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“If it pleased Ruethen of the Long Hand to give a feast and ball at the Crystal Moon for his enemies. He knew they must come. Pride of race had slipped from Terra, while the need to appear well-bred and sophisticated had waxed correspondingly. The fact that spaceships prowled and fought, fifty light-years beyond Antares, made it all the more impossible a gaucherie to refuse an invitation from the Mersian representative. Besides, one could feel delightfully wicked and ever so delicately in danger.”

It is the common fate of empires to grow old and jaded: Rome, Byzantium, Britain, America, and so on to the Empire of Terra itself, each has near the end succumbed to the same weary “sophistication” that allows a warlord of Merseia to make a mock of a race whose star-conquering ancestors found the Merseians a race of pre-technic barbarians huddled in stone piles – and saved them from extinction. Flandry himself has come to understand that there is no more point to all his victories than that a few trillion of his fellow creatures may live out their lives before the coming of the Long Night of galactic barbarism. That he will not have shortened that coming Dark Age one bit – only postponed it. That the barbarians always win in the end, and are always followed by a new round of civilisation.

“Destiny awaits the world of Metelaze. Mighty will be our future. To us will come the races of the galaxy. To us will come the wealth of a universe.

“Too long have we rested beneath the Terran heel. Very soon now we shall strike off the chains of our oppressors. Metelaze shall be free!”

This sort of propaganda was always common among the demagogues of backward planets that had received help from Terra. But Metelaze was different. For there the promise held out was that secrets of the ancient pre-galactic science were becoming available, that an offer was being made that “could not be refused.”

To Cap Kennedy fell the task of finding out. Were there really unknown scientific marvels available on Metelaze? Who was behind these offers of total power and absolute wealth? What, in fact, was the monster of Metelaze?

And how could such a monster out of time and space be stopped?

For Mark Carodyne, all of life was a gamble. For money, for sport, for knowledge, for danger. That’s why he had come to Krait for the skimming races he knew would make him rich. Or broke.

Or dead.

Krait. It was dominated by the pulsing quivering kaleidoscopic Omphalos that filled the sky above. An unmeasurable mass that was said to have the power to swallow whole planets – even galaxies. Indeed, seven ships had been sent to explore its mysteries and none had returned.

Now there were those who believed that Krait was about to come into its path. And Mark Carodyne had agreed to gamble his life to obtain the scientific data that might save the planet from destruction. One man. In a single ship. Skimming the edge of the unknown . . .

The year is 2016, and President Kennedy is being murdered – again and again and again.

The director has come to the charred ruins of New York to re-enact a mad dream from the past – the assassination of President Kennedy. As actors, he has the primitive race who inhabit the city. With them and his glamorous, dark haired lover, he rehearses everything – the motorcade, the shots, the panic.

But at the last moment it all goes wrong. When the flower-filled limousine rounds the bend, the passenger is not Kennedy – but the Director himself.

Shots ring out in a wild explosion of roses.

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)

March, 2015. Nasa’s first manned voyage to Mars is about to launch. But disaster strikes – the rocket explodes, killing the entire crew, and the US government abandons the project. What they come up with in its place will change the nature of space exploration together. Businessman John Axelrod and his consortium have every intention of winning the $30 billion Mars Prize for the first successful mission to the red planet. He knows that it will involve far higher risks than the one NASA had planned. But he has no choice. He has to win.

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.

Behind Garamond comes Earth’s space fleet…

Winner of the BSFA Award for best novel, 1975

The Pnume were an ancient race of the planet Tschai, living underground in a vast network of caverns with their human slave-species, the Pnumekin: The Pnume were the historians of Tschai, collecting its past with ruthless and scholarly dedication. Surface-dwellers never saw the Pnume – if they were lucky. Adam Reith was not so fortunate. The Pnume had heard rumors of a strange man, claiming to have come from the planet Earth, and they wanted him for Foreverness, the museum of Tschai life. Adam Reith was about to become an alien exhibit.

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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?

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.

Orthe – half-civilized, half-barbaric, home to human-like beings who live and die by the code of the sword. Earth envoy Lynne Christie has been sent here to establish contact and to determine whether this is a world worth developing. But first Christie must come to understand that human-like is not and never can be human, and that not even Orthe’s leaders can stop the spread of rumors about her, dark whisperings that could cost Christie her life.And on a goodwill tour to the outlying provinces, these evil rumors turn to deadly accusations. Christie is no offworlder, Church officials charge: she is a treacherous and cunning descendant of Orthe’s legendary Golden Witchbreed – the cruel, ruthless race that once enslaved the whole planet. Suddenly, Christie finds herself a hunted fugitive on an alien world, where friend and foe alike may prove her executioners. And her only chance of survival lies in saving Orthe from a menace older than time…

The humanoids, an ultra-mechanical race created by man, have pursued the last remnants of mankind to a remote galactic outpost. One man, a member of the planet’s ruling class, comes across a secret force that could be the only hope of defeating the machines.

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.

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…

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.

When Tabitha stole the Starship Plenty, she had no idea what it would come to mean. Its alien nature began to burrow into her affections. Now the rules are changing and with them come war and treachery. Tabitha is facing a crisis and this time round, Plenty might not be the saviour.

A winner of the Arthur C. Clarke and British Science Fiction Awards, the series featuring intergalactic pilot Captain Tabitha Jute concludes with her daring flight into a dying star system to avert a plot against the human race.

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?