Join Douglas Adams's hapless hero Arthur Dent as he travels the galaxy with his intrepid pal Ford Prefect, getting into horrible messes and generally wreaking hilarious havoc. Dent is grabbed from Earth moments before a cosmic construction team obliterates the planet to build a freeway. You'll never read funnier science fiction; Adams is a master of intelligent satire, barbed wit, and comedic...

‘A fascinating, gripping story of the confrontation between the fearless young meteorologist Klimenko and the half-mad, brilliant adventurer Bailey, who has learned to liquefy air from the atmosphere and sell the resulting balls of air gas hydrate. Bailey's criminal activity leads to radical climate change. The Earth begins to lose its atmosphere. How can we stop the ‘air seller’ before he...

The hero of The Star Diaries, Ijon Tichy, like Gulliver, communes with various extraterrestrial beings. During his numerous interplanetary journeys, the traveler has met various alien civilizations, created by both sentient beings and advanced robots.

Seit Jahrhunderten muss sich die Menschheit gegen die fremdartigen Honta verteidigen, ohne zu wissen, warum sie immer wieder angreifen. Im Jahr 3233 überfällt der Feind Harkonia, einen über 8000 Lichtjahre von der Erde entfernten Kolonialplaneten. Zu den wenigen Überlebenden zählt der siebenjährige Cameron, der durch den Angriff seine Mutter verliert. Adoptiert von einem Kommandanten der...

In The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury, America’s preeminent storyteller, imagines a place of hope, dreams, and metaphor— of crystal pillars and fossil seas—where a fine dust settles on the great empty cities of a vanished, devastated civilization. Earthmen conquer Mars and then are conquered by it, lulled by dangerous lies of comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of...

Hapless cosmonaut Ijon Tichy has been sent back to earth to attend the Eighth Futurological Congress in smog-bound, overpopulated Costa Rica, holed up with an assortment of scientists in a luxury hotel (fully equipped with tear gas sprinklers in case things get out of hand). But when an unfortunate incident occurs involving a revolution and hallucinogenic drugs in the water supply, Tichy finds...

Written as the memoir of a mathematician who participates in the government project (code name: His Master’s Voice) attempting to decode what seems to be a message from outer space, this classic novel shows scientists grappling with fundamental questions about the nature of reality, the confines of knowledge, the limitations of the human mind, and the ethics of military-sponsored scientific...

Gag, the Fighting Cat, a teenager, a fighting unit capable of dealing with any conceivable and unimaginable surprise and turning it to the honor and glory of His Highness the Duke of Alai and his house... A resident of the planet Giganda, where war has been raging for years, he would have perished in battle if members of the Earth expedition hadn't arrived in time. Will the progressors from the...

Thousands of important experiments are conducted daily on Rainbow, the most important of which is a new method of spatial travel – ‘Null-T.’ But one day, the experiment goes awry, resulting in a gigantic, devastating Wave, sweeping all life from the planet's surface. The ship ‘Tariel’ can only take a limited number of passengers. Who must be rescued first? The collection also features the...

Former cosmonaut Ivan Zhilin, familiar to readers from the stories ‘The Road to Amalthea’ and ‘Interns,’ arrives in a European resort town to uncover the dealers and distributors of the dangerous drug Slobodan. Here, it seems, a true World of Abundance has arrived—people have what they've been yearning for: material wealth, plenty of free time, and accessible entertainment. However, behind the...

Twenty years have passed since Maxim Kammerer's mission on the planet Saraksh. He now works on Earth, at COMCON-2. His latest assignment is to locate the progressor Lev Abalkin, who left Saraksh without permission but ignored the requirement to register on Earth. Kammerer's encounters with Abalkin's acquaintances uncover a secret that could cause serious harm not only to those around him, but...