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Here are five adventures in planetary exploration capable of orbit the most Earthbound reader. You will find yourself embroiled in interplanetary riddles as pioneer space rovers Penton and Blake pit their wits against five alien races.

Into the fray come an array of otherworld creatures – invisible imps, super-evolved blobs, and an amazing tribe of human chameleons. Watch, for the instance, how the adventures from Earth use their cunning to escape death from the ‘spreading shleath’ who ooze their unpleasant slime into every crack and crevice of the planet.


(First published in 1966)

If there is no money, what is there to steal? If the inhabitants have no endocrine gland systems, how can there be crimes of passion? And if there was no crime whatsoever on Albazar I, why was Hautley Quicksilver, licensed criminal extraordinaire, called there? He had no answer until he arrived at the planet… or where it should have been. For Albazar I disappeared before his eyes…

The Dragon, an enormous comet, is on a trajectory that will bring it perilously close to an Earth that is still suffering from the scars of a nuclear incident, and from the problems of the Greenhouse Effect. For the optimists – those that remain – it is a sign of change for the better; for others, the comet foreshadows humanity’s final doom.

But to Francis Reese and the hard-pressed astronauts of the depleted space programme, the Dragon presents a third outrageous, yet irresistible possibility – the transformation of a barren world into a new home for the beleaguered peoples of Earth.

The Dag Hammarskjold takes off from Woomera, Australia for the new human settlement on Mars.
Planet Earth is being eaten away by uncontrollable pollution, starvation and disease. Its life expectancy is nil.
This is the last spaceship, its passengers the last people on earth with any hope. But it is never to reach its objective. Five thousand years later its captain wakes up to a new world undiscovered in his time and to a bitter experience he must fight alone.

Classic space opera adventure, Book #7 in the “Family D’Alembert” series. For centuries, the planet Gastonia has been a planet of exile, an escape-proof prison world for the worst sorts of traitors. But now, it seems, prisoners are indeed escaping, and all evidence points to the sinister, all-knowing conspiracy that continues to shadow the Throne. The d’Alemberts must infiltrate this world of traitors – and they must do it without a safety net, because if they fail they themselves will be trapped on this inhospitable world.

Look down into the streets, the buildings, the parks.

There is your battleground. Down there is the enemy – an enemy who wears no uniform.

He walks behind you in the street, sits with you when you eat, and perhaps swims beside you in a public pool. He may ask you for a light, bow you into a hotel, sell you a flyer, or in another form, leave the smell of perfume on your pillow.

The enemy is young and old, male and female, and he is everywhere. Could such a situation arise – or has it arisen? In this exciting story of the future, the author depicts a world at war. An undercover war, so skilfully manipulated that sixty per cent of the population is unaware of its existence. Yet, daily, the casualty figures climb higher and higher.

Can you say that such a war is impossible? Can you say when you have this all-action novel, that it has not already begun?

Earth and Firma were twin planets – mirror worlds in a single time-track. Now Firma was halted in its rotation around the sun by the Aliens. Unless Denning and Liston, twin humans, could destroy the Aliens and get Firma moving again, Earth would some day repeat Firma’s tragedy and be burned to a cinder.

The Aliens had an incredible array of weapons at their disposal.

Denning and Liston had only their courage and their brains.

Remote, mysterious and deadly, Verdia is a world from which no one has ever returned.
But Jan Hazard is convinced his brother could still be alive and Petra knows Jan can’t make it alone…on the Killer Planet.
Together they go in search for survivors – only to find themselves the next victims, trapped by the malign forces of a monstrous alien…

Big Planet is Jack Vance’s first major sf novel, and in the words of the Encyclopedia of SF, “provided an sf model for the planetary romance which has been of significant use for forty years”. The huge world of the title is home to a range of colourfully detailed and imaginative human societies, which Vance explores with the zest and humour which are hallmarks of his work.

All Jack Vance titles in the SFGateway use the author’s preferred texts, as restored for the Vance Integral Edition (VIE), an extensive project masterminded by an international online community of Vance’s admirers. In general, we also use the VIE titles, and have adopted the arrangement of short story collections to eliminate overlaps. Big Planet was cut almost in half for its first publication, but sadly the excised pages are lost.

Between the frozen wastes of the night side and the searing inferno of the dayside, the Twilight Belt held all that was Human on the tiny world of Mercury, Hell Planet of the Solar System. A strange world, airless, subject to the alien distortions of Einsteinian mathematics, Mercury was both a promise and a challenge, for here could be found torrents of cheap power essential to the ships and men in space. Lee Correy, Commander of the Station, plunges into the frigid wastes in a desperate race against time to find and rescue both his brother and the essential component of the beam control. Fighting impossible conditions and incredible alien life he is up against the enigmatic mystery of the sand devils; a dead man who walked, and a machine that could not fail-but did.

Here is a story of the future, of the planets and the men who will colonise them, of the way they will live and the problems they will face. With mystery, adventure, exciting action and scientifically correct detail. A story of what might well be in the days to come . . .

Earthman Roy Crawford is framed for murder on the planet Velliran. He has two choices. He must escape from the planet within three days or go to prison for life.

But the only spaceship leaving the planet within three days belongs to the Exploration Corps. This is a group of scientists which investigates new planets. They are about to leave for World Seven on the Star System Z-16. With help from his friends, the dazed Crawford finds himself in the ship. The scientists, of course, think he is one of them.

But World Seven is no escape for Roy. It is a planet of death. The team of scientists find themselves in a world where even the trees are killers. And one more killer is on the spaceship – the real murderer who framed Crawford!

In 1492, Colombus discovered America.

In 1992 Claude Regan had to make it happen again!

The US needed a shot in the arm as the twentieth century entered the last decade. And a World’s fair celebrating five hundred years of American civilisation might just do the trick.

Regan was the trickiest, most ruthless promoter in the country. And the first thing he realised was that Earth wasn’t big enough to hold the kind of fair he wanted.

So he built a new world!

It was in wide-eyed horror that Roy Gardner heard the news from the Chief of Security. In just sixty-seven years the Earth would be totally destroyed by the planet Lurion.

That data had been compiled by the invincible computer. With unwavering faith in the machine, humans had only one thing to do – destroy Lurion first.

And the man to do the job was Gardner. If he did it successfully the blood of billions would be on his hands; if he fouled up he would be the worst traitor in Terrestrial history. And not even he knew which course he would pursue when he finally learned that even the all-wise machine had not known all the right answers.

First published in 1959.

Amazonia had a reputation for strangeness even among the zany worlds of the United Federation of Planets. It was a spartan planet ruled by a fearsome military caste – made up exclusively of women. The males of Amazonia usually wound up in some warrior’s harem.

When Guy Thomas arrived he was allowed the privilege of landing only because he offered the government profitable trade agreements, but it wasn’t long before his real plans were fulfilled by his secret meetings with the male-liberationist revolutionary group, The Sons of Liberty. They needed a lot of help.

The more he got involved, however, the more he got the feeling that something was wrong with the whole setup. Guy Thomas was soon to learn that there was more to Amazonia than met the eye – and he wasn’t going to like the truth at all.

Ron Bronston was sworn to protect the United Planets’ dream – the pursuit of freedom and progress on all of the 3000 human-inhabited planets of the galaxy.
As an operative of the secret section of the United Planets’ Bureau of Investigation, Bronston was called upon for some very unusual missions. But the present crisis was without precedent.
Man’s sovereignty in his galaxy was challenged by a single madman and the super-weapons of the Dawnmen, the mysterious aliens from the unexplored vastness of the galaxy’s center. Bronston, alone, had to find a way to stop them.

Folsom’s Planet – An Alien land yet so familiar.

If the mission were a success, Folsom’s planet would bear his name for eternity. The barbarians would be civilized; the planet would join the Federation; the Federation’s integrity would be preserved.

But Hans Folsom had to be on guard. The aliens were intractable, his crew possibly traitorous. There was an incident during the voyage he couldn’t quite remember. And a prophetic runic stone.

Had ancient spacemen visited here in the past? Did that explain the strange religions, the ancient ruins, the mysterious runic stone?

Keill Randor, the Last Legionary of the planet Moros, and his alien companion, Glr, finally end their search for the evil that threatens the galaxy when they come face to face with the true horror of the Galactic Warlord. But even their combined power may not be enough to smash the Deathwing army and save the galaxy from destruction.

The Earth was in shambles after the final quake had leveled the cities.

For Mal Irish the last hold on reality was the embossed gold coin he had taken from the pocket of the dead man – the man who with his last breath had told him of mastodons buried in ice and men who weren’t human.

Once in possession of the coin, Mal found himself on a mysterious quest which led him to discover even stranger things – the girl who spoke the language of another world, the city under the ocean floor, and the deadly little men who followed him. He was in the power of something beyond his understanding, and he meant to find out its source before it put him to its own unfathomable uses.

John Grimes arrives on the forgotten planet Sparta, where a birth machine produces only men generation after generation. The strangely shaped ‘men’ on his ship have a catastrophic effect.

The year is 2087. The two great power blocs still face each other, with Britain having adopted the political role formerly occupied by Switzerland.

For 75 years the world has known of the approach of another solar system which will pass between our sun and its outermost planets. The sun of the other solar system is named Helios by astronomers, and it too is found to have planets. Its fifth planet, Achilles, is the one most similar to Earth; and rival rocket ship expeditions are launched by the Euro-American and Communist blocs to explore this transient neighbour…

From here on the story is weird and wonderful, the action lively; the scientific ideas are intriguing and the social satire is amusing.

The Frames were only a realization of the ultimate form of escape. Books, films, sensors, complete total experience – and finally the Frames. The saviors of civilization had shown the way: move the tribes of Americans to Europe, the tribes of the Germans to Spain, the tribes of the English to Switzerland and permutate the combinations endlessly. Use trains, then aircraft, then spaceships.

The Frames of the Thirtieth Century were a logical extension of the Mechanical Age’s exploitation of the means of mass travel. Now, whole populations moved to new areas of experience. New worlds – new re-created worlds – were manufactured for them. And it had all begun on Talisker. But whatever had left the monstrous scenery on Talisker’s desert had not begun anywhere in our universe.

A strange new race of modified men had fantastic powers and a kind of immortality. But something the human touch itself had been lost, and in consequence a terrible barrier grew. It looked as if a cataclysmic war would be inevitable.

Mars is our nearest neighbour in the solar system, with the exception of our own satellite Luna. It will be considerably easier to hit the moon of course, but what will we find when we get there? Plenty to interest the scientist, the mining engineer, and the cosmologist. But the Biologist will find only fossilised traces of Lunar life, if he finds anything at all.
On Mars the story will be vastly different. We know that there is vegetation there. We still argue about those enigmatic canals. Are they optical illusion or…? What if…? What if an intelligent civilisation cut those great water courses? What if that civilisation still exists? Is man the only intelligence in God’s great Universe? How will earth’s envoys react when they first encounter non-human intellect for the first time? Will the aliens be friendly, or…?

They were suspended in frozen animation billions of years ago. Now the Searcher was looking for them, scattered across the universe. Would he find them before those set on destruction could?