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A daring novel of mankind’s strange and startling destiny. . .

Here is a novel to equal Arthur C. Clarke’s great work, Childhood’s End. It tells with frightening clarity of a desperately stricken Earth – wracked by overpopulation and plagued by famine and despair.

It tells, too, of a new breed of men and women – twenty-first century lotus eaters caught up in a mysterious euphoria which will ultimately threaten all life on this planet: the drug-induced world of ‘happy dreams’. Do these ‘happy dreamers’ herald the end of the human race – or the next extraordinary step in the evolution of Man?


First published in 1963.

Earth’s last hope?

The Arc, a being of immense power, trapped within a continuum too small, fights for its freedom. Its monumental struggle will touch a few select individuals on Earth – and in doing so, change their lives forever. The Arc may also be the last hope for humanity’s survival.

Author’s Note: The volumes of this series can each be read independently of the others. The feature that unifies them is their individual observations of science fiction’s sub-genre: “space opera,” which the editors David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer define as “colorful, dramatic, large-scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character and plot action, and usually set in the relatively distant future, and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone. It often deals with war, piracy, military virtues, and very large-scale action, large stakes.”

The Dreamlands! Created from the dreams of men, haunt of gods and demons, the other side of Death’s portal…

Professor Leonard E. Dingle, lecturer on the subconscious mind of man. Deceased.

David Allenby Hero, fantastic artist of the macabre and supernatural. Also deceased.

Or should we simply say they have undergone…a transition?

A transition indeed – for under the aliases of Eldin the Wanderer and Hero of Dreams, their present occupations include keep-climbing, wizard-slaying, swordmastery and amazing adventuring in the land of Earth’s dreams!

All the signals seemed set at “go.” For Earl Dumarest had found people who believed in the legendary Earth. He had found the coordinates of the Sun and its attendant planets. And he would have the starship with a faithful crew of colonists for whom Earth was the paradise of their dreams.

But before he could reach that ideal moment, Dumarest would have to fight his way out of a demonic Cyclan trap as well as unravel a very tricky web of planetary conspiracy.

Only if he could achieve those desperate goals would he be able to set out on what he hoped would be the final lap of his long galactic trek . . .




(First published 1982)

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 moon is inhabited by the amorphous moonbeasts and their servants, the horned-ones of ill-regarded Leng… also by the monstrous lizard-God Mnomquah who came down with mighty Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones out of the stars when the world was young and Chaos ruled. But now the Mad Moon of Dreams is falling – on Earth’s Dreamlands!

In a pit in ruined Sarkomand, Mnomquah’s aeon-destined mate, Oorn The Awful, awaits her lord and master’s coming. Then, to celebrate their mating, the mad moon will disintegrate and rain death on all the lands of Earth’s dreams!

Dreamland needs an army of heroes – and has only a handful. But such a handful! Join David, Hero and Eldin the Wanderer, the Eidolon Lathi, Zura of Zura, Curator, Gytherik the Gauntmaster – and all the rest – in their epic quest to the…
MAD MOON OF DREAMS

Conn, the son of a melon planter on the planet Poictesme, returns home after five years on Earth, studying.

And spying.

The planet had been used as a military staging point during the last interstellar war between the Federation and the System States Alliance, and somewhere among the leftover war debris on the planet is rumored to be the supercomputer that won the war.

Many believe that this supercomputer can provide the answers to lift Poictesme out of economic stagnation and make it a prosperous place again. Conn has been gathering information just for this purpose – the search is on…

It looked remarkably like a sterile, cold metallic coffin. It was the Intuitive Computer, a fantastic invention that would allow a user to assume the identity of any historical figure – Napoleon, Cleopatra, Hitler – anyone who ever existed. The possessor of this top-secret device would be able to witness the building of the pyramids, the crucifixion, the discovery of America.

The Intuitive Computer would revolutionise the studies of history, archaeology, anthropology; it would eventually revolutionise the entire entertainment and leisure industry. The lives of every person on Earth would be changed because of it.

IT WAS PROBABLY THE MOST DANGEROUS INVENTION IN THE HISTORY OF THE HUMAN RACE.

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!

I’m Sam Horowitz. My wife Brandy and I are private eyes – and belly-up broke. This is why we agreed to trace Martin Whitlock, a hotshot banker who’d skipped town over $2,000,000 in laundered drug money. Not our usual sort of case, but even filthy mob lucre pays bills.
The trail led from a posh mansion to a hick burg called McInerney, Oregon – and to G.O.D. Inc: the geeks who hawk overpriced garbage on late night TV. That’s where we found our man…too often. There were three Mary Whitlocks, same prints. But one was female. One was dead. We got busted. That wasn’t the worst.
The mob rip-off was only one move in a caper to take over crime – not the Mafia but something bigger. A hell of lot bigger. Because McInerney, Oregon wasn’t just off the map…It was off the edge of the Earth.
And Brandy and I were being taken for a ride – into The Labyrinth of Dreams.

The daughter of rich but neglectful parents, Terisa Morgan lives alone in a New York City apartment, a young woman who has grown to doubt her own existence. Surrounded by the flat reassurance of mirrors, she leads an unfulfilled life-until the night a strange man named Geraden comes crashing through one of her mirrors, on a quest to find a champion to save his kingdom of Mordant from a pervasive evil that threatens the land. Terisa is no champion. She wields neither magic nor power. And yet, much to her own surprise, when Geraden begs her to come back with him, she agrees.Now, in a culture where women are little more than the playthings of powerful men, in a castle honeycombed with secret passages and clever traps, in a kingdom threatened from without and within by enemies able to appear and vanish out of thin air, Terisa must become more than the pale reflection of a person. For the way back to Earth is closed to her. And the enemies of Mordant will stop at nothing to see her dead.

After laboring for thousands of years, the people of Earth, fleeing ecological disaster, have built a new, clean, stable world on a worldwide platform erected over the entire land surface of the Earth. Everything is going well–except for Carl Magner, the man who’s been having bad dreams. He shouldn’t be having dreams at all, because dreams have been banished from the society of the Euchronian Millennium, but somehow he is, and his dreams are showing him the “Underworld.” The real surface of the Earth, the Underworld that the Euchronian Millennium has left behind, still maintains life, human and otherwise, life that’s adapted to a world without sky or sun, still evolving in response to extreme environmental challenges. Dreams are only dreams, but they’re a provocation nevertheless, not merely for Carl Magner, but for the whole of Euchronian society. Can Heaven be truly Heaven, if Hell still festers in its entrails?

THE EARTH’S REAL LANDLORDS ARE SURFACING. HERE. NOW…From the darkly fantastic worlds of H P Lovecraft’s world-famous Cthulhu Mythos comes a grimly compelling novel of the Ultimate War, between men – and monsters spawned in Hell!For millennia, men have strutted in puny pride over the fragile surface of the Earth, arrogantly proclaiming themselves masters of creation. But now their feeble investigations have disturbed the planet’s original rulers far beneath the globe’s crust. And mankind’s placid dreams are about to be wrenched into shattering nightmare.’They were here before man evolved. They are older than our oldest legends, predating the very dinosaurs. They call to use in our dreams and make us… do things!’They are THE BURROWERS BENEATH. And they’re surfacing right now. Right here…

Life on Earth was intolerable – and yet Man had stayed there, his dreams and potential suffocating under the dead weight of bureaucracy.

The stars were attainable – thanks to the Infall Drive – but only a few heard the call of deep space. Some had already gone to colonise a new world. The second ship was ready at last. Ready to escape the Earth’s prison; ready to seek refuge in deepest space. But it wasn’t only freedom that awaited it…

How Kemlo won his spurs in the first and last great Battle of Space. For, yes, even to Space, that final goal of all Man’s earthly dreams, enmity and war eventually came. But in Space, as always in the end on Earth, good was to triumph over evil – though not until a hideous and terrifying danger had been averted.

This is the gripping story of the collision between two vastly different human civilisations. One is Earth in the early 21st century, rushing toward self-inflicted nuclear doom. The other is the distant world of Mollan, whose inhabitants have achieved great longevity and the power to transport themselves instantly from star to star.

Bob Shaw’s novel unfolds a tale which spans thousands of years and the reaches of interstellar space. On Earth’s side, there is Denny Hargate, whose indomitable courage drives him to alter the course of history. On their side is the Gretana ty Iltha, working on Earth as a secret observer, who dreams of returning to the delights of her world’s high society, but who gets caught up in a cosmic train of events leading to an explosive climax.

The far-flung fingers of Earth’s civilisation touched many corners of the galaxy, and among them was the beautiful planet Yan. Here the colonists lived a peaceful, almost idyllic life, amid ancient and secret relics, co-existing with their strange and compatible neighbours.

The arrival of Gregory Chart, the greatest dramatist ever, whose productions were played out in the skies, and whose actors were also the audience, could only disrupt and destroy once the Yanfolk were aroused from their dreaming indifference . . .



(First published 1972)

OUT FROM THE GREEN WORLD: Humans had colonized the planets & lost its birthright. Civilization was a lonely chain of space stations linked by terror. The Empire kept the pioneers enslaved with a weapon that shattered any protest into screaming insanity.
All they had left was the dream of someday returning home. Until their dream exploded in the holocaust that destroyed the Earth. But the embers of their dead planet sparked a brain-blasting revolution that swept the galaxy: a revolution of exiles in an alien universe-with nothing left to lose.

Artificial intelligence has been developed to a point where human intelligence can be uploaded into a computer, achieving a sort of hybrid immortality. Astronaut Christian Brannock welcomes this technology that will make it possible for him to achieve his dream and explore the stars.

A billion years later, Brannock is dispatched to Earth to check on some strange anomalies. While there he meets Laurinda Ashcroft, another hybrid upload. Brannock and Laurinda join forces and investigate Gaia, the supermind dominating the planet, and learn the truth of her terrifying and secret plans for Earth…

Winner of the John W. Campbell Award for best novel, 2001

If wishes would only come true; how often has every human being thought that? How wonderful life would be if only we could have everything we ever dreamed of?

But the man who invented the dream-machine turned out to be the worst enemy humanity ever encountered! The dream became as real as the reality – and yet remained a figment of the imagination. And thereby the very foundations of civilization were undermined. Why strive – when you could get it all without effort?

Reality Forbidden is the unusual novel of what came afterwards. Of the world in which only the most rigid of terror kept cities standing, and of the man who dared to escape that world, to find the last place on Earth where dreaming was not prohibited, and where one could not only have one’s cake, but eat it as well!

The dream of being a superman came true for Max Quest – and immediately turned into a nightmare.

He was not alone. There were Others with extraordinary powers, and the last thing they wanted was another superman on Earth – especially one working for good instead of evil.

They couldn’t kill him. But they could send him . . . elsewhere.

Elsewhere was the viciously hostile world of Qanar, where Max’s powers didn’t work and sorcery was a more potent weapon than science, where shadows were as menacing as steel. Max Quest still had to save Earth from the corrupt threat of the Others – but he found his destiny intricately linked with that of Qanar as well. And somewhere in space-time was his lost love . . .

Old Earth has reached its Third Cycle, a tired planet basking in the faded glories of a lost civilisation. Long ago it had been great – but the pride and greed of its rulers had brought about a terrible downfall.

And now Earth was threatened. Far out in space an alien race waited. Once they had been the victims of a crime perpetrated by the human race – now they were ready to return as conquerors. As a Watcher, Tomis had spent his life searching the skies for signs of the impending invasion. And when it finally came, it was to disrupt not only his world but his whole life in a way he had never dreamed was possible.


(First published 1969)

It is sometime I the near future. The nations of Earth have drawn closer together – there is even hope of a new era of co-operation and progress will soon begin.

These dreams of lasting peace are shattered by one momentous discovery. One of the members of an international team of scientists stationed on the moon has found an alien spacecraft – with all its incredible technology and weaponry intact. The discovery shatters the illusion of peace on Earth, as each nation joins the mad scramble to learn the terrible secrets entombed by alien visitors eons before.

Only one thing prevents total war – Werner Brecht, the discoverer of the vehicle, is the only one who knows its location, and he has disappeared into thin air.

Sea Venture, CV for short, is the largest ocean-going vessel ever built by man. It is not a ship but a huge sea habitat housing a scientific research station, an entire city of two thousand permanent residents and a thousand passengers.

For some, CV is the vacation dream of a lifetime; for others, a vision of man’s conquest of the seas; for two men it becomes the arena for a deadly game of cat and mouse.

But for one, CV is something else: a place to stalk its next victim. It is not human, it is not even of Earthly origin. To be touched by it is deadly.

What important are the hopes and dreams, fears and schemes of the people of Sea Venture when they are threatened by a force that could destroy all of human civilization?