Search Results for: Air

Wheelworld: An unforgiving planet where the sun is about to rise and will not set for another four years; where an ancient peasant hierarchy still rules a society equipped with the highest technology; where the people are as dependent on visiting ships as they are on the very air that they breathe; home for some, but for Jan Kulozik it is an eternal prison.

And when ships don’t come, Jan finds himself at the centre of an epic struggle for power, and survival…

Earthly medicine – helpless in the face of a plague from space.

Unexpectedly, long thought lost, the first manned Jupiter probe has returned – but only a madman would have tried to land it at Kennedy International! The result is the biggest air disaster in history. And that’s only the beginning: now comes The Jupiter Plague.

Code word – “onion bagel”

That little phrase would put FBI agent Tony Hawkin in touch with the Israeli commando unit at Cohn’s Fancy Bakery in London, should he ever need help. And Tony needed help like he needed air to breathe!

The trouble was, he wasn’t cut out for the FBI. He couldn’t shoot straight, and had a tendency to panic when things went wrong. But somehow he’d got himself handcuffed to a case containing two million dollars, bundled aboard a hijacked DC-10 and whisked off to darkest Scotland, where he found himself hotly pursued by a lot of people who wanted to get their hands on the money – and around his throat. People like the hijackers. And a bunch of fanatical Scots patriots. And some Cuban thugs led by a mad Colonel. And the police.

Tom Hawkin was lost and terrified in an apparently crazy country. Which was why he yelled Onion Bagel at the first opportunity…

Unexpectedly, long thought lost, the first manned Jupiter probe has returned – but only a madman would have tried to land it at Kennedy International! The result is the biggest air disaster in history. And that’s only the beginning . . .

Colonel McCulloch was up to no good. That was becoming very clear indeed. He had stashed away a quarter of a million dollars in gold, and was a prime suspect in a couple of murder cases.

But secret agent Troy Harman can find no trace of his whereabouts. McCulloch has vanished into thin air.

When Harman visits the research station where McCulloch worked as security chief, he realises the awful truth.

To follow McCulloch, to try to put an end to his insane mission – Troy Harman has to embark on a strictly one-way trip . . .

“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!”

The Civilizations of the First and Second Man have been destroyed by the products of their own technology. Now the world is emerging from a new dark age into the dawn of a second Middle Ages. Britain is dominated by a Luddite Church and by the doctrine that all machines are evil.
Into this strange world comes Kieron, an artist’s apprentice who is inflamed by a forbidden dream – to construct a flying machine which will enable man to soar through the air like a bird.

Several light-years west of the Earth’s Sun lay the planet, Lucifer, circling a sun of its own, circled by its own two moons. The five specially selected and trained passengers of the “Argo” found much on Lucifer to remind them of the Earth they had left eleven years before. The air was invigorating, the vegetation lush, and there were people – a race of friendly white giants and a swarming population of wary pygmy tribes.

The Earth pioneers soon faced the problem of survival on the red-green planet, and also the founding of a democratic civilization among the strife-torn pygmies. However, they were soon entwined in a brutal war between opposing pygmy forces. On the outcome of this war hinged the very fate of the new way of life on Lucifer…

Scott Warden is a man haunted by the past – and soon to be haunted by the future.
In early twenty-first-century Thailand, Scott is an expatriate slacker. Then, one day, he inadvertently witnesses an impossible event: the violent appearance of a 200-foot stone pillar in the forested interior. Its arrival collapses trees for a quarter mile around its base, freezing ice out of the air and emitting a burst of ionizing radiation. It appears to be composed of an exotic form of matter. And the inscription chiseled into it commemorates a military victory…sixteen years in the future.
Shortly afterwards, another, larger pillar arrives in the center of Bangkok – obliterating the city and killing thousands. Over the next several years, human society is transformed by these mysterious arrivals from, seemingly, our own near future. Who is the warlord “Kuin” whose victories they note?
Scott wants only to rebuild his life. But some strange look of causality keeps drawing him in, to the central mystery and a final battle with the future.

The time: 1979

The place: a top-secret US Air Force base in the Cotswolds

The actors: carefully selected, healthy-living personnel

The missions: long-range reconnaissance flights

The problem: is there any connection between these flights and the growing menace of a strange blood-cancer disease that is spreading through the world? Several of the more intelligent and intuitive realise that there is. There are those who retain their integrity, and doing so, lose their lives; and there are those who live silently in their knowledge, condemned to lives of emotional death.

The hill below the fortress of Taurovinda, stronghold of Urtha, High King of the Cornovidi, is coming alive: the Otherworldly realm of the Shadows of Heroes are claiming the land as their own. But this time their actions are driven by a force that is darker and older than even the oldest among the ghosts. Who or what is raising the Dead? Merlin, a temporary resident in the fortress, must answer that question if this time of kings and lovers is to be saved. Jason’s wonderful ship, Argo, has returned, drawn back by her own guilty past, and a dreadful secret that she will reveal only to Merlin. Argo holds the key to the mystery. And Niiv, the bewitching, beautiful Northlands enchantress, is working her way even closer into Merlin’s charms.

This is a journey that will take Merlin back in history, and to a fabled island of legend. Love is in the air. But at a price.

The lowland girl seemed to contain fire. Her hair stirred, flickered, gushed upward, blowing flame in a wind that did now blow.

A tower of light shot up the sky, beginning where the girl stood. For half a second there was only light, then it took form.

The form it took was Anackire.

She towered, she soared. Her flesh was a white mountain. Her snake’s tail a river of fire in spate. Her golden head touched the apex of the sky, and there the serpents of her hair snapped like lightnings. Her eyes were twin suns. The eight arms, outheld as the two arms of the girl had been, rested weightlessly on the air, the long fingers subtly moving…

The girl standing before the well, unblasted by the entity she had released, seemed only quiescent. At last one could see that her face, as it had always been, was the face of Anackire…

The Soviet Union won the Cold War. The Russians were a little smarter than they were in our own world, and the United States was a little dumber and a lot less resolute. Now, more than a century later, the world’s gone Communist, and capitalism is a bad word.

For Gianfranco and his friend Annarita, a couple of teenagers growing up in Milan, life in a heavily regimented, surveillance-rich command economy is just plain dreary. The eventual withering-away of the state doesn’t look like it’s going to happen anytime soon.

Annarita’s a hard-working student and a member of the Young Socialists’ League. Gianfranco is a lot less motivated–but on the other hand, his father’s a Party apparatchik. The biggest excitement in their lives is a wargame shop called The Gladiator, which runs tournaments, and stocks marvelous complex games you can’t find anywhere else.

Then, abruptly, the shop is shut down. Someone’s figured out that The Gladiator’s games are teaching counterrevolutionary capitalist principles. The Security Police are searching high and low for the shop’s proprietors, who’ve not only vanished into thin air, but have left behind sets of fingerprints that aren’t in the records of any government on earth.

Only one staffer is left: Gianfranco and Annarita’s friend Eduardo. He’s on the run, and he comes to them in secret with an astonishing story: he’s a time trader from our own timeline, accidentally left behind when the store was evacuated. The only way Eduardo can get home to his own timeline is if Gianfranco and Annarita can help him reach one of the other time trader sites in this world – and the Security Police will be on their tails all the way there…

INTO THIN AIR

“A porteur? Never heard of it.” Robert Prestin was just an ordinary aviation journalist who had never heard of such things as porteurs, nor of other dimensions that supplied jewels to the Earth, nor of the metamorphic Borgia-like countess who ran the show with the aid of her scarlet-scaled Thrugs. And certainly he had never heard of a Lombok vine that could grow faster than a man could run.

No, Robert Prestin was just an ordinary man who sometimes lost things. That is until he sat next to a beautiful girl on a plane headed for Rome – and lost her somewhere in mid-air! At that point he knew he had a lot to learn, because somehow he had – or was – the key to Irunium.

An adventure of the near future – brought on by a catastrophe in the far future. On a summer’s day like any other, holes appeared in the air and people from nowhere walked through them into our world.

They came, and they kept coming, until they numbered in the millions. They said they came from the future – they were our children’s children. They said there was trouble “up there”. They knew they were a terrible burden on our economy, and all, but – well, we couldn’t just let them starve, could we?

Then more facts became apparent.The “holes in the air” were time tunnels, one-way tunnels from the future. The trouble up there was in the form of alien creatures – ravening beasts with teeth, claws, and tentacles, that reproduced like bacteria and were intelligent.They were utterly uncontrollable and so our children’s children fled through the time tunnels, which, they claimed, were securely guarded. The beasts, whatever or whoever they were, couldn’t get through. So they claimed.

But then somebody up there slipped and the beasts were abroad.

Sixteen humans have come together on Damien, a distant world where once, dreams were stolen and atrocities took place. They have gathered to view the last rising of a manmade nova, the testament to a war none can forget.

Soon, time will warp and masks will fall. Soon, violence will erupt anew – along with treachery, horror, murder, release and love.

Soon, some will find justice . . . and others, judgement. Soon.

Now, sixteen humans have gathered – to await the light of the Murdered Star.

Star humans were engineered to exist within the mantle of a star, mere tools of their Earth-evolved makers in a war against the Xeelee, owners of the universe. Stephen Baxter’s third novel in his magnificent Xeelee Sequence is an exotic and endearing story of an abandoned people.

Abandoned to their fate, their history lost along with contact with their makers, Star people survive in an environment that is possibly the strangest in science fiction. Microscopic inhabitants of superfluid air above a Quantum Sea and below the tangled Crust of the Star, swimming in an electric-blue grid, the Magfield, which is subject to violent storms, Star people struggle, like us, to make sense of their world… and the threat hanging over it.

Though the truth is far more disturbing and ominous than they feared, they will confront, finally, their makers, and they will rebel against the purpose for which they were created.

Billy Byrne squared his broad shoulders and filled his deep lungs with the familiar medium which is known as air in Chicago. He was standing upon the platform of a New York Central train that was pulling into the La Salle Street Station, and though the young man was far from happy something in the nature of content pervaded his being, for he was coming home. After something more than a year of world wandering and strange adventure Billy Byrne was coming back to the great West Side and Grand Avenue. Now there is not much upon either side or down the center of long and tortuous Grand Avenue to arouse enthusiasm, nor was Billy particularly enthusiastic about that more or less squalid thoroughfare. The thing that exalted Billy was the idea that he was coming back to show them. He had left under a cloud and with a reputation for genuine toughness and rowdyism that has seen few parallels even in the ungentle district of his birth and upbringing.


A girl had changed him. She was as far removed from Billy’s sphere as the stars themselves; but Billy had loved her and learned from her, and in trying to become more as he knew the men of her class were he had sloughed off much of the uncouthness that had always been a part of him, and all of the rowdyism.


Billy Byrne was no longer the mucker.

The daughter of rich but neglectful parents, Terisa Morgan lives alone in a New York City apartment, a young woman who has grown to doubt her own existence. Surrounded by the flat reassurance of mirrors, she leads an unfulfilled life-until the night a strange man named Geraden comes crashing through one of her mirrors, on a quest to find a champion to save his kingdom of Mordant from a pervasive evil that threatens the land. Terisa is no champion. She wields neither magic nor power. And yet, much to her own surprise, when Geraden begs her to come back with him, she agrees.Now, in a culture where women are little more than the playthings of powerful men, in a castle honeycombed with secret passages and clever traps, in a kingdom threatened from without and within by enemies able to appear and vanish out of thin air, Terisa must become more than the pale reflection of a person. For the way back to Earth is closed to her. And the enemies of Mordant will stop at nothing to see her dead.

One moment Kenniston was strolling down the quiet street, lost in pleasant reverie. The next moment the sky split open!

It split wide open, and above them was a burn and a blaze of light – so swift, so violent, that the air itself seemed to have burst into flame. Then there was silence – awful, suffocating silence.

Kenniston felt the chill of premonition – a shapeless terror that grew into a thing too evil to be borne alone.

Mercury is slowly dying. Each year its air grows thinner. Each month thousands of broken Mercurians are ordered to leave their planet.

They have only one hope. Captain Future, the Solar System’s most daring agent, has promised to restore their world – a next to impossible task.

The solution lies beyond the stars…at the very core of the universe where no man has ventured before. There, in the shadow of doom, Captain Future meets the mightiest of all evil beings – creatures he may not live to describe…

The Tavona is called to action once again!

When signals from space summon Vargo, the Professor joins the crew to conduct more research into the alien races their adventures have introduced to them. This journey takes them into the unknown reaches of the galaxy, trying to find a planet which has shifted orbit between solar systems. On their way they face snake aliens, tiny meteorites, and worlds where the air itself is deadly.

The eighth instalment in Captain W. E. Johns’ science fiction series brings more classic sci fi adventures from the legendary creator of Biggles.

The stories in A Ghostly Gallery were written over a period of sixty years, the whole length of Joan Aiken’s writing career; some appeared in her very first collections of what her father Conrad Aiken called “Twentieth century Fairy stories for the young of all ages.”


Stories include A Roomful of Leaves, where a boy escapes an unbearable family and disappears into the Elizabethan past, and the luminously uplifting Watkyn Comma about a ghost mouse who rescues a lonely heroine. These stories often inspired by dreams and myths are written to comfort and console. Some appeared in anthologies, such as a Pan Ghost Book, or in her own collections for younger readers, which came out in England and America. As she moved away from overtly scary stories towards the end of her life, these are her gentler tales of mystery and imagination.

Two of the stories have not previously appeared in an Aiken collection.
Dancing in the Air, and Lungewater

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

An innocent enough advertisement, placed by General Maxwell, retired war hero and beloved squire of Duntisbury Royal, equally innocent hamlet nestled in the English countryside. But the results are explosive…

Although it seems obvious that the IRA’s stars are rising, there’s a more global type of conspiracy in the country air. The CIA and the KGB are suddenly sniffing around, along with British Intelligence Chief Dr David Audley – whose intuition for mischief and espionage puts him right in the midst of the action.