Search Results for: dare

As a young mathematician, Jim Eckert was transported to a parallel medieval world where he found he had the ability to transform himself into a large but none-too-bright dragon named Gorbash. Jim Eckert’s daring exploits have earned him a title – Baron de Bois de Malencontri et Riveroak – and he has settled down to a peaceful life as a feudal lord, with his beloved Angela at his side.

But a new peril endangers his enchanted realm – as the King of the Gnarlies teams up with the Earl of Cumberland, Jim’s longtime rival, to kidnap his adopted son, Robert. Soon Sir Jim must assume the shape of the Dragon Knight once again to rescue little Robert, and finds himself entrenched in a magical battle royal – one he’ll have to fight harder than ever to survive!

James Blish called him the “finest conscious artist science fiction ever produced.” Kurt Vonnegut based the famous character Kilgore Trout on him. And such luminaries as Harlan Ellison, Stephen King, and Octavia Butler have hailed him as a mentor. Theodore Sturgeon was both a popular favorite and a writer’s writer, carving out a singular place in the literary landscape based on his masterful wordplay, conceptual daring, and narrative drive. Sturgeon’s sardonic sensibility and his skill at interweaving important social issues such as sex-including gay themes-and war into his stories are evident in all of his work, regardless of genre.

Case and the Dreamer displays Sturgeon’s gifts at their peak. The book brings together his last stories, written between 1972 and 1983. They include “The Country of Afterward,” a sexually explicit story Sturgeon had been unable to write earlier in his career, and the title story, about an encounter with a transpatial being that is also a meditation on love. Several previously unpublished stories are included, as well as his final one, “Grizzly,” a poignant take on the lung disease that killed him two years later.

At last a lone youth dares to challenge the unchallengeable, to defy the Anome. But first he must find him – and though all men obey his orders, no man knows his identity. He is the Faceless Man.

865 A.D. Warring kings rule over the British Isles, but the Church rules over the kings. Powerful bishops and black-robed priests fill their cathedrals with gold, while threatening all who oppose them with damnation. But there are those who do not fear the priests, and they are the dreaded Vikings of Scandinavia. Among these Northern invaders, those who follow the Way of the Gods of Asgard carry the Hammer of Thor as their emblem, and they are sworn to increase mankind’s knowledge and strength by conquest and by craft. And as Viking warlords cast hungry eyes upon a weak and divided Britain, the Way collides with the Church, launching an all-out war between The Hammer and the Cross.
At the center of this bloody conflict is Shef, bastard son of a Norse raider and a captive English lady. A smith and a warrior, he is driven by strange visions that seem to come from Odin himself. Torn by divided loyalties, Shef alone dares to imagine new weapons and tactics with which to carve out a kingdom – and threaten the holy power of Rome itself!

They are saurians.
They are armed and dangerous.

On an Earth where the descendants of dinosaurs are still the dominant species, human beings have only their ingenuity to pit against the terrifying biological technology of the Yilanè. Kerrick grew up as their slave-pet: now he must rescue his embattled people with the help of the seafaring Paramutans. And in order to succeed he must place the future of the entire human species at risk…

Winter in Eden continues Harry Harrison’s acclaimed epic story of the titanic clash between two implacably opposed cultures – the saurian Yilanè and the resourceful mammals who have dared to challenge their absolute power.

Asia, vast continent of ancient civilizations and mysterious peoples, has many corners little known to the rest of the world. One such was the jungle-hidden heart of exotic Cambodia, where Gordon King, a daring American explorer, stumbled upon the thousand-year secret kingdom of THE LAND OF HIDDEN MEN.



Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose Tarzan tales have enthralled millions, has written a novel of another such jungle hero that is as exciting, as adventure-packed and as imaginative as his best. The dangers Gordon King faced, his rescue of a jungle princess, and his combat against the perils of the lost city of Pnom Dhek are first-rate Burroughs to the last exciting line.

War had devastated the entire eastern hemisphere. For two hundred years America had lived in civilized isolation, while Europe had lapsed into legend.

Jefferson Turck was the first man who dared recross the 30th meridian, and like Columbus centuries before him, he landed in a New World. For Europe had become the jungle home of savage beasts and her people had banded together in bloodthirsty tribes led by barbarian queens.

Somewhere in the unexplored heart of Africa a part of this Earth has been taken over by an intelligence from outer space. Such was the message that reached the explorer Hareton Ironcastle, member of the famous Baltimore Gun Club. In that hidden and transformed valley would now be found monsters and pre-humans not to be seen anywhere else.

Such a challenge could not be ignored, and the account of Ironcastle’s expedition of daring but inexperienced amateurs became one of the classic novels of the French writer, J. H. Rosny, who was a contemporary of Verne, Wells, and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Now Philip José Farmer, Hugo winner and chronicler of the adventures of Tarzan and Doc Savage, has translated and retold Rosny’s novel, making it a marvel adventure novel to stand alongside the works of Burroughs, Haggard and Farmer himself.

Though Earthmen first landed on the planet Dare 300 years earlier, they were still bound by the same standards of snobbery and fear… until Jack Cage, eldest son of a wealthy human, found himself strangely drawn to a spectacularly beautiful native. To consort with her meant death. But why? And what were humans doing on the planet anyway?

And through the shimmering gates they left for us, there are stars beyond stars: universes to be discovered on a voyage more awesome, an adventure more incredible, than anything humankind has ever dared to dream before!

There were three of them – Adzel who measured four and a half metres and resembled a dragon, Chee Lan who was furry, catlike and female, and David Falkayn, a dare-devil rakehell from space.

When they learned of a rogue planet two hundred and four light-years from Sol, they were interested because the planet, a nightmare of ice and darkness, was rich in minerals. And the planet was about to melt – to move closer to a sun and release the vast wealth entombed in its depths.

And Falkayn, Chee Lan and Adzel were prepared to risk the horrors of an erupting, melting world if they could only salvage the riches that would shortly boil from the planet’s core…

The years since first he gained the Starburst Crown have been difficult ones for Coronal Lord Prestimion and the vast, unfathomable realm he rules. But finally peace has been restored to Majipoor. And now it is time for Prestimion to name the able Prince Dekkeret as his succeeding Coronal and to descend to the Labyrinth as Pontifex. But a power from a dark past that both men believed was dead is stirring once again – an evil more potent and devastating than either leader dares to remember.

THROUGH THE TERROR TOROID

It could have been a black hole – one of those terrifying rips in space that defy all laws. That it was artificial in origin did not make it any less deadly.

Worst of all, that strange extra-galactic torus was drifting into an intersect with Earth in its orbit. The result would be devastation beyond concept.

Cap Kennedy and his three companions were considered expendable in such a cause. And Cap himself volunteered to dare the impossible – to turn that cosmic hole aside.

What he fell into was an adventure utterly different than anything he had expected. The novel of EARTH ENSLAVED is a real surprise package for the legion of Cap Kennedy’s followers.

The galaxy is at war, a war between the oxygen-breathing Terran Federation of worlds and the Ginzoes, chlorine-breathing aliens. Neither side dare attack the others’ habitable worlds for fear of reprisals: the war has become a matter of spaceships firing on each other as they emerge from hyperspace.
An Earth ship is captured in battle by the Ginzoes, and its surviving crew learn that the aliens have gained possession of a newly-developed catalyst. If dropped into the oceans of oxygen planets the catalyst can liberate the chlorine from the sea and convert them to chlorine worlds suitable for the Ginzoes. The catalyst will be used unless the Terran Federation declares peace within fifty days. Fifty days to save Mankind . . . or fifty days to doom!

Identical twins Sean and Eric have been chosen for a daring experiment. One of them will travel into the distant past. The other into the distant future. But each swing of the time pendulum means they will be further and further apart.

Will the experiment work? And if it does, will the twins ever meet again?

The Long Winter is over.

The People of the New Springtime must go out and reclaim their world.

For generations the survivors of the cataclysm have sheltered in cocoons buried in the earth and waited for the gods to grow tired of hurling down death-stars onto a frozen world. Now it is time for Koshmar and the boy-chronicler, Hresh, and the rest of Koshmar’s tribe to emerge into the sun. A strange and savage landscape awaits them, where rat-wolves, bloodbirds and soulless hjjk-men stalk – and terrifyingly altered other creatures.

In the ruins of Vengiboneeza, the ancient capital of the sapphire-eyes folk, Hresh dares to celebrate their triumph – and suffers a shattering defeat at the realisation of a great and terrible truth.




(First published 1988)

The ship was to be seven miles long, a third of a mile in diameter and have a wing-spread of three and a half miles. It would take two and a half centuries to construct. Its announced purpose: to carry humanity away from its ruined world, from the world that had become a perpetual purgatory.

To build this vast ship would require the undivided activity of an entire nation and would mean carrying out a ruthless program of war and conquest, of annihilation and reconstruction, and of education and rediscovery.

But was this starship really what it was claimed to be? Or was there a greater secret behind its incredible cost – a secret so strange that no man dared reveal it?

This is the strange, compelling story of Roger Bacon. Ambitious, impatient, mutinous, Bacon was a man of his times with a vision reaching far beyond even our own day. Subject to the harsh, narrow confines of Church-dominated ‘science’, Bacon dared to venture into the deep waters of theory, risking deadly accusations of heresy and black magic. Set against a vividly realised backdrop of thirteenth-century England, Paris and Rome, this is an engrossing account of this lonely prophet and suspected sorcerer.

On the 15th day of Franklin, Year of Descent 1008, in the Kralate of Vizantia Planet Kforri.

A young teacher, Marko Prokopiu, is convicted and jailed. His heinous crime: preaching the false and unholy belief that Kforri was originally settled by men arriving from Earth in flying machines – a dangerous heresy against the official doctrine of divine evolution.

Goaded into jail-break by his wife’s desertion and mightily armed with his father’s great ax, Markorushes to avenge his marital honour. With an eminent philosopher, Dr. Halran, inventor of the incredible hot-air balloon, Marko journeys perilously to exotic lands – to decadent Anglonia, hostile Afka, civilised Eropia and, at last, the all-female Isle of Mnaenn. There, by clever ruse and uncommon physical daring, he must recover the Great Fetish and solve the riddle of planet Kforri’s ancient history, or meet a fate more complicated than death!

They put him into a hypnotic trance in a sealed room to cure him. Then the house burnt down and he was forgotten.

Until he awoke forty years later and could not – dared not – believe what he saw . . .

A daring novel of mankind’s strange and startling destiny. . .

Here is a novel to equal Arthur C. Clarke’s great work, Childhood’s End. It tells with frightening clarity of a desperately stricken Earth – wracked by overpopulation and plagued by famine and despair.

It tells, too, of a new breed of men and women – twenty-first century lotus eaters caught up in a mysterious euphoria which will ultimately threaten all life on this planet: the drug-induced world of ‘happy dreams’. Do these ‘happy dreamers’ herald the end of the human race – or the next extraordinary step in the evolution of Man?


First published in 1963.

You didn’t make an Adapted Man with just a wave of the wand. It involved an elaborate constellation of techniques, known collectively as pantropy, that changed the human pattern in a man’s shape and chemistry before he was born.

But the pantropists didn’t stop with biology. Education, thoughts, ancestors and the world itself were changed, because the Adapted Men were produced to live and thrive in the alien environments found only in space. They were crucial to a daring plan to colonize the universe.

And millennia later, it is only fitting that they should return to a long forgotten planetary system to colonise a hostile world called . . . Earth.

Rhys Morgan and Jack Dawson are the last two boys on the school bus. It’s the same everyday. But today will be different.

Coming down the hill towards Wellthorpe, through a heavy snow laden day, the bus careers out of control and crashes.

Into a river and a different world. A world where crows talk. The world of the Icetower and its dark owner. A world where Rhys and Jack must find the strength to be heroes.

In Dreamtime, you have to look before you leap. So, do you dare step over the Threshold?