Search Results for: between-the-rivers

Young Sharur is the scion of a merchant family in the city o Gibil, loyal – he thinks – to his city’s god, Engibil, and to that god’s human deputies. But like his fellows in Gibil, Sharur is less interested in gods than in invention and trade. Then, on a routine trading expedition, he learns that the gods of the other cities, resentful of Engibil’s relaxed attitude toward his people, are uniting to punish Gibil and squelch the growing power of human creativity, epitomised by the city-state’s easygoing ways. Now only Sharur’s wits can save the city from the aroused divinities…and he’s going to need all the inventiveness he can muster.

In the early hours before dawn, a small Michigan town vanishes from the face of the earth. That morning the men and women of Two Rivers wake up in a world strangely different from their own – a world of curfews, food rationing and secret police.

Something has gone terribly wrong in Two Rivers, something that has to do with the mysterious government facility on the outskirts of the town. For schoolteacher Dexter Graham, who has lost his family and has nothing left he values . . . for twelve-year-old Clifford Stockton, driven by a child’s curiosity and courage . . . for Evelyn Woodward, torn between obedience to the state and loyalty to her friends . . . and for physicist Howard Poole, haunted by the memory of his brilliant, enigmatic uncle, the only way to escape the nightmare is to journey deeper into fear.

These are the heroes of the Starry Rift, a dark river of night that flows between the arms of our galaxy: a headstrong teenaged runaway who makes first contact with a strange alien race; a young officer on a deep-space salvage mission who discovers an exact double of a woman he thought he’d lost; and the crew of an exploration ship who must plead for the human race to avert an interstellar war.

All those who ever lived on Earth have found themselves resurrected – healthy, young, and naked as newborns – on the grassy banks of a mighty river, in a world unknown. Miraculously provided with food, but with no clues to the meaning of their strange new afterlife, billions of people from every period of Earth’s history – and prehistory – must start again.

Sir Richard Francis Burton would be the first to glimpse the incredible way-station, a link between worlds. This forbidden sight would spur the renowned 19th-century explorer to uncover the truth. Along with a remarkable group of compatriots, including Alice Liddell Hargreaves (the Victorian girl who was the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland), an English-speaking Neanderthal, a WWII Holocaust survivor, and a wise extraterrestrial, Burton sets sail on the magnificent river. His mission: to confront humankind’s mysterious benefactors, and learn the true purpose – innocent or evil – of the Riverworld . . .

Winner of the Hugo Award for best novel, 1972

The world that Man has known for close on twenty thousand years had been overthrown in a holocaust of atomic fire and annihilation. The immense and complex system of civilisation had been utterly destroyed almost overnight and only a scant handful of true humans remained.

Stretched out between the rivers of radioactive fire, the cities were growing wildernesses of shattered stone and brick, splintered glass and silent streets. But here and there in quiet places sheltered from the deadly rains, men waited for the fires to subside and hoped to rebuilt something a little like the civilisation which had existed before.

This is the stirring and sometimes terrible story of the supreme struggle for survival, when the continued existence of the human race on Earth is uncertain after such a tremendous catastrophe, and when all life is menaced by the wandering bands of mutants, creatures spawned and tainted by the deadly radiation.