Search Results for: far-out

Killed by the power of the god Zezeth, his true father, Lionwolf has been cast into a bleak and icy hell lit just by a cold blue sun. Here he and others of the living dead must wage endless combat and war, to appease the whim of a deathly King whose face is made of stone. But when Lionwolf encounters the King’s wife, she is none other than the beautiful, god-fashioned Chillel, his own former lover – and nemesis.

As Lionwolf struggles in the toils of Hell, elsewhere in the hell-cold ice-age of the mortal earth, men and women work out their own destinies. An empire has fallen. Ru Karismi, Capital of the Kings, has been abandoned to the poisons of the White Death. Reivers cross the lands of the Jafn and the Ruk, preying wherever they wish.

Against this unsettled backdrop, Jemhara the sorceress determines to save the Magician Thryfe from a dire self-inflicted punishment, and Saphay, now a goddess of the far north, seeks to lead her people to a new world.

Yet Seseth’s violent hadred shadows all – and from the depths of an ice-locked sea his other terrifying son, the mountainous whale-leviathan Brightshade, is once more rising for vengeance…

Michael Moorcock edited and produced the magazine New Worlds from 1964 to 1973. Within its pages he encouraged the development of new kinds of popular writing out of the genre of science fiction, energetically reworking traditional themes, images and styles as a radical response to the crisis of modern fiction. The essential paradox of the new writing lay in its fascination with ‘entropy’ – the universal and irreversible decline of energy into disorder. Entropy provides the key both to the anarchic vitality of the magazine and to its neglect by critics and academics, as well as its intimate connection with other cultural experiments of the 1960s. The fiction of the New Worlds writers, who included Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard and Moorcock himself, was not concerned with the far future and outer space, but with the ambiguous and unstable conditions of the modern world. As Ballard put it: ‘The only truly alien planet is Earth.’

The Entropy Exhibition is the first critical assessment of the literary movement known as ‘New Wave’ science fiction. It examines the history of the magazine and its background in the popular imagination of the 1960s, traces the strange history of sex in science fiction and analyses development in stylistic theory and practice. Detailed attention is given to each of the three principal contributors to New Worlds – Aldiss, Ballard and Moorcock. Moorcock himself is most commonly judged by his commercial fantasy novels instead of by the magazine he supported with them, but here the balance is at last redressed: New Worlds emerges as nothing less than a focus and a metaphor for many of the transformations of English and American literature in the past two decades.

‘YOU KEEP OUT OF HARM’S WAY, SOPHIE FARTHING’ Her father’s advice seemed only sensible. The flying island of High Haven was a dangerous place. So what was she doing down on the docks at midnight, talking to the sinister gentleman with the iron jaw? Where had he come from on his majestic space yacht? And why did he laugh when she spoke of her poor dead mama? Sophie only wanted to talk to him again. She didn’t really mean to stow away – certainly not on the wrong ship. Her unintended quest is to take Sophie far from home, to the pleasure gardens of the Moon, the grogshops and grime of Lambeth Walk, through the perilous Asteroid Sea and the cruel canyons of Mars where Angels fill the red sky with their ravenous cries.

In an incredible far future, the known laws of Time and Space no longer apply to the world – and the seed of Man has mutated. Lobey is a mutant, different because he can hear the music in people’s minds. And when he encounters the beautiful dead-mute, Friza, he knows he has found a kindred soul.

Then Friza is killed, by someone or something unknown, and Lobey, driven by a knowledge he does not understand, sets out to bring her back from the dead. His journey leads him to strange lands and stranger people: people such as Spider, the eternal traitor incarnate; the Dove, embodiment of beauty; and Green-Eye, doomed to be the victim of a ritual as old as Time.

And always in the background, always waiting, stands the shadow of the chilling, childlike killer from the sea. The being called Kid Death . . .

Winner of the Nebula Award for best novel, 1968

The dying alien from the ship that crashed onto Rhys gave Comet Jo a jewel, and begged him to take it to the heart of the Galactic Empire. And, seeing no reason to miss an adventure, Comet Jo started out for the fabled Empire Star. But his journey was to have far-reaching consequences – consequences that could disrupt all the known laws of Time and Space . . .

The Star Folk were an anachronism. Living in their cluster of giant ships far out in space, cut off from contact with their fellow humans, they were shrouded in mystery. Through the allegory of an ancient song, Joneny, an anthropology student, set out to unravel that mystery – and found a truth stranger than any allegory . . .

One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives.

The effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk – a heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not only have the world’s artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered remains are pitted and aged, as though they’d been in space far longer than their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, space probe reveals a bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the barrier than inside – more than a hundred million years per day on Earth. At this rate, the death throes of the sun are only about forty years in our future.

Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader who’s forged a new religion out of the fears of the masses.

Earth sends terraforming machines to Mars to let the onrush of time do its work, turning the planet green. Next they send humans…and immediately get back an emissary with thousands of years of stories to tell about the settling of Mars. Then Earth’s probes reveal that an identical barrier has appeared around Mars. Jason, desperate, seeds near space with self-replicating machines that will scatter copies of themselves outward from the sun – and report back on what they find.

Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.

It is hard to say how it started – all the unexplained little signs of a new baby about the house in ‘The Silent Cradle’ – but soon none of the O’Bannons could deny that there had been a highly irregular addition to the family. In ‘Max Haunting’ a middle-aged hippie, preserved almost intact from the Sixties, starts showing up on the doorsteps of his old friends and loves who, in acquiring jobs and furniture, have ‘sold out’ rather less than he thought. Hauntings of curious varieties continue in other stories: the sort manufactured out of glass by a man who thinks his godly wife deserves a miracle; the visitation of a mother’s cruelty into the mind of her daughter as she confronts the frustrations of coping with her own child; the specters of opportunities lost or spurned which nag to be laid, like ghosts.



Elsewhere Leigh Kennedy considers the impulse of cannibalism in a future world whose greed has induced ecological upheaval, and the phenomenon of speaking in tongues as investigated by a sociology professor. She views the world through the eyes of a victim of seizures and of a primatologist whose devotion to apes has gone a bit too far.

The river cuts right across the known world, from the impassable Far Precipices to the sea. The people on one bank are cut off from those on the other, for the black current has the power to stop them crossing.

Only women can travel repeatedly up and down the river, but when Yaleen joins the boating guild and becomes a riverwoman, she is singled out to follow an even more extraordinary path…

In every mouse’s long life, there comes a time when ancestral voices tell him to move on. Pedlar, a yellow-necked mouse, has reached that point. Told to leave the Hedgerow and go on a long journey, the adventurous mouse says his farewells and sets out for a far-distant country knows as The House. Reaching his destination, Pedlar enters a strange new world inhabited by many warring tribes: the Stinkhorns of the cellar, the great Savage Tribe in the kitchen, the library Bookeaters, the Invisibles, the Deathshead and the rebellious 13-K Gang.

During his stay, Pedlar witnesses a momentous truce, in which the tribes come together at an Allthing meeting and decide to rid themselves of the greatest pests in The House, the greedy, stupid nudniks – the humans. And so the Great Nudnik Drive is set in motion, a time of considerable anxiety for the nudniks, when clocks strike twenty and inanimate objects seem to have a life of their own. Ranged against the mouse tribes are the nudniks’ allies: the two cats, Eyeball the Burmese blue and Spitz the ginger tom; the Headhunter, a barbarian human child; and Little Prince, the Headhunter’s cannibalistic pet white mouse. The House becomes a hotbed of riot and discord, until Pedlar finally comes up with a solution. The outcome of this heroic struggle has gone down in the annals of mouse history, a history tens of thousands of days long, and the whole remarkable tale is recorded here, between these pages.

On Cloudrock the penalty for imperfection is death: death by the long fall into the void, through the poisonous mists and gases that rise from the deadlands far, far below.

The two tribes who survive on the Rock, the tribes of Day and Night, keep their families tight, their bloodlines pure and true, by incest, by cannibalism and by murder. Parcelling out their tiny world in measures of light and time, they wrap themselves in ritual and taboo, each family denying the presence of the other. Then came the Shadow.

Born to the matriarch Catrunner, the Shadow is deformed – a neuter dwarf – a natural candidate for instant death. But for this mutant, fate intervenes. The Shadow may live – on the condition that none acknowledge its presence: one word, one glance, and the Shadow will join its luckless kin in the long death-flight.

Surviving on the outskirts of the family, the Shadow’s very existence creates an unspoken question that challenges the ties that bind. This is the Shadow’s tale…

A churning nuclear vortex, appearing out of nowhere, wreaking utter destruction – and countless numbers of them were menacing planets throughout the galaxy! ‘Storm’ cloud, nucleonic genius, set out in his spaceship Vortex Blaster to track and destroy the mysterious vortices – and embarked on a saga of discovery and conflict among the far stars and the worlds of the Lensmen . . .

The Vortex Blaster is the seventh and last self-contained novel in E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s epic Lensman series, one of the all-time classics of adventurous, galaxy-spanning science fiction.

Like a great, lethal snake, plague creeps through the galaxies. No conscious entity can halt its progress, and life is slowly draining from planet after planet.

Only one super-intelligence is capable of preventing cataclysm. To do it, he must penetrate far beyond infinity – to the formless, deathless creature out to kill the universe.

What would you do if little men in purple uniforms filled your living room with impossible machinery?

A machine made it possible to bury your crimes in the future?

You were abandoned on an asteroid alone with a murderous living snake of metal?

Kainui is one of a pair of double planets circling a pair of binary stars. Mike Hoani has come there to study the languarge of the colonists. But Kainui is an ocean planet, covered in water 1700 miles deep, with no solid ground anywhere. The population is scattered in cities on floating artificial islands with no fixed locations. The atmosphere isn’t breathable, and lightning, water-spouts, and tsunamis are constant. Out on the great planetary ocean, self-sufficiency is crucial, and far from any floating city, on a small working-family ship, anything can happen. Mike’s academic research turns into an exotic nautical adventure unlike anything he could have imagined.

The planet was called Felicity. The name was a joke, except for those compelled to settle there. Inhabiting it were beings bred for thousands of years for a single purpose: to attack and kill.

Jason knew this. But he also knew the planet on which he lived was moving towards certain disaster. And Felicity was the only spot in the universe where he and his companions could survive. He thought he had worked out the perfect plan. But what awaited him on Felicity went far beyond his wildest imagining.

It all began simply enough. A client had vanished, and Jay Corcoran went to investigate the man’s empty hotel suite. But Corcoran’s trick vision spotted the room-sized box stuck to the outside wall of the suite. There was no way to get into the box, so Corcoran cabled his long-time pal Tom Boone.

Boone had a talent. When threatened he could “step around a corner” into some otherwhere. Boone stepped into the box, taking Corcoran with him. The box turned out to be a time traveler machine that transported them back to 1745 England, where they found a family of refugees from a million years in the future. In that far future, alien Infinites were converting humanity to incorporeal form. When the family had refused conversion, they had to flee. For more than a century, the family had lain hidden in their time bubble.

Suddenly, the Infinites’ killer monster broke through–and things grew complicated as the family fled to the distant past and the farther future.

“Upon you and you alone must rest the fate of the universe. You are the only ones to save it.” Thus spoke the mysterious Cosmic Engineers to a small group of human beings on the rim of the solar system. Somewhere out there in the vastness of the galaxies lurked the greatest challenge they would ever face – the catastrophic fury of the Hellhounds of Space. Promptly, courageously the earthlings boarded their galactic spaceships and journeyed out far beyond uncharted stars, plunging into dangers too awful even to contemplate.

AN ACCIDENT IN TIME…

Duncan Reid was snatched out of the twentieth century from a cruise liner in the mid-Pacific. Oleg Vladimirovitch came from Novgorod in medieval Russia. Udin was a Hun barbarian who lived by cunning and the axe. Erissa had been a sacred priestess in a lost continent. And a mistake in a time-experiment by a race from the far future had thrown these four unlikely comrades together, pulling them through a warp in the fabric of space and time to a world which was ancient history.

The strange alliance that Duncan and his comrades formed in that unfamiliar world was to take on a significance that none of them could have foreseen. For not only their own future, but they very future of the world they had found was at stake…

‘Earth is real,’ Dumarest insisted. ‘A world old and scarred by ancient wars. The stars are few and there is a great single moon which hangs like a pale sun in the night sky.’

In the quest for his legendary birthplace, Earl Dumarest has traversed galaxies. Now, at least, he reaches Ourelle, a planet close to Earth – out along a far arm of the Milky Way. There he finds Jondelle, a boy who may hold the key to Earl’s search.

But then Jondelle is kidnapped. And Dumarest’s pursuit of the imperilled boy leads him to a city of paranoiac killers – madmen whose terrible violence is always on a hair-trigger!



(First published 1973)

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

Captain Kennedy, Earth’s trouble shooter carries the Banner of Terran against the unknown sciences and alien psychologies of a thousand worlds.

The crack in the cosmos that has to be sealed!

FATE is the space hero series that has become a must wherever Science Fiction is read. A solid space adventure more exciting than “Startrek” and far more real than “Perry Rhodan”. Look out for further titles in this exciting series.

Far from Earth, on a ship carrying the 13th and 14th generations of descendants from the original crew, life is short. You are born, learn the tasks needed to keep the ship running, help breed and train the next crew – and your death is ordered by the computer in charge.

Gregson, chief of the psych-police, makes sure the computer’s death-sentences are carried out quickly and painlessly. His duty is a sacred trust. He knows the intricacies of the system, how it works . . . and how it can be subverted.

He is growing old. Rebellious.

He also knows his name will soon come up in the computer for elimination.

And he has no intention of carrying out his own death-sentence!

Old Earth has reached its Third Cycle, a tired planet basking in the faded glories of a lost civilisation. Long ago it had been great – but the pride and greed of its rulers had brought about a terrible downfall.

And now Earth was threatened. Far out in space an alien race waited. Once they had been the victims of a crime perpetrated by the human race – now they were ready to return as conquerors. As a Watcher, Tomis had spent his life searching the skies for signs of the impending invasion. And when it finally came, it was to disrupt not only his world but his whole life in a way he had never dreamed was possible.


(First published 1969)

Santaroga seemed to be nothing more than a prosperous farm community. But there was something . . . different . . . about Santaroga.

Santaroga had no juvenile delinquency, or any crime at all. Outsiders found no house for sale or rent in this valley, and no one ever moved out. No one bought cigarettes in Santaroga. No cheese, wine, beer or produce from outside the valley could be sold there. The list went on and on and grew stranger and stranger.

Maybe Santaroga was the last outpost of American individualism. Maybe they were just a bunch of religious kooks. . . .

Or maybe there was something extraordinary at work in Santaroga. Something far more disturbing than anyone could imagine.

A stunning work from the acclaimed author of Dune, the series which inspired the 2021 Denis Villeneuve epic film adaptation, Dune, starring Oscar Isaac, Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya and Josh Brolin.