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They were six ill-assorted players of the strangest game ever devised. Set on a strange planet, they knew neither its rules or its aim. There was the giant blue cube, the ruined city, the singing tower, the roaring wall of Chaos – all deadly dangerous, all part of the challenge that the unwilling travellers must confront. But what was it all for – and would they survive to find out?

Earth is faced with annihilation by the Purple Dawn – effect of the cosmic fall-out from the swirling planet-in-the-making Polarthanus.

Kemlo and his Space Scouts are out in the void, towing a crippled space ship with their scooters, when suddenly the crisis is upon them. The space-born boys have to make a decision: if they take drastic action will it avert the danger – or will they blow up Earth, the Satellite Belts and themselves?

On the poisonous, icy surface of Ganymede, a man and a boy are on a deadly hunt. Their prey is the Aleph – an unknowable alien artifact that roamed and ruled Ganymede for countless millennia. Indescribable, infinitely dangerous, the Aleph haunts men’s dreams and destroys all efforts to terraform Ganymede into a habitable planet. Now in a modern world ancient struggle is joined, as a boy seeks manhood, a man seeks enlightenment, and a society seeks the power to rule the universe.

A raw hatred of ColSec burned in Cord. Hatred for the huge, world-dominating organization which had callously bundled Cord and a group of drop-out kids into a defective spacecraft and launched them out to live or die on a wild planet.

Luckily, cord and one of his new companions were able to crash-land their shuttle. But then the fight for survival was on – and some of the dangers they were to face had travelled there with them…

For Mark Carodyne, all of life was a gamble. For money, for sport, for knowledge, for danger. That’s why he had come to Krait for the skimming races he knew would make him rich. Or broke.

Or dead.

Krait. It was dominated by the pulsing quivering kaleidoscopic Omphalos that filled the sky above. An unmeasurable mass that was said to have the power to swallow whole planets – even galaxies. Indeed, seven ships had been sent to explore its mysteries and none had returned.

Now there were those who believed that Krait was about to come into its path. And Mark Carodyne had agreed to gamble his life to obtain the scientific data that might save the planet from destruction. One man. In a single ship. Skimming the edge of the unknown . . .

Is he George Whitley, a twentieth-century writer of science fiction – or Peter Quinn, Second Officer of the interstellar liner Lode Maiden?

An injection of lysergic acid and Whitley finds himself … where … who … and in what age? He is inhabiting the body of Second Officer Quinn but his mind is still that of George Whitley.

Aboard the Lode Maiden he can capture only fragments of Quinn’s memory and consciousness, until a magnetic storm throws the ship off trajectory into the deep reaches of space. Then, somehow, enough knowledge comes to him to enable him to help land the ship on an unnamed planet on the Galactic Rim.

But the forced landing damages the ship and kills the Captain, leaving Quinn – or is it Whitley? – to lead the crew and passengers to safety through the horrors and dangers of the unknown planet.

Keill Randor, at the plateau of years between childhood and manhood, faces the Ordeal. As a symbol of the hardships and struggles to come in the years ahead, the Ordeal requires him to travel, unarmed and unequipped, through som eof the roughest terrain on the harsh planet of Moros. He has to pass this test to enter advanced training with the Young Legionaries.

Keill has been told that, during the two-day Ordeal, he will face the most deadly danger known to Legionaries – but what form it will take he cannot guess. Throughout the trek, Keill encounters vicious, merciless creatures of that wild region, But he learns – through the Ordeal and his subsequent training as a Young Legionary – that deadly dangers can come from within himself as from without.

What did our ancestors dream of when they gazed up at the stars and looked beyond the present?

A Journey in Other Worlds races far ahead of the nineteenth century to imagine what life would be like in the year 2000. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Earth is effectively a corporate technocracy, with big businesses using incredible advances in science to improve life on the planet as a whole. Seeking other planets habitable for the growing human population, the spaceship Callisto, powered by an antigravitational force known as apergy, embarks on a momentous tour of the solar system. Jupiter proves to be a wilderness paradise, full of threatening beasts and landscapes of inspired beauty, where the explorers must fight for their lives. Dangers less tangible but equally deadly await the Callisto crew on Saturn, which yields profound secrets about their fate and the ultimate destiny of mankind.

The Tavona and its crew of intrepid heroes, led by Tiger Clinton, are back and exploring the galaxy once again.

On a routine trip to Mars, a chance visit to a new planetoid leads to kidnap! Another planet is populated entirely by identical twins. Even simple streams are not as they appear, and everything holds hidden and unexpected dangers.

Using their wits, their skills, and with the help of friends made on their travels, Tiger Clinton and his team are ready to face anything – and they’ll have to!

Escaping the religious tyranny of a 31st-century Earth by a fluke assignment to the planet of Ozagen, linguist Hal Yarrow found that the worst of Earth had followed him – Pornsen, his personal Guardian Angel, vigilant for any evidence of sin or wrong thinking.

Conditioned by a lifetime of submission, Yarrow would have accepted Pornsen’s constant spying as an unpleasant necessity, had it not been for Jeanette, the beautiful but dangerously different fugitive he found hiding in the ancient ruins…

On the 15th day of Franklin, Year of Descent 1008, in the Kralate of Vizantia Planet Kforri.

A young teacher, Marko Prokopiu, is convicted and jailed. His heinous crime: preaching the false and unholy belief that Kforri was originally settled by men arriving from Earth in flying machines – a dangerous heresy against the official doctrine of divine evolution.

Goaded into jail-break by his wife’s desertion and mightily armed with his father’s great ax, Markorushes to avenge his marital honour. With an eminent philosopher, Dr. Halran, inventor of the incredible hot-air balloon, Marko journeys perilously to exotic lands – to decadent Anglonia, hostile Afka, civilised Eropia and, at last, the all-female Isle of Mnaenn. There, by clever ruse and uncommon physical daring, he must recover the Great Fetish and solve the riddle of planet Kforri’s ancient history, or meet a fate more complicated than death!

Newly accepted as a Special Agent of the star-spanning United Planets organization, Ronny Bronston found that his first assignment was one which had taken the lives of dozens of agents before him: he was to track down a man named Tommy Paine.

‘We’ve been trying to catch him for twenty years,’ said Ronny’s section chief. ‘How long before that he was active, we have no way of knowing. It was some time before we became aware that half the revolts, coups d’états and assassinations that occur in the United Planets have his dirty finger stirring around in them.’

‘But what motivates him?’ Ronny asked. ‘What’s he get out of all the war and killing he stirs up?’

‘Nobody seems to know. But the best guess is that he’s insane – a homicidal maniac on an intergalactic scale. He’s dangerous, Ronny, and you’ve got to get him!’

Scientific progress has taken human beings to remote planes in far galaxies and enabled them to build comfortable homes there. But when that science proved a deadly enemy and had to be abandoned, the pioneers were isolated in alien surroundings. There was no way home. Earth, which had once been home, had ceased to exist. And when the men of the planet Demeter died out in space, the destiny of the human race was left to a group of women.

Clare Monkton worked to establish a feminist world. She used the resources of science to assure the continuance of the race … but the resulting children were to be brought up according to her ideas.

There was bound to be a challenge. When there were once more young men growing up on the planet, it was inevitable that they should oppose the authority of the women. And when one of those young men proved to come from such a dangerous ancestry, Clare knew she had a battle on her hands…

The RIM STAR seemed to be an ordinary enough spaceship bound for the planet Handel on a routine mission. Then young Braden, a merchant-space officer, discovered that there was something all wrong about the RIM STAR . . . The captain was wrong, the crew mutinous, and there was even something going on with the passengers. The ship was in deadly danger . . .

For centuries space travelers had dreaded a place they called the Other Side of Nowhere – a place in the universe where up was down, where right was wrong, and where all direction was lost . . .

To save the RIM STAR Braden had to bring the ship to that place of nightmare. . .

A GAME OF CAT…AND CAT?

Movie star Jason Carter is on vacation in Peru. All he wants is a break, but what he finds is a lost civilization of extra-dimensional Incas bent on conquest of the entire world!

Nor is Carter alone. His allies include a bloodthirsty Amazon, an archaeologist, a bank robber, three alien vegetables and a scoop-crazed gossip columnist – and not one of them knows what to do next.

Only Carter’s cat seems unruffled by the growing danger. In true feline fashion, she acts like she’s in charge of the planet.

Maybe she is.

The Changeling could become anyone or anything – man, woman, child, animal. It was endowed with an inborn lust for disorder and destruction. Now it had chosen the plague-ridden planet of Alvea for its next mission – to throw an entire world into eternal chaos and madness.

The Earth Consortium could send only an embittered killer and an untrained anthropologist to hunt down the Changeling. Yet, dangerous though it was, the Changeling was not the only peril the Earthmen faced on Alvea, or the worst – for the Alveans feared and hated Earth. Even a hint of the hunter’s identities would leave them dead and dismembered within minutes

Abner Harris was sent to Earth on a mission of extreme urgency. The universe was in danger of enslavement by the Medlins, and the fight against them called for Harris to assume the disguise of a flesh-and-blood Earthman.

But he discovered that the real villains of space were not the Medlins or the people of Earth: they were his own kind.

Suddenly he was alone, alienated from his own race, hated by the Medlins, and an imposter on Earth. No matter what side he chose he’d be a traitor.

Yet choose he must – or remain for ever a man without a planet.




(First published 1963)

Stranded on an alien planet, light years from home, wandering from blistering heat to searing cold, Nils Kruger was not a happy man. So when he met another being – even though it wasn’t human – things seemed to be looking up. The alien might be helpless, or it might be dangerous, but one thing was for sure – they stood a better chance for survival if they worked together.

But as the two creatures overcame their mutual suspicion, as they worked together, as the language barrier was broken down, Nils came to a terrifying conclusion – this alien was more intelligent than a human. And to it, Nils was the alien.

It is the 21st century and Earth is overcrowded, underfed and teetering on the brink of worldwide chaos. Their best and last hope rests among the stars, in finding another world able to sustain human life. Enter Colonel Jerry Cornelius, hero and adventurer extraordinaire. Along with his wife Cathy and good friend, Professor Frank Marek, he will brave the madness of space and the dangers of an alien world.

But there is more to this new world than meets the eye. Secrets are buried here, in its earth and in its history. Uncovering them could hold the keys to planet Earth’s salvation as well as its past. But time is against Jerry Cornelius. His friend has gone mad, his wife has gone missing, and with each tick of the clock planet Earth draws closer to its end.

Bereft of friends, loved ones, and all he has ever known, Jerry Cornelius will hold the fates of two worlds in his hands. A solution will require all his legendary strength, intelligence and courage … and even that might not be enough in the end.

ALLIANCE CENTRAL: the world once called Earth. Nothing breathes upon it but man and the wind, and the wind is tamed beneath great domes. From here humanity rules a vast stellar empire.
FIRSTISM: the belief that the universe is made for humanity. Therefore be fruitful, and multiply, and replace all other creatures with humankind and its domesticated beasts, and replace all other green things with plants useful to human life…
HERMES SECTOR: the remote frontier system where colonists are abruptly wiped out by an alien visitation. As a deadly threat to the countless billions of humans swarming outward from Alliance Central, the aliens must be identified.
One planet alone in Hermes Sector was spared. But that planet is Dinadh, the strangest and most secretive of all populated worlds. Firsters are not welcome on Dinadh, nor Firster technology. The only people from Alliance Central qualified by blood to visit Dinadh are a lone woman and her severely disabled five-year-old son. Their journey to Dinadh marks the beginning of a terrifying ordeal pitching mother and son beyond the shadow cast by human civilization.
Astounding sights, extraordinary aliens and colossal dangers await them…

THREE AGAINST THE STARS!

A sky pirate armed with superior weapons of his own invention…

First contact with an alien race dangerous enough to threaten the safety of two planets…

The arrival of an unseen dark sun whose attendant marauders aimed at the very end of civilization in this Solar System…

These were the three challenges that tested the skill and minds of the brilliant team of scientist-astronauts Arcot, Wade, and Morey. Their initial adventures are a classic of science fiction which first brought the name of their author, John W. Campbell, Jr., into prominence as a master of the inventive imagination – long before he became the editor of Astounding/Analog and changed the field of science fiction forever!

Gone from the galaxy… A startling discovery has shaken Earth’s galactic Empire: more than two hundred and fifty thousand people have vanished from the resort moon, Vesa, without a trace! Called to duty, SOTE’s most daring secret agents, Jules and Yvette D’Alembert – the former aerialists from the triple-gravity planet Des Plaines, possessed of lightning-reflexes and super-strength – are faced with a lethal and baffling conspiracy.

Together the D’Alemberts have conquered many of the Empire’s most dangerous foes, but now the mighty pair must divide forces – each to challenge a deadly evil terror alone!

Stranglers’ Moon is the second book in the “Family D’Alembert” series.

Power-Greedy.

Men wished to rule the world, but one man stood in their way. Peter Duncan came from the planet Mattrain – but who was he? Was he human? If so, whence came his vastly superior intellect and technical knowledge? These were mysteries the Administration feared – because they could not find the answer to them. Too late they saw danger. For, by then, Peter Duncan had escaped and taken refuge in the Devastated Areas, from which he continued his fight to save the human race from final utter destruction. But then, he had a reason. Martha of the chestnut hair and striking beauty, who alone knew his secret and who taught him how to love.

General Benjamin Shore was heading for the stars – under forged orders and in defiance of Presidential commands. He was leaving Earth in an untested ship with a crew chosen by necessity. And with nothing but faith to guide him. His only hope was to find habitable worlds in the uncharted regions of space ahead.

Thus began Man’s first mission to the unexplored universe. Shore knew that before him lay danger, probable disillusion – maybe even death. But nothing had prepared him for the nightmare he would face on the planet of the Grey-furs for the menace of the Golden People who had driven all other races from Galactic Centre or for what awaited him if he returned to the world he called home.