Search Results for: galaxies

In the 277th century, Earth is dead, but mankind survives in colonies scattered across the galaxy. To these new worlds come the Immortals, beings with strange ties to ancient Earth who seem to live forever, who can travel light years in days – and who use their strange powers to control the existence of ordinary mortals. On the planet Pentecost, a small group sets out to find and challenge the Immortals. But in the search they themselves are changed: as Immortals, they discover a new threat, not just to themselves, but to the galaxy itself.

When Earth is contacted by galactic civilization, our heroic couplet – diplomat Tom Parent, and his linguist wife, Lucy – prove themselves to be just the pair to tour the galaxy representing Earth and learning the whys and wherefores of galactic civilization. There’s only one tiny catch to this grand tour – on Tom and Lucy’s performance hinges our acceptance by the rest of the galaxy as a civilized world rather than as ward of some more “advanced” species. (You don’t want Earth to become a Galactic ward.).

Retief returns – to make the galaxy safe for diplomacy!

The diplomat extraordinaire faces his ultimate challenge on the embattled planet Furtheron – to keep the peace and keep himself in one piece!

Voracious Crawlie cannibals want him for dinner – while the wily Creepies are besieging Earth’s embassy. Then greedy Groacians add fuel to the fire, igniting civil war for their own secret ends.

Only a rare diplomat can pull his Corps out of this stew, save his boss’s hide, and preserve the future of the Galaxy!

A churning nuclear vortex, appearing out of nowhere, wreaking utter destruction – and countless numbers of them were menacing planets throughout the galaxy! ‘Storm’ cloud, nucleonic genius, set out in his spaceship Vortex Blaster to track and destroy the mysterious vortices – and embarked on a saga of discovery and conflict among the far stars and the worlds of the Lensmen . . .

The Vortex Blaster is the seventh and last self-contained novel in E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s epic Lensman series, one of the all-time classics of adventurous, galaxy-spanning science fiction.

There was a name, but the name was a myth. The myth rode the tongues of ten billion men – and ten times ten billion not-men – on ten thousand worlds, and wherever the name was spoken, it was with awe and respect.

Citadel!

The secret name for the masters of space, the creatures who ruled without office, who served without reward.

Citadel!

The deepest mystery and the greatest power of all the myriad stars. Wherever two creatures met in fear of oppression, a silent cry to the men of that code-named organization rose in the birth of a new hope. For the galaxy was Citadel… and the Citadel was the galaxy!

Terran Corps scattered their ships outward into the glittering galaxies. Solterra’s prime objective: orbital reconstruction of the far-flung planets. They had tightened up Solterra’s galaxy and had made mankind secure against alien threats – or so Terrans believed.

As Chief Commander, Stephen Strang aggressively explored the cosmos for the glory of his beloved Earth. He could boast that he had moved more planets into orbit around Sol than any other. Strang felt smugly safe against alien “sharks” – until he discovered the vast time-bomb that was planet Vesta’s core. . .

When the starship Meteor crash-landed on a strange world orbiting a solitary sun in the vast darkness outside the galaxy, her crew of Earthmen had no idea of what to expect. The planet was Earthlike in gravity, air, animal and vegetable life – but what of the native races they glimpsed from a distance?

What kind of culture would evolve on a planet whose sky was dominated by the glow of an entire galaxy – and with no other stars save its own dim sun? What kind of gods would they worship?

The Earthmen had to find the astounding answers to these questions on a planet split by a world-wide war.

“Five of our worlds are missing”. That was the essence of the report that shocked the galactic Nomads at their annual meeting. For each of the mighty star-ships reported vanished was a world of its own – a man-made, self-sustaining city-state housing thousands of people. The Nomads themselves were an unplanned by-product of man’s conquest of the stars. They were the gypsies of the distant future, the restless rovers of outer space. But to Joachim of the peregrine tey represented a way of life that was to be dearly defended. So it fell to him to make his own world-ship the bait in a cosmic trap set to catch the galaxy’s unknown foemen!

From the author of Dune, the greatest SF novel of all time, comes a stunning evocation of alien cultures

In the far future, humans and aliens have joined together in a galaxy-wide federation of intelligent species: The Consentiency. But its existence is now threatened by the discovery of a secret, illegal and deadly experiment on the planet Dosadi.

There, the froglike Gowachin have created a brutal society: 850 million beings, human and Gowachin, are confined in an area of 40 square kilometres. But the experiment in overcrowding is getting out of control: the beings that have bred on Dosadi are so tough and resourceful that they are capable of breaking out of their monstrous prison and overrunning the galaxy.

The human race was expanding through the galaxy . . . and so, they knew, were the Aliens. When two expanding empires meet . . . war is inevitable. Or is it . . .?

Donal Graeme set out to re-shape the galaxy, but first he must tear it apart.

Donal Graeme, Dorsai of the Dorsai, was the final link in a long genetic train, the ultimate soldier, whose breadth of vision made him a master of space war and strategy – and something even greater. He was the focus of centuries of evolution, the culmination of planned development, and through him a new force made itself felt.

Dorsai were renowned throughout the galaxy as the finest soldiers ever born, trained from birth to fight and win, no matter what the odds. With Donal at their head they embarked upon the final, impossible venture: they set out to unify the splintered worlds of Mankind.

The Galaxy is a big place, made up of thousands of millions of worlds, and the work of exploration will probably never be entirely completed. But various systems within the Galaxy, each with its own particular humanoid race if intelligent beings, have joined in galactic federation for the mutual good of all concerned. Once major snag remained: speedy communication.

When space travel velocities were increased by the introduction of 5C drive on all but local planetary working vessels the way was opened to enormously expanded regions of movement. Piet Tek, captain of a space tramp, tells of what happened when the secret of instantaneous communication was prematurely exploited by unscrupulous people in search of power.

The things from beyond the Milky Way galaxy found the intelligent races of our universe amusingly slight. To them, possessors of vast cosmic power, the strivings of various humanoids to outdo each other were a source of contemptuous entertainment.

They established a contest between the worlds. It would be an Olympiad of the whole galaxy – a Galactiad. Let these puny interstellar intelligences meet each other in contest. Pit one against the other – and let the losers beware!

Earth had its team – a mixed group of powerful athletes and genius scientists. Because other worlds did not always believe in the ideal of good sportsmanship, they had to confront the reality. Win at all costs . . . or goodbye to humanity!

Slippery Jim di Griz – the Stainless Steel Rat – is still recovering from his efforts to save his beloved Angelina from the notorious Interstellar Internal and External Revenue when he is called upon to perform the impossible. Saving the galaxy. But can he pull it off? The galaxy is being attacked by every kind of alien race – untold billions of tentacled, slimy, green, clawed mutations – and time is running out. Aided and abetted by his wife Angelina and his teenage sons, James and Bolivar, Jim infiltrates the nerve centre of the enemy council chambers. But he hasn’t reckoned on the grey men and their commitment to a ‘holy crusade’ to destroy mankind – permanently!

Travel out along the galaxy’s Perseid Arm. Branch off to follow the ten thousand stars of Mircea’s Wisp. Eventually you will come to the Purple Rose System – three stars, Lorca, Sing and Syrene, that seem about to drift away into the void. Three planets circle Syrene. On one, Cadwal, there is Life. Long ago the Naturalist Society of Earth had listed Cadwal as a natural preserve. An administration centre had been set up and staffed to protect the planet from all exploitation. Araminta Station. Now, centuries later, the young Glawen Clattuc is beginning to wonder what the future may hold for him in the hierarchic, carefully ordered hereditary society that is life on Cadwal.

Does crime pay – if a galaxy is the prize?

What mysterious power emanated from the bejeweled crown of stars that rulers of three planets frantically sought its possession?

White Flag for Earthmen

Man had discovered a means of colonising the galaxy. Through a system of instantaneous matter transmission, men, machines, anything, could be sent light years away in seconds!

Only, men were not the only beings in the galaxy who were expanding, and at 200 light years from Earth the alien Gershmi people made their claims clear, with guns!

It would have been a fair fight between equally matched races, had not the very matter transmitter boxes which had made mankind’s expansion possible, suddenly began to put men back together, 200 light years from Earth, with their will to fight removes, so that Earthmen were marching with white flags of truce straight into Gershmi fire!

Visit Earth, the birthplace of man!

From the holiday planet of Paradiso one could go on many exciting tours and excursions – Mars, Venus, the Moon, even the most distant and alien worlds were accessible to the inquisitive holidaymaker, courtesy of Starways Inc. – the giant combine which owned Paradiso and over half of the galaxy.

But of all Starways illustrious trips, there was really only one which interested Ram Burrell – the one which Starways seemed to actually discourage people from taking… the trip to planet Earth. And once Burrell had got himself a ticket for the journey, he began to discover why Earth had become the least visited planet in the galaxy, and why Starways worked so hard to keep it that way…

The planet had two unique elements. One was that it produced the galaxy’s most desirable hallucinatory drug. The other was that it was a stock broker’s paradise.

The world was split into rich men’s holdings – and every hour, every minute these were being traded on a continuous stock-market. Up and down went values as men conspired to seize others’ properties, to push prices down and costs up. Their money game controlled everything else – the common people, workers, farmers, homes, lives, poverty and luxury . . .

Earl Dumarest went there to find his next stake. Find the drug-gem or manipulate the market – two possibilities. But behind the scenes stood the advisors of the inhuman Cyclan, determined to fix the odds against Dumarest . . .





(First published 1981)

Asher Sutton has a book in his hands – a book that would change the history of the galaxy, a book by himself…that he had never written.
Or had he?
Or would he?

Former assassin Raena Zacari thinks she’s left the past behind. The Imperial torturer who trained her is dead, the human empire is disbanded, and she is finally free.

But Raena is troubled by a series of nightmares that always seem to end with her shooting an ex-lover in the head. She needs to get her mind clear because there’s a flaw in the most commonly used starship drive-and the band of media-obsessed pirates she’s fallen in with is right at the heart of the controversy.

With humanity scattered across the galaxy, she’s going to have to rely on the alien crew members of the Veracity to help her put the pieces together. It doesn’t help that the Templars- wiped out in a genetic plague while Raena was imprisoned-have left booby-trapped biotechnology scattered across the galaxy.

Matthew Wade had been a coord, one of the mysterious chosen ones, who through the powers unknown to the rest of mankind, ruled over the known galaxy. But Wade fled the overwhelming responsibility of his exalted caste and went into hiding on the symb-socket circuit.

The symb-socketeers were the migrant workers of the galaxy. Traveling from planet to planet, they worked for play and played for a living. Matthew Wade adopted the freewheeling, ever-changing life hoping to evade the bailiffs of Altimus, the home planet of the cords, knowing that they would never rest until they had tracked down the renegade.

And then Wade took service on the plant of Ashramdrego, and was faced with the most important decision of his life – would he let an entire planet be destroyed rather than reveal his true identity?

At last as they reached out through the ghostly transparencies of the galaxy the men from Earth encountered an alien race completely non-human in appearance. They were the real aliens. Their physiology differed gruesomely from Terrans’ – could men hope their psychology would not?

The Unknown Non Human Aliens – the Unha – replied to peace overtures with immediate hostility. So, reluctantly, the men from Earth forged a weapon of awesome power. Created out of the shattered bodies of men and women – men like Siegfried Ritter, Giuseppe Tozzi and Eugene Valois – Blazon set fire to the Galaxy.

For Doctor Marjorie Rothwell the existence of Blazon challenged the basic assumptions forced on humanity by alien intransigence; but the action-packed story of Blazon does more than explore the running sore of human aggression in its understanding of human sacrifice.

One Hoka is a threat to human sanity. Two Hokas are a menace to civilization. And three Hokas . . . Heaven help the galaxy, in this hilarious science fiction adventure from two of the best writers in the genre.