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At the end of the 22nd century, following a nuclear accident, the birth rate is falling.

Faced with a rapidly shrinking human race, governments come up with a solution: new people from old. Cloning.

But these Reborn people are kept closely monitored, in controlled scenarios. Will they really fit into futuristic society? What other secrets are being hidden outside of the worlds in which they are contained?

At a meeting of Quenborough Borough Council, the Mayor, Sir John Assington, is accused by Alderman Trant of wasting money and turning a blind eye to speculators on the make.

Then Trant is stabbed with his own knife, and while dying, manages to scratch the initials ‘MA’ on a piece of paper.

Local Chief Constable Race is on the case. He is new to the force, so Superintendent Vorley comes to his aid. With the help of Scotland Yard, in the shape of Inspector Lott, they each bring a different approach to the investigation.

For the truth is rarely straightforward . . .

When Odin breathed life into the mortal realms, he also created the Cardinal Wizards: the Northern Wizard as the representative of Good, the Southern as master of Evil, and the Western and Eastern as the keepers of the balance between Good and Evil, each neutral, both sharing the burden of holding their fellow magic wielders in check.
But now the days decreed in ancient prophecy have come upon the mortal realms. The Great War has been fought and a Renshai has proven its Champion.
Yet even as the war’s heroes struggle to place the rightful king of Bearn upon his throne, and the also true Renshai seeks to train a new generation of his warrior race, the word is carried forth on falcon’s wings that the Western Wizard is no more.
And unless Shadimar, the Wizard of the East, can find the one mortal with any hope of surviving the challenge of the Seven Tasks of Wizardry, the worlds of gods and mortals alike will fall….

Paul Heisenberg is mysteriously endowed with the ability to jump through time. Together with thousands of eventual followers, he begins a journey that eventually takes him a billion years into the future. The Earth has been devastated by war with an alien race, and the changes that have resulted from the degradation of the world’s biosphere force him–and others–to rethink their own humanity. His pilgrim’s progress through the coming time is beset by doubts, distractions, and temptations as various voices attempt to distract him from his determination to follow the process through to its end. He eventually witnesses the complete transformation of the Earth, and the evolution of a single omnipotent but mindless Gaean organism. Is intelligence itself just a brief candle, forever doomed to burn out? Or can Paul find some other alternative for his race.

The acclaimed science fiction author Brian M. Stableford returns with the final book in his trilogy about a planet that contains thousands of worlds inside it – and the one man who will do anything to penetrate its secrets. The conflict between the Isthomi and Scarid races and the surface dwellers of Asgard had come to a halt, but not an end. Forces are at work on all sides to attempt to gain the upper hand in the struggle to control Asgard, for control of Asgard’s heart could mean total power over the planet itself, and all who live in it. At the middle of the struggle is Michael Rousseau, who must penetrate the very core of the planet itself – both in reality and in another dimension altogether – to save Asgard and all who dwell in it, before it’s too late,

They call it Asgard, the Home of the Gods. Beneath its artificial shell are at least three vast cave-systems, each one the size of an Earth-like world; and beneath those, possibly many more. No one knows how many layers there might be, and no one knows what secrets might be buried down at the “center”–if there is a center. At some time in the distant past, Asgard had suffered a terrible catastrophe. Now its outer layers are cold, its builders presumed dead. Explorers and exploiters from a hundred different worlds and races are scavenging among the ruins–but deep down, there might still be light, warmth, life…and perils unknown. Mike Rousseau was one of the first humans to come to Asgard, decades earlier. Now he’s challenged by both friends and foes–and it’s hard to tell them apart on this icebound planet. He might also be the one man who can solve the biggest puzzle in the galaxy…if only he can stay alive!

The Coming Race draws upon ideas of Darwinism to describe a near-future world characterized by female dominance, physical perfection, and vast technological progress.

As the Hukk maneuver on the fringes of Terran Space, the Terran Navy is about to begin the most important “game” in the history of the human race. For too many years the Hukk have been pushing, pushing at humanity’s frontiers, testing our strength and our courage – and finding both wanting. Now the Terran Hardliners have had enough. They will use the coming war games to start a real war, even if it requires a revolution at home to clear the way!

Scientific progress has taken human beings to remote planes in far galaxies and enabled them to build comfortable homes there. But when that science proved a deadly enemy and had to be abandoned, the pioneers were isolated in alien surroundings. There was no way home. Earth, which had once been home, had ceased to exist. And when the men of the planet Demeter died out in space, the destiny of the human race was left to a group of women.

Clare Monkton worked to establish a feminist world. She used the resources of science to assure the continuance of the race … but the resulting children were to be brought up according to her ideas.

There was bound to be a challenge. When there were once more young men growing up on the planet, it was inevitable that they should oppose the authority of the women. And when one of those young men proved to come from such a dangerous ancestry, Clare knew she had a battle on her hands…

With the discovery of the hyperdrive, mankind at last possessed the means of going out to the stars. Four expeditions had already gone by the fine the fifth starship left Pluto for Vega. Carrying its complement of scientists and military personnel, they arrived at the solar system of Vega to find one planet sufficiently like Earth to allow them to land.

Here, they discovered mystery. The ruins of great cities built on the shattered remains of still earlier fortresses, showing that some great race of conquerors had passed that way sometime in the past thirty thousand years.

No life now remained on this planet and speeding to the next sun, they found a civilisation which possessed powers so utterly strange to them that one native almost succeeded in destroying them and taking over the ship. And still the mystery remained, for the legends of the planet spoke of a race of gods who had come down from the stars twenty thousand years before.

It was not until they reached the planet of a red giant sun that they ran into a race of creatures so fantastically alien that there was no defence against them, and they learned the real identity of the race which had conquered the stars millennia before…

ANTARCTIC SAVAGES – PREHISTORIC MASTODONS – FLYING FORTRESSES – PARALYSING RAY GUNS – GRYPHONS – WATER-WITCHES – LOST CONTINENTS – WONDERFUL FLYING MACHINES…AND MORE!

Coming soon – the most fantastic contest ever conceived: An airplane race pitting Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh and Howard Hughes against Manfred von Richthofen (the Bloody Red Baron), his kid brother Lothar and Princess Irina Lvova of Russia!

Which team will be the first to complete the never-before-attempted round-the-poles flight?

Warning: On this doughnut-shaped alternate Earth it is impossible to fly off the edge!

It was a great world in the fortieth century. No economic problems. No work. Robots and androids everywhere. Every girl a princess, every man a king. Pleasure, parties, amusements, art, drama and literature were the ultimate goal of every man woman and child.
When people have too much leisure there is a danger. They grow soft and effete. There hadn’t been a standing army on earth for a thousand years. There hadn’t been a single warrior for five hundred. Then the Masked Swordsmen began breaking up the pleasure parties, after the swords came guns, stolen from the museums. Then… worse,… far, far worse.
But that wasn’t all. There were rumours of alien ships in the sky. Ships manned by a savage blue skinned humanoid race. Ships landed. Blues were enslaved. More blues came. Earthmen and women were captured in reprisal.
Who were the blues? Why did they come? What was their history? What were their plans for the future?
Would the human race survive?

From the vaults of The SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal introduction to the work of the award-winning Bob Shaw. Best known for his extraordinary novel of ‘slow glass’, Other Days, Other Eyes, Bob Shaw was a fan favourite at conventions for his hysterical ‘serious scientific talks’. This omnibus contains three of his finest works: Orbitsville, A Wreath of Stars and The Ragged Astronauts.

Orbitsville:
Racing from the certain vengeance of Earth’s tyrant ruler, space captain Vance Garamond flees the Solar System. And discovers the almost unimaginably vast spherical structure soon to become famous as ‘Orbitsville’ – a new home for Earth’s huddled masses.

A Wreath of Stars:
Thornton’s Planet is an anti-neutrino planet detected on its approach to Earth. It can be seen only through the newly developed magniluct lenses and its arrival causes a wave of panic. When its course carries it past the earth, interest in Thornton’s Planet wanes. But the visit of Thornton’s Planet has had effects on Earth further-ranging than anyone could have imagined.

The Ragged Astronauts:
Land and Overland – twin worlds a few thousand miles apart. On Land, humanity faces a threat to its very survival – an airborne species, the ptertha, has declared war on humankind, and is actively hunting for victims. The only hope lies in migration. Through space to Overland. By balloon.

Entered by a thousand unsuspected gateways – built by a race lost in the clouds of time – Well World transforms creatures of any sort into different forms.

So, spacefarer Nathan Brazil is not surprised to find himself accompanied by a batman, an amorous female centaur and a mermaid as he sets out on his strange mission.

Yet Nathan Brazil’s own metamorphosis is more terrifying than any of the others – and with the gradual return of his memory comes the secret of the Well World.

Curtis MscKinnon is an intemperate, naïve fool. Sure of his invulnerability as an American expatriate, he comes to Borneo to play at being disreputable. His illusions and charm make him a dangerous man: soon enough, he is in trouble and forced to hide in the jungles of Kalimantan.

He discovers a drug once used to the Punan Dayak, a lost race remembered as ‘the dream wanderers’. Seribu aso does not, however, alter the perceptions of only the user. It changes the concrete reality of the land itself. MacKinnon has awoken the spirits of Kalimantan, the guardians of an unspoilt land. And he has no idea how powerful they are…

With its echoes of Altered States and Heart of Darkness, Kalimantan has all the enthralling dark magic and superb story-telling that have made Lucius Shepard one of the most acclaimed fantasists today.

A runaway planet hurtles toward the earth. As it draws near, massive tidal waves, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions wrack our planet, devastating continents, drowning cities, and wiping out millions. In central North America a team of scientists race to build a spacecraft powerful enough to escaped the doomed earth. Their greatest threat, they soon discover, comes not from the skies but from other humans.

The end draws nigh….The year is 2053, and Earth has barely recovered from the Alpha Centauri supernova that destroyed much of the planet’s infrastructure. Now the supernova’s residual effect – a storm of high-energy particles – is racing toward Earth, and an international effort has been launched out of the Sky City space colony to save the planet. But the controversial plan – to build a giant protective shield for Earth – is falling dangerously behind schedule. A series of unexplained murders has disrupted the Sky City workforce, so much so that a brilliant but monstrous criminal has been enlisted to track down the Sky City killer.Then comes more startling news. Evidence indicates that the original supernova was caused deliberately, and that the lethal particle storm will arrive sooner than anyone expected. But who – or what – tried to destroy the Earth? And will the answer come in time to save it from its final apocalypse?

The Solar System is finally recovering from the Great War – a war that devastated the planets and nearly wiped out the human race – and the population of the outer moons, orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, is growing.

On one of those moons, Alex Ligon, scion of a great interplanetary trading family has developed a wonderfully accurate new population model and cannot wait until the newly reconstituted “Seine”, the interlinked network of computers that spans the planets and moons and asteroids, comes back online. But when it does, and he extends his perfect model a century into the future, it predicts the complete destruction of the human race.

On another moon, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence goes on, undaunted by generations of failure. And to her amazement, Millie Wu, a young genius newly recruited to the project, has found a signal… a signal that is coming from outside the solar system.

And in his new retreat on a minor moon of Saturn, the cranky genius Rustum Battachariya is still collecting weapons from the Great War. He thinks he may have stumbled on an unexpected new one…but he’ll need to disarm it before it destroys the Sun.

Set more than four thousand years in the future, Summertide introduces a galaxy widely populated by humans and a variety of intelligent aliens, all of whom live in the shadow of the vanished race known only as the Builders. Nothing is known about the Builders, but the gigantic artifacts they have left behind – many of them still hardly understood – dominate the areas of space in which they are found. One such is the double-planet system of Opal and Quake – the former covered in water, the latter in desert – connected by a Builder device called the Umbilical. It is to this system that a variety of humans and aliens come, ostensibly to witness Summertide – the annual tidal wave which sweeps across Opal.

‘Spaceships in their thousands, and they’re attacking us! They’ve come from somewhere toward our galaxy – have come out of intergalactic space itself to attack our universe!’

The Interstellar Patrol, that fabulous fleet manned by all the assorted races of our galaxy, faced its greatest struggle when that alarm came through. For this was an attack from OUTSIDE THE UNIVERSE, a vast migration from another galaxy, and it had to be stopped if a thousand worlds were to survive!

This terrific classic space novel on the grandest scale involves three giant galaxies in an all-out conflict.

The Humanx Commonwealth: Book Eight.

The mission to planet Quofum to investigate unknown flora and fauna is supposed to be a quickie for Captain Boylan and his crew.

The first surprise is that Quofum, which seems to regularly slip in and out of existence, is actually there when they arrive. The second surprise is Quofum’s wild biodiversity: the planet is not logical, ordered or rational. But the real shock comes when the crew members not only find a killer in their midst but discover that their spaceship is missing – along with all means of communication.

Of course, the marooned team-mates know nothing about the Great Evil racing toward the galaxy, or about Flinx, the only person with half a chance to stop it. Nor do they know that Quofum could play a crucial role in defeating the all devouring monster from beyond.

There lived on Mars, 500,000 years ago, a race so intelligent, so superior to ours, that they knew the secret of everlasting life. They chose instead-to have one man come back to life exactly 500,000 years after his death!

His reappearance in the Galaxy World was enough to set planet against planet, ideology against ideology, man against man, and life against death.

Imagine a living specimen of a multimillion-year-old hominid species, Homo habilis, encountering the contemporary world.

Told in the first-person narrative of Paul Loyd, divorced owner of a small town restaurant, Ancient of Days tells the story of a habiline man found wandering in a Georgia pecan orchard, a living descendant of a habiline tribe, brought from Africa via Haiti as a slave. Paul’s ex-wife, RuthClaire, takes in the living fossil, appropriately naming him Adam, and as an artist she discovers Adam’s mute but vibrant artistic sensibility, falls in love with him, and marries him – much to Paul’s confusion and dismay.

And then the story begins to widen out onto a broader canvas, as Adam first faces persecution by small town Georgia Klansmen, then, surviving that, moves with RuthClaire to Atlanta and encounters the whole spectrum of American culture, from art critics and media spectacles to evangelists and punk clubs.

Throughout the peregrinations and travails of Adam, however, runs a rich and developing strain of self-conscious spiritual, intellectual, and artistic growth, interwoven with Adam’s genuine anguish over the problematic nature of his true humanity.

In the end, the central characters come together on the Haitian island of Montarez in the aftermath of crisis, and in a moment of illumination and revelation meet the mysterious and extraordinary origins of Adam and his race in human prehistory.

Heinrich Gimpel is a respected officer with the Oberkommando Wehrmachts office in Berlin. His wife is a common hausfrau, raising his three precious daughters the same way he was raised – to be loyal, unquestioning citizens of the Third Reich, obedient to the will of the Führer.

But Heinrich Gimpel has a secret. He is not, in fact, a member of the Master Race. He has been living a lie to protect his true identity as a Jew – and he’s not alone. Throughout Berlin, Jews survive in secrecy…doing their jobs, caring for their families, maintaining the facade of perfect Aryans, and praying they will not be discovered.

But a change is coming. And soon they will be forced to choose between safety and freedom…