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Gollancz Flowers for Algernon (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
Daniel Keyes wrote little SF but is highly regarded for one classic, <I>Flowers for Algernon</I>. As a 1959 novella it won a Hugo award; the 1966 novel-length expansion won a Nebula. The Oscar-winning movie adaptation <I>Charly</I> (1968) also spawned a 1980 Broadway musical.<p>Following his doctor's instructions, engaging simpleton Charlie Gordon tells his own story in a semi-literate progris riports. He dimly wants to better himself but with an IQ of 68 can't even beat the laboratory mouse Algernon at maze-solving:<p><bloc kquote>I dint feel bad because I watched Algernon and I lernd how to finish the amaze even if it takes me along time.<br>I dint know mice were so smart.</blockquote><p >Algernon is extra-clever thanks to an experimental brain operation so far tried only on animals. Charlie eagerly volunteers as the first human subject. After frustrating delays and agonies of concentration, the effects begin to show and the reports steadily improve: Punctuation, is fun! But getting smarter brings cruel shocks, as Charlie realises that his merry friends at the bakery where he sweeps the floor have all along been laughing at him, never with him. The IQ rise continues, taking him steadily past the human average to genius level and beyond, until he's as intellectually alone as the old, foolish Charlie ever was--and now painfully aware of it. Then, ominously, the smart mouse Algernon begins to deteriorate ... <p>A timeless tear-jerker with a terrific emotional impact, <I>Flowers for Algernon</I> is the 25th choice in the millennium SF Masterworks series. --<I>David Langford</I>
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Gollancz The Lathe of Heaven (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
First published in 1971, Ursula Le Guin's SF novel <I>The Lathe of Heaven</I> combines a sheaf of future possibilities--including an early evocation of global warming--with a parable about wishes that has the terrible clarity of a fairytale. <p> The uncomfortably gifted George Orr is desperately drugging himself to avoid sleep, because he knows his dreams can change the world. Psychiatrist Dr Haber begins with good intentions of curing Orr, but when he finds he can shape Orr's effective dreams and force his own wishes into reality, the lure of power is too much. Though Haber believes he wants only to do good, he's also quick to upgrade himself from obscurity in a windowless office to Director of the prestigious Oregon Oneirological Institute. <p> During his flawed attempts to create an earthly paradise, we see that each sweeping change makes matters worse. Let's fix over-population: suddenly there's a new past in which humanity was almost destroyed by plague, billions of people are written out of existence, and Haber drinks a toast--to a better world. Let's fix war: the hapless Orr's dreaming mind can only imagine and create a new threat that unites Earth against outside foes. Let's fix racism: the result is even more painful. As Orr broods: <p> <blockquote>The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.</blockquote> <p> In this mad round of poisoned wishes, it becomes necessary to stop. But power-crazed Haber refuses to stop.... <p> Beautifully written, jolting in its moral force, <I>The Lathe of Heaven</I> is one of Le Guin's finest SF excursions. --<I>David Langford</I>
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Gollancz The Chronicles of Amber: Nine Princes in Amber, The Guns of Avalon, Sign of the Unicorn, The Hand of Oberon, The Courts of Chaos (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
Pages: 772, Paperback, Gollancz
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Gollancz Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
<I>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?</I> is a book that most people think they remember, and almost always get more or less wrong. Ridley Scott's film <I>Blade Runner</I> took a lot from it, and threw a lot away; wonderful in itself, it is a flash thriller where Dick's novel is a sober meditation. As we all know, bounty hunter Rick Deckard is stalking a group of androids returned from space with short life spans and murder on their minds--where Scott's Deckard was Harrison Ford, Dick's is a financially over-stretched municipal employee with bills to pay and a depressed wife. In a world where most animals have died, and pet-keeping is a social duty, he can only afford a robot imitation, unless he gets a big financial break. The genetically warped chickenhead John Isidore has visions of a tomb-world where entropy has finally won. And everyone plugs in to the spiritual agony of Mercer, whose sufferings for the sins of humanity are broadcast several times a day. Prefiguring the religious obsessions of Dick's last novels, this asks dark questions about identity and altruism. After all, is it right to kill the killers just because Mercer says so? --<I>Roz Kaveney</I>
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Gollancz Star Maker (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
Brian Aldiss calls this 1937 SF classic the most wonderful novel I have ever read, and its Millennium Masterworks reissue adds admiring remarks by Jorge Luis Borges, Arthur C Clarke, Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf among others. Olaf Stapledon is better known for <I>Last and First Men</I> (1930), a sweeping history of the future whose early chapters are now embarrassing--but <I>Star Maker</I> leaps straight into a unfurling vision of infinity.<p> Looking at the starry night from an English hillside, the unnamed narrator is snatched from his earthly body and flung through space at impossible acceleration, soon outstripping light. He visits other stars, sees other worlds and alien races, a gallery of SF marvels in documentary rather than story form. (Some of this now seems over-familiar, however fresh and new in 1937: the book drags a little here.) Fellow disembodied intelligences from the galactic community join our hero, sensing something beyond mere matter and energy:<p> <blockquote>The felt presence of the Star Maker remained unintelligible, even though it increasingly illuminated the cosmos, like the splendour of the unseen sun at dawn.</blockquote><p& gt; But the godlike Star Maker is not exactly God, as we see when the scope expands beyond one mere universe to show an endless cycle of creations, many of them being crude and immature products of this experimenter's hand. Further mature creations follow, foreshadowing the Ultimate Cosmos whose crystalline perfection is not comforting but terrifying. <I>Star Maker</I>'s final unsparing evocation of the deep chill of infinity has even been compared to Dante. --<I>David Langford</I>
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Gollancz Pavane (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
Pages: 288, Paperback, Gollancz
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Gollancz Gateway (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
Some SF writers have astonishingly long productive careers. Frederik Pohl started in 1940 and with Cyril Kornbluth co-wrote such classic 1950s satires as <I>The Space Merchants</I>. He won Hugo and Nebula awards for the 1977 <I>Gateway</I>, a major novel combining classic SF excitement with psychological depth and now reissued in Millennium SF Masterworks. The compelling central idea is Gateway itself, an asteroid base stuffed with abandoned interstellar ships built by the mysterious, elusive alien Heechee. These tiny vessels can travel on autopilot to countless unknown destinations. Some human passengers return with fabulous technologies and scientific insights, others empty-handed. Many more die from incomprehensible hazards at journey's end, or from lack of food or air in overlong round-trips. So the atmosphere of the human community at Gateway is uniquely edgy, halfway between a gold-rush town and Death Row. Pohl's unheroic hero Broadhead has both good and bad luck in Heechee craft, emerging with riches and terrible loss. We learn the shattering story of what happened in successive flashbacks, while the engaging, scene-stealing AI psychology software called Sigfrid patiently tries to put Broadhead together again. <I>Gateway</I> is witty and humane, full of clever insights, ingenious asides and claustrophobic drama. Its sequels are less impressive. --<I>David Langford</I>
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Gollancz The Book of Skulls (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
From 1967 to 1972, Robert Silverberg had a burst of extraordinary creativity during which he wrote most of his finest novels. <I>The Book of Skulls</I> (1972) is one of these. Following the cryptic manuscript which provides the title, four young men cross America in search of a forgotten Shangri-La in the cactus-ridden desert north of Phoenix, Arizona--a monastery whose adepts hold the keys of immortality and supposedly follow a tradition handed down since Atlantis.<p>Candidates for eternal life must present themselves at the Skullhouse as a foursome. The brothers are happy to provide training in their secrets (including tantric sex)--but there's a price. The Ninth Mystery in the Book of Skulls states: Two of thee we undertake to admit to our fold. Two must go into darkness. One of those four college students must willingly commit suicide. One is fated to be murdered by his own friends.<p>The narrative shuttles between their viewpoints, each distinct and sharply characterised. Rich, handsome, upper-class Timothy doesn't believe in immortality and is just going along with the gag. Eli the Jewish intellectual believes passionately. Ned, who is openly gay, has his own agenda involving Oliver, a Midwestern farm boy with tortured depths who says the Skullhouse is his only hope. Each in turn undergoes an ordeal of dreadful self-knowledge, after which the impossible choice of who wins and who loses seems natural, even inevitable.<p>Though only marginally SF, <I>The Book of Skulls</I> is a fine, scarifying novel of character. Unforgettable. --<I>David Langford</I>
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Gollancz The Fifth Head Of Cerberus (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
A brothel-keeper's sons discuss genocide and plot murder; a young alien wanderer is pursued by his shadow double; a political prisoner tries to prove his identity, not least to himself. Gene Wolfe's first novel consists of three linked sections, all of them elegant broodings on identity, sameness and strangeness, and all of them set on the vividly evoked colony worlds of Ste. Croix and Ste. Anne, themselves twins delicately poised in mutual orbit. Marsch, victim in the third story, is the apparent author of the second and a casual visitor whose naïve questions precipitate tragedy in the first; the sections dance around each other like the planets of their setting. Clones, down-loaded personalities inhabiting robots, aliens that perhaps mimicked humans so successfully that they forgot who they were, a French culture adopted by its ruthless oppressors--there are a lot of ways to lose yourself, and perhaps the worst is to think that freedom consists of owning other people, that identity is won at the expense of others. It is easy to be impressed by the intellectual games of Wolfe's stunning book, and forget that he is, and always has been, the most intensely moral of SF writers. --<I>Roz Kaveney</I>
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Gollancz Now Wait for Last Year (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
Pages: 240, Paperback, Gollancz
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Gollancz More Than Human (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
Theodore Sturgeon created very human characters with real, intensely observed emotions. <I>More Than Human</I> (1953) is his story of a Gestalt or group mind, not a chilly super-intellect but a painfully assembled band of talented misfits. Lone is telepathic but a literal idiot; Janie, an abused runaway girl, moves things with her mind; Bonnie and Beanie, very young black twins, can teleport; Baby has a computer-like brain and also Downs syndrome.<p> In part one, this crippled Gestalt is movingly brought together from the wreckage of members' past lives. Part two sees Lone replaced by the psychologically damaged Gerry, a murderer at age eight: he must, agonisingly, confront his reasons for killing the benefactor who cherished them as individuals but menaced the all-important group. (The twins can't eat with the white folks; Baby should go to a home...) Part three artfully echoes the previous sections' long healing of Lone's body and Gerry's mind, with the now-grown Janie defiantly rehabilitating an unfortunate victim of Gerry's misused talents. Although the Gestalt is now tremendously powerful, there's still one important factor missing.<p> <blockquote>Does a superman have super-hunger, Gerry? Super-loneliness?</blockq uote><p> Sturgeon wrote beautifully, from the famous opening--The idiot lived in a black and grey world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear.--through moments of great poignancy, and unexpected images, like a starved man seeing marmalade as stained glass. <I>More Than Human</I> won the International Fantasy Award and holds up well today. This is recommended. --<I>David Langford</I>
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Gollancz The Forever War (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
Today we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man. The first line of this 1974 sf war story still grabs hard: <I>The Forever War</I>, winner of both Hugo and Nebula awards, is a fine choice to launch Millennium's SF Masterworks series of classic reissues. Future soldier William Mandella's service in the interstellar Forever War chillingly echoes Vietnam, where Joe Haldeman was severely wounded and won the Purple Heart. Afterwards, many real-life veterans found themselves distanced and alienated from US society: thanks to starflight's time dislocations, Mandella returns from weeks or months of combat duty to an Earth which after centuries of change is no longer his home. Though armed with increasingly futuristic weaponry--laser fingers, nova bombs, stasis fields--the infantry still suffers the long agonising waits, the sudden flurry and horror of battle, the shock of loss in a futile war without glory or glamour. But there's still room for tenderness, and for a satisfying ending as the cruel equations of relativistic time finally work in Mandella's favour. Incidentally, this is the first full British edition. When <I>The Forever War</I> was serialised, the magazine editor vetoed one section; it was omitted from the 1974 novel and is now restored. Highly recommended. --<I>David Langford</I>
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Gollancz Emphyrio (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
Jack Vance began to publish SF in 1945, and his 1950 science- fantasy classic <I>The Dying Earth</I> established him as a master of exotic, ironic style--still the hallmark of his 1990s novels. <I>Emphyrio</I> dates from 1969 and is perhaps his best handling of a favourite theme, a young boy's rebellion against a fossilized and unfair society. Ambroy, on the far world Halma, is a city of fine craft-workers where quiet tyranny wears the smiling face of a welfare state. Social workers with draconian powers enforce strict laws against mechanical duplication (each work of art must be unique), while priests of the absurd state religion go from door to door being loftily officious. Dissatisfied young Ghyl Tarvoke more or less prankishly runs for Mayor of Ambroy under the name of legendary hero Emphyrio--a quixotic act which leads indirectly to his master-craftsman father's tragic punishment and death, to despairing involvement in his wild friends' spaceship hijack plan, and to shocking revelations about Ambroy's real rulers. Legend says that Emphyrio long ago brought peace to Halma by uncovering truth, at the cost of his life. After colourful adventures Ghyl finds himself similarly placed: the truth can redeem the city he loves but means great personal loss. A fine, strangely underrated novel, now reissued as #19 in the Millennium SF Masterworks series. --<I>David Langford</I>
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Gollancz A Scanner Darkly (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
Mind- and reality-bending drugs feature again and again in Philip K. Dick's hugely influential SF stories. <I>A Scanner Darkly</I> is the novel that cuts closest to the bone, drawing on Dick's own experience with illicit chemicals and on his many friends who died through drug misuse. Nevertheless it's blackly farcical, full of comic- surreal conversations between people whose synapses are partly fried, sudden flights of paranoid logic, and bad trips like the one whose victim spends a subjective eternity having all his sins read to him, in shifts, by compound-eyed aliens. (It takes 11,000 years of this to reach the time when as a boy he discovered masturbation.) The antihero Bob Arctor is forced by his double life into warring double personalities: as futuristic narcotics agent Fred, face blurred by a high-tech scrambler, he must spy on and entrap suspected drug dealer Bob Arctor. His disintegration under the influence of the insidious Substance D is genuine tragicomedy. For Arctor there's no way off the addict's downward escalator, but what awaits at the bottom is a kind of redemption--there are more wheels within wheels than we suspected, and his life is not entirely wasted. In a just world this harrowing novel, the 20th selection in the Millennium SF Masterworks, would have matched the sales of <I>Trainspotting</I&g t;. --<I>David Langford</I>
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Gollancz Timescape (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
Pages: 416, Paperback, Gollancz
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Cassell military Martian Time-slip (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
One of the stand-out novels in Philip K. Dick's career of wildly reality-bending SF, <I>Martian Time- Slip</I> (1964) convinces by placing its insanities in a quiet, even domestic context. Here colonised Mars has a flavour of grubby, struggling 1950s suburbia, where money (not to mention water) is in short supply, jobs are insecure, the humour's mostly black, and small tragedies like one minor character's suicide cause far-ranging ripples. The good old human comedy of lies, power-play, real-estate deals and extramarital naughtiness continues as ever--all distorted by the real SF factor, an autistic child's dislocated sense of time. In one memorable scene he sketches the glorious new Martian housing project just being planned ... but as it will look a century later, a decayed slum. So powerful are this boy's visions of nightmare futures that they suck in other people and infect them with sick images of the gubbish worm, an appalling symbol of entropy. Gubbish devours beauty and reduces language itself to meaningless gubble-gubble. The very human and occasionally even likeable villain Arnie Kott plans to exploit this time-twisting ability, whereupon things become very tangled indeed. Another worthy reissue in the Millennium SF Masterworks series, which has yet to pick a single dud. --<I>David Langford</I>
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Gollancz The Demolished Man (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
Alfred Bester's early, pyrotechnic novels gave us two of SF's greatest antiheroes: Gully Foyle in <I>The Stars My Destination</I> (1956) and Ben Reich in <I>The Demolished Man</I> (1953)--which deservedly won the first-ever Hugo Award for Best Novel. Reich is an obsessed monster, haunted by nightmares of a Man With No Face, driven and compelled to murder a rival magnate in a future where crime can't be hidden from police telepaths. The penalty is Demolition: erasure of the criminal's mind. Armed with an ugly weapon holding very special ammo, an insane jingle to mask his thoughts, and the resources of his interplanetary business empire, Reich takes on the world--but, as hinted by clues in chapter 1, he still doesn't understand his own buried motives. It's an impossible problem for police chief Lincoln Powell, one of the hated mind-reading elite--who knows very well whodunnit but can't go to court on telepathic evidence alone. Bester's dazzling 24th century is full of brilliant and dotty conceits, most famously the woven typographic patterns of telepaths' group 'conversations'. A gripping, headlong storyline hurtles from Earth's decadent high society to its lowest dives, with an interlude of mayhem at the Spaceland asteroid resort. The final confrontations are apocalyptic and unforgettable, with major psychological shockers and a moving aftermath. A genuine SF classic. --<I>David Langford</I>
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Gollancz Dr. Bloodmoney (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
Pages: 336, Paperback, Gollancz
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Gollancz The Centauri Device (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
Pages: 208, Paperback, Gollancz
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Gollancz The City and the Stars (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
Pages: 256, Paperback, Gollancz
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Gollancz I Am Legend (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
It seems strange to find a 1954 vampire novel in Millennium's SF Masterworks classic reprints series. <I>I Am Legend</I>, though, was a trailblazing and later much imitated story that reinvented the vampire myth as SF. Without losing the horror, it presents vampirism as a disease whose secrets can be unlocked by scientific tools. The hero Robert Neville, perhaps the last uninfected man on Earth, finds himself in a paranoid nightmare. By night, the bloodthirsty undead of small-town America besiege his barricaded house: their repeated cry Come out, Neville! is a famous SF catchphrase. By day, when they hide in shadow and become comatose, Neville gets out his wooden stakes for an orgy of slaughter. He also discovers pseudoscientific explanations, some rather strained, for vampires' fear of light, vulnerability to stakes though not bullets, loathing of garlic, and so on. What gives the story its uneasy power is the gradual perspective shift which shows that by fighting monsters Neville is himself becoming monstrous--not a vampire but something to terrify vampires and haunt their dreams as a dreadful legend from the bad old days. <I>I Am Legend</I> was altered out of recognition when filmed as <I>The Omega Man</I> (1971), starring Charlton Heston. Avoid the movie; read the book. --<I>David Langford</I>
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Gollancz Stand on Zanzibar (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
Thirty-year old predictions have a habit of going stale, but not John Brunner's startling panoramic view of the year 2010. Even where he got the future we almost inhabit wrong, he understood where things were oing--<I>Conincidence& lt;/I> You weren't paying attention to the other half of what was going on--and his world of Artificial Intelligence, gene-engineering, psychedelics, government-sponsored murder and brainwashing is frighteningly enough like our own. Constantly panning from a few individuals and their stories to the chatter of the media and sudden chunks of crucial text, <I>Stand on Zanzibar</I> was a ground-breaking novel in which Brunner broke wide open the stylistic and narrative conventions of SF, and set the agenda for the next decades. Packed with memorable characters--the computer Shalmaneser, the incestuous racist Clodard family, Presidents and newscasters--and sudden flashes of insight from rebel sociologist Chad Mulligan. <I>Rumour</I> Believe all you hear. Your world may not be a better one than the one the blocks live in but it'll be a sight more vivid. <I>Stand on Zanzibar</I> is a masterpiece of speculative sociological SF, which some have described as a nightmare vision and others as a possible world better than what we are likely to get. --<I>Roz Kaveney</I>
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Gollancz The Fountains of Paradise (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
Originally <I>The Fountains of Paradise</I> was intended to be Arthur C. Clarke's last novel, before the author came out of retirement to pen <I>2010: Odyssey Two</I>. It is also one of his best, and being set in a fictionalised version of Clarke's adopted home of Sri Lanka, one of his most personal. The story is based around the fantastical yet scientifically supportable idea of a Space Elevator, a tower from the earth to geo-stationary orbit, 23 000 miles high. The purpose is to make access to space routine, safe and cheap, and the 22nd century-set novel essentially follows Vannevar Morgan in his quest to complete this monumental project.<p>There are grand set-pieces worthy of the best adventure story, a generous scattering of fascinating speculations and observations and, of course, Clarke's famous eye for the epic vistas inherent in large-scale science fiction:<blockquote>Slow ly his eyes adapted, and in the depths of the mirror a faint red glow began to burn, and spread, and consume the stars. It grew brighter and brighter and flowed beyond the limits of the mirror; now he could see directly, for it extended halfway down the sky. A cage of light, with flickering, moving bars, was descending upon the earth.</blockquote>As much the novel of a poet as that of a scientist, <I>The Fountains of Paradise</I> makes striking use of the sometimes haunting history of Sri Lanka, a device echoed by Kathleen Ann Goonan in her Hawaiian set novel, <I>The Bones of Time</I>. Anyone seriously interested in great science fiction should really have both these books in their collection. --<I>Gary S. Dalkin</I>
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Gollancz Nova (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
Pages: 224, Paperback, Gollancz
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Gollancz Bring the Jubilee (Millennium SF Masterworks S.)
Ward Moore wrote few SF novels, but <I>Bring the Jubilee</I> (1953) instantly became a classic of alternate history. It's the definitive story of a timeline where the South won the American Civil War--known in this different 20th century as the War of Southern Independence. <p> Crippled by war reparations that must be paid in gold, the 26 Northern states are seedy and run-down. Slavery, disguised as corporate indenture, is commonplace for whites as well as blacks. There's no worse insult than Dirty Abolitionist. Life goes on as always, and 1938 New York has a certain provincial charm, swarming with bicycles and horse-drawn carts, while dirigibles float over skyscrapers of 14 or even 15 storeys, and telegraph wires are ... <p> <blockquote>a reminder that no urban family with pretensions to gentility would be without the clacking instrument in the parlor, that every child learned the Morse code before he could read.</blockquote> <p> Newly arrived from the sticks, Hodge Backmaker picks up an education as apprentice to a cynical printer who supports the underground Grand Army (the North hopes to rise again). Eventually our hero, a self-taught historian, joins an eccentric community of scholars and has a turbulent affair with a brilliant female physicist working on the mysteries of Time. <p> She offers Hodge his big research opportunity: to visit 1863 and study the Battle of Gettysburg from a safe vantage point. Fortunately or tragically, the place he chooses is rather crucial ... <p> Moore writes lovingly and movingly of America as it was and might have been. This is number 42 in Gollancz's high-quality SF Masterworks reissue series. --<I>David Langford</I>
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Gollancz Lord of Light (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
In the 1960s, Roger Zelazny dazzled the SF world with what seemed to be inexhaustible talent and inventiveness. <I>Lord of Light</I>, his third novel and the seventh in Millennium's SF Masterworks series, is his finest book: a science fantasy in which the intricate, colourful mechanisms of Hindu religion, of capricious gods and repeated reincarnations, are wittily underpinned by technology. For six days he had offered many kilowatts of prayer, but the static kept him from being heard On High. The gods are a starship crew who subdued a colony world, developed godlike--though often machine-enhanced--powers during successive lifetimes of mind transfer to new, cloned bodies and now lord it over descendants of the ship's mere passengers. Their tyranny is opposed by retired god Sam, who mocks the Celestial City, introduces Buddhism to subvert Hindu dogma, allies himself with the planet's native demons against Heaven, fights pyrotechnic battles with bizarre troops and weapons, plays dirty with politics and poison and dies horribly but won't stay dead.... It's a huge, lumbering, magical story, told largely in flashback, full of wonderfully ornate language (and one unforgivable pun) that builds up the luminous myth of trickster Sam, Lord of Light. Essential SF reading, despite this edition's tiresome typographic errors. --<I>David Langford</I>
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Gollancz Non-stop (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
Pages: 256, Paperback, Gollancz
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