The first is a sharp analysis: through dialogues, parodies and essays, Burgess sheds new light on what he called 'an apocalyptic codex of our worst fears', creating a critique that is literature in its own right. Part two is Burgess' own dystopic vision, written in 1978. He skewers both the present and the future, describing a state where industrial disputes and social unrest compete with overwhelming surveillance, security concerns and the dominance of technology to make life a thing to be suffered rather than lived. Together these two works form a unique guide to one of the twentieth century's most talented, imaginative and prescient writers. Several decades later, Burgess' most singular work still stands.

    In the festering sewers below a darker game is afoot: a Wall Street takeover artist has been murdered, and Gant’s crusading ex-wife, Joan Fine, has been hired to find out why. The year is 2023, and Ayn Rand has been resurrected and bottled in a hurricane lamp to serve as Joan's assistant; an eco-terrorist named Philo Dufrense travels in a pink-and-green submarine designed by Howard Hughes; a Volkswagen Beetle is possessed by the spirit of Abbey Hoffman; Meisterbrau, a mutant great white shark, is running loose in the sewers beneath Times Square; and a one-armed 181-year-old Civil War veteran joins Joan and Ayn in their quest for the truth. All of whom, and many more besides, are caught up in a vast conspiracy involving Walt Disney, J. Edgar Hoover, and a mob of homicidal robots.

    Brave New Worlds brings together the best dystopian fiction of the last 30 years, demonstrating the diversity that flourishes in this compelling subgenre. This landmark tome contains stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, Cory Doctorow, M. Rickert, Paolo Bacigalupi, Orson Scott Card, Neil Gaiman, Ray Bradbury, and many others.Table of ContentsIntroduction / John Joseph Adams --Lottery / Shirley Jackson --Red card / S.L. Gilbow --Ten with a flag / Joseph Paul Haines --Ones who walk away from Omelas / Ursula K. Le. Guin --Evidence of love in a case of abandonment / M. Rickert --The Funeral / Kate Wilhelm --O happy day! / Geoff Ryman --Pervert / Charles Coleman Finlay --From homogeneous to honey / Neil Gaiman & Bryan Talbot --Billennium / J.G. Ballard --Amaryllis / Carrie Vaughn --Pop squad / Paolo Bacigalupi --Auspicious eggs / James Morrow --Peter Skilling / Alex Irvine --The Pedestrian / Ray Bradbury --Things that make me weak and strange get engineered away / Cory Doctorow --Pearl diver / Caitlin R. Kiernan --Dead space for the unexpected / Geoff Ryman --"Repent harlequin!", said the Ticktockman / Harlan Ellison --Is this your day to join the revolution? / Genevieve Valentine --Independence day / Sarah Langan --Lunatics / Kim Stanley Robinson --Sacrament / Matt Williamson --Minority report / Philip K. Dick --Just do it / Heather Lindsley --Harrison Bergeron / Kurt Vonnegut Jr. --Caught in the organ draft / Robert Silverberg --Geriatric ward / Orson Scott Card --Arties aren't stupid / Jeremiah Tolbert --Jordan's waterhammer / Joe Mastroianni --Of a sweet slow dance in the wake of temporary dogs / Adam-Troy Castro --Resistance / Tobias S. Buckell --Civilization / Vylar Kaftan.

    Maybe it will kill you when the per diem for your allotted food, water, and air runs out, just before you hit paydirt. Maybe it will kill you when you are trapped between the reigning corporations-the Five Dragons-in a foolish gamble against a futuristic feudal society. On the Moon, you must fight for every inch you want to gain. And that is just what Adriana Corta did. As the leader of the Moon's newest "dragon," Adriana has wrested control of the Moon's Helium-3 industry from the Mackenzie Metal corporation and fought to earn her family's new status. Now, in the twilight of her life, Adriana finds her corporation-Corta Helio-confronted by the many enemies she made during her meteoric rise. If the Corta family is to survive, Adriana's five children must defend their mother's empire from her many enemies... and each other.

    . . 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?

    Cities are forbidden by law, as is scientific research. Rumors abound of a secret place known as "Bartorstown", where science is untrammelled by interference or hatred. A youth named Len Colter, developing an unhealthy thirst for knowledge exacerbated by the discovery of a forbidden radio, sets out on a long road. During this journey, he will change his mind many times before determining the correct direction for himself, and the benighted America in which he lives.

    Newton is an extraterrestrial who goes to Earth on a desperate mission of mercy. But instead of aid, Newton discovers loneliness and despair that ultimately ends in tragedy.

    Earth has been dominated for 1,000 years by an alien invader—and man is an endangered species. From the handful of surviving humans a courageous leader emerges—Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, who challenges the invincible might of the alien Psychlo empire in a battle of epic scale, danger and intrigue with the fate of the Earth and of the universe in the tenuous balance.

    Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass (Mozart’s second requiem) is about to be sung to lay him to rest. In the choir is our hero, Hubert Anvil, an extremely ordinary ten-year-old boy with a faultless voice. In the audience is a select group of experts whose job is to determine whether that faultless voice should be preserved by performing a certain operation. Art, after all, is worth any sacrifice.How Hubert realizes what lies in store for him and how he deals with the whirlpool of piety, menace, terror, and passion that he soon finds himself in are the subject of a classic piece of counterfactual fiction equal to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.The Alteration won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science-fiction novel in 1976.

    Not even politicians lie, and weirdly frank notices abound—such as warning: this elevator maintained by people who hate their jobs: ride at your own risk. In this dystopia of mandatory candor, every preadolescent citizen is ruthlessly conditioned, through a Skinnerian ordeal called a “brainburn,” to speak truthfully under all circumstances.Jack Sperry wouldn’t dream of questioning the norms of Veritas; he’s happy with his life and his respectable job as a “deconstructionist,” destroying “mendacious” works of art—relics from a less honest era. But when his adored son, Toby, falls gravely ill, the truth becomes Jack’s greatest enemy. Somehow our hero must overcome his brainburn and attempt to heal his child with beautiful lies.

    Trapped in 1877, a historian writes an account of an alternative history of America in which the South won the Civil War. Living in this alternative timeline, he was determined to change events at Gettysburg.When he's offered the chance to return to that fateful turning point his actions change history as he knows it, leaving him in an all too familiar past.

    Set in the United States, it pictures a society in which human problems are solved by a scientific technology of human conduct.

    The work of English clergyman, educator and Shakespearean scholar Edwin A. Abbott (1838-1926), it describes the journeys of A. Square [sic – ed.], a mathematician and resident of the two-dimensional Flatland, where women-thin, straight lines-are the lowliest of shapes, and where men may have any number of sides, depending on their social status.Through strange occurrences that bring him into contact with a host of geometric forms, Square has adventures in Spaceland (three dimensions), Lineland (one dimension) and Pointland (no dimensions) and ultimately entertains thoughts of visiting a land of four dimensions—a revolutionary idea for which he is returned to his two-dimensional world. Charmingly illustrated by the author, Flatland is not only fascinating reading, it is still a first-rate fictional introduction to the concept of the multiple dimensions of space. "Instructive, entertaining, and stimulating to the imagination." — Mathematics Teacher.

    Their charter was for a Class III uninhabited planet, which Zarathustra was, and it meant they owned the planet lock stock and barrel. They exploited it, developed it and reaped the huge profits from it without interference from the Colonial Government. Then Jack Holloway, a sunstone prospector, appeared on the scene with his family of Fuzzies and the passionate conviction that they were not cute animals but little people.

    E. van Vogt was one of the giants of the 1940s, the Golden Age of classic SF. Of his masterpieces, The World of Null-A is his most famous and most influential. Published in 1949 it was the first major trade SF hardcover, and has been in print in various editions ever since. The entire careers of Philip K. Dick, Keith Laumer, Alfred Bester, Charles Harness, and Philip Jose Farmer were created or influenced by The World of Null-A, and so it is required reading for anyone who wishes to know the canon of SF classics.It is the year 2650 and Earth has become a world of non-Aristotelianism, or Null-A. This is the story of Gilbert Gosseyn, who lives in that future world where the Games Machine, made up of twenty-five thousand electronic brains, sets the course of people's lives. Gosseyn isn't even sure of his own identity, but realizes he has some remarkable abilities and sets out to use them to discover who has made him a pawn in an interstellar plot.