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A veteran of the Forever War, William Mandella lives on the snow-covered planet set aside for his kind, supporting his family by ice-fishing and teaching physics. But now Mandella’s life has become obsolete.
The denizens of Earth have evolved into a group consciousness and taken control of his new home – keeping its independent human inhabitants alive for the sake of their diverse gene pool. But that’s not how Mandella and his fellow soldiers want to exist. So, in desperation, he rallies the humans to hijack a spaceship and take to the stars, to begin humanity anew…
Then something goes wrong. The crew is forced to abandon ship – and return home in suspended animation twenty-five years later. But the planet has aged centuries during their voyage – and the crew wonders what new world awaits their arrival…
Kapcsolódó könyvek
China Miéville - The Scar
A human cargo bound for servitude in exile...
A pirate city hauled across the oceans...
A hidden miracle about be revealed...
This is the story of a prisoner's journey. The search for the island of a forgotten people, for the most astonishing beast in the seas, and ultimately for a fabled place - a massive wound in reality, a source of unthinkable power and danger.
Dan Simmons - Endymion (angol)
Two hundred and seventy-four years after the fall of the WorldWeb in _Fall of Hyperion,_ Raoul Endymion is sent on a quest. Retrieving Aenea from the Sphinx before the Church troops reach her is only the beginning. With help from a blue-skinned android named A. Bettik, Raoul and Aenea travel the river Tethys, pursued by Father Captain Frederico DeSoya, an influential warrior-priest and his troops. The Shrike continues to make enigmatic appearances, and while many questions were raised in _Hyperion_ and _Fall of Hyperion,_ still more are raised here. Raoul's quest will continue.
Isaac Asimov - Buy Jupiter and Other Stories
From backyard miracles to cosmic conundrums, enter the incredible world of Isaac Asimov. Spanning twenty-three years of Asimov's amazing career, these stories display to the full the exhilarating power of one of science fiction's most astonishing writers. Each tale is accompanied by Asimov's own intriguing account of how and why it came to be written.
Barbara Hambly - Crossroad
The crew of the Nautilus, a battered Starship of mysterious origin, is beamed aboard the Starship Enterprise. The group claims they are freedom fighters from the future working to save the Federation from the Consilium, a group of corrupt power-seekers.
The Nautilus crew members then seize control of the U.S.S. Enterprise, and a Starship from the future arrives to arrest the renegades. Kirk must separate his true allies from those who wish to destroy the Federation.
Michael Jan Friedman - Double, Double
On a routine exploratory mission, the Starship U.S.S. Hood picks up a distress signal from a research expedition thought lost long ago -- the expedition of Dr. Roger Korby, one of the centuries' greatest scientific minds. Korby himself is dead, it seems, but his colleagues have made a most incredible discover -- a discovery they insist the Hood's captain see for himself. Reluctantly, the captain agrees to beam down...
Meanwhile, the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise™ begins long-overdue shore leave on Tranquility Seven. James T. Kirk is looking forward to a few days of rest and relaxation....until what seems like a bizarre case of mistaken identity plunges Kirk into a whirlpool of mayhem and murder.
And puts an inhuman stranger with his memories and anilities in command of the Enterprise.
Margaret Wander Bonanno - Probe
Ten years have passed since Captain Kirk and the "EnterpriseTM crew brought back hump-backed whales from the twentieth century to communicate with the mysterious Probe which threatened Earth. The Probe is returning to Earth and has plotted its course, and the Enterprise must continue to delve into the mystery of its language, and its cosmic purpose to save Earth once again.
Douglas Adams - The Salmon of Doubt
he Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time is a posthumous collection of previously unpublished material by Douglas Adams. It consists largely of essays about technology and life experiences, but its major selling point is the inclusion of the incomplete novel on which Adams was working at the time of his death, The Salmon of Doubt (from which the collection gets its title, a reference to the Celtic myth of the Salmon of Wisdom). English editions of the book were published in the USA and UK in May 2002, exactly one year after the author's death.
Arthur C. Clarke - The Songs of Distant Earth
Just a few islands in a planetwide ocean, Thalassa was a veritable paradise-home to one of the small colonies founded centuries before by robot Mother Ships when the Sun had gone nova and mankind had fled Earth. Mesmerized by the beauty of Thalassa and overwhelmed by its vast resources, the colonists lived an idyllic existence, unaware of the monumental evolutionary event slowly taking place beneath their seas... Then the Magellan arrived in orbit carrying one million refugees from the last, mad days on Earth. And suddenly uncertainty and change had come to the placid paradise that was Thalassa.
Mary Doria Russell - The Sparrow
In 2019, humanity finally finds proof of extraterrestrial life when a listening post in Puerto Rico picks up exquisite singing from a planet which will come to be known as Rakhat. While United Nations diplomats endlessly debate a possible first contact mission, the Society of Jesus quietly organizes an eight-person scientific expedition of its own. What the Jesuits find is a world so beyond comprehension that it will lead them to question the meaning of being "human." When the lone survivor of the expedition, Emilio Sandoz, returns to Earth in 2059, he will try to explain what went wrong... Words like "provocative" and "compelling" will come to mind as you read this shocking novel about first contact with a race that creates music akin to both poetry and prayer.
Arthur C. Clarke - The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke, (ISBN 0-575-07065-X), first published in 2001, is a collection of almost every science fiction story shorter than novel length that Arthur C. Clarke has ever published: more than 100 in all arranged in order of publication, from "Travel by Wire!" in 1937 through to "Improving the Neighbourhood" in 1999. The story "Improving The Neighbourhood" has the distinction of being the first fiction published in the journal Nature.
Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
A gripping vision of our society radically overturned by a theocratic revolution, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale has become one of the most powerful and most widely read novels of our time.
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, serving in the household of the enigmatic Commander and his bitter wife. She may go out once a day to markets whose signs are now pictures because women are not allowed to read. She must pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, for in a time of declining birthrates her value lies in her fertility, and failure means exile to the dangerously polluted Colonies. Offred can remember a time when she lived with her husband and daughter and had a job, before she lost even her own name. Now she navigates the intimate secrets of those who control her every move, risking her life in breaking the rules.
Like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Handmaid's Tale has endured not only as a literary landmark but as a warning of a possible future that is still chillingly relevant.
Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game
The human race faces annihilation. An alien threat is on the horizon, ready to strike. And if humanity is to be defended, the government must create the greatest military commander in history. The brilliant young Ender Wiggin is their last hope. But first he must survive the rigours of a brutal military training program - to prove that he can be the leader of all leaders. A saviour for mankind must be produced, through whatever means possible. But are they creating a hero or a monster? This is the multiple award-winning classic ENDER'S GAME - a groundbreaking tale of war, strategy and survival.
Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus
Ingram. A small, exclusive college in upstate New York is nestled along the frozen shores of Lake Mohiga . . . and directly across from a maximum-security prison. The two institutions manage to coexist peacefully, until 10,000 prisoners break out and head directly for the college.
Vernor Vinge - A Deepness in the Sky
After thousands of years of searching, humans stand on the verge of first contact with an alien race. Two human groups: The Qeng Ho, a culture of free, innovative traders, and the Emergents, a ruthless society based on the technological enslavement of minds.
The group that opens trade with the aliens will reap unimaginable riches. But first, both groups must wait at the aliens' very doorstep for their strange star to relight and for the alien planet to reawaken, as it does every two hundred and fifty years...
Amidst terrible treachery, the Qeng Ho must fight for their freedom and for the lives of the unsuspecting innocents on the planet below, while the aliens themselves play a role unsuspected by the Qeng Ho and Emergents alike.
Edgar Allan Poe - Meghökkentő történetek / Unexpected Stories
Edgar Allan Poe a XIX. század elején megerősödő amerikai irodalom első klasszikus alakja. Novellái - ő a modern amerikai novella megteremtője - bármennyire kalandos is legyen a cselekményük, rövid, zárt történetek. Szerkezetük racionális, céltudatos. Lényegük a csattanó, a meghökkentés. Az érdekfeszítő cselekmény minden fordulata mérnöki pontossággal e felé halad, minden elem e legvégső hatásnak van alávetve. Az író a tudatosság esztétikáját vallja, csapongó, meghökkentő novelláiban is fokozott jelentőséget nyer az ész munkája.
Poe hosszú ideje ismert és népszerű hazánkban, műveit már a múlt század utolsó harmadában sokan fordították, de igazi prózaírói sikerét Babits Mihály és Pásztor Árpád klasszikussá vált fordításkötetei hozták meg. Az író művészetében a fantasztikum és a ráció különös keveréke vonzotta őket.
A kétnyelvű kötetben elsősorban a prózában is költői Poe-val találkozunk, a vizionárius, romantikus művésszel, kísérteties tájak és helyzetek lázas álmodójával. Személyes lidércnyomások elevenednek meg az elbeszélésekben: az elevenen eltemetett tetszhalott (Az elsietett temetés), az alkoholmámorban elkövetett esztelen-oktalan gyilkosság (A perverzió démona), a végzet elől való menekülés képtelensége (Az Usher-ház vége), de megjelenik a komikus-fantasztikum (Az elveszett lélegzet) és a szorongásos álom talán legmeghökkentőbb példája: A vörös halál álarca. Az elbeszélések maradandó hatásának titka, hogy Poe nem elsősorban a hátborzongató elemek mesteri elrendezésével és fokozásával keresi a hatást, hanem a költői eszközökkel megteremtett atmoszférával.
Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep
A Fire upon the Deep is the big, breakout book that fulfills the promise of Vinge's career to date: a gripping tale of galactic war told on a cosmic scale.
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 technology can function. Nobody knows what strange force partitioned space into these "regions of thought," but when the warring Straumli realm use an ancient Transcendent artifact as a weapon, they unwittingly unleash an awesome power that destroys thousands of worlds and enslaves all natural and artificial intelligence.
Fleeing the threat, a family of scientists, including two children, are taken captive by the Tines, an alien race with a harsh medieval culture, and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle. A rescue mission, not entirely composed of humans, must rescue the children-and a secret that may save the rest of interstellar civilization.
Joe Haldeman - Camouflage
Two aliens have wandered Earth for centuries. The Changeling has survived by adapting the forms of many different organisms. The Chameleon destroys anything or anyone that threatens it.
Now, a sunken relic that holds the key to their origins calls to them to take them home--but the Chameleon has decided there's only room for one.
Arthur C. Clarke - More Than One Universe
The stories originally appeared in the periodicals Playboy, Vogue, Dude, New Worlds, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Dundee Sunday Telegraph, Analog, Amazing Stories, Galaxy Science Fiction, Infinity Science Fiction, London Evening News, Startling Stories, Venture Science Fiction Magazine, If, Boys' Life, This Week, Bizarre! Mystery Magazine, Escapade, IASFM, Astounding, King's College Review, Dynamic Science Fiction, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Satellite, Argosy and Ten Story Fantasy as well as the anthologies Star Science Fiction Stories No.1 edited by Frederik Pohl, Time to Come edited by August Derleth, Infinity #2 edited by Robert Hoskins and The Farthest Reaches, edited by Joseph Elder.
Stephen Baxter - Manifold: Space
Few writers can combine mind bending scientific speculation with breathtaking adventure like award-winning author Stephen Baxter. In Manifold: Time, Baxter told a thrilling story in which the fate of the universe hung in the balance. It followed visionary Reid Malenfant, a man who willed humankind to explore space, and ultimately was faced with a harrowing choice between a past that never was and a future that must never be. Now, in Manifold: Space, Reid Malenfant is back. But this is a different Malenfant. And a different universe.
Fueled by an insatiable curiosity, Malenfant ventures to the far edge of the solar system, where he discovers a strange artifact left behind by an alien civilization: A gateway that functions as a kind of quantum transporter, allowing virtually instantaneous travel over the vast distances of interstellar space. What lies on the other side of the gateway? Malenfant decides to find out.
Yet as Malenfant embarks on a grand tour of the universe, back on Earth the Japanese scientist Nemoto fears her worst nightmares are coming true. Startling and chilling discoveries reveal that the Moon, Mars, Venus, even the Jovian moons, once thrived with life . . . life that was snuffed out in the distant past by starfaring races. Snuffed out not just once but many times, in cycles of birth and destruction as plain as they are inexplicable.
One fact is clear. The recent, Earthbound arrival of the Gaijin portend the first alien visitors in a new cycle. And behind them, looms another--a species with an ominous predilection for blowing up suns. In desperation, Nemoto searches for a means of survival. Or failing that, revenge.
Meanwhile Malenfant, having traveled millions of light years, is once more faced with a choice both impossible and necessary--a choice that will push him beyond terror, beyond sanity, beyond humanity itself.
Arthur C. Clarke - Childhood's End
The Overlords appeared suddenly over every city--intellectually, technologically, and militarily superior to humankind. Benevolent, they made few demands: unify earth, eliminate poverty, and end war. With little rebellion, humankind agreed, and a golden age began.
But at what cost? With the advent of peace, man ceases to strive for creative greatness, and a malaise settles over the human race. To those who resist, it becomes evident that the Overlords have an agenda of their own. As civilization approaches the crossroads, will the Overlords spell the end for humankind . . . or the beginning?
