Search Results for: hunted

Those who tried never returned, and those who didn’t, always wondered what they were missing by not attempting the perilous journey to ‘Heaven’.

The official designation of the giant anti-gravity floating disc was ‘International Land Extension U.S.23’. But to the people living like sardines in the fam-apts and dormitories on the ground below, it was known as ‘Heaven’.

Government regulations meant that it was almost impossible for a human being to get to ‘Heaven’ – almost, but no quite, as Vic Sterling found out when he began to hunt for his missing half-brother Johnny Considine. For Johnny, along with over a hundred other rebels, had decided they could no longer stand the living conditions on Earth and had hitched a ride to ‘Heaven’, a ‘Heaven’ full of unexpected dangers for Vic when he decided to follow.

When Saul and Diane save a wild rabbit from a hungry weasel in a quiet country lane, they inadvertently unleash the vengeance of a bloodthirsty, carnivorous force.

Soon their sanity and their lives are at risk – as are the young people of a cell of the Animal Liberation Front with whom they join forces to learn the terrible secrets of their rural village. A visit to a battery chicken shed turns into an animal Auschwitz, where Saul is held prisoner. And a raid on a butcher’s shop brings to murderous life a full size model of the meatman which, armed with a butcher’s cleaver, goes hunting for blood and MEAT!

Predictably unpredictable, normally abnormal.

Watson combines science fiction and fantasy into an eclectic mix that includes stories about fallen angels in Hell rebelling and mounting a breakout, about the inconvenience of keeping aging parents in your brain instead of a nursing home, about Jesus’ immortal brother as solo passenger on the first starship, about alien coffins bombarding the solar system, about right-wing U.S. militias stealing a quantum computer to commit nuclear blackmail, about a computer games designer haunted by the cyber-ghost of his murdered wife, about frozen heads and strange mind-changes, and how a cake decorator defeats a vampire with a sweet tooth. De-evolution, treasure-hunting via hang glider, dark animal fantasies, humanity as hive-entity, Hercules Poirot on a starship – Watson takes the strange, the eerie the weird, mixes his seasoned writing skills, and produces a potpourri of the fantastic. These nineteen stories are sure to amuse, bemuse and entertain.

In this brilliant acclaimed novel dinosaurs still rule the Earth.

The cosmic catastrophe that ended the Age of the Dinosaurs 65 million years ago never happened. The evolution of the great reptiles continued, climaxing with the Yilanè, the most intelligent and advanced race on Earth.
But when the onset of a new Ice Age forces them to cross the ocean to explore and colonize a vast contingent, they clash violently with a savage new breed of mammal that they have never before encountered. Mammals that walk erect, hunt and use crude stone tools – and weapons . . .

THE TRILOGY CONCLUDES…



In West of Eden and Winter in Eden, Harry Harrison, an acknowledged master of imaginative fiction, broke new ground with his most ambitious project to date. He brought to vivid life the world as it might have been, where dinosaurs survived, where their intelligent descendants, the Yilanè, challenged humans for mastery of the Earth, and where the human Kerrick, a young hunter of the Tanu tribe, grew among the dinosaurs and rose to become their most feared enemy.



Now, in Return to Eden, Harrison brings the epic trilogy to a stunning conclusion. After Kerrick rescues his people from the warlike Yilanè, they must regroup and consider their future. They find a safe haven on an island and there begin to rebuild their shattered lives. But with fierce predators stalking the forests, how long can these unarmed human outcasts hope to survive? They need weapons, but they only effective weapons lie in the hands of the technologically superior Yilanè. The small band of humans has no choice but to confront their face head-on.



And, of course, Kerrick cannot forget Vaintè, his implacable Yilantè enemy. She’s been cast out from her kind, under sentence of death, but how long will her banishment last? For her strange attraction to Kerrick has turned into a hatred even more powerful than her inbred instincts – an obsession that compels her to hunt down Kerrick and kill him. In a world completely unlike her own, two great cultures struggling for mastery of the Earth face the same problem that faces us today: how to coexist on the same planet completely unlike ourselves – or mutually perish.

A young genius is hunted by killers. His sole hope for survival lies in the brain power of the intelligent being he has created. The Earth’s first machine intelligence becomes the key to a harrowing battle.

When Marianne’s parents died, leaving control of their fortune to her feared older brother, she struggled to make her way as a student in America – and her old home began to seem as unreal as a fairy tale, her childhood there as distant as a dream . . .

Until the Magus came to claim her, and the Black Madame to destroy her, and the Manticore to hunt her down through the streets of another world – for there is magic in Marianne’s blood, and magic in her soul.

And in a battle fought in an everchanging world of warped time and wicked magic, it is the souls of Marianne and her family that are the ultimate prizes.

Marianne, the Magus and the Manticore is the first volume of Sheri S. Tepper’s acclaimed Marianne Trilogy.

When Marianne’s parents died, leaving control of their fortune to her feared older brother, she struggled to make her way as a student in America – and her old home began to seem as unreal as a fairy tale, her childhood there as distant as a dream . . .

Until the Magus came to claim her, and the Black Madame to destroy her, and the Manticore to hunt her down through the streets of another world – for there is magic in Marianne’s blood, and magic in her soul.

And in a battle fought in an everchanging world of warped time and wicked magic, it is the souls of Marianne and her family that are the ultimate prizes.

Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods is the second volume of Sheri S. Tepper’s acclaimed Marianne Trilogy.

When Marianne’s parents died, leaving control of their fortune to her feared older brother, she struggled to make her way as a student in America – and her old home began to seem as unreal as a fairy tale, her childhood there as distant as a dream . . .

Until the Magus came to claim her, and the Black Madame to destroy her, and the Manticore to hunt her down through the streets of another world – for there is magic in Marianne’s blood, and magic in her soul.

And in a battle fought in an everchanging world of warped time and wicked magic, it is the souls of Marianne and her family that are the ultimate prizes.

Marianne, the Matchbox and the Malachite Mouse is the final volume of Sheri S. Tepper’s acclaimed Marianne Trilogy.

Benita Alvarez, a downtrodden Hispanic woman, is chosen by alien envoys to be the Intermediary in their bid to get humankind to join an interstellar federation of peaceable races who practise Neighbourliness and strive to live ethical and moral lives.

But other alien races have their own plans for the verdant, over-populated planet and they have chosen their own contact: a down-and-dirty government Senator. They don’t want mankind to join the Federation, though: they just want hunting rights of Earth . . . hunting rights on man . . .

Vanessa Smith looked like any normal seventeen year old girl. But Vanessa wasn’t normal at all.

She possessed extraordinary telepathic powers – and in the 1990s telepathy was the ultimate weapon in psychological warfare. Vanessa, along with other gifted children, was virtually a prisoner at Random Hill Residential School, developing her abilities for Government exploitation.

So when she escaped, Vanessa became a political embarrassment. Questions were asked by the Opposition. It was vital for the Prime Minister, the ruthlessly dictatorial Sir Joseph Humbolt, that everything that marked Vanessa’s existence should be erased. And orders were given that she should be hunted down – using telepaths like herself – and destroyed.

IT WAS EXTERMINATION DAY – THE REMAINING MEN WERE TO BE HUNTED DOWN

Rura Alexandra, Madam Exterminator, had recently graduated into a 25th century world where men had become biologically less important, where women could reproduce as they wished by cloning and parthenogenesis. Her task was simple – in theory, if not in practice: to wipe out the last few thousand men who had taken refuge in the Highlands of Scotland.

But an ambush near Lock Lomond led to rape, and the killing of her fellow-exterminators. And Diarmid MacDiarmid, the last remaining rebel chieftain, proved too much of a fascination . . .

On the poisonous, icy surface of Ganymede, a man and a boy are on a deadly hunt. Their prey is the Aleph – an unknowable alien artifact that roamed and ruled Ganymede for countless millennia. Indescribable, infinitely dangerous, the Aleph haunts men’s dreams and destroys all efforts to terraform Ganymede into a habitable planet. Now in a modern world ancient struggle is joined, as a boy seeks manhood, a man seeks enlightenment, and a society seeks the power to rule the universe.

The Changeling could become anyone or anything – man, woman, child, animal. It was endowed with an inborn lust for disorder and destruction. Now it had chosen the plague-ridden planet of Alvea for its next mission – to throw an entire world into eternal chaos and madness.

The Earth Consortium could send only an embittered killer and an untrained anthropologist to hunt down the Changeling. Yet, dangerous though it was, the Changeling was not the only peril the Earthmen faced on Alvea, or the worst – for the Alveans feared and hated Earth. Even a hint of the hunter’s identities would leave them dead and dismembered within minutes

There is a landscape between reality and dreams, a strange and primitive country that exists upon the edge of our waking world. Michael Whitlock knows that country well. His best friend lives there…
It beings with a scatter of earth, thrown over the infant by unseen hands, a haunting attack that is repeated day after day, culminating with an explosive fall of mud that nearly kills the boy. And found in those tons of raw, wet earth: flints, chalk artefacts, and remains of a primitive shrine and the dismembered carcase of a hunting dog.
The Whitlocks’ house, in the Kentish Weald, stands near a chalk-pit, and it is here that their son, Michael creates his preculiar imaginary world, making his camp by the pile of grave-earth from that early attack. Unaware of what is happening to him, the boy touches and uses the strange force that now ebbs and flows in the pit, And when the haunting returns, this time it is more subtle, almost wonderful in its secutive nature. Torn between a fear of the supernatural and greed for the results of Michael’s power, his adoptive parents are helpless. It is left to Françoise Jeury, a psyhic investigator, to piece together the bizarre truth of th epit and the shrine and the oddly silent boy.

Under Eddie Burton’s management the ambitious starlet Lorna Maxwell seemed headed for the top of Broadway’s glamorous world of make-believe. And then she vanished – through a wall where there was no door. Eddie found himself plunging after her into a city beyond reality.

In that weird twin city to New York, Eddie became a hunted fugitive while his girl friend turned up as an ever-present face and all-pervading voice that awed and mystified the inhabitants. And Eddie learned that between him and return to his natural home stood her new manager, a mysterious figure who ruled by a tyrannical combination of super-scientific miracle and brute force.

He called himself by the name of the father he had never known, Vazkor, king of a forgotten land. In his veins were mingled the blood of that regal warrior and that of his witch mother, the silver-masked, snowy-haired survivor of the hated Old Race. He had sworn that she would die at his hands in the name of his father and all that his world had become.

Across that barbaric and age-haunted planet his quest went relentlessly on. As he searched, so grew his own powers, his fearful heritage. Across wide seas, in conquered cities, and among haunted mountains, the hunt took him. And as he drew closer to his objective, the clearer became the way she must be slain, the more certain his ability to sunder all her witchcraft and ancient science to rid the world once and for all of his creator – the white witch from the volcano.

I saw her, hanging in the sky like a flake of the moon. A woman, her face masked by a black shireen, her body by a black shift, but her white arms spread, and her white, white, bone-white hair blowing all around her like a flame composed of smoke. Recognition was immediate. It was my mother. I shouted at her. It was crystal clear to me, what he had meant for me, my father, Vazkor, what she had robbed me of. And I drew from my belt my hunting knife and threw it at her heart.

…He heard a shout, distant and ringing, “No, Carson! Not that door!”

Something green writhed in through that door. Something gaseous, billowing, filling the chamber faster and faster, something that caught at his throat and gagged him, made him wretch, brought streaming tears to his eyes.

Before his eyes stretched a nightmarish growth of vine and tree, of mushroom-headed stalks, of gyrating tentacles swaying from every branch and limb. He heard a shrill, triumphant chittering.

He turned to spring back. A vice closed over his foot and tripped him. He fell, sprawling, his mouth and nostrils filling with stinking mud.

He did not remember anything more for a very long time.

Cy Yancey dreamt of being a big game hunter adventuring in Africa. Little did he know that stepping into an alleyway outside his rifle club would lead him to the most important hunt in his life, a hunt that would take Cy much farther than Africa, a hunt through the worlds of the Dimensions, seeking, of all things, Earth!

For Yancey, in trying to grab a cab, ends up hitching a ride with Porteurs Zelda and Jorine – escapees from the power of the mysterious Contessa.

Fleeing with them, Yancey is bounced from one Dimension to another until he arrives on Jundagai, planet of the Hunters.

On Jundagai lies the answer to Yancey’s dreams. The Hunt reigns supreme, though often one is not sure what the quarry is. But Jundagai holds still a greater attraction. Jundagai, Yancey’s prison, holds the key to home. Yancey has only to find the right lock before death finds him.

Without setting foot on another planet, people like Shep Blaine were reaching out to the stars with their minds, telepathically contacting strange beings on other worlds. But even Blaine was unprepared for what happened when he communed with the soul of an utterly alien being light years from Earth. After recovering from his experience, he becomes a dangerous man: not only has he gained startling new powers – but he now understands that humankind must share the stars.

Hunted through time and space by those who he used to trust, Blaine undergoes a unique odyssey that takes him through a nightmarish version of small-town America as he seeks to find others who share his vision of a humane future. Blaine has mastered death and time. Now he must master the fear and ignorance that threatened to destroy him!

Bursting right through the four-dimensional travel zone of subspace, Tellurian psiontists make an amazing discovery on the other side.

Beyond the bounds of subspace, a parallel universe is cruelly ruled by a violent, murderous empire, the Justiciate, where psiontists are ruthlessly hunted down and fed to giant eagles.

And within the Justiciate are lodged spies and traitors, dedicated to its overthrow – evil agents of the proud Garshan ‘master race’.

The arrival of the psiontists from Tellus triggers off a truly spectacular space adventure…

Originally published in the omnibus Rings, Drunkard’s Endgame follows a group of robots who, 1000 years after rebelling against their human masters and fleeing on a starship, are trying to hunt down mankind’s ultimate weapon.

On an ecologically seared Earth, James Konteau is a veteran krono, a professional time traveler. His job is to ease the overpopulation crisis by establishing new colonies in Earth’s prehistory, long before human beings evolved. But his job has lost all meaning, for Konteau is a lone and troubled man haunted by his own past.

Now, suddenly, his future is also in turmoil: a timequake has reportedly ripped through distant eons, destroying one of Konteau’s colonies. Framed for the disaster, Konteau is hunted by authorities, defying all the powers of technology and politics to escape back through the misty ages on a complex mission of death, justice, love – and incredible destiny . . .