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“Horng sat opposite the tiny, fragile creature who held a microphone, its wires attached to an interpreting machine. He blinked his huge eyes slowly, his stiff mouth fumblingly forming words of a language his race had not used for thirty thousand years. ‘Kor was . . . is . . . God . . . Knowledge.’ He had tried to convey this to the small creatures who had invaded his world, but they did not heed. Their ill-equipped brains were trying futilely to comprehend the ancient race memory of his people.”

It is hard to say how it started – all the unexplained little signs of a new baby about the house in ‘The Silent Cradle’ – but soon none of the O’Bannons could deny that there had been a highly irregular addition to the family. In ‘Max Haunting’ a middle-aged hippie, preserved almost intact from the Sixties, starts showing up on the doorsteps of his old friends and loves who, in acquiring jobs and furniture, have ‘sold out’ rather less than he thought. Hauntings of curious varieties continue in other stories: the sort manufactured out of glass by a man who thinks his godly wife deserves a miracle; the visitation of a mother’s cruelty into the mind of her daughter as she confronts the frustrations of coping with her own child; the specters of opportunities lost or spurned which nag to be laid, like ghosts.



Elsewhere Leigh Kennedy considers the impulse of cannibalism in a future world whose greed has induced ecological upheaval, and the phenomenon of speaking in tongues as investigated by a sociology professor. She views the world through the eyes of a victim of seizures and of a primatologist whose devotion to apes has gone a bit too far.

The Penheniot Experimental Research Village was a top-secret community with an elaborate defence system to keep away prying eyes. Inside the walls men rushed ahead with practical experiments to develop a means of time travel, while outside the everyday world fell victim to more and more plagues, strikes and rioting.

The world was on the brink of chaos. Could the small band of scientists and chrononauts at Penheniot Village find a safe method of escape into the future before the violence and death outside destroyed them too?

The Fear – mysterious, unstoppable, this deadly plague is slowly wiping out humanity. And only one world seems to offer hope of sanctuary – Ree’hdworld, home of the only other intelligent beings in the universe. But Ree’hdworld is not as safe as it seems. For something has been happening to the natives – both the friendly Ree’hd and their more primitive kinsmen, the Rundii. And only three people stand any chance of discovering and surviving the danger that the humans of Ree’hdworld will soon face: Kristina, an Earthwoman who is slowly “going Ree’hd”; Maguire, a blind man who should have died centuries ago and who, living, has seen all the secrets of the universe; and Zeitman, a brilliant scientist who holds the key to salvation on Ree’hdworld in his mind – if only he can discover it in time¿

In an incredible far future, the known laws of Time and Space no longer apply to the world – and the seed of Man has mutated. Lobey is a mutant, different because he can hear the music in people’s minds. And when he encounters the beautiful dead-mute, Friza, he knows he has found a kindred soul.

Then Friza is killed, by someone or something unknown, and Lobey, driven by a knowledge he does not understand, sets out to bring her back from the dead. His journey leads him to strange lands and stranger people: people such as Spider, the eternal traitor incarnate; the Dove, embodiment of beauty; and Green-Eye, doomed to be the victim of a ritual as old as Time.

And always in the background, always waiting, stands the shadow of the chilling, childlike killer from the sea. The being called Kid Death . . .

Winner of the Nebula Award for best novel, 1968

Wolff-Jadawin, demigod in Earthman’s guise, and Lord of the Planet of Many Levels, opened his eyes to see the symbol of the Master Lord, Urizen, floating below the ceiling.

The summons of the Cruellest of the Universe-makers was direct and urgent. Jadawin’s beautiful wife had been abducted and held captive by the satanic Urizen

In this uniquely amazing adventure, contrived by Urizen, Jadawin was required to enter the many-levelled universe that had been purposely constructed for his torment and possible destruction. Only through crossing the Gates of Creation could Jadawin redeem his bride, as he ventured through world after brutal world in an attempt to outfox the Master Lord’s diabolically booby-trapped planets.

Searching for the beautiful witch Jemhara, the magician Thryfe at last finds her in the reinvented town of Kandexa, where a strange and passionate wooing begins. From this union a son is born – golden-skinned, red-haired, blue-eyed – and thus the Lionwolf returns to the world of men.

Unaware of this birth, his original mother the goddess Saftri has begun her own search for her lost love Athluan . . . while elsewhere the black and shining ones, the Children of Chillel, seek to establish claims on the ice-locked planet. Beyond, over, under all, the evil god Zzth rages and plans the ruin of these separate and immortal lives.

Strafed by the tumult of such conflicting powers, the be-wintered realm of mortals can only wait to learn its destiny.

Today, tomorrow, always…the white-haired girl from the marsh is running for her life down a derelict highway
In a future world polluted to the point of dissolution, the trees are dead, the sky is yellow, and no birds sing. Everyone and everything is tinged with madness. For Eva Belmort there seems no role except to become some man’s plaything and drudge.
Then, one day, arrives the stranger with the gun – with blue eyes and hair as white as her own. Roaming the tortured landscape in his wagon, Steel is a seller of death…but for Eva he provides hope of escape from Foulmarsh.
Urged on by a power of love and hate impossible to fathom, Eva’s travels now take her to distant towns and villages full of danger and surprises – and arouse in her strong passions she cannot harness…

Glaciers once covered the world with ice. Now a gap has opened in the ice wall. And through that gap come the men who call themselves “Rulers”.

Their cavalry rides on mammoths. Their bows can shoot faster, harder, farther. Their wizards wield power that neither the shamans of the Bizogots nor the wizards of Raumsdalian Empire can match, a magic that can melt the stone beneath a man’s feet and call down fire from the sky. Scattered Bizogot survivors hide. The Empire is shattered. The feckless Emperor is in hiding.

Against the Rulers stands Count Hamnet Thyssen and a few friends: Jarl Trasamund of the Three Tusk Bizogots, the adventurer Ulric Skakki, and, most important, Marcovefa, the female shaman who has magic that Rulers cannot counter.

Perhaps Hamnet and his allies can save their lands from Rulers. But first they must seek the legendary Golden Shrine – which has not been seen by human eyes since before the glaciers came.

1945: Russian troops have entered Berlin, and are engaged in a violent orgy of robbery, rape, and revenge…

Wehrmacht officer Hasso Pemsel, a career soldier on the losing end of the greatest war in history, flees from a sniper’s bullet, finding himself hurled into a mysterious, fantastic world of wizards, dragons, and unicorns. There he allies himself with the blond-haired, blue-eyed Lenelli, and Velona, their goddess in human form, offering them his knowledge of warfare and weaponry in their genocidal struggle against a race of diminutive, swarthy barbarians known as Grenye.

But soon, the savagery of the Lenelli begins to eat at Hasso Pemsel’s soul, causing him to question everything he has long believed about race and Reich, right and wrong, Übermenschen and Untermenschen. Hasso Pemsel will learn the difference between following orders… and following his conscience.

CONSPIRACY OF GENIUS

His height barely reached five feet, his spindly legs supported a bulging chest, and his eyes protruded grotesquely from a gnome-like head – but within that absurd-looking man lay the mind of a genius.

It was a genius that had carried mankind deep into the secrets of creation and was now on the verge of producing living organisms from test tubes filled with inert chemicals. The world, however, ridiculed the theories of Professor Cheslin Randolph and the government refused to advance the millions needed for the final series of experiments.

But Professor Randolph was determined to get the money – even if it meant turning his powerful brain to robbing a spaceship in mid-flight, using trained viruses as his accomplices.

The planet Kerim must have been Utopia – once. All its inhabitants had to do when they wanted something was to pray out loud for it – and what they wanted would materialise before their eyes. But by the time Jack Waley crashed on it, its best days had long been gone – and its future was strictly limited.

Which was typical Jack Waley luck. He had bungled and blundered his way across the space lanes, messing up everything he tried and being castaway on Kerim looked like the end of the line.

For Kerim’s people were now bands of confused savages and its cities crumbling ruins. And this time Waley knew that he’d have to change a whole world’s luck if he wanted to save his own neck one more time.

Expressway to an Uncharted Sphere

“Theyre about!” the woman whispered, and Crane abruptly saw a strange light shining through the heavy black curtains that shrouded the house. He crossed to the window and before anyone could stop him he drew the curtain back.

At first he did not understand what he saw: a round gleaming, colour-running orb stared unwinkingly back into his face. It was an eye. An immense sad eye staring at him through the chink of the curtains, an eye surrounded by a living whorl of flame that he had last seen engulfing poor Barney in the parking lot.

At least three others had disappeared into the strange world from which those aliens had come, and a girl had been driven insane by them. And before Crane’s quest to unravel the secret of the Map Country was complete, the fate of two worlds would hang in the balance.

This is the first volume of the Helliconia Trilogy – a monumental saga which goes beyond anything yet created by this master among today’s imaginative writers. An entire solar system is revealed, and with it a world disturbingly reflecting our own, Helliconia: an Earth-like planet where dynasties change with the seasons .
Events and characters and animals stream across the pages of this gigantic novel. Cosmic in scope, it keeps an eye lovingly on the humans involved. So the 5,000 inhabitants of the Earth’s observation station above Helliconia keep their eyes trained on the events of Oldorando and may long to intervene though the dangers are too great. So we on Earth have them all in our vision in one of the most consuming and magnificent novels of scientific romance.

An introductory note seems called for to explain to the reader the origin of the following strange document, which I have received from a friend with a view to publication. The author has given it the form of a letter to myself, and he signs himself with his nickname, “Cass,” which is an abbreviation of Cassandra. I have seldom met Cass since we were undergraduates together at Oxford before the war of 1914. Even in those days he was addicted to lurid forebodings, hence his nickname.
My last meeting with him was in one of the great London blitzes of 1941, when he reminded me that he had long ago prophesied the end of civilization in world-wide fire. The Battle of London, he affirmed, was the beginning of the long-drawn-out disaster.

Cass will not, I am sure, mind my saying that he always seemed to us a bit crazy: but he certainly had a queer knack of prophesy, and though we thought him sometimes curiously unable to understand the springs of his own behaviour, he had a remarkable gift of insight into the minds of others. This enabled him to help some of us to straighten out our tangles, and I for one owe him a debt of deep gratitude. He saw me heading for a most disastrous love affair, and by magic (no other word seems adequate) he opened my eyes to the folly of it. It is for this reason that I feel bound to carry out his request to publish the following statement. I cannot myself vouch for its truth. Cass knows very well that I am an inveterate sceptic about all his fantastic ideas. It was on this account that he invented my nickname. “Thos,” which most of my Oxford friends adopted. “Thos,” of course, is an abbreviation for Thomas, and refers to the “doubting Thomas” of the New Testament.

Cass, I feel confident, is sufficiently detached and sane to realize that what is veridical for him may be sheer extravagance for others, who have no direct experience by which to judge his claims. But if I refrain from believing, I also refrain from disbelieving. Too often in the past I have known his wild prophesies come true.

The head of the following bulky letter bears the address of a well-known mental home.

“THOS.”

Featuring man’s staggering journey to the stars…

In a Tenn’s-eye view of the world, “staggering” can be interpreted in more ways than one, of course.

Notably –
The warm, human interpretation
The feminist interpretation
The green-transparent-bubble interpretation
The man-in-the-street interpretation

Mr. Tenn has included a charming witch tale, a really delicious vampire item, and a superior machine (intergalactic hit) story. These have nothing to do with man’s staggering journey to the stars. They are simply here to add to the confusion.

Then again, why couldn’t they have something to do with the square root of man?

They called him Flinx…

He was just a freckle-faced, redheaded kid with green eyes and a strangely compelling stare when Mother Mastiff first saw him on the auctioneer’s block. One hundred credits and he was hers.

For years the old woman was his only family. She loved him, fed him, taught him everything she knew – even let him keep the deadly flying snake he called Pip.

Then Mother Mastiff mysteriously disappeared and Flinx took Pip to tail her kidnappers. Across the forests and swamps of the winged world called Moth, their only weapons were Pip’s venom…and Flinx’s unusual Talents.

It advanced not in the manner of a living creature but in the manner of sand. It had no arms and then a hundred, no feet but one as wide as the base of the advancing dune itself.
Everywhere and all of it was dark red, like all the rust that had ever afflicted the metals of the world squeezed into a swiftly shifting pyramid rage.
The dune howled and moaned and bellowed like some sky-scraping banshee unwillingly fastened to the Earth.
And in the midst of all that geologic fury, two thirds up the face of the oncoming mountain were two eyes…

For three decades science fiction legend Alan Dean Foster has captivated readers around the world, from his debut classic The Tar-Aiym Krang and his inspired scenario for the first Star Trek movie to a host of New York Times bestsellers, including Splinter of the Mind’s Eye and Flinx in Flux.
In this collection of twenty brilliant odysseys of the imagination, Foster once again soars beyond the limits of reality – where the real thrills begin…
NASA Sending Addicts to Mars!: It was the most insane idea in the annals of space travel – and the only one that would work.
Diesel Dream: Sometimes on dark, lonely highways dreams do come true, and this trucker’s hope was the best one of all.
Sideshow: Flinx hadn’t a clue about the alien dancer, but Pip knew trouble when she saw it.
Empowered: A magnificent male discovers the not-so-super part about being a superhero.
The Question: A bold adventurer determines to solve one of life’s profound mysteries.
…and fourteen other amazing stories!

STAR TREK is one of the world’s most popular and enduring science fiction franchises, spanning decades’ worth of TV, film, comics, books and more. This book – originally published just as DEEP SPACE NINE was first being produced – analyses the rebirth and renaissance of the series in the nineteen eighties and nineties.

Along with masses of factual information – plot synopses, cast and crew and, uniquely, British transmission dates – this Programme Guide casts a gently critical eye over the series’ continuity (and lack of it) and lingers over the moments of humour (intentional and otherwise).

In sum, this is a light-hearted, detailed and affectionate overview of the revitalised version of the classic STAR TREK. Please note that it has not been updated since its original publication.

When Davey and his family moved to the city from the island of Muckle Burra off the coast of Scotland, they left his grandmother behind. But now his parents are dead-after a car accident that left Davey confined to a wheelchair-and Gran has moved in to take care of him and his sister, Lu-Lyn. But Lu-Lyn believes that both she and Gran are “Ridders” who have strange, dark powers and must return to the island… or has a dangerous force already followed them here?

Davey must embark on a terrifying journey that will reveal the true secret of his grandmother’s rare gift-and the limitless power of his own potential.

Joan Aiken mixes myth and magic in this mysterious short novel inspired by the Munch painting, The Scream.

“An eerie story from this bestselling children’s author: ‘Superbly chilling…this is one of her best” Independent on Sunday

“A tense, exciting and disturbing new story from Joan Aiken, whose magical, fantastic and supernatural books for children are among the best ever written” World of Books

“A prolific and much-beloved children’s author, Joan Aiken is perhaps best known for her classic “Gothic” adventures, chief among them The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Midnight is a Place. The Scream, which features Edvard Munch’s famous painting of the same name, was written later in the author’s career, and makes for an agreeable “shivery” read” LibraryThing

“Joan Aiken, one of the most brilliant children’s writers of her generation, delivers a dark and potent reading experience in this short, disturbing story. After their parents’ fatal accident, David and his sister live with their grandmother, a fearsome woman who possesses the power of the Evil Eye. Gran’s mysterious links to the old legends and magic of a remote Scottish island seem destined to lead to another tragedy” Amazon Review

“Joan Aiken is just ridiculously talented in terms of the scope of her writing and this is truly demonstrated by her ability to create a chilling and compelling narrative in such a short book” Goodreads Review

In a peaceful, residential section of Queens, Kitty Keeler’s young sons have gone missing. Both she and her husband say they have no idea where the children are. Then New York Police Department cop Joe Peters gets the call he’s been dreading. The bodies of two blond, blue-eyed boys have been found.
As Joe launches an investigation, he becomes dangerously drawn to the exquisite Kitty. With the evidence against her mounting and the world calling her a heartless killer, Joe vows to uncover the truth, no matter what the cost. But as violence begets violence, and his obsession with Kitty grows, Joe knows he’ll never rest until he finds the answer to the burning question: Did Kitty Keeler murder her own children?

‘Donald Thomas introduces us to the slums and fetid courtyards of nineteenth-century London and in doing so provides a sweeping portrait of the vast world that did not accept “Victorian Values”. The villainy is outstanding. It is also entertaining. The author has a practised eye for the best anecdotes and presents amazing characters, some of whom come equipped with names that sound positively Dickensian . . . a wonderful profile of Victorian London’ The Spectator

Agnes receives few compliments, and Henry Preble is not so bad-looking even if he does have a reputation for cornering girls at work. In the eyes of the world, knowing that you’re on the shelf at twenty-four can do strange things to a girl. So strange that you might wake up one morning with almost no recollection of the previous night’s events . . . Published for the first time in the UK, The Gardenia, the basis for Fritz Lang’s 1953 classic Hollywood noir film The Blue Gardenia, is a gripping story of suspense and a brilliant exposé of the press sensationalism of 1950s America.

This volume also contains Out of the Blue, which was made into a comedy film in 1947 starring George Brent and Carole Landis.