A 1959 classic ‘hard’ science-fiction novel by renowned Cambridge astronomer and cosmologist Fred Hoyle. Tracks the progress of a giant black cloud that comes towards Earth and sits in front of the sun, causing widespread panic and death. A select group of scientists and astronomers—including the dignified Astronomer Royal, the pipe smoking Dr Marlowe and the maverick, eccentric Professor Kingsly—engage in a mad race to understand and communicate with the cloud, battling against trigger happy politicians.
The Shadow of the Torturer is the tale of young Severian, an apprentice in the Guild of Torturers on the world called Urth, exiled for committing the ultimate sin of his profession -- showing mercy toward his victim.
The Claw of the Conciliator continues the saga of Severian, banished from his home, as he undertakes a mythic quest to discover the awesome power of an ancient relic, and learn the truth about his hidden destiny.
The Book of the New Sun is unanimously acclaimed as Gene Wolfe's most remarkable work, hailed as "a masterpiece of science fantasy comparable in importance to the major works of Tolkien and Lewis" by Publishers Weekly, and "one of the most ambitious works of speculative fiction in the twentieth century" by The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Shadow & Claw brings together the first two books of the tetralogy in one volume.
Hannon Fuller, l'inventeur du Simulacron 3, un simulateur d'environnement total, vient de mourir dans un accident. Douglas Hall, son assistant, le remplace tout naturellement. Il va vite s'apercevoir que les projets d'Horace P Siskin, le président de la REACO, propriétaire du Simulacron 3, ne sont pas aussi désintéressés que celui-ci le prétend. Et peut-être la mort de Fuller n'est-elle pas accidentelle ? La disparition du chef de la sécurité de l'entreprise et de notes secrètes laissées par l'inventeur semble confirmer cette hypothèse. Douglas Hall est bien décidé à découvrir la vérité sur toute cette histoire.
In the overcrowded world and cramped space colonies of the late 21st century, tedium can be endured through the drug Can-D, which enables users to inhabit a shared illusory world. When industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from an interstellar trip, he brings with him a new drug, Chew-Z. It is far more potent than Can-D, but threatens to plunge the world into a permanent state of drugged illusion controlled by the mysterious Eldritch.
For fans of the popular and award-winning Netflix movie Don’t Look Up, a prescient, rediscovered speculative novel about how a small English village prepares for the end of the world.
Edgar Hopkins is a retired math teacher in his mid-fifties with a strong sense of self-importance, whose greatest pride in life is winning poultry breeding contests. When not meticulously caring for his Bantam, Edgar is an active member of the British Lunar Society. Thanks to that affiliation, Edgar becomes one of the first people to learn the moon is on a collision course, headed towards Earth.
Members of the society are sworn to secrecy but eventually the moon looms so large in the sky that the government can no longer deny the truth. It’s during these final days that Edgar befriends two young siblings and writes what he calls The Hopkins Manuscript—a testimony juxtaposing the ordinary and extraordinary as Edgar and the villagers dig trenches and play cricket before the end of days.
First published in 1939, as the world was teetering on the brink of global war, R.C. Sherriff’s classic speculative novel is a timely and powerful warning from the past that captures the breadth of human nature in all its complexity.
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?'
In Ballard's hallucinatory novel, the car provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a "TV scientist" turned "nightmare angel of the highways," experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister than the last. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens rapidly toward his own demise in an intentionally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor. A classic work of cutting edge fiction, Crash explores the disturbing potentialities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations.
In this genre-bending novel—among the first to have launched sci-fi into the arena of literature—one of the great imaginers of the twentieth century tells a story as mind-blowing as any controlled substance and as affecting as a glimpse into a stranger's soul.
There's Lone, the simpleton who can hear other people's thoughts and make a man blow his brains out just by looking at him. There's Janie, who moves things without touching them, and there are the teleporting twins, who can travel ten feet or ten miles. There's Baby, who invented an antigravity engine while still in the cradle, and Gerry, who has everything it takes to run the world except for a conscience. Separately, they are talented freaks. Together, they compose a single organism that may represent the next step in evolution, and the final chapter in the history of the human race.
As the protagonists of More Than Human struggle to find out who they are and whether they are meant to help humanity or destroy it, Theodore Sturgeon explores questions of power and morality, individuality and belonging, with suspense, pathos, and a lyricism rarely seen in science fiction.
Nebula Award Reality has come unglued and a mad civilization takes root in Bellona, in this science fiction classic.
A young half–Native American known as the Kid has hitchhiked from Mexico to the midwestern city Bellona—only something is wrong there . . . In Bellona, the shattered city, a nameless cataclysm has left reality unhinged. Into this desperate metropolis steps the Kid, his fist wrapped in razor-sharp knives, to write, to love, to wound.
So begins Dhalgren , Samuel R. Delany’s masterwork, which in 1975 opened a new door for what science fiction could mean. A labyrinth of a novel, it raises questions about race, sexuality, identity, and art, but gives no easy answers, in a city that reshapes itself with each step you take . . .
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Samuel R. Delany including rare images from his early career.
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