Search Results for: there-will-be-time

Earth zero to Earth fifteen – which was the real one?

What the inhabitants of Greater America didn’t realize was that theirs was the only inhabited landmass, apart from one island in the Philippines. They still talked about foreign countries, though they would forget little by little, but the countries were only in their imaginations, mysterious and romantic places where nobody actually went..

That was the way it was on E-3, one of the fifteen alternate Earths that had been discovered through the subspace experiments.

Professor Faustaff knew that these alternate earths were somehow recent creations, and that they were under attack from the strange eroding raids of the mysterious bands known as the D-Squads. But there were tens of millions of people on those Earths who were entitled to life and protection-and unless Faustaff and his men could crack the mystery of these worlds’ creation and the more urgent problem of their impending destruction, it would mean not only the end of these parallel planets, but just possibly the blanking out of all civilization in the universe.

‘It is there…the relentless pressure of a million craving minds on the barrier of Time – and if it should break…’
From the author of The Body Snatchers and Time and Again, a collection containing:
Such Interesting Neighbours
The Third Level
I’m Scared
Cousin Len’s Wonderful Adjective
Cellar
Of Missing Persons
Something in a Cloud
There is a Tide…
Behind the News
Quit Zoomin’ Those Hands Through the Air
A Dash of Spring
Second Chance
Contents of the Dead Man’s Pocket

Modern man’s most persistent and powerful dream is about to come true. He is ready to travel through time. And who better to take the leap than Mark Elverson, a man with an inoperable heart condition? The far future can only be an improvement for him … or can it?

Until he became an alcoholic, Murray Douglas was one of Britain’s leading actors. Now, after treatment, he’s ready to resume his career, but his first come-back part isn’t exactly what he thought it would be.

The idea was to create an avant-garde play where the actors made up the script as they rehearsed. Unusual but hardly frightening. What was frightening was the rest of the cast. Like Murray, they all had some kind of craving. And each of them was given access to whatever had addicted them.

It was doubtful if the play would ever entertain the public. But it seemed to entertain the director . . .





(First published 1967)

Life had become too interesting on one world crawling across the rubble-strewn arm of a spiral galaxy.

For as the system moved it swept up cosmic dust and debris. Ice ages and periods of tropical warmth followed one another very quickly. Meteors large and small fell constantly. Yesterday’s fabled culture might be tomorrow’s interesting hole in the ground.

But society had always endured. Many thought it always would. Only the brightest scientists admitted that to survive, the race would have to abandon the planet. And to do that they’d have to invent spacecraft . . .

This engrossing epic describes the development, over millennia, of a species from a culture of planet-bound medieval city-states to a sophisticated, technological civilization. With The Crucible of Time, John Brunner returns to the large-canvas science fiction he pioneered in his Hugo Award-winning, novel Stand on Zanzibar.


First published in 1982.

First there was the end.



After weeks of running from pursuers, Gene and Stacy finally found refuge on an isolated island.



But around them the island changed – and so did they.



Each time they awoke from sleep, they lived a different life in a different time. And the farther back they went, the more they lost their anchor to their own world. When at last they were found, the people they had become no longer recognised their pursuers.



And that was the beginning.

A collection of science fiction short stories from the master author of THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS and THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS.

In 1941, Roy Sabre’s girlfriend Betty mysteriously disappears.

Ten years later he has constructed a time-machine and his first trip is to go back to find her.

But his arrival is observed and his machine attacked and damaged as it departs – instead of returning to 1951, it travels to the far future where mankind has disappeared and the Earth is under the control of machines controlled by insects.

Roy finds that several other time-travellers, due to damage and malfunction, have been cast forward to the same time . . .

Stories included:
– “Wanderers of Time”
– “Derelict of Space”
– “Child of Power”
– “The Last Lunarians”
– “The Puff-ball Menace”

Time and Chance is the autobiography of Hugo, World Fantasy and SFWA Grand Master Award-winning author, L. Sprague de Camp. It is a fascinating insight into a man who began writing in the late 1930’s and remained an active voice in the genre up until his death in the last year of the twentieth century, and who was a prime mover in the formation of the fields of Science Fiction and Fantasy as we know them today.

When the scientists of the wandering planet, journeying through inter-galactic space, heard the sound of hydrogen atoms coming into existence out of nothing, they realized that they had accidentally discovered the birthplace of continuous creation. They had lifted the curtain and caught an instant’s glimpse of the unknowable. But to have looked it full in the face could have been no more fatal. For later, much later, they were to learn that they had also uncovered mankind’s Day of Judgment . . .

Travel at light speeds is common, and Earth – the first in the universe to discover it – now reigns over many worlds.

But in order to rule effectively, Captain Robin Weinbaum, head of Security, needs an extremely advanced communications system. He gets it with the Dirac transmitter, the first machine capable of sending instantaneous messages anywhere in the universe. The only problem is that someone called J. Shelby Stevens has a machine that can do the impossible – tap the transmissions before they are even made! It is Weinbaum’s job to find Stevens. And unless he does, time will be abolished and the universe closed to Earth forever . . .

ROBERT SILVERBERG confronts the paradoxes of time travel in a brilliant novel of the 25th century, when the only escape from suffocation in a totally controlled environment is to hop backward through time.
Since time hopping rearranges the past on which the structure of current existence is based, it must be stopped – but not too quickly. For the history of the 1970’s includes the arrival of hoppers who have not yet left the 2490’s – and whose departure thus must not be stopped!

A teenager in the late 21st century discovers a way to travel in time as a way to escape the dystopian world he inhabits, only to learn that time travel introduces dangers of its own.

Man reached for the stars – and failed to keep the Earth in his grasp. With the western United States devastated by drought, the survivors huddle in squalid concentration camps in the east.

And still the dream won’t go away. In high orbit, an artefact is found that may be man’s first contact with aliens. The only woman who can decode it has found her future in the past, in the remote Indian territories of the Pacific Northwest. But in which direction does the planet’s survival lie?

Why is Lauren Steele being followed around by a mysterious red-haired ghost? Why is the Pentagon after her? And why doesn’t anyone believe her?

As a psychologist at the Waycross Clinic in Seattle, she has enough problems. Her clients never seem to listen to anything she says, and her co-workers could use extensive counseling themselves. The last thing she needs is an obnoxious figment of her own imagination showing up at the least opportune moments.

But Daniel (“Corky”) Corcoran is actually the victim of a fault experimental laser, having been accidentally “dispersed” when the device misfired during a demonstration. He has literally gathered his wits about him by focusing on the last person he saw – Lauren. The trouble is, Corky’s attempts at communication only convince Lauren that she is going crazy.

Add to this one paranoid colonel from the Pentagon who is convinced that both Corky and Lauren are Soviet spies, and you have a mix of zany and colourful characters caught up in a plot that is quintessential Wilhelm.

14 science fiction shorts covering topics such as the rebuilding of Manhattan in the heart of Leicestershire, seeking help from an angel, enlivening Utopia by taking a demon lover, changing rivals into animals. A fascinating collection from one of the leading lights of feminist SF.

The first coming was the Man:
The second was Fire to burn Him;
The third was water to drown the Fire;
The fourth is the Bird of Dawning.

Twenty years have passed since the martyrdom of the Boy-piper at York, twenty years in which his legacy, the movement of Kinship, has challenged the tyranny of the Church Militant in Britain’s seven island kingdoms.

Now his namesake, Tom, bearing the Boy’s own pipes and perhaps himself imbued with the spirit of the White Bird, is wandering Europe in company with the girl, Witchet. But disaster overtakes them and Tom, in a fury of vengeance, breaks his vow of Kinship.

A terrible path lies before him, one that transcends his own world. As he travels it, Tom must come to understand the true nature of the wild White Bird, of The Bride of Time and her Child, and of the Song the Star Born sang.

Colonel McCulloch was up to no good. That was becoming very clear indeed. He had stashed away a quarter of a million dollars in gold, and was a prime suspect in a couple of murder cases.

But secret agent Troy Harman can find no trace of his whereabouts. McCulloch has vanished into thin air.

When Harman visits the research station where McCulloch worked as security chief, he realises the awful truth.

To follow McCulloch, to try to put an end to his insane mission – Troy Harman has to embark on a strictly one-way trip . . .

They called their secret society Members of the Human Race, but the majority of humanity preferred to call them “the Inhumans.” That’s because it was generally believed that they were a vicious masked gang of vivisectionists, mutators, and monster-makers.

The day the Time Storm came, Marc Despard was one of the handful to survive – or keep a remnant of sanity. Mist walls moving endlessly across the surface of the Earth, created a devastated, shifting patchwork of temporal anarchy, wrenching both inanimate and living things between the past and the future, beyond all hope of return.

But Despard saw strange, dazzling patterns in his head that he knew were instruments that might enable him to beat the Time Storm.
Travelling through the violent, terrifying landscape of an ever-changing world, slowly gathering others around him, he began to realise his awe-inspiring mission.

He, Marc Despard, must become nothing less than master of the universe – what men call God.

Called to the end of time by a being they knew only as The Face of Ea, four adventurers from the twentieth century faced a power that not even the super-science of that era could meet – the nekron, negative matter, negative force, ultimate destruction for everything it touched. It seemed hopeless to expect them to win this battle for the fate of the universe – but between them they had a power they themselves could not suspect.

Aggression is out of date.

After one war scare too many the human has suppressed it aggressive instincts by genetic manipulation.

Make love, not war.

Now mankind is faced with an enemy so superior, so ruthless, that it is fight or be wiped out – and humans can no longer fight; they cannot even order their robots to fight.

Violence is decadent.

Only a museum exhibit from a thousand years ago – a Royal Navy submarine complete with commander and crew, their belligerent natures intact – can hope to save the planet from an enemy to whom living space is all-important and human life entirely superfluous.

Vornan-19 fell from the sky and landed, naked, on the Spanish Steps in Rome on the afternoon of Christmas Day toward the end of the millennium. And that, for Leo Garfield began an extraordinary and eventful year. For Garfield is an acknowledged expert in the time-reversal of sub-atomic particles and Vornan-19 claims to come from far in the future, a claim that has to be investigated. But the world is in a strange, edgy state as it prepares to move into the next millennium and is ready and willing to see the charming and magnetically charismatic Vornan as some kind of messiah. Even Garfield and his fellow scientists come under Vornan’s spell. But can he really be from the future? Or is he just a charlatan and a fraud?

First published in 1968

They were visitors from out of space.

They had slept for 15,000 years. But they were men. Nevertheless it was a fantastic experience for Wes Chase to discover them while on a casual fishing trip.

It was a long time before they were able to explain to Wes why they were on earth and what they needed. It was even longer before Wes conquered his horror and decided he could help them in their mission to bring peace to the universe.

When Wes finally found the daring answer to their problems, he realised that he would have to leave his own life behind and go with them into the future and the winds of time.

ABE LINCOLN IN AFRICA?

He was seen – and photographed – in a Tunisian bazaar. And an ancient Spanish galleon, fully crewed with ancient Spaniard, was taken in tow off Tampa by the Coast Guard…and a few luckless people found themselves living the same day over and over and over…

Something was badly wrong with Time – but Roger Tyson didn’t know it until he met the lovely agent from elsewhen and started on a mad chase through the dimensions, plagued by a motley bunch of temporal castaways, and pursued hotly by Oob the Rhox!