In the Name of Good and Evil (Historical Fiction Book 1)

---

Disjointed, hallucinatory cut-ups form a collage of, as Burroughs explained of the title, "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork". A junkie's picaresque adventures in both the real world and the fantastical "Interzone", this is satire using the most savage of distorting mirrors: Only Cronenberg could have filmed it in , and even he recreated Burroughs's biography rather than his interior world. Butler's fourth novel throws African American Dana Franklin back in time to the early s, where she is pitched into the reality of slavery and the individual struggle to survive its horrors.

Butler single-handedly brought to the SF genre the concerns of gender politics, racial conflict and slavery. Several of her novels are groundbreaking, but none is more compelling or shocking than Kindred. A brilliant work on many levels, it ingeniously uses the device of time travel to explore the iniquity of slavery through Dana's modern sensibilities.

The wittiest of Victorian dystopias by the period's arch anti-Victorian. The hero Higgs finds himself in New Zealand as, for a while, did the chronic misfit Butler. Assisted by a native, Chowbok, he makes a perilous journey across a mountain range to Erewhon say it backwards , an upside-down world in which crime is "cured" and illness "punished", where universities are institutions of "Unreason" and technology is banned.

The state religion is worship of the goddess Ydgrun ie "Mrs Grundy" - bourgeois morality. Does it sound familiar?

Higgs escapes by balloon, with the sweetheart he has found there. He ends up keeping his promise, witnessing the French revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath from the perspective of the Italian treetops. Drafted soon after Calvino's break with communism over the invasion of Hungary, the novel can be read as a fable about intellectual commitments. At the same time, it's a perfectly turned fantasy, densely imagined but lightly written in a style modelled on Voltaire and Robert Louis Stevenson. Chris Tayler Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop.

Campbell has long been one of the masters of psychological horror, proving again and again that what's in our heads is far scarier than any monster lurking in the shadows. In this novel, the domineering old spinster Queenie dies - a relief to those around her. Her niece Alison inherits the house, but soon starts to suspect that the old woman is taking over her eight-year-old daughter Rowan.

A paranoid, disturbing masterpiece. The intellectuals' favourite children's story began as an improvised tale told by an Oxford mathematics don to a colleague's daughters; later readers have found absurdism, political satire and linguistic philosophy in a work that, years on, remains fertile and fresh, crisp yet mysterious, and endlessly open to intepretation.

Alice, while reading in a meadow, sees a white rabbit rush by, feverishly consulting a watch. She follows him down a hole Freudian analysis, as elsewhere in the story, is all too easy , where she grows and shrinks in size and encounters creatures mythological, extinct and invented. Morbid jokes and gleeful subversion abound. The trippier sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and, like its predecessor, illustrated by John Tenniel.

More donnish in tone, this fantasy follows Alice into a mirror world in which everything is reversed. Her journey is based on chess moves, during the course of which she meets such figures as Humpty Dumpty and the riddling twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee. More challenging intellectually than the first instalment, it explores loneliness, language and the logic of dreams.

The year is - and other times. Fevvers, aerialiste, circus performer and a virgin, claims she was not born, but hatched out of an egg.

Workshops by Form

She has two large and wonderful wings. In fact, she is large and wonderful in every way, from her false eyelashes to her ebullient and astonishing adventures. The journalist Jack Walser comes to interview her and stays to love and wonder, as will every reader of this entirely original extravaganza, which deftly and wittily questions every assumption we make about the lives of men and women on this planet. Carmen Callil Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop.

The golden age of the American comic book coincided with the outbreak of the second world war and was spearheaded by first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants who installed square-jawed supermen as bulwarks against the forces of evil. Chabon's Pulitzer prize-winning picaresque charts the rise of two young cartoonists, Klayman and Kavalier.

It celebrates the transformative power of pop culture, and reveals the harsh truths behind the hyperreal fantasies. XB Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Clarke's third novel fuses science and mysticism in an optimistic treatise describing the transcendence of humankind from petty, warring beings to the guardians of utopia, and beyond. One of the first major works to present alien arrival as beneficent, it describes the slow process of social transformation when the Overlords come to Earth and guide us to the light.

Humanity ultimately transcends the physical and joins a cosmic overmind, so ushering in the childhood's end of the title EB Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Chesterton's "nightmare", as he subtitled it, combines Edwardian delicacy with wonderfully melodramatic tub-thumping - beautiful sunsets and Armageddon - to create an Earth as strange as any far-distant planet. Secret policemen infiltrate an anarchist cabal bent on destruction, whose members are known only by the days of the week; but behind each one's disguise, they discover only another policeman. At the centre of all is the terrifying Sunday, a superhuman force of mischief and pandemonium.

Chesterton's distorting mirror combines spinetingling terror with round farce to give a fascinating perspective on Edwardian fears of and flirtations with anarchism, nihilism and a world without god. Clarke's first novel is a vast, hugely satisfying alternative history, a decade in the writing, about the revival of magic - which had fallen into dusty, theoretical scholarship - in the early 19th century. Two rival magicians flex their new powers, pursuing military glory and power at court, striking a dangerous alliance with the Faerie King, and falling into passionate enmity over the use and meaning of the supernatural.

The book is studded with footnotes both scholarly and comical, layered with literary pastiche, and invents a whole new strain of folklore: This classic by an unjustly neglected writer tells the story of Drove and Pallahaxi-Browneyes on a far-flung alien world which undergoes long periods of summer and gruelling winters lasting some 40 years. It's both a love story and a war story, and a deeply felt essay, ahead of its time, about how all living things are mutually dependant.

This is just the kind of jargon-free, humane, character-driven novel to convert sceptical readers to science fiction.

Coupland began Girlfriend in a Coma in "probably the darkest period of my life", and it shows. Listening to the Smiths - whose single gave the book its title - can't have helped. This is a story about the end of the world, and the general falling-off that precedes it, as year-old Karen loses first her virginity, then consciousness. When she reawakens more than a decade later, the young people she knew and loved have died, become junkies or or simply lost that new-teenager smell. Wondering what the future holds?

It's wrinkles, disillusionment and the big sleep. It's not often you get to read a book vertically as well as horizontally, but there is much that is uncommon about House of Leaves. It's ostensibly a horror story, but the multiple narrations and typographical tricks - including one chapter that cuts down through the middle of the book - make it as much a comment on metatextuality as a novel. That said, the creepiness stays with you, especially the house that keeps stealthily remodelling itself: Carrie O'Grady Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. It wasn't a problem at first: But the changes don't stop there: A curly tail, trotters and a snout are not far off.

Darrieussecq's modern philosophical tale is witty, telling and hearteningly feminist. Joanna Biggs Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. The setting is a post-apocalyptic future, long past the age of humans. Aliens have taken on the forms of human archetypes, in an attempt to come to some understanding of human civilisation and play out the myths of the planet's far past. The novel follows Lobey, who as Orpheus embarks on a quest to bring his lover back from the dead. With lush, poetic imagery and the innovative use of mythic archetypes, Delaney brilliantly delineates the human condition.

Dick's novel became the basis for the film Blade Runner, which prompted a resurgence of interest in the man and his works, but similarities film and novel are slight.

1000 novels everyone must read: Science Fiction & Fantasy (part one)

Here California is under-populated and most animals are extinct; citizens keep electric pets instead. In order to afford a real sheep and so affirm his empathy as a human being, Deckard hunts rogue androids, who lack empathy. As ever with Dick, pathos abounds and with it the inquiry into what is human and what is fake. Much imitated "alternative universe" novel by the wayward genius of the genre. The Axis has won the second world war. Imperial Japan occupies the west coast of America; more tyrannically, Nazi Germany under Martin Bormann, Hitler having died of syphilis takes over the east coast.

The Californian lifestyle adapts well to its oriental master. Germany, although on the brink of space travel and the possessor of vast tracts of Russia, is teetering on collapse. The novel is multi-plotted, its random progression determined, Dick tells us, by consultation with the Chinese I Ching. Foucault's Pendulum followed the massive success of Eco's The Name of the Rose, and in complexity, intrigue, labyrinthine plotting and historical scope it is every bit as extravagant.

Eco's tale of three Milanese publishers, who feed occult and mystic knowledge into a computer to see what invented connections are created, tapped into the worldwide love of conspiracy theories, particularly those steeped in historical confusion. As "The Plan" takes over their lives and becomes reality, the novel turns into a brilliant historical thriller of its own that inspired a similar level of obsession among fans. Nicola Barr Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. A woman drives around the Scottish highlands, all cleavage and lipstick, picking up well-built male hitchhikers - but there's something odd behind her thick pebble glasses Faber's first novel refreshes the elements of horror and SF in luminous, unearthly prose, building with masterly control into a page-turning existential thriller that can also be read as an allegory of animal rights.

And in the character of Isserley - her curiosity, resignation, wonderment and pain - he paints an immensely affecting portrait of how it feels to be irreparably damaged and immeasurably far from home. Determined to extricate himself from an increasingly serious relationship, graduate Nicholas Urfe takes a job as an English teacher on a small Greek island. Walking alone one day, he runs into a wealthy eccentric, Maurice Conchis, who draws him into a succession of elaborate psychological games that involve two beautiful young sisters in reenactments of Greek myths and the Nazi occupation.

Appearing after The Collector, this was actually the first novel that Fowles wrote, and although it quickly became required reading for a generation, he continued to rework it for a decade after publication. David Newnham Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Before long, he is embroiled in a battle between ancient and modern deities: A road trip through America's sacred places is spiced up by some troublesome encounters with Shadow's unfaithful wife, Laura.

She's dead, which always makes for awkward silences. The author of such outstanding mythical fantasies as Elidor and The Owl Service, Garner has been called "too good for grown-ups"; but the preoccupations of this young adult novel love and violence, madness and possession, the pain of relationships outgrown and the awkwardness of the outsider are not only adolescent.

The three narrative strands - young lovers in the s, the chaos of thebetweenalcoholics, English civil war and soldiers going native in a Vietnam-tinged Roman Britain - circle around Mow Cop in Cheshire and an ancient axehead found there. Dipping in and out of time, in blunt, raw dialogue, Garner creates a moving and singular novel. This classic of cyberpunk won Nebula, Hugo and Philip K Dick awards, and popularised the term "cyberspace", which the author described as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions". A fast-paced thriller starring a washed-up hacker, a cybernetically enhanced mercenary and an almost omnipotent artificial intelligence, it inspired and informed a slew of films and novels, not least the Matrix trilogy.

When three explorers learn of a country inhabited only by females, Terry, the lady's man, looks forward to Glorious Girls, Van, the scientist, expects them to be uncivilised, and Jeff, the Southern gallant, hopes for clinging vines in need of rescue. The process by which their assumptions are overturned and their own beliefs challenged is told with humour and a light touch in Gilman's brilliantly realised vision of a female Utopia where Mother Love is raised to its highest power.

Many of Herland's insights are as relevant today as when it was first published a hundred years ago. Joanna Hines Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. The shadow of the second world war looms over Golding's debut, the classic tale of a group of English schoolboys struggling to recreate their society after surviving a plane crash and descending to murderous savagery.

Fat, bespectacled Piggy is sacrificed; handsome, morally upstanding Ralph is victimised; and dangerous, bloodthirsty Jack is lionised, as the boys become "the Beast" they fear. When the adults finally arrive, childish tears on the beach hint less at relief than fear for the future. NB Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Originating as a BBC radio series in , Douglas Adams's inspired melding of hippy-trail guidebook and sci-fi comedy turned its novelisations into a publishing phenomenon. Non-Stop Aldiss's first novel is a tour-de-force of adventure, wonder and conceptual breakthrough.

Foundation One of the first attempts to write a comprehensive "future history", the trilogy - which also includes Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation - is Asimov's version of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, set on a galactic scale. The Blind Assassin On planet Zycron, tyrannical Snilfards subjugate poor Ygnirods, providing intercoital entertainment for a radical socialist and his lover.

The Wasp Factory A modern-gothic tale of mutilation, murder and medical experimentation, Banks's first novel - described by the Irish Times as "a work of unparalleled depravity"- is set on a Scottish island inhabited by the ultimate dysfunctional family: Frank's victims are mostly animals - but he has found time to kill a few children … Phil Daoust Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop Iain M Banks: Consider Phlebas Space opera is unfashionable, but Banks couldn't care less.

Weaveworld Life's rich tapestry is just that in Clive Barker's fantasy. Darkmans Nicola Barker has been accused of obscurity, but this Booker-shortlisted comic epic has a new lightness of touch and an almost soapy compulsiveness. Darwin's Radio Bear combines intelligence, humour and the wonder of scientific discovery in a techno-thriller about a threat to the future of humanity. This leaves the students of the schools in chaos as they realize the teachings about Good and Evil being incapable of friendship were untrue.

Agatha and Sophie have returned home and they are accepted as heroes. Unfortunately for Agatha, Sophie is taking advantage of this opening. Whereas Agatha wants nothing to do with fame, Sophie puts on many shows. At Sophie's father's wedding, Agatha suddenly wishes for another ending to her story, an ending with Tedros. This wish causes magical arrows to come and messages saying to give Sophie to them.

Angry, the town turns into a mob demanding Sophie be given to whoever wants her. The Elders says that they are protecting Sophie, but in reality, they are planning to give in to the mob. They tell Sophie to stay in the church alone; and Agatha, thinking that Sophie would be safe, leaves. Sophie is taken into the forest with a message on her chest made from her own blood.

She is hung on a tree with the message Take Me and left to die. Agatha finds Sophie and runs away with her trying not to be attacked by the mob. They soon arrive at a flowerground line and notice butterflies trying to help them. They get on a train unknowingly bound for the School of Good and Evil. Arriving at the doors of the School for Good, now the School for Girls, they are swamped by a herd of girls from both schools robed in blue.

As the girls are introduced to their classmates including a silent girl named Yara and taken around by the new Dean, Evelyn Sader, they notice that the school has been changed and the fairy tales on the walls have changed as a result, with the damsels in distress now becoming warrior women.

Agatha mentions the absence of boys, and it is discovered that after they left, all the girls from the School for Evil were repelled and had to come to the School for Good seeking refuge. The boys from the School for Good were then expelled by an unseen force and had to go to the School for Evil. As the truth and impact of what they have done settles on the girls, Sophie is horrified to discover that they are back due to Agatha's wish for a different ending to their tale, mainly that she ends up with Tedros.

Agatha denies this and insists that all she wants to do is return home. Agatha sneaks into the School for Boys with Sophie following her under an invisible cape to stop her from kissing Tedros. Agatha attempts to speak with Tedros, does, and almost kisses him, but in the moment before they do, Tedros becomes paranoid about Sophie still being alive and able to seek revenge and starts raving.

As they argue, Sophie hidden underneath a table in the room seizes the opportunity and shoots a spell between them. Agatha thinks Tedros attacked her and Tedros thinks Agatha attacked him and they both start fighting. Agatha then flees, convinced that Tedros is evil.

She returns to the School for Good where Sophie is waiting for her, pretending not to have known a thing. Eventually, it is decided that one of the girls must become a boy to integrate into the School for Boys and steal the Storian. Sophie is chosen due to her surprisingly masculine sense of willpower and perseverance and integrates into the boys' school. Soon Sophie's name as a boy is Fillip. Fillip and Tedros have problems at first, but soon, Fillip is protecting Tedros. Then they become the best of friends. Filip confesses to Tedros that he Sophie would do anything to see his her mother again.

Tedros says he wouldn't want to see his because his dad King Arthur sent out a warrant for her head she had cheated on King Arthur with Sir Lancelot , and when he turns 16, he'd have to honor that warrant. Soon, Agatha sees that Tedros leans in to kiss Filip, but Agatha only sees their lips almost touch. This causes a dispute between the three, and Filip turns back into Sophie as the spell wears off. Tedros is confused and angry, but then, the Dean of the new School for Girls, Evelyn Sader, half-sister of August Sader, has her butterflies fly off trees as they carry the Storian and Evelyn to the trio.

Agatha and Tedros kiss because Agatha told Sophie that she couldn't trust her anymore, and Sophie was turning into a witch again. The Storian is about to finish writing the end, but the Dean stops it.

Evelyn reveals that it was not Agatha's wish that brought them back to the school, but rather Sophie's wish to see her mother, who had been abandoned by her husband when she fell sick and later died. Sophie, in grief, having lost her village, her family and now her best friend, accepts her wish, and Evelyn conjures the School Master's ghost, in the guise of Sophie's mother. Sophie kisses the ghost and as it becomes the School Master, who explains that a true love's kiss can even revive the dead, just as Agatha revived Sophie.

The School Master kills Evelyn and sends Agatha home. The School Master tries to do the same to Tedros, but Agatha manages to grab Tedros and takes him with her.

Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

Sophie however, is left behind refusing to leave the School Master, stating that he was the only one who didn't abandon her. The two schools become a malevolent School for Evil together. As the two girls are separated, they both remain in the arms of the ones who love them, their wishes are granted. Still, the change is all but complete as the School Master, named Rafal, still has to 'marry' Sophie and ultimately start his campaign to destroy Good.

Though hesitating, she is afraid she might end up alone forever, taking into account of Agatha and Tedros' supposed betrayals when ignoring her pleas for help. Sophie accepts the proposal and becomes a teacher for the School for New Evil, but the Storian still does not accept this as a rightful 'happy ending'. This starts a countdown in which the sun grows weaker each passing day, and when the final dusk settles, it will mean the end of all the fairytale world. Meanwhile, Agatha and Tedros, back in Gavaldon, attempt to remain in hiding and reconcile, but are forced to escape when the people of Gavaldon tries to execute them both for all the woes she and Sophie previously caused.

Agatha's mother, Callis, sacrifices herself to buy time for the both to escape to the Endless Woods. Arriving there, they are rescued by Professor Uma, whom explains that Rafal's return has allowed the return of old villains as undead and that the remaining original heroes including Cinderella, Peter Pan, Hansel and Gretel, and Pinocchio are formed in a League of Thirteen led by Merlin to combat against the Rafal's assaults. It becomes clear that he is seeking to alter the original fairytales, starting with the murder of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and following with Rapunzel and Tom Thumb.

Brian W Aldiss: Non-Stop (1958)

Agatha and Tedros, despite a rocky beginning, are eventually assigned by Merlin to destroy Rafal's wedding ring, which keeps so much his sustenance as his 'empire' alive, but under the strict condition that Sophie must be the one to deliver the killing blow. It can only be performed with the sword Excalibur that Tedros lost in the day of Rafal's return. They realize the Excalibur is being guarded in the School for Old Evil, and thus Agatha sets to recover the sword while Tedros, on Agatha's insistence, sets out to rescue Sophie and attempt to convince her to give up her marriage with Rafal.

Aided by Sophie's former friends Hester, Anadil, Dot, and Hort, they manage to infiltrate the School and perform both tasks as they then run away, with Rafal mysteriously allowing them to escape. Despite his initial grudges against both, he slow and painfully comes to forgive them as he learns further of Arthur's previous paranoic behavior and domineering issues.

Agatha, on her part, becomes willing to give up her love for Tedros so Sophie can have him instead, more driven by her reluctance in becoming the future Queen of Camelot than by her personal feelings. Despite both's best efforts, however, the plan ultimately fails when Sophie and Tedros kiss, and both realize they were never meant for each other. Believing she was used all along, she returns to Rafal, accepting her place by his side and becoming the Queen of Evil.

Against her wills, Agatha is chosen as the Queen of Good as both parties prepare for war.

Navigation menu

The final battle is to take place in Gavaldon, still untouched because of an energy barrier fed by people's beliefs in fairytales, but weakening due to Rafal's altered stories, and is being targeted for reasons unknown. During training, Agatha also learns of Cinderella's true fairytale, where she claims that she didn't want to be a princess at all.

She believed her stepsisters, who were really kind to her, deserved it, and that she would simply tag along.

• Смертельная любовь: Личные истории знаменитых людей (Russian Edition)
• How To Grow Vegetables Indoors: A Guide To Small Space and Container Gardening to Grow Vegetables and Herbs At Home Or In Your Apartment
• Rachegeist - Campus des Grauens (German Edition)
• Forgotten Past: The Stones of Remembrance
• 1st Australian Armoured Car Squadron Group - British Commonwealth Occupation Force Japan
• Preparação para Entrar no Templo Sagrado (Portuguese Edition)
• Royal Coachman: Adventures in the Fly Fishers World