Search Results for: escape-into-space

The ship rose on a column of invisible, super-heated steam ejected at incredible velocity. The spread of the blast flattened everything in the immediate vicinity. The surrounding town was wiped out.

Immediately on blast off the automatic pilot engaged hi-drive to avoid the attacking missile. This put the ship into negative mass with relation to the normal universe. It was now in M-space.

The ship was self-contained. It could keep going till all her occupants died of old age. But where to? Proxima Centauri? Or maybe Alpha Centauri, Riga, perhaps, or Sirius! The universe is a big space.

They hurtled on through space and time until they saw the planet, a cloud-hidden ball, as it hung in space a hundred thousand miles below the orbiting vessel. It had seas and clouds, mountains and ice-caps, islands and continents, It had a moon and a yellow G-type sun.

Home? Was this their second chance?

Lawyers in space?!

Well, yes. It’s a terrifying thought. But there are lawyers and lawyers. And then, there are Henry Carver and Waldo P. Burmeister. Sometimes it’s not clear if their greatest skill lies in getting their clients out of trouble – or getting themselves into it. Whether it’s Waldo doggedly trying to escape The Dalmation of Faust or Henry’s grim internal struggle against Parasites Lost, or the two working together, because so much is riding With the Knight Male, their adventures are sure to entertain every reader – and lead most to consider a long time before daring to seek legal representation.

WAS VENU’S FATHER ADRIFT IN SPACE, CAPTIVE…OR DEAD?
Life changed abruptly for 16-year-old Venu Jhabulova when his father disappeared. Venu had been heir to a large fortune and his father’s title…but now his uncle forced him to leave school and work for the family business. Venu’s only wish – that he be allowed to search the star system for his father – was denied.
Venu knew, deep inside, that his father still lived. So he escaped his uncle, fleeing from world to world in a desperate search. With the help of a mercenary who teaches him the proper use of violence and the ways of several planets, Venu learns and grows…during his SPACE SEARCH.

They were trying out a new drive when a cosmic accident took them incalculable light years off course. A miracle of courage and astrogation meant than there were some survivors from the inevitable crash. The ship itself did not escape unscathed. What had been their vehicle became their prison. The buckled lock could not be opened from the inside and they had no other means of getting free. The air was slowly running out.

The planet they had hit was raw and primitive by their own standards, but it did hold intelligent life. One of the natives found the ship. Dare the trapped space travellers hope for a miracle? If they go out what kind of strange life forms would they be involved with? Could they hope to find the kind of raw materials which would get their crippled ship into space again? If not, could they face life sentences on this strange, unknown, primitive world . . . ?

Faced by a thousand fantastic difficulties the astronauts battled untiringly for their right to survive.

To VENTUR the Subs were a nuisance.

They were fed and housed under the stern but loving care of the great machine systems. They were housed in space-saving underground accommodation, designed to protect the surface of their planet, and perfectly functional if not luxurious. Their culture was respected, some even had employment. In reality, VENTUR saved them, and their planet, from their own thoughtless harm.

But some refuse to be appropriately grateful. Some refuse to know their place…

Visiting the homeworld, ALIC hoped to find a little old-fashioned excitement on the “Subcontinent”. A retired games creator, however, ALIC can’t resist when Millie invites her to play a game that is wholly unique. One from which she struggles to escape, as her life becomes entwined with the people around her as they strive for revolution.

First published in 1986, ESCAPE PLANS was lauded as an original feminist cyberpunk novel, one which pulls no punches in its exploration of humanity’s relationships with computers, and our own flaws and follies.

Susan Galina and her friend Pat have escaped their normal lives into the elegant, isolated world of the Odyssey, a luxury cruise ship heading from New York to Europe via Bermuda. Pat is working on her doctoral thesis in quantum physics, and Susan is recovering from a recent and unhappy divorce.

To Susan’s delight, she discovers that her favourite author, Max Merriwell, is also aboard ship, teaching a writers’ workshop. Susan’s life becomes even more interesting when she meets Tom Clayton, the handsome chief of security. This cruise looks very promising indeed.

But the pleasant shipboard vacation turns dark as the Odyssey passes into the Bermuda Triangle. Each year, Max Merriwell writes three novels: a science fiction novel under his own name, a fantasy novel under the pseudonym Mary Maxwell, and a mystery novel under the pseudonym Weldon Merrimax. The trouble begins when Max receives a threatening note that appears to come from Weldon Merrimax, Max’s own pseudonym. Susan hears wolves howling in the night, the ship’s passengers are seized with a dancing mania, and monsters lurk in the ship’s corridors. An eyewitness reports a murder – but the victim of the crime is not on the passenger list and the body is nowhere to be found. While others struggle to understand these strange events, Pat seeks the explanation in quantum theory.

After a thousand years in space the earth vessel lands on a remote planet capable of supporting human life, Shakespeare’s Planet.



But due to a systems malfunction Carter Horton is the only crew member to awaken from his long sleep. And on the strange alien planet he finds only the bizarre creature named Carnivore. Soon he discovers that the two of them must leave the planet immediately – or face certain death. But his space-ship is now obsolete and the inner-space tunnel, their only escape-route to safety, has broken down…

Life on Earth was intolerable – and yet Man had stayed there, his dreams and potential suffocating under the dead weight of bureaucracy.

The stars were attainable – thanks to the Infall Drive – but only a few heard the call of deep space. Some had already gone to colonise a new world. The second ship was ready at last. Ready to escape the Earth’s prison; ready to seek refuge in deepest space. But it wasn’t only freedom that awaited it…

Instead of the welcome they’d expected, the returning crew of the first interstellar spaceship were kept in space, imprisoned in their craft. In quarantine, as carriers of a deadly alien disease!
When the prisoners escaped, the worried authorities hired Earth’s top detective Martin Slade to track them down, little suspecting that Slade had his own personal agenda to find the men. Slade’s search for the missing crew spans millions of miles of space, following a trail of hideous deaths . . .

Classic space opera adventure, Book #7 in the “Family D’Alembert” series. For centuries, the planet Gastonia has been a planet of exile, an escape-proof prison world for the worst sorts of traitors. But now, it seems, prisoners are indeed escaping, and all evidence points to the sinister, all-knowing conspiracy that continues to shadow the Throne. The d’Alemberts must infiltrate this world of traitors – and they must do it without a safety net, because if they fail they themselves will be trapped on this inhospitable world.

George Mallory was out for a quiet day’s shooting. A typical country-man, in typical English country. His day’s sport was interrupted by the beginning of the greatest catastrophe in man’s history – an alien space ship was crashing as his feet.
The ghastly monstrosity that emerged was so hideously repulsive that no one would have guessed at the degree of intelligence and potential friendliness in its strange mind.
Mallory shot first and asked questions afterwards. With its dying strength, the alien cursed the earth with a scientific horror beyond the comprehension of man, a horror that turned the beasts against us.
The only escape seemed to lie out in space… but the devastating effect of the cosmic rays wrought havoc in the minds of the space men and the lunar expedition turned on itself in deadly carnage.
What would be the outcome of the terrible conflict between man and beast?

Trapped behind walls of towering ice, First City was a prison from which no one ever escaped. The Trysts ruled with an iron fist: violent death was a common sight on the streets.

Morag MacKenzie was a mind-prostitute who gave erotic thought stimulation, without giving her body. Those who yearned for other escapes visited the Timesmiths, within those hands time could be moulded like clay as they spun dream-visions. But morag has her own dreams, of a world outside the ice walls, a world of space and freedom, and she is determined to find it.

To escape war and suffering, humanity had allowed itself to take a drug that killed all emotion. But a small number of insurgents – including the returning astronauts from a mission to Mars – had refused to take the drug, and waged an armed rebellion. The last survivors of the Freedom Army were holed up in a besieged bunker when one of their number, the physicist Burges, constructed a gateway to another dimension-an alternate existence. Ex space-pilot Lanson leads the remnants of his Freedom Army in escaping through the gateway-only to find themselves in an alternate world were humanity has been enslaved for the last 30 years by a toad-like alien race, the Zytlen!

CAPTAIN FUTURE FACES FIERY SOLAR DEATH

It was ten o’clock, solar time, when disaster struck. At exactly the same moment, gravium mines on Mercury, Mars and Saturn were totally destroyed by an unidentified army. Without gravium – the life-blood of interplanetary civilization – the system would perish.

Meanwhile, Captain Future struggled on the floor of a moving space craft, his arms and legs bound by steel ropes. He did not know why he’d been captured – only that the system was in grave danger – that he was needed…

As Captain Future was plunged through space, towards a deadly orb of flaming gases – the raging inferno of the sun – he planned his daring escape. It was to be the most dangerous gamble of his life.

Shot at by aliens, eaten up by monsters, frozen up, burned up and shipped all over the galaxy¿ war was one game Private Peace didn’t want to play. So why had he joined the Space Legion?

Warren Peace had joined the Space Legion to forget – exactly what, he hadn’t the faintest idea. But he was sure about one thing – however horrific the crime he’d once committed, the memory of it could hardly be more unbearable than life in the lunatic Space Legion. Private Peace knew he’d got to get out¿

The trouble was, the only way to escape his 30-year contract was to discover exactly why he’d signed it in the first place. And that meant a hair raising journey into his forgotten past to meet the one person Peace definitely didn’t want to know – Warren Peace Mark I – in other words, himself!

The valley was isolated in time and space, a land of barbarous science and human sacrifice.

Coatlice the Dreadful stalked the night, her twin serpent heads dealing death to taboo-breakers.

Citallatonac the First Priest sacrificed anyone believed to be possessed by the gods.

Chimal rebelled: he wanted to escape the atavistic confines of his lost civilisation, to venture into the unknown world beyond the valley, a world of hope, and nightmare, too.

Woodworld is a lodestone world, a planet with a magnetic field so strong that it can pluck spaceships out of the sky. Which is exactly what happened to Maxy, the youngest cadet in the space fleet. Stuck on Woodworld, with little hope of ever being rescued, Maxy must rely on his friends to have any chance of escape. When one of them is taken captive by Maxy’s one-time companion, Baker, he has no choice but to set off in pursuit across the Electric Ocean.

William Mandela is a genetic throwback, one of the small group of humans who fought and survived the Forever War. They returned to find humanity has evolved into a group mind called Man.

Surrounded by a society that is too autocratic and intrusive, living a dull existence which cannot compare to the certainties of combat and feeling increasingly alienated, the veterans plan an escape to the future by means of space travel and relativity. But when their ship starts to fail, their journey becomes a search for the Unknown, the elusive entity responsible.

Max Harborn and his wife Eva, the first space explorers to visit Mars, discover an almost dead world of endless deserts. Lifeless, that is, except for a few curious Martian moths, paradoxically existing in the absence of vegetation and water. Two of the living moths are brought back to Earth, along with samples of rocks, sand, and atmosphere. But once back on Earth, the two moths, male and female, escape from captivity, and begin breeding at a prodigious rate. The alien grubs are capable of eating almost anything, and soon the world is imperilled by a horrifying destructive plague of the Martian moths…

Here are five adventures in planetary exploration capable of orbit the most Earthbound reader. You will find yourself embroiled in interplanetary riddles as pioneer space rovers Penton and Blake pit their wits against five alien races.

Into the fray come an array of otherworld creatures – invisible imps, super-evolved blobs, and an amazing tribe of human chameleons. Watch, for the instance, how the adventures from Earth use their cunning to escape death from the ‘spreading shleath’ who ooze their unpleasant slime into every crack and crevice of the planet.


(First published in 1966)

He held the power of life after the world’s end! In four days the world was coming to an end! The exploding sun would burn every living thing on Earth to a cinder! In Simsville, it was Bill Easson who got the job of picking those fit to escape. He had to choose ten people – men, women, or children – out of its desperate, hysterical three thousand. Whom should he pick – the beautiful, the bold, or the clever? Did they really have a chance to reach a new world in the rickety, jerry-built, inadequate space boat that would be given them? Would cold and hostile Mars welcome them?

Jonathan Dark was a normal human on Earth, but suddenly found himself on another world – Callisto. Taking the name Jandar, he works with the natives of Shondakar to free them from the Black Legion and the nefarious Zanadarian Sky Pirates who prowl the heavens of Callisto.

When the heir to Shondakar, Princess Darloona is kidnapped by the fleeing Prince Thuton, Jandar must infiltrate Zanadar to rescue her. What follows is a daring story of adventure, betrayal, uprising and escape, and Jandar has to think fast and fight smart to save the day.

The Sky Pirates of Callisto is the third book in Lin Carter’s epic space opera Callisto series.

A mothballed space fleet, the great ships were silent and shut down. Each up to fourteen kilometres long, they had been circling Jupiter in their hundreds for nearly a millennium.
To the little band of fugitives, they were both their hope for the future and a terrible reminder of the past. Once they had been the slave ships of their time, transporting whole populations of unwilling humans to the star colonies at the behest of the Master System.
Now, reactivated, one might not only help them escape the Master System but take them in search of the five gold rings that were the key to its control and their freedom.
Cautiously, nervously, their craft edged towards the huge empty hull that loomed in the sky before them…

Continuing their mission to explore the galaxy and find new worlds for man to conquer, Captain Timothy “Tiger” Clinton, the Professor, Toby Paul and Rex are ready for whatever challenges the stars have to throw at them.

From Mars to Mino, Unkos to Lin, they explore planets and planetoid alike, encountering tree-dwelling creatures, lizard-people, watery worlds and spider-like aliens. As they try to communicate with civilisations trapped under ice, or escape cannibals, no adventure is too tough for Tiger, and there is nothing they can’t overcome!

The third book in Captain W. E. Johns’ Tiger Clinton space adventure series, Now to the Stars brings yet more action and adventure from the legendary creator of Biggles.