Search Results for: gateway-to-never,-the

It was the highest and most coveted award of all time. It was given only to the bravest among those defending Earth from the mysterious Kradens. Many had sacrificed their lives for it. The current bearer of the medal became the idol of all mankind – a man above the law, a man who would never want for anything. Everyone on Earth sought that medal. One man was going to cheat to win it – and live to regret it.

Young Charles Dexter Ward is fascinated by the history of Joseph Curwen, his wizard ancestor of the 17th century. Curwen was notorious for haunting graveyards, practicing alchemy – and never aging! Ward can’t help his fixation: he, himself, looks just like Curwen. In an attempt to duplicate his ancestor’s cabbalistic feats, he resurrects the fearsome Curwen . . . and then the true horror begins!

The aim of Laurie Paton and his colleagues was a goal which no other scientists had ever attained – the creation of a living entity by means of synthetic biological structure. But, working on their isolated island base, they unleashed a force for which they had never bargained, and against which they found themselves powerless. They created, not the entity they aimed at, but a window in Time, and, unexpectedly, a channel through which the Forces of Darkness assailed them.

Nicole Gunther-Perrin is a modern young professional, proud of her legal skills but weary of childcare, of senior law partners who put the moves on her, and of her deadbeat ex-husband. Following a ghastly day of dealing with all three, she falls into bed asleep – and awakens the next morning to find herself in a different life, that of a widowed tavernkeeper in the Roman frontier town of Carnuntum around 170 A.D.

Delighted at first to be away from corrupt, sexist modern America, she quickly begins to realise that her new world is as complicated as her old one. Violence, dirt, and pain are everywhere – and yet many of the people she comes to know are as happy as those she knew in twentieth-century Los Angeles. Slavery is a commonplace, gladiators kill for sport, and drunkenness is taken for granted – but everyday people somehow manage to face life with humour and good will.

No quitter, Nicole manages to adapt to her new life despite endless worry about the fate of her children “back” in the twentieth century. Then plague sweeps through Carnuntum, followed by brutal war. Amid pain and loss on a level she had never imagined, Nicole finds reserves of strength she had never known.

Nine ships blasted off from Moon Base. Once in space, eight of them formed a globe around the smallest. They held this formation all the way to Earth.

The small ship displayed the insignia of an admiral – yet there was no living thing of any sort in her. She was not even a passenger ship, but a drone, a robot ship intended for radioactive cargo. This trip she carried nothing but a lead coffin – and a Geiger counter that was never quiet.

In plain English, at 4 a. m., a ray of light had been observed on the disc of the planet Mars in or near the “terminator”; that is to say, the zone of twilight separating day from night. The news was doubly interesting to me, because a singular dream of “Sunrise in the Moon” had quickened my imagination as to the wonders of the universe beyond our little globe, and because of a never-to-be-forgotten experience of mine with an aged astronomer several years ago…

The Phantom Crusader: A skeleton figure gleamed beneath the ancient armour.

The Room that Never Was: The door had been there the night before … and now there was nothing.

The Tunnel: Faint and far beneath them, they could hear the unmistakable sounds…

Stranger in the Skill: There was someone at the door, someone strangely, frighteningly familiar.

The Stockman: Psychic justice … strange but sure …

Footprints in the Sand: There was nothing but wilderness for a thousand square miles. What had made the prints?

In this classic of alternate history by grand master Philip Jose Farmer, Native American bomber pilot Roger Two Hawks bails out over enemy territory in WWII, only to find himself on another Earth – one in which the American continents never rose from the waters, and the ancestors of the American Indians remained in Asia and Europe-an Earth embroiled in a world war of its own – with Two Hawks caught in the middle.

Britannia is a land of forests – it is said a man can walk from the walls of Eboracum to the southern sea without leaving the shade of the greenwood – inhabited by wildcats, wolves and bears, as well as by the descendants of the folk who built Stonehenge. Traversing the forests, linking the Roman cities, are the straight Roman roads on which solar-powered aircars travel from the far north of Britain to expressways that link with London, Rome, Constantinople and beyond.

In this world Rome never fell to the Barbarians, the legions never left Britain and now, in the late twentieth century, Rome is the capital of a vast global civilisation.

Outside Eboracum, (or York as we know it), and dominating the city, is the Battle Dome, a vast hemisphere enclosing the artificial landscapes where the Games – as brutal, deadly and colourful as ever – are held. Here the destinies of three young people come together when a jealous feud forces them to flee the Dome and take refuge in the forest. There, Viti, Miranda, and Angus discover that the older Britain that has endured for two millennia, where the assumptions of rational Romans and city-dwellers no longer apply. And it is there they find they must learn new lessons about their world – if they are to survive.

This first volume of A Land Fit for Heroes is a superb, lyrical novel of cultures clashing in a wonderfully evoked alternate world, filled with magic, wonder and haunting sense of place.

When the cities left Earth, they exchanged a simple environment for one of constant, sometimes shattering change. The Universe was littered with cultures in every conceivable stage of development. Only the iron hand of the germanium-backed economy and occasional interventions by the Earth police imposed some kind of order on the spaceways. Even John Amalfi never got used to the life – and he had been mayor of New York for nearly five hundred years now.

The Wide syndrome

It is the not-too-distant future. The space colony Lagrangia, on the moon’s orbit, is an idyllic utopia of parks, mountains, streams and blue skies. Lulled by its beauty, citizens can sometimes forget that the ‘stream’ are recycled water, and the ‘blue skies’ are titanium strips bound together. But there are a few who can never forget. There are the victims of the Wide syndrome – a terrifying form of contagious, claustrophobic madness that can strike anyone – at any time – on Lagrange Five.

Aubrey was a student, gifted in the fine art of wizardry. But the more knowledge he acquired, the more he wanted to learn. So he travelled to a faraway land in search of the greatest master of all, the powerful shape-changer Glyrenden. From him, Aubrey expected to discover the secret of long-lost spells and the mysteries of arcane magic.

But there was one discovery he never expected, one mystery he risked everything to solve.

Her name was Lilith.

Written in the prophetic technological vein of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, Griffith’s epic masterpiece tells the story of a Great War which never was. Airship squadrons and steam fleets clash over the world’s great kingdoms, leaving panic and devastation in their wake. What is the secret of the mysterious dark “Angel,” Natasha? Can anyone stop the tyrannical ethernauts who pilot the stately war machines? Will the British Empire crumble and fall prey to the anarchists of the air?

At sea, the danger can’t be escaped…

Classic crime fiction from the 1960s set around a Thames mooring.

‘Compton has been one of Britain’s most original and consistent novelists since the late Sixties, but he has never received the attention he deserves…Compton’s prose is fine-tuned, his human insights sharp, and his narrative pace filled with the weird synchronicities and dissonances of how violent things usually happen’ INDEPENDENT

Classic crime from the 1960s from a master of suspense

The first novel in the acclaimed Ben Anderson series.

‘Compton has been one of Britain’s most original and consistent novelists since the late Sixties, but he has never received the attention he deserves…Compton’s prose is fine-tuned, his human insights sharp, and his narrative pace filled with the weird synchronicities and dissonances of how violent things usually happen’ INDEPENDENT

Kandri Hinjuman was never meant to be a soldier. His brother Mektu was never meant for this world. Rivals since childhood, they are drafted into a horrific war led by a madwoman-Prophet, and survive each day only by hiding their disbelief. Kandri is good at blending in, but Mektu is hopeless: impulsive, erratic-and certain that a demon is stalking him. Is this madness or a second sense? Either way, Kandri knows that Mektu’s antics will land them both in early graves.

But all bets are off when the brothers’ simmering feud explodes into violence, and holy blood is spilled. Kandri and Mektu are taken for contract killers and must flee for their lives-to the one place where they can hope to disappear: the sprawling desert known as the Land that Eats Men. In this eerie wilderness, the terrain is as deadly as the monsters, ghouls, and traffickers in human flesh. Here the brothers find strange allies: an aging warlord, a desert nomad searching for her family, a lethal child-soldier still in her teens. They also find themselves in possession of a secret that could bring peace to the continent of Urrath. Or unthinkable carnage.

On their heels are the Prophet’s death squads. Ahead lie warring armies, sandstorms, evil spirits and the deeper evil of human greed. But hope beckons as well-if the “Master Assassins” can expose the lie that has made them the world’s most wanted men.

For eons, King Oblivion, Ph.D., was one of the most ruthless supervillains the world has ever known. As the CEO of the ISS (International Society of Supervillains) for half a century, he was personally responsible for numerous nefarious acts, including Nixon’s presidential election, stealing the country of Japan, Star Wars: Episode I-III, and Milli Vanilli, just to name a few.

Since his untimely (and inexplicable) passing, Matt D. Wilson, who was found rotting in one of Oblivion’s numerous dungeons, has discovered in his giant lair (located in the Earth’s mantle) what seems to be the early workings of the villain’s ultimate manifesto. Though in-depth research (and paper cuts), Wilson reviewed endless documents and has compiled numerous unedited chapters, email correspondences, and various threats which combine tell the “life story” of this anti-hero.

Supreme Villainy is an intimate look into the mastermind who once ruled the globe with an iron fist (and ray gun). For the first time ever, readers will learn of his birth (which has never been noted on record), rise to power, and domination of the world as we know it today. Revealed inside are never-before-seen notes, illustrations, and personal letters which, now collected, show a glimpse into the once-infamous villain’s uncompleted manuscript, and maybe a hint into who the real man was behind that horrible mask.

On Earth, life held for him only the fate of a recluse, confined to daydreams and the lore of ancient wonders but apparently destined never to share them – until he found the formula that let him cross space to the world of the Green Star. There, appearing in the body of a fabled hero, he is to experience all that his heroic fantasies had yearned for. A princess to be saved . . . an invader to be thwarted . . . and otherworldly monsters to be faced!

A thrilling adventure in the grand tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs, as only Lin Carter can tell it!

In the royal palace of conquered Luscany, Princess Nette chafes at the bonds that confine her to a life of empty ceremony. Meanwhile, in a less salubrious quarter, Serin Guille’s father scents success in his search for the secret of immortality. Then a gypsy blade flashes at the ice fair. An imperial emissary lies bleeding by the frozen river, and the uneasy peace is shattered.

The Eschalan overlords will not rest until they have revenge. Serin saw it happen, saw the blow fall. Now she can never go home . . .

The Dag Hammarskjold takes off from Woomera, Australia for the new human settlement on Mars.
Planet Earth is being eaten away by uncontrollable pollution, starvation and disease. Its life expectancy is nil.
This is the last spaceship, its passengers the last people on earth with any hope. But it is never to reach its objective. Five thousand years later its captain wakes up to a new world undiscovered in his time and to a bitter experience he must fight alone.

It’s never easy being a knight, especially for a practical Eudoric Dambertson, whose mind and temperature are better suited to trade than to the highly impractical demands of chivalry. Take the simple matter of courting a wife. To please his potential father-in-law, the enchanter Baldonius, the young man must bring back two square yards of dragon hide. Only then can he earn his knightly spurs and the hand of the beauteous Lusina. But battles with dragons always seem to go better in the ballads.

Earth was a weird and dire place after the plagues.

The few humans who survived could not bear the touch of each other; they lived in the enormous, endless caverns hacked out of the bowels of the earth for the bombs that never came.

And on one man rested the hopes of the world, though he did not know it. Sam Sewell only knew he had to journey, despite forbidding perils from the darkness of the past, into the ultimate fastnesses of the unknown to rescue the timeless wisdom of the witch Desponia . . .

When the Order of Planetary Engineers sent Hall Davenant to Ganymede for a terraforming survey, they knew that the job on the airless, frigid Jovian moon would be tough. Changing it to resemble Earth – with fertile land, water and good air – was the biggest and most important planet conversion job ever attempted by the Engineers. But they hadn’t counted on the already too Earthlike behaviour of the Ganymede colonists, who had never altered the ancient Earth-born habits of intrigue, bigotry and double-dyed treachery!

In a Moslem-free universe where Constantinople never fell, the Byzantine Empire has not only survived but flourished, developing technology at an earlier date than in our universe. And spreading its power and influence throughout the world. But Byzantium has enemies who are jealous of its glory and would like nothing better than to bring it down and loot its treasures.

Basil Argyros, Byzantium’s top agent, as his hands full, thwarting un-Byzantine plots and making the world safe for the Byzantine Empire.