Search Results for: to-the-ultimate

It is an age of omnipotent machines; of a vast, megalopolis with hover-cars tied into an electronic traffic control, pedways and monorails…

It is an age, too, of ultimate detectives. Robin Carver was one of the best on Ridforce. Connecting with the dying brains of murder victims, reliving their last moments, fingering the killers for the police was his job, and he did it well.

But the sudden wave of murders had shaken him to the core. A man could work with death for just so long – then something had to give…

He was ‘The Visitor’ . . .
in a society revolutionised and troubled by a transportation device that let you walk through a door and be anywhere in the world – instantly.

He was ‘The Visitor’ . . .
at a time when unauthorised travel had caused the violent deaths of countless millions and the survivors were quaking in fear.

He was ‘The Visitor’ . . .
in a world where the invasion of privacy was the ultimate crime and where his obsession with visiting places where he had no right to be led him on a perilous adventure towards his own destruction.

On Venus: An ancient and powerful Venusian race finds its ultimate evolution – but can they accept it?

On Mars: The people of the Fourth Planet are eminently reasonable in all things – except for the cult of the Sacred Martian Pig, for which ‘fanatic’ would be entirely too reasonable a word.

And on Earth: On the unknown world of one or ten centuries from now, the strangest stories of all become haunting, fascinating reality, as we find out that human beings are, after all, the most alien of creatures . . .

Earth was a weird and dire place after the plagues.

The few humans who survived could not bear the touch of each other; they lived in the enormous, endless caverns hacked out of the bowels of the earth for the bombs that never came.

And on one man rested the hopes of the world, though he did not know it. Sam Sewell only knew he had to journey, despite forbidding perils from the darkness of the past, into the ultimate fastnesses of the unknown to rescue the timeless wisdom of the witch Desponia . . .

Those exiles and rebels determined to bring peace to Lescar discover the true cost of war. Courage and friendships are tested to breaking point. Who will pay such heart-breaking penalties for their boldness? Who will pay the ultimate price? The dukes of Lescar aren’t about to give up their wealth and power without a fight. They won’t pass up any chance to advance their own interests either, if one of their rivals suffers in all this upheaval. The duchesses have their own part to play, more subtle but no less deadly.

Only one thing could lure Hal Mayne away from his research aboard the Final Encyclopedia. It was the shattering news of the Younger Worlds’ oncoming defeat – an inevitable triumph for the cross-cultural hybrids known as the Others.

To save Earth’s future in space, Hal must journey to the planet Kultis, where the powerful alternate forces have been mastered by the top secret Chantry Guild. There, Hal Mayne will meet his greatest challenge and ultimate fate – one that will alter mankind’s destiny forever.

In the Country of Tattooed Men the nights feel hollow and are full of sounds of the jungle: danger is everywhere. Tattoos hide all from the prying eyes of the world. On Murderer’s Walk the cards are dealt for the ultimate game. There can be only one loser: pray you do not hold the ace of spades. And from York to London, Northampton to Southend the boys are surfing Spanish style.
It’s exciting and exhilarating and potentially fatal.

Gary Kilworth has created a powerful and striking anthology of stories from the past, present and future.

Retief returns – to make the galaxy safe for diplomacy!

The diplomat extraordinaire faces his ultimate challenge on the embattled planet Furtheron – to keep the peace and keep himself in one piece!

Voracious Crawlie cannibals want him for dinner – while the wily Creepies are besieging Earth’s embassy. Then greedy Groacians add fuel to the fire, igniting civil war for their own secret ends.

Only a rare diplomat can pull his Corps out of this stew, save his boss’s hide, and preserve the future of the Galaxy!

Flatland follows the journeys of A. Square, a mathematician and resident of the two-dimensional Flatland, where women – thin, straight lines – are the lowliest of shapes, and where men may have any number of sides, depending on their social status.

Through strange occurrences that bring him into contact with a host of geometric forms, Square has adventures in Spaceland (three dimensions), Lineland (one dimension) and Pointland (no dimensions) and ultimately entertains thoughts of visiting a land of four dimensions-a revolutionary idea for which he is returned to his two-dimensional world.

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!

Bart Fraden came looking for a planet to conquer – and found the hell-hole of the galaxy: Sangre – the killer planet. For three centuries Sangre had been dominated by the sadistic Brotherhood of Pain, a priesthood dedicated to torture, slavery and cannibalism. Bart sensed the kind of revolutionary potential that he could manipulate to make himself ultimate ruler. But he hadn’t counted on the apathy of a people bred as meat animals and the dreadful power wielded by the Brotherhood. Sangre might cost him more than his life – it might destroy his soul . . .

A daring novel of mankind’s strange and startling destiny. . .

Here is a novel to equal Arthur C. Clarke’s great work, Childhood’s End. It tells with frightening clarity of a desperately stricken Earth – wracked by overpopulation and plagued by famine and despair.

It tells, too, of a new breed of men and women – twenty-first century lotus eaters caught up in a mysterious euphoria which will ultimately threaten all life on this planet: the drug-induced world of ‘happy dreams’. Do these ‘happy dreamers’ herald the end of the human race – or the next extraordinary step in the evolution of Man?


First published in 1963.

IT SEEMED AS IF EVERYONE WAS A SPY!

The political situation in the 21st century was coming to the boil: one man, a scientist, held what might be the important key to ultimate power in the struggle between the three blocs: West-world, Sov-world, and Common Europe. The scientist, Auguste Bazaine, disappears, and each bloc accuses the other of kidnapping.

There was only one way to settle the difference! So nine men were chosen to fight to the death in a trial by combat organised by the World Court. The winner will put his country on top. But when an American and a Russian meet face to face – the result is not what was expected!

The men of the Dorsai were the finest fighting soldiers in the universe, mercenary troops without equal.

Their talents were devastatingly employed on Kultis, where a bloody little war raged between the Western Alliance and Eastern Coalition. But not even the Dorsai could anticipate the dramatic effect of Cletus Grahame’s brilliant mind and the galaxy-shaking theory he called The Tactics of Mistake.

This first book in the Dorsai sequence is the story of how Cletus Grahame risked his life, the fate of three worlds, and ultimately the whole of the Dorsai to prove that a mistake may remake worlds. A classic of science fiction.

R.U.R. – written in 1920, premiered in Prague in 1921, and first performed in New York in 1922 – garnered worldwide acclaim for its author and popularized the word ‘robot’. Mass-produced as efficient laborers to serve man, Capek’s Robots are an android product-they remember everything but think of nothing new. But the Utopian life they provide ultimately lacks meaning, and the humans they serve stop reproducing. When the Robots revolt, killing all but one of their masters, they must strain to learn the secret of self-duplication. It is not until two Robots fall in love and are christened “Adam” and “Eve” by the last surviving human that Nature emerges triumphant.

The fourth novel in the classic Legion of Space series.

In swarming hordes they poured forth from the core of the Nebula: the shadowflashers – nightmarish parasites bent on enslaving the minds and bodies of the entire human race. Already they had killed the Keeper of the Peace, and stolen the great secret weapon Akka. Now nothing stood between Mankind and the ultimate destruction…

It was Jil Gyrel who first sensed danger. Daughter of a lost Legion pilot, Jil had inherited her father’s uncanny gifts of navigation – and his courage. But what was one girl’s bravery against the most monstrous evil ever to emerge from the treacherous oceans of space?

The ultimate maquiladora. Montezuma Strip: First World tech and Third World wages, sprawling from L.A. to East Elpaso Juarez, Guyamas to Phoenix; a thousand gangs, a million locos; and a few wealthy beyond the dreams of gods…


And Federale Angel Cardenas, a living lie detector, is a top cop on the blistering streets of virtual reality scams and cryogenic kidnaps, where talking animals are programmed to kill, computer screens can spit murder, and even the Holy Blessed Virgin’s ghost runs extortion rackets.


Once Angel Cardenas was blind. But now he sees…straight into the heart of darkness that rules…


MONTEZUMA STRIP

They were three: Maq Ancor, the master assassin, Macician Cherry, space illusionist, Sine Anura, mistress of the erotic.

Chosen for the great quest, the journey into the heart of mankind’s greatest creation: Zeus.

Zeus who made the new worlds for Man, endlessly forming, linking, organising the spread of Man into the new Zeus-created lands. So great was the undertaking that it had passed beyond the control of Man. Zeus, obeying with ruthless logic its original program, was lethal in what it deemed to be its own defence.



For Man to regain control he had to understand what he had created.



This was the great quest, the ultimate journey of discovery.

In his long and fabulous career as the Captain Hornblower of space, John Grimes was to experience many strange things, rising through the ranks of the Interstellar Federation – from triumph to disaster – and ultimately becoming the most famous of the Rim Runners, far out along the edge of the Milky Way.

But there was a period when Grimes fell between one cosmic empire and another, on his own, commander of a single deep-space pinnace and looking for work.

And that was when he became a god! He thought he was just doing a mailman’s job, bu the price of the postage turned out to be divinity – with a lovely nude postmistress certified for a goddess!

Riverworld was a planet of Eden whose people possessed the power of dreaming the future. Kyreol, daughter of a Healer, pierced the vision veil to discover the ultimate truth – that her home world unknowingly hosted the way station of a vast interstellar civilisation.

An evil star shone on Kyreol’s first mission as an interplanetary agent. Her ship fell out of space, cracking on a lonely, mysterious moon. Rising from its endless plains was the white city – awesome, abandoned, eons-dead – a silent world of secret wonders.

Only her prophetic dreams linked Kyroel to Riverworld, but she was hopelessly marooned light-years away. And she was not alone…

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…

Zarkon and his Omega Crew zoom into death-defying action!

Dead men. One after another. Rich. Famous. Powerful. And all defenseless against the invisible occult force that struck them down and left no trace of its satanic identity and devilish design.

The police were powerless. The governments of the world were struck with fear and trembling. And only Prince Zarkon, the Ultimate Man, and his devoted Omega Crew, could hope to stem the bloody flood of terror about to engulf all mankind.

But even the great Zarkon and his miracle men might have met their match, as the defenders of Good moved into shattering showdown with an eerie Empire of awesome Evil.

His fiendish foes would do anything to learn the identity of the man called Prince Zarkon, who foils their most diabolical schemes. But Zarkon remains a mystery to even his devoted Omega Crew as they follow him to the ends of the Earth battling the forces of darkness.

Now Prince Zarkon and his Omega Crew must meet their ultimate challenge. Never before has Zarkon faced an enemy as monstrous as the creature who calls himself Lucifer, whose army of satanic slaves, whose mastery of the black arts, and whose nearly infinite arsenal of infernal weapons make him the greatest threat that mankind has ever known!

MUST THE UNIVERSE DIE WITH THEM?

The Starfolk, arrogant masters of vast stretches of the cosmos beyond the Earth’s sphere of influence, were determined to complete the extermination of the mind-reading mutants of Regnier’s planet.

But to the mutants themselves, the terror of the Starfolk was nothing compared to the greater dread that gripped their spirits – the obsession that the universe itself was doomed. This obsession ripped into their minds, overwhelmed them, and plunged them into horrifying hysteria.

The message of room reached the ears of the Starfolk themselves, forcing the to a fateful decision. They would allow an Earthman, archeologist Philip Gascon, to visit Regnier in an attempt to unravel its secrets. What he found would either contain the key to the ultimate destiny of the universe – or the date of the doomsday.