Masterworks

So here we are again.  The new calendar is on the wall, clock has been re-set and a brand new year stretches before us like . . . a great big, stretchy yearie thing, as a certain former-Alaskan governor might well say. It’s a bit daunting to have a whole twelve months staring one down, […]

Launched in 1999 and described by none other than Iain M. Banks as ‘An amazing list, genuinely the best novels from sixty years of SF’, the Masterworks have grown to be a keynote collection for anyone with even the faintest interest in the genre. In the intervening years the list has changed its look, a […]

Last week, in honour of University Challenge asking a series of questions based on the covers of some of the SF Masterworks series, I set a little test. 30 questions about the Masterworks line, ranging from easy to quite hard. Three people got 30 out of 30, which makes me suspect the dread hand of […]

Last night, Gollancz was honoured to appear as a series of questions on University Challenge. Taking the covers (without title and author, of course) of four of our wonderful SF Masterworks series, and with a slight look of disdain on his face, Jeremy Paxman asked the teams to work out what book they were seeing. […]

My first encounter with Dune was the opening sentence of Part Two, Muad’Dib: “Now Harkonnen shall kill Harkonnen,” Paul whispered. Dune wasn’t even a novel at that time – it was a pair of magazine serials, published in one of the leading magazines, Analog, still under the legendary editorship of John W. Campbell Jr. The […]

‘I seemed to see a ghostly, indistinct figure sitting in a whirling mass of black and brass for a moment – a figure so transparent that the bend behind with its sheets of drawings was absolutely distinct; but this phantasm vanished as I rubbed my eyes. The Time Machine had gone . . . The […]

From urban fantasy to zombie apocalypse, from the forerunner of fantasy to modern authors who are changing the genre, this Thursday there will be something on your local bookshop’s shelves for all Gollancz fans.