Series: S.F. Masterworks

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...

'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...

When Dan Davis is crossed in love and stabbed in the back by his business associates, the immediate future doesn't look too bright for him and Pete, his independent-minded tomcat. Suddenly, the lure of suspended animation, the Long Sleep, becomes irresistible and Dan wakes up 30 years later in the 21st century, a time very much to his liking. The...

This is the story of the world after it ended . . . Five thousand years after the apocalyptic event known as The Death, Per Hiero Desteen—priest, telepath, assassin—has been working to find ancient information to save his people. The Brotherhood of the Unclean, a roving band of feral raiders, stage an unprecedented attack. They manage to nullify Hiero's telepathic...

Written against the background of the rise of Nazism, War with the Newts concerns the discovery in the South Pacific of a sea-dwelling race, which is enslaved and exploited by mankind. In time they rebel, laying siege to the strongholds of their former masters in a global war for supremacy. R.U.R., or Rossum's Universal Robots, seen by many as a...

It is a mysterious city whose sun is switched on in the morning and switched off at night, bordered by an abyss on one side and an impossibly high wall on the other. Its inhabitants are people who were plucked from twentieth-century history at various times and places and left to govern themselves, advised by Mentors whose purpose seems inscrutable....

The remarkable novel upon which the stunning cult film was based. 'Beautiful ... The story of an extraterrestrial visitor from another planet is designed mainly to say something about life on this one' NEW YORK TIMES The Man Who Fell to Earth follows the story of Thomas Jerome Newton, an extraterrestrial from the planet Anthea, which has been devastated by...

Synners are synthesizers - not machines, but people. They take images from the brains of performers and turn them into a form which can be packaged, sold and consumed. This book is set in a world where new technology spawns new crime before it hits the streets. In Synners the line between technology and humanity is hopelessly slim; the human...

Luna is an open penal colony, and the regime is a harsh one. Not surprisingly, revolution against the hated authority is planned. But the key figures in the revolt are an unlikely crew: Manuel Garcia O'Kelly, an engaging jack of all trades; the beautiful Wyoming Knott; and Mike, a lonely computer who likes to make up jokes... The Moon is...

Welcome to the Best of the Masterworks: a selection of the finest in science fiction What does it mean to be human when you're part of the machine? Synners are synthesizers - not machines, but people. They take images from the brains of performers and turn them into a form which can be packaged, sold, and consumed. They don't use...

Greg Egan is arguably Australia's greatest living science fiction writer. In a career spanning more than thirty years, he has produced a steady stream of novels and stories that address a wide range of scientific and philosophical concerns: artificial intelligence, higher mathematics, science vs religion, the nature of consciousness, and the impact of technology on the human personality. All these...

James Blish's galaxy-spanning masterwork, originally published in four volumes, explores a future in which two crucial discoveries—antigravity devices which enable whole cities to be lifted from the Earth to become giant spaceships and longevity drugs that allow their inhabitants to live for thousands of years—lead to the establishment of a unique Galactic empire.

Welcome to the strangest, most distinctive future ever imagined by a science fiction writer. An interstellar empire ruled by the mysterious Lords of the Instrumentality, whose access to the drug stroon from the planet Norstrilia confers on them virtual immortality. A world in which wealthy and leisured humanity is served by the underpeople, genetically engineered animals turned into the semblance...

In the far future, after human civilisation has spread through the galaxy, communications begin to arrive in an apparently alien language. They appear to threaten invasion, but in order to counter the threat, the messages must first be understood.

'No city, no town, no community of more than one thousand people or two hundred buildings to the square mile, shall be built or permitted to exist anywhere in the United States of America.' - Thirtieth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States Two generations after the nuclear holocaust, rumours persisted about a secret desert hideaway where scientists worked...

Pierson's puppeteers, strange, three-legged, two-headed aliens, have discovered an immense structure in a hitherto unexplored part of the universe. Frightened of meeting the builders of such a structure, the puppeteers set about assembling a team consisting of two humans, a puppeteer, and a kzin, an alien not unlike an eight-foot-tall, red-furred cat, to explore it. The artefact is a vast...

From the multi-award-winning author of The Left Hand of Darkness and the Earthsea sequence comes this single-volume omnibus of the first three Hainish novels. Intergalactic war reaches Fomalhaut II in Rocannon's World. Born out of season, a precocious young girl visits the alien city of the farborns and the false-men in Planet of Exile. In City of Illusions, a stranger...

In the drowsy tranquillity of Little Belaire, the Truthful Speakers lead lives of peaceful self-sufficiency, ignoring the depopulated wilderness beyond their narrow borders. It is a society untouched by pain or violence, and the self-destroying 'Angels' of the past are barely remembered. But when Rush That Speaks leaves his home on a pilgrimage of self-enlightenment, he finds a landscape haunted...

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 –...

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...

Far from Earth, two sister planets, Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix, circle each other. It is said that a race of shapeshifting aliens once lived here, only to become extinct when human colonists arrived. But one man believes they still exist, somewhere out in the wilderness. In The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Gene Wolfe brilliantly interweaves three tales: a scientist's...

There are seven billion-plus humans crowding the surface of 21st-century Earth. It is an age of intelligent computers, mass-market psychedelic drugs, politics conducted by assassination, and scientists who burn incense to appease volcanoes... all the hysteria of a dangerously overcrowded world, portrayed in a dazzlingly inventive style. Moving, sensory, impressionistic, and as jagged as the times it portrays, Stand On...

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 the eve of disaster, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to the legendary Time Tombs on Hyperion,...

Experiment. Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it. Solution. Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding fathers of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he is the inventor of ice-nine, a lethal chemical capable...

The balance of galactic power in the 31st century revolves around Illyrion, the most precious energy source in the universe. Captain Lorq van Ray's varied and exotic crew know their mission is dangerous, but they have no idea of Lorq's secret obsession: to gather Illyrion at source by flying through the very heart of an imploding star.

Fourteen people arrive on the strange planet of Delmark-O; they have nothing in common other than a desire to make a fresh start. They have no idea why they are there and no way of escaping. And then the first murder takes place... A Maze of Death by Philip K. Dick immerses readers in a gripping mystery filled with suspense...

It's just a little later than now and Lola Hart is writing her life in a diary. She's a nice middle-class girl on the verge of her teens who schools at the calm end of town. A normal, happy girl. But in a disintegrating New York, she is a dying breed. War is breaking out on Long Island, the army...

'Devilishly clever and compulsive' Daily Mail 'Science Fiction at its best' Spectator In Galaxies Like Grains of Sand, Brian W. Aldiss tells the tale of mankind's future over the course of forty million years. Each of these nine connected short stories highlights a different millennia in which man has adapted to new environments and hardships. It is one of the...

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...

One moment a man sits on a suburban hill, gazing curiously at the stars. The next, he is whirling through the firmament, and perhaps the most remarkable of all science fiction journeys has begun. Even Stapledon's other great work, Last and First Men, pales in ambition next to Star Maker, which presents nothing less than an entire imagined history of...

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...

Fifty men and women set out in the twenty-third century from Earth aboard an interstellar craft to travel to a planet some thirty light-years away. The ship will approach the speed of light and so (as Einstein predicted) subjective time on board will slow, and the journey of several decades will be of much shorter duration for the crew. But...

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...

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...

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...

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 was...

'One of the literary greats of the twentieth century' Margaret Atwood'A work of extraordinary imagination and compassion' Atlantic'The book I wish I had written' Roddy DoyleShevek, a brilliant physicist, was raised on Anarres, a barren moon with no government, army, laws, or police that has long been isolated from other worlds because of its rigid dedication to radical equality. Shevek's...

Acclaimed as one of the most original voices in modern literature, Raphael Aloysius Lafferty has been awarded and nominated for a multitude of accolades over the span of his career, including the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. The Best of R. A. Lafferty is a collection containing 22 unique tall tales, including: Hugo Award-winning 'Eurema's Dam' - introduced by...

Jason Taverner is a Six, the result of top secret government experiments forty years prior, which produced a handful of unnaturally bright and beautiful people. He's the prime-time idol of millions until, inexplicably, all record of him is wiped from the data banks of Earth. Suddenly, he's a nobody in a police state where nobody is allowed to be a...

Vergil Ulam's breakthrough in genetic engineering is considered too dangerous for further research. 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. Greg Bear's treatment of the traditional tale of scientific hubris is suspenseful and a compelling portrait of a new...

In a world drowning in data and information and choking on novelty and innovation, Nickie Haflinger—a most dangerous fugitive who doesn't even appear to exist—provides a window onto a global society falling apart in all directions, with madness run amok and personal freedom surrendered to computers and bureaucrats. Caught and about to be re-programmed, can he escape once again, defy...

From the far reaches of space to the hidden corners of Earth, from aliens to wizards and everything in between... One of the most influential SFF writers of modern times, Roger Zelazny wrote across a wide range of subgenres and themes, experimenting with form and story with mastery. He won many awards throughout his lifetime, including six Hugo awards, three...

Listed by the Guardian as one of the top 100 science fiction books of the 21st century. On the barren surface of an asteroid, located deep in the galaxy beneath the unbearable light of the Kefahuchi Tract, lie three objects: an abandoned spacecraft, a pair of bone dice covered with strange symbols, and a human skeleton. What they are and...

This new collection of stories from the multi-award-winning author of Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog contains: A Letter from the Clearys At the Rialto Death on the Nile The Soul Selects Her Own Society Fire Watch Inside Job Even the Queen The Winds of Marble Arch All Seated on the Ground Last of the Winnebagos Ten...

She awoke in an alley to the splash of rain. She was naked, a foot-long gash in her back was still bleeding, and her identity implant was gone. Lore Van Oesterling had been the daughter of one of the world's most powerful families... and now she was nobody, and she had to hide. Then out of the rain walked Spanner,...

When the silent spacecraft arrived and took the light from the world, no one knew what to expect. But, although the Overlords kept themselves hidden from man, they had come to unite a warring world and to offer an end to poverty and crime. When they finally showed themselves it was a shock, but one that humankind could now cope...

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...

It began with a blinding light, a divine revelation from a mysterious intelligence that called itself VALIS. And with that, the fabric of reality was ripped open and laid bare so that anything seemed possible, but nothing seemed quite right. Part science fiction, part theological detective story—in which God plays both the missing person and the perpetrator of the ultimate...

Set in the twenty-second century after the repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment, the novel reveals a world where women are once again property, denied civil rights, and banned from public life. In this world, Earth's wealth relies on interplanetary commerce, for which the population depends on linguists, a small, clannish group of families whose women breed and become perfect translators...

Shortlisted for the 1961 Hugo Award, Rogue Moon is the disquieting story of what happens when monstrous scientific ambition is matched by human obsession. The moon has finally been reached and on it has been found the most terrifying structure, which kills men over and over again, in torturous, unfathomable ways. Clearly, only a madman or a suicidal maniac could...

A moving, compulsive science fiction novel from one of the best writers in the field When the human settlers arrived on Hobbs Land, the native intelligent species, the Owlbrit, were already almost extinct. Before the last one died, a few years later, the humans had learned a little of their language, their ideas and their religion. It seemed the natural...

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...

For a decade, Alice Sheldon produced an extraordinary body of work under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr, until her identity was exposed in 1977. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever presents the finest of these stories and contains the Nebula Award-winning "Love is the Plan the Plan is Death"; Hugo Award-winning novella "The Girl Who Was Plugged In"; "Houston, Houston, Do...

Above our planet hangs a hollow Stone, vast as the imagination of Man. The inner dimensions are at odds with the outer: there are different chambers to be breached, some even containing deserted cities. The furthest chamber contains the greatest mystery ever to confront the Stone's scientists. But tombstone or milestone, the Stone is not an alien structure: it comes...

The computer age has arrived a century ahead of time with Charles Babbage's perfection of his Analytical Engine. The Industrial Revolution, supercharged by the development of steam-driven cybernetic Engines, is in full and drastic swing. Great Britain, with her calculating-cannons, steam dreadnoughts, machine-guns and information technology, prepares to better the world's lot... The Difference Engine by Bruce Sterling and William...

Helliconia is a planet that, due to the massively eccentric orbit of its own sun around another star, experiences seasons that last 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...

Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick transports readers to a desolate Mars, largely forgotten by Earth. The planet remains helpless under the stranglehold of Arnie Kott, who, as the boss of the plumber's union, has a monopoly over the vital water supply. Arnie Kott is obsessed with the past, while the native Bleekmen, poverty-stricken wanderers, possess the ability to see...

ENTER THE ADMINISTRATION Peretz spends his days navigating the bureaucracy of the Administration, the institute tasked with governing the Forest below. Except no one ever seems to go there, and his attempts only trap him further within the workings of this strange organisation. ENTER THE FOREST Candide cannot remember how he got to the Forest, and he is certain he...

Imagine a future where crimes can be detected before they are committed, and criminals are convicted and sentenced for crimes before committing them. This is the scenario of Philip K. Dick's classic story, now filmed by Steven Spielberg, starring Tom Cruise. In addition to Minority Report, this exclusive collection includes nine other outstanding short stories by the twentieth century's outstanding...

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick explores the harrowing world of Substance D—otherwise known as Death—arguably the most dangerous drug ever to infiltrate the black market. This potent substance effectively destroys the connections between the brain's two hemispheres, leading first to disorientation and ultimately resulting in complete and irreversible brain damage. Bob Arctor, an undercover narcotics agent, is on...

Pavane begins in 1588 with a pivotal moment in history: Queen Elizabeth is felled by an assassin's bullet. Within a week, the Spanish Armada has set sail, resulting in a victory that alters the course of history. Fast forward to 1968, England remains under the dominance of the Church of Rome. The world is starkly different—bereft of telephones, television, and...

In the year 2038, the Earth has been ravaged by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Retroviruses run rampant through humanity. Economic disaster has destabilised the world, the US has undergone a socialist revolution, and the balance of power has changed. Then the aliens arrive. With no clear understanding of the visitors' intent, factions form, including the anti-alien group White Queen, working...

It began with a blinding light, a divine revelation from a mysterious intelligence that called itself Valis. And with that, the fabric of reality was ripped open and laid bare so that anything seemed possible, but nothing seemed quite right. Part science fiction, part theological detective story in which God plays both the missing person and the perpetrator of the...

Meet Karl Glogauer, time traveller and unlikely Messiah. When he finds himself in Palestine in the year 29AD, he is shocked to meet the man known as Jesus Christ—a drooling idiot, hiding in the shadows of the carpenter's shop in Nazareth. But if he is not capable of fulfilling his historical role, then who will take his place? Behold The...

Brilliant, driven Victor Frankenstein has at last realised his greatest ambition. The scientist has succeeded in creating intelligent life. But when his creature first stirs, Frankenstein realises he has made a monster. Abandoned by its maker and shunned by everyone who sees it, the Doctor's creation sets out to destroy him and all that he holds dear. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein...