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The newly discovered planet of Senisran is a veritable paradise, its oceans dotted with thousands of lush islands containing vast deposits of rare-earths and minerals. But Senisran is also the Humanx Commonwealth’s problem child, for each island is inhabited by a different tribe of aboriginal natives. Each has to be negotiated with separately for mining rights – and the Commonwealth is locked in a race against the vicious AAnn Empire to secure those rights.

The clans of the Parramat Archipelago on Senisran are resisting entreaties by the Commonwealth and AAnn alike. But Pulickel Tomochelor, xenologist and first-contact specialist, is confident of his ability to handle to negotiations.

What Pulickel hasn’t counted on is the secret of Parramat: the strange green stones that the natives use to bless the crops, ensure plentiful fishing, heal the injured and ill, and control the weather. For within those stones lies an awesome technology the origin of which is lost in time – a technology that has to be kept from the AAnn at any cost.

The Humanx Commonwealth: Book Six.

Stapledon projects two separate futures for humanity, depending not on the outcome of World War II but on the failure or success of a future “Tibetan Renaissance” to influence the temper and ideology of the militaristic empires that threaten it.

The sequel to Last and First Men, Olaf Stapledon’s great classic work of science fiction.


In Last Men in London the author follows up the themes of his earlier masterpiece in presenting a Neptunian ‘last man’s’ views on our twentieth-century world, views informed by the huge dimensions of space and time which separate him from our tiny contemporary world. Once again, Olaf Stapledon has been totally successful in creating a work of such stunning imagination and brilliance that it has taken its place amongst the classics of science fiction.

Rhavas is a good, holy, and pious man, as befits a member of the clergy. He is also the cousin of the Avtokrator, ruler of the Empire. Hoping someday to become ecumenical patriarch of Videssos, he was reluctantly willing to bide his time in one of the smaller cities on the outskirts of the Empire.

Then civil war broke out, and the Avtokrator had to pull back the troops guarding the borders as he struggled for control of the Empire. Rhavas had to flee for his life as the fierce Khamorth nomads took advantage of the chaos and sacked the city he had come to love. He only survived because he accidentally discovered that he had an unsuspected power: Men often cursed each other – but Rhavas’s curse had the power to kill!

Rhavas had always followed Phos, the god of light and goodness, Videssos’ own god, just as he had always despised Phos’ evil rival Skotos. Those who fall off the Bridge of the Separator during judgment in the afterlife are doomed to dwell in Skotos’ ice and darkness forevermore. But Rhavas has reverenced logic as well as goodness, and knows the power to kill with a curse cannot be an attribute of Phos. As evil swallows up the world, Rhavas, ever the logician, decided that Skotos is actually the more powerful god, and becomes determind to change the official religion of Videssos. But in the end, it is he who will be changed, and neither the world nor he will ever be the same again…

Searching for the beautiful witch Jemhara, the magician Thryfe at last finds her in the reinvented town of Kandexa, where a strange and passionate wooing begins. From this union a son is born – golden-skinned, red-haired, blue-eyed – and thus the Lionwolf returns to the world of men.

Unaware of this birth, his original mother the goddess Saftri has begun her own search for her lost love Athluan . . . while elsewhere the black and shining ones, the Children of Chillel, seek to establish claims on the ice-locked planet. Beyond, over, under all, the evil god Zzth rages and plans the ruin of these separate and immortal lives.

Strafed by the tumult of such conflicting powers, the be-wintered realm of mortals can only wait to learn its destiny.

The Lyonesse sequence evokes the Elder Isles, is a baroque land of pre-Arthurian myth now lost beneath the Atlantic, where powerful sorcerers, aloof faeries, stalwart champions, and nobles eccentric, magnanimous, and cruel pursue intrigue among their separate worlds . . .

When Princess madouc discovers that she is actually a changeling left by fairies in place of a baby boy, she sets out, with her servant and companion Pymfyd, to find her true identity. Madouc locates her mother, the fairy Twisk, easily enough, but her paternity poses a problem: Twisk is not certain who fathered her child.

Meanwhile, her uncle, King Casmir, attempts to conquer the whole island of Hybras, on which Lyonesse is located, and thwart the prophesy of Persilian the Magic Mirror that his sister’s son would one day rule. He is foiled at every turn by King Aillas of Troicinet and his son Dhrun, who is actually the child of the prophesy, but is older than expected because of a youth spent in the fairy shee (home), where time runs differently. A sly mixture of satire and epic, Vance’s medieval tale is a delightful conclusion to an epic fantasy trilogy.

Winner of the World Fantasy Award for best novel, 1990

The Lyonesse sequence evokes the Elder Isles, is a baroque land of pre-Arthurian myth now lost beneath the Atlantic, where powerful sorcerers, aloof faeries, stalwart champions, and nobles eccentric, magnanimous, and cruel pursue intrigue among their separate worlds . . .

King Aillas of Troicinet defends the peace of the Elder Isles against both the Ska marauders who once enslaved him and the wicked King Casmir. While organizing the unruly barons in the frontiers of his land, Aillas goes out of his way to capture the lovely Ska noblewoman who once stung him with her disregard. When he gets separated from his men, his dream of forcing the lady’s recognition becomes the toil of dragging a defiant captive across lands governed by Casmir’s henchmen.

Meanwhile, the world of magic has gone on the move. The concentrated malice of the witch Desmëi has manifested as a green pearl, breeding lust and envy and death; and a sorcerer in Casmir’s employ abducts the princess Glyneth, in a bid to draw Aillas and friends on a hopeless rescue mission across a bizarre and deadly alternate world . . .



(First published in 1985)

The Lyonesse sequence evokes the Elder Isles, is a baroque land of pre-Arthurian myth now lost beneath the Atlantic, where powerful sorcerers, aloof faeries, stalwart champions, and nobles eccentric, magnanimous, and cruel pursue intrigue among their separate worlds . . .

Prince Aillas of Troicinet is betrayed on his first diplomatic voyage and cast into the sea. Before he redeems his birthright, he must pass the breadth of Hybras Isle as prisoner, vagabond, and slave, an acquaintance of faeries, wizards, and errant knights, and lover to a sad and beautiful girl whose fate sets his bitter rivalry with the tyrant Casmir, King of Lyonesse.


(First published in 1983)

TEN MEN AND WOMEN ESCAPED IN THE STARSHIP – THE ONLY HOME THEY WOUKD KNOW FOR GENERATIONS – THE SEED FROM WHICH THEY WOULD BUILD A NEW RACE.

The Solarian was a hundred metres high and, at its broadest point, twenty metres in diameter. It was designed to carry an initial crew of ten people – five men and five women – with provisions for subsequent children. Yet in that vast hull every cubic metre of space was indispensable, for the ship was a self-contained world, required to support human life independently for centuries.

No member of the crew, male or female, could regard themselves as a separate entity, an individual personality. But each person was a part of a total life-unit, a dedicated nucleus that might one day expand into a tribe; that might, phoenixlike, bring forth a new human race.

I am called Jinian Footseer by some. By some, Jinian Star-Eye. And by some, the Wizard Jinian. One or two call me Dervish Daughter.

On thinking it over, I decided I had been right all along. Everything I had told Peter was true. All the evidence pointed in one way and one way only. I felt as I had felt so long ago, travelling toward Bleer with Peter, when he put the clues to a mystery in my hands and asked me to make sense of it. Now, as then, all the pieces were in my hands, or my head.

The great flitchhawk who had granted me a boon in Chimmerdong, and the d’bor wife, and the gobblemole. The story of Lite Star and the Daylight Bell. The Oracle. The Eesties. Yellow crystals and blue, separated by a thousand years of time. My illness in Chimmerdong, the diagnoses of Bartelmy of the Ban, the Dervish, my mother. All these. No matter how I turned them, there was no other explanation.

Could anything be done?

The inhabitants of a planet called Iszm, a species known as the Iszic, have evolved the native giant trees into living homes, with all needs and various luxuries supplied by the trees’ own natural growth. The Iszic maintain a jealously-guarded monopoly, exporting only enough trees to keep prices high and make a great profit. The protagonist, Ailie Farr, is a human botanist who goes to Iszm (like many others before him, of many species) to steal a female tree, which might allow the propagation of the species off world and break the monopoly.

This volume includes two short novels, previously published separately – the title story, and Nopalgarth (published as The Brains of Earth). The collection is rounded out by two of his best shorter works – “The Gift of Gab” and “The Narrow Land”. “The Narrow Land” was the first of a proposed story sequence which was never completed.

Contents: The Houses of Iszm, The Gift of Gab, Nopalgarth (The Brains of Earth), The Narrow Land

All Jack Vance titles in the SFGateway use the author’s preferred texts, as restored for the Vance Integral Edition (VIE), an extensive project masterminded by an international online community of Vance’s admirers. In general, we also use the VIE titles, and have adopted the arrangement of short story collections to eliminate overlaps.

The Faceless Man is a prisoner in his own palace. His power over the people of Durdane is in the hands of Gastel Etzwane, a youth whose thirst for vengeance against the dreaded Rogushkoi would be slaked only by oceans of their blood. For these invincible foes who threatened Durdane had taken and killed his mother and sister. To destroy the Rogushkoi Gastel would have to unite a world that survived only through its separateness. It was more than dangerous, but he had no choice. If they were to fight the people must regain control of their own lives. Only then could Gastel recruit an elite corps of the liberated – the Brave Free Men – to fling against the Rogushkoi and fight to the death.

The planet was unknown¿ a savagely primitive place where every man had to kill every other man – or live as a slave.

The inhabitants lived in the early Bronze Age one minute, and in the early Machine Age the next. Technology had degenerated into a number of mysteries jealously guarded by separate brotherhoods.

But Jason dinAlt was a gambler. He realised that if he was ever going to get a winning hand in this game, the brotherhoods would need a shuffle¿

Alvin is a clone. One of four, all raised separately, all with unnatural powers. Terrified by their potential, their creator attempts to wipe their recent memories, their knowledge of the talents. But the process goes wrong, and all four are left with no memory at all. They see the world with brand new eyes.

Sent to a remote research station, kept under the guidance of an intelligent ape, Alvin begins to recover his memories. Desperate to rediscover his brothers, he sets off to London in a desperate search for their creator. But when he is kidnapped by criminal apes, the trouble really begins.

On the airless surface of the Moon the ‘cold war’ continues, with the bases of the major world powers watching each other and waiting . . .

The dedicated personnel of Britain’s Moon Base seemed well-adjusted to their peculiar existence despite a series of mysterious happenings. What bothers them most is the visit of a Royal Commission sent by an economically-worried British Government to investigate expenditure. Travelling with the Commission, but under separate and secret orders, is Felix Larsen, who’s investigations are of quite a different nature.

Larsen, alive to the possibilities of espionage, soon finds himself faced with the inexplicable. Why should one man fall a thousand feet and escape with minor bruises while another dies after falling a mere eighteen inches? Why does a desperate man, bent on suicide and with all the means at hand, find it absolutely impossible to kill himself? What are the strange messages emanating from the Base – and from whence do they come? And what is the fantastic thing that has been conceived in the research department?

What happens to a man whose entire personality undergoes a sudden and profound change? Stephen Marsh is a successful management consultant, happily married and with a daughter at university. Then one day he becomes cold to his wife, is unable to relate to his daughter, is uninterested in his job and his friends. The old Stephen Marsh seems to have been replaced by an intrusive newcomer equipped with new memories and new attitudes. The deuteron-Marsh recalls a previous half-century of life as a writer who shied away from human contact, nurturing a secret which separates him from other people. Incapable of giving love or companionship, the new Marsh struggles to continue his predecessor’s lifestyle, torn between a longing for solitude and the bounds of ordinary obligation and affection.