Search Results for: trips

It’s murder in a sleepy French fishing village . . .

Crime writer Ben Anderson was hoping for a peaceful honeymoon sailing in Europe. He’s solved four murders in the last three years, which is more than enough to suit him. He is, after all, a married man now. Things are going to be different.

Alas, their trip to a quiet, out-of-the-way French village is disrupted when they rescue the passengers of a boat on fire, and find themselves swept up in a chain of events that involves smugglers, car chases and – yes – murder.

‘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

In the Well-Built City, Master Drachton Below’s power is absolute, and he will not hesitate to use it. His primary method of control is through his physiognomists, who are trained to read a person’s face and body, perceiving that person’s past and secrets-and even events yet to come. These seers are the judges and jury. Now Drachton has found something that could extend his reign for eternity: a fruit that bestows immortality. To investigate its whereabouts, Below sends cold, collected physiognomist Cley to the remote mining town of Anamasobia. One at a time Cley interrogates the townspeople, performing his usual fact finding without issue. That is, until he meets the beautiful and bright Arla, who harbors a secret that could potentially turn Cley’s world upside down-and topple the Well-Built City itself.

A Kafkaesque journey into the unknown, The Physiognomy is an award-winning trip through a land where the line between reality and imagination is constantly blurred.

New Arizona a lush, virgin planet teeming with rich vegetation and a vast hoard of mineral wealth. A company had been formed to colonise and exploit it, and the spaceship Titov set out with the Board of Directors and two thousand colonists. And shortly after the trip had begun, the trouble started.

The Board of Directors was only interested in the vast profits that could be made by stripping the planet of its natural resources which could be sold to the highest bidder. Not for them the gradual establishment of a pioneer community, of farmlands and villages.

The Colonists had given up everything by leaving Earth, and they wanted a new planet where they could work, prosper and establish a new and better way of life. They were determined to thwart the directors by any means they could find.

And after landing on New Arizona, someone smashes the radio and sabotages the life-craft. Now the balance is more even – but when a real crisis erupts it seems as if neither side will be alive to win!

The Lexman Spacedrive gave man the stars – but at a fantastic price.

Interstellar exploration, colonisation, and trade became things of reality. The benefits to Earth were enormous but, because of the Fitzgerald Contraction, a man who shipped out to space could never live a normal life on Earth again. Travelling at speeds close to that of light, spacemen lived at an accelerated pace. A nine-year trip to Alpha Centauri and back seemed to take only six weeks to men on a spaceship. When they returned, their friends and relatives had aged enormously in comparison, old customs had changed, even the language was different.

Alan was a spacer, just like his whole family – until, suddenly and without intending to, he in turn jumped ship and remained on Earth. There were times he regretted that. Earth was a bewildering and utterly hostile place. To stay alive, he had to play a ruthless game – and he couldn’t even find anyone to tell him the rules. . . .


First published in 1958.

Justin’s having the worst trip ever. He and his mother are Time Traders, traveling undercover to different alternate realities of Earth so they can take valuable resources back to their own timeline. In some of these worlds, Germany won World War I or the world has been destroyed by nuclear warfare. Justin and his mother are in an America that never became the United States: each state is like a country, and many of them are at war with one another. Their mission takes them to Virginia, which is on the verge of bloody violence with Ohio.

Beckie is from California and, like the rest of her world, is unaware that Time Traders exist. The only reason she’s in small-town Virginia is because her grandmother dragged her there to visit old relatives. Beckie is just as horrified by the violence and racism of the alternate Virginia as Justin is, and the two are drawn to each other. But when full-fledged war breaks out between Ohio and Virginia, including a biologically designed plague, will either of them manage to get back home? Forget about home: will they make it out alive?

When Cassidy Walker stumbles into the middle of the highway, bloodied and bruised, Bard college in flames behind her, and manages to flag down a ride, she thinks the worst is over. Arriving in the nearby town of Red Hook, Cassidy tries to call her parents but the phone lines are down – no radio or television signals are being received either. The town, it seems, is cut off from the rest of the world. But that’s not the strangest thing. Not by a long shot. Nobody in Red Hook has even heard of Bard College. Furthermore, they claim that Cassidy is not a music student, but a hand at the local stable. And she has lived in a house she can’t remember, with people she barely knows, for over a year.


The world is fracturing. Cassidy just knows it – just as she knows that she is responsible. As Cassidy undertakes the ultimate road trip, through bubbles of reality, she will find that everything she thinks she knows about herself is wrong. Is she losing her mind or is the world a far more complex place than she thought?

The Collected Stories Volume 3: Something Wild is Loose (1969 – 1972)

Winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, Robert Silverberg is one of the all time greats of science fiction. A professional writer for more than half a century, his short story output has been prolific and exceptional in quality.

This series of nine volumes will collect all of the short stories and novella-length that SF Grand Master Silverberg wants to take their place on the permanent shelf.

Each volume will be roughly 150,000-200,000 words, with classics and lesser known gems alike. The author has also graced us with a lengthy introduction and extensive story notes for each tale.

Contents:
Something Wild is Loose
In Entropy’s Jaws
The Reality Trip
Going
Caliban
Good News from the Vatican
Thomas the Proclaimer
When We Went to See the End of the World
Push No More
The Wind and the Rain
Some Notes on the Pre-Dynastic Epoch
The Feast of St. Dionysus
What We Learned from This Morning’s Newspaper
The Mutant Season
Caught in the Organ Draft
Many Mansions

In the third book of his Zombie series, Scott Kenemore brings the explosive horror thriller of an undead outbreak in the city of Indianapolis. Zombie, Indiana takes place during the same timeline as the outbreaks in his books Zombie, Ohio and Zombie, Illinois, and has the same punch as the previous two.

Zombie, Indiana explores the impact of an invading zombie horde on a trio of Hoosier protagonists . . . each of whom have some dark secrets to keep. When the governor’s daughter mysteriously disappears on a field trip, IMPD Special Sergeant James Nolan, scholarship student Kesha Washington, and Governor Hank Burleson must all come together not only to find the governor’s daughter, but also to undertake a quest to redeem the very soul of the state itself . . . all while under constant attack from the living dead.

With humorous, memorable characters, tense action sequences, and brutal zombie violence, Zombie, Indiana will put readers in mind of some of the most compelling works of popular fiction. At once a mystery, a thriller, and a horror novel, Kenemore strikes again with this rollicking tour through America’s heartland that is nothing but a tour de force for zombie fiction fans!

Grad-school dropout Matt Fuller is toiling as a lowly research assistant at MIT when, while measuring quantum relationships between gravity and light, his calibrator disappears – and reappears, one second later. In fact, every time Matt hits the reset button, the machine goes missing twelve times longer.

After tinkering with the calibrator, Matt is convinced that what he has in his possession is a time machine. And by simply attaching a metal box to it, he learns to send things through time – including a pet-store turtle, which comes back no worse for wear.

With a dead-end job and a girlfriend who left him for another man, Matt has nothing to lose by taking a time machine trip for himself. So he borrows an old car, stocks it with food and water, and ends up in the near future – under arrest for the murder of the car’s original owner, who dropped dead after seeing Matt disappear before his eyes. The only way to beat the rap is to continue time travelling until he finds a place in time safe enough to stop for good. But such a place may not exist…

Set after the Third Great War, North and South America are united into one country: Imperial America. A slave state run by a small noble elite who flaunt their wealth by using, and abusing, the one commodity that only the rich can have: human labour. But working underground, persecuted by the police, is an organization dedicated to the overthrow of government and the existing way of life and the establishment of freedom.

The Society of Thieves was the only organization that flouted authority in America Imperial: they robbed the rich to buy freedom for the slaves. They were well equipped and trained for their job and had friends and informers in high places ready to reveal where the wealth of the nobles was hidden. And Alar was the best Thief of them all – for he had senses not found in ordinary men, senses that accurately warned him when danger was near. But Alar had amnesia and did not know his true identity though sometimes he sensed that there was a purpose in his actions that was not entirely his own volition.

When Keiris, wife of the Imperial Chancellor saw him, she sensed that he was something special and helped him to elude pursuit even though it put her own life in danger. And in trips to the Moon and even the Sun itself, Alar begins to see what part he is destined to play in the struggle for men’s freedom.

It meant little to Robert Fairlie, a serious and dedicated young philologist, that the United States and Soviet Russia were at odds about the Moon. He had little interest in the first rocket landings or the bases that the two nations had established there. And he neither knew nor cared why the Americans would not agree to mutual inspections of these bases.

Yet the Americans had reason enough: and quite unexpectedly, because of his specialised knowledge of languages, he found himself sharing the burden of an incredible secret. For what the American base had yielded was astounding evidence that space had already been conquered many centuries before by a people who had once spanned the stars. There had been machines and destructive weapons beyond the comprehension of present-day scientists which, if knowledge of them fell into the wrong hands, could plunge the world into unutterable chaos.

Fairlie’s trip to the closely-guarded rocket base in New Mexico turned out to be only the first step on a fantastic journey amid the unexplored stars to the home-world of the space-conquerors of long ago.

It was a journey into the appalling reality of stellar space still haunted by the past cosmic struggle whose scale in space and time dwarfed the rivalries of tiny Earth’s quarreling nations.

This book contains four striking novellas, and the author’s own philosophy of fiction writing expressed in her speech as a guest of honour at the 38th World Science Fiction Convention.

“The Winter Beach” turns what might be a spy story into suspense of a far different order.

“Julian” begins when its youthful hero trains his telescope on nearby earth rather than the stars and sees a woman who rules the rest of his life.

“With Thimbles, with Forks and Hope” seems to be the dramatic story of a holiday fishing trip, but once on the ocean we are gripped by a different reality.

“Moongate”, set in the mountains of the Northwest, takes its two men and one woman through many dimensions in time and space.

“The Uncertain Edge of Reality” casts a new light on Kate Wilhelm’s many books and short stories. “This is my subject matter when I write,” she says. “I am asking, What actually do we mean by reality, and are we stuck with the one we have? This is what I mean by reality fiction, and usually it is also called science fiction…We are more than simple animals using sophisticated tools in our search for food, security and mates. We are something new on the earth…We can change reality.”

Kate Wilhelm’s writing always has meaning on many levels. Listen, Listen provides a feasts for fans and new readers alike.

A marvelous medley of Tiptree’s best, including:

“YOUR HAPLOID HEART” – When Ian Suitlov and Pax Patton landed on Esthaa to check for humans, the job wasn’t as easy as it appeared. Though the natives seemed human enough, only cross breeding would be conclusive proof. But how were they to prove anything, when sex was punishable by death?

“THE PSYCHOLOGIST WHO WOULDN’T DO AWFUL THINGS TO RATS” – Dr Tilly Lipsitz hated his name, loved his rats… and would be out of a job if he didn’t come up with a real zinger of an experiment soon. He didn’t have much in mind until he took a midnight trip to his lab and learned more than he would have thought possible.

“SHE WAITS FOR ALL MEN BORN” – She had eyes that could not see, but without sight she had powers that went far beyond those of all who came upon her.

Contents:
Your Haploid Heart (1969)
And So On, and So On (1971)
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1974)
A Momentary Taste of Being (1975)
Houston, Houston, Do You Read? (1976)
The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats (1976)
She Waits for All Men Born (1976)