Search Results for: voices

“I’ll need your help. Come night and the Oracle again, I’m going to try the final couplet.”
“Jinian,” Murzy breathed while Dodie looked white-eyed at me. “Dangerous.”
“And fatal not to,” I said, still smiling at them all…

I wove by forest and meadow, branch and leaf. I wove by stream and pool, by river and fall. I wove by cloud and air, by thunder and sunset glow. I wove by depths of the earth, rock and gem, glittering ores and crystals blooming in the dark, old bone and new. Beside me the others wove as well…

“And all within sound of my voice or reach of the wind,” I cried, thrusting my voice like a Sending, like a magic spear, driving it upward. “And all within sound of my voice or lick of the wave, or all within sound of my voice or stretch of the soil, or all within sound of my voice where green grows and leaf springs up. Named or unnamed, silent or speaking. Let this message be brought,

By the Eye of the Star,
Where Old Gods Are!”

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.

He reached for Churan’s throat and his hands closed on air…

…yet the alien had not moved. With a chill of terror, Naismith realized that his arm had passed completely through the ugly, green-skinned body.

The aliens’ laughter swelled out, malicious and mocking. Behind him, Lall’s voice said, “A nice try. But not good enough.”

A voice in your brain warning you away from that one drink too many, or the crime of violence, guiding your every move from birth to death – that’s the Analogue Machine, a terrifying and ingenious psychological device for compelling conformity. Analogue Men is an exploration of man and society written with dazzling ingenuity and plausibility.

The ancient starship La Chasse Gallerie is found drifting perilously in space. Despite heavy damage from alien Laagi warships, incredibly the ship is till intact and the voice of its pilot, Raoul Penard, comes through loud and clear.

But Petard died over one hundred years ago.

On Earth, frantic investigation reveals that Petard may be dead but his mind is very much alive, merged with the ship itself. The staggering potential of this evolutionary breakthrough compels the scientists to embark on a technological journey of astonishing discovery.

Patrick Joya lifted his head to scan the southern sky and saw a dark bluish shape flicker against the clouds. Growing larger and larger the object undulated like a wide piece of cloth carried along a moving current of water. He could hear the babble of voices around him swelling to a mounting groan of panic. The sound went racing like a cresting wave back toward the Terminal where the thousands there would be lifting their gaze skyward. Another Space Swimmer, Pat thought with sinking heart. It seemed as if it intended to swallow up the sky – for the brightness of day had blackened into night.

The second volume of the Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon covers his prolific output during 1940 and 1941, after which he suffered five years of writer’s block. Showcasing Sturgeon’s early penchant for fantasy, the first six selections include whimsical ghost stories, such as “Cargo,” in which a World War II munitions freighter is commandeered by invisible, peace-loving fairies. With the publication of his enduring SF classic, “Microcosmic God,” Sturgeon finally found his voice, combining literate, sharp-edged prose with fascinating speculative science while recounting the power struggle between a brilliant scientist, who creates his own miniature race of gadget makers, and his greedy banker. Voice found or not, every one of the stories here is readable and entertaining today because of Sturgeon’s singular gifts for clever turns of phrase and compelling narrative. As Samuel R. Delaney emphasizes in an insightful introduction, Sturgeon was the single most influential SF writer from the 1940s through the 1960s.

‘Valentine looked downward. Everything was black, a pool of night rising from the floor. That blackness seemed to be beckoning to him. Come, a quiet voice was saying, here is your path, here is your destiny: night, darkness, doom. Yield. Yield, Lord Valentine, Coronal that was, Pontifex that will never be. Yield . . .’

Valentine is now established as Coronal of Majipoor, about to undertake the grand processional, but filled with inexplicable despond, still shadowed by the dark cloud that had passed across his soul in Labyrinth.

His foreboding proves to be not without foundation as soon he faces a planetary crisis – the shapeshifting Metamorphs are sabotaging the crops upon which Majipoor’s billions depend – and a conflict, about how the suddenly turbulent planet should be ruled, with his protégé and heir-apparent, Hissune.

Only after this crisis has been overcome and the conflict with Hissune resolved can Valentine fulfil his proper destiny and succeed to the title of Pontifex.

It was the last planet left for men to conquer – a planet rich in priceless urillium ore, yet no man laid a finger on this wealth that was for the taking.

For the planet Vendor could not be conquered. Space-men tried time and time again, but always the Voices drove them mad and destroyed them. Some intangible power kept men away from that taunting prize – until a scientist on Deneb IV perfected a blanketing device to protect his shop through the barrier. It took him twenty years to do it and every penny he possessed, but at last his voyage to Vendor began.

It was the voyage of a gambler who knew that only two alternatives faced him…illimitable wealth and glory, or failure and death.

But the journey to Vendor brought hazards that neither he nor his crew had foreseen, and before its conclusion a force was unwittingly released that could have swept life from the Universe – the indestructible and horrifying force of THE METAL EATER.

2650 AD

The Earth has been buried beneath a sheet of ice for 300 years. In cities miles beneath the surface humanity huddles, waiting for release.
Dr. Raymond Barnes waits with passion, and listens daily for evidence of life on the still Earth. Finally, a voice from across the void hails his open frequency . . . the surface awaits mankind.
But not all men are anxious to return to what was . . . those in power are determined to keep man in his new place, to retain their order of fear and oppression. Barnes and his courageous group of scientists and adventurers are arrested for possession of forbidden technology; the radio is destroyed! Their punishment is swift ejection from the underground city, their only hope is to reach London – 3000 desolate miles across a frozen wasteland!

Time and Chance is the autobiography of Hugo, World Fantasy and SFWA Grand Master Award-winning author, L. Sprague de Camp. It is a fascinating insight into a man who began writing in the late 1930’s and remained an active voice in the genre up until his death in the last year of the twentieth century, and who was a prime mover in the formation of the fields of Science Fiction and Fantasy as we know them today.

The man in black picked up something which had been leaning beside him. A ring perhaps two feet wide . . . yet when the man in black laid it down on the floor it was as large as he was tall.

The light went out. A bluish glow now emanated from the ring, revealing Bryda’s face ghastly gray as she leaned forward, and Yarco’s also, set and serious, and the conjurer’s impassive.

And within the ring, where moments before there had been the bare planks of the floor, a shape that moved, and opened eyes glowing like coals, and spoke.

‘What world is this?’ the awful voice inquired.



(First published 1962)

Simeon Krug’s obsession is to see a tower built, on kilometre high, that will reach out to answer the voice from space. The Androids are his tools; superb, man-like creations of Man. The Androids take Krug for their God, and seek to become one with flesh-and-blood mankind through his wisdom. But Krug is not God – and it takes a God to control the terrible emotions Krug has stirred . . .