Search Results for: earth

In Earthsong, the Native Tongue trilogy’s long-awaited finale, the Aliens have abandoned Earth, taking their technologies with them and plunging the planet into economic and ecological disaster. Devastated, the women decide to take their failed Láadan project back underground, desperately seeking guidance from their long-dead foremothers. The women discover an ingenious solution to the problem of human violence and seek to spread their knowledge-but has their final solution come too late?

An instant cult classic upon first publication, Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue trilogy has earned wide critical acclaim, shocking and captivating a loyal readership among science fiction and women’s literature audiences alike.

Sequel to the enormously popular Native Tongue, The Judas Rosecontinues Elgin’s gripping vision of a frightening, male-dominated world where the women of Earth are virtually enslaved. Once again, this group of women-and the nonviolent yet transformative power of language-is called upon to challenge Earth’s violent, patriarchal order. Their revolutionary tool is Laadan-a secret women’s language created to free them from men’s control and make resistance possible for all women.

In The Judas Rose, the time has come to take Laadan from underground and spread its revolutionary power to women everywhere-in part, through a group of nuns inside the Roman Catholic Church. But when a handful of horrified priests uncover the women’s sabotage they move to stamp it out with an undercover female agent of their own.

The neighbours all said ten-year-old Paul Brandon would grow up to be a detective: he was remarkably observant and inquisitive. But Paul doesn’t grow up to be a detective; after failing to return one night, his body is found buried under a road excavation site. A tragic, unnecessary accident it seems.

But after the foreman insists that no child could move that amount of earth, Vic Varallo begins to suspect foul play and follows the leads to Paul’s reticent playmate Gordon, who may have witnessed something terrible that night.

‘My favourite American crime-writer’ New York Herald Tribune

Money in the bank had always been a persuasive factor in Bertha Cool’s life – and Lamont Hawley represented a lot of it. He also represented an insurance company that smelled a rat about a traffic-accident claim. The trouble was the claimant had drifted away – a beautiful blonde who had been co-operative and level-headed. In fact, too level-headed … she sounded almost professional.

Donald Lam didn’t like it. Why should a large insurance company need an outside investigator? But Bertha’s eyes see $$$ so Donald gets cracking, and within no time he is the prime suspect. For what on earth is a body doing in the trunk of Donald’s car?

‘The British, once they take the gloves off – once they forget to play cricket, to be English gentlemen – they are the toughest things on earth,’ says one German espionage agent to another in Dark Duet. And the trouble with Michael Kane, hero of this spy thriller, is that he never plays cricket with Nazi spies …

‘Dark Duet seems to me damn good’ Raymond Chandler

From The SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal sample introduction to the incredible career of Jack Williamson, whose career spanned over seventy years.

Jack Williamson published his first SF story, ‘The Metal Man’, in 1928 and continued to write high quality SF until his death in 2006, along the way coining many of the terms the genre now takes for granted, such as ‘terraforming’ and ‘genetic engineering’. He was the second writer (after Heinlein) to be named a SFWA Grand Master and was the oldest recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. This volume contains The Legion of Space, the first volume in the eponymous series; The Humanoids; John W. Campbell Award-winning Terraforming Earth and his Hugo Award-winning autobiography Wonder’s Child: My Life in Science Fiction.

Alien horror becomes a living nightmare as the Xenos, meaning “strangers”, inflict mayhem on earth.

International distress alerts are sent out when planes first seem to disappear, disturbing concepts of space and time and leaving a trail of death and disillusionment. This bizarre series of “cosmic skyjackings” is shrouded in secrecy by a baffled and frightened military. Intense surveillance fails to reveal the cause of a seemingly hostile yet invisible enemy. Aircraft continue to disappear, plucked out of the sky without warning, only to reappear months later, thousands of miles off course.

National and global security is under threat and the ICARUS committee is formed to investigate. Military officials, the government and the FBI work alongside physician Mark Freedman and Soviet scientists to uncover the supernatural mystery that lies behind these unexplainable events. Earth has been found by a horde of creatures that not even the wildest imagination could invent – sinister parasitic creatures that took to their human hosts with deadly speed and bloodthirsty precision.

The terror that unfolds has terrifying consequences for all involved, and the invasion reveals something much more frightening and final than ever suspected.

The 22nd Century. Dr. Charles Forbin is Earth’s most powerful man. As mediator between Colossus, the Super Computer, and the rest of humanity, Forbin holds the key to Earth’s fate.
When Colossus, an awe-inspiring technological creation, suddenly became self-aware and took upon itself the task of righting humanity’s wrongs with no regard for humans themselves, Forbin intervened. He took the decision to turn off his great machine – but could not do it alone.
Forbin called upon invaders from Mars. The Martians did their fastidious work, shutting down Colossus. The Earth descended into chaos. Rival factions sparred for supremacy, with only Forbin to control the populace and maintain order.
But now, the Martians have returned. And they want compensation. Forbin is asked to design a super Collector in order to solidify the Earth’s supply of oxygen – or, a large proportion of it – to be handed over to the Martians. But to do so would condemn the lives of hundreds of millions of Earth’s inhabitants. There is only one entity on Earth with the power to stop the Martians…Colossus must return.

The hugely powerful and pervasive presence of the Colossus supercomputer mechanically runs Earth and its myriad operations. Managed by its creator, Dr. Charles Forbin, it is incapable of lies and void of human emotion. It is not a robot and not human. As part of its brief to enhance the human race, it runs eerie emotion research centres, authorizing acts of savagery to measure resistance and feeling. Art and abstract creation are banned, and surveillance is constant. No one is free. The power of Colossus is spiralling out of control. The Sect worship it as a God, enforcing its word at every opportunity and seeking out traitors. The Fellowship secretly oppose it as a force of evil, and they risk their lives in a concentrated effort to destroy it and escape its domination. Meanwhile, as Forbin becomes increasingly disillusioned with what he has unleashed on the world, his wife, Cleo, becomes distant, with disastrous consequences.

Supernatural fusion of horror and police procedural set in Phoenix, Arizona. When Police Sergeant Alex Volchak discovers the true nature of a predator that has survived among us unnoticed for generations, he places himself and those around him in mortal danger. It’s older than the desert, a thing without a name, but as vicious, jealous and self-preserving a creature as ever walked the earth. And it hides in plain sight.

From the award-winning author of Majestrum, Template, and The Other, this collection of short stories ranges from the thoughtful to the whimsical. Most of them appeared first in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov’s. Others were written for the bespoke anthologies: Songs of the Dying Earth, Old Mars, and Welcome to the Greenhouse; one is published here for the first time.

Praise for Matthew Hughes:

“Matthew Hughes does Jack Vance better than anyone except Jack himself” – George R.R. Martin
“Heir apparent to Jack Vance” – Booklist
“Hughes’s boldness is admirable”- New York Review of Science Fiction
“Hughes effortlessly renders fantastic worlds and beings believable”- Publishers Weekly
“A towering talent”- Robert J. Sawyer
“A treasure” – David Gerrold

In Old Earth’s penultimate age, humanity’s collective unconscious has long since been fully explored and mapped by the noönaut scholars of the Institute for Historical Inquiry. But something is threatening the integrity – perhaps even the very existence – of the noösphere, and aspiring academic Guth Bandar finds his career plans diverted by a collective unconscious that appears to be waking up.
The Compleat Guth Bandar brings together the full series of Bandar stories originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and later assembled into a “fix-up” novel: The Commons.

Praise for Matthew Hughes:

“Matthew Hughes does Jack Vance better than anyone except Jack himself” – George R.R. Martin
“Heir apparent to Jack Vance” – Booklist
“Hughes’s boldness is admirable”- New York Review of Science Fiction
“Hughes effortlessly renders fantastic worlds and beings believable”- Publishers Weekly
“A towering talent”- Robert J. Sawyer
“A treasure” – David Gerrold

In Old Earth’s penultimate age, the corpulent master criminal Luff Imbry moves through the halfworld like a full-fleshed shark. Thief, forger, confidence man, and sometimes go-between, he maps out his illicit operations with exquisite care then carries them out with courage and panache. But, often, things don’t go as Luff planned, and he must call upon a talent for improvisation and a ruthless will to survive.

This collection brings together seven short stories and novelettes previously published in Postscripts, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the anthology Forbidden Planets, plus two novellas formerly only available in limited editions. It offers Luff Imbry in all his moods and guises.

Finalist for the 2014 Endeavour Award.

Praise for Matthew Hughes:

“Matthew Hughes does Jack Vance better than anyone except Jack himself” – George R.R. Martin
“Heir apparent to Jack Vance” – Booklist
“Hughes’s boldness is admirable”- New York Review of Science Fiction
“Hughes effortlessly renders fantastic worlds and beings believable”- Publishers Weekly
“A towering talent”- Robert J. Sawyer
“A treasure” – David Gerrold

Here are nine tales of Henghis Hapthorn, foremost freelance discriminator of Old Earth in the planet’s penultimate age. Included are the six stories that ran in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (and were previously collected in The Gist Hunter and Other Stories), leading up to the events that began the first Hapthorn novel, Majestrum, plus three more.

Praise for Matthew Hughes:

“Matthew Hughes does Jack Vance better than anyone except Jack himself” – George R.R. Martin
“Heir apparent to Jack Vance” – Booklist
“Hughes’s boldness is admirable”- New York Review of Science Fiction
“Hughes effortlessly renders fantastic worlds and beings believable”- Publishers Weekly
“A towering talent”- Robert J. Sawyer
“A treasure” – David Gerrold

THE TALES OF HENGHIS HAPTHORN

Henghis Hapthorn is the foremost penetrator of mysteries and uncoverer of secrets in a decadent, far-future Old Earth, one age before Jack Vance’s Dying Earth. A superb rationalist, he has long disdained the notion that the universe has an alternative organizing principle: magic. But now a new age is dawning, overturning the very foundations of Hapthorn’s existence, and he must struggle to survive in a world where all the rules are changing.

HESPIRA

Hapthorn decides to leave Old Earth, seeking to solve the mystery of Hespira, an ungainly off-world woman who has lost her memory. The investigation takes him down The Spray to the rank-obsessed world of Ikkibal and the rustic Shannery, where he unravels Hespira’s role in a deadly feud between aristocrats. But behind the scenes an unseen antagonist is plotting the discriminator’s destruction.

Praise for Matthew Hughes:

“Matthew Hughes does Jack Vance better than anyone except Jack himself” – George R.R. Martin
“Heir apparent to Jack Vance” – Booklist
“Hughes’s boldness is admirable”- New York Review of Science Fiction
“Hughes effortlessly renders fantastic worlds and beings believable”- Publishers Weekly
“A towering talent”- Robert J. Sawyer
“A treasure” – David Gerrold

It was bad enough when Henghis Hapthorn, Old Earth’s foremost discriminator and die-hard empiricist, had to accept that the cosmos was shortly to rewrite its basic operating system, replacing rational cause-and-effect with detestable magic. Now he finds himself cast forward several centuries, stranded in a primitive world of contending wizards and hungry dragons, and without his magic-savvy alter ego. Worse, some entity with a will powerful enough to bend space and time is searching for him through the Nine Planes, bellowing “Bring me Apthorn!” in a voice loud enough to frighten demons.

Praise for Matthew Hughes:

“Matthew Hughes does Jack Vance better than anyone except Jack himself” – George R.R. Martin
“Heir apparent to Jack Vance” – Booklist
“Hughes’s boldness is admirable”- New York Review of Science Fiction
“Hughes effortlessly renders fantastic worlds and beings believable”- Publishers Weekly
“A towering talent”- Robert J. Sawyer
“A treasure” – David Gerrold

THE TALES OF HENGHIS HAPTHORN

Henghis Hapthorn is the foremost penetrator of mysteries and uncoverer of secrets in a decadent, far-future Old Earth, one age before Jack Vance’s Dying Earth. A superb rationalist, he has long disdained the notion that the universe has an alternative organizing principle: magic. But now a new age is dawning, overturning the very foundations of Hapthorn’s existence, and he must struggle to survive in a world where all the rules are changing.

In MAJESTRUM, Hapthorn is on the trail of an unknown killer who collects body parts from his victims. The search leads him off-planet, into the Ten Thousand Worlds of The Spray, then turns in an unexpected direction as the freelance discriminator learns that an ancient and evil power is plotting to reassert its dominion over Old Earth.

Praise for Matthew Hughes:

“Matthew Hughes does Jack Vance better than anyone except Jack himself” – George R.R. Martin
“Heir apparent to Jack Vance” – Booklist
“Hughes’s boldness is admirable”- New York Review of Science Fiction
“Hughes effortlessly renders fantastic worlds and beings believable”- Publishers Weekly
“A towering talent”- Robert J. Sawyer
“A treasure” – David Gerrold

In another sparkling and slightly askew adventure in the mode of Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams and Jack Vance, Fools Errant’s Filidor Vesh sashays once more through the penultimate age, finding that love is a many splintered thing.
The dandified Archon’s apprentice is literally bowled over by beautiful Emmlyn Podarke — she knocks him flat and steals his credentials, daring him to pursue her to a remote and mostly forgotten corner of Old Earth. Now Filidor must cope with philosophical pirates, prophet-seeking aliens, light-fingered mummers, and a tiny, bothersome voice in his left ear. Meanwhile, the Archon may or may not have been kidnaped, and somebody’s digging up a mysterious ancient artefact buried on the Podarke family farm.

Praise for Matthew Hughes:

“Matthew Hughes does Jack Vance better than anyone except Jack himself” – George R.R. Martin
“Heir apparent to Jack Vance” – Booklist
“Hughes’s boldness is admirable”- New York Review of Science Fiction
“Hughes effortlessly renders fantastic worlds and beings believable”- Publishers Weekly
“A towering talent”- Robert J. Sawyer
“A treasure” – David Gerrold

Wise, witty and just a little weird, FOOLS ERRANT wryly strolls the satirical path laid down by Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett and Jack Vance, heralding the brilliant debut of a gifted new voice. Foppish young Filidor Vesh wants only to dally among his shallow pastimes. But a simple errand for his uncle, the vaguely all-powerful Archon of those parts of Old Earth still populated by human beings, becomes a frenetic odyssey across a planet speckled with eccentric nations pursuing odd aims with intense determination. Harried at every step by the irascible dwarf, Gaskarth, and frequently at the peril of wild beasts, enraged mobs and a particularly nasty thaumaturge, Filidor makes a relucant progress toward a final encounter with an ancient and possibly world-ending evil.

Praise for Matthew Hughes:

“Matthew Hughes does Jack Vance better than anyone except Jack himself” – George R.R. Martin
“Heir apparent to Jack Vance” – Booklist
“Hughes’s boldness is admirable”- New York Review of Science Fiction
“Hughes effortlessly renders fantastic worlds and beings believable”- Publishers Weekly
“A towering talent”- Robert J. Sawyer
“A treasure” – David Gerrold

Forty years after his starship escapes from an apocalyptic Earth, Commander Albert Raft and his crew return to a much younger and violent Earth society that wants to embrace Raft as a god because of his telepathic powers.

In a distant future, on an Earth populated by a scant few hundred thousand humans, the Atkins’s Thomas performs without question the duties for which he was genetically bred. Called “Soldier” by one and all, he is a man of honor and ability, responsible for keeping the peace, for maintaining the status quo . . . and, most important, for guarding the great Book House on the hill – a vast repository of Last Culture knowledge presided over by Libary, Soldier’s mentor, the most senior of the mystic Celibate scholars.

Such is Thomas’s life in the serene, semi-primitive world without nations and cities and governments – until the night the starship comes home. Having fled a dangerously overcrowded Earth years before the Collapse and the Twilight that followed, for seven centuries the men and women of the space-going vessel Search have been combing the galaxy for inhabitable planets – their aging processes dramatically slowed by the relative magic of light speed travel and cryogenic sleep. And now, lonely and frustrated, the weary voyagers have returned to a homeworld unrecognizably altered by the relentless tides of time – a world that does not want them back.

A bitter welcome awaits the Searchers, as old Libary gathers Earth’s Ordinands and Elders together to tap the terrifying power of the collective unconscious – in preparation of the Carnival night when they will sweep the helpless intruders back to their lonely sky in the name of Holy Science. And it is Soldier who stands in the middle, silent and alone – bound by duty to evict the homesick star-travelers . . . yet cursed by a preordained genetic destiny that has decreed their eviction will mean Soldier’s death.

In the era of “the big squeeze” – when an environmentally ravaged Earth groans beneath the weight of twelve billion people – two men control the destiny of humankind. One was recently senile…the other is going insane.

In the year 2069, with the Earth’s population dangerously out of control, procreation and the medical treatment of terminal illness are the two most heinous crimes against society. But behind the doors of the top secret Biophysical Institute, an old man has been illegally cured of the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease and made artificially younger – to serve the unspecified purposes of Premier Jeremy Beltane, one of the world’s most powerful leaders.

A member of the underprivileged “Wardie” class, Detective Sergeant Harry Ostrov has been assigned to serve as a guardian to the mysteriously rejuvenated nonagenarian – and entrusted with a devastating secret that could topple the unstable “Minder” government. But once within the confines of the Beltane family enclave, the dedicated police officer is dragged deeper and deeper into a lethal mire of scandal, corruption, political outrage, and moral dilemma – sworn to silence even as he observes his nation’s ruler, a man ultimately responsible for the future of civilization, descend steadily into depression, uncertainty . . . and madness.

Two men, one of them a policeman, are investigating a death involving a large international genetic engineering corporation. They become bothersome to the corporate owners and are taken out of action – not by being killed, but by being put to sleep for hundreds of years. But this may be a fate worse than death.

They awaken to a distant future in which contemporary industrial civilization has been “cleansed” from the earth and what humanity survives is learning to live a very low-technology lifestyle, being bred eugenically to this life. This cleaning was done on purpose, an international plot by the rich and powerful who in fact rule the world – and who, in this distant future, are dying off.

This is a complex and morally tortuous vision, and Turner’s characters find it nearly impossible to adapt without killing someone, perhaps even themselves.

The first in a new series from the master of heroic fantasy

Born in the storm that doomed his father, Connavar grows to manhood among the mist-covered mountains of Caer Druagh, where the Rigante tribe dwell in harmony with the land and its gods.

But beyond the border, across the water, an evil force is gathering strength, an unstoppable force that will change the world beyond all recognition.

Haunted by malevolent spirits and hunted by evil men, Connavar sets out on a spectacular mission to save his people.

In this latest tale of love and honour, friendship and courage, from the master of the genre, Gemmell explores the intriguing worlds of Celtic myth and earth magic.

Read by Adjoa Andoh
(p) 2017 Orion Publishing Group