![]() First edition cover | |
Author | Avram Davidson |
---|---|
Cover artist | John Schoenherr |
Language | English |
Genre | Science fiction |
Publisher | Pyramid Books |
Publication date | 1965 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print (Paperback) |
Pages | 156 |
OCLC | 4159938 |
813 |
Masters of the Maze is a science fiction novel by American writer Avram Davidson, originally published in 1965 by Pyramid Books with a cover by John Schoenherr. The first UK edition, the only hardcover to date, was issued by White Lion in 1974. An American paperback reprint followed from Manor Books in 1976. Ebook editions appeared in 2012, from both Prologue Books and SF Gateway. [1]
The novel presents historical and fictional characters as "Guardians" of a maze which malignant, insect-like aliens are seeking to traverse in order to subjugate Earth. [2]
Algis Budrys praised the novel as "a very fine piece of light reading" despite having "marks of the short story writer all over it"; he declared that "no one but Davidson could have made of this wreck-save-the-world plot a thing of such polished beauty. It wafts of the incense of scholarship for its own sake . . . ". [3] Judith Merril praised "Davidson's incredible ear for dialogue, his sharp eye for detail, and his resulting deft touch with a wide range of characterizations", but noted that the story "falls apart" in its closing sections, losing its "almost Carrollian" quality. [4] P. Schuyler Miller described the novel as "rich", saying "This one has everything in it. . . . It has monsters. It has freemasonry. It has innumerable worlds. It has fully portrayed characters -- including a couple of monsters -- who pop up and vanish. It has a rather feckless hero who gets involved and blunders into all the feck he needs". [5]
John Clute, in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction , describes Masters of the Maze as "an intricate Parallel-Worlds adventure with sharply characterized humans and remote Secret Masters involved in barring interdimensional transit to a remarkably vivid insectoid Alien race". [6]
Laurence van Cott Niven is an American science fiction writer. His 1970 novel Ringworld won the Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards. With Jerry Pournelle he wrote The Mote in God's Eye (1974) and Lucifer's Hammer (1977). The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America gave him the 2015 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is a 1964 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1965. Like many of Dick's novels, it utilizes an array of science fiction concepts and explores the ambiguous slippage between reality and unreality. It is one of Dick's first works to explore religious themes.
The New Wave was a science fiction style of the 1960s and 1970s, characterized by a great degree of experimentation with the form and content of stories, greater imitation of the styles of non-science fiction literature, and an emphasis on the psychological and social sciences as opposed to the physical sciences. New Wave authors often considered themselves as part of the modernist tradition of fiction, and the New Wave was conceived as a deliberate change from the traditions of the science fiction characteristic of pulp magazines, which many of the writers involved considered irrelevant or unambitious.
Damon Francis Knight was an American science fiction author, editor, and critic. He is the author of "To Serve Man", a 1950 short story adapted for The Twilight Zone. He was married to fellow writer Kate Wilhelm.
James White was a Northern Irish author of science fiction novellas, short stories and novels. He was born in Belfast and returned there after spending some early years in Canada. After a few years working in the clothing industry, he worked at Short Brothers Ltd., an aircraft company based in Belfast, from 1965 until taking early retirement in 1984 as a result of diabetes. White married Margaret Sarah Martin, another science fiction fan, in 1955 and the couple had three children. He died of a stroke.
The Dragon in the Sea (1956), also known as Under Pressure from its serialization, is a novel by Frank Herbert. It was first serialized in Astounding magazine from 1955 to 1956, then reworked and published as a standalone novel in 1956. A 1961 2nd printing of the Avon paperback, catalog # G-1092, was titled 21st Century Sub with the previous title in parentheses, and a short 36 page version of the novel was later collected in Eye. It is usually classified as a psychological novel.
Algirdas Jonas "Algis" Budrys was a Lithuanian-American science fiction author, editor and critic. He was also known under the pen names Frank Mason, Alger Rome in collaboration with Jerome Bixby, John A. Sentry, William Scarff and Paul Janvier. In the 1990s he was the publisher and editor of the science fiction magazine Tomorrow Speculative Fiction.
Lester del Rey was an American science fiction author and editor. He was the author of many books in the juvenile Winston Science Fiction series, and the fantasy editor at Del Rey Books, the fantasy and science fiction imprint of Ballantine Books, subsequently Random House, working for his fourth wife Judy-Lynn del Rey’s imprint, Del Rey.
Robert Silverberg is a prolific American science fiction author and editor. He is a multiple winner of both Hugo and Nebula Awards, a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, and a Grand Master of SF since 2004.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is a U.S. fantasy and science-fiction magazine, first published in 1949 by Mystery House, a subsidiary of Lawrence Spivak's Mercury Press. Editors Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas had approached Spivak in the mid-1940s about creating a fantasy companion to Spivak's existing mystery title, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. The first issue was titled The Magazine of Fantasy, but the decision was quickly made to include science fiction as well as fantasy, and the title was changed correspondingly with the second issue. F&SF was quite different in presentation from the existing science-fiction magazines of the day, most of which were in pulp format: it had no interior illustrations, no letter column, and text in a single-column format, which in the opinion of science-fiction historian Mike Ashley "set F&SF apart, giving it the air and authority of a superior magazine".
The Rest of the Robots is a collection of eight short stories and two full-length novels by American writer Isaac Asimov, published in 1964. The stories, centred on positronic robots, are all part of the Robot series, most of which take place in the Foundation universe. Another collection of short stories about robots, I, Robot, was re-published in the previous year, which is why Asimov chose to title the collection as The Rest of the Robots. None of the short stories in this collection were in I, Robot, however all of them were later included in The Complete Robot, and both novels about Elijah Baley were also published separately.
The Golden Age of Science Fiction, often identified in the United States as the years 1938–1946, was a period in which a number of foundational works of science fiction literature appeared. In the history of science fiction, the Golden Age follows the "pulp era" of the 1920s and '30s, and precedes New Wave science fiction of the '60s and '70s. The 1950s are, in this scheme, a transitional period. Robert Silverberg, who came of age then, saw the '50s as the true Golden Age.
The Squares of the City is a science fiction novel by British writer John Brunner, first published in 1965 (ISBN 0-345-27739-2). It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1966.
Past Master is a science fiction novel by American writer R. A. Lafferty, first published in 1968. The novel follows the attempt of a future Utopian society in preventing its decline, by bringing Sir Thomas More to the year 2535.
The Genocides is a 1965 science fiction novel by American author Thomas M. Disch. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1965.
The Einstein Intersection is a 1967 science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany. The title is a reference to Einstein's Theory of Relativity connecting to Kurt Gödel's Constructible universe, which is an analogy to science meeting philosophy. The original publisher, Ace Books, changed Delany's originally intended title from A Fabulous, Formless Darkness for commercial reasons.
Davy is a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel by American writer Edgar Pangborn, nominated for the 1965 Hugo Award. It is set in the Northeastern United States some centuries after an atomic war ended high-technology civilization, with some scenes on an unnamed Atlantic island.
Thorns is a science fiction novel by American author Robert Silverberg, published as a paperback original in 1967, and a Nebula and Hugo Awards nominee.
Four for Tomorrow is the first story collection by Roger Zelazny, published in paperback by Ace Books in 1967. British hardcover and paperback editions followed in 1969, under the title A Rose for Ecclesiastes. The first American hardcover was issued in the Garland Library of Science Fiction in 1975. A French translation appeared in 1980. Paperback reissues continued from Ace and later from Baen Books into the 1990s.
Why Call them Back From Heaven? is a 1967 science fiction novel by American writer Clifford D. Simak. It was the initial volume in the Ace Science Fiction Specials line.