Maxima Library

A forgotten SF classic that exposed the pitfalls of voyeuristic entertainment decades before the reality show craze

A few years in the future, medical science has advanced to the point where it is practically unheard of for people to die of any cause except old age. The few exceptions provide the fodder for a new kind of television show for avid audiences who lap up the experience of watching someone else’s dying weeks. So when Katherine Mortenhoe is told that she has about four weeks to live, she knows it’s not just her life she’s about to lose, but her privacy as well.

When tombstone engraver George Paxman is offered a bargain, he doesn’t hesitate. His beloved daughter gets an otherwise unaffordable survival suit to protect her from radioactive fall-out and all George has to do is sign a document admitting that, as a passive citizen who did nothing to stop it, he has a degree of guilt for any nuclear war that breaks out. George signs on the dotted line. And then the unthinkable happens.

The world and everyone in it (survival suit or not) is destroyed in a nuclear Armageddon – except for George and five others who must now face prosecution from the great mass of humanity who will now never be born. And George Paxman stands accused in the name of all the people who stood by and never raised a finger to stop the horror of nuclear war…

Begins where Dr Strangelove ends… a gorgeously crafted and insanely funny tale about mortal and ghostly matters… deals seriously and intelligently with large issues in strangely captivating modes.

Tinker was a Good Citizen of the hive, he had no choice. The time had come to give up his neuter status and become polarized. The Big Earth Society wanted Tinker to mate. But no one had prepared T inker for sexual activation, nor for a woman like Mu Ren. From that moment on, Tinker was no longer a Good Citizen of the hive. Suddenly Tinker knew he wanted more. He wanted out. Tinker had become a man.

Rorqual Maru was a cyborg—part organic whale, part mechanized ship.and part god. She was a harvester—a vast plankton rake, now without a crop—abandoned by Earth Society when the seas died. So she selected an island for her grave hoping to keep her carcass visible for possible salvage. Although her long ear heard nothing, she believed that Man still lived in his Hive. If he should ever return to the sea she wanted to serve. She longed for the thrill of Man's bare feet touching the skin of her deck. She missed the hearty hails, the sweat and the laughter. She needed Man!

One of the most extraordinary, imaginative and ambitious novels of the century: a history of the evolution of humankind over the next 2 billion years. Among all science fiction writers Olaf Stapledon stands alone for the sheer scope and ambition of his work. First published in 1930, Last and First Men is full of pioneering speculations about evolution, terraforming, genetic engineering and many other subjects.

Amazon.com Review

Suspense builds in this novel about scientists, physics, time travel, and saving the Earth. It’s 1998, and a physicist in Cambridge, England, attempts to send a message backward in time. Earth is falling apart, and a government faction supports the project in hopes of diverting or avoiding the environmental disasters beginning to tear at the edges of civilization. It’s 1962, and a physicist in California struggles with his new life on the West Coast, office politics, and the irregularities of data that plague his experiments. The story’s perspective toggles between time lines, physicists, and their communities. Timescape presents the subculture and world of scientists in microcosm: the lab, the loves, the grappling for grants, the pressures from university and government, the rewards and trials of relationships with spouses, the pressures of the scientific race, and the thrill of discovery.

Timescape merits the tag “hard science fiction”; it tells the story of scientists, and readers can't help but learn something about tachyons and physics while reading it. Yet much of the story is about humanity: the men John Renfrew and Gordon Bernstein and their relationships—between husband and wife, lover and lover, English working class and upper class, professor and student, and academician and colleagues.

Winner of the Nebula Award in 1980 and the John W. Clark Award in 1981, Timescape offers readers a great yarn, in terms of both humanity and science.

Detecting strange patterns of interference in a lab experiment, Gordon Bernstein, an assistant researcher at a California university, investigates and begins to uncover something that will change his life forever. Reprint. Nebula Award winner.

Father Ruiz-Sanchez is a dedicated man—a priest who is also a scientist, and a scientist who is also a human being. He has found no insoluble conflicts in his beliefs or his ethics… until he is sent to Lithia. There he comes upon a race of aliens who are admirable in every way except for their total reliance on cold reason; they are incapable of faith or belief.

Confronted with a profound scientific riddle and ethical quandary, Father Ruiz-Sanchez soon finds himself torn between the teachings of his faith, the teachings of his science, and the inner promptings of his humanity. There is only one solution: He must accept an ancient and unforgivable heresy—and risk the futures of both worlds…

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Curiosity was discouraged in the Greene tribe. Its members lived out their lives in cramped Quarters, hacking away at the encroaching ponics. As to where they were—that was forgotten. Roy Complain decides to find out. With the renegade priest Marapper, he moves into unmapped territory, where they make a series of discoveries which turn their universe upside-down… Non-Stop is the classic SF novel of discovery and exploration; a brilliant evocation of a familiar setting seen through the eyes of a primitive.

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1588: Queen Elizabeth is felled by an assassin’s bullet. Within the week, the Spanish Armada had set sail, and its victory changed the course of history.

1968: England is still dominated by the Church of Rome. There are no telephones, no television, no nuclear power. As Catholicism and the Inquisition tighten their grip, rebellion is growing.

The award winning tale of the inevitable takeover of our society by a benign, intelligent scientific experiment gone awry. In the tradition of the greatest cyberpunk novels,

Blood Music

explores the imminent destruction of mankind and the fear of mass destruction by technological advancements.

Blood Music

follows present-day events in which the fears concerning nuclear annihilation of the world subsided after the Cold War and the fear of chemical warfare spilled over into the empty void of nuclear fear. An amazing breakthrough in genetic engineering made by Vergil Ulam is considered too dangerous for further research, but rather than destroy his work, he injects himself with his creation and walks out of his lab, unaware of just quite how his actions will change the world.

Author Greg Bear’s treatment of the traditional tale of scientific hubris is both suspenseful and a compelling portrait of a new intelligence emerging amongst us, irrevocably changing our world.

Blood Music

won the Nebula and Hugo Awards in its original shorter form.

Trapped in 1877, a historian writes an account of an alternate history of America in which the South won the Civil War. Living in this alternate 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.

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Never before published in its entirety in the United States,

The Complete Roderick

is John Sladek’s masterpiece.

Roderick is a robot who learns. He begins life looking like a toy tank, thinking like a child, and knowing nothing about human ways. But as he will discover, growing up and becoming fully human is no easy task in a world where many people seem to have little trouble giving up their humanity.

The Complete Roderick

is widely considered to be the most ambitious and genius work of a novelist described by

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

as “the most formally inventive, the funniest, and very nearly the most melancholy of modern US science fiction writers.”

Amazon Review

John Sladek was one of SF’s premier satirists, and

The Complete Roderick

is his masterpiece—a dark comedy of artificial intelligence, previously split into

Roderick

(1980) and

Roderick at Random

(1983).

Roderick is an experimental robot, a well-meaning innocent who grows up and learns what it is to be human in the comic inferno of modern America. Being human isn’t much fun: bullied at school, diagnosed as mentally unstable for saying he’s a robot, forever in trouble for applying logic to religion…

Being a robot is tough: a sinister government agency is determined to destroy all AI “Entities”. Luckily their agents are hilariously inept—one assassin lying in wait for Roderick gets mugged for his laser-aimed sniper rifle.

Like Voltaire’s Candide, Roderick moves wide-eyed through a world of insane commercialism: (Danton’s Doggie Dinette, the posh canine restaurant), fly-by-night religions (the Church of Christ Symmetrical), non-art (identical purple squares, meaningless when painted by Roderick, are praised as cutting-edge art), junk science (research into psychic pigeons is faked but generates a bestseller anyway) and—everywhere—people whose fads and tics and rigid prejudices make them more programmed, less truly human, than Roderick himself.

This book is painfully funny, sprinkled with wild ideas and nifty one-liners: a surreal musical called

Hello Dali

; marketing a dull book on fishing as

You Can Master Bait

; the lady founder of Machine Lib, dubbed the Joan of Arc-welding; buying your jeans at Denim Iniquity… Beneath the dazzle, there’s some seriously comic discussion of artificial intelligence and why it fascinates us.

Applause to Gollancz SF Masterworks for producing the first one-volume edition of this major SF satire.

—

David Langford

What could be more commonplace than grass, or a world covered over all its surface with a wind-whipped ocean of grass? But the planet Grass conceals horrifying secrets within its endless pastures. And as an incurable plague attacks all inhabited planets but this one, the prairie-like Grass begins to reveal these secrets—and nothing will ever be the same again…

In a semi-tropical London, surrounded by paddy-fields, the people feed off the sun, like plants, the young are raised in Child Gardens and educated by viruses, and the Consensus oversees the country, “treating” non-conformism. Information, culture, law and politics are biological functions. But Milena is different: she is resistant to viruses and an incredible musician, one of the most extraordinary women of her age. This is her story and that of her friends, like Lucy the immortal tumour and Joseph the Postman whose mind is an information storehouse for others, and Rolfa, genetically engineered as a Polar Bear, whose beautiful singing voice first awakens Milena to the power of music.

‘Richly peopled, highly literate, and brilliantly drawn… [Lucius Shepard is] one of the finest science fiction writers of all time’.

Science Fiction Chronicle.

Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those strange misfits who are compelled by some unknown force to venture illegally into the Zone and, in spite of the extreme danger, collect the mysterious artefacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the Zone and the thriving black market in the alien products. Even the nature of his daughter has been determined by the Zone. And it is for her that Red makes his last, tragic foray into the hazardous and hostile depths.

Walter M. Miller Jr. is best remembered as the author of

A Canticle for Leibowitz

, universally recognized as one of the greatest novels of modern SF. But as well as writing that deeply felt and eloquent book, he produced many shorter works of fiction of stunning originality and power. His profound interest in religion and his innate literary gifts combined perfectly in the production of such works as ‘The Darfsteller’, for which he won a Hugo in 1955, ‘Conditionally Human’, ‘I, Dreamer’ and ‘The Big Hunger’, all of which are included in this brilliant and essential collection.

The future is a grim place in which the declining human population wanders, drugged and lulled by electronic bliss. It’s a world without art, reading and children, a world where people would rather burn themselves alive than endure. Even Spofforth, the most perfect machine ever created, cannot bear it and seeks only that which he cannot have—to cease to be. But there is hope for the future in the passion and joy that a man and woman discover in love and in books, hope even for Spofforth. A haunting novel, reverberating with anguish but also celebrating love and the magic of a dream.

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Helliconia is a planet that, due to the massively eccentric orbit of its own sun around another star, experiences seasons that lasts eons. Whole civilisations grow in the Spring, flourish in the Summer and then die in the brutal winters. The human-like inhabitants have been profoundly changed by their experience of this harsh cycle.

Helliconia is a planet that, due to the massively eccentric orbit of its own sun around another star, experiences seasons that lasts eons. Whole civilisations grow in the Spring, flourish in the Summer and then die in the brutal winters. The human-like inhabitants have been profoundly changed by their experience of this harsh cycle. In orbit above the planet a terran mission struggles to observe and understand the effects on society of such a massive climatic impact. Massive, thoroughly researched, minutely organised, full of action, pulp references and deep drama this is a classic trilogy.

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Review

Four women living in parallel worlds, each with a different gender landscape. When they begin to travel to each other’s worlds each woman’s preconceptions on gender and what it means to be a woman are challenged.

Acclaimed as one of the essential works of science fiction and an influence on William Gibson, THE FEMALE MAN takes a look at gender roles in society and remains a work of great power.

Nebula and Hugo Award winner Joanna Russ is the author of The Adventures of Alyx, Extra(Ordinary) People, and To Write Like a Woman, among many other books.

‘Her finest novel.’

‘An explosion of witty and savage writing.’

‘A writer of energetic clarity. The power of her writing is always complexly vivid… Ms Russ is a major writer.’

Arslan is a young Asian general who conquers the world in a week without firing a shot and shortly thereafter sets up his headquarters in a small town in Illinois. And if this did occur, this is how it would happen.

A masterpiece of political science fiction and a book to challenge such works as Ursula K. LeGuin’s

The Dispossessed

,

Arslan

is a book that others are now measured against. “It's about fathers and sons, about power, about a genuinely ruthless (but not unfeeling) mind in pursuit of a practical solution to the world's problems.” So M. J. Engh describes

Arslan.

This is a novel of power and depth that is unforgettable.

A Classic of Political Science Fiction

“Engh creates a truly shocking situation, introduces a monstrous character, and then refuses to satisfy any of the emotions he has aroused…. Engh’s performance is as perversely flawless as Arslan’s.”

—

The New York Times

“

Arslan

starts with a strong science fiction premise—and then raises it to the level of the greatest tragedies. You will find surprises almost from the start, as Engh shatters the tired cliches of the genre. And by the end of the book, exhausted and fulfilled, you will realize you have read something that stands head and shoulders above the other fiction of its time.”

—Orson Scott Card

“This is wonderful and terrifying SF—terrifying because its premise, the takeover of the United States by a third-rate world power, is at once so preposterous and yet, in the hands of this highly-skilled writer, so stupefyingly believable. Certainly

Arslan

is the best political novel I’ve read in more than a decade.”

—Samuel R. Delany

Ecological disaster has left the English countryside a wasteland. Humanity faces extinction, unless Greybeard and his wife Martha are successful in their quest for the scarcest and most precious of resources: human children.

Review

“Greybeard is one of those hidden gems, a rare find that makes you kick yourself for not discovering it sooner, a masterful piece of literary science fiction and a poignant tale of human mortality.”

(5/5 stars) SFBOOK

“…brilliant and highly recommended.”

SFFWORLD.COM

“A truly impressive achievement.”

Observer

“Mr Aldiss’ novel is suffused with grief at the loss of children… he uses the genre novel to explore themes of importance to him.”

P. D. James

First published in 1973, Frank Herbert’s vivid imagination and brilliant view of nature and ecology have never been more evident than in this classic of science fiction.

America is a police state, and it is about to be threatened by the most hellish enemy in the world: insects.

When the Agency discovered that Dr Hellstrom’s Project 40 was a cover for a secret laboratory, a special team of agents was immediately dispatched to discover its true purpose and its weaknesses—it could not be allowed to continue. What they discovered was a nightmare more horrific and hideous than even their paranoid government minds could devise.

The Styths, a powerful and aggressive mutant race from the Gas Planets, Uranus and Saturn, have been launching pirate raids on ships from Mars. Earth’s Committee for the Revolution has been asked to mediate, to negotiate a truce between the Middle Planets and the Styth Empire. The task of conducting the talks falls to an intelligent, resourceful and unpredictable young woman, Paula Mendoza. Her initial meetings with the Styth warlord and his unruly band of bodyguards and advisers are not promising. But then Paula adopts a less conventional approach. The consequences for her are considerable and she finds herself on the Gas Planets, the only tenuous link between Earth and the Styth Empire…

“On a par with Ursula LeGuin or Arthur C. Clarke.”

—

Chicago Tribune

“A magnificent novel… a colossal achievement… an instant contemporary classic.”

—

Science Fiction Review

“A SF masterpiece.”

—Kim Stanley Robinson

John Wainwright is a freak, a human mutation with an extraordinary intelligence which is both awesome and frightening to behold. Ordinary humans are mere playthings to him. And Odd John has a plan to create a new order on Earth, a new supernormal species. But the world is not ready for such a change…