The Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author and Science Fiction Grand Master delivers a sweeping epic of a planet suffering deadly conditions of alternating extremes in this Nebula Award finalist 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. Brian W. Aldiss has, for more than fifty years, continued to challenge readers’ minds with literate, thought-provoking, and inventive fiction. Helliconia Spring’s prescience with regard to climate change is nothing short of extraordinary.

Originally published: London: Cape, 1983.

A civilization crumbles as its planet hurtles away from its star in the final chapter of this “monumental” epic from the Grand Master of Science Fiction (The Times, London). 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. More than thirty years after the original publication of Helliconia Spring, the first volume of the Helliconia Trilogy, the series is newly available, now with a map, an afterword, and an introduction by the author.

Helliconia is a planet that, due to the massively eccentric orbit of its own sun around another star, experiences seasons that lasts eons. Whole civilisations grow in the Spring, flourish in the Summer and then die in the brutal winters. The human-like inhabitants have been profoundly changed by their experience of this harsh cycle. In orbit above the planet a terran mission struggles to observe and understand the effects on society of such a massive climatic impact. Massive, thoroughly researched, minutely organised, full of action, pulp references and deep drama this is a classic trilogy.

An unending chain of surveillance crosses countless dimensions in this brilliant, disturbing, and groundbreaking “antinovel” by one of science fiction’s greatest practitioners 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. Each observer must file a report with his superiors in another continuum, pausing in his surveillance only long enough to eat identical meals alone at the deserted café across the street. But the watchers are themselves being observed by others who are, in turn, being watched across vast and infinite dimensional planes in an attempt to unravel the mysteries of the world known as Probability A. This brilliant, experimental work by Grand Master Brian W. Aldiss is a perplexing and devastatingly haunting masterwork of speculative fiction, considered by many to be the greatest work in the long, prolific career of a true giant of the genre. Thought-provoking, confounding, and stylistically brilliant, Report on Probability A will burn its way into the reader’s mind and memory.

Hailed as “one of the finest achievements of modern science fiction” by The New York Times Book Review, The Hyperion Cantos is a triumphant odyssey into the heart of space and time. Through four riveting novels, Dan Simmons masterfully weaves such influences as classical mythology, romantic poetry, and far-future philosophy into an ambitiously conceived and unfailingly entertaining epic. Now, for the first time, this entire masterpiece of the imagination is available in one extraordinary eBook bundle: HYPERION THE FALL OF HYPERION ENDYMION THE RISE OF ENDYMION On the planet Hyperion, beyond the reach of galactic law, waits a creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. On the eve of Armageddon, with the known universe at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of existence. As the Shrike anticipates their mission, each traveler nurtures a desperate hope—and harbors a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his or her hands. Praise for The Hyperion Cantos “For vastness of scope, clarity of detail and seriousness of purpose, Simmons’s epic narrative is on a par with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, Frank Herbert’s Dune books, Gene Wolfe’s multipart Book of the New Sun and Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia trilogy.”—The New York Times Book Review “Dan Simmons has brilliantly conceptualized a future 700 years distant. In sheer scope and complexity it matches, and perhaps even surpasses, those of Isaac Asimov and James Blish.”—The Washington Post Book World “State of the art science fiction . . . This work will be that against which all future works will have to be measured, in the same way, in their time, that Asimov’s Foundation series and Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness set new standards.”—Asimov’s “Simmons’ own genius transforms space opera into a new kind of poetry.”—The Denver Post “A major work . . . Simmons doesn’t just promise; he delivers.”—Science Fiction Chronicle

A collection of science fiction tales, including the story of a robot boy who wants nothing more than to be loved by his parents.