A planet orbiting binary suns, Helliconia has a Great Year spanning three millennia of Earth cultures are born in spring, flourish in summer, then die with the onset of the generations-long winter. Helliconia is emerging from its centuries-long winter. The tribes of the equatorial continent emerge from their hiding places and are again able to dispute possession of the planet with the ferocious phagors. In Oldorando, love, trade and coinage are being redisovered, This is the first volume of the Helliconia Trilogy — a monumental saga that goes beyond anything yet created by this master among today’s imaginative writers.
A master storyteller, Stephen R. Donaldson established a worldwide reputation with his unforgettable, critically acclaimed fantasy series The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant . Then, with The Real Story and Forbidden Knowledge , he launched a thrilling new science fiction series. Now the galactic epic continues as humanity struggles against the forces of ultimate evil—and its own dark nature.
The stage is set for confrontation at Billingate—illegal shipyard, haven for pirates and brigands, where every vice flourishes and every appetite can be sated. Gateway to the alien realm of the Amnion, the shipyard is a clearinghouse for all they require to fulfill their mutagenic plans against humanity.
It is here that the fate of Morn Hyland is to be decided amid a kaleidoscopic whirl of plot and counter-plot, treachery and betrayal.
As schemes unravel to reveal yet deeper designs, Morn, Nick, Angus' lives may all be forfeit as pawns in the titanic game played our between Warden Dios, dedicated director of the UMC Police, and the Dragon, greed-driven ruler of the UMC. Here, the future of humankind hangs on the uncertain fortune of Morn Hyland in a daring novel of epic power and suspense, relentlessly gripping from first page to last.
In his most ambitious project to date, award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson utilizes years of research and cutting-edge science in the first of a trilogy chronicling the colonization of Mars.
For eons, sandstorms have swept the desolate landscape. For centuries, Mars has beckoned humans to conquer its hostile climate. Now, in 2026, a group of 100 colonists is about to fulfill that destiny.
John Boone, Maya Toitavna, Frank Chalmers and Arkady Bogdanov lead a terraforming mission. For some, Mars will become a passion driving them to daring acts of courage and madness. For others it offers an opportunity to strip the planet of its riches. For the genetic alchemists, it presents a chance to create a biomedical miracle, a breakthrough that could change all we know about life and death. The colonists orbit giant satellite mirrors to reflect light to the surface. Black dust sprinkled on the polar caps will capture warmth. Massive tunnels, kilometers deep, will be drilled into the mantle to create stupendous vents of hot gases. Against this backdrop of epic upheaval, rivalries, loves and friendships will form and fall to pieces—for there are those who will fight to the death to prevent Mars from ever being changed.
Brilliantly imagined, breathtaking in scope and ingenuity, Red Mars is an epic scientific saga, chronicling the next step in evolution, creating a world in its entirety. It shows a future, with both glory and tarnish, that awes with complexity and inspires with vision.
Generations of a tormented human-alien people, caged on a toxic planet, conditioned by constant hunger and war-this is the Dosadi Experiment, and it has succeeded too well. For the Dosadi have bred for Vengeance as well as cunning, and they have learned how to pass through the shimmering God Wall to exact their dreadful revenge on the Universe that created them . . .
Wan-To was the oldest and must powerful intelligence in the universe, a being who played with star systems as a child plays with marbles. Matter occupied so tiny a part of his vast awareness that humans were utterly beneath his notice. The colonists of Newmanhome first suffered the effects of Wan-To's games when their planet's stars began to shift, the climate began to cool down, and the colony was forced into a desperate struggle to survive.
Viktor Sorricaine was determined to discover what force had suddenly sent his world hurtling toward the ends of the universe. And the answer was something beyond the scope of his imagination—even if he lived for 4000 years...
The 21st century was drawing to a close, and metapsychic humankind was poised at last to achieve Unity to be admitted into the group mind of the already unified alien races of the Galactic Milieu. But a growing corps of rebels was plotting to keep the people of Earth forever separate in the name of human individuality. And the rebels had a secret supporter: Fury, the insane metapsychic creatrue that would stop at nothing to claim humanity for itself. Fury's greatest enemy was the mutant genius Jack the Bodiless, whose power it craved. But Jack would never be a tool for Fury . . . And so it turned to Dorothea Macdonald, a young woman who had spent a lifetime hiding her towering mindpowers from the best mind readers of the Milieu. But she could not hide them from Fury or from Jack. Time and again she rejected their advances, unwilling to be drawn into the maelstrom of galactic politics or megalomaniacal dreams. And in the end, no one not Jack, not Fury, not even the Galactic Milieu would be a match for the awesome powers of the girl who would come to be called Diamond Mask . . .
Doro is an entity who changes bodies like clothes, killing his hosts by reflex or design. He fears no one until he meets Anyanwu. Anyanwu is a shapeshifter who can absorb bullets and heal with a kiss and savage anyone who threatens her. She fears no one until she meets Doro. Together they weave a pattern of destiny (from Africa to the New World) unimaginable to mortals.
Fraa Erasmas is a young avout living in the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, protected from the corrupting influences of the outside "saecular" world by ancient stone, honored traditions, and complex rituals. Over the centuries, cities and governments have risen and fallen beyond the concent's walls. Three times during history's darkest epochs violence born of superstition and ignorance has invaded and devastated the cloistered mathic community. Yet the avout have always managed to adapt in the wake of catastrophe, becoming out of necessity even more austere and less dependent on technology and material things. And Erasmas has no fear of the outside—the Extramuros—for the last of the terrible times was long, long ago.
Now, in celebration of the week-long, once-in-a-decade rite of Apert, the fraas and suurs prepare to venture beyond the concent's gates—at the same time opening them wide to welcome the curious "extras" in. During his first Apert as a fraa, Erasmas eagerly anticipates reconnecting with the landmarks and family he hasn't seen since he was "collected." But before the week is out, both the existence he abandoned and the one he embraced will stand poised on the brink of cataclysmic change.
Powerful unforeseen forces jeopardize the peaceful stability of mathic life and the established ennui of the Extramuros—a threat that only an unsteady alliance of saecular and avout can oppose—as, one by one, Erasmas and his colleagues, teachers, and friends are summoned forth from the safety of the concent in hopes of warding off global disaster. Suddenly burdened with a staggering responsibility, Erasmas finds himself a major player in a drama that will determine the future of his world—as he sets out on an extraordinary odyssey that will carry him to the most dangerous, inhospitable corners of the planet . . . and beyond.
The Golden Age is 10,000 years in the future in our solar system, an interplanetary utopian society filled with immortal humans.
Phaethon, of Radamanthus House, is attending a glorious party at his family mansion celebrating the thousand-year anniversary of the High Transcendence. There he meets an old man who accuses him of being an imposter, and then a being from Neptune who claims to be an old friend. The Neptunian tells him that essential parts of his memory were removed and stored by the very government that Phaethon believes to be wholly honorable. It shakes his faith. Is he indeed an exile from himself? He can't resist investigating, even though to do so could mean the loss of his inheritance, his very place in society. His quest must be to regain his true identity and fulfill the destiny he chose for himself.
The Golden Age is just the beginning of Phaethon's story, which will continue in The Phoenix Exultant, forthcoming from Tor.
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