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Ian Watson is one of the finest writers of SF and fantasy stories, and Butterflies of Memory is his 10th collection, a selection of stories that are by turns serious and playful, and always wildly imaginative…

In the title story, what if mobile phones were to become truly mobile, flying about like butterflies? ‘An Appeal to Adolf’ tells of gay sailors on a Nazi battleship many kilometres long during a Second World War unfamiliar to us; ‘Lover of Statues’ of an enigmatic alien visiting the only statue of Satan in the world, in Madrid – while in the bubbling stew of faiths which is Jerusalem a doorway opens to reveal capricious godlike beings. And just suppose that Jules Verne undertook an actual journey to the centre of the Earth. Closer to home, in a Midlands town, a man who seems to have suddenly popped into existence tries to discover who and what he is. ‘Hijack Holiday’, written a year before 9/11, presciently if bizarrely anticipates events akin to those on that fateful day.

The conflicts of Planet Earth are forgotten now. Even The Solar System War with its Cold Victory is barely a memory. In this the third and final volume of THE PSYCHOTECHNIC LEAGUE, the scale is immeasurably greater: in Space, in Time, and in violence

Escape is all that Quir thinks about. Escape from the enclosure on Earth. Escape from the endless interrogations. Quir’s memories have been burned out; all he knows is that he must give scientific data to humans whenever they ask for it.

Once, at the height of Earth’s fabled history, there was a city called Ferrin. Compared to Ferrin, all the cities of Earth that ever were or would be – from imperial Rome to towering New York before to the city called R afterwards – paled into insignificance. But in the long twilight centuries that followed the fall of Ferrin memories faded and men’s ambitions waned, and by the time that the young man Thel heard of Ferrin, no one was sure it was anything but a myth.

But part of an abandoned highway still passed near Thel’s home – and when a starry fragment from Ferrin came into Thel’s possession, he knew there could be no rest for him until he had followed the ruined roadway that still spanned time and space to find the truth about the Rise and Fall of Ferrin – and also of all humanity’s hopes.

A race of octopoid aliens visits earth to restore man’s dying beliefs, with spaceships containing the very Gods themselves. In the future the rich are allowed a four week holiday – into their own futures. A soldier wounded at the front finds his memories too terrifying to live with once his government-approved drugs are withdrawn. A young girl is convinced that mother-earth is male and dedicates her life to consummating her love for him. God is dead and the Devil makes an offer for the real estate of heaven…

These dark visions of the future by James Tiptree Jr. are a vivid, sometimes frightening foretelling of what may happen.

This gracefully written sequel to Golden Witchbreed powerfully depicts the impact of a high-technology civilization on a decaying planet. Ten years after having served as Earth’s first envoy to Orthe, which is struggling to survive after a planetwide holocaust millennia ago, Lynne de Lisle Christie returns there as an advisor to PanOceania, one of Earth’s giant multinational companies, which is seeking to discover the technological secrets of the Goldens, the ruling race that had destroyed itself while almost obliterating Orthe. Christie seeks to help the native people, some of whom have been her friends, some her enemies, but all closely bound in her memories and loyalties. Instigated by the last of the Golden, a madwoman seeking domination, war between the poor and starving hiyeks of the Desert Coast and the land-loving telestres of the north is aggravated by smuggled high-tech weapons. Christie, while holding a dreadful secret from the Orthe’s past, attempts to mediate. Gentle creates moving, different, yet recognizable societies and people that catch the reader’s emotions as they struggle to save themselves.

During an action on the third planet from Arcturus, soldier Cal Truent woke up in the hospital with a sixteen-hour hole in his memory. No one knows what it is that Cal has forgotten, but his superiors can’t take the chance that it might be something deadly to his fellow soldiers – and to Earth.
Somehow Cal means to seek out whatever it is that his mind is resisting . . .

Harry Blakey remembered a childhood secret – that there was a room under his folks’ home which crossed into another world. When, finally as a war veteran, he came back to the old house, he investigated – and found his memory was true.

There were indeed other Earths and other civilisations and adventures to be had – at great risks.

For when he enlisted in the special commando corps organised to stop the interdimensional warfare, he came up against the terrifying hordes of the Diamond Contessa. She had looted many Earths and her hunger was always increasing. No mere human heroics would wrest the keys of the world away from her – not white her army of monsters held a dozen civilisations in thrall!

Winner of the Nebula Award for best novel, 2005
Winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award 2004

Unknown to anyone, two creatures have wandered the Earth for generations. The aliens have no knowledge of each other, but share a residual memory of a mysterious, sunken relic – and an affinity for deep water. One, the changeling, has survived by adaptation, taking the shapes of many different organisms. The other, the chameleon, has survived solely by destroying anything or anyone that threatens it.

Now, finally brought up from the bottom of the sea by marine biologist Russell Sutton, the relic calls to them both . . . to come home. For all these generations there have been two invincible creatures on Earth. But the chameleon has decided there’s only room for one . . .

MARS: THE SKULL OF A PLANET PICKED CLEAN BY THE WIND OF TIME

North Beyond the desert of Meroe, past the ancient cliffs of the dust-locked continents, past the dry wharfs of a city that was old when Earth was new, the caravan crept into the unmapped waste called Umbra. It was into this shadowed land that the lost nation of the People had ridden and vanished-in a time beyond memory. It was here that the outworlder Ryker followed the golden-eyed Valarda and found the Child-of-Stars.

PROGRESS REPORT:


Cornwall, Nebraska – 894 catatonic, 86 dead


Boland, California – 1200 blind


Berwick, Maine – 2100 severely mentally retarded


McKay, Maryland – 2300 with complete loss of memory


Small towns, each wiped out as surely as if bombed off the face of the earth.

The president’s announcement was simple: “My fellow Americans, the people of the United States are under attack. Terrorists are using germ warfare against us and we must take extraordinary enforcement measures. I will ask Congress to declare a state of national emergency…”

Top Gun heads to outer space in this throwback to the classic science fiction of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein.

Strapped in to artificial wings spanning twenty-five feet across, your arms push a tenth of your body weight with each pump as you propel yourself at frightening speeds through the air. Inside a pressurized dome on the Moon, subject to one-sixth Earth’s gravity, there are swarms of chiseled, fearless, superbly trained flyers all around you, jostling for air space like peregrine falcons racing for the prize. This was the sport of piloting, and after Helium-3, piloting was one of the first things that entered anyone’s mind when Borealis was mentioned.

It was Helium-3 that powered humanity’s far-flung civilization expansion, feeding fusion reactors from the Alliances on Earth to the Terran Ring, Mars, the Jovian colonies, and all the way out to distant Titan. The supply, taken from the surface of the Moon, had once seemed endless. But that was long ago. Borealis, the glittering, fabulously rich city stretched out across the lunar North Pole, had amassed centuries of unimaginable wealth harvesting it, and as such was the first to realize that its supplies were running out.

The distant memories of the horrific planetwide devastation spawned by the petroleum wars were not enough to quell the rising energy and political crises. A new war to rival no other appeared imminent, but the solar system’s competing powers would discover something more powerful than Helium-3: the indomitable spirit of an Earth-born, war-weary mercenary and pilot extraordinaire.

THE TALES OF HENGHIS HAPTHORN

Henghis Hapthorn is the foremost penetrator of mysteries and uncoverer of secrets in a decadent, far-future Old Earth, one age before Jack Vance’s Dying Earth. A superb rationalist, he has long disdained the notion that the universe has an alternative organizing principle: magic. But now a new age is dawning, overturning the very foundations of Hapthorn’s existence, and he must struggle to survive in a world where all the rules are changing.

HESPIRA

Hapthorn decides to leave Old Earth, seeking to solve the mystery of Hespira, an ungainly off-world woman who has lost her memory. The investigation takes him down The Spray to the rank-obsessed world of Ikkibal and the rustic Shannery, where he unravels Hespira’s role in a deadly feud between aristocrats. But behind the scenes an unseen antagonist is plotting the discriminator’s destruction.

Praise for Matthew Hughes:

“Matthew Hughes does Jack Vance better than anyone except Jack himself” – George R.R. Martin
“Heir apparent to Jack Vance” – Booklist
“Hughes’s boldness is admirable”- New York Review of Science Fiction
“Hughes effortlessly renders fantastic worlds and beings believable”- Publishers Weekly
“A towering talent”- Robert J. Sawyer
“A treasure” – David Gerrold

A science fiction thriller from the author of THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH.

‘A fine engrossing novel by a master!’ Philadelphia Enquirer

In a time when America’s power has been eroded by energy depletion, and world control has been virtually given over to the Chinese, only one man has the courage to seek new mineral resources among the stars. He is Ben Belson, one of the richest men in the world, a man haunted by the memory of a loveless childhood and driven by needs and desires he can barely understand or control. His dream is to find the means to help America break the stranglehold of the corrupt interests who are keeping it a second class power.

Jeremy Clyde is a young scientist who discovers that Time is a circle, and that deep within the human brain is a memory ‘hangover’ of future and past events. He carries out an experiment on himself and succeeds in mentally projecting his body 2,000 years into the future. Here he learns that his arrival in 3950 has been anticipated, and incredibly, he is appointed as the nominal ruler of the four inhabited inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. But he discovers he is only a puppet for a ruthless governing system being secretly maintained by malign Jovians. Clyde joins forces with his counterparts on the three other planets and battles to throw off the alien yoke…

In the early hours before dawn, a small Michigan town vanishes from the face of the earth. That morning the men and women of Two Rivers wake up in a world strangely different from their own – a world of curfews, food rationing and secret police.

Something has gone terribly wrong in Two Rivers, something that has to do with the mysterious government facility on the outskirts of the town. For schoolteacher Dexter Graham, who has lost his family and has nothing left he values . . . for twelve-year-old Clifford Stockton, driven by a child’s curiosity and courage . . . for Evelyn Woodward, torn between obedience to the state and loyalty to her friends . . . and for physicist Howard Poole, haunted by the memory of his brilliant, enigmatic uncle, the only way to escape the nightmare is to journey deeper into fear.

After roving through space for centuries, a starship unburdens its cargo of human embryos on a harsh new world. They quickly grow to maturity in the ship’s artificial womb. A lifetime of Earth memories is programmed into their dreams.
But before their indoctrination is complete, an alien intruder infiltrates and destroys the system, and the reason for the odyssey is never learned.
Now, on a verdant island surrounded by quicksand, Othman, wanderer, dreamer, and self-proclaimed leader of the Earthling band, builds a mighty bridge to span the ocean of molten mud that keeps them from the world beyond.
He has yet to face the deadly toll his quest will take on the delicate ecology of the planet – or the revolt of his beautiful, strong-willed wife, Silandi. And he has yet to discover the hidden knowledge locked deep within their hearts.

Former Air Force officer and NSA agent Ron Moosic thought he had been assigned to be the Security Director for a nuclear power plant – but the power plant was only a cover for a top secret project sending observers back in time.

And terrorists had taken control of the project and sent two of their own back to change the past. Moosic was sent downtime in pursuit, with two considerable handicaps: like all time travelers, he would change upon arrival into a person who was alive at the time – he could find himself changed into a young boy or a woman – and if he stayed too long, his memories would vanish and he would be trapped in the past.

But Moosic quickly discovered that both he and the terrorists were only pawns in the time game, maneuvered by warring humans and… ex-humans in a future struggle that would either conquer the Earth or destroy all life on it…

It is the year 2450. Humanity is scattered among the stars, which teem with intelligent life, while the home world has been destroyed by an inadvertent catastrophe two hundred years before. Thus all Earthmen are exiles, and Earth itself is only a memory.

Hydros is a world of great complexity. It has almost no landmass, only a great globe-encompassing ocean with occasional tiny islands. Its seas swarm with apparently intelligent life-forms of a hundred kinds, and one – a bipedal humanoid form – has created a kind of land for itself: floating islands, woven from sea-borne materials, buffered by elaborate barricades against the ceaseless tidal surges that circle the planet.

To Hydros have come an assortment of Earthmen. For them it’s a world of no return: having no form of outbound space transportation. This brilliantly inventive novel tells their story, as they travel across the planet’s endless ocean in search of the mysterious area from which no human has ever returned – the Face of the Waters.




(First published 1991)

Humpty Dumpty is a breakthrough work for this acknowledged master of the fantastic, an intriguing, entertaining, and immensely appealing novel of a man trying to make sense of a world gone mad. The tale begins when Wellington Stout wakes in an Italian hospital, uncertain how or why he came to be there. Gradually he learns that he was shot in the head in a Milan restaurant the night before his stepdaughter’s wedding, perhaps because of a mysterious packet his brother asked him to deliver. The doctors tell him he is fortunate to be alive, but Stout has his doubts. For the bullet that has entered his skull has also opened cracks in the fabric of reality, and, as in the old nursery rhyme, no force on Earth or in Heaven can put it back together again. Soon Stout is hearing voices foretelling his doom, encountering antediluvian cabals of dentists, extraterrestrial shoe salesmen, gargantuan rodents, seductive adolescent sibyls, and giant craters opening across the face of North America, and traveling on an uncertain odyssey through a distorted landscape made of the fragments of his own life and memory.