Search Results for: brothers

Predictably unpredictable, normally abnormal.

Watson combines science fiction and fantasy into an eclectic mix that includes stories about fallen angels in Hell rebelling and mounting a breakout, about the inconvenience of keeping aging parents in your brain instead of a nursing home, about Jesus’ immortal brother as solo passenger on the first starship, about alien coffins bombarding the solar system, about right-wing U.S. militias stealing a quantum computer to commit nuclear blackmail, about a computer games designer haunted by the cyber-ghost of his murdered wife, about frozen heads and strange mind-changes, and how a cake decorator defeats a vampire with a sweet tooth. De-evolution, treasure-hunting via hang glider, dark animal fantasies, humanity as hive-entity, Hercules Poirot on a starship – Watson takes the strange, the eerie the weird, mixes his seasoned writing skills, and produces a potpourri of the fantastic. These nineteen stories are sure to amuse, bemuse and entertain.

By the workings of chance Bleys Ahrens was born the genetic equal of Hal Mayne, the hero of The Final Encyclopedia, but he was destined by nurture to a far different fate. Raised alone by his unhappy Exotic mother, Bleys was an outcast from every society until his half-brother Dahno claimed him. Disciplined by Friendlies, schooled by Exotics, Dahno was beginning to build an interplanetary network of half-breeds, who called themselves “Others”.

But Dahno thought only of gaining wealth and power for himself; Bleys saw an opportunity to challenge the Dorsai for control of the Human Worlds.

The World Economic Council said the world had become Utopia. There should be no cause for dissatisfaction. But for those who were still restless, there was the new mind-stimulating drug R-47. Those who took R-47 were engaging in a sort of lottery whose rare winners would be super-geniuses and whose losers might be fit only for asylums.

Etter Ho, whose brother was one of the losers, took the drug on the chance that, if he won, he could cure his brother. But what he became when he emerged from the mainlining was something none expected. For he became a menace to Utopian order, a danger to those who knew him, and the only man who might, just possibly, diagnose the real illnesses of the world.

The black-clad mercenaries of the Friendly planets fought where their employer and their God dictated. On New Earth they pitted their fanaticism against the cold courage of the Dorsai.

And the implacable hatred of one man, Tam Olyn. Olyn saw his brother-in-law shot down before his eyes. His quest for vengeance took him across half the civilised worlds, to Cassida and Frieland, to St. Marie and back to New Earth. He met men of all the splinter groups into which mankind had evolved an he used them all to bring about his revenge – until Padma the Exotic taught him how to use his special powers, and the frightening knowledge of Final Encyclopaedia.

In the beginning…

… there was Egan Drake, the genius who dreamed of spreading mankind among the galaxies.

Then came Megan, who took on her brother’s mantle and made his imaginings real. She gathered around her the finest in their fields – biology and astronautics, computer science and fusion propulsion – and fired them with her vision.

And finally was born The Project: a thousand tiny spacecraft crawling like electromechanical wombs towards the stars, each bearing the genetic seeds for a future colony of man.

And some fell on stony ground, and some fell on fertile ground and some…

Brother to Demons, Brother to Gods begins with a genetic engineering program conceived by the Smithwicks, a family of “Creators” who first improve on inadequate Homo sap (“preman”) with two laboratory species and then come up with the “stargods.” These powerful Frankenstein fabrications, however, send the Creators chasing back to their labs in a last desperate attempt to undo the consequences of their folly. A thousand years later, two “preman” waifs, Davey and Bugler, find unsuspected powers genetically programmed into their minds and bodies, and realize that they are to be the parents of the liberating “ultiman.”

This stunning collection showcases 11 of Haldeman’s best stories. They range through time and space from planets beyond our wildest dreams to a nightmare future Earth all too close to home.

Lindsay and the Red City Blues: A story of revenge – with a heart-stopping twist in the tail.

Blood Brothers: A ‘Thieves World’ story.

You Can Never Go Back: A self-contained story from the original version of ‘The Forever War’, never before published in book form.

And ten more sharp and startling visions of tomorrow.

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.

Remote, mysterious and deadly, Verdia is a world from which no one has ever returned.
But Jan Hazard is convinced his brother could still be alive and Petra knows Jan can’t make it alone…on the Killer Planet.
Together they go in search for survivors – only to find themselves the next victims, trapped by the malign forces of a monstrous alien…

Those who tried never returned, and those who didn’t, always wondered what they were missing by not attempting the perilous journey to ‘Heaven’.

The official designation of the giant anti-gravity floating disc was ‘International Land Extension U.S.23’. But to the people living like sardines in the fam-apts and dormitories on the ground below, it was known as ‘Heaven’.

Government regulations meant that it was almost impossible for a human being to get to ‘Heaven’ – almost, but no quite, as Vic Sterling found out when he began to hunt for his missing half-brother Johnny Considine. For Johnny, along with over a hundred other rebels, had decided they could no longer stand the living conditions on Earth and had hitched a ride to ‘Heaven’, a ‘Heaven’ full of unexpected dangers for Vic when he decided to follow.

This book contains ten major stories by the master of science fiction, fantasy, and horror written during the 1960s. The controversial “If All Men We re Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?” shows the author’s technique of “ask the next question” used in a way that shatters social conventions. “When You Care, When You Love” offers a prescient vision of the marriage of deep obsessive love and genetic manipulation, written long before actual cloning techniques existed. “Runesmith” constitutes a rare example of Sturgeon collaborating with a legendary colleague, Harlan Ellison. Included also are two other rarities: two detective stories and a Western that showcase Sturgeon’s knack for characterization and action outside his usual genre. “Take Care of Joey” has been read as an allusion to the complex personal relationship between Sturgeon and Ellison, while “It Was Nothing, Really!” hilariously skewers the mores of the military-industrial complex. As always, these stories demonstrate not only Sturgeon’s brilliant wordplay but also his timeliness, with “Brown-shoes” and “The Nail and the Oracle” standing out as powerful commentaries on the use and abuse of power that might have been written yesterday.

His father had been slain in a heinous ambush; his grandfather, in an act of brotherly murder. His blood was of the Skjoldungs . . . and even the most unremarkable of seers knew his life would be as sweeping as it was savage.

From the roiling midnight years before his birth, to the unshakable love and twisted fates that brought him to the throne of his ravaged Icelandic kingdom, Hrolf Kraki’s magnificent saga is the story of an age of runes and ravishments, of blades and omens . . . and of a man who ruled and was ruled by an inescapable destiny.

Alvin is a clone. One of four, all raised separately, all with unnatural powers. Terrified by their potential, their creator attempts to wipe their recent memories, their knowledge of the talents. But the process goes wrong, and all four are left with no memory at all. They see the world with brand new eyes.

Sent to a remote research station, kept under the guidance of an intelligent ape, Alvin begins to recover his memories. Desperate to rediscover his brothers, he sets off to London in a desperate search for their creator. But when he is kidnapped by criminal apes, the trouble really begins.

Anthologies seldom make history, but Dangerous Visions is a grand exception. Harlan Ellison’s 1967 collection of science fiction stories set an almost impossibly high standard, as more than a half dozen of its stories won major awards – not surprising with a contributors list that reads like a who’s who of 20th-century SF:

Evensong by Lester del Rey | Flies by Robert Silverberg | The Day After the Day the Martians Came by Frederik Pohl | Riders of the Purple Wage by Philip José Farmer | The Malley System by Miriam Allen deFord | A Toy for Juliette by Robert Bloch | The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World by Harlan Ellison | The Night That All Time Broke Out by Brian W. Aldiss | The Man Who Went to the Moon – Twice by Howard Rodman | Faith of Our Fathers by Philip K. Dick | The Jigsaw Man by Larry Niven | Gonna Roll the Bones by Fritz Leiber | Lord Randy, My Son by Joe L. Hensley | Eutopia by Poul Anderson | Incident in Moderan and The Escaping by David R. Bunch | The Doll-House by James Cross | Sex and/or Mr. Morrison by Carol Emshwiller | Shall the Dust Praise Thee? by Damon Knight | If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister? by Theodore Sturgeon | What Happened to Auguste Clarot? by Larry Eisenberg | Ersatz by Henry Slesar | Go, Go, Go, Said the Bird by Sonya Dorman | The Happy Breed by John Sladek | Encounter with a Hick by Jonathan Brand | From the Government Printing Office by Kris Neville | Land of the Great Horses by R. A. Lafferty | The Recognition by J. G. Ballard | Judas by John Brunner | Test to Destruction by Keith Laumer | Carcinoma Angels by Norman Spinrad | Auto-da-Fé by Roger Zelazny | Aye, and Gomorrah by Samuel R. Delany

Unavailable for 15 years, this huge anthology now returns to print, as relevant now as when it was first published.

Sam Falkirk, Captain of the World Police and stationed at the World Council building in New York, has a special interest in investigating the sudden and inexplicable death of Angelo Augustine, the brother of his girl friend. A messenger employed by the Council, Augustine was also a spy in the pay of Senator Rayburn, a fanatical Nationalist who is fighting both to retain his power and to destroy the Orient before they, as he believes, turn against the Occident.

Augustine had died while delivering a parcel containing a statue of a Buddha for an employee of Senator Sucamari of the Japanese Legation, and who, in his own way, is as fanatical as Rayburn himself. Sucamari wants to gain living room for the teeming millions of the Orient, and his secret plan involves the releasing of a deadly bacterial plague across the Americas. The bacteria is contained in a special coating on the Buddha statue, but when the statue is stolen by a petty criminal, millions of people hover on the brink of agonizing death, unless Falkirk can find the criminal in time . . .

Between the frozen wastes of the night side and the searing inferno of the dayside, the Twilight Belt held all that was Human on the tiny world of Mercury, Hell Planet of the Solar System. A strange world, airless, subject to the alien distortions of Einsteinian mathematics, Mercury was both a promise and a challenge, for here could be found torrents of cheap power essential to the ships and men in space. Lee Correy, Commander of the Station, plunges into the frigid wastes in a desperate race against time to find and rescue both his brother and the essential component of the beam control. Fighting impossible conditions and incredible alien life he is up against the enigmatic mystery of the sand devils; a dead man who walked, and a machine that could not fail-but did.

Here is a story of the future, of the planets and the men who will colonise them, of the way they will live and the problems they will face. With mystery, adventure, exciting action and scientifically correct detail. A story of what might well be in the days to come . . .

The Collected Stories Volume 5: The Palace At Midnight (1980 – 1982)

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:
Our Lady of the Sauropods
Waiting for the Earthquake
The Regulars
The Far Side of the Bell-Shaped Curve
A Thousand Paces Along the Via Dolorosa
How They Pass the Time in Pelpel
The Palace at Midnight
The Man Who Floated in Time
Gianni
The Pope of the Chimps
Thesme and the Ghayrog
At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party
The Trouble with Sempoanga
Jennifer’s Lover
Not Our Brother
Gate of Horn, Gate of Ivory
Dancers in the Time-Flux
Needle in a Timestack
Amanda and the Alien
Snake and Ocean, Ocean and Snake
The Changeling
Basileus
Homefaring

‘You will be a King, and Great King, and then you will Die, and you may not avoid that destiny, try as you may¿’

Two-thirds god, one-third human, Gilgamesh is a giant among men and a formidable warrior, even as a boy. When his father the king of Rurk dies, Gilgamesh is forced into exile by the newly crowned Dumuzi, jealous of his prowess and fearful of his intentions.

In neighbouring Kis his fighting skills are honed to perfection, and when in time Dumuzi dies, Gilgamesh returns to be proclaimed king by the wily priestess Inanna, goddess of beauty. Together they rule Uruk, and prosperity descends upon the land.

However, the kingship is not enough to satisfy Gilgamesh’s gargantuan appetite for adventure, and his boredom is only relieved by the coming of Enkidu, a strange wild man who proves the king’s equal in combat. The two become closer than brothers, but when Gilgamesh incurs the wrath of Inanna, the gods conspire to tear them apart, and for Gilgamesh all that remains is his search for immortality.

In retelling the legend of the great Sumerian monarch, Robert Silverberg brings all his superb storytelling powers to a mesmerising tale of ambition, power and obsession, against the background of an ancient and fearsome world.

Hour by hour, the computers produce the names of those to die. Simple. Neat. Ruthless.

In a world where human feelings seem frozen, one spirit flares with defiance and hope . . . while two powerful brothers fight their old blood feud to a brutal climax.

And hurtling through space . . . a lost explorer desperately tries to reach earth with word of a new paradise for man beyond the stars . . .




(First published 1957)

The gods of Poseidonis – or Atlantis – were powerful and real. Now they were determined to destroy the kingdom ruled by the father of Prince Vakar, the one man whose mind they could not read. The only way to save the kingdom was to discover that thing which the gods feared most.

To find it, Prince Vakar set out across the largely unknown world where dangers multiplied with every league. There he found savage countries and strange people – the wild Amazons; a voluptuous, ensorcelled queen; a too-charming girl who was half-horse, half-woman; dangerous magicians who ruled hordes of headless slaves; and the Gorgons, who could paralyze their victims at a glance.

Behind was his ambitious brother, determined that Vakar must fail. Even closer were unknown enemies set on his trail by the suspicious gods.

And to add to his troubles, Vakar had no idea of what he sought!

The Whims of Destiny

Jorian, the one-time unbeheaded king, was now safely retired from a long career of getting into trouble. But his younger brother Kerin lacked such wisdom. The outraged father of Adeliza had caught him in compromising circumstances with the maiden. So Kerin had to be sent at once on a mission by sea to the Far East.

But Kerin’s talent for trouble was not to be denied. First came Belinka, a sprite sent by Adeliza to bring him back safe for her. The ship captain believed Kerin was seducing his mistress. Though innocent this time, Kerin left hastily in a rowboat. That got him to a hermit-wizard’s island – and a voyage on a pirate ship, where the kidnapped princess Nogiri was held captive. Kerin was unable to save her – until he gained the help of the hermit-wizard, who then betrayed him by seizing the girl and fleeing with her to be used as a human sacrifice.

From then on, events became hectic as Kerin managed to save Nogiri again, helped by a wizard who was the enemy of the first one. Belinka was much distressed by what happened then between Kerin and Nogiri – with cause – as they set out again, this time to the Emperor of the Farthest East.

There Kerin discovered more magic, and the Emperor learned that no man should be absentminded when using a powerful spell. But it was later that Kerin discovered the limitations of roller skates.

On a future Earth, where invading aliens have forced humanity to revert to a feudal society and conducting scientific research is punishable by death, it’s good to be the heir to a duchy. Unless your brother has been burnt as punishment for heresy. And unless you intended to do something about it . . .

After The Knights of the Limits, here is a second collection of endlessly inventive stories by Barrington J. Bayley; dark fables resounding with sombre undertones – love used as a weapon, God assassinated by the ingenuity of man, the secret of death revealed, the inexplicable explained! Tales which will be pondered on, and remembered.
Contains the following:
Sporting with the Chid
The God-Gun
The Ship that Sailed the Ocean of Space
The Radius RidersMan in Transit
Wizard Wazo’s Revenge
The Infinite Searchlight
Integrity
Perfect Love
The Countenance
Life Trap
Farewell Dear Brother
The Seed of Evil

The interstellar Bridge System was the greatest invention in the long history of cosmic humanity. Spread through dozens of planets, men and their societies had drifted apart in isolation until the Bridge came to link together humanity’s multifold worlds . . . and had affirmed once more that all men were brothers and sisters under the skin.

But the far away world of Azreal was the exception, the one dissident world that refused the Bridge. It became the task of two agents, a man and a woman, to bring Azreal back into manshape unity, to ferret out the hidden reasons for the stubborn refusal.

The problem, with its perils and high risks, was to involve more than just secrets, for Manshape is John Brunner novel that deals with the very fabric of civilization . . .