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exclusive interview, David Garnett, author of Bikini Planet, explains how in the future, everyday normalities like
knocking on a door or using a mobile phone could be nothing but
distant memories and why we will still be wearing bikinis in
space.
by Stephen Baxter
Hardcover, 456 pages
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by Kathleen Ann Goonan
Paperback, 382 pages
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by Justina Robson
Paperback, 374 pages
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by Bruce Sterling
Paperback, 384 pages
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by Neal Stephenson
Paperback, 918 pages
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by Vernor Vinge
Paperback, 606 pages
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Set in ancient Ireland and
blending historical fiction and fantasy in a tale of the relationships and
conflicts between paganism and Roman and Celtic Christianity, The
Circle and The Cross has been described by Dr Colleen McCullough
(author of The Thorn Birds) as "a sumptuous feast of storytelling".
First published in Australia in 1995, where it was an instant bestseller,
the book is both a first novel and the beginning of The Wanderers
trilogy with The Song of the Earth and The Water of Life
following. The multi-talented Caiseal Mór also creates his own
Celtic-inspired art and has composed and performed successful albums of
harp music as the "soundtracks" to each book! Mór certainly can tell a
rattling adventure with the voice of a born storyteller, "Hear the wind
wailing down a chimney on the darkest night of winter. Sit at the fire
warming flesh that has blued in icy air. Rest eyes that ache, feet that
are weary..." even if at times, writing Celtic fantasy from down-under,
his vision does seem contrived and just a little too self-consciously
poetic.
While Mór strives for balance with sympathetic individual Christian characters, his heart lies with the pagans, whom he romanticises enthusiastically. Beginning with Taliesin, Stephen Lawhead's Pendragon Cycle covers similar material with greater maturity and more excitement from a Christian perspective, while Melvin Bragg's Credo is an epic of love and religious war in 7th century Britain and is simply one of the most brilliant novels written in years.--Gary S Dalkin
Synopsis
Mawn knows little of the
world outside his village. But his island home is in turmoil - monks have
made their way from Rome and set the people at war. The High-King and the
Druid Council know they cannot survive the might of Rome so they must find
a way to save their ancient magic and traditions.
Nobody but Philip K Dick could so successfully combine SF comedy with the
unease of reality gone wrong, shifting underfoot like
quicksand. Besides grisly ideas like funeral parlours where you swap gossip
for the advice of the frozen dead, Ubik (1969) offers such
deadpan farce as a moneyless character's attack on the robot apartment
door that demands a five-cent toll:
"I'll sue you," the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live
through it."
Chip works for Glen Runciter's anti-psi security agency, which hires out its talents to block telepathic snooping and paranormal dirty tricks. When its special team tackles a big job on the Moon, something goes badly wrong. Runciter is killed, it seems--but messages from him now appear on toilet walls, traffic tickets or product labels. Meanwhile fragments of reality are time-slipping into past versions: Joe Chip's beloved stereo system reverts to a hand-cranked 78 player with bamboo needles. Why does Runciter's face appear on US coins? Why the repeated ads for a hard-to-find universal panacea called Ubik ("safe when taken as directed")?
The true, chilling state of affairs slowly becomes clear, though the villain isn't who Joe Chip thinks. And this is Dick country, where final truths are never quite final and--with the help of Ubik--the reality/illusion balance can still be tilted the other way...Another nifty choice from Millennium SF Masterworks. --David Langford
... one hundred million tons of night all crammed in that huge dark pit, that dank cellar, that deliciously frightening ravine.
Awaiting them is the comic-sinister trickster Moundshroud, who whirls the boys on a tour through time that shows them the roots of Halloween--cavemen trembling from the dark, Egyptians whose lives revolved around death, Druids appeasing their terrible gods, and so on to the grim carnival of Mexico's Day of the Dead. It's full of poetic flashes, as when "all the old beasts, all the old tales, all the old nightmares, all the unused demons-put- by" are summoned from every corner of Europe to become gargoyles in the newly-built Notre Dame Cathedral. Bradbury's theme of celebrating life by celebrating death is underlined by fleeting appearances of the gang's missing ninth boy, the one we soon realise is gravely ill and may not last the night. But Moundshroud, who is more than he seems, offers a deal ... The Halloween Tree is written as though for children, with lashings of exclamation marks--but, just as in a fairground, adults too can let their hair down and enjoy the wild roller- coaster ride. --David Langford
Fritz Leiber was a pioneer of sword-and-sorcery adventure, the first writer to handle this sub-genre with the spicy wit of James Branch Cabell's high fantasies. His best-loved creations are mighty Fafhrd and the nimble-witted Gray Mouser, whose seven volumes of flamboyant exploits are repackaged as Ill Met in Lankhmar, Lean Times in Lankhmar, Return to Lankhmar and Farewell to Lankhmar. The latter is a retitling of The Knight and Knave of Swords, Leiber's last full-length book before his death in 1992.
The fabulous duo are now in semi-retirement on northerly Rime Isle, settled down with tough but loving lady comrades and looking back on their lurid years as rogues-for-hire. Discarded mistresses, former wizardly mentors and vengeful gods remember them, though, and the past always catches up. One story, The Curse of the Smalls and Stars, inflicts strange obsessions upon our heroes, distracting them from the sworn assassins on their trail. The Mouser Goes Below is a short novel where the Mouser literally sinks into solid ground and is magically moved about the world while always imprisoned in earth. Fafhrd organises desperate mining operations as his friend undergoes peculiar underworld torments and titillations, some slightly embarrassing--Leiber's witty handling of sexual naughtiness, seen at its finest in Return to Lankhmar, had begun to fail with illness and age. Nevertheless his prose remained elegant, while neat inventions and unexpected twists still abound. No reader hooked on the earlier volumes will want to miss this one. --David Langford
Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy has grown out of its reputation as a cult classic and into the mainstream of fantasy, as a book no reader interested in Gothic dare to miss. It is one of the most distinctive, absorbing and wonderfully strange books ever written. The story concerns Titus, heir to and afterwards 77th Earl of Groan and his adventures in the sprawling, crumbling castle of Gormenghast. Gormenghast is an entire world and Titus comes to grips with his prime antagonist, the sinister kitchenboy Steerpike, amongst a brilliant profusion of characters and vivid detail. Peake's work is rarely compared with that other great fantasy trilogy to come out of the immediately post-war years, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings but in ways the two works do go together. Although Tolkien is plain and expansive where Peake is elaborate, poetic and inward-looking, both authors nonetheless use a detailed imaginative escapism in order to talk about the concerns of their day--specifically the passing of the old certainties of traditional England and the coming of something new. 'Equality is the great thing', said the sinister Steerpike, pulling the legs off a stag beetle and preparing to take on the whole hierarchy of Gormenghast, 'equality is everything'. This is why the short, surreal oddity of Titus Alone, the third novel, is the best: finally leaving his castle home Titus finds the larger world stranger even than his birthplace.
The new television series, with which this edition ties in, promises great things but the best part of Mervyn Peake is to be found in his ornate, poetic writing; his grasp of the Dickensian oddities of character and the utterly unique atmosphere of the books. --Adam Roberts
Book Information
Gormenghast is the vast, crumbling castle to which the 77th Earl, Titus
Graon, is Lord and heir. Gothic labyrinth of roofs and turrets,
cloisters and corridors, stairwells and dungeons, it is also the cobwebbed
kingdom of Byzantine government and age-old ritual, a world
primed to implode beneath the weight of centuries of intrigue, treachery,
manipulation and murder-- a world suggested in a tour de force
that ranks as one of the century's most remarkable feats of imaginative
writing.
"The Gormenghast trilogy is one of the most important works of the imagination to come out of the age that also produced Four Quartets, The Unquiet Grave, Brideshead Revisited, The Loved One, Animal Farm and 1984" --Anthony Burgess, Spectator
Pratchett is always at his best when the comedy is mixed with a real sense of jeopardy that even favourite characters might be hurt if there was a good joke in it. As always the most unlikely things crop up as the subjects of gags--Chekhov, grand opera, the Caine Mutiny--and as always there are remorselessly funny gags about the inevitability of story:
"They say that the fifth elephant came screaming and trumpeting through the atmosphere of the young world all those years ago and landed hard enough to split continents and raise mountains.
No one actually saw it land, which raised the interesting philosophical question: when millions of tons of angry elephant come spinning through the sky, and there is no one to hear it, does it--philosophically speaking--make a noise?
As for the dwarfs, whose legend it is, and who mine a lot deeper than other people, they say that there is a grain of truth in it".
All this, the usual guest appearances and Gaspode the Wonder Dog... -- Roz Kaveney
Book Information
Terry Pratchett has sold over 17 million books, and his work has been translated
into 27 languages. The Fifth Elephant is the 24th book in
the bestselling Discworld series.
Sam Vimes is a man on the run. Yesterday he was a duke, a chief of police and the ambassador to the mysterious fat-rich country of Uberwald. Now he has nothing but his native wit and the gloomy trousers of Uncle Vanya (don't ask). It's snowing. It's freezing. And if he can't make it through the forest to civilisation there's going to be a terrible war. But there are monsters on his trail. They're bright. They're fast. They're werewolves--and they're catching up. Sam Vimes is out of time, out of luck, and already out of breath...
About the Author Terry Pratchett has been writing the Discworld novels since 1983. His first novel was published when he was 20, and he continued to write in his spare time whilst working as a journalist for a local newspaper. In his thirties he left journalism to become a press officer for Central Electricity Generating Board. He now writes full-time and is Britain's best-selling novelist, with a fanatical following.
Praise for Terry Pratchett
"Like reading Tolkien but with gags" --Guardian
"Has the energy of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the inventiveness of Alice in Wonderland ... an intelligent wit and a truly grim and comic grasp of the nature of things" --AS Byatt, Sunday Times
"It's hard to think of any humorist writing in Britain today who can match him" --Time Out
"The most breathtaking display of comic invention since PG Wodehouse" --The Times
"If Terry Pratchett were a character from one of his novels, he would be a wizard with a special qualification in alchemy, for everything he touches turns to gold" --The Guardian
"With their humour, terrors and strange and unnerving philosophical reflections on space and time, Pratchett's novels are that paradoxical phenomenon--cult writings that are relished by millions" --Gerald Kaufman, The Express
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