Search Results for: Alan Dean Foster

Pip and Flinx: Book Two.

Repler was a humanx-controlled planet, a minor outpost of the flourishing Commonwealth. It housed two of the most terrible threats ever to have faced the material universe.

First was the Vom. A vast mass of liquid blackness, it had waited half a million years to be discovered. The wait was over.

Second there was Bloodyhype, a killer drug with no known antidote. It caused instant addiction, followed by excruciatingly slow death.

Flinx was a sanitation engineer, strictly on the sidelines. But his role in the affairs of the planet soon took on a more ominous aspect.

Pip and Flinx: Book One.

So-named because of its beautiful “wings” – great golden clouds forever suspended in space. And like its namesake, the planet attracted unwary tourists, travellers, space-sailors, merchants – a teeming, constantly shifting horde that provided a comfortable income for certain quick-witted fellows like Flinx and his pet flying-snake, Pip. The pickings were easy enough so that you with care you didn’t even have to be dishonest.

In fact, you could hardly call it dishonest – stealing a starmap from a dead body that didn’t need it any more. But Flinx wasn’t quite smart enough. He should have wondered why the body was dead . . .

Pip and Flinx: Book Ten.

Never have the cares of the universe lain so heavily on Flinx’s shoulders, nor the forces against him seemed so invincible. Pursued by a newly revealed sect of doomsday fanatics and hunted by factions inside and outside the Commonwealth, he is expected to single-handedly avert a looming galactic crisis (or bear responsibility for the consequences.) Flinx can be forgiven for feeling a slight touch of melancholy.

According to his ship’s Al, there’s only one solution for what ails Flinx – a vacation. But with increasing number of enemies chasing him with ever greater enthusiasm, Flinx must find a getaway shrouded in obscurity. It seems that Jast, a planet smack in the middle of nowhere, is prefect, but trouble can find Flinx anywhere. What he doesn’t know is that his vacation paradise is a danger zone of the highest magnitude. And by the time he learns the truth, it may be too late.

Pip and Flinx; Book Eleven.

In the outer depths of the universe lies that Great Emptiness, behind which lurks something dreadful – something that is now raging straight for the Commonwealth. To avert catastrophe, Flinx must find a conscious planet size weapons system and, using his heightened mental powers, coax it into joining the battle against the behemoth from beyond.

So Pip and Flinx sail their little spaceship into the unknown, only to be forced down for emergency repairs on planet Arrwad, home to primitive sentiments and therefore off limits to space travellers. But rules never applied to Flinx. Upon his arrival, Flinx is besieged by hordes bent on worshipping him as a god. Escaping this fate will be as impossible as fulfilling his dire mission. What’s a deity to do?

In the beginning, before Man and the insect Thranx became allies, in the days when the reptilian AAnn were just occasional raiders of the Thranx colony worlds, one young Thranx agricultural expert lived a life of quiet desperation.

A dreamer in a world of sensible well adjusted socialised beings, Ryo buried himself in his work of reclaiming marshland until…

Until he met the Aliens.

Grotesque two legged creatures, unpleasingly soft skinned, gross in their appetites, alarming in their movements, all in all pretty revolting species, yet his curiosity overcame his queasiness and he befriended them.

And discovered they were called Man.

The Humanx Commonwealth: Book Five.

He was smart. He was good. He was backed by the Commonwealth’s best equipment. So what could possibly go wrong?

‘In the midst of life…’ thought Evan Orgel.

A whole lot of life. Alien life-form upon alien life-form, crawling, floating, wriggling, darting and oozing. The entire unexplored surface of the planet Prism was unimaginably alive.

‘…we are in death.’

His death. His Mobile Hostile World suit – the very latest, state-of-the-art, off-world protection gear – had just failed. Attacked in just about the only way its proud makers hadn’t thought of.

So there he lay, a hermit crab trapped in his own armour, while the myriad alien life-forms of prism crawled, floated, wriggled, darted and oozed about him, getting ready to open him up like a tin of upmarket cat food.

Evan Orgell was full of misery.

The newly discovered planet of Senisran is a veritable paradise, its oceans dotted with thousands of lush islands containing vast deposits of rare-earths and minerals. But Senisran is also the Humanx Commonwealth’s problem child, for each island is inhabited by a different tribe of aboriginal natives. Each has to be negotiated with separately for mining rights – and the Commonwealth is locked in a race against the vicious AAnn Empire to secure those rights.

The clans of the Parramat Archipelago on Senisran are resisting entreaties by the Commonwealth and AAnn alike. But Pulickel Tomochelor, xenologist and first-contact specialist, is confident of his ability to handle to negotiations.

What Pulickel hasn’t counted on is the secret of Parramat: the strange green stones that the natives use to bless the crops, ensure plentiful fishing, heal the injured and ill, and control the weather. For within those stones lies an awesome technology the origin of which is lost in time – a technology that has to be kept from the AAnn at any cost.

The Humanx Commonwealth: Book Six.

THE DREAD RETURNS

Jon Meriweather, plucked from his own world to a place where animals walk, talk and cast spells, is pitted once more against a deadly foe. Now he and his strange fellowship must embark on a journey from which none has survived.

His way lies down the treacherous river that winds through the subterranean lair of Massaurath, Mother of Nightmares, across Helldrink through a tunnel of cold flame to the centre of the Earth…

The Day of Dissonance continues Alan Dean Foster’s epoch fantasy set in a strange world where magic, beauty and violence challenge Jon Thomas Meriweather, the Spellsinger.

In this enchanting sequel to Spellsinger and The Hour of the Gate the wizard Clothahump sends the Spellsinger on a perilous and adventure-filled quest. It is on this journey that the powers of his musical magic are tested to their fullest.

There’s no place like home…

It was a pretty good life for a spellsinger from L.A. He’d battled demons, fought deadly Plated Folk, even met a socialist dragon and survived. Now Jon-Tom was quite happy to settle into domestic bliss with the fiery Talea, study magic, and practice spellsinging on his duar. But the magic instrument is broken when Jon-Tom protects the wizard Clothahump from thieves and he must set out across the Glittergeist Sea to find the one person who can fix it. With the irrepressible Mudge the Otter as a travelling companion, only the unexpected can happen. But cannibal muskrats, ogres, and a fierce pirate king parrot must seem ordinary indeed when Jon-Tom finds a way back to Earth – and he must choose which world is home.

Jon-Tom, the Spellsinger, isn’t getting any younger. And neither, as Jon-Tom is fond of pointing out, is his otter friend, Mudge. But their not so long in the tooth that they’re completely content to laze by a riverbank. Not, that is, while there’s still adventurning to be done.

And when a lost chord comes up, clearly wanting Jon-Tom and Mudge to follow it, a little gentle adventuring, with the usual gaggle of spoiled princesses in peril, seems to be on the cards. But the chord leads the intrepid pair into deadly danger and, unless Jon-Tom’s magic can overcome the machinations of an evil wizard, there’s the real possibility of the world being plunged into discord and chaos…

After millennia of relentless war, the union of alien races called the Weave was on the verge of winning a decisive victory – thanks to their new allies from Earth, who in a mere handful of centuries had proved masters of combat. But then the birdlike Wais scholar Lalelelang found disturbing evidence that Humans might not adapt so easily to peace – that natural Human aggression would next be turned against the Weave, unless they were once again confined to fight amongst themselves.

When her field research revealed the existence of a secret group of powerfully telepathic Humans called the Core, it looked as if Lalelelang would be the first victim in a new war between Humans and their allies. But just as her fate was sealed, a lone Core commander took a chance on her intelligence and compassion, gambling the fate of Humanity on the possibility that together they could both find an alternative to a galaxy-wide bloodbath…