Search Results for: this-second-earth

The world that Man has known for close on twenty thousand years had been overthrown in a holocaust of atomic fire and annihilation. The immense and complex system of civilisation had been utterly destroyed almost overnight and only a scant handful of true humans remained.

Stretched out between the rivers of radioactive fire, the cities were growing wildernesses of shattered stone and brick, splintered glass and silent streets. But here and there in quiet places sheltered from the deadly rains, men waited for the fires to subside and hoped to rebuilt something a little like the civilisation which had existed before.

This is the stirring and sometimes terrible story of the supreme struggle for survival, when the continued existence of the human race on Earth is uncertain after such a tremendous catastrophe, and when all life is menaced by the wandering bands of mutants, creatures spawned and tainted by the deadly radiation.

Prince Zarkon’s arch-enemy, Dr Zanfor Sinestro, returns for a second match in the fourth novel in Lin Carter’s fantastic Zarkon series, hoping to extort millions of dollars by targeting the banks of Knickerbocker City by targeting them with artificially generated earthquakes.

The Earth passes into the Aquas Nebula, resulting in torrents of rain the world over. Only one odd scientist realises what’s going to happen and does his best to warn people – building an ark to save himself and as many people as he can.

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 . . .

Far From This Earth and Other Stories is volume 2 of a collection of Chad Oliver’s SF, containing the following:

Stardust
Let Me Live in a House
Field Expedient
Transformer
If Now You Grieve a Little
Anachronism
North Wind
Pilgrimage
The Wind Blows Free
Of Course
Rite of Passage
Didn’t He Ramble?
Second Nature
Ghost Town
End of the Line
Just Like a Man
Far From This Earth
King of the Hill
Meanwhile, Back on the Reservation
A Lake of Summer

Seven billion years from now, long after the Sun has died and human life itself has become extinct, alien beings reincarnate humanity from our fossilized DNA drifting as debris in the void of deep space. We are reborn to serve as bait in a battle to the death between the Rimstalker, humankind’s reanimator, and the zotl, horrific creatures who feed vampire-like on the suffering of intelligent lifeforms.

The reborn children of Earth are told: “You owe no debt to the being that roused you to this second life. Neither must you expect it to guide you or benefit you in any way.” Yet humans choose sides, as humans will, participating in the titanic struggle between Rimstalker and zotl in ways strange and momentous.

Author’s Note: The volumes of this series can each be read independently of the others. The feature that unifies them is their individual observations of science fiction’s sub-genre: “space opera,” which the editors David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer define as “colorful, dramatic, large-scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character and plot action, and usually set in the relatively distant future, and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone. It often deals with war, piracy, military virtues, and very large-scale action, large stakes.”

Life on Earth was intolerable – and yet Man had stayed there, his dreams and potential suffocating under the dead weight of bureaucracy.

The stars were attainable – thanks to the Infall Drive – but only a few heard the call of deep space. Some had already gone to colonise a new world. The second ship was ready at last. Ready to escape the Earth’s prison; ready to seek refuge in deepest space. But it wasn’t only freedom that awaited it…

Helena, second in command of the Empire Of Earth’s security forces (and daughter of its head), has disappeared. She knows the identity of SOTE’s two most highly trained operators and their lives are now in danger . . . they have to find her before she can reveal their identities.

Getaway World is the fourth book in the Family d’Alembert series.

Towards the end of the twenty-first century 41 Worlds, small satellites with a total population of half a million, orbit the Earth, which has seen many changes, not least of which is a second revolution in America. Marianne O’Hara, a brilliant political sciences student, is from New New York, a hollowed out asteroid and the largest of the Worlds, but is to spend a year on Earth as a postgraduate student. Because the political relationship between the Worlds and Earth is complex and voltatile, Marianne unwittingly finds herself caught up with a group of fanatics determined on a third revolution in America – even if such a revolution could lead to the destruction of the Earth…

Trapped by the evil Edrick in a locked room, Yaleen is cold-bloodedly murdered. But it is not the end of Yaleen’s story, for she is given a second life – a reincarnation on Earth as a ‘cherub’.

Soon she encounters Godmind, the megalomaniac artificial deity which controls life on Earth – and maintains a brutal labour colony on the Moon for any who dare to rebel. Bit by bit, Yaleen comes to understand the horrifying project of the Godmind…

Everything about the planet revolving about Sigma Draconis seemed to indicate that here was a world that could be made into a second Earth. It was fertile and lacked native inhabitants and dangerous beasts. Then what was troubling the pioneer colony that had landed and set up shop there? Was it really possible just to create a new Earth on any vacant world waiting a landing?

Or was there a lot more to planetary ecologies than humanity realized?

The devastated Earth had only a handful of inhabitants – now even their future was in the balance.

The Twenty-Second Century had been and gone – and with it, the worst war in the bloody history of mankind: the War of the Black Rising. The Earth was devastated, the moon blasted out of the sky, it was only on Mars, many millions of miles away, that humanity had survived – in the shape of a few Black colonists.

But out of that few had grown a new civilization – a civilization which now, some two thousand years later, had successfully launched its first space exploration – destination, the ‘dead’ planet Earth.

Dawn of a new Doomsday

It was in the light of the swift star “God’s-Eye” – said to have been thrown aloft by the Ancients before the Desolation – that Beatra was captured by raiders from under the Earth.

Armed with only a psi-kinetic sand-sword and a Dire Wolf’s eyes, Jeremy Wolfhead followed, and found a strange city ruled by the descendants of an ancient government that had escaped the Desolation – a city that was preparing to emerge and bring to Earth a second, even more horrible, Doomsday!

Mysterious radio signals were being received from the planet Uranus, and Earth’s leading scientists decided that a complete investigation was needed. For the first time, the U.N.E.X.A. planned a two-ship expedition, under the overall command of Chris Godfrey. Serge, Morrey and Tony were of course included, and four other astronauts made up the crew of the two ships.

At first the signals made little difference to them, except that they produced violent headaches if listened to for more than a few seconds. But when Chris awoke after a spell of hypothermia and tried to call the other ship he was horrified to hear the sinister sounds from Uranus on the wavelength which connected the two ships with each other and both of them with Control, back on Earth…

The public abruptly ceased to be interested in news of the signals. Rather, it suddenly wanted to stop thinking about them. The public was scared. Throughout all human history, the most horrifying of all ideas has been the idea of something which was as intelligent as a man, but wasn’t human.

The first sounds came at midnight, a plaintive keening from an unknown voice in the vastness of uncharted space. Within hours the whole world had heard the strange, unearthly music–and the panic had begun.

Were the sounds a plea for help? From whom? From where? Or were they a command too terrible to think about? No one knew: And in billions of earth-bound minds the horror grew…

For how could man, who had not yet claimed the moon, defy a challenge from the stars?

And hours later, to the ears of a helpless world, the second message came. . .

And Earth’s days were numbered.

CHART (Cartography Headquarters, Astro Research Trust) is Earth’s galactic takeover bid. Knowledge is power, and the human race means to go on using painfully acquired knowledge of other worlds to remain top dog in the galaxy. But pioneers are not normal men.

Blake is not a normal man; and Rachel, a lovely redhead, is not a lovely sexy redhead.

In timeshift the CHART men drift off into a fantasy world; except Blake, who is condemned to repeat over and over again, agonisingly, the great trauma of his life. He doesn’t know it, but this serves to prepare him for the second great crisis of his life – the weird, terrifying, sickening drama of his meeting with the Men of Crock.

Gone from the galaxy… A startling discovery has shaken Earth’s galactic Empire: more than two hundred and fifty thousand people have vanished from the resort moon, Vesa, without a trace! Called to duty, SOTE’s most daring secret agents, Jules and Yvette D’Alembert – the former aerialists from the triple-gravity planet Des Plaines, possessed of lightning-reflexes and super-strength – are faced with a lethal and baffling conspiracy.

Together the D’Alemberts have conquered many of the Empire’s most dangerous foes, but now the mighty pair must divide forces – each to challenge a deadly evil terror alone!

Stranglers’ Moon is the second book in the “Family D’Alembert” series.

White Flag for Earthmen

Man had discovered a means of colonising the galaxy. Through a system of instantaneous matter transmission, men, machines, anything, could be sent light years away in seconds!

Only, men were not the only beings in the galaxy who were expanding, and at 200 light years from Earth the alien Gershmi people made their claims clear, with guns!

It would have been a fair fight between equally matched races, had not the very matter transmitter boxes which had made mankind’s expansion possible, suddenly began to put men back together, 200 light years from Earth, with their will to fight removes, so that Earthmen were marching with white flags of truce straight into Gershmi fire!

In a time when Earth’s interplanetary Empire is crumbling . . .

On a world where technology has begun to fail . . .

When the rightful ruler of the planet has been deposed by renegades . . .

One young man embodies the spirit of survival.

Frank Rovzar has seen his father murdered most foully in a palace coup. Escaping the deadly Transports he flees to the only safe place he can think of, Munson Underground, the city beneath the surface of the planet, den of thieves and haven of the damned.

Rovzar has only two goals. The first is survival. The second is vengeance. He will have both, he vows, and he embarks on a course that will see him rise from the dregs of society to the very pinnacle of power.

The second and concluding volume of Ian Watson’s extraordinary epic, The Book of Mana. Kaleva is Earth’s first and only interstellar colony, discovered by Lucky Sariola who was transported there by an Ukko, a mysterious asteriod-like entity that responds to stories told to it – in Lucky’s case, those of her Finnish grandmother. Now Queen Lucky, half-mad and newly widowed, is obsessed by relocating that Ukko – but this is potentially disastrous, as the snakelike alien Isi are also on its trail as part of their design to enslave humans. Understanding this, one of Lucky’s daughters (with obsessions of her own) crowns herself rival queen. A summer turns into unseasonable winter and elysian peace turns to bitter civil war and Ukko, once more, has a role to play in the history of Kaleva.

In the late twentieth century, Admiral Julian 3rd can get no rest, for he knows his future. He will be reborn as his grandson in the next century to journey through space and make an ominous discovery inside the moon; he will live again in the dark years of the twenty-second century as Julian 9th, who refuses to bow down to the victorious Moon Men; and as Julian 20th, the fierce Red Hawk, he will lead humanity’s final battle against the alien invaders in the twenty-fifth century. The Moon Maid is Edgar Rice Burroughs’s stunning epic of a world conquered by alien invaders from the moon and of the hero Julian, who champions the earth’s struggle for freedom, peace, and dignity.

Timelike Infinity: the strange region at the end of time where the Xeelee, owners of the universe, are waiting… The second novel in Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee sequence.

First there were good times: humankind reached glorious heights, even immortality. Then there were bad times: Earth was occupied by the faceless, brutal Qax. Immortality drugs were confiscated, the human spirit crushed. Earth became a vast factory for alient foodstuffs.

Into this new dark age appears the end of a tunnel through time. Made from exotic matter, it is humanity’s greatest engineering project in the pre-Qax era, where the other end of the tunnel remains anchored near Jupiter. When a small group of humans in a makeshift craft outwit the Qax to escape to the past through the tunnel, it is not to warn the people of Earth against the Qax, who are sure to follow them. For these men and women from the future are themselves dangerous fanatics in pursuit of their own bizarre quantum grail.

Michael Poole, architect of the tunnel, must boldly confront the consequences of his genius.

The team from Earth had the task of raising backward planets to the home world’s high level. The situation on Rigel was this:

“The most advanced culture on Rigel’s first planet is to be compared to the Italian cities during Europe’s feudalistic yeas. The most advanced of the second planet is comparable to the Aztecs at the time of the Spanish conquest.”

“These planets are in your control to the extent that no small group has ever dominated millions before. No Caesar ever exerted the power that will be in your collective hands. For half a century, you will be as gods and goddesses!”

But the Rigelians were themselves descended from the lost colonists of old Earth and they could learn their lessons as fast as they could be taught.

In fact, they could even teach their teachers a thing or two. And therein lay the peril the professors from space never dreamed of.

A dozen years had passed since Mark Fraser and his family had fled to Ganymede, hoping to find the peace and freedom which had eluded them on Earth. Now violence and terror had pursued them to their new-found home: Captain Swayne and his battleship Vega had made landfall on Ganymede and were using its resources to build missiles with which to hold Planet Earth to ransom. For the second time, Mark Fraser was a marked man, running for his life. His only chance of escape was to a third planet: Jupiter. But as Fraser knew only too well, Jupiter itself was the scene of conflict and carnage. And so far no human being had ever breathed its atmosphere and lived to tell the tale!