Search Results for: out-of-this-world

A journey to the Rim Worlds takes you straight to the edge of the unknown or right to the gaping void of the abyss. Out there you’re beyond the borders, hovering between the warped contours of troubled space and time…

Captain Clavering bought his ship on a lottery win. Now he’s holed up on the dismal planet of Lorn filling in the time on a chemical-blasted airstrip waiting for a contract. Somewhere there must be a newly colonized planet needing charters or some threatened world that needs evacuating. He’d risk anything for money in the bank – even a dodgy landing on the gas-blasted plains of Eblis, if the Rim Runners fancy paying hard cash for an expedition to hell…

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!

It is a new world, stunned by the horrors that linger in the aftermath of total war. The United States and Soviet Union are squaring off in a different kind of conflict, one that’s fought in the shadows, where there are whispers of strange and mysterious developments. . .

Normal people across the United States have inexplicably gained paranormal abilities. A factory worker can heal the sick and injured. A schoolteacher bends emotions to her will. A car salesman alters matter with a simple touch. A former soldier speaks to the dying and gains their memories as they pass on.

They are the Variants, controlled by a secret government program called MAJESTIC-12 to open a new front in the Cold War.

From the deserts of Nevada to the palaces of Istanbul, the halls of power in Washington to the dark, oppressive streets of Prague, the Variants are thrown into a deadly game of shifting alliances. Amidst the seedy underbelly of nations, these once-ordinary Americans dropped in extraordinary circumstances will struggle to come to terms with their abilities as they fight to carve out a place for themselves in a world that may ultimately turn against them.

And as the MAJESTIC-12 program will soon discover, there are others out there like them, some with far more malevolent goals. . .

It is hard to say how it started – all the unexplained little signs of a new baby about the house in ‘The Silent Cradle’ – but soon none of the O’Bannons could deny that there had been a highly irregular addition to the family. In ‘Max Haunting’ a middle-aged hippie, preserved almost intact from the Sixties, starts showing up on the doorsteps of his old friends and loves who, in acquiring jobs and furniture, have ‘sold out’ rather less than he thought. Hauntings of curious varieties continue in other stories: the sort manufactured out of glass by a man who thinks his godly wife deserves a miracle; the visitation of a mother’s cruelty into the mind of her daughter as she confronts the frustrations of coping with her own child; the specters of opportunities lost or spurned which nag to be laid, like ghosts.



Elsewhere Leigh Kennedy considers the impulse of cannibalism in a future world whose greed has induced ecological upheaval, and the phenomenon of speaking in tongues as investigated by a sociology professor. She views the world through the eyes of a victim of seizures and of a primatologist whose devotion to apes has gone a bit too far.

Lieutenant Luis Mendoza is tasked with solving a double murder, shrouded in strange rites. Acting on one of his famous hunches, he is drawn into the world behind the glitter of Hollywood and into the Temple of Mystic Truth.

There he finds cultists Martin and Cara Kingman, who turn out to be less than spiritual . . .

‘A Luis Mendoza story means superlative suspense’ Los Angeles Times

Charlatans or Prophets? At best, the tiny Kandarian Air Fleet would fight until its last ship was blown into infinity. At worst, it would be annihilated without a chance. To young Captain Bors, either course was unthinkable.

The ruthless Dictator of Mekin had already subjugated twenty-two helpless planets. Now he wanted Kandar’s unconditional surrender, or his vastly superior forces would blast it out of existence.

It took a lot of guts, and the hope that is frequently born of despair, for a military man like Bors to throw in his lot with Talents, Incorporated, an untried, unscientific organization. Through peculiar gifts of extra-sensory perception, its personnel could, their leader insisted, out-think and out-guess even the most deadly dictator in the history of mankind. Could it? It just might.

And it just might not. . . . But there was absolutely nothing to lose, and a free world (and a beautiful girl) to win. Captain Bors made his decision, and the loaded die was cast!

The first in a new series from the master of heroic fantasy

Born in the storm that doomed his father, Connavar grows to manhood among the mist-covered mountains of Caer Druagh, where the Rigante tribe dwell in harmony with the land and its gods.

But beyond the border, across the water, an evil force is gathering strength, an unstoppable force that will change the world beyond all recognition.

Haunted by malevolent spirits and hunted by evil men, Connavar sets out on a spectacular mission to save his people.

In this latest tale of love and honour, friendship and courage, from the master of the genre, Gemmell explores the intriguing worlds of Celtic myth and earth magic.

Read by Adjoa Andoh
(p) 2017 Orion Publishing Group

The object appeared over the Pacific, moving so fast that it was over Arizona before the supersonic shock of its passing was felt. It slowed perceptibly somewhere over New Jersey, and took only a small chunk out of the World Trade Center on its way between the two towers. Earth would never be the same again

‘The Oinn and the Blettr are in league against us. They do not war with each other. The ship that crashed was a plant to make us believe.’ They came from beyond the galaxy, bent on world domination.the alien terror that endangered mankind. They deceived men into believing they sought only peace. And as their battle fleets threatened earth with extinction, only one man could save the human race.

Gastel Etzwane had held total power in the Land of Shant: the brooding musician, turned man of action with his corps of Brave Free Men, rid the land of slavery and alien invaders in one masterful stroke-only to discover the greatest threat of all – alien parasites of inconceivable intelligence and unfathomable purpose. Their expulsion from Shat has been celebrated by all, but Etzwane is uneasy. For wild rumours come out of the hidden land of Caraz-and once again the musician must don the cloak of action, setting out on a dangerous quest for knowledge that will take him farther than he ever wanted to go: to the grim reaches of a hideously alien world, there to learn the secret of the Asutra!

On the mysterious Well World, the evil tyrant Josich and his dark agents search desperately for the eight scattered pieces of the fabled Straight Gate. Whoever possesses the Gate will wield enormous power, travelling between universes at the speed of light and wreaking havoc across galaxies.

Opposing Josich is a small band of travellers new to the Well World. There is Core, once a machine, now flesh and blood; Ming and Ari, two minds sharing a single body; Jaysu, an angel; and Ghengis O’Leary, a lizard being. Unbeknownst to them, they have an unlikely ally: a vengeful entity who is able to clone any person or object with a single touch – and mete out death just as swift…

Dr Ezawa had made some remarkable discoveries about the Voodoo beliefs that persisted in the Louisiana bayou country – like how to create zombies by injecting corpses with the dirt from old slave graveyards.


The eyes of the awoken dead blazed with a brilliant green luminosity, and before they burned out, strange visions and superhuman abilities tormented them.


The poet Harrison didn’t want to remain a guinea pig. He wanted to find out the truth behind the scientists’ sinister manipulations – and he wanted to stay alive.


But when he escaped and began to test his growing powers on the superstitious Cajun swamp dwellers, another terrifying world began to unfold before his green eyes…

Blood was what they called that mountain town and the forbidding land around it – and the name was significant. Folks there knew a secret that would have shocked the world…but nobody was ever going to get out of Blood to tell. Not even when Portia Clark arrived, hot on a news story for a national magazine. Especially not her…

Clint Breen, who had been in the outside world, tried to save her. But he had to fight a tradition that drove men and women to unspeakable lusts and that ruled secretly the lives and afterlives of everything being in the county. Blood was the place where more men and women walked the night than were ever seen by day. Horror was their heritage, for they were the people that the census dared not count!

His wild career as a space pirate ended, Grimes faced his toughest assignment – he was “punished” by being made governor of the anarchists’ own planet! John Grimes, living legend of the spaceways, had been in and out of some cosmic catastrophes but this threatened to reach his luck’s ultimate breaking point!

An influx of planetary refugees had made that world a paradise of cheap labor and the original anarchist colonists had become such masters of wealth that no mere outsider could hope to dictate “law and order” to them. They had their own ideas which included slavery, treachery, and utter villainy.

Grimes’ first task as governor would be simply to stay alive with a whole world plotting his murder!

“When Kinsolving’s Planet crosses your path, beware!”

Commodore John Grimes would have done well to heed this warning. But the evil magic of Kinsolving draws him on, pulling him on a journey through the universes. Is Grimes a swiftly facing literary ghost, doomed to disappearance for the inadvertent theft of a meerschaum pipe? Or, is he a flesh and blood Commodore, sailing the spaceways from world to world, enjoying dangerous voyages to momentary safe ports?

It does not matter what role is the “true” John Grimes for none can protect him from the grasp of Kinsolving’s Planet, an abandoned colony which reaches out for man, for the target, John Grimes, who is inexorably sucked toward his final destiny …

‘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.

One of them is the link to Davidian.
One of them is holding out . . .

Steve Wintress’s flight to Los Angeles is forced down in bad weather, and he shares a car into town with three fellow travellers: a shy young soldier, a cool Hollywood actress and a Justice Department official.

But all four passengers have something in common – something any one of them might kill to get their hands on.

Every secret agency in the world wants to possess the Davidian Report, smuggled out of East Berlin by a Communist defector, and it’s lying somewhere in LA. Steve wants that Report, but he’ll have to fight with the big guns, like the CIA and the FBI, if he’s going to get there first . . .

Ys has fallen, murdered by her god in an act of senile vengeance. Now Gratillonius, once King of Ys, must strive to save a remnant of his people from utter destruction – then use them to rescue civilisation itself, as the light that once was Rome flickers out and barbarian night descends upon the world.

In the process, he will give rise to a legend that will ring down the corridors of time . . .

Quasi-SF post-apocalyptic novel of Britain after the rich have abandoned the world to the poor. This humorous fable charts the odyssey of down-and-out Guppy and his companions – the “abandonati” – who are looking for the rich people and their affluent lifestyles. It is a forceful reminder of the need for a greater humanity and sense of social responsibility towards the poor. Garry Kilworth is also author of “Cloudrock”, “The Songbirds of Pain” and “Hunter’s Moon”.

Coming in fast and low, the huge ship made planetfall. Three years out from Terra, the colony ship Omega had reached her destination, and the crew began to off-load the cargo and passengers.

Then the ship vanished.

Against the vast panorama of an unexplored universe, Keith Laumer sets this first volume of the history of the world called Colmar – mankind’s first venture among the stars.

When Commander Herries of the Space Line began to sell the water of Mars as a ‘potion’ for lengthening life he had no idea that he was going to create the world’s greatest thirst and produce havoc among the two social grades of Earth – the Inelligentsia and the Normals. But produce it he did.

Among the confusion thus produced one man thinks clearly for his own ends – Vance Unthra, the leading scientist of the world – and he sees in the crisis which has hit Earth a way to be rid of all those who do not measure up to what he thinks as an intellectual standard. By his orders two synthetic worlds are created – Alpha and Omega – and to these are ruthlessly evacuated all the victims of the Martian water, there to rebuild there shattered fortunes and never cross the ‘Dark Boundaries’ which exist between those worlds and Earth.

Despite his careful planning, however, Unthra makes one mistake. In destroying the power of the Martian water over the evacuated thousands he miscalculates the strength of cosmic radiation on Omega with the result that the leader – the Controllix – of this world, Sylvia Grantham, becomes a far greater power in the grand scheme of things than her former lover, Dexter Carfax. Through the machinations of the wily Unthra open hostility breaks out between Dexter Carfax and the girl, and eventually their worlds are destroyed through the influence of a deadly chain reaction ‘disease’ from the Great Red Spot of Jupoter.

Both of them, however, through the various experiences they undergo, hold to one objective – to be avenged on Vance Unthra for his viciousness.

Eight journeys into the future from this prize-winning author: a civilized society where barbarism is the norm; a search for super-intelligence that goes horribly wrong; a world where to be Non-Legal is to be non-human; an experiment to test the very nature of reality.

Contains:
A Pursuit of Miracles
Not in Front of the Children
Feedback
Shut the Door When You Go Out
On the Nursery Floor
In a Petri Dish Upstairs
Generation Gap
The Fittest

There was only one way out of Harge: to find a singing jewel, the greatest prize on that world of sand dunes. But the jewels were hidden deep in the burrows of Harge’s most vicious predator.

Earl Dumarest could fight humans, could match wits with the implacable Cyclan. But now, in his galaxy-spanning quest for the lost planet Earth, he must face the WEB OF SAND.



(First published 1979)

In the course of a continuing quest for his legendary birthplace, Earl Dumarest befriends a young man who says his home world was called Nerth.

New Earth, perhaps? Or even the original planet Dumarest seeks? He must find out.

And so Dumarest comes to Nerth – to discover that the Cyclan, his prime enemy in the cosmos, is already there . . . together with mysteries and terror that defy the imagination!




(First published 1975)

The river cuts right across the known world, from the impassable Far Precipices to the sea. The people on one bank are cut off from those on the other, for the black current has the power to stop them crossing.

Only women can travel repeatedly up and down the river, but when Yaleen joins the boating guild and becomes a riverwoman, she is singled out to follow an even more extraordinary path…