National Network for Equitable Library Service

A moving and powerful science fiction novel of love, revenge, and identity in a totalitarian world. A story about humanity and the universal search to find salvation in the face of insurmountable odds. An old soldier in exile embarks on a desperate journey to find his dying son. A young woman trapped in an abusive marriage with a government official finds hope in an illicit love. A female scientist uncovers a mysterious technology that reveals that her world is more fragile than she believed.

A collection of short stories from the Hugo and Nebula award-winning author who "has the imagination of six ordinary science fiction writers" (George R.R. Martin)—John Varley. Picnic on Nearside includes nine astonishing stories from an author whose imagination has changed the genre and the way that people envision the future.

Hailed as "one of the literary giants of SF" by the Denver Post, Gene Wolfe has repeatedly won the field's highest honors, including the Nebula, the Hugo, and the World Fantasy awards. Peace is Gene Wolfe's first full-length novel, a work that shows the genius that later flourished in such acclaimed works as The Fifth Head of Cerberus and The Book of the New Sun. Originally published in 1975, Peace is a spellbinding, brilliant tour de force of the imagination.

In the skies over Oakland, California, a DC-10 and a 747 are on a collision course. But in the distant future, a time travel team is preparing to intervene, snatching the passengers and leaving behind prefabricated smoking bodies for rescue teams to discover. Meanwhile, in Washington D.C., air disaster investigator Smith is about to receive a phone call that will change his life—and alter the fate of the world.

From award-winning author Charlie Jane Anders comes an original space opera short story "If You Take My Meaning." As an ex-smuggler and two-time reluctant revolutionary, Alyssa is used to staring into the razor-sharp jaws of death. But now she's embarking on the most terrifying adventure of her life - journeying into the darkness to become a new type of being, one who can help humanity to survive. And deep at the heart of the city in the middle of the night, the price of transformation could be higher, and more terrible, than Alyssa ever expected.

Gene Wolfe takes us to a future North America at once familiar and utterly strange. A young man and woman, Skip and Chelle, fall in love in college and marry, but she is enlisted in the military, there is a war on, and she must serve her tour of duty before they can settle down. But the military is fighting a war with aliens in distant solar systems, and her months in the service will be years in relative time on Earth.

"Free Live Free," said the newspaper ad, and the out-of-work detective Jim Stubb, the occultist Madame Serpentina, the salesman Ozzie Barnes, and the overweight prostitute Candy Garth are brought together to live for a time in Free's old house, a house scheduled for demolition to make way for a highway. Free drops mysterious hints of his exile from his homeland, and of the lost key to his return. And so when demolition occurs and Free disappears, the four make a pact to continue the search, which ultimately takes them far beyond their wildest dreams.

Gladiator meets 1984 in this near-future thriller featuring timeslips, ancient magic, and a disturbingly plausible dystopian Britain... 68 CE—Fleeing disaster, young Winston Monk wakes to find himself trapped in the past, imprisoned by the mad Emperor Nero. The Roman civilization he idolized is anything but civilized, and his escape from a barbaric home has led him somewhere far more dangerous. 2070 CE—As the European Union crumbled, Britain closed its borders, believing they were stronger alone.

It's a post-everything world, so how could everything possibly go wrong? When the ecotecture starts to degrade on the asteroid of Mymercia-killing a workgroup on the surface-Fola Hanani miraculously survives. A former missionary, she's hacked a living out of a gengineered ecology built after the Armageddon of overheating, overpopulation, over-everything. Now she has to find out what's causing a catastrophic biosystem failure before everyone else on Mymercia is killed. Meanwhile, onworld, in a trailer park of migrant workers, a washed-out one-hit wonder named L.

Winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and a Hugo and Nebula Award nominee. With this groundbreaking novel, Maureen F. McHugh established herself as one of the decade's best science fiction writers. In its pages, we enter a postrevolution America, moving from the hyperurbanized eastern seaboard to the Arctic bleakness of Baffin Island; from the new Imperial City to an agricultural commune on Mars.