Maxima Library

Robert Gu es un famoso poeta afectado de Alzheimer durante años y al que la medicina del futuro cercano logra recuperar y rejuvenecer. Así, debe enfrentarse a un mundo parecido pero insidiosamente distinto del que recordaba.

An anthology of stories

Extreme sports. Extreme future. Extreme collection.

Science fiction's most expert dreamers envision the computerized, high-risk games of the future in this winning collection. Features Robert Sheckley, Cory Doctorow, Kate Wilhelm, Alastair Reynolds, Vernor Vinge, Jonathan Letham, Gwyneth Jones, William Browning Spencer, Allen Steele, Terry Dowling, and Jason Stoddard.

In a near future where everyone lives in a wireless-direct-mind-link, networked, sensory-enhanced world, two eighth-graders struggle to pass an exam for which using outside information sources is forbidden.

Aux yeux des habitants de Giri, les explorateurs venus d’outre-espace n’étaient que des plaisantins.Et sur cette planète qui semblait si primitive, ils n’étaient rien d’autres.

En fait, les péripéties de l’évolution avaient doté les autochtones d’un talent bien particulier, un talent qui rendait inutiles la plupart des inventions associées, sur d’autres planètes, au développement de la vie intelligente. Comme les explorateurs d’outre-espace, le lecteur va de surprise en surprise jusqu’à la chute finale.

Un roman passionnant qui mêle avec intelligence aventure et réflexion, dû à un auteur de talent injustement méconnu en France.

Come il pianeta Tschai della celebre quadrilogia di Jack Vance, anche Giri non scherza: creato fin nei minimi dettagli dalla fantasia di Vernor Vinge, è un mondo pittoresco e avventuroso popolato da una miriade di razze e tribù bellicose, alle quali non è per niente facile inculcare il concetto di Pax Galattica. Ma questo sarebbe niente se almeno su Giri ci fosse una remota possibilità di sopravvivenza…

Invece: sostanze velenose e piante poco raccomandabili, complotti di corte e intrighi tribali, violenze e pericoli, guerre e sacrifici. I due terrestri sbarcati su questo mondo pazzesco per una spedizione scientifica, e costretti a restarvi loro malgrado, si accorgeranno che c’è poco da stare allegri soprattutto quando, per tentare l’unica via di fuga, dovranno partecipare a un piano sanguinoso e assecondare la volontà di un principe folle.

RAINBOWS END

To the Internet-based cognitive tools that are changing our lives — Wikipedia, Google, eBay, and the others of their kind, now and in the future

As a mud-spattered youngster, Tatja quickly realized she was different from the Stone Age primitives with whom she grew up. Her insatiable curiosity and thirst for knowledge could not be quenched among them; she had to explore and learn more about the strange world on which she lived. She finds the bastion of all culture, arts, entertainment, and history for the entire planet, the seven-hundred-year-old science fiction magazine Fantasie, which is produced entirely aboard a gargantuan floating vessel the size of a small city. But despite the printing presses, sail-powered vessels, and mind-expanding technology, Tatja is still displeased. Rising through the ranks, she finds that the people on the enormous barge are just as unintelligent as the primitives that raised her. But others have come to the planet who not only challenge her intelligence, but offer her a tantalizing opportunity to uncover answers to mysteries that have long plagued her. But with opportunity comes risk. And if she acts unwisely, she could bring doom to the only world she knows. Part I appeared in a slightly different form as The Barbarian Princess, copyright © 1986 by Vernor Vinge, in Analog, September 1986. Part II appeared in a different form as Grimm’s Story, copyright © 1968 by Vernor Vinge, in Damon Knight’s anthology Orbit 4, published by Putnam and Berkley, 1968. Parts II and III appeared in a different form as Grimm's World, copyright © 1969 by Vernor Vinge, published by Berkley Books, 1969.

This collection, structured around a reprint of Vernor Vinge's enormously influential novella "True Names," includes several essays as well as other short fiction inspired by Vinge's revolutionary tale.

Comment by the transcriber:

This is as complete and accurate an etext of the 1984 edition of True Names as I can make. I agree with Project Gutenberg, regarding the superiority of hard formatted plain ASCII over other formats. Except that this work requires some italics, so I've used a bastard mix of plain text and HTML. If you want to read it as plain text, the HTML codes for italics are not too annoying; yet in HTML it will still preserve the original work's line formatting (minus right justification). Also included is the Afterword by Marvin Minsky, and .GIFs of all illustrations from the book. These are linked in at the correct places in the etext. One zip file contains the whole lot, for portability.

Enjoy! The Rectifier, Feb 1998