Worlds Enough & Time
Five Tales of Speculative Fiction
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- 7,99 €
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- 7,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
An extraordinary artist with few rivals in his chosen arena, Dan Simmons possesses a restless talent that continually presses boundaries while tantalizing the mind and touching the soul. Now he offers us a superb quintet of novellas -- five dazzling masterworks of speculative fiction, including "Orphans of the Helix," his award-winning return to the Hyperion Universe -- that demonstrates the unique mastery, breathtaking invention, and flawless craftsmanship of one of contemporary fiction's true greats.
Human colonists seeking something other than godhood encounter their long-lost "cousins"...and an ancient scourge.
A devastated man in suicide's embrace is caught up in a bizarre cat-and-mouse game with a young woman possessing a world-ending power.The distant descendants of a once-oppressed people learn a chilling lesson about the persistence of the past.A terrifying ascent up the frigid, snow-swept slopes of K2 shatters preconceptions and reveals the true natures of four climbers, one of whom is not human.At the intersection of a grand past and a threadbare present, an aging American in Russia confronts his own mortality as he glimpses a wondrous future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As in his last collection, Lovedeath (1993), the chameleonic Simmons shifts effortlessly between dark fantasy, space opera, hard SF and mainstream fiction, offering five high-concept novellas in which parallel plots and colliding lives yield intricately layered and emotionally resonant narratives. In "Looking for Kelly Dahl," a self-pitying alcoholic teacher finds salvation when he is absorbed into a fantasy world of unsullied nature conjured by a sexually abused student. "On K2 with Kanakaredes" distills a potent study of universal values from an account of a team of mountain climbers three human and one extraterrestrial struggling together to scale a formidable peak. Occasionally the stories can seem too consciously didactic, as in "The Ninth of Av," which depends on a strained analogy between Scott's failed polar expedition and an episode of future genocide, and "Orphans of the Helix," a vividly detailed but surprisingly dramaless extension of the author's landmark Hyperion/Endymion saga. But the author's lapidary prose and ambitious ideas more often mesh seamlessly, as in "The End of Gravity," where he turns a fleshed-out treatment for an as-yet-unproduced film about humanity's place in the cosmic scheme into a mesmerizing meditation with the intensity of a prose poem. Simmons's readers know to expect literate and illuminating fiction that pushes the envelope of his chosen story forms, and this volume will not disappoint them. FYI:Simmons's latest novel is A Winter Haunting (Forecasts, Jan. 14).