Ingenious essays from "a Jorge Luis Borges for the Space Age, who plays in earnest with every concept . . . from free will to probability theory" ( The New York Times Book Review).In A Perfect Vacuum, Stanislaw Lem steps outside of his fictional comfort zone to try his hand at reviewing the literature of others. The only catch is this: None of these books have actually been published—or even written—he just made them up.These sixteen satiri...

Conjuring worlds in which robots are kings and Earthlings exist on the fringes of the universe, Stanisław Lem's anachronistic fairy tales and science fiction parables envision knights who fight for the favor of a mechanical princess, a computer that can create anything (so long as it begins with the letter n), and a human astronaut who goes undercover on a planet ruled by robots. In celebrated translations by Michael Kandel and with a new introduction by Bożena Shallcross, the sto...

The absurdly brilliant far-future satire from "the Borges of scientific culture" ( Time).The year is 3149, and a vast paper destroying blight—papyralysis—has obliterated much of the planet's written history. Fortunately, these rare memoirs, preserved for centuries in a volcanic rock, record the strange life of a man trapped in a hermetically sealed underground community . . .From the Kafka Prize–winning author of Solaris, this is an entert...

DescriptionNest of Worlds is the first novel to appear in English from contemporary Polish science fiction master Marek S. Huberath. This metafictional adventure, owing as much to Borges, Saramago, and even Thomas More as it does to Stanislaw Lem, describes a world where every 35 years, all residents must move to a new “Land”, each a rigid caste society based on hair color, and each person bears a Significant Name that foretells the manner of their deaths. ...

Journey through Poland, Ukraine, Slovenia, and other places neglected by tourists, with "an accomplished stylist with an eye for telling detail" (Irvine Welsh).Andrzej Stasiuk is a restless and indefatigable traveler. By car, train, bus, and ferry, he goes from his native Poland to Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova, and Ukraine—to small towns and villages with strangely evocative names. "The heart of my Europe," he tells us, "beats in Sokolów P...

A playful, witty, reflective memoir of childhood by the science fiction master Stanisław Lem.With Highcastle, Stanisław Lem offers a memoir of his childhood and youth in prewar Lvov. Reflective, artful, witty, playful—“I was a monster,” he observes ruefully—this lively and charming book describes a youth spent reading voraciously (he was especially interested in medical texts and French novels), smashing toys, eating pastries, and being terrorized by insec...

Nest of Worlds is the first novel to appear in English from contemporary Polish science fiction master Marek S. Huberath. This metafictional adventure, owing as much to Borges, Saramago, and even Thomas More as it does to Stanislaw Lem, describes a world where every thirty-five years, all residents must move to a new “Land,” each a rigid caste society based on hair color, and each person bears a Significant Name that foretells the manner of their deaths. As new arrivals in the lan...

The first three novels in the acclaimed sci-fi fantasy series from the award-winning author: "An imaginative fusion of action, sorcery, and science fiction" ( The New York Times Book Review).In the first three books of the Majipoor Cycle, Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author Robert Silverberg delivered a vast and vividly imagined world full of epic adventure, court intrigue, and high drama.In Lord Valentine's Castle, an amnesiac wanderer r...

The epic sci-fi fantasy Majipoor Cycle continues with the saga of Lord Prestimion, whose rise to power is beset by war and madness.Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author Robert Silverberg returns to the richly imagined world of Majipoor. Collected here in one volume is the complete Prestimion Trilogy, set hundreds of years before the events of the first three novels.In Sorcerers of Majipoor, a peaceful transfer of power is threatened by a cunning riv...

Meet Ijon Tichy—a space age adventurer who encounters faulty time machines, intelligent washing machines, and other puzzling phenomena—in this collection from a science fiction legend.Memoirs of a Space Traveler follows the adventures of Ijon Tichy, a Gulliver of the space age, who leads readers through strange experiments involving, among other puzzling phenomena, faulty time machines, intelligent washing machines, and suicidal potatoes. The scientists Ti...

A philosophical science fiction novel from Hugo Award–winning author Philip K. Dick, Radio Free Albemuth is a visionary alternate history of a dystopian United States, full of the conspiracy theories and religious themes that became the foundation for his celebrated VALIS trilogy.It is the late 1960s, and a paranoid incompetent has schemed his way into the White House and convulsed America into a vicious war against imaginary, internal enemies. Philip K. D...

Ben Franklin must save the world when Isaac Newton unleashes dark magic in this "ambitious" alternate history series by a New York Times–bestselling author ( Library Journal).Greg Keyes reimagines the eighteenth-century as an era of apocalyptic sorcery in which a young printer's apprentice named Benjamin Franklin joins forces with a host of historical personages to prevent humankind's annihilation by demons and black magic inadvertently released by...