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Third in a powerful trilogy that examines Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics—a challenge welcomed and sanctioned by Isaac Asimov, and written with his cooperation.
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Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
World War Terminus had left the Earth devastated. Through its ruins, bounty hunter Rick Deckard stalked, in search of the renegade replicants who were his prey. When he wasn't 'retiring' them with his laser weapon, he dreamed of owning a live animal -- the ultimate status symbol in a world all but bereft of animal life. Then Rick got his chance: the assignment to kill six Nexus-6 targets, for a huge reward. But in Deckard's world things were never that simple, and his assignment quickly turned into a nightmare kaleidoscope of subterfuge and deceit -- and the threat of death for the hunter rather than the hunted...
Roger MacBride Allen - Isaac Asimov's Inferno
In a Universe protected by the Three Laws of Robotics, humans are safe... When a key politician is murdered, suspicion falls on Caliban... the only robot without guilt or conscience, with no need to obey or respect humanity... a robot without the Three Laws. But the stakes go deeper than one man's life. Caliban is challenging long-held ideas of a robot's place in society. Will he lead his New Law robots in a rebellion that threatens all of humanity?
Kim Stanley Robinson - Blue Mars
The red planet is red no longer, as Mars has become a perfectly inhabitable world. But while Mars flourishes, Earth is threatened by overpopulation and ecological disaster. Soon people look to Mars as a refuge, initiating a possible interplanetary conflict, as well as political strife between the Reds, who wish to preserve the planet in its desert state, and the Green "terraformers". The ultimate fate of Earth, as well as the possibility of new explorations into the solar system, stand in the balance.
Philip K. Dick - Blade Runner
It was January 2021, and Rick Deckard had a license to kill.
Somewhere among the hordes of humans out there, lurked several rogue androids. Deckard's assignment--find them and then..."retire" them. Trouble was, the androids all looked exactly like humans, and they didn't want to be found!
Isaac Asimov - The Robots of Dawn
A puzzling case of roboticide sends New York Detective Elijah Baley on an intense search for a murderer. Armed with his own instincts, his quirky logic, and the immutable Three Laws of Robotics, Baley is determined to solve the case. But can anything prepare a simple Earthman for the psychological complexities of a world where a beautiful woman can easily have fallen in love with an all-too-human robot...?
Ray Bradbury - A Medicine For Melancholy
Ray Bradbury is a painter who uses words rather than brushes for he created lasting visual images that, once observed, are impossible to forget. Sinister mushrooms growing in a dank cellar. A family's first glimpse at Martians. A wonderful white vanilla ice cream summer suit that changes everyone who wears it. A great artist drawing in the sand on the beach. A clunky contraption made out of household implements to help some kids play a game called Invasion. The most marvelous Christmas display a little boy ever saw. All those images and many more are inside this book, a new trade edition of thirty one of Bradbury's most arresting tales timeless short fiction that ranges from the farthest reaches of space to the innermost stirrings of the heart. Ray Bradbury is known worldwide as one of the century's great men of imagination.
Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon
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 tranformation preceded his, fades and dies, and Charlie has to face the possibility that his salvation was only temporary.
Suzanne Collins - Catching Fire
This is the second book in the ground-breaking "Hunger Games" trilogy. After winning the brutal Hunger Games, Katniss and Peeta return to their district, hoping for a peaceful future. But their victory has caused rebellion to break out ...and the Capitol has decided that someone must pay. As Katniss and Peeta are forced to visit the districts on the Capitol's Victory Tour, the stakes are higher than ever. Unless they can convince the world that they are still lost in their love for each other, the consequences will be horrifying. Then comes the cruelest twist: the contestants for the next Hunger Games are announced, and Katniss and Peeta are forced into the arena once more.
Suzanne Collins - The Hunger Games
First in the ground-breaking HUNGER GAMES trilogy. Set in a dark vision of the near future, a terrifying reality TV show is taking place. Twelve boys and twelve girls are forced to appear in a lve event called The Hunger Games. There is only one rule: kill or be killed. When sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen steps forwar to take her younger sister's place in the games, she sees it as a death sentence. But Katniss has been close to death before. Fo her, survival is second nature.
Orson Scott Card - Maps in a Mirror
_Maps in a Mirror_ brings together nearly all of Orson Scott Card's short fiction written between 1977 and 1990. For those readers who have followed this remarkable talent since the beginning, here are all those amazing stories gathered together in one place, with some extra surprises as well.
For the hundreds of thousands who are newly come to Card, here is chance to experience the wonder of a writer so versatile that he can handle everything from traditional narrative poetry to modern experimental fiction with equal ease and grace. The brilliant story-telling of the Alvin Maker books is no accident; the breathless excitement evoked by the Ender books is not a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
In this enormous volume are forty-six stories, plus ten long, intensely personal essays, unique to this volume. In them the author reveals some of his reasons and motivations for writing, with a good deal of autobiography into the bargain.
Philip K. Dick - Ray Faraday Nelson - The Ganymede Takeover
First published, in paperback, in 1967, this is one of two novels Dick wrote in collaboration. Stylistically, it is typical Dick, but it lacks the gravity and conviction of most of his other novels. It's set in the 21st century when the Earth has been conquered by a race of alien, telepathic, wormlike creatures, one of whom, Mekkis, is attracted to the theories of the psychologist Rudolph Balkani. Although ostensibly a ``wik'' or worm-kisser (i.e., one who freely serves the Ganymedians), Balkani is a complex man whose allegiances and motives are not easily discerned; indeed, Mekkis's attraction to his ideas leads to the worms' undoing. Other characters include the musicologist Joan Hiashi, whom Balkani unsuccessfully pursues, and Percy X, the black revolutionary who represents the ony overt resistance to the worms. Characterizations are unusually weak for Dick, and the ultimate instrument of the alien downfall--Dr. Balkani's ``hell-machine,'' which distorts reality--cannot summon up in the reader the ontological confusion and terror that drives Dick's best work.
Roger MacBride Allen - Isaac Asimov's Caliban
Among Asimov's contributions to science fiction are the Three Laws of Robotics, ethics built into every robot to ensure it never hurts humans. In 1990, Asimov developed the idea of a robot subject to revised Laws - Caliban. This book follows the possible adventures of such a robot.
Connie Willis - Doomsday Book
A woman travels back through time to complete her doctoral thesis - but due to an accident, she lands in the middle of the Black Plague of 1348. The Oxford she left behind is laid low by a flu released from the grave of the knight from the era she's visiting.
Ray Bradbury - The Toynbee Convector
A superlative new collection of twenty-two stories by the author of "The Martian Chronicles" includes the continuating saga of H.G. Well's time traveller and his Toynbee Convector, a ghost on the Orient Express, and a bored man who creates his own genuine Egyptian mummy
Philip K. Dick - The Simulacra
A 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, does it? Welcome to the world of Dr. Superb, the sole remaining psychotherapist.
Philip K. Dick tells a story of desperate love, lethal body odour and an attempted fascistic takeover of the USA and shows that there is always another layer of conspiracy beneath the one we see.
Arthur C. Clarke - Frederik Pohl - The Last Theorem
When Ranjit Subramanian, a Sri Lankan with a special gift for numbers, writes a three-page proof of the coveted “Last Theorem,” which French mathematician Pierre de Fermat claimed to have discovered (but never recorded) in 1637, Ranjit’s achievement is hailed as a work of genius, bringing him fame and fortune. But it also brings him to the attention of the National Security Agency and a shadowy United Nations outfit called Pax per Fidem–or Peace Through Transparency–whose secretive workings belie its name. Suddenly Ranjit–along with his family–finds himself swept up in world-shaking events, his genius for abstract mathematical thought put to uses that are both concrete and potentially deadly.
Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination
'EDUCATION: NONE. SKILLS: NONE. MERITS: NONE RECOMMENDATIONS: NONE'
Such is the official verdict on Gully Foyle, unskilled space crewman. But Gully has managed to survive for 170 days in the airless purgatory of deep space after the wreck of his ship, and has escaped to Earth carrying a murderous grudge and a secret that could change the course of history.
The novel which in large part inspired both the cyberpunk movement of the 1980s and the science fiction New Wave of the 1960s, THE STARS MY DESTINATION has an unrivalled claim to be the most influential sf book of all time.
Connie Willis - Passage
A tunnel, a light, a door. And beyond it ... the unimaginable.
Dr. Joanna Lander is a psychologist specializing in near-death experiences. She is about to get help from a new doctor with the power to give her the chance to get as close to death as anyone can.
A brilliant young neurologist, Dr. Richard Wright has come up with a way to manufacture the near-death experience using a psychoactive drug. Joanna’s first NDE is as fascinating as she imagined — so astounding that she knows she must go back, if only to find out why that place is so hauntingly familiar.
But each time Joanna goes under, her sense of dread begins to grow, because part of her already knows why the experience is so familiar, and why she has every reason to be afraid.
Yet just when Joanna thinks she understands, she’s in for the biggest surprise of all — a shattering scenario that will keep you feverishly reading until the final climactic page.
Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan
When Winston Niles Rumfoord flies his spaceship into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum he is converted into pure energy and only materializes when his waveforms intercept Earth or some other planet. As a result, he only gets home to Newport, Rhode Island, once every fifty-nine days and then only for an hour. But at least, as a consolation, he now knows everything that has ever happened and everything that ever will be. He knows, for instance, that his wife is going to Mars to mate with Malachi Constant, the richest man in the world. He also knows that on Titan - one of Saturn's moons - is an alien from the planet Tralfamadore, who has been waiting 200,000 years for a spare part for his grounded spacecraft...
Larry Niven - Jerry Pournelle - The Moat Around Murcheson's Eye
Humankind has spent years agonizing over the deadly threat posed by the only aliens they have ever encountered, the Moties. A race divided into distinct biological forms, each serving a different function. Now the Moties are isolated - until the empire is threatened. By the authors of "Footfall".
