Search Results for: more-than-human

THE TRILOGY CONCLUDES…



In West of Eden and Winter in Eden, Harry Harrison, an acknowledged master of imaginative fiction, broke new ground with his most ambitious project to date. He brought to vivid life the world as it might have been, where dinosaurs survived, where their intelligent descendants, the Yilanè, challenged humans for mastery of the Earth, and where the human Kerrick, a young hunter of the Tanu tribe, grew among the dinosaurs and rose to become their most feared enemy.



Now, in Return to Eden, Harrison brings the epic trilogy to a stunning conclusion. After Kerrick rescues his people from the warlike Yilanè, they must regroup and consider their future. They find a safe haven on an island and there begin to rebuild their shattered lives. But with fierce predators stalking the forests, how long can these unarmed human outcasts hope to survive? They need weapons, but they only effective weapons lie in the hands of the technologically superior Yilanè. The small band of humans has no choice but to confront their face head-on.



And, of course, Kerrick cannot forget Vaintè, his implacable Yilantè enemy. She’s been cast out from her kind, under sentence of death, but how long will her banishment last? For her strange attraction to Kerrick has turned into a hatred even more powerful than her inbred instincts – an obsession that compels her to hunt down Kerrick and kill him. In a world completely unlike her own, two great cultures struggling for mastery of the Earth face the same problem that faces us today: how to coexist on the same planet completely unlike ourselves – or mutually perish.

From the SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal sample introduction to the fantastic imagination of Theodore Sturgeon, one of the great names in science fiction.

Highly acclaimed for his short fiction, Sturgeon is nevertheless best known for his 1953 novel, MORE THAN HUMAN, and for scripting the STAR TREK episode ‘Amok Time’, which introduced the Vulcan mating ritual, the pon farr. This omnibus contains three of his finest works: THE DREAMING JEWELS, TO MARRY MEDUSA and VENUS PLUS X.

The Plague’s origins were mysterious, but its consequences were all too obvious: quarantined cities, safe-sex machines, Sex Police, the outlawing of old-fashioned love. Four people hold the fate of humanity in their hands…A sexual mercenary condemned to death as a foot soldier in the Army of the Living Dead; a scientist who’s devoted his whole life to destroying the virus and now discovers he has only ten weeks to succeed; a God-fearing fundamentalist on his way to the presidency before he accepts a higher calling; and a young infected coed from Berkeley on a bizarre crusade to save the world with a new religion of carnal abandon. Each will discover that the only thing more dangerous than the Plague is the cure.

He was designed to be the perfect man. And at first the experiment seemed a success. John Shaw – the product of secret government research into enhanced intelligence – was from birth far beyond anything human. Brilliant and charismatic, John could have been anything he wanted – except that which he longed for more than anything. To be normal.


So John created Benjamin: an alternative persona, a way of coping with people who hated what they could not understand. He was everything that John wasn’t – but now those very differences are killing him. Benjamin has become the dominant personality, more and more often in control. John’s altered body has left his mind at risk – and unless he can discover the truth that will fuse both parts together, both he and Benjamin will die.


Robert Charles Wilson spins one of his most stirring, tightly woven tales with The Divide. Reminiscent of Flowers for Algernon, it is at once an adventure story and a sensitive look at the consequences of man’s actions – and of one man’s quite literal search for himself.

Physician Matt Wheeler is one of the few who said no to eternity. As he watches his friends, his colleagues, even his beloved daughter transform into something more-and-less-than human, Matt suddenly finds everything he once believed about good and evil, life and death, god and mortal called into question. And he finds himself forced to choose sides in an apocalyptic struggle – a struggle that very soon will change the face of the universe itself.

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.

In his first story collection, Robert Charles Wilson, one of the most distinguished SF authors of his generation, weaves a tapestry of tales set in and around the city of Toronto – a haunted, numinous Toronto of past, present and future, buzzing with strangeness.


In “The Fields of Abraham”, one of three stories written especially for this collection, an impoverished immigrant boy is trained in strange disciplines by a bookseller who is more than he seems. In “The Perseids”, winner of Canada’s national SF award, love and amateur astronomy weave in and out of a terrifying tale of forced human evolution. In “The Observers”, an awkward young Canadian girl who sees extra-human presences has an extraordinary encounter in 1950s California with Edwin Hubble. In “Plato’s Mirror”, a professional New Age charlatan has a genuine and terrible encounter with the extraordinary. And in the Hugo-nominated “Divide by Infinity”, an aging Toronto book-lover finds himself becoming, literally, increasingly unlikely.


Throughout are showcased Wilson’s suppleness and storytelling strength: bravura ideas, scientific rigor and living, breathing human beings facing choices that matter in a universe stranger than we can imagine.

Continuing the story begun in Great Sky River, Benford creates a stunning novel of the last band of humans fleeing extinction in the Galactic Center. This last remnant of humanity is led by Killeen, a man elevated to command in desperate times by his luck and daring. He manages to reach a new planet where he encounters vast wonders. But with one enemy behind them, the humans are dismayed to discover an alien race more awesome than any they have encountered.

For sixteen-year-old Jane, life is a mystery she despairs of ever mastering. She and her friends are the idle, pampered children of the privileged class, living in luxury on an Earth remade by natural disaster. Until Jane’s life is changed forever by a chance encounter with a robot minstrel with auburn hair and silver skin, whose songs ignite in her a desperate and inexplicable passion.

Jane is certain that Silver is more than just a machine built to please. And she will give up everything to prove it. So she escapes into the city’s violent, decaying slums to embrace a love bordering on madness. Or is it something more? Has Jane glimpsed in Silver something no one else has dared to see – not even the robot or his creators? A love so perfect it must be destroyed, for no human could ever compete?

As an orphan growing up in the slums, Loren read her clandestine copy of Jane’s Story over and over, relishing every word. But Loren is no Jane. Savvy and street-smart, Loren could never be stirred by a man of metal, her passion never ignited by an almost-human – even one designed for pleasure.

Still, when the META corporation does the unthinkable and brings back updated versions of robots past-Loren knows she must see Silver. And just like Jane, it is love at first sight. But Silver is now Verlis. If he was perfection before, he is now like a god. Yet he is more human than his creators think – or fear. While Loren doesn’t quite trust him, she will follow her twice-born lover into a battle to control his own destiny – one that
will reveal to her the most astonishing illusion of all.

David Fisher, an EPA (Environmental Perfection Agency) bureaucrat, was not the stuff of which heroes are made. At least he hoped not. All he wanted was a good life with a good wife, and a chance to do his bit for society reviewing magical impact statements (like the one that assesses the effect on local non-life resulting from the introduction of leprechauns into Southern California, for example) and ensuring that various manufacturers of magical devices did not intentionally or otherwise foul the environment with the sorcerous by-products of their trade. Indeed it would be hard to imagine a more regular and down to earth soul than that of David Fisher of the EPA. No hero he!

Then one day David received a call from Washington to investigate a certain Toxic Spell Dump, and suddenly he is up to his neck in skullduggery and magic most foul. Some ancient deity, it seems, is attempting to reopen for business in the L.A. Basin, complete with human sacrifice (open up their hearts and let the sun shine in!) and the destruction of Western Civilization. All that stands in the way is David Fisher – and he’s no hero.

Until he has to be.

At last as they reached out through the ghostly transparencies of the galaxy the men from Earth encountered an alien race completely non-human in appearance. They were the real aliens. Their physiology differed gruesomely from Terrans’ – could men hope their psychology would not?

The Unknown Non Human Aliens – the Unha – replied to peace overtures with immediate hostility. So, reluctantly, the men from Earth forged a weapon of awesome power. Created out of the shattered bodies of men and women – men like Siegfried Ritter, Giuseppe Tozzi and Eugene Valois – Blazon set fire to the Galaxy.

For Doctor Marjorie Rothwell the existence of Blazon challenged the basic assumptions forced on humanity by alien intransigence; but the action-packed story of Blazon does more than explore the running sore of human aggression in its understanding of human sacrifice.

The Earth’s population was more than eight billion. One day they were there, the next they were gone – all except the guests at a family birthday party, a small tribe of American Indians, and, of course, the robots. Technology disintegrated, the Indians went back to nature, and the rest developed new and extraordinary powers. As for the robots, some went to live with the remnants of humanity, others gathered in their own community and commenced work on the Project, work which was baffling in all its fantastic electronic complexity. Then one day a traveller returned from the stars – and the idyllic existence of the last of Earth’s humans was threatened.

It all began simply enough. A client had vanished, and Jay Corcoran went to investigate the man’s empty hotel suite. But Corcoran’s trick vision spotted the room-sized box stuck to the outside wall of the suite. There was no way to get into the box, so Corcoran cabled his long-time pal Tom Boone.

Boone had a talent. When threatened he could “step around a corner” into some otherwhere. Boone stepped into the box, taking Corcoran with him. The box turned out to be a time traveler machine that transported them back to 1745 England, where they found a family of refugees from a million years in the future. In that far future, alien Infinites were converting humanity to incorporeal form. When the family had refused conversion, they had to flee. For more than a century, the family had lain hidden in their time bubble.

Suddenly, the Infinites’ killer monster broke through–and things grew complicated as the family fled to the distant past and the farther future.

Star humans were engineered to exist within the mantle of a star, mere tools of their Earth-evolved makers in a war against the Xeelee, owners of the universe. Stephen Baxter’s third novel in his magnificent Xeelee Sequence is an exotic and endearing story of an abandoned people.

Abandoned to their fate, their history lost along with contact with their makers, Star people survive in an environment that is possibly the strangest in science fiction. Microscopic inhabitants of superfluid air above a Quantum Sea and below the tangled Crust of the Star, swimming in an electric-blue grid, the Magfield, which is subject to violent storms, Star people struggle, like us, to make sense of their world… and the threat hanging over it.

Though the truth is far more disturbing and ominous than they feared, they will confront, finally, their makers, and they will rebel against the purpose for which they were created.

When Carson Napier, astronaut from Earth, attempted to help Duare, princess of Vepaja, find her homeland on an unmapped cloud-shrouded planet, they found more trouble than they had ever desired.

They found it in Mypos, the country of amphibian people; in the land of the Brokols, whose young grow on trees; and in Voo-ad, the city of the human amoebae. How they escape from their strange predicaments is a thrill-a-page novel of Venus by the author of the famous Tarzan novels.

Featuring man’s staggering journey to the stars…

In a Tenn’s-eye view of the world, “staggering” can be interpreted in more ways than one, of course.

Notably –
The warm, human interpretation
The feminist interpretation
The green-transparent-bubble interpretation
The man-in-the-street interpretation

Mr. Tenn has included a charming witch tale, a really delicious vampire item, and a superior machine (intergalactic hit) story. These have nothing to do with man’s staggering journey to the stars. They are simply here to add to the confusion.

Then again, why couldn’t they have something to do with the square root of man?

Once there was a Hero who confronted the dreaded Daggertooth and slew it. Unfortunately he was also slain by it – but the legend persisted. If it could be done once, then another Hero could be raised to do it again. Because the Daggertooth was dangerous to hibernating humanity. All people – all that anyone knew of – lived far underground in tunnels built for safety and hibernation. The Daggertooth was a mass killer – more so even than the hideous Oddlies, the outcasts of the darker tunnels.

So this is the story of John-A, the “vatkid” who was trained to be a second Hero. And the story of “trukid” Shirl who taught John-A what to do. And Threesum, the Oddlies’ leader, who scoffed at heroes. And the Elders who frowned at all the risky goings-on. This is the story of a mighty strange world and a mighty strange future…

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.

A rat called Crocus, imprisoned in the laboratory of an Irish scientist Dr Dresmond Burke, is transmitting information to a person or persons unknown in another galaxy. His information is in the form of a report on man’s history and development over the past 500 years. And it ends with Crocus’s shadowy imprecise foreknowledge of what will become of the human race in the future.

Crocus is sharp, wise and cleverer by far than most men – as, he claims, the whole race of rats is. He comments astutely on man’s spiritual decline; on the collapse of formalised religion and the obsession with things scientific; with man’s mistakes in numerology, and therefore in mathematics and astronomy; and with his loss of faith in all that is supernatural or extra-sensory. But Crocus himself is being monitored by Dr Burke, who is beaming the rat’s thoughts through an elderly lady medium and on to a tape recorder. The message as transmitted is unintelligible, but Dr Burke thinks he knows a way to interpret it. This involves outside help…the help of the army…of foreign powers. And then he discovers that what he has learned through Crocus is already known to a small band of resolute and dedicated men. Man’s thought-processes can be interfered with, thought-waves can move material objects, and this knowledge is being put to a use more potent than the nuclear bomb…

In that hidden valley, land of strangely forbidding beauty, Eric Nelson, soldier of fortune, faced a battle weirder and more savage than any he had ever fought. He was hired to fight for humanity, against beings that seemed to be both more and less than human.

The weapons of the enemy included centuries-old powers of magic and superstition . . . but Nelson fought grimly, even when his mind was helplessly trapped in the body of a wolf. Then came the climactic test of his allegiance, the knowledge that more than just humanity was at stake . . . and the final mind-shattering discovery of an alien secret that lay buried in the Cavern of Creation!

Laredo Space Base hadn’t sent a ship to Earth for hundreds of years before the Project Deep Green survey craft was launched. Only one thing was known: the planet humankind had so long ago vacated was a wasteland with nothing on it but poisonous flora and small, murderous denizens.

That’s what they taught astronaut Ferrer Burgoyne and as a result he was totally unprepared for the teeming jungle stretching farther than his eyes could see. He was even moer unprepared for the slightly green humanoids who greeted him. Obviously the scientists of Old Earth had done more in their labs than just mess around mixing human and plant cells. As sure as Ferrer Burgoyne was an astronaut the new men of Earth were the descendants of those hidden, forbidden experiments.



How then could Burgoyne continue his mission: to defoliate Earth with the deadly chemical Deep Green and prepare Earth for the return of his species?

After years of caring for her often impossible mother, Alice is finally free. But an unexpected legacy gives her more than she bargained for…
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club


When Alice Hunter’s mother dies, after grimly clinging on for eighty-odd years, it is enough for genteel Alice just to be free. But she soon becomes lonely, having few points of contact with the people in the cheap boarding houses which are all she can afford. Then comes news of a legacy, and Alice’s soul rises as she travels to the family’s lawyers in Bath.

Her new life is not what she expects, however, and she is lost in a fog of human misunderstanding, hatred and deceit. A nice cup of tea, stirred by detective Arthur Crook, is what she will need to put things right . . .

Death is everywhere. A child in a playground. A playboy in a cheap hotel. A John Doe in a freight yard. A nanny and her two charges in a church pew.

After twenty-six years in homicide, Lieutenant Luis Mendoza knows death is all in a day’s work. But in the heat of a Los Angeles summer, even the predictable becomes bizarre. And for a hard-boiled cop with a decidedly soft centre, nothing is more implausible than human nature – especially when it comes to murder . . .

‘A Luis Mendoza story means superlative suspense’ Los Angeles Times