Search Results for: out-of-their-minds

Out of their minds and the force of their imagination, men have created countless beings, from demons and monsters of legend to comic-strip characters. What if their world were real – if dragons, devils and Don Quixote hobnobbed with Dagwood Bumstead and Charlie Brown? Such a world would have its fascinations . . . and its dreadful perils – if it existed. Horton Smith found out that it did – and that he was right in the middle of it!

Twenty-two stories and novella-length works, mixing imagination with suspense in the kind of tale that can slide into the back of your mind and then stay there for the rest of your life… well-known as a novelist and screenwriter, the author of Valley of Lights and Oktober has assembled a signature collection from over two decades’ worth of his lesser-known short fiction.
A telephone chat line where not all of the respondents can be found amongst the living… the terrified flight of a hit-and-run driver whose fate was sealed at the moment of his deed… the seduction and harrowing education of a young artist in nineteenth-century France… the unholy alliance of an honest psychic and a skeptical conjurer…
All brought together in one volume for the first time anywhere, with an introduction by TV scriptwriter/producer Brian Clemens and an afterword filled with background insights and dashes of autobiography.

They had conquered Mars! Earth was next.

And in the council chambers at Washington, Earth’s leaders gathered to face the peril.

Mars had gone down to defeat in one hour and thirty-four minutes. And now a fleet of creatures from outer space was headed towards Earth.

All eyes turned to Eldin Raigmore, President of the United States – the one man to be trusted above all others. One by one the elite were dispatched on missions of last-minute strategy. They went with confidence, inspired by the swift, sure mind of Raigmore.

Civilization rested in his hands. And he was a secret member of the invader race!

As a young boy, Laurie Linton encountered a strange apparition: a ghostly man who urgently mouthed a message:
KILL MAGOBION!
Years later, as a member of the UN Narcotics Security Agency, Linton and the beautiful Carol Kennedy were assigned a special duty: investigation of a mysterious drug which endowed its addicts with superhuman powers.
Now, that investigation leads Linton and Carol into a bewildering maze where past and future slide by each other at terrifying speed…where international peace teeters in the balance…and where all blues point to the top-secret Ministry of Internal Security and its prestigious, powerful leader – COLONEL PIERS MAGOBION.

In the 23rd Century, out of all the races of the galaxy, only humanity has discovered the secret of travel between the stars – not so much because we’re smart, but because we are incredibly gadget-orientated. We are also, compared to the galaxy’s highest sophisticated norms, very, very tough, which most of the time does nothing for our social acceptability. But when a threat to all life in the galaxy arises from non-living biological constructs, suddenly the peculiar human virtues of valor and stubbornness make us the sword-wielding saviours of All…

Time Switch at the Zoo.

One day Martin Naumchik, reporter for Paris Soir, visited the Berlin Zoo. He was standing outside the spacious cage housing the newly-acquired Brecht Biped, Fritz, when the world seemed to lurch.

Then he was no longer outside the cage looking in, but inside looking out. He was no longer Martin Naumchik. He was Fritz, the Biped, that strange celestial animal from a world eighteen light-years away.

At the same time, Fritz, who had lived almost all his life in Hamburg Zoo, also felt the lurching motion. And found himself standing outside his cage in the body of Martin Naumchik, looking at the frantic Biped inside, who was beating with both hands on the glass.

First published in 1976, “The Mind-Riders” features a remarkable anticipation of virtual reality gaming, in which the revised sport of boxing pits physically identical virtual fighters against one another, operated by electronically-connected “handlers” — with viewers receiving transmissions of the combatants’ emotions as their simulations slug it out. Ryan Hart, banished from the sport in its early days because of his lack of marketable emotion, is brought back by an obsessed media executive who wants to see the reigning champion beaten at any cost. Hart is not certain that he can win, after such a lapse of time, nor is he certain he can resist pressure to give the vast virtual crowds the dose of sadistic exultation they crave. But that doesn’t stop him from heading into the virtual “ring” and fighting the bout of his life!

The sea has always been a symbol of uncontrolled power and infinite movement. Its rhythms are the rhythms of Life itself… for Life began in the primeval oceans…

Roger Adams was a man who dreamt of the untold wealth lying beneath the inscrutable waves of the Atlantic deeps. His mind filled with visions of Lost Continents, sunken galleons and the limitless possibilities of undersea farming. He same his meagre capital into a neck-or-nothing gamble and fought desperately against time and rude to turn his dreams into reality.

The unexpected stowaway added to his problems and then his diving began to pay dividends. The Atlantic Deeps gave up some of their secrets… but each enigma led to greater riddles. Then came the discovery that pointed to world-shaking consequences. Hidden beneath the great rollers lay supernatural forces so immense that the Kraken and other monsters of popular mythology were harmless toys beside it.

The force which had submerged continents was stirring once more…

They had been working for a long time to send a ship out into space, but when the great day came it was essential that the ship should be destroyed. They had looked ambitiously at the Moon and at the planets and stars beyond. Now they stared up in fear…

Here is the record of the first onslaught of a strange disease that dropped on mankind from the skies. It is the story of an alien plague that worked too swiftly to be counteracted by human science – a plague that did not so much drive men out of their minds as steal the minds from them.

Out of body, out of time…

Though basically a skeptic, William Reynolds had known out-of-body experiences in the past. But never before had he floated past the boundaries of Baltimore . . . and across the borders of time. And now, with the fires of Civil War looming on the horizon, the astonished graduate student was hobnobbing with none other than the dark poet Edgar Allan Poe. But their meeting of minds was to have chilling consequences. For a desperate Confederacy planned to use them both to remold the world – and to change history…for the worse.

George Mallory was out for a quiet day’s shooting. A typical country-man, in typical English country. His day’s sport was interrupted by the beginning of the greatest catastrophe in man’s history – an alien space ship was crashing as his feet.
The ghastly monstrosity that emerged was so hideously repulsive that no one would have guessed at the degree of intelligence and potential friendliness in its strange mind.
Mallory shot first and asked questions afterwards. With its dying strength, the alien cursed the earth with a scientific horror beyond the comprehension of man, a horror that turned the beasts against us.
The only escape seemed to lie out in space… but the devastating effect of the cosmic rays wrought havoc in the minds of the space men and the lunar expedition turned on itself in deadly carnage.
What would be the outcome of the terrible conflict between man and beast?

Cephapples can seriously damage your health…

A cephapple is a dreambean – a programmed hallucination. Quinjinn is a reviewer of cephapples. When he is persuaded to sample one particular dream, it is so real that he cannot get it out of his mind, and so hideous that he cannot remember its climax. Horrified when his young daughter is exposed to it as well, Quinjinn resolves to find the tree on which this cephapple grew, and to destroy it before it can poison any other minds.

His interstellar quest becomes a bizarre journey through a cold and alien galaxy and exotic distant planets – and into the deepest recesses of his own mind.

Atlantis, the legendary lost continent of wonders and marvels, has intrigued the mind of men for thousands of years. So when a daring young adventurer found a new clue to its actual whereabouts, he could not resist setting out to find it.

The megalomaniac Godmind is still planning to use all the minds in creation to make a vast ‘lens’, and if necessary it will burn out all life in the process.

Back beside the river and literally born again, Yaleen represents to the guild of riverwomen the perfect proof of salvation, of life after death. In fact, she is desperately searching for a way to save the whole universe from imminent destruction.

During an action on the third planet from Arcturus, soldier Cal Truent woke up in the hospital with a sixteen-hour hole in his memory. No one knows what it is that Cal has forgotten, but his superiors can’t take the chance that it might be something deadly to his fellow soldiers – and to Earth.
Somehow Cal means to seek out whatever it is that his mind is resisting . . .

When Spencer Gill, Jack Turnbull and Angela Denholm were taken by the Castle in Scotland – when they played Sith of the Throne’s monstrous multidimensional game to stay the execution of Earth, and won – they made a deadly, devious enemy of the alien master of The House of Doors.

Now Sith is back, and his game is more deadly yet. In worlds that are known, and others beyond imagining . . . in mad machine worlds, and some that can only be the product of a diseased mind – indeed, in one such that is a diseased mind – Sith’s new game will be played out to the bitter end. For the game is rigged, The House of Doors inscrutable as ever, and its doors all designed to lead Gill and his companions ever deeper into worlds of uttermost terror . . .

Humans first reached out to the stars travelling at a painfully slow sublight crawl – then they found the Bose network, which allowed ships to jump instantaneously from one node in the galactic arm to another. Once in the Network they found the Artifacts: enigmatic structures, millions of years old, left by a vanished race. Incomprehensible to both human ad non-human minds, the Artifacts seemingly defy natural law.

Now, after millions of years, a new Artifact has appeared – and previously discovered Artifacts are showing strange changes in their inexplicable activities. When a motley crew of human and alien scientists and adventurers set out to examine still more Artifacts, they should have considered the fat that some changes are more dangerous than others…

Four-BEE was an utopian city. If you didn’t mind being taken care of all your long long life, having a wild time as a “jang” teen-ager, able to do anything you wanted from killing yourself innumerable times, changing bodies, changing sex, and raising perpetual hell, it could be heaven.

But for one inhabitant there was always something askew. He/she had tried everything and yet the taste always soured. And then he/she succeeded in committing the one illegal act – and was thrown out of heaven forever.

But forever is not a term any native of that robotic utopia understood. And so he/she challenged the rules, declared independence, and set out to prove that a human was still smarter than the cleverest and most protective robot.

HUMAN VS INHUMAN

To the reptilian mind – especially the intelligent type of planets like Sergan and Obrac – the lives of others were as nothing to the need for status.

To the feline mind – especially to the clever advisor of the master of Sergan – the agonies of others were not only of no consequence, they could even be a source of joy.

So when these two types of inhuman intelligences got together to defy the Terran orders against interplanetary kidnapping, space hijacking, and human slavery, it was definitely a case for a top-notch secret agent. Because Earth could not afford a showdown with more than one alien species at a time.

The secret agent was Cap Kennedy, Free Acting Terran Envoy, and his pursuit of the SLAVE SHIP FROM SERGAN turned out to be one of his most dangerous single-handed adventures.

Millennia in the future, Earth has become a backwater planet, ignored by others in the galaxy. Its one jewel is Cirque – the city on the Abyss, a city of love and harmony, with inspiring religious rites.

But in the Abyss there lives the Beast, formed from the castoff hates of the Cirquians: a beast whose body is refuse, whose mind is black as sin. Feeble weapons are no match for the Beast.

And now, after centuries, it’s climbing out of the Abyss to claim its own…

Jake Cutter is reluctantly learning how to be a Necroscope – how to use the Möbius continuum to travel instantaneously from place to place, how to talk to the dead – but the dead don’t like him much. It seems Jake’s got a hitchhiker in his mind, a dead vampire named Korath. But since Korath holds the key to the Möbius equations, Jake can’t just kick him out…

In Australia, Jake helped E-Branch destroy the aerie of the mind-master, Nephran Malinari, one of the trio of Great Vampires who came to Earth from the vampire world. Malinari escaped and went to ground with the hideously beautiful Lady Vavara. Vavara has taken over a holy monastery on a beautiful Greek island and turned the nuns into most unholy creatures of fearsome appetites for all things carnal.

But Jake wants revenge against the Italian mobsters who killed the woman he loved. As far as he’s concerned, E-Branch can search for Malinari, Vavara, and the metamorphic Lord Szwart without him until he’s satisfied his own bloodlust. But it seems vampire-hunting is truly Jake’s job now – the men he’s trying to kill aren’t men at all but vampires hidden for two generations in human guise!

To defeat them, Jake will need every weapon in Necroscope’s arsenal, including the power to call the unsleeping dead out of their mouldering graves…

A police officer needs the quickness and guile of a bookmaker, the ingenuity of a psychiatrist and the physical reserves of a Marine, or so it seems to Detective Chief Superintendent Manton, who is called in to investigate a huge bullion robbery and its possible link with the death of a solicitor in a car crash.

But even when a supposed double murderer is charged and tried there is still a taunting question mark over the case. Whose was the brain that planned the audacious gold robbery and does Manton know enough about the criminal mind to find out?

The ship was called the Pleiades, and it was Earth’s first starship. It could travel instantaneously to literally anywhere in the universe – but that was just the trouble with it. For there was absolutely no way of predicting where in the infinites of space it would reappear when it winked out of the Solar System, and no way of knowing how to return.

Its crew was two men and two women, each a Psionic Prime with mind-powers unparalleled in Earth’s history. The tale of how they pitted their powers against an entire universe is one of daring adventure on the galactic scale…

Life was not possible on that watery world except on the Hundred Islands. The Empire of Arelia ruled them all – all except one. Peldain was entirely covered with a forest so impenetrable and so deadly that all attempts to explore it were disastrous. Then a man came out of that jungle – a human – who told the Arelians that at the center of the island a secret kingdom flourished.

There was nothing for it but to organise an expedition. However deadly the alien forest might be, if one man could get out, an army could get in. So Lord Vorduthe landed and began the assault on the great green enemy.

Nobody could have foreseen the horrors with which the forest defended itself. Nobody could have foreseen the price that would be paid by Vorduthe’s men. And only Vorduthe himself would learn the incredible secret of the island…if his mind could stand it.