When Gravity Fails, the first Marid novel, is set in a high-tech near future featuring a divided United States and USSR, a world with mind- or mood-altering drugs for any purpose, brains enhanced by electronic hardware, with plug-in memory additions and modules offering the wearer new personalities (James Bond, celebrities), and bodies shaped to perfection by surgery. Marid Audran, an unmodified and fairly honest street survivor, lives in a decadent Arab ghetto, the Budayeen, and against his best instincts, becomes involved in a series of inexplicable murders. Some seem like routine assassinations, carried out with an old-fashioned handgun by a man wearing a plug-in James Bond persona; others, involving whores, feature prolonged torture and horrible mutilations. The problem comes to the attention of Budayeen godfather Friedlander Bey, who makes Audran an offer he can’t refuse. Audran submits to electronic brain-enhancement in order to track down and deal with the killer or killers.

Now Vergil Magus, the powerful sorcerer-poet, returns in the long-awaited prequel to Avram Davidson’s bestselling novel of fable and magic, The Phoenix and the Mirror. Here, Vergil’s extraordinary adventures begin as he journeys into the hideous heart of evil and darkness . . .

Enter the Very Rich City of Averno and discover a place on untold riches and untamed lusts, of orgies and drunken revelries, of madness and human corruption. Here is a decaying metropolis of wizards and warlocks, where old crones spin webs of cruelty and deceit, and hell lurks in a labyrinth of underworld caves. Vergil has come to Averno to uncover the secret of its eternal fires, the very center of its wealth and prominence. But as he explores the inner sancta of this ancient and heartless inferno, he finds, too, the fiery bed of Poppaea, the beautiful wife of the city’s most influential Magnates. With this forbidden pleasure comes forbidden knowledge, and Vergil is drawn into a web of intrigue that threatens to turn the terrible power of Averno against him.

For centuries, the lords of the city have thrived on the bloody sacrifice of their own people. Now they are determined to add one more name to the scrolls of Averno’s dead . . . and to cast Vergil, now an outlaw, into the burning pits of the dying empire.

David Brin’s Uplift novels are among the most thrilling and extraordinary science fiction ever written.  Sundiver, Startide Rising, and The Uplift War–a New York Times bestseller–together make up one of the most beloved sagas of all time.  Brin’s tales are set in a future universe in which no species can reach sentience without being “uplifted” by a patron race.  But the greatest mystery of all remains unsolved: who uplifted humankind?

As galactic armadas clash in quest of the ancient fleet of the Progenitors, a brutal alien race seizes the dying planet of Garth.  The various uplifted inhabitants of Garth must battle their overlords or face ultimate extinction.  At stake is the existence of Terran society and Earth, and the fate of the entire Five Galaxies.  Sweeping, brilliantly crafted, inventive and dramatic, The Uplift War is an unforgettable story of adventure and wonder from one of today’s science fiction greats.

The first volume of Gene Wolfe’s powerful story of Latro, a Roman mercenary who received a head injury that deprived him of his short-term memory. In return it gave him the ability to converse with supernatural creatures, gods and goddesses who invisibly inhabit the ancient landscape.

On July 26, Arthur Gordon learns that Europa, the sixth moon of Jupiter, has disappeared. Not hiding, not turned black, but gone.

On September 28th, Edward Shaw finds an error in the geological records of Death Valley. A cinder cone was left off the map. Could it be new? Or, stranger yet, could it be artificial? The answer may be lying beside it—a dying Guest who brings devastating news for Edward and for Planet Earth.

As more unexplained phenomena spring up around the globe—a granite mountain appearing in Australia, sounds emanating from the earth’s core, flashes of light among the asteroids—it becomes clear to some that the end is approaching, and there is nothing we can do.

In The Forge of God, award-winning author Greg Bear describes the final days of the world on both a massive, scientific scale and in the everyday, emotional context of individual human lives. Facing the destruction of all they know, some people turn to God, others to their families, and a few turn to saviors promising escape from a planet being torn apart. Will they make it in time? And who gets left behind to experience the last moments of beauty and chaos on earth?

Nominated for a Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1987 and for Hugo and Locus Awards in 1988, The Forge of God is an engrossing read, breathtaking in its scope and in its detail.