Past Master
R. A. Lafferty
Past Master by R. A. Lafferty is an acclaimed literary masterpiece celebrating major critical honors and timeless storytelling.
Read Time: ~3.2 hr
The Goblin Reservation
by Clifford D. Simak (1968)
About this book
Having just returned to Earth from an intergalactic research mission, Professor Peter Maxwell, specialist in Supernatural Phenomena, finds himself in most desperate straits. Earth, as the professor is well aware, has advanced beyond belief in many areas; time travel, for instance, has been perfected to such an extent that creatures from different ages (goblins, dinosaurs, and Shakespeare!) live together at the same time. But Maxwell has accidentally discovered a mysterious crystal planet which contains a storehouse of secret information, and he is sure that not even one-tenth of this knowledge is yet known on Earth. Realizing the value of the planet for the Earth's future development, he attempts to convince those in power that they must, at any cost, get control of the crystal planet. But his efforts are thwarted by a startling fact: Maxwell was ingeniously duplicated on his return trip. The "other" him came back before he did, and was soon after "accidentally" killed. Now no one will believe the new Maxwell really exists.
Setting / LocationGlobal
Story EraLate 20th Century
Protagonist / CoreNotable Characters
Readers who enjoyed this also loved
Patternmaster
Octavia E. Butler
Patternmaster is a celebrated work by Octavia E. Butler (Multi-Hugo & Nebula Winner, MacArthur Fellow), recognized for masterclass storytelling and lasting literary resonance.
The Many-Colored Land
Julian May
When a one-way time tunnel to Earth's distant past, specifically six million B.C., was discovered by folks on the Galactic Milieu, every misfit for light-years around hurried to pass through it. Each sought his own brand of happiness. But none could have guessed what awaited them. Not even in a million years....
Ancient Shores
Jack McDevitt
It turned up in a North Dakota wheat field: a triangle, like a shark's fin, sticking up from the black loam. Tom Lasker did what any farmer would have done. He dug it up. And discovered a boat, made of a fiberglass-like material with an utterly impossible atomic number. What it was doing buried under a dozen feet of prairie soil two thousand miles from any ocean, no one knew. True, Tom Lasker's wheat field had once been on the shoreline of a great inland sea, but that was a long time ago -- ten thousand years ago.A return to science fiction on a grand scale, reminiscent of the best of Heinlein, Simak, and Clarke, Ancient Shores is the most ambitious and exciting SF triumph of the decade, a bold speculative adventure that does not shrink from the big questions -- and the big answers.