Showing results by publisher "Faber & Faber" in Science Fiction & Fantasy

From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change for ever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans.

In a self-running smart house, a young sentient hoover listens as her owner, Harold, reads aloud to his dying wife, Edie. Mesmerized by To Kill a Mockingbird and craving human connection, the little vacuum renames herself Scout and embarks on a journey of self-discovery. But when Edie passes away, Scout and her fellow appliances discover that the omnipresent Grid, which monitors every household in the City, wants to displace Harold from the home he's lived in for fifty years.

Tara Selter has lived the eighteenth of November 1,143 times when she notices a break in the pattern; a man has changed his shirt. The man is Henry Dale and he remembers all the days that have come before. He knows that time has fallen out of joint. Now they are two of a kind: trapped in the eighteenth of November, but no longer alone. Together they learn to share their present; their voices grow hoarse recounting their small battles against it and their bewilderment at the disintegrating world.

The Romans have long since departed, and Britain is steadily declining into ruin. But at last the wars that once ravaged the country have ceased.The Buried Giant begins as a couple, Axl and Beatrice, set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen for years. They expect to face many hazards - some strange and otherworldly - but they cannot yet foresee how their journey will reveal to them dark and forgotten corners of their love for one another.

When spring comes, the people leave their winter cave, foraging for honey and shoots, bulbs and grubs, the hot richness of a deer's brain. They awaken the fire to heat their naked bodies, lay down their thorn bushes and share pictures in their minds. But strange things are happening - inexplicable scents, sounds and violence - and, suddenly, unimaginable creatures are half-glimpsed in the forest: an upright new people of bone-faces and deerskins. What the early people don't know is that their season is already over....

It's the summer of 1939. London is on the brink of catastrophic war. Iris Hawkins, an ambitious young woman in the stuffy world of City finance, has a chance encounter with Geoff, a technical whizz at the BBC's nascent television unit. What was supposed to be one night of abandon draws her instead into an adventure of otherworldly pursuit - into a reality where time bends, spirits can be summoned, and history hangs by a thread. Soon there are Nazi planes overhead.

The year is 2021. No child has been born for twenty-five years. The human race faces extinction. Under the despotic rule of Xan Lyppiat, the Warden of England, the old are despairing and the young cruel. Theo Faren, a cousin of the Warden, lives a solitary life in this ominous atmosphere. That is, until a chance encounter with a young woman leads him into contact with a group of dissenters. Suddenly his life is changed irrevocably as he faces agonising choices which could affect the future of mankind.

This is Britain: but not as we know it. THEY are coming closer . . . THEY begin with a dead dog, shadowy footsteps, confiscated books. Soon the National Gallery is purged; eerie towers survey the coast; savage mobs stalk the countryside destroying artworks—and those who resist. THEY capture dissidents—writers, painters, musicians, even the unmarried and childless—in military sweeps, 'curing' these subversives of individual identity. Survivors gather together as cultural refugees, preserving their crafts, creating, loving and remembering. But THEY make it easier to forget ...

Don Paterson's new collection starts from the premise that the crisis of midlife may be a permanent state of mind. Zonal is an experiment in science-fictional and fantastic autobiography, with all of its poems taking their imaginative cue from the first season of The Twilight Zone (1959-1960), playing fast and loose with both their source material and their author's own life. Narrative and dramatic in approach, these poems change voices constantly in an attempt to get at the truth by alternate means.

Dorothy is a grieving housewife in the Californian suburbs. Her infant son, unborn child and dog have all just died; her husband is unfaithful; her only friend is an alcoholic. One day, she is doing chores when the radio announces that a green-skinned sea monster has escaped from the Institute for Oceanographic Research - but little did she expect him to arrive in her kitchen. Muscular yet gentle, vegetarian, sexually magnetic and excellent at housework, Larry the frogman is a revelation: and their passionate affair goes beyond their wildest dreams.

Bruno, a young magazine editor, seems to live a charmed life, until he discovers a growth on his neck - the first sign of incurable cancer. Decades later, he wakes up to find himself cured, but the world is now a very different place. Bruno must decide what he really wants from his life and whether it's worth the cost.

It's no ordinary existence on the rugged isle of Muckle Flugga. The elements run riot and the very rocks that shape the place begin to shift under their influence. The only human inhabitants are the lighthouse keeper, known as The Father, and his otherworldly son, Ouse. Them, and the occasional lodger to keep the wolf from the door.

The Icelandic Psychological Association has prepared a test. They call it a sensitivity assessment -- a way of measuring a person's empathy and identifying the potential for anti-social behaviour. In a few days' time, Iceland will vote on whether to make the test compulsory for every citizen. The nation is bitterly divided. Some believe the test makes society safer; others decry it as a violation. As the referendum draws closer, four people - Vetur, Eyja, Tristan and Ólafur - find themselves caught in the teeth of the debate.