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Two of Aldiss’ essay collections from the mid-1980s in one volume.In this warm, chatty, opinionated collection of essays, Brian Aldiss tells the reader a bit about his youth, holds forth on the position of science fiction within the literary and scientific worlds and reveals some of the processes at work in his own writing.This volume also includes the companion collection …And the Lurid Glare of the Comet.

‘Unforgettable and utterly affecting. You can’t turn the pages fast enough’ Dave EggersJudy Budnitz, author of the Orange Prize shortlisted novel If I Told You Once and the critically acclaimed collection Flying Leap. creates her own brand of stark, dystopian reality in this impressive collection of blisteringly inventive and surreal new stories. Budnitz's first-person narrators are pitch perfect, helping the reader to see from their perspective, no matter how odd it might be. Clever, comic and perpetually surprising, these are stories that demand to be read again and again.‘A truly talented young writer.’ Times

An epic masterwork of science fiction, Neverness is a stand-alone novel from one of the most important talents in the genre.

A discreet advertisement brings a group of apparently disparate individuals together to a bizarre rendezvous – on the ocean floor.The reasons for their selection are unclear: Don, an archaeologist, chronically shy, Gaspar, marine biologist, suffering from terminal directness, middle-aged Pacifica, and Melanie, whose normal exterior masks a strange genetic inheritance, seem, on the face of it, to have little in common – except their feeling that they are part of a greater plan … a feeling that grows as they embark on their strange odyssey across the bed of the ocean …For the underwater explorers, the mystery of being out of phase with the world above water is heightened by that surrounding the mysterious Eleph – a mystery which is ultimately revealed to be more significant and bewildering than they could ever have imagined …

Venus has exploded.

Now in ebook format.Down below in Tacoma, the group around Dan Alders' brother had been held together by a mutual taste for beer, spirits and endless arguments – with a little lying and wife-stealing on the side. But now, high in the mountains on a test of endurance, jealousy is tearing friendships apart.

Some secrets demand betrayal.When Noria Kaitio reaches her seventeenth birthday, she is entrusted with the secret of a freshwater spring hidden deep within the caves near her small rural village. Its preservation has been the responsibility of her family for generations.Apprenticed to her father, one of the last true tea masters, when Noria takes possession of the knowledge, she becomes much more than the guardian of ancestral treasure; soon, she will hold the fate of everyone she loves in her hands.

The dazzling novel from the acclaimed author of the groundbreaking MARS trilogy follows Galileo on an amazing journey from the dawn of the modern world to a future on the verge of a completely new scientific breakthrough.Late Renaissance Italy still abounds in alchemy and Aristotle, yet it trembles on the brink of the modern world. Galileo's new telescope encapsulates all the contradictions of this emerging reality.Then one night a stranger presents a different kind of telescope for Galileo to peer through. Galileo is not sure if he is in a dream, an enchantment, a vision, or something else as yet undefined. The blasted wasteland he sees when he points the telescope at Jupiter, of harsh yellows and reds and blacks, looks just like hell as described by the Catholic church, and Galileo is a devout Catholic.But he’s also a scientist, perhaps the very first in history. What he’s looking at is the future, the world of Jovian humans three thousand years hence. He is looking at Jupiter from the vantage point of one of its moons whose inhabitants maintain that Galileo has to succeed in his own world for their history to come to pass.Their ability to reach back into the past and call Galileo «into resonance» with the later time is an action that will have implications for both periods, and those in between, like our own.By day Galileo’s life unfurls in early seventeenth century Italy, leading inexorably to his trial for heresy. By night Galileo struggles to be a kind of sage, or an arbiter in a conflict … but understanding what that conflict might be is no easy matter, and resolving his double life is even harder.This sumptuous, gloriously thought-provoking and suspenseful novel recalls Robinson’s magnificent Mars books as well as bringing to us Galileo as we have always wanted to know him, in full.

It's hot in Washington. No sign of rain. The world's climates are changing, catastrophe beckons, but no one in power is noticing. Yet. Tom Wolfe meets Michael Crichton in this highly topical, witty and entertaining science thriller.When the Arctic ice pack was first measured in the 1950s, it averaged thirty feet thick in midwinter. By the end of the century it was down to fifteen. One August the ice broke. The next year the break-up started in July. The third year, it began in May.That was last year.It's an increasingly steamy summer in America's capital as environmental policy advisor Charlie Quibler cares for his young son, and deals with the frustrating politics of global warming. According to the President and his science advisor Dr S, the weather isn’t important! But Charlie must find a way to get a sceptical administration to act before it's too late – and his progeny find themselves living in Swamp World.Just arrived in Washington to lobby the Senate for aid is an embassy from Khembalung, a sinking island nation in the Bay of Bengal. Charlie's wife Anna, director of bioinformatics at the National Science Foundation and well known for her hyperrational intensity, is entranced by the Khembalis. By contrast, her colleague, Frank Vanderwal, is equally cynical about the Buddhists and the NSF.The profound effect the Khembali ambassador has on both Charlie and Frank could never have been predicted – unlike the abrupt, catastrophic climate change which is about to transform everything.Forty Signs of Rain is an unforgettable tale of survival which captures a world where even the innocent pattern of rainfall resounds with the destiny of the biosphere.

A Space Opera. An ambitious, incredible – Space Opera!A science-fiction story which occasionally breaks off into song – a genuine space opera.Quite possibly Aldiss’s strangest novel, and that is saying something.

They were prisoners, exiles, pawns of a corrupt government. Now they are Dr Rachel Dycek's adin: surgically transformed beings who can survive new lives on the surface of Mars. But they are still exiles, unable ever again to breathe Earth's air … And they are still pawns.They were prisoners, exiles, pawns of a corrupt government. Now they are Dr. Rachel Dycek’s adin: surgically transformed beings who can survive new lives on the surface of Mars. But they are still exiles, unable ever again to breath Earth’s air . . . And they are still pawns.For the adin exist to terraform Mars for human colonists, not for themselves. Creating a new Earth, they will destroy their world; killed by their own success. Desperate, adin leader Boris Tiban launches a suicide campaign to sabotage the Mars Project, knowing his people will perish in a glorious, doomed orgy of mayhem. Unless embattled, bitter Rachel Dycek can find a miracle to save both the Mars Project and the race she created.