*** THIS BROWSER DOES NOT SUPPORT THE CANVAS ELEMENT ***

Search Results for: voices

Showing 1-24 of 71 results for voices

Fantastic Fables

Fantastic Fables

Contributors

Joan Aiken

Price and format

Price
£4.99
Format
Digital (deliver electronic)
This final collection of Joan Aiken’s stories, taken from nearly sixty years of her writing career, is rooted in the classic fables and fairy tales familiar to us all, but which she has brought up to date by adding her own voice, and a touch of that mysterious added ingredient that makes you return to them again and again, at any age.

They range from fantastic fairy tales to science fiction, from a future where the sun no longer shines thanks to human folly, to one where all the best words are kept locked away in a forbidden forest . . . they take us to lands that could be from our own past, where we can call upon magical friends like the mysterious Miss Samphire, or long lost magic spells to save a castle from Viking attack. These are absolutely timeless tales, for as she said:


‘They come from nowhere, and they are aimed at nobody’s ear; or rather they are aimed at the ear of anybody who happens to pass by just at that moment’
Return to Harken House

Return to Harken House

Contributors

Joan Aiken

Price and format

Price
£7.99
Format
ebook
In the late 1930’s as the threat of war is building in Germany, twelve year old Julia arrives to spend the summer with her famous playwright father, only to find herself alone with Trudl, her Austrian stepmother. With Trudl preoccupied by the plight of her fellow countrymen in Europe, Julia retreats into the scary Gothic novels left behind by her older siblings, and becomes haunted by dreams of Joshua Harken, the notorious alchemist who built the 17th century house, and then disappeared, accused of murder. Even after she joins forces with local boy Tim Bellyap to investigate the stories of Joshua’s ghost, she is afraid to tell anybody about the terrifying voices coming unbidden from somewhere inside her chest…

In a compelling exploration of loneliness and adolescent insecurities, peopled by ghosts from the old house, this is the powerful story of Julia’s awakening from her nightmare world.

Also published as Voices, and set in Joan Aiken’s own supposedly haunted childhood home, Jeake’s House in Rye, Sussex, this Y.A. ghost story draws on some of her own childhood memories to create an unusual thriller.

“When reduced to its essence, Julia’s story may not be so very different from that of Aiken’s Wolves Chronicles heroine Dido Twite: each girl must cope with a distant, unreliable father and learn to survive in a world peopled with self-absorbed adults. It is the exploration of these issues, even more than the fine storytelling, which makes this novel so compelling” Publisher’s Weekly
“Joan Aiken is the godsend to children who are at the age when they read as if there were no tomorrow” Washington Post

“An entertaining read, for readers who like to read suspenseful ghost stories with a hint of real menace. The ghostly elements of this story are nicely mirrored by the historical menace of the times, as Julia ruminates on the dangers of Hitler, whom she sees as a sort of spider, spreading his web out over Europe” Goodreads reviewer
The Haunting of Lamb House

The Haunting of Lamb House

Contributors

Joan Aiken

Price and format

Price
£7.99
Format
ebook
“LAMB HOUSE is in Rye, an ancient town of East Sussex, England. It is very much a real place, even a famous one, yet The Haunting of Lamb House is as elusive to review as it must have been to write. It is safe to say that no one but Joan Aiken could have written it, not only because she was born in Rye and has the town in her bones as it were, but also because she has the power — shown in her other books — of evoking strange, often eerie events of the past and making other times, places and people vividly alive. This book goes further: She has taken the real history of Lamb House and interwoven happenings that are purely imaginary, working so skillfully that even those who have lived there can hardly tell which is which!”

So wrote novelist Rumer Godden, who also lived in Lamb House. She went on:

“For those who do not sense such things, The Haunting of Lamb House is a most skillful and intriguing interweaving of fact and fiction; to those who do, it is a memorable evocation. In either case it is a little masterpiece.”

Lamb House in Joan Aiken’s birth town of Rye in Sussex is said to be haunted. This is her story of what might have happened to cause the haunting: using the imagined diary of an earlier Mayor of Rye, Toby Lamb, whose father built the handsome Georgian house, and later episodes that might have occurred during the occupancy of two of its famous literary tenants – Henry James and E.F. Benson.

Joan Aiken was born in another haunted house owned by her father Conrad Aiken: Jeake’s House, just around the corner in Mermaid Street, Rye, which she also wrote about in Return to Harken House.

“Joan Aiken has written a clever book, kindling a whole world of feeling out of small macabre details, presenting to the senses a series of apprehensions of reality which seem to touch a completeness beyond themselves. An impressive achievement; I shivered as I admired” Robert Nye, The Guardian

“Joan Aiken’s artful web of truth and fancy is divided into three histories of haunting – the first employs Aiken’s considerable skill in a vivid evocative rendering of the old town of Rye when the house was built…followed by the twenty years of Henry James’ residence. The end is worth waiting for…where E.F.Benson encounters hideous apparitions and even an exorcism in the last enthralling twenty pages” Miranda Seymour, T.L.S.

“Aiken has conjured up a deliciously scary ghost story…her mastery of style serves her well in the creation of three separate voices. Those familiar with Henry James’s writing especially The Turn of The Screwwill derive special enjoyment from this novel, but there are shivers enough for any reader willing to acknowledge the possibility of ghosts and the reality of evil” U.S. Library Journal

“In three interlocking ghost stories this veteran British novelist places a fictional haunting within the history of a real house, and displays a masterly way with several contrasting narrative styles, sympathetically evoking some ghostly presences…the wayward spirit of the house and the growing number of literary presences which gradually take possession” Publisher’s Weekly
A Puzzle For Fools

A Puzzle For Fools

Contributors

Patrick Quentin

Price and format

Price
£7.99
Format
ebook
A series of horrifying murders rips through a sanatorium – and only the patients can stop the killings.

‘Baffling crimes, brilliant writing’ SATURDAY REVIEW

‘Quentin is a craftsman of the first class’ TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Peter Duluth turned to drink after his wife’s untimely death; now, two years later and desperate to dry out, he enters a sanitorium, hoping to turn his life around. But he doesn’t quite get the calm relaxation he expected. Strange, malevolent occurrences plague the hospital – and Peter hears his own voice crying out the warning ‘There will be murder.’

With a murderer is on the loose, and the staff every bit as erratic as the idiosyncratic patients, everyone is a suspect – including Peter, who is desperate to clear his name before the killer strikes again.
Destination Mars

Destination Mars

Contributors

Hugh Walters

Price and format

Price
£4.99
Format
ebook
An expedition to Mars is decided on and Chris, Serge, Morrey and Tony are chosen to man it. Unlike their expedition to Venus, this is not a desperate last-minute venture; it is a sober, carefully planned affair. Chris and his friends have no reason to expect anything beyond the normal risks of space travel – except for the experiences of the Dutchman Van der Veen. He is the only man who has ever penetrated beyond the Le Prince layer, which blots out radio communication with the earth – and he returned in a state of mental collapse. When he hears of the new expedition he has another breakdown, and when at last he is able to describe his experiences he speaks of strange and terrifying voices that assailed him in outer space.

Will Chris and his friends also here these voices, and what will they find on Mars?
Time Out For Tomorrow

Time Out For Tomorrow

Contributors

Richard Wilson

Price and format

Price
£3.99
Format
ebook
Richard Wilson’s stories could almost be described as gentle – if it were not for the pungent humor which runs through most of them, the startling satiric commentary, all the more impressive for its quiet setting – and the one other quality that is essential in any form of good writing: a genuine concern with the human condition. This quality Wilson possesses in abundance and, perhaps in the end, it is this that makes his work such a joy to read.

TIME OUT FOR TOMORROW contains twelve SF tales of vivid imagination!

Kin (1956)
The Big Fix (1956)
Wasp (1954)
An Abundance of Good Things (1954)
The Tunnel Under the World (1959)
The Best Possible World (1960)
The Voice of the Diaphragm (1958)
QRM (1957)
The Ubiquitous You (1957)
Just Call Me Irish (1958)
The Locus Focus (1957)
Mindbenders

Mindbenders

Contributors

Nicholas Fisk

Price and format

Price
£4.99
Format
ebook
Vinny and Toby can make things happen just by using their minds. As Vinny stares at a box of ants, she feels as though she is plugging into a giant power socket. It is then that she hears a voice, letting her know that the ants plan to take over the Earth. Can Vinny stop it before it’s too late?
The Shadow Year

The Shadow Year

Contributors

Jeffrey Ford

Price and format

Price
£7.99
Format
ebook
In New York’s Long Island, in the unpredictable decade of the 1960s, a young boy laments the approaching close of summer and the advent of sixth grade. Growing up in a household with an overworked father whom he rarely sees, an alcoholic mother who paints wonderful canvases that are never displayed, an older brother who serves as both tormentor and protector, and a younger sister who inhabits her own secret world, the boy takes his amusements where he can find them. Some of his free time is spent in the basement of the family’s modest home, where he and his brother, Jim, have created Botch Town, a detailed cardboard replica of their community, complete with clay figurines representing friends and neighbors. And so the time passes with a not-always-reassuring sameness-until the night a prowler is reported stalking the neighborhood.

Appointing themselves ad hoc investigators, the brothers set out to aid the police-while their little sister, Mary, smokes cigarettes, speaks in other voices, inhabits alternate personas . . . and, unbeknownst to her older siblings, moves around the inanimate residents of Botch Town. But ensuing events add a shadowy cast to the boys’ night games: disappearances, deaths, and spectral sightings capped off by the arrival of a sinister man in a long white car trawling the neighborhood after dark. Strangest of all is the inescapable fact that every one of these troubling occurrences seems to correspond directly to the changes little Mary has made to the miniature town in the basement.
The Wailing Asteroid

The Wailing Asteroid

Contributors

Murray Leinster

Price and format

Price
£4.99
Format
ebook
The public abruptly ceased to be interested in news of the signals. Rather, it suddenly wanted to stop thinking about them. The public was scared. Throughout all human history, the most horrifying of all ideas has been the idea of something which was as intelligent as a man, but wasn’t human.

The first sounds came at midnight, a plaintive keening from an unknown voice in the vastness of uncharted space. Within hours the whole world had heard the strange, unearthly music–and the panic had begun.

Were the sounds a plea for help? From whom? From where? Or were they a command too terrible to think about? No one knew: And in billions of earth-bound minds the horror grew…

For how could man, who had not yet claimed the moon, defy a challenge from the stars?

And hours later, to the ears of a helpless world, the second message came. . .

And Earth’s days were numbered.
The Spiral Labyrinth

The Spiral Labyrinth

Contributors

Matthew Hughes

Price and format

Price
£4.99
Format
ebook
It was bad enough when Henghis Hapthorn, Old Earth’s foremost discriminator and die-hard empiricist, had to accept that the cosmos was shortly to rewrite its basic operating system, replacing rational cause-and-effect with detestable magic. Now he finds himself cast forward several centuries, stranded in a primitive world of contending wizards and hungry dragons, and without his magic-savvy alter ego. Worse, some entity with a will powerful enough to bend space and time is searching for him through the Nine Planes, bellowing “Bring me Apthorn!” in a voice loud enough to frighten demons.

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
Fool Me Twice

Fool Me Twice

Contributors

Matthew Hughes

Price and format

Price
£4.99
Format
ebook
In another sparkling and slightly askew adventure in the mode of Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams and Jack Vance, Fools Errant’s Filidor Vesh sashays once more through the penultimate age, finding that love is a many splintered thing.
The dandified Archon’s apprentice is literally bowled over by beautiful Emmlyn Podarke — she knocks him flat and steals his credentials, daring him to pursue her to a remote and mostly forgotten corner of Old Earth. Now Filidor must cope with philosophical pirates, prophet-seeking aliens, light-fingered mummers, and a tiny, bothersome voice in his left ear. Meanwhile, the Archon may or may not have been kidnaped, and somebody’s digging up a mysterious ancient artefact buried on the Podarke family farm.

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
Fools Errant

Fools Errant

Contributors

Matthew Hughes

Price and format

Price
£4.99
Format
ebook
Wise, witty and just a little weird, FOOLS ERRANT wryly strolls the satirical path laid down by Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett and Jack Vance, heralding the brilliant debut of a gifted new voice. Foppish young Filidor Vesh wants only to dally among his shallow pastimes. But a simple errand for his uncle, the vaguely all-powerful Archon of those parts of Old Earth still populated by human beings, becomes a frenetic odyssey across a planet speckled with eccentric nations pursuing odd aims with intense determination. Harried at every step by the irascible dwarf, Gaskarth, and frequently at the peril of wild beasts, enraged mobs and a particularly nasty thaumaturge, Filidor makes a relucant progress toward a final encounter with an ancient and possibly world-ending evil.

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
Phoenix in Obsidian

Phoenix in Obsidian

Contributors

Michael Moorcock

Price and format

Price
£2.99
Format
ebook
The second book of The Eternal Champion trilogy.

As Erekose, the Eternal Champion, he slew the human race that had betrayed his ideals. And loved Ermizhad, the Eldren princess

The the voices called him and he was powerless to resist. As Fate’s soldier, the Eternal One, his lot was to vanquish tyranny. Sent tumbling through the corridors of eternity, he found himself transformed. Now Urlik Skarsol – he is the Prince of the Southern Ice.

To find his way home, Urlik Skarsol must take up the Black Sword, the monstrous weapon that demands blood – be it friend’s or foe’s – before his tortured soul can rest.
Before the powers of Evil can be conquered.
Before he can rediscover Ermizhad.
Before he can know peace again …
The Walking Shadow

The Walking Shadow

Contributors

Brian Stableford

Price and format

Price
£3.99
Format
ebook
Paul Heisenberg is mysteriously endowed with the ability to jump through time. Together with thousands of eventual followers, he begins a journey that eventually takes him a billion years into the future. The Earth has been devastated by war with an alien race, and the changes that have resulted from the degradation of the world’s biosphere force him–and others–to rethink their own humanity. His pilgrim’s progress through the coming time is beset by doubts, distractions, and temptations as various voices attempt to distract him from his determination to follow the process through to its end. He eventually witnesses the complete transformation of the Earth, and the evolution of a single omnipotent but mindless Gaean organism. Is intelligence itself just a brief candle, forever doomed to burn out? Or can Paul find some other alternative for his race.
Brain Palaeo

Brain Palaeo

Contributors

Denis Hughes, Arn Romulus

Price and format

Price
£3.99
Format
ebook
Working on the theory that an electronic current variation is set up by thought processes within the human brain, Alex Larsen and his fellow scientists developed a system of telepathic cerebral communication. Nothing, it seemed, could be more valuable. Here was a soundless means of communication without complex or bulky equipment. But there was the matter of a mysterious thought-voice that interrupted the experiment…
Kemlo and the Star Men

Kemlo and the Star Men

Contributors

E. C. Eliott

Price and format

Price
£2.99
Format
ebook
Solid land inside a cloud of ‘star dust’ – where no solid land should be. And the weird voices – where are they coming from?

Forced down on a minor star galaxy, Kemlo and his friends of Satellite Belt K discover a secret of Space which gives scientists information for which they have been searching for years.
Pioneer 1990

Pioneer 1990

Contributors

John Russell Fearn, Vargo Statten

Price and format

Price
£2.99
Format
ebook
From the ether came mysterious messages announcing that a hitherto unknown Englishman had conquered space, flown to Venus, and is now on his way back to Earth. The fact that science’s most highly developed range and frequency finders are unable to pinpoint the actual source of the voice is looked upon as absolute proof that they are hearing from outer space. The aggressive and autocratic quality about the way in which the eccentric Ardath Steele makes his proclamations not only annoys Betty Travers, ace reporter on the Daily Searchlight, but also deciders her to embark on a one-woman vendetta to prove that Steele is an impostor. Even when the spaceship finally lands she remains the only sceptic in a country full of pride in its first space explorer.
The Delicate Ape

The Delicate Ape

Contributors

Dorothy B. Hughes

Price and format

Price
£18.99
Format
Paperback
Diplomatic corps man Piers Hunt watches the glittering lights of Broadway from his Hotel Astor room. The German girl’s mocking voice returns to his mind yet again: ‘More melodrama, Piers?’ Yes: this time it’s ‘more melodrama’, but with a vengeance.

In New York incognito, only Piers knows that his superior, Samuel Anstruther, has been murdered, possibly to get him out of the way of a plan to withdraw a police force that governs post-Second World War Germany. Rumours abound that the Germans might be allowed free reign once again.

Piers is a man of peace, but he may have to get his hands dirty if he doesn’t want to be murdered – before telling the world what Anstruther knew . . .
A Time Appointed

A Time Appointed

Contributors

John Russell Fearn, Vargo Statten

Price and format

Price
£2.99
Format
ebook
On her maiden voyage to Venus, the space liner Cosmic Cloud encounters a mysterious voice speaking through the void. The language is alien-but it is realised that danger threatens. Hardly has a recording been sent to Earth for expert interpretation before a mysterious gong is heard in the space liner, followed by further nerve-shattering notes until, abruptly, the space liner is utterly destroyed. Eventually it is learned that a diabolical mechanism is buried somewhere on Venus, left behind by a long-vanished malign alien race, and at a time appointed it will destroy the whole Solar System. Three men and a girl travel to Venus in a desperate race against time to find and deactivate the doomsday device…
Menaced Assassin

Menaced Assassin

Contributors

Joe Gores

Price and format

Price
£4.99
Format
ebook
It began with the murder of a beautiful woman, the adulterous wife of a mild-mannered professor. Then a corrupt cop was gunned down in a phone booth.

After that, the killer who called himself Raptor moved through a list of players, playboys and mobsters from Palm Springs to Minnesota. With each hit came a phone call to San Francisco organised crime investigator Dante Stagnoro, and a disguised, taunting voice daring Stagnoro to stop him. Raptor is a killer like no other Stagnoro has ever pursued.

And the final truth of his death trip – a truth about man, nature and God – will not be revealed until the last victim is claimed.
The Case of the Lucky Loser

The Case of the Lucky Loser

Contributors

Erle Stanley Gardner

Price and format

Price
£18.99
Format
Paperback
The first woman wouldn’t even give her name. But the clear, feminine voice faltered considerably over the question of what Perry Mason’s charges would be for a day in court – a day doing nothing but listening.

The second woman gave a good deal more – but the question was, what did she expect to get? Dorla Balfour, lethally lovely and dangerously rich, forced a $1,000 retainer on Mason to deal with a case already tried and decided.

The offense involved appeared to be manslaughter, hit-and-run, but it soon became murder … with the corpse killed twice.
Richard Cowper SF Gateway Omnibus

Richard Cowper SF Gateway Omnibus

Contributors

Richard Cowper

Price and format

Price
£20
Format
ebook
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.
Vengeance of Siva

Vengeance of Siva

Contributors

Lionel Fanthorpe, Patricia Fanthorpe, John E. Muller

Price and format

Price
£2.99
Format
ebook
Uma, a beautiful but frightened dancing girl, sells a strange bronze statuette of Nataraja, the dancing Siva, to Dr Chris Anderson, while he was visiting a bazaar in Pollachi, Southern India. He travels back to Kerala and puts the statuette on the bedside cabinet in his hotel room. His sleep is tortured by fantastic nightmares in which he seems hosts of ancient Indian gods and demons, in all their splendour and horror.

He wakes in terror to hear a faint voice whispering in the darkness. The bronze statuette is glowing with unearthly light and there is a smell if incense.

Can a human soul be imprisoned in bronze by the power of weird, unearthly dark magic?

Can Dr Chris Anderson release the psychic prisoner? Who is Uma, the mysterious dancing girl?
The Synthetic Ones

The Synthetic Ones

Contributors

Lionel Fanthorpe, Patricia Fanthorpe, Lionel Roberts

Price and format

Price
£2.99
Format
ebook
Is there a Destiny? Does Fate impose a limit? What Barrier stands between man and the creation of life?

Since the legendary failure of the ill-fated Frankenstein, man has tried time and time again to pass those limits. He has created androids, clumsy robots of flesh and blood. He has made men of metal and servants of plastic, with wheels for limbs and magnetic tapes for voices. Man has made things by cross breeding the animal kingdom and destroying Nature’s intentions…but man has never yet made man. Or has he?

Forbisher thought that he had the answer. It wasn’t a clumsy Synthetic. It wasn’t an Android, or a Robot, it was a real flesh and blood human being.

The beautiful woman in his arms was the product of a laboratory experiment, not the result of a natural biological process. But how could he prove it?
Filter (0) +