Search Results for: mutiny-in-space

A Wall Street trader leaves the bulls and bears – and comes face-to-face with hungrier dinosaurs. A Roaring ’20s gangster gets roughed up – by real cavemen. A pioneer hitches up his covered wagon on the Oregon Trail – and winds up in a modern shopping mall. And Roger Tyson, who thought the space-time continuum had finally settled down to normal, is flung helplessly from the distant past to the far future, and back again.

Superbeings from the end of time are struggling for control of the universe with aliens from another galaxy. And if a few random humans get caught in one of their time gates, they don’t much care. So Roger and his friends find themselves facing everyone from the cast of the original Mutiny on the Bounty to real pirates of the Spanish Main in a wild quest to their own time and bring everything back to insanity as usual…

In luck and out of luck, John Grimes was a living legend of the spaceways. He had been an officer of the service, he had been the victim of a mutiny, he had discovered lost worlds, he had served under strange masters and on strange ships, but he had never turned space pirate. Until this adventure.

How it happened was a complex story to begin with, but typical Grimes luck. How he became the terror of the star lanes developed, as usual, from his own efforts to make an honest living and other’s efforts to use him for devious diversions.

This is a story of the loot of the stars, of how Grimes graduated from operator of a space courier ship to master of a fleet of dreaded carriers of the skull and crossbones!

The Iralians were humanoid and techically free citizens of the Galactic Empire. But as slaves they were prized above all others, for they had the unique capacity to transmit acquired knowledge through heredity. And so when the space mercenary Wanderer was hired by GLASS (Galactic League for the Abolition and Supression of Slavery) to take a cargo of Iralians home it was going to be a simple task!

For one thing, they’d be hunted by interstellar slavers for their priceless passengers.

For another, the Iralians themselves had other ideas which included mutiny and high treason.

And for the third and worst, they were too close to the Horsehead Nebula, whose capacity for warping time, space and the dimensions was a permanent Red Alert for all spacecraft.

The remains of an exploded radio-active planet reach the outer solar system in the course of their plunge across interstellar space. A massive fragment crashes into Pluto. Earth’s scientists determine that it is set to mutate into pure energy which will explode Pluto and threaten the equilibrium of the solar system. A mission is quickly mounted for a spaceship to reach Pluto and neutralise the meteorite before it can trigger a chain reaction. The problem is that the crew will have only 110 hours to reach Pluto, which means a constant acceleration and intense, prolonged physical suffering for the crew, The authoritarian Captain Rapier has his hands full to save the mission when mutiny breaks out…

Kill and die. That was the battle tactic of the Tinkers, rough, vicious interplanetary invaders who would rather die than be captured alive. Controlling them in some way were The Six – an occult group that had learned how to duplicate human beings and use them as pawns in a grandiose plan to control interstellar space.

Defending civilization against this onslaught were Rey Cottrell, a war consultant without even a fortress from which to fight his battle, and Captain Brixby, a lone idealist faced with mutiny when he tried to take his ship into the combat zone. Their chances seemed hopeless – especially since Cottrell suspected that there were supernatural forces involved that could take over the whole galaxy!

All Verrill wanted to do was to get to Mars, to Port Mercham where a ship was getting ready to take the Big Jump to the stars. But he was stranded on Venus, without money, papers, or weapons, with nothing but a keep-sake between him and starvation and the revengeful fury of the powerful Brotherhoods – and charity was a forgotten word.

How, with foreign papers, he fought and won the right to a berth, discovered a subtle plot to smuggle narcotics and defeated a mutiny. How he fought a desperate battle with the menace of the Sun and escaped from Mercury, and how, at last, he managed to reach his objective, make a story of high adventure.

This is a fast-moving, hard-hitting tale of the future, of rocket ships and the men who guide them across the wastes of space, of the perils and dangers waiting at every turn. A story which paints bright colours across the pages of unwritten history, and brings to life the lives of those yet unborn.

This collection by Lucius Shepard, one of the most exciting new writers to emerge in the 1980s, includes the eponymous story ¿Barnacle Bill the Spacer¿, about an attempted mutiny on a space station, which won the Hugo Award, as well as ¿Sports in America¿, about a man who finds out just how far he is willing to go when he is hired by a local crime boss to kill a man. In ¿All the Perfumes of Araby¿ a small-time smuggler is granted a vision of the future that compels him to change his life, while ¿Human History¿ is a post-apocalyptic adventure story with a hint of decadence. ¿The Sun Spider¿ is a romance of sorts, with a decidedly gothic twist, while in ¿Beast of the Heartland¿, a boxer at the end of his career is lured back into the ring with the promise of one last big payoff. And anyone who has ever completely lost themselves in a piece of music will recognise the inspiration for ¿A Little Night Music¿. Shepard’s stories are not just wonderfully three-dimensional characters dealing with life-changing events; they are filled with colours, textures, sounds and smells, as he describes his backgrounds with as much care as a master painter.