SF Masterworks

The classic novel about a daring experiment in human intelligence'A masterpiece of poignant brilliance . . . heartbreaking, and utterly, completely brilliant' Guardian'A timeless tearjerker' IndependentCharlie Gordon, IQ 68, is a floor sweeper and the...

A masterly tale of political deception from the most significant writer of SF in the 20th centuryWorld War III is raging - or so the millions of people crammed in their underground tanks believe. For fiteen years, subterranean humanity has been fed on...

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...

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...

Seven years after the day of the bombs, Point Reyes was luckier than most places. Its people were reasonably normal - except for the girl with her twin brother growing inside her, and talking to her. Their barter economy was working. Their resident...

An extraordinary epic, set a million years in the future, in the time of a dying sun, when our present culture is no longer even a memory. Severian, a torturer's apprentice, is exiled from his guild after falling in love with one of his prisoners...

ENTER THE ADMINISTRATIONPeretz 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...

Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth ... but he is not alone. Every other man, woman and child on the planet has become a vampire, and they are hungry for Neville's blood. By day he is the hunter, stalking the undead through the ruins of...

A classic science fiction tale of artifical worlds by one of the great American writers of the 20th centuryGlen Runciter is dead.Or is he?Someone died in the explosion orchestrated by his business rivals, but even as his funeral is scheduled, his...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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, scientists who burn incense to appease volcanoes ... all the...

One of the very best must-read novels of all time - with a new introduction by Roddy Doyle'A well told tale signifying a good deal; one to be read again and again' THE TIMES'The book I wish I had written ... It's so far away from my own imagination, I'd...

The multi-award-winning SF masterpiece from one of the greatest SF writers of all timeRama is a vast alien spacecraft that enters the Solar System. A perfect cylinder some fifty kilometres long, spinning rapidly, racing through space, Rama is a...

'No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's...'So begins H. G. Wells' classic novel in which Martian lifeforms take over planet Earth. As...

A moving, compulsive science fiction novel from one of the best writers in the fieldWhen 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...

A classic science fiction tale of artifical worlds by one of the great American writers of the 20th centuryGlen Runciter is dead.Or is he?Someone died in the explosion orchestrated by his business rivals, but even as his funeral is scheduled, his...

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.A haunting vision of a...

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...

The Caltraps of Time is David I. Masson's only published book of fiction, a collection of short stories, most of which made their first appearance in New Worlds SF during the 1960s under the legendary editorship of Michael Moorcock. An apocalyptic battle...

A whisperjewel from Gwen Delvano calls Dirk t'Larien across space and beyond the Tempter's Veil to Worlorn, a dying Festival planet of rock and ice. Warlorn is slowly drifting through twilight to neverending night; as the planet sinks into darkness, so...

A world of peaceful aliens conquered by bloodthirsty yumens, their existence is irrevocably altered. Forced into servitude, the Athsheans find themselves at the mercy of their brutal masters. Desperation causes the Athsheans to retaliate against their...

'As we saw it first it was the wildest and most desolate of scenes. We were in an enormous amphitheatre, a vast circular plain, the floor of the giant crater. Its cliff-like wall closed us in on every side?'Thanks to the discovery of an anti-gravity...

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...

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...

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...

A uniquely powerful novel of a society in decay. On a planet whose very nature is a mystery a massive decrepit city is pulled along a massive railway track, laying the line down before it as it progresses into the wilderness.The society within toils...

Amber is the one real world, casting infinite reflections of itself - Shadow worlds, that can be manipulated by those of royal Amberite blood. But the royal family is torn apart by jealousies and suspicion; the disappearance of the Patriarch Oberon has...

A brilliant sci-fi novel from one of the last century's most influential pop culture figuresSubstance D - otherwise known as Death - is the most dangerous drug ever to find its way on to the black market. It destroys the links between the brain's two...

One of America's greatest writers gives us his unique perspective on our fears of nuclear annihilationExperiment.Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing...

A deep and meaningful masterpiece of science fiction, full of heart and mind-bending ideas. A true classic, Vonnegut will make you laugh and have you contemplating the meaning of lifeWhen Winston Niles Rumfoord flies his spaceship into a...

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 ClearysAt the RialtoDeath on the NileThe Soul Selects Her own SocietyFire WatchInside JobEven the QueenThe Winds...

Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth ... but he is not alone. Every other man, woman and child on the planet has become a vampire, and they are hungry for Neville's blood. By day he is the hunter, stalking the undead through the ruins of...

Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space - from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures and...

One of Clarke's most famous and acclaimed novels, winner of both the HUGO AWARD and the NEBULA AWARDIn the 22nd century visionary scientist Vannevar Morgan conceives the most grandiose engineering project of all time, and one which will revolutionize the...

Grand Master Ursula K. LeGuin has been recognised for almost fifty years as one of the most important writers in the SF field - and is likewise feted beyond the confines of the genre. The Wind's Twelve Quarters was her first collection and it brings...

Giant, technologically superior aliens have conquered Earth, but humankind survives - even flourishes in a way. Men and women live, like mice, in burrows in the massive walls of the huge homes of the aliens, and scurry about under their feet, stealing...