Search Results for: worlds-for-the-taking

British Science Fiction award winner Ian Watson graces us here with a brilliant new collection of short stories and essays.

Though he dazzles the reader with his footwork in the kaleidoscope intensity of his vision, each piece is plainly the work of a master craftsman. Whether he is dealing with a future culture where whales control us (“The Culling”) or taking a hilarious poke at the matter of government funding (“The President’s Not for Turning”), his concepts are clear and undeniably logical.

True to the highest ideal of science fiction, Watson carries present tendencies of our society to possible conclusions in “Roof Gardens under Saturn,” and points a warning finger at the consequences of alienation from the environment.

In an innovative style which borders on the experimental, Watson explores in “The Pharaoh and the Mademoiselle” the horrors of fascism.

Ian Watson’s writing stays with us. He entertains and he makes us think. If in some future and better world politicians were to take advice form writers, Watson should be one of them.

When a young British couple, who make jigsaw puzzles, are hired by an ageing Norwegian to take nude photos of themselves in a sculpture park in Oslo, they are drawn into a web of occult Nazi horror. Even more horrifying will be the fate of the whole world some years later if alien visitors achieve their secret aims.

However, the aftermath of events in that Oslo park will provide Anna Sharman with a key to unlock those aims.

Anna is a rebel within Britain’s intelligence service at a time when most of the world appeases the aliens because of the gifts they bring – and if she must lose her own body in order to discover the truth, she will do so.

After roving through space for centuries, a starship unburdens its cargo of human embryos on a harsh new world. They quickly grow to maturity in the ship’s artificial womb. A lifetime of Earth memories is programmed into their dreams.
But before their indoctrination is complete, an alien intruder infiltrates and destroys the system, and the reason for the odyssey is never learned.
Now, on a verdant island surrounded by quicksand, Othman, wanderer, dreamer, and self-proclaimed leader of the Earthling band, builds a mighty bridge to span the ocean of molten mud that keeps them from the world beyond.
He has yet to face the deadly toll his quest will take on the delicate ecology of the planet – or the revolt of his beautiful, strong-willed wife, Silandi. And he has yet to discover the hidden knowledge locked deep within their hearts.

Bleys Ahrens is now a political power on the planet Association, home of the Friendlies. His people – his Others, not Dorsai or Friendly or Exotic, but hybrids – are in place in all the new worlds and are ready to take his message to the greater human public. But within his inner circle is Henry McLean, Soldier of God, and a True Faith-Holder.

Henry fears for the soul of his nephew Bleys, and while he guards, he also watches and judges. And beyond Bleys Ahrens’ control is Hal Mayne: the one man in all the human worlds who might successfully challenge Bleys in his bid for power.

For Hal Mayne is the true culmination of the Cycle’s grand design. Bleys would give anything to convert Hal Mayne to his cause – or failing that, to destroy him.

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 . . .

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…

Astronomy professor Aurora ‘Rory’ Bell gets a message from space that seems to portend the arrival of extraterrestrial visitors. According to her calculations, whoever is coming will arrive in three months – on New Year’s Day to be exact.

A crowded and poisoned Earth is moving toward the brink of the last world war – and is certainly unprepared to face invasion of any kind. Rory’s continuing investigation leads her to wonder if it could be some kind of hoax, but the impending ‘visit’ takes on a media life of its own. And so the world waits. But the question still remains as to what, exactly, everyone is waiting for…

Gene Anderson was born in Oregon, in the twilight post-war years, into the most ordinary circumstances imaginable.

Gene is endowed with powers. He can look into the other worlds that are all around him. He can make things happen. He can hurt and he can heal.

His life changes dramatically when another boy is killed in a tragic accident, and Gene runs away. He is only nine. As he grows to 8’6″ tall, his wanderings take him round the world in search of a remarkable destiny.

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.

By the winner of the Hugo, the Nebula, and the World Fantasy Life Achievement Awards, this latest volume finds Theodore Sturgeon in fine form as he gains recognition for the first time as a literary short story writer. Written between 1957 and 1960, when Sturgeon and his family lived in both America and Grenada, finally settling in Woodstock, New York, these stories reflect his increasing preference for psychology over ray guns. Stories such as “The Man Who Told Lies,” “A Touch of Strange,” and “It Opens the Sky” show influences as diverse as William Faulkner and John Dos Passos. Always in touch with the zeitgeist, Sturgeon takes on the Russian Sputnik launches of 1957 with “The Man Who Lost the Sea,” switching the scene to Mars and injecting his trademark mordancy and vivid wordplay into the proceedings. These mature stories also don’t stint on the scares, as “The Graveyard Reader”-one of Boris Karloff’s favorite stories-shows. Acclaimed novelist Jonathan Lethem’s foreword neatly summarizes Sturgeon’s considerable achievement here.

“The Tree ruled the horizons, shouldered aside the clouds, and wore thunder and lightning like a wreath of tinsels. It was the soul of life, trampling and vanquishing the inert, and Joe understood how it had come to be worshipped by the first marvelling settlers on Kyril.” Joe Smith is roaming the galaxy in search of the man who has stolen his love’s heart. During his travels he becomes involved with a power struggle taking part between two worlds – one religious, the other cultural – over possession of a developing, but potentially lucrative, third.

Trullion – World 2262 of the Alastor Cluster – was a beautiful waterworld of fens, mists, idyllic islands set in clear oceans whose teeming richness provided food for the taking. The Trill were a carefree, easy-living race. But violence entered their lives during the raids of the galactic pirates known as the Starmenters. And there was also the planetwide game of hussade, when the Trill’s ferocious passion for gambling drove them to risk all – even life itself – on the hazardous water-chessboard gaming fields. Their prize? The virginal body of the beautifu sheirl-maiden, the body any Trill is willing to die for.

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!

In the dim far future of Earth, when the sun had shrunk to a small red disk in the dark sky and the race of man lived in isolated cities that echoed with the vastness of the world’s history, science, myth and magic had become one. Sorcerors who read the books of ancient times held great power, and fearsome monsters created in ages long forgotten stalked the land. In this world of mystery and danger, the adventurer known as Cugel the Clever was forced to undertake a quest for Iucounu the Laughing Magician – a quest that was to take him to lands stranger than any he had dreamed of, and pit his wits and his sword against powers from beyond time itself.

Previously published as The Eyes of the Overworld, this is the second of a quartet of titles sharing the same far-future setting first introduced in The Dying Earth

Contents: The Overworld, Cil, The Mountains of Magnatz, The Sorcerer Pharesm, The Pilgrims, The Cave in the Forest, The Manse of Iucounu.

All Jack Vance titles in the SFGateway use the author’s preferred texts, as restored for the Vance Integral Edition (VIE), an extensive project masterminded by an international online community of Vance’s admirers. In general, we also use the VIE titles, and have adopted the arrangement of short story collections to eliminate overlaps.

AN ACCIDENT IN TIME…

Duncan Reid was snatched out of the twentieth century from a cruise liner in the mid-Pacific. Oleg Vladimirovitch came from Novgorod in medieval Russia. Udin was a Hun barbarian who lived by cunning and the axe. Erissa had been a sacred priestess in a lost continent. And a mistake in a time-experiment by a race from the far future had thrown these four unlikely comrades together, pulling them through a warp in the fabric of space and time to a world which was ancient history.

The strange alliance that Duncan and his comrades formed in that unfamiliar world was to take on a significance that none of them could have foreseen. For not only their own future, but they very future of the world they had found was at stake…

At the world’s end, all love is timeless, and all age-old disputes irrelevant . . .

Jherek Carnelian, however, is in danger of taking reality too seriously, and grows tired of his pleasures. Perhaps a hunt for aliens could lift his spirits? Or better yet, a journey through time? Ah, yes! The past! So complicated and strange – especially with its scarcity of time machines for a return trip! But regardless of the dangers, the past does hold one irresistible lure: Mrs Amelia Underwood, for whom the Hero at the End of Time risks all.

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 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 legendary Nicholas van Rijn had, of course, been right all along. Just as he had foreseen, the Polesotechnic League – that great empire of merchant princes – had flowered and then crumbled into the vastness of space.

The same fate would befall the Terran Empire that succeeded it. Even heroes like Dominic Flandry lived under the shadow of their eventual extinction – the ever-hungry darkness that would take him and his world in the end.

But for those who came after, those wretched heirs of Terran civilisation, the darkness was no impending tragedy. This time they were facing the reality of…

THE LONG NIGHT

‘Behold these annals from the Discovery and on through the World-Taking.
This is the tale as told by Terrans, who walk the earth.
Then read.’

THE EARTH BOOK OF STORMGATE POUL ANDERSON’S MIGHTY EPIC OF FUTURE HISTORY

The full length story forming the core of the chronicle of the expansion of earthmen into the inhabited galaxy . . . from the Earth Book kept in the Stormgate archive of the great winged race of Ythri.

‘Le Guin’s words are magical. Drink this magic up. Drown in it. Dream it’ David Mitchell, author of CLOUD ATLAS

In this stunning collection of four intimately interconnected novellas, Ursula K. Le Guin returns to the great themes that have made her one of America’s most honored and respected authors.

At the far end of our universe, on the twin planets of Werel and Yeowe, all humankind is divided into ‘assets’ and ‘owners’, tradition and liberation are at war, and freedom takes many forms. Here is a society as complex and troubled as any on our world, peopled with unforgettable characters struggling to become fully human. For the disgraced revolutionary Abberkam, the callow ‘space brat’ Solly, the haughty soldier Teyeo, and the Ekumen historian and Hainish exile Havzhiva, freedom and duty both begin in the heart, and success as well as failure has its costs.

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!’

ENTER DR. KAIFENG . . .

Of all possible enemies, Cap Kennedy had yet to cross swords with the legendary master of galactic villainy, Dr Kaifeng. In the struggle for the mind of the tyrant of Papan, they finally met – and Kennedy was the loser.

There was only one chance to save the situation and that was to pay the price of the enigmatic super-surgeons of the Kraid. He would have to take a role in their eternal play-acting. The stage would be the past, a barbaric world of swords and sorcery. Kennedy would be just a sword-wielding freebooter with a crew of murderous puppets at his back. And if he survived, Kaifeng would be waiting at the stage door.

As an officer in the United Nations Law Enforcement Agency Ralph Mancini was dedicated to the worldwide War on Drugs, employing all the resources of the U.N., whilst working with the national and international police forces. But now an insidious new drug was being developed, one in which the people taking it experienced a trip like no other. They became, in effect, God-like beings, and once they had experienced ‘heaven’ they could think of nothing but their next trip – whatever the cost. Ralph and Inspector Frere follow a tangled trail of murder and intrigues to try and find the source of the peril-but will they be too late to stop it spreading across the world…?