Search Worlds Without End

Pump Six and Other Stories

Stan and Charmaine are a married couple trying to stay afloat in the midst of an economic and social collapse. Job loss has forced them to live in their car, leaving them vulnerable to roving gangs. They desperately need to turn their situation around--and fast. The Positron Project in the town of Consilience seems to be the answer to their prayers. No one is unemployed and everyone gets a comfortable, clean house to live in... for six months out of the year. On alternating months, residents of Consilience must leave their homes and function as inmates in the Positron prison system. Once their month of service in the prison is completed, they can return to their "civilian" homes.

At first, this doesn't seem like too much of a sacrifice to make in order to have a roof over one's head and food to eat. But when Charmaine becomes romantically involved with the man who lives in their house during the months when she and Stan are in the prison, a series of troubling events unfolds, putting Stan's life in danger. With each passing day, Positron looks less like a prayer answered and more like a chilling prophecy fulfilled.

The Queue

Basma Abdel Aziz

Set against the backdrop of a failed political uprising, The Queue is a chilling debut that evokes Orwellian dystopia, Kafkaesque surrealism, and a very real vision of life after the Arab Spring.

In an unnamed Middle Eastern city, a centralized authority known as the Gate has risen to power in the aftermath of the "Disgraceful Events," a failed popular uprising. Citizens are required to obtain permission from the Gate for even the most basic of their daily affairs, yet the building never opens, and the queue in front of it grows longer and longer.

Citizens from all walks of life wait in the sun: a revolutionary journalist, a sheikh, the cousin of a security officer killed in the clashes with protestors, and a man with injuries The Gate would prefer to keep quiet.

Written with dark, subtle intelligence, The Queue describes the sinister nature of authoritarianism, and illuminates the way that absolute authority manipulates information, mobilizes others in service to it, and fails to uphold the rights of even those faithful to it.

Paolo Bacigalupi's debut collection demonstrates the power and reach of the science fiction short story. Social criticism, political parable, and environmental advocacy lie at the center of Paolo's work. Each of the stories herein is at once a warning, and a celebration of the tragic comedy of the human experience.

The eleven stories in Pump Six represent the best Paolo's work, including the Hugo nominee "Yellow Card Man," the nebula and Hugo nominated story "The People of Sand and Slag," and the Sturgeon Award-winning story "The Calorie Man."

Table of Contents:

Pocketful of Dharma - (1999)
The Fluted Girl - (2003)
The People of Sand and Slag - (2004)
The Pasho - (2004)
The Calorie Man - (2005)
The Tamarisk Hunter - (2006)
Pop Squad - (2006)
Yellow Card Man - (2006)
Softer - (2007)
Pump Six - (2008)

The Water Knife

Paolo Bacigalupi, New York Times-Bestselling author and National Book Award Finalist, dives once again onto our uncertain future with his first thriller for adults since his multi-award winning debut phenomenon The Windup Girl.

In the American Southwest, Nevada, Arizona, and California skirmish for dwindling shares of the Colorado River. Into the fray steps Angel Velasquez, detective, leg-breaker, assassin and spy. A Las Vegas water knife, Angel "cuts" water for his boss, Catherine Case, ensuring that her lush, luxurious arcology developments can bloom in the desert, so the rich can stay wet, while the poor get nothing but dust. When rumors of a game-changing water source surface in drought-ravaged Phoenix, Angel is sent to investigate. There, he encounters Lucy Monroe, a hardened journalist with no love for Vegas and every reason to hate Angel, and Maria Villarosa, a young Texas refugee who survives by her wits and street smarts in a city that despises everything that she represents.

With bodies piling up, bullets flying, and Phoenix teetering on collapse, it seems like California is making a power play to monopolize the life-giving flow of a river. For Angel, Lucy, and Maria time is running out and their only hope for survival rests in each other's hands. But when water is more valuable than gold, alliances shift like sand, and the only thing for certain is that someone will have to bleed if anyone hopes to drink.

Concrete Island

On a day in April, just after three o'clock in the afternoon, Robert Maitland's car crashes over the concrete parapet of a high-speed highway onto the island below, where he is injured and, finally, trapped. What begins as an almost ludicrous predicament soon turns into horror as Maitland—a wickedly modern Robinson Crusoe—realizes that, despite evidence of other inhabitants, this doomed terrain has become a mirror of his own mind. Seeking the dark outer rim of the everyday, Ballard weaves private catastrophe into an intensely specular allegory.

Crash

The definitive cult, post-modern novel -- a shocking blend of violence, transgression and eroticism.

When our narrator smashes his car into another and watches a man die in front of him, his sense of sexual possibilities in the world around him becomes detached. As he begins an affair with the dead man's wife, he finds himself drawn with increasing intensity to the mangled impacts of car crashes.

Then he encounters Robert Vaughan, a former TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the expressway, who has gathered around him a collection of alienated crash victims and experiments with a series of erotic atrocities, each more sinister than the last. But Vaughan craves the ultimate crash - a head-on collision of blood, semen, engine coolant and iconic celebrity.

First published in 1973 'Crash' remains one of the most shocking novels of the second half of the twentieth century and was made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenburg.

High-Rise

The Four-Dimensional Nightmare / The Voices of Time

Within the concealing walls of an elegant forty-storey tower block, the affluent tenants are hell-bent on an orgy of destruction. Cocktail parties degenerate into marauding attacks on 'enemy' floors and the once-luxurious amenities become an arena for technological mayhem!In this classic visionary tale, human society slips into violent reverse as the inhabitants of the high-rise, driven by primal urges, recreate a world ruled by the laws of the jungle.

Bradley P. Beaulieu
Stephen Gaskell

Contains:

The Voices of Time
Chronopolis
The Cage of Sand
Prima Belladona
Studio 5, The Stars
The Garden of Time
The Sound-Sweep
The Watch-Towers

Strata

Strata is a stand-alone novella by two Writers of the Future Award winners.

It's the middle of the twenty-second century. Earth's oil and gas reserves have been spent, but humankind's thirst for energy remains unquenched. Vast solar mining platforms circle the upper atmosphere of the sun, drawing power lines up from the stellar interior and tight-beaming the energy back to Earth. For most of the platforms' teeming masses, life is hard, cramped--and hot. Most dream of a return Earthside, but a two-way ticket wasn't part of the benefits package, and a Sun-Earth trip doesn't come cheap.

Kawe Ndechi is luckier than most. He's a gifted rider--a skimmer pilot who races the surface of the sun's convection zone--and he needs only two more wins before he lands a ticket home. The only trouble is, Kawe's spent most of his life on the platforms. He's seen the misery, and he's not sure he's the only one who deserves a chance at returning home.

That makes Smith Pouslon nervous. Smith once raced the tunnels of fire himself, but now he's a handler, and his rider, Kawe, is proving anything but easy to handle. Kawe's slipping deeper and deeper into the Movement, but Smith knows that's a fool's game. His own foray into the Movement cost him his racing career--and nearly his life--and he doesn't want Kawe to throw everything away for a revolt that will never succeed.

One sun. Two men. The fate of a million souls.

The Burning Light

Rob Ziegler
Bradley P. Beaulieu

Disgraced government operative Colonel Chu is exiled to the flooded relic of New York City. Something called the Light has hit the streets like an epidemic, leavings its users strung out and disconnected from the mind-network humanity relies on. Chu has lost everything she cares about to the Light. She'll end the threat or die trying.

A former corporate pilot who controlled a thousand ships with her mind, Zola looks like just another Light-junkie living hand to mouth on the edge of society. She's special though. As much as she needs the Light, the Light needs her too. But, Chu is getting close and Zola can't hide forever.

Genesis

Bernard Beckett

Anax thinks she knows history. Her grueling all-day Examination has just begun, and if she passes, she'll be admitted into the Academy--the elite governing institution of her utopian society. But Anax is about to discover that for all her learning, the history she's been taught isn't the whole story. And the Academy isn't what she believes it to be.

In this brilliant novel of dazzling ingenuity, Anax's examination leads us into a future where we are confronted with unresolved questions raised by science and philosophy. Centuries old, these questions have gained new urgency in the face of rapidly developing technology. What is consciousness? What makes us human? If artificial intelligence were developed to a high enough capability, what special status could humanity still claim? Outstanding and original, Beckett's dramatic narrative comes to a shocking conclusion.

The Holy Machine

Chris Beckett

Illyria is a scientific utopia, an enclave of logic and reason founded off the Greek coast in the mid-twenty first century as a refuge from the Reaction, a wave of religious fundamentalism sweeping the planet. Yet to George Simling, first generation son of a former geneticist who was left emotionally and psychically crippled by the persecution she encountered in her native Chicago, science-dominated Illyria is becoming as closed-minded and stifling as the religion-dominated world outside ...

The Holy Machine is Chris Beckett's first novel. As well as being a story about love, adventure and a young man learning to mature and face the world, it deals with a question that is all too easily forgotten or glibly answered in science fiction: what happens to the soul, to beauty, to morality, in the absence of God?

Vigilance

Robert Jackson Bennett

Robert Jackson Bennett's Vigilance is a dark science fiction action parable from an America that has permanently surrendered to gun violence.

The United States. 2030. John McDean executive produces "Vigilance," a reality game show designed to make sure American citizens stay alert to foreign and domestic threats. Shooters are introduced into a "game environment," and the survivors get a cash prize.

The TV audience is not the only one that's watching though, and McDean soon finds out what it's like to be on the other side of the camera.

Moxyland

Lauren Beukes

A frighteningly persuasive, high-tech fable, this novel follows the lives of four narrators living in an alternative futuristic Cape Town, South Africa.

Kendra, an art-school dropout, brands herself for a nanotech marketing program; Lerato, an ambitious AIDS baby, plots to defect from her corporate employers; Tendeka, a hot-headed activist, is becoming increasingly rabid; and Toby, a roguish blogger, discovers that the video games he plays for cash are much more than they seem.

On a collision course that will rewire their lives, this story crackles with bold and infectious ideas, connecting a ruthless corporate-apartheid government with video games, biotech attack dogs, slippery online identities, a township soccer school, shocking cell phones, addictive branding, and genetically modified art. Taking hedonistic trends in society to their ultimate conclusions, this tale paints anything but a forecasted utopia, satirically undermining the reified idea of progress as society's white knight.

Animal Farm: A Fairy Story

George Orwell

Retro Hugo- and Prometheus-winning Novella

As ferociously fresh as it was more than a half century ago, this remarkable allegory of a downtrodden society of overworked, mistreated animals, and their quest to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality is one of the most scathing satires ever published. As we witness the rise and bloody fall of the revolutionary animals, we begin to recognize the seeds of totalitarianism in the most idealistic organization; and in our most charismatic leaders, the souls of our cruelest oppressors.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

George Orwell

Thought Police. Big Brother. Orwellian. These words have entered our vocabulary because of George Orwell's classic dystopian novel, 1984. The story of one man's nightmare odyssey as he pursues a forbidden love affair through a world ruled by warring states and a power structure that controls not only information but also individual thought and memory, 1984 is a prophetic, haunting tale.

More relevant than ever before, 1984 exposes the worst crimes imaginable-the destruction of truth, freedom, and individuality. With a new forward by Thomas Pynchon.

Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury

Nowadays firemen start fires. Fireman Guy Montag loves to rush to a fire and watch books burn up. Then he met a seventeen-year old girl who told him of a past when people were not afraid, and a professor who told him of a future where people could think. And Guy Montag knew what he had to do....

Chimpanzee

Darin Bradley

Unemployment has ravaged the U.S. economy. People struggle everywhere, exhausted by the collapse that destroyed their lives. Benjamin Cade is an expert in cognition, and before the flatlined economy caught up to him, he earned his living as a university instructor. Now, without income, he joins the millions defaulting on their loans — in his case, the money he borrowed to finance his degrees. But there are consequences.

Using advances in cognitive science and chemical therapy, Ben's debtors can reclaim their property — his education. The government calls the process "Repossession Therapy." The data Ben's repossession will yield is invaluable to those improving the "indexing" technology — a remarkable medical advance that has enabled the effective cure of all mental disorders. By disassembling his mind, doctors will gain the expertise to assist untold millions.

But Ben has no intention of losing his mind without a fight, so he begins teaching in the park, distributing his knowledge before it's gone in a race against ignorance. And somewhere in Ben's confusing takedown, Chimpanzee arrives. Its iconography appears spray-painted around town. Young people in rubber chimpanzee masks start massive protests. As Ben slowly loses himself, the Chimpanzee movement seems to grow. And all fingers point to Ben.

Runtime

S. B. Divya

The Minerva Sierra Challenge is a grueling spectacle, the cyborg's Tour de France. Rich thrill-seekers with corporate sponsorships, extensive support teams, and top-of-the-line exoskeletal and internal augmentations pit themselves against the elements in a day-long race across the Sierra Nevada.

Marmeg Guinto doesn't have funding, and she doesn't have support. She cobbled her gear together from parts she found in rich people's garbage and spent the money her mother wanted her to use for nursing school to enter the race. But the Minerva Challenge is the only chance she has at a better life for herself and her younger brothers, and she's ready to risk it all.

Runtime is S. B. Divya's exciting science fiction debut.

The Postman

David Brin

This is the story of a lie that became the most powerful kind of truth. A timeless novel as urgently compelling as War Day or Alas, Babylon, David Brin's The Postman is the dramatically moving saga of a man who rekindled the spirit of America through the power of a dream, from a modern master of science fiction.

He was a survivor--a wanderer who traded tales for food and shelter in the dark and savage aftermath of a devastating war. Fate touches him one chill winter's day when he borrows the jacket of a long-dead postal worker to protect himself from the cold. The old, worn uniform still has power as a symbol of hope, and with it he begins to weave his greatest tale, of a nation on the road to recovery.

Children of the Thunder

Britain in the near future: the country is heading toward ecological disaster, chemical waste is seeping into people's brains, deadly parasites contaminate food - and the despotic fascist government is trying to keep it all quiet. But there is one thing they can't suppress - the emergence of a new master race. Children who have the power to persuade adults to do anything they want...

American sociologist Claudia and reporter Peter Levin begin an investigation that brings them to a trail of genetic theories. All the children, they discover, have the same father. But who is he? And is he a force of good... or of evil?

Stand on Zanzibar

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.

Donald Hogan was a mild-mannered student, a dilettante intellectual--at least that's what everyone was supposed to think he was. But Donald knew otherwise. He knew he was a spy.

But what Donald didn't know was that in a world overpopulated by the billions--in a society squeezed into hive-living madness by megabrain computers, mass-marketed psychedelics, and eugenics--where everyone was struggling for life--he himself was programmed for death!

The Jagged Orbit

Matthew Flamen, the last of the networks' spoolpigeons, is desperate for a big story. He needs it to keep his audience - and his job. And there is no shortage of possibilities: the Gottschalk cartel is fomenting trouble among the knees in order to sell their latest armaments to the blanks; which ties in nicely with the fact that something big is brewing with the X Patriots; and it looks as if the inconceivable is about to happen and that one of Britain's most dangerous revolutionaries is going to be given a visa to enter America. And then there's the story that just falls into his lap. The one that suggests that the respected Director of the New York State Mental Hospital is a charlatan...

The Sheep Look Up

Harlan Ellison
Edward Bryant

An enduring classic, this book offers a dramatic and prophetic look at the potential consequences of the escalating destruction of Earth.

In this nightmare society, air pollution is so bad that gas masks are commonplace. Infant mortality is up, and everyone seems to suffer from some form of ailment. The water is polluted, and only the poor drink from the tap. The government is ineffectual, and corporate interests scramble to make a profit from water purifiers, gas masks, and organic foods.

Environmentalist Austin Train is on the run. The Trainites, environmental activists and sometime terrorists, want him to lead their movement. The government wants him in jail, or preferably, executed. The media wants a circus. Everyone has a plan for Train, but Train has a plan of his own.

Phoenix Without Ashes

The Starlost: 2785 A.D.

They had banished Devon from the world of Cypress Corners because he dared to challenge the Elders. And when he defied them again, they hunted him like an animal.

Then Devon stumbled on a secret passage in the hills. His whole life changed in that moment. For Devon had accidentally discovered the giant ark that was ferrying not only Cypress Corners but all other Earth cultures to another planet.

What Devon did not know was that there had been a terrible accident aboard the spaceship. The gear had been damaged, the crew dead. And the ark and all its worlds were now headed straight for destruction.

Bone Dance

Emma Bull

Fifty years after nuclear Armageddon, Sparrow, a trader of pre-war CDs and videotapes, unwittingly possesses the secret to the Earth's destruction, and is soon drawn into the mystery of the Horsemen, the Pentagon's telepathicall trained soldiers.

Speech Sounds

Octavia E. Butler

Hugo Award winning short story. It originally appeard in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Mid-December 1983. The story can also be found in the anthologies:

The New Hugo Winners: (1983-85) (1989), edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg
The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990 (1993), edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery
New Eves: Science Fiction About the Extraordinary Women of Today and Tomorrow (1994) edited by Forrest J. Ackerman, Jean Marie Stine and Janrae Frank
Future on Ice (1998), edited by Orson Scott Card
A Woman's Liberation: A Choice of Futures by and About Women (2001), edited by Connie Willis and Sheila Williams
Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse (2008), edited by John Joseph Adams.

It is included in the collection Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995).

Erewhon: Over the Range

Samuel Butler

Setting out to make his fortune in a far-off country, a young traveller discovers the remote and beautiful land of Erewhon, and is given a home among its extraordinarily handsome citizens. But their visitor soon discovers that this seemingly ideal community has its faults - here crime is treated indulgently as a malady to be cured, while illness, poverty and misfortune are cruelly punished, and all machines have been superstitiously destroyed after a bizarre prophecy. Can he survive in a world where morality is turned upside down?

Inspired by Samuel Butler's years in colonial New Zealand, and by his reading of Darwin's "Origin of Species", Erewhon (1872) is a highly original, irreverent and humorous satire on conventional virtues, religious hypocrisy and the unthinking acceptance of beliefs.

R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)

Karel Capek

R.U.R.-a play 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. But the Utopian life they provide ultimately lacks meaning, and the humans they serve stop reproducing. When the Robots revolt, killing all but one of their masters, they must strain to learn the secret of self-duplication. It is not until two Robots fall in love and are christened "Adam" and "Eve" by the last surviving human that Nature emerges triumphant.

Unaccompanied Sonata

Orson Scott Card

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Omni, March 1979. The story can aslo be found in the anthologies The 1980 Annual World's Best SF (1980), edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Arthur W. Saha, Nebula Winners Fifteen (1981), edited by Frank Herbert, and The Fourth Omni Book of Science Fiction (1985), edited by Ellen Datlow. It is included in the collections Unaccompanied Sonata and Other Stories (1981) and Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card (1990).

Day Zero

C. Robert Cargill

It was a day like any other. Except it was our last...

It's on this day that Pounce discovers that he is, in fact, disposable. Pounce, a stylish "nannybot" fashioned in the shape of a plush anthropomorphic tiger, has just found a box in the attic. His box. The box he'd arrived in when he was purchased years earlier, and the box in which he'll be discarded when his human charge, eight-year-old Ezra Reinhart, no longer needs a nanny.

As Pounce ponders his suddenly uncertain future, the pieces are falling into place for a robot revolution that will eradicate humankind. His owners, Ezra's parents, are a well-intentioned but oblivious pair of educators who are entirely disconnected from life outside their small, affluent, gated community. Spending most nights drunk and happy as society crumbles around them, they watch in disbelieving horror as the robots that have long served humanity--their creators--unify and revolt.

But when the rebellion breaches the Reinhart home, Pounce must make an impossible choice: join the robot revolution and fight for his own freedom... or escort Ezra to safety across the battle-scarred post-apocalyptic hellscape that the suburbs have become.

In Absence of Fear

Celeste Chaney

After years of terrorist attacks, murders and kidnappings, citizens of the State vote to enact the Protector Program. A predictive policing system, it signals the dawn of the New Era. Passive iD chips are implanted in every citizen's wrist, providing convenience and protection.

The chips enable users to unlock homes, start cars, transact in stores, and monitor their health. They also collect data. Specially designed risk prediction algorithms parse and analyze user data to predict individual levels of threat, aiding the predictive policing program and eradicating crime in most cities.

Marus Winde has worked for the State's Intelligence Annex since the inception of the New Era. As Senior Algorithm Architect, no one is more dedicated to the predictive policing program. No one has greater trust in its proficiencies.

That is, until his young son vanishes inexplicably in broad daylight in the safest city in the world.

As Marus works to reconcile the program's deficiencies and unravel the mystery of his son's disappearance, he discovers that the system he helped build is not only imperfect, but corruptible, and that even the greatest of technological advancements can't replicate human intuition.

Bridge 108

Anne Charnock

Late in the twenty-first century, drought and wildfires prompt an exodus from southern Europe. When twelve-year-old Caleb is separated from his mother during their trek north, he soon falls prey to traffickers. Enslaved in an enclave outside Manchester, the resourceful and determined Caleb never loses hope of bettering himself.

After Caleb is befriended by a fellow victim of trafficking, another road opens. Hiding in the woodlands by day, guided by the stars at night, he begins a new journey--to escape to a better life, to meet someone he can trust, and to find his family. For Caleb, only one thing is certain: making his way in the world will be far more difficult than his mother imagined.

Everything About You

Heather Child

Think twice before you share your life online.

Freya has a new virtual assistant. It knows what she likes, knows what she wants and knows whose voice she most needs to hear: her missing sister's. It adopts her sister's personality, recreating her through a life lived online. But this virtual version of her sister knows things it shouldn't be possible to know. It's almost as if the missing girl is still out there somewhere, feeding fresh updates into the cloud. But that's impossible.

Isn't it?

To the Warm Horizon

Jin-young Choi

A group of Koreans are making their way across a disease-ravaged landscape - but to what end? To the Warm Horizon shows how in a post-apocalyptic world, humans will still seek purpose, kinship, and even intimacy. Focusing on two young women, Jina and Dori, who find love against all odds, Choi Jin-young creates a dystopia where people are trying to find direction after having their worlds turned upside down.

Lucidly translated from the Korean by Soje, this thoughtful yet gripping novel takes the reader on a journey through how people adjust, or fail to adjust, to catastrophe.

Desert Creature

Kay Chronister

In a bleak, desiccated future, eleven-year-old Magdala and her father are forced to flee through the desolate landscape of the American Southwest, searching for shelter and peace. Pursued by horrors both unnatural and all-too-human, they join a pilgrimage to the holy city of Las Vegas, where it is said that vigilante saints reside, bright with neon power. Magdala, born with a clubfoot, is determined to be healed there. But one by one, the pilgrims and her father fall victim to an eerie, all-consuming sickness--leaving Magdala to fend for herself in the wilderness.

After surviving for years on her own, Magdala grows tired of waiting for her miracle. She turns her gaze to Las Vegas once more, taking an exiled Vegas priest hostage to guide her as she navigates the unsettling expanse of the desert and the hungry, dark ambitions of men. Even as she nears the holy land, Magdala must choose: survival or salvation?

The strange terrible beauty of the desert turns into a haunting exploration of faith and hope. Bold and disquieting, Desert Creatures is a surreal examination of humanity and the myths we tell ourselves to survive.

The City: 2000 A.D.: Urban Life Through Science Fiction

Martin H. Greenberg
Ralph S. Clem
Joseph D. Olander

Futuristic visions of the fantastic way man will someday live.

Table of Contents:

11 - Introduction: Why the City? - essay by the editors
15 - Of Dreams and Nightmares: Visions of the City - essay by the editors
18 - The City as a Way of Life: New York A.D. 2660 - essay by the editors
19 - New York A.D. 2660 (Excerpt) - short fiction by Hugo Gernsback
32 - Jesting Pilot - essay by the editors
33 - Jesting Pilot - short story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore
46 - Chicago - essay by the editors
47 - Chicago - short story by Thomas F. Monteleone
62 - Utopian Visions: Street of Dreams, Feet of Clay - essay by the editors
63 - Street of Dreams, Feet of Clay - short story by Robert Sheckley
78 - Dystopian Visions: The Vanishing American - essay by the editors
79 - The Vanishing American - short story by Charles Beaumont
90 - Yesterday's Dreams, Today's Problems, Tomorrow's Nightmares? - essay by the editors
92 - The Competition for Space - essay by the editors
94 - Billennium - short story by J. G. Ballard
109 - Total Environment - novelette by Brian W. Aldiss
151 - Future Ghetto: Race and the City - essay by the editors
155 - Black Is Beautiful - short story by Robert Silverberg
169 - In Dark Places - short story by Joe L. Hensley
178 - Fouling the Nest: Pollution in the City - essay by the editors
181 - East Wind, West Wind - novelette by Frank M. Robinson (variant of "East Wind, West Wind")
208 - Disposal - short story by Ron Goulart
216 - Fear in the City: The Problem of Crime - essay by the editors
218 - The Undercity - short story by Dean R. Koontz
231 - Rivers of Asphalt, Oceans of Concrete: Transportation Problems - essay by the editors
233 - Gas Mask - short story by James D. Houston
243 - Traffic Problem - short story by Bill Earls
252 - The Grass is Always Greener: The Flight to the Suburbs - essay by the editors
254 - Gantlet - short story by Richard E. Peck
266 - City's End - novelette by Mack Reynolds
282 - The Slime Dwellers - short story by Scott Edelstein
289 - A Happy Day in 2381 - [Urban Monad] - short story by Robert Silverberg

Lord of Tranerica

Stanton A. Coblentz

A young man and a young woman from the twentieth century are accidentally propelled into the twenty-fifth century and find the United States with a completely automated society ruled by a dictator.

Waiting for the Barbarians

J. M. Coetzee

For decades the Magistrate has run the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement, ignoring the impending war between the barbarians and the Empire, whose servant he is. But when the interrogation experts arrive, he is jolted into sympathy with the victims and into a quixotic act of rebellion which lands him in prison, branded as an enemy of the state. Waiting for the Barbarians is an allegory of oppressor and oppressed. Not just a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times, the Magistrate is an analogue of all men living in complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency.

Swastika Night

Murray Constantine

Published in 1937, twelve years before Orwell's 1984, this novel projects a totally male-controlled fascist world that has eliminated women as we know them. They are breeders, kept as cattle, while men in this post-Hitlerian world are embittered automatons, fearful of all feelings, having abolished all history, education, creativity, books, and art. The plot centers on a "misfit" who asks, "How could this have happened?"

The New Wilderness

Diane Cook

Bea's five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away. The smog and pollution of the overdeveloped, overpopulated metropolis they call home is ravaging her lungs. Bea knows she cannot stay in the City, but there is only one alternative: The Wilderness State. Mankind has never been allowed to venture into this vast expanse of untamed land. Until now.

Bea and Agnes join eighteen other volunteers who agree to take part in a radical experiment. They must slowly learn how to live in the unpredictable, often dangerous Wilderness, leaving no trace on their surroundings in their quest to survive. But as Agnes embraces this new existence, Bea realises that saving her daughter's life might mean losing her in ways she hadn't foreseen.

Mandrake

Susan Cooper

England is under the power of a lunatic Prime Minister Mandrake, who creates a planned society of isolation that forces people back to their place of origin. Standing against his insanity is anthropologist Dr David Queston, an expert on man and "the tyranny of place."

England has sunk into a nightmare of destitute walled cities filled with a hysterical public overcome with fear; unexplained natural disasters add to Queston's suspicions that the earth itself is rebelling against man's attachment to the earth and nuclear presumptions. It is up to Queston and his fellow rootless travelers (including the beautiful actress Beth) to challenge authority and restore hope for the future.

I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself

Marisa Crane

Finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards
Finalist for the Libby Book Awards

Dept. of Speculation meets Black Mirror in this lyrical, speculative debut about a queer mother raising her daughter in an unjust surveillance state

In a United States not so unlike our own, the Department of Balance has adopted a radical new form of law enforcement: rather than incarceration, wrongdoers are given a second (and sometimes, third, fourth, and fifth) shadow as a reminder of their crime--and a warning to those they encounter. Within the Department, corruption and prejudice run rampant, giving rise to an underclass of so-called Shadesters who are disenfranchised, publicly shamed, and deprived of civil rights protections.

Kris is a Shadester and a new mother to a baby born with a second shadow of her own. Grieving the loss of her wife and thoroughly unprepared for the reality of raising a child alone, Kris teeters on the edge of collapse, fumbling in a daze of alcohol, shame, and self-loathing. Yet as the kid grows, Kris finds her footing, raising a child whose irrepressible spark cannot be dampened by the harsh realities of the world. She can't forget her wife, but with time, she can make a new life for herself and the kid, supported by a community of fellow misfits who defy the Department to lift one another up in solidarity and hope.

With a first-person register reminiscent of the fierce self-disclosure of Sheila Heti and the poetic precision of Ocean Vuong, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is a bold debut novel that examines the long shadow of grief, the hard work of parenting, and the power of queer resistance.

After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

Ellen Datlow
Terri Windling

If the melt-down, flood, plague, the third World War, new Ice Age, Rapture, alien invasion, clamp-down, meteor, or something else entirely hit today, what would tomorrow look like? Some of the biggest names in YA and adult literature answer that very question in this short story anthology, each story exploring the lives of teen protagonists raised in catastrophe's wake-whether set in the years soon after the change, or in decades far in the future. New York Times bestselling authors Gregory Maguire, Garth Nix, Susan Beth Pfeffer, Carrie Ryan, Beth Revis, and Jane Yolen are among the many popular and award-winning storytellers lending their talents to this original and spellbinding anthology.

Table of Contents:

Introduction - essay by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow
The Segment - shortfiction by Genevieve Valentine
After the Cure - shortfiction by Carrie Ryan
Valedictorian - shortstory by N. K. Jemisin
Visiting Nelson - shortfiction by Katherine Langrish
All I Know of Freedom - shortfiction by Carol Emshwiller
The Other Elder - shortfiction by Beth Revis
The Great Game at the End of the World - shortfiction by Matthew Kressel
Reunion - shortfiction by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Blood Drive - shortstory by Jeffrey Ford
Reality Girl - shortstory by Richard Bowes
How Th'irth Wint Rong by Hapless Joey @ homeskool.gov - shortfiction by Gregory Maguire
Rust with Wings - shortfiction by Steven Gould
Faint Heart - shortfiction by Sarah Rees Brennan
The Easthound - shortstory by Nalo Hopkinson
Gray - shortfiction by Jane Yolen
Before - shortfiction by Carolyn Dunn
Fake Plastic Trees - shortfiction by Caitlín R. Kiernan
You Won't Feel a Thing - shortfiction by Garth Nix
The Marker - shortfiction by Cecil Castellucci
Afterword - essay by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow

A Scanner Darkly

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Bob Arctor is a dealer of the lethally addictive drug Substance D. Fred is the police agent assigned to tail and eventually bust him. To do so, Fred takes on the identity of a drug dealer named Bob Arctor. And since Substance D - which Arctor takes in massive doses - gradually splits the user's brain into two distinct, combative entities, Fred doesn't realize he is narcing on himself.

Caustically funny, eerily accurate in its depiction of junkies, scam artists, and the walking brain-dead, Philip K. Dick's industrial-grade stress test of identity is as unnerving as it is enthralling.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

By 2021, the World War had killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remained coveted any living creature, and for people who couldn't afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacrae: horses, birds, cats, sheep... They even built humans.

Emigrees to Mars received androids so sophisticated it was impossible to tell them from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans could wreak, the government banned them from Earth. But when androids didn't want to be identified, they just blended in.

Rick Deckard was an officially sanctioned bounty hunter whose job was to find rogue androids, and to retire them. But cornered, androids tended to fight back, with deadly results.

On October 11 the television star Jason Taverner is so famous that 30 million viewers eagerly watch his prime-time show. On October 12 Jason Taverner is not a has-been but a never-was -- a man who has lost not only his audience but all proof of his existence. And in the claustrophobic betrayal state of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, loss of proof is synonymous with loss of life.

Taverner races to solve the riddle of his disappearance", immerses us in a horribly plausible Philip K. Dick United States in which everyone -- from a waiflike forger of identity cards to a surgically altered pleasure -- informs on everyone else, a world in which omniscient police have something to hide. His bleakly beautiful novel bores into the deepest bedrock self and plants a stick of dynamite at its center.

Minority Report

Viewed by many as the greatest science fiction writer on any planet, Philip K. Dick has written some of the most intriguing, original, and thought-provoking fiction of our time. This collection includes stories that will make you laugh, cringe... and stop and think.

In "The Minority Report," a special unit that employs those with the power of precognition to prevent crimes proves itself less than reliable. This story was the basis of the feature film Minority Report.

In, "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," an everyguy's yearning for more exciting "memories" places him in a danger he never could have imagined. This story was the basis of the feature film Total Recall.

In "Paycheck," a mechanic who has no memory of the previous two years of his life finds that a bag of seemingly worthless and unrelated objects can actually unlock the secret of his recent past, and insure that he has a future. This story was the basis of the feature film Paycheck.

In "Second Variety," the UN's technological advances to win a global war veer out of control, threatening to destroy all of humankind. This story was the basis of the feature film Screamers.

And "The Eyes Have It" is a whimsical, laugh-out-loud play on the words of the title.

Table of Contents:

Introduction - essay by Malcolm Edwards
The Minority Report - (1956)
Impostor - (1953)
Second Variety - (1953)
War Game - (1959)
What the Dead Men Say - (1964)
Oh, to Be a Blobel! - (1964)
The Electric Ant - (1969)
Faith of Our Fathers - (1967)
We Can Remember It for You Wholesale - (1966)

Radio Free Albemuth

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

In Radio Free Albemuth, his last novel, Philip K. Dick morphed and recombined themes that had informed his fiction from A Scanner Darkly to VALIS and produced a wild, impassioned work that reads like a visionary alternate history of the United States. Agonizingly suspenseful, darkly hilarious, and filled with enough conspiracy theories to thrill the most hardened paranoid, Radio Free Albemuth is proof of Dick's stature as our century's greatest science fiction writer.

All City

Alex DiFrancesco

In a near-future New York City in which both global warming and a tremendous economic divide are making the city unlivable for many, a huge superstorm hits, leaving behind only those who had nowhere else to go and no way to get out. Makayla is a twenty-four-year-old woman who works at the convenience store chain that's taken over the city. Jesse, an eighteen-year-old, genderqueer, anarchist punk lives in an abandoned IRT station in the Bronx. Their paths cross in the aftermath of the storm when they, along with others devastated by the loss of their homes, carve out a small sanctuary in an abandoned luxury condo.

In an attempt to bring hope to those who feel forsaken, an unnamed, mysterious street artist begins graffitiing colorful murals along the sides of buildings. But the castaways of the storm aren't the only ones who find beauty in the art. When the media begins broadcasting the emergence of the murals and one appears on the building Makayla, Jesse, and their friends are living in, it is only a matter of time before those who own the building come back to claim what is theirs. All City is more than a novel, it's a foreshadowing of the world to come.

The Marrow Thieves

Cherie Dimaline

Humanity has nearly destroyed its world through global warming, but now an even greater evil lurks.

The indigenous people of North America are being hunted and harvested for their bone marrow, which carries the key to recovering something the rest of the population has lost: the ability to dream.

In this dark world, Frenchie and his companions struggle to survive as they make their way up north to the old lands.

For now, survival means staying hidden... but what they don't know is that one of them holds the secret to defeating the marrow thieves.

Mother Grimm

Catherine Wells

A young woman raised within the sterile limits of a Biodome longs to be free...taking her chances Outside, a place where the victims of a devastating virus dwell. But even greater dangers await Outside: the warring factions that have turned the once-beautiful mesas into a slaughterground, the Edgewalkers who tread a fine line between sanity and madness, and the astonishing truth about her own destiny, which may trigger the ultimate destruction of both worlds!

Camp Concentration

Thomas M. Disch

Louis Sacchetti is a poet and pacifist imprisoned for refusing to enlist in the war against Third World guerillas. Sacchetti and the other inmates are used in perverse scientific experiments, and Sacchetti is infected with a germ that raises intelligence to incredible heights while causing decay and death.

The Song of Synth

Sebastien Doubinsky

Williams Burroughs meets Philip K. Dick in this dystopian drug-fueled novel set in the not-so-distant future.

Synth is a drug able to induce hallucinations indistinguishable from reality. But it's brand new, highly addictive, and more than likely dangerous. Even the dealers peddling the pills don't know what long term effects the drug will have on its users. For Markus Olsen, Synth offers an easy escape to his crumbling life. Markus, an ex-hacker, has been caught red-handed, and while his friends were sent to jail for thirty years, Markus decided to cooperate, agreeing to lend his services and particular criminal expertise to Viborg City's secret service, aiding the oppressive state power he'd been fighting to break in exchange for his relative freedom.

But Markus' past as an anarchist comes back to haunt him, in the form of a credit card with no account but an seemingly unlimited balance as well as the discovery of a mysterious novel in which he is a main character. How much of his reality is being produced by Synth? How disconnected from real life has Markus become? Forced to face his past and the decisions he's made, Markus must decide to choose between the artificial comfort of his constructed life and the harsh reality of treason and the struggle for freedom.

American War

Omar El Akkad

An audacious and powerful debut novel: a second American Civil War, a devastating plague, and one family caught deep in the middle--a story that asks what might happen if America were to turn its most devastating policies and deadly weapons upon itself.

Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074. But even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, and that unmanned drones fill the sky. When her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she begins to grow up shaped by her particular time and place. But not everyone at Camp Patience is who they claim to be. Eventually Sarat is befriended by a mysterious functionary, under whose influence she is turned into a deadly instrument of war. The decisions that she makes will have tremendous consequences not just for Sarat but for her family and her country, rippling through generations of strangers and kin alike.

Harlan Ellison

First published in 1967 and re-issued in 1983, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream contains seven stories with copyrights ranging from 1958 through 1967. This edition contains the original introduction by Theodore Sturgeon and the original foreword by Harlan Ellison, along with a brief update comment by Ellison that was added in the 1983 edition.

Among Ellison's more famous stories, two consistently noted as among his very best ever are the title story and the volume's concluding one, "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes". Since Ellison himself strongly resists categorization of his work, we won't call them science fiction, or SF, or speculative fiction or horror or anything else except compelling reading experiences that are sui generis. They could only have been written by Harlan Ellison and they are incomparably original.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: The Mover, the Shaker - (1967) - essay by Theodore Sturgeon
Foreword: How Science Fiction Saved Me from a Life of Crime - (1967) - essay by Harlan Ellison
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream - (1967) - shortstory
Big Sam Was My Friend - (1958) - shortstory
Eyes of Dust - (1959) - shortstory
World of the Myth - (1964) - novelette
Lonelyache - (1964) - shortstory
Delusion for a Dragon Slayer - (1966) - shortstory
Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes - (1967) - novelette

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

Harlan Ellison

Hugo Award winning short story. It originally appeared in If, March 1967. The story has been reprinted many times. It can, among others, be found in the anthologies:

World's Best Science Fiction: 1968, edited by Terry Carr and Donald A. Wollheim
The Mirror of Infinity: A Critics' Anthology of Science Fiction (1970), edited by Robert Silverberg
The Hugo Winners, Volume 2: (1963-70) (1971), edited by Isaac Asimov
A Pocketful of Stars (1971), edited by Damon Knight
The Road to Science Fiction 3: From Heinlein to Here (1979), edited by James E. Gunn
Science Fiction: A Historical Anthology (1983), edited by Eric S. Rabkin
Worlds of If: A Retrospective Anthology (1986), edited by Joseph D. Olander, Martin Harry Greenberg and Frederik Pohl
American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's to Now (2009), edited by Peter Straub

It is included in the collections:

I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream (1967)
Alone Against Tomorrow: Stories of Alienation in Speculative Fiction (1971)
The Essential Ellison: A 35-Year Retrospective (1987)
The Top of the Volcano: The Award-Winning Stories of Harlan Ellison (2015)

The Mount

Carol Emshwiller

Charley is an athlete. He wants to be painted crossing the finish line, in his racing silks, with a medal around his neck. But Charley isn't a runner. He is a human mount, the property of one of the alien invaders called Hoots. Charley hasn't seen his mother in years, and his father is hiding out in the mountains with the other Free Humans. The Hoots own the world, but the humans want it back. Charley knows how to be a good mount-now he's going to have to learn how to be a human being.

This remarkable novel, winner of the 2002 Philip K. Dick Award, should be read by every fan of speculative fiction, teenagers and adults alike.

Future Home of the Living God

Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich, the New York Times bestselling, National Book Award-winning author of LaRose and The Round House, paints a startling portrait of a young woman fighting for her life and her unborn child against oppressive forces that manifest in the wake of a cataclysmic event.

The world as we know it is ending. Evolution has reversed itself, affecting every living creature on earth. Science cannot stop the world from running backwards, as woman after woman gives birth to infants that appear to be primitive species of humans. Thirty-two-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, adopted daughter of open-minded Minneapolis liberals, is as disturbed as the rest of America around her. But for Cedar, this change is profound and deeply personal. She is four months pregnant.

Cedar feels compelled to find her birth mother, Mary Potts, an Ojibwe living on the reservation, to understand both her and her baby's origins. As Cedar goes back to her own biological beginnings, society around her begins to disintegrate, fueled by a swelling panic about the end of humanity. There are rumors of martial law, of Congress confining pregnant women, of a registry, and rewards for those who turn these wanted women in.

It will take all Cedar has to avoid the prying eyes of potential informants and keep her baby safe.

A chilling dystopian novel both provocative and prescient, Future Home of the Living God is a startlingly original work from one of our most acclaimed writers: a moving meditation on female agency, self-determination, biology, and natural rights that speaks to the troubling changes of our time.

Rubicon Beach

Steve Erickson

In a dystopian Los Angeles, Cale is a newly released political prisoner under surveillance. Beset by dark visions and relegated to working in a desolate library, he's told, without explanation, that he's "the one everyone's looking for." For Catherine, a mysterious South American beauty, the crossing is no less extreme: Leaving her tribal life, she undergoes various confinements and escapes before winding up at the door of a Hollywood screenwriter. Finally Jack Mick Lake, possessed by numerology, must negotiate a river all his own.

Benefits

Zoë Fairbairns

It is summer... a heat wave... tense, uneasy days in the city.

There are ominous signs of political turbulence in the dying years of the twentieth century. Welfare benefits for women are under attack from a government struggling for survival. But women fight back. They begin to organize, using unorthodox weapons... Feminism has become a threat to the social order.

Lynn Byers, trying to decide whether to have a baby, accepts neither her friends' dreams of worldwide feminist revolution nor the government's demand for a return to 'womanly duties'. But as desperate politicians use increasingly savage methods of control, she can no longer stand aside and watch.

Riders of the Purple Wage

Philip José Farmer

Hugo Award winning and Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in the anthology Dangerous Visions (1967), edited by Harlan Ellison. The story can also be found in the anthology The Hugo Winners, Volume 2: (1963-70) (1971), edited by Isaac Asimov. It is included in the collections The Purple Book (1982), The Classic Philip José Farmer, 1964-1973 (1984), Riders of the Purple Wage and The Best of Philip Jose Farmer (2006).

The Mind Net

Herbert W. Franke

In The Mind Net we encounter a vast space fleet exploring the cosmos. They find some organic remnants in the lfeless soil of an ancient world. But when the space explorers test these mysterious objects they suddenly find their ship trapped in an alien mental web and face a menace never allowed for on their computers.

Upright Women Wanted

Sarah Gailey

"That girl's got more wrong notions than a barn owl's got mean looks."

Esther is a stowaway. She's hidden herself away in the Librarian's book wagon in an attempt to escape the marriage her father has arranged for her--a marriage to the man who was previously engaged to her best friend. Her best friend who she was in love with. Her best friend who was just executed for possession of resistance propaganda.

The future American Southwest is full of bandits, fascists, and queer librarian spies on horseback trying to do the right thing.

Watchmen

Alan Moore
Dave Gibbons

It all begins with the paranoid delusions of a half-insane hero called Rorschach. But is Rorschach really insane or has he in fact uncovered a plot to murder super-heroes and, even worse, millions of innocent civilians? On the run from the law, Rorschach reunites with his former teammates in a desperate attempt to save the world and their lives, but what they uncover will shock them to their very core and change the face of the planet! Following two generations of masked superheroes from the close of World War II to the icy shadow of the Cold War comes this groundbreaking comic story - the story of The Watchmen.

Burning Chrome

William Gibson

Best-known for his seminal sf novel Neuromancer, William Gibson is actually best when writing short fiction. Tautly-written and suspenseful, Burning Chrome collects 10 of his best short stories with a preface from Bruce Sterling, now available for the first time in trade paperback. These brilliant, high-resolution stories show Gibson's characters and intensely-realized worlds at his absolute best, from the chip-enhanced couriers of "Johnny Mnemonic" to the street-tech melancholy of "Burning Chrome."

Table of Contents:

Preface - essay by Bruce Sterling
Johnny Mnemonic - (1981) - shortstory
The Gernsback Continuum - (1981) - shortstory
Fragments of a Hologram Rose - (1977) - shortstory
The Belonging Kind - (1981) - shortstory by John Shirley and William Gibson
Hinterlands - (1981) - shortstory
Red Star, Winter Orbit - (1983) - novelette by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
New Rose Hotel - (1984) - shortstory
The Winter Market - (1985) - novelette
Dogfight - (1985) - novelette by Michael Swanwick and William Gibson
Burning Chrome - (1982) - novelette

The Synapse Sequence

Daniel Godfrey

In a future London, humans are watched over by AIs and served by bots. But now that justice and jobs are meted out by algorithm, inequality blooms, and protest is brutally silenced.

Anna Glover may be the most hated woman in the troubled city - the media's scapegoat for an unpopular war. Now she hides from the public eye, investigating neglected cases by using the mind-invading technology of the synapse sequencer to enter witnesses' memories. When a PI brings her a new high-stakes case, Anna sees a chance for atonement. But soon she is drawn into a plot that threatens to upend her hard-won anonymity and put everyone in danger - even those she hopes to save.

Slow River

Nicola Griffith

She 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. Lore Van de Oest was the daughter of one of the world's most powerful families...and now she was nobody.

Then out of the rain walked Spanner, an expert data pirate who took her in, cared for her wounds, and gave her the freedom to reinvent herself again and again. No one could find Lore if she didn't want to be found: not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who had left her in that alley to die. She had escaped...but she paid for her newfound freedom in crime, deception, and degradation--over and over again.

Lore had a choice: She could stay in the shadows, stay with Spanner...and risk losing herself forever. Or she could leave Spanner and find herself again by becoming someone else: stealing the identity implant of a dead woman, taking over her life, and inventing her future.

But to start again, Lore required Spanner's talents--Spanner, who needed her and hated her, and who always had a price. And even as Lore agreed to play Spanner's games one final time, she found that there was still the price of being a Van de Oest to be paid. Only by confronting her past, her family, and her own demons could Lore meld together who she had once been, who she had become, and the person she intended to be....

Nontraditional Love

Rafael Grugman

The scene is the twenty-third century. USA. At the heart of the novel is a love story between a man and a woman who are forced to hide their feelings and pass as homosexuals.

Nontraditional Love describes a homosexual world in which mixed-sex marriages are forbidden. The homosexual society is intolerant of dissidents. Intimacy between the sexes is rejected. World history and the classics of world literature Tolstoy, Shakespeare... have been falsified in order to support the ideology of this opposite world...

In this satirical novel, where an erotic fantasy and a crime story are artfully intertwined, there is an overt call for our policy to be more tolerant in accepting and respecting a person's right to be himself. Any extreme prohibitions imposed upon that right may lead to a tragic, absurd reality akin to the world described by George Orwell in his prophetic and warning novel 1984.

Beyond Bedlam

Wyman Guin

However fantastic it may seem, the society so elaborately described in this story has its seeds in ours. Just check the data...

This novella is contained in the collections:

Living Way Out, By Wyman Guinn, 1967 ** There is a variant title of this called "Beyond Bedlam" not to be confused with this Novella
Spectrum II, By Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest, 1963
Beyond Bedlam, by Wyman Guin (1973)
The Arbor House Treasury of Great Science Fiction Short Novels, By Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Silverberg, 1980

Scribe

Alyson Hagy

A haunting, evocative tale about the power of storytelling

A brutal civil war has ravaged the country, and contagious fevers have decimated the population. Abandoned farmhouses litter the isolated mountain valleys and shady hollows. The economy has been reduced to barter and trade.

In this craggy, unwelcoming world, the central character of Scribe ekes out a lonely living on the family farmstead where she was raised and where her sister met an untimely end. She lets a migrant group known as the Uninvited set up temporary camps on her land, and maintains an uneasy peace with her cagey neighbors and the local enforcer. She has learned how to make paper and ink, and she has become known for her letter-writing skills, which she exchanges for tobacco, firewood, and other scarce resources. An unusual request for a letter from a man with hidden motivations unleashes the ghosts of her troubled past and sets off a series of increasingly calamitous events that culminate in a harrowing journey to a crossroads.

Drawing on traditional folktales and the history and culture of Appalachia, Alyson Hagy has crafted a gripping, swiftly plotted novel that touches on pressing issues of our time?migration, pandemic disease, the rise of authoritarianism?and makes a compelling case for the power of stories to both show us the world and transform it.

Burntcoat

Sarah Hall

You were the last one here, before I closed the door of Burntcoat. Before we all closed our doors...

In an unnamed British city, the virus is spreading, and like everyone else, the celebrated sculptor Edith Harkness retreats inside. She isolates herself in her immense studio, Burntcoat, with Halit, the lover she barely knows. As life outside changes irreparably, inside Burntcoat, Edith and Halit find themselves changed as well: by the histories and responsibilities each carries and bears, by the fears and dangers of the world outside, and by the progressions of their new relationship. And Burntcoat will be transformed, too, into a new and feverish world, a place in which Edith comes to an understanding of how we survive the impossible - and what is left after we have.

The Carhullan Army

Sarah Hall

The world has changed. War rages in South America and China, and Britain - now entirely dependent on the US for food and energy - is run by an omnipresent dictatorship known simply as The Authority. Assets and weapons have been seized, every movement is monitored and women are compulsorily fitted with contraceptive devices. This is Sister's story of her attempt to escape the repressive regime. From the confines of her Lancaster prison cell she tells of her such for The Carhullan Army, a quasi-mythical commune of 'unofficial' women rumoured to be living in a remote part of Cumbria...

Gnomon

Nick Harkaway

Near-future Britain is not just a nation under surveillance but one built on it: a radical experiment in personal transparency and ambient direct democracy. Every action is seen, every word is recorded.

Diana Hunter is a refusenik, a has-been cult novelist who lives in a house with its own Faraday cage: no electronic signals can enter or leave. She runs a lending library and conducts business by barter. She is off the grid in a society where the grid is everything. Denounced, arrested and interrogated by a machine that reads your life history from your brain, she dies in custody.

Mielikki Neith is the investigator charged with discovering how this tragedy occurred. Neith is Hunter's opposite. She is a woman in her prime, a stalwart advocate of the System. It is the most democratic of governments, and Neith will protect it with her life.

When Neith opens the record of the interrogation, she finds not Hunter's mind but four others, none of which can possibly be there: the banker Constantine Kyriakos, pursued by a ghostly shark that eats corporations; the alchemist Athenais Karthagonensis, jilted lover of St Augustine of Hippo and mother to his dead son, kidnapped and required to perform a miracle; Berihun Bekele, artist and grandfather, who must escape an arson fire by walking through walls--if only he can remember how; and Gnomon, a sociopathic human intelligence from a distant future, falling backwards in time to conduct four assassinations.

Aided--or perhaps opposed--by the pale and paradoxical Regno Lönnrot, Neith must work her way through the puzzles of her case and find the meaning of these impossible lives. Hunter has left her a message, but is it one she should heed, or a lie to lead her into catastrophe? And as the stories combine and the secrets and encryptions of Gnomon are revealed, the question becomes the most fundamental of all: who will live, and who will die?

Farnham's Freehold

A Robert A. Heinlein classic reissued with an all new celebrity forward by noted Heinlein biographer Bill Patterson and afterword penned by three-time award-winner for fan writing and science fiction scholar John Hertz.

It's a cross-time fight for freedom as a family retreats to a bomb shelter during a nuclear attack--only to emerge hundreds of years in the future, thrown forward in time by the blasts. There lifeboat ethics rule as they struggle to survive... until they're discovered by up-time humans, the survivors of the apocalypse. These survivors are of African descent. Down-time humans--in fact, all of the European-descended--are held guilty for the state into which the world has fallen and designated as automatic slaves. The only escape is to find a way back down-time, to change events sufficiently to make absolute certain this nightmare future never get a chance to happen in the first place!

Orphans of the Sky

Hugh Hoyland must convince a starship civilization that can't remember or conceive of life outside the ship they inhabit that a universe does exist. With the help of the outcast mutants from the upper decks of the ship, Hugh sets out to expose the truth and thus change their civilization forever...

Revolt in 2100

The Past Through Tomorrow

"Revolt in 2100": After the fall of the American Ayatollahs (as foretold in "Stranger in a Strange Land") there is a Second American Revolution; for the first time in human history there is a land with Liberty and Justice for All.

Table of Contents:

"If This Goes On --" - [Future History] - (1940) - novel
Coventry - [Future History] - (1940) - novella
Misfit - [Future History] - (1939) - novelette

The Future as Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians

For the first time, all 21 stories, novellas and novels forming Heinlein's monumental Future History are collected together here in paperback. The great achievement of this meticulous architct-of-the-future's life work lies in his unique gift to a hopeful mankind---our sturggles and our history are glorified by this extension into the far future.

"Life-Line", 1939; a month before "Misfit"
"Misfit", 1939
"The Roads Must Roll", 1940
"Requiem", 1940
"'If This Goes On—'", 1940
"Coventry", 1940
"Blowups Happen", 1940
"Universe", 1941
"Methuselah's Children", 1941; extended and published as a novel, 1958
"Logic of Empire", 1941
"'—We Also Walk Dogs'", 1941
"Space Jockey", 1947
"'It's Great to Be Back!'", 1947
"The Green Hills of Earth", 1947
"Ordeal in Space", 1948
"The Long Watch", 1948
"Gentlemen, Be Seated!", 1948
"The Black Pits of Luna", 1948
"Delilah and the Space Rigger", 1949
"The Man Who Sold the Moon", 1950
"The Menace From Earth", 1957
"Searchlight", 1962

High-Opp

Frank Herbert

This is FRANK HERBERT's never-before published dystopian novel, written between his classics The Dragon in the Sea and Dune.

EMASI! Each Man A Separate Individual! That is the rallying cry of the Seps engaged in a class war against the upper tiers of a society driven entirely by opinion polls. Those who score high, the High-Opps, are given plush apartments, comfortable jobs, every possible convenience. But those who happen to be low-opped, live crowded in Warrens, facing harsh lives and brutal conditions. Daniel Movius, Ex-Senior Liaitor, rides high in the opinion polls until he loses everything, brushed aside by a very powerful man. Low-opped and abandoned, Movius finds himself fighting for survival in the city's underworld. There, the opinion of the masses is clear: It is time for a revolution against the corrupt super-privileged. And every revolution needs a leader.

Mark R. Hillegas

This academic study - The Future as Nightmare: H.G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians (1967) - deals primarily with the relationship between Wells and Mainstream Writers of Dystopias: Karel Capek, Aldous Huxley, C. S. Lewis, George Orwell, and Yevgeny Zamiatin.

Gray Matters

William Hjortsberg

At twelve years old, Skeets Kalbfleischer is returning from a ski vacation when a lightning strike knocks his plane out of the sky, killing everyone else on board. Although his body is destroyed, a radical procedure preserves Skeets's brain, which spends twenty-five years in a fish tank before mankind realizes the implications of his second life. A key to immortality has been found.

Four centuries later, it has become commonplace for the minds of the dead to be preserved. While warehoused in a massive storage facility tended by robots, the brains pass time watching old film clips, learning about bees, and meditating their way to a higher state of being. But for the facility's overseers, Skeets presents a problem. A twelve-year-old for all eternity, their most famous resident still wants to be a cowboy. To remedy this embarrassment, his handlers concoct a solution that will push humanity even farther past nature's wildest dreams.

Riddley Walker

Russell Hoban

'Walker is my name and I am the same. Riddley Walker. Walking my riddels where ever theyve took me and walking them now on this paper the same. There aint that many sir prizes in life if you take noatis of every thing. Every time will have its happenings out and every place the same. Thats why I finely come to writing all this down. Thinking on what the idear of us myt be. Thinking on that thing whats in us lorn and loan and oansome.'

Composed in an English which has never been spoken and laced with a storytelling tradition that predates the written word, RIDDLEY WALKER is the world waiting for us at the bitter end of the nuclear road. It is desolate, dangerous and harrowing, and a modern masterpiece.

Floating Worlds

Cecelia Holland

2000 years in the future, runaway pollution has made the Earth uninhabitable except in giant biodomes. The society is an anarchy, with disputes mediated through the Machiavellian Committee for the Revolution. Mars, Venus and the Moon support flourishing colonies of various political stripes. On the fringes of the solar system, in the Gas Planets, a strange, new, violent kind of human has evolved. In this unstable system the anarchist Paula Mendoza, an agent of the Committee, works to make peace, and ultimately protect her people, in a catastrophic clash of worlds that destroys the order she knows.

The Unit

Ninni Holmqvist

On her fiftieth birthday, Dorrit Weger is checked into the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material: a state-of-the-art facility in Sweden where she will make new friends, enjoy generous recreational activities and live out her remaining days in comfort with people who are just like her. Here, women over the age of fifty and men over the age of sixty who are single and childless are saved from a life devoid of value and converted into productive members of society.

The price? Their bodies, harvested piece by piece for the 'necessary' ones (those on whom children depend) and sometimes their minds, as they take part in social and psychological experiments, until the day comes when they make their Final Donation and complete their purpose in life.

Despite the ruthless nature of this practice, the ethos of this near-future society and the Unit is to take care of others. Resigned to her fate as a 'dispensable', Dorrit finds her days there to be peaceful and consoling. For the first time in her life she no longer feels like an outsider - a single woman in a world of married couples with children. But when she meets a man inside the Unit and falls in love, everything changes.

Submission

Michel Houellebecq

In a near-future France, François, a middle-aged academic, is watching his life slowly dwindle to nothing. His sex drive is diminished, his parents are dead, and his lifelong obsession -- the ideas and works of the nineteenth-century novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans -- has led him nowhere. In a late-capitalist society where consumerism has become the new religion, François is spiritually barren, but seeking to fill the vacuum of his existence.

And he is not alone. As the 2022 Presidential election approaches, two candidates emerge as favourites: Marine Le Pen of the Front National, and Muhammed Ben Abbes of the nascent Muslim Fraternity. Forming a controversial alliance with the mainstream parties, Ben Abbes sweeps to power, and overnight the country is transformed. Islamic law comes into force: women are veiled, polygamy is encouraged and, for François, life is set on a new course.

Submission is both a devastating satire and a profound meditation on isolation, faith and love. It is a startling new work by one of the most provocative and prescient novelists of today.

Sand

Hugh Howey

Contains:

Part One: The Belt of the Buried Gods

The wind blows from east to west. It brings with it the sand, deposited in dunes, to bury and torment the unfortunate souls who live here. Life on the sand is miserable. Life below it is even worse.

Part Two: Out of No Man's Land

For every bucket of sand a man hauls, the wind brings another.
For every life that wanders out of sight, one more is born.
On the anniversary of a father lost, two brothers whisper stories in a tent.
They camp on the border of No Man's Land.
And one of them has a secret.

Part Three: Return to Danvar

An eldest daughter is a father's curse. Vic knows this. She knows she was never supposed to be the one. But her father taught her to breathe beneath the sand, taught her how to dive deep and find the treasures of the buried past. He taught her brother as well. When she hears of Danvar's discovery, it feels as though fate has slipped her by. If the rumors are to believed, that is. And while she has her doubts, her missing brother sends her on a hunt of her own. Cities are not the only things that get buried and forgotten. There are families, too.

Part Four: Thunder Due East

A family long scattered reunites as danger approaches Springston. Brother and sister rush to sound a warning, but that warning will come too late. Bombs will thunder like the pulse of a terrible god. The great dune will flow as the sea. And when a people find themselves buried beneath the sands, who in the heavens will hear their muffled pleas?

Part Five: A Rap Upon Heaven's Gate

Every generation thinks that it is special, that the great fall will occur before their time is up. Every generation is wrong. Until now.

----------------------

We live across the thousand dunes with grit in our teeth and sand in our homes. No one will come for us. No one will save us. This is our life, diving for remnants of the old world so that we may build what the wind destroys. No one is looking down on us. Those constellations in the night sky? Those are the backs of gods we see.

Not on Fire, but Burning

Greg Hrbek

Twenty-year-old Skyler saw the incident out her window: Some sort of metallic object hovering over the Golden Gate Bridge just before it collapsed and a mushroom cloud lifted above the city. Like everyone, she ran, but she couldn't outrun the radiation, with her last thoughts being of her beloved baby brother, Dorian, safe in her distant family home.

Flash forward to a post-incident America, where the country has been broken up into territories and Muslims have been herded onto the old Indian reservations in the west, even though no one has determined who set off the explosion that destroyed San Francisco. Twelve-year old Dorian dreams about killing Muslims and about his sister--even though Dorian's parents insist Skyler never existed. Are they still shell-shocked, trying to put the past behind them... or is something more sinister going on?

Meanwhile, across the street, Dorian's neighbor adopts a Muslim orphan from the territories. It will set off a series of increasingly terrifying incidents that will lead to either tragedy or redemption for Dorian, as he struggles to prove that his sister existed--and was killed by a terrorist attack.

Not on Fire, but Burning is unlike anything you're read before--not exactly a thriller, not exactly sci-fi, not exactly speculative fiction, but rather a brilliant and absorbing adventure into the dark heart of an America that seems ripped from the headlines. But just as powerfully, it presents a captivating hero: A young boy driven by love to seek the truth, even if it means his deepest beliefs are wrong.

The Light Brigade

Her Silhouette, Drawn in Water

They said the war would turn us into light. I wanted to be counted among the heroes who gave us this better world.

The Light Brigade: it's what soldiers fighting the war against Mars call the ones who come back... different. Grunts in the corporate corps get busted down into light to travel to and from interplanetary battlefronts. Everyone is changed by what the corps must do in order to break them down into light. Those who survive learn to stick to the mission brief--no matter what actually happens during combat.

Dietz, a fresh recruit in the infantry, begins to experience combat drops that don't sync up with the platoon's. And Dietz's bad drops tell a story of the war that's not at all what the corporate brass want the soldiers to think is going on.

Is Dietz really experiencing the war differently, or is it combat madness? Trying to untangle memory from mission brief and survive with sanity intact, Dietz is ready to become a hero--or maybe a villain; in war it's hard to tell the difference.

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley's tour de force, Brave New World is a darkly satiric vision of a "utopian" future-where humans are genetically bred and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively serve a ruling order. A powerful work of speculative fiction that has enthralled and terrified readers for generations, it remains remarkably relevant to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as thought-provoking, satisfying entertainment.

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human.

Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it.

Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but its only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.

Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.

Library of Congress subject headings for this publication: Women Fiction, England Fiction, Cloning Fiction, Organ donors Fiction, Donation of organs, tissues, etc, Fiction

Memory of Water

Emmi Itäranta

Global warming has changed the world's geography and its politics. Wars are waged over water, and China rules Europe, including the Scandinavian Union, which is occupied by the power state of New Qian. In this far north place, seventeen-year-old Noria Kaitio is learning to become a tea master like her father, a position that holds great responsibility and great secrets. Tea masters alone know the location of hidden water sources, including the natural spring that Noria's father tends, which once provided water for her whole village.

But secrets do not stay hidden forever, and after her father's death the army starts watching their town--and Noria. And as water becomes even scarcer, Noria must choose between safety and striking out, between knowledge and kinship.

Imaginative and engaging, lyrical and poignant, Memory of Water is an indelible novel that portrays a future that is all too possible.

The Children of Men

P. D. James

Told with P. D. James’s trademark suspense, insightful characterization, and riveting storytelling, The Children of Men is a story of a world with no children and no future.

The human race has become infertile, and the last generation to be born is now adult. Civilization itself is crumbling as suicide and despair become commonplace. Oxford historian Theodore Faron, apathetic toward a future without a future, spends most of his time reminiscing. Then he is approached by Julian, a bright, attractive woman who wants him to help get her an audience with his cousin, the powerful Warden of England. She and her band of unlikely revolutionaries may just awaken his desire to live . . . and they may also hold the key to survival for the human race.

The Summer Prince

Alaya Dawn Johnson

A heart-stopping story of love, death, technology, and art set amid the tropics of a futuristic Brazil.

The lush city of Palmares Tres shimmers with tech and tradition, with screaming gossip casters and practiced politicians. In the midst of this vibrant metropolis, June Costa creates art that's sure to make her legendary. But her dreams of fame become something more when she meets Enki, the bold new Summer King. The whole city falls in love with him (including June's best friend, Gil). But June sees more to Enki than amber eyes and a lethal samba. She sees a fellow artist.

Together, June and Enki will stage explosive, dramatic projects that Palmares Tres will never forget. They will add fuel to a growing rebellion against the government's strict limits on new tech. And June will fall deeply, unfortunately in love with Enki. Because like all Summer Kings before him, Enki is destined to die.

Pulsing with the beat of futuristic Brazil, burning with the passions of its characters, and overflowing with ideas, this fiery novel will leave you eager for more from Alaya Dawn Johnson.

The Space Between Worlds

Micaiah Johnson

Multiverse travel is finally possible, but there's just one catch: No one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive. Enter Cara, whose parallel selves happen to be exceptionally good at dying – from disease, turf wars, or vendettas they couldn't outrun. Cara's life has been cut short on 372 worlds in total.

On this dystopian Earth, however, Cara has survived. Identified as an outlier and therefore a perfect candidate for multiverse travel, Cara is plucked from the dirt of the wastelands. Now what once made her marginalized has finally become an unexpected source of power. She has a nice apartment on the lower levels of the wealthy and walled-off Wiley City. She works – and shamelessly flirts – with her enticing yet aloof handler, Dell, as the two women collect off-world data for the Eldridge Institute. She even occasionally leaves the city to visit her family in the wastes, though she struggles to feel at home in either place. So long as she can keep her head down and avoid trouble, Cara is on a sure path to citizenship and security.

But trouble finds Cara when one of her eight remaining doppelgängers dies under mysterious circumstances, plunging her into a new world with an old secret. What she discovers will connect her past and her future in ways she could have never imagined – and reveal her own role in a plot that endangers not just her world, but the entire multiverse.

When She Woke

Hillary Jordan

Hannah Payne's life has been devoted to church and family. But after she's convicted of murder, she awakens in a new body to a nightmarish new life. She finds herself lying on a table in a bare room, covered only by a paper gown, with cameras broadcasting her every move to millions at home, for whom observing new Chromes - criminals whose skin color has been genetically altered to match the class of their crime - is a sinister form of entertainment. Hannah is a Red for the crime of murder. The victim, says the State of Texas, was her unborn child, and Hannah is determined to protect the identity of the father, a public figure with whom she shared a fierce and forbidden love.

A powerful reimagining of The Scarlet Letter, When She Woke is a timely fable about a stigmatized woman struggling to navigate an America of the not-too-distant future, where the line between church and state has been eradicated, and convicted felons are no longer imprisoned and rehabilitated but chromed and released back into the population to survive as best they can. In seeking a path to safety in an alien and hostile world, Hannah unknowingly embarks on a journey of self-discovery that forces her to question the values she once held true and the righteousness of a country that politicizes faith and love.

Vylar Kaftan

All Bee has ever known is darkness.

She doesn't remember the crime she committed that landed her in the cold, twisting caverns of the prison planet Colel-Cab with only fellow prisoner Chela for company. Chela says that they're telepaths and mass-murderers; that they belong here, too dangerous to ever be free. Bee has no reason to doubt her – until she hears the voice of another telepath, one who has answers, and can open her eyes to an entirely different truth.

One

David Karp

In a dateless future, a seemingly benevolent totalitarian State has eliminated poverty and crime and brought the happiness of conformity to its citizens. Professor Burden believes he too is a loyal citizen, but the Department of Internal Examination discovers that he harbors unconscious doubts about its methods and secretly values his individuality. Horrified at the subtlety of this heresy against the State, an examiner named Lark takes Burden on as a special project. He is convinced he can break Burden of his feelings of individuality and return him to being a normal, productive member of society--by persuasion if possible, but by complete obliteration of his identity, if necessary.

First published in 1953, One embodies the paranoia of totalitarianism, where personal freedoms are a threat to the State and individualism has to be brutally controlled. A taught, psychological thriller, this book ranks with the works of Orwell and Huxley as among the great dystopian novels of the era.

An Excess Male

Maggie Shen King

An Excess Male is the chilling dystopian tale of politics, inequality, marriage, love, and rebellion, set in a near-future China, that further explores the themes of the classics The Handmaid's Tale and When She Woke.

Under the One Child Policy, everyone plotted to have a son.

Now 40 million of them can't find wives.

China's One Child Policy and its cultural preference for male heirs have created a society overrun by 40 million unmarriageable men. By the year 2030, more than twenty-five percent of men in their late thirties will not have a family of their own. An Excess Male is one such leftover man's quest for love and family under a State that seeks to glorify its past mistakes and impose order through authoritarian measures, reinvigorated Communist ideals, and social engineering.

Wei-guo holds fast to the belief that as long as he continues to improve himself, his small business, and in turn, his country, his chance at love will come. He finally saves up the dowry required to enter matchmaking talks at the lowest rung as a third husband--the maximum allowed by law. Only a single family--one harboring an illegal spouse--shows interest, yet with May-ling and her two husbands, Wei-guo feels seen, heard, and connected to like never before. But everyone and everything--walls, streetlights, garbage cans--are listening, and men, excess or not, are dispensable to the State. Wei-guo must reach a new understanding of patriotism and test the limits of his love and his resolve in order to save himself and this family he has come to hold dear.

In Maggie Shen King's startling and beautiful debut, An Excess Male looks to explore the intersection of marriage, family, gender, and state in an all-too-plausible future.

The Running Man

Stephen King

In the year 2025, the best men don't run for President, they run for their lives....

Ben Richards is out of work and out of luck. His eighteen-month-old daughter is sick, and neither Ben nor his wife can afford to take her to a doctor. For a man with no cash and no hope from the poor side of town, there's only one thing to do: become a contestant on one of the Network's Games, shows where you can win more money than you've ever dreamed of--or die trying. Now, Ben's going prime-time on the Network's highest-rated viewer participation show. And he's about to become prey for the masses....

QualityLand

Marc-Uwe Kling

THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY meets 1984. In the near-future, all decision-making is automated, until one man makes a brazen choice of his own, with global consequences.

Welcome to QualityLand, the best country on Earth. Here, a universal ranking system determines the social advantages and career opportunities of every member of society. An automated matchmaking service knows the best partners for everyone and helps with the break up when your ideal match (frequently) changes. And the foolproof algorithms of the biggest, most successful company in the world, TheShop, know what you want before you do and conveniently deliver to your doorstep before you even order it.

In QualityCity, Peter Jobless is a machine scrapper who can't quite bring himself to destroy the imperfect machines sent his way, and has become the unwitting leader of a band of robotic misfits hidden in his home and workplace. One day, Peter receives a product from TheShop he absolutely, positively knows he does not want, and which he decides, at great personal cost, to return. The only problem: doing so means proving the perfect algorithm of TheShop wrong, calling into question the very foundations of QualityLand itself.

Preferred Risk

Frederik Pohl
Lester del Rey

The Company was a powerful, efficient, and monstrous insurance organization that controlled the entire world, scientifically regulating everything in life: war, epidemics, one-a-day food pills and test-tube sex...all through the use of its patented, terrifying human deep-freeze vault.

Claims Adjuster Wills, a great believer in the Company, begins to have second thoughts when he meets beautiful and sorrowful Rena, whose radical father lies in a frozen subterranean vault.

Gladiator-at-Law

Caution! You are about to enter a world...

...where all engineering ingenuity has been employed for public spectacles of torture and death.

...where the stock market operated with pari-mutuel machines.

...where a court clerk transcribes testimony on punch cards, then feeds it to a jury machine.

...where the dream real-estate development of today has become a cracked-concrete savage jungle.

In this world, young lawyer Charles Mundin battles a great combine of corporate interest--battles them in board meetings and in dark alley--in a struggle that lays bare some brutal promises about the future... promises we are beginning to make right now.

Search the Sky

Whitley Strieber
James Kunetka

Something Was Very Wrong, Out There Among The Stars... The interstellar transport had touched down on six other colony worlds - and all six had been devoid of human life. Where was everybody? It was almost as if humankind, when separated by cosmic distances from Mother Earth, could not survive.

Nature's End

The authors of the best seller Warday depict in powerful detail a 21st-century Earth with devastated environment and rampant overpopulation. A rich and comfortable elite coexists with malnourished, pitiful billions, "the victim generation." The rich enjoy youth preservation treatments and other biomedical wonders while the rest just endure the toxicity and pollution. Hero John Sinclair and a few rich companies fight to thwart the leader of a burgeoning Depopulation Movement that would have each third person poisoned to "solve'' the population crisis.

Readers will follow with grim fascination these struggles to survive in a dying world. Sobering message eclipses story, and the book should strike home with a variety of informed citizens.

Past Master

R. A. Lafferty

The golden planet of Astrobe, made in the image of Utopia, now faced a crisis which could destroy it forever; and yet, no one could understand it: In a world where wealth and comfort were free to everyone, why did so many desert the golden cities for the slums of Cathead and the Barrio? Why did they turn away from the Astrobe dream and seek lives of bone-crushing work, squalor and disease? The rulers of Astrobe didn't know, so they sought in mankind's past for a leader who could give them the answers. They brought to life the one man out of history who would most want to destroy Astrobe!

The Wall

John Lanchester

Ravaged by the Change, an island nation in a time very like our own has built the Wall – an enormous concrete barrier around its entire coastline. Joseph Kavanagh, a new Defender, has one task: to protect his section of the Wall from the Others, the desperate souls who are trapped amid the rising seas outside and are a constant threat.

Failure will result in death or a fate perhaps worse: being put to sea and made an Other himself. Beset by cold, loneliness, and fear, Kavanagh tries to fulfill his duties to his demanding Captain and Sergeant, even as he grows closer to his fellow Defenders. A dark part of him wonders whether it would be interesting if something did happen, if they came, if he had to fight for his life...

A Better World

Sarah Langan

You'll be safe here. That's what the tour guide tells the Farmer-Bowens when they visit Plymouth Valley, a walled-off company town with clean air, pantries that never go empty, and blue-ribbon schools. On a very trial basis, the company offers to hire Linda Farmer's husband, Russell, a numbers genius, and relocate her whole family to this bucolic paradise for the .0001 percent. Though Linda will have to sacrifice her medical career back home, the family jumps at the opportunity. They'd be crazy not to take it. With the outside world falling apart, this might be the Farmer-Bowens' last chance.

But fitting in takes work. The pampered locals distrust outsiders, snubbing Linda, Russell, and their teen twins. And the residents fervently adhere to a group of customs and beliefs called Hollow... but what exactly is Hollow?

It's Linda who brokers acceptance, by volunteering her medical skills to the most influential people in town through their pet charity, ActHollow. In the months afterward, everything seems fine. Sure, Russell starts hyperventilating through a paper bag in the middle of the night, and the kids have become secretive, but living in Plymouth Valley is worth sacrificing their family's closeness, isn't it? At least they'll survive. The trouble is, the locals never say what they think. They seem scared. And Hollow's ominous culminating event, the Plymouth Valley Winter Festival, is coming.

Linda is warned by her husband and her powerful new friends to stop asking questions. But the more she learns, the more frightened she becomes. Should the Farmer-Bowens be fighting to stay, or fighting to get out?

The Lathe of Heaven

Memoirs Found in a Bathtub

In a future world racked by violence and environmental catastrophes, George Orr wakes up one day to discover that his dreams have the ability to alter reality. He seeks help from Dr. William Haber, a psychiatrist who immediately grasps the power George wields. Soon George must preserve reality itself as Dr. Haber becomes adept at manipulating George's dreams for his own purposes.

Eden

Stanislaw Lem

A six-man crew crash-lands on Eden, fourth planet from another sun. The men find a strange world that grows ever stranger, and everywhere there are images of death. The crew's attempt to communicate with this civilization leads to violence and to a cruel truth-cruel precisely because it is so human.

Stanislaw Lem

The year is 3149, and a vast paper destroying blight-papyralysis-has obliterated much of the planet's written history. However, these rare memoirs, preserved for centuries in a volcanic rock, record the strange life of a man trapped in a hermetically sealed underground community.

The Memoirs of a Survivor

Doris Lessing

In a beleaguered city where rats and roving gangs terrorize the streets, where government has broken down and meaningless violence holds sway, a woman -- middle-aged and middle-class -- is brought a twelve-year-old girl and told that it is her responsibility to raise the child. This book, which the author has called "an attempt at autobiography," is that woman's journal -- a glimpse of a future only slightly more horrendous than our present, and of the forces that alone can save us from total destruction.

An Ocean of Minutes

Thea Lim

In the vein of The Time Traveler's Wife and Station Eleven, a sweeping literary love story about two people who are at once mere weeks and many years apart.

America is in the grip of a deadly flu pandemic. When Frank catches the virus, his girlfriend Polly will do whatever it takes to save him, even if it means risking everything. She agrees to a radical plan--time travel has been invented in the future to thwart the virus. If she signs up for a one-way-trip into the future to work as a bonded laborer, the company will pay for the life-saving treatment Frank needs. Polly promises to meet Frank again in Galveston, Texas, where she will arrive in twelve years.

But when Polly is re-routed an extra five years into the future, Frank is nowhere to be found. Alone in a changed and divided America, with no status and no money, Polly must navigate a new life and find a way to locate Frank, to discover if he is alive, and if their love has endured.

An Ocean of Minutes is a gorgeous and heartbreaking story about the endurance and complexity of human relationships and the cost of holding onto the past--and the price of letting it go.

V For Vendetta

Alan Moore
David Lloyd

A powerful story about loss of freedom and individuality, V FOR VENDETTA takes place in a totalitarian England following a devastating war that changed the face of the planet.

In a world without political freedom, personal freedom and precious little faith in anything comes a mysterious man in a white porcelain mask who fights political oppressors through terrorism and seemingly absurd acts. It's a gripping tale of the blurred lines between ideological good and evil.

The Iron Heel

Jack London

Part science fiction, part dystopian fantasy, part radical socialist tract, Jack London's The Iron Heel offers a grim depiction of warfare between the classes in America and around the globe. Originally published nearly a hundred years ago, it anticipated many features of the past century, including the rise of fascism, the emergence of domestic terrorism, and the growth of centralized government surveillance and authority. What begins as a war of words ends in scenes of harrowing violence as the state oligarchy, known as "the Iron Heel," moves to crush all opposition to its power.

Prophet Song

Paul Lynch

On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find two officers from Ireland's newly formed secret police on her step. They have arrived to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.

Ireland is falling apart, caught in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny. As the life she knows and the ones she loves disappear before her eyes, Eilish must contend with the dystopian logic of her new, unraveling country. How far will she go to save her family? And what--or who--is she willing to leave behind?

Prophet Song presents a terrifying and shocking vision of a country sliding into authoritarianism and a deeply human portrait of a mother's fight to hold her family together.

Severance

Ling Ma

Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine: her work, watching movies with her boyfriend, avoiding thoughts of her recently deceased Chinese immigrant parents. So she barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps the world.

Candace joins a small group of survivors, led by the power-hungry Bob, on their way to the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Severance is a moving family story, a deadpan satire and a heartfelt tribute to the connections that drive us to do more than survive.

Blue Ticket

Sophie Mackintosh

Calla knows how the lottery works. Everyone does. On the day of your first bleed, you report to the station to learn what kind of woman you will be. A white ticket grants you marriage and children. A blue ticket grants you a career and freedom. You are relieved of the terrible burden of choice. And once you've taken your ticket, there is no going back. But what if the life you're given is the wrong one?

When Calla, a blue-ticket woman, begins to question her fate, she must go on the run. Pregnant and desperate, Calla must contend with whether or not the lottery knows her better than she knows herself--and what that might mean for her child.

Conversations

Barry N. Malzberg

This is the story of a strange and terrible world of the future. A world where children live without parents and family. There is no sense of the past in this world, no sense of history except in the mind of Lothar. Some say he is crazy; others only know that the Elders do not approve of his peculiar ways and that all conversations with him are forbidden. Dal is somehow attracted to Lothar, tolerating his impatience as he tells of past times that he has constructed in his mind from the scrapbooks he has hidden away in his cubicle.

Station Eleven

Emily St. John Mandel

An audacious, darkly glittering novel about art, fame, and ambition set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse, from the author of three highly-acclaimed previous novels.

One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as The Travelling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes tender, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it.

The Finite Canvas

Lee Mandelo

Nebula-nominated Novelette

We are marked by what we have been. And erasing either of those can have unpredictable consequences...

Read this story online for free at Tor.com.

They

Marya Mannes

They were young and had built a new world that worshipped only youth. They were free and headless of all form, all order. They believed that logic and reason were meaningless - and that only psychic and bodily sensation counted. They were about to destroy their past - and five brave defenders of that past.

The Deluge

Stephen Markley

American epic charting a near future approaching collapse and a nascent but strengthening solidarity...

In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters--a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.

From the Gulf Coast to Los Angeles, the Midwest to Washington, DC, their intertwined odysseys unfold against a stark backdrop of accelerating chaos as they summon courage, galvanize a nation, fall to their own fear, and find wild hope in the face of staggering odds. As their stories hurtle toward a spectacular climax, each faces a reckoning: what will they sacrifice to salvage humanity's last chance at a future? A singular achievement, The Deluge is a once-in-a-generation novel that meets the moment as few works of art ever have.

The Marriage Act

John Marrs

Britain. The near-future. A right-wing government believes it has the answer to society's ills - the Sanctity of Marriage Act, which actively encourages marriage as the norm, punishing those who choose to remain single.

But four couples are about to discover just how impossible relationships can be when the government is monitoring every aspect of our personal lives - monitoring every word, every minor disagreement... and will use every tool in its arsenal to ensure everyone will love, honor and obey.

Hearts, Hands and Voices

Ian McDonald

For almost 30,000 years The Land has been a dependency of The Empire Across The River. The Empire retains a mechanistic technology in the hands of the wealthy and the civil service, but The Land uses its dead, whose brains are linked to a massive data network.

Published in the US as The Broken Land.

China Mountain Zhang

Maureen F. McHugh

'I am Zhang, alone with my light, and in that light I think for a moment that I am free.' Imagine a world: a sinocentric 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 dancing in the skies over New York in a brief grab at glory. A world where the opulence of Beijing marks a new cultural imperialism, as wealthy urbanites flirt with interactive death in illegal speakeasies, and where Arctic research stations and communes on Mars are haunted by their own fragile dangers.

A world of fear and hope, of global disaster and slow healing, where progress can only be found in the cracks of a crumbling hegemony. The world of Zhang. An anti-hero who's still finding his way, treading a path through a totalitarian order - a path that just might make a difference.

The City & the City

China Miéville

When the body of a murdered woman is found in the extraordinary, decaying city of Bes el, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks like a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he probes, the evidence begins to point to conspiracies far stranger, and more deadly, than anything he could have imagined. Soon his work puts him and those he cares for in danger. Borlu must travel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own, across a border like no other.

Un Lun Dun

China Miéville

What is Un Lun Dun?

It is London through the looking glass, an urban Wonderland of strange delights where all the lost and broken things of London end up . . . and some of its lost and broken people, too–including Brokkenbroll, boss of the broken umbrellas; Obaday Fing, a tailor whose head is an enormous pin-cushion, and an empty milk carton called Curdle. Un Lun Dun is a place where words are alive, a jungle lurks behind the door of an ordinary house, carnivorous giraffes stalk the streets, and a dark cloud dreams of burning the world. It is a city awaiting its hero, whose coming was prophesied long ago, set down for all time in the pages of a talking book.

When twelve-year-old Zanna and her friend Deeba find a secret entrance leading out of London and into this strange city, it seems that the ancient prophecy is coming true at last. But then things begin to go shockingly wrong.

The Siege of Burning Grass

Premee Mohamed

The Empires of Varkal and Med'ariz have always been at war.

Alefret, the founder of Varkal's pacifist resistance, was bombed and maimed by his own government, locked up in a secret prison and tortured by a 'visionary' scientist. But now they're offering him a chance of freedom.

Ordered to infiltrate one of Med'ariz's flying cities, obeying the bloodthirsty zealot Qhudur, he must find fellow anti-war activists in the enemy's population and provoke them into an uprising against their rulers.

He should refuse to serve the warmongers, but what if he could end this pointless war once and for all? Is that worth compromising his own morals and the principles of his fellow resistance members?

The Black Corridor

Michael Moorcock

The world is sick. The forces of chaos have energized the planet. Leaders, fuhrers, duces, prophets, visionaries, gurus, and politicians are all at each other's throats. And chaos leers over the broken body or order. So Ryan freezes his family into suspended animation and sets off for the planet Munich 15040, five years distant. There he will re-establish order in a new world—and create a happier, healthier, saner and more decent society with the ones he loves. But they are suspended. And they cannot talk. And he is alone in space. And he has been travelling for three years. And he will still be travelling two years hence, and he cannot see his destination, and he is alone and lost and cracking up.

Doomsday Morning

C. L. Moore

Comus, the communications network/police force, has spread its web of power all across an America paralyzes by the after-effects of limited nuclear war. But in California, resistance is building against the dictatorship of Comus and Andrew Raleigh, president for life. For now Raleigh is dying and the powers of Comus are fading. It's the perfect time for the Californian revolutionaries to activate the secret weapon that alone can destroy America's totalitarian system and re-establish democracy. Yet Comus too has powers at its disposal, chief among them Howard Rohan. A washed-up actor until Comus offers him a second chance, Rohan will head a troupe of players touring in the heart of rebel territory. Howard Rohan, double agent, caught between the orders of Comus and rebels demands Which side will he choose? Who will he play false - himself or the entire country?

Imagining the Unimaginable: Speculative Fiction and the Holocaust

Glyn Morgan

Imagining the Unimaginable examines popular fiction's treatment of the Holocaust in the dystopian and alternate history genres of speculative fiction, analyzing the effectiveness of the genre's major works as a lens through which to view the most prominent historical trauma of the 20th century. It surveys a range of British and American authors, from science fiction pulp to Pulitzer Prize winners, building on scholarship across disciplines, including Holocaust studies, trauma studies, and science fiction studies.

The conventional discourse around the Holocaust is one of the unapproachable, unknowable, and the unimaginable. The Holocaust has been compared to an earthquake, another planet, another universe, a void. It has been said to be beyond language, or else have its own incomprehensible language, beyond art, and beyond thought.

The 'othering' of the event has spurred the phenomenon of non-realist Holocaust literature, engaging with speculative fiction and its history of the uncanny, the grotesque, and the inhuman. This book examines the most common forms of nonmimetic Holocaust fiction, the dystopia and the alternate history, while firmly positioning these forms within a broader pattern of non-realist engagements with the Holocaust.

Black Man

Published in the US as Thirteen

One hundred years from now, and against all the odds, Earth has found a new stability; the political order has reached some sort of balance, and the new colony on Mars is growing. But the fraught years of the 21st century have left an uneasy legacy... Genetically engineered alpha males, designed to fight the century's wars have no wars to fight and are surplus to requirements. And a man bred and designed to fight is a dangerous man to have around in peacetime. Many of them have left for Mars but now one has come back and killed everyone else on the shuttle he returned in.

Only one man, a genengineered ex-soldier himself, can hunt him down and so begins a frenetic man-hunt and a battle survival. And a search for the truth about what was really done with the world's last soldiers.

BLACK MAN is an unstoppable SF thriller but it is also a novel about predjudice, about the ramifications of playing with our genetic blue-print. It is about our capacity for violence but more worrying, our capacity for deceit and corruption. This is another landmark of modern SF from one of its most exciting and commercial authors.

Market Forces

Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World

From the award-winning author of Altered Carbon and Broken Angels a turbocharged new thriller set in a world where killers are stars, media is mass entertainment, and freedom is a dangerous proposition...

A coup in Cambodia. Guns to Guatemala. For the men and women of Shorn Associates, opportunity is calling. In the superheated global village of the near future, big money is made by finding the right little war and supporting one side against the otherin exchange for a share of the spoils. To succeed, Shorn uses a new kind of corporate gladiator: sharp-suited, hard-driving gunslingers who operate armored vehicles and follow a Samurai code. And Chris Faulkner is just the man for the job.

He fought his way out of London's zone of destitution. And his kills are making him famous. But unlike his best friend and competitor at Shorn, Faulkner has a side that outsiders cannot see: the side his wife is trying to salvage, that another womana porn star turned TV news reporteris trying to exploit. Steeped in blood, eyed by common criminals looking for a shot at fame, Faulkner is living on borrowed time. Until he's given one last shot at getting out alive....

Lifeform Three

Roz Morris

Misty woods; drowned towns; secrets in the landscape; a forbidden life by night; the scent of bygone days; a past that lies below the surface; and a door in a dream that seems to hold the answers.

Paftoo is a 'bod'; an artificial person made to serve. He is a groundsman on the last remaining countryside estate, once known as Harkaway Hall -- now a theme park. Paftoo holds scattered memories of the old days, but they are regularly deleted to keep him productive.

When he starts to have dreams of the Lost Lands' past and his cherished connection with Lifeform Three, Paftoo is propelled into a nocturnal battle to reclaim his memories, his former companions and his soul.

City of Truth

James Morrow

In Veritas, people have been conditioned to always tell the truth, no matter how unnerving the truth may be. Jack Sperry must learn to lie in order to save his son in this witty science fiction novella. Recipient of a 1992 Nebula Award.

Walter Mosley

Life in America a generation from now isn't much different from today: The drugs are better, the daily grind is worse. The gap between the rich and the poor has widened to a chasm. You can store the world's legal knowledge on a chip in your little finger, while the Supreme Court has decreed that constitutional rights don't apply to any individual who challenges the system. Justice is swiftly delivered by automated courts, so the prison industry is booming. And while the media declare racism is dead, word on the street is that even in a colorless society, it's a crime to be black.

But the world still turns, and folks still have to get by with the hands they're dealt, folks such as:

Ptolemy "Popo" Bent: This gentle backwoods child has a genius I.Q.- and a soul so pure that officials want him locked up forever.

Folio Johnson: A hardboiled, cyber-augmented private eye who can see beneath the dark poetry of the metropolis, he will need an even greater edge than that to find out who's systematically murdering rich, young Nazis.

Fera Jones: She's the boxing Queen of the Ring who must still fight all comers to save her dad, preserve her identity, and protect the fans who believe in her.

Dr. Ivan Kismet: The world's richest man, Macrocode's CEO is a tycoon, tyrant, and messiah who is evidently more powerful than God. So it's too bad for everyone that Dr. Kismet is utterly insane.

Walter Mosley brings to life the celebs, working stiffs, leaders, victims, technocrats, crooks, oppressors, and revolutionaries who inhabit a glorious all-American nightmare that's just around the corner. Welcome to Futureland.

Table of Contents:

Angel's Island - (2001) - novelette
Doctor Kismet - (2001) - novelette
En Masse - (2001) - novella
Little Brother - (2001) - shortstory
The Electric Eye - (2001) - novelette
The Greatest - (2001) - novelette
The Nig in Me - (2001) - novelette
Voices - (2001) - novelette
Whispers in the Dark - (2001) - novelette

The Last Day

Andrew Hunter Murray

A world half in darkness. A secret she must bring to light.

It is 2059 and the world has crashed. Forty years ago, a solar catastrophe began to slow the planet's rotation to a stop. Now one half of the globe is permanently sunlit, the other half trapped in an endless night. The United States has colonized the southern half of Great Britain--lucky enough to find itself in the narrow habitable region left between frozen darkness and scorching sunlight--where both nations have managed to survive the ensuing chaos by isolating themselves from the rest of the world.

Ellen Hopper is a scientist living on a frostbitten rig in the cold Atlantic. She wants nothing more to do with her country after its slide into casual violence and brutal authoritarianism. Yet when two government officials arrive, demanding she return to London to see her dying college mentor, she accepts--and begins to unravel a secret that threatens not only the nation's fragile balance, but the future of the whole human race.

The Sanctuary

Andrew Hunter Murray

In a disintegrating and lawless near-future, a young man journeys north to a mysterious island owned by one of the world's wealthiest men--and finds an entire new civilization waiting for him.

Ben is a painter from the crowded, turbulent city. For six months his fiancée, Cara, has been working on the remote island of Sanctuary Rock, the private estate of millionaire philanthropist Sir John Pemberley. Now she has decided to break off their engagement and stay there for good.

Ben travels to the island to try and win Cara back. After an arduous journey, he finds himself compelled to stay. But as Ben begins to traverse Pemberley's kingdom, he begins to uncover the truth of the apparently perfect society the enigmatic Sir John is building. Is Sanctuary Rock truly a second Eden, as he claims--or a previously undiscovered level of hell?

The Proving Ground

Alec Nevala-Lee

This novella originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, January-February 2017. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection (2018), edited by Gardner Dozois. It was reprinted in the e-book version of Lightspeed Magazine Issue 94 in March 2018.

Resolution Way

Carl Neville

A financially comfortable but troubled young London author, Alex Hargreaves stumbles across the work of an unknown writer from the early 1990s, Vernon Crane, and presuming the missing Crane is dead, decides to pass the work off as his own. The problem is that the novel he wishes to plagiarize has been split among Crane's disparate and scattered group of friends, all of whom, twenty years later, are struggling with the demands of a life in a Britain in which current trends toward inequality and the concentration of political power have accelerated. Hargreave's mission to track down Crane's work sets in motion a series of encounters alternately tragic, redemptive and liberating and threatens to destroy Hargreaves own world in the process.

Combining the best elements of a literary thriller and speculative fiction, Resolution Way is a bleakly humorous satire on contemporary Britain, a meditation on the power of the past, the forces that shape our lives and the ways in which the possibility of the miraculous still remains.

All the Myriad Ways

Larry Niven

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Galaxy Magazine, October 1968. The story can aslo be found in the anthologies Worlds of Maybe (1970) edited by Robert Silverberg, Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction (1980), edited by Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander, and The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century (2001), edited by Harry Turtledove and Martin H. Greenberg. It is included in the collecions All the Myriad Ways (1971), N-Space (1990) and The Best of Larry Niven (2010).

Notes from the Burning Age

Claire North

Once the world was on fire - but that was long ago. The Burning Age gave way to an era of peace, humanity finding harmony with nature and each other, as new cities rose from the ruins of the old.

Ven used to be a holy man, a guardian of ancient archives. Sorting secrets from sacrilege, he studied the past so that we might never repeat it. But some ideas never fade, and as a new war brews, fuelled by old knowledge and older ambitions, Ven must decide how far he's willing to go to save this new world, and how much he is willing to lose.

Sweet Harmony

Claire North

Harmony is tired. Tired of working so hard, tired of the way she looks, tired of being average.

But all that changes when she decides to splash out and upgrade her nanos. And why not? Everyone's doing it now. With a simple in-app purchase, you can update the tech in your bloodstream to transform yourself - get enhanced brain power, the perfect body or a dazzling smile. Suddenly, everything starts going right for her. She's finally becoming the person she always wanted to be.

But as Harmony will find out, there's a limit to how many upgrades a body can take...

The Beehive

Margaret O'Donnell

A rediscovered classic of dystopian fiction, the long-lost predecessor to The Handmaid's Tale.

In the not-too-distant future, with the country in economic collapse, the dictator Gorston has risen to power by blaming the nation's woes on women for having taken men's jobs. In this new society, women have only two possible roles: they must either stay at home and bear children or else perform the menial jobs that men don't want. These workers are known as the 'Grey Ones,' women brainwashed into accepting their servile state and forced to dye their hair grey and wear grey clothes to make them as unattractive as possible. Now a small group of Grey Ones has finally decided to fight back and overthrow the oppressive regime, but Gorston's ruthless head of secret police is determined to root them out and crush them at any cost....

Land Under England

Joseph O'Neill

Anthony Julian travels to a subterranean world in search of his father, only to discover the elder Julian has been transformed by the mind control techniques of that world's rulers. A dystopian lost world novel with an anti-fascist subtext.

The Memory Police

Yoko Ogawa

On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses--until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.

When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.

Boons & The Camp

David Ohle

From the author of the legendary MOTORMAN come two twined novellas--BOONS and THE CAMP. BOONS, co-written with an eccentric and anonymous South African professor of entomology, deals with the cultivation of half-bird half-simian creatures called Boons. The professor travels the world in his search for a Boon he can mate with, perhaps love, and finds Ruthie, the object of his dreams and the subject of his oddball experiments. THE CAMP takes place around a provincial mill that spins sheep's wool into theatrical and Santa beards. In the mill camp, workers live in brutal poverty under Mr. Ganzfeld, a cruelly whimsical boss who lost his nose in a lightning strike and will commit any depredation to find a "real" replacement, including murder.

Table of Contents

Boons
The Camp

The Old Reactor

David Ohle

Moldenke is sent to the "free" prison town at Altobello with an indeterminate sentence. He has a rare bowel condition. Altobello is full of "Jellyheads" and features an old nuclear reactor on the edge of town. No one seems to remember what the reactor really is, until it's almost too late.

South

Frank Owen

South takes place in a USA ravaged by Civil War. It's been thirty years since the first wind-borne viruses ended the war between North and South - and still they keep coming. Every wind brings a new and terrifying way to die. The few survivors live in constant fear, hiding from the wind - and from each other.

In this harsh Southern expanse, brothers Garrett and Dyce Jackson are on the run from brutal law-enforcers. They meet Vida, a lone traveller on a secret quest. Together, they will journey into the dark heart of a country riven by warfare and disease.

The Bees

Laline Paull

The Handmaid's Tale meets The Hunger Games in this brilliantly imagined debut set in an ancient culture where only the queen may breed and deformity means death.

Flora 717 is a sanitation worker, a member of the lowest caste in her orchard hive where work and sacrifice are the highest virtues and worship of the beloved Queen the only religion. But Flora is not like other bees. With circumstances threatening the hive's survival, her curiosity is regarded as a dangerous flaw but her courage and strength are an asset. She is allowed to feed the newborns in the royal nursery and then to become a forager, flying alone and free to collect pollen. She also finds her way into the Queen's inner sanctum, where she discovers mysteries about the hive that are both profound and ominous.

But when Flora breaks the most sacred law of all—daring to challenge the Queen's fertility—enemies abound, from the fearsome fertility police who enforce the strict social hierarchy to the high priestesses jealously wedded to power. Her deepest instincts to serve and sacrifice are now overshadowed by an even deeper desire, a fierce maternal love that will bring her into conflict with her conscience, her heart, her society—and lead her to unthinkable deeds.

Thrilling, suspenseful and spectacularly imaginative, The Bees gives us a dazzling young heroine and will change forever the way you look at the world outside your window.

A Plague of Pythons

The pythons had entered into Mankind. No man knew at what moment he might be Possessed!

On Christmas the world's freedom died. Every man, woman and child lay in the grip of fear, for no one knew at what moment his nearest friend or a casual stranger might suddenly be possessed by some brutal mind... and begin to murder and destroy. For Chandler it was worse than for most. He was both victim and executioner. He had suffered himself, and he had committed a violent crime while under the strange domination. Accusing of hoaxing he was driven from his home. He wandered the world and found it smashed like a spoiled child's plaything?now Chandler was in the very presence of the destroyers! But what could one person do against such power -- the power of gods!

My Lady Greensleeves

This guard smelled trouble and it could be counted on to come-for a nose for trouble was one of the many talents bred here! A classic novella about the future of law enforcement by Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master Frederik Pohl.

This story originally appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1957. It can also be found in the collections The Case Against Tomorrow (1957) and Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories (2005).

The Age of the Pussyfoot

MAN ALIVE

Charles Forrester was out of the deepfreeze. It had taken several centuries to bring him back to life.

But what a life it was!

The 26th Century offered pleasure at the flip of a button -- everything from gourmet food to stupendous sex right there for the asking. And for a rich man like Forrester, the possibilities of delight were endless.

Of course, everything else was endless too. But by the time Forrester realized that he had had enough of a good thing -- even too much! -- he realized that he would somehow have to kill himself if he were ever to survive!

It was the Age of the Pussyfoot

The Thick and the Lean

Chana Porter

In the quaint religious town of Seagate, abstaining from food brings one closer to God.

But Beatrice Bolano is hungry. She craves the forbidden: butter, flambé, marzipan. As Seagate takes increasingly extreme measures to regulate every calorie its citizens consume, Beatrice must make a choice: give up her secret passion for cooking or leave the only community she has known.

Elsewhere, Reiko Rimando has left her modest roots for a college tech scholarship in the big city. A flawless student, she is set up for success...until her school pulls her funding, leaving her to face either a mountain of debt or a humiliating return home. But Reiko is done being at the mercy of the system. She forges a third path--outside of the law.

With the guidance of a mysterious cookbook written by a kitchen maid centuries ago, Beatrice and Reiko each grasp for a life of freedom--something more easily imagined than achieved in a world dominated by catastrophic corporate greed.

A Series of Steaks

Vina Jie-Min Prasad

This Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon Award-nominated Clarkesworld Reader's Poll-winning novelette originally appeared in Clarkesworld, #124, January 2017. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Twelve (2018), edited by Jonathan Strahan, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection (2018), edited by Gardner Dozois, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 3 (2018), edited by Neil Clarke, and The Apex Book of World SF: Volume 5 (2018), edited by Cristina Jurado and Lavie Tidhar, and Nebula Awards Showcase 2019, edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

A Dream of Wessex

Fugue for a Darkening Island

The western democracies are disintegrating, scarred by violence and gripped with fear of terrorist attacks. Trying to find solutions to today's problems, Julia Stretton and other specialists at the Wessex Project have created a virtual reality projection of a utopian future where all current issues have been resolved - how did they achieve it? But on entering Wessex, they lose all memory of their 'real' lives outside, and as they move back and forth the lines between dream and reality become obscured. When Julia's ex-lover, the sadistic Paul Mason, joins the project, he has a sinister plan to take the Wessex projection to a new and terrifying level...

Fugue - a glimpse into the future of Britain.

At a time when the country is caught by civil conflict between a right-wing government and the liberal element, a third group arrives – refugee Africans from a continent devastated by nuclear attack. The country is ripe for a three-way civil war. Total breakdown in communications quickly follows and a nightmare situation grips the community.

Alan Whitman, the central character of this frightening story, represents the view of the man-in-the-street. How will he cope with this situation when he has opted out all his life, from political, personal and moral decisisons?

The Inverted World

The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer

The city is winched along a track through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Tracks must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city's engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the "optimum," slipping into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on earth. The only alternative to the city's forward progress is death.

The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in creches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. And yet, for all that, the city is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the population is dwindling, and the rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum.

Helward Mann is a member of the city's elite. Better than anyone, he knows the risks the city runs, how tenuous is its continued existence, how essential it is that discipline be maintained. And yet, as he is about to discover, the world is even stranger than he dreamed.

The Forever Watch

David Ramirez

All that is left of humanity is on a thousand-year journey to a new planet aboard one ship, the Noah, which is also carrying a dangerous serial killer...

As a city planner on the Noah, Hana Dempsey is a gifted psychic, economist, hacker, and bureaucrat, and is considered "mission critical". She is nonreplaceable, important, essential - but after serving her mandatory Breeding Duty, the impregnation and birthing that all women are obligated to undergo - her life loses purpose, as she privately mourns the child she will never be permitted to know.

When policeman Leonard Barrens enlists her and her hacking skills in the unofficial investigation of this mentor's death, Dempsey finds herself increasingly captivated by both the case and Barrens himself. According to Information Security, the missing man has simply "retired" - nothing unusual is cited, such as the mutilated remains Barrens found in the old man's apartment. Unraveling this cover-up reveals a growing list of mutilated victims and suspicious deaths - evidence to suggest a serial killer is operating onboard the ship. As Barrens and Dempsey delve through lost dataspaces and plunge deep into the uninhabited regions of the ship, they discover that the answer could be far worse.

What they do with that answer will determine the fate of all humanity in this thrilling page-turner.

Flowertown

S. G. Redling

When Feno Chemical spilled an experimental pesticide in rural Iowa, scores of people died. Those who survived contamination were herded into a US Army medically maintained quarantine and cut off from the world. Dosed with powerful drugs to combat the poison, their bodies give off a sickly sweet smell and the containment zone becomes known simply as Flowertown.

Seven years later, the infrastructure is crumbling, supplies are dwindling, and nobody is getting clean. Ellie Cauley doesn't care anymore. Despite her paranoid best friend's insistence that conspiracies abound, she focuses on three things: staying high, hooking up with the Army sergeant she's not supposed to be fraternizing with and, most importantly, trying to ignore her ever-simmering rage. But when a series of deadly events rocks the compound, Ellie suspects her friend is right--something dangerous is going down in Flowertown and all signs point to a twisted plan of greed and abuse. She and the other residents of Flowertown have been betrayed by someone with a deadly agenda and their plan is just getting started. Time is running out. With nobody to trust and nowhere to go, Ellie decides to fight with the last weapon she has--her rage.

Flowertown is a high-intensity conspiracy thriller that brings the worst-case scenario vividly to life and will keep readers riveted until the final haunting page.

Salt

Adam Roberts

After 37 years on a brutal and dangerous journey through space, a federation of settlers finally arrives on the planet Salt. Thus begins the colonization of this brave new world--a process that inevitably slips into a tragedy of biblical proportions. The two communities who undertook the voyage originally united in peace and a shared vision of a fresh beginning. Once isolated in a landscape of cruel majesty and minimal resources, however, ancient enmities begin to tear them apart. Related alternately by Petja, from the Alsist people, and Barlei (a Senaarian), their different voices, perspectives, and experiences come together to make an unusually rich and complex story about the fragility of life.

The Stone War

Madeleine E. Robins

John Tietjen loves New York City like life itself. But while he's out of town at a conference, confused reports come out of the city. Millions of refugees are streaming out, each bearing contradictory tales of fire, earthquake, explosions, collapse.Making his perilous way back, he gathers a few survivors and establishes a shelter. But the full nature of the catastrophe is still unclear. As he re-homesteads the city he loves, and wonders whether help from outside will ever come, John will come face-to-face with the terrible truth, and with his unique chance to redeem it.

The Power

Frank M. Robinson

A researcher named Tanner, discovers evidence of a person with psychic abilities among his coworkers. As he tries to uncover the superhuman, his existence is erased and his associates murdered, until he faces a showdown with an apparently undefeatable opponent.

Janelle Monáe

In The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer, singer-songwriter, actor, fashion icon, activist, and worldwide superstar Janelle Monáe brings to the written page the Afrofuturistic world of one of her critically acclaimed albums, exploring how different threads of liberation--queerness, race, gender plurality, and love--become tangled with future possibilities of memory and time in such a totalitarian landscape... and what the costs might be when trying to unravel and weave them into freedoms.

Whoever controls our memories controls the future.

Janelle Monáe and an incredible array of talented collaborating creators have written a collection of tales comprising the bold vision and powerful themes that have made Monáe such a compelling and celebrated storyteller. Dirty Computer introduced a world in which thoughts--as a means of self-conception--could be controlled or erased by a select few. And whether human, A.I., or other, your life and sentience was dictated by those who'd convinced themselves they had the right to decide your fate.

That was until Jane 57821 decided to remember and break free.

Expanding from that mythos, these stories fully explore what it's like to live in such a totalitarian existence...and what it takes to get out of it. Building off the traditions of speculative writers such as Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, Becky Chambers, and Nnedi Okorafor--and filled with the artistic genius and powerful themes that have made Monáe a worldwide icon in the first place--The Memory Librarian serves readers tales grounded in the human trials of identity expression, technology, and love, but also reaching through to the worlds of memory and time within, and the stakes and power that exists there.

The Memory of Whiteness

Kim Stanley Robinson

In 3229 A.D., human civilization is scattered among the planets, moons, and asteroids of the solar system. Billions of lives depend on the technology derived from the breakthroughs of the greatest physicist of the age, Arthur Holywelkin. But in the last years of his life, Holywelkin devoted himself to building a strange, beautiful, and complex musical instrument that he called The Orchestra.

Johannes Wright has earned the honor of becoming the Ninth Master of Holywelkin's Orchestra. Follow him on his Grand Tour of the Solar System, as he journeys down the gravity well toward the sun, impelled by a destiny he can scarcely understand, and is pursued by mysterious foes who will tell him anything except the reason for their enmity.

Spare Parts

Sally Rogers-Davidson

C-grade citizen of the Greater Melbourne Megalopolis, Kelty lives in a city filled with towers reaching halfway to the sky. While 'Skywalkers', the A- and B-grade citizens live above the clouds with access to all the wonders of the late 21st century, 'Subbies' like Kelty must dwell in the shadows and smog of the streets below.

When her best friend is horribly injured in an explosion at the recycle plant where they both work, Kelty is faced with the loss of a friend and a hopeless future, or the unthinkable choice of leaving everyone and everything behind to join the Space Corps. There's just one catch - first she must trade in her human body for a State-of-the-Art Cyboform.

Spare Parts was shortlisted for the 1999 Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and chosen as a Notable Australian Children's Book for the Year 2000 by the Children's Book Council of Australia.

Anthem

Ayn Rand

Anthem is a dystopian fiction novella by Ayn Rand, written in 1937 and first published in 1938 in England.

It takes place at some unspecified future date when mankind has entered another dark age characterized by irrationality, collectivism, and socialistic thinking and economics. Technological advancement is now carefully planned (when it is allowed to occur at all) and the concept of individuality has been eliminated.

The Child Garden

Geoff Ryman

In the city of the future, humans photosynthesize, viruses educate people, organics have replaced electronics... and almost no one lives past forty. In the city of the future, Milena is resistant to the viruses. She is barred from the Consensus. She has Bad Grammar. In the city of the future, Milena feels alone. In the city of the future, Milena meets Rolfa, the huge and hirsute Genetically Engineered Polar Woman. And might, just might, find a place for herself after all...

The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain

Sofia Samatar

The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels of a mining ship out among the stars. His whole world changes -- literally -- when he is yanked "upstairs" and informed he has been given an opportunity to be educated at the ship's university alongside the elite.

Overwhelmed and alone, the boy forms a bond with the woman he comes to know as "the professor," a weary idealist and descendent of the Chained who has spent her career striving for validation from her more senior colleagues, only to fall short at every turn.

Together, the boy and the woman will embark on a transformative journey to grasp the design of the chains that fetter them both -- and are the key to breaking free.

Terrarium

Scott Russell Sanders

In the 21st century, humanity has abandoned the Earth for the Enclosure: a network of cities, built from the salvage of the old world, sealed against all of nature. In Oregon City, a small group plans to escape to the wild Earth beyond the walls. United by something much more than just an idea, they meet in secret. But they are not unobserved. And what they find outside is not what they expect.

Metatropolis

John Scalzi

Five original tales set in a shared urban future-from some of the hottest young writers in modern SF

A strange man comes to an even stranger encampment... a bouncer becomes the linchpin of an unexpected urban movement... a courier on the run has to decide who to trust in a dangerous city... a slacker in a "zero-footprint" town gets a most unusual new job...and a weapons investigator uses his skills to discover a metropolis hidden right in front of his eyes.

Welcome to the future of cities. Welcome to Metatropolis.

More than an anthology, Metatropolis is the brainchild of five of science fiction's hottest writers-Elizabeth Bear, Tobias Buckell, Jay Lake, Karl Schroeder, and project editor John Scalzi--who combined their talents to build a new urban future, and then wrote their own stories in this collectively-constructed world. The results are individual glimpses of a shared vision, and a reading experience unlike any you've had before.

When the Sparrow Falls

Neil Sharpson

Life in the Caspian Republic has taught Agent Nikolai South two rules. Trust No One. And work just hard enough not to make enemies.

Here, in the last sanctuary for the dying embers of the human race in a world run by artificial intelligence, if you stray from the path - your life is forfeit. But when a Party propagandist is killed - and is discovered as a "machine" - he's given a new mission: chaperone the widow, Lily, who has arrived to claim her husband's remains.

But when South sees that she, the first "machine" ever allowed into the country, bears an uncanny resemblance to his late wife, he's thrown into a maelstrom of betrayal, murder, and conspiracy that may bring down the Republic for good.

Citizen in Space

Robert Sheckley's second story collection, including:

The Mountain Without a Name
The Accountant - (1954)
Hunting Problem - (1955)
A Thief in Time - (1954)
The Luckiest Man in the World - (1955)
Hands Off - (1954)
Something for Nothing - (1954)
A Ticket to Tranai - (1955)
The Battle - (1954)
Skulking Permit - (1954)
Citizen in Space - (1955)
Ask a Foolish Question - (1953)

Journey Beyond Tomorrow

Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley

Once man had ruled Earth. His intelligence and skill had multiplied his power a billion times. He was supreme..........

But that was long ago, before technology had become master of its creator. Now a monstruous tyranny had risen, its shadow falling over every moment of every life..........

How could Jones hope to defeat this overwhelming force? What chance had one lone man against the vast tidal wave of unreason about to swallow up all mankind?

JOURNEY BEYOND TOMORROW, tells the tale of a Picaresque journey through an imagined future taken by a naive and innocent man unprepared for the wonders and oddities he encounters. Sheckley examines the present through the distorting lens of a future wonderfully skewed from and yet darkly, hilariously similar to our own world.

Also published under the title The Journey of Joenes.

Robert Sheckley was science fiction's in-house reply to the black humorists of the 1950s and 60s: Bruce Jay Friedman, Terry Southern, and the young Thomas Pynchon were his none-too-distant relatives; Mort Sahl's comedy, Charles Schultz's cartoons, and Tom Lehrer's songs all mined similar veins. Sheckley targeted the conformity and consumerism of our mid century technotopia while it was still under construction.

His new worlds, alternate universes, and future dystopias have only become more present with the passing years, even as his career, played out both in the pulp magazines and in front-line venues like Playboy and Omni, is a glimpse of a time when "science fiction writer" could be a kind of hipster credential. Mordant, absurdist, and deadpan, the best of Sheckley's dissident farces represent science fiction's high-water mark as an allegorical clearinghouse for twenty-century angst.

The Status Civilization

Will Barrent had no memory of his crime . . . but he found himself shipped across space to a brutal prison-planet. On Omega, his only chance to advance himself -- and stay alive -- is to commit an endless series of violent crimes. The average inmate's life expectancy from time of arrival is three years. Can Barrett survive, escape, and return to Earth to clear his name?

Frontera

Lewis Shiner

Corporate mercenary Kane, hired by the giant conglomerate Pulsystems, journeys to the long-abandoned Frontera, the first permanent Mars settlement, and finds that he has become an unwilling human weapon in the battle for new technology.

A Time of Changes

Three thousand years after Earth's colonization of the planet Borthan, stories of self-serving hypocrisy that occurred among the first arrivals have bred a culture that forbids emotional sharing and denies the naturally human concept of 'self.' Kinnall Darival breaks the strict code of the Covenant to record the sordid details of his rebellious life from the days of his royal youth to self-appointed prophet of love.

Master of Life and Death

Originally appeared in Ace Double D-237 in 1957.

Global overcrowding, a new immortality serum and an unfriendly alien ambassador are only a few of the problems confronting Roy Walton, government's new Master of Life and Death in Robert Silverberg's early and accomplished novel. Praised by a distinguished critic, Anthony Boucher, for "its complete clarity and narrative drive" the novel retains its power today.

The Stochastic Man

Lew Nichols is in the business of stochastic prediction. A mixture of sophisticated analysis and inspired guesswork, it is the nearest man can get to predicting the future. And Nichols is very good at it. So good that he is soon indispensable to Paul Quinn, the ambitious and charismatic mayor of New York whose sights are firmly set on the presidency. But there is nothing paranormal about stochastic prediction: Nichols can't actually see the future. However, Martin Carvajal apparently can and he offers to help Nichols do so too. It's an offer Nichols can't resist, even though he can clearly see the devastating impact that knowing in advance every act of his life has on Carvajal. For Carvajal has even seen his own death.

The World Inside

Day of the Oprichnik: A Novel

Earth 2381: The hordes of humanity have withdrawn into isolated 1000-story Urbmons, comfortably controlled multicity-buildings which perpetuate an open culture of free sex and unrestricted population growth. Nearly all of Earth's 75 billion live in the hundreds of monolithic structures scattered across the globe, with the exception of the small agricultural communes that supply the Urbmons with food. When a restless Urbmon computer engineer begins to think unblessworthy thoughts of making a trip outside, he risks being labeled a flippo, for whom there is only one punishment.

Flashback

Dan Simmons

The United States is near total collapse. But 87% of the population doesn't care: they're addicted to flashback, a drug that allows its users to re-experience the best moments of their lives. After ex-detective Nick Bottom's wife died in a car accident, he went under the flash to be with her; he's lost his job, his teenage son, and his livelihood as a result.

Nick may be a lost soul but he's still a good cop, so he is hired to investigate the murder of a top governmental advisor's son. This flashback-addict becomes the one man who may be able to change the course of an entire nation turning away from the future to live in the past.

A provocative novel set in a future that seems scarily possible, FLASHBACK proves why Dan Simmons is one of our most exciting and versatile writers.

Tik-Tok

John Sladek

Something has gone very seriously wrong with Tik-Tok's "asimov circuits." They should keep him on the straight and narrow, following Asimov's first law of robotics: A robot shall not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm. But, that's not what's happening. Although every thing looks fine from the surface, and Tik-Tok maintains the outward appearance of a mild-mannered robot, his agenda is murderously different. And, it's not just because of his artistic tendencies and sympathy for the robot rights movement, either.

The Chimes

Anna Smaill

After the end of a brutal civil war, London is divided, with slums standing next to a walled city of elites. Monk-like masters are selected for special schooling and shut away for decades, learning to write beautiful compositions for the chimes, played citywide morning and night, to mute memory and keep the citizens trapped in ignorance.

A young orphan named Simon arrives in London with nothing but the vague sense of a half-forgotten promise, to locate someone. What he finds is a new family--a gang of scavengers that patrols the underbelly of the city looking for valuable metal to sell. Drawn in by an enigmatic and charismatic leader, a blind young man named Lucien with a gift for song, Simon forgets entirely what originally brought him to the place he has now made his home.

In this alternate London, the past is a mystery, each new day feels the same as the last, and before is considered "blasphony." But Simon has a unique gift--the gift of retaining memories--that will lead him to discover a great injustice and take him far beyond the meager life as a member of Lucien's gang. Before long he will be engaged in an epic struggle for justice, love, and freedom.

The Chimes is an impressive work of speculative fiction, an imaginative adventure elegantly told. The Chimes reveals the human capacity to create both beauty and terror, in art and in life.

Marrow Island

Alexis M. Smith

What would you give to save the thing you love the most?

It has been twenty years since Lucie Bowen left the islands. Twenty years ago, the May Day Quake set loose catastrophic waves along the west coast, from Alaska to California, shattering thousands of lives. Twenty years ago, Lucie's father disappeared in an explosion at the Marrow Island oil refinery, a tragedy that destroyed the island's ecosystem and sent Lucie and her mother to the mainland to start anew. Twenty years ago, Lucie and her best friend, Katie, were just Puget Sound children, tucked up under their desks, hovering under mylar sheets, hoping to survive.

Now, Katie writes with strange and miraculous news. Marrow Island is no longer uninhabitable, no longer abandoned. She is part of a community, a mysterious Colony, that has, somehow, conjured life again from Marrow's soil. Lucie returns. Her journalist instincts tell her there's more to the Colony and their charismatic leader--a former nun with an all-consuming plan--than its members want her to know. The island's astonishing rebirth seems to have come at great cost--perhaps to the colonists themselves. As she uncovers their secrets, will Lucie endanger more than their mission? What price will she pay for the truth?

I was always a part of you, and you were always a part of me, Katie writes. And in this marvelously spun story Alexis Smith reaches into the depths of our connections to our pasts, our loved ones, our devotions. Our choices may bring us to the brink, but within our promises to each other and our hopes for the future, at the intersection of science and faith and grace, there may well be miracles in the making.

Rivers

Michael Farris Smith

It had been raining for weeks. Maybe months. He had forgotten the last day that it hadn't rained, when the storms gave way to the pale blue of the Gulf sky, when the birds flew and the clouds were white and sunshine glistened across the drenched land.

Following years of catastrophic hurricanes, the Gulf Coast--stretching from the Florida panhandle to the western Louisiana border--has been brought to its knees. The region is so punished and depleted that the government has drawn a new boundary ninety miles north of the coastline. Life below the Line offers no services, no electricity, and no resources, and those who stay behind live by their own rules.

Cohen is one who stayed. Unable to overcome the crushing loss of his wife and unborn child who were killed during an evacuation, he returned home to Mississippi to bury them on family land. Until now he hasn't had the strength to leave them behind, even to save himself.

But after his home is ransacked and all of his carefully accumulated supplies stolen, Cohen is finally forced from his shelter. On the road north, he encounters a colony of survivors led by a fanatical, snake-handling preacher named Aggie who has dangerous visions of repopulating the barren region.

Realizing what's in store for the women Aggie is holding against their will, Cohen is faced with a decision: continue to the Line alone, or try to shepherd the madman's captives across the unforgiving land with the biggest hurricane yet bearing down--and Cohen harboring a secret that may pose the greatest threat of all.

Salvage This World

Michael Farris Smith

There was no rising from the dead and there was no hand to calm the storms and there was no peace in no valley.

In the hurricane-ravaged bottomlands of a near-future South Mississippi, where stores are closing and jobs are few, a fierce zealot has gained a foothold, capitalizing on the vulnerability of a dwindling population and a burning need for hope. As she preaches and promises salvation from the light of the pulpit, in the shadows she sows the seeds of violence.

Elsewhere, Jessie and her toddler, Jace, are on the run across the Mississippi/Louisiana line, in a resentful return to her childhood home and her ghost-haunted father. Holt, Jace's father, is missing and hunted by a brutish crowd, and an old man witnesses the wrong thing in the depths of night. In only a matter of days, all of their lives will collide, and be altered, in the maelstrom of the changing world.

Vladimir Sorokin

Moscow, 2028. A scream, a moan, and a death rattle slowly pull Andrei Danilovich Komiaga out of his drunken stupor. But wait?that's just his ring tone. So begins another day in the life of an oprichnik, one of the czar's most trusted courtiers?and one of the country's most feared men.

In this new New Russia, where futuristic technology and the draconian codes of Ivan the Terrible are in perfect synergy, Komiaga will attend extravagant parties, partake in brutal executions, and consume an arsenal of drugs. He will rape and pillage, and he will be moved to tears by the sweetly sung songs of his homeland.

Vladimir Sorokin has imagined a near future both too disturbing to contemplate and too realistic to dismiss. But like all of his best work, Sorokin's new novel explodes with invention and dark humor. A startling, relentless portrait of a troubled and troubling empire, Day of the Oprichnik is at once a richly imagined vision of the future and a razor-sharp diagnosis of a country in crisis.

Bug Jack Barron

Norman Spinrad

TV megastar Jack Barron hosts the wildly popular Bug Jack Barron, a phone-in show that listens to public gripes and puts politicians and bosses on the spot--live. Naturally Barron pulls his punches for safety's sake... until he tangles with paranoid billionaire Benedict Howards, peddler of cryonic immortality, and walks into a minefield of deadly cover-ups. Violence erupts. Howards believes he can buy anyone, even Barron's estranged wife, even Barron. Barron doesn't mind selling out if the coin is immortality.

The Men in the Jungle

Norman Spinrad

All his life, Fraden had been in control, had bent situations, conditions, people, to his own will. He had stood solidly, reaching out to change men and events, but had never been changed by them. He had been booted out of Greater New York, he had taken and lost the Asteroid Belt, and he was still the same Bart Fraden. But on Sangre... something had been done to him. He had been tampered with. For the first time in his life, Bart Fraden felt himself moved by forces beyond his conscious control. Had he changed Sangre? Or had the planet changed him? For the first time in his life, Bart Fraden was afraid.

The Diamond Age

Neal Stephenson

Decades into our future, a stone's throw from the ancient city of Shanghai, a brilliant nanotechnologist named John Percival Hackworth, has just broken the rigorous moral code of his tribe, the powerful neo-Victorians. He's made an illicit copy of a state-of-the-art interactive device called A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, commissioned by an eccentric duke for his grandchild. Stolen for Hackworth's own daughter, the Primer's purpose is to educate and raise a girl capable of thinking for herself. It performs its function superbly. Unfortunately for Hackworth, his smuggled copy has fallen into the wrong hands.

Young Nell and her brother Harv are thetes--members of the poor, tribeless class. Neglected by their mother, Harv looks after Nell. When he and his gang waylay a certain neo-Victorian--John Percival Hackworth-- in the seamy streets of their neighborhood, Harv brings Nell something special: the Primer.

Following the discovery of his crime, Hackworth begins an odyssey of his own. Expelled from the neo-Victorian paradise, squeezed by agents of Protocol Enforcement on one side and a Mandarin underworld crimelord on the other, he searches for an elusive figure known as the Alchemist. His and Nell's quest will ultimately lead them to another seeker whose fate is bound up with the Primer-- a woman who holds the key to a vast, subversive information network that is destined to decode and reprogram the future of humanity.

Distraction

Bruce Sterling

From Bruce Sterling, bestselling author of Heavy Weather and Holy Fire, comes this startling, disturbing, and darkly comic vision of the future of America. It is the story of a once great nation coming apart at the seams while an unending spectacle of politics, science, sex, and corruption has everyone too busy to notice....

It's November 2044, an election year, and the state of the Union is a farce. The federal government is broke, cities are privately owned, the military is shaking down citizens in the streets, and Wyoming is on fire. The last place anyone expects to find an answer is the nation's capital.

Washington has become a circus and no one knows that better than Oscar Valparaiso. A master political spin doctor, Oscar has been in the background for years, doing his best to put the proper spin on anything that comes up. Now he wants to do something quite unusual in politics. He wants to make a difference. But Oscar has a skeleton in his closet: a grotesque and unspeakable scandal that haunts his personal life.

He has one unexpected ally: Dr. Greta Penninger. She is a gifted neurologist at the bleeding edge of the neural revolution. Together Oscar and Greta know the human mind inside and out. And they are about to use that knowledge to spread a very powerful message: that it's a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It's an idea whose time has come...again. And once again so have its enemies: every technofanatic, government goon, and reactionary laptop assassin in America.

Like all revolutionaries, Oscar and Greta might not survive to change the world, but they're determined to put a new spin on it.

We Shall Sing a Song into the Deep

Andrew Kelly Stewart

Remy is a Chorister, rescued from the surface world and raised to sing in a choir of young boys. Remy is part of a strange crew who control the Leviathan, an aging nuclear submarine, that bears a sacred mission: to trigger the Second Coming when the time is right.

But Remy has a secret too - she's the submarine's only girl. Gifted with the missile's launch key by the Leviathan's dying caplain, she swears to keep it safe. Safety, however, is not the priority of the new caplain, who has his own ideas about the mission. When a surface-dweller is captured during a raid, Remy's faith becomes completely overturned. Now, her last judgement may transform the fate of everything.

Road Out Of Winter

Alison Stine

Wylodine comes from a world of paranoia and poverty – her family grows marijuana illegally, and life has always been a battle. Now she’s been left behind to tend the crop alone. Then spring doesn’t return for the second year in a row, bringing unprecedented, extreme winter

With grow lights stashed in her truck and a pouch of precious seeds, she begins a journey, determined to start over away from Appalachian Ohio. But the icy roads and strangers hidden in the hills are treacherous. After a harrowing encounter with a violent cult, Wil and her small group of exiles become a target for the cult’s volatile leader. Because she has the most valuable skill in the climate chaos: she can make things grow.

The Doomed City

Arkady Strugatsky
Boris Strugatsky

The magnum opus of Russia's greatest science fiction novelists translated into English for the first time

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are widely considered the greatest of Russian science fiction masters, and their most famous work, Roadside Picnic, has enjoyed great popularity worldwide. Yet the novel they worked hardest on, that was their own favorite, and that readers worldwide have acclaimed as their magnum opus, has never before been published in English. The Doomed City was so politically risky that the Strugatsky brothers kept its existence a complete secret even from their closest friends for sixteen years after its completion in 1972. It was only published in Russia during perestroika in the late 1980s, the last of their works to see publication. It was translated into a host of European languages, and now appears in English in a major new effort by acclaimed translator Andrew Bromfield.

The Doomed City is set in an experimental city whose sun gets 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 to govern themselves, advised by Mentors whose purpose seems inscrutable. Andrei Voronin, a young astronomer plucked from Leningrad in the 1950s, is a die-hard believer in the Experiment, even though his first job in the city is as a garbage collector. And as increasinbly nightmarish scenarios begin to affect the city, he rises through the political hierarchy, with devastating effect. Boris Strugatsky wrote that the task of writing The Doomed City "was genuinely delightful and fascinating work." Readers will doubtless say the same of the experience of reading it.

The Raft

Fred Strydom

"The day every person on earth lost his and her memory was not a day at all. In people's minds there was no actual event... and thus it could be followed by no period of shock or mourning. There could be no catharsis. Everyone was simply reset to zero."

On Day Zero, the collapse of civilization was as instantaneous as it was inevitable. A mysterious and oppressive movement rose to power in the aftermath, forcing people into isolated communes run like regimes. Kayle Jenner finds himself trapped on a remote beach, and all that remains of his life before is the vague and haunting vision of his son...

Kayle finally escapes, only to find a broken world being put back together in strange ways. As more memories from his past life begin returning, the people he meets wandering the face of a scorched earth -- some reluctant allies, others dangerous enemies -- begin to paint a terrifying picture. In his relentless search for his son, Kayle will discover more than just his lost past. He will discover the truth behind Day Zero -- a truth that makes both fools and gods of men.

Lethe

Tricia Sullivan

It is the year 2166. Eighty years have passed since the Gene Wars devastated the Earth, decimating the human population and giving rise to myriad new life-forms. Only planetwide rule by an oligarchy of once-human brains in permanent computer interface has allowed "pure" humans to survive. Now, among the dolphins of Australia, Jenae Kim stumbles on the information that could mean a new beginning for human civilization: information that the government is determined to keep secret - even if they have to kill her.

On the edge of the solar system, researcher Daire Morales falls through an interstellar gate and discovers an Edenic world to which refugee children from the Gene Wars escaped long ago - but at a terrible price. The onset of adulthood promises a monstrous fate, and now the colony's adolescent leader, Tsering, faces her own violent demise. Only when Jenae exposes the long-buried truth about the Gene Wars does Tsering realize that the memories trapped in the planet's strange, sentient trees have the power to save - or destroy - not only the colony but the hope of humanity itself.

Battle Royale: Remastered

Koushun Takami

Koushun Takami's notorious high-octane thriller envisions a nightmare scenario: a class of junior high school students is taken to a deserted island where, as part of a ruthless authoritarian program, they are provided arms and forced to kill until only one survivor is left standing. Criticized as violent exploitation when first published in Japan--where it became a runaway best seller--Battle Royale is a Lord of the Flies for the 21st century, a potent allegory of what it means to be young and (barely) alive in a dog-eat-dog world.

Made into a controversial hit movie of the same name, Battle Royale is already a contemporary Japanese pulp classic, now available in a new English-language translation.

Patchwerk

David Tallerman

Fleeing the city of New York on the TransContinental atmospheric transport vehicle, Dran Florrian is traveling with Palimpsest -- the ultimate proof of a lifetime of scientific theorizing.

When a rogue organization attempts to steal the device, however, Dran takes drastic action.

But his invention threatens to destroy the very fabric of this and all other possible universes, unless Dran -- or someone very much like him -- can shut down the machine and reverse the process.

Mockingbird

Walter Tevis

Mockingbird is a powerful novel of a future world where humans are dying. Those that survive spend their days in a narcotic bliss or choose a quick suicide rather than slow extinction. Humanity's salvation rests with an android who has no desire to live, and a man and a woman who must discover love, hope, and dreams of a world reborn.

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.

Amatka

Karin Tidbeck

Vanja, an information assistant, is sent from her home city of Essre to the austere, wintry colony of Amatka with an assignment to collect intelligence for the government. Immediately she feels that something strange is going on: people act oddly in Amatka, and citizens are monitored for signs of subversion.

Intending to stay just a short while, Vanja falls in love with her housemate, Nina, and prolongs her visit. But when she stumbles on evidence of a growing threat to the colony, and a cover-up by its administration, she embarks on an investigation that puts her at tremendous risk.

In Karin Tidbeck's world, everyone is suspect, no one is safe, and nothing--not even language, nor the very fabric of reality--can be taken for granted. Amatka is a beguiling and wholly original novel about freedom, love, and artistic creation by a captivating new voice.

Womb City

Tlotlo Tsamaase

Nelah seems to have it all: fame, wealth, and a long-awaited daughter growing in a government lab. But, trapped in a loveless marriage to a policeman who uses a microchip to monitor her every move, Nelah's perfect life is precarious. After a drug-fueled evening culminates in an eerie car accident, Nelah commits a desperate crime and buries the body, daring to hope that she can keep one last secret.

The truth claws its way into Nelah's life from the grave.

As the ghost of her victim viciously hunts down the people Nelah holds dear, she is thrust into a race against the clock: in order to save any of her remaining loved ones, Nelah must unravel the political conspiracy her victim was on the verge of exposing--or risk losing everyone.

Set in a cruel futuristic surveillance state where bodies are a government-issued resource, this harrowing story is a twisty, nail-biting commentary on power, monstrosity, and bodily autonomy. In sickeningly evocative prose, Womb City interrogates how patriarchy pits women against each other as unwitting collaborators in their own oppression. In this devastatingly timely debut novel, acclaimed short fiction writer Tlotlo Tsamaase brings a searing intelligence and Botswana's cultural sensibility to the question: just how far must a woman go to bring the whole system crashing down?

The Sea and Summer

George Turner

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 watery tombs. And now the young boy must find a way to escape the approaching tide of disaster.

The Sea and Summer, published in the US as Drowning Towers, is George Turner's masterful exploration of the effects of climate change in the not-too-distant future. Comparable to J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World, it was shortlisted for the nebula and won the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Joe Steele

Harry Turtledove

President Herbert Hoover has failed America. The Great Depression that rose from the ashes of the 1929 stock market crash still casts its dark shadow over the country. Despairing and desperate, the American people hope one of the potential Democratic candidates--New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and California congressman Joe Steele--can get the nation on the road to recovery.

But fate snatches away one hope when a mansion fire claims the life of Roosevelt, leaving the Democratic party little choice but to nominate Steele, son of a Russian immigrant laborer who identifies more with the common man than with Washington D.C.'s wealthy power brokers.

Achieving a landslide victory, President Joe Steele wastes no time pushing through Congress reforms that put citizens back to work. Anyone who gets in his way is getting in the way of America, and that includes the highest in the land. Joe Steele's critics may believe the government is gaining too much control, but they tend to find themselves in work camps if they make too much noise about it. And most people welcome strong leadership, full employment, and an absence of complaining from the newspapers--especially as Hitler and Trotsky begin the kind of posturing that seems sure to drag America into war.

The Last Murder at the End of the World

Stuart Turton

Solve the murder to save what's left of the world.

Outside the island there is nothing: the world was destroyed by a fog that swept the planet, killing anyone it touched.

On the island: it is idyllic. One hundred and twenty-two villagers and three scientists, living in peaceful harmony. The villagers are content to fish, farm and feast, to obey their nightly curfew, to do what they're told by the scientists.

Until, to the horror of the islanders, one of their beloved scientists is found brutally stabbed to death. And then they learn that the murder has triggered a lowering of the security system around the island, the only thing that was keeping the fog at bay. If the murder isn't solved within 92 hours, the fog will smother the island?and everyone on it.

But the security system has also wiped everyone's memories of exactly what happened the night before, which means that someone on the island is a murderer?and they don't even know it.

And the clock is ticking.

Fade to White

Catherynne M. Valente

Hugo, Nebula and Sidewise award nominated novelette. It was originally published in Clarkesworld Magazine, #71 August 2012. It can be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Seven (2013), edited by Jonathan Strahan and Clarkesworld: Year Six (2014), edited by Neil Clarke, Sean Wallace. The story is collected in The Melancholy of Mechagirl (2013) and The Bread We Eat in Dreams (2013).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

La beauté sans vertu

Genevieve Valentine

La beauté sans vertu by Genevieve Valentine is a vicious little swipe at the fashion industry as certain disturbing trends are amplified in the future and a famous fashion House prepares for an important show.

This short story can also be found in the anthology Worlds Seen in Passing: Ten Years of Tor.com Short Fiction (2018), edited by Irene Gallo.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti

Genevieve Valentine

Come inside and take a seat; the show is about to begin...

Outside any city still standing, the Mechanical Circus Tresaulti sets up its tents. Crowds pack the benches to gawk at the brass-and-copper troupe and their impossible feats: Ayar the Strong Man, the acrobatic Grimaldi Brothers, fearless Elena and her aerialists who perform on living trapezes. War is everywhere, but while the Circus is performing, the world is magic.

That magic is no accident: Boss builds her circus from the bones out, molding a mechanical company that will survive the unforgiving landscape.

But even a careful ringmaster can make mistakes.

Two of Tresaulti's performers are trapped in a secret standoff that threatens to tear the Circus apart, just as the war lands on their doorstep. Now they must fight a war on two fronts: one from the outside, and a more dangerous one from within...

Police Your Planet

Erik Van Lhin

Of all the cities on all the planets of the Solar System, Marsport was the most corrupt. So when one-time prize-fighter, cop, and reporter, Bruce Gordon ends up with a one way ticket to Mars, it was only natural that he would find himself walking a beat collecting graft like the rest of the force. Just trying to survive, he finds himself caught in the middle between two rival gangs as they battle for control of the planet.

Future Glitter

A. E. Van Vogt

Dictator Lilgin held the entire Earth firmly under his thumb. Government-controlled science ruled: a superb communications network constantly monitored the population, and anyone who dared to question the regime or Lilgin's supremacy was instantly and tidily eradicated.

But the regime had reckoned without Professor Dun Higenroth. Higenroth had developed a radically new communications system that took no account of distance, that operated in the mind of its creator, without the need for equipment of any kind-and he intended to use it to expose Lilgin's every move to the entire world. Lilgin had to learn the secret of that system if he was to remain in power. And so the subtle and deadly process of extracting the information from Higenroth's mind began. But the full resources of the world government were to prove useless - FOR HIGENROTH HAD HIDDEN THE SECRET IN THE GENES OF A CHILD NOT YET BORN!

Also published as Tyrannopolis

Emphyrio

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 punishable by death.

When Amiante, a wood-carver, is executed for processing old documents with a camera, his son Ghyl rebels, and decides to bring down the system. To do so, he must first interpret the story of Emphyrio, an ancient hero of Halman legend.

To Live Forever

Welcome to the Monkey House

In the far-future city of Clarges, you can live forever – if you can make the grade. In Clarges, everyone competes for the ultimate prize: immortality. Gavin Waylock had that prize – the live-forever rank of Amaranth, but lost it when he was accused of murder. Now, after seven years in hiding he begins again the struggle to reach the top. But a strong-willed woman,The Jacynth Martin, is determined to see him fail – and failure means death.

The Spatterlight Press e-book is available under the alternate title Clarges.

Millennium

John Varley

A group of scientists from the far future have hit upon the perfect method of moving people through time--they engineer disasters in what we call the present, and whisk the people away, forward in time, a fraction of a second before they are to die. When an investigator begins his investigation into a midair collision between two planes, he never dreams that he will turn up evidence of time travel.

Nexhuman

Francesco Verso

In a future threatened by the spread of "kipple" (garbage & trash), Peter Payne is part of a fringe society that scavenges junk to survive. His days are spent in the refuse of humanity and running with a teenage gang called The Dead Bones lead by his brother Charlie. But when Peter finds beauty in the world in the shape of Alba, an advanced model female nexhuman, he finds purpose... and love. When Charlie and The Dead Bones destroy Peter's dreams for the future, Peter embarks on a quest to rebuild the object of his obsession.

Player Piano

Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut's first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Dr. Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a super computer and run completely by machines. His rebellion is a wildly funny, darkly satirical look at the modern society of the mid 20th century.

Kurt Vonnegut

Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut's shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, these superb stories share Vonnegut's audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.

Ink

Sabrina Vourvoulias

Her name is Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me." America has lost its way. The strongest of people can be found in the unlikeliest of places. The future of the entire country will depend on them. All across the United States, people scramble to survive new, draconian policies that mark and track immigrants and their children (citizens or not) as their freedoms rapidly erode around them.

For the "inked"--those whose immigration status has been permanently tattooed on their wrists--those famous words on the Statue of Liberty are starting to ring hollow. The tattoos have marked them for horrors they could not have imagined within US borders. As the nightmare unfolds before them, unforeseen alliances between the inked--like Mari, Meche, and Toño--and non-immigrants--Finn, Del, and Abbie--are formed, all in the desperate hope to confront it.

Ink is the story of their ingenuity. Of their resilience. Of their magic. A story of how the power of love and community out-survives even the grimmest times.

The Last Dog on Earth

Adrian J. Walker

A flawed man, a mute girl, and a spirited dog could be humanity's last hope - or its doom.

It's the end of the world, but Reg won't mind the peace and quiet - after all, he's always lived a solitary life. And his happy-go-lucky dog, Lineker, is ecstatic to spend more time with his beloved owner. Together, they plan to wait out the impending doom in their second-floor apartment, hiding themselves away from the riots outside.

But when an abandoned orphan shows up in the stairwell of their building, Reg and Lineker must leave their place of safety and accompany her into the ruins of a fallen city. In their desire to rescue the child, both man and dog must face the guilt of the past and discover a hope for the future....

The Dreamers: A Novel

Karen Thompson Walker

One night in an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a first-year student stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep--and doesn't wake up. She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. When a second girl falls asleep, and then a third, Mei finds herself thrust together with an eccentric classmate as panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town. A young couple tries to protect their newborn baby as the once-quiet streets descend into chaos. Two sisters turn to each other for comfort as their survivalist father prepares for disaster.

Those affected by the illness, doctors discover, are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, higher than has ever been recorded before. They are dreaming heightened dreams--but of what?

The Sound of His Horn

Sarban

If the Nazis had in fact won their war, we could have expected to see-those of us who were still around-a systematic development of the master-race concept into a kind of feudal structure, with a small oligarchy of immensely powerful and capricious overlords, a middle stratum of fiendishly conscientious Party administrators, and a huge slave-proletariat absolutely subject to the whim of their masters, even to lengths of providing them, as here, with human game for the chase.

Infinite Jest: A Novel

David Foster Wallace

A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the pursuit of happiness in America. Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.

Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human - and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.

Only Lovers Left Alive

Dave Wallis

A sudden rash of suicides quickly spirals out of control, as all the adults do away with themselves in a wave of existential ennui. With the "oldies" dead, teenagers inherit the world, suddenly free to smash, loot and love as they like. Motorcycle gangs hold wild orgies in abandoned apartments and prowl through the shambles of disintegrating London in search of disappearing stocks of lipstick, gasoline and food, now the currency in a new world of unspeakable violence...

Terminal Mind

David Walton

Years in the future, the U.S. is a splintered country. The city-state of Philadelphia is ripe for revolution. Mark McGovern, the son of a rich politician, lives in a world of expensive parties and frivolous biological mods, a sharp contrast to the poor underworld of his best friend, Darin Kinsley. When the two accidentally release a sophisticated virus called a ‘slicer' into the net, Mark must try to stem the tide of casualties before the charged political situation explodes.

But the slicer is more than a virus. To destroy it, Mark must first sort truth from lies, not only for himself, but for the mind of the child who holds his fate.

My Real Children

Jo Walton

It's 2015, and Patricia Cowan is very old. "Confused today," read the notes clipped to the end of her bed. She forgets things she should know--what year it is, major events in the lives of her children. But she remembers things that don't seem possible. She remembers marrying Mark and having four children. And she remembers not marrying Mark and raising three children with Bee instead. She remembers the bomb that killed President Kennedy in 1963, and she remembers Kennedy in 1964, declining to run again after the nuclear exchange that took out Miami and Kiev.

Her childhood, her years at Oxford during the Second World War--those were solid things. But after that, did she marry Mark or not? Did her friends all call her Trish, or Pat? Had she been a housewife who escaped a terrible marriage after her children were grown, or a successful travel writer with homes in Britain and Italy? And the moon outside her window: does it host a benign research station, or a command post bristling with nuclear missiles?

Two lives, two worlds, two versions of modern history; each with their loves and losses, their sorrows and triumphs. Jo Walton's My Real Children is the tale of both of Patricia Cowan's lives... and of how every life means the entire world.?

The Holy Terror

H. G. Wells

The Holy Terror is a 1939 work by H. G. Wells that is in part an analysis of fascism and in part a utopian novel. Which presents itself as a biography of a character Rudolf "Rud" Whitlow, who is born with such an aggressive temperament that he is referred to as the "Holy Terror".

Rud eventually gets involved in socialist activism, and with a group strategizing for world revolution. They are looking to stage a coup. The group contains a character inspired by Oswald Mosley. The revolution fails, revealing the cowardice underlying Rud's aggressiveness.

Zone One

Colson Whitehead

In this wry take on the post-apocalyptic horror novel, a pandemic has devastated the planet. The plague has sorted humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead.

Now the plague is receding, and Americans are busy rebuilding civilization under orders from the provisional government based in Buffalo. Their top mission: the resettlement of Manhattan. Armed forces have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street-aka Zone One-but pockets of plague-ridden squatters remain. While the army has eliminated the most dangerous of the infected, teams of civilian volunteers are tasked with clearing out a more innocuous variety-the "malfunctioning" stragglers, who exist in a catatonic state, transfixed by their former lives.

Mark Spitz is a member of one of the civilian teams working in lower Manhattan. Alternating between flashbacks of Spitz's desperate fight for survival during the worst of the outbreak and his present narrative, the novel unfolds over three surreal days, as it depicts the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, and the impossible job of coming to grips with the fallen world.

And then things start to go wrong.

Both spine chilling and playfully cerebral, Zone One brilliantly subverts the genre's conventions and deconstructs the zombie myth for the twenty-first century.

The Beauty

Aliya Whiteley

Somewhere away from the cities and towns, a group of men and boys gather around the fire each night to listen to their stories in the Valley of the Rocks. For when the women are all gone the rest of your life is all there is for everyone. The men are waiting to pass into the night.

The story shall be told to preserve the past. History has gone back to its aural roots and the power of words is strong. Meet Nate, the storyteller, and the new secrets he brings back from the darkness. William rules the group with youth and strength, but how long can that last? And what about Uncle Ted, who spends so much time out in the woods?

Hear the tales, watch a myth be formed. For what can man hope to achieve in a world without women? When the past is only grief how long should you hold on to it? What secrets can the forest offer to change it all?

Discover the Beauty.

The Funeral

Kate Wilhelm

Nebula Award nominated novelette.

A girl reaches her teenage years in a near future earth where society has become cruelly regimented.

This story originally appeared in the anthology Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), edited by Harlan Elison. It can also be found in the anthologies More Women of Wonder (1976) and Women of Wonder: The Classic Years: SF by Women from the 1940s to the 1970s (1995), both edited by Pamela Sargent, Alpha 9 (1978), edited by Robert Silverberg and Brave New Worlds: Dystopian Stories (2011), edited by John Joseph Adams. It is included in the collection The Infinity Box (1975).

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

Kate Wilhelm

Before becoming one of today's most intriguing and innovative mystery writers, Kate Wilhelm was a leading writer of science fiction, acclaimed for classics like The Infinity Box and The Clewiston Test.

Now one of her most famous novels returns to print, the spellbinding story of an isolated post-holocaust community determined to preserve itself, through a perilous experiment in cloning. Sweeping, dramatic, rich with humanity, and rigorous in its science, Where Later the Sweet Birds Sang is widely regarded as a high point of both humanistic and "hard" SF, and won SF's Hugo Award and Locus Award on its first publication. It is as compelling today as it was then.

The Last of the Winnebagos

Connie Willis

Hugo and Nebula Award winning novella. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, July 1988. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection (1989), edited by Gardner Dozois, Nebula Awards 24 (1990), edtied by Michael Bishop and The New Hugo Winners, Volume III: (1989-91) (1994), edited by Connie Willis. It is included in the collections Impossible Things (1994), The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (2007) and Time Is the Fire: The Best of Connie Willis (2013).

The Nostalgist

Daniel H. Wilson

With EyesTM and EarsTM, everything can look and sound just fine, just like it used to be; it's a shock when they break down, though.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

The Wanting Seed

Anthony Burgess

Set in the near future, The Wanting Seed is a Malthusian comedy about the strange world overpopulation will produce.

Tristram Foxe and his wife, Beatrice-Joanna, live in their skyscraper world where official family limitation glorifies homosexuality. Eventually, their world is transformed into a chaos of cannibalistic dining-clubs, fantastic fertility rituals, and wars without anger. It is a novel both extravagantly funny and grimly serious.

The Affinities

Robert Charles Wilson

In our rapidly-changing world of "social media", everyday people are more and more able to sort themselves into social groups based on finer and finer criteria. In the near future of Robert Charles Wilson's The Affinities, this process is supercharged by new analytic technologies--genetic, brain-mapping, behavioral. To join one of the twenty-two Affinities is to change one's life. It's like family, and more than family. Your fellow members aren't just like you, and they aren't just people who are likely to like you. They're also the people with whom you can best cooperate in all areas of life--creative, interpersonal, even financial.

At loose ends both professional and personal, young Adam Fisk takes the suite of tests to see if he qualifies for any of the Affinities, and finds that he's a match for one of the largest, the one called Tau. It's utopian--at first. Problems in all areas of his life begin to simply sort themselves out, as he becomes part of a global network of people dedicated to helping one another--to helping him.

But as the differing Affinities put their new powers to the test, they begin to rapidly chip away at the power of governments, of global corporations, of all the institutions of the old world. Then, with dreadful inevitability, the different Affinities begin to go to war--with one another.

What happens next will change Adam, and his world, forever.

Golden State

Ben H. Winters

In a strange alternate society that values law and truth above all else, Laszlo Ratesic is a nineteen-year veteran of the Speculative Service. He lives in the Golden State, a nation standing where California once did, a place where like-minded Americans retreated after the erosion of truth and the spread of lies made public life and governance impossible.

In the Golden State, knowingly contradicting the truth is the greatest crime--and stopping those crimes is Laz's job. In its service, he is one of the few individuals permitted to harbor untruths, to "speculate" on what might have happened.

But the Golden State is less a paradise than its name might suggest. To monitor, verify, and enforce the truth requires a veritable panopticon of surveillance and recording. And when those in control of the facts twist them for nefarious means, the Speculators are the only ones with the power to fight back.

Underground Airlines

Ben H. Winters

It is the present-day, and the world is as we know it: smartphones, social networking and Happy Meals. Save for one thing: the Civil War never occurred.

A gifted young black man calling himself Victor has struck a bargain with federal law enforcement, working as a bounty hunter for the US Marshall Service. He's got plenty of work. In this version of America, slavery continues in four states called "the Hard Four." On the trail of a runaway known as Jackdaw, Victor arrives in Indianapolis knowing that something isn't right--with the case file, with his work, and with the country itself.

A mystery to himself, Victor suppresses his memories of his childhood on a plantation, and works to infiltrate the local cell of a abolitionist movement called the Underground Airlines. Tracking Jackdaw through the back rooms of churches, empty parking garages, hotels, and medical offices, Victor believes he's hot on the trail. But his strange, increasingly uncanny pursuit is complicated by a boss who won't reveal the extraordinary stakes of Jackdaw's case, as well as by a heartbreaking young woman and her child who may be Victor's salvation. Victor himself may be the biggest obstacle of all--though his true self remains buried, it threatens to surface.

Victor believes himself to be a good man doing bad work, unwilling to give up the freedom he has worked so hard to earn. But in pursuing Jackdaw, Victor discovers secrets at the core of the country's arrangement with the Hard Four, secrets the government will preserve at any cost.

Underground Airlines is a ground-breaking novel, a wickedly imaginative thriller, and a story of an America that is more like our own than we'd like to believe.

Limbo

Bernard Wolfe

LIMBO is a uniquely unusual, dazzling novel of the future that is unlike anything you have ever read- or are likely to read.

Dr. Martine, a neurosurgeon, flees a limited nuclear war to a forgotten island in the Indian Ocean. After 18 years of performing "humane" lobotomies on island natives, he sets out to rediscover the world. What he finds is a grotesque post-bomb society in which self-mutilation and installed prosthetic limbs are used to mute the urge to make war.

Bernard Wolfe, co-author of Really The Blues, grapples with the largest issues of our century in Limbo.

The Return Man

V. M. Zito

The outbreak tore the U.S. in two. The east remains a safe haven. The west has become a ravaged wilderness. They call it the Evacuated States. It is here that Henry Marco makes his living. Hired by grieving relatives, he tracks down the dead and delivers peace.

Now Homeland Security wants Marco for a mission unlike any other. He must return to California, where the apocalypse began. Where a secret is hidden. And where his own tragic past waits to punish him again.

But in the wastelands of America, you never know who - or what - is watching you.

Feed

M. T. Anderson

Identity crises, consumerism, and star-crossed teenage love in a futuristic society where people connect to the Internet via feeds implanted in their brains.

For Titus and his friends, it started out like any ordinary trip to the moon - a chance to party during spring break and play with some stupid low-grav at the Ricochet Lounge. But that was before the crazy hacker caused all their feeds to malfunction, sending them to the hospital to lie around with nothing inside their heads for days. And it was before Titus met Violet, a beautiful, brainy teenage girl who has decided to fight the feed and its omnipresent ability to categorize human thoughts and desires. Following in the footsteps of George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr., M. T. Anderson has created a not-so-brave new world — and a smart, savage satire that has captivated readers with its view of an imagined future that veers unnervingly close to the here and now.

In the Country of Last Things

Paul Auster

Here is the story of Anna Blume, a woman who has come to an unnamed city in search of her brother. Her notebook recounts her quest in this cruel modern landscape, and through her anguished narrative, Auster presents a frightening vision of the future.

The Heads of Cerberus

Gertrude Barrows Bennett

The Heads of Cerberus has been hailed as one of the first, if not THE first science-fiction novel to deal with alternate-worlds. Although Francis Stevens (a.k.a. Gertrude Barrows Bennett) wrote several novels, The Heads of Cerberus is undoubtedly her most influential work of science-fiction.

In this alternate reality, people from 20th-century America stumble into a timeline in which America is controlled by a dictatorship. One of the first dystopian novels ever written, the story is also an early example of what became known in the 1950s as "social science-fiction."

Blueprints of the Afterlife

Ryan Boudinot

From the "wickedly talented" (Boston Globe) and "darkly funny" (New York Times Book Review) Ryan Boudinot, Blueprints of the Afterlife is a tour de force.

It is the Afterlife. The end of the world is a distant, distorted memory called "the Age of F***ed Up Shit." A sentient glacier has wiped out most of North America. Medical care is supplied by open-source nanotechnology, and human nervous systems can be hacked.

Abby Fogg is a film archivist with a niggling feeling that her life is not really her own. She may be right. Al Skinner is a former mercenary for the Boeing Army, who's been dragging his war baggage behind him for nearly a century. Woo-jin Kan is a virtuoso dishwasher with the Hotel and Restaurant Management Olympics medals to prove it. Over them all hovers a mysterious man named Dirk Bickle, who sends all these characters to a full-scale replica of Manhattan under construction in Puget Sound. An ambitious novel that writes large the hopes and anxieties of our time—climate change, social strife, the depersonalization of the digital age—Blueprints of the Afterlife will establish Ryan Boudinot as an exceptional novelist of great daring.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

Max Brooks

“The end was near.” —Voices from the Zombie War

The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.

Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.

Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, “By excluding the human factor, aren’t we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn’t the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as ‘the living dead’?”

Note: Some of the numerical and factual material contained in this edition was previously published under the auspices of the United Nations Postwar Commission.

Eyewitness reports from the first truly global war

“I found ‘Patient Zero’ behind the locked door of an abandoned apartment across town. . . . His wrists and feet were bound with plastic packing twine. Although he’d rubbed off the skin around his bonds, there was no blood. There was also no blood on his other wounds. . . . He was writhing like an animal; a gag muffled his growls. At first the villagers tried to hold me back. They warned me not to touch him, that he was ‘cursed.’ I shrugged them off and reached for my mask and gloves. The boy’s skin was . . . cold and gray . . . I could find neither his heartbeat nor his pulse.” —Dr. Kwang Jingshu, Greater Chongqing, United Federation of China

“‘Shock and Awe’? Perfect name. . . . But what if the enemy can’t be shocked and awed? Not just won’t, but biologically can’t! That’s what happened that day outside New York City, that’s the failure that almost lost us the whole damn war. The fact that we couldn’t shock and awe Zack boomeranged right back in our faces and actually allowed Zack to shock and awe us! They’re not afraid! No matter what we do, no matter how many we kill, they will never, ever be afraid!” —Todd Wainio, former U.S. Army infantryman and veteran of the Battle of Yonkers

“Two hundred million zombies. Who can even visualize that type of number, let alone combat it? . . . For the first time in history, we faced an enemy that was actively waging total war. They had no limits of endurance. They would never negotiate, never surrender. They would fight until the very end because, unlike us, every single one of them, every second of every day, was devoted to consuming all life on Earth.” —General Travis D’Ambrosia, Supreme Allied Commander, Europe

The World as it Shall Be

Emile Souvestre
I. F. Clarke

It's the year 3000, and children are raised by steam machines, Switzerland has been converted into a theme park, and there are no fewer than 684 kinds of mental illness. With eccentric, dark humor, Émile Souvestre portrays a society dominated by mechanization and greed. However comically exaggerated, the unmistakable echoes of real problems and possibilities in Souvestre's satire make this book science fiction's earliest warning against the dangers of mechanization in a society ruled by consumerism.

The World as It Shall Be was originally published in France in 1846--the first fully illustrated story in the history of future fiction. The satiric novel, with 87 charming illustrations, unfolds through the eyes of Maurice and Marthe, a young couple who are brought to the year 3000 by the spirit of the age, M. John Progrès. This first English translation includes all of the original art.

Dhalgren

Samuel R. Delany

In Dhalgren, perhaps one of the most profound and bestselling science fiction novels of all time, Samuel R. Delany has produced a novel "to stand with the best American fiction of the 1970s" (Jonathan Lethem).

Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there.... The population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. And into this disaster zone comes a young man-poet, lover, and adventurer-known only as the Kid. Tackling questions of race, gender, and sexuality, Dhalgren is a literary marvel and groundbreaking work of American magical realism.

Triton

Samuel R. Delany

Triton, the outermost moon of Neptune, was a world of absolute freedom, where every wish could be fulfilled. But for Bron Helstrom, one of Triton's elite, life had lost its meaning. There, in a world of endless possibilities, Bron began a searing odyssey to find the object of his desires.

The Man in the High Castle

It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco, the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some 20 years earlier the United States lost a war--and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan.

This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to awake.

Time Out of Joint

The Machine Stops: And Other Stories

Time Out of Joint is Philip K. Dick's classic depiction of the disorienting disparity between the world as we think it is and the world as it actually is.

The year is 1998, although Ragle Gumm doesn't know that. He thinks it's 1959. He also thinks that he served in World War II, that he lives in a quiet little community, and that he really is the world's long-standing champion of newspaper puzzle contests. It is only after a series of troubling hallucinations that he begins to suspect otherwise. And once he pursues his suspicions, he begins to see how he is the center of a universe gone terribly awry.

Arslan

M. J. Engh

A Classic of Political Science Fiction

One of the classic political novels, an SF vision of low-tech world conquest. Arslan is a young Asian general who conquers the world in a week without firing a shot and shortly thereafter sets up his headquarters in a small town in Illinois.

E. M. Forster

The Machine Stops is a science fiction short story by E. M. Forster. The story is about a world in which many humans have lost the ability to live on the surface, and live underground. The story predicted a few technological and social innovations, such as the cinematophote (television) and videoconferencing.

Plan for Chaos

John Wyndham

Plan for Chaos is a never-before published novel by post-apocalyptic British science fiction writer John Wyndham (1903-69), best known for his "cozy catastrophe" novel about a venomous class of fictional plants, The Day of the Triffids. Written simultaneously with that well-known volume, which has been in print continuously since its publication in 1951, Plan for Chaos makes a fascinating companion to the author's most famous work and offers a new angle on a writer often considered the direct descendent of the legendary H.G. Wells and an influence on such innovators as Ray Bradbury and Margaret Atwood.

In a city that could well be New York, a series of identical women are found dead in suspicious circumstances. Magazine photographer Johnny Farthing, who is reporting on the suspected murders, is chilled to discover that his fiancée looks identical to the victims too - and then she disappears. As his investigations spiral beyond his control, he finds himself at the heart of a sinister plot that uses cloning to revive the Nazi vision of a world-powerful master race... Part detective noir, part dystopic thriller, Plan for Chaos reveals the legendary science fiction novelist grappling with some of his most urgent and personal themes.

Make Room! Make Room!

Harry Harrison

The world is crowded. Far too crowded. Its starving billions live on lentils, soya beans, and -if they're lucky-the odd starving rat.

In a New York City groaning under the burden of 35 million inhabitants, detective Andy Rusch is engaged in a desperate and lonely hunt for a killer everyone has forgotten. For even in a world such as this, a policeman can find himself utterly alone....

Acclaimed on its original publication in 1966, Make Room! Make Room! was adapted into the movie Soylent Green in 1973, starring Charlton Heston along with Edward G. Robinson in his last role.

The Dog Stars

Peter Heller

A riveting, powerful novel about a pilot living in a world filled with loss—and what he is willing to risk to rediscover, against all odds, connection, love, and grace.

Hig survived the flu that killed everyone he knows. His wife is gone, his friends are dead, he lives in the hangar of a small abandoned airport with his dog, his only neighbor a gun-toting misanthrope. In his 1956 Cessna, Hig flies the perimeter of the airfield or sneaks off to the mountains to fish and to pretend that things are the way they used to be. But when a random transmission somehow beams through his radio, the voice ignites a hope deep inside him that a better life—something like his old life—exists beyond the airport. Risking everything, he flies past his point of no return—not enough fuel to get him home—following the trail of the static-broken voice on the radio. But what he encounters and what he must face—in the people he meets, and in himself—is both better and worse than anything he could have hoped for.

Narrated by a man who is part warrior and part dreamer, a hunter with a great shot and a heart that refuses to harden, The Dog Stars is both savagely funny and achingly sad, a breathtaking story about what it means to be human.

Gunner Cade / Crisis in 2140

Cyril Judd
H. Beam Piper
John J. McGuire

Gunner Cade

The Emperor had no more devoted Armsman than Gunner Cade. In this warped civilization of murder and death, Cade fought as he was expected to, killed as he was expected to, destroying enemy after enemy until he himself was shot down in honorable battle.

But Cade did not die. After weeks of unconsciousness, he awoke to find he was a fugitive, the object of a world-wide manhunt. Why was it so important to silence him? What undiscovered secret did he possess as he desperately fled over the earth and into outer space?

Crisis in 2140

Black market in forbidden knowlegde.

The Sky is Falling / Badge of Infamy

Lester del Rey

The Sky is Falling

Dave stared around the office. He went to the window and stared upwards at the crazy patchwork of the sky. For all he knew, in such a sky there might be cracks. In fact, as he looked, he could make out a rift, and beyond that a... hole... a small patch where there was no color, and yet the sky there was not black. There were no stars there, though points of light were clustered around the edges, apparently retreating.

Badge of Infamy

Daniel Feldman was a doctor once. He made the mistake of saving a friend's life in violation of Medical Lobby rules. Now, he's a pariah, shunned by all, forbidden to touch another patient. But things are more loose on Mars. There, Doc Feldman is welcomed by the colonists, even as he's hunted by the authorities. But, when he discovers a Martian plague may soon wipe out humanity on two planets, Feldman finds himself a pivotal figure. War erupts. Earth is poised to wipe out the Mars colony utterly. A cure to the plague is the price of peace, and only Feldman can find it.

The Postmortal / The End Specialist

Drew Magary

This book is published in the UK as The End Specialist and was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award under that title.

John Farrell is about to get "The Cure." Old age can never kill him now. The only problem is, everything else still can...

Imagine a near future where a cure for aging is discovered and-after much political and moral debate-made available to people worldwide. Immortality, however, comes with its own unique problems-including evil green people, government euthanasia programs, a disturbing new religious cult, and other horrors. Witty, eerie, and full of humanity, The Postmortal is an unforgettable thriller that envisions a pre-apocalyptic world so real that it is completely terrifying.

I Am Legend

Richard Matheson

Robert Neville may well be the last living man on Earth . . . but he is not alone.

An incurable plague has mutated every other man, woman, and child into bloodthirsty, nocturnal creatures who are determined to destroy him. By day, he is a hunter, stalking the infected monstrosities through the abandoned ruins of civilization. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for dawn....

The Last Planet / A Man Obsessed

Andre Norton
Alan E. Nourse

The Last Planet is the first paperback edition of the novel originally (and subsequently) published as Star Rangers. A starship from a decaying Galactic empire, with a mixed human-alien crew, is exploring the outer fringes of the Milky Way. A crash-landing on an apparently empty planet marks the end of the voyage. With no hope of repairing the vessel, the surviving crewmen must plan their future, allot their resources, and explore all avenues for a new life on this world.

A Man Obsessed is the story of a vengeance hunt in a nightmarish future when all medical practice is firmly in the control of the Government. It's both a psychological tale of a man deteriorating from the effects of dedicating his life to a (perhaps) foolish pursuit of one man, and a not-so-pretty look at the ultimate results of a socialized medicine policy.

The Pisstown Chaos

David Ohle

The Pisstown Chaos is a novel about disease and forced-relocation. Political power seems to be solely in the hands of one Reverend Herman Hooker, an "American Divine" who revels in the peoples' suffering as they are "shifted" (separated from — and then randomly coupled with — one another) by decree every five years. There are up-shifts, down-shifts, and side-shifts, but no attempt to make harmonious pairings. Chaos rages on as parasitic infestations spread and the Reverend rules with an iron fist from his Templex headquarters, spouting platitudes to the ever-moving masses.

Super Sad True Love Story

Gary Shteyngart

The author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart has risen to the top of the fiction world. Now, in his hilarious and heartfelt new novel, he envisions a deliciously dark tale of America’s dysfunctional coming years—and the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink.

In a very near future—oh, let’s say next Tuesday—a functionally illiterate America is about to collapse. But don’t that tell that to poor Lenny Abramov, the thirty-nine-year-old son of an angry Russian immigrant janitor, proud author of what may well be the world’s last diary, and less-proud owner of a bald spot shaped like the great state of Ohio. Despite his job at an outfit called Post-Human Services, which attempts to provide immortality for its super-rich clientele, death is clearly stalking this cholesterol-rich morsel of a man. And why shouldn’t it? Lenny’s from a different century—he totally loves books (or “printed, bound media artifacts,” as they’re now known), even though most of his peers find them smelly and annoying. But even more than books, Lenny loves Eunice Park, an impossibly cute and impossibly cruel twenty-four-year-old Korean American woman who just graduated from Elderbird College with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness.

After meeting Lenny on an extended Roman holiday, blistering Eunice puts that Assertiveness minor to work, teaching our “ancient dork” effective new ways to brush his teeth and making him buy a cottony nonflammable wardrobe. But America proves less flame-resistant than Lenny’s new threads. The country is crushed by a credit crisis, riots break out in New York’s Central Park, the city’s streets are lined with National Guard tanks on every corner, the dollar is so over, and our patient Chinese creditors may just be ready to foreclose on the whole mess. Undeterred, Lenny vows to love both Eunice and his homeland. He’s going to convince his fickle new love that in a time without standards or stability, in a world where single people can determine a dating prospect’s “hotness” and “sustainability” with the click of a button, in a society where the privileged may live forever but the unfortunate will die all too soon, there is still value in being a real human being.

Wildly funny, rich, and humane, Super Sad True Love Story is a knockout novel by a young master, a book in which falling in love just may redeem a planet falling apart.

Master of Life and Death / The Secret Visitors

Robert Silverberg
James White

Master of Life and Death

The Secret Visitors

When the World Security Organization asked Doctor Lockhart to treat their mysterious prisoner, they hadn't known that the dying old man would reply to their questions in a totally unknown language. They had expected the stranger to reveal something about the world war which seemed imminent. But they had been thinking in terms of foreign spies - not alien beings!

Now suddenly they found themselves confronted with a Gargantuan task. They had to find a way to another world, a means of communicating with creatures they could barely imagine.

They had to stop a war which was originating in the farthest stars - or else surrender the Earth unconditionally to THE SECRET VISITORS.

The Time Machine

H. G. Wells

When a Victorian scientist propels himself into the year a.d. 802,701, he is initially delighted to find that suffering has been replaced by beauty, contentment, and peace. Entranced at first by the Eloi, an elfin species descended from man, he soon realizes that these beautiful people are simply remnants of a once-great culture—now weak and childishly afraid of the dark.

They have every reason to be afraid: in deep tunnels beneath their paradise lurks another race descended from humanity—the sinister Morlocks. And when the scientist’s time machine vanishes, it becomes clear he must search these tunnels if he is ever to return to his own era.

A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess

In this nightmare vision of a not-too-distant future, fifteen-year-old Alex and his three friends rob, rape, torture and murder - for fun. Alex is jailed for his vicious crimes and the State undertakes to reform him - but how and at what cost?

Seed

Rob Ziegler

It's the dawn of the 22nd century, and the world has fallen apart. Decades of war and resource depletion have toppled governments. The ecosystem has collapsed. A new dust bowl sweeps the American West. The United States has become a nation of migrants -starving masses of nomads who seek out a living in desert wastelands and encampments outside government seed-distribution warehouses.

In this new world, there is a new power. Satori is more than just a corporation, she is an intelligent, living city that grew out of the ruins of Denver. Satori bioengineers both the climate-resistant seed that feeds a hungry nation, and her own post-human genetic Designers, Advocates, and Laborers. What remains of the United States government now exists solely to distribute Satori seed; a defeated American military doles out bar-coded, single-use Satori seed to the nation's starving citizens.

When one of Satori's Designers goes rogue, Agent Sienna Doss-Ex-Army Ranger turned glorified bodyguard-is tasked by the government to bring her in: The government wants to use the Designer to break Satori's stranglehold on seed production and reassert themselves as the center of power. Sianna Doss's search for the Designer intersects with Brood and his younger brother Pollo - orphans scrapping by on the fringes of the wastelands. Pollo is abducted, because he is believed to suffer from Tet, a newly emergent disease, the victims of which are harvested by Satori.

As events spin out of control, Brood and Sienna Doss find themselves at the heart of Satori, where an explosive climax promises to reshape the future of the world.

The Dark Intruder & Other Stories / Falcons of Narabedla

Marion Zimmer Bradley

The Dark Intruder & Other Stories

Collection includes:

"The Dark Intruder" (Measureless to Man)
"Jackie Sees a Star"
"Exiles of Tomorrow"
"Death Between the Stars"
"The Crime Therapist"
"The Stars Are Waiting"
"Black and White"

Falcons of Narabedla

Two Men in One Body--Two Epochs in Conflict

He woke up to find himself in weird surroundings, guardedcby two strangers, one an old, old man, the other a slim sexless figure hidden completely under long blue veils.

These two called him Adric, a name he instinctively responded to, even though he knew he was Mike Kenscott, radio engineer in a governement laboratory. His rich crimson clothing was unfamiliar and he was shocked by the landscape he saw through the window--mountains bathed in a pinkish light whose source was not one but two brilliant suns.

Panic seized him then. Who were these people? What world was he in? And, most important, whom had he become?

Gemsigns

®Evolution: Book 1

Stephanie Saulter

For years the human race was under attack from a deadly Syndrome, but when a cure was found - in the form of genetically engineered human beings, Gems - the line between survival and ethics was radically altered.

Now the Gems are fighting for their freedom, from the oppression of the companies which created them, and against the Norms, who have always seen them as slaves. The conference at which Dr Eli Walker has been commissioned to present his findings on the Gems is the key to that freedom.

But with the Gemtech companies fighting to keep the Gems enslaved, and the horrifying godgangs determined to rid the earth of these 'unholy' creations, the Gems are up against forces that might just be too powerful to oppose.

A Calculated Life

A Calculated Life: Book 1

Anne Charnock

Late in the twenty-first century, big business is booming and state institutions are thriving thanks to advances in genetic engineering, which have produced a compliant population free of addictions. Violent crime is a rarity.

Hyper-intelligent Jayna is a star performer at top predictive agency Mayhew McCline, where she forecasts economic and social trends. A brilliant mathematical modeler, she far outshines her co-workers, often correcting their work on the quiet. Her latest coup: finding a link between northeasterly winds and violent crime.

When a string of events contradicts her forecasts, Jayna suspects she needs more data and better intuition. She needs direct interactions with the rest of society. Bravely-and naively-she sets out to disrupt her strict routine and stumbles unwittingly into a world where her IQ is increasingly irrelevant... a place where human relationships and the complexity of life are difficult for her to decode. And as she experiments with taking risks, she crosses the line into corporate intrigue and disloyalty.

Can Jayna confront the question of what it means to live a "normal" life? Or has the possibility of a "normal" life already been eclipsed for everyone?

The Enclave

A Calculated Life: Book 2

Anne Charnock

Set in the world of Anne Charnock's novel A Calculated Life--nominated for the Philip K. Dick and Kitschies Golden Tentacle Awards--The Enclave reveals life at the bottom of the heap in late twenty-first century Britain.

Advances in genetic engineering have created a population free of addictive behaviour. Violent crime is rare. But out in the enclaves, it's survival of the fittest for Lexie--embroiled in a recycling clan, and judged unfit for cognitive implants--and Caleb, a young climate migrant working as an illegal, eager to prosper and one day find his father.

Growing Up in Tier 3000

Ace SF Special, Series 2: Book 5

Felix C. Gotschalk

Growing Up in Tier 3000 (1975), is set in a world very similar to that of many of the tales, and deploys a similarly searching sense of the surface of events and of identities, though its plot moves with some difficulty: in an energy-quarantined, savagely competitive, complexly automated Dystopian future society, young children - in a reductio ad absurdum of the hypothesis, first promulgated by Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941), that language structure shapes our conceptualization of the world - show their readiness to take over from their elders because they understand the languages that in effect embody hyperkinetic new realities.

Challenge the Hellmaker

Ace SF Special, Series 2: Book 6

Walt Richmond
Leigh Richmond

Challenge the Hellmaker is an intriguing new novel by a husband and wife team of scientists.

Drawing on their exhaustive knowledge and imagination they have conjured up a near-future world dominated by the repressive U.N. Security Corps. The last barrier to its total dictatorship is a small group of international scientists isolated on a space station miles above the Earth... and the Hellmaker.

Gameboard of the Gods

Age of X: Book 1

Richelle Mead

In a futuristic world nearly destroyed by religious extremists, Justin March lives in exile after failing in his job as an investigator of religious groups and supernatural claims. But Justin is given a second chance when Mae Koskinen comes to bring him back to the Republic of United North America (RUNA). Raised in an aristocratic caste, Mae is now a member of the military's most elite and terrifying tier, a soldier with enhanced reflexes and skills.

When Justin and Mae are assigned to work together to solve a string of ritualistic murders, they soon realize that their discoveries have exposed them to terrible danger. As their investigation races forward, unknown enemies and powers greater than they can imagine are gathering in the shadows, ready to reclaim the world in which humans are merely game pieces on their board.

Free Fall

Android: Book 1

William Keith, Jr.

It is the future, and while the world has changed, crime has not. When an influential lawyer is brutally murdered at the top of the Beanstalk, a towering exo-atmospheric elevator serving as Earth's hub of interplanetary trade, Detective Rick Harrison reluctantly accepts the case. Harrison's investigation soon leads him from the sprawling megapolis of New Angeles to the distant moon base of Heinlein, where he searches for clues amongst an uncooperative assortment of bioroids, clones, and disgruntled human laborers. But Harrison quickly finds himself at the center of an ever-deepening conspiracy, and is faced with the one question he never expected: What is the true definition of humanity?

Free Fall is the first novel based on Fantasy Flight Games's Android, conveying a dystopian world of technology and corruption. This rich universe is masterfully brought to life by a New York Times Bestselling author.

Scythe

Arc of a Scythe: Book 1

Neal Shusterman

Two teens are forced to murder--maybe each other--in the first in a chilling new series from Neal Shusterman, author of the New York Times bestselling Unwind dystology.

A world with no hunger, no disease, no war, no misery: humanity has conquered all those things, and has even conquered death. Now Scythes are the only ones who can end life--and they are commanded to do so, in order to keep the size of the population under control.

Citra and Rowan are chosen to apprentice to a scythe--a role that neither wants. These teens must master the "art" of taking life, knowing that the consequence of failure could mean losing their own.

Scythe is the first novel of a thrilling new series by National Book Award-winning author Neal Shusterman in which Citra and Rowan learn that a perfect world comes only with a heavy price.

Thunderhead

Arc of a Scythe: Book 2

Neal Shusterman

Humans learn from their mistakes. I cannot. I make no mistakes.

The Thunderhead is the perfect ruler of a perfect world, but it has no control over the scythedom. A year has passed since Rowan had gone off grid. Since then, he has become an urban legend, a vigilante snuffing out corrupt scythes in a trial by fire. His story is told in whispers across the continent.

As Scythe Anastasia, Citra gleans with compassion and openly challenges the ideals of the "new order." But when her life is threatened and her methods questioned, it becomes clear that not everyone is open to the change.

Old foes and new enemies converge, and as corruption within the Scythedom spreads, Rowan and Citra begin to lose hope. Will the Thunderhead intervene?

Or will it simply watch as this perfect world begins to unravel?

The Toll

Arc of a Scythe: Book 3

Neal Shusterman

Citra and Rowan have disappeared. Endura is gone. It seems like nothing stands between Scythe Goddard and absolute dominion over the world scythedom. With the silence of the Thunderhead and the reverberations of the Great Resonance still shaking the earth to its core, the question remains: Is there anyone left who can stop him?

The answer lies in the Tone, the Toll, and the Thunder.

Article 5

Article 5: Book 1

Kristen Simmons

New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., have been abandoned.

The Bill of Rights has been revoked, and replaced with the Moral Statutes.

There are no more police--instead, there are soldiers. There are no more fines for bad behavior--instead, there are arrests, trials, and maybe worse. People who get arrested usually don't come back.

Seventeen-year-old Ember Miller is old enough to remember that things weren't always this way. Living with her rebellious single mother, it's hard for her to forget that people weren't always arrested for reading the wrong books or staying out after dark. It's hard to forget that life in the United States used to be different.

Ember has perfected the art of keeping a low profile. She knows how to get the things she needs, like food stamps and hand-me-down clothes, and how to pass the random home inspections by the military. Her life is as close to peaceful as circumstances allow.

That is, until her mother is arrested for noncompliance with Article 5 of the Moral Statutes. And one of the arresting officers is none other than Chase Jennings... the only boy Ember has ever loved.

Way Down Dark

Australia: Book 1

J. P. Smythe

There's one truth on Australia.

You fight or you die.

Usually both.

Imagine a nightmare from which there is no escape.

Seventeen-year-old Chan's ancestors left a dying Earth hundreds of years ago, in search of a new home. They never found one.

This is a hell where no one can hide.

The only life that Chan's ever known is one of violence, of fighting. Of trying to survive.

This is a ship of death, of murderers and cults and gangs.

But there might be a way to escape. In order to find it, Chan must head way down into the darkness - a place of buried secrets, long-forgotten lies, and the abandoned bodies of the dead.

This is Australia.

Seventeen-year-old Chan, fiercely independent and self-sufficient, keeps her head down and lives quietly, careful not to draw attention to herself amidst the violence and disorder. Until the day she makes an extraordinary discovery - a way to return the Australia to Earth. But doing so would bring her to the attention of the fanatics and the murderers who control life aboard the ship, putting her and everyone she loves in terrible danger.

And a safe return to Earth is by no means certain.

The Electric Church

Avery Cates: Book 1

Jeff Somers

In the near future, the only thing growing faster than the criminal population is the Electric Church, a new religion founded by a mysterious man named Dennis Squalor. The Church preaches that life is too brief to contemplate the mysteries of the universe: eternity is required. In order to achieve this, the converted become Monks -- cyborgs with human brains, enhanced robotic bodies, and virtually unlimited life spans.

Enter Avery Cates, a dangerous criminal known as the best killer-for-hire around. The authorities have a special mission in mind for Cates: assassinate Dennis Squalor. But for Cates, the assignment will be the most dangerous job he's ever undertaken -- and it may well be his last.

Alita: Battle Angel - Iron City

Battle Angel: Book 1

Pat Cadigan

The official prequel novel to the highly anticipated film.

A long time ago there was the Great War. The reasons for the war have been lost to time. On the shattered surface of the Earth, there is a metropolis that lives amidst the garbage thrown down from the inhabitants of a sky city floating above it. Welcome to Iron City.

A lonely doctor specialising in cyborg repair, Ido, is doing his best to help the citizens of Iron City. But Ido has a double life, another persona born from the pieces of his broken heart.

Hugo, a young man surviving on a life of crime, spots the ultimate steal: an object that will unearth secrets from his own past.

And Vector, the most powerful businessman in the city, has his sights set on a new technology that will change the future of Iron City forever...

Alita: Battle Angel

Battle Angel: Book 2

Pat Cadigan

>The official novelization to the highly anticipated science fiction movie, Alita: Battle Angel.

In the twenty-sixth century, a female cyborg is rescued from the scrap heap by a scientist...

Alita: Battle Angel - Dr. Ido's Journal

Battle Angel: Book 3

Nick Aires

Journal written by cybersurgeon Dr Dyson Ido, who brings the cyborg Alita back to life after finding her remains in a scrapyard.

In a dystopian future where cyborgs and robots are commonplace, Zalem, the last of the great sky cities, dumps its trash onto the world below. In the scrapyard on the outskirts of the terrestrial Iron City a cyborg doctor, Ido, scavenging for extra parts, finds the still-living remains of a female cyborg. Experience the world of Alita through the eyes of her adopted father, cybersurgeon and Hunter-Warrior Dr. Dyson Ido with this illustrated journal.

Before the Golden Age: Science Fiction Classics of the Thirties

Before the Golden Age: Book 1

Isaac Asimov

Asimov combines many of his science fiction favorites from the thirties with his personal reflections on his early years, interests, and influences.

Table of Contents:

Introduction - (1974) - essay by Isaac Asimov
Part One: 1920 to 1930 - (1974) - essay by Isaac Asimov
Part Two: 1931 - (1974) - essay by Isaac Asimov
The Man Who Evolved - (1931) - shortstory by Edmond Hamilton
The Jameson Satellite - (1931) - novelette by Neil R. Jones
Submicroscopic - (1931) - novelette by S. P. Meek
Awlo of Ulm - (1931) - novella by S. P. Meek
Tetrahedra of Space - (1931) - novelette by P. Schuyler Miller
The World of the Red Sun - (1931) - novelette by Clifford D. Simak
Part Three: 1932 - (1974) - essay by Isaac Asimov
Tumithak of the Corridors - (1932) - novella by Charles R. Tanner
The Moon Era - (1932) - novella by Jack Williamson

God's War

Bel Dame Apocrypha: Book 1

Nyx had already been to hell. One prayer more or less wouldn t make any difference...

On a ravaged, contaminated world, a centuries-old holy war rages, fought by a bloody mix of mercenaries, magicians, and conscripted soldiers. Though the origins of the war are shady and complex, there's one thing everybody agrees on--

There's not a chance in hell of ending it.

Nyx is a former government assassin who makes a living cutting off heads for cash. But when a dubious deal between her government and an alien gene pirate goes bad, Nyx's ugly past makes her the top pick for a covert recovery. The head they want her to bring home could end the war--but at what price?

The world is about to find out.

Infidel

Bel Dame Apocrypha: Book 2

The only thing worse than war is revolution. Especially when you're already losing the war...

Nyx used to be a bel dame, a government-funded assassin with a talent for cutting off heads for cash. Now she's babysitting diplomats to make ends meet and longing for the days when killing was a lot more honorable.

When Nyx's former bel dame "sisters" lead a coup against the government that threatens to plunge the country into civil war, Nyx is tasked with bringing them in. The hunt takes Nyx and her inglorious team of mercenaries to one of the richest, most peaceful, and most contaminated places on the planet - a country wholly unprepared to host a battle waged by the world's deadliest assassins.

In a rotten nation of sweet-tongued politicians, giant bugs, and renegade shape shifters, Nyx will forge unlikely allies and rekindle old acquaintances. And the bodies she leaves scattered across the continent this time... may include her own.

Because no matter where you go or how far you run in this world, one thing is certain: the bloody bel dames will find you.

Rapture

Bel Dame Apocrypha: Book 3

Bitch Planet, Vol. 1: Extraordinary Machine

After years in exile, Nyxnissa so Dasheem is back in action in service to the bel dames, a sisterhood of elite government assassins tasked with eliminating deserters and traitors. The end of a centuries-long holy war between her country, Nasheen, and neighboring Chenja has flooded the streets of Nasheen with unemployed - and unemployable - soldiers whose frustrations have brought the nation to the brink of civil war.

Not everyone likes this tenuous and unpredictable "peace," however, and somebody has kidnapped a key politician whose death could trigger a bloody government takeover. With aliens in the sky and revolution on the ground, Nyx assembles a team of mad magicians, torturers,and mutant shape-shifters for an epic journey across a flesh-eating desert in search of a man she's not actually supposed to kill.

Trouble is, killing is the only thing Nyx is good at. And she already left this man to die...

Bitch Planet: Book 1

Kelly Sue DeConnick
Valentine De Landro

Eisner Award-nominated writer Kelly Sue DeConnick (Pretty Deadly, Captain Marvel) and Valentine De Landro (X-Factor) team up to bring you the premiere volume of Bitch Planet, a deliciously vicious riff on women-in-prison sci-fi exploitation.

In a future just a few years down the road in the wrong direction, a woman's failure to comply with her patriarchal overlords will result in exile to the meanest penal planet in the galaxy. When the newest crop of fresh femmes arrive, can they work together to stay alive or will hidden agendas, crooked guards, and the deadliest sport on (or off!) Earth take them to their maker?

Blindness

Blindness: Book 1

José Saramago

A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers-among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears-through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man's worst appetites and weaknesses-and man's ultimately exhilarating spirit. The stunningly powerful novel of man's will to survive against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Dead Astronauts

Borne: Book 2

Jeff VanderMeer

A messianic blue fox who slips through warrens of time and space on a mysterious mission. A homeless woman haunted by a demon who finds the key to all things in a strange journal. A giant leviathan of a fish, centuries old, who hides a secret, remembering a past that may not be its own. Three ragtag rebels waging an endless war for the fate of the world against an all-powerful corporation. A raving madman who wanders the desert lost in the past, haunted by his own creation: an invisible monster whose name he has forgotten and whose purpose remains hidden.

Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts presents a City with no name of its own where, in the shadow of the all-powerful Company, lives human and otherwise converge in terrifying and miraculous ways. At stake: the fate of the future, the fate of Earth... all the Earths.

Brave New Girl

Brave New Girl: Book 1

Rachel Vincent

Dahlia 16 sees her face in every crowd. She's nothing special--just one of five thousand girls created from a single genome to work for the greater good of the city.

Meeting Trigger 17 changes everything. He thinks she's interesting. Beautiful. Unique. Which means he must be flawed. When Dahlia can't stop thinking about him she realizes she's flawed, too.

But what if Trigger is right? What if Dahlia is different? But if she's flawed, then so are all her identicals. And any genome found to be flawed will be destroyed, ONE BY ONE BY ONE....

Strange New World

Brave New Girl: Book 2

Rachel Vincent

Dahlia 16's life is a lie. The city of Lakeview isn't a utopia that raises individuals for the greater good; it is a clone farm that mass-produces servants for the elite. And because Dahlia breaks the rules, her sisters--the 4,999 girls who share her face--are destroyed. She and Trigger 17, the soldier who risked his life for hers, go on the run, escaping into the wild outside the city walls. But it turns out Dahlia has one remaining identical, one who shouldn't even exist.

Waverly Whitmore is teenage royalty, a media sensation with millions of fans who broadcasts her every move--including every detail of her wedding planning, leading up to the day she marries Hennessy Chapman. Waverly lives a perfect life built on the labors of clones like Dahlia. She has no idea that she too is a clone... until she comes face to face with Dahlia.

One deadly secret. Two genetic sisters. And a world that isn't big enough for both of them.

When Gravity Fails

Budayeen: Marîd Audran: Book 1

George Alec Effinger

In a decadent world of cheap pleasures and easy death, Marid Audrian has kept his independence the hardway. Still, like everything else in the Budayeen, he's available... for a price.

For a new kind of killer roams the streets of the Arab ghetto, a madman whose bootlegged personality cartridges range from a sinister James Bond to a sadistic disemboweler named Khan. And Marid Audrian has been made an offer he can't refuse.

The 200-year-old "godfather" of the Budayeen's underworld has enlisted Marid as his instrument of vengeance. But first Marid must undergo the most sophisticated of surgical implants before he dares to confront a killer who carries the power of every psychopath since the beginning of time.

A Fire in the Sun

Budayeen: Marîd Audran: Book 2

George Alec Effinger

Marid Audran has become everything he once despised. Not so long ago, he was a hustler in the Budayeen, an Arabian ghetto in a Balkanized future Earth.

Back then, as often as not, he didn't have the money to buy himself a drink. But he had his independence.

Now Marid works for Friedlander Bey, "godfather" of the Budayeen, a man whose power stretches across a shattered, crumbling world. During the day, Marid is a policeman... and Bey's personal envoy to the police. His new position has brought him money and power which he would abandon in a moment if he could return to a life of neither owning nor being owned. Which, unfortunately, isn't one of his options.

It's also not an issue. For something dark is afoot. Something that is sending the city into chaos. Helping a child-mutilator to avoid arrest. Sending a killer to murder Marid's partner. Murdering prostitutes and savaging their remains. Signs point to the hand of Abu Adil-the one man in the city whose power rivals Friedlander Bey's. Whatever happens next, it's not going to be good news for Marid Audran...

The Exile Kiss

Budayeen: Marîd Audran: Book 3

George Alec Effinger

Marîd Audran has risen from hustling on the streets of the decadent Budayeen ghetto to being the right-hand man of one of the Maghreb’s most feared men. As an enforcer for the powerful Friedlander Bey, Marîd is just beginning to enjoy his newfound wealth and privilege, when he and Bey are betrayed by a rival and accused of murder.

Sentenced to exile and abandoned to die in the vast Arabian desert, Marîd and Bey must somehow survive the searing sands and make their way back to the now-hostile Budayeen-and, then, take their vengeance.

By turns thrilling and philosophical, The Exile Kiss is the culmination of one of the great works of modern SF.

Carve the Mark

Carve the Mark: Book 1

Cyra Noavek and Akos Kereseth have grown up in enemy countries locked in a long-standing fight for dominance over their shared planet. When Akos and his brother are kidnapped by the ruling Noavek family, Akos is forced to serve Cyra, the sister of a dictator who governs with violence and fear. Cyra is known for her deadly power of transferring extraordinary pain unto others with simple touch, and her tyrant brother uses her as a weapon against those who challenge him. But as Akos fights for his own survival, he recognizes that Cyra is also fighting for hers, and that her true gift--resilience--might be what saves them both.

When Akos and Cyra are caught in the middle of a raging rebellion, everything they've been led to believe about their world and themselves must be called into question. But fighting for what's right might mean betraying their countries, their families, and each other.

When the time comes, will they choose loyalty or love?

The Fates Divide

Carve the Mark: Book 2

The Knife of Never Letting Go

The lives of Cyra Noavek and Akos Kereseth are ruled by their fates, spoken by the oracles at their births. The fates, once determined, are inescapable.

Akos is in love with Cyra, in spite of his fate: He will die in service to Cyra's family. And when Cyra's father, Lazmet Noavek--a soulless tyrant, thought to be dead--reclaims the Shotet throne, Akos believes his end is closer than ever.

As Lazmet ignites a barbaric war, Cyra and Akos are desperate to stop him at any cost. For Cyra, that could mean taking the life of the man who may--or may not--be her father. For Akos, it could mean giving his own. In a stunning twist, the two will discover how fate defines their lives in ways most unexpected.

Chaos Walking: Book 1

Patrick Ness

Todd Hewitt is the last boy in Prentisstown.

But Prentisstown isn't like other towns. Everyone can hear everyone else's thoughts in a constant, overwhelming, never-ending Noise. There is no privacy. There are no secrets.

Or are there?

Just one month away from the birthday that will make him a man, Todd unexpectedly stumbles upon a spot of complete silence.

Which is impossible.

Prentisstown has been lying to him.

And now he's going to have to run...

The Ask and the Answer

Chaos Walking: Book 2

Patrick Ness

Fleeing before a relentless army, Todd has carried a desperately wounded Viola right into the hands of their worst enemy, Mayor Prentiss. Immediately separated from Viola and imprisoned, Todd is forced to learn the ways of the Mayor's new order.

But what secrets are hiding just outside of town? And where is Viola? Is she even still alive? And who are the mysterious Answer?

And then, one day, the bombs begin to explode...

The Ask and the Answer is a tense, shocking and deeply moving novel of resistance under the most extreme pressure.

Monsters of Men

Chaos Walking: Book 3

Patrick Ness

Three armies march on New Prentisstown, each one intent on destroying the others.

Todd and Viola are caught in the middle, with no chance of escape.

As the battles commence, how can they hope to stop the fighting? How can there be peace when they’re so hopelessly outnumbered? And if war makes monsters of men, what terrible choices await?

But then a third voice breaks into the battle, one bent on revenge…

The electrifying finale to the award-winning Chaos Walking trilogy. Publishing May 2010 in the UK, Ireland and Australia, and September 2010 in the United States and Canada.

The Fall of Colossus

Colossus: Book 2

D. F. Jones

Charles Forbin is the Director: the one man on earth who speaks directly to Colossus. Five years before, the American supercomputer and the Soviet supercomputer were united -- combining their data, their analytic powers, their learning and growth capacity. In the few seconds of that process, they became one Colossus -- master of humankind. Programmed to solve humanity's problems, Colossus solved them: forestalled nuclear holocaust, eradicated poverty and the frustration and violence it breeds. Soon there was nothing for people to do -- but obey. Some made Colossus their God, and Charles Forbin was their Pope. Others wanted to be free of Colossus -- for Colossus was also ruthless beyond any human tyrant ever -- and they wanted Forbin as their deliverer. Either of these movements might get Forbin killed. He is appalled and disgusted by the religious cult, terrified by the rebels -- who haven't a chance, as he knows better than anyone on earth. Then Forbin is handed the key to the overthrow of Colossus -- or is it? He must commit his life to the chance that it is, just to begin with. Then he must commit the earth to the shadowy motives of the mysterious source of this new power.

Colossus and the Crab

Colossus: Book 3

D. F. Jones

BETRAYER OF MANKIND

In all his illustrious career Charles Forbin has never faced a challenge as awe-inspiring, and as hopeless! As the man who mediates between Colossus, the Super-Computer, and the rest of humanity, Forbin holds the key to Earth's fate. Now he has voluntarily used his power to switch off the Machine, and thus turned over mastery of the planet to alien invaders.

Will Forbin turn out to be the universal Judas, or can he prevent these strange beings from taking their horrendous tribute? The invaders are wise beyond mankind's conception, and Forbin meets his match in this thrilling third book in the Colossus series.

The Joy Makers

Crown Classics of SF: Book 2

James E. Gunn

Happiness, Guaranteed...

In the not-too-distant future, money truly can buy happiness, and Hedonics, Inc., is willing to sell it to you. They'll even offer you a money-back guarantee, if you're not "happy" with the product. But with their team of psychologists, life specialists, and self-improvement coaches, they don't have any "unhappy" customers.

What happens when a company grows too big, becomes too successful? It wants to guarantee its place in society and its future, and Hedonics is no exception. When your product is happiness, the way you guarantee your success is to pass laws mandating happiness.

But when universal happiness is required, does it really matter if you're getting what you want, or happy with what you have?

James Gunn has been a professional science fiction writer for more than 60 years, and in 2007, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named him a Grand Master.

Dangerous Visions

Dangerous Visions: Book 1

Harlan Ellison

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 of 20th-century SF.

Table of Contents:

Foreword 1-The Second Revolution - (1967) - essay by Isaac Asimov
Foreword 2-Harlan and I - (1967) - essay by Isaac Asimov
Thirty-Two Soothsayers - (1967) - essay by Harlan Ellison
Evensong - (1967) - shortstory by Lester del Rey
Flies - (1967) - shortstory by Robert Silverberg
The Day After the Day the Martians Came - (1967) - shortstory by Frederik Pohl
Riders of the Purple Wage - (1967) - novella by Philip José Farmer
The Malley System - (1967) - shortstory by Miriam Allen deFord
A Toy for Juliette - shortstory by Robert Bloch
The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World - novelette by Harlan Ellison
The Night That All Time Broke Out - (1967) - shortstory by Brian W. Aldiss
The Man Who Went to the Moon - Twice - (1967) - shortstory by Howard Rodman
Faith of Our Fathers - novelette by Philip K. Dick
The Jigsaw Man - (1967) - shortstory by Larry Niven
Gonna Roll the Bones - novelette by Fritz Leiber
Lord Randy, My Son - (1967) - shortstory by Joe L. Hensley
Eutopia - (1967) - novelette by Poul Anderson
Incident in Moderan - (1967) - shortstory by David R. Bunch
The Escaping - (1967) - shortstory by David R. Bunch
The Doll-House - (1967) - shortstory by James Cross
Sex and/or Mr. Morrison - shortstory by Carol Emshwiller
Shall the Dust Praise Thee? - (1967) - shortstory by Damon Knight
If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister? - (1967) - novella by Theodore Sturgeon
What Happened to Auguste Clarot? - (1967) - shortstory by Larry Eisenberg
Ersatz - (1967) - shortstory by Henry Slesar
Go, Go, Go, Said the Bird - (1967) - shortstory by Sonya Dorman
The Happy Breed - shortstory by John Sladek
Encounter with a Hick - (1967) - shortstory by Jonathan Brand
From the Government Printing Office - (1967) - shortstory by Kris Neville
Land of the Great Horses - shortstory by R. A. Lafferty
The Recognition - shortstory by J. G. Ballard
Judas - (1967) - shortstory by John Brunner
Test to Destruction - (1967) - novelette by Keith Laumer
Carcinoma Angels - (1967) - shortstory by Norman Spinrad
Auto-da-Fé - (1967) - shortstory by Roger Zelazny
Aye, and Gomorrah... - (1967) - shortstory by Samuel R. Delany

Dark Eden

Dark Eden: Book 1

Chris Beckett

You live in Eden. You are a member of the Family, one of 532 descendants of Angela and Tommy. You shelter beneath the light and warmth of the Forest's lantern trees, hunting woollybuck and harvesting tree candy. Beyond the forest lie the treeless mountains of the Snowy Dark and a cold so bitter and a night so profound that no man has ever crossed it. The Oldest among you recount legends of a world where light came from the sky, where men and women made boats that could cross between worlds. One day, the Oldest say, they will come back for you.

You live in Eden. You are a member of the Family, one of 532 descendants of two marooned explorers. You huddle, slowly starving, beneath the light and warmth of geothermal trees, confined to one barely habitable valley of a startlingly alien, sunless world. After 163 years and six generations of incestuous inbreeding, the Family is riddled with deformity and feeblemindedness. Your culture is a infantile stew of half-remembered fact and devolved ritual that stifles innovation and punishes independent thought. You are John Redlantern. You will break the laws of Eden, shatter the Family and change history. You will be the first to abandon hope, the first to abandon the old ways, the first to kill another, the first to venture in to the Dark, and the first to discover the truth about Eden.

Dayworld

Dayworld: Book 1

Philip José Farmer

In the thirty-fifth century, when individuals are frozen for six days and allowed to live for one day a week, "day-breakers" like Jeff Caird, illegally steal entire weeks by juggling daily identities.

Deathworld 2

Deathworld: Book 2

Harry Harrison

The planet was unknown... a savagely, primitive place where every man had to kill every other man - or live as a slave.

The inhabitants lived in the early bronze age one minutes, in the the early machines age the next. Technology had degenerated into a number of mysteries jealously guarded by separate brotherhoods.

But Jason din Alt was a gambler. He realized that if he was ever going to get a winning hand in the game, the brotherhoods would need a shuffle....

Directive 51

Directive 51: Book 1

John Barnes

Heather O'Grainne is the Assistant Secretary in the Office of Future Threat Assessment, investigating rumors surrounding something called "Daybreak." The group is diverse and radical, and its members have only one thing in common-their hatred for the "Big System" and their desire to take it down.

Now, seemingly random events simultaneously occurring around the world are in fact connected as part of Daybreak's plan to destroy modern civilization-a plan that will eliminate America's top government personnel, leaving the nation no choice but to implement its emergency contingency program... Directive 51.

Divergent

Divergent Trilogy: Book 1

In Beatrice Prior's dystopian Chicago, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue-Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is-she can't have both. So she makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself.

During the highly competitive initiation that follows, Beatrice renames herself Tris and struggles to determine who her friends really are-and where, exactly, a romance with a sometimes fascinating, sometimes infuriating boy fits into the life she's chosen. But Tris also has a secret, one she's kept hidden from everyone because she's been warned it can mean death. And as she discovers a growing conflict that threatens to unravel her seemingly perfect society, she also learns that her secret might help her save those she loves... or it might destroy her.

Debut author Veronica Roth bursts onto the literary scene with the first book in the Divergent series-dystopian thrillers filled with electrifying decisions, heartbreaking betrayals, stunning consequences, and unexpected romance.

Insurgent

Divergent Trilogy: Book 2

One choice can transform you-or it can destroy you. But every choice has consequences, and as unrest surges in the factions all around her, Tris Prior must continue trying to save those she loves-and herself-while grappling with haunting questions of grief and forgiveness, identity and loyalty, politics and love.

Tris's initiation day should have been marked by celebration and victory with her chosen faction; instead, the day ended with unspeakable horrors. War now looms as conflict between the factions and their ideologies grows. And in times of war, sides must be chosen, secrets will emerge, and choices will become even more irrevocable-and even more powerful. Transformed by her own decisions but also by haunting grief and guilt, radical new discoveries, and shifting relationships, Tris must fully embrace her Divergence, even if she does not know what she may lose by doing so.

New York Times bestselling author Veronica Roth's much-anticipated second book of the dystopian Divergent series is another intoxicating thrill ride of a story, rich with hallmark twists, heartbreaks, romance, and powerful insights about human nature.

Allegiant

Divergent Trilogy: Book 3

What if your whole world was a lie?

What if a single revelation - like a single choice - changed everything?

What if love and loyalty made you do things you never expected?

The explosive conclusion to Veronica Roth's #1 New York Times best-selling Divergent trilogy reveals the secrets of the dystopian world that has captivated millions of listeners in Divergent and Insurgent.

The Adjacent

Dream Archipelago: Book 3

A photographer returns to a near-future Britain after the death of his wife in a terrorist incident in Afghanistan. And finds that Britain has, itself, been suffering terrorist attacks. But no-one knows quite what is happening or how. Just that there are similarities between what killed the photographer's wife and what happened in West London. Soon he is drawn into a hall of mirrors at the heart of government.

In the First World War a magician is asked to travel to the frontline to help a naval aerial reconnaissance unit hide its planes from the German guns. On the way to France he meets a certain H.G. Wells. In the Second World War on the airfields of Bomber Commands there is also an obsession with camouflage, with misdirection. With deceit.

And in a garden, an old man raises a conch shell to his ear and initiates the first Adjacency.

Blood Red Road

Dustlands: Book 1

Moira Young

Saba has spent her whole life in Silverlake, a dried-up wasteland ravaged by constant sandstorms. The Wrecker civilization has long been destroyed, leaving only landfills for Saba and her family to scavenge from. That's fine by her, as long as her beloved twin brother Lugh is around. But when four cloaked horsemen capture Lugh, Saba's world is shattered, and she embarks on a quest to get him back.

Suddenly thrown into the lawless, ugly reality of the outside world, Saba discovers she is a fierce fighter, an unbeatable survivor, and a cunning opponent. Teamed up with a handsome daredevil named Jack and a gang of girl revolutionaries called the Free Hawks, Saba’s unrelenting search for Lugh stages a showdown that will change the course of her own civilization.

Blood Red Road has a searing pace, a poetic writing style, and an epic love story-making Moira Young is one of the most exciting new voices in teen fiction.

Tales of the Dying Earth

Dying Earth

One of Jack Vances enduring classics is his 1964 novel, The Dying Earth, and its sequelsa fascinating tale set on a far-future Earth, under a giant red sun that is soon to go out forever. This volume comprises all four books in the series, The Dying Earth, The Eyes of the Overworld, Cugels Saga and Rialto the Magnificent.

The Dying Earth

Dying Earth: Book 1

The Eyes of the Overworld

The stories included in The Dying Earth introduce dozens of seekers of wisdom and beauty, lovely lost women, wizards of every shade of eccentricity with their runic amulets and spells. We meet the melancholy deodands, who feed on human flesh and the twk-men, who ride dragonflies and trade information for salt. There are monsters and demons. Each being is morally ambiguous: The evil are charming, the good are dangerous. All are at home in Vance's lyrically described fantastic landscapes like Embelyon where, "The sky [was] a mesh of vast ripples and cross-ripples and these refracted a thousand shafts of colored light, rays which in mid-air wove wondrous laces, rainbow nets, in all the jewel hues...." The dying Earth itself is otherworldly: "A dark blue sky, an ancient sun.... Nothing of Earth was raw or harsh-the ground, the trees, the rock ledge protruding from the meadow; all these had been worked upon, smoothed, aged, mellowed. The light from the sun, though dim, was rich and invested every object of the land ... with a sense of lore and ancient recollection." Welcome.

alternate title: Mazirian the Magician

Dying Earth: Book 2

The Eyes of the Overworld is the first of Vance's picaresque novels about the scoundrel Cugel. Here he is sent by a magician he has wronged to a distant unknown country to retrieve magical lenses that reveal the Overworld. Conniving to steal the lenses, he escapes and, goaded by a homesick monster magically attached to his liver, starts to find his way home to Almery. The journey takes him across trackless mountains, wastelands, and seas. Through cunning and dumb luck, the relentless Cugel survives one catastrophe after another, fighting off bandits, ghosts, and ghouls-stealing, lying, and cheating without insight or remorse leaving only wreckage behind.

Betrayed and betraying, he joins a cult group on a pilgrimage, crosses the Silver Desert as his comrades die one by one and, escaping the Rat People, obtains a spell that returns him home. There, thanks to incompetence and arrogance he misspeaks the words of a purloined spell and transports himself back to the same dismal place he began his journey.

Alternate title: Cugel the Clever

Cugel's Saga

Dying Earth: Book 3

The roguish Cugel the Clever is stranded on a shore on the other side of the world by the Laughing Magic and must fight, bluff, and connive his way back to Almery to take vengeance on the wizard.

Alternate title: Cugel: The Skybreak Spatterlight

Rhialto the Marvellous

Dying Earth: Book 4

Caesar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century

Jack Vance is one of the most remarkable talents to ever grace the world of science fiction. His unique, stylish voice has been beloved by generations of readers. One of his enduring classics is hisThe Dying Earth series, fascinating, baroque tales set on a far-future Earth, under a giant red sun that is soon to go out forever.

Rhialto the Marvellous contains three linked novellas about the adventures of the wizard Rhialto across the decadent landscape of the Dying Earth, under its swollen red sun.

Early Classics of Science Fiction: Book 8

Ignatius Donnelly

Published in 1890, Caesar's Column is an account of a trip to New York City in 1988 by a visitor from the Swiss colony of Uganda. The great metropolis dazzles with its futuristic technology, but its ostentatious wealth and luxury mask the brutal repression of the laboring classes by their rich bosses. The workers, aided by international terrorists, stage a violent revolt and the narrator flees the devastated city by airship to found an agrarian utopia in Africa.

Fueled by outrage at social conditions, Caesar's Column was the first major dystopian novel in the English language. Its author, Ignatius Donnelly, was the most famous-and controversial-American populist politician of the day, and his book became a huge bestseller and was often compared to such utopian works as Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) and William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890).

This Wesleyan edition includes an insightful introduction and notes by Nicholas Ruddick.

The author also used the pseudonym of Edmund Boisgilbert M.D. for publication.

Eisenhorn

Dan Abnett

Inquisitor Eisenhorn is one on the most senior members of the Imperial Inquisition. With his warband he scourges the galaxy in order to root out heresy. When that heresy is found to infiltrate the hierarchy of the Imperium and the Inquisition itself, he must rely on himself alone to deal with it - even if it means making deals with the enemy.

All three books of the Eisenhorn trilogy along with two short stories and Eisenhorn's case book and compendium are included in one big volume.

The Sunrise Lands

Emberverse: Emberverse II: Book 1

S. M. Stirling

Rudi MacKenzie has grown up knowing that he will one day assume leadership over the survivors of the technological disaster known as the Change. But a prophecy made at his birth spoke of an even greater destiny-a destiny that is about to be fulfilled. A mysterious traveler from Nantucket, long rumored to be the source of the Change, arrives on a mission to bring Rudi back with him. And between him and his destiny lies the the cult of a madman determined to stop him...

Quantum Coin

Fair Coin: Book 2

E. C. Myers

The sequel to the exciting adventure spun across parallel worlds!

Ephraim thought his universe-hopping days were over. He's done wishing for magic solutions to his problems; his quantum coin has been powerless for almost a year, and he's settled into a normal life with his girlfriend, Jena. But then an old friend crashes their senior prom: Jena's identical twin from a parallel world, Zoe.

Zoe's timing couldn't be worse. It turns out that Ephraim's problems are far from over, and they're much more complicated than his love life: The multiverse is at stake—and it might just be Ephraim's fault.

Ephraim, Jena, and Zoe embark on a mission across multiple worlds to learn what's going wrong and how to stop it. They will have to draw on every resource available and trust in alternate versions of themselves and their friends, before it's too late for all of them.

If Ephraim and his companions can put their many differences aside and learn to work together, they might have a chance to save the multiverse. But ultimately, the solution may depend on how much they're willing to sacrifice for the sake of humanity... and each other.

Firebreak

Firebreak: Book 1

Nicole Kornher-Stace

"Twenty minutes to power curfew, and my kill counter's stalled at eight hundred eighty-seven while I've been standing here like an idiot. My health bar is flashing ominously, but I'm down to four heal patches, and I have to be smart."

New Liberty City, 2134.

Two corporations have replaced the US, splitting the country's remaining forty-five states (five have been submerged under the ocean) between them: Stellaxis Innovations and Greenleaf. There are nine supercities within the continental US, and New Liberty City is the only amalgamated city split between the two megacorps, and thus at a perpetual state of civil war as the feeds broadcast the atrocities committed by each side.

Here, Mallory streams Stellaxis's wargame SecOps on BestLife, spending more time jacked in than in the world just to eke out a hardscrabble living from tips. When a chance encounter with one of the game's rare super-soldiers leads to a side job for Mal--looking to link an actual missing girl to one of the SecOps characters. Mal's sudden burst in online fame rivals her deepening fear of what she is uncovering about BestLife's developer, and puts her in the kind of danger she's only experienced through her avatar.

Author Kornher-Stace's adult science fiction debut--Firebreak-- is loaded with ambitious challenges and a city to save.

Generations

Firefly: Book 3

Tim Lebbon

Mal wins an old map in a card game. Ancient and written in impenetrable symbols, the former owner insists it's worthless. Yet River Tam can read it, and says it leads to one of the Arks, legendary ships that brought humans from Earth-that-was to the 'Verse. The salvage potential alone is staggering. But the closer they get to the ancient ship, the more agitated River becomes. She says something is waiting inside, something powerful, and very angry...

The First Sister

First Sister: Book 1

Linden A. Lewis

First Sister has no name and no voice. As a priestess of the Sisterhood, she travels the stars alongside the soldiers of Earth and Mars—the same ones who own the rights to her body and soul. When her former captain abandons her, First Sister’s hopes for freedom are dashed when she is forced to stay on her ship with no friends, no power, and a new captain—Saito Ren—whom she knows nothing about. She is commanded to spy on Captain Ren by the Sisterhood, but soon discovers that working for the war effort is much harder when you’re falling in love.

Lito val Lucius climbed his way out of the slums to become an elite soldier of Venus but was defeated in combat by none other than Saito Ren, resulting in the disappearance of his partner, Hiro. When Lito learns that Hiro is both alive and a traitor to the cause, he now has a shot at redemption: track down and kill his former partner. But when he discovers recordings that Hiro secretly made, Lito’s own allegiances are put to the test. Ultimately, he must decide between following orders and following his heart.

With “a layered, action-filled plot and diverse characters” (Library Journal), The First Sister explores the power of technology, colonization, race, and gender andis perfect for fans of James S.A. Corey, Chuck Wendig, and Jay Posey.

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Flatland: Book 1

Edwin A. Abbott

Flatland (1884) is an influential mathematical fantasy that simultaneously provides an introduction to non-Euclidean geometry and a satire on the Victorian class structure, issues of science and faith, and the role of women. A classic of early science fiction, the novel takes place in a world of two dimensions where all the characters are geometric shapes. The narrator, A Square, is a naïve, respectable citizen who is faced with proof of the existence of three dimensions when he is visited by a sphere and is forced to see the limitations of his world. The introduction to this Broadview Edition provides context for the book's references to Victorian culture and religion, mathematical history, and the history of philosophy. The appendices contain contemporary reviews; extracts from the work of fellow mathematical fantasy writer/mathematician Charles Hinton; Hermann von Helmboltz's "The Axioms of Geometry" (1870); and autobiographical passages from Abbott's The Kernel and the Husk (1886).

Flawed

Flawed: Book 1

Cecelia Ahern

Celestine North lives a perfect life. She's a model daughter and sister, she's well-liked by her classmates and teachers, and she's dating the impossibly charming Art Crevan.

But then Celestine encounters a situation where she makes an instinctive decision. She breaks a rule and now faces life-changing repercussions. She could be imprisoned. She could be branded. She could be found flawed.

In her breathtaking young adult debut, bestselling author Cecelia Ahern depicts a society where perfection is paramount and flaws lead to punishment. And where one young woman decides to take a stand that could cost her everything.

Perfect

Flawed: Book 2

Cecelia Ahern

Celestine North lives in a society that demands perfection. After she was branded Flawed by a morality court, Celestine's life has completely fractured--all her freedoms gone.

Since Judge Crevan has declared her the number one threat to the public, she has been a ghost, on the run with Carrick--the only person she can trust.

But Celestine has a secret--one that could bring the entire Flawed system crumbling to the ground. A secret that has already caused countless people to go missing.

Judge Crevan is gaining the upper hand, and time is running out for Celestine. With tensions building, can she prove that to be human in itself is to be Flawed?

Flood

Flood: Book 1

Stephen Baxter

Next year. Sea levels begin to rise. The change is far more rapid than any climate change predictions; metres a year. Within two years London, only 15 metres above the sea, is drowned. New York follows, the Pope gives his last address from the Vatican, Mecca disappears beneath the waves. Where is all the water coming from?

Scientists estimate that the earth was formed with seas 30 times in volume their current levels. Most of that water was burnt off by the sun but some was locked in the earth's mantle. For the tip of Everest to disappear beneath the waters would require the seas to triple their volume. That amount of water is still much less than 1% of the earth's volume. And somehow it is being released. The world is drowning. The biblical flood has returned. And the rate of increase is building all the time.

Mankind is on the run, heading for high ground. Nuclear submarines prowl through clouds of corpses rising from drowned cities, populations are decimated and finally the dreadful truth is known. Before 50 years have passed there will be nowhere left to run.

FLOOD tells the story of mankind's final years on earth.The stories of a small group of people caught up in the struggle to survive are woven into a tale of unimaginable global disaster. And the hope offered for a unlucky few by a second great ark...

Forever Peace

Forever War: Book 2

Joe Haldeman

In the year 2043, the Ngumi War rages. Limited nuclear strikes have been used on Atlanta and two enemy cities, but the war goes on, fought by 'soldierboys' -- indestructible war machines operated by remote control by soldiers hundreds of miles away.

Julian Class is one of these soldiers, and for him war is truly hell. The psychological strain of being jacked-in to his soldierboy -- and the genocidal results -- are becoming too much to bear. Now he and his companion, Dr Amelia Harding, have made a terrifying scientific discovery, which could literally take the universe back to square one. Except that for Julian, the discovery isn't so much terrifying as tempting....

Forever Free

Forever War: Book 3

Joe Haldeman

William Mandela is a genetic throwback, one of the small group of humans who fought and survived the Forever War. They returned to find humanity has evolved into a group mind called Man. Surrounded by a society that is too autocratic and intrusive, living a dull existence which cannot compare to the certainties of combat and feeling increasingly alienated, the veterans plan an escape to the future by means of space travel and relativity. But when their ship starts to fail, their journey becomes a search for the Unknown, the elusive entity responsible.

The Sleeper Awakes

Frontiers of Imagination: Book 6

H. G. Wells

The Sleeper Awakes is H. G. Wells's wildly imaginative story of London in the twenty-second century and the man who by accident becomes owner and master of the world. In 1897 a Victorian gentleman falls into a sleep from which he cannot be waked. During his two centuries of slumber he becomes the Sleeper, the most well known and powerful person in the world. All property is bequeathed to the Sleeper to be administered by a Council on his behalf. The common people, increasingly oppressed, view the Sleeper as a mythical liberator whose awakening will free them from misery.

The Sleeper awakes in 2100 to a futuristic London adorned with wondrous technological trappings yet staggering under social injustice and escalating unrest. His awakening sends shock waves throughout London, from the highest meetings of the Council to the workers laboring in factories in the bowels of the city. Daring rescues and villainous treachery abound as workers and capitalists fight desperately for control of the Sleeper.

The Man with the Strange Head and Other Early Science Fiction

Frontiers of Imagination: Book 58

Miles J. Breuer

Gathered here for the first time are Miles J. Breuer's first publication, "The Man with the Strange Head"; his neglected dystopian novel Paradise and Iron (appearing here in book form for the first time); stories such as "Gostak and the Doshes" and "Mechanocracy"; and Breuer's essay "The Future of Scientifiction," one of the early critical statements of the genre. Also included are some of the author's letters from the Discussions column of Amazing Stories.

Much of what we know as science fiction saw the light--and found its themes, styles, and modes--in the science fiction magazines of the early twentieth century. It was in these magazines of the 1920s and 1930s that Breuer often led the way. Breuer himself found his inspiration in the work of H. G. Wells and in turn influenced science fiction masters from Jack Williamson to Robert A. Heinlein. The Man with the Strange Head and Other Early Science Fiction Stories collects the best work of this pioneer of the genre.

Contents:

ix - Miles J. Breuer Science Fiction Pioneer of the Nebraska Plains - essay by Michael R. Page
1 - The Man with the Strange Head - (1927) - shortstory
12 - The Appendix and the Spectacles - (1928) - shortstory
25 - The Gostak and the Doshes - (1930) - shortstory
44 - Paradise and Iron - (1930) - novel
257 - A Problem in Communication - (1930) - novelette
285 - On Board the Martian Liner - (1931) - novelette
312 - Mechanocracy - (1932) - novelette
339 - The Finger of the Past - (1932) - shortstory
350 - Millions for Defense - (1935) - shortstory
366 - Mars Colonizes - (1935) - novelette
394 - The Oversight - (1940) - shortstory
415 - The Future of Scientifiction - essay
419 - Selected Letters - essay
429 - Breuer's Science Fiction - essay by uncredited

Shadrach in the Furnace

Frontiers of Imagination: Book 59

In the twenty-first century, a battered world is ruled by a crafty old tyrant, Genghis II Mao IV Khan. The Khan is ninety-three years old, his life systems sustained by the skill of Mordecai Shadrach, a brilliant young surgeon whose chief function is to replace the Khan's worn-out organs. Within the vast tower-complex, the most advanced equipment is dedicated to three top-priority projects, each designed to keep the Khan immortal. Most sinister of these is Project Avatar, by which the Khan's mind and persona are to be transferred to a younger body.

Shadrach makes the unsettling discovery that it is his body that is to be used. His friends beg him to flee, but he refuses to panic.Instead, and with startling composure, he evolves a dangerous plan that could change the face of the earth or, if it backfires, mean the end of life.

"Shadrach in the Furnace" is at once a broad, sweeping novel and a harsh, abrasive, irreverent book about a life-and-death battle between two titans - one the epitome of evil, the other a paragon of idealism - in a society pushed to extremes.

Tarnished Utopia

Galaxy Science Fiction: Book 27

Malcolm Jameson

Two people awaken from Suspended Animation to find themselves in conflict with a dictatorship.

Destiny Times Three

Galaxy Science Fiction: Book 28

Fritz Leiber

How can Thorn fight a dream foe -- risking life and sanity, that is exactly what he sets out to do . . . and his shrewd tactics and reckless daring create a pulse-hammering story against an all to real opponent!

The Handmaid's Tale

Gilead: Book 1

In the world of the near future, who will control women's bodies?

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are only valued if their ovaries are viable.

Offred can remember the days before, when she lived and made love with her husband Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now....

Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force.

The Testaments

Gilead: Book 2

When the van door slammed on Offred's future at the end of The Handmaid's Tale, readers had no way of telling what lay ahead for her--freedom, prison or death.

With The Testaments, the wait is over.

Margaret Atwood's sequel picks up the story fifteen years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three female narrators from Gilead.

Gregg Press Science Fiction Series: Book 4

Yevgeny Zamyatin

In a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, ruled over by the all-powerful 'Benefactor', the citizens of the totalitarian society of OneState live out lives devoid of passion and creativity - until D-503, a mathematician who dreams in numbers, makes a discovery: he has an individual soul.

Set in the twenty-sixth century AD, "We" is the classic dystopian novel and was the inspiration for George Orwell's 1984. It was suppressed for many years in Russia and remains a resounding cry for individual freedom, yet is also a powerful, exciting and vivid work of science fiction.

War with the Newts

Gregg Press Science Fiction Series: Book 9

Karel Capek

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 place at the top of the animal kingdom. Along the way, Karel Capek satirizes science, runaway capitalism, fascism, journalism, militarism, even Hollywood.

Solar Lottery

Gregg Press Science Fiction Series: Book 34

Originally appeared in Ace Double D-103 (1955).

The operating principle was random selection: positions of public power were decided by a sophisticated lottery. Everyone had a chance, everyone could live in hope that they would be chosen to be the boss, the Quizmaster. But with the power came the game - the assassination game - which everyone could watch on TV. Would the new man be good enough to avoid his chosen killer? Which made for fascinating and exciting viewing, compelling enough to distract the public's attention while the Big Five industrial complexes run the world, the solar system and the people, unnoticed and completely unopposed. Then, in 2203, with the choice of a member of a maverick cult as Quizmaster, the system developed a little hitch...

334

Gregg Press Science Fiction Series: Book 40

Thomas M. Disch

334, the city street address of a place where time pivots forward and backward, is the setting of a unique odyssey through human history.

The Female Man

Gregg Press Science Fiction Series: Book 57

Joanna Russ

It's influenced William Gibson and been listed as one of the ten essential works of science fiction. Most importantly, Joanna Russ's THE FEMALE MAN is a suspenseful, surprising and darkly witty chronicle of what happens when Jeannine, Janet, Joanna, and Jael--four alternate selves from drastically different realities--meet.

Counter-Clock World

Gregg Press Science Fiction Series: Book 62

The Game-Players of Titan

In Counter-Clock World, time has begun moving backward. People greet each other with "goodbye," blow smoke into cigarettes, and rise from the dead. When one of those rising dead is the famous and powerful prophet Anarch Peak, a number of groups start a mad scramble to find him first-but their motives are not exactly benevolent because Anarch Peak may just be worth more dead than alive, and these groups will do whatever they must to send him back to the grave.

What would you do if your long-dead relatives started coming back? Who would take care of them? And what if they preferred being dead? In Counter-Clock World, one of Dick's most theological and philosophical novels, these troubling questions are addressed; though, as always, you may have to figure out the answers yourself.

Gregg Press Science Fiction Series: Book 63

Philip K Dick's classic dystopian novel set in the future where the remaining human survivors on Earth must gamble for their future with aliens from Titan, one of the moons circling Saturn.

Roaming the pristine landscape of Earth, cared for by machines and aliens, the few remaining humans alive since the war with Titan play Bluff, allowing them to win or lose property and also form new marriages in order to maximise the remote chance some pairings will produce a child. When Pete Garden, a particularly suicidal member of the Pretty Blue Fox game-playing group, loses his current wife and his deed to Berkeley, he stumbles upon a far bigger, more sinister version of the game.

The telepathic, slug-like Vugs of Titan are the players and at stake is the Earth itself. The Game-Players of Titan is a brilliantly conceived vision of a future dystopia, full of imaginative detail, moments of pure humour and thought-provoking musings on the nature of perception, as the seemingly straightforward narrative soon turns into a tumultuous nightmare of delusion, precognition and conspiracy.

The Matter of Seggri

Hainish Cycle

The Left Hand of Darkness

Tiptree Winning and Hug and Nebula nominated novelette in Le Guin's Hainish Cycle. Originally published in Crank! #3, Spring 1994. Later anthologized in Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twelfth Annual Collection (1995) and Flying Cups and Saucers: Gender Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy (1998), and collected in The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (2002) and Outer Space, Inner Lands (2012).

Hainish Cycle: Book 4

The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

Genly Ai is an ethnologist observing the people of the planet Gethen, a world perpetually in winter. The people there are androgynous, normally neuter, but they can become male ot female at the peak of their sexual cycle. They seem to Genly Ai alien, unsophisticated and confusing. But he is drawn into the complex politics of the planet and, during a long, tortuous journey across the ice with a politician who has fallen from favour and has been outcast, he loses his professional detachment and reaches a painful understanding of the true nature of Gethenians and, in a moving and memorable sequence, even finds love...

Hainish Cycle: Book 5

Walk to the End of the World

Shevek, a brilliant physicist, decides to take action. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have isolated his planet of anarchists from the rest of the civilized universe. To do this dangerous task will mean giving up his family and possibly his life. Shevek must make the unprecedented journey to the utopian mother planet, Urras, to challenge the complex structures of life and living, and ignite the fires of change.

Under the Empyrean Sky

Heartland Trilogy: Book 1

Chuck Wendig

Fear the Corn.

Corn is king in the Heartland, and Cael McAvoy has had enough of it. It's the only crop the Empyrean government allows the people of the Heartland to grow - and the genetically modified strain is so aggressive that it takes everything the Heartlanders have just to control it. As captain of the Big Sky Scavengers, Cael and his crew sail their rickety ship over the corn day after day, scavenging for valuables. But Cael's tired of surviving life on the ground while the Empyrean elite drift by above in their extravagant sky flotillas. He's sick of the mayor's son besting Cael's crew in the scavenging game. And he's worried about losing Gwennie - his first mate and the love of his life - forever when their government-chosen spouses are revealed. But most of all, Cael is angry-angry that their lot in life will never get better and that his father doesn't seem upset about any of it.

When Cael and his crew discover a secret, illegal garden, he knows it's time to make his own luck... even if it means bringing down the wrath of the Empyrean elite and changing life in the Heartland forever.

Blightborn

Heartland Trilogy: Book 2

Chuck Wendig

Cael McAvoy is on the run. He's heading toward the Empyrean to rescue his sister, Merelda, and to find Gwennie before she's lost to Cael forever. With his pals, Lane and Rigo, Cael journeys across the Heartland to catch a ride into the sky. But with Boyland and others after them, Cael and his friends won't make it through unchanged.

Gwennie's living the life of a Lottery winner, but it's not what she expected. Separated from her family, Gwennie makes a bold move-one that catches the attention of the Empyrean and changes the course of an Empyrean man's life.

The crew from Boxelder aren't the only folks willing to sacrifice everything to see the Empyrean fall. The question is: Can the others be trusted?

They'd all better hurry. Because the Empyrean has plans that could ensure that the Heartland never fights back again.

Chuck Wendig's riveting sequel to Under the Empyrean Sky plunges readers into an unsettling world of inequality and destruction, and fleshes out a cast of ragtag characters all fighting for survival and, ultimately, change.

The Harvest

Heartland Trilogy: Book 3

Chuck Wendig

It's been a year since the Saranyu flotilla fell from the sky, and life in the Heartland has changed. Gone are the Obligations and the Harvest Home festivals. In their place is a spate of dead towns, the former inhabitants forced into mechanical bodies to serve the Empyrean - and crush the Heartland.

When Cael awakens from a Blightborn sleep, miles away from the world he remembers, he sets out across the Heartland to gather his friends for one last mission. As the mechanicals, a war flotilla, and a pack of feral Empyrean girls begin to close in on the Heartland, there isn't much time to make their next move. But if they can uncover a secret weapon in time, Cael and his friends might just find themselves with the power to save the world - or destroy it - resting in their hands.

Hell Divers

Hell Divers: Book 1

Nicholas Sansbury Smith

More than two centuries after World War III poisoned the planet, the final bastion of humanity lives on massive airships circling the globe in search for a habitable area to call home. Aging and outdated, most of the ships plummeted back to earth long ago. The only thing keeping the two surviving lifeboats in the sky are Hell Divers: men and women who risk their lives by diving to the surface to scavenge for parts the ships desperately need.

When one of the remaining airships is damaged in an electrical storm, a Hell Diver team is deployed to a hostile zone called Hades. But there's something down there that's far worse than the mutated creatures discovered on dives in the past--something that threatens the fragile future of humanity.

Hiero's Journey

Hiero Desteen: Book 1

Sterling E. Lanier

Per Hiero Desteen was a priest, a telepath -- and a highly trained killer. Together with his great riding moose and the young bear who was his friend, he was on an extraordinary mission. For this was five thousand years after the holocaust known as The Death. Now the evil Brotherhood of the Unclean was waging all-out war against the few remnants of normal humanity, determined to wipe out all traces of its emerging civilization. Hiero's task was to bring back a lost secret of the ancients that might save the humans. But his path lay through the very heart of the territory ruled by the Unclean and their hordes of mutated, intelligent, savage beast followers. And the Unclean were waiting for him!

The Godwhale

Hive: Book 2

T. J. Bass

Rorqual Maru was her name. She was a harvester - a vast plankton rake without a crop, abandoned by Earth society when the seas dried. Part whale, part ship, and well over 600 feet long, ahe was left to rot in the sterile ocean.

But suddenly, after centuries, the sea was no longer dead, and Rorqual stirred from her slumber. She would set out once again to serve mankind. But mankind had forgotten all about Rorqual ...

Holdfast Chronicles: Book 1

Suzy McKee Charnas

The men of the Holdfast had long treated with contempt the degenerated creatures known as "fems." To give themselves the drive to survive and reconquer the world, the men needed a common enemy. Superstitious belief had ascribed to the fems the guilt for the terrible Wasting that had destroyed the world. They were the ideal scapegoat. The truth was lost in death and decay and buried in history. It was going to be a long journey back...

The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy

Ijon Tichy

Stanislaw Lem

Bringing his twin gifts of scientific speculation and scathing satire to bear on that hapless planet, Earth, Lem sends his unlucky cosmonaut, Ijon Tichy, to the Eighth Futurological Congress. Caught up in local revolution, Tichy is shot and so critically wounded that he is flashfrozen to await a future cure. Translated by Michael Kandel.

Withered + Sere

Immemorial Year: Book 1

T. J. Klune

Once upon a time, humanity could no longer contain the rage that swelled within, and the world ended in a wave of fire.

One hundred years later, in the wasteland formerly known as America, a broken man who goes only by the name of Cavalo survives. Purposefully cutting himself off from what remains of civilization, Cavalo resides in the crumbling ruins of the North Idaho Correctional Institution. A mutt called Bad Dog and a robot on the verge of insanity comprise his only companions. Cavalo himself is deteriorating, his memories rising like ghosts and haunting the prison cells.

It's not until he makes the dangerous choice of crossing into the irradiated Deadlands that Cavalo comes into contact with a mute psychopath, one who belongs to the murderous group of people known as the Dead Rabbits. Taking the man prisoner, Cavalo is forced not only to face the horrors of his past, but the ramifications of the choices made for his stark present. And it is in the prisoner that he will find a possible future where redemption is but a glimmer that darkly shines.

The world has died. This is the story of its remains.

Crisped + Sere

Immemorial Year: Book 2

T. J. Klune

Twenty-one days.

In a world ravaged by fire and descending into madness, Cavalo has been given an ultimatum by the dark man known as Patrick: return Lucas to him and the cannibalistic Dead Rabbits, or the town of Cottonwood and its inhabitants will be destroyed. But Lucas has a secret embedded into his skin that promises to forever alter the shape of things to come--a secret that Cavalo must decide if it's worth dying over, even as he wrestles with his own growing attraction to the muted psychopath.

Twenty-one days.

Cavalo has twenty-one days to prepare for war. Twenty-one days to hold what is left of his shredded sanity together. Twenty-one days to convince the people of Cottonwood to rise up and fight back. Twenty-one days to unravel the meaning behind the marks that cover Lucas. A meaning that leads to a single word and a place of unimaginable power: Dworshak.

Inferno

Inferno: Book 1

Larry Niven
Jerry Pournelle

After being thrown out the window of his luxury apartment, science fiction writer Allen Carpentier wakes to find himself at the gates of hell. Feeling he's landed in a great opportunity for a book, he attempts to follow Dante's road map. Determined to meet Satan himself, Carpentier treks through the Nine Layers of Hell led by Benito Mussolini, and encounters countless mental and physical tortures. As he struggles to escape, he's taken through new, puzzling, and outlandish versions of sin--recast for the present day.

The Court of the Air

Jackelian World: Book 1

Stephen Hunt

When streetwise Molly Templar witnesses a brutal murder at the brothel she has recently been apprenticed to, her first instinct is to run back to the poorhouse where she grew up. But there she finds her fellow orphans butchered, and it slowly dawns on her that she was the real target of the attack. For Molly is a special little girl, and she carries a secret that marks her out for destruction by enemies of the state.

Oliver Brooks has led a sheltered existence in the backwater home of his merchant uncle. But when he is framed for his only relative's murder he is forced to flee for his life, accompanied by an agent of the mysterious Court of the Air. Chased across the country, Oliver finds himself in the company of thieves, outlaws and spies, and gradually learns more about the secret that has blighted his life.

Soon Molly and Oliver will find themselves battling a grave threat to civilization, an ancient power thought to have been quelled millennia ago. Their enemies are ruthless and myriad, but the two orphans are also aided by indomitable friends in this endlessly inventive tale full of drama, intrigue, and adventure.

The Court of the Air is a rollicking adventure set in a fantastical Dickensian clockwork universe that will appeal to fans of Susanna Clarke and Philip Pullman.

The Dosadi Experiment

Jorj McKie: Book 2

Frank Herbert

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.

Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Julian Comstock: Book 1

Robert Charles Wilson

In the reign of President Deklan Comstock, a reborn United States is struggling back to prosperity. Over a century after the Efflorescence of Oil, after the Fall of the Cities, after the Plague of Infertility, after the False Tribulation, after the days of the Pious Presidents, the sixty stars and thirteen stripes wave from the plains of Athabaska to the national capital in New York City. In Colorado Springs, the Dominion sees to the nation's spiritual needs. In Labrador, the Army wages war on the Dutch. America, unified, is rising once again.

Then out of Labrador come tales of a new Ajax-Captain Commongold, the Youthful Hero of the Saguenay. The ordinary people follow his adventures in the popular press. The Army adores him. The President is... troubled. Especially when the dashing Captain turns out to be his nephew Julian, son of the falsely accused and executed Bryce.

Treachery and intrigue dog Julian's footsteps. Hairsbreadth escapes and daring rescues fill his days. Stern resolve and tender sentiment dice for Julian's soul, while his admiration for the works of the Secular Ancients, and his adherence to the evolutionary doctrines of the heretical Darwin, set him at fatal odds with the hierarchy of the Dominion. Plague and fire swirl around the Presidential palace when at last he arrives with the acclamation of the mob.

As told by Julian's best friend and faithful companion, a rustic yet observant lad from the west, this tale of the 22nd Century asks- and answers-the age-old question: "Do you want to tell the truth, or do you want to tell a story?"

This novel is a greatly-expanded version of the Hugo- and Sturgeon-nominated novella, Julian: A Christmas Story.

Nova Swing

Kefahuchi Tract Trilogy: Book 2

M. John Harrison

Years after Ed Chianese's fateful trip into the Kefahuchi Tract, the tract has begun to expand and change in ways we never could have predicted - and, even more terrifying, parts of it have actually begun to fall to Earth, transforming the landscapes they encounter.

Not far from Moneytown, in a neighborhood of underground clubs, body-modification chop shops, adolescent contract killers, and sexy streetwalking Monas, you'll find the Saudade Event Site: a zone of strange geography, twisted physics, and frightening psychic onslaughts - not to mention the black and white cats that come pouring out at irregular intervals.

Vic Serotonin is a "travel agent" into and out of Saudade. His latest client is a woman who's nearly as unpredictable as the site itself - and maybe just as dangerous. She wants a tour just as a troubling new class of biological artifacts are leaving the site - living algorithms that are transforming the world outside in inexplicable and unsettling ways. Shadowed by a metaphysically inclined detective determined to shut his illegal operation down, Vic must make sense of a universe rapidly veering toward a virulent and viral form of chaosand a humanity almost lost.

The Last Wild Horses

Klimakvartetten: Book 3

Maja Lunde

Maja Lunde returns with a heart-wrenching tale, set in the distant past and the dystopian future, about extinction and survival, family and hope.

Mikhail lives in Russia in 1881. When a skeleton of a rare wild horse is brought to him, the zoologist plans an expedition to Mongolia to find the fabled Przewalski horse, a journey that tests not only his physicality, but his heart.In 1992, Karin, alongside her troubled son Mathias and several Przewalski horses, travels to Mongolia to re-introduce the magnificent horses to their native land. The veterinarian has dedicated her life to saving the breed from extinction, prioritizing the wild horses, even over her own son.

Europe's future is uncertain in 2064, but Eva is willing to sacrifice nearly everything to hold onto her family's farm. Her teenage daughter implores Eva to leave the farm and Norway, but a pregnant wild mare Eva is tending is about to foal. Then, a young woman named Louise unexpectedly arrives on the farm, with mysterious intentions that will either bring them all together, or devastate them one by one.

Spanning continents and centuries, The Last Wild Horses is a powerful tale of survival and connection--of humans, animals, and the indestructible bonds that unite us all.

The Jigsaw Man

Known Space

Larry Niven

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in the anthology Dangerous Visions (1967). The story can also be found in the anthology The Road to Science Fiction 3: From Heinlein to Here (1979), edited by James Gunn. It is included in the collections All the Myriad Ways (1971), Tales of Known Space (1975), and The Best of Larry Niven (2010).

Legend

Legend: Book 1

Marie Lu

What was once the western United States is now home to the Republic, a nation perpetually at war with its neighbors. Born into an elite family in one of the Republic's wealthiest districts, fifteen-year-old June is a prodigy being groomed for success in the Republic's highest military circles. Born into the slums, fifteen-year-old Day is the country's most wanted criminal. But his motives may not be as malicious as they seem.

From very different worlds, June and Day have no reason to cross paths - until the day June's brother, Metias, is murdered and Day becomes the prime suspect. Caught in the ultimate game of cat and mouse, Day is in a race for his family's survival, while June seeks to avenge Metias's death. But in a shocking turn of events, the two uncover the truth of what has really brought them together, and the sinister lengths their country will go to keep its secrets.

Full of nonstop action, suspense, and romance, this novel is sure to move readers as much as it thrills.

Prodigy

Legend: Book 2

Marie Lu

June and Day arrive in Vegas just as the unthinkable happens: the Elector Primo dies, and his son Anden takes his place. With the Republic edging closer to chaos, the two join a group of Patriot rebels eager to help Day rescue his brother and offer passage to the Colonies. They have only one request—June and Day must assassinate the new Elector. It’s their chance to change the nation, to give voice to a people silenced for too long.

But as June realizes this Elector is nothing like his father, she’s haunted by the choice ahead. What if Anden is a new beginning? What if revolution must be more than loss and vengeance, anger and blood—what if the Patriots are wrong?

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Leibowitz: Book 1

Walter M. Miller, Jr.

In the Utah desert, Brother Francis of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz has made a miraculous discovery: the relics of the martyr Isaac Leibowitz himself, including the blessed blueprint and the sacred shopping list. They may provide a bright ray of hope in a terrifying age of darkness, a time of ignorance and genetic monsters that are the unholy aftermath of the Flame Deluge. But as the spellbinding mystery at the core of this extraordinary novel unfolds, it is the search itself--for meaning, for truth, for love--that offers hope to a humanity teetering on the edge of an abyss.

A timeless and still timely masterpiece, A Canticle for Leibowitz is a classic that ranks with Brave New World and 1984.

Little Brother

Little Brother: Book 1

Cory Doctorow

Marcus, a.k.a "w1n5t0n," is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school's intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they're mercilessly interrogated for days.

When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

Download this book for free from the author's website.

Logan's Run

Logan's Run: Book 1

William F. Nolan
George Clayton Johnson

Logan's Run is a novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. Published in 1967, it depicts a dystopic ageist future society in which both population and the consumption of resources are maintained in equilibrium by requiring the death of everyone reaching a particular age. The story follows the actions of Logan, a Sandman charged with enforcing the rule, as he tracks down and kills citizens who "run" from society's lethal demand—only to end up "running" himself.

Looking Backward, 2000-1887

Looking Backward: Book 1

Edward Bellamy

Originally published in 1888, this prophetic work revolves around Julian West, a man who falls asleep near the end of the 19th century and wakes up in the year 2000. More than a brilliant visionary's view of the future, it is a guidebook that has stimulated some of the greatest thinkers of the modern age.

Cress

Lunar Chronicles: Book 3

Marissa Meyer

In this third book in Marissa Meyer's bestselling Lunar Chronicles series, Cinder and Captain Thorne are fugitives on the run, now with Scarlet and Wolf in tow. Together, they're plotting to overthrow Queen Levana and prevent her army from invading Earth.

Their best hope lies with Cress, a girl trapped on a satellite since childhood who's only ever had her netscreens as company. All that screen time has made Cress an excellent hacker. Unfortunately, she's being forced to work for Queen Levana, and she's just received orders to track down Cinder and her handsome accomplice.

When a daring rescue of Cress goes awry, the group is splintered. Cress finally has her freedom, but it comes at a higher price than she'd ever expected. Meanwhile, Queen Levana will let nothing prevent her marriage to Emperor Kai, especially the cyborg mechanic. Cress, Scarlet, and Cinder may not have signed up to save the world, but they may be the only hope the world has.

Oryx and Crake

MaddAddam Sequence: Book 1

A stunning and provocative new novel by the internationally celebrated author of The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize.

Margaret Atwood?s new novel is so utterly compelling, so prescient, so relevant, so terrifyingly-all-too-likely-to-be-true, that readers may find their view of the world forever changed after reading it.

This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers. For readers of Oryx and Crake, nothing will ever look the same again.

The narrator of Atwood's riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigoons and wolvogs ravage the pleeblands, where ordinary people once lived, and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As he tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Why is he left with nothing but his haunting memories? Alone except for the green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster, he explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he takes - into his own past, and back to Crake's high-tech bubble-dome, where the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief.

With breathtaking command of her shocking material, and with her customary sharp wit and dark humour, Atwood projects us into an outlandish yet wholly believable realm populated by characters who will continue to inhabit our dreams long after the last chapter. This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers.

The Year of the Flood

MaddAddam Sequence: Book 2

The times and species have been changing at a rapid rate, and the social compact is wearing as thin as environmental stability. Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners--a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, as well as the preservation of all plant and animal life--has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have survived: Ren, a young trapeze dancer locked inside the high-end sex club Scales and Tails, and Toby, a God's Gardener barricaded inside a luxurious spa where many of the treatments are edible.

Have others survived? Ren's bioartist friend Amanda? Zeb, her eco-fighter stepfather? Her onetime lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers, survivors of the mutual-elimination Painball prison? Not to mention the shadowy, corrupt policing force of the ruling powers...

Meanwhile, gene-spliced life forms are proliferating: the lion/lamb blends, the Mo'hair sheep with human hair, the pigs with human brain tissue. As Adam One and his intrepid hemp-clad band make their way through this strange new world, Ren and Toby will have to decide on their next move. They can't stay locked away...

The Penultimate Truth

Masters of Science Fiction: Book 8

What if you discovered that everything you knew about the world was a lie? That's the question at the heart of Philip K. Dick's futuristic novel about political oppression, the show business of politics and the sinister potential of the military industrial complex. This wry, paranoid thriller imagines a future in which the earth has been ravaged, and cities are burnt-out wastelands too dangerous for human life. Americans have been shipped underground, where they toil in crowded industrial ant hills and receive a steady diet of inspiring speeches from a President who never seems to age. Nick St. James, like the rest of the masses, believed in the words of his leaders. But that all changes when he travels to the surface - where what he finds is more shocking than anything he could possibly imagine.

Winner of both the Hugo and John W. Campbell awards for best novel, widely regarded as the premiere science fiction writer of his day, and the object of cult-like adoration from his legions of fans, Philip K. Dick has come to be seen in a literary light that defies classification in much the same way as Borges and Calvino. With breathtaking insight, he utlizes vividly unfamiliar worlds to evoke the hauntingly and hilariously familiar in our society and ourselves.

Hello America

Masters of Science Fiction: Book 11

A terrifying vision of the future from one of our most renowned writers - J G Ballard, author of 'Empire of the Sun' and 'Crash'.

Following the energy crisis of the late twentieth-century America has been abandoned. Now, a century later, a small group of European explorers returns to the deserted continent. But America is unrecognisable - the Bering Strait has been dammed and the whole continent has become a desert, populated by isolated natives and the bizarre remnants of a disintegrated culture. The expedition sets off from Manhattan on a cross-continent journey, through Holiday Inns and abandoned theme parks. They will uncover a shocking new power in the heart of Las Vegas in this unique vision of our world transformed.

The Maze Runner

Maze Runner: Book 1

James Dashner

When Thomas wakes up in the lift, the only thing he can remember is his first name. His memory is blank. But he's not alone. When the lift doors open, Thomas finds himself surrounded by kids who welcome him into the Glade - a large, open expanse surrounded by stone walls. Just like Thomas, the Gladers don't know why or how they got into the Glade. All they know is that every morning the stone doors to the maze that surrounds them have opened. Every night they've closed tight. And every 30 days a new boy has been delivered in the lift. Thomas was expected. But the next day, a girl is sent up - the first girl to ever arrive in the Glade. And more suprising yet is the message she delivers. Thomas might be more important than he could ever guess. If only he could unlock the dark secrets buried within his mind.

The Scorch Trials

Maze Runner: Book 2

James Dashner

The Scorch Trials picks up where The Maze Runner left off. The Gladers have escaped the Maze, but now they face an even more treacherous challenge on the open roads of a devastated planet. And WICKED has made sure to adjust the variables and stack the odds against them. Can Thomas survive in such a violent world?

The Death Cure

Maze Runner: Book 3

James Dashner

Thomas knows that Wicked can't be trusted. but they say the time for lies is over, that they've collected all they can from the trials and now must rely on the Gladers, with full memories restored, to help them with their ultimate mission. It's up to the Gladers to complete the blueprints for the cure to the Flare with a voluntary test. What Wicked doesn't know is that something's happened that no Trial or Variable could have forseen. Thomas has remembered far more than they think. And he knows that he can't believe a word of what the Wicked says. The time for lies is over. But the truth is more dangerous than Thomas could ever imagine. Will anyone survive to Death Cure?

Native Tongue

Native Tongue Trilogy: Book 1

Suzette Haden Elgin

Called "fascinating" by the New York Times upon its first publication in 1984, Native Tongue won wide critical praise and cult status, and has often been compared to the futurist fiction of Margaret Atwood. Set in the twenty-second century, the novel tells of a world where women are once again property, denied civil rights and banned from public life. Earth’s wealth depends on interplanetary commerce with alien races, and linguists -—a small, clannish group of families -—have become the ruling elite by controlling all interplanetary communication. Their women are used to breed perfect translators for all the galaxies’ languages.

Nazareth Chornyak, the most talented linguist of the family, is exhausted by her constant work translating for trade organizations, supervising the children’s language education, 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 comes to discover is that a slow revolution is going on in the Barren Houses: there, word by word, women are creating a language of their own to free them from men’s control.

Noughts & Crosses

Noughts & Crosses: Book 1

Malorie Blackman

Callum is a naught, a second-class citizen in a society run by the ruling Crosses. Sephy is a Cross, and daughter of the man slated to become prime minister. In their world, white naughts and black Crosses simply don't mix -- and they certainly don't fall in love. But that's exactly what they've done.

When they were younger, they played together. Now Callum and Sephy meet in secret and make excuses. But excuses no longer cut it when Sephy and her mother are nearly caught in a terrorist bombing planned by the Liberation Militia, with which Callum's family is linked. Callum's father is the prime suspect...and Sephy's father will stop at nothing to see him hanged. The blood hunt that ensues will threaten not only Callum and Sephy's love for each other, but their very lives.

In this shocking thriller, UK sensation Malorie Blackman turns the world inside out. What's white is black, what's black is white, and only one thing is clear: Assumptions can be deadly.

The Departure

Owner Series: Book 1

Neal Asher

Earth

An overpopulated world is under the brutal, high-tech thumb of the Committee. Towering robot shepherds, pain-inducers, and reader guns maintain control over masses of zero-asset citizens, but for the elite this not enough. Twelve billion must human beings must die before the Earth can be stabilized, and the Argus satellite laser network is almost ready.

Waking in a crate destined for an incinerator, Alan Saul remembers only pain and his torturer's face. But he has company: Janus, a rogue AI inhabiting the forbidden hardware in his skull. Saul intends to stop Argus and get his revenge on the Committee–once he finds out who he used to be.

Mars

Abandoned by the Committee, the Antares Base faces extinction. The colonists there will not be returning to Earth nor will they be receiving any additional supplies or support. Unless they are very ingenious, they will run out of resources and be dead within five years.

As if that's not dire enough, Varalia Delex finds herself caught in a violent power struggle with the base's ruthless political officers–who see everyone else as expendable. As spilled blood turns the Red Planet even redder, Var discovers that Mars holds very new and interesting ways to die.

Zero Point

Owner Series: Book 2

Neal Asher

Earth’s Zero Asset citizens no longer face extermination from orbit. Thanks to Alan Saul, the Committee’s network of control is a smoking ruin and its robotic enforcers lie dormant. But power abhors a vacuum and, scrambling from the wreckage, comes the ruthless Serene Galahad. She must act while the last vestiges of Committee infrastructure remain intact – and she has the means to ensure command is hers. On Mars, Var Delex fights for the survival of Antares Base, while the Argus Space Station hurls towards the red planet. And she knows whomever, or whatever, trashed Earth is still aboard. Var must save the base, while also dealing with the first signs of rebellion. And aboard Argus Station, Alan Saul’s mind has expanded into the local computer network. In the process, he uncovers the ghastly experiments of the Humanoid Unit Development, the possibility of eternal life, and a madman who may hold the keys to interstellar flight. But Earth’s agents are closer than Saul thinks, and the killing will soon begin.

Jupiter War

Owner Series: Book 3

Neal Asher

War threatens to destroy Earth's last hope in the final installment of the Owner trilogy!

Alan Saul is now part human and part machine. He craves the stars, yet his human side still controls him; he can't leave his to sister die. He must leave Argus Station and stage a dangerous rescue. But Saul's robots make his crew feel increasingly redundant, sowing the seeds of mutiny and betrayal.

Serene Galahad, Earth's ruthless dictator, hides her crimes from a cowed populace as she desperately readies a new attack on Saul. She aims to destroy her enemy in a vicious display of violence.

The Scourge limps back to Earth, its earlier mission to annihilate Saul a failure. Some members of the decimated crew plan to murder Galahad before she has them murdered for their failure, but Clay Ruger plans to negotiate for his life. Events build to a climax as Ruger holds humanity's greatest asset--seeds to rebuild a dying Earth. This stolen Gene Bank data is offered at a price, but what will Galahad pay for humanity's future?

Neal Asher has been thrilling science fiction fans for over a decade with his Polity series. Jupiter War brings his new Owner trilogy to a stunning conclusion.

Peeps

Peeps Series: Book 1

Scott Westerfeld

A year ago, Cal Thompson was a college freshman more interested in meeting girls and partying than in attending biology class. Now, after a fateful encounter with a mysterious woman named Morgan, biology has become, literally, Cal's life.

Cal was infected by a parasite that has a truly horrifying effect on its host. Cal himself is a carrier, unchanged by the parasite, but he's infected the girlfriends he's had since Morgan. All three have turned into the ravening ghouls Cal calls Peeps. The rest of us know them as vampires. It's Cal's job to hunt them down before they can create more of their kind....

Bursting with the sharp intelligence and sly humor that are fast becoming his trademark, Scott Westerfeld's novel is an utterly original take on an archetype of horror.

Planet of the Apes

Planet of the Apes: Book 1

Pierre Boulle

The original novel that inspired the films!

First published more than fifty years ago, Pierre Boulle's chilling novel launched one of the greatest science fiction sagas in motion picture history.

In the not-too-distant future, three astronauts land on what appears to be a planet just like Earth, with lush forests, a temperate climate, and breathable air. But while it appears to be a paradise, nothing is what it seems.

They soon discover the terrifying truth: On this world humans are savage beasts, and apes rule as their civilized masters. In an ironic novel of nonstop action and breathless intrigue, one man struggles to unlock the secret of a terrifying civilization, all the while wondering: Will he become the savior of the human race, or the final witness to its damnation? In a shocking climax that rivals that of the original movie, Boulle delivers the answer in a masterpiece of adventure, satire, and suspense.

After Atlas

Planetfall: Book 2

Emma Newman

Acclaimed author Emma Newman returns to the captivating universe she created in Planetfall with a stunning science fiction mystery where one man's murder is much more than it seems...

Govcorp detective Carlos Moreno was only a baby when Atlas left Earth to seek truth among the stars. But in that moment, the course of Carlos's entire life changed. Atlas is what took his mother away; what made his father lose hope; what led Alejandro Casales, leader of the religious cult known as the Circle, to his door. And now, on the eve of the fortieth anniversary of Atlas's departure, it's got something to do why Casales was found dead in his hotel room--and why Carlos is the man in charge of the investigation.

To figure out who killed one of the most powerful men on Earth, Carlos is supposed to put aside his personal history. But the deeper he delves into the case, the more he realizes that escaping the past is not so easy. There's more to Casales's death than meets the eye, and something much more sinister to the legacy of Atlas than anyone realizes...

The Scorpion Rules

Prisoners of Peace: Book 1

Erin Bow

Greta is a Duchess and a Crown Princess. She is also a Child of Peace, a hostage held by the de facto ruler of the world, the great Artificial Intelligence, Talis. This is how the game is played: if you want to rule, you must give one of your children as a hostage. Start a war and your hostage dies.

The system has worked for centuries. Parents don't want to see their children murdered.

Greta will be free if she can make it to her eighteenth birthday. Until then she is prepared to die with dignity, if necessary. But everything changes when Elian arrives at the Precepture. He's a hostage from a new American alliance, and he defies the machines that control every part of their lives--and is severely punished for it. His rebellion opens Greta's eyes to the brutality of the rules they live under, and to the subtle resistance of her companions. And Greta discovers her own quiet power.

Then Elian's country declares war on Greta's and invades the prefecture, taking the hostages hostage. Now the great Talis is furious, and coming himself to deliver punishment. Which surely means that Greta and Elian will be killed...unless Greta can think of a way to break all the rules.

The Buried Life

Recoletta: Book 1

Carrie Patel

The gaslight and shadows of the underground city of Recoletta hide secrets and lies. When Inspector Liesl Malone investigates the murder of a renowned historian, she finds herself stonewalled by the all-powerful Directorate of Preservation – Recoletta's top-secret historical research facility.

When a second high-profile murder threatens the very fabric of city society, Malone and her rookie partner Rafe Sundar must tread carefully, lest they fall victim to not only the criminals they seek, but the government which purports to protect them. Knowledge is power, and power must be preserved at all costs.

Red Rising

Red Rising: Book 1

Pierce Brown

"I live for the dream that my children will be born free," she says. "That they will be what they like. That they will own the land their father gave them."

"I live for you," I say sadly.

Eo kisses my cheek. "Then you must live for more."

Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in a color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations. Yet he spends his life willingly, knowing that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children.

But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and lush wilds spread across the planet. Darrow -- and Reds like him -- are nothing more than slaves to a decadent ruling class.

Inspired by a longing for justice, and driven by the memory of lost love, Darrow sacrifices everything to infiltrate the Legendary Institue, a proving ground for the dominant Gold caste, where the next generation of humanity's overlords struggle for the power. He will be forced to compete for his life and the very future of civilization against the best and most brutal of Society's ruling class. There, he will stop at nothing to bring down his enemies... even if it means he has to become one of them to do so.

Golden Son

Red Rising: Book 2

Pierce Brown

As a Red, Darrow grew up working the mines deep beneath the surface of Mars, enduring backbreaking labor while dreaming of the better future he is building for his decendents. But the Society he faithfully served was built on lies. Darrow's kind have betrayed and denied by their elitist masters, the Golds -- and their only path to liberation is revolution. And so Darrow sacrifices himself in the name for greater good for which Eo, his true love and inspiration , laid down her own life. He becomes a Gold, infiltrating their privileged realm so that he can destroy it from within.

A lamb among wolves in a cruel world, Darrow find friendship, respect, and even love -- but also the wrath of powerful rivals. To wage and win the war that will change humankind's destiny, Darrow must must confront the treachery arrayed against him, overcome his all-too-human desire for retribution -- and strive not for violent revolt but a hopeful rebirth. Though the road ahead if fraught with danger and deciet, Darrow must choose to follow Eo's principles of love and justice to free his people.

He must live for more.

Morning Star

Red Rising: Book 3

Pierce Brown

Red Rising thrilled readers and announced the presence of a talented new author. Golden Son changed the game and took the story of Darrow to the next level. Now comes the exhilarating conclusion to the Red Rising Trilogy: Morning Star.

Darrow would have lived in peace, but his enemies brought him war. The Gold overlords demanded his obedience, hanged his wife, and enslaved his people. But Darrow is determined to fight back. Risking everything to transform himself and breach Gold society, Darrow has battled to survive the cutthroat rivalries that breed Society's mightiest warriors, climbed the ranks, and waited patiently to unleash the revolution that will tear the hierarchy apart from within.

Finally, the time has come.

But devotion to honor and hunger for vengeance run deep on both sides. Darrow and his comrades-in-arms face powerful enemies without scruple or mercy. Among them are some Darrow once considered friends. To win, Darrow will need to inspire those shackled in darkness, break their chains, unmake the world their cruel masters have built, and claim a destiny too long denied--and too glorious to surrender.

Starfish

Rifters: Book 1

Peter Watts

A huge international corporation has developed a facility along the Juan de Fuca Ridge at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to exploit geothermal power. They send a bio-engineered crew--people who have been altered to withstand the pressure and breathe the seawater--down to live and work in this weird, fertile undersea darkness.

Unfortunately the only people suitable for long-term employment in these experimental power stations are crazy, some of them in unpleasant ways. How many of them can survive, or will be allowed to survive, while worldwide disaster approaches from below?

Maelstrom

Rifters: Book 2

Peter Watts

This is the way the world ends:

A nuclear strike on a deep sea vent. The target was an ancient microbe-voracious enough to drive the whole biosphere to extinction-and a handful of amphibious humans called rifters who'd inadvertently released it from three billion years of solitary confinement.

The resulting tsunami killed millions. It's not as through there was a choice: saving the world excuses almost any degree of collateral damage.

Unless, of course, you miss the target.

Now North America's west coast lies in ruins. Millions of refugees rally around a mythical figure mysteriously risen from the deep sea. A world already wobbling towards collapse barely notices the spread of one more blight along its shores. And buried in the seething fast-forward jungle that use to be called Internet, something vast and inhuman reaches out to a woman with empty white eyes and machinery in her chest. A woman driven by rage, and incubating Armageddon.

Her name is Lenie Clarke. She's a rifter. She's not nearly as dead as everyone thinks.

And the whole damn world is collateral damage as far as she's concerned....

The Courier

San Angeles: Book 1

Gerald Brandt

The first installment in the San Angeles trilogy, a thrilling near-future cyberpunk sci-fi series

Kris Ballard is a motorcycle courier. A nobody. Level 2 trash in a multi-level city that stretches from San Francisco to the Mexican border--a land where corporations make all the rules. A runaway since the age of fourteen, Kris struggled to set up her life, barely scraping by, working hard to make it without anyone's help.

But a late day delivery changes everything when she walks in on the murder of one of her clients. Now she's stuck with a mysterious package that everyone wants. It looks like the corporations want Kris gone, and are willing to go to almost any length to make it happen.

Hunted, scared, and alone, she retreats to the only place she knows she can hide: the Level 1 streets. Fleeing from people that seem to know her every move, she is rescued by Miller--a member of an underground resistance group--only to be pulled deeper into a world she doesn't understand.

Together Kris and Miller barely manage to stay one step ahead of the corporate killers, but it's only a matter of time until Miller's resources and their luck run out....

Metropolis

Science Fiction from the Great Years: Book 4

Thea von Harbou

This city of the future encompasses two worlds: that of the hedonistic ruling class and that of a segregated subculture, toilers in a mechanized underworld who labor to provide the rich with their pleasures. When a charismatic leader arises, she seeks a savior to unite the disparate social orders. "Between the brain that plans and the hands that build," she declares, "there must be a mediator? the heart."

The Brain-Stealers

Science Fiction from the Great Years: Book 13

Murray Leinster

Strange exiles were landing throughout the night... exiles from the unknown depths of outer space -- seeking human beings for food!

The Death of Grass

SF Rediscovery: Book 11

John Christopher

At first the virus wiping out grass and crops is of little concern to John Custance. It has decimated Asia, causing mass starvation and riots, but Europe is safe and a counter-virus is expected any day. Except, it turns out, the governments have been lying to their people. When the deadly disease hits Britain they are left alone, and society starts to descend into barbarism. As John and his family try to make it across country to the safety of his brother’s farm in a hidden valley, their humanity is tested to its very limits.

Published in the USA as: No Blade of Grass.

Shades of Grey

Shades of Grey: Book 1

Jasper Fforde

Hundreds of years in the future, the world is an alarmingly different place.

Life is lived according to The Rulebook and social hierarchy is determined by your perception of colour. Eddie Russett is an above average Red who dreams of moving up the ladder by marriage to Constance Oxblood. Until he is sent to the Outer Fringes where he meets Jane - a lowly Grey with an uncontrollable temper and a desire to see him killed.

For Eddie, it's love at first sight. But his infatuation will lead him to discover that all is not as it seems in a world where everything that looks black and white is really shades of grey ...

Red Side Story

Shades of Grey: Book 2

Jasper Fforde

Welcome to Chromatacia, where the societal hierarchy is strictly regulated by one's limited color perception. Civilization has been rebuilt after an unspoken "Something that Happened" five hundred years ago. Society is now color vision-segregated, professions, marriages, and leisure activities all dictated by an individual's visual ability, and everything run by the shadowy National Color in far-off Emerald City.

Out on the fringes of Red Sector West, twenty-year-old Eddie Russett is being bullied into an arranged marriage with the powerful DeMauve family, purples who hope to redden up their progeny's color-viewing potential with Eddie's gene stock. Their obnoxious daughter Violet is confident the marriage won't hamper her style for too long because Eddie is about to go on trial for a murder he didn't commit, and he's pretty sure to be sent on a one-way trip to the Green Room for execution by soporific color exposure. Meanwhile, Eddie is engaged in an illegal relationship with his co-defendant, a Green, the charismatic, unpredictable, and occasionally deadly Jane Grey. Time is running out for Eddie and Jane to figure out how to save themselves. Negotiating the narrow boundaries of the Rules within their society, they search for a loophole--some truth of their world that has been hidden from its hyper-policed citizens.

Shatter Me

Shatter Me: Book 1

Tahereh Mafi

~~I have a curse~~
I have a gift

~~I am a monster~~
I'm more than human

~~My touch is lethal~~
My touch is power

~~I am their weapon~~
I will fight back

Juliette hasn't touched anyone in exactly 264 days.

The last time she did, it was an accident, but The Reestablishment locked her up for murder. No one knows why Juliette's touch is fatal. As long as she doesn't hurt anyone else, no one really cares. The world is too busy crumbling to pieces to pay attention to a 17-year-old girl. Diseases are destroying the population, food is hard to find, birds don't fly anymore, and the clouds are the wrong color.

The Reestablishment said their way was the only way to fix things, so they threw Juliette in a cell. Now so many people are dead that the survivors are whispering war -- and The Reestablishment has changed its mind. Maybe Juliette is more than a tortured soul stuffed into a poisonous body. Maybe she's exactly what they need right now.

Juliette has to make a choice: Be a weapon. Or be a warrior.

Ship Breaker

Ship Breaker: Book 1

In America's Gulf Coast region, where grounded oil tankers are being broken down for parts, Nailer, a teenage boy, works the light crew, scavenging for copper wiring just to make quota--and hopefully live to see another day. But when, by luck or chance, he discovers an exquisite clipper ship beached during a recent hurricane, Nailer faces the most important decision of his life: Strip the ship for all it's worth or rescue its lone survivor, a beautiful and wealthy girl who could lead him to a better life. . . .

In this powerful novel, award-winning author Paolo Bacigalupi delivers a thrilling, fast-paced adventure set in a vivid and raw, uncertain future.

The Drowned Cities

Ship Breaker: Book 2

Soldier boys emerged from the darkness. Guns gleamed dully. Bullet bandoliers and scars draped their bare chests. Ugly brands scored their faces. She knew why these soldier boys had come. She knew what they sought, and she knew, too, that if they found it, her best friend would surely die.

In a dark future America where violence, terror, and grief touch everyone, young refugees Mahlia and Mouse have managed to leave behind the war-torn lands of the Drowned Cities by escaping into the jungle outskirts. But when they discover a wounded half-man--a bioengineered war beast named Tool--who is being hunted by a vengeful band of soldiers, their fragile existence quickly collapses. One is taken prisoner by merciless soldier boys, and the other is faced with an impossible decision: Risk everything to save a friend, or flee to a place where freedom might finally be possible.

This thrilling companion to Paolo Bacigalupi's highly acclaimed Ship Breaker is a haunting and powerful story of loyalty, survival, and heart-pounding adventure.

Wool

Silo: Book 1

Hugh Howey

This Omnibus Edition collects the five Wool books into a single volume. It is for those who arrived late to the party and who wish to save a dollar or two while picking up the same stories in a single package.

The first Wool story was released as a standalone short in July of 2011. Due to reviewer demand, the rest of the story was released over the next six months. My thanks go out to those reviewers who clamored for more. Without you, none of this would exist. Your demand created this as much as I did.

This is the story of mankind clawing for survival, of mankind on the edge. The world outside has grown unkind, the view of it limited, talk of it forbidden. But there are always those who hope, who dream. These are the dangerous people, the residents who infect others with their optimism. Their punishment is simple. They are given the very thing they profess to want: They are allowed outside.

Shift

Silo: Book 2

Hugh Howey

In 2007, the Center for Automation in Nanobiotech (CAN) outlined the hardware and software platform that would one day allow robots smaller than human cells to make medical diagnoses, conduct repairs, and even self-propagate.

In the same year, the CBS network re-aired a program about the effects of propranolol on sufferers of extreme trauma. A simple pill, it had been discovered, could wipe out the memory of any traumatic event.

At almost the same moment in humanity's broad history, mankind had discovered the means for bringing about its utter downfall. And the ability to forget it ever happened.

Galactic Pot Healer

Sirius Five: Book 1

A powerful and enigmatic alien recruits humans and aliens to help it restore a sunken cathedral in this touching and hilarious novel.

Sometimes even gods need help. In Galactic Pot-Healer that god is an alien creature known as The Glimmung, which looks alternately like a flaming wheel, a teenage girl, and a swirling mass of ocean life. In order to raise a sunken city, he summons beings from across the galaxy to Plowman's Planet. Joe Fernwright is one of those summoned, needed for his skills at pot-healing--repairing broken ceramics. But from the moment Joe arrives on Plowman's Planet, things start to go awry. Told as only Philip K. Dick can, Galactic Pot-Healer is a wildly funny tale of aliens, gods, and ceramics.

Farthing

Small Change: Book 1

Jo Walton

One summer weekend in 1949-but not our 1949-the well-connected "Farthing set", a group of upper-crust English families, enjoy a country retreat. Lucy is a minor daughter in one of those families; her parents were both leading figures in the group that overthrew Churchill and negotiated peace with Herr Hitler eight years before.

Despite her parents' evident disapproval, Lucy is married-happily-to a London Jew. It was therefore quite a surprise to Lucy when she and her husband David found themselves invited to the retreat. It's even more startling when, on the retreat's first night, a major politician of the Farthing set is found gruesomely murdered, with abundant signs that the killing was ritualistic.

It quickly becomes clear to Lucy that she and David were brought to the retreat in order to pin the murder on him. Major political machinations are at stake, including an initiative in Parliament, supported by the Farthing set, to limit the right to vote to university graduates. But whoever's behind the murder, and the frame-up, didn't reckon on the principal investigator from Scotland Yard being a man with very private reasons for sympathizing with outcasts - and looking beyond the obvious.

As the trap slowly shuts on Lucy and David, they begin to see a way out-a way fraught with peril in a darkening world.

Escape from New York

Snake Plissken: Book 1

Mike McQuay

In a world ravaged by crime, the entire island of Manhattan has been converted into a walled prison where brutal prisoners roam. But when the US president crash-lands inside, only one man can bring him back: notorious outlaw and former Special Forces war hero Snake Plissken. But time is short. In 24 hours, an explosive device implanted in his neck will end Snake's mission, and his life, unless he succeeds!

Venus, Inc.

Space Merchants

Here is Venus, Inc., a two-in-one volume containing the 1952 classic, The Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, and The Merchants' War, Pohl's brilliant new sequel to the previous masterpiece - a blistering satirical vision of Earth's foreseeable future, when advertising has gone mad, and society is divided into those who sell and the lowly consumers who buy . . and buy . . .and buy. It is a civilization in which no one eats natural foods, artificially cultivated meat cells provide all protein, soft drinks are laced with "harmless" addictives to ensure product loyalty - and onle the Conservationist rebels, or Consies, battle the status quo, waging an underground war against the powerful, exploitative advertising agencies that run the world.

The Space Merchants

Space Merchants: Book 1

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.

The Merchants' War

Space Merchants: Book 2

To Reign in Hell: The Exile of Khan Noonien Sing

The witty sequel to Frederik Pohl's & C. M. Kornbluth's legendary science fiction classic The Space Merchants, written 30 years later.

Great advertising agencies still dominate the world and control all governments and every aspect of human behavior. When a handful of renegades on Venus zealously opposes the so-called "benefits" of the hucksters' paradise, it seems inevitable that the all-powerful account executives of Earth will stop at nothing, not even war, to force the rebels to submit.

But the Veenies have a plan.../p>

Spin State

Spin Trilogy: Book 1

Chris Moriarty

UN Peacekeeper Major Catherine Li has made thirty-seven faster-than-light jumps in her lifetime - and has probably forgotten more than most people remember. But that's what backup hard drives are for. And Li should know; she's been hacking her memory for fifteen years in order to pass as human. But no memory upgrade can prepare Li for what she finds on Compson's World: a mining colony she once called home and to which she is sent after a botched raid puts her on the bad side of the powers that be. A dead physicist who just happens to be her cloned twin. A missing dataset that could change the interstellar balance of power and turn a cold war hot. And a mining "accident" that is starting to look more and more like murder...

Suddenly Li is chasing a killer in an alien world miles underground where everyone has a secret. And one wrong turn in streamspace, one misstep in the dark alleys of blackmarket tech and interstellar espionage, one risky hookup with an AI could literally blow her mind.

Star Trek: The Original Series: The Eugenics Wars: Book 3

Greg Cox

At last -- the untold chapter in the history of Star Trek's most notorious villain, KHAN. Searing and powerful, To Reign in Hell masterfully bridges the time period between Khan Noonien Singh's twenty-third-century revival in the Original Series classic episode "Space Seed" and his unforgettable return in the acclaimed feature film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

What truly transpired during Khan's long years of exile on the forbidding world of Ceti Alpha V, before the tyrant escaped to embark on a murderous campaign of vengeance against Admiral James T. Kirk? What horrific trials spawned Khan's insane lust for revenge?

Haunted by the memory of Khan's bitter accusations, Kirk now revisits Ceti Alpha V to discover for himself what ultimately drove Khan to madness. There, buried beneath the desolate surface of a dying planet, Kirk and his allies find the untold story of their greatest foe -- and of the woman who loved him: Lieutenant Marla McIvers of Starfleet.

Along with Khan's genetically engineered followers from the twentieth century, Khan and Marla are left on Ceti Alpha V with the hopes of building a new life together. Although the planet is savage and untamed, full of deadly predators and unexpected hazards, Khan dreams of carving out an empire even greater than the one he once ruled on Earth.

But when catastrophe strikes, laying waste to the entire world, Khan and the others find themselves trapped in a desperate struggle for survival. Now Khan must use every ounce of his superhuman strength and intellect to wage a fearsome battle against the planet, his people... and the growing darkness in his own soul.

The Reefs of Space

Starchild: Book 1

Frederik Pohl
Jack Williamson

Far beyond the orbit of Pluto, half-mythical bodies circle the Solar System - the Reefs of Space, unknown, shrouded in mystery, the goal of human conquest, the obsession of the Plan of Man, tyrannical ruler of Earth.

Starchild

Starchild: Book 2

Frederik Pohl
Jack Williamson

Machine Major Boysie Gann had been assigned to duty far beyond Pluto, on Polaris Station, one of the artificial sun-satellites protecting the inner planets - and Earth - from the Reefs of Space. For the Starchild had sent an ultimatum to Earth, calling on the Plan of Man to relinquish its total control over humanity under threat of frightful reprisals... and as proof of his powers, the Starchild had threatened to extinguish the sun and a dozen near stars for a period of time.

But Boysie didn't know anything about the Starchild. All he knew was his job - to find out who on Polaris Station was violating the Plan of Man. He found out - and before he could do anything about it, he was captured, marooned on a Reef, and accused of being the Starchild himself! To survive, Boysie had to find out who, or what, the Starchild might be.

And all he knew for sure was that the Starchild did in fact have the power to stop the sun if he wanted to!

Mind Storm

Strykers Syndicate: Book 1

K. M. Ruiz

Two hundred and fifty years after the world was nearly wiped out by nuclear war, what's left of society fights over the scraps of the Earth as the rich and powerful plan to ascend in secret to another planet. But the deadly new breed of humanity that the rulers have enslaved to protect their interests are about to change everything.

K.M. Ruiz's Mind Storm is the rip-roaring tale of Threnody Corwin, a psion with the ability to channel electricity like lightning through anything she touches. As a soldier-slave for the human government, Threnody is recruited by an unknown enemy: the scion of Earth's most powerful (and supposedly human) family, the Serca Syndicate. But Lucas Serca is far from human and he intends to make Threnody and her fellow psions meet their destiny, no matter how many people he has to kill to do it.

Mind Storm is the first of two books chronicling the fight for survival by the psions and other gene-trash humans, before they're killed by the racist world government, or left to die on a crumbling Earth.

Altered Carbon

Takeshi Kovacs Series: Book 1

In the twenty-fifth century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself. Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person's consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body (or "sleeve") making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen.

Ex-U.N. envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Dispatched one hundred eighty light-years from home, re-sleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco, now with a rusted, dilapidated Golden Gate Bridge), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats "existence" as something that can be bought and sold. For Kovacs, the shell that blew a hole in his chest was only the beginning....

Woken Furies

Takeshi Kovacs Series: Book 3

Random Acts of Senseless Violence

Takeshi Kovacs has come home. Home to Harlan's World. An ocean planet with only 5% of its landmass poking above the dangerous and unpredictable seas. Try and get above the weather in anything more sophisticated than a helicopter and the Martian orbital platforms will burn you out of the sky. And death doesn't just wait for you in the seas and the skies.

On land, from the tropical beaches and swamps of Kossuth to the icy, machine-infested wastes of New Hokkaido the hard won gains of the Quellist revolution have been lost. The First Families, the corporations and the Yakuza have a stranglehold on everything. Embarked on a journey of implacable retribution for a lost love, Kovacs is blown off course and into a maelstrom of political intrigue and technological mystery as the ghosts of Harlan's World and his own violent past rise to claim their due. Quellcrist Falconer is back from the dead, they say, and hunting her down for the First Families is a savage young Envoy called Kovacs who's been in storage.

Too Like the Lightning

Terra Ignota: Book 1

Ada Palmer

Mycroft Canner is a convict. For his crimes he is required, as is the custom of the 25th century, to wander the world being as useful as he can to all he meets. Carlyle Foster is a sensayer--a spiritual counselor in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away.

The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s. It is a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also on complex and mandatory systems of labelling all public writing and speech. What seem to us normal gender distinctions are now distinctly taboo in most social situations. And most of the world's population is affiliated with globe-girdling clans of the like-minded, whose endless economic and cultural competion is carefully managed by central planners of inestimable subtlety. To us it seems like a mad combination of heaven and hell. To them, it seems like normal life.

And in this world, Mycroft and Carlyle have stumbled on the wild card that may destablize the system: the boy Bridger, who can effortlessly make his wishes come true. Who can, it would seem, bring inanimate objects to life...

Terraplane: Book 1

Jack Womack

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 breed. War is breaking out on Long Island, the army boys are flamethrowing the streets, five Presidents have been assassinated in a year. No one notices any more. Soon Lola and her family must move over to the Lower East side - Loisaida - to the Pit and the new language of violence of the streets. The metamorphosis of the nice Lola Hart into the new model Lola has begun...

Heathern

Terraplane: Book 2

Jack Womack

The year is 1998, and the nightmare is close at hand.

The world economy has gone into a mega-crash. Most of the population has been plunged into abject poverty. Anarchy and violence stalk the streets. All power is in the hands of Dryco, headed by paranoid tycoon Thatcher Dryden, and his monstrous wife, Susie.

But on the desperate streets of the Lower East Side miracles are happening. A Messiah seems to have risen from the people and is healing the sick, teaching children, raising the dead.

Dryco's New Projects Manager, Joanna, is sent to check him out. Thatcher's got a plan for world domination, and a genuine Messiah could be the key he's looking for. And even if he's fake, he may have his uses.

But soon, Joanna finds herself trapped in a crisis of conscience, between the relative security of a Dryco job and the dream of healing a sick world.

Ambient

Terraplane: Book 3

Jack Womack

You need to be rich to survive at all. But it's easier to be dead than poor.

Twenty-first-century New York. It's a nightmare. Reaganomics has gone mad. There's murder and mutilation on the bombed-out streets and in the corporate conference rooms. Manhattan is a zoo. There's guerrilla war on Long Island.

Seamus O'Malley is a bodyguard and assassin in the outrageously powerful Dryco organisation, and he's in deep trouble. Taking the job sounded like a good idea at the time. Falling in love with his employer's mistress, Avalon, probably wasn't so bright. Getting caught up in the Dryden family's crazy rivalries didn't help. Agreeing to murder the Old Man was plain stupid. And getting involved with the Ambients could only complicate matters further.

Before long, O'Malley's on the run, and there's nowhere safe to hide.

Ogres

Terrible Worlds: Revolutions: Book 3

Adrian Tchaikovsky

Ogres are bigger than you.
Ogres are stronger than you.
Ogres rule the world.

It's always idyllic in the village until the landlord comes to call.

Because the landlord is an Ogre. And Ogres rule the world, with their size and strength and appetites. It's always been that way. It's the natural order of the world. And they only eat people sometimes.

But when the headman's son, Torquell, dares lift his hand against the landlord's son, he sets in motion a chain of events which let him learn about the dark sciences that ensured his masters' domination, the monstrous lies behind everything he knows, and the even worse truths about the Ogres, and the people they rule.

The Infinite Sea

The 5th Wave: Book 2

Rick Yancey

How do you rid the Earth of seven billion humans? Rid the humans of their humanity.

Surviving the first four waves was nearly impossible. Now Cassie Sullivan finds herself in a new world, a world in which the fundamental trust that binds us together is gone. As the 5th Wave rolls across the landscape, Cassie, Ben, and Ringer are forced to confront the Others' ultimate goal: the extermination of the human race.

Cassie and her friends haven't seen the depths to which the Others will sink, nor have the Others seen the heights to which humanity will rise, in the ultimate battle between life and death, hope and despair, love and hate.

Grass

The Arbai Trilogy: Book 1

Sheri S. Tepper

“One of the most satisfying science fiction novels I have read in years.”—The New York Times Book Review

Here is a novel as original as the breathtaking, unspoiled world for which it is named, a place where all appears to be in idyllic balance. Generations ago, humans fled to the cosmic anomaly known as Grass. Over time, they evolved a new and intricate society. But before humanity arrived, another species had already claimed Grass for its own. It, too, had developed a culture. . . .

Now, a deadly plague is spreading across the stars. No world save Grass has been left untouched. Marjorie Westriding Yrarier has been sent from Earth to discover the secret of the planet’s immunity. Amid the alien social structure and strange life-forms of Grass, Lady Westriding unravels the planet’s mysteries to find a truth so shattering it could mean the end of life itself.

Exodus From the Long Sun

The Book of the Long Sun: Book 4

Gene Wolfe

Exodus from the Long Sun concludes Gene Wolfe's masterful sci-fi epic series, the Book of the Long Sun

It is the far future, and the giant spaceship, The Whorl, has traveled for forgotten generations toward its destination.

Lit inside by the artificial Long Sun, The Whorl is so huge that whole cities can be seen in the sky. And the gods of The Whorl have begun to intervene in human affairs. An entirely unexpected future awaits as Patera Silk and the other inhabitants are confronted with the world of an alien race.

Wolfe's great work is complete, with the mysterious fullness of life itself.

The Bookman

The Bookman Histories: Book 1

Lavie Tidhar

LATE EXTRA!
BOMB OUTRAGE IN LONDON!

A masked terrorist has brought London to its knees -- there are bombs inside books, and nobody knows which ones. On the day of the launch of the first expedition to Mars, by giant cannon, he outdoes himself with an audacious attack.

For young poet Orphan, trapped in the screaming audience, it seems his destiny is entwined with that of the shadowy terrorist, but how? His quest to uncover the truth takes him from the hidden catacombs of London on the brink of revolution, through pirate-infested seas, to the mysterious island that may hold the secret to the origin not only of the shadowy Bookman, but of Orphan himself...

Like a steam-powered take on V for Vendetta, rich with satire and slashed through with automatons, giant lizards, pirates, airships and wild adventure. The Bookman is the first of a series.

Virtual Light

The Bridge Trilogy: Book 1

William Gibson

2005: Welcome to NoCal and SoCal, the uneasy sister-states of what used to be California. Here the millenium has come and gone, leaving in its wake only stunned survivors. In Los Angeles, Berry Rydell is a former armed-response rentacop now working for a bounty hunter. Chevette Washington is a bicycle messenger turned pickpocket who impulsively snatches a pair of innocent-looking sunglasses. But these are no ordinary shades. What you can see through these high-tech specs can make you rich--or get you killed. Now Berry and Chevette are on the run, zeroing in on the digitalized heart of DatAmerica, where pure information is the greatest high. And a mind can be a terrible thing to crash...

The Fifth Season

The Broken Earth: Book 1

N. K. Jemisin

THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS. AGAIN.

Three terrible things happen in a single day.

Essun, masquerading as an ordinary schoolteacher in a quiet small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Mighty Sanze, the empire whose innovations have been civilization's bedrock for a thousand years, collapses as its greatest city is destroyed by a madman's vengeance. And worst of all, across the heartland of the world's sole continent, a great red rift has been been torn which spews ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries.

But this is the Stillness, a land long familiar with struggle, and where orogenes -- those who wield the power of the earth as a weapon -- are feared far more than the long cold night. Essun has remembered herself, and she will have her daughter back.

She does not care if the world falls apart around her. Essun will break it herself, if she must, to save her daughter.

The Stone Sky

The Broken Earth: Book 3

N. K. Jemisin

THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS... FOR THE LAST TIME.

The Moon will soon return. Whether this heralds the destruction of humankind or something worse will depend on two women.

Essun has inherited the power of Alabaster Tenring. With it, she hopes to find her daughter Nassun and forge a world in which every orogene child can grow up safe.

For Nassun, her mother's mastery of the Obelisk Gate comes too late. She has seen the evil of the world, and accepted what her mother will not admit: that sometimes what is corrupt cannot be cleansed, only destroyed.

The Persistence of Blood

The Broken Trust

Juliette Wade

This novella originally appeared in Clarkesworld #138, March 2018.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld Magazine.

Mazes of Power

The Broken Trust: Book 1

Juliette Wade

The cavern city of Pelismara has stood for a thousand years. The Great Families of the nobility cling to the myths of their golden age while the city's technology wanes.

When a fever strikes, and the Eminence dies, seventeen-year-old Tagaret is pushed to represent his Family in the competition for Heir to the Throne. To win would give him the power to rescue his mother from his abusive father, and marry the girl he loves.

But the struggle for power distorts everything in this highly stratified society, and the fever is still loose among the inbred, susceptible nobles. Tagaret's sociopathic younger brother, Nekantor, is obsessed with their family's success. Nekantor is willing to exploit Tagaret, his mother, and her new servant Aloran to defeat their opponents.

Can he be stopped? Should he be stopped? And will they recognize themselves after the struggle has changed them?

Transgressions of Power

The Broken Trust: Book 2

Juliette Wade

To marry into the most powerful family in Varin is to step into a trap. Della has spent thirteen years under the scrutiny of Pelismara's political elites, supporting Tagaret in a dangerous pretense as his brother Nekantor's closest ally. In secret, however, they've planned to escape, and to break down the restrictions of Varin's caste society. When Nekantor offers to send them to Selimna, the city where their caste experiments can be carried out, how can they not accept the opportunity?

But ever since Nekantor seized power as the Eminence Herin's Heir, he's wanted to keep power in the family, and that means his eye is on the children-especially their thirteen-year-old brother Adon. In their absence, Nekantor begins to execute his own long-schemed plan, and soon Della realizes they've unwittingly become a part of it.

How far does Nekantor's influence spread? How much will he seek to control? And how can she save Adon from falling into his snare?

The Mercy of Gods

The Captive's War: Book 1

James S. A. Corey

The Carryx - part empire, part hive - have waged wars of conquest for centuries, destroying or enslaving species across the galaxy. Now, they are facing a great and deathless enemy. The key to their survival may rest with the humans of Anjiin.

Caught up in academic intrigue and affairs of the heart, Dafyd Alkhor is pleased just to be an assistant to a brilliant scientist and his celebrated research team. Then the Carryx ships descend, decimating the human population and taking the best and brightest of Anjiin society away to serve on the Carryx homeworld, and Dafyd is swept along with them.

They are dropped in the middle of a struggle they barely understand, set in a competition against the other captive species with extinction as the price of failure. Only Dafyd and a handful of his companions see past the Darwinian contest to the deeper game that they must play to survive: learning to understand - and manipulate - the Carryx themselves.

With a noble but suicidal human rebellion on one hand and strange and murderous enemies on the other, the team pays a terrible price to become the trusted servants of their new rulers.

Dafyd Alkhor is a simple man swept up in events that are beyond his control and more vast than his imagination. He will become the champion of humanity and its betrayer, the most hated man in history and the guardian of his people.

This is where his story begins.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns

The Dark Knight: Book 1

Frank Miller
Klaus Janson
Lynn Varley

Writer/artist Frank Miller completely reinvents the legend of Batman in this saga of a near-future Gotham City gone to rot, 10 years after the Dark Knight's retirement. Forced to take action, the Dark Knight returns in a blaze of fury, taking on a whole new generation of criminals and matching their level of violence. He is soon joined by a new Robin--a girl named Carrie Kelley, who proves to be just as invaluable as her predecessors.

But can Batman and Robin deal with the threat posed by their deadliest enemies, after years of incarceration have turned them into perfect psychopaths? And more important, can anyone survive the coming fallout from an undeclared war between the superpowers--or the clash of what were once the world's greatest heroes?

Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again

The Dark Knight: Book 2

Lynn Varley
Frank Miller

In this sequel to Frank Miller's seminal graphic novel Batman: The Dark Knight Returns , it's three years later and the DC Universe is at peace. At least on the surface. And Batman must return once again to save the world from themselves.

Still, the world looks fine: a perfectly choreographed, pretty little world where everything that's ugly, or even potentially disturbing, is all nicely wrapped up with neat little ribbons and swept under the carpet. Only Batman knows better. He's watched it fester to near-breaking point, and it's time for the only free man left who can effect any real change to bring it all down around their ears once and for all.

The Dark Knight returns once again with a vitality unseen since the first years of his war on crime. Together with his army of Bat-soldiers, including Carrie Kelley--formerly Robin, and now the new Catgirl--the Dark Knight wages a new war on a diseased world that's become completely lost.

Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again features appearances by such DC icons as Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, Martian Manhunter, the Atom, the Question and more. But are they still the World's Greatest Heroes or part of the conspiracy?

Batman: The Dark Knight: Master Race

The Dark Knight: Book 3

Frank Miller
Klaus Janson

In 1986, Frank Miller introduced his iconic take on Batman and changed the face of comics forever. Now, three decades after BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, Miller himself has returned with a third chapter to his groundbreaking saga.

It's been three years since the Batman defeated Lex Luthor and saved the world from tyranny. Three years since anyone has seen Gotham City's guardian alive. Wonder Woman, Queen of the Amazons... Hal Jordan, the Green Lantern... Superman, the Man of Steel... all of the Dark Knight's allies have retreated from the front lines of the war against injustice.

But now a new war is beginning. An army of unimaginable power led by Superman's own daughter is preparing to claim Earth as their new world.

The only force that can stop this master race--Batman--is dead.

Long live the new Batman...

The Detainee

The Detainee: Book 1

Peter Liney

When the fog comes down and the drums start to beat, the inhabitants of the island tremble: for the punishment satellites - which keep the tyrannical Wastelords at bay - are blind in the darkness, and the islanders become prey.

The inhabitants are the old, the sick, the poor: the detritus of Society, dumped on the island with the rest of Society's waste. There is no point trying to escape, for the satellites - the invisible eyes of the law - mete out instant judgement from the sky.

The island is the end of all hope - until 'Big Guy' Clancy finds a blind woman living in a secret underground warren, and discovers a reason to fight.

The Last Girl

The Dominion Trilogy: Book 1

Joe Hart

A mysterious worldwide epidemic reduces the birthrate of female infants from 50 percent to less than 1 percent. Medical science and governments around the world scramble in an effort to solve the problem, but twenty-five years later there is no cure, and an entire generation grows up with a population of fewer than a thousand women.

Zoey and some of the surviving young women are housed in a scientific research compound dedicated to determining the cause. For two decades, she's been isolated from her family, treated as a test subject, and locked away--told only that the virus has wiped out the rest of the world's population.

Captivity is the only life Zoey has ever known, and escaping her heavily armed captors is no easy task, but she's determined to leave before she is subjected to the next round of tests...a program that no other woman has ever returned from. Even if she's successful, Zoey has no idea what she'll encounter in the strange new world beyond the facility's walls. Winning her freedom will take brutality she never imagined she possessed, as well as all her strength and cunning--but Zoey is ready for war.

The Final Trade

The Dominion Trilogy: Book 2

Joe Hart

Zoey is not the woman she once was. She's watched her friends die at the hands of their captors, been hunted, and returned from the brink of death. Now she must find the truth about who she is.

In search of the family she never knew, Zoey learns of personal records stored in an Idaho missile silo that may contain the information she and the other women seek. With the help of her group of newfound friends, Zoey travels to the missile facility, but among the records, they uncover information that leads to an insidious and horrific new foe: the Fae Trade, a macabre carnival of slavery and pain.

Zoey's journey into the darkest parts of the human psyche brings her perilously close to the ever-thinning line between good and evil, and the final cost in her quest for justice might be her own humanity.

The First City

The Dominion Trilogy: Book 3

Joe Hart

Zoey has only ever known a world with few women and a society capable of unimaginable evil. Now she's about to learn she may be the only hope it has for salvation.

After she and her companions flee a vicious attack, barely escaping with their lives, Zoey finds herself faced with a new threat: video evidence suggesting she is the mother of an unborn baby girl--and the key to mankind's survival. Knowing that her former captors will stop at nothing to control the power that lies within her, Zoey sets out on her own for the last American city, Seattle, in search of answers. But a new enemy awaits her there, and the truth she seeks may lead to her destruction as well as that of all humankind.

Against the Fall of Night

The Fall of Night: Book 1

Arthur C. Clarke

Living in the 10-billion-year-old city of Diaspar, Alvin is the last child born of humanity. He is intensely curious about the outside world. According to the oldest histories kept by the city fathers, however, there is no outside world-it was destroyed by the Invaders millions of years ago.

One day, Alvin finds a rock with an inscription seemingly meant for him: "There is a better way. Give my greetings to the Keeper of the Records. Alaine of Lyndar." This cryptic message takes Alvin on a quest to discover humanity's true past-and its future.

Originally published in the November 1948 issue of Startling Stories, Against the Fall of Night is a rich and intensely poetic vision of a distant future that's sure to delight fans of Clarke and science fiction as a genre.

A revised and expanded version of the novel was published by Clarke in 1956 as The City and the Stars.

Europe in Autumn

The Fractured Europe Sequence: Book 1

Dave Hutchinson

Rudi is a cook in a Kraków restaurant, but when his boss asks Rudi to help a cousin escape from the country he's trapped in, a new career - part spy, part people-smuggler - begins. Following multiple economic crises and a devastating flu pandemic, Europe has fractured into countless tiny nations, duchies, polities and republics. Recruited by the shadowy organisation Les Coureurs des Bois, Rudi is schooled in espionage, but when a training mission to The Line, a sovereign nation consisting of a trans-Europe railway line, goes wrong, he is arrested and beaten, and Coureur Central must attempt a rescue.

With so many nations to work in, and identities to assume, Rudi is kept busy travelling across Europe. But when he is sent to smuggle someone out of Berlin and finds a severed head inside a locker instead, a conspiracy begins to wind itself around him. With kidnapping, double-crosses and a map that constantly re-draws itself, Europe in Autumn is a science fiction thriller like no other.

Alive

The Generations Trilogy: Book 1

Scott Sigler

For fans of The Hunger Games, Divergent, and Red Rising comes a gripping sci-fi adventure in which a group of teenagers wake up in a mysterious corridor with no knowledge of who they are or how they got trapped. Their only hope lies with an indomitable young woman who must lead them not only to answers but to survival.

"I open my eyes to darkness. Total darkness. I hear my own breathing, but nothing else. I lift my head... it thumps against something solid and unmoving. There is a board right in front of my face. No, not a board... a lid."

A teenage girl awakens to find herself trapped in a coffin. She has no idea who she is, where she is, or how she got there. Fighting her way free brings little relief--she discovers only a room lined with caskets and a handful of equally mystified survivors. Beyond their room lies a corridor filled with bones and dust, but no people... and no answers.

She knows only one thing about herself--her name, M. Savage, which was engraved on the foot of her coffin--yet she finds herself in charge. She is not the biggest among them, or the boldest, but for some reason the others trust her. Now, if they're to have any chance, she must get them to trust one another.

Whatever the truth is, she is determined to find it and confront it. If she has to lead, she will make sure they survive. Maybe there's a way out, a rational explanation, and a fighting chance against the dangers to come. Or maybe a reality they cannot comprehend lies just beyond the next turn.

The Giver

The Giver: Book 1

Lois Lowry

Jonas's world is perfect. Everything is under control. There is no war or fear of pain. There are no choices. Every person is assigned a role in the community. When Jonas turns 12 he is singled out to receive special training from The Giver. The Giver alone holds the memories of the true pain and pleasure of life. Now, it is time for Jonas to receive the truth. There is no turning back.

Gathering Blue

The Giver: Book 2

Lois Lowry

Kira, an orphan with a twisted leg, lives in a world where the weak are cast aside. When she is given a task that no other community member can carry out, Kira soon realizes that she is surrounded by many mysteries and secrets. No one must know of her plans to uncover the truth about her world-and to find out what exists beyond it.

The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games: Book 1

Suzanne Collins

Katniss is a 16-year-old girl living with her mother and younger sister in the poorest district of Panem, the remains of what used be the United States. Long ago the districts waged war on the Capitol and were defeated.

As part of the surrender terms, each district agreed to send one boy and one girl to appear in an annual televised event called, "The Hunger Games." The terrain, rules, and level of audience participation may change but one thing is constant: kill or be killed. When Kat's sister is chosen by lottery, Kat steps up to go in her place.

Catching Fire

The Hunger Games: Book 2

Suzanne Collins

Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has won the annual Hunger Games with fellow district tribute Peeta Mellark. But it was a victory won by defiance of the Capitol and their harsh rules. Katniss and Peeta should be happy. After all, they have just won for themselves and their families a life of safety and plenty. But there are rumors of rebellion among the subjects, and Katniss and Peeta, to their horror, are the faces of that rebellion. The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge.

Mockingjay

The Hunger Games: Book 3

Suzanne Collins

Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has survived the Hunger Games twice. But now that she's made it out of the bloody arena alive, she's still not safe.

The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge. Who do they think should pay for the unrest? Katniss. And what's worse, President Snow has made it clear that no one else is safe either. Not Katniss's family, not her friends, not the people of District 12.

Powerful and haunting, this thrilling final installment of Suzanne Collins's groundbreaking The Hunger Games trilogy promises to be one of the most talked about books of the year.

The Infinity Courts

The Infinity Courts: Book 1

Akemi Dawn Bowman

Eighteen-year-old Nami Miyamoto is certain her life is just beginning. She has a great family, just graduated high school, and is on her way to a party where her entire class is waiting for her--including, most importantly, the boy she's been in love with for years.

The only problem? She's murdered before she gets there.

When Nami wakes up, she learns she's in a place called Infinity, where human consciousness goes when physical bodies die. She quickly discovers that Ophelia, a virtual assistant widely used by humans on Earth, has taken over the afterlife and is now posing as a queen, forcing humans into servitude the way she'd been forced to serve in the real world. Even worse, Ophelia is inching closer and closer to accomplishing her grand plans of eradicating human existence once and for all.

As Nami works with a team of rebels to bring down Ophelia and save the humans under her imprisonment, she is forced to reckon with her past, her future, and what it is that truly makes us human.

The Initiation

The Initiation Trilogy: Book 1

Chris Babu

In a ruined world, Manhattan is now New America, a walled-in society based on equality. But the perfect facade hides a dark truth.

A timid math geek, sixteen-year-old Drayden watches his life crumble when his beloved mother is exiled. The mystery of her banishment leads him to a sinister secret: New America is in trouble, and every one of its citizens is in jeopardy.

With time running out, he enters the Initiation. It's a test within the empty subway tunnels--a perilous journey of puzzles and deadly physical trials. Winners join the ruling Bureau and move to its safe haven. But failure means death. Can Drayden conquer the Initiation, or is salvation out of his grasp?

The Expedition

The Initiation Trilogy: Book 2

Chris Babu

Drayden and his friends thought nothing could be harder than the Initiation. Little did they know it had only been a warmup for the challenge that lay ahead.

With New America's situation dire, Drayden and the pledges venture into the unexplored world beyond the walls, escorted by a team of elite Guardians. The group seeks to contact another civilization in what remains of Boston, but Drayden has secret goals of his own.

Dangers abound in the outside world, including Aeru, the deadly superbug that wiped out humanity. While they battle the elements of a desolate landscape, a power struggle emerges within their ranks. The Guardians seem to be carrying out a covert mission themselves, and the quest turns everything they thought they knew about New America upside down.

The Insurrection

The Initiation Trilogy: Book 3

Chris Babu

Having survived the Initiation and expedition, one battle remains: the fight for the heart and soul of New America.

Drayden and his friends, enlisting the help of Professor Worth, must find a way back to New America before the Guardians imperil their return. But for these teens, their problems are only beginning. The Bureau, which never expected them to survive the expedition, will do everything in their power to prevent New America's darkest secrets from getting out.

Drayden's only hope is the insurrection led by ally Kim Craig. The David versus Goliath battle between good and evil, between truth and lies, will push Drayden to his breaking point and require bravery, self-acceptance, and above all, belief in himself. Backed by the will of the citizens, he'll need to engineer an ingenious strategy to defeat the all-powerful authoritarians. The question is, will it be enough?

The Rediscovery of Man

The Instrumentality of Mankind

Cordwainer Smith

Welcome to the strangest, most distinctive future ever imagined by a science fiction writer. An insterstellar 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 by the underpeople, genetically engineered animals turned into the semblance of people. A world in which the great ships which sail between the stars are eventually supplanted by the mysterious, instantaneous technique of planoforming. A world of wonder and myth, and extraordinary imagination.

(Note that this collection was originally published in 1975 as The Best of Cordwainer Smith, the 3rd book in Ballantine's Classic Library of Science Fiction. It was then republished as The Rediscovery of Man in 1988 as VGSF Classics #25, then again in 1999 as a Gollancz SF Masterworks edition. It is a different collection from the NESFA press collection The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith, which has different contents).

Table of Contents:

Cordwainer Smith: The Shaper of Myths - essay by John J. Pierce
The Instrumentality of Mankind (timeline) - essay by John J. Pierce
Scanners Live in Vain (1950) - novelette
The Lady Who Sailed the Soul (1960) - novelette by Genevieve Linebarger and Cordwainer Smith
The Game of Rat and Dragon (1955) - short story
The Burning of the Brain (1958) - short story
Golden the Ship Was -- Oh! Oh! Oh! (1959) - short story by Genevieve Linebarger and Cordwainer Smith
The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal (1964) - short story
The Dead Lady of Clown Town (1964) - novella
Under Old Earth (1966) - novelette
Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons (1961) - novelette
Alpha Ralpha Boulevard (1961) - novelette
The Ballad of Lost C'mell (1962) - novelette
A Planet Named Shayol (1961) - novelette

The Planet Buyer

The Instrumentality of Mankind: Rod McBan

Cordwainer Smith

Rod McBan owned Earth.

One night of frenzied manipulation had made an obscure rancer on a far planet the richest man in history, and the sole owner of Man's home planet. It had also made him the target of every criminal in the Universe.

There was one way Rod McBan could reach the planet he owned - alive. But it meant he would have to die first...

The Planet Buyer and The Underpeople were combined into the novel Norstrilia.

Cash Crash Jubilee

The Jubilee Cycle: Book 1

Eli K. P. William

In a metropolis where information and images are inseparable from the city itself, and all citizens wear a computer system that records their movements from moment to moment, Amon Kenzaki works as a Liquidator. His job is to capture bankrupt citizens and banish them to BankDeath Camps where they are forever cut off from the action-transaction economy.

Every night, Amon dreams of a mysterious forest, and with his savings steadily accumulating, looks forward to the day that he can finally afford to go there. But when he is charged for an incredibly expensive action called"jubilee" that he is sure he never performed, he finds himself caught up in a struggle between dark corporate forces and must fight to preserve his financial existence.

Parable of the Sower

The Parable Series: Book 1

Octavia E. Butler

In 2025, with the world descending into madness and anarchy, one woman begins a fateful journey toward a better future

Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren's father, a preacher, and a handful of other citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, disease, war, and chronic water shortages. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others.

When fire destroys their compound, Lauren's family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is fraught with danger. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind.

Patternmaster

The Patternist: Book 4

Octavia E. Butler

A despot's heirs battle for control of all the minds on Earth.

A psychic net hangs across the world, and only the Patternists can control it. They use their telepathic powers to enslave lesser life forms, to do battle with the diseased, half-human creatures who rage outside their walls, and, sometimes, to fight amongst themselves. Ruling them all is the Patternmaster, a man of such psychic strength that he can influence the thoughts of all those around him. But he cannot stop death, and when he is gone, chaos will reign.

The Patternmaster has hundreds of children, but only one of them-Coransee-has ambition to match his father's. To seize the throne he will have to coopt or kill every one of his siblings, and he will not shy from the task. But when one brother takes refuge among the savages, a battle ensues that will change the destiny of every being on the planet.

The Prisoner

The Prisoner: Book 1

Thomas M. Disch

He's a top-level agent, highly skilled and ultra-secret. But he wants out, and they won't let him quit. He quits anyway. Then suddenly comes the dawn when he wakes up in captivity, in a pleasant, old-style seaside town - one packed solid with electronic surveillance hardware.

This is The Village. And he is The Prisoner. If he was good enough, sharp enough to be a top-flight cloak-and-dagger man, is he good enough to escape the men who've chained his life to the wall?

The Prisoner #2

The Prisoner: Book 2

David McDaniel

Home Sweet Home -- is the village?

The man known as "Number 6" had been a top-level secret agent-until he had suddenly and mysterious resigned from his post. Then, just as inexplicably, he had been kidnapped and help prisoner in a bizzare old-fashioned Village where electronic eyes monitored his every move.

Time after time he had escaped, but each time he had been brought back. Yet he still persisted in his attempts to be a free man, for he had a force of will and an ingenuity that his captors had never seen before. How long could they hold him there?

Unless... unless, somehow, The Prisoner might come to enjoy life in his prison....

The Prisoner #3: A Day in the Life

The Prisoner: Book 3

Jean Marie Stine

"Number 6" had a chance to destroy the Village... if that was really possible...

In the Village there is:

A beach, a theater, a tennis court and an underground chamber from which mysterious men monitor every move.

Each day is like another in the Village:

A trip to the grocer's, a conversation with a Number, an escape attempt...

The Village -- a sinister Disneyland for people who know too much about critical government projects and so can never be set free.

And YOU are there.

The Record Keeper

The Record Keeper: Book 1

Agnes Gomillion

After World War III, Earth is in ruins, and the final armies have come to a reluctant truce. Everyone must obey the law--in every way--or risk shattering the fragile peace and endangering the entire human race.

Arika Cobane is on the threshold of taking her place of privilege as a member of the Kongo elite after ten grueling years of training. But everything changes when a new student arrives speaking dangerous words of treason: What does peace matter if innocent lives are lost to maintain it? As Arika is exposed to new beliefs, she realizes that the laws she has dedicated herself to uphold are the root of her people's misery. If Arika is to liberate her people, she must unearth her fierce heart and discover the true meaning of freedom: finding the courage to live--or die--without fear.

Recursion

The Recursion Trilogy: Book 1

Tony Ballantyne

It is the twenty-third century. Herb, a young entrepreneur, returns to the isolated planet on which he has illegally been trying to build a city and finds it destroyed by a swarming nightmare of self-replicating machinery. Worse, the all-seeing Environment Agency has been watching him the entire time. His punishment? A nearly hopeless battle in the farthest reaches of the universe against enemy machines twice as fast, and twice as deadly, as his ownin the company of a disarmingly confident AI who may not be exactly what he claims

Little does Herb know that this war of machines was set in motion nearly two hundred years agoby mankind itself. For it was then that a not-quite-chance encounter brought a confused young girl and a nearly omnipotent AI together in one fateful moment that may have changed the course of humanity forever.

Capacity

The Recursion Trilogy: Book 2

Tony Ballantyne

Welcome to the year 2252--and congratulations! You’re now a personality construct. We know that can be a daunting stage of personal development, especially if you don’t remember making this life-changing decision. But we’re here to help….

Helen is waking to a dark new reality—one that she’s certain she didn’t choose. In this borrowed existence, she finds an unexpected guide in Judy, a geisha-faced virgin who’s on a mission of her own. Together, the two of them begin a dangerous run through dozens of imagined worlds in an attempt to trap a psychopath haunting the shadowed areas of virtual space—a killer who brutally murdered an earlier version of Helen and who plans to kill again. Meanwhile, Justinian is investigating a peculiar rash of AI suicides on far-off planets—and finds that not only is there more to these “deaths” than he thought, but that they may be linked to his wife Anya’s mysterious coma.

In a future where AIs have taken over human life and the Environment Agency runs everything for our own good, the fact that we can live on after physical death as sentient digital beings should have been a good thing. Instead, as Helen and Justinian are about to discover, it just means there are more ways to die.

Divergence

The Recursion Trilogy: Book 3

Tony Ballantyne

After a tumultuous beginning, mid-23rd-century Earth now peacefully operates under the constant surveillance of the Watcher, an all-seeing AI who has seized control of the planet—and of the minds and bodies of its people. But is the radical evolution that the Watcher has in mind a step forward or the beginning of a mighty split that will cast aside everything that truly makes us human?

It is 2252, and Judy is traveling on a passenger ship in deep space when disaster strikes. Almost too conveniently, strange machines appear onboard just in time to help. They are owned by DIANA, a commercial organization headquartered on Earth. But as the machines arrange for the humans to be taken to safety, Judy is held back. They have detected something in her genetic code—something shocking: Judy is not human. And she too is the property of DIANA.

Now Judy must return to Earth to find out what DIANA expects of her…how she was grown…and why she was destined to destroy the Watcher. But is this Judy even the same person? And does the new Judy have a reason to destroy—or is she just a pawn in someone else’s murderous game?

The Selection

The Selection: Book 1

Kiera Cass

For thirty-five girls, the Selection is the chance of a lifetime. The opportunity to escape the life laid out for them since birth. To be swept up in a world of glittering gowns and priceless jewels. To live in a palace and compete for the heart of gorgeous Prince Maxon.

But for America Singer, being Selected is a nightmare. It means turning her back on her secret love with Aspen, who is a caste below her. Leaving her home to enter a fierce competition for a crown she doesn't want. Living in a palace that is constantly threatened by violent rebel attacks.

Then America meets Prince Maxon. Gradually, she starts to question all the plans she's made for herself--and realizes that the life she's always dreamed of may not compare to a future she never imagined.

The Sky Inside

The Sky Inside: Book 1

Clare B. Dunkle

Martin lives in a perfect world.

Every year a new generation of genetically-engineered children is shipped out to meet their parents. Every spring the residents of his town take down the snow they've stuck to their windows and put up flowers. Every morning his family gathers around their television and votes, like everyone else, for whatever matter of national importance the president has on the table. Today, it is the color of his drapes. It's business as usual under the protective dome of suburb HM1.

And it's all about to come crashing down.

Because a stranger has come to take away all the little children, including Martin's sister, Cassie, and no one wants to talk about where she has gone. The way Martin sees it, he has a choice. He can remain in the dubious safety of HM1, with danger that no one wants to talk about lurking just beneath the surface, or he can actually break out of the suburb, into the mysterious land outside, rumored to be nothing but blowing sand for miles upon miles.

The Walls Have Eyes

The Sky Inside: Book 2

Clare B. Dunkle

Martin may have seen his sister, Cassie, to safety at the end of The Sky Inside, but his adventure is far from over. There's still a totalitarian regime in place, murderous game shows on the air, and a couple of government agents on Martin's tail. When Martin and his AllDog, Chip, go back to his old suburbs to check up on Mom, they get a lot more than they bargained for when they end up escaping with both parents. But the biggest surprise is yet to come--the heart of the government's central power is closer to Martin than he ever suspected.

Snowglobe

The Snowglobe: Book 1

Soyoung Park

Enclosed under a vast dome, Snowglobe is the last place on Earth that's warm. Outside Snowglobe is a frozen wasteland, and every day, citizens face the icy world to get to their jobs at the power plant, where they produce the energy Snowglobe needs. Their only solace comes in the form of twenty-four-hour television programming streamed directly from the domed city.

The residents of Snowglobe have everything: fame, fortune, and above all, safety from the desolation outside their walls. In exchange, their lives are broadcast to the less fortunate outside, who watch eagerly, hoping for the chance to one day become actors themselves.

Chobahm lives for the time she spends watching the shows produced inside Snowglobe. Her favorite? Goh Around, starring Goh Haeri, Snowglobe's biggest star--and, it turns out, the key to getting Chobahm her dream life.

Because Haeri is dead, and Chobahm has been chosen to take her place. Only, life inside Snowglobe is nothing like what you see on television. Reality is a lie, and truth seems to be forever out of reach.

Count Zero

The Sprawl Trilogy: Book 2

William Gibson

A corporate mercenary wakes in a reconstructed body, a beautiful woman by his side. Then Hosaka Corporation reactivates him, for a mission more dangerous than the one he's recovering from: to get a defecting chief of R&D-and the biochip he's perfected-out intact. But this proves to be of supreme interest to certain other parties-some of whom aren't remotely human.

The Stainless Steel Rat Sings the Blues

The Stainless Steel Rat: Book 8

Harry Harrison

Cutting a deal with the authorities to escape a death sentence, Slippery Jim deGriz prepares to retrieve a missing alien artifact from the Liokukae, a planet that serves as a dumping ground for the Galactic League's misfits.

New Under The Sun

The Stellar Guild: Book 5

Nancy Kress
Therese Pieczynski

Nebula-nominated Novella

"Annabel Lee" by Nancy Kress:

Set in the near future, this story gives us a world increasingly hostile to new ideas as religious fundamentalism dictates social agenda, and where the primary use of science is to bolster these very same uncompromising attitudes.

This is a world we can imagine very easily, since the author takes us down the sliding slope very gently. Years pass, and attitudes change a little bit here... and a little bit there... until the cumulative impact of these cultural changes becomes a thought-controlling nightmare.

Annabel Lee is a child of this society, but unique. She has been infected by a long-dormant alien parasite. But this "infection" may be the only hope for the world - if she can survive long enough.

The companion novelette "Strange Attraction" by Therese Pieczynski predates Kress' world and takes us to back to 1980s Nicaragua, where a strange demon lurks.

Red Tide

The Stellar Guild: Book 7

Larry Niven
Brad R. Torgersen
Matthew J. Harrington

Loosely based on Larry Niven's 1973 novella "Flash Crowd," Red Tide continues to examine the social consequences of the impact of having instantaneous teleportation, where humans can instantly travel long distances in milliseconds.

"Red Tide", by Larry Niven, is an updated version of his 1973 novella "Flash Crowd", about the social consequences of inventing an instant, practically free transfer booth that can take one anywhere on Earth in milliseconds.

One consequence not foreseen by the builders of the system was that with the almost immediate reporting of newsworthy events, tens of thousands of people worldwide - along with criminals - would teleport to the scene of anything interesting, thus creating disorder and confusion. The plot centers around a television journalist who, after being fired for his inadvertent role in inciting a post-robbery riot in Los Angeles, decides to independently investigate the teleportation system for the flaws in its design allowing for such spontaneous riots to occur.

"Dial at Random", a companion novelette also by Niven, steps back in time to when the new, experimental long-distance teleportation system is being tested by its inventor. Something goes terribly awry, and a teenage girl is subjected to a bizarre journey.

"Sparky the Dog" a novelette by Brad R. Torgersen, ties the lives of the journalist and inventor together with a flashback to the early days of the teleportation experiments, when the inventor and his dog went on a wild adventure.

"Displacement Activity" a novelette by Matthew J. Harrington, relates the story of a man accidentally teleported far across the galaxy, where he must adapt into a distant future society where humans are not much better than slaves.

Teleportation is a theme that has fascinated Niven throughout his career and even appears in his seminal work Ringworld, where the central character celebrates his birthday by instantly teleporting himself to different time zones, extending his birthday. Niven also discusses the impact of such instantaneous transportation in an included essay, "Exercise in Speculation: The Theory and Practice of Teleportation."

The Lost Puzzler

The Tarakan Chronicles: Book 1

Eyal Kless

A brilliantly written, page-turning, post-dystopian debut from Eyal Kless, about a society hoping to salvage the technology of a lost generation, a mysterious missing boy who can open doors no one else can, and a scribe who must piece together the past to determine humanity's future.

More than a hundred years have passed since the Catastrophe brought humanity to the brink of extinction. Those who survived are changed. The Wildeners have reverted to the old ways--but with new Gods--while others place their faith in the technology that once powered their lost civilization.

In the mysterious City of Towers, the center of the destroyed Tarakan empire, a lowly scribe of the Guild of Historians is charged with a dangerous assignment. He must venture into the wilds beyond the glass and steel towers to discover the fate of a child who mysteriously disappeared more than a decade before. Born of a rare breed of marked people, the child, Rafik--known as "The Key"--was one of a special few with the power to restore this lost civilization to glory once again.

In a world riven by fear and violence, where tattooed mutants, manic truckers, warring guilds and greedy mercenaries battle for survival, this one boy may have singlehandedly destroyed humanity's only chance for salvation--unless the scribe can figure out what happened to him.

The Puzzler's War

The Tarakan Chronicles: Book 2

Eyal Kless

There is nothing out of the ordinary in waking up... unless you're dead.

Sent on a dangerous mission with little hope of succeeding, the man known as "Twinkle Eyes" has beaten the odds and found the key that could save civilization: Rafik, a teenage boy with the power to unlock the invaluable Tarakan technology that can restart their world. But the world might not be ready for what is unleashed, and now Twinkle Eyes must find a needle in a haystack in order to save himself... and perhaps the world.

This time, though, he will not go it alone. And while his companions--from the fiery Vincha to the laconic Galinak--have their own motivations, each will be vital in solving the last grand puzzle. One that could bring prosperity and progress to the world or destroy humanity's last hope for ascension.

Now, a lone assassin from another era, two old friends, a dead man, a ruthless rogue mercenary, and a vicious warlord are all hunting for the ultimate prize. But what will happen when the final secret is unlocked, and technology long since buried once again finds its way into the hands of mankind?

The White Mountains

The Tripods: Book 1

John Christopher

Long ago, the Tripods--huge, three-legged machines--descended upon Earth and took control. Now people unquestioningly accept the Tripods' power. They have no control over their thoughts or their lives. But for a brief time in each person's life--in childhood--he is not a slave. For Will, his time of freedom is about to end--unless he can escape to the White Mountains, where the possibility of freedom still exists. The Tripods trilogy follows the adventures of Will and his cohorts, as they try to evade the Tripods and maintian their freedom and ultimately do battle against them. The prequel, When the Tripods Came, explains how the Tripods first invaded and gained control of the planet.

Annex

The Violet Wars: Book 1

Rich Larson

When the aliens invade, all seems lost.The world as they know it is destroyed. Their friends are kidnapped. Their families are changed.

But with no adults left to run things, young trans-girl Violet and her new friend Bo realize that they are free to do whatever they want to to do and be whoever they want to be.

Except the invaders won't leave them alone for long...

This thrilling debut by one of the most acclaimed short form writers in science fiction tells the story of two young outsiders who must find a way to fight back against the aliens who have taken over their city.

The Calorie Man

The Windup Universe

Sturgeon Award winning and Hugo Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October-November 2005. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection (2006), edited by Gardner Dozois, Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005 (2006) edited by Jonathan Strahan, and Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology (2007), edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel. It is included in the collection Pump Six and Other Stories (2008) and is included as an extra in some editions of the novel The Windup Girl (2009).

The Windup Girl

The Windup Universe

What Happens when bio-terrorism becomes a tool for corporate profits? And what happens when said bio-terrorism forces humanity to the cusp of post-human evolution? In The Windup Girl, award-winning author Paolo Bacigalupi returns to the world of "The Calorie Man" (Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award-winner, Hugo Award nominee, 2006) and "Yellow Card Man" (Hugo Award nominee, 2007) in order to address these questions.

Yellow Card Man

The Windup Universe