Search Results for: in-the-beginning

In this novel of secret sorceries and forbidden desires, the mystic Cammon must put aside his personal feelings for Princess Amalie while he reads the souls of her suitors for any potential threats. But Cammon is unable to read Amalie, and he begins to suspect that she herself possesses magic powers-a revelation which would put her life in danger, and throw the kingdom into chaos.

For fifteen years, Maria Devane has been desperately, passionately in love with Dante Romano. But Maria knows that Dante can never give everything of himself back – at least not all the time. Every month, Dante shifts shape, becoming a wild animal. He can’t choose when he shifts, the transition is often abrupt, and as he gets older the time he spends in human form is gradually decreasing.

Maria has kept his secret since the beginning, knowing that their love is worth the danger. But when a string of brutal attacks occurs in local parks while Dante is in animal form, Maria is forced to consider whether the lies she’s been telling about her life have turned into lies she’s telling herself . . .

Prince Zarkon is back! This thrilling new case from the top-secret files of the crime-fighting organization known as Omega begins in London with a strangely simple and bewildering crime. It’s just a warehouse robbery, but the perpetrators are no ordinary criminals. They are the diabolical Blue Men.

Sinister, invulnerable to conventional weaponry, and entirely blue, these evildoers can walk unharmed through clouds of deadly gases. Even gunfire doesn’t stop them – bullets bounce off their bodies as though they’d struck the steel side of a battleship. Bold and brazen, the chilling culprits carry out their crimes again and again, making headlines around the world. London is panicked . . . and Scotland Yard is stumped.

Straight from Knickerbocker City comes Prince Zarkon and the Omega Men to the rescue. The lord of the unknown and nemesis of all villains, Zarkon soon discovers the malignant mastermind behind the mysterious Blue Men. It is the aptly-named Vulture, a brilliant but deranged, unscrupulous, and embittered scientist who is determined to leave the bloody stain of his extraordinary genius upon the world. As the band of Blue Men multiplies, until it terrifyingly outnumbers the Omega Team, it looks as if our superhero has finally met his match.

Filled with electrifying suspense, this is a Zarkon adventure beyond compare . . . and one of the strangest pursuits in the annals of criminology.

It was Thane who crossed the abyss of the ages and stood on the very brink of Eternity…who found the secret of the Time Treasure… who saw, and laughed and came back sane from that place beyond the Universe where no man had ever been before him, and where none should ever come again.

This was the ending. But the beginning was in the city of Zotheera on the planet Daikoon…

A restless outworlder was Thane of the Two Swords. A man of blood and steel, a man of strange powers strangely acquired. The warrior Thane possessed a secret vital to the greedy Princes of the Planets. And it was on the planet Daikoon that the princes tried to buy Thane’s services…

A rose-red city, half as old as time. Once it had been king city of a mighty empire and the center of the ancient faith – Gateway to the Gods, the old epics name it. Now it was dead, empty, deserted, only a dim ghost of its vanished splendor. Such was Ilionis. Lost city of Mars. A somber ruin, cold and lonely. But Ilionis was not forgotten. The old city held a valuable treasure. A treasure that brought Earthmen Ivo Tengren and scientist Keresny on a strange and difficult journey to the city’s gates. A journey that was now ended. Ilionis had been found. The treasure was close by. And now an even stranger journey was about to begin.

Ganelon Silvermane, the genetically designed superhero of the Earth’s fabulous final age, has offered himself as hostage to the worst band of barbarians to roam the plains. As a captive of the Horde, Ganelon rises to greater heights of heroism than ever before . . . and begins to assume the full power of his mighty being!

Paul Heisenberg is mysteriously endowed with the ability to jump through time. Together with thousands of eventual followers, he begins a journey that eventually takes him a billion years into the future. The Earth has been devastated by war with an alien race, and the changes that have resulted from the degradation of the world’s biosphere force him–and others–to rethink their own humanity. His pilgrim’s progress through the coming time is beset by doubts, distractions, and temptations as various voices attempt to distract him from his determination to follow the process through to its end. He eventually witnesses the complete transformation of the Earth, and the evolution of a single omnipotent but mindless Gaean organism. Is intelligence itself just a brief candle, forever doomed to burn out? Or can Paul find some other alternative for his race.

This collection brings together the ten earliest stories in Brian Stableford’s series of “Tales of the Biotech Revolution,” all written in the 1980s, except for one anomalous example from the 1960s. The dates in some of the stories, located a comfortable distance in the future when the stories were written, have now long past, revealing certain anomalies of early expectation; but they have been left unaltered, as nostalgic samples of yesterday’s long-dead and perhaps much-lamented tomorrows. The collection begins and ends, as is surely only appropriate, with flamboyant utopian fantasies boldly asserting the perfectibility of humankind and the world of which the species has custody.

The final contact made by the Daedalus Mission begins badly, even before the ship makes a hard landing in the middle of nowhere. The situation of the colony doesn’t seem to make any sense, and neither does the situation of the indigenous aliens–the Sets–that have helped the colony survive and thrive. Alex Alexander doesn’t take long to work out a hypothesis that might explain the mystery–a hypothesis that the people on the ground have already worked out for themselves–and he’s fortunate enough to fall in with a colonist who’s obsessively determined to prove the hypothesis. Unfortunately, the quest seems likely to become so dangerous that both of them might die trying–and there’s too much at stake not to take it to the very limit of possibility, no matter what the cost.

The planet Attica has two continents: Lambda and Delta. The indigenous alien population being restricted to Delta, Earth’s colony was planted on Lambda. Before the arrival of the Daedalus, two sailing ships had set out from Lambda to cross the ocean separating the two continents, and neither had returned. Now a third is on its way, and Mariel Valory and Alex Alexander of the Daedalus have hitched a lift, in order that Mariel might use her talent to try to make contact with the aliens. Unfortunately, it turns out that contact has already been made, and that the aliens are building an empire with the aid of borrowed Terran technology–an empire that’s beginning to crack under its internal strains and eternal challenges. And when Alex and Mariel are marooned by their reluctant hosts, things start to go from very bad to much worse….

Earth, can you spare a city?

The town of Superior, Ohio, certainly was living up to its name! In what was undoubtedly the most spectacular feat of the century, it simply picked itself up one night and rose two full miles above Earth! Radio messages stated simply that Superior had seceded from Earth. But Don Cort, stranded on that rising town, was beginning to suspect that nothing was simple about Superior except its citizens. Calmly they accepted their rise in the world as being due to one of their local townspeople, a crackpot professor. But after a couple of weeks of floating around, it began to be obvious that the professor had no idea how to get them down. So then it was up to Cort: either find a way to anchor Superior, or spend the rest of his days on the smallest-and the nuttiest-planet in the galaxy!

When Cook’s newborn baby entered the world, he had nothing but hope for its future. However, it was immediately clear that this was no ordinary child – it’s murderous screams seemed a dark portent. As it grew, things only got worse, and the child’s mother began to despair. The new parents hoped their child would grow out of it, but soon came to realise that its inauspicious beginnings were only a sign of things to come.

“The King Who Was a King – The Book of a Film” is a fascinating treatise on the development of film written by H. G. Wells and first published in 1929. Writing at the when cinema was beginning to explode, Wells explores the emerging industry’s history, future, and the elements of contemporary film.

Following the development of massive airships, naïve Londoner Bert Smallways becomes accidentally involved in a German plot to invade America by air and reduce New York to rubble. But although bombers devastate the city, they cannot overwhelm the country, and their attack leads not to victory but to the beginning of a new and horrific age for humanity. And so dawns the era of Total War, in which brutal aerial bombardments reduce the great cultures of the twentieth century to nothing. As civilization collapses around the Englishman, now stranded in a ruined America, he clings to only one hope – that he might return to London, and marry the woman he loves.

Telling the story of a dying Earth, The Night Land begins with a man from the 17th century who, mourning the death of his true love, is given a vision through the eyes his future incarnation. In that distant time Earth is only dimly lit by the remaining glow of the dead Sun. The last millions of the human race cluster together inside the Last Redoubt, a huge metal pyramid, and are set upon by mysterious forces from the dark outside. Leaving the protection of their refuge means certain death, but our narrator makes mind contact with a survivor in a forgotten Lesser Redoubt. He must journey alone through the evil darkness to find her, knowing that she is the reincarnation of his past precious love.

This classic of Gothic horror follows Laura, a woman haunted by a girlhood dream of a beautiful visitor to her bedroom. Now, a decade later, Laura finds Carmilla, who appears to be her own age, on the side of the road after a carriage accident. The two recognize each other from the same childhood dream and become fast friends. Soon after, Laura begins to experience mysterious feelings and is once again haunted by nightmares. She finds Carmilla strangely irresistible and longs to be with her.

But as the two friends grow closer, Laura’s health begins to fail. It becomes apparent that her enchanting companion is harboring a sinister secret. To free herself from Carmilla’s grasp, Laura and her family must fight for their lives.

The sequel to Bellamy’s Looking Backward where a young man falls asleep in 1887 and wakes in a utopian year 2000, where all social ills are solved. This novel continues the thread of his utopian vision.

Equality begins when Julian West returns to the year 2000 to continue his education. The book describes an ideal society in that year.

What did our ancestors dream of when they gazed up at the stars and looked beyond the present?

A Journey in Other Worlds races far ahead of the nineteenth century to imagine what life would be like in the year 2000. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Earth is effectively a corporate technocracy, with big businesses using incredible advances in science to improve life on the planet as a whole. Seeking other planets habitable for the growing human population, the spaceship Callisto, powered by an antigravitational force known as apergy, embarks on a momentous tour of the solar system. Jupiter proves to be a wilderness paradise, full of threatening beasts and landscapes of inspired beauty, where the explorers must fight for their lives. Dangers less tangible but equally deadly await the Callisto crew on Saturn, which yields profound secrets about their fate and the ultimate destiny of mankind.

“ZNIDD SUDDABIT!”So the Ulleran challenge begins, with the rantings of a prophet and a seemingly incidental street riot. Only when a dose of poison lands in the governor-general’s whiskey does it become clear that the “geeks” have had it up to their double-lidded eyeballs with the imperialist Terran Federation’s Chartered Uller Company. Then, overnight, war is everywhere.
How it will end is in the (merely) two Terran hands of the new governor-general, a man shrewd enough to know that “it is easier to banish a habit of thought than a piece of knowledge.” The problem is, the particular piece of knowledge he needs hasn’t been used in 450 years. . . .

“In the next few days you will master the rules and techniques for every activity, skill, talent, sport and art ever mastered by any human being anywhere. You will be as expert at clipping flints as at architectural drawing. You will be able to juggle, walk a tightrope and add the numerals on the sides of passing freight cars as fast as any idiot savant. You’ll absorb all the information in all the books – the human race’s entire heritage of knowledge…”

This was only the beginning of the experiment that was to turn a petty thief into the mos brilliant and powerful man ever to hold the earth in thrall.

This was only the first step on the path of conquest mapped out for – THE ULTIMAX MAN.

When he awakens in a skid row alley, Adam knows nothing. Not who he is, nor where he’s from. Money is a mystery. So are women. All he begins his new life with is a will to survive. But he learns fast: first, how to get away; then how not to have to. In the beginning Adam wants to be friends with us. Before he’s through he just might run the human race off its feet…

As the Hukk maneuver on the fringes of Terran Space, the Terran Navy is about to begin the most important “game” in the history of the human race. For too many years the Hukk have been pushing, pushing at humanity’s frontiers, testing our strength and our courage – and finding both wanting. Now the Terran Hardliners have had enough. They will use the coming war games to start a real war, even if it requires a revolution at home to clear the way!

Appearing from the remote future, Nexx Central agent Ravel is emplaced in America, circa 1936. His mission: to undo successive tamperings of the time stream which threaten the survival of Mankind. He falls in love with a lovely, simple girl, Lisa, but in the midst of his happiness is called away to Dinosaur Beach.

Dinosaur Beach is a Nexx Central station located millions of years in the past, in the Jurassic Age. But shortly after Ravel’s arrival, the station is attacked and destroyed, and Ravel begins a terrifying odyssey through time.

For the attackers were another time-tampering team from still a different future era. And Ravel himself is not only in growing danger but the human world as we know it…

THE CORPS DIPLOMATIQUE TERRESTRIENNE HAS NEVER SEEN HIS LIKE…

Retief – the most diplomatic diplomat of the 27th century.

His mission: to gain control of the most desirable planet in the universe – without triggering intergalactic war.

He tries talking … but how does anyone – even Retief – negotiate with an uninhabited planet?

He tries a dice game … but how does gambling help the solar peace organization prevent the malevolent Basurans (who’ve eaten their own planet) from turning to Terra’s prize colony for an after-dinner snack?

The problems Retief faces are just beginning, but as insurmountable as they seem, the indomitable adventurer prevails – and keeps the state of the universe on an even keel!