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Gastel Etzwane had held total power in the Land of Shant: the brooding musician, turned man of action with his corps of Brave Free Men, rid the land of slavery and alien invaders in one masterful stroke-only to discover the greatest threat of all – alien parasites of inconceivable intelligence and unfathomable purpose. Their expulsion from Shat has been celebrated by all, but Etzwane is uneasy. For wild rumours come out of the hidden land of Caraz-and once again the musician must don the cloak of action, setting out on a dangerous quest for knowledge that will take him farther than he ever wanted to go: to the grim reaches of a hideously alien world, there to learn the secret of the Asutra!

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.

After their final battle, legend tells us, Arthur and his knights went to Lyonesse, the land under the sea. Now Lyonesse is threatened by a resurgence of the Dark Powers, those mindless malevolent forces that struggle to stop the course of History.

And Jim Eckert – the Dragon Knight – and his friends are called upon to stop them.

Arthur and his knights are proud; too proud to easily accept help from Jim Eckert and his allies. But they will have help – from Jim in his dragon form, from knight-in-armour Sir Brian Neville-Smyth, from the brilliant archer Dafydd ap Hywel, and from one small hobgoblin.

The result is a wild ride: Arthurian fantasy adventure as only Gordon R. Dickson could tell it.

A Wall Street trader leaves the bulls and bears – and comes face-to-face with hungrier dinosaurs. A Roaring ’20s gangster gets roughed up – by real cavemen. A pioneer hitches up his covered wagon on the Oregon Trail – and winds up in a modern shopping mall. And Roger Tyson, who thought the space-time continuum had finally settled down to normal, is flung helplessly from the distant past to the far future, and back again.

Superbeings from the end of time are struggling for control of the universe with aliens from another galaxy. And if a few random humans get caught in one of their time gates, they don’t much care. So Roger and his friends find themselves facing everyone from the cast of the original Mutiny on the Bounty to real pirates of the Spanish Main in a wild quest to their own time and bring everything back to insanity as usual…

The first coming was the Man:
The second was Fire to burn Him;
The third was water to drown the Fire;
The fourth is the Bird of Dawning.

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 fury 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.

Alone in New York City, Lizanne Steffasson comes face to face with reality when her dream of acting on Broadway collapses.

Now she just needs to pay her rent. So she answers an unusual ad in the paper, for ‘a beautiful girl. One not afraid to look on danger’s bright face’.

Lizanne is neither beautiful nor fearless, yet she is certainly about to look danger in the face. A New York estate lawyer wants her help to track down a young man who has vanished into the wilds of the city on the eve of inheriting a vast sum of money from his billionaire late father, a Swedish man known as the Cross-Eyed Bear.

It turns out that Lizanne is the perfect person for the job, as she knows more about the story than her employer has bargained for . . .

Who will stop the planetary marauders?

For 6000 years the great Carina Empire ruled the galaxy – but slowly, under the remorseless erosion of centuries, the Empire faded as its Imperial bloodline ran out in weaklings who paid tribute to the wild, untamed Barbarians of the Rim. Finally came the day when the Barbarian legions struck at Carina itself, destroying in a single day and night the mightiest empire in galactic history.

In the ages that followed, the rest of the empire decayed, its individual suns and worlds losing contact, isolated Star-Kings fighting to hold their own cultures together . . . and failing. Ironically, only the Barbarians themselves remained the only coordinated power among the Near Stars. Their fleets drifted the star-trails, looting and destroying everything in their way.

One world alone stood against the dark night of savagery that was engulfing the galaxy – Parlion, the planet of the Star Magicians. And at last came the final battle for civilization in the stars.

The gods of Poseidonis – or Atlantis – were powerful and real. Now they were determined to destroy the kingdom ruled by the father of Prince Vakar, the one man whose mind they could not read. The only way to save the kingdom was to discover that thing which the gods feared most.

To find it, Prince Vakar set out across the largely unknown world where dangers multiplied with every league. There he found savage countries and strange people – the wild Amazons; a voluptuous, ensorcelled queen; a too-charming girl who was half-horse, half-woman; dangerous magicians who ruled hordes of headless slaves; and the Gorgons, who could paralyze their victims at a glance.

Behind was his ambitious brother, determined that Vakar must fail. Even closer were unknown enemies set on his trail by the suspicious gods.

And to add to his troubles, Vakar had no idea of what he sought!

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.

Tarzan, Mighty Hunter, Mighty Fighter! Tarzan the Invincible, embroiled in a thrilling Red plot for the domination of savage Africa. Here, in his own grim jungle and in the wild wastes of mysterious Abyssinia, he meets high adventure-with cruel, relentless, unscrupulous enemies.

Here, swinging through the giant forests with Tarzan, you will meet new friends and old. Zora Drinov, the beautiful Russian conspirator, will puzzle you to the last. You will like Wayne Colt, the American, and you will think that you know all about him, but you won’t. Little Nkima, the tiny monkey, comes again to thwart the enemies of Tarzan; and you will meet La, High Priestess of the Flaming God, and Tantor, the elephant, and Numa, the lion; the Great Apes, the Waziri and all the myriad life that makes the teeming jungle beloved of Tarzan.

And when you have turned the last page you will say that this is one of the greatest Tarzan stories that Edgar Rice Burroughs ever wrote.

A deranged killer sends a doctor on a quest for the truth – deep into the recesses of his own mind.

‘Deserves its reputation as one of the greatest mysteries of all time’ PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review

What really happened to Inis St. Erme? What was his fatal mistake? Was it when he and his bride-to-be first set out to elope in Vermont? Or did his deadly error occur later, when they picked up a terrifying hitch-hiker, or when the three stopped at ‘Dead Bridegroom’s Pond’ for a picnic?

Dr Riddle is determined to find out, but he soon uncovers a series of bizarre coincidences that leave him questioning his sanity and his innocence. After all, he too walked those wild, deserted roads the night of the murder, stranded and struggling to get home to New York City. The more he reflects, the more his own memories become increasingly uncertain, as he veers into the irrational territory of pure terror…

THE EPIC FANTASY OF THE PEOPLE OF THE WIND CONTINUES . . .

Kieto’s destiny, set in the heavens, is to conquer the Land-of-Mists, the mysterious island discovered by Kupe, one of the great Polynesian voyagers. But he knows it won’t be easy: the wild native tribes, particularly the Scots and Picts, have two formidable advantages – iron and horses.

But Kieto has heard of a magnificent warrior race, the Maori, who live in another world and from whom he hopes to learn the secret of success in war. The gateway to this world is on the island of giants, and Kieto and his friends, Boy-Girl, Seumas and Dorcha, themselves taken years before from the Land-of-Mists, leave the safety of Rarotonga and embark on an epic voyage of discovery aboard THE PRINCELY FLOWER.

Pursued by sea-fairies, vengeful gods, power-hungry priests and, in Seumas’s case, by a murderously angry son, confronting their worst fears and supernatural horrors, the friends finally face the awesome wrath of the mighty Maori.

THE PRINCELY FLOWERS is the second wonderful volume of THE NAVIGATOR KINGS, set in the richly imaginative world of Polynesian life and myth.

Thursday began as an ordinary day as far as Estelle was concerned. Breakfast… Tube… Office… Lunch… And then the sane, sane, simple everyday world began to fade. One moment she was walking along the pleasant tree-lined familiarity of her home town… the next she was involved in a strange translucent sphere and life had turned into a nightmare.
Without warning and without explanation she found herself alone in a strange new environment. There were strange stars in the unknown sky above her and the flora and fauna of her new surroundings were disturbingly unfamiliar. Most minds would have yielded to the easy escape of insanity. But Estelle Wilde was made of sterner stuff. She fought back at the strangeness of her new setting and tried desperately to establish a new set of survival data before it was too late.
Piece by piece she collected her information and sat down to the mammoth task of answering the great questions. Where was she? How had she been brought there? And why?
Above all… was it possible to get home?

When human genes go wild, reproduction can no longer be left to chance – and it is Robert Wellton, Chief of the Genetics Bureau, the most feared and hated man in the world, who decides who will mate with whom.
But nobody can tell Wellton whom to mate with! He alone knows that the Genetics Program is collapsing, for fewer Normals are found each yer – and his father, who had been Genetics Chief before him, had discovered that not all Deviates are nature’s failures. Some are telepathic and long-lived – like Robert Wellton himself.
Thus is born the plan that Adam Wellton conceived and that Robert Wellton carries on – the creation of a Secret People. Born of Normal mothers, they are all Wellton’s sons and daughters, bearing his improved genes – living hidden in a colony in the Canadian wilderness, protected from the hate and jealousy of civilization by Wellton, who stays in telepathic touch with them.
But disaster strikes when a bitter powerful committee, suspecting the existence of concealed Deviates, begins a relentless search for them. Wellton knows there can be only one result – he Secret People will be hunted down and wiped out!

Widely acclaimed as one of the first successful female science fiction authors, Mildred Clingerman returns with the exciting follow up to her 1961 science fiction collection, A Cupful of Space. Her stories tend to wed a literate tone to subject matters whose ominousness is perhaps more submerged than the horrors under the skin made explicit in the work of Shirley Jackson, but equally as deadly.

Clingerman’s new anthology, The Clingerman Files, includes all of her originally published stories; The Day of the Green Velvet Cloak, Mr. Sakrison’s Halt, Wild Wood, The Little Witch of Elm Street and many other favourites. Also included are previously unpublished works; Top Hand, Tribal Customs, The Birthday Party, Fathers of Daughters and many more soon to be favourites. The key to her stories is that they appear simple and straightforward, but each takes a twist or turn that, even when you’re tempted to guess where they’re heading, they take you there in a way you would never have bargained on.

Other writers of the period tried to make big splashes. Clingerman, it seems, prided herself in concealing her effects within her masterfully constructed sentences. They barely make a ripple on the surface; all their power and drive lurk deep down below. So many of her stories are alive with the underpinning notion that the cosmological vistas we spy at the end ends of telescopes and various other means of measurement belong to the very same universe under our feet. We’re not apart from the universe, we’re a part of it. Nearly every story here is alive with that sensibility, in the truest sense of that word. In every sentence there is a note (a gentle one, but insistent) of silent rebellion, a surreptitious snarl, entreating you to see that not the everyday, but an undiscovered marvel.

May these eloquent rebellions be undiscovered no longer.

‘You will be a King, and Great King, and then you will Die, and you may not avoid that destiny, try as you may¿’

Two-thirds god, one-third human, Gilgamesh is a giant among men and a formidable warrior, even as a boy. When his father the king of Rurk dies, Gilgamesh is forced into exile by the newly crowned Dumuzi, jealous of his prowess and fearful of his intentions.

In neighbouring Kis his fighting skills are honed to perfection, and when in time Dumuzi dies, Gilgamesh returns to be proclaimed king by the wily priestess Inanna, goddess of beauty. Together they rule Uruk, and prosperity descends upon the land.

However, the kingship is not enough to satisfy Gilgamesh’s gargantuan appetite for adventure, and his boredom is only relieved by the coming of Enkidu, a strange wild man who proves the king’s equal in combat. The two become closer than brothers, but when Gilgamesh incurs the wrath of Inanna, the gods conspire to tear them apart, and for Gilgamesh all that remains is his search for immortality.

In retelling the legend of the great Sumerian monarch, Robert Silverberg brings all his superb storytelling powers to a mesmerising tale of ambition, power and obsession, against the background of an ancient and fearsome world.

An introductory note seems called for to explain to the reader the origin of the following strange document, which I have received from a friend with a view to publication. The author has given it the form of a letter to myself, and he signs himself with his nickname, “Cass,” which is an abbreviation of Cassandra. I have seldom met Cass since we were undergraduates together at Oxford before the war of 1914. Even in those days he was addicted to lurid forebodings, hence his nickname.
My last meeting with him was in one of the great London blitzes of 1941, when he reminded me that he had long ago prophesied the end of civilization in world-wide fire. The Battle of London, he affirmed, was the beginning of the long-drawn-out disaster.

Cass will not, I am sure, mind my saying that he always seemed to us a bit crazy: but he certainly had a queer knack of prophesy, and though we thought him sometimes curiously unable to understand the springs of his own behaviour, he had a remarkable gift of insight into the minds of others. This enabled him to help some of us to straighten out our tangles, and I for one owe him a debt of deep gratitude. He saw me heading for a most disastrous love affair, and by magic (no other word seems adequate) he opened my eyes to the folly of it. It is for this reason that I feel bound to carry out his request to publish the following statement. I cannot myself vouch for its truth. Cass knows very well that I am an inveterate sceptic about all his fantastic ideas. It was on this account that he invented my nickname. “Thos,” which most of my Oxford friends adopted. “Thos,” of course, is an abbreviation for Thomas, and refers to the “doubting Thomas” of the New Testament.

Cass, I feel confident, is sufficiently detached and sane to realize that what is veridical for him may be sheer extravagance for others, who have no direct experience by which to judge his claims. But if I refrain from believing, I also refrain from disbelieving. Too often in the past I have known his wild prophesies come true.

The head of the following bulky letter bears the address of a well-known mental home.

“THOS.”

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.