Search Results for: orbit-one

Space fiction is no longer fiction in the same way that it used to be. There was an element of distance and strangeness about it a few years back. Now, fact has caught up and threatens to overtake. Science fiction today has become science prediction.

An atom is a miniature solar system in some respects. The clustering molecules resemble galaxies, colloids are, perhaps, tiny models of the whole creation. Man stands midway between the unbelievably small and the unbelievably huge. This is one of the allies of science fiction. We look down into the mysteries of the infinitesimal; we look up into the majesty of the macrocosm.

In all this vastness of stars and planets there must be other life. One day we shall make contact with that life. What will the aliens be like? How will human culture compete with non-human culture? Which will survive?

Earth had changed since the days when her proud space fleets spanned the void of Space. Now her people were packed and packaged tight on Earth, their freedoms exchanged for a promise of stability by a multi-armed autocratic government. Then one small band of people led by a fanatic saw there was one last chance for Man to make his place in the Universe. But to take that chance they had to fight, not only the mighty grip of the government, but the terrible, generation-long voyage fraught with risk. And then, the new planet – strange, challenging, alien…

Matthew Flamen, the last of the networks’ spoolpigeons, is desperate for a big story. He needs it to keep his audience – and his job. And there is no shortage of possibilities: the Gottschalk cartel is fomenting trouble among the knees in order to sell their latest armaments to the blanks; which ties in nicely with the fact that something big id brewing with the X Patriots; and it looks as if the inconceivable is about to happen and that one of Britain’s most dangerous revolutionaries is going to be given a visa to enter America. And then there’s the story that just falls into his lap. The one that suggests that the respected Director of the New York State Mental Hospital is a charlatan.

Winner of the BSFA Award for best novel, 1970

Bill Hastings was one in a million. He was the winner of a planet-wide contest, and the prize was a chance to spend a year working at the 1992 World’s Fair. For the young xenobiology student, it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

Fifty thousand miles above the Earth, a gigantic satellite moved in its elegant orbit. It would be Bill’s home for a year, and host to hundreds of thousands of visitors. The 1992 World’s Fair was to be an orbital extravaganza, and Bill Hastings thought that his dreams had come true. He had a lot to learn.

Early in the 21st century the world is enjoying an uneasy peace, with a distinct division between the “straight” society and the various fringe groups that go to form the Byworld.

Tension grows, however, over the presence of an alien spaceship that is orbiting the world, bearing a single occupant – the Sigman. It appears that no-one knows how to communicate with the Sigman; no-one knows the purpose of his visit. Until two people – one “straight” and the other a Byworlder – solve the problems involved; and in so doing trigger off a series of violent plots and counterplots that mount to a frenetic climax.

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?

The planet Mercury. Forty million miles from the Sun, following his eccentric orbit, one side of him solid with the frost of untold cycles of time, the other molten whereon metals boiled and sizzled in the incredible heat of the sun. A world utterly dead, a terror-planet, but such is the spirit of adventure in Man that even here he was exploring…

The astronomers at the International Symposium were faced with an alarming discovery. An unexpectedly early solar eclipse had caused the Moon’s orbit to contract. Evidence from a hurried investigation all pointed in one direction: the Moon was drawing nearer to Earth, and in five years the two would collide and both would be destroyed.

What were the astronomers to do? They knew that once the news became public there would be a world-wide panic, and they turned for advice to Billy Gillanders, the head of the United Nations Exploration Agency. Gillanders and his deputy, Chris Godfrey, had one faint hope to offer, and it lay in the experiments of an eccentric retired professor…

The most expensive, the most luxurious resort in the history of man. Where no request, no whim or pleasure, was denied. Where anything was possible – for a price.

SATELLITE CITY

The haven and the playground of only the very rich and the most powerful. It was the most amazing pleasure complex ever built – and it looked down on the Earth from an orbit 22,000 miles high.

Yet, for all its glitter, there was something ominous about Satellite City – no nation or international body had any jurisdiction there, it was a law unto itself; no one knew who owned it; or what went on within its secret council rooms.

Until one man penetrated the wall of secrecy and discovered satellite city’s hidden masters.

“The Eternal Footman” completes Morrow’s darkly comic trilogy about God’s untimely demise. With God’s skull in orbit, competing with the moon, a plague of “death awareness” spreads across the Western hemisphere. As the United States sinks into apocalypse, two people fight to preserve life and sanity. One is Nora Burkhart, a schoolteacher who will stop at nothing to save her only son, Kevin. The other is the genius sculptor Gerard Korty, who struggles to create a masterwork that will heal the metaphysical wounds of the age.

Lola Belman was a refugee. She and her younger brother were on one of the last ships to leave Earth as the bombs began to fall; by the time they left lunar orbit, they were orphans. Lola is now practicing as a therapist on Ganymede, and she has a new patient whose past is a mystery.

During those years of chaos, many records were lost and histories forgotten, and it was an ideal time for anyone who wanted to conceal his or her identity. Now there is a small, dangerous group who will stop at nothing to keep Lola from exploring the past and discovering their existence.

In the year of grace 1345, as Sir Roger Baron de Tourneville is gathering an army to join King Edward III in the war against France, a most astonishing event occurs: a huge silver ship descends through the sky and lands in a pasture beside the little village of Ansby in North East Lincolnshire.

The Wersgorix, whose scouting ship it is, are quite expert at taking conquering planets, and having determined from orbit that this one is suitable, they initiate standard procedure. Their ship carries guided missiles and nuclear weaponry – but they have long since lost the art (and weapons) of hand-to-hand fighting. And this time it’s no mere primitives the Wersgorix seek to enslave – they’ve launched their invasion against Englishmen!

In the end, only one alien is left alive – and Sir Roger’s grand vision is born. He intends for the creature to fly the ship first to France to aid his King, then on to the Holy Land to vanquish the infidel. And then . . . ?

THROUGH THE TERROR TOROID

It could have been a black hole – one of those terrifying rips in space that defy all laws. That it was artificial in origin did not make it any less deadly.

Worst of all, that strange extra-galactic torus was drifting into an intersect with Earth in its orbit. The result would be devastation beyond concept.

Cap Kennedy and his three companions were considered expendable in such a cause. And Cap himself volunteered to dare the impossible – to turn that cosmic hole aside.

What he fell into was an adventure utterly different than anything he had expected. The novel of EARTH ENSLAVED is a real surprise package for the legion of Cap Kennedy’s followers.

There were nine major planets in the Solar System, and it was within their boundaries that man first set up interplanetary commerce and began trading with the ancient Martian civilization. And then they discovered a tenth planet – a maverick!
This tenth world, if it had an orbit, had a strange one, for it was heading inwards from interstellar space, heading close to the Earth-Mars spaceways, upsetting astronautic calculations and raising turmoil on the two inhabited worlds.
But even so none suspected then just how much trouble this new world would make. For it was WANDL THE INVADER and it was no barren planetoid. It was a manned world, manned by minds and monsters and travelling into our system with a purpose beyond that of astronomical accident!

Trouble aboard the satellite observatory which has been established to circle the Earth every four hours. It is under the despotic control of a brilliant but unbalanced scientist, Commander Hendricks, who refuses to allow his staff any means of communicating with Earth on their own account. But he doesn’t know that Tony Hale, who is one of the engineers in the observatory, has smuggled in his homemade transistor radio.

Scientists everywhere are baffled when three brown streaks appear on the Earth’s surface, destroying all the vegetation in their path. No one can find the explanation until it is realised that the streaks lie in the direction of the satellite’s orbit. Hendricks first refuses to reply to any questions and then announces that he intends to be the world dictator; if the governments of the world refuse to agree he will starve them into surrender by destroying all the vegetation on Earth. The situation seems desperate. But Tony has already used his transistor radio to get in touch with a friend on Earth. His homemade set is now the only means of contact between Earth and the observatory, and through it plans can be made to deal with Hendricks – plans in which Chris Godfrey has a leading role to play.

The Solar System is finally recovering from the Great War – a war that devastated the planets and nearly wiped out the human race – and the population of the outer moons, orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, is growing.

On one of those moons, Alex Ligon, scion of a great interplanetary trading family has developed a wonderfully accurate new population model and cannot wait until the newly reconstituted “Seine”, the interlinked network of computers that spans the planets and moons and asteroids, comes back online. But when it does, and he extends his perfect model a century into the future, it predicts the complete destruction of the human race.

On another moon, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence goes on, undaunted by generations of failure. And to her amazement, Millie Wu, a young genius newly recruited to the project, has found a signal… a signal that is coming from outside the solar system.

And in his new retreat on a minor moon of Saturn, the cranky genius Rustum Battachariya is still collecting weapons from the Great War. He thinks he may have stumbled on an unexpected new one…but he’ll need to disarm it before it destroys the Sun.

The largest spaceship ever made is hurtling overhead, falling. Six people are trapped inside with no escape. If it strikes the Earth it will explode with the force of an atomic bomb; what can be done?

The mighty 2,000-tonne Prometheus is the largest piece of space hardware ever launched – a joint Soviet-American project to harness solar energy before the power resources of the world run out. But politically and technically the project is doomed, and the nerve-racking predicament of the crew of six shrinks to nothing beside the horrifying destruction which threatens hundreds of thousands of people if no way can be found to move the satellite from it’s ever-decreasing orbit towards Earth . . .

Skyfall is a tale of incredible terror, giving a foresight of the global disaster which could one day become reality.

Blake had waited a long time for his big chance. Finally the selection board called him in. This was it. He got his promotion, his captain’s ticket and his first assignment. Vorgal was a tough planet but Blake was ready for it. He was the first spaceman to land on Vorgal without crashing. He was the first human being to see a Vorgalian and live. He was the first to learn the planet’s deadly secret an come back alive.

But…when he went into landing orbit around Earth they fired on him. No one would believe that the impossible had happened. They thought Blake’s body was being used by an alien, and unless he could convince them fast he would die. Without his secret knowledge of Vorgal, Earth would die too…

‘We won’t be landing anywhere just yet’, Waters said to the other passengers on the spaceship Fulmar. ‘I was pretty mystified by this story of mechanical breakdown, so I’ve been checking up.’ He hefted his little box. ‘I’ve spent the past half hour successfully tapping your subspace circuits, Captain, so I know the truth and I propose to share it with everyone. We’re not to land. We’re to orbit in space, indefinitely.’

Beloved Sister Dorcas’s screams pierced the quiet.

‘You see,’ Waters continued, holding up his hand for silence, ‘this is being done on the direct orders of Master Brand . . . you don’t know the name?’ He glanced inquiringly around. ‘No? Well, he happens to be one of the powers of Earth, and there is nobody in the galaxy to overrule him.’



(First published 1965)

Kirk Hammond was a man alone.

He had been chosen to ride in the first manned satellite to go out around the Moon and back to Earth. But when the satellite failed to orbit properly, it went on past the Moon into the vastness of outer space, and a whole world watched helplessly as he was borne toward an unthinkably lonely death.

Yet destiny decreed that Kirk Hammond should suffer, not death but a pseudo-death. And he awoke from it to find that a hundred centuries had passed and that the space age which had begun in the 20th Century had now grown into a vast galactic civilization that had carried the sons of Earth to countless stars and worlds. But, unexpectedly, the conquest of space had changed Man himself, and the human race had become not one but several species.

Hammond was plunged into the climactic struggle between the new races. And in his quest with a desperate band for the mysterious Star of Life that was the key to the struggle, in his relations with the strange and beautiful Thayn Marden who was not a human woman, in his odyssey through the mighty suns and earthly worlds of the galaxy, a man of the 20th Century found himself facing the dangers of the great space age which he himself helped pioneer.

In the second book of the Blue Gemini trilogy, Air Force Majors Scott Ourecky and Drew Carson continue to fly highly classified missions to intercept and destroy suspect Soviet satellites.

But after experiencing numerous close calls in orbit, the astronauts soon discover that not all perils reside in the sky. With his marriage already at risk because he cannot explain his frequent absences and strange activities to his wife, Ourecky learns that his unborn child may be in grave danger as a radiation consequence of his flights into space.
Even as the Ourecky and Carson accumulate successful mission after successful mission in space, other crucial events occur much closer to home. Interservice rivalries reach new heights as a caustic but highly influential Navy admiral schemes to steal control of the Project from the Air Force. Realizing that a Soviet GRU agent is operating in their midst, a shadowy team of counter-intelligence operatives scramble to shield the Project’s secrets from discovery, leading to a confrontation that bears fatal consequences.

As they train to accomplish more difficult missions against complicated targets, Ourecky and Carson are asked to volunteer to risk their lives one more time in an extremely hazardous rescue mission. The stakes are high; even as they leave the launch pad, there is no certainty that either man will return.

One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives.

The effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk – a heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not only have the world’s artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered remains are pitted and aged, as though they’d been in space far longer than their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, space probe reveals a bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the barrier than inside – more than a hundred million years per day on Earth. At this rate, the death throes of the sun are only about forty years in our future.

Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader who’s forged a new religion out of the fears of the masses.

Earth sends terraforming machines to Mars to let the onrush of time do its work, turning the planet green. Next they send humans…and immediately get back an emissary with thousands of years of stories to tell about the settling of Mars. Then Earth’s probes reveal that an identical barrier has appeared around Mars. Jason, desperate, seeds near space with self-replicating machines that will scatter copies of themselves outward from the sun – and report back on what they find.

Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.