Search Results for: departures

What if history had taken a different path, made a detour, and deviated just a little bit from the road it chose? Here, Harry Turtledove explores such “what ifs” in twenty alternate-history stories ranging from ancient times to the far, far-different future.

Persia has conquered Greece; Athens is in ruins. Yet even under Persia’s rule, the power of the people can never be completely broken…

A werewolf boy tears through Cologne’s medieval streets in search of sanctuary from the angry mob. But who will shelter a creature so hated and feared?

A student from the far-off future sets off on a field trip to study Genghis Khan – and finds him in the twentieth century?

And many more!

Two hundred years ago mankind found Orbitsville, a vast sphere whose habitable inner surface comprised living space equivalent to five billion Earths. The resulting migration was enthusiastic – and nearly total.

Earth itself is a backwater now, a place with which the people of Orbitsville maintain only marginal contact. But just because it’s backward doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous.

The stories in this groundbreaking collection – including the Nebula Award-winning ‘Rachel in Love’ – effortlessly cross the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, blending visionary storytelling with uncompromising realism. They reveal the extraordinary range, depth, and insight that imbue all of Murphy’s work, confirming her as one of the most gifted authors of short fiction writing today.

Orbitsville is the scene of two of Bob Shaw’s most successful novels and is possibly the most gigantic artefact ever dreamed up by an SF writer – a vast hollow world completely enclosing its sun, habitable across its entire inner surface. At the end of ORBITSVILLE DEPARTURE the whole world was shifted to an alternative universe. In a conclusion which is both stunning and moving, ORBITSVILLE JUDGEMENT tells what happens next…

ROBERT SILVERBERG confronts the paradoxes of time travel in a brilliant novel of the 25th century, when the only escape from suffocation in a totally controlled environment is to hop backward through time.
Since time hopping rearranges the past on which the structure of current existence is based, it must be stopped – but not too quickly. For the history of the 1970’s includes the arrival of hoppers who have not yet left the 2490’s – and whose departure thus must not be stopped!

After Colin Reiver is acquitted of responsibility for killing a child in a car accident he sets out on a sea cruise in the hope that it might ease local feeling and the voice of his own conscience.

But when a few days after his departure Colin is found dead by the roadside, Miles Bredon, investigator for the Indescribable Insurance Company, must travel to Scotland to establish precisely when the death occurred. The body has disappeared and reappeared in the space of forty-eight hours and a large insurance premium is at stake.

Once, not so long ago, A warlock named Vond built an empire in the southern part of the Small Kingdoms. Vond is gone, but his empire survives under the rule of a seven-person Imperial Council and a young regent named Sterren. The Empire of Vond was hardly trouble-free after Vond’s departure. Its neighbors are understandably wary of further expansion, there are questions about how Vond’s magic became so potent, and so on. Most of the World, though, doesn’t care — Vond is off there in the southeastern corner of the World, far away from anywhere important.

But one day a dockworker named Emmis watches a Vondish ship arrive in Ethshar of the Spices and finds himself hired as native guide and aide to someone who claims to be Vond’s ambassador plenipotentiary to the overlords of the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars.

But who is the Vondish ambassador, really, and what is his true business in Ethshar? And who has followed him to the city?

Both “Drink Me, Francesca” and “Out There Where the Big Ships Go” examine – in differing but related ways – humanity’s first encounter with other intelligent life, and its inevitable profound consequences. In the former, one member of an interstellar expeditionary force is drawn into communion with an intangible, superior being; in the latter an astronaut, believed long dead, returns to Earth bringing with him an alien game whose subtleties the human race must master in order to show itself worthy of membership in the galactic community.

“The Attleborough Poltergeist” is an eerie account of an apparently paranormal phenomenon which proves to have an even stranger scientific explanation, while the long title story is a surprising – and successful – departure: a full-blooded, adventurous fantasy reminiscent of Rider Haggard. A Victorian Army officer, doing surveying work in Asia Minor, stumbles upon a hidden valley in a remote mountain range. There he discovers a cult whose members literally tend and spin the loom of human destiny, and who await his long-predicted arrival to fulfil a strange and unexpected role in their society.