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

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.

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.

The second volume of the epic Helliconia trilogy, the enthralling masterwork of one of the last century's greatest masters of imaginative fiction. It is the summer of the Great Year on Helliconia. The humans are involved with their own affairs. Their old enemies, the phagors, are comparatively docile at this time of year; yet they can afford to wait, to take advantage of human weakness—and of the king's weakness.

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.

Curiosity was discouraged in the Greene tribe. Its members lived out their lives in cramped Quarters, hacking away at the encroaching ponics. As to where they were—that was forgotten. Roy Complain decides to find out. With the renegade priest Marapper, he moves into unmapped territory, where they make a series of discoveries which turn their universe upside-down ...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is the first volume of the Helliconia Trilogy—a monumental sage which goes beyond anything yet created by this master among today's imaginative writers. An entire solar system is revealed, and with it a world disturbingly reflecting our own, Helliconia: an Earth-like planet where dynasties change with the seasons.

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.

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.

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.

The Sun is about to go Nova. Earth and Moon have ceased their axial rotation and present one face continuously to the sun. The bright side of Earth is covered with carnivorous forest. This is the age of vegetables. Gren and his lady - not to mention the tummybelly men - journey to the even more terrifying dark side. One of Aldiss' most famous and long-enduring novels, fast moving, packed with brilliant imagery.

War is hell, and the conflict tearing the world apart may be humankind's last. Set adrift on a makeshift raft in the middle of the South Pacific, the sole survivor of a sabotaged space-shuttle flight, undersecretary of state Calvert Roberts is certain his life is coming to an end. But fate intervenes, depositing him dehydrated and half starved on the beach of an uncharted island with a giant M etched into a cliff wall. At first it appears to be paradise, but Eden has a dark side: Here, Dr. Mortimer Dart is playing God.

From the tale of a boy who finds companionship from his robot Teddy – which was the basis of Steven Spielberg's blockbuster film A.I Artificial Intelligence – to robots controlling Earth in the 44th century, to the time-travelling hunt for a brontosaurus, this collection is a must-have for all Aldiss fans and an excellent introduction to the work of a true science fiction master. Hello Earth, Are You There includes twenty-seven short stories from Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author, Brian Aldiss, OBE.

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.

Architectural historian Roy Burnell has been tasked with traveling the globe and listing architectural gems in danger of being destroyed. But when Burnell is in Budapest, ten years of his memory, mostly his architectural knowledge and sexual experiences, are stolen. In this near-future, thieves using EMV ("e-mnemonicvision") sell memories on the black market. In the wake of this event, Burnell tries to resume his life, while also searching for the "bullet" that will restore his memory.