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A science fiction thriller from the author of THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH.

‘A fine engrossing novel by a master!’ Philadelphia Enquirer

In a time when America’s power has been eroded by energy depletion, and world control has been virtually given over to the Chinese, only one man has the courage to seek new mineral resources among the stars. He is Ben Belson, one of the richest men in the world, a man haunted by the memory of a loveless childhood and driven by needs and desires he can barely understand or control. His dream is to find the means to help America break the stranglehold of the corrupt interests who are keeping it a second class power.

The world, as Lafayette O’Leary knew it, disappeared in a flash. Perhaps it was his own doing – after all, he had the uncanny gift of creating alternate realities by sheer mental power.

But the result was a nightmare gone out of control. All O’Leary wanted was to find his wife and return to the familiar world of Artesia. Yet no sooner did he manage to extricate himself from one bizarre situation than he was thrust into another, equally threatening…

There was only one thing to do: he had to penetrate the very center of power from which his destiny was being controlled and – take it into his own hands!

THE COMING OF THE BLIGHT
It seemed as though the world was eroding right under everyone’s feet. Stories disappeared from magazines; the baron’s silver coat of arms, polished in the morning, was pitted with corrosion by afternoon; toadstools were springing up from every corner. And these were but the first signs of the coming plague, a cancerous orgy of patternless vitality seeking to engulf the world…

TO STEM THE TIDE
Carefree Johnny Curlon, indelicately plucked from his fishing boat one evening, is bluntly informed by high powers that he is a man destined for a role in great affairs: only his unique powers can prevent the coming probability crisis that threatens to turn the world into bubbling chaos…

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.

A genetic experiment gone wrong produces a tiny pink “worm” that matures into a beautiful woman whose superhuman powers propel her toward a unique destiny.

Set several years after RAINBOW BRIDGE, England is ruled by a foreign power. Heidi has been her parents’ carer for many years, but when her mother apparently murders her father she is sent to work as an Indentured Teen in a remote coastal village.

As she explores her new home and its mysteries, Heidi is convinced of her mother’s innocence, and is determined to prove it. What secrets does the village hold? Are the other teenagers friends or foes? What creature creeps through the attics at night, and what power do the Carron-Knowells hold over the rest of the village’s inhabitants?

This is the sixth book in Gwyneth Jones’ critically-acclaimed BOLD AS LOVE series.

It seems a simple quest for a happy occasion: Sir James Eckert, the brave Dragon Knight, accompanies Sir Brian Neville-Smythe to the Holy Land to ask his beloved’s father for her hand.

But the Holy Land holds more than they bargained for. As the pair face pirates, sea giants, and the legendary Djinn, this ‘simple’ quest becomes the most dangerous odyssey the Dragon Knight has even undertaken. For the Djinn hold more power over good and evil than even the most powerful magicians – including the Dragon Knight himself . . .

Gordon R. Dickson continues his spectacular saga of a twentieth-century American transformed into a Dragon Knight – and transported into a fantastic medieval adventure.

Rhialto the Marvellous takes up the personal and political conflicts among a conclave of two dozen magicians of Ascolais and Almery in the 21st Aeon. The shocking appearance of the Llorio the Murtha, a powerful female force from an earlier aeon threatens to unbalance nature by “ensqualming” or feminizing the magicians. This triggers a tremendous struggle for power and the other mages turn against Rhialto. Hoping to reestablish his rightful place, Rhialto travels to other aeons to restore the missing Perciplex which projects the Mostrament, the constitution of the association. In his final adventure, Rhialto must, ultimately, travel to the very ends of time and space to confront an old adversary whom he had wronged and must commit further misdeeds to restore order.

The dream of being a superman came true for Max Quest – and immediately turned into a nightmare.

He was not alone. There were Others with extraordinary powers, and the last thing they wanted was another superman on Earth – especially one working for good instead of evil.

They couldn’t kill him. But they could send him . . . elsewhere.

Elsewhere was the viciously hostile world of Qanar, where Max’s powers didn’t work and sorcery was a more potent weapon than science, where shadows were as menacing as steel. Max Quest still had to save Earth from the corrupt threat of the Others – but he found his destiny intricately linked with that of Qanar as well. And somewhere in space-time was his lost love . . .

Mervyn, wizard and Fluxlord, leader of the Nine Who Guard, faces the ultimate threat of the opposing Seven Who Wait: the opening of the Hellgates to World. Closed more than two thousand years ago, they are portals to unknowable danger and, perhaps, great power.

Mervyn must gather the shattered forces of guardianship, dispersed and reeling after the battle with Coydt:

Cassie, once the powerful saint and crusader, now the brainwashed slave of an oppressive male dictatorship.

Spirit, her daughter, controlled by her mysterious Soul Raider.

Jeff, Spirit’s son

Matson: he will lead the entire force of the Stringers Guild to war, if need be.

But all of them are doomed to death unless they can become Masters of Flux and Anchor.

Does crime pay – if a galaxy is the prize?

What mysterious power emanated from the bejeweled crown of stars that rulers of three planets frantically sought its possession?

A gripping story about primal evil: a sinister intermingling of power, politics, modern theology, the dark forces of necromancy, and what proves, all too terribly, not to be superstition.

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…

In 1861 the American Civil War was in its first lethal year. Britain favoured the Confederacy – and the United Kingdom’s hostility to the North increased to a flashpoint when a Union warship stopped a British vessel at sea. At that moment, there was a very real risk of war between Britain and the Union.

Would Britain have invaded the United States? And if she had – what would have happened? This brilliantly envisaged alternative history shows on a truly epic scale the terrible consequences of such an action. For by the middle of the last century, warfare was already industrialised. Steam-powered ironclad ships at sea and trench warfare, powerful cannon and rapid firing guns on land had revolutionised the business of mass slaughter. Men died in battle on a scale never before seen.

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!

No human being had ever landed on the hidden planet of Arisia. A mysterious barrier, hanging unseen in space, turned back all ships. Then the word came to Earth, inexplicably but compellingly:

GO TO ARISIA!

Virgil Samms, founder of the Galactic Patrol, went – and came back with the Lens, the strange device that gave its wearer powers no man had ever possessed before. Samms knew that the price of this power would be high. But even he had no idea of the ultimate cost – nor of the strange destiny that awaited the First Lensman . . .

First Lensman is the second self-contained novel in E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s epic Lensman series, one of the all-time classics of adventurous, galaxy-spanning science fiction.

The year is 2000. America is swept up in the tide of fundamentalism that is overwhelming the world. Suicide cults and paranoid militias are on the rise and mobs of hooded men drive young women from the streets, as the right-wing American Alliance marshals it forces to close an iron grip on the United States.

Yet even as a power-hungry Alliance candidate makes his first move in a game that will land him the presidency, one woman prepares to stand against him. At Carolyn Crespin’s side are five women friends, the oddly present spirit of another friend who had been reported dead, and an even more surprising ally, mysterious and powerful – one who hands Carolyn the key to the future of humanity, for good or ill.

It is a nameless city somewhere between past and future, a mythic realm at the “heart of the world,” where wicked Rat Lords have reduced all humankind to slaves, and god-daemons make the decision to end all existence. This energizes a compelling quest for survival, and prompts the powerful White Crow to order an uprising against this chaotic strike that threatens them all. Among those who respond to her are the defiant Prince Lucas of Candover, a student at the University of Crime, and no mans’s slave; and Zari, the young Katayan woman who is destined to become the living Memory of all that follows. And others rally to join them in one final desperate revolt, hoping to create a magic powerful enough to reshape the very nature of how they live.

In the realm of science things are often far from what they seem. In the science of sociology this is truest of all. Those who seem to control human affairs may only be figure-heads. The real power lies in unsuspected places…sinister…alien…

Mervyn Wayne called at the offices of an apparently normal, respectable, old-established city firm and overheard intrigue of nightmare quality. He found himself a fugitive from an organisation whose ramifications extended everywhere.

Society was being master-minded by someone, or something, so irresistibly powerful that Mervyn’s first reaction was hopeless fear. Gradually, however, he learnt how to distinguish allies from organisation men and began building a counter-group of his own.

Kickaha, a freedom-seeking wanderer from the planet Earth, meets his archenemy, the most powerful of the decadent interstellar lords, Lord Red Orc, in a final battle that will determine the fate of the universes.

A washed-up actor, a mysterious motel and a Malaysian “woman of power” form the central elements in a riveting account of a rootless man forced to confront the impossible – but very real- demons of his past.

A romantic, suspenseful, genre-bending debut set in Edwardian London.

Amid the sumptuous backdrop of the London season in 1905, headstrong Katherine Sinclair must join the ranks of debutantes vying for suitors. Unfortunately for Katherine, she cannot imagine anything more loathsome-or dangerous. To help ease her entrance into society, Katherine’s family has elicited the assistance of the Earl of Thornewood, a friend and London’s most eligible bachelor, to be her constant companion at the endless fetes and balls. But upon her arrival in London, Katherine realizes there will be more to this season than just white gowns and husband hunting.

Through her late mother’s enchanted diary, Katherine receives warning to keep hidden her otherworldly ability to perform arcana, a magic fueled by the power of the sun. Any misstep could mean ruin-and not just for her family name. The Order of the Eternal Sun is everywhere-hunting for those like her, able to feed on arcana with only a touch of the hand.

But society intrigue can be just as perilous as the Order. The machinations of the fashionable elite are a constant threat, and those who covet Katherine’s arcana, seeking the power of her birthright, could be hiding behind the façade of every suitor-even the darkly handsome Earl of Thornewood.

With so much danger and suspicion, can she give her heart to the one who captivates her, or is he just another after her power?

England, 1967: ruled by the power of the Catholic Church, as it has been since the failure of the Protestant Reformation. In this England there are steam trains, but no internal combustion engine; rifles but no electricity; heresy but no democracy.

And in this England, magic works.

England, 1967; young Tobias Oakley, out on an illicit nighttime expedition, meets an elven woman – and is chosen for initiation into the secrets of necromancy. Tobias has a powerful talent and his injudicious use of it brings him to the attention of the Church – whose Thaumaturgical Division soon recruits him.

And so Tobias enters the Church, beginning his career amid the brothels and taverns of the teeming slums of the diocese of Southwark. From there his progress, if not steady – there is something about Tobias that arouses unease in his superiors – is generally upwards. As a curate, as a priest, as a soldier in the bloody war against heresy and finally as an eminent expert on diabolism, Tobias becomes a power in the English Catholic Church.

And as he does so, he pursues his second career: as liar, drug smuggler, rakehell, mass murderer, betrayer, vicious libertine and consorter with demons. For the elf legacy that has shaped his life has robbed him of something vital. And when Tobias, in an effort finally to discover some meaning in life, embarks on a fantastic and perilous quest through supernatural realms he finds himself at the last confronting a savage irony.

A cold war among the stars was growing hotter by the minute. As Pag and Cathrodyne struggled for domination, a hot war threatened which would rend and annihilate whole planetary systems. The two master races would have consumed one another long ago, but for one single factor:

Waystation. It was a stupendous synthetic world, famed throughout this galaxy. For Waystation was controlled by a neutral people, and until the greater powers could seize this strategic wonder planet and ferret out its secrets, they were doomed to fretful inactivity.

But as a Cathrodyne vessel drew near to Waystation, the all-important balance of power stood in sudden peril. The ship in itself was routine. But on board was a stranger, a man of undiscovered race, who spoke too little, and, it appeared, knew too much…