Search Results for: matter

A man at a masquerade discovers that one guest has come a long, long way to attend – and that some disguises reveal more secrets than they hide. This collection of 21 short stories by Gregory Benford, who won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Nebula for his novel, “Timescape”, is a remarkable introduction to his writing.

Even for a redhead, Helen Dester was wild – she’d driven one guy to drink and made another jump out of a top-floor window.

Glyn Nash realises that to tangle with her will be dangerous. But he has no option if he wants a share of the $750,000 insurance money Helen stands to gain if her husband dies accidentally – or even if he is murdered.

It’s wartime London. Inspector Gringall of the Yard, long-time friendly rival of private detective Slim Callaghan, sends Slim on a mission to meet Doria Varette, a torch singer at Ferdie’s Place.

Callaghan knows Gringall has something up his sleeve. And when, backstage, Doria asks him to take on a job – to find her boyfriend Lionel Wilbery, a poet with the wrong friends and a drug problem – Callaghan finds Gringall has more than a missing person in his sights.

C.T. or Seetee, contraterrene, is also known as anti-matter. It is untouchable by the normal matter universe… yet men must learn to control it, or die!

Makstarn was ugly, an outcast in the midst of the beautiful people of his tribe. Where they were tall and slender, he was short and squat. Where they were golden, touched with the beauty of the dawn, he was black and hairy . . . and hated by those of his own generation. It little mattered that the Elders respected him for what he was . . . and for what his father, Max Quest, had been; the young were all that mattered.

And their hatred drove him at last from the tribe, and on an impossible journey in search of the memory of his father . . . and in search of his own manhood.

Lawyer Jesse Falkenstein thought his secretary Miss Williams was a remarkably efficient typist, but he felt she had drawbacks as a legal secretary. She had an earnest face, unfashionable tight curls and she irritated him very much. Jesse wished he could fire her.

But she’d been his secretary for nine years, so even when, on a particularly busy day, she called to say that an urgent matter would keep her away from the office, Jesse didn’t fire her. He also didn’t realise how urgent the matter was until it was almost too late . . .

‘My favourite American crime-writer’ New York Herald Tribune

White Flag for Earthmen

Man had discovered a means of colonising the galaxy. Through a system of instantaneous matter transmission, men, machines, anything, could be sent light years away in seconds!

Only, men were not the only beings in the galaxy who were expanding, and at 200 light years from Earth the alien Gershmi people made their claims clear, with guns!

It would have been a fair fight between equally matched races, had not the very matter transmitter boxes which had made mankind’s expansion possible, suddenly began to put men back together, 200 light years from Earth, with their will to fight removes, so that Earthmen were marching with white flags of truce straight into Gershmi fire!

Videssos was beset by enemies abroad and had fallen into decadence at home. But on his first night in the imperial capital, The Empires health mattered less to Krispos than finding a dry place to sleep.

A science fantasy tale about a brilliant scientist who discovered a universe where mind rules matter, and the courageous men and women who battled treachery, rebellion and hellish alien forces, to found a colony there.

In Veritas, people have been conditioned to always tell the truth, no matter how unnerving the truth may be. Jack Sperry must learn to lie in order to save his son in this witty science fiction novella. Recipient of a 1992 Nebula Award.

After the Gorgorian barbarians conquer the civilized kingdom of Hydrangea, their leader Gudge makes himself king, marries Hydrangean Princess Artemisia and settles down to a highly satisfactory life of drinking and debauchery.

Royal triplets, separated at birth because of a Gorgorian superstition that multiple births suggest the mother’s infidelity, receive very different upbringings. The only girl, Avena, is brought up in the palace as Prince Arbol, heir to the throne and a fearsome swordsman. One brother, Wulfrith, is raised by a shepherd; although a young ewe is his favorite companion, his size makes him a fearsome battler. The other brother, Dunwin, reared by the outlawed wizard Clootie, develops into a talented magician.

War and wizardry, dark deeds and derring-do, matters of state and matters of the heart, and a dragon who thinks she’s a sheep. . . . This modern fantasy is the ultimate saga of flashing swords, high magic, and hopeless dynamic confusion – an event fans of the genre will not want to miss.

Mankind was at war with the hideous Gool…and losing. Then, beyond Ganymead, one man fought the searing brain probe of an alien spy…and won. He mastered the power of its telepathic mind-control, captured the secret of its matter transmitters, and learned how to destroy the Gool Overlords. He called intelligence with news of the victory and headed home.

Straight into a barrage of Terran nuclear warheads.

Past missiles, shells, and assassins, he made it home – alone, badly wounded, and branded a traitor by conventional Terran wisdom that said no one could survive the Gool brain probe. No one, that is, except a brainwashed puppet deliberately allowed to survive to serve the Goos as a spy.

But he must survive Earth’s attempts to kill him – because no matter how much his fellow humans want him dead, he knows that he is the only one who can lead them against the Gool and have a chance at victory.

Three memorable creatures world jump in a meta-cosmic universe that orbits with nightmarish landscapes that thrive on anti-matter, anti-space, and anti-time. What mind and body searing challenges await the Pilger, Pilgrim, and Polder, who are really one man?

As the mighty spaceship Skylark roamed the intergalactic spaceways, scientist Richard Seaton and his companions found a world of disembodied intelligences. A world of four dimensions where time was insanely distorted and matter obeyed no terrestrial laws – where three-dimensional human intellects had to fight hard to thwart malevolent invisible mentalities…

Working on the theory that an electronic current variation is set up by thought processes within the human brain, Alex Larsen and his fellow scientists developed a system of telepathic cerebral communication. Nothing, it seemed, could be more valuable. Here was a soundless means of communication without complex or bulky equipment. But there was the matter of a mysterious thought-voice that interrupted the experiment…

“If you have any interest at all in satire, SF’s New Wave, the Sixties, pop music, comic books, the picaresque tradition in literature, juicy, vigorous, humorous writing, or even such a trivial matter as how the world of 2003 got into the state we daily observe, then you owe it to yourself to read Sacred Locomotive Flies.” – Paul Di Filippo

A terrible civil war was tearing apart the kingdom of Detina, a land which could no longer be half serf and half free. When the new ruler, King Avram, decided to liberate the blond serfs upon which the northern provinces depended, the north rebelled, taking Grand Duke Geoffrey as their King.


Neither side expected an easy victory. The south was larger and wealthier, but the north had better soldiers and more powerful wizards. Led by officers riding unicorns, supplied by flying carpets, both sides had clashed for three bloody years, as the tide slowly turned against the north.


But the war was far from over: The north had found a far more competent general, and he was determined to hold Peachtree Province. When the southrons attacked, they faced formidable obstacles both natural and manmade, as well as the deadly repeating crossbows of the northern rebels and the sorcerous storm and lightning wielded by the northern wizards.


Still, the very survival of Detina as one united realm was at stake, and King Avram’s forces had no choice but to attack, no matter what the odds, no matter how desperate the situation…

Called to the end of time by a being they knew only as The Face of Ea, four adventurers from the twentieth century faced a power that not even the super-science of that era could meet – the nekron, negative matter, negative force, ultimate destruction for everything it touched. It seemed hopeless to expect them to win this battle for the fate of the universe – but between them they had a power they themselves could not suspect.

Starships are grounded, interrupting vital inter-stellar commerce, all the highly-developed industries have stopped, man turns to the primitive sources of animal fat and wood for light and heat. With civilization waning, the young scientist Kleon, sentenced to death for using precious conserves of power in an attempt to generate vast energy from dead matter, makes a spectacular bid for the freedom of the whole universe.

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!

The second title in the popular Harpur and Iles series.

Five teenage girls have been raped and murdered, and the criminal is still at large. Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur, assigned to the case, is a tough hunter, but so is the ‘Lolita man’ watching the school playgrounds. Now it looks as if the daughter of Harpur’s friend may be the latest victim. Virtually obsessed with the urgency of the matter, and hampered by the bitter police rivalry that is jeopardising the case, Harpur decides to go it alone.

Baron Jim is in the thick of it again. Somehow he’s found himself taking on England’s oldest enemy – the French – who have entered into an unholy alliance with a most fearsome horror: the mighty serpents of the deep underseas. Nobody has battled them before; nobody even realised they could leave the sea. And with the serpents as their allies it’s only a matter of time before the French invasion succeeds – unless Baron Jim can stop them.

Usually, Crosstime Traffic concerns itself with trade. Our world owns the secret of travel between parallel continuums, and we use it to trade for much-needed resources with the worlds next door; preferably without letting them know about any of that parallel-worlds stuff. But in one parallel world, Crosstime Traffic is present, not to trade, but to study what went wrong.

In a Los Angeles where nuclear war broke out back in 1967, survival is a matter of neighbourhood versus neighbourhood. When the Westsiders block Sepulveda Pass, the inhabitants of the San Fernando Valley are forced to fight back. With the help of some prewar machine guns, the Valley prevails, and their forces occupy the Westside.

In this brutal world, Liz and her family are undercover Crosstime Traffic agents living near the ruins of UCLA. Dan is a soldier in the occupying Valley army. Dan thinks Liz is the most impressive woman he’s ever met. Liz thinks she’d better avoid Dan if she wants to protect the mission.

To complicate matters, when Dan catches Liz in the UCLA library, he fears she may be a spy for the Westsiders. After all, what reason could anyone have for reading about the Old Times, if not to figure out how to reconstruct old weapons systems?

Then a real spy for the Westside government-in-exile shows up at Liz’s house…

It’s never easy being a knight, especially for a practical Eudoric Dambertson, whose mind and temperature are better suited to trade than to the highly impractical demands of chivalry. Take the simple matter of courting a wife. To please his potential father-in-law, the enchanter Baldonius, the young man must bring back two square yards of dragon hide. Only then can he earn his knightly spurs and the hand of the beauteous Lusina. But battles with dragons always seem to go better in the ballads.