Product Description

The Earth has been torn away from the Sun, kidnapped by a runaway planet , whose inhabitants - enigmatic, utterly alien Pyramids - have their own plans for Earth's resources. And humankind, depending for warmth on a constantly renewed but woefully inadequate Moon, wracked by hunger and ruled by a slavish conformity to tradition, is dying out. But there are those who defy convention and refuse to give in. Feared and persecuted by by the ordinary citizens, these 'Wolves' are preparing to fight back against the Pyramids.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #886909 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 189 pages

About the Author
* #41 in the Millennium SF Masterworks series, a library of the finest science fiction ever written. * 'Frederik Pohl, one of the old pros of the genre, never takes unnecessary risks. For him, science fiction is a form of play - an excusable indulgence since he plays it so much better than most people.' The New York Times Book Review * 'The most consistently able writer science fiction has yet produced' -- Kingsley Amis * 'One of Frederik Pohl's best novels - and my personal favourite. Complex people in tough situations on a marvelous and gritty world - who could ask for more from any novel?' Greg Bear Frederik Pohl was born in 1919 and has been professionally involved in sf as an editor and writer since his teens. Among his many books are A Plague of Pythons, Gateway, Man Plus and JEM: The Making of a Utopia. C.M. Kornbluth (1923-1958) was the bureau chief of a Chicago news agency until 1951 when he took up fiction writing full time. He established himself very quickly as a brilliant short-story writer with works such as 'The Little Black Bag', 'The Marching Morons', 'The Cosmic Charge Account' and 'Two Dooms'. Pohl and Kornbluth started writing stories together in 1940 and their collaborations include The Space Merchants, Search the Sky and Gladiators-at-Law.

Customer Reviews

Superb and deserved SF classic
Okay, it's curiously similar to some far lesser virtual reality movie of the 1990s. It's also a billion times better: more exciting, more gripping, with a horror almost entirely missing from that Hollywood guns-'n'-kung-fu concoction. And I am certainly not suggesting plagiarism. "Wolfbane" is so rich with detail, so full of great and clever ideas, that even if it was boiled down to fit the popcorn mentality enough would be left of its details that the movie wouldn't have made so many dumb mistakes. For example, in "Wolfbane" the network isn't some silly battery pack, but used by the machines as a processing unit. A single human brain, reputedly, has more neural connections than there are atoms in the universe. A network of them has immense processing power, used by the machines to do all their calculations.

There's some doubt over the exact providence of "Wolfbane". Pohl and Kornbuth were a great collaboration -- they wrote "The Space Merchants" together. Kornbluth died in 1958. The front of the book states, "Copyright Pohl and Kornbluth 1986. The earlier and substantially different version of this work was published under the same title, copyright 1959." Even if the computer network idea was added later, it's still way ahead of the virtual reality pack.

Don't read it as a forward echo of something lesser. "Wolfbane" (shame about the title) is a marvellous book, one of the best SF novels ever written, and a standout in the excellent "yellowback" series of Gollancz reissues. Ideas pour out of the pages in an exuberant rush. It reminds me of Philip K Dick a decade later, or those freewheeling early novels by Kurt Vonnegut ("Sirens Of Titan", say). As the horror mounts, the rather fey opening darkens into something truly shocking and spectacular; the final battle for freedom is one of SF's classic cinematic sequences, and in Glenn Tropile "Wolfbane" has a central character who is both complex, heroic and utterly human. The extraordinary ending is one of those classic mouth agape moments you will remember forever. Undeniably great, and a must read.