closed-worlds,-the | SF Gateway - Your Portal to the Classics of SF & Fantasy

The year is 1998, and the nightmare is close at hand.

The world economy has gone into a mega-crash. Most of the population has been plunged into abject poverty. Anarchy and violence stalk the streets. All power is in the hands of Dryco, headed by paranoid tycoon Thatcher Dryden, and his monstrous wife, Susie.

But on the desperate streets of the Lower East Side miracles are happening. A Messiah seems to have risen from the people and is healing the sick, teaching children, raising the dead.

Dryco’s New Projects Manager, Joanna, is sent to check him out. Thatcher’s got a plan for world domination, and a genuine Messiah could be the key he’s looking for. And even if he’s fake, he may have his uses.

But soon, Joanna finds herself trapped in a crisis of conscience, between the relative security of a Dryco job and the dream of healing a sick world.

When Morgan Chane and his comrades of John Dilullo’s interstellar mercenaries invaded the Close World of Arkuu in search of a lost Terran expedition, they found a planet of strange menace. Incredibly powerful monsters prowled though Arkuu’s dense jungles, and the ghosts of the planet’s past haunted its ancient deserted cities. The Arkuuns themselves fought grimly to drive the Terrans away. But at last Chane discovered the Free-Faring, the terrible alien secret of Arkuu..and suddenly he knew why no Terran had left the Closed Worlds alive.

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 chariots came on at great speed and there was no mistaking their purpose. Tulley wondered if they were using this place as a base . . . Then an arrow plunked into the parapet of his chariot. Oolou lashed the reins. The nageres sprang forward. With suicidal speed the two chariot groups closed on each other.

Tulley swallowed down, feeling the dryness in his throat, loosed a shaft at the oncoming mass. There must be twenty chariots out there . . .

He glanced at Oolou, shouting. She stared back at him with a ghastly grin, the blood pouring from her neck above the corselet where an arrow stood, stark and brutal.

The Chariots of Ra is a parallel worlds adventure novel, set in Kenneth Bulmer’s ‘Keys to the Dimensions’ series.

The alien spaceship landed in a cornfield. Its crew died rapidly, leaving only one survivor – a baby, conceived on an unknown world, carried in its mother’s womb across space and delivered even as the mother died on a hostile Earth.

But the alien woman had given birth to more than a child. With her last act she had bequeathed to the Earth that hated her and her kind decades of turmoil and strife that would come close to tearing the whole planet apart.

What happened on Judgement Day? Do we have Martian ancestors? Will we blow up the world? In this collection of his best SF stories, Edmund Cooper gives his own inimitably entertaining answers to these and other such intriguing questions. From The Death Watch to The Brain Child, Cooper ‘considers possible scenarios’. Sometimes he is serious, sometimes satirical. Sometimes he is uncomfortably close to the truth.

The year is 2000. America is swept up in the tide of fundamentalism that is overwhelming the world. Suicide cults and paranoid militias are on the rise and mobs of hooded men drive young women from the streets, as the right-wing American Alliance marshals it forces to close an iron grip on the United States.

Yet even as a power-hungry Alliance candidate makes his first move in a game that will land him the presidency, one woman prepares to stand against him. At Carolyn Crespin’s side are five women friends, the oddly present spirit of another friend who had been reported dead, and an even more surprising ally, mysterious and powerful – one who hands Carolyn the key to the future of humanity, for good or ill.

This stunning collection showcases 11 of Haldeman’s best stories. They range through time and space from planets beyond our wildest dreams to a nightmare future Earth all too close to home.

Lindsay and the Red City Blues: A story of revenge – with a heart-stopping twist in the tail.

Blood Brothers: A ‘Thieves World’ story.

You Can Never Go Back: A self-contained story from the original version of ‘The Forever War’, never before published in book form.

And ten more sharp and startling visions of tomorrow.

Travel at light speeds is common, and Earth – the first in the universe to discover it – now reigns over many worlds.

But in order to rule effectively, Captain Robin Weinbaum, head of Security, needs an extremely advanced communications system. He gets it with the Dirac transmitter, the first machine capable of sending instantaneous messages anywhere in the universe. The only problem is that someone called J. Shelby Stevens has a machine that can do the impossible – tap the transmissions before they are even made! It is Weinbaum’s job to find Stevens. And unless he does, time will be abolished and the universe closed to Earth forever . . .

Death and Disorder 104.

Institute courses told a grim story about the Network – that savage world beyond the closely guarded Institute gates. But they wanted to see for themselves. They had to know.

Were they really females there? Would their training as mercenaries prepare them for the wild bands of grisly subhumans?

They set out on a journey of discovery only to become the unwitting agents of forces that threatened to destroy the only world they’d ever known.

The year is 2012. The world lies ravaged by biological warfare, its population decimated by a ferocious genetically-transmitted disease known as the organ rot. And presiding over the ruins is a ninety-three-year-old tyrant, preserved in a state of youth by a series of organ transplants: the self-styled Genghis Mao.

Shadrach Mordecai, Genghis Mao’s trusted personal physician, was a vital cog in the great machine devoted to keeping the ruler alive: linked to him by a network of electronic implants, Shadrach was able to detect and diagnose the first signs of malfunction in his lord and master. But close as he was to the aging dictator, Shadrach could not have known that events would soon plunge him into a desperate struggle – a struggle in which a paragon of idealism faced the very incarnation of evil.

Earl Dumarest continues his desperate search for his birthplace, and seems to be coming close to the mythical planet Earth.

But his attention is temporarily diverted, as he is unexpectedly involved in a hunt for a nebulous ghost world in another galaxy.

It is rumoured that in this fabulous land lies the mysterious Castle of Heart’s Desire, where every wish is fulfilled. If Dumarest can find it, then maybe – just maybe – he will be able to return to the planet of his birth.

(First published 1976)

‘Earth is real,’ Dumarest insisted. ‘A world old and scarred by ancient wars. The stars are few and there is a great single moon which hangs like a pale sun in the night sky.’

In the quest for his legendary birthplace, Earl Dumarest has traversed galaxies. Now, at least, he reaches Ourelle, a planet close to Earth – out along a far arm of the Milky Way. There he finds Jondelle, a boy who may hold the key to Earl’s search.

But then Jondelle is kidnapped. And Dumarest’s pursuit of the imperilled boy leads him to a city of paranoiac killers – madmen whose terrible violence is always on a hair-trigger!

(First published 1973)

September 15, 2018

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June 1, 2019

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Cordwainer Smith (1913 – 1966) Cordwainer Smith was the most famous pen name of US foreign policy adviser Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger. Born in Milwaukee in 1913, his godfather was the Chinese revolutionary and political leader, Sun Yat-sen – the result of his political activist father’s close ties with leaders of the Chinese revolution. Smith held a PhD in Political Science from Johns Hopkins, served in the US military during the Second World War and acted as an adviser to President Kennedy. Although he only published one novel, Norstrilia, Smith is well regarded for his short fiction, the majority of which is set in his future history of the Instrumentality of Mankind.

Robert Holdstock (1948 – 2009) Robert Paul Holdstock was born in a remote corner of Kent, sharing his childhood years between the bleak Romney Marsh and the dense woodlands of the Kentish heartlands. He received an MSc in medical zoology and spent several years in the early 1970s in medical research before becoming a full-time writer in 1976. His first published story appeared in the New Worlds magazine in 1968 and for the early part of his career he wrote science fiction. However, it is with fantasy that he is most closely associated. 1984 saw the publication of Mythago Wood, winner of the BSFA and World Fantasy Awards for Best Novel, and widely regarded as one of the key texts of modern fantasy. It and the subsequent ‘mythago’ novels (including Lavondyss, which won the BSFA Award for Best Novel in 1988) cemented his reputation as the definitive portrayer of the wild wood. His interest in Celtic and Nordic mythology was a consistent theme throughout his fantasy and is most prominently reflected in the acclaimed Merlin Codex trilogy, consisting of Celtika, The Iron Grail and The Broken Kings, published between 2001 and 2007. Among many other works, Holdstock co-wrote Tour of the Universe with Malcolm Edwards, for which rights were sold for a space shuttle simulation ride at the CN Tower in Toronto, and The Emerald Forest, based on John Boorman’s film of the same name. His story, ‘The Ragthorn’, written with friend and fellow author Garry Kilworth, won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella and the BSFA Award for Short Fiction. Robert Holdstock died in November 2009, just four months after the publication of Avilion, the long-awaited, and sadly final, return to Ryhope Wood. http://www.robertholdstock.com

Jonathan Burke (1922 – 2011) Jonathan Burke was the working name of English writer John Frederick Burke, who also wrote SF and fantasy under his own name (particularly his short fiction) as well as J F Burke and Robert Miall. Burke was born in Rye, Sussex, but soon moved to Liverpool, where his father was a Chief Inspector of Police. He became a prominent science fiction fan in the late 1930s, and with David Mcllwain he jointly edited one of the earliest British fanzines. The Satellite, to which another close friend, Sam Youd, was a leading contributor. All three men would become well-known SF novelists after the war, writing as Jonathan Burke, Charles Eric Maine, and John Christopher, respectively. During the early 1950s he wrote numerous science fiction adventure novels and his short stories appeared regularly in all of the leading SF magazines, most notably in New Worlds and Authentic Science Fiction. In the mid-1950s he worked in publishing and as a public relations executive for Shell, before being appointed as European Story Editor for 20th Century-Fox Productions in 1963. His cinematic expertise led to his being commissioned to pen dozens of bestselling novelizations of popular film and TV titles, ranging from such movies as A Hard Day’s Night, Privilege, numerous Hammer Horror films, and The Bill. He also did adaptations of Gerry Anderson’s UFO TV series (as Robert Miall). Burke went on to write more than 150 books in all genres, including work in collaboration with his wife, Jean; and also published non-fiction works on an astonishing variety of subjects, most notably music. After finally settling in the Scottish countryside. Burke continued to write well into his eighth decade, and in later years many of his best supernatural and macabre short stories were collected and anthologized. He died on 21 September 201l, aged 89, shortly after completing his final novel, a contemporary supernatural thriller The Nightmare Whisperers, which was published posthumously in 2012.

Heathern

The Closed Worlds

Double Planet

The Chariots of Ra

Let the Fire Fall

Jupiter Laughs

Gibbon's Decline and Fall

Dealing in Futures

The Quincunx of Time

The Sodom and Gomorrah Business

Shadrach in the Furnace

Jack of Swords

Jondelle

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Cordwainer Smith

Robert Holdstock

Jonathan Burke

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