Search Results for: death-into-life

The megalomaniac Godmind is still planning to use all the minds in creation to make a vast ‘lens’, and if necessary it will burn out all life in the process.

Back beside the river and literally born again, Yaleen represents to the guild of riverwomen the perfect proof of salvation, of life after death. In fact, she is desperately searching for a way to save the whole universe from imminent destruction.

The twentieth century lies hundreds of years in humanity’s past. But the near-immortal citizens of the future yearn for the good old days – when people’s bodies were susceptible to death through disease and old age. Now, they immerse themselves in virtual reality time machines to explore the life-to-death arc that defined existence so long ago.

Jacob Brewer is a virtual reality engineer overseeing the time machine’s operation aboard the starship Aspera. But on the thousand-year voyage to Beta Hydrii, the eight-hundred-member crew gets more reality than they expect when people entering the machine start to die.

The time machine has become sentient. Obsessed with humanity, it wants John Brewer to enter its confines – and discuss this fragile state of being called life…

Parsloe’s Planet was in its death throes. A world of mobile cities, the populace had moved frantically from radiation site to radiation site – for without this life-giving radiation the inevitable result would be insanity and death.

Now the radiation was failing. Soon it would be no more. The planet was going to die.

But into the chaos and agony of the dying planet comes Douglas Marsden: an outcast, a renegade – and the only man who can save the stricken world.

They called him the Life-Lord and the deadly milk-white elixir that his syndicate pushed was called Lifewater.

As promised, Lifewater brought youth to the old. Women who were losing their once cherished beauty, men who were losing their strength gave their life’s savings for a vial of the magic substance. What they did not know was that the powerful brew could cause sudden and violent death.

As the fatal youth epidemic spreads throughout the Solar System, Captain Future battles with time and danger to save his fellow beings from doom – only to find himself trapped in a master fiend’s plot to conquer the solar system.

In the Room of the Seven Doors, Carson Napier faced the choice of his life. Six doors led to terrible deaths – the seventh was the door of life. But for him, this door too would lead only to the new dangers of a planet whose beasts were more frightful than those of his native Earth.


But Carson sought the rescue of the planet’s fairest princess, and even though he stepped from one danger to meet another, he was determined to make good an Earthman’s pledge.

The great wizard Nabal’s death offers many opportunities, both for those who knew him and those who did not. For young conmen Ezak and Kel, it means a chance to loot the wizard’s estate… if they can win the confidence of Nabal’s widow, Dorna. But Dorna has plans of her own. She means to leave the tiny village for a better life in the city. And all of Nabal’s wizardly artifacts and talismans will pay for that new life – if she can only get them there intact!

‘Geoffrey Household’s prose is as clean and spare and unwaveringly efficient as are his plots’ Sunday Times

On the death of his father, artist and mystic Alfgif Hollaston returns to his Somerset house. There, he befriends Paddy Gadsden, a saddler and horse psychiatrist, and inherits Paddy’s polecat, Meg, after Paddy’s violent and inexplicable death. But innocent and playful Meg isn’t quite what she seems.

Soon Alfgif’s life and sanity are threatened by a relentless terror, resembling the sixth sense of an animal, which warns when danger is imminent …

In Queens, in the middle of a brightly lit street, a woman is savagely stabbed to death. The victim, Anna Grace, was a nurse devoted to helping others. But no one tries to help her on the last night of her life, even as she screams.

Homicide cop Miranda Torres vows to bring the killer to justice. Then a series of mob hits in the city takes the case in an astonishing new direction. And when Miranda discovers why Anna was murdered, she must catch a killer who will soon hold her life in his hands.

Far from Earth, on a ship carrying the 13th and 14th generations of descendants from the original crew, life is short. You are born, learn the tasks needed to keep the ship running, help breed and train the next crew – and your death is ordered by the computer in charge.

Gregson, chief of the psych-police, makes sure the computer’s death-sentences are carried out quickly and painlessly. His duty is a sacred trust. He knows the intricacies of the system, how it works . . . and how it can be subverted.

He is growing old. Rebellious.

He also knows his name will soon come up in the computer for elimination.

And he has no intention of carrying out his own death-sentence!

FLETCHER HAD TO DIE.
And so he did; and found himself in a place – in a state of mind – that he could not tolerate. And so he had to die again. And then again. Until, soon enough, it became clear that death did not want him.
It became his challenge to die into life!

FREE ACTING TERRAN ENVOY
F.A.T.E.

Captain Kennedy lay between life and death after his mind had been hurled a million years into the past.

To break the spell of the Jewel of Jarhen which held the Captain in its thrall, three members of FATE had to pit all their formidable skills against a terrible enemy.

The danger to Captain Kennedy’s life was matched by the peril to an entire world. It was an inexorable race against time for the FATE team as they tried to break the mystery of the pre-galactic artifact on which all the horror hinged.

In the near future, the line between entertainment and brutality has blurred. Mysterious billionaire Cameron Crayton is a household name from televised spectacles in which prison inmates fight to the death, but his old shows pale in comparison to his new event, The Crucible, a gladiatorial tournament anyone can enter. The winner is promised unimaginable wealth and glory…if they’re able to survive a series of globally broadcast fight-to-the-death matches with medieval weaponry against the world’s most fearsome fighters.

Former black-ops operative Mark Wei wants nothing more than to be left alone to drink after sacrificing everything – including his family – in America’s covert Cold War II against China, a war won largely because of him. But there are rumors that Crayton’s background and business dealings involve shady connections to foreign powers, and soon Mark is convinced to reluctantly dust off his training, strap on a sword and armor, and enter the tournament arena as an undercover agent.

It’s the most dangerous assignment he’s ever been given, and Mark quickly finds himself not just fighting for his life in the arena against trained killers, but racing to expose The Crucible’s founder’s secrets while navigating a viral phenomenon in which the stakes are literally life and death…

Another story novelized from the pages of Astounding Stories, telling of the experiments of an alien race who have migrated to the solar system to domicile themselves on Mars. Their experiments result in the death of their leader and lead to the Martians being overwhelmed by an invasion of beings from the microcosm…and, ultimately, to the creation of life on Earth!

His name was Tharg, but he was not of any life form we know today. He lived so long ago that the planet Earth had not yet shaped itself. Lava seas roiled and churned, volcanoes spouted and grew, and heavy clouds hung in the hydrogen atmosphere, leaving the planet’s surface dark and dangerous.

On that world Tharg met his death, or something very much like it. He became a disembodied, totally nonphysical intelligence, cut off from all contact with the life he had known. He ‘slept’ for hundreds of millions of years, unconnected with the world, unthinking, hardly existing.

But then he began to awake – for there was new life on Earth, creatures called ‘human’, and Tharg, knowing an ancient promise from the stars, had to tell them of it. But . . . how?

Slippery Jim diGriz is in the process of robbing the new Mint on Paskonjak when the heist goes terribly wrong. Threatened with a horrific death, Slippery Jim is allowed to cut a deal with the Galactic League: voyage to the planet Liokukae and bring back a missing artifact – the only known evidence of alien life-forms found in 32,000 years of galactic exploration.

For diGriz there are a few catches. One is Liokukae itself – a dumping ground for the League’s misfits, murderers, maniacs, and the incurably obnoxious. Another is a little matter of life and death. To ensure the utterly untrustworthy diGriz’s cooperation, the League has given him a slow-acting poison, allowing him thirty days in which to succeed . . . or die.

Now the Stainless Steel Rat is on his way to a world that is hurtling backward down the evolutionary scale – a land of fanatic, goat-herding Fundamentaloids, murderous Machmen, and a rusty guru named Iron John. DiGriz has developed an almost perfect cover: a four-member rock band that has a way of giving its audiences what they want to hear.

But while the days tick away and diGriz’s life expectancy lowers, the mission evolves from finding an artifact to liberating a planet . . . which is a tune the Stainless Steel Rat most certainly knows how to sing.

A hurricane of terrifying intensity is looming over Florida. Along a state highway, a handful of foolhardy souls trying to outrun the storm are forced to seek shelter in an abandoned house.

Thrown together by nothing more than chance, this disparate bunch of misfits includes an undercover agent seeking revenge for a personal tragedy, a burgeoning criminal in over his head, a beautiful young widow trying to start over, and a businessman whose life’s work is crumbling before his eyes. Their refuge from the awesome power of nature becomes a sort of grand and grisly hotel – especially once the invisible hand of flying death descends.

In a lovely English village of flowers, Tudor cottages and cobbled streets, Joan Brook works as companion to Lady d’Arcy, living in at the huge mansion with its surrounding park. And the village is not too small for Joan to have found a man whom she can love.

Suddenly the peaceful surface of life is shattered as a poisonous letter is received by the town’s most saintly citizen. It is followed by others; no one is safe from the anonymous letter writer. With the letters comes death. In the anguished days that follow, Joan realises that she too is in danger.

For to receive one of these letters could mean the end of her love … and her life.

The answers behind the mind-bending origins of Riverworld lie at last within reach, as the remarkable gathering of Earthlings – including Sir Richard Burton, Samuel Clemens, Alice Liddell Hargreaves (the real-life Alice in Wonderland) and the Chinese poet Li Po – finally breaches the stronghold of Riverworld’s extraordinary super-race.

But answers would lead to more mind-bending questions. Who is the Mysterious Stranger who taunted the Riverworld resurrectees with hints of the truth? What is the key to the gargantuan computer that wields the power of life and death?

The astonishing secrets lie within the Dark Tower – but only for those brave enough to seek them and wise enough to decipher them .

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.

Two monstrous armies stand opposed: Vormulac Unsleep’s undead legions out of Turgosheim, and Wratha the Risen’s Renegades, masters of the last great aerie of the Wamphyri. The spoils of war will be revenge, territory, and human flesh! And blood, of course – the sweet blood of Sunside’s Szgany. For the blood is the life, and when life or land are threatened there’s only one course of action for a vampire: battle to the death!

Trapped in the middle: Nathan Keogh, Necroscope. And the espers of Earth’s E-Branch, Trask and Zek, Goodly and Chung: Guardians of the Gate against a vampire invasion of Earth! The Necroscope holds the keys; he is the only one who can close the Gates to end the crimson carnage of the Bloodwars!

But the past holds many a secret, and the future was ever a devious thing!

2030. The Moralist party is in power, buoyed by the promise to end death. Chronic care specialist Patricia Jewett deals daily with the result: her ward is packed with technologically dependent patients. When a colleague ends up paralysed and nearly brain-dead, Jewett is forced to keep him alive – while knowing his wishes to terminate life support. Then a murder occurs, and Jewett, the only witness, is also the prime suspect.

Irish-Italian detective Nick O’Hara, grandson of a Mafia don, knows who is responsible for his son’s death, but his hands are tied. Abandoned by his wife, he grows increasingly desperate, going into a tailspin from which he can see only one escape: revenge.

As Nick’s life goes into freefall, he must choose between duty, family loyalty and his desperate need for justice.

A gunman on the run, a seventeen-year-old girl on a family vacation, a jaded working girl, a guilt-stricken widower, an abandoned mistress. All heading fast down a route to sudden death. Then for one horrifying instant their lives are frozen in time, when a Cadillac drives at speed into oncoming traffic.

Lives are lost, and those that survive must endure a violent sequence of events that ensure life will never be the same again – for any of them.

Two men, one of them a policeman, are investigating a death involving a large international genetic engineering corporation. They become bothersome to the corporate owners and are taken out of action – not by being killed, but by being put to sleep for hundreds of years. But this may be a fate worse than death.

They awaken to a distant future in which contemporary industrial civilization has been “cleansed” from the earth and what humanity survives is learning to live a very low-technology lifestyle, being bred eugenically to this life. This cleaning was done on purpose, an international plot by the rich and powerful who in fact rule the world – and who, in this distant future, are dying off.

This is a complex and morally tortuous vision, and Turner’s characters find it nearly impossible to adapt without killing someone, perhaps even themselves.