Proving that mainstream comics could be infused with past literary/cultural ideals and still be bestsellers, the America's Best Comics imprint took the dilapidated superhero genre and created three vastly entertaining hybrids with Tom Strong, Promethea and Top Ten. Now, a stunning coup de grace is delivered with this masterful pairing of Victorian adventure fiction's greatest characters and the old war-horse of the super-group. With the stunning The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it would be no exaggeration to say that Alan Moore has produced a near-perfect piece of adventure fiction that is clever, literate, rich with excitement and hard to put down.

It's 1898 and at the behest of M, the mysterious head of the secret Service, Campion Bond is dispatched to procure the services of Miss Mina Murray (nee Harker), adventurer Allan Quartermain, "Science-Pirate" Captain Nemo, Henry Jekyll (and his monstrous alter ego) and Hawley Griffin (a.k.a. the Invisible Man). Together, they must combat an insidious threat that will decide supremacy of the London skies, but their success may unleash a far greater threat. With no shortage of action, Moore and O' Neill sustain a high level of suspense, intrigue, mystery and terrific wit that all contribute to an indispensable read. O'Neill's art, so memorable in Marshal Law, produces a London filled with vivid, magnificent architecture and a malevolent atmosphere ripe with thrills and danger. An unmitigated triumph—pure and simple. —Danny Graydon

Alan Moore, like Neil Gaiman, constantly flirts with the too-smart-for-his-own-good aesthetic without alienating his readers. Promethea weaves Moore's trademark scholarly mysticism with wild, fun swipes at post-everything culture in a complex tale based on the importance of story. Following a teenage girl, whose interest in an obscure and possibly real heroine leads to her assumption of the heroine's role, Promethea draws on a century of comics art to express themes of history and fiction. Action, intimacy, fantasy, and ennui all find their place, and when it's over, the reader will hunger for the next collection. —Rob Lightner

Strangers In Paradise: I Dream of You is the ongoing tale of three friends, Katchoo, Francine and David, who find themselves deeply involved in each other's lives. This volume finds Katchoo's past coming back to haunt her as well as the ones she loves. This Eisner Award winning graphic novel offers love, romance and suspense. You won't be able to put it down!

Strangers In Paradise: Immortal Enemies is the ongoing tale of three friends, Katchoo, Francine and David. This volume finds Ktachoo leaving her beloved Francinie to look for David, the only male friend she's ever had, but finds his wicked sister Darcy Parker instead. Given an offer she can't refuse, Katchoo is forced to return to work for Darcy in the sordid world of sex and politics, or lose Francine forever. When Francine enlists the aid of Det. Walsh to help find Ktahcoo, she soon discovers the horrible secrets her friend has been hdiding-secrets that may destroy them both!

This collection presents a restless time for Francine, Kathcoo and David as they struggle with their relationships in the aftermath of the I Dream of You period. However, in their self-absorbing conflicts they fail to notice an ominous presence that rises and surrounds their lives like a deadly storm. A powerful look at the human heart caught off guard. This collection includes a five page color dream swquence by Jim Lee!

Strangers In Paradise: It's A Good Life is the continuing saga of three friends, Katchoo, Francine and David. This volume finds our friends chasing each other to Hawaii in the name of love. Francine becomes involved with former beau, Freddie and Katchoo gets involved with everyone!

Francine and Katchoo in high school! Learn how this enduring relationship began. Although they are complete opposites, Francine and Katchoo find a common bond in the one thing neither one has, friendship. Also included in this volume is a side splitting spoof of the popular Xena television show with Francine, Katchoo and David showing up in the oddest places.

My Other Life contains the powerful and moving story of a horrendous plane crash that rips the lives of Francine, Katchoo and David apart. And, to make matters worse, Katchoo discovers the plane crash was no accident, as the demons from her other life come back to claim her for good. A heartbreaking story that launched the SIP books in a new direction.

This trade paperback contains the hottest story arc yet from creator Terry Moore! Passions run high when the SIP gang find themselves in Hawaii surrounded by sun, sand and a cornucopia of sexy choices in the trade winds paradise! SIP is hot again and this is the story arc that made it happen!

Ward Moore wrote few SF novels, but Bring the Jubilee (1953) instantly became a classic of alternate history. It's the definitive story of a timeline where the South won the American Civil War—known in this different 20th century as the War of Southern Independence.

Crippled by war reparations that must be paid in gold, the 26 Northern states are seedy and run-down. Slavery, disguised as corporate indenture, is commonplace for whites as well as blacks. There's no worse insult than "Dirty Abolitionist". Life goes on as always, and 1938 New York has a certain provincial charm, swarming with bicycles and horse-drawn carts, while dirigibles float over skyscrapers of 14 or even 15 storeys, and telegraph wires are ...

a reminder that no urban family with pretensions to gentility would be without the clacking instrument in the parlor, that every child learned the Morse code before he could read.

Newly arrived from the sticks, Hodge Backmaker picks up an education as apprentice to a cynical printer who supports the underground "Grand Army" (the North hopes to rise again). Eventually our hero, a self-taught historian, joins an eccentric community of scholars and has a turbulent affair with a brilliant female physicist working on the mysteries of Time.

She offers Hodge his big research opportunity: to visit 1863 and study the Battle of Gettysburg from a safe vantage point. Fortunately or tragically, the place he chooses is rather crucial ...

Moore writes lovingly and movingly of America as it was and might have been. This is number 42 in Gollancz's high-quality SF Masterworks reissue series. —David Langford

Richard Morgan's debut SF thriller Altered Carbon isn't for the faint-hearted. Its noir private-eye investigation races through extreme violence, hideously imaginative torture and many high-tech firefights.

In 2411, death is not forever. Afterward, they can read your personality from an implanted "cortical stack" and upload you into a new body—at a price. Hero Kovacs has worn many bodies on different worlds as a former member of the UN Envoy Corps, programmed killers to a man. Now the incredibly rich Bancroft brings him to Earth to investigate a killing... of Bancroft himself, restored from his digital backup and rejecting the police theory of suicide.

Half the vice-lords of 25th-century San Francisco are soon chasing Kovacs with futuristic surveillance, drugs and weaponry. Virtual-reality interrogation means they can torture you to death, and then start again. There's a bleak slave trade in rented or confiscated bodies—and Kovacs finds his current borrowed face is all too well known to both police and underworld.

Ultraviolent set-pieces follow, sprinkled with philosophical asides such as this reflection on a stungun: "It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped around me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death."

There are some James-Bondian implausibilities, such as Kovacs's final confrontation with the villain he's sworn to kill: rather than shooting and leaving fast, he discusses the plot for 10 pages until... but that would be telling. This is high-tension SF action, hard to put down—though squeamish readers may shut their eyes rather frequently. —David Langford

High above the planet, aboard a fifty-mile-wide alien vessel, The Authority - seven awesomely powerful meta-humans - act as bouncers for the Earth. If you threaten the life and liberty of its inhabitants, they'll get nasty in the pursuit of your blood. Reality Incorporated is the first ever multiversal business corporation. They strip-mine and globalise on a universal scale. Now they want The Authority's technology as their next exploitable resource or they'll reduced the Earth to an asteroid cloud. The Authority has only one answer - fight's on! The latest volume in this acclaimed, gut-crunching series features a brilliant new creative team to pitch The Authority once more into action!

Mary Morrissey's second novel The Pretender, begins with an utterly fascinating premise: why should a Polish factory worker claim to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II? The novel unwinds smoothly in time, from Virginia in 1978 to post-First World War Berlin and finally to a childhood in rural Poland at the turn of the last century. There is something of Miss Havisham in the demeanour and behaviour of the first Anastasia——"a magnificent relic, a holy totem", whose life has been "as volatile as the century itself". She is almost deaf and imperiously selfish, with "a corrupted memory". She has been saved from herself by a former history professor with a "genealogical envy" for her Romanov past, who marries her to enter a royal dynasty. He not only dotes on her but more importantly believes in her.

It's a shame to leave this strange, symbiotic couple to their increasing squalor but Morrissey is more interested in exploring Anastasia's unreliable memory and takes the action to a hospital in Berlin in 1922, where a young woman who has been saved from drowning in the canal has forgotten her identity. Moved to an asylum where she's called Fraulein Unbekannt, the Unknown Woman, she refuses to speak and believes herself guilty of a crime. She is exempted from communal duties and washing, and treated with special privileges by the staff. When a fellow inmate reads an extract from a newspaper detailing the missing Anastasia, she resolves to "incubate a Princess" as an escape. Although the title of the novel does in a sense spoil the delicate ambiguity of Anastasia's "true" identity before the text itself does, the way the author teases out the "real" identity of the protagonist is brilliantly done. As though delusion is her cure, the woman grasps an alternative past to mask her guilt and loss, inventing a history that will protect her from poverty and anonymity. She pinches stories from other characters, much as a fiction writer will do, and twists events to bolster the notion of her tragic life. The climax of the book is delayed a little too long, but when it comes, it provides convincing emotional clues as to why a peasant Polish girl, with a great appetite for love, should fancy herself as royalty and seek immunity for her crime. —Cherry Smyth

James Morrow had published SF novels before, but This Is the Way the World Ends (1986) reached a new level of intensity, tackling World War III horrors with ultra-black magic realism plus a touch of Lewis Carroll. Like George Orwell's 1984, it still packs a grim punch although history took another course.

As the Cold War heats up, Americans frantically buy "scopas suits"(Self-COntained Post-Attack Survival) as protection against nukes. Tombstone engraver George Paxton can't afford one for his young daughter, until a strange old woman commissions epitaphs for her "parents" and pays by directing him to a magic shop where the scopas suit costs only his signature—acknowledging responsibility for any nuclear war. Soon we realise George's improvised epitaphs are for Eve, Adam and everyone:

She was better than she knew. He never found out what he was doing here.

Whimsy and social satire give way to nightmare as the missiles fall, scopas suits prove useless, and post-nuclear hell is painted in stomach-churning detail: flashburns, melted eyes, shattered people begging for death.

George, though, is rescued. As one of six who signed the McMurdo Sound Agreement, he must stand trial in Antarctica for complicity in murdering humanity. Prosecution, defenders, judges and police are the "unadmitted", unborn future generations now denied real life, whose sheer rage has won them temporary existence. Old disarmament and deterrence arguments, wittily rehashed in the Nuremberg-like court, seem all too different after the worst has happened. This queasy tragicomedy isn't easily forgotten. —David Langford

Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician.

Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.

If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight. —Simon Leake, Amazon.com