2065: In a world that has rediscovered harmony with nature, the village of El Modena, California, is an ecotopia in the making. Kevin Claiborne, a young builder who has grown up in this “green” world, now finds himself caught up in the struggle to preserve his community’s idyllic way of life from the resurgent forces of greed and exploitation.

Pacific Edge is the third novel in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Three Californias Trilogy.

Dedicated men can often employ the most unethical of tactics—and sometimes with a clear conscience… Here is a tale of such a man, but one who developed a conscience.

Soprapopolazione globale, nuovo siero d’immortalità ed un ambasciatore extraterrestre ostile sono soltanto alcuni problemi di Roy Walton, recentemente nominato dal governo alla carica del Padrone della vita e della morte.

Robert Heinlein says, “This book is raw corn liquor. You should serve a whiskbroom with each shot so the customer can brush the sawdust off after he gets up from the floor.” Perhaps a mooring cable might also be added as necessary equipment for reading these eight wonderful stories: They not only knock you down — they raise you to the stars. Passion is the keynote as you encounter the Harlequin and his nemesis, the dreaded Tictockman, in one of the most reprinted and widely taught stories in the English language; a pyretic who creates fire merely by willing it; the last surgeon in a world of robot physicians; a spaceship filled with hideous mutants rejected by the world that gave them birth. Touching and gentle and shocking stories from an incomparable master of impossible dreams and troubling truths.

Late in March of 1965, I was compelled to join twenty-five thousand others, from all corners of the United States, who marched on the then-bastion of bigotry, the then-capitol of corruption, Montgomery, Alabama (though South Boston now holds undisputed title to the designation, Montgomery is still no flowerbed of racial sanity) (but the myth of the “liberal” North sure got the hell shot out of it by the Southies from Irish-redneck Boston).

I was part of the human floodtide they called a “freedom march” that was trying to tell Governor George Wallace that Alabama was not an island, that it was part of the civilized universe, that though we came from New York and California and Illinois and South Dakota we were not “outside agitators,” we were fellow human beings who shared the same granfalloon called “Americans,” and we were seeking dignity and civil rights for a people shamefully bludgeoned and mistreated for over two centuries. It was a walk through the country of the blind. I’ve written about it at length elsewhere.

But now it’s ten years later and yesterday a friend of mine’s sixty-five-year-old mother got mugged and robbed in broad daylight by two black girls. It’s ten years later and a girl I once loved very deeply got raped repeatedly, at knife-point, in the back seat of her own car in an empty lot behind a bowling alley in the San Fernando Valley by a black dude who kept at her for seven hours. It’s ten years later and Martin Luther King is dead and Super Fly is alive, and what am I to say to Doris Pitkin Buck, who lost her dear and magical Richard on the streets of Washington, D.C., to a pack of black killers who chose to stomp to death a man in his eighties for however much stash-money he might have been carrying?

Do I say to that friend of mine: when they went to drag the Mississippi swamps for the bodies of the civil rights workers Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, they dredged up the bodies of sixteen black men who had been cavalierly murdered and dumped in the muck, and no one even gave a damn, the newspapers didn’t even make much of a note of it, that it was the accepted way to handle an “uppity nigger” in the South? Do I say that and hope I’ve said something rational?

Do I say to that girl I loved: every time you see a mocha-colored maid or waitress it means her great-great-grandmother was a sexual pin cushion for some plantation Massa’, that rape and indentured bed service was taken for granted for two hundred years and if it was refused there was always a stout length of cordwood to change the girl’s thinking? Do I say that and hope I’ve drawn a reasonable parallel?

Do I tell brave and talented Doris Buck, who never hurt anyone in her life, that we’re paying dues for what our ancestors did, that we’re reaping the terrible crop of pain and evil and murder committed in the name of White Supremacy, that white men rob and rape and steal and kill as well as black, but that blacks are poorer, more desperate, more frustrated, angrier? Do I say that and hope to stop her tears with logic?

Why the hell do we expect a nobility of blacks that whites never possessed?

Of course I don’t say that pack of simple-minded platitudes. Personal pain is incapable of spontaneous remission in the presence of loss. I say nothing.

But my days of White Liberal Guilt are gone. My days of championing whole classes and sexes and pigmentations of people are gone. The Sixties are gone, and we live in the terrible present, where death and guilt don’t mix. Now I come, after all these years, to the only position that works: each one on his or her own merits, black/white/yellow/brown. Not all Jews are money-gouging kikes, but some are. Not all blacks are slavering rapists, but some are. Not all Puerto Ricans are midnight second-storey spicks, but some are.

And we come to the question again and again, what kind of a god is it that permits such misery … are we truly cast in his image, such an image of cruelty and rapaciousness … were we put here really to suffer such torment? Let the Children of God answer that one with something other than no-brain jingoism. Mark Twain said, “If one truly believes there is an all-powerful Deity, and one looks around at the condition of the universe, one is led inescapably to the conclusion that God is a malign thug.” That’s the quote that caused me to write “The Deathbird.” It’s a puzzle I cannot reason out.

I doubt. I have always doubted, since the day I read in the Old Testament — the word of God, remember — that there was only Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, and then Cain got married. To whom? To Eve? Then don’t tell me what a no-no incest is.

Isaac Asimov assures me it’s a rational universe, predicated on sanity and order. Yeah? Well, tell me about God. Tell me who He is, why He allows the foulest hyenas of our society to run amuck while decent men and women cower in terror behind Fox locks and Dictograph systems. Tell me about Him. Equate theology with the world in which we live, with William Calley and Kitty Genovese and the people who keep their kids out of school because the new textbooks dare to say Humans are clever descendants of the Ape. No? Having some trouble? Getting ready to write me a letter denouncing me as the Antichrist? “God in his infinite wisdom,” you say? Faith, you urge me? I have faith … in people, not Gods.

But perhaps belief is not enough. Perhaps doubt serves the cause more honestly, more boldly. If so, I offer by way of faith Paingod.

Now it can be told: my secret vice. Buried deep in the anthracite core of my being is a personal trait so hideous, so confounding, a conceit so terrible in its repercussions, that it makes sodomy, pederasty, and barratry on the high seas seem as tame as a Frances Parkinson Keyes novel. I am always late. Invariably. Consistently. If I tell you I’ll be there to pick up you at 8:30, expect me Thursday. A positive genius for tardiness. Paramount sends a car to pick me up when I’m scripting, otherwise they know I’ll be off looking at the flowers, or watching the ocean, or reading a copy of The Amazing Spider-Man in the bathroom. I have been brought to task for this, on innumerable occasions. It prompted several courts-martial when I was in the Army. I’ve lost girlfriends because of it. So I went to a doctor, to see if there was something wrong with my medulla oblongata, or somesuch. He told me I was always late. His bill was seventy-five dollars. I’ve decided that unlike most other folk with highly developed senses of the fluidity of time, the permanence of humanity in the chrono-stream, et al, I got no ticktock going up there on top. So I had to explain it to the world, to cop out, as it were, in advance. I wrote the following story as my plea for understanding, extrapolating the (to me) ghastly state of the world around me — in which everyone scampers here and there to be places on time — to a time not too far away (by my watch) in which you get your life docked every time you’re late. It is not entirely coincidental that the name of the hero in this minor masterpiece closely resembles that of the author, to wit: “Repent, Harlequin!” said the Ticktockman

Madness is in the eye of the beholder.

Having done exhaustive research on sociopathic behavior for a two-hour NBC dramatic special recently, I won’t give you the faintest murmur of an objection that there are freaks and whackos walking the streets; they’re as liable to shoot you dead for chuckles as they are to assist you in getting your stalled car moving out of the intersection. One reliable estimate of the number of potential psychomotor epileptics undetected in our midst is 250,000 in the United States alone. And if you’ve read Michael Crichton’s TERMINAL MAN you know that the “brain storm” caused by psychomotor epilepsy can turn a normal human being into a psychopathic killer in moments. No, I won’t argue: there are madfolk among us.

But the madness of which I speak is what the late George Apley might have called “eccentricity.” The behavioral pattern outside the accepted norm. Whatever the hell that might be. The little old man sitting on the park bench having an animated conversation with himself. The girl who likes to dress as an exact replica of Betty Boop. The young guy out on the sidewalk playing an ocarina and interspersing his recital with denunciations of the city power and water authority. The old lady who dies in her two-room flat and the cops find sixty years’ worth of old newspapers plus two hundred thousand dollars in a cigar box. (One of the wooden ones, the old ones you simply can’t find any more because they don’t make them. They’re great for storing old photos and comic character buttons. If you have one you don’t want, send it along to me, willya?) The staid businessman who gets off by wearing his wife’s pantyhose. The little kid who puts a big “S” on a bath towel and, shouting, “Up, up and awaaayyy!” jumps off the garage roof.

They’re not nuts, friends, they’re simply seeing it all through different eyes. They have imagination, and they know something about being alone and in pain. They’re altering the real world to fit their fantasies. That’s okay.

We all do it. Don’t say you don’t. How many of you have come out of the movie, having seen Bullitt or The French Connection or Vanishing Point or The Last American Hero or Freebie and the Bean, gotten in your car, and just about done a wheelie, sixty-five mph out of the parking lot? Don’t lie to me, gentle reader, we all have weird-looking mannerisms that seem perfectly rational to us, but make onlookers cock an eyebrow and cross to the other side of the street.

I’ve grown very fond of people who can let it out, who can have the strength of compulsion to indulge their special affectations. They seem to me more real than the faceless gray hordes of sidewalk sliders who go from there to here without so much as a hop, skip, or a jump.

One morning in New York last year, I was having a drug-store breakfast with Nancy Weber, who wrote THE LIFE SWAP. We were sitting up at the counter, on revolving stools, chewing down greasy eggs and salty bacon, talking about how many dryads can live in a banyan tree, when the front door of the drug store (the now-razed, much-lamented, lovely Henry Halper’s on the corner of 56th and Madison, torn down to build, I suppose, an aesthetically-enchanting parking structure or candidate for a towering inferno) opened, and in stormed a little old man in an overcoat much too heavy for the weather. He boiled in like a monsoon, stood in the middle of the room and began to pillory Nixon and his resident offensive line of thugs for double-teaming Democracy. He was brilliant. Never repeated himself once. And this was long before the crash of Nixon off his pedestal. Top of his lungs. Flamboyant rhetoric. Utter honesty, no mickeymouse, corruption and evil a-flower in the land of the free! On and on he went, as everyone stared dumbfounded. And then, without even a bow to the box seats, out he went, a breath of fresh air in a muggy world. I sat there with a grin on my face only a tape measure could have recorded. I applauded. Superduper! Nancy dug it, I dug it, and a bespectacled gentleman three down from us — burnt toast ignored — dug it. The rest of the people vacillated between outrage and confusion, finally settling on attitudes best described by a circling finger toward the right ear. They thought he was bananas. Well, maybe, but what a swell madness!

Or take my bed, for instance.

When you come into my bedroom, you see the bed up on a square box platform covered with deep pile carpeting. It’s in bright colors, because I like bright colors. Now, there’s a very good, solid, rational reason why the bed is up there like that. Some day I’ll tell you why; it’s a personal reason; in the nature of killing evil shadows. But that isn’t important, right here. What is important is the attitude of people who see that bed for the first time. Some snicker and call it an altar. Others frown in disapproval and call it a pedestal, or a Playboy bed. It’s none of those. It’s very functional, and serves an emotional purpose that is none of their business, but Lord, how quick they are to label it the way they see it, and to lay their value judgment on it and me. Most of the time I don’t bother explaining. It isn’t worth it.

But it happens all the time, and every time it happens I think about this story. Madness is in the eye of the beholder. What seems cuckoo to you may be rigorously logical to someone else. Remember that as you read.

The pain in this one is the pain of a mind blocked from all joy and satisfaction by an outworn idea, an idée fixe, a monomaniacal hangup that tunnels the vision. Think of someone you know, even someone you love, trapped into a corrupt or self-destructive or anti-social behavior pattern by an inability to get around the roadblock of erroneous thinking. Pathetic.

The story is about a man and a woman. The woman is the good guy, the man is the dummy. When it appeared in Analog, Kelly Freas did a drawing that showed the man as the stronger of the two, his body positioned in such a way that it looked as if he was protecting the lesser female. Wrong. I tried to get Ben Bova, the editor of Analog , to get Kelly to alter the drawing, but it was too close to the publication deadline, so it went in that way.

But, much as I admire and respect Kelly, I took it not so much as a sexist attitude on his part — Polly wouldn’t permit such an evil to exist — as an unconscious understanding of the massmind of the general Analog readership, which is, at core and primarily, engineers, technicians, scientists, men of the drawing board and the spanner.

So I wasn’t perplexed or saddened when the story came in at the bottom of Analog’s Analytical Laboratory ratings. Where else would a story that says machismo is bullshit and a woman thinks more reasonably than a man come in? Diana King at the magazine assures me the short stories always come in last, but I think she’s just trying to help me over a bad time; I handle rejection, I just don’t handle it well.

Nonetheless, I’m including it in this collection, an addition to the stories that appeared in previous editions of this book, not only to give you a little extra for your money, but because it’s the latest in my Earth-Kyba War stories. And what with “The Crackpots” here, the first of the series, it makes a nice little package.

There’s not much else to say about it. This isn’t the most soul-sundering tale I’ve ever tried to write, it’s just an attempt to do an actual, honest-to-God science fiction story for Analog. To see if I could do it on my own terms. And to see if I could gig the Analog readers of thirty-and-more years’ good standing, who would have coronary arrest at seeing Ellison in the hallowed pages of their favorite magazine. You can imagine my joy when I saw the is sue on the newsstands, with my name on the front cover with Isaac Asimov’s, knowing that Analog’s faithful would be gagging, and knowing the little jibe I had waiting for them inside with Sleeping dogs.

“How did you come to write this story?” I am frequently asked, whether it be this story, or that one over there, or the soft pink-and-white one in the corner. Usually, I shrug helplessly. My ideas come from the same places yours come from: Compulsion City, about half an hour out of Schenectady. I can’t give a more specific location than that. Once in a great while, I know specifically. The story that follows is one of those instances, and I will tell you. I attended the 22nd World Science Fiction Convention (Pacificon II) on Labor Day, 1964. For the past many “cons,” a feature has been a fan-art exhibit, with artwork entered by nonprofessionals from all over the science fiction world. Several times (for some as-yet-unexplained reason) I have been asked to be among the judges of this show, and have found the level of work to be pleasantly high, in some cases really remarkable. On half a dozen occasions I have found myself wondering why the certain illustrator that impressed me was not working deep in the professional scene; and within a year, invariably, that artist has left the amateur ranks and become a selling illustrator. At the Pacificon, once again I attended the fan-art exhibition. I was in the company of Robert Silverberg, a writer whose name will not be unfamiliar to you, and the then-editor of Amazing Stories, Cele Goldsmith Lalli (the Lalli had only recently been added, when that handsome bachelor lady finally threw in the sponge and married Mr. Lalli, in whose direction dirty looks for absconding with one of the ablest editors s-f had yet produced). Cele had been trying vainly to get a story out of me. I was playing coy. There had been days when the cent or cent-and-a-half Amazing Stories paid was mucho dinero to me, but now I was a Big-Time Hollywood Writer (it says here somewhere) and I was enjoying saying stupid things like, “You can’t afford me, Cele,” or “I’ll see if Joseph E. Levine will let me take off a week to write one for you … I’ll have my agent call you.” Cele was taking it staunchly. Since I was much younger, and periodically disrupted her efficient Ziff-Davis office, she had tolerated me with a stoic resign only faintly approached by the Colossus of Rhodes. “Okay, okay, big shot,” she was replying, “I’ll stretch it to two cents a word, and we both know you’re being overpaid.” I sneered and marched away. It was something of a running gunbattle for two days. But, in point of fact, I was so tied up with prior commitments in television (that was my term of menial servitude on “The Outer Limits”) that I knew I didn’t have the time for short stories, much as I lusted to do a few, to keep my hand in. That Sunday morning in September, we were at the fan-art exhibit, and I was stopped in front of a display of scratchboard illustrations by a young man named Dennis Smith, from Chula Vista, California. They were extraordinary efforts, combining the best features of Finlay, Lawrence, and Heinrich Kley. They were youthfully derivative, of course, but professionally executed, and one of them held me utterly fascinated. It was a scene on a foggy landscape, with a milk-wash of stars dripping down the sky, a dim outline of battlements in the distance, and in the foreground, a weird phosphorescent creature with great luminous eyes, holding a bag of skulls, astride a giant rat, padding toward me. I stared at it for a long while, and a small group of people clustered behind me, also held by the picture. “If somebody would buy that, I’d write the story for it,” I heard myself say. And from behind me, Cele Goldsmith Lalli’s margarine-warm voice replied, “I’ll buy it for Fantastic; you’ve got an assignment.” I was trapped. Hell hath no fury like the wrath of an editor with single-minded devotion to duty. Around that strange, remarkable drawing, I wrote a story, one of my personal favorites. Dennis Smith had named the picture, so I felt it only seemly to title the story the same: Bright Eyes.

Pretty people have it easier than uglies. It smacks of cliché, and yet the lovelies of this world, defensive to the grave, will say, ‘tain’t so. They will contend that nice makes it harder for them. They get hustled more, people try to use them more, and to hear girls tell it, their good looks are nothing but curse, curse, curse. But stop to think: at least a good-looking human being has that much going for openers. Plain to not-so-nice-at-all folk have to really jump for every little crumb. Things come harder to them. The reasoning of the rationale is a simple one: we worship the Pepsi Generation. We have a pathological lemming drive to conceal our age, lift our faces, dress like overblown Shirley Temples, black that grey in the hair, live a lie. What ever happened to growing old gracefully, the reverence of maturity, the search for character as differentiated from superficial comeliness? It be a disease, I warn you. It will rot you from the inside, while the outside glows. It will escalate into a culture that can never tolerate The Discarded.

Pain. The pain of being obsolete. I go down to Santa Monica sometimes, and walk along through the oceanside park that forms the outermost edge of California. There, at the shore of the Pacific, like flotsam washed up by America, with no place to go, are the old people. Their time has gone, their eyes look out across the water for another beginning, but they have come to the final moments. They sit in the vanilla sunshine and they dream of yesterday. Kind old people, for the most part. They talk to each other, they talk to themselves, and they wonder where it all went.

I stop and sit on the benches and talk to them sometimes. Not often; it makes me think of endings rather than continuations or new beginnings. They’re sad, but they have a nobility that cannot be ignored. They’re passed-over, obsolescent, but they still run well and they have good minutes in them. Their pain is a terrible thing because it cries to be given the chance to work those arthritic fingers at something meaningful, to work those brain cells at something challenging.

This story is about someone in the process of being passed-over, being made obsolete. He fights. I would fight. Some of the old people in Santa Monica fight. Do we ever win? Against the shadow that inevitably falls, no.

Against the time between now and the shadow’s arrival, yes, certainly.

That’s the message in Wanted in Surgery.

Repetitiously, the unifying theme to the stories in this collection is pain, human anguish. But there is a subtext that informs the subject; it is this: we are all inescapably responsible, not only for our own actions, but for our lack of action, the morality and ethic of our silences and our avoidances, the shared guilt of hypocrisy, voyeurism, and cowardice; what might be called the “spectator-sport social conscience.” Catherine Genovese, Martin Luther King, Viola Luizzo, Nathanael West, Marilyn Monroe … how the hell do we face them if there’s something like a Hereafter? And how do we make it day-to-day, what with mirrors everywhere we look, if there isn’t a Hereafter? Perhaps it all comes down to the answer to the question any middle-aged German in, say, Munich, might ask today: “If I didn’t do what they said, they’d kill me. I had to save my life, didn’t I?” I’m sure when it comes right down to it, the most ignominious life is better than no life at all, but again and again I find the answer coming from somewhere too noble to be within myself: “What for?” Staying alive only has merit if one does it with dignity, with purpose, with responsibility to his fellow man. If these are absent, then living is a sluglike thing, more a matter of habit than worth. Without courage, the pain will destroy you. And, oh, yeah, about this story … the last section came first. It was a tone-poem written to a little folk song Tom Scott wrote, titled “38th Parallel,” which Rusty Draper recorded vocally some years later as “Lonesome Song.” lf you can find a 45 rpm of it anywhere, and play it as you read the final sections, it will vastly enhance, audibly coloring an explanation of what I mean when I talk about pain that is Deeper than the Darkness

Pamiętnik znaleziony w wannie to przerażająca relacja z pierwszej ręki, dotycząca przeżyć agenta uwięzionego głęboko w podziemnym kompleksie wojskowym Nowego Pentagonu, gdzieś pod Górami Skalistymi. Świat i życie tajnego kompleksu rządowego przypomina najgorsze kafkowskie wizje biurokracji i zagubienia w trybach maszyn urzędniczych. Bohater w tym nieprzyjaznym świecie, gdzie tylko on wydaje się być normalnym, musi pod zagrożeniem życia kontynuować tajną misję agenta wojskowego, skierowaną przeciwko nieznanym wrogom wewnętrznym. Wszystko zorganizowane w stylu ultratajnych szpiegowskich awantur. Zweryfikuj. Odnajdź. Zniszcz. Sprowokuj. Informuj. Koniec nadawania. N-tego dnia, o n-tej godzinie w n-tym subsektorze n-tego sektora, odbądź n-te spotkanie z N.

Narrator znajduje się w paranoicznej dystopii, gdzie nic nie jest tym na co wygląda, a wszystkim zdaje się rządzić chaos. Każdy jest podejrzliwy wobec każdego. Zagrożony postradaniem zmysłów, nasz bohater zaczyna prowadzić tytułowy pamiętnik, w którym zawiera szczegóły ostatnich kilku dni. Właśnie ten pamiętnik zostanie w przyszłości wydobyty z ruin Nowego Pentagonu, gdzie zachował się w całości w wannie w łaźni, która była jedynym schronieniem bohatera. Jako nieliczny zachowany papierowy nośnik danych (po katastrofie papyrolizy), dziennik ten jest świadectwem dawnych czasów.

Jarosław Grzędowicz — urodzony w 1965 roku, debiutował w 1982 na łamach tygodnika „Odgłosy” opowiadaniem Azyl dla starych pilotów. Klub absolutnej karty kredytowej (publikacja w internecie w 1999 r.) otrzymał nominację do Nagrody Elektrybałta, a po publikacji w Wizjach alternatywnych 2002 także nominację do nagrody Sfinksa. W 1990 roku wraz z Andrzejem Łaskim, Krzysztofem Sokołowskim, Dariuszem Zientalakiem i Rafałem Ziemkiewiczem założył magazyn literacki „Fenix”, w którym prowadził dział prozy polskiej, a od 1993 roku był jego redaktorem naczelnym.

 Oprócz tego pracuje jako dziennikarz „wolny strzelec”, prowadzi stałą rubrykę naukowo-cywilizacyjną w Gazecie Polskiej i tłumaczy komiksy, głównie z serii Usagi Yojimbo i Batman.

 W Fabryce Słów ukazała się Księga jesiennych demonów, jego pierwszy autorski zbiór opowiadań grozy.

 Pan Lodowego Ogrodu to pierwsza powieść Jarosława Grzędowicza, w mistrzowski sposób łącząca elementy science fiction i fantasy.

Jarosław Grzędowicz — urodzony w 1965 roku, debiutował w 1982 na łamach tygodnika „Odgłosy” opowiadaniem Azyl dla starych pilotów. Klub absolutnej karty kredytowej (publikacja w internecie w 1999 r.) otrzymał nominację do Nagrody Elektrybałta, a po publikacji w Wizjach alternatywnych 2002 także nominację do nagrody Sfinksa. W 1990 roku wraz z Andrzejem Łaskim, Krzysztofem Sokołowskim, Dariuszem Zientalakiem i Rafałem Ziemkiewiczem założył magazyn literacki „Fenix”, w którym prowadził dział prozy polskiej, a od 1993 roku był jego redaktorem naczelnym.

Oprócz tego pracuje jako dziennikarz „wolny strzelec”, prowadzi stałą rubrykę naukowo-cywilizacyjną w Gazecie Polskiej i tłumaczy komiksy, głównie z serii Usagi Yojimbo i Batman.

W Fabryce Słów ukazała się Księga jesiennych demonów, jego pierwszy autorski zbiór opowiadań grozy.

Pan Lodowego Ogrodu to pierwsza powieść Jarosława Grzędowicza, w mistrzowski sposób łącząca elementy science fiction i fantasy.

Ilustracje Jan J. Marek

Deep beneath the Ural Mountains, in an underground city carved out by slave labor during the darkest hours of the Cold War, ancient caverns hold exotic and dangerous life-forms that have evolved in isolation for countless millennia. Cut off from the surface world, an entire ecosystem of bizarre subterranean species has survived undetected — until now.

Biologists Nell and Geoffrey Binswanger barely survived their last encounter with terrifying, invasive creatures that threatened to engulf the planet. They think the danger is over until a ruthless Russian tycoon lures them to his underground metropolis, where they find themselves confronted by a vicious menagerie of biological horrors from their past — and by entirely new breeds of voracious predators. Now they’re rising up from the bowels of the Earth to consume the world as we know it.

USA Today praised Warren Fahy's debut novel, Fragment, as “a rollicking tale [that] will enthrall readers of Jurassic Park and The Ruins.” Now Fahy sets off an even more thrilling stampede of action and suspense, bursting forth from the hellish depths of… Pandemonium.

It’s not hard to disarm a dangerous weapon whose nature you know thoroughly. The one that simply cannot be disarmed, by any conceivable means, however, has a special characteristic…

Действия Андреевского Братства нарушили «гармонию сфер», которую даже в своем непримиримом противостоянии пытались сохранить аггры и форзейли, превратили отдельные реальности в «обитаемые острова», разделенные океаном времени и законов Вселенной, изменив в них течение событий и поведение ключевых персонажей. Но любой шторм когда-то кончается, и волны стихают. Что остается на берегу? Какой импульс может предотвратить, например, великую войну, а какой окажется недостаточным, и история вернется в прежнее русло? 1941 год. Советский Союз. Попытка устранить Сталина. Ошибка или спасение? И какова цена этого опыта, проведенного над временем, страной, тысячами людей?

Jedna z najważniejszych powieści polskiej fantastyki socjologicznej

Fantastyki socjologicznej nie wymyślili pisarze, tylko PRL-owscy cenzorzy. Byli oni skłonni przepuścić właściwie dowolną treść, pod warunkiem że bohaterowie będą się nazywać Sneer lub Rinah, a akcja będzie się rozgrywać na innej planecie. Gdyby zaś dokładnie tacy sami bohaterowie robili dokładnie to samo, ale nazywali się Kowalski i Malinowski, powieść nie mogłaby się ukazać. Jednak nie da się sprowadzić fantastyki socjologicznej tylko do sztuczki cenzorskiej, tworzyli ją bowiem autorzy skądinąd naprawdę rozmiłowani w science-fiction – jak choćby Janusz Zajdel.

Te książki świetnie znoszą próbę czasu i czyta się je dzisiaj jak literaturę współczesną, czego przykładem choćby "Paradyzja". Jest to opowieść o mieszkańcach orbitalnej kolonii poddawanych nieustannej kontroli przez wszechobecny i wszechwiedzący komputerowy system zabezpieczeń. Pilnuje nawet tego, komu i kiedy wolno przejść do sąsiedniego pomieszczenia (oficjalnie chodzi o względy bezpieczeństwa – niekontrolowane ruchy kolonistów mogłyby zaburzyć ruch wirowy stacji).

Kto pamięta PRL, temu nie trzeba tłumaczyć, jak bardzo odnajdywaliśmy siebie w tej metaforze. Ale i dzisiaj nie czytamy "Paradyzji" jak baśni o żelaznym wilku. A to za sprawą oryginalnego literackiego pomysłu Zajdla, jakim jest "koalang", czyli język kojarzeniowo-aluzyjny. Chodzi o to, że komputerowy system podsłuchu rozumie wprawdzie znaczenia słów i prostych zbitek, ale jest bezradny wobec poetyckich aluzji i metafor – co wykorzystują mieszkańcy Paradyzji, tocząc na przykład takie dialogi:

– Szary anioł przyśnił mi się nieostrożnie.

– Przestrzeni skrawek pustką się wypełnił?

– Mimo przeszłości myszki w czasowniku rozprzestrzenionej od krańca po kraniec, kotara głosu dłoni mej nie tknięta, tęsknoty hieny pozostały przy niej.

Co oznacza odpowiednio: "Funkcjonariusz zrobił mi w nocy rewizję, myśląc, że śpię", "Czy coś zabrał?", "Myszkował po całym pokoju, szukając tłumika sygnału identyfikatora, nie znalazł, ale drań chyba nie dał za wygraną".

Przez 20 lat, które upłynęło od wydania "Paradyzji", koalang nie stracił nic na aktualności. Przeciwnie – od dłuższego czasu w praktyce podobne zabiegi stosowane są przez internautów. Sieć od dawna przecież jest czytana przez różne mniej lub bardziej bezmyślne maszyny reagujące na określone słowa kluczowe (ze słynnym amerykańskim Echelonem na czele) i zwłaszcza na grupach dyskusyjnych popularna jest taka poezja "poezja": "Poprosze o smietanke do salaty… Musze ja podlac czyms swiezym – ta moja sie chyba zwarzyla". To autentyczny list z 31 października 2001 r. z grupy pl.rec.telewizja (chodzi o aktualne kody do pirackiego dekodera Canal+).

Zgadując z obecnych tendencji, można się spodziewać, że koalang w internecie będzie zjawiskiem coraz popularniejszym – a więc choćby dlatego warto sięgnąć po powieść, w której go wyprorokowano.

From New York Times bestselling author Mira Grant, a high-concept near-future thriller.

A decade in the future, humanity thrives in the absence of sickness and disease.

We owe our good health to a humble parasite—a genetically engineered tapeworm developed by the pioneering SymboGen Corporation. When implanted, the tapeworm protects us from illness, boosts our immune system—even secretes designer drugs. It’s been successful beyond the scientists’ wildest dreams. Now, years on, almost every human being has a SymboGen tapeworm living within them.

But these parasites are getting restless. They want their own lives… and will do anything to get them.

The debut novel by the author of The Orphan Master's Son (winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize) and the story collection Fortune Smiles (winner of the 2015 National Book Award)

Hailed as "remarkable" by the New Yorker, Emporium earned Adam Johnson comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut and T.C. Boyle. In his acclaimed first novel, Parasites Like Us, Johnson takes us on an enthralling journey through memory, time, and the cost of mankind's quest for its own past.

Anthropologist Hank Hannah has just illegally exhumed an ancient American burial site and winds up in jail. But the law will soon be the least of his worries. For, buried beside the bones, a timeless menace awaits that will set the modern world back twelve thousand years and send Hannah on a quest to save that which is dearest to him. A brilliantly evocative apocalyptic adventure told with Adam Johnson's distinctive dark humor, Parasites Like Us is a thrilling tale of mankind on the brink of extinction.

Humanity has never really been alone in the Universe, and if things had been just a bit different…

Kivrinai, laiko tyrimo instituto bendradarbei, išvyka į pačią tamsiausią, pačią pavojingiausią žmonijos istorijos erą, 14-ąjĮ šimtmetį, atrodė neką baisesnė už daugybę skiepų bei imuniteto stiprinimo programą.

Projekto vadovams 21-ojo amžiaus Oksforde viskas atrodė kur kas sudėtingiau — painūs apskaičiavimai, prietaisų kalibravimas, tikslaus grįžimo taško nustatymas.

Staiga pasaulį — ir tą 21-ojo amžiaus, ir tą 14-ojo — ištinka siaubinga katastrofa.