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Jeremy Clyde is a young scientist who discovers that Time is a circle, and that deep within the human brain is a memory ‘hangover’ of future and past events. He carries out an experiment on himself and succeeds in mentally projecting his body 2,000 years into the future. Here he learns that his arrival in 3950 has been anticipated, and incredibly, he is appointed as the nominal ruler of the four inhabited inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. But he discovers he is only a puppet for a ruthless governing system being secretly maintained by malign Jovians. Clyde joins forces with his counterparts on the three other planets and battles to throw off the alien yoke…

There were nine major planets in the Solar System, and it was within their boundaries that man first set up interplanetary commerce and began trading with the ancient Martian civilization. And then they discovered a tenth planet – a maverick!
This tenth world, if it had an orbit, had a strange one, for it was heading inwards from interstellar space, heading close to the Earth-Mars spaceways, upsetting astronautic calculations and raising turmoil on the two inhabited worlds.
But even so none suspected then just how much trouble this new world would make. For it was WANDL THE INVADER and it was no barren planetoid. It was a manned world, manned by minds and monsters and travelling into our system with a purpose beyond that of astronomical accident!

Continuing their mission to explore the galaxy and find new worlds for man to conquer, Captain Timothy “Tiger” Clinton, the Professor, Toby Paul and Rex are ready for whatever challenges the stars have to throw at them.

From Mars to Mino, Unkos to Lin, they explore planets and planetoid alike, encountering tree-dwelling creatures, lizard-people, watery worlds and spider-like aliens. As they try to communicate with civilisations trapped under ice, or escape cannibals, no adventure is too tough for Tiger, and there is nothing they can’t overcome!

The third book in Captain W. E. Johns’ Tiger Clinton space adventure series, Now to the Stars brings yet more action and adventure from the legendary creator of Biggles.

By the twenty-first century the world was drowning in its own population. A solution had to be found quickly – and it was, in ‘gravi-power’. Wonderful, unending source of power – only the scientists knew that its use was reducing the Earth’s distance from the sun at a dangerous rate. But if another planet’s gravi-power could harnessed . . .

An expedition was launched to Mars, known to be uninhabited – except that a woman was wandering around its surface who claimed she had come from another galaxy to warn Earth of a terrible menace, and there was a huge poly-hedron of metal emanting a force very much like that of gravipower.

Someone else had discovered it! A thousand years ago, or now? Friend, or enemy?



(First published 1965)

Mercury Shell, Venus Shell, Earth, Mars, Asteroid, Jupiter, Saturn. Each shell concentric, studded with artificial planets, each planet embedded in its shell, spinning like a ball-bearing. The whole Zeus-created in the service of Man but now beyond his control.
Now mathematics and space physics, converging, suggested another shell, its existence hidden from Man. A shell of utter darkness, cold and silence where only extreme mutants could survive.
To find that shell, the three were journeying again: Maq Ancor, Master Assassin, Magician Cherry and Sine Anura, Mistress of the Erotic. Together, daring the all-seeing, all-sensing hostility of Zeus.

After the shocking first contact between humans and alien life on Mars, Carmen Dula and her husband board a tiny, long-range craft with five other humans and two Martians. They travel to a distant solar system that is home to the “Others” – an enigmatic, powerful, and possibly immortal race. Once there, they manage to find enough common purpose to forge a delicate truce between human, Martian, and Other.

By the time Carmen and her party are sent back to Earth, fifty years have passed – and the Earthlings have not been idle. They have built a massive flotilla of warships to defend Earth against the Others’ expected aggression. But the Others have more power than any could imagine.

And they will brook no insolence from the upstart human race…

CAPTAIN FUTURE FACES FIERY SOLAR DEATH

It was ten o’clock, solar time, when disaster struck. At exactly the same moment, gravium mines on Mercury, Mars and Saturn were totally destroyed by an unidentified army. Without gravium – the life-blood of interplanetary civilization – the system would perish.

Meanwhile, Captain Future struggled on the floor of a moving space craft, his arms and legs bound by steel ropes. He did not know why he’d been captured – only that the system was in grave danger – that he was needed…

As Captain Future was plunged through space, towards a deadly orb of flaming gases – the raging inferno of the sun – he planned his daring escape. It was to be the most dangerous gamble of his life.

Visit Earth, the birthplace of man!

From the holiday planet of Paradiso one could go on many exciting tours and excursions – Mars, Venus, the Moon, even the most distant and alien worlds were accessible to the inquisitive holidaymaker, courtesy of Starways Inc. – the giant combine which owned Paradiso and over half of the galaxy.

But of all Starways illustrious trips, there was really only one which interested Ram Burrell – the one which Starways seemed to actually discourage people from taking… the trip to planet Earth. And once Burrell had got himself a ticket for the journey, he began to discover why Earth had become the least visited planet in the galaxy, and why Starways worked so hard to keep it that way…

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

For countless years the enigmatic city of Klagan had rested beneath the racing moons of ancient Mars. Forbidden, guarded, sheltered in the cup of the Blue Mountains and surrounded by waterless desert. It rested there, a place of a thousand rumours and whispered fantasies, and gave birth to muttered tales of incredible wealth and riches.

To this city came Halmar, the guide; Lorna, the dancer from Venus; and the man called Smith. Defying the ban of the Terran Authorities, the fanatical Drylanders, and the harsh desert, they reached the crystal walls of the strange city. There they found a tremendous mystery, the deserted artefacts of a vanquished civilisation – and found themselves snared in an incredible trap.

For Klagan was more than a city. It was. . .
What it was and how the intrepid adventurers solved the incredible secret of the mysterious city makes this an exciting tale of science and plausible speculation, action and human motivations.

The Vorsters
Were the blue-robed worshippers of the atom, symbolised by the Cobalt-60 reactors that glowed blindingly on every alter in their fast-growing churches.

The Harmonists
Were the green-robed heretics, a breakaway faction condemned as icon-adorers, who believed that their creed was truer to the code of Vorst, the Founder.

At the beginning of the 22nd century, Earth colonies were established on Mars and Venus. But the ultimate dream – to travel to the stars – was still an impossibility. A few enlightened men believed that the Vorsters and the Harmonists could solve this seemingly insurmountable problem, if they could only forget their differences and work together. But the hatred between the two factions was too deep to be reconciled – until a conflict on Venus between a Vorster priest and his Harmonist opponent resulted in some totally unexpected developments . . .

The sails were the product of the Old Technology, lost long ago in the depleted Earth, and they were priceless. For with those fantastic sheets of etheric material, ships could sail the sky and even brave the radiant tides between worlds and stars.

The alchemists who had replaced scientists still sough the ancient secrets, and Rachad, apprentice to such a would-be wizard, learned that the key to his quest lay in a book abandoned in a Martian colonial ruin long, long ago.

But how to get to Mars? There was one way left – take a sea vessel, caulk it airtight, steal new sails and fly the star winds in the way of the ancient windjammers.

Here is an intriguing, unusual and colourful novel of ships that sail the stars riding before the solar breeze that blows between worlds.

An international agency, COSMOS, is in charge of space exploration in the not very distant future. Odd forms of life have been discovered on Mars, Venus, and Jupiter; there may be a life form on Mercury; and finally something utterly mystifying is discovered on the moon. Three astronauts land and examine an installation that all three perceive as radically different – one sees a heap of gold, one a fort bristling with guns, one a space platform and space craft. They return to Earth with some crystals picked up at the mystery site.

All three soon produce children – the moon children, gifted, precocious, and seemingly damned by the crystals their fathers had handled. Two are eerily beautiful, the third a grotesque monster. And the three soon discover that they are Earth’s hope for survival, as interplanetary invasion brings overwhelming alien forces to bear on mankind.

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.

‘YOU KEEP OUT OF HARM’S WAY, SOPHIE FARTHING’ Her father’s advice seemed only sensible. The flying island of High Haven was a dangerous place. So what was she doing down on the docks at midnight, talking to the sinister gentleman with the iron jaw? Where had he come from on his majestic space yacht? And why did he laugh when she spoke of her poor dead mama? Sophie only wanted to talk to him again. She didn’t really mean to stow away – certainly not on the wrong ship. Her unintended quest is to take Sophie far from home, to the pleasure gardens of the Moon, the grogshops and grime of Lambeth Walk, through the perilous Asteroid Sea and the cruel canyons of Mars where Angels fill the red sky with their ravenous cries.

Charles Spark is an expert on body language, a bestselling author and a consultant (or walking lie detector) much in demand with industry and government. So when the aliens arrive, who better to join the team that will attempt to understand them?

But even though these insectoid aliens – the “Flies” – in their pyramid-ship speak both English and Russian, they seem unreadable. “We have come to your planet to remember it,” they say and at first they seem indeed to be a bizarre group of intergalactic tourists.

When human beings start to interfere, things begin disappearing. The Dome of St Peter’s in Rome is the first to go, followed by downtown Prague, old Mombasa, Münich, the heart of New Orleans.

In an effort to understand what has happened, Spark, and a strange group of pilgrims, embark on a bizarre journey to Mars – where the city of Münich has reappeared in a canyon. And where time, and memory, have become manifest.

To see the stars.

This was the great and paradoxical dream. To stand and look upward into space, at the myriad pin-points of light, forever out of reach, just as their forebears on Earth had in the long gone days before the building of the planetary shells.

Mars, Jupiter, Saturn… Shell had succeeded shell, each studded with its captive caged worlds, each progressively populated by men who could look up only into a sky of artificial luminaries and space debris.

Always Zeus, man-created prime mover, was at work beyond them, the giant space machines forming and working the next shell.

Uranus, Neptune, Pluto…The last shell.

Again they journeyed: Maq Ancor, Master Assassin, Magician Cherry and Sine Anura, Mistress of the Erotic, to reach the outer shell, to return to the past when Man could see the stars.

The twenty-year Earth-Mars war was finally over. What was left of Earth – its crumbled cities, its ruined farmlands – were firmly and completely under the rule of the Martian Archon. And this powerful planetary ruler was taking no chances: he intended to reduce the Terrans to a society of primitive agricultural tribes in less than a generation!

But for David Arnfeld, ex-spaceman and Earth Base Commander, there was something in the whole set-up which did not ring true. Why had both sides muffed countless chances to end that awful war in the first year or two? And why had the two planets gone to war in the first place?

In the back of Arnfeld’s mind an idea was growing…perhaps there was yet a chance to save the doomed population of Earth. But if his idea was true, and proof was available, he had to work fast. Too many people were involved in this War of the Two Worlds to let one man upset their plans.

Originally published in 1958, under the pseudonym David Osborne.

Dr. Jeffrey Brewster, assistant professor of psycho-sociology at Columbia University, had been six weeks old when the first crude satellites were flung into space back in 1957. During his childhood there had been Moon rockets and the space stations – then the joint American-Russian-manned expedition to the Moon in 1965, right after the collapse of the Soviet dictatorship. Mars and Venus had been reached as he grew up and a permanent base was established on the Moon in 1973. Now the day’s papers reported that an expedition was ready to leave for Callisto, moon of Jupiter.

But Dr. Brewster had a class to make and he was late.

That was when the telephone rang and Mari, his wife, said, “Long distance from Washington.” The caller was Colonel Chasin of Unsecfor – United Nations Security Force, the global and international army that policed the world in these days of relative peace and harmony…

Smoothly, remorselessly, inhumanly, the controlled flow of people continued. As each of the great planetary shells approached population maximum, the surplus of mass of humanity was transported out: Mars shell, Asteroid, Jupiter. Inexorably they filled the space made ready for them by Zeus, the master-minding intelligence.
Jupiter shell, Saturn, Uranus…
But at Uranus shell the ordered, ever-outward flow stopped and the pressure of the countless billions had pushed the shell to the very edge of catastrophic breakdown.
Beyond Uranus lay ready Neptune shell. Zeus-designed, Zeus-built but no longer Zeus-controlled. Another giant intelligence had usurped all power, was refusing to operate the system that alone gave any future to Solaria.
And so it was that Maq Ancor, Master Assassin, Magician Cherry and Sine Anura became the eyes of Zeus as they journeyed to the place where all systems failed, where chaos and the Tyrant of Hades ruled.

Earth was a crowded world of vast cities, manned by robots who carried out all of the menial tasks, who saw to it that everything contained functioning normally. Interplanetary travel was now an established fact. The planets favourable to Man’s existence had been colonised but where, as yet, under-developed according to Earth standards.

In the whole of the Solar System, mankind was supreme. There was life on Mars, Venus and the outer moons of Jupiter and Saturn, but nothing which could match the military might of Earth.

Yet now, Earth itself faced destruction. Quite suddenly the thread had materialised. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Someone – or Something – wanted Earth. But vast creatures such as these had never originated on any of the Solar Planets and Brad Norton, investigating events for the Military Commission, refused to believe that they could have been transported through space from an of the stars.

But the undeniable fact was that they were here and Earth science was powerless against them…

By the winner of the Hugo, the Nebula, and the World Fantasy Life Achievement Awards, this latest volume finds Theodore Sturgeon in fine form as he gains recognition for the first time as a literary short story writer. Written between 1957 and 1960, when Sturgeon and his family lived in both America and Grenada, finally settling in Woodstock, New York, these stories reflect his increasing preference for psychology over ray guns. Stories such as “The Man Who Told Lies,” “A Touch of Strange,” and “It Opens the Sky” show influences as diverse as William Faulkner and John Dos Passos. Always in touch with the zeitgeist, Sturgeon takes on the Russian Sputnik launches of 1957 with “The Man Who Lost the Sea,” switching the scene to Mars and injecting his trademark mordancy and vivid wordplay into the proceedings. These mature stories also don’t stint on the scares, as “The Graveyard Reader”-one of Boris Karloff’s favorite stories-shows. Acclaimed novelist Jonathan Lethem’s foreword neatly summarizes Sturgeon’s considerable achievement here.

It’s 2026, and the Alpha Centauri supernova has risen like a second sun, rushing Earth toward its last summer. Floods, fires, starvation and disease paralyze the planet. A flash of gamma rays has destroyed all microchips worldwide, leaving an already devastated Earth without communications, transportation, weaponry or medicine.

The disaster sets three groups of survivors on separate quests. A militant cult seizes the opportunity to free their leader from her long court-mandated coma. Three cancer patients also search for a man in judicial sleep: the brilliant scientist – and monstrous criminal – who alone can continue the experimental treatment that keeps them alive. From a far greater distance come the survivors of the first manned Mars expedition, struggling homeward to a world that has changed far beyond their darkest fears. And standing at the crossroads is one man, U.S. President Saul Steinmetz, who faces a crucial decision that will affect the fate of his own people… and the world.

After a meteor explosion, Rikardon wakes in a new body-and in a strange desert land named Gandalara, where a sacred gem known as the Ra’ira grants its owner the power to rule-or to destroy…

Victory is sweet-but for Rikardon and Tarani, it is all too brief. Although they have retrieved the sword of the Kings from the lost city of Kä, a savage battle with the vineh mars their journey back to Raithskar. These ape-like creatures were once controlled through the power of the Ra’ira. Now they pose a threat both to the cat-like sha’um and humanoid Gandalarans.

To restore order, Rikardon and Tarani must travel to Eddarta, where Tarani can use the Ra’ira against the increasingly vicious vineh. First she must face her treacherous brother, Indomel, and convince the Council to name her High Lord in his place. Indomel will not take such betrayal lightly, but another danger is about to reveal itself-a sinister and ambitious traitor who has been hiding in plain sight all along.