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Books : Science Fiction & Fantasy : Authors, A-Z : V
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The adventures of the enigmatic Captain Nemo and his fantastic submarine "Nautilus" have Made 20,000 Leagues under the Sea a legend in science fiction. This exciting retelling captures the essence of Verne's visionary and unforgettable story, while also explaining the fascinating facts and fantasies of Captain Nemo's marvellous ocean realm.However, as you would expect being a Dorling Kindersley book, there is much more to this edition than an expert retelling of the story. With colour photographs, diagrams, narrative illustrations and a unique cross-section of the "Nautilus" this edition also explores Verne's unique vision and knowledge of the deep, adding an extra dimension to the excitement of this thrilling adventure story. (Ages 8 to 12)
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It took Vonnegut more than 20 years to put his Dresden experiences into words. He explained, "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again." Slaughterhouse Five is a powerful novel incorporating a number of genres. Only those who have fought in wars can say whether it represents the experience well. However, what the novel does do is invite the reader to look at the absurdity of war. Human versus human, hedonist politicians pressing buttons and ordering millions to their deaths all for ideologies many cannot even comprehend. Flicking between the US, 1940's Germany and Tralfamadore, Vonnegut's semi- autobiographical protagonist Billy Pilgrim finds himself very lost. One minute he is being viewed as a specimen in a Tralfamadorian Zoo, the next he is wandering a post-apocalyptic city looking for corpses. Slaughterhouse Five-Or The Children's Crusade A Duty-Dance with Death is a remarkable blend of black humour, irony, the truth and the absurd. The author regards his work a "failure", millions of readers do not. Released the same time bombs were falling on South East Asia, this title caused controversy and awakening. Essential reading for all. So it goes. --Jon Smith
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Kurt Vonnegut's second SF novel was published way back in 1959 but remains horribly timeless. For all the book's wild inventiveness, it's one of the most blackly nihilistic comedies ever published in the genre. The tragicomic godgame is presided over by Winston Niles Rumfoord, who has accidentally become a standing wave in space/time and knows the past and the future. Since the future is fixed, he can't change it even though it involves him arranging nasty fates for many people--in particular Malachi Constant, richest man in the world since his father's career of interpreting the Bible as a coded guide to the stockmarket. Despite his struggles, Constant is destined for a grimly comic pilgrimage around the Solar System to Titan, home since 203,117 BC of the visiting alien Salo whose presence has warped the whole of human history. Salo's far-off people manipulated us into building Stonehenge, the Great Wall of China and other vast constructions as reassuring signals to their stranded emissary--who himself is carrying a message of truly cosmic unimportance. Small wonder that Rumfoord tries to cheer up humanity by founding the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. Vonnegut scatters crazed ideas in all directions, forcing you into painful laughter at the grandiose futility of his cosmos. Another worthy Millennium SF Masterworks classic. --David Langford
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In this Hugo-winning 1991 SF novel, Vernor Vinge gives us a wild new cosmology, a galaxy-spanning "Net of a Million Lies", some finely imagined aliens, and much nail-biting suspense.Faster-than-light travel remains impossible near Earth, deep in the galaxy's Slow Zone--but physical laws relax in the surrounding Beyond. Outside that again is the Transcend, full of unpredictable, godlike "Powers". When human meddling wakes an old Power, the Blight, this spreads like a wildfire mind virus that turns whole civilisations into its unthinking tools. And the half-mythical Countermeasure, if it exists, is lost with two human children on primitive Tines World.
Serious complications follow. One paranoid alien alliance blames humanity for the Blight and launches a genocidal strike. Pham Nuwen, the man who knows about Countermeasure, escapes this ruin in the spacecraft Out of Band--heading for more violence and treachery, with 500 warships soon in hot pursuit. On his destination world, the fascinating Tines are intelligent only in combination: named "individuals" are small packs of the dog-like aliens. Primitive doesn't mean stupid, and opposed Tine leaders wheedle the young castaways for information about guns and radios. Low-tech war looms, with elaborately nested betrayals and schemes to seize Out of Band if it ever arrives. The tension becomes extreme... while half the Beyond debates the issues on galactic Usenet.
Vinge's climax is suitably mind-boggling. This epic combines the flash and dazzle of old-style space opera with modern, polished thoughtfulness. Pham Nuwen also appears in the nifty prequel set 30,000 years earlier, A Deepness in the Sky. Both recommended. --David Langford
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Somewhere at the end of time, the sun gutters towards final death, science has long ago been replaced by alchemy and demonic invocation and the few inhabitants of the world wander around with a near-psychotic ennui and yearning. The original six stories Vance wrote early in his career are moody and poetic and genially depraved; when he came back to his dying earth, years later, it was in a rather different mood and the two volumes of adventures in which Cugel the Clever proves how little he deserves his sobriquet have much of the poetry, but also a sly wit that was not the early stories' strength. Cugel is incapable of leaving alone anything not nailed down, and much that is; he wanders his world miraculously surviving his own cupidity and treachery--yet is no worse than the smarter, more beautiful people he meets and more often than not better. More recently, he produced the slighter and almost whimsical tales of the magician Rhialto the Marvellous; Vance's poetic and comic strains of invention work effectively in tandem. The Dying Earth collects all of these stories, tragic, comic and charming--they take us to one of the strangest places and attractively affected styles in all fantasy. --Roz Kaveney
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Jack Vance began to publish SF in 1945, and his 1950 science- fantasy classic The Dying Earth established him as a master of exotic, ironic style--still the hallmark of his 1990s novels. Emphyrio dates from 1969 and is perhaps his best handling of a favourite theme, a young boy's rebellion against a fossilized and unfair society. Ambroy, on the far world Halma, is a city of fine craft-workers where quiet tyranny wears the smiling face of a welfare state. Social workers with draconian powers enforce strict laws against mechanical duplication (each work of art must be unique), while priests of the absurd state religion go from door to door being loftily officious. Dissatisfied young Ghyl Tarvoke more or less prankishly runs for Mayor of Ambroy under the name of legendary hero Emphyrio--a quixotic act which leads indirectly to his master-craftsman father's tragic punishment and death, to despairing involvement in his wild friends' spaceship hijack plan, and to shocking revelations about Ambroy's real rulers. Legend says that Emphyrio long ago brought peace to Halma by uncovering truth, at the cost of his life. After colourful adventures Ghyl finds himself similarly placed: the truth can redeem the city he loves but means great personal loss. A fine, strangely underrated novel, now reissued as #19 in the Millennium SF Masterworks series. --David Langford
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