Search Results for: world-beyond,-the

His name was Robert Coffin, but the Maori natives called him Iron Hair. A civilized man in the raw wilderness of New Zealand, he had come to forge a nation at the end of the world – and discovered a magical world beyond his strangest dreams.

A world of astonishing beauty and breathtaking adventure, the natives called it the Land of the Long White Cloud. And Robert Coffin was about to enter its greatest mystery, cast in the wondrous spell of a shaman whose magic would change his life forever…

The first in a new series from the master of heroic fantasy

Born in the storm that doomed his father, Connavar grows to manhood among the mist-covered mountains of Caer Druagh, where the Rigante tribe dwell in harmony with the land and its gods.

But beyond the border, across the water, an evil force is gathering strength, an unstoppable force that will change the world beyond all recognition.

Haunted by malevolent spirits and hunted by evil men, Connavar sets out on a spectacular mission to save his people.

In this latest tale of love and honour, friendship and courage, from the master of the genre, Gemmell explores the intriguing worlds of Celtic myth and earth magic.

Read by Adjoa Andoh
(p) 2017 Orion Publishing Group

There were nine major planets in the Solar System, and it was within their boundaries that man first set up interplanetary commerce and began trading with the ancient Martian civilization. And then they discovered a tenth planet – a maverick!
This tenth world, if it had an orbit, had a strange one, for it was heading inwards from interstellar space, heading close to the Earth-Mars spaceways, upsetting astronautic calculations and raising turmoil on the two inhabited worlds.
But even so none suspected then just how much trouble this new world would make. For it was WANDL THE INVADER and it was no barren planetoid. It was a manned world, manned by minds and monsters and travelling into our system with a purpose beyond that of astronomical accident!

The valley was isolated in time and space, a land of barbarous science and human sacrifice.

Coatlice the Dreadful stalked the night, her twin serpent heads dealing death to taboo-breakers.

Citallatonac the First Priest sacrificed anyone believed to be possessed by the gods.

Chimal rebelled: he wanted to escape the atavistic confines of his lost civilisation, to venture into the unknown world beyond the valley, a world of hope, and nightmare, too.

Death and Disorder 104.

Institute courses told a grim story about the Network – that savage world beyond the closely guarded Institute gates. But they wanted to see for themselves. They had to know.

Were they really females there? Would their training as mercenaries prepare them for the wild bands of grisly subhumans?

They set out on a journey of discovery only to become the unwitting agents of forces that threatened to destroy the only world they’d ever known.

JANDAR THE LOST ALIEN

…in the mysterious and treacherous domain of the insidious Mind Wizards. Searching for him is a fearless armada of his loyal friends, and a stranger who knows him better than anyone on Callisto. The stranger, Lankar, is none other than Lin Carter, accidentally transported through the Gate Between the Worlds to the land of the Thanatorians. Aware of Jandar’s plight, Lankar joins the search beyond the world’s edge and suddenly finds himself battling for his own existence against the most nightmarish creatures on the planet – the gruesome flesh robots of Kuur and the fiendish Mind Wizards of Callisto themselves…

VOLKHAVAAR is a novel of witchcraft and wonders on a world far removed from those we know. Here the gods contend for power – the Dark forces against the Light – and here an entire city and its land is plunged into the shadow of an eil beyond anything conceivable.

It is the story of Shaina the slave girl and of Volk the outcast who enslaved himself to cosmic forces to gain total power – and of how they were finally to meet and flash – with an entire world as their prize.

Silent, upon a peak in Nevèrÿon.

The enchanted land of Nevèrÿon is the most fascinating fantasy empire ever mapped by a modern word-enchanter – a realm of nameless terror and sensuous delights beyond the feeble imaginings of mortal men and women.

Now Nevèrÿon’s wildest desires and darkest dreams collide with the drear realities of our own blighted world as the gossamer boundaries between the real and the fantastic, truth and falsehood being to break down. And the world we know (or think we know) is revealed to us as if for the first time.

Come with us out of this dull, workaday world to Terra Magica, the land beyond World’s Edge, where knights ride out on wonder quests, where beautiful princesses wait for rescue from sea serpents, where sky-high giants seek human morsels for their cookpots, and where a king may seek a champion to set aside his realm’s enchantment.Here again is Kesrick, knight of Dragonrouge, in combat against villainy. At his side stand a Scythian princess and a lost nobleman of Tartary. Here be wizards of good and wizards of evil; here be mighty giants and witches of utter meanness. Here be high fantasy from the golden pen of the Grand Master himself, Lin Carter!

Come with us out of this dull, workaday world to Terra Magica, tha land beyond World’s Edge, where knights ride out on wonder quests, where beautiful princesses wait for rescue from sea serpents, where sky-high giants seek human morsels for their cookpots, and where a king may seek a champion to set aside his realm’s enchantment.Here again is Kesrick, knight of Dragonrouge, in combat against villainy. At his side stand a Scythian princess and a lost nobleman of Tartary. Here be wizards of good and wizards of evil; here be mighty giants and witches of utter meanness. Here be high fantasy from the golden pen of the Grand Master himself, Lin Carter!

When Spencer Gill, Jack Turnbull and Angela Denholm were taken by the Castle in Scotland – when they played Sith of the Throne’s monstrous multidimensional game to stay the execution of Earth, and won – they made a deadly, devious enemy of the alien master of The House of Doors.

Now Sith is back, and his game is more deadly yet. In worlds that are known, and others beyond imagining . . . in mad machine worlds, and some that can only be the product of a diseased mind – indeed, in one such that is a diseased mind – Sith’s new game will be played out to the bitter end. For the game is rigged, The House of Doors inscrutable as ever, and its doors all designed to lead Gill and his companions ever deeper into worlds of uttermost terror . . .

It’s 1920s Chicago, and Louise and Evvie, who have known each other since school, share an apartment. Worldly Evvie, a painter and dancer – supposedly married at seventeen and then divorced – is living on her alimony. Louise is a successful advertising copywriter and in love with her boss. Flouting the Prohibition, they party and enjoy a drink, and like the company of men. They’re independent, making their own way in the world, beyond the confines of marriage and motherhood.

But Louise’s life is rudely interrupted by the brutal murder of Evvie – a crime that involves family, friends and Chicago itself.

Jandar – the alien clawed from his airship by the cannibalistic Zarkoon bird-men while leading his aerial armada to an attack on the hidden city of Kuur – devises a daring escape into the land beyond the world’s edge. But in this unknown terrain, with only a nubile jungle maid as a guide, he is no longer the hunter but the hunted, prey for the giant fang-snouted groack, game for the ferocious six-legged othodes, and stalked by a fate far worse than death which forces him to renounce all hope of rescue: the merciless vengeance of the fiendish Mind Wizards of Callisto…

Deep in the sounds, scents and shifting rhythms of the Amazon forest, a family have lost their seven-year-old child, stolen by the mysterious ‘Invisible People’, the tribe which has never been seen.
Through ten years their agonised search for him takes them beyond the world’s last great natural frontier into the cruel beauty of the Brazilian jungle.
When at last father and son do meet – in a dramatic and terrifying encounter – it is in the emerald forest, a place where the mythical and magical powers of primal existence must clash with the cold-hearted greed of modern man.

BEYOND THE SEA OF DREAMS

Life had not been kind to Joe and Marge. Now, according to the strangers who met them on a road that wasn’t there, they were due to die in nineteen minutes, eighteen seconds. But the ferryboat that waited to take them across the Sea of Dreams could bring them to a new and perhaps better life.

There lay a world where fairies still danced by moonlight and sorcery became real. Joe could become a mighty-thewed barbarian warrior. Marge could be beautiful and find her magical self.

But there was much more than they realised to this strange land.

This was a world where Hell still strove to win its ancient war and demon princes sent men into battles of dark magic. It was a world where Joe and Marge must somehow prevent the coming of Armageddon.

In its hour of need, the Well World’s guardians had been neutralized. Nathan Brazil was shipwrecked on a desert island with a seemingly harmless girl but his contact with her had allowed his mind to be invaded, his will sapped, and his mission forgotten.
Mavra Chang had been abducted by a vicious gang of inter-hex drug smugglers, and was now held prisoner by a revenge-mad creature who had surgically and genetically altered her into a bizarre form and made her a slave to powerful narcotics. But the Well could allow nothing to stop the guardian’s journey for long. For the Well of Souls was only a machine; it needed the Watchers to handle events and circumstances beyond its sophisticated programming. And so it set plans in motion to jolt its champions back into the game.
The only other help Brazil and Chang could expect was from the companions who had been swept along to the Well World by accident or design. But the newcomers had been caught in a web of intrigue and deceit spun by the ruling council, a group desperate to stop both Brazil and Chang.
What none of them could know was that all of them, even the great Well computer, were being manipulated by the Kraang, an entity more ancient than the universe itself, a being that would use the guardians to give it powers far beyond even those of the Well of Souls- a being that would become a living god…

Immortal, unchanging, the external survivor, Nathan Brazil had tired of his long duty as the guardian of the Well World and had enlisted Mavra Chang, space pilot and adventurer, as his companion and equal, sharing with her some of the godlike power to control the universe’s destiny.

But over the millennia, Brazil and Chang had become estranged. When they were once again summoned to the Well World, they came as bitter rivals, each racing to be the first to reach the Well of Souls. What they found, however, was a Well World changed in ways it should not have been. Evolution on the Well World seemed to have diverged from its preset course- and that was impossible.

Brail sensed that some force beyond local animosity was at work, and he was determined to find out just what that force was and how it could have changed the elaborate programming of the Well of Souls. But the changes that had so affected the Well World were beginning to change the unchangeable Nathan Brazil – and if the watchman himself could altered, the universe might be left without any guardian at all . . .

In a barbaric, demon-infested world, no one stands against the all-powerful magic of the Unnamed Enemy, who is called Master of Fiends. No on except young Jarrel and his three friends – Scythe, Archer and Mandra – each with their own special powers. And they have taken on the impossible task of rescuing their friend, the wizard Cryl, who is held captive beyond the Barrier Peaks.

Trying to pass beneath the Peaks, they must battle the weird beings of that underworld and their monstrous ruler, the Keeper of the Chasms. And beyond those terrors lies something even worse – the ghastly realm of the Enemy, and his demon horde from the Farther Darkness…

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

Honor White Jackson was a human being. But his planet was not Earth, nor his time Now. His world was dominated by a giant Iron Thorn. Beyond the reach of this tower there was supposedly, nothing – except a frozen, airless desert where huge winged beasts called Amsirs roamed.

The duty of Jackson’s caste was to hunt and kill the Amsir. And it was not until Jackson had made his first kill that he discovered the secret of his world. As the creature lay dying at his feet, Honor White Jackson partook of the fruit of knowledge. Forevermore he was committed to another life – and the bitter discovery of genius, cruelty and the human paradox.

The things from beyond the Milky Way galaxy found the intelligent races of our universe amusingly slight. To them, possessors of vast cosmic power, the strivings of various humanoids to outdo each other were a source of contemptuous entertainment.

They established a contest between the worlds. It would be an Olympiad of the whole galaxy – a Galactiad. Let these puny interstellar intelligences meet each other in contest. Pit one against the other – and let the losers beware!

Earth had its team – a mixed group of powerful athletes and genius scientists. Because other worlds did not always believe in the ideal of good sportsmanship, they had to confront the reality. Win at all costs . . . or goodbye to humanity!

The object appeared over the Pacific, moving so fast that it was over Arizona before the supersonic shock of its passing was felt. It slowed perceptibly somewhere over New Jersey, and took only a small chunk out of the World Trade Center on its way between the two towers. Earth would never be the same again

‘The Oinn and the Blettr are in league against us. They do not war with each other. The ship that crashed was a plant to make us believe.’ They came from beyond the galaxy, bent on world domination.the alien terror that endangered mankind. They deceived men into believing they sought only peace. And as their battle fleets threatened earth with extinction, only one man could save the human race.

Hour by hour, the computers produce the names of those to die. Simple. Neat. Ruthless.

In a world where human feelings seem frozen, one spirit flares with defiance and hope . . . while two powerful brothers fight their old blood feud to a brutal climax.

And hurtling through space . . . a lost explorer desperately tries to reach earth with word of a new paradise for man beyond the stars . . .




(First published 1957)

Cassie did not feel the Soul Rider enter her body…

…but suddenly she knew that Anchor was corrupt. Knew that the Flux beyond Anchor was no formless void, from which could issue only mutant changelings and evil wizards…

…Flux was the source of Anchor’s existence!

The price of her knowledge is exile – the first confrontation with the Seven Who Wait for the redemption of World…

This is book one in the Soul Rider series.