Imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. This is the story of love, friendship and memory, with a sense of the fragility of life.

'It is to the Vietnam War what Catch-22 was to World War II, the definitive, bleakly comic satire' Thomas M. Disch

Gateway: an artifical spaceport, full of working interstellar ships left behind by the mysterious, vanished Heechee. They are easy to operate, but impossible to control - some come back with discoveries which make their pilots rich; others return with their remains barely identifiable.

In post-apocalypse America, a survivor wanders the aftermath of a devastating war, trading tales for food and shelter. Fate touches him when he borrows the jacket of a long-dead postal worker and begins to weave his greatest tale - that of a world on the way to recovery.

Al Morris is a private investigator. Actually, he's lots of private investigators. For he lives in a world in which every person, every day, can be in any number of places at the same time. It's the world of dittos. It is our world. Welcome to the future, where Al is about to be thrown into chaos.

One of the very best must-read SF novels of all time