Search Results for: planet-of-no-return

Landing on a new planet is a danger every time, and Selm II is no exception.

The specialist didn’t like it. There were no cities visable from space, no broadcasts or transmissions on the airwaves – yet the wrecked war machines of an advanced technology littered the rich pastures of the planet. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of crumpled and gigantic weapons of war, a graveyard of destruction stretching almost to the lifeless horizon. But the war wasn’t over…and they weren’t all wrecks.

It’s an emergency. It’s a job for Brian Brand, the mightiest weightlifter in the galaxy. With the brilliant, sensuous Dr Lea Morees at his side he plunges into the war zone, into the steel jaws of…the Planet of No Return!

Remote, mysterious and deadly, Verdia is a world from which no one has ever returned.
But Jan Hazard is convinced his brother could still be alive and Petra knows Jan can’t make it alone…on the Killer Planet.
Together they go in search for survivors – only to find themselves the next victims, trapped by the malign forces of a monstrous alien…

Back under the thumb of the Terran Empire after leading their planetary sector in an almost successful war against Imperial rule, Commissioner Desai saw real trouble brewing this time. A strange, fanatical movement was spreading like wildfire: there were rumours of the return of the fabled Elder Race: the Firstling, leader-elect of the planet, was on the run and hiding from Imperialist retribution. And off-planet agents from the Ythrian Domain and Mersia, Terra’s ancient foe, were abroad in the land. Unless Commissioner Desai could damp the fuse of rebellion, the universe would begin its terrifying descent into the Long Night . . .

PLANET AFTER PLANE FELL TO THE REE

A vast and powerful race, the Ree needed breeding room for an ever-increasing population – and their expansion plans took no account of human territory. The farmers and miners of Tip Space were helpless against the Ree invasion. Still the Terran diplomats dithered, holding back the Navy, hoping for a truce.

Retief, already on probation for undiplomatic behaviour, earned himself the assignment parleying with the Ree when he urged force against them. A suicide mission? Perhaps…but Retief is Retief.

Man has often wondered about the birth of his world. Our remote ancestors told strange tales of parental deities who gave birth to planets, and people.

Primitive religious thought regarded inanimate Nature as teeming with terrifying psychic life. It is a trend which persists in the dark recesses of the modern mind. There is reason for this persistence . . .

Were the ancients entirely wrong?

Science has unlocked many mysteries that terrified our forebears, but there are others which remain just as enigmatically sealed as before.

What strange astrological influences do the dark stars exert as they speed through the heavens on their evil courses? Like a cosmic combination lock their tuning unleashes timeless forces of evil.

The Pantheon of Old Gods rides again to bring hideous terror to the 20th century.

WHOEVER HOLDS THIS NEBULA CAN SWAY THE GALACTIC IMPERIUM

When Raul Linton, Commander of Space Navy, returned from the bloody Third Imperial War in 3468 A.D. he was a disillusioned hero. Defiantly stripping off his medals and ribands, Raul roamed the Inner Cluster of stars in search of some meaning.

But close on his trail was the Imperium Government spy, Pertinax – known as the Snake – who was out to prove Raul a traitor.

And then Raul Linton met up with Sharl of the Yellow Eyes, who proposed a daring scheme of intergalactic action which would at once restore the Sharl’s exiled Queen Innald to her rightful place on the throne of Valadon – but to join this mission, Raul would have to fight openly against his own government…

THE TRILOGY CONCLUDES…



In West of Eden and Winter in Eden, Harry Harrison, an acknowledged master of imaginative fiction, broke new ground with his most ambitious project to date. He brought to vivid life the world as it might have been, where dinosaurs survived, where their intelligent descendants, the Yilanè, challenged humans for mastery of the Earth, and where the human Kerrick, a young hunter of the Tanu tribe, grew among the dinosaurs and rose to become their most feared enemy.



Now, in Return to Eden, Harrison brings the epic trilogy to a stunning conclusion. After Kerrick rescues his people from the warlike Yilanè, they must regroup and consider their future. They find a safe haven on an island and there begin to rebuild their shattered lives. But with fierce predators stalking the forests, how long can these unarmed human outcasts hope to survive? They need weapons, but they only effective weapons lie in the hands of the technologically superior Yilanè. The small band of humans has no choice but to confront their face head-on.



And, of course, Kerrick cannot forget Vaintè, his implacable Yilantè enemy. She’s been cast out from her kind, under sentence of death, but how long will her banishment last? For her strange attraction to Kerrick has turned into a hatred even more powerful than her inbred instincts – an obsession that compels her to hunt down Kerrick and kill him. In a world completely unlike her own, two great cultures struggling for mastery of the Earth face the same problem that faces us today: how to coexist on the same planet completely unlike ourselves – or mutually perish.

After being sent to the planet from which no one had returned and was guarded by barrier rays, Mac is able to return. But the rays had affected him and made him wish that death had been swift as the unknown menace began to spread.

The Gem Planet, the Storm Planet, the Sand Planet . . . one of these three marvel worlds held the secret Casher O’Neill sought. Casher had wandered the inhabited galaxy seeking justice, seeking the cosmic power that would enable him to return to his home world and overthrow its usurper. But in the search he found much more than he had sought, for there were things more incredible among the stars than he had dreamed of.

Time drifted onto the ruin of the Galactic Federation. The centuries rolled over the wars of the first part of the new millennium, laying their patina of forgetfulness over the adventures of the survivors of the expedition to the Forever Planet. Only in the memory banks of lost and ruined computers was there a record of the withering piece of time, hung in its weird universe, poised in a matrix of forever, which had waited eons to release its makers from their imprisonment on a planet which was their plaything, workshop, laboratory and engine.

No one returned to the planet of the Timepivot.

Not of his own volition.

Conn, the son of a melon planter on the planet Poictesme, returns home after five years on Earth, studying.

And spying.

The planet had been used as a military staging point during the last interstellar war between the Federation and the System States Alliance, and somewhere among the leftover war debris on the planet is rumored to be the supercomputer that won the war.

Many believe that this supercomputer can provide the answers to lift Poictesme out of economic stagnation and make it a prosperous place again. Conn has been gathering information just for this purpose – the search is on…

Masters of Everon, announces the brass plate on the door of the original Everon colonists’ corporate headquarters. But somehow Everon resisted all their efforts; it was as if the planet itself fought against human efforts to establish a foothold. Some settlers want to return the favour, wrecking Everon’s ecology in revenge, but Jef Roboni loves the great cat-like maolots of Everon, and the planet itself; he believes that settlers and planet can coexist.

Now time is running out – and even the hints that Jef has uncovered are not enough to prepare him for the incomprehensible strangeness and wonder of the true Masters of Everon.

It is the year 2450. Humanity is scattered among the stars, which teem with intelligent life, while the home world has been destroyed by an inadvertent catastrophe two hundred years before. Thus all Earthmen are exiles, and Earth itself is only a memory.

Hydros is a world of great complexity. It has almost no landmass, only a great globe-encompassing ocean with occasional tiny islands. Its seas swarm with apparently intelligent life-forms of a hundred kinds, and one – a bipedal humanoid form – has created a kind of land for itself: floating islands, woven from sea-borne materials, buffered by elaborate barricades against the ceaseless tidal surges that circle the planet.

To Hydros have come an assortment of Earthmen. For them it’s a world of no return: having no form of outbound space transportation. This brilliantly inventive novel tells their story, as they travel across the planet’s endless ocean in search of the mysterious area from which no human has ever returned – the Face of the Waters.




(First published 1991)

Having just returned to Earth from an intergalactic research mission, Professor Peter Maxwell, specialist in Supernatural Phenomena, finds himself in desperate straits. Earth, as he is aware, is well advanced in many areas; perfected time travel, for instance, enables all creatures (goblins, dinosaurs, and Shakespeare!) to coexist.

But Maxwell has accidentally discovered a mysterious crystal planet containing a storehouse of secret information not yet known to Earth. Knowing the value of the planet for the future of Earth, he attempts to convince those in power that they must, at any cost, get control of it.

But his efforts are thwarted by a startling fact: Maxwell was ingeniously duplicated on his return trip. The ‘other’ him came back before he did, and was soon after ‘accidentally’ killed. Now no one will believe the original Maxwell exists.

Earl Dumarest continues his desperate search for his birthplace, and seems to be coming close to the mythical planet Earth.

But his attention is temporarily diverted, as he is unexpectedly involved in a hunt for a nebulous ghost world in another galaxy.

It is rumoured that in this fabulous land lies the mysterious Castle of Heart’s Desire, where every wish is fulfilled. If Dumarest can find it, then maybe – just maybe – he will be able to return to the planet of his birth.




(First published 1976)

OUT FROM THE GREEN WORLD: Humans had colonized the planets & lost its birthright. Civilization was a lonely chain of space stations linked by terror. The Empire kept the pioneers enslaved with a weapon that shattered any protest into screaming insanity.
All they had left was the dream of someday returning home. Until their dream exploded in the holocaust that destroyed the Earth. But the embers of their dead planet sparked a brain-blasting revolution that swept the galaxy: a revolution of exiles in an alien universe-with nothing left to lose.

Over the long years, ships of the Interplanetary Confederation had scoured the empty wastes surrounding Sol, searching desperately for a sister planet; a companion for the isolated worlds of the Solar System. Of the ships that were sent out, many returned. But always the answer was the same.

There were no planets! The worlds of Sol were alone in the Great Dark that swirled across the boundless heavens.

It was not until Steve Rane and Nick Brodine, in the Exploratory Ship Vega, reached across the yawning gulf of light years to Sirius, that they found the strange planet that rotated in its complicated orbit around the twin sun. It was an event transcending all others.

A discovery that plunged the planets of Sol into the greatest race of all time. For whoever controlled the alien planet, controlled the Solar System. And away from the watchful eye of the IPC it would be possible to build the greatest space armada in history and attack the Interplanetary Confederation without warning.

To Steve Rane, the order came from Earth Central. Zero Point has been set for three months hence. The ship of Jupiter must not reach the new planet first.

For many years the starships of earth searched the heavens for places where men could live. Many planets were found, but always something was wrong: too hot; too cold; atmospheric contaminants; poisonous biochemistry; intelligent natives – something. At last a deep-space survey vessel has reported a planet that seems perfect, an uninhabited paradise where people can roam free. But the first Troas Expedition never returns. And now the crew of the De Gama must find out why or mankind will lose the stars forever.

The acclaimed science fiction author Brian M. Stableford returns with the final book in his trilogy about a planet that contains thousands of worlds inside it – and the one man who will do anything to penetrate its secrets. The conflict between the Isthomi and Scarid races and the surface dwellers of Asgard had come to a halt, but not an end. Forces are at work on all sides to attempt to gain the upper hand in the struggle to control Asgard, for control of Asgard’s heart could mean total power over the planet itself, and all who live in it. At the middle of the struggle is Michael Rousseau, who must penetrate the very core of the planet itself – both in reality and in another dimension altogether – to save Asgard and all who dwell in it, before it’s too late,

Marooned on the strange planet Tschai, Adam Reith agreed to lead an expedition to return the princess, the Flower of Cath, to her homeland halfway around the globe. Monsters of land and sea lay before them, and beings both human and alien who might rob, kill, or enslave them.

Judith Moffett returns to the future with this moving tale of the Hefn occupation of Earth and how it affects the planet’s native humans – two in particular: Pam Pruitt, a talented young woman from Kentucky, and Liam O’Hara, whose unique friendship with the Hefn Humphrey saved his life. The two teens journey to a special place in remote Kentucky, Hurt Hollow, where the painter Orrin Hubbell and his wife, Hannah, found a way to live in peace with the planet during the twentieth century. The prospects of living peacefully seem distant for Pam and Liam, both of whom must find peace with themselves as well as with the Hefn Directive. The marvelous events that befall them en route to Kentucky and in the Hollow itself beautifully depict the subtle ways in which the world shapes them, and the stunning ways in which they change the world.

Tiger, Rex and the Professor return in book six of Captain W.E. John’s classic space adventure series!

In their previous adventures, they encountered the planet Ardilla and its strange rays, which caused its inhabitants to develop thick skin in resistance. But reports are, the rays are getting stronger, and more deadly, and a mission to survey the planet has gone missing. The crew of the Tavona join the rescue mission – but what will they find?

Meanwhile, a plucky young stowaway has hidden away on the ship, and finds himself seeing far more than he bargained for.

It’s up to Tiger to get everyone home safely!

The chronicle of adventures of the survey ship Sarafand as it journeys through space exploring and mapping newly-discovered planets.

The mission brings them into contact with man startling life-forms and menacing aliens. On one world the Sarafand sends out six survey modules and seven return: one of them is a shape-changing malevolent alien – but which?

On another planet they discover a humanoid civilisation which can move around in time. Suddenly the Sarafand investigators are marooned millions of years in the past.

Finally the Sarafand and its crew are stranded in a distant galaxy where everything – including them – is shrinking inexorably to zero size…

During his heroic first encounter with an alien race, Dick Muller was permanently altered, hideously transformed in a way that left him repulsive to the entire human race. Alone and embittered, he exiled himself to Lemnos, an abandoned planet famed for its labyrinthine horrors, both real and imagined.

But now, Earth trembles on the brink of extinction, threatened by another alien species, and only Muller can rescue the planet. Men must enter the murderous maze of Lemnos, find Muller, and convince him to return with them.

But will the homeless alien, alone in the universe, risk his life to save his race, the race that has utterly rejected him?




(First published 1968)