Search Results for: life-form

Keill Randor, the Last Legionary, and his alien companion, Glr, set course for the uninhabited planet of Rilyn in the Jitrell Federation to investigate the sinister activities of the Overseers’ deadly enemy, the Warlord, and his agents the Deathwing.

Amongst these strange and deadly life-forms on Rilyn, Keill encounters the grotesque, golden figure of the Altern, “The One”, leader of the Deathwing. In a thrilling climax, Keill must not only pit his wits against the concerted forces of the Deathwing band of warrior clones but also defend himself and Glr from the savage futy of the elements as the murderous Starwind begins to blow.

The Nightingale was the most advanced craft in the entire fleet of Mercy ships belonging to the Gentle Order of St Francis Dionysos. On its maiden voyage, its life bays packed with refugees, the Nightingale disappeared. Despite strenuous efforts no trace of it could be found.

Then, a year later, a distress signal was heard and the Nightingale reappeared. It was damaged in ways that meant its survival in space was a miracle. But of its previous cargo of life-forms there was no sign. Only one creature remained alive within the ship, and that was its captain, Jon Wilberfoss.

Wulfsyarn is the story of the Nightingale, and of Jon Wilberfoss. It is told by Wulf, an autoscribe who has the task of observing Wilberfoss in the aftermath of his return. For the captain of the Nightingale is a condemned man: condemned by the Gentle Order, and self-condemned by a burden of guilt so intense his mind refuses to acknowledge it. Over the long period of Wilberfoss’ tortured convalescence in a peaceful monastery garden on the planet Tallin, Wulf watches and waits, recording the mosaic of Wilberfoss’ life: his childhood and adolescence, his entry into the Gentle Order, his marriage (to a native Tallin woman), and the great moment when he was chosen as captain of the Nightingale.

But can Wulf bring Wilberfoss to finally face the truth of what happened on the Nightingale’s fatal first and last journey?

Slippery Jim diGriz is in the process of robbing the new Mint on Paskonjak when the heist goes terribly wrong. Threatened with a horrific death, Slippery Jim is allowed to cut a deal with the Galactic League: voyage to the planet Liokukae and bring back a missing artifact – the only known evidence of alien life-forms found in 32,000 years of galactic exploration.

For diGriz there are a few catches. One is Liokukae itself – a dumping ground for the League’s misfits, murderers, maniacs, and the incurably obnoxious. Another is a little matter of life and death. To ensure the utterly untrustworthy diGriz’s cooperation, the League has given him a slow-acting poison, allowing him thirty days in which to succeed . . . or die.

Now the Stainless Steel Rat is on his way to a world that is hurtling backward down the evolutionary scale – a land of fanatic, goat-herding Fundamentaloids, murderous Machmen, and a rusty guru named Iron John. DiGriz has developed an almost perfect cover: a four-member rock band that has a way of giving its audiences what they want to hear.

But while the days tick away and diGriz’s life expectancy lowers, the mission evolves from finding an artifact to liberating a planet . . . which is a tune the Stainless Steel Rat most certainly knows how to sing.

The chronicle of adventures of the survey ship Sarafand as it journeys through space exploring and mapping newly-discovered planets.

The mission brings them into contact with man startling life-forms and menacing aliens. On one world the Sarafand sends out six survey modules and seven return: one of them is a shape-changing malevolent alien – but which?

On another planet they discover a humanoid civilisation which can move around in time. Suddenly the Sarafand investigators are marooned millions of years in the past.

Finally the Sarafand and its crew are stranded in a distant galaxy where everything – including them – is shrinking inexorably to zero size…

Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t even look at them. The life of Roy Phipps can be summed up in a paragraph: He’s fifty, leads an uneventful, well-organised existence in the house inherited from his parents, earns a modest income writing formulaic detective novels, and remembers, sometimes, his encounters with women. Roy’s only aberration is the other novel he has been secretively also writing for years, the sprawling and florid story of the mad poet Vilmos, a study of murder, angst and alchemic magic. Then one evening Roy meets Vilmos, face to face. Of course, handsome Vilmos’s double, Joseph Traskul, is only a coincidental look-alike. But in those fatal minutes a terrible bond is formed. For Traskul is, at the very least, insane – charismatic, predatory, lawless – a sort of human demon – whose almost supernatural powers, once provoked, will prove unstoppable. As the fiery shadows close in on him, Roy soon understands that he is now fighting for his own sanity. And probably for his life.

Lew Nichols’ business, at the end of the twentieth century, was stochastic prediction – high-powered guesswork. He was very good at this well-paid, sophisticated form of witchcraft. And he was quite content with the sultry Indian beauty he had married.

In fact, Lew Nichols was more than satisfied with his life. Until the day in March ’99 when he met Martin Carvajal. Lew got strange vibrations from the eccentric millionaire from the start. But Carvajal took a special interest in Lew. He wanted to teach him to SEE the future – not just guess at it.

But the power to see the future did not prepare Lew for the horrifying possibilities it offered.




(First published 1975)

The Gene Wars have turned Earth into a blighted wasteland. Mile-long airships patrol the skies, exacting crippling tribute from the scattered ground communities. Threatened by mutant vegetation and predatory creatures, forced to the brink of starvation by the Sky Lords, Minerva – a former feminist utopia – has had enough.

Its rebellion is swiftly crushed and Jan Dorvin, a Minervan warrior, is winched aboard a Sky Lord; towards a fate worse than death. For as a ground dweller and slave – but above all, as a woman – she is now regarded as the lowest form of humanity and is consigned to a life spent serving the sexual appetites of male slaves.

But no Minervan could be kept slave for very long…..

College student Nicholas Dal shares the family talent, or curse – he is an empath, a man who experiences the emotions of other people. Too-powerful emotion can induce seizures, so to stay sane he must live alone and dull his senses with vodka.

This, in itself, would be enough for anyone to bear, but Nicholas ias also haunted by a secret from his family’s past in Russia. Now someone is looking for him and he fears the worst. To further complicate things, a relationship is forming with a young woman, Jack, and his feelings for her threaten to break through his isolation.

Will Nicholas risk his love, his sanity – his life – to be with Jack?

Young Peter, a student of Byzantine art forms at Moscow University, through a cryptic sentence in a lecture receives a message to buy two books of his choice at exactly 1.30 pm in the university bookstore. When he opens the package, a third book, ‘The Life of Pushkin’, a very special copy indeed, has been included. It is this third book that leads Peter to Armenia on a series of adventures of the sort that Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle know how to spin so skilfully and so spell bindingly. Peter’s mission includes finding his father again after many years of separation. And from his father he receives the remarkable ‘battery’ – plus a very difficult task to perform.

When racial hatred turns to murderous menace . . .

First a rocket ship loses its engines on take-off and is destroyed. On board – an important extra-terrestrial visitor.

Next someone slams into the sealed vehicle used for transporting aliens around in the lethal atmosphere of Earth.

Then the vital controlled environment for the Tau Cetian delegation is sabotaged. Oxygen leaks in, and the aliens are half burnt alive.

Even if it means brutal murder, The Stars Are For Man League is determined to shatter the harmony between Earth and civilizations on other planets – and to keep mankind supreme among the alien life forms. Only one man can stop them – a man who unknowingly nurses a viper in his bosom . . .

First published in 1965.

The earth changed forever when the Aleutians landed. A hundred years after the invasion, the planet is firmly under extra-terrestrial rule. While the aliens pursue a form of immortality, small bands of human rebels still try to fight back.

Bella is an Aleutian, with a limited understanding of human cultures and gender. Their expectations of society and life are shaped by their own upbringing. But then they meet Sidney Carton, a human. Bella learns quickly as the pair scour the war-ravaged ruins of Europe to find the last vestige of human technology that could be the only hope for saving civilisation as it still exists.

Nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke award, NORTH WIND is book two of Gwyneth Jones’ critically acclaimed Aleutians Trilogy.

Francis Simnel was a pathetic old man who lived in a strange world of his own, a world of puppets and marionettes. His sister Agnes was a demoness incarnate, a female fiend in human form, a relentless, ruthless, driving force urging the old man to a macabre destiny. There was something different about Simnel’s Puppets. They had personality and a realism that was uncanny. They bore a sinister resemblance to the newly-dead.

What began as the wildest and most improbable suspicion, crystallised into near certainty in the mind of Josephine Starr. She began asking questions, and the Satanists scented danger. She fell into a trap that had been set with diabolical cunning. Her life was balanced on a razor edge, with all the macabre resources of the Black Magicians weighing against her.

Throughout the centuries that have passed since humans first ventured into interstellar space, they have been at war with the alien Veich. The human race has, in consequence, been fully militarized, its educational system being a form of military training–which includes, among other disciplines, the elimination of fear from the human psyche. Attitudes to the war have, however, been colored by the gradual discovery of relics revealing that it is echoing an earlier interstellar conflict whose antagonists have completely disappeared, victors and vanquished alike. On a neglected continent of an unimportant world, ex-sergeant Remy and other human and Veich deserters have joined forces to form a mercenary company that places its expert skills at the disposal of the dominant indigenes. This refuge from the greater war is, however, disrupted when archeologists on another world discover evidence that there might be significant relics of the earlier war buried in the inhospitable heart of the continent, where barbarian tribes are currently massing for a religious war. Remy has no alternative but to revert to working for his own race, knowing that whatever he enables them to find, or even if they find nothing at all, his own life will be in grave peril, and that nothing will ever be the same again….

After his father’s interference in Irish politics ends with a band of killers arriving on Christmas night to assassinate him, young Charles Peridore finds himself master of the estate. During idyllic school holidays, Charles enjoys riding to hounds and hunting geese and snipe while his friend Tommy Marlin tells stories of Tir-nan-Og, the land of eternal youth that lies just beyond the bog. But when Progress arrives in the form of an English corporation determined to convert the landscape into factories and housing, it appears that an entire way of life is destined to vanish. Only one thing stands in the way: the sorcery of an old witch, whose curses the English workers do not even believe in. In the novel’s unforgettable conclusion, the ancient powers of the wise woman will be pitted against the machinery of modern corporate greed, with surprising and thrilling results.

If an alien creature can so perfectly imitate a human being that not only is it physically and mentally indistinguishable from a man but it actually believes itself to be one, what do you do with it? Is it human?

This is the question which confronts Alex Stordahl, supervisor of the harsh planet Marilyn. Initially nobody had suspected anything unusual about the largely reptilian animal life. Then Stordahl discovered the amorphs – shapeless in their natural state, but possessing a unique defence mechanism: when closely approached by a possible aggressor, they could adopt the form least likely to be attacked by the creature.

When it transpires that the creatures are harmless they are quickly absorbed into the colony to provide extra labour. The the ruthless owner of the development corporation arrives from Earth. He wants to test the amorphs, and brings with him a group of four brilliant, but totally egotistical men. And trouble soon starts…

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.

Scott Warden is a man haunted by the past – and soon to be haunted by the future.
In early twenty-first-century Thailand, Scott is an expatriate slacker. Then, one day, he inadvertently witnesses an impossible event: the violent appearance of a 200-foot stone pillar in the forested interior. Its arrival collapses trees for a quarter mile around its base, freezing ice out of the air and emitting a burst of ionizing radiation. It appears to be composed of an exotic form of matter. And the inscription chiseled into it commemorates a military victory…sixteen years in the future.
Shortly afterwards, another, larger pillar arrives in the center of Bangkok – obliterating the city and killing thousands. Over the next several years, human society is transformed by these mysterious arrivals from, seemingly, our own near future. Who is the warlord “Kuin” whose victories they note?
Scott wants only to rebuild his life. But some strange look of causality keeps drawing him in, to the central mystery and a final battle with the future.

By the winner of the Hugo, the Nebula, and the World Fantasy Life Achievement Awards, this latest volume finds Theodore Sturgeon in fine form as he gains recognition for the first time as a literary short story writer. Written between 1957 and 1960, when Sturgeon and his family lived in both America and Grenada, finally settling in Woodstock, New York, these stories reflect his increasing preference for psychology over ray guns. Stories such as “The Man Who Told Lies,” “A Touch of Strange,” and “It Opens the Sky” show influences as diverse as William Faulkner and John Dos Passos. Always in touch with the zeitgeist, Sturgeon takes on the Russian Sputnik launches of 1957 with “The Man Who Lost the Sea,” switching the scene to Mars and injecting his trademark mordancy and vivid wordplay into the proceedings. These mature stories also don’t stint on the scares, as “The Graveyard Reader”-one of Boris Karloff’s favorite stories-shows. Acclaimed novelist Jonathan Lethem’s foreword neatly summarizes Sturgeon’s considerable achievement here.

When Marl Judson, fleeing a rapacious government that wanted not just his fabulous wealth but his life, crash-landed on a uninhabited planet, he thought he was marooned without hope of rescue, so he prepared himself to live out his remaining years as best he could amidst the planet’s weird hallucinogenic flora. But head-twistting flowers (which Judson learned to avoid) were only part of the planet’s weirdness: it was possessed of some sort of field effect which made time play strange tricks; temporal anomalies sometimes resulted in cause preceding effect and bizarre compressions and expansions of the normal pace of events.

In such an environment time had no meaning; has Jusdson lived centuries alone, or only decades? Or is it years? Or all of the above? He doesn’t quite know, but when another ship crashes the strange time effects allow(ed) him to conduct an experiment aimed at producing a perfect society, a veritable Judson’s Eden. The the Snake arrives in the form of the government that marooned him – and the Snake wants Judson’s Eden for itself.

Millennia ago Starquin visited the Solar System. Because he is huge – some say bigger than the Solar System itself – he could not set foot on Earth personally. yet events here were beginning to interest him, and he wanted to observe more closely.


So he sent down extensions of himself, creatures fashioned after Earth’s dominant life-form. In one of Earth’s languages they became known as Dedos, or Fingers of Starquin. Disguised, they mingled with Mankind.


We know this now, here at the end of Earth’s time. The information is all held in Earth’s great computer, the Rainbow. The Rainbow will endure as long as Earth exists, watching, listening, recording and thinking. I am an extension of the Rainbow, just as the Dedos are extensions of Starquin. My name is Alan-Blue-Cloud.


It is possible you cannot see me but are aware of me only as a voice speaking to you from a desolate hillside, telling you tales from the Song of Earth. I can see you, the motley remains of the human race, however. You sit there with our clubs and you chew your roots, entranced and half-disbelieving as I sing the Song – and in our faces are signs of the work of your great geneticist, Mordecai N. Whirst. Catlike eyes here, broad muzzles there, all the genes of Earth’s life, expertly blended, each having its purpose. Strong people, adapted people, people who survived.


The story I will tell is about people who were not so strong. It is perhaps the most famous in the whole Song of Earth, and it tells of three simple human beings involved in a quest who unwittingly became involved in much greater events concerning the almighty Starquin himself. It is a story of heroism and love, and it ends in triumph – and it will remind the humans among you of the greatness that was once yours.

Jack Chatwin has visions, which leave tangible evidence – sounds and smells, which linger afterwards. What he sees are two primitive figures, with painted faces – Greyface and Greenface, a brother and sister. He calls them bullrunners.
John Garth is a city dowser, searching for the mythical pre-Roman city of Glanum. He hopes to find an entryway to the elusive city beneath Exburgh, Jack’s home town. And he thinks Jack’s bullrunners may be connected to Glanum . . .
Years later, Jack, now grown up, agrees to take part in experiments to investigate his bullrunners – until Greyface, the male, breaks free of Jack and takes corporeal form. The bullrunner kidnaps Jack’s young daughter so Jack will force Greenface to follow her brother-husband, even against her own wishes. Though Greyface returns the daughter, he keeps a shadow of her, which takes on a life of its own. If Jack refuses to co-operate, the shadow will drain his daughter’s vitality and personality – and her very future.

The story of Jack’s search for Greenface is interwoven with the connections between the bullrunners and the mystical city of Glanum in this resonant tale of ancient mythic wonder.

These stories which have never been brought together before are taken from Joan Aiken’s earliest writing years in the 1950s and 1960s when she was working for the English short story magazine, Argosy where they were first published. They demonstrate her wide ranging stylistic ability, with subjects as diverse as a rented apartment that comes with a resident swan, a man who buys a girl in a crystal ball, an invisible man-eating tiger, or a psychiatric patient who can always, sometimes unfortunately, conjure up a 93 London bus.


All these ideas seem to pour out of an endless imagination, making bold use of eccentric and unexpected settings and characters, and at the same time demonstrating an evident delight in parodying a variety of literary styles from gothic to comedy, fantasy to folk tales selected from her incredible reading background. But Joan Aiken always repudiated the suggestion that she was “a born storyteller” she would always argue furiously that it was a craft, like oil painting or cabinet making that she had learned, practiced and developed over the years. She described this period of her life as a single-minded engagement with the writer’s craft; and her grasp of the short story form as the foundation of her literary career.

What is far from apparent from these wildly inventive and freewheeling tales, is that this was in fact a bitterly difficult period of Joan Aiken’s life, when not long after the end of the Second World War she was left widowed and homeless with two young children. Having made the brave decision to try and support herself and her family by writing, she applied for a job on this popular short story magazine. In many ways, as she often said subsequently, this period spent working at Argosy could not have been bettered, both as a wonderful distraction and consolation during a bad time, and as an unbeatable apprenticeship in the craft of writing.

During the day a blazing and merciless sun beat down on “the boy” and at night a friendless and cold darkness enveloped him. It was a bleak and lonely countryside over which he had been wandering for ten years. A rare tree, bird or wild animal was the only life he encountered during his desolate trek through his young years of roaming. Infrequently, he was fortunate enough to find shelter and food in the shops of deserted villages; otherwise he foraged what he could from the nearly barren land. Contact with other humans was his innermost and greatest fear.

But the day came when his curiosity overcame his sensibilities of self-preservation and he was drawn to the sound of a great wailing not far from a place where he had come to rest.

Form that moment on his whole existence took on a radical change. His wanderings became a kaleidoscope of adventures, emotions, and responsibilities – never static, forever mobile, and potentially dangerous. There were moments when it would have been easier to turn his back, return to old ways, but somehow he knew this was an impossibility. He accepted his new fate, but still feared the greatest of all commitments until it was too late for him.

This fantasy adventure will not fail to excite and stir in every reader memories and emotions of seemingly forgotten times and moments.