Search Results for: flesh

His face badly burned in a motor accident, young Robert Struve is horribly disfigured.
Unable to afford corrective surgery, and denied lawful redress against the rich man whose daughter was responsible, Struve wears his scars as a badge of honor, excelling at school and sports. The social pressure is intense however, and he is treated harshly by his peers-young men and women alike. When his frustration boils over, he assaults a girl.
In a correctional institution, as a ward of the state, he undergoes reconstructive surgery.
Years go by. Then one of the girls involved in the incident is murdered, her face mutilated. A second and third are killed in similar fashion; is Robert Struve involved? No one has seen him, since his incarceration…
Written in the late 1940s, The Flesh Mask was Jack Vance’s first success as a mystery writer, launching his Edgar-winning career. The story was first published in 1957, as Take My Face, under the pseudonym “Peter Held”.

What if when Columbus came to the New World he found, not Indians, but primitive apelike men who were soon dubbed “sims”?

These immediate ancestors of modern man were less effective hunters, allowing prehistoric creatures such as mammoths and saber-toothed tigers to survive. Unable to learn human speech or conceptualize at a human level, sims could, however, be trained to do reliable work… as slaves.

Author of the Nebula Award winning Timescape, Benford’s first collection of short stories demonstrates the extraordinary range of his imagination. The stories contained within are a perfect introduction to the work of one of our greatest SF novelists and thinkers.

A mysterious invisible barrier suddenly enclose a small, out-of-the-way American township. The agency is a galactic intelligence intent on imposing harmony and co-operation on all peoples – but fear of the unknown reduces man to the most illogical behaviour.

Vitus Adamson is falling apart. As a pre-deceased private investigator, he takes the prescription Atroxipine hourly to keep his undead body upright and functioning. Whenever he is injured, he seeks Niko, a bombshell mortician with bedroom eyes and a way with corpses, to piece him back together. Decomposition, however, is the least of his worries when two clients posing his most dangerous job yet appear at his door looking for their lost son.

Vitus is horrified to discover the photo of the couple’s missing son is a picture-perfect reproduction of his long dead son. This leads him to question the events of his tormented past; he must face the possibility that the wife and child he believed he murdered ten years ago in a zombie-fugue have somehow survived . . . or is it just wishful thinking designed to pull him into an elaborate trap?

In the second book in the Legion of Space series, Jay Kalam, Hal Samdu and Giles Habibula fight The Cometeers, an alien race of energy beings controlling a “comet” which is really a giant force field containing a swarm of planets populated by their slaves. The slave races are of flesh and blood, but none are remotely similar to humans. The Cometeers cannot be destroyed by AKKA, as they are incorporeal from the Universe’s point of view and exist for the most part in an alternate reality. The ruling Cometeers feed on their slaves and literally absorb their souls, leaving disgusting, dying hulks in their wake. It is said that they do so, as they were once fleshly entities themselves of various species. Hence, the ruling Cometeers keep other intelligent beings as slaves and “cattle.” They fear AKKA, though, as it can erase all their possessions.

Is there a Destiny? Does Fate impose a limit? What Barrier stands between man and the creation of life?

Since the legendary failure of the ill-fated Frankenstein, man has tried time and time again to pass those limits. He has created androids, clumsy robots of flesh and blood. He has made men of metal and servants of plastic, with wheels for limbs and magnetic tapes for voices. Man has made things by cross breeding the animal kingdom and destroying Nature’s intentions…but man has never yet made man. Or has he?

Forbisher thought that he had the answer. It wasn’t a clumsy Synthetic. It wasn’t an Android, or a Robot, it was a real flesh and blood human being.

The beautiful woman in his arms was the product of a laboratory experiment, not the result of a natural biological process. But how could he prove it?

They had existed from time immemorial, hidden in a space warp far beneath the the surface of the Earth. Until now, their only form of nourishment had been a strange hallucinogenic grain. Now, they hungered for human flesh. The Earth was to be their stockyard and mankind their meat…

In answer to an unanswerable future, science has created Bohn, the omnipotent computer whose flashing circuits and messianic pronouncements dictate what tomorrow will – or will not – be.

But Matthew Oliver is flesh and blood and full of questions – not nearly as certain as the machine he’s appointed to serve.

And the right hand of science seldom knows what the left hand is doing . . .

Malevolent aliens, the Mordri Three decide to become so evil that God himself will have to stop them. They can alter flesh with a simple touch, literally turning people inside out or seeding them with cancer. The Three have already destroyed an entire solar system and most of their own race. Their next targets: mankind and Earth!

On Earth, Scott St. John is mourning his wife when he is struck by a golden arrow of light – a fragment of the soul of Harry Keogh, the original Necroscope – and gains powers he does not understand. A mysterious, beautiful woman appears, desperately trying to warn Scott about something . . . then vanishes midword. Scott dreams of a very unusual Wolf, who begs him – in human speech – for rescue.

A fledgling Necroscope, a telepathic Wolf, a beautiful woman from beyond the stars, the ghost of Harry Keogh, the best of E-Branch’s psychic fighting forces, and a dead girl who is not yet ready to seek her just reward must defeat three impossibly strong, psychically gifted monsters whose touch literally melts flesh from bone.

Simeon Krug’s obsession is to see a tower built, on kilometre high, that will reach out to answer the voice from space. The Androids are his tools; superb, man-like creations of Man. The Androids take Krug for their God, and seek to become one with flesh-and-blood mankind through his wisdom. But Krug is not God – and it takes a God to control the terrible emotions Krug has stirred . . .

It is the dawn of a new era of space exploration and colonisation. Dagny Beynac, descendant of the legendary Anson Guthrie, becomes a heroine of a new Lunarian civilisation that struggles to break free of the influence of Earth.

Centuries later, the entire solar system is dominated by a vast network of machine intelligences. On Earth and Luna, splintered fragments of humanity search for some way to survive in a system that no longer seems to hold a place for flesh and blood.

And the only solution lies in the distant past, in the life of Dagny Beynac.

DRACULA?

A mere figment of superstition, a thing that could not exist.

SABELLA?

A very real person, an enticing girl of flesh and warmth – who detested the sunlight, who required the blood of young men to feed upon, who was all that Dracula was said to be except never one of the “undead.” Sabella was alive, sensual and dangerous.
She lived on Nova Mars, a colony of Earth and very much like the world we know. She knew what she was and her very existence was a peril to the all-too-human population of that world.

Abner Harris was sent to Earth on a mission of extreme urgency. The universe was in danger of enslavement by the Medlins, and the fight against them called for Harris to assume the disguise of a flesh-and-blood Earthman.

But he discovered that the real villains of space were not the Medlins or the people of Earth: they were his own kind.

Suddenly he was alone, alienated from his own race, hated by the Medlins, and an imposter on Earth. No matter what side he chose he’d be a traitor.

Yet choose he must – or remain for ever a man without a planet.




(First published 1963)

JANDAR THE LOST ALIEN

…in the mysterious and treacherous domain of the insidious Mind Wizards. Searching for him is a fearless armada of his loyal friends, and a stranger who knows him better than anyone on Callisto. The stranger, Lankar, is none other than Lin Carter, accidentally transported through the Gate Between the Worlds to the land of the Thanatorians. Aware of Jandar’s plight, Lankar joins the search beyond the world’s edge and suddenly finds himself battling for his own existence against the most nightmarish creatures on the planet – the gruesome flesh robots of Kuur and the fiendish Mind Wizards of Callisto themselves…

The planet beckoned them from space – and closed round them like a Venus Fly Trap!

Assailed by strange perils and even stranger temptations, the little group stumbled towards its destiny – Mike Ross, the pilot, Sara Foster, the big game hunter, blind George Smith, and the odious Friar Tuck.

Before them was a legend made flesh, around them were creatures of myth and mystery, close behind them stalked Nemesis. The doll, the little wooden painted doll, was to be their salvation. Or their damnation, for each might choose, and find, his own Nirvana.

The lavalite world is a world of slow but constant change. Here mountains rise from plains, or sink into rifts; new oceans form as vast hollows collapse and seas rush in. There is only one escape from this world where the very landscape moves. The one gateway to other universes is in the palace of the Lord Urthona. Paul Janus Finnegan – also known as Kickaha – must reach it if he is to survive. And he must do so despite the Lords Urthone and Red Orc, the hired thug McKay, flesh-eating vegetation on the run, beasts of prey and planetary pseudopods.

Poul Anderson wrote stories ranging throughout time and space, from the near future to the far future, tales set on Earth, other planets, and galaxies distant… sometimes with a bit of time travel added to the brew.

Call me Joe is the first of a multi-volume compendium of Poul Anderson’s best works from a writing career that spans over 50 years and contains 26 stories, including:

“Call Me Joe”
“Enough Rope”
“Starfog”
“The Helping Hand”
“The Man Who Came Early”
“The Sharing of Flesh” (1969 Hugo winner)
“Time Patrol”
“Tomorrow’s Children”
“Wildcat”

It all began when someone tried to push Creed into the flesh pool to be ingested. The assassination failed, but Creed was never the same again. Because it launched the new cliff-dwellers of Creed’s colony onto a new course of life – which could lead to humanity’s re-emergence as Earth’s masters.

In those far future days, Earth’s masters were two trees. Not trees as we know them, but two Everest-high growths, whose sentient roots and fast-growing branches dominated every living thing on the world. Men lived between their arboreal combat.

Marooned! The pulsating Well World Saga continues…


As Volume Three opens, Mavra Chang has been a prisoner on the Well World for eleven years. Her once human friends are now grotesquely mutated, and her own body is monstrously changed.


Mavra is abandoned. Her only hope, the planetoid circling above her, containing Obie, the supercomputer that could restore her body. But Obie can only be reached by entering the northern hemisphere, where no creature of blood and flesh can exist. yet Mavra’s eyes were shining. After all these years the great game was on again, the game she was born to play…

When Odin’s curse fell upon him, Harald Swiftaxe, the young Norse warrior, lusty in love and battle, was fully human no longer. He was incensed with the animal rage of the god’s devotees, the Berserkers. The snarling ferocious savagery of the bear possessed him. Immune to fire and steel, frenzied by the smell of blood and the sight of torn human flesh, he was driven to the worst of human deeds . . . The stench of fear was meat and drink to him, and cowering women learned of his cruel, insatiable lust.

The bear screeched its ecstasy – yet at times the man dimly understood the horror. Could the demon god be killed, the spell lifted…? If there was a way, the price of failure would be high, greater than death itself . . .

“When Kinsolving’s Planet crosses your path, beware!”

Commodore John Grimes would have done well to heed this warning. But the evil magic of Kinsolving draws him on, pulling him on a journey through the universes. Is Grimes a swiftly facing literary ghost, doomed to disappearance for the inadvertent theft of a meerschaum pipe? Or, is he a flesh and blood Commodore, sailing the spaceways from world to world, enjoying dangerous voyages to momentary safe ports?

It does not matter what role is the “true” John Grimes for none can protect him from the grasp of Kinsolving’s Planet, an abandoned colony which reaches out for man, for the target, John Grimes, who is inexorably sucked toward his final destiny …

Science and technology seem to advance in wild leaps. Something tremendous is discovered, then there is a breathing space. War accelerates the process of discovery. Primitive man discovered the wheel, the lever, fire and language. After the Dark Ages there was a great upsurge of scientific discovery. Amazing new knowledge was added almost daily. Today progress is faster than ever. The Twentieth Century is the Age of the Machine. Men use machines. Tomorrow, machines may use men. Imagine a world where everything is dependent on automatic machinery. Imagine a world where men have forgotten how to service the machines that serve them. Imagine the chaos, the horror and the conflicts when the machines begin to fail. Are flesh and blood superior to metal and plastic?

On the mysterious Well World, the evil tyrant Josich and his dark agents search desperately for the eight scattered pieces of the fabled Straight Gate. Whoever possesses the Gate will wield enormous power, travelling between universes at the speed of light and wreaking havoc across galaxies.

Opposing Josich is a small band of travellers new to the Well World. There is Core, once a machine, now flesh and blood; Ming and Ari, two minds sharing a single body; Jaysu, an angel; and Ghengis O’Leary, a lizard being. Unbeknownst to them, they have an unlikely ally: a vengeful entity who is able to clone any person or object with a single touch – and mete out death just as swift…