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...
In this, which many consider this to be Clarke's best novel, Vannevar Morgan is the greatest civil engineer of the mid-22nd century. Having built a bridge across the Straits of Gibraltar, he dreams of an even greater accomplishment, a bridge to space: a "skyhook," or "space elevator." This will be a cable stretching from the Earth's equator to an anchoring satellite in geosynchronous orbit. First Morgan must deal with the monks who own the ideal real...
It is the 20th Century, an advertisement-drenched world in which the big ad agencies dominate governments and everything else. Now Schoken Associates, one of the big players, has a new challenge for star copywriter Mitch Courtenay. Volunteers are needed to colonise Venus. It's a hellhole, and nobody who knew anything about it would dream of signing up. But by the time Mitch has finished, they will be queuing to get on board the spaceships.
In a dying world where humans are drugged and lulled by electronic bliss, where there are no children, where some would rather burn themselves alive than endure, Spofforth is the most perfect machine ever created. But his only desire is cease to be. Yet there is hope in the passion and joy that a man and a woman discover in love and in books, hope for the future, hope even for Spofforth.
Far in the future, the craftsmen of the distant planet Halma create goods which are the wonder of the galaxy. But they know little of this. Their society is harshly regimented, its religion austere and unforgiving, and primitive - to maintain standards, even the most basic use of automation is punishable by death. When Amiante, a wood-carver, is executed for processing old documents with a camera, his son Ghyl rebels, and decides to bring down the...
Three thousand years after Earth's colonisation of the planet Borthan, stories of self-serving hypocrisy that occurred among the first arrivals have bred a culture that forbids emotional sharing and denies the naturally human concept of 'self'. The result is a lasting peace, but at a terrible price. For it is a peace without love, without self, where even the mention of the word 'I' is taboo. Spurred on by the arrival of an Earthman with a self-baring...
Experimenting with biochips, Vergil Ulam creates instead a microscopic intelligence that mutates. Vergil injects himself with the disease culture to smuggle it out of the country. That is how the end of the world begins.
Klypso Deed is a shotgun, riding the interface between the AI Ganesh and human scientists who solve problems through cyberassisted Dreams. But she's young and a little careless; she'd rather mix drinks and play jazz. Azamat Marcsson is a colorless statistician: middle-aged, boring, and obsessed with microorganisms. A first-class nonentity--until one of his Dreams implodes, taking Kalypso with it. Now Ganesh is crashing, and nothing could be worse....
The Styths, a powerful and aggressive race from Uranus and Saturn, have been launching pirate raids on ships from Mars. Earth has been asked to mediate and the task has fallen on Paula Menoza. Her initial meetings with the Styth warlord don't go well until she adopts an unconventional approach.
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.
The discovery of another habitable world might spell salvation to the three bitterly competing power blocs of the resource-starved 21st century; but when their representatives arrive on Jem, with its multiple intelligent species, they discover instead the perfect situation into which to export their rivalries.
In the aftermath of an atomic war, a new international movement of pacifism has arisen. Multitudes of young men have chosen to curb their aggressive instincts through voluntary amputation - disarmament in its most literal sense. Those who have undergone this procedure are highly esteemed in the new society. But they have a problem - their prosthetics require a rare metal to function, and international tensions are rising over which countries get the...
Set in an immense world teeming with alien races and fantastic, almost magical, machinery, Valentine, an itinerant juggler, wakes up one morning with only a vague and troubled idea of who he is. He gradually discovers, through dreams and portents, that he is in fact his namesake: Lord Valentine, the Coronal, his body and throne stolen by a usurper. Across the giant world of Majipoor, Valentine sets out on a quest to win back his throne - and discover...
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?
Set in a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England (Inland), Hoban has imagined a humanity regressed to an iron-age, semi-literate state--and invented a language to represent it.
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 circular ribbon of matter, some 180 million miles across, with...
Seven hundred years after Nazism has permanently come to power Adolf Hitler is worshipped as a god. Christians have been marginalized, Jews have been eliminated, and women have been deprived of all rights. Europe is ruled by the Reich and the Japanese rule other parts of the world. Alfred, an Englishman, is on pilgrimage to Germany to visit sites related to Hitler and the rise of the Reich. Loathed as an Englishman, Alfred is murdered by the SS, but...
