The Unlimited Dream Company
10 best books like The Unlimited Dream Company (J.G. Ballard): Nifft the Lean, Felaheen, Gloriana, On Wings of Song, Orbitsville, Take Back Plenty, Sweet Dreams, The Anti-Death League, Falstaff, The Old Men at the Zoo
Author | Michael Shea |
ISBN | 0879977833 |
Come then, Mortal. We Will Seek Her Soul:
At the behest of an apparition, Nifft and Haldar kidnap a disgraced warrior and take him to the land of the dead to be reunited with her in exchange for the Wizard's Key. Only things don't go as planned...
The first Nifft story was quite good, a trip to...
Author | Jon Courtenay Grimwood |
ISBN | 0553383787 |
In a world where secrets kill, an ex-cop discovers he's got the biggest secret of all. . . .
Set in a 21st-century Ottoman Empire, Jon Courtenay Grimwood's acclaimed Arabesk series is a noir action-thriller with an exotic twist. Here an ex-cop with nothing to lose finds himself on the trail of...
Author | Michael Moorcock |
ISBN | 0446691402 |
A fable satirizing Spenser's "The Fairie Queen" and reflecting the real life of Elizabeth I, tells of a woman who ascends to the throne upon the death of her debauched and corrupted father, King Hern. Gloriana's reign brings the Empire of Albion into a Golden Age, but her oppressive responsibilities...
Author | Thomas M. Disch |
ISBN | 0881844438 |
The human society is in the terrible decline and On Wings of Song is a kind of cultural dystopia… Thomas M. Disch writes with so many realistic details that it starts appearing that the dystopia is now…
“They say we’re very conformist, don’t they?”
“Yes, that’s certainly one...
Author | Bob Shaw |
ISBN | 0575070986 |
[He] was a man who had looked on many worlds in his lifetime, yet his face was the face of a man in shock.
You’ll be forgiven if Orbitsville reminds you a lot of Ringworld. Both deal with megastructures around a star. Around a star, just in case you missed that part; these things are huge. Where...
Author | Colin Greenland |
ISBN | 0380763958 |
A fast-moving space adventure featuring mysterious aliens, a journey to a de-populated planet, a mad run from space cops, a ship captain in trouble, and her AI (Artificially Intelligent) companion/ship's computer. Winner of both the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel of the year...
Author | Michael Frayn |
ISBN | 0140040633 |
An utter delight.
Even though it was written in the 1970s, it still feels completely fresh & topical today. It's a lovely, optimistic satire of man & covers many of the Big Ideas. I know when Life of Pi was so very popular, various reviews said it would affirm/renew your faith in God (a...
Author | Kingsley Amis |
ISBN | 0575008156 |
Brian Leonard, a Monty Python of secret agents, meets James Churchill, a young officer at an English army base where preparations are under way for Operation Apollo. To complicate matters, Churchill has gone round-the-bend for a parole from the mental ward. Thrown amongst these loose cannons is a...
The most beloved comic figure in English literature decides that history hasn't done him justice -- it's time for him to tell the whole unbuttoned story, his way. Irascible and still lecherous at eighty-one, Falstaff spins out these outrageously bawdy memoirs as an antidote to legend, and in the process...
Author | Angus Wilson |
ISBN | 0586049029 |
Set in a near future (the novel was first published in 1961 and is set in the period 1970–73), this is Angus Wilson's most allegorical novel, about a doomed attempt to set up a reserve for wild animals. Simon Carter, secretary of the London Zoo, has accepted responsibility and power to the prejudice...
Author | Barry N. Malzberg |
ISBN | 0881845515 |
MYSTERY IN SPACE!
a mystery in space of How Did the Captain of the Venusian Expedition Die? is not the mystery in space
the mystery in space is the mystery of the inner space
the mystery of the confined madman and hopeful author and failed husband and tragic victim and master...
Author | Christopher Priest |
ISBN | 0684816326 |
British-born Teresa Simons returns to England after the death of her husband, an FBI agent, who was killed by an out-of-control gunman while on assignment in Texas. A shocking coincidence has drawn her to the run-down south coast town of Bulverton, where a gunman's massacre has haunting similarities...
Something has gone very seriously wrong with Tik-Tok's "asimov circuits." They should keep him on the straight and narrow, following Asimov's first law of robotics: A robot shall not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm. But, that's not what's happening. Although...
Author | John Brunner |
ISBN | 0575070528 |
Matthew Flamen, the last of the networks' spoolpigeons, is desperate for a big story. He needs it to keep his audience and his job. And there is no shortage of possibilities: the Gottschalk cartel is fomenting trouble among the knees in order to sell their latest armaments to the blanks; which ties in...
Author | Ken MacLeod |
ISBN | 1841496510 |
Can you imagine a future where religious fundamentalists have caused so much damage that the world embraces a politics of 'radical secularism', marginalising all faiths and denominations by effectively failing to recognise their existence?
Sounds like paradise on Earth, right? So speaks...
Author | V. Vale |
ISBN | 0965046974 |
This is the most comprehensive introduction to this visionary writer, the William Burroughs of England. J.G. Ballard finally achieved world recognition when Steven Spielberg filmed his autobiography (childhood til age 15) in Empire of the Sun. But Ballard has been a visionary iconoclast since...
Author | Nadine Gordimer |
ISBN | 0140056149 |
Liz Van Den Sandt's ex-husband, Max, an ineffectual rebel, has drowned himself. In prison for a failed act of violence against the government, he had betrayed his colleagues. Now Liz has been asked to perform a direct service for the black nationalist movement, at considerable danger to herself. Can...
Author | Rex Warner |
ISBN | 1566630258 |
First published in 1941, The Aerodrome is one of the few works of fiction in the twentieth century to understand the dangerous yet glamorous appeal of fascism and the less than satisfactory answer of traditional democracy - and to transmute their deadly opposition into terms of enduring art. Rex Warner...
Author | Bernard Malamud |
ISBN | 0374528829 |
With a new introduction by Thomas Mallon
Dubin's Lives (1979) is a compassionate and wry commedia, a book praised by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times as Malamud's "best novel since The Assistant. Possibly, it is the best he has written of all."
Its protagonist is one...
Author | Brian W. Aldiss |
ISBN | 0755100662 |
When an undeclared Acid Head War breaks out, Britain is the first to be devastated by Psycho-Chemical Aerosols--tasteless, odourless, colourless psychedelic drugs, which distort the minds of thousands of civilians into extreme terror or extreme joy. When the warped citizens of Europe proclaim...