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Venus Enslaved

What chance had the castaway Earthman and his crossbow-weaponed Amazons against the mighty Frogmasters of the Veiled Planet?

The Flame Breathers

Ray Cummings

Vulcan was a doom-world. One expedition had mysteriously disappeared, and now another was following in its path—searching for the unknown menace that stalked Vulcan's shadowed gorges.

Praise for Berlin:"Mirolla . . . is a teller of tales that only the tautest of prose could relate with cohesion and beauty. This book will thrill the mind."CrimeSpree"Intriguing, passionate, sad, hilarious. Mirolla is a master storyteller."Toronto Sun"Mirolla's book excels."Rain TaxiMussolini clones that won't stay dead. The power to re-create othersforever. Memory and identity are no longer unique. Trapped inside the cloning facility at a time when humans are undergoing their final death rattle on a prion-infected earth, Fausto struggles to re-create the world he once knew. Or did he ever know it?

On the Beach

Nevil Shute

"On the Beach" is a 1957 post-apocalyptic novel written by British-Australian author Nevil Shute after he emigrated to Australia. The novel details the experiences of a mixed group of people in Melbourne as they await the arrival of deadly radiation spreading towards them from the northern hemisphere following a nuclear war a year previously. As the radiation approaches each person deals with their impending death in different ways.

Citadel of Lost Ships

Leigh Brackett

It was a Gypsy world, built of space flotsam, peopled with the few free races of the Solar System. Roy Campbell, outcast prey of the Coalition, entered its depths to seek haven for the Kraylens of Venus—only to find that it had become a slave trap from which there was no escape!

The Inquisitor

Robert Silverberg

“The Inquisitor,” was written in May, 1956 for William Hamling's IMAGINATION magazine, as Robert Silverberg writes in his lengthly introduction, «a few weeks before my graduation from Columbia, and put my own byline on it, but when Hamling published it in the December, 1956 issue of IMAGINATION it was credited to Randall Garrett, and so it has remained in bibliographies to this day. It’s my work, though: a compact synthesis, in 2500 words, of the themes of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” two classic works of fiction that would have been very much on my mind as I rounded out my days as a literature major at Columbia.»

The Push of a Finger

Alfred Bester

The Push of a Finger—or a careless word, for that matter—can wreck the entire universe. Think not? Well, if it happened this way…

The Food of the Gods

H. G. Wells

What happens when science tampers with nature? A riveting, cautionary tale with disastrous results reveals the chilling answer.Hoping to create a new growth agent for food with beneficial uses to mankind, two scientists find that the spread of the material is uncontrollable. Giant chickens, rats, and insects run amok, and children given the food stuffs experience incredible growth–and serious illnesses. Over the years, people who have eaten these specially treated foods find themselves unable to fit into a society where ignorance and hypocrisy rule. These «giants,» with their extraordinary mental powers, find themselves shut away from an older, more traditional society. Intolerance and hatred increase as the line of distinction between ordinary people and giants is drawn across communities and families. One of H. G. Wells' lesser-known works, The Food of the Gods has been retold many times in many forms since it was first published in 1904. The gripping, newly relevant tale combines fast-paced entertainment with social commentary as it considers the ethics involved in genetic engineering.

After the Flare

Deji Bryce Olukotun

“ After the Flare is spectacularly imagined, well-written, and a pleasure to read. An absorbing novel that explores a compelling, African-centered future world.” – Kirkus Reviews , Starred Review A catastrophic solar flare reshapes our world order as we know it – in an instant, electricity grids are crippled, followed by devastating cyberattacks that paralyze all communication. With America in chaos, former NASA employee Kwesi Bracket works at the only functioning space program in the world, which just happens to be in Nigeria. With Europe, Asia, and the U.S. knocked off-line, and thousands of dead satellites about to plummet to Earth, the planet’s only hope rests with the Nigerian Space Program’s plan to launch a daring rescue mission to the International Space Station. Bracket and his team are already up against a serious deadline, but life on the ground is just as disastrous after the flare. Nigeria has been flooded with advanced biohacking technologies, and the scramble for space supremacy has attracted dangerous peoples from all over Africa. What’s more: the militant Islamic group Boko Haram is slowly encroaching on the spaceport, leaving a trail of destruction, while a group of nomads has discovered an ancient technology more powerful than anything Bracket’s ever imagined. With the clock ticking down, Bracket – helped by a brilliant scientist from India and an eccentric lunar geologist – must confront the looming threats to the spaceport in order to launch a harrowing rescue mission into space. In his follow-up to Nigerians in Space , Deji Bryce Olukotun poses deep questions about technology, international ambition, identity, and space exploration in the 21st century.

Pioneer

Robert Zimmerman

The time is 2183. Fifty-six-year-old Saunders Maxwell is a stubborn old space-farer who has spent his entire life in space. He has captained the Moon-Mars shuttle and led exploration missions beyond Mars. When he came to Mars in his forties he helped discover the water source that made the first American Mars colony possible. Later he turned to asteroid mining, captaining a small ship and crew of about a half dozen on repeated trips to the asteroid belt, bringing back minerals or even small asteroids so that the Mars colony could harvest them for the needed resources. Having just returned from one such four year mission, he and his pilot Harry Nickerson are heading back to Mars when, as they fly over the vast slopes of the giant volcano Olympus Mons, Maxwell spots this strange glint below, a glint that is not natural and should not be there. When they land they discover something entirely unexpected and impossible, the body of man who had disappeared on a distant asteroid almost a half century before. Sanford Addiono had been on one of the first manned missions to the asteroid belt when he and a partner had vanished. Nothing was ever heard from them again. Even more baffling, two later missions to the asteroid from which they had been lost found that it was gone as well, no longer in orbit where it was supposed to be. Now, 46 years later, Maxwell finds Addiono's body on the surface of Mars. How Addiono had gotten to Mars from a distant now-lost asteroid orbiting beyond Mars–without a spaceship–was a riddle that almost defied an answer. That riddle was magnified exponentially by what Addiono had brought back with him. Among his effects was a six-fingered robot hand that had clearly been made by some alien civilization, along with a recorder and memo book describing what Addiono had seen. Here was a mystery that would rock humanity, the first alien contact. And at that moment Saunders Maxwell decides that he is going to be the person to solve that mystery, even if it takes him through hell and back. Unfortunately, that is exactly where that journey takes him. Not that it matters. Saunders Maxwell is a typical human, and for humanity, the journey itself is really all that matters. So now I stand on earthside shore, And wonder what I am. I must go out and find my home. The journey's what I am. Chorus: O Pioneer! O Pioneer! Where do you go from here? O Pioneer! O Pioneer! The stars are far too near. -A folksong of Mars and the Moon