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When the Order of Planetary Engineers sent Hall Davenant to Ganymede for a terraforming survey, they knew that the job on the airless, frigid Jovian moon would be tough. Changing it to resemble Earth – with fertile land, water and good air – was the biggest and most important planet conversion job ever attempted by the Engineers. But they hadn’t counted on the already too Earthlike behaviour of the Ganymede colonists, who had never altered the ancient Earth-born habits of intrigue, bigotry and double-dyed treachery!

The Collected Stories Volume 4: Trips (1972 – 1973)

Winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, Robert Silverberg is one of the all time greats of science fiction. A professional writer for more than half a century, his short story output has been prolific and exceptional in quality.

This series of nine volumes will collect all of the short stories and novella-length that SF Grand Master Silverberg wants to take their place on the permanent shelf.

Each volume will be roughly 150,000-200,000 words, with classics and lesser known gems alike. The author has also graced us with a lengthy introduction and extensive story notes for each tale.

Contents:
In the Group
Getting Across
Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame
A Sea of Faces
The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV
Breckenridge and the Continuum
Capricorn Games
Ship-Sister, Star-Sister
This is the Road
Trips
Born with the Dead
Schwartz Between the Galaxies
In the House of Double Minds

IN THE “DOC” SMITH TRADITION

The planet was fine for big game hunters. And it was the tradition there that one must have a trophy before one could call oneself truly a man.

If that were all, it would hardly interest Cap Kennedy because his trophies consisted of planets saved for Terra and missions accomplished. But there was something on Eriadne which was not just a hunt trophy – something which required the presence of Kennedy and his men to check on. One of these things was a fragment of Zheltyana construction which outdated all civilisation.

But the hunt proved to be a double one – Kennedy against an unslayable monster and a lost world of monsters against Kennedy. And if he lost, it would be Terra itself that would be a trophy on some alien’s hunting lodge wall.

SPAWN OF LABAN is one of the best – a real edge-of-the-seat science fiction chiller in the tradition of Edward E. Smith and Edmond Hamilton

When empires hung on the turn of a card…

Cheyne Scarne was a gambler – a lucky one. What he didn’t know about randomatics wasn’t worth knowing. He had brains to get right to the heart of the Grand Wheel – the syndicate that controlled all illegal activity in the planets under human control.

But what Scarne had staked to get that far was chickenfeed compared to what he would risk to get into the real big time – the massive intergalactic combine that dwarfed the empires of mere men.

For Scarne, double-crossing at every deal, had laid his life on the line to win a game where no one knew the value of the cards and the rules changed with every trick!

Inkosi – the magnificent Ridgeback

Bruno and Hermetic Tradition – a pop-rock-mod group consisting in part of Bruno Twentyman, Cressida Beggarstaff, Gideon Hard, Liz, Nancy, Glenn and others.

Dr. Tom Reedwall, who works for the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries.

Miss Felicia Beeding, a pathetically daffy old drunk, a living in a burned out house above a chalk cliff.

Joseph Leigh-Warden, a rundown journalist, mostly sour, sometimes vicious.

Sergeant Branksome and Rodge Sellers of the local constabulary.

Radio Jolly Roger – a piratical broadcasting station whose personnel sometimes fished.

And many more.

What peculiar invisibility tied these disparate types together – threatening to make them all the same? They themselves didn’t know – and perhaps never would.

Scientists Dick Seaton and Marc DuQuesne were the deadliest enemies in the galaxy. Their feud had blazed among the stars and challenged the history of a thousand planets. But now a threat from outside the galaxy drove them into a desperate alliance as hordes of strange aliens stormed through space on a collision course with Man.

Seaton and DuQuesne fought side by side to fend off the invasion – as Seaton kept constant, perilous watch for DuQuesne’s inevitable double-cross.

Defying time, Jack Breton crosses into a parallel world to regain Kate – the wife who, nine years earlier, was found raped and strangled in a lonely park. But, in the alternate time-stream Kate is married to his double, John. And for one husband to remain either Jack or John must die.

Five startling and provocative voyages into the future, by one of the most respected authors in science fiction – Rule Golden, Natural State, The Dying Man, Double Meaning and The Earth Quarter.

The fate of the Earth Empire hung in the balance – and Security Commissioner Spangler knew it was up to him to find the monster, the Rithian Terror, as some called it. Seven Rithians had landed on Earth. Six had been disposed of. One was loose.

Surely, Spangler reasoned, the stereoptic fluoroscope would flush it out. ‘That’s one test the Rithian can’t meet, no matter how good his human disguise may be.’ Spangler explained to Pembun, the strange, little Colonial who had been sent to help find the monster.

But Pembun didn’t agree. ‘The trouble,’ he said, ‘is that the Rithi have no bones. Which would be indication enough under a fluoroscope, if it weren’t for the fact that it can easily swallow a skeleton.’

Spangler shuddered.

Johnny Parent was driven by a furious anger – anger against the cocky aliens from outer space and anger against the company which had hired him to build the space drive which would lift the quarantine against Earth.

It was a tough problem – made tougher by the company’s double-dealing. And Johnny didn’t relish the thought of cracking it with a whip on his back and a knife at his throat.

Then he stumbled upon an eccentric young playboy, his pretty but ambitious secretary and weird little alien with colossal strength. Together they plotted the piratical flight into space which would earn Earth its due place in the Universe.

But they had to hurry – because the company’s strong men were right behind them – and the sola time clock was running out!

The Hon. Vernon Lethaby is a flamboyant, headline-seeking exhibitionist with extravagant tastes and an allowance that barely covers his racing debts. In an unlikely partnership with middle-aged Canadian adventurer Joe ‘Digger’ Henderson, he strikes out for the Highlands of Scotland to hunt for Prince Charlie’s treasure, which, according to legend, is interred on the isle of Erran.

But Lathaby doesn’t trust his partner, and has taken out insurance to cover him against being swindled. Enter Miles Bredon, who is sent by his employer to ensure than neither of them defrauds the Indescribable Insurance Company.

An unidentified body burned in a garage, maps, photographs and a missing key sustain this clever tale of financial skulduggery until the final pages.

The sixth title in the popular Harpur and Iles series.

‘Planner’ Preston, a lifetime of successful robberies behind him, is organising a heist against a wages van, ill-guarded and with a predictable route. After hiring the necessary manpower and allowing for every contingency, Planner sets a date. Then one of his team learns that the route has lengthened and the guard has been doubled. Against his instincts, but goaded by the young recruits who think he has become timid in his old age, Planner agrees to go ahead – even though he knows the risks.

Harpur and Iles always suspect Preston is planning something and view even a visit to the dentist as cause for speculation. Now, the increase in activity surrounding Planner’s associates begins to turn their detective antennae firmly in his direction.

On New Year’s Eve, solicitor Rosa Epton spends a pleasant evening talking to a man who seems to be finding the date he has brought with him less than satisfactory company. The next morning she receives a call from the police. Toby Nash has been charged with raping the woman with whom he attended the party, and has asked for Rosa.

Unfortunately for Nash and Rosa, the detective inspector in charge of the case is determined to get a conviction by any means.

The Dragon, an enormous comet, is on a trajectory that will bring it perilously close to an Earth that is still suffering from the scars of a nuclear incident, and from the problems of the Greenhouse Effect. For the optimists – those that remain – it is a sign of change for the better; for others, the comet foreshadows humanity’s final doom.

But to Francis Reese and the hard-pressed astronauts of the depleted space programme, the Dragon presents a third outrageous, yet irresistible possibility – the transformation of a barren world into a new home for the beleaguered peoples of Earth.

It is over a thousand years since the events of Double Planet, when a group of cosmonauts crashed a comet into the Moon, thereby bringing a potential life-supporting atmosphere to that desolate planet.
Tugela is a young girl who has grown up in the austere post-technological society that has settled there in that time, a society dominate by the all-powerful City and its insidious cult of the Eye. As the comets stopped coming, and the atmosphere became increasingly thin, the Priests’ power grew with the claim that only their rituals could bring the comets back.
But a revolution is brewing among the Moon colony that aims to smash both the City and the poisonous stranglehold of superstition that has been holding it back for so long. Within this violent struggle, Tugela has a vital role to play. When she stumbles into a secret vital to the cause, she soon realises her destiny lies far beyond her homeland, beyond the deadly Forbidden Zone, perhaps even beyond the Moon itself…

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

When ex-Major Ed Parker of the US Army is pushed over a cliff at Pointe du Hoc following the D-Day anniversary, a crisis is sparked off in British Intelligence. The cream of the Secret Service gather: Dr Audley, Oliver St John Latimer, Commander Cable, Dr Paul Mitchell. But none will take on the case.

Why is the investigation left to inexperienced Elizabeth Loftus? Is there any truth in the old rumour that Parker was a KGB double agent?

Elizabeth must ponder these and many other questions as she prises the lid off a can of worms forty years old – and suspicion begins to fall on her most respected colleagues.

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

David Roche, a young double agent, is assigned to recruit British Intelligence Chief Dr David Audley into Soviet service. It isn’t long before Roche begins to doubt the information he has been given . . . and it isn’t long before he sees how he might use than information to free himself of his obligations to both sides.

Roche joins Audley and two friends at an ancient tower in the French countryside, and also meets with Lady Alexandra Champeney-Perowne – who shows him why it is so vital that he get out.

And out he goes, in an exciting denouement involving the KGB, British Intelligence and – out of the blue – a team of Algerian terrorists.

Winner of seven Nebula and eleven Hugo awards, Connie Willis is one of the most acclaimed and imaginative authors of our time. Her startling and powerful works have redefined the boundaries of contemporary science fiction.

Here in one volume are twelve of her greatest stories, including double award-winner “Fire Watch”, set in the universe of Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, in which a time-travelling student learns one of history’s hardest lessons. In “A Letter from the Clearys”, a routine message from distant friends shatters the fragile world of a beleaguered family. In “The Sidon in the Mirror”, a mutant with the unconscious urge to become other people finds himself becoming both killer and victim.

Disturbing, revealing and provocative, this remarkable collection of short fiction brings together some of the best work of an incomparable writer whose ability to amaze, confound and enlighten never fails.

Cara, Gayda, Pearl: sizzling dames. Travis, Clemensky, Clansing: desperate men. A set of secret papers. Bring in FBI man Lemmy Caution to recover the papers, and we have all the ingredients for a fast-moving story of espionage, deception and double dealing.

Lemmy Caution once again steers his way round the bodies of dead men and beautiful, very much alive, women to a successful conclusion.

Set more than four thousand years in the future, Summertide introduces a galaxy widely populated by humans and a variety of intelligent aliens, all of whom live in the shadow of the vanished race known only as the Builders. Nothing is known about the Builders, but the gigantic artifacts they have left behind – many of them still hardly understood – dominate the areas of space in which they are found. One such is the double-planet system of Opal and Quake – the former covered in water, the latter in desert – connected by a Builder device called the Umbilical. It is to this system that a variety of humans and aliens come, ostensibly to witness Summertide – the annual tidal wave which sweeps across Opal.

On the face of it, the double homicide of Arnold and Marie Robbins looks like just another brutal Miami Beach murder – except that teenage Cathy Robbins is lying between the bodies, traumatised but unharmed. Is she a silent witness to murder, or is she a killer?

‘An absorbing, cleverly constructed thriller by an ever-popular British writer’ Books Magazine

When Meg Jeacock let out the furnished cottage next to her house she did not care that her new tenant had certain rather sinister characteristics – he’d paid three months’ rent in advance. But Meg’s husband Marcus sensed he was a crook.
And when the stranger shows an inexplicable interest in Shandon Priory, the big house nearby, whose elderly owner has recently died, it becomes clear that there is trouble brewing – which, when it comes, takes the form of double murder . . .

Roberta Fenn was every man’s dream – a clinging climber with photogenic features and a phenomenal body. She had what it took to get what she wanted, and she wanted a lot.

But one thing she wasn’t looking for was an early grave, and that was where she was heading – unless the redoubtable Bertha Cool and the inimitable Donald Lam jumped in, guessed right, and moved fast to save this bedevilled dream girl from a nightmare of blackmail, double cross and murder.

Bertha Cool has just been released from a sanitarium where she has been recovering from flu and pneumonia, but soon she and Donald Lam are on the hunt for a missing bride-to-be.

They become tangled in case filled with slot-machine skullduggery, a double-crossing client, murder and a spot of financial finagling before they eventually achieve their goal.