(Gollancz SF)
Description
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is a 1974 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. The story follows a genetically enhanced pop singer and television star who wakes up in a world where he has never existed. The novel is set in a futuristic dystopia, where the United States has become a police state in the aftermath of a Second Civil War. It was nominated for a Nebula Award in 1974 and a Hugo Award in 1975, and was awarded the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 1975. TV star Jason Taverner is no more. Overnight, he looses his ID cards, the records about him in the official databases have strangely vanished and no one seems to know him any more. Even the songs he recorded don’t exist any more. In an oppressing police state, Jason struggels not to get arrested.
How the series evolves
Books in this Series
Flow my tears, the policeman said
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is a 1974 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. The story follows a genetically enhanced pop singer and television star who wakes up in a world where he has never existed. The novel is set in a futuristic dystopia, where the United States has become a police state in the aftermath of a Second Civil War. It was nominated for a Nebula Award in 1974 and a Hugo Award in 1975, and was awarded the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 1975. TV star Jason Taverner is no more. Overnight, he looses his ID cards, the records about him in the official databases have strangely vanished and no one seems to know him any more. Even the songs he recorded don’t exist any more. In an oppressing police state, Jason struggels not to get arrested.
The dreamers
It’s an age where high tech rules supreme. Computers do all the work while humans spend their lives enjoying drug-induced fantasies. Only a handful live and work in the traditional sense—managing the few affairs that still need attention. At the center of this system is the Mnemonist, the man who directs everything that happens. But now he has reached an advanced age and must carefully choose a dreamer capable of taking over his crucial position.
Walk to the end of the world
After thirty years, Suzy McKee Charnas has completed her incomparable epic tale of men and women, slavery and freedom, power and human frailty. It starts with Walk to the End of the World, where Alldera the Messenger is a slave among the Fems, in thrall to men whose own power is waning. In continues with Motherlines, where Alldera the Runner is a fugitive among the Riding Women, who live a tribal life of horse-thieving and storytelling, killing the few men who approach their boundaries. The books that finish Alldera's story, The Furies and The Conqueror's Child, are now available. Once you start here, you won't want to stop until you've read the last word of the last book.
Up the walls of the world
Human telepaths receive calls for help from an endangered world. However, the interstellar being threatening them, may be trying to help.
Rocannon's World
Earth-scientist Rocannon has been leading an ethnological survey on a remote world populated by three native races: the cavern-dwelling Gdemiar, the elvish Fiia, and the warrior clan, Liuar. But when the technologically primitive planet is suddenly invaded by a fleet of ships from the stars, rebels against the League of All Worlds, Rocannon is the only survey member left alive. Marooned among alien peoples, he leads the battle to free this newly discovered world and finds that legends grow around him as he fights.
Against infinity
On the poisonous, icy surface of Ganymede (one of the moons of Jupiter), a man and a boy are on a deadly hunt. Their prey is the Aleph-- an unknowable alien artifact that roamed and ruled Ganymede for countless millennia. The Aleph haunts men's dreams and destroys all efforts to terraform Ganymede into an habitable planet.
Other days, other eyes
Slow glass was an amusing scientific toy. Light traveled through it so slowly that, looking through a pane of it, you might see what had happened five minutes ago on the other side--or five years. It stopped being a toy when great new jeliners began to crash, caraccidents multiplied astronomically and a mounting toll of deaths and disasters revealed its true potential. And it was no toy at all when blackmailers discovered how to use it to see into the secret life of any victim--and government officials found it could permit surveillance of any person, any time, anywhere.
A Time Of Changes
In the far future, Earth is a worn-out backwater and humanity is spread across the galaxy on worlds that began as colonies, but now feel like home, each with its own long history of a thousand years or more, and each with its own unique culture. One of the strangest is on Borthan, where the founding settlers established the Covenant, which teaches that the self is to be despised, and forbids anyone to reveal his innermost thoughts or feelings to another. On Borthan, the filthiest obscenities imaginable are the words “I” and “me.” For the heinous crime of “self-baring,” apostates have always paid with exile or death, but after his eyes are opened by a visitor from Earth, Kinnall Darival, prince of Salla, risks everything to teach his people the real meaning of being human.
Floating worlds
2000 years in the future, runaway pollution has made the Earth uninhabitable except in giant biodomes. The society is an anarchy, with disputes mediated through the Machiavellian Committee for the Revolution. Mars, Venus and the Moon support flourishing colonies of various political stripes. On the fringes of the solar system, in the Gas Planets, a strange, new, violent kind of human has evolved.In this unstable system the anarchist Paula Mendoza, an agent of the Committee, works to make peace, and ultimately protect her people, in a catastrophic clash of worlds that destroys the order she knows.
Gollancz/Sunday Times SF competition stories
According to the accompanying note by Malcolm Edwards the length for the story entries was limited to a maximum of 3,000 words, though it was allowed to slightly revised and expand them for the publication; a number of over 1,000 stories were supplied. The jurors were J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter and Malcolm Edwards.
Friends Come in Boxes
The problem of immortality was solved in the 21st century: at forty, your brain was transferred to the head of a six month old child. Thus you gained another forty years of active life, until you could do it all over again. But then the birthrate fell - and a growing horde of brains waited in the Friendship Boxes for host bodies. And on the sidelines a rebellious minority fought the system, seeking to raise their children in freedom to live a normal life. Inevitable, the factions moved towards confrontation: a day of final reckoning.
The Quiet War
"Twenty-third century Earth, ravaged by climate change, looks backwards to the holy ideal of a pre-industrial Eden. Political power has been grabbed by a few powerful families and their green saints. Millions of people are imprisoned in teeming cities; millions more labour on Pharaonic projects to rebuild ruined ecosystems." "On the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the Outers, descendants of refugees from Earth's repressive regimes, have constructed a wild variety of self-sufficient cities and settlements: scientific utopias crammed with exuberant creations of the genetic arts; the last outposts of every kind of democratic tradition." "The fragile detente between the Outer cities and the dynasties of Earth is threatened by the ambitions of the rising generation of Outers, who want to break free of their cosy, inward-looking pocket paradises, colonise the rest of the Solar System, and drive human evolution in a hundred new directions. On Earth, many demand pre-emptive action against the Outers before it's too late; others want to exploit the talents of their scientists and gene wizards. Amid campaigns for peace and reconciliation, political machinations, crude displays of military might, and espionage by cunningly wrought agents, the two branches of humanity edge towards war ..." "From the prison cities of Earth to the scrupulously realised landscapes of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, The Quiet War is an exotic, fast-paced space opera that turns on a single question: who decides what it means to be human?"--BOOK JACKET.
Earth abides
The story of rebuilding civilization after a plague nearly wipes out the human race.
Born with the dead
His wife was among the rekindled dead now. He'd heard that she was on a plane to Zanzibar with five other rekindled dead. As a "warm" he was not really allowed to make contact with her. The dead liked to stay in their cold-cities. But he'd loved her so much when she was alive, he just had to try. Science Fiction Hall of Fame Pick, Nebula Award(R) Winner, Locus Poll Award Winner, Hugo Award Nominee
The Feast of St Dionysus
These stories were written before the end of Silverberg's "first period" (i.e., before 1974), and represent some of the finest short work he did during that time. The title story is a fine exploration of both survivor's guilt and the healing power of religious ecstasy. "Trips" is an playful take on the now over-used cliche of the alternate universe; no real conclusion, but still a fun ride. The remaining stories all entertain as only Silverberg can.
Dimension of miracles
This madcap cosmic farce relates the adventures of the hapless human Carmody, as he attempts to make his way home to Earth after winning the grand prize in the Intergalactic Sweepstake, encountering parallel worlds, incompetent bureaucrats and talking dinosaurs on the way.
Shadrach in the Furnace
A Hugo and Nebula Award Finalist novel from a Grand Master of science fiction! A modern day Genghis Khan rules the world 30 years from now, after it has been ravaged by the Virus Wars. With billions slowly dying from genetic organ rot, there aren't enough doses of the life-saving treatment. Not content with mere treatments and organ replacements to continuously extend his life, the Khan dreams of an immortal empire with himself as immortal emperor, and sets his personal physician, Shadrach Mordecai, to oversee the three lines of research that could grant immortality -- but at what terrible cost?
Engine Summer
From back cover Bantam paperback March 1980: RUSH THAT SPEAKS Born into the community of Truthful Speakers one thousand years after the Storm, he was raised on stories of the old days -- a world filled with saints, a world in which all things were possible, a world which finally destroyed itself. In love with a beautiful woman, Rush journeys far and learns much. Taken into the society of Dr. Boots's List, attached to the old mysteries, Rush grows closer to a sainthood he could never have imagined.
Inconstant moon
From the back cover: INCONSTANT MOON a moon so bright could mean only one thing. The sun had gone nova. DEATH BY ECSTASY Belters didn't get addicted to current stimulation, so why did the spacer die with electrodes in his brain? BORDERED IN BLACK the continent had a thin black border all the way around. The things that made it drove a space explorer raving mad.
Dying of the Light
A whisperjewel summoned him to Worlorn, and a love he thought he'd lost. But Worlorn isn't the world Dirk t'Larien imagined, and Gwen Delvano is no longer the woman he once knew. She is bound to another man, and to a dying planet that is trapped in twilight, forever falling toward night. Amid this bleak landscape is a violent clash of cultures in which there is no code of honor--and the hunter and the hunted are often interchangeable. Caught up in a dangerous triangle, Gwen is in need of Dirk's protection, and he will do anything to keep her safe, even if it means challenging the barbaric man who has claimed her--and his cunning cohort. But an impenetrable veil of secrecy surrounds them all, and it's becoming impossible for Dirk to distinguish between his allies and his enemies. While each will fight to stay alive, one is waiting for escape, one for revenge, and another for a brutal, untimely demise.From the Trade Paperback edition.
A maze of death
A Maze of Death is a 1970 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. Like many of Dick's novels, it portrays what appears to be a drab and harsh off-world human colony and explores the difference between reality and perception. It is, however, one of his few to examine the human death instinct and capacity for murder and is one of his darkest novels.
Tau Zero
Poul Anderson's Tau Zero is an outstanding work of science fiction, in part because it combines two qualities that are often at odds in this genre: an interest in the emotional lives of its characters and a fascination with all things technological and scientific. In Tau Zero these components are not merely fused; they work together with a remarkable synergy that makes the novel much more than just a deep space adventure story.The novel centers on a ten-year interstellar voyage aboard the spaceship Leonora Christine, and it opens with members of the crew preparing for their departure from earth. It is an especially moving departure because they know that while they are aboard the ship and traveling close to the speed of light, time will be passing much more quickly back home. As a result, by the time they return everyone they know will have long since died. From practically the very first page, therefore, Tau Zero sets the scientific realities of space travel in dramatic tension with the no-less-real emotional and psychological states of the travelers. This is a dynamic Anderson explores with great success over the course of the novel as fifty crewmembers settle in for the long journey together. They are a highly-trained team of scientists and researchers, but they are also a community of individuals, each trying to make a life for him or herself in space.This is the background within which the action of the novel takes place. Anderson carefully depicts the network of relationships linking these people before the real plot begins to unfold. The voyage soon takes a unexpected and disastrous turn for the worse. The ship passes through a small, uncharted, cloudlike nebula that makes it impossible for the crew to decelerate the ship. The only hope, in fact, is for the ship to speed up. But acceleration towards the speed of light means that time outside the spaceship passes even more quickly, and the crew finds itself hurtling deeper into space and further into the future. Anderson's experience as a physicist is evidenced in the knowledgeable way he discusses the technical details of space and time travel, although his explanations never become burdensome or tedious. More to the point, the painstaking care with which he has drawn the characters ensures that the action is both imaginatively compelling and emotionally meaningful. It is a combination that is unfortunately all too rare in science fiction.