Search Results for: coming,-the

A Wall Street trader leaves the bulls and bears – and comes face-to-face with hungrier dinosaurs. A Roaring ’20s gangster gets roughed up – by real cavemen. A pioneer hitches up his covered wagon on the Oregon Trail – and winds up in a modern shopping mall. And Roger Tyson, who thought the space-time continuum had finally settled down to normal, is flung helplessly from the distant past to the far future, and back again.

Superbeings from the end of time are struggling for control of the universe with aliens from another galaxy. And if a few random humans get caught in one of their time gates, they don’t much care. So Roger and his friends find themselves facing everyone from the cast of the original Mutiny on the Bounty to real pirates of the Spanish Main in a wild quest to their own time and bring everything back to insanity as usual…

Retief is an officer of the distinguished Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne, a supra-national organization devoted to keeping the peace – or more accurately, to maintaining a state of tension short of armed conflict.
Retief is not exactly in the mainstream of current Galactic diplomacy, as expounded by such giants of the C.D.T. as Crodfoller, Hidebinder, Straphanger, and his own immediate superior, Magnan. Deviously sincere, uncompromisingly venal, fearlessly cowardly, these great, dedicated public servants will seem curiously familiar as they strive to keep the peace seven hundred years in the future.

But when Retief’s on the scene things have a way of coming right in the end…

Contents:

Ultimatum
Saline Solution
The Brass God
The Castle of Light
Wicker Wonderland
Native Intelligence
The Prince and the Pirate
Courier
Protest Note

THE COMING OF THE BLIGHT
It seemed as though the world was eroding right under everyone’s feet. Stories disappeared from magazines; the baron’s silver coat of arms, polished in the morning, was pitted with corrosion by afternoon; toadstools were springing up from every corner. And these were but the first signs of the coming plague, a cancerous orgy of patternless vitality seeking to engulf the world…

TO STEM THE TIDE
Carefree Johnny Curlon, indelicately plucked from his fishing boat one evening, is bluntly informed by high powers that he is a man destined for a role in great affairs: only his unique powers can prevent the coming probability crisis that threatens to turn the world into bubbling chaos…

Is he George Whitley, a twentieth-century writer of science fiction – or Peter Quinn, Second Officer of the interstellar liner Lode Maiden?

An injection of lysergic acid and Whitley finds himself … where … who … and in what age? He is inhabiting the body of Second Officer Quinn but his mind is still that of George Whitley.

Aboard the Lode Maiden he can capture only fragments of Quinn’s memory and consciousness, until a magnetic storm throws the ship off trajectory into the deep reaches of space. Then, somehow, enough knowledge comes to him to enable him to help land the ship on an unnamed planet on the Galactic Rim.

But the forced landing damages the ship and kills the Captain, leaving Quinn – or is it Whitley? – to lead the crew and passengers to safety through the horrors and dangers of the unknown planet.

ALAN KEMP HAD A DREAM FEW SPACEMEN EVER SAW COME TRUE. BUT IN THE RIM WORLD ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE…

Alan Kemp was a man obsessed. Stranded with his crew on the Rim planet Elsinore, he saw a chance to realise that dream – and took it. When a gausjammer crash-landed on Elsinore, Kemp rebuild the second-hand, obsolete starship and set out to establish a shuttle between the Rim planets.

But before they reached their destination, Kemp and his comrades were waylaid by an alien colony. A colony inhabited by giant mechanical spiders who imprisoned their captives in a palace of pleasure whey the chance – or desire to escape – is precisely zero.

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.

Did she hold the key to ecstasy – or to horror?

The people of Gwethym were highly intelligent, rational beings. They worshiped the goddess Neith, not because they believed in such a golden-haired being, but because they recognised the need for religion as a counterbalance to human passions.

So when trouble struck their planet, when they discovered an energy leak which was slowly destroying their world, the Gwethymians turned to science for their answer. If their world was to be saved, the solution must come from the logicians.

Or so they thought, until one day a woman, in the image of their goddess Neith, walked across the waters of the harbour and into their city! Then their trouble was two-fold. Would there be anything left to save of their world if they waited for the scientists? And if they didn’t, if they put their trust in this goddess whom logic told them could not even exist, would they just be sealing their doom that much quicker?

Detailed research, empathy with his characters, an ecological perspective and his trademark flare for epic narrative sweep make Baxter’s Mammoth series very much key works in his canon.

ICEBONES takes the action to a stunningly realised partially terraformed Mars in the far future and sees the epic Mammoth story cycle come to fruition.

The cyborg code-named “Slant” was sent out as an Independent Reconnaissance Unit during an interstellar war between Earth and its colonies. The fighting ended three hundred years ago, but Slant’s computer does not admit this – he is compelled to carry on as if the war were still raging.

Then he comes across a planet where his sensors register “gravitational anomalies.” The computer interprets these as enemy weapons research.

The local inhabitants call the anomalies “magic.”

Ethshar, or “the World” as its inhabitants call it, is the setting for almost a dozen novels by Lawrence Watt-Evans. The dominant nation on the World is the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars, while the largest, richest city, where most of the stories are set, is Ethshar of the Spices. The name itself comes from words meaning “safe harbor.” You don’t need to have read any of the novels to enjoy the stories herein; each one should stand alone. And if you’ve read the novels, you will enjoy this return to the world of Ethshar with 11 stories…

OH COME TO KLEPSIS TO CLAIM YOUR SHARE … AND BREATHE THE RANK AND LAWLESS AIR!

Plots and intrigues and romances abound.
Smoke pictures, ghosts and treasure chests to be found.
Magnifying monocles and hallucinogenic grapes – the unvoiced dreams of the dregs of space.

Long John Tony Tyrone, the peg-legged historian, journeys here…
And marries a princess with rainbow hair.

But the Ghost of Christopher Brannagan will not rest
Until mathematician Aloysius has put to the test
His theory concerning the Doomsday Equation
Which might save the plane from total devastation.

Or might not.

As Kartin says, ‘You can’t have houses in space.’ What then are those mysterious objects that have suddenly appeared far out on the planet routes? What connection do they have with ‘the Shy Six Hundred’, as Kemlo calls them, those strange, Earth-born visitors to Satellite K who are so chary of having their photographs taken?

Kemlo and his Space Scouts decide that the time has come for a little detective work and the boys are soon hot on the trail – a trail which is to lead them from the comfort and security of the satellite to a battle to the death twenty million miles out into the void.

Solid land inside a cloud of ‘star dust’ – where no solid land should be. And the weird voices – where are they coming from?

Forced down on a minor star galaxy, Kemlo and his friends of Satellite Belt K discover a secret of Space which gives scientists information for which they have been searching for years.

The Far Traveler was hardly the sort of starship to use in the study of lost space colonies. Lost colonies were likely to be desperate, eccentric and otherwise unappreciative. And The Far Traveler was a rich woman’s toy, constructed of gold and directed by an omniscient, dictatorial and feminine computer known as Big Sister.

John Grimes had become that golden vessel’s captain. A captain in name only because nobody could talk back to Big Sister or the haughty beauty who owned everything aboard. But Grimes was a man of many resources and lost space colonies were placed that did not observe the civilized rules. You could be sure, therefore, that the man known as the Commodore Hornblower of Outer Space would be likely to come through okay, even if the ladies – mechanical and physical – never expected him to!

Being lost in space was no new experience to John Grimes, whose career as an interstellar officer had brought him into many such dilemmas. But being lost inside a colossal alien spacecraft had no precedent.

Complicating the matter was the discovery that the very universe was not their own but an alternate and that their captor seemed to be the omnipotent force of that entire other cosmos.
As Grime’s only companion was the comely policewoman, Una Freeman, the fate that the Alien God selected for them required the creation of a Garden of Eden. But there were two serpents in this one – both of them bicycles!

Scientific progress has taken human beings to remote planes in far galaxies and enabled them to build comfortable homes there. But when that science proved a deadly enemy and had to be abandoned, the pioneers were isolated in alien surroundings. There was no way home. Earth, which had once been home, had ceased to exist. And when the men of the planet Demeter died out in space, the destiny of the human race was left to a group of women.

Clare Monkton worked to establish a feminist world. She used the resources of science to assure the continuance of the race … but the resulting children were to be brought up according to her ideas.

There was bound to be a challenge. When there were once more young men growing up on the planet, it was inevitable that they should oppose the authority of the women. And when one of those young men proved to come from such a dangerous ancestry, Clare knew she had a battle on her hands…

Robotic minds made interstellar travel possible, but human minds still controlled the destination and purpose of such flight. Conflict develops only when a programmed brain cannot evaluate beyond what is visible and substantial, whereas the human mind is capable of infinite imagination – including that which is unreal.

Such was the problem at the singularity in space in which the ALTAIR STAR and a hundred other vessels had come to grief. At that spot, natural laws seem subverted – and some other universe’s rules impinged.

For Buchanan, the station meant a chance to observe and maybe rescue his lost vessel. For the robotic navigators of oncoming spaceships, the meaning was different. And at Singularity Station the only inevitable was conflict.

With the discovery of the hyperdrive, mankind at last possessed the means of going out to the stars. Four expeditions had already gone by the fine the fifth starship left Pluto for Vega. Carrying its complement of scientists and military personnel, they arrived at the solar system of Vega to find one planet sufficiently like Earth to allow them to land.

Here, they discovered mystery. The ruins of great cities built on the shattered remains of still earlier fortresses, showing that some great race of conquerors had passed that way sometime in the past thirty thousand years.

No life now remained on this planet and speeding to the next sun, they found a civilisation which possessed powers so utterly strange to them that one native almost succeeded in destroying them and taking over the ship. And still the mystery remained, for the legends of the planet spoke of a race of gods who had come down from the stars twenty thousand years before.

It was not until they reached the planet of a red giant sun that they ran into a race of creatures so fantastically alien that there was no defence against them, and they learned the real identity of the race which had conquered the stars millennia before…

These were the last weeks and days before the end of the world, before total destruction overwhelmed Earth and every living thing on the surface of the planet. No one knew exactly how long they had before the sun turned nova and destroyed not only Earth but all of the other planets in the Solar System. For mankind, the only excape lay in flight to the stars, to Alpha Centauri, more than four light years distant.

The hyperdrive, capable of carrying them there at close to the speed of light had been developed, but as yet had not been perfected. In a world without a future, the starships were the only salvation of mankind and they could save only a minute fraction of the population of Earth.

Panic is there, but temporarily forgotten by most, as the plans for a mass exodus are speeded up, as the long hours of mounting tension draw to a close and Judgement Day, when the world shall be destroyed by fire, is mo longer a hazy time in the far future, but something very close and very terrible. For those who remained behind, there could be no escape; death would come suddenly, eight minutes after the nova explosion. For those who fled the Solar System in the starships, untried and working on principles only partially understood, there was only the long, terrible journey through the endless night, not knowing what lay at the end of it.

Earth had been destroyed, but man had built his colonies on Mars and Venus and the far-flung moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Mutation and forced breeding had changed these people so they were no longer human. Clyde Lester, the last man on Earth, had a special problem. From somewhere in space there originated strange radio signals which could only come from beyond the orbit of Pluto, the outermost planet.

To the crew of the Exploratory Ship Canopus, outward bound on the first intergalactic voyage to the flaring suns of mighty Andromeda, the evil whisperings that spilled out from the nebula into deep space came as a warning. This was something far beyond their previous experience. Nor were they the only ones to come under the malignant influence of the alien intelligence.

In the empty, murmuring void, virtually half-way between the two galaxies of stars, a solitary sun streaked away from Andromeda, dragging its lonely, ammonia-laden planet with it. And it was here that the explorers first gained their glimpse of the black horror that lay straddled across the intergalactic darkness. Something that had being. Something that existed where it seemed impossible that anything could.

It fell on Klau-Telph, the only non-Terran on board the Canopus, to finally track down and destroy the inhuman monster that threatened to drive the inhabitants of a trillion planets over the red edge of madness. Not until it was done did he find that the hidden reason behind the insidious whisperings was not what it seemed. In fact, it was something that even he, with his strange double mind, had never thought possible…

Into a world armed to the teeth there suddenly comes a strange gospel of disarmament. Briefed to investigate the intrigue is Sidney Boyd of MI5, and from a murdered diplomat his adventures take him to the fantastic Earth Two, an exact duplicate of our own planet in so far as living beings are con­cerned, and it falls to him-with the help of Orwena Exburg of Earth Two-to try and smash the deadly plan which is being matured against the peaceful nations of the world. Boyd and Orwena solve the mystery of Earth Two after making a landing on the moon and discovering something about it never before suspected by Earth scientists…

Dudley Carnforth, gifted beyond the average with the ‘gift of the gab’, and also a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ scientific and master of none, decides that the time has come to end his grasshopper leaping from one job to another and do something really arresting which will put him on top of the world. Born in an age where space travel is just around the corner but not yet accomplished, he conceives the notion of pooling the many sciences he almost understands and producing therefrom a master plan for the conquest of space…

Did it ever occur to you what might happen if you found yourself compelled to tell the truth for the rest of your life, because all power of telling a lie was gone? It would seem that since a great bulk of our society is built upon sham and pretense, things would come to a pretty pass if the power of untruths were destroyed.