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When the starship Meteor crash-landed on a strange world orbiting a solitary sun in the vast darkness outside the galaxy, her crew of Earthmen had no idea of what to expect. The planet was Earthlike in gravity, air, animal and vegetable life – but what of the native races they glimpsed from a distance?

What kind of culture would evolve on a planet whose sky was dominated by the glow of an entire galaxy – and with no other stars save its own dim sun? What kind of gods would they worship?

The Earthmen had to find the astounding answers to these questions on a planet split by a world-wide war.

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

Ace Lieutenant Dominic Flandry was not a man easily swayed from his duty to the Empire; not, that is, until galactic vice king Leon Ammon offered him a million-credit bribe, a voluptuous woman called Djana, and a chance to explore a dark and treasure-laden moon.

Yet within the desolate peaks and valleys of that strange world of ice and shadows, Flandry found more than he had bargained for. Supposedly barren, the planet swarmed with a hideous race of strange, inhuman creatures, infernally controlled by a deranged and brilliant computer brain. Each, like a piece in a bizarre and vicious chess game, was programmed to kill. And although Flandry did not know it – so was the woman he loved.

There were three of them – Adzel who measured four and a half metres and resembled a dragon, Chee Lan who was furry, catlike and female, and David Falkayn, a dare-devil rakehell from space.

When they learned of a rogue planet two hundred and four light-years from Sol, they were interested because the planet, a nightmare of ice and darkness, was rich in minerals. And the planet was about to melt – to move closer to a sun and release the vast wealth entombed in its depths.

And Falkayn, Chee Lan and Adzel were prepared to risk the horrors of an erupting, melting world if they could only salvage the riches that would shortly boil from the planet’s core…

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)

THE DAUGHTER OF KAIFENG

The world was haunted. Every sunset the natives went home, locked their doors, and pulled down the window blinds. Ghosts didn’t scare Kennedy. As an agent of FATE, it took more than superstition to shake him. But Epidoris was the real thing. Monsters did appear in the darkness, people did vanish at night – a whole MALACA barracks had vanished, garrison, weapons and building.

That’s what brought Kennedy to Epidoris. That and one thing more – a creature of the infamous Dr. Kaifeng had turned up. A beautiful woman, a princess she called herself – but Kennedy had seen her before – lying in a processing vat on a Kaifeng planetoid of warped genetics. Between the scientific machinations of the galaxy’s most perverted mind and the spectral realities of a disputed world there had to be a meaning that boded no good for Terra – and that’s where Kennedy came in.

DOORWAY TO UTOPIA

“Beyond that curtain of darkness lies paradise.”

That was the promise of the doorway known as the Gholan Gate, a doorway so ancient that its makers had vanished millions of years before the first Earthly life crawled out of the primeval oceans. It was still functioning in the possession of its discoverers.

To go through it was to enter a universe where all your dreams came true – where your every wish was obeyed, every fantasy became reality, where you could play God to your heart’s content.

But there was a price, for once beyond the Gholan Gate, you would live only in hopes for a second visit, and a third. . . . And to get the right for that return to paradise a man would sell his soul, his people, his world.

Cap Kennedy entered THE GHOLAN GATE once . . . and the result became cosmic history.

‘The explosion was painfully bright against the dark backdrop of the moonless New Mexico sky. To those who looked up at that precise moment – and there were many who happened to look up – it was as though a new star had momentarily blossomed in blue-white incandescence.’

Only three human beings would ever know that the blinding flash in the sky on that night in 1982 was an exploding flying saucer. Only they would learn the truth about THOSE WHO WATCH – about the alien observers who came into this world in a crash landing from the stars. THOSE WHO WATCH is the strange, seductive story of three accidental colonists from outer space whose chance encounter with Earth brought revelation to three earthly counterparts – and triggered interplanetary conflict. It is a remarkable story by one of science fiction’s most remarkable writers.

The death-stars had come, and they had kept on coming for hundreds of thousands of years, falling upon the Earth, swept upon it by a vagrant star that had passed through the outer reaches of the solar system. They brought with them a time of unending darkness and cold. It was an event that occured every twenty-six million years, and there was no turning it aside.

But all that was done with now. At last the death-stars had ceased to fall, the sky had cleared of dust and cinders, the sun’s warmth again was able to break through the clouds. The glaciers relinquished their hold on the land; the Long Winter ended; the New Springtime began. The world was born anew.

Now each year was warmer than the last. The fair seasons of spring and summer, long lost from the world, came again with increasing power. And the People, having survived the dark time in their sealed cocoons, were spreading rapidly across the fertile land. But others were already there. The hjjks, the somber cold-eyed insect-folk, had never retreated, even at the time of greatest chill. The world had fallen to them by default, and they had been its sole masters for seven hundred thousand years. They were not likely to share it gladly now . . .

Amon VanRoark heard the prophet speaking in the market place of the decaying city. He called men to the wars, to the fabled Meadows where the armies of Good would meet the forces of Evil in one final Armageddon that would decide the fate of a world already doomed and dying.

VanRoark followed the prophet to the Meadows and there he witnessed the last cataclysmic battle between humanity and the dark powers of Salasar.

Past worlds almost too strange to describe, three men hurtle into the dark uncharted mystery of space. Their task: to make contact with the Hegemony of Malis, the unknown force that has been watching the Solar System since before the beginning of recorded history. On their success or failure depends the future of the entire Earth.

Join them as they accelerate on Haertel drive towards the stunning core of the Hegemony itself in James Blish’s masterpiece of the time to come, Mission to the Heart Stars.

Against the Fall of Night

The Roman Empire had spread order, knowledge, and civilisation throughout the ancient world. When Rome fell, the light of reason flickered out across the Empire. The Dark Ages had begun; they would last a thousand years. Could a man from the 20th century prevent the fall of Rome? When lightening struck and he was hurled backward into the sixth century, the question became anything but academic to Martin Padway, but even forearmed with a knowledge of 20th century technology and of events to come, what could one man do? But Padway must try, lest darkness fall.

Rhys Morgan and Jack Dawson are the last two boys on the school bus. It’s the same everyday. But today will be different.

Coming down the hill towards Wellthorpe, through a heavy snow laden day, the bus careers out of control and crashes.

Into a river and a different world. A world where crows talk. The world of the Icetower and its dark owner. A world where Rhys and Jack must find the strength to be heroes.

In Dreamtime, you have to look before you leap. So, do you dare step over the Threshold?