Search Results for: forbidden,-the

The fifth title in the popular Harpur and Iles series.

Sarah Iles’ latest young lover, Ian Aston, and the seedy gangland club he frequents both possess the intense attraction of the forbidden. When one night at the Monty they witness a fatal knifing, they unwittingly learn far too much for their own good of a deadly plot that could, if successfully executed, rearrange the city’s criminal power structure.

Immediately, the unfaithful wife and petty criminal become targets of both police and underworld observation. In Come Clean Bill James once again explores that no-man’s-land of law enforcement, where human concern and naked expediency stand perennially at odds with each other.

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

The Russians are looking for a few good men, and they’re doing most of their looking within the British University system. It’s a ploy which has served them well in the past, but now there’s a difference. As Dr David Audley discovers very quickly, the aim of the Soviets is not simply to recruit, but to lay the groundwork for destruction.

From the dim, comfortable reading rooms of Oxford to the bleak moors stretching away from Hadrian’s Wall, Audley searches for the Russian wolf in don’s clothing. What Audley can’t know is that the agent has been forbidden to fail . . . on pain of death.

Earth, 2000 years after the holocaust which drove man deep underground; a ghostly, deserted planet peopled only by the diligent robots who, century after century, silently harvest grain which no man will eat. Up into this eerie world comes Mel, a questioning young Roamer who has disobeyed the Law which says he must never venture into or beyond the Lost Levels. Together with three companions, and a companion not of this earth, Mel takes on the awesome task of freeing human beings from the tyranny imposed upon them by their remote ancestors; of justifying the agonized cry of Barney as he died in a Forbidden Level; ‘I am a man! Everything is for Man!’

2650 AD

The Earth has been buried beneath a sheet of ice for 300 years. In cities miles beneath the surface humanity huddles, waiting for release.
Dr. Raymond Barnes waits with passion, and listens daily for evidence of life on the still Earth. Finally, a voice from across the void hails his open frequency . . . the surface awaits mankind.
But not all men are anxious to return to what was . . . those in power are determined to keep man in his new place, to retain their order of fear and oppression. Barnes and his courageous group of scientists and adventurers are arrested for possession of forbidden technology; the radio is destroyed! Their punishment is swift ejection from the underground city, their only hope is to reach London – 3000 desolate miles across a frozen wasteland!

Gifford knows that he must get away. London, his office job, his suburban home and his older wife have become unendurable. Then comes the answer in Callender, whom he meets in a pub and who offers him the job of handyman on a remote island. But once there doubts began to creep in. What has become of his predecessor, Mackie? Why has all the furniture been moved out of Mackie’s cottage and into the one he now occupies? What secret lies inside the power house, which he has been forbidden to enter?

There is some dreadful mystery behind the isolated community on the island, and he realises that his own safety depends on remaining ignorant of the truth: that Mackie disappeared because he knew too much …

Chris Godfrey, the famous astronaut, is on holiday in Majorca with his friends Morrey, Serge and Tony. They visit the fabulous underground Caves of Drachm and there they encounter Ebenezer Yates, an elderly and wealthy American who is greatly distressed because his grandson Ian has just disappeared. There is one cavern to which no one is admitted; armed soldiers guard its entrance, but Mr Yates knows that Ian was fascinated by this forbidden cave and he is sure that the boy has slipped in while the lights were switched off. The cavern is regarded with such terror that no one will talk about it, but Mr Yates finally discovers that before it was kept guarded a number of people had entered and none had ever returned. Nonetheless, the astronauts are determined to find Ian no matter what the danger…

For countless years the enigmatic city of Klagan had rested beneath the racing moons of ancient Mars. Forbidden, guarded, sheltered in the cup of the Blue Mountains and surrounded by waterless desert. It rested there, a place of a thousand rumours and whispered fantasies, and gave birth to muttered tales of incredible wealth and riches.

To this city came Halmar, the guide; Lorna, the dancer from Venus; and the man called Smith. Defying the ban of the Terran Authorities, the fanatical Drylanders, and the harsh desert, they reached the crystal walls of the strange city. There they found a tremendous mystery, the deserted artefacts of a vanquished civilisation – and found themselves snared in an incredible trap.

For Klagan was more than a city. It was. . .
What it was and how the intrepid adventurers solved the incredible secret of the mysterious city makes this an exciting tale of science and plausible speculation, action and human motivations.

The dense forests and forbidding jungles of Africa harbour innumerable uncanny mysteries, dangers and horrors.

Among these, often reported though little known, is a secret society of Leopard Men. By day and night they are the terror of the vast domain they frequent. Their orgies, their rites, their ruthless power form the basis of this series of adventures, of which Tarzan of the Apes is the central figure.

Adding to the suspense, an absorbing detail of interest is the mysterious quest of a beautiful American girl braving the dangers of the Dark Continent alone; while nonetheless interesting are two luckless and poverty-stricken white ivory poachers, whose trails cross those of both the Lord of the Jungle and the lone girl – trails that lead three of them to the forbidden precincts of the Holy of Holies of the Leopard Men, where no white man has ever been and returned alive.

On the gold-symbol world of Beresford’s Planet, Richard Kirby lived in total luxury. As a member of “The Set” his life was a never-ending round of planetary party-hopping. The only restriction imposed on him – that he never put down on any world marked with a red or black symbol – was something that he had always accepted without question.

That is, until his brother Alec was murdered in cold blood! Alec had been an undercover agent to those forbidden planets, and in order to avenge him, Kirby had to find out for himself what was really happening there.

But with the start of his investigation, Kirby found out quickly that the authorities meant business when they said “Hands off!” The secret they were protecting was of vital importance, and it now became a matter of life and death, not only to Kirby, but to all the inhabitants of THE CHANGELING WORLDS.

A boy’s struggle to grasp the forbidden truth about his world…

Michael was quite young when he discovered that some of his playmates bled if they cut themselves, and some didn’t. For a long time he didn’t think about it. Nor did it seem strange to see Zeppelins being attacked by jet fighters above London’s force field, or glimpse Queen Victoria walking with Winston Churchill in the Mall. Not at first.

But later he thought about these things – he couldn’t help it. The world was real, and yet unreal. It was all desperately worrying. So Michael and his friends formed a society to investigate the world around them.

Despite the terrible things they discovered, things that made some of them insane, they never actually guessed the truth about the Overman culture. Until Mr Shakespeare told them.

Set more than four thousand years in the future, The End of This Day’s Business depicts a truly utopian way of life, a global society in which distinct national cultures are preserved but coexist without competitive nationalism, violence, or war. Women, characterised as the reasonable sex in this society, care for the earth and all it’s creatures. Only one price must be paid for this harmony. It is the subjection of men, who, stripped of their history and deprived of any knowledge of women’s sacred rights, complacently accept their ‘natural’ inferiority.

The plot turns on the desire of one woman, Grania, an artist and leader, to teacher her son what is forbidden for men to know. Risking both their lives, she tells the story of when men dominated, especially of the twentieth-century rise of fascism, and the subsequent world transformation as life-loving women took over from death-loving men.

Astra City was a technological 40th century masterpiece. It represented the challenge of society to the raw untamed planet where it raised its gleaming towers in a far-flung corner of the galaxy. Beyond the force field encircling Astra City lay mystery and terror in the form of the weird primeval Greek beasts.
There were other mysteries surrounding Astra City. Mysteries like those the one-eyed Twen discovered in the labyrinth below the modern city. A labyrinth whose age would only be calculated in centuries… but which was believed to have been erected by the distant Masters themselves. Hidden in its depths Twen discovers a forbidden document of the millennial age, which involves her with a secret society who know the dreadful truth about the colonists. They are Androids… and their dawning intelligence leads them into head-on conflict with the rapidly decaying human race.

He had forgotten his real name, so they called him “Spingarn” after the last role he had played. He was the man the directors of the Frames regarded as their major headache – for he was guilty of two unforgivable arrogances. He had programmed himself into every one of the vast world-staged dramas he had directed – and he had reactivated the forbidden Frames of the pre-human planet of Talisker.

In those days of an overcrowded colonized cosmos, a thousand years from now, the Frames were the major means of diversion. Historical re-creations and fictional dramas played out with planets as stages and while populations as actors – the Frame directors and their robot assistants had become the masters of all life.

They could not destroy Spingarn, THE PROBABILITY MAN, but they could sentence him to undo the damage he had done. So he was sent to the mad Frames of Talisker to unravel the secret of their origin a billion years before the universe

Since the first classical ghost story was written, and since the unexplainable caught the imaginations of men, the mysteries of ancient Egypt have captivated the reading public in both fact and fiction.
Non one who walks through the Egyptian exhibits of a museum can fail to be impressed by the immense number and complexity of the exhibits.
What meanings lie hidden in that ageless heiroglyphic writing?
What forbidden knowledge lurks behind the inscrutable eyes of Nephthys, Guardian of the Dead?
What dreadful secrets are revealed when the seals around the lid of a sarcophagus are broken?
Do the falcon-headed gods Horus and Set still walk the earth?
Do the carnivorous fangs of the weird Anubis still seek the human blood.
Does Mont, the macabre bull-headed god still hold sinister sway in forgotten corners of the Delta?
The explorers who raided the timeless tomb at Luxor discovered to their cost, that an Egyptian curse was independent of time and space…

All those who ever lived on Earth have found themselves resurrected – healthy, young, and naked as newborns – on the grassy banks of a mighty river, in a world unknown. Miraculously provided with food, but with no clues to the meaning of their strange new afterlife, billions of people from every period of Earth’s history – and prehistory – must start again.

Sir Richard Francis Burton would be the first to glimpse the incredible way-station, a link between worlds. This forbidden sight would spur the renowned 19th-century explorer to uncover the truth. Along with a remarkable group of compatriots, including Alice Liddell Hargreaves (the Victorian girl who was the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland), an English-speaking Neanderthal, a WWII Holocaust survivor, and a wise extraterrestrial, Burton sets sail on the magnificent river. His mission: to confront humankind’s mysterious benefactors, and learn the true purpose – innocent or evil – of the Riverworld . . .

Winner of the Hugo Award for best novel, 1972

Laredo Space Base hadn’t sent a ship to Earth for hundreds of years before the Project Deep Green survey craft was launched. Only one thing was known: the planet humankind had so long ago vacated was a wasteland with nothing on it but poisonous flora and small, murderous denizens.

That’s what they taught astronaut Ferrer Burgoyne and as a result he was totally unprepared for the teeming jungle stretching farther than his eyes could see. He was even moer unprepared for the slightly green humanoids who greeted him. Obviously the scientists of Old Earth had done more in their labs than just mess around mixing human and plant cells. As sure as Ferrer Burgoyne was an astronaut the new men of Earth were the descendants of those hidden, forbidden experiments.



How then could Burgoyne continue his mission: to defoliate Earth with the deadly chemical Deep Green and prepare Earth for the return of his species?

This final collection of Joan Aiken’s stories, taken from nearly sixty years of her writing career, is rooted in the classic fables and fairy tales familiar to us all, but which she has brought up to date by adding her own voice, and a touch of that mysterious added ingredient that makes you return to them again and again, at any age.

They range from fantastic fairy tales to science fiction, from a future where the sun no longer shines thanks to human folly, to one where all the best words are kept locked away in a forbidden forest . . . they take us to lands that could be from our own past, where we can call upon magical friends like the mysterious Miss Samphire, or long lost magic spells to save a castle from Viking attack. These are absolutely timeless tales, for as she said:


‘They come from nowhere, and they are aimed at nobody’s ear; or rather they are aimed at the ear of anybody who happens to pass by just at that moment’

It is over a thousand years since the events of Double Planet, when a group of cosmonauts crashed a comet into the Moon, thereby bringing a potential life-supporting atmosphere to that desolate planet.
Tugela is a young girl who has grown up in the austere post-technological society that has settled there in that time, a society dominate by the all-powerful City and its insidious cult of the Eye. As the comets stopped coming, and the atmosphere became increasingly thin, the Priests’ power grew with the claim that only their rituals could bring the comets back.
But a revolution is brewing among the Moon colony that aims to smash both the City and the poisonous stranglehold of superstition that has been holding it back for so long. Within this violent struggle, Tugela has a vital role to play. When she stumbles into a secret vital to the cause, she soon realises her destiny lies far beyond her homeland, beyond the deadly Forbidden Zone, perhaps even beyond the Moon itself…

Valli had always lived for the Dance. She expressed her very soul through the sinuous, mystic movements that were as old as the East itself. Like all true artists she was a perfectionist. Her mind, as lithe as her body, was always searching for new material. At last she discovered a temple, old and deserted, hidden by Time and the mysterious, impenetrable jungle. In the temple she saw a series of carvings depicting an ancient sacred dance. It was a dance such as she had never imagined possible. Slowly at first and then with increasing speed she began to copy the movements recorded so faithfully by the timeless stone.

A strange feeling possessed her as the rhythm of the ancient dance obsessed her whole being. Dark beings of terrifying supernatural aspect glided from the crumbling walls an joined in the ancient rhythm.

Not until it was too late did Valli realise that the Forbidden Dance had resurrected forces of cosmic evil which had been sleeping in the lost temple.

And so it came to pass…

Through science, faith and force of will, the Harmonics carved out for themselves a society they perceived as perfect. Diverse peoples held together by respect for each other and the prospect of swift punishment if their laws were disobeyed. Fertile land that embraced a variety of climates and seasons. Angels to guard the mortals and mystics to guard the forbidden knowledge. Jehovah to watch over them all…

Generations later, the armed space cruiser Jehovah still looms over the planet Samaria, programmed to unleash its arsenal if peace is not sustained. Bu tan age of corruption has come to the land, threatening that peace and placing the Samarians in grave danger. Their only hope lies in the crowning of a new Archangel. The oracles have chosen for this honour the angel named Gabriel and further decreed that he must first wed a mortal woman named Rachel.

It is his destiny and hers. And Gabriel is certain that she will greet the news of her betrothal with enthusiasm and a devotion to duty equal to his own.

Rachel, however, has other ideas…

Long before William Shakespeare, tales were told of the Dane Ameleth whose noble father was murdered by the uncle who swiftly weds new widow Gerutha. Must Ameleth repay this crime by killing his uncle? The White Abacus dares to reconfigure the best known version of the classic tale, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, to create a futuristic revenge drama with an entirely different outcome. Telmah is an inventive genius. Ophelia is no sobbing suicide but rather the impressive Warrior Rose, who shockingly revises the fate of her lover.

In this exotic future history, the galaxy is open to anyone who passes through a hex gate, whether hu (augmented human) or ai (artificial mind). Telmah’s close friend is the ai Ratio, newly embodied to the Real. Like all members of his asteroid tribe, Telmah is forbidden to use the hex transport system, since that would doom his rebirth.

Out of this agonizing dilemma comes a feverish pursuit of truth and duty, love and near-madness, in an endlessly startling future where nothing turns out the way you expect.

In Old Earth’s penultimate age, the corpulent master criminal Luff Imbry moves through the halfworld like a full-fleshed shark. Thief, forger, confidence man, and sometimes go-between, he maps out his illicit operations with exquisite care then carries them out with courage and panache. But, often, things don’t go as Luff planned, and he must call upon a talent for improvisation and a ruthless will to survive.

This collection brings together seven short stories and novelettes previously published in Postscripts, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the anthology Forbidden Planets, plus two novellas formerly only available in limited editions. It offers Luff Imbry in all his moods and guises.

Finalist for the 2014 Endeavour Award.

Praise for Matthew Hughes:

“Matthew Hughes does Jack Vance better than anyone except Jack himself” – George R.R. Martin
“Heir apparent to Jack Vance” – Booklist
“Hughes’s boldness is admirable”- New York Review of Science Fiction
“Hughes effortlessly renders fantastic worlds and beings believable”- Publishers Weekly
“A towering talent”- Robert J. Sawyer
“A treasure” – David Gerrold

For ten years, Colin sweated, slaved, and eventually built-up a nice business on a dusty world called Mars. Ten more years and he’d have been able to retire a rich man. Five more years and he’d have put all worry behind him. He didn’t get those five years.

During a sandstorm, he blundered accidentally into the forbidden zone, where the temple of Dra Vheera waited and rested, an area guarded zealously to the death by a fanatical faith. The Martians complained, and he lost all, stripped of everything he owned, fined, and sent back to Earth on a one-way ticket. And who was to blame? The Dra Vheera, the priesthood of Mars, the temple, the religion. One name for all three, but all three really one.

A man named Barhart offered vengeance, sweet, pure vengeance. With his help and money, Colin put together a force of eager men determined to strike back at the Martians, but he found more than they bargained for. The safety of Earth was now at stake, and Colin had to race against time and Death to save mankind.

Young Walter Scot is hot on the heels of cattle raiders in the service of the dark Lord of Soulis when he encounters his kinsman Michael Scot – and his life is changed for ever. Even in the turbulent Borderlands of the thirteenth-century Scotland Michael had a fearsome reputation as a magician and master of forbidden arts, trafficking with the demons of middle air. Now he has returned from years of exile with the Pope’s pardon and the favour of the Emperor, a peaceful man of God – and yet strange events still follow him.

The mysterious fire that blasts the raiders. The fourth voice that laughs where only three men were seen. The luxury that suddenly appears to furnish his long-abandoned castle – the mystery about him only deepens.

But still darker forces are at work behind the bloody rivalries of Border politics, black sorceries stirring within the sinister castle of Hermitage. When Walter’s father is ambushed and killed, his betrothed flung into a dungeon and his lands and his very life threatened by the necromancer-baron Soulis, Michael appears to offer the aid he desperately needs. Aid that, as Walter soon discovers, is almost as frightening as his enemies’ threats – as he is transported to another world, ensnaring, enchanting, seductive. There he finds a new life, new heroism and a new, all-consuming love. But there is a terrible price he must pay…