Search Results for: station-in-space

Arthur C. Clarke was renowned for his science fiction, but his understanding of the subject was more than imagined.

First published in 1951, this painstakingly-researched non-fiction book shows the depth of Clarke’s expertise – he predicts the moon landings nearly two decades before they occurred, explores the potential use of satellites for communications more than ten years before Telstar 1 was put into orbit, and goes on to discuss the potential of space stations and long range orbital telescopes.

Informed by interviews with the foremost scientists and engineers of the time, Clarke presents his thesis for how man will explore space . . . and the reader can measure his predictions against reality.

‘He was a great visionary, a brilliant science fiction writer and a great forecaster. He foresaw communications satellites, a nationwide network of computers, interplanetary travel; he said there would be a man on the moon by 1970, while I said 1980′ – and he was right’ Sir Patrick Moore

Welcome to the Tomorrow Factory.

On your left, post-human hedonists on a distant space station bring diseases back in fashion, two scavengers find a super-powered parasite under the waves of Sunk Seattle, and a terminally-ill chemist orchestrates an asteroid prison break.

On your right, an alien optometrist spins illusions for irradiated survivors of the apocalypse, a high-tech grifter meets his match in near-future Thailand, and two teens use a blackmarket personality mod to get into the year’s wickedest, wildest party.

This collection of published and original fiction by award-winning writer Rich Larson will bring you from a Bujumbura cyberpunk junkyard to the icy depths of Europa, from the slick streets of future-noir Chicago to a tropical island of sapient robots. You’ll explore a mysterious ghost ship in deep space, meet an android learning to dream, and fend off predatory alien fungi on a combat mission gone wrong.

Twenty-three futures, ranging from grimy cyberpunk to far-flung space opera, are waiting to blow you away.

So step inside the Tomorrow Factory, and mind your head.

Set sixteen years after the events of The Exiled Earthborn, this explosive conclusion of the Earthborn trilogy tells the story of two brothers, the sons of Lucas and Asha, tasked with surviving the Xalan war to ensure the continued existence of the human race.

Noah, an orphan from Earth’s last days who, as a child, was smuggled to safety across the stars, is now nearly a man and a leader to the young enclave of Earthborn who reside on Sora. When the tranquility of their settlement is shattered by a shocking assassination attempt, Noah turns to his combative younger brother Erik, Lucas and Asha’s only child by blood, for aid. Their journey takes them to the remnants of a dead planet, an outlaw-infested space station, and back to Sora, whose inhabitants are bracing for a final showdown with the bloodthirsty Xalans.

They find themselves facing a new evil: the omnipotent Archon, who is somehow controlling the whole of the Xalan horde, and his bloodthirsty lieutenant, the Black Corsair, who has an unmatched taste for brutality. The Archon, so-called God of the Shadows, has unearthed knowledge that could wipe both Sorans and humans alike from the face of existence. The descendants of the Earthborn must uncover the true nature of the Archon and the Xalans before he burns everything they know and love to ashes.

Before the hyper-space vessels could go from planet to planet, stations had to be set up. And that meant manned spaceships cut off from Earth for decades.
The explorer vessel Ariadne had gone toward galactic centre and was considered lost – until its call came in appealing for a xenobiologist.
Their new world was all swamp. As far as could be seen, there was no intelligent species. Yes, this was alarming because all inhabitable planets so far discovered had thinking inhabitants.
But the nature of that planet’s “people” turned out to be an enigma that had to be solved. For their alien biology could spell doom to all the civilizations of the stars … doom or a terrible unity!

Originally published in 1958, under the pseudonym David Osborne.

Dr. Jeffrey Brewster, assistant professor of psycho-sociology at Columbia University, had been six weeks old when the first crude satellites were flung into space back in 1957. During his childhood there had been Moon rockets and the space stations – then the joint American-Russian-manned expedition to the Moon in 1965, right after the collapse of the Soviet dictatorship. Mars and Venus had been reached as he grew up and a permanent base was established on the Moon in 1973. Now the day’s papers reported that an expedition was ready to leave for Callisto, moon of Jupiter.

But Dr. Brewster had a class to make and he was late.

That was when the telephone rang and Mari, his wife, said, “Long distance from Washington.” The caller was Colonel Chasin of Unsecfor – United Nations Security Force, the global and international army that policed the world in these days of relative peace and harmony…

Riverworld was a planet of Eden whose people possessed the power of dreaming the future. Kyreol, daughter of a Healer, pierced the vision veil to discover the ultimate truth – that her home world unknowingly hosted the way station of a vast interstellar civilisation.

An evil star shone on Kyreol’s first mission as an interplanetary agent. Her ship fell out of space, cracking on a lonely, mysterious moon. Rising from its endless plains was the white city – awesome, abandoned, eons-dead – a silent world of secret wonders.

Only her prophetic dreams linked Kyroel to Riverworld, but she was hopelessly marooned light-years away. And she was not alone…

Philip Shane, journalist for the London Sunday Sentinel and undercover agent for the British Government, sets out, at the Prime Minister’s request, to investigate the death of key scientists on the moon. His fellow travellers are Claire Scott, daughter of Sir Fabian Scott, pioneer of Lunar City; Professor Denis Quarles, a one-man Investigating Commission; Gaff Midley, a psychiatrist; the Ferry Rocket Commander and crew.

At Woomera, firing base for the Ferry Rockets in the year AD 2050, Shane is drugged and sabotage occurs. On the Commonwealth Space Station, 1079 miles above the Earth the Ferry Rocket Commander is killed.

Who is responsible, and why?

Robotic minds made interstellar travel possible, but human minds still controlled the destination and purpose of such flight. Conflict develops only when a programmed brain cannot evaluate beyond what is visible and substantial, whereas the human mind is capable of infinite imagination – including that which is unreal.

Such was the problem at the singularity in space in which the ALTAIR STAR and a hundred other vessels had come to grief. At that spot, natural laws seem subverted – and some other universe’s rules impinged.

For Buchanan, the station meant a chance to observe and maybe rescue his lost vessel. For the robotic navigators of oncoming spaceships, the meaning was different. And at Singularity Station the only inevitable was conflict.

Originally written as a play and performed at the Mermaid Theatre, Easter 1962.

It is the early 20th century. Man is seeking signs of life elsewhere in the universe, but all exploratory ships have been lost without a trace – except for DSP15. Thirty years after leaving earth, and given up for lost, DSP15 suddenly appears on radar screens at the space station at Mildenhall, England. Her crew had been frozen to prevent ageing, and as the ship settles to a landing, Dr Richard Warboys eagerly awaits with other scientists for word of what DSP15 has found. But there is no crew, only a message scratched into a metal surface, signed by the captain: “If this ship returns to Earth, then mankind is in deadly peril – God help you – ” And so Earth becomes accidentally involved in a cosmic battle against a virtually omnipotent alien power, in a story suspenseful and exciting from cover to cover.

The logical outcome of the space race, and the preliminary step towards the Moo, was the manned satellite, the Big Wheel moving in a stable orbit about the Earth, integrating the data necessary for a landing on the Moon, and eventually acting as a fuelling station for the Lunar rockets.

After several failures, the station is ready, but even there, danger exists, unseen, unheard, invisible and terrible. Forced to exist in the belt of cosmic radiation surrounding the planet, men die within weeks from aplastic anemia. Seeking a solution to the problem, Doctor Paul Russell is sent up to the satellite and here learns of the two men fro the previous crew who vanished without a trace after spotting an unidentified spaceship in orbit further out from Earth than themselves.

Between the frozen wastes of the night side and the searing inferno of the dayside, the Twilight Belt held all that was Human on the tiny world of Mercury, Hell Planet of the Solar System. A strange world, airless, subject to the alien distortions of Einsteinian mathematics, Mercury was both a promise and a challenge, for here could be found torrents of cheap power essential to the ships and men in space. Lee Correy, Commander of the Station, plunges into the frigid wastes in a desperate race against time to find and rescue both his brother and the essential component of the beam control. Fighting impossible conditions and incredible alien life he is up against the enigmatic mystery of the sand devils; a dead man who walked, and a machine that could not fail-but did.

Here is a story of the future, of the planets and the men who will colonise them, of the way they will live and the problems they will face. With mystery, adventure, exciting action and scientifically correct detail. A story of what might well be in the days to come . . .

When young Roy Malcolm won the aviation quiz contest, his prize should have meant an ordinary sight-seeing jaunt on one of the man-made space stations that circled the earth. But instead the trip turned into a terrifying journey as misadventure after misadventure plagued the artificial satellite. The climatic moment came when one of the crew pushed the wrong button and rocketed the runaway ship into outer space…

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.

In the corner gas station, the local saloon, on the down-east farm, in the settings of EVERYDAY – there appear UNEXPECTEDLY THE ALIEN, THE WEIRD, THE MYSTERIOUS
The title story tells of one tearful stray from a herd of alien livestock which crushes most of Manhattan and causes apologetic herders to make amends. There is a shivery novelette about the abduction of a country wife by a hairy beast, and the story of a pickup truck full of mythical characters asking directions to Olympus. Then there are the ten-legged blue bugs from inner – or outer – space that can give you a dream – or a nightmare; the shadow-monkeys who have the absurd habit of following along and changing by what you think; the tiny angel that hatches from an egg; and the ‘wrens’ that hatch from Grandpa’s beard the summer he was 106.

Enoch Wallace survived the carnage of Gettysburg and lived through the rest of the Civil War to make it home to his parents’ farm in south-west Wisconsin. But his mother was already dead and his father soon joined her in the tiny family cemetery.

It was then that Enoch met the being he called Ulysses and the farm became a way station for space travellers. Now, nearly a hundred years later, the US government is taking an interest in the seemingly immortal Enoch, and the Galactic Council, which set up the way station is threatening to tear itself apart.

Winner of the Hugo Award for best novel, 1964

It is sometime I the near future. The nations of Earth have drawn closer together – there is even hope of a new era of co-operation and progress will soon begin.

These dreams of lasting peace are shattered by one momentous discovery. One of the members of an international team of scientists stationed on the moon has found an alien spacecraft – with all its incredible technology and weaponry intact. The discovery shatters the illusion of peace on Earth, as each nation joins the mad scramble to learn the terrible secrets entombed by alien visitors eons before.

Only one thing prevents total war – Werner Brecht, the discoverer of the vehicle, is the only one who knows its location, and he has disappeared into thin air.

This collection by Lucius Shepard, one of the most exciting new writers to emerge in the 1980s, includes the eponymous story ¿Barnacle Bill the Spacer¿, about an attempted mutiny on a space station, which won the Hugo Award, as well as ¿Sports in America¿, about a man who finds out just how far he is willing to go when he is hired by a local crime boss to kill a man. In ¿All the Perfumes of Araby¿ a small-time smuggler is granted a vision of the future that compels him to change his life, while ¿Human History¿ is a post-apocalyptic adventure story with a hint of decadence. ¿The Sun Spider¿ is a romance of sorts, with a decidedly gothic twist, while in ¿Beast of the Heartland¿, a boxer at the end of his career is lured back into the ring with the promise of one last big payoff. And anyone who has ever completely lost themselves in a piece of music will recognise the inspiration for ¿A Little Night Music¿. Shepard’s stories are not just wonderfully three-dimensional characters dealing with life-changing events; they are filled with colours, textures, sounds and smells, as he describes his backgrounds with as much care as a master painter.