About Salman Rushdie: Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most acclaimed, award-winning contemporary authors. Translated into over forty languages, his sixteen works of fiction include Midnight’s Children – for which he won the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers on the 25th anniversary of the prize and Best of the Booker on the 40th anniversary – Shame, The Satanic Verses, Quichotte and Victory City. His latest book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder was a number one Sunday Times bestseller. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in the Queen's last Birthday Honours list in 2022.

Salman Rushdie

About Salman Khan: Salman Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. His lessons on YouTube have revolutionized learning, garnering billions of views globally. Recognized as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, Khan is also the founder of schoolhouse.world, Khan Lab School, and Khan World School, and the author of The One World Schoolhouse. He holds three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Salman Khan

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George Orwell

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Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through the all-seeing telescreens and the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the Party. In his longing for truth and liberty, Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow-worker, Julia, but soon discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

The Annotated Edition

Penguin Modern Classics

Fido Nesti

The Graphic Novel

Richard Matheson

Among the greats of twentieth century horror and fantasy, few names stand above Richard Matheson. Though known by many for novels like I Am Legend and his sixteen Twilight Zone episodes, Matheson truly shines in his chilling, masterful short stories. Matheson revolutionized horror by taking it out of Gothic castles and strange cosmos and into the darkened streets and suburbs we recognize as our own. He infuses tales of the fantastic and supernatural with dark explorations of human nature, delving deep into the universal dread of feeling alone and threatened in a dangerous world.

The Best of Richard Matheson

Karin Boye

A pioneering work of dystopian fiction from one of Sweden's most acclaimed writers 
 
Written midway between Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, as the terrible events of the Second World War were unfolding, Kallocain depicts a totalitarian 'World State' which seeks to crush the individual entirely. In this desolate, paranoid landscape of 'police eyes' and 'police ears', the obedient citizen and middle-ranking scientist Leo Kall discovers a drug that will force anyone who takes it to tell the truth. But can private thought really be obliterated? Karin Boye's chilling novel of creeping alienation shows the dangers of acquiescence and the power of resistance, no matter how futile. 
 
Translated with an introduction by David McDuff

Kallocain

Penguin Classics

Stanislaw Lem

Journey into space with Polish scifi master Stanislaw Lem. The whimsical time-loops of Ijon Tichy’s cosmic adventure ‘The Seventh Voyage’ are reminiscent of Douglas Adams, while the spectral whispers haunting Pirx the Pilot as he navigates his spaceship to Mars in ‘Terminus’, echo the author’s masterpiece Solaris. Then ‘The Mask’ introduces a perfect robot assassin and asks, can AI fall in love or refuse its programming? What if the target of its affections is also its prey?

The Seventh Voyage

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany is widely considered to be one of the greatest science fiction writers of the twentieth century, and a pioneer of Black and Queer genre fiction. 
 
Driftglass, the definitive collection of Delany's science fiction stories, displays the extraordinary depth of his writing: strange men and women labouring beneath the seas, the struggle of those attempting to break free from their galaxies, the intrigue of violent underworlds, as well as children with psychic powers and an ice cream parlour on a moon of Neptune. Radical, inventive, and brilliantly original, Driftglass contains the Hugo and Nebula award-winning stories 'Aye, and Gomorrah. . .' and 'Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-precious Stones'.

Driftglass

Robert Sheckley

Announced in a thunderclap out of another day's tedium, Tom Carmody - a hapless New Yorker - learns that he is the winner of the Intergalactic Sweepstake. Accepting with a shrug, he is whipped across the universe to collect his prize. The catch? There's no way home. Enlisting the help of galactic bureaucrats, planetary engineers and a couple of gods, Carmody embarks on a desperate search for Earth, all the while being pursued by a perplexing predatory creature . . . 
 
Often compared to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Dimension of Miracles is a masterwork of electric humour that offers an oblique examination of human nature amid the vastness of the cosmos.

Dimension of Miracles

Italo Calvino

Twelve enchanting and fantastical stories about the evolution of the universe from the giant of Italian literature, Italo Calvino. His characters - whether human, dinosaur or mollusc - disport themselves among galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms - and have time for a love life.

Cosmicomics

H G Wells

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In the space of less than four years, H. G. Wells (1866-1946) published four of the most influential, original and hair-raising of all works of science-fiction. In a life of tireless experiment, travelling and intellectual engagement, Wells was both a leading public figure and one of the great imaginers of the modern world, but his reputation was always dominated by these amazing novels: The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds. Each is great in its own right, but they also became the 'books of Genesis' for entire genres of speculative fiction. 
 
This omnibus allows them to be read together, perhaps for the first time allowing the full range of Wells's achievement to be understood.

The Great Science Fiction

The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, Short Stories

George S. Schuyler

Black Empire tells the electrifying tale of Dr Henry Belsidus, a Black scientific genius desperate to free his people from the crushing tyranny of racism. To do so, he concocts a plot to enlist a crew of Black intellectuals to help him take over the world, cultivating a global network to reclaim Africa from imperial powers and punish Europe and America for white supremacy and their crimes against the planet's Black population. 
 
At once a daring, high-stakes science fiction adventure and a strikingly innovative Afrofuturist classic, this controversial and fearlessly political work lays bare the ethical quandaries of exactly how far one should go in the name of justice.

Black Empire

Fred Hoyle

A 1959 classic 'hard' science-fiction novel by renowned Cambridge astronomer and cosmologist Fred Hoyle. Tracks the progress of a giant black cloud that comes towards Earth and sits in front of the sun, causing widespread panic and death. A select group of scientists and astronomers - including the dignified Astronomer Royal, the pipe smoking Dr Marlowe and the maverick, eccentric Professor Kingsly - engage in a mad race to understand and communicate with the cloud, battling against trigger happy politicians. 
 
In the pacy, engaging style of John Wyndham and John Christopher, with plenty of hard science thrown in to add to the chillingly credible premise (he manages to foretell Artificial Intelligence, Optical Character Recognition and Text-to-Speech converters), Hoyle carries you breathlessly through to its thrilling end.

The Black Cloud

Arkady Strugatsky

Boris Strugatsky

Astrophysicist Dmitri Malianov is on the precipice of a major discovery - a Nobel Prize-worthy breakthrough. Yet, home alone in his Leningrad apartment, his work is beginning to be stymied. Strange and improbable distractions are mounting around him - and he is not alone. Across the city, his scientific colleagues, all close to their own Eureka moments, keep finding themselves subject to countless mysterious interruptions. Are they paranoid, or is a malign authority conspiring against them...? 
A science fiction classic from two Russian masters, One Billion Years to the End of the World is at turns both hilarious and suspenseful, while at its heart hiding a quiet yet biting critique of Soviet totalitarianism.

One Billion Years to the End of the World

A troubled insomniac in 1890s England falls suddenly into a sleep-like trance, from which he does not awake for over two hundred years. During his centuries of slumber, however, investments are made that make him the richest and most powerful man on Earth. But when he comes out of his trance he is horrified to discover that the money accumulated in his name is being used to maintain a hierarchal society in which most are poor, and more than a third of all people are enslaved. Oppressed and uneducated, the masses cling desperately to one dream - that the sleeper will awake, and lead them all to freedom.

The Sleeper Awakes

Stanislaw Lem is perhaps the most original and influential European science-fiction writer of the twentieth century. 
The Cyberiad, one of Lem's most beloved works, follows the exploits of the Trurl and Klapaucius, two ingenious 'constructors'. In their adventures through a strange medieval universe they encounter a machine capable of creating anything that starts with the letter 'N'; kings who oppress their people with parlour games; and PhD pirates who demand ransom in knowledge rather than gold. It is a world where UFOs land silently on lawns at dawn, and where even the stars can be re-arranged for advertising purposes.

The Cyberiad

Fables for the Cybernetic Age

James Tiptree Jr.

James Tiptree Jr, the pen name of Alice Bradley Sheldon, is widely considered to be one of the most influential American genre writers ever, and a pioneer of feminist science fiction. 
 
10,000 Light Years from Home, her brilliant debut collection, displays all her trademark humour, intensity and originality, with dark dystopian thrills, fast-paced intergalactic satire and hardboiled tales of alien invasion. A startling and unforgettable depiction of humanity's experience among the stars, the collection includes some of Tiptree's most powerful stories: 'And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side', 'The Man Who Walked Home' and 'Beam Us Home'.

Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home

Edgar Allan Poe

One of the greatest of all horror writers, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) also composed pioneering tales that seized upon the scientific developments of an era marked by staggering change. In this collection of sixteen stories, he explores such wide-ranging contemporary themes as galvanism, time travel and resurrection of the dead. 'The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfall' relates a man's balloon journey to the moon with a combination of scientific precision and astonishing fantasy. Elsewhere, the boundaries between horror and science are elegantly blurred in stories such as 'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar', while the great essay 'Eureka' outlines Poe's own interpretation of the universe. Powerfully influential on later authors including Jules Verne, these works are essential reading for anyone wishing to trace the genealogy of science fiction, or to understand the complexity of Poe's own creative vision

The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe

John Wyndham

A stunning new clothbound edition of one of the most famous science-fiction novels of the twentieth century, designed by the acclaimed Coralie-Bickford Smith. 
 
When Bill Masen wakes up blindfolded in hospital there is a bitter irony in his situation. Carefully removing his bandages, he realizes that he is the only person who can see: everyone else, doctors and patients alike, have been blinded by a meteor shower. Now, with civilization in chaos, the triffids - huge, venomous, large-rooted plants able to 'walk', feeding on human flesh - can have their day...

The Day of the Triffids

Terry Pratchett

Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is in hot pursuit of a serial killer. The trouble is, a well-timed lightning strike has thrown both policeman and pursued into the city’s past. Now Vimes must relive the history that made him: a cruel regime, a bloody revolution, a corrupt police force, and, most unnerving of all, a keen young recruit named Sam Vimes… Night Watch, which draws on inspirations as far ranging as Victor Hugo and M*A*S*H, is a keen satire about the true nature of political power, and the sacrifices made in the name of the greater good; but also a profoundly empathetic novel about community, connection and the tenacity of the human spirit. 
 
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels are among the most successful and influential fantasy titles of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This edition of Night Watch – written at the height of Pratchett’s imaginative powers – includes a new foreword by Rob Wilkins and an introduction and annotations by Dr David Lloyd and Dr Darryl Jones, contextualising the novel and Pratchett’s far-reaching legacy for new readers and current fans alike. 
 
'A master storyteller' - A.S. Byatt

Night Watch

"This Room Guaranteed BOMB-FREE. From the Management". 
 
Both gruesome and very funny, The Futurological Congress is the story of an ill-fated gathering of scientists who meet in a vast luxury hotel in the smog-bound, chronically over-populated Costa Rica of the future. Caught up in a revolution, the congress ends in a shambles as the authorities try to quell discontent by pouring hallucinogenic drugs into the water-supply. The beleaguered hero, Ijon Tichy (well-known to readers of Lem's The Star Diaries) is shot, frozen and thawed out years later, to find the Earth he had known changed in entirely unexpected ways.

The Futurological Congress

When Dr Philip Raven, an intellectual working for the League of Nations, dies in 1930 he leaves behind a powerful legacy - an unpublished 'dream book'. Inspired by visions he has experienced for many years, it appears to be a book written far into the future: a history of humanity from the date of his death up to 2105. The Shape of Things to Come provides this 'history of the future', an account that was in some ways remarkably prescient - predicting climatic disaster and sweeping cultural changes, including a Second World War, the rise of chemical warfare, and political instabilities in the Middle East.

The Shape of Things to Come

Jules Verne

In this thrilling adventure tale, three men embark on an epic journey under the sea with the mysterious Captain Nemo aboard his submarine, the Nautilus. Over the course of their fantastical voyage, they encounter the lost city of Atlantis, the South Pole and the corals of the Red Sea, and must battle countless adversaries, both human and monstrous. This new version by acclaimed translator David Coward brings Verne's novel vividly to life for a new generation of readers.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Russell Hoban

On an ordinary day in a strangely unfamiliar London, Kleinzeit is fired from his advertising job and told he must go to hospital with a skewed hypotenuse. There on Ward A4, he falls in love with the divine, rosy-cheeked Sister and is sent spinning into a quest involving, among other things, a glockenspiel, sheets of yellow paper, Orpheus, the Underground and that dirty chimpanzee, Death.

Kleinzeit

Stanislaw Lem's set of short stories, written over a period of twenty years, all feature the adventures of space traveller Ijon Tichy and recount him spinning in time-warps, spying on robots, encountering bizarre civilizations and creatures in space  and being hopelessly lost in a forest of supernovae. This is a philosophical satire on technology, theology, intelligence and human nature from one of the greatest of science fiction writers

The Star Diaries

Mary Shelley

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The Penguin English Library Edition of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley 
 
'Never did I behold a vision so horrible as his face, of such loathsome, yet appalling hideousness' 
 
A twisted, upside-down creation myth, Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale lays bare the dark side of science, and the horror within us all. It tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, who plunders graveyards to create a new being from the bodies of the dead - but whose botched creature causes nothing but murder and destruction. Written after a nightmare when its author was only eighteen, Frankenstein gave birth to the modern science fiction novel. 
 
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

Frankenstein

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells 
 
'People screamed. People sprang off the pavement ... "The Invisible Man is coming! The Invisible Man!"' 
 
With his face swaddled in bandages, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses and his hands covered even indoors, Griffin - the new guest at The Coach and Horses - is at first assumed to be a shy accident-victim. But the true reason for his disguise is far more chilling: he has developed a process that has made him invisible, and is locked in a struggle to discover the antidote. Forced from the village, and driven to murder, he seeks the aid of an old friend, Kemp. The horror of his fate has affected his mind, however - and when Kemp refuse to help, he resolves to wreak his revenge. 
 
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

The Invisible Man

Kurt Vonnegut

Dr Felix Hoenikker - a father of the atomic bomb - has another creation. Far more dangerous than that which levelled Hiroshima is ice-nine, a chemical that could freeze the world's oceans solid. The search for Hoenikker leads first to his three children, each in possession of the chemical, and then to the Republic of San Lorenzo, a mysterious island in thrall to a bizarre religion. 
First published a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cat's Cradle is shot through with a nauseous anxiety about the nuclear apocalypse. Yet Vonnegut's darkly hilarious dissection of apathy and selfishness on the edge of the abyss speaks clearly to our own environmental angst and to the fragility of civilization.

Cat's Cradle

Margaret Cavendish

Flamboyant, theatrical and ambitious, Margaret Cavendish was one of the seventeenth century's most striking figures: a woman who ventured into the  male spheres of politics, science, philosophy and literature. The Blazing World is a highly original work: part Utopian fiction, part feminist text, it tells of a lady shipwrecked on the Blazing World where she is made Empress and uses her power to ensure that it is free of war, religious division and unfair sexual discrimination. This volume also includes The Contract, a romance in which love and law work harmoniously together, and Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, which explores the power and freedom a woman can achieve in the disguise of a man.

The Blazing World and Other Writings

'What use to a being that lives beneath a sun are jewels of gas and silver stars of ice?' 
 
From a giant of twentieth-century science fiction, these four miniature space epics feature crazy inventors, surreal worlds, robot kings and madcap machines. 
 
Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

The Three Electroknights

Mary Shelley's seminal novel of the scientist whose creation becomes a monster 
 
This edition is the original 1818 text, which preserves the hard-hitting and politically charged aspects of Shelley's original writing, as well as her unflinching wit and strong female voice. This edition also includes a new introduction and suggestions for further reading by author and Shelley expert Charlotte Gordon, literary excerpts and reviews selected by Gordon and a chronology and essay by preeminent Shelley scholar Charles E. Robinson.

Frankenstein: The 1818 Text

H. P. Lovecraft

In the deep glens of Massachusetts, in the wild hills of Vermont, and in Australia's sandy wastes, unfathomable things lurk. Things that shine with an unnatural light, that speak and buzz strangely in the night, that prowl in the mind. Things not of our Earth. 
 
Widely considered to be the most significant writer of supernatural tales in the twentieth century, H.P. Lovecraft made a profound contribution to science fiction. From their singularly creepy atmospheres to their portrayal of extraordinary creatures and happenings, the three stories included in this collection - 'The Colour Out of Space', 'The Whisperer in the Darkness' and 'The Shadow Out of Time' - are peerless examples of the genre.

The Colour Out of Space

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