Search Results for: floating-worlds

The Taking of AT1: Before AT1 had ground down the slipway unchristened – rightly, said seamen, for it would be a ship with no soul – it had been dubbed ‘Zombie’. That sinister name would stick and prove its accuracy.

AT1 was a robot-ship, a ship with no crew, only a tiny security force of three men & a woman. ‘Invulnerable,’ said its inventors, ‘foolproof’. But it was neither – not if one of the four security guards was an insane, ruthless killer. And if the greatest, most powerful self-contained nuclear reactor in the world fell into the hands of such a person, the whole world was in peril!

When the curiously exotic millionairess Klai Ford started telling him about ghosts in a uranium mine, Sawyer knew he’d better be ready for anything in his investigations.

But he didn’t count on being drawn into a passage between dimensions and tossed adrift in a world of islands floating in the sky, where strange brute-like creatures were attacking the cities in a vast struggle for power.

Lost in this new world, Sawyer realised that the key to everything lay in the mysterious Well of the Worlds – and that the future of the universe lay in its secret.

The Cradle was the starting point of the strange alien race that had colonised the galaxy while Man was still a cell floating in a warm primeval sea, From here must have surged the expanding tide of life that had built the enigmatic ruins, the constructions of rare and priceless materials. Beings who had left their mark for the new and curious race of Man to stare at, and to wonder at the mystery of the Cradle-the golden hoard of undreamed wealth for the first men to discover it.

To Rex Tendris and his two friends came the coordinates that could lead them to the legendary treasure. They set out on a voyage to find it-but it was a voyage into hell!

The legends of a fabled land of the lost have floated for centuries around the bazaars of North Africa and the sand-surrounded oases of the vast Sahara. They tell of treasure caravans that have never returned, of weird monsters forgotten by time, of savage peoples surviving out of antiquity.
Eric Carstairs had heard these tales but until he met Professor Potter he did not really believe them. But the famous palaeontologist had the location of the entrance to the Underground World pinned down, and wanted only a man of courage to fly him there.
Carstairs and Potter took the chance – and pierced the pit to Zanthodon, a world within the world, where cavemen and cave-beasts roamed side by side with dinosaur-monsters of millions of years ago.

One star-chained evening in a Manhattan bathroom, Carl Schirmer spontaneously combusts! His body transforms into light, mysteriously snatched from his banal life by an alien intelligence 130 billion years in the future. There, all spacetime is collapsing into a cosmic black hole, the Big Crunch – and a bold, cosmic destiny awaits Carl. Rebuilt from the remnants of his light by extraterrestrials for a cryptic purpose, he awakens in time’s last world, the strangest of all – the Werld.

At the edge of infinity, Carl discovers the Foke, nomadic humans who travel among the floating islands of the Werld. The Foke teach him how to live – and love – at the end of time, and he loses his heart to his plucky guide, the beautiful Evoë. Their life together in this blissful kingdom that knows no aging or disease brings them to rapture – until Evoë falls prey to the zotl, a spidery intelligence who hunt the Foke and eat the chemical by-products of their pain. In order to save his beloved from a gruesome death, Carl must return to Earth – 130 billion years earlier – where he is shocked to discover that the Earth he’s come back to is not the one he left.

Can he meet the harsh demands of his task before the zotl find him and begin ravishing the Earth?

Author’s Note: The volumes of this series can each be read independently of the others. The feature that unifies them is their individual observations of science fiction’s sub-genre: “space opera,” which the editors David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer define as “colorful, dramatic, large-scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character and plot action, and usually set in the relatively distant future, and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone. It often deals with war, piracy, military virtues, and very large-scale action, large stakes.”

Zabul was no ordinary world. It was a private religious sanctuary – location secret, visitors unwelcome. It was a world fanatically dedicated to one belief and to one goal. The belief that mankind originated on a single world . . . the goal was to find it.

To find Earth was a goal that Earl Dumarest shared. But how much did he really have in common with the zealot Terridae, who slept in caskets decorated with the zodiacs and dreamed of soaring towers of crystal and floating cities? And what were their despotic Guardians really after?





(First published 1981)

The Humanx Commonwealth: Book Five.

He was smart. He was good. He was backed by the Commonwealth’s best equipment. So what could possibly go wrong?

‘In the midst of life…’ thought Evan Orgel.

A whole lot of life. Alien life-form upon alien life-form, crawling, floating, wriggling, darting and oozing. The entire unexplored surface of the planet Prism was unimaginably alive.

‘…we are in death.’

His death. His Mobile Hostile World suit – the very latest, state-of-the-art, off-world protection gear – had just failed. Attacked in just about the only way its proud makers hadn’t thought of.

So there he lay, a hermit crab trapped in his own armour, while the myriad alien life-forms of prism crawled, floated, wriggled, darted and oozed about him, getting ready to open him up like a tin of upmarket cat food.

Evan Orgell was full of misery.

Wolff-Jadawin, demigod in Earthman’s guise, and Lord of the Planet of Many Levels, opened his eyes to see the symbol of the Master Lord, Urizen, floating below the ceiling.

The summons of the Cruellest of the Universe-makers was direct and urgent. Jadawin’s beautiful wife had been abducted and held captive by the satanic Urizen

In this uniquely amazing adventure, contrived by Urizen, Jadawin was required to enter the many-levelled universe that had been purposely constructed for his torment and possible destruction. Only through crossing the Gates of Creation could Jadawin redeem his bride, as he ventured through world after brutal world in an attempt to outfox the Master Lord’s diabolically booby-trapped planets.

The ability to see other-dimensional rings that float in Earth’s atmosphere was a late mutation of a few space-age humans. Daryl was under the care of the institution for muters, and she had discovered that if you jumped through the right ring at the right time it would land you in another dimensional world and another shape.



Spaceling is the story of Daryl’s desperate efforts to unravel the mystery of why she was being held captive and of what was really going on in a certain alien dimension. Because she was sure it was all bad and that someday everyone would thank her for the revelation.



But instead everyone was engaged in a wild effort to hold her down, to keep her on this Earth, and to keep the world simply intact!

Out of body, out of time…

Though basically a skeptic, William Reynolds had known out-of-body experiences in the past. But never before had he floated past the boundaries of Baltimore . . . and across the borders of time. And now, with the fires of Civil War looming on the horizon, the astonished graduate student was hobnobbing with none other than the dark poet Edgar Allan Poe. But their meeting of minds was to have chilling consequences. For a desperate Confederacy planned to use them both to remold the world – and to change history…for the worse.

It is the year 2450. Humanity is scattered among the stars, which teem with intelligent life, while the home world has been destroyed by an inadvertent catastrophe two hundred years before. Thus all Earthmen are exiles, and Earth itself is only a memory.

Hydros is a world of great complexity. It has almost no landmass, only a great globe-encompassing ocean with occasional tiny islands. Its seas swarm with apparently intelligent life-forms of a hundred kinds, and one – a bipedal humanoid form – has created a kind of land for itself: floating islands, woven from sea-borne materials, buffered by elaborate barricades against the ceaseless tidal surges that circle the planet.

To Hydros have come an assortment of Earthmen. For them it’s a world of no return: having no form of outbound space transportation. This brilliantly inventive novel tells their story, as they travel across the planet’s endless ocean in search of the mysterious area from which no human has ever returned – the Face of the Waters.




(First published 1991)

A frontier world on the back end of nowhere is the sort of place people go to get lost. And some of those people have secrets worth hiding, secrets that can change the future-assuming there is one. . .

André Deschênes is a hired assassin, but he wants to be so much more. If only he can find a teacher who will forgive his murderous past-and train him to manipulate odds and control probability. It’s called the art of conjuring, and it’s André’s only route to freedom. For the world he lives on is run by the ruthless Charter Trade Company, and his floating city, Novo Haven, is little more than a company town where humans and aliens alike either work for one tyrannical family-or are destroyed by it. But beneath Novo Haven’s murky waters, within its tangled bayous, reedy banks, and back alleys, revolution is stirring. And one more death may be all it takes to shift the balance . . .

Pursued from the shadows, Simon Pilgrim fled in terror from the floating restaurant Eton Boating Song. In the bar of the Eton, he’d had the choice spot, discreetly purveying high-stakes drugs to the restaurant’s well-to-do patrons. Now he’s dead, his throat cut, and the police know that the drug syndicates are in an all-out war, with the Eton as the prize.

Police officer Naomi Anstruther is sent undercover into this turbulent world. Right away she becomes an unknowing pawn in the rival criminals’ plans and in the complex struggle between Harpur and his rival, Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles.

‘Masterly . . . there is nothing else quite like this series’ The Times

In the marvel-adventure sagas of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Otis Adelbert Kline, and John Norman, has there ever been a situation such as befell the Earthling who found his way to the world under the Green Star? For while his real body lay crippled and silent under the sun of old Earth, his mind occupied the vigorous body of a young primitive on that alien planet of mighty trees, floating cities, and unmapped limits. And in that guise he had found incredible friends, a royal love, and inhuman and superhuman enemies. But no matter what predicament he was in – and as this book starts he is alone, abandoned on an uncharted sea – his courage never flagged though the greatest of risks would confront him as the Green Star rises.

Earth, can you spare a city?

The town of Superior, Ohio, certainly was living up to its name! In what was undoubtedly the most spectacular feat of the century, it simply picked itself up one night and rose two full miles above Earth! Radio messages stated simply that Superior had seceded from Earth. But Don Cort, stranded on that rising town, was beginning to suspect that nothing was simple about Superior except its citizens. Calmly they accepted their rise in the world as being due to one of their local townspeople, a crackpot professor. But after a couple of weeks of floating around, it began to be obvious that the professor had no idea how to get them down. So then it was up to Cort: either find a way to anchor Superior, or spend the rest of his days on the smallest-and the nuttiest-planet in the galaxy!

Have a Happy Golden Straub Day!

The message floated in the sky for all to read; citizens chanted it to each other, motorists tooted it on their car horns as they drove the uncongested freeways. Earth had become a paradise, courtesy of Cordwainer Hardware International; population dwindling, war a thing of the past, free, untrammelled sex the right of all. But is paradise everything . . .?

In this vividly realised novel, S. G. Compton charts the growth of CHI and the bland, idyllic world they engineered. Too idyllic for some; for beneath the surface darker forces were at work. At their heart was Scudder Laznett; brilliant, irascible, uncompromising. Scudder had begun a little game of his own; what that game was, Pete Laznett only discovered by slow degrees.

And what he discovered was horrifying.

Xhea has no magic. Born without the power that everyone else takes for granted, Xhea is an outcast-no way to earn a living, buy food, or change the life that fate has dealt her. Yet she has a unique talent: the ability to see ghosts and the tethers that bind them to the living world, which she uses to scratch out a bare existence in the ruins beneath the City’s floating Towers.

When a rich City man comes to her with a young woman’s ghost tethered to his chest, Xhea has no idea that this ghost will change everything. The ghost, Shai, is a Radiant, a rare person who generates so much power that the Towers use it to fuel their magic, heedless of the pain such use causes. Shai’s home Tower is desperate to get the ghost back and force her into a body-any body-so that it can regain its position, while the Tower’s rivals seek the ghost to use her magic for their own ends. Caught between a multitude of enemies and desperate to save Shai, Xhea thinks herself powerless-until a strange magic wakes within her. Magic dark and slow, like rising smoke, like seeping oil. A magic whose very touch brings death.

With two extremely strong female protagonists, Radiant is a story of fighting for what you believe in and finding strength that you never thought you had.