A retro-viral plague sweeps the world, infecting women via their sexual partners and aborting their embryos.
Beryl Kingston - Agora Books
But the plague is more than it seems What might in other hands have been a mere end-of-the-world runaround is transformed by Bear's scientific knowledge into something marvellous, as reason overcomes paranoia and fear. Somehow surviving, he swiftly gets down to it.
- Manitou Murder;
- Sonhos Douro (Classics of Brazilian Literature Livro 40) (Portuguese Edition)!
- Los nuevos investigadores (Fuera de colección) (Spanish Edition);
- Ride on Morning Star;
- Building Websites for Return on Investment;
- the Artist proposes: An inner Revolution.
Bester's novel updates The Count of Monte Cristo with telepathy, nuclear weapons and interplanetary travel. Those who stumble across it are inevitably surprised to find it was written half a century ago. Brite's first novel, a lush, decadent and refreshingly provocative take on vampirism told in rich, stylish prose, put her at the forefront of the s horror scene.
It's the story of Nothing, an angst-filled teenager who runs away from his adoptive parents to seek out his favourite band. Along the way he joins up with a group of vampires, finds his true family and discovers what he really values, amid much blood, sex, drugs and drink. Keith Brooke Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Al Barker is a thrillseeking adventurer recruited to investigate an alien labyrinth on the moon.
Everyone who enters the maze dies, so Barker's doppelganger is transmitted there while he remains in telepathic contact.
Barker is the first person to survive the trauma of witnessing their own death, returning again and again to explore. Rogue Moon works as both thriller and character study, a classic novel mapping out a new and sophisticated SF, just as Barker maps the alien maze. KB Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. When the Devil comes to s Moscow, his victims are pillars of the Soviet establishment: This is just a curtain-raiser for the main event, however: For his hostess, his satanic majesty chooses Margarita, a courageous young Russian whose lover is in a psychiatric hospital, traumatised by the banning of his novel.
No prizes for guessing whom Bulgakov identified with; although Stalin admired his early work, by the s he was personally banning it. This magisterial satire was not published until more than 20 years after the writer's death. In this pioneering work of British science fiction, the hero is a bumptious American mining engineer who stumbles on a subterranean civilisation.
The "Vril-ya" enjoy a utopian social organisation based on "vril", a source of infinitely renewable electrical power commerce promptly produced the beef essence drink, Bovril. Also present are ray guns, aerial travel and ESP. Ironically, the hero finds utopia too boring. He is rescued from death by the Princess Zee, who flies him to safety.
The novel ends with the ominous prophecy that the superior race will invade the upper earth - "the Darwinian proposition", as Bulwer-Lytton called it. John Sutherland Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. One of a flurry of novels written by Burgess when he was under the mistaken belief that he had only a short time to live. Set in a dystopian socialist welfare state of the future, the novel fantasises a world without religion.
Alex is a "droog" - a juvenile delinquent who lives for sex, violence and subcult high fashion. The narrative takes the form of a memoir, in Alex's distinctive gang-slang. The state "programmes" Alex into virtue; later deprogrammed, he discovers what good and evil really are.
Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
The novel, internationally popularised by Stanley Kubrick's film into what Burgess called "Clockwork Marmalade", is Burgess's tribute to his cradle Catholicism and, as a writer, to James Joyce. JS Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. In one of the first split-screen narratives, Burgess juxtaposes three key 20th-century themes: Trotsky's visit to New York is presented as a Broadway musical; a mournful Freud looks back on his life as he prepares to flee the Nazis; and in the year , as a rogue asteroid barrels towards the Earth, humanity argues over who will survive and what kind of society they will take to the stars.
JJ Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. John Carter, a Confederate veteran turned gold prospector, is hiding from Indians in an Arizona cave when he is mysteriously transported to Mars, known to the locals as Barsoom. There, surrounded by four-armed, green-skinned warriors, ferocious white apes, eight-legged horse-substitutes, legged "dogs", and so on, he falls in love with Princess Dejah Thoris, who might almost be human if she didn't lay eggs.
She is, naturally, both beautiful and extremely scantily clad Burroughs's first novel, published in serial form, is the purest pulp, and its lack of pretension is its greatest charm. Disjointed, hallucinatory cut-ups form a collage of, as Burroughs explained of the title, "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork". A junkie's picaresque adventures in both the real world and the fantastical "Interzone", this is satire using the most savage of distorting mirrors: Only Cronenberg could have filmed it in , and even he recreated Burroughs's biography rather than his interior world.
Butler's fourth novel throws African American Dana Franklin back in time to the early s, where she is pitched into the reality of slavery and the individual struggle to survive its horrors. Butler single-handedly brought to the SF genre the concerns of gender politics, racial conflict and slavery. Several of her novels are groundbreaking, but none is more compelling or shocking than Kindred. A brilliant work on many levels, it ingeniously uses the device of time travel to explore the iniquity of slavery through Dana's modern sensibilities.
The wittiest of Victorian dystopias by the period's arch anti-Victorian. The hero Higgs finds himself in New Zealand as, for a while, did the chronic misfit Butler. Assisted by a native, Chowbok, he makes a perilous journey across a mountain range to Erewhon say it backwards , an upside-down world in which crime is "cured" and illness "punished", where universities are institutions of "Unreason" and technology is banned. The state religion is worship of the goddess Ydgrun ie "Mrs Grundy" - bourgeois morality.
Does it sound familiar? Higgs escapes by balloon, with the sweetheart he has found there. He ends up keeping his promise, witnessing the French revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath from the perspective of the Italian treetops. Drafted soon after Calvino's break with communism over the invasion of Hungary, the novel can be read as a fable about intellectual commitments.
At the same time, it's a perfectly turned fantasy, densely imagined but lightly written in a style modelled on Voltaire and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Brian W Aldiss: Non-Stop (1958)
Chris Tayler Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Campbell has long been one of the masters of psychological horror, proving again and again that what's in our heads is far scarier than any monster lurking in the shadows.
In this novel, the domineering old spinster Queenie dies - a relief to those around her. Her niece Alison inherits the house, but soon starts to suspect that the old woman is taking over her eight-year-old daughter Rowan. A paranoid, disturbing masterpiece. The intellectuals' favourite children's story began as an improvised tale told by an Oxford mathematics don to a colleague's daughters; later readers have found absurdism, political satire and linguistic philosophy in a work that, years on, remains fertile and fresh, crisp yet mysterious, and endlessly open to intepretation.
- BOOKS - Beryl Kingston - Bestselling Author;
- Kindle Editions!
- The Internet Revolutionary.
Alice, while reading in a meadow, sees a white rabbit rush by, feverishly consulting a watch. She follows him down a hole Freudian analysis, as elsewhere in the story, is all too easy , where she grows and shrinks in size and encounters creatures mythological, extinct and invented.
Morbid jokes and gleeful subversion abound. The trippier sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and, like its predecessor, illustrated by John Tenniel. More donnish in tone, this fantasy follows Alice into a mirror world in which everything is reversed. Her journey is based on chess moves, during the course of which she meets such figures as Humpty Dumpty and the riddling twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee. More challenging intellectually than the first instalment, it explores loneliness, language and the logic of dreams.
The year is - and other times. Fevvers, aerialiste, circus performer and a virgin, claims she was not born, but hatched out of an egg. She has two large and wonderful wings. In fact, she is large and wonderful in every way, from her false eyelashes to her ebullient and astonishing adventures. The journalist Jack Walser comes to interview her and stays to love and wonder, as will every reader of this entirely original extravaganza, which deftly and wittily questions every assumption we make about the lives of men and women on this planet.
Carmen Callil Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. The golden age of the American comic book coincided with the outbreak of the second world war and was spearheaded by first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants who installed square-jawed supermen as bulwarks against the forces of evil. Chabon's Pulitzer prize-winning picaresque charts the rise of two young cartoonists, Klayman and Kavalier. It celebrates the transformative power of pop culture, and reveals the harsh truths behind the hyperreal fantasies.
XB Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Clarke's third novel fuses science and mysticism in an optimistic treatise describing the transcendence of humankind from petty, warring beings to the guardians of utopia, and beyond. One of the first major works to present alien arrival as beneficent, it describes the slow process of social transformation when the Overlords come to Earth and guide us to the light.
Humanity ultimately transcends the physical and joins a cosmic overmind, so ushering in the childhood's end of the title EB Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Chesterton's "nightmare", as he subtitled it, combines Edwardian delicacy with wonderfully melodramatic tub-thumping - beautiful sunsets and Armageddon - to create an Earth as strange as any far-distant planet.
Secret policemen infiltrate an anarchist cabal bent on destruction, whose members are known only by the days of the week; but behind each one's disguise, they discover only another policeman. At the centre of all is the terrifying Sunday, a superhuman force of mischief and pandemonium. Chesterton's distorting mirror combines spinetingling terror with round farce to give a fascinating perspective on Edwardian fears of and flirtations with anarchism, nihilism and a world without god.
Clarke's first novel is a vast, hugely satisfying alternative history, a decade in the writing, about the revival of magic - which had fallen into dusty, theoretical scholarship - in the early 19th century. Two rival magicians flex their new powers, pursuing military glory and power at court, striking a dangerous alliance with the Faerie King, and falling into passionate enmity over the use and meaning of the supernatural. The book is studded with footnotes both scholarly and comical, layered with literary pastiche, and invents a whole new strain of folklore: This classic by an unjustly neglected writer tells the story of Drove and Pallahaxi-Browneyes on a far-flung alien world which undergoes long periods of summer and gruelling winters lasting some 40 years.
It's both a love story and a war story, and a deeply felt essay, ahead of its time, about how all living things are mutually dependant. This is just the kind of jargon-free, humane, character-driven novel to convert sceptical readers to science fiction. Coupland began Girlfriend in a Coma in "probably the darkest period of my life", and it shows.
Listening to the Smiths - whose single gave the book its title - can't have helped. This is a story about the end of the world, and the general falling-off that precedes it, as year-old Karen loses first her virginity, then consciousness.
Beryl Kingston
When she reawakens more than a decade later, the young people she knew and loved have died, become junkies or or simply lost that new-teenager smell. Wondering what the future holds? It's wrinkles, disillusionment and the big sleep. It's not often you get to read a book vertically as well as horizontally, but there is much that is uncommon about House of Leaves.
It's ostensibly a horror story, but the multiple narrations and typographical tricks - including one chapter that cuts down through the middle of the book - make it as much a comment on metatextuality as a novel. That said, the creepiness stays with you, especially the house that keeps stealthily remodelling itself: Carrie O'Grady Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. It wasn't a problem at first: But the changes don't stop there: A curly tail, trotters and a snout are not far off.
Darrieussecq's modern philosophical tale is witty, telling and hearteningly feminist. Joanna Biggs Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. The setting is a post-apocalyptic future, long past the age of humans. Aliens have taken on the forms of human archetypes, in an attempt to come to some understanding of human civilisation and play out the myths of the planet's far past.
The novel follows Lobey, who as Orpheus embarks on a quest to bring his lover back from the dead. With lush, poetic imagery and the innovative use of mythic archetypes, Delaney brilliantly delineates the human condition. Dick's novel became the basis for the film Blade Runner, which prompted a resurgence of interest in the man and his works, but similarities film and novel are slight.
1000 novels everyone must read: Science Fiction & Fantasy (part one)
Here California is under-populated and most animals are extinct; citizens keep electric pets instead. In order to afford a real sheep and so affirm his empathy as a human being, Deckard hunts rogue androids, who lack empathy. As ever with Dick, pathos abounds and with it the inquiry into what is human and what is fake.
Much imitated "alternative universe" novel by the wayward genius of the genre. The Axis has won the second world war. Off the Rails This is the story of George Hudson, pre-eminently successful railway entrepreneur, politician, crook and bully, and the child he fathered and deserted when he was fifteen. Girl on the Orlop Deck Based on the true story of a young woman who, when her husband got drunk and was persuaded to join the Navy, disguised herself as a boy and followed him into the fleet determined to find him.
She ends up in the 'Victory' at the Battle of Trafalgar, working as one of the loblolly boys who were assistants to the surgeon. And does she find her husband, you ask? It is a difficult time for all of them, but she is determined to give her girls the best possible education no matter where they are.
Octavia Octavia is the story of an educational pioneer who taught in the '20s when they knew more about how children learn than putative teachers are allowed to know now in these examination ridden times. It was first published in hardback in October and the paperback came out in October Gates of Paradise When William Blake was living in Felpham in Sussex between and his poetry and painting inspired pupils and villagers alike, including a pair of young lovers who followed his teaching literally and disastrously.
Then he ran foul of a trooper who accused him of sedition and brought him to trial. Had it not been for the testimony of neighbours Blake would have been imprisoned. Neptune's Daughter When Gwen McIvor is widowed she embarks on a new life, buys a derelict windmill and gives it a makeover, takes a lover and finds a job, so she is put in a difficult position when she discovers that her daughter Eleanor is pregnant and expects her to take over care of the infant when it is born. What will she do? This leads to quarrels and fights and culminates in his incarceration in Bedlam, where Suki finally finds him.
Only Young Set in the middle of the 18th century in the world of sugar and slavery, whores, highwaymen and rich entrepreneurs, one of whom employs Suki Brown as a wet nurse but does not know that when his own baby dies Suki puts her own infant in its place. Avalanche of Daisies The love story of 19 year old Private Steve Wilkins and 17 year old Barbara Nelson who marry despite opposition, are then parted by the Normandy invasion and by the buzz bombs and rockets that are bombarding London, but never lose their spirit nor their determination that they will build a better world when the war is over.
Gemma's Journey Newly qualified actress Gemma is on her way to an audition when she is caught up in a terrible train crash. Her leg is amputated to release her from the wreckage but she is determined to live life to the full despite her injury. Laura's Way Laura Pendleton has always considered herself a quiet librarian but when her home is threatened with compulsory purchase to make way for a new bypass she leads the campaign to oppose it and in so doing discovers a new love and the solution to an old mystery.
Two Silver Crosses An advertisement in The Times asked twin sisters Virginia and Emily Holborn, last seen 10 years previously at Victoria Station boarding the boat train to Boulogne to contact solicitors.