Search Results for: what-mad-universe

BUG-EYED MONSTERS ON BROADWAY

Pulp SF magazine editor Keith Winton was answering a letter from a teenage fan when the first moon rocket fell back to Earth and blew him away.

But where to? Greenville, New York, looked the same, but Bems (Bug-Eyed Monsters) just like the ones on the cover of Startling Stories walked the streets without attracting undue comment.

And when he brought out a half-dollar coin in a drugstore, the cops wanted to shoot him on sight as an Arcturian spy.

Wait a minute. Seven-foot purple moon-monsters? Earth at war with Arcturus? General Dwight D. Eisenhower in command of Venus Sector?

What mad universe was this?

One thing was for sure: Keith Winton had to find out fast – or he’d be good and dead, in this universe or any other.

What! A science fiction novel about science fiction fans? And why not?

Or – like it says in this novel:

“Do you really think that a group of science fiction fans could save this planet? Could understand this situation to save it?”
“I most certainly do,” she says. “Who else?”

Who else, indeed?
Not since Frederic Brown’s “What Mad Universe” has there been a novel like this.

Parallel Worlds! Earth, cerated out of universal chaos, and the Dreamlands, spawned of the dreams of men. But where dreams turn to nightmares, Death is the only crossing-point…
Ex-waking worlders David Hero and Eldin the Wanderer are now sellswords in that ephemeral dimension called Deramland. Once a talented artist of the fantastic, now Hero’s art is the wizardry of his swordplay. Once a lecturing professor, now Eldin professes a knowledge of the dark, mysterious Dream Realms second to none. A formidable pair! But face to face with Yibb-Tstll and the Gaunts of Night, the Eidolon Lathi and her brood, and the mad, alien First One who plots to set free dreaming Cthulu from eon-old imprisonment…what can mere men do?
Take up arms with the Heroes of Dreams and laugh in the face of the world’s worst nightmare!

In Philip Jose Farmers incredible sequel to The Image of the Beast, Herald Childe continues what started as a murder case – a very gruesome one – but which has now become a struggle against the strange and deadly beings who have taken his wife, who threaten his manhood and threaten mankind itself.

His seems a hopeless quest. He is fighting not people but inhuman, unhuman monster from another universe. They take grotesque physical forms, they indulge cruel whims, and they are sex-mad.

There is Vivienne, amazingly beautiful, who used to be Joan of Arc. But she has false teeth and she comes literally to pieces. Her lover is a snake-like horror whose needle teeth drip aphrodisiac venom. There is Count Igescu, a real live vampire. And these three are surrounded by a grisly crowd of bizarre aliens, characters in a science fiction nightmare. But for Childe there is to be no waking up: though no one else will believe him, he knows this is for real…

In its hour of need, the Well World’s guardians had been neutralized. Nathan Brazil was shipwrecked on a desert island with a seemingly harmless girl but his contact with her had allowed his mind to be invaded, his will sapped, and his mission forgotten.
Mavra Chang had been abducted by a vicious gang of inter-hex drug smugglers, and was now held prisoner by a revenge-mad creature who had surgically and genetically altered her into a bizarre form and made her a slave to powerful narcotics. But the Well could allow nothing to stop the guardian’s journey for long. For the Well of Souls was only a machine; it needed the Watchers to handle events and circumstances beyond its sophisticated programming. And so it set plans in motion to jolt its champions back into the game.
The only other help Brazil and Chang could expect was from the companions who had been swept along to the Well World by accident or design. But the newcomers had been caught in a web of intrigue and deceit spun by the ruling council, a group desperate to stop both Brazil and Chang.
What none of them could know was that all of them, even the great Well computer, were being manipulated by the Kraang, an entity more ancient than the universe itself, a being that would use the guardians to give it powers far beyond even those of the Well of Souls- a being that would become a living god…