With her now-classic novel Outlander, Diana Gabaldon introduced two unforgettable characters — Claire Randall and Jamie Fraser—delighting readers with a story of adventure and love that spanned two centuries. Now Gabaldon returns to that extraordinary time and place in this vivid, powerful follow-up to Outlander....

For twenty years Claire Randall has kept her secrets. But now she is returning with her grown daughter to Scotland’s majestic mist-shrouded hills. Here Claire plans to reveal a truth as stunning as the events that gave it birth: about the mystery of an ancient circle of standing stones ... about a love that transcends the boundaries of time ... and about James Fraser, a Scottish warrior whose gallantry once drew a young Claire from the security of her century to the dangers of his....

Now a legacy of blood and desire will test her beautiful copper-haired daughter, Brianna, as Claire’s spellbinding journey of self-discovery continues in the intrigue-ridden Paris court of Charles Stuart ... in a race to thwart a doomed Highlands uprising ... and in a desperate fight to save both the child and the man she loves....

From Library Journal

This time-traveling romantic adventure will please fans who have been waiting for the further adventures of Dr. Claire Beauchamp Randall, a 20th-century American who goes to Scotland in search of her 18th-century husband, virile Scot Jamie Fraser, whom she met and married in Outlander ( LJ 7/91). Book 2 of a planned trilogy takes readers along on Randall's quest, as she hopes to find a state or time (like that of the title's dragonfly suspended in a piece of amber) where Fraser still exists. This imaginative novel suffers somewhat from the author's overuse of personification ("spectacles gleaming with concern and curiosity") and her confusing switches between the two first-person narrations, which sometimes cloud an otherwise intriguing adventure. But Outlander 's readers will still devour this hefty volume without complaint.
-Marlene Lee, Drain Branch Lib., Ore.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

An engaging time-travel romance, the second of a trilogy (after Outlander, 1991), that animates the people and politics of a pivotal period in history--while turning up the heat between an appealing modern heroine and a magnetic romantic hero. It's now 1968, and Claire Beauchamp Randall has returned to Inverness, Scotland, with her daughter, Brianna. This is Claire's first visit back since she and husband Frank visited 22 years before--when she walked through a Druid stone circle into the middle of the 18th century. Now, Frank is dead, and Claire hopes to learn what happened to the second great love of her life--gallant Jamie Fraser, laird of Lallybroch whom she married during her journey into the past. She's also looking for a way to tell Brianna who her real father is. Framed by these dilemmas, the bulk of the story consists of the second installment of Claire and Jamie's adventures. Escaping the English death sentence passed against Jamie, they flee to prerevolutionary Paris, where they secretly work at foiling Bonnie Prince Charlie's efforts to regain the Scottish throne. But this espionage is only the beginning...A most entertaining mix of history and fantasy whose author, like its heroine, exhibits a winning combination of vivid imagination and good common sense. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The magnificent saga continues....

It began in Scotland, at an ancient stone circle. There, a doorway, open to a select few, leads into the past—or the grave. Claire Randall survived the extraordinary passage, not once but twice. Her first trip swept her into the arms of Jamie Fraser, an eighteenth-century Scot whose love for her became legend—a tale of tragic passion that ended with her return to the present to bear his child. Her second journey, two decades later, brought them together again in frontier America. But Claire had left someone behind in the twentieth century. Their daughter, Brianna....

Now Brianna has made a disturbing discovery that sends her to the stone circle and a terrifying leap into the unknown. In search of her mother and the father she has never met, she is risking her own future to try to change history...and to save their lives. But as Brianna plunges into an uncharted wilderness, a heartbreaking encounter may strand her forever in the past...or root her in the place she should be, where her heart and soul belong....

From the bestselling author of Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber, and Voyager comes the exquisite fourth novel in the romantic, time-travel tale of Jamie Fraser and Claire Randall. 1767: On the even of the American Revolution, Jamie and Claire land on the shores of Charleston to begin a new life. Jamie, determined to stay away from the rumblings of a war that is not his own, soon realizes that war spares no one--and that love is worth fighting for. The long-anticipated continuation of the best-selling, century-spanning family saga.

Diana Gabaldon’s brilliant storytelling has captivated millions of readers in her bestselling and award-winning Outlander saga. Now, in An Echo in the Bone, the enormously anticipated seventh volume, Gabaldon continues the extraordinary story of the eighteenth-century Scotsman Jamie Fraser and his twentieth-century time-traveling wife, Claire Randall.

Jamie Fraser, former Jacobite and reluctant rebel, is already certain of three things about the American rebellion: The Americans will win, fighting on the side of victory is no guarantee of survival, and he’d rather die than have to face his illegitimate son–a young lieutenant in the British army–across the barrel of a gun.

Claire Randall knows that the Americans will win, too, but not what the ultimate price may be. That price won’t include Jamie’s life or his happiness, though–not if she has anything to say about it.

Meanwhile, in the relative safety of the twentieth century, Jamie and Claire’s daughter, Brianna, and her husband, Roger MacKenzie, have resettled in a historic Scottish home where, across a chasm of two centuries, the unfolding drama of Brianna’s parents’ story comes to life through Claire’s letters. The fragile pages reveal Claire’s love for battle-scarred Jamie Fraser and their flight from North Carolina to the high seas, where they encounter privateers and ocean battles–as Brianna and Roger search for clues not only to Claire’s fate but to their own. Because the future of the MacKenzie family in the Highlands is mysteriously, irrevocably, and intimately entwined with life and death in war-torn colonial America.

With stunning cameos of historical characters from Benedict Arnold to Benjamin Franklin, An Echo in the Bone is a soaring masterpiece of imagination, insight, character, and adventure–a novel that echoes in the mind long after the last page is turned.

Review

“All you’ve come to expect from Gabaldon . . . adventure, history, romance, fantasy.”
—The Arizona Republic

From the Trade Paperback edition.

About the Author

Diana Gabaldon is the New York Times bestselling author of the wildly popular Outlander novels–Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, Drums of Autumn, The Fiery Cross, and A Breath of Snow and Ashes (for which she won a Quill Award and the Corine International Book Prize)–and one work of nonfiction, The Outlandish Companion, as well as the bestselling series featuring Lord John Grey, a character she introduced in Voyager. She lives in Scottsdale, Arizona.

From Publishers Weekly

Trouble befalls Lord John Grey (fresh from minor roles in Gabaldon's bestselling Outlander novels) when he accidentally discovers that the Hon. Joseph Trevelyan, his cousin's betrothed, may have what those in 1757 termed "the pox" or "the French disease" syphilis. Before he can figure out an appropriate way to handle this delicate matter, he becomes involved in the investigation of the mysterious and grisly murder of a military colleague suspected of being a spy. Gabaldon (The Fiery Cross; Drums of Autumn; etc.) stitches these two plots together into a compelling narrative that also offers a wealth of juicy details about 18th-century London, especially its homosexual underbelly. Lord John, who reminisces about his dead lover, Hector, and the "lean, hard body" of an old flame, learns that Trevelyan may be traveling from one house of ill repute to another of a different sort: at the Lavender House, both buyers and sellers are men. Among his various trials and tribulations, Lord John must discern the identity of a mysterious figure in a green velvet dress spotted in both of these establishments and investigate the mysterious death of a similarly attired man, found with his face bashed in. Grey is a competent and likable sleuth, and Gabaldon's prose is crisply elegant. Her many fans will be happy to learn that this is the first in a series about the travails of Lord John Grey.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

After accidentally observing a spot on Joseph Trevelyan's "privy member," Major Lord John Grey finds himself in a devilishly difficult position because Trevelyan is about to marry Grey's cousin, who has no idea her fiance is infected with the pox. As he searches for a discreet way to confirm his suspicions, Grey is dragged into a different kind of investigation. British Army requisition papers have vanished in Calais, and Grey must find out if there is some connection between their disappearance and the recent murder of a possible spy Sergeant Timothy O'Connell. Grey, who has a secret of his own to protect, begins an investigation into O'Connell's death, which, interestingly enough, leads to Trevelyan and a mysterious woman in green velvet whose identity may provide answers to all of Grey's questions. New York Times best-seller Gabaldon promotes Grey, a popular secondary character in her Outlander series, to a starring role in this thoroughly entertaining and wonderfully witty historical mystery set in the richly detailed, occasionally bawdy world of Georgian England. John Charles
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

“The battle scenes have the breathless urgency of firsthand experience, and the . . . evil laced into the forces of good, the dangers latent in any promised salvation, the sense of the unavoidable onslaught of unpredictable events bear the marks of American national experience during the last three decades, just as the experience of the First World War and its aftermath gave its imprint to J. R. R. Tolkien’s work.”--_The New York Times_ on The Wheel of Time®

Product Description

The Last Battle has started. The seals on the Dark One’s prison are crumbling. The Pattern itself is unraveling, and the armies of the Shadow have begun to boil out of the Blight.

The sun has begun to set upon the Third Age.

Perrin Aybara is now hunted by specters from his past: Whitecloaks, a slayer of wolves, and the responsibilities of leadership. All the while, an unseen foe is slowly pulling a noose tight around his neck. To prevail, he must seek answers in Tel’aran’rhiod and find a way--at long last--to master the wolf within him or lose himself to it forever.

Meanwhile, Matrim Cauthon prepares for the most difficult challenge of his life. The creatures beyond the stone gateways--the Aelfinn and the Eelfinn--have confused him, taunted him, and left him hanged, his memory stuffed with bits and pieces of other men’s lives. He had hoped that his last confrontation with them would be the end of it, but the Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills. The time is coming when he will again have to dance with the Snakes and the Foxes, playing a game that cannot be won. The Tower of Ghenjei awaits, and its secrets will reveal the fate of a friend long lost.

This penultimate novel of Robert Jordan’s #1 New York Times bestselling series--the second of three based on materials he left behind when he died in 2007--brings dramatic and compelling developments to many threads in the Pattern. The end draws near.

Dovie’andi se tovya sagain. It’s time to toss the dice.

In her now classic novel Outlander, Diana Gabaldon told the story of Claire Randall, an English ex-combat nurse who walks through a stone circle in the Scottish Highlands in 1946, and disappears . . . into 1743. The story unfolded from there in seven bestselling novels, and CNN has called it “a grand adventure written on a canvas that probes the heart, weighs the soul and measures the human spirit across [centuries].” Now the story continues in Written in My Own Heart’s Blood.

1778: France declares war on Great Britain, the British army leaves Philadelphia, and George Washington’s troops leave Valley Forge in pursuit. At this moment, Jamie Fraser returns from a presumed watery grave to discover that his best friend has married his wife, his illegitimate son has discovered (to his horror) who his father really is, and his beloved nephew, Ian, wants to marry a Quaker. Meanwhile, Jamie’s wife, Claire, and his sister, Jenny, are busy picking up the pieces.

The Frasers can only be thankful that their daughter Brianna and her family are safe in twentieth-century Scotland. Or not. In fact, Brianna is  searching for her own son, who was kidnapped by a man determined to learn her family’s secrets. Her husband, Roger, has ventured into the past in search of the missing boy . . . never suspecting that the object of his quest has not left the present. Now, with Roger out of the way, the kidnapper can focus on his true target: Brianna herself.

Written in My Own Heart’s Blood is the brilliant next chapter in a masterpiece of the imagination unlike any other.

**

About the Author

Diana Gabaldon is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the wildly popular Outlander novels—Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, Drums of Autumn, The Fiery Cross, A Breath of Snow and Ashes (for which she won a Quill Award and the Corine International Book Prize), An Echo in the Bone, and Written in My Own Heart’s Blood—as well as the related Lord John Grey books Lord John and the Private Matter, Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade, Lord John and the Hand of Devils, and The Scottish Prisoner; one work of nonfiction, The Outlandish Companion; and the Outlander graphic novel The Exile. She lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, with her husband.

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Diana Gabaldon returns to her Outlander universe in “The Space Between,” an irresistible novella brimming with adventure, history, and suspense—and available for the first time as a standalone eBook.
 
Features a preview of the much-anticipated new Outlander novel, Written in My Own Heart’s Blood!

Joan MacKimmie is on her way to Paris to take up her vocation as a nun. Yet her decision is less a matter of faith than fear, for Joan is plagued by mysterious voices that speak of the future, and by visions that mark those about to die. The sanctuary of the nunnery promises respite from these unwanted visitations . . . or so she prays. Her chaperone is Michael Murray, a young widower who, though he still mourns the death of his wife, finds himself powerfully drawn to his charge. But when the time-traveling Comte St. Germain learns of Joan’s presence in Paris, and of her link to Claire Fraser—La Dame Blanche—Murray is drawn into a battle whose stakes are not merely the life but the very soul of the Scotswoman who, without even trying, has won his heart.

Praise for Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series
 
“A grand adventure written on a canvas that probes the heart, weighs the soul and measures the human spirit across [centuries].”—CNN, on The Fiery Cross
 
“History comes deliciously alive on the page.”—New York Daily News, on Outlander

“Abounds with Gabaldon’s sexy combination of humor, wild adventure and, underlying it all, the redemptive power of true love.”*—The Dallas Morning News, on The Fiery Cross
 
“Gabaldon is a born storyteller. . . . The pages practically turn themselves.”—The Arizona Republic, on Dragonfly in Amber
 
“Wonderful . . . This is escapist historical fiction at its best.”—*San Antonio Express-News, on Drums of Autumn

Review

“[This] is Robert Silverberg at his very best, and when [he’s] at his best, no one is better.”
–George R.R. Martin

“This is, simply put, one of my favorite nightmare novels.”
–Harlan Ellison, author of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

“Flawlessly written . . . as close to poetic beauty as any contemporary science fiction novel I’ve ever read.”
–James Blish, Hugo Award—winning author of A Case of Conscience*

Review

This is a fascinating read, for it prefigures many of the themes that pervade the author's subsequent books: planetary/ecological disaster, entropy, the devolution of human nature, a preoccupation with the roots of violence. For those unfamiliar with Ballard, it's a good introduction -- more accessible and less transgressive than some of his later work, yet full of the arresting surrealism and hallucinatory brilliance of language that are hallmarks of his writing.

About the Author

J.G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. After internment in a civilian prison camp, he and his family returned to England in 1946. His 1984 bestseller Empire of the Sun won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was later filmed by Steven Spielberg. His controversial novel Crash was also made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenberg. His most recent novels include the Sunday Times bestsellers Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes.

From Library Journal

Written in the late 1950s and early 1960s, these titles follow Dick's familiar theme that things and people are not quite what and who they seem, basically challenging reality. Though dead for 20 years now, Dick still is hugely popular among sf readers and Blade Runner nuts, so pop for these.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

“[A] brilliant, idiosyncratic, formidably intelligent writer. . . . Dick illuminates. He casts light. He gives off a radiance.” --*The Washington Post

“Philip K. 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

SALES POINTS * #41 in the Millennium SF Masterworks series, a library of the finest science fiction ever written. * 'Frederik Pohl, one of the old pros of the genre, never takes unnecessary risks. For him, science fiction is a form of play - an excusable indulgence since he plays it so much better than most people.' The New York Times Book Review * 'The most consistently able writer science fiction has yet produced' -- Kingsley Amis * 'One of Frederik Pohl's best novels - and my personal favourite. Complex people in tough situations on a marvelous and gritty world - who could ask for more from any novel?' Greg Bear

Review

“One of the most complete and fully realized pictures of an interstellar society that I have ever read.” --Science Fiction Times

“As of this book [Samuel R. Delany] is the best science-fiction writer in the world.” --Galaxy

“A fast-action farflung interstellar adventure; [an] archetypal mystical/mythical allegory; [a] modern myth told in the S-F idiomÉand lots more.” --Fantasy and Science Fiction

From the Inside Flap

Given that the suns of Draco stretch almost sixteen light years from end to end, it stands to reason that the cost of transportation is the most important factor of the 32nd century. And since Illyrion is the element most needed for space travel, Lorq von Ray is plenty willing to fly through the core of a recently imploded sun in order to obtain seven tons of it. The potential for profit is so great that Lorq has little difficulty cobbling together an alluring crew that includes a gypsy musician and a moon-obsessed scholar interested in the ancient art of writing a novel. What the crew doesn?t know, though, is that Lorq?s quest is actually fueled by a private revenge so consuming that he?ll stop at nothing to achieve it. In the grandest manner of speculative fiction, Nova is a wise and witty classic that casts a fascinating new light on some of humanity?s oldest truths and enduring myths.

From Library Journal

To commemorate the 30th anniversary of Moorcock's Nebula Award-winning novel, Mojo is reissuing the book in a special illustrated edition that incorporates the author's corrections. Moorcock also provides a new afterword. All that in a hardcover for $12.95 makes this a bargain.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Behold The Man won the 1967 Nebula Award. Moorcock is an acknowledged master of fantasy with social and psychological bite, and this extremely controversial novella may well represent the best the fantasy field has to offer in terms of pure literary firepower. Karl Glogauer travels back in time two thousand years, meets John the Baptist, and then seeks Jesus Christ himself. To quote the jacket copy, "What he discovers shocks him to the core." This is a devastating story- science fiction at its most abstract and symbolic. And absolutely unforgettable. I'm ecstatic to have this beautiful corrected 30th Anniversary edition, with foreword by Jonathan Carroll and an afterword by the author, as well as lush illustrations by John Picacio. It's an essential element of any library of the fantastic- be grateful Mojo Press cared enough to make it available again. -- from William D. Gagliani's "Literature Fantastique" column from the December 1996 issue of Booklovers

Review

"This is wonderful and terrifying SF—terrifying because its premise, the takeover of the United States by a third-rate world power, is at once so preposterous and yet, in the hands of this highly skilled writer, so stupefyingly believable. Certainly Arslan is the best political novel I've read in more than a decade."—Samuel R. Delany

"Engh creates a truly shocking situation, introduces a monstrous character, and then refuses to satisfy any of the emotions he has aroused . . . Engh's performance is as perversely flawless as Arslan's."—The New York Times

"Arslan is an astonishing novel—not just for its strange and uncompromising content, but as well for the unforgivable passing of a decade before its being published in a permanent edition. This phantasmagorical vision of an America occupied by a foreign power is a tour de force. It is shocking, chilling and thoughtful."—Edward Bryant

"Arslan's goal is not merely to conquer the world, but to destroy it. Just by chance, it seems, he has chosen a small Illinois town to be the capital of his all-embracing empire. Yet this is not really the tale of great world events. It all comes down to a handful of unforgettable men and women, whose pain and cruelty and compassion shine a spotlight on human nature. What makes Engh's novel extraordinary is her perfect understanding of power, how it grows out of the heat between people who hate and fear each other. Arslan makes Khomeini look wishy-washy, as he takes ordinary people and tears at them until they die, or become strong enough to be his rivals. Arslan starts with a strong science fiction premise—and then raises it to the level of the greatest tragedies. You will find surprises almost from the start, as Engh shatters the tired cliches of the genre. And by the end of the book, exhausted and fulfilled, you will realize you have read something that stands head and shoulders above the other fiction of its time."—Orson Scott Card

From the Back Cover

“Engh creates a truly shocking situation, introduces a monstrous character, and then refuses to satisfy any of the emotions he has aroused . . . . Engh’s performance is as perversely flawless as Arslan’s.”—The New York Times

A Classic of Political Science Fiction

“Arslan starts with a strong science fiction premise—and then raises it to the level of the greatest tragedies. You will find surprises almost from the start, as Engh shatters the tired cliches of the genre. And by the end of the book, exhausted and fulfilled, you will realize you have read something that stands head and shoulders above the other fiction of its time.”—Orson Scott Card

Arslan is a young Asian general who conquers the world in a week without firing a shot, and shortly thereafter sets up his world headquarters in a small town in Illinois. And if this did occur, this is how it would happen.

“This is wonderful and terrifying SF—terrifying because its premise, the takeover of the United States by a third-rate world power, is at once so preposterous and yet, in the hands of this highly-skilled writer, so stupefyingly believable. Certainly Arslan is the best political novel I’ve read in more than a decade.”—Samuel R. Delany

From School Library Journal

YA In the year 2000, a huge potato-shaped asteroid, nicknamed the Stone by Americans, appears in orbit around the earth. Exploration shows that it is divided into seven man-made, hollowed-out chambers, indicating that it had been inhabited. Scientists discover that it was built by Earth people, but in the far distant future, and that a nuclear war is imminent. It becomes crucial that theoretical mathematician Patricia Vasquez discover why the former habitants left and where they went. Although Eon is far too long, its story of futuristic cities and life forms stirs the imagination. Readers travel to worlds where humans may exist as memories in the City Memory Bank, corporeal representatives (ghosts) or incarnations. Other humanoid life forms also exist, and in an amazing array of shapes, from snake-like creatures to floating blobs. Bear's creativity provides a richness to an intricate, complex plot. It's unfortunate that the length may deter all but the most avid sci/fi fans. Pam Spencer, Mount Vernon High School Library, Fairfax, Va.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Sharing aspects of Calrke's Rendevouz with Rama, its uniqueness arises from bear's bold imagination. Bear is a writer of passionate vision. Eon is his grandest work yet."--Locus

"Eon may be the best constructed hard SF epic yet."--The Washington Post

Amazon.com Review

A brothel keeper's sons discuss genocide and plot murder; a young alien wanderer is pursued by his shadow double; and a political prisoner tries to prove his identity, not least to himself. Gene Wolfe's first novel consists of three linked sections, all of them elegant broodings on identity, sameness, and strangeness, and all of them set on the vividly evoked colony worlds of Ste. Croix and Ste. Anne, twin planets delicately poised in mutual orbit.

Marsch, the victim in the third story, is the apparent author of the second and a casual visitor whose naïve questions precipitate tragedy in the first. The sections dance around one another like the planets of their settings. Clones, downloaded personalities inhabiting robots, aliens that perhaps mimicked humans so successfully that they forgot who they were, a French culture adopted by its ruthless oppressors--there are lots of ways to lose yourself, and perhaps the worst is to think that freedom consists of owning other people, that identity is won at the expense of others.

It is easy to be impressed by the intellectual games of Wolfe's stunning book and forget that he is, and always has been, the most intensely moral of SF writers. --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk

Review

"Gene Wolfe is unique. If there were forty or fifty of this first-rate author--no, let's be reasonable and ask Higher Authorities for only four or five--American literature as a whole would be enormously enriched." --Chicago Sun-Times

"One of the major fictional works of the decade...Wolfe's novel, with its elusiveness and its beauty, haunts one long after reading it." --Pamela Sargent

"A richly imaginative exploration of the nature of identity and individuality." --Malcolm Edwards, The Science Fiction Encyclopedia

"SF for the thinking reader..The style is highly literate and the ideas sophisticated and handled with sensitivity." --Amazing SF

"One of the 100 best science fiction novels...A truly extraordinary work. One of the most cunningly wrought narratives in the whole of modern SF, a masterpiece of misdirection, subtle clues, and apparently casual revelations." --David Pringle

On a quiet fall evening in the small, peaceful town of Mill Valley, California, Dr. Miles Bennell discovered an insidious, horrifying plot. Silently, subtly, almost imperceptibly, alien life-forms were taking over the bodies and minds of his neighbors, his friends, his family, the woman he loved — the world as he knew it.

First published in 1955, this classic thriller of the ultimate alien invasion and the triumph of the human spirit over an invisible enemy inspired three major motion pictures.

This classic science fiction thriller tells the story of the residents of a small town who are being imperceptibly taken over by alien creatures without individual personalities or feelings.

In some ways the main character of Hal Clement?s under-appreciated novel, Mission of Gravity, is not Charles Lackland, the human explorer dispatched to the planet Mesklin to retrieve stranded scientific equipment. Nor is it the small caterpillar-like creature named Barlennan, a native of Mesklin who agrees to help Lackland find and recover the equipment. Rather, the main character is the planet Mesklin itself, a place with utterly unique characteristics that make themselves felt during every interaction and calculation the intrepid Lackland and his guide have to make. Odd, formidable and of serious interest to the human scientists sent to study it, Mesklin has, at its poles, the strongest gravitational pull in the known galaxy. A place of obvious interest to Earth?s scientists with the potential to provide human beings with the most new insights into the space-time continuum since Einstein?s day, Mesklin proves a daunting challenge to the explorers who have to cope with the strange and often trying conditions.

Barlennan and his crew are creatures designed for life under heavy gravitational conditions. The journey to the pole with Lackland, though, first takes them out of their native habitat and across Mesklin?s equator, a region of the ovular planet where the lack of gravity threatens the tiny creatures with getting carried away by the wind and other hazards. Clement is careful to pursue at every turn the implications of the conditions on Mesklin, and his insistence on this gives the novel a certain sense of authenticity, belied only by the fantastic subject matter. Although the novel is, as a result, considered "hard science fiction," it remains refreshingly free of jargon or overly-complicated explanations.

While Mission of Gravity is an interesting read by virtue of its sincere interest in science, it is also a gripping adventure story filled with close encounters and hair-raising plot twists. The planet Mesklin is largely unexplored, so neither Lackland nor the native Barlennan is prepared for what they encounter. Formidable terrain, unfamiliar creatures and new civilizations confront the explorers as they make their way towards their destination. The alliance between Lackland and his guide is itself something of a puzzle as Barlennan, always the opportunist, has an agenda motivating his decision to help the earthling. What that agenda is slowly becomes clear as the novel unfolds.

Mission of Gravity is Clement?s most popular and enduring work

Amazon.com Review

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of science fiction's greatest writers. She is also an acclaimed author of powerful and perceptive nonfiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. She has received many honors, including six Nebula and five Hugo Awards, the National Book Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Newbery, the Pilgrim, the Tiptree, and citations by the American Library Association. She has written over a dozen highly regarded novels and story collections. Her SF masterworks are The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Dispossessed (1974), and The Lathe of Heaven (1971).

George Orr has dreams that come true--dreams that change reality. He dreams that the aunt who is sexually harassing him is killed in a car crash, and wakes to find that she died in a wreck six weeks ago, in another part of the country. But a far darker dream drives George into the care of a psychotherapist--a dream researcher who doesn't share George's ambivalence about altering reality.

The Lathe of Heaven is set in the sort of worlds that one would associate with Philip K. Dick, but Ms. Le Guin's treatment of the material, her plot and characterization and concerns, are more akin to the humanistic, ethically engaged, psychologically nuanced fiction of Theodore Sturgeon. The Lathe of Heaven is an insightful and chilling examination of total power, of war and injustice and other age-old problems, of changing the world, of playing God. --Cynthia Ward

Review

"When I read The Lathe of Heaven as a young man, my mind was boggled; now when I read it, more than twenty-five years later, it breaks my heart. Only a great work of literature can bridge - so thrillingly - that impossible span." - Michael Chabon

"A rare and powerful synthesis of poetry and science, reason and emotion." -- The New York Times

"Gracefully developed...extremely inventive.... What science fiction is supposed to do." -- Newsweek

"Profound. Beautifully wrought...[Le Guin's] perceptions of such matters as geopolitics, race, socialized medicine, and the patient-shrink relationship are razor sharp and more than a little cutting." -- National Review

Review

“A novel of the future that the present must inevitably rank as a classic.”—The New York Times

About the Author

FREDERIK POHL’s writing career spans over seventy years. He won the National Book Award in 1980 for his novel Jem. From about 1959 until 1969, Pohl edited Galaxy magazine and its sister magazine, If, winning the Hugo Award for it three years in a row. His writing also won him four Hugos and multiple Nebula Awards. He became a Nebula Grand Master in 1993. Pohl won the 2010 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer, based on his writing on his blog, “The Way the Future Blogs.”

Review

"The best novel about cloning written to date."--Locus

"Kate Wilhelm's cautionary message comes through loud and clear."--The New York Times

"One of the best treatments of cloning in SF."--The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

What David always hated most about the Sumner family dinners was the way everyone talked about him as if he were not there.
"Has he been eating enough meat lately? He looks peaked."
"You spoil him, Carrie. If he won't eat his dinner, don't let him go out and play. You were like that, you know."
"When I was his age, I was husky enough to cut down a tree with a hatchet. He couldn't cut his way out of a fog."
David would imagine himself invisible, floating unseen over their heads as they discussed him. Someone would ask if he had a girlfriend yet, and they would tsk-tsk whether the answer was yes or no. From his vantage point he would aim a ray gun at Uncle Clarence, whom he especially disliked, because he was fat, bald, and very rich. Uncle Clarence dipped his biscuits in his gravy, or in syrup, or more often in a mixture of sorghum and butter that he stirred together on his plate until it looked like baby shit.
"Is he still planning to be a biologist? He should go to med school and join Walt in his practice."
He would point his ray gun at Uncle Clarence and cut a neat plug out of his stomach and carefully ease it out, and Uncle Clarence would ooze from the opening and flow all over them.
"David." He started with alarm, then relaxed again. "David, why don't you go out and see what the other kids are up to?" His father's quiet voice, saying actually, That's enough of that. And they would turn their collective mind to one of the other offspring.
As David grew older, he learned the complex relationships that he merely accepted as a child. Uncles, aunts, cousins, second cousins, third cousins. And the honorary members--the brothers and sisters and parents of those who had married into the family. There were the Sumners and Wistons and O'Gradys and Heinemans and the Meyers and Capeks and Rizzos, all part of the same river that flowed through the fertile valley.
He remembered the holidays especially. The old Sumner house was rambling with many bedrooms upstairs and an attic that was wall-to-wall mattresses, pallets for the children, with an enormous fan in the west window. Someone was forever checking to make certain that they hadn't all suffocated in the attic. The older children were supposed to keep an eye on the younger ones, but what they did in fact was to frighten them night after night with ghost stories. Eventually the noise level would rise until adult intervention was demanded. Uncle Ron would clump up the stairs heavily and there would be a scurrying, with suppressed giggles and muffled screams, until everyone found a bed again, so that by the time he turned on the hall light that illuminated the attic dimly, all the children would seem to be sleeping. He would pause briefly in the doorway, then close the door, turn off the light, and tramp back down the stairs, apparently deaf to the renewed merriment behind him.
Whenever Aunt Claudia came up, it was like an apparition. One minute pillows would be flying, someone would be crying, someone else trying to read by flashlight, several of the boys playing cards by another flashlight, some of the girls huddled together whispering what had to be delicious secrets, judging by the way they blushed and looked desperate if an adult came upon them suddenly, and then the door would snap open, the light would fall on the disorder, and she would be standing there. Aunt Claudia was very tall and thin, her nose was too big, and she was tanned to a permanent old-leather color. She would stand there, immobile and terrible, and the children would creep back into bed without a sound. She would not move until everyone was back where he or she belonged, then she would close the door soundlessly. The silence would drag on and on. The ones nearest to the door would hold their breath, trying to hear breathing on the other side. Eventually someone would become brave enough to open the door a crack, and if she were truly gone, the party would resume.
The smells of holidays were fixed in David's memory. All the usual smells: fruit cakes and turkeys, the vinegar that went in the egg dyes, the greenery and the thick, creamy smoke of bayberry candles. But what he remembered most vividly was the smell of gunpowder that they all carried at the Fourth of July gathering. The smell that permeated their hair and clothes lasted on their hands for days and days. Their hands would be stained purple-black by berry picking, and the color and smell were one of the indelible images of his childhood. Mixed in with it was the smell of the sulfur that was dusted on them liberally to confound the chiggers.
If it hadn't been for Celia, his childhood would have been perfect. Celia was his cousin, his mother's sister's daughter. She was one year younger than David, and by far the prettiest of all his cousins. When they were very young they promised to marry one day, and when they grew older and it was made abundantly clear that no cousins might ever marry in that family, they became implacable enemies. He didn't know how they had been told. He was certain that no one ever put it in words, but they knew. When they could not avoid each other after that, they fought. She pushed him out of the hayloft and broke his arm when he was fifteen, and when he was sixteen they wrestled from the back door of the Winston farmhouse to the fence, fifty or sixty yards away. They tore the clothes off each other, and he was bleeding from her fingernails down his back, she from scraping her shoulder on a rock. Then somehow in their rolling and squirming frenzy, his cheek came down on her uncovered chest, and he stopped fighting. He suddenly became a melting, sobbing, incoherent idiot and she hit him on the head with a rock and ended the fight.
Up to that point the battle had been in almost total silence, broken only by gasps for breath and whispered language that would have shocked their parents. But when she hit him and he went limp, not unconscious, but dazed, uncaring, inert, she screamed, abandoning herself to terror and anguish. The family tumbled from the house as if they had been shaken out, and their first impression must have been that he had raped her. His father hustled him to the barn, presumably for a thrashing. But in the barn his father, belt in hand, looked at him with an expression that was furious, and strangely sympathetic. He didn't touch David, and only after he had turned and left did David realize that tears were still running down his face.
In the family there were farmers, a few lawyers, two doctors, insurance brokers and bankers and millers, hardware merchandisers, other shopkeepers. David's father owned a large department store that catered to the upper-middle-class clientele of the valley. The valley was rich, the farms in it large and lush. David always supposed that the family, except for a few ne'er-do-wells, was rather wealthy. Of all his relatives his favorite was his father's brother Walt. Dr. Walt, they all called him, never uncle. He played with the children and taught them grown-up things, like where to hit if you really meant it, where not to hit in a friendly scrap. He seemed to know when to stop treating them as children long before anyone else in the family did. Dr. Walt was the reason David had decided very early to become a scientist.
David was seventeen when he went to Harvard. His birthday was in September and he didn't go home for it. When he did return at Thanksgiving, and the clan had gathered, Grandfather Sumner poured the ritual before-dinner martinis and handed one to him. And Uncle Warner said to him, "What do you think we should do about Bobbie?"
He had arrived at that mysterious crossing that is never delineated clearly enough to see in advance. He sipped his martini, not liking it particularly, and knew that childhood had ended, and he felt a profound sadness and loneliness.
The Christmas that David was twenty-three seemed out of focus. The scenario was the same, the attic full of children, the food smells, the powdering of snow, none of that had changed, but he was seeing it from a new position and it was not the wonderland it had been. When his parents went home he stayed on at the Wiston farm for a day or two, waiting for Celia's arrival. She had missed the Christmas Day celebration, getting ready for her coming trip to Brazil, but she would be there, her mother had assured Grandmother Wiston, and David was waiting for her, not happily, not with any expectation of reward, but with a fury that grew and caused him to stalk the old house like a boy being punished for another's sin.
When she came home and he saw her standing with her mother and grandmother, his anger melted. It was like seeing Celia in a time distortion, as she was and would be, or had been. Her pale hair would not change much, but her bones would become more prominent and the almost emptiness of her face would have written on it a message of concern, of love, of giving, of being decisively herself, of a strength unsuspected in her frail body. Grandmother Wiston was a beautiful old lady, he thought in wonder, amazed that he never had seen her beauty before. Celia's mother was more beautiful than the girl. And he saw the resemblance to his own mother in the trio. Wordlessly, defeated, he turned and went to the rear of the house and put on one of his grandfather's heavy jackets because he didn't want to see her at all now and his own outdoor clothing was in the front hall closet too near where she was standing.
He walked a long time in the frosty afternoon, seeing very little, and shaking himself from time to time when he realized that the cold was entering his shoes or making his ears numb. He should turn back, he thought often, but he walked on. And he found that he was climbing the slope to the antique forest that his grandfather had taken him to once, a long time ago. He climbed and became warmer, and at dusk he was under the branches of the tiers of trees that had been there since the beginning of time. They or others that were identical to them. Waiting. Forever waiting for the day when they would start the whole climb up the evolutiona...

Review

Review

...An intelligent New Wave classic from the mid-1970s which blends mysticism, world-building and literary references in an inventive mix... ...This is perhaps SF's finest tribute to Joseph Conrad, both in its keen moral sense and its portrayal of a vividly realised alien forest... -- Roz Kaveney TIME OUT

About the Author

Robert Silverberg was born in 1935 and began to write while studying for his BA at Columbia University. He is one of the most prolific of all sf writers and among his many fine novels are Dying Inside, Downward To Earth, The World Inside and Shadrach in the Furnace.

Amazon.com Review

What is Dhalgren? Dhalgren is one of the greatest novels of 20th-century American literature. Dhalgren is one of the all-time bestselling science fiction novels. Dhalgren may be read with equal validity as SF, magic realism, or metafiction. Dhalgren is controversial, challenging, and scandalous. Dhalgren is a brilliant novel about sex, gender, race, class, art, and identity.

A mysterious disaster has stricken the midwestern American city of Bellona, and its aftereffects are disturbing: a city block burns down and is intact a week later; clouds cover the sky for weeks, then part to reveal two moons; a week passes for one person when only a day passes for another. The catastrophe is confined to Bellona, and most of the inhabitants have fled. But others are drawn to the devastated city, among them the Kid, a white/American Indian man who can't remember his own name. The Kid is emblematic of those who live in the new Bellona, who are the young, the poor, the mad, the violent, the outcast--the marginalized.

Dhalgren is many things, but instantly accessible isn't one of them. While most of this big, ambitious, deeply detailed novel is beautifully pellucid, the opening pages will be difficult for some: the novel starts with the second half of an incomplete sentence, in the viewpoint of a man who doesn't know who he is. If you find the early pages rough going, push on; the story soon becomes clear and fascinating. But--fair warning--the central nature of the disaster, of its strange devastations and disruptions, remains a puzzle for many readers, sometimes after several readings.

Spoiler warning: If you want to figure out the secret of the novel as you read Dhalgren, then stop reading this review right now! If you want to know the secret before you start, this is what the novel is about: the experience of existence inside a novel. Time passes differently for different characters. A river changes location. Stairs change their number. The Kid looks in a mirror and sees not himself, but someone who looks an awful lot like Samuel R. Delany. Central images include mirrors, lenses, and prisms, devices that focus, reflect--and distort. The Kid fills a notebook with a journal that may be Dhalgren, and is uncertain if he has written much, or any, of it. The characters don't know they're in a novel, but they know something is wrong. Dhalgren explores the relationship between characters and author (or, perhaps, characters, "author," and author).

The final chapter can be even tougher going than the opening pages, with its viewpoint change and its stretches of braided narrative--and the novel ends with the beginning of an unfinished sentence. But the last chapter becomes clear as you persevere; and when you get to that unfinished closing line, turn to the first line of the novel to finish the sentence and close the narrative circle. --Cynthia Ward

From Library Journal

Vintage launches its new Delany series with this 1974 epic. In coming months the volumes Babel 17/Empire Star, Nova, and an expanded edition of Driftglass will also be reissued. Though pushing 30, Dhalgren features themes of racial identity, religious faith, and self-awareness revealed in a multilayered plot that will be right at home with today's audiences.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of Time Tombs, where huge brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope—and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands.

A stunning tour-de-force filled with transcedent awe and wonder, Hyperion is a masterwork of science fiction that resonates with excitement and invention, the first volume in a remarkable new science fiction epic by the multiple-award-winning author of The Hollow Man.

Hyperion is the tale of seven people who make a pilgrimmage to a terrifying creature called the Shrike in an attempt to save mankind. Stunningly written and beautifully crafted, Simmons's Hyperion resonates with technical achievement and the excitement and wonder found only in the best SF. Reissue.

In the stunning continuation of the epic adventure begun in Hyperion, Simmons returns us to a far future resplendent with drama and invention. On
the world of Hyperion, the mysterious Time Tombs are opening. And the secrets they contain mean that nothing--nothing anywhere in the universe--will ever be the same.

From the Paperback edition.

In the continuation of the epic adventure begun in Hyperion, the far future is resplendent with drama and invention. On the world of Hyperion, the mysterious Time Tombs are opening. And the secrets they contain mean that nothing--nothing anywhere in the universe--will ever be the same. Reissue.

On a far future Earth, mankind's achievements are immense: artificially intelligent robots, genetically uplifted animals, interplanetary travel, genetic modification of the human form itself.But nothing comes without a cost. Humanity is tired, its vigour all but gone. Society is breaking down into smaller communities, dispersing into the countryside and abandoning the great cities of the world.As the human race dwindles and declines, which of its great creations will inherit the Earth...and which will claim the stars...

Simak's City is a series of connected stories, a series of legends, myths, and campfire stories told by Dogs about the end of human civilization, centering on the Webster family, who, among their other accomplishments, designed the ships that took Men to the stars and gave Dogs the gift of speech and robots to be their hands.