It is the 22nd 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.
Gateway: an artificial spaceport, full of working interstellar ships left behind by the mysterious, vanished Heechee. They are easy to operate, but impossible to control. Some come back with discoveries which make their intrepid pilots rich; others return with their remains barely identifiable. It is the ultimate game of Russian roulette, but in this resource-starved future there is no shortage of desperate volunteers.
On Luna – an open penal colony of the twenty-first century – a revolution is being plotted. The conspirators are a strange assortment: an engaging jack-of-all-trades, his luscious blonde girlfriend, and a lonely talking computer. Their aim – the overthrow of the hated Authority. But things don’t go according to plan, and their independence may ultimately prove harder to maintain than it was to seize…
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 twenty years earlier the United States lost a war—and is now occupied 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...
For the exiles from a blistering Earth, Mars is a lonely place, made bearable only by drugs, specifically Can-D, which translates those who take in into a shared hallucination of a Barbie-esque world. But the new drug Chew-Z promises more than thateternal life itself. But it a world where everyone is tripping, no promises can be taken at face value. When those promises come from Palmer Eldritch, who may be human, alien, or god,...
It began with a blinding light, a divine revelation from a mysterious intelligence that called itself VALIS. And with that, the fabric of reality was ripped open and laid bare so that anything seemed possible, but nothing seemed quite right. Part science fiction, part theological detective story in which God plays both the missing person and the perpetrator of the ultimate crime, VALIS is both disorienting and eerily funny, and a joy to read.
A classic of feminist predictive fiction finally returns to the light. 700 years after Hitler personally won the war, one man discovers the truth about his god. This remarkably prescient novel of the future under Nazism was published in 1937. Swastika Night takes place seven hundred years after Nazism achieved power, by which time Adolf Hitler is worshipped as a god. Elsewhere, the Japanese rule the Americas, Australia, and Asia. Though Japan is the only...
For the crew of the Leonora Christine, travelling close to the speed of light on a 30-light-year journey, subjective time slows down. Then buffeting by an interstellar dust cloud damages the ship’s deceleration system and it achieves light speed, tau zero itself.
Dangerous Visions was a science fiction short story anthology edited by Harlan Ellison, published in 1967. A path-breaking collection, Dangerous Visions helped define the New Wave science fiction movement, particularly in its depiction of sex in science fiction.
Curiosity was discouraged in the Greene tribe. Its members lived out their lives in cramped Quarters, hacking away at the encroaching ponics. As to where they were—that was forgotten. Roy Complain decides to find out. With the renegade priest Marapper, he moves into unmapped territory, where they make a series of discoveries which turn their universe upside-down… Non-Stop is the classic SF novel of discovery and exploration; a brilliant evocation of a familiar setting seen...
