Ondine was a resort planet. Sixteen million tourists travelled there from just about every world you could think of to live and love in sixteen million different ways. Then came the machists... They had gobbled up world after world, spreading their culture to thousands of different races with a brutal, vicious, but most effective system. They were inhuman, unthinking...uncaring. The Combine had already seen what they had done on other worlds, seen whole populations converted into something horrible...something not quite human, non-thinking and no longer caring. Now they had captured Ondine, and no human could save the planet. And then Daniel came to Judgment. Daniel was a cyborg, a former fighter pilot now wedded to a master computer and life-support system housed in a flying golden egg. He was the Combine scientists' finest creation, a spaceship that could control twenty-two robot slaves. He was the perfect saviour for Ondine, but for one thing. Everyone seemed to forget that deep inside that golden egg was a very human being...

    Strange fireballs race through the sky above the deepest trenches of the oceans. Something is about to show itself, something terrible and alien, a force capable of causing global catastrophe.

    It had been traveling thru space for almost twenty years & still nine years of flight remained before Centaurus would be reached. For many on board the craft earth had become a vague memory, while for others it was a mere dot in the vast starry reaches of space. Restlessness was evident everywhere. The people wanted to return to a place they knew was inhabited--not continue to an unknown where life was questionable. Mutiny seemed inevitable. Captain Lesbee knew that mutiny bred mutiny, but what was more vital was his knowledge of earth's possible obliteration. The one hope was Centaurus. Now more than ever, there could be no turning back. Order had to be maintained even at the price of human life. This is only the beginning of a fascinating dramatic interspace voyage, where the greatest hazards are not the forces of an unknown scientific world, but humans themselves.

    Paperback has 7 of 11 stories from the first hardcover edition: “Target Generation”, “Mirage”, “Beachhead”, “TheAnswers”, “Retrograde Evolution”, “The Fence” & “Shadow Show”.

    Here is a novel to equal Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End. It tells with frightening clarity of a desperately stricken earth-wracked by overpopulation and plagued by famine and despair. It tells, too, of a new breed of men and women--21st century lotus eaters caught up in a mysterious euphoria which will ultimately threaten all life on this planet; the drug-induced world of "happy dreams." Do these "happy dreamers" herald the end of the human species--or the next extraordinary step in the evolution of humanity?

    For aeons this golden-skinned, golden-eyed race had provided the universe mercenary soldiers of almost unimaginable ability. But now the mri have faced an enemy unlike any other - an enemy whose only way of war is widespread destruction. These "humans" are mass fighters, creatures of the herd, and the mri have been slaughtered like animals.Now, in the aftermath of war, the mri face extinction. It will be up to three individuals to save whatever remains of this devastated race: a warrior - one of the last survivors of his kind; a priestess of this honorable people; and a lone human - a man sworn to aid the enemy of his own kind. Can they retrace the galaxy-wide path of this nomadic race back through millennia to reclaim the ancient world which first gave them life?

    This was the one thing she was sure of. Because Earth was not a dead planet, not by a long way. There were all manner of strange plants and bizarre animals, and there were the blue boys who insisted they were human--but she always set fire to them. There was however Indigo, the all-devouring protoplasmic ocean that was literally gobbling up everything in the world. And there was the enigmatic Emeroo to whom she owed her continued existence. There were also the so-called Martians--humans who had fled to Mars and only came back to Earth to scout for survivors and vent their futile furies on the the inhospitable homeworld.

    A Shaper. In a warm womb of metal, his patients dream their neuroses, while Render, intricately connected to their brains, dreams with them, makes delicate adjustments, and ultimately explains and heals. Her name is Eileen Shallot, a resident in psychiatry. She wants desperately to become a Shaper, though she has been blind from birth. Together, they will explore the depths of the human mind -- and the terrors that lurk therein

    Delany's 1976 SF novel, originally published as Triton, takes us on a tour of a utopian society at war with . . . our own Earth! High wit in this future comedy of manners allows Delany to question gender roles and sexual expectations at a level that, 20 years after it was written, still make it a coruscating portrait of the happily reasonable man, Bron Helstrom -- an immigrant to the embattled world of Triton, whose troubles become more and more complex, till there is nothing left for him to do but become a woman. Against a background of high adventure, this minuet of a novel dances from the farthest limits of the solar system to Earth's own Outer Mongolia. Alternately funny and moving, it is a wide-ranging tale in which character after character turns out not to be what he -- or she -- seems.

    Sartorials compete fiercely in creating new apparel, and Peder has heard that the greatest of them all are in the Caeanic worlds, where clothing is a way of life and a philosophy of living. In Peder's sector, though, Caeanic clothing is prohibited, and he has fallen in with a band of pirates attempting to salvage a Caeanic freighter. In splitting the loot--clothes--Peder cleverly spots a legendary suit, one of five in the entire galaxy, and walks off with it. And no sooner does he put it on than his personality changes; he becomes self-assured, clever, successful--it almost seems as though the suit of clothes is wearing him! A whimsical tale of a suit of clothes that really makes the man.

    Contents:p 11 • The Horn of Time the Hunter • [Kith] • (1963) • short story (aka Homo Aquaticus)p 27 • A Man to My Wounding • (1959) • short story (aka State of Assassination)p 44 • The High Ones • (1958) • novelettep 68 • The Man Who Came Early • (1956) • novelettep 91 • Marius • [Psychotechnic League] • (1957) • short storyp 104 • Progress • [Maurai] • (1962) • novelette

    Now their long battle is nearing its climax—and the final battleground is an uncontrolled experimental power plant that threatens the Earth itself! * Night of Delusions: A detective is hired by men claiming to be government agents and given an assignment that may lead to his being hailed as the savior of the nation—or executed for treason. His mysterious clients also give him devices to use in the assignment, devices which seem to be far beyond anything of which human technology is capable. And as he doggedly pursues the case, he finds that the very fabric of reality seems to be changing around him, even to the point that he himself seems never to have existed! * Plus three short novels of equally stunning concepts and breathtaking action.

    His mission: save, develop, and protect the group of Pak breeders sent out into space some two and a half million years before...Brennan was a Belter, the product of a fiercely independent, somewhat anarchic society living in, on, and around an outer asteroid belt. The Belters were rebels, one and all, and Brennan was a smuggler. The Belt worlds had been tracking the Pak ship for days -- Brennan figured to meet that ship first...He was never seen again -- at least not by those alive at the time.

    Johnny Mnemonic (1981)The Gernsback Continuum (1981)Fragments of a Hologram Rose (1977)The Belonging Kind (1981) with John ShirleyHinterlands (1981)Red Star, Winter Orbit (1983) with Bruce SterlingNew Rose Hotel (1984)The Winter Market (1985)Dogfight (1985) with Michael SwanwickBurning Chrome (1982)

    Named after the migrant workers of America's Dust Bowl, these novels convey Blish's "history of the future," a brilliant and bleak look at a world where cities roam the Galaxy looking for work and a sustainable way of life.In the first novel, They Shall Have Stars, man has thoroughly explored the Solar System, yet the dream of going even further seems to have died in all but one man. His battle to realize his dream results in two momentous discoveries anti-gravity and the secret of immortality. In A Life for the Stars, it is centuries later and anti-gravity generations have enabled whole cities to lift off the surface of the earth to become galactic wanderers. In Earthman, Come Home, the nomadic cities revert to barbarism and marauding rogue cities begin to pose a threat to all civilized worlds. In the final novel, The Triumph of Time, history repeats itself as the cities once again journey back in to space making a terrifying discovery which could destroy the entire Universe. A serious and haunting vision of our world and its limits, Cities in Flight marks the return to print of one of science fiction's most inimitable writers.A Selection of the Science Fiction Book Club