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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.

The end draws nigh….The year is 2053, and Earth has barely recovered from the Alpha Centauri supernova that destroyed much of the planet’s infrastructure. Now the supernova’s residual effect – a storm of high-energy particles – is racing toward Earth, and an international effort has been launched out of the Sky City space colony to save the planet. But the controversial plan – to build a giant protective shield for Earth – is falling dangerously behind schedule. A series of unexplained murders has disrupted the Sky City workforce, so much so that a brilliant but monstrous criminal has been enlisted to track down the Sky City killer.Then comes more startling news. Evidence indicates that the original supernova was caused deliberately, and that the lethal particle storm will arrive sooner than anyone expected. But who – or what – tried to destroy the Earth? And will the answer come in time to save it from its final apocalypse?

The devastated Earth had only a handful of inhabitants – now even their future was in the balance.

The Twenty-Second Century had been and gone – and with it, the worst war in the bloody history of mankind: the War of the Black Rising. The Earth was devastated, the moon blasted out of the sky, it was only on Mars, many millions of miles away, that humanity had survived – in the shape of a few Black colonists.

But out of that few had grown a new civilization – a civilization which now, some two thousand years later, had successfully launched its first space exploration – destination, the ‘dead’ planet Earth.

A hundred years in our future, the first expedition from Earth reaches Alpha Centauri only to discover a vast human empire, long-established and sternly ruled by the aristocratic High-born. In a stroke Earth becomes merely another primitive outpost, its people dubbed “wolflings” by the rulers of the Throne World. Painstakingly chosen and meticulously trained, Jim Keil was sent merely to observe conditions on the Throne World.

The High-born would consider him no more than a diversion until Keil cast away his orders from Earth and proved a Wolfling indeed.

Formula for revenge:
Take one high-spirited little boy.
Kill his family before his eyes.
Allow him to escape.
Give him time to grow up.
You’re in trouble.

They had slaughtered Earth’s colonists with impunity. Now they were going pay.

It had been five hundred years since the distant Terran Colony of Corwin had communicated with Earth. But now Corwin was threatened by the indomitable warriors of Klodni and the peaceful planet desperately needed help. Baird Ewing was the ambassador chosen by his people to find that help and save Corwin from destruction.

But Earth had changed . . .

Ewing found a decadent world of worthless pleasure-seekers devoid of hope and incapable of help. The only remaining vestige of the old world on Earth was to be found in the College of Abstract Science. It was Ewing’s last hope. If he failed it was the end of the line for him, Corwin – and the galaxy.


First published in 1958.

From the vaults of The SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal introduction to the fantastic worlds of one of the greatest adventure writers of all time, Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The son of a Civil War veteran, Edgar Rice Burroughs was a prolific writer for the early pulp magazines. Famous the world over as the creator of Tarzan – and in SF circles for his Martian tales featuring John Carter – Burroughs is a household name. But there was more to him than apemen and four-armed Martians! This omnibus collects his tales of the world within a hollow Earth: At the Earth’s Core, Pellucidar and Tanar of Pellucidar.

Ganelon Silvermane, the genetically designed superhero of the Earth’s fabulous final age, has offered himself as hostage to the worst band of barbarians to roam the plains. As a captive of the Horde, Ganelon rises to greater heights of heroism than ever before . . . and begins to assume the full power of his mighty being!

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.

Earth was finally entering the galaxy…

The ‘Allies’ had arrived, sweeping down from the stars to offer a jaded Earth the marvels of the cosmos.

And Earth had gone crazy. Farmers sat back to wait for Vita Flakes to fall from the sky. New York City drank itself into a permanent starstruck stupor. Blissed-out teenagers wandered into the Great Mexican Defoliation Desert to wait for the New Gods to bear them off to the astral plane…

But the ‘Allies’ weren’t in the business of trading something for nothing. This impertinent little marketworld might fetch a nice price on the interstellar auction block… particularly if a runaway wondergirl named Golden Vanity was tossed into the bargain!

Annihilating everything before it, a horde of monstrous space travellers were advancing through the stars. And Earth lay in their route. To defend their home planets, the worlds that lay in the path of the monsters created a super defence force, asking each planet to contribute one especially talented warrior to help turn the invaders away. Miles Vander was Earth’s man, but when he arrived at the rendezvous point he found that he was included in the special task force of the less civilized defenders.

But in the contest of advanced nuclear weaponry and computer strategy, it turned out to be Vander’s group that had the special independent qualities and the raw courage to meet the challenge most effectively.

On an ecologically seared Earth, James Konteau is a veteran krono, a professional time traveler. His job is to ease the overpopulation crisis by establishing new colonies in Earth’s prehistory, long before human beings evolved. But his job has lost all meaning, for Konteau is a lone and troubled man haunted by his own past.

Now, suddenly, his future is also in turmoil: a timequake has reportedly ripped through distant eons, destroying one of Konteau’s colonies. Framed for the disaster, Konteau is hunted by authorities, defying all the powers of technology and politics to escape back through the misty ages on a complex mission of death, justice, love – and incredible destiny . . .

The mysterious disintegration of the planet Mercury presaged mutational changes in the solar system. Next, the Moon followed Mercury into oblivion, bombarding Earth with giant meteors and causing more earthquakes. Then a giant metal globe that had apparently been buried inside the Moon took up an orbit of the Earth. The new satellite is an alien spaceship carrying the survivors of a super scientific race forced to abandon their own world to emigrate to our solar system. The aliens seeded the then primeval Earth with life cultures in their own image, and then placed themselves in suspended animation whilst evolution took place. They have awakened to assist humanity to avert the mutational danger now facing the remaining planets…

She called herself Reee and she was the last human being on Earth. This was the one thing she was sure of. Because Earth was not a dead planet, not by a long way. There were all manner of strange plants and bizarre animals, and there were the blue boys who insisted they were human – but she always set fire to them.



There was however Indigo, the all-devouring protoplasmic ocean that was literally gobbling up everything in the world. And there was the enigmatic Emeroo to whom she owed her continued existence. There were also the so-called Martians – humans who had fled to Mars and only came back to Earth to scout for survivors and vent their futile furies on the inhospitable homeworld.

Trapped in the confines of their fragile lifeship, a tiny band of aliens and humans faces the awesome challenge of survival after the mysterious explosion of a giant spaceship.
Giles Steel, a member of Earth’s master race, assumes responsibility for erupting tempers, the dwindling food supply…and the saboteur whose ugly work has already begun!

The Frontier Rebellion has long been won, thanks in part to the efforts of Culihan O’Rourke, the best hijacker the Rebels ever had. When he is greeted upon his return to Earth with beatings, torture, and interrogation, Cully learns the hard way of the ultimatum issued to Earth by the Moldaug: evacuate the Frontier or be destroyed.

How Kemlo won his spurs in the first and last great Battle of Space. For, yes, even to Space, that final goal of all Man’s earthly dreams, enmity and war eventually came. But in Space, as always in the end on Earth, good was to triumph over evil – though not until a hideous and terrifying danger had been averted.

This gracefully written sequel to Golden Witchbreed powerfully depicts the impact of a high-technology civilization on a decaying planet. Ten years after having served as Earth’s first envoy to Orthe, which is struggling to survive after a planetwide holocaust millennia ago, Lynne de Lisle Christie returns there as an advisor to PanOceania, one of Earth’s giant multinational companies, which is seeking to discover the technological secrets of the Goldens, the ruling race that had destroyed itself while almost obliterating Orthe. Christie seeks to help the native people, some of whom have been her friends, some her enemies, but all closely bound in her memories and loyalties. Instigated by the last of the Golden, a madwoman seeking domination, war between the poor and starving hiyeks of the Desert Coast and the land-loving telestres of the north is aggravated by smuggled high-tech weapons. Christie, while holding a dreadful secret from the Orthe’s past, attempts to mediate. Gentle creates moving, different, yet recognizable societies and people that catch the reader’s emotions as they struggle to save themselves.

The radar-complex had picked up the strange object in space just as it neared the earth’s surface. It was described as “an object of considerable size.” The impact of its landing at Boulder Lake Park, Colorado, was felt on every seismograph in the world. Then the first reports began to trickle in: there were “creatures” on board? Creatures who soon left their ship and began exploring the area …

Where was the ship from, and what was the quest of the strange visitors? These visitors who were armed with a terrifying paralysis ray that blinded its victims, filling their nostrils with a reptilian odor of the jungle?

Only one man in the Boulder Lake Park area could hope to solve the mystery of the “Aliens” who had come to call on earth …

‘She is unique. She is legend’ THE TIMES

‘A tour de force’ EVENING STANDARD

‘A wonderfully mordant analyst of human weakness’ Martin Amis

Earth, like the rest of the Known Worlds, has fallen to the Shing. Scattered here and there, small groups of humans live in a state of semi-barbarism. They have lost the skills, science and knowledge that had been Earth’s in the golden age of the League of Worlds, and whenever a colony of humans tries to rekindle the embers of a half-forgotten technology, the Shing, with their strange, mindlying power, crush them out. There is one man who can stand against the malign Shing, but he is an alien with amber eyes and must first prove to paranoid humanity that he himself is not a creature of the Shing.

When mankind colonized the stars, they travelled out from Earth in two directions – to Centaurus and its Southern Hemisphere neighbours and to Ursa Major and the constellations around Polaris. And strange to say the humans who settled on those various worlds began to develop into two differing antagonistic types.

For Ray Mallin, born under the surface of Mars in the sparse colony of Earth’s inhospitable old neighbour, neither the anarchic ‘bears’ nor the autocratic ‘Centaurs’ commanded his loyalty. So when secret agents of both galactic groupings suddenly focus their unwelcome attention on his most recent star-piloting mission, he knew only that something of vast significance was up – and that he unknowingly was the key to it.

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)

The ability to see other-dimensional rings that float in Earth’s atmosphere was a late mutation of a few space-age humans. Daryl was under the care of the institution for muters, and she had discovered that if you jumped through the right ring at the right time it would land you in another dimensional world and another shape.



Spaceling is the story of Daryl’s desperate efforts to unravel the mystery of why she was being held captive and of what was really going on in a certain alien dimension. Because she was sure it was all bad and that someday everyone would thank her for the revelation.



But instead everyone was engaged in a wild effort to hold her down, to keep her on this Earth, and to keep the world simply intact!

After two hundred years colonising earth, the Aleutians prepare to return to space, leaving behind humanity and an earth that have been shaped by their presence, their care, and their cruelty.

In the dying days of Aleutian rule, Catherine has altered her body to appear more alien, and soaks herself in the decadence of their culture. Misha idolises the Aleutians, and begins a love affair with Catherine, both desperate to forget their humanity and embrace the alien.

What will be left for the humans when the Aleutians leave? What will the Aleutians take with them from their time on earth? Could humanity have changed them as much as they changed it?

Dark, violent, political and emotional, PHOENIX CAFÉ is the third book in Gwyneth Jones’ critically acclaimed Aleutians Trilogy.