Search Results for: second-visit

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 . . .

One of the very last authors of detective fiction from the genre’s “Golden Age” INDEPENDENT

Suicide or murder? Despite all indications to the contrary, Alec Methven had not eaten his last meal in solitude, and somebody was very anxious to conceal that fact.

As if one death on the beautiful island of Madeira was not enough, there was another. Peter Corey, who had found Methven’s body, had a cast-iron alibi: he was on a plane to the island at the time of the death, en route to visit his old friend. But what of the second killing that so inexplicably occurred?

Matthew Damon was a loving father and a figure of moral rectitude. Why, then, has a rumour of scandal followed him, denying him the knighthood he thought he had earned? Why had he, long ago, repeatedly and alone visited the cells of condemned young women?

Behind the discreetly drawn curtains at High Chimneys something sinister lurked. Black-haired Kate and demure Celia were suspect. Brother Victor was distraught. The second Mrs Damon was indiscreet. And murder was done.


‘Faultless puzzle in detection’ New York Times Book Review

That first visit to Mars had been a mistake. A miraculous journey out through the myriad miles of space and back, back through the millennia to a time before Man existed, it had been the chance result of a small-scale malfunction in an experimental matter transfer machine.
But Michael Kane’s first great adventure in a world where great mythic armies battled, where hugely bizarre creatures roamed and deeds of high heroism and dark treachery resounded, was but the start. For as he learned to control and use the machinery, he was to return to Mars again and again.
The second volume of the Martian adventures of Michael Kane, of the proud Princess Shizala, her warrior brother and the darkly beautiful but evil Horguhl, as book two of the Warrior of Mars series is available in ebook for the first time!

DOORWAY TO UTOPIA

“Beyond that curtain of darkness lies paradise.”

That was the promise of the doorway known as the Gholan Gate, a doorway so ancient that its makers had vanished millions of years before the first Earthly life crawled out of the primeval oceans. It was still functioning in the possession of its discoverers.

To go through it was to enter a universe where all your dreams came true – where your every wish was obeyed, every fantasy became reality, where you could play God to your heart’s content.

But there was a price, for once beyond the Gholan Gate, you would live only in hopes for a second visit, and a third. . . . And to get the right for that return to paradise a man would sell his soul, his people, his world.

Cap Kennedy entered THE GHOLAN GATE once . . . and the result became cosmic history.

Ian Watson is one of the finest writers of SF and fantasy stories, and Butterflies of Memory is his 10th collection, a selection of stories that are by turns serious and playful, and always wildly imaginative…

In the title story, what if mobile phones were to become truly mobile, flying about like butterflies? ‘An Appeal to Adolf’ tells of gay sailors on a Nazi battleship many kilometres long during a Second World War unfamiliar to us; ‘Lover of Statues’ of an enigmatic alien visiting the only statue of Satan in the world, in Madrid – while in the bubbling stew of faiths which is Jerusalem a doorway opens to reveal capricious godlike beings. And just suppose that Jules Verne undertook an actual journey to the centre of the Earth. Closer to home, in a Midlands town, a man who seems to have suddenly popped into existence tries to discover who and what he is. ‘Hijack Holiday’, written a year before 9/11, presciently if bizarrely anticipates events akin to those on that fateful day.