Search Results for: out-of-their-minds

These stories which have never been brought together before are taken from Joan Aiken’s earliest writing years in the 1950s and 1960s when she was working for the English short story magazine, Argosy where they were first published. They demonstrate her wide ranging stylistic ability, with subjects as diverse as a rented apartment that comes with a resident swan, a man who buys a girl in a crystal ball, an invisible man-eating tiger, or a psychiatric patient who can always, sometimes unfortunately, conjure up a 93 London bus.


All these ideas seem to pour out of an endless imagination, making bold use of eccentric and unexpected settings and characters, and at the same time demonstrating an evident delight in parodying a variety of literary styles from gothic to comedy, fantasy to folk tales selected from her incredible reading background. But Joan Aiken always repudiated the suggestion that she was “a born storyteller” she would always argue furiously that it was a craft, like oil painting or cabinet making that she had learned, practiced and developed over the years. She described this period of her life as a single-minded engagement with the writer’s craft; and her grasp of the short story form as the foundation of her literary career.

What is far from apparent from these wildly inventive and freewheeling tales, is that this was in fact a bitterly difficult period of Joan Aiken’s life, when not long after the end of the Second World War she was left widowed and homeless with two young children. Having made the brave decision to try and support herself and her family by writing, she applied for a job on this popular short story magazine. In many ways, as she often said subsequently, this period spent working at Argosy could not have been bettered, both as a wonderful distraction and consolation during a bad time, and as an unbeatable apprenticeship in the craft of writing.

A magician turned detective is caught up in the most baffling locked-room murder mystery…

‘One of the all-time greatest impossible murder mysteries’ Publishers Weekly starred review

‘Dazzling’ Saturday Review

‘A cornerstone of detective fiction’ New York Times


Master magician The Great Merlini has hung up his top hat and white gloves, and now spends his days running a magic shop in New York and his nights moonlighting as a consultant for the NYPD. When the crimes seem impossible, it is his magician’s mind they need.

So when two occultists are discovered dead in locked rooms, one spread out on a pentagram, both appearing to have been murdered under similar circumstances, Merlini is immediately called in. The list of suspects includes an escape artist, a professional medium, and a ventriloquist – and it is only too clear that this is a world Merlini knows rather too well…

A deranged killer sends a doctor on a quest for the truth – deep into the recesses of his own mind.

‘Deserves its reputation as one of the greatest mysteries of all time’ PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review

What really happened to Inis St. Erme? What was his fatal mistake? Was it when he and his bride-to-be first set out to elope in Vermont? Or did his deadly error occur later, when they picked up a terrifying hitch-hiker, or when the three stopped at ‘Dead Bridegroom’s Pond’ for a picnic?

Dr Riddle is determined to find out, but he soon uncovers a series of bizarre coincidences that leave him questioning his sanity and his innocence. After all, he too walked those wild, deserted roads the night of the murder, stranded and struggling to get home to New York City. The more he reflects, the more his own memories become increasingly uncertain, as he veers into the irrational territory of pure terror…

The late Lin Carter was a prolific writer and anthologist of horror and fantasy with over eighty titles to his credit. His tales of Mythos horror are loving tributes to H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘revision’ tales and to August Derleth’s stories of Hastur and the R’lyeh Text. This collection of Carter’s Mythos tales includes all five Xothic Legend Cycle stories:

– The Dweller in the Tomb
– Out of the Ages
– The Horror in the Gallery
– The Thing in the Pit
– The Winfield Heritance

Filled with mind-bending, soul-warping terror, Carter taps into the eldritch horrors that Lovecraft brought into the world…

Zerfall awakens in an alley, wounded and unable to remember her past. Chased by an assassin out into the endless wastes of the desert, she is caught, disfigured, and left for dead. Her scabbard is empty, but the need for answers-and the pull of her sword-will draw her back to the city-states.

When Jateko, a naïve youth, accidentally kills a member of his own tribe, he finds himself outcast and pursued across the desert for his crimes. Crazed from dehydration, dying of thirst and hunger, he stumbles across Zerfall.

Hunted by assassins and bound by mutual need, both Zerfall and Jateko will confront the Täuschung, an ancient and deranged religion ruled by a broken fragment of Zerfall’s mind. Swarm, the Täuschung hell, seethes with imprisoned souls, but where gods-real or imagined-meddle in the affairs of man, the cost is high.

In Swarm and Steel, the power of belief can manifest and shape reality, and for political and religious leaders, faith becomes a powerful tool. But the insane are capable of twisting reality with their delusions as well, turning increasingly dangerous as their sanity crumbles. It is here that a long prophesied evil will be born, an endless hunger. The All Consuming will rise.

Former assassin Raena Zacari thinks she’s left the past behind. The Imperial torturer who trained her is dead, the human empire is disbanded, and she is finally free.

But Raena is troubled by a series of nightmares that always seem to end with her shooting an ex-lover in the head. She needs to get her mind clear because there’s a flaw in the most commonly used starship drive-and the band of media-obsessed pirates she’s fallen in with is right at the heart of the controversy.

With humanity scattered across the galaxy, she’s going to have to rely on the alien crew members of the Veracity to help her put the pieces together. It doesn’t help that the Templars- wiped out in a genetic plague while Raena was imprisoned-have left booby-trapped biotechnology scattered across the galaxy.

Top Gun heads to outer space in this throwback to the classic science fiction of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein.

Strapped in to artificial wings spanning twenty-five feet across, your arms push a tenth of your body weight with each pump as you propel yourself at frightening speeds through the air. Inside a pressurized dome on the Moon, subject to one-sixth Earth’s gravity, there are swarms of chiseled, fearless, superbly trained flyers all around you, jostling for air space like peregrine falcons racing for the prize. This was the sport of piloting, and after Helium-3, piloting was one of the first things that entered anyone’s mind when Borealis was mentioned.

It was Helium-3 that powered humanity’s far-flung civilization expansion, feeding fusion reactors from the Alliances on Earth to the Terran Ring, Mars, the Jovian colonies, and all the way out to distant Titan. The supply, taken from the surface of the Moon, had once seemed endless. But that was long ago. Borealis, the glittering, fabulously rich city stretched out across the lunar North Pole, had amassed centuries of unimaginable wealth harvesting it, and as such was the first to realize that its supplies were running out.

The distant memories of the horrific planetwide devastation spawned by the petroleum wars were not enough to quell the rising energy and political crises. A new war to rival no other appeared imminent, but the solar system’s competing powers would discover something more powerful than Helium-3: the indomitable spirit of an Earth-born, war-weary mercenary and pilot extraordinaire.

A COMIC SCIENCE FICTION MASTERPIECE!
In the spirit of Monty Python, Arthur Schopenhauer and Douglas Adams, Striped Holes is science fiction with a sense of humor.
Sopwith Hammil might be the nation’s top chat-show host but his peace of mind is shattered when a time traveling bureaucrat lands on his couch. To save his life and the human race (They’re turning the Sun off!), Sopwith must find a wife inside three hours. Turns out it’s not that easy, Soppy.
Meanwhile, popular astrologer and certified lifesaver O’Flaherty Gribble, a favorite guest on Sopwith’s show, has discovered the Callisto Effect and how to build striped holes. And in a future that makes Nineteen Eighty-Four look like Brave New World or vice versa, beautiful Hsia Shan-Yun is about to have her brain scrubbed for knitting one of those striped holes, with frightful consequences. But luckily, O’Flaherty finds himself seated on a plane next to God. Tighten your belt, it’s that kind of novel.

Long before William Shakespeare, tales were told of the Dane Ameleth whose noble father was murdered by the uncle who swiftly weds new widow Gerutha. Must Ameleth repay this crime by killing his uncle? The White Abacus dares to reconfigure the best known version of the classic tale, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, to create a futuristic revenge drama with an entirely different outcome. Telmah is an inventive genius. Ophelia is no sobbing suicide but rather the impressive Warrior Rose, who shockingly revises the fate of her lover.

In this exotic future history, the galaxy is open to anyone who passes through a hex gate, whether hu (augmented human) or ai (artificial mind). Telmah’s close friend is the ai Ratio, newly embodied to the Real. Like all members of his asteroid tribe, Telmah is forbidden to use the hex transport system, since that would doom his rebirth.

Out of this agonizing dilemma comes a feverish pursuit of truth and duty, love and near-madness, in an endlessly startling future where nothing turns out the way you expect.

After beholding the destruction of the Well-Built City, physiognomist Cley is now a simple healer seeking peace and atonement in the happy village of survivors. When the town falls into a deadly sleeping sickness, Cley must make a dangerous trip to the ruins of City – now beset by mechanical birds and werewolves – to seek out an antidote.

The evil Master Below is still alive, but an accidental exposure to the sickness that he created has put him into a coma. With the help of Below’s adopted demon son, found in the wreckage of the laboratory, Cley ventures into the mind and intricate memories of Below to search for a cure.

Cley will encounter wonders and dangers undreamed of in the second installment of this classic trilogy.

The strange visitors had landed. Why had they come, and what unknown terror would they bring upon our world?

The radio and television stations of the world carried the short, terrifying statement: The visitors were telepaths. These children from another time, another planet, were about to read human minds. They were utterly invincible.

And they were infinitely dreaded…

In the Pentagon and the Kremlin, leaders were grim with the awareness that all military secrets would be exposed…The overlords of the underworld realized the children could smash their most profitable rackets…And even ordinary citizens shuddered at the prospect of their shabby sins being found out.

So four small children came to be hated by the entire world.

A whole civilization wanted them dead.

Twenty-two stories and novella-length works, mixing imagination with suspense in the kind of tale that can slide into the back of your mind and then stay there for the rest of your life… well-known as a novelist and screenwriter, the author of Valley of Lights and Oktober has assembled a signature collection from over two decades’ worth of his lesser-known short fiction.
A telephone chat line where not all of the respondents can be found amongst the living… the terrified flight of a hit-and-run driver whose fate was sealed at the moment of his deed… the seduction and harrowing education of a young artist in nineteenth-century France… the unholy alliance of an honest psychic and a skeptical conjurer…
All brought together in one volume for the first time anywhere, with an introduction by TV scriptwriter/producer Brian Clemens and an afterword filled with background insights and dashes of autobiography.

Johnny Mays has the moral conscience of a selfish child in the frame of a plain-clothes cop. The city is his playground, the rest of us his toys. He likes to find out where we work, and where we live, and what will scare us most. And Johnny never had a toy he didn’t break.

But Johnny starts a car chase, and he pushes it too far. Soon they’re fishing for his body at the foot of a dam, and his partner Nick Frazier has been left behind. They were friends, once, a long time ago. Nick had hoped that he might save Johnny.

Johnny’s last words still echo in Nick’s mind: “I’m going to remember this,” he said, a dark fire in his eyes. “I’m coming back for you.”

Then the killings start. Killings of people Johnny didn’t like. And Johnny’s car is dredged up, empty.

Welcome to Argylle, where the ruling family – a brilliant, flighty, civilized and occasionally dangerous clan of nearly-immortal warriors and magicians – are hoping for a few years of relative peace.

True, their Father Gaston has vanished, leaving both throne and family while he pursues some unexplained errand. His absence has stretched into years. True as well that their powerful Uncle Dewar has also wandered off without leaving a forwarding address, and hasn’t been heard from for a worrisome length of time. It’s a bad habit of running off that this family’s elders have.

But now young Prince Gwydion’s been stuck with ruling the Dominion of Argylle, and with any luck, life can go back to being a satisfactory mixture of intrigue, gossip and viniculture, periodically enlivened by amateur theatricals and the odd quest or two.

Yet Gwydion is finding this arrangement uncomfortable. Strange things keep turning up. A plague of monsters appears out of nowhere, attempting to take up residence in the local barns and forests. These are trumped by the arrival of a ravenous Great Dragon – ancient, sorcerous, profoundly cunning – so big you can see it thirty miles away. Meanwhile, a mysterious young woman has shown up, claiming to be Gwydion’s long-lost – indeed, quite unexpected – sister. And then there are the high-tech aliens, who say they just want to conduct a legal investigation. It’s enough, Gwydion thinks, to make a ruler want to find some nice long errand that’ll take him away from his homeland for a spell…

The Well-Favored Man is a courtly, complex, bloody-minded fantasy for those who love Roger Zelazny’s Amber, Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint and the fantasy adventures of Steven Brust.

First published in 1976, “The Mind-Riders” features a remarkable anticipation of virtual reality gaming, in which the revised sport of boxing pits physically identical virtual fighters against one another, operated by electronically-connected “handlers” — with viewers receiving transmissions of the combatants’ emotions as their simulations slug it out. Ryan Hart, banished from the sport in its early days because of his lack of marketable emotion, is brought back by an obsessed media executive who wants to see the reigning champion beaten at any cost. Hart is not certain that he can win, after such a lapse of time, nor is he certain he can resist pressure to give the vast virtual crowds the dose of sadistic exultation they crave. But that doesn’t stop him from heading into the virtual “ring” and fighting the bout of his life!

The colony was successful. That was evident as soon as the recontact ship Daedalus had landed. It was successful, prosperous, and everything was due to the work and genius of J. Wildeblood, biochemist and planetary leader.

This world now bore the name of its benefactor. And it was truly his empire, with a grateful, hard-working people heeding every wish of his descendants.

But the suspicious scientific minds of the Daedalus‘s special crew were very uneasy. Was Wildeblood’s Empire all it seemed – or was there a structure invisible to the eyewhich spelled out something a lot more blood-curdling?

Kemlo and Krillie, together with Krillie’s sister Krinsetta, set out for a visit to S Belt in Kemlo’s space scooter. They are attacked by three boys from S Belt, who kidnap Krinsetta. Kemlo gives chase, and both his and the other craft are forced down, off course, on to the Zones of Silence, part of a large area known as the Dead World where the slightest whisper is magnified into a roar…

The inhabitants of the Zones have no audible form of speech, but use instead a highly developed system of thought transference. These creatures are friendly, but too friendly: they attempt to drug the minds of visitors with thought impulses compelling them to stay on the Zones. Kemlo is able to resist this powerful impulse, but…

Retief’s latest assignment is on Zany-Doo, a wild, undeveloped planet whose residents have a marked dislike for Terrans. The caterpilleroid natives seem to have something to hide, but neither Ambassador Spoilsport nor Retief’s ineffable boss, Ben Magnan, can figure out what it might be. Then Retief and Magnan stumble into an idyllic enclave unlike anything else they’ve seen – and realize just how special Zany-Doo is. The planet is at the center of a trans-temporal flux where the very nature of reality can be transformed by a thought.

But even in a world where reality is subject to whim, honor, courage and determination will carry the day. After all, Retief is just a state of mind…

Four-BEE was an utopian city. If you didn’t mind being taken care of all your long long life, having a wild time as a “jang” teen-ager, able to do anything you wanted from killing yourself innumerable times, changing bodies, changing sex, and raising perpetual hell, it could be heaven.

But for one inhabitant there was always something askew. He/she had tried everything and yet the taste always soured. And then he/she succeeded in committing the one illegal act – and was thrown out of heaven forever.

But forever is not a term any native of that robotic utopia understood. And so he/she challenged the rules, declared independence, and set out to prove that a human was still smarter than the cleverest and most protective robot.

A marvelous medley of Tiptree’s best, including:

“YOUR HAPLOID HEART” – When Ian Suitlov and Pax Patton landed on Esthaa to check for humans, the job wasn’t as easy as it appeared. Though the natives seemed human enough, only cross breeding would be conclusive proof. But how were they to prove anything, when sex was punishable by death?

“THE PSYCHOLOGIST WHO WOULDN’T DO AWFUL THINGS TO RATS” – Dr Tilly Lipsitz hated his name, loved his rats… and would be out of a job if he didn’t come up with a real zinger of an experiment soon. He didn’t have much in mind until he took a midnight trip to his lab and learned more than he would have thought possible.

“SHE WAITS FOR ALL MEN BORN” – She had eyes that could not see, but without sight she had powers that went far beyond those of all who came upon her.

Contents:
Your Haploid Heart (1969)
And So On, and So On (1971)
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1974)
A Momentary Taste of Being (1975)
Houston, Houston, Do You Read? (1976)
The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats (1976)
She Waits for All Men Born (1976)

Atlantis, the legendary lost continent of wonders and marvels, has intrigued the mind of men for thousands of years. So when a daring young adventurer found a new clue to its actual whereabouts, he could not resist setting out to find it.

‘She is unique. She is legend’ THE TIMES

‘A tour de force’ EVENING STANDARD

‘A wonderfully mordant analyst of human weakness’ Martin Amis

Earth, like the rest of the Known Worlds, has fallen to the Shing. Scattered here and there, small groups of humans live in a state of semi-barbarism. They have lost the skills, science and knowledge that had been Earth’s in the golden age of the League of Worlds, and whenever a colony of humans tries to rekindle the embers of a half-forgotten technology, the Shing, with their strange, mindlying power, crush them out. There is one man who can stand against the malign Shing, but he is an alien with amber eyes and must first prove to paranoid humanity that he himself is not a creature of the Shing.

When his brother failed to return from a dangerous mission into the town dominated by Motils, Mathew knew that he must go after him.

it was not only a question of rescuing Don, but of finding out just how far the parasite rulers had advanced in their plans for bringing their master mind, the Controller, down to Earth. If the Controller arrived, the future of the human race would be even darker than its present.

It was not until Mathew made contact with a man who had been delivered from the power of the evil micro-organisms that he learned how close the Controller was, and just now imperative it was to strike a blow now.

The Golden Age is a haunting, mysterious story – a strange Gothic novel of the future. The holocaust is over; Oxford seems to be the capital of the habitable world; and a poet-ruler appears to live out a future tale of Orpheus and Eurydice.

It has become a world in which the devil can materialise monstrosities through barriers of time and place, where death has been the monarch and beauty remains a memory in the mind of only a few. The scientists, the priests, soldiers and politicians have all failed; perhaps only the poets can save mankind.