Search Results for: new-america

The benevolent, paternalistic World State regarded the freedom-minded Jeffersonians as a minor embarrassment whose violent elimination would cause more disruption than their demise would merit. So both sides were happy when the chance came for voluntary exile to a distant planet. But two hundred years later the less benevolent descendant of the World State that had let them go was to decide that the cosmos was not big enough to hold both it and a free people.

Spinrad examines one of his most compelling obsessions – the possible “futures” of America.
Street Meat: In New York City, streeties, zonies and subway cannibals are locked in a nighmarish scrabble for rat meat, sex – and survival.
The Lost Continent: group of African tourists visit the ruins of Space Age America – a surreal landscape of abandoned skyscrapers, empty streets and dead, rusted machinery.
World War Last: The hashish-smoking Sheik of Koram has a plan to trick America and Russia into war.
La Vie Continue: In Paris exiled science-fiction author Norman Spinrad ignores a lucrative – but dangerous – bidding war between the KGB and the CIA for the film rights to his story “Riding the Torch”.

What new menace was besieging mankind’s last refuge?
The Earth had been stripped bare of the atmosphere and water, its surface left an airless and lifeless desert…except for America. A dome of energy had been erected around the U.S. in the nick of time and only within this vast transparent dome could men and women live in safety. Until the moment Barry Thane spotted a moving thing outside the dome!
Something was there where only Death reigned. Something that was spying on the dome, trying to break in and destroy Earth’s last oasis! But what was it…and why?

Barry’s single-handed struggle with the unknown, his own break-out into the outside world of airless terror, makes one of the most exciting novels that Jack Williamson, master of science fiction, has ever written.

Hal Halliday runs a missing persons business in mid 21st century New York. It is a city that is drowning in refugees after terrorist outrages have left much of America a radioactive wasteland. People colour their grim lives with endless hours spent in VR. It is an addiction which has made VR magnate Sergio Mantoni a multi-millionaire. But now Mantoni faces a threat from a guerrilla group called VIREX, who are dedicating to ending the false promise of VR. And when Hal accepts a job to look for the missing sister of a Holodrama star, he find himself drawn into the complex world of VR and VIREX ..

Following the development of massive airships, naïve Londoner Bert Smallways becomes accidentally involved in a German plot to invade America by air and reduce New York to rubble. But although bombers devastate the city, they cannot overwhelm the country, and their attack leads not to victory but to the beginning of a new and horrific age for humanity. And so dawns the era of Total War, in which brutal aerial bombardments reduce the great cultures of the twentieth century to nothing. As civilization collapses around the Englishman, now stranded in a ruined America, he clings to only one hope – that he might return to London, and marry the woman he loves.

Towards the end of the twenty-first century 41 Worlds, small satellites with a total population of half a million, orbit the Earth, which has seen many changes, not least of which is a second revolution in America. Marianne O’Hara, a brilliant political sciences student, is from New New York, a hollowed out asteroid and the largest of the Worlds, but is to spend a year on Earth as a postgraduate student. Because the political relationship between the Worlds and Earth is complex and voltatile, Marianne unwittingly finds herself caught up with a group of fanatics determined on a third revolution in America – even if such a revolution could lead to the destruction of the Earth…

America, 1984 – not our version of America, but an America that calls itself the Real, an America in which the invention of Turing Gates has allowed it access to sheaves of alternate histories. For ten years, in the name of democracy, the Real has been waging clandestine wars and fomenting revolution, freeing versions of America from communist or fascist rule, and extending its influence across a wide variety of alternate realities.

But the human and political costs have proven too high, and new President Jimmy Carter has called an end to war, and is bringing troops and secret agents home.

Adam Stone is called out of retirement when his former comrade, Tom Waverly, begins to murder different versions of the same person, mathematician Eileen Barrie. Aided by Waverly’s daughter, Linda, Adam hunts for his old friend across different sheaves, but when they finally catch up with Waverly, they discover that they have stumbled into the middle of an audacious conspiracy that plans to exploit a new property of the Turing Gates: it will change not only the history of the Real, but that of every other sheaf, including our own.

Cowboy Angels combines the high-octane action and convoluted plots of the TV series 24 in a satirical, multi-layered alternate reality thriller.

Susannah runs away from her husband, loses her memory, and – with new innocence – rediscovers life in America, becoming involved with thieves and terrorists, relating to people on disconcerting levels, and falling for a most unlikely Mr. Right…

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.

A man walks into a bar. A dispute ensues, and the bartender kills him. He’s sentenced to ten years for manslaughter. In prison, the convict, Wardlin Stuart, writes prayers addressed to no god in particular. Inexplicably, his prayers – whether it’s a request for a girlfriend or a special favor for a fellow inmate – are answered, be it in days or weeks. When his collection of supplications, A Handbook of American Prayer, is published by a New York press, Stuart emerges a celebrity author. Settling into a new life in Arizona, he encounters a fundamentalist minister. The two are destined for a confrontation. In the interim, it seems that the god to whom Stuart has been praying has manifested himself on the earth. In this short novel about America’s conflicting love triangle – celebrity, spirituality, and money – Shepard negotiates the thin line between the real and the surreal, expounding upon violence and redemption along the way. this story of an unlikely American messiah shows why The Wall Street Journal has compared Shepard, an award-winning author, to Graham Greene, Robert Stone, and Ward Just.

A quick-witted Irish safecracker juggles alchemy and automatons in the action-packed follow-up to the nineteenth-century United States steampunk adventure, King of the Cracksmen.

Liam McCool, the premier safecracker in 1877 New York, isn’t the type to hang around fairy circles on the Celtic day of the dead. But an invitation from his Gram leaves the “King of the Cracksmen” possessed by the spirit of Finn McCool, the great hunter-warrior of ancient Ireland and a mighty magical force.

Just in time, too. Edwin Stanton, once Lincoln’s Secretary of War but now a self-proclaimed dictator, has restored slavery in the United States, and conscripted every able-bodied white male to fight in the war he’s waging against Little Russia, made up of all the continental North America west of the Mississippi, sold to Russia by Andrew Jackson fifty years earlier.

Stanton needs Little Russia’s calorium, a mineral used to power America’s airships, factories, and humanoid automatons. But Liam and the love of his life, world-famous reporter Becky Fox, mean to stop him. Joined by Crazy Horse, the Sioux war chief and medicine man, and Ambrose Chen, a Taoist sorcerer and alchemist, Liam and company embark on a wild series of adventures from New Petersburg, where revolutionaries are fighting to overthrow the government, to the Bear Flag Republic, a California enclave governed by P. T. Barnum.

From Turkish dominated Europe, across the high seas to the land of opportunity – the Aztec Empire. Dan Beauchamp is a young Englishman whose heart longs for fortune and adventure. But industrial Mexico is a long way from primitive Britain, and Dan has a lot to learn. From the city of London – better known as New Istanbul – to the untamed wilderness of North America here is a high adventure not to be missed.

American Dream or American Nightmare? Norman Spinrad describes The Star-Spangled Future:

“America is something new under the sun. not so much a nation at all as a precog flash of the future of the species . . .

I wrote believing that I was simply writing disconnected science fiction stories from whatever came into my head . . . And they all turned out to be about America, the leading edge of all possible futures unfolding around us . . . After all, that was what was coming into my head, that’s the mother lode of science fiction realities – the American fusion plasma of which we are creatures – and all we have to do is keep ourselves open to it . . . that’s my definition of science fiction.

We have seen the future and it is us.”

War had devastated the entire eastern hemisphere. For two hundred years America had lived in civilized isolation, while Europe had lapsed into legend.

Jefferson Turck was the first man who dared recross the 30th meridian, and like Columbus centuries before him, he landed in a New World. For Europe had become the jungle home of savage beasts and her people had banded together in bloodthirsty tribes led by barbarian queens.

In 1492, Colombus discovered America.

In 1992 Claude Regan had to make it happen again!

The US needed a shot in the arm as the twentieth century entered the last decade. And a World’s fair celebrating five hundred years of American civilisation might just do the trick.

Regan was the trickiest, most ruthless promoter in the country. And the first thing he realised was that Earth wasn’t big enough to hold the kind of fair he wanted.

So he built a new world!

New York, 2033. A rebellious populace flocks to join the C of E – Church of Elvis. The Elvii have already formed schismatic groups: among them the Hosts of Memphis and the Shaken, Rattled and Rolled. Global corporation Dryco send their operative, Iz, back to 1954 to bring Elvis home to his adoring millions. But the America she finds is strangely altered, and so too is the King. At the Presley home Elvis – nineteen, acned, never recorded – stands over the blood-spattered body of his ma…

Mystery writer Brendan Monroe is tormented by the fear that his flamboyant fictional detective P. I. Roy Barron has come to life. Is the author losing his mind? Or is someone making it seem that way?

When Barron is found dead, Sergeant Dan Valentine of the Santa Monica police focuses his investigation on the local chapter of the Mystery Writers of America, where he faces the fascinating challenge of trying to trap a murderer whose profession is devising diabolical plots.

‘My favourite American crime-writer’ New York Herald Tribune

What would the world be like if the Russians discovered how to beat us at our own capitalistic game, and began dumping inexpensive, quality goods on the world market?

In this brand new novel, Mack Reynolds deposits us into just such a future. It is a world where America is rapidly being turned into a second-rate power as its industries go bankrupt. A world that is falling under the wheels of the Soviet juggernaut, peacefully and passively. It is a world where the U.S. has only one way to retaliate – by bringing a little religion into the Soviet Union, a very special religion.

The waters rose, and darkness was upon the earth.

For a few decades after the Twenty-Minute War and the Red Plague, there were those who remembered the ways and pleasures of civilization, but soon the harsh realities of life in the flooded seaboard of North America pushed the survivors into a new Dark Age – an age of superstition and brutality, but one of seeking and poetry as well. This is the world of Edgar Pangborn’s classic Davy, portrayed here over centuries of its change and growth. Here are heretics, and harpers, crusaders and cowards, magicians and mundane folk, in a stunning cycle of stories that have timeless quality of legend.

From the Hugo-winning author of Spin, an exuberant adventure in a post-climate-change America

In the reign of President Deklan Comstock, a reborn United States is struggling back to prosperity. Over a century after the Efflorescence of Oil, after the Fall of the Cities, after the Plague of Infertility, after the False Tribulation, after the days of the Pious Presidents, the sixty stars and thirteen stripes wave from the plains of Athabaska to the national capital in New York City. In Colorado Springs, the Dominion sees to the nation’s spiritual needs. In Labrador, the Army wages war on the Dutch. America, unified, is rising once again.

Then out of Labrador come tales of a new Ajax-Captain Commongold, the Youthful Hero of the Saguenay. The ordinary people follow his adventures in the popular press. The Army adores him. The President is…troubled. Especially when the dashing Captain turns out to be his nephew Julian, son of the falsely accused and executed Bryce.

Treachery and intrigue dog Julian’s footsteps. Hairsbreadth escapes and daring rescues fill his days. Stern resolve and tender sentiment dice for Julian’s soul, while his admiration for the works of the Secular Ancients, and his adherence to the evolutionary doctrines of the heretical Darwin, set him at fatal odds with the hierarchy of the Dominion. Plague and fire swirl around the Presidential palace when at last he arrives with the acclamation of the mob.

As told by Julian’s best friend and faithful companion, a rustic yet observant lad from the west, this tale of the 22nd Century asks- and answers-the age-old question: “Do you want to tell the truth, or do you want to tell a story?”

L M Greenspan, the head of ailing Climactic Studios, gave producer, Barney Hendrickson, five days to get a major movie in the can – and Climactic out of it.

Impossible?

Not with Professor Hewett’s miraculous presto chango time machine, the answer to Hollywood producer’s prayer.

Nipping back to AD 1,000 with a whole film crew and two glam stars, Barney sets out to prove that the Vikings discovered America five hundred years before Columbus – and to film the event in glorious Technicolour. But it’s not as easy as it sounds, as they realise when history lets them down and their Viking Columbus fails to show up in the New World.

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 nicely with the fact that something big id brewing with the X Patriots; and it looks as if the inconceivable is about to happen and that one of Britain’s most dangerous revolutionaries is going to be given a visa to enter America. And then there’s the story that just falls into his lap. The one that suggests that the respected Director of the New York State Mental Hospital is a charlatan.

Winner of the BSFA Award for best novel, 1970

Benoni Rider set out across the unexplored desert of a future America to prove himself a man and find a new land for his people. The task at first seemed merely exceedingly hard – and then it began to seem entirely impossible.

Because all he had to do was join a barbaric army, become a bodyguard for a queen, act as another nation’s emissary to his own, lead an army into battle against the wild men of the north, and manage somehow to get back to Fiiniks with the secret of the CACHE FROM OUTER SPACE.

That last was the secret that, if learned, could enable any of the barbarian nations of that devastated future to control the rest of the world . . . or annihilate it all over again!

It was a quiet night in Albuquerque, New Mexico.


But then they mostly are.


Seeth, token punk for the territory, was bored, bored, bored. Which was why he went ten pin bowling. Not for the bowling, you understand – it was Ladies’ League Night – but to spread a little outrage among the upright, mostly overweight citizenry.

And so it was he came upon the alien, playing lane 36, saved him from arrest by the pseudo-cops from outer space, found himself in a stolen van, along with Kerwin the nerd and Miranda the born-to-shop, Miss Teen America lookalike, driven by a green-skinned, tentacled shape changer and about to be space chased clean out of the galaxy…