Search Results for: The Time Ships

For the first time Morrey, Serge and Tony make a space expedition without Chris, who has become Deputy Director of U.N.E.X.A.. Their dedtination is Pluto, which since its discovery in 1930 has always been thought the most distant of the planets. Now, however, the powerful instruments of the Lunar Observatory have detected a change in its orbit which suggests the existence of another planet beyond it. The task of Morrey and his crew is to learn more about this mysterious Planet X and also to try out a new form of propulsion which will send their ship through space faster than ever before.

The launching is a complete success, but as the crew are approaching Pluto they make a terrible discovery about their ship…

Mysterious radio signals were being received from the planet Uranus, and Earth’s leading scientists decided that a complete investigation was needed. For the first time, the U.N.E.X.A. planned a two-ship expedition, under the overall command of Chris Godfrey. Serge, Morrey and Tony were of course included, and four other astronauts made up the crew of the two ships.

At first the signals made little difference to them, except that they produced violent headaches if listened to for more than a few seconds. But when Chris awoke after a spell of hypothermia and tried to call the other ship he was horrified to hear the sinister sounds from Uranus on the wavelength which connected the two ships with each other and both of them with Control, back on Earth…

Chris and his friends are setting off on the first trip ever to be made to the planet Jupiter. One thing puzzles them – they have been given no details of the time the flight will take. But as the space ship continues on its journey they are told that they will travel at higher speeds than have ever been achieved before. The effects of the tremendous speed turn out to be much more serious than expected…

WINNER OF THE 2018 BRAM STOKER AWARD FOR BEST ANTHOLOGY

It’s only water, so why should we fear large bodies of it, such as the sea or the ocean? However, when you’re all alone, you realize how scary a place it can be.

Stranded on a desert island, a young man yearns for objects from his past. A local from a small coastal town in England is found dead as the tide goes out. A Norwegian whaling ship is stranded in the Arctic, its crew threatened by mysterious forces. In the nineteenth century, a ship drifts in becalmed waters in the Indian Ocean, those on it haunted by their evil deeds. A surfer turned diver discovers there are things worse than drowning under the sea. Something from the sea is creating monsters on land.

In Devil and the Deep, award-winning editor Ellen Datlow shares an original anthology of horror that covers the depths of the deep blue sea. Whether its tales of murderous pirates who stalk the waters in search of treasure and blood, creatures that haunt the depths below?ones we’ve only seen in our nightmares, or storms that can swallow you whole, the open water can be a dangerous and terrifying place.

With stories from New York Times-bestsellers and award-winning authors such as Seanan McGuire, Christopher Golden, Stephen Graham Jones, and more, Devil and the Deep guarantees you’ll think twice before going back into the water.

A Victorian family is left high and dry when its lord and master sails off to China to bring back the first tea of the season. Absent for six months at a time, he never ceases to dominate the lives of his wife and children.

The yearly race to be the first home with the tea is underway, with every ship vying for both kudos and the prize money. The year is 1866, and as both Ariel and Taeping are surging up the channel, Caroline, the second daughter of the oppressed family, begins her own voyage of discovery.

Private First Class Johnnie Brown is on a break in New York, with just two days to spend however he likes before shipping out to fight the Nazis. All he wants to do is ride the subway, and while his fellow soldiers are exploring the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building and what the nightclubs in Times Square have to offer, he pays his nickel and boards the train.

Oddly, he runs into a stout, mysterious man speaking German. Johnnie follows him to an upscale townhouse, where he finds himself looking at more thrills than any cabaret. Suddenly he has lost his clothes, his sense of where he is and his dignity, but Johnnie isn’t going to give up until he’s uncovered every secret the townhouse is hiding.

At the age of 63, Philip Drury was 25 years away from his days as a ‘boatrider’ – a conman afloat. At that time his criminal partner had been a man called Mark Russell. In the years in between Drury had built up a hugely successful stud, and become involved in property speculation – and in doing so had lost virtually everything.

Drury was not a man to accept defeat. He needed to locate Mark Russell and give ‘boatriding’ one last go. A cruise liner is selected, but in the Caribbean where the ship will cruise, two young American conmen have exactly the same idea . . .

The third book of The Eternal Champion trilogy.

John Daker is the Eternal Champion, trapped in a dimensionless plane outside of time, defender and destroyer of justice, a hero whose quest for justice leads only further into darkness.

Haunted by the memories of too many battles waged during countless lifetimes, he searches for the beautiful Ermizhad – and for the key that will allow him to step off the wheel of infinite incarnations. His is a voyage on a dark ship piloted by a blind helmsman, through the slave stalls of the Cannibal Ghost Women and the tunnels of doom to a monstrous confrontation with the Evil that could plunge the world into the final night of oblivion.

In a galactic culture that extends from quasi-Utopian worlds such as New Alexandria to vermin-infested slums like Old Earth, the Star-Pilots have become the great heroes of the day. Grainger has become a legend in his own time, flying the prototype vessel of a new starship…. Having escaped from his contract with Charlot, Grainger is hounded by the Caradoc Commpany, who wants to extract everything from his brain about his former employer. But Charlot has other plans, and Grainger suddenly finds himself back on the Hooded Swan, leading a rescue mission for the Swan’s sister ship in the bizarre Nightingale Nebula. This last voyage proves costlier than the previous ones, as Grainger must risk not only his life – but his very soul!

In a galactic culture that extends from quasi-Utopian worlds like new Rome to vermin-infested slums like Old Earth, the Star-Pilots are the great heroes of the day, and Grainger has become a legend in his own time, flying the revolutionary ship, Hooded Swan. The rain forest of Chao Phrya seems a more hospitable place than the Halcyon Drift or the underground world of Rhapsody, scenes of Grainger’s previous adventures. But the colonists of the jungle planet are crazed and the indigenous population enigmatic; and Grainger must must undertake a mission that requires a lengthy journey on foot through the dense forest. His quest seems awkward, hazardous, and doomed to failure – and that’s before the giant spiders make their appearance!

Man is established on Kliron XIV, a dark, bleak, barren little globe used solely as a base for spatial patrol ships. Life on Kliron is no bed of roses, but it is only when faced by perils that seem at first too incredible to believe that the best – and worst – is revealed in men. Here in Kliron XIV just such a peril materialises. For the first time in their lives men find themselves confronted by an enemy against which no weapon can prevail. Worse even than the Master Entity, the Gargantua are its slaves, evil Flowers of Darkness that bloom where no life can exist . . .

A journey to the Rim Worlds takes you straight to the edge of the unknown or right to the gaping void of the abyss. Out there you’re beyond the borders, hovering between the warped contours of troubled space and time…

Captain Clavering bought his ship on a lottery win. Now he’s holed up on the dismal planet of Lorn filling in the time on a chemical-blasted airstrip waiting for a contract. Somewhere there must be a newly colonized planet needing charters or some threatened world that needs evacuating. He’d risk anything for money in the bank – even a dodgy landing on the gas-blasted plains of Eblis, if the Rim Runners fancy paying hard cash for an expedition to hell…

When Marl Judson, fleeing a rapacious government that wanted not just his fabulous wealth but his life, crash-landed on a uninhabited planet, he thought he was marooned without hope of rescue, so he prepared himself to live out his remaining years as best he could amidst the planet’s weird hallucinogenic flora. But head-twistting flowers (which Judson learned to avoid) were only part of the planet’s weirdness: it was possessed of some sort of field effect which made time play strange tricks; temporal anomalies sometimes resulted in cause preceding effect and bizarre compressions and expansions of the normal pace of events.

In such an environment time had no meaning; has Jusdson lived centuries alone, or only decades? Or is it years? Or all of the above? He doesn’t quite know, but when another ship crashes the strange time effects allow(ed) him to conduct an experiment aimed at producing a perfect society, a veritable Judson’s Eden. The the Snake arrives in the form of the government that marooned him – and the Snake wants Judson’s Eden for itself.

Originally, Sparta was an all-male planet – an all-male population with everything that implies: babies – male babies only – produced by the so-called Birth Machine from an almost unending supply of fertilized ova brought by Sparta’s founding father, a dyed-in-the-wool misogynist. But unnatural situations rarely stand the test of time, and it wasn’t too long before Sparta bowed to Mother Nature.
But there was still something rather strange about Sparta when John Grimes landed there to await the arrival of his beloved ship Sister Sue. It seemed to him that among the recently transplanted women of Sparta, there was a strange movement afoot. And when the Archon was kidnapped by a group of militant women the press claimed were men, he knew he couldn’t just stand by and watch!

Commodore John Grimes was finally getting his space wings back. On his old ship, Faraway Quest, Grimes was to venture forth to the very Rim of the known worlds, seeing … The Outsider.

“The Outsider’s Ship … is a storehouse of science and technology … we, and the Federation, and the Shaara Empire, and probably quite a few more, have sent expeditions. Every one has ended disastrously.”

So, it is out to the Rim and find The Outsider. But the mystery ship is not always easy to find. And other worlds, too, yearn for the treasures of the alien technology. What Commodore Grimes finds at the Rim, and what finds him there, sends him racing through time tracks, surrounded by enemies and temporary friends, trying endlessly to discover the secret dangers of … The Outsider.

They had been working for a long time to send a ship out into space, but when the great day came it was essential that the ship should be destroyed. They had looked ambitiously at the Moon and at the planets and stars beyond. Now they stared up in fear…

Here is the record of the first onslaught of a strange disease that dropped on mankind from the skies. It is the story of an alien plague that worked too swiftly to be counteracted by human science – a plague that did not so much drive men out of their minds as steal the minds from them.

Over the long years, ships of the Interplanetary Confederation had scoured the empty wastes surrounding Sol, searching desperately for a sister planet; a companion for the isolated worlds of the Solar System. Of the ships that were sent out, many returned. But always the answer was the same.

There were no planets! The worlds of Sol were alone in the Great Dark that swirled across the boundless heavens.

It was not until Steve Rane and Nick Brodine, in the Exploratory Ship Vega, reached across the yawning gulf of light years to Sirius, that they found the strange planet that rotated in its complicated orbit around the twin sun. It was an event transcending all others.

A discovery that plunged the planets of Sol into the greatest race of all time. For whoever controlled the alien planet, controlled the Solar System. And away from the watchful eye of the IPC it would be possible to build the greatest space armada in history and attack the Interplanetary Confederation without warning.

To Steve Rane, the order came from Earth Central. Zero Point has been set for three months hence. The ship of Jupiter must not reach the new planet first.

Pennterra is a beautiful and fertile planet and humanity’s last hope for survival. But Pennterra is already inhabited. After warning other colony ships to stay away, the small advance colony of Quakers has adapted to life on Pennterra. Heeding the empathic warnings of the native hrossa, they have settled in a single valley, sharply limited their population, and continued to use no heavy machinery in their building and farming. But surviving under these conditions has left the Quakers little time to learn more about their native neighbors. Catastrophe or peace-Tanka Wakan, the omnipotent master spirit of Pennterra, will decide.

‘She is unique. She is legend’ THE TIMES

‘Ursula Le Guin is a chemist of the heart’ David Mitchell, author of CLOUD ATLAS

‘A tour de force’ EVENING STANDARD

Earth-scientist Rocannon has been leading an ethnological survey on a remote world populated by three native races: the cavern-dwelling Gdemiar, the elvish Fiia, and the warrior clan, Liuar. But when the technologically primitive planet is suddenly invaded by a fleet of ships from the stars, rebels against the League of All Worlds, Rocannon is the only survey member left alive. Marooned among alien peoples, he leads the battle to free this newly discovered world – and finds that legends grow around him as he fights.

The ties of home were strong. In a few years man gets attached to bricks and mortar, and scenery. In a hundred years roots are so deep that no one wants to tear them up. In a thousand years it is quite unthinkable. In a million years, only a lunatic would want to leave…
Then came the alien, presenting an impossible choice… Humanity must leave the Earth – or die! Behind them was everything they had known. In front of them, an unknown to-morrow.
Which were the greater – the hazards remaining or the dangers of the infinite void ahead?
Could they trust the alien?
He said there was another world, a safe world, that would be a new home – but was it all a trap?
There were dangers out there. The dangers of a population confined in ships for a half a life-time; the dangers of cosmic radiation; danger of attacks by the ‘Others’!
Only men of the highest courage and the greatest integrity could hope to survive in the raw, searing savagery of the unknown…

At first it was just another hoax, another UFO story, but the sightings went on increasing.
It couldn’t be an alien, there had been so many false alarms, dramatic news-columnists had shouted ‘wolf’ so many times, that John Citizen shrugged his shoulders and said ‘nuts’ at the very mention of the word space-ship. Then one of them landed…
The things they did were not exactly friendly. In fact by the time they’d finished, they had made an old-time Viking raid seem like a social call from the vicar…
Many other attacks followed. Day after day and night after night the alien ships screamed in on their mission of death. The earth struck back. But no one could track the aliens to their lair.
They seemed to come from Nowhere. They weren’t Martians. They weren’t Venusians, and they weren’t from another system.
That left only one place where they could have originated… yet the truth was so fantastic that none of the earth governments would take it seriously until it was almost too late.
The enemy came from within! From the gigantic caverns at the earth’s core.

After bitter defeat on the Isle of the One Tree, Thomas Covenant, Linden Avery and the Giants of the Search take ship again. Across the frozen oceans they return to the Land, now perilously close to destruction from the ravages of the Sunbane. Drawn inexorably towards the caverns deep below Mount Thunder, Covenant and Linden Avery prepare to meet their bitterest foe. Even the white gold they carry may not serve against Lord Foul’s powers. For once the wild magic is released, the Arch of Times will crack, and Lord Foul’s conquest of the Land will be assured . . .

Nobody beats Bar Holliday.
He was paid to find the Terraformable worlds, new planets for his corporation to plunder. Up until the day he came upon Peace Victory, an abandoned generation ship hovering ominously above a definitely habitable planet, he believed nobody ever could.
Nobody beats Bar Holliday.
…because he was never satisfied with anything lower than first place, because he was always the oddball, in charge of his own welfare, his own destiny…a man determined to make his mark in the world and win games at any cost.
NOBODY EVER BEATS BAR HOLLIDAY.
…because he only took the wrong chances at the right times. But on the planet Patmos, where everything looked safe, but nothing was, Bar Holliday had at last met his match!

A mothballed space fleet, the great ships were silent and shut down. Each up to fourteen kilometres long, they had been circling Jupiter in their hundreds for nearly a millennium.
To the little band of fugitives, they were both their hope for the future and a terrible reminder of the past. Once they had been the slave ships of their time, transporting whole populations of unwilling humans to the star colonies at the behest of the Master System.
Now, reactivated, one might not only help them escape the Master System but take them in search of the five gold rings that were the key to its control and their freedom.
Cautiously, nervously, their craft edged towards the huge empty hull that loomed in the sky before them…