New Releases by George Alec Effinger

Zwei Astronauten auf dem Planet der Affen... Ihre Namen sind Alan Virdon und Pete Burke. Als Astronauten der US-Airforce wurden sie unter härtesten Bedingungen geschult und mannigfaltigen Überlebenstests unterworfen. Doch als ihr Vorstoß ins All auf der Erde der Zukunft endet, sind Alan und Pete unvorbereitet auf das, was sie erwartet: Die Erde wird beherrscht von intelligenten Affen, und jeder Mensch – egal ob Mann, Frau oder Kind – ist nichts anderes als ein Sklave der Affen... Terror auf dem Planet der Affen basiert auf der US-amerikanischen TV-Serie Planet Of The Apes, die es im Jahr 1974 auf 14 Episoden brachte und die auf der gleichnamigen Kino-Reihe aufbaute. Der vorliegende Band enthält die Adaptionen Hetzjagd auf dem Planet der Affen, Terror auf dem Planet der Affen und Gefangen auf dem Planet der Affen.

The complete Hugo and Nebula Award–nominated cyberpunk trilogy by an author whose work is "wry and black and savage" (George R. R. Martin). Praised as "a perfect example of how exciting the subgenre can and should be," George Alec Effinger's Budayeen Cycle is a towering and timeless science fiction achievement that continues to amaze, shock, and captivate readers ( SF Signal). When Gravity Fails: Set in a high-tech near future featuring an ascendant Muslim world and divided Western superpowers, this cult classic takes readers into a world with mind- or mood-altering drugs for any purpose, brains enhanced by electronic hardware, and surgically altered bodies. Street hustler Marîd Audran has always prided himself on his independence, free from commitments, connections, and even cybernetic modifications. But when a string of brutal murders lands him on the radar of Friedlander Bey, the most powerful and dangerous man in the decadent Arab ghetto, the Budayeen, Audran is forced to change his loner ways, or risk losing his life . . . A Fire in the Sun: Once a small-time smuggler, Marîd Audran has, to his chagrin, moved up in the ranks of the criminal underworld to become a lieutenant in Friedlander Bey's shadowy empire. Tasked with being Bey's eyes and ears inside local law enforcement, Audran finds himself tracking yet another serial killer through the streets of the Budayeen. And the closer he gets to his target, the more embroiled he becomes in the deadly political machinations hidden behind the city's façade. The Exile Kiss: Marîd Audran is finally learning to appreciate the wealth and benefits that come from being on Friedlander Bey's payroll when a powerful enemy does the unthinkable, and gets both Audran and Bey exiled from the Budayeen. Abandoned in the lifeless and lethal Arabian Desert, Audran and Bey have only one option: survive long enough to exact revenge on the man responsible.

The Hugo Award–winning author's "most memorable short stories . . . a tribute from those who best knew his work—his friends, fellow writers, and editors" (SFRevu). George Alec Effinger was a true master of satirical Science Fiction. Before his death in 2002, he gained the highest esteem amongst his peers for his pitch-perfect stylistic mimicry and his great insight into the human condition. Despite a life filled with chronic illness and pain, Effinger was a prolific novelist and short story writer, earning multiple Nebula and Hugo Award nominations. LIVE! FROM PLANET EARTH represents a very special look at the many works of this unique genius. These 22 short pieces have been specifically selected and introduced by his fellow writers and editors, from Michael Bishop to Jack Dann, Mike Resnick to Neil Gaiman. Each writes about his or her memories of Effinger and his legacy. Included are "The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything" in which Earth is visited by benevolent aliens who happen to have annoying opinions about everything. "Everything but Honor" goes along as a black physicist time-travels to 1860 to murder a Civil War general. Also included here are Effinger's O.Niemand stories, which perfectly mimic the styles of Steinbeck, Hemingway and Twain. The results are a tour de force sure to please existing fans and make new fans of anyone who reads them.

Far into the future, Hartstein's graduation present from his grandparents was a wonderful trip...into the past. He had a long future in the doughnut industry to look forward to but this trip was the icing on the cake. It had been a long time since that first experiment in time travel was successfully pulled off, although not without its flaws. Now, in the future, time travel was a lucrative tourist industry. But the time travel industry was keeping one little fact to itself: two percent never came back. This cover-up was the work of the Agency. The Agency knew what others did not: that the past wasn't really the past but a complicated dynamic of individual perceptions of what the past might have been. The past isn't real and reality becomes a state of mind. While selling their particular brand of escapist entertainment and vacation packages, the Agency didn't bother to tell its clients or the populace in general that a war was going on--a time war. The Agency was spending its time in a neck-and-neck battle with the Temporary Underground. The battlefield was none other than the space-time continuum, the weapons were time-shifts and theoretical mathematics. Hartstein had no idea what his trip would be or where it would take him.

A novel of first alien contact—and the conspiracy it unveils—from the Hugo Award–winning author of When Gravity Falls. "Because it's there"—that was why Earth men climbed Mt. Everest and why, in 2017, they set out for the distant star Wolf 359. In 1988 they had learned that intelligent inhabitants from a planet orbiting Wolf 359 had been signaling Earth. That fact was reason enough to dispatch a manned probe to explore and investigate. But perhaps there was another reason for the journey—a reason too incredible for Earth people ever to imagine, a reason they may never understand, even when they land on the planet they call Jennings' World. Author George Alec Effinger was a true master of satirical science fiction. Before his death in 2002 he gained the highest esteem among his peers for his pitch-perfect stylistic mimicry and his great insight into the human condition. Despite a life filled with chronic illness, Effinger was a prolific novelist and short story writer, earning multiple Nebula and Hugo Award nominations.

Science fiction stories that offer "a poignant glimpse into the author's psyche . . . this bittersweet collection [is] one to be cherished" ( Publishers Weekly). When we first meet Courane, he must face down TECT, the self-aware computer that has come to control Earth and its colonial planets. Exiled to Planet D, Courane races to cure the debilitating disease that attacks each of the planet's residents, even as his own memory begins to fade. Unfortunately, his only source of information about the illness is TECT itself, and the computer's agenda doesn't seem to line up with Courane's. In the seven other stories contained in A Thousand Deaths, Courane begins to blur reality and fiction as Effinger expertly plays with narrative conventions. However, these are not simply the whims of a science fiction writer; they are the frameworks the Nebula and Hugo Award–nominated author uses to answer questions about existence no one else even thought to ask. While George Alec Effinger's Budayeen novel When Gravity Fails is perhaps his most famous work, his lesser-known novel The Wolves of Memory remained his favorite. In it, he introduced readers to Sandor Courane, an everyman and Effinger stand-in who struggles as he swims against the currents of fate. In life and in his multiple deaths, Sandor Courane serves as the unifying force in this collection of Effinger's stories, starting with The Wolves of Memory and getting ever more clever and off the wall from there.

The Hugo Award–winning author returns to the futuristic, high-tech Middle East setting of When Gravity Falls in this "major science fiction epic" ( Locus). In a world filled with so many puppets, strings tend to get tangled. In this follow-up to the groundbreaking cyberpunk novel When Gravity Fails, the Budayeen is still a very dangerous place, a high-tech Arabian ghetto where power and murder go hand in hand. Marid Audran used to be a low-level street hustler, relying on his wits and independence. Now he's a cop planted in the force by Friedlander Bey, the powerful "godfather" of the Budayeen. Marid is supposed to simply be Bey's envoy into the police, but as a series of grisly murders piles up—children, prostitutes, a fellow officer—he is drawn deeper and deeper into the city's chaos. Would Marid give up all his newfound money and power to get out of this mess? Absolutely. If only he could. But answers are never that easy and choices are never completely one's own in the Budayeen.

Stories that "belong to a world that has been shaped not only by Asimov and Heinlein but also by Borges, Pynchon and Barthelme" ( The New York Times). In IRRATIONAL NUMBERS, as with much of his work, author George Alec Effinger straddles the line between allegorical fantasy and science fiction. It's a vein Effinger mines for a deep, meaningful understanding of human nature. Challenging and disquieting in the way only the best fiction can be, this collection of eight magnificent pieces of fiction will have readers clamoring for more. George Alec Effinger was a true master of satirical Science Fiction. Before his death in 2002, he gained the highest esteem amongst his peers for his pitch-perfect stylistic mimicry and his great insight into the human condition. Despite a life filled with chronic illness, Effinger was a prolific novelist and short story writer, earning multiple Nebula and Hugo Award nominations.

A plan to make a perfect world leads to its destruction in this science fiction thriller from the Hugo Award–winning author of When Gravity Falls. In a wild and crazy novel composed equally of black humor and deep, humane insight, George Alec Effinger strips away the veneer of civilization, revealing the deep truths by which we all live. Without the culture we have accumulated, existence is sometimes a nightmare, sometimes absurd, sometimes courageous and wonderful. Utopia 3 is a movement spreading through the world, a project designed to mold everyone into people devoted to brotherhood and peace. A large portion of Europe is set aside for members of the pilot program. Each member is permitted to travel anywhere within the project, do anything, take anything without limit. Each person undergoes an indoctrination designed to prevent destructive or harmful acts. This is the meaning and hope of Utopia 3. This story focuses on three people: Eileen Brant, a weary young woman escaping the dead-end life she was leading; Justin Benarcek, a man who tries either too hard or not at all; and Bo Staefler, who, accompanied by a silent Arab boy, accidentally joins Utopia 3 by standing too near the genuine members at the wrong moment. These three people are caught up in a growing scheme, a deadly and evil plan that threatens to destroy the project and, ultimately, the entire world. A conflict greater than any war in history is about to be unleashed and only Brant, Benarcek, and Staefler can hope to prevent it. Death in Florence has also been published as Utopia 3.

A hilarious story of overly helpful aliens and a WWII alternate history tale from the Hugo Award–winning author of When Gravity Falls. These two short stories serve as a wonderful glimpse into the mind of multiple Hugo and Nebula Award nominee George Alec Effinger, a singular talent in the world of SF. In The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything, benevolent aliens have arrived on Earth, sharing their knowledge but also their annoying, overbearing opinions about every little thing. Target: Berlin! offers an absurdist ride through an alternate version of World War II, in which Effinger has reshaped the aerial campaigns into battles by car.

Three slightly different versions of the same man inhabit three radically different versions of our world in this novel by a Nebula Award winner. Ernest Weinraub, Ernst Weinraub, Ernst Weintraub—three slightly different versions of the same name, the same man. Each incarnation of Weintraub/Weinraub inhabits a different version of our world: Ernest Weinraub lives in a maddeningly overcrowded New York, a hellish near-future world where sanity and life are imperiled by a nightmare of pollution, overpopulation and manic power games played by the six despotic men who rule Earth; Ernst Weinraub is a poet and an intellectual who lives in a decadent world in which America has never been colonized, Europe and Asia are crumbling, and Africa has only one populated city, a world where drink, drugs and sex reduce human being to little more than animals and a man feels himself being sucked under with all the others; Ernst Weintraub, an idealistic revolutionary, lives in a world in which the Allies lost the First World War to "Jermany" and people are forced into a terror-ridden underground existence as tyranny rides roughshod over man and civilization. The single factor uniting these startlingly different worlds is Weinraub/Weintraub. But even he is molded and distorted, it would appear, by the various environments and societies, and his problems seem entirely different in each of the three worlds. Yet, as the book progresses, both he and the reader learn that neither time nor place matters—every person must sooner or later make certain basic decisions. Relatives is a novel about personality and about duty, chiefly one's duty to the state. The Weinraub/Weintraub variations are carefully orchestrated so that each tells the same story while presenting vastly varying reasons for a single outcome. Once having experienced these three powerful visions of an individual's interaction with society, one is compelled to consider, and reconsider, the foundations of moral and social responsibility.

From a Nebula Award winner: A "phenomenal," action-packed tale of crime, corruption, and cybernetics ( Locus). Set in a divided near future, The Exile Kiss is author George Alec Effinger's third book about the high-tech Arab ghetto called the Budayeen. It is a world filled with mind- or mood-altering drugs for any purpose; brains enhanced by electronic hardware, with plug-in memory additions and new personalities; and bodies shaped to perfection by surgery. Marid Audran, having risen from the rank of street hustler, is now an enforcer for Friedlander Bey, one of the most feared men in the Budayeen. But betrayal and exile send Marid and Bey out into the lifeless Arabian desert. Can they survive on their own? Will they make it back into hostile territory? Will they find their revenge? With this culmination of the sequence of Marid books, readers will quickly understand why this series is considered one of the great works of modern SF and a defining example of the cyber-punk genre.

Someone's about to rip off a sleepy little Louisiana town! Chuck's gang of truckers are geared for looting. When Tom masterminds a false hurricane alert...When sheriff Boshardt orders an evacuation of the town...When Chuck moves in to strip the town clean...Their cool caper escalates into a devastating triple-cross that rips the rooftops off everything from Miami to New Orleans—and nothing—no one will ever be the same!

"In the 23rd century, when plug-in personality modules are as easy to obtain as gender reassignment, pleasures are cheap and death is easy. Marid Audran has kept his independence the hard way, selling his detection skills in the slums of the Budayeen. By his standards, it's a comfortable life. But his hard-won freedom is about to be tested ..."--Jacket.

The classic of cyberpunk SF

These nine tales are set in Budayeen, the walled city in the sand, a city of dark shadows and even darker inhabitants, where a Raymond Chandleresque vision has been created--hardboiled, noir, futuristic--but with a twist. The sights, smells, and denizens of Budayeen are brought to life--from the city's sordid, decadent underbelly to the glamorous excesses of the sex industry.

Pauvre Marîd Audran ! Lui qui se croyait définitivement à l'abri des galères, respecté (on l'appelle " cheikh Marîd ") parce que lié au tout-puissant parrain " Papa " Friedlander Bey, le voilà injustement accusé d'un meurtre et expédié sans ménagement chez les bédouins en plein désert d'Arabie ! Pire encore : Papa partage son exil. Dès lors ils n'auront plus qu'un seul souci : se disculper, mais surtout appliquer en bons musulmans les préceptes du Saint Livre. Car n'y est-il pas dit qu'à ceux qui sont lésés Dieu a prescrit le recours au talion ? Faisant suite à Gravité à la manque et Privé de désert, mais pouvant se lire indépendamment, une nouvelle enquête du Philip Marlowe de l'Orient islamique.

Dans le monde exotique et décadent du Boudayin, il faut être prêt aux rencontres les plus inattendues. On y croise aussi bien des avatars de James Bond (sourcil arqué, gin et Walther PPK) que des Levantins adipeux, des disciples enturbannés de Jack l'éventreur, des Sœurs Veuves noires (cuir et couteau), ou un " parrain " bicentenaire. Il faut dire que dans ce Moyen-Orient du XXIIe siècle, il suffit de s'enficher dans le crâne un module mimétique pour changer de personnalité. Mais pour Marîd Audran, synthèse islamique de Philip Marlowe et Nero Wolfe, comme pour tous les autres protagonistes de cet additif aux Mille et Une Nuits, le monde a beau se déglinguer, le rite du café à la cardamone, ou le ramadân, ça reste sacré. Et c'est ainsi qu'Allah est grand.

While attending college in Michigan, van Eyck concocts a plan to get rich quick by stealing computer tapes containing the payrolls of the three major auto companies and ransoming them back during labor negotiations

Science fiction stories deal with baseball, ice hockey, chess, basketball, running, football, and horse racing

The human race has turned over its cares and woes to the infinitely superior mechanism of TECT, but not everyone is at home in this new world.