Search Results for: to-the-ultimate

White-skinned, black-haired Sovaz is beautiful and wayward, yet seemingly soulless – as if vampirised by some unknown force. Wife of a very wealthy but older husband, she is the prize ornament of his treasure collection, yet she is toying with a naive young American lover. And while the faces of this doomed trio converge, somewhere outside the glowing casements a creature of darkness prepares to feed…

Here are a novel and twelve short stories encompassing all the richness and variety of Tanith Lee’s unique talent.

This fascinating and disturbing collection casts a new and chilling light on that ancient mythical creature, the mermaid… pinpoints the ultimate peril of mankind’s fascination with the domestic cat… sucks us into the pulsing horror of bricks and mortar with a life of their own… investigates the dark and marvellous legends of tree spirits, and the tantalising allure of other carnal obsessions.

Sandra Foster studies fads – from Barbie dolls o the grunge look – how they start and what they mean. Bennett O’Reilly is a chaos theorist studying monkey group behaviour. They both work for the HiTek corporation, strangers until a misdelivered package brings them together. It’s a moment of synchronicity – if not serendipity – which leads them into a chaotic system of their own, complete with a million-dollar research grant, caffe latte, tattoos, and a series of unlucky coincidences that leaves Bennett monkeyless, fundless, and nearly jobless. Sandra intercedes with a flock of sheep and an idea for a joint project. (After all, what better animal to study both chaos theory and the herd mentality that so often characterizes human behaviour?) But scientific discovery is rarely straightforward and never simple, and Sandra and Bennett have to endure a series of setbacks, heartbreaks, dead ends, and disasters before they find their ultimate answer…

Edward Cadence was a brilliant man, and a dedicated scientist. He had invented Sensitape, a means of recording the thoughts and emotions of great musicians, religious figures, etc. so that others could experience at first-hand just what it was like to play a magnificent concerto, or to slip peacefully toward an untroubled death with the sure expectation that Heaven lies waiting. And he had added Sexitape, whereby people whose sex lives weren’t completely satisfying could experience everything that the most compatible couple in the world felt together.

For all this he was given the Nobel Prize, became enormously wealthy and famous.

But finally he set to work on the ultimate application of his experiments: Synthajoy. And when the enormity of this dehumanising process became clear, he was murdered.

Rod was a television reporter with the ultimate gimmick. Thanks to the marvels of microsurgery, TV cameras were implanted in his eyes. He could broadcast people’s actions without them even knowing it. But when he was forced to spy on a dying woman, he deliberately blinded himself by overloading his sensitive circuits.

Rod thought that he could opt out of the tough choice that society was forcing him to make. He was wrong, of course. Dead wrong . . .

Bart Fraden came looking for a planet to conquer – and found the hell-hole of the galaxy: Sangre – the killer planet. For three centuries Sangre had been dominated by the sadistic Brotherhood of Pain, a priesthood dedicated to torture, slavery and cannibalism. Bart sensed the kind of revolutionary potential that he could manipulate to make himself ultimate ruler. But he hadn’t counted on the apathy of a people bred as meat animals and the dreadful power wielded by the Brotherhood. Sangre might cost him more than his life – it might destroy his soul . . .

In the Country of Tattooed Men the nights feel hollow and are full of sounds of the jungle: danger is everywhere. Tattoos hide all from the prying eyes of the world. On Murderer’s Walk the cards are dealt for the ultimate game. There can be only one loser: pray you do not hold the ace of spades. And from York to London, Northampton to Southend the boys are surfing Spanish style.
It’s exciting and exhilarating and potentially fatal.

Gary Kilworth has created a powerful and striking anthology of stories from the past, present and future.

Vanessa Smith looked like any normal seventeen year old girl. But Vanessa wasn’t normal at all.

She possessed extraordinary telepathic powers – and in the 1990s telepathy was the ultimate weapon in psychological warfare. Vanessa, along with other gifted children, was virtually a prisoner at Random Hill Residential School, developing her abilities for Government exploitation.

So when she escaped, Vanessa became a political embarrassment. Questions were asked by the Opposition. It was vital for the Prime Minister, the ruthlessly dictatorial Sir Joseph Humbolt, that everything that marked Vanessa’s existence should be erased. And orders were given that she should be hunted down – using telepaths like herself – and destroyed.

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 fourth novel in the classic Legion of Space series.

In swarming hordes they poured forth from the core of the Nebula: the shadowflashers – nightmarish parasites bent on enslaving the minds and bodies of the entire human race. Already they had killed the Keeper of the Peace, and stolen the great secret weapon Akka. Now nothing stood between Mankind and the ultimate destruction…

It was Jil Gyrel who first sensed danger. Daughter of a lost Legion pilot, Jil had inherited her father’s uncanny gifts of navigation – and his courage. But what was one girl’s bravery against the most monstrous evil ever to emerge from the treacherous oceans of space?

Called to the end of time by a being they knew only as The Face of Ea, four adventurers from the twentieth century faced a power that not even the super-science of that era could meet – the nekron, negative matter, negative force, ultimate destruction for everything it touched. It seemed hopeless to expect them to win this battle for the fate of the universe – but between them they had a power they themselves could not suspect.

Lucas Hutchman is the Ground Zero Man

The man who has his finger on the button, the man who can destroy the world – or save it, the man whose own life suddenly has no value, unless he can make the governments of Earth understand that he is the absolute master of the ultimate doomsday device – a device that can trigger every nuclear weapon in existence if Hutchman’s demands are not met in time.

When Marianne’s parents died, leaving control of their fortune to her feared older brother, she struggled to make her way as a student in America – and her old home began to seem as unreal as a fairy tale, her childhood there as distant as a dream . . .

Until the Magus came to claim her, and the Black Madame to destroy her, and the Manticore to hunt her down through the streets of another world – for there is magic in Marianne’s blood, and magic in her soul.

And in a battle fought in an everchanging world of warped time and wicked magic, it is the souls of Marianne and her family that are the ultimate prizes.

Marianne, the Matchbox and the Malachite Mouse is the final volume of Sheri S. Tepper’s acclaimed Marianne Trilogy.

When Marianne’s parents died, leaving control of their fortune to her feared older brother, she struggled to make her way as a student in America – and her old home began to seem as unreal as a fairy tale, her childhood there as distant as a dream . . .

Until the Magus came to claim her, and the Black Madame to destroy her, and the Manticore to hunt her down through the streets of another world – for there is magic in Marianne’s blood, and magic in her soul.

And in a battle fought in an everchanging world of warped time and wicked magic, it is the souls of Marianne and her family that are the ultimate prizes.

Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods is the second volume of Sheri S. Tepper’s acclaimed Marianne Trilogy.

When Marianne’s parents died, leaving control of their fortune to her feared older brother, she struggled to make her way as a student in America – and her old home began to seem as unreal as a fairy tale, her childhood there as distant as a dream . . .

Until the Magus came to claim her, and the Black Madame to destroy her, and the Manticore to hunt her down through the streets of another world – for there is magic in Marianne’s blood, and magic in her soul.

And in a battle fought in an everchanging world of warped time and wicked magic, it is the souls of Marianne and her family that are the ultimate prizes.

Marianne, the Magus and the Manticore is the first volume of Sheri S. Tepper’s acclaimed Marianne Trilogy.

Only one thing could lure Hal Mayne away from his research aboard the Final Encyclopedia. It was the shattering news of the Younger Worlds’ oncoming defeat – an inevitable triumph for the cross-cultural hybrids known as the Others.

To save Earth’s future in space, Hal must journey to the planet Kultis, where the powerful alternate forces have been mastered by the top secret Chantry Guild. There, Hal Mayne will meet his greatest challenge and ultimate fate – one that will alter mankind’s destiny forever.

The world designated 49381D is a small backwater planet inhabited by simple agrarians. The Galactic Expansion Service has an agent posted there to slowly bring the native species under the auspices of the Galactic community.

But the new Sector Chief, Harb Mallard, is a man of action. In less than two years he has attained his present rank and he is in a hurry to proceed even higher. With a display of false bravado backed up by hidden technological wonders, Harb Mallard infiltrates a warlike faction of the native population. He intends to rise swiftly to a position of power and then present the Galactic Expansion Service with a fully converted population in record time.
But what Harb doesn’t know is enough to cost him his sanity. The ultimate lesson is learned too late, for the end is always a direct result of the means.

The men of the Dorsai were the finest fighting soldiers in the universe, mercenary troops without equal.

Their talents were devastatingly employed on Kultis, where a bloody little war raged between the Western Alliance and Eastern Coalition. But not even the Dorsai could anticipate the dramatic effect of Cletus Grahame’s brilliant mind and the galaxy-shaking theory he called The Tactics of Mistake.

This first book in the Dorsai sequence is the story of how Cletus Grahame risked his life, the fate of three worlds, and ultimately the whole of the Dorsai to prove that a mistake may remake worlds. A classic of science fiction.

Donal Graeme set out to re-shape the galaxy, but first he must tear it apart.

Donal Graeme, Dorsai of the Dorsai, was the final link in a long genetic train, the ultimate soldier, whose breadth of vision made him a master of space war and strategy – and something even greater. He was the focus of centuries of evolution, the culmination of planned development, and through him a new force made itself felt.

Dorsai were renowned throughout the galaxy as the finest soldiers ever born, trained from birth to fight and win, no matter what the odds. With Donal at their head they embarked upon the final, impossible venture: they set out to unify the splintered worlds of Mankind.

The Ultimate Egoist, the first volume of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, contains the late author’s earliest work, written from 1937 to 1940. Although Sturgeon’s reach was limited to the lengths of the short story and novelette, his influence was strongly felt by even the most original science fiction stylists, including Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Gene Wolfe, each of whom contributes a laudatory foreword. The more than 40 stories here showcase Sturgeon’s masterful knack with clever, O. Henry-ish plot twists, sparkling character development, and almost archetypal, why didn’t I think of that? story ideas. Early Sturgeon masterpieces include “It,” about the violence done by a creature spontaneously born from garbage and mud, and “Helix the Cat,” about an inventor’s bizarre encounter with a disembodied soul and the cat that saves it. Sturgeon’s unique genius is timelessly entertaining.

The Potters of Firsk includes the majority of Vance’s ‘Magnus Ridolph’ stories, previously collected in The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph. In the VIE edition this book is titled Gadget Stories.
Contents: Planet of the Black Dust, Dead Ahead (“Ultimate Quest”), Hard Luck Diggings, Sanatoris Short-cut, The Unspeakable McInch, The Howling Bounders, The King of Thieves, The Sub-standard Sardines, To B or Not to C or to D (“Cosmic Hotfoot”), Spa of the Stars, The Enchanted Princess (“The Dreamer”), The Potters of Firsk, The Visitors (“Winner Lose All”), Plagian Siphon (“The Uninhibited Robot”; “The Planet Machine”), Dover Spargill’s Ghastly Floater, Sabotage on Sulfur Planet, Three Legged Joe, Four Hundred Blackbirds, Sjambak, Parapsyche, Sail 25 (“Gateway to Strangeness”; “Dust of Far Suns”).

All Jack Vance titles in the SFGateway use the author’s preferred texts, as restored for the Vance Integral Edition (VIE), an extensive project masterminded by an international online community of Vance’s admirers. In general, we also use the VIE titles, and have adopted the arrangement of short story collections to eliminate overlaps.

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.

On the murky outskirts of our solar system, a lonely star has exploded, emitting monstrous doses of radiation . . .

The year is 1983. The exploding star Briareus Delta, 132 light years away, provokes only mild interest from planet Earth. Suddenly, appalling tornadoes and storms ravage the cities and countryside, leaving death and desolation in their wake. Then mankind realises another terrifying side-effect – every adult in the world has been rendered infertile.

Schoolteacher Calvin Johnson discovers he is one of the select few to have acquired strange psychic powers. Termed ‘Zetas’, these people experience mental flashes of the future – a future of freezing isolation, snow-swept landscapes and bleak, ice-bound cities.

A second ice-age is imminent as man faces the ultimate horror . . . extinction.

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!

It is known as the alaraf drive: instantaneous travel between two points of space. Three of special ships have been built using this technology to explore and make contact with the many sentient races inhabiting the universe.

Captain Hûd Ramstam launches his ship, al-Buraq, on a mid-tearing space odyssey with a planet’s god in his cabin – and a planet-destroyer on the loose . . .

What exactly is the vast, superpowerful, worldburning BOLG? Can it be taken out or is it unstoppable? And who precisely is the green-cloaked mystery glimpsed by Ramstam? Can it be al-Kindhr, the Green One, mentioned in Surat 18 of the Qu’ran? Or is it someone older, wiser and more deadly?

Ranstan, a thoughtful and moral man, becomes a fascinated yet reluctant pawn in the hands of the strange forces which arise to fight the deadly destroyer. Ultimately, he is the one man who, in a fearful race against time, can stop the destruction. But what price must he pay for becoming the saviour of intelligent-kind?