Search Results for: observers,-the

McNulty’s Disease has escaped the Sea Venture and is now epidemic on land. The disease kills only a few of its victims…but no one knows what long-term effects it has on those who survive. For the public’s safety, the U.S. government sets up a giant internment camp on the old CV herself, and attempts to find as many survivors as possible to keep safely on board the ship. Fortunately, Julie Prescott has a most resourceful and clever husband (he used to be a high-priced hired killer) who doesn’t want his wife locked up forever. So he sets himself up against the entire government bureaucracy – with remarkable results.

The Martians, long exiled from their home planet, have for millennia been observers of the world of men. Forbidden by their laws to interfere with human destiny, they wait for mankind to mature.

From the turmoil of mid twentieth-century America, word comes to the Observers that one of their renegades is hoping to encourage humanity in its headlong rush to self-destruction through corruption of a single rare intellect. The struggle between Observer and Abdicator for the continuance of the human species is one the classic conflicts in the annuals of science fiction.

Edgar Pangborn studied music at Harvard when just 15 years old, eventually turned his back on music to focus on his writing. He flourished in the early ’50s, producing a string of highly-regarded stories for the likes of Galaxy, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Ellery Queen’s Mystery magazine. His work helped establish a new ‘humanist’ school of science fiction, and has been cited as an influence by Ursula Le Guin. This omnibus contains the Hugo-shortlisted Davy, International Fantasy Award-winner A Mirror for Observers and story collection Good Neighbours and Other Strangers.

DAVY: A HUGO and NEBULA AWARD nominee, this post-apocalyptic science fiction novel is Pangborn’s most acclaimed. It is set in the Northeastern United States some centuries after an atomic war ended high-technology civilization. Davy comes of age in a pseudo-medieval society dominated by a Church that actively suppresses technology.

A MIRROR FOR OBSERVERS: The Martians, long exiled from their home planet, have for millennia been observers of the world of men. Forbidden by their laws to interfere with human destiny, they wait for mankind to mature. From the turmoil of mid 20th-century America, word comes to the Observers that one their renegades is hoping to encourage humanity in its headlong rush to self-destruction through the corruption of a single rare intellect. The struggle between Observer and Abdicator for the continuance of the human species is one of the classic conflicts in the annals of science fiction.

GOOD NEIGHBORS AND OTHER STRANGERS: A collection of short stories reflecting Pangborn’s fresh writing style and mastery of the short form.

The long-awaited new novel in the superb Hainish cycle

‘Le Guin is a writer of phenomenal power’ OBSERVER

‘Her worlds have a magic sheen . . . She moulds them into dimensions we can only just sense. She is unique. She is legend’ THE TIMES


There have been eighty requests to send an Observer into the hinterlands of the planet Aka to study the natives. Much to everyone’s surprise, the eighty-first request is granted, and Observer Sutty is sent upriver to Okzat-Ozkat, a small city in the foothills of Rangma, to talk to the remnants in hiding of a cult practising a banned religion. On Aka, everything that was written in the old scripts has been destroyed; modern aural literature is all written to Corporation specifications.

The Corporation expects Sutty to report back so the non-standardised folk stories and songs can be wiped out and the people ‘re-educated’.

But Sutty herself is in for an education she never imagined.

An imaginative satire, telling of a benign Martian explorer comes to Earth to observe humanity-and is amazed to discover how Hollywood films and popular literature have engendered an irrational xenophobia and hatred of alien visitors. Befriended by a writer and his wife, the Martian is forced to remain incognito…

“If you have any interest at all in satire, SF’s New Wave, the Sixties, pop music, comic books, the picaresque tradition in literature, juicy, vigorous, humorous writing, or even such a trivial matter as how the world of 2003 got into the state we daily observe, then you owe it to yourself to read Sacred Locomotive Flies.” – Paul Di Filippo

Lieutenant Luis Mendoza likes nothing better than to wrap up his homicide cases neatly. The latest Jane Doe is identified as Valerie Ellis, a spoiled rich kid who was left penniless when her parents died four years ago. But, as Mendoza is about to find out, there are many layers to this complex case…

‘One of his best’ Observer

‘Mendoza is back again and on form’ Spectator

A brilliant but sadistic safe-breaker; a beautiful seductress; an expert young hunter and an ace pilot with a shady past – this is the team that undercover operator Armo Shalik assembles to steal the priceless Borgia ring from millionaire Max Kahlenberg’s closely guarded fortress in the remote and deadly African bush.

But when Kahlenberg finds out they are coming, the gang’s expedition turns into a strictly one-way safari – to slaughter …

‘Insanely readable’ Observer

Somewhere, spinning through another universe is an Earth where a twist of fate, a revolution and a few early inventions have made a world quite unlike our own.

It is a world where Cavaliers and Puritans battle with the aid of observation balloons and steam trains; where Oberon and Titania join forces with King Arthur to resist the Industrial Revolution; and where the future meshes with the past in the shape of Valeria, time traveller from New York.

In plain English, at 4 a. m., a ray of light had been observed on the disc of the planet Mars in or near the “terminator”; that is to say, the zone of twilight separating day from night. The news was doubly interesting to me, because a singular dream of “Sunrise in the Moon” had quickened my imagination as to the wonders of the universe beyond our little globe, and because of a never-to-be-forgotten experience of mine with an aged astronomer several years ago…

In the first place there was the Dangerfield Talisman, an ancient golden armlet set with diamonds and valued at $50,000 – an unguarded treasure, which, although stolen more than once, always came back. Second was the Dangerfield Secret.

The last thief of the talisman has been found on the lawn of Old Rollo Dangerfield’s home, dead of a heart attack. And in unearthing the mystery a whole series of bewildering complications unfolds …

‘Specially ingenious’ Observer

Naomi Anstruther’s undercover operation among the drug gangs – planned carefully by Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur – has ended in a bloody shoot-out. Naomi has escaped harm, but her lovers Donald McWater and Lyndon Evans are dead.

Now the biggest danger to Naomi is a young woman named Esme, who believes that she and Naomi should personally avenge their deaths.

‘A comic novel of a high order . . . essential reading’ Observer

‘The door was open. McCool stood in the doorway and switched on the light. He gazed at an open safe, and then he turned his head slightly to observe a heap of stained brown gabardine which lay on the floor. It was an untidy sight, even though the legs and feet which protruded from it were expensively trousered and immaculately shod.’

Chief Inspector McCool has two murder cases on his hands – and one of the victims is his ex-fiancee, found dead after a reunion with him.

Those mysterious domes on the Moon – what were they? Who built them? Thanks to young Chris Godfrey and his historic rocket-flight they had been photographed from outside the atmosphere; they had been under constant observation by the world’s astronomers – but the answer was as baffling as ever. Until one day every single atomic power station on Earth suddenly and disastrously went out of action. There could only be one explanation – the extra-terrestrial radiation bombardment of appalling magnitude. And only one possible source of it: the domes of Pico.

Joey Luck and his daughter Cindy are small-time criminals going nowhere fast, until they join forces with Vin Pinna, a hardened criminal on the run from Miami.

They soon begin to set their sights higher and turn their hands to kidnapping. But their hostage, ex-movie star Don Elliot, seems to have different ideas. When he wants in they form a ‘quartet in crime’, and this time the stakes are higher still – eight Russian stamps worth a million dollars.

‘Realistic and suspenseful far beyond his average’ Observer

Most fantasy enthusiasts consider Lord Dunsany one of the most significant forces in modern fantasy; his influences have been observed in the works of H.P. Lovecraft, L. Sprague de Camp, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, and many other modern writers. The Book of Wonder is Dunsany at the peak of his talent. The stories here are a lush tapestry of language, conjuring images of people, places, and things which cannot possibly exist, yet somehow ring true. They are, in short, full of wonder.

A SCIENTIST BY NATURE – he used his rational powers of observation to examine more closely the privileges he was born to enjoy – and the people he was raised to despise.

A REBEL AT HEART – she followed her fiercest passions in the struggle to overthrow a legacy of hate – one that had poisoned her family for generations.

ON A PLANET DIVIDED – between rich and poor, strong and weak, intellect and feeling, only one thing could bring these two opposites together: a strictly forbidden desire.

For justice. For equality.

FOR EACH OTHER…

A superb thriller, romance and spy novel from ‘The best in his field since Buchan’ Observer

Arabesque is a love story that takes us to the colourful crossroads of the Middle East at the height of World War II

Armande Herne – half English, half French and impassively beautiful – is sitting out the war in Beirut with no visible means of support. The rumour is she’s a spy. But, as conflict between British and French, Jew and Arab whirl around her, it is a British security sergeant who finds her. Soon they are embroiled in a plot, rich with adventure and intrigue.

Kyra Novacs: Who was she? Where did she come from? Bob knew almost nothing about her, just enough to fall hopelessly in love with her. They were thrown together for business reasons and, believing her to be single, he threw caution to the wind.

But Kyra isn’t single. And when her husband is killed in the midst of an argument over divorce, it falls to Bob’s loyal wife of seventeen years, Susan, to prove his innocence …

‘Miss McCloy compels you to read every word’ Observer

Introducing the pipe-smoking DI Ernest Hardcastle, bluff straight-talker, canny investigator and no respecter of privilege.1916. In a London shocked by reports of the first days of the Somme, a woman is found murdered in Shoreditch. At first it’s thought she was a common streetwalker, but then she’s identified as someone MI5 have had under observation and who has an address book containing the names of some of the high and mighty names in the land.

Hardcastle is brought in to take charge of the case, but his forthright and common sense approach does not sit comfortably with the help – and hindrance – of the MI5.

It is the 21st century, and a man can journey through time in the form of disembodied consciousness. Now Roy Colton is about to leap 20,000 years into the past. His mission: to observe the fabled city-island of Atlantis through the mind of its royal heir, Prince Ram. But Roy is soon worried by Ram’s dark dreams. Do they presage the island’s legendary destruction? And how can Atlantis be so technologically brilliant during a barbaric ice age? Boldly, Roy seeks the truth, yet nothing can prepare him for the strange secret of Atlantis’s past…and future.

A hundred years in our future, the first expedition from Earth reaches Alpha Centauri only to discover a vast human empire, long-established and sternly ruled by the aristocratic High-born. In a stroke Earth becomes merely another primitive outpost, its people dubbed “wolflings” by the rulers of the Throne World. Painstakingly chosen and meticulously trained, Jim Keil was sent merely to observe conditions on the Throne World.

The High-born would consider him no more than a diversion until Keil cast away his orders from Earth and proved a Wolfling indeed.

An escaped convict, a mysterious deserted house, and murder in the Lake District..
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

The shades of night were falling fast when Arthur Crook drove the old Superb over the Lakeland Fells and into the valley, to stop at a mysterious house where, though a light burned in an upper window, no one answered the bell.

Here opens a double murder mystery in which Crook acts in the defence of a young prisoner on the run, whose guilt appears evident.

‘The usual gusto, racy prose, good plotting and up-to-the-minute social observation’ Sunday Times

The neighbours all said ten-year-old Paul Brandon would grow up to be a detective: he was remarkably observant and inquisitive. But Paul doesn’t grow up to be a detective; after failing to return one night, his body is found buried under a road excavation site. A tragic, unnecessary accident it seems.

But after the foreman insists that no child could move that amount of earth, Vic Varallo begins to suspect foul play and follows the leads to Paul’s reticent playmate Gordon, who may have witnessed something terrible that night.

‘My favourite American crime-writer’ New York Herald Tribune