Search Results for: world-that-never-was,-the

The Dag Hammarskjold takes off from Woomera, Australia for the new human settlement on Mars.
Planet Earth is being eaten away by uncontrollable pollution, starvation and disease. Its life expectancy is nil.
This is the last spaceship, its passengers the last people on earth with any hope. But it is never to reach its objective. Five thousand years later its captain wakes up to a new world undiscovered in his time and to a bitter experience he must fight alone.

Earth was a weird and dire place after the plagues.

The few humans who survived could not bear the touch of each other; they lived in the enormous, endless caverns hacked out of the bowels of the earth for the bombs that never came.

And on one man rested the hopes of the world, though he did not know it. Sam Sewell only knew he had to journey, despite forbidding perils from the darkness of the past, into the ultimate fastnesses of the unknown to rescue the timeless wisdom of the witch Desponia . . .

Nobody beats Bar Holliday.
He was paid to find the Terraformable worlds, new planets for his corporation to plunder. Up until the day he came upon Peace Victory, an abandoned generation ship hovering ominously above a definitely habitable planet, he believed nobody ever could.
Nobody beats Bar Holliday.
…because he was never satisfied with anything lower than first place, because he was always the oddball, in charge of his own welfare, his own destiny…a man determined to make his mark in the world and win games at any cost.
NOBODY EVER BEATS BAR HOLLIDAY.
…because he only took the wrong chances at the right times. But on the planet Patmos, where everything looked safe, but nothing was, Bar Holliday had at last met his match!

On board an obsolete ship, nine weeks out from home, the latest batch of colonists arrive at their destination. A grim penal settlement in a wilderness worlds away from the homes they will never see again. TASMANIA? BOTANY BAY? No.

For this is tomorrow, not yesterday. The dumping ground for social outcasts and political deportees is Mars, barren, unproductive, but invaluable as a convict settlement. What kind of welcome will the twenty-four deportees receive when the reception party from the Settlement reaches their stranded ship? And how will they survive in a primitive environment, an alien system?

For Poilar Crookleg, the Pilgrimage to Kosa Saag has been a lifelong dream. Each year twenty men and twenty women attempt to reach the Summit, converse with the gods, and return with new knowledge. A few Pilgrims return as madmen. Most are never seen again.

Poilar and his childhood friend Traiben are determined to survive the terrifying journey not as madmen but as teachers of wisdom. Traversing mysterious Kingdoms and blasted landscapes, braving ghosts and monstrous apparitions, they will arrive at the secret of the gods themselves – a secret that will shatter centuries of belief and change their world forever.

Out of body, out of time…

Though basically a skeptic, William Reynolds had known out-of-body experiences in the past. But never before had he floated past the boundaries of Baltimore . . . and across the borders of time. And now, with the fires of Civil War looming on the horizon, the astonished graduate student was hobnobbing with none other than the dark poet Edgar Allan Poe. But their meeting of minds was to have chilling consequences. For a desperate Confederacy planned to use them both to remold the world – and to change history…for the worse.

The hoax proposed to John Baird by a two-bit con man in a seedy Key West bar was shady but potentially profitable. With little left to lose, the struggling, middle-aged Hemingway scholar agreed to forge a manuscript and pass it off as Papa’s lost masterpiece. But Baird never realized his actions would shatter the history of his own Earth . . . and others.

Now the unsuspecting academic is trapped out of time – propelled through a series of grim parallel worlds – and pursued by an interdimensional hitman with a literary license to kill.

He called himself by the name of the father he had never known, Vazkor, king of a forgotten land. In his veins were mingled the blood of that regal warrior and that of his witch mother, the silver-masked, snowy-haired survivor of the hated Old Race. He had sworn that she would die at his hands in the name of his father and all that his world had become.

Across that barbaric and age-haunted planet his quest went relentlessly on. As he searched, so grew his own powers, his fearful heritage. Across wide seas, in conquered cities, and among haunted mountains, the hunt took him. And as he drew closer to his objective, the clearer became the way she must be slain, the more certain his ability to sunder all her witchcraft and ancient science to rid the world once and for all of his creator – the white witch from the volcano.

The Roman Empire never fell. Riven by political ambition and internal dissent, thrown into turmoil by rebellion and civil war, it changed and adapted, and somehow it survived. The balance of power between Constantinopolis in the east and Roma in the west ebbed and flowed, but the Empire endured. And it continued to expand, encountering the New World while still dominating the old.

Robert Silverberg’s superbly accomplished and ambitious novel explores over fifteen hundred years of Roman history through the very human stories of some of those who lived it. The young soldier encountering the exoticism of the New World for the first time; the minor official exiled to Arabia, for some misdemeanour, whose meeting with a religious fanatic may have changed the course of history; the military hero seizing his destiny; the innocent British aristocrat witnessing at first hand the bloody destruction of the royal family, and the children who find the last emperor in a decaying house in an old wood are all vividly and memorably portrayed.

QUARANTINED PLANET

“On Dephene, the native life -form is peculiar and unique. All protoplasmic life is equal to and one with the mimics.” On screen, the shape changed, altered into the shape of a man.

Then it changed. It shrank, dropped, lifted a snouted head in the semblance of a dog. It grew, spread wings and became a large bird which hopped and pecked. The wings vanished and a tall and lovely woman smiled from where the bird had halted. A dozen changes, a score until the mind reeled.

“These Mimics represent a threat to every world in the entire galaxy. Their power of mimicry would enable them to adopt the outward form of rulers and high officials. A man could never be certain that his companion was what he seemed to be.”

When Kennedy went to Delphene the speculation became pure nightmare, for both he and his crew were being duplicated over and over – and so was the worlds-conqueror he sought to block.

When vampires stalk among us . . .

Robbed of his supernatural powers, Harry Keogh is back from Starside, the vampire sourceworld. A mere man again – denied access to the metaphysical Möbius Continuum, no longer able to communicate with the dead – now he must rebuild his life in a world made safe only through his efforts. But safe for how long?

E-Branch, Britain’s mindspy organisation, wants Harry back with his invaluable talents intact. Likewise the Great Majority, his countless dead friends across the world, who know that he’s needed as never before. For the old thread has risen anew!

Crumbling in their graves, the teeming dead fear for Harry. If the ex-Necroscope can’t find and destroy the last of the Ferenczys, that nightmare vampire dynasty, they know that the vampire will find him. He must regain his powers – or risk becoming a vampire himself, undead for ever . . .

The death-stars had come, and they had kept on coming for hundreds of thousands of years, falling upon the Earth, swept upon it by a vagrant star that had passed through the outer reaches of the solar system. They brought with them a time of unending darkness and cold. It was an event that occured every twenty-six million years, and there was no turning it aside.

But all that was done with now. At last the death-stars had ceased to fall, the sky had cleared of dust and cinders, the sun’s warmth again was able to break through the clouds. The glaciers relinquished their hold on the land; the Long Winter ended; the New Springtime began. The world was born anew.

Now each year was warmer than the last. The fair seasons of spring and summer, long lost from the world, came again with increasing power. And the People, having survived the dark time in their sealed cocoons, were spreading rapidly across the fertile land. But others were already there. The hjjks, the somber cold-eyed insect-folk, had never retreated, even at the time of greatest chill. The world had fallen to them by default, and they had been its sole masters for seven hundred thousand years. They were not likely to share it gladly now . . .

‘East of the sun and west of the moon…’


…you may find a freighter carrying ivory to Huy Braseal, mammoth tusks to Tartessos and Ashkelon, spices from Cathay to Lyonesse. Another world, of infinite strangeness and high adventure, yet never far from our own; round a corner, through a door into a harbourside inn and you may find yourself there.


Steve Fisher had been there once, had sailed the cloud archipelagos on a desperate quest to Hispaniola. Or had he? The memories have faded…was it only a dream? Then, in Bangkok, as he struggles to arrange a shipment of vital supplies to the endangered paradise of Bali, Steve finds himself catapulted back into that world, through the eerie gates of the Spiral – and into terrible dangers. For our there is something that wants him stopped, at any costs.

Shadows from the past, from the present – and from somewhere that is neither, where myths and legends and terrifying archetypes stalk the world. Entangles by old loves and ancient hatreds, with witches and warlocks to help him and the original Bogeyman on his trail, Steve must fight to reconcile past and present in an epic battle of wits which leads him from the sleazy sex bars of Bangkok to the mist-shrouded islands of the South Seas…

Orthe – half-civilized, half-barbaric, home to human-like beings who live and die by the code of the sword. Earth envoy Lynne Christie has been sent here to establish contact and to determine whether this is a world worth developing. But first Christie must come to understand that human-like is not and never can be human, and that not even Orthe’s leaders can stop the spread of rumors about her, dark whisperings that could cost Christie her life.And on a goodwill tour to the outlying provinces, these evil rumors turn to deadly accusations. Christie is no offworlder, Church officials charge: she is a treacherous and cunning descendant of Orthe’s legendary Golden Witchbreed – the cruel, ruthless race that once enslaved the whole planet. Suddenly, Christie finds herself a hunted fugitive on an alien world, where friend and foe alike may prove her executioners. And her only chance of survival lies in saving Orthe from a menace older than time…

It was the ultimate case: to stop the ultimate drug…
I’m Horowitz. Brandy Horowitz. My husband Sam and I are private eyes who take cases for G.O.D., Inc. – the outfit that runs the Labyrinth to infinite alternate earths filled with crime, danger…and murder.

Power-mad fanatics are running a narcotic V.D. that spreads like a bug, works like a drug, and one touch hooks you for good. You don’t become a junkie…you become a zombie. ‘Cause this monkey’s not just on your back, but in your brain – it’s got a mind, and if you kick it, it kicks back with madness and death.

So this beautiful black PI and wonderful Jewish sleuth have to smash the source before the drug-bug reaches our client’s Home World. But the opposition’s got fake Sams and Brandys set up in headquarters on the two worlds that hold any possible leads: one that never heard of civil rights…

And one ruled by the Nazis.

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.

Omega: an apocalyptic rumour from the Eastern Front. Omega: something that will alter all the strategic calculations of the Earth’s great military blocs. Omega: the code name for a weapon that may well bring doomsday with it. But if Omega is indeed the agent that will destroy the world, that world is not our own. For this is a timeline in which World War Two never truly ended: a timeline in which Hitler died in a plane crash, Britain joined Germany in its battle against Communist Russia, and the present is an age of intermittent, but deadly, armed conflict between the USSR, the European Alliance, and the USA.

The frontier regions are radioactive wastelands, nuclear winter threatens catastrophe, global confrontation could erupt again any time – and that’s before Omega is taken into account…This is the reality experienced by Owen Meredith when an accident forces his consciousness from the England we know into the mind of his cognate self in that other darker, Europe.

Switching back and forth between being plain Owen Meredith and troubled Major Owain Maredudd, Owen is faced not only with a Cold War going Hot, but with a deep crisis of identity. Who is he? Whose twisted destiny is he treading? Did the ordinary domestic life he remembers ever even take place? Perhaps the universe of Owain and Omega is merely a symptom of mental illness – but if so, why is it so urgently tangible?

‘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.

Once the great Glacier enclosed the Raumsdalian Empire. Now it’s broken open, and Count Hamnet Thyssen faces a new world. With the wisecracking Ulric Skakki, the neighboring clan leader Trasamund (politely addressed as Your Ferocity), and his lover, the shaman Liv, Hamnet leads an exploration of the new territory in hopes of finding the legendary Golden Shrine.

But dangers abound. A violent and implacable group known as the Rulers has already killed many, and now they attack again. Riding deer and woolly mammoths and using powerful magic, the Rulers triumph and force the Raumsdalians to flee.

In the spring another battle ends even more badly for Hamnet’s side, but the Glacier is also retreating, so they are able to escape. Meeting a tribe whose desperate living conditions have led them to overcome the Raumsdalian taboo against eating fallen foes, they find unexpected allies. Now, returning to the capital city and its intrigues, Hamnet prepares to lead an army against the merciless Rulers. The world, once so bounded and comprehensible, will never be the same…

Light on Bottom…

The light was artificial. Believe it if you can. I realise that for a normal person it’s hard. Wasting watts to light up the outdoors is bad enough. Spending the world’s limited power to illuminate the sea bottom, though – well, for a few moments I was too furious to think straight. My job has brought me into contact with people who were careless with energy, with people who stole it, and even with people who misused it; but this was a brand-new dimension!

I was lower now and could see acres and acres of light stretching off to the north, east, and west until it blurred out of sight. Acres and acres lighted by things suspended a few yards above the level bottom, things visible only as black specks in the centre of slightly brighter areas.

Then I got my anger under control, or maybe my fear did it for me. I suddenly realised that if I hit bottom the way I was heading I might never be able to get back to the…

Ocean on Top.

A hundred thousand years ago, there had been a planet called Earth. It had been a proud world ruling a thousand vassal stars, but its stellar empire had turned upon and annihilated their conquerors, and wiped the name of Earth from the maps of space.

But Earthmen still survived . . . a strange race of worldless men and women, by tradition advisers to rulers, but never themselves ruling. Wanderers through myriad planets, their origin was a half-forgotten legend.

That was the situation when a strange quirk of fate sent Earthman Hallam Navarre on an interstellar wild goose chase. He had to bring back a strictly mythical treasure to his alien ruler, or die.

On the other side of the sun, opposite our earth, is a world we never see Counterearth. In every way it’s identical to ours…almost!

Albert Einstein, Juan (and Eva) Peron, Babe Didrickson and Sir Oswald Mosley are off on a wild race to Counterearth. It’s all action and excitement against a historical background – in fact against two historical backgrounds – detailed enough to intrigue any history buff. It’s January 1942; Cordell Hull is President of the United States; and the good guys take off in their spaceship, Manta, from the deck of the SS Titanic, steaming back from Liverpool to New York with thousands of New Year’s revellers on board.

The Galaxy is a big place, made up of thousands of millions of worlds, and the work of exploration will probably never be entirely completed. But various systems within the Galaxy, each with its own particular humanoid race if intelligent beings, have joined in galactic federation for the mutual good of all concerned. Once major snag remained: speedy communication.

When space travel velocities were increased by the introduction of 5C drive on all but local planetary working vessels the way was opened to enormously expanded regions of movement. Piet Tek, captain of a space tramp, tells of what happened when the secret of instantaneous communication was prematurely exploited by unscrupulous people in search of power.

Since the beginning of time it had worked its will on humanity, and for as long as man could remember, he had struggled against its power. But in the 21st century the battle was won: the sea, mankind’s age-old enemy, had finally been conquered.
Professionals like Walter Franklin now patrolled the infinite savannahs of the oceans, harvesting from the plankton prairies as crop which kept the world fed. But like that other great frontier, space, the sea had not yet yielded up all its secrets. And men like Franklin would never rest until its every fathomless mystery had been challenged . . .