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On the gold-symbol world of Beresford’s Planet, Richard Kirby lived in total luxury. As a member of “The Set” his life was a never-ending round of planetary party-hopping. The only restriction imposed on him – that he never put down on any world marked with a red or black symbol – was something that he had always accepted without question.

That is, until his brother Alec was murdered in cold blood! Alec had been an undercover agent to those forbidden planets, and in order to avenge him, Kirby had to find out for himself what was really happening there.

But with the start of his investigation, Kirby found out quickly that the authorities meant business when they said “Hands off!” The secret they were protecting was of vital importance, and it now became a matter of life and death, not only to Kirby, but to all the inhabitants of THE CHANGELING WORLDS.

TWO PATHS TO ARMAGEDDON
Two valiant humans: swashbuckling Elron and the Sorceress Shannara…two implacably evil “Others”…two kinds of weapons with which to fight…and many kinds of doom awaiting an entire world if the battle is lost!
Again Ted White takes us to the strange, paradoxical world of Qanar, where a weird age-old magic exists as everyday reality, side by side with the remnants of an equally ancient but less understood science. The alien “Others” are making a new bid to take over the planet…and only the noble Elron stands against them. But not entirely alone after he meets the beautiful Shannara, and she adds her limited psionic powers to his great strength to vanquish the enemy. Together they share an outstanding Odyssey – through unpredictable matter transmitters and over treacherous terrain – to reach a hair-raising climax…IN THIS GREAT SEQUEL TO PHOENIX PRIME!

Mase Everard is a man with a mission. As an Unattached Agent of the Time Patrol, he’s to go anyplace – and anytime! – where humanity’s transcendent future is threatened by the alteration of the past. This is Manse’s profession, and his burden: for how much suffering, throughout human history, can he bear to “preserve”?

Wanda Tamberley is a Patrol member in search of her mission. Recruited from sunny California in the late 20th century, she’d rather serve as a scientist in the research branch, exploring Earth’s flora and fauna in epochs long past. But as hints accumulate from the Patrol’s mysterious leaders uptime, it’s beginning to look as if a lot of human history depends on her personal decisions – and Manse’s.

Meanwhile, the Exaltationists are on the loose, determined to revise human history and rule Time forever and Manse Everard is sworn to stop them, no matter what the heartbreaking cost!

Humans had finally gone to the stars, as the dreamers had always hoped; celestial stretches of the galaxy became the playgrounds of a new spacefaring race. But now these worlds were being taken over by Titans, creatures with unimaginable, godlike powers, supremely indifferent to humanity’s survival.

There was one chance to stop them. Helena, one of the Titan-dominated planets, concealed an untapped, hundred-year-old weapon – Priam’s Lens. Getting to Helena would not be difficult, but activating the lens was another matter. No one had ever returned from a Titan encounter. They simply disappeared – status unknown.

Now a small ragtag crew made up of scientists, warriors, a priest, and a stowaway – naval officer Gene Harker – were ready to pit themselves against the greatest power in the universe. With the help of a mad space pirate, they descended upon the deadly planet. They would succeed – or die trying…

You need to be rich to survive at all. But it’s easier to be dead than poor.

Twenty-first-century New York. It’s a nightmare. Reaganomics has gone mad. There’s murder and mutilation on the bombed-out streets and in the corporate conference rooms. Manhattan is a zoo. There’s guerrilla war on Long Island.

Seamus O’Malley is a bodyguard and assassin in the outrageously powerful Dryco organisation, and he’s in deep trouble. Taking the job sounded like a good idea at the time. Falling in love with his employer’s mistress, Avalon, probably wasn’t so bright. Getting caught up in the Dryden family’s crazy rivalries didn’t help. Agreeing to murder the Old Man was plain stupid. And getting involved with the Ambients could only complicate matters further.

Before long, O’Malley’s on the run, and there’s nowhere safe to hide.

She lost her memory – will she lose her life?

Superb crime fiction from ‘A star in our galaxy of crime writers’ FINANCIAL TIMES

‘The mistress of unease’ DAILY TELEGRAPH

Mrs Anderson is starting to forget where she has put things, what she has bought, or even eaten. Living alone in a rambling mansion, she is isolated from the town.

But Mrs Anderson has a visitor. A young man comes every night, through the dining room window. He helps himself to food and money, and has even made himself comfortable in the attic. A young man who enjoys power, he might take over the whole house and make it his. It’s a place where no one will think to look for him, where no one will find him – no matter what he’s done.

After long and patient research I am still unable to give to the reader of these Chronicles the exact date of the times that they tell of. Were it merely a matter of history there could be no doubts about the period; but where magic is concerned, to however slight an extent, there must always be some element of mystery, arising partly out of ignorance and partly from the compulsion of those oaths by which magic protects its precincts from the tiptoe of curiosity. Moreover, magic, even in small quantities, appears to affect time, much as acids affect some metals, curiously changing its substance, until dates seem to melt into a mercurial form that renders them elusive even to the eye of the most watchful historian. It is the magic appearing in Chronicles III and IV that has gravely affected the date, so that all I can tell the reader with certainty of the period is that it fell in the later years of the Golden Age in Spain.

For eons, the Amplitur had searched space for intelligent species, each of which was joyously welcomed to take part in the fulfillment of the Amplitur Purpose. Whether it wanted to or not. When the Amplitur and their allies stumbled upon the races called the Weave, the Purpose seemed poised for a great leap forward. But the Weave’s surprising unity also gave it the ability to fight the Amplitur and their cause. And fight it did, for thousands of years.

Will Dulac was a New Orleans composer who thought the tiny reef off Belize would be the perfect spot to drop anchor and finish his latest symphony in solitude. What he found instead was a group of alien visitors – a scouting party for the Weave – looking for allies among what they believed to be a uniquely warlike race: Humans.

Will tried to convince the aliens that Man was fundamentally peaceful, for he understood that Human involvement would destroy the race. But all too soon, it didn’t matter. The Amplitur had discovered Earth…

Scott Warden is a man haunted by the past – and soon to be haunted by the future.
In early twenty-first-century Thailand, Scott is an expatriate slacker. Then, one day, he inadvertently witnesses an impossible event: the violent appearance of a 200-foot stone pillar in the forested interior. Its arrival collapses trees for a quarter mile around its base, freezing ice out of the air and emitting a burst of ionizing radiation. It appears to be composed of an exotic form of matter. And the inscription chiseled into it commemorates a military victory…sixteen years in the future.
Shortly afterwards, another, larger pillar arrives in the center of Bangkok – obliterating the city and killing thousands. Over the next several years, human society is transformed by these mysterious arrivals from, seemingly, our own near future. Who is the warlord “Kuin” whose victories they note?
Scott wants only to rebuild his life. But some strange look of causality keeps drawing him in, to the central mystery and a final battle with the future.

British Science Fiction award winner Ian Watson graces us here with a brilliant new collection of short stories and essays.

Though he dazzles the reader with his footwork in the kaleidoscope intensity of his vision, each piece is plainly the work of a master craftsman. Whether he is dealing with a future culture where whales control us (“The Culling”) or taking a hilarious poke at the matter of government funding (“The President’s Not for Turning”), his concepts are clear and undeniably logical.

True to the highest ideal of science fiction, Watson carries present tendencies of our society to possible conclusions in “Roof Gardens under Saturn,” and points a warning finger at the consequences of alienation from the environment.

In an innovative style which borders on the experimental, Watson explores in “The Pharaoh and the Mademoiselle” the horrors of fascism.

Ian Watson’s writing stays with us. He entertains and he makes us think. If in some future and better world politicians were to take advice form writers, Watson should be one of them.

Dan Bellamy was down and out. It seemed that he had reached the end of the road… and then he met the stranger. Who was the mystery man? Why were his amber eyes so powerful? Above all why did he call himself Melchizdek?
The stranger took him to a house, and then the mystery deepened. What was going on in the hidden laboratory? Why were M.I.5 so interested? These men were different. They possessed uncanny mental powers. They had a weird control over matter that was outside any known physical laws. Then Bellamy asked himself the $64,000 question. Was he one of them? And if he was, what were they?
Mutation is well-known, though still only partially understood, biological phenomena. Atomic radiations cause strange changes in the genes and chromosomes of plants and animals. They might also change men…. To find out just how strange these changes would be, you must read “Dawn of the Mutants”. A superb science fiction story – that might be fact.

“It can’t be true! It must be some kind of hoax!” These were the words that went spinning through Neil Banning’s mind when the Greenville authorities told him that the house he had grown up in, the aunt and uncle who had raised him, had never existed.
So Banning found himself in jail, charged with disturbing the peace – and maybe insanity. But when a stranger from outer space came to his cell at midnight and hailed him as the Valkar of Katuun, then Banning decided that maybe the authorities were right, maybe he was crazy. Because the only alternative was to believe the impossible explanation of the Outworlder – that he really was the exiled ruler of a remote star-world, and the personality of Neil Banning was an elaborate fraud.
It didn’t really matter, though, who was right. Banning was on his way to Katuun whether he liked it or not. And as Banning – or the Valkar – he would have to save that star-world from the terror of THE SUN SMASHER…or perish with the loyal subjects he might never have known!

Timelike Infinity: the strange region at the end of time where the Xeelee, owners of the universe, are waiting… The second novel in Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee sequence.

First there were good times: humankind reached glorious heights, even immortality. Then there were bad times: Earth was occupied by the faceless, brutal Qax. Immortality drugs were confiscated, the human spirit crushed. Earth became a vast factory for alient foodstuffs.

Into this new dark age appears the end of a tunnel through time. Made from exotic matter, it is humanity’s greatest engineering project in the pre-Qax era, where the other end of the tunnel remains anchored near Jupiter. When a small group of humans in a makeshift craft outwit the Qax to escape to the past through the tunnel, it is not to warn the people of Earth against the Qax, who are sure to follow them. For these men and women from the future are themselves dangerous fanatics in pursuit of their own bizarre quantum grail.

Michael Poole, architect of the tunnel, must boldly confront the consequences of his genius.

There’s a hot new drug on the market, and it’s creating a stir. Synth can induce bold hallucinations that are indistinguishable from reality. Sure, it’s highly addictive, and no-one knows yet what the long-term effects are, but does that really matter when the buzz is this good?
For Markus Olsen, Synth is the escape he needs as his life crumbles around him. His hacking career is in tatters, his friends imprisoned, and his skills traded in a plea bargain to the oppressive state he spent his life fighting to avoid his own jail sentence. His freedom is only nominal, as he is entirely at the mercy of his new employers.
When Markus receives a mysterious credit card with no name and an unlimited balance and discovers a novel where he is the main character, he is forced to face his anarchist past and question how much of his present is real. What is being created by Synth? What can he believe?
Is it better to live a lie of false comfort, or face the harsh struggle of reality?

I am called Jinian Footseer by some. By some, Jinian Star-Eye. And by some, the Wizard Jinian. One or two call me Dervish Daughter.

On thinking it over, I decided I had been right all along. Everything I had told Peter was true. All the evidence pointed in one way and one way only. I felt as I had felt so long ago, travelling toward Bleer with Peter, when he put the clues to a mystery in my hands and asked me to make sense of it. Now, as then, all the pieces were in my hands, or my head.

The great flitchhawk who had granted me a boon in Chimmerdong, and the d’bor wife, and the gobblemole. The story of Lite Star and the Daylight Bell. The Oracle. The Eesties. Yellow crystals and blue, separated by a thousand years of time. My illness in Chimmerdong, the diagnoses of Bartelmy of the Ban, the Dervish, my mother. All these. No matter how I turned them, there was no other explanation.

Could anything be done?

It is a new world, stunned by the horrors that linger in the aftermath of total war. The United States and Soviet Union are squaring off in a different kind of conflict, one that’s fought in the shadows, where there are whispers of strange and mysterious developments. . .

Normal people across the United States have inexplicably gained paranormal abilities. A factory worker can heal the sick and injured. A schoolteacher bends emotions to her will. A car salesman alters matter with a simple touch. A former soldier speaks to the dying and gains their memories as they pass on.

They are the Variants, controlled by a secret government program called MAJESTIC-12 to open a new front in the Cold War.

From the deserts of Nevada to the palaces of Istanbul, the halls of power in Washington to the dark, oppressive streets of Prague, the Variants are thrown into a deadly game of shifting alliances. Amidst the seedy underbelly of nations, these once-ordinary Americans dropped in extraordinary circumstances will struggle to come to terms with their abilities as they fight to carve out a place for themselves in a world that may ultimately turn against them.

And as the MAJESTIC-12 program will soon discover, there are others out there like them, some with far more malevolent goals. . .

It’s the mid-twenty-first century. The oceans are rising, the world’s population is growing, terrorist organizations are running rampant, and it has become readily apparent that humanity’s destructive nature is at the heart of the matter.

When all faith in humanity seems lost, a startling proposal is announced: Solomon Chavez, the mysterious son of the world’s first trillionaire, announces that he, backed by a consortium of governments and wealthy donors, will build an interstellar starship-one that will convey a select group of six thousand individuals, all under the age of fifty, with no living relatives, to a recently discovered planet in the Epsilon Eridani star system. His goal is lofty: to build a colony that will ensure the survival of the human race. However, Solomon Chavez has a secret that he doesn’t dare share with the rest of the world.

With the launch date rapidly approaching, great odds must be overcome so that the starship Solomon’s Arrow can fulfill what the human race has dreamed of for millennia: reaching for the stars. The goal is noble, but looming on the horizon are threats nobody could have imagined-ones that may spell the end of all human life and end the universe as we know it.

In his first story collection, Robert Charles Wilson, one of the most distinguished SF authors of his generation, weaves a tapestry of tales set in and around the city of Toronto – a haunted, numinous Toronto of past, present and future, buzzing with strangeness.


In “The Fields of Abraham”, one of three stories written especially for this collection, an impoverished immigrant boy is trained in strange disciplines by a bookseller who is more than he seems. In “The Perseids”, winner of Canada’s national SF award, love and amateur astronomy weave in and out of a terrifying tale of forced human evolution. In “The Observers”, an awkward young Canadian girl who sees extra-human presences has an extraordinary encounter in 1950s California with Edwin Hubble. In “Plato’s Mirror”, a professional New Age charlatan has a genuine and terrible encounter with the extraordinary. And in the Hugo-nominated “Divide by Infinity”, an aging Toronto book-lover finds himself becoming, literally, increasingly unlikely.


Throughout are showcased Wilson’s suppleness and storytelling strength: bravura ideas, scientific rigor and living, breathing human beings facing choices that matter in a universe stranger than we can imagine.

After Richard Garrison lost his sight in a terrorist explosion, he developed vast mental powers that more than compensated for his blindness. He mastered the Psychomech machine, then used it to conquer his enemies and restore his dead love to full and vibrant life. Psychomech also revealed to Garrison the Psychosphere, a startling reality where mental powers reigned supreme and could influence people and events on Earth.

Once he was nearly godlike – or demonic, if one dared become his enemy – but now Garrison’s mental abilities grow weaker with each use. He tries desperately to conserve his energies, but he has begun to have strange visions of a mind so different from his own as to be other human, and knows he must stay alert and strong.

Charon Gubwa has invaded the Psychosphere. Twisted and evil, sexually and mentally warped, physically corrupt, Gubwa’s desires are simple: More. More drugs. More sex. More power. More of the Earth under his dominion.

Richard Garrison must battle Gubwa in the Psychosphere and on Earth. And he must win, no matter the cost to himself or those he loves, or all mankind will be lost.

This book contains four striking novellas, and the author’s own philosophy of fiction writing expressed in her speech as a guest of honour at the 38th World Science Fiction Convention.

“The Winter Beach” turns what might be a spy story into suspense of a far different order.

“Julian” begins when its youthful hero trains his telescope on nearby earth rather than the stars and sees a woman who rules the rest of his life.

“With Thimbles, with Forks and Hope” seems to be the dramatic story of a holiday fishing trip, but once on the ocean we are gripped by a different reality.

“Moongate”, set in the mountains of the Northwest, takes its two men and one woman through many dimensions in time and space.

“The Uncertain Edge of Reality” casts a new light on Kate Wilhelm’s many books and short stories. “This is my subject matter when I write,” she says. “I am asking, What actually do we mean by reality, and are we stuck with the one we have? This is what I mean by reality fiction, and usually it is also called science fiction…We are more than simple animals using sophisticated tools in our search for food, security and mates. We are something new on the earth…We can change reality.”

Kate Wilhelm’s writing always has meaning on many levels. Listen, Listen provides a feasts for fans and new readers alike.

D.G. Compton is best known for his prescient 1974 novel, THE CONTINUOUS KATHERINE MORTENHOE, which predicted the 21st century’s obsessions with media voyeurism and ‘reality television’. It was filmed as DEATH WATCH in 1980 by Bertrand Tavernier. This omnibus collects three of his incisive SF novels, ASCENDANCIES, SYNTHAJOY and THE STEEL CROCODILE.

ASCENDANCIES: 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…

SYNTHAJOY: Would you like to experience first-hand the emotions of a great artist, the sublime peace of a saint, the happiness of a child at Christmas? Try Sensitape. Or perhaps you had something more passionate in mind. Don’t be shy. Ask for Sexitape. And for the true connoisseur, we have the ultimate human experience: a distinguished blend of synthetic ecstasies. The world is not ready for it, but perhaps you are. We call it Synthajoy.

THE STEEL CROCODILE: In answer to an unanswerable future, science has created Bohn, the omnipotent computer whose flashing circuits and messianic pronouncements dictate what tomorrow will – or will not – be. But Matthew Oliver is flesh and blood and full of questions – not nearly as certain as the machine he’s appointed to serve. And the right hand of science seldom knows what the left hand is doing…

Slippery Jim diGriz is in the process of robbing the new Mint on Paskonjak when the heist goes terribly wrong. Threatened with a horrific death, Slippery Jim is allowed to cut a deal with the Galactic League: voyage to the planet Liokukae and bring back a missing artifact – the only known evidence of alien life-forms found in 32,000 years of galactic exploration.

For diGriz there are a few catches. One is Liokukae itself – a dumping ground for the League’s misfits, murderers, maniacs, and the incurably obnoxious. Another is a little matter of life and death. To ensure the utterly untrustworthy diGriz’s cooperation, the League has given him a slow-acting poison, allowing him thirty days in which to succeed . . . or die.

Now the Stainless Steel Rat is on his way to a world that is hurtling backward down the evolutionary scale – a land of fanatic, goat-herding Fundamentaloids, murderous Machmen, and a rusty guru named Iron John. DiGriz has developed an almost perfect cover: a four-member rock band that has a way of giving its audiences what they want to hear.

But while the days tick away and diGriz’s life expectancy lowers, the mission evolves from finding an artifact to liberating a planet . . . which is a tune the Stainless Steel Rat most certainly knows how to sing.

On the Rim planet fittingly called End of Nothing, a bizarre society of robots and humans toiled for a thousand years to perfect a religion that would create a new and all-embracing faith – no novelty in a galaxy crowded with religions. But one project was hidden from the hordes of pilgrims welcomed at Vatican-17 on End of Nothing. A group of trained human sensitives were sending their minds ranging through all of time and space, gathering information. With that information, a computer of infinite knowledge, wisdom and infallibility was being constructed in secret – the ultimate Pope.

Of the three outsiders allowed residence on End of Nothing, one was tolerated at a distance by Vatican-17, one was welcome – and one was a threat to be countered.

Decker hardly mattered. His lifeboat had landed him on the remote planet, and he kept to himself in the wilderness. Neither the human nor robot authorities knew of the unseen companion who whispered constantly in Decker’s mind.

Dr Jason Tennyson had fled the political furies of his homeworld. Here, Vatican-17’s physician had died, and Tennyson’s skills were desperately needed and well rewarded.

Jill Roberts was a journalist in quest of a sensational story she had scented. Vatican-17 knew she could not be allowed to break the news of Project Pope before it was completed – and debated two possible ways of stopping her.

The one of the Searcher sensitives threw Vatican-17 into turmoil, threatening its very existence and involving the three outsiders in a sudden power struggle between human and robot.

Drifting in unsuspecting dimensions, the woman had encountered Heaven!

Frank Rhind was lucky. He saw the Ice Dancer and lived. The town of Hays died. And still they didn’t believe Dr. William Stovin’s warnings. For very many years climatologists had been predicting a change in the world’s climate but they always believed that the process would take centuries. Now there was a reason to believe differently. Stovin had staked his career and credibility on trying to persuade the U.S. National Science Council to act, but 15,000 years of warmth had lulled mankind into thinking that climatic history was over. Already it was too late. The new Ice Age had begun.


One by one the great northern cities – Chicago, Oslo, Montreal, Moscow, Leningrad – came under siege. Some fell and were evacuated, sending their young, old and sick to crowded areas further south. Crops and animals were destroyed. Governments drew lines of catastrophe across their national maps. Doomsday prophets were in full cry. Technological man was overwhelmed. The world had changed.


Some time in the year future the next Ice Age will be triggered off. It could happen in a thousand years’ time, or in a century from now.


Or it could, quite literally, happen next winter. This book is fiction only because the events described have not yet happened. But it is not science fiction because all the science in the book is fact. When the year arrives that we see the sixth winter resembling 1792 within the space of a decade or so, then the Ice Age will be with us in a matter of weeks – and it will develop very much as described here.