Category: cont 1950-1970

The Invasion of the Body Snatchers

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The Family Business

Decades ago, the Visitors descended on Earth. They claimed to bring peace and prosperity. Their real goal was the total subjugation of humankind. But humanity did not give up its only home without a fight. After a devastating war, the Read more

Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000

1977. NASA LAUNCHES THE SPACE PROBE VOYAGER 1. One of its missions: answer the question—is there intelligent life beyond our planet? Fast-forward a thousand years. Question answered … by the Psychlos, an alien race who’ve proven just how terrifying intelligent Read more

The Invasion of the Body Snatchers
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Celebrate one of the earliest science fiction novels by rediscovering Jack Finney’s internationally acclaimed Invasion of the Body Snatchers—which Stephen King calls a story “to be read and savored for its own satisfactions,” now repackaged with a foreword by #1 New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz.

On a quiet fall evening in the peaceful town of Mill Valley, California, Dr. Miles Bennell discovers an insidious, horrifying plot. Subtly, almost imperceptibly, alien life-forms are taking over the bodies and minds of his neighbors, friends, family, the woman he loves, and the entire world as he knows it.

First published in 1955, this classic science fiction thriller about the ultimate alien invasion and the triumph of the human spirit over an invisible enemy has inspired multiple film adaptations and entertained readers for decades. This repackaged edition features a new cover by Hugo award–winning illustrator, John Picacio and a foreword by New York Times bestselling author, Dean Koontz.

 

Colossus

Colossus
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Charles Forbin has dedicated the last 10 years of his life to the construction of his own supercomputer, Colossus, rejecting romantic and social endeavours in order to create the United States’ very first Artificially Intelligent defence system.
Colossus is a supercomputer capable of taking in and analysing data rapidly, allowing it to make real-time decisions about the nation’s defence.
But Colossus soon exceeds even Forbin’s calculated expectations, learning to think independently of the Colossus Programming Office, processing data over 100 times faster than Forbin and his team had originally anticipated.
The President hands off full control of the nation’s missiles and other defence protocols to Colossus and makes the announcement to the world that he has ensured peace.
However, the USSR quickly announces that it too has a supercomputer, Guardian, with capabilities similar to that of Colossus.
Forbin is concerned when Colossus asks – asks – to communicate with Guardian.
The computer he built shouldn’t be able to ask at al

Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut (include Harrison Bergeron and other stories)

Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut (include Harrison Bergeron and other stories)
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Since its original publication in 1968, Welcome to the Monkey House has been one of Kurt Vonnegut’s most beloved works. This special edition celebrates a true master of the short-story form by including multiple variant drafts of what would eventually be the title story. In a fascinating accompanying essay, “Building the Monkey House: At Kurt Vonnegut’s Writing Table,”noted Vonnegut scholar Gregory D. Sumner walks readers through Vonnegut’s process as the author struggles—false start after false start—to hit upon what would be one of his greatest stories. The result is the rare chance to watch a great writer hone his craft in real time.

Includes the following stories:

“Where I Live”
“Harrison Bergeron”
“Who Am I This Time?”
“Welcome to the Monkey House”
“Long Walk to Forever”
“The Foster Portfolio”
“Miss Temptation”
“All the King’s Horses”
“Tom Edison’s Shaggy Dog”
“New Dictionary”
“Next Door”
“More Stately Mansions”
“The Hyannis Port Story”
“D.P.”
“Report on the Barnhouse Effect”
“The Euphio Question”
“Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son”
“Deer in the Works”
“The Lie”
“Unready to Wear”
“The Kid Nobody Could Handle”
“The Manned Missiles”
“Epicac”
“Adam”
“Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”

Stand on Zanzibar: The Hugo Award-Winning Novel

Stand on Zanzibar: The Hugo Award-Winning Novel
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The brilliant 1969 Hugo Award-winning novel from John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar, now included with a foreword by Bruce Sterling

Norman Niblock House is a rising executive at General Technics, one of a few all-powerful corporations. His work is leading General Technics to the forefront of global domination, both in the marketplace and politically—it’s about to take over a country in Africa. Donald Hogan is his roommate, a seemingly sheepish bookworm. But Hogan is a spy, and he’s about to discover a breakthrough in genetic engineering that will change the world…and kill him.

These two men’s lives weave through one of science fiction’s most praised novels. Written in a way that echoes John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. Trilogy, Stand on Zanzibar is a cross-section of a world overpopulated by the billions. Where society is squeezed into hive-living madness by god-like mega computers, mass-marketed psychedelic drugs, and mundane uses of genetic engineering. Though written in 1968, it speaks of now, and is frighteningly prescient and intensely powerful.

Atlas Shrugged

Atlas Shrugged
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Peopled by larger-than-life heroes and villains, charged with towering questions of good and evil, Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand’s magnum opus: a philosophical revolution told in the form of an action thriller—nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read.

Who is John Galt? When he says that he will stop the motor of the world, is he a destroyer or a liberator? Why does he have to fight his battles not against his enemies but against those who need him most? Why does he fight his hardest battle against the woman he loves?

You will know the answer to these questions when you discover the reason behind the baffling events that play havoc with the lives of the amazing men and women in this book. You will discover why a productive genius becomes a worthless playboy…why a great steel industrialist is working for his own destruction…why a composer gives up his career on the night of his triumph…why a beautiful woman who runs a transcontinental railroad falls in love with the man she has sworn to kill.

Atlas Shrugged, a modern classic and Rand’s most extensive statement of Objectivism—her groundbreaking philosophy—offers the reader the spectacle of human greatness, depicted with all the poetry and power of one of the twentieth century’s leading artists.

Doomsday Morning

Doomsday Morning
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A classic, post-apocalyptic vision of America created by C. L. Moore, an undisputed master of science fiction’s golden age.

In the wake of a nuclear war, the totalitarian system known as Comus has restored order in a shattered America. Comus controls every aspect of American life, from communications to transportation to law enforcement, but cracks are beginning to show: rumors of a rebellion in California are brewing, and Comus’s leadership is aging. History is at a crossroads, and the man who will decide the outcome is a washed-up actor named Howard Rohan.

Leading a troupe of theatre players to perform in the heart of rebel territory, Howard’s true mission is to gather intelligence on a device that could bring down Comus. But Rohan finds himself slipping between his roles as a double agent and supposed revolutionary sympathizer, to the point where even he isn’t sure where he stands. As America edges closer to its reckoning, Rohan will need to decide who he’s been lying to: the rebels, Comus, or himself.

“A finely wrought dystopic vision where an oppressive future government utilizes communication networks to spread its tentacles across the United States.” —Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations

“It need hardly be mentioned at this late date what a gloriously fine writer Moore was . . . she combined elegant yet colorful prose with a distinctive emotional flair and one helluva imagination.” —Fantasy Literature

THE HAIRY ONES SHALL DANCE (The Judge Pursuivant Trilogy Book 1)

THE HAIRY ONES SHALL DANCE (The Judge Pursuivant Trilogy Book 1)
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FROM THE PAGES OF “WEIRD TALES” THE WORLD’S GREATEST SHUDDER PULP!
“Manly Wade Wellman is a treasure that should not be missed … should be in the collection of everyone who loves pulp fiction in the “Weird Tales” style.” Goodreads
The first spellbinding novel in multi-fantasy award winner Manley Wade Wellman’s classic horror trilogy about Judge Hilary Pursuivant, the jurist so deeply seeped in the lore of deviltry and supernatural evil – that no one or thing, not even the most powerful of dark forces, can stand against him.
“Mr. Wellman’s Occult investigators are at the top of the genre. All of them would have felt right at home working side by side with either Karl Kolchak or Mulder-Scully. One has even worked with a certain Mr. Jules de Grandin.” Amazon review
Talbot Wills, a skeptic, gave up his career as a stage magician to study psychic phenomena – and once and for all prove or disprove its existence to himself. Learning this, his friend Doctor Otto Zoberg, an expert in occult subjects brings him to an isolated hamlet to attend a séance at the home of a spirit medium whose powers are legendary. There Talbot meets Susan Gird, an intelligent and likable young woman, and after an afternoon together finds himself attracted to her. The séance is held that night – and though everyone is handcuffed to someone else, a strange wolf-like shape moves in the dark. When Susan Gird’s father cries out some sort of accusation, the shape leaps upon him and slaughters him.
The town constable investigates and, since Wills is a magician and escape artist, arrests him for the crime. Later, while Talbot is locked in jail, an angry mob gathers to lynch him. With his knowledge of locks, Talbot breaks out his cell and in eluding his pursuers finds himself in the Devil’s Croft, a mysterious grove which most locals are afraid to approach. As he enters it, Wills falls, exhausted. What happens next shatters his skepticism for good.
Fleeing, Talbot meets Judge Pursuivant, a giant of a man both physically and mentally, and a man with an almost uncanny knowledge of the occult who promises to help him and Susan.

John the Balladeer by Manly Wade Wellman

John the Balladeer by Manly Wade Wellman
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In John the Balladeer, Manly Wade Wellman created one of the great characters in all of horror and fantasy literature. Armed with his silver-stringed guitar and an endless trove of folk songs, John travels the backwoods of Appalachia, battling supernatural evil with his own brand of down-home charm and endless resourcefulness. In these tales, John wanders the Southern mountains, encountering hoodoo men and witch women, strange supernatural beasts, malevolent spirits, and even George Washington’s ghost.

Edited by horror legend Karl Edward Wagner, this volume contains the complete John the Balladeer stories in their original, unaltered form, as they first appeared in magazines and anthologies between 1951 and 1987. Also featured are a foreword by Wellman’s friend and literary executor David Drake and an introduction by Wagner.

“Just as J. R. R. Tolkien brilliantly created a modern British myth cycle, so did Manly Wade Wellman give to us an imaginary world of purely American fact, fantasy and song.” – Karl Edward Wagner

“This is the real thing-a book of haunting fantasies with their roots going down deep into the American folk tradition.” – Robert Silverberg

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
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‘Listen. You’re a patriotic Englishman. Highly respected. Been here for years. A wide circle of influential friends. It is important that we have our man in Havana, Mr Wormwold.’

Jim Wormwold, an under-employed vacuum cleaner salesman living in 1950s Cuba, is struggling to pay for his teenage daughter’s increasingly extravagant lifestyle. So when the British Secret Service asks him to become their ‘man in Havana’ he can’t afford to say no. There’s just one problem… he doesn’t know anything! To avoid suspicion, he begins to recruit non-existent sub-agents, concocting a series of intricate fictions. Soon, he’s apparently deciphering incomprehensible codes, passing along sketches of secret weapons that look suspiciously like vacuum parts, and claiming to recruit fellow operatives from his country club, all to create the perfect picture of intrigue.

But Wormwold soon discovers that his stories are closer to the truth tan he could ever have imagined…

When MI6 dispatches a secretary to oversee his endeavors, Wormold fears his carelessly fabricated world will come undone. Instead, it all comes true. Somehow, he’s become the target of an assassin, and it’s going to take more than a fib to get out of Cuba alive. Her Majesty’s man in Havana may have to resort to spying.

A hapless salesman in Cuba is recruited into Cold War spy games in Greene’s classic “comical, satirical, atmospherical” novel (The Daily Telegraph).
Named one of the 20 Best Spy Novels of All Time by the Telegraph and adapted into the classic 1959 comedy starring Alec Guinness, Our Man in Havana is “high-comic mayhem . . . weirdly undated . . . [and] bizarrely prescient” (Christopher Buckley, New York Times–bestselling author).

The Corridors of Time

The Corridors of Time
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A young man from the twentieth century is recruited to fight in a war that rages throughout time in this classic science fiction adventure from a multiple Hugo and Nebula Award–winning master.

College student, ex-marine, and martial artist Malcolm Lockridge is in prison awaiting his trial for murder when he receives an unexpected visit from an extraordinarily beautiful woman named Storm. Claiming to be a representative of the Wardens, a political faction from two thousand years in the future, Storm offers the astonished young man a proposition: freedom in return for his assistance in recovering an unspecified lost treasure. But it is not long before Malcolm realizes that, in truth, he’s been recruited as a soldier in the Wardens’ ongoing war against their rivals, the Rangers.

And this war is different from any that has ever been fought, because the battlefield is not a place but time itself.

Traveling backward and forward through corridors connecting historical epochs separated by thousands of years, Malcolm is soon embroiled in a furious conflict between the forces of good and minions of evil. But the deeper he is pulled into this devastating time war, the clearer Malcolm’s ultimate role in humankind’s destiny becomes, causing the troubled young soldier from the twentieth century to question whether he’s been chosen to fight on the side of good or evil . . . and if such a distinction even exists.