Search Results for: at-the-earth's-core

When Abner Perry invents a vehicle that essentially drills through the earth, he takes it to his good friend (and independently wealthy man about town) David Ennis. And what else can they do? Drill down into the earth, of course. What they find there isn’t what we’d expect: it’s an inner world called Pellicidar, a place where the sun neither sets nor rises – because what appears to be the sun is no sun at all, but the molten core of the earth. Pellucidar is a great fun fantasy world, full of dragons, apes, and reptiles and Weird Things. It’s ruled by sorcerous royalty (the princess falls in love with Our Hero, of course) and of course our heroes end up hip-deep in dragons…

An urgent message from Pellucidar, that world of primitive men and primeval jungles that lies inside the crust of the Earth, called on Tarzan of the Apes for assistance.

Tarzan, used to the dangers of darkest Africa, heeded the call to Pellucidar, where all his skill in the jungle, all his talents with beasts and primitive men, would be put to the extreme test. For in that land at the Earth’s core, under the eternal day of the Central Sun, his terrific talents were needed just to stay alive – let alone to fulfil the mission that had called him there!

From the vaults of the SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal introduction to the fantastic worlds of one of the greatest adventure writers of all time, Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The son of a Civil War veteran, Edgar Rice Burroughs was a prolific writer for the early pulp magazines. Famous the world over as the creator of Tarzan – and in SF circles for his Martian tales featuring John Carter – Burroughs is a household name. This omnibus collects six more tales of Tarzan of the Apes – perhaps the greatest pulp hero of all time: TARZAN AT THE EARTH’S CORE, TARZAN THE INVINCIBLE, TARZAN TRIUMPHANT, TARZAN AND THE CITY OF GOLD, TARZAN AND THE LION MAN and TARZAN AND THE LEOPARD MEN.

‘Behold these annals from the Discovery and on through the World-Taking.
This is the tale as told by Terrans, who walk the earth.
Then read.’

THE EARTH BOOK OF STORMGATE POUL ANDERSON’S MIGHTY EPIC OF FUTURE HISTORY

The full length story forming the core of the chronicle of the expansion of earthmen into the inhabited galaxy . . . from the Earth Book kept in the Stormgate archive of the great winged race of Ythri.

Two explorers from the Earth’s surface had carved themselves an empire at the Earth’s core – Pellucidar.

The dangers were many. Untamed tribes and vicious beasts were a constant peril, and there were times when the lives of the surface-men were at stake. But, just when things seemed hopeless, they came up with a trump card – a new weapon.

What they didn’t realize was that it was a weapon that could bring its makers to the brink of disaster.

A stunning novel of alien invasion from a master of the genre

The disappearance of one of Jupiter’s moons, the appearance of “little green men” in Australia and the American Southwest, and the sudden presence of unidentifiable objects on a collision course inside the Earth’s core add up to the inescapable conclusion that the Earth has been invaded by an enemy it cannot fight.

Powerfully and gracefully written, the latest novel by the author of EON and BLOOD MUSIC stands far above most examples of “doomsday” science fiction.

The Million Cities covered every inch of Earth’s surface with a gleaming metal skin – and penetrated almost to the planet’s core. Billions of people crowded them, using up the last depleted resources of an aging world. There was no hope for mankind but exploring and colonizing new frontiers beyond the sky.

The Chartists were the only people with the ability to build a spaceship -were within reach of success…

And then the government outlawed space travel – and began a vicious reign of terror against the Chartists!

From the vaults of The SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal introduction to the fantastic worlds of one of the greatest adventure writers of all time, Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The son of a Civil War veteran, Edgar Rice Burroughs was a prolific writer for the early pulp magazines. Famous the world over as the creator of Tarzan – and in SF circles for his Martian tales featuring John Carter – Burroughs is a household name. But there was more to him than apemen and four-armed Martians! This omnibus collects his tales of the world within a hollow Earth: At the Earth’s Core, Pellucidar and Tanar of Pellucidar.

One day Kil Bruner was a solid Class A engineer in a society of World Police and citizen Files, jet-set migrants and status-ranking Stability keys. But the Police ordered Kil to forget about his missing wife Ellen – and that was a mistake.

Because Kil would move Heaven and Earth to find the woman he loved.

Even when the search leads to slums filled with blade-wielding thugs and criminal Ace Kings . . . to secret societies and vast, interlocked, warring conspiracies – each out to rule the Earth or destroy it. Even when the search costs Kil his freedom, his sanity, the core of his soul – and reality itself . . .

Because to find Ellen, Kil will have to move Heaven and Earth. Literally.

In this sequel to At the Earth’s Core, return to the world of Pellucidar – an exotic, savage land at the centre of our Earth, an untamed wilderness where time stands still. When American explorer David Innes first discovered Pellucidar, he fell under the spell of the strange world, earning the respect of many, the undying hatred of a few, and the love of the beautiful Dian. Torn from the arms of Dian by trickery, Innes vows revenge and returns to the Inner World in his most exciting adventure to date. But David Innes appears in Pellucidar far from the land of his beloved and is forced to cross a fierce, unyielding world to reach her. Inne’s epic journey through the many strange lands of Pellucidar, including the brilliantly conceived pendant moon and Land of Awful Shadow, and his heart-pounding encounters with prehistoric beasts and strange peoples ranks as one of the best adventures ever penned by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Fifteen billion years from now, Earth is a dying planet, its skies darkened by the ashes of burned-out galaxies, its molten core long cooled. The sunless planet is nearing the day of final gravitational collapse in the surrounding galaxy. Mutations and evolution have led to a great disparity of life-forms, while civilization has resorted to the primitive.
Young Deyv of the Turtle Tribe knew nothing of his world’s history or its fate. He lived only to track down the wretched Yawtl who had stolen his precious Soul Egg. Joined by other victims of the same thief – the feisty Vana and the plant-man Sloosh – the group sets off across a nightmare landscape of monster-haunted jungle and wetland. Their search leads them ultimately to the jeweled wasteland of the Shemibob, an ageless being from another star who knows Earth’s end is near and holds the only key to escape.

After millennia of relentless war, the union of alien races called the Weave was on the verge of winning a decisive victory – thanks to their new allies from Earth, who in a mere handful of centuries had proved masters of combat. But then the birdlike Wais scholar Lalelelang found disturbing evidence that Humans might not adapt so easily to peace – that natural Human aggression would next be turned against the Weave, unless they were once again confined to fight amongst themselves.

When her field research revealed the existence of a secret group of powerfully telepathic Humans called the Core, it looked as if Lalelelang would be the first victim in a new war between Humans and their allies. But just as her fate was sealed, a lone Core commander took a chance on her intelligence and compassion, gambling the fate of Humanity on the possibility that together they could both find an alternative to a galaxy-wide bloodbath…

Past worlds almost too strange to describe, three men hurtle into the dark uncharted mystery of space. Their task: to make contact with the Hegemony of Malis, the unknown force that has been watching the Solar System since before the beginning of recorded history. On their success or failure depends the future of the entire Earth.

Join them as they accelerate on Haertel drive towards the stunning core of the Hegemony itself in James Blish’s masterpiece of the time to come, Mission to the Heart Stars.

So, just how was Tarzan created? Eager to know the inside story about the legendary John Carter and the amazing cities and peoples of Barsoom? Perhaps your taste is more suited to David Innes and the fantastic lost world at the Earth’s core? Or maybe wrong-way Napier and the bizarre civilizations of cloud-enshrouded Venus are more to your liking? These pages contain all that you will ever want to know about the wondrous worlds and unforgettable characters penned by the master storyteller Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Richard A. Lupoff, the respected critic and writer who helped spark a Burroughs revival in the 1960s, reveals fascinating details about the stories written by the creator of Tarzan. Featured here are outlines of all of Burroughs’s major novels, with descriptions of how they were each written and their respective sources of inspiration.

At first it was just another hoax, another UFO story, but the sightings went on increasing.
It couldn’t be an alien, there had been so many false alarms, dramatic news-columnists had shouted ‘wolf’ so many times, that John Citizen shrugged his shoulders and said ‘nuts’ at the very mention of the word space-ship. Then one of them landed…
The things they did were not exactly friendly. In fact by the time they’d finished, they had made an old-time Viking raid seem like a social call from the vicar…
Many other attacks followed. Day after day and night after night the alien ships screamed in on their mission of death. The earth struck back. But no one could track the aliens to their lair.
They seemed to come from Nowhere. They weren’t Martians. They weren’t Venusians, and they weren’t from another system.
That left only one place where they could have originated… yet the truth was so fantastic that none of the earth governments would take it seriously until it was almost too late.
The enemy came from within! From the gigantic caverns at the earth’s core.

Terran Corps scattered their ships outward into the glittering galaxies. Solterra’s prime objective: orbital reconstruction of the far-flung planets. They had tightened up Solterra’s galaxy and had made mankind secure against alien threats – or so Terrans believed.

As Chief Commander, Stephen Strang aggressively explored the cosmos for the glory of his beloved Earth. He could boast that he had moved more planets into orbit around Sol than any other. Strang felt smugly safe against alien “sharks” – until he discovered the vast time-bomb that was planet Vesta’s core. . .

A world of peaceful aliens conquered by bloodthirsty yumens, their existence is irrevocably altered. Forced into servitude, the Athsheans find themselves at the mercy of their brutal masters.

Desperation causes the Athsheans to retaliate against their captors, abandoning their strictures against violence. In defending their lives, they endanger the very foundations of their society. Every blow against the invaders is a blow to the core of Athsheans’ culture.

And once the killing starts, there is no turning back.

Winner of the 1973 Hugo award for Best Novella, and nominated for many others, The Word for World is Forest is part of Le Guin’s ‘Hainish Cycle’. It explores a future history of Earth and pacifistic ideals in its depictions of violence, colonialism and resistance.

‘A simple story that, like most things Le Guin wrote, packs a powerful emotional and critical punch’- Tordotcom
‘Deeply moving and shocking by turns’- Suzanne Reid
‘Le Guin writes in quiet, straightforward sentences about people who feel they are being torn apart by massive forces in society . . . and who fight courageously to remain whole’ – The New York Times Book Review


Welcome to The Best Of The Masterworks: a selection of the finest in science fiction

Stephen Baxter’s highly acclaimed first novel and the beginning of his stunning Xeelee Sequence finally enters the SF Masterwork series!

A spaceship from Earth accidentally crossed through a hole in space-time to a universe where the force of gravity is one billion times as strong as the gravity we know. Somehow the crew survived, aided by the fact that they emerged into a cloud of gas surrounding a black hole, which provided a breathable atmosphere.

Five hundred years later, their descendants still struggle for existence, divided into two main groups. The Miners live on the Belt, a ramshackle ring of dwellings orbiting the core of a dead star, which they excavate for raw materials. These can be traded for food from the Raft, a structure built from the wreckage of the ship, on which a small group of scientists preserve the ancient knowledge which makes survival possible.

Rees is a Miner whose curiosity about his world makes him stow away on a flying tree – just one of the many strange local lifeforms – carrying trade between the Belt and the Raft. And what he finds will change his world…

“What does a cockatrice enjoy most for dinner? Anyone it can find.”

So the alarmed inhabitants of England discover when a plague of monsters–known as cockatrices–invade their country and begin gobbling them up. They must be stopped! A plucky band of survivors dubbed the Cockatrice Corps–including youngsters Dakin and Sauna–decide to fight back. But how?

A rollicking adventure filled with breathtaking twists and turns, The Cockatrice Boys is Joan Aiken at her comic best.

But there is also a powerful message in her only full length Sci- Fi (or even Cli-Fi!) YA novel as Joan Aiken imagines the result of human folly, in an earlier version of global warming, with the hole created in the ozone layer becoming a channel for evil to arrive on earth as an invasion of monstrous creatures.

Joan Aiken believed in the power of the imagination, and using stories to prepare us for our future.
In The Cockatrice Boys she wrote:

“People need stories…to remind them that reality is not only what we can see or smell or touch. Reality is in as many layers as the globe we live on itself, going inwards to a central core of red-hot mystery, and outwards to unguessable space. People’s minds need detaching, every now and then, from the plain necessities of daily life. People need to be reminded of these other dimensions above us and below us. Stories do that.”

“Besides being a daringly original, funny, scary, and morally instructive book, it also contains one of the strongest statements of the purpose of fantasy stories and fairy tales . . . This book was excellent, I highly recommend it . . . buy it now!” Mugglenet.com


“Readers will be reminded of Alice in Wonderland . . . and the movie trilogy Star Wars” School Library Journal

“This one is a real page-turner – as usual for Aiken – and sometimes really quite sinister, with a lot of gallows humour. It’s suitable for all adults and most children… just as creepy as anything by M.R. James” Amazon Reviewer

“Like all Aiken’s best work, there is a deeply scary, nightmare thread running through this book, which makes it thrilling and involving for older readers and adults …but the monsters are especially entertaining – drawn from Lewis Carroll, ancient mythology, and even Monty Python, they are scary and funny at the same time. A brilliant book” Amazon Reviewer

The book that reinvented Space Opera. The Canterbury Tales in space – from the Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning author of The Terror, which is now a chilling TV show.

It is the 29th century and the universe of the Human Hegemony is under threat. Invasion by the warlike Ousters looms, and the mysterious schemes of the secessionist AI TechnoCore bring chaos ever closer.

On the eve of disaster, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set fourth on a final voyage to the legendary Time Tombs on Hyperion, home to the Shrike, a lethal creature, part god and part killing machine, whose powers transcend the limits of time and space. The pilgrims have resolved to die before discovering anything less than the secrets of the universe itself.

Readers are hooked on Hyperion:

‘His narrative is beautifully written . . . I couldn’t stop reading. The payoff is totally worth it, as each story unfolds another facet of this incredible universe Simmons has created’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

‘One of the best epic, old mythology, and literature inspired, mindblowing, amazingly ingeniously written space operas‘ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

‘The scope of imagination, wordplay, and critical analysis of humankind is astounding . . . this is a story-driven narrative, and the stories that we’re given are well worth the entry into a brave, new, unfamiliar world‘ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

‘Hyperion has that indescribable, almost lovecraftian terror, dread and brooding present throughout’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

‘The superb use of the pilgrim’s story telling device, that not only pushes the main story on, but seamlessly provides the depth and vibrancy to lay out this reality to the reader in such a simple, yet compelling way’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

‘Imagine a universe where the Earth has been destroyed and humanity is spread out across hundreds of planets. Combine the artful poetry of John Keats with a science fiction retelling of the Canterbury Tales . . . what you have is Hyperion. A masterpiece of literature‘ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

‘A science fiction classic . . . If you count yourself an sf fan you need to read this. If you just want to read a damn good book this is also for you‘ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐