Search Results for: islands

It began with a few small items in the newspapers – dead dogs and cats, a mutilated child, a series of unexplained fires. Then suddenly it exploded into a full sized catastrophe.

Huge mutants – half rat, half man – began to take over the world, stealing children for slaves and destroying their populations.

Only a few people escaped, among them Tim Barrett, his wife Jane, and a handful of survivors. Alone on the high seas in a small ship, they set off to find the island where Dr. Theodore Piper had been experimenting with a sonic death ray.

They knew Dr. Piper was their only hope for personal and world survival – if he was still alive… if the King Rats hadn’t forced him to serve their evil purpose… and if he could find a way to stop the spreading horror of invasion.

Stephen Baxter breaks genre boundaries and brings his unique imagination, epic scope and elegant style to an anthropomorphic fantasy. Starting with the story of a young female mammoth and the struggle her herd has to survive into the present day on a remote Siberian Island the MAMMOTH trilogy encompasses thousands of millions of years, the geological and climatic history of earth and a vision of a startling future. All via an astounding evocation of mammoth. Life, biology, intelligence, culture, myth and legend. It is a triumph of imaginative story telling.

Storm God’s Fury: The ancient gods used powerful weapons on those who defied them.

Vampire Castle: Something with claws instead of hands was unpicking the lead.

Moonlight Island: The prints on the beach changed from human feet to leopard tracks…

The Mountain Thing: It staggered from the mountain cave … savage … hideous … part man, part beast.

Return of Lilith: Lilith … ghastly night monster from mythology older than history.

Sixteen stories about secret places and mean men, containing:

About a Secret Crocodile
Mad Man
Nor Limestone Islands
The Man Underneath
Boomer Flats
This Grand Carcass Yet
In the Garden
Groaning Hinges of the World
Golden Trabant
How They Gave It Back
Maybe Jones and the City
Seven Story Dream
Adam Had Three Brothers
Pig in a Pokey
The Weirdest World
The Ultimate Creature

One star-chained evening in a Manhattan bathroom, Carl Schirmer spontaneously combusts! His body transforms into light, mysteriously snatched from his banal life by an alien intelligence 130 billion years in the future. There, all spacetime is collapsing into a cosmic black hole, the Big Crunch – and a bold, cosmic destiny awaits Carl. Rebuilt from the remnants of his light by extraterrestrials for a cryptic purpose, he awakens in time’s last world, the strangest of all – the Werld.

At the edge of infinity, Carl discovers the Foke, nomadic humans who travel among the floating islands of the Werld. The Foke teach him how to live – and love – at the end of time, and he loses his heart to his plucky guide, the beautiful Evoë. Their life together in this blissful kingdom that knows no aging or disease brings them to rapture – until Evoë falls prey to the zotl, a spidery intelligence who hunt the Foke and eat the chemical by-products of their pain. In order to save his beloved from a gruesome death, Carl must return to Earth – 130 billion years earlier – where he is shocked to discover that the Earth he’s come back to is not the one he left.

Can he meet the harsh demands of his task before the zotl find him and begin ravishing the Earth?

Author’s Note: The volumes of this series can each be read independently of the others. The feature that unifies them is their individual observations of science fiction’s sub-genre: “space opera,” which the editors David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer define as “colorful, dramatic, large-scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character and plot action, and usually set in the relatively distant future, and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone. It often deals with war, piracy, military virtues, and very large-scale action, large stakes.”

Artemesia Blastside, 17

Position – the Most Admired Pirate in England.
Partner – Handsome Felix Phoenix.
Enemy – Little Goldie Girl, a Monster.
Heart set – on winning back Lost Treasure Beyond the War-Torn Seas.

As a child, Rook had been taken in by the bards of Luly, and raised as one of their own. Of his past he knew nothing – except faint memories of fire and death that he’d do anything to forget. But nightmares, and a new threat to the island that had become his own, would not let him escape the dreaded fate of his true family. Haunted by the music of the bards, he left the only home he knew to wander the land of the power-hungry basilisk who had destroyed his family. And perhaps, finally, to find a future in the fulfillment of his forgotten destiny.

In an age that takes wireless for granted and its beginning to tire of television, it seems incredible that parts of the globe are still unexplored.
Powerful modern steamers connect landmass with landmass, island with peninsula, and archipelago with isthmus. Screaming jets roar through the upper atmosphere, at speeds in excess of a thousand miles an hour.
Yet the mysteries remain. The ancient planet is reluctant to divulge her timeless secrets to the probing, insolent minds of mortal man.
On a remote island, amid weird reef-ridden seas, the Flame Goddess lives on… immortal… undisturbed… alone, save for her primitive worshipers.
And then the white man came…

From the vaults of the SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal introduction to one of the unique voices of British science fiction, John Middleton Murry, Jr, who wrote his best work under the pen name Richard Cowper.

The son of the famous critic John Middleton Murry, Cowper announced himself to the science fiction world in 1967 with BREAKTHROUGH, which found favour for a subtlety and richness of characterisation not seen in most contemporary SF. The idea of a transformed future England became his signature leitmotif and it is this theme that informs the Corlay tales contained in this omnibus. This is the complete Corlay sequence, featuring introductory novella ‘PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN’ and novels THE ROAD TO CORLAY, A DREAM OF KINSHIP and A TAPESTRY OF TIME.

THE ROAD TO CORLAY:
On the Eve of the Fourth Millennium a slowly-building civilization, struggling out of the rubble of the Drowning, was crushed beneath the sceptre of a powerful and repressive Church. But on the Eve of the Fourth Millennium the sound of a magical pipe was heard, and the air was filled with songs of freedom and enlightenment. And on the Eve of the Fourth Millennium the Boy appeared, bringing the gift of sacrilege, a harbinger of the future, heralding the arrival of the White Bird of Dawning. It is the coming of a New Age. A glorious future bearing the presents of the past!

A DREAM OF KINSHIP:
They came to destroy! The treacherous Falcons, uniformed in the black leather tunics of the fanatic Secular Arm, descended on Corlay to burn and kill. Commanded by Lord Constant, ruler of the Seven Kingdoms, they were determined to crush the religious heresy of Kinship. But a new dream rose from the ashes… When four Kinsmen escaped the carnage of their beloved land, each helped to fulfill the miracle that had been foretold: the coming of the Child of the Bride of Time.

A TAPESTRY OF TIME:
Twenty years have passed since the martyrdom of the Boy-piper at York, twenty years in which his legacy, the movement of Kinship, has challenged the tyranny of the Church Militant in Britain’s seven island kingdoms. Now his namesake, Tom, bearing the Boy’s own pipes and perhaps himself imbued with the spirit of the White Bird, is wandering Europe in company with the girl, Witchet. But disaster overtakes them and Tom, in a furry of vengeance, breaks his vow of Kinship. A terrible path lies before him, one that transcends his own world. As he travels it, Tom must come to understand the true nature of the wild White Bird, of The Bride of Time and her Child, and of the Song the Star Born sang.

The small Hebridean island of Alsaig is facing a crisis. It is famous for its only export, a particularly fine malt whisky, upon which most of the islanders depend for their livelihood. But the distillery is threatened with a takeover by an American firm, which would not only make many of the workforce redundant but also adulterate the product.

But owner Alisdair Matheson is refusing to sell, despite threats of sabotage and an attempt on his life. The situation is complicated further by an actual murder on the island, which the locals believe to have been committed by American Mike MacDonald. Tension mounts as storms lash the island, isolating it from the outside world and locking the killer in with the islanders.

Morgan the Raider got his name from the famous pirate of old, as he stands convicted of stealing $40 million. He is good at getting himself out of jail, too; he has already escaped custody once.

Now he is offered the chance of a reduced sentence – but at risk of his life. For he must get into an escape-proof prison on a Caribbean island, a torture fortress known as the Rose Castle, in order to find and set free an important scientist. A CIA agent, Kim Stacy, is assigned the job of accompanying him – and keeping an eye on him at the same time.

But did Morgan really steal the money? And just who are the prisoners being held in the island fortress?

Honolulu: Port of Call is a unique collection of short stories of the Hawaiian islands brought together by Joe Gores: thirteen tales by legendary writers including Jack London, Herman Melville, W. Somerset Maugham, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad and Joe Gores himself.

Yet these are tales chosen to entertain, rather than literary gems. They paint a picture of a Hawaii before the high-rise buildings went up; an era of missionaries and merchants, sailors and whalers, of the drama of East meeting West before, finally, urbanisation and the tourist buck killed off the Polynesian way of life almost completely.

Gores brings us a flavour of that lost way of life; a breath of the romance that still draws Western visitors to the islands in search of the exotic and, perhaps, of an innocence long lost.

It’s 1943, and down-on-his-luck American expat Philip Stark is on the Caribbean island of Santa Teresa. The prewar destination playground is deserted now except for diplomats and oil refinery workers.

When a local correspondent dies, Stark sees a chance to make some money. Having worked for the same company in the past, he is hired to replace the dead man. But Stark doesn’t think his predecessor died by accident. As he looks into the mystery, he encounters a rival correspondent, an enigmatic police officer and the mistress of the dead man – all of whom had a stake in seeing him dead.

When Dr Basil Willing rents a small shack for a vacation on Long Island he becomes embroiled with his landlady, Claudia Bethune. Claudia wants to learn the secrets of her relatives and friends, so she steals a truth serum and holds a dinner party for her nearest and dearest.

In the early morning hours, as Dr Willing returns to his cottage, he sees what he thinks is a fire and investigates. He finds Claudia near death at the table and hears footsteps fading up the stairs. Someone didn’t want Claudia to learn the truth about them, and soon Dr Willing finds himself a suspect in murder.

Tucker Loomis is a hard and dangerous man with a ruthlessness all West Bay fears and respects, and an improbable amount of money. Wade Rowley is a common man who aspires to honour but gets caught up in the footwork of a skilled swindler.

In a pitiless game, with a few harsh rules and just one way of keeping score, the wrong man will die. And another will get away with more than murder.

‘Lively, gritty … complex and convincing’ New York Times Book Review

When a yacht explodes in the Bahamas, apparently killing six people, Sam Boyleston, an attorney from Texas and the brother of one of the victims, is compelled to investigate the circumstances, as does Raoul Kelly, a newspaper reporter.

After the disaster the yacht’s burned captain was temporarily marooned on a small island, and soon it becomes apparent that one person is ruthlessly manipulating events. But for Boyleston and Kelly proving guilt appears impossible …

‘A major suspense novel’ New York Times

Antonia Winfield sensed someone was following her. She’d seen a man in a brown suit. He was even behind her in the travel agents where she’d booked her holiday abroad. But perhaps she’d just imagined things.

This year she was going on a restful, comfortable trip to a lovely Greek island – but that’s not the way things turned out. Mrs Winfield’s niece was going on the trip with her, and the two ladies soon had a third companion: the man in the brown suit . . .

One of the very last authors of detective fiction from the genre’s “Golden Age” INDEPENDENT

Suicide or murder? Despite all indications to the contrary, Alec Methven had not eaten his last meal in solitude, and somebody was very anxious to conceal that fact.

As if one death on the beautiful island of Madeira was not enough, there was another. Peter Corey, who had found Methven’s body, had a cast-iron alibi: he was on a plane to the island at the time of the death, en route to visit his old friend. But what of the second killing that so inexplicably occurred?

Roberta Ellison lives in Madeira where she had settled with her late husband after being crippled in a motor accident. Domestic help was easy to come by and the climate was ideal.

Then her sister Camilla comes to the island to help her to find a companion, bringing problems of her own with her, problems that at first seem trivial, but that soon involve the sisters in a violent and mystifying spiral of events. As more newcomers appear, so Camilla’s history begins to unfold and it emerges that all is not as it seems . . . and then murder strikes.

A young couple, the Trents, arrive on the lonely islet of Ruffa – where a large house has been lent to them for part of their honeymoon – and stumble upon mystery.

Gold is being exported from Ruffa in quantity. Where does it come from? From the Armada wreck in the bay? Or from some old Norseman’s hoard like the Traprain Law treasure. Or has the other tenant discovered the secret of making gold? The Trents are set on a surprising course to find out …

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.

While hunting in the English countryside, Ben Selby stumbles upon the murdered body of Peter Gaston, a friend of some twenty years earlier. As they had both been agents in a clandestine organisation, he is convinced that Peter was killed to prevent their meeting and sets out to question his widow.

What she tells him is the beginning of a perilous and exasperating search for something buried long ago on a remote island headland.

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 …

Peter Grant, sailing his boat in unfamiliar waters, is forced ashore on an island connected with the mainland by a causeway uncovered only at low tide. There is a house on the opposite shore lived in by two secretive people.

His involvement in their affairs, begun by his sea-chance, becomes deeper and more dangerous as the tides ebb and flow over the causeway, until he finds himself face-to-face first with love – and then with terror and violent death.

‘A sensitive, absorbing tale’ Sunday Times