Four mind-bending novels from science fiction's most transformative decade in a deluxe collector's edition hardcover, including two long out-of-print classics In this second volume of a two-volume set gathering the best American science fiction from the tumultuous 1960s, R. A. Lafferty's quirky and utterly original Past Master, an unjustly neglected classic, imagines Sir Thomas More transported to the colony Astrobe in the year 2535, where he is made president of a future Utopia. In Picnic on Paradise, Joanna Russ presents her indelible heroine, Alyx, who is hired to protect a group of tourists in a hostile alien world. Samuel R. Delany's proto-cyberpunk space opera Nova, reprinted here for the first time in a text corrected by the author, combines the pacing of a revenge story with the arc of a grail-quest legend. Jack Vance's dystopian thriller Emphyrio is the coming-of-age story of Ghyl, who has been raised in a world barring the use of automation but has a strong sense of subversive individualism. The novel has been restored to the author's original text, without later editorial interventions.

In a deluxe collector's edition hardcover, four classic novels from science fiction's most transformative decade, including the landmark Flowers for Algernon This volume, the first of a two-volume set gathering the best American science fiction from the tumultuous 1960s, opens with Poul Anderson's immensely popular The High Crusade, in which aliens planning to conquer Earth land in Lincolnshire during the Hundred Years' War. In Clifford Simak's Hugo Award-winning Way Station, Enoch Wallace is a spry 124-year-old Civil War veteran whose lifelong job monitoring the intergalactic pit stop inside his home is largely uneventful--until a CIA agent shows up and Cold War hostilities threaten the peaceful harmony of the Galactic confederation. Daniel Keyes's beloved Flowers for Algernon, winner of the Nebula Award and adapted as the Academy Award-winning movie Charly, is told through the journal entries of Charlie Gordon, a young man with severe learning disabilities who is the test subject for surgery to improve his intelligence. And in the postapocalyptic earthscape of Roger Zelazny's Hugo Award-winning . . . And Call Me Conrad (also published as This Immortal) Conrad Nomikos reluctantly accepts the responsibility of showing the planet to the governing extraterrestrials' representative and protecting him from rebellious remnants of the human race. Using early manuscripts and original setting copy, this Library of America volume restores the novel to a version that most closely approximates Zelazny's original text.

Following its acclaimed three-volume edition of the novels of science fiction master Philip K. Dick, The Library of America now presents a two-volume anthology of nine groundbreaking works from the golden age of the modern science fiction novel, works by turns satiric, adventurous, incisive, and hauntingly lyrical. Long unnoticed or dismissed by the literary establishment, these visionary “outsider” novels grappled in fresh ways with a world in rapid transformation and have gradually been recognized as American classics that opened new imaginative territory in American writing. This first volume contains: Frederik Pohl & C. M. Kornbluth / The Space Merchants Theodore Sturgeon / More Than Human Leigh Brackett / The Long Tomorrow Richard Matheson / The Shrinking Man LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Wolf Hall meets The Man in the High Castle in this mind-bending science fiction classic, now presented in an authoritative new edition from Library of America Plucked from time, Sir Thomas More arrives on the human colony of Astrobe in the year 2535 A.D., where there is trouble in utopia. Can he and his motley followers save this golden world from the Programmed Persons, and the soulless perfection they have engineered? The survival of faith itself is at stake in this thrilling, uncategorizable, wildly inventive first novel—but the adventure is more than one of ideas. As astonishingly as Philip K. Dick and other visionaries of the 1960s new wave, Lafferty turns the conventions of space-opera science fiction upside-down and inside-out. Here are fractured allegories, tales-within-tales, twinkle-in-the-eye surprises, fantastic byways, and alien subjectivities that take one's breath away. Neil Gaiman has described Lafferty “a genius, an oddball, a madman”; Gene Wolfe calls him “our most original writer." Long-hailed by insiders and now with an introduction by Andrew Ferguson as well as unpublished omitted passages included in the notes, Past Master deserves to perplex and delight a wider audience.

Following its acclaimed three-volume edition of the novels of science fiction master Philip K. Dick, The Library of America now presents a two-volume anthology of nine groundbreaking works from the golden age of the modern science fiction novel, works by turns satiric, adventurous, incisive, and hauntingly lyrical. Long unnoticed or dismissed by the literary establishment, these visionary “outsider” novels grappled in fresh ways with a world in rapid transformation and have gradually been recognized as American classics that opened new imaginative territory in American writing. This second volume contains: Robert Heinlein / Double Star Alfred Bester / The Stars My Destination James Blish / A Case of Conscience Algis Budrys / Who? Fritz Leiber / The Big Time LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Far in the future, the craftsmen of the distant planet Halma create goods which are the wonder of the galaxy. But they know little of this. Their society is harshly regimented, its religion austere and unforgiving, and primitive - to maintain standards, even the most basic use of automation is punishable by death. When Amiante, a wood-carver, is executed for processing old documents with a camera, his son Ghyl rebels, and decides to bring down the system. To do so, he must first interpret the story of Emphyrio, an ancient hero of Halman legend. All Jack Vance titles in the SF Gateway use the author's preferred texts, as restored for the Vance Integral Edition (VIE), an extensive project masterminded by an international online community of Vance's admirers. In general, we also use the VIE titles, and have adopted the arrangement of short story collections to eliminate overlaps.