American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1968-1969 (Loa #322): Past Master / Picnic on Paradise / Nova / Emphyrio [Wolfe, Gary K., ed.]

Four mind-bending novels from science fiction's most transformative decade in a deluxe collector's edition hardcover, including two long out-of-print classics

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In this second volume of a two-volume set gathering the best American science fiction from the tumultuous 1960s, R. A. Lafferty's quirky and utterly original ‚  Past Master, an unjustly neglected classic, imagines Sir Thomas More transported to the colony Astrobe in the year 2535, where he is made president of a future Utopia. In ‚  Picnic on Paradise, Joanna Russ presents her indelible heroine, Alyx, who is hired to protect a group of tourists in a hostile alien world. Samuel R. Delany's proto-cyberpunk space opera ‚  Nova, reprinted here for the first time in a text corrected by the author, combines the pacing of a revenge story with the arc of a grail-quest legend. Jack Vance's dystopian thriller ‚  Emphyrio ‚  is the coming-of-age story of Ghyl, who has been raised in a world barring the use of automation but has a strong sense of subversive individualism. The novel has been restored to the author's original text, without later editorial interventions.