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Born in the radioactive ashes of World War Three the institute for Applied Psychodynamics had guided Planet Earth to a period of plenty that for the first time fulfilled Science’s promise. But it is the central irony of human existence that prosperity bears the seeds of its own destruction; this time not just Earth but the entire Solar System would endure the flames of war.

In the beginning was World War III…

Out of the flames was born a new civilization, a new humanity dedicated to one world rather than to many nations, to once peace rather than many wars. Never again on Planet Earth would one group of humans “defend” themselves against another group equally convinced that all their actions were “defensive”. Never again on Planet Earth.

But cycles repeat themselves endlessly; Earth is only the beginning of the human story. Next comes planet against planet, and then the stars themselves. Through it all the impersonal forces of historical necessity will tend to force that story into the pathways of tyranny, stasis, and war. And in the end they must prevail. But ever will humankind win free once more…

‘Earth is real,’ Dumarest insisted. ‘A world old and scarred by ancient wars. The stars are few and there is a great single moon which hangs like a pale sun in the night sky.’

In the quest for his legendary birthplace, Earl Dumarest has traversed galaxies. Now, at least, he reaches Ourelle, a planet close to Earth – out along a far arm of the Milky Way. There he finds Jondelle, a boy who may hold the key to Earl’s search.

But then Jondelle is kidnapped. And Dumarest’s pursuit of the imperilled boy leads him to a city of paranoiac killers – madmen whose terrible violence is always on a hair-trigger!



(First published 1973)

This is the tale of Earl Dumarest. Space-wanderer, gladiator-for-hire, seeker of Man’s forgotten home.

Dumarest’s search begins on the ghost-world of Gath, where he becomes unwilling champion of the Matriarch of Kund, and must undergo a fight-to-the-death at stormtime.

Victory could give Dumarest his first clue to the whereabouts of the planet he fled from as a child – an obscure world scarred by ancient wars, which lies countless light years from the thickly populated centre of the galaxy; a world no-one else in the inhabited universe believed exists.

Earth, the birthplace of Man.


(First published 1967)

The galaxy is at war, a war between the oxygen-breathing Terran Federation of worlds and the Ginzoes, chlorine-breathing aliens. Neither side dare attack the others’ habitable worlds for fear of reprisals: the war has become a matter of spaceships firing on each other as they emerge from hyperspace.
An Earth ship is captured in battle by the Ginzoes, and its surviving crew learn that the aliens have gained possession of a newly-developed catalyst. If dropped into the oceans of oxygen planets the catalyst can liberate the chlorine from the sea and convert them to chlorine worlds suitable for the Ginzoes. The catalyst will be used unless the Terran Federation declares peace within fifty days. Fifty days to save Mankind . . . or fifty days to doom!

Earth and its colonies on Mars and Venus are ruled by an authoritarian post-World War III world state which plans to take control of a new method of space travel when it has been perfected by a Martian scientist. When they fail to secure the invention, the world state’s Coordinator decides to destroy the Mars colony with “radi-germ bombs.

The Virgin of Zesh

In which a beautiful woman, a mind-drunk poet, and a super-sober scientist must fight for their lives on a planet occupied by weird cultists from the Earth and bizarre varieties of humanoids from all over the galaxy.

The Wheels of If

In which a young lawyer is trapped in a sense-shattering shuttle among alternative worlds of possibility, and lands at last in an America that has been colonised by Norsemen and divided between two great warring empires – one white, one Indian.

Outside the walls of the starport Novorecife, Earthmen on the warrior planet Kishna are on their own. So when he is chosen to lead the first ersuma (Earth-tourists) through the sorcerer-kingdoms of this “protected” medieval world, Fergus Reith must first learn to speak Durou; must take the chemical oath against imparting technical information; and must above all else learn to handle a broadsword! All these skills are needed when Reith finds himself and his ersuma trapped as pawns in a deadly war between a sorceress and a sterile kingdom under three moons . . .

The Hostage of Zir is the third of L. Sprague de Camp’s Krishna book – interplanetary romance in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian Tales.

It is sometime I the near future. The nations of Earth have drawn closer together – there is even hope of a new era of co-operation and progress will soon begin.

These dreams of lasting peace are shattered by one momentous discovery. One of the members of an international team of scientists stationed on the moon has found an alien spacecraft – with all its incredible technology and weaponry intact. The discovery shatters the illusion of peace on Earth, as each nation joins the mad scramble to learn the terrible secrets entombed by alien visitors eons before.

Only one thing prevents total war – Werner Brecht, the discoverer of the vehicle, is the only one who knows its location, and he has disappeared into thin air.

In the 21st century the nature of war has change – Atomic weapons, Bazookas and rockets, were all banned. Machine guns were just permissable.
An the newest secret weapon? – A GLIDER
East and West had managed an uneasy truce in the arms’ race by banning all weapons developed after 1900. Yet small wars, waged in front of television cameras, were the means of settling industrial disputes.
It was a crazy way of doing things…but it worked – until an ambitious Major upset the status quo, and threw the world’s peace into deadly peril!

Is the story of 21st Century Earth – a world where work is forgotten, where the masses fight boredom with trank pills and telly, and where it is almost impossible to leave the social class you were born in. You could break the class barrier only by hiring yourself out as a mercenary to fight in the prime-time wars that are fought to keep the telly-viewing public satisfied. That is the only way to move up the ladder – if you could stay alive long enough.

BUG-EYED MONSTERS ON BROADWAY

Pulp SF magazine editor Keith Winton was answering a letter from a teenage fan when the first moon rocket fell back to Earth and blew him away.

But where to? Greenville, New York, looked the same, but Bems (Bug-Eyed Monsters) just like the ones on the cover of Startling Stories walked the streets without attracting undue comment.

And when he brought out a half-dollar coin in a drugstore, the cops wanted to shoot him on sight as an Arcturian spy.

Wait a minute. Seven-foot purple moon-monsters? Earth at war with Arcturus? General Dwight D. Eisenhower in command of Venus Sector?

What mad universe was this?

One thing was for sure: Keith Winton had to find out fast – or he’d be good and dead, in this universe or any other.

Omega: an apocalyptic rumour from the Eastern Front. Omega: something that will alter all the strategic calculations of the Earth’s great military blocs. Omega: the code name for a weapon that may well bring doomsday with it. But if Omega is indeed the agent that will destroy the world, that world is not our own. For this is a timeline in which World War Two never truly ended: a timeline in which Hitler died in a plane crash, Britain joined Germany in its battle against Communist Russia, and the present is an age of intermittent, but deadly, armed conflict between the USSR, the European Alliance, and the USA.

The frontier regions are radioactive wastelands, nuclear winter threatens catastrophe, global confrontation could erupt again any time – and that’s before Omega is taken into account…This is the reality experienced by Owen Meredith when an accident forces his consciousness from the England we know into the mind of his cognate self in that other darker, Europe.

Switching back and forth between being plain Owen Meredith and troubled Major Owain Maredudd, Owen is faced not only with a Cold War going Hot, but with a deep crisis of identity. Who is he? Whose twisted destiny is he treading? Did the ordinary domestic life he remembers ever even take place? Perhaps the universe of Owain and Omega is merely a symptom of mental illness – but if so, why is it so urgently tangible?

Three Mind-Jarring Space Operas

Marooned:
Four giant ships made of the wonder element synthium crash the asteroid belt and brave the cold of Jupiter’s moons in mans last reckless dash to adventure.

All:
The Chinese have brutally conquered the Earth and out of their ruthless tyranny evolves the last great religious war, and the first God of Nuclear Divinity.

The Space Beyond:
When you wake up 75 billion miles from Earth in a crippled ship hurtling towards a blistering Mega-Sun, with a crew of insane gangsters and a Texan, what you don’t need to run into is a galactic war. Or was that their only chance of survival?

Ed Carter, a New York reporter on his way to his home town in Omaha for a short vacation, saw the missile in the last moments in its journey back to earth. A sweller on the brink, like all of us, he had no doubt about what it was; Oh God, he thought, this is it. The blast of the impact flung him some distance, and when he regained consciousness, his first reaction was one of surprised to find himself still alive, and not, it seemed, even badly hurt. Presumably the missile had been directed at the big Air Force base nearby, and should have destroyed everything and everyone within a radius of miles. Could it have failed to explode?

Carter sees the remains of part of the missile in an adjacent field and hobbles over to it. A minute or two later several Air Force officers arrive. They examine the remains, and find the burned-up body of a pilot. In other worlds, the missile was not Russia’s first shot in the Third World War, but a failure to launch a man into space. But Carter knows that the Distant Early Warning line will have reported the missile; that the senior Air Force officers, in accordance with plan, will have taken to the air – in the country’s interest, their lives must, of course, be preserved if possible; that by now the retaliatory American bombers will have passed the point of no recall; and that the Third World War has begun. Not so, Colonel Ben Goldwater tells him: “I called the bombers back.”

Goldwater, the man who had been left in command, has saved the world – for at least a little longer. So he becomes a world hero? Not a bit of it. On the contrary: a nightmare looms ahead both for him and for Ed Carter, and the reader watches it all with growing fury…

The 22nd century, 150 years after the Dust War destroyed America’s Mid-West, and much else besides. California is a last outpost for survival and reclamation during a long epidemic of all-purpose despair.

The extraordinary cult of ‘Tumbonde,’ a former taxi driver its prophet and leader, predicts the imminent arrival on earth of ‘Gods’ from the stars. The movement grows daily.

Tom O’Bedlam, an apparent madman, prey since childhood to visions which seem to confirm ‘Tumbonde,’ goes even further. He can, he will, help others to make the Crossing. If the world doesn’t go too man too soon. If well-meaning ‘rationalists’ don’t lock him away . . .

The second and concluding volume of Ian Watson’s extraordinary epic, The Book of Mana. Kaleva is Earth’s first and only interstellar colony, discovered by Lucky Sariola who was transported there by an Ukko, a mysterious asteriod-like entity that responds to stories told to it – in Lucky’s case, those of her Finnish grandmother. Now Queen Lucky, half-mad and newly widowed, is obsessed by relocating that Ukko – but this is potentially disastrous, as the snakelike alien Isi are also on its trail as part of their design to enslave humans. Understanding this, one of Lucky’s daughters (with obsessions of her own) crowns herself rival queen. A summer turns into unseasonable winter and elysian peace turns to bitter civil war and Ukko, once more, has a role to play in the history of Kaleva.

In 1997 an angel fell to Earth. Dave Peters, and his sidekick in the San Francisco police squad, Danny, were right there at the time. Caught up in a supernatural war between good and evil, they had eventually tracked down the rogue entity and brought an end to its reign of deadly fire. But now the stakes had risen. It’s 2002, and there’s a demon abroad in London, a soul so corrupt and foul that Satan himself has recruited him from the legions of the dead. Only one entity in Heaven can counter his power – an Archangel, an angel of the highest rank.

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.