Cranston Public Library

You could hear the voices murmuring, small and muted, from the crowds that inhabited his body.

A peerless American storyteller, Ray Bradbury brings wonders alive. The Illustrated Man is classic Bradbury— eighteen startling visions of humankind's destiny, unfolding across a canvas of decorated skin. In this phantasmagoric sideshow, living cities take their vengeance, technology awakens the most primal natural instincts, Martian invasions

...

A comet rushes toward the Earth, a deadly orb that soon fills the sky and promises doom. But mankind is too busy hating, stealing and scheming to care. This is H.G. Wells's tale of the last days of the old Earth and the extraterrestrial change that becomes the salvation of the human race.

Blast off with "From the Earth to the Moon," a visionary science fiction masterpiece from the iconic Jules Verne. This groundbreaking novel spins an extraordinary tale of the daring Baltimore Gun Club, a post-Civil War society of weapons enthusiasts, who devise an audacious plan to catapult a spaceship to the moon. In the era before actual lunar expeditions, Verne astonishingly predicts technological advancements and the thrill of space exploration,...

"An audacious, darkly glittering novel about art, fame, and ambition set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse, from the author of three highly acclaimed previous novels. One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time-from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a...

A series of unexplained happenings occur across the eastern United States, caused by objects moving with such great speed that they are nearly invisible. The first-person narrator John Strock, 'Head inspector in the federal police department' travels to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina to investigate and discovers that all the phenomena are being caused by Robur, a brilliant inventor who had previously appeared in Verne's Robur the Conqueror....

Biron Farrell was young and naïve, but he was growing up fast. A radiation bomb planted in his dorm room changed him from an innocent student at the University of Earth to a marked man, fleeing desperately from an unknown assassin. He soon discovers that, many light-years away, his father, the highly respected Rancher of Widemos, has been murdered. Stunned, grief-stricken, and outraged, Biron is determined to uncover the reasons behind his father's...

On an island off Costa Rica there exists a hush-hush colony of giant animals which attracts the attention of two expeditions. The first one, including children, is led by a paleontologist, the other is made up of evil scientists who want to do experiments. The animals rout both without much concern for their motives.

"In The Passage and The Twelve, Justin Cronin brilliantly imagined the fall of civilization and humanitys desperate fight to survive. Now all is quiet on the horizon--but does silence promise the nightmares end or the second coming of unspeakable darkness? At last, this bestselling epic races to its breathtaking finale" --

Adrift in a dinghy, Edward Prendick, the single survivor from the good ship Lady Vain, is rescued by a vessel carrying a profoundly unusual cargo -- a menagerie of savage animals. Nursed to recovery by their keeper Montgomery, who gives him dark medicine that tastes of blood, Prendick soon finds himself stranded upon an uncharted island in the Pacific with his rescuer and the beasts. Here, he meets Montgomery's master, the sinister Dr. Moreau -- a...

Ted Chiang's first published story, "Tower of Babylon," won the Nebula Award for 1990. Now, collected for the first time, are all seven of this extraordinary writer's extraordinary stories--plus a new story written especially for this volume.