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.

"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).