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Black Abyss
by John Glasby J.L. PowersWith the discovery of the hyperdrive, mankind at last possessed the means of going out to the stars. Four expeditions had already gone by the fine the fifth starship left Pluto for Vega. Carrying its complement of scientists and military personnel, they arrived at the solar system of Vega to find one planet sufficiently like Earth to allow them to land. Here, they discovered mystery. The ruins of great cities built on the shattered remains of still earlier fortresses, showing that some great race of conquerors had passed that way sometime in the past thirty thousand years. No life now remained on this planet and speeding to the next sun, they found a civilisation which possessed powers so utterly strange to them that one native almost succeeded in destroying them and taking over the ship. And still the mystery remained, for the legends of the planet spoke of a race of gods who had come down from the stars twenty thousand years before. It was not until they reached the planet of a red giant sun that they ran into a race of creatures so fantastically alien that there was no defence against them, and they learned the real identity of the race which had conquered the stars millennia before...
Cyclops in the Sky
by Patricia Fanthorpe Lionel Roberts Lionel FanthorpeAstra City was a technological 40th century masterpiece. It represented the challenge of society to the raw untamed planet where it raised its gleaming towers in a far-flung corner of the galaxy. Beyond the force field encircling Astra City lay mystery and terror in the form of the weird primeval Greek beasts. There were other mysteries surrounding Astra City. Mysteries like those the one-eyed Twen discovered in the labyrinth below the modern city. A labyrinth whose age would only be calculated in centuries... but which was believed to have been erected by the distant Masters themselves. Hidden in its depths Twen discovers a forbidden document of the millennial age, which involves her with a secret society who know the dreadful truth about the colonists. They are Androids... and their dawning intelligence leads them into head-on conflict with the rapidly decaying human race.
The Day of Timestop
by Philip Jose FarmerOperation Timestop: Post-holocaust Paris is a pretty seedy stand-in for the original, but what can you expect when the goverment's main function is Orgasm Prevention & when the national hero is wandering around in Nowhen. But things are changing! Rumor has it that the Timetraveler is coming back in a few months. At which point, Time itself will come to an end.
Deathworld: Deathworld Book 1 (Gateway Essentials #Bk. 1)
by Harry HarrisonThe planet was called Pyrrus, a strange place where all the beasts, plants and natural elements were designed for one specific purpose: to destroy man.The settlers there were supermen, twice as strong as ordinary men and with milli-second reflexes. They had to be. For their business was murder.It was up to Jason dinAlt, interplanetary gambler, to discover why Pyrrus had become so hostile during man's brief habitation.
Defiance
by Kenneth BulmerThis is the story of one member of the Terran Survey Corps. His name is Loftus Tait. There are many men of his stamp in the Corps; men who possess a deep and unshakable conviction that what they are doing has a meaning in face of the great unknowns, men who, recognising the transience and minuteness of humankind, yet believe that Man has a destiny among the stars.Not for him or his crew was there the refinement and luxury of a base ship equipped like a small world; they took their frail craft across the parsecs and set down as and when they could, and worked at their jobs, and came back - if they were lucky.Some were not so lucky.
Doomed World
by Patricia Fanthorpe Lionel Fanthorpe R L FanthorpeGeorge Mallory was out for a quiet day's shooting. A typical country-man, in typical English country. His day's sport was interrupted by the beginning of the greatest catastrophe in man's history - an alien space ship was crashing as his feet. The ghastly monstrosity that emerged was so hideously repulsive that no one would have guessed at the degree of intelligence and potential friendliness in its strange mind. Mallory shot first and asked questions afterwards. With its dying strength, the alien cursed the earth with a scientific horror beyond the comprehension of man, a horror that turned the beasts against us. The only escape seemed to lie out in space... but the devastating effect of the cosmic rays wrought havoc in the minds of the space men and the lunar expedition turned on itself in deadly carnage. What would be the outcome of the terrible conflict between man and beast?
Exit Humanity
by Leo Brett Lionel Fanthorpe Patricia FanthorpeThe ties of home were strong. In a few years man gets attached to bricks and mortar, and scenery. In a hundred years roots are so deep that no one wants to tear them up. In a thousand years it is quite unthinkable. In a million years, only a lunatic would want to leave... Then came the alien, presenting an impossible choice... Humanity must leave the Earth - or die! Behind them was everything they had known. In front of them, an unknown to-morrow. Which were the greater - the hazards remaining or the dangers of the infinite void ahead? Could they trust the alien? He said there was another world, a safe world, that would be a new home - but was it all a trap? There were dangers out there. The dangers of a population confined in ships for a half a life-time; the dangers of cosmic radiation; danger of attacks by the 'Others'! Only men of the highest courage and the greatest integrity could hope to survive in the raw, searing savagery of the unknown...
The Face of X
by Patricia Fanthorpe Lionel Roberts Lionel FanthorpeThey woke up to the smell of danger. No one could see it. None of them could hear it. But it was there. Lurking... intangible... inaudible... invisible. The space around them was alive with it. They breathed it into their lungs. It crept through the pores of their skins. It was the dreaded presence of X the Unknown.
A Fine and Private Place
by Peter S. BeagleJonathan Rebeck is homeless. Bankrupt. He has dropped out of society and has been living quietly in a local cemetery, under the care of a raven who is quite good at stealing sandwiches.Far from being lonely, however, Jonathan is able to converse with the ghosts around him, and finds himself following two new spirits, Michael and Laura, as they fall in love with each other. He becomes invested in, and part of, their cautious romance. But the circumstances behind Michael's death are slipping from his memory, and the further from life they drift, the closer the loss of love feels. When a visiting widow stumbles across Jonathan in his graveyard home, will the living world begin to intrude on this fine and private place?Peter S. Beagle's legendary, beautiful debut novel is filled with all his characteristic warmth and humanity. With a new introduction by Neil Gaiman, A Fine and Private Place is a timeless classic from the author of The Last Unicorn.
Frozen Planet
by Pel Torro Lionel Fanthorpe Patricia FanthorpeThey were suspended in frozen animation billions of years ago. Now the Searcher was looking for them, scattered across the universe. Would he find them before those set on destruction could?
The Games of Neith
by Margaret St ClairDid she hold the key to ecstasy - or to horror?The people of Gwethym were highly intelligent, rational beings. They worshiped the goddess Neith, not because they believed in such a golden-haired being, but because they recognised the need for religion as a counterbalance to human passions.So when trouble struck their planet, when they discovered an energy leak which was slowly destroying their world, the Gwethymians turned to science for their answer. If their world was to be saved, the solution must come from the logicians. Or so they thought, until one day a woman, in the image of their goddess Neith, walked across the waters of the harbour and into their city! Then their trouble was two-fold. Would there be anything left to save of their world if they waited for the scientists? And if they didn't, if they put their trust in this goddess whom logic told them could not even exist, would they just be sealing their doom that much quicker?
The Glory That Was
by L. Sprague deCampThe Glory that was - or the Glory that wasn't?Knut Bulnes had considered Vasil IX, World Emperor of the 27th century, to be a harmless eccentric until Imperial decree completely sealed off Greece behind a force wall and people of Greek descent suddenly began disappearing from the rest of the world - including the wife of Bulnes's friend Wiyem Flin.Bulnes reluctantly agreed to help Flin find his wife, and the two managed to get inside the force wall only to find themselves in the Classical Greece of Socrates and Euripides - and the target of a man-hunt not only by the soldiers of Perikles, but also by the unpleasant characters with machine guns.
Hand of Doom
by R L Fanthorpe Lionel Fanthorpe Patricia FanthorpeIt was a great world in the fortieth century. No economic problems. No work. Robots and androids everywhere. Every girl a princess, every man a king. Pleasure, parties, amusements, art, drama and literature were the ultimate goal of every man woman and child. When people have too much leisure there is a danger. They grow soft and effete. There hadn't been a standing army on earth for a thousand years. There hadn't been a single warrior for five hundred. Then the Masked Swordsmen began breaking up the pleasure parties, after the swords came guns, stolen from the museums. Then... worse,... far, far worse. But that wasn't all. There were rumours of alien ships in the sky. Ships manned by a savage blue skinned humanoid race. Ships landed. Blues were enslaved. More blues came. Earthmen and women were captured in reprisal. Who were the blues? Why did they come? What was their history? What were their plans for the future? Would the human race survive?
The Haunted Stars
by Edmond HamiltonIt meant little to Robert Fairlie, a serious and dedicated young philologist, that the United States and Soviet Russia were at odds about the Moon. He had little interest in the first rocket landings or the bases that the two nations had established there. And he neither knew nor cared why the Americans would not agree to mutual inspections of these bases.Yet the Americans had reason enough: and quite unexpectedly, because of his specialised knowledge of languages, he found himself sharing the burden of an incredible secret. For what the American base had yielded was astounding evidence that space had already been conquered many centuries before by a people who had once spanned the stars. There had been machines and destructive weapons beyond the comprehension of present-day scientists which, if knowledge of them fell into the wrong hands, could plunge the world into unutterable chaos.Fairlie's trip to the closely-guarded rocket base in New Mexico turned out to be only the first step on a fantastic journey amid the unexplored stars to the home-world of the space-conquerors of long ago.It was a journey into the appalling reality of stellar space still haunted by the past cosmic struggle whose scale in space and time dwarfed the rivalries of tiny Earth's quarreling nations.
The High Crusade: The High Crusade / Way Station / Flowers For Algernon / This Immortal (Gateway Essentials)
by Poul AndersonIn the year of grace 1345, as Sir Roger Baron de Tourneville is gathering an army to join King Edward III in the war against France, a most astonishing event occurs: a huge silver ship descends through the sky and lands in a pasture beside the little village of Ansby in North East Lincolnshire. The Wersgorix, whose scouting ship it is, are quite expert at taking conquering planets, and having determined from orbit that this one is suitable, they initiate standard procedure. Their ship carries guided missiles and nuclear weaponry - but they have long since lost the art (and weapons) of hand-to-hand fighting. And this time it's no mere primitives the Wersgorix seek to enslave - they've launched their invasion against Englishmen! In the end, only one alien is left alive - and Sir Roger's grand vision is born. He intends for the creature to fly the ship first to France to aid his King, then on to the Holy Land to vanquish the infidel. And then . . . ?
Hydrosphere
by John Glasby A.J. MerakThe Colony on Rigel IV had been founded seven hundred years earlier but for the past six centuries, they had been forced to exist on the bottoms of the great oceans of the planet, kept there by the tremendously potent weapons of the alien star-race which had swept down out of space and wiped them off the land masses of the new world.Kerrel Stevens found himself trapped in one of the Shells, unable to remember how he came to be there, aware only that for some strange reason, he held the secret which could release these people from their terrible existence, but that his memory and all of the knowledge which could help in the struggle against the aliens had been erased from his mind.In the Shells, he finds what he is seeking - others like himself, different from the people who had become used to this life on the sea bottom, where science had gradually given way to superstition and witchcraft - and this chance meeting provides the key which unlocked the amnesia in his mind. For him, it opened the doorway to the surface of this strange, impossible planet, plunging him breathlessly towards the stars- and the unbelievable secret which spelt destruction for the alien star-race.
The In-World
by Patricia Fanthorpe Lionel Roberts Lionel FanthorpeAt first it was just another hoax, another UFO story, but the sightings went on increasing. It couldn't be an alien, there had been so many false alarms, dramatic news-columnists had shouted 'wolf' so many times, that John Citizen shrugged his shoulders and said 'nuts' at the very mention of the word space-ship. Then one of them landed... The things they did were not exactly friendly. In fact by the time they'd finished, they had made an old-time Viking raid seem like a social call from the vicar... Many other attacks followed. Day after day and night after night the alien ships screamed in on their mission of death. The earth struck back. But no one could track the aliens to their lair. They seemed to come from Nowhere. They weren't Martians. They weren't Venusians, and they weren't from another system. That left only one place where they could have originated... yet the truth was so fantastic that none of the earth governments would take it seriously until it was almost too late. The enemy came from within! From the gigantic caverns at the earth's core.
Juggernaut
by Bron Fane Lionel Fanthorpe Patricia FanthorpeMost of the problems were solved in the 29th century. War was a memory. Disease was almost conquered. Old age and Death were held at bay. It was a glad world. A brave new world. Humanity had grown up. And then It came... At first the dare-devil pioneers from the far-flung corners of the universe brought back strange tales of a mountain that walked. The reign of terror spread from planet to planet, until the authorities sat up and took notice. By the time someone with enough initiative to re-open the long disused weapon shops, came on the scene, it was almost too late. Time was against them. Atomic bomb wouldn't smash that creature, neither would heat rays nor energy bolts. It left a train of utter chaos and devastation behind it as it strode imperiously through the galaxy.
Last Man on Earth
by Bron Fane Lionel Fanthorpe Patricia FanthorpeThe strange thing about THE END was that nobody expected it... The pessimists had been wrong. No atomic war. No nuclear destruction. No fall out. No radioactivity. Disarmament had brought universal peace and sanity. Co-existence had become a reality - not an idealist's dream.Then disaster struck. The desperate weather forecasts were the beginning. The ice was The End.Seas became frozen wastes. Rivers turned to glaciers overnight. The whole planet was in the grip of a cold so intense that millions perished in a few hours... millions more died within the week.Only the bravest and the hardiest survived. Rugged men and courageous women, with the spirits of the earliest pioneers, urging them on to do the impossible.Was the big freeze just a cosmic accident - with man on the unlucky end? Had one of the big powers tried to master weather control, secretly, despite the disarmament talks... and failed disastrously.Perhaps it was the prelude to alien invasion?
Lightning World
by Patricia Fanthorpe Lionel Fanthorpe Trebor ThorpeBrant was a scientist, a space scientist. He had techniques and technologies at his fingertips that would have looked like magic to the old timers of the twentieth century. There were new sciences that hadn't been heard of a century before. Things like Teleportology and Psycholithography. The specialised departmental scientists were narrow field experts in spheres of work that a twentieth century man wouldn't even have begun to comprehend. Science had the answer to most things, but there was a new world out through the Hyperdrive Lanes, a world of mystery on the edge of the universe. It was inhabited by ebony skinned humanoids, with proud noble chieftains and weird La-akas or medicine men. Brant and his crew scoffed at first. "Primitive magic and superstition" laughed the scientists. Then the La-akas did things that science couldn't' explain. Things like controlling nature. Brant and his men began to investigate the age of the culture. It wasn't primitive, it was old.... thousands of years older than Earth.... And it throbbed with terrible danger.
Lost Race of Mars
by Robert SilverbergAre the Old Martians really a lost race - just withered mummies lying in dark caves? Or are they still alive - somewhere on the red planet?Sally and Jim must find out. They must help their father discover if the Old Martians exist. His life work as a scientist is at stake!But it's not easy. They are only visitors to the Mars colony in this year 2017. And no one really wants them there.
The Night of the Long Knives (Dover Doomsday Classics)
by Fritz LeiberI was one hundred miles from Nowhere ― and I mean that literally ― when I spotted this girl out of the corner of my eye. I’d been keeping an extra lookout because I still expected the other undead bugger left over from the murder party at Nowhere to be stalking me.Welcome to Deathland, a postapocalyptic nuclear desert where kill or be killed is the law of the land. The radiation-damaged survivors of this ravaged region are consumed by the urge to murder each other, making partnership of any sort a lethal risk. But when two drifters forge an uneasy truce, the possibility of a new life beckons.Written by a multiple Hugo Award–winning author and one of the founders of the sword-and-sorcery genre, this novel-length magazine story first appeared at the height of Cold War paranoia. Fritz Leiber's thought-provoking tale addresses timeless questions about the influences of community and culture as well as the individual struggle to reform.
Of Earth Foretold
by Kenneth BulmerThe Prophets of Earth slept crated in their thousands. They filled the ship's bomb-bays, lying quietly waiting in their machine-gleaming metal sheaths. Each one was destined to cover a world.Each individual one lay there, quiescent in its capsule, awaiting the master command that would send it, after the one before and preceding the next in line in strict mathematical order, out over a new and unknown world to plunge down to its destined consummation.
Operation Columbus
by Hugh WaltersAfter the radiation bombardment from those mysterious structures on the Moon - chronicled in The Domes of Pico - it was inevitable, of course, that a lunar landing would have to be made; and Chris thought, too, that it was inevitable that he should be chosen for the job. But things didn't work out quite as planned. There was an American candidate for the honour of piloting the first Western rocket to the Moon; and the Russians had their own schemes for turning it into a Soviet satellite...
Out of the Darkness
by R L Fanthorpe Lionel Fanthorpe Patricia FanthorpeSince the first classical ghost story was written, and since the unexplainable caught the imaginations of men, the mysteries of ancient Egypt have captivated the reading public in both fact and fiction.Non one who walks through the Egyptian exhibits of a museum can fail to be impressed by the immense number and complexity of the exhibits. What meanings lie hidden in that ageless heiroglyphic writing?What forbidden knowledge lurks behind the inscrutable eyes of Nephthys, Guardian of the Dead?What dreadful secrets are revealed when the seals around the lid of a sarcophagus are broken?Do the falcon-headed gods Horus and Set still walk the earth?Do the carnivorous fangs of the weird Anubis still seek the human blood. Does Mont, the macabre bull-headed god still hold sinister sway in forgotten corners of the Delta?The explorers who raided the timeless tomb at Luxor discovered to their cost, that an Egyptian curse was independent of time and space...