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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.

Another war, the most terrible nuclear disaster in the history of man has scorched and crippled all life on the surface of earth. In a few isolated zones human survival has occurred. Among these groups the birth rate is said to be phenomenal. There are reports of strange mutations of the human species appearing as frequently as fifty or sixty in a hundred births. Only a few of these strange mutations have been strong enough to survive, but some are reported to be reproducing their kind. A physical and mental examination of these freaks is being undertaken at the present time.

Mankind was at war with the hideous Gool…and losing. Then, beyond Ganymead, one man fought the searing brain probe of an alien spy…and won. He mastered the power of its telepathic mind-control, captured the secret of its matter transmitters, and learned how to destroy the Gool Overlords. He called intelligence with news of the victory and headed home.

Straight into a barrage of Terran nuclear warheads.

Past missiles, shells, and assassins, he made it home – alone, badly wounded, and branded a traitor by conventional Terran wisdom that said no one could survive the Gool brain probe. No one, that is, except a brainwashed puppet deliberately allowed to survive to serve the Goos as a spy.

But he must survive Earth’s attempts to kill him – because no matter how much his fellow humans want him dead, he knows that he is the only one who can lead them against the Gool and have a chance at victory.

Leinster was a scientist with rather odd political ideas. When he discovers a new super-efficient rocket projectile, he decides to publish his findings to the entire world. The implications are tremendous. Who-ever reaches the moon first and establishes a base can control the earth…
East and West despatch their various expeditions and the space race ends in something like a photo-finish. Almost every Lunar crater in the Sea of Rains becomes a new base for one or other of the great powers, and a new miniature cold-war develops on the moon. Suddenly the leaders of the various expeditions mysteriously disappear. What sinister power is at work? Does life still exist below the dead surface of Lunar?
Has out satellite been the target for non-human space expeditions?
Can the earth men combine against this weird scientific peril?
Or will they remain divided and fall before the terrible alien aggressor?

The waters rose, and darkness was upon the earth.

For a few decades after the Twenty-Minute War and the Red Plague, there were those who remembered the ways and pleasures of civilization, but soon the harsh realities of life in the flooded seaboard of North America pushed the survivors into a new Dark Age – an age of superstition and brutality, but one of seeking and poetry as well. This is the world of Edgar Pangborn’s classic Davy, portrayed here over centuries of its change and growth. Here are heretics, and harpers, crusaders and cowards, magicians and mundane folk, in a stunning cycle of stories that have timeless quality of legend.

Stolen from Earth by Ithaqua the Wind-Walker and transported to the alien world of Borea, a team of ERP-talented earthmen are faced with a terrible choice: join with the Thing That Walks on the Wind in his eternal war with Armandra and the People of the Plateau, and become his mindless slaces or side with Armandra and risk the perils of the Plateau – especially its Cavern of Madness!

Such a choice might seem easy, for at least the People of the Plateau are human…but is Armandra herself human As Ithaqua’s daughter, who can say which way her loyalties will turn when the chips are down and Ithaqua walks on the wind?

World War II veteran Edward Bond’s recuperation from a disastrous fighter plane crash takes a distinct turn for the weird when he encounters a giant wolf, a red witch, and the undeniable power of the need-fire, a portal to a world of magic and swordplay at once terribly new and hauntingly familiar. In the Dark World, Bond opposes the machinations of the dread lord Ganelon and his terrible retinue of werewolves, wizards, and witches, but all is not as it seems in this shadowy mirror of the real world, and Bond discovers that a part of him feels more at home here than he ever has on Earth.

In 1997 an angel fell to Earth. Dave Peters, and his sidekick in the San Francisco police squad, Danny, were right there at the time. Caught up in a supernatural war between good and evil, they had eventually tracked down the rogue entity and brought an end to its reign of deadly fire. But now the stakes had risen. It’s 2002, and there’s a demon abroad in London, a soul so corrupt and foul that Satan himself has recruited him from the legions of the dead. Only one entity in Heaven can counter his power – an Archangel, an angel of the highest rank.

Astronomy professor Aurora ‘Rory’ Bell gets a message from space that seems to portend the arrival of extraterrestrial visitors. According to her calculations, whoever is coming will arrive in three months – on New Year’s Day to be exact.

A crowded and poisoned Earth is moving toward the brink of the last world war – and is certainly unprepared to face invasion of any kind. Rory’s continuing investigation leads her to wonder if it could be some kind of hoax, but the impending ‘visit’ takes on a media life of its own. And so the world waits. But the question still remains as to what, exactly, everyone is waiting for…

This is the tale of Earl Dumarest. Space-wanderer, gladiator-for-hire, seeker of Man’s forgotten home.

Dumarest’s search begins on the ghost-world of Gath, where he becomes unwilling champion of the Matriarch of Kund, and must undergo a fight-to-the-death at stormtime.

Victory could give Dumarest his first clue to the whereabouts of the planet he fled from as a child – an obscure world scarred by ancient wars, which lies countless light years from the thickly populated centre of the galaxy; a world no-one else in the inhabited universe believed exists.

Earth, the birthplace of Man.


(First published 1967)

The Earth does not belong to man alone

The Himalayas bury their secrets well. Two skulls unearthed in the cradle of the human race – the remote heights of Kashmir – throw evolutionary theory into chaos. But a far more disturbing secret lies hidden deep in the bleak mountains and snow-swept valleys unseen by human eyes.

A few miles from the explosive triangle of tension where Afghanistan and Pakistan border on India the story of the century breaks. And the echoes of the most shattering revelation yet made to man threaten to plunge the world into total war which will turn the cradle of the human race into its final grave.

Uprooted from her Southern home during the Civil War, Rosa Coleman settles in Philadelphia with a husband whose compassion quickly turns to cruelty. But when that cruelty is inflicted upon their only son, she picks up and flees with the boy across the uncivilized Western frontier – and into Alaska to start anew among the region’s gold fields.

But even the harsh journey across America has not prepared Rosa for the infinite possibilities that await her. Something not of this world has approached her. It has revealed the universe’s secrets to her. And it will take her on an extraordinary odyssey as she discovers the role she must play in bringing peace to Earth…

Powerful war machines of the far-future collide across a barren desert world in this post-apocalyptic debut novel from award-winning Australian author Cat Sparks.

Seventeen-year-old Star and her sister Nene are orphans, part of a thirteen-wagon caravan of nomadic traders living hard lives travelling the Sand Road. Their route cuts through a particularly dangerous and unforgiving section of the Dead Red Heart, a war-ravaged desert landscape plagued by rogue semi-sentient machinery and other monsters from a bygone age.

But when the caravan witnesses a relic-Angel satellite unexpectedly crash to Earth, a chain of events begins that sends Star on a journey far away from the life she once knew. Shanghaied upon the sandship Dogwatch, she is forced to cross the Obsidian Sea by Quarrel, an ancient Templar supersoldier. Eventually shipwrecked, Star will have no choice but to place her trust in both thieves and priestesses while coming to terms with the grim reality of her past-and the horror of her unfolding destiny-as the terrible secret her sister had been desperate to protect her from begins to unravel.

Meanwhile, something old and powerful has woken in the desert. A Lotus Blue, deadliest of all the ancient war machines. A warrior with plans of its own, far more significant than a fallen Angel. Plans that do not include the survival of humanity.

The war was over. The great computer which had arranged and directed the complex military operations of that future nation was to be dismantled. But the computer had become expert in the science of self-defence…and it resisted.
The government buildings were blasted. Rockets rained on the great city, and the Empire of Toromon, the first great hope of humanity after the millennia of radiation wreckage, faced disaster at the hands of a super-scientific monster of its own creation.
But, unknown even to Toromon’s desperate leaders, was the fact that behind the berserk computer lurked the unearthly mind of a real enemy – a foe from the most distant realm of space, intent on making the Earth the first victim of galactic conquest.

The Gene Wars have turned Earth into a blighted wasteland. Mile-long airships patrol the skies, exacting crippling tribute from the scattered ground communities. Threatened by mutant vegetation and predatory creatures, forced to the brink of starvation by the Sky Lords, Minerva – a former feminist utopia – has had enough.

Its rebellion is swiftly crushed and Jan Dorvin, a Minervan warrior, is winched aboard a Sky Lord; towards a fate worse than death. For as a ground dweller and slave – but above all, as a woman – she is now regarded as the lowest form of humanity and is consigned to a life spent serving the sexual appetites of male slaves.

But no Minervan could be kept slave for very long…..

A father must come to terms with his son’s death in the war. In Venice, an architecture student commits a crime of passion. A white southern airport loader tries to do a favour for a black northern child. The ordinary stuff of fiction – but with a difference! These tales take place twenty-five, fifty, a hundred and fifty years from now. Men and women have been given gills to labor under the sea. Huge repair stations patrol the cables carrying power to the ends of the earth. Telepathic and precocious children yearn so passionately to visit distant galaxies that they’ll kill to go. Brilliantly crafted, beautifully written, these are Samuel Delany’s award-winning stories, like no other before or since.

Charlie Stuart, young scion of the Scottish royal family, long nourished a secret desire for adventure – an escape from his dreary books, his sheltered life. When his father realized that, for Charlie to grow into the full Stuart heritage he must face the rigors of the real world, the young man’s dreams had a chance of coming true.

But Charlie’s private fantasies had never included Talyina, a planet 200 light-years from earth and ruled by a ruthless usurper. And he had never envisioned himself as a galactic savior. Yet, young Charlie, late the classroom dreamer, suddenly found himself the only man in the galaxy capable of averting inter-planetary war!

Outside the walls of the starport Novorecife, Earthmen on the warrior planet Kishna are on their own. So when he is chosen to lead the first ersuma (Earth-tourists) through the sorcerer-kingdoms of this “protected” medieval world, Fergus Reith must first learn to speak Durou; must take the chemical oath against imparting technical information; and must above all else learn to handle a broadsword! All these skills are needed when Reith finds himself and his ersuma trapped as pawns in a deadly war between a sorceress and a sterile kingdom under three moons . . .

The Hostage of Zir is the third of L. Sprague de Camp’s Krishna book – interplanetary romance in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian Tales.

The orphan had always known she wasn’t what people described as ‘normal’. Whether merely precocious or a mutant freak, she had always been able to link minds with an equally weird mutated lion and skip into the worlds of the fourth dimension.



What the heck, it sure beat staying in school on Earth – that is until she realized that some of her fellow dimension-hoppers from other planets had more in mind than just a romp in the swamp.



They were launching an inter-dimensional war of imperialism, and she alone held the secret which could save her home world – if she could only escape the truant officer long enough to pull it off!

The earth changed forever when the Aleutians landed. A hundred years after the invasion, the planet is firmly under extra-terrestrial rule. While the aliens pursue a form of immortality, small bands of human rebels still try to fight back.

Bella is an Aleutian, with a limited understanding of human cultures and gender. Their expectations of society and life are shaped by their own upbringing. But then they meet Sidney Carton, a human. Bella learns quickly as the pair scour the war-ravaged ruins of Europe to find the last vestige of human technology that could be the only hope for saving civilisation as it still exists.

Nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke award, NORTH WIND is book two of Gwyneth Jones’ critically acclaimed Aleutians Trilogy.

Set sixteen years after the events of The Exiled Earthborn, this explosive conclusion of the Earthborn trilogy tells the story of two brothers, the sons of Lucas and Asha, tasked with surviving the Xalan war to ensure the continued existence of the human race.

Noah, an orphan from Earth’s last days who, as a child, was smuggled to safety across the stars, is now nearly a man and a leader to the young enclave of Earthborn who reside on Sora. When the tranquility of their settlement is shattered by a shocking assassination attempt, Noah turns to his combative younger brother Erik, Lucas and Asha’s only child by blood, for aid. Their journey takes them to the remnants of a dead planet, an outlaw-infested space station, and back to Sora, whose inhabitants are bracing for a final showdown with the bloodthirsty Xalans.

They find themselves facing a new evil: the omnipotent Archon, who is somehow controlling the whole of the Xalan horde, and his bloodthirsty lieutenant, the Black Corsair, who has an unmatched taste for brutality. The Archon, so-called God of the Shadows, has unearthed knowledge that could wipe both Sorans and humans alike from the face of existence. The descendants of the Earthborn must uncover the true nature of the Archon and the Xalans before he burns everything they know and love to ashes.

The 22nd century, 150 years after the Dust War destroyed America’s Mid-West, and much else besides. California is a last outpost for survival and reclamation during a long epidemic of all-purpose despair.

The extraordinary cult of ‘Tumbonde,’ a former taxi driver its prophet and leader, predicts the imminent arrival on earth of ‘Gods’ from the stars. The movement grows daily.

Tom O’Bedlam, an apparent madman, prey since childhood to visions which seem to confirm ‘Tumbonde,’ goes even further. He can, he will, help others to make the Crossing. If the world doesn’t go too man too soon. If well-meaning ‘rationalists’ don’t lock him away . . .

In Husaquahr, the world of magic beyond the Sea of Dreams, the battle had been won. All seemed peaceful. But Throckmorton P. Ruddygore, master sorcerer, knew better. Far to the south, on the River of Dancing Gods, the Dark Baron plotted with a Demon Prince to wage the final war that would bring about Armageddon.

Someone had to make the dangerous trip into the unknown to spy on the conspirators. And so Ruddygore called again on the services of his erstwhile human helpers- Joe, who had become a superbarbarian hero with an enchanted sword, and Marge, now changed to a flying fairy woman.

But could two fragile people from the Earth Prime – even with some magic ingredients- survive in this new, bitter struggle to good versus evil?

Have a Happy Golden Straub Day!

The message floated in the sky for all to read; citizens chanted it to each other, motorists tooted it on their car horns as they drove the uncongested freeways. Earth had become a paradise, courtesy of Cordwainer Hardware International; population dwindling, war a thing of the past, free, untrammelled sex the right of all. But is paradise everything . . .?

In this vividly realised novel, S. G. Compton charts the growth of CHI and the bland, idyllic world they engineered. Too idyllic for some; for beneath the surface darker forces were at work. At their heart was Scudder Laznett; brilliant, irascible, uncompromising. Scudder had begun a little game of his own; what that game was, Pete Laznett only discovered by slow degrees.

And what he discovered was horrifying.