Download or read book The Saliva Tree written by Brian W. Aldiss and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Invisible aliens invade the bucolic English countryside in Brian W. Aldiss’s Nebula Award–winning science fiction novella, plus nine other stories of the fantastic and the odd A meteor shower in the skies above the rolling English countryside late in the nineteenth century fires the imagination of a young man with a penchant for science—especially when one of the falling rocks breaks off from the rest and lands at the bottom of a pond near the Benford farm. While the young man’s curiosity has been seriously aroused, Farmer Benford and his clan couldn’t be less interested—not even when there’s a sudden, curious rash of animal births, they notice odd, lingering, pervasive smells, and the family dog dies inexplicably. Still, the young man is not willing to abandon his investigation into these strange occurrences, even as it becomes increasingly apparent that to keep looking could prove injurious—and perhaps even fatal—not only to himself but to every Benford in the vicinity. Grand Master Brian W. Aldiss wrote his wonderfully strange and gripping novella “The Saliva Tree,” as a tribute to H. G. Wells, the immortal author of The Time Machine and War of the Worlds, and it was honored with a Nebula Award. Included alongside this classic tale of creeping alien terror are nine other sparkling gems of short fiction—from the grisly baby steps of a novice serial killer, to the travels of a history professor through alternate worlds, to the journey of a young widow who has both a murderer and a monster vying for her attention.
Download or read book Brian Aldiss written by Michael R. Collings and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 1986-01-01 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to Aldiss's fictional output from the 50's to the 80's.
Download or read book Brian W Aldiss written by Paul Kincaid and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brian W. Aldiss wrote classic science fiction novels like Report on Probability A and Hothouse. Billion Year Spree, his groundbreaking study of the field, defined the very meaning of SF and delineated its history. Yet Aldiss’s discomfort with being a guiding spirit of the British New Wave and his pursuit of mainstream success characterized a lifelong ambivalence toward the genre. Paul Kincaid explores the many contradictions that underlay the distinctive qualities of Aldiss’s writing. Wartime experiences in Asia and the alienation that arose upon his return to the cold austerity of postwar Britain inspired themes and imagery that Aldiss drew upon throughout his career. He wrote of prolific nature overwhelming humanity, believed war was madness even though it provided him with the happiest period of his life, and found parallels in the static lives of Indian peasants and hidebound English society. As Kincaid shows, contradictions created tensions that fueled the metaphorical underpinnings of Aldiss's work and shaped not only his long career but the evolution of postwar British science fiction.
Download or read book Dracula Unbound written by Brian W. Aldiss and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a brilliant reimagining of Bram Stoker’s horror classic, an inventor travels back in time to save humankind from a nightmarish enslavement by vampires Joe Bodenland has figured out how to manipulate time—a discovery that leads him to Utah and an impossible sixty-five-million-year-old human gravesite. It is here that he learns of the existence of a monstrous race of intelligent predators as old as the dinosaur, and of the remarkable “train” the undead creatures use to travel back and forth from a Paleolithic past to a monstrous far future in which Homo sapiens are enslaved cattle. With the fate of all humanity at stake, Joe commandeers the ghostly transportation and rides it back to Victorian England, where he enlists the aid of a powerful ally, the author Bram Stoker, in the battle to secure Earth. But to prevent the coming apocalyptic nightmare, they must first confront and destroy the most cunning and deadly being the world has ever known: Lord Dracula, the immortal vampire. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, including multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards and the Prix Jules Verne, Grand Master Brian W. Aldiss puts a bold new science ficion spin on Bram Stoker’s classic tale of vampiric horror. An ingenious reinvention of the Nosferatu myth, Dracula Unbound is a breakneck thrill ride from one of the most revered names in science fiction and fantasy.
Download or read book The Malacia Tapestry written by Brian W. Aldiss and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a grand medieval city where all change has been outlawed, a roguish young actor tempts fate and dinosaurs, all in the name of love By law, nothing can change in Malacia—a teeming, eternal city of dukes, players, wizards, merchants, beggars, ape-men, lizard-boys, and courtesans—but that is of no great consequence to Perian de Chirolo. An out-of-work actor and unabashed rogue, he is well satisfied with his lot as long as there’s coin, eager young women to bed, and the occasional adventure. Perhaps it is this thrill-seeking spirit—or simply the lure of noble beauty—that makes Perian imprudently agree to take part in a mad inventor’s illegal experiments, since such foolishness will never be tolerated in Malacia. But Perian’s rash actions will only lead him on to further indiscretions, winning him first fame and then notoriety, causing him to be hunted, hounded, martyred, and trapped in a fight to the death with a razor-toothed Ancestral Beast on the outskirts of the city. And perhaps most frightening of all, Perian de Chirolo will find himself in love. Grand Master Brian W. Aldiss, one of science fiction’s most able and ingenious creative artists, performs a truly astonishing feat of alternate-world building, immersing the reader in an unforgettable Medieval fantasy realm rich in color, incident, invention, and peril—and of course, giant lizards. Welcome to Malacia.
Download or read book Hothouse written by Brian W. Aldiss and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Hugo Award–winning classic about a far-future Earth dominated by gargantuan plants and the few humans who remain Millions of years beyond our time, our Earth has long since stopped spinning—and giant flora have taken over the sunlit half of the motionless world. Here humans are among the very few animal species that still exist, struggling to survive against enormous odds, but they have become small and weak, and their numbers have dwindled to almost nothing. When the aging leader of Gren’s tribe decrees it is time for the old ones to go “Up,” the younger are left to make their own way below. Although the journey will not be an easy one for young Gren, he sets off on an odyssey across a perilous world populated by carnivorous plants and other evolved vegetation. But any knowledge to be gained at the terminator—the forbidding boundary between the day world and the night—might well prove worthless for the boy and the companions he amasses along the way when the expanding sun goes nova and their Earth is no more. A thrilling parable of courage, discovery, and survival, Hothouse is among Grand Master Brian W. Aldiss’s most beloved and enduring works. Ingeniously inventive, richly detailed, and breathtakingly lush and vibrant, the doomed world and people that Aldiss creates will live forever in the minds of all those who enter this remarkable realm.
Download or read book Galaxies Like Grains of Sand written by Brian W. Aldiss and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of nine stories from the Grand Master of Science Fiction charts the course of humanity from the near future onward through millennia. In Galaxies Like Grains of Sand, Brian W. Aldiss tells the tale of mankind’s future over the course of forty million years. Each of these nine connected short stories highlights a different millennia in which man has adapted to new environments and hardships. This ebook includes a new introduction from the author.
Download or read book Finches of Mars written by Brian W. Aldiss and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-08-04 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Colonists on Mars fight to prevent their own extinction in “a suspenseful genre-bending combination of straight SF and mystery” (Booklist, starred review). Doomed by overpopulation, irreversible environmental degradation, and never-ending war, Earth has become a fetid swamp. For many, Mars represents humankind’s last hope. In six tightly clustered towers on the red planet’s surface, the colonists who have escaped their dying home world are attempting to make a new life unencumbered by the corrupting influences of politics, art, and religion. Unable ever to return, these pioneers have chosen an unalterable path that winds through a landscape as terrible as it is beautiful, often forcing them to compromise their beliefs—and sometimes their humanity—in order to survive. But the gravest threat to the future is not the settlement’s total dependence on foodstuffs sent from a distant and increasingly uncaring Earth, or the events that occur in the aftermath of the miraculous discovery of native life on Mars—it is the fact that in the ten years since colonization began, every new human baby has been born dead, or so tragically deformed that death comes within hours. The great Brian W. Aldiss has delivered a dark and provocative yet ultimately hopeful magnum opus rich in imagination and bold ideas. A novel of philosophy as much as science fiction, Finches of Mars is an exploration of intellectual history, evolution, technology, and the future by one of speculative fiction’s undisputed masters.
Download or read book Report on Probability A written by Brian W. Aldiss and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book An Island Called Moreau written by Brian W. Aldiss and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A castaway government official is stranded on an island of man-made monsters in this bold reimagining of the H. G. Wells science fiction classic War is hell, and the conflict tearing the world apart may be humankind’s last. Set adrift on a makeshift raft in the middle of the South Pacific, the sole survivor of a sabotaged space-shuttle flight, undersecretary of state Calvert Roberts is certain his life is coming to an end. But fate intervenes, depositing him dehydrated and half starved on the beach of an uncharted island with a giant M etched into a cliff wall. At first it appears to be paradise, but Eden has a dark side: Here, Dr. Mortimer Dart is playing God. A genius geneticist who is certifiably mad, he is called Master by the unspeakable creations of his predecessor—monstrous creatures, neither human nor animal but some nightmarish hybrid. Yet as horrible as the stranded government official finds these abominations, it is the truth behind Dart’s experiments that chill Roberts’s blood—for it will open wide a window onto an inescapable future of emptiness, ashes, and death. One of twentieth-century science fiction’s brightest luminaries, Grand Master Brian W. Aldiss pays homage to one of the genre’s most beloved progenitors, the great H. G. Wells, author of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and other science fiction classics. An Island Called Moreau is a gripping near-future tale of inhuman experimentation, dystopia, morality, war, and mad science that honors and ingeniously updates Wells’s brilliant, dark masterwork, The Island of Doctor Moreau.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Science Fiction written by Don D'Ammassa and published by Infobase Learning. This book was released on 2015-04-22 with total page 2098 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents articles on the science fiction genre of literature, including authors, themes, significant works, and awards.
Download or read book Super State written by Brian W. Aldiss and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wildly satirical look at life—and death—in the near-future, not-quite-unified superstate that was once the continent of Europe Welcome to the future European Super-State—one continent united into a not-quite-homogenous whole. Numerous historic happenings and technological advances have ushered us to this new age of solidarity and prosperity, though it’s true that some of the past’s annoying problems still linger: global warming, terrorism, war, rape, murder, Alzheimer’s disease, environmental catastrophe. Despite all the advances of this brave new tomorrow, it seems people haven’t changed one bit. The rich, beautiful, and celebrated still revel in their outrageous excesses. The government still stumbles about its business of governing while presidential assassins blithely go about theirs. As before, we gaze toward the stars with wonderment, and even now the brave crew of the spaceship Roddenberry is approaching Jupiter’s moon, Europa, ready to make first contact with members of a very tasty alien race. Back on Earth, the Insanatics, our digital conscience, attempt to keep us honest as we love, lie, covet, cheat, and watch our best-laid plans go predictably haywire—and the android slaves we keep locked away overnight in cupboards exchange perplexed reflections on the myriad foibles of their human masters. One of the most acclaimed and accomplished science fiction writers of the twentieth century, Grand Master Brian W. Aldiss offers a colorful tapestry of what’s to come in his thoughtful and savagely funny take on the shape of tomorrow. Aldiss has seen the future . . . and it is ridiculous.
Download or read book Greybeard written by Brian W. Aldiss and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human reproduction has ceased and society slowly spirals in this “adult Lord of the Flies” by a Grand Master of Science Fiction (San Francisco Chronicle). After the “Accident,” all males on Earth become sterile. Society ages and falls apart bit by bit. First, toy companies go under. Then record companies. Then cities cease to function. Now Earth’s population lives in spread‐out, isolated villages, with its youngest members in their fifties. When the people of Sparcot begin to make claims of gnomes and man‐eating rodents lurking around their village, Greybeard and his wife set out for the coast with the hope of finding something better.
Download or read book Frankenstein Unbound written by Brian W. Aldiss and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A disruption of time and space sends a modern man back two hundred years to confront Dr. Frankenstein’s immortal monster in this brilliant reinvention of Mary Shelley’s classic tale Some years into the twenty-first century, a newly devised weapon of mass destruction will do far worse than kill; it will disrupt time and space. Suddenly, land, buildings, animals, and people are falling through “timeslips” and being transported briefly back to earlier eras. One of these inadvertent time travelers, Joe Bodenland, is shocked when he finds himself parked outside a villa on the shore of Lake Geneva—and soon after, unbelievably, in the presence of nineteenth-century literary luminaries Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, along with Shelley’s very enticing fiancée, budding author Mary. But when Joe comes face to face with a real, flesh-and-blood Victor Frankenstein and the monster the mad doctor brought into this world, the visitor from the future realizes that not only has time been disrupted, reality itself has been transmogrified. And this Frankenstein, it seems, is far from finished with his unholy endeavors, leaving it up to Joe to make it right for the sake of history—and for the bewitching lady novelist who has stolen his heart—before he is rudely thrust back to his own time. An absolutely stunning reinvention of a cherished literary classic, Frankenstein Unbound proves once more that there are no limits to the unparalleled creative genius of science fiction Grand Master W. Brian Aldiss, one of the most revered names in the field of speculative fiction.
Download or read book White Mars or The Mind Set Free written by Brian W. Aldiss and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A breathtaking vision of a utopian future on Mars by one of science fiction’s most renowned authors In the middle decades of the twenty-first century, the corporate powers on Earth have established a thriving colony on Mars as an alternative to life on the overpopulated, war-torn, ecologically ravaged home planet. But when the economy of EUPACUS—Earth’s collective industrialized nations—collapses, all contact between the two worlds abruptly ceases, and the Martian pioneers are left to fend for themselves. Led by Tom Jeffries, a philosopher and a visionary, the colonists now face a twofold challenge: No longer supported and subsidized by Earthbound interests, they must somehow form a working planetary alliance to create a new society based firmly in freedom and fairness for all while at the same time eliminating war, hunger, hatred, environmental abuse, and other former scourges of humanity. But first and foremost, they must survive. Brian W. Aldiss, a Hugo and Nebula Award–winning Grand Master of Science Fiction, presents a vision for the future that is startling, uplifting, and endlessly exciting. Written in collaboration with noted mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose—and with essential input from international law expert Laurence Lustgarten—Aldiss’s remarkable White Mars opens a window onto a relentlessly thrilling and gloriously possible tomorrow.
Download or read book Earthworks written by Brian W. Aldiss and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: War is humanity’s only hope. “Aldiss’ dark vision of collapsing society and withering earth is poignant and brutal . . . [a] richly detailed world” (Science Fiction Ruminations). In a future where the Earth has been savaged by overpopulation and over‐farming, robots are considered more valuable than humans and sand must be altered to create artificially fertile soil. Ex‐convict Knowle Noland, the hallucinating sea captain of the Trieste Star, finds himself wrapped up in a plot to incite a global war that will wipe out millions. War, it seems, is the only way to drastically reduce the population and create a better world for those who survive.
Download or read book The Dark Light Years written by Brian W. Aldiss and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A strange alien species forces us to question our definition of civilization in this biting satire from the Grand Master of Science Fiction. What would intelligent life‐forms on another planet look like? Would they walk upright? Would they wear clothes? Or would they be hulking creatures on six legs that wallow in their own excrement? Upon first contact with the Utod— intelligent, pacifist beings who feel no pain—mankind instantly views these aliens as animals because of their unhygienic customs. This leads to the slaughter, capture, and dissection of the Utod. But when one explorer recognizes the intelligence behind their habits, he must reevaluate what it actually means to be “intelligent.”
