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A most entertaining volume of memoir from a legend of science fiction.A writer’s life can be exciting, unexpected, routine, lonely – and sometimes all on the same day! Brian Aldiss recounts the highs and lows of his professional career in this entertaining and revealing book.Here are his adventures with publishers, booksellers, agents, other authors, and readers. Here are some of the complex questions of what makes and sustains a successful modern writer. The tales he tells are wry, witty, informative – beginning with his first job at the Oxford bookshop that was to be the setting for his first book of fiction, The Brightfount Diaries, and ending as he undergoes one of the most gruelling experiences of a writer’s life: the publication of a new novel, in this case his brilliant Forgotten Life.

One of Ray Bradbury’s classic short story collections, available in ebook for the first time.Over the course of a long and celebrated career, Ray Bradbury has traveled many roads: cruising down country highways that wound through the unseen heart of small-town America; exploring rutted backwoods paths that led to dark and dangerous places; racing at mach-speed along shimmering celestial turnpikes as limitless and exciting as the unbound imagination.DRIVING BLIND is a stunning collection of short fiction. With a steady hand on the wheel, the master once again transports us to remarkable places – and to warm and achingly familiar destinations of the heart, revealed as we've never seen them before in the brilliance of day or gloom of night. Here are unforgettable excursions to the fantastic, glorious grand tours through time and memory – interspersed with strange, unexpected side trips to the disturbing and eerie – where surprises are waiting around every curve and just beyond each mile marker.These are new roads we have never ridden before – sprawling interstates and lush, twisting rural routes fraught with dangers and delights of all manner, shape and substance. With Ray Bradbury in the driver's seat, the journey promises to be a memorable one. Come along and enjoy the ride.

From the author of The Sunday Times bestseller Cocaine Nights the story of suburban London transformed into an exotic dreamworld.When a light aircraft crashes into the Thames at Shepperton, the young pilot who struggles to the surface minutes later seems to have come back from the dead. Within hours everything in the dormitory suburb is surreally transformed. Vultures invade the rooftops, luxuriant tropical vegetation overruns the quiet avenues, and the local inhabitants are propelled by the young man’s urgent visions through ecstatic sexual celebrations towards an apocalyptic climax.In this characteristically inventive novel Ballard displays to devastating effect the extraordinary imagination that established him as one of Britain’s most highly acclaimed writers.This edition is part of a new commemorative series of Ballard’s works, featuring introductions from a number of his admirers (including Ned Beauman, Ali Smith, Neil Gaiman and Martin Amis) and brand-new cover designs.

’A contemporary masterpiece’ GuardianTHE FIRST VOLUME OF THE EXTRAORDINARY SOUTHERN REACH TRILOGY – NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ALEX GARLAND (EX MACHINA) AND STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAACFor thirty years, Area X has remained mysterious and remote behind its intangible border – an environmental disaster zone, though to all appearances an abundant wilderness.The Southern Reach, a secretive government agency, has sent eleven expeditions to investigate Area X. One has ended in mass suicide, another in a hail of gunfire, the eleventh in a fatal cancer epidemic.Now four women embark on the twelfth expedition into the unknown.

From J. G. Ballard, author of ‘Crash’ and ‘Cocaine Nights’ comes his extraordinary vision of an African forest that turns all in its path to crystal.Through a ‘leaking’ of time, the West African jungle starts to crystallize. Trees metamorphose into enormous jewels. Crocodiles encased in second glittering skins lurch down the river. Pythons with huge blind gemstone eyes rear in heraldic poses. Most flee the area in terror, afraid to face a catastrophe they cannot understand.But some, dazzled and strangely entranced, remain to drift through this dreamworld forest: a doctor in pursuit of his ex-mistress, an enigmatic Jesuit wielding a crystal cross and a tribe of lepers searching for Paradise.In this tour de force of the imagination, Ballard transports the reader into one of his most unforgettable landscapes.

This fast-paced narrative by the author of ‘Crash’ and ‘Empire of the Sun’ is a stunning evocation of a flooded, tropical London of the near future and a foray into the workings of the unconscious mind.Fluctuations in solar radiation have melted the ice caps, sending the planet into a new Triassic Age of unendurable heat. London is a swamp; lush tropical vegetation grows up the walls of the Ritz and primeval reptiles are sighted, swimming through the newly-formed lagoons. Some flee the capital; others remain to pursue reckless schemes, either in the name of science or profit. While the submerged streets of London are drained in search of treasure. Dr Robert Kerans – part of a group of intrepid scientists – comes to accept this submarine city and finds himself strangely resistant to the idea of saving it.First published in 1962, Ballard’s mesmerising and ferociously imaginative novel gained him widespread critical acclaim and established his reputation as one of Britain’s finest writers of science fiction.

A new benchmark in modern SF. A sharp, clever, funny morality tale that answers the biggest question of all: what makes us human?In a fight outside a bar Ramon Espejo kills a man. Next day, all hell breaks loose. The dead man was a big shot, a diplomat on a mission to the out-world of São Paulo. Ramon goes on the run, heading north toward unexplored territory, land so far only glimpsed from orbit during the first colony surveys.Ramon has gone from being nothing in the hills of Mexico to being nothing on São Paulo. He makes a bare living prospecting for minerals. Maybe God meant him to be poor, or he wouldn't have made him so mean. He can't even remember why he killed the European, only the drinking, and the rage that followed.Better to be alone in the wild landscape … off the map, beyond law and civilization. Each trip out he's sure will be the big one that'll make him rich. This one, too.Instead he finds something else, something terrifying. Or rather, it finds him, and uses him: as humans are used by species more intelligent than themselves. But Ramon Espejo is about to prove what a man is capable of. Ramon is about to demonstrate what it is to be human; to be angry, intelligent and alive. And he is about to discover his function in the broad flow of the universe. And why it was he killed the diplomat in the first place…

The final work from the brightest star in science fiction’s galaxy. Arthur C Clarke, who predicted the advent of communication satellites and author of 2001: A Space Odyssey completes a lifetime career in science fiction with a masterwork.30 light years away, a race known simply as the One Point Fives are plotting a dangerous invasion plan, one that will wipe humankind off the face of the Earth…Meanwhile, in Sri Lanka, a young astronomy student, Ranjit Subramanian, becomes obsessed with a three-hundred-year-old theorem that promises to unlock the secrets of the universe. While Ranjit studies the problem, tensions grow between the nations of the world and a UN taskforce headed up by China, America and Russia code-named Silent Thunder begins bombing volatile regimes into submission.On the eve of the invasion of Earth a space elevator is completed, helped in part by Ranjit, which will herald a new type of Olympics to be held on the Moon. But when alien forces arrive Ranjit is forced to question his own actions, in a bid to save the lives of not just his own family but of all of humankind.Co-written with fellow grand master Frederik Pohl, The Last Theorem not only provides a fitting end to the career one of the most famous names in science fiction but also sets a new benchmark in contemporary prescient science fiction. It tackles with ease epic themes as diverse as third world poverty, the atrocities of modern warfare in a post-nuclear age, space elevators, pure mathematics and mankind’s first contact with extra-terrestrials.

In the most exciting SF collaboration ever, Arthur C. Clarke and his acknowledged heir Stephen Baxter pool talent and unprecedented cosmic insights as well as page-turning plotting skills and breathlessly good writing to produce the most awesome novel of the future since 2001: A Space Odyssey.’Space is what keeps everything from being in the same place. Right?’ With these words Hiram Patterson, head of the giant media corporation OurWorld, launches the greatest communications revolution in history. With OurWorld’s development of wormhole technology, any point in space can be connected to any other, faster than the speed of light. Realtime television coverage is here: earthquakes and wars, murders and disasters can be watched, exactly as they occur, anywhere on the planet.Then WormCams are made to work across time as well as space. Humanity encounters itself in the light of other days. We witness the life of Jesus, go to the premiere of Hamlet, solve the enigmas that have baffled generations. Blood spilled centuries ago flows vividly once more – and no personal treachery or shame can be concealed.But when the world and everything in it becomes as transparent as glass and there are no more secrets, people find new ways to gain vengeance and commit crime. And Hiram Patterson meanwhile will try to keep his deadly schemes secret – but even he, its creator, cannot anticipate the power of the all-seeing WormCam.

«Рубцов – это я. Илья Ильич. Двадцать четыре года от роду. Румян, весел, подвижен. Товарищи называют меня Чижиком.

Погрузившись в мрачную старину, где сплелись мифы и магия, «Клаус» рассказывает историю о прошлом Санты. О том, как один человек со своим верным волком бросил вызов тоталитарному государству и стоящему за ним древнему злу… Откуда на самом деле взялся Санта-Клаус? И что он делает в оставшиеся 364 дня в году?