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Gene Anderson was born in Oregon, in the twilight post-war years, into the most ordinary circumstances imaginable.

Gene is endowed with powers. He can look into the other worlds that are all around him. He can make things happen. He can hurt and he can heal.

His life changes dramatically when another boy is killed in a tragic accident, and Gene runs away. He is only nine. As he grows to 8’6″ tall, his wanderings take him round the world in search of a remarkable destiny.

Winner of the Nebula Award for best novel, 2005
Winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award 2004

Unknown to anyone, two creatures have wandered the Earth for generations. The aliens have no knowledge of each other, but share a residual memory of a mysterious, sunken relic – and an affinity for deep water. One, the changeling, has survived by adaptation, taking the shapes of many different organisms. The other, the chameleon, has survived solely by destroying anything or anyone that threatens it.

Now, finally brought up from the bottom of the sea by marine biologist Russell Sutton, the relic calls to them both . . . to come home. For all these generations there have been two invincible creatures on Earth. But the chameleon has decided there’s only room for one . . .

After roving through space for centuries, a starship unburdens its cargo of human embryos on a harsh new world. They quickly grow to maturity in the ship’s artificial womb. A lifetime of Earth memories is programmed into their dreams.
But before their indoctrination is complete, an alien intruder infiltrates and destroys the system, and the reason for the odyssey is never learned.
Now, on a verdant island surrounded by quicksand, Othman, wanderer, dreamer, and self-proclaimed leader of the Earthling band, builds a mighty bridge to span the ocean of molten mud that keeps them from the world beyond.
He has yet to face the deadly toll his quest will take on the delicate ecology of the planet – or the revolt of his beautiful, strong-willed wife, Silandi. And he has yet to discover the hidden knowledge locked deep within their hearts.

Conan the Barbarian is one of the most famed figures in fantasy fiction. With the success of the new film starring Jason Momoa and Ron Perlman, the time is right to revisit Robert E. Howard’s classic stories.

Presented in chronological order over three books, all of Conan’s life is here, from his wild adventures as a youth to the final tale of Conan the King. Howard’s tales of the wanderer, the reaver, the thief, the Barbarian have never been surpassed.

In this volume Conan learns the secrets of THE TOWER OF THE ELEPHANT and the ROGUES IN THE HOUSE, meets THE FROST-GIANT’S DAUGHTER and the QUEEN OF THE BLACK COAST and visits THE VALE OF LOST WOMEN and THE BLACK COLOSSUS. A selection of other tales and fragments round out this new collection of a classic character.

Conan the Barbarian is one of the most famed figures in fantasy fiction. With the success of the new film starring Jason Momoa (of A GAME OF THRONES)and Ron Perlman, the time is right to revisit Robert E. Howard’s classic stories.

Presented in chronological order over three books, all of Conan’s life is here, from his wild adventures as a youth to the final tale of Conan the King. Howard’s tales of the wanderer, the reaver, the thief, the Barbarian have never been surpassed.

In this volume Conan learns the secrets of the RED NAILS and the JEWELS OF GWAHLUR, meets THE SLITHERING SHADOW and THE PEOPLE OF THE BLACK CIRCLE, visits THE POOL OF THE BLACK ONE and travels BEYOND THE BLACK RIVER. A selection of other tales and fragments round out this new collection of a classic character.

In the exotic interstellar civilization of the Second Starfaring Age, youthful wanderers are known as Children of Fortune. This is the tale of one such wanderer, who seeks her destiny on an odyssey of self-discovery amid humanity’s many worlds.

In 1986, Halley’s Comet returned to our heavens for the first time in over seventy-five years. Heart of the Comet is the story of Halley’s next return in the middle of the twenty-first century, and of a daring mission to explore and colonize this ice-covered wanderer. It is the thrilling saga of a multinational group of exiles who discover the comet’s astonishing secret – the secret that threatens their very survival.

During the day a blazing and merciless sun beat down on “the boy” and at night a friendless and cold darkness enveloped him. It was a bleak and lonely countryside over which he had been wandering for ten years. A rare tree, bird or wild animal was the only life he encountered during his desolate trek through his young years of roaming. Infrequently, he was fortunate enough to find shelter and food in the shops of deserted villages; otherwise he foraged what he could from the nearly barren land. Contact with other humans was his innermost and greatest fear.

But the day came when his curiosity overcame his sensibilities of self-preservation and he was drawn to the sound of a great wailing not far from a place where he had come to rest.

Form that moment on his whole existence took on a radical change. His wanderings became a kaleidoscope of adventures, emotions, and responsibilities – never static, forever mobile, and potentially dangerous. There were moments when it would have been easier to turn his back, return to old ways, but somehow he knew this was an impossibility. He accepted his new fate, but still feared the greatest of all commitments until it was too late for him.

This fantasy adventure will not fail to excite and stir in every reader memories and emotions of seemingly forgotten times and moments.

Earth was finally entering the galaxy…

The ‘Allies’ had arrived, sweeping down from the stars to offer a jaded Earth the marvels of the cosmos.

And Earth had gone crazy. Farmers sat back to wait for Vita Flakes to fall from the sky. New York City drank itself into a permanent starstruck stupor. Blissed-out teenagers wandered into the Great Mexican Defoliation Desert to wait for the New Gods to bear them off to the astral plane…

But the ‘Allies’ weren’t in the business of trading something for nothing. This impertinent little marketworld might fetch a nice price on the interstellar auction block… particularly if a runaway wondergirl named Golden Vanity was tossed into the bargain!

Kickaha, a freedom-seeking wanderer from the planet Earth, meets his archenemy, the most powerful of the decadent interstellar lords, Lord Red Orc, in a final battle that will determine the fate of the universes.

Genghis Khan, Alice, Sir Richard Burton, Mark Twain, Peter Frigate, and millions of others mysteriously resurrected on the planet Riverworld wander along the planet’s twisting river in search of the master beings who brought them all back to life.

Operation Timestop: Post-holocaust Paris is a pretty seedy stand-in for the original, but what can you expect when the goverment’s main function is Orgasm Prevention & when the national hero is wandering around in Nowhen. But things are changing! Rumor has it that the Timetraveler is coming back in a few months. At which point, Time itself will come to an end.

Mindplayers are tomorrow’s psychoanalysts, linked directly to their patients using sophisticated machinery attached to the optic nerve. In one-to-one Mindplay contact, you can be inside someone else’s head, wandering the landscapes of their consciousness. Allie is a sensation-seeking young woman, obtaining illicit thrills from her shady friend Jerry Wirerammer. But Allie goes badly astray when Jerry supplies her with a “madcap” – a device that lets you temporarily and harmlessly experience psychosis. There’s something wrong with Jerry’s madcap, and the psychosis doesn’t go away when it’s disconnected. Allie ends up undergoing treatment at a “dry-cleaner”, and she is faced with a stark choice – jail, for her illegal use of the madcap; or training to become a Mindplayer herself.

During training Allie becomes familiar with the Pool – a cohesive, though shifting mental landscape jointly constructed by a number of minds; and more disturbingly encounters McFlor, who has been mind-wiped, so that his adult body is inhabited by a mind only two hours old. And as a fully-fledged Mindplayer Allie has to choose between the many specialist options open to her – Reality Affixing or Pathosfinding; Thrillseeking or Dreamfeeding.

THE STORM LORD is a big novel of an unknown planet and of the conflict of empires and peoples on that world. It is a story of a priestess raped and slain, of a baby born of a king and hidden among strangers, and of how that child, grown to manhood, sought his true heritage.

It is a novel of alien gods and lost goddesses, of warriors and wanderers, and of vengeance long delayed.

It is an epic in every sense of the word.

The exciting sequel to Black Unicorn and Gold Unicorn!
The young wanderer Tanaquil can mend anything that is broken – except her own heart. With the engagement of her beloved Honj to her sister, Empress Lizra, she returns home to her sorcerous mother – and her mother’s new lover, the magician Worabex.
Caught up in their combined magic, Tanaquil and her mischievous familiar – a literal pet peeve – find themselves in a parallel world where she meets Tanakil, a mirror-image princess with murder on her mind.

Imagine a living specimen of a multimillion-year-old hominid species, Homo habilis, encountering the contemporary world.

Told in the first-person narrative of Paul Loyd, divorced owner of a small town restaurant, Ancient of Days tells the story of a habiline man found wandering in a Georgia pecan orchard, a living descendant of a habiline tribe, brought from Africa via Haiti as a slave. Paul’s ex-wife, RuthClaire, takes in the living fossil, appropriately naming him Adam, and as an artist she discovers Adam’s mute but vibrant artistic sensibility, falls in love with him, and marries him – much to Paul’s confusion and dismay.

And then the story begins to widen out onto a broader canvas, as Adam first faces persecution by small town Georgia Klansmen, then, surviving that, moves with RuthClaire to Atlanta and encounters the whole spectrum of American culture, from art critics and media spectacles to evangelists and punk clubs.

Throughout the peregrinations and travails of Adam, however, runs a rich and developing strain of self-conscious spiritual, intellectual, and artistic growth, interwoven with Adam’s genuine anguish over the problematic nature of his true humanity.

In the end, the central characters come together on the Haitian island of Montarez in the aftermath of crisis, and in a moment of illumination and revelation meet the mysterious and extraordinary origins of Adam and his race in human prehistory.

Billy Byrne squared his broad shoulders and filled his deep lungs with the familiar medium which is known as air in Chicago. He was standing upon the platform of a New York Central train that was pulling into the La Salle Street Station, and though the young man was far from happy something in the nature of content pervaded his being, for he was coming home. After something more than a year of world wandering and strange adventure Billy Byrne was coming back to the great West Side and Grand Avenue. Now there is not much upon either side or down the center of long and tortuous Grand Avenue to arouse enthusiasm, nor was Billy particularly enthusiastic about that more or less squalid thoroughfare. The thing that exalted Billy was the idea that he was coming back to show them. He had left under a cloud and with a reputation for genuine toughness and rowdyism that has seen few parallels even in the ungentle district of his birth and upbringing.


A girl had changed him. She was as far removed from Billy’s sphere as the stars themselves; but Billy had loved her and learned from her, and in trying to become more as he knew the men of her class were he had sloughed off much of the uncouthness that had always been a part of him, and all of the rowdyism.


Billy Byrne was no longer the mucker.

Wandering out there in some remote region of the galaxy is a gargantuan, sentient Tar-Aiym weapons system. All Flinx has to do – while his pals look after his injured love, Clarity Held – is find the hefty object and persuade it to knock out the monstrous evil that is hurtling through the space to lay waste to the entire Commonwealth. A no brainier, really… just as soon as Flinx and his mini drag, Pip, visit Visaria – a dangerously depraved planet to make sure that humans are indeed worth saving. But prospects really go south when Flinx runs afoul of a ruthless crime king. What’s more, a new mystery is waiting to be uncovered: a shocking clue about Flinx’s shadowy past.

Flinx is the only one with any chance of stopping the evil colossus barrelling in to destroy the Humanx Commonwealth (and everything else in the Milky Way.) His efforts take him to the land of his mortal enemies, the bloodthirsty AAnn, where chances are excellent that Flinx may be executed. And he must also seek out an ancient sentient weapons platform wandering around the galaxy and then communicate with it, a powwow that could very well fry his brain. Then there are the oblivion craving assassins determined to stop Flinx before he can prevent total annihilation. With a future that rosy, it’s no surprise that Flinx is flirting with disaster. Still, he’s no quitter. Now he’s going to need every once of his know-how, because he’s venturing to places where no one’s every been, to do what no one’s ever done, and where his deadliest enemy is so close it’s invisible.

A beautiful woman – with no memory – and the people who claim to know her may not have her best interests at heart…

‘Vera Caspary is an expert at suspense and suspicion’ New York Times

Kate and Allan Royce are driving home from a party in Westport, Connecticut one night when they see a girl in a beautiful but muddied dress wandering in the road and stop to pick her up. She is suffering from amnesia, so they name her Elizabeth X and take her into their home while the police try to establish her identity.

They are left in peace, until first a couple claim her as their daughter and then a psychiatrist arrives to say that she has escaped from his clinic. What does seem certain is that she is the child of wealthy parents.

But who really is Elizabeth X, and what has happened to her?

From the vaults of the SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal introduction to one of the unique voices of British science fiction, John Middleton Murry, Jr, who wrote his best work under the pen name Richard Cowper.

The son of the famous critic John Middleton Murry, Cowper announced himself to the science fiction world in 1967 with BREAKTHROUGH, which found favour for a subtlety and richness of characterisation not seen in most contemporary SF. The idea of a transformed future England became his signature leitmotif and it is this theme that informs the Corlay tales contained in this omnibus. This is the complete Corlay sequence, featuring introductory novella ‘PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN’ and novels THE ROAD TO CORLAY, A DREAM OF KINSHIP and A TAPESTRY OF TIME.

THE ROAD TO CORLAY:
On the Eve of the Fourth Millennium a slowly-building civilization, struggling out of the rubble of the Drowning, was crushed beneath the sceptre of a powerful and repressive Church. But on the Eve of the Fourth Millennium the sound of a magical pipe was heard, and the air was filled with songs of freedom and enlightenment. And on the Eve of the Fourth Millennium the Boy appeared, bringing the gift of sacrilege, a harbinger of the future, heralding the arrival of the White Bird of Dawning. It is the coming of a New Age. A glorious future bearing the presents of the past!

A DREAM OF KINSHIP:
They came to destroy! The treacherous Falcons, uniformed in the black leather tunics of the fanatic Secular Arm, descended on Corlay to burn and kill. Commanded by Lord Constant, ruler of the Seven Kingdoms, they were determined to crush the religious heresy of Kinship. But a new dream rose from the ashes… When four Kinsmen escaped the carnage of their beloved land, each helped to fulfill the miracle that had been foretold: the coming of the Child of the Bride of Time.

A TAPESTRY OF TIME:
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 furry 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.

Psychic investigators have long been intrigued by the question of the existence of Elemental Spirits. Is it possible that Beings of incredible age wander unseen through the wild, lonely deserts, and drift above the peaks of barren, desolate mountains? Is there any connection between such speculation and the legends of ancient mythology? Could it be that the djinn and devas of India are only other interpretations of the same inexplicable phenomena?

Man feels that he has progressed beyond magic and even the most rational of civilised religions are undergoing periods of theological revolution and fundamental re-appraisal in the mid-60s.

But what if an Elemental Spirit invaded the safety and comfort of everyday life? What if something over than mankind burst like a tornado into the security of ordered human society? Could the logic and science of the Twentieth Century defeat the terrifying power of a thing which was alive yet not alive, dead yet undying?

As a child, Rook had been taken in by the bards of Luly, and raised as one of their own. Of his past he knew nothing – except faint memories of fire and death that he’d do anything to forget. But nightmares, and a new threat to the island that had become his own, would not let him escape the dreaded fate of his true family. Haunted by the music of the bards, he left the only home he knew to wander the land of the power-hungry basilisk who had destroyed his family. And perhaps, finally, to find a future in the fulfillment of his forgotten destiny.

With hair the colour of the moon, Corleu was different from the other Wayfolk. He alone tried to free his wandering tribe from the unearthly swamp that ensnared them – and he alone dared to cross the forbidden threshold. There he found a strange dark house, a place of legends and gods, foreseen in the stars. And there, to save his people, began Corleu’s search for the heart of the Cygnet – and impossible treasure…

But if legends are real, nothing is impossible.