Search Results for: return-to-the-stars

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…

WHOEVER HOLDS THIS NEBULA CAN SWAY THE GALACTIC IMPERIUM

When Raul Linton, Commander of Space Navy, returned from the bloody Third Imperial War in 3468 A.D. he was a disillusioned hero. Defiantly stripping off his medals and ribands, Raul roamed the Inner Cluster of stars in search of some meaning.

But close on his trail was the Imperium Government spy, Pertinax – known as the Snake – who was out to prove Raul a traitor.

And then Raul Linton met up with Sharl of the Yellow Eyes, who proposed a daring scheme of intergalactic action which would at once restore the Sharl’s exiled Queen Innald to her rightful place on the throne of Valadon – but to join this mission, Raul would have to fight openly against his own government…

Earthly medicine – helpless in the face of a plague from space.

Unexpectedly, long thought lost, the first manned Jupiter probe has returned – but only a madman would have tried to land it at Kennedy International! The result is the biggest air disaster in history. And that’s only the beginning: now comes The Jupiter Plague.

The alien ruins that dotted Earth’s landscape were an enigma.

Archaeologist Rond Heshke dismissed as a ridiculous hoax the photographic evidence which suggested that the ruins disobeyed the laws of time. The Titanium Legions believed that the ruins had been left behind by an invading force from space, which had been repelled in a past age and whose imminent return was feared.

It was not until the Titanium scientists perfected their time machines that the truth began to emerge piece by piece: that the builders of the ruins belonged not to the stars but to Earth’s own future, and that the dreaded confrontation was indeed shortly due – not with aliens, but in a form more horrifying, more calamitous, than anything imaginable…

For Earth was to be the victim of an extraordinary cosmic accident. Time itself was about to collide! Mankind’s leaders became even more fanatical, pressing on with new plans, determined at all costs to survive…

Humans had finally gone to the stars, as the dreamers had always hoped; celestial stretches of the galaxy became the playgrounds of a new spacefaring race. But now these worlds were being taken over by Titans, creatures with unimaginable, godlike powers, supremely indifferent to humanity’s survival.

There was one chance to stop them. Helena, one of the Titan-dominated planets, concealed an untapped, hundred-year-old weapon – Priam’s Lens. Getting to Helena would not be difficult, but activating the lens was another matter. No one had ever returned from a Titan encounter. They simply disappeared – status unknown.

Now a small ragtag crew made up of scientists, warriors, a priest, and a stowaway – naval officer Gene Harker – were ready to pit themselves against the greatest power in the universe. With the help of a mad space pirate, they descended upon the deadly planet. They would succeed – or die trying…

‘A star in our galaxy of crime writers’ FINANCIAL TIMES

Superb crime fiction from the CWA Diamond Dagger Award Winner

‘Yorke practised deception artfully and with style’ GUARDIAN

‘Mistress of the skilfully spun suspense novel’ SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Nesta Falconer, an attractive widow, lives with her fifteen-year-old daughter Philippa, managing brother-in-law Charles Falconer’s household after the breakdown of his marriage. Nesta’s comfortable position is threatened when her sister Claire, returning from America, comes to stay at her cottage.

Charles realises that Nesta is a menace to Philippa’s happiness, and that she has been responsible for much distress. His mother, a formidable old lady, plays a part in revealing Nesta not only to her family but to herself as a negative person who contributes little to the happiness of others.

Blue Genes…

Ape-like and with one arm replaced by a claw, the not-quite-human Angelo and his beautiful female partner Ariadne are genetically bred rescuers programmed to travel vast distances through space in suspended animation to bring back Pioneers – explorers sent out from Earth generations ago to settle other planets. The latest mission is to rescue Pioneer Murray from the planet La Plage and to return to Earth where – as usual – decades have passed while they have been travelling between the stars.

But Earth itself has gone through a catastrophic collapse from which its burnt-out civilization is trying to recover. And amongst the remnants of a sterile and despairing humanity, there is less room than ever before for such strange creatures as Angelo.

Combining rich and weird alien environments with exciting deep-space adventure, Pioneers is a brilliant novel of love and alienation in a strange and poignant future.

More than any other series, THE AVENGERS typified the Swinging Sixties – beginning in 1961 with Patrick Macnee starring with Ian Hendry in a grainy, realistic spy thriller, and ending in 1969 with Macnee and the glamorous Linda Thorson blasting off into space in a surreal episode appropriately entitled ‘Bizarre’. Meanwhile we had seen the memorable Honor Blackman and Diana Rigg in roles unusually progressive for British television.

THE NEW AVENGERS in the mid-seventies reflected changing times but retained the essence of the show – as Macnee returned to play alongside another strong, independent heroine in the form of Joanna Lumley’s Purdey. And then there was the film…

THE AVENGERS DOSSIER is a uniquely comprehensive yet humorous survey of all the show’s incarnations. As well as a remarkably detailed episode guide to both series – even covering the kinkiness factor and champagne count in both – this volume gives behind the scenes insights and revelations about every aspect of the programme. The film and its production are examined, and critical essays look at the history behind the cult.

The Lexman Spacedrive gave man the stars – but at a fantastic price.

Interstellar exploration, colonisation, and trade became things of reality. The benefits to Earth were enormous but, because of the Fitzgerald Contraction, a man who shipped out to space could never live a normal life on Earth again. Travelling at speeds close to that of light, spacemen lived at an accelerated pace. A nine-year trip to Alpha Centauri and back seemed to take only six weeks to men on a spaceship. When they returned, their friends and relatives had aged enormously in comparison, old customs had changed, even the language was different.

Alan was a spacer, just like his whole family – until, suddenly and without intending to, he in turn jumped ship and remained on Earth. There were times he regretted that. Earth was a bewildering and utterly hostile place. To stay alive, he had to play a ruthless game – and he couldn’t even find anyone to tell him the rules. . . .


First published in 1958.

Starfarers is the story of an expedition into the far reaches of the galaxy, where answers to mankind’s greatest questions await.

The saga begins when evidence of an advanced civilization is discovered by SETI astronomers. “Trails” observed in the sky are thought to be from starships travelling at the speed of light, an enigma that spurs scientific minds until this breakthrough is achieved by mankind as well. An expedition is then mounted and an eclectic team of scientists chosen to journey into the sector where the intelligent life is allegedly located.

But because the destination of the starship, Envoy, and her crew is 60,000 light-years away, the time required to reach the point of origin of the signals and return is 120,000 years – longer than Homo sapiens has been on Earth. And though the crew is ready to face the ramifications of such a trek, no one is prepared for what awaits them at the outer edge of the cosmos – or back at the planet they once called home.

Starfarers is a story of patience and immediacy, but most of all of courage. It is a saga for anyone who has ever felt the emptiness of life on Earth and found the missing substance in the spaces between the stars.

In a distant future, on an Earth populated by a scant few hundred thousand humans, the Atkins’s Thomas performs without question the duties for which he was genetically bred. Called “Soldier” by one and all, he is a man of honor and ability, responsible for keeping the peace, for maintaining the status quo . . . and, most important, for guarding the great Book House on the hill – a vast repository of Last Culture knowledge presided over by Libary, Soldier’s mentor, the most senior of the mystic Celibate scholars.

Such is Thomas’s life in the serene, semi-primitive world without nations and cities and governments – until the night the starship comes home. Having fled a dangerously overcrowded Earth years before the Collapse and the Twilight that followed, for seven centuries the men and women of the space-going vessel Search have been combing the galaxy for inhabitable planets – their aging processes dramatically slowed by the relative magic of light speed travel and cryogenic sleep. And now, lonely and frustrated, the weary voyagers have returned to a homeworld unrecognizably altered by the relentless tides of time – a world that does not want them back.

A bitter welcome awaits the Searchers, as old Libary gathers Earth’s Ordinands and Elders together to tap the terrifying power of the collective unconscious – in preparation of the Carnival night when they will sweep the helpless intruders back to their lonely sky in the name of Holy Science. And it is Soldier who stands in the middle, silent and alone – bound by duty to evict the homesick star-travelers . . . yet cursed by a preordained genetic destiny that has decreed their eviction will mean Soldier’s death.

One star-chained evening in a Manhattan bathroom, Carl Schirmer spontaneously combusts! His body transforms into light, mysteriously snatched from his banal life by an alien intelligence 130 billion years in the future. There, all spacetime is collapsing into a cosmic black hole, the Big Crunch – and a bold, cosmic destiny awaits Carl. Rebuilt from the remnants of his light by extraterrestrials for a cryptic purpose, he awakens in time’s last world, the strangest of all – the Werld.

At the edge of infinity, Carl discovers the Foke, nomadic humans who travel among the floating islands of the Werld. The Foke teach him how to live – and love – at the end of time, and he loses his heart to his plucky guide, the beautiful Evoë. Their life together in this blissful kingdom that knows no aging or disease brings them to rapture – until Evoë falls prey to the zotl, a spidery intelligence who hunt the Foke and eat the chemical by-products of their pain. In order to save his beloved from a gruesome death, Carl must return to Earth – 130 billion years earlier – where he is shocked to discover that the Earth he’s come back to is not the one he left.

Can he meet the harsh demands of his task before the zotl find him and begin ravishing the Earth?

Author’s Note: The volumes of this series can each be read independently of the others. The feature that unifies them is their individual observations of science fiction’s sub-genre: “space opera,” which the editors David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer define as “colorful, dramatic, large-scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character and plot action, and usually set in the relatively distant future, and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone. It often deals with war, piracy, military virtues, and very large-scale action, large stakes.”