The Illustrated Man is classic Bradbury - a collection of tales that breathe and move, animated by sharp, intaken breath and flexing muscle. Here are eighteen startling visions of humankind's destiny, unfolding across a canvas of decorated skin - visions as keen as the tattooist's needle and as colorful as the inks that indelibly stain the body. The images, ideas, sounds and scents that abound in this phantasmagoric sideshow are provocative and powerful:...

Combining political intrigue, time travel, family drama, and all the perils that come with being the first at anything, Hugo Award—winning author Philip K. Dick's Martian Time-Slip follows a group of exiled colonists on Mars and the ten-year-old psychic among them, a boy so powerful he not only looks into the future but can send people there. On an arid Mars, local bigwigs compete with Earth-bound interlopers to buy up land before the UN develops...

Lieutenant Patricia Kelly Elizabeth Strickland--otherwise known as Podkayne--is a third-generation Martian. Her grandfather, Manny, was one of the first men to set foot on Mars. So Poddy has some planet-sized shoes to fill. That's why she's joined the Music, Arts, and Drama Division of the Martian Navy. Though some may say her voice is a weapon in itself, Poddy passed the audition. And now she's going to Europa, one of Jupiter's many moons, to be...

"A British astronomer, Thayer, high on Darwin and other progressive scientists of [his] age, has come to believe that beings more highly evolved than us are alive on Mars (he has evidence) and that there will be a perfect moment in which we can signal to them that we are here, too. He gets the support and funding for a massive project to build the Equilateral, a triangle with sides hundreds of miles long, in the desert of Egypt in time for that perfect...

In the parallel world first introduced in S. M. Stirling's The Sky People, aliens terraformed Mars (and Venus) 200 million years ago, seeding them with life-forms from Earth. Humans didn't suspect this until the twentieth century, but when the first probes landed on our sister worlds and found life-intelligent life, at that-things changed with a vengeance. By the year 2000, America, Russia, and the other great powers of Earth were all contending for...

Five-time Hugo Award-winner Larry Niven weaves together time travel and fantasy to create an utterly unique novel on the origin of the Martian "canals." Hanville Svetz was born into a future earth that matches the sorriest predictions of Greenpeace. With most of Earth's original species extinct, Svetz travels back and forth in time retrieving them. Svetz learns that Mars was inhabited, and how the sapient Martian species were wiped out. He forsees...

What happens when your dream mission to Mars is a reality TV nightmare? This debut science-fiction romp with heart follows the tradition of Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles with a dash of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. For the six lucky scientists selected by the Destination Mars! corporation, a one-way ticket to Mars--in exchange for a lifetime of research--was an absolute no-brainer. The incredible opportunity was clearly worth even the...

At the end of the twenty-first century, Earth is under the control of a single intelligence, the apparently benign One True. Mars, meanwhile, is slowly terraforming, and the human settlers there are still free of One True's control...but they need a pressure suits to survive outside, and it will be a century or more before the planet's fit for terrestrial life. Terpsichore Murray is growing up on Mars. She wants to quit school and become, like her...

"Podkayne Fries, born and raised on Mars, has just one ambition: to earn her wings as a starship pilot and rise through the ranks to command deep-space explorations. The opportunity to travel aboard the Tricorn - on an interstellar journey to Venus and Earth in the company of her diplomat uncle - is a dream come true. Poddy's idea of diplomacy is trying to handle her troublesome brother, Clark. But she's about to learn some things about war and peace....

From the Nebula Award–winning author of Timescape and Foundation's Fear comes a hard-science thriller about the race to Mars.When an explosion of the rocket launching the Mars Transit Vehicle kills four crewmen, the US decides to redirect its energies to near-Earth projects, killing the manned mission to Mars. But tycoon John Axelrod assembles a consortium to fund the project, and he expects to net billions. But a European-Asian airbus will make...