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Search Results for: book-of-being,-the

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Ring Around the Sun

Ring Around the Sun

Contributors

Clifford D. Simak

Price and format

Price
£2.99
Format
ebook
Jay Vickers was an ordinary man, or so he thought. All he wanted was to be left in peace to finish his next book. However, strange things started happenin – from his discovery of a mouse that was not a mouse, to the visit of an old neighbor that was not a man. Or at least he was not an ordinary man.

For as it turned out, neither was Jay Vickers. This is the story of human mutation – the next step in the evolution of the species. What if mutants walked among us already? What if they were organized? What if they had unbelievable powers, such as the ability to cross between alternate worlds or dimensions at will, or to intuitively reach the absolutely correct answer by intuition or “hunch”, or to telepathically reach out to the stars?

Such supermen would automatically try to conquer lesser men, would they not? Or would they do everything in their power to free the rest of humanity from slavery and suffering? Just what would the political and corporate powers-that-be do to keep their power and their slaves? How would mutants undermine the power of these bosses to set mankind free?

This is a story of unlimited freedom, of worlds without end, ready for the taking. It is also the story of powerful, benevolent beings that exist only to help those who need that help. This is a future of a lop-sided mechanical culture of technology that could provide creature comfort for a few, but not human justice or security for the many. It is a future of hate, and war, and worry. Nothing like the way the world really turned out – after all, there couldn’t really be an underground of mutants working to free humanity . . . could there?

Antony Swithin

Antony Swithin (1935-2002) William Antony Swithin (“Bill”) Sarjeant (1935-2002) was born in Sheffield, England. An only child and blessed with a vivid imaginative life nourished not only by science but by the fiction of writers like Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and T.H. White, he became a professor of geology and taught at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada for some thirty years, until his death. Besides being a renowned paleontologist and historian of geology, he was also a naturalist, novelist, bibliophile, local historian, folksinger, and Sherlockian scholar- in other words, a brilliant Renaissance man, a polymath of rare and astonishing versatility. One of his grand projects was The Perilous Quest for Lyonesse, an ambitious 12-novel cycle set in the alternative world of Rockall, an island continent that he construed as the legendary Atlantis, albeit as a place existing in another dimension. Situated northwest of the British Isles in the Atlantic Ocean and named after a tiny islet only 20 metres in size, it had sparked his fertile imagination as a child and held an enduring fascination for him. “Rockall,” he once remarked, “is for me a lifetime quest and a continuing, very beguiling dream which I delight in sharing with my readers.” The first four books of Sarjeant’s series were published under his pen-name, Antony Swithin, in the 1990s, but then further progress on the series was forestalled by his untimely death. Sarjeant’s richly conceived project has been resurrected under the editorship of Canadian novelist and independent scholar, Mark Sebanc.

W. E. Johns

Captain W. E. Johns (1893-1968) A World War One pilot, Captain Johns started flying as part of the Royal Flying Corps before the RAF was even formed, and flew a number of missions into Germany before being shot down and taken as a POW in September 1918. After the war ended, he remained in the RAF in recruitment and then as a reservist before relinquishing his commission in 1931. He published his first Biggles book the following year. The renowned flying ace Biggles is probably his most well-known character, however throughout Johns’ 46-year writing career (from 1922 until his death) he wrote over 160 books, including other novels and non-fiction. His first science fiction novel, Kings of Space, was published in 1954 and introduced Captain “Tiger” Clinton to the world. A series of nine further novels followed. Captain Johns died in 1968, at the age of 75. He wrote right up until his death.

Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg (1935 – ) Robert Silverberg has been a professional writer since 1955, widely known for his science fiction and fantasy stories. He is a many-time winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, was named to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1999, and in 2004 was designated as a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. His books and stories have been translated into forty languages. Among his best known titles are Nightwings, Dying Inside, The Book Of Skulls, and the three volumes of the Majipoor Cycle: Lord Valentine’s Castle, Majipoor Chronicles and Valentine Pontifex. His collected short stories, covering nearly sixty years of work, are being published in nine volumes by SF Gateway and Subterranean Press. His most recent book is Tales Of Majipoor (2013), a new collection of stories set on the giant world made famous in Lord Valentine’s Castle. He and his wife Karen and an assorted population of cats, live in the San Francisco Bay Area in a sprawling house surrounded by exotic plants.

Robert Sheckley

Robert Sheckley (1928-2005) Robert Sheckley was a Hugo- and Nebula-nominated author born and educated in New York. He received an undergraduate degree from New York University in 1951 after a varied career that included time spent as a landscape gardener, a milkman and a stint in the US Army. He published his first story, “Final Examination” for Imagination in May 1952 and quickly gained prominence as a writer, publishing stories for Imagination, Galaxy and other science fiction magazines. His first four books – three collections and a previously serialised novel – were published in the 1950s and his career continued to be successful throughout the following decades. Sheckley served as fiction editor for Omni magazine from January 1980 through September 1981 and was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2001. He passed away at the age of 77 before being able to attend the World SF Convention in Glasgow, where he’d been scheduled Guest of Honour.

Edwin Balmer

Edwin Balmer (1883-1959) Edwin Balmer, born in Chicago, began his career as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune in 1903. He then went on to write for books and magazines, becoming an editor of Redbook in 1927 and then later associate publisher. With Philip Wylie, Balmer co-wrote When Worlds Collide (1933) and After Worlds Collide (1934), the former being adapted for the big screens in the 1951 award-winning film of the same title. Balmer died in 1959, aged 75.

Karen Haber

Karen Haber (1955 – ) Karen Haber, working name of Karen Lee Haber Silverberg, is both a science fiction and non-fiction author and editor, as well as being an art critic and historian. Beginning her career as a genre writer with “Madre de Dios”, published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1988, she became more popular with her Fire in Winter sequence. Subsequently, Haber’s work has appeared in magazines such as Asimov’s Science Fiction and many anthologies. In total she has authored nine books including Star Trek Voyager: Bless the Beasts, and is co-author of Science of the X-Men. Her non-fiction essay Meditations on Middle Earth was nominated for the 2001 Hugo award. She has been married to fellow SF author Robert Silverberg since 1987.

Adrian Cole

Adrian Cole was born in Plymouth, Devonshire in 1949. Recently the Director of College Resources in a large secondary school in Bideford, he makes his home there with his wife Judy, son Sam, and daughter Katia. The books of the DREAM LORDS trilogy (Zebra books 1975-1976) were his first books published. Cole has had numerous short stories published in genres ranging from science fiction and fantasy through horror. His works also have been translated into many languages including German, Dutch, Belgian, and Italian. Apart from the STAR REQUIEME and OMARAN SAGA quartets being reprinted by e-reads, some of his most recent works include the VOIDAL TRILOGY (Wildside Press) and STORM OVER ATLANTIS (Cosmos Press).

James Tiptree Jr.

James Tiptree Jr (1915-1987) Alice Hastings Bradley Sheldon wrote most of her fiction as James Tiptree, Jr – she was making a point about sexist assumptions and also keeping her US government employers from knowing her business. Most of her books are collections of short stories, of which Her Smoke Rose Up Forever is considered to be her best selection. Sheldon’s best stories combine radical feminism with a tough-minded tragic view of life; even virtuous characters are exposed as unwitting beneficiaries of disgusting socio-economic systems. Even good men are complicit in women’s oppression, as in her most famous stories ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ and ‘Houston, Houston, Do you Read?’ or in ecocide. Much of her work, even at its most tragic, has an attractively ironic tone which sometimes becomes straightforwardly comedy – it is important to stress that Tiptree’s deep seriousness never becomes sombre or pompous. Her two novels Up the Walls of the World and Brightness Falls from the Air are both remarkable transfigurations of stock space opera material – the former deals with a vast destroying being, sympathetic aliens at risk of destruction by it and human telepaths trying to make contact across the gulf of stars. She died tragically in 1987.

Jonathan Burke

Jonathan Burke (1922 – 2011) Jonathan Burke was the working name of English writer John Frederick Burke, who also wrote SF and fantasy under his own name (particularly his short fiction) as well as J F Burke and Robert Miall. Burke was born in Rye, Sussex, but soon moved to Liverpool, where his father was a Chief Inspec­tor of Police. He became a prominent science fiction fan in the late 1930s, and with David Mcllwain he jointly edited one of the earliest British fanzines. The Satellite, to which another close friend, Sam Youd, was a leading contributor. All three men would become well-known SF novelists after the war, writing as Jonathan Burke, Charles Eric Maine, and John Christopher, respectively. During the early 1950s he wrote numerous science fiction adventure novels and his short stories appeared regularly in all of the leading SF magazines, most notably in New Worlds and Authentic Science Fiction. In the mid-1950s he worked in publishing and as a public relations executive for Shell, before being appointed as European Story Editor for 20th Century-Fox Productions in 1963. His cinematic expertise led to his being commissioned to pen dozens of bestselling novelizations of popular film and TV titles, ranging from such movies as A Hard Day’s Night, Privilege, numerous Hammer Horror films, and The Bill. He also did adaptations of Gerry Anderson’s UFO TV series (as Robert Miall). Burke went on to write more than 150 books in all genres, including work in collaboration with his wife, Jean; and also published non-fiction works on an astonishing variety of subjects, most notably music. After finally settling in the Scottish countryside. Burke continued to write well into his eighth decade, and in later years many of his best supernatural and macabre short stories were collected and anthologized. He died on 21 September 201l, aged 89, shortly after completing his final novel, a contemporary supernatural thriller The Nightmare Whisperers, which was published posthumously in 2012.

Katherine MacLean

Katherine MacLean (1925- ) Katherine Anne MacLean is an American science fiction writer best known for her short stories of the 1950s. Born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, MacLean received a BA in economics from Barnard College, New York, and did postgraduate study in psychology. Her first published short story was “Defense Mechanism”, which appeared in Astounding in October 1949. Over the decades MacLean has continued to write whilst being employed in a wide variety of jobs – as book reviewer, economic graphanalyst, editor, EKG technician, food analyst, laboratory technician in penicillin research, nurse’s aide, office manager and payroll bookkeeper, photographer and pollster, to name a few. Much of her later work features psi powers as a central theme.
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