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Their quest was to find the Elders. But hellhounds, witchcraft and harpies barred their way. From the theft of a manuscript in a fusty library an amazing tale develops. From a young man’s obstinate questions emerges an answer of stupendous import. The quest for an elder civilisation becomes a terrifying ordeal. Enchanted Pilgrimage is like no other fantasy novel – a stunning adventure set in an alternative universe where myths still walk the earth.

Thirteen fantastical tales, including What Time Do You Call This? – a wildly ironic story about a bank robber who shuttles to an alternate universe and runs into himself. Communication – a modest plan by a shaman spiritualist gets out of hand when the dead begin to contact him. And Isles Where Good Men Lie – a space caravan of scale-armoured, bacteria-laden immigrants begins to make landings on Earth every twenty-two hours.. and is likely to do so for the next twelve centuries.

Thrown into the alternate universe of 14th century England, 20th century mathematician Jim Eckert and his wife Angie have become Sir James, Baron de Bois de Malencontri, and Lady Angela. A bit of a shock, but they’d coped with it. In fact they were dealing with their new life’s hazards and magical manifestations just fine. Until Jim is suddenly transformed into a dragon. None too pleased about this latest turn of events, Jim turns for help to his neighbour, the magician S. Carolinus, who takes him on as an apprentice. When Prince Edward is captured by the French at the Battle of Poitiers, Jim sets out with some companions, including Aaargh the wolf, to join the English forces. He ends up as chief pawn in a battle against the Dark Powers – with extraordinary consequences.

In the second book in the Legion of Space series, Jay Kalam, Hal Samdu and Giles Habibula fight The Cometeers, an alien race of energy beings controlling a “comet” which is really a giant force field containing a swarm of planets populated by their slaves. The slave races are of flesh and blood, but none are remotely similar to humans. The Cometeers cannot be destroyed by AKKA, as they are incorporeal from the Universe’s point of view and exist for the most part in an alternate reality. The ruling Cometeers feed on their slaves and literally absorb their souls, leaving disgusting, dying hulks in their wake. It is said that they do so, as they were once fleshly entities themselves of various species. Hence, the ruling Cometeers keep other intelligent beings as slaves and “cattle.” They fear AKKA, though, as it can erase all their possessions.

Orbitsville is the scene of two of Bob Shaw’s most successful novels and is possibly the most gigantic artefact ever dreamed up by an SF writer – a vast hollow world completely enclosing its sun, habitable across its entire inner surface. At the end of ORBITSVILLE DEPARTURE the whole world was shifted to an alternative universe. In a conclusion which is both stunning and moving, ORBITSVILLE JUDGEMENT tells what happens next…

I’m Horowitz. Private eye. I work of G.O.D., Inc. – the company that rules the Labyrinth between infinite alternate Earths. Only now I’ve got new clients – vengeful rebels out to wreck the Labyrinth. But their Big Plan’s on hold: one of the inner circle’s dead, leaving eight conspirator/ prime suspends on eight private worlds.

And finding the killer’s the least of my problems. The rebels play for high stakes – and I know too much to live. If I succeed, they’ll kill me. If I stall, they’ll blow up a planet – ours. If I escape, the Company will kill me. If I stop the rebel scheme, my wife and child will be turned into mindless drug-sex slaves.

But if I don’t stop them, they’ll unleash a force that might well cremate Earths. All Earths. In all universes. Throughout all creation…

Abyss Anyone?

Enter Kate Wilhelm’s realm of extrasensory perception, alternate universes, alien monsters, and something else, something much more strange…the abyss that lurks near each of us, ready to destroy us…or set us free.

Three unique empires threatened by the discovery of alternate life…

The Exchange are consuming the universe’s resources through the powers of their cybernetic leaders.

The Mycohlians are parasitic beings who, like a virus, can invade and take over other life forms.

The Mizlaplan are a brilliant, long-lived race who will use any means possible to spread the word of the Cosmic All.

These three empires, maintaining a delicate balance of power, have very little in common – except a strange, recurring legend of a horned demon. Now, a shocking event will change their lives forever: the discovery of two horned creatures, seemingly lifeless and perfectly preserved…

Asmodeus Mogart was not a bad fellow, as demons go. Having gotten in trouble back in the home office, he had been assigned to duty on Earth. There he toiled, doing the kinds of things demons do and turning into something of a drunk.

Then a rogue asteroid threatened to crash into Earth and destroy all life on the planet – demons included! There had to be a better way.

Mac Walters and Jill McCullough, holding a private wake for their world in a Reno bar, were more than startled when a strange-looking little drunk told them they could save the world. All they had to do was enter five alternate universes and steal a demon-guarded jewel in each. Clearly, the man was crazy.

But they had nothing better to do than go along with the gag. Then they each found themselves, naked and alone, on a hostile alien world!

It was the last planet left for men to conquer – a planet rich in priceless urillium ore, yet no man laid a finger on this wealth that was for the taking.

For the planet Vendor could not be conquered. Space-men tried time and time again, but always the Voices drove them mad and destroyed them. Some intangible power kept men away from that taunting prize – until a scientist on Deneb IV perfected a blanketing device to protect his shop through the barrier. It took him twenty years to do it and every penny he possessed, but at last his voyage to Vendor began.

It was the voyage of a gambler who knew that only two alternatives faced him…illimitable wealth and glory, or failure and death.

But the journey to Vendor brought hazards that neither he nor his crew had foreseen, and before its conclusion a force was unwittingly released that could have swept life from the Universe – the indestructible and horrifying force of THE METAL EATER.

Norman Spinrad’s 1972 alternate history, gives us both a metafictional what-if novel and a cutting satire of one of the 20th century’s most evil regimes . . .

In 1919, a young Austrian artist by the name of Adolf Hitler immigrated to the United States to become an illustrator for the pulp magazines and, eventually, a Hugo Award-winning SF author.

This volume contains his greatest work, Lord of the Swastika: an epic post-apocalyptic tale of genetic ‘trueman’ Feric Jagger and his quest to purify the bloodline of humanity by ruthlessly slaughtering races of the genetically impure – a quest Norman Spinrad expertly skewers through ironic imagery and over-the-top rhetoric.

Spinrad hoped to expose some unpalatable truths about much of SF and Fantasy literature and its uncomfortable relationship with fascist ideologies – an aim that was not always apparent to neo-fascist readers. In order to make his aims clear to the hard-of-understanding, Spinrad added an imaginary critical analysis by a fictional literary scholar, Homer Whipple, of New York University.

Rim ghosts are real! Intruders from alternate universes appearing where the fabric of space is thin. Sonya and John Grimes find themselves in an alternate universe.

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!

“When Kinsolving’s Planet crosses your path, beware!”

Commodore John Grimes would have done well to heed this warning. But the evil magic of Kinsolving draws him on, pulling him on a journey through the universes. Is Grimes a swiftly facing literary ghost, doomed to disappearance for the inadvertent theft of a meerschaum pipe? Or, is he a flesh and blood Commodore, sailing the spaceways from world to world, enjoying dangerous voyages to momentary safe ports?

It does not matter what role is the “true” John Grimes for none can protect him from the grasp of Kinsolving’s Planet, an abandoned colony which reaches out for man, for the target, John Grimes, who is inexorably sucked toward his final destiny …

Earth zero to Earth fifteen – which was the real one?

What the inhabitants of Greater America didn’t realize was that theirs was the only inhabited landmass, apart from one island in the Philippines. They still talked about foreign countries, though they would forget little by little, but the countries were only in their imaginations, mysterious and romantic places where nobody actually went..

That was the way it was on E-3, one of the fifteen alternate Earths that had been discovered through the subspace experiments.

Professor Faustaff knew that these alternate earths were somehow recent creations, and that they were under attack from the strange eroding raids of the mysterious bands known as the D-Squads. But there were tens of millions of people on those Earths who were entitled to life and protection-and unless Faustaff and his men could crack the mystery of these worlds’ creation and the more urgent problem of their impending destruction, it would mean not only the end of these parallel planets, but just possibly the blanking out of all civilization in the universe.

THE TALES OF HENGHIS HAPTHORN

Henghis Hapthorn is the foremost penetrator of mysteries and uncoverer of secrets in a decadent, far-future Old Earth, one age before Jack Vance’s Dying Earth. A superb rationalist, he has long disdained the notion that the universe has an alternative organizing principle: magic. But now a new age is dawning, overturning the very foundations of Hapthorn’s existence, and he must struggle to survive in a world where all the rules are changing.

In MAJESTRUM, Hapthorn is on the trail of an unknown killer who collects body parts from his victims. The search leads him off-planet, into the Ten Thousand Worlds of The Spray, then turns in an unexpected direction as the freelance discriminator learns that an ancient and evil power is plotting to reassert its dominion over Old Earth.

Praise for Matthew Hughes:

“Matthew Hughes does Jack Vance better than anyone except Jack himself” – George R.R. Martin
“Heir apparent to Jack Vance” – Booklist
“Hughes’s boldness is admirable”- New York Review of Science Fiction
“Hughes effortlessly renders fantastic worlds and beings believable”- Publishers Weekly
“A towering talent”- Robert J. Sawyer
“A treasure” – David Gerrold

THE TALES OF HENGHIS HAPTHORN

Henghis Hapthorn is the foremost penetrator of mysteries and uncoverer of secrets in a decadent, far-future Old Earth, one age before Jack Vance’s Dying Earth. A superb rationalist, he has long disdained the notion that the universe has an alternative organizing principle: magic. But now a new age is dawning, overturning the very foundations of Hapthorn’s existence, and he must struggle to survive in a world where all the rules are changing.

HESPIRA

Hapthorn decides to leave Old Earth, seeking to solve the mystery of Hespira, an ungainly off-world woman who has lost her memory. The investigation takes him down The Spray to the rank-obsessed world of Ikkibal and the rustic Shannery, where he unravels Hespira’s role in a deadly feud between aristocrats. But behind the scenes an unseen antagonist is plotting the discriminator’s destruction.

Praise for Matthew Hughes:

“Matthew Hughes does Jack Vance better than anyone except Jack himself” – George R.R. Martin
“Heir apparent to Jack Vance” – Booklist
“Hughes’s boldness is admirable”- New York Review of Science Fiction
“Hughes effortlessly renders fantastic worlds and beings believable”- Publishers Weekly
“A towering talent”- Robert J. Sawyer
“A treasure” – David Gerrold

Gods’ Magic, Mortal’s Doom… In a land where magic is real, where elves and dragons menace the unwary, and where the Norse gods wage a deadly campaign, using mortals as their favourite pawns, Loki, god of deception, and Freyr, god of war, are locked in a battle that could tip the universal balance toward order or eternal chaos. Searching the alternate timeways, Freyr has reached out to snatch Al Larson, twentieth-century American soldier, from the midst of a fire-fight in Vietnam, flinging him through time and space into the body of an elvish warrior to stand against Loki and his sorcerous ally, Bramin. Torn from a world where bullets and grenades are the weapons of choice, and locked into an elvish body on a world where sword and spell are the means of battle, Al must adapt swiftly – or die. For the gods have marked him as their own private battleground, and Al’s only chance rests in completing the quest Freyr has set him, a quest that will lead him to the very gates of Hel, where he must save a god – or destroy one!

Early in the 21st century, after the Great Recession, poet and young mother Maggie Roche is harassed by a lovely woman, Sriyanie, and a famous neuroscientist, David Elfield. She doesn’t know it yet, but she is about to become history’s first time traveler. When agents from the far future attempt to kill her, in baffled fury she slingshots herself into the 7th millennium. Instantly she’s on the run from the Ull Lords and their virtual reality devotees. These superbeings are cyborged humans constructed to live forever, with the ambition to rule the universe.

Maggie is having none of this. Encountering an earlier version of Sriyanie, her fated future role in the formation of the multiverse falls upon her shoulder like a thunderous lightningbolt. A Being at the end of time she calls the Something wages endless war with its foes, the Ull Lords. Torn from her beloved child and her own time, Maggie must choose whether to accept this alienating path into an alternative cosmic history fit for a poet and a free woman.

Antony Swithin (1935-2002) William Antony Swithin (“Bill”) Sarjeant (1935-2002) was born in Sheffield, England. An only child and blessed with a vivid imaginative life nourished not only by science but by the fiction of writers like Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and T.H. White, he became a professor of geology and taught at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada for some thirty years, until his death. Besides being a renowned paleontologist and historian of geology, he was also a naturalist, novelist, bibliophile, local historian, folksinger, and Sherlockian scholar- in other words, a brilliant Renaissance man, a polymath of rare and astonishing versatility. One of his grand projects was The Perilous Quest for Lyonesse, an ambitious 12-novel cycle set in the alternative world of Rockall, an island continent that he construed as the legendary Atlantis, albeit as a place existing in another dimension. Situated northwest of the British Isles in the Atlantic Ocean and named after a tiny islet only 20 metres in size, it had sparked his fertile imagination as a child and held an enduring fascination for him. “Rockall,” he once remarked, “is for me a lifetime quest and a continuing, very beguiling dream which I delight in sharing with my readers.” The first four books of Sarjeant’s series were published under his pen-name, Antony Swithin, in the 1990s, but then further progress on the series was forestalled by his untimely death. Sarjeant’s richly conceived project has been resurrected under the editorship of Canadian novelist and independent scholar, Mark Sebanc.

John Whitbourn (1958- ) John Whitbourn is an archaeology graduate and has been a published author since 1987. His first book, A Dangerous Energy, won the BBC/Victor Gollancz Fantasy Novel Prize in 1991. Whitbourn’s novels and short stories tend to focus on alternative histories set in a ‘Catholic’ universe. Key characteristics of his works are wry humour, the reality of magic and a sustained attempt to reflect on the interaction between religion and politics on a personal and social scale.

Harry Turtledove (1949 – ) Harry Turtledove was born in Los Angeles in 1949, and has a PhD in Byzantine history. He has taught ancient and medieval history at a number of universities including UCLA, and has published a translation of a ninth-century Byzantine chronicle, as well as several scholarly articles. A full-time science fiction writer since 1991, he is best known for his rigorously researched alternative history, such as the classic The Guns of the South, in which the Confederacy wins the American Civil War. Harry Turtledove is married to novelist Laura Frankos, and lives in Los Angeles.

The Enchanted Pilgrimage

Tomorrow Lies in Ambush

The Dragon Knight

The Cometeers

Orbitsville Judgement

The Maze in the Mirror

Abyss: Two Novellas

The Demons at Rainbow Bridge

And the Devil Will Drag You Under

The Metal Eater

The Iron Dream

Into the Alternate Universe

The Broken Cycle

Alternate Orbits

The Wrecks of Time

Majestrum

Hespira

Godslayer

The Judas Mandala

Antony Swithin

John Whitbourn

Harry Turtledove

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