New Releases by Adam Roberts

Klara et son père, Miklos Gyeroffy, font partie des rares chanceux capables de se placer sur orbite par leurs propres moyens. Là-haut, un nouvel espace de liberté s''offre à eux, un vaste territoire vierge de toute règle : les Hautes-Landes. Mais, outre les riches excentriques, cette nouvelle frontière attire aussi de dangereux criminels, bienheureux de pouvoir échapper aux poursuites des autorités terriennes. C''est, sur trois générations, l''histoire de cette nation naissante qui nous est contée, une histoire inextricablement liée à celle de la famille Gyeroffy.

Award nominated SF author Adam Roberts takes on Dickens in this festive zombie gorefest. Marley was dead. To begin with. The legendary Ebenezeer Scrooge sits in his house counting money. The boards that he has nailed up over the doors and the windows shudder and shake under the blows from the endless zombie hordes that crowd the streets hungering for his flesh and his miserly braaaaiiiiiinns! Just how did the happiest day of the year slip into a welter of blood, innards and shambling, ravenous undead on the snowy streets of old London town? Will the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future be able to stop the world from drowning under a top-hatted and crinolined zombie horde? It''s the Dickensian Zombie Apocalypse - God Bless us, one and all!

Russia, 1946, the Nazis recently defeated. Stalin gathers half a dozen of the top Soviet science fiction authors in a dacha in the countryside somewhere. Convinced that the defeat of America is only a few years away, and equally convinced that the Soviet Union needs a massive external threat to hold it together, to give it purpose and direction, he tells the writers: ''I want you to concoct a story about aliens poised to invade earth ... I want it to be massively detailed, and completely believable. If you need props and evidence to back it up, then we can create them. But when America is defeated, your story must be so convincing that the whole population of Soviet Russia believes in it - the population of the whole world!'' The little group of writers gets down to the task and spends months working on it. But then new orders come from Moscow: they are told to drop the project; Stalin has changed his mind; forget everything about it. So they do. They get on with their lives in their various ways; some of them survive the remainder of Stalin''s rule, the changes of the 50s and 60s. And then, in the aftermath of Chernobyl, the survivors gather again, because something strange has started to happen. The story they invented in 1946 is starting to come true ... A typically mind-blowing SF novel from one of the genre''s literary stars.

Doctor Whom, the grammatically correct TimeLord (or should that be Time Lord? Or is it Timelord?) has come to save our universe from the terror''s of sloppy syntax and bad grammar. With his intrepid assistant Lynne: hes here to correct greengrocers sign''s, popular fiction and government memos (memoes?) before inaccurate and lazy communication rips apart the very fabric of the space time continuum. Is it any wonder that the rise of global warming has coincided with the decline in the teaching of Latin in our schools? I do''nt think so. Will the Doctor save us all? or will his evil nemisises (nemisiss? nemisi?) The Dalek''s triumph and rule over a universe where no-one has any clear idea of the correct usage of semi-colons?

Hector travels across America to visit his father on a ranch. He discovers that he has constructed a cult who await the impact of an asteroid. However, Hector is amazed when the section of Earth that the ranch is on suddenly breaks free from the rest of the planet during the collision. He struggles with his skepticism and acceptance of the fact that he is part of the remnants of the human race, on a splinter from the Earth.

Two experimental essays engaging with the science fiction concepts of ''Alien'' and ''Star''.

Mai 2005 verra la sortie du sixième (en fait, le troisième) et dernier film de la série (à part le premier, qui vient ensuite, bien qu''il soit sorti en 1977, et après il y a les deux suivants). Vous pigez rien ? Normal. Pourtant, malgré cet ordre bizarroïde, c''est l''oeuvre cinématographique qui domine la culture populaire depuis 30 ans. Tout simplement le plus gros truc de SF au cinoche qui ait jamais existé. Et la plus puissante franchise de merchandising. C''est pourquoi il était grand temps de parodier ce qui semble avoir été fait pour. " Bien rigoler, tu vas ! " Yodla (maître Jedognon).

Jupiter, magnified so as to fill half the sky, appears suddenly one evening. From that night onwards, life continues as best it can under this sublime and overwhelming apparition in the heavens. People everywhere struggle to come to terms with what it means, with how it can have happened. Is it a portent of the end of the world?

Tighe lives on the Worldwall. It towers above his village and falls away below it. It is vast and unforgiving and it is everything they know. Life is hard on the Worldwall, little more than a clinging on for dear life. And then one day Tighe falls off the world. And falls, and falls and falls . . . and survives. He finds a new part of the Worldwall, a city, more people than he ever imagined existed and a war. A war fought by the Popes and their armies. A war Tighe must join, a war that will take him on a journey into the heart of the mystery behind the Worldwall. ON is a superbly confident novel of a changed world. It has echoes of a Canticle for Leibowitz and The Book of the New Sun. It is a remarkable feat of imagination and sustained narrative drive. Its hero is immensely appealing. Coming after SALT it is evidence of an extraordinary SF career in the making.

Science Fiction offers a critical account of the phenomenon of science fiction, illustrating the critical terminology and following the contours of its continuing history. The impact of technological advances on the genre is discussed.

En la última década se ha intensificado el número de acciones humanitarias de diverso tipo. Para ello se han usado tanto medios no violentos como acciones militares. Desde Somalia hasta Kosovo, pasando por Haití, Ruanda, Bosnia o Sudán. Estados, organizaciones multilaterales y ONG practican el humanitarismo en Estados frágiles con resultados altamente desiguales. La acción humanitaria se percibe popularmente como dar de un lado y recibir de otro. Sin embargo, se trata de una relación mucho más compleja en la que intervienen factores como los intereses políticos y económicosde todos los actores de la cadena de la solidaridad, las posicionesmorales, las dificultades técnicasy operativas, y las percepciones que se tienen, especialmente a través de los medios periodísticos. Este libro analiza los problemas centrales de la acción humanitaria en el fin de siglo: la cuestión jurídica y el derecho a la asistencia humanitaria; el marco ético; la constelación de actores y su coordinación; los receptores en la cadena de la ayuda; la relación circular entre cooperación al desarrollo e intervención de emergencia humanitaria; el papel de los medios periodísticosen las crisis humanitarias; y una evaluación práctica de la Operación Lifeline Sudán. Los desafíos de la acción humanitaria es producto de una investigación del Instituto de Derechos Humanos Pedro Arrupe (Universidad de Deusto), el Centro de Investigación para la Paz (Fundación Hogar del Empleado), y Médicos sin Fronteras que crearon la Unidad de Estudios Humanitarios. Los autores son Adam Roberts, Joana Abrisketa, Xabier Etxeberría, Francisco Rey, David Sogge, Joanne Raisin, Alexander Rambostham, Mariano Aguirre y un equipo de Médicos sin Fronteras.

Includes bibliographical references.