Series: S.F. Masterworks

Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes is a profoundly moving and thought-provoking novel that tells the story of Charlie Gordon, a kind-hearted and intellectually disabled man working as a floor sweeper in a bakery. Often the target of cruel jokes by his co-workers, Charlie dreams of being smart and accepted like others. His life takes a dramatic turn when he...

The Principle of Simultaneity is a scientific breakthrough that will revolutionise interstellar civilisation by making possible instantaneous communication. It is the life work of Shevek, a brilliant physicist from the arid anarchist world of Anarres. However, Shevek's work is being stifled by jealous colleagues, so he travels to Anarres's sister-planet Urras, hoping to find more liberty and tolerance there. But...

The book that defined the cyberpunk movement, inspiring everything from The Matrix to Cyberpunk 2077. The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel. William Gibson revolutionised science fiction in his 1984 debut Neuromancer. The writer who gave us the matrix and coined the term 'cyberspace' produced a first novel that won the Hugo,...

Welcome to the Best of the Masterworks: a selection of the finest in science fiction Arthur Dent thought his day was going badly when someone tried to demolish his house. Then someone demolished his planet. Rescued by his friend Ford—who is not a human from Guilford, but an alien from somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse—Arthur is flung into an...

'A rich and complex story of friendship and love' GUARDIAN 'Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.' Two people, until recently strangers, find themselves on a long, tortuous and dangerous journey across the ice. One is an outcast, forced to leave his beloved homeland; the other...

World War Terminus had left the Earth devastated. Through its ruins, bounty hunter Rick Deckard stalked, in search of the renegade replicants who were his prey. When he wasn't 'retiring' them with his laser weapon, he dreamed of owning a live animal - the ultimate status symbol in a world all but bereft of animal life. Then Rick got his...

An extraordinary epic, set a million years in the future, in the time of a dying sun, when our present culture is no longer even a memory. Severian, a torturer's apprentice, is exiled from his guild after falling in love with one of his prisoners. Ordered to the distant city of Thrax, armed with his ancient executioner's sword, Terminus Est,...

One of the very best must-read novels of all time - with a new introduction by Roddy Doyle 'A well told tale signifying a good deal; one to be read again and again' THE TIMES 'The book I wish I had written ... It's so far away from my own imagination, I'd love to sit at my desk one day...

The world ended. People survived. Per Hiero Desteen was a priest, a telepath—and a highly trained killer. Five thousand years after the apocalyptic event known only as The Death, Hiero is tasked with finding the secrets of the old world, which could protect his civilisation from massing enemies. The planet is not the same as it used to be. Mutations...

'A rich and complex story of friendship and love' GUARDIAN 'Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.' Two people, until recently strangers, find themselves on a long, tortuous and dangerous journey across the ice. One is an outcast, forced to leave his beloved homeland; the other...

In A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge, the far future cosmos is divided into 'zones of thought', an enigmatic partitioning of space where the intelligence and capabilities of minds are directly contingent upon their spatial location. From the sublime super-intelligent entities residing in the Transcend, to the rudimentary intellects tethered in the Unthinking Depths, this universe offers a...

The Strugatsky brothers' poignant and introspective novel of first contact that inspired the classic film Stalker. 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...

An extraordinary epic, set a million years in the future, in the time of a dying sun, when our present culture is no longer even a memory. The torturer's apprentice, Severian, exiled from his guild after falling in love with one of his prisoners, is now the Lictor of Thrax, a city far distant from his home. But it is...

A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge is an extraordinary work of science fiction that explores the grandeur and complexity of interstellar exploration and commerce. Set in the distant future, this gripping prequel to the critically acclaimed A Fire Upon the Deep captures readers with an epic tale spanning hundreds of years and the farthest reaches of Human Space....

World War Terminus devastated the Earth. Through its ruins, bounty hunter Rick Deckard searches for the renegade replicants he is sent to 'retire', while he dreams of owning a live animal - the ultimate status symbol in a world all but bereft of natural life. The opportunity of a lifetime: kill six Nexus-6 targets, for a huge reward. But in...

Grand Master Ursula K. Le Guin has been recognised for almost fifty years as one of the most important writers in the SF field and is likewise celebrated beyond the confines of the genre. The Wind's Twelve Quarters was her first collection, and it brings together some of her finest short fiction, including the Hugo Award-winning 'The Ones Who Walk...

The multi-award-winning SF masterpiece from one of the greatest SF writers of all time Rendezvous With Rama is a vast alien spacecraft that enters the Solar System. A perfect cylinder some fifty kilometres long, spinning rapidly, racing through space, Rama is a technological marvel, a mysterious and deeply enigmatic alien artefact. It is Mankind's first visitor from the stars and...

Welcome to the Best of the Masterworks: a selection of the finest in science fiction When Winston Niles Rumfoord flies his spaceship into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum, he is converted into pure energy and only materialises when his waveforms intercept Earth or some other planet. As a result, he only gets home to Newport, Rhode Island, once every fifty-nine days and...

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. 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 the overcrowded world and cramped space colonies of the late 21st century, tedium can be endured through the use of the drug Can-D, which enables the user to inhabit a shared illusory world. When industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from an interstellar trip, he brings with him a new drug, Chew-Z, which is far more potent than Can-D. This new...

Ursula Le Guin was able to reimagine many concepts we take to be natural, shared, and unalterable - gender, utopia, creation, war, family, the city, the country - and reveal the all-too-human constructions at their centre ... Literature will miss her. There's no one like her - Zadie Smith Le Guin is a writer of phenomenal power - Observer Through...

One Thursday lunchtime, Earth is unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. For Arthur Dent, who has only just had his house demolished that morning, this is already more than he can cope with. Sadly, however, the weekend has only just begun. And the Galaxy is a very, very large and startling place indeed... The Hitchhiker's Guide...

Amber is the one real world, casting infinite reflections of itself - Shadow worlds, that can be manipulated by those of royal Amberite blood. But the royal family is torn apart by jealousies and suspicion; the disappearance of the Patriarch Oberon has intensified the internal conflict by leaving the throne apparently up for grabs. In a hospital on the Shadow...

For Kivrin Engle, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman travelling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be...

Charlie Gordon, IQ 68, is a floor sweeper and the gentle butt of everyone’s jokes — until an experiment in the enhancement of human intelligence turns him into a genius. But then Algernon, the mouse whose triumphal experimental transformation preceded his, fades and dies, and Charlie has to face the possibility that his salvation was only temporary. Winner of the...

Nine hundred thousand years ago, something wiped out the Amarantin. For the human colonists now settling the Amarantin homeworld Resurgam, it's of little more than academic interest, even after the discovery of a long-hidden, almost perfect Amarantin city and a colossal statue of a winged Amarantin. For brilliant but ruthless scientist Dan Sylveste, it's more than merely intellectual curiosity —...

Glen Runciter is dead. Or is he? Someone died in the explosion orchestrated by his business rivals, but even as his funeral is scheduled, his mourning employees are receiving bewildering messages from their boss. And the world around them is warping and regressing in ways which suggest that their own time is running out. If it hasn't already. Ubik is...

In this profound ecological fable, a mysterious plague has destroyed the vast majority of the human race. Isherwood Williams, one of the few survivors, returns from a wilderness field trip to discover that civilisation has vanished during his absence. Eventually, he returns to San Francisco and encounters a female survivor who becomes his wife. Around them and their children, a...

Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth... but he is not alone. Every other man, woman, and child on the planet has become a vampire, and they are hungry for Neville's blood. By day he is the hunter, stalking the undead through the ruins of civilisation. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for the...

Ned Henry is a time-travelling historian who specialises in the mid-20th century, currently engaged in researching the bombed-out Coventry Cathedral. He's also made so many drops into the past that he's suffering from a dangerously advanced case of 'time-lag'. Unfortunately for Ned, an emergency dash to Victorian England is required and he's the only available historian. But Ned's time-lag is...

A Victorian scientist develops a time machine and travels to the year 802,171 AD. There he finds the meek, child-like Eloi who live in fear of the underground-dwelling Morlocks. When his time machine goes missing, the Traveller faces a fight to enter the Morlocks' domain and return to his own time. The Time Machine remains one of the cornerstones of...

Gully Foyle, Mechanic's Mate 3rd Class. EDUCATION: None. SKILLS: None. MERITS: None. RECOMMENDATIONS: None. That's the official verdict on Gully Foyle, an unskilled space crewman. But right now he is the only survivor on his drifting, wrecked spaceship. When another space vessel, the Vorga, ignores his distress flares and sails by, Gully becomes obsessed with revenge. He endures 170 days...

Merlin is a Prince of Chaos and Amber, Corwin's son and heir. He has grown up knowing that his legacy is to one day follow in his father's footsteps and live up to his father's legend. When Corwin goes missing, that day comes far sooner than he could ever have expected. Merlin must find his own identity as the ruler...

When the inhabitants of a peaceful world are conquered by the bloodthirsty yumens, their existence is irrevocably altered. Forced into servitude, the Athsheans find themselves at the mercy of their brutal masters. Desperation causes the Athsheans, led by Selver, to retaliate against their captors, abandoning their strictures against violence. But in defending their lives, they have endangered the very foundations...

Francis Conway is Swill - one of the 90% in the year 2041 who must subsist on the inadequate charities of the state. A young boy growing up in a challenging world, life is already difficult and rapidly becoming impossible for Francis and others like him, as government corruption, official blindness, and nature have conspired to turn Swill homes into...

In the 22nd century, visionary scientist Vannevar Morgan conceives the most grandiose engineering project of all time, one which will revolutionise the future of humankind in space: a Space Elevator. This colossal structure, 36,000 kilometres high, is anchored to an equatorial island in the Indian Ocean. The Fountains of Paradise by Sir Arthur C. Clarke explores this ambitious vision and...

The Gate to Women's Country tells of a society that exists three hundred years after our own has nearly destroyed itself. Now, male warriors are separated from women at an early age and live in garrisons, plotting futilely for the battles which must never be fought again. Inside the women's towns, education, arts, and science flourish. But for some like...

Welcome to the Best of the Masterworks: a selection of the finest in science fiction When Edward Prendick is shipwrecked on a tropical island, he is surprised to find he has company in the form of Dr Moreau. Driven out of Britain in disgrace, Dr Moreau has decided to explore his science in peace and isolation. It isn't long before...

Private William Mandella is a reluctant hero in an interstellar war against an unknowable and unconquerable alien enemy. But his greatest test will be when he returns home. Relativity means that for every few months' tour of duty centuries have passed on Earth, isolating the combatants ever more from the world for whose future they are fighting. The Earth he...

Ned Henry is a time-travelling historian who specialises in the mid-20th century, currently engaged in researching the bombed-out Coventry Cathedral. He's also made so many drops into the past that he's suffering from a dangerously advanced case of 'time-lag'. Unfortunately for Ned, an emergency dash to Victorian England is required, and he's the only available historian. But Ned's time-lag is...

The year is 2110. Humankind is entering a new golden age. But when an amateur astronomer points his telescope at just the right corner of the night sky, he sees disaster hurtling toward Earth: a chunk of rock that could annihilate civilisation. While a few fanatics welcome the apocalyptic destruction as a sign from God, the greatest scientific minds of...

Time is running out for the passengers and crew of the tourist cruiser Selene, incarcerated in a sea of choking lunar dust. On the surface, her rescuers find their resources stretched to the limit by the mercilessly unpredictable conditions of a totally alien environment. A brilliantly imagined story of human ingenuity and survival, A Fall of Moondust is a tour-de-force...

Private William Mandella is a reluctant hero in an interstellar war against an unknowable and unconquerable alien enemy. But his greatest test will be when he returns home. Relativity means that for every few months' tour of duty, centuries have passed on Earth, isolating the combatants ever more from the world for whose future they are fighting. The Forever War...

In the year 2100, the invention of the Electron Pump - an apparently inexhaustible supply of free energy - has enabled humanity to devote its time and energies to more than the struggle for survival, finally breaking free of the Earth. But the Electron Pump works by exchanging materials with a parallel universe, and such unbalancing of the cosmos has...

Thomas Jerome Newton is an extraterrestrial from the planet Anthea, which has been devastated by a series of nuclear wars, and whose inhabitants are twice as intelligent as human beings. When he lands on Earth - in Kentucky, disguised as a human - it's with the intention of saving his own people from extinction. Newton patents some very advanced Anthean...

Rendezvous With Rama tells the story of Rama, a vast alien spacecraft that enters the Solar System. A perfect cylinder some fifty kilometres long, spinning rapidly and racing through space, Rama is a technological marvel—an enigmatic alien artefact that captivates the imagination. It is Mankind's first visitor from the stars and must be investigated...

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 that 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...

Imagine a distant world where gods walk as men, but wield vast and hidden powers. Here they have made the stage on which they build a subtle pattern of alliance, love, and deadly enmity. Are they truly immortal? Who are these gods who rule the destiny of a teeming world? Their names include Brahma, Kali, Krishna, and also he who...

Seven years after the day of the bombs, Point Reyes was luckier than most places. Its people were reasonably normal—except for the girl with her twin brother growing inside her, and talking to her. Their barter economy was working. Their resident genius could fix almost anything that broke down. But they didn't know they were harbouring the one man who...

Nine hundred thousand years ago, something wiped out the Amarantin. For the humans now settling the Amarantin homeworld, it's of little more than academic interest, even after the discovery of a long-hidden, almost perfect city and a colossal statue of a winged Amarantin. For brilliant, ruthless scientist Dan Sylveste, it's more than merely intellectual curiosity - and he will stop...

George Orr is a mild and unremarkable man who finds the world a less than pleasant place to live: seven billion people jostle for living space and food. But George dreams dreams which do in fact change reality—and he has no means of controlling this extraordinary power. Psychiatrist Dr William Haber offers to help. At first sceptical of George's powers,...

The Road can go Anywhere. The Road can go Anywhen. Almost. Red Dorakeen has been on the Road for a very long time. For all of time, in fact. It stretches infinitely into the future and past, with exits that take him wherever, or whenever, he wants to go. But he can't find the place he wants to be. He's...

Men had built cities before, but never such a city as Diaspar; for millennia its protective dome shut out the creeping decay and danger of the world outside. Once, it held powers that ruled the stars. But then, as legend had it, the Invaders came, driving humanity into this last refuge. It takes one man, a Unique, to break through...

Time Out Of Joint tells the story of Ragle Gumm, an ordinary man leading an ordinary life. He makes his living by entering a newspaper contest every day — and winning, every day. However, Ragle gradually begins to suspect that his life — indeed his whole world — is an illusion, constructed around him for the express purpose of keeping...

Hard To Be A God follows the story of Anton, an undercover operative from future Earth, who journeys to an alien world where the culture remains entrenched in the Middle Ages. Despite possessing knowledge far more advanced than the society that surrounds him, Anton is bound by strict orders to refrain from interfering with the natural progression of history. His...

Welcome to the Best of the Masterworks: a selection of the finest in science fiction Mill Valley, Marin County, California. Dr Miles Bennell has lived there all his life. But one day Miles sees a patient who claims her Uncle isn't himself. He's a different person, despite being identical in every way except one: he is only pretending to have...

Wealth ... or death. Those were the choices Gateway offered. Humans had discovered this artificial spaceport, full of working interstellar ships left behind by the mysterious, vanished Heechee. Their destinations are preprogrammed. They are easy to operate, but impossible to control. Some came back with discoveries which made their intrepid pilots rich; others returned with their remains barely identifiable. It...

A few years from now, the President of the USA will be an android and his entire government a fraud. Everyone in the country is maladjusted. Doesn't seem possible, does it? Welcome to the world of Dr. Superb, the sole remaining psychotherapist. Philip K. Dick tells a story of desperate love, lethal body odour, and an attempted fascistic takeover of...

When young programmer Alexander Ivanovich Privalov picks up two hitchhikers while driving in Karelia, he is drawn into the mysterious world of the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy, where research into magic is serious business. And where science, sorcery, and socialism meet, can chaos be far behind? Monday Starts on Saturday is a captivating exploration of...

A world of peaceful aliens conquered by bloodthirsty yumens, their existence is irrevocably altered. Forced into servitude, the Athsheans find themselves at the mercy of their brutal masters. Desperation causes the Athsheans to retaliate against their captors, abandoning their strictures against violence. In defending their lives, they endanger the very foundations of their society. Every blow against the invaders is...

Two 19th century stage illusionists, the aristocratic Rupert Angier and the working-class Alfred Borden, engage in a bitter and deadly feud; the effects are still being felt by their respective families a hundred years later. Working in the gaslight-and-velvet world of Victorian music halls, they prowl edgily in the background of each other's shadowy life, driven to the extremes by...

Joanna. Jeannine. Janet. Jael. Four women, four worlds, four vastly different societies. When these women are suddenly able to communicate with each other through the boundaries of dimensions, they are confronted with what could have been if one thing changed in history. And they find themselves looking at their own worlds with new eyes. Acclaimed as one of the essential...

Ubik by Philip K Dick delves into a perplexing narrative where Glen Runciter might be dead—or perhaps not. An explosion, orchestrated by his business rivals, claims a life. Yet, as Glen's funeral is planned, his grieving employees start receiving baffling messages from him. The situation becomes even more unsettling as the world surrounding them begins to warp and regress, implying...

The book that reinvented Space Opera - from the Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning author of The Terror, which is now a chilling TV show. It is the 29th century and the universe of the Human Hegemony is under threat. Invasion by the warlike Ousters looms, and the mysterious schemes of the secessionist AI TechnoCore bring chaos ever closer. On...

In the year 2301, guns are only museum pieces and benign telepaths sweep the minds of the populace to detect crimes before they happen. In 2301 murder is virtually impossible, but one man is about to change that... Ben Reich, a psychopathic business magnate, has devised the ultimate scheme to eliminate the competition and destroy the order of his society....

Change or die. These are the only options available on the planet Jeep. Centuries earlier, a deadly virus shattered the original colony, killing the men and forever altering the few surviving women. Now, generations after the colony has lost touch with the rest of humanity, a company arrives to exploit Jeep—and its forces find themselves fighting for their lives. Terrified...

World War III is raging—or so the millions of people crammed in their underground tanks believe. For fifteen years, subterranean humanity has been fed daily broadcasts of a never-ending nuclear destruction, sustained by a belief in the all-powerful Protector. Now, someone has gone to the surface and found no destruction, no war. The authorities have been telling a massive lie....

One minute, down-and-out actor Lorenzo Smythe was—as usual—in a bar, drinking away his troubles as he watched his career go down the tubes. Then a space pilot bought him a drink, and the next thing Smythe knew, he was shanghaied to Mars. Suddenly he found himself agreeing to the most difficult role of his career: impersonating an important politician who...

The Duke of Atreides has been manoeuvred by his arch-enemy, Baron Harkonnen, into administering the desert planet of Dune. Although it is almost completely without water, Dune is a planet of fabulous wealth, for it is the only source of a drug prized throughout the Galactic Empire. The Duke and his son, Paul, are expecting treachery and it duly comes...

Rod McBan 151st farms stroon, the immortality drug, and is the last scion of one of the oldest and most honourable families on Norstrilia, the only source of stroon. But he's also a telepathic cripple and faces the ever-present risk of being culled under the government's draconian population laws. To protect himself, he uses his not-strictly-legal computer to play the...

COMING TO BBC ONE IN AUTUMN 2019! No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's... So begins H. G. Wells' classic novel in which Martian lifeforms take over planet Earth. As the Martians emerge, they construct giant killing machines - armed...

Colonists from the entire solar system converge on the mother planet for the 2276 celebrations. Among the influx of humanity is Duncan Makenzie, a scientist-administrator from the underground colony of Titan, one of the outer moons of Saturn. Makenzie is not just on Earth for the celebrations; he has a delicate mission to perform — for his world, his family,...

What could be more innocuous than grass? Or more idyllic than a world covered with a wind-whipped ocean of verdant plains? But the planet Grass conceals horrifying secrets within its endless pastures. As an incurable plague attacks all inhabited planets except this one, the prairie-like Grass begins to reveal these secrets - and nothing will ever be the same again......

1981. A different Britain. When Norman Forrester of the Defence Ministry's Experimental Institute effects a successful fertilisation of a female gorilla with human sperm, an infant is born. Gordon, known as Gor, is his son in two senses. But Gor's parentage must remain a secret. He has no legal existence as an individual because his existence has never been divulged...

If your planet has been destroyed to make way for a new hyperspace bypass, your best friend turns out to be from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse (and not Guilford, as you'd thought), and you find yourself in the company of a two-headed man who also happens to be the president of the galaxy, and a...

A long, long time from now, in the valleys of what will no longer be called Northern California, might be going to have lived a people called the Kesh. But Always Coming Home is not the story of the Kesh. Rather it is the stories of the Kesh - stories, poems, songs, recipes. Always Coming Home is no less than...

What The Lord of the Rings is to fantasy, Dune is to science fiction. Presenting one of the most influential works of all time, which has inspired countless other stories for more than half a century, this is an awe-inspiring world, and a story of truly epic scope. 'An astonishing science fiction phenomenon' - Washington Post 'I know nothing comparable...

'The historians can't seem to settle whether to call this one 'The Third Space War' (or the fourth), or whether 'The First Interstellar War' fits it better. We just call it 'The Bug War'. Everything up to then and still later were 'incidents', 'patrols' or 'police actions'. However, you are just as dead if you buy the farm in an...

Originally published in 1955, Jack Finney's sinister SF tale has outgrown the initial debate about whether it satirised Communism or the conformity of US society at the time, to become a classic of paranoia; an examination of our fear of 'the other'. Most people know the story from seeing The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the classic 1978 remake (one...

A whisperjewel from Gwen Delvano calls Dirk t'Larien across the expanse of space to Worlorn, a dying festival planet of rock and ice. Worlorn is slowly drifting through twilight into a neverending night, and as the planet sinks into darkness, its inhabitants face annihilation. Seven years earlier, on Avalon, Gwen was Dirk's lover, his Guenevere; now she wears the jade-and-silver...