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For Al Larson it all began with his death in a fire-fight in Vietnam. He woke from this certain death to find himself alive – in a body and a world that was not his own! Transformed into an elven warrior, he became an unsuspecting pawn of the Norse gods, claimed as a weapon by both the forces of Chaos and of Law. Faced with challenges that would take him to Hel and back, Al made a place for himself in a land of swordsmen and spell-casters, and, after slaying one god, he found himself leagued with sorceresses and a master thief in the endless battle against Chaos.

But when Al and Shadow the thief slew the Chaos dragon, they unleashed a magical force beyond anyone’s power to contain. And Al and his companions would be forced to work a desperate magic to flee back to a twentieth century America which was not quite the one from which Al had originally come. But Chaos would not let Al, Shadow, and the Dragonrank mages Silme and Astryd escape so easily, and, a mortal man once again, Al would find himself caught in a desperate fight to save everyone he held dear, as Chaos pursued him into the heart of New York City.

Gods’ Magic, Mortal’s Doom… In a land where magic is real, where elves and dragons menace the unwary, and where the Norse gods wage a deadly campaign, using mortals as their favourite pawns, Loki, god of deception, and Freyr, god of war, are locked in a battle that could tip the universal balance toward order or eternal chaos. Searching the alternate timeways, Freyr has reached out to snatch Al Larson, twentieth-century American soldier, from the midst of a fire-fight in Vietnam, flinging him through time and space into the body of an elvish warrior to stand against Loki and his sorcerous ally, Bramin. Torn from a world where bullets and grenades are the weapons of choice, and locked into an elvish body on a world where sword and spell are the means of battle, Al must adapt swiftly – or die. For the gods have marked him as their own private battleground, and Al’s only chance rests in completing the quest Freyr has set him, a quest that will lead him to the very gates of Hel, where he must save a god – or destroy one!

Seeking the answer to the mystery of life, Captain Oswald Bastable visits the Temple of the Future Buddha and is thrown through time to a new twentieth century. Plague, anarchy and superstition rule the world where he finds himself. Bands of diseased mutants pillage the continents while pirate U-boats prowl the oceans.

But from this chaos emerges Black Attila, commander of the African Hordes and master of the most terrible weapon ever devised by Man – the Land Leviathan, a terrifying ziggurat on wheels, a moving mountain of deadly artillery.

At last, after centuries of cruel oppression, the Land Leviathan helps the Black Attila establish Black Power on an unimaginable, global scale. Unimaginable, that is, to anyone except Michael Moorcock who has re-written the history of the twentieth century in his own totally original, biting style.

Until the coming of the People of Asa, the world of Man went its own, often quarrelsome, way along the road of human advancement. There were many pitfalls on the road, conflict and misery often going hand-in-hand; but there was happiness as well. It was, for us and millions more, a happiness interrupted by the terrible advent of the worst scourge ever visited on Man – an alien invasion of the Earth’s surface by beings of diabolical power.

Rising from the deeps, wielding weapons hitherto beyond mortal conception, the Asans wrought havoc on a fearful scale. Picked out from our fellow men, we witnessed scenes of appalling chaos, experiencing as well a measure of the seeming magic of which these beings were capable. Only when all seemed lost did the fortunes of mankind change, and that in a manner we none of us dared to hope…

Most of the problems were solved in the 29th century. War was a memory. Disease was almost conquered. Old age and Death were held at bay. It was a glad world. A brave new world. Humanity had grown up. And then It came… At first the dare-devil pioneers from the far-flung corners of the universe brought back strange tales of a mountain that walked. The reign of terror spread from planet to planet, until the authorities sat up and took notice. By the time someone with enough initiative to re-open the long disused weapon shops, came on the scene, it was almost too late. Time was against them. Atomic bomb wouldn’t smash that creature, neither would heat rays nor energy bolts. It left a train of utter chaos and devastation behind it as it strode imperiously through the galaxy.

A sunflare, a meteorite strike, a tachyon storm – all natural disasters – were wiping out the best brains of mankind at a rate of a thousand times greater than normal.

The Director of ChaosCenter laid it out bluntly: “All our evidence suggests that a device that can alter probability exists. For want of a better name we call it the Chaos Weapon.

Somebody, somewhere, wants us cut back – and hard. Unless we find that Chaos Weapon and destroy it, it’s going to destroy us!”.

It meant little to Robert Fairlie, a serious and dedicated young philologist, that the United States and Soviet Russia were at odds about the Moon. He had little interest in the first rocket landings or the bases that the two nations had established there. And he neither knew nor cared why the Americans would not agree to mutual inspections of these bases.

Yet the Americans had reason enough: and quite unexpectedly, because of his specialised knowledge of languages, he found himself sharing the burden of an incredible secret. For what the American base had yielded was astounding evidence that space had already been conquered many centuries before by a people who had once spanned the stars. There had been machines and destructive weapons beyond the comprehension of present-day scientists which, if knowledge of them fell into the wrong hands, could plunge the world into unutterable chaos.

Fairlie’s trip to the closely-guarded rocket base in New Mexico turned out to be only the first step on a fantastic journey amid the unexplored stars to the home-world of the space-conquerors of long ago.

It was a journey into the appalling reality of stellar space still haunted by the past cosmic struggle whose scale in space and time dwarfed the rivalries of tiny Earth’s quarreling nations.

Steve Matuckek Book 1

In a war waged against Black Magic, the fact that Steve is a werewolf and his wife is a highly skilled witch is not unusual. But their adventures prove very unusual, even for their world, when they are given the task of neutralizing an enemy’s ultimate weapon – the world’s most powerful demon.