Search Results for: earth-war,-the

In the 21st century the nature of war has change – Atomic weapons, Bazookas and rockets, were all banned. Machine guns were just permissable.
An the newest secret weapon? – A GLIDER
East and West had managed an uneasy truce in the arms’ race by banning all weapons developed after 1900. Yet small wars, waged in front of television cameras, were the means of settling industrial disputes.
It was a crazy way of doing things…but it worked – until an ambitious Major upset the status quo, and threw the world’s peace into deadly peril!

Visa for an enigma.

When John Carter came to the Horakah Cluster, it was in the guise of an interstellar salesman. If anyone there suspected he was more than that, it would mean his instant execution.

But Carter’s unusual personality made it possible for him to put over the deception and even gain a visa to the forbidden central planet, an arsenal of space war factories. Of course, had to make some special deals to do it, and those proved his undoing.

For he found himself caught between two menaces: the tyrannical militaristic moguls and a fantastically greater threat fro beyond the ends of space.

From the vaults of the SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal introduction to the fantastic worlds of one of the greatest adventure writers of all time, Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The son of a Civil War veteran, Edgar Rice Burroughs was a prolific writer for the early pulp magazines. Famous the world over as the creator of Tarzan – and in SF circles for his Martian tales featuring John Carter – Burroughs is a household name. This omnibus collects six more tales of Tarzan of the Apes – perhaps the greatest pulp hero of all time: TARZAN AT THE EARTH’S CORE, TARZAN THE INVINCIBLE, TARZAN TRIUMPHANT, TARZAN AND THE CITY OF GOLD, TARZAN AND THE LION MAN and TARZAN AND THE LEOPARD MEN.

The object appeared over the Pacific, moving so fast that it was over Arizona before the supersonic shock of its passing was felt. It slowed perceptibly somewhere over New Jersey, and took only a small chunk out of the World Trade Center on its way between the two towers. Earth would never be the same again

‘The Oinn and the Blettr are in league against us. They do not war with each other. The ship that crashed was a plant to make us believe.’ They came from beyond the galaxy, bent on world domination.the alien terror that endangered mankind. They deceived men into believing they sought only peace. And as their battle fleets threatened earth with extinction, only one man could save the human race.

The twenty-year Earth-Mars war was finally over. What was left of Earth – its crumbled cities, its ruined farmlands – were firmly and completely under the rule of the Martian Archon. And this powerful planetary ruler was taking no chances: he intended to reduce the Terrans to a society of primitive agricultural tribes in less than a generation!

But for David Arnfeld, ex-spaceman and Earth Base Commander, there was something in the whole set-up which did not ring true. Why had both sides muffed countless chances to end that awful war in the first year or two? And why had the two planets gone to war in the first place?

In the back of Arnfeld’s mind an idea was growing…perhaps there was yet a chance to save the doomed population of Earth. But if his idea was true, and proof was available, he had to work fast. Too many people were involved in this War of the Two Worlds to let one man upset their plans.

PROGRESS REPORT:


Cornwall, Nebraska – 894 catatonic, 86 dead


Boland, California – 1200 blind


Berwick, Maine – 2100 severely mentally retarded


McKay, Maryland – 2300 with complete loss of memory


Small towns, each wiped out as surely as if bombed off the face of the earth.

The president’s announcement was simple: “My fellow Americans, the people of the United States are under attack. Terrorists are using germ warfare against us and we must take extraordinary enforcement measures. I will ask Congress to declare a state of national emergency…”

The twenty-seventh century planet of Quopp is a world where Earthmen walk cautiously or not at all. The inhabitants are weirdly diabolical creatures, possessing spoked-wheel limbs and sprouting steel-sharp talons.

Plans are afoot to place these singular beings under a single government friendly to Earth. But Jame Retief, officer of the distinguished Corps Diplomatique Teresstienne, a supra-national organization devoted to keeping the peace, has discovered that evil forces are undermining the whole scheme.

Deviously sincere, uncompromisingly venal, fearlessly cowardly, Retief goes to work against mounting planetary intrigue and more than once brings those around him to the brink of nervous collapse.

After millennia of relentless war, the union of alien races called the Weave was on the verge of winning a decisive victory – thanks to their new allies from Earth, who in a mere handful of centuries had proved masters of combat. But then the birdlike Wais scholar Lalelelang found disturbing evidence that Humans might not adapt so easily to peace – that natural Human aggression would next be turned against the Weave, unless they were once again confined to fight amongst themselves.

When her field research revealed the existence of a secret group of powerfully telepathic Humans called the Core, it looked as if Lalelelang would be the first victim in a new war between Humans and their allies. But just as her fate was sealed, a lone Core commander took a chance on her intelligence and compassion, gambling the fate of Humanity on the possibility that together they could both find an alternative to a galaxy-wide bloodbath…

New Alabama. A planet that’s a fair reproduction of long-lost Dixie, filled with down-home, racist rednecks. The N’Alabamians have carried their tribal prejudices to the farthest reached of the galaxy, like the other minorities expelled from the Earth by the dominant Pan-Semitic Alliance. There’s New Transvaal. New Cathay. And New Haiti, a black world where Papa Doc’s descendants carry on the old ways.

When New Alabama and New Haiti go to war with each other, it’s a bloody black-versus-white stalemate. Until the N’Haitians develop a horrific new secret weapon based on a very ancient tradition.

Imagine you’re a clean-cut N’Alabamian good ol’ boy, giving your all up there in the space fleet, and you suddenly realise the enemy crews aren’t human at all. They’re what people back on Earth used to call Zombies…

Earth and its colonies on Mars and Venus are ruled by an authoritarian post-World War III world state which plans to take control of a new method of space travel when it has been perfected by a Martian scientist. When they fail to secure the invention, the world state’s Coordinator decides to destroy the Mars colony with “radi-germ bombs.

At the end of The Cyborg and the Sorcerers, Sam Turner was making a life for himself on the planet Dest. He thought he had left the long-lost interstellar war between Earth and its rebellious colonies behind him forever.
“Forever” turned out to be eleven years. That was how long it took for another Independent Reconaissance Unit to respond to the distress call his ship had sent before it was destroyed. And this one made his own berserk killer computer look sane.

Jan Dorvin, the Minervan, has overthrown the power of no less than five of the mighty airship colonies known as the Sky Lords that once terrorized the Earth and destroyed her people.



Now, under her rule, the Lord Montcalm, the Lord Matamoros, the Perfumed Breeze, the Lord Retribution, and the Lord Nimrod all unwillingly bow to the ancient yet superior and terrible technology that she has plucked from outer space.



But not every Sky Lord is under her control. Now her enemies are learning that as much as they hate each other, the only way to survive is to join together in a colossal show of strength that not even the laser beams of a Sky Angel, a sentient computer program, or an uppity Minervan can resist.

In this classic of alternate history by grand master Philip Jose Farmer, Native American bomber pilot Roger Two Hawks bails out over enemy territory in WWII, only to find himself on another Earth – one in which the American continents never rose from the waters, and the ancestors of the American Indians remained in Asia and Europe-an Earth embroiled in a world war of its own – with Two Hawks caught in the middle.

Seven billion years from now, long after the Sun has died and human life itself has become extinct, alien beings reincarnate humanity from our fossilized DNA drifting as debris in the void of deep space. We are reborn to serve as bait in a battle to the death between the Rimstalker, humankind’s reanimator, and the zotl, horrific creatures who feed vampire-like on the suffering of intelligent lifeforms.

The reborn children of Earth are told: “You owe no debt to the being that roused you to this second life. Neither must you expect it to guide you or benefit you in any way.” Yet humans choose sides, as humans will, participating in the titanic struggle between Rimstalker and zotl in ways strange and momentous.

Author’s Note: The volumes of this series can each be read independently of the others. The feature that unifies them is their individual observations of science fiction’s sub-genre: “space opera,” which the editors David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer define as “colorful, dramatic, large-scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character and plot action, and usually set in the relatively distant future, and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone. It often deals with war, piracy, military virtues, and very large-scale action, large stakes.”

Earth was programmed for destruction in the mad war of the computer worlds – unless the Solarians could stop the machines!

Three hundred years ago the Solarians retreated to the safety of their Fortress as Earth became embroiled in the first of the computer wars with the dread Duglaari Empire.

The Solarians’ final word to all humanity was a promise to reappear one day and bring it to victory. Suddenly, with Earth on the verge of becoming a helpless victim of the merciless Duglaars, the Solarians made contact with Fleet Commander Jay Palmer. It was an offer of aid.

But the Solarians’ plan was so cunning, so fraught with danger, that Jay faced the greatest decision of his life – and that of Earth’s:

Accept their ingenious strategy as a stroke of genius or reject it as a trick designed to destroy human life forever.

Born in the radioactive ashes of World War Three the institute for Applied Psychodynamics had guided Planet Earth to a period of plenty that for the first time fulfilled Science’s promise. But it is the central irony of human existence that prosperity bears the seeds of its own destruction; this time not just Earth but the entire Solar System would endure the flames of war.

In the beginning was World War III…

Out of the flames was born a new civilization, a new humanity dedicated to one world rather than to many nations, to once peace rather than many wars. Never again on Planet Earth would one group of humans “defend” themselves against another group equally convinced that all their actions were “defensive”. Never again on Planet Earth.

But cycles repeat themselves endlessly; Earth is only the beginning of the human story. Next comes planet against planet, and then the stars themselves. Through it all the impersonal forces of historical necessity will tend to force that story into the pathways of tyranny, stasis, and war. And in the end they must prevail. But ever will humankind win free once more…

The devastated Earth had only a handful of inhabitants – now even their future was in the balance.

The Twenty-Second Century had been and gone – and with it, the worst war in the bloody history of mankind: the War of the Black Rising. The Earth was devastated, the moon blasted out of the sky, it was only on Mars, many millions of miles away, that humanity had survived – in the shape of a few Black colonists.

But out of that few had grown a new civilization – a civilization which now, some two thousand years later, had successfully launched its first space exploration – destination, the ‘dead’ planet Earth.

Several light-years west of the Earth’s Sun lay the planet, Lucifer, circling a sun of its own, circled by its own two moons. The five specially selected and trained passengers of the “Argo” found much on Lucifer to remind them of the Earth they had left eleven years before. The air was invigorating, the vegetation lush, and there were people – a race of friendly white giants and a swarming population of wary pygmy tribes.

The Earth pioneers soon faced the problem of survival on the red-green planet, and also the founding of a democratic civilization among the strife-torn pygmies. However, they were soon entwined in a brutal war between opposing pygmy forces. On the outcome of this war hinged the very fate of the new way of life on Lucifer…

Earth: expensive, elite graveyard to the galaxy. Ravaged 10,000 years earlier by war, Earth was reclaimed by its space-dwelling offspring as a planet of landscaping and tombstones. None of them fully human, Fletcher, Cynthia, and Elmer journey through this dead world, discovering human traits and undertaking a quest to rebuild a human world on Earth.

Men had fought wars throughout history, but never such a war as the one which destroyed the cities of earth and turned vast areas into badlands, stretches of intense radioactivity where nothing could grow and no one could live. It also produced the deviates, mutants who had warped bodies and strange talents.
But there were others who had still stranger talents, mental powers exceeding those of the mutants, and whose bodies did not bear the sign of the deviate. Their origin could not be traced to an atomic war; even they themselves had no idea whence they came.
Forced to take part in the abortive war between the Eastern and Western Federations, one man and one man eventually escaped and discovered creatures similar to themselves. But to discover their origin they had to go back five thousand years; and the answer lay not on earth, but somewhere in the stars.

A deadly meteor swarm approaching the Earth activates ancient Lunar technology buried beneath Earth’s surface that results in the birth of Raquilo, the last Selenite, who will save some humans from the meteor storm that millions of years ago destroyed the Moon’s atmosphere, oceans and inhabitants. Meanwhile, the balance of power on Earth has shifted to Vilgarth, an arms merchant who, with stolen v-ray technology and an alliance with governments in favor of his plan, wages a world war to take over the planet.

How Kemlo won his spurs in the first and last great Battle of Space. For, yes, even to Space, that final goal of all Man’s earthly dreams, enmity and war eventually came. But in Space, as always in the end on Earth, good was to triumph over evil – though not until a hideous and terrifying danger had been averted.

Three Mind-Jarring Space Operas

Marooned:
Four giant ships made of the wonder element synthium crash the asteroid belt and brave the cold of Jupiter’s moons in mans last reckless dash to adventure.

All:
The Chinese have brutally conquered the Earth and out of their ruthless tyranny evolves the last great religious war, and the first God of Nuclear Divinity.

The Space Beyond:
When you wake up 75 billion miles from Earth in a crippled ship hurtling towards a blistering Mega-Sun, with a crew of insane gangsters and a Texan, what you don’t need to run into is a galactic war. Or was that their only chance of survival?