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When Robert Wolff found a strange horn in an empty house he held the key to a different universe. To blow that horn would open up a door through space-time and permit entry to a cosmos whose dimensions and laws were not those known by our starry galaxy.

For that other universe was a place of tiers, world upon world piled upon each other like the landings of a sky-piercing mountain. The one to blow that horn would ascend those steps, from creation to creation, until he would come face to face with the being whose brain-child it was. But what if that maker of universes was a madman? Or an imposter? Or a super-criminal hiding from the wrath of his own superiors…?

After an accident in a brilliant young physicist’s most ambitious experiment, it appears: a wondrous sphere the size of a basketball, made of nothing known to science. Before long, it will be clear that this object has opened a vista on an entirely different universe, a newborn cosmos whose existence will rock this world and test one woman to the limit: the physicist who has ignited this thrilling adventure.

Colonising a new planet requires much more than just settling on a newly discovered island of Old Earth. New planets were different in thousands of ways, different from Earth and from each other. Any of those differences could mean death and disaster to a human settlement.

When a ship filled with refugees from a cosmic catastrophe crash-landed on such an unmapped world, their outlook was precarious. Their ship was lost, salvage had been minor, and everything came to depend on one bright young man accidentally among them.

He was a trainee planet-builder. It would have been his job to foresee all the problems necessary to set up a safe home for humanity. But the problem was that he was a mere student – and he had been studying the wrong planet.




(First published 1974)

Francis Simnel was a pathetic old man who lived in a strange world of his own, a world of puppets and marionettes. His sister Agnes was a demoness incarnate, a female fiend in human form, a relentless, ruthless, driving force urging the old man to a macabre destiny. There was something different about Simnel’s Puppets. They had personality and a realism that was uncanny. They bore a sinister resemblance to the newly-dead.

What began as the wildest and most improbable suspicion, crystallised into near certainty in the mind of Josephine Starr. She began asking questions, and the Satanists scented danger. She fell into a trap that had been set with diabolical cunning. Her life was balanced on a razor edge, with all the macabre resources of the Black Magicians weighing against her.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK…

Walter Bullitt’s New York, 1968. Part-time U.S. government provocateur and full-time hepcat, Walter isn’t keen on the assignment his employers are trying to toss him – no need to mix with the Kennedys if you don’t have to.

…SO GOOD THEY MADE IT TWICE

He also hopes the ghosts he’s been talking to lately are only a side-effect of the recreational drugs. Then two women from a different New York show up and tell him they aren’t. Now, Walter saw When Worlds Collide but he never thought he’d be starring in the road show, especially when one world is his and the other is invisible – at the moment.

The power of one…
Job. Against all evidence he never lost faith in his fellow man.
Job. Born on he bottom rung in an age that made ours seem Golden, his life went rapidly downhill from there.
Job. Cast adrift into a world he never made, but would change forever.
Job. Sometimes, one true man can make the difference.

In the early hours before dawn, a small Michigan town vanishes from the face of the earth. That morning the men and women of Two Rivers wake up in a world strangely different from their own – a world of curfews, food rationing and secret police.

Something has gone terribly wrong in Two Rivers, something that has to do with the mysterious government facility on the outskirts of the town. For schoolteacher Dexter Graham, who has lost his family and has nothing left he values . . . for twelve-year-old Clifford Stockton, driven by a child’s curiosity and courage . . . for Evelyn Woodward, torn between obedience to the state and loyalty to her friends . . . and for physicist Howard Poole, haunted by the memory of his brilliant, enigmatic uncle, the only way to escape the nightmare is to journey deeper into fear.

Sweetly are the secrets told
wrapt in crystal,
limned in gold . . .

On a planet of barren beauty near the edge of the civilized galaxy, two religions are practiced. Both sects worship the same goddess – the Triumphantes in joy and splendour, the Fideles in solemnity and selflessness. As different as day and night, sun and shadow, joy and grief, the two sects are now bound together in death . . .

A serial killer is stalking the priestesses, killing first a Triumphante, then a Fidele, in turn. Six women are now dead, and the planetary authorities are at a loss. Enter Interfed Agent Cowen Drake. A cunning professional, he must immerse himself in an unfamiliar world of stark spirituality to catch the killer. A world that will trap him between opulence and sacrifice, between duty and desire and between two extraordinary women – one who could become the killer’s ultimate victim . . .

Two worlds with very different futures for humanity…

In The Lord of Death, four scientists, aided by reverse-magnetism, travel to a dead planet where they discover that one human’s lust for power destroyed all life there-except for him. In suspended animation, he awaits the newcomers.

In The Queen of Life, the scientists travel to a planet encased in a glass sphere to protect the overpopulated planet from the sun’s radiation. Conflict leads to a riot.

Getting back to Earth from the planet Tschai involved only stealing a spaceship or having one built to order – for Tschai was the abode of several intelligent star-born races and, as such, had spaceyards. But Adam Reith’s problem was not so simple. He’d already been lucky to escape the Chasch and the Wannek, and a dozen different types of humans, and now his course led directly to the Great Sivishe Spaceyards in the domains of the Dirdir. But the Dirdir were quite different from the other aliens who competed for this world. They were quicker, more sinister, and had an unrelenting thirst for hunting victims like Adam Reith. The closer he came to his objective, the keener their hunting instincts would become!

Full colour three dimensional television is a target at which engineers will soon be aiming. The technical obstacles are bound to be numerous, and it is also possible that other difficulties of an entirely different nature will arise – as Herrick soon finds out. Herrick had already achieved success on a limited scale, but his work led to curious results when the newly-developed receiver started picking up what appeared to be transmissions from an alien world…

The Eight Stabilities are islands of order surrounded by corrupting, lethal chaos-and the chaos is encroaching.

All Keris Kaylen ever wanted was to be a mapmaker like her father. Instead, she finds herself on the run into the realm of Carasma, the Unmaker Lord of Chaos. When her path crosses that of the traitorous aristocrat, Davron Storre, she’s way out of her depth, with no idea that the magic map she’s inherited might make a difference to the world…

When his wallet is lifted from a one-night stand with an exotic young woman, who may be either the girl of his dreams or just a common third-world grifter and thief, this world-weary traveller decides to go against his own better judgement and that of the local authorities and pursue this alluring thief up-country into the darkest jungles of Papua New Guinea.

Here is a land where headhunters still roam, and where the natural obstacles of poisonous insects and reptiles, savage and deadly beasts, and the mortally demanding jungle itself are the least of his worries. The forces of good and evil and law and anarchy play by entire different rules in this shadowed world.

Driven by delusions of romance and the need to restore his honour, Bohannon moves in hot pursuit farther and farther up-country, into a heart of darkness almost untouched by modern civilization. And once he attains his immediate goal, he is drawn into the darkness of his own soul, as a hunt for gold proves that greed, more than love or lust, is the primal instinct. For men or women, black or white, civilized or savage, in the darkness of the jungle all shadows are primal.

They came out of the star-strewn wilderness around Sol, these alien creatures. And their object was the vicious, total destruction of the Federation of Worlds.

Earth was one of the last pf the planets to be attacked and here they were opposed by the Earth Council: six men who held the destinies of a hundred billion people in their hands.

But in the end, there remained only one man out of the six to fight. Velga Dorne, Earth Councillor and Member of the Triumvirate of Worlds. And he himself was a hunted man. Death and terrible destruction followed him across the wastes of space in the search for the crazy, nightmare planet that had spawned these creatures. Fear and terror were his only companions.

Until he reached the nameless planet of a still more insignificant sun and learned that there were others to join him in the struggle against the black, inhuman monsters. These were the Hheroni, scientists whose achievements had progressed along a slightly different path of research to humanity. And Astraea, the girl who went with him on the suicidal mission to where the Aliens originated: on a world that no one in their wildest dreams had thought possible to exist, one which even science said was impossible.

The gun straps to the inside of my leg with Velcro. It’s not the absolute zenith of fashion to do this anymore, but girls who wear theirs with leather straps and buckles aren’t serious: with Velcro you can get at the thing when you need it.

I also have a pink ammo belt. It’s heavy, but who said fashion was easy?’

In a mall like any other, a gang of teenage girls are suddenly caught up in a maelstrom of shopping and violence. But – as the designer bullets fly – it is not only their own lives they are fighting for. Unknown to them they are battling for the life of a man trapped in another place, in a different world, and with very different enemies.
He is a man they have never met, but who represents the future of the human race … or could destroy it.

The Presences mean something different to each of Jubal’s colonists. In some, these towering crystals inspire awe, in others fear. A small band must break through the long silence between humanity and the Presences to strike a new alliance – and bring about the end of a tyrannical dynasty.

Sheri S. Tepper’s world has the depths of galaxies. Her characters come alive like stars burning in the black of space. The tale she tells will leave you astounded.

In this collection of eight stories by one of America’s most gifted writers, Helen McCloy takes the reader into a world of mystery and imagination.

In the signature story – ‘The Singing Diamonds’ – Mathilde Verworn enlists the help of Basil Willing, a psychiatrist-sleuth, to answer the question of whether there is such a thing as collective hallucination. Six people from six different locations testify to seeing diamond-shaped objects in the sky, and four of those six have died in peculiar circumstances in the past twelve days …

Cyborg imaginings mix with romance and transformation in this complex first novel where even the reader has a role to play. The narrator works as a compositor, a new kind of storyteller, but she is designing a different future for herself. Once a wife and mother, now she longs to escape from the world of human emotion into the calm and pain-free life of a cyborg. As her surgeries move towards closure, her story characters Shirley and Rosa have other agendas, leading to an unexpected outcome.

Three travellers find six very different worlds await their choice – if they have the courage to leave Eden…
On awakening in an idyllic tropical paradise, Rex is disoriented and possibly afflicted with amnesia. He knows his name, but the particulars are curiously missing. He spends his first week exploring, and discovers that his Eden-like paradise is surrounded by a huge unscalable wall 50 miles in circumference. Furthermore, there are six gateways at roughly equal intervals, but there is no way to climb up there and see where they go…

In 1912 the world changes overnight. Europe and all its inhabitants disappear, replaced by a primeval continent which becomes known as Darwinia: a strange land in which evolution has followed a different path.

To some this event is an act of divine retribution; to others it is an opportunity to carve out a new empire. Leaving a USA now ruled by religious fundamentalists, young photographer Guilford Law joins an expedition to Darwinia, a mission of discovery which uncovers extraordinary revelations about the whole nature of the universe.

They call it Asgard, the Home of the Gods. Beneath its artificial shell are at least three vast cave-systems, each one the size of an Earth-like world; and beneath those, possibly many more. No one knows how many layers there might be, and no one knows what secrets might be buried down at the “center”–if there is a center. At some time in the distant past, Asgard had suffered a terrible catastrophe. Now its outer layers are cold, its builders presumed dead. Explorers and exploiters from a hundred different worlds and races are scavenging among the ruins–but deep down, there might still be light, warmth, life…and perils unknown. Mike Rousseau was one of the first humans to come to Asgard, decades earlier. Now he’s challenged by both friends and foes–and it’s hard to tell them apart on this icebound planet. He might also be the one man who can solve the biggest puzzle in the galaxy…if only he can stay alive!

By the workings of chance Bleys Ahrens was born the genetic equal of Hal Mayne, the hero of The Final Encyclopedia, but he was destined by nurture to a far different fate. Raised alone by his unhappy Exotic mother, Bleys was an outcast from every society until his half-brother Dahno claimed him. Disciplined by Friendlies, schooled by Exotics, Dahno was beginning to build an interplanetary network of half-breeds, who called themselves “Others”.

But Dahno thought only of gaining wealth and power for himself; Bleys saw an opportunity to challenge the Dorsai for control of the Human Worlds.

The space programme has finally lost its novelty, and a jaded public hardly notices another moon launch. Skilful PR men preserve the illusion that the missions have become routine.

But astronaut Richard Martin can tell a different story. Of panic in deep space, of crewmen pushed beyond breaking point, of official indifference towards his own shattered life.

Martin is effectively put under wraps – until the pilot of a moon capsule, loaded with nuclear weaponry goes beserk and a nightmare develops, threatening to engulf the world – a nightmare that only Martin could end.

Frank Rhind was lucky. He saw the Ice Dancer and lived. The town of Hays died. And still they didn’t believe Dr. William Stovin’s warnings. For very many years climatologists had been predicting a change in the world’s climate but they always believed that the process would take centuries. Now there was a reason to believe differently. Stovin had staked his career and credibility on trying to persuade the U.S. National Science Council to act, but 15,000 years of warmth had lulled mankind into thinking that climatic history was over. Already it was too late. The new Ice Age had begun.


One by one the great northern cities – Chicago, Oslo, Montreal, Moscow, Leningrad – came under siege. Some fell and were evacuated, sending their young, old and sick to crowded areas further south. Crops and animals were destroyed. Governments drew lines of catastrophe across their national maps. Doomsday prophets were in full cry. Technological man was overwhelmed. The world had changed.


Some time in the year future the next Ice Age will be triggered off. It could happen in a thousand years’ time, or in a century from now.


Or it could, quite literally, happen next winter. This book is fiction only because the events described have not yet happened. But it is not science fiction because all the science in the book is fact. When the year arrives that we see the sixth winter resembling 1792 within the space of a decade or so, then the Ice Age will be with us in a matter of weeks – and it will develop very much as described here.