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The Gone-Away gods were real, once, and taller than towers. But they’re long dead now, buried in the catacombs beneath the city of Eth, where their calcified organs radiate an eldritch power that calls out to anyone hardy enough to live in this cut-throat, war-torn land. Some survivors are human, while others are close enough, but all are struggling to carve out their lives in a world both unforgiving and wondrous.

Darkly comic and viciously original, Viscera is an unforgettable journey through swords-and-sorcery fantasy where strangeness gleams from every nook and cranny.

A gripping retelling of the myth of Perseus by award-winning author Gwyneth Jones, writing as Ann Halam.

Perseus, the God-Touched son of Zeus, lives in luxury on the island of Serifos. But trouble is brewing in the world – Gods and mortals are bringing discord closer to his home shores.

When a beautiful stranger, a fugitive from another disaster zone, arrives on the island, Perseus is smitten. But Andromeda isn’t all she seems. She must die to save her people, and a stunning, world-changing discovery will die with her, unless Perseus abandons everything to confront the Medusa quest.

You didn’t make an Adapted Man with just a wave of the wand. It involved an elaborate constellation of techniques, known collectively as pantropy, that changed the human pattern in a man’s shape and chemistry before he was born.

But the pantropists didn’t stop with biology. Education, thoughts, ancestors and the world itself were changed, because the Adapted Men were produced to live and thrive in the alien environments found only in space. They were crucial to a daring plan to colonize the universe.

And millennia later, it is only fitting that they should return to a long forgotten planetary system to colonise a hostile world called . . . Earth.

In the summer of 1921, a disenchanted journalist escapes the rat race for a drive in the country. But Mr. Barnstaple’s trip exceeds his expectations when he and other motorists are swept 3,000 years into the future. The inadvertent time travelers arrive in a world that corresponds exactly to Barnstaple’s ideals: a utopian state, free of crime, poverty, war, disease, and bigotry. Unfettered by the constraints of government and organized religion, the citizens lead rich, meaningful lives, passed in pursuit of their creative fancies. Barnstaple’s traveling companions, however, quickly contrive a scheme to remake the utopia in the image of their twentieth-century world.

It all began when someone tried to push Creed into the flesh pool to be ingested. The assassination failed, but Creed was never the same again. Because it launched the new cliff-dwellers of Creed’s colony onto a new course of life – which could lead to humanity’s re-emergence as Earth’s masters.

In those far future days, Earth’s masters were two trees. Not trees as we know them, but two Everest-high growths, whose sentient roots and fast-growing branches dominated every living thing on the world. Men lived between their arboreal combat.

They have lived among us for centuries-distant, separate, just out of sight. They fill our myths, our legends, and the stories we tell our children in the dark of night. They come from the air, from water, from earth, and from fire. What are these creatures that enjoin out imagination? Faeries.

Megan is an artist who draws seascapes. Jonah owns a shop devoted to treasures from the deep. Their lives, so strongly touched by the ocean, become forever intertwined when enchanting people of the sea lure them further into the underwater world-and away from each other.

Dumarest has traced the lost planet of Earth to one remote corner of the galaxy, but he still lacks its precise co-ordinates.

Somewhere on the cyber-dominated police-world of Technos lives the mysterious woman who can help him. And the only way to find her is to become a slave . . .



(First published 1972)

Harry Keogh, Necroscope, is no more . . .

And the Wamphyri are back – not only in the Vampire World, where the ancient northern ice has melted to release the original, the most evil, most powerful vampires of all time, but in our world, too. Without Necroscope – the one man who could talk to the dead and undead alike – only Ben Trask and the weirdly talented espers of his secret organisation, E- Branch, stand between Mankind’s survival and its domination by terrible invaders from Starside.

Trask: human lie-detector; David Chung: locator of all things evil; Ian Goodfly: precog, whose glimpses of the ever-furtive future have so often saved the lives of his E-Branch colleagues. Three men, their technology and the esoteric talents against shape-changing challengers from a parallel universe. The odds don’t look good, and Harry Keogh is dead and gone, his motes scattered throughout the Universes of Light. But as Harry himself was witness, death isn’t like that . . .

Harry may be dead, but his legacy lives on.

‘My favourite American crime-writer’ New York Herald Tribune

Ireland, 1749. Dennis McDermott, a witty, charming and daring young man with shades of the Scarlet Pimpernel, lives two lives in eighteenth-century Dublin. Fashionable society idolises him as a handsome, rakish man of their world, never suspecting that he is the mysterious leader of the Irish underground whose nightly missions continue to outwit the British authorities.

But Dennis’ cover as an Anglophile who has renounced his Gaelic roots is under threat from an ever-more inquisitive policeman, and he also is embroiled in another cat-and-mouse game . . . falling in love.

The ultimate maquiladora. Montezuma Strip: First World tech and Third World wages, sprawling from L.A. to East Elpaso Juarez, Guyamas to Phoenix; a thousand gangs, a million locos; and a few wealthy beyond the dreams of gods…


And Federale Angel Cardenas, a living lie detector, is a top cop on the blistering streets of virtual reality scams and cryogenic kidnaps, where talking animals are programmed to kill, computer screens can spit murder, and even the Holy Blessed Virgin’s ghost runs extortion rackets.


Once Angel Cardenas was blind. But now he sees…straight into the heart of darkness that rules…


MONTEZUMA STRIP

It was supercivilization, a Utopia. At its core were the Cybernetic Brains, brains taken from geniuses who were promised they would live forever.
Then engineer Al Demming discovers the truth accidentally, the terrible truth transmitted to him by one of the brains. The brains are in reality slaves and in terrible torment. It was now up to Demming to stop the inhuman practice.
Just when he planned to make the announcement to the Governing Board, Demming learned that the Board knew about the hideous living death. What was the real reason behind the facade? How could he convince the Board to suspend the system before the Brains revolted and destroyed the world?

In Old Earth’s clandestine world of ambassador-spies, Michelangelo Kusanagi-Jones and Vincent Katherinessen were once a starring team. But ever since a disastrous mission, they have been living separate lives in a universe dominated by a ruthless Coalition – one that is about to reunite them.

The pair are dispatched to New Amazonia as diplomatic agents. Allegedly, they are to return priceless art. Covertly, they seek to tap its energy supply. But in reality, one has his mind set on treason. And among the extraordinary women of New Amazonia, in a season of festival, betrayal, and disguise, he will find a new ally – and a force beyond any that humans have known . . .

Into a world armed to the teeth there suddenly comes a strange gospel of disarmament. Briefed to investigate the intrigue is Sidney Boyd of MI5, and from a murdered diplomat his adventures take him to the fantastic Earth Two, an exact duplicate of our own planet in so far as living beings are con­cerned, and it falls to him-with the help of Orwena Exburg of Earth Two-to try and smash the deadly plan which is being matured against the peaceful nations of the world. Boyd and Orwena solve the mystery of Earth Two after making a landing on the moon and discovering something about it never before suspected by Earth scientists…

In the beginning, before Man and the insect Thranx became allies, in the days when the reptilian AAnn were just occasional raiders of the Thranx colony worlds, one young Thranx agricultural expert lived a life of quiet desperation.

A dreamer in a world of sensible well adjusted socialised beings, Ryo buried himself in his work of reclaiming marshland until…

Until he met the Aliens.

Grotesque two legged creatures, unpleasingly soft skinned, gross in their appetites, alarming in their movements, all in all pretty revolting species, yet his curiosity overcame his queasiness and he befriended them.

And discovered they were called Man.

The first book in the 5 volume Demon Princes saga. The protagonists parents were murdered by a posse of 5 galactic criminals, the “demon princes”. He vows revenge, and eliminates them one by one. In the process Vance does what he excels at: creating strange worlds, environments, customs, and adaptations that humans have made to live in these conditions.

Pardon This Intrusion gathers together 47 pieces by John Clute, some written as long ago as 1985, though most are recent. The addresses and essays in Part One, “Fantastika in the World Storm”, all written in the twenty-first century, reflect upon the dynamic relationship between fantastika – an umbrella term Clute uses to describe science fiction, horror and fantasy – and the world we live in now.

Of these pieces, “Next”, a contemporary response to 9/11, has not been revised; everything else in Part One has been reworked, sometimes extensively. Parts Two, Three and Four include essays and author studies and introductions to particular works; as they are mostly recent, Clute has felt free to rework them where necessary. The few early pieces – including “Lunch with AJ and the WOMBATS”, a response to the Scientology scandal at the Brighton WorldCon in 1987 – are unchanged.

It’s the mid-twenty-first century. The oceans are rising, the world’s population is growing, terrorist organizations are running rampant, and it has become readily apparent that humanity’s destructive nature is at the heart of the matter.

When all faith in humanity seems lost, a startling proposal is announced: Solomon Chavez, the mysterious son of the world’s first trillionaire, announces that he, backed by a consortium of governments and wealthy donors, will build an interstellar starship-one that will convey a select group of six thousand individuals, all under the age of fifty, with no living relatives, to a recently discovered planet in the Epsilon Eridani star system. His goal is lofty: to build a colony that will ensure the survival of the human race. However, Solomon Chavez has a secret that he doesn’t dare share with the rest of the world.

With the launch date rapidly approaching, great odds must be overcome so that the starship Solomon’s Arrow can fulfill what the human race has dreamed of for millennia: reaching for the stars. The goal is noble, but looming on the horizon are threats nobody could have imagined-ones that may spell the end of all human life and end the universe as we know it.

First came the tourists…


Ondine was a resort planet. Sixteen million tourists travelled there from just about every world you could think of to live and love in sixteen million different ways.


Then came the machists…


They had gobbled up world after world, spreading their culture to thousands of different races with a brutal, vicious, but most effective system. They were inhuman, unthinking…uncaring. The Combine had already seen what they had done on other worlds, seen whole populations converted into something horrible…something not quite human, non-thinking and no longer caring.


Now they had captured Ondine, and no human could save the planet.


And then Daniel came to Judgment.


Daniel was a cyborg, a former fighter pilot now wedded to a master computer and life-support system housed in a flying golden egg. He was the Combine scientists’ finest creation, a spaceship that could control twenty-two robot slaves. He was the perfect saviour for Ondine, but for one thing. Everyone seemed to forget that deep inside that golden egg was a very human being…

When an out-worlder’s body was found in the river, Thissel knew where the criminal was – behind one of the masks worn by the remaining out-worlders on Sirene. But how could he tell which one, on a world where everybody lived behind masks, where men never spoke but sang to instruments, and where any act of intervention with another man’s business was punishable by death!

It is the early summer of 1945, and war reigns in the Pacific Rim with no end in sight. Back in the States, Hollywood B-movie star Syms Thorley lives in a very different world, starring as the Frankenstein-esque Corpuscula, and Kha-Ton-Ra, the living Mummy. But the U.S. Navy has a new role waiting for Thorley, the role of a lifetime.


The top secret Knickerbocker Project is putting the finishing touches on the ultimate biological weapon: a breed of gigantic, fire-breathing, proto-Godzillas engineered to stomp and burn cities on the Japanese mainland. The Navy calls upon Thorley to don a rubber suit and become the merciless Gorgantis, starring in a film that simulates the destruction of a miniature Japanese metropolis. If the demonstration succeeds, the Japanese will surrender and many thousands of lives will be spared; if it fails, the horrible mutant lizards must be unleashed.


One thing is certain: Syms Thorley must now give the most terrifyingly convincing performance of his life.

What unfathomed secrets lay sleeping in this eerie world of water?

The Clan knew almost nothing about the giant sphere of water they inhabited, and even less about the sun and planets nearby in space. Living amidst a cluster of nets anchored to the roots of a giant plant, they were aware only of their unending quest for precious air bubbles; and of the unending threat from the ever-hungry Hora. Those who fell victim to the beasts’ voracious tentacles were left to sink slowly to the depths, where an awesome and unknown being awaited them. He was the greatest mystery of Clan existence – until that is, the world began to change, until the current began to draw the city down to the realms of Ka.

His wild career as a space pirate ended, Grimes faced his toughest assignment – he was “punished” by being made governor of the anarchists’ own planet! John Grimes, living legend of the spaceways, had been in and out of some cosmic catastrophes but this threatened to reach his luck’s ultimate breaking point!

An influx of planetary refugees had made that world a paradise of cheap labor and the original anarchist colonists had become such masters of wealth that no mere outsider could hope to dictate “law and order” to them. They had their own ideas which included slavery, treachery, and utter villainy.

Grimes’ first task as governor would be simply to stay alive with a whole world plotting his murder!

‘She is unique. She is legend’ THE TIMES

‘A tour de force’ EVENING STANDARD

‘A wonderfully mordant analyst of human weakness’ Martin Amis

Earth, like the rest of the Known Worlds, has fallen to the Shing. Scattered here and there, small groups of humans live in a state of semi-barbarism. They have lost the skills, science and knowledge that had been Earth’s in the golden age of the League of Worlds, and whenever a colony of humans tries to rekindle the embers of a half-forgotten technology, the Shing, with their strange, mindlying power, crush them out. There is one man who can stand against the malign Shing, but he is an alien with amber eyes and must first prove to paranoid humanity that he himself is not a creature of the Shing.

Blood was what they called that mountain town and the forbidding land around it – and the name was significant. Folks there knew a secret that would have shocked the world…but nobody was ever going to get out of Blood to tell. Not even when Portia Clark arrived, hot on a news story for a national magazine. Especially not her…

Clint Breen, who had been in the outside world, tried to save her. But he had to fight a tradition that drove men and women to unspeakable lusts and that ruled secretly the lives and afterlives of everything being in the county. Blood was the place where more men and women walked the night than were ever seen by day. Horror was their heritage, for they were the people that the census dared not count!