À ma gauche, Jack Barron, présentateur vedette, empêcheur de tourner en rond et pourfendeur des injustices en prime time devant cent millions de téléspectateurs. À ma droite, Benedict Howards, industriel tout-puissant qui règne sur la finance, la politique et les médias. Avantage Howards, qui dispose du bien le plus précieux, celui auquel personne, si intègre soit-il, ne peut résister : le secret de l'immortalité. Personne sauf Jack l'incorruptible, qui n'est pas près de la fermer...
Imaginez une Terre au destin différent.
Tandis que les États-Unis s'enfoncent dans la récession, le protectionnisme et la paranoïa, une nouvelle Union soviétique, poursuivant la trajectoire entamée par Mikhaïl Gorbatchev, s'intègre à une Europe en passe de devenir la première puissance mondiale et vers laquelle convergent toutes les énergies.
C'est en Europe que Jerry Reed, jeune ingénieur déçu par l'orientation désormais exclusivement militaire de la NASA, se réfugie pour poursuivre son rêve d'aller dans l'espace ; et que vient travailler Sonia Gagarine, fille du Printemps russe éprise de liberté. Leur histoire se confondra avec celle de la Grande Europe en marche, au milieu des crises qui secouent ce début de XXIe siècle.
Imaginez une Terre au destin différent.
Tandis que les États-Unis s'enfoncent dans la récession, le protectionnisme et la paranoïa, une nouvelle Union soviétique, poursuivant la trajectoire entamée par Mikhaïl Gorbatchev, s'intègre à une Europe en passe de devenir la première puissance mondiale et vers laquelle convergent toutes les énergies.
C'est en Europe que Jerry Reed, jeune ingénieur déçu par l'orientation désormais exclusivement militaire de la NASA, se réfugie pour poursuivre son rêve d'aller dans l'espace ; et que vient travailler Sonia Gagarine, fille du Printemps russe éprise de liberté. Leur histoire se confondra avec celle de la Grande Europe en marche, au milieu des crises qui secouent ce début de XXIe siècle.
Bart Fraden est à la recherche d'un monde à conquérir. Il pense avoir trouvé le candidat idéal : Sangre, planète dominée depuis trois siècles par la Confrérie de la Souffrance, bande de sadiques qui s'adonnent à la torture, l'esclavage et le cannibalisme. Fraden est persuadé que sa population est mûre pour une révolution, surtout si c'est lui qui la commande. Pourtant, ce qu'il découvre sur place risque non seulement de contrarier son plan, mais mettra en péril son âme...
DEUX OEUVRES MAJEURES DE L'AUTEUR DE JACK BARRON ET L'ÉTERNITE ENFIN REEDITEES
Les Avaleurs de vide
Depuis des siècles qu'ils errent dans l'espace, les vagabonds du Trek se sont presque accoutumés à l'immensité interstellaire. Presque. Car l'espoir ne les a pas quittés de découvrir un jour le nouvel Éden qui remplacera le monde que leurs ancêtres ont assassiné : la Terre.
La Grande Migration sillonne l'abîme infini, précédée par des éclaireurs, les avaleurs de vide, qui, eux, connaissent l'insupportable vérité...
Deux Ex
L'esprit d'un prêtre mourant a été téléchargé dans l'ordinateur le plus avancé de son temps, provoquant ainsi un conflit fascinant, divertissant et intellectuellement stimulant entre les divers personnages impliqués dans cette expérience, y compris une papesse à la tête de l'Église catholique et un hacker qui préférerait être en train de naviguer sur les mers, pétard à la main...
Les Brigades vertes, des éco-terroristes de choc, viennent briser la routine des feuilletons débiles et du blablabla à propos des derniers scandales hollywoodiens sur la petite chaîne de télévision KLAX-TV. Ce n'est pas seulement le personnel qu'ils prennent en otage, mais l'Information. Cette Information qui nous cache tant de choses...
Une Amérique en proie au chaos économique et à des inégalités sociales exacerbées, où le métro de New York est devenu une vaste cour des Miracles, théâtre permanent d'une lutte sans merci pour survivre. Triste destin pour la Chair à pavé.
Une Amérique dévastée par l'épidémie du sida, où les malades sont parqués dans des Zones de Quarantaine, où le sexe virtuel a remplacé l'amour physique, où s'écrivent au quotidien les sinistres Chroniques de l'Âge du Fléau.
Une Amérique bien-pensante, qui contraint à l'exil les francs-tireurs comme... Norman Spinrad, réfugié à Paris pour fuir les foudres de la censure. Quelle importance ? puisque La vie continue.
En trois visions d'apocalypse, Norman Spinrad règle ses comptes avec son pays d'origine. Trois descentes aux Enfers d'une puissance dévastatrice.
Boris Johnson rêve de démocratie. Sous le joug de l'Hégémonie, l'humanité vit sous contrôle permanent, et la moindre incartade est punie d'une mort immédiate. La liste des interdits ? Personne ne la connaît exactement... Dans l'ombre, la Ligue pour la Démocratie et la Confrérie des Assassins luttent pour décapiter le pouvoir. La première saura-t-elle répondre aux aspirations de ceux qui souffrent ? À quelles extrémités la seconde est-elle prête à en venir pour restaurer la liberté par le chaos ? La liberté... un concept banni depuis si longtemps. La réponse que cherche Boris se trouve-t-elle parmi eux ? Ou devrait-il lever les yeux vers les étoiles ? « Une éblouissante démonstration politique. L'intelligence et la maîtrise de Spinrad éclatent. » Jean-Pierre Andrevon « Un livre à lire en priorité. » Joël Houssin Norman Spinrad, né le 15 septembre 1940 à New York, est un auteur de science-fiction américain appartenant à la Nouvelle Vague littéraire qui a révolutionné la science-fiction dans les années 1960-1970. Il a été rendu célèbre par des livres perçus à l'époque comme de véritables bombes, principalement Jack Barron et l'Éternité et Rêve de fer. Après avoir vécu à Los Angeles puis à San Francisco, il vit depuis plusieurs années à Paris.
American Dream or American Nightmare? Norman Spinrad describes The Star-Spangled Future:
"America is something new under the sun. not so much a nation at all as a precog flash of the future of the species . . .
I wrote believing that I was simply writing disconnected science fiction stories from whatever came into my head . . . And they all turned out to be about America, the leading edge of all possible futures unfolding around us . . . After all, that was what was coming into my head, that's the mother lode of science fiction realities - the American fusion plasma of which we are creatures - and all we have to do is keep ourselves open to it . . . that's my definition of science fiction.
We have seen the future and it is us."
A collection of short stories from the acclaimed author of 'Bug Jack Barron'. Includes "No Direction Home" which depicts a drug dystopia, and "Sierra Maestra." A violent rock group with maniacal music boils up a craze for a nuclear blast. A man finds himself blown into a ghastly world by a bolt of lightning.
Pacifica was a monument to freedom and equality-until the off-worlders came. The Femocrats, a party of female separatists, and the Transcendental Scientists, an institute of technofascists dedicated to male supremacy. Carlotta Madigan, Pacifica's prime minister, and Royce Lindblad, her handsome young lover and media adviser, had to find a way to stop the Pink and Blue War-without becoming casualties themselves.
Bart Fraden came looking for a planet to conquer - and found the hell-hole of the galaxy: Sangre - the killer planet. For three centuries Sangre had been dominated by the sadistic Brotherhood of Pain, a priesthood dedicated to torture, slavery and cannibalism. Bart sensed the kind of revolutionary potential that he could manipulate to make himself ultimate ruler. But he hadn't counted on the apathy of a people bred as meat animals and the dreadful power wielded by the Brotherhood. Sangre might cost him more than his life - it might destroy his soul . . .
The Great Tyrant rules the solar system with absolute terror. Only one man dares to fight back.
The time is the 24th century. Humankind populates the entire solar system from icy Pluto to boiling Mercury. Great domed cities, humming factories, hordes of workers, all feed the power of the dictatorship that controls all life. Only a small group among the cowed population dares rebel in a struggle that pits democracy against tyranny.
But there is a third force at work as well. A mysterious band of assassins whose final solution to the problem of humanity's fate is as terrifying as it is irresistible - one of them is known as the AGENT OF CHAOS.
Earth was programmed for destruction in the mad war of the computer worlds - unless the Solarians could stop the machines!
Three hundred years ago the Solarians retreated to the safety of their Fortress as Earth became embroiled in the first of the computer wars with the dread Duglaari Empire.
The Solarians' final word to all humanity was a promise to reappear one day and bring it to victory. Suddenly, with Earth on the verge of becoming a helpless victim of the merciless Duglaars, the Solarians made contact with Fleet Commander Jay Palmer. It was an offer of aid.
But the Solarians' plan was so cunning, so fraught with danger, that Jay faced the greatest decision of his life - and that of Earth's:
Accept their ingenious strategy as a stroke of genius or reject it as a trick designed to destroy human life forever.
Welcome aboard the sex-drive void ship . . .
Captain Genro commands the giant spaceship Dragon Zephyr - on board are ten thousand passengers in electrocoma, a smaller number of conscious passengers eagerly utilising the ship's dream chambers - and a Pilot.
In the context of space travel, the Pilot is merely a biological component in the machine. Always a woman, her function is to launch the ship into the Jump by means of a cosmic orgasm. She is a pariah, shunned by all.
Void Captain Genro should never even have spoken to his Pilot, let alone tried to embark on a relationship with her. When he did so, the result was every space traveller's nightmare.
A Blind Jump into the Void . . .
It's just another sleazy, smoggy day at KLAX: But today is anything but normal. Green Army Commandos is what they call themselves. They're violent ecoterrorists, they're armed to the teeth, and they haven't just taken over the station - they're hijacking the news itself. The Bad News Is they've wired themselves and the station with enough high explosives to blow a significant hole in the planet they're trying to save - and they're ready to do it unless their entirely impossible demands are met. The Good News Is the KLAX Action News Team has an exclusive on the most explosive story of the decade - their own kidnapping - and the ratings are going through the roof.
The Plague's origins were mysterious, but its consequences were all too obvious: quarantined cities, safe-sex machines, Sex Police, the outlawing of old-fashioned love. Four people hold the fate of humanity in their hands...A sexual mercenary condemned to death as a foot soldier in the Army of the Living Dead; a scientist who's devoted his whole life to destroying the virus and now discovers he has only ten weeks to succeed; a God-fearing fundamentalist on his way to the presidency before he accepts a higher calling; and a young infected coed from Berkeley on a bizarre crusade to save the world with a new religion of carnal abandon. Each will discover that the only thing more dangerous than the Plague is the cure.
The world of the future is in a lot of trouble. Pollution, overpopulation, and ecological disasters have left the rich nations still rich, and the poor nations dying. Still, for international businesses it is business as usual. It is better to be rich. But is it all coming to a terrible end? A scientist has predicted Condition Venus, the sudden greenhouse end of the planet - but she can't say when. So the attention of the world is on a UN conference in Paris, where all hell is about to break loose.
In the exotic interstellar civilization of the Second Starfaring Age, youthful wanderers are known as Children of Fortune. This is the tale of one such wanderer, who seeks her destiny on an odyssey of self-discovery amid humanity's many worlds.
Spinrad examines one of his most compelling obsessions - the possible "futures" of America.
Street Meat: In New York City, streeties, zonies and subway cannibals are locked in a nighmarish scrabble for rat meat, sex - and survival.
The Lost Continent: group of African tourists visit the ruins of Space Age America - a surreal landscape of abandoned skyscrapers, empty streets and dead, rusted machinery.
World War Last: The hashish-smoking Sheik of Koram has a plan to trick America and Russia into war.
La Vie Continue: In Paris exiled science-fiction author Norman Spinrad ignores a lucrative - but dangerous - bidding war between the KGB and the CIA for the film rights to his story "Riding the Torch".
Muzic Inc had become a music industry giant by staying one step ahead of the game, but for some reason APs (totally cybernetic rock stars) had failed to ship gold.
That was where Glorianna O'Toole came in. The Crazy Old Lady of Rock and Roll was well into her sixties, but with her producer they hoped to synthesize an AP that would really take off.
Glorianna hated everything Muzic Inc had done to the rebel music of her youth, but for the sake of a steady supply of designer dust she was prepared to try and rekindle the revolutionary music spirit of the 1960s.
Meanwhile, at street level, the wire wizards had come up with a new piece of technology: a portable trip machine that made Owsley acid look like a vitamin supplement...
Can human consciousness exist within the framework of an electronic "brain" and still maintain its humanity? In DEUS X, a dying priest's consciousness is uploaded into the most advanced computer of the day - and what ensues is a thought-provoking, entertaining and overly intriguing clash between the various characters surrounding the experiment, a female Pope and a computer guru who'd rather be sailing and smoking pot, for example.
In the near future, the debt-laden U.S. owns a technology that renders it "the world's best-defended Third World country." The only real outer-space planning is in Common Europe, so young American "space cadet" Jerry Reed goes to work in Paris. He falls in love with and marries Soviet career bureaucrat Sonya Gagarin and the story jumps ahead 20 years, blending world events with a focus on their family. Sonya's star has risen with the Euro-Russians' while Jerry has been stymied by pervasive anti-Americanism. Daughter Franja has her father's space fever and enrolls in a Russian space school; son Bob, fiercely curious about an earlier, admired America before it was run by xenophobic "Gringos," enters Berkeley. Ten years later the U.S. is a pariah, Euro-Russia the pet of the civilized world and the Reeds scattered - politics forced Jerry and Sonya's divorce, Franja speaks only to her mother and Bob is trapped in "Festung Amerika." A series of odd, occasionally tragic events brings the family (and the world) together. Despite some tech-talk this is not science fiction: the first two-thirds of this hefty book is chillingly logical, if sometimes very funny, and while the "happy" ending may seem forced, Spinrad ( Bug Jack Barron ) gives us a wild, exhilarating ride into the next century.
Norman Spinrad's 1972 alternate history, gives us both a metafictional what-if novel and a cutting satire of one of the 20th century's most evil regimes . . .
In 1919, a young Austrian artist by the name of Adolf Hitler immigrated to the United States to become an illustrator for the pulp magazines and, eventually, a Hugo Award-winning SF author.
This volume contains his greatest work, Lord of the Swastika: an epic post-apocalyptic tale of genetic 'trueman' Feric Jagger and his quest to purify the bloodline of humanity by ruthlessly slaughtering races of the genetically impure - a quest Norman Spinrad expertly skewers through ironic imagery and over-the-top rhetoric.
Spinrad hoped to expose some unpalatable truths about much of SF and Fantasy literature and its uncomfortable relationship with fascist ideologies - an aim that was not always apparent to neo-fascist readers. In order to make his aims clear to the hard-of-understanding, Spinrad added an imaginary critical analysis by a fictional literary scholar, Homer Whipple, of New York University.
