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The long-awaited new novel in the superb Hainish cycle

‘Le Guin is a writer of phenomenal power’ OBSERVER

‘Her worlds have a magic sheen . . . She moulds them into dimensions we can only just sense. She is unique. She is legend’ THE TIMES


There have been eighty requests to send an Observer into the hinterlands of the planet Aka to study the natives. Much to everyone’s surprise, the eighty-first request is granted, and Observer Sutty is sent upriver to Okzat-Ozkat, a small city in the foothills of Rangma, to talk to the remnants in hiding of a cult practising a banned religion. On Aka, everything that was written in the old scripts has been destroyed; modern aural literature is all written to Corporation specifications.

The Corporation expects Sutty to report back so the non-standardised folk stories and songs can be wiped out and the people ‘re-educated’.

But Sutty herself is in for an education she never imagined.

When a small-time clerk insures his life for $50,000 and then suddenly dies ten days later, it doesn’t take a genius to work out something suspicious is going on. So when Maddox, the top man in the insurance business, finds out, he is determined to get to the bottom of it. And this means trouble for someone. In fact, it means trouble for the beautiful, auburn-haired Meg Barlowe, a woman with a serious past.

‘The thriller maestro of the generation’ Manchester Evening News

Did it ever occur to you what might happen if you found yourself compelled to tell the truth for the rest of your life, because all power of telling a lie was gone? It would seem that since a great bulk of our society is built upon sham and pretense, things would come to a pretty pass if the power of untruths were destroyed.

A daring novel of mankind’s strange and startling destiny. . .

Here is a novel to equal Arthur C. Clarke’s great work, Childhood’s End. It tells with frightening clarity of a desperately stricken Earth – wracked by overpopulation and plagued by famine and despair.

It tells, too, of a new breed of men and women – twenty-first century lotus eaters caught up in a mysterious euphoria which will ultimately threaten all life on this planet: the drug-induced world of ‘happy dreams’. Do these ‘happy dreamers’ herald the end of the human race – or the next extraordinary step in the evolution of Man?


First published in 1963.

Nick Foley is on the run. The KGB and CIA are both after him. Not suprising, since he’s a Soviet sleeper whose cover has been blown, but Nick has more than state secrets to hide. If he tells a stranger to drive him a thousand miles, it’ll happen; if he tells a pusher to OD on his own heroin, the pusher will do it.

Nick’s strange power is vital to both sides, and neither of them intend to let him keep it to himself, but neither the CIA nor the KGB can imagine Nick’s final, desperate throw of the dice.

The Dorsai are the finest soldiers ever trained to fight and win against all odds. The Spirit of Dorsai is an illumination of the heart and soul of the planet Dorsai and its people, showing with epic clarity and unforgettable vision how why the Dorsai fight and live.

It tells of the beginning when the first Dorsai was former by mercenaries willing to fight other’s battles to buy freedom for their own homes. It tells how even children and old men fought for the dream of Dorsai. From the mouth of Amanda Morgan, direct descendant of two illustrious women who bore her name, the full story is told in all its splendour.

The Custodians tells of a visitor to a French monastery, and of one specially built tiny room which is constructed precisely on the intersection of mysterious force fields, so that anyone who enters is able to foresee the future. Paradise Beach is the story of a wall-screen whose image of the sea attunes itself to the individual perceptions of the onlooker. Piper at the Gates of Dawn is set towards the end of the next millennium when the stories about the coming of the mysterious white bird of kinship become associated with the travels of an old story-teller and his young nephew, whose pipe seems to have a magical quality. Finally, The Hertford Manuscript tells of the remarkable discovery of a seventeenth-century book with some pages purporting to be the journals of a nineteenth-century time traveller.

In The Devil is Dead, Lafferty tells of an astonishing band of adventurers seeking the Devil himself. It is a tale of demons and changelings, monsters and mermaids – and of how it is not always serious to die, the first time it happens…

After their final battle, legend tells us, Arthur and his knights went to Lyonesse, the land under the sea. Now Lyonesse is threatened by a resurgence of the Dark Powers, those mindless malevolent forces that struggle to stop the course of History.

And Jim Eckert – the Dragon Knight – and his friends are called upon to stop them.

Arthur and his knights are proud; too proud to easily accept help from Jim Eckert and his allies. But they will have help – from Jim in his dragon form, from knight-in-armour Sir Brian Neville-Smyth, from the brilliant archer Dafydd ap Hywel, and from one small hobgoblin.

The result is a wild ride: Arthurian fantasy adventure as only Gordon R. Dickson could tell it.

Man has already entered space and lived to tell the tale. Science Fiction is on the verge of being overtaken by science fact. Tomorrow is here . . . today. The space age is no longer the dream of the writer or the hope of the scientist. It has already dawned.

Man is galloping towards the stars. The roaring hoofs of the rockets are beating out the trail to Infinity. There will be no turning back. Boundless possibilities stretch out before us. Endless opportunities beckon us. Will we use them for good or ill?

Space holds a million unknown factors. We are like children plunging into a vast ocean and striking out bravely for an unseen shore, the shore of the unexplored land. As we swim into the future we tell ourselves stories about the wonders that lie ahead of us. This is one of those stories.

For fifteen years, Maria Devane has been desperately, passionately in love with Dante Romano. But Maria knows that Dante can never give everything of himself back – at least not all the time. Every month, Dante shifts shape, becoming a wild animal. He can’t choose when he shifts, the transition is often abrupt, and as he gets older the time he spends in human form is gradually decreasing.

Maria has kept his secret since the beginning, knowing that their love is worth the danger. But when a string of brutal attacks occurs in local parks while Dante is in animal form, Maria is forced to consider whether the lies she’s been telling about her life have turned into lies she’s telling herself . . .

This colorful, action-packed space opera tells of rival factions, including Earthmen and an enigmatic and fanatical Venusian, who voyage through space in a race to find the derelict ship of an ancient civilization, a Venusian Elder Race.

The Translator tells of the relationship between an exiled Russian poet and his American translator during the Cuban missile crisis, a time when a writer’s words – especially forbidden ones – could be powerful enough to change the course of history.

In Veritas, people have been conditioned to always tell the truth, no matter how unnerving the truth may be. Jack Sperry must learn to lie in order to save his son in this witty science fiction novella. Recipient of a 1992 Nebula Award.

After long and patient research I am still unable to give to the reader of these Chronicles the exact date of the times that they tell of. Were it merely a matter of history there could be no doubts about the period; but where magic is concerned, to however slight an extent, there must always be some element of mystery, arising partly out of ignorance and partly from the compulsion of those oaths by which magic protects its precincts from the tiptoe of curiosity. Moreover, magic, even in small quantities, appears to affect time, much as acids affect some metals, curiously changing its substance, until dates seem to melt into a mercurial form that renders them elusive even to the eye of the most watchful historian. It is the magic appearing in Chronicles III and IV that has gravely affected the date, so that all I can tell the reader with certainty of the period is that it fell in the later years of the Golden Age in Spain.

DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES…Except to Harry Keogh, Necroscope. And what they tell him is horrifying.

In the Balkan mountains of Rumania, a terrible evil is growing. Long buried in hallowed ground, bound by earth and silver, the master vampire schemes and plots. Trapped in unlife, neither dead nor living, Thibor Ferenczy hungers for freedom and revenge.

The vampire’s human tool is Boris Dragosani, part of a super-secret Soviet spy agency. Dragosani is an avid pupil, eager to plumb the depthless evil of the vampire’s mind. Ferenczy teaches Dragosani the awful skills of the necromancer, gives him the ability to rip secrets from the mind and bodies of the dead.

Dragosani works not for Ferenczy’s freedom but world domination. he will rule the world with knowledge raped from the dead.

His only opponent: Harry Koegh, champion of the dead and the living.

To protect Harry, the dead will do anything – even rise from their graves!

These artistic, subtle, little sketches of the war with a fairy-story elusiveness to them interpret, in a few pages, more than many books do. They tell of the soldiers’ longings, his horror of war, the memories of springtime at home, and even descent to a delight in the work of the kaiser’s barber.

An imaginative satire, telling of a benign Martian explorer comes to Earth to observe humanity-and is amazed to discover how Hollywood films and popular literature have engendered an irrational xenophobia and hatred of alien visitors. Befriended by a writer and his wife, the Martian is forced to remain incognito…

Set in the misty time between the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of our own age, The King of Ys chronicles the coming of Gratillonius, the Roman prefect who became a king.

Gallicenae continues that story to tell of Gratillonius’ nine queens and penetrate to the very heart of the legend of the King of Ys . . .

GALACTIC STORM tells the tale of a young genius who uses a supercomputer to discover an alarming trend of global warming that will see half the world’s ice-caps melted within fifty years. This leads to an expedition to the South Pole to investigate the problem, and from there to the discovery of a sinister plot of extraterrestrial origin…

Another story novelized from the pages of Astounding Stories, telling of the experiments of an alien race who have migrated to the solar system to domicile themselves on Mars. Their experiments result in the death of their leader and lead to the Martians being overwhelmed by an invasion of beings from the microcosm…and, ultimately, to the creation of life on Earth!

Earth is destroyed in a collision with the rogue planet Bronson Alpha, with about a year of warning enabling a small group of survivors to build a spacecraft and escape to the rogue planet’s moon. Continuing the story of When Worlds Collide, the novel tells of the survivors’ progress on their new world, Bronson Beta, and their conflict with other groups of survivors.

This powerful and horrific novel is set in England in the early part of the 21st century. It tells of the tragic and terrifying events that occur on one day – Christmas Eve – in the life of Maggie Minerva, the attractive widow of a Trade Union boss. These events have startling repercussions not only for the people involved but also for the social structure of Britain.

Millennia ago Starquin visited the Solar System. Because he is huge – some say bigger than the Solar System itself – he could not set foot on Earth personally. yet events here were beginning to interest him, and he wanted to observe more closely.


So he sent down extensions of himself, creatures fashioned after Earth’s dominant life-form. In one of Earth’s languages they became known as Dedos, or Fingers of Starquin. Disguised, they mingled with Mankind.


We know this now, here at the end of Earth’s time. The information is all held in Earth’s great computer, the Rainbow. The Rainbow will endure as long as Earth exists, watching, listening, recording and thinking. I am an extension of the Rainbow, just as the Dedos are extensions of Starquin. My name is Alan-Blue-Cloud.


It is possible you cannot see me but are aware of me only as a voice speaking to you from a desolate hillside, telling you tales from the Song of Earth. I can see you, the motley remains of the human race, however. You sit there with our clubs and you chew your roots, entranced and half-disbelieving as I sing the Song – and in our faces are signs of the work of your great geneticist, Mordecai N. Whirst. Catlike eyes here, broad muzzles there, all the genes of Earth’s life, expertly blended, each having its purpose. Strong people, adapted people, people who survived.


The story I will tell is about people who were not so strong. It is perhaps the most famous in the whole Song of Earth, and it tells of three simple human beings involved in a quest who unwittingly became involved in much greater events concerning the almighty Starquin himself. It is a story of heroism and love, and it ends in triumph – and it will remind the humans among you of the greatness that was once yours.