Search Results for: hunted

IN THE “DOC” SMITH TRADITION

The planet was fine for big game hunters. And it was the tradition there that one must have a trophy before one could call oneself truly a man.

If that were all, it would hardly interest Cap Kennedy because his trophies consisted of planets saved for Terra and missions accomplished. But there was something on Eriadne which was not just a hunt trophy – something which required the presence of Kennedy and his men to check on. One of these things was a fragment of Zheltyana construction which outdated all civilisation.

But the hunt proved to be a double one – Kennedy against an unslayable monster and a lost world of monsters against Kennedy. And if he lost, it would be Terra itself that would be a trophy on some alien’s hunting lodge wall.

SPAWN OF LABAN is one of the best – a real edge-of-the-seat science fiction chiller in the tradition of Edward E. Smith and Edmond Hamilton

The Cyclan was the greatest concentration of intelligence in a thousand worlds – and yet Earl Dumarest continued to elude it. For too long.

Bochner was the greatest hunter of a hundred worlds – a man more than wise to the wiles of beasts and men. And now he was on the trail of the most dangerous and most challenging quarry of his career: Earl Dumarest.

While Dumarest searched for lost Terra, the Cyclan and Bochner searched for him. Of all the nightmare worlds of the universe, the hunt this time was to lead to the Quillian Sector.
The Quillian Sector: the place where space goes mad…



(First published 1978)

As guardian of the Universe’s freedom from the domination by the Cyclan, Earl Dumarest is ruthlessly hunted by their agent, Cyber Broge, as he searches for the fortune necessary to finance his epic quest for Terra – the planet of his birth. Hunter and fugitive, predator and victim, Earl Dumarest lands on the planet Zakym.

ZAKYM – a cadaverous, twin-sunned world where the spectres of the dead daily claim the lives of the living; a decadent world that threatens to explode with the unparalleled violence of civil war and broken taboos.

ZAKYM – home of the beautiful, haunted Lavinia whose soul is claimed and condemned by a power-crazed madman.

Both Lavinia and her planet are doomed until a man appears who promises to be their saviour. Dumarest is the only person capable of challenging the terrifying menace of the Cyclan and the terrors of Zakym. But can even he triumph against such foes?




(First published 1977)

Earl Dumarest continues his desperate search for his birthplace, and seems to be coming close to the mythical planet Earth.

But his attention is temporarily diverted, as he is unexpectedly involved in a hunt for a nebulous ghost world in another galaxy.

It is rumoured that in this fabulous land lies the mysterious Castle of Heart’s Desire, where every wish is fulfilled. If Dumarest can find it, then maybe – just maybe – he will be able to return to the planet of his birth.




(First published 1976)

Between 1956 and 1958, Silverberg contributed dozens of short stories and novellas to the digest pulps, each written in the bombastic, high-adventure style of the original Planet Stories magazine. Since then, those tales have re-appeared only rarely (and sometimes never again) in long out-of-print paperback anthologies. This volume features seven hard-to-find classic Silverberg novellas: Slaves of the Star Giants, Spawn of the Deadly Sea, The Flame and the Hammer, Valley Beyond Time, Hunt the Space-Witch!, The Silent Invaders, and Spacerogue.

THE FIFTH MAJIPOOR NOVEL

On the gigantic planet Majipoor it is a time of ancient mysteries and new wonders. The aged Pontifex Prankipin is at last near death. Omens are seen, prodigies are born – even the sea dragons have been glimpsed from the cliffs. Surely some great change is at hand!

The Coronal Lord Confalume will succeed him as Pontifex, and it is no secret that the next Coronal will be Prince Prestimion of Muldemar – for, by law and custom, the blood son of the present Coronal cannot rule. Besides, everyone knows that they young Korsibar much prefers the pleasures of the hunt to the intrigues of court.

They cannot know this hunter has found a new quarry – the Starburst Crown. For, when Korsibar is visited by an oracle, the two-headed Su-Suheris whispers words that plunge the planet into a fearsome conflagration and engulf its myriad races in a war to alter destiny itself.

The Glory that was – or the Glory that wasn’t?

Knut Bulnes had considered Vasil IX, World Emperor of the 27th century, to be a harmless eccentric until Imperial decree completely sealed off Greece behind a force wall and people of Greek descent suddenly began disappearing from the rest of the world – including the wife of Bulnes’s friend Wiyem Flin.

Bulnes reluctantly agreed to help Flin find his wife, and the two managed to get inside the force wall only to find themselves in the Classical Greece of Socrates and Euripides – and the target of a man-hunt not only by the soldiers of Perikles, but also by the unpleasant characters with machine guns.

They were Thieves for Freedom.

The golden ring – a sacred object to the inhabitants of Janipur – was one of five. Together they were the key to control of the Master System and the only hope of humanity taking charge once more of its own destiny.

Hunted through the galaxy, the rebels’ chances of survival, let alone success, were desperately slim. The three had been transmuted into Janipurians – four-legged, hairy creatures – and had infiltrated the complex, ritualised society of this long-ago terraformed planet.

And with them was Vulture, the artificially created shapechanger who could become, in body and mind, any organic creature. Vulture it was who now watched the solemn ceremony as the ring was brought out and displayed to the crowd, who understood that not just the Master System but the whole population would be hunting down the stealers of the ring.

The gathering forces of the Dark Powers threaten the world of man. The legions of Faery, aided by trolls, demons and the Wild Hunt itself, are poised to overthrow the Realms of Light.
Holger Carlsen, a bemused and puzzled twentieth-century man mysteriously snatched out of time, finds himself the key figure in the conflict. Arrayed against him are the dragons, giants and elven warriors of the armies of Chaos, and the beautiful sorceress Morgan le Fay. On his side is a vague prophecy, a quarrelsome dwarf and a beautiful woman who can turn herself into a swan, not to mention Papillon, the magnificent battle-horse, and a full set of perfectly fitting armour, both of which were waiting for him when he entered the magical realm. The shield bears three hearts and three lions – the only clue to Holger Carlsen’s true identity. Could Carlsen really be a legendary hero, the only man who can save the world?

Across the galaxy and beyond, he Master System ruled. Once the product of human intelligence, it now far surpassed its creators. All understanding of it was lost and any attempt at rediscovery ruthlessly suppressed. The rule of the Master System was unchallenged.


Yet there was a key, long forgotten, that would break that control and it happened by chance that two people, an American and a Chinese woman, stumbled across the secret of the five golden rings that were the key.


Now their only hope lay in finding the rings themselves for the Master System was at their backs, hunting them down…

Once the city of Carrig stood supreme on this planet that had been settled by space refugees in the distant, forgotten past. From every corner of this primitive lost world caravans came to trade – and to view the great King-Hunt, the gruesome test by which the people of Carrig chose their rulers.

Then from space came new arrivals. And with them came their invincible death guns and their ruthless, all-powerful tyranny.

Now there would be no King-Hunt in Carrig, or hope for the planet-unless a fool-hardy high-born named Saikmar and a beautiful Earthling space-spy named Maddalena, could do the impossible . . .



(First published 1969)

The world lay frozen under a thousand feet of ice. Only in the Eight Cities of the Matto Grosso did men still live, hunting the wary ice whales for meat and oil, and following the creed of the Ice Mother which foretold the end of all life in ultimate cold.
But legend told of a city far to the north – fabled New York – whose towers rose above the ice, whose crypts held the forgotten lore that might bring warmth to Earth once again. In the best ice ship in the Eight Cities, Konrad Arflane embarked on the impossible voyable to New York – an odyssey of incredible peril and adventure with a shattering discovery at the journey’s end…

Jake Cutter is reluctantly learning how to be a Necroscope – how to use the Möbius continuum to travel instantaneously from place to place, how to talk to the dead – but the dead don’t like him much. It seems Jake’s got a hitchhiker in his mind, a dead vampire named Korath. But since Korath holds the key to the Möbius equations, Jake can’t just kick him out…

In Australia, Jake helped E-Branch destroy the aerie of the mind-master, Nephran Malinari, one of the trio of Great Vampires who came to Earth from the vampire world. Malinari escaped and went to ground with the hideously beautiful Lady Vavara. Vavara has taken over a holy monastery on a beautiful Greek island and turned the nuns into most unholy creatures of fearsome appetites for all things carnal.

But Jake wants revenge against the Italian mobsters who killed the woman he loved. As far as he’s concerned, E-Branch can search for Malinari, Vavara, and the metamorphic Lord Szwart without him until he’s satisfied his own bloodlust. But it seems vampire-hunting is truly Jake’s job now – the men he’s trying to kill aren’t men at all but vampires hidden for two generations in human guise!

To defeat them, Jake will need every weapon in Necroscope’s arsenal, including the power to call the unsleeping dead out of their mouldering graves…

High tide in a sea of blood!
…And for Harry Keogh, Necroscope, the tide has finally turned. Always the champion of the living and the dead alike, now Harry is shunned by all men. Always a hunter of the evil that stalks the night, now he in turn is hunted. Always the hero, now he is the plague-bearer, the menace – the monster!

But yet his greatest battle will be with himself, with the Thing Inside. For the Necroscope is now a vampire.

Forsaken by the teeming dead pursued by the espers of E-Branch, Harry has a choice: to be banished, hounded right out of this world…or to release the plague which he carries within himself upon all humanity!

America, 1984 – not our version of America, but an America that calls itself the Real, an America in which the invention of Turing Gates has allowed it access to sheaves of alternate histories. For ten years, in the name of democracy, the Real has been waging clandestine wars and fomenting revolution, freeing versions of America from communist or fascist rule, and extending its influence across a wide variety of alternate realities.

But the human and political costs have proven too high, and new President Jimmy Carter has called an end to war, and is bringing troops and secret agents home.

Adam Stone is called out of retirement when his former comrade, Tom Waverly, begins to murder different versions of the same person, mathematician Eileen Barrie. Aided by Waverly’s daughter, Linda, Adam hunts for his old friend across different sheaves, but when they finally catch up with Waverly, they discover that they have stumbled into the middle of an audacious conspiracy that plans to exploit a new property of the Turing Gates: it will change not only the history of the Real, but that of every other sheaf, including our own.

Cowboy Angels combines the high-octane action and convoluted plots of the TV series 24 in a satirical, multi-layered alternate reality thriller.

In Towing Jehovah, the discovery of the two-mile-long corpse of God in the mid-Atlantic proved a serious menace to both navigation and to faith. But was God truly dead, as the nihilists and the New York Times believed? In Blameless in Abaddon, His body – comatose yet far from inert – has been hauled from its temporary resting place in the Arctic to Florida, where it has become the Main Attraction at Orlando’s Celestial City USA. And now one Martin Candle, a small-time and sore-afflicted judge practicing in Abaddon Township, Pennsylvania, proposes further travels for the Corpus Dei: to the World Court in The Hague, to answer for history’s injustices large and small.


In his quest to counter the world’s great theodicies, Martin embarks on an astonishing odyssey through the mind of the Creator, where Lot’s wife proves a most convenient way of adding salt to a margarita glass, early hominids vigorously debate Augustinian doctrine over jasmine tea, and Martin’s alter ego, Job, keeps an eternal vigil atop his dung heap. Once the Trial of the Millennium has begun, Martin will understand why Abaddon is another name for Hell. God hunting simply is not a sport for amateurs.