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Showing 13541 - 13560 of 28680 items
By A. Bertram Chandler. 1984
Originally, Sparta was an all-male planet - an all-male population with everything that implies: babies - male babies only -…
produced by the so-called Birth Machine from an almost unending supply of fertilized ova brought by Sparta's founding father, a dyed-in-the-wool misogynist. But unnatural situations rarely stand the test of time, and it wasn't too long before Sparta bowed to Mother Nature.But there was still something rather strange about Sparta when John Grimes landed there to await the arrival of his beloved ship Sister Sue. It seemed to him that among the recently transplanted women of Sparta, there was a strange movement afoot. And when the Archon was kidnapped by a group of militant women the press claimed were men, he knew he couldn't just stand by and watch!While on a boating holiday, Scott Carey is exposed to a cloud of radioactive spray. A few weeks later, following…
a series of medical examinations, he can no longer deny the extraordinary truth. Not only is he losing weight, he is also shorter than he was. Scott Carey has begun to shrink.Richard Matheson's novel follows through its premise with remorseless logic, with Carey first attempting to continue some kind of normal life and later having left human contact behind, having to survive in a world where insects and spiders are giant adversaries. And even that is only a stage on his journey into the unknown.By A. Bertram Chandler. 1979
John Grimes, owner of the deep space pinnace Little Sister, could not be too fussy about who he carried. Fenalla…
Pruin, the muckraking reporter, was always going to be trouble. They need the boomerang throwing abilities of two sexy dancers from New Alice to get them out of trouble.By Keith Laumer. 1968
Across the galaxies, against wrongdoers and rogues! Only Retief - the indomitable champion of the underdog and 27th-century diplomacy -…
can seal the peace between the battling earthlings and the lobster-like aliens known as the Haterakans. In constant peril, the daring spacewarrior must join a pirate band, cross the fatal boundaries of the Terran Defense League, and take on his arch rivals Foulbrood and Bloodblister. Facing certain torture, double-dealing, and ruthless espionage, he passes within inches of death. But he must emerge victorious - or the Hatracks will waste no time in executing their berserk plan to raise earthlings as a food supply!By R. A. Lafferty. 1971
In The Devil is Dead, Lafferty tells of an astonishing band of adventurers seeking the Devil himself. It is a…
tale of demons and changelings, monsters and mermaids - and of how it is not always serious to die, the first time it happens...By Dean Koontz. 2002
The Dean Koontz Collection is an unmissable omnibus of three of his most spine-tingling thrillers, By the Light of the…
Moon, One Door Away From Heaven and Seize the Night. A terrifying treat perfect for Stephen King fans...By the Light of the Moon: When Dylan O'Conner pulls into a motel, all he wants is sleep. But he soon finds himself bound, gagged and being injected with a mysterious fluid by a lunatic doctor, who claims Dylan will be the carrier of his 'life's work'. He warns Dylan and fellow victim Jillian that he's being pursued and that they too are now targets. They're sceptical. But soon they realise that perhaps he isn't so mad after all... One Door Away From Heaven: Leilani Maddoc's tenth birthday is nine months away. Micky Bellsong is convinced that in nine months and one day, the girl will be dead. Micky's decision to save the child's life - and pit herself against an adversary as fearsome as he is cunning - takes her on a journey of incredible peril and stunning discoveries, a journey that will change her for ever...Seize the Night: One by one, the children of Moonlight Bay are disappearing. No one knows if they are dead or alive. Christopher Snow has glimpsed the dark and torrid secrets of the small-town community where he has spent his life. And only he has the key to the truth - a truth that could only exist in the genetic chaos of Moonlight Bay.By Adam Roberts. 2016
Adam Roberts turns his attention to answering the Fermi Paradox with a taut and claustrophobic tale that echoes John Carpenters'…
The Thing.Two men while away the days in an Antarctic research station. Tensions between them build as they argue over a love-letter one of them has received. One is practical and open. The other surly, superior and obsessed with reading one book - by the philosopher Kant.As a storm brews and they lose contact with the outside world they debate Kant, reality and the emptiness of the universe. The come to hate each other, and they learn that they are not alone.By Gavin G. Smith. 2016
In the far future, after the Loss of Earth, war has begun and an unknowable alien race has awakened, intent…
on the destruction of everything.Here and now, the end of the world has come. And the only way our species will survive is if two augmented humans can fight their way through apocalypse to a faint glimmer of hope.Long ago, the seeds of that apocalypse were resisted by the warrior tribes of Britain, with devastating consequences for them and their lands.And all three of these times will meet on another world . . .By R. A. Lafferty. 1968
Set in the far future, Space Chantey chronicles the adventures of Space Captain Roadstrum and his crew, on a journey…
through galaxies resonant with myth and peril as Roadstrum valiantly battles to return across the cosmos to Big Tulsa, the Capital of the World, and to his wife and young son Tele-Max.By Olaf Stapledon. 1979
Science fiction has its immortals - authors whose impact was so tremendous that they belong in a class by themselves.…
Olaf Stapledon extended the boundaries of science fiction to the infinite, and there are few of the major authors who do not directly or indirectly owe him a great debt. This volume of his short science fiction and fantasy includes in addition to the five stories, an uncollected radio script from which this volume takes its title and an uncollected 1948 address to the British Interplanetary Society.By Stephen Baxter. 1999
Stephen Baxter breaks genre boundaries and brings his unique imagination, epic scope and elegant style to an anthropomorphic fantasy. Starting…
with the story of a young female mammoth and the struggle her herd has to survive into the present day on a remote Siberian Island the MAMMOTH trilogy encompasses thousands of millions of years, the geological and climatic history of earth and a vision of a startling future. All via an astounding evocation of mammoth. Life, biology, intelligence, culture, myth and legend. It is a triumph of imaginative story telling.By Jon Wallace. 2015
Another high action SF dystopia perfect for fans of Richard Morgan and Alfred Bester alike. The follow-up to the acclaimed…
Barricade this another short, sharp and kinetic SF thrillerKenstibec is a Ficial - a genetically engineered artificial life form; tough, skilled, hard to kill. Or at least he was. He's lost the nanotech that constantly repaired him. Life just got real. Just like it is for the few remaining humans in this blighted world - the Reals; locked in a fight over a ruined world with the Ficials they created to make Utopia.And now Kenstibec must take a trip to the pinnicle of our failed civilisation. The Steeple is a one thousand storey tower that looms over the wreckage of London. It is worshipped, feared and haunted by attack droids and cannibals. And the location of a secret that just might save Kenstibec's life.The only way is up.By Harry Turtledove. 2010
In 1938, two men held history in their hands. One was Adolf Hitler. The other was British prime minister Neville…
Chamberlain, who, determined to avoid war at any cost, came to be known as "the great appeaser." But Harry Turtledove, the unrivaled master of alternate history, has launched a gripping saga that springboards from a different fateful act: What if Chamberlain had stood up to Hitler? What would the Nazis' next move have been? And how would the war--which Hitler had always regretted waiting eleven months to start--have unfolded and changed our world?Here, Turtledove takes us across a panorama of conflict fueled by ideology and demagoguery. Nations are pitted against nations, alliances are forged between old enemies, ordinary men and women are hurled into extraordinary life-and-death situations. In Japanese-controlled Singapore, an American marine falls in love with a Russian dance hall hostess, while around him are heard the first explosions of Chinese guerilla resistance. On the frontlines of war-ravaged rural France, a weary soldier perfects the art of using an enormous anti-tank gun as a sniper's tool--while from Germany a killer is sent to hunt him down. And in the icy North Atlantic, a U-boat bearing an experimental device wreaks havoc on British shipping, setting the stage for a Nazi ground invasion of Denmark. From an American woman trapped in Germany who receives safe passage from Hitler himself to a Jewish family steeped in German culture and facing the hatred rising around them, from Japanese soldiers on the remote edge of Siberia to American volunteers in Spain, West and East is the story of a world held hostage by tyrants--Stalin, Hitler, Sanjuro--each holding on to power through lies and terror even in the face of treacherous plots from within.As armies clash, and as the brave, foolish, and true believers choose sides, new weapons are added to already deadly arsenals and new strategies are plotted to break a growing stalemate. But one question looms over the conflict from West to East: What will it take to bring America into this war? From the Hardcover edition.By A. Bertram Chandler. 1961
ALAN KEMP HAD A DREAM FEW SPACEMEN EVER SAW COME TRUE. BUT IN THE RIM WORLD ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE...Alan Kemp…
was a man obsessed. Stranded with his crew on the Rim planet Elsinore, he saw a chance to realise that dream - and took it. When a gausjammer crash-landed on Elsinore, Kemp rebuild the second-hand, obsolete starship and set out to establish a shuttle between the Rim planets.But before they reached their destination, Kemp and his comrades were waylaid by an alien colony. A colony inhabited by giant mechanical spiders who imprisoned their captives in a palace of pleasure whey the chance - or desire to escape - is precisely zero.By Harry Turtledove. 2011
In this extraordinary World War II alternate history, master storyteller Harry Turtledove begins with a big switch: what if Neville…
Chamberlain, instead of appeasing Hitler, had stood up to him in 1938? Enraged, Hitler reacts by lashing out at the West, promising his soldiers that they will reach Paris by the new year. They don't. Three years later, his genocidal apparatus not fully in place, Hitler has barely survived a coup, while Jews cling to survival. But England and France wonder whether the war is still worthwhile.Weaving together a cast of characters that ranges from a brawling American fighter in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain to a woman who has seen Hitler's evil face-to-face, Harry Turtledove takes us into a world shaping up very differently in 1941. The Germans and their Polish allies have slammed into the gut of the Soviet Union in the west, while Japan pummels away in the east. In trench warfare in France, French and Czech fighters are outmanned but not outfought by their Nazi enemy. Then the stalemate is shattered. In England, Winston Churchill dies in an apparent accident, and the gray men who walk behind his funeral cortege wonder who their real enemy is. The USSR, fighting for its life, makes peace with Japan--and Japan's war with America is about to begin.A sweeping saga of human passions, foolishness, and courage, of families and lovers and soldiers by choice and by chance, The Big Switch is a provocative, gripping, and utterly convincing work of alternate history at its best. For history buffs and fans of big, blood-and-guts fiction, Harry Turtledove delivers a panoramic clash of ideals as powerful as armies themselves.From the Hardcover edition.By J. T. McIntosh. 1953
He held the power of life after the world's end! In four days the world was coming to an end!…
The exploding sun would burn every living thing on Earth to a cinder! In Simsville, it was Bill Easson who got the job of picking those fit to escape. He had to choose ten people - men, women, or children - out of its desperate, hysterical three thousand. Whom should he pick - the beautiful, the bold, or the clever? Did they really have a chance to reach a new world in the rickety, jerry-built, inadequate space boat that would be given them? Would cold and hostile Mars welcome them?By Robert Silverberg. 1958
A hundred thousand years ago, there had been a planet called Earth. It had been a proud world ruling a…
thousand vassal stars, but its stellar empire had turned upon and annihilated their conquerors, and wiped the name of Earth from the maps of space.But Earthmen still survived . . . a strange race of worldless men and women, by tradition advisers to rulers, but never themselves ruling. Wanderers through myriad planets, their origin was a half-forgotten legend.That was the situation when a strange quirk of fate sent Earthman Hallam Navarre on an interstellar wild goose chase. He had to bring back a strictly mythical treasure to his alien ruler, or die.By Stephanie Saulter. 2015
Could the return of an old enemy could see the gillungs fragile peace destroyed?The gillungs - waterbreathing, genetically modified humans…
- are thriving. They've colonised riverbanks and ports long since abandoned to the rising seas and the demand for their high-efficiency technologies is growing fast. But as demand grows, so do fears about their impact on both norm businesses and the natural environment. Then, a biohazard scare at Sinkat, their colony on the Thames, fuels the opposition and threatens to derail the gillungs' progress. But was it an accident, or was it sabotage? DCI Sharon Varsi has her suspicions, but her investigations are compromised by family ties. And now there is a new threat: Zavcka Klist is about to be released from prison - and she wants her company back.'Some books are good, some books are even great. This one is important' - SF SignalBy Michael G. Coney. 2014
Michael Greatrex Coney was a British-born author who spent the last three decades of his life in Canada - including…
16 years in the British Colombia Forest Service. His early work carried a sense of Cold War-inspired paranoia, but his repertoire was wide and perhaps his best novel, HELLO SUMMER, GOODBYE, is a wistful story of adolescent love on a far-distant planet. The titles collected in this omnibus come from the fertile beginning of his career and include his debut novel MIRROR IMAGE, CHARISMA and the BSFA AWARD-winning BRONTOMEK!By Tanith Lee. 1994
Tanaquil, a young mender, and her familiar come face to face with her half-sister, Lizra, who forces Tanaquil to make…
a perilous choice between siding with Lizra in her quest for conquest or risking her terrible anger.