Search Results for: no-way-back

Gifted novelist Fowler (Sarah Canary and The Sweetheart Season) delights in the arcane, and, as a result, these 15 clever tales are occasionally puzzling but never dull.

In the long title story, temperance activist Carry Nation is resurrected in the 1990s (“We’re talking about a very troubled, very big woman,” says one shaken barman to reporters) and becomes such a nuisance that the DEA is forced to dispatch her with voodoo. Other plots are only slightly less outrageous in conceit. In “Lieserl,” a lovesick madwoman dupes Albert Einstein into believing he has a daughter; in “The Faithful Companion at Forty,” Tonto admits to second thoughts about his biggest life choice (“But for every day, for your ordinary life, a mask is only going to make you more obvious. There’s an element of exhibitionism in it”). “The Travails” offers a peek at the one-sided correspondence of Mary Gulliver, who wants Lemuel to come home already and help out around the house. The homage to Swift makes sense, for, when Fowler doesn’t settle for amusing her readers, she makes a lively satirist. The extraterrestrials who appear in her stories (whether the inscrutably sadistic monsters in “Duplicity” or the members of a seminar studying late-1960s college behavior in “The View from Venus: A Case Study”) seem stand-ins for the author herself, who, in elegant and witty prose, cultivates the eye of a curious alien and, along the way, unfolds eccentric plots that keep the pages turning.

Contents:
Black Glass (1991), Contention (1986), Shimabara (1995), The Elizabeth Complex (1996), Go Back (1998), The Travails (1998), Lieserl (1990), Letters from Home (1987), Duplicity (1989), The Faithful Companion at Forty (1987), The Brew (1995), Lily Red (1988), The Black Fairy’s Curse (1997), The View from Venus (1986), Game Night at the Fox and Goose (1989)

The Zardalu were the greatest menace ever known to the worlds of the spiral arm, enslaving entire races and exterminating others, guided by an unswerving belief in their own supremacy. Then their slaves rose up against them, and for eleven thousand years the Zardalu had been extinct and the spiral arm had known a kind of peace.

But now the Zardalu are back . . .


The search for the Builders, the legendary alien race whose unfathomable constructs continued to perplex scholars and explorers alike, had led Builder expert Darya Lang, adventurer Hans Rebka, and treasure hunters Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial to an unknown Builder artifact far outside the spiral arm. There they found the Zardalu – just a few who had been trapped in stasis all those millennia, held there for purposes known only to the Builders. And in the struggle that ensued the Zardalu had been set loose, transported by Builder technology to to galactic parts unknown – free to ravage any world and any race within their grasp.


The only chance to eliminate the Zardalu threat was to find them and wipe them out before they had time to breed back up to strength and once again threaten civilized beings everywhere. The problem was that no one believed the story. Only Darya Land and her companions had actually seen the aliens – and no evidence existed to support their claims. And so the course seemed clear: get a ship themselves and search out the Zardalu.


But the way would not be easy. Even once they managed to locate the Zardalu, they still had the Builders to deal with. For the closer they got to their quarry, the more clear it became that the Zardalu and their world were closely entwined with the fate – and the plans – of the Builders themselves.

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!

‘All le Guin’s stories are metaphors for the one human story; all her fantastic planets are this one’ Margaret Atwood

ARMCHAIR TRAVEL FOR THE MIND:

It was Sita Dulip who discovered, whilst stuck in an airport, unable to get anywhere, how to change planes – literally. With a kind of a twist and a slipping bend, easier to do than describe, she could go anywhere – be anywhere – because she was already between planes … and on the way back from her sister’s wedding, she missed her plane in Chicago and found herself in Choom.

The author, armed with this knowledge and Rornan’s invaluable Handy Planetary Guide – although not the Encyclopedia Planeria, as that runs to forty-four volumes – has spent many happy years exploring places as diverse as Islac and the Veksian plane.

CHANGING PLANES is an intriguing, enticing mixture of GULLIVER’S TRAVELS and THE HITCH-HIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY; a cross between Douglas Adams and Alain de Botton: a mix of satire, cynicism and humour by one of the world’s best writers.

Ed Carter, a New York reporter on his way to his home town in Omaha for a short vacation, saw the missile in the last moments in its journey back to earth. A sweller on the brink, like all of us, he had no doubt about what it was; Oh God, he thought, this is it. The blast of the impact flung him some distance, and when he regained consciousness, his first reaction was one of surprised to find himself still alive, and not, it seemed, even badly hurt. Presumably the missile had been directed at the big Air Force base nearby, and should have destroyed everything and everyone within a radius of miles. Could it have failed to explode?

Carter sees the remains of part of the missile in an adjacent field and hobbles over to it. A minute or two later several Air Force officers arrive. They examine the remains, and find the burned-up body of a pilot. In other worlds, the missile was not Russia’s first shot in the Third World War, but a failure to launch a man into space. But Carter knows that the Distant Early Warning line will have reported the missile; that the senior Air Force officers, in accordance with plan, will have taken to the air – in the country’s interest, their lives must, of course, be preserved if possible; that by now the retaliatory American bombers will have passed the point of no recall; and that the Third World War has begun. Not so, Colonel Ben Goldwater tells him: “I called the bombers back.”

Goldwater, the man who had been left in command, has saved the world – for at least a little longer. So he becomes a world hero? Not a bit of it. On the contrary: a nightmare looms ahead both for him and for Ed Carter, and the reader watches it all with growing fury…

After an unintentionally successful demon-summoning, accountant Prosper Nash finds himself on the astral plane, inhabiting the body of Jean-Prospere, Chevalier de Néche-the swashbuckling cavalier he likes to imagine himself as-and in a New York filled with characters from similar wish-fulfillment daydreams of other mundane souls. The demon is possessing his body on a mundane plane, and he attempts to find his way back. This involves the Shamir, the Solomon’s Stone of the title, and plentiful swashbuckling adventure, and a plot in which Prosper Nash’s accounting abilities prove as useful as Chevalier de Néche’s athletic ones.

A determined group of colonists are attempting to establish a bridgehead on the planet Pandora, despite the savagery of the native lifeforms, as deadly as they are inhospitable.

But they have more to deal with than just murderous aliens: their ship’s computer has been given artificial consciousness and has decided that it is a God. Now it is insisting – with all the not inconsiderable force of its impressive array of armaments to back it up – that the colonists find appropriate ways to worship It.

A stunning work from the acclaimed author of Dune, the series which inspired the 2021 Denis Villeneuve epic film adaptation, Dune, starring Oscar Isaac, Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya and Josh Brolin.

Edward Davis was a promising rookie in the Time Service. He had made jumps into the past – two, three, even six centuries – but nothing could prepare him for a leap of thirty-five centuries, all the way back to Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt.

In the blink of an eye, he found himself in a world of temples and tombs, pharaohs and pyramids, jackal-headed gods, mummies and talking beetles. In the ancient city of Thebes, Davis must rescue two members of the Service lost in time.

Taken in by a mysterious temple priestess and befriended by a beautiful Egyptian slave girl, Davis is sent to the City of the Dead to learn the trade of embalming. But as the hour of his scheduled return to his own time approaches, Edward Davis must come to grips with the truth behind the fate of his comrades – and the seductive allure of ancient Egypt.

For ten years, Colin sweated, slaved, and eventually built-up a nice business on a dusty world called Mars. Ten more years and he’d have been able to retire a rich man. Five more years and he’d have put all worry behind him. He didn’t get those five years.

During a sandstorm, he blundered accidentally into the forbidden zone, where the temple of Dra Vheera waited and rested, an area guarded zealously to the death by a fanatical faith. The Martians complained, and he lost all, stripped of everything he owned, fined, and sent back to Earth on a one-way ticket. And who was to blame? The Dra Vheera, the priesthood of Mars, the temple, the religion. One name for all three, but all three really one.

A man named Barhart offered vengeance, sweet, pure vengeance. With his help and money, Colin put together a force of eager men determined to strike back at the Martians, but he found more than they bargained for. The safety of Earth was now at stake, and Colin had to race against time and Death to save mankind.

The fifth of ten volumes that will reprint all Sturgeon’s short fiction contains fifteen classics and two previously unpublished stories, including “Quietly.” The Perfect Host provides enough of a representative sampling of Sturgeon’s “greatest hits” to give the uninitiated a good sense of what all the fuss was about way back when. At the same time, it offers a generous selection of alternate takes and rarities, notably several of Sturgeon’s best forays into other forms of genre writing, plus previously unreleased cuts and liner notes.

Light on Bottom…

The light was artificial. Believe it if you can. I realise that for a normal person it’s hard. Wasting watts to light up the outdoors is bad enough. Spending the world’s limited power to illuminate the sea bottom, though – well, for a few moments I was too furious to think straight. My job has brought me into contact with people who were careless with energy, with people who stole it, and even with people who misused it; but this was a brand-new dimension!

I was lower now and could see acres and acres of light stretching off to the north, east, and west until it blurred out of sight. Acres and acres lighted by things suspended a few yards above the level bottom, things visible only as black specks in the centre of slightly brighter areas.

Then I got my anger under control, or maybe my fear did it for me. I suddenly realised that if I hit bottom the way I was heading I might never be able to get back to the…

Ocean on Top.

THE HARD-CORE SCIENCE OF HAL CLEMENT
The supreme practitioner of “hard” science fiction, Hal Clement combines ingenious problem-solving with suspenseful drama and action. These ten stories show the mastery of science and fiction that Clement has displayed in such favourites as Mission of Gravity, Iceworld, and Needle.
UNCOMMON SENSEIf your back’s to the wall, even a deadly predator can be useful.
ANSWER”Know thyself” is great advice…if you don’t follow it all the way.
QUESTION OF GUILTWas he a medical pioneer…or the first vampire?
IMPEDIMENTMind-reading makes for perfect trust – as long as it works both ways!
-AND LOTS MORE!

Grad-school dropout Matt Fuller is toiling as a lowly research assistant at MIT when, while measuring quantum relationships between gravity and light, his calibrator disappears – and reappears, one second later. In fact, every time Matt hits the reset button, the machine goes missing twelve times longer.

After tinkering with the calibrator, Matt is convinced that what he has in his possession is a time machine. And by simply attaching a metal box to it, he learns to send things through time – including a pet-store turtle, which comes back no worse for wear.

With a dead-end job and a girlfriend who left him for another man, Matt has nothing to lose by taking a time machine trip for himself. So he borrows an old car, stocks it with food and water, and ends up in the near future – under arrest for the murder of the car’s original owner, who dropped dead after seeing Matt disappear before his eyes. The only way to beat the rap is to continue time travelling until he finds a place in time safe enough to stop for good. But such a place may not exist…

The megalomaniac Godmind is still planning to use all the minds in creation to make a vast ‘lens’, and if necessary it will burn out all life in the process.

Back beside the river and literally born again, Yaleen represents to the guild of riverwomen the perfect proof of salvation, of life after death. In fact, she is desperately searching for a way to save the whole universe from imminent destruction.

Slippery Jim diGriz is in the process of robbing the new Mint on Paskonjak when the heist goes terribly wrong. Threatened with a horrific death, Slippery Jim is allowed to cut a deal with the Galactic League: voyage to the planet Liokukae and bring back a missing artifact – the only known evidence of alien life-forms found in 32,000 years of galactic exploration.

For diGriz there are a few catches. One is Liokukae itself – a dumping ground for the League’s misfits, murderers, maniacs, and the incurably obnoxious. Another is a little matter of life and death. To ensure the utterly untrustworthy diGriz’s cooperation, the League has given him a slow-acting poison, allowing him thirty days in which to succeed . . . or die.

Now the Stainless Steel Rat is on his way to a world that is hurtling backward down the evolutionary scale – a land of fanatic, goat-herding Fundamentaloids, murderous Machmen, and a rusty guru named Iron John. DiGriz has developed an almost perfect cover: a four-member rock band that has a way of giving its audiences what they want to hear.

But while the days tick away and diGriz’s life expectancy lowers, the mission evolves from finding an artifact to liberating a planet . . . which is a tune the Stainless Steel Rat most certainly knows how to sing.

The spaceship landed on the planet Earth to bring it the message of a new religion and a new way of life that would fit the terrestrial barbarians to take their place in the great community of the Galaxy.

Their motives were beyond reproach. Their objectives were honourable. It was not their fault that humanity distrusted their motives, repudiated their objectives – and did its best to drive the missionaries back into space . . .

During the day a blazing and merciless sun beat down on “the boy” and at night a friendless and cold darkness enveloped him. It was a bleak and lonely countryside over which he had been wandering for ten years. A rare tree, bird or wild animal was the only life he encountered during his desolate trek through his young years of roaming. Infrequently, he was fortunate enough to find shelter and food in the shops of deserted villages; otherwise he foraged what he could from the nearly barren land. Contact with other humans was his innermost and greatest fear.

But the day came when his curiosity overcame his sensibilities of self-preservation and he was drawn to the sound of a great wailing not far from a place where he had come to rest.

Form that moment on his whole existence took on a radical change. His wanderings became a kaleidoscope of adventures, emotions, and responsibilities – never static, forever mobile, and potentially dangerous. There were moments when it would have been easier to turn his back, return to old ways, but somehow he knew this was an impossibility. He accepted his new fate, but still feared the greatest of all commitments until it was too late for him.

This fantasy adventure will not fail to excite and stir in every reader memories and emotions of seemingly forgotten times and moments.

The hill below the fortress of Taurovinda, stronghold of Urtha, High King of the Cornovidi, is coming alive: the Otherworldly realm of the Shadows of Heroes are claiming the land as their own. But this time their actions are driven by a force that is darker and older than even the oldest among the ghosts. Who or what is raising the Dead? Merlin, a temporary resident in the fortress, must answer that question if this time of kings and lovers is to be saved. Jason’s wonderful ship, Argo, has returned, drawn back by her own guilty past, and a dreadful secret that she will reveal only to Merlin. Argo holds the key to the mystery. And Niiv, the bewitching, beautiful Northlands enchantress, is working her way even closer into Merlin’s charms.

This is a journey that will take Merlin back in history, and to a fabled island of legend. Love is in the air. But at a price.

It all began simply enough. A client had vanished, and Jay Corcoran went to investigate the man’s empty hotel suite. But Corcoran’s trick vision spotted the room-sized box stuck to the outside wall of the suite. There was no way to get into the box, so Corcoran cabled his long-time pal Tom Boone.

Boone had a talent. When threatened he could “step around a corner” into some otherwhere. Boone stepped into the box, taking Corcoran with him. The box turned out to be a time traveler machine that transported them back to 1745 England, where they found a family of refugees from a million years in the future. In that far future, alien Infinites were converting humanity to incorporeal form. When the family had refused conversion, they had to flee. For more than a century, the family had lain hidden in their time bubble.

Suddenly, the Infinites’ killer monster broke through–and things grew complicated as the family fled to the distant past and the farther future.

The daughter of rich but neglectful parents, Terisa Morgan lives alone in a New York City apartment, a young woman who has grown to doubt her own existence. Surrounded by the flat reassurance of mirrors, she leads an unfulfilled life-until the night a strange man named Geraden comes crashing through one of her mirrors, on a quest to find a champion to save his kingdom of Mordant from a pervasive evil that threatens the land. Terisa is no champion. She wields neither magic nor power. And yet, much to her own surprise, when Geraden begs her to come back with him, she agrees.Now, in a culture where women are little more than the playthings of powerful men, in a castle honeycombed with secret passages and clever traps, in a kingdom threatened from without and within by enemies able to appear and vanish out of thin air, Terisa must become more than the pale reflection of a person. For the way back to Earth is closed to her. And the enemies of Mordant will stop at nothing to see her dead.

Dr. Joanna Lander is a psychologist specializing in near-death experiences. She is about to get help from a new doctor with the power to give her the chance to get as close to death as anyone can.

A brilliant young neurologist, Dr. Richard Wright has come up with a way to manufacture the near-death experience using a psychoactive drug. Joanna’s first NDE is as fascinating as she imagined – so astounding that she knows she must go back, if only to find out why that place is so hauntingly familiar.

But each time Joanna goes under, her sense of dread begins to grow, because part of her already knows why the experience is so familiar, and why she has every reason to be afraid.

Yet just when Joanna thinks she understands, she’s in for the biggest surprise of all – a shattering scenario that will keep you feverishly reading until the final climactic page.

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.

In The Moment of the Magician Alan Dean Foster continues the adventures of Jon Thomas Meriweather, the Spellsinger, in a land where magic and constant danger combine against a background of beauty and individual courage.

Jon-Tom (as he is known in the land), in his quest to find a way back to his own world, discovers that there exists in the land another human from Earth who may hold the secret he so desperately seeks. This individual, however, is reputedly evil and has strange powers.

Jon-Tom’s adventures in seeking out this mysterious and dangerous human make this sequel to The Day of Dissonance a suspenseful and exciting saga in the Spellsinger epoch.

There’s no place like home…

It was a pretty good life for a spellsinger from L.A. He’d battled demons, fought deadly Plated Folk, even met a socialist dragon and survived. Now Jon-Tom was quite happy to settle into domestic bliss with the fiery Talea, study magic, and practice spellsinging on his duar. But the magic instrument is broken when Jon-Tom protects the wizard Clothahump from thieves and he must set out across the Glittergeist Sea to find the one person who can fix it. With the irrepressible Mudge the Otter as a travelling companion, only the unexpected can happen. But cannibal muskrats, ogres, and a fierce pirate king parrot must seem ordinary indeed when Jon-Tom finds a way back to Earth – and he must choose which world is home.