Search Results for: worlds-for-the-taking

Jonathan Dark was a normal human on Earth, but suddenly found himself on another world – Callisto. Taking the name Jandar, he works with the natives of Shondakar to free them from the Black Legion and the nefarious Zanadarian Sky Pirates who prowl the heavens of Callisto.

When the heir to Shondakar, Princess Darloona is kidnapped by the fleeing Prince Thuton, Jandar must infiltrate Zanadar to rescue her. What follows is a daring story of adventure, betrayal, uprising and escape, and Jandar has to think fast and fight smart to save the day.

The Sky Pirates of Callisto is the third book in Lin Carter’s epic space opera Callisto series.

Paul Heisenberg is mysteriously endowed with the ability to jump through time. Together with thousands of eventual followers, he begins a journey that eventually takes him a billion years into the future. The Earth has been devastated by war with an alien race, and the changes that have resulted from the degradation of the world’s biosphere force him–and others–to rethink their own humanity. His pilgrim’s progress through the coming time is beset by doubts, distractions, and temptations as various voices attempt to distract him from his determination to follow the process through to its end. He eventually witnesses the complete transformation of the Earth, and the evolution of a single omnipotent but mindless Gaean organism. Is intelligence itself just a brief candle, forever doomed to burn out? Or can Paul find some other alternative for his race.

In a galactic culture that extends from quasi-utopian worlds like New Alexandria to the vermin-infested slums of Old Earth, the Star-Pilots are the great heroes of the day, and Grainger has become a legend in his own time. Pharos is paradise – or so it appears. But the champions of commerce want to package and sell the planet, and the conservationists want to stop them. Grainger’s employer, Titus Charlot, is enlisted to negotiate a settlement, but the game is rigged. Charlot needs the Star-Pilot’s help, but there seems to be nothing he can do – until the planet’s ecosystem takes a hand, and “paradise” suddenly turns deadly!

Asgard’s not an easy world to get away from. Mike Rousseau only wants to take a vacation in his home system, but he’s back before he has time to draw breath, and he’s been drafted into the Space Force once again. His new mission is even more dangerous than the last one, the number of his enemies has increased vastly, and his friends haven’t improved at all. By way of compensation, he has another chance to get closer to the mystery at Asgard’s heart–but the inhabitants of the megaplanet’s core are no longer content to sit quietly and wait to be found. They’ve discovered the outside universe, and are trying to decide what to do about it–but they have problems of their own. Only Rousseau can cross the boundaries between species, and offer each of the races a possible solution.

In “The World Set Free,” H.G. Wells takes a science fictional look at the future, where if world peace is to be attained through labour internationalism, it will have to be at the price of complete social and economic reconstruction. But first comes a phase of revolution – violent, very bloody, and prolonged, which in the end may fail to achieve anything but social destruction . . .

“The World Set Free” is a vision of highly educated and highly favoured leading and ruling men, voluntarily setting themselves to the task of reshaping the world.

Draftsmen can’t fight dragons.

Then again, that’s usually no problem – they generally don’t have to. But Lafayette O’Leary does. When an accidental overdose of self-hypnosis wrenches him out of the dull (but safe) Mrs. MacGlint’s Clean Rooms and Board and deposits him in the feudal, bedragoned world of Artesia, it takes him a little while to catch on, even with the attentions of the beautiful Princess Adoranne. Then he decides that he likes this new life of his – except for the part where he’s supposed to get killed…

The world, as Lafayette O’Leary knew it, disappeared in a flash. Perhaps it was his own doing – after all, he had the uncanny gift of creating alternate realities by sheer mental power.

But the result was a nightmare gone out of control. All O’Leary wanted was to find his wife and return to the familiar world of Artesia. Yet no sooner did he manage to extricate himself from one bizarre situation than he was thrust into another, equally threatening…

There was only one thing to do: he had to penetrate the very center of power from which his destiny was being controlled and – take it into his own hands!

It began with a few small items in the newspapers – dead dogs and cats, a mutilated child, a series of unexplained fires. Then suddenly it exploded into a full sized catastrophe.

Huge mutants – half rat, half man – began to take over the world, stealing children for slaves and destroying their populations.

Only a few people escaped, among them Tim Barrett, his wife Jane, and a handful of survivors. Alone on the high seas in a small ship, they set off to find the island where Dr. Theodore Piper had been experimenting with a sonic death ray.

They knew Dr. Piper was their only hope for personal and world survival – if he was still alive… if the King Rats hadn’t forced him to serve their evil purpose… and if he could find a way to stop the spreading horror of invasion.

A journey to the Rim Worlds takes you straight to the edge of the unknown or right to the gaping void of the abyss. Out there you’re beyond the borders, hovering between the warped contours of troubled space and time…

Captain Clavering bought his ship on a lottery win. Now he’s holed up on the dismal planet of Lorn filling in the time on a chemical-blasted airstrip waiting for a contract. Somewhere there must be a newly colonized planet needing charters or some threatened world that needs evacuating. He’d risk anything for money in the bank – even a dodgy landing on the gas-blasted plains of Eblis, if the Rim Runners fancy paying hard cash for an expedition to hell…

Originally published in England in 1934, this searing, still timely novel offers and incisive critique of the sexual politics and militarism of England, and the West as a whole.

Proud Man is told from the perspective of a “Genuine Person” who has been thrown back in time thousands of years from a peaceful future society. The Genuine Person comes from a people that are androgynous, self-fertilizing, and vegetarian; they live without a national government and artificial social divisions of gender and class. Taking on first female, then male form, the “Genuine Person” confronts the deeply troubled reality of England in the 1930s, still battered after one World War and on the road to another.

Takes the story of the mammoths back into prehistory; 16,000 B.C.

It is a time when the mammoths face the vicious intrusions into their world of the Lost – mankind. And it is up to Longtusk, the only Bull to feature in the great story cycle of the mammoths to lead them away to a new land, safe from the lost.

Pel Brown has troubles in his basement. But it’s not water leaking in – it’s magic. Sword-carrying barbarians are spilling through, demanding that Pel help them defeat Shadow, a dark force taking over their world.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, a spaceship has crashed in Amy Jewell’s backyard, and the aliens want Amy’s help against the Shadow seeking to conquer their world. When Pel and Amy go through the basement portal into the world of magic, the Shadow attacks and traps them inside.

Now Pel and Amy find themselves entangled in escapades that will make them into heroes … or corpses.

A frontier world on the back end of nowhere is the sort of place people go to get lost. And some of those people have secrets worth hiding, secrets that can change the future-assuming there is one. . .

André Deschênes is a hired assassin, but he wants to be so much more. If only he can find a teacher who will forgive his murderous past-and train him to manipulate odds and control probability. It’s called the art of conjuring, and it’s André’s only route to freedom. For the world he lives on is run by the ruthless Charter Trade Company, and his floating city, Novo Haven, is little more than a company town where humans and aliens alike either work for one tyrannical family-or are destroyed by it. But beneath Novo Haven’s murky waters, within its tangled bayous, reedy banks, and back alleys, revolution is stirring. And one more death may be all it takes to shift the balance . . .

Dr John West, Cambridge don and private investigator, was present at the trial of an odd duck, R. A. Adcock, who was being most uncooperative in answering questions about a bank robbery. At length, Adcock had made a dash for it from the courtroom – through a glass window, and what should have been a three storey drop to the street. But suddenly, Adcock wasn’t there, and at once a swarm of bees came into the courtroom.

Thus begins The Molecule Men, which takes many fascinating and terrifying turns to its chilling conclusion.

In the second story, the Monster of Loch Ness, Tom Cochrane, an independent scientist, determines to find out why the waters of Loch Ness are inexplicably warming up. What was it that caused the waters of the loch to pour up into the air like the worst rainstorm any of the observers had ever seen? What was at the bottom of the loch?
These two short novels by a celebrated father and son team will hold the interest of the science fiction fan from page one on.

Mike Jerome, a likeable young TV writer, visits Professor Smitt, a physicist, who gives him an idea for a TV script: using some source of light, perhaps a laser beam, one could reduce the human structure to a form that could be transmitted into the future as electrical pulses – and thus create time travel.

On the way home Mike is hit by a taxi, and when he recovers he finds the date is 1979 – ten years in the future. This is but the beginning of a series of bewildering, fascinating ten year jumps. Mike is himself living the time change himself! At the end of each stop he tries to find his best friend, Pete Jones, a Negro jazz musician. Jumps to 1989, 1999 and so on, take Mike into such far-reaching places as London, the Northern Territory of Australia, California and the Italian Alps, for a rousing series of adventures in all sorts of bizarre circumstances. At the very end of this outstanding science fiction adventure by a noted father-son team, there is a slyly ambiguous twist which leaves the reader wondering…

Can immortal man ever outwit the airlines? What if dumb animals could be trained to ‘appreciate’ the communications media of the human world? How does Number 38, Zone 11, respond when he sees a U.F.O? What happens to Slippage City when the Devil decides to think big?

These – plus a remarkable sex comedy – are some of the intriguing themes of Element 79, the new Hoyle galaxy that ranges the full scientific spectrum and beyond into the furthest reaches of the imagination. Author Fred Hoyle is an internationally renowned astronomer and much of his fiction is rooted in the realm of what is possible – scientifically and psychologically – on earth and in space, in the present and the future. His visions of his fellow humans is disquieting, hilarious, and sometimes frightening; his social commentary is often etched in acid. In Element 79 Mr Hoyle steps forward to take a backward glance at the world – deftly balancing his followers between the unreal and the real, between a chuckle and a shudder.

Returning to the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge after a spell at the nuclear research labs of CERN in Geneva, Professor Isaac Newton is plunged into the centre of a baffling mystery. One of his research students, Mike Howarth, has picked up strange signals on his satellite telemetry equipment, signals that appear to emanate from a passing comet. Not long after he has passed the vital data into Isaac Newton’s hands, Howarth is found dead. Soon after that, it becomes clear that some people in very high places – including the Kremlin and the White House – are more than a little interested in the remarkable events taking place at the Cavendish. But with the arrival of that most majestic of all celestial bodies, Comet Halley, a third and infinitely more powerful superpower enters the scene. And the Comet’s extraordinary intentions – not to mention its devastating methods of communicating them to Earth – promise a new dawn for humanity.

They came out of the long grey ages of Time, killing and plundering, and their object was to take back captives to appease the blood-thirsty mobs. The city was burning when Paul Sanders drove into it that wet and foggy evening, the streets filled with tall, cruel-faced warriors.

Taken prisoner by them, he and a handful of others found themselves transported in Time to the world of a million years hence. A strange world filled with the weirdest anachronisms where a superstitious people were held in thrall by three men, the Time Kings, who alone knew the secret of time travel.

The ancient knowledge had been destroyed by a people smarting under utter defeat. During the long ages there had been three Interstellar Empires when Earth had reigned supreme throughout the galaxy, but it remained for a group of men from the early dawn of the Atomic Age to overthrow the anarchy which prevailed and to restore Earth to her previous position of greatness, leading the people back to the stars which were their destiny.

Into a world armed to the teeth there suddenly comes a strange gospel of disarmament. Briefed to investigate the intrigue is Sidney Boyd of MI5, and from a murdered diplomat his adventures take him to the fantastic Earth Two, an exact duplicate of our own planet in so far as living beings are con­cerned, and it falls to him-with the help of Orwena Exburg of Earth Two-to try and smash the deadly plan which is being matured against the peaceful nations of the world. Boyd and Orwena solve the mystery of Earth Two after making a landing on the moon and discovering something about it never before suspected by Earth scientists…

A deadly meteor swarm approaching the Earth activates ancient Lunar technology buried beneath Earth’s surface that results in the birth of Raquilo, the last Selenite, who will save some humans from the meteor storm that millions of years ago destroyed the Moon’s atmosphere, oceans and inhabitants. Meanwhile, the balance of power on Earth has shifted to Vilgarth, an arms merchant who, with stolen v-ray technology and an alliance with governments in favor of his plan, wages a world war to take over the planet.

When meteorologist Alvin Brook invents a means of controlling the weather, he imagines it will lead to his becoming a world benefactor, with riches for him and his family. Instead, Brook and his wife are murdered, and his invention stolen and misused by industrialist Marcus Denham. Denham creates the mighty empire of Climate Incorporated, controlling the world’s weather and holding nations to ransom…but he does not anticipate that outraged Nature – and Brook’s son – will take their revenge.

On the other side of the sun, opposite our earth, is a world we never see Counterearth. In every way it’s identical to ours…almost!

Albert Einstein, Juan (and Eva) Peron, Babe Didrickson and Sir Oswald Mosley are off on a wild race to Counterearth. It’s all action and excitement against a historical background – in fact against two historical backgrounds – detailed enough to intrigue any history buff. It’s January 1942; Cordell Hull is President of the United States; and the good guys take off in their spaceship, Manta, from the deck of the SS Titanic, steaming back from Liverpool to New York with thousands of New Year’s revellers on board.

In a vastly changed world, thirteen centuries from now, Sumner Kagan searches the earth to find the godmind, a malicious being with reality-shaping powers. In this strange and beautiful world – eerily alien, yet hauntingly familiar – Kagan will change from an adolescent outcast to a warrior with god-like abilities and, in the process, take us on an epic and transcendent journey.

Author’s Note: The volumes of this series can each be read independently of the others. The feature that unifies them is their individual observations of science fiction’s sub-genre: “space opera,” which the editors David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer define as “colorful, dramatic, large-scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character and plot action, and usually set in the relatively distant future, and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone. It often deals with war, piracy, military virtues, and very large-scale action, large stakes.”

At first it was just another hoax, another UFO story, but the sightings went on increasing.
It couldn’t be an alien, there had been so many false alarms, dramatic news-columnists had shouted ‘wolf’ so many times, that John Citizen shrugged his shoulders and said ‘nuts’ at the very mention of the word space-ship. Then one of them landed…
The things they did were not exactly friendly. In fact by the time they’d finished, they had made an old-time Viking raid seem like a social call from the vicar…
Many other attacks followed. Day after day and night after night the alien ships screamed in on their mission of death. The earth struck back. But no one could track the aliens to their lair.
They seemed to come from Nowhere. They weren’t Martians. They weren’t Venusians, and they weren’t from another system.
That left only one place where they could have originated… yet the truth was so fantastic that none of the earth governments would take it seriously until it was almost too late.
The enemy came from within! From the gigantic caverns at the earth’s core.