Search Results for: child-of-earth

There should have been soft breezes scented with entrancing perfumes, the soothing warmth of a golden sun, lakes of wine and mountains of grain, trees adorned with fruit and bud and flower, shrubs bearing a profusion of glittering gems. Herbs and spices to provide freedom from pain, a return to youthful zest, an end of aging and decay. Salves and ointments and natural fungi to cure all physical ills. . .

For this was Earth, that planet of legend, the paradise for which all yearned and hungered to find. The world of joy and beauty and riches beyond the wildest dreams.

Instead Earl Dumarest found a landscape of unremitting hostility. Could this really be the fabled home world for which he had spent his entire life searching . . . ?



(First published 2008)

The alien spaceship landed in a cornfield. Its crew died rapidly, leaving only one survivor – a baby, conceived on an unknown world, carried in its mother’s womb across space and delivered even as the mother died on a hostile Earth.

But the alien woman had given birth to more than a child. With her last act she had bequeathed to the Earth that hated her and her kind decades of turmoil and strife that would come close to tearing the whole planet apart.

The Changeling could become anyone or anything – man, woman, child, animal. It was endowed with an inborn lust for disorder and destruction. Now it had chosen the plague-ridden planet of Alvea for its next mission – to throw an entire world into eternal chaos and madness.

The Earth Consortium could send only an embittered killer and an untrained anthropologist to hunt down the Changeling. Yet, dangerous though it was, the Changeling was not the only peril the Earthmen faced on Alvea, or the worst – for the Alveans feared and hated Earth. Even a hint of the hunter’s identities would leave them dead and dismembered within minutes

I’m Horowitz. Private eye. I work of G.O.D., Inc. – the company that rules the Labyrinth between infinite alternate Earths. Only now I’ve got new clients – vengeful rebels out to wreck the Labyrinth. But their Big Plan’s on hold: one of the inner circle’s dead, leaving eight conspirator/ prime suspends on eight private worlds.

And finding the killer’s the least of my problems. The rebels play for high stakes – and I know too much to live. If I succeed, they’ll kill me. If I stall, they’ll blow up a planet – ours. If I escape, the Company will kill me. If I stop the rebel scheme, my wife and child will be turned into mindless drug-sex slaves.

But if I don’t stop them, they’ll unleash a force that might well cremate Earths. All Earths. In all universes. Throughout all creation…

Set sixteen years after the events of The Exiled Earthborn, this explosive conclusion of the Earthborn trilogy tells the story of two brothers, the sons of Lucas and Asha, tasked with surviving the Xalan war to ensure the continued existence of the human race.

Noah, an orphan from Earth’s last days who, as a child, was smuggled to safety across the stars, is now nearly a man and a leader to the young enclave of Earthborn who reside on Sora. When the tranquility of their settlement is shattered by a shocking assassination attempt, Noah turns to his combative younger brother Erik, Lucas and Asha’s only child by blood, for aid. Their journey takes them to the remnants of a dead planet, an outlaw-infested space station, and back to Sora, whose inhabitants are bracing for a final showdown with the bloodthirsty Xalans.

They find themselves facing a new evil: the omnipotent Archon, who is somehow controlling the whole of the Xalan horde, and his bloodthirsty lieutenant, the Black Corsair, who has an unmatched taste for brutality. The Archon, so-called God of the Shadows, has unearthed knowledge that could wipe both Sorans and humans alike from the face of existence. The descendants of the Earthborn must uncover the true nature of the Archon and the Xalans before he burns everything they know and love to ashes.

In the early hours before dawn, a small Michigan town vanishes from the face of the earth. That morning the men and women of Two Rivers wake up in a world strangely different from their own – a world of curfews, food rationing and secret police.

Something has gone terribly wrong in Two Rivers, something that has to do with the mysterious government facility on the outskirts of the town. For schoolteacher Dexter Graham, who has lost his family and has nothing left he values . . . for twelve-year-old Clifford Stockton, driven by a child’s curiosity and courage . . . for Evelyn Woodward, torn between obedience to the state and loyalty to her friends . . . and for physicist Howard Poole, haunted by the memory of his brilliant, enigmatic uncle, the only way to escape the nightmare is to journey deeper into fear.

MARS: THE SKULL OF A PLANET PICKED CLEAN BY THE WIND OF TIME

North Beyond the desert of Meroe, past the ancient cliffs of the dust-locked continents, past the dry wharfs of a city that was old when Earth was new, the caravan crept into the unmapped waste called Umbra. It was into this shadowed land that the lost nation of the People had ridden and vanished-in a time beyond memory. It was here that the outworlder Ryker followed the golden-eyed Valarda and found the Child-of-Stars.

What happens when . . .

An all-powerful killing machine is equipped with a human brain on the brink of madness?

A group of apes are injected with human intelligence and build their own strange empire?

A child with an other-worldly intellect is locked in mortal combat with his own down-to-earth father?

A hand-picked space team convenes at a countdown that can mean the start of a new era – or the end of mankind?

You’ll find out when you enter . . . THE DOWNSTAIRS ROOM.

Margaret St Clair is best known for her shorter science fiction and fantasy, much of the latter written under the pen name of Idris Seabright. She has a remarkably ironic sense of humor, and many of her stories have social or philosophical themes.

Contents:
Idris’ Pig (1964)
The Gardener (1949)
Child of Void (1949)
Hathor’s Pets (1950)
The Pillows (1950)
The Listening Child (1950)
Brightness Falls from the Air (1951)
The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles (1951)
The Causes (1952)
An Egg a Month from All Over (1952)
Prott (1953)
New Ritual (1953)
Brenda (1954)
Short in the Chest (1954)
Horrer Howce (1956)
The Wines of Earth (1957)
The Invested Libido (1958)
The Nuse Man (1960)
An Old-Fashioned Bird Christmas (1961)
Wryneck, Draw Me (1980)

This is the tale of Earl Dumarest. Space-wanderer, gladiator-for-hire, seeker of Man’s forgotten home.

Dumarest’s search begins on the ghost-world of Gath, where he becomes unwilling champion of the Matriarch of Kund, and must undergo a fight-to-the-death at stormtime.

Victory could give Dumarest his first clue to the whereabouts of the planet he fled from as a child – an obscure world scarred by ancient wars, which lies countless light years from the thickly populated centre of the galaxy; a world no-one else in the inhabited universe believed exists.

Earth, the birthplace of Man.


(First published 1967)

The neighbours all said ten-year-old Paul Brandon would grow up to be a detective: he was remarkably observant and inquisitive. But Paul doesn’t grow up to be a detective; after failing to return one night, his body is found buried under a road excavation site. A tragic, unnecessary accident it seems.

But after the foreman insists that no child could move that amount of earth, Vic Varallo begins to suspect foul play and follows the leads to Paul’s reticent playmate Gordon, who may have witnessed something terrible that night.

‘My favourite American crime-writer’ New York Herald Tribune

A father must come to terms with his son’s death in the war. In Venice, an architecture student commits a crime of passion. A white southern airport loader tries to do a favour for a black northern child. The ordinary stuff of fiction – but with a difference! These tales take place twenty-five, fifty, a hundred and fifty years from now. Men and women have been given gills to labor under the sea. Huge repair stations patrol the cables carrying power to the ends of the earth. Telepathic and precocious children yearn so passionately to visit distant galaxies that they’ll kill to go. Brilliantly crafted, beautifully written, these are Samuel Delany’s award-winning stories, like no other before or since.

Only one thing could lure Hal Mayne away from his research aboard the Final Encyclopedia. It was the shattering news of the Younger Worlds’ oncoming defeat – an inevitable triumph for the cross-cultural hybrids known as the Others.

To save Earth’s future in space, Hal must journey to the planet Kultis, where the powerful alternate forces have been mastered by the top secret Chantry Guild. There, Hal Mayne will meet his greatest challenge and ultimate fate – one that will alter mankind’s destiny forever.

A collection of science fiction short stories from the master author of THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS and THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS.

In 1941, Roy Sabre’s girlfriend Betty mysteriously disappears.

Ten years later he has constructed a time-machine and his first trip is to go back to find her.

But his arrival is observed and his machine attacked and damaged as it departs – instead of returning to 1951, it travels to the far future where mankind has disappeared and the Earth is under the control of machines controlled by insects.

Roy finds that several other time-travellers, due to damage and malfunction, have been cast forward to the same time . . .

Stories included:
– “Wanderers of Time”
– “Derelict of Space”
– “Child of Power”
– “The Last Lunarians”
– “The Puff-ball Menace”

Nobel Prize-winning scientist Richard Lee has stirred up fanatical religious hatred with his controversial theory that chimpanzees and humans may have shared a common ancestor as little as three million years ago. When this hatred loses him both his reputation and his beloved colleague Marjorie, Lee retreats into hiding with his experiments and with Adam, an apelike creature thought by some to be Lee’s own deformed love-child, or even a kind of Frankenstein’s monster.
But Adam is growing up, and the astonishing secret of his genetic parentage cannot remain secret forever, especially once investigative journalist Louise Henderson scents a story in the remote Norfolk village where Lee has gone to earth.

It was touch and go for Earl Dumarest when the slavers of the Matriarchy of Onorldi struck his work camp. Had he not captured the Matriarch herself during the fight, it might have spelled his doom when the slavers triumphed.

Because, even though the odds had turned heavily against him, he was able to strike a bargain. The Matriarch’s child daughter Iduna had disappeared into the mind-trap of the Tau. If he could follow, find her, and return with her, he would have his freedom and a chance to locate the lost Earth he sought.

But Dumarest had to outwit her monster playthings, outfight her hideous horrors, and outdream her satanic fantasies . . .




(First published 1979)

The black-clad mercenaries of the Friendly planets fought where their employer and their God dictated. On New Earth they pitted their fanaticism against the cold courage of the Dorsai.

And the implacable hatred of one man, Tam Olyn. Olyn saw his brother-in-law shot down before his eyes. His quest for vengeance took him across half the civilised worlds, to Cassida and Frieland, to St. Marie and back to New Earth. He met men of all the splinter groups into which mankind had evolved an he used them all to bring about his revenge – until Padma the Exotic taught him how to use his special powers, and the frightening knowledge of Final Encyclopaedia.

From The SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal sample introduction to the incredible career of Jack Williamson, whose career spanned over seventy years.

Jack Williamson published his first SF story, ‘The Metal Man’, in 1928 and continued to write high quality SF until his death in 2006, along the way coining many of the terms the genre now takes for granted, such as ‘terraforming’ and ‘genetic engineering’. He was the second writer (after Heinlein) to be named a SFWA Grand Master and was the oldest recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. This volume contains The Legion of Space, the first volume in the eponymous series; The Humanoids; John W. Campbell Award-winning Terraforming Earth and his Hugo Award-winning autobiography Wonder’s Child: My Life in Science Fiction.

The newly discovered planet of Senisran is a veritable paradise, its oceans dotted with thousands of lush islands containing vast deposits of rare-earths and minerals. But Senisran is also the Humanx Commonwealth’s problem child, for each island is inhabited by a different tribe of aboriginal natives. Each has to be negotiated with separately for mining rights – and the Commonwealth is locked in a race against the vicious AAnn Empire to secure those rights.

The clans of the Parramat Archipelago on Senisran are resisting entreaties by the Commonwealth and AAnn alike. But Pulickel Tomochelor, xenologist and first-contact specialist, is confident of his ability to handle to negotiations.

What Pulickel hasn’t counted on is the secret of Parramat: the strange green stones that the natives use to bless the crops, ensure plentiful fishing, heal the injured and ill, and control the weather. For within those stones lies an awesome technology the origin of which is lost in time – a technology that has to be kept from the AAnn at any cost.

The Humanx Commonwealth: Book Six.

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?

Richard Garrison was once a corporal in the British Military Police, until a terrorist’s bomb destroyed his eyesight and his career. Repaying Garrison for saving his wife and child from the blast, millionaire industrialist Thomas Schroeder introduced him to the Psychomech, an amazing machine that could either gift its users with astonishing mental powers – or destroy them utterly.


Having successfully harnessed the Psychomech, Garrison discovered the Psychosphere, a strange plane of existence where mental abilities were all. Thought became intent, word became deed, and Garrison became unto a god.


Two decades later, Garrison is utilising his unique powers to explore the universe. On Earth, his son, Richard Stone, is happily in love, until his beloved falls victim to “The Gibbering”, a plague of madness that destroys men and women by destroying their minds. There is no obvious cause. There is no cure. There are no survivors.


When Richard Stone is himself infected by The Gibbering, the mental powers he inherited from his father enable him to defeat the madness, at least for a while. Then, to his horror, Stone discovers that the Psychomech has run amok and that The Gibbering is the result! Even though the insanity it creates batters his struggling mind, Stone realises he is the only man with the knowledge and power capable of destroying the berserker mind-machine.

All around us, under most of humanity’s very noses, lurks a dangerous alien race. The Nafikh inhabit human bodies while visiting Earth, and an underground system designed to disguise and protect them from being discovered allows them to indulge their wildest and often violent urges. The circumstances of these brutal visits require the sacrifice of servs.

Servs are aliens themselves, created by the Nafikh to attend to their every need. Physically indistinguishable from humans, they are destined to live in pain, their very livelihood regulated by the Source, a powerful force of energy inside each of them that burns like a white-hot fire under the stress of their servitude.

Lucy is a serv who arrived a baby, and by chance was adopted by humans. She’s an outcast among outcasts, dwelling in both worlds but belonging to neither. For years she has been walking a tightrope, balancing between the horrors of her serv existence and the ordinary human life she desperately longs to maintain, her family unaware of her darkest secrets.

But when the body of a serv child turns up and Lucy is implicated in the gruesome death, the worlds she’s tried so hard to keep separate collide. Hounded by the police, targeted in the dog-eat-dog world of servs, she’ll find herself fighting to protect her family and the life she’s made for herself. Skinner Luce is Lucy’s story.