Mostrando resultados por autor "Brian W. Aldiss" en Todas las categorías

The earth is recovering from the Acid Head War, in which hallucinogenic chemicals were the primary weapon. Many humans are now suffering from delusions and are unable to tell the real from the imaginary. When a man named Colin Charteris tries to make sense of the drugged-out world, he is taken as the new messiah. As he descends into paranoid visions, he begins to believe this himself.

Millions of years beyond our time, our Earth has long since stopped spinning—and giant flora have taken over the sunlit half of the motionless world. Here humans are among the very few animal species that still exist, struggling to survive against enormous odds, but they have become small and weak, and their numbers have dwindled to almost nothing. When the aging leader of Gren's tribe decrees it is time for the old ones to go "Up," the younger are left to make their own way below.

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.

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.

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.

Some years into the twenty-first century, a newly devised weapon of mass destruction will do far worse than kill; it will disrupt time and space. Suddenly, land, buildings, animals, and people are falling through "timeslips" and being transported briefly back to earlier eras. One of these inadvertent time travelers, Joe Bodenland, is shocked when he finds himself parked outside a villa on the shore of Lake Geneva—and soon after, unbelievably, in the presence of nineteenth-century literary luminaries Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, along with Shelley's very enticing fiancee, budding author Mary.

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.

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.

In the middle decades of the twenty-first century, the corporate powers on Earth have established a thriving colony on Mars as an alternative to life on the overpopulated, war-torn, ecologically ravaged home planet. But when the economy of EUPACUS—Earth's collective industrialized nations—collapses, all contact between the two worlds abruptly ceases, and the Martian pioneers are left to fend for themselves.

Joe Bodenland has figured out how to manipulate time—a discovery that leads him to Utah and an impossible sixty-five-million-year-old human gravesite. He learns of the existence of a monstrous race of intelligent predators as old as the dinosaur, and of the remarkable "train" the undead creatures use to travel back and forth from a Paleolithic past to a future in which Homo sapiens are enslaved cattle. Joe commandeers the ghostly transportation and rides it back to Victorian England, where he enlists the aid of a powerful ally, the author Bram Stoker, in the battle to secure Earth.

Grand Master Brian W. Aldiss wrote his wonderfully strange and gripping novella The Saliva Tree, as a tribute to H. G. Wells, the immortal author of The Time Machine and War of the Worlds, and it was honored with a Nebula Award. Included alongside this classic tale of creeping alien terror are nine other sparkling gems of short fiction—from the grisly baby steps of a novice serial killer, to the travels of a history professor through alternate worlds, to the journey of a young widow who has both a murderer and a monster vying for her attention.

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.

This collection of nine stories from the Grand Master of Science Fiction charts the course of humanity from the near future onward through millennia. In Galaxies Like Grains of Sand, Brian W. Aldiss tells the tale of mankind's future over the course of forty million years. Each of these nine connected short stories highlights a different millennia in which man has adapted to new environments and hardships.

Roy Complain žije v kočovném kmeni Greenů uprostřed divočiny. Primitivní způsoby společenství však v jeho očích nesouzní s pozůstatky civilizovanějšího života, které nachází při svých kořistnických výpravách do pralesa. Uvnitř cítí zvláštní prázdno, touhu, kterou nedokáže pojmenovat. Má jejich země nějaké hranice? V Royovi postupně vzrůstá odpor k dusivému společenskému řádu a tradovaným vysvětlením věcí kolem něj, která však mají nepřehlédnutelné trhliny.

After the "Accident," all males on Earth become sterile. Society ages and falls apart bit by bit. First, toy companies go under. Then record companies. Then cities cease to function. Now Earth's population lives in spread-out, isolated villages, with its youngest members in their fifties. When the people of Sparcot begin to make claims of gnomes and man-eating rodents lurking around their village, Greybeard and his wife set out for the coast with the hope of finding something better.

Ray and Ruby Tebbutt are a Norfolk couple struggling to pay off a loan they could not afford. Peter Petrik, a small-time Czech film director, is involved with an Irish arms smuggler. Dominic Mayor, a British millionaire with a cold past, made his fortune by manipulating the stock market. All four people's lives are taken by a terrorist bombing in a small British seaside hotel. In Remembrance Day, an American academic examines the details of the victims' lives and histories to find the relationship between them and their fate.

In the year 2093, human consciousness has expanded to the point that man can now travel to the past using a technique called "mind-traveling." Artist Edward Bush returns from a nearly three-year mind-travel to find that his government has crumbled and society is now under the leadership a new regime. Given Bush's experience, he is recruited by the regime to track down and assassinate a scientist whose ideas threaten to topple everything they've built.

In a future where the Earth has been savaged by overpopulation and over-farming, robots are considered more valuable than humans, and sand must be altered to create artificially fertile soil. Ex-convict Knowle Noland, the hallucinating sea captain of the Trieste Star, finds himself wrapped up in a plot to incite a global war that will wipe out millions. War, it seems, is the only way to drastically reduce the population and create a better world for those who survive.

One million years in the future, the universe has become a utopia for the humans inhabiting it. Having evolved into the race homo uniformis—"man alike throughout"—they share a centralized nervous system and know nothing of war, disease, violence, emotion, or any of the ancient ills that plagued their ancestors. But while en route to a vacation that is light years from Earth, a small group of elite travelers find themselves marooned in the wilderness of the planet Lysenka. And they are not alone.

Thomas C. Squire, creator of the hit documentary series Frankenstein Among the Arts, one-time secret agent and founder of the Society for Popular Aesthetics, is attending an international media symposium in Sicily. It is here that he becomes involved with lovely, but calculating Selina Ajdina. Alongside the drama of the conference is the story of Squire's private life—the tale of his infidelity, the horrifying circumstances surrounding his father's death, and the threatened future of his ancestral home in England.