The Gold at the Starbow's End


Frederik Pohl - 1972
    Contents:The Gold at the Starbow's End (1972)Sad Solarian Screenwriter Sam (1972)Call Me Million (1970)Shaffery among the Immortals (1972)The Merchants of Venus (1972)

Ice


Anna Kavan - 1967
    The country has been invaded and is being governed by a secret organization. There is destruction everywhere; great walls of ice overrun the world. Together with the narrator, the reader is swept into a hallucinatory quest for this strange and fragile creature with albino hair. Acclaimed upon its 1967 publication as the best science fiction book of the year, this extraordinary and innovative novel has subsequently been recognized as a major work of literature in its own right.

Last Summer at Mars Hill


Elizabeth Hand - 1998
    There are 12 pieces in all here, ranging from those first published in places like Interzone and Pulphouse to a two-page poem taken from the pages of Asimov's. Although many readers may be familiar with Hand's longer works, such as Glimmering or Waking the Moon, here she shows that she's a master of short fiction as well. Her stylish prose and keen insights make for some wonderful stories. --Craig E. EnglerContents:Last Summer at Mars Hill (1994)The Erl-King (1993)Justice (1993)Dionysus Dendrites (1993) poemThe Have-Nots (1992)In the Month of Athyr (1992)Engels Unaware (1992)The Bacchae (1991)Snow on Sugar Mountain (1991)On the Town Route (1989)The Boy in the Tree (1989)Prince of Flowers (1988)

The Strange Bird: A Borne Story


Jeff VanderMeer - 2017
    But now the lab in which she was created is under siege and the scientists have turned on their animal creations. Flying through tunnels, dodging bullets, and changing her colors and patterning to avoid capture, the Strange Bird manages to escape.But she cannot just soar in peace above the earth. The sky itself is full of wildlife that rejects her as one of their own, and also full of technology—satellites and drones and other detritus of the human civilization below that has all but destroyed itself. And the farther she flies, the deeper she finds herself in the orbit of the Company, a collapsed biotech firm that has populated the world with experiments both failed and successful that have outlived the corporation itself: a pack of networked foxes, a giant predatory bear. But of the many creatures she encounters with whom she bears some kind of kinship, it is the humans—all of them now simply scrambling to survive—who are the most insidious, who still see her as simply something to possess, to capture, to trade, to exploit. Never to understand, never to welcome home.With The Strange Bird, Jeff VanderMeer has done more than add another layer, a new chapter, to his celebrated novel Borne. He has created a whole new perspective on the world inhabited by Rachel and Wick, the Magician, Mord, and Borne—a view from above, of course, but also a view from deep inside the mind of a new kind of creature who will fight and suffer and live for the tenuous future of this world.

The Test


Sylvain Neuvel - 2019
    Twenty-five chances to impress.When the test takes an unexpected and tragic turn, Idir is handed the power of life and death.How do you value a life when all you have is multiple choice?

Bloodchild


Octavia E. Butler - 1984
    Butler’s shattering meditation on symbiosis, love, power and tough choices. It won the Hugo, Locus, Nebula and Science Fiction Chronicle awards and is widely regarded as one of her greatest works.Years ago, a group known as the Terrans left Earth in search of a life free of persecution. Now they live alongside the Tlic, an alien race who face extinction; their only chance of survival is to plant their larvae inside the bodies of the humans.When Gan, a young boy, is chosen as a carrier of Tlic eggs, he faces an impossible dilemma: can he really help the species he has grown up with, even if it means sacrificing his own life?Perfect for fans of the thrilling Arrival and the works of Ursula Le Guin.

After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall


Nancy Kress - 2012
    After ecological disasters nearly destroyed the Earth, 26 survivors—the last of humanity—are trapped by an alien race in a sterile enclosure known as the Shell. Fifteen-year-old Pete is one of the Six—children who were born deformed or sterile and raised in the Shell. As, one by one, the survivors grow sick and die, Pete and the Six struggle to put aside their anger at the alien Tesslies in order to find the means to rebuild the earth together. Their only hope lies within brief time-portals into the recent past, where they bring back children to replenish their disappearing gene pool. Meanwhile, in 2013, brilliant mathematician Julie Kahn works with the FBI to solve a series of inexplicable kidnappings. Suddenly her predictive algorithms begin to reveal more than just criminal activity. As she begins to realize her role in the impending catastrophe, simultaneously affecting the Earth and the Shell, Julie closes in on the truth. She and Pete are converging in time upon the future of humanity—a future which might never unfold. Weaving three consecutive time lines to unravel both the mystery of the Earth's destruction and the key to its salvation, this taut post-apocalyptic thriller offers a topical plot with a satisfying twist.

Jam


Yahtzee Croshaw - 2012
    We had a flood plan in place. We could even have dealt with zombies. Probably.But no one expected the end to be quite so . . . sticky . . . or strawberry scented.

Song of Kali


Dan Simmons - 1985
    At its decaying core is the Goddess Kali: the dark mother of pain, four-armed and eternal, her song the sound of death and destruction. Robert Luczak has been hired by Harper's to find a noted Indian poet who has reappeared, under strange circumstances, years after he was thought dead. But nothing is simple in Calcutta and Lucsak's routine assignment turns into a nightmare when he learns that the poet is rumoured to have been brought back to life in a bloody and grisly ceremony of human sacrifice.

At the Mountains of Madness


H.P. Lovecraft - 1931
    Lovecraft established the genuineness and dignity of his own pioneering fiction in 1931 with his quintessential work of supernatural horror, At the Mountains of Madness. The deliberately told and increasingly chilling recollection of an Antarctic expedition's uncanny discoveries --and their encounter with an untold menace in the ruins of a lost civilization--is a milestone of macabre literature.This Definitive Edition of At the Mountains of Madness (The Modern Library) also includes Lovecraft's long essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature."

The Etched City


K.J. Bishop - 2003
    Gwynn is a gunslinger from the north, a loner, a survivor . . . a killer. Raule is a wandering surgeon, a healer who still believes in just--and lost--causes. Bound by a desire to escape the ghosts of the past, together they flee to the teeming city of Ashamoil, where Raule plies her trade among the desperate and destitute, and Gwynn becomes bodyguard and assassin for the household of a corrupt magnate. There, in the saving and taking of lives, they find themselves immersed in a world where art infects life, dream and waking fuse, and splendid and frightening miracles begin to bloom . . .

Nifft the Lean


Michael Shea - 1982
    Places where horror, harm and long eerie calms flow past the traveller in endless, unpredictable succession. Travel the man whose long, rawboned, sticky fingers and stark length of arm will lead you down to the vermiculous grottos of the demon sea, to stand beneath the subworld's lurid sky and battle monsters who seem the spiritual distillation of human evil itself!We invite to the very gates of Hell and beyond —COME IF YOU DARE!

Extreme Makeover


Dan Wells - 2016
    As more and more anomalies crop up in testing, Lyle realizes that the lotion's formula has somehow gone horribly wrong. It is actively overwriting the DNA of anyone who uses it, turning them into physical clones of someone else. Lyle wants to destroy the formula, but NewYew thinks it might be the greatest beauty product ever designed--and the world's governments think it's the greatest weapon.New York Times bestselling author Dan Wells brings us a gripping corporate satire about a health and beauty company that could destroy the world.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch


Philip K. Dick - 1965
    When industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from an interstellar trip, he brings with him a new drug, Chew-Z. It is far more potent than Can-D, but threatens to plunge the world into a permanent state of drugged illusion controlled by the mysterious Eldritch.Cover illustration: Chris Moore

The Drought


J.G. Ballard - 1964
    Violence erupts and insanity reigns as the human race struggles for survival in a worldwide desert of despair.