Search Results for: to-live-again

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.

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.

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?

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.

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!

Where once the mighty Kane has passed, no one who lives forgets. Now, down the trail of past battles, Kane travels again. To the ruins of a devastated city peopled only with half-men and the waif they call their queen. To the half-burnt tavern where a woman Kane wronged long ago holds his child in keeping for the Devil. To the cave kingdom of the giants where glory and its aftermath await discovery. To the house of death itself where Kane retrieves a woman in love.

The past, the future, the present – all these are one for Kane as he travels through the centuries.

Contents:
“Undertow”
“Two Suns Setting”
“The Dark Muse”
“Raven’s Eyrie”
“Lynortis Reprise”
“Sing a Last Song of Valdese”

The world lay frozen under a thousand feet of ice. Only in the Eight Cities of the Matto Grosso did men still live, hunting the wary ice whales for meat and oil, and following the creed of the Ice Mother which foretold the end of all life in ultimate cold.
But legend told of a city far to the north – fabled New York – whose towers rose above the ice, whose crypts held the forgotten lore that might bring warmth to Earth once again. In the best ice ship in the Eight Cities, Konrad Arflane embarked on the impossible voyable to New York – an odyssey of incredible peril and adventure with a shattering discovery at the journey’s end…