Neil MacGregor was Director of the National Gallery, London from 1987 to 2002 and of the British Museum from 2002 to 2015, and Chair of the Steering Committee of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin from 2015 to 2018. His previous books include A History of the World in 100 Objects, Shakespeare's Restless World and Germany: Memories of a Nation, all available in Penguin and now between them translated into more than a dozen languages. In 2010, he was made a member of the Order of Merit, the UK's highest civil honour. In 2015 he was awarded the Goethe Medal and the German National Prize. In 2018 the radio series Living with the Gods received the Sandford Saint Martin Award for Religious Broadcasting.

Neil MacGregor

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Yukio Mishima

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The Osugi family have come to a realization. Each of them hails from a different planet. Father from Mars, mother from Jupiter, son from Mercury and daughter from Venus. Already seen as oddballs in their small Japanese town in the 1960s, this extra-terrestrial knowledge brings them closer together; they climb mountains to wait for UFOs, study at home together and regard their human neighbours with a kindly benevolence. 
 
But Father, Juichiro, is worried about the bomb. He writes letters to Khrushchev, trying to warn everyone he can of the terrible threat. After all, humans may be terribly flawed, but aren't they worth saving? He sends out a coded message in the newspaper to find other aliens. But there are other extra-terrestrials out there, ones who do not look so kindly on the flaws and foibles of humans. And a charming young man, who claims to be from Venus too, tempts daughter Akiko away from the family . . .

Beautiful Star

John Christopher

At first the virus wiping out grass and crops is of little concern to John Custance. It has decimated Asia, causing mass starvation and riots, but Europe is safe and a counter-virus is expected any day. Except, it turns out, the governments have been lying to their people. When the deadly disease hits Britain they are left alone, and society starts to descend into barbarism. As John and his family try to make it across country to the safety of his brother's farm in a hidden valley, their humanity is tested to its very limits.

The Death of Grass

Russell Hoban

'O what we ben! And what we come to...' Wandering a desolate post-apocalyptic landscape, speaking a broken-down English lost after the end of civilization, Riddley Walker sets out to find out what brought humanity here. This is his story.

Riddley Walker

Penguin Modern Classics

Stanislaw Lem

'There were two kinds of landscape characteristic of the inner planets of the Sun: the purposeful and the desolate.' 
 
The planet Quinta is pocked with ugly mounds and covered by a spiderweb-like network draped from spindly poles. It is a kingdom of phantoms and of a beauty afflicted by madness. The Earth spaceship Hermes arrives on Quinta with the best of intentions towards the humans' 'brothers in intelligence'. But something on the planet has gone terribly wrong...

Fiasco

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

Anthony Burgess

Edited by Andrew Biswell With a Foreword by Martin Amis 
 
Fifteen-year-old Alex likes lashings of ultraviolence. He and his gang of friends rob, kill and rape their way through a nightmarish future, until the State puts a stop to his riotous excesses. But what will his re-education mean? 
 
A dystopian horror, a black comedy, an exploration of choice, A Clockwork Orange is also a work of exuberant invention which created a new language for its characters. This critical edition restores the text of the novel as Anthony Burgess originally wrote it, and includes a glossary of the teen slang 'Nadsat', explanatory notes, pages from the original typescript, interviews, articles and reviews, shedding light on the enduring fascination of the novel's 'sweet and juicy criminality'.

A Clockwork Orange

Restored Edition

'I have gone to look for a lion.' In a world where lions have become extinct, the map-maker Jachin-Boaz nevertheless abandons his wife and son to find one, leaving just this note. But his decision has unexpected consequences. He will be pursued by his son, Boaz-Jachin, and by something else: a tawny-skinned, amber-eyed beast from another place and time, a bringer of life and death.

The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

R. C. Sherriff

Self-important and more or less friendless, retired teacher Edgar Hopkins lives for the thrill of winning poultry prizes. But his narrow world is shattered when he discovers that the moon is about to come crashing to the earth, with probably apocalyptic consequences. The manuscript he leaves behind will be a testament - to his growing humanity and to how one English village prepared for the end of the world... 
 
Written in 1939 as the world was teetering on the brink of global war, R. C. Sherriff's tragicomic novel is a classic work of science fiction, an elegy for a lost way of life, and a powerful warning from the past.

The Hopkins Manuscript

Fourth Galaxy, 4 November 2052: in the blackness of space a figure in blue overalls tumbles over and over as it drifts towards the planet Badr-al-Budur. No space suit, no helmet, no oxygen. He can't be alive, can he? But he is. 
 
First Navigator Fremder Gorn is the only survivor when the Corporation tanker Clever Daughter disappears. Nobody knows how he did it, and everybody, including Fremder himself, wants to know. Dr Caroline Lovecraft, Head of the Physio/Psycho unit, finds that intimacy doesn't lead to answers and Fremder's own memories are resolutely obscure. Fremder's name means stranger, and his story is otherworldly and yet ultimately life-affirming.

Fremder

Ayn Rand

Equality 7-2521 is a man apart. Since The Great Rebirth it has been a crime in his world to think or act as an individual. Even love is forbidden. Yet since his childhood in the Home of the Infants, Equality 7-2521 has felt that he is different. When he is sent by The Council of Vocations to work as a road sweeper, he stumbles upon a link to the old world that gives him the spur to break free. First published in England in 1938, Ayn Rand&rsquo;s short dystopian novel crystalises the ideas of individualism and competition that would make her name.

Anthem

Anna Kavan

The world is threatened by encroaching ice, creeping down day by day from the polar ice caps. The imminent catastrophe has thrown the world's governments into chaos, and no one knows whether the disaster has an environmental or nuclear cause, or how soon the end will come. One man pursues his sylph-like, silver-haired ex-fiancée ('the girl') as she flees from country to country, away from her husband; away from the malevolent 'warden' of one of the proto-territories that have sprung up as traditional societies crumble; away from him.

Brian Aldiss

The Sun is about to go Nova. Earth and Moon have ceased their axial rotation and present one face continuously to the sun. The bright side of Earth is covered with carnivorous forest. This is the Age of vegetables. Gren and his lady - not to mention the tummybelly men - journey to the even more terrifying Dark side. One of Aldiss' most famous and long-enduring novels, fast moving, packed with brilliant imagery.

Hothouse

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

Italo Calvino

Enchanting stories about the evolution of the universe, with characters that are fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures. They 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. 
 
'Naturally, we were all there, - old Qfwfq said, - where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?'

The Complete Cosmicomics

Mission: vertical launch at half booster power. Ascent to ellipsis B68. Correction to stable oriental path, with orbital period of four hours and twenty-six minutes. Proceed to rendezvous with shuttlecraft vehicles of the JO-2 type. There await further instructions. 
 
Tales of Pirx the Pilot imagines a world in which space travel has become routine and boring - an unremarkable aspect of the human condition. Pirx graduates through a series of stories from cadet to captain. He is regaled with anecdotes of the glory days, when space travel was dangerous and thrilling. And yet, even as he sits at the controls cursing that his little puzzle toy won't work in zero-gravity conditions or as he makes himself comfy on the luxury space cruise ship Intergalactic, things keep going terribly wrong. As the cyberneticist Professor Taurov sighs: 'We have no choice but to trust to our technology. Without it we would never have set foot on the Moon. But. . . sometimes we have to pay a high price for that trust.'

Tales of Pirx the Pilot

This new edition of Brian Aldiss&rsquo;s classic anthology brings together a diverse selection of science fiction spanning over sixty years, from Isaac Asimov&rsquo;s &lsquo;Nightfall&rsquo;, first published in 1941, to the 2006 story &lsquo;Friends in Need&rsquo; by Eliza Blair. Including authors such as Clifford Simak, Harry Harrison, Bruce Sterling, A. E. Van Vogt and Brian Aldiss himself, these stories portray struggles against machines, epic journeys, genetic experiments, time travellers and alien races. From stories set on Earth, to uncanny far distant worlds and ancient burnt-out suns, the one constant is humanity itself, compelled by an often fatal curiosity to explore the boundless frontiers of time, space and probability.

A Science Fiction Omnibus

L. P. Hartley

'You'll never be happy until you can think and feel and look like other people . . .' 
 
Jael 97 is an Alpha. Deemed over-privileged for her beauty, she is compelled to report to the Ministry of Facial Justice, where her face will be reconstructed. 
 
For Jael lives in the New State, created out of the devastation of the Third World War. Under the rule of the Darling Dictator, citizens must wear sackcloth and ashes, and only a 17.5% quotum of personality is permitted to each. Anything that inspires envy is forbidden. 
 
But Jael cannot suppress her rebellious spirit. Secretly, she starts to reassert the rights of the individual, and decides to hunt down the faceless Dictator. 
 
 
'An exquisitely entertaining fantasy' Observer

Facial Justice

Len Deighton

Texan billionaire General Midwinter will stop at nothing to bring down the USSR - even if it puts the whole world at risk. The fourth and final novel featuring the cynical, insolent narrator of The IPCRESS File sees him sent from his shabby Soho office to bone-freezing Helsinki in order to penetrate Midwinter's vast anti-Communist network - and stop a deadly virus from wiping out the planet.

Billion-Dollar Brain

Robert Graves

Edward Venn-Thomas lives in the twentieth century but has been mysteriously transported to the future, and the apparently idyllic society of New Create, where there is no hunger, no war and no dissatisfaction. However Venn-Thomas is starting to find life among the New Cretans rather dull. He comes to realize that their perfect existence, inspired by the poets and magicians of their strange occultic religion, lacks one fundamental thing - evil. So Venn-Thomas sees it as nothing less than his duty to introduce them to the darker side of life. First published in 1949 and also known as Watch the North Wind Rise, Graves's novel is a thrilling blend of utopian fantasy, science fiction and mythology.

Seven Days in New Crete

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

John Wyndham

&quot;In a decade marked, much like our own, by simple fears, John Wyndham refused to make simple metaphors&quot;. -M John Harrison. A world paralyzed by genetic mutation: Wyndham takes the reader into the anguished heart of a community where the chances of breeding true are less than fifty percent and where deviations are rooted out and destroyed as abominations.

The Chrysalids

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

Matthew's parents are worried. At eleven, he's much too old to have an imaginary friend, yet they find him talking to and arguing with a presence that even he admits is not physically there. This presence - Chocky - causes Matthew to ask difficult questions and say startling things: he speaks of complex mathematics and mocks human progress. Then, when Matthew does something incredible, it seems there is more than the imaginary about Chocky. Which is when others become interested and ask questions of their own: who is Chocky? And what could it want with an eleven-year-old boy?

Chocky

"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

Angélica Gorodischer

Part pulp adventure, part otherworldly meditation, this is the story of Trafalgar Medrano: intergalactic trader and lover of bitter coffee and black cigarettes. In the bars and cafés of Rosario, Argentina, he recounts tall tales of his space escapades - involving, among other things, time travel and dancing troglodytes. 
 
Cosmopolitan, philosophical and, above all else, pure fun, Angélica Gorodischer's Trafalgar is a unique blend of science fiction, magical realism and shaggy-dog tale from one of Argentina's most distinctive writers.

Trafalgar

H G Wells

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

Atlas Shrugged is the astounding story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world--and did. Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, Atlas Shrugged stretches the boundaries further than any book you have ever read. It is a mystery, not about the murder of a man's body, but about the murder--and rebirth--of man's spirit.

Atlas Shrugged

Philip K. Dick

An official tie-in edition of Philip K. Dick's dazzling speculative novel to accompany the new TV series, executive produced by Ridley Scott. 
 
Philip K. Dick's acclaimed cult novel gives us a horrifying glimpse of an alternative world - one where the Allies have lost the Second World War. In this nightmare dystopia the Nazis have taken over New York, the Japanese control California and the African continent is virtually wiped out. In a neutral buffer zone in America that divides the world's new rival superpowers, lives the author of an underground bestseller. His book offers a new vision of reality - an alternative theory of world history in which the Axis powers were defeated - giving hope to the disenchanted. Does 'reality' lie with him, or is his world just one among many others? 
 
'The most brilliant science fiction mind on any planet' 
Rolling Stone 
 
'Dick's finest book, and one of the very best science fiction novels ever published' 
Eric Brown

The Man in the High Castle

'On one side of the ducats was stamped the radiant profile of Archithorius, on the other - an image of his six hundred arms' 
 
Mortal Engines is a selection of the best of Stanislaw Lem's extraordinary miniature space epics, chosen by his heroic translator Michael Kandel, who has somehow battled through Lem's jokes, parodies, fabricated technological terms and unreliable robots and brilliantly converted them from Polish into English. Encompassing his Fables for Robots and stories from his protagonists Ijon Tichy (from The Star Diaries) and Pirx the Pilot, this is a highly entertaining but also deeply alarming view of the glories and absurdities of Outer Space.

Showing results for: ‘Neil MacGregor’

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