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It’s 2050, and LAPD Detective Terri Pastuzka has drawn the short straw with her first assignment of the new decade. Someone has executed one of the city’s countless immigrants, and no one (besides the usual besieged advocacy groups) seems to much care. Even Terri herself is already looking ahead to her next case before an unexpected development reveals there’s far more to this corpse than meets the eye.

And a lot already meets the eye. In a city immersed in augmented reality, the LAPD have their own superior network of high-tech eyewear-PanOpts, the ultimate panopticon-allowing Terri instant access to files and suspects and literal insertion into the crime scene using security footage captured from every angle the day the murder occurred. What started as a single homicide turns into a string of unsolved murders that tie together in frightening ways, leading Terri down a rabbit hole through Los Angeles’s conflicting realities-augmented and virtual, fantastically rumored and harrowingly true-towards an impossible conclusion.

Exploded View is the story of a city frozen in crisis, haunted by hardship and overwhelmed by refugees, where technology gives everyday citizens the power to digitally reshape news in real time, and where hard video evidence is impotent against the sheer, unrelenting power of belief. After all, when anyone can forge their own version of the truth, what use is any other reality?

It’s 1949, and the Cold War is heating up across the world. Operating in the shadows, the Variants – once ordinary US citizens, but now imbued with strange paranormal abilities and corralled into covert service by the government’s top secret MAJESTIC-12 program – find themselves on the front lines of an international crisis.

In Syria, Variant agents have been sent to support a coup by a pro-American army officer. In Washington, a shocking suicide has them fighting for their very freedom. And at Area 51, the operation’s headquarters, the strange interspatial phenomenon which originally granted Variants their abilities has yielded disturbing discoveries.

All the while, dangerous figures flit among the shadows, and it’s unclear whether they are threatening to expose the Variants for what they are . . . or completely destroy them. Are they working for the Soviet Union, or something far worse?

Josef Stalin is dead. In the aftermath, the Soviet Union is thrown into crisis, giving former secret police chief Laverentiy Beria exactly the opening he needs. Beria’s plan is to secretly place his country’s Variants-ordinary people mysteriously embued with strange, superhuman powers-into the very highest levels of leadership, where he can use them to stage a government coup and seize control of the USSR.

America’s response comes from its intelligence communities, including the American Variants recruited for the top-secret MAJESTIC-12 program, who are suddenly thrown into their most dangerous and important assignment yet. From the halls of the Kremlin to the battlefields of Korea, superpowered covert agents face off to determine the future of the planet-a future their very existence may ultimately threaten.

Lieutenant Commander Shaila Jain has been given the assignment of her dreams: the first manned mission to Saturn. But there’s competition and complications when she arrives aboard the survey ship Armstrong. The Chinese are vying for control of the critical moon Titan, and the moon Enceladus may harbor secrets deep under its icy crust. And back on Earth, Project DAEDALUS now seeks to defend against other dimensional incursions. But there are other players interested in opening the door between worlds . . . and they’re getting impatient.

For Thomas Weatherby, it’s been nineteen years since he was second lieutenant aboard HMS Daedalus. Now captain of the seventy-four-gun Fortitude, Weatherby helps destroy the French fleet at the Nile and must chase an escaped French ship from Egypt to Saturn, home of the enigmatic and increasingly unstable aliens who call themselves the Xan. Meanwhile, in Egypt, alchemist Andrew Finch has ingratiated himself with Napoleon’s forces . . . and finds the true, horrible reason why the French invaded Egypt in the first place.

The small Hebridean island of Alsaig is facing a crisis. It is famous for its only export, a particularly fine malt whisky, upon which most of the islanders depend for their livelihood. But the distillery is threatened with a takeover by an American firm, which would not only make many of the workforce redundant but also adulterate the product.

But owner Alisdair Matheson is refusing to sell, despite threats of sabotage and an attempt on his life. The situation is complicated further by an actual murder on the island, which the locals believe to have been committed by American Mike MacDonald. Tension mounts as storms lash the island, isolating it from the outside world and locking the killer in with the islanders.

It should have been her sanctuary – until things got murderous…

‘Few authors are better than Margaret Yorke in generating a real sense of fear’ SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

‘The mistress of unease’ DAILY TELEGRAPH

Ruth Castle – alone, proud, defiant – is determined to rescue some personal happiness from the wreckage of her life. In Haverbury village, she makes friends with Marjorie and Robert Bretherton, and is soon involved in the affairs of other relatives who come to stay for Christmas.

Family conflicts emerge, and one night, turning to Ruth for support in a sudden crisis, Marjorie realises that things are not as straightforward as she thought – and that her very life is threatened …

It was not altogether surprising that Ambrose Brenthurst was found brutally murdered outside Fountain Court the night he had presided over the diner meeting of the ‘Hernshaw Thirteen Club’.

Many were the potential murderers – some of them guests at the diner. But when a second murder takes place it precipitates a crisis in which investigator Sir Clinton Driffield must penetrate a maze of conflicting evidence to spot the murderer.

It is 1936 – the year of the Abdication Crisis – and gangland capo Sonny Tarrant’s money-laundering operation is being threatened by three small-time thieves thinking big.

Would-be gangsters Sandboy, McGouran and Gillis have carried out a violent raid on the premises of furrier Pelly Pender. But Pender insists to the police that no attack took place, for he knows the trio will face a different justice in which the law plays no part. And Sandboy soon finds himself caught in a nightmare world in which Tarrant manipulates his victims with the deftness of a flick-knife.

His last hope is Yvonne Manders, once the stage-dancer ‘Lady Blue’ . . .

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

When ex-Major Ed Parker of the US Army is pushed over a cliff at Pointe du Hoc following the D-Day anniversary, a crisis is sparked off in British Intelligence. The cream of the Secret Service gather: Dr Audley, Oliver St John Latimer, Commander Cable, Dr Paul Mitchell. But none will take on the case.

Why is the investigation left to inexperienced Elizabeth Loftus? Is there any truth in the old rumour that Parker was a KGB double agent?

Elizabeth must ponder these and many other questions as she prises the lid off a can of worms forty years old – and suspicion begins to fall on her most respected colleagues.

THE COMING OF THE BLIGHT
It seemed as though the world was eroding right under everyone’s feet. Stories disappeared from magazines; the baron’s silver coat of arms, polished in the morning, was pitted with corrosion by afternoon; toadstools were springing up from every corner. And these were but the first signs of the coming plague, a cancerous orgy of patternless vitality seeking to engulf the world…

TO STEM THE TIDE
Carefree Johnny Curlon, indelicately plucked from his fishing boat one evening, is bluntly informed by high powers that he is a man destined for a role in great affairs: only his unique powers can prevent the coming probability crisis that threatens to turn the world into bubbling chaos…

Change the Sky is a collection in which you will find:

– A man who has spent his life searching for the world of his dreams and got exactly what he wanted
– A women who found the people around her so boring she changed them
– A righteous minister who preached an old-fashioned Christmas and started an energy crisis – 2000 years in the future

The golden planet of Astrobe, made in the image of Utopia, now faced a crisis which could destroy it forever; and yet, no one could understand it: In a world where wealth & comfort were free to everyone, why did so many desert the golden cities for the slums of Cathead and the Barrio? Why did they turn away from the Astrobe dream and seek lives of bone-crushing work, squalor and disease?

The rulers of Astrobe didn’t know, so they sought in humankind’s past for a leader who could give them the answers. They brought to life the one man out of history who would most want to destroy Astrobe!

Earth is faced with annihilation by the Purple Dawn – effect of the cosmic fall-out from the swirling planet-in-the-making Polarthanus.

Kemlo and his Space Scouts are out in the void, towing a crippled space ship with their scooters, when suddenly the crisis is upon them. The space-born boys have to make a decision: if they take drastic action will it avert the danger – or will they blow up Earth, the Satellite Belts and themselves?

When Commander Herries of the Space Line began to sell the water of Mars as a ‘potion’ for lengthening life he had no idea that he was going to create the world’s greatest thirst and produce havoc among the two social grades of Earth – the Inelligentsia and the Normals. But produce it he did.

Among the confusion thus produced one man thinks clearly for his own ends – Vance Unthra, the leading scientist of the world – and he sees in the crisis which has hit Earth a way to be rid of all those who do not measure up to what he thinks as an intellectual standard. By his orders two synthetic worlds are created – Alpha and Omega – and to these are ruthlessly evacuated all the victims of the Martian water, there to rebuild there shattered fortunes and never cross the ‘Dark Boundaries’ which exist between those worlds and Earth.

Despite his careful planning, however, Unthra makes one mistake. In destroying the power of the Martian water over the evacuated thousands he miscalculates the strength of cosmic radiation on Omega with the result that the leader – the Controllix – of this world, Sylvia Grantham, becomes a far greater power in the grand scheme of things than her former lover, Dexter Carfax. Through the machinations of the wily Unthra open hostility breaks out between Dexter Carfax and the girl, and eventually their worlds are destroyed through the influence of a deadly chain reaction ‘disease’ from the Great Red Spot of Jupoter.

Both of them, however, through the various experiences they undergo, hold to one objective – to be avenged on Vance Unthra for his viciousness.

David Fox, fast approaching his fortieth birthday, is in the throes of a mid-life crisis. That is until he finds a message in a bottle whilst walking on the beach. The message, written in 1953, is from a boy called John Marshall who claims his father his trying to kill him. And with a new, invigorating purpose to his life David is compelled to find out what happened all those years ago.

The truth is more bizarre and horrific than he could ever have imagined. At the heart of his investigations is a secret society called the Flux and each of its members possesses unique and formidable supernatural powers. And they want the bottle…

On an ecologically seared Earth, James Konteau is a veteran krono, a professional time traveler. His job is to ease the overpopulation crisis by establishing new colonies in Earth’s prehistory, long before human beings evolved. But his job has lost all meaning, for Konteau is a lone and troubled man haunted by his own past.

Now, suddenly, his future is also in turmoil: a timequake has reportedly ripped through distant eons, destroying one of Konteau’s colonies. Framed for the disaster, Konteau is hunted by authorities, defying all the powers of technology and politics to escape back through the misty ages on a complex mission of death, justice, love – and incredible destiny . . .

CHART (Cartography Headquarters, Astro Research Trust) is Earth’s galactic takeover bid. Knowledge is power, and the human race means to go on using painfully acquired knowledge of other worlds to remain top dog in the galaxy. But pioneers are not normal men.

Blake is not a normal man; and Rachel, a lovely redhead, is not a lovely sexy redhead.

In timeshift the CHART men drift off into a fantasy world; except Blake, who is condemned to repeat over and over again, agonisingly, the great trauma of his life. He doesn’t know it, but this serves to prepare him for the second great crisis of his life – the weird, terrifying, sickening drama of his meeting with the Men of Crock.

Benny Rice is not what he seems to be. His tests for rebirth reveal all the necessary traits – compassion, health, energy, potential for creativity – but with the intelligence of a moron, which disqualifies him. But Benny’s test scores must be re-examined in a crisis that endangers the existence of rebirth – and threatens more than Benny’s life!

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.

Why is the government deliberately destroying all trace of Man’s past?

Why are the laws of gravity and momentum strangely altered?

Why has the world’s population continually increased without the predicted eco-crisis taking place?

Why is there an international conspiracy to conceal the future of the human race?

These are just some of the reality-shattering questions that face Manalone, a brilliant computer scientist, when he tries to find out exactly what has happened to humanity. Manalone, outcast from society, must fight the entire machinery of a ruthless police state to discover the truth. And the truth is an awful, chilling one, that sounds only too real in today’s world.

Pip and Flinx: Book Ten.

Never have the cares of the universe lain so heavily on Flinx’s shoulders, nor the forces against him seemed so invincible. Pursued by a newly revealed sect of doomsday fanatics and hunted by factions inside and outside the Commonwealth, he is expected to single-handedly avert a looming galactic crisis (or bear responsibility for the consequences.) Flinx can be forgiven for feeling a slight touch of melancholy.

According to his ship’s Al, there’s only one solution for what ails Flinx – a vacation. But with increasing number of enemies chasing him with ever greater enthusiasm, Flinx must find a getaway shrouded in obscurity. It seems that Jast, a planet smack in the middle of nowhere, is prefect, but trouble can find Flinx anywhere. What he doesn’t know is that his vacation paradise is a danger zone of the highest magnitude. And by the time he learns the truth, it may be too late.

The Translator tells of the relationship between an exiled Russian poet and his American translator during the Cuban missile crisis, a time when a writer’s words – especially forbidden ones – could be powerful enough to change the course of history.

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.

Michael Moorcock edited and produced the magazine New Worlds from 1964 to 1973. Within its pages he encouraged the development of new kinds of popular writing out of the genre of science fiction, energetically reworking traditional themes, images and styles as a radical response to the crisis of modern fiction. The essential paradox of the new writing lay in its fascination with ‘entropy’ – the universal and irreversible decline of energy into disorder. Entropy provides the key both to the anarchic vitality of the magazine and to its neglect by critics and academics, as well as its intimate connection with other cultural experiments of the 1960s. The fiction of the New Worlds writers, who included Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard and Moorcock himself, was not concerned with the far future and outer space, but with the ambiguous and unstable conditions of the modern world. As Ballard put it: ‘The only truly alien planet is Earth.’

The Entropy Exhibition is the first critical assessment of the literary movement known as ‘New Wave’ science fiction. It examines the history of the magazine and its background in the popular imagination of the 1960s, traces the strange history of sex in science fiction and analyses development in stylistic theory and practice. Detailed attention is given to each of the three principal contributors to New Worlds – Aldiss, Ballard and Moorcock. Moorcock himself is most commonly judged by his commercial fantasy novels instead of by the magazine he supported with them, but here the balance is at last redressed: New Worlds emerges as nothing less than a focus and a metaphor for many of the transformations of English and American literature in the past two decades.