Literary Science Fiction

If Max Brod had obeyed Franz Kafka's dying request, Kafka's unpublished manuscripts would have been burned, unread. Fortunately, Brod ignored his friend's wishes and published The Trial, which became the author's most famous work. Now Kafka's enigmatic novel regains its humor and stylistic elegance in a new translation based on the restored original manuscript.

"All first-rate criticism first defines what we are confronting," the late, great jazz critic Whitney Balliett once wrote. By that measure, the essays of Christopher Hitchens are in the first tier. For nearly four decades, Hitchens has been telling us, in pitch-perfect prose, what we confront...

A number-one New York Times best-selling author, Charlaine Harris penned the addictive Sookie Stackhouse series. In Day Shift psychic Manfred Bernardo is hounded by the press after a client drops dead during a reading. Turning to the local vampire's lover for help, Manfred hopes she can put the squeeze on the scandal before someone else is put on ice.

A great working of Wild Magic and High Magic strikes at the heart of the Demon Queen's plots, but the human city, the Golden City of the Bells, falls farther under her sway with each day that passes. And without the City's High Magicians, the Wild Magicians, the Elven Army, and all their allies will surely fall before the onslaught of the Demon Queen's malignant warriors. But not all hope is lost. The Light's young mages, tempered by war, grow ever more powerful.

The Underdark: Beneath the surface of Faern lies a whole different world. A world of drow, deep gnomes, and other denizens of the dark. A world of cities like Menzoberranzan and Skullport, of warriors and rogues like Drizzt Do'Urden and Liriel Baenre and numerous others. Leave the security of the surface world and seek out the darkness that lies below. Welcome to the Realms of the Underdark.

As Constantinople is being pillaged and burned in April 1204, a young man, Baudolino, manages to save a historian and a high court official from certain death at the hands of crusading warriors. Born a simple peasant, Baudolino has two gifts: his ability to learn languages and to lie. A young man, he is adopted by a foreign commander who sends him to university in Paris. After he allies with a group of fearless and adventurous fellow students, they go in search of a vast kingdom to the East.

From a remote corner of the galaxy, a message is being sent. The continuous beats of a pulsar have become odd, irregular, and artificial. It can only be a code. Frantically, a research team struggles to decipher the alien communication. And what the scientists discover is destined to shake the foundations of empires around this world - from Wall Street to the Vatican.

Anakin Skywalker–the Chosen One–is dead. In his place rises Darth Vader, who now hunts what Jedi survived the desctruction of their temple on Coruscant. From the site of Anakin Skywalker’s last stand–on the molten surface of the planet Mustafar, where he sought to destroy his friend and...

Contre le chaos de l'univers, une étincelle de vie dans le vide infini. En pleine guerre interplanétaire, la vie de Kira bascule : un organisme vivant d'origine extraterrestre prend peu à peu possession de son corps, lui conférant des pouvoirs quasi divins. Et ces nouvelles aptitudes bouleversent profondément son identité. Tout son être évolue vers une intelligence supérieure hybride.

Reiko, empress of Japan, has allied herself with Princess Órlaith, heir to the High Kingdom of Montival, to find the Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi, the Grass-Cutting Sword, a legendary treasure of an ancient dynasty that confers valor and victory to its bearer. Órlaith understands all too well the power it signifies. Her own inherited blade, the Sword of the Lady, was both a burden and a danger to her father, Rudi Mackenzie, as it failed to save the king from being assassinated.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. . . . “The war is over. The Separatists have been defeated, and the Jedi rebellion has been foiled. We stand on the threshold of a new beginning.”—Emperor Palpatine For a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights brought peace and order to the...

Two Syndicate World star systems have fallen prey to a mysterious fleet of warships - a fleet controlled entirely by artificial intelligence - that is now targeting Alliance space. The warships are no mystery to Geary. They were developed by his government to ensure security but malfunctioned. If the Syndics learn the truth, the war with the Alliance will resume with a vengeance.

As the battle against the Empire rages, a new crew of X-wing fighters risk life and machine on a daring undercover mission and emerge as the Rebel Alliance’s elite strike force. It is Wedge Antilles’s boldest creation: a covert-action unit of X-wing fighters, its pilots drawn from the dregs...

Urmag’Tal’s Puzzle is slated to open for the first time in 100 years, and considering his connection with it, Thorn can’t afford to be absent. Heading to the Temple of Man will throw him into the whirlpool of political intrigue that dominates the city of the Saints. Even as Thorn seeks to build alliances, he finds himself gaining enemies as the forces of the Council of Gods conspire against him.

No matter how much the paranormal politics of Atlanta change, one thing always remains the same: If there' s trouble, Kate Daniels will be in the middle of it. As the mate of the Beast Lord, Curran, former mercenary Kate Daniels has more responsibilities than it seems possible to juggle. Not only is she still struggling to keep her investigative business afloat, she must now deal with the affairs of the pack, including preparing her people for attack from Roland, a cruel ancient being with god-like powers.

Aster lives in the low-deck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations the Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way the ship's leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster, whom they consider to be less than human.

Two men while away the days in an Antarctic research station. Tensions between them build as they argue over a love letter one of them has received. One is practical and open. The other surly, superior and obsessed with reading one book - by the philosopher Kant. As a storm brews and they lose contact with the outside world, they debate Kant, reality and the emptiness of the universe. The come to hate each other, and they learn that they are not alone.

À 28 ans, Jacques Klein rencontre dans son sommeil l'homme qu'il sera 20 ans plus tard grâce à une machine permettant le voyage dans le temps via les rêves inventée par le Jacques de 48 ans. Celui-ci le guide pour retrouver sa mère disparue en Malaisie. Arrivé chez les Senoi, un peuple qui maîtrise le rêve lucide, il tente d'apprendre à atteindre le sixième sommeil, le stade de tous les possibles.

Deftly blending such genres as mystery, science fiction, and classic literature, Jasper Fforde’s gleefully irreverent New York Times best-selling Thursday Next novels defy categorization. In this sixth installment, the threat of all-out Genre war looms over BookWorld. But with the real Thursday Next retired in the real world, the Council of Genres has no other choice than to tap the fictional Thursday to save the day. Her mission as emissary is to prevent the brewing war—but her task is made more difficult by a hidden foe manipulating events.

Equality 7-2521 is a young man who yearns to understand “the Science of Things”, but he lives in a bleak, dystopian future where independent thought is a crime and where science and technology have regressed to primitive levels. All expressions of individualism have been suppressed in his world. Obedience to the collective is so deeply ingrained that the very word “I” has been erased. In pursuit of his quest for knowledge, Equality 7-2521 struggles to answer the questions that burn within him.