Search Results for: crisis

When Tabitha stole the Starship Plenty, she had no idea what it would come to mean. Its alien nature began to burrow into her affections. Now the rules are changing and with them come war and treachery. Tabitha is facing a crisis and this time round, Plenty might not be the saviour.

A winner of the Arthur C. Clarke and British Science Fiction Awards, the series featuring intergalactic pilot Captain Tabitha Jute concludes with her daring flight into a dying star system to avert a plot against the human race.

Eight short stories by the author of Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. The title piece plus The Encounter; Planet Story; Mrs Bagley Goes to Mars; Symbiosis; Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis; The Hounds; and State of Grace.

As a boy Phil Benson tried to summon up an enthusiasm for baseball. He could see that his real passion, classical music, was considered somehow subversive – not really American. That is why Mr Tackett’s became such a haven for him. Away from the uninspiring pitch and the disapproving ear of his father at home, Phil found at his piano teacher’s a sanctuary for his musical conspiracy with the universe to flourish.

Katie Doheney was the victim of another sort of conspiracy – or so she was convinced from the first brush of her childhood logic with the real-life spectacle of death in a road accident and the image of the Hiroshima mushroom on television. The threat of nuclear holocaust stalked Katie’s every moment. Meanwhile Katie stalked Phil Benson.

By the time Phil was ready to go East and make everyone proud of him, no ordinary bond had grown up between Katie and himself. They understood each other’s obsessions. Phil’s keyboard was Katie’s bomb shelter and from Cuban missile crisis to the raid on Tripoli the curious duet played on.

Leigh Kennedy’s disarming and irresistible novel follows Katie into unlikely matrimony and Phil into the arms of a gun-toting St Louis actress. But that’s the least you would expect from two people who alone, as far as we know, have already been through World War Three.

Bill Waltham has a sneaking suspicion that a few important details were purposely withheld from him when he receives his assignment to the planet Dilbia. At first, the project – to teach the planet’s bear-like inhabitants basic agricultural skills – seems a straightforward, though boring, undertaking for a young engineer on the rise.

But Bill immediately senses a very keen hostility from the Dilbians toward interfering humans. And in trying to solve a major crisis on the planet, he finds himself involved in a knock-down, drag-out brawl that has all the undertones of a David-and-Goliath battle revisited.

Theodore Sturgeon was a model for his friend Kurt Vonnegut’s legendary character Kilgore Trout, and his work was an acknowledged influence on important younger writers from Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg to Stephen King and Octavia Butler. His work has long been deeply appreciated for its sardonic sensibility, dazzling wordplay, conceptual brilliance, memorable characters, and unsparing treatment of social issues such as sex, war, and marginalized members of society. Sturgeon also authored several episodes of the original Star Trek TV series and originated the Vulcan phrase “Live long and prosper.”

This twelfth volume of his complete short stories includes classic works such as the award-winning title story, which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 1971, as well as “Case and the Dreamer,” a well-crafted tale of an encounter with a trans-spatial being that is also a meditation on love, and “The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff,” a creative exploration of the human ability to achieve self-realization in response to crisis.

‘Valentine looked downward. Everything was black, a pool of night rising from the floor. That blackness seemed to be beckoning to him. Come, a quiet voice was saying, here is your path, here is your destiny: night, darkness, doom. Yield. Yield, Lord Valentine, Coronal that was, Pontifex that will never be. Yield . . .’

Valentine is now established as Coronal of Majipoor, about to undertake the grand processional, but filled with inexplicable despond, still shadowed by the dark cloud that had passed across his soul in Labyrinth.

His foreboding proves to be not without foundation as soon he faces a planetary crisis – the shapeshifting Metamorphs are sabotaging the crops upon which Majipoor’s billions depend – and a conflict, about how the suddenly turbulent planet should be ruled, with his protégé and heir-apparent, Hissune.

Only after this crisis has been overcome and the conflict with Hissune resolved can Valentine fulfil his proper destiny and succeed to the title of Pontifex.

New Arizona a lush, virgin planet teeming with rich vegetation and a vast hoard of mineral wealth. A company had been formed to colonise and exploit it, and the spaceship Titov set out with the Board of Directors and two thousand colonists. And shortly after the trip had begun, the trouble started.

The Board of Directors was only interested in the vast profits that could be made by stripping the planet of its natural resources which could be sold to the highest bidder. Not for them the gradual establishment of a pioneer community, of farmlands and villages.

The Colonists had given up everything by leaving Earth, and they wanted a new planet where they could work, prosper and establish a new and better way of life. They were determined to thwart the directors by any means they could find.

And after landing on New Arizona, someone smashes the radio and sabotages the life-craft. Now the balance is more even – but when a real crisis erupts it seems as if neither side will be alive to win!

Ron Bronston was sworn to protect the United Planets’ dream – the pursuit of freedom and progress on all of the 3000 human-inhabited planets of the galaxy.
As an operative of the secret section of the United Planets’ Bureau of Investigation, Bronston was called upon for some very unusual missions. But the present crisis was without precedent.
Man’s sovereignty in his galaxy was challenged by a single madman and the super-weapons of the Dawnmen, the mysterious aliens from the unexplored vastness of the galaxy’s center. Bronston, alone, had to find a way to stop them.

Omega: an apocalyptic rumour from the Eastern Front. Omega: something that will alter all the strategic calculations of the Earth’s great military blocs. Omega: the code name for a weapon that may well bring doomsday with it. But if Omega is indeed the agent that will destroy the world, that world is not our own. For this is a timeline in which World War Two never truly ended: a timeline in which Hitler died in a plane crash, Britain joined Germany in its battle against Communist Russia, and the present is an age of intermittent, but deadly, armed conflict between the USSR, the European Alliance, and the USA.

The frontier regions are radioactive wastelands, nuclear winter threatens catastrophe, global confrontation could erupt again any time – and that’s before Omega is taken into account…This is the reality experienced by Owen Meredith when an accident forces his consciousness from the England we know into the mind of his cognate self in that other darker, Europe.

Switching back and forth between being plain Owen Meredith and troubled Major Owain Maredudd, Owen is faced not only with a Cold War going Hot, but with a deep crisis of identity. Who is he? Whose twisted destiny is he treading? Did the ordinary domestic life he remembers ever even take place? Perhaps the universe of Owain and Omega is merely a symptom of mental illness – but if so, why is it so urgently tangible?

Jonathan Herovit is a science fiction writer in a state of deep personal and professional crisis. Whilst struggling to deal with his wife’s post-partum depression, his own alcoholism and a long-overdue novel that he has no motivation to write, the pseudonym under which he writes begins talking to him…

When Ivan Wright stepped out of his mountain cabin, rifle in hand, to investigate the sound of a strange helicopter, he stepped right into the middle of a galactic crisis.

For the crew of that odd aircraft were not men such as he’d ever seen before – and when he tried to oppose them, he found himself hurled uncontrollably into oblivion.

He awoke to find himself considered as a kidnapped barbarian from a backward planet in a galaxy of advanced civilizations – yet one who somehow held in his own hands the key to all their futures!