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How Kemlo won his spurs in the first and last great Battle of Space. For, yes, even to Space, that final goal of all Man’s earthly dreams, enmity and war eventually came. But in Space, as always in the end on Earth, good was to triumph over evil – though not until a hideous and terrifying danger had been averted.

He was suspended alone and unprotected in the sea of forgetfulness where Saturn looked brilliant against the sunless black of deep outer space.

It was like an elusive dream of a past only half-remembered, forever just out of reach amid the shifting galaxies of deep space. Somewhere out there he had lost his memory – space amnesia they called it. But they had found him and brought him back and given him a memory again.

But was it his memory?

The Solar System was imprisoned. Locked in a vast, invisible screen. Set there by something – or someone – but no one knew why…

And man, banned from the stars, turned inward to himself, to a world of carefully controlled thoughts and ideas, a world where it was forbidden to dream…

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.

Troubled Martin Clegg has always suffered from dreams which seem intensely real. In them, bizarrely, he’s another person not of this Earth! He’s finally forced to confide in his fiancée, Elsie Barlow, and they consult Martin’s scientifically inclined friend Tom Cavendish. He reveals, astonishingly, that Martin has a cosmic twin on a planet of Betelgeuse to whom he’s mentally linked. Unsuspecting, they are both about to become caught up in the strands of an incredible cosmic mystery in which, to save the universe from destruction, Martin must die–twice!

Occupation of Earth is now in its 27th year, and relations between humanity and the dictatorial Hefn have never seemed shakier. The aliens mission is to save the planet from its human abusers; and the Baby Ban imposed by mass hypnosis has made Earth a cleaner, wilder, less crowded place. But the Ban has now lasted so long, and provoked such hatred, that when a spark is struck the situation explodes into worldwide riots on one side and retaliatory mindwipings on the other. Years of effort by the eco-spiritual Gaians, who mediate between humans and Hefn, have been destroyed.

While the Gaians regroup and brainstorm frantically in an atmosphere of doubt and danger, one obsessed Hefn and one young woman begin a radical experiment. Pam Pruitt has discovered a growing ability to acquire information by non-rational means. Childhood suffering has empowered her, in a way once understood by hunting and gathering peoples – an understanding lost with that lost lifeway – to communicate with mysterious forces through strong dreaming: to function as a shaman on behalf of her community, the human race.

Earth’s last hope?

The Arc, a being of immense power, trapped within a continuum too small, fights for its freedom. Its monumental struggle will touch a few select individuals on Earth – and in doing so, change their lives forever. The Arc may also be the last hope for humanity’s survival.

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.”

Art Blastside in her third daring adventure upon the high seas.

It’s been eighteen months since Art’s baby was born: a pretty child called Africa, with Felix’s dark hair and Art’s grey eyes. Now Art, who dreamed of being like her own loving, wonderful Ma, must face up to the fact that she has absolutely no warm feeling for her child. In fact – Art can’t stand her! What’s wrong with her?

Beyond the family lies an unsettled world too. The French are still waging war, and England has fallen out of love with pirates. Piratomania has been suppressed by the government and Art and Felix are evicted from their cliff-top mansion.

The return of Ebad and the new and improved Unwelcome Stranger prompts Art to regroup her ragtag crew and sail once again across the oceans, through wild weather, bizarre places and riotous sea battles, to return to the Treasured Isle and learn the ultimate true secret behind the treasure and the mystery of why Art can’t love her child.

Among the less-traveled mountains and plains of Central Europe, a little east of Austria perhaps and north of Slovenia, lies the old kingdom of Orsinia. A land of forests and quiet farmlands and towns, with its capital city Krasnoy on the broad Molsen River, Orsinia has always found itself, like all the countries of Europe, subject to forces beyond its borders. Yet, cast as they are in the shadow of tyrannies both Western and Eastern, the lives and dreams of its free people are no less important than the great arguments of Europe’s emperors and dictators.

Here then are those lives: in tales of romance and blood-lust, hope and fear, freedom and tyranny, passion and despair. Tales of love, of life and of death. This is Orsinia and these are her stories.

Sorrow and trouble and bitterness will bound you and yours and the children of yours…

Some said the dying words of Nial Lynn, murdered by his own son, were a wicked curse. To others, it was a winter’s tale spun by firelight on cold, dark nights. But when Corbet Lynn came to rebuild his family estate, memories of his grandfather’s curse were rekindled by young and old – and rumours filled the heavy air of summer.

In the woods that border Lynn Hall, free-spirited Rois Melior roams wild and barefooted in search of healing herbs. She is as hopelessly unbridled – and unsuited for marriage – as her betrothed sister Laurel is domestic. In Corbet’s pale green eyes, Rois senses a desperate longing. In her restless dreams, mixed with the heady warmth of harvest wine, she hears him beckon. And as autumn gold fades, Rois is consumed with Corbet Lynn, obsessed with his secret past – until, across the frozen countryside and in flight from her own imagination, truth and dreams become inseparable…

Riverworld was a planet of Eden whose people possessed the power of dreaming the future. Kyreol, daughter of a Healer, pierced the vision veil to discover the ultimate truth – that her home world unknowingly hosted the way station of a vast interstellar civilisation.

An evil star shone on Kyreol’s first mission as an interplanetary agent. Her ship fell out of space, cracking on a lonely, mysterious moon. Rising from its endless plains was the white city – awesome, abandoned, eons-dead – a silent world of secret wonders.

Only her prophetic dreams linked Kyroel to Riverworld, but she was hopelessly marooned light-years away. And she was not alone…

Man is an intelligent mammal. His intelligence lies in his brain. In mammals the tissues of the central nervous system are irreplaceable. The human brain contains something like 100,000,000,000,000 neurons, but 100,000 are destroyed on average each day of a man’s life. Cosmic rays and general internal and external radioactivity account for most of this destruction.

Hunger and Gradey decided on an illegal experiment. They brought up a small group of children in a strange artificial setting where there was practically no radiation. The setting was improved. The environment grew more shielded as generations passed. At last the Thinkers exploded into a world that had not dreamed of their existence. The world was facing other complications at the moment. An alien had appeared from the other side of the cosmos! Humanity was faced with two potentially deadly enemies; could they be turned against each other, or was one a secret friend?

The sea has always been a symbol of uncontrolled power and infinite movement. Its rhythms are the rhythms of Life itself… for Life began in the primeval oceans…

Roger Adams was a man who dreamt of the untold wealth lying beneath the inscrutable waves of the Atlantic deeps. His mind filled with visions of Lost Continents, sunken galleons and the limitless possibilities of undersea farming. He same his meagre capital into a neck-or-nothing gamble and fought desperately against time and rude to turn his dreams into reality.

The unexpected stowaway added to his problems and then his diving began to pay dividends. The Atlantic Deeps gave up some of their secrets… but each enigma led to greater riddles. Then came the discovery that pointed to world-shaking consequences. Hidden beneath the great rollers lay supernatural forces so immense that the Kraken and other monsters of popular mythology were harmless toys beside it.

The force which had submerged continents was stirring once more…

Man has already entered space and lived to tell the tale. Science Fiction is on the verge of being overtaken by science fact. Tomorrow is here . . . today. The space age is no longer the dream of the writer or the hope of the scientist. It has already dawned.

Man is galloping towards the stars. The roaring hoofs of the rockets are beating out the trail to Infinity. There will be no turning back. Boundless possibilities stretch out before us. Endless opportunities beckon us. Will we use them for good or ill?

Space holds a million unknown factors. We are like children plunging into a vast ocean and striking out bravely for an unseen shore, the shore of the unexplored land. As we swim into the future we tell ourselves stories about the wonders that lie ahead of us. This is one of those stories.

Catherine Wilder was a strange girl, lovely but lonely. Sir Henry Wilder, her father, was the kind of eccentric, medical researcher who preferred to work in complete isolation. Catherine withdrew deeper into herself as the oppressing loneliness of her father’s remote mansion weighed upon her mind.
When she first heard the voice she wondered whether the mansion was haunted, then she feared for her sanity. But it was neither madness nor the supernatural which threatened her.
Mezak appeared to her suddenly in the twilight of the mansion’s gloomy corridors. He was more romantic than her wildest dreams. Although some of his language was beyond her understanding at first, it gradually became possible for them to communicate. Mezak was from the future, the remote future, but Catherine slowly realised that she was in love with him! Her father’s strange research into super-freezing and suspended animation gave her only a remote chance of reaching him, but she was prepared to take that chance. As Catherine placed herself in the freezing chamber, numbness and darkness crept over her…. Would she ever open those beautiful eyes again?

Cobwebs hung in weird, grotesque festoons from the vaulted roof. There was a strange odour in the ancient cellar. A bent figure crouches over forbidden books and mixes indescribably strange ingredients in a cauldron. The cauldron bubbles and foul fumes arise. The alchemist transfers the secret formula to a flask. It travels carefully and ceremoniously from flash to retort and back again. Unnatural things happen in the flask… terrifying things. Suddenly a human figure appears, yet it is not human in all respects. Has the alchemist made this strange, frightening thing, or has it come from realms beyond? The alchemist finds himself involved in a series of breathtaking psychic adventures such as he had never imagined possible even in his wildest dreams.

The human personality had been defined by leading psychologists as the integrated and dynamic organisation of psychical, mental, moral and social qualities. A personality is the product of heredity and environment. Every experience records itself in the neurons of the brain producing an almost infinite number of possible combinations. Brains are as individual as fingerprints.
In an infinite universe, however, there is a possibility that somewhere – separated by vast distances of Time and Space – two exactly similar brains exist. The strange telepathic bonds between identical twins could operate between identical minds.
Melinda Tracey was a practical, intelligent, modern girl who didn’t believe in dreams – even recurring dreams – but her odd sleep experiences of the ruined city, and the strangely suited figure who searched it, disturbed her considerably.
What incredible psychological bond linked Melinda to the lonely stranger, probing the wreckage of an alien metropolis?

It was a proud moment in the earth’s history, when twenty-four dedicated volunteers set off, on that bright summer morning in 1993, to conquer the vastnesses of inter-stellar space. They did not hope to accomplish their Herculean task in the meagre span of human life. It was their descendants who would walk out onto the as yet undiscovered, planets of the alien stars… or so they dreamed.
There were dire perils ahead of them. Damage to their engines, radio-activity the invisible killer, space madness and the failure of the life giving hydroponic tanks which supplied their oxygen. Yet the worst enemy of all was the enemy within themselves. The human failure of men and women, locked in the close confines of the Star Ship.
Then there was the Alien Ship… Friend or foe?… Saviour or destroyer?

Ten tantalizing tales of man, woman and child – and their cosmic connections…

Contents:
Angel Fix (1974)
Beaver Tears (1976)
Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light! (1976)
The Screwfly Solution (1977)
Time-Sharing Angel (1977)
We Who Stole the Dream (1978)
Slow Music (1980)
A Source of Innocent Merriment (1980)
Out of the Everywhere (1981)
With Delicate Mad Hands (1981)

The Edge – the farthest solar system of the civilized galaxy. Its one inhabitable planet, Tallyra, is unconventional, ungovernable an teeming with crooks – and it’s where young Jaxie Cade heads when he breaks jail with stolen information that could lead him to the fabled Phantom Planet, the dream of every Edge-worlder…

But trouble is right behind Cade: trouble from the alien Occians, from whom Cade stole the information; and from Raishe – a bounty-hunter and combat-ace determined to drag Cade back to prison. And that’s before the Commonwealth Intelligence Agency turns up – or the evil, mysterious criminal, Acs, takes a hand…

In the shadowed swamps far from Prince Phaedran’s fabulous city of Quamarr, a sorcerer tests the fabric of the universe. At his command something stirs in the emptiness beyond the stars. It is incalculably evil, immeasurably old. It is summoned by the promise of fresh human souls…

Meanwhile in a 20th Century film studio, Red Cordell takes another cheap part in another cheap swords and sorcery movie. A beautiful neglected sword he finds in Props is his only satisfaction.

But in Quamarr, the enchantress Aurilia is in mortal danger. When she calls on the sword of Corodel, Red finds himself at her side, fighting for her life in a land of waking dreams…

From the vaults of the SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal introduction to one of the unique voices of British science fiction, John Middleton Murry, Jr, who wrote his best work under the pen name Richard Cowper.

The son of the famous critic John Middleton Murry, Cowper announced himself to the science fiction world in 1967 with BREAKTHROUGH, which found favour for a subtlety and richness of characterisation not seen in most contemporary SF. The idea of a transformed future England became his signature leitmotif and it is this theme that informs the Corlay tales contained in this omnibus. This is the complete Corlay sequence, featuring introductory novella ‘PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN’ and novels THE ROAD TO CORLAY, A DREAM OF KINSHIP and A TAPESTRY OF TIME.

THE ROAD TO CORLAY:
On the Eve of the Fourth Millennium a slowly-building civilization, struggling out of the rubble of the Drowning, was crushed beneath the sceptre of a powerful and repressive Church. But on the Eve of the Fourth Millennium the sound of a magical pipe was heard, and the air was filled with songs of freedom and enlightenment. And on the Eve of the Fourth Millennium the Boy appeared, bringing the gift of sacrilege, a harbinger of the future, heralding the arrival of the White Bird of Dawning. It is the coming of a New Age. A glorious future bearing the presents of the past!

A DREAM OF KINSHIP:
They came to destroy! The treacherous Falcons, uniformed in the black leather tunics of the fanatic Secular Arm, descended on Corlay to burn and kill. Commanded by Lord Constant, ruler of the Seven Kingdoms, they were determined to crush the religious heresy of Kinship. But a new dream rose from the ashes… When four Kinsmen escaped the carnage of their beloved land, each helped to fulfill the miracle that had been foretold: the coming of the Child of the Bride of Time.

A TAPESTRY OF TIME:
Twenty years have passed since the martyrdom of the Boy-piper at York, twenty years in which his legacy, the movement of Kinship, has challenged the tyranny of the Church Militant in Britain’s seven island kingdoms. Now his namesake, Tom, bearing the Boy’s own pipes and perhaps himself imbued with the spirit of the White Bird, is wandering Europe in company with the girl, Witchet. But disaster overtakes them and Tom, in a furry of vengeance, breaks his vow of Kinship. A terrible path lies before him, one that transcends his own world. As he travels it, Tom must come to understand the true nature of the wild White Bird, of The Bride of Time and her Child, and of the Song the Star Born sang.

“If you run round the church seven times in an anti-clockwise direction, you’ll wake the Seven Sleepers. Then, if you look through the keyhole of the church door, you’ll see the Devil walking up the aisle towards you…”

When David Wisher’s mother inherits a house in the peaceful Yorkshire village of Longbarrow, David feels he is coming home. For he’s seen the house in his dreams. And when he eventually arrives in Longbarrow, he finds a place touched by the stories and beliefs of the past. There’s old Jonas Dyer, whose mystical visions have driven him to the verge of madness; Mr Toot, who uses magic to cure all ills; the little men, too small to be human, who are said to come out of the river; and Black Shuck, a ghostly dog with glowing eyes, whose appearance heralds approaching death. Most extraordinary of all, there’s the legend of the Seven Sleepers, defeated in an ancient battle and trapped throughout the centuries, their evil powers dormant.

Redcap, Uther, Vinegar Tom, Gerennius, Shuck, Pyewackett and Cullen. Together they spread terror, pestilence and destruction. And now, because of David’s unwitting actions, they are stirring once more…

It started as a harmless practical joke. But then the real nightmare begins…John Straker is the neighbourhood bogeyman. Hideously disfigured, he hides himself away from the rest of the world – until the night when a group of children set fire to his house and reduce it – and its owner – to ashes.

Mr Bad Face has been well and truly laid to rest. Or so the children think…

They’re grown up now and they’ve struggled hard to leave the bad dreams behind. Then, without warning, a figure from the past casts his shadow across the present. Mr Bad Face is back – and he wants revenge.