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Science has come to humanity’s rescue with two crucial discoveries – antigravity devices that enable whole cities to be lifted from the Earth to become giant spaceships, and longevity drugs that allow their inhabitants to live for thousands of years – lead to the establishment of a unique Galactic empire.

Now, the earth’s cities are able to abandon the worn-out homeworld for a new life, a new future. But what will they find as the hurtle off into the depths of space . . . ?

Kirk Hammond was a man alone.

He had been chosen to ride in the first manned satellite to go out around the Moon and back to Earth. But when the satellite failed to orbit properly, it went on past the Moon into the vastness of outer space, and a whole world watched helplessly as he was borne toward an unthinkably lonely death.

Yet destiny decreed that Kirk Hammond should suffer, not death but a pseudo-death. And he awoke from it to find that a hundred centuries had passed and that the space age which had begun in the 20th Century had now grown into a vast galactic civilization that had carried the sons of Earth to countless stars and worlds. But, unexpectedly, the conquest of space had changed Man himself, and the human race had become not one but several species.

Hammond was plunged into the climactic struggle between the new races. And in his quest with a desperate band for the mysterious Star of Life that was the key to the struggle, in his relations with the strange and beautiful Thayn Marden who was not a human woman, in his odyssey through the mighty suns and earthly worlds of the galaxy, a man of the 20th Century found himself facing the dangers of the great space age which he himself helped pioneer.

Trapped by the evil Edrick in a locked room, Yaleen is cold-bloodedly murdered. But it is not the end of Yaleen’s story, for she is given a second life – a reincarnation on Earth as a ‘cherub’.

Soon she encounters Godmind, the megalomaniac artificial deity which controls life on Earth – and maintains a brutal labour colony on the Moon for any who dare to rebel. Bit by bit, Yaleen comes to understand the horrifying project of the Godmind…

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…

Can it be that of all the billions of probably planets, revolving around strange suns, in far corners of the Universe, ours is the only home of intelligent life?
If life has managed to come into being elsewhere on some bizarre, grotesque world, just how strange and alien will that life be?
What if its own planet is dying?
It would need a new environment, and the questing ships of its explorers would traverse the void. What if they find Earth and decide that it suits their purpose perfectly… except for man? How would the battle be fought and who would win?

The inhabitants of Terra nicknamed them “Angels”. They were exquisitely beautiful, these shimmering, fiery creatures , highly intelligent and playful. Yet they were awesome, too, considering that the youngest were four million years old, and the oldest had probably participated in the First Cause, which had given birth to the whole universe. To young space cadet Jack Loftus fell the overwhelming responsibility of negotiating a treaty with them – a treaty which could mean the life or death of earth and mankind.

The greatest quest man will ever undertake . . .

The original story from which If the Stars are Gods grew won the Nebula Award. Now the long-awaited magnificent full-length novel is complete. It tells the unforgettable story of the century-long search of a scientist-monk for the secret of alien intelligent life – a quest which leads him from the time-scoured deserts of Mars to the vast holes in the raging cloud-cover of Jupiter; from the radio winds of Titan to the true centre of a universe where Beings are collected like songs . . .

“Five of our worlds are missing”. That was the essence of the report that shocked the galactic Nomads at their annual meeting. For each of the mighty star-ships reported vanished was a world of its own – a man-made, self-sustaining city-state housing thousands of people. The Nomads themselves were an unplanned by-product of man’s conquest of the stars. They were the gypsies of the distant future, the restless rovers of outer space. But to Joachim of the peregrine tey represented a way of life that was to be dearly defended. So it fell to him to make his own world-ship the bait in a cosmic trap set to catch the galaxy’s unknown foemen!

All of his life Flinx had lived in the marketplace on Drallar with his foster mother, an ageing shopkeeper. But Flinx did not belong there and although he knew nothing of his true parents he was determined to find out about himself and the strange mental abilities that he had been endowed with.

His search was to lead him into the clutches of Challis, one of the most depraved and powerful men in the Commonwealth … on to Terra where the records of his birth were kept … and finally to Ulru-Ujurr where the priceless and mysterious Janus jewels came from and where a new civilisation was about to be born.

Doubleluck…Home…with its streets of flowing gold, waterfalls of diamonds, lakes of perfume – and its deadly curse! Jade is the one human with the will to challenge all odds and find the key to save her species. Fellow creatures fear her ability to dream. The powerful Rulon will exterminate all galactic life unless he can possess both Jade and the riches of Doubleluck. The brutal Dreens seek to mate with her to improve their inferior stock. Escape from each of them brings her one step closer to the perfect monument that is Doubleluck – a monument that covers a lonely grave.

A race of octopoid aliens visits earth to restore man’s dying beliefs, with spaceships containing the very Gods themselves. In the future the rich are allowed a four week holiday – into their own futures. A soldier wounded at the front finds his memories too terrifying to live with once his government-approved drugs are withdrawn. A young girl is convinced that mother-earth is male and dedicates her life to consummating her love for him. God is dead and the Devil makes an offer for the real estate of heaven…

These dark visions of the future by James Tiptree Jr. are a vivid, sometimes frightening foretelling of what may happen.

It is a thousand years from now.

The tenuous galactic empire humanity has cast across the skies depends for its very existence on hyperspace and the pilots who can ride its bizarre force-fields. And these pilots are gypsies. The Romany have come into their own. But there is a price: the legendary Romany Star. All the leverage the gypsies can bring to bear is used in the search for their ancestral home. Intergalactic blackmail? Of course. But also a statement of intent, romantic but implacable.

Who better to orchestrate a scam so colossal than Yakoub, once and future King of Gypsies? Sulking in luxurious exile, he has been planning his return to power and reminiscing over his extraordinary life. But when the moment of truth arrives, nothing seems to go according to (Yakoub’s) plan. All his ingenuity, every sacrifice (even his pride) may not be enough . . .

Thousands of years into the future man has completely destroyed a technology-based society and lives a tribal existence, worshipping the ‘brain’-cases of long-rusted robots. Here and there pockets of knowledge remain, and young Tom Cushing lives in one such university.

His imagination fired by reading of the fabled ‘Place of Going to the Stars’ in an ancient manuscript, Tom sets out on a long odyssey to find out if the legend is true. His journey encompasses excitement, danger and some strange and colourful companions who commune with plants, can sense life and include the very last robot.

But nothing he meets along the way compares with what he and his motley group find at Thunderhead Butte, the Place of Going to the Stars, their journey’s end. Here wonder abounds almost as at the edge of the universe. A new challenge, for man to rediscover his destiny, to fulfil his heritage and recover his lost knowledge.

Among the myriad colourful characters of the galaxy, men called him a Treasure Troubleshooter.

His name was Felix Vereker, and he liked good food and fine wines and his taste ran to Moliere and ancient legends and digging up the fabulous treasures of the past – on whatever planet they happened to be buried.

He did not relish the distraction of political assassination, or mysterious attempts on his own life, or the prehistoric savagery and barbarian swords of a playground world of bored millionaires.

But when his professional competence as a troubleshooter for a firm of galactic antique dealers demanded, he could be rougher and tougher than all the perils pitted against him. And he knew how to handle Delia Camacho, the lady assassin, and Miss Rosalind Henley – who demanded and then rejected more than he wanted to give.

This novel of future speculation and intrigue ranges a wide galactic canvas and a profusion of brilliant colourful incidents pours out in headlong action as Felix Vereker seeks control of his own identity.

Starduster

Yes, I’m Max Andrews. I’m one of the guys who fought and bled and worked to get to Mars. I figure what I gave up in those early years gave me the right to pilot the next big jump.

I’ve lied and stolen for that right. I’d have killed, too, but I didn’t have to. Instead, I let a woman give her life so I could have my chance, my door to space.

You think I’d stop at anything, now?

I’ll be on that rocket, blasting away on America’s biggest adventure, the hop out into the stars themselves.

Only Fred Brown could have written this deeply moving science fiction novel about one man’s epic, life-long struggle to open mankind’s pathway to the stars.

An Egyptologist, attempting to raise from the dead the mummy of Tera, an ancient Egyptian queen, finds a fabulous gem and is stricken senseless by an unknown force. Amid bloody and eerie scenes, his daughter is possessed by Tera’s soul, and her fate depends upon bringing Tera’s mummified body to life.

There are too many men in a world governed by women. They’re bored and disillusioned and often resort to ‘suicide missions’ – jobs in experimental space research. Jorn applies for such a job, is selected and trained as a navigator for the huge ship Javelin, the first to implement the recently discovered faster-than-light Evrak Effect.

Before the Effect is tested, however, it is discovered that life will be extinct within nine years; the sun is burning up, preparing to explode. The Evrak Effect will save a small percentage of mankind, take civilisation to a yet unknown planet. Production on new ships is given priority, the ruthless selection of passengers begins. Twenty-five billion people will be left behind.

Led by Javelin, thirty ships wander in space through many light years of promises, lost hope and death for the original crew and passengers. But life does survive, children grow and learn, to inherit the beginning of another world, another promise.

James Blish has written a compelling novel of gigantic moral problems and of people who learn to cope with their own limitations in order to deal with them.

Hour by hour, the computers produce the names of those to die. Simple. Neat. Ruthless.

In a world where human feelings seem frozen, one spirit flares with defiance and hope . . . while two powerful brothers fight their old blood feud to a brutal climax.

And hurtling through space . . . a lost explorer desperately tries to reach earth with word of a new paradise for man beyond the stars . . .




(First published 1957)

Orphan-slave Claidi has fought for freedom and won. Now she looks forward to a life of happiness with the wandering Hulta people.
But once again for Claidi, nothing and no-one is as it seems. Secrets menace her; a bewildering land of giant flowers and savage animals; the awesome Rise, a great cliff topped by a mansion ruled by a strange, arrogant, enigmatic Prince. At dusk each night, the rising of the flaming Wolf Star.

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!

It is the dawn of a new era of space exploration and colonisation. Dagny Beynac, descendant of the legendary Anson Guthrie, becomes a heroine of a new Lunarian civilisation that struggles to break free of the influence of Earth.

Centuries later, the entire solar system is dominated by a vast network of machine intelligences. On Earth and Luna, splintered fragments of humanity search for some way to survive in a system that no longer seems to hold a place for flesh and blood.

And the only solution lies in the distant past, in the life of Dagny Beynac.

When the starship Meteor crash-landed on a strange world orbiting a solitary sun in the vast darkness outside the galaxy, her crew of Earthmen had no idea of what to expect. The planet was Earthlike in gravity, air, animal and vegetable life – but what of the native races they glimpsed from a distance?

What kind of culture would evolve on a planet whose sky was dominated by the glow of an entire galaxy – and with no other stars save its own dim sun? What kind of gods would they worship?

The Earthmen had to find the astounding answers to these questions on a planet split by a world-wide war.

Charlie Stuart, young scion of the Scottish royal family, long nourished a secret desire for adventure – an escape from his dreary books, his sheltered life. When his father realized that, for Charlie to grow into the full Stuart heritage he must face the rigors of the real world, the young man’s dreams had a chance of coming true.

But Charlie’s private fantasies had never included Talyina, a planet 200 light-years from earth and ruled by a ruthless usurper. And he had never envisioned himself as a galactic savior. Yet, young Charlie, late the classroom dreamer, suddenly found himself the only man in the galaxy capable of averting inter-planetary war!

The conquest of a galaxy is relatively easy providing the aggressor has the necessary technology and, more important, a safe method of overcoming possible opposition without bleeding to death in the process. The Asdrake employed mutated micro-organisms which directly attacked the brain of the planet’s intelligent life – they liked this method. They could fight if they had to but were inherently lazy. This method had worked successfully on twenty-two occasions – why should it fail on planet 5/6/9. Sector 88. Sun System 46. “Tseudec” (Native name: “Earth”).

Casualties from the epidemic were astronomical yet, in complete paradox, failed to kill a single human being – the side effects took care of that. And those side effects were beyond even the Asdrake’s imagination. The survivors on Earth found undreamed complications in rebuilding the world with the use of their new psychic powers – and perhaps more important, were they new powers at all, and if not who had removed them thousands of years ago?