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Memories of the Space Age by J. G. Ballard. Sauk City. 1988. Arkham House. 0870541579. Art Work by Jeffrey K. Potter. . 216 pages. hardcover. Cover art by MAX ERNST (1891-1976), one of the twentieth century's preeminent surrealists, is represented on the jacket by an apocalyptic landscape from his decalcomania period, Europe After the Rain (L'Europe apres la pluie II), 1940-42; oil on canvas, 5.

  
DESCRIPTION - The Space Age has passed into history. In the shadow of the derelict gantries at Cape Canaveral repose the abandoned motels, the empty swimming pools, the desolate launching grounds, the crashed space capsules, all the rusting remnants of a vanished technological civilization. A crime had been committed here, a violation of the evolutionary order embodied in man's attempt to conquer the tideways of space, to breach the boundaries of his own humanity. Over the years, beginning with ‘The Cage of Sand' in 1962, J. G. Ballard has probed the psychological implications of man's exploration of outer space, and during this period the author has written a series of mesmerizing stories set within the forsaken Space Center at Cape Canaveral, involving moribund astronauts encircling the Earth, and depicting a world in retreat from the ravages of time, All of the Cape Canaveral and related fiction is preserved in the present volume, which includes several of the most haunting images in contemporary literature, as Ballard's obsessed men and women stumble through the archetypes of a declining technological landscape. The collected Cape Canaveral stories establish indisputably what partisans of this author have recognized for many years: J. G. Ballard is one of the supreme visionary prophets of our age, possibly the most significant writer of speculative fiction since H. G. Wells. In his melding of science and surrealism to create a phantasmagorical milieu worthy of Max Ernst, Ballard is exploring the uneasy interface between technology and humanity, dramatizing the neuroses and paranoias of our age, presenting with hallucinogenic intensity the existential plight of modern man. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - J. G. BALLARD was born in 1930 of British parents in Shanghai, China, but has lived in England since the age of fifteen. In 1956 Ballard's first imaginative stories began to appear in conventional genre periodicals, but with publication of a series of disaster novels in the early 1960s, he emerged as the most powerful and original talent in British science fiction. Later, as high priest of the New Wave movement Ballard wrote a series of experimental ‘condensed novels,' collected in THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION (1970); more recently, the semiautobiographical EMPIRE OF THE SUN (1984). filmed by Steven Spielberg, has brought J. G. Ballard to a vast new audience. JEFFREY K. POTTER was born in 1956 at March Air Force Base in southern California and is largely self-taught though the artist-photographer acknowledges Clarence John Laughlin, Jerry N. Uelsmann, John Heartfield, and Man Ray as major creative influences, Potter has illustrated numerous hardcover and paperbound books as well as magazine covers for such disparate publications as Night Cry, American Politics, and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Like some mighty Dadaist demiurge, Potter is able to juxtapose images in quest of his own imaginative counterpart to reality, enabling us to perceive the world through his unique artistic vision.

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Solitude: A Novel of Catalonia by Victor Catala (pseudonym of Caterina Albert I Paradis). Columbia. 1992. Readers International. 0930523911. Included Is The Author's Foreword To The Fifth Edition. Translated from the Catalan by David H. Rosenthal. 224 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Beautiful, industrious, and intelligent Camilla is taken to an isolated hermitage in the Pyrenees by her lazy and insensitive husband, Matias. There she contends not only with her rapidly failing marriage but with her attraction to her young neighbor Arnau; her growing admiration and respect for the older shepherd named Gaieta; and the violent intentions of the bestial Anima. Through Gaieta's guidance, Camilla finds strength and a sense of self in the mountains.DESCRIPTION - Beautiful, industrious, and intelligent Camilla is taken to an isolated hermitage in the Pyrenees by her lazy and insensitive husband, Matias. There she contends not only with her rapidly failing marriage but with her attraction to her young neighbor Arnau; her growing admiration and respect for the older shepherd named Gaieta; and the violent intentions of the bestial Anima. Through Gaieta's guidance, Camilla finds strength and a sense of self in the mountains.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Caterina Albert i Paradís (L'Escala, Spain, 11 September 1869  -  27 January 1966), better known by her penname Víctor Català, was a Spanish writer in Catalan and Spanish who participated in the Modernisme movement and was the author of one of the signature works of the genre, Solitud (Solitude) (1905). Her literary skill was first recognized in 1898, when she received the Jocs Florals (floral games) prize; soon thereafter, she began using the pseudonym Victor Català, taking it from the protagonist of a novel she never finished. Despite her success as a dramatist and her forays into poetry, she is best known for her work in narrative literature, with the force of her style and the richness of her diction being especially noted. She died in her hometown of l'Escala, Catalonia, in 1966 and is interred in the Cementiri Vell de l'Escala.

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The Purple Cloud by M. P. Shiel. New York. 2012. Penguin Books. 9780141196428. Introduction by John Sutherland.  352 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - The first great science fiction novel of the twentieth century-now available from Penguin Classics   Strange, macabre, and, fantastical, M. P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud is a landmark work that heralded the genre of apocalyptic fiction. It tells the grandly bleak story of Adam Jeffson-the first man to reach the North Pole and the last man left alive on earth. A sweet-smelling cloud of poisonous gas has devastated the world, and as Jeffson travels the stricken globe in search of human life, he slowly succumbs to madness, unleashing fire and destruction on his planet. A new introduction by literary scholar John Sutherland explores The Purple Cloud's apocalyptic themes and Shiel's colorful private life.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Matthew Phipps Shiell (21 July 1865 – 17 February 1947), known as M. P. Shiel, was a British writer, remembered mainly for supernatural horror and scientific romances. His work was published as serials, novels, and as short stories. The Purple Cloud (1901, revised 1929) remains his most often reprinted novel. John Sutherland is Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London and wrote the introduction to Chekhov's The Shooting Party for Penguin Classics.

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Typescript of the Second Origin by Manuel de Pedrolo. Middletown. 2018. Wesleyan University Press. 9780819577429. Translated by Sara Martín. Foreword by Kim Stanley Robinson. 184 pages. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - Manuel de Pedrolo's widely acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel, which includes a foreword by Kim Stanley Robinson, tells the story of two children who survive the brutal destruction of Earth by alien explorers. The protagonists, Alba and Dídac, retreat to the forest, then journey to the rubble of Barcelona to rescue and preserve the remnants of human civilization in the city's bombed libraries and cultural institutions. in the absence of the rule of law and social norms, the children create a utopian world of two that honors knowledge and interracial love, to become a new Adam and Eve and try to bring about the world's second origin. A bestseller and required reading for secondary school students in Catalonia, Typescript of the Second Origin is indispensable to understand how a region of Spain whose language, culture, and institutions were targeted and punished by Francisco Franco. At the same time, Pedrolo's tale of survival reaches beyond national and cultural borders to offer contemporary international readers a timely warning about the threat of global ecological destruction.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - MANUEL DE PEDROLO was born in L'Aranyo (Lleida), Eastern Catalonia, in 1918 and died in Barcelona in 1990. A prolific writer in all genres, Pedrolo experimented with new forms and content. He fought on the side of the Republican during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), and was a critic of the repressive policies of Franco's regime (1939–1975), which included censorship of the Catalan language. Within the field of science fiction, Pedrolo's greatest contribution was without a doubt Typescript of the Second Origin. SARA MARTÍN is a senior lecturer in English literature and cultural studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. As a researcher she specializes in popular fiction, particularly gothic and science fiction, and in gender studies. This is her first literary translation into English. KIM STANLEY ROBinSON is an American writer of science fiction. He has published nineteen novels and numerous short stories but is best known for his Mars trilogy. Robinson has won many awards, including the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the World Fantasy Award.

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Greener Than You Think by Ward Moore. New York. 1947. William Sloan. 358 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Ward Moore's classic novel "Greener Than You Think" posits a world with Bermuda grass running out of control -- choking out every other plant and destroying the food supply of animals and humanity alike. Originally published in 1947.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ward Moore (August 10, 1903 - January 28, 1978) was the working name of American writer Joseph Ward Moore. According to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ‘he contributed only infrequently to the field, [but] each of his books became something of a classic.' Moore began publishing with the novel Breathe the Air Again (1942), about the onset of the Great Depression. The story is told from multiple viewpoints, and Ward Moore himself appears briefly as a character in the novel. His most famous work is the alternate history novel Bring the Jubilee (1953). This novel, narrated by Hodge Backmaker, tells of a world in which the South won the American Civil War, leaving the North in ruins. Moore's other novels include Cloud By Day, in which a brush fire threatens a town in Topanga Canyon; Greener Than You Think, a novel about unstoppable Bermuda Grass; Joyleg (co-authored with Avram Davidson), which assumes the survival of the State of Franklin; and Caduceus Wild (co-authored with Robert Bradford), about a medarchy, a nation governed by physicians. Moore is also known for the two short stories (since collected) ‘Lot' (1953) and ‘Lot's Daughter' (1954) which arepostapocalyptic tales with parallels to the Bible. The film Panic in Year Zero! (1962) was (without giving credit) based on Lot andLot's Daughter. His short story ‘Adjustment', in which an ordinary man adjusts to a never-never land in which his wishes are fulfilled, and makes the environment adjust to him as well, has been reprinted several times.Moore was born in Madison, New Jersey, a western suburb of New York City. His parents were Jewish and had married in 1902, the previous year. His grandfather Joseph Solomon Moore (1821–1892) had been a successful German-born commission merchant and the statistician of the New York custom house, the author of several books on the tariff question and a friend of Carl Schurz. Five months after Ward Moore's birth, he moved with his parents to Montreal, where his mother's family lived. In 1913 they returned to New York. Moore's parents divorced and remarried around this time, and his father died in 1916. His mother's second husband and Moore's stepfather was the noted German jazz band leader Julian Fuhs. Moore attended De Witt Clinton High School in New York, where according to one widely repeated story he was expelled for antiwar activity during World War I; elsewhere he claimed that he dropped out of school in order to write. He later attended Columbia College. Moore claimed to have spent several years tramping around the United States as a hobo during the early 1920s. In the mid-1920s he managed a bookshop in Chicago, where he befriended one of the store's patrons, the young poet Kenneth Rexroth. Moore appears in Rexroth's memoir An Autobiographical Novel as the mad bohemian poet/bookseller/science fiction writer ‘Bard Major'. Rexroth claimed that ‘Major' had been on the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Milwaukee and was expelled for Trotskyist deviationism, but the factual basis for this tale, if any, is obscure. In 1929 Moore relocated to California, where he was to live for the rest of his life. Starting in 1937 he participated in the Federal Writers Project of the WPA, where his friend Rexroth was an administrator in the San Francisco office. His picaresque first novel Breathe the Air Again, was about the labor struggle in California during the 1920s. It had autobiographical elements and was widely and favorably reviewed. It was intended to be the first of a trilogy but the remaining volumes were never published. During the 1940s Moore wrote book reviews, articles and short stories for a number of magazines and newspapers, including Harper's Bazaar, the San Francisco Chronicle, Jewish Horizons, and The Nation. By 1942 Moore was married to his first wife, Lorna Lenzi. He had seven children. Starting in 1950 he was book review editor of Frontier, a West Coast political monthly similar in outlook to The Nation. In the early 1950s he began writing regularly for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He was a friend of the magazine's California-based editors, Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas, and soon became a popular favorite with the magazine's readers. Though he was never terribly prolific, his science fiction stories penned during the 1950s were entertaining and well crafted and were well received. In the 1960s his literary output diminished, and his last two novels were completed with the help of collaborators. His 1953 speculative if-the-South-had-won-the-Civil-War novel Bring the Jubilee was brought back into print at the time of the Civil War centennial and found an appreciative new audience among Civil War buffs. In 1965 he remarried; his second wife was the science fiction writer Raylyn Moore (nee Crabbe; 1928–2005). The couple moved to Pacific Grove, California where he died in 1978.

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Prodigies: A Novel by Angelica Gorodischer. Easthampton. 2015. Small Beer Press. 9781618730992. Translated from the Spanish by Sue Burke. 166 pages. paperback. Cover art by Elisabeth Alba.  

DESCRIPTION - Prodigies explores the story of the poet Novalis's birthplace in the German town of Weissenfels after it is converted into a boarding house. Moving, subtle, and full of wit, irony, and dreams, this novel fills the house with the women who lived there throughout the nineteenth century, and across the flow of history constructs the secret drama of their destinies.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Angélica Gorodischer (1928-2022) was born in Buenos Aires and lived in Rosario from 1936 on. She published many novels and short story collections including Kalpa Imperial, Mango Juice, and Trafalgar, as well as a memoir, History of My Mother. Her work has been translated into many languages and her translators include Ursula K. Le Guin and Alberto Manguel. With certain self-satisfaction she claimed to never have written plays or poems, not even at 16 when everybody writes poems, especially on unrequited love. She received two Fulbright awards as well as many literary awards around the world, including the Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Awards and a 2014 Konex Special Mention Award.

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Jaguars’ Tomb by Angelica Gorodischer. Nashville. 2021. Vanderbilt University Press. 9780826501400. Translated from the Spanish by Amalia Gladhart. 246 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - Jaguars' Tomb is a novel in three parts, written by three interconnected characters. Part one, "Hidden Variables" by María Celina Igarzábal, is narrated by Bruno Seguer. Seguer in turn is the author of the second part, "Recounting from Zero" ("Contar desde zero"), in which Evelynne Harrington, author of the third, is a central character. Harrington, finally, is the author of "Uncertainty" ("La incertidumbre"), whose protagonist is the dying Igarzábal. Each of the three parts revolves around the octagonal room that is alternately the jaguars' tomb, the central space of the torture center, and the heart of an abandoned house that hides an adulterous affair. The novel, by Argentine author Angélica Gorodischer, is both an intriguing puzzle and a meditation on how to write about, or through, violence, injustice, and loss. Among Gorodischer's many novels, Jaguars' Tomb most directly addresses the abductions and disappearances that occurred under the Argentine military dictatorship of 1976–83. This is the fourth of Gorodischer's books translated into English. The first, Kalpa Imperial—translated by Ursula Le Guin—was selected for the New York Times summer reading list in 2003.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Angélica Gorodischer (1928-2022) was born in Buenos Aires and lived in Rosario from 1936 on. She published many novels and short story collections including Kalpa Imperial, Mango Juice, and Trafalgar, as well as a memoir, History of My Mother. Her work has been translated into many languages and her translators include Ursula K. Le Guin and Alberto Manguel. With certain self-satisfaction she claimed to never have written plays or poems, not even at 16 when everybody writes poems, especially on unrequited love. She received two Fulbright awards as well as many literary awards around the world, including the Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Awards and a 2014 Konex Special Mention Award.

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Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was by Angelica Gorodischer. Northampton. 2003. Small Beer Press. 1931520054. Translated from the Spanish by Ursula K. Le Guin. 248 pages. paperback  Cover painting by Rafal Olbinski.

  
DESCRIPTION - Ursula K. Le Guin chose to translate this novel which was on the New York Times Summer Reading list and winner of the Prix Imaginales, Más Allá, Poblet and Sigfrido Radaelli awards. This is the first of Argentinean writer Angélica Gorodischer's award-winning books to be translated into English. In eleven chapters, Kalpa Imperial's multiple storytellers relate the story of a fabled nameless empire which has risen and fallen innumerable times. Fairy tales, oral histories and political commentaries are all woven tapestry-style into Kalpa Imperial: beggars become emperors, democracies become dictatorships, and history becomes legends and stories. But this is much more than a simple political allegory or fable. It is also a celebration of the power of storytelling. Gorodischer and translator Ursula K. Le Guin are a well-matched, sly and delightful team of magician-storytellers. Rarely have author and translator been such an effortless pairing. Kalpa Imperial is a powerful introduction to the writing of Angélica Gorodischer, a novel which will enthrall readers already familiar with the worlds of Le Guin.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Angélica Gorodischer (1928-2022) was born in Buenos Aires and lived in Rosario from 1936 on. She published many novels and short story collections including Kalpa Imperial, Mango Juice, and Trafalgar, as well as a memoir, History of My Mother. Her work has been translated into many languages and her translators include Ursula K. Le Guin and Alberto Manguel. With certain self-satisfaction she claimed to never have written plays or poems, not even at 16 when everybody writes poems, especially on unrequited love. She received two Fulbright awards as well as many literary awards around the world, including the Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Awards and a 2014 Konex Special Mention Award.

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The Time Ship: A Chrononautical Journey by Enrique Gaspar. Middletown. 2012. Wesleyan University Press. 9780819572936. Translated and introduced by Yolanda Molina-Gavilán and Andrea L. Bell. Early Classics of Science Fiction. 52 illus. 5 1/2 x 8 1/2". 240 pages . paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - “…[The Time Ship] inaugurates one of science fiction’s most potent subgenres, and for this alone, it deserves to be remembered and honored. Moreover, the period illustrations by Francesc Soler are exceptionally charming. ”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post. Globe-trotting scientists pursue immortality and love in the world’s first time machine. H. G. Wells wasn’t the only nineteenth-century writer to dream of a time machine. The Spanish playwright Enrique Gaspar published El anacronópete—“He who flies against time”—eight years before Wells’s influential work appeared. The novel begins at the 1878 Paris Exposition, where Dr. Don Sindulfo unveils his new invention—which looks like a giant sailing vessel. Soon the doctor embarks on a voyage back in time, accompanied by a motley crew of French prostitutes and Spanish soldiers. The purpose of his expedition is to track down the imprisoned wife of a third-century Chinese emperor, believed to possess the secret to immortality. A classic tale of obsession, high adventure, and star-crossed love, The Time Ship includes intricately drawn illustrations from the original 1887 edition, and a critical introduction that argues persuasively for The Time Ship’s historical importance to science fiction and world literature. Reviews: “…a jolly romp with considerable humour and sly digs at both Spanish and French pretensions. ” —Nick Caistor, Times Literary Supplement. “As the first English Translation of this humorous and important work, this book belongs on the shelf along with more famous works of science fiction from the late 19th century, as a reminder of the contributions of less-known but still important Spanish writers to this genre. Recommended”—P. J. Kurtz, Choice. “This is a lovely little slice of genre history. …The Time Ship makes for an entertaining—and in places gleefully subversive—read. Thanks are due to Wesleyan University Press for supporting its publication, and to all involved for bringing it back to light for modern SF fans. ”—Nic Clarke, Strange Horizons. Endorsements: “What an amazing discovery! A time machine before H. G. Wells, and lively and witty romps through history before Doctor Who. Add Enrique Gaspar to the list of inventors of science fiction, and place him high. ”—Andy Sawyer, Science Fiction Foundation Collection, University of Liverpool Library. “Gaspar’s novel takes us back to science fiction’s infancy, when emotion and intelligence were enough to evoke a sense of wonder, creating pure adventure without needing to resort to rivers of blood or extreme violence. Reading it is a surprising experience as well because, though almost 125 years old, The Time Ship proves that many of the themes we think of as current were already a concern to our great-grandparents. ”—Daína Chaviano, author of The Island of Eternal Love. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Enrique Lucio Eugenio Gaspar y Rimbau (2 March 1842 in Madrid – 7 September 1902 in Oloron) was a Spanish diplomat and writer, who wrote many plays (zarzuelas), and one of the first novels involving time travel with a time machine, El anacronópete. Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau was born to parents who were well known actors. Upon the death of his father, Juan, he moved to Valencia with his mother and two siblings. He studied humanities and philosophy, though he never finished his studies, leaving to work in the commercial bank of the marqués of San Juan. He had already written his first zarzuela by the age of 13, and at 14 he was writer at the La Ilustración Valenciana. When he was 15 his mother put on a performance of his first comedy. He moved to Madrid when he was 21 to dedicate himself to writing. His peak years as a writer were 1868 to 1875, when he wrote operas for the consumption of the bourgeoisie rather than the aristocracy. During this time, he also wrote historical dramas, and he became a pioneer of social theatre in Spain. He had huge success for his comedies, but his real passion was social commentary, promoting the education of women and meaningful marriage. These plays were less successful because they were before their time. When he was 23, Gaspar y Rimbau married Enriqueta Batllés y Bertán de Lis, a beautiful aristocrat, to the displeasure of her parents. After the birth of their second child, he entered the diplomatic corps, at the age of 27. He spent time in Greece and France, then Madrid, and eventually served as consul in China, first in Macau, and then in Hong Kong. During this time, he continued to write and mount operas, in addition to writing for El Diario de Manila. Upon his return to Europe, he moved to Oloron, in the South of France, though his family lived in Barcelona, where he put on an opera in Catalan. Later, he lived in various locations in the south of France. His wife died in Marseille, where he was consul. In poor health himself, he retired to Oloron with his daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren. He died there in 1902 at the age of 60.  YOLANDA MOLINA-GAVILÁN is a professor of Spanish at Eckerd College. ANDREA L. BELL is a professor of Spanish and Latin American studies at Hamline University. Molina-Gavilán and Bell are the coeditors of Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain.

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Kindred by Octavia Butler. New York. 1979. Doubleday. 0385150598. 264 pages. hardcover. 

  
DESCRIPTION - Kindred (1979) is a novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler that incorporates time travel and is modeled on slave narratives. Widely popular, it has frequently been chosen as a text by community-wide reading programs and book organizations, and for high school and college courses. The book is the first-person account of a young African-American writer, Dana, who is repeatedly transported in time between her Los Angeles, California home in 1976 with her white husband and an early 19th-century Maryland plantation just outside Easton. There she meets some of her ancestors: a proud, free Black woman and a white planter who forces her into slavery and concubinage. As Dana stays for longer periods in the past, she becomes intimately entangled with the plantation community. Dana makes hard choices to survive slavery and to ensure her return to her own time. Kindred explores the dynamics and dilemmas of antebellum slavery from the sensibility of a late 20th-century Black woman, who is aware of its legacy in contemporary American society. Through the two interracial couples who form the emotional core of the story, the novel also explores the intersection of power, gender, and race issues, and speculates on the prospects of future egalitarianism. While most of Butler's work is classified as science fiction, Kindred crosses genre boundaries and is also classified as African-American literature. Butler categorized the work as "a kind of grim fantasy."

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Octavia Estelle Butler (June 22, 1947 - February 24, 2006) was an American science fiction writer. A recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, Butler was one of the best-known African-American women in the field. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Fellowship nicknamed the Genius Grant. Butler was born and raised in Pasadena, California. Since her father Laurice, a shoeshiner, died when she was a baby, Butler was raised by her grandmother and her mother (Octavia M. Butler), who worked as a maid in order to support the family. Butler grew up in a struggling, racially mixed neighborhood. According to the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Butler was ‘an introspective, only child in a strict Baptist household' and ‘was drawn early to [science fiction] magazines such as Amazing, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Galaxy and soon began reading all the science fiction classics.' Octavia Jr., nicknamed Junie, was paralytically shy and a daydreamer, and was later diagnosed as being dyslexic. She began writing at the age of 10 ‘to escape loneliness and boredom'; she was 12 when she began a lifelong interest in science fiction. ‘I was writing my own little stories and when I was 12, I was watching a bad science fiction movie called Devil Girl from Mars,' she told the journal Black Scholar, ‘and decided that I could write a better story than that. And I turned off the TV and proceeded to try, and I've been writing science fiction ever since.'

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The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. New York. 2001. Penguin Books. 9780141185415. Introduction by Barry Langford. PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS. 256 pages. paperback.

  
DESCRIPTION - When Bill Masen wakes up blindfolded in hospital there is a bitter irony in his situation. Carefully removing his bandages, he realizes that he is the only person who can see: everyone else, doctors and patients alike, have been blinded by a meteor shower. Now, with civilization in chaos, the triffids - huge, venomous, large-rooted plants able to 'walk', feeding on human flesh - can have their day. The Day of the Triffids, published in 1951, expresses many of the political concerns of its time: the Cold War, the fear of biological experimentation and the man-made apocalypse. However, with its terrifyingly believable insights into the genetic modification of plants, the book is more relevant today than ever before. John Wyndham was born in 1903. After a wide experience of the English preparatory school he was at Bedales from 1918 to 1921. Careers which he tried included farming, law, commercial art, and advertising, and he first started writing short stories, intended for sale, in 1925. During the war he was in the Civil Service and afterwards in the Army. In 1946 he began writing his major science fiction novels including "The Kraken Wakes", "The Chrysalids" and "The Midwich Cuckoos".

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Wyndham was born in 1903 in the Midlands. After leaving school, he tried his hand at several careers, including farming, law and advertising, before starting to write stories in 1925. During the war he worked as a censor in the Ministry of Information and afterwards served in the Army. The Day of The Triffids was published in 1951, and was followed by many other famous works of science fiction, including The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids and The Midwich Cuckoos. Wyndham died in 1969.

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Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson. New York. 1998. Warner Books/Aspect. 0446674338. Paperback Original. 250 pages. paperback. Cover Illustration by Linda Messier.  

DESCRIPTION - The rich and the privileged have fled the city, barricaded it behind roadblocks, and left it to crumble. The inner city has had to rediscover old ways - farming, barter, herb lore. But now the monied need a harvest of bodies, and so they prey upon the helpless of the streets. With nowhere to turn, a young woman must open herself to ancient truths, eternal powers, the tragic mystery surrounding her mother and grandmother. She must bargain with gods, and give birth to new legends. Nalo Hopkinson is a novelist whose life ranges over a hemisphere, and whose experience encompasses enduring traditions of word and story, whose voice authentically reaches to those who are aliens in their own lands, and whose vision touches the essence of history, society, science fiction, and myth.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - NALO HOPKINSON was born on December 20, 1960 in Jamaica and grew up in Guyana, Trinidad, and Canada. The daughter of a poet/playwright and a library technician, she has won the Ontario Arts Council Foundation Award for Emerging Writers, and her most recent book, the award-winning short fiction collection SKIN FOLK, was selected in 2002 for the New York Times Summer Reading List and was one of the New York Times Best Books of the Year. She is also the author of BROWN GIRL IN THE RING and MIDNIGHT ROBBER and editor of MOJO: CONJURE STORIES. Hopkinson lives in Toronto.

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Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor. New York. 2021. Tordotcom. 9781250772800. 159 pages. hardcover. Jacket art by Greg Ruth. Jacket design by Christine Foltzer.  

DESCRIPTION - An alien artifact turns a young girl into Death's adopted daughter in Remote Control, a thrilling sci-fi tale of community and female empowerment from Nebula and Hugo Award-winner Nnedi Okorafor. “She’s the adopted daughter of the Angel of Death. Beware of her. Mind her. Death guards her like one of its own.” The day Fatima forgot her name, Death paid a visit. From hereon in she would be known as Sankofa - a name that meant nothing to anyone but her, the only tie to her family and her past. Her touch is death, and with a glance a town can fall. And she walks - alone, except for her fox companion - searching for the object that came from the sky and gave itself to her when the meteors fell and when she was yet unchanged; searching for answers. But is there a greater purpose for Sankofa, now that Death is her constant companion?

Nnedi Okorafor was born in the United States to two Igbo (Nigerian) immigrant parents. She holds a PhD in English and was a professor of creative writing at Chicago State University. She has been the winner of many awards for her short stories and young adult books, and won a World Fantasy Award for Who Fears Death. Nnedi's books are inspired by her Nigerian heritage and her many trips to Africa.

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Strange Things Happen Here: 26 Short Stories and a Novel  by Luisa Valenzuela. New York. 1979. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 0151857822. Translated from the Spanish by Helen Lane. 220 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Bascove. Type design by Paul Gamarello.  

DESCRIPTION - In this second book of fiction Luisa Valenzuela propels the reader on a shattering journey from the cafes of Buenos Aires to a house of prostitution in Barcelona, from the sinister corridors of the Ministry of the Interior to a lonely table of torture. Here is modern Argentina - the site of strange happenings - absurd violence, political repression, bizarre personal relationships. In Valenzuela's world the extraordinary marks the normal course of events. Children are murderers and psychiatrists are transvestites and celery munchers are criminals. Bombs are hidden in briefcases but they never explode, the bodies of lovers serve as maps of the city, neighborly offerings of food disguise the smell of burning flesh, mirrors reflect masked images. Innocence and evil are exquisitely united. Political repression assumes the form of sexual curiosity delirium inspires myth, victims are more powerful than their tormentors. Like the aborted child in ‘He Who Searches' Valenzuela's products, her creatures, have neither name nor sex nor line of conduct. There is comedy in Liliana's shotgun wedding to the cross-eyed Nicolás, there is tragedy in the murder of a harmless old man, and finally there is hope in a single thistle springing from acres of rock, in a writer who slowly and painfully types at night to record the history of her people. ‘There is true brilliance, there is true love, there is true freedom and liberty in each one of her pages' - Julio Cortázar . . . ‘Valenzuela's are the best stories to come out of Latin America in some time. Her style is original, her dialogue superb' - Gregory Rabassa.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Luisa Valenzuela (born November 26, 1938, in Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a post-'Boom' novelist and short story writer. Her writing is characterized by an experimental, avant-garde style which questions hierarchical social structures from a feminist perspective. She is best known for her work written in response to the dictatorship of the 1970s in Argentina. Works such as Como en la guerra (1977), Cambio de armas (1982) and Cola de lagartija (1983) combine a powerful critique of dictatorship with an examination of patriarchal forms of social organization and the power structures which inhere in human sexuality and gender relationships.

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Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany. New York. 1966. Ace Books. Ace Double Edition - Packaged With THE TREE LORD OF IMETEN by Tom Purdom. 102 pages. paperback. M-139. Cover art by Jack Gaughan.  

DESCRIPTION - EMPIRE STAR - On the infinity route . . . Comet Jo had a body that was brown and slim and looked like a cat's, and on his left hand were sharp brass claws with which he had already killed three wild kepards and a boy his own age. He also had a propensity for wandering, and this was to lead him on an adventure spanning uncounted light-years of space and incalculable spans of time, to free a race of beings upon whom the civilization of the stars depended. Along the way he would meet: the strange multiplex consciousness called Jewell; the beautiful, soul-burdened space traveler San Severina; a creature known as the Lump, who was half-alien, half-machine; Ni Ty Lee, the suicidal ppoet of the stars, who lived everyone's life but his own; a young princess of the Galactic Empire, fresh from Miss Perrypicker's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies. . . And finally he would meet - himself. A thousand times, or perhaps more. . . THE TREE LORD OF IMETEN - Delta Pavonis II . . . far from the sphere of Earth-colonized worlds where a tiny human colony kept a miserable toehold alone on a high plateau of that unexplored planet. Delta Pavonis II . . . where two people, Harold and Joanne, were driven from the colony, unarmed, into the terrors of the unknown jungle. Delta Pavonis II . . . where two intelligent races fought a bitter no-holds-barred battle in which the human intruders proved to be the decisive factor that would throw the world to one species or the other! Tom Purdom's THE TREE LORD OF IMETEN is a saga of high adventure and scientific ingenuity.

Samuel Ray Delany, Jr., also known as ‘Chip’, is an American author, professor and literary critic. His work includes a number of novels, many in the science fiction genre, as well as memoir, criticism, and essays on sexuality and society. His science fiction novels include BABEL-17, THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION (winners of the Nebula Award for 1966 and 1967 respectively), NOVA, DHALGREN, and the RETURN TO NEVÈRŸON series. After winning four Nebula awards and two Hugo awards over the course of his career, Delany was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002. Between 1988 and 1999 he was a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Between 1999 and 2000 he was a professor of English at SUNY Buffalo. Since January 2001 he has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he is Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program.

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Triton by Samuel R. Delany. New York. 1976. Bantam Books. 370 pages. paperback. Y2567.  

DESCRIPTION - Interplanetary war. Capture and escape. Diplomatic intrigues that topple worlds. All the color, invention and romance of classic science fiction in a futuristic novel for today. TROUBLE ON TRITON. The human race has colonized the outer satellites. One of them is Triton, moon of Neptune, where the ideals of universal prosperity are possible, Yet Earth threatens war. Within this strange climate of complete utopia and certain doom, BRON HELSTROM seeks passion and purpose in a gypsy woman whose wisdom and power will forever reverse his life. THE SPIKE: The woman he loves - a wandering playwright ganymede. SAM: The man he admires - the handsome, astute chief foreign officer crippled by the responsibility of vast power. LAWRENCE: His confessor - the master of strategic games. CHARO and WINDY: The players - cosmic minstrels of the far future.

Samuel Ray Delany, Jr., also known as ‘Chip’, is an American author, professor and literary critic. His work includes a number of novels, many in the science fiction genre, as well as memoir, criticism, and essays on sexuality and society. His science fiction novels include BABEL-17, THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION (winners of the Nebula Award for 1966 and 1967 respectively), NOVA, DHALGREN, and the RETURN TO NEVÈRŸON series. After winning four Nebula awards and two Hugo awards over the course of his career, Delany was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002. Between 1988 and 1999 he was a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Between 1999 and 2000 he was a professor of English at SUNY Buffalo. Since January 2001 he has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he is Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program.

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Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany. New York. 1975. Bantam Books. Paperback Original. 880 pages. paperback. Y8554.   

DESCRIPTION - THE SUN HAS GROWN DEADLY. . . The world has gone mad, society has perished, savagery rules over all. All that was known is over, all that was familiar is strange and terrible. Today and yesterday collide with tomorrow. In these dying days of earth, a young drifter enters the city.  When this richly written novel first appeared in 1975, Samuel R. Delany began to sweep up what would eventually exceed a million readers with his tale of Bellona, a city at the center of the United States, shaken by a catastrophe that has unhinged the very structure of reality. Skies darkened by smoke from burning buildings, population reduced to youth gangs, drifters, prophets, and perverts, Bellona is a city where a young man known only as the Kid - poet, lover, and finally a leader of the volatile "scorpions" - tries to create a life for himself and those around him in a landscape where two moons can suddenly shine through the night clouds or a sun thousands of times larger than any ever seen before may rise - and set - in a day. Dhalgren is a novel that interrogates a range of inchoately American oppositions: black and white, male and female, gay and straight, sane and mad.

Samuel Ray Delany, Jr., also known as ‘Chip’, is an American author, professor and literary critic. His work includes a number of novels, many in the science fiction genre, as well as memoir, criticism, and essays on sexuality and society. His science fiction novels include BABEL-17, THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION (winners of the Nebula Award for 1966 and 1967 respectively), NOVA, DHALGREN, and the RETURN TO NEVÈRŸON series. After winning four Nebula awards and two Hugo awards over the course of his career, Delany was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002. Between 1988 and 1999 he was a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Between 1999 and 2000 he was a professor of English at SUNY Buffalo. Since January 2001 he has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he is Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program.

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The Lizard's Smile by Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro. New York. 1994. Atheneum. 0689121253. Translated from the Portuguese by Clifford E. Landers. 357 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Marc Burckhardt. Jacket design by Mary Schuck.

DESCRIPTION - THE LIZARD'S SMILE is the first novel in five years from the internationally acclaimed Brazilian novelist João Ubaldo Ribeiro. A best-seller in his native land, it is a suspenseful, spirited, and very funny novel about a truly serious subject-the hazards of genetic engineering-that confirms Ribeiro's reputation as one of the masters of the Latin American novel. Set on an island off the coast of Bahia in northeast Brazil, THE LIZARD'S SMILE centers on one João Pedroso, a disenchanted biologist who has given up his profession to become a fishmonger. Kindly if a bit enigmatic, given to drink and rumination, João has recently been disturbed by a vague but pervasive sense 0f evil, manifesting itself chiefly among the island's animal family. Arrayed around him are such figures as the Secretary of Health for Bahia, Dr. Angelo Marcos Barreto, a fastidious, compulsive, and corrupt millionaire who has been diagnosed as having cancer, his much younger wife, Ana Clara, who has developed an appetite for her husband's medicinal stash 0f marijuana, for the seemingly irresistible João, and for a pseudonymous journal in which she records her adventures in high style . Father Monteirinho, the local priest, who finds it increasingly hard to be confidant and drinking partner to his parishioners while exercising his churchly duties, and Dr. Lücio NemEsio, surgeon and director 0f the island's new, state-of-the-art hospital, an older man, easily worried by the behavioral tics he is beginning to witness around him.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JOAO UBALDO RIBEIRO was born on the island of Itaparica (in the middle of All Saints Bay and is part of the state of Bahia, Brazil), and spent much of his childhood in the neighboring state of Sergipe. He went to law school at the Federal University of Bahia ‘because it was the thing to do for intellectuals such as I fancied myself to be.' Ubaldo Ribeiro then went to the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, graduating as a Master of Public Administration with a minor in Political Science. In 1972-1973 was a guest of the University of Iowa International Writing Program. His first novel, SETEMBRO NAO TEM SENTIDO (September Has No Meaning), brought him early critical acclaim. He worked as a journalist and a teacher in Salvador, the capital of Bahia, but decided he wanted to be a full-time writer and ‘fish occasionally.' Ubaldo Ribeiro has been married three times and has four children. After living in Salvador, Portugal, and Rio de Janeiro, he returned to live in Itaparica. Of AN INVINCIBLE MEMORY he says: ‘I kept making up the story as I went along. The rest is Brazilian history as was taught to me in school, and I didn't believe a word of it. My grandfather was a historian of sorts and used to talk to me about our island all the time. It took me longer to translate it into English (about two years) than to write (about a year and a half).' He is also the author of SERGEANT GETULIO (1978), which was hailed as ‘an astounding success' (The Atlantic). In 1971 SERGEANT GETULIO was published and won Brazil's prestigious Jabuti Prize for best novel of the year. It has been in published in Portugal and (in translation) in France. Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro currently lives in Salvador, Brazil, where he is editor in chief of the Tribuna da Bahia. In the English speaking world his An Invincible Memory has been highly praised. Several of his books and short tails have been turned into movies and TV series in Brazil.

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The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells. New York. 1988. Signet/New American Library. 0451521919. Afterword by Brian Aldiss. 145 pages. paperback. CE2191. Signet Classic original.  

DESCRIPTION - A lonely island in the Pacific . . . The sinister scientist who rules it . . . And the strange beings who dwell there . . . This is the scenario for H.G. Well's haunting classic, one of his most intriguing and visionary fictions. Living in the late nineteenth century and facing the impact of Darwin's theory of evolution, Wells wrote this chilling masterpiece about the blurring characteristics of beasts as they turn into men. Dr. Moreau, a scientist expelled from his homeland for his cruel vivisection experiments, finds an isolated island that gives him the freedom to continue tortuous transplantations and create hideous creatures with manlike intelligence. But as the cruelly enforced order on Moreau's island dissolves, the true consequences of his meddling emerge. His new creations revert to beasts more shocking than any nature could devise. Today, when gene splicing and bio-engineering are already accepted scientific procedures, Wells's dark visionary fables serves as a compelling reminder of the horrors reckless experiments with nature can produce.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Herbert George ‘H. G.' Wells (21 September 1866 - 13 August 1946) was an English writer, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing textbooks and rules for war games. Wells is sometimes called ‘The Father of Science Fiction', as are Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback. His most notable science fiction works include The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau. Wells's earliest specialised training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a specifically and fundamentally Darwinian context. He was also from an early date an outspoken socialist, often (but not always, as at the beginning of the First World War) sympathising with pacifist views. His later works became increasingly political and didactic, and he sometimes indicated on official documents that his profession was that of ‘Journalist.' Most of his later novels were not science fiction. Some described lower-middle class life (Kipps; The History of Mr Polly), leading him to be touted as a worthy successor to Charles Dickens, but Wells described a range of social strata and even attempted, in Tono-Bungay (1909), a diagnosis of English society as a whole.

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The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham. Middlesex. 1960. Penguin Books.  240 pages. paperback.

  
DESCRIPTION - The Kraken Wakes is an apocalyptic science fiction novel by John Wyndham, originally published by Michael Joseph in the United Kingdom in 1953, and first published in the United States in the same year by Ballantine Books under the title Out of the Deeps as a mass market paperback. The title is a reference to Alfred Tennyson's sonnet The Kraken. The novel describes escalating phases of what appears to be an invasion of Earth by aliens, as told through the eyes of Mike Watson, who works for the English Broadcasting Company (EBC) with his wife and co-reporter Phyllis. A major role is also played by Professor Alastair Bocker - more clear-minded and far-sighted about the developing crisis than everybody else, but with the habit of telling brutally unvarnished and unwanted truths. Mike and Phyllis are witness to several major events of the invasion, which proceeds in a series of drawn-out phases; it in fact takes years before the bulk of humanity even realise that their world has been invaded. In the first phase, objects from outer space land in the oceans. Mike and Phyllis happen to see five of the "fireballs" falling into the sea, from the ship where they are sailing on their honeymoon. Eventually the distribution of the objects' landing points - always at ocean depths, never on land - implies intelligence. The aliens are speculated to come from a gas giant, and thus can only survive under conditions of extreme pressures in which humans would be instantly crushed. The deepest parts of the oceans are the only parts of Earth in any way useful to them, and they presumably have no need or use for the dry land or even the shallower parts of the seas. Bocker puts forward the theory that the two species could co-exist indefinitely, hardly noticing each other's presence. Humanity nevertheless feels threatened by this new phenomenon - particularly since the newcomers show signs of intensive work to adapt the ocean deeps to their needs. A British bathysphere is sent down to investigate, and is destroyed by the aliens with the loss of two lives. The British government responds by exploding a nuclear device in the same location. As it turns out, the aliens have more means of getting at the humans than the other way around; a similar American attempt ends in disaster. Moreover, humanity is not united in the face of the mounting threat - the Cold War between West and East is well under way, with the two sides often suspiciously attributing the effects of the alien attacks to their human opponents, or refusing to co-operate because of their different political ideals. Phase two of the war starts when ships all over the globe begin to be attacked by unknown weapons and are rapidly sunk, causing havoc to the world economy. Shortly after, the aliens also start "harvesting" the land by sending up biological "sea tanks", which capture humans from coastal settlements, for reasons that are never made clear; the Watsons witness one of these assaults on a Caribbean island. These attacks are eventually met with sufficiently strong retaliation from humanity that they become far less frequent. And so, in the final phase, the aliens begin melting the polar ice caps, causing sea levels to rise. London and other ports are flooded (the government relocates to Harrogate), causing widespread social and political collapse. The Watsons cover the continuing story for the EBC until the radio (and organised social and political life in general) ceases to exist, whereupon they can only try to survive and escape a flooded London, relocating to a Cornwall holiday cottage which due to the floods now exists on an island in its own right. Other coastal countries are also disastrously affected - there is a reference to masses of Dutch refugees fleeing into Germany, having "lost their centuries-long war with the sea". Ultimately, scientists in Japan develop an underwater ultrasonic weapon that kills the aliens. However, the global population has been reduced to between a fifth and an eighth of its pre-invasion level, and the world's climate has been changed permanently. Up to the end, humans have no clear idea what their opponents looked like. The most they have is some protoplasm which floated to the surface of the sea after the ultrasonic weapon was used. As stated in the book by the protagonist, the book aims to demonstrate that an alien invasion of Earth could take a very different form from that in The War of The Worlds; publication of the book coincided with the release of 1953 film The War of the Worlds, an adaptation of H. G. Wells' classic work which was both a critical and box office success Depending on the book's printed origin there are several changes to the plot: In the US edition almost an entire chapter on how the Watsons gained possession of The Midge yacht, and their aborted attempt to use a dinghy to get to Cornwall is cut, instead simply stating that Freddie Whittier "found it" one day. In the US epilogue, the Watsons are tracked down by Bocker via helicopter and he explains a great deal of what has happened to the world while Mike and Phyllis have been isolated - even describing the Japanese ultrasonic device in some detail. In the UK edition they are instead approached by a neighbour in a rowing boat, who gives them only a brief overview of what has happened in the world - excluding much of the detail and just mentioning that the Japanese have developed an ultrasonic device. He tells them that their names have been broadcast on radio, and that a "Council For Reconstruction" has been formed. The UK edition is less bleak than the US version, implying that humanity has already begun to rebuild, and that civilisation survives - albeit at a lesser level than before. There are several changes for a US audience in terms of language and phraseology.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (10 July 1903 - 11 March 1969) was an English science fiction writer best known for his works written using the pen name John Wyndham, although he also used other combinations of his names, such as John Beynon and Lucas Parkes. Many of his works were set in post-apocalyptic landscapes. His best known works include The Day of the Triffids (1951) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), the latter filmed twice as Village of the Damned.

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Gray Matters by William Hjortsberg. New York. 1971. Simon & Schuster. 0671209760. 160 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Unrest simmers in a dystopian future where disembodied brains are kept alive in tanks, waiting to earn a new body. At twelve years old, Skeets Kalbfleischer is returning from a ski vacation when a lightning strike knocks his plane out of the sky, killing everyone else on board. Although his body is destroyed, a radical procedure preserves Skeets's brain, which spends twenty-five years in a fish tank before mankind realizes the implications of his second life. A key to immortality has been found. Four centuries later, it has become commonplace for the minds of the dead to be preserved. While warehoused in a massive storage facility tended by robots, the brains pass time watching old film clips, learning about bees, and meditating their way to a higher state of being. But for the facility's overseers, Skeets presents a problem. A twelve-year-old for all eternity, their most famous resident still wants to be a cowboy. To remedy this embarrassment, his handlers concoct a solution that will push humanity even farther past nature's wildest dreams.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William 'Gatz' Hjortsberg William "Gatz" Hjortsberg (February 23, 1941 - April 22, 2017) was a novelist and screenwriter best known for writing the screenplays of the movies Legend and Angel Heart. His novel Falling Angel was the basis for the film Angel Heart (1987).

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I, Robot by Isaac Asimov. New York. 1956. Signet/New American Library. 192 pages. paperback. S1282.

  
DESCRIPTION - Man-like machines rule the world! Fascinating tales of a strange tomorrow. TOMORROW'S WEIRD WORLD - Where Man Is Obsolete! Here is a whole panorama of strange and thrilling tales about the Earth in the years ahead when robots - man-like machines - threaten to control the world. Here are the headline stories of tomorrow when Robots help Man reach the stars, run for political office, out-think humans, rule the world, revolt against their HUMAN MASTERS.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Isaac Asimov, an outstanding imaginative writer, was also a biochemist and teacher at the Boston University School of Medicine. Mr. Asimov is the author of The Currents of Space (Signet #1082), The Caves of Steel (Signet # S 1245), and many other stories. l, Robot was originally published by Gnome Press.

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The Day Before Tomorrow by Gerard Klein. New York. 1972. DAW/New American Library. Translated from the French by P. J. Sokolowski.  A DAW Books Original. 128 pages. paperback. UQ1011. Cover painting by Josh Kirby.

DESCRIPTION - The federation considered itself a technological Utopia-and the innumerable planets under its sway were guaranteed stability by virtue of the time-change teams. For whenever a planetary historian located evidence in the past of any newly found world that it might evolve into a possible menace, a team of seven would be sent to tamper with that world's history.But the seven men that went to Ygone encountered a fate no theorist had projected. They met with immediate ambush, they met with a strangely peaceful culture that could not be fathomed, and they finally were confronted with all the contradictions and temporal knots that the whole system of time-change had to imply.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gérard Klein (born 1937), known also as Gilles , is a French science fiction writer with sociological entrenamiento. He is the editor of the prestigious science fiction series Ailleurs et Demain published by Robert Laffont and of the Le Livre de Poche science-fiction imprint.In his novella Les virus ne parlent pas ("The viruses do not speak"), he imagines that viruses have created all living beings in the same fashion that human beings have created computers, and for the same reason: to improve eir efficiency. Gérard Klein used the pseudonym "Gilles d'Argyre" for his novels published by Editions Fleuve Noir for their series Anticipation. Several of his novels were published in translation by DAW Books in the United States.

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Adam the Creator: A Comedy in Six Scenes & an Epilogue by Karel Capek and Josef Capek. London. 1929. Allen & Unwin. Translated from the Czech by Dora Round. 187 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Adam the Creator is a play from 1927 from the brothers Capek (1927), which shows man endeavouring to rebuild the world destroyed by robots. Adam, an unacknowledged philosopher and inventor, destroys the world using a cannon of negation, and for that he is punished by God who orders him to create a new human kind. In his work, the author shows the absurdity of extreme revolutionism, which refutes values without being able to create new values.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Karel Capek (January 9, 1890 - December 25, 1938) was one of the most influential Czech writers of the 20th century. Capek was born in Male Svatonovice, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic). He wrote with intelligence and humour on a wide variety of subjects. His works are known for their interesting and precise descriptions of reality, and Capek is renowned for his excellent work with the Czech language. He is perhaps best known as a science fiction author, who wrote before science fiction became widely recognized as a separate genre. He can be considered one of the founders of classical, non-hardcore European science fiction, a type which focuses on possible future (or alternative) social and human evolution on Earth, rather than technically advanced stories of space travel. However, it is best to classify him with Aldous Huxley and George Orwell as a speculative fiction writer, distinguishing his work from genre-specific hard science fiction. Many of his works discuss ethical and other aspects of revolutionary inventions and processes that were already anticipated in the first half of 20th century. These include mass production, atomic weapons, and post-human intelligent beings such as robots or intelligent salamanders. In addressing these themes, Capek was also expressing fear of impending social disasters, dictatorship, violence, and the unlimited power of corporations, as well as trying to find some hope for human beings. Josef Čapek (23 March 1887 - April, 1945 ) was a Czech artist who was best known as a painter, but who was also noted as a writer and a poet. He invented the word robot, which was introduced into literature by his brother, Karel Čapek.

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R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots): A Fantastic Melodrama by Karel Capek. Garden City/New York. 1923. Doubleday Page & Company. Translated from the Czech by Paul Selver. The Theatre Guild Version, with four illustrations from photographs of the Theatre Guild production. 187 pages. hardcover.

  
DESCRIPTION - R.U.R. - written in 1920 - garnered worldwide acclaim for its author and popularized the word ‘Robot.' Mass produced, efficient, and servile labor, Capek's robots remember everything, but lack creative thought, and the Utopian life they provide ultimately lacks meaning. When the robots revolt, killing all but one of their masters, they must attempt to learn the secret of self-duplication. But their attempts at replication leave them with nothing but bloody chunks of meat. It is not until two robots fall in love and are christened ‘Adam' and ‘Eve' by the last surviving human that Nature emerges triumphant. ‘It is time to read Capek again for his insouciant laughter, and the anguish of human blindness that lies beneath it.' - Arthur Miller.

In a more recent translation from Penguin Classics:

R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karel Capek. New York. 2004. Penguin Books. 0141182083. Translated from the Czech by Claudia Novack. Introduction by Ivan Klima. 84 pages. paperback. . Cover photograph by Bob Elsdale.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Karel Capek (January 9, 1890 - December 25, 1938) was one of the most influential Czech writers of the 20th century. Capek was born in Male Svatonovice, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic). He wrote with intelligence and humour on a wide variety of subjects. His works are known for their interesting and precise descriptions of reality, and Capek is renowned for his excellent work with the Czech language. He is perhaps best known as a science fiction author, who wrote before science fiction became widely recognized as a separate genre. He can be considered one of the founders of classical, non-hardcore European science fiction, a type which focuses on possible future (or alternative) social and human evolution on Earth, rather than technically advanced stories of space travel. However, it is best to classify him with Aldous Huxley and George Orwell as a speculative fiction writer, distinguishing his work from genre-specific hard science fiction. Many of his works discuss ethical and other aspects of revolutionary inventions and processes that were already anticipated in the first half of 20th century. These include mass production, atomic weapons, and post-human intelligent beings such as robots or intelligent salamanders. In addressing these themes, Capek was also expressing fear of impending social disasters, dictatorship, violence, and the unlimited power of corporations, as well as trying to find some hope for human beings.

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