Search Results for: fanthorpe

Man has often wondered about the birth of his world. Our remote ancestors told strange tales of parental deities who gave birth to planets, and people.

Primitive religious thought regarded inanimate Nature as teeming with terrifying psychic life. It is a trend which persists in the dark recesses of the modern mind. There is reason for this persistence . . .

Were the ancients entirely wrong?

Science has unlocked many mysteries that terrified our forebears, but there are others which remain just as enigmatically sealed as before.

What strange astrological influences do the dark stars exert as they speed through the heavens on their evil courses? Like a cosmic combination lock their tuning unleashes timeless forces of evil.

The Pantheon of Old Gods rides again to bring hideous terror to the 20th century.

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.

Mars is our nearest neighbour in the solar system, with the exception of our own satellite Luna. It will be considerably easier to hit the moon of course, but what will we find when we get there? Plenty to interest the scientist, the mining engineer, and the cosmologist. But the Biologist will find only fossilised traces of Lunar life, if he finds anything at all.
On Mars the story will be vastly different. We know that there is vegetation there. We still argue about those enigmatic canals. Are they optical illusion or…? What if…? What if an intelligent civilisation cut those great water courses? What if that civilisation still exists? Is man the only intelligence in God’s great Universe? How will earth’s envoys react when they first encounter non-human intellect for the first time? Will the aliens be friendly, or…?

It should have been routine. Nothing could go wrong. The anode and the cathode were behaving perfectly. The meters and dials were recording accurately. A faint effervescence stirred in the chemical solution.

There was a subtle change in the speed – the experiment seemed to freeze in its tracks – the stream of gentle bubbles hovered motionless. Something inexplicable was appearing in the solution. The scientist peered harder at the vessel…It couldn’t be…It was impossible…It was incredible…but it had happened!

A woman’s face smiled at him from the depths of the glass tank! But the face was translucent, he could see tank and solution despite its contours.

“Hello, Earthman,” said the face from Nowhere.

He clapped a hand to his forehead and collapsed insensible. When he came to, the experiment was back to normal. What had happened? Was it all in his mind? Or had he really made contact with an alien?

Ever since science began seriously investigating the potentials of electronics, man has toyed with the idea of creating robots. The dawn of the robot age has already broken. We have automatic telephone exchanges. We fly planes with robot pilots. We send self-sufficient instruments into the void to record and transmit cosmic information.

Frobisher was a brilliant theorist, years ahead of his time. He worked out a scheme that took long patient decades of planning. His great moment came. The robots were a success. Frobisher was a kindly old man. There was nothing evil in his plans. But the world is not entirely inhabited by kindly old men with high visions. Someone else got hold of the plans and the robots embarked on a career of international crime and pillage.

Despite his pacifist ideals, the old professor tried to combat the evil which he had unwittingly released . . . the results were staggering.

In the realm of science things are often far from what they seem. In the science of sociology this is truest of all. Those who seem to control human affairs may only be figure-heads. The real power lies in unsuspected places…sinister…alien…

Mervyn Wayne called at the offices of an apparently normal, respectable, old-established city firm and overheard intrigue of nightmare quality. He found himself a fugitive from an organisation whose ramifications extended everywhere.

Society was being master-minded by someone, or something, so irresistibly powerful that Mervyn’s first reaction was hopeless fear. Gradually, however, he learnt how to distinguish allies from organisation men and began building a counter-group of his own.

After being sent to the planet from which no one had returned and was guarded by barrier rays, Mac is able to return. But the rays had affected him and made him wish that death had been swift as the unknown menace began to spread.

Alex was a pioneer. Like all pioneers he had problems. He had more problems than most; when things start to go wrong in space they go wrong in a big way. One by one the perils of the void took their toll of his companions. Alex was alone, alone with a vision, the vision of a town, home.

Only thoughts of home kept him alive. He remembered trees, houses, shops, churches, peoples…above all people. At last he reached earth…or perhaps it wasn’t earth? Things had changed unbelievably. Perhaps he had changed. How long had he been away? How far had he drifted? There was a sinister possibility that this wasn’t home at all. If the things that looked like people weren’t people but aliens, what was he to do?

Alex was a realist. He knew what space could do to a man’s mind. He was disinclined to trust the evidence of his own senses. A mine that has had far more than it can take can produce from very peculiar perceptions…

The engines died first, then the ship. Hope died. Men lived on. Then men died one by one… Accidents… quarrels… illness… age. One man remained. One man sat in the quietness of the drifting ship and wondered why Death didn’t want him.
The Others found the incredible derelict and approached her cautiously. The last spaceman watched them come and went to greet them. He was too old and tired to have any emotions left. Then they went to work on him. One by one his feelings came to life again. He took an interest in the New World on which he found himself. There was something strangely worrying about the planet. Things looked vaguely reminiscent of other things from long ago… A mountain range reminded him of Earth. A vast stretch of water looked like an ocean he had once crossed. Could the impossible have happened?
Could the incredible be reality?

Tharnos, assistant to the High Priest of the Holy Mysteries at Karnak was disturbed when strange alternation appeared in the ritual. Was it Kakos the silent High Priest who was introducing these dark ceremonies….? If not was there a presence from Beyond lurking in the shadows of the great temple?
A dying slave warned Tharnos of the plot that was being launched against him . . . Too late! There were other victims waiting in the secret cells below the temple; a retired Roman Centurion; a giant Nubian; a Greek mariner with the cunning of Odysseus.
Only the sacred Temple Virgin could help them to escape. If she would help them, there was a slim chance that the Dark Powers could be held in check…. If not… the world was threatened with an Aeon of darkness such as it had never witnessed before.

Personality has a physical basis and what is in itself bio-chemical can be modified by bio-chemical means. The new formula could dissolve a man’s personality into a state of plasticity from which almost any kind of temperament could be re-fashioned. Worlds were at war. With technologies resting in an uneasy equilibrium victory or defeat depended upon morale. Morale depended upon personality. Personality depended upon the new formula!
A weapon as insidious as that could work both ways. An unscrupulous government could use it to control men’s minds to a degree which had never been possible before. The Automatic State lay just around the corner. Bill Stokes and his underground movement were faced with a savage dilemma. Disloyalty could mean defeat for their own people, but to keep faith with the present regime could lead to the end of individual human independence.

They had reached the very limits of space. Nothing lay ahead except the evil planet, waiting to destroy.

NOTES FROM CAPTAIN BRONET’S LOG:
It looked like a lizard, or a snake with legs. It had a large flattish head, three eyes set in triangular formation, and a round food-intake in the centre of the “face.” There was no chin. The head perched high on a mottled, leathery neck. The skin on its back was ribbed and corrugated. This creature was the first living thing we encountered on the sinister planet…

An itinerant French mercenary stumbles into the Valley of the Kings; driven by thirst and crazed by the eastern sun, he crawls through a crevice in an ancient wall…

The papyrus roll he found contained weird hieroglyphics, an owl, a bolted door, an eagle, an axe and, strangest of all, Xerefu and Akeru – the lions of Yesterday and Today. The scroll found its way to Paris. The year was 1798. The Terror was born. Behind the welter of blood that was revolution, older, darker, more sinister forces were at work. The Revolution was only a means to an end… only a symptom of a deadlier peril, a terror behind the Terror.

Ancient Egyptian power was stronger than the guillotine…

Servius had always been a faithful servant of the goddess Diana. As a gladiator he had given her thanks for his victories, as a Centurion he had prayed to her on the eve of every battle. When at last the tide of war turned against him he fled to her sanctuary on the shore of Lake Nemi. Here he killed the Priest in order to become the Priest and ever after he lived in fear of being killed himself by the next aspirant for the office. When the fatal battle was fought the dying Servius had a vision of Diana, who made him a strange promise. He would die, yet he would not die. He would live, yet he would not live. When he found himself he would be lost, and when he was lost he would be found.

Servius closed his eyes by the shorts of Lake Nemi and opened them in a strange, frightening world where chariots ran without horses and where men flew inside iron birds. His first problem was to survive. His second was to find his way home!

Anzar was known as a crazy eccentric scientist. Nobody paid much attention to his weird pseudo -scientific experiments. When unexplained accidents started to happen around his derelict house it took a young I.P.F lieutenant named Cameron to find out what was going on… Then Cameron vanished.

The I.P.F sent another man after Cameron, he went too. That started the full scale attack; an attack that was repulsed before it started. Anzar was ready.

Maybe Anzar wasn’t crazy? Maybe Anzar was the outstanding scientific genius of the 22nd century? What strange power did his yellow mist possess? What became of the men who got caught in it? As Cameron blacked out he wondered whether there was flesh and blood behind the metal . . .

Above all, what mystery lay locked in the great steel cylinder?

They were suspended in frozen animation billions of years ago. Now the Searcher was looking for them, scattered across the universe. Would he find them before those set on destruction could?

Brant was a scientist, a space scientist. He had techniques and technologies at his fingertips that would have looked like magic to the old timers of the twentieth century.
There were new sciences that hadn’t been heard of a century before. Things like Teleportology and Psycholithography. The specialised departmental scientists were narrow field experts in spheres of work that a twentieth century man wouldn’t even have begun to comprehend.
Science had the answer to most things, but there was a new world out through the Hyperdrive Lanes, a world of mystery on the edge of the universe. It was inhabited by ebony skinned humanoids, with proud noble chieftains and weird La-akas or medicine men.
Brant and his crew scoffed at first. “Primitive magic and superstition” laughed the scientists. Then the La-akas did things that science couldn’t’ explain. Things like controlling nature.
Brant and his men began to investigate the age of the culture. It wasn’t primitive, it was old…. thousands of years older than Earth…. And it throbbed with terrible danger.

Innumerable explanations have been put forward for the phenomena, known popularly as U.F.O’S and Flying Saucers. Eminent psychologists explain them as purely mental phantasmagoria – symptomatic of mankind’s age-old desire for “saviours from the sky”.

Enthusiastic arm-chair cosmonauts regard them as irrefutable proof that super intelligences from Out There are watching the Earth. A few un-scrupulous publicity seekers and practical jokers cash in on the public’s curiosity and weird stories of little green men and pink ants go the rounds.

Amateur military tacticians decide that the saucers are either out new secret weapons or the experimental weapons of some alien power.

Interest rises and falls. The Great Debate continues.

There are some other possibilities . . . and the implications of some are so horrifying that mere monsters from Beyond would be a pleasant anti-climax. This mature, challenging novel is not recommended for those who like to think of the everyday world in terms of permanence and security with humanity safely established at the head of creation.

Elspeth Jermyn came dangerously close to the truth, and slowly but surely gathered a small group of helpers together. They worked in strictest secrecy against the Saucer Phenomena and the invidious menace behind it . . . if they failed, life would have no real meaning.

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?

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.

An archaeological party in Mesopotamia found a chest of stone tablets in an unknown script. Disaster struck every man who worked on the tablets, every man save one. The stranger who offered his services to the archaeologists claimed to read the ancient unknown symbols, but the stranger vanished together with the tablets and the mystery deepened.

The stranger’s claims had not been exaggerated. Incredible events began to take place in unlikely places, as the-man-who-knew slowly gained a mastery of over the Power Tablets. Like all megalomaniacs he over-reached himself and the power of the tablets took over. He no longer controlled them… They controlled him. The vengeance of the ancients was slow and terrible to behold.

The Thing was the worst part of their vengeance… a supernatural monster striding like a colossus over the trembling ground. Man’s weapons failed to stop it. Only the courage of three priests stood between humanity and annihilation.

Brinton couldn’t believe the inscription when he read it in the cold white moonlight. He was looking at his own grave. He tried to read the date but the light wasn’t strong enough to be certain. He returned to the graveyard by daylight… but the grave had gone.
He left the town in horror, but the grave followed him. He was drawn to burial grounds like iron to a magnet. It was always the same. By Moonlight he saw the grave, but never the date. By day he saw nothing. One night he saw the month. Then they day; at last he saw the year. He knew he was due to die in one week. What could he do? Can a man forestall his fate? Can a mortal outwit the dark designs of destiny? Was it all in his mind? Perhaps Roger Brinton was mad? The asylum is warmer than the grave. The day before he was due to die he saw the grave again… The earth was newly turned… it was waiting for him!

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.

Most of the problems were solved in the 29th century. War was a memory. Disease was almost conquered. Old age and Death were held at bay. It was a glad world. A brave new world. Humanity had grown up. And then It came… At first the dare-devil pioneers from the far-flung corners of the universe brought back strange tales of a mountain that walked. The reign of terror spread from planet to planet, until the authorities sat up and took notice. By the time someone with enough initiative to re-open the long disused weapon shops, came on the scene, it was almost too late. Time was against them. Atomic bomb wouldn’t smash that creature, neither would heat rays nor energy bolts. It left a train of utter chaos and devastation behind it as it strode imperiously through the galaxy.