Search Results for: way-back,-the

Lost in space…lost in time. There can be no more terrifying situation for any spaceman to be in, and such was the problem when Commodore Grimes’ Faraway Quest broke free from the mysterious Kinsolving’s Planet.

Because the universe was vast and they had been out beyond the Galactic Lens. Because time is infinite and they had slipped beyond their own epoch. Because in whatever universe they were in they could raise no etheric word, no telepathic beacon, no other star vessel.

But for John Grimes, a veritable Commodore Hornblower of the future space seas, there had to be a way back. The first step was to locate Earth, the launching place for all humanity.

But Earth turned out to be legend and myth and faith – and Grimes’ rebellious crew were to enact roles already fabled before they were born.

Along with progress in other spheres, criminology and remedial treatment for the socially unacceptable will undoubtedly make rapid strides in the Twenty-second and Twenty-third centuries.
Purely retributive justice is not a satisfactory answer to the enlightened Welfare Officer of the Future. Psychiatry, criminology and electronic mind control could combine into an entirely new concept of reclamation. In the right hands this would be an advance into something close to Utopia – in the wrong it would be leave 1984 looking like a pleasant week-end in the country.
This thoughtful new novel is a daring attempt to handle the deliucate theme of advanced criminology and the unresolved conflict of Society versus those who will not or cannot conform. Try as they will to be impersonal and humane, the psychiatrists of the future – even with electronic aids – will be as human as we are today. Their problems will be ours…

HAUNTED BY THE PAST, JOHN PETERSEN WOULD GIVE ANYTHING TO TURN BACK THE CLOCK…OR WOULD HE?

When Lightning blasts off without him, Second Officer John Petersen is finished as far as Trans-Galactic Clippers are concerned. Branded a deserter, stranded on Carinthia and desperate for a job, there are very few places left to go. The Rim Runners would have him – they’ll have anyone who’s still warm and can flash some kind of certificate. But there may be a less than unpleasant alternative…

Private detective Steve Vynalek needs Petersen. Has a fanatical scientist on the planet Wenceslaus really found a way to beat the time travel problem, a way to bring back yesterday? The Presidents of Carinthia and Vynalek are convinced that Petersen is the only man for the job. In the airless wastes of Wenceslaus, Petersen finds himself reliving the past, trapped in a terrible cycle of familiarity – a cycle that only he can break.

Dick Tredgold has spent seven years in jail for a murder he insists he did not commit. Now eligible for parole, he refuses to apply, because he feels that by doing so he would acknowledge his guilt. His family, at their wit’s end, appeal to Jesse Falkenstein for help.

Falkenstein realises the only way of getting Tredgold to leave prison is to identify the real murderer – no easy task in an eight-year-old investigation. And when Jesse re-examines the case he begins to discover that not all the witnesses were as reliable as they had seemed. . .

‘My favourite American crime-writer’ New York Herald Tribune

On June 1st 1963 Donald Bailey set out on a hiking tour. For twelve days it was mountain and lakes, rivers and fells, healthy exercise and the magic of a starlit campfire. On the thirteenth day they found a cave and decided to explore. A rock fall cut off the entrance and they searched desperately for another way out. Exhausted and battered, they finally scrambled through a small shaft into a strangely changed countryside which was familiar, yet not familiar.

From a cottager who fed them and tended their wounds they learnt that somehow they were back in the days of the Civil War. Roundheads and Cavaliers battled desperately across the country and they found themselves involved in the bitter struggle for power.

Unwittingly they gave information to a Roundhead spy, which resulted in the death of a Cavalier Commander. He returns from the dead in monstrous form, trying to exact a terrible vengeance on the bewildered pair who are desperately seeking to return to their own time.

THE HARD-CORE SCIENCE OF HAL CLEMENT
The supreme practitioner of “hard” science fiction, Hal Clement combines ingenious problem-solving with suspenseful drama and action. These ten stories show the mastery of science and fiction that Clement has displayed in such favourites as Mission of Gravity, Iceworld, and Needle.
UNCOMMON SENSEIf your back’s to the wall, even a deadly predator can be useful.
ANSWER”Know thyself” is great advice…if you don’t follow it all the way.
QUESTION OF GUILTWas he a medical pioneer…or the first vampire?
IMPEDIMENTMind-reading makes for perfect trust – as long as it works both ways!
-AND LOTS MORE!

An apparently fatal incident occurs when schoolteacher Jim Harper is skiing near a small research station owned by the giant multinational Risinger-Genoud. Even treatment with their new, untried and experimental superdrug cannot save his life.

Or so it seems. For Jim Harper, though left for dead, has survived. But in the long haul back to health and sanity, he begins to realise that something terrible has happened to him. Now the only way in which he can unravel the mystery in his mind is to go back to the point where it began to develop – back to Risinger-Genoud and their Oktober programme. And Risinger Genoud are going to be very interested to see him.

Oktober is a frightening journey into a world of greed and lies, a world in which the cover-up is not only a way of life, but something planned ahead of time. Step by horrifying step, Jim Harper unravels what has been done to him, and then designs the perfect act of vengeance, an act that teeters on the brink of madness…

A young Viking sets off on a quest to rescue his kidnapped bride and, along the way, discovers an earthly paradise. Somehow he must turn his back on this paradise to complete his quest to find a woman he barely knows.

The spaceship landed on the planet Earth to bring it the message of a new religion and a new way of life that would fit the terrestrial barbarians to take their place in the great community of the Galaxy.

Their motives were beyond reproach. Their objectives were honourable. It was not their fault that humanity distrusted their motives, repudiated their objectives – and did its best to drive the missionaries back into space . . .

Arthur Chamberlain has problems. His one-man engineering firm is faltering and his pretty secretary Estelle barely notices him. But these problems are put aside when his Manhattan office building falls into the fourth dimension. Madison Square is filled with wigwams and it’s up to Arthur to engineer a way to make his building to fall back to the future.

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.

From the ether came mysterious messages announcing that a hitherto unknown Englishman had conquered space, flown to Venus, and is now on his way back to Earth. The fact that science’s most highly developed range and frequency finders are unable to pinpoint the actual source of the voice is looked upon as absolute proof that they are hearing from outer space. The aggressive and autocratic quality about the way in which the eccentric Ardath Steele makes his proclamations not only annoys Betty Travers, ace reporter on the Daily Searchlight, but also deciders her to embark on a one-woman vendetta to prove that Steele is an impostor. Even when the spaceship finally lands she remains the only sceptic in a country full of pride in its first space explorer.

The hill below the fortress of Taurovinda, stronghold of Urtha, High King of the Cornovidi, is coming alive: the Otherworldly realm of the Shadows of Heroes are claiming the land as their own. But this time their actions are driven by a force that is darker and older than even the oldest among the ghosts. Who or what is raising the Dead? Merlin, a temporary resident in the fortress, must answer that question if this time of kings and lovers is to be saved. Jason’s wonderful ship, Argo, has returned, drawn back by her own guilty past, and a dreadful secret that she will reveal only to Merlin. Argo holds the key to the mystery. And Niiv, the bewitching, beautiful Northlands enchantress, is working her way even closer into Merlin’s charms.

This is a journey that will take Merlin back in history, and to a fabled island of legend. Love is in the air. But at a price.

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

The evacuation of Philip Masson’s body near Mrs Griffin’s cottage resurrects several old ghosts that send the newshounds scurrying to dig in their clippings archives. Rumours, matured with the passing years since Masson’s ‘disappearance’ way back in 1978, once more abound.

But the investigative team of Ian Robinson and Jenny Fielding are already on a trail of discovery that leads back to the end of the Wilson/Callaghan era. Jenny has overheard a snatch of gossip at an embassy party which seems to implicate British Intelligence’s David Audley in the original cover-up of Masson’s death . . . and Jenny has a personal interest in that affair.

But it is not until the labyrinthine trails come together on a Spanish battlefield that Jenny learns why it is that Philip Masson had to die….

Lafayette O’Leary, to his acute discomfiture, has an exhilarating and terrifying tendency to slip continua. And what might that mean?

It might mean finding oneself a gypsy with a ring in his ear at one moment, and then suddenly a crippled birdman unable to leave his nest because of the awkward loss of teleporting talent.

It might mean battling one’s way back to the time stream where he started – only to find himself already there, lording it over the populace like a tyrant.

“Hello Earth! Hello London!”

But no reply was forthcoming to the message sent out by the spaceship in which the four pioneers had been exploring all the planets en route to Pluto, and which was now on its way back to London after two long years. Even the silence failed to dismay the voyagers; it could well be explained by a major fault of the airport’s wireless transmitter. It was only when they touched down that they realised some terrible catastrophe had hit Earth in their absence…

Brendan Thorne, ex-army Ranger and master CIA sniper, has turned his back on violence. But while working as a game warden at a Kenya safari park, an FBI team appear from nowhere, kidnap him and fly him back to the US to meet the newly elected President.

President Wallberg is being stalked by veteran Vietnam sniper and old schoolmate Hal Corwin. According to the government’s computers, Thorne is the perfect match for Corwin in every way. Only Thorne can stop him before he gets to the President.

Thorne pursues Corwin across America in a deadly game of cat and mouse, but as he closes in on his target, he learns that all is not as it seems, and that he can trust no one. Now he is caught in a web of deceit and ambition far larger than he ever suspected . . .

Six men have failed to appear in a West End court, so it’s time for Scotland Yard to make a few undercover enquiries. They enlist the help of Detective-Constable Cordari, who leads them to a mysterious organisation smuggling criminals out of the country.

There ensues a relentless chase that moves to Algeria and back to London. In the meantime, Cordari has vanished in the same horribly mysterious way as others before him.

‘A plot that grows to grim and sinister proportions. An ingenious story with plenty of excitement’ Manchester Evening News

Keith Devery, burdened with a criminal record, arrives in Wicksteed, a prosperous little town on the Pacific coast. He is looking for any job that will provide eating money. It is when he meets Beth Marshall – whose husband, a local drunk, is to inherit $1,000,000 – that he realises there’s a way to get back in the big league.

Together they ruthlessly plot the perfect murder, but Keith soon finds himself at the centre of a double-bluff. Beth has plans of her own once the money is hers …

The fifth of ten volumes that will reprint all Sturgeon’s short fiction contains fifteen classics and two previously unpublished stories, including “Quietly.” The Perfect Host provides enough of a representative sampling of Sturgeon’s “greatest hits” to give the uninitiated a good sense of what all the fuss was about way back when. At the same time, it offers a generous selection of alternate takes and rarities, notably several of Sturgeon’s best forays into other forms of genre writing, plus previously unreleased cuts and liner notes.

It looks like a trivial enough incident: a would-be petty thief makes his escape before he has stolen anything. But when the beat constable arrives to look for damage, he finds something he hasn’t been expecting – a dead man, with a wound in his back made by a broad blade … possibly a spearhead.

Scotland Yard get to work, following what turns out to be a very complicated business, especially when they find they are on the trail of smuggled diamonds leading all the way to South Africa …

By the time Jim Gilruth returns to Pakistan, twenty years after he served as a law officer in a small village near Lahore, colonial rule has given way to Pakistani officialdom. His strange and enigmatic mission is painfully involved in the brutal clash of the old and the new – but why has he been chosen as the instrument of coercion?

Then the details of a half-forgotten murder that he had long ago adjudicated begin to come back in all their bewildering nuances, and Gilruth, in an eerie repetition of the circumstances of a generation ago, is powerless to save the life of a good man, or bring a murderer to justice.

Private eye Bill Crane is back, in his fifth and final case, working and drinking as usual with his old sidekick, Doc Williams, and a new member of the gang, Ann Fortune, who is posing as his girlfriend – and disapproves of his carousing.

The trio has been sent to a Chicago suburb to investigate a murder and death threats made to the family of an industrial magnate. Alternately impeded and abetted by the many attractive women of the family, Crane cracks the case in his own inimitable way, following a trail of clues including the perfume of gardenias, the lipstick marks on the dead man’s face and the crimson cat.

After an unintentionally successful demon-summoning, accountant Prosper Nash finds himself on the astral plane, inhabiting the body of Jean-Prospere, Chevalier de Néche-the swashbuckling cavalier he likes to imagine himself as-and in a New York filled with characters from similar wish-fulfillment daydreams of other mundane souls. The demon is possessing his body on a mundane plane, and he attempts to find his way back. This involves the Shamir, the Solomon’s Stone of the title, and plentiful swashbuckling adventure, and a plot in which Prosper Nash’s accounting abilities prove as useful as Chevalier de Néche’s athletic ones.