Naota's life is not simple. He lives with his eccentric father and grandfather in a city distinguished by a gigantic hand-iron shaped factory perched on hill. His brother's ex-girlfriend makes passes at him. And to top it all off, an impish, playful alien has run him over with her Vespa and smacked him in the head with a bass guitar! Little does he know that this is only the beginning of his involvement in an interplanetary ideological war.

Inspired by the FLCL anime.

We have proven that time travels are safe; the present is affected by changing the past. Nothing had changed—count your pseudopods!

Nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novelette in 1966.

The building does not have thirteenth floor: fourteenth immediately follows twelfth. But three very strange-looking gentlemen want to rent it nevertheless.

Originally published as “The Space Willies” in 1958. A slightly extended version of it was published a year later under the title “Next of Kin”. This is a comic story of a military misfit who successfully conducts a one-man psychological warfare operation against an alien race and its allies, with whom humans and allied races are at war.

It’s 1964, and a billion Martians suddenly ’kwimmed’ to Earth. There’s one Martian for every three people on the planet. They’re annoying but your fist goes straight through them, since they’re essentially projections that can talk. And the most annoying about them is that they always tell the truth.

Energy beings from outer space invaded Earth’s atmosphere making electricity and radio impossible. Is it humanity’s bane or blessing?

“…only a madman would give a loaded revolver to an idiot.”

В богом забытой глуши живет-поживает развеселое семейство мутантов Хогбенов, вовсе не напрашивающихся на неприятности, но постоянно в них влипающих — как будто если у человека три ноги и способность пускать, когда хочется пить, дождичек прямо себе в рот,то он и не человек вовсе!

В богом забытой глуши живет-поживает развеселое семейство мутантов Хогбенов, вовсе не напрашивающихся на неприятности, но постоянно в них влипающих — как будто если у человека три ноги и способность пускать, когда хочется пить, дождичек прямо себе в рот,то он и не человек вовсе!

James Bolivar diGriz, criminal-virtuoso-turned-undercover-agent, had never been one to quail in the face of danger. Therefore, when his lovely, larcenous wife, Angelina, was kidnapped by the cruelest organization in the galaxy—Interstellar Internal and External Revenue (IIER)—he wasted no time in formulating a scheme to free her. Unfortunately, even though he had the aid of his talented sons, James and Bolivar (whom he'd arranged to have graduate a little ahead of time from the Dorsky Military Boarding School and Penitentiary), things didn't go according to plan. The trio broke into IIER's headquarters easily enough, but they set off an alarm in the process—which not only meant 'that Angelina's rescue had to be postponed, but also that the boys had to wipe clean the family's tax records on their own while their father created an appropriate diversion. It was a thoroughly enjoyable escapade for the senior stainless steel rat, and “Slippery Jim's” exhilaration was not diminished when, some time later, he was taken into custody. But the fun stopped there. For instead of hauling him off to prison, diGriz's captors took him to an unfamiliar building across town…where his boss, Harold Inskipp—the hard-nosed, humorless head of the Interplanetary Special Corps—was waiting to hand him a tricky, very possibly suicidal assignment. After grudgingly assuring Jim that Angelina was out of jail, Inskipp outlined the much more serious problem currently facing the Corps. Asatellite base which had been hosting a major meeting of the League Navy chiefs of staff had vanished without a trace, leaving League defenses in a dangerously disorganized state. It was up to diGriz to find out what had happened in the satellite, and who was responsible. The first part of the puzzle wasn't at all difficult for him to solve. A quick jump backward in time revealed that the satellite and its occupants had been swallowed by a huge, toothy something. But when it came to following the something back to its home base, the situation became a bit more hairy…or rather, scaly. Because the attack on the satellite was merely the first move in what was destined to become an all-out intergalactic war—between Mankind and an unholy union of slimy, stalk-eyed, multi-limbed and oozy-tentacled alien races…who had decided that human beings were just too dry and ugly to exist!

Gallegher invents a machine that solves three problems at ones. But what exactly?

Never before published in its entirety in the United States, The Complete Roderick is John Sladek’s masterpiece. Roderick is a robot who learns. He begins life looking like a toy tank, thinking like a child, and knowing nothing about human ways. But as he will discover, growing up and becoming fully human is no easy task in a world where many people seem to have little trouble giving up their humanity. The Complete Roderick is widely considered to be the most ambitious and genius work of a novelist described by The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction as “the most formally inventive, the funniest, and very nearly the most melancholy of modern US science fiction writers.” Amazon Review John Sladek was one of SF’s premier satirists, and The Complete Roderick is his masterpiece—a dark comedy of artificial intelligence, previously split into Roderick (1980) and Roderick at Random (1983). Roderick is an experimental robot, a well-meaning innocent who grows up and learns what it is to be human in the comic inferno of modern America. Being human isn’t much fun: bullied at school, diagnosed as mentally unstable for saying he’s a robot, forever in trouble for applying logic to religion… Being a robot is tough: a sinister government agency is determined to destroy all AI “Entities”. Luckily their agents are hilariously inept—one assassin lying in wait for Roderick gets mugged for his laser-aimed sniper rifle. Like Voltaire’s Candide, Roderick moves wide-eyed through a world of insane commercialism: (Danton’s Doggie Dinette, the posh canine restaurant), fly-by-night religions (the Church of Christ Symmetrical), non-art (identical purple squares, meaningless when painted by Roderick, are praised as cutting-edge art), junk science (research into psychic pigeons is faked but generates a bestseller anyway) and—everywhere—people whose fads and tics and rigid prejudices make them more programmed, less truly human, than Roderick himself. This book is painfully funny, sprinkled with wild ideas and nifty one-liners: a surreal musical called Hello Dali; marketing a dull book on fishing as You Can Master Bait; the lady founder of Machine Lib, dubbed the Joan of Arc-welding; buying your jeans at Denim Iniquity… Beneath the dazzle, there’s some seriously comic discussion of artificial intelligence and why it fascinates us. Applause to Gollancz SF Masterworks for producing the first one-volume edition of this major SF satire. —David Langford

Johannes Cabal, necromancer of some little infamy, returns in this riotously clever and terrifically twisted tale of murder and international intrigue. In this genre-twisting novel, infamous necromancer Johannes Cabal, after beating the Devil and being reunited with his soul, leads us on another raucous journey in a little-known corner of the world. This time he's on the run from the local government. Stealing the identity of a minor bureaucrat, Cabal takes passage on the Princess Hortense, a passenger aeroship that is leaving the country. The deception seems perfect, and Cabal looks forward to a quiet trip and a clean escape, until he comes face-to-face with Leonie Barrow, an enemy from the old days who could blow his cover. But when a fellow passenger throws himself to his death, or at least that is how it appears, Cabal begins to investigate out of curiosity. His minor efforts result in a vicious attempt on his own life — and then the gloves come off. Cabal and Leonie — the only woman to ever match wits with him — reluctantly team up to discover the murderer. Before they are done, there will be more narrow escapes, involving sword fighting and newfangled flying machines. There will be massive destruction, not to mention resurrected dead. Steampunk meets the classic Sherlockian mystery in this rip-roaring adventure where anything could happen… and does.