Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, the author of the immortal pangram, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."
Now, Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island's Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop.
As the letters progressively drop from the statue, they also disappear from the novel. The result is both a hilarious and moving story of one girl's fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere.
With undertones of vampires, Frankenstein, dragons' hoards, and killing fields, Matt's story turns out to be an inspiring tale of friendship, survival, hope, and transcendence. A must-read for teenage fantasy fans.
At his coming-of-age party, Matteo Alacrán asks El Patrón's bodyguard, "How old am I?...I know I don't have a birthday like humans, but I was born." "You were harvested," Tam Lin reminds him. "You were grown in that poor cow for nine months and then you were cut out of her." To most people around him, Matt is not a boy, but a beast. A room full of chicken litter with roaches for friends and old chicken bones for toys is considered good enough for him. But for El Patrón, lord of a country called Opium—a strip of poppy fields lying between the U.S. and what was once called Mexico—Matt is a guarantee of eternal life. El Patrón loves Matt as he loves himself for Matt is himself. They share identical DNA.
In Island, his last novel, Aldous Huxley transports us to a Pacific island where, for 120 years, an ideal society has flourished. Inevitably, this island of bliss attracts the envy and enmity of the surrounding world. A conspiracy is underway to take over Pala, and events begin to move when an agent of the conspirators, a newspaperman named Faranby, is shipwrecked there. What Faranby doesn't expect is how his time with the people of Pala will revolutionize all his values and—to his amazement—give him hope.
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.
The Last Book in the Universe is a fast-paced action novel set in a future where the world has been almost destroyed. It's the story of an epileptic teenager nicknamed Spaz, who begins the heroic fight to bring human intelligence back to the planet.
In a world where most people are plugged into brain-drain entertainment systems, Spaz is the rare human being who can see life as it really is. When he meets an old man called Ryter, he begins to learn about Earth and its past. With Ryter as his companion, Spaz sets off on an unlikely quest to save his dying sister—and in the process, perhaps the world.
Parable of the Talents is the Nebula Award-winning sequel to Parable of the Sower, continuing the gripping story of Lauren Olamina in a socially and economically depressed California in the 2030s.
Convinced that her community should colonize the stars, Lauren and her followers make preparations. However, the collapse of society and rise of fanatics result in Lauren's followers being enslaved, and her daughter stolen from her. Now, Lauren must fight back to save the new world order.
This novel explores themes of alienation and transcendence, violence and spirituality, slavery and freedom, and separation and community, to astonishing effect in the shockingly familiar, broken world of 2032.
R.U.R.—written in 1920—garnered worldwide acclaim for its author and popularized the word "Robot."
Mass-produced, efficient, and servile labor, ÄŚapek's Robots remember everything, but lack creative thought, and the Utopian life they provide ultimately lacks meaning. When the Robots revolt, killing all but one of their masters, they must attempt to learn the secret of self-duplication. But their attempts at replication leave them with nothing but bloody chunks of meat.
It's not until two robots fall in love and are christened "Adam" and "Eve" by the last surviving human that Nature emerges triumphant.
Luke Garner is terrified. Out of hiding for the first time in his life, he knows that any minute one of his new classmates at Hendricks School for Boys could discover his secret: that he's a third child passing as the recently deceased Lee Grant. And in a society where it's illegal for families to have more than two children, being a third child means certain death at the hands of the dreaded Population Police.
His first experience outside the safety of his home is bewildering. There's not a single window anywhere in the school; Luke can't tell his classmates apart (even as they subject him to brutal hazing); and the teachers seem oblivious to it all.
Desperate to fit in, Luke endures the confusion and teasing until he discovers an unlocked door to the outside, and a chance to understand what is really going on. But to take this chance—to find out the secrets of Hendricks—Luke will need to put aside his fears and discover a courage that a lifetime in hiding couldn't thwart.
Once again, best-selling author Margaret Peterson Haddix delights her fans with this spine-tingling account of an all-too-possible future. Among the Impostors is a worthy companion to Among the Hidden and a heart-stopping thriller in its own right.
I am confiding this manuscript to space, not with the intention of saving myself, but to help, perhaps, to avert the appalling scourge that is menacing the human race. Lord have pity on us!
With these words, Pierre Boulle hurtles the reader onto the Planet of the Apes. In this simian world, civilization is turned upside down: apes are men and men are apes; apes rule and men run wild; apes think, speak, produce, wear clothes, and men are speechless, naked, exhibited at fairs, used for biological research. On the planet of the apes, man, having reached to apotheosis of his genius, has become inert.
To this planet come a journalist and a scientist. The scientist is put into a zoo, the journalist into a laboratory. Only the journalist retains the spiritual strength and creative intelligence to try to save himself, to fight the appalling scourge, to remain a man.
Out of this situation, Pierre Boulle has woven a tale as harrowing, bizarre, and meaningful as any in the brilliant roster of this master storyteller. With his customary wit, irony, and disciplined intellect and style, the author of The Bridge Over the River Kwai tells a swiftly moving story dealing with man's conflicts, and takes the reader into a suspenseful and strangely fascinating orbit.
On Earth, Hari Michaelson was a superstar. But on Overworld, he was the assassin Caine. Real monarchs lived and died at his hands and entire governments were overthrown—all for the entertainment of millions back on Earth. But now Hari, stripped of his identity as Caine, must fight his greatest battle: against the powerful corporate masters of Earth and the faceless masses who are killing everything he loves.
Enemies old and new array themselves against him. And Hari is just one man—alone, half-crippled, powerless. They say he doesn't have a chance. They are wrong...
In Anthony Burgess's influential nightmare vision of the future, criminals take over after dark. Teen gang leader Alex narrates in fantastically inventive slang that echoes the violent intensity of youth rebelling against society. Dazzling and transgressive, A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil and the meaning of human freedom.
This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition, and Burgess’s introduction, “A Clockwork Orange Resucked.”
Dr. Tom More has created a unique invention: a stethoscope of the human spirit. With this remarkable device, he embarks on an unforgettable odyssey to cure mankind's spiritual flu.
This novel confronts the value of life and its susceptibility to chance and ruin. Set amid the decadence and polarization of a future American society, it is a journey through the complexities of the human psyche, highlighting both its potential and its pitfalls.
Otherland. In many ways, it is humankind's most stunning achievement: a private, multidimensional universe built over two generations by the greatest minds of the twenty-first century. But this most exclusive of places is also one of the world's best-kept secrets, created and controlled by an organization made up of the world's most powerful and ruthless individuals, a private cartel known—to those who know of their existence at all—as The Grail Brotherhood.
Though their purpose in creating Otherland is still a mystery, it may not remain so for long. For they have exacted a terrible price from humanity in the process, and even their highly organized global conspiracy cannot hide the nature of their crimes forever.
And now, a small band of adventurers has penetrated the veil of secrecy that prevents the uninitiated from entering Otherland. But having broken into the amazing worlds within worlds that make up this universe, they are trapped, unable to escape back to their own flesh-and-blood bodies in the real world.
As dangers and circumstances split their party into small, widely scattered groups, their only hope of reuniting lies in returning again and again to the River that flows—in one form or another—through all the worlds.
But the odds seem to be completely against them as they—and the one outsider with whom they might join forces—become hopelessly lost in realms where an Ice Age tribe's fears can only be quenched in blood... where insects are as large and deadly as dinosaurs... where they are caught in the war between a man made of straw and one made of tin... where cartoon ads take on a life of their own... where humans strive to survive in the aftermath of an alien invasion... and where one among their party is actually The Grail Brotherhood's most terrifying weapon—a sociopathic killer who has never failed and whose current mission is to make certain that not even one member of this little invasion force lives long enough to reveal the truth about Otherland to the people of Earth...
The Tripods Boxed Set of 4 presents a captivating series of novels that tell the story of how the Tripods came to rule the Earth. It follows a small group of boys who bravely work to retain their autonomy and win freedom for Earth's people.
This thrilling adventure series combines elements of science fiction and dystopian themes, capturing the reader's imagination as they explore the dynamics of power, freedom, and resistance.
In the far distant future, the country is laid waste by a nuclear holocaust. Twelve-year-old Riddley Walker tells his story in a language as fractured as the world in which he lives. As Riddley steps outside the confines of his small world, he finds himself caught up in intrigue and a frantic quest for power, desperately trying to make sense of things.
Set in a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England (Inland), Hoban has imagined a humanity regressed to an iron-age, semi-literate state—and invented a language to represent it. Riddley is at once the Huck Finn and the Stephen Dedalus of his culture—rebel, change agent, and artist.
This is a brilliant, unique, completely realized work of fiction. One reads it again and again, discovering new wonders every time through. Join Riddley Walker on his journey of discovery and survival in a world that echoes both the past and a possible future.
The Key to Survival Rests in the Hands of Shade's Children.
If you’re lucky, you live to fight another day.
In a futuristic urban wasteland, evil Overlords have decreed that no child shall live a day past his fourteenth birthday. On that Sad Birthday, the child becomes the object of an obscene harvest, resulting in the construction of a machine-like creature whose sole purpose is to kill.
The mysterious Shade — once a man, but now more like the machines he fights — recruits the few children fortunate enough to escape. With luck, cunning, and skill, four of Shade's children come closer than any to discovering the source of the Overlords' power — and the key to their downfall. But the closer the children get, the more ruthless Shade seems to become...
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.
In 1945, Hitler unleashed the Blood Death on Britain as his final act of vengeance. Those who died at once were the lucky ones. The really unfortunate took years. The survivors - people like me, who had the blood group that kept us safe from the disease - were now targets for those who believed our blood could save them.
I survived for three years. I lived alone, spending my days avoiding the fascist Blackshirts who wanted my blood for their dying leader. Then I met the others - and life got complicated all over again.
Set in the near-future, Into the Forest is a powerfully imagined novel that focuses on the relationship between two teenage sisters living alone in their Northern California forest home.
Over 30 miles from the nearest town, and several miles away from their nearest neighbor, Nell and Eva struggle to survive as society begins to decay and collapse around them. No single event precedes society's fall. There is talk of a war overseas and upheaval in Congress, but it still comes as a shock when the electricity runs out and gas is nowhere to be found.
The sisters consume the resources left in the house, waiting for the power to return. Their arrival into adulthood, however, forces them to reexamine their place in the world and their relationship to the land and each other.
Reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale, Into the Forest is a mesmerizing and thought-provoking novel of hope and despair set in a frighteningly plausible near-future America.
That Hideous Strength, the final installment of the Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis, unfolds a dark narrative set against the looming threats of World War II. This novel serves as a timeless parable, cherished across generations not only for its captivating storytelling but also for its profound moral insights. At the heart of this tale is Dr. Elwin Ransom, a character of remarkable brilliance, clarity, and courage, inspired by Lewis's close friend J.R.R. Tolkien.
In this narrative, the forces of darkness, previously thwarted in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, gather for an all-out assault on Earth itself. Rumors abound that the legendary wizard Merlin has returned, offering ultimate power to those who can control him. Amidst this turmoil, a nefarious technocratic organization, N.I.C.E. (the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments), emerges, aiming to 'recondition' society with Merlin's aid. Dr. Ransom assembles a counterforce, Logres, setting the stage for a climactic showdown that concludes the trilogy in a spectacular fashion.
Discover a chillingly powerful and prescient dystopian vision from one of Europe's greatest writers. A driver waiting at the traffic lights goes blind. An ophthalmologist tries to diagnose his distinctive white blindness, but is affected before he can read the textbooks. It becomes a contagion, spreading throughout the city. Trying to stem the epidemic, the authorities herd the afflicted into a mental asylum where the wards are terrorised by blind thugs. And when fire destroys the asylum, the inmates burst forth and the last links with a supposedly civilised society are snapped. This is not anarchy, this is blindness.
Saramago repeatedly undertakes to unite the pressing demands of the present with an unfolding vision of the future. This is his most apocalyptic, and most optimistic, version of that project yet.
The Book of the New Sun is unanimously acclaimed as Gene Wolfe's most remarkable work. Sword & Citadel brings together the final two books of the tetralogy in one volume:
The Sword of the Lictor is the third volume in Wolfe's remarkable epic, chronicling the odyssey of the wandering pilgrim called Severian, driven by a powerful and unfathomable destiny, as he carries out a dark mission far from his home.
The Citadel of the Autarch brings The Book of the New Sun to its harrowing conclusion, as Severian clashes in a final reckoning with the dread Autarch, fulfilling an ancient prophecy that will forever alter the realm known as Urth.
Andrew "Ender" Wiggin thinks he is playing computer simulated war games; he is, in fact, engaged in something far more desperate. The result of genetic experimentation, Ender may be the military genius Earth desperately needs in a war against an alien enemy seeking to destroy all human life. The only way to find out is to throw Ender into ever harsher training, to chip away and find the diamond inside, or destroy him utterly. Ender Wiggin is six years old when it begins. He will grow up fast.
But Ender is not the only result of the experiment. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway almost as long. Ender's two older siblings, Peter and Valentine, are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. While Peter was too uncontrollably violent, Valentine very nearly lacks the capability for violence altogether. Neither was found suitable for the military's purpose. But they are driven by their jealousy of Ender, and by their inbred drive for power. Peter seeks to control the political process, to become a ruler. Valentine's abilities turn more toward the subtle control of the beliefs of commoner and elite alike, through powerfully convincing essays. Hiding their youth and identities behind the anonymity of the computer networks, these two begin working together to shape the destiny of Earth—an Earth that has no future at all if their brother Ender fails.
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.
A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.
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.
An epic tale of freedom and slavery, love and war, and the potential futures of humankind. It tells of a twenty-first century California clan caught between two clashing worlds, one based on tolerance, the other on repression.
The earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water, and earth. Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them.
To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standards by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. No one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy.
All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure balance: only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity.
To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible.
In the middle of the twenty-first century, life as we know it has changed for all time. Shira Shipman's marriage has broken up, and her young son has been taken from her by the corporation that runs her zone, so she has returned to Tikva, the Jewish free town where she grew up.
There, she is welcomed by Malkah, the brilliant grandmother who raised her, and meets an extraordinary man who is not a man at all, but a unique cyborg implanted with intelligence, emotions—and the ability to kill.
From the imagination of Marge Piercy comes yet another stunning novel of morality and courage, a bold adventure of women, men, and the world of tomorrow.
High above the planet Harmony, the Oversoul watches. Its task, programmed so many millennia ago, is to guard the human settlement on this planet—to protect this fragile remnant of Earth from all threats. To protect them, most of all, from themselves. The Oversoul has done its job well. There is no war on Harmony. There are no weapons of mass destruction. There is no technology that could lead to weapons of war.
By control of the data banks, and subtle interference in the very thoughts of the people, the artificial intelligence has fulfilled its mission. But now there is a problem. In orbit, the Oversoul realizes that it has lost access to some of its memory banks, and some of its power systems are failing. And on the planet, men are beginning to think about power, wealth, and conquest.
Published in 1937, twelve years before Orwell's 1984, Swastika Night projects a totally male-controlled fascist world that has eliminated women as we know them. Women 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?”
This Perfect Day is set in a seemingly perfect global society where uniformity is the defining feature. There is only one language, and all ethnic groups have been eugenically merged into one race called "The Family." The world is ruled by a central computer called UniComp, programmed to keep every human in check.
People are continually drugged through regular injections to ensure they remain satisfied and cooperative. They are told where to live, when to eat, whom to marry, and when to reproduce. Even the basic facts of nature are subject to UniComp’s will—men do not grow facial hair, women do not develop breasts, and it only rains at night.
Follow Chip as he embarks on a perilous journey to reclaim his true self and challenge Uni’s rule in this thrilling tale of free will versus control.
Remember, remember the fifth of November...
A frightening and powerful tale of the loss of freedom and identity in a chillingly believable totalitarian world, V for Vendetta stands as one of the highest achievements of the comics medium and a defining work for creators Alan Moore and David Lloyd.
Set in an imagined future England that has given itself over to fascism, this groundbreaking story captures both the suffocating nature of life in an authoritarian police state and the redemptive power of the human spirit which rebels against it. Crafted with sterling clarity and intelligence, V for Vendetta brings an unequaled depth of characterization and verisimilitude to its unflinching account of oppression and resistance.
In the Country of Last Things is a gripping dystopian epistolary novel by Paul Auster. The story unfolds through a letter written by a young woman named Anna Blume to a childhood friend. Anna ventures into an unnamed city that has descended into chaos and disorder.
In this bleak environment, no industry thrives, and most of the population survives by collecting garbage or scavenging for objects to resell. The city governments are unstable, focusing only on collecting human waste and corpses for fuel. Amidst this turmoil, Anna searches for her brother William, a journalist, suggesting that the Blumes hail from an eastern world that has not yet collapsed.
Auster explores themes of the modern city, the mysteries of storytelling, and the elusive and unstable nature of truth. This novel is a tense, psychological take on the dystopian genre, echoing some of our darker societal legacies.
Hailed as a classic of speculative fiction, Marge Piercy’s landmark novel is a transformative vision of two futures—and what it takes to will one or the other into reality.
Harrowing and prescient, Woman on the Edge of Time speaks to a new generation on whom these choices weigh more heavily than ever before. Connie Ramos is a Mexican American woman living on the streets of New York. Once ambitious and proud, she has lost her child, her husband, her dignity—and now they want to take her sanity.
After being unjustly committed to a mental institution, Connie is contacted by an envoy from the year 2137, who shows her a time of sexual and racial equality, environmental purity, and unprecedented self-actualization. But Connie also bears witness to another potential outcome: a society of grotesque exploitation in which the barrier between person and commodity has finally been eroded. One will become our world. And Connie herself may strike the decisive blow.
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.
When he awakens in 2039, he is faced with a future unlike any that the Congress could have ever imagined. Translated by Michael Kandel.
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 valued only if their ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the years 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.
Neuromancer is the seminal work in the cyberpunk genre, offering a vision of the future that has become a cornerstone of science fiction literature. It is the first novel in William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, and it stands as a classic that has influenced countless other works.
Henry Dorsett Case was once the sharpest data-thief in the business, until his employers crippled his nervous system as retribution for his thefts. Now, a mysterious new employer has offered him a chance at redemption and a return to the cyberspace he was banished from. The mission: to pull off a seemingly impossible heist against an artificial intelligence of staggering power. Joined by Molly, a street-samurai with mirror implants for eyes, Case is thrust into a world of danger and intrigue that will test his abilities to the fullest.
William Gibson's Neuromancer is not only a must-read for fans of the genre but also for anyone interested in the relationship between humanity and technology. The novel's impact on the language and landscape of our digital culture cannot be overstated, making it a true masterpiece of modern literature.
The Martian Chronicles tells the story of humanity's repeated attempts to colonize the red planet. The first men were few. Most succumbed to a disease they called the Great Loneliness when they saw their home planet dwindle to the size of a fist. They felt they had never been born. Those few that survived found no welcome on Mars. The shape-changing Martians thought they were native lunatics and duly locked them up.
But more rockets arrived from Earth, and more, piercing the hallucinations projected by the Martians. People brought their old prejudices with them – and their desires and fantasies, tainted dreams. These were soon inhabited by the strange native beings, with their caged flowers and birds of flame.
The White Plague is a marvelous and terrifyingly plausible blend of fiction and visionary themes. It tells the story of one man pushed over the edge of sanity by the senseless murder of his family. Reappearing several months later as the so-called Madman, he unleashes a terrible plague upon the human race—one that zeros in, unerringly and fatally, on women.
From Science fiction grandmaster Frank Herbert, creator of the Dune universe, comes this novel of bioterrorism and gendercide. What if women were an endangered species? It begins in Ireland, but soon spreads throughout the entire world: a virulent new disease expressly designed to target only women.
As fully half of the human race dies off at a frightening pace and life on Earth faces extinction, panicked people and governments struggle to cope with the global crisis. Infected areas are quarantined or burned to the ground. The few surviving women are locked away in hidden reserves, while frantic doctors and scientists race to find a cure. Anarchy and violence consume the planet.
The plague is the work of a solitary individual who calls himself the Madman. As government security forces feverishly hunt for the renegade scientist, he wanders incognito through a world that will never be the same. Society, religion, and morality are all irrevocably transformed by the White Plague.
We is the classic dystopian novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin that has influenced writers from George Orwell to Ayn Rand. 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 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. Clarence Brown's brilliant translation is based on the corrected text of the novel, first published in Russia in 1988 after more than sixty years' suppression.
On the first day of May, 100 teenage boys meet for a race known as The Long Walk. If you break the rules, you get three warnings. If you exceed your limit, what happens is absolutely terrifying.
Substance D is not known as Death for nothing. It is the most toxic drug ever to find its way on to the streets of LA. It destroys the links between the brain's two hemispheres, causing, first, disorientation and then complete and irreversible brain damage.
The undercover narcotics agent who calls himself Bob Arctor is desperate to discover the ultimate source of supply. But to find any kind of lead he has to pose as a user and, inevitably, without realising what is happening, Arctor is soon as addicted as the junkies he works among...
The combined mind-force of a telepathic race, Patternist thoughts can destroy, heal, rule. For the strongest mind commands the entire pattern and all within. Now the son of the Patternmaster craves this ultimate power, He has murdered or enslaved every threat to his ambition--except one. In the wild, mutant-infested hills, a young apprentice must be hunted down and destroyed because he is the tyrant's equal... and the Patternmaster's other son.
Childhood's End is a seminal work by Arthur C. Clarke, an author celebrated for his contributions to the science fiction genre. This prescient novel explores the concept of first contact gone awry and has been regarded not only as a classic of science fiction but as a literary thriller of the highest order.
When vast spaceships suddenly appear over every city on Earth, they bring with them the Overlords, an alien race that is intellectually, technologically, and militarily superior to humans. Their initial demands are seemingly benevolent: unify Earth, eliminate poverty, and end war. As humankind enters a golden age, the Overlords' true agenda remains shrouded in mystery, prompting questions about the true cost of peace.
As the Overlords exert their influence, humanity ceases to strive for creative greatness, and a sense of malaise descends. For those who resist, it becomes clear that the Overlords have their own plans for the human race. As civilization stands at a crossroads, the Overlords' role in human evolution questions whether their arrival marks the end of humankind, or a new beginning.
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. The Dispossessed is a penetrating examination of society and humanity—and one man's brave undertaking to question the unquestionable and ignite the fires of change.
Jason Tavener woke up one morning to find himself completely unknown. The night before he had been the top-rated television star with millions of devoted watchers. The next day he was just an unidentified walking object, whose face nobody recognised, of whom no one had heard, and without the I.D. papers required in that near future.
When he finally found a man who would agree to counterfeiting such cards for him, that man turned out to be a police informer. And then Taverner found out not only what it was like to be a nobody but also to be hunted by the whole apparatus of society.
It was obvious that in some way Taverner had become the pea in some sort of cosmic shell game - but how? And why?
Philip K. Dick takes the reader on a walking tour of solipsism's scariest margin in his latest novel about the age we are already half into.
The Girl Who Was Plugged In by James Tiptree, Jr. (aka Alice Sheldon) is a critically acclaimed work, celebrated for its compelling short fiction. The novella, awarded the Hugo for best novella in 1974, presents a dystopian future dominated by corporate power, where traditional advertising is obsolete and life itself becomes a form of commercial influence through celebrities and product placements.
In this world, Philadelphia ("P.") Burke, a seventeen-year-old girl with profound deformities, is given a second chance at life after a suicide attempt. She is selected to become one of these pivotal celebrities, operating a flawless, brainless body engineered specifically for this role. As she steps into her new persona, a public figure whose sole responsibility is to be seen purchasing products, she becomes entangled in the complexities of fame, identity, and unexpected love.
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is a thought-provoking short story that poses a powerful ethical question. It explores the concept of a seemingly utopian city, Omelas, where the prosperity and happiness of its citizens are contingent upon the perpetual misery of a single child. The narrative delves into the moral implications of this arrangement and the reaction of the citizens when confronted with the reality of the child's suffering.
Ursula K. Le Guin's masterful storytelling invites readers to ponder the sacrifices made for the greater good and the individual's role in confronting injustices. The tale's enduring relevance and its challenge to societal norms make it a compelling read that continues to inspire philosophical debate and reflection.
The Earth no longer rotates. Science rules the dayside of the globe. Magic rules the World of Night, and Jack of Shadows, Shadowjack the Thief, who broke the Compact and duped the Lord of High Dudgeon, walks in silence and in shadows to seek vengeance upon his enemies.
Who are his foes? All who would despise him or love the Lord of Bats: Smage of the Jackass Ears, the Colonel Who Never Died, the Borshin, and Quazer, winner of the Hellgames and abductor of the voluptuous Evene. One by one, Shadowjack would seek them out and have his revenge, building his power as he goes.
And once his vengeance is obtained, he would come to terms with all others who are against him, he would unite the World of High Dudgeon, destroy the Land of Filth, and bring peace to the Shadowguard. But to accomplish all, Jack of Shadows must find Kolwynia, the Key That Was Lost...