Search Results for: out-of-this-world

The Humanx Commonwealth: Book Seven.

They call it the Drowning World. It is Fluva, a planet on the fringes of the Commonwealth where it rains torrentially, ceaselessly, and maddeningly for all but one month of the Fluvan year. Chief Administrator Lauren Matthias is fairly new to the position. Her primary goal: keeping Fluva’s indigenous species, the warlike Sakuntala, and its immigrant species, the timid but hardworking Deyzara, from annihilating one another.
The wettest place on Fluva is Viisiiviisii, an immense, mostly unexplored jungle. Thanks to the endless rains and humid conditions, exotic animals and plants have thrived there, many of them deadly predators. Yet the same evolutionary process responsible for creating toxic creatures has made the jungle a treasure trove of undiscovered botanicals potentially useful in engineering everything from pharmaceuticals to perfumes. A man can get rich there. Or die trying.
Bio-prospector Sadrach Hasselemoga has come to the jungle to get rich – if he survives the terrain once his sabotaged ship goes down. When a Sakuntala and a Deyzara are dispatched by Matthias to rescue the unfortunate soul, their ship crashes, too. Now, in order to survive, the three unlikely allies must do something that no one has ever done before: walk out of the Viisiiviisii.
Meanwhile, in what passes for civilization, long-simmering tensions between Sakuntala and Deyzara erupt into violence, threatening Matthias’s official position of neutrality – and her life. Behind the violence, Matthias detects a mysterious presence, one related to Shadrach’s disappearance. But how are the two related? The answer, when it comes, will send shock waves through the entire Commonwealth…and beyond.

On Venus: An ancient and powerful Venusian race finds its ultimate evolution – but can they accept it?

On Mars: The people of the Fourth Planet are eminently reasonable in all things – except for the cult of the Sacred Martian Pig, for which ‘fanatic’ would be entirely too reasonable a word.

And on Earth: On the unknown world of one or ten centuries from now, the strangest stories of all become haunting, fascinating reality, as we find out that human beings are, after all, the most alien of creatures . . .

Are there aliens among us? Are the chariots of the gods returning? If so – are they for us or against us?

John Brunner, award-winning author and science fiction writer extraordinary, takes the questions now on everyone’s mind, and gives one possible answer in this startling novel.

Here is an edge-of-the-seat story of the man who discovers that the vanguard of the aliens are indeed amongst us – and that the human species has but a few hours left before our time runs out.

It’s a science fiction thriller you won’t be able to put down.

A time-traveller on an illegal trip into the past learns a chilling truth about her own destiny…


As a deadly Superflu runs rampant through a polluted, overpopulated Earth, a husband-and-wife scientific team races to scientific team races to salvage a livable future…


On a planet where the laws of physics are strangely twisted, a brilliant scientist’s work undermines an ancient faith and leads to a shattering revelation…


An ore-hauler on Mercury, desperate to save her endangered ship and career, finds a remarkable way out: a wormhole trapped in the hellish flux of magnetic fields and fiery plasma generated by the nuclear furnace of the sun…

Agnes receives few compliments, and Henry Preble is not so bad-looking even if he does have a reputation for cornering girls at work. In the eyes of the world, knowing that you’re on the shelf at twenty-four can do strange things to a girl. So strange that you might wake up one morning with almost no recollection of the previous night’s events . . . Published for the first time in the UK, The Gardenia, the basis for Fritz Lang’s 1953 classic Hollywood noir film The Blue Gardenia, is a gripping story of suspense and a brilliant exposé of the press sensationalism of 1950s America.

This volume also contains Out of the Blue, which was made into a comedy film in 1947 starring George Brent and Carole Landis.

The legends of a fabled land of the lost have floated for centuries around the bazaars of North Africa and the sand-surrounded oases of the vast Sahara. They tell of treasure caravans that have never returned, of weird monsters forgotten by time, of savage peoples surviving out of antiquity.
Eric Carstairs had heard these tales but until he met Professor Potter he did not really believe them. But the famous palaeontologist had the location of the entrance to the Underground World pinned down, and wanted only a man of courage to fly him there.
Carstairs and Potter took the chance – and pierced the pit to Zanthodon, a world within the world, where cavemen and cave-beasts roamed side by side with dinosaur-monsters of millions of years ago.

Towards the end of the twenty-first century 41 Worlds, small satellites with a total population of half a million, orbit the Earth, which has seen many changes, not least of which is a second revolution in America. Marianne O’Hara, a brilliant political sciences student, is from New New York, a hollowed out asteroid and the largest of the Worlds, but is to spend a year on Earth as a postgraduate student. Because the political relationship between the Worlds and Earth is complex and voltatile, Marianne unwittingly finds herself caught up with a group of fanatics determined on a third revolution in America – even if such a revolution could lead to the destruction of the Earth…

Two monstrous armies stand opposed: Vormulac Unsleep’s undead legions out of Turgosheim, and Wratha the Risen’s Renegades, masters of the last great aerie of the Wamphyri. The spoils of war will be revenge, territory, and human flesh! And blood, of course – the sweet blood of Sunside’s Szgany. For the blood is the life, and when life or land are threatened there’s only one course of action for a vampire: battle to the death!

Trapped in the middle: Nathan Keogh, Necroscope. And the espers of Earth’s E-Branch, Trask and Zek, Goodly and Chung: Guardians of the Gate against a vampire invasion of Earth! The Necroscope holds the keys; he is the only one who can close the Gates to end the crimson carnage of the Bloodwars!

But the past holds many a secret, and the future was ever a devious thing!

Someone was tampering with time, altering the past to eliminate the present, fading people out of existence into a timeless limbo.

One of the victims was Angelina, the lovely, lethal wife of James Bolivar di Griz – better known as the Stainless Steel Rat. That put Slippery Jim on the trail of the villains, a trail that went back to 1984 and an ancient nation called the United States of America. The Stainless Steel Rat was determined to rescue his wife. And before he was through he’d thrown dozens of centuries through time in both directions. But then he didn’t have much choice: to save Angelina he had to save the world. Again.

The vampires have been vanquished! Harry Keogh and the armies of the dead have destroyed the evil that once plagued the world. Nathan and Nestor, secret twin sons of the Necroscope and a proud gypsy woman, were children when their father, his humanity poisoned by his fearsome struggles, sacrificed himself to save mankind.

Yet there are vampires still, vampires crueller and stranger than any the Necroscope had faced. When these new, merciless killers swoop out of the sky, Nathan and Nestor are men – but they have few of Harry Keogh’s miraculous powers.

Torn from each other by battle, the sons of the Necroscope journey across the vampire world, exploring its mysteries, each seeking the powerful, terrible vampires, his missing brother…and the woman they both love!

Given: Earth 400 years from now – a rotten society which mankind is doomed to die out.

A solution to the problem – an ultra-intelligent computer to govern humanity.

One man of seemingly average intelligence, but with incredible I.Q. potential.

And you have: A corrupt society turned into a world where there is no corruption, because Mother Machine knows what’s best for her human children and does it. Where that same all-powerful computer is rapidly turning men into zombies.

And where the world’s only hope turns out to be one outlawed not-average man.

When the Inter-Planetary Corporation’s crack spaceliner Arturus took off on a routine flight to Mars, it turned out to be the beginning of a most unexpected trip to the unexplored moons of distant Jupiter.

For once wreaked on Ganymede, the survivors had first to master that world’s primeval terrors, then reconstruct a new spacecraft, and finally find a way out of the problems presented by the warring intelligence of the Jovian system.

SPACEHOUNDS OF ICP is justly considered to be on of Edward E. Smith’s finest novels – a standalone classic of exciting space adventure.

Come with us out of this dull, workaday world to Terra Magica, the land beyond World’s Edge, where knights ride out on wonder quests, where beautiful princesses wait for rescue from sea serpents, where sky-high giants seek human morsels for their cookpots, and where a king may seek a champion to set aside his realm’s enchantment.Here again is Kesrick, knight of Dragonrouge, in combat against villainy. At his side stand a Scythian princess and a lost nobleman of Tartary. Here be wizards of good and wizards of evil; here be mighty giants and witches of utter meanness. Here be high fantasy from the golden pen of the Grand Master himself, Lin Carter!

Come with us out of this dull, workaday world to Terra Magica, tha land beyond World’s Edge, where knights ride out on wonder quests, where beautiful princesses wait for rescue from sea serpents, where sky-high giants seek human morsels for their cookpots, and where a king may seek a champion to set aside his realm’s enchantment.Here again is Kesrick, knight of Dragonrouge, in combat against villainy. At his side stand a Scythian princess and a lost nobleman of Tartary. Here be wizards of good and wizards of evil; here be mighty giants and witches of utter meanness. Here be high fantasy from the golden pen of the Grand Master himself, Lin Carter!

The sun shone brightly on this fateful morning, bringing to its planets warmth and life-giving rays. The brightness increased sharply as the morning grew older. The glare was blinding; the radiation not life-giving, but deadly. By mid-afternoon the brilliant, intense sun shone on barren space. It had blasted each of its four planets out of existence.

Someone had found a way to poison a star.

And someone had to be found who could prevent the takeover – or destruction – of the entire universe. Who? Johnny Kettrick, as improbable a hero there never was. Johnny Kettrick who was banned from the Cluster World for his not-too-honest dealings was sent back there with his three equally unholy partners to search out the Doomstar…to find the Doomstar before it burned out another world.

There have always been the Twenty One Pillars of Rectitude who sustain the World: Seven Saints to insure the sanity of the world; Seven Technicians to insure its correct mechanical working; and Seven Scribbling Giants to write its scenarios and histories. The Saints and Technicians were always in plentiful supply. But not so the Scribbling Giants.

So when Atrox Fabulinus, the greatest of the Scribbling Giants, was most foully murdered with his own nine-foot-long goose feather quill, the World staggered with the collapse of its most sustaining pillar. Then the remaining Scribbling Giants (all of them very old and tired) cried out for replacements so they could go to their restful deaths.

This is the story of how the World, at the uneven changing of its supporting pillars, staggered and reeled.

It is also the story of the Group of Twelve, an Group remarkable for its creativity and elegance, and how it set out to sustain the World in its new days of tottering terror.

Whether the Group will be successful, indeed whether they have been successful, remains to be answered on the ninth day of the week, east of Laughter.

The only survivor plucked from a world where life has been burned out from horizon to horizon, Rat Korga is a very unusual human. On his own world he was subjected to Radical Anxiety Termination-a synapse-jamming technique banned on many planets.

Now the officials of the Web must find a new world for him. Their first choice is the planet Velm: a world on which humans co-exist uneasily with the trisauian evelmi – and also the world of Marq Dyeth, for whom Korga is calculated to be the perfect erotic object, to about seven decimal places . . .

Rhys Morgan and Jack Dawson are the last two boys on the school bus. It’s the same everyday. But today will be different.

Coming down the hill towards Wellthorpe, through a heavy snow laden day, the bus careers out of control and crashes.

Into a river and a different world. A world where crows talk. The world of the Icetower and its dark owner. A world where Rhys and Jack must find the strength to be heroes.

In Dreamtime, you have to look before you leap. So, do you dare step over the Threshold?

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.

Justin’s having the worst trip ever. He and his mother are Time Traders, traveling undercover to different alternate realities of Earth so they can take valuable resources back to their own timeline. In some of these worlds, Germany won World War I or the world has been destroyed by nuclear warfare. Justin and his mother are in an America that never became the United States: each state is like a country, and many of them are at war with one another. Their mission takes them to Virginia, which is on the verge of bloody violence with Ohio.

Beckie is from California and, like the rest of her world, is unaware that Time Traders exist. The only reason she’s in small-town Virginia is because her grandmother dragged her there to visit old relatives. Beckie is just as horrified by the violence and racism of the alternate Virginia as Justin is, and the two are drawn to each other. But when full-fledged war breaks out between Ohio and Virginia, including a biologically designed plague, will either of them manage to get back home? Forget about home: will they make it out alive?

Nobody could get in. Nobody could get out. But somebody did.

The theft of three shipments of priceless pharmaceuticals from the Braun-Ives corporation has left the local police dumbfounded. Enter Broderick Manz, the highly paid and highly resourceful Adjuster from the Insurance Division. With the help of the irresistible Vyra, whose charms are truly out of this world, the irrepressible humaniform Moses, and the irreverent Minder, an artificial intelligence, Manz soon finds himself in the heart of the criminal underworld. And it really is a jungle out there.

The Ledom had made a world without war, without fear – a world in which each individual was free to love, to create, to explore . . .

The Ledom, a gentle and kindly new race, made their twentieth-century guest, Charlie Johns, welcome to their paradise.

Charlie thought he was in heaven. But then he found out just where – and when – he was . . . an Eden turned into a nightmare!

When an out-worlder’s body was found in the river, Thissel knew where the criminal was – behind one of the masks worn by the remaining out-worlders on Sirene. But how could he tell which one, on a world where everybody lived behind masks, where men never spoke but sang to instruments, and where any act of intervention with another man’s business was punishable by death!

Out of body, out of time…

Though basically a skeptic, William Reynolds had known out-of-body experiences in the past. But never before had he floated past the boundaries of Baltimore . . . and across the borders of time. And now, with the fires of Civil War looming on the horizon, the astonished graduate student was hobnobbing with none other than the dark poet Edgar Allan Poe. But their meeting of minds was to have chilling consequences. For a desperate Confederacy planned to use them both to remold the world – and to change history…for the worse.