SF Masterworks

One man must make a journey across a once colonised alien planet. Abandoned by man when it was discovered that the species there were actually sentient, the planet is now a place of mystery. A mystery that obsesses the lone traveller Gundersen and takes...

John Wainwright is a freak, a human mutation with an extraordinary intelligence which is both awesome and frightening to behold. Ordinary humans are mere playthings to him. And Odd John has a plan to create a new order on Earth, a new supernormal species...

A cynical and compelling tale of politics, exploitation and colonisation on another planetThe discovery of another habitable world might spell salvation to the three bitterly competing power blocs of the resource-starved 21st century; but when their...

The world ended. People survived.Per Hiero Desteen was a priest, a telepath-and a highly trained killer. Five thousand years after the apocalyptic event known only as The Death, Hiero is tasked with finding the secrets of the old world, which could...

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...

One minute, down-and-out actor Lorenzo Smythe was - as usual - in a bar, drinking away his troubles as he watched his career go down the tubes. Then a space pilot bought him a drink, and the next thing Smythe knew, he was shanghaied to Mars.Suddenly he...

Thomas Jerome Newton is an extraterrestrial from the planet Anthea, which has been devastated by a series of nuclear wars, and whose inhabitants are twice as intelligent as human beings. When he lands on Earth - in Kentucky, disguised as a human -...

'The historians can't seem to settle whether to call this one 'The Third Space War' (or the fourth), or whether 'The First Interstellar War' fits it better. We just call it 'The Bug War'. Everything up to then and still later were 'incidents',...

Welcome to the Best of the Masterworks: a selection of the finest in science fiction-What does it mean to be human when you're part of the machine? Synners are synthesizers - not machines, but people. They take images from the brains of performers, and...

A landmark book in the fields of science fiction and feminism.Four women living in parallel worlds, each with a different gender landscape. When they begin to travel to each other's worlds each woman's preconceptions on gender and what it means to be a...

This is the story of the world after it ended . . . Five thousand years after the apocalyptic event known as The Death, Per Hiero Desteen - priest, telepath, assassin - has been working to find ancient information to save his people.The Brotherhood of...

What could be more commonplace than grass, or a world covered over all its surface with a wind-whipped ocean of grass? But the planet Grass conceals horrifying secrets within its endless pastures. And as an incurable plague attacks all inhabited planets...

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...

Frank Herbert's classic SF tale of an insect menace threatening the USAFirst published in 1973, Frank Herbert's vivid imagination and brilliant view of nature and ecology have never been more evident than in this classic of science fiction.America is a...

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...

If your planet has been destroyed to make way for a new hyperspace bypass, your best friend turns out to be from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse (and not Guilford, as you'd thought), and you find yourself in the company of a...

Fourteen people arrive on the strange planet of Delmak-O; they have nothing in common other than a desire to make a fresh start. And they have no idea why they are there and no way of escaping. And then the first murder takes place ...'Has been described...

Sirius is Thomas Trelone's great experiment - a huge, handsome dog with the brain and intelligence of a human being. Raised and educated in Trelone's own family alongside Plaxy, his youngest daughter, Sirius is a truly remarkable and gifted creature. His...

Listed by the Guardian as one of the top 100 science fiction books of the 21st century.On the barren surface of an asteroid, located deep in the galaxy beneath the unbearable light of the Kefahuchi Tract, lie three objects: an abandoned spacecraft, a...

Four students discover a manuscript, The Book of Skulls, which reveals the existence of a sect, now living in the Arizona desert, whose members can offer immortality to those who can complete its initiation rite.To their surprise, they discover that the...

'I am Zhang, alone with my light, and in that light I think for a moment that I am free.' Imagine a world where Chinese Marxism has vanquished the values of capitalism and Lenin is the prophet of choice. A cybernetic world where the new charioteers...

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...

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...

The balance of galactic power in the 31st century revolves around Illyrion, the most precious energy source in the universe. Captain Lorq van Ray's varied and exotic crew know their mission is dangerous, but they have no idea of Lorq's secret obsession:...

Merlin is a Prince of Chaos and Amber, Corwin's son and heir. He has grown up knowing that his legacy is to one day follow in his father's footsteps, live up to his father's legend. When Corwin goes missing, that day comes far sooner than he could ever...

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...

In the jungles of Guatemala, David Mingolla is struggling to survive amongst the rotting vegetation and his despairing fellow foot soldiers. He knows he is nothing but an expendable pawn in an endless war. On R & R a few miles away from the warzone he...

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...

While on a boating holiday, Scott Carey is exposed to a cloud of radioactive spray. A few weeks later, following a series of medical examinations, he can no longer deny the extraordinary truth. Not only is he losing weight, he is also shorter than he was...

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...

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...

The award-winning account of a man changed beyond all recognition so that he can be part of a bold experiment to live on Mars Ill luck made Roger Torraway the subject of the Man Plus Programme, but it was deliberate biological engineering which turned...

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...

Joshua Kampa is torn between two worlds - the Early Pleistocene Africa of his dreams and the 20th-century reality of his waking life. These worlds are transposed when a government experiment sends him over a million years back in time. Here, John builds...

Far in the future, the craftsmen of the distant planet Halma create goods which are the wonder of the galaxy. But they know little of this. Their society is harshly regimented, its religion austere and unforgiving, and primitive - to maintain standards,...

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...

Mars is a desolate world. Largely forgotten by Earth, the planet remains helpless in the stranglehold of Arnie Kott, who as boss of the plumber's union has a monopoly over the vital water supply.Arnie Kott is obsessed by the past; the native Bleekmen,...

Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez S.J., is a part of a four man scientific commission to the planet Lithia, there to study a harmonious society of aliens living on a planets which is a biologist's paradise. He soon finds himself troubled: how can these perfect...

Colonists from the entire solar system converge on the mother planet for the 2276 celebrations.Among the influx of humanity is Duncan Makenzie, scientist-administrator from the underground colony of Titan, one of the outer moons of Saturn. Makenzie is...

Set in the twenty-second century after the repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment, the novel reveals a world where women are once again property, denied civil rights, and banned from public life. In this world, Earth's wealth relies on interplanetary...