Search Results for: star-of-life,-the

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 . . .

The Earth teemed with life of all kinds, and many besides man had intelligence and the gift of speech. But chaos ruled. And violence. And despair. Then, in the Valley of the Dead, Sheen first entered the world, and all of the life would bend to the might of the Supreme One before the final push to the stars.

Travel out along the galaxy’s Perseid Arm. Branch off to follow the ten thousand stars of Mircea’s Wisp. Eventually you will come to the Purple Rose System – three stars, Lorca, Sing and Syrene, that seem about to drift away into the void. Three planets circle Syrene. On one, Cadwal, there is Life. Long ago the Naturalist Society of Earth had listed Cadwal as a natural preserve. An administration centre had been set up and staffed to protect the planet from all exploitation. Araminta Station. Now, centuries later, the young Glawen Clattuc is beginning to wonder what the future may hold for him in the hierarchic, carefully ordered hereditary society that is life on Cadwal.

It was a proud moment in the earth’s history, when twenty-four dedicated volunteers set off, on that bright summer morning in 1993, to conquer the vastnesses of inter-stellar space. They did not hope to accomplish their Herculean task in the meagre span of human life. It was their descendants who would walk out onto the as yet undiscovered, planets of the alien stars… or so they dreamed.
There were dire perils ahead of them. Damage to their engines, radio-activity the invisible killer, space madness and the failure of the life giving hydroponic tanks which supplied their oxygen. Yet the worst enemy of all was the enemy within themselves. The human failure of men and women, locked in the close confines of the Star Ship.
Then there was the Alien Ship… Friend or foe?… Saviour or destroyer?

A movie star whose fame is on the decline – but did he take his own life or did someone else have an axe to grind?
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

Eight years ago René Tessier was at the height of his fame. Now the once-celebrated film star frequents less reputable Parisian cafés. That is until young producer Julian Lane plans to star Tessier in his latest production with the promise of millions.

Tessier is headed to London. But the washed-up old man spends less than 24 hours in a dingy Soho hotel before he is found dead. Was it suicide or murder? And who could have wanted Tessier dead?

His name was Tharg, but he was not of any life form we know today. He lived so long ago that the planet Earth had not yet shaped itself. Lava seas roiled and churned, volcanoes spouted and grew, and heavy clouds hung in the hydrogen atmosphere, leaving the planet’s surface dark and dangerous.

On that world Tharg met his death, or something very much like it. He became a disembodied, totally nonphysical intelligence, cut off from all contact with the life he had known. He ‘slept’ for hundreds of millions of years, unconnected with the world, unthinking, hardly existing.

But then he began to awake – for there was new life on Earth, creatures called ‘human’, and Tharg, knowing an ancient promise from the stars, had to tell them of it. But . . . how?

Though Morgon the Riddle-Master was reunited with his beloved Raederle, his purpose in life and the reason for the stars on his forehead remained a mystery. All around him, the realm shook with war as mysterious shape-changers battled against mankind. Without the missing High One, Morgon must assume responsibility for all his world.

When the Colonnaders plucked him from a life of misery and their surgeons rebuilt his twisted body with silicon bones, Joachim Boaz renamed himself after THE PILLARS OF ETERNITY. Now he seeks Meirjaihn the Wanderer, a planet that plots its own course between stars: for on its surface lies a gem that offers mastery over time itself . . .

For almost two centuries the huge spaceship had speared its way through the stars, bound for another two hundred years of travel before it would put down on a new planet, a new home for the Earth people.

On board the metal-enclosed worldlet were four hundred people: the last survivors of Earth. It was up to them to start life anew, to correct the mistakes their ancestors made.

But as the tenth generation neared maturity, the idle passengers found themselves face to face with these same problems – and this time there was no place to run and hide or to postpone their answers. For their miniature society was changing faster and faster. An the spaceship suddenly seemed destined to end as a star-bound coffin.

Moon dust that comes alive in an attempt to destroy the invaders from Earth . . .

A diabolical snare set on a fiery star for a desperate inter-galactic fugitive . . .
An alien ‘primitive’ life form that has the last laugh on condescending space-men . . .

This is a perverse Pandora’s box of startling surprises and deadly perils – nine breakthrough stories by one of the most exciting and imaginative talents of SF

It is the early summer of 1945, and war reigns in the Pacific Rim with no end in sight. Back in the States, Hollywood B-movie star Syms Thorley lives in a very different world, starring as the Frankenstein-esque Corpuscula, and Kha-Ton-Ra, the living Mummy. But the U.S. Navy has a new role waiting for Thorley, the role of a lifetime.


The top secret Knickerbocker Project is putting the finishing touches on the ultimate biological weapon: a breed of gigantic, fire-breathing, proto-Godzillas engineered to stomp and burn cities on the Japanese mainland. The Navy calls upon Thorley to don a rubber suit and become the merciless Gorgantis, starring in a film that simulates the destruction of a miniature Japanese metropolis. If the demonstration succeeds, the Japanese will surrender and many thousands of lives will be spared; if it fails, the horrible mutant lizards must be unleashed.


One thing is certain: Syms Thorley must now give the most terrifyingly convincing performance of his life.

From the Garlowe Clusters in the north to the Veils of Darkness in the south, the Star Kingdom sprawled over roughly a fifth of the galaxy. So huge was this realm that those who tussled for power over it seemed unable to appreciate that it faced annihilation by the Patch, a roving region of peculiar pseudo-energy a light-year across which drained the life-force from any living thing it encountered.

The Patch had moved into the Kingdom and was systematically feeding on system after system. Cynically unperturbed by the appalling loss of life, the royal houses merely tried to involve the Patch in their machinations, to the extent that civil war broke out all over again. But in the event, the Patch was to provide the crucial factor in the struggle for absolute power. The Annihilation Factor!

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.

Space fiction is no longer fiction in the same way that it used to be. There was an element of distance and strangeness about it a few years back. Now, fact has caught up and threatens to overtake. Science fiction today has become science prediction.

An atom is a miniature solar system in some respects. The clustering molecules resemble galaxies, colloids are, perhaps, tiny models of the whole creation. Man stands midway between the unbelievably small and the unbelievably huge. This is one of the allies of science fiction. We look down into the mysteries of the infinitesimal; we look up into the majesty of the macrocosm.

In all this vastness of stars and planets there must be other life. One day we shall make contact with that life. What will the aliens be like? How will human culture compete with non-human culture? Which will survive?

The world of theatre is a graveyard of hopes and dreams – but someone is adding corpses to the list…

Classic, golden age crime from ‘The masters of misdirection’ NEW YORK TIMES

‘Delicious … an enormously engaging old-school mystery’ BOOKLIST, starred review

Life is far from quiet for Mr and Mrs North. Despite Mr North’s attempts to live a peaceful life, Mrs North’s constant efforts as an amateur detective give them more than enough excitement – and not a little danger.

So when the wealthy backer of a play is found dead in the seats of a New York theatre, the Norths aren’t far behind, led by Mrs North’s customary flair for eccentric murders. Alongside Lieutenant William Weigand of the New York Police Department, they’ll employ illogical logic and bizarrely tangential suggestions to draw the curtains on a killer.

What did our ancestors dream of when they gazed up at the stars and looked beyond the present?

A Journey in Other Worlds races far ahead of the nineteenth century to imagine what life would be like in the year 2000. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Earth is effectively a corporate technocracy, with big businesses using incredible advances in science to improve life on the planet as a whole. Seeking other planets habitable for the growing human population, the spaceship Callisto, powered by an antigravitational force known as apergy, embarks on a momentous tour of the solar system. Jupiter proves to be a wilderness paradise, full of threatening beasts and landscapes of inspired beauty, where the explorers must fight for their lives. Dangers less tangible but equally deadly await the Callisto crew on Saturn, which yields profound secrets about their fate and the ultimate destiny of mankind.

With the discovery of the hyperdrive, mankind at last possessed the means of going out to the stars. Four expeditions had already gone by the fine the fifth starship left Pluto for Vega. Carrying its complement of scientists and military personnel, they arrived at the solar system of Vega to find one planet sufficiently like Earth to allow them to land.

Here, they discovered mystery. The ruins of great cities built on the shattered remains of still earlier fortresses, showing that some great race of conquerors had passed that way sometime in the past thirty thousand years.

No life now remained on this planet and speeding to the next sun, they found a civilisation which possessed powers so utterly strange to them that one native almost succeeded in destroying them and taking over the ship. And still the mystery remained, for the legends of the planet spoke of a race of gods who had come down from the stars twenty thousand years before.

It was not until they reached the planet of a red giant sun that they ran into a race of creatures so fantastically alien that there was no defence against them, and they learned the real identity of the race which had conquered the stars millennia before…

In the Jesus Incident Herbert and Ransom introduced Ship, an artificial intelligence that believed it was God, abandoning its unworthy human cargo on the all-sea world of Pandora. Now centuries have passed. The descendants of humanity, split into Mermen and Islanders, must reunite… because Pandora’s original owner is returning to life!

A stunning work from the acclaimed author of Dune, the series which inspired the 2021 Denis Villeneuve epic film adaptation, Dune, starring Oscar Isaac, Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya and Josh Brolin.

The Colony on Rigel IV had been founded seven hundred years earlier but for the past six centuries, they had been forced to exist on the bottoms of the great oceans of the planet, kept there by the tremendously potent weapons of the alien star-race which had swept down out of space and wiped them off the land masses of the new world.

Kerrel Stevens found himself trapped in one of the Shells, unable to remember how he came to be there, aware only that for some strange reason, he held the secret which could release these people from their terrible existence, but that his memory and all of the knowledge which could help in the struggle against the aliens had been erased from his mind.

In the Shells, he finds what he is seeking – others like himself, different from the people who had become used to this life on the sea bottom, where science had gradually given way to superstition and witchcraft – and this chance meeting provides the key which unlocked the amnesia in his mind. For him, it opened the doorway to the surface of this strange, impossible planet, plunging him breathlessly towards the stars- and the unbelievable secret which spelt destruction for the alien star-race.

Ganelon Silvermane, the genetically designed superhero of the Earth’s fabulous final age, has rapidly become the most popular of all Lin Carter’s creations. Brought to life prematurely, Ganelon’s adventures in a world of crumbling empires, ravaging hordes, and marvelous relics of forgotten scientific empires are always edge-of-the-seat wonder novels – the best creation of the author of the Thongor, Green Star, and Callisto books, to mention but a few!Now, in this third novel of Gondwane, Ganelon Silvermane encounters a city of illusion, the problem of scientific immortals, and the disastrous collision of a massive horde of the world’s ultimate barbarians!

In the 23rd Century, out of all the races of the galaxy, only humanity has discovered the secret of travel between the stars – not so much because we’re smart, but because we are incredibly gadget-orientated. We are also, compared to the galaxy’s highest sophisticated norms, very, very tough, which most of the time does nothing for our social acceptability. But when a threat to all life in the galaxy arises from non-living biological constructs, suddenly the peculiar human virtues of valor and stubbornness make us the sword-wielding saviours of All…

It is the year 2450. Humanity is scattered among the stars, which teem with intelligent life, while the home world has been destroyed by an inadvertent catastrophe two hundred years before. Thus all Earthmen are exiles, and Earth itself is only a memory.

Hydros is a world of great complexity. It has almost no landmass, only a great globe-encompassing ocean with occasional tiny islands. Its seas swarm with apparently intelligent life-forms of a hundred kinds, and one – a bipedal humanoid form – has created a kind of land for itself: floating islands, woven from sea-borne materials, buffered by elaborate barricades against the ceaseless tidal surges that circle the planet.

To Hydros have come an assortment of Earthmen. For them it’s a world of no return: having no form of outbound space transportation. This brilliantly inventive novel tells their story, as they travel across the planet’s endless ocean in search of the mysterious area from which no human has ever returned – the Face of the Waters.




(First published 1991)

The romantic legend of the Holy Grail is almost without parallel in the stories of chivalry. It has about it a quality of inspiration and a standard of purity that transcends everyday life. It shines like a star through the darkness of the Dark Ages. But what if Satan has his own counterpart? What if – just as the Black Mass of the witches and wizards, is an abominable reversal of the Holy Communion Service of the Christian – what if, then, there is an Unholy grail? A sinister thing of death and terror. A glittering, golden chalice forged in the nethermost chasms of Hell, wrought by the hands of unholy craftsmen. Gilded by demons, decked with gems by jewellers who life with the Prince of Darkness.

A thing that originated below the dark hills where trolls dwell…

That, too, would be the object of many a quest. There would be dedicated heroes searching to destroy it. There would be unscrupulous men who wanted to employ its dark power for their own ends. There would be weak men unable to resist its call. There would be strong men whose wills clashed with the almost irresistible power of the Golden Goblet.

One-way ticket to death . . .?

‘Hughes is the master we keep turning to’ Sara Paretsky

‘The tension and terror of Dread Journey are such that few will be able to lay the book down unfinished’ New York Times

‘Cornell Woolrich meets Agatha Christie’ Publishers Weekly

‘Superbly done’ Washington Post

In the four years since she arrived in Los Angeles, Kitten Agnew has become a star. Not all by herself, of course; though beautiful and talented, Kitten would be lost without her director, the acclaimed and powerful Vivien Spender.

But Spender is a dangerous man. Kit knows that, and has heard all the stories – of discarded stars that have ended up in a chorus line, or a sanatorium, or worse.

Spender knows that Kit knows, and wouldn’t dare destroy her glittering career. But he may be willing to kill her . . .

On a train from LA to Chicago, Kit makes a discovery that could have her fighting not just for her career, but for her life.