Search Results for: in-the-beginning

Mase Everard is a man with a mission. As an Unattached Agent of the Time Patrol, he’s to go anyplace – and anytime! – where humanity’s transcendent future is threatened by the alteration of the past. This is Manse’s profession, and his burden: for how much suffering, throughout human history, can he bear to “preserve”?

Wanda Tamberley is a Patrol member in search of her mission. Recruited from sunny California in the late 20th century, she’d rather serve as a scientist in the research branch, exploring Earth’s flora and fauna in epochs long past. But as hints accumulate from the Patrol’s mysterious leaders uptime, it’s beginning to look as if a lot of human history depends on her personal decisions – and Manse’s.

Meanwhile, the Exaltationists are on the loose, determined to revise human history and rule Time forever and Manse Everard is sworn to stop them, no matter what the heartbreaking cost!

Starfarers is the story of an expedition into the far reaches of the galaxy, where answers to mankind’s greatest questions await.

The saga begins when evidence of an advanced civilization is discovered by SETI astronomers. “Trails” observed in the sky are thought to be from starships travelling at the speed of light, an enigma that spurs scientific minds until this breakthrough is achieved by mankind as well. An expedition is then mounted and an eclectic team of scientists chosen to journey into the sector where the intelligent life is allegedly located.

But because the destination of the starship, Envoy, and her crew is 60,000 light-years away, the time required to reach the point of origin of the signals and return is 120,000 years – longer than Homo sapiens has been on Earth. And though the crew is ready to face the ramifications of such a trek, no one is prepared for what awaits them at the outer edge of the cosmos – or back at the planet they once called home.

Starfarers is a story of patience and immediacy, but most of all of courage. It is a saga for anyone who has ever felt the emptiness of life on Earth and found the missing substance in the spaces between the stars.

The Fleet of Stars sees the return of Anson Guthrie, Poul Anderson’s iconoclastic hero from Harvest of Stars. Suspecting a conspiracy to suppress humankind’s freedom, Guthrie begins a dangerous journey across the realm of comets…

Before there was an England, there was Roma Mater . . .

Before King Arthur, there was the King of Ys . . .

In the wild and eldritch time between the fall of Rome and the rise of our own age, the kingdom of Ys was ruled by the magic of The Nine and the might of the king, their husband. How the Nine conspired with their gods to bring him to them, though he belonged to Mithras and to Rome, is only the beginning of an enchanted saga that weaves together Celtic myth with distant memories of Roman Britain – and adds a magic of its own.

In the Foreword, writing fifty years ago, the author describes his vision of a new space age; he predicts that by 1985 the age of space piracy will begin and that a Space Navy will be established, speculating that some of his younger readers might participate: “I hope that none of you serve with the pirates. The pay might not be so good in the Space Navy, but you’ll live longer.”

Travel out along the galaxy’s Perseid Arm. Branch off to follow the ten thousand stars of Mircea’s Wisp. Eventually you will come to the Purple Rose System – three stars, Lorca, Sing and Syrene, that seem about to drift away into the void. Three planets circle Syrene. On one, Cadwal, there is Life. Long ago the Naturalist Society of Earth had listed Cadwal as a natural preserve. An administration centre had been set up and staffed to protect the planet from all exploitation. Araminta Station. Now, centuries later, the young Glawen Clattuc is beginning to wonder what the future may hold for him in the hierarchic, carefully ordered hereditary society that is life on Cadwal.

In the reaches of Mircea’s Whips the convoluted plots and politics that have swirled around the House of Clattuc and the Conservancy of Cadwal are beginning to unravel. But what remains for Glawen Clattuc to discover could bring down a dozen powerful families on as many worlds. Throy concludes the Cadwal Chronicles, which began with Araminta Station and continued in Ecce and Old Earth.

Baby Is Three is the sixth volume in the series devoted to the complete works of one of science fiction’s titans. Like others in the series, this one includes extensive notes and background information on each story by editor Paul Williams. The early 1950s, during which this material was written, was the beginning of Sturgeon’s greatest creative period. The title story for this collection was later expanded into the International Fantasy Award winning novel More Than Human. Sturgeon’s whimsical, sardonic sense of humor lifts his work out of the mundane realm of genre science fiction. This wide-ranging collection shows precisely why he has been cited as a primary influence by authors as varied as Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, and Carl Sagan.

‘A Robot shall not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm’.

That’s Asimov’s celebrated First Law of Robotics. And in the 21st century, all domestic robots are programmed according to that Law.

But something had gone terribly wrong with Tik-Tok’s ‘asimov circuits’, and he sets out to injure as many people as possible – preferably fatally – while maintaining the exterior of a mild-mannered artist and a sincere campaigner for robot rights. So, like any self-respecting crook and murderer, he moves into politics, becoming the first robot candidate for Vice-President of the United States.

Tik-Tok follows his maniacal progress from humble beginnings to the top of the heap – or almost. Because in his devious cunning, there was one element that Tik-Tok had forgotten…

Winner of the BSFA Award for best novel, 1983

From the vaults of The SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal introduction to the razor-sharp wit of John Sladek.

An important voice in the New Wave movement, Sladek had stories published in Harlan Ellison’s seminal anthology, DANGEROUS VISIONS, as well as in Michael Moorcock’s ground-breaking NEW WORLDS magazine. Perhaps best known for the ambitious robot tales RODERICK and RODERICK AT RANDOM, he is now recognized as one of SF’s most brilliant satirists. This omnibus collects novels THE REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM, THE MULLER-FOKKER EFFECT and BSFA AWARD-winning TIK-TOK.

THE REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM: Wompler’s Walking Babies aren’t selling like they used to, so the company develops Project 32, producing self-replicating mechanisms designed to repair inter-cellular breakdowns. But then the metal boxes begin crawling about the laboratory, feeding voraciously on metal and multiplying…

THE MULLER-FOKKER EFFECT: Bob Shairp – a writer and dreamer – has agreed to be a guinea-pig in a military experiment to find out if his personality can be turned into data and stored on computer. But a computing error quickly destroys Shairp’s physical body, leaving his mind stranded in an encoded world. Can the process be reversed?

TIK-TOK: Something has gone very seriously wrong with Tik-Tok’s ‘asimov circuits’. They should keep him on the straight and narrow, following Asimov’s First Law of Robotics: ‘a robot shall not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.’ But they don’t. While maintaining the outward appearance of a mild-mannered robot, albeit one with artistic tendencies and sympathy for the robot rights movement, Tik-Tok’s real agenda is murderously different. He seems intent on injuring – preferably fatally – as many people as possible. Almost inevitably, a successful career in crime and general mayhem leads to a move into politics and Tik-Tok becomes the first robot candidate for Vice President of the United States.

‘The entire head had been stripped of skin, creating a nightmarish sculpture in gelled blood…’
The hideous apparition that confronted John Redpath almost defied description. It was the beginning of a horrific ordeal that would cause him to question his own sanity…
A member of a telepathic research project, Redpath believes the cause to be side-effects from the experimental drugs he is taking – but then stranger things begin to happen. He wakes up to find himself in America…he is drawn to a local house occupied by a bizarre group of people leading an artificial and peculiar life…which events are really happening?
Slowly an explanation emerges, more terrifying than anything he could have imagined…

Thirteen fantastical tales, including What Time Do You Call This? – a wildly ironic story about a bank robber who shuttles to an alternate universe and runs into himself. Communication – a modest plan by a shaman spiritualist gets out of hand when the dead begin to contact him. And Isles Where Good Men Lie – a space caravan of scale-armoured, bacteria-laden immigrants begins to make landings on Earth every twenty-two hours.. and is likely to do so for the next twelve centuries.

It’s the early 21st century. Ed Stone says he’s been in suspended animation since the 1930s. He says he was kidnapped by aliens. He says they sent him forth on a mission: to convince the nations of the world to build massive vault, a mile on each side, in which humanity’s billions will lie in suspension and survive the impending destruction of the Earth.

Ed Stone says all these things, and the strangest part is that people believe him – ordinary people and powerful people alike. So begins Why Do Birds, a classically science-fictional novel of ideas and quite possibly Damon Knight’s most haunting work, a terrifying tale of deceit and human folly.

Humpty Dumpty is a breakthrough work for this acknowledged master of the fantastic, an intriguing, entertaining, and immensely appealing novel of a man trying to make sense of a world gone mad. The tale begins when Wellington Stout wakes in an Italian hospital, uncertain how or why he came to be there. Gradually he learns that he was shot in the head in a Milan restaurant the night before his stepdaughter’s wedding, perhaps because of a mysterious packet his brother asked him to deliver. The doctors tell him he is fortunate to be alive, but Stout has his doubts. For the bullet that has entered his skull has also opened cracks in the fabric of reality, and, as in the old nursery rhyme, no force on Earth or in Heaven can put it back together again. Soon Stout is hearing voices foretelling his doom, encountering antediluvian cabals of dentists, extraterrestrial shoe salesmen, gargantuan rodents, seductive adolescent sibyls, and giant craters opening across the face of North America, and traveling on an uncertain odyssey through a distorted landscape made of the fragments of his own life and memory.

The room was quiet; the man in front of the mirror was the only living things there, and he was too horrified to utter a sound.

In the mirror, five faces stared back at him: one young and ruddy, which was his own, and four that did not belong in that place at all, for they were wrinkled, malevolent, small as crabapples and blue as smoke.

So begins Damon Knight’s ‘Be My Guest’, a story of the human race possessed by things that were – well, not exactly demons . . . but not exactly not demons, either.

It’s just one of the unpredictably imaginative tales in this fascinating collection by a modern master of science fiction.

Chemical symbol… atomic number… atomic weight…

Scientific terms for gold… but science can’t begin to explain the mystery and magic of gold.

It was gold that lured the ‘Secret Legion’ – as oddly mixed a group of adventures as any song or story – into the world’s most treacherous desert.

And gold they found – a golden man, and exotic golden woman, a huge golden tiger, and an eerie golden snake.

Gold brought them together… gold made them enemies in a battle to the death… gold held the key to the mysterious forces that assailed them.

Jack Williamson, alchemist with words, spins a rare web of adventure, fantasy and science… a gem from the golden age of Weird Tales, now available in book form for the first time.

Brother to Demons, Brother to Gods begins with a genetic engineering program conceived by the Smithwicks, a family of “Creators” who first improve on inadequate Homo sap (“preman”) with two laboratory species and then come up with the “stargods.” These powerful Frankenstein fabrications, however, send the Creators chasing back to their labs in a last desperate attempt to undo the consequences of their folly. A thousand years later, two “preman” waifs, Davey and Bugler, find unsuspected powers genetically programmed into their minds and bodies, and realize that they are to be the parents of the liberating “ultiman.”

In the beginning…

… there was Egan Drake, the genius who dreamed of spreading mankind among the galaxies.

Then came Megan, who took on her brother’s mantle and made his imaginings real. She gathered around her the finest in their fields – biology and astronautics, computer science and fusion propulsion – and fired them with her vision.

And finally was born The Project: a thousand tiny spacecraft crawling like electromechanical wombs towards the stars, each bearing the genetic seeds for a future colony of man.

And some fell on stony ground, and some fell on fertile ground and some…

The Dorsai are the finest soldiers ever trained to fight and win against all odds. The Spirit of Dorsai is an illumination of the heart and soul of the planet Dorsai and its people, showing with epic clarity and unforgettable vision how why the Dorsai fight and live.

It tells of the beginning when the first Dorsai was former by mercenaries willing to fight other’s battles to buy freedom for their own homes. It tells how even children and old men fought for the dream of Dorsai. From the mouth of Amanda Morgan, direct descendant of two illustrious women who bore her name, the full story is told in all its splendour.

By the workings of chance Bleys Ahrens was born the genetic equal of Hal Mayne, the hero of The Final Encyclopedia, but he was destined by nurture to a far different fate. Raised alone by his unhappy Exotic mother, Bleys was an outcast from every society until his half-brother Dahno claimed him. Disciplined by Friendlies, schooled by Exotics, Dahno was beginning to build an interplanetary network of half-breeds, who called themselves “Others”.

But Dahno thought only of gaining wealth and power for himself; Bleys saw an opportunity to challenge the Dorsai for control of the Human Worlds.

So begins one of the most celebrated stories in fantasy literature . . . packed full of mystery, deep themes and incredible prose, meet Severian the Torturer and follow him on his journey across the great world of Urth

Severian is a torturer, born to the guild and with an exceptionally promising career ahead of him . . . until he falls in love with one of his victims, a beautiful young noblewoman.

Her excruciations are delayed for some months and, out of love, Severian helps her commit suicide and escape her fate. For a torturer, there is no more unforgivable act. In punishment he is exiled from the guild and his home city to the distant metropolis of Thrax with little more than Terminus Est, a fabled sword, to his name.

Along the way he has to learn to survive in a wider world without the guild – a world in which he has already made both allies and enemies. And a strange gem is about to fall into his possession, which will only make his enemies pursue him with ever-more determination . . .

Winner of the World Fantasy Award for best novel, 1981
Winner of the BSFA Award for best novel, 1982

Readers can’t stop reading The Shadow of the Torturer:

‘Full of rich characters and great imagination’ Mark Lawrence, author of Red Sister

‘A dark jewel . . . He has a mastery of language not often seen in fantasy writing . . . Couple this with an original and unique, highly imaginative and complex worldbuilding and the high praise is warranted‘ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

‘This is a picaresque fantasy with a difference, for our hero Severian is no wide-eyed country boy from the shire, but an apprentice torturer, thoroughly schooled in his trade’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

‘There are certain books that can be considered life-changing experiences. Gene Wolfe is an author who has written one of those for me’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
‘The Book of the New Sun Tetralogy is one of the great achievements in science fiction and is a MUST READ for fans of the genre. HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION!!!’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

‘In addition to being unique in style, The Shadow of the Torturer is a gorgeous piece of work: passionate storytelling (heart-wrenching in places), fascinating insights into nature and the human condition, beautiful prose’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

‘Genre fiction at its finest. Original, difficult and well-crafted, it is easy to see how Wolfe is regarded as a writer’s writer’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

The human race is in decline, is withdrawing into protective city shells. Could contact with civilised aliens revive the probing curiosity once the hallmark of human achievement? Are there any such beings in the Universe? If there are, can they be contacted?

The beginnings of an answer, oddly enough, begins to form when Alex Craven sets out in search of his girlfriend Nicole and finds her working in the marshlands of the Angles. Reluctantly he becomes involved in her work. She is experimenting with empathic communication between twins. Eventually, accompanied by one of two particularly gifted twins, he leaves Earth for New Carthage.

In that strange world a shadow-line civilisation is in perpetual slow motion to avoid the intolerable daytime heat. But what lies beyond the shadow line . . . ?

To escape his life in England, John Trencher volunteers to teach schoolchildren on a tropical island. But paradise has its darker, less innocent side, and a web of violence, taboo and sexuality soon begins to wind itself around him.

In the Hollow of the Deep-Sea Wave contains the compelling and erotic title tale, and seven short stories on similar themes.

In another world, somewhere in space and time, two countries – Bellogard and Chorny – are locked in perpetual war, conducted by magic. Each of the main members of the two countries’ courts – king, queen, prince, bishop, knight and squire – has their own form of magic, and special ways of moving magically. A war may continue for centuries, until one side succeeds in killing the other side’s king, at which point the whole world vanishes, only to reappear and have the cycle begin again. . .

Pedino is a young Bellogardian who becomes the queen’s squire and, as part of his training, is sent into a seedier part of the city to uncover a Chornian spy. During his adventures he meets and falls in love with a whore, Sara, who turns out to be a Chornian bishop’s squire. Pedino succeeds in killing the other Chornian bishop – a remarkable achievement for a mere squire; but in the manoeuvres which follow Chorny proves to have outwitted its rival, and Pedino’s whole world is threatened with extinction.

There have been many stories modelled on chess games, but none so ingenious and enjoyable as Ian Watson’s latest novel. And, as one would expect from Watson, the story of Bellogard and Chorny is only the beginning. When Pedino and Sara manage to escape the destruction of their universe, they find themselves in a series of even more bizarre worlds operating under still stranger rules, as they seek to discover the purpose of their existence, and the meaning of their universe. Queenmagic, Kingmagic is Ian Watson in sparkling, exuberant form.