Search Results for: alien-art

In the distant future, when science has evolved into an art indistinguishable from magic, Kirin the thief finds himself forced down on an alien planet. Gathering allies, he must defeat the Witch Queen – who plans nothing less than the conquest of the entire galaxy!

A frontier world on the back end of nowhere is the sort of place people go to get lost. And some of those people have secrets worth hiding, secrets that can change the future-assuming there is one. . .

André Deschênes is a hired assassin, but he wants to be so much more. If only he can find a teacher who will forgive his murderous past-and train him to manipulate odds and control probability. It’s called the art of conjuring, and it’s André’s only route to freedom. For the world he lives on is run by the ruthless Charter Trade Company, and his floating city, Novo Haven, is little more than a company town where humans and aliens alike either work for one tyrannical family-or are destroyed by it. But beneath Novo Haven’s murky waters, within its tangled bayous, reedy banks, and back alleys, revolution is stirring. And one more death may be all it takes to shift the balance . . .

It 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?

Parallel Worlds! Earth, cerated out of universal chaos, and the Dreamlands, spawned of the dreams of men. But where dreams turn to nightmares, Death is the only crossing-point…
Ex-waking worlders David Hero and Eldin the Wanderer are now sellswords in that ephemeral dimension called Deramland. Once a talented artist of the fantastic, now Hero’s art is the wizardry of his swordplay. Once a lecturing professor, now Eldin professes a knowledge of the dark, mysterious Dream Realms second to none. A formidable pair! But face to face with Yibb-Tstll and the Gaunts of Night, the Eidolon Lathi and her brood, and the mad, alien First One who plots to set free dreaming Cthulu from eon-old imprisonment…what can mere men do?
Take up arms with the Heroes of Dreams and laugh in the face of the world’s worst nightmare!

The Humanx Commonwealth: Book Five.

He was smart. He was good. He was backed by the Commonwealth’s best equipment. So what could possibly go wrong?

‘In the midst of life…’ thought Evan Orgel.

A whole lot of life. Alien life-form upon alien life-form, crawling, floating, wriggling, darting and oozing. The entire unexplored surface of the planet Prism was unimaginably alive.

‘…we are in death.’

His death. His Mobile Hostile World suit – the very latest, state-of-the-art, off-world protection gear – had just failed. Attacked in just about the only way its proud makers hadn’t thought of.

So there he lay, a hermit crab trapped in his own armour, while the myriad alien life-forms of prism crawled, floated, wriggled, darted and oozed about him, getting ready to open him up like a tin of upmarket cat food.

Evan Orgell was full of misery.

In 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 . . . ?

Secretive, enigmatic beings, they came to Earth to live among humanity in quiet, aristocratic isolation. But now, after years of silence, the “gods” have decided to share their art.

Across the vast galactic void come great ships bearing the fruits of an incomprehensible alien culture – paintings and sculpture of such raw, visceral power that their unveiling plunges the Earth into violent chaos, and sends the visitors fleeing from their adopted planet. But some remain behind – to face death at the hands of rampaging mobs, to witness the outcome of the grand cosmic game, and to assist in the creation of one last, potentially universe-shattering masterpiece that will illuminate the awesome, final destinies of god and man.

On the planet Arcadia, a young man and woman and a swamp otter join together to haul the otter’s eleven hundred pound statue overland to meet the deadline of a prospective buyer from another planet.

Ian Watson’s latest collection shows the same range and apparently inexhaustible fund of ideas that have characterized all his previous books. No other contemporary figure in SF is so prolific or inventive a writer of short stories. In the title story we immediately encounter a phantasmagoric vision of a society increasingly dependent on recycling its usable material; other brilliant inventions include a planet inhabited by lemur-like aliens who bafflingly produce marvellously finished stone carvings without apparently having the tools to do so (‘The Moon and Michelangelo’); people fighting their way through the various levels of what appears to be a real-life version of a computer adventure game (‘Jewels in an Angel’s Wing’); and a zoo in which are caged the extensions into our universe of four-dimensional hyberbeings (‘Hyperzoo’). And that is only the beginning: there are fifteen stories in all, each one a state-of-the-art example of short science fiction at its finest.