Search Results for: alien

Jandar – the alien abducted by the mad Tharkolian princess Zamara and taken prisoner in the Scarlet City, along with his devoted companion Ergon and beloved Darloona – effects a daring celestial escape. But freedom proves more terrifying than the most heinous captivity when they find themselves adrift in the skies of the great monstrous ghastozar, enslaved by the barbaric arthropods of the Yathoon Horde and at the fiendish mercy of an insidious Kuurian Mind Wizard determined to snare them in a macabre and horrifying web of death…

He was Karn, the savage of the sky-high trees. He was protector and defender of the princess Niamh, whose very city was lost in the mapless jungles of the world under the Green Star. But he was also an Earthling, whose helpless body lay in suspended animation in a guarded mansion in New England. It was his alien mind that drove Karn through perils that no other wold dare…

In the Green Star’s Glow is a science fantasy novel in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Written by American author Lin Carter, it is the final book in his Green Star series. It was first published in 1976.

In the marvel-adventure sagas of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Otis Adelbert Kline, and John Norman, has there ever been a situation such as befell the Earthling who found his way to the world under the Green Star? For while his real body lay crippled and silent under the sun of old Earth, his mind occupied the vigorous body of a young primitive on that alien planet of mighty trees, floating cities, and unmapped limits. And in that guise he had found incredible friends, a royal love, and inhuman and superhuman enemies. But no matter what predicament he was in – and as this book starts he is alone, abandoned on an uncharted sea – his courage never flagged though the greatest of risks would confront him as the Green Star rises.

The human race was expanding through the galaxy . . . and so, they knew, were the Aliens. When two expanding empires meet . . . war is inevitable. Or is it . . .?

The radar-complex had picked up the strange object in space just as it neared the earth’s surface. It was described as “an object of considerable size.” The impact of its landing at Boulder Lake Park, Colorado, was felt on every seismograph in the world. Then the first reports began to trickle in: there were “creatures” on board? Creatures who soon left their ship and began exploring the area …

Where was the ship from, and what was the quest of the strange visitors? These visitors who were armed with a terrifying paralysis ray that blinded its victims, filling their nostrils with a reptilian odor of the jungle?

Only one man in the Boulder Lake Park area could hope to solve the mystery of the “Aliens” who had come to call on earth …

Orejas de ellos, the things who listen, whispered the superstitious fishermen when the strange occurrences began off the Philippine coast. How else could you explain the sudden disappearance of a vessel beneath a mysterious curtain of foam? The writhings of thousands of maddened fish trapped in a coffin-like area of ocean? An alien intelligence gorged at the bottom of the Luzon Deep and made its plans. Radar expert Terry Holt and the crew of the Experance had to devise a weapon against the horrifying creatures which threatened mankind with extinction.

When Stellaris, the first human interstellar ship, unexpectedly hurtles off the earth, it takes the ship’s designer, Rob Cantrell, his girlfriend and a skeleton crew with it into the furthest reaches of space. If only that was their biggest problem! With no star maps, killer aliens on their tail and a ship that was only half finished, their journey home is going to be quite the challenge!

There is a town that brews a strange intoxicant from a rare fruit called the deathberry-and once a year a handful of citizens are selected to drink it. . . .

There is a life lived beneath the water-among rotted buildings and bloated corpses-by those so overburdened by the world’s demands that they simply give up and go under. . . .

In this mesmerizing blend of the familiar and the fantastic, multiple award-winning New York Times notable author Jeffrey Ford creates true wonders and infuses the mundane with magic. In tales marked by his distinctive, dark imagery and fluid, exhilarating prose, he conjures up an annual gale that transforms the real into the impossible, invents a strange scribble that secretly unites a significant portion of society, and spins the myriad dreams of a restless astronaut and his alien lover.

At times literary, at other times surreal, this collection offers an eclectic group of stories that deal with real-life conflicts, human values, and coming-of-age experiences all placed within fantastical settings. One tale recounts the author’s search for a Kafka story that can only be found in an elusive and quite possibly cursed edition. Other stories feature humans dressing in full-body protective exoskins in the personas of old Hollywood movie stars to barter old Earth movies for an alien aphrodisiac and a young boy coming to terms with creation and moulding his own man out of detritus from a nearby forest. In the title story, a great fantasy writer loses touch with the world he has created and pleads with his young assistant to help him visualise the story’s end and enable him to complete his greatest novel ever.

In Earthsong, the Native Tongue trilogy’s long-awaited finale, the Aliens have abandoned Earth, taking their technologies with them and plunging the planet into economic and ecological disaster. Devastated, the women decide to take their failed Láadan project back underground, desperately seeking guidance from their long-dead foremothers. The women discover an ingenious solution to the problem of human violence and seek to spread their knowledge-but has their final solution come too late?

Alien horror becomes a living nightmare as the Xenos, meaning “strangers”, inflict mayhem on earth.

International distress alerts are sent out when planes first seem to disappear, disturbing concepts of space and time and leaving a trail of death and disillusionment. This bizarre series of “cosmic skyjackings” is shrouded in secrecy by a baffled and frightened military. Intense surveillance fails to reveal the cause of a seemingly hostile yet invisible enemy. Aircraft continue to disappear, plucked out of the sky without warning, only to reappear months later, thousands of miles off course.

National and global security is under threat and the ICARUS committee is formed to investigate. Military officials, the government and the FBI work alongside physician Mark Freedman and Soviet scientists to uncover the supernatural mystery that lies behind these unexplainable events. Earth has been found by a horde of creatures that not even the wildest imagination could invent – sinister parasitic creatures that took to their human hosts with deadly speed and bloodthirsty precision.

The terror that unfolds has terrifying consequences for all involved, and the invasion reveals something much more frightening and final than ever suspected.

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

Welcome to Argylle, where the ruling family – a brilliant, flighty, civilized and occasionally dangerous clan of nearly-immortal warriors and magicians – are hoping for a few years of relative peace.

True, their Father Gaston has vanished, leaving both throne and family while he pursues some unexplained errand. His absence has stretched into years. True as well that their powerful Uncle Dewar has also wandered off without leaving a forwarding address, and hasn’t been heard from for a worrisome length of time. It’s a bad habit of running off that this family’s elders have.

But now young Prince Gwydion’s been stuck with ruling the Dominion of Argylle, and with any luck, life can go back to being a satisfactory mixture of intrigue, gossip and viniculture, periodically enlivened by amateur theatricals and the odd quest or two.

Yet Gwydion is finding this arrangement uncomfortable. Strange things keep turning up. A plague of monsters appears out of nowhere, attempting to take up residence in the local barns and forests. These are trumped by the arrival of a ravenous Great Dragon – ancient, sorcerous, profoundly cunning – so big you can see it thirty miles away. Meanwhile, a mysterious young woman has shown up, claiming to be Gwydion’s long-lost – indeed, quite unexpected – sister. And then there are the high-tech aliens, who say they just want to conduct a legal investigation. It’s enough, Gwydion thinks, to make a ruler want to find some nice long errand that’ll take him away from his homeland for a spell…

The Well-Favored Man is a courtly, complex, bloody-minded fantasy for those who love Roger Zelazny’s Amber, Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint and the fantasy adventures of Steven Brust.

In the distant future, when science has evolved into an art indistinguishable from magic, Kirin the thief finds himself forced down on an alien planet. Gathering allies, he must defeat the Witch Queen – who plans nothing less than the conquest of the entire galaxy!

Throughout the centuries that have passed since humans first ventured into interstellar space, they have been at war with the alien Veich. The human race has, in consequence, been fully militarized, its educational system being a form of military training–which includes, among other disciplines, the elimination of fear from the human psyche. Attitudes to the war have, however, been colored by the gradual discovery of relics revealing that it is echoing an earlier interstellar conflict whose antagonists have completely disappeared, victors and vanquished alike. On a neglected continent of an unimportant world, ex-sergeant Remy and other human and Veich deserters have joined forces to form a mercenary company that places its expert skills at the disposal of the dominant indigenes. This refuge from the greater war is, however, disrupted when archeologists on another world discover evidence that there might be significant relics of the earlier war buried in the inhospitable heart of the continent, where barbarian tribes are currently massing for a religious war. Remy has no alternative but to revert to working for his own race, knowing that whatever he enables them to find, or even if they find nothing at all, his own life will be in grave peril, and that nothing will ever be the same again….

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.

Before the hyper-space vessels could go from planet to planet, stations had to be set up. And that meant manned spaceships cut off from Earth for decades.
The explorer vessel Ariadne had gone toward galactic centre and was considered lost – until its call came in appealing for a xenobiologist.
Their new world was all swamp. As far as could be seen, there was no intelligent species. Yes, this was alarming because all inhabitable planets so far discovered had thinking inhabitants.
But the nature of that planet’s “people” turned out to be an enigma that had to be solved. For their alien biology could spell doom to all the civilizations of the stars … doom or a terrible unity!

The final contact made by the Daedalus Mission begins badly, even before the ship makes a hard landing in the middle of nowhere. The situation of the colony doesn’t seem to make any sense, and neither does the situation of the indigenous aliens–the Sets–that have helped the colony survive and thrive. Alex Alexander doesn’t take long to work out a hypothesis that might explain the mystery–a hypothesis that the people on the ground have already worked out for themselves–and he’s fortunate enough to fall in with a colonist who’s obsessively determined to prove the hypothesis. Unfortunately, the quest seems likely to become so dangerous that both of them might die trying–and there’s too much at stake not to take it to the very limit of possibility, no matter what the cost.

The planet Attica has two continents: Lambda and Delta. The indigenous alien population being restricted to Delta, Earth’s colony was planted on Lambda. Before the arrival of the Daedalus, two sailing ships had set out from Lambda to cross the ocean separating the two continents, and neither had returned. Now a third is on its way, and Mariel Valory and Alex Alexander of the Daedalus have hitched a lift, in order that Mariel might use her talent to try to make contact with the aliens. Unfortunately, it turns out that contact has already been made, and that the aliens are building an empire with the aid of borrowed Terran technology–an empire that’s beginning to crack under its internal strains and eternal challenges. And when Alex and Mariel are marooned by their reluctant hosts, things start to go from very bad to much worse….

The Bear’s Baby and Other Stories gathers together for the first time six standalone tales by award-winning author Judith Moffett. Featuring aliens intent on halting humanity’s biosphere-destroying behaviour, an alternate USA under the presidency of Davy Crockett, cross-species telepathic communication, angels, dreaming, and climate change – although not all at once! – this is a collection defined by variety, and admirably demonstrates the broad range of Moffett’s skill as a writer.

With new introductions to each story from the author, The Bear’s Baby and Other Stories contains:

The Bear’s Baby
Chickasaw Slave
The Realms of Glory
Ten Lights and Darks
The Middle of Somewhere
Space Ballet

In a galactic culture that extends from quasi-Utopian worlds like New Alexandria to vermin-infested slums like Old Earth, the Star-Pilots that link the cosmos are the great heroes of the day, and Grainger has become a legend in his own lifetime. The atmosphere of Mormyr is so dense that the surface is unreachable, which made it the ideal place for the alien Gallacellans to hide an ancient spaceship. Now they want it back. Grainger refuses, but when the Hooded Swan answers a mayday call, Grainger and his crew are trapped by a madman, who forces them to pursue the salvage anyway. Success will mean Grainger’s freedom from Titus Charlot, owner of the Hooded Swan; failure will mean the death of the inhabitants of an entire planet. And then the Gallacellans appear!

In a galactic culture that extends from quasi-Utopian worlds like New Alexandria to vermin-infested slums like Old Earth, starship pilots have become the great romantic heroes of the day. When Star-Pilot Grainger is rescued from a shipwreck, he finds himself pressed into reluctant service to fly the Hooded Swan, the prototype of a new kind of interstellar ship. He’s also picked up an alien parasite that’s determined to share his brain. Under these dire circumstances, can Grainger possibly stay out of trouble? Not a chance!

The fourth landing of the Daedalus Mission confronts Alex and his companions with a colonial culture seemingly modeled on a classic Utopian dream, but all of its inhabitants are infected with a mysterious alien parasite, and they no longer seem entirely human. Are they being controlled by the parasite, or has the parasite merely enabled them to transform themselves? Can the visitors from Earth avoid infection themselves, and what will the consequences be if they cannot? For once, the risks of the contact seem potentially far greater than any possible reward – but that still leaves the visitors with the necessity of passing judgment and deciding what to do, in an exceedingly awkward situation.

They call them the “rat-catchers.” They’re the crew of the spaceship Daedalus, which an economically destitute Earth has dispatched on a mission to re-establish contact with its far-flung, long-lost colonies in space. Alex Alexander, the ship’s biologist, together with his staff, must help solve the mysteries of human and alien ecosystems that he encounters light-years from home.

Dendra is a stable world, covered by a huge, unchanging forest-except that nothing living can really be free of change. The planet has no seasons, but its animal life still undergoes life-cycles involving birth, maturation, metamorphosis, and death. The Earth colony sent to tame the world has failed, at least in the terms expected of it, and seems beyond redemption; but the crew of the Daedalus still has to find out exactly why and how the program has gone wrong. Provided, of course, that they can survive the investigation itself!