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SF Masterworks #21: Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker
In a study of Poe's Eureka, Valéry has observed that cosmogony is the most ancient of the literary genres; despite the anticipations of Bacon, whose New Atlantis was published at the beginning of the...
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SF Masterworks #66: Lucius Shepard, Life During Wartime
One of the new Sikorsky gunships, an element of the First Air Cavalry with the words Whispering Death painted on its side, gave Mingolla and Gilbey and Baylor a lift from the Ant Farm to San Francisco...
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SF Masterworks #35: Keith Roberts, Pavane
On a warm July evening of the year 1588, in the royal palace of Greenwich, London, a woman lay dying, an assassin's bullets lodged in abdomen and chest. Her face was lined, her teeth blackened, and...
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SF Masterworks #42: Ward Moore, Bring the Jubilee
I was born, as I say, in 1921, but it was not until the early 1930s, when I was about ten, that I bean to understand what a peculiarly frustrated and disinherited world was about me. Perhaps my...
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Fantasy Masterworks #28: Gene Wolfe, Peace
Unlike Wolfe's New Sun or Soldier series, Peace is a single novel that's only a shade over 260 pages. However, this 1975 novel perhaps contains within its pages even more levels of symbolism and...
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Fantasy Masterworks #32: Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword
"The world is flesh dissolving off a dead skull," mumbled the troll-woman. She clanked her chain and lay back, shuddering. "Birth is but the breeding of maggots in the crumbling flesh. Already the...
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Fantasy Masterworks #4: Jack Vance, Tales of the Dying Earth
"In ages gone," the Sage had said, his eyes fixed on a low star, "a thousand spells were known to sorcery and the wizards effected their wills. Today, as Earth dies, a hundred spells remain to man's...
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Fantasy Masterworks #1: Gene Wolfe, Shadow and Claw
The four-volume The Book of the New Sun is widely considered to be Gene Wolfe's magnus opus and it consistently ranks as one of the most highly-regarded literary works of the past 30 years. Blending...
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Fantasy Masterworks #12: Gene Wolfe, Sword and Citadel
The Sword of the LictorThe Sword of the Lictor, the third volume in Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun series, contains some of the most revealing and troublesome passages in the entire series. In...
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SF Masterworks #82: Jack Finney, The Body Snatchers
I warn you that what you're starting to read is full of loose ends and unanswered questions. It will not be neatly tied up at the end, everything resolved and satisfactorily explained. Not by me it...
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SF Masterworks #89: Dan Simmons, Hyperion
When pressed to give a basic description of Hyperion, most readers likely would say that in structure it approximates that of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. There is something to that,...
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SF Masterworks #25: Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
progris riport 1 martch 3Dr Strauss says I should rite down what I think and remembir and evrey thing that happins to me from now on. I dont no why but he says its importint so they will see if they...
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SF Masterworks #28: Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human
What am I doing? What am I doing? he thought wildly. Trying and trying like this to find out what I am and what I belong to...Is this another aspect of being outcast, monstrous, different?"Ask Baby...
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SF Masterworks #16: Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed
The New Wave of SF broke like a tidal wave over the shores of American and British SF. Where the "Golden Age" stories tended to focus on individuals striving against the forces of nature or on how...
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SF Masterworks #38: H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon
As I sit down to write here amidst the shadows of vine-leaves under the blue sky of Southern Italy it comes to me with a certain quality of astonishment that my participation in these amazing...
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SF Masterworks #71: Frank Herbert, Dune
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past...
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Fantasy Masterworks #39: Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion
That day Pwyll, Prince of Dyved, who thought he was going out to hunt, was in reality going out to be hunted, and by no beast or man of earth. (p. 15)Myths are an absolute bitch to translate properly....
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Fantasy Masterworks #8: Robert E. Howard, The Conan Chronicles Volume I: The...
Conan went up the stairs and halted at the door he knew well of old. It was fastened within, but his blade passed between the door and the jamb and lifted the bar. he stepped inside, closing the door...
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Fantasy Masterworks #43: Geoff Ryman, WAS
Hell was full of the souls of children. They were made to sing merry school songs, chained to desks. They were drilled by tormenting demons in gray clothes with spectacles and fangs and rulers that...
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SF Masterworks #84: M.J. Engh, Arslan
"It is true that Kraftsville was a safe and pleasant place, in comparison with other places. Your hungriest paupers have been better fed than the chiefs of towns. Your people have slept in security....
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