Search Results for: heroics

Kuttner’s two pulp heroic fantasy stories in the Conan style, “Cursed Be The City” and “The Citadel of Darkness”.

After huge gold deposits were found in Antarctica and gold became common, the world’s financial markets went into a tailspin and every currency lost its value. As bankers meet to find a solution they are approached by one Dr. Syx, who has an evil sneer and a source of a new, mysterious metal to replace gold – a metal which only he can produce.

It is up to two heroic engineers try to uncover the secret of this new metal…

On Earth, life held for him only the fate of a recluse, confined to daydreams and the lore of ancient wonders but apparently destined never to share them – until he found the formula that let him cross space to the world of the Green Star. There, appearing in the body of a fabled hero, he is to experience all that his heroic fantasies had yearned for. A princess to be saved . . . an invader to be thwarted . . . and otherworldly monsters to be faced!

A thrilling adventure in the grand tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs, as only Lin Carter can tell it!

THE GORGON, a brilliant shocker that leads off this scintillating collection of Tanith Lee’s tales, was the winner of the World Fantasy Award for best short story of the year in 1983. It is appropriate that it gives its title to these tales ranging from horror and the supernatural to science fiction, from the writer who has been justly termed “Princess Royal of Heroic Fantasy.”

Here you will find unforgettable encounters of men and beasts – of dragons and unicorns, cats and seals, virgins and vampires. This is truly a feast of treasures for everyone whose taste runs to a gourmet imagination.

When Earth is contacted by galactic civilization, our heroic couplet – diplomat Tom Parent, and his linguist wife, Lucy – prove themselves to be just the pair to tour the galaxy representing Earth and learning the whys and wherefores of galactic civilization. There’s only one tiny catch to this grand tour – on Tom and Lucy’s performance hinges our acceptance by the rest of the galaxy as a civilized world rather than as ward of some more “advanced” species. (You don’t want Earth to become a Galactic ward.).

Humanity played with fire once too often. It was atomic fire and its ravages produced an almost complete annihilation, but there were survivors. The radiations had not been entirely malevolent in their influence. Genes and chromosomes danced like dervishes in the gamma bombardments, and settled back into fantastic new patterns. God-like beings strode proudly athwart the devastation. Half-human demons lurked in the shadowy ruins. The twilight of humanity faded into a new heroic epoch, behind which the forbidden secrets of the ancient atom gods bided their time…

Playboy millionaire Harvey Bradman is set an ultimatum by his fiancée: before she marries him, he must carry out some significant, courageous act. Amazingly, the next day the newspa­pers carry a full report of Harvey’s heroic rescue of a woman from her stalled car on a level crossing! But Harvey had been asleep in bed at the time of the incident. And when his mysterious twin seeks him out, he becomes enmeshed in the sinister cosmic conspiracy being waged by his alien doppelganger…

A massive migration of the gods threatens the March of Gamelon with apocalyptic change.

Only Torr Vorkun of Darkholm and his lovely twin sister, Tara, can preserve order and prepare the people for a new era. Torr is a magnificently powerful youth who bears the magical broadsword, Lycheaper. Tara, too, is magnificent, yet her secret power lies in the witchery she can invoke – when naked.

Kenneth Bulmer, a leading British writer of fantasy and science fiction, paints a vivid and heroic picture of a world convulsed with change and aflame with new hope.

During his heroic first encounter with an alien race, Dick Muller was permanently altered, hideously transformed in a way that left him repulsive to the entire human race. Alone and embittered, he exiled himself to Lemnos, an abandoned planet famed for its labyrinthine horrors, both real and imagined.

But now, Earth trembles on the brink of extinction, threatened by another alien species, and only Muller can rescue the planet. Men must enter the murderous maze of Lemnos, find Muller, and convince him to return with them.

But will the homeless alien, alone in the universe, risk his life to save his race, the race that has utterly rejected him?




(First published 1968)

The first in a new series from the master of heroic fantasy

Born in the storm that doomed his father, Connavar grows to manhood among the mist-covered mountains of Caer Druagh, where the Rigante tribe dwell in harmony with the land and its gods.

But beyond the border, across the water, an evil force is gathering strength, an unstoppable force that will change the world beyond all recognition.

Haunted by malevolent spirits and hunted by evil men, Connavar sets out on a spectacular mission to save his people.

In this latest tale of love and honour, friendship and courage, from the master of the genre, Gemmell explores the intriguing worlds of Celtic myth and earth magic.

Read by Adjoa Andoh
(p) 2017 Orion Publishing Group

Harry Blakey remembered a childhood secret – that there was a room under his folks’ home which crossed into another world. When, finally as a war veteran, he came back to the old house, he investigated – and found his memory was true.

There were indeed other Earths and other civilisations and adventures to be had – at great risks.

For when he enlisted in the special commando corps organised to stop the interdimensional warfare, he came up against the terrifying hordes of the Diamond Contessa. She had looted many Earths and her hunger was always increasing. No mere human heroics would wrest the keys of the world away from her – not white her army of monsters held a dozen civilisations in thrall!

There is magic in the grand old tales that have survived through centuries of time. Even the names of the books have a ring that sets the blood pounding – THE VOLSUNG SAGA, THE SHAH-NAMAH, THE MABINOGIAN.

From all over the world, from all periods of ancient time, the great myths and heroic tales thunder down through the ages. Each country, each region has its legends. Somewhere, sometime, somehow, some often unknown scribe has set the tales down in permanent form.

In this volume, Lin Carter has gathered together samplings from this richest of all sources of adult fantasy and although their original names may sometimes be anonymous, there surely has never been such a pride of taletellers together at one time as we have in DRAGONS, ELVES AND HEROES.

Earth’s last hope?

The Arc, a being of immense power, trapped within a continuum too small, fights for its freedom. Its monumental struggle will touch a few select individuals on Earth – and in doing so, change their lives forever. The Arc may also be the last hope for humanity’s survival.

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.”

In a vastly changed world, thirteen centuries from now, Sumner Kagan searches the earth to find the godmind, a malicious being with reality-shaping powers. In this strange and beautiful world – eerily alien, yet hauntingly familiar – Kagan will change from an adolescent outcast to a warrior with god-like abilities and, in the process, take us on an epic and transcendent journey.

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.”

A sumptuous collection of epic fantasy heroes from the pen of Robert E. Howard, one of the true Masters of Fantasy

Robert E. Howard was a pulpwriter who turned his hand to everything from historical adventure and detective stories to Western and boxing fiction – and invented the genre now known as sword-and-sorcery: it is for these tales of heroic fantasy and horror that he is best remembered.

His mighty heroes – including an English Puritan adventurer sent on redressing grievous wrongs, the king of a mythical, antediluvian empire contemporary with Atlantis, a Pictish warrior-king – all these brothers of the sword and more bestrode the pages of WEIRD TALES and the other pulp magazines of the twenties and thirties.

This companion volume follows on from the success of the first Gollancz Big Black Book featuring Howard’s world-famous barbarian king, and contains all the stories featuring his brothers-in-arms, collected together in chronological order, as fresh and atmospheric today as when they were first published in the pulp magazines of more than eighty years ago.

Compiled by and with an Afterword by award-winning writer and editor Stephen Jones, and with cover image, frontispiece and internal pictures by the award-winning artist Les Edwards.

In every mouse’s long life, there comes a time when ancestral voices tell him to move on. Pedlar, a yellow-necked mouse, has reached that point. Told to leave the Hedgerow and go on a long journey, the adventurous mouse says his farewells and sets out for a far-distant country knows as The House. Reaching his destination, Pedlar enters a strange new world inhabited by many warring tribes: the Stinkhorns of the cellar, the great Savage Tribe in the kitchen, the library Bookeaters, the Invisibles, the Deathshead and the rebellious 13-K Gang.

During his stay, Pedlar witnesses a momentous truce, in which the tribes come together at an Allthing meeting and decide to rid themselves of the greatest pests in The House, the greedy, stupid nudniks – the humans. And so the Great Nudnik Drive is set in motion, a time of considerable anxiety for the nudniks, when clocks strike twenty and inanimate objects seem to have a life of their own. Ranged against the mouse tribes are the nudniks’ allies: the two cats, Eyeball the Burmese blue and Spitz the ginger tom; the Headhunter, a barbarian human child; and Little Prince, the Headhunter’s cannibalistic pet white mouse. The House becomes a hotbed of riot and discord, until Pedlar finally comes up with a solution. The outcome of this heroic struggle has gone down in the annals of mouse history, a history tens of thousands of days long, and the whole remarkable tale is recorded here, between these pages.

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.”

One star-chained evening in a Manhattan bathroom, Carl Schirmer spontaneously combusts! His body transforms into light, mysteriously snatched from his banal life by an alien intelligence 130 billion years in the future. There, all spacetime is collapsing into a cosmic black hole, the Big Crunch – and a bold, cosmic destiny awaits Carl. Rebuilt from the remnants of his light by extraterrestrials for a cryptic purpose, he awakens in time’s last world, the strangest of all – the Werld.

At the edge of infinity, Carl discovers the Foke, nomadic humans who travel among the floating islands of the Werld. The Foke teach him how to live – and love – at the end of time, and he loses his heart to his plucky guide, the beautiful Evoë. Their life together in this blissful kingdom that knows no aging or disease brings them to rapture – until Evoë falls prey to the zotl, a spidery intelligence who hunt the Foke and eat the chemical by-products of their pain. In order to save his beloved from a gruesome death, Carl must return to Earth – 130 billion years earlier – where he is shocked to discover that the Earth he’s come back to is not the one he left.

Can he meet the harsh demands of his task before the zotl find him and begin ravishing the Earth?

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.”