Search Results for: time-machine,-the

Ten-year-old Zanne has lived on her parents’ farm in Garth her whole life, following the seasons as regularly as the years.

Everything changes when raiders come to their village, and Zanne uses her powers to save her family. Zanne’s mother – Keeper of the Covenant, binding life to their country – sends her to Covenant school. Zanne needs to be trained, and to put her powers to use for the good of Inland.

But there is a stronger force present than even Zanne realises. The call of the Daymaker, the legendary power from the time of the machines, pulls against the Covenant, and Zanne finds herself on a quest to discover its origins, and the truth of Inland’s history…

The first book in the DAYMAKER trilogy, this book by award-winning author Gwyneth Jones, writing as Ann Halam, is perfect for fans of Ursula Le Guin’s EARTHSEA trilogy.

A collection of science fiction short stories from the master author of THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS and THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS.

In 1941, Roy Sabre’s girlfriend Betty mysteriously disappears.

Ten years later he has constructed a time-machine and his first trip is to go back to find her.

But his arrival is observed and his machine attacked and damaged as it departs – instead of returning to 1951, it travels to the far future where mankind has disappeared and the Earth is under the control of machines controlled by insects.

Roy finds that several other time-travellers, due to damage and malfunction, have been cast forward to the same time . . .

Stories included:
– “Wanderers of Time”
– “Derelict of Space”
– “Child of Power”
– “The Last Lunarians”
– “The Puff-ball Menace”

‘For fans of classic hard-boiled whodunits, this is a time machine back to an exuberant era of snappy patter, stakeouts, and double-crosses’ LA Times

‘Kingpin among the mystery writers’ New York Times

Muriell Gilman left her father at the breakfast table while she cooked seconds of sausage and eggs. When she returned, he had disappeared.
She searched the house from cellar to attic. Then she went out to the workshop . . . there, scattered on the floor, were hundred-dollar bills, an overturned chair, and a spreading, crimson stain. That’s when she telephoned Perry Mason.

Perry Mason has so many questions: why did she call him? Why didn’t she want her step-sister to talk to him? And why was Gillman’s wife being blackmailed – by a female private investigator . . . ?

Breeding machines and fertility camps.

When a foreign power puts a sterility drug in Britain’s reservoirs, the result is all too predictable.

The birth-rate plummets and the country’s future looks bleak. There is only one way to save the nation; all women with a natural immunity to the drug must be placed in special camps where they can be bred from like prize cattle.

They must be given special hormone treatment and artificial insemination so that they can produce triplets, quads, quins time after time until they die of exhaustion.

They must become Nation Mums, the sole hope of a desperate people. They must be pampered and disciplined to accept their role.

Even if one of them happens to be the wife of the Minister in charge of the whole terrifying affair…

‘I had a hunch that madness was a predominant theme and normal condition for Americans living in the second half of this century’ Charles Willeford

Willeford’s pulp classic features six incisive tales as fresh as the day they were first published in 1963. Writing at a time when we still had some faith in our elected leaders, Willeford laid bare the American Dream – and 50 years later his revelations are as chilling and relevant as ever.

When recently exhumed church relics are stolen from a small English village the theft is quickly followed by four murders.

The joint inheritance of a piece of property supplies a motive but the cause of death is mystery. Cue Sir Clinton Driffield, who investigates and makes an on-the-spot arrest of the culprits and their super-scientific death machine.

‘J.J. Connington’s stories are always attractive’ Sunday Times

There was blood on the drawing-room floor and Hazel Deerhurst had disappeared wearing slippers over walking shoes, two pairs of stockings and a bright silk kimono.

First investigations shed interesting light on Hazel. A mysterious machine is found at her home, some paintings and a cryptic telegram. She was also secretary to a man whose secrets involved the future of the empire. Is she victim or villainess?

‘JJ Connington stories are always attractive’ TheSunday Times

In a time before computers were a mainstay of our lives, Lord Dunsany tells the story, which takes place in England, about the revolution of self-reproducing machines. Known to have a profound distaste for the Industrial Revolution, The Last Revolution touches on a topic we know all too well today: What happens if the computers take over?

That first visit to Mars had been a mistake. A miraculous journey out through the myriad miles of space and back, back through the millennia to a time before Man existed, it had been the chance result of a small-scale malfunction in an experimental matter transfer machine.
But Michael Kane’s first great adventure in a world where great mythic armies battled, where hugely bizarre creatures roamed and deeds of high heroism and dark treachery resounded, was but the start. For as he learned to control and use the machinery, he was to return to Mars again and again.
The second volume of the Martian adventures of Michael Kane, of the proud Princess Shizala, her warrior brother and the darkly beautiful but evil Horguhl, as book two of the Warrior of Mars series is available in ebook for the first time!

Dr. Henshaw had created what he thought was a time travel machine and he had sent guinea pigs through it. But now he needed a human guinea pig to test it with.

Christopher Wilkinson thought the whole idea was absurd, until a book that had been sent through the machine came back with a thumb print on it, the fingerprint of Vanessa, his long lost sweetheart!

So Wilkinson agreed to the experiment. He stood in the white circle facing the machine as it began to gleam and spin, pulling him down through the tortuous coils of time…

Chester W. Chester IV inherits a run-down mansion and millions in back taxes. In order to pay the taxes, he initially decides to auction off the mansion and its contents, but then he discovers a massive computer (the Generalized Nonlinear Extrapolator, or “Genie”) that can bring any situation or time to life.

‘This, I believe, is the first autobiography of a machine,’ writes Epikt, a Ktistec machine. In the resulting mindbending, at times hilarious, work of the imagination, the careful and attentive reader realizes that Epikt is not only presiding at its own birth at the Institute for Impure Science, but it is also addressing itself to the interpretation of mankind’s most profoundly puzzling problems.

Originally, Sparta was an all-male planet – an all-male population with everything that implies: babies – male babies only – produced by the so-called Birth Machine from an almost unending supply of fertilized ova brought by Sparta’s founding father, a dyed-in-the-wool misogynist. But unnatural situations rarely stand the test of time, and it wasn’t too long before Sparta bowed to Mother Nature.
But there was still something rather strange about Sparta when John Grimes landed there to await the arrival of his beloved ship Sister Sue. It seemed to him that among the recently transplanted women of Sparta, there was a strange movement afoot. And when the Archon was kidnapped by a group of militant women the press claimed were men, he knew he couldn’t just stand by and watch!

Using the secret motive power of a lost a lost flying saucer, physicist Micael Arnott, three companions and an escaped convict are flung into the void at eight times the speed of light to eventually land, after the oblivion of acceleration, upon a world that is both extraordinary and terrifying.

Their machine disappears and they themselves also vanish one by one, Michael Arnott going first when he is on the verge of explaining the mystery of this far-flung world.

That the planet is inhabited seems obvious from queerly designed spaceships glimpsed at intervals, all of them blazoned with a “Z”, which is not so much an alphabet letter as a symbol of a master-race of scientists.

In their efforts to solve the riddle of the world and system to which they have been hurled, the perplexed travellers gradually realise they are not only involved in an odyssey of space, but in a problem of Time as well. They are forced to the conclusion that, just as the first supersonic airmen paid a penalty of mental blackout for breaking the barrier of sound, so there is also a penalty for exceeding Fitzgerald’s Law – namely that 186,000 miles per second is the ultimate possible speed.

Helen Powell was a punch card operator in the test office of Elcomp, the largest and most dynamically progressive computer manufacturing company in the West. A saboteur, acting for a totalitarian regime, eluded the security network and attempted to destroy the new top secret Mark IX, the greatest computer Elcomp had ever constructed. Unfortunately for the saboteur, the Mark IX had inbuilt defence mechanisms and the secret agent died in a holocaust of high voltage sparks.

From that time onwards Helen began to notice strange changes in the great electronic thinking machine. It seemed to her that the Mark IX was developing something which might almost have been described as a personality. She tried to dismiss the thoughts as imagination . . . then the face appeared . . . if it was a face!

Helen saw an image on the computer’s main screen. It was a face, yet not a human face in the accepted sense. The most horrible thing about it was the resemblance it bore to the dead agent.

Darryl Whitesmith was engaged upon a new line of research at the Horological Central Institute. He was familiar with the famous saying of Minkowski: “From henceforth space in itself and time in itself sink to mere shadows and only a kind of union of the two preserves an independent existence.”

But he had no idea to what extent that saying would be borne upon him. It was difficult for Darryl’s mind to make the transition from subjective to objective time, but once that transition had been made there was no turning back. It began as a simple experiment, an experiment which concerned space-time, relativity and the four dimensional continuum.

Whitemith’s first indication that something was wrong was when the clock on the wall raced backwards in a blur of speed to fast to follow. The laboratory faded, day and night blended into a welter of greyness.

He was back in the Jurassic Age – but not for long. The machine was still dragging him back into the remote epochs of the Past…

These seventeen classic stories create their own unique galaxy of vain, protective, and murderous robots; devilish angels; and warm and angry aliens. In “Mimsy Were the Borogoves”-the inspiration for New Line Cinema’s major motion picture The Last Mimzy-a boy finds a discarded box containing a treasure trove of curious objects. When he and his sister begin to play with these trinkets-including a crystal cube that magnifies the unimaginable and a strange doll with removable organs that don’t quite correspond to those of the human body-their parents grow concerned. And they should be. For the items are changing the way the children think and perceive the world around them-for better or worse.

Ray Bradbury called Henry Kuttner “a man who shaped science fiction and fantasy in its most important years.” Marion Zimmer Bradley and Roger Zelazny said he was a major inspiration. Kuttner was a writer’s writer whose visionary works anticipated our own computer-controlled, machine-made world. At the time of his death at forty-two in 1958, he had created as many as 170 stories under more than a dozen pseudonyms-sometimes writing entire issues of science fiction magazines-in close collaboration with his wife, C. L. Moore.

This definitive collection will be a revelation to those who wish to discover or rediscover Henry Kuttner, a true master of the universe.

Who would lay time to rest, or raise it up from its tomb?
The Ancients of Days – humans returned from a long exile in the depths of time and space and history – brought heresy and doubt to the artificial world of Confluence, and ignited a terrible civil war, of all the varied creatures of Confluence’s ten thousand genetically manipulated bloodlines, only young Yama holds the power to end the conflict, for who ever controls him controls the myriad machines of the world. Though now a helpless captive being forged intoa weapon of horrific consequence, Yama must win the struggle to reclaim his soul, and complete his search for the true story of his origin – a story mapped eons before his birth.

Confluence – a long, narrow man-made world, half fertile river valley, half crater-strewn desert. It is a world at the end of its time, a place of savagery, bureaucracy and war, inhabited by countless flying micro-machines and ten thousand bloodlines ruled by devotion to absent gods.

It is the home of a singular young man named Yama. An infant who was discovered in a bier on the river, he was raised by the prelate of Aeolis until it was learned that his ancestry was unique. Yama appeared to be the last remaining scion of the Builders, closest of all races to the worshipped architects of Confluence.

Now, awed and fearful of his increasing ability to awaken the machines the Builders left behind, Yama searches for his identity and a history that is both his and his world’s.

At the world’s end, all love is timeless, and all age-old disputes irrelevant . . .

Jherek Carnelian, however, is in danger of taking reality too seriously, and grows tired of his pleasures. Perhaps a hunt for aliens could lift his spirits? Or better yet, a journey through time? Ah, yes! The past! So complicated and strange – especially with its scarcity of time machines for a return trip! But regardless of the dangers, the past does hold one irresistible lure: Mrs Amelia Underwood, for whom the Hero at the End of Time risks all.

It meant little to Robert Fairlie, a serious and dedicated young philologist, that the United States and Soviet Russia were at odds about the Moon. He had little interest in the first rocket landings or the bases that the two nations had established there. And he neither knew nor cared why the Americans would not agree to mutual inspections of these bases.

Yet the Americans had reason enough: and quite unexpectedly, because of his specialised knowledge of languages, he found himself sharing the burden of an incredible secret. For what the American base had yielded was astounding evidence that space had already been conquered many centuries before by a people who had once spanned the stars. There had been machines and destructive weapons beyond the comprehension of present-day scientists which, if knowledge of them fell into the wrong hands, could plunge the world into unutterable chaos.

Fairlie’s trip to the closely-guarded rocket base in New Mexico turned out to be only the first step on a fantastic journey amid the unexplored stars to the home-world of the space-conquerors of long ago.

It was a journey into the appalling reality of stellar space still haunted by the past cosmic struggle whose scale in space and time dwarfed the rivalries of tiny Earth’s quarreling nations.

Richard Garrison, a corporal in the British Military Police, loses his sight while trying to save the wife and child of millionaire industrialist Thomas Schroeder from a terrorist bomb. While Garrison is recovering from his injuries, Schroeder makes him an offer the young man cannot refuse – refuge at Schroefer’s luxurious mountain retreat and rehabilitation from the best doctors who can treat Garrison’s blindness, and, if not cure him, at least teach him a new way of life.

But Thomas Schroeder has a secret. His is dying and determined not to lose his life. The doctors tell him his body cannot be saved. But what about his mind? Garrison’s healthy young body would make an excellent replacement for Schroeder’s failing corpus, if the machines to perform the operation can be perfected in time.

Garrison has secrets of his own. Since the bombing that caused the loss of his sight, Garrison has become aware of new abilities slowly developing in his mind: mental powers he is beginning to master, strengths Schroeder cannot expect.

Richard Garrison and Thomas Schroeder, two strong-willed men locked in battle for the greatest prize – life itself.

It was just an average day for tabloid reporter Max Parker when he arrived in Malibu for a demonstration of a brand-new parallel-universe machine. But everything changed in an instant when inventor Barrington Boles succeeded in making Max the human gate to numerous parallelities.


Now Max was lost in a virtual sea of collateral worlds, confronting man-eating aliens, dinosaurs, talking frogs, dead Maxes, girl Maxes, old Maxes, even ghost Maxes. His only chance to escape the space-time continuum was to find Boles and hole the loony genius could rescue him. But how could he be sure which world was real, which Max was Max, and which Boles was the Boles who could stop the madness – or trap Max in the wrong world forever…?

His name is Caspar Last, and this is the unique chronicle of the vacation he took from the twentieth century. It begins – or does it? – when Caspar, a genius, poor of course, and resentful at that, decides to use his “time machine” to bring back a modest fortune. It begins – or maybe it doesn’t – with a mysterious bequest to a secret Otherhood charged with preserving and extending the British Empire at any cost. From the bold colonial days of empire-builder Cecil Rhodes through the wide-eyed and wondrous possibilities of the present to a strange and haunting future of magi and angels, of men and many races other than our own, John Crowley’s time-travel masterpiece surfs bravely along “the infinite, infinitely broken coastline of Time” to tell a story that takes place neither here nor there, but everywhen.