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The team from Earth had the task of raising backward planets to the home world’s high level. The situation on Rigel was this:

“The most advanced culture on Rigel’s first planet is to be compared to the Italian cities during Europe’s feudalistic yeas. The most advanced of the second planet is comparable to the Aztecs at the time of the Spanish conquest.”

“These planets are in your control to the extent that no small group has ever dominated millions before. No Caesar ever exerted the power that will be in your collective hands. For half a century, you will be as gods and goddesses!”

But the Rigelians were themselves descended from the lost colonists of old Earth and they could learn their lessons as fast as they could be taught.

In fact, they could even teach their teachers a thing or two. And therein lay the peril the professors from space never dreamed of.

“HE” was really an “IT”

He was incapable of love or mercy, or hate. And he certainly never felt the lack. He was almost pure thought.

He was just doing what he had to do – looking for the right body to play host to him. Once he found it and moved in, he would execute one of the most incredible plans ever conceived. He would be hailed as a hero on his own planet and…

EARTH WOULD NEVER KNOW WHAT HIT IT!

THEY WERE GREEN, THEY WERE LITTLE, THEY WERE BALD AS BILLIARD BALLS AND THEY WERE EVERYWHERE!

Luke Devereaux was a science fiction writer, holed up in a desert shack waiting for inspiration. He was the first to see a Martian – but he certainly wasn’t the last.

It was estimated that one billion of them had arrived – one to every three human beings on Earth. Obnoxious green creatures who could be seen and heard (but not harmed) and who probed private sex lives as shamelessly as they exposed government secrets.

No one knew why they had come. No one knew how to make them go away – except perhaps, Luke Devereaux. Unfortunately he was going slightly bananas, so it wouldn’t be easy.

But for a science fiction writer nothing was impossible…

BUG-EYED MONSTERS ON BROADWAY

Pulp SF magazine editor Keith Winton was answering a letter from a teenage fan when the first moon rocket fell back to Earth and blew him away.

But where to? Greenville, New York, looked the same, but Bems (Bug-Eyed Monsters) just like the ones on the cover of Startling Stories walked the streets without attracting undue comment.

And when he brought out a half-dollar coin in a drugstore, the cops wanted to shoot him on sight as an Arcturian spy.

Wait a minute. Seven-foot purple moon-monsters? Earth at war with Arcturus? General Dwight D. Eisenhower in command of Venus Sector?

What mad universe was this?

One thing was for sure: Keith Winton had to find out fast – or he’d be good and dead, in this universe or any other.

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?

A staggering vision of Earth in the not-so-distant future. . .

In a controlled and mechanical world, the only reality is fear and killing boredom. The only escape from mind-blowing monotony is the Game, with predictable rules of stimulus and response. And if you pit yourself against the Games Master, you may lose your last vestige of sanity. Or your life!

‘There are perhaps a dozen genius writers in this genre and Barry is at least eight of them’ – Harlan Ellison

Who can resist the Final Trip?

Earth in the twenty-third century is adorned with corpses as suicides ravage a dehumanised population, compelled to live, or merely exist, in segregated complexes. Despite the technical wizardry of the Church of the Epiphany and the dictates of the unseen rulers, more and more people seek the ultimate exit. One man probes the social disease, but he too fights that dreadful and permanent seduction. If he succumbs, the victory of the Oppressors would be complete.

Earth’s Elite – or its outcasts?

For a selected, genetically-fitted few among the teeming millions of the twenty-first century, to become a Messenger for the Hulm Institute is to escape the prison that is life, that is earth.

A Messenger is Noble!

A Messenger is One of the Chosen.

A Messenger is a Forerunner of a Time in which Fear and Disease will Disappear Forever.

And inside a Messenger’s head is murder, impotence and despair.

Escape is all that Quir thinks about. Escape from the enclosure on Earth. Escape from the endless interrogations. Quir’s memories have been burned out; all he knows is that he must give scientific data to humans whenever they ask for it.

It was a sultry summer day in 1981, and the 3 billion or so inhabitants of the world went about their daily routine unaware that, possibly, the fate of the human race lay in the shaking hands of one George Mercer, an insignificant and slightly neurotic employee of the New York City Department of Welfare.

For George had been informed, by an accredited emissary of the Galactic Overlords, that he had 12 hours in which to prove the people of the Earth worthy of admission into the Galactic Federation. George, and George alone, would represent all of mankind. If he failed the entire planet would be destroyed.

Was this all a nightmare of delusions dredged up by his tortured subconscious? Or a very real nightmare that would end in the Day of the Burning . . .

Earth was a planet of incompetents, but Simmons was the greatest loser of all. It seemed as if the powers of the Universe were concentrated on grinding his small soul into ultimate insignificance – until the aliens came. To them, Simmons was the most important human on the planet – for only through his mind could they overcome this world.

Science fiction writer Sanford Kvass has a problem. Three problems, actually. He suffering from terrible writer’s block and owes his agent a large sum of money. The last thing he needs is the approaching distraction of the World Science Fiction Convention, with it’s obsessive fans, sex-mad SF groupies and professional writers and editors getting drunk and behaving badly.

But we said ‘three problems’, didn’t we? The best that can be said about Sanford Kvass’ third problem is that it renders his first two irrelevant. Kvass is approached by an alien ( a genuine alien, not a cosplay one) who informs him that the human race is to be tested: an alien will appear at the World Science Fiction Convention, disguised as a human being, and unless Kvass can unmask it, the Earth will be destroyed.

Under normal circumstances, this wouldn’t present much of a challenge. All he’s have to do, is to observe as many people as he could and identify the one who clearly had no experience of normal social interaction. Voila! One unmasked alien.

There’s just one problem: this is Worldcon . . .

The sails were the product of the Old Technology, lost long ago in the depleted Earth, and they were priceless. For with those fantastic sheets of etheric material, ships could sail the sky and even brave the radiant tides between worlds and stars.

The alchemists who had replaced scientists still sough the ancient secrets, and Rachad, apprentice to such a would-be wizard, learned that the key to his quest lay in a book abandoned in a Martian colonial ruin long, long ago.

But how to get to Mars? There was one way left – take a sea vessel, caulk it airtight, steal new sails and fly the star winds in the way of the ancient windjammers.

Here is an intriguing, unusual and colourful novel of ships that sail the stars riding before the solar breeze that blows between worlds.

The alien ruins that dotted Earth’s landscape were an enigma.

Archaeologist Rond Heshke dismissed as a ridiculous hoax the photographic evidence which suggested that the ruins disobeyed the laws of time. The Titanium Legions believed that the ruins had been left behind by an invading force from space, which had been repelled in a past age and whose imminent return was feared.

It was not until the Titanium scientists perfected their time machines that the truth began to emerge piece by piece: that the builders of the ruins belonged not to the stars but to Earth’s own future, and that the dreaded confrontation was indeed shortly due – not with aliens, but in a form more horrifying, more calamitous, than anything imaginable…

For Earth was to be the victim of an extraordinary cosmic accident. Time itself was about to collide! Mankind’s leaders became even more fanatical, pressing on with new plans, determined at all costs to survive…

In the huge termite-hills of cities that dotted the dead world of Killibol it seemed that nothing could ever change. Each city was enclosed and self-sustaining, in a stasis fixed by the one reality of power: the protein tanks in which organic nutrients could be processed to provide food.

But gang-leader Becmath was a man with a vision: to build an empire for himself without breaking this stasis. His lieutenant Klein recognised Becmath’s genius and stayed faithful to him even when they were forced to travel Killibol’s arid surface in a desperate search for the lost gateway to Earth. He stayed faithful through murder, treachery and countless adventures. Only when Becmath’s schemes reached incredible fulfilment was he able to realise that he had been serving an egomaniac and a monster . . .

The star Mira was unpredictably variable. Sometimes it was blazing, brilliant and hot. Other times it was oddly dim, cool, shedding little warmth on its many planets. Gresth Gkae, leader of the Mirans, was seeking a better star, one to which his people could migrate. That star had to be steady, reliable, with a good planetary system. And in his astronomical searching, he found Sol. With hundreds of ships, each larger than whole Terrestrial spaceports, and traveling faster than the speed of light, the Mirans set out to move in to Solar regions and take over.

And on Earth there was nothing which would be capable of beating off this incredible armada – until Buck Kendall stumbled upon . . .

The Ultimate Weapon . . .

Three Mind-Jarring Space Operas

Marooned:
Four giant ships made of the wonder element synthium crash the asteroid belt and brave the cold of Jupiter’s moons in mans last reckless dash to adventure.

All:
The Chinese have brutally conquered the Earth and out of their ruthless tyranny evolves the last great religious war, and the first God of Nuclear Divinity.

The Space Beyond:
When you wake up 75 billion miles from Earth in a crippled ship hurtling towards a blistering Mega-Sun, with a crew of insane gangsters and a Texan, what you don’t need to run into is a galactic war. Or was that their only chance of survival?

Here are five adventures in planetary exploration capable of orbit the most Earthbound reader. You will find yourself embroiled in interplanetary riddles as pioneer space rovers Penton and Blake pit their wits against five alien races.

Into the fray come an array of otherworld creatures – invisible imps, super-evolved blobs, and an amazing tribe of human chameleons. Watch, for the instance, how the adventures from Earth use their cunning to escape death from the ‘spreading shleath’ who ooze their unpleasant slime into every crack and crevice of the planet.


(First published in 1966)

A million light-years from Earth, one solitary spaceship floats through a vast swarm of enemies. The ship was an experimental vessel from Earth that utilised a revolutionary new concept in space mechanics, developed by the near-superman Aarn Munro. The enemy vessels were wholly unknown to Mankind, for the new drive had taken the Terran vessel into an unmapped void, where not even the telescopes of Earth had ever penetrated before…

The alien spaceship was unthinkably huge, enormously powerful, apparently irresistible. It came from the void and settle on Earth, striking awe into the hearts of all who saw it. Its burden, however, was not conquest – but a call for the brilliant team of scientists, Arcot, Wade and Morey, explorers of the islands of space. And what they learned was an offer of an alliance against an invading foe so powerful that no known force could turn back.

John W. Campbell’s Invaders from the Infinite is a veritable odyssey of the universe, exploring world after world, and uncovering cosmic secret after cosmic secret. Here is a classic novel of super-science that may never be surpassed.

ANNOUNCING THE TOURIST EXPERIENCE THAT IS THE TALK OF THE GALAXY! MEET:
The Cryogenic resurrectee Rinpoche Gibbs. He’s not surprised to awaken in the twenty-fourth century, cured of cancer. He is, however, very surprised by everything else…
The incredibly beautiful Nixy Anangaranga-Jones, who may or may not be haunted by ghosts, but to whom the unexpected always happens…
The Yelignese Chief Bureaucrat – the Esteemed Thingitude in charge of restoring Earth who can’t quite grasp what human history is all about…
Spotch from the planet Trigon, whose trip to Earth really did cost an arm and a leg…
The amazing Cardinal Numbernine and Her Wiliness Pope Joan II – religion may be gone, but the church will endure forever…
The adolescent Sherlock Holmes and his Biker Street Irregulars…

Nineteen light years from Earth, on Sigma Draconis, an international space team stumbles upon the first evidence of another highly advanced civilization in the universe.

Tragically, however, the Draconians are extinct and have been for a hundred thousand years. What mysterious disaster destroyed man’s nearest neighbour in the colossal emptiness of space? And will the same fate befall Earth?

The answers, as Earth degenerates into squabbles, paranoia and self-destruction, are vital. But how to begin the almost insuperable task of cracking the enigma of a long-buried and utterly alien culture?

Colonising a new planet requires much more than just settling on a newly discovered island of Old Earth. New planets were different in thousands of ways, different from Earth and from each other. Any of those differences could mean death and disaster to a human settlement.

When a ship filled with refugees from a cosmic catastrophe crash-landed on such an unmapped world, their outlook was precarious. Their ship was lost, salvage had been minor, and everything came to depend on one bright young man accidentally among them.

He was a trainee planet-builder. It would have been his job to foresee all the problems necessary to set up a safe home for humanity. But the problem was that he was a mere student – and he had been studying the wrong planet.




(First published 1974)

When suddenly all the fissionable material on Earth was exploded, Earthmen had their first notice of the aliens’ arrival.

And by the time the panic, death and chaos had been sorted out, reports were coming in about mysterious cities scattered across the face of the planet – huge areas of flickering light and awesome free energy, disorienting to human senses and impregnable to attack.

The question was: were they alien bases . . . or something else?