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They called him Bane the Bastard – though none said it to his face

Born of treachery, his name a curse, he grew up among the warriors of the Rigante. They valued his skills in war, but they feared the violence in his heart.

And when, as a Wolfshead and Outlaw, he left Rigante lands, they breathed sighs of relief.

But Bane would return, the destiny of the Rigante in his hands, the fate of the world resting on his skills with a blade.

Midnight Falcon continues the tale of the Rigante, which began in Sword in the Storm, and tells the epic story of Bane, the bastard son of Connavar the King, and his quest for vengeance in a world of blood, honour, betrayal and love.

Read by Adjoa Andoh
(p) 2017 Orion Publishing Group

He was a mysterious cosmic presence who came out of nowhere with the incredible promise to free the dying planet.

Earth’s future is one of peace. There are no more wars, nuclear weapons are outlawed, and technology is raising mankind to new heights. Many cities are now underground. Alain von Bek is a bastard of distinguished lineage working an unassuming job with city administration in the underground city of Switzerland. But with the appearance of a massive clownish figure calling himself the Fireclown, Alain’s life and the course of Earth’s future are both about to change.

The Fireclown claims to hold the keys to mankind’s salvation. He carries an undeniable charisma that is winning him followers, chief among them Helen Curtis, Alain’s cousin and former lover, not to mention serious candidate in the next presidential election. But there are also those who mistrust the Fireclown. At the forefront of this opposition is Minister Simon von Bek, Alain’s grandfather, and Helen’s chief competition in the forthcoming election.

Gradually, Alain finds himself sucked into a game of chess between these three polarizing forces, but each new revelation raises new questions, about his past and that of the world’s future. He will have to put his trust in someone, and time is running out-for him and the world.

Dorian Hawkmoon… Corum Jhaelen Irsei… Elric of Melniboné. Over the years, Michael Moorcock has captivated readers with his unending versions of the Eternal Champion, the timeless warrior who serves the Cosmic Balance in the ongoing battle that rages between Law and Chaos through the many planes and levels of the multiverse. But what is the multiverse and what are its origins? In this essential novel, Michael Moorcock provides readers these critical answers.
World War Three has come and gone, and humankind has survived its brutal past to assume its place among the stars. Yet their existence is endangered nonetheless, as their entire universe is threatening to collapse. All their hopes rest on the shoulders of Count Renark von Bek, a nobleman of extraordinary psychic abilities and carefully guarded secrets.
Aided by his companions, von Bek will delve into the Sundered Worlds, a mysterious galaxy outside the space-time continuum that has materialized on the edges of known space. Inside this roving galaxy, they will uncover the secrets of the multiverse and embark upon a last desperate gamble to save humankind.
But as they will soon discover, even survival comes laden with danger, as the solutions to their dilemma may also hold the final keys to their destruction

Throughout the centuries that have passed since humans first ventured into interstellar space, they have been at war with the alien Veich. The human race has, in consequence, been fully militarized, its educational system being a form of military training–which includes, among other disciplines, the elimination of fear from the human psyche. Attitudes to the war have, however, been colored by the gradual discovery of relics revealing that it is echoing an earlier interstellar conflict whose antagonists have completely disappeared, victors and vanquished alike. On a neglected continent of an unimportant world, ex-sergeant Remy and other human and Veich deserters have joined forces to form a mercenary company that places its expert skills at the disposal of the dominant indigenes. This refuge from the greater war is, however, disrupted when archeologists on another world discover evidence that there might be significant relics of the earlier war buried in the inhospitable heart of the continent, where barbarian tribes are currently massing for a religious war. Remy has no alternative but to revert to working for his own race, knowing that whatever he enables them to find, or even if they find nothing at all, his own life will be in grave peril, and that nothing will ever be the same again….

Paul Heisenberg is mysteriously endowed with the ability to jump through time. Together with thousands of eventual followers, he begins a journey that eventually takes him a billion years into the future. The Earth has been devastated by war with an alien race, and the changes that have resulted from the degradation of the world’s biosphere force him–and others–to rethink their own humanity. His pilgrim’s progress through the coming time is beset by doubts, distractions, and temptations as various voices attempt to distract him from his determination to follow the process through to its end. He eventually witnesses the complete transformation of the Earth, and the evolution of a single omnipotent but mindless Gaean organism. Is intelligence itself just a brief candle, forever doomed to burn out? Or can Paul find some other alternative for his race.

The four novellas in Quatrain are set in worlds of Archangel, Heart of Gold, Summers at Castle Auburn, and Mystic and Rider. “Flight” follows a former angel-seeker who used to be in love with the Archangel Raphael and now is determined to keep her beautiful niece from making her same mistakes. “Blood” is the story of a fierce young gulden man who comes to the city to seek his mother, whom he hasn’t seen since he was a boy and she ran away from his abusive father. In “Gold,” a crown princess escapes the hazards of war by hiding among the fairylike aliora, where she encounters an altogether different sort of danger. And in “Flame,” the mystic Senneth uses her magic to save a little girl, an act that wins her new friends but puts her own life at risk.

In A.D. 2043 the world seemed doomed to suffer the impact of total war on a hitherto undreamed-of scale. The horrors of titanic bombardment and the searing ravages of electronic ray assault were slowly simmering up to a point when the Controllers themselves could not turn back. But it was only a handful of men and women, living and working in the underground dumps of destructive force, who fully appreciated the danger. They feared for their fellow beings; but when the war itself was due to start the blow came, not from a mortal enemy but from a far more terrible foe…

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.

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?

A young Boston gentleman is mysteriously transported from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century – from a world of war and want to one of peace and plenty.

Written as a sequel to Fighters from Mars, an unauthorized and heavily altered version of H. G. Wells’s The War of the World, this novel weaves a distinct and astonishing story of humans invading Mars, marking the invention of the space techno-thriller. Presenting a cornucopia of technical ingenuity, Edison’s Conquest of Mars marks a variety of firsts in the genre: the first space battle ever to appear in print, the original fictional example of alien abduction, the introduction of the theory that the pyramids were constructed by extraterrestrials, and the first truly functional spacesuits.

Up to the Sky in Ships contains seven undeservedly obscure stories by A. Bertram Chandler, including “Chance Encounter”, the first story in which John Grimes (Chandler’s most famous character) appears and “A New Dimension”, set in an alternate world in which Ned Kelley uses unusual tactics to win Australia’s war for independence.

THE DEMONS HAD TO STOP JOHN BRAVAIS

His secret assignment was simply – to save mankind from the savage dog-like ‘things’ that used their hands like men. Yet an unknown number of apparently ‘human’ beings were against him too.

First transformed by surgery into a superman, John Bravais probes ever more deeply into the secret nightmare world of the ‘things’. At last, when only his mind remains – trapped in a vast robot war machine on the moon – only by an immense act of will-power can he give humanity a future.

Awakened from suspended animation aboard his exploration starship, John Jackson is shocked to discover that the ship never left Earth – and that he has slept a century after a world war. Facing a nightmare wilderness inhabited by neo-barbarians and sentient tanks, Jackson is the only man who can bring the world to its senses.

How are thing on Rockamorra? Bad, very. Earth Ambassador Pinchbottle has contracted to fight a dinosaur, and it’s up to troubleshooter Jame Retief to keep him from being stomped, mangled, or eaten.

Things are tough on other planets, too, with a civil war on Skweem, a dying race om Sulinore, and mudstorms on Schweinhund’s World.

These seven stories show the Galaxy’s hippest diplomat at his unexpected and jaunty best.

The twenty-seventh century planet of Quopp is a world where Earthmen walk cautiously or not at all. The inhabitants are weirdly diabolical creatures, possessing spoked-wheel limbs and sprouting steel-sharp talons.

Plans are afoot to place these singular beings under a single government friendly to Earth. But Jame Retief, officer of the distinguished Corps Diplomatique Teresstienne, a supra-national organization devoted to keeping the peace, has discovered that evil forces are undermining the whole scheme.

Deviously sincere, uncompromisingly venal, fearlessly cowardly, Retief goes to work against mounting planetary intrigue and more than once brings those around him to the brink of nervous collapse.

Set more than four thousand years in the future, The End of This Day’s Business depicts a truly utopian way of life, a global society in which distinct national cultures are preserved but coexist without competitive nationalism, violence, or war. Women, characterised as the reasonable sex in this society, care for the earth and all it’s creatures. Only one price must be paid for this harmony. It is the subjection of men, who, stripped of their history and deprived of any knowledge of women’s sacred rights, complacently accept their ‘natural’ inferiority.

The plot turns on the desire of one woman, Grania, an artist and leader, to teacher her son what is forbidden for men to know. Risking both their lives, she tells the story of when men dominated, especially of the twentieth-century rise of fascism, and the subsequent world transformation as life-loving women took over from death-loving men.

Originally published in England in 1934, this searing, still timely novel offers and incisive critique of the sexual politics and militarism of England, and the West as a whole.

Proud Man is told from the perspective of a “Genuine Person” who has been thrown back in time thousands of years from a peaceful future society. The Genuine Person comes from a people that are androgynous, self-fertilizing, and vegetarian; they live without a national government and artificial social divisions of gender and class. Taking on first female, then male form, the “Genuine Person” confronts the deeply troubled reality of England in the 1930s, still battered after one World War and on the road to another.

In early 20th-century England, Edward Lessingham and Lasy Mary Scarnsdale conduct a passionate if tumultuous courtship. After the First World War, they raise their children in their Cumbrian idyll, until tragedy strikes.

On the world of Zimiamvia, Duke Barganax pursues the divine Lady Florinda who toys with his affections like a cat with a mouse. Meanwhile, King Mezentius struggles to hold his Threee Kingdoms together against the intrigues of his enemies.

And over a fish dinner in Memison the true relationship between worlds and lovers will be made shockingly clear . . .

It is a time of great darkness, when the sun is in danger of being forever extinguished, and mankind has been divided into two warring factions: the worshipers of the God of Light and the servants of Eternal Night. Now three unsuspecting travelers are called by prophecy to face a legion of the undead and the powers of the Dark Lord in the faint hope of reclaiming the world for the light.

Claire Escott had ignored her father’s warning against involvement with her fiancé Mark Rowland. However, she little realised the extent of the scientist’s corroding ambition when he invents a method of matter transmission. And it was not long after their marriage that Rowland’s ruthless pursuit of a scientific empire encompassed a horri­fying murder. But that was only the start of things. Mark’s scientific genius and obsessive ambition to go one step further eventually led to the conquest of space, culminating in the mass destruc­tion of an interstellar war!

A deadly meteor swarm approaching the Earth activates ancient Lunar technology buried beneath Earth’s surface that results in the birth of Raquilo, the last Selenite, who will save some humans from the meteor storm that millions of years ago destroyed the Moon’s atmosphere, oceans and inhabitants. Meanwhile, the balance of power on Earth has shifted to Vilgarth, an arms merchant who, with stolen v-ray technology and an alliance with governments in favor of his plan, wages a world war to take over the planet.

“Suppose the war took a sudden turn for the worse from the scientific point of view? Suppose some bright scientist on the enemy side found a truly terrible weapon?” This was John Russell Fearn’s main premise for Aftermath, written two years before the end of the second World War.

New Alabama. A planet that’s a fair reproduction of long-lost Dixie, filled with down-home, racist rednecks. The N’Alabamians have carried their tribal prejudices to the farthest reached of the galaxy, like the other minorities expelled from the Earth by the dominant Pan-Semitic Alliance. There’s New Transvaal. New Cathay. And New Haiti, a black world where Papa Doc’s descendants carry on the old ways.

When New Alabama and New Haiti go to war with each other, it’s a bloody black-versus-white stalemate. Until the N’Haitians develop a horrific new secret weapon based on a very ancient tradition.

Imagine you’re a clean-cut N’Alabamian good ol’ boy, giving your all up there in the space fleet, and you suddenly realise the enemy crews aren’t human at all. They’re what people back on Earth used to call Zombies…