Search Results for: dare

With hair the colour of the moon, Corleu was different from the other Wayfolk. He alone tried to free his wandering tribe from the unearthly swamp that ensnared them – and he alone dared to cross the forbidden threshold. There he found a strange dark house, a place of legends and gods, foreseen in the stars. And there, to save his people, began Corleu’s search for the heart of the Cygnet – and impossible treasure…

But if legends are real, nothing is impossible.

They were trying out a new drive when a cosmic accident took them incalculable light years off course. A miracle of courage and astrogation meant than there were some survivors from the inevitable crash. The ship itself did not escape unscathed. What had been their vehicle became their prison. The buckled lock could not be opened from the inside and they had no other means of getting free. The air was slowly running out.

The planet they had hit was raw and primitive by their own standards, but it did hold intelligent life. One of the natives found the ship. Dare the trapped space travellers hope for a miracle? If they go out what kind of strange life forms would they be involved with? Could they hope to find the kind of raw materials which would get their crippled ship into space again? If not, could they face life sentences on this strange, unknown, primitive world . . . ?

Faced by a thousand fantastic difficulties the astronauts battled untiringly for their right to survive.

Along with progress in other spheres, criminology and remedial treatment for the socially unacceptable will undoubtedly make rapid strides in the Twenty-second and Twenty-third centuries.
Purely retributive justice is not a satisfactory answer to the enlightened Welfare Officer of the Future. Psychiatry, criminology and electronic mind control could combine into an entirely new concept of reclamation. In the right hands this would be an advance into something close to Utopia – in the wrong it would be leave 1984 looking like a pleasant week-end in the country.
This thoughtful new novel is a daring attempt to handle the deliucate theme of advanced criminology and the unresolved conflict of Society versus those who will not or cannot conform. Try as they will to be impersonal and humane, the psychiatrists of the future – even with electronic aids – will be as human as we are today. Their problems will be ours…

Most of the problems were solved in the 29th century. War was a memory. Disease was almost conquered. Old age and Death were held at bay. It was a glad world. A brave new world. Humanity had grown up. And then It came… At first the dare-devil pioneers from the far-flung corners of the universe brought back strange tales of a mountain that walked. The reign of terror spread from planet to planet, until the authorities sat up and took notice. By the time someone with enough initiative to re-open the long disused weapon shops, came on the scene, it was almost too late. Time was against them. Atomic bomb wouldn’t smash that creature, neither would heat rays nor energy bolts. It left a train of utter chaos and devastation behind it as it strode imperiously through the galaxy.

Kicking off one of the most celebrated series in fantasy literature . . . and introducing Thomas Covenant, the legendary antihero, who is about to start a dark adventure like no other

He called himself Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever, because he dared not believe in the strange alternative world on which he suddenly found himself – the Land.

But the Land tempted him. As a leper, in his own world he had been an outcast, unclean, a pariah. Now he was regarded as a saviour, the reincarnation of the Land’s greatest hero – Berek Halfhand. Only the mystic powers of the white gold he carried could protect the Lords of the Land from the ancient evil of the Despiser, Lord Foul.

Yet Thomas Covenant had no idea how those powers could be tapped . . .

Readers love Lord Foul’s Bane:

‘It has to be one of the strangest, most frightening, and surrealistic fantasy worlds ever created . . . Stephen R Donaldson is my unsung hero of fantasy greatness. He is up there with the best’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

‘Thomas Covenant is a character unlike most you’ll probably see in other fantasy stories . . . if you are interested in high fantasy stories, a colourful setting rich in magic and lore, and enjoy broken main characters, this could be a great title for you’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

‘What I loved most about these stories: that nothing was easy or assured for the “Hero”. He was his own worst enemy . . . Yet, I rooted for Thomas’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

‘I remember thinking at the time that for as much as I liked the LOTR, the bad guys just weren’t bad enough . . . Lord Foul’s Bane answered those issues and then some’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

‘A classic in the genre that is quite unlike anything I’ve read before . . . believable and fascinating, despite being disturbing at times‘ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

‘There are scenes in this series that literally had me in tears they were so moving and other scenes that made me put down the book in utter amazement . . . It will take your breath away‘ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Best known for his Hugo Award-winning classic A Case of Conscience, Blish was one of the first serious SF writers to involve themselves with tie-in novels, writing eleven Star Trek adaptations as well as the first original adult Star Trek novel, Spock Must Die. This omnibus contains three of his long out-of-print works: Black Easter, The Day After Judgement and The Seedling Stars.
BLACK EASTER: A gripping story about primal evil: a sinister intermingling of power, politics, modern theology, the dark forces of necromancy, and what proves, all too terribly, not to be superstition.

THE DAY AFTER JUDGEMENT: Develops and extends the characters from BLACK EASTER. It suggests that God may not be dead, or that demons may not be inherently self-destructive, as something appears to be restraining the actions of the demons upon Earth.

THE SEEDLING STARS: You didn’t make an Adapted Man with just a wave of the wand. It involved an elaborate constellation of techniques, known collectively as pantropy, that changed the human pattern in a man’s shape and chemistry before he was born. And the pantropists didn’t stop there. Education, thoughts, ancestors and the world itself were changed, because the Adapted Men were produced to live and thrive in the alien environments found only in space. They were crucial to a daring plan to colonize the universe.

When shy, psychic bookworm ‘Cookie’ Orbach watches television, she sees things. But not the things that you or I would see. Cookie sees The Grid – a strange, shifting landscape where human forces battle against an enemy they dare not kill. Her employer, the mysterious Dataplex Corporation, pays her well to watch this war, and asks only that she report her observations but take no direct action, which suits her passive demeanour just fine.
But Cookie’s quiet life is about to be shattered. Her two very different worlds are threatening to merge in a way that shouldn’t really be possible. Everything is about to change. And we do mean everything…

It began with the murder of a beautiful woman, the adulterous wife of a mild-mannered professor. Then a corrupt cop was gunned down in a phone booth.

After that, the killer who called himself Raptor moved through a list of players, playboys and mobsters from Palm Springs to Minnesota. With each hit came a phone call to San Francisco organised crime investigator Dante Stagnoro, and a disguised, taunting voice daring Stagnoro to stop him. Raptor is a killer like no other Stagnoro has ever pursued.

And the final truth of his death trip – a truth about man, nature and God – will not be revealed until the last victim is claimed.

One-way ticket to death . . .?

‘Hughes is the master we keep turning to’ Sara Paretsky

‘The tension and terror of Dread Journey are such that few will be able to lay the book down unfinished’ New York Times

‘Cornell Woolrich meets Agatha Christie’ Publishers Weekly

‘Superbly done’ Washington Post

In the four years since she arrived in Los Angeles, Kitten Agnew has become a star. Not all by herself, of course; though beautiful and talented, Kitten would be lost without her director, the acclaimed and powerful Vivien Spender.

But Spender is a dangerous man. Kit knows that, and has heard all the stories – of discarded stars that have ended up in a chorus line, or a sanatorium, or worse.

Spender knows that Kit knows, and wouldn’t dare destroy her glittering career. But he may be willing to kill her . . .

On a train from LA to Chicago, Kit makes a discovery that could have her fighting not just for her career, but for her life.

Griselda and Con Satterlee are spending a second honeymoon in a cottage on Long Beach, and it’s not going well. To cap it all, Con picks up a blonde in the Bamboo Bar one night and walks out with her, leaving Griselda on her own.

Con comes back, saying that he took the blonde outside to try to stop her from shooting herself, but the police find her body the next morning and Con is arrested for her murder.

Then Con disappears, and Griselda is alone in their beach house with a door that can’t keep out the Major, who frightens her; Kew, whom Con distrusts; Kathie, who is lovely, and so strange; or Dare, who has caused trouble before . . .

Griselda must work quickly to save Con – and their marriage.

‘My favourite American crime-writer’ New York Herald Tribune

Twenty years ago the five-year-old Traxler heir was kidnapped from his Hollywood home and never seen again. Now his widowed mother is overjoyed when a plausible young man claims to be her long-lost son, a claim supported by accurate childhood memories. Mrs Traxler accepts him unconditionally, and when her niece Charlotte dares to question him, she is cut out of the will.

Charlotte turns to Jesse Falkenstein, who is soon as suspicious of the man’s claim as she is. After launching an intense investigation, one lead after another falls flat – and even the original kidnapper refuses to talk . . .

‘My favourite American crime-writer’ New York Herald Tribune

Ireland, 1749. Dennis McDermott, a witty, charming and daring young man with shades of the Scarlet Pimpernel, lives two lives in eighteenth-century Dublin. Fashionable society idolises him as a handsome, rakish man of their world, never suspecting that he is the mysterious leader of the Irish underground whose nightly missions continue to outwit the British authorities.

But Dennis’ cover as an Anglophile who has renounced his Gaelic roots is under threat from an ever-more inquisitive policeman, and he also is embroiled in another cat-and-mouse game . . . falling in love.

From one of the best-loved authors of the Golden Age of detective fiction, this collection of short stories by Helen McCloy features psychiatrist-sleuth Dr Basil Willing.

Beginning with her classic, Through a Glass, Darkly, which she later expanded into a full-length novel, McCloy experimented with daringly imaginative concepts within the framework of the formal, fairplay detective story. From doppelgangers to flying saucers each story demonstrates the author’s masterful combination of style, content and technique to produce some of crime fiction’s finest work.

For years the Delevan family image reflected only the best of everything – wealth, position, influence, and the kind of expensive good looks that take generations to cultivate.

No one dared suspect that their glittering façade, their cherished privacy masked hidden lusts, furtive pleasures and twisted dreams that would soon erupt into a pattern of strange violence that threatened to destroy them all.

Eight hundred years have passed since King Connavar of the Rigante and his bastard son, Bane, defeated the invading army of Stone. In that time, Connavar has become a legend, and the Rigante have lost the freedom so many gave their lives to preserve. A conquered people, they live and die under the iron rule of the Varlish, their culture all but destroyed.

One woman remains who follows the ancient paths once trod by the

Rigante. She is the Wyrd of Wishing Tree Wood, and she alone knows the nature of the evil soon to be unleashed on a doomed and unsuspecting world.

In a perilous land, facing an uncertain destiny, she pins her initial hopes on two men: Jaim Grymauch, the giant Rigante fighter, a man haunted by his failure to save the friend he loved from betrayal, and Kaelin Ring, a youth whose deadly talents will earn him the enmity of all Varlish. One will become the Ravenheart, an outlaw leader whose daring exploits will inspire the Rigante. The other will forge a legend and light the fires of rebellion.

The Wyrd knows that ultimately all hopes will rest on a third man. Of the bloodline of Connavar the King, he will need to overcome generations of fear and hatred if he is to achieve his destiny. For he is a Varlish nobleman, and – worse – the son of the Rigante’s greatest enemy . . .

Read by Adjoh Andoh
(p) 2017 Orion Publishing Group

“What does a cockatrice enjoy most for dinner? Anyone it can find.”

So the alarmed inhabitants of England discover when a plague of monsters–known as cockatrices–invade their country and begin gobbling them up. They must be stopped! A plucky band of survivors dubbed the Cockatrice Corps–including youngsters Dakin and Sauna–decide to fight back. But how?

A rollicking adventure filled with breathtaking twists and turns, The Cockatrice Boys is Joan Aiken at her comic best.

But there is also a powerful message in her only full length Sci- Fi (or even Cli-Fi!) YA novel as Joan Aiken imagines the result of human folly, in an earlier version of global warming, with the hole created in the ozone layer becoming a channel for evil to arrive on earth as an invasion of monstrous creatures.

Joan Aiken believed in the power of the imagination, and using stories to prepare us for our future.
In The Cockatrice Boys she wrote:

“People need stories…to remind them that reality is not only what we can see or smell or touch. Reality is in as many layers as the globe we live on itself, going inwards to a central core of red-hot mystery, and outwards to unguessable space. People’s minds need detaching, every now and then, from the plain necessities of daily life. People need to be reminded of these other dimensions above us and below us. Stories do that.”

“Besides being a daringly original, funny, scary, and morally instructive book, it also contains one of the strongest statements of the purpose of fantasy stories and fairy tales . . . This book was excellent, I highly recommend it . . . buy it now!” Mugglenet.com


“Readers will be reminded of Alice in Wonderland . . . and the movie trilogy Star Wars” School Library Journal

“This one is a real page-turner – as usual for Aiken – and sometimes really quite sinister, with a lot of gallows humour. It’s suitable for all adults and most children… just as creepy as anything by M.R. James” Amazon Reviewer

“Like all Aiken’s best work, there is a deeply scary, nightmare thread running through this book, which makes it thrilling and involving for older readers and adults …but the monsters are especially entertaining – drawn from Lewis Carroll, ancient mythology, and even Monty Python, they are scary and funny at the same time. A brilliant book” Amazon Reviewer

Mercury Shell, Venus Shell, Earth, Mars, Asteroid, Jupiter, Saturn. Each shell concentric, studded with artificial planets, each planet embedded in its shell, spinning like a ball-bearing. The whole Zeus-created in the service of Man but now beyond his control.
Now mathematics and space physics, converging, suggested another shell, its existence hidden from Man. A shell of utter darkness, cold and silence where only extreme mutants could survive.
To find that shell, the three were journeying again: Maq Ancor, Master Assassin, Magician Cherry and Sine Anura, Mistress of the Erotic. Together, daring the all-seeing, all-sensing hostility of Zeus.

Blood was what they called that mountain town and the forbidding land around it – and the name was significant. Folks there knew a secret that would have shocked the world…but nobody was ever going to get out of Blood to tell. Not even when Portia Clark arrived, hot on a news story for a national magazine. Especially not her…

Clint Breen, who had been in the outside world, tried to save her. But he had to fight a tradition that drove men and women to unspeakable lusts and that ruled secretly the lives and afterlives of everything being in the county. Blood was the place where more men and women walked the night than were ever seen by day. Horror was their heritage, for they were the people that the census dared not count!

CAPTAIN FUTURE FACES FIERY SOLAR DEATH

It was ten o’clock, solar time, when disaster struck. At exactly the same moment, gravium mines on Mercury, Mars and Saturn were totally destroyed by an unidentified army. Without gravium – the life-blood of interplanetary civilization – the system would perish.

Meanwhile, Captain Future struggled on the floor of a moving space craft, his arms and legs bound by steel ropes. He did not know why he’d been captured – only that the system was in grave danger – that he was needed…

As Captain Future was plunged through space, towards a deadly orb of flaming gases – the raging inferno of the sun – he planned his daring escape. It was to be the most dangerous gamble of his life.

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…

One million years back in the swirling, shrouded past, evil ultra-beings ruled the Planet Roo. Suddenly, unbelievably, they are alive again, threatening the universe with total destruction.

Only one man dares challenge the Evil Ones. He is Captain Future, inter-galactic agent of justice, whose identity is top secret, whose strength is ultimate. He sets out alone to stop the deathless menace creeping ever close…

Somewhere there was a radioactive fire that could perform miracles of super-science. Somewhere there was a place where cat-people prowled, where time was altered, and incredible mysteries held their secrets of power and fortune for the daring discoverer. Deep in an unexplored jungle, Brian Raft sought the secret of the legendary Valley of the Flame . . .

Asia, vast continent of ancient civilizations and mysterious peoples, has many corners little known to the rest of the world. One such was the jungle-hidden heart of exotic Cambodia, where Gordon King, a daring American explorer, stumbled upon the thousand-year secret kingdom of THE LAND OF HIDDEN MEN.



Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose Tarzan tales have enthralled millions, has written a novel of another such jungle hero that is as exciting, as adventure-packed and as imaginative as his best. The dangers Gordon King faced, his rescue of a jungle princess, and his combat against the perils of the lost city of Pnom Dhek are first-rate Burroughs to the last exciting line.

War had devastated the entire eastern hemisphere. For two hundred years America had lived in civilized isolation, while Europe had lapsed into legend.

Jefferson Turck was the first man who dared recross the 30th meridian, and like Columbus centuries before him, he landed in a New World. For Europe had become the jungle home of savage beasts and her people had banded together in bloodthirsty tribes led by barbarian queens.