Two contrasting societies — one organized around communal, anarchist principles and the other structured by more conventional hierarchy and market relations — come into contact.

An energetic near-future story that interleaves a fast-paced real-world plot with a pervasive virtual-reality environment and a memetic/linguistic threat.

On a forested alien world, an occupying human logging colony treats the native population as subjugated labor. Tensions escalate after an especially brutal crime, and a native leader mobilizes resistance against the colonists.

A member of a long-lived, blood-dependent species awakens with amnesia and physical injuries and must piece together who she is and how she relates to the human partners her kind depends on.

In a near-future coastal setting, scientists discover a hyper-intelligent octopus species and confront what that intelligence means for ethics, exploitation, and human self-understanding. The discovery triggers corporate and political interests, forcing choices about study, containment, and contact.

Billy Pilgrim, an American who served in World War II, experiences a fractured relationship with time after the war. The novel follows episodes of his life — including his capture and survival of the Allied firebombing of Dresden — presented out of chronological order.

A human envoy arrives on a frigid, isolated planet to persuade its nations to join an interstellar confederation, but finds himself hampered by profound cultural and sexual differences.

A Wizard of Earthsea follows Ged, a gifted youth from the island of Gont, whose early talent leads him to a school of wizardry. After a duel goes wrong and releases a dangerous shadow, he must leave home and undertake a solitary quest to confront and undo the harm he caused.

Set in a far-future, quasi-medieval city, the novel follows Severian, an apprentice in a torturers' guild, whose expulsion forces him to leave his home and travel into a decaying world.