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In another world, somewhere in space and time, two countries – Bellogard and Chorny – are locked in perpetual war, conducted by magic. Each of the main members of the two countries’ courts – king, queen, prince, bishop, knight and squire – has their own form of magic, and special ways of moving magically. A war may continue for centuries, until one side succeeds in killing the other side’s king, at which point the whole world vanishes, only to reappear and have the cycle begin again. . .

Pedino is a young Bellogardian who becomes the queen’s squire and, as part of his training, is sent into a seedier part of the city to uncover a Chornian spy. During his adventures he meets and falls in love with a whore, Sara, who turns out to be a Chornian bishop’s squire. Pedino succeeds in killing the other Chornian bishop – a remarkable achievement for a mere squire; but in the manoeuvres which follow Chorny proves to have outwitted its rival, and Pedino’s whole world is threatened with extinction.

There have been many stories modelled on chess games, but none so ingenious and enjoyable as Ian Watson’s latest novel. And, as one would expect from Watson, the story of Bellogard and Chorny is only the beginning. When Pedino and Sara manage to escape the destruction of their universe, they find themselves in a series of even more bizarre worlds operating under still stranger rules, as they seek to discover the purpose of their existence, and the meaning of their universe. Queenmagic, Kingmagic is Ian Watson in sparkling, exuberant form.

The sudden appearance of angelic beings bearing a mystical space drive and a summons to ”God’s World” launches an international crew of scientists on a voyage to the far limits of space. There they become embroiled in an alien war that will decide the fate of all creation . . .

THE EPIC FANTASY OF THE PEOPLE OF THE WIND CONTINUES . . .

Kieto’s destiny, set in the heavens, is to conquer the Land-of-Mists, the mysterious island discovered by Kupe, one of the great Polynesian voyagers. But he knows it won’t be easy: the wild native tribes, particularly the Scots and Picts, have two formidable advantages – iron and horses.

But Kieto has heard of a magnificent warrior race, the Maori, who live in another world and from whom he hopes to learn the secret of success in war. The gateway to this world is on the island of giants, and Kieto and his friends, Boy-Girl, Seumas and Dorcha, themselves taken years before from the Land-of-Mists, leave the safety of Rarotonga and embark on an epic voyage of discovery aboard THE PRINCELY FLOWER.

Pursued by sea-fairies, vengeful gods, power-hungry priests and, in Seumas’s case, by a murderously angry son, confronting their worst fears and supernatural horrors, the friends finally face the awesome wrath of the mighty Maori.

THE PRINCELY FLOWERS is the second wonderful volume of THE NAVIGATOR KINGS, set in the richly imaginative world of Polynesian life and myth.

In every mouse’s long life, there comes a time when ancestral voices tell him to move on. Pedlar, a yellow-necked mouse, has reached that point. Told to leave the Hedgerow and go on a long journey, the adventurous mouse says his farewells and sets out for a far-distant country knows as The House. Reaching his destination, Pedlar enters a strange new world inhabited by many warring tribes: the Stinkhorns of the cellar, the great Savage Tribe in the kitchen, the library Bookeaters, the Invisibles, the Deathshead and the rebellious 13-K Gang.

During his stay, Pedlar witnesses a momentous truce, in which the tribes come together at an Allthing meeting and decide to rid themselves of the greatest pests in The House, the greedy, stupid nudniks – the humans. And so the Great Nudnik Drive is set in motion, a time of considerable anxiety for the nudniks, when clocks strike twenty and inanimate objects seem to have a life of their own. Ranged against the mouse tribes are the nudniks’ allies: the two cats, Eyeball the Burmese blue and Spitz the ginger tom; the Headhunter, a barbarian human child; and Little Prince, the Headhunter’s cannibalistic pet white mouse. The House becomes a hotbed of riot and discord, until Pedlar finally comes up with a solution. The outcome of this heroic struggle has gone down in the annals of mouse history, a history tens of thousands of days long, and the whole remarkable tale is recorded here, between these pages.

Zelos seemed an ideal planet for colonization. Possessing one large continent and numerous archipelagos, it had a climate and vegetation comfortably like that of Earth.



Captain James Conrad and his crew of Expendables started on their initial reconnaissance of the planet. For the first time they found human beings already in residence. But this was a society remote from anything they had ever before experienced. For the Emperor of this strange world controlled his domain through the great annual War Games.



Only the fittest could survive – and only they were allowed to procreate. Through this ‘death control’ the population was limited to twenty thousand. There was only one way the Expendables could get permission to establish a colony on Zelos. Risking their own lives, they must compete in the dreaded War Games. And, somehow, they must win.

When the Inter-Planetary Corporation’s crack spaceliner Arturus took off on a routine flight to Mars, it turned out to be the beginning of a most unexpected trip to the unexplored moons of distant Jupiter.

For once wreaked on Ganymede, the survivors had first to master that world’s primeval terrors, then reconstruct a new spacecraft, and finally find a way out of the problems presented by the warring intelligence of the Jovian system.

SPACEHOUNDS OF ICP is justly considered to be on of Edward E. Smith’s finest novels – a standalone classic of exciting space adventure.

The Arisians, benevolent humanoids who have declared themselves Guardians of Civilization, war with the Eddoreans, shapeless, malevolent beings, hungry for power at any price. They fight on both physical and mental levels, wielding weaponry of inconceivable destructiveness.

And their battleground is a tiny planet in a remote galaxy: Earth. The swamping of Atlantis, the fall of Rome, the wars that wrack the world and blaze through space – all may seem historical accidents to the men involved, but each in reality is a move in a save universe-wide power struggle . . .

Look down into the streets, the buildings, the parks.

There is your battleground. Down there is the enemy – an enemy who wears no uniform.

He walks behind you in the street, sits with you when you eat, and perhaps swims beside you in a public pool. He may ask you for a light, bow you into a hotel, sell you a flyer, or in another form, leave the smell of perfume on your pillow.

The enemy is young and old, male and female, and he is everywhere. Could such a situation arise – or has it arisen? In this exciting story of the future, the author depicts a world at war. An undercover war, so skilfully manipulated that sixty per cent of the population is unaware of its existence. Yet, daily, the casualty figures climb higher and higher.

Can you say that such a war is impossible? Can you say when you have this all-action novel, that it has not already begun?

Wholly Smokes was the last book completed by one of the most original, brilliant and under-rated American writers of the 20th century. Like so many of John Sladek’s earlier books, this is almost impossible to categorize. It’s the non-fiction or non-fact history of General Snuff and Tobacco, a very American tobacco company which seems to have been present at, or had bizarre influence on, many great and not-so-great moments of history.

John Sladek provides his own indescribable clip-art illustrations. As he says in the Introduction:
“The story of GST is also the story of the Badcock family, who owned and operated the company throughout its magnificent history. This book follows that history, stopping to explore a few of its more dazzling events. You will meet the Badcock who kidnapped Pocahontas, the Badcock
who burned London, the Badcock who started the American Revolution, the Badcock who almost killed a president, the Badcock who delivered the real Gettysburg address, the Badcock who wanted to prolong World War One (because he was doing so well out of it), the Badcock who tried to bribe Roosevelt, the Badcock who tried to kill Fidel Castro, and many others . . .”

World War II veteran Edward Bond’s recuperation from a disastrous fighter plane crash takes a distinct turn for the weird when he encounters a giant wolf, a red witch, and the undeniable power of the need-fire, a portal to a world of magic and swordplay at once terribly new and hauntingly familiar. In the Dark World, Bond opposes the machinations of the dread lord Ganelon and his terrible retinue of werewolves, wizards, and witches, but all is not as it seems in this shadowy mirror of the real world, and Bond discovers that a part of him feels more at home here than he ever has on Earth.

Land and Overland – twin worlds a few thousand miles apart. On Land, humanity faces a threat to its very survival – an airborne species, the ptertha, has declared war on humankind, and is actively hunting for victims. The only hope lies in migration. Through space to Overland. By balloon. The Ragged Astronauts – first volume in an epic adventure filled with memorable characters, intense action, engaging notions, exotic locales.

Winner of the BSFA Award for best novel, 1986

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.

One of the tales of Jim Eckert, the young mathematician who travels to a parallel medieval world only to be transformed into a large but none too bright dragon named Gorbash. Now the Dragon Knight must confront the three disasters that lie in wait for any visitor to the English Middle ages: war, plague and Plantagenets

The Dragon Knight, faces three new challenges – a plague caused by an invasion of shape-changing goblins, the arrival of the quarrelsome and ambitious Plantagenet dynasty, and a full-scale human-versus-goblin war.

One day Kil Bruner was a solid Class A engineer in a society of World Police and citizen Files, jet-set migrants and status-ranking Stability keys. But the Police ordered Kil to forget about his missing wife Ellen – and that was a mistake.

Because Kil would move Heaven and Earth to find the woman he loved.

Even when the search leads to slums filled with blade-wielding thugs and criminal Ace Kings . . . to secret societies and vast, interlocked, warring conspiracies – each out to rule the Earth or destroy it. Even when the search costs Kil his freedom, his sanity, the core of his soul – and reality itself . . .

Because to find Ellen, Kil will have to move Heaven and Earth. Literally.

The men of the Dorsai were the finest fighting soldiers in the universe, mercenary troops without equal.

Their talents were devastatingly employed on Kultis, where a bloody little war raged between the Western Alliance and Eastern Coalition. But not even the Dorsai could anticipate the dramatic effect of Cletus Grahame’s brilliant mind and the galaxy-shaking theory he called The Tactics of Mistake.

This first book in the Dorsai sequence is the story of how Cletus Grahame risked his life, the fate of three worlds, and ultimately the whole of the Dorsai to prove that a mistake may remake worlds. A classic of science fiction.

They were humanity’s hope – the first young people selected to leave Earth for study in the Galactic Federation. But something went wrong in deep space. Terribly wrong.

Suddenly Jim Rawlins, Ellen Bouvier, Curt Harrington, and the squirrel-like Alien philosopher Peep were castaways, stranded on the quarantined planet of Quebahr – with no training, and little hope of rescue. Between them and the Federation’s emergency beacon were primitive Mauregs, aggressive Walats, lizard-like Noifs – plus danger, conspiracy and the mystery of an impending high-tech war on a backward peaceful planet.
Without warning, the future of the two worlds – Earth and Quebahr – depended on three young humans’ ability to adapt and survive.

Donal Graeme set out to re-shape the galaxy, but first he must tear it apart.

Donal Graeme, Dorsai of the Dorsai, was the final link in a long genetic train, the ultimate soldier, whose breadth of vision made him a master of space war and strategy – and something even greater. He was the focus of centuries of evolution, the culmination of planned development, and through him a new force made itself felt.

Dorsai were renowned throughout the galaxy as the finest soldiers ever born, trained from birth to fight and win, no matter what the odds. With Donal at their head they embarked upon the final, impossible venture: they set out to unify the splintered worlds of Mankind.

Charlie Stuart, young scion of the Scottish royal family, long nourished a secret desire for adventure – an escape from his dreary books, his sheltered life. When his father realized that, for Charlie to grow into the full Stuart heritage he must face the rigors of the real world, the young man’s dreams had a chance of coming true.

But Charlie’s private fantasies had never included Talyina, a planet 200 light-years from earth and ruled by a ruthless usurper. And he had never envisioned himself as a galactic savior. Yet, young Charlie, late the classroom dreamer, suddenly found himself the only man in the galaxy capable of averting inter-planetary war!

The Ledom had made a world without war, without fear – a world in which each individual was free to love, to create, to explore . . .

The Ledom, a gentle and kindly new race, made their twentieth-century guest, Charlie Johns, welcome to their paradise.

Charlie thought he was in heaven. But then he found out just where – and when – he was . . . an Eden turned into a nightmare!

The second volume of the Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon covers his prolific output during 1940 and 1941, after which he suffered five years of writer’s block. Showcasing Sturgeon’s early penchant for fantasy, the first six selections include whimsical ghost stories, such as “Cargo,” in which a World War II munitions freighter is commandeered by invisible, peace-loving fairies. With the publication of his enduring SF classic, “Microcosmic God,” Sturgeon finally found his voice, combining literate, sharp-edged prose with fascinating speculative science while recounting the power struggle between a brilliant scientist, who creates his own miniature race of gadget makers, and his greedy banker. Voice found or not, every one of the stories here is readable and entertaining today because of Sturgeon’s singular gifts for clever turns of phrase and compelling narrative. As Samuel R. Delaney emphasizes in an insightful introduction, Sturgeon was the single most influential SF writer from the 1940s through the 1960s.

This stunning collection showcases 11 of Haldeman’s best stories. They range through time and space from planets beyond our wildest dreams to a nightmare future Earth all too close to home.

Lindsay and the Red City Blues: A story of revenge – with a heart-stopping twist in the tail.

Blood Brothers: A ‘Thieves World’ story.

You Can Never Go Back: A self-contained story from the original version of ‘The Forever War’, never before published in book form.

And ten more sharp and startling visions of tomorrow.

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…

Earth was finished, devastated by nuclear and biological war. The inhabitants of the artificial asteroid colonies looked down on it and knew that humanity’s old home would soon be gone forever.

But Earth would not loose its ties so easily. And for Marianne O’Hara there was work that had to be done among the stricken ruins before she could at last look outwards to the stars.