Search Results for: war-of-the-worlds,-the

Rachel thought she was facing the battle of her life when her son was diagnosed with leukemia. Then the Ancient Gods rose and brought the apocalypse with them. Some people accept their new deities, others wage war for the future of humanity.
Desperate to protect Adam from enemies both mythical and biological, they flee the city hoping to find shelter in the mountains. Instead, they discover mutations, grotesque plants and animals warped by the changing world. When Adam’s cancer cells begin to mutate as well, the Rachel is forced to choose between his life and their freedom.

A priceless da Vinci painting, supposedly destroyed during World War II, miraculously appeared in Mexico. The Agency sent art expert Tony Hawkin to find out what the hell was going on down there.

But what started as a holiday jaunt, soon became a deadly mad escapade that was as hilarious as it was deadly. In a nightmare comedy of errors, professional agents from Israel, Italy, and Germany, closed in on poor, bumbling Hawkin.

it was a death trap for the timid art investigator and only an illogical amateur could home to survive the murderously inept MEXICAN CONNECTION.

Arcot, Wade, Morey, and their computer, Fuller, put together a ship which will travel faster than light; they gave us what may have been the first space-warp drive. The concept was simple, to make it plausible wasn’t – unless you were John W. Campbell.

With this out-of-space drive they hightail it among the stars. They locate the fugitive planets of the Black Star, find a frozen cemetery-world of a lost race, then head out for another galaxy and wind up in a knock-down-drag-out interplanetary war!

The waters rose, and darkness was upon the earth.

For a few decades after the Twenty-Minute War and the Red Plague, there were those who remembered the ways and pleasures of civilization, but soon the harsh realities of life in the flooded seaboard of North America pushed the survivors into a new Dark Age – an age of superstition and brutality, but one of seeking and poetry as well. This is the world of Edgar Pangborn’s classic Davy, portrayed here over centuries of its change and growth. Here are heretics, and harpers, crusaders and cowards, magicians and mundane folk, in a stunning cycle of stories that have timeless quality of legend.

In this sequel to the bestselling INTO THE DARKNESS, the country of Algarve is successful in its blitzkrieg tactics, but becomes bogged down in the desolate winter of Unkerlant, its main enemy.

Algarve’s king decides to undertake blood magic, which amounts to genocide, in order to break the deadlock; when it is seen to work, its use elsewhere cannot be long coming. On a small island, a theoretical sorcerer may hold the only answer to this horror . . .

Harry Turtledove has taken events similar to those from Earth’s wars and transplanted them to a wonderfully imagined fantasy world.

Stolen from Earth by Ithaqua the Wind-Walker and transported to the alien world of Borea, a team of ERP-talented earthmen are faced with a terrible choice: join with the Thing That Walks on the Wind in his eternal war with Armandra and the People of the Plateau, and become his mindless slaces or side with Armandra and risk the perils of the Plateau – especially its Cavern of Madness!

Such a choice might seem easy, for at least the People of the Plateau are human…but is Armandra herself human As Ithaqua’s daughter, who can say which way her loyalties will turn when the chips are down and Ithaqua walks on the wind?

THE DEMONS HAD TO STOP JOHN BRAVAIS

His secret assignment was simply – to save mankind from the savage dog-like ‘things’ that used their hands like men. Yet an unknown number of apparently ‘human’ beings were against him too.

First transformed by surgery into a superman, John Bravais probes ever more deeply into the secret nightmare world of the ‘things’. At last, when only his mind remains – trapped in a vast robot war machine on the moon – only by an immense act of will-power can he give humanity a future.

Ian Watson is one of the finest writers of SF and fantasy stories, and Butterflies of Memory is his 10th collection, a selection of stories that are by turns serious and playful, and always wildly imaginative…

In the title story, what if mobile phones were to become truly mobile, flying about like butterflies? ‘An Appeal to Adolf’ tells of gay sailors on a Nazi battleship many kilometres long during a Second World War unfamiliar to us; ‘Lover of Statues’ of an enigmatic alien visiting the only statue of Satan in the world, in Madrid – while in the bubbling stew of faiths which is Jerusalem a doorway opens to reveal capricious godlike beings. And just suppose that Jules Verne undertook an actual journey to the centre of the Earth. Closer to home, in a Midlands town, a man who seems to have suddenly popped into existence tries to discover who and what he is. ‘Hijack Holiday’, written a year before 9/11, presciently if bizarrely anticipates events akin to those on that fateful day.

The grand conflict for control of the continent of Derlavai rages on, in a battle with all the drama and terror of the Second World War-only the bullets are beams of magical fire, the tanks and submarines are great lumbering beasts, and the fighters and bombers are dragons raining fire upon their targets.

Yet hope may be dawning at last. The terrible onslaught of the conquering forces of Algarve-who power their battle magics with the life energy of their murdered victims-begins to founder as it runs into Habbakuk: a sorcerous ship of ice used by embattled nations of Lagoas and Kuusamo to ferry their deadly dragons across the seas to strike at the very heart of Algarvian power.

But though the tide has begun to turn, the conflict is far from over. The widely disdained Kaunians still struggle desperately to escape as the Algarvians kill them by the thousands-for life energy, but also simply for the crime of being Kaunian. And as the deaths of innocent civilians on both sides continue to feed the flames of war, those who have struggled to survive and preserve their freedom have only their passions to see them through. . . .

Empath Kayla John Reed’s rebel forces, the War Minstrels, had struck a crucial blow at the heart of Yates Keller’s empire, conquering the Alliance capital, Vardalia. It should have been Kayla’s moment of triumph. But Vardalia was a shambles, and not only had Yates himself escaped, he claimed to have her friends and shipmates in his clutches.



Kayla had no choice but to agree to the terms he’d left in a holographic message. Meet him on their home world, the mining colony Styx, surrender the fabled Mindstone to him, and Keller would release her friends. Yet even as she set off for the rendezvous point, trouble was brewing among the War Minstrels – trouble that could transform their successful revolution into the deadliest kind of anarchy if she didn’t make it back in time. And what Kayla had no way of know foreseeing was that Styx itself hid a peril far greater than any trap Keller had planned for her…

The Gone-Away gods were real, once, and taller than towers. But they’re long dead now, buried in the catacombs beneath the city of Eth, where their calcified organs radiate an eldritch power that calls out to anyone hardy enough to live in this cut-throat, war-torn land. Some survivors are human, while others are close enough, but all are struggling to carve out their lives in a world both unforgiving and wondrous.

Darkly comic and viciously original, Viscera is an unforgettable journey through swords-and-sorcery fantasy where strangeness gleams from every nook and cranny.

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…?

Wilson, an unwanted waif of the generation-long war of unity, spends his boyhood in forced labour and persecution. Rebelling, he is sent as a convicted murderer to the newly colonised penal world of Stellar. He survives to win promotion in the Stellar Legion, the most brutal military system ever founded.

Laurance, Director of the Federation of Man, is afraid of the thing he has helped create, and tries to dissolve the Stellar Legion. He pits his wits against its commander, Hogarth, terrified lest the human wolves trained and hardened in blood and terror should range the defenceless galaxy . . .

The Earth does not belong to man alone

The Himalayas bury their secrets well. Two skulls unearthed in the cradle of the human race – the remote heights of Kashmir – throw evolutionary theory into chaos. But a far more disturbing secret lies hidden deep in the bleak mountains and snow-swept valleys unseen by human eyes.

A few miles from the explosive triangle of tension where Afghanistan and Pakistan border on India the story of the century breaks. And the echoes of the most shattering revelation yet made to man threaten to plunge the world into total war which will turn the cradle of the human race into its final grave.

Powerful war machines of the far-future collide across a barren desert world in this post-apocalyptic debut novel from award-winning Australian author Cat Sparks.

Seventeen-year-old Star and her sister Nene are orphans, part of a thirteen-wagon caravan of nomadic traders living hard lives travelling the Sand Road. Their route cuts through a particularly dangerous and unforgiving section of the Dead Red Heart, a war-ravaged desert landscape plagued by rogue semi-sentient machinery and other monsters from a bygone age.

But when the caravan witnesses a relic-Angel satellite unexpectedly crash to Earth, a chain of events begins that sends Star on a journey far away from the life she once knew. Shanghaied upon the sandship Dogwatch, she is forced to cross the Obsidian Sea by Quarrel, an ancient Templar supersoldier. Eventually shipwrecked, Star will have no choice but to place her trust in both thieves and priestesses while coming to terms with the grim reality of her past-and the horror of her unfolding destiny-as the terrible secret her sister had been desperate to protect her from begins to unravel.

Meanwhile, something old and powerful has woken in the desert. A Lotus Blue, deadliest of all the ancient war machines. A warrior with plans of its own, far more significant than a fallen Angel. Plans that do not include the survival of humanity.

Two threats from a newly released convict – a poacher framed on a murder charge – put Captain Scole, Chief Constable of Brodshire, on his guard. Special men are assigned to protect him.

But four days later, Captain Scole is found shot through the head at his desk in Police Headquarters.

A full week later, young Inspector Poole of Scotland Yard is called in to follow a cold trail in the face of open hostility from the local police. And the further he explores the murder, the more baffling it becomes.

Could Scole’s First World War past be catching up with him – or something much closer to home?

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…

‘Earth is real,’ Dumarest insisted. ‘A world old and scarred by ancient wars. The stars are few and there is a great single moon which hangs like a pale sun in the night sky.’

In the quest for his legendary birthplace, Earl Dumarest has traversed galaxies. Now, at least, he reaches Ourelle, a planet close to Earth – out along a far arm of the Milky Way. There he finds Jondelle, a boy who may hold the key to Earl’s search.

But then Jondelle is kidnapped. And Dumarest’s pursuit of the imperilled boy leads him to a city of paranoiac killers – madmen whose terrible violence is always on a hair-trigger!



(First published 1973)

An extraordinary collection of short stories from the award-winning author of Sarah Canary. Including “Praxis”, the story about a theater where the real and unreal collide; “The Poplar Street Study”, Fowler’s darkly comic account of an alien invasion; and “The Gates of Ghosts”, in which a child journeys to a strange and deadly world, this anthology of 13 tales also features a new foreword by the author.

The lake was full of artificial things – The Poplar Street study – Face value – The dragon’s head – The war of the roses – Contention – Recalling Cinderella – Other planes – The gate of ghosts – The bog people -Wild boys: variations on a theme – The view from Venus – Praxis

The firebird came at night – a magnificent creature whose magical cry seemed to transform objects at random. Gifted with powers of her own, Meguet tried to reach out to the bird. But at moonrise, the firebird became human, a prince cursed by dark magic. Meguet bowed to help him. But then the mystery carried her away, on alien winds, to a land far from her home…

At the edge of the world, the Luxor Desert awaits – a barren land where a sorcerer’s war rages. Where invisible dragons cast shadows over ruined castles. And where Meguet’s own fate depends upon a secret locked away in a tower for centuries…

The son of a Civil War veteran, Edgar Rice Burroughs was a prolific writer for the early pulp magazines. Famous the world over as the creator of Tarzan – and in SF circles for his Martian tales featuring John Carter – Burroughs is a household name. But John Carter wasn’t the only Earthman to champion another world. This omnibus collects PIRATES OF VENUS, LOST ON VENUS and CARSON OF VENUS – the first three of Burroughs’ classic pulp tales of Carson Napier on the waterworld of Amtor – better known to us as Venus.

PIRATES OF VENUS: The shimmering, cloud-covered planet of Venus conceals a wondrous secret: the strikingly beautiful yet deadly world of Amtor. In Amtor, cities of immortal beings flourish in giant trees reaching thousands of feet into the sky; ferocious beasts stalk the wilderness below; rare flashes of sunlight precipitate devastating storms; and the inhabitants believe their world is saucer-shaped with a fiery center and icy rim. Stranded on Amtor after his spaceship crashes, astronaut Carson Napier is swept into a world where revolution is ripe, the love of a princess comes at a dear price, and death can come as easily from the blade of a sword as from the ray of a futuristic gun.

LOST ON VENUS: Napier’s adventures continue in this pulse-pounding sequel to PIRATES OF VENUS. Here the intrepid and wry explorer takes on a savage world in order to rescue the princess from her sworn enemies. Napier’s epic quest for Duare takes him through the streets of the City of the Dead, into the terrifying Room of the Seven Doors, and face to face with fantastic and perilous creatures. LOST ON VENUS brims with the action, suspense and wit unique to the Master of Adventure.

CARSON OF VENUS: Carson Napier, first Earthman to reach Venus, had to keep alert every instant of his stay on that world of mist and mystery. For its lands were unmapped, its inhabitants many, varied and strange, and he had taken an obligation to restore a native princess to her lost homeland. On terrible oceans where dreaded sea-monsters dwelled, in deep forests where terror haunted every branch, and behind the walls of eerie cities where power-mad chieftains plotted uncanny schemes, CARSON OF VENUS is fast-paced science fiction adventure.

In this new collection taken from her very first short stories, written while she and her young family were living in a bus, shortly after the end of the second world war, up until her most recent, Joan Aiken draws on the characters of women from folk and fairy tales who may have had to keep their own light under a bushel, but who use their understanding of the ways of the world, and often their sense of humour to help not just themselves, but others who are lonely and unhappy.


Often delightfully tongue in cheek, Joan Aiken presents stories of shop girls who can sell you a pinch of weather, or lonely spinster piano teachers who can confront the devil and his pop group in a dark alley. Old ladies, browbeaten wives, silent mothers, unhappy daughters – all are given a chance to speak their thoughts, and even practise a little magic in Joan Aiken’s modern folk tales, particularly in her last collection, called Mooncake. Stories from her whole writing career are included in this collection.

Gods’ Magic, Mortal’s Doom… In a land where magic is real, where elves and dragons menace the unwary, and where the Norse gods wage a deadly campaign, using mortals as their favourite pawns, Loki, god of deception, and Freyr, god of war, are locked in a battle that could tip the universal balance toward order or eternal chaos. Searching the alternate timeways, Freyr has reached out to snatch Al Larson, twentieth-century American soldier, from the midst of a fire-fight in Vietnam, flinging him through time and space into the body of an elvish warrior to stand against Loki and his sorcerous ally, Bramin. Torn from a world where bullets and grenades are the weapons of choice, and locked into an elvish body on a world where sword and spell are the means of battle, Al must adapt swiftly – or die. For the gods have marked him as their own private battleground, and Al’s only chance rests in completing the quest Freyr has set him, a quest that will lead him to the very gates of Hel, where he must save a god – or destroy one!

The world, as we know it, has changed considerably. A civil war is raging, between the eastern half of North America and the west. The latest methods of destruction are frightening, brutal, inescapable. They are called light raids – massive laser-beam assaults that are as effective as they are merciless.

Seventeen-year-old Hellene Ariadne, daughter of a prominent Western scientist, has been evacuated to Victoria for her protection. When the letters from her parents suddenly stop, Ariadne is forced to leave the safety of the North and return to her home in Denver Springs. There she finds her house in ruins, the city devastated by a huge light raid.

Ariadne assumes that her parents are dead. But the truth is much worse: her mother is in prison, accused of sabotage and treason, and her father is left helpless, an emotional cripple.

It is up to Ariadne to clear her mother’s name. But, as she plunges deeper and deeper into a fatal web of intrigue and deception, she discovers that there are truths far more shocking than war, more devastating than the fiercest light raids…