Sci Fi

Brave New World is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, inhabited by genetically modified citizens and an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist.

Librarian note: An alternative cover for this ISBN can be found here. Ranked among the classic novels of the English language and the inspiration for several unforgettable movies, this early work of H. G. Wells was greeted in 1896 by howls of protest from reviewers, who found it horrifying and blasphemous. They wanted to know more about the wondrous possibilities of science shown in his first book, The Time Machine, not its potential for misuse and terror. In The Island of Dr. Moreau, a shipwrecked gentleman named Edward Prendick, stranded on a Pacific island lorded over by the notorious Dr. Moreau, confronts dark secrets, strange creatures, and a reason to run for his life. While this riveting tale was intended to be a commentary on evolution, divine creation, and the tension between human nature and culture, modern readers familiar with genetic engineering will marvel at Wells’s prediction of the ethical issues raised by producing “smarter” human beings or bringing back extinct species. These levels of interpretation add a richness to Prendick’s adventures on Dr. Moreau’s island of lost souls without distracting from what is still a rip-roaring good read.

When an unidentified “monster” threatens international shipping, French oceanographer Pierre Aronnax and his unflappable assistant Conseil join an expedition organized by the US Navy to hunt down and destroy the menace. After months of fruitless searching, they finally grapple with their quarry, but Aronnax, Conseil, and the brash Canadian harpooner Ned Land are thrown overboard in the attack, only to find that the “monster” is actually a futuristic submarine, the Nautilus, commanded by a shadowy, mystical, preternaturally imposing man who calls himself Captain Nemo. Thus begins a journey of 20,000 leagues—nearly 50,000 miles—that will take Captain Nemo, his crew, and these three adventurers on a journey of discovery through undersea forests, coral graveyards, miles-deep trenches, and even the sunken ruins of Atlantis. Jules Verne’s novel of undersea exploration has been captivating readers ever since its first publication in 1870, and Frederick Paul Walter’s reader-friendly, scientifically meticulous translation of this visionary science fiction classic is complete and unabridged down to the smallest substantive detail.

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned—a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible. When Animal Farm was first published, Stalinist Russia was seen as its target. Today it is devastatingly clear that wherever and whenever freedom is attacked, under whatever banner, the cutting clarity and savage comedy of George Orwell’s masterpiece have a meaning and message still ferociously fresh.

Melanie is a very special girl. Dr. Caldwell calls her "our little genius." Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant Parks keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don't like her. She jokes that she won't bite, but they don't laugh. Melanie loves school. She loves learning about spelling and sums and the world outside the classroom and the children's cells. She tells her favorite teacher all the things she'll do when she grows up. Melanie doesn't know why this makes Miss Justineau look sad. The Girl with All the Gifts is a sensational thriller, perfect for fans of Stephen King, Justin Cronin, and Neil Gaiman.

It was January 2021, and Rick Deckard had a license to kill. Somewhere among the hordes of humans out there, lurked several rogue androids. Deckard's assignment—find them and then..."retire" them. Trouble was, the androids all looked exactly like humans, and they didn't want to be found!

Joe works at a facility that performs human experimentation. His work just followed him home. The government wanted to unlock hidden abilities in the human mind. They put subjects in extreme sensory deprivation. All the test subjects went violently insane. But the research continued. Today it has been perfected. Almost perfected. From the author of In My Father's Basement comes another chilling novel that's a must-read for fans of horror. "Gruesome, gripping, and terrifyingly real!"

What would you do if you could unleash a plague with just a thought? Sarah Vinson seems like an average, well-mannered, high school student in Portland, Oregon with a perfectly ordinary life. She has two loving, supportive parents. She lives in a comfortable home. She’s a good student. Her boyfriend dotes on her. But Sarah is not average and she is not ordinary. Sarah never gets ill. She’s never missed a day from school. She has no idea what the flu feels like. No cold has ever made her sneeze. No spoiled food has ever upset her stomach. No germ can harm her. Because locked within her are frighteningly potent powers over disease. When dark corporate forces from the Seattle-based Penwall Corporation learn of her existence and her abilities, they utilize their formidable resources to unlock those secrets for their own gain. Kidnapped and isolated, Sarah seemingly has no one to turn to for help or escape. It is all up to her to stop the Penwall scientists from continuing their mercilessly cruel testing—even if it means that she must harness her abilities and use them as a weapon. Immunity is a thrilling, grotesque, medical horror novel for fans of classic King.

Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company. His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species. And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone. Or does he?

A novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space. Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core. Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him. When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe. A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.'

This book is fantastic and frightening, but entirely plausible. It doesn't just seem scientifically possible, but its characters are living people shaken out of the civilization they know into the horror of a world dominated by triffids. The triffids are grotesque and dangerous plants, over seven feet tall, originally cultivated for their yield of high-grade oil. So long as conditions give the mastery to their human directors, they are a valuable asset to mankind. But when a sudden universal disaster turns those conditions upside down, then the triffids, seizing their opportunity, become an active and dreadful menace. The story of what happens is told here by one of the few people lucky enough to escape the disaster.

"I devoured this."—V. E. Schwab, New York Times bestselling author of The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue Out on the Yorkshire Moors lives a secret line of people for whom books are food, and who retain all of a book's content after eating it. To them, spy novels are a peppery snack; romance novels are sweet and delicious. Eating a map can help them remember destinations, and children, when they misbehave, are forced to eat dry, musty pages from dictionaries. Devon is part of The Family, an old and reclusive clan of book eaters. Her brothers grow up feasting on stories of valor and adventure, and Devon—like all other book eater women—is raised on a carefully curated diet of fairy tales and cautionary stories. But real life doesn't always come with happy endings, as Devon learns when her son is born with a rare and darker kind of hunger—not for books, but for human minds.

When every word you read, whatever it says, fills you with euphoric calm - that's HellSans; a typeface used everywhere by the government. To keep people happy. Blissful. And controlled. Unless you're allergic. And then every word is agony. Then HellSans is hell, and reading it will slowly kill you. HellSans is the story of two women. CEO Jane Ward is famous and successful, until she falls ill with the allergy and her life falls apart, dumping her in the ghetto with the other HSAs (HellSans Allergic). Where she meets... Dr Icho Smith, a scientist who has a cure for the allergy. But she's on the run from the government, and the Seraphs, a terrorist group with their own plan for the HSAs... HellSans innovative structure allows you to read either Jane or Icho's story first, before their lives meet in the terrifying finale. HellSans is dystopia writ large. A novel where words can kill.

The year 1984 has come and gone, but George Orwell's prophetic, nightmarish vision in 1949 of the world we were becoming is timelier than ever. 1984 is still the great modern classic of "negative utopia"—a startlingly original and haunting novel that creates an imaginary world that is completely convincing, from the first sentence to the last four words. No one can deny the novel's hold on the imaginations of whole generations, or the power of its admonitions—a power that seems to grow, not lessen, with the passage of time.

Following the bestselling The Kaiju Preservation Society, John Scalzi returns with Starter Villain, another unique sci-fi caper set in the strangest of all worlds, present-day Earth. Inheriting your mysterious uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might imagine. Sure, there are the things you'd expect. The undersea volcano lairs. The minions. The plots to take over the world. The international networks of rivals who want you dead. Much harder to get used to...are the the sentient, language-using, computer-savvy cats. And the fact that in the overall organization, they're management...

An unsettling, immersive, and wildly entertaining debut novel from an exciting new voice in horror for fans of Paul Tremblay and Stephen Graham Jones. After publishing his debut novel, The Shattered Man, to disappointing sales and reviews, Campbell P. Marion is struggling to find inspiration for a follow-up. When Edenville College invites him to join as a writer-in-residence, he’s convinced that his bad luck has finally taken a turn. His girlfriend Quinn isn’t so sure—she grew up near Edenville and has good reasons for not wanting to move back. Cam disregards her skepticism and accepts the job, with Quinn reluctantly following along. But there’s something wrong in Edenville. Despite the charming old ladies milling about Main Street and picturesque sunflowers dotting the sidewalks, poison lurks beneath the surface. As a series of strange and ominous events escalate among Edenville and its residents, Cam and Quinn find themselves entangled in a dark and disturbing history. Told with equal parts horror and humor, Edenville explores the urban legends that fuel our nightmares and the ways in which ambition can overshadow our best instincts. Sam Rebelein is an exciting, sharp new voice, sure to terrify readers for years to come.

AWARD-WINNING FICTION! A mesmerizing journey of redemption and self-discovery. In 1959 an earthquake in central Vancouver Island devastated the lakeside community of Pyrite Ridge. The seismic event triggered landslides that isolated the town and killed sixteen people, while a geological anomaly known as a segue caused the lake to drop an astonishing 150 meters. Perched at the precipice of an abyss and cut off from the world by tons of rubble, Pyrite Ridge became a place of myth and lore. Travis Sivart, an Air Force officer struggling with PTSD, finds a single-page newspaper attached to a red balloon that appears to have originated from Pyrite Ridge, now called The Segway. The headline story about the sighting of a large sea creature in the lake compels Travis to set off on a quest to find the enigmatic town. After an arduous journey he stumbles upon the secluded settlement, which is home to a group of delightfully quirky residents. Travis spends a week in the town, learning of its remarkable history and interacting with the unforgettable inhabitants. Everyone has their own fascinating story of how they came to The Segway, creating an extraordinary tapestry that causes Travis to question his own sanity. Is there a connection between the source of his trauma and the tragic earthquake that struck the region decades earlier? Solving the mystery may be the key to overcoming his personal demons. Life at the Precipice is a wholly unique blend of drama, mystery, and humour that will captivate readers. AWARDS AND ACCOLADES 2023 Best Indie Book Award - Literary Fiction Winner 2024 Leacock Medal for Humour - Long Listed 2024 Readers' Favorite Bronze Medal Winner - Literary Fiction 2023 The BookLife Prize Quarter-finalist Indie B.R.A.G. Medallion Recipient Literary Titan Gold Medal Award "Life at the Precipice, by R.F. Vincent, is a novel that refuses to adhere to the rules of any single genre. Instead, it walks the line between drama and fantasy, with poignant moments of good-natured humor interspersed throughout." - Literary Titan "Life at the Precipice is a stunning balancing act, built around a trip log that mirrors a nonfictional account while firmly establishing itself as a work of fiction. Vincent artfully straddles the lines of mystery, fantasy, memoir, and much more." - The BookLife Prize “Life at the Precipice by R.F. Vincent is an exceptionally well-written science fiction tale that seamlessly blends scientific concepts with a fantastic narrative. The characters are multidimensional and fun to follow. There were plenty of heartwarming moments, but there were also some times when I caught myself laughing out loud. " - Reader Views ★★★★★ "Life at the Precipice by R F Vincent is an immediate drop into fantasy and a masterclass in subverting a reader's expectations and inviting them instead to consider the limitations of their own perceptions and interpretations. " - Readers' Favorite ★★★★★ "A fascinating novel that will pull you swiftly into its world and then hold you completely. Un-put-downable." - Bookview Review Recommended Gold Badge Review "The characters in R.F. Vincent's novel are little masterpieces of comic invention . . . Highly, highly recommended." - Vancouver Sun "LIFE AT THE PRECIPICE is a remarkable book that effortlessly dissolves genre boundaries to bring a captivating and unique story to life. Surreal, fascinating, threaded with humor, and a wonderfully bizarre array of quirky characters, Vincent has produced a stunning novel, full of imagination, originality, and pathos." IndieReader "A captivating literary blend of science and fantasy." - Kirkus Reviews (GET IT) "Mesmerizing, brilliant, gripping work . . . Readers will stay glued to the pages as Travis begins his investigation . . . A stunner." - The Prairies Book Review " a gripping tale of a man seeking understanding and finding it in an unlikely place" - The British Columbia Review "R.F. Vincent’s debut novel is wonderful. Literally . . . It combines elements of literary-, speculative fiction, humor and beautiful character-work, and casts it in the mold of a fictional scientific travel log to create something I’ve never read before, but couldn’t stop thinking about. It’s a wholly unique combination." - The Fiction Fox