Search Results for: into-the-darkness

Commodore John Grimes was finally getting his space wings back. On his old ship, Faraway Quest, Grimes was to venture forth to the very Rim of the known worlds, seeing … The Outsider.

“The Outsider’s Ship … is a storehouse of science and technology … we, and the Federation, and the Shaara Empire, and probably quite a few more, have sent expeditions. Every one has ended disastrously.”

So, it is out to the Rim and find The Outsider. But the mystery ship is not always easy to find. And other worlds, too, yearn for the treasures of the alien technology. What Commodore Grimes finds at the Rim, and what finds him there, sends him racing through time tracks, surrounded by enemies and temporary friends, trying endlessly to discover the secret dangers of … The Outsider.

The anatomy of fear is the unknown. The essence of terror is contained in the phrase “What if?” Suppose the dead should return? Are there invisible phychic entities hovering on the fringe of the physical world? Can the power of evil manifest itself in tangible form and launch world shattering violence against humanity?

The most gripping fear lies within the human mind. Lana Davis was a normal, healthy, sane young woman to all outward appearances but the Unknown was laying siege to her mind. By day her work kept the worst of the Terror at bay, but at night it returned. Time passed and Fear grew greater…Fear was embodied in a mysterious effigy which stood beside her bed . . . Fear lurked in a weird voice on the telephone.

Lana Davis ran screaming into the night – unable to face Fear any longer. The stranger who found her apparently knew more about her problems than she did; Lana found herself involved in a macabre new environment where Fear had expelled reality leaving the stranger as the only link with the world she had once known. Dark supernatural powers contended with insanity for Lana’s very soul, as she hovered on the brink of unreality and annihilation.

Beyond the eccentric orbits of Pluto and Neptune lies a vast, empty wilderness. There is nothing but the silence of space between the fringes of the Solar System and our nearest stellar neighbour, Proxima Centauri. The outer worlds of the Home System were only inhabited by Service and Scientific Personnel. Life for them was a constant routine war against an almost impossibly hostile environment.
Then something in deep space began to affect the fringe of the Solar System. The isolated Observers in their living domes were helpless. They could do nothing except report on the increasingly bewildering phenomena. As the strange effects worsened, several domes were abandoned. The menace from Beyond continued to encroach on the civilised planets as it head steadily earthwards…
What was the rational, scientific explanation for the thing that looked like an eye? Was it merely motiveless and purposeless, or was it guided by something sinister and more dangerous? Were men fighting a Cosmic Accident or an enormous Intelligence from out there…?

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…

Planet Earth was finished, its surface seared by nuclear heat, its great cities obliterated, its billions of inhabitants dying or dead. Only a few pockets of survivors remained. For all but a few it was only a matter of time. Then into the poisoned atmosphere of Earth there flashed a mysterious craft from somewhere deep in space. It landed, a small number of Earth people were taken aboard, then the craft disappeared into the great void. During the dark millennium which followed a strange experiment was conducted. When it was complete, another space craft took off for Earth…

Earth was threatened with attach from the huge space-fleets of the Hundred Suns of Andromeda – an attack that the Terran Fleet could not hope to defeat.

Only one chance remained to prevent Earth’s destruction, and that was the chance that a skilled and experienced saboteur might just have time strike his blow before the enemy could launch the attack.

It was Captain Blair whose mission this became, and it was his ace-saboteur who raced against death in planet after planet, as the zero-hour approached when Earth would face the attacking fleets of DARK ANDROMEDA.

“My God!” he yelled. “What’s happening now?” Stevens stared. Then he started abruptly to his feet. Even afterwards, when he looked back on the incident, he could never actually decide what really happened. He had a persistent, oddly unshakable memory of a man flowing suddenly into liquid.

Inside the blue and gray uniform of the Interstellar Passenger Service, the man began to melt, to change into a thick gooey substance that dripped and trickled away between the rising pillars of steel. Desperately, he fought down the rising sense of nausea that tugged at the muscles of his stomach. The picture was so utterly impossible that he screwed his eyes tightly to shut it out of his mind. When he looked again, there was nothing there and Blair was looking across at him, his jaw slack and an expression of stark disbelief in his dark eyes.

When Commander Herries of the Space Line began to sell the water of Mars as a ‘potion’ for lengthening life he had no idea that he was going to create the world’s greatest thirst and produce havoc among the two social grades of Earth – the Inelligentsia and the Normals. But produce it he did.

Among the confusion thus produced one man thinks clearly for his own ends – Vance Unthra, the leading scientist of the world – and he sees in the crisis which has hit Earth a way to be rid of all those who do not measure up to what he thinks as an intellectual standard. By his orders two synthetic worlds are created – Alpha and Omega – and to these are ruthlessly evacuated all the victims of the Martian water, there to rebuild there shattered fortunes and never cross the ‘Dark Boundaries’ which exist between those worlds and Earth.

Despite his careful planning, however, Unthra makes one mistake. In destroying the power of the Martian water over the evacuated thousands he miscalculates the strength of cosmic radiation on Omega with the result that the leader – the Controllix – of this world, Sylvia Grantham, becomes a far greater power in the grand scheme of things than her former lover, Dexter Carfax. Through the machinations of the wily Unthra open hostility breaks out between Dexter Carfax and the girl, and eventually their worlds are destroyed through the influence of a deadly chain reaction ‘disease’ from the Great Red Spot of Jupoter.

Both of them, however, through the various experiences they undergo, hold to one objective – to be avenged on Vance Unthra for his viciousness.

Although she leads an overprotected life with the two old hags, Lilune knows she possesses a special gift. When she ‘calls’ the musician, Lir, to her prison-like castle, she knows she must avail herself of the opportunity to escape and explore the world. But travelling south of the castle, Lilune and Lir realize that they aren’t alone – for an ancient, infectious evil accompanies them, which instills terror in everyone they meet. Lir dislikes arrogant Lilune, but finds himself intrigued by her and the source of the evil. Is it within Lilune, or does it come from a deeper source? When the pair become separated, he carries on searching for her. Finally, Lilune returns to her castle in despair, believing that she must be imprisoned to protect the world from the evil within her. But Lir follows her, and discovers that the root of the evil lies deep beneath the castle…

An elegiac ghost story from the acclaimed and visionary author of the Corlay sequence.

Fifteen billion years from now, Earth is a dying planet, its skies darkened by the ashes of burned-out galaxies, its molten core long cooled. The sunless planet is nearing the day of final gravitational collapse in the surrounding galaxy. Mutations and evolution have led to a great disparity of life-forms, while civilization has resorted to the primitive.
Young Deyv of the Turtle Tribe knew nothing of his world’s history or its fate. He lived only to track down the wretched Yawtl who had stolen his precious Soul Egg. Joined by other victims of the same thief – the feisty Vana and the plant-man Sloosh – the group sets off across a nightmare landscape of monster-haunted jungle and wetland. Their search leads them ultimately to the jeweled wasteland of the Shemibob, an ageless being from another star who knows Earth’s end is near and holds the only key to escape.

As guardian of the Universe’s freedom from the domination by the Cyclan, Earl Dumarest is ruthlessly hunted by their agent, Cyber Broge, as he searches for the fortune necessary to finance his epic quest for Terra – the planet of his birth. Hunter and fugitive, predator and victim, Earl Dumarest lands on the planet Zakym.

ZAKYM – a cadaverous, twin-sunned world where the spectres of the dead daily claim the lives of the living; a decadent world that threatens to explode with the unparalleled violence of civil war and broken taboos.

ZAKYM – home of the beautiful, haunted Lavinia whose soul is claimed and condemned by a power-crazed madman.

Both Lavinia and her planet are doomed until a man appears who promises to be their saviour. Dumarest is the only person capable of challenging the terrifying menace of the Cyclan and the terrors of Zakym. But can even he triumph against such foes?




(First published 1977)

The Collected Stories Volume 7: We Are For The Dark (1987 – 1990)

Winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, Robert Silverberg is one of the all time greats of science fiction. A professional writer for more than half a century, his short story output has been prolific and exceptional in quality.

This series of nine volumes will collect all of the short stories and novella-length that SF Grand Master Silverberg wants to take their place on the permanent shelf.

Each volume will be roughly 150,000-200,000 words, with classics and lesser known gems alike. The author has also graced us with a lengthy introduction and extensive story notes for each tale.

Contents:
The Dead Man’s Eyes
Enter A Soldier. Later: Enter Another
To The Promised Land
Chip Runner
A Sleep And A Forgetting
In Another Country
The Asenion Solution
We Are For The Dark
Lion Time In Timbuctoo
A Tip On A Turtle

The Collected Stories Volume 2: To The Dark Star (1962 – 1969)

Winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, Robert Silverberg is one of the all time greats of science fiction. A professional writer for more than half a century, his short story output has been prolific and exceptional in quality.

This series of nine volumes will collect all of the short stories and novella-length that SF Grand Master Silverberg wants to take their place on the permanent shelf.

Each volume will be roughly 150,000-200,000 words, with classics and lesser known gems alike. The author has also graced us with a lengthy introduction and extensive story notes for each tale.

Contents:
To See The Invisible Man
The Pain Peddlers
Neighbor
The Sixth Palace
Flies
Halfway House
To The Dark Star
Hawksbill Station
Passengers
Bride 91
Going Down Smooth
The Fangs of the Trees
Ishmael in Love
Ringing the Changes
Sundance
How It Was When the Past Went Away
A Happy Day in 2381
(Now + n, Now – n)
After the Myths Went Home
The Pleasure of Their Company
We Know Who We Are

Kane the Mystic Swordsman encounters an ancient cult of evil. The cruel cult of Sataki has come to life again, and Orted Ak-Ceddi, a daring outlaw, is its prophet. Orted knows he must have a powerful cavalry to launch a new drive – and Kane is the man who can command the conquest. But Kane intends no final victory for the Forces of Darkness – he intends to rule the earth himself!

Kane – indestructible swordsman, invincible sorcerer, immortal wanderer through strange worlds. Efrel, Empress of Pellin, seeks vengeance on the King of Thovnos and chooses Kane as her champion.

The Solar System is finally recovering from the Great War – a war that devastated the planets and nearly wiped out the human race – and the population of the outer moons, orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, is growing.

On one of those moons, Alex Ligon, scion of a great interplanetary trading family has developed a wonderfully accurate new population model and cannot wait until the newly reconstituted “Seine”, the interlinked network of computers that spans the planets and moons and asteroids, comes back online. But when it does, and he extends his perfect model a century into the future, it predicts the complete destruction of the human race.

On another moon, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence goes on, undaunted by generations of failure. And to her amazement, Millie Wu, a young genius newly recruited to the project, has found a signal… a signal that is coming from outside the solar system.

And in his new retreat on a minor moon of Saturn, the cranky genius Rustum Battachariya is still collecting weapons from the Great War. He thinks he may have stumbled on an unexpected new one…but he’ll need to disarm it before it destroys the Sun.

FAILWAY- the organisation whose process could break through into an inferior energy level, transporting the people into other dimensions, bringing them pleasures simple, exciting, exotic or erotic…
FAILWAY- a police state, which tolerated no opposition. It was ruthless, thorough, and invariably fatal to its opponents…
FAILWAY- against whose other-world power stood one man…
DALROI

Elinor has spent her life being bullied and abused by her uncle, aunt and cousins. Her mother missing, her father dead, she has been left her adoptive family’s not-so tender mercies. The prospect of a holiday to Dartmoor seems like just a chance to experience the same awful life in a new location.

It’s worse than Elinor could have predicted.

Forced to sleep in the smallest, darkest room with its musty, curtained four-poster bed, Elinor finds herself retreating into the life of another Elinor – Nell the nurserymaid, whose tragic story from three hundred years ago is at first intriguing, then horrifying.

When she becomes trapped in what was once her escape, Elinor faces forever stuck in a nightmare, unless she is willing to commit to the horrifying price of freedom.

You can find out more about the fiction Gwyneth Jones wrote as Ann Halam here: http://www.gwynethjones.uk/HALAM.htm

A dark tale of the destructive power of love and obsession from ‘The supreme master of suspense’ NEW YORK TIMES

‘The father of the modern suspense story’ LA TIMES

When Louis Durand first meets his bride-to-be after a months-long courtship by mail, he’s shocked that she doesn’t match the photographs sent with her correspondence. But Durand has not exactly been truthful, either, concealing the details of his wealth. Mostly, he feels fortunate she is so much more beautiful than he expected.

Soon after they marry, however, he becomes increasingly convinced that the woman in his life is not the same woman with whom he exchanged letters – and then she suddenly disappears with his fortune.

Alone and desperate, Louis becomes obsessed with finding Julia and bringing her to justice – but it is only when he finally tracks her down that the nightmare truly begins…

The sinister business of counter-espionage is played out by an array of magnificent characters. Quayle, compounded of wisdom, administrative genius and the ability to live without sleep, wine or women; Shaun O’Mara, who loves all those things, looks like an actor and is an aristocrat, and works with subtlety, artistry and distinction; and Ricky Kerr, a cleverly drawn portrait of a man who is not quite able to stand the pace.

The women, of course, dress superbly, move like angels, are as beautiful as diamonds and, with one notable exception, behave abominably.

‘If there are better thrillers it is hardly possible to think of them while under the spell of this one’ Times Literary Supplement

Shaun Aloysius O’Mara, intelligence agent for the British ‘second bureau’, has been ordered by his superiors to go to Paris to obtain information that will lead to the capture of the lone survivor of the Nazi espionage system.

So when Shaun arrives in Paris he becomes a crude and shiftless drunkard and entangles himself with a clever and ruthless spy, Tanga de Sarieux, who is as brave as the men that surround her …

Fourteen miles off the tail-end of Andros Island in the West Indies lies Dark Bahama. Many people have discovered they can find their heart’s desires there; many have found, too, that even in paradise it pays to watch your step.

Viola Steyning is young, wayward, rich and good looking, and the sort of girl to cause her mother back home in England a certain anxiety. That is why Julian Isles has been sent out by Johnny Vallon of Chennault Investigations to bring her back alive – for beneath the tranquil surface of Dark Bahama’s tropical beauty lurk sinister and dangerous undercurrents.

Quayle, the master of a British spy ring in World War II, is faced with the task of dealing with a man who has come from Morocco with what he says is important information about German troops there. But is the man what he seems?

Quayle puts his agents into action, not hesitating to risk their lives to discover the answer, but it is Quayle who ends up doing most of the work – and who is prepared to sacrifice everything for the cause of war.