Search Results for: gifts

THE GREKS WERE PEOPLE-HATERS

They came to Earth in their space ship, bearing fabulous gifts – such as machines that did any day job automatically, and fertilizer that made plants shoot up overnight. But they presented their gifts with contempt, and with a look in their eyes that made people feel “creepy”.

Still, because of the brave new world they promised, they Greks could be forgiven anything – until they left and people discovered the machines were breaking down. Then their only choice was to beg the Greks to come back, on their own terms. And they knew the terms would be hard…

Dudley Carnforth, gifted beyond the average with the ‘gift of the gab’, and also a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ scientific and master of none, decides that the time has come to end his grasshopper leaping from one job to another and do something really arresting which will put him on top of the world. Born in an age where space travel is just around the corner but not yet accomplished, he conceives the notion of pooling the many sciences he almost understands and producing therefrom a master plan for the conquest of space…

Brenden Vetch has a gift. With an innate sense he cannot explain to himself or describe to others, he connects to the agricultural world, nurturing gardens to flourish and instinctively knowing the healing properties each plant and herb has to offer. But Brenden’s gift isolates him from people, and from becoming part of a community – until the day he receives a personal invitation from the wizard Od, to serve as a gardener in her great school of wizards. But even Brenden isn’t fully aware of the full extent of his power – and the true reason Od has recruited him …

Lavan Chitward is a very unhappy young man; pulled away from his country home by his parents’ ambitions and resettled in the big city of Haven, he is desperately lonely, bullied and beaten at school, ignored by his parents. It is not surprising that he falls ill — but his illness is the first manifestation of a terrible power, the Gift of the Firestorm, a power which can and does kill. If controlled, the Gift of the Firestorm can save Valdemar, but if it is uncontrolled, it will destroy the country — and him. Chosen by the Companion Kalira, brought into the ranks of the Heralds of Valdemar, Lavan finds acceptance and hope for the first time. But war with Karse threatens to engulf the Kingdom and only Lavan Firestorm stands between Valdemar and destruction — and only then if he can harness his dreadful power to his will.

The sword that Garth had stolen from Dusarra marked him as the chosen of Bheleu, god of destruction, and gave him immense power. This power could only be used to destroy, and Garth wanted to build. He chose to refuse the god’s gift. Bheleu did not intend to allow that.

The Earth teemed with life of all kinds, and many besides man had intelligence and the gift of speech. But chaos ruled. And violence. And despair. Then, in the Valley of the Dead, Sheen first entered the world, and all of the life would bend to the might of the Supreme One before the final push to the stars.

A collection of short stories from the award-winning author, Kate Wilhelm. Contains the following:
The Mile-Long Spaceship Fear Is a Cold Black Jenny with Wings A Is for Automation Gift from the Stars No Light in the Window One for the Road Andover and the Android The Man without a Planet The Apostolic Travelers The Last Days of the Captain

The stories in this groundbreaking collection – including the Nebula Award-winning ‘Rachel in Love’ – effortlessly cross the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, blending visionary storytelling with uncompromising realism. They reveal the extraordinary range, depth, and insight that imbue all of Murphy’s work, confirming her as one of the most gifted authors of short fiction writing today.

They had come – on the first day of the world as it now was.

They stalked over the world with cold, alien indifference.

They are the Slavers, alien invaders on an embattled Earth. In this brutal world, Finn Ferral is a young huntsman with a dangerous gift – he is wild and instinctive, more wolf or hawk than man.

When his father and sister are captured by Slavers, Finn follows – right to the heart of the Slavers’ lair…

Beyond Evolution.

A certain gifted engineer accepted the Theory of Evolution until he wandered by chance into a museum. In that museum was the skeleton of a dinosaur, and the skeleton got him thinking and enquiring, with terrifying results.

Attempts are made on his life and then, in a horrifying time-shift, he finds himself naked and unarmed in the distant past, facing one of the very creatures which had aroused his interest – a dinosaur!

When Dr. Mark Haslam encounters Esau Jones, he’s astonished to learn that Jones can perform apparent miracles. But despite his amazing gift of complete mastery of mind over matter, Jones is content to remain anonymous, living the life of a country rustic. Until, that is, the Earth faced destruction when Haslam’s atomic experiment goes horribly wrong-spreading an advancing tide of dissolution…Decreation!

On the Eve of the Fourth Millennium a slowly-building civilization, struggling out of the rubble of the Drowning, was crushed beneath the sceptre of a powerful and repressive Church. But on the Eve of the Fourth Millennium the sound of a magical pipe was heard, and the air was filled with songs of freedom and enlightenment. And on the Eve of the Fourth Millennium the Boy appeared, bringing the gift of sacrilege, a harbinger of the future, heralding the arrival of the White Bird of Dawning. It is the coming of a New Age. A glorious future bearing the presents of the past!

The inhabitants of a planet called Iszm, a species known as the Iszic, have evolved the native giant trees into living homes, with all needs and various luxuries supplied by the trees’ own natural growth. The Iszic maintain a jealously-guarded monopoly, exporting only enough trees to keep prices high and make a great profit. The protagonist, Ailie Farr, is a human botanist who goes to Iszm (like many others before him, of many species) to steal a female tree, which might allow the propagation of the species off world and break the monopoly.

This volume includes two short novels, previously published separately – the title story, and Nopalgarth (published as The Brains of Earth). The collection is rounded out by two of his best shorter works – “The Gift of Gab” and “The Narrow Land”. “The Narrow Land” was the first of a proposed story sequence which was never completed.

Contents: The Houses of Iszm, The Gift of Gab, Nopalgarth (The Brains of Earth), The Narrow Land

All Jack Vance titles in the SFGateway use the author’s preferred texts, as restored for the Vance Integral Edition (VIE), an extensive project masterminded by an international online community of Vance’s admirers. In general, we also use the VIE titles, and have adopted the arrangement of short story collections to eliminate overlaps.

When Caroline leaves hospital her sister Fenella insists that she must convalesce in her house in the West Country. But, in the event, Caroline’s visit is far from restful.

Fenella’s husband is moody, excitable, reckless and inexplicably affluent, and soon the brooding atmosphere explodes into violence and murder . . .

‘Her great virtue, exceeding even her meatily logical plotting and gift of hitting often on really intriguing situations, is her portrayal of people’ The Times

Aubrey was a student, gifted in the fine art of wizardry. But the more knowledge he acquired, the more he wanted to learn. So he travelled to a faraway land in search of the greatest master of all, the powerful shape-changer Glyrenden. From him, Aubrey expected to discover the secret of long-lost spells and the mysteries of arcane magic.

But there was one discovery he never expected, one mystery he risked everything to solve.

Her name was Lilith.

Mike Hurst, tormented by events that happened five years ago, returns to the cottage he still owns and the location of past revelations.

The place hasn’t changed, but the people have, and he finds himself involved in a fresh net of personal discoveries, all rooted in the past and bedevilled by it, but all making it more difficult for him to find the solution he has come back to seek …

‘This is a haunting novel for the thoughtful reader by one of Britain’s most gifted storytellers’ Chicago Tribune

In this collection of eight stories by one of America’s most gifted writers, Helen McCloy takes the reader into a world of mystery and imagination.

In the signature story – ‘The Singing Diamonds’ – Mathilde Verworn enlists the help of Basil Willing, a psychiatrist-sleuth, to answer the question of whether there is such a thing as collective hallucination. Six people from six different locations testify to seeing diamond-shaped objects in the sky, and four of those six have died in peculiar circumstances in the past twelve days …

POWER!

Perhaps the rarest gift in the world is that ability to read the future, to know what will happen to a person, a group, even a country, and when it will happen!

EXTRASENSORY PERCEPTION

The year is some indeterminate time in the future; Mickey Grant and Anna Enesco are involved in special studies for people who have shown extraordinary ESP talent. Their progress is as frightening as it is incredible.
But when our government sends them on missions that become increasingly dangerous and difficult, are their lives the price of their special pre-knowledge?

A Star Above It and Other Stories is volume 1 of a collection of Chad Oliver’s SF, containing the following:

Blood’s a Rover
The Land of Lost Content
The Ant and the Eye
Artifact
Any More At Home Like You?
Rewrite Man
The Edge of Forever
The Boy Next Door
A Star Above It
The Mother of Necessity
Night
Technical Advisor
Between the Thunder and the Sun
The One That Got Away
Transfusion
Guardian Spirit
The Gift
To Whom It May Concern
A Stick for Harry Eddington
Old Four-Eyes

A hidden labyrinth beneath the Canadian wilderness where dwarfish Lords and Ladies ride humans like horses – and plot the final downfall of mankind. Bart Dybig is a “Steed”, but one gifted with mental and physical abilities unsuspected by those who have enslaved him. Soon, he vows, he will surprise the Lords and escape to the world above – if there’s a world to go back to.

For the Earth Lords are building a doomsday device of unimaginable power to completely destroy mankind. Only Bart and his strange heritage can stop them.

Ward Jackson and his wife make an incredible spaceship journey, exploring every planet in the solar system from Mercury to Pluto, in an attempt to unravel the cosmic mathematical mystery of the number 9 by finding machines and clues buried on each planet by a long-vanished alien race. Jackson believes that the ninth son of a ninth sun should have the inherent gift of leading his race to domination if the continuity was not broken. A rousing interplanetary odyssey based in the odd facts surrounding the number 9 as outlined in the famous Ripley’s Omnibus Believe it Or Not.

Jacque LeFavre is a tamer – a member of one of the tough and honed exploration teams that, since the dramatic discovery of the Levant-Meyer Translation, humankind has been able to send to the stars. And Jacque’s first world is the second planet out from Groombridge 1618. It isn’t an especially promising place; the planets accompanying small stars rarely pan out. But the strange and mysterious creature that Jacque and his colleagues find there, with its gift of telepathy, leads to contact with the alien and enigmatic L’vrai, and confronts humankind with an awesome opportunity – and appalling danger.

Dogeron Kelly, a walking bomb of a man, suddenly appears in elegant – and not so elegant – New York circles with a suitcase containing a quarter of a million dollars. There are rumours, but no one is certain where he, or the money, came from. It seems he is out to claim his inheritance – or is there something else he is after?

Sharon Cass, for instance: a bright and beautiful girl with some very special gifts for the right man.

Whatever it is, Dog Kelly isn’t telling, but his search takes in a baronial old family manor, the higher reaches of international illegal trafficking, paid mobsters and the rich and famous …

The King’s Rider Justin has been dispatched to watch any suspicious activity at the convent that houses the fanatical Daughters of the Pale Mother. Worshippers of the moon goddess, they believe that all magic-wielding mystics are evil. Yet, in their midst, a young novice named Ellynor possesses the gift of healing and the ability to move through the night unobserved. Assuming the guise of a stablehand, Justin befriends Ellynor – and love blossoms between them. And when he discovers her magical talents, Justin will risk everything – his own secret, the trust of his friends, even his very life – in order to save her…