Maxima Library

El decenio 1956-1965 marca una época crítica para la ciencia ficción. La reciente respetabilidad del género motivó la atención, muchas veces peligrosa, del cine y la televisión. El inicio de la Era espacial en octubre de 1957 parecía confirmar aquello de que la realidad supera a la ficción.

Pero la crisis condujo a la renovación del género: cuantitativa, por la aparición de una pléyade de nuevos autores; cualitativa, por la revolución de la tématica, que abandona de una vez por todas la fascinación por la cacharrería espacial, sentándose nuevas normas de calidad, como demuestra el presente volumen.

– Recopilación, Prefacio e Introducción de Michael Ashley

Recommended by Paul Cook as one of the most important SF novels.

Recommended by Paul Cook as one of the most important SF novels. Jommy Cross is a slan, a genetically bred superhuman whose race was created to aid humanity but is now despised by "normal" humans. Slans are usually shot on sight, but that doesn't stop Jommy's mother from bringing him to see the world capital of Centropolis, the seat of power for Earth's dictator, Kier Gray. But on their latest trip to Centropolis, the two slans are discovered, and Jommy's mother is killed. Jommy, only 9 years old, unwittingly becomes caught up in a plot to undermine Gray, who may be more sympathetic to slans than the public suspects. The nonstop action and root-for-the-underdog plot has made Slan a science fiction favorite.

Two classic Van Vogt works, The Weapon Makers and The Weapon Shops of Isher form the complete story of Robert Hedrock and the Empire of Isher. They are about revolution through time travel, the right to bear arms, the end of the universe and the beginning of the next, and several other things per chapter.

“Nobody, possibly with the exception of the Bester of The Stars My Destination, ever came close to matching Van Vogt for headlong, breakneck pacing, or for the electric, crackling paranoid tension with which he was capable of suffusing his work”, says Gardner Dozois.

Everything your rulers never wanted you to know and you were afraid to ask…

Ten classic stories from the birth of modern science fiction writing

The Golden Age of Science Fiction, from the early 1940s through the 1950s, saw an explosion of talent in SF writing including authors such as Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke.

Their writing helped science fiction gained wide public attention, and left a lasting impression upon society. The same writers formed the mould for the next three decades of science fiction, and much of their writing remains as fresh today as it was then.

Collected in one giant volume, here is the very best of the golden era. The stories include:

• A.E. van Vogt, ‘The Weapons Shop’

• Isaac Asimov, ‘The Big and the Little’

• Lester del Rey, ‘Nerves’

• Fredric Brown, ‘Daymare’

• Theodore Sturgeon, ‘Killdozer!’

• C.L. Moore, ‘No Woman Born’

• A. Bertram Chandler, ‘Giant Killer’.

One of the great original classics of modern SF returns!

An all-time classic space saga, The Voyage of the Space Beagle is one of the pinnacles of Golden Age SF, an influence on generations of stories. An episodic novel filled with surprises and provocative ideas, this is the story of a great exploration ship sent out into the unknown reaches of space on a long mission of discovery. They encounter several terrifying alien species, including the Ix, who lay their eggs in human bodies, which then devour the humans from within when they hatch. This is one of the most entertaining and gripping stories in all of classic SF.

The first third of this novel, “Black Destroyer,” appeared in the July 1939 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION as Van Vogt’s first science fiction story. It was the basis of the Sigourney Weaver film, Alien.

Alfred Elton van Vogt (1912–2000) was a Canadian-born science fiction author who was one of the most prolific, yet complex, writers of the mid-twentieth century “Golden Age” of the genre. Many fans of that era would have named van Vogt, Robert Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov as the three greatest science fiction writers.

The Voyage of the Space Beagle, as the immense rocket leaps from galaxy to galaxy, vertiginously hurtling ever deeper into space, is one of the most enthralling ‘outward bound’ stories ever written. On some planets they find traces of long vanished alien civilisations. On other worlds the aliens have by no means vanished!And one terrifying race they come upon needs no planet: it exists and lives after its fashion in space itself.But the final aliens that van Vogt brilliantly and disturbingly conjures up are discovered in the rocket — Man himself.

The Voyage of the Space Beagle is an SF classic.

Into the awesome depths of intergalactic space hurtled the Space Beagle, travelling on Man’s most ambitious expedition to the far reaches of the universe. From galaxy to galaxy, the crew explored the remains of past races and civilizations on desolate planets and found weird life forms floating in space itself.

But the explorers not only had to contend with danger from the outside: within their own ship they carried one of the deadliest menaces in all creation…

A. E. van Vogt is one of the foremost masters of adventurous science fiction. The Voyage of the Space Beagle is one of his all-time classic space sagas, an action-packed narrative that carries the reader out among far stars into new dimensions of SF excitement.