The Lions of Al-Rassan

The Lions of Al-Rassan is a work of historical fantasy. It is set in a peninsula of the same world in which The Sarantine Mosaic and The Last Light of the Sun are set, and is based upon Moorish Spain. The novel concentrates on the relationships between the three peoples: the Kindath (based on the Jews), the Asharites (based on the Muslims), and the Jaddites (based on the Christians).

Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog: A Novel

This sequel to Lessing's futuristic novel Mara and Dann continues the saga of Dann, the refugee boy prince of the Mahondi, who searched with his older sister Mara for habitable land on a planet Earth beset by a new ice age. Several characters from that novel reappear, including Griot, a soldier who served under Dann, but Mara has died in childbirth. Grief deafens General Dann to the pleas of those who believe he alone can save civilization from the warring chaos of displaced populations.

Mara and Dann: An Adventure

Tenderly perceptive, Lessing's first far-future novel since her celebrated Canopus in Argos: Archives series of the late 1970s-mid '80s features two appealing orphans precariously reaching adulthood on Earth thousands of years from now. The Ice Age brought on by the ecological rapaciousness of today's society is receding, bringing lethal drought to the Southern land of "Ifric," where a power struggle in her family has stranded seven-year-old Mara, who is fiercely caring for her even younger brother, Dann, in a remote village of neo-Neanderthals.

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

Philip K Dick notoriously charted SF's most dangerous, booby-trapped realities. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974) is a relatively straightforward tale of paranoid unease at finding the world isn't what it should be.

Jason Taverner is world-famous for his songs and regular TV show. "Thirty million people saw you zip up your fly tonight." "... It's my trademark."

 

A Scanner Darkly

Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly begins as a standard American nightmare. It is California, 1994, and society is divided between the straights in their fortified apartment complexes, and the acid-heads who are hooked on a new drug of unknown origin, substance D (for Death). Most of the detritus of the 1970s survives unchanged but surveillance technology has been advanced by the invention of the "scramble suit", which reduces the appearance of the wearer to a nebulous blur, and is compu...