SF Masterworks

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...

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...

Arthur C. Clarke's classic in which he ponders humanity's future and possible evolutionWhen the silent spacecraft arrived and took the light from the world, no one knew what to expect. But, although the Overlords kept themselves hidden from man, they had...

Welcome to the Best of the Masterworks: a selection of the finest in science fictionArthur Dent thought his day was going badly when someone tried to demolish his house.Then someone demolished his planet.Rescued by his friend Ford - who is not a human...

SWASTIKA NIGHT takes place seven hundred years after Nazism achieved power, by which time Adolf Hitler is worshipped as a god. Elsewhere, the Japanese rule the Americas, Australia, and Asia. Though Japan is the only rival superpower to the Nazi West,...

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,...

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...

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...

Henry Dorsett Case is a low-level hustler, former hack and 'console cowboy' who crashed and burned. His nerves were damaged and thus cut off from the digital matrix, he slouches through life.Until he meets Molly, an augmented 'razorgirl', who offers...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Greg Egan is arguably Australia's greatest living science fiction writer. In a career spanning more than thirty years, he has produced a steady stream of novels and stories that address a wide range of scientific and philosophical concerns: artificial...

Luna is an open penal colony and the regime is a harsh one. Not surprisingly, revolution against the hated authority is planned. But the key figures in the revolt are an unlikely crew: Manuel Garcia O'Kelly, an engaging jack of all trades, the beautiful...

Fifty men and women set out in the twenty-third century from Earth aboard an interstellar craft to travel to a planet some thirty light-years away. The ship will approach the speed of light and so (as Einstein predicted) subjective time on board will...

A powerful novel about what happens when the magic leaves our lives.Imagine what it would be like if you could tell what the innermost thoughts and feelings of those around you were. Imagine if, as you reached middle age, you lost that ability. What...

It's just a little later than now and Lola Hart is writing her life in a diary. She's a nice middle-class girl on the verge of her teens who schools at the calm end of town.A normal, happy, girl.But in a disintegrating New York she is a dying breed. War...

Helliconia is a planet that, due to the massively eccentric orbit of its own sun around another star, experiences seasons that lasts eons. Whole civilisations grow in the Spring, flourish in the Summer and then die in the brutal winters. The human-like...

Time is running out for the passengers and crew of the tourist cruiser Selene, incarcerated in a sea of choking lunar dust. On the surface, her rescuers find their resources stretched to the limit by the mercilessly unpredictable conditions of a totally...

In this profound ecological fable, a mysterious plague has destroyed the vast majority of the human race. Isherwood Williams, one of the few survivors, returns from a wilderness field trip to discover that civilization has vanished during his absence...

A young man arrives in the anarchic city of Bellona, in a near future USA. This world has two moons but could otherwise be our own.The man, known only as 'the Kid', begins to write a novel called Dhalgren that begins where it ends.Dhalgren is about the...

A prescient tale of political satire set in a near future America by a master of the genreA few years from now the President of the USA will be an android and his entire government a fraud. Everyone in the country is maladjusted. Doesn't seem possible,...

Welcome to the Best of the Masterworks: A selection of the finest in science fiction-Black-cloaked Sarah Canary is the ugliest woman Chin Ah Kin could ever imagine. But after she wanders into a railway camp in the Washington territories in 1873, Chin is...

Nine hundred thousand years ago, something wiped out the Amarantin. For the humans now settling the Amarantin homeworld, it's of little more than academic interest, even after the discovery of a long-hidden, almost perfect city and a colossal statue...

One Thursday lunchtime Earth is unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. For Arthur Dent, who has only just had his house demolished that morning, this is already more than he can cope with. Sadly, however, the weekend has only...

All alone: an idiot boy, a runaway girl, a severely retarded baby, and twin girls with a vocabulary of two words between them. Yet once they are mysteriously drawn together this collection of misfits becomes something very, very different from the rest...

All alone: an idiot boy, a runaway girl, a severely retarded baby, and twin girls with a vocabulary of two words between them. Yet once they are mysteriously drawn together this collection of misfits becomes something very, very different from the rest...

Ned Henry is a time-travelling historian who specialises in the mid-20th century - currently engaged in researching the bombed-out Coventry Cathedral. He's also made so many drops into the past that he's suffering from a dangerously advanced case of...

The iconic science fiction vampire novel, adapted into the film starring Will Smith. The last man on earth is not alone . . .Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth ... but he is not alone. Every other man, woman and child on the planet has...

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...

'Ursula Le Guin was able to reimagine many concepts we take to be natural, shared, and unalterable - gender, utopia, creation, war, family, the city, the country - and reveal the all-too-human constructions at their centre ... Literature will miss her...

Welcome to the Best of the Masterworks: a selection of the finest in science fictionMill Valley, Marin County, California. Dr Miles Bennell has lived there all his life. But one day Miles sees a patient who claims her Uncle isn't himself. He's a...

Trapped in 1877, a historian writes an account of an alternate history of America in which the South won the Civil War.Living in this alternate timeline, he was determined to change events at Gettysburg. When he's offered the chance to return to that...

For a decade Alice Sheldon produced an extraordinary body of work under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr, until her identity was exposed in 1977. HER SMOKE ROSE UP FOREVER presents the finest of these stories and contains the NEBULA AWARD-winning LOVE IS...

Welcome to the strangest, most distinctive future ever imagined by a science fiction writer. An interstellar empire ruled by the mysterious Lords of the Instrumentality, whose access to the drug stroon from the planet Norstrilia confers on them virtual...

Welcome to the strangest, most distinctive future ever imagined by a science fiction writer. An interstellar empire ruled by the mysterious Lords of the Instrumentality, whose access to the drug stroon from the planet Norstrilia confers on them virtual...

Three extraordinary people in some most extraordinary times:It's Dissolution Summer and as the United Kingdom prepares to break up into separate nations, the Counterculturals have gathered for a festival where everything's allowed. Among them is a...

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...