Search Results for: worlds-for-the-taking

Uprooted from her Southern home during the Civil War, Rosa Coleman settles in Philadelphia with a husband whose compassion quickly turns to cruelty. But when that cruelty is inflicted upon their only son, she picks up and flees with the boy across the uncivilized Western frontier – and into Alaska to start anew among the region’s gold fields.

But even the harsh journey across America has not prepared Rosa for the infinite possibilities that await her. Something not of this world has approached her. It has revealed the universe’s secrets to her. And it will take her on an extraordinary odyssey as she discovers the role she must play in bringing peace to Earth…

Earthmen and Aleriona have met in space and neither side can afford to let the other get too strong. The Aleriona have captured the human outpost, New Europe, and claim that all the inhabitants were killed. The World Federation on Earth seems committed to peace at any price, but there are those, and ex-navy Captain Gunnar Heim is one of them, who know that appeasement will only lead to further Alerion encroachment, and he passionately believes that there must be a showdown now, before it is too late.

Heim and his crew of volunteers take off from Earth in the Star Fox and start to fit out for their hit-and-run battle.

The adventures of Li-lin, a Daoist priestess with the unique ability to see the spirit world, continue in the thrilling follow-up to the critically-acclaimed historical urban fantasy The Girl with Ghost Eyes.

It’s the end of the Nineteenth Century. San Francisco’s cobblestone streets are haunted, but Chinatown has an unlikely protector in a young Daoist priestess named Li-lin. Using only her martial arts training, spiritual magic, a sword made from peachwood, and the walking, talking spirit of a human eye, Li-lin stands alone to defend her immigrant community from supernatural threats.

But when the body of a young girl is brought to the deadhouse Li-lin oversees for a local group of gangsters, she faces her most bewildering-and potentially dangerous-assignment yet. The nine-year-old has died from suffocation . . . specifically by flowers growing out of her nose and mouth. Li-lin suspects Gong Tau, a dirty and primitive form of dark magic. But who is behind the spell, and why, will take her on a perilous journey deep into a dangerous world of ghosts and spirits.

There are too many men in a world governed by women. They’re bored and disillusioned and often resort to ‘suicide missions’ – jobs in experimental space research. Jorn applies for such a job, is selected and trained as a navigator for the huge ship Javelin, the first to implement the recently discovered faster-than-light Evrak Effect.

Before the Effect is tested, however, it is discovered that life will be extinct within nine years; the sun is burning up, preparing to explode. The Evrak Effect will save a small percentage of mankind, take civilisation to a yet unknown planet. Production on new ships is given priority, the ruthless selection of passengers begins. Twenty-five billion people will be left behind.

Led by Javelin, thirty ships wander in space through many light years of promises, lost hope and death for the original crew and passengers. But life does survive, children grow and learn, to inherit the beginning of another world, another promise.

James Blish has written a compelling novel of gigantic moral problems and of people who learn to cope with their own limitations in order to deal with them.

WINNER OF TWO WORLD FANTASY AWARDS

A magical apple tree in the mountains. A hopeless king with no people to rule. A woman who loves a god. An unsettling princess.

This collection of wonderous fairy tales from award-winning author Gwyneth Jones takes traditional tropes and spins them in the way only she can. Darkness hides in the mundane as much as the magical, and the morals may not be what you’re expecting. Enchanting and chilling in alternate turns, each story will weave a spell and draw you in deep . . .

You can find more information on the writing Gwyneth did as Ann Halam on her website:http://www.gwynethjones.uk/HALAM.htm

Invading England after Charles II’s death, the Duke of Monmouth comes face-to-face with an old friend – Theophilus Oglethorpe. Oglethorpe, in common with only a handful of others, knows Monmouth’s background fully – not only that he is Charles’s son, but also that he has elven blood, and has allied himself with evil powers in order to take England’s crown. In fact, he is being used as a cat’s paw by one far more steeped in evil than himself…King Arthur, who would return to rule Britain and the entire world. Through London, Glastonbury, Sedgemoor and many stranger places unearthly battles rage, and the elves forsake their millennia-long neutrality…

Flinx: born in controversy as the product of illegal genetic experiments.


Flinx: raised an orphan in the streets of Drallar on the planet Moth.


Flinx: the extraordinary young man with a rare flying snake for a companion, always the inadvertent centre of danger and galactic intrigue.


Even on the backwater worlds of the Commonwealth, Flinx finds himself in trouble, as a rich local bully takes an unwelcome interest in the minidrag Pip. Fleeing into space, Flinx arrives on the strange planet of Midworld, where an immense kilometre-deep jungle is home to an incredible array of plant and animal life, all of it unknown and all of it deadly. It soon becomes apparent that his hiding place is rather more perilous than he bargained for…

Otto McGavin is peaceful and idealistic by nature, an Anglo-Buddhist, who seeks employment with the Confederación because he believes in it and its mission to protect the rights of humans and nonhumans. The only problem is that the Confederación needs him as a Prime Operator for its secret service, the TBII, and the TBII wants Otto as a spy, a thief and an assassin.

It’s not, of course, a problem for the Confederación, which simply uses immersion therapy and hypnosis for Otto’s training, and then sends him out in deep cover on a variety of dangerous missions on a number of bizarre worlds.

But for Otto, it’s a different matter: what he has to witness and what he is forced to do take a terrible toll on him . . .

On the other side of the sun, opposite our earth, is a world we never see Counterearth. In every way it’s identical to ours…almost!

Albert Einstein, Juan (and Eva) Peron, Babe Didrickson and Sir Oswald Mosley are off on a wild race to Counterearth. It’s all action and excitement against a historical background – in fact against two historical backgrounds – detailed enough to intrigue any history buff. It’s January 1942; Cordell Hull is President of the United States; and the good guys take off in their spaceship, Manta, from the deck of the SS Titanic, steaming back from Liverpool to New York with thousands of New Year’s revellers on board.

Originally published in England in 1934, this searing, still timely novel offers and incisive critique of the sexual politics and militarism of England, and the West as a whole.

Proud Man is told from the perspective of a “Genuine Person” who has been thrown back in time thousands of years from a peaceful future society. The Genuine Person comes from a people that are androgynous, self-fertilizing, and vegetarian; they live without a national government and artificial social divisions of gender and class. Taking on first female, then male form, the “Genuine Person” confronts the deeply troubled reality of England in the 1930s, still battered after one World War and on the road to another.

When shy, psychic bookworm ‘Cookie’ Orbach watches television, she sees things. But not the things that you or I would see. Cookie sees The Grid – a strange, shifting landscape where human forces battle against an enemy they dare not kill. Her employer, the mysterious Dataplex Corporation, pays her well to watch this war, and asks only that she report her observations but take no direct action, which suits her passive demeanour just fine.
But Cookie’s quiet life is about to be shattered. Her two very different worlds are threatening to merge in a way that shouldn’t really be possible. Everything is about to change. And we do mean everything…

Earth, 2000 years after the holocaust which drove man deep underground; a ghostly, deserted planet peopled only by the diligent robots who, century after century, silently harvest grain which no man will eat. Up into this eerie world comes Mel, a questioning young Roamer who has disobeyed the Law which says he must never venture into or beyond the Lost Levels. Together with three companions, and a companion not of this earth, Mel takes on the awesome task of freeing human beings from the tyranny imposed upon them by their remote ancestors; of justifying the agonized cry of Barney as he died in a Forbidden Level; ‘I am a man! Everything is for Man!’

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.

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!

After three passengers – Ming, Ari, and Angel – embark on an elite starship journey into the Realm, they unwittingly become ensnared in one man’s bloodthirsty vendetta that will alter their very beings. That man is Jeremiah Wong Kincaid. He vows to destroy Josich Conqueror Hadun, the evil genius who has wreaked unspeakable havoc throughout the universe.

It is an obsession that will take to lands of demons and strange races – and into a deadly new cyberworld where humans are mere pawns of the godlike computers they have created.

But it is only after Kincaid and his unwitting fellow travellers enter Well World and discover the water hexes that he confronts the mad tyrant- and learns their universe is threatened by something far, far worse…

Remember what it’s like to last an entire night without sleep? That dull but constant headache. The feeling of your brain on edge. How easily irritated you were. How difficult it was to concentrate, even on seemingly menial tasks. It was just a single restless night, but everything felt just a little bit harder to do, and the only real comfort was knowing your head would finally hit the pillow at the end of the day, and when you awoke the next morning everything would return to normal.

But what if sleep didn’t come the next night? Or the night after? What might happen if you, your friends and family, your coworkers, the strangers you pass on the street, all slowly began to realize that rest might not ever come again?

How slowly might the world fall apart? How long would it take for a society without sleep to descend into chaos?

Sleep Over is collection of waking nightmares, a scrapbook of the haunting and poignant stories from those trapped in a world where the pillars of society are crumbling, and madness is slowly descending on a planet without rest.

Online vigilantism turns social media into a deadly gamble.

A freelance journalist grapples with the ethics of turning in footage of mass suicide.

A kidnapped hypnotist is held hostage by those at wit’s end for a cure.

In Sleep Over, these stories are just the beginning. Before the Longest Day, the world record was eleven days without sleep. It turns out most of us can go much longer.

Jay Vickers was an ordinary man, or so he thought. All he wanted was to be left in peace to finish his next book. However, strange things started happenin – from his discovery of a mouse that was not a mouse, to the visit of an old neighbor that was not a man. Or at least he was not an ordinary man.

For as it turned out, neither was Jay Vickers. This is the story of human mutation – the next step in the evolution of the species. What if mutants walked among us already? What if they were organized? What if they had unbelievable powers, such as the ability to cross between alternate worlds or dimensions at will, or to intuitively reach the absolutely correct answer by intuition or “hunch”, or to telepathically reach out to the stars?

Such supermen would automatically try to conquer lesser men, would they not? Or would they do everything in their power to free the rest of humanity from slavery and suffering? Just what would the political and corporate powers-that-be do to keep their power and their slaves? How would mutants undermine the power of these bosses to set mankind free?

This is a story of unlimited freedom, of worlds without end, ready for the taking. It is also the story of powerful, benevolent beings that exist only to help those who need that help. This is a future of a lop-sided mechanical culture of technology that could provide creature comfort for a few, but not human justice or security for the many. It is a future of hate, and war, and worry. Nothing like the way the world really turned out – after all, there couldn’t really be an underground of mutants working to free humanity . . . could there?

Frank Rhind was lucky. He saw the Ice Dancer and lived. The town of Hays died. And still they didn’t believe Dr. William Stovin’s warnings. For very many years climatologists had been predicting a change in the world’s climate but they always believed that the process would take centuries. Now there was a reason to believe differently. Stovin had staked his career and credibility on trying to persuade the U.S. National Science Council to act, but 15,000 years of warmth had lulled mankind into thinking that climatic history was over. Already it was too late. The new Ice Age had begun.


One by one the great northern cities – Chicago, Oslo, Montreal, Moscow, Leningrad – came under siege. Some fell and were evacuated, sending their young, old and sick to crowded areas further south. Crops and animals were destroyed. Governments drew lines of catastrophe across their national maps. Doomsday prophets were in full cry. Technological man was overwhelmed. The world had changed.


Some time in the year future the next Ice Age will be triggered off. It could happen in a thousand years’ time, or in a century from now.


Or it could, quite literally, happen next winter. This book is fiction only because the events described have not yet happened. But it is not science fiction because all the science in the book is fact. When the year arrives that we see the sixth winter resembling 1792 within the space of a decade or so, then the Ice Age will be with us in a matter of weeks – and it will develop very much as described here.

From “one of the greatest writers of science fiction and fantasy who ever lived” (Stephen King) here is a masterpiece of fiction – a haunting, meaningful and at times erotic novel that describes a wonderous transformation that takes place in an American town when a charismatic, Christ-like figure mysteriously appears in its midst.
Godbody – sweetly innocent, as naked of guile as he is of worldly trappings – has returned to remind mankind of what it has lost. He will touch only a few lives before his preordained end, but they will be forever transformed. As one by one the members of a small rural town fall under Godbody’s spell, the burdens that had weighed down on them disappear, and a new vision of life as it can – and should – be suddenly reveals itself to them.

When a desk clerk welcomes a group of tourists into his mysterious and crumbling hotel, the last thing he ever expected was that one girl on the tour might hold the power to unravel the hidden mystery that lies in its walls.

The Grand Hotel is a horror novel by esteemed author Scott Kenemore ( Zen of Zombie, Zombie, Ohio) that takes the reader on a thrilling ride that interconnects a series of stories narrated by the desk clerk of the Grand Hotel. While it is not known whether or not the desk clerk is actually the devil reincarnated, it is strange that many of the people who come for a tour of the hotel never leave.

As the narrator takes you deeper and deeper into the heart of the hotel, he starts wondering if all the secrets that have been hiding for so long may soon start to show themselves. While he is quite ready for this experience, the real question is if the rest of the world is.

Kenemore’s incredible style and originality carry The Grand Hotel to places most people only see in their nightmares. And while we don’t know what secrets lie in the Grand Hotel, all we know is that the person who holds the secret puts fear into the narrator himself-a thought which will terrify everyone.

The story of Dr. Hartwell (Reanimators) continues, but now he has company. Weird company: a witch, a changeling, a mad scientist, and a poet trapped in the form of a beast. These are not heroes but monsters…monsters to fight monsters. Their adventures rage across the globe, from the mountains and long-forgotten caves of Antarctica to the dimly lit backstreets of Innsmouth that still hold terrifying secrets. The unholy creatures released upon the world via the ill-fated Lake expedition to Antarctica must be stopped. And only the weird company stands in their way.

Continuing in the fashion of Reanimators, The Weird Company finds Lovecraft expert Pete Rawlik taking some of the most well-known of H. P. Lovecraft’s creations and creating a true Frankenstein monster of a story-a tale more horrific than anything Lovecraft could have imagined…

There’s no mistaking the terminal phase of irreversible catastrophe. The climate has gone berserk. Rising oceans inundate swamps and deserts. Genetic engineers have yet to redesign the human body to cope with the crud in the air, the water, the food, the soil. Now time has run out.

With Earth a lost cause, the satellite worlds twinkling in orbit are prime territory for takeover by the powerful and rich. They are a single battleground on which the richest and most powerful megacorps, Kyocera-Merck and Samurai Industries, fight, no holds barred.

In the artificial purity of satellite air or beneath the bilious skies of Earth, despite newly evolved bacterial plagues and bribe-taking androids, Robert Silverberg’s characters pursue destinies both outrageously self interested and heartwrenchingly familiar in a savagely funny story of our planets last gasp.

Today, tomorrow, always…the white-haired girl from the marsh is running for her life down a derelict highway
In a future world polluted to the point of dissolution, the trees are dead, the sky is yellow, and no birds sing. Everyone and everything is tinged with madness. For Eva Belmort there seems no role except to become some man’s plaything and drudge.
Then, one day, arrives the stranger with the gun – with blue eyes and hair as white as her own. Roaming the tortured landscape in his wagon, Steel is a seller of death…but for Eva he provides hope of escape from Foulmarsh.
Urged on by a power of love and hate impossible to fathom, Eva’s travels now take her to distant towns and villages full of danger and surprises – and arouse in her strong passions she cannot harness…

Asgard’s not an easy world to get away from. Mike Rousseau only wants to take a vacation in his home system, but he’s back before he has time to draw breath, and he’s been drafted into the Space Force once again. His new mission is even more dangerous than the last one, the number of his enemies has increased vastly, and his friends haven’t improved at all. By way of compensation, he has another chance to get closer to the mystery at Asgard’s heart–but the inhabitants of the megaplanet’s core are no longer content to sit quietly and wait to be found. They’ve discovered the outside universe, and are trying to decide what to do about it–but they have problems of their own. Only Rousseau can cross the boundaries between species, and offer each of the races a possible solution.