recently strangers, find themselves on a long, tortuous and dangerous journey across the ice. One is an outcast, forced to leave his beloved homeland; the other is fleeing from a different kind of persecution. What they have in common is curiosity, about others and themselves, and an almost unshakeable belief that the world can be a better place.

As they journey for over 800 miles, across the harshest, most inhospitable landscape, they discover the true meaning of friendship, and of love.

Ten selected short stories from the master of pulp, Murray Leinster – pen name of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, who’s prolific career spanned the first six decades of the 20th Century. The Golden Age Masterwork of Sidewise in Time includes the Hugo Award-winning novella “Exploration Team”.

Full contents include:

Sidewise in Time
The Runaway Skyscraper
The Mad Planet
Politics
Proxima Centauri
First Contact
A Logic Names Joe
De Profundis
If You Was a Moklin
Exploration Team

Set in the twenty-second century after the repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment, the novel reveals a world where women are once again property, denied civil rights, and banned from public life. In this world, Earth’s wealth relies on interplanetary commerce, for which the population depends on linguists, a small, clannish group of families whose women breed and become perfect translators of all the galaxies’ languages. The linguists wield power, but live in isolated compounds, hated by the population, and in fear of class warfare. But a group of women is destined to challenge the power of men and linguists.

Nazareth, the most talented linguist of her family, is exhausted by her constant work translating for the government, supervising the children’s language education in the Alien-in-Residence interface chambers, running the compound, and caring for the elderly men. She longs to retire to the Barren House, where women past childbearing age knit, chat, and wait to die. What Nazareth does not yet know is that a clandestine revolution is going on in the Barren Houses: there, word by word, women are creating a language of their own to free them of men’s domination. Their secret must, above all, be kept until the language is ready for use. The women’s language, Láadan, is only one of the brilliant creations found in this stunningly original novel, which combines a page-turning plot with challenging meditations on the tensions between freedom and control, individuals and communities, thought and action.

Listed by the Guardian as one of the top 100 science fiction books of the 21st century.

On the barren surface of an asteroid, located deep in the galaxy beneath the unbearable light of the Kefahuchi Tract, lie three objects: an abandoned spacecraft, a pair of bone dice covered with strange symbols, and a human skeleton.

What they are and what they mean are the mysteries explored and unwrapped in LIGHT, M. John Harrison’s triumphant novel.

In the vastness of space, the crimes just get bigger and Slippery Jim diGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat, is the biggest criminal of them all. He can con humans, aliens and any number of robots time after time. Jim is so slippery that all the inter-galactic cops can do is make him one of their own.

ENTER THE ADMINISTRATION

Peretz spends his days navigating the bureaucracy of the Administration, the institute tasked with governing the Forest below. Except no one ever seems to go there, and his attempts only trap him further within the workings of this strange organisation.

ENTER THE FOREST

Candide cannot remember how he got to the Forest, and he is certain he belongs somewhere else. Determined to escape, he finds that all paths lead him round strange bends and into encounters with bizarre creatures.

NOTHING IS AS IT SEEMS

This classic SF novel sees Boris and Arkady Strugatsky meditate on how little man can understand of the wider world, and in doing so produce one of the great literary works to come out of Soviet Russia.

In a world drowning in data and information and choking on novelty and innovation, Nickie Haflinger – a most dangerous fugitive who doesn’t even appear to exist – provides a window onto a global society falling apart in all directions, with madness run amok and personal freedom surrendered to computers and bureaucrats. Caught and about to be re-programmed, can he escape once again, defy the government and turn the tide of organizational destruction?

The planet was called Pyrrus, a strange place where all the beasts, plants and natural elements were designed for one specific purpose: to destroy man.

The settlers there were supermen, twice as strong as ordinary men and with milli-second reflexes. They had to be. For their business was murder.

It was up to Jason dinAlt, interplanetary gambler, to discover why Pyrrus had become so hostile during man’s brief habitation.

This omnibus contains all three novels in the Deathworld trilogy!

One of the very best must-read novels of all time – with a new introduction by Roddy Doyle

‘A well told tale signifying a good deal; one to be read again and again’ THE TIMES

‘The book I wish I had written … It’s so far away from my own imagination, I’d love to sit at my desk one day and discover that I could think and write like Ursula Le Guin’ Roddy Doyle

‘Le Guin is a writer of phenomenal power’ OBSERVER

‘There was a wall. It did not look important – even a child could climb it. But the idea was real. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on…’

Shevek is brilliant scientist who is attempting to find a new theory of time – but there are those who are jealous of his work, and will do anything to block him. So he leaves his homeland, hoping to find a place of more liberty and tolerance. Initially feted, Shevek soon finds himself being used as a pawn in a deadly political game.

With powerful themes of freedom, society and the natural world’s influence on competition and co-operation, THE DISPOSSESSED is a true classic of the 20th century.

In addition to being the man who coined the term ‘the Big Bang’, world-renowned astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle also produced a fine body of science fiction. The Andromeda Anthology contains the acclaimed duology A for Andromeda and The Andromeda Breakthrough, co-written with John Elliot.

The close-knit group of scientists who work at the new radio telescope are shocked to receive a mysterious signal from the heart of the Andromeda galaxy. Working with mathematician Christine Jones, Dr John Fleming interprets the signal as the instructions to build a super-computer. When the computer begins to relay the information it receives from Andromeda, scientists find themselves possessing knowledge previously unknown to mankind, knowledge that could threaten the security of human life itself.

Three extraordinary people in some most extraordinary times:

It’s Dissolution Summer and as the United Kingdom prepares to break up into separate nations, the Counterculturals have gathered for a festival where everything’s allowed. Among them is a talented little brat called Fiorinda, rock and roll princess by birth, searching for her father, the legendary Rufus O’Niall.
Instead, she finds Ax Preston, the softly spoken guitarman with bizarre delusions about saving the country from the dark ages. Together with Sage Pender, techno-wizard king of the lads, they join the pop-icon team that’s supposed to make the government look cool.

Rock Legends. True Romance. A stunning fantasy about England.

The BOLD AS LOVE series is a world of daring, dread and enchantment, a world that could almost be ours: a brilliant combination of myth, magic and pop culture.

Ax Preston, Sage Pender and Fiorinda, charismatic leaders of the Rock-n-Roll Reich, have beaten the cascade of disasters that followed the collapse of the former United Kingdom. Now they have to find some resolution to the impossible dynamics of their own relationship, while the world keeps falling apart. There are fearsome things going on in England’s rural hinterland, and in Continental Europe the green nazis are planning a final solution to desperate environmental damage. But there’s nothing the Triumvirate can’t handle – until Fiorinda’s father, a monster of the kind the world has never before known, reaches out to reclaim his magical child, the flower-bride.

And that’s when darkness falls over Ax’s England . . .

Harrowing . . . enchanting – a dark fairy tale with an epic sweep, set in a world very like our own.

It’s All Hallow’s Eve, and Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to town.

Hear the music, see the lights, shrug off life’s worries and enter a place where dreams are not dreams, and wishes can be real.

All this awaits two boys trembling on the brink of manhood. But entering the smoke, mazes and mirrors, they will discover that not all dreams are worth the cost that must be paid . . .

Ray Bradbury’s seminal tale of life in small-town America is as prescient today as it was sixty years ago.

The ‘outward urge’ was a factor in the Troon inheritance. Successive generations of Troons, looking up at the stars, heard the siren voices that called them out into Space. And, as the frontiers of Space receded, there was usually one Troon, if not more, out there, helping to push them back.

In an age in which what goes up need not necessarily come down, the likely adventures of the Conquistadors of Space are every bit as exciting as any world menaced by triffids. This coming-of-age classic from the author of The Midwich Cuckoos shows Wyndham’s mastery across genres.

From the multi-award-winning author of The Left Hand of Darkness and the Earthsea sequence comes this single-volume omnibus of the first three Hainish novels.

Intergalactic war reaches Fomalhaut II in Rocannon’s World.
Born out of season, a precocious young girl visits the alien city of the farborns and the false-men in Planet of Exile.
In City of Illusions a stranger wandering in the forest people’s woods is found and his health restored; now the fate of two worlds rests in this stranger’s hands . . .

The three novels contained in this volume are the books that launched Ursula K. Le Guin’s glittering career, and are set in the same universe as her Hugo and Nebula Award-winning classics The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.

Greg Egan is arguably Australia’s greatest living science fiction writer. In a career spanning more than thirty years, he has produced a steady stream of novels and stories that address a wide range of scientific and philosophical concerns: artificial intelligence, higher mathematics, science vs religion, the nature of consciousness, and the impact of technology on the human personality. All these ideas and more find their way into this generous and illuminating collection, the clear product of a man who is both a master storyteller and a rigorous, exploratory thinker.
The Best of Greg Egan contains twenty stories and novellas arranged in chronological order, and each of them is a brilliantly conceived, painstakingly developed gem, including the Hugo Award-winning novella “Oceanic”, a powerful account of a boy whose deeply held religious beliefs are undermined by what he comes to learn about the laws of the physical world.
This book really does represent the best of Greg Egan, and it therefore takes its place among the best of contemporary SF. Startling, intelligent and always hugely entertaining, it provides an ideal introduction to one of the most accomplished and original writers working today. This is an important and provocative collection, and it deserves a place on the serious science fiction reader’s permanent shelf.

Matthias Ronay is a prodigy. He’s talented, smart, imaginative, and he’s never left the Moon. He dreams of more – of space, of adventure, of glory.

Desperate to explore the galaxy further, he finds himself at odds with his father, Albin, a senior politician in the Lunar government. Albin has expectations for his son, for the legacy he has built on the Moon, and he expects Matthias to fall in line without question.

While Matthias buries himself in computer games to simulate being anywhere but where he is, and Albin attempts to gain support for political plans that he wants to groom Matthias for, can they come to a solution that benefits them both?

GROWING UP WEIGHTLESS is one of John M. Ford’s last novels, and another triumph of writing.

THE SEPARATION is the story of twin brothers, rowers in the 1936 Olympics (where they met Hess, Hitler’s deputy); one joins the RAF, and captains a Wellington; he is shot down after a bombing raid on Hamburg and becomes Churchill’s aide-de-camp; his twin brother, a pacifist, works with the Red Cross, rescuing bombing victims in London. But this is not a straightforward story of the Second World War: this is an alternate history: the two brothers – both called J.L. Sawyer – live their lives in alternate versions of reality. In one, the Second World War ends as we imagine it did; in the other, thanks to efforts of an eminent team of negotiators headed by Hess, the war ends in 1941.

THE SEPARATION is an emotionally riveting story of how the small man can make a difference; it’s a savage critique of Winston Churchill, the man credited as the saviour of Britain and the Western World, and it’s a story of how one perceives and shapes the past.



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).

‘Ursula Le Guin was able to reimagine many concepts we take to be natural, shared, and unalterable – gender, utopia, creation, war, family, the city, the country – and reveal the all-too-human constructions at their centre … Literature will miss her. There’s no one like her’ Zadie Smith

‘Le Guin is a writer of phenomenal power’ OBSERVER

Through his dreams, George Orr can make alternate realities real – but who is controlling him?

War rages and global warming wreaks havoc on the quality of life everywhere as seven billion people jostle for living space and food. For George Orr, a mild and unremarkable man, the world is overwhelmingly difficult. But George is different: his dreams can change reality – although he has no means of controlling this extraordinary power.

Psychiatrist Dr William Haber offers to help, directing George to dream a world without racism. But as ambition gets the better of ethics, no one can predict the devastating consequences.