Search Results for: voices

A chilling and mysterious voice becomes audible to Sanie shortly after she and her husband Jackson move into the decaying antebellum mansion that is the Bullard ancestral home in rural South Carolina. At first, she wonders if the voice might be a prank played by Jackson’s peyote-popping brother Will or his equally off-kilter sister Louise.

But soon Sanie discovers that the ghostly voice is merely a single piece of the decadent, baroque puzzle that comprises the Bullard family history, rank with sensuality, violence, repression and madness.

Young Walter Scot is hot on the heels of cattle raiders in the service of the dark Lord of Soulis when he encounters his kinsman Michael Scot – and his life is changed for ever. Even in the turbulent Borderlands of the thirteenth-century Scotland Michael had a fearsome reputation as a magician and master of forbidden arts, trafficking with the demons of middle air. Now he has returned from years of exile with the Pope’s pardon and the favour of the Emperor, a peaceful man of God – and yet strange events still follow him.

The mysterious fire that blasts the raiders. The fourth voice that laughs where only three men were seen. The luxury that suddenly appears to furnish his long-abandoned castle – the mystery about him only deepens.

But still darker forces are at work behind the bloody rivalries of Border politics, black sorceries stirring within the sinister castle of Hermitage. When Walter’s father is ambushed and killed, his betrothed flung into a dungeon and his lands and his very life threatened by the necromancer-baron Soulis, Michael appears to offer the aid he desperately needs. Aid that, as Walter soon discovers, is almost as frightening as his enemies’ threats – as he is transported to another world, ensnaring, enchanting, seductive. There he finds a new life, new heroism and a new, all-consuming love. But there is a terrible price he must pay…

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 man in black picked up something which had been leaning beside him. A ring perhaps two feet wide . . . yet when the man in black laid it down on the floor it was as large as he was tall.

The light went out. A bluish glow now emanated from the ring, revealing Bryda’s face ghastly gray as she leaned forward, and Yarco’s also, set and serious, and the conjurer’s impassive.

And within the ring, where moments before there had been the bare planks of the floor, a shape that moved, and opened eyes glowing like coals, and spoke.

‘What world is this?’ the awful voice inquired.



(First published 1962)

Time and Chance is the autobiography of Hugo, World Fantasy and SFWA Grand Master Award-winning author, L. Sprague de Camp. It is a fascinating insight into a man who began writing in the late 1930’s and remained an active voice in the genre up until his death in the last year of the twentieth century, and who was a prime mover in the formation of the fields of Science Fiction and Fantasy as we know them today.

2650 AD

The Earth has been buried beneath a sheet of ice for 300 years. In cities miles beneath the surface humanity huddles, waiting for release.
Dr. Raymond Barnes waits with passion, and listens daily for evidence of life on the still Earth. Finally, a voice from across the void hails his open frequency . . . the surface awaits mankind.
But not all men are anxious to return to what was . . . those in power are determined to keep man in his new place, to retain their order of fear and oppression. Barnes and his courageous group of scientists and adventurers are arrested for possession of forbidden technology; the radio is destroyed! Their punishment is swift ejection from the underground city, their only hope is to reach London – 3000 desolate miles across a frozen wasteland!

Simeon Krug’s obsession is to see a tower built, on kilometre high, that will reach out to answer the voice from space. The Androids are his tools; superb, man-like creations of Man. The Androids take Krug for their God, and seek to become one with flesh-and-blood mankind through his wisdom. But Krug is not God – and it takes a God to control the terrible emotions Krug has stirred . . .

‘Valentine looked downward. Everything was black, a pool of night rising from the floor. That blackness seemed to be beckoning to him. Come, a quiet voice was saying, here is your path, here is your destiny: night, darkness, doom. Yield. Yield, Lord Valentine, Coronal that was, Pontifex that will never be. Yield . . .’

Valentine is now established as Coronal of Majipoor, about to undertake the grand processional, but filled with inexplicable despond, still shadowed by the dark cloud that had passed across his soul in Labyrinth.

His foreboding proves to be not without foundation as soon he faces a planetary crisis – the shapeshifting Metamorphs are sabotaging the crops upon which Majipoor’s billions depend – and a conflict, about how the suddenly turbulent planet should be ruled, with his protégé and heir-apparent, Hissune.

Only after this crisis has been overcome and the conflict with Hissune resolved can Valentine fulfil his proper destiny and succeed to the title of Pontifex.

It was the last planet left for men to conquer – a planet rich in priceless urillium ore, yet no man laid a finger on this wealth that was for the taking.

For the planet Vendor could not be conquered. Space-men tried time and time again, but always the Voices drove them mad and destroyed them. Some intangible power kept men away from that taunting prize – until a scientist on Deneb IV perfected a blanketing device to protect his shop through the barrier. It took him twenty years to do it and every penny he possessed, but at last his voyage to Vendor began.

It was the voyage of a gambler who knew that only two alternatives faced him…illimitable wealth and glory, or failure and death.

But the journey to Vendor brought hazards that neither he nor his crew had foreseen, and before its conclusion a force was unwittingly released that could have swept life from the Universe – the indestructible and horrifying force of THE METAL EATER.

The second volume of the Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon covers his prolific output during 1940 and 1941, after which he suffered five years of writer’s block. Showcasing Sturgeon’s early penchant for fantasy, the first six selections include whimsical ghost stories, such as “Cargo,” in which a World War II munitions freighter is commandeered by invisible, peace-loving fairies. With the publication of his enduring SF classic, “Microcosmic God,” Sturgeon finally found his voice, combining literate, sharp-edged prose with fascinating speculative science while recounting the power struggle between a brilliant scientist, who creates his own miniature race of gadget makers, and his greedy banker. Voice found or not, every one of the stories here is readable and entertaining today because of Sturgeon’s singular gifts for clever turns of phrase and compelling narrative. As Samuel R. Delaney emphasizes in an insightful introduction, Sturgeon was the single most influential SF writer from the 1940s through the 1960s.

From the vaults of The SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal introduction to the razor-sharp wit of John Sladek.

An important voice in the New Wave movement, Sladek had stories published in Harlan Ellison’s seminal anthology, DANGEROUS VISIONS, as well as in Michael Moorcock’s ground-breaking NEW WORLDS magazine. Perhaps best known for the ambitious robot tales RODERICK and RODERICK AT RANDOM, he is now recognized as one of SF’s most brilliant satirists. This omnibus collects novels THE REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM, THE MULLER-FOKKER EFFECT and BSFA AWARD-winning TIK-TOK.

THE REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM: Wompler’s Walking Babies aren’t selling like they used to, so the company develops Project 32, producing self-replicating mechanisms designed to repair inter-cellular breakdowns. But then the metal boxes begin crawling about the laboratory, feeding voraciously on metal and multiplying…

THE MULLER-FOKKER EFFECT: Bob Shairp – a writer and dreamer – has agreed to be a guinea-pig in a military experiment to find out if his personality can be turned into data and stored on computer. But a computing error quickly destroys Shairp’s physical body, leaving his mind stranded in an encoded world. Can the process be reversed?

TIK-TOK: Something has gone very seriously wrong with Tik-Tok’s ‘asimov circuits’. They should keep him on the straight and narrow, following Asimov’s First Law of Robotics: ‘a robot shall not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.’ But they don’t. While maintaining the outward appearance of a mild-mannered robot, albeit one with artistic tendencies and sympathy for the robot rights movement, Tik-Tok’s real agenda is murderously different. He seems intent on injuring – preferably fatally – as many people as possible. Almost inevitably, a successful career in crime and general mayhem leads to a move into politics and Tik-Tok becomes the first robot candidate for Vice President of the United States.

A voice in your brain warning you away from that one drink too many, or the crime of violence, guiding your every move from birth to death – that’s the Analogue Machine, a terrifying and ingenious psychological device for compelling conformity. Analogue Men is an exploration of man and society written with dazzling ingenuity and plausibility.

He reached for Churan’s throat and his hands closed on air…

…yet the alien had not moved. With a chill of terror, Naismith realized that his arm had passed completely through the ugly, green-skinned body.

The aliens’ laughter swelled out, malicious and mocking. Behind him, Lall’s voice said, “A nice try. But not good enough.”

Humpty Dumpty is a breakthrough work for this acknowledged master of the fantastic, an intriguing, entertaining, and immensely appealing novel of a man trying to make sense of a world gone mad. The tale begins when Wellington Stout wakes in an Italian hospital, uncertain how or why he came to be there. Gradually he learns that he was shot in the head in a Milan restaurant the night before his stepdaughter’s wedding, perhaps because of a mysterious packet his brother asked him to deliver. The doctors tell him he is fortunate to be alive, but Stout has his doubts. For the bullet that has entered his skull has also opened cracks in the fabric of reality, and, as in the old nursery rhyme, no force on Earth or in Heaven can put it back together again. Soon Stout is hearing voices foretelling his doom, encountering antediluvian cabals of dentists, extraterrestrial shoe salesmen, gargantuan rodents, seductive adolescent sibyls, and giant craters opening across the face of North America, and traveling on an uncertain odyssey through a distorted landscape made of the fragments of his own life and memory.

Patrick Joya lifted his head to scan the southern sky and saw a dark bluish shape flicker against the clouds. Growing larger and larger the object undulated like a wide piece of cloth carried along a moving current of water. He could hear the babble of voices around him swelling to a mounting groan of panic. The sound went racing like a cresting wave back toward the Terminal where the thousands there would be lifting their gaze skyward. Another Space Swimmer, Pat thought with sinking heart. It seemed as if it intended to swallow up the sky – for the brightness of day had blackened into night.

The ancient starship La Chasse Gallerie is found drifting perilously in space. Despite heavy damage from alien Laagi warships, incredibly the ship is till intact and the voice of its pilot, Raoul Penard, comes through loud and clear.

But Petard died over one hundred years ago.

On Earth, frantic investigation reveals that Petard may be dead but his mind is very much alive, merged with the ship itself. The staggering potential of this evolutionary breakthrough compels the scientists to embark on a technological journey of astonishing discovery.

In every mouse’s long life, there comes a time when ancestral voices tell him to move on. Pedlar, a yellow-necked mouse, has reached that point. Told to leave the Hedgerow and go on a long journey, the adventurous mouse says his farewells and sets out for a far-distant country knows as The House. Reaching his destination, Pedlar enters a strange new world inhabited by many warring tribes: the Stinkhorns of the cellar, the great Savage Tribe in the kitchen, the library Bookeaters, the Invisibles, the Deathshead and the rebellious 13-K Gang.

During his stay, Pedlar witnesses a momentous truce, in which the tribes come together at an Allthing meeting and decide to rid themselves of the greatest pests in The House, the greedy, stupid nudniks – the humans. And so the Great Nudnik Drive is set in motion, a time of considerable anxiety for the nudniks, when clocks strike twenty and inanimate objects seem to have a life of their own. Ranged against the mouse tribes are the nudniks’ allies: the two cats, Eyeball the Burmese blue and Spitz the ginger tom; the Headhunter, a barbarian human child; and Little Prince, the Headhunter’s cannibalistic pet white mouse. The House becomes a hotbed of riot and discord, until Pedlar finally comes up with a solution. The outcome of this heroic struggle has gone down in the annals of mouse history, a history tens of thousands of days long, and the whole remarkable tale is recorded here, between these pages.

“I’ll need your help. Come night and the Oracle again, I’m going to try the final couplet.”
“Jinian,” Murzy breathed while Dodie looked white-eyed at me. “Dangerous.”
“And fatal not to,” I said, still smiling at them all…

I wove by forest and meadow, branch and leaf. I wove by stream and pool, by river and fall. I wove by cloud and air, by thunder and sunset glow. I wove by depths of the earth, rock and gem, glittering ores and crystals blooming in the dark, old bone and new. Beside me the others wove as well…

“And all within sound of my voice or reach of the wind,” I cried, thrusting my voice like a Sending, like a magic spear, driving it upward. “And all within sound of my voice or lick of the wave, or all within sound of my voice or stretch of the soil, or all within sound of my voice where green grows and leaf springs up. Named or unnamed, silent or speaking. Let this message be brought,

By the Eye of the Star,
Where Old Gods Are!”

‘Welcome to Heaven’, said the voice. ‘The acquisition programme is entirely for females; but the occasional enterprising male does not displease us.’

Berry, Chief of his clan, knew his people could survive the dangers of the forest; and when winter came he made them build barricades against raiders from other clans. But no barricades were strong enough to hold against the Night Comers – huge silver beings of horrifying strength who carried away the womenfolk and were drastically lowering the human population.

Were the Night Comers men, monsters or gods? Berry believed they were men; and when the inevitable night came when the women of his clan were seized, he managed to follow. He followed them to a huge tapering column of metal, which took him away from the world he had known to an island in the sky called ‘heaven’.

And there Berry realised that he had to defeat the Lords of Heaven if the people on Earth were to survive.

At ten-thirty in the morning the skies over London were clear. Then an arrow formation of five bright points became visible. They appeared to be moving at an amazing speed in tight circles. They were spiralling down to about five thousand feet, and at that altitude their nature was easily discernable. They were the tings most of us had discussed and dismissed at one time o another. Flying Saucers. Giant saucers, smooth and lustrous and blinding, more than a hundred yards in diameter. They hung over the city in a neat formation.

‘You are an artificially constructed human being, a mobile gathering device.’
That is what the computer’s metallic voice tells Tanner when it releases him from his cell. Naked, unarmed, with no memory to guide him, he emerges into a savage world, into the ruins of Manhattan in the 23rd century where wild animals roam and men have become cannibals in a frantic struggle to survive.

Who has unleashed this chaos upon the world? Has Tanner really been dispatched to gather facts to help save the tragic remnants of humanity? Or is he to be the final instrument of its destruction?

Under Eddie Burton’s management the ambitious starlet Lorna Maxwell seemed headed for the top of Broadway’s glamorous world of make-believe. And then she vanished – through a wall where there was no door. Eddie found himself plunging after her into a city beyond reality.

In that weird twin city to New York, Eddie became a hunted fugitive while his girl friend turned up as an ever-present face and all-pervading voice that awed and mystified the inhabitants. And Eddie learned that between him and return to his natural home stood her new manager, a mysterious figure who ruled by a tyrannical combination of super-scientific miracle and brute force.

First published in 1965, this brilliant, prescient book is divided into three sections:

The first concerns space travel and other aspects of the new space age: how our concept of time must be modified when we travel long distances, the space seas of tomorrow, uses of the moon, how lower gravity will affect the sports of space colonists and other fascinating ideas.

The second part is about communications satellites, a field in which the author has already played the role of true prophet.

The third section ranges widely over the side implications of the space age – scientific meddling, the lunatic fringe and the moral obligations of scientists.

Seventeen of writer Michael Bishop’s favorite stories were handpicked from his previously uncollected works to create this compelling collection, providing an excellent overview of a career that includes award-winning science fiction, horror, fantasy, satire, space opera, and mystery. In “A Tapestry of Little Murders, ” a murderer attempts to escape along a literal road to self-destruction. A medical missionary, tortured by government thugs, reveals her dying wish in “With a Little Help from Her Friends.” In “The Procedure, ” an operation to remove a tumorous growth will hopefully excise from the patient’s mind and body all tendencies toward faith and superstition. From futuristic mystery and Vietnam-era dark fantasy to theological speculation on Christ’s death, a variety of lyrical voices speak through these haunting stories. An essay by the author divulges the genesis of each story.