Three remarkable journeys into the stars: Worlds of Exile and Illusion includes Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions. These three spacefaring adventures mark the beginning of grand master Ursula K. Le Guin’s remarkable career. Set in the same universe as Le Guin’s groundbreaking classics The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, these first three books of the celebrated Hainish series follow travelers of many worlds and civilizations in the depths of space.

Every novella by Ursula K. Le Guin, an icon in American literature, collected for the first time - and introduced by the legendary author - in one breathtaking volume. Ursula K. Le Guin has won multiple prizes and accolades, from the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to the Newbery Honor, Nebula, Hugo, World Fantasy, and PEN/Malamud awards. She has had her work collected over the years but never as a complete retrospective of her longer works.

Before Area X, there was Ambergris. Jeff VanderMeer conceived what would become his first cult classic series of speculative works: the Ambergris trilogy. Now, for the first time ever, the story of the sprawling metropolis of Ambergris is collected into a single volume, including City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, and Finch.

One man—visionary billionaire restaurant chain magnate T. R. Schmidt, Ph.D.—has a Big Idea for reversing global warming, a master plan perhaps best described as “elemental.” But will it work? Ranging from the Texas heartland to the Dutch royal palace in the Hague, from the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas to the sunbaked Chihuahuan Desert, Termination Shock brings together a disparate group of characters from different cultures and continents who grapple with the real-life repercussions of global warming.

Ursula K. Le Guin was one of the most revered and influential writers of the 20th century. Her Earthsea books have sold millions of copies and been translated into numerous languages, while her trailblazing novel The Left Hand of Darkness was a landmark in feminist science fiction and ranks among the greatest SF novels of all time. This BBC collection brings together the magical radio retellings of both these seminal classics.

In this landmark modern-day rendition of the ancient Taoist classic, Ursula K. Le Guin presents Lao Tzu’s time-honored and astonishingly powerful philosophy like never before. Drawing on a lifetime of contemplation, she offers an unparalleled window into the text’s awe-inspiring, immediately relatable teachings and their inestimable value for our troubled world.

When Sparrowhawk casts a spell that saves his village from destruction at the hands of the invading Kargs, Ogion, the Mage of Re Albi, encourages the boy to apprentice himself in the art of wizardry. So, at the age of 13, the boy receives his true name - Ged - and gives himself over to the gentle tutelage of the Master Ogion. But impatient with the slowness of his studies and infatuated with glory, Ged embarks for the Island of Roke, where the highest arts of wizardry are taught.

The recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the National Book Award, the Kafka Award, and the Pushcart Prize, Ursula K. Le Guin is renowned for her lyrical writing, rich characters, and diverse worlds. The Wind's Twelve Quarters collects 17 powerful stories, each with an introduction by the author, ranging from fantasy to intriguing scientific concepts, from medieval settings to the future.

Highly acclaimed author Ursula K. Le Guin lends a resonant voice to a pivotal yet often overlooked character of Vergil's The Aeneid. Born into peace and freedom, Lavinia is stunned to learn that she will be the cause of a great war - or so the prophecies and omens claim. Her fate is sealed, however, when she meets a man from Troy.

Always Coming Home is Ursula K. Le Guin’s fictional ethnography of the Kesh, a people of the far future living in a post-apocalyptic Napa Valley. Having survived ecological catastrophe brought on by relentless industrialization, the Kesh are a peaceful people who reject governance and the constriction of genders, limit population growth to prevent overcrowding and preserve resources, and maintain a healthy community in which everyone works to contribute to its well-being. This richly imagined story unfolds through a series of narrated “translations” that illuminate individual lives.

The future is here...in an adventure of cosmic dimension. In December, 1999, a multinational team journeys out to the stars, to the most awesome encounter in human history. Who - or what - is out there? In Cosmos, Carl Sagan explained the universe. In Contact, he predicts its future - and our own.

In the first book of this brilliant series, Stephen King introduces listeners to one of his most powerful creations: Roland of Gilead, The Last Gunslinger. He is a haunting figure, a loner on a spellbinding journey into good and evil. In his desolate world, which frighteningly mirrors our own, Roland tracks The Man in Black, encounters an enticing woman named Alice, and begins a friendship with the boy from New York named Jake.

These 11 stories, including five Chinese Galaxy Award winners, are a blazingly original ode to planet Earth, its pasts, and its futures. Liu's fiction takes the listener to the edge of the universe and the end of time, to meet stranger fates than we could have ever imagined. With a melancholic and keen understanding of human nature, Liu's stories show humanity's attempts to reason, navigate, and above all, survive in a desolate cosmos.

Helene Wecker's dazzling debut novel tells the story of two supernatural creatures who appear mysteriously in 1899 New York. Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life by a strange man who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic. When her master dies at sea on the voyage from Poland, she is unmoored and adrift as the ship arrives in New York Harbor. Ahmad is a jinni, a being of fire, born in the ancient Syrian Desert. Trapped in an old copper flask by a Bedouin wizard centuries ago, he is released accidentally by a tinsmith in a Lower Manhattan shop.

It is an age of exploration. Jedi travel the galaxy, expanding their understanding of the Force and all the worlds and beings connected by it. Meanwhile, the Republic, led by its two chancellors, works to unite worlds in an ever-growing community among near and distant stars. On the close-orbiting planets of Eiram and E’ronoh, the growing pains of a galaxy with limited resources but unlimited ambition are felt keenly. The two worlds’ hatred for each other has fueled half a decade of escalating conflict and now threatens to consume surrounding systems.

What happens after the bombs drop? This is the troubling question Philip K. Dick addresses with Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb. It is the story of a world reeling from the effects of nuclear annihilation and fallout, a world where mutated humans and animals are the norm, and the scattered survivors take comfort from a disc jockey endlessly circling the globe in a broken-down satellite.

They mustn't harm a human being, they must obey human orders, and they must protect their own existence...but only so long as that doesn't violate rules one and two. With these Three Laws of Robotics, humanity embarked on a bold new era of evolution that would open up enormous possibilities, and unforeseen risks.

When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event", a lethal black chemical cloud floats over the Gladneys' lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys - radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings - pulsing with life yet suggesting something ominous.

Roger Torraway watched in horror as the monster lurched, toppled over and died. Project Man Plus had gone suddenly and drastically wrong. The race to colonize Mars was too important, too costly, and America was already too committed, for plans to be scrapped. They would have to make a new Martian. And Roger Torraway was it, candidate for the endless surgery, operation after painful operation, that would enable him to survive on that faraway planet.

Vergil's innovative experiment restructuring the cells of a common virus becomes a nightmare when, in order to save his research, Vergil injects the entire culture into his bloodstream.

The profoundly original and wildly entertaining short stories of a legendary Twilight Zone writer. It is only natural that Charles Beaumont would make a name for himself crafting scripts for The Twilight Zone - for his was an imagination so limitless it must have emerged from some other dimension. Perchance to Dream contains a selection of Beaumont's finest stories, including five that he later adapted for Twilight Zone episodes.

Niblock House is a rising executive at General Technics, one of a few all-powerful corporations. His work is leading General Technics to the forefront of global domination, both in the marketplace and politically - it's about to take over a country in Africa. Donald Hogan is his roommate, a seemingly sheepish bookworm. But Hogan is a spy, and he's about to discover a breakthrough in genetic engineering that will change the world...and kill him. Society is squeezed into hive-living madness by god-like mega computers and mass-marketed psychedelic drugs.

A writer in California. A doctor in Boston. A motel owner and his employee in Nevada. A priest in Chicago. A robber in New York. A little girl in Las Vegas. They’re a handful of people from across the country, living through eerie variations of the same nightmare.

Robert Charles Wilson, says The New York Times, "writes superior science fiction thrillers." His Darwinia won Canada's Aurora Award; his most recent novel, The Chronoliths, won the prestigious John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Now he tells a gripping tale of alien contact and human love in a mysterious but hopeful universe.

A secluded Pacific Northwest cottage becomes a door to the past for Tom Winter, who travels back to the New York City of 1962, followed by a human killing machine that he alone must stop.

At his death in 1988, Robert A. Heinlein left a legacy that almost single-handedly defined modern science fiction. But one of Heinlein's masterpieces was never finished. In 1955, he began work on Variable Star, a powerful and passionate tale of two young lovers driven apart by pride, power, and the vastness of interstellar time and space. Now, the Heinlein estate has authorized award-winning author Spider Robinson to expand his outline into a full-length novel. And the result is vintage Heinlein.

His name was Kevin but his keepers called him Zoo Boy. He didn't talk. He hid under tables and surrounded himself with a cage of chairs. He hadn't been out of the building in the four years since he'd come in. He was afraid of water and wouldn't take a shower. He was afraid to be naked, to change his clothes. He was nearly 16. Desperate to see change in the boy, the staff of Kevin's adolescent treatment center hired Hayden. As Hayden read to him and encouraged him to read, crawling down into his cage of chairs with him, Kevin talked.

"Something is murdering my men." Thus reads the message received from a Nazi commander stationed in a small castle high in the remote Transylvanian Alps. Invisible and silent, the enemy selects one victim per night, leaving the bloodless and mutilated corpses behind to terrify its future victims. When an elite SS extermination squad is dispatched to solve the problem, the men find something that's both powerful and terrifying. Panicked, the Nazis bring in a local expert on folklore - who just happens to be Jewish - to shed some light on the mysterious happenings.

When a house explodes in a quiet Oxford suburb and a young girl disappears in the aftermath, Sarah Tucker becomes obsessed with finding her. Accustomed to dull chores in a childless household and hosting her husband’s wearisome business clients for dinner, Sarah suddenly finds herself questioning everything she thought she knew, as her investigation reveals that people long believed dead are still among the living, while the living are fast joining the dead.

Perhaps it wasn't from our time, perhaps it wasn't even from our universe, but the arrival of the 300-kilometer long stone was the answer to humanity's desperate plea to end the threat of nuclear war. Inside the deep recesses of the stone lies Thistledown: the remnants of a human society, versed in English, Russian and Chinese. The artifacts of this familiar people foretell a great Death caused by the ravages of war, but the government and scientists are unable to decide how to use this knowledge.

Highly acclaimed author Ursula K. Le Guin lends a resonant voice to a pivotal yet often overlooked character of Vergil's The Aeneid. Born into peace and freedom, Lavinia is stunned to learn that she will be the cause of a great war - or so the prophecies and omens claim. Her fate is sealed, however, when she meets a man from Troy.

In Victoria on a former prison colony, two exiled groups - the farmers of Shantih and the city dwellers - live in apparent harmony. All is not as it seems, however. While the peace-loving farmers labor endlessly to provide food for the city, the city bosses rule the Shantih with an iron fist. When a group of farmers decide to form a new settlement further away, the bosses retaliate by threatening to crush the "rebellion".

Every novella by Ursula K. Le Guin, an icon in American literature, collected for the first time - and introduced by the legendary author - in one breathtaking volume. Ursula K. Le Guin has won multiple prizes and accolades, from the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to the Newbery Honor, Nebula, Hugo, World Fantasy, and PEN/Malamud awards. She has had her work collected over the years but never as a complete retrospective of her longer works.

Outer Space, Inner Lands includes many of the best known Ursula K. Le Guin nonrealistic stories (such as "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," "Semley' s Necklace," and "She Unnames Them") which have shaped the way many listeners see the world. She gives voice to the voiceless, hope to the outsider, and speaks truth to power - all the time maintaining her independence and sense of humor.

Three remarkable journeys into the stars: Worlds of Exile and Illusion includes Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions. These three spacefaring adventures mark the beginning of grand master Ursula K. Le Guin’s remarkable career. Set in the same universe as Le Guin’s groundbreaking classics The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, these first three books of the celebrated Hainish series follow travelers of many worlds and civilizations in the depths of space.

A must-listen collection, Words Are My Matter is a manual for investigating the depth and breadth of contemporary fiction - and, through the lens of deep considerations of contemporary writing, a way of exploring the world we are all living in. "We need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship."

Ursula K. Le Guin has enthralled fans with her imagination, clarity, and moral vision. The recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the National Book Award, the Kafka Award, and five Hugo and five Nebula Awards, this renowned writer has created a provocative, ever-evolving universe filled with diverse worlds and rich characters reminiscent of our earthly selves. Now, in The Birthday of the World, this gifted artist returns to these worlds in eight brilliant short works, including a never-before-published novella, each of which probes the essence of humanity.

From modern literature to menopause, from utopian thought to rodeos - in this classic collection of essays, Ursula K. Le Guin roves with her customary audacity over the intersecting arenas of literature, feminism, and social responsibility, exploding any received notions she comes across and revealing visionary possibilities in their stead.

When Sparrowhawk casts a spell that saves his village from destruction at the hands of the invading Kargs, Ogion, the Mage of Re Albi, encourages the boy to apprentice himself in the art of wizardry. So, at the age of 13, the boy receives his true name - Ged - and gives himself over to the gentle tutelage of the Master Ogion. But impatient with the slowness of his studies and infatuated with glory, Ged embarks for the Island of Roke, where the highest arts of wizardry are taught.

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote this highly acclaimed novel about a very special litter of kittens. Mrs. Jane Tabby has always longed toget away from the cramped alleys of the city. She knows it is too late for her, but she thinks her longing may be the reason her litter of kittens was born with wings. When they are old enough to fly, she sends the four kittens, who become known as catwings, out into the world to find their home. But they find that danger does not lurk only in city alleyways.

Ursula K. Le Guin was one of the most revered and influential writers of the 20th century. Her Earthsea books have sold millions of copies and been translated into numerous languages, while her trailblazing novel The Left Hand of Darkness was a landmark in feminist science fiction and ranks among the greatest SF novels of all time. This BBC collection brings together the magical radio retellings of both these seminal classics.