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...

Now, a man erased from this world has managed to break the invisible chains that bound him to another. He is free—but his former masters still hunt him.

‘The Robot Tales,’ written and published by Stanislaw Lem between 1963 and 1965, tell stories set in an imaginary pseudo-medieval universe where robots have taken the place of humans. They dream and fall in love, perform heroic deeds and play petty tricks on each other – just like members of humanity. The stories have been translated into 18 languages and have also been adapted into several...

— Alexander Belyaev is called the Soviet Jules Verne and Herbert Wells – he skillfully intertwined captivating plots with the latest scientific achievements, and many of the ideas or assumptions he expressed have eventually become reality. — Belyaev is primarily known for his novels ‘The Island of Lost Ships,’ ‘Professor Dowell's Head,’ ‘The Air Seller,’ and, of course, ‘The Amphibian Man.’...

James Edwin Gunn (1923-2020) was an American science fiction writer, critic, teacher, professor at the University of Kansas, and founder of the Sturgeon and Campbell Memorial Awards. He was a two-time Hugo Award winner, a Nebula Grand Master, and the author of nearly two dozen novels and more than one hundred short stories and novellas. This collection includes novellas and short stories...

In a near future, the air pollution is so bad that everyone wears gas masks. The infant mortality rate is soaring, and birth defects, new diseases, and physical ailments of all kinds abound. The water is undrinkable—unless you’re poor and have no choice. Large corporations fighting over profits from gas masks, drinking water, and clean food tower over an ineffectual, corrupt government.

Where neither the police, nor a certified psychiatrist, nor a Cambridge professor can help you, Dirk Gently's detective agency steps in – the leading expert on divorce cases, missing cats, and aliens from other worlds. Who better than him to answer the most complex questions of our time: What do a cat and Coleridge have in common with quantum mechanics and a Chesterfield sofa? Can a deceased...