Search Results for: great-work-of-time

His name is Caspar Last, and this is the unique chronicle of the vacation he took from the twentieth century. It begins – or does it? – when Caspar, a genius, poor of course, and resentful at that, decides to use his “time machine” to bring back a modest fortune. It begins – or maybe it doesn’t – with a mysterious bequest to a secret Otherhood charged with preserving and extending the British Empire at any cost. From the bold colonial days of empire-builder Cecil Rhodes through the wide-eyed and wondrous possibilities of the present to a strange and haunting future of magi and angels, of men and many races other than our own, John Crowley’s time-travel masterpiece surfs bravely along “the infinite, infinitely broken coastline of Time” to tell a story that takes place neither here nor there, but everywhen.

Ruben Prien is still at work with the Project, still dreaming of altering man’s fate by going back in time to adjust events… to interfere, some might say, with destiny. Once again, his conduit to that bygone era, his messenger to that lost world, is Simon Morley, the man who actually proved himself capable of traveling back and forth in time.

Rube’s purpose in summoning Si back from that earlier world, where he has taken up permanent residence, is no less grand than an attempt to prevent World War I from erupting. It is ironic, therefore, that the man assigned to carry to America the papers that might help avert the Great Catastrophe travels to his meeting on board the Titanic. And it is Si’s task to attempt to ensure his safe passage.

Early in human history, certain individuals were born who live on, unaging, undying, through the centuries and millennia. We follow them through over 2000 years, up to our time and beyond – to the promise of utopia and the challenge of the stars. A milestone in modern science fiction and a New York Times Notable Book on its first publication in 1989, this is one of a great writer’s finest works.

They had been working for a long time to send a ship out into space, but when the great day came it was essential that the ship should be destroyed. They had looked ambitiously at the Moon and at the planets and stars beyond. Now they stared up in fear…

Here is the record of the first onslaught of a strange disease that dropped on mankind from the skies. It is the story of an alien plague that worked too swiftly to be counteracted by human science – a plague that did not so much drive men out of their minds as steal the minds from them.

The sequel to Last and First Men, Olaf Stapledon’s great classic work of science fiction.


In Last Men in London the author follows up the themes of his earlier masterpiece in presenting a Neptunian ‘last man’s’ views on our twentieth-century world, views informed by the huge dimensions of space and time which separate him from our tiny contemporary world. Once again, Olaf Stapledon has been totally successful in creating a work of such stunning imagination and brilliance that it has taken its place amongst the classics of science fiction.

The Great Tyrant rules the solar system with absolute terror. Only one man dares to fight back.

The time is the 24th century. Humankind populates the entire solar system from icy Pluto to boiling Mercury. Great domed cities, humming factories, hordes of workers, all feed the power of the dictatorship that controls all life. Only a small group among the cowed population dares rebel in a struggle that pits democracy against tyranny.

But there is a third force at work as well. A mysterious band of assassins whose final solution to the problem of humanity’s fate is as terrifying as it is irresistible – one of them is known as the AGENT OF CHAOS.

Deep beneath the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, scientists and engineers attempt the most daring and audacious scientific project of all time: the construction of an undersea tunnel between Great Britain and Canada; linking Land’s End with Labrador. Canadian and British teams work simultaneously at either end, to converge in the middle. Using scientific methods to fight the crushing pressure and geological and marine perils involved, the brave workers face a far greater hazard – the danger within – from saboteurs!

The set of a Sherlock Holmes film is disrupted by a murder even the great detective would find hard to solve.

‘Delightful … A surprise on every page’ NEW YORK TIMES

The Baker Street Irregulars are a group of Sherlock Holmes experts, and when they get word that a Hollywood studio has plans to produce a tough, hard-boiled interpretation of the Great Detective, written by an author who dislikes both the group and Conan Doyle’s original work, they make their feelings abundantly clear.

To placate them, the studio invites them to visit the set. But as soon as they arrive, things start to get strange. There are a series of ominous warnings, each one referencing one of Holmes’s famous cases, warnings which are soon followed by murder …

Once the world was not as it has since become. Once it worked in a way different from the way it works now…

Pierce Moffett is a teacher and historian who at midlife feels himself to be standing at a great turning point in the history of the world. As a child, Pierce was no stranger to magic, but those revelations faded with time. Now Pierce’s search for a secret history of the world – one in which magic works and angels speak to humankind – has begun again.

Pierce finds clues offered to him in the unfinished last novel of a writer named Fellowes Kraft and in the real-life histories of the doomed Renaissance heretic Giordano Bruno and the Elizabethan magus John Dee. He will also find the secret history pervading his present in his involvement with two Roses: Rosie Rasmussen, guardian of the dead Kraft’s legacy, and Rose Ryder, who will soon become his lover.

From the SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal sample introduction to the fantastic imagination of Theodore Sturgeon, one of the great names in science fiction.

Highly acclaimed for his short fiction, Sturgeon is nevertheless best known for his 1953 novel, MORE THAN HUMAN, and for scripting the STAR TREK episode ‘Amok Time’, which introduced the Vulcan mating ritual, the pon farr. This omnibus contains three of his finest works: THE DREAMING JEWELS, TO MARRY MEDUSA and VENUS PLUS X.

This unique novel represents a collaboration between two greats of science fantasy writing, published for the first time on the SF Gateway.

Between 1956 and 1962, John Brunner wrote three novellas that blurred the boundaries between science fiction and fantasy. Following Brunner’s untimely death, Damien Broderick was given permission to develop these works into a full-length novel, expanding on the ideas and concepts that had captured his imagination when he first read them. The result is a story that blends the technological with the magical, and travels to different worlds and undiscovered parts of our own.

Weaving together ideas from No Other Gods But Me, The Kingdom of the world and Father of Lies, Broderick takes us from the modern day Earth, across dimensions and into battle with cults, dragons, ogres and people with psychokinetic powers. This is a fantastic read for both fans of Brunner’s original works and readers looking to be swept away on a new adventure.

Since the beginning of time it had worked its will on humanity, and for as long as man could remember, he had struggled against its power. But in the 21st century the battle was won: the sea, mankind’s age-old enemy, had finally been conquered.
Professionals like Walter Franklin now patrolled the infinite savannahs of the oceans, harvesting from the plankton prairies as crop which kept the world fed. But like that other great frontier, space, the sea had not yet yielded up all its secrets. And men like Franklin would never rest until its every fathomless mystery had been challenged . . .

Contains four novellas: Stranger in the House; Sugar and Spice; The Murder in the Stork Club; Ruth.

In these deftly woven noir novellas, Vera Caspary draws on her own rich, independent life as a woman at a time of great social change, including her own experience of Manhattan’s Stork Club, which, from 1929 to 1965, was one of the most prestigious nightclubs in the world.

The title novella The Murder in the Stork Club features working-class detective Joe Collins, who is married to Sara Haworth, a writer of radio mysteries who belongs in Stork Club café society. Joe has to try to clear Sara’s name when an ex-lover is murdered shortly after she has dinner with him.

The beautiful Dedo Nyneve’s innocent tales of a land called Camelot have spawned a real-life cast determined to choose their own fates, yet each move draws them closer to catastrophe. And as the many happentracks of the universe narrow to a dangerous few, the actions of every sorcerer, man, and living creature will determine whether the great god Starquin lives or dies.
For the first time in remembered history, humans and gnomes find themselves sharing the same Earth happentrack. But King Arthur has larger concerns as he watches the society he rules spiralling toward ultimate destruction. Little does he know that the evil Mogan Le Fay has been working her treacherous magic to split the happentracks wide open – a deadly betrayal that could spell the end of Camelot.
With the ma possible futures swiftly shrinking to one last destiny too awful to contemplate, courageous Fang the gnome joins forces with Arthur and Nyneve to manipulate history in a final confrontation of wills and worlds. The last move is Fang’s, as he unravels the strands of time to keep his clan from the brutal vision of Starquin’s end.

Modern man is not fascinated by ancient Egypt without good reason. The Nile Civilisation is not only interesting because of its age but because of its mystery. Who can completely answer the riddle of the Sphinx, even today? What strange mysteries are still buried among the measurements of the Great Pyramid? How many wonders are yet incarcerated in the Valley of the Kings?

Johnny Cole and Chris Saunders set out for the Eye Temple at Luxor. The discovered evidence of a strange cult, hitherto quite unsuspected. The search took them to Thebes and beyond. From Necropolis to Necropolis they traced the terrifying ancient truth to learn at last that the Eye-god still lived, deadly, ruthless, malevolent.

Would twentieth century weapons work on a being older than time itself?

If not, how did a mortal fight against an evil deity?

Ever since science began seriously investigating the potentials of electronics, man has toyed with the idea of creating robots. The dawn of the robot age has already broken. We have automatic telephone exchanges. We fly planes with robot pilots. We send self-sufficient instruments into the void to record and transmit cosmic information.

Frobisher was a brilliant theorist, years ahead of his time. He worked out a scheme that took long patient decades of planning. His great moment came. The robots were a success. Frobisher was a kindly old man. There was nothing evil in his plans. But the world is not entirely inhabited by kindly old men with high visions. Someone else got hold of the plans and the robots embarked on a career of international crime and pillage.

Despite his pacifist ideals, the old professor tried to combat the evil which he had unwittingly released . . . the results were staggering.

‘Her worlds have a magic sheen … She is unique. She is legend’ THE TIMES

‘Le Guin is a writer of phenomenal power’ OBSERVER

Among the less-travelled mountains and plains of Central Europe, a little east of Austria perhaps and north of Slovenia, lies the old kingdom of Orsinia. A land of forests and quiet farmlands and towns, with its capital city Krasnoy on the broad Molsen River, Orsinia has always found itself, like all the countries of Europe, subject to forces beyond its borders.

Val Malafrena is an estate in the rural western provinces of Orsinia, far removed from the engines of European politics and content for it to remain so. When Itale Sorde, the idealistic young heir to Val Malafrena, leaves his family home to venture to the bustling capital city of Krasnoy, it is therefore very much against his father’s wishes. Sorde’s intention is to work as a journalist, but he will soon find himself moving from reporter on the great events of the day to active participant in the rising tide of revolution that seems destined to sweep the continent.

Millennia ago Starquin visited the Solar System. Because he is huge – some say bigger than the Solar System itself – he could not set foot on Earth personally. yet events here were beginning to interest him, and he wanted to observe more closely.


So he sent down extensions of himself, creatures fashioned after Earth’s dominant life-form. In one of Earth’s languages they became known as Dedos, or Fingers of Starquin. Disguised, they mingled with Mankind.


We know this now, here at the end of Earth’s time. The information is all held in Earth’s great computer, the Rainbow. The Rainbow will endure as long as Earth exists, watching, listening, recording and thinking. I am an extension of the Rainbow, just as the Dedos are extensions of Starquin. My name is Alan-Blue-Cloud.


It is possible you cannot see me but are aware of me only as a voice speaking to you from a desolate hillside, telling you tales from the Song of Earth. I can see you, the motley remains of the human race, however. You sit there with our clubs and you chew your roots, entranced and half-disbelieving as I sing the Song – and in our faces are signs of the work of your great geneticist, Mordecai N. Whirst. Catlike eyes here, broad muzzles there, all the genes of Earth’s life, expertly blended, each having its purpose. Strong people, adapted people, people who survived.


The story I will tell is about people who were not so strong. It is perhaps the most famous in the whole Song of Earth, and it tells of three simple human beings involved in a quest who unwittingly became involved in much greater events concerning the almighty Starquin himself. It is a story of heroism and love, and it ends in triumph – and it will remind the humans among you of the greatness that was once yours.

The lyrical genius of Michael Moorcock defies categorization; his creations soar to grand and golden places hitherto unimagined and unimaginable. In this, his most heartfelt and astonishing work to date, he carries the reader across mystical thresholds viewed from afar in the brilliant Blood and Fabulous Harbors, and reveals the mighty destinies, exemplary loves, and the true and secret histories of his most beloved and intriguing characters. It is a tale of the incomparable Rose von Bek, who discovers the myriad possibilities that life has to offer in the special, infinitely wondrous places known as the Second Ether – where time has no bounds and existence is a river of endless reinvention. Here, also, is the love of her life – the volatile and enigmatic Sam Oakenburst – and the story of the ill-fated passion of the exotic Colinda Dovero and the swashbuckling gambler Jack Karaquazian. These four together – along with their exceptional companions, including Rose’s mad uncle, Michael, late of Texas – will become allies in what some call the great War in Heaven, fighting shoulder-to-shoulder against the agents of evil and stagnation, in a battle whose outcome will determine the very nature of reality itself.