Search Worlds Without End

Babel-17, winner of the Nebula Award for best novel of the year, is a fascinating tale of a famous poet bent on deciphering a secret language that is the key to the enemy's deadly force, a task that requires she travel with a splendidly improbable crew to the site of the next attack.

For the first time, Babel-17 is published as the author intended with the short novel Empire Star, the tale of Comet Jo, a simple-minded teen thrust into a complex galaxy when he's entrusted to carry a vital message to a distant world. Spellbinding and smart, both novels are testimony to Delany's vast and singular talent.

A fantastic classic science fiction tale from an anonymous late-19th century author. In a far-flung future, humanity has colonised the solar system. The story is set against a background of interplanetary war, with mighty electric spaceships riding the inter-system electric currents to battle in epic space warfare.

Eleven years before Jules Verne took his readers to the Moon, 40 years before Wells devised the Time Machine, nearly a century before Tolkien published Lord Of The Rings, Charles Defontenay wrote the imaginary history of an entire star system located in the far off constellation of Cassiopeia.

Long before science fiction writers dreamed of interstellar travels, alien races and the colonization of other planets, in 1854, on the eve of the Crimean War, Charles Defontenay penned the first modern "space opera".

STAR is a treasure chest of alien lore, the history of a world and its varied species, their rise and fall, triumphs and failures. It includes samples of their literature, arts and moral codes. Above all, it is a visionary work without precedent in the history of science fiction.

Star describes the discovery in the Himalayas of a stone that has fallen from the sky. After opening it, it turns out to contain a metal box where the narrator finds some paper manuscripts. After two years of study, he managed to decipher them and finds out that they describe the alien societies of various humanoid races living in the constellation of Cassiopeia.

Given that the suns of Draco stretch almost sixteen light years from end to end, it stands to reason that the cost of transportation is the most important factor of the 32nd century. And since Illyrion is the element most needed for space travel, Lorq von Ray is plenty willing to fly through the core of a recently imploded sun in order to obtain seven tons of it. The potential for profit is so great that Lorq has little difficulty cobbling together an alluring crew that includes a gypsy musician and a moon-obsessed scholar interested in the ancient art of writing a novel.

What the crew doesn't know, though, is that Lorq's quest is actually fueled by a private revenge so consuming that he'll stop at nothing to achieve it.

In the grandest manner of speculative fiction, Nova is a wise and witty classic that casts a fascinating new light on some of humanity's oldest truths and enduring myths.