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Inverted World (Paperback)
Christopher Priest; Afterword by John Clute
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R520
R434
Discovery Miles 4 340
Save R86 (17%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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The city is winched along a track through a devastated land full of
hostile tribes. Tracks must be freshly laid ahead of the city and
carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly
insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city's engineers.
But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther
behind the optimum, slipping into the crushing gravitational field
that has transformed life on earth. The only alternative to the
city's forward progress is death. The secret directorate that
governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of
this. Raised in common in creches, nurtured on synthetic food,
prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of
the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire necessities
that have come to define human existence. And yet, for all that,
the city is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the
population is dwindling, and the rulers know that, for all their
efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind
the optimum. Helward Mann is a member of the city's elite. Better
than anyone, he knows the risks the city runs, how tenuous is its
continued existence, how essential it is that discipline be
maintained. And yet, as he is about to discover, the world is even
stranger than he dreamed. Christopher Priest's The Inverted World
is a meticulously imagined, deeply disconcerting vision of an
alternate reality that lights up not only the dreams that sustain
what passes for reality but the alien essence of the human.
The Architect of Ruins is considered one of the masterpieces of
20th century German fiction. An archetypal Dedalus novel with its
literary game-playing and story-within-a-story technique. It has
the labyrinthine brilliance of Robert Irwin's The Arabian Nightmare
and Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.Four men led by the
Architect of Ruins construct an Armagedon shelter, in the shape of
a giant cigar, so that when the end of the world comes they can
enter eternity in the right mood, whilst playing a Schubert string
quartet. They amuse themselves by telling stories, which take on a
life of their own, with walk on parts for Faust, Don Juan, da
Ponte, and G.K. Chesterton etc as the narrative flashes back and
forth between the Dark Ages and the Modern Day, like a literary
Mobius strip.Although for European readers it will call to mind Jan
Potocki's The Saragossa Manuscript, for English readers the wit and
humour of The Architect of Ruins will make it read like a 20th
century sequel to Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy.
When Dr Philip Raven, an intellectual working for the League of
Nations, dies in 1930 he leaves behind a powerful legacy - an
unpublished 'dream book'. Inspired by visions he has experienced
for many years, it appears to be a book written far into the
future: a history of humanity from the date of his death up to
2105. The Shape of Things to Come provides this 'history of the
future', an account that was in some ways remarkably prescient -
predicting climatic disaster and sweeping cultural changes,
including a Second World War, the rise of chemical warfare, and
political instabilities in the Middle East.
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The Purple Cloud (Paperback)
M. P. Shiel; Introduction by John Clute
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R466
R390
Discovery Miles 3 900
Save R76 (16%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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"If now a swell from the Deep has swept over this planetary ship of
earth, and I, who alone chanced to find myself in the furthest
stern, as the sole survivor of her crew . . . What then, my God,
shall I do?" The Purple Cloud is widely hailed as a masterpiece of
science fiction and one of the best "last man" novels ever written.
A deadly purple vapor passes over the world and annihilates all
living creatures except one man, Adam Jeffson. He embarks on an
epic journey across a silent and devastated planet, an apocalyptic
Robinson Crusoe putting together the semblance of a normal life
from the flotsam and jetsam of his former existence. As he descends
into madness over the years, he becomes increasingly aware that his
survival was no accident and that his destiny-and the fate of the
human race-are part of a profound, cosmological plan. M. P. Shiel's
(1865-1947) long, distinguished writing career included such works
as Prince Zaleski, The Lord of the Sea and The Yellow Peril. John
Clute is the author of Science Fiction: The Illustrated
Encyclopedia (winner of the Hugo Award) and coeditor of The
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (winner of the Hugo and Locus
Awards).
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