Search Results for: worlds-for-the-taking

To escape war and suffering, humanity had allowed itself to take a drug that killed all emotion. But a small number of insurgents – including the returning astronauts from a mission to Mars – had refused to take the drug, and waged an armed rebellion. The last survivors of the Freedom Army were holed up in a besieged bunker when one of their number, the physicist Burges, constructed a gateway to another dimension-an alternate existence. Ex space-pilot Lanson leads the remnants of his Freedom Army in escaping through the gateway-only to find themselves in an alternate world were humanity has been enslaved for the last 30 years by a toad-like alien race, the Zytlen!

Earth and its colonies on Mars and Venus are ruled by an authoritarian post-World War III world state which plans to take control of a new method of space travel when it has been perfected by a Martian scientist. When they fail to secure the invention, the world state’s Coordinator decides to destroy the Mars colony with “radi-germ bombs.

Space-wanderer Earl Dumarest is on the planet Toy to consult the giant computer which may contain information on the whereabouts of Earth, his lost home-world.

But soon he realises Toy is a place that gives away nothing for free. Before Dumarest can gain the information he needs, he must take part in the Toy Games – must fight like a tin soldier in a vast nursery.

And there is nothing playful about the Games on Toy. The pain is real enough; the wounds, the blood – and death.



(First published 1969)

Capturing a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the world of science fiction, this unique autobiography by Robert Silverberg shows how famous stories in this genre were conceived and written. Chronicling his career as one of the most important American science fiction writers of the 20th century, this account reveals how he rose to prominence as the pulp era was ending-and the genre was beginning to take on a more sophisticated tone-to eventually be named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

The Collected Stories Volume 3: Something Wild is Loose (1969 – 1972)

Winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, Robert Silverberg is one of the all time greats of science fiction. A professional writer for more than half a century, his short story output has been prolific and exceptional in quality.

This series of nine volumes will collect all of the short stories and novella-length that SF Grand Master Silverberg wants to take their place on the permanent shelf.

Each volume will be roughly 150,000-200,000 words, with classics and lesser known gems alike. The author has also graced us with a lengthy introduction and extensive story notes for each tale.

Contents:
Something Wild is Loose
In Entropy’s Jaws
The Reality Trip
Going
Caliban
Good News from the Vatican
Thomas the Proclaimer
When We Went to See the End of the World
Push No More
The Wind and the Rain
Some Notes on the Pre-Dynastic Epoch
The Feast of St. Dionysus
What We Learned from This Morning’s Newspaper
The Mutant Season
Caught in the Organ Draft
Many Mansions

The Collected Stories Volume 1: To Be Continued 1953 – 1958

Winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, Robert Silverberg is one of the all time greats of science fiction. A professional writer for more than half a century, his short story output has been prolific and exceptional in quality.

This series of nine volumes will collect all of the short stories and novella-length that SF Grand Master Silverberg wants to take their place on the permanent shelf.

Each volume will be roughly 150,000-200,000 words, with classics and lesser known gems alike. The author has also graced us with a lengthy introduction and extensive story notes for each tale.

Contents:
Gorgon Planet
The Road to Nightfall
Continued
Alaree
The Artifact Business
Collecting Team
A Man of Talent
One Way Journey
Sunrise on Mercury
World of a Thousand Colors
Warm Man
Blaze of Glory
Why?
The Outbreeders
The Man Who Never Forgot
There Was an Old Woman
The Iron Chancellor
Ozymandias
Counterpart
Delivery Guaranteed

NEVER FOLLOW A FALLING STAR!

The humanoid worlds of the galaxy were alarmed! Somehow, somewhere the mind-destroying hypnojewels were being trafficked in.

An uneasy Earth, newcomer to the ranks of the civilized planets, sent Lloyd Catton to the Interworld Crime Commission on Morilar to investigate. Although the Commission had made little progress until then, after his arrival things started to happen fast.

For it didn’t take Catton long to realize that the hypnojewels were but the thin edge of a murderous wedge that was calculated to shove the Earth back again into the helpless isolation of a world returned to savagery.

The new millennium has barely begun when a vast fleet of alien vessels descends without warning on the Earth. Some starships blaze mighty trails of fire; some pop into view, unfathomably silent. Three different but equally strange kinds of alien emerge. Wide-eyed UFOlogists who rush to welcome them are scooped up like bugs collected for study.

The aliens make no response when the governments attempt to communicate with them, but a single act of resistance to them provokes massive retaliation. This is the first major catastrophe of the alien years and it will be followed by others. In silence the aliens take control of the world, effortlessly enslaving what remains of its population.

On a remote California ranch, the Carmichaels are a family of blue-eyed, straight-backed patriots, flawed by narrow thinking and repressed emotions – but redeemed by their courage. With them rests the slender hope that natives of Earth may one day be free.



(First published 1997)

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.

The ship was to be seven miles long, a third of a mile in diameter and have a wing-spread of three and a half miles. It would take two and a half centuries to construct. Its announced purpose: to carry humanity away from its ruined world, from the world that had become a perpetual purgatory.

To build this vast ship would require the undivided activity of an entire nation and would mean carrying out a ruthless program of war and conquest, of annihilation and reconstruction, and of education and rediscovery.

But was this starship really what it was claimed to be? Or was there a greater secret behind its incredible cost – a secret so strange that no man dared reveal it?

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.

On Midsummer’s Eve, as everybody knows, you should leave a bowl of milk out for the fairies. Unfortunately – or fortunately – Fred Barber, an American diplomat convalescing in Yorkshire, didn’t take the obligation with proper seriousness. He swapped the milk for a stiff dose of Scotch. So he had only himself to blame if the fairies got a bit muddled. Barber found himself in an Old English Fairyland. At the Court of King Oberon, to be precise. The natural – or supernatural – laws there were, to say the least of it, distinctly odd. Things kept changing. This made the mssion with which he was entrusted, as the price of his return to the normal world, even harder than he expected. He had to penetrate the Kobold Hills, where it was said that swords were being made, and discover if an ancient enemy had returned. He was given a magic wand – but not told how to use it. Through the fields and forests he went, meeting dryads and sprites, ogres and two-headed eagles, on the way. Danger, seduction and magic lay all around him. And, as the adventure continued, somehow it darkened and became more seriousness. At the end of Fred Barber’s quest lay a shattering revelation.

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.

Meet Victor Hasselborg, easily the most miserable Private Investigator in the entire galaxy. More comfortable with the dull routine of investigating insurance frauds than interstellar adventure, Hasselborg is bound by duty to chase a runaway heiress across known space to the primitive world called Krishna. Clad in kilt and sword, his hair dyed green, riding a buggy driven by a six legged monster of a beast, Hasselborg’s quest takes him through the volatile world of feudal Krishna politics and into the presence of . . . the Queen of Zamba.

The Queen of Zamba is the first of L. Sprague de Camp’s Krishna book – interplanetary romance in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian Tales.

In Rolltown, Reynolds has turned his productive imagination towards the growing phenomenon of mobile living in America. Taking us decades into the future, he tells the story of a world where people have taken to the road en masse, in huge mobile “towns” composed of hundreds or even thousands of inhabitants, attempting to deal with a hostile and over-organized world.

Rex Morris belonged to the master class which ruled the entire world by brain power or brutality, depending on which was needed. He should have functioned perfectly in the rigid totalitarian society of the future where every thought, word, and action was controlled by the superstate, where everyone was watched night and day by the Great Eye of the internal security forces.

It was a strange world, but the rewards were great for those who belonged to the right caste. Morris had all the qualifications – yet he didn’t belong. Nonconformity could mean liquidation – but he was prepared to take the risk!

Omega: an apocalyptic rumour from the Eastern Front. Omega: something that will alter all the strategic calculations of the Earth’s great military blocs. Omega: the code name for a weapon that may well bring doomsday with it. But if Omega is indeed the agent that will destroy the world, that world is not our own. For this is a timeline in which World War Two never truly ended: a timeline in which Hitler died in a plane crash, Britain joined Germany in its battle against Communist Russia, and the present is an age of intermittent, but deadly, armed conflict between the USSR, the European Alliance, and the USA.

The frontier regions are radioactive wastelands, nuclear winter threatens catastrophe, global confrontation could erupt again any time – and that’s before Omega is taken into account…This is the reality experienced by Owen Meredith when an accident forces his consciousness from the England we know into the mind of his cognate self in that other darker, Europe.

Switching back and forth between being plain Owen Meredith and troubled Major Owain Maredudd, Owen is faced not only with a Cold War going Hot, but with a deep crisis of identity. Who is he? Whose twisted destiny is he treading? Did the ordinary domestic life he remembers ever even take place? Perhaps the universe of Owain and Omega is merely a symptom of mental illness – but if so, why is it so urgently tangible?

The sails were the product of the Old Technology, lost long ago in the depleted Earth, and they were priceless. For with those fantastic sheets of etheric material, ships could sail the sky and even brave the radiant tides between worlds and stars.

The alchemists who had replaced scientists still sough the ancient secrets, and Rachad, apprentice to such a would-be wizard, learned that the key to his quest lay in a book abandoned in a Martian colonial ruin long, long ago.

But how to get to Mars? There was one way left – take a sea vessel, caulk it airtight, steal new sails and fly the star winds in the way of the ancient windjammers.

Here is an intriguing, unusual and colourful novel of ships that sail the stars riding before the solar breeze that blows between worlds.

Are there aliens among us? Are the chariots of the gods returning? If so – are they for us or against us?

John Brunner, award-winning author and science fiction writer extraordinary, takes the questions now on everyone’s mind, and gives one possible answer in this startling novel.

Here is an edge-of-the-seat story of the man who discovers that the vanguard of the aliens are indeed amongst us – and that the human species has but a few hours left before our time runs out.

It’s a science fiction thriller you won’t be able to put down.

A Pandora’s box of evil

Freitas had commanded the engineers of his vast, world-wide empire to build him a device that could ransack the past.

Now all the riches of the ages were his for the taking. But mere wealth was not what Freitas was after. Supreme power was what he sought, and from the past he picked the men and women who could help him gain absolute mastery over his rivals.

But one thing he had not reckoned on – the power these creatures fro the past would have over him, the reign of terror about to begin…

‘One citizen of your planet shall go to the capital of the Federation of Worlds. He shall live there for thirty days. If your representative can survive and demonstrate his ability to exist in a civilized society with creatures whose outward appearance and manner of thinking differ from his own, you will pass the test. You will be permitted to send your starships to other planets of the galaxy.

‘If he fails the test, if prejudice, fear, intolerance or stupidity trip him up, then you world will be sealed of from the stars for ever!’

This was the ultimatum from space. The task before the world then was – who shall go? What man or woman could be found to take this frightening test for the whole of humanity and be certain not to fail?




(First published 1961)

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…

The rift in the fabric of space was fast approaching the Well World, and time was running out. Troops all over the planet were gathering for the final battle.

Nathan Brazil and Mavra Chang somehow had to reach the Well of Souls in time to save the universe and before any of the hostile natives managed to kill them.

At best, a difficult mission. At worst, impossible – especially since there was a price on Brazil’s head and many would be claimants! For Brazil, the difficult was but the work of a moment – the impossible would take a little longer!

While attempting to repel an intergalactic invasion, mankind resorts to a weapon of such awesome destructive power that it undermines the Well World computer’s control of time and space – and threatens the very existence of the Universe.

It is up to Mavra Chang – victim and veteran of the Wars of the Well – and Obie, her sophisticated computer companion, to find the only being capable of travelling to the desolate Well World to repair the damage at source.

The infamous and near-mythical Nathan Brazil does not want to be found. But Mavra and Obie have never been ones to take no for an answer…