Search Results for: life-for-the-stars,-a

The Lexman Spacedrive gave man the stars – but at a fantastic price.

Interstellar exploration, colonisation, and trade became things of reality. The benefits to Earth were enormous but, because of the Fitzgerald Contraction, a man who shipped out to space could never live a normal life on Earth again. Travelling at speeds close to that of light, spacemen lived at an accelerated pace. A nine-year trip to Alpha Centauri and back seemed to take only six weeks to men on a spaceship. When they returned, their friends and relatives had aged enormously in comparison, old customs had changed, even the language was different.

Alan was a spacer, just like his whole family – until, suddenly and without intending to, he in turn jumped ship and remained on Earth. There were times he regretted that. Earth was a bewildering and utterly hostile place. To stay alive, he had to play a ruthless game – and he couldn’t even find anyone to tell him the rules. . . .


First published in 1958.

Hour by hour, the computers produce the names of those to die. Simple. Neat. Ruthless.

In a world where human feelings seem frozen, one spirit flares with defiance and hope . . . while two powerful brothers fight their old blood feud to a brutal climax.

And hurtling through space . . . a lost explorer desperately tries to reach earth with word of a new paradise for man beyond the stars . . .




(First published 1957)

In the Jesus Incident Herbert and Ransom introduced Ship, an artificial intelligence that believed it was God, abandoning its unworthy human cargo on the all-sea world of Pandora. Now centuries have passed. The descendants of humanity, split into Mermen and Islanders, must reunite… because Pandora’s original owner is returning to life!

A stunning work from the acclaimed author of Dune, the series which inspired the 2021 Denis Villeneuve epic film adaptation, Dune, starring Oscar Isaac, Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya and Josh Brolin.

The inhabitants of Terra nicknamed them “Angels”. They were exquisitely beautiful, these shimmering, fiery creatures , highly intelligent and playful. Yet they were awesome, too, considering that the youngest were four million years old, and the oldest had probably participated in the First Cause, which had given birth to the whole universe. To young space cadet Jack Loftus fell the overwhelming responsibility of negotiating a treaty with them – a treaty which could mean the life or death of earth and mankind.

There are too many men in a world governed by women. They’re bored and disillusioned and often resort to ‘suicide missions’ – jobs in experimental space research. Jorn applies for such a job, is selected and trained as a navigator for the huge ship Javelin, the first to implement the recently discovered faster-than-light Evrak Effect.

Before the Effect is tested, however, it is discovered that life will be extinct within nine years; the sun is burning up, preparing to explode. The Evrak Effect will save a small percentage of mankind, take civilisation to a yet unknown planet. Production on new ships is given priority, the ruthless selection of passengers begins. Twenty-five billion people will be left behind.

Led by Javelin, thirty ships wander in space through many light years of promises, lost hope and death for the original crew and passengers. But life does survive, children grow and learn, to inherit the beginning of another world, another promise.

James Blish has written a compelling novel of gigantic moral problems and of people who learn to cope with their own limitations in order to deal with them.

Science has come to humanity’s rescue with two crucial discoveries – antigravity devices that enable whole cities to be lifted from the Earth to become giant spaceships, and longevity drugs that allow their inhabitants to live for thousands of years – lead to the establishment of a unique Galactic empire.

Now, the earth’s cities are able to abandon the worn-out homeworld for a new life, a new future. But what will they find as the hurtle off into the depths of space . . . ?

WAS VENU’S FATHER ADRIFT IN SPACE, CAPTIVE…OR DEAD?
Life changed abruptly for 16-year-old Venu Jhabulova when his father disappeared. Venu had been heir to a large fortune and his father’s title…but now his uncle forced him to leave school and work for the family business. Venu’s only wish – that he be allowed to search the star system for his father – was denied.
Venu knew, deep inside, that his father still lived. So he escaped his uncle, fleeing from world to world in a desperate search. With the help of a mercenary who teaches him the proper use of violence and the ways of several planets, Venu learns and grows…during his SPACE SEARCH.

Starduster

Yes, I’m Max Andrews. I’m one of the guys who fought and bled and worked to get to Mars. I figure what I gave up in those early years gave me the right to pilot the next big jump.

I’ve lied and stolen for that right. I’d have killed, too, but I didn’t have to. Instead, I let a woman give her life so I could have my chance, my door to space.

You think I’d stop at anything, now?

I’ll be on that rocket, blasting away on America’s biggest adventure, the hop out into the stars themselves.

Only Fred Brown could have written this deeply moving science fiction novel about one man’s epic, life-long struggle to open mankind’s pathway to the stars.

When the Colonnaders plucked him from a life of misery and their surgeons rebuilt his twisted body with silicon bones, Joachim Boaz renamed himself after THE PILLARS OF ETERNITY. Now he seeks Meirjaihn the Wanderer, a planet that plots its own course between stars: for on its surface lies a gem that offers mastery over time itself . . .

From the Garlowe Clusters in the north to the Veils of Darkness in the south, the Star Kingdom sprawled over roughly a fifth of the galaxy. So huge was this realm that those who tussled for power over it seemed unable to appreciate that it faced annihilation by the Patch, a roving region of peculiar pseudo-energy a light-year across which drained the life-force from any living thing it encountered.

The Patch had moved into the Kingdom and was systematically feeding on system after system. Cynically unperturbed by the appalling loss of life, the royal houses merely tried to involve the Patch in their machinations, to the extent that civil war broke out all over again. But in the event, the Patch was to provide the crucial factor in the struggle for absolute power. The Annihilation Factor!

It was carnival time on Earth. Prosperity was at its peak; science had triumphed over environment; all human needs were taken care of by computers, robots and androids. There was nothing left for humans to do but enjoy, themselves . . . to seek pleasure where they found it, without inhibitions and without thinking of the price.

Then an android died – in a senseless, brutal murder. And young Derry Horn was shocked out of his boredom and alienation. His life of flabby ease had not prepared him for a fantastically dangerous mission to outlying, primitive stars – but now, at last, he had a reason for living. And even when he found himself a prisoner of ruthless slavers, even when he learned the shocking truth about what the androids really were and where they came from . . . even when he saw all the laws of the orderly, civilised universe he knew turned upside-down and inside-out . . . he fought on.

For that universe had to be shattered and reborn – even if Derry Horn and the Earth he had irrevocably left behind died in the process!



(First published 1968)

When racial hatred turns to murderous menace . . .

First a rocket ship loses its engines on take-off and is destroyed. On board – an important extra-terrestrial visitor.

Next someone slams into the sealed vehicle used for transporting aliens around in the lethal atmosphere of Earth.

Then the vital controlled environment for the Tau Cetian delegation is sabotaged. Oxygen leaks in, and the aliens are half burnt alive.

Even if it means brutal murder, The Stars Are For Man League is determined to shatter the harmony between Earth and civilizations on other planets – and to keep mankind supreme among the alien life forms. Only one man can stop them – a man who unknowingly nurses a viper in his bosom . . .

First published in 1965.

For almost two centuries the huge spaceship had speared its way through the stars, bound for another two hundred years of travel before it would put down on a new planet, a new home for the Earth people.

On board the metal-enclosed worldlet were four hundred people: the last survivors of Earth. It was up to them to start life anew, to correct the mistakes their ancestors made.

But as the tenth generation neared maturity, the idle passengers found themselves face to face with these same problems – and this time there was no place to run and hide or to postpone their answers. For their miniature society was changing faster and faster. An the spaceship suddenly seemed destined to end as a star-bound coffin.

Life on Earth was intolerable – and yet Man had stayed there, his dreams and potential suffocating under the dead weight of bureaucracy.

The stars were attainable – thanks to the Infall Drive – but only a few heard the call of deep space. Some had already gone to colonise a new world. The second ship was ready at last. Ready to escape the Earth’s prison; ready to seek refuge in deepest space. But it wasn’t only freedom that awaited it…

Lucius Shepard is a grand master of dark fantasy, famed for his baroque yet utterly contemporary visions of existential subversion and hallucinatory collapse. In Dagger Key, his fifth major story collection, Shepard confronts hard-bitten loners and self-deceiving operators with the shadowy emptiness within themselves and the insinuating darkness without, to ends sardonic and terrifying. The stories in this book, including six novellas, are:


“Stars Seen Through Stone” – in a small Pennsylvania town, mediocrity suddenly blossoms into genius; but at what terrible cost?


“Emerald Street Expansions” – in near-future Seattle, echoes of the life of a medieval French poet hint at either reincarnation or a dire conspiracy.


“Limbo” – a retired criminal on the run from the Mafia encounters ghosts, and much worse, on the shores of a haunted lake.


“Liar’s House” – in the grip of the legendary dragon Griaule, destiny is a treacherous and transformative thing.


“Dead Monty” – a small-time New Orleans criminal ventures outside his proper territory, and poker and voudoun conspire to bring him down.


“Dinner at Baldassaro’s” – a gang of immortals debates the future in an Italian resort, only for events to outrun any of their expectations.


“Abimagique” – a glib college loser falls in love with a witch, becoming an involuntary part of a world-saving – or world-destroying – magical ritual.


“The Lepidopertrist” – a small boy on a Caribbean island witnesses the creation of preternatural beings by a Yankee wizard…


“Dagger Key” – off the coast of Belize, the ghost of a famous pirate seems to control a spiral of murder and intrigue; or is someone else responsible?

Spacer Chan Dalton is torn between two masters. The pacifist aliens who hold Earth under Quarantine want him to find out why their starships have been disappearing in the Geyser Swirl, the Bermuda Triangle of the galaxy. Earth’s military, which has secretly discovered a way to break the quarantine, assumes that someone out there is making ships vanish, including Earth’s, and wants Dalton to find the culprits and hopefully stop them – with extreme prejudice, if necessary. The trouble is, the aliens hold the taking of intelligent life, even in selfdefense, to be the greatest of sins. It was Earth’s violent ways (in defense of the damned pacifist aliens!) that led to the quarantine in the first place -and if Dalton is forced to fight, it will unveil, and so destroy, Earth’s final chance to reach for the stars again. So when Dalton does indeed discover the hostile invaders responsible for the lost starships, he is faced with an impossible decision: Fight and lose access to space forever; or allow a rapacious enemy to run riot over all that he holds dear…

In the 23rd Century, out of all the races of the galaxy, only humanity has discovered the secret of travel between the stars – not so much because we’re smart, but because we are incredibly gadget-orientated. We are also, compared to the galaxy’s highest sophisticated norms, very, very tough, which most of the time does nothing for our social acceptability. But when a threat to all life in the galaxy arises from non-living biological constructs, suddenly the peculiar human virtues of valor and stubbornness make us the sword-wielding saviours of All…

It is the early summer of 1945, and war reigns in the Pacific Rim with no end in sight. Back in the States, Hollywood B-movie star Syms Thorley lives in a very different world, starring as the Frankenstein-esque Corpuscula, and Kha-Ton-Ra, the living Mummy. But the U.S. Navy has a new role waiting for Thorley, the role of a lifetime.


The top secret Knickerbocker Project is putting the finishing touches on the ultimate biological weapon: a breed of gigantic, fire-breathing, proto-Godzillas engineered to stomp and burn cities on the Japanese mainland. The Navy calls upon Thorley to don a rubber suit and become the merciless Gorgantis, starring in a film that simulates the destruction of a miniature Japanese metropolis. If the demonstration succeeds, the Japanese will surrender and many thousands of lives will be spared; if it fails, the horrible mutant lizards must be unleashed.


One thing is certain: Syms Thorley must now give the most terrifyingly convincing performance of his life.

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!

It is the 21st century and Earth is overcrowded, underfed and teetering on the brink of worldwide chaos. Their best and last hope rests among the stars, in finding another world able to sustain human life. Enter Colonel Jerry Cornelius, hero and adventurer extraordinaire. Along with his wife Cathy and good friend, Professor Frank Marek, he will brave the madness of space and the dangers of an alien world.

But there is more to this new world than meets the eye. Secrets are buried here, in its earth and in its history. Uncovering them could hold the keys to planet Earth’s salvation as well as its past. But time is against Jerry Cornelius. His friend has gone mad, his wife has gone missing, and with each tick of the clock planet Earth draws closer to its end.

Bereft of friends, loved ones, and all he has ever known, Jerry Cornelius will hold the fates of two worlds in his hands. A solution will require all his legendary strength, intelligence and courage … and even that might not be enough in the end.