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After centuries of fighting wizards, dedicated scientists have found the answer to winning the war: turn magic into science. Reduce it to its final empirical base, to be read and studied.

But to gather such information, the Special Office decides a transmitter must be implanted in a legendary unicorn, the prize talisman of the most powerful magician. Then it can spy upon the highest councils of sorcery and the daily transmissions analyzed.

Wearing this electronic eye in places of his own, Aden enters the Holy City and carries out the mission. But it leaves him vulnerable to the wonders of enchantment, and he wanders the middle ground between two warring forces. As scientific rationality picks up momentum and the enchantment of the enemy crumbles away before it, Aden – and those out to stop him – races to find the unicorn again.

Welcome to a haunted world; the world of Keith Roberts’ powerful and unique imagination. These stories show Roberts’ fascination for the curious and unclassifiable; and as ever, his mastery of character and detail. ‘Susan’ introduces the reader to a schoolgirl with awesome psychic powers; but the sensitive treatment turns a shock situation into a brilliant fable, while ‘The Scarlet Lady’, predating Stephen King’s Christine, has the genuine stench of petrol, oil and demons. ‘The Eastern Windows’ chillingly continues the theme; by contrast, ‘Winderwood’ introduces us to a fearsome locale that Roberts insists is real. ‘Mrs. Cibber’ transports the reader, with complete conviction, to the smog-ridden London of the fifties and unfolds the strange tale of a young graphic designer haunted by a woman from the eighteenth century. ‘The Snake Princess’, equally atmospheric, tells the story of a boy’s doomed, bizarre love, while ‘Everything in the Garden’ presents the tour de force of a haunting within a haunting.

Kaeti and her companions inhabit a strange world; a ‘theatre of the mind’ where the unexpected is commonplace, where ghosts, vampires and even the odd goddess may be encountered at any turn. It is a tribute to the author’s skill that Kaeti’s world seems, at all times, as real as our own, sometimes uncomfortably so. Whether satirising the mores of the Thames Valley or exposing the curious antics of the publishing world, Roberts is equally at home. He explores the gamut of human emotions; high comedy alternates with terror, the most delicate of love scenes are set against the iron dreariness of Death Row. Always though, at the focus, is Kaeti; witty and resourceful, resilient and vulnerable by turns. Some characters may change their roles with lightning speed, like the players i n a repertory company – but Kaeti remains. As does London. Robert always displays a knowledge of a city haunted by its own past, and a love for its highways and byways, that will surprise old fans and win him many new admirers.

Acting sergeant Thorolf Zigramson of the Fourth Commonwealth Foot, an aspiring scholar but a soldier by default, somewhat reluctantly rescues Yvette, the beautiful countess of Grintz, from the soldiers set after her by an evil duke who covets her body and her land. After elderly magician Doctor Bardi mistakenly transforms Yvette into an octopus, Thorolf turns to sinister Doctor Orlandus to restore her true form and discovers that the Doctor Orlandus has invaded the minds of his followers, including Yvette, and is slowly assuming control of the government of Rhaetia. When Thorolf is accused of Doctor Bardi’s murder, he flees to the trolls, one of whom he must wed to gain sanctuary and keep from being eaten. From their uncertain stronghold he mounts an expedition to rescue his beloved countess and his country.

The Producer thinks he’s God’s gift to women – whether they’re human or alien.

The Director is delighted to work on a wild and woolly planet, where he can really behave like Attila the Hun. Some of the local natives are trying to steal the film crew blind – while others plan all-out war.

And if that weren’t enough, every time Tour Guide Fergus Reith turns around, he stumbles over another of his ex wives or girlfriends!

The Swords of Zinjaban is the fourth of L. Sprague de Camp’s Krishna book – interplanetary romance in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian Tales.

In Rolltown, Reynolds has turned his productive imagination towards the growing phenomenon of mobile living in America. Taking us decades into the future, he tells the story of a world where people have taken to the road en masse, in huge mobile “towns” composed of hundreds or even thousands of inhabitants, attempting to deal with a hostile and over-organized world.

What would the world be like if the Russians discovered how to beat us at our own capitalistic game, and began dumping inexpensive, quality goods on the world market?

In this brand new novel, Mack Reynolds deposits us into just such a future. It is a world where America is rapidly being turned into a second-rate power as its industries go bankrupt. A world that is falling under the wheels of the Soviet juggernaut, peacefully and passively. It is a world where the U.S. has only one way to retaliate – by bringing a little religion into the Soviet Union, a very special religion.

For over a century, the human colonists on the planet Gaia have prospered under the guidance of the M’threnni. But when David arrives in the capital Helixport and makes contact with the aliens, he begins to learn the terrifying truth about them. From that moment on he is in mortal danger, for the M’threnni far from being silent benefactors, may turn out to be the deadliest of cruel dictators.

Marvin Martin, the show’s host, is angry. Night after night he strips his guests of their pitiful pretensions, their commonplace hypocrisies – but how long has it been since he uncovered a genuine revelation?

Hurwitz, who selects Martin’s victims, is scared. He made a bad mistake when he chose Doris Jensen; she turned out to be from a competitive network and ruined a taping. Hurwitz’s job is in danger.

Walter Monaghan, historically, the 29th man to have walked on the moon, is desperate. He wants to tell the Revelations audience the truth about America’s “space program” – that it never got off the ground. If he’s just another nut, why is it so important that he be silenced?

When empires hung on the turn of a card…

Cheyne Scarne was a gambler – a lucky one. What he didn’t know about randomatics wasn’t worth knowing. He had brains to get right to the heart of the Grand Wheel – the syndicate that controlled all illegal activity in the planets under human control.

But what Scarne had staked to get that far was chickenfeed compared to what he would risk to get into the real big time – the massive intergalactic combine that dwarfed the empires of mere men.

For Scarne, double-crossing at every deal, had laid his life on the line to win a game where no one knew the value of the cards and the rules changed with every trick!

The alien spaceship was unthinkably huge, enormously powerful, apparently irresistible. It came from the void and settle on Earth, striking awe into the hearts of all who saw it. Its burden, however, was not conquest – but a call for the brilliant team of scientists, Arcot, Wade and Morey, explorers of the islands of space. And what they learned was an offer of an alliance against an invading foe so powerful that no known force could turn back.

John W. Campbell’s Invaders from the Infinite is a veritable odyssey of the universe, exploring world after world, and uncovering cosmic secret after cosmic secret. Here is a classic novel of super-science that may never be surpassed.

War hero, jet-setter, gourmet – Godwin Harpinshield was all of those and more; his life was a game played among the Beautiful People whose fame, wealth and power set them above the law, and beyond the laws of nature. Because of a simple bargain that all the Beautiful People made, Godwin’s every desire was his for the asking. Seduced by luxury, Godwin never doubted his fortune, never wondered about his mysterious patrons.


Then the game turned ugly.


Suddenly, the ante was raised and the game was real. The stakes were his future, his sanity and, possibly, his very soul. All Godwin Harpinshield had to discover was: What were the rules of the game? And who – or what – were the other players?

It was carnival time on Earth. Prosperity was at its peak; science had triumphed over environment; all human needs were taken care of by computers, robots and androids. There was nothing left for humans to do but enjoy, themselves . . . to seek pleasure where they found it, without inhibitions and without thinking of the price.

Then an android died – in a senseless, brutal murder. And young Derry Horn was shocked out of his boredom and alienation. His life of flabby ease had not prepared him for a fantastically dangerous mission to outlying, primitive stars – but now, at last, he had a reason for living. And even when he found himself a prisoner of ruthless slavers, even when he learned the shocking truth about what the androids really were and where they came from . . . even when he saw all the laws of the orderly, civilised universe he knew turned upside-down and inside-out . . . he fought on.

For that universe had to be shattered and reborn – even if Derry Horn and the Earth he had irrevocably left behind died in the process!



(First published 1968)

When racial hatred turns to murderous menace . . .

First a rocket ship loses its engines on take-off and is destroyed. On board – an important extra-terrestrial visitor.

Next someone slams into the sealed vehicle used for transporting aliens around in the lethal atmosphere of Earth.

Then the vital controlled environment for the Tau Cetian delegation is sabotaged. Oxygen leaks in, and the aliens are half burnt alive.

Even if it means brutal murder, The Stars Are For Man League is determined to shatter the harmony between Earth and civilizations on other planets – and to keep mankind supreme among the alien life forms. Only one man can stop them – a man who unknowingly nurses a viper in his bosom . . .

First published in 1965.

Whether or not he had wanted to turn back at the last minute, he couldn’t have – the wave of dirty, hungry people carried him helplessly along in their fervour reach the temple. Like dope addicts, he told himself, they don’t even care about themselves, only about the thing that is inside the temple!

He remembered the day ten years ago when his older brother had been made a Warden of Asconel, a prosperous and happy planet, and he and his other brothers had left in the interests of their people. Now they returned to a world where a fanatical cult had usurped the Warden’s chair, and men and women were offering themselves up as human sacrifices to Belizuek – whoever or whatever that being from beyond the galaxy was . . .

I’ll find out, he told himself grimly, when I enter these doors . . .



(First published 1965)

AWAKEN, TERROR!

When the first expedition descended to the bottom of the Atlantic in a perfected high-pressure diving bell, their speculation ran wild as to the wonders they would encounter in that unknown sea-bottom world.

But their wildest dreams did not prepare them for uncovering first, the stones of an ancient civilization, and second, the monstrous body of an inhuman creature that had been sealed beneath the waters for countless eons.

Then, at the height of their excitement, elation turned to horror. For they had brought back an abomination so old that the memory of it had been lost to man’s remotest ancestors. Shops were disappearing, men and women were becoming enslaved by invisible whips of mental mastery, and it began to look as if it might be beyond the powers even of modern science to stop something that had so successfully defied time and space.

Because of a twist in the structure of Time, three strangers were brought unexpectedly together: Red Hawkins of California, Chantal Vareze of London and a man from the 41st Century. Their meeting seemed an impossible prank of a universe gone mad – but it turned out to be quite otherwise.

For it seemed there was a war going on throughout space and time. A war fought by men of different epochs, on planets of different cultures, but for a cause that all could acknowledge – the very continued existence of creation itself.

And the coming together of these three very unlikely people – a modern man, a lovely girl and a futurian soldier – was to prove the master stroke of a super-science strategy that had already brought humanity to the THRESHOLD OF ETERNITY.

When a young Russian boy disappears from a top-secret Soviet research establishment and turns up in Tokyo, he presents a major problem for the American security officials. For the boy appears to be part of a sophisticated experiment and to have the mind of a supposedly dead astronaut imperfectly imprinted on his own. If the boy is to be believed, then the experiment has been extended to a whale.

In Mexico, ground-breaking research by Nobel Prize winner Paul Hammond has shown that what we perceive as the Universe is no more than the ghost of the real thing. Signals received by his radio telescope have shown him that the Universe God created no longer exists.

Winner of the BSFA Award for best novel, 1977

Sheri Tepper, one of the foremost science fiction writers in the world, gives us an exciting, evocative and thought-provoking tale where science and magic meet head-on. A group of colonists, waking every few hundred years to see what’s been happening on the planet they fled to from a dying Earth, watch as the systems and rules they set in place so long ago become debased and decayed.

The corrupt leaders govern by oppression, but technological resources run low and the knowledge of how to replace them is lost in the mists of time. Instead, the power-hungry leaders turn to sorcery of the blackest kind, kindled by pain and despair.

And when they launch a religious crusade to wipe out all those who won’t conform to the government’s ever-more-stringent dictates, not even the original colonists – the new gods – are safe from the ravaging sorcery-fuelled armies of the righteous . . .

For more than a thousand years, Homeworld has been unchanged: the Great Houses rule and peace between them is enforced by unbreakable webs of kinship. The Folk accept what the system offers them – stability, prosperity and peace – and the Indigenes are placid.

Then, on one night of rebellion everything changes, as the Folk overthrow the Great Houses. Joseph, the young son of one Great House is visiting another and survives the violence, but his home is ten thousand miles away and communications and transport have been destroyed. For all he knows his family may have been wiped out but his only hope lies in making that ten thousand mile trek across a world turned strange and hostile.

To succeed, he must set aside all his old beliefs and assumptions and learn the truth about the world he lives in.

This novel is about the first truly modern man.

His name’s Bob Shairp, and he gets completely turned into data and stored on computer tape. (How modern can you get?)

Actually, there are quite a few other modern characters (though none so modern as Bob) in this book. There’s Wes Davis, who knows the U.S. Army is part of a Black Conspiracy. And Billy Koch, the great faith-healing evangelist who orders a robot replica of himself to share the burden of crusading. And Glen Dale, editor of Stagman magazine and, strangely enough, a virgin. And Wise Bream, god of the Utopi Indians. And others, too numerous to enumerate.

The second and concluding volume of Ian Watson’s extraordinary epic, The Book of Mana. Kaleva is Earth’s first and only interstellar colony, discovered by Lucky Sariola who was transported there by an Ukko, a mysterious asteriod-like entity that responds to stories told to it – in Lucky’s case, those of her Finnish grandmother. Now Queen Lucky, half-mad and newly widowed, is obsessed by relocating that Ukko – but this is potentially disastrous, as the snakelike alien Isi are also on its trail as part of their design to enslave humans. Understanding this, one of Lucky’s daughters (with obsessions of her own) crowns herself rival queen. A summer turns into unseasonable winter and elysian peace turns to bitter civil war and Ukko, once more, has a role to play in the history of Kaleva.

BILL – the perfect Starship Trooper: big, brawny, and brainwashed. Possessor of two right arms (impressive when it comes to saluting) and a foot that is threatening to turn into something more suited to being an umbrella stand than anything that could be squeezed into a size 11 sneaker.



BILL – a perfect recruit for the good ship Bounty, bound for the Chinger war and carrying a cargo of as nice a company of homicidal misfits and maniacs as you could wish to meet outside of a penitentiary asylum (which is where they’ve just come from).



BILL, THE GALACTIC HERO – he’s back, he’s bad and about to meet the most hideous alien lifeform of his entire career. He’d do anything to save his skin without rocking the boat – but mutiny? On the Bounty?