Search Results for: coming,-the

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…

The fifth title in the popular Harpur and Iles series.

Sarah Iles’ latest young lover, Ian Aston, and the seedy gangland club he frequents both possess the intense attraction of the forbidden. When one night at the Monty they witness a fatal knifing, they unwittingly learn far too much for their own good of a deadly plot that could, if successfully executed, rearrange the city’s criminal power structure.

Immediately, the unfaithful wife and petty criminal become targets of both police and underworld observation. In Come Clean Bill James once again explores that no-man’s-land of law enforcement, where human concern and naked expediency stand perennially at odds with each other.

After eight hard years in San Quentin prison, Runyan is out and ready to lead a quiet life – an honest life. But certain people have been planning for the day of his release – people who desperately want the two million dollars in diamonds Runyan was carrying just before he went to jail … Like the insurance investigator who arranged his parole. A beautiful woman who wants him alive. The unknown killer who definitely wants him dead.

Runyan goes to recover the diamonds from where he has stashed them, so he can buy his way out … but the diamonds are gone. Now he must pull another robbery – something he swore never to repeat – and use the proceeds to stay alive.

The story of how a man can commit a brutal murder, confess, and get away with it!

The killer was guilty without a shred of doubt. The police had him behind bars. The district attorney had plenty of evidence. But – no court in the state could convict him!

The Bigger They Come features that fast-moving, skull-cracking team: Bertha Cool, a two-hundred pound “lady” who uses the language of a longshoreman. And Donald Lam, a pint-sized process server who would have been in the morgue long ago except that he can think faster than the next man … or woman.

The Terridae believed the lost Earth was heaven and utopia combined. In their artificial planet, they moved slowly through the universe in search of it. And in their eyes, the rediscovery of Earth was to be the Event.

Now they said the Event was coming! Earl Dumarest – who was born on Earth and knew the truth – was an unwelcome visitor among them. If they knew of Earth’s whereabouts, they were not telling him.

But another Event was already on its way. A Cyclan ship was rapidly approaching the Terridae’s world, confident that this time Dumarest would fall into their heartless clutches.

Dumarest was not ready to flee – but if he stayed there would be no Earth for him, only a long, lingering doom.





(First published 1982)

The Coming Race draws upon ideas of Darwinism to describe a near-future world characterized by female dominance, physical perfection, and vast technological progress.

When two corpses are found in a small English village, all who have a go at solving the crime are completely baffled, and spur the local Chief Constable to investigating. Local gossip, blackmail and a family feud form the ingredients that point towards the perpetrator …

‘A top-notch murder yarn that is guaranteed to leave its readers baffled until the 11th hour’ Boston Herald

PC John Bragg is young and full of ambition, and with his eye on making Superintendent one day, he squares up to each case that comes his way as an opportunity to show himself brave, reliable and a good detective. In town and country, at scenes of murder, robbery, fraud, abduction, military and industrial spying and arson, PC John Bragg’s character grows as his mettle is tested.

From dealing with artists’ models in a murder case, to ensuring a bejewelled, high-spirited American heiress doesn’t attract the wrong sort of attention, to protecting the pay destined for a staff of quarrymen, PC Bragg has his work cut out for him.

When the cities left Earth, they exchanged a simple environment for one of constant, sometimes shattering change. The Universe was littered with cultures in every conceivable stage of development. Only the iron hand of the germanium-backed economy and occasional interventions by the Earth police imposed some kind of order on the spaceways. Even John Amalfi never got used to the life – and he had been mayor of New York for nearly five hundred years now.

If you’re a human, the deadliest game.

You may consider yourselves experienced hunters. You have hunted on many planets. But here things are different.

For there are no mindless monsters or charging carnivores, but a devious, intelligent and dangerous prey.

A prey who is out to get you before you get him.

Man!

The Conversationalist sat among the boxes, trying to interest the friends in history. “The Compulsory Transfer Act was passed in 2056,” he was saying, “with the dual object of reducing the birthrate and preventing the wastage of valuable minds through death. It might fairly be said to have changed the face of civilisation.”

“I’ll say!” rasped one of the friends.

“If it wasn’t for the Act, I’d have been in a physical body now, instead of being in this damned box!”

“If it wasn’t for the Act, you’d have been dead this last hundred and fifty years,” pointed out the Conversationalist.

“You’ve probably has four physical bodies by now, a total of one hundred and sixty years of active life. And just twenty years in a box. That’s not bad!”

The problem of immortality had been solved in the 21st century: when you reached forty, your brain was transferred to the head of a six-month-old infant. In that way, you obtained another forty years of life, until you could do it all over again. But nobody could have foreseen the dramatic manner in which the birthrate would fall – resulting in a growing waiting list for host bodies, and the creation of Friendship Boxes to house the brains of those who waited. The Friendship Boxes proliferated: a grumbling section of the community, a constant source of embarrassment to every politician…Until the day it all came to a head.

There are some parts of the world where change comes slowly. There are other placed where it scarcely comes at all. In really remote areas time stands still. The passing of the centuries means no more than the passing of clouds across a leaden sky.

In the wilder regions of eastern Europe and the dark forests of Transylvania ancient derelict castles moulder away in medieval gloom. There are deadly secrets behind the decaying walls.

Karina was running away from the Secret Police. She accidentally stumbled upon the hidden headquarters of a coven of witches, warlocks and necromancers and as a result she found herself pursued by a thing that was not of this world. Karina had three desperate problems; to rescue her lover from the Secret Police; to save her brother from the coven; and to escape from the inescapable.

Farrell Brannigan, President of the National Californian Bank, is an extremely successful man. So when he builds another bank in an up-and-coming town on the Pacific coast, he is given worldwide publicity, and this new bank is hailed as the ‘safest bank in the world’.

But Brannigan’s success comes at a price and he makes enemies on his way up the ladder. It seems one of them is now set on revenge and determined to destroy both the bank and Brannigan himself.

When Chet Carson broke jail he thought he’d found a safe hideout in a lonely filling station. But instead he finds himself caught up in a dangerous threesome – an elderly owner, his gorgeous wife, Lola, and a safe with a fortune inside, which Lola wants. Her chance comes when she uncovers Chet’s identity and threatens him with jail unless he opens the safe.

Chet is in dead trouble. If he lands in prison again he’ll be crucified, but if he opens the safe Lola will pin the rap on him anyway. Somehow there has to be a third way …

A collection of science-fiction short stories by the author of “Lucky’s Harvest”. They feature dozens of characters, a new way of travelling between the stars, a strange planet, magical powers, bravura set-pieces, and manoeuvres of narrative.

THE COMING OF THE BLIGHT
It seemed as though the world was eroding right under everyone’s feet. Stories disappeared from magazines; the baron’s silver coat of arms, polished in the morning, was pitted with corrosion by afternoon; toadstools were springing up from every corner. And these were but the first signs of the coming plague, a cancerous orgy of patternless vitality seeking to engulf the world…

TO STEM THE TIDE
Carefree Johnny Curlon, indelicately plucked from his fishing boat one evening, is bluntly informed by high powers that he is a man destined for a role in great affairs: only his unique powers can prevent the coming probability crisis that threatens to turn the world into bubbling chaos…

Operation 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.

After the collapse of civilization, when the social fabric of America has come apart in bloody rags, when every man’s hand is raised against another, and only the strong survive.

“Jeebee” Walther was a scientist, a student of human behavior, who saw the Collapse of the world economy coming, but could do nothing to stop it. Now he must make his way across a violent and lawless America, in search of a refuge where he can keep the spark of knowledge alive in the coming Dark Age. He could never make it on his own, but he has found a companion who can teach him how to survive on instinct and will.

Jeebee has been adopted by a great Gray Wolf.

Come to Majipoor, the magnificent, exotic planet of LORD VALENTINE’S CASTLE. Come with Hissune, favourite of Lord Valentine, as he probes the deepest secrets of Majipoor’s long past in the depths of the great Labyrinth.

Join Hissune as he becomes one with its many peoples – dukes and generals, thieves and murderers, Ghayrogs and Metamorphs – and discovers wonder, terror, longing and love, and learns the wisdom that will shape his destiny.




(First published 1982)

“If it pleased Ruethen of the Long Hand to give a feast and ball at the Crystal Moon for his enemies. He knew they must come. Pride of race had slipped from Terra, while the need to appear well-bred and sophisticated had waxed correspondingly. The fact that spaceships prowled and fought, fifty light-years beyond Antares, made it all the more impossible a gaucherie to refuse an invitation from the Mersian representative. Besides, one could feel delightfully wicked and ever so delicately in danger.”

It is the common fate of empires to grow old and jaded: Rome, Byzantium, Britain, America, and so on to the Empire of Terra itself, each has near the end succumbed to the same weary “sophistication” that allows a warlord of Merseia to make a mock of a race whose star-conquering ancestors found the Merseians a race of pre-technic barbarians huddled in stone piles – and saved them from extinction. Flandry himself has come to understand that there is no more point to all his victories than that a few trillion of his fellow creatures may live out their lives before the coming of the Long Night of galactic barbarism. That he will not have shortened that coming Dark Age one bit – only postponed it. That the barbarians always win in the end, and are always followed by a new round of civilisation.

In relentless pursuit of Earl Dumarest come the emotionless minions of the Cyclan. Seeking the body-switching formula which would make them masters of the universe, they must seize Dumarest alive to gain his secret.

It all comes together on the world of the Guardians, where in the great temple of their fanatical faith, the true co-ordinates of Earth are listed. There Dumarest will battle the Cyclan . . . while the fate of all humanity hangs in the balance.




(First published 1985)

Nobody knew where it had come from, or what it wanted. Not even Jaive, the sorceress, could fathom the mystery of the fabled beast. But Tanaquil, Jaive’s completely unmagical daughter, understood it at once. She knew why the unicorn was there: It had come for her. It needed her. Tanaquil was amazed because she was the girl with no talent for magic. She could only fiddle with broken bits of machinery and make them work again. What could she do for a unicorn?

The story of the great King Hadding is one of the darkest and most violent to come down to us from the old North. Hadding was raised by giants far from his rightful throne, as his father, a Danish king, was slain shortly after Hadding’s birth. But the time comes when Hadding feels he must reclaim his legitimate place in the land of the old North. He must endure ferocious battles, the charms of voluptuous Valkieries, and a War of the Gods to rival Armageddon.