Macrolife

Subtitled “A Mobile Utopia,” this pioneering novel about the meaning of space habitats for human history, presents spacefaring as no work did in its time, and since. A utopian novel like no other, presenting a dynamic utopian civilization that transcends the failures of our history. Epic in scope, Macrolife opens in the year 2021. The Bulero family owns one of Earth’s richest corporations. As the Buleros gather for a reunion at the family mansion, an industrial accident plunges the corporation into a crisis, which eventually brings the world around them to the brink of disaster. Vilified, the Buleros flee to a space colony where young Richard Bulero gradually realizes that the only hope for humanity lies in macrolife—mobile, self-reproducing space habitats. A millennium later, these mobile communities have left our sunspace and multiplied. Conflicts with natural planets arise. John Bulero, a cloned descendant of the twenty-first century Bulero clan, falls in love with a woman from a natural world and experiences the harshness of her way of life. He rediscovers his roots when his mobile returns to the solar system, and a tense confrontation of three civilizations takes place. One hundred billion years later, macrolife, now as numerous as the stars, faces the impending death of nature. Regaining his individuality by falling away from a highly evolved macrolife, a strangely changed John Bulero struggles to see beyond a collapse of the universe into a giant black hole. Inspired by the possibilities of space settlements, projections of biology and cosmology, and basic human longings, Macrolife is a visionary speculation on the long-term future of human and natural history. Filled with haunting images and memorable characters, this is a vivid and brilliant work.

Another selection of fascinating, informal conversations with the creators of Science Fiction and Fantasy, presented exactly as originally published.Here are authentic voices from 1983 through 2002: Peter S. Beagle, Octavia Butler, Philip Jose Farmer, Charles L. Harness, Michael Kandel, R.A. Lafferty, Jack McDevitt Tim Powers, Charles Sheffield, Susan Shwartz, Michael Swanwick, Evangeline Walton, Gene Wolfe, Jane Yolen, and George Zebrowski."

The Science Fiction Handbook offers a comprehensive and accessible survey of one of the literary world's most fascinating genres. Includes separate historical surveys of key subgenres including time-travel narratives, post-apocalyptic and post-disaster narratives and works of utopian and dystopian science fiction Each subgenre survey includes an extensive list of relevant critical readings, recommended novels in the subgenre, and recommended films relevant to the subgenre Features entries on a number of key science fiction authors and extensive discussion of major science fiction novels or sequences Writers and works include Isaac Asimov; Margaret Atwood; George Orwell; Ursula K. Le Guin; The War of the Worlds (1898); Starship Troopers (1959); Mars Trilogy (1993-6); and many more A 'Science Fiction Glossary' completes this indispensable Handbook

This collection of stories showcases the work of George Zebrowski, one of science fiction’s masters and a writer Hugo and Nebula Award winner Robert J. Sawyer has called “one of the most philosophically astute writers in science fiction.” Like the writers Olaf Stapledon, Arthur C. Clarke, and Stanislaw Lem, Zebrowski explores the “big questions”—the expansion of human horizons, and the growth of power over our lives and the world in which we live. In the title story, scientists push the boundaries of human mentality to keep pace with ever-evolving AIs. In “The Eichmann Variations,” a finalist for the Nebula Award, exact copies of captured Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann stand trial for his crimes against humanity, while in “The Word Sweep,” all speech must be rationed because spoken words take on physical form. In “Wound the Wind,” another Nebula Award finalist, unchanged humans roam freely until captured by those who know what’s best for them, and in “Stooges,” a visiting alien hijacks the persona of Curly Howard. From hard science fiction (“Gödel’s Doom”) to alternate history (“Lenin in Odessa”) to first alien contact (“Bridge of Silence”), and with an introduction by renowned physicist/writer Gregory Benford, this collection presents one of the most distinctive voices writing in the field of science fiction today.

For more than 50 years John Clute has been reviewing science fiction and fantasy. Strokes is a collection of reviews from a wide variety of sources - including Interzone, the New York Review of Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Weekly - about the most significant literatures of the twenty-first century: science fiction, fantasy and horror: the literatures Clute argues should be recognized as the central modes of fantastika in our times. It covers the period between 1966 and 1986.

"These four volumes cover 791 books or series, 238 of them published during the 1980s and 1990s. the entries are 1,000 words long for single books and 1,500 for series, with a one-sentence summary beginning each entry followed by bibliographical information ... Volume 4 contains an extensive bibliography of critical works on science fiction and fantasy, a list of major award winners, a genre index." Booklist.

In this new retrospective collection spanning almost forty years, Pilgrim Award- and Collector's Award-winning fantasy novelist, critic, and bibliographer Robert Reginald contributes forty-five essays on writers of fantastic literature, including such major and minor figures as: Piers Anthony, Edwin Lester Arnold, Margaret Atwood, John Kendrick Bangs, Leslie Barringer, John Bellairs, Arthur Byron Cover, Lindsey Davis, Alexander de Comeau, Daphne du Maurier, R. Lionel Fanthorpe, H. Rider Haggard, Charlotte Haldane, Edward Heron-Allen, Eleanor M. Ingram, Vernon Knowles, Katherine Kurtz, Andrew Lang, Fritz Leiber, Bruce McAllister, Ward Moore, Robert Nathan, Sir Henry Newbolt, William F. Nolan, John Norman, Keith Roberts, Michael Reaves, Brian Stableford, and George Zebrowski. Also included is a comprehensive bibliography and history of the publications of Starmont House, Inc., and FAX Collector's Editions, a selection of reviews and obituaries, a bibliography, and detailed index. This unique literary collection will prove of interest both to students and researchers alike. This second edition features fifteen new pieces, including the author's earliest published critique (1968), and a number of original autobiographical reflections on his life and career penned shortly after his heart attack in 2003.

Old Earth is gone. Humanity has been scattered to the stars. Some left their dying planet in spaceship arks, in search of new worlds to inhabit. Others, nanoengineered for near-immortality, explore the far reaches of interstellar space in gargantuan macrolife mobiles. An earth-like human society endures on the environmentally volatile planet of Tau Ceti IV—a rigid community of the faithful that has declared evil the science that caused the homeworld’s destruction. The Church is the absolute power here; obedience and belief the rule. But His Holiness Peter III, the New Vatican’s most powerful figure, himself harbors doubts, engendered by his love for his unacknowledged and illegitimate rebel daughter Josepha. And suddenly there is another assault on his tottering faith—and on the sacred traditions he has devoted his life to uphold. For an emissary, Voss Rhazes, has arrived from one of old Earth’s journeying mobiles—the first off-planet human visitor ever to Tau Ceti—bearing remarkable hated technology that could shred the fragile emotional fabric of a family . . . and bring devastating chaos to their world.