Search Results for: no-way-back

‘All le Guin’s stories are metaphors for the one human story; all her fantastic planets are this one’ Margaret Atwood

ARMCHAIR TRAVEL FOR THE MIND:

It was Sita Dulip who discovered, whilst stuck in an airport, unable to get anywhere, how to change planes – literally. With a kind of a twist and a slipping bend, easier to do than describe, she could go anywhere – be anywhere – because she was already between planes … and on the way back from her sister’s wedding, she missed her plane in Chicago and found herself in Choom.

The author, armed with this knowledge and Rornan’s invaluable Handy Planetary Guide – although not the Encyclopedia Planeria, as that runs to forty-four volumes – has spent many happy years exploring places as diverse as Islac and the Veksian plane.

CHANGING PLANES is an intriguing, enticing mixture of GULLIVER’S TRAVELS and THE HITCH-HIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY; a cross between Douglas Adams and Alain de Botton: a mix of satire, cynicism and humour by one of the world’s best writers.

It all began simply enough. A client had vanished, and Jay Corcoran went to investigate the man’s empty hotel suite. But Corcoran’s trick vision spotted the room-sized box stuck to the outside wall of the suite. There was no way to get into the box, so Corcoran cabled his long-time pal Tom Boone.

Boone had a talent. When threatened he could “step around a corner” into some otherwhere. Boone stepped into the box, taking Corcoran with him. The box turned out to be a time traveler machine that transported them back to 1745 England, where they found a family of refugees from a million years in the future. In that far future, alien Infinites were converting humanity to incorporeal form. When the family had refused conversion, they had to flee. For more than a century, the family had lain hidden in their time bubble.

Suddenly, the Infinites’ killer monster broke through–and things grew complicated as the family fled to the distant past and the farther future.

Edward Davis was a promising rookie in the Time Service. He had made jumps into the past – two, three, even six centuries – but nothing could prepare him for a leap of thirty-five centuries, all the way back to Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt.

In the blink of an eye, he found himself in a world of temples and tombs, pharaohs and pyramids, jackal-headed gods, mummies and talking beetles. In the ancient city of Thebes, Davis must rescue two members of the Service lost in time.

Taken in by a mysterious temple priestess and befriended by a beautiful Egyptian slave girl, Davis is sent to the City of the Dead to learn the trade of embalming. But as the hour of his scheduled return to his own time approaches, Edward Davis must come to grips with the truth behind the fate of his comrades – and the seductive allure of ancient Egypt.

During the day a blazing and merciless sun beat down on “the boy” and at night a friendless and cold darkness enveloped him. It was a bleak and lonely countryside over which he had been wandering for ten years. A rare tree, bird or wild animal was the only life he encountered during his desolate trek through his young years of roaming. Infrequently, he was fortunate enough to find shelter and food in the shops of deserted villages; otherwise he foraged what he could from the nearly barren land. Contact with other humans was his innermost and greatest fear.

But the day came when his curiosity overcame his sensibilities of self-preservation and he was drawn to the sound of a great wailing not far from a place where he had come to rest.

Form that moment on his whole existence took on a radical change. His wanderings became a kaleidoscope of adventures, emotions, and responsibilities – never static, forever mobile, and potentially dangerous. There were moments when it would have been easier to turn his back, return to old ways, but somehow he knew this was an impossibility. He accepted his new fate, but still feared the greatest of all commitments until it was too late for him.

This fantasy adventure will not fail to excite and stir in every reader memories and emotions of seemingly forgotten times and moments.

The megalomaniac Godmind is still planning to use all the minds in creation to make a vast ‘lens’, and if necessary it will burn out all life in the process.

Back beside the river and literally born again, Yaleen represents to the guild of riverwomen the perfect proof of salvation, of life after death. In fact, she is desperately searching for a way to save the whole universe from imminent destruction.

A determined group of colonists are attempting to establish a bridgehead on the planet Pandora, despite the savagery of the native lifeforms, as deadly as they are inhospitable.

But they have more to deal with than just murderous aliens: their ship’s computer has been given artificial consciousness and has decided that it is a God. Now it is insisting – with all the not inconsiderable force of its impressive array of armaments to back it up – that the colonists find appropriate ways to worship It.

A stunning work from the acclaimed author of Dune, the series which inspired the 2021 Denis Villeneuve epic film adaptation, Dune, starring Oscar Isaac, Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya and Josh Brolin.

Slippery Jim diGriz is in the process of robbing the new Mint on Paskonjak when the heist goes terribly wrong. Threatened with a horrific death, Slippery Jim is allowed to cut a deal with the Galactic League: voyage to the planet Liokukae and bring back a missing artifact – the only known evidence of alien life-forms found in 32,000 years of galactic exploration.

For diGriz there are a few catches. One is Liokukae itself – a dumping ground for the League’s misfits, murderers, maniacs, and the incurably obnoxious. Another is a little matter of life and death. To ensure the utterly untrustworthy diGriz’s cooperation, the League has given him a slow-acting poison, allowing him thirty days in which to succeed . . . or die.

Now the Stainless Steel Rat is on his way to a world that is hurtling backward down the evolutionary scale – a land of fanatic, goat-herding Fundamentaloids, murderous Machmen, and a rusty guru named Iron John. DiGriz has developed an almost perfect cover: a four-member rock band that has a way of giving its audiences what they want to hear.

But while the days tick away and diGriz’s life expectancy lowers, the mission evolves from finding an artifact to liberating a planet . . . which is a tune the Stainless Steel Rat most certainly knows how to sing.

By the time Jim Gilruth returns to Pakistan, twenty years after he served as a law officer in a small village near Lahore, colonial rule has given way to Pakistani officialdom. His strange and enigmatic mission is painfully involved in the brutal clash of the old and the new – but why has he been chosen as the instrument of coercion?

Then the details of a half-forgotten murder that he had long ago adjudicated begin to come back in all their bewildering nuances, and Gilruth, in an eerie repetition of the circumstances of a generation ago, is powerless to save the life of a good man, or bring a murderer to justice.

In The Moment of the Magician Alan Dean Foster continues the adventures of Jon Thomas Meriweather, the Spellsinger, in a land where magic and constant danger combine against a background of beauty and individual courage.

Jon-Tom (as he is known in the land), in his quest to find a way back to his own world, discovers that there exists in the land another human from Earth who may hold the secret he so desperately seeks. This individual, however, is reputedly evil and has strange powers.

Jon-Tom’s adventures in seeking out this mysterious and dangerous human make this sequel to The Day of Dissonance a suspenseful and exciting saga in the Spellsinger epoch.

The sun shone brightly on this fateful morning, bringing to its planets warmth and life-giving rays. The brightness increased sharply as the morning grew older. The glare was blinding; the radiation not life-giving, but deadly. By mid-afternoon the brilliant, intense sun shone on barren space. It had blasted each of its four planets out of existence.

Someone had found a way to poison a star.

And someone had to be found who could prevent the takeover – or destruction – of the entire universe. Who? Johnny Kettrick, as improbable a hero there never was. Johnny Kettrick who was banned from the Cluster World for his not-too-honest dealings was sent back there with his three equally unholy partners to search out the Doomstar…to find the Doomstar before it burned out another world.

Empath Kayla John Reed’s rebel forces, the War Minstrels, had struck a crucial blow at the heart of Yates Keller’s empire, conquering the Alliance capital, Vardalia. It should have been Kayla’s moment of triumph. But Vardalia was a shambles, and not only had Yates himself escaped, he claimed to have her friends and shipmates in his clutches.



Kayla had no choice but to agree to the terms he’d left in a holographic message. Meet him on their home world, the mining colony Styx, surrender the fabled Mindstone to him, and Keller would release her friends. Yet even as she set off for the rendezvous point, trouble was brewing among the War Minstrels – trouble that could transform their successful revolution into the deadliest kind of anarchy if she didn’t make it back in time. And what Kayla had no way of know foreseeing was that Styx itself hid a peril far greater than any trap Keller had planned for her…

Grad-school dropout Matt Fuller is toiling as a lowly research assistant at MIT when, while measuring quantum relationships between gravity and light, his calibrator disappears – and reappears, one second later. In fact, every time Matt hits the reset button, the machine goes missing twelve times longer.

After tinkering with the calibrator, Matt is convinced that what he has in his possession is a time machine. And by simply attaching a metal box to it, he learns to send things through time – including a pet-store turtle, which comes back no worse for wear.

With a dead-end job and a girlfriend who left him for another man, Matt has nothing to lose by taking a time machine trip for himself. So he borrows an old car, stocks it with food and water, and ends up in the near future – under arrest for the murder of the car’s original owner, who dropped dead after seeing Matt disappear before his eyes. The only way to beat the rap is to continue time travelling until he finds a place in time safe enough to stop for good. But such a place may not exist…

She called herself Reee and she was the last human being on Earth. This was the one thing she was sure of. Because Earth was not a dead planet, not by a long way. There were all manner of strange plants and bizarre animals, and there were the blue boys who insisted they were human – but she always set fire to them.



There was however Indigo, the all-devouring protoplasmic ocean that was literally gobbling up everything in the world. And there was the enigmatic Emeroo to whom she owed her continued existence. There were also the so-called Martians – humans who had fled to Mars and only came back to Earth to scout for survivors and vent their futile furies on the inhospitable homeworld.

The daughter of rich but neglectful parents, Terisa Morgan lives alone in a New York City apartment, a young woman who has grown to doubt her own existence. Surrounded by the flat reassurance of mirrors, she leads an unfulfilled life-until the night a strange man named Geraden comes crashing through one of her mirrors, on a quest to find a champion to save his kingdom of Mordant from a pervasive evil that threatens the land. Terisa is no champion. She wields neither magic nor power. And yet, much to her own surprise, when Geraden begs her to come back with him, she agrees.Now, in a culture where women are little more than the playthings of powerful men, in a castle honeycombed with secret passages and clever traps, in a kingdom threatened from without and within by enemies able to appear and vanish out of thin air, Terisa must become more than the pale reflection of a person. For the way back to Earth is closed to her. And the enemies of Mordant will stop at nothing to see her dead.

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

The evacuation of Philip Masson’s body near Mrs Griffin’s cottage resurrects several old ghosts that send the newshounds scurrying to dig in their clippings archives. Rumours, matured with the passing years since Masson’s ‘disappearance’ way back in 1978, once more abound.

But the investigative team of Ian Robinson and Jenny Fielding are already on a trail of discovery that leads back to the end of the Wilson/Callaghan era. Jenny has overheard a snatch of gossip at an embassy party which seems to implicate British Intelligence’s David Audley in the original cover-up of Masson’s death . . . and Jenny has a personal interest in that affair.

But it is not until the labyrinthine trails come together on a Spanish battlefield that Jenny learns why it is that Philip Masson had to die….

The Humanx Commonwealth: Book Five.

He was smart. He was good. He was backed by the Commonwealth’s best equipment. So what could possibly go wrong?

‘In the midst of life…’ thought Evan Orgel.

A whole lot of life. Alien life-form upon alien life-form, crawling, floating, wriggling, darting and oozing. The entire unexplored surface of the planet Prism was unimaginably alive.

‘…we are in death.’

His death. His Mobile Hostile World suit – the very latest, state-of-the-art, off-world protection gear – had just failed. Attacked in just about the only way its proud makers hadn’t thought of.

So there he lay, a hermit crab trapped in his own armour, while the myriad alien life-forms of prism crawled, floated, wriggled, darted and oozed about him, getting ready to open him up like a tin of upmarket cat food.

Evan Orgell was full of misery.

Gifted novelist Fowler (Sarah Canary and The Sweetheart Season) delights in the arcane, and, as a result, these 15 clever tales are occasionally puzzling but never dull.

In the long title story, temperance activist Carry Nation is resurrected in the 1990s (“We’re talking about a very troubled, very big woman,” says one shaken barman to reporters) and becomes such a nuisance that the DEA is forced to dispatch her with voodoo. Other plots are only slightly less outrageous in conceit. In “Lieserl,” a lovesick madwoman dupes Albert Einstein into believing he has a daughter; in “The Faithful Companion at Forty,” Tonto admits to second thoughts about his biggest life choice (“But for every day, for your ordinary life, a mask is only going to make you more obvious. There’s an element of exhibitionism in it”). “The Travails” offers a peek at the one-sided correspondence of Mary Gulliver, who wants Lemuel to come home already and help out around the house. The homage to Swift makes sense, for, when Fowler doesn’t settle for amusing her readers, she makes a lively satirist. The extraterrestrials who appear in her stories (whether the inscrutably sadistic monsters in “Duplicity” or the members of a seminar studying late-1960s college behavior in “The View from Venus: A Case Study”) seem stand-ins for the author herself, who, in elegant and witty prose, cultivates the eye of a curious alien and, along the way, unfolds eccentric plots that keep the pages turning.

Contents:
Black Glass (1991), Contention (1986), Shimabara (1995), The Elizabeth Complex (1996), Go Back (1998), The Travails (1998), Lieserl (1990), Letters from Home (1987), Duplicity (1989), The Faithful Companion at Forty (1987), The Brew (1995), Lily Red (1988), The Black Fairy’s Curse (1997), The View from Venus (1986), Game Night at the Fox and Goose (1989)

Private eye Bill Crane is back, in his fifth and final case, working and drinking as usual with his old sidekick, Doc Williams, and a new member of the gang, Ann Fortune, who is posing as his girlfriend – and disapproves of his carousing.

The trio has been sent to a Chicago suburb to investigate a murder and death threats made to the family of an industrial magnate. Alternately impeded and abetted by the many attractive women of the family, Crane cracks the case in his own inimitable way, following a trail of clues including the perfume of gardenias, the lipstick marks on the dead man’s face and the crimson cat.

The Zardalu were the greatest menace ever known to the worlds of the spiral arm, enslaving entire races and exterminating others, guided by an unswerving belief in their own supremacy. Then their slaves rose up against them, and for eleven thousand years the Zardalu had been extinct and the spiral arm had known a kind of peace.

But now the Zardalu are back . . .


The search for the Builders, the legendary alien race whose unfathomable constructs continued to perplex scholars and explorers alike, had led Builder expert Darya Lang, adventurer Hans Rebka, and treasure hunters Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial to an unknown Builder artifact far outside the spiral arm. There they found the Zardalu – just a few who had been trapped in stasis all those millennia, held there for purposes known only to the Builders. And in the struggle that ensued the Zardalu had been set loose, transported by Builder technology to to galactic parts unknown – free to ravage any world and any race within their grasp.


The only chance to eliminate the Zardalu threat was to find them and wipe them out before they had time to breed back up to strength and once again threaten civilized beings everywhere. The problem was that no one believed the story. Only Darya Land and her companions had actually seen the aliens – and no evidence existed to support their claims. And so the course seemed clear: get a ship themselves and search out the Zardalu.


But the way would not be easy. Even once they managed to locate the Zardalu, they still had the Builders to deal with. For the closer they got to their quarry, the more clear it became that the Zardalu and their world were closely entwined with the fate – and the plans – of the Builders themselves.

Six men have failed to appear in a West End court, so it’s time for Scotland Yard to make a few undercover enquiries. They enlist the help of Detective-Constable Cordari, who leads them to a mysterious organisation smuggling criminals out of the country.

There ensues a relentless chase that moves to Algeria and back to London. In the meantime, Cordari has vanished in the same horribly mysterious way as others before him.

‘A plot that grows to grim and sinister proportions. An ingenious story with plenty of excitement’ Manchester Evening News

THE HARD-CORE SCIENCE OF HAL CLEMENT
The supreme practitioner of “hard” science fiction, Hal Clement combines ingenious problem-solving with suspenseful drama and action. These ten stories show the mastery of science and fiction that Clement has displayed in such favourites as Mission of Gravity, Iceworld, and Needle.
UNCOMMON SENSEIf your back’s to the wall, even a deadly predator can be useful.
ANSWER”Know thyself” is great advice…if you don’t follow it all the way.
QUESTION OF GUILTWas he a medical pioneer…or the first vampire?
IMPEDIMENTMind-reading makes for perfect trust – as long as it works both ways!
-AND LOTS MORE!

Marcus Walker, a former hotshot commodities broker, and a wisecracking dog named George, who has been speech-enhanced to increase his market value, have escaped their alien Vilenjji captors, who saw the two as cuddly extra-terrestrial “pets” to be sold for a hefty sum. But Walker hasn’t a clue which way will lead him back home to Chicago. With the Vilenjji hot on his trail, Walker must pull off the impossible and pinpoint his needle of a solar system in the universal haystack. Will the unrelenting Vilenjji get to him before he reaches Wrigley Field? Yep, it’s a wide-open universe out there, bursting with possibilities – and Walker’s going to get hit with all of them.

For ten years, Colin sweated, slaved, and eventually built-up a nice business on a dusty world called Mars. Ten more years and he’d have been able to retire a rich man. Five more years and he’d have put all worry behind him. He didn’t get those five years.

During a sandstorm, he blundered accidentally into the forbidden zone, where the temple of Dra Vheera waited and rested, an area guarded zealously to the death by a fanatical faith. The Martians complained, and he lost all, stripped of everything he owned, fined, and sent back to Earth on a one-way ticket. And who was to blame? The Dra Vheera, the priesthood of Mars, the temple, the religion. One name for all three, but all three really one.

A man named Barhart offered vengeance, sweet, pure vengeance. With his help and money, Colin put together a force of eager men determined to strike back at the Martians, but he found more than they bargained for. The safety of Earth was now at stake, and Colin had to race against time and Death to save mankind.

Light on Bottom…

The light was artificial. Believe it if you can. I realise that for a normal person it’s hard. Wasting watts to light up the outdoors is bad enough. Spending the world’s limited power to illuminate the sea bottom, though – well, for a few moments I was too furious to think straight. My job has brought me into contact with people who were careless with energy, with people who stole it, and even with people who misused it; but this was a brand-new dimension!

I was lower now and could see acres and acres of light stretching off to the north, east, and west until it blurred out of sight. Acres and acres lighted by things suspended a few yards above the level bottom, things visible only as black specks in the centre of slightly brighter areas.

Then I got my anger under control, or maybe my fear did it for me. I suddenly realised that if I hit bottom the way I was heading I might never be able to get back to the…

Ocean on Top.