Search Results for: king-of-the-dead

He wears the guise of a Necromancer: the black cloak, the broad-rimmed hat, the gauze mask painted with a death’s head. But raising the dead is the least of his Talents. He is a wild card that threatens the True Game itself. Demon, Doyen, Dragon and Tragamor, Sorcerer, Seer, Armiger and King – take your places. Let the Game begin.

It was a changed world. No longer did the black monks of the Christian Church own half of England and extend their deadly domain over their flock. No longer did the murderous Ragnarssons and their Viking hordes ravage the shires unopposed. Now, in the year 867 AD, those who wished to be Christian were free to worship without the heavy yoke of the ever-hungry Church. Those who did not could follow the Asgarth Way, the Norse religion that paid homage to the gods of Asgard: Othin, Thor, Frey…and Rig. Rig, the patron – perhaps the father? – of Shef Sigvarthsson. Whose new weapons and battle strategy had defeated both the battle-hardened Vikings and the Frankish knights of Pope Nicholas’ failed Crusade.

While enemies plotted, Shef left England by ship, to avoid the wedding of his ally, Alfred of Wessex, to his childhood love, Godive. Shipwrecked on the Frisian Coast he begins a journey that will keep him away from England for months and years, and add more legends to his already myth-shrouded life.

In One King’s Way Harry Harrison Continues the story of Shef Sigvarthsson, god-chosen warrior and mystic. From the Vikings of the North Sea to the scheming priests of Germany, from the frozen northern lands to the snow-covered Finnish tundra, he fights his way towards overwhelming kingship. While his supernatural allies and enemies engage in a shadowy battle for his future. This is historical fantasy of the highest order, from a giant of the genre.

The Lyonesse sequence evokes the Elder Isles, is a baroque land of pre-Arthurian myth now lost beneath the Atlantic, where powerful sorcerers, aloof faeries, stalwart champions, and nobles eccentric, magnanimous, and cruel pursue intrigue among their separate worlds . . .

King Aillas of Troicinet defends the peace of the Elder Isles against both the Ska marauders who once enslaved him and the wicked King Casmir. While organizing the unruly barons in the frontiers of his land, Aillas goes out of his way to capture the lovely Ska noblewoman who once stung him with her disregard. When he gets separated from his men, his dream of forcing the lady’s recognition becomes the toil of dragging a defiant captive across lands governed by Casmir’s henchmen.

Meanwhile, the world of magic has gone on the move. The concentrated malice of the witch Desmëi has manifested as a green pearl, breeding lust and envy and death; and a sorcerer in Casmir’s employ abducts the princess Glyneth, in a bid to draw Aillas and friends on a hopeless rescue mission across a bizarre and deadly alternate world . . .



(First published in 1985)

The Potters of Firsk includes the majority of Vance’s ‘Magnus Ridolph’ stories, previously collected in The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph. In the VIE edition this book is titled Gadget Stories.
Contents: Planet of the Black Dust, Dead Ahead (“Ultimate Quest”), Hard Luck Diggings, Sanatoris Short-cut, The Unspeakable McInch, The Howling Bounders, The King of Thieves, The Sub-standard Sardines, To B or Not to C or to D (“Cosmic Hotfoot”), Spa of the Stars, The Enchanted Princess (“The Dreamer”), The Potters of Firsk, The Visitors (“Winner Lose All”), Plagian Siphon (“The Uninhibited Robot”; “The Planet Machine”), Dover Spargill’s Ghastly Floater, Sabotage on Sulfur Planet, Three Legged Joe, Four Hundred Blackbirds, Sjambak, Parapsyche, Sail 25 (“Gateway to Strangeness”; “Dust of Far Suns”).

All Jack Vance titles in the SFGateway use the author’s preferred texts, as restored for the Vance Integral Edition (VIE), an extensive project masterminded by an international online community of Vance’s admirers. In general, we also use the VIE titles, and have adopted the arrangement of short story collections to eliminate overlaps.

The years since first he gained the Starburst Crown have been difficult ones for Coronal Lord Prestimion and the vast, unfathomable realm he rules. But finally peace has been restored to Majipoor. And now it is time for Prestimion to name the able Prince Dekkeret as his succeeding Coronal and to descend to the Labyrinth as Pontifex. But a power from a dark past that both men believed was dead is stirring once again – an evil more potent and devastating than either leader dares to remember.

What if there were an Afterworld? Not Heaven or Hell in the conventional sense, but a place where everyone who has ever lived reawakens when they die, to live again and die again and live again, seemingly forever. This is the premise of Robert Silverberg’s brilliantly inventive new fantasy novel. The central character is the legendary warrior-king Gilgamesh, who has been in the Afterworld longer than almost anyone else save the Hairy Men from before the Flood, and who in recent centuries (insofar as you can count time) has seen it change beyond recognition, as the newly dead from industrial times import their machinery, their weaponry and their attitudes. Gilgamesh’s adventures in the course of the novel take him to the Afterworld realms of other quasi-mythical figures like Prester John and Simon Magus, bring him into contact with such figures from more recent history as Walter Ralegh and Pablo Ruiz (known to some as Picasso), and eventually send him in search of a gateway which is rumoured to exist somewhere in the land of the dead – a gateway which leads back to the land of the living.

“Who was your father?” the mutant asked Dale Kesley. And try as he might, Kesley could not remember; his past was an utter blank. But he knew one thing – the answer to his life’s riddle lay in Antarctica, the once-frozen continent, now an earthly paradise surrounded by an impenetrable barrier.

But how to get there? The only means of transportation were the spindly six-legged mutant horses. And it was suicide for Kesley to travel on the American continents. Two immortal dictators had set king-size rewards for his capture – dead or alive! But somewhere in the two continents there was someone who would help him, someone he had to find. The future of the world depended on his success.



(First published 1956)

A Viking temple. A Viking ship. Both preserved in the clinging, black mud of the North Yorkshire estuary. Press and TV watch over the archaeologists’ shoulders as past and present merge.

And while huge, death-cold creatures stalk and destroy through the blizzards of an eerily early winter, modern computer science and the dark night-knowledge of the old Norse gods disinter a terrible truth about a past that is sleeping, not dead.

The secrets of Asorbes – and of the alien Pharaoh who ruled there!

All bowed their heads before the golden splendour of Khasathut’s pyramid – and before his atrocities. Slaves and princes alike feared his awesome powers, which came from far beyond the stars. Only Khai was not blinded by the glories of the Pharaoh, for not only had he seen the horrible secrets of the pyramid but he had lived to escape their deadly grasp!

A man of two worlds, out of two ages, Khai fought to win the hand of the Queen Ashtarta and to vanquish the devil-king and his wraiths of hell. And he kept to an eternal faith: that one day the Golden Ones would return from their journey through the heavens bringing justice…