Search Results for: alien

The time is the future. The place, an America so isolated by fear that it is cut off from the rest of the world by a massive defence system. Into this armed, barricaded state comes a young Russian scientist bearing a strange and almost unbelievable story: Superior, intelligent life – on a far higher order than any on earth – has been detected near the planet Pluto. Immune themselves by virtue of their far greater intelligence, these aliens are about to destroy the planet Earth.

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.

You didn’t make an Adapted Man with just a wave of the wand. It involved an elaborate constellation of techniques, known collectively as pantropy, that changed the human pattern in a man’s shape and chemistry before he was born.

But the pantropists didn’t stop with biology. Education, thoughts, ancestors and the world itself were changed, because the Adapted Men were produced to live and thrive in the alien environments found only in space. They were crucial to a daring plan to colonize the universe.

And millennia later, it is only fitting that they should return to a long forgotten planetary system to colonise a hostile world called . . . Earth.

An extra-terrestrial way of death.

When legendary linguist Marius Thorndyke visits the bizarre planet of Pe-Ellia, he is inexorably sucked into the local way of life, of sex, of death.

Nearly twice our size, powerful, intelligent, skin-changing yet roughly humanoid, the alien Pe-Ellians are vulnerable – and deadly.

During his heroic first encounter with an alien race, Dick Muller was permanently altered, hideously transformed in a way that left him repulsive to the entire human race. Alone and embittered, he exiled himself to Lemnos, an abandoned planet famed for its labyrinthine horrors, both real and imagined.

But now, Earth trembles on the brink of extinction, threatened by another alien species, and only Muller can rescue the planet. Men must enter the murderous maze of Lemnos, find Muller, and convince him to return with them.

But will the homeless alien, alone in the universe, risk his life to save his race, the race that has utterly rejected him?




(First published 1968)

Benita Alvarez, a downtrodden Hispanic woman, is chosen by alien envoys to be the Intermediary in their bid to get humankind to join an interstellar federation of peaceable races who practise Neighbourliness and strive to live ethical and moral lives.

But other alien races have their own plans for the verdant, over-populated planet and they have chosen their own contact: a down-and-dirty government Senator. They don’t want mankind to join the Federation, though: they just want hunting rights of Earth . . . hunting rights on man . . .

Duncan Chalk is a monstrous media mogul with a vast appetite for other people’s pain. He feeds off it, and carefully nurtures it in order to feed it to the public. It is inevitable that Chalk should home in on Minner Burris, a space traveller whose body was taken apart by alien surgeons and then put back together again – differently. Burris’ pain is constant. And so is that of Lona Kelvin, used by scientists to supply eggs for 100 children and then ruthlessly discarded. Only an emotional vampire like Chalk can see the huge audience eager to watch a relationship develop between these two damaged people. And only Chalk can make it happen.

First published in 1967

When she was a young girl Lucky belonged to a space-going mining commune which came upon an asteroid whose caves concealed the bones of serpentine aliens and humanoids. It was Lucky who discovered that the rock was an Ukko, a mysterious entity which would respond to stories told to it.

Centuries later Lucky, altered by the Ukko, is still alive, though capricious and sometimes crazy. By mating with her, her consort Bertel has had his life prolonged for centuries, as will the men who first bed her daughters – Lucky’s harvest.

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.

Predictably unpredictable, normally abnormal.

Watson combines science fiction and fantasy into an eclectic mix that includes stories about fallen angels in Hell rebelling and mounting a breakout, about the inconvenience of keeping aging parents in your brain instead of a nursing home, about Jesus’ immortal brother as solo passenger on the first starship, about alien coffins bombarding the solar system, about right-wing U.S. militias stealing a quantum computer to commit nuclear blackmail, about a computer games designer haunted by the cyber-ghost of his murdered wife, about frozen heads and strange mind-changes, and how a cake decorator defeats a vampire with a sweet tooth. De-evolution, treasure-hunting via hang glider, dark animal fantasies, humanity as hive-entity, Hercules Poirot on a starship – Watson takes the strange, the eerie the weird, mixes his seasoned writing skills, and produces a potpourri of the fantastic. These nineteen stories are sure to amuse, bemuse and entertain.

Vengeance of the oppressed…

Pawl Paxwax was now Master of the eleven human families who rule the galaxy, and free to marry his loved one, the remarkable Laurel Beltane.

But Pawl’s happiness was to be short-lived. The many oppressed alien species who paid dearly for humanity’s triumph were about to rise up in bloody retribution – with Pawl as their unwitting instrument.

The Fall Families is the epic sequel to Master of Paxwax, an extraordinary interstellar revenge tragedy played out against an immense and powerfully imagined canvas of the far future.

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?

Bill would give his right arm to defend his Emperor against the alien Chingers – which is lucky seeing as he has two of them…



War demands sacrifices, and if you’ve lot one left arm, have an artificial foot and a set of nifty surgically-implanted tusks, it’s a small price to pay for the privilege of being a hero. And Bill knows all about heroism – as part of a motley crew his new task is to track down the source of Chinger-controlled metal dragons that are making mincemeat out of humans…

Jacque LeFavre is a tamer – a member of one of the tough and honed exploration teams that, since the dramatic discovery of the Levant-Meyer Translation, humankind has been able to send to the stars. And Jacque’s first world is the second planet out from Groombridge 1618. It isn’t an especially promising place; the planets accompanying small stars rarely pan out. But the strange and mysterious creature that Jacque and his colleagues find there, with its gift of telepathy, leads to contact with the alien and enigmatic L’vrai, and confronts humankind with an awesome opportunity – and appalling danger.

William Mandela is a genetic throwback, one of the small group of humans who fought and survived the Forever War. They returned to find humanity has evolved into a group mind called Man.

Surrounded by a society that is too autocratic and intrusive, living a dull existence which cannot compare to the certainties of combat and feeling increasingly alienated, the veterans plan an escape to the future by means of space travel and relativity. But when their ship starts to fail, their journey becomes a search for the Unknown, the elusive entity responsible.