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The dying alien from the ship that crashed onto Rhys gave Comet Jo a jewel, and begged him to take it to the heart of the Galactic Empire. And, seeing no reason to miss an adventure, Comet Jo started out for the fabled Empire Star. But his journey was to have far-reaching consequences – consequences that could disrupt all the known laws of Time and Space . . .

The Empire of Earth, spanning more than a thousand solar systems, is threatened by a conspiracy from within. Now, with more than three-quarters of the Galaxy ready to fall into enemy hands, the Empire is forced to call on its top-secret weapon: the renowned Circus of the Galaxy featuring the d’Alembert family, a clan of circus performers with uncanny abilities. But even these super agents may not be in time to save the Empire.

The Imperial Stars is the first book in the “Family D’Alembert” series.

Flung across space and time by the sorcery of super-science, John Gordon exchanges bodies with Zarth Arn, Prince of the Mid-Galactic Empire 2000 centuries in the future!

Suddenly John is trust into a last-ditch battle between the democratic Empire World and the tyranny of the Black Cloud regime. Only one weapon – the terrifying Disruptor – can win the struggle for the Empire Forces. But it is so powerful that unless John uses it correctly it could destroy not only the enemy but the cosmos.

Could his 20th Century mind cope with the technology of 200,000 years from now?

Science has come to humanity’s rescue with two crucial discoveries – antigravity devices that enable whole cities to be lifted from the Earth to become giant spaceships, and longevity drugs that allow their inhabitants to live for thousands of years – lead to the establishment of a unique Galactic empire.

Now, the earth’s cities are able to abandon the worn-out homeworld for a new life, a new future. But what will they find as the hurtle off into the depths of space . . . ?

In his long and fabulous career as the Captain Hornblower of space, John Grimes was to experience many strange things, rising through the ranks of the Interstellar Federation – from triumph to disaster – and ultimately becoming the most famous of the Rim Runners, far out along the edge of the Milky Way.

But there was a period when Grimes fell between one cosmic empire and another, on his own, commander of a single deep-space pinnace and looking for work.

And that was when he became a god! He thought he was just doing a mailman’s job, bu the price of the postage turned out to be divinity – with a lovely nude postmistress certified for a goddess!

It is a thousand years from now.

The tenuous galactic empire humanity has cast across the skies depends for its very existence on hyperspace and the pilots who can ride its bizarre force-fields. And these pilots are gypsies. The Romany have come into their own. But there is a price: the legendary Romany Star. All the leverage the gypsies can bring to bear is used in the search for their ancestral home. Intergalactic blackmail? Of course. But also a statement of intent, romantic but implacable.

Who better to orchestrate a scam so colossal than Yakoub, once and future King of Gypsies? Sulking in luxurious exile, he has been planning his return to power and reminiscing over his extraordinary life. But when the moment of truth arrives, nothing seems to go according to (Yakoub’s) plan. All his ingenuity, every sacrifice (even his pride) may not be enough . . .

An uneasy truce is broken by the British, who refuse to believe that the might of the British Empire can be bested by their former colony. They begin building a road across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, where Mexico is at its narrowest. This will enable them to bring in colonial troops from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic to attack the United States along the undefended Gulf coast.

When the Americans attack the road, the war bogs down in futile jungle warfare. Only a brilliant plan by General Robert E. Lee enables the United States to broaden the war and attack the British forces where they least expect it – very close to home.

You might have thought that the Fiesta of the Holy Hermit in the Mexican town of Los Remedios was just another of those quaint colourful ceremonies that the Indian natives put on each year for the mystification of tourists. And perhaps for the past few hundred years it had bee nothing more than that – but this year was to be different.
For Jacob Clay, the American expatriate, had been poking into the buried secrets of that mountain community which dated back before the Aztec Empire, and he had begun to entertain a shocking suspicion. Before that fiesta was over he was due to learn the volcanic reality behind:
The Holy Hermit – a mummy that was not a mummy…
Tlaloc – a statue that was not just a thing of stone…
Huitzilopochtli – a legend that was stark realism…
And what started as a holiday turned into a nightmare on which pivoted the fates of the very stars themselves!

The Stars and Stripes trilogy is the story of the war that never was, but might so easily have happened: the war of the 1860s between the United States of America and the British Empire.

It began with an ill-considered seizure of a British ship, escalated with an ill-considered letter to Abraham Lincoln, and continued with an ill-starred invasion of the territory of the USA by an incensed British government. The first modern war – with iron-clad ships, rapid-firing guns, trenches, mass armies and massive casualties, was taking place, not between the industrial northern states and the agricultural southern ones, but between the two great English-speaking nations. Who happened also to be the two most powerful nations on the planet.

In the stunning conclusion to this series, the Irish become involved and a most surprising ending is the culmination of the ill-fated war.

A hundred thousand years from now, it was discovered that a star was approaching the world on a collision course. Its discoverer, Creohan, figured there might be time to save the world if he could arouse everyone to the danger.
But the Earth had become a strange and kaleidoscopic place in that distant era. Too many empires had risen and fallen, too many cultures had spread their shattered fragments across a planet whose very maps had long since been forgotten. People were too busy with their own private dreams to pay attention to one more new alarm.
The story Creohan’s effort to Catch a Falling Star is one of John Brunner’s most colourful science-fiction concepts.