Search Results for: this-second-earth

Dive into adventure in the last unknown territory on Earth – the sea. Join Robby Hoenig and a cast of characters as unusual as any ever met on a distant planet . . .

In the second Robby Hoenig adventure, Secret Under Antarctica, a scientific expedition becomes a race to stop a terrorist plot for world-wide disaster, buried beneath the ice of the South Pole . . .

Gordon R. Dickson’s Robby Hoenig adventures are timeless young adult stories in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke’s Dolphin Island.

A mind-shaking glimpse into the future of the earth: a brilliantly imagined, horrifyingly plausible glimpse into a world where the social elite, the Uppers, live in absolute luxury, boosting themselves with ‘Joy Juice’.



The ‘Joy Juice’ is the vital life fluid extracted from the workers, the second class citizens whose life is a constant search for and movement from one trip, one hallucination to the next. It is only when the workers are tripping that the Uppers can extract the ‘Joy Juice’.



But what happens when the good trips turn into bad ones? When pleasant dreams become nightmares?

It’s 2026, and the Alpha Centauri supernova has risen like a second sun, rushing Earth toward its last summer. Floods, fires, starvation and disease paralyze the planet. A flash of gamma rays has destroyed all microchips worldwide, leaving an already devastated Earth without communications, transportation, weaponry or medicine.

The disaster sets three groups of survivors on separate quests. A militant cult seizes the opportunity to free their leader from her long court-mandated coma. Three cancer patients also search for a man in judicial sleep: the brilliant scientist – and monstrous criminal – who alone can continue the experimental treatment that keeps them alive. From a far greater distance come the survivors of the first manned Mars expedition, struggling homeward to a world that has changed far beyond their darkest fears. And standing at the crossroads is one man, U.S. President Saul Steinmetz, who faces a crucial decision that will affect the fate of his own people… and the world.

In this thrilling second book of the Earthborn trilogy, Lucas and Asha have survived the decimation of Earth at the hands of the invading Xalans and seek safe haven with their enemy’s true foes, the Sorans. They find a lush planet inhabited by a civilization far more advanced than their own, waging a seemingly endless war against a constantly evolving enemy.

The Sorans call the pair of them the “Earthborn” and they’re welcomed as heroes, almost as gods. To an audience of billions, they swear an oath to avenge their fallen planet by aiding the Sorans in their war against Xala. But soon Lucas and Asha find Sora just as dangerous as apocalyptic Earth when they’re targeted by the Fourth Order, a rebel collective who decries them as false prophets and harbingers of further bloodshed.

Their friend and turncoat Xalan scientist Alpha believes he’s located someone who can help them turn the tide of the war for good, stranded on a conquered colony planet. But landing on the new world, Lucas and Asha find themselves hunted by a violent, mysterious beast, known only as the Desecrator, let loose by the Xalans.

Escaping Earth was only the beginning. As Lucas and Asha quickly learn, the universe has worlds and creatures far more dangerous than anything their home planet could have offered, and their continued survival hinges on gaining new allies they never could have imagined.

PLANET OF SAND: A world literally bald, completely covered by sand and devoid of life – or so the stranded spaceman thought until he saw the huge menacing girders whose origin and purpose he could not begin to fathom.

WHITE SPOT: A gold locket containing a picture of a girl, found in millennia-old ruins on a planet some hundreds of light-years from Earth, threatens the existence of the entire human race.

SECOND LANDING: A lost space team lands on a deserted planet, entirely unprepared for the strange world’s one citizen; a great white amoeboid monster, hiding in wait to wreak its fury on any intruders.

A science fiction thriller from the author of THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH.

‘A fine engrossing novel by a master!’ Philadelphia Enquirer

In a time when America’s power has been eroded by energy depletion, and world control has been virtually given over to the Chinese, only one man has the courage to seek new mineral resources among the stars. He is Ben Belson, one of the richest men in the world, a man haunted by the memory of a loveless childhood and driven by needs and desires he can barely understand or control. His dream is to find the means to help America break the stranglehold of the corrupt interests who are keeping it a second class power.

Poul Anderson’s stories are classics from the golden age of science fiction and beyond. A master storyteller, Anderson wrote tales ranging from the immediate to the distant future, from Earth to far-flung galaxies, from hard science fiction to fantasy – all the elements stirred and blended as only Anderson could!

THE QUEEN OF AIR AND DARKNESS is the second volume of The Collected Works of Poul Anderson and collects his best works from a writing career that spans over 50 years.

This volume contains 23 stories including:

‘The Queen of Air and Darkness’ (1972 Hugo Award-winner)
‘Jennifer’s Lament’
‘Industrial Revolution’
‘The Longest Voyage’ (1960 Hugo Award-winner)
‘Marque and Reprisal’

In the dim far future of Earth, when the sun had shrunk to a small red disk in the dark sky and the race of man lived in isolated cities that echoed with the vastness of the world’s history, science, myth and magic had become one. Sorcerors who read the books of ancient times held great power, and fearsome monsters created in ages long forgotten stalked the land. In this world of mystery and danger, the adventurer known as Cugel the Clever was forced to undertake a quest for Iucounu the Laughing Magician – a quest that was to take him to lands stranger than any he had dreamed of, and pit his wits and his sword against powers from beyond time itself.

Previously published as The Eyes of the Overworld, this is the second of a quartet of titles sharing the same far-future setting first introduced in The Dying Earth

Contents: The Overworld, Cil, The Mountains of Magnatz, The Sorcerer Pharesm, The Pilgrims, The Cave in the Forest, The Manse of Iucounu.

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.

No human being had ever landed on the hidden planet of Arisia. A mysterious barrier, hanging unseen in space, turned back all ships. Then the word came to Earth, inexplicably but compellingly:

GO TO ARISIA!

Virgil Samms, founder of the Galactic Patrol, went – and came back with the Lens, the strange device that gave its wearer powers no man had ever possessed before. Samms knew that the price of this power would be high. But even he had no idea of the ultimate cost – nor of the strange destiny that awaited the First Lensman . . .

First Lensman is the second self-contained novel in E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s epic Lensman series, one of the all-time classics of adventurous, galaxy-spanning science fiction.

Everything was ordinary. Men worked in factories and fields. Women were shopping. Children were at school. Then came the four-minute warning. Wires hummed madly between heads of governments. Just before the massive retaliation went into the air the world realised that no-one had despatched the first rocket.

The retaliation was checked with seconds to spare. Experts examined the ruined city. There was something else besides radiation. Deadly bacteria from an unknown source spread across the planet. More alien bombs followed the first. But there was no real pattern in the attacks, if they were genuine attacks.

At last the detectors found the alien ships. They were fighting among themselves and earth was the battle-area. Could the remnants of humanity interfere? What would be the result if they did?

On the murky outskirts of our solar system, a lonely star has exploded, emitting monstrous doses of radiation . . .

The year is 1983. The exploding star Briareus Delta, 132 light years away, provokes only mild interest from planet Earth. Suddenly, appalling tornadoes and storms ravage the cities and countryside, leaving death and desolation in their wake. Then mankind realises another terrifying side-effect – every adult in the world has been rendered infertile.

Schoolteacher Calvin Johnson discovers he is one of the select few to have acquired strange psychic powers. Termed ‘Zetas’, these people experience mental flashes of the future – a future of freezing isolation, snow-swept landscapes and bleak, ice-bound cities.

A second ice-age is imminent as man faces the ultimate horror . . . extinction.

From The SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal sample introduction to the incredible career of Jack Williamson, whose career spanned over seventy years.

Jack Williamson published his first SF story, ‘The Metal Man’, in 1928 and continued to write high quality SF until his death in 2006, along the way coining many of the terms the genre now takes for granted, such as ‘terraforming’ and ‘genetic engineering’. He was the second writer (after Heinlein) to be named a SFWA Grand Master and was the oldest recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. This volume contains The Legion of Space, the first volume in the eponymous series; The Humanoids; John W. Campbell Award-winning Terraforming Earth and his Hugo Award-winning autobiography Wonder’s Child: My Life in Science Fiction.

DOORWAY TO UTOPIA

“Beyond that curtain of darkness lies paradise.”

That was the promise of the doorway known as the Gholan Gate, a doorway so ancient that its makers had vanished millions of years before the first Earthly life crawled out of the primeval oceans. It was still functioning in the possession of its discoverers.

To go through it was to enter a universe where all your dreams came true – where your every wish was obeyed, every fantasy became reality, where you could play God to your heart’s content.

But there was a price, for once beyond the Gholan Gate, you would live only in hopes for a second visit, and a third. . . . And to get the right for that return to paradise a man would sell his soul, his people, his world.

Cap Kennedy entered THE GHOLAN GATE once . . . and the result became cosmic history.

Throckmorton P. Ruddygore, master wizard, had troubles again – but this time, they were partly of his own making. He’d finally beaten the Dark Baron, stripped him of all magical power, and exiled him from Husaquahr to Earth. But he hadn’t counted on the Baron’s using a computer there to create even more effective spells.
Of course, the Baron couldn’t use those spells. But the forces of Hell soon sent him a second-rank wizard who could – and a demon in the cellar to amplify the spells’ power. And now the Baron was developing a scheme which would surely result in Armageddon before its time!
So once again Marge the fairy and Joe the barbarian were called on to do the dirty work. They had to return to their home world and somehow stop the Baron – if they could…

Parallel Worlds! Earth, cerated out of universal chaos, and the Dreamlands, spawned of the dreams of men. But where dreams turn to nightmares, Death is the only crossing-point…
Ex-waking worlders David Hero and Eldin the Wanderer are now sellswords in that ephemeral dimension called Deramland. Once a talented artist of the fantastic, now Hero’s art is the wizardry of his swordplay. Once a lecturing professor, now Eldin professes a knowledge of the dark, mysterious Dream Realms second to none. A formidable pair! But face to face with Yibb-Tstll and the Gaunts of Night, the Eidolon Lathi and her brood, and the mad, alien First One who plots to set free dreaming Cthulu from eon-old imprisonment…what can mere men do?
Take up arms with the Heroes of Dreams and laugh in the face of the world’s worst nightmare!

Alexander Blish was the security chief at Tomloy’s, the new nuclear physics research centre. They were doing things in the plant that had never been done before. They were tapping power sources so terrible that their ultimate conclusions could be heaven on earth or a hell of destruction. Armageddon might be just around the dangerous corner which humanity called tomorrow.

Blish had problems. There were alien forces to consider. There were human traitors who were prepared to sell out the Empire if the price was right. The price could be as high as planetary control.

Wilkie Gordon was Alexander’s second problem. Wilkie was an outworlder with strange wild talents. He could be an invaluable ally or a deadly enemy. Blish had to decide and decide at once. If he made the wrong choice there was just a chance that Gordon could detect the aliens and renegades before they reached the J-Pile…

In the year 2130 a mysterious spaceship, Rama, arrived in the solar system. It was huge – big enough to contain a city and a sea – and empty, apparently abandoned. By the time Rama departed for its next, unknown, destination many wonders had been uncovered, but few mysteries solved. Only one thing was clear: everything the enigmatic builders of Rama did, they did in threes.

Eighty years later the second alien craft arrived in the solar system. This time, Earth had been waiting. But all the years of preparation were not enough to unlock the Raman enigma.

Now Rama II is on its way out of the solar system. Aboard it are three humans, two men and a woman, left behind when the expedition departed. Ahead of them lies the unknown, a voyage no human has ever experienced. And at the end of it – and who could tell how many years away that might be? – may lie the truth about Rama…

Ian Watson is one of the finest writers of SF and fantasy stories, and Butterflies of Memory is his 10th collection, a selection of stories that are by turns serious and playful, and always wildly imaginative…

In the title story, what if mobile phones were to become truly mobile, flying about like butterflies? ‘An Appeal to Adolf’ tells of gay sailors on a Nazi battleship many kilometres long during a Second World War unfamiliar to us; ‘Lover of Statues’ of an enigmatic alien visiting the only statue of Satan in the world, in Madrid – while in the bubbling stew of faiths which is Jerusalem a doorway opens to reveal capricious godlike beings. And just suppose that Jules Verne undertook an actual journey to the centre of the Earth. Closer to home, in a Midlands town, a man who seems to have suddenly popped into existence tries to discover who and what he is. ‘Hijack Holiday’, written a year before 9/11, presciently if bizarrely anticipates events akin to those on that fateful day.

Lieutenant Commander Shaila Jain has been given the assignment of her dreams: the first manned mission to Saturn. But there’s competition and complications when she arrives aboard the survey ship Armstrong. The Chinese are vying for control of the critical moon Titan, and the moon Enceladus may harbor secrets deep under its icy crust. And back on Earth, Project DAEDALUS now seeks to defend against other dimensional incursions. But there are other players interested in opening the door between worlds . . . and they’re getting impatient.

For Thomas Weatherby, it’s been nineteen years since he was second lieutenant aboard HMS Daedalus. Now captain of the seventy-four-gun Fortitude, Weatherby helps destroy the French fleet at the Nile and must chase an escaped French ship from Egypt to Saturn, home of the enigmatic and increasingly unstable aliens who call themselves the Xan. Meanwhile, in Egypt, alchemist Andrew Finch has ingratiated himself with Napoleon’s forces . . . and finds the true, horrible reason why the French invaded Egypt in the first place.