Rocannon's World


Ursula K. Le Guin - 1966
    Earth scientist Rocannon is on that world, and he sees his friends murdered and his spaceship destroyed. Marooned among alien peoples, he leads the battle to free this new world - and finds that legends grow around him even as he fights.

The Last Man


Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - 1826
    With intriguing portraits of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, the novel offers a vision of the future that expresses a reaction against Romanticism, and demonstrates the failure of the imagination and of art to redeem the doomed characters.

Downward to the Earth


Robert Silverberg - 1969
    That led many people to underestimate the Nildoror and their obviously more fearsome commensals, the Sulidoror.But aliens should never be judged by human standards, as the Company learned to its cost when Holman's World, now once again known as Belzagor, was given back to the natives and the Company sent packing. Now Edmund Gunderson, once head of the Company's operation on this world, has come back across the galaxy to settle old scores with the Nildoror. If he can even get them to acknowledge his existence. Cover Artist: Gene Szafran

The Vicomte de Bragelonne


Alexandre Dumas - 1847
    This new edition of the classic translation presents a key episode in the Musketeers saga, fully annotated and with an introduction by a leading Dumas scholar.

Logan's Run


William F. Nolan - 1967
    your life is over! Logan-6 has been trained to kill; born and bred from conception to be the best of the best. But his time is short and before his life ends he's got one final mission: Find and destroy Sanctuary, a fabled haven for those that chose to defy the system. But when Logan meets and falls in love with Jessica, he begins to question the very system he swore to protect and soon they're both running for their lives. When Last Day comes, will you lie down and die... or run!

Gloriana


Michael Moorcock - 1978
    Gloriana's reign brings the Empire of Albion into a Golden Age, but her oppressive responsibilities choke her, prohibiting any form of sexual satisfaction, no matter what fetish she tries. Her problem is in fact symbolic of the hypocrisy of her entire court. While her life is meant to mirror that of her nation - an image of purity, virtue, enlightenment and prosperity - the truth is that her peaceful empire is kept secure by her wicked chancellor Monfallcon and his corrupt network of spies and murderers, the most sinister of whom is Captain Quire, who is commissioned to seduce Gloriana and thus bring down Albion and the entire empire.

A Voyage to Arcturus


David Lindsay - 1920
    It is simultaneously an epic quest across one of the most unusual and brilliantly depicted alien worlds ever conceived, a profoundly moving journey of discovery into the metaphysical heart of the universe, and a shockingly intimate excursion into what makes us human and unique.  After a strange interstellar journey, Maskull, a man from Earth, awakens alone in a desert on the planet Tormance, seared by the suns of the binary star Arcturus. As he journeys northward, guided by a drumbeat, he encounters a world and its inhabitants like no other, where gender is a victory won at dear cost; where landscape and emotion are drawn into an accursed dance; where heroes are killed, reborn, and renamed; and where the cosmological lures of Shaping, who may be God, torment Maskull in his astonishing pilgrimage. At the end of his arduous and increasingly mystical quest waits a dark secret and an unforgettable revelation.A Voyage to Arcturus was the first novel by writer David Lindsay (1878–1945), and it remains one of the most revered classics of science fiction. This commemorative edition features an introduction by noted scholar and writer of speculative fiction John Clute and a famous essay by Loren Eiseley.

Make Room! Make Room!


Harry Harrison - 1966
    First published in 1966, Harrison's novel of an overpopulated urban jungle, a divided class system—operating within an atmosphere of riots, food shortages, and senseless acts of violence—and a desperate hunt for the truth by a cynical NYC detective tells a classic tale of a dark future.

News from Nowhere


William Morris - 1890
    The novel describes the encounter between a visitor from the nineteenth century, William Guest, and a decentralized and humane socialist future. Set over a century after a revolutionary upheaval in 1952, these Chapters from a Utopian Romance recount his journey across London and up the Thames to Kelmscott Manor, Morris's own country house in Oxfordshire. Drawing on the work of John Ruskin and Karl Marx, Morris's book is not only an evocative statement of his egalitarian convictions but also a distinctive contribution to the utopian tradition. Morris's rejection of state socialism and his ambition to transform the relationship between humankind and the natural world, give News from Nowhere a particular resonance for modern readers. This text is based on the 1891 version, incorporating the extensive revisions made by Morris to the first edition.

Inherit the Stars


James P. Hogan - 1977
    They called him Charlie. He had big eyes, abundant body hair and fairly long nostrils. His skeletal body was found clad in a bright red spacesuit, hidden in a rocky grave. They didn't know who he was, how he got there, or what had killed him. All they knew was that his corpse was 50,000 years old; and that meant that this man had somehow lived long before he ever could have existed!

Schismatrix Plus


Bruce Sterling - 1996
    For the first time in one volume: every word Bruce Sterling has ever written on the Shapers-Mechanists Universe.In the last decade, Sterling has emerged a pioneer of crucial, cutting-edge science fiction. Now Ace Books is proud to offer Sterling's stunning world of the Schismatrix--where Shaper revolutionaries struggle against aristocratic Mechanists for ultimate control of man's destiny. This volume includes the classic full-length novel, Schismatrix, plus thousands of words of mind-bending short fiction.

Flinx of the Commonwealth


Alan Dean Foster - 1983
    But beneath the freckles and red hair--not to mention dirt--are a pair of wide green eyes that awaken previously unknown feelings. And before she knows it, she finds herself buying the strange small boy named Flinx.Just another mouth to feed, say Mother Mastiff's second thoughts, but she stops resenting her inexplicable purchase when she witnesses Flinx's psychic influence on the customers of her rattletrap gift-shop. She even lets him keep Pip, the brightly hued--and deadly--Alaspinian mini-drag Flinx finds...and with whom he bonds as if they were of one mind. For as time goes by, Mother Mastiff comes to love the boy as her own, nurturing him, teaching him everything she knows--and hoping he'll survive into adulthood.That may prove more dicey than she'd care to admit. By the age of sixteen, Flinx is as lithe, quick and quiet as any jungle cat--traits that make him a superb thief and con-artist. But far more deadly than his affinity for the Commonwealth underworld is his unknown history, a past destined to rear its head in terrifying ways, sending him on a wild journey in search of his true self.In For Love of Mother-Not, the renegade group of scientists responsible for Flinx's psychic gifts scheme to get him back--by holding hostage the only person he ever truly care for: Mother Mastiff. In The Tar-Aiym Krang, Flinx must find an ancient otherworldly device that could hold the key to his true nature--or become the deadliest weapon in the Commonwealth. And in Orphan Star, Flinx comes closer than ever to learning about his biological parents--and a family tie to power that can either strengthen or destroy them.

J.R.R. Tolkien 4-Book Boxed Set: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings


J.R.R. Tolkien - 1955
    Tolkien's epic masterworks The Hobbit and the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King).In The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins is whisked away from his comfortable, unambitious life in Hobbiton by the wizard Gandalf and a company of dwarves. He finds himself caught up in a plot to raid the treasure hoard of Smaug the Magnificent, a large and very dangerous dragon.The Lord of the Rings tells of the great quest undertaken by Frodo Baggins and the Fellowship of the Ring: Gandalf the wizard; the hobbits Merry, Pippin, and Sam; Gimli the dwarf; Legolas the elf; Boromir of Gondor; and a tall, mysterious stranger called Strider. J.R.R. Tolkien's three volume masterpiece is at once a classic myth and a modern fairy tale—a story of high and heroic adventure set in the unforgettable landscape of Middle-earth

Software


Rudy Rucker - 1982
    But now Cobb is just an aging alcoholic waiting to die, and the big boppers are threatening to absorb all of the little boppers--and eventually every human--into a giant, melded consciousness. Some of the little boppers aren't too keen on the idea, and a full-scale robot revolt is underway on the moon (where the boppers live). Meanwhile, bopper Ralph Numbers wants to give Cobb immortality by letting a big bopper slice up his brain and tape his "software." It seems like a good idea to Cobb.

McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales


Michael ChabonNick Hornby - 2003
    Includes:Jim Shepard’s "Tedford and the Megalodon"Glen David Gold’s "The Tears of Squonk, and What Happened Thereafter"Dan Chaon’s "The Bees"Kelly Link’s "Catskin"Elmore Leonard’s "How Carlos Webster Changed His Name to Carl and Became a Famous Oklahoma Lawman"Carol Emshwiller’s "The General"Neil Gaiman’s "Closing Time"Nick Hornby’s "Otherwise Pandemonium"Stephen King’s "The Tale of Gray Dick"Michael Crichton’s "Blood Doesn’t Come Out"Laurie King’s "Weaving the Dark"Chris Offutt’s "Chuck’s Bucket"Dave Eggers’s "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly"Michael Moorcock’s "The Case of the Nazi Canary"Aimee Bender’s "The Case of the Salt and Pepper Shakers"Harlan Ellison’s "Goodbye to All That"Karen Joy Fowler’s "Private Grave 9"Rick Moody’s "The Albertine Notes"Michael Chabon’s "The Martian Agent, a Planetary Romance"Sherman Alexie’s "Ghost Dance"