Search Results for: legacy

After long years of struggle, the fight for acceptance and equality is over. The mutant clans have fit themselves and their extraordinary talents into the mainstream of human society. But when peculiar phenomena begin in the New Mexican desert – “miracle” cures, supernatural rescues – the issue of mutancy rises once more to the forefront of human affairs. At the center of the conflict are three strong and vastly different personalities, three men who will guide the tides of human destiny – and ultimately the tides of evolutionary destiny as well:

Joachim Metzger – Leader of the mutant clans, desperate to keep the hard-won peace and prosperity his people have finally achieved.

Julian Akimura – The brilliant therapist who banished his twin brother, Rick, in the hopes of saving humanity from his unsurpassed mutant talents.

Rick Akimura – The long-sought supermutant, the promise of whose power has been the building force of mutant society for centuries – and whose coming is nothing that anyone could have foretold.

The rift in the fabric of space was fast approaching the Well World, and time was running out. Troops all over the planet were gathering for the final battle.

Nathan Brazil and Mavra Chang somehow had to reach the Well of Souls in time to save the universe and before any of the hostile natives managed to kill them.

At best, a difficult mission. At worst, impossible – especially since there was a price on Brazil’s head and many would be claimants! For Brazil, the difficult was but the work of a moment – the impossible would take a little longer!

After years of caring for her often impossible mother, Alice is finally free. But an unexpected legacy gives her more than she bargained for…
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club


When Alice Hunter’s mother dies, after grimly clinging on for eighty-odd years, it is enough for genteel Alice just to be free. But she soon becomes lonely, having few points of contact with the people in the cheap boarding houses which are all she can afford. Then comes news of a legacy, and Alice’s soul rises as she travels to the family’s lawyers in Bath.

Her new life is not what she expects, however, and she is lost in a fog of human misunderstanding, hatred and deceit. A nice cup of tea, stirred by detective Arthur Crook, is what she will need to put things right . . .

Sci-fi master Theodore Sturgeon wrote stories with power and freshness, and in telling them created a broader understanding of humanity-a legacy for readers and writers to mine for generations. Along with the title story, the collection includes stories written between 1953 and 1955, Sturgeon’s greatest period, with such favorites as “Bulkhead,” “The Golden Helix,” and “To Here and the Easel.”

Courage and achievement are celebrated and questioned, paradoxes examined, and human frailty appreciated in fifteen tales, at once lyrical and provocative, ranging fromthe fantastic to the achingly real. Be it a tale of an expulsion from Eden, a journey through time, the dreams of a failed writer, ora dead woman’s ambiguous legacy, each story in Novelties & Souvenirs is a glorious reading experience, offering delights to be savored … and remembered.

While her faithful friend Virginia watched by the bedside, rich old Mrs Arliss passed away peacefully in her sleep – and left behind a legacy of violent death. A greedy niece, a pompous nephew, a hopeful distant relation and a hungry solicitor each expect a tidy sum out of her estate, but all they are in for is murder.

A valuable collection of miniatures is missing, the sinister caretaker couple have vanished and a body is lying stone dead on the drawing room floor . . .

A SCIENTIST BY NATURE – he used his rational powers of observation to examine more closely the privileges he was born to enjoy – and the people he was raised to despise.

A REBEL AT HEART – she followed her fiercest passions in the struggle to overthrow a legacy of hate – one that had poisoned her family for generations.

ON A PLANET DIVIDED – between rich and poor, strong and weak, intellect and feeling, only one thing could bring these two opposites together: a strictly forbidden desire.

For justice. For equality.

FOR EACH OTHER…

At first sight the case looks simple enough to private investigator Miles Bredon. Two cousins on a boat trip on the River Thames: Derek with a £50,000 reason for surviving the next two months until he inherits a legacy; Nigel with a £50,000 reason for getting rid of him and inheriting the money himself.

When Derek disappears, Nigel naturally falls under suspicion – not least because he has a train of alibis that is almost too perfect. But where is the body? And if this is not murder, whose is the photograph of a body slumped in a boat, and who left the wet footprints at the lock?

Immaculate officers and rough-bearded riflemen, evangelists, card-sharps and dandies face death at attention on the sloping deck of the Birkenhead. But who was the coward hidden among the women in the lifeboat, and who was the girl who lived to report his shame?

Eight years later in the summer of 1860, the coward’s legacy unfolds, and Verity must piece together a mystery that leads him to uncover an ingenious plot: a madman’s revenge for the loss of the Birkenhead. And with this knowledge, only Verity can avert a tragedy unparalleled in English history since the loss of Prince William in the White Ship 700 years before.

Charlie Baxter has never been a success. Yes, he’s popular with women, but he’s not exactly a party guy. A cheerful loser, that’s Charlie.

He has even made a hash of his ‘death’. For, having almost exhausted a legacy left to him by a rich aunt, he has planned to insure his life and then ‘die’. But he has failed to foresee the ramifications of his sinister scheme. And he has reckoned without people cleverer than him – the insurance company, for one.

Then there’s his wife, Vera, who is playing along for her own benefit …

They came to his deathbed. Four dutiful children. Each the victim of a different mother. Each mother the victim of a tragic accident, unsolved murder, mysterious disappearance.

As he sank away they glowered their hatred. It was a hatred he expected, and his revenge was well-planned.

He left a multimillion dollar legacy, bearing a ghoulish price tag. They could pay with their sanity, or their psyches, or their souls, they would be part of an experiment, something to do with brain waves. It would be a great service to science, they were told. Just one last little joke on his kids, and they swore they could hear him laughing – all the way to hell.

The dark force known as Shadow had been defeated, but its world-spanning web of power had survived. This incredible magical weapon was now held not by a prince or wizard, but by Pellinore Brown, a marketing consultant from Germantown, Maryland.

Pel Brown wished no one ill; he merely wanted his family back. But the Galactic Empire that had seen Shadow as a threat saw him as Shadow’s heir, a menace to be destroyed as Shadow had been. And when the awesome magical might of Shadow’s legacy was turned against the rayguns and spaceships of the Empire, entire planets were caught in the middle.

Pel Brown wished no one ill – but hundreds would die to put an end to … THE REIGN OF THE BROWN MAGICIAN

One of America’s greatest writers gives us his unique perspective on our fears of nuclear annihilation

Experiment.

Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut’s cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it.

Solution.

Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding fathers of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he is the inventor of ice-nine, a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. The search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker’s three eccentric children, to a crazed dictator in the Caribbean, to madness. Felix Hoenikker’s death-wish comes true when his last, fatal, gift to mankind brings about an end that, for all of us, is nigh.

With Earth teetering on the brink of extinction, only one man dares to defy the legacy of the Spaceraiders – Clovis Marca, the twilight man.

Long ago Earth, now fixed on her axis, with eternal day on one side, eternal night on the other and a ribbon of twilight in between, was ravaged by galactic raiders. Earthlings recovered, grew stronger. But now, unable to reproduce, the last humans are frenzied with final decadence. And fear.

Only Clovis Marca, the last man born on Earth, dares to brave infected space to seek the impossible solution. His dark quest leads him to face Orlando Sharvis, the scientist whose insane experiments on his own mind and body might just save the human race… but would that race then be more, or less, human?

Matthias Ronay is a prodigy. He’s talented, smart, imaginative, and he’s never left the Moon. He dreams of more – of space, of adventure, of glory.

Desperate to explore the galaxy further, he finds himself at odds with his father, Albin, a senior politician in the Lunar government. Albin has expectations for his son, for the legacy he has built on the Moon, and he expects Matthias to fall in line without question.

While Matthias buries himself in computer games to simulate being anywhere but where he is, and Albin attempts to gain support for political plans that he wants to groom Matthias for, can they come to a solution that benefits them both?

GROWING UP WEIGHTLESS is one of John M. Ford’s last novels, and another triumph of writing.

Once the world was not as it has since become. Once it worked in a way different from the way it works now…

Pierce Moffett is a teacher and historian who at midlife feels himself to be standing at a great turning point in the history of the world. As a child, Pierce was no stranger to magic, but those revelations faded with time. Now Pierce’s search for a secret history of the world – one in which magic works and angels speak to humankind – has begun again.

Pierce finds clues offered to him in the unfinished last novel of a writer named Fellowes Kraft and in the real-life histories of the doomed Renaissance heretic Giordano Bruno and the Elizabethan magus John Dee. He will also find the secret history pervading his present in his involvement with two Roses: Rosie Rasmussen, guardian of the dead Kraft’s legacy, and Rose Ryder, who will soon become his lover.

The first coming was the Man:
The second was Fire to burn Him;
The third was water to drown the Fire;
The fourth is the Bird of Dawning.

Twenty years have passed since the martyrdom of the Boy-piper at York, twenty years in which his legacy, the movement of Kinship, has challenged the tyranny of the Church Militant in Britain’s seven island kingdoms.

Now his namesake, Tom, bearing the Boy’s own pipes and perhaps himself imbued with the spirit of the White Bird, is wandering Europe in company with the girl, Witchet. But disaster overtakes them and Tom, in a fury of vengeance, breaks his vow of Kinship.

A terrible path lies before him, one that transcends his own world. As he travels it, Tom must come to understand the true nature of the wild White Bird, of The Bride of Time and her Child, and of the Song the Star Born sang.

They’re on the run! Now that their monstrous vampire ‘gardens’ under London, in Australia, and on the Greek island of Krassos have been razed, two ‘Lords’ and a ‘Lady’ of the Wamphyri Malinari the Mind, Lord Szwart, and the hag Vavara have joined forces, leaving a trail of undead destruction as they flee headlong from Ben Trask’s E-Branch and the dead-waking Necroscope, Jake Cutter.

But headstrong Jake has problems of his own. In the metaphysical Mobius Continuum, it appears that his blue life-thread – the emblem of his humanity – is gradually fading, changing to red. And not only red but blood red, dreaded insignia of the Great Vampire!

Could this be the downside of Harry Keogh’s legacy? And if so, are Necroscope and Trask’s ESP-talented Avengers – his team of precogs, telepaths, and locators – hastening in pursuit of their own hideous doom? Earth’s fate is undecided, mankind’s destiny on hold, the future a page as yet unwritten.

And the future was ever a devious thing…

For the people in this novel, the concerns of everyday life are beginning to transmute into the extraordinary and to reveal the forces, dark and light, that truly govern their lives. So it is for Pierce Moffett, would-be historian and author, who has moved from New York to the Faraway Hills, where he seems to discover – or rediscover – a path into magic, past and present. And so it is for Rosie Rasmussen, a single mother grappling with her mysterious uncle’s legacy and her young daughter Samantha’s inexplicable seizures. For Pierce’s lover Rose Ryder, another path unfolds: she’s drawn into a cult that promises to exorcise her demons – the same cult that Samantha’s father has joined. It is the dark of the year, between Halloween and the winter solstice, and the gateway is open between the worlds of the living and the dead. A great cycle of time is ending, and Pierce and Rosie, Samantha and Rose Ryder must take sides in an age-old war that is approaching the final battle…Or is it?

The last humans from the planet Snowglade have taken flight from the genocidal mechs aboard the spaceship Argo. As the shop hurtles toward the Galactic Center, hunger and desperation are taking their toll among the refugees, who are beginning to question the leadership of Captain Killeen. Convinced that his people’s only hope of survival lies in the True Center of the galaxy, he is determined to find it, with a will bordering on obsession.


As the crew of the Argo, an even Killeen’s own son Toby, find their faith in their captain’s brilliance tested to the limit, Toby faces his own perilous journey into the unknown, into the mysterious of adulthood. Like the others in this Family of voyagers, Toby’s spine contains microchip implants holding the memories – the legacy – of his race. But just as the technology is designed to save his people may tear Toby himself apart, so his father’s desperate gamble to save the Argo may plunge the ship and its inhabitants into a cosmic fit of all-consuming fire.

Merlin is a Prince of Chaos and Amber, Corwin’s son and heir. He has grown up knowing that his legacy is to one day follow in his father’s footsteps, live up to his father’s legend.

When Corwin goes missing, that day comes far sooner than he could ever have expected. Merlin must find his own identity as the ruler of the worlds, and discover what kind of King he wants to be. Will he be a warrior like his father, or embrace his own path as a hacker-magician?

A generation after Corwin’s rise to the throne, Merlin is aided by powers beyond anything Corwin could have imagined. The epic magic from The Chronicles of Amber is wielded alongside sentient computers, a vorpal sword, and the ghosts of those who came before.

Featuring the Locus award-winning Trumps of Doom, the Locus nominated Blood of Amber and Sign of Chaos, and the final two novels Knight of Shadows and Prince of Chaos, the Second Chronicles of Amber continues the epic story of Amber and the Shadow worlds.

Harry Keogh, Necroscope, is no more . . .

And the Wamphyri are back – not only in the Vampire World, where the ancient northern ice has melted to release the original, the most evil, most powerful vampires of all time, but in our world, too. Without Necroscope – the one man who could talk to the dead and undead alike – only Ben Trask and the weirdly talented espers of his secret organisation, E- Branch, stand between Mankind’s survival and its domination by terrible invaders from Starside.

Trask: human lie-detector; David Chung: locator of all things evil; Ian Goodfly: precog, whose glimpses of the ever-furtive future have so often saved the lives of his E-Branch colleagues. Three men, their technology and the esoteric talents against shape-changing challengers from a parallel universe. The odds don’t look good, and Harry Keogh is dead and gone, his motes scattered throughout the Universes of Light. But as Harry himself was witness, death isn’t like that . . .

Harry may be dead, but his legacy lives on.

England, 1967: ruled by the power of the Catholic Church, as it has been since the failure of the Protestant Reformation. In this England there are steam trains, but no internal combustion engine; rifles but no electricity; heresy but no democracy.

And in this England, magic works.

England, 1967; young Tobias Oakley, out on an illicit nighttime expedition, meets an elven woman – and is chosen for initiation into the secrets of necromancy. Tobias has a powerful talent and his injudicious use of it brings him to the attention of the Church – whose Thaumaturgical Division soon recruits him.

And so Tobias enters the Church, beginning his career amid the brothels and taverns of the teeming slums of the diocese of Southwark. From there his progress, if not steady – there is something about Tobias that arouses unease in his superiors – is generally upwards. As a curate, as a priest, as a soldier in the bloody war against heresy and finally as an eminent expert on diabolism, Tobias becomes a power in the English Catholic Church.

And as he does so, he pursues his second career: as liar, drug smuggler, rakehell, mass murderer, betrayer, vicious libertine and consorter with demons. For the elf legacy that has shaped his life has robbed him of something vital. And when Tobias, in an effort finally to discover some meaning in life, embarks on a fantastic and perilous quest through supernatural realms he finds himself at the last confronting a savage irony.

From the vaults of the SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal introduction to one of the unique voices of British science fiction, John Middleton Murry, Jr, who wrote his best work under the pen name Richard Cowper.

The son of the famous critic John Middleton Murry, Cowper announced himself to the science fiction world in 1967 with BREAKTHROUGH, which found favour for a subtlety and richness of characterisation not seen in most contemporary SF. The idea of a transformed future England became his signature leitmotif and it is this theme that informs the Corlay tales contained in this omnibus. This is the complete Corlay sequence, featuring introductory novella ‘PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN’ and novels THE ROAD TO CORLAY, A DREAM OF KINSHIP and A TAPESTRY OF TIME.

THE ROAD TO CORLAY:
On the Eve of the Fourth Millennium a slowly-building civilization, struggling out of the rubble of the Drowning, was crushed beneath the sceptre of a powerful and repressive Church. But on the Eve of the Fourth Millennium the sound of a magical pipe was heard, and the air was filled with songs of freedom and enlightenment. And on the Eve of the Fourth Millennium the Boy appeared, bringing the gift of sacrilege, a harbinger of the future, heralding the arrival of the White Bird of Dawning. It is the coming of a New Age. A glorious future bearing the presents of the past!

A DREAM OF KINSHIP:
They came to destroy! The treacherous Falcons, uniformed in the black leather tunics of the fanatic Secular Arm, descended on Corlay to burn and kill. Commanded by Lord Constant, ruler of the Seven Kingdoms, they were determined to crush the religious heresy of Kinship. But a new dream rose from the ashes… When four Kinsmen escaped the carnage of their beloved land, each helped to fulfill the miracle that had been foretold: the coming of the Child of the Bride of Time.

A TAPESTRY OF TIME:
Twenty years have passed since the martyrdom of the Boy-piper at York, twenty years in which his legacy, the movement of Kinship, has challenged the tyranny of the Church Militant in Britain’s seven island kingdoms. Now his namesake, Tom, bearing the Boy’s own pipes and perhaps himself imbued with the spirit of the White Bird, is wandering Europe in company with the girl, Witchet. But disaster overtakes them and Tom, in a furry of vengeance, breaks his vow of Kinship. A terrible path lies before him, one that transcends his own world. As he travels it, Tom must come to understand the true nature of the wild White Bird, of The Bride of Time and her Child, and of the Song the Star Born sang.