SUMMARY: On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope--and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands.
It is December 1999, the dawn of the millennium, and a team of international scientists is poised for the most fantastic adventure in human history. After years of scanning the galaxy for signs of somebody or something else, this team believes they've found a message from an intelligent source--and they travel deep into space to meet it. Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Sagan injects Contact, his prophetic adventure story, with scientific details that make it utterly believable. It is a Cold War era novel that parlays the nuclear paranoia of the time into exquisitely wrought tension among the various countries involved. Sagan meditates on science, religion, and government--the elements that define society--and looks to their impact on and role in the future. His ability to pack an exciting read with such rich content is an unusual talent that makes Contact a modern sci-fi classic.
Who could be better qualified than the author of the highly successful Cosmos to turn the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence, and humankind's first contact with it, into imaginative reality? This is precisely what Sagan does in this eagerly awaited and, as it turns out, engrossing first novel. The basic plot is very simple. A worldwide system of radio telescopes, in the charge of brilliant astrophysicist Ellie Arroway, picks up a "Message" from outer space. Ellie is instrumental in decoding the message and building the "Machine" for which it gives instructions (despite stiff opposition from religious fundamentalists and those scientists and politicians who fear it may be a Trojan Horse). Then she and fellow members of a small multinational team board the machine, take a startling trip into outer spaceand on their return must convince the scientific community that they are not the perpetrators of a hoax. Sagan's characters, mostly scientists, are credible without being memorable, and he supplies a love interest that is less than compelling. However, his informed and dramatically enacted speculations into the mysteries of the universe, taken to the point where science and religion touch, make his story an exciting intellectual adventure and science fiction of a high order. First serial to Discover Magazine; BOMC selection. Foreign rights: S & S. October 1Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.
EDITORIAL REVIEW: *Man, was a a distant shore, and the men spread upon it in wave... Each wave different, and each wave stronger. * **The Martian Chronicles** Ray Bradbury is a storyteller without peer, a poet of the possible, and, indisputably, one of America's most beloved authors. In a much celebrated literary career that has spanned six decades, he has produced an astonishing body of work: unforgettable novels, including *Fahrenheit 451* and *Something Wicked This Way Comes;* essays, theatrical works, screenplays and teleplays; *The Illustrated Mein, Dandelion Wine, The October Country,* and numerous other superb short story collections. But of all the dazzling stars in the vast Bradbury universe, none shines more luminous than these masterful chronicles of Earth's settlement of the fourth world from the sun. Bradbury's Mars is a place of hope, dreams and metaphor-of crystal pillars and fossil seas-where a fine dust settles on the great, empty cities of a silently destroyed civilization. It is here the invaders have come to despoil and commercialize, to grow and to learn -first a trickle, then a torrent, rushing from a world with no future toward a promise of tomorrow. The Earthman conquers Mars ... and then is conquered *by* it, lulled by dangerous lies of comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of an ancient, mysterious native race. Ray Bradbury's *The Martian Chronicles* is a classic work of twentieth-century literature whose extraordinary power and imagination remain undimmed by time's passage. In connected, chronological stories, a true grandmaster once again enthralls, delights and challenges us with his vision and his heart-starkly and stunningly exposing in brilliant spacelight our strength, our weakness, our folly, and our poignant humanity on a strange and breathtaking world where humanity does not belong.
Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Part Six of Three
At long last, the motley band from Douglas Adams's renowned five-book Hitchhiker's Guide Trilogy have returned, thanks to Artemis Fowl author Colfer. When the Vogons return to finish obliterating Earth in our universe and all alternatives, Arthur Dent and his companions find themselves hitchhiking on the spacefaring Viking longship of Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, an immortal with a death wish who is an expert at mass insults. Readers may find this volume paradoxical. On its own it is a funny novel, but Adams set a legendary, nearly impossible standard. Wacky humor reminiscent of the original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy rings true, as do most of the characters, but newer elements, such as the brief appearance of Cthulhu, feel out of place. Most notably absent is the supreme inventiveness that hit us with the Infinite Improbability Drive, and the comic-sublime moments like Arthur flying with Fenchurch. You can't go home again, but Adams fans will still appreciate the reunion with old friends. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
A wide variety of people love Douglas Adams's books, so perhaps it is appropriate that each critic brought his or her own expectations to And Another Thing . ... Several who revered Adams's deadpan prose and verbal inventiveness found that the new book falls short. Others felt that Colfer's imitation often lacks subtlety and relies too heavily on reviving old Adams gags and characters. The Los Angeles Times even went so far as to argue that this novel should have been reinvented in some more original form, such as an e-book. But some took the appearance of And Another Thing ... to critically review the Adams oeuvre and found that Colfer made up for some qualities the original author lacked. In any case, even the harshest critics of the book were happy to see Arthur, Ford, Trillian, and Random saved from their doom.
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SUMMARY: On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope--and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands.