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For many years the starships of earth searched the heavens for places where men could live. Many planets were found, but always something was wrong: too hot; too cold; atmospheric contaminants; poisonous biochemistry; intelligent natives – something. At last a deep-space survey vessel has reported a planet that seems perfect, an uninhabited paradise where people can roam free. But the first Troas Expedition never returns. And now the crew of the De Gama must find out why or mankind will lose the stars forever.

Between 1956 and 1958, Silverberg contributed dozens of short stories and novellas to the digest pulps, each written in the bombastic, high-adventure style of the original Planet Stories magazine. Since then, those tales have re-appeared only rarely (and sometimes never again) in long out-of-print paperback anthologies. This volume features seven hard-to-find classic Silverberg novellas: Slaves of the Star Giants, Spawn of the Deadly Sea, The Flame and the Hammer, Valley Beyond Time, Hunt the Space-Witch!, The Silent Invaders, and Spacerogue.

Over a dozen spaceships had disappeared into hyperspace, never to return. The lost vessels included the Jason, the Starbird, and the Invincible. Everyone assumed that they had fallen victim to some mechanical failure. But the mystery deepened when the Invincible was found drifting in space, six months after vanishing. The ship’s engines were undamaged, the hull intact – but there was no trace of any living thing aboard; living or dead. No trace of its crew or the two hundred passengers. The ship was deserted!

Something had happened to the ship, to the passengers and crew. Something in hyperspace – or somebody!

For Poilar Crookleg, the Pilgrimage to Kosa Saag has been a lifelong dream. Each year twenty men and twenty women attempt to reach the Summit, converse with the gods, and return with new knowledge. A few Pilgrims return as madmen. Most are never seen again.

Poilar and his childhood friend Traiben are determined to survive the terrifying journey not as madmen but as teachers of wisdom. Traversing mysterious Kingdoms and blasted landscapes, braving ghosts and monstrous apparitions, they will arrive at the secret of the gods themselves – a secret that will shatter centuries of belief and change their world forever.

The Family had never seen a manhunter like it. And when its machine-mind engulfed Cap’n Fanny, they knew Mantis was no simple killing-mech. A collector of human minds, a plunderer of living personalities, Mantis was a weaver of complex, murderous illusions. But why, Killeen wondered, did it indulge in such elaborate variations on slaughter when in a single blast it could destroy the remnants of Mankind?

His answer lay waiting in Mantis’s extraordinary sensorium, in the museum of living ghosts and defiled spirits which drove the heart of the machine . . .

On board an obsolete ship, nine weeks out from home, the latest batch of colonists arrive at their destination. A grim penal settlement in a wilderness worlds away from the homes they will never see again. TASMANIA? BOTANY BAY? No.

For this is tomorrow, not yesterday. The dumping ground for social outcasts and political deportees is Mars, barren, unproductive, but invaluable as a convict settlement. What kind of welcome will the twenty-four deportees receive when the reception party from the Settlement reaches their stranded ship? And how will they survive in a primitive environment, an alien system?

In a Moslem-free universe where Constantinople never fell, the Byzantine Empire has not only survived but flourished, developing technology at an earlier date than in our universe. And spreading its power and influence throughout the world. But Byzantium has enemies who are jealous of its glory and would like nothing better than to bring it down and loot its treasures.

Basil Argyros, Byzantium’s top agent, as his hands full, thwarting un-Byzantine plots and making the world safe for the Byzantine Empire.

While attempting to repel an intergalactic invasion, mankind resorts to a weapon of such awesome destructive power that it undermines the Well World computer’s control of time and space – and threatens the very existence of the Universe.

It is up to Mavra Chang – victim and veteran of the Wars of the Well – and Obie, her sophisticated computer companion, to find the only being capable of travelling to the desolate Well World to repair the damage at source.

The infamous and near-mythical Nathan Brazil does not want to be found. But Mavra and Obie have never been ones to take no for an answer…

New York, 2033. A rebellious populace flocks to join the C of E – Church of Elvis. The Elvii have already formed schismatic groups: among them the Hosts of Memphis and the Shaken, Rattled and Rolled. Global corporation Dryco send their operative, Iz, back to 1954 to bring Elvis home to his adoring millions. But the America she finds is strangely altered, and so too is the King. At the Presley home Elvis – nineteen, acned, never recorded – stands over the blood-spattered body of his ma…

Out of body, out of time…

Though basically a skeptic, William Reynolds had known out-of-body experiences in the past. But never before had he floated past the boundaries of Baltimore . . . and across the borders of time. And now, with the fires of Civil War looming on the horizon, the astonished graduate student was hobnobbing with none other than the dark poet Edgar Allan Poe. But their meeting of minds was to have chilling consequences. For a desperate Confederacy planned to use them both to remold the world – and to change history…for the worse.

DRACULA?

A mere figment of superstition, a thing that could not exist.

SABELLA?

A very real person, an enticing girl of flesh and warmth – who detested the sunlight, who required the blood of young men to feed upon, who was all that Dracula was said to be except never one of the “undead.” Sabella was alive, sensual and dangerous.
She lived on Nova Mars, a colony of Earth and very much like the world we know. She knew what she was and her very existence was a peril to the all-too-human population of that world.

She was a girl with a talent for witchcraft and a taste for adventure.

The illegitimate child of a royal lord, she longed for a man who could never be hers. And she lived for her summers at Castle Auburn.

She is a woman who has grown accustomed to standing alone.

What she once loved, she has lost. Where she once saw joy, she now sees terrible injustice. And at the castle where she only lived in peace she now walks in fear for her life.

The Pnume were an ancient race of the planet Tschai, living underground in a vast network of caverns with their human slave-species, the Pnumekin: The Pnume were the historians of Tschai, collecting its past with ruthless and scholarly dedication. Surface-dwellers never saw the Pnume – if they were lucky. Adam Reith was not so fortunate. The Pnume had heard rumors of a strange man, claiming to have come from the planet Earth, and they wanted him for Foreverness, the museum of Tschai life. Adam Reith was about to become an alien exhibit.

NEVER FOLLOW A FALLING STAR!

The humanoid worlds of the galaxy were alarmed! Somehow, somewhere the mind-destroying hypnojewels were being trafficked in.

An uneasy Earth, newcomer to the ranks of the civilized planets, sent Lloyd Catton to the Interworld Crime Commission on Morilar to investigate. Although the Commission had made little progress until then, after his arrival things started to happen fast.

For it didn’t take Catton long to realize that the hypnojewels were but the thin edge of a murderous wedge that was calculated to shove the Earth back again into the helpless isolation of a world returned to savagery.

Deep in the sounds, scents and shifting rhythms of the Amazon forest, a family have lost their seven-year-old child, stolen by the mysterious ‘Invisible People’, the tribe which has never been seen.
Through ten years their agonised search for him takes them beyond the world’s last great natural frontier into the cruel beauty of the Brazilian jungle.
When at last father and son do meet – in a dramatic and terrifying encounter – it is in the emerald forest, a place where the mythical and magical powers of primal existence must clash with the cold-hearted greed of modern man.

They were the first arrivals from the other side of the cosmos.

With the help of the Martian scientist Thrin, they had crossed the whirling black abyss of the fourth dimension – a dimension that had never been reached before!

Now a man with skin of pure marble-white and a woman of unearthly beauty stood before the disbelieving eyes of Captain Future and the Futuremen. The strange couple stared back in awe and amazement – particularly at Captain Future.

“Here is the one,” the man said finally in his alien tongue. “He is the only one who can save us!”

In the Celtic tribal lands of Connacht, he came of age among the Druids and headhunters and the ghosts of the great Bronze Age people of Danann.

He fought his savage, bloodthirsty way to the west, as a naked warrior who had rejected the tribal laws. And there Arthur, Warlord of the Britons, came to find him, to exploit his skill and invulnerability in the war against the Saxons.

Yet Swiftaxe, the Berserker, wanted one thing only; to break the curse that condemned him to his life of frenzied violence and bloodlust.

But until the might of the Saxons was destroyed, he would never be free . . .

Casper Beech is a corporate drone. One day his boss sends him in for neural imprinting but a computer glitch loads the wrong file, and Casper is programmed with something that has nothing to do with his job. Instead of learning a new software package, he learns a new way of thinking – a mindset designed by a secret government agency for use in enemy nations, and never meant to be unleashed in the United States. Lethal government agents seek to correct the error in a steadily-escalating conflict, while Casper struggles to survive and to find out just what was in the Spartacus File.

Into a future where a depleted fuel supply had the world spiralling down into grinding poverty and constant war came . . . Moondrift. Mysterious white flakes of alien matter that was the perfect fuel – clean powerful, dependable.

But the aliens – or whatever they were – who sent Moondrift seemed to demand a heavy ransom in return. After each Moondrift comes an eerie sound, as pure as a children’s choir, heard all over the world. It mesmerises all who hear it with it’s beauty – and when it is ended, certain people have simply disappeared without warning, never to be seen again.

This is the story of one who disappeared . . .

Manhattan 2012: Nat Hamlin’s brilliant career as an artist came to an end the day he went insane and embarked on a murderous rampage … his sentence: Total Personality Replacement.

Lissa loved Nat for his passion, now she loves him again – but as Paul Macy – for his warmth and kindness. Now each personality wants her help in battling the other, for with her Power, the man she chooses can kill the other. Lissa is terrified. She has to send one of her loves to his destruction. If she chooses the wrong man, the horror will never end.

After journeying across the multiverse with other manifestations of the Eternal Champion,Dorian Hawkmoon is stunned to discover that he has returned to a version of his world in which it was his friend and ally, Count Brass, who survived the Battle of Londra, rather than Brass’s daughter – and Hawkmoon’s beloved wife – Yisselda. Driven close to madness by the loss of his wife and children (who never existed in this world), he locks himself away in Castle Brass, painstakingly recreating the battle of Londra, in an attempt to discover a version in which Yisselda also survives. But the paths through the multiverse are treacherous…

It all began when someone tried to push Creed into the flesh pool to be ingested. The assassination failed, but Creed was never the same again. Because it launched the new cliff-dwellers of Creed’s colony onto a new course of life – which could lead to humanity’s re-emergence as Earth’s masters.

In those far future days, Earth’s masters were two trees. Not trees as we know them, but two Everest-high growths, whose sentient roots and fast-growing branches dominated every living thing on the world. Men lived between their arboreal combat.

ANTARCTIC SAVAGES – PREHISTORIC MASTODONS – FLYING FORTRESSES – PARALYSING RAY GUNS – GRYPHONS – WATER-WITCHES – LOST CONTINENTS – WONDERFUL FLYING MACHINES…AND MORE!

Coming soon – the most fantastic contest ever conceived: An airplane race pitting Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh and Howard Hughes against Manfred von Richthofen (the Bloody Red Baron), his kid brother Lothar and Princess Irina Lvova of Russia!

Which team will be the first to complete the never-before-attempted round-the-poles flight?

Warning: On this doughnut-shaped alternate Earth it is impossible to fly off the edge!

WINNER OF THE DRACULA SOCIETY’S CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT AWARD

There’s a deserted house on Roman Road.

They say it has a dreadful secret.

Is that why Andrei can’t stay away from it?

Something stalks his family at night, and the threat looms of the father he has never known. Andrei wants to be ordinary, but he’s living a nightmare.

Writing as Ann Halam, award-winning author Gwyneth Jones delivers a story of the creatures that haunt the darkness, and the monsters that don’t stay there . . .


You can find out more about Gwyneth’s writing as Ann Halam here: http://www.gwynethjones.uk/HALAM.htm