Gateway Essentials Series

Set in the artificial planetary system of Chalco-Doror, which is no more and no less than a vast cosmic machine, The Last Legends of Earth is a love story, a gripping saga of struggle against alien control, and an examination of the machinery of creation and destruction. Above all, it is world-building of the highest and grandest order, on a scale rarely seen in science fiction since the great works of Olaf Stapledon.

“A grand and glorious visionary epic, which floods the reader with wonders—The thing that science fiction is supposed to achieve but all too rarely does. I loved it.”—Robert Silverberg

Radix

by A.A. Attanasio

Published 1 November 1982

In a vastly changed world, thirteen centuries from now, Sumner Kagan searches the earth to find the godmind, a malicious being with reality-shaping powers. In this strange and beautiful world - eerily alien, yet hauntingly familiar - Kagan will change from an adolescent outcast to a warrior with god-like abilities and, in the process, take us on an epic and transcendent journey.

Author's Note: The volumes of this series can each be read independently of the others. The feature that unifies them is their individual observations of science fiction's sub-genre: "space opera," which the editors David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer define as "colorful, dramatic, large-scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character and plot action, and usually set in the relatively distant future, and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone. It often deals with war, piracy, military virtues, and very large-scale action, large stakes."