Search Results for: notions

In a parallel-world 21st-century San Francisco where the Kaiser’s Germany won World War One and went on to dominate the world, Paul Gomes and his father Lawrence are secret agents for our timeline, posing as traders from a foreign land. They run a storefront shop called Curious Notions, selling what is in our world routine consumer technology – record players, radios, cassette decks – all of which is better than anything in this world, but only by a bit. Their real job is to obtain raw materials for our timeline. Just as importantly, they must guard the secret of Crosstime Traffic – for of the millions of parallel timelines, this is one of the few advanced enough to use that secret against us.

Now, however, the German occupation police are harassing them. They want to know where the Gomeses are getting their mysterious goods. Under pressure, Paul and Lawrence hint that their supplies come from San Francisco’s Chinese…setting in motion a chain of intrigues that will put the entire enterprise of Crosstime Traffic at deadly risk.

While in Rome, art student Chuck Musgrave is offered a job painting pictures of Positano, a picturesque town south of Naples. When Chuck arrives in Positano, strange things begin to happen. It becomes clear that not all foreigners living in Positano are there for the scenery!

Land and Overland – twin worlds a few thousand miles apart. On Land, humanity faces a threat to its very survival – an airborne species, the ptertha, has declared war on humankind, and is actively hunting for victims. The only hope lies in migration. Through space to Overland. By balloon. The Ragged Astronauts – first volume in an epic adventure filled with memorable characters, intense action, engaging notions, exotic locales.

Winner of the BSFA Award for best novel, 1986

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…

The exciting original of the Hitchcock film classic.

Iris Carr was young, wealthy, attractive – and bored. Despairing of her society friends, tired of skiing with the crowd, she decides to return to England alone by train. But she hadn’t bargained for the extraordinary Miss Froy – a lively, gossipy spinster who is determined to befriend her, nor had she expected Miss Froy’s sudden disappearance.

Certain that she has not imagined so bizarre a character, and outraged by the blank faces of the passengers who deny her existence, Iris vows to find her companion, unaware of the terrifying trail ahead, so wildly different from her notion of a comfortable journey home.

“We talk of good luck and bad luck. We even wear, some of us, good luck charms and we tend to select certain lucky numbers if we enter a raffle. No, Norman, you can’t tell me that we don’t acknowledge the existence of something we call luck.”

The world, indeed the Universe, is surrounded by intangible energies of which man has, at present, only the vaguest notions. Electricity is such a force. Magnetism, gravitation . . . all once-unsuspected natural forces, now known for the realities they are. And so why not luck?

And once the possibility of luck being an actual force is recognised the next step is obvious – a machine to harness its forces.

But if one man can attract the good luck, someone, somewhere is due for bad luck. When the machine falls into the wrong hands, the inventors begin to wish they’d stuck to rabbits’ feet and black cats . . .

John of the Hawks was a proud, young man, proud of his people, proud of his heritage, and proud of his ability to count coup on his clann’s traditional enemies. He knew what was right and what was wrong – the four great books had laid down the way things had to be.

Which is why the uncouth ways of the clannless drifters from space outraged him so. Not only did these peddlers know nothing of the finesse of proper combat, they knew nothing of the respect due to such things as the coup stick, the right way to capture a wife, and the sanctity of the clann’s elders.

Worse still, they had some idiotic notion that that cheap silvery metal so commonly used for plumbing and horse-bits, known as platinum, was somehow of special merit.

Well, one could excuse an outrage or two on the grounds of ignorance, but there came a time when any good clannsman, such as John certainly was, must decide to teach these barbarians from space a lesson!

THE TALES OF HENGHIS HAPTHORN

Henghis Hapthorn is the foremost penetrator of mysteries and uncoverer of secrets in a decadent, far-future Old Earth, one age before Jack Vance’s Dying Earth. A superb rationalist, he has long disdained the notion that the universe has an alternative organizing principle: magic. But now a new age is dawning, overturning the very foundations of Hapthorn’s existence, and he must struggle to survive in a world where all the rules are changing.

In MAJESTRUM, Hapthorn is on the trail of an unknown killer who collects body parts from his victims. The search leads him off-planet, into the Ten Thousand Worlds of The Spray, then turns in an unexpected direction as the freelance discriminator learns that an ancient and evil power is plotting to reassert its dominion over Old Earth.

Praise for Matthew Hughes:

“Matthew Hughes does Jack Vance better than anyone except Jack himself” – George R.R. Martin
“Heir apparent to Jack Vance” – Booklist
“Hughes’s boldness is admirable”- New York Review of Science Fiction
“Hughes effortlessly renders fantastic worlds and beings believable”- Publishers Weekly
“A towering talent”- Robert J. Sawyer
“A treasure” – David Gerrold

THE TALES OF HENGHIS HAPTHORN

Henghis Hapthorn is the foremost penetrator of mysteries and uncoverer of secrets in a decadent, far-future Old Earth, one age before Jack Vance’s Dying Earth. A superb rationalist, he has long disdained the notion that the universe has an alternative organizing principle: magic. But now a new age is dawning, overturning the very foundations of Hapthorn’s existence, and he must struggle to survive in a world where all the rules are changing.

HESPIRA

Hapthorn decides to leave Old Earth, seeking to solve the mystery of Hespira, an ungainly off-world woman who has lost her memory. The investigation takes him down The Spray to the rank-obsessed world of Ikkibal and the rustic Shannery, where he unravels Hespira’s role in a deadly feud between aristocrats. But behind the scenes an unseen antagonist is plotting the discriminator’s destruction.

Praise for Matthew Hughes:

“Matthew Hughes does Jack Vance better than anyone except Jack himself” – George R.R. Martin
“Heir apparent to Jack Vance” – Booklist
“Hughes’s boldness is admirable”- New York Review of Science Fiction
“Hughes effortlessly renders fantastic worlds and beings believable”- Publishers Weekly
“A towering talent”- Robert J. Sawyer
“A treasure” – David Gerrold

Widely acclaimed as one of the first successful female science fiction authors, Mildred Clingerman returns with the exciting follow up to her 1961 science fiction collection, A Cupful of Space. Her stories tend to wed a literate tone to subject matters whose ominousness is perhaps more submerged than the horrors under the skin made explicit in the work of Shirley Jackson, but equally as deadly.

Clingerman’s new anthology, The Clingerman Files, includes all of her originally published stories; The Day of the Green Velvet Cloak, Mr. Sakrison’s Halt, Wild Wood, The Little Witch of Elm Street and many other favourites. Also included are previously unpublished works; Top Hand, Tribal Customs, The Birthday Party, Fathers of Daughters and many more soon to be favourites. The key to her stories is that they appear simple and straightforward, but each takes a twist or turn that, even when you’re tempted to guess where they’re heading, they take you there in a way you would never have bargained on.

Other writers of the period tried to make big splashes. Clingerman, it seems, prided herself in concealing her effects within her masterfully constructed sentences. They barely make a ripple on the surface; all their power and drive lurk deep down below. So many of her stories are alive with the underpinning notion that the cosmological vistas we spy at the end ends of telescopes and various other means of measurement belong to the very same universe under our feet. We’re not apart from the universe, we’re a part of it. Nearly every story here is alive with that sensibility, in the truest sense of that word. In every sentence there is a note (a gentle one, but insistent) of silent rebellion, a surreptitious snarl, entreating you to see that not the everyday, but an undiscovered marvel.

May these eloquent rebellions be undiscovered no longer.