Product Description

THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST
The crew of the Constitution--scientists cum astronauts--had been carefully screened for extremely high intelligence and superb physical qualities. They were to be the first explorers sent to another stellar system. There they would explore the planet Alpha-Aleph and then return. They were the toast of the world press--true heroes, for they were to go where no man had gone before.
Or so they thought.
Dr. Dieter von Knefhausen knew otherwise--for there was no planet, no place to go...and no place from which to return. Knefhuasen had planned it that way. Of course, Knefhausen realized his plan wasn't exactly ethical. But then, he knew the ends often justify the means.
And Knefhausen's plan worked better then even he had ever hoped!

From the Inside Flap

THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST
The crew of the Constitution--scientists cum astronauts--had been carefully screened for extremely high intelligence and superb physical qualities. They were to be the first explorers sent to another stellar system. There they would explore the planet Alpha-Aleph and then return. They were the toast of the world press--true heroes, for they were to go where no man had gone before.
Or so they thought.
Dr. Dieter von Knefhausen knew otherwise--for there was no planet, no place to go...and no place from which to return. Knefhuasen had planned it that way. Of course, Knefhausen realized his plan wasn't exactly ethical. But then, he knew the ends often justify the means.
And Knefhausen's plan worked better then even he had ever hoped!

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SUMMARY: When a plague wipes out most of humanity, fifteen-year-old Eric sets out to find his father. Sixty years later, Eric starts another long journey in an America that has long since quit resembling our own, but there are shadows everywhere. Shadows of what the world once was, and shadows from Eric's past. Blood bandits, wolves, fire, feral children, and an insane militia are only a few of the problems Eric faces. Set in Denver, Colorado and the western foothills, Van Pelt's first novel is both a coming-of-age tale, and a story of an old man's search for hope in the midst of disaster. Eric's two adventures lead him through a slice of modern America and into the depths of one man's heart.<

SUMMARY: When I was fourteen, a cousin of mine angered a Malignant One. It was a big case, a genuine scandal. Maybe you remember it. At the time, when it ended, I just wanted to forget about the whole thing. But a couple of years have passed and I guess maybe it's time to think about it again. Thus begins Ellen Pierson's story of how she helped her cousin Paul contend with the Malignant One running a temp agency in the office building where he worked. Ellen's story is a bright and moving tale set in the same fabulous, fantastic America as that of Rachel Pollack's award-winning Unquenchable Fire. Funny and frantic, poignant and powerful, Temporary Agency is an enduring fable from a writer whose work, in the words of Orson Scott Card, "like a river in flood, resists the well-channeled ways, cutting its own channel through the fictional terrain."<

From Publishers Weekly

This fourth and possibly concluding volume in Pohl's popular Heechee Saga takes place 100 years after the first, Gateway, when the discovery of abandoned alien spaceships opened the galaxy to human exploration. Now allies, human and Heechee, are guarding against the Foe, a race of energy beings that has already wiped out several civilizations. Millionaire Robin Brodhead, who has survived his physical death to become a computer-stored intelligence, tracks suspicious Foe-directed transmissions back to a Pacific island and the refugee children who have unwittingly carried the Foe to Earth. Robin's first contact with these beings becomes vital to human and Heechee existence. Although Pohl relies rather heavily on cute aliens and wise-guy computer programs, his restless, loquacious narrator Robin whips the reader from planet to planet and from past to future, rapidly solving problems and just as rapidly shoveling up new ones in the best Pohl fashion.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Description

At last--the ultimate book in the renowned Heechee Saga!
Advanced Heechee technology had enabled Robinette Broadhead to live after death as a machine-stored personality, enjoying his life by flitting along the wires from party to party with a host of other machine-people. But suddenly his decadent existence ends when an all powerful alien race intent on the utter destruction of all intelligent life reappears after eons of silence, and threatens the lives of all heechee and humans. Even Robin, virtually immortal and with unlimited access to millennia of accumulated data, cannot discover how to stop these aliens. It began to seem that only a face to face meeting could determine the future of the entire universe....
THE HEECHEE SAGE
Book One: GATEWAY
Book Two: BEYOND THE BLUE EVENT HORIZON
Book Three: HEECHEE RENDEZVOUS
Book Four: THE ANNALS OF THE HEECHEE
The Gateway Trip: TALES AND VIGNETTES OF THE HEECHEE

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SUMMARY: “A planet-stomping space opera that bursts off the page like a tactical nuke.”–John Birmingham, author of Weapons of ChoiceThe Hammer Worlds–the most brutal and oppressive interstellar government in the universe–have hijacked the Federated Worlds cruise ship Mumtaz, seizing its valuable terraforming cargo and damning its passengers to mining the moons of the prison planet known as Hell. For Junior Lieutenant Michael Helfort and the crew aboard deep space scout vessel 387, the mission is clear: infiltrate enemy territory, locate the Mumtaz, and rescue the prisoners.The odds are appalling, and the damage will probably be fatal, but victory is nonnegotiable–especially for Helfort, whose mother and sister were on the Mumtaz. And Michael Helfort will be damned if he’ll let his family rot on the moons of Hell.<

The gaslight and shadows of the underground city of Recoletta hide secrets and lies. When Inspector Liesl Malone investigates the murder of a renowned historian, she finds herself stonewalled by the all-powerful Directorate of Preservation – Recoletta's top-secret historical research facility.

When a second high-profile murder threatens the very fabric of city society, Malone and her rookie partner Rafe Sundar must tread carefully, lest they fall victim to not only the criminals they seek, but the government which purports to protect them. Knowledge is power, and power must be preserved at all costs...

File Under: Science Fantasy [ Thriller | Society in Ruins | Fully Booked | New and Weird ]

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1864. London is a city in transition. The Constantine Affliction?a strange malady that kills some of its victims and physically transforms others into the opposite sex?has spread scandal and upheaval throughout society. Scientific marvels and disasters, such as clockwork courtesans, the alchemical fires of Whitechapel, electric carriages, and acidic monsters lurking in the Thames, have forever altered the face of the city.Pembroke ?Pimm” Hanover is an aristocrat with an interest in criminology, who uses his keen powers of observation to assist the police or private individuals?at least when he's sober enough to do so. Ellie Skyler, who hides her gender behind the byline ?E. Skye,” is an intrepid journalist driven by both passion and necessity to uncover the truth, no matter where it hides.When Pimm and Skye stumble onto a dark plot that links the city's most notorious criminal overlord with the Queen's new consort, famed scientist Sir Bertram Oswald, they soon find the forces of both high and low society arrayed against them. Can they save the city from the arcane machinations of one of history's most monsters?and uncover the shocking origin of . . . THE CONSTANTINE AFFLICTION.

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"Dick’s best books always describe a future that is both entirely recognizable and utterly unimaginable."—The New York Times Book Review

When a repairman accidentally discovers a parallel universe, everyone sees it as an opportunity, whether as a way to ease Earth’s overcrowding, set up a personal kingdom, or hide an inconvenient mistress. But when a civilization is found already living there, the people on this side of the crack are sent scrambling to discover their motives. Will these parallel humans come in peace, or are they just as corrupt and ill-intentioned as the people of this world?

Review

“Dick’s best books always describe a future that is both entirely recognizable and utterly unimaginable.” –The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Over a writing career that spanned three decades, Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) published 36 science fiction novels and 121 short stories in which he explored the essence of what makes man human and the dangers of centralized power. Toward the end of his life, his work turned toward deeply personal, metaphysical questions concerning the nature of God. Eleven novels and short stories have been adapted to film; notably: Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly. The recipient of critical acclaim and numerous awards throughout his career, Dick was inducted into the SF Hall of Fame in 2005, and in 2007 the Library of America published a selection of his novels in three volumes. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

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EDITORIAL REVIEW: *** Just as medicine is not a science, but rather an art-a device, practised in a scientific manner, in its best manifestations-time-travel stories are not science fiction. Time-travel, however, has become acceptable to science fiction readers as a traditional device in stories than are otherwise admissible in the genre. Here, Frederik Pohl employs it to portray the amusingly catastrophic meeting of three societies.*** excerpt from the introductory: I - Foraminifera 9 Paptaste udderly, semped sempsemp dezhavoo, qued schmerz-Excuse me. I mean to say that it was like an endless diet of days, boring, tedious.... No, it loses too much in the translation. Explete my reasons, I say. Do my reasons matter? No, not to you, for you are troglodytes, knowing nothing of causes, understanding only acts. Acts and facts, I will give you acts and facts. First you must know how I am called. My "name" is Foraminifera 9-Hart Bailey's Beam, and I am of adequate age and size. (If you doubt this, I am prepared to fight.) Once the-the tediety of life, as you might say, had made itself clear to me, there were, of course, only two alternatives. I do not like to die, so that possibility was out; and the remaining alternative was flight. Naturally, the necessary machinery was available to me. I arrogated a small viewing machine, and scanned the centuries of the past in the hope that a sanctuary might reveal itself to my aching eyes. Kwel tediety that was! Back, back I went through the ages. Back to the Century of the Dog, back to the Age of the Crippled Men. I found no time better than my own. Back and back I peered, back as far as the Numbered Years. The Twenty-Eighth Century was boredom unendurable, the Twenty-Sixth a morass of dullness. Twenty-Fifth, Twenty-Fourth-wherever I looked, tediety was what I found. I snapped off the machine and considered. Put the problem thus: Was there in all of the pages of history no age in which a 9-Hart Bailey's Beam might find adventure and excitement? There had to be! It was not possible, I told myself, despairing, that from the dawn of the dreaming primates until my own time there was no era at all in which I could be-happy? Yes, I suppose happiness is what I was looking for. But where was it? In my viewer, I had fifty centuries or more to look back upon. And that was, I decreed, the trouble; I could spend my life staring into the viewer, and yet never discover the time that was right for me. There were simply too many eras to choose from. It was like an enormous library in which there must, there had to be, contained the one fact I was looking for-that, lacking an index, I might wear my life away and never find. "*Index!*"<

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