Search Results for: Air

Top Gun heads to outer space in this throwback to the classic science fiction of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein.

Strapped in to artificial wings spanning twenty-five feet across, your arms push a tenth of your body weight with each pump as you propel yourself at frightening speeds through the air. Inside a pressurized dome on the Moon, subject to one-sixth Earth’s gravity, there are swarms of chiseled, fearless, superbly trained flyers all around you, jostling for air space like peregrine falcons racing for the prize. This was the sport of piloting, and after Helium-3, piloting was one of the first things that entered anyone’s mind when Borealis was mentioned.

It was Helium-3 that powered humanity’s far-flung civilization expansion, feeding fusion reactors from the Alliances on Earth to the Terran Ring, Mars, the Jovian colonies, and all the way out to distant Titan. The supply, taken from the surface of the Moon, had once seemed endless. But that was long ago. Borealis, the glittering, fabulously rich city stretched out across the lunar North Pole, had amassed centuries of unimaginable wealth harvesting it, and as such was the first to realize that its supplies were running out.

The distant memories of the horrific planetwide devastation spawned by the petroleum wars were not enough to quell the rising energy and political crises. A new war to rival no other appeared imminent, but the solar system’s competing powers would discover something more powerful than Helium-3: the indomitable spirit of an Earth-born, war-weary mercenary and pilot extraordinaire.

In the second book of the Blue Gemini trilogy, Air Force Majors Scott Ourecky and Drew Carson continue to fly highly classified missions to intercept and destroy suspect Soviet satellites.

But after experiencing numerous close calls in orbit, the astronauts soon discover that not all perils reside in the sky. With his marriage already at risk because he cannot explain his frequent absences and strange activities to his wife, Ourecky learns that his unborn child may be in grave danger as a radiation consequence of his flights into space.
Even as the Ourecky and Carson accumulate successful mission after successful mission in space, other crucial events occur much closer to home. Interservice rivalries reach new heights as a caustic but highly influential Navy admiral schemes to steal control of the Project from the Air Force. Realizing that a Soviet GRU agent is operating in their midst, a shadowy team of counter-intelligence operatives scramble to shield the Project’s secrets from discovery, leading to a confrontation that bears fatal consequences.

As they train to accomplish more difficult missions against complicated targets, Ourecky and Carson are asked to volunteer to risk their lives one more time in an extremely hazardous rescue mission. The stakes are high; even as they leave the launch pad, there is no certainty that either man will return.

Charlatans or Prophets? At best, the tiny Kandarian Air Fleet would fight until its last ship was blown into infinity. At worst, it would be annihilated without a chance. To young Captain Bors, either course was unthinkable.

The ruthless Dictator of Mekin had already subjugated twenty-two helpless planets. Now he wanted Kandar’s unconditional surrender, or his vastly superior forces would blast it out of existence.

It took a lot of guts, and the hope that is frequently born of despair, for a military man like Bors to throw in his lot with Talents, Incorporated, an untried, unscientific organization. Through peculiar gifts of extra-sensory perception, its personnel could, their leader insisted, out-think and out-guess even the most deadly dictator in the history of mankind. Could it? It just might.

And it just might not. . . . But there was absolutely nothing to lose, and a free world (and a beautiful girl) to win. Captain Bors made his decision, and the loaded die was cast!

There was nothing on the island big enough to kill a man, yet each new day brought with it another bloody death, another mysterious disappearance.

The first hint of something wrong at the outpost was the plane. It crazily circled the little island, its cargo-bay doors open, its radio dead. It seemed to hang in the air for a moment and then it dived downward, levelled and dipped again. It made a belly landing on the runway with its wheels still retracted.

There was a singular, dead silence and then a shot rang out.

The crew of two and the seven passengers had vanished, the cargo was strewn about and the fuel tanks had been emptied. And the pilot, after landing, had blown his brains out…

When experimental drilling on the pacific sea-bed breaks through the earth’s thin mantle, vast quantities of nitrogen, trapped for untold millions of years, are released into the atmosphere. As a result, the oxygen in the air becomes dangerously diluted. Whole areas of America are thrown into chaos as the inhabitants literally fight for breath. Two men and two girls put to sea in a yacht in a desperate effort to escape the terror, but terror, in a different and no less deadly form, pursues them relentlessly.

Josetta is a princess of one of the Five Families. But she is far from the throne, so she is free to spend her days working in the poorest sections of the city.

Rafe Adova lives the life of a career gambler in those slums. He has no real ambition – until the night he helps a girl names Corene, who looks like she’s stumbled into the wrong bar.

Josetta is fascinated by the man who has helped her sister. Rafe is unlike anyone she’s ever encountered – someone seemingly devoid of elemental blessings.

Rafe is also drawn to Josetta, but when he is assaulted by foreign mercenaries and the reason behind the attack is discovered, Rafe and Josetta realise that the truth could endanger not only their newfound love but also their very lives . . .

Following the development of massive airships, naïve Londoner Bert Smallways becomes accidentally involved in a German plot to invade America by air and reduce New York to rubble. But although bombers devastate the city, they cannot overwhelm the country, and their attack leads not to victory but to the beginning of a new and horrific age for humanity. And so dawns the era of Total War, in which brutal aerial bombardments reduce the great cultures of the twentieth century to nothing. As civilization collapses around the Englishman, now stranded in a ruined America, he clings to only one hope – that he might return to London, and marry the woman he loves.

Written in the prophetic technological vein of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, Griffith’s epic masterpiece tells the story of a Great War which never was. Airship squadrons and steam fleets clash over the world’s great kingdoms, leaving panic and devastation in their wake. What is the secret of the mysterious dark “Angel,” Natasha? Can anyone stop the tyrannical ethernauts who pilot the stately war machines? Will the British Empire crumble and fall prey to the anarchists of the air?

The finest tale ever written of fabled Atlantis, The Lost Continent is a sweeping, fiery saga of the last days of the doomed land. Atlantis, at the height of its power and glory, is without equal. It has established far-flung colonies in Egypt and Central America, and its mighty navies patrol the seas. The priests of Atlantis channel the elemental powers of the universe, and a powerful monarch rules from a staggeringly beautiful city of pyramids and shining temples clustered around a sacred mountain.

Mighty Atlantis is also decaying and corrupt. Its people are growing soft and decadent, and many live in squalor. Rebellion is in the air, and prophecies of doom ring forth. Into this epic drama of the end of time stride two memorable characters: the warrior-priest Deucalion, stern, just, and loyal, and the Empress Phorenice, brilliant, ambitious, and passionate. The old and new Atlantis collide in a titanic showdown between Deucalion and Phorenice, a struggle that soon affects the destiny of an entire civilization.

Margaret St Clair is best known for her shorter science fiction and fantasy, much of the latter written under the pen name of Idris Seabright. She has a remarkably ironic sense of humor, and many of her stories have social or philosophical themes.

Contents:
Idris’ Pig (1964)
The Gardener (1949)
Child of Void (1949)
Hathor’s Pets (1950)
The Pillows (1950)
The Listening Child (1950)
Brightness Falls from the Air (1951)
The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles (1951)
The Causes (1952)
An Egg a Month from All Over (1952)
Prott (1953)
New Ritual (1953)
Brenda (1954)
Short in the Chest (1954)
Horrer Howce (1956)
The Wines of Earth (1957)
The Invested Libido (1958)
The Nuse Man (1960)
An Old-Fashioned Bird Christmas (1961)
Wryneck, Draw Me (1980)

OH COME TO KLEPSIS TO CLAIM YOUR SHARE … AND BREATHE THE RANK AND LAWLESS AIR!

Plots and intrigues and romances abound.
Smoke pictures, ghosts and treasure chests to be found.
Magnifying monocles and hallucinogenic grapes – the unvoiced dreams of the dregs of space.

Long John Tony Tyrone, the peg-legged historian, journeys here…
And marries a princess with rainbow hair.

But the Ghost of Christopher Brannagan will not rest
Until mathematician Aloysius has put to the test
His theory concerning the Doomsday Equation
Which might save the plane from total devastation.

Or might not.

Dr John West, Cambridge don and private investigator, was present at the trial of an odd duck, R. A. Adcock, who was being most uncooperative in answering questions about a bank robbery. At length, Adcock had made a dash for it from the courtroom – through a glass window, and what should have been a three storey drop to the street. But suddenly, Adcock wasn’t there, and at once a swarm of bees came into the courtroom.

Thus begins The Molecule Men, which takes many fascinating and terrifying turns to its chilling conclusion.

In the second story, the Monster of Loch Ness, Tom Cochrane, an independent scientist, determines to find out why the waters of Loch Ness are inexplicably warming up. What was it that caused the waters of the loch to pour up into the air like the worst rainstorm any of the observers had ever seen? What was at the bottom of the loch?
These two short novels by a celebrated father and son team will hold the interest of the science fiction fan from page one on.

A cosmic atrocity of the ancient past-the murder of the planet Mars by Venusian super-scientists who strip the planet of its air and water, leaving only a handful of survivors on a dying world! Martian scientist Jad Inicus embarks on am amazing scheme of revenge-by sending two young Martians, male and female, to a prehistoric earth. His cry for revenge reverberated down the corridors of centuries, and when it throbbed to awaking in Arnath Layton, his remote ancestor on Earth, the descendants of the malign Venusians were truly doomed! Another cosmic saga of this prolific author, novelized from the pages of Astounding Stories.

The last thing computer circuit planner Daniel Kitajima remembered was being hit by a crane at an orbital construction site. Waking up 80 years later – in 2089 – he found that most of his body had been destroyed…but he had survived.

A group of doctors had constructed an artificial body that gave him superhuman strength, the ability to survive without food or air, the powers of radar and infrared vision.

All Daniel wanted was to resume a normal life. But his new-found strengths had attracted the attention of powerful people with a devastating secret – that the solar system only has a few centuries to live…

Sorrow and trouble and bitterness will bound you and yours and the children of yours…

Some said the dying words of Nial Lynn, murdered by his own son, were a wicked curse. To others, it was a winter’s tale spun by firelight on cold, dark nights. But when Corbet Lynn came to rebuild his family estate, memories of his grandfather’s curse were rekindled by young and old – and rumours filled the heavy air of summer.

In the woods that border Lynn Hall, free-spirited Rois Melior roams wild and barefooted in search of healing herbs. She is as hopelessly unbridled – and unsuited for marriage – as her betrothed sister Laurel is domestic. In Corbet’s pale green eyes, Rois senses a desperate longing. In her restless dreams, mixed with the heady warmth of harvest wine, she hears him beckon. And as autumn gold fades, Rois is consumed with Corbet Lynn, obsessed with his secret past – until, across the frozen countryside and in flight from her own imagination, truth and dreams become inseparable…

They have lived among us for centuries-distant, separate, just out of sight. They fill our myths, our legends, and the stories we tell our children in the dark of night. They come from the air, from water, from earth, and from fire. What are these creatures that enjoin out imagination? Faeries.

Megan is an artist who draws seascapes. Jonah owns a shop devoted to treasures from the deep. Their lives, so strongly touched by the ocean, become forever intertwined when enchanting people of the sea lure them further into the underwater world-and away from each other.

They were trying out a new drive when a cosmic accident took them incalculable light years off course. A miracle of courage and astrogation meant than there were some survivors from the inevitable crash. The ship itself did not escape unscathed. What had been their vehicle became their prison. The buckled lock could not be opened from the inside and they had no other means of getting free. The air was slowly running out.

The planet they had hit was raw and primitive by their own standards, but it did hold intelligent life. One of the natives found the ship. Dare the trapped space travellers hope for a miracle? If they go out what kind of strange life forms would they be involved with? Could they hope to find the kind of raw materials which would get their crippled ship into space again? If not, could they face life sentences on this strange, unknown, primitive world . . . ?

Faced by a thousand fantastic difficulties the astronauts battled untiringly for their right to survive.

Everything was ordinary. Men worked in factories and fields. Women were shopping. Children were at school. Then came the four-minute warning. Wires hummed madly between heads of governments. Just before the massive retaliation went into the air the world realised that no-one had despatched the first rocket.

The retaliation was checked with seconds to spare. Experts examined the ruined city. There was something else besides radiation. Deadly bacteria from an unknown source spread across the planet. More alien bombs followed the first. But there was no real pattern in the attacks, if they were genuine attacks.

At last the detectors found the alien ships. They were fighting among themselves and earth was the battle-area. Could the remnants of humanity interfere? What would be the result if they did?

From the vaults of the SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal introduction to one of the unique voices of British science fiction, John Middleton Murry, Jr, who wrote his best work under the pen name Richard Cowper.

The son of the famous critic John Middleton Murry, Cowper announced himself to the science fiction world in 1967 with BREAKTHROUGH, which found favour for a subtlety and richness of characterisation not seen in most contemporary SF. The idea of a transformed future England became his signature leitmotif and it is this theme that informs the Corlay tales contained in this omnibus. This is the complete Corlay sequence, featuring introductory novella ‘PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN’ and novels THE ROAD TO CORLAY, A DREAM OF KINSHIP and A TAPESTRY OF TIME.

THE ROAD TO CORLAY:
On the Eve of the Fourth Millennium a slowly-building civilization, struggling out of the rubble of the Drowning, was crushed beneath the sceptre of a powerful and repressive Church. But on the Eve of the Fourth Millennium the sound of a magical pipe was heard, and the air was filled with songs of freedom and enlightenment. And on the Eve of the Fourth Millennium the Boy appeared, bringing the gift of sacrilege, a harbinger of the future, heralding the arrival of the White Bird of Dawning. It is the coming of a New Age. A glorious future bearing the presents of the past!

A DREAM OF KINSHIP:
They came to destroy! The treacherous Falcons, uniformed in the black leather tunics of the fanatic Secular Arm, descended on Corlay to burn and kill. Commanded by Lord Constant, ruler of the Seven Kingdoms, they were determined to crush the religious heresy of Kinship. But a new dream rose from the ashes… When four Kinsmen escaped the carnage of their beloved land, each helped to fulfill the miracle that had been foretold: the coming of the Child of the Bride of Time.

A TAPESTRY OF TIME:
Twenty years have passed since the martyrdom of the Boy-piper at York, twenty years in which his legacy, the movement of Kinship, has challenged the tyranny of the Church Militant in Britain’s seven island kingdoms. Now his namesake, Tom, bearing the Boy’s own pipes and perhaps himself imbued with the spirit of the White Bird, is wandering Europe in company with the girl, Witchet. But disaster overtakes them and Tom, in a furry of vengeance, breaks his vow of Kinship. A terrible path lies before him, one that transcends his own world. As he travels it, Tom must come to understand the true nature of the wild White Bird, of The Bride of Time and her Child, and of the Song the Star Born sang.

When MP Hugh Blakemore is shot dead in the Fulham Road, DCI Harry Brock and DS Dave Poole are assigned to the case. Months previously, Blakemore killed an inmate when visiting a prison, and although Blakemore was exonerated, Brock is convinced this is a revenge killing.

In an investigation with more ups and downs than fairground ride – and more lies than a villain’s alibi – the MP’s widow, her ex-husband and their daughter all play starring roles, along with a motley crew of actresses, American gangsters and criminals. And, along with murder, blackmail and corruption are in the air . . .

When a woman’s body is found by the Thames river police, floating opposite the Houses of Parliament in London, it doesn’t take DCI Brock long to work out that she has been murdered.

Further investigation reveals the woman was one of a stable of prostitutes run by a shadowy figure wanted in his native Australia. But the investigation presses other names upon Brock and Poole, and they must suffer several missed turns and pay the price for their assumptions before they get their man.

At four o’clock on a misty October afternoon in London, Evelyn Cross, blonde, nineteen and fashionably dressed, vanishes into thin air. Evelyn is the daughter of wealthy Raphael Cross. She has been seen going into the flat of Madame Goya, a fortune teller in Mayfair, but in response to Mr Cross’s distracted enquiries, Madame Goya swears that his daughter never entered her flat.

Then another millionaire’s daughter goes missing in the same block of flats, and Cross decides to employ the services of Alan Foam, Private Investigator.

But if Foam thinks this is a straightforward case of find the victim, he’ll need to think again …

‘A Luis Mendoza story means superlative suspense’ Los Angeles Times

An earthquake shakes Southern California and the Los Angeles Police Department. With no air-conditioning and a temperature around 98 degrees the heat is turned up when there’s a triple shooting of a highly respected Doctor, his wife and his nurse.

Can Lieutenant Luis Mendoza and his team solve the case while chaos reigns around them?

When Mike Rodenska, a former journalist and recent widower, visits his old friend Troy Jamison in Florida, he’s shocked at what he finds. For despite the parties, the shapely women, the devil-may-care air that surrounds Troy and his friends, Mike can see a life slowly coming apart. The only question is: why?

Putting together the pieces of his friend’s life – and downfall – turns an ordinary visit into a mystery that Mike Rodenska is compelled to solve …