Author: Adam Roberts Publisher: Gollancz ISBN: 0575087803 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 325
Book Description
Russia, 1946, the Nazis recently defeated. Stalin gathers half a dozen of the top Soviet science fiction authors in a dacha in the countryside somewhere. Convinced that the defeat of America is only a few years away, and equally convinced that the Soviet Union needs a massive external threat to hold it together, to give it purpose and direction, he tells the writers: 'I want you to concoct a story about aliens poised to invade earth ... I want it to be massively detailed, and completely believable. If you need props and evidence to back it up, then we can create them. But when America is defeated, your story must be so convincing that the whole population of Soviet Russia believes in it - the population of the whole world!' The little group of writers gets down to the task and spends months working on it. But then new orders come from Moscow: they are told to drop the project; Stalin has changed his mind; forget everything about it. So they do. They get on with their lives in their various ways; some of them survive the remainder of Stalin's rule, the changes of the 50s and 60s. And then, in the aftermath of Chernobyl, the survivors gather again, because something strange has started to happen. The story they invented in 1946 is starting to come true ... A typically mind-blowing SF novel from one of the genre's literary stars.
Author: Adam Roberts Publisher: Gollancz ISBN: 0575127651 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 443
Book Description
WINNER OF THE BSFA AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL Jack Glass is the murderer. We know this from the start. Yet as this extraordinary novel tells the story of three murders committed by Glass the reader will be surprised to find out that it was Glass who was the killer and how he did it. And by the end of the book our sympathies for the killer are fully engaged. Riffing on the tropes of crime fiction (the country house murder, the locked room mystery) and imbued with the feel of golden age SF, JACK GLASS is another bravura performance from Roberts. Whatever games he plays with the genre, whatever questions he asks of the reader, Roberts never loses sight of the need to entertain and JACK GLASS has some wonderfully gruesome moments, is built around three gripping HowDunnits and comes with liberal doses of sly humour. Roberts invites us to have fun and tricks us into thinking about both crime and SF via a beautifully structured novel set in a society whose depiction challanges notions of crime, punishment, power and freedom. It is an extraordinary novel.
Author: Jasper Fforde Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 1101159650 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 419
Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of the Thursday Next series comes a “laugh-out-loud funny” (Los Angeles Times) and “brilliantly original” (Booklist, starred review) novel of a man attempting to navigate a color-coded world. “A rich brew of dystopic fantasy and deadpan goofiness.”—The Washington Post Welcome to Chromatacia, where the Colortocracy rules society through a social hierarchy based on one’s limited color perception. In this world, you are what you can see. Eddie Russet wants to move up. When he and his father relocate to the backwater village of East Carmine, his carefully cultivated plans to leverage his better-than-average red perception and marry into a powerful family are quickly upended. Eddie must content with lethal swans, sneaky Yellows, inviolable rules, an enforced marriage to the hideous Violet deMauve, and a risky friendship with an intriguing Grey named Jane who shows Eddie that the apparent peace of his world is as much an illusion as color itself. Will Eddie be able to tread the fine line between total conformity—accepting the path, partner, and career delineated by his hue—and his instinctive curiosity that is bound to get him into trouble?
Author: Charles Yu Publisher: Knopf ISBN: 0307379884 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
This enhanced eBook includes video, audio, photographic, and linked content, as well as a bonus short story. Hear TAMMY talk. Learn the origins of Minor Universe 31. See the TM-31. Take a trip in it. Photos and illustrations appear as hyperlinked endnotes. Video and audio are embedded directly in text. *Video and audio may not play on all readers. Check your user manual for details. National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award winner Charles Yu delivers his debut novel, a razor-sharp, ridiculously funny, and utterly touching story of a son searching for his father . . . through quantum space–time. Minor Universe 31 is a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction, where paradox fluctuates like the stock market, lonely sexbots beckon failed protagonists, and time travel is serious business. Every day, people get into time machines and try to do the one thing they should never do: change the past. That’s where Charles Yu, time travel technician—part counselor, part gadget repair man—steps in. He helps save people from themselves. Literally. When he’s not taking client calls or consoling his boss, Phil, who could really use an upgrade, Yu visits his mother (stuck in a one-hour cycle of time, she makes dinner over and over and over) and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. Accompanied by TAMMY, an operating system with low self-esteem, and Ed, a nonexistent but ontologically valid dog, Yu sets out, and back, and beyond, in order to find the one day where he and his father can meet in memory. He learns that the key may be found in a book he got from his future self. It’s called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and he’s the author. And somewhere inside it is the information that could help him—in fact it may even save his life. Wildly new and adventurous, Yu’s debut is certain to send shock waves of wonder through literary space–time.
Author: Adam Roberts Publisher: Gollancz ISBN: 0575127740 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 394
Book Description
Adam Roberts turns his attention to answering the Fermi Paradox with a taut and claustrophobic tale that echoes John Carpenters' The Thing. Two men while away the days in an Antarctic research station. Tensions between them build as they argue over a love-letter one of them has received. One is practical and open. The other surly, superior and obsessed with reading one book - by the philosopher Kant. As a storm brews and they lose contact with the outside world they debate Kant, reality and the emptiness of the universe. The come to hate each other, and they learn that they are not alone.
Author: Adam Roberts Publisher: Gollancz ISBN: 0575088745 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 244
Book Description
Adam Roberts' new novel is a terrifying vision of a near future war - a civil war that tears the UK apart as new technologies allow the world's first truly democratic army to take on the British army and wrest control from the powers that be. Taking advances in modern communication and the new eagerness for power from the bottom upwards, Adam Roberts has produced a novel that is at once an exciting war novel and a philosophical examination of war and democracy. It shows one of the UK's most exciting and innovative literary voices working at the height of his powers and investing SF with literary significance that is its due.
Author: Bharti Khurana Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1107690765 Category : Medical Languages : en Pages : 683
Book Description
This book of 85 index cases is organized by clinical presentations that simulate real-life radiology practice in the emergency department. Companion cases spanning the differential diagnoses and spectrum of disease provide hundreds more examples for a fast, focused, effective education we like to call COFFEE (Case-Oriented Fast Focused Effective Education).
Author: Doris Lessing Publisher: HarperPerennial ISBN: 9780006547211 Category : Allegories Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
'The Sirian Experiments' is the third volume in Doris Lessing's celebrated space fiction series, 'Canopus in Argos: Archives'. In this interlinked quintet of novels, she creates a new, extraordinary cosmos where the fate of the Earth is influenced by the rivalries and interactions of three powerful galactic empires, Canopus, Sirius and their enemy, Puttiora. Blending myth, fable and allegory, Doris Lessing's astonishing visionary creation both reflects and redefines the history of our own world from its earliest beginnings to an inevitable, tragic self-destruction. 'The Sirian Experiments' chronicles the origins of our planet, as the three galactic empires fight for control of the human race. The novel charts the gradual moral awakening of its narrator, Ambien II, a 'dry, dutiful, efficient' female Sirian administrator. Witnessing the wanton colonization of land and people, Ambien begins to question her involvement in such insidious experimentati- on, her faith in the possibility of human progress itself growing weaker every day.
Author: Terry McMillan Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0451417038 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 466
Book Description
Trinetta drops off her two young boys with her mother, Betty Jean - and then pulls a disappearing act. BJ is a sassy, pull-no-punches, trademark McMillan matriarch, and she already has her hands full picking up the slack for her other kids, coaching her best friend Tammy through her own tribulations and dealing with two feuding sisters, all while holding down a job as a hotel maid. Who Asked You? raises questions about how we care for one another and how we set limits for those we love when the demands are too great.
Author: Terry Pratchett Publisher: National Geographic Books ISBN: 1804990310 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
NAMED AS ONE OF THE BBC'S 100 MOST INSPIRING NOVELS 'It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination . . .' Somewhere between thought and reality exists the Discworld, a magical world not totally unlike our own. Except for the fact that it travels through space on the shoulders of four giant elephants who in turn stand on the shell of an astronomically huge star turtle, of course. Rincewind is the world's worst wizard who has just been handed a very important job: to look after the world's first tourist, upon whose survival rests the peace and prosperity of the land. Unfortunately, their journey across the Disc includes facing robbers, monsters, mercenaries, and Death himself. And the whole thing's just a game of the gods that might send them over the edge . . . 'If you've never read a Discworld novel, what's the matter with you?' Guardian 'Pratchett uses his other world to hold up a distorting mirror to our own' The Times The Colour of Magic is the first book in the Wizards series, but you can read the Discworld novels in any order.
Author: Adam Roberts
Author: Adam Roberts
Author: Jasper Fforde
Author: Charles Yu
Author: Adam Roberts
Author: Adam Roberts
Author: Bharti Khurana
Author: Doris Lessing
Author: Terry McMillan
Author: Terry Pratchett