Books in Order: S.F. MASTERWORKS by Roger Zelazny

The Road can go Anywhere. The Road can go Anywhen. Almost. Red Dorakeen has been on the Road for a very long time. For all of time, in fact. It stretches infinitely into the future and past, with exits that take him wherever, or whenever, he wants to go. But… Read More

Merlin is a Prince of Chaos and Amber, Corwin's son and heir. He has grown up knowing that his legacy is to one day follow in his father's footsteps, live up to his father's legend. When Corwin goes missing, that day comes far sooner than he could ever have expected.… Read More

Amber is the one real world, casting infinite reflections of itself - Shadow worlds, that can be manipulated by those of royal Amberite blood. But the royal family is torn apart by jealousies and suspicion; the disappearance of the Patriarch Oberon has intensified the internal conflict by leaving the throne… Read More

Anna Senoz is a brilliant young scientist, working towards her PhD and a bright career when she makes a discovery that could change the world of genetics forever. The 'Transferred Y' chromosome, however, isn't as welcomed by her peers, or the wider society. Anna is forced to choose between her… Read More

London. Early 21st Century. A Conservative government is in power in the UK, bringing increased wealth disparity, an ever-more militant police state, and rising civil discontent as the wealthy govern for themselves rather than the people. But BREAKTHRU - a pharmaceutical company turned religious cult - have the answer. They… Read More

In the year 2038, the earth has been ravaged by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Retroviruses run rampant through humanity. Economic disaster has destabilised the world, the US has undergone a socialist revolution, and the balance of power has changed. Then the aliens arrive. With no clear understanding of the visitors'… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

A whisperjewel from Gwen Delvano calls Dirk t'Larien across space and beyond the Tempter's Veil to Worlorn, a dying Festival planet of rock and ice. Warlorn is slowly drifting through twilight to neverending night; as the planet sinks into darkness, so its inhabitants face annihilation. Seven years ago, on Avalon,… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

Acclaimed as one of the most original voices in modern literature, Raphael Aloysius Lafferty has been awarded and nominated for a multitude of accolades over the span of his career, including the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. This collection contains 22 unique tall tales, including: Hugo Award-winning 'Eurema's Dam'… Read More

While searching for his missing father, Anthony Julian embarks on a terrifying journey into the Earth's interior. There he discovers a subterranean world, where descendants of the Roman Army suffer under a totalitarian regime in which individualism is completely obliterated by telepathic means. Refusing to join this rigidly controlled society,… Read More

In the year 2093, human consciousness has expanded to the point that man can visit the past using a technique called 'mind-travelling'. Artist Edward Bush returns from a lengthy 'trip' to the Jurassic period to find the government overthrown by an authoritarian regime. Given his mind-travel experience, he is recruited… Read More

It is a mysterious city whose sun is switched on in the morning and switched off at night, bordered by an abyss on one side and an impossibly high wall on the other. Its inhabitants are people who were plucked from twentieth-century history at various times and places and left… Read More

When Dr Philip Raven, a diplomat working for the League of Nations, dies in the 1930s, he leaves behind a book of dreams outlining the visions he has been experiencing for many years. These visions seem to be glimpses into the future, detailing events that will occur on Earth for… Read More

The book that defined the cyberpunk movement, inspiring everything from The Matrix to Cyberpunk 2077. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. William Gibson revolutionised science fiction in his 1984 debut Neuromancer. The writer who gave us the matrix and coined the… Read More

Only five individuals stand between the killer robots of Krikkit and their goal of the total annihilation of the universe. They are Arthur Dent, homeless Englishman currently marooned in the deep past; his friend Ford Prefect, temporarily insane to see if he likes it, also marooned; Slartibartfast, once of the… Read More

'A rich and complex story of friendship and love' GUARDIAN 'It's a giant thought experiment that's also a cracking good read about gender' Neil Gaiman '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… Read More

Two scientists develop a foodstuff that causes unparalleled growth in animals and humans. The results of their experimentation lead to chaos and unforseen consequences throughout the land. THE FOOD OF THE GODS deals with many issues which are still present in science today and is a both witty and disturbing… Read More

Edward Prendick is shipwrecked and finds himself stranded on an island in the Pacific. Here he meets the sinister Dr Moreau, a vivisectionst driven out of Britain in disgrace. And soon strange events cause Prendick to uncover the full horror of Dr Moreau's activities on the island. THE ISLAND OF… Read More

'As we saw it first it was the wildest and most desolate of scenes. We were in an enormous amphitheatre, a vast circular plain, the floor of the giant crater. Its cliff-like wall closed us in on every side . . .' Thanks to the discovery of an anti-gravity metal,… Read More

COMING TO BBC ONE IN AUTUMN 2019! 'No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's...' So begins H. G. Wells' classic novel in which Martian lifeforms take over planet Earth. As… Read More

In the aftermath of an atomic war, a new international movement of pacifism has arisen. Multitudes of young men have chosen to curb their aggressive instincts through voluntary amputation - disarmament in its most literal sense. Those who have undergone this procedure are highly esteemed in the new society. But… Read More

An extraordinary epic, set a million years in the future, in the time of a dying sun, when our present culture is no longer even a memory. The torturer's apprentice, Severian, exiled from his guild after falling in love with one of his prisoners, is now the Lictor of Thrax,… Read More

An extraordinary epic, set a million years in the future, in the time of a dying sun, when our present culture is no longer even a memory. Severian, a torturer's apprentice, is exiled from his guild after falling in love with one of his prisoners. Ordered to the distant city… Read More

'I am Zhang, alone with my light, and in that light I think for a moment that I am free.' Imagine a world where Chinese Marxism has vanquished the values of capitalism and Lenin is the prophet of choice. A cybernetic world where the new charioteers are flyers, human-powered kites… Read More

'The historians can't seem to settle whether to call this one 'The Third Space War' (or the fourth), or whether 'The First Interstellar War' fits it better. We just call it 'The Bug War'. Everything up to then and still later were 'incidents', 'patrols' or 'police actions'. However, you are… Read More

In the sleepy English village of Midwich, a mysterious silver object appears and all the inhabitants fall unconscious. A day later the object is gone and everyone awakens unharmed - except that all the women in the village are discovered to be pregnant. The resultant children of Midwich do not… Read More

SWASTIKA NIGHT takes place seven hundred years after Nazism achieved power, by which time Adolf Hitler is worshipped as a god. Elsewhere, the Japanese rule the Americas, Australia, and Asia. Though Japan is the only rival superpower to the Nazi West, their inevitable wars always end in stalemate. The fascist… Read More

When young programmer Alexander Ivanovich Privalov picks up two hitchhikers while driving in Karelia, he is drawn into the mysterious world of the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy, where research into magic is serious business. And where science, sorcery and socialism meet, can chaos be far… Read More

A long, long time from now, in the valleys of what will no longer be called Northern California, might be going to have lived a people called the Kesh. But Always Coming Home is not the story of the Kesh. Rather it is the stories of the Kesh - stories,… Read More

David's father doesn't approve of Angus Morton's unusually large horses, calling them blasphemies against nature. And blasphemies, as everyone knows, should be burned: KEEP PURE THE STOCK OF THE LORD; WATCH THOU FOR THE MUTANT. Little does he realise that his own son - and his son's cousin Rosalind and… Read More

The remarkable novel upon which the stunning cult film was based. 'Beautiful ... The story of an extraterrestrial visitor from another planet is designed mainly to say something about life on this one' NEW YORK TIMES Thomas Jerome Newton is an extraterrestrial from the planet Anthea, which has been devastated… Read More

When Bill Masen wakes up in his hospital bed, he has reason to be grateful for the bandages that covered his eyes the night before. For he finds a population rendered blind and helpless by the spectacular meteor shower that filled the night sky, the evening before. But his relief… Read More

Count Sessine is about to die for the very last time ... Chief Scientist Gadfium is about to receive the mysterious message she has been waiting for from the Plain of Sliding Stones... And Bascule the Teller, in search of an ant, is about to enter the chaos of the… Read More

On a far future Earth, mankind's achievements are immense: artificially intelligent robots, genetically uplifted animals, interplanetary travel, genetic modification of the human form itself. But nothing comes without a cost. Humanity is tired, its vigour all but gone. Society is breaking down into smaller communities, dispersing into the countryside and… Read More

Grand Master Ursula K. LeGuin has been recognised for almost fifty years as one of the most important writers in the SF field - and is likewise feted beyond the confines of the genre. The Wind's Twelve Quarters was her first collection and it brings together some of finest short… Read More

'Her worlds have a magic sheen . . . She moulds them into dimensions we can only just sense. She is unique. She is legend' THE TIMES 'Le Guin is a writer of phenomenal power' OBSERVER George Orr is a mild and unremarkable man who finds the world a less… Read More

In this profound ecological fable, a mysterious plague has destroyed the vast majority of the human race. Isherwood Williams, one of the few survivors, returns from a wilderness field trip to discover that civilization has vanished during his absence. Eventually he returns to San Francisco and encounters a female survivor… Read More

Against the backdrop of the Gaean Reach, the widely populated region of space where the full diversity of human development is revealed, the story of Jaro Fath unfolds: from wildling orphan to spaceship captain, a tale of adventure and discovery wittily told. Jaro's life is directed by an inner voice… Read More

When the inhabitants of a peaceful world are conquered by the bloodthirsty yumens, their existence is irrevocably altered. Forced into servitude, the Athsheans find themselves at the mercy of their brutal masters. Desperation causes the Athsheans, led by Selver, to retaliate against their captors, abandoning their strictures against violence. But… Read More

Anton is an undercover operative from future Earth, who travels to an alien world whose culture has not progressed beyond the Middle Ages. Although in possession of far more advanced knowledge than the society around him, he is forbidden to interfere with the natural progress of history. His place is… Read More

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 that people would rather burn themselves alive than endure. Even Spofforth, the most perfect machine ever created, cannot bear it and… Read More

While on a boating holiday, Scott Carey is exposed to a cloud of radioactive spray. A few weeks later, following a series of medical examinations, he can no longer deny the extraordinary truth. Not only is he losing weight, he is also shorter than he was. Scott Carey has begun… Read More

Mesklin is a vast, inhospitable, disc-shaped planet, so cold that its oceans are liquid methane and its snows are frozen ammonia. It is a world spinning dizzyingly, a world where gravity can be a crushing 700 times greater than Earth's, a world too hostile for human explorers. But the planet… Read More

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… Read More

A brilliant sci-fi novel from one of the last century's most influential pop culture figures Substance D - otherwise known as Death - is the most dangerous drug ever to find its way on to the black market. It destroys the links between the brain's two hemispheres, leading first to… Read More

For a decade Alice Sheldon produced an extraordinary body of work under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr, until her identity was exposed in 1977. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever presents the finest of these stories and contains the Nebula Award-winning ' Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death', Hugo… Read More

The Strugatsky brothers' poignant and introspective novel of first contact that inspired the classic film Stalker Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those strange misfits who are compelled by some unknown force to venture illegally into the Zone and, in spite of the extreme danger, collect the mysterious artefacts… Read More

The computer age has arrived a century ahead of time with Charles Babbage's perfection of his Analytical Engine. The Industrial Revolution, supercharged by the development of steam-driven cybernetic Engines, is in full and drastic swing. Great Britain, with her calculating-cannons, steam dreamnoughts, machine-guns and information technology, prepares to better the… Read More

A cynical and compelling tale of politics, exploitation and colonisation on another planet The discovery of another habitable world might spell salvation to the three bitterly competing power blocs of the resource-starved 21st century; but when their representatives arrive on Jem, with its multiple intelligent species, they discover instead the… Read More

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… Read More

The balance of galactic power in the 31st century revolves around Illyrion, the most precious energy source in the universe. Captain Lorq van Ray's varied and exotic crew know their mission is dangerous, but they have no idea of Lorq's secret obsession: to gather Illyrion at source by flying through… Read More

'No city, no town, no community of more than one thousand people or two hundred buildings to the square mile, shall be built or permitted to exist anywhere in the United States of America.' Thirtieth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States Two generations after the nuclear holocaust, rumors… Read More

A novel of dystopian future in the tradition of SOYLENT GREEN and H.G. Wells' THE TIME MACHINE, with an introduction by Ken MacLeod Tinker was a good citizen of the Hive - a model worker. But when he was allowed sexual activation he found Mu Ren who, like him, harboured… Read More

One of the great anti-utopian satires of the twentieth century, an inspiration to writers from Orwell to Vonnegut, at last in a modern translation. Man discovers a species of giant, intelligent newts and learns to exploit them so successfully that the newts gain skills and arms enough to challenge man's… Read More

R.U.R. - written in 1920, premiered in Prague in 1921, and first performed in New York in 1922 - garnered worldwide acclaim for its author and popularized the word 'robot'. Mass-produced as efficient laborers to serve man, Capek's Robots are an android product-they remember everything but think of nothing new.… Read More

A popular and enduring time travel tale by one of science fiction's all-time greats When Dan Davis is crossed in love and stabbed in the back by his business associates, the immediate future doesn't look too bright for him and Pete, his independent-minded tomcat. Suddenly, the lure of suspended animation,… Read More

James Blish's galaxy-spanning masterwork, originally published in four volumes, explores a future in which two crucial discoveries - antigravity devices which enable whole cities to be lifted from the Earth to become giant spaceships, and longevity drugs which enable their inhabitants to live for thousands of years - lead to… Read More

If your planet has been destroyed to make way for a new hyperspace bypass, your best friend turns out to be from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse (and not Guilford, as you'd thought), and you find yourself in the company of a two-headed man who also… Read More

In a clearing of the great forest of the planet Bosk Veld, a strange, ape-like species of alien, the Asadi, act out their almost-incomprehensible rituals, rainbow eyes flashing, spinning like pinwheels. Egon Chaney, in his anthropological study, "Death and Designation Among the Asadi" has shown how their life-style has apparently… Read More

It's just a little later than now and Lola Hart is writing her life in a diary. She's a nice middle-class girl on the verge of her teens who schools at the calm end of town. A normal, happy, girl. But in a disintegrating New York she is a dying… Read More

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… Read More

One minute, down-and-out actor Lorenzo Smythe was - as usual - in a bar, drinking away his troubles as he watched his career go down the tubes. Then a space pilot bought him a drink, and the next thing Smythe knew, he was shanghaied to Mars. Suddenly he found himself… Read More

This new collection of stories from the multi-award-winning author of Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog contains: A Letter from the Clearys At the Rialto Death on the Nile The Soul Selects Her own Society Fire Watch Inside Job Even the Queen The Winds of Marble Arch… Read More

Joshua Kampa is torn between two worlds-the Early Pleistocene Africa of his dreams and the twentieth-century reality of his waking life. These worlds are transposed when a government experiment sends him over a million years back in time. Here, John builds a new life as part of a tribe of… Read More

For many generations the Just have been at war with the Protectors. In their strange world, supported by a huge pillar poised in the vast and mysterious Deep, ritual bloodshed and sorcery have obsessed the inhabitants since the beginning of time. Half human, half machine, sexless and hairless, the Visitor… Read More

There are seven billion-plus humans crowding the surface of 21st century Earth. It is an age of intelligent computers, mass-market psychedelic drugs, politics conducted by assassination, scientists who burn incense to appease volcanoes ... all the hysteria of a dangerously overcrowded world, portrayed in a dazzlingly inventive style. Winner of… Read More

In the year 2100, the invention of the Electron Pump - an apparently inexhaustible supply of free energy - has enabled humanity to devote its time and energies to more than the struggle for survival, finally breaking free of the Earth. But the Electron Pump works by exchanging materials with… Read More

When tombstone engraver George Paxman is offered a bargain, he doesn't hesitate. His beloved daughter gets an otherwise unaffordable survival suit to protect her from radioactive fall-out and all George has to do is sign a document admitting that, as a passive citizen who did nothing to stop it, he… Read More

Walter M. Miller Jr is best remembered as the author of A Canticle for Leibowitz, universally recognized as one of the greatest novels of modern SF. But as well as writing that deeply felt and eloquent book, he produced many shorter works of fiction of stunning originality and power. His… Read More

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… Read More

Ned Henry is a time-travelling historian who specialises in the mid-20th century - currently engaged in researching the bombed-out Coventry Cathedral. He's also made so many drops into the past that he's suffering from a dangerously advanced case of 'time-lag'. Unfortunately for Ned, an emergency dash to Victorian England is… Read More

The HUGO AWARD-winning novel of Earth after the apocalypse In the depths of the Utah desert, long after the Flame Deluge has scoured the earth clean, the rediscoveries of science are secretly nourished by cloistered monks dedicated to the study and preservation of knowledge. By studying the Holy Relics of… Read More

H.G. Wells' great novel of the dangers of science describes a man cast out from society by his own terrifying discovery. THE INVISIBLE MAN tells the story of Griffin, a brilliant and obsessed scientist dedicated to achieving invisibility. Taking whatever action is necessary to keep his incredible discovery safe, he… Read More

Francis Conway is Swill - one of the millions in the year 2041 who must subsist on the inadequate charities of the state. Life, already difficult, is rapidly becoming impossible for Francis and others like him, as government corruption, official blindness and nature have conspired to turn Swill homes into… Read More

The prequel to A Fire Upon The Deep, this is the story of Pham Nuwen, a small cog in the interstellar trading fleet of the Queng Ho. The Queng Ho and the Emergents are orbiting the dormant planet Arachna, which is about to wake up to technology, but the Emergents'… Read More

Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space - from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures and technology can function. Nobody knows what strange force partitioned space… Read More

Stephen Baxter's highly acclaimed first novel and the beginning of his stunning Xeelee Sequence finally enters the SF Masterwork series! A spaceship from Earth accidentally crossed through a hole in space-time to a universe where the force of gravity is one billion times as strong as the gravity we know.… Read More

In the drowsy tranquility of Little Belaire, the Truthful Speakers lead lives of peaceful self-sufficiency ignoring the depopulated wilderness beyond their narrow borders. It is a society untouched by pain or violence and the self-destroying 'Angels' of the past are barely remembered. But when Rush That Speaks leaves his home… Read More

A fast-moving space adventure featuring mysterious aliens, a journey to a de-populated planet, a mad run from space cops, a ship captain in trouble, and her AI (Artificially Intelligent) companion/ship's computer. It is carnival time on Mars, but Tabitha Jute isn't partying. She is in hiding from the law, penniless… Read More

Welcome to the strangest, most distinctive future ever imagined by a science fiction writer. An interstellar empire ruled by the mysterious Lords of the Instrumentality, whose access to the drug stroon, from the planet Norstrilia, confers on them virtual immortality. A world in which wealthy and leisured humanity is served… Read More

Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez S.J., is a part of a four man scientific commission to the planet Lithia, there to study a harmonious society of aliens living on a planets which is a biologist's paradise. He soon finds himself troubled: how can these perfect beings, living in an apparent Eden, have… Read More

The classic novel about a daring experiment in human intelligence 'A masterpiece of poignant brilliance . . . heartbreaking, and utterly, completely brilliant' Guardian 'A timeless tearjerker' Independent Charlie Gordon, IQ 68, is a floor sweeper and the gentle butt of everyone's jokes - until an experiment in the enhancement… Read More

Set in a post-apocalyptic England, RIDDLEY WALKER tells the tale of one twelve year old boy and his journey through the ruins of civilisation. After the death of his father in an accident, Riddley must become a man. But his inquiring mind and strange ways set him apart from his… Read More

"A tour de force" - New York Times Book Review "Ambitious, finely detailed and compulsively readable" - Locus "It is a book that feels fundamentally true; it is a book to live in" - Washington Post For Kivrin Engle, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in… Read More

Brilliant, driven Victor Frankenstein has at last realised his greatest ambition. The scientist has succeeded in creating intelligent life. But when his creature first stirs, Frankenstein realises he has made a monster. And, abandoned by its maker and shunned by everyone who sees it, the Doctor's creation sets out to… Read More

THE NEW REVISED EBOOK EDITION RELEASED IN 2019 WITH THE AUTHOR'S PREFERRED TEXT! A few years in the future, medical science has advanced to the point where it is practically unheard of for people to die of any cause except old-age. The few exceptions provide the fodder for a new… Read More

In Synners, the line between technology and humanity is hopelessly slim. To be a Synner is to join the online hardcore, an outlaw band of hackers, simulation pirates, and reality synthesizers hooked on artificial reality and virtual space. Now you can change yourself to suit the machines - all it… Read More

Set in the Old West, this is the strange, magical tale of Sarah Canary and the ragtag band of misfits and lovers she trails in her wake When black cloaked Sarah Canary wanders into a railway camp in the Washington territories in 1873, Chin Ah Kin is ordered by his… Read More

One Thursday lunchtime Earth is unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. For Arthur Dent, who has only just had his house demolished that morning, this is already more than he can cope with. Sadly, however, the weekend has only just begun. And the Galaxy is a… Read More

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… Read More

Shortlisted for the 1961 Hugo Award, Rogue Moon is the disquieting and story of what happens when monstrous scientific ambition is matched by human obsession. The moon had finally been reached, and on it was found the most terrifying structure, that killed men over and over again, in torturous, unfathomable… Read More

One of the most extraordinary, imaginative and ambitious novels of the century: a history of the evolution of humankind over the next 2 billion years. Among all science fiction writers Olaf Stapledon stands alone for the sheer scope and ambition of his work. First published in 1930, Last and First… Read More

One of Clarke's most famous and acclaimed novels, winner of both the HUGO AWARD and the NEBULA AWARD In the 22nd century visionary scientist Vannevar Morgan conceives the most grandiose engineering project of all time, and one which will revolutionize the future of humankind of space: a Space Elevator, 36,000… Read More

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… Read More

The multi-award-winning SF masterpiece from one of the greatest SF writers of all time Rama is a vast alien spacecraft that enters the Solar System. A perfect cylinder some fifty kilometres long, spinning rapidly, racing through space, Rama is a technological marvel, a mysterious and deeply enigmatic alien artefact. It… Read More

Time is running out for the passengers and crew of the tourist cruiser Selene, incarcerated in a sea of choking lunar dust. On the surface, her rescuers find their resources stretched to the limit by the mercilessly unpredictable conditions of a totally alien environment. A brilliantly imagined story of human… Read More

Anthologies seldom make history, but Dangerous Visions is a grand exception. Harlan Ellison's 1967 collection of science fiction stories set an almost impossibly high standard, as more than a half dozen of its stories won major awards - not surprising with a contributors list that reads like a who's who… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

Four students discover a manuscript, The Book of Skulls, which reveals the existence of a sect, now living in the Arizona desert, whose members can offer immortality to those who can complete its initiation rite. To their surprise, they discover that the sect exists, and is willing to accept them… Read More

One moment a man sits on a suburban hill, gazing curiously at the stars. The next, he is whirling through the firmament, and perhaps the most remarkable of all science fiction journeys has begun. Even Stapledon's other great work, LAST AND FIRST MEN, pales in ambition next to STAR MAKER,… Read More

In an America where the miraculous is par for the course, where magic and myths are as real as shopping malls and television game shows, Jennifer Mazdan listens to the modern storytellers recite the tales of the Founders. But when strange things start to happen and Jennie becomes pregnant -… Read More

Far from Earth two sister planets, Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix, circle each other. It is said that a race of shapeshifting aliens once lived here, only to become extinct when human colonists arrived. But one man believes they still exist, somewhere out in the wilderness. In THE FIFTH HEAD… Read More

Far in the future, the craftsmen of the distant planet Halma create goods which are the wonder of the galaxy. But they know little of this. Their society is harshly regimented, its religion austere and unforgiving, and primitive - to maintain standards, even the most basic use of automation is… Read More

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.… Read More

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 ... THE AFFIRMATION is at… Read More

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… Read More

The year is 1998, the world is a growing nightmare of desperation, of uncontrollable pollution and increasing social unrest. In Cambridge, two scientists experiment with tachyons - subatomic particles that travel faster than the speed of light and, therefore, according to the Theory of Relativity, may move backwards in time.… Read More

Born with the extraordinary power to look deep within the human heart, David Selig recklessly misuses his gift in the pursuit of pleasure, until his power begins to die and he must come to terms with what it means to be truly human. This is a fascinating portrait. Never has… Read More

All alone: an idiot boy, a runaway girl, a severely retarded baby, and twin girls with a vocabulary of two words between them. Yet once they are mysteriously drawn together this collection of misfits becomes something very, very different from the rest of humanity. This intensely written and moving novel… Read More

Ian Watson's brilliant debut novel was one of the most significant publications in British SF in the 1970s. Intellectually bracing and grippingly written, it is the story of three experiments in linguistics, and is driven by a searching analysis of the nature of communication. Deep in the Brazilian jungle, an… Read More

When his ultra-logical computer tells him that to survive he must become the richest man in the universe, Rod McBan the hundred and fifty-first thought he had a good plan. A telepathic cripple, rejected by many of his people, owner of the Station of Doom, the safety of wealth would… Read More

He was the most dangerous fugitive alive, but he didn't exist! Nickie Haflinger had lived a score of lifetimes . . . but technically he didn't exist. He was a fugitive from Tarnover, the high-powered government think tank that had educated him. First he had broken his identity code -… Read More

The Caltraps of Time is David I. Masson's only published book of fiction, a collection of short stories, most of which made their first appearance in New Worlds SF during the 1960s under the legendary editorship of Michael Moorcock. An apocalyptic battle at the edge of the unknown, the deadly… Read More

Change or die. These are the only options available on the planet Jeep. Centuries earlier, a deadly virus shattered the original colony, killing the men and forever altering the few surviving women. Now, generations after the colony has lost touch with the rest of humanity, a company arrives to exploit… Read More

A moving, compulsive science fiction novel from one of the best writers in the field When the human settlers arrived on Hobbs Land, the native intelligent species, the Owlbrit, were already almost extinct. Before the last one died, a few years later, the humans had learned a little of their… Read More

What could be more commonplace than grass, or a world covered over all its surface with a wind-whipped ocean of grass? But the planet Grass conceals horrifying secrets within its endless pastures. And as an incurable plague attacks all inhabited planets but this one, the prairie-like Grass begins to reveal… Read More

One man must make a journey across a once colonised alien planet. Abandoned by man when it was discovered that the species there were actually sentient, the planet is now a place of mystery. A mystery that obsesses the lone traveller Gundersen and takes him on a long trek to… Read More

Lore van de Oest awoke in an alley to the splash of rain. She was naked, a foot-long gash in her back was still bleeding, and her identity implant was gone. She had been the daughter of one of the world's most powerful families ... and now she was nobody.… Read More

The Gate to Women's Country tells of a society that exists three hundred years after our own has nearly destroyed itself. Now, male warriors are separated from women at an early age and live in garrisons plotting futilely for the battles which must never be fought again. Inside the women's… Read More

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… Read More

The iconic science fiction vampire novel, adapted into the film starring Will Smith. The last man on earth is not alone . . . Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth ... but he is not alone. Every other man, woman and child on the planet has become… Read More

Frank Herbert's classic SF tale of an insect menace threatening the USA First published in 1973, Frank Herbert's vivid imagination and brilliant view of nature and ecology have never been more evident than in this classic of science fiction. America is a police state, and it is about to be… Read More

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… Read More

Clarke's masterful evocation of the far future of humanity, considered his finest novel Men had built cities before, but never such a city as Diaspar. For millennia its protective dome shut out the creeping decay and danger of the world outside. Once, it held powers that rule the stars. But… Read More

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… Read More

Curiosity was discouraged in the Greene tribe. Its members lived out their lives in cramped Quarters, hacking away at the encroaching ponics. As to where they were - that was forgotten. Roy Complain decides to find out. With the renegade priest Marapper, he moves into unmapped territory, where they make… Read More

Seven years after the day of the bombs, Point Reyes was luckier than most places. Its people were reasonably normal - except for the girl with her twin brother growing inside her, and talking to her. Their barter economy was working. Their resident genius could fix almost anything that broke… Read More

Mars is a desolate world. Largely forgotten by Earth, the planet remains helpless in the stranglehold of Arnie Kott, who as boss of the plumbers' union has a monopoly over the vital water supply. Arnie Kott is obsessed by the past; the native Bleekmen, poverty-stricken wanderers, can see into the… Read More

Ecological disaster has left the English countryside a wasteland. Humanity faces extinction, unless Greybeard and his wife Martha are successful in their quest for the scarcest and most precious of resources: human children. Read More

The 21st century. Europe is divided between the First World bourgeoisie, made rich by nanotechnology and the cheap versatile slave labour of genetically engineered Dolls and the Fourth World of refugees and homeless displaced by war and economic upheaval. In London, Alex Sharkey is trying to make his mark as… Read More

John Truck was to outward appearances just another lowlife spaceship captain. But he was also the last of the Centaurans, or at least half of him was, which meant that he was the only person who could operate the Centauri Device, a sentient bomb which might hold the key to… Read More

In the jungles of Guatemala, David Mingolla is struggling to survive amongst the rotting vegetation and his despairing fellow foot soldiers. He knows he is nothing but an expendable pawn in an endless war. On R & R a few miles away from the warzone he meets Debora - an… Read More

The epic voyage of the spacecraft Leonora Christine will take her and her fifty-strong crew to a planet some thirty light-years distant. But, because the ship will accelerate to close to the speed of light, for those on board subjective time will slow and the journey will be of only… Read More

A classic of political science fiction Arslan is a young Asian general who has conquered the USA and then the world, with a small town in Illinois as the capital of his new empire. Praised by the likes of Orson Scott Card and Samuel R. Delany, ARSLAN is a thoughtful… Read More

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… Read More

A landmark book in the fields of science fiction and feminism. Four women living in parallel worlds, each with a different gender landscape. When they begin to travel to each other's worlds each woman's preconceptions on gender and what it means to be a woman are challenged. Acclaimed as one… Read More

In the far future, after human civilization has spread through the galaxy, communications begin to arrive in an apparently alien language. They appear to threaten invasion, but in order to counter the threat, the messages must first be understood. Joint winner of the Nebula Award for best novel, 1966 Read More

Originally published in 1955 Jack Finney's sinister SF tale has outgrown the initial debate about whether it satirized Communism or the conformity of US society at the time, to become a classic of paranoia; an examination of our fear of 'the other'. Most people know the story from seeing THE… Read More

The book that reinvented Space Opera. The Canterbury Tales in space - from the Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning author of The Terror, which is now a chilling TV show. It is the 29th century and the universe of the Human Hegemony is under threat. Invasion by the warlike Ousters… Read More

A young man arrives in the anarchic city of Bellona, in a near future USA. This world has two moons but could otherwise be our own. The man, known only as 'the Kid' begins to write a novel called Dhalgren that begins where it ends. Dhalgren is about the possibilites… Read More

Arthur C. Clarke's classic in which he ponders humanity's future and possible evolution When the silent spacecraft arrived and took the light from the world, no one knew what to expect. But, although the Overlords kept themselves hidden from man, they had come to unite a warring world and to… Read More

One of America's greatest writers gives us his unique perspective on our fears of nuclear annihilation Experiment. Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it. Solution. Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

Jason Taverner has a glittering TV career, millions of fans, great wealth and something close to eternal youth. He is one of a handful of brilliant, beautiful people, the product of top-secret government experiments forty years earlier. But suddenly, all records of him vanish. He becomes a man with no… Read More

It began with a blinding light, a divine revelation from a mysterious intelligence that called itself VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System). And with that, the fabric of reality was torn apart and laid bare so that anything seemed possible, but nothing seemed quite right. It was madness, pure and… Read More

A masterly tale of political deception from the most significant SF writer of 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,… Read More

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… Read More

A classic science fiction tale of artifical worlds by one of the great American writers of the 20th century Glen Runciter is dead. Or is he? Someone died in the explosion orchestrated by his business rivals, but even as his funeral is scheduled, his mourning employees are receiving bewildering messages… Read More

World War Terminus had left the Earth devastated. Through its ruins, bounty hunter Rick Deckard stalked, in search of the renegade replicants who were his prey. When he wasn't 'retiring' them with his laser weapon, he dreamed of owning a live animal - the ultimate status symbol in a world… Read More

In the overcrowded world and cramped space colonies of the late twenty-first century, tedium can be endured through the use of the drug Can-D, which enables the user to inhabit a shared illusory world. But when industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from an interstellar trip, he brings with him a new… Read More

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 ... Read More

Gully Foyle, Mechanic's Mate 3rd Class. EDUCATION: none SKILLS: none MERITS: none RECOMMENDATIONS: none That's the official verdict on Gully Foyle, unskilled space crewman. But right now he is the only survivor on his drifting, wrecked spaceship, and when another space vessel - the Vorga - ignores his distress flares… Read More

One of the very best must-read SF novels of all time Wealth ... or death. Those were the choices Gateway offered. Humans had discovered this artificial spaceport, full of working interstellar ships left behind by the mysterious, vanished Heechee. Their destinations are preprogrammed. They are easy to operate, but impossible… Read More

Imagine a distant world where gods walk as men, but wield vast and hidden powers. Here they have made the stage on which they build a subtle pattern of alliance, love, and deadly enmity. Are they truly immortal? Who are these gods who rule the destiny of a teeming world?… Read More

Luna is an open penal colony and the regime is a harsh one. Not surprisingly, revolution against the hated authority is planned. But the key figures in the revolt are an unlikely crew: Manuel Garcia O'Kelly, an engaging jack of all trades, the beautiful Wyoming Knott - and Mike, a… Read More

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,… Read More

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… Read More

Enter a decaying far, far future society, a time when anything and everything is possible, where words like 'conscience' and 'morality' are meaningless, and where heartfelt love blossoms mysteriously between Mrs Amelia Underwood, an unwilling time traveller, and Jherek Carnelian, a bemused denizen of the End of Time. The Dancers… Read More

Above our planet hangs a hollow Stone, vast as the imagination of Man. The inner dimensions are at odds with the outer: there are different chambers to be breached, some even containing deserted cities. The furthest chamber contains the greatest mystery ever to confront the Stone's scientists. But tombstone or… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

In the tradition of the greatest cyberpunk novels, Blood Music explores the imminent destruction of mankind and the fear of mass destruction by technological advancements. Blood Music follows present-day events in which the fears concerning the nuclear annihilation of the world subsided after the Cold War and the fear of… Read More

The award-winning account of a man changed beyond all recognition so that he can be part of a bold experiment to live on Mars Ill luck made Roger Torraway the subject of the Man Plus Programme, but it was deliberate biological engineering which turned him into a monster - a… Read More

Meet Karl Glogauer, time traveller and unlikely Messiah. When he finds himself in Palestine in the year 29AD he is shocked to meet the man known as Jesus Christ - a drooling idiot, hiding in the shadows of the carpenter's shop in Nazareth. But if he is not capable of… Read More

When Winston Niles Rumfoord flies his spaceship into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum he is converted into pure energy and only materializes when his waveforms intercept Earth or some other planet. As a result, he only gets home to Newport, Rhode Island, once every fifty-nine days and then only for an hour.… Read More

In the year 2301, guns are only museum pieces and benign telepaths sweep the minds of the populace to detect crimes before they happen. In 2301 murder is virtually impossible, but one man is about to change that ... Ben Reich, a psychopathic business magnate, has devised the ultimate scheme… Read More