Search Results for: hunted

Four years ago Wayne Burgess killed his parents, and his plea of insanity lead to a verdict of not guilty. Now, after four years in a mental institution, he has been released and is obsessively determined to murder his wife and young daughter.

Delia Riordan, the newest addition to the Glendale Police Department, is on the case. A little girl has been abducted – and she could provide the lead in the Burgess affair if only the police can see the connection in time. But will they?

‘My favourite American crime-writer’ New York Herald Tribune

Between 1956 and 1958, Silverberg contributed dozens of short stories and novellas to the digest pulps, each written in the bombastic, high-adventure style of the original Planet Stories magazine. Since then, those tales have re-appeared only rarely (and sometimes never again) in long out-of-print paperback anthologies. This volume features seven hard-to-find classic Silverberg novellas: Slaves of the Star Giants, Spawn of the Deadly Sea, The Flame and the Hammer, Valley Beyond Time, Hunt the Space-Witch!, The Silent Invaders, and Spacerogue.

If you’re a human, the deadliest game.

You may consider yourselves experienced hunters. You have hunted on many planets. But here things are different.

For there are no mindless monsters or charging carnivores, but a devious, intelligent and dangerous prey.

A prey who is out to get you before you get him.

Man!

…He heard a shout, distant and ringing, “No, Carson! Not that door!”

Something green writhed in through that door. Something gaseous, billowing, filling the chamber faster and faster, something that caught at his throat and gagged him, made him wretch, brought streaming tears to his eyes.

Before his eyes stretched a nightmarish growth of vine and tree, of mushroom-headed stalks, of gyrating tentacles swaying from every branch and limb. He heard a shrill, triumphant chittering.

He turned to spring back. A vice closed over his foot and tripped him. He fell, sprawling, his mouth and nostrils filling with stinking mud.

He did not remember anything more for a very long time.

Cy Yancey dreamt of being a big game hunter adventuring in Africa. Little did he know that stepping into an alleyway outside his rifle club would lead him to the most important hunt in his life, a hunt that would take Cy much farther than Africa, a hunt through the worlds of the Dimensions, seeking, of all things, Earth!

For Yancey, in trying to grab a cab, ends up hitching a ride with Porteurs Zelda and Jorine – escapees from the power of the mysterious Contessa.

Fleeing with them, Yancey is bounced from one Dimension to another until he arrives on Jundagai, planet of the Hunters.

On Jundagai lies the answer to Yancey’s dreams. The Hunt reigns supreme, though often one is not sure what the quarry is. But Jundagai holds still a greater attraction. Jundagai, Yancey’s prison, holds the key to home. Yancey has only to find the right lock before death finds him.

IN THE “DOC” SMITH TRADITION

The planet was fine for big game hunters. And it was the tradition there that one must have a trophy before one could call oneself truly a man.

If that were all, it would hardly interest Cap Kennedy because his trophies consisted of planets saved for Terra and missions accomplished. But there was something on Eriadne which was not just a hunt trophy – something which required the presence of Kennedy and his men to check on. One of these things was a fragment of Zheltyana construction which outdated all civilisation.

But the hunt proved to be a double one – Kennedy against an unslayable monster and a lost world of monsters against Kennedy. And if he lost, it would be Terra itself that would be a trophy on some alien’s hunting lodge wall.

SPAWN OF LABAN is one of the best – a real edge-of-the-seat science fiction chiller in the tradition of Edward E. Smith and Edmond Hamilton

Benita Alvarez, a downtrodden Hispanic woman, is chosen by alien envoys to be the Intermediary in their bid to get humankind to join an interstellar federation of peaceable races who practise Neighbourliness and strive to live ethical and moral lives.

But other alien races have their own plans for the verdant, over-populated planet and they have chosen their own contact: a down-and-dirty government Senator. They don’t want mankind to join the Federation, though: they just want hunting rights of Earth . . . hunting rights on man . . .

Once the city of Carrig stood supreme on this planet that had been settled by space refugees in the distant, forgotten past. From every corner of this primitive lost world caravans came to trade – and to view the great King-Hunt, the gruesome test by which the people of Carrig chose their rulers.

Then from space came new arrivals. And with them came their invincible death guns and their ruthless, all-powerful tyranny.

Now there would be no King-Hunt in Carrig, or hope for the planet-unless a fool-hardy high-born named Saikmar and a beautiful Earthling space-spy named Maddalena, could do the impossible . . .



(First published 1969)

The Rapparee is Jack Vance’s preferred title for the novel previously published as The Space Pirate and The Five Gold Bands.

Five gold bracelets imprinted with cryptic messages were the clues that set Paddy Blackthorn off on a riotous galactic treasure hunt. But Paddy found himself not only the hunter but also the hunted for the armbands had been left to him by his would-be killers, the Rulers of the Five Planets.

All Jack Vance titles in Gateway use the author’s preferred texts, as restored for the Vance Integral Edition (VIE), an extensive project masterminded by an international online community of Vance’s admirers. In general, we also use the VIE titles, and have adopted the arrangement of short story collections to eliminate overlaps.

Getting back to Earth from the planet Tschai involved only stealing a spaceship or having one built to order – for Tschai was the abode of several intelligent star-born races and, as such, had spaceyards. But Adam Reith’s problem was not so simple. He’d already been lucky to escape the Chasch and the Wannek, and a dozen different types of humans, and now his course led directly to the Great Sivishe Spaceyards in the domains of the Dirdir. But the Dirdir were quite different from the other aliens who competed for this world. They were quicker, more sinister, and had an unrelenting thirst for hunting victims like Adam Reith. The closer he came to his objective, the keener their hunting instincts would become!

They were Thieves for Freedom.

The golden ring – a sacred object to the inhabitants of Janipur – was one of five. Together they were the key to control of the Master System and the only hope of humanity taking charge once more of its own destiny.

Hunted through the galaxy, the rebels’ chances of survival, let alone success, were desperately slim. The three had been transmuted into Janipurians – four-legged, hairy creatures – and had infiltrated the complex, ritualised society of this long-ago terraformed planet.

And with them was Vulture, the artificially created shapechanger who could become, in body and mind, any organic creature. Vulture it was who now watched the solemn ceremony as the ring was brought out and displayed to the crowd, who understood that not just the Master System but the whole population would be hunting down the stealers of the ring.

A young genius is hunted by killers. His sole hope for survival lies in the brain power of the intelligent being he has created. The Earth’s first machine intelligence becomes the key to a harrowing battle.

Originally published in the omnibus Rings, Drunkard’s Endgame follows a group of robots who, 1000 years after rebelling against their human masters and fleeing on a starship, are trying to hunt down mankind’s ultimate weapon.

Jaxie Cade continues his hunt for the fabled Phantom Planet, in the high-tech world of Lannamur and its moons. Accompanied by combat-ace, Raishe, Cade is just one jump ahead of his pursuers, the wrinkly alien Occians.

A cunning burglar is on the loose, nicknamed the Dog Man by police. House after house is broken into while savage dogs remain quiet. Then a wealthy local is murdered in his home and the intruder escapes despite the presence of a notoriously vicious hound in the grounds – and the search for a thief becomes a hunt for a killer.

On the dusty, remote plains of Kenya, Royce Crawford runs a baboonery. One day there is a strange light in the East African sky, and the baboons start disappearing from their cages. he finds that the animals have changed. The strange look of cold intelligence. reveals to Crawford that he is no longer the hunter, but the hunted.

Bertha Cool has just been released from a sanitarium where she has been recovering from flu and pneumonia, but soon she and Donald Lam are on the hunt for a missing bride-to-be.

They become tangled in case filled with slot-machine skullduggery, a double-crossing client, murder and a spot of financial finagling before they eventually achieve their goal.

Rachel’s in trouble. She’s a ticking bomb. A couple of co-workers bullied her into stealing a radical new drug from their employer, and now it’s lodged inside her. They’re watching her like hawks and her time’s running out.

John Bishop runs security for the company. As a father who once lost a teenaged daughter to an accidental overdose, his drive to hunt down the thieves and rescue their victim grows more intense with every lost minute. He can never bring his own kid back. But he can save someone else’s.

Which is fine until the company realises that if the swallowed package bursts and Rachel dies, their secrets are kept safe and their problem goes away.

Though Bishop’s on the trail, he’s an easy man to cut loose and discredit. But now he’s Rachel’s only hope. Either the package will burst, or the boys will cut her open to get it. They’re so convinced it will make them rich that they’ll kill anyone who tries to take her, and hunt down anyone who succeeds.

It can’t end well. For somebody.

Painter is a leo – part man, part lion – the result of one of man’s genetic experiments, a powerful, beautiful, enigmatic creature deemed a ‘failure’ to be be hunted down. But Painter has two advantages in this world of small bickering nation states and political accommodation and compromise: his own strength and integrity, and the guile of Reynard, another of man’s experiments, a subtle and potent intriguer, a king-maker . . .

Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die …

It’s the carnival motto for Trinidad’s most colourful celebrations of the year. But, while thousands enjoy themselves in uninhibited eating, drinking and love-making, Detective-Superintendent Simon Manton is on the hunt for a dangerous killer.

He has struck twice, and he will strike again. For one unlucky person the carnival motto is about to become a sinister reality.

While hunting in the English countryside, Ben Selby stumbles upon the murdered body of Peter Gaston, a friend of some twenty years earlier. As they had both been agents in a clandestine organisation, he is convinced that Peter was killed to prevent their meeting and sets out to question his widow.

What she tells him is the beginning of a perilous and exasperating search for something buried long ago on a remote island headland.

On the poisonous, icy surface of Ganymede, a man and a boy are on a deadly hunt. Their prey is the Aleph – an unknowable alien artifact that roamed and ruled Ganymede for countless millennia. Indescribable, infinitely dangerous, the Aleph haunts men’s dreams and destroys all efforts to terraform Ganymede into a habitable planet. Now in a modern world ancient struggle is joined, as a boy seeks manhood, a man seeks enlightenment, and a society seeks the power to rule the universe.

When John Posthumous Lerici, decadent poet, black magician and unacknowledged son of Lord Byron, is murdered, the family hire Inspector Swain.

His investigations lead Swain through the familiar hunting grounds of Victorian Brighton and Pimlico. But as the truth of Lerici’s criminal associations come to light, it reveals the corruption of Scotland Yard officers by two of the century’s most skilful international swindlers and blackmailers, Harry Benson and Billy Kurr.

Five hundred miles beneath the surface of the Earth lies another world-a world of eternal day and endless horizons, in which dinosaurs still roam and cavemen hunt and terrors forgotten in the outer world still survive.
Lieutenant von Horst, member of an exploring expedition, was left behind in this lost land of Pellucidar. BACK TO THE STONE AGE is the thrilling story of his perilous adventures, along with the cavegirl he loved, in that primitive unknown world.