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Are there aliens among us? Are the chariots of the gods returning? If so – are they for us or against us?

John Brunner, award-winning author and science fiction writer extraordinary, takes the questions now on everyone’s mind, and gives one possible answer in this startling novel.

Here is an edge-of-the-seat story of the man who discovers that the vanguard of the aliens are indeed amongst us – and that the human species has but a few hours left before our time runs out.

It’s a science fiction thriller you won’t be able to put down.

Spacer Chan Dalton is torn between two masters. The pacifist aliens who hold Earth under Quarantine want him to find out why their starships have been disappearing in the Geyser Swirl, the Bermuda Triangle of the galaxy. Earth’s military, which has secretly discovered a way to break the quarantine, assumes that someone out there is making ships vanish, including Earth’s, and wants Dalton to find the culprits and hopefully stop them – with extreme prejudice, if necessary. The trouble is, the aliens hold the taking of intelligent life, even in selfdefense, to be the greatest of sins. It was Earth’s violent ways (in defense of the damned pacifist aliens!) that led to the quarantine in the first place -and if Dalton is forced to fight, it will unveil, and so destroy, Earth’s final chance to reach for the stars again. So when Dalton does indeed discover the hostile invaders responsible for the lost starships, he is faced with an impossible decision: Fight and lose access to space forever; or allow a rapacious enemy to run riot over all that he holds dear…

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.

One man fights those who quarantine Earth from alien cultures.

The crew of the interstellar exploration ship Ultima Thule is menaced by a brain-eating alien.

The free humans lived underground, secretive, like rats. Above, the world was a fearsome place for them – the open sky a terror, the night so black, and the striding machines from space so laser-flame deadly.

Esther dared the open; she saw the sky; she saw the Enemy. And she was taken – captive – to the vast alien empty city. Surrounded by marvels of a science not born on earth, Esther did not know what they wanted of her. There was mystery in the city, dread in the heavens, and magic in the handsome alien man who came to her.

This book is about Magdalen, a woman who is on her own planet, out to lunch and on her own trip. She moves through time and space, from a private mental hospital to an alien spaceship where she is interrogated about human behaviour and the function of sex. Is Magdalen mad, or have the aliens really landed? She weaves her way through the fantasies of those around her – husband Clive, psychiatrist Dr. Murgatroyd, lovers, friends and friends’ lovers – until, finally, she can reclaim her own existence.

Warren Peace joined the Space Legion to forget – and forget what it was he wanted to forget. In his quest to find out who he’d been he got turned into an Oscar by a symbiotic alien parasite.



Oscars are invulnerable superbeings, immune to everything and with no need for air, food or drink, let alone sex and drugs and rock’n’roll. Marooned on an airless planet with a whole bunch of them, Warren is bored witless.



Then a chance encounter with a lump of pryktonite turns him back into a human, and Warren embarks on a new career- as a galactic troubleshooter. His first mission takes him (with a couple of Oscars providing the muscle) to a water-covered planet where a company producing a mind-blowing drug is having trouble with its alien work force. It seems they’re smuggling alien porn mags on to the planet, and are too…tired to work. Warren sets out to find the solution…



Warren Peace is the second bizarre episode in the series that began with Who Goes Here? By the acclaimed author of Orbitsville and the Ragged Astronauts trilogy.

Unless life itself is a pathetic cosmic accident, man cannot be the only intelligence in the universe. It is unlikely that man is the highest intelligence. Compared to other planetary systems, our solar system is quite young. Its raw materials have barely been touched. If older intelligences wanted those raw materials only the primitive mind of man would stand in their way. Our so-called defences would perhaps aid the aliens more than aided us…
Ken Andrews was a research worker in electronics. He had a sensitive mind and a vivid imagination. When he has a strange experience with the radar-screen his chief said he had been overworking. His doctor explained it as hallucination, but the so-called delusion persisted. If Ken Andrews was sane his world was in danger…. If he really was in communion with an alien intelligence, could that alien intelligence be trusted? The intriguing thought behind this story is that it could be true. It could happen today or tomorrow …. It might even have happened a few minutes ago in a top-secret research station somewhere in England…

Terran Corps scattered their ships outward into the glittering galaxies. Solterra’s prime objective: orbital reconstruction of the far-flung planets. They had tightened up Solterra’s galaxy and had made mankind secure against alien threats – or so Terrans believed.

As Chief Commander, Stephen Strang aggressively explored the cosmos for the glory of his beloved Earth. He could boast that he had moved more planets into orbit around Sol than any other. Strang felt smugly safe against alien “sharks” – until he discovered the vast time-bomb that was planet Vesta’s core. . .

Into a future where a depleted fuel supply had the world spiralling down into grinding poverty and constant war came . . . Moondrift. Mysterious white flakes of alien matter that was the perfect fuel – clean powerful, dependable.

But the aliens – or whatever they were – who sent Moondrift seemed to demand a heavy ransom in return. After each Moondrift comes an eerie sound, as pure as a children’s choir, heard all over the world. It mesmerises all who hear it with it’s beauty – and when it is ended, certain people have simply disappeared without warning, never to be seen again.

This is the story of one who disappeared . . .

Life is simple where Ralph lives, up in the Pennines. It’s peaceful. Ordinary.

Until one day, when out with the sheep, he finds something strange, too strange to be from Earth.

The alien grave holds secrets of the past, but also draws Ralph into the middle of an epic war between two alien races, taking place among the stars above his head. Has he thrown his planet into a battle it can’t possibly fight? This war has raged for centuries, but perhaps Ralph could hold the key to ending it once and for all.

The Tavona is called to action once again!

When signals from space summon Vargo, the Professor joins the crew to conduct more research into the alien races their adventures have introduced to them. This journey takes them into the unknown reaches of the galaxy, trying to find a planet which has shifted orbit between solar systems. On their way they face snake aliens, tiny meteorites, and worlds where the air itself is deadly.

The eighth instalment in Captain W. E. Johns’ science fiction series brings more classic sci fi adventures from the legendary creator of Biggles.

In The Reefs of Earth, Lafferty’s first-completed novel, a passel of Alien children bumptiously attempt to rid Earth of humans.

ALLIANCE CENTRAL: the world once called Earth. Nothing breathes upon it but man and the wind, and the wind is tamed beneath great domes. From here humanity rules a vast stellar empire.
FIRSTISM: the belief that the universe is made for humanity. Therefore be fruitful, and multiply, and replace all other creatures with humankind and its domesticated beasts, and replace all other green things with plants useful to human life…
HERMES SECTOR: the remote frontier system where colonists are abruptly wiped out by an alien visitation. As a deadly threat to the countless billions of humans swarming outward from Alliance Central, the aliens must be identified.
One planet alone in Hermes Sector was spared. But that planet is Dinadh, the strangest and most secretive of all populated worlds. Firsters are not welcome on Dinadh, nor Firster technology. The only people from Alliance Central qualified by blood to visit Dinadh are a lone woman and her severely disabled five-year-old son. Their journey to Dinadh marks the beginning of a terrifying ordeal pitching mother and son beyond the shadow cast by human civilization.
Astounding sights, extraordinary aliens and colossal dangers await them…

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.

The secret of the three kings – revealed at last

For centuries, interstellar prospectors had searched for the fabled Worlds of the Three Kings, the lost El Dorado of the galaxy. But if any found it, they were never heard from again. The mad cyborg Prophet, Ishmael Hand, discovered the mysterious system, with artefacts indicating a superhuman technology, and he had refused to reveal its location before vanishing forever in history.

Two more recent expeditions have found the Three Kings. A starfaring evangelist – Doctor Karl Woodward, preacher and leader of the starship The Mountain – followed a clue and found it, but never returned. Then a spacegoing salvage team followed Woodward’s trail, and also vanished.

Now a chance encounter between what’s left of the once-mighty human military with an inexplicable alien force has brought an armed expedition to the third planet of the Three Kings, Kaspar. They will join forces with the survivors of the first two expeditions, who have been marooned both by alien powers and by human treachery, as they at last encounter the alien minds behind the mysterious triple planetary system – and face a decision that may determine the fate of the entire human race!

The chronicle of adventures of the survey ship Sarafand as it journeys through space exploring and mapping newly-discovered planets.

The mission brings them into contact with man startling life-forms and menacing aliens. On one world the Sarafand sends out six survey modules and seven return: one of them is a shape-changing malevolent alien – but which?

On another planet they discover a humanoid civilisation which can move around in time. Suddenly the Sarafand investigators are marooned millions of years in the past.

Finally the Sarafand and its crew are stranded in a distant galaxy where everything – including them – is shrinking inexorably to zero size…

FREE ACTING TERRAN ENVOY
F.A.T.E.

Alien scientists had learned how to release the ravening beast-instincts buried in the recesses of the human brain from the far distant past.

Now they were willing to sell their knowledge to the highest bidder in exchange for an alliance against Terra. And they had many willing to bargain with them.

Captain Kennedy, the top man of the Free Acting Terran Envoys – FATE – was assigned to stop this terrifying menace. But he knew immediately that his greatest danger lay within himself – and that by challenging the alien scientists he could turn himself and his friends into beasts beyond imagining!

The crew of the XV-ftl was looking forward to shore leave, vacation, and a chance to see their families after a month in space. But once they brought back the news that they had discovered aliens, they were doomed to another, and longer, journey.

Accompanying them on the return were several technical experts, who seemed to be more interested in squabbling with each other than meeting the first alien race in the history of humankind. But face to face with the blue humanoid Norglans, everyone began to realise just how important these first meetings could be – for they could make the difference between peaceful coexistence in space and interstellar war!




(First published 1958)

Seven desperate survivors drifting helplessly in a life-capsule, sight an uncharted world. The anti-grav landing shields are only working spasmodically, but the survivors still land safely.
In this strange, alien environment there is room for vivid, dramatic conflict of personalities. The survivors are at a loss to explain the strange conduct of the humanoid ethnic groups which they find of this strange world. Slowly the horrifying truth begins to dawn on the dwindling band from the capsule.
There are other life forms in evidence on the planet, things which were extinct on earth aeons ago. Yet there is a vital, terrifying difference between the giant reptiles of earthly prehistory and the monsters on this alien world.

Set more than four thousand years in the future, Summertide introduces a galaxy widely populated by humans and a variety of intelligent aliens, all of whom live in the shadow of the vanished race known only as the Builders. Nothing is known about the Builders, but the gigantic artifacts they have left behind – many of them still hardly understood – dominate the areas of space in which they are found. One such is the double-planet system of Opal and Quake – the former covered in water, the latter in desert – connected by a Builder device called the Umbilical. It is to this system that a variety of humans and aliens come, ostensibly to witness Summertide – the annual tidal wave which sweeps across Opal.

From the author of Dune, the greatest SF novel of all time, comes a stunning evocation of alien cultures

In the far future, humans and aliens have joined together in a galaxy-wide federation of intelligent species: The Consentiency. But its existence is now threatened by the discovery of a secret, illegal and deadly experiment on the planet Dosadi.

There, the froglike Gowachin have created a brutal society: 850 million beings, human and Gowachin, are confined in an area of 40 square kilometres. But the experiment in overcrowding is getting out of control: the beings that have bred on Dosadi are so tough and resourceful that they are capable of breaking out of their monstrous prison and overrunning the galaxy.

When a young British couple, who make jigsaw puzzles, are hired by an ageing Norwegian to take nude photos of themselves in a sculpture park in Oslo, they are drawn into a web of occult Nazi horror. Even more horrifying will be the fate of the whole world some years later if alien visitors achieve their secret aims.

However, the aftermath of events in that Oslo park will provide Anna Sharman with a key to unlock those aims.

Anna is a rebel within Britain’s intelligence service at a time when most of the world appeases the aliens because of the gifts they bring – and if she must lose her own body in order to discover the truth, she will do so.