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The Cradle was the starting point of the strange alien race that had colonised the galaxy while Man was still a cell floating in a warm primeval sea, From here must have surged the expanding tide of life that had built the enigmatic ruins, the constructions of rare and priceless materials. Beings who had left their mark for the new and curious race of Man to stare at, and to wonder at the mystery of the Cradle-the golden hoard of undreamed wealth for the first men to discover it.

To Rex Tendris and his two friends came the coordinates that could lead them to the legendary treasure. They set out on a voyage to find it-but it was a voyage into hell!

A machine that enables the living to communicate with the dead threatens to allow angry and vengeful ghosts to reenter the world of the living and enact cruel revenge.

Helena, second in command of the Empire Of Earth’s security forces (and daughter of its head), has disappeared. She knows the identity of SOTE’s two most highly trained operators and their lives are now in danger . . . they have to find her before she can reveal their identities.

Getaway World is the fourth book in the Family d’Alembert series.

A Trader had no home – yet was at home everywhere.

From the Chill settlements to Cap City, from the Strine Interior to the Darklands and out to the space colonies, the Traders were always on the move.

They did the deals, turned contacts into contracts. They collected information, exchanged technologies, undertook espionage…

Always outsiders, welcomed warily at best, at risk always, they and their systems were everywhere but belonged nowhere.

To be a Trader was to live by your wits, survive through training and experience and to relax only with other Traders.

Mikal Asparian was about to enter the world of the Traders.

In the penultimate book of Captain W.E. Johns’ space adventures, the crew of the Tavona travel yet further and see yet more unbelievable sights!

First up is the planet Krona, whose seemingly youthful inhabitants can live for centuries. What is in their food that sustains them? Is this something that could help revolutionise medicine as we know it? Of course, something so valuable will always have its hunters – and not all of them are as virtuous as the Professor.

Tiger and his team will need to protect the natives of Krona, and persuade them that Earth is no threat in order to win the day!

Over twelve generations the descendents of a space crash on a world completely covered in water had managed to adapt to their marine culture. Living in villages built on giant clumps of sea plants, they survived on the flora and fauna of the sea. But they have always been at the mercy of the kragen – gigantic squid-like monsters that prey on their fish flocks, and on them. The biggest of these is King Kragen, with whom the colonists can communicate, who has to be appeased. But one man has had enough of a life of slavery and sacrifice. But how can he convince his fellow men that King Kragen must be killed? And how can that be achieved in a world without weapons?

The opening of The Fugitive Worlds finds Toller Maraquine II – grandson of the hero of The Ragged Astronauts and The Wooden Spaceships – bemoaning the fact that life on the twin planets of Land and Overland has become dull and uneventful compared to the stirring times in which his illustrious forebear lived. Then, while on a balloon flight between the worlds, he makes an astonishing discovery – a rapidly growing crystal disc, many miles across, is creating a barrier between Land and Overland. Precipitated for personal reasons into investigating the enigmatic disc, Toller – armed with only his sword and boundless courage – becomes a pivotal figure in events which will decide the future of entire planets and their civilizations.

Atomic war! Men had started the war, overriding the desires of their women and plunging the world into an orgy of destruction. Finally, when the vast armies of men had finally been shattered, women took over as rulers.

Under successive Matriarchs, the world was slowly recovering, diverting the vast war potential to peaceful purposes. To keep the world free of war, the Matriarch employed official assassins under the chief of Security Police. It was felt that the death of one person was an acceptable price to preserve the lives of many. But when the Matriarch ordered the assassination of Don Burgarde, an apparently harmless young man, her personal secretary, Lyra, decided to intervene.

The seeds of rebellion had been sown…

Something is rotten in tomorrow’s computer world¿

The time is in the not-too-distant future. Physical work is done by robot devices. Men and women are endowed at birth with a sum of credit called Inalienable Basic. Everyone operates with a Universal Credit Card – which is also identification, police record, medical record, and many other things. Every detail of life in the United States of the Americas is stored in the International Data Center, located in Denver.

Paul Kosloff, a language teacher who lectures over National Tri-Vision is rescued from a mysterious assault by a secret agent of the authorities who insists that only he, Kosloff, can prevent the International Data Center from being destroyed – and every living being’s data wiped out.

Kosloff goes forth – into a maelstrom of plot and counter-plot, murder, treason – and worse¿

On the gold-symbol world of Beresford’s Planet, Richard Kirby lived in total luxury. As a member of “The Set” his life was a never-ending round of planetary party-hopping. The only restriction imposed on him – that he never put down on any world marked with a red or black symbol – was something that he had always accepted without question.

That is, until his brother Alec was murdered in cold blood! Alec had been an undercover agent to those forbidden planets, and in order to avenge him, Kirby had to find out for himself what was really happening there.

But with the start of his investigation, Kirby found out quickly that the authorities meant business when they said “Hands off!” The secret they were protecting was of vital importance, and it now became a matter of life and death, not only to Kirby, but to all the inhabitants of THE CHANGELING WORLDS.

In a world stripped bare of digital images and promotainment, unveiled with the audiovisual overlay of the ImmaNet, in an exposed world, a naked world, Amon Kenzaki awakens, lost and alone. He must now travel deep into the District of Dreams in search of Anisha Birla, the one person that might help him unravel the mystery of jubilee. But deprived of the apps and informational tools he’s depended on his entire life, traversing the largest bankdeath camp on Earth is no easy task.

Inside an ephemeral labyrinth of slowly-dissolving disposable skyscrapers clogged to the limit with the bankdead masses, Amon soon finds himself face to face with two dangerous groups: a luddite cult called the Borginans, who preach bizarre superstitions about electronic banking, and a supposedly humanitarian army called the Charity Brigade, whose mandate of protecting the bankdead conceals opportunistic motives.

Taking refuge in a hospital that strives to improve conditions in the camps, Amon begins to work towards its cause and reconciles himself to his newfound poverty. But when political forces threaten the community’s existence and the lives of its members, he is forced to team up with a vending-machine designer, an Olympic runner, a fertility researcher, a corporate tycoon, and many others to expose the heinous secret festering at the heart of the action-transaction market he once served.

In book two of the Jubilee Cycle, Eli K. P. William delves beneath the surface of his cyber-dystopian Tokyo to unearth the fate of outcasts trapped in its depths and shine a light on the financial obstacles blocking one individual’s efforts to help them.

Rob Merlin was the best engineer who had ever lived. That was why “The King of Space” had to have him for the most spectacular construction project ever – even though Rob was a potentially fatal threat to his power…


Thus begins a breakthrough novel by the former President of the American Astronautical Society, about an idea whose time has come: a shimmering bridge between Earth and space that mankind will climb to the stars!

A mind-shaking glimpse into the future of the earth: a brilliantly imagined, horrifyingly plausible glimpse into a world where the social elite, the Uppers, live in absolute luxury, boosting themselves with ‘Joy Juice’.



The ‘Joy Juice’ is the vital life fluid extracted from the workers, the second class citizens whose life is a constant search for and movement from one trip, one hallucination to the next. It is only when the workers are tripping that the Uppers can extract the ‘Joy Juice’.



But what happens when the good trips turn into bad ones? When pleasant dreams become nightmares?

One star-chained evening in a Manhattan bathroom, Carl Schirmer spontaneously combusts! His body transforms into light, mysteriously snatched from his banal life by an alien intelligence 130 billion years in the future. There, all spacetime is collapsing into a cosmic black hole, the Big Crunch – and a bold, cosmic destiny awaits Carl. Rebuilt from the remnants of his light by extraterrestrials for a cryptic purpose, he awakens in time’s last world, the strangest of all – the Werld.

At the edge of infinity, Carl discovers the Foke, nomadic humans who travel among the floating islands of the Werld. The Foke teach him how to live – and love – at the end of time, and he loses his heart to his plucky guide, the beautiful Evoë. Their life together in this blissful kingdom that knows no aging or disease brings them to rapture – until Evoë falls prey to the zotl, a spidery intelligence who hunt the Foke and eat the chemical by-products of their pain. In order to save his beloved from a gruesome death, Carl must return to Earth – 130 billion years earlier – where he is shocked to discover that the Earth he’s come back to is not the one he left.

Can he meet the harsh demands of his task before the zotl find him and begin ravishing the Earth?

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.”

A dozen years had passed since Mark Fraser and his family had fled to Ganymede, hoping to find the peace and freedom which had eluded them on Earth. Now violence and terror had pursued them to their new-found home: Captain Swayne and his battleship Vega had made landfall on Ganymede and were using its resources to build missiles with which to hold Planet Earth to ransom. For the second time, Mark Fraser was a marked man, running for his life. His only chance of escape was to a third planet: Jupiter. But as Fraser knew only too well, Jupiter itself was the scene of conflict and carnage. And so far no human being had ever breathed its atmosphere and lived to tell the tale!

What did our ancestors dream of when they gazed up at the stars and looked beyond the present?

A Journey in Other Worlds races far ahead of the nineteenth century to imagine what life would be like in the year 2000. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Earth is effectively a corporate technocracy, with big businesses using incredible advances in science to improve life on the planet as a whole. Seeking other planets habitable for the growing human population, the spaceship Callisto, powered by an antigravitational force known as apergy, embarks on a momentous tour of the solar system. Jupiter proves to be a wilderness paradise, full of threatening beasts and landscapes of inspired beauty, where the explorers must fight for their lives. Dangers less tangible but equally deadly await the Callisto crew on Saturn, which yields profound secrets about their fate and the ultimate destiny of mankind.

Alien Ghetto.

The men of Earth were spread thin across the galaxy – and little welcome where they did appear. They lived on sufferance, disliked by their hosts and intent on spreading hatred to the stars! Unable to live in peace in their own worlds, they would sow their seeds of discontent among the peoples of the galaxy, as all the hatreds of mankind simmered under alien rule. But revolution against Earth’s alien hosts would mean – for all mean – the end of the stars!

Between the lines of the official histories of the frontier worlds of the 29th Century lie myriad confidential accounts of the boners, near-catastrophes, and interstellar crises that were bound to occur when human meets non-human. The adventures of CDC (Corps Diplomatique Terra) diplomat Jame Retief loom large in six highly classified missions where brain and brawn save land and lives despite red-tape bound superiors amid conspiracy and conflict across alien planets – guaranteed astounding, amazing, startling, galactic, weird, and thrillingly wonderful.

The Solar System is ours. Biotechnology has provided the Settled Worlds with a riot of habitable environments; sentient craft ply the routes between the planets; the souls of the dead live on in the Noosphere, a psychic Net where they can be contacted by the living.

Paradise? Not quite – and when a strange womb is recovered from a living spaceship crashed on Mars it swiftly becomes the focus of intrigue and murder as the Settled Worlds begin to disintegrate under the strain of a vicious interplanetary war between two rival factions.

Almost a set of short stories, this novel breaks into discrete episodes, centered on identity, love, and death. Jaqe has no identity until she meets Laurie, introduced and named by Mother Night; in that moment, she knows herself, and that she loves Laurie. But once Mother Night has become part of their lives, Laurie and Jaqe and their daughter Kate cannot live as other people do. Knowing Death, inevitably each of them seeks to use the knowledge, to bargain with Death, and to change the terms in the balance of life and death in the world. Pollack’s characters, major and supporting, living, dead, and divine, are memorably human. As she transplants myths and folklore into a modern setting, she gives new life to old tales and a deeper meaning to a seemingly simple world.

Winner of the World Fantasy Award for best novel, 1997

Seven very special people blending to create a higher form of humanity…

A laughing man living alone on a mountain top, guarding the world…

The returnees, men who live again and again, century after century…

A dog-ape plappergeist who can be seen only from the corner of the eye…

And a young man named Foley, very much like you or me, who begins to find out about these people and these things, and how they are shaping the destiny of the world…

The ability to distinguish reality from fantasy is supposedly the root of sanity.

But if a man lives in two worlds, and both are real, what then? Is he mad, or sane? One person, or two? And if one of his worlds should begin to grow dim, a shadow world, could one say he was in danger of going sane?

The time: 1979

The place: a top-secret US Air Force base in the Cotswolds

The actors: carefully selected, healthy-living personnel

The missions: long-range reconnaissance flights

The problem: is there any connection between these flights and the growing menace of a strange blood-cancer disease that is spreading through the world? Several of the more intelligent and intuitive realise that there is. There are those who retain their integrity, and doing so, lose their lives; and there are those who live silently in their knowledge, condemned to lives of emotional death.

The tetraploids, giant men and women created by genetic experiment, only wanted to live their lives in peace, but they had to live in the world of the jealous ‘normals’ who gathered in screaming mobs with murder in their hearts.

Sena, the heroine of this remarkable science fiction novel, is a tetraploid giantess whose youth would last more than a century, who looked with wonder at the toy bridges and houses of normal men and women who regarded her with fear and revulsion. Beautiful, defenceless Sena was the first of a new race, but would she be allowed to live . . . ?