Helliconia Spring

Helliconia Spring PDF Author: Brian W. Aldiss
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1497608295
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 634

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Book Description
The Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author and Science Fiction Grand Master delivers a sweeping epic of a planet suffering deadly conditions of alternating extremes in this Nebula Award finalist Helliconia follows an eccentric orbit around a double-star system with a twenty-six-hundred-year cycle of very long seasons. As spring slowly breaks the brutally long winter, humans emerge from hiding and a long sequence of civilization and growth begins to repeat again, unbeknownst to the participants but watched by an orbiting satellite station, Avernus, created by Earth some centuries ago. Humans free themselves from slavery to the aboriginal Phagors, and religion and science flower and expand. Brian W. Aldiss has, for more than fifty years, continued to challenge readers’ minds with literate, thought-provoking, and inventive fiction. Helliconia Spring’s prescience with regard to climate change is nothing short of extraordinary.

Helliconia Spring

Helliconia Spring PDF Author: Brian W. Aldiss
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1497608295
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 634

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Book Description
The Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author and Science Fiction Grand Master delivers a sweeping epic of a planet suffering deadly conditions of alternating extremes in this Nebula Award finalist Helliconia follows an eccentric orbit around a double-star system with a twenty-six-hundred-year cycle of very long seasons. As spring slowly breaks the brutally long winter, humans emerge from hiding and a long sequence of civilization and growth begins to repeat again, unbeknownst to the participants but watched by an orbiting satellite station, Avernus, created by Earth some centuries ago. Humans free themselves from slavery to the aboriginal Phagors, and religion and science flower and expand. Brian W. Aldiss has, for more than fifty years, continued to challenge readers’ minds with literate, thought-provoking, and inventive fiction. Helliconia Spring’s prescience with regard to climate change is nothing short of extraordinary.

Helliconia Summer

Helliconia Summer PDF Author: Brian W. Aldiss
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1497608325
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 678

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Book Description
The Grand Master of Science Fiction’s “monumental” epic continues as Helliconia nears its larger star—and a strange visitor joins its civilization (The Times, London). A handful of centuries on, Helliconia is close to the larger star in its binary system, and the Phagors have been driven into exile, but conflicting religions and hostility to science keep human civilization fragmented and constantly fighting wars over petty power and fertile land as a plague devastates populations. However, everything changes when a secret visitor from the observer satellite from Earth accepts a slow death in order to visit the planet and spend his time in the sunlight and open air. More than thirty years after the original publication of Helliconia Spring, the first volume of the Helliconia Trilogy, the series is newly available, now with a map, an afterword, and an introduction by the author.

Helliconia Winter

Helliconia Winter PDF Author: Brian W. Aldiss
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 149760835X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
A civilization crumbles as its planet hurtles away from its star in the final chapter of this “monumental” epic from the Grand Master of Science Fiction (The Times, London). After many centuries, the flowering of human civilization has begun to dwindle again and the Great Year slowly progresses while the long, deadly cold winter looms—but a break in the long, repeating cycles of growth and decay may result from the long-ago visit of the Earthman. New legends of the spring and summer have evolved and a new future may be aborning. More than thirty years after the original publication of Helliconia Spring, the first volume of the Helliconia Trilogy, the series is newly available, now with a map, an afterword, and an introduction by the author.

Helliconia

Helliconia PDF Author: Brian Aldiss
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0575086165
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1248

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Book Description
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 inhabitants have been profoundly changed by their experience of this harsh cycle. In orbit above the planet a terran mission struggles to observe and understand the effects on society of such a massive climatic impact. Massive, thoroughly researched, minutely organised, full of action, pulp references and deep drama this is a classic trilogy.

Supertoys Last All Summer Long

Supertoys Last All Summer Long PDF Author: Brian W. Aldiss
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0312280610
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
A collection of science fiction tales, including the story of a robot boy who wants nothing more than to be loved by his parents.

The Helliconia Trilogy

The Helliconia Trilogy PDF Author: Brian W. Aldiss
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504041372
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1683

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Book Description
From a Science Fiction Grand Master: The sweeping epic of a planet veering from one extreme atmosphere to another—and the humans trying to survive on it. Helliconia Spring introduces us to a tumultuous world that follows an eccentric orbit around a double-star system—and the satellite from Earth secretly monitoring it. Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author Brian W. Aldiss then explores the social and religious divisions keeping the planet’s population in conflict even as they’re devastated by plague in Helliconia Summer, and concludes the trilogy with Helliconia Winter, which recounts both the threat of a looming, frigid age of decay and the hope of a new future. The Helliconia Trilogy is both a riveting story and a thought-provoking examination of how our destinies are shaped by the environment around us. Aldiss’s study of fields from astronomy to climatology to geobiology endow all three novels with rich details of the planet Helliconia. This riveting, century-spanning saga is a timely exploration of what climate change can mean for our own planet. “Brian Aldiss’s towering imagination places his Helliconia Trilogy far above standard science fiction” (Daily Mail).

Finches of Mars

Finches of Mars PDF Author: Brian W. Aldiss
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504002121
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Colonists on Mars fight to prevent their own extinction in “a suspenseful genre-bending combination of straight SF and mystery” (Booklist, starred review). Doomed by overpopulation, irreversible environmental degradation, and never-ending war, Earth has become a fetid swamp. For many, Mars represents humankind’s last hope. In six tightly clustered towers on the red planet’s surface, the colonists who have escaped their dying home world are attempting to make a new life unencumbered by the corrupting influences of politics, art, and religion. Unable ever to return, these pioneers have chosen an unalterable path that winds through a landscape as terrible as it is beautiful, often forcing them to compromise their beliefs—and sometimes their humanity—in order to survive. But the gravest threat to the future is not the settlement’s total dependence on foodstuffs sent from a distant and increasingly uncaring Earth, or the events that occur in the aftermath of the miraculous discovery of native life on Mars—it is the fact that in the ten years since colonization began, every new human baby has been born dead, or so tragically deformed that death comes within hours. The great Brian W. Aldiss has delivered a dark and provocative yet ultimately hopeful magnum opus rich in imagination and bold ideas. A novel of philosophy as much as science fiction, Finches of Mars is an exploration of intellectual history, evolution, technology, and the future by one of speculative fiction’s undisputed masters.

The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle

The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle PDF Author: Dan Simmons
Publisher: Spectra
ISBN: 080418058X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 2320

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Book Description
Hailed as “one of the finest achievements of modern science fiction” by The New York Times Book Review, The Hyperion Cantos is a triumphant odyssey into the heart of space and time. Through four riveting novels, Dan Simmons masterfully weaves such influences as classical mythology, romantic poetry, and far-future philosophy into an ambitiously conceived and unfailingly entertaining epic. Now, for the first time, this entire masterpiece of the imagination is available in one extraordinary eBook bundle: HYPERION THE FALL OF HYPERION ENDYMION THE RISE OF ENDYMION On the planet Hyperion, beyond the reach of galactic law, waits a creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. On the eve of Armageddon, with the known universe at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of existence. As the Shrike anticipates their mission, each traveler nurtures a desperate hope—and harbors a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his or her hands. Praise for The Hyperion Cantos “For vastness of scope, clarity of detail and seriousness of purpose, Simmons’s epic narrative is on a par with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, Frank Herbert’s Dune books, Gene Wolfe’s multipart Book of the New Sun and Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia trilogy.”—The New York Times Book Review “Dan Simmons has brilliantly conceptualized a future 700 years distant. In sheer scope and complexity it matches, and perhaps even surpasses, those of Isaac Asimov and James Blish.”—The Washington Post Book World “State of the art science fiction . . . This work will be that against which all future works will have to be measured, in the same way, in their time, that Asimov’s Foundation series and Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness set new standards.”—Asimov’s “Simmons’ own genius transforms space opera into a new kind of poetry.”—The Denver Post “A major work . . . Simmons doesn’t just promise; he delivers.”—Science Fiction Chronicle

Report on Probability A

Report on Probability A PDF Author: Brian W. Aldiss
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504010329
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
An unending chain of surveillance crosses countless dimensions in this brilliant, disturbing, and groundbreaking “antinovel” by one of science fiction’s greatest practitioners Mr. Mary and his wife are being observed from at least three vantage points as they go about their mundane home lives. G, the former gardener, watches them from a garden shed. Mr. Mary’s dismissed secretary, S, watches them from the top room of a brick outhouse in the back. The chauffeur, C, who no longer drives, watches the Marys from the garage. Each observer must file a report with his superiors in another continuum, pausing in his surveillance only long enough to eat identical meals alone at the deserted café across the street. But the watchers are themselves being observed by others who are, in turn, being watched across vast and infinite dimensional planes in an attempt to unravel the mysteries of the world known as Probability A. This brilliant, experimental work by Grand Master Brian W. Aldiss is a perplexing and devastatingly haunting masterwork of speculative fiction, considered by many to be the greatest work in the long, prolific career of a true giant of the genre. Thought-provoking, confounding, and stylistically brilliant, Report on Probability A will burn its way into the reader’s mind and memory.

Non-Stop

Non-Stop PDF Author: Brian W. Aldiss
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504064046
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
A “brilliant . . . classic of the field” generation ship adventure from the Golden Age of Science Fiction by the author of the Helliconia Trilogy (Encyclopedia of Science Fiction). Non-Stop is Grand Master of Science Fiction and Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author Brian W. Aldiss’s debut novel. Written in response to Robert Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky and published in the late 1950s, it is set in a primitive world, home to tribes of inhabitants who endure their harsh and stunted lives in a maze of corridors. Though legends exist that they’re actually on a ship traveling through the universe, no one really believes it. But that conviction doesn’t stop a group of people from embarking on a mission to find the rumored “Forwards” section and its control room. Through a tangled, hydroponic jungle, they’ll encounter telepathic animals, giants, outcasts, and mutants in an epic race to uncover the truth—and survive . . . “A breakneck ride filled with some truly disturbing and chaotic imagery . . . Aldiss’ world is visceral and powerful.” —Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations “Worth reading, and quite a significant contribution to the long SF history of generation ship novels.” —SF Site Praise for Brian W. Aldiss “A major figure in world SF . . . Whatever else Aldiss may be, predictable he is not.” —The Guardian “One of the most influential—and one of the best—SF writers Britain has ever produced.” —Iain M. Banks, award-winning author of the Culture series “One of the most important SF writers of the 20th century.” —Publishers Weekly