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Lake of the Long Sun is the second volume in the Book of the Long Sun series from science fiction and fantasy master Gene Wolfe

It is the far future, and the giant spaceship, The Whorl, has traveled for forgotten generation towards its destination. Lit inside by the artificial Long Sun, The Whorl is so huge that you can see whole cities in the sky. And now the gods of The Whorl begin to intervene in human affairs. A god speaks to Patera Silk, a clergyman at work in the schoolyard of his church. Silk must go on a quest to save his church and his people.

This collection of short stories by H. G. Wells is the most comprehensive yet, and showcases the hugely fertile imagination of the great author, whose ideas and storylines remain hugely relevant to this day.

Table of Contents:

• 3 - The Stolen Bacillus - (1894) - short story
• 9 - The Flowering of the Strange Orchid - (1894) - short story
• 16 - In the Avu Observatory - (1894) - short story
• 22 - The Triumphs of a Taxidermist - (1894) - short story
• 26 - A Deal in Ostriches - (1894) - short story
• 30 - Through a Window - (1894) - short story
• 37 - The Temptation of Harringay - (1895) - short story
• 42 - The Flying Man - (1895) - short story
• 48 - The Diamond Maker - (1894) - short story
• 55 - Aepyornis Island - (1894) - short story (variant of Æpyornis Island)
• 65 - The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes - (1895) - short story
• 74 - The Lord of the Dynamos - non-genre - (1894) - short story
• 82 - The Hammerpond Park Burglary - (1894) - short story
• 89 - The Moth - (1895) - short story
• 98 - The Treasure in the Forest - (1894) - short story
• 107 - The Plattner Story - (1896) - short story
• 124 - The Argonauts of the Air - (1895) - short story
• 135 - The Story of the Late Mr Elvesham - (1896) - short story (variant of The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham)
• 150 - In the Abyss - (1896) - short story
• 164 - The Apple - (1896) - short story
• 171 - Under the Knife - (1896) - short story
• 183 - The Sea Raiders - (1896) - short story (variant of The Sea-Raiders)
• 192 - Pollock and the Porroh Man - (1895) - short story
• 206 - The Red Room - (1896) - short story
• 214 - The Cone - non-genre - (1895) - short story
• 224 - The Purple Pileus - (1896) - short story
• 234 - The Jilting of Jane - (1894) - short story
• 241 - In the Modern Vein: An Unsympathetic Love Story - (1894) - short story
• 250 - A Catastrophe - (1895) - short story
• 258 - The Lost Inheritance - (1896) - short story
• 264 - The Sad Story of a Dramatic Critic - (1895) - short story
• 272 - A Slip Under the Microscope - (1896) - short story
• 291 - The Crystal Egg - (1897) - short story
• 306 - The Star - (1897) - short story
• 316 - A Story of the Stone Age - (1897) - novella
• 363 - A Story of the Days to Come - (1899) - novella
• 436 - The Man Who Could Work Miracles - (1898) - short story
• 453 - Filmer - (1901) - short story
• 468 - The Magic Shop - (1903) - short story
• 478 - The Valley of Spiders - (1903) - short story
• 488 - The Truth About Pyecraft - (1903) - short story
• 497 - Mr Skelmersdale in Fairyland - (1903) - short story
• 509 - The Inexperienced Ghost - (1902) - short story
• 520 - Jimmy Goggles the God - (1898) - short story
• 531 - The New Accelerator - (1901) - short story
• 543 - Mr Ledbetter's Vacation - (1898) - short fiction (variant of Mr. Ledbetter's Vacation)
• 558 - The Stolen Body - (1898) - short story
• 572 - Mr Brisher's Treasure - (1899) - short fiction (variant of Mr. Brisher's Treasure)
• 581 - Miss Winchelsea's Heart - (1898) - short story
• 596 - A Dream of Armageddon - (1901) - short story
• 621 - The Door in the Wall - (1906) - short story
• 636 - The Empire of the Ants - (1905) - short story
• 650 - A Vision of Judgment - (1899) - short story (variant of A Vision of Judgement)
• 656 - The Land Ironclads - (1903) - novelette
• 675 - The Beautiful Suit - non-genre - (1909) - short story
• 679 - The Pearl of Love - (1925) - short story
• 683 - The Country of the Blind - (1904) - novelette
• 704 - The Reconciliation - (1895) - short story
• 710 - My First Aeroplane - [Little Mother - 1] - (1910) - short story
• 720 - Little Mother Up the Mörderberg - [Little Mother - 2] - (1910) - short story
• 730 - The Story of the Last Trump - (1915) - short story
• 743 - The Grisly Folk - (1921) - essay
• 757 - A Tale of the Twentieth Century: For Advanced Thinkers - (1887) - short fiction (variant of A Tale of the Twentieth Century)
• 762 - Walcote - (1898) - short story
• 769 - The Devotee of Art - (1888) - short fiction
• 779 - The Man with a Nose - (1894) - short fiction
• 783 - A Perfect Gentleman on Wheels - (1897) - short fiction
• 793 - Wayde's Essence - (1895) - short fiction
• 802 - A Misunderstood Artist - (1894) - short fiction
• 806 - Le Mari Terrible - (1895) - short story
• 810 - The Rajah's Treasure - (1896) - short story
• 821 - The Presence by the Fire - (1897) - short story
• 827 - Mr Marshall's Doppelganger - (1897) - short fiction (variant of Mr. Marshall's Doppelganger)
• 837 - The Thing in No. 7 - (1894) - short story
• 843 - The Thumbmark - (1894) - short story
• 850 - A Family Elopement - (1894) - short fiction
• 855 - Our Little Neighbour - (1895) - short fiction
• 863 - How Gabriel Became Thompson - (1894) - short fiction
• 872 - How Pingwill Was Routed - (1895) - short fiction
• 876 - The Loyalty of Esau Common: A Fragment - (1902) - short fiction (variant of The Loyalty of Esau Common)
• 891 - The Wild Asses of the Devil - (1915) - short story
• 901 - Answer to Prayer - (1937) - short story
• 904 - The Queer Story of Brownlow's Newspaper - (1932) - short story
• 921 - The Country of the Blind (Revised Version) - (1939) - short fiction (variant of The Country of the Blind (revised))
• 951 - Introduction to The Country of the Blind and Other Stories - (1911) - essay (variant of Introduction (The Country of the Blind and Other Stories))
• 956 - Introduction to Revised Version of "The Country of the Blind" - (1939) - essay (variant of Introduction (The Country of the Blind))

The final novel of Hermann Hesse, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, The Glass Bead Game is a fascinating tale of the complexity of modern life as well as a classic of modern literature.

Set in an unspecified future, The Glass Bead Game is the story of Joseph Knecht, who has been raised in Castalia, the remote place his society has provided for the intellectual elite to grow and flourish. Since childhood, Knecht has been consumed with mastering the Glass Bead Game, which requires a synthesis of aesthetics and scientific arts, such as mathematics, music, logic, and philosophy, which he achieves in adulthood, becoming a Magister Ludi (Master of the Game).

"For Warre, consisteth not in Battell onely, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known..."

-- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan XIII.

The world of Terra Ignota has been upended. War is inevitable. But after three centuries of peace, how does a war begin? With every world ruler friends with every other, how do the nations pick sides? How can war begin when every nation already has surrendered? Genius convict Mycroft Canner has completed the history started in Too Like the Lightning and concluded in Seven Surrenders. Now he begins his chronicle of the guideless search for an order to the conflict as the world slouches toward war, while a living myth contends with a celebrity assassin, a corrupt priestess and a captive god to shape the conflict and the world to come.

Centuries in the future, Francis Sandow is the only man alive who was born as long ago as the 20th century. His body is kept young and in perfect health by advanced scientific methods; he has amassed such a fortune that he can own entire planets; and he has become a god. No, not a god of Earth, but one of the panetheon of the alien Pei'ans: he is Shimbo of Darktree, Shrugger of Thunders. Yet he doesn't believe that his personality has merged with the ancient consciousness of Shimbo, that he really can call down the skies upon his enemies. The time comes, however, when Francis Sandow must use these powers against the most dangerous antagonist in the universe: another Pei'an god -- Shimbo's own enemy, Belion. And Belion has no doubt whatever of his own powers....

From the 2017 John W. Campbell Award Winner for Best Writer, Ada Palmer's Perhaps the Stars is the final book of the Hugo Award-shortlisted Terra Ignota series.

World Peace turns into global civil war.

In the future, the leaders of Hive nations--nations without fixed location--clandestinely committed nefarious deeds in order to maintain an outward semblance of utopian stability. But the facade could only last so long. The comforts of effortless global travel and worldwide abundance may have tempered humanity's darkest inclinations, but conflict remains deeply rooted in the human psyche. All it needed was a catalyst, in form of special little boy to ignite half a millennium of repressed chaos.

Now, war spreads throughout the globe, splintering old alliances and awakening sleeping enmities. All transportation systems are in ruins, causing the tyranny of distance to fracture a long-united Earth and threaten to obliterate everything the Hive system built.

With the arch-criminal Mycroft nowhere to be found, his successor, Ninth Anonymous, must not only chronicle the discord of war, but attempt to restore order in a world spiraling closer to irreparable ruin.

The fate of a broken society hangs in the balance. Is the key to salvation to remain Earth-bound or, perhaps, to start anew throughout the far reaches of the stars?

From acclaimed, award-winning author Jo Walton: Philosopher Kings, a tale of gods and humans, and the surprising things they have to learn from one another. Twenty years have elapsed since the events of The Just City. The City, founded by the time-traveling goddess Pallas Athene, organized on the principles espoused in Plato's Republic and populated by people from all eras of human history, has now split into five cities, and low-level armed conflict between them is not unheard-of.

The god Apollo, living (by his own choice) a human life as "Pythias" in the City, his true identity known only to a few, is now married and the father of several children. But a tragic loss causes him to become consumed with the desire for revenge. Being Apollo, he goes handling it in a seemingly rational and systematic way, but it's evident, particularly to his precocious daughter Arete, that he is unhinged with grief.

Along with Arete and several of his sons, plus a boatload of other volunteers--including the now fantastically aged Marsilio Ficino, the great humanist of Renaissance Florence--Pythias/Apollo goes sailing into the mysterious Eastern Mediterranean of pre-antiquity to see what they can find--possibly the man who may have caused his great grief, possibly communities of the earliest people to call themselves "Greek." What Apollo, his daughter, and the rest of the expedition will discover... will change everything.

A Nebula Award Finalist and Winner of the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, Caldé of the Long Sun is the third volume in science fiction Grand Master Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun tetralogy.

Journeying aboard the generational starship the Whorl, the young priest Patera Silk becomes a prophet and revolutionary as he questions his faith while confronting a crime lord in a saga where "[Wolfe] continues to prove himself one of the genre's most literate writers and luminescent thinkers" (Library Journal).

Mycroft Canner is a convict. For his crimes he is required, as is the custom of the 25th century, to wander the world being as useful as he can to all he meets. Carlyle Foster is a sensayer--a spiritual counselor in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away.

The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s. It is a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also on complex and mandatory systems of labelling all public writing and speech. What seem to us normal gender distinctions are now distinctly taboo in most social situations. And most of the world's population is affiliated with globe-girdling clans of the like-minded, whose endless economic and cultural competion is carefully managed by central planners of inestimable subtlety. To us it seems like a mad combination of heaven and hell. To them, it seems like normal life.

And in this world, Mycroft and Carlyle have stumbled on the wild card that may destablize the system: the boy Bridger, who can effortlessly make his wishes come true. Who can, it would seem, bring inanimate objects to life...

Widely regarded as one of the true classics of science fiction, Star Maker is a poetic and deeply philosophical work. This 1937 successor to Last and First Men offers another entrancing speculative history of the future. The story details the mental journey of an unnamed narrator who is transported not only to other worlds but also other galaxies, intelligent star clusters, mingles amoung alien races and continues on to parallel universes, until he eventually becomes part of the "cosmic mind."

First published in 1937, Olaf Stapledon's descriptions of alien life are a political commentary on human life in the turbulent inter-war years. The book challenges preconceived notions of intelligence and awareness, and ultimately argues for a broadened perspective that would free us from culturally ingrained thought and our inevitable anthropomorphism.

This is the first scholarly edition of a book that influenced such writers as C.S. Lewis, Doris Lessing, and Arthur C. Clarke. Jorge Luis Borges called this work "a prodigious novel."

Soldier and adventurer John Carter tells the story of how he returns to the planet Mars to be reunited with his love, the Martian princess Dejah Thoris. With his great friend Tars Tarkas, mighty Jeddak of Thark, Carter sets out in search of his princess. But Dejah Thoris has vanished. And Carter becomes trapped in the legendary Eden of Mars from which none has ever escaped alive.

All those who ever lived on Earth have found themselves resurrected--healthy, young, and naked as newborns--on the grassy banks of a mighty river, in a world unknown. Miraculously provided with food, but with no clues to the meaning of their strange new afterlife, billions of people from every period of Earth's history--and prehistory--must start again.

Sir Francis Bacon would be the first to glimpse the incredible way-station, a link between worlds. This forbidden sight would spur the renowned 19th-century explorer to uncover the truth. Along with a remarkable group of compatriots, including Alice Liddell Hargreaves (the Victorian girl who was the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland), an English-speaking Neanderthal, a WWII Holocaust survivor, and a wise extraterrestrial, Burton sets sail on the magnificent river. His mission: to confront humankind's mysterious benefactors, and learn the true purpose--innocent or evil--of the Riverworld...

Sirius is the titular character and a 1944 science fiction novel by the British philosopher and author Olaf Stapledon.

Scientist Thomas Trelone creates a super-intelligent dog, named Sirius. He is the only dog to have attained a humanlike intelligence. Other dogs of the same breed Trelone created, have an intermediate intelligence (they are above the dog's average intelligence, but they cannot master human language and complex analytic thinking as Sirius does. A sense of existential questioning suffuses the book, as the author delves into every aspect of Sirius's psyche. The novel deals with a lot of human issues through Sirius and his experiences, his unusual nature, his ideas and his relationships with humans, showing a very gloomy, intelligent, obscure, sad, and complex tale, whose significance and depth cannot be fully understood, and is often misinterpreted.

High above the planet Harmony, the Oversoul watches. Its task, programmed so many millennia ago, is to guard the human settlement on this planet--to protect this fragile remnant of Earth from all threats. To protect them, most of all, from themselves.

The Oversoul has done its job well. There is no war on Harmony. There are no weapons of mass destruction. There is no technology that could lead to weapons of war. By control of the data banks, and subtle interference in the very thoughts of the people, the artificial intelligence has fulfilled its mission.

But now there is a problem. In orbit, the Oversoul realizes that it has lost access to some of its memory banks, and some of its power systems are failing. And on the planet, men are beginning to think about power, wealth, and conquest.

After he firewalked in Polynesia, the world wasn't the same for Alexander Hergensheimer, now called Alec Graham. As natural accidents occurred without cease, Alex knew Armageddon and the Day of Judgement were near. Somehow he had to bring his beloved heathen, Margrethe, to a state of grace, and, while he was at it, save the rest of the world....

Secrets Lie Within The Earth

"Tell me frankly what you saw in that chasm: I am sure it was something strange and terrible. Confide in me."

The engineer long endeavoured to evade my inquiries. But at last, he spoke.

"I will tell you all. A steady brilliant light. I left the cage and clambered down. As I drew nearer and nearer to the light, the chasm became wider, and at last I saw, to my unspeakable amaze, a broad level road at the bottom of the abyss, illumined as far as the eye could reach by what seemed artificial gas-lamps placed at regular intervals, as in the thoroughfare of a great city; and I heard confusedly at a distance a hum as of human voices. I know, of course, that no rival miners are at work in this district. Whose could be those voices? What human hands could have levelled that road and marshalled those lamps?"

"You will descend again?"

"I ought, yet I feel as if I durst not."