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What happens to a man whose entire personality undergoes a sudden and profound change? Stephen Marsh is a successful management consultant, happily married and with a daughter at university. Then one day he becomes cold to his wife, is unable to relate to his daughter, is uninterested in his job and his friends. The old Stephen Marsh seems to have been replaced by an intrusive newcomer equipped with new memories and new attitudes. The deuteron-Marsh recalls a previous half-century of life as a writer who shied away from human contact, nurturing a secret which separates him from other people. Incapable of giving love or companionship, the new Marsh struggles to continue his predecessor’s lifestyle, torn between a longing for solitude and the bounds of ordinary obligation and affection.

The year is 2381. The place is Urban Monad 116 of the constellation Chippitts. The population of this one-thousand storey super-structure is 800,000+ and always growing. After two centuries of ruthless, selective breeding, the essence of life is to be blessworthy and to multiply; to afford one’s neighbours any type of sexual fulfilment and, above all, to avoid the evil of frustration.

But, within this seemingly blissful vertical world there are individuals who feel such perverse desires as a longing for privacy, a wish to descend from the heights, to walk on earth and bask in the sunshine. These rebel throwbacks to an earlier Earth are dangerous, disruptive elements. And they must be destroyed – if they do not destroy themselves first . . .

Earth’s Elite – or its outcasts?

For a selected, genetically-fitted few among the teeming millions of the twenty-first century, to become a Messenger for the Hulm Institute is to escape the prison that is life, that is earth.

A Messenger is Noble!

A Messenger is One of the Chosen.

A Messenger is a Forerunner of a Time in which Fear and Disease will Disappear Forever.

And inside a Messenger’s head is murder, impotence and despair.

For over 100 years, the machine called Colligatarch had ruled the Earth. Its predictions of the future have proved so accurate that humans accepted its recommendations as the best course of action – until a young engineer in Phoenix begins to travel without authorization, enter secret places, assume aliases, and display super-human feats of strength. Is it because he has fallen in love? Or has he instead fallen into an interplanetary plot?

Time Switch at the Zoo.

One day Martin Naumchik, reporter for Paris Soir, visited the Berlin Zoo. He was standing outside the spacious cage housing the newly-acquired Brecht Biped, Fritz, when the world seemed to lurch.

Then he was no longer outside the cage looking in, but inside looking out. He was no longer Martin Naumchik. He was Fritz, the Biped, that strange celestial animal from a world eighteen light-years away.

At the same time, Fritz, who had lived almost all his life in Hamburg Zoo, also felt the lurching motion. And found himself standing outside his cage in the body of Martin Naumchik, looking at the frantic Biped inside, who was beating with both hands on the glass.

First, you feel uncomfortably hot. But it’s no use turning up the air conditioning or reaching for a long, cool drink. Whatever you do, the temperature inside you keeps rising. And rising. Soon you’re in agony beyond your wildest nightmares as your whole body is engulfed in searing, unbearable heat. You go mad briefly with the pain. Then, with luck, you black out. If your luck holds, you’re dead soon after. Very dead. But your involuntary cremation continues. Your blood boils in your veins for a few seconds – before it bursts them. As your tortured corpse dries out from the horror-heat inside it, your skin blisters, pops, bursts – and then flares into scorching flame fueled by your own melding body-fat. Clouds of choking, greasy smoke join the searing blaze consuming what’s left of you. You have become your own funeral pyre…

Solid land inside a cloud of ‘star dust’ – where no solid land should be. And the weird voices – where are they coming from?

Forced down on a minor star galaxy, Kemlo and his friends of Satellite Belt K discover a secret of Space which gives scientists information for which they have been searching for years.

The Vampyre: A Tale is based on a fragment written by Lord Byron in 1816 during a gathering of author friends who, trapped inside due to bad weather, decided to write ghost stories. It was the first vampire story in English prose, and as such had a wide-ranging influence, almost single-handedly creating the now-popular image of the vampire as an aristocratic seducer.

Helen Capel takes the position of lady-help in a remote country house owned by the Warren family and, before long, learns that a murderer is on the loose. All four of his victims were young girls, and the last of these was strangled in a lonely house just five miles away. Helen feels safe inside the house, protected, but the maniac is closer than she fears.

‘A Luis Mendoza story means superlative suspense’ Los Angeles Times

Lieutenant Luis Mendoza works with an outstanding team at the Los Angeles Police Department. They need to be. On their hands is a case of a vanished treasure of coins; drug dealers and a clutch of law-breaking brothers.

As well as the cases, though, there’s an inside view of a police department and the varied lives of the characters who work within it.

Deep inside a palace on the edge of the world, the orphan Nepenthe pores over books in the royal library, translating their languages and learning their secrets. At sixteen, she knows little of the outside world. But when a young mage gives Nepenthe a book that has defied translation – a book written in a language of thorns – it speaks to Nepenthe’s soul, and becomes her secret obsession. As the words escape the brambles they reveal themselves – and begin to reveal Nepenthe’s destiny …

In the middle-distant future, Andrew Blake, discovered on a distant planet huddled inside a capsule, is brought back to Earth suffering from total amnesia. Over 200 years old, he thinks and acts like a man but becomes frighteningly aware of two alien beings that lurk within his body – a strange biological computer and a wolf-like animal. With the latter in control he breaks out of hospital to look for his past.

Dive into adventure in the last unknown territory on Earth – the sea. Join Robby Hoenig and a cast of characters as unusual as any ever met on a distant planet . . .

In the third Robby Hoenig adventure, Secret Under the Caribbean, the key to a baffling puzzle – and the truth about a mysterious monster – are locked inside a sunken Spanish ship . . .


Gordon R. Dickson’s Robby Hoenig adventures are timeless young adult stories in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke’s Dolphin Island.

A millionaire’s sage-green Rolls Royce has been discovered, empty, beside a graveyard, and a little later the murdered body of the millionaire is discovered inside the graveyard – above ground.

The hunt for the murderer is complicated by the behaviour of the dead man’s family, including his pretty second wife. And the members of a very different family, seemingly far less respectable, appear to be connected to this complex case.

But Inspector Martineau and the Granchester police have handled difficult cases before …

The Penheniot Experimental Research Village was a top-secret community with an elaborate defence system to keep away prying eyes. Inside the walls men rushed ahead with practical experiments to develop a means of time travel, while outside the everyday world fell victim to more and more plagues, strikes and rioting.

The world was on the brink of chaos. Could the small band of scientists and chrononauts at Penheniot Village find a safe method of escape into the future before the violence and death outside destroyed them too?

Kiarda lives in a magic-laced land where peace is guarded so fiercely that those who train as warriors are outcast . . . until the arrival of a well-trained foreign army bent on conquest and determined to use everything in their power, including mages trained in the deadliest of the six magic arts: the magic of destruction.

Kiarda should have been spirit-linked to a fox, but the cub died at the moment of their birth. Now that spirit lurks deep inside her, and at the time of her greatest need, it could prove her greatest ally . . .

An urgent message from Pellucidar, that world of primitive men and primeval jungles that lies inside the crust of the Earth, called on Tarzan of the Apes for assistance.

Tarzan, used to the dangers of darkest Africa, heeded the call to Pellucidar, where all his skill in the jungle, all his talents with beasts and primitive men, would be put to the extreme test. For in that land at the Earth’s core, under the eternal day of the Central Sun, his terrific talents were needed just to stay alive – let alone to fulfil the mission that had called him there!

Being lost in space was no new experience to John Grimes, whose career as an interstellar officer had brought him into many such dilemmas. But being lost inside a colossal alien spacecraft had no precedent.

Complicating the matter was the discovery that the very universe was not their own but an alternate and that their captor seemed to be the omnipotent force of that entire other cosmos.
As Grime’s only companion was the comely policewoman, Una Freeman, the fate that the Alien God selected for them required the creation of a Garden of Eden. But there were two serpents in this one – both of them bicycles!

Barrister Martin Ainsworth is sent to West Berlin by British Intelligence to make contact with his former lover, a suspected Communist agent, and it’s up to him to find out the truth and to spot her contacts.

As he travels through a divided Berlin, his dual role becomes emotionally tortuous, his lack of training an unforeseen hazard, and he turns more reckless than his peers had ever bargained for …

‘A more or less conventional spy story is suddenly turned inside out by a most ingenious twist’ Guardian

Ships occasionally disappeared in hyperspace, regrettable sacrifices to the luxury of faster than light travel. But now one of the lost ships has been found and the wreckage is enough to terrify even the most cold-blooded witness.

The lucky ones on the lost ship are dead. The others have been turned inside-out in gruesome parody of human beings and they are still alive. The disgraced Captain Kurt Varl is chosen to command a suicide mission to discover the cause of these disasters.

The enemy is unknown and the only way Varl can solve the mystery is to use himself as bait!

THE WIZARD KNIGHT springs from the myths, legends and literature of times past.
A teenager passes from Earth to a magical realm of seven worlds, where he is given a hero’s adult body and named Able. Though forced to act as a man, inside he is still a boy, even as he sets off to find his destined sword and become a knight.
In his quest he battles giants, meets gods, heroes and a sorceress (who repeatedly tries to seduce him), and serves the mercurial dragon king Arnthor in a was that could end everything.

THE WIZARD KNIGHT springs from the myths, legends and literature of times past.
A teenager passes from Earth to a magical realm of seven worlds, where he is given a hero’s adult body and named Able. Though forced to act as a man, inside he is still a boy, even as he sets off to find his destined sword and become a knight.
In his quest he battles giants, meets gods, heroes and a sorceress (who repeatedly tries to seduce him), and serves the mercurial dragon king Arnthor in a was that could end everything.

One Saturday, DC Brabant walks into the CID office of Granchester City Police. He has been at the football, looking for pickpockets, and has had his own wallet stolen. His boss, DCI Martineau, is amused, until Brabant reveals that his police warrant card was inside.

The missing warrant investigation soon picks up momentum: an elderly businessman goes missing, and his secretary turns out to have much wider interests, that extend to Granchester City Football Club and a knot of conflict over money, greed and love to untangle …

A houseful of paintings is stolen and the body of a finely dressed stranger is discovered at the home of art-loving drug dealer Mansel Shale. Meanwhile Detective Chief Inspector Colin Harpur and his boss, Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles, find their domain descending into bloody chaos as villain drug firms fight for dominance.

Luckily Iles has done some illicit phone-tapping and has inside information on which way the battle will go. In this fast-paced thriller, there’s no telling who will catch the next bullet.

‘Shrewd, savage, funny enough to give you an injury’ Literary Review