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This is the story of how a world could be resurrected¿

Mars is a barren planet, almost without atmosphere and with a temperature ranging from near zero to 120 degrees below. No water flows and there is no evidence that life has ever existed there.

Yet Mars is Earth’s near neighbour and has always exerted a powerful hold on our imagination. The astronomer Lowell thought he’d discovered canals on the planet’s surface; H.G. wells (and his near namesake Orson) speculated on the red planet’s inhabitants invading Earth; sf writers have always used Mars as a setting and continue to do so.

In the Snows of Olympus Arthur C. Clarke uses a revolutionary computer program to show, in words and pictures, how the surface of the planet would change as, gradually, scientists created an atmosphere and raised the temperature. Taking as his starting point Olympus Mons, the highest mountain in the Solar System, a 27km extinct volcano, Clarke creates detailed ‘photographs’ of the Martian surface and then shows how the landscape would change as vegetation began to thrive and water to flow. He speculates about how this might happen, about the journey to Mars and about what living on the planet would be like. The result is one of the most fascinating, challenging and imaginatively stimulating books of the year.

Arthur C. Clarke has long been hailed as the most visionary and accurate of science fiction and non-fiction writers, having predicted communications satellites years before their development. In this extraordinary booked he chart the next chapter of humanity’s future in space.

March, 2015. Nasa’s first manned voyage to Mars is about to launch. But disaster strikes – the rocket explodes, killing the entire crew, and the US government abandons the project. What they come up with in its place will change the nature of space exploration together. Businessman John Axelrod and his consortium have every intention of winning the $30 billion Mars Prize for the first successful mission to the red planet. He knows that it will involve far higher risks than the one NASA had planned. But he has no choice. He has to win.

They had conquered Mars! Earth was next.

And in the council chambers at Washington, Earth’s leaders gathered to face the peril.

Mars had gone down to defeat in one hour and thirty-four minutes. And now a fleet of creatures from outer space was headed towards Earth.

All eyes turned to Eldin Raigmore, President of the United States – the one man to be trusted above all others. One by one the elite were dispatched on missions of last-minute strategy. They went with confidence, inspired by the swift, sure mind of Raigmore.

Civilization rested in his hands. And he was a secret member of the invader race!

A space expedition to Mars find themselves in the worlds of H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Otis Adelbert Kline.

A Terran adventurer on an epic Martian odyssey to discover the ultimate secret of Mars and the universe, or else be destroyed by the dark forces that rules the valley where time stood still!

To Paul Clayton, obscure shipping clerk, his forty-fifth birthday was not an occasion for celebration. It meant the achievement of status of Senior Citizen, and with it several dubious privileges – not least of which was voluntary euthanasia, facilitated by the government issue suicide pill. Those who changed their minds, once they had broken the capsule containing the lethal pill, faced the prospect of forced labor camps in the Australian desert of the penal colony on Mars, where convicts toiled to make more space fit for Earth’s over-spilling populations.

Under the supervision of the corrupt and brutal Mars Corps, Clayton crosses paths again with others he once knew on distant Earth. They find themselves caught up on a maelstrom of terror and political intrigue.

Mars is our nearest neighbour in the solar system, with the exception of our own satellite Luna. It will be considerably easier to hit the moon of course, but what will we find when we get there? Plenty to interest the scientist, the mining engineer, and the cosmologist. But the Biologist will find only fossilised traces of Lunar life, if he finds anything at all.
On Mars the story will be vastly different. We know that there is vegetation there. We still argue about those enigmatic canals. Are they optical illusion or…? What if…? What if an intelligent civilisation cut those great water courses? What if that civilisation still exists? Is man the only intelligence in God’s great Universe? How will earth’s envoys react when they first encounter non-human intellect for the first time? Will the aliens be friendly, or…?

Fleeing from justice across the ancient dust-oceans of Mars, Brant had no way of knowing that he was running toward the most fantastic adventure any man had ever lived!

Eight short stories by the author of Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. The title piece plus The Encounter; Planet Story; Mrs Bagley Goes to Mars; Symbiosis; Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis; The Hounds; and State of Grace.

Included in this volume are two short novels by Raymond F. Jones: “The Memory of Mars” originally appeared in the December, 1961 issue of Amazing Stories. “Cubs of the Wolf” originally appeared in the November, 1955 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

‘We are all dead men,’ said First Engineer Holtz when the space ship Johannes Kepler was hit by a meteorite. But Lieutenant Donald Chase refused to give in to the general spirit of despair. Something could be done and somehow they would reach Mars safely.

Cameron, a tall, testy, whisky-drinking, nationalist-minded, Scottish physicist, may not have been an astronomer, but he knew the off things in the sky when he saw them. From an Australian mountaintop where he was advising on the location of a radiotelescope he saw what looked like Mars, in the wrong spot in the sky. But it wasn’t Mars at all, it was a supernova … no, not a supernova but a quasar.

Knowing what would happen, Cameron dashed home to Scotland and found himself at a crossroads of his life. In the face of total catastrophe, and of intense heat, darkness and rain, he took over as natural leader with both the north and south of the United Kingdom turning to him for help.

Sir Fred Hoyle, world-renowned astrophysicist, and his son, Geoffrey Hoyle, have set their newest science fiction thriller not only in London and Scotland, but also at the University of Charlottesville, and in Australia as well.

The result is an intriguing, fast-paced novel written with a wry humour and offering some fascinating glimpses of and gibes at astronomy.

Another story novelized from the pages of Astounding Stories, telling of the experiments of an alien race who have migrated to the solar system to domicile themselves on Mars. Their experiments result in the death of their leader and lead to the Martians being overwhelmed by an invasion of beings from the microcosm…and, ultimately, to the creation of life on Earth!

One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives.

The effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk – a heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not only have the world’s artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered remains are pitted and aged, as though they’d been in space far longer than their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, space probe reveals a bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the barrier than inside – more than a hundred million years per day on Earth. At this rate, the death throes of the sun are only about forty years in our future.

Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader who’s forged a new religion out of the fears of the masses.

Earth sends terraforming machines to Mars to let the onrush of time do its work, turning the planet green. Next they send humans…and immediately get back an emissary with thousands of years of stories to tell about the settling of Mars. Then Earth’s probes reveal that an identical barrier has appeared around Mars. Jason, desperate, seeds near space with self-replicating machines that will scatter copies of themselves outward from the sun – and report back on what they find.

Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.

Detailed research, empathy with his characters, an ecological perspective and his trademark flare for epic narrative sweep make Baxter’s Mammoth series very much key works in his canon.

ICEBONES takes the action to a stunningly realised partially terraformed Mars in the far future and sees the epic Mammoth story cycle come to fruition.

For ten years, Colin sweated, slaved, and eventually built-up a nice business on a dusty world called Mars. Ten more years and he’d have been able to retire a rich man. Five more years and he’d have put all worry behind him. He didn’t get those five years.

During a sandstorm, he blundered accidentally into the forbidden zone, where the temple of Dra Vheera waited and rested, an area guarded zealously to the death by a fanatical faith. The Martians complained, and he lost all, stripped of everything he owned, fined, and sent back to Earth on a one-way ticket. And who was to blame? The Dra Vheera, the priesthood of Mars, the temple, the religion. One name for all three, but all three really one.

A man named Barhart offered vengeance, sweet, pure vengeance. With his help and money, Colin put together a force of eager men determined to strike back at the Martians, but he found more than they bargained for. The safety of Earth was now at stake, and Colin had to race against time and Death to save mankind.

Sojan the Swordsman is Michael Moorcock’s very first published character, the precursor to the Eternal Champion. Heavily influenced by the pulp tales of Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, this is the tale of the hero Sojan Shieldbearer as he travels across the planet Zylor encountering strange races and even stranger monsters in a fast-paced adventure in the tradition of John Carter of Mars and Esau Cairns of Almuric.

The first manned mission to Mars has been a resounding success, and excitement grows as more new discoveries are made. However, one phenomenon continues to defy rational explanation – the ‘marsmat’ – a complex anaerobic life-form found in the planet’s honeycomb of tunnels.

This raises questions about the nature and meaning of life itself which will lead the curious and the driven to Pluto and beyond, to the cold void at the fringes of the solar system.

There lived on Mars, 500,000 years ago, a race so intelligent, so superior to ours, that they knew the secret of everlasting life. They chose instead-to have one man come back to life exactly 500,000 years after his death!

His reappearance in the Galaxy World was enough to set planet against planet, ideology against ideology, man against man, and life against death.

Earth had been destroyed, but man had built his colonies on Mars and Venus and the far-flung moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Mutation and forced breeding had changed these people so they were no longer human. Clyde Lester, the last man on Earth, had a special problem. From somewhere in space there originated strange radio signals which could only come from beyond the orbit of Pluto, the outermost planet.

In plain English, at 4 a. m., a ray of light had been observed on the disc of the planet Mars in or near the “terminator”; that is to say, the zone of twilight separating day from night. The news was doubly interesting to me, because a singular dream of “Sunrise in the Moon” had quickened my imagination as to the wonders of the universe beyond our little globe, and because of a never-to-be-forgotten experience of mine with an aged astronomer several years ago…

MARS: THE SKULL OF A PLANET PICKED CLEAN BY THE WIND OF TIME

North Beyond the desert of Meroe, past the ancient cliffs of the dust-locked continents, past the dry wharfs of a city that was old when Earth was new, the caravan crept into the unmapped waste called Umbra. It was into this shadowed land that the lost nation of the People had ridden and vanished-in a time beyond memory. It was here that the outworlder Ryker followed the golden-eyed Valarda and found the Child-of-Stars.

Carson Napier set out for Mars in a secret interplanetary rocket but found himself instead on a different world – the cloud-hidden planet of Venus.


Venus was a startling world – semi-private, semi-civilised. It was a place of unmapped oceans dotted with great islands; a world whose trees pierced the clouds and whose cities squatted on their branches; a planet whose inhabitants included men, half-men, and monsters, all struggling with each other for dominance.

The Tavona and its crew of intrepid heroes, led by Tiger Clinton, are back and exploring the galaxy once again.

On a routine trip to Mars, a chance visit to a new planetoid leads to kidnap! Another planet is populated entirely by identical twins. Even simple streams are not as they appear, and everything holds hidden and unexpected dangers.

Using their wits, their skills, and with the help of friends made on their travels, Tiger Clinton and his team are ready to face anything – and they’ll have to!