Not the Only Planet: Science Fiction Travel Stories - Softcover

Broderick, Damien

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0864425821 ISBN 13: 9780864425829

Publisher: Lonely Planet, 1998

Synopsis

Like a cyborg and a spaceship, like an explorer and a time machine, travel and science fiction have always gone together. Not the Only Planet is a unique collection of stories about travelling both ends of the space-time continuum by internationally celebrated sf writers. A family takes a package tour to the Crucifixion; astronauts on Mars confront the difficulty of reporting on the unimaginable; and a phrasebook for tourists offers a hilariously skewed vision of travel to come. Hi-tech galaxies, tattered futures, the shiveringly strange and the uncomfortably familiar: when every corner of our current world is thoroughly described in guidebook after guidebook, Not the Only Planet offers a set of exotic post-cards from worlds that don't exist. Yet.

Compiled by Damien Broderick, Not the Only Planet contains stories by: Brian W. Aldiss, Stephen Dedman, Greg Egan, Lisa Goldstein, Garry Kilworth, Paul J. McAuley, Joanna Russ, Robert Silverberg, John Varley and Gene Wolfe.

About this title

Review

If our planet seems a little overexplored these days--well, there are always other worlds to survey. Australian science fiction icon Damien Broderick has collected stories from some of the world's best sci-fi writers in Not the Only Planet, a book of sci-fi travel that propels the imagination on an unbridled tour of worlds no travel agent will ever have on file.

The collection probes the vastness of the space-time continuum, as readers join a tour to the Crucifixion in Garry Kilworth's "Let's Go to Golgotha!"; photograph mountains on Mars in Brian W. Aldiss's "The Difficulties Involved in Photographing Nix Olympica"; and glean essential phrases for the space-traveling earthling ("You are not my guide. My guide was bipedal") in Joanna Russ's "Useful Phrases for the Tourist." From humorous to stark and unsettling, like all good sci-fi and travel writing, these stories investigate the many interiors of the human soul. A provocative book that truly takes travel to new dimensions. --Byron Ricks

Edition details

• Publisher: Lonely Planet
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0864425821
• ISBN 13: 9780864425829
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 250