Search Results for: rose,-the

An extraordinary collection of short stories from the award-winning author of Sarah Canary. Including “Praxis”, the story about a theater where the real and unreal collide; “The Poplar Street Study”, Fowler’s darkly comic account of an alien invasion; and “The Gates of Ghosts”, in which a child journeys to a strange and deadly world, this anthology of 13 tales also features a new foreword by the author.

The lake was full of artificial things – The Poplar Street study – Face value – The dragon’s head – The war of the roses – Contention – Recalling Cinderella – Other planes – The gate of ghosts – The bog people -Wild boys: variations on a theme – The view from Venus – Praxis

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.

Award-winning author Michael Moorcock continuously astonishes readers and critics alike with each new literary offering. Revered for his eloquent, lyrical prose, his work is a testament to the emotional power of words. Fabulous Harbors is the second of a three-book set, and is a bridge between the novels Blood and The War Amongst the Angels. Comprised of 11 interlocking tales, Fabulous Harbors takes the reader by the hand and guides him into and through Moorcock’s spectacular expanding multiverse – a luminously realized, richly layered world of fantastic invention and lovingly drawn characters.

Here, in the comfort and peace of Sporting Club Square – an obscure and perhaps magical corner of London that seems oddly immune to the normal effects of time – Begg family patriarch Sir Sexton and various family members and friends gather to swap memories, anecdotes and dreams. Come, sit by the fire and listen to the continuing exploits of the brave Sam Oakenhurst, the mysterious and seductive Rose von Bek, old friend and adventure Jerry Cornelius and Elric, the brooding albino prince of ruins, among others.

Haunting and compelling, Fabulous Harbors is an extraordinary achievement from a true star in the literary firmament.

The lyrical genius of Michael Moorcock defies categorization; his creations soar to grand and golden places hitherto unimagined and unimaginable. In this, his most heartfelt and astonishing work to date, he carries the reader across mystical thresholds viewed from afar in the brilliant Blood and Fabulous Harbors, and reveals the mighty destinies, exemplary loves, and the true and secret histories of his most beloved and intriguing characters. It is a tale of the incomparable Rose von Bek, who discovers the myriad possibilities that life has to offer in the special, infinitely wondrous places known as the Second Ether – where time has no bounds and existence is a river of endless reinvention. Here, also, is the love of her life – the volatile and enigmatic Sam Oakenburst – and the story of the ill-fated passion of the exotic Colinda Dovero and the swashbuckling gambler Jack Karaquazian. These four together – along with their exceptional companions, including Rose’s mad uncle, Michael, late of Texas – will become allies in what some call the great War in Heaven, fighting shoulder-to-shoulder against the agents of evil and stagnation, in a battle whose outcome will determine the very nature of reality itself.

The world lay frozen under a thousand feet of ice. Only in the Eight Cities of the Matto Grosso did men still live, hunting the wary ice whales for meat and oil, and following the creed of the Ice Mother which foretold the end of all life in ultimate cold.
But legend told of a city far to the north – fabled New York – whose towers rose above the ice, whose crypts held the forgotten lore that might bring warmth to Earth once again. In the best ice ship in the Eight Cities, Konrad Arflane embarked on the impossible voyable to New York – an odyssey of incredible peril and adventure with a shattering discovery at the journey’s end…

The year is 2016, and President Kennedy is being murdered – again and again and again.

The director has come to the charred ruins of New York to re-enact a mad dream from the past – the assassination of President Kennedy. As actors, he has the primitive race who inhabit the city. With them and his glamorous, dark haired lover, he rehearses everything – the motorcade, the shots, the panic.

But at the last moment it all goes wrong. When the flower-filled limousine rounds the bend, the passenger is not Kennedy – but the Director himself.

Shots ring out in a wild explosion of roses.

Capturing a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the world of science fiction, this unique autobiography by Robert Silverberg shows how famous stories in this genre were conceived and written. Chronicling his career as one of the most important American science fiction writers of the 20th century, this account reveals how he rose to prominence as the pulp era was ending-and the genre was beginning to take on a more sophisticated tone-to eventually be named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

From the opening reared a head, wide, flat, huge. Below it stretched a body beautiful with iridescent scales of gold edged with ruby. Nictitating membranes lifted over enormous eyes, deep, limpid pools of ancient wisdom, catching and reflecting the light of the miniature sun, turning the glowing orb into a scatter of stars shimmering in an ebon sea. From open jaws a forked tongue flickered with a soft susurration. Its scent was dry, acrid, tinged with that of living fur on a summer’s day. The head rose higher, swaying over the three men on the ledge, the sinuous length of the body almost filling the passage through which it had come. From it radiated an impression of incredible age.

“A serpent,” whispered Thagamista. “A creature from the beginning of time. Somehow surviving to find this place and feast on those who well here. It was inevitable they should think it a god.”

THE SLEEPING CITY continues the dynamic saga of the Chronicles of Malkar, E.C. Tubb’s newest fantasy hero!

The ship rose on a column of invisible, super-heated steam ejected at incredible velocity. The spread of the blast flattened everything in the immediate vicinity. The surrounding town was wiped out.

Immediately on blast off the automatic pilot engaged hi-drive to avoid the attacking missile. This put the ship into negative mass with relation to the normal universe. It was now in M-space.

The ship was self-contained. It could keep going till all her occupants died of old age. But where to? Proxima Centauri? Or maybe Alpha Centauri, Riga, perhaps, or Sirius! The universe is a big space.

They hurtled on through space and time until they saw the planet, a cloud-hidden ball, as it hung in space a hundred thousand miles below the orbiting vessel. It had seas and clouds, mountains and ice-caps, islands and continents, It had a moon and a yellow G-type sun.

Home? Was this their second chance?

PILLAR OF FIRE

Millions of Years before humanity and other intelligent races learned to roam the Milky Way, the Zheltyana had created an empire among the stars – rose, triumphed, and vanished. All that remained were a few ruins, some artifacts, and the knowledge that their powerful scientific secrets awaited rediscovery.

One such secret had been found on the feudal planet Naxos, under the tyranny of the half-mad Idalia Ancanette. Her scientists had tapped its mystery to create a pillar of energy which promised to make Idalia mistress of a hundred worlds – if it did not destroy Naxos before it could be harnessed.

Such an event called for the attention of Earth’s master agent, Cap Kennedy, and his scientific crew. Because that column of atomic fire was a beacon that could herald a millennium or end in A WORLD AFLAME.

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.

They built a ship called the Southern Cross and launched her to Alpha Crucis. Centuries passed, civilisations rose and fell, the very races of mankind changed, and still the ship fell on her headlong journey toward the distant star.

After ten generations the Southern Cross was the farthest thing from Earth of any human work – but she was still not halfway to her goal.

Here is an absolutely absorbingly exciting tale of the far future from one of the giants in the field of Science Fiction writing.

Travel out along the galaxy’s Perseid Arm. Branch off to follow the ten thousand stars of Mircea’s Wisp. Eventually you will come to the Purple Rose System – three stars, Lorca, Sing and Syrene, that seem about to drift away into the void. Three planets circle Syrene. On one, Cadwal, there is Life. Long ago the Naturalist Society of Earth had listed Cadwal as a natural preserve. An administration centre had been set up and staffed to protect the planet from all exploitation. Araminta Station. Now, centuries later, the young Glawen Clattuc is beginning to wonder what the future may hold for him in the hierarchic, carefully ordered hereditary society that is life on Cadwal.

This fourth volume of Theodore Sturgeon’s Complete Stories publishes the work of 1946-1948, wen Sturgeon’s early popularity among science fiction readers crystallized into a lasting reputation among a wider group of readers. “Maturity” and “Thunder and Roses” are the best-known of the stories in this period. “It Wasn’t Syzygy” display’s Sturgeon’s interest in psychological themes. “The Professor’s Teddy Bear” is an early prototype of the modern “horror story” as practiced by Clive Baker, Stephen King and many others.


In these years Sturgeon was recovering from the failure of his first marriage and a severe case of “writer’s block”. In March 1947 his luck turned around: a story he had failed to sell earlier won a short story contest sponsored by the prominent British magazine, Argosy, with the then-enormous prize of $1000. Later Sturgeon credited this event for restoring his faith in himself as a writer. The same year “Maturity” and “Thunder and Roses” were received with tremendous enthusiasm by his peers. Ray Bradbury, a few years short of his own success, wrote to Sturgeon in February 1947:


“Ted, I hate you!…MATURITY…is a damned nice story. Your sense of humour, sir, is incredible. I don’t believe you’ve written a bad story yet; I don’t think you ever will. This is not log-rolling, by God; I only speak the truth. I predict you’ll be selling at least six stories a year to Collier’s and The Post before long. You have the touch.” A month later, the day he learned he’d won the contest, Sturgeon wrote to his ex-wife, “It’s more than a thousand dollars. The curse is off with me. My faith in [the story’s] quality and my own is restored, and I don’t think that I shall ever again experience that mystic diffidence and childish astonishment when one of my stories sells or is anthologized. I know now why they do, and I’m proud of it, and I know how to use it.”


This fourth volume also features a major “undiscovered” story, “Wham Bop!”, from an obscure youth magazine in 1947. It may be one of the finest fictional portraits of a 1940s jazz band in American letters.


Additional delicacies awaiting the Sturgeon fan in Thunder and Roses are his first Western Story, “Well Spiced”, and a UFO saga, “The Sky Was Full of Ships”, written in 1947 and set in the Southwest. It could well be the true story of the Roswell incident.

THE TRILOGY CONCLUDES…



In West of Eden and Winter in Eden, Harry Harrison, an acknowledged master of imaginative fiction, broke new ground with his most ambitious project to date. He brought to vivid life the world as it might have been, where dinosaurs survived, where their intelligent descendants, the Yilanè, challenged humans for mastery of the Earth, and where the human Kerrick, a young hunter of the Tanu tribe, grew among the dinosaurs and rose to become their most feared enemy.



Now, in Return to Eden, Harrison brings the epic trilogy to a stunning conclusion. After Kerrick rescues his people from the warlike Yilanè, they must regroup and consider their future. They find a safe haven on an island and there begin to rebuild their shattered lives. But with fierce predators stalking the forests, how long can these unarmed human outcasts hope to survive? They need weapons, but they only effective weapons lie in the hands of the technologically superior Yilanè. The small band of humans has no choice but to confront their face head-on.



And, of course, Kerrick cannot forget Vaintè, his implacable Yilantè enemy. She’s been cast out from her kind, under sentence of death, but how long will her banishment last? For her strange attraction to Kerrick has turned into a hatred even more powerful than her inbred instincts – an obsession that compels her to hunt down Kerrick and kill him. In a world completely unlike her own, two great cultures struggling for mastery of the Earth face the same problem that faces us today: how to coexist on the same planet completely unlike ourselves – or mutually perish.

The waters rose, and darkness was upon the earth.

For a few decades after the Twenty-Minute War and the Red Plague, there were those who remembered the ways and pleasures of civilization, but soon the harsh realities of life in the flooded seaboard of North America pushed the survivors into a new Dark Age – an age of superstition and brutality, but one of seeking and poetry as well. This is the world of Edgar Pangborn’s classic Davy, portrayed here over centuries of its change and growth. Here are heretics, and harpers, crusaders and cowards, magicians and mundane folk, in a stunning cycle of stories that have timeless quality of legend.

The palace was several hundred years old, a sort of haphazard medieval city containing church buildings, stables, army barracks – and the offices and homes of the ministers of the Revolutionary Government, in a Communist satellite country somewhere in Europe. The palace rose starkly and threateningly out of the marshes, its three great gilt domes reminding observers of the glittering monarchies that once resided there. But all was changed, all was forbidding.

“We stand too high to be human, Katarin”, says the President of the country to his tempestuous, unloving wife. The revolution, which made him absolute ruler, has also taken him away from Katarin, dehumanizing him and his power-ridden ministers. Katarin, in defiance of the restrictions that bind her life, takes a lover, finding herself liberated even as she senses that the consequences are sure to be disastrous.

It makes people positively ache with happiness. It puts the roses back in their cheeks and the itch back in their blood. “It” is the Scholes Virus – proper medical term for what used to be called, out of mawkish ignorance but with uncanny prescience, the “love bug”.

Professor Trevor Scholes has discovered, isolated and classified every variety of the infection that now bears his name. One variety, B79/K, is so rare that the odds are fifty thousand to one against two compatible carriers meeting.

So of course Giles Cranston and Tamsin McGillivray meet . . .

In this classic of alternate history by grand master Philip Jose Farmer, Native American bomber pilot Roger Two Hawks bails out over enemy territory in WWII, only to find himself on another Earth – one in which the American continents never rose from the waters, and the ancestors of the American Indians remained in Asia and Europe-an Earth embroiled in a world war of its own – with Two Hawks caught in the middle.

Love, history or blood…which is the strongest?

In childhood something black settled on Mechail Korhlen and drank from his throat. And later somebody pitied him enough to kill his poor deformed body when he became an adult. But then Mechail chose to return from beyond the veil to enact revenge – and to follow Anjelen, ruler of the sinister monastery sited deep in the forest.

The fulfilment of his destiny had begun.

Composer and dancer Anna van Tuyl is working on her masterpiece, a work she has titled “The Rose”. Her progress is stymied, however, when her body begins suddenly to change. For no knowable reason, she begins to grow strange protuberances, her body warping more day by day. Desperate to complete her symphony before her life becomes subsumed by these growths, she encounters a painter suffering from the same affliction.
Ruy Jacques is an artist, famed for his works and full of inspiration despite his condition. His wife is a scientist, a woman of logic, working to build the perfect weapon. While Anna at first believes she has found a saviour and kindred spirit in Ruy, she instead finds herself in the middle of a tense battle between art and science, with building jealousy and resentment.
Is the true goal the completion of her work, or the possibility of a cure? Is it better to seek immortality through their art, or a full life through science?

Award-winning author Charles Harness’ lost classic was rediscovered by Michael Moorcock more than a decade after it was first published, and champsioned by him to great acclaim. IT was awarded the Retro-Hugo award in 2004.

A brilliant scientist learns to reduce humans to Lilliputian size and finds the perfect guinea pigs when three colleagues try to discover his secret.

Dr. Bulfinch, Bill Stockton, beautiful Mary Phillips, and the Mexican, Pedro, did not remember what had happened after the furious scientist caught them snooping in his secret room.

Now they did not know where they were. They rose, shakily, breathing in great gasps. Everything was dark.

“Where are we?” Mary cried out.

Suddenly horror grew in Pedro’s eyes as he remembered something. He gasped, “He made my Pinto, the mule, little. Now I know… He has made us little like my mule…”

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.

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?