Search Results for: to-live-again

That was the strange message left on Cory Maddox’s e-mail – just at the moment when years of work on a revolutionary subspace computer system were about to pay off. Nothing would be the same for Cory again. Suddenly his life was thrown into chaos when the company that controlled his patent was sold out from under him, and instead of imminent watch, Cory was facing immediate poverty. Then along came Alan Stark, who wanted to recruit Cory for a special research project on virtual reality.

Initially thrilled to be involved, Cory quickly discovered that there was nothing virtual about the realities he was working on. Instead, he found that Stark was on the verge of controlling the very fabric of reality itself.

Cory was unsure of Stark’s ultimate goal until he began to recall pieces of another life and found himself in the middle of a battle between two groups of people who could use “rabbit holes” in space and time to jump between different realities, personalities, and lives. Whoever had control of the power to shape reality would have power to become a god – or a devil. But before Cory could combat Stark and his minions, he first had to remember which side he was on.

All those who ever lived on Earth have found themselves resurrected – healthy, young, and naked as newborns – on the grassy banks of a mighty river, in a world unknown. Miraculously provided with food, but with no clues to the meaning of their strange new afterlife, billions of people from every period of Earth’s history – and prehistory – must start again.

Sir Richard Francis Burton would be the first to glimpse the incredible way-station, a link between worlds. This forbidden sight would spur the renowned 19th-century explorer to uncover the truth. Along with a remarkable group of compatriots, including Alice Liddell Hargreaves (the Victorian girl who was the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland), an English-speaking Neanderthal, a WWII Holocaust survivor, and a wise extraterrestrial, Burton sets sail on the magnificent river. His mission: to confront humankind’s mysterious benefactors, and learn the true purpose – innocent or evil – of the Riverworld . . .

Winner of the Hugo Award for best novel, 1972

It all began when someone tried to push Creed into the flesh pool to be ingested. The assassination failed, but Creed was never the same again. Because it launched the new cliff-dwellers of Creed’s colony onto a new course of life – which could lead to humanity’s re-emergence as Earth’s masters.

In those far future days, Earth’s masters were two trees. Not trees as we know them, but two Everest-high growths, whose sentient roots and fast-growing branches dominated every living thing on the world. Men lived between their arboreal combat.

What if there were an Afterworld? Not Heaven or Hell in the conventional sense, but a place where everyone who has ever lived reawakens when they die, to live again and die again and live again, seemingly forever. This is the premise of Robert Silverberg’s brilliantly inventive new fantasy novel. The central character is the legendary warrior-king Gilgamesh, who has been in the Afterworld longer than almost anyone else save the Hairy Men from before the Flood, and who in recent centuries (insofar as you can count time) has seen it change beyond recognition, as the newly dead from industrial times import their machinery, their weaponry and their attitudes. Gilgamesh’s adventures in the course of the novel take him to the Afterworld realms of other quasi-mythical figures like Prester John and Simon Magus, bring him into contact with such figures from more recent history as Walter Ralegh and Pablo Ruiz (known to some as Picasso), and eventually send him in search of a gateway which is rumoured to exist somewhere in the land of the dead – a gateway which leads back to the land of the living.

More even than space travel, the Stileman Process had altered twenty-first century life. The most complex of medical miracles, it ensured that every ten years or so, the ailing aging body could be restored to youthful vigour and health.

There was a catch of course. The cost. Every ten years or so you have to come up with £1,000,000 minimum or die.

For Dallas Barr, one of the oldest men on earth, it was that time again. It was while he was casting around for that vital next million that he came across Maria, a woman from – literally – a previous life. And made two major discoveries.

Not all Stileman ‘immortals’ were born – or created – the same. And someone is trying to kill them. All of them.

Paul Kaufmann is dead – but his mind lives on.

And the mind of a financial genius is always in demand.

Mark Kaufmann, the old man’s nephew and heir, wants it, to ensure the future of the Kaufmann empire.

The ruthless and self-made John Roditis, Mark’s great rival, wants it, to give him the social status he has always lacked.

And Risa, Mark’s self-willed and sensual daughter, wants what a mind like Paul’s can give, for reasons all her own.

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.

Fortieth-Century Space Probe!

The diabolically clever Bureau had superbly trained their space pilot, beautiful Lena Thomas.

Nothing could go wrong in an age where science had conquered the universe. In one of their fifteen faster-than-light ships, Lena would reach beyond the over-populated Milky Way, carrying her grotesque cargo: seven programmed prosthetic engineers to give advice and comfort, and 515 dead men sealed in gelatinous fix. Exposed to the unskilled ultraviolet of space, they would gradually become the living again!

But the omniscient Bureau was not aware of the black galaxy in Lena’s charted path. And Lena’s ship fell into it, fell through twenty-five billion miles of hyperspace, into the lifeless, timeless expanse of the dreadful pit . . .

The cyborg engineers couldn’t help Lena now. She was totally alone except for the awakening dead! If she geared the ship up to tachyonic drive, would she break out of the terrifying black hole? Or would she destroy the universe?

Time was running out for Bob Kinnaird. Without much warning, the Hunter – the green protoplasmic alien that lived inside him and cured all his ills – had suddenly become his destroyer. Day by day Bob grew weaker and weaker, but only specialists from the Hunter’s distant world would know what was wrong with him and, more importantly, how to save him.

But the only way searchers from his planet could find him was to locate his missing spaceship . . . a spaceship that had crashed beneath the ocean years before, its location still very much a mystery. Once again leading an investigation against time – as he had done so many years before – the Hunter knew he had to find comrades and find them fast . . . before someone murdered his best friend.