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Born to Be Weird...

When Tom Kolczyskrenski got his discharge papers from the Air Force, he decided to look up his old pals--and the world would never be the same. At one time, the oddly mismatched trio had been roommates, then they'd gone their separate ways. Tom, for lack of money, enlisted in the Air Force to learn electronics. The other two had finished college, lan McTavish going into mechanical engineering and a job with GM, and Jim Hasenpfeffer into behavioral science, leading to his having gotten a Department of Defense grant to--this is serious stuff, now--study social interactions in motorcycle gangs.

So the three set out to be their own motorcycle gang. But these easy riders had barely begun to closely observe their own interactions when they ran across a strange perfectly hemispherical hole in the ground where a house used to be, with everything that had been in the sphere of influence slowly materializing in bits and pieces in the surrounding area. And they found the plans for the machine that had done this, and were sure they could duplicate it and get rich. But before long they would be wishing they had kept on being the three musketeers on bikes, instead of the three stooges of time travel....

We are happy to republish Copernick's Rebellion because it is better now than when it was first published almost 25 years ago. At the time, genetic engineering was only for science fiction and then only for very speculative science fiction. Everyone knew that someday, somewhere, we would have corn that resisted rot and tomatoes that stayed fresh longer than usual, but no one would have believed trees that grew golden apples and engineered sentient bio-beings. We knew the theory about DNA, but did not have the sequence for even the simplest bacteria. Now, in the real world, you can order mice with genes that glow in the dark when activated. Want to research a gene? Phone the lab and they will splice in a bioluminescence gene along with the one that you want to research. $20,000 and they will breed you a litter of custom mice with genes that glow. We now have sequenced an entire human genome, decoded the rat and several other species. It is only a matter of time before we can build a person from scratch. The problem is now only complexity, not science. When we decide to build a self aware bio-organism, we'll do it. Twenty five years ago, this book was a hard sell for a new author. Now it is current. Virtually everything in this book is possible, from the tree houses, to the trees with golden apples, to the fauns. Come look at a future that is more possible now than when it was written.

Doomed Paradise

The ancient tales of European Man, carefully recorded by pious monks and hedge wizards alike, are insistent about the Western Isles. One of the tales of Doubting Thomas, the apostle, has it that he Christianized these islands and stayed there until the end of his days. The Arthurian legends clearly state that Arthur's father, Uther, came from the Western Isles.

Ancient and Medieval maps agree in showing them as being off the Western Coast of France. Lyonnesse was a part of the Western Islands, as was the City of Ys, Avalon, and the Land of Dahout.

Up until the time of the First Crusade, there are records of pilgrims visiting the Holy sites of the Western Islands. The remains of mercantile records of those days hint of trade with the islands of the west. Irish records and legends, which are generally regarded as reliable back to preChristian times, have many references to great floating islands being pushed by ocean currents and winds alike past the Emerald Isle, and sometimes becoming snagged there for a time.

The Icelandic Eddas make similar references.

Modern sailors and travelers sometimes sight great, many tiered cities near the ocean's horizon, but these people are rarely believed. It is easier for modern, technocentric man to believe in an optical illusion, the Fata Morgana.

This book is about two modern, hardheaded engineers who find the Western Islands.

It is six hundred years in the future and mankind has learned to move between the stars... by going into Two-Space, the vast realm where sentient wooden ships travel beneath canvas sails in a universe that is corrosive to technology.

As they charged headlong into the galaxy, humans discovered others who were already there: The elven Sylvans who live in the vast forests of low-gravity worlds, the dwarven Dwarrowdelf who thrive deep in the mines of high-gravity worlds, and other, far more alien races. The ancient Sylvan race is enchanted by the human culture, embracing Tolkien as prophecy and taking "classic" human science fiction as a guide.

Against this stellar backdrop, Lt. Thomas Melville's ship is mortally wounded in a cowardly surprise attack. With his captain killed, Melville must capture a feral, sentient enemy ship, then fight his way across the galaxy to warn of the vast invading armada. In an odyssey of turmoil and battle he forges his ship and crew into a mighty weapon of war and earns the love of an alien princess.

Now, if he can only survive the attacks of two very angry alien empires, and avoid being court martialed by his own nation of Westerness for getting them involved in a vast intergalactic war, he might live to enjoy the fruits of his labor.

LEGENDARY WARRIORS--THE ONLY HOPE OF A CONQUERED EARTH

Damon Lathe and his blackcollar combat team face their most serious challenge. On one of the conquered human colony worlds is a Ryqril tactical center through which flows an entire sector's worth of military data. If the blackcollars can find a way inside, it could tip the balance in the current Ryqril-Chryselli war. It could even start humanity on the path back to ultimate freedom.

But the Ryqril aren't sitting idly by. Under threat of reprisals against his world, Prefect Jamus Galway of Plinry is already on the case. His plan: to turn the blackcollars and their combat skill into unknowing tools of the Ryqril. His hidden ace: a clone duplicate of Lathe's ally Allan Caine, ready to be slipped into Lathe's inner circle.

It will be the blackcollars' most important mission. It may also be their last.

Somehow, Conrad Stargard, faithful Roman Catholic and stalwart Socialist of the Peoples Republic of Poland, 20th Century, had been marooned in Poland, A.D. 1231.

Somehow, Conrad found himself under investigation by the Inquisition, got himself knighted, was granted his own fief, and made a few enemies.

Somehow, he had to round up a few vassals, build himself a city, and figure out how to survive armed combat against the Champion of the Teutonic Knights, one of the Toughest Men Alive.

Then he'd have time to worry about the Mongols . . .

New Light on the Past. Conrad Stargard, a 20th-century Pole marooned in 13th-century Poland, had just ten years to prevent the Mongol Hordes from slaughtering everyone in Poland. So he "invented" all the modern advances, things like prefabricated housing, playboy clubs, the steam engine, universal education, the cloth factory, and belly dancing. But wars are fought by warriors, not strong economies, and Conrad would need the very best. So he set out to create an army...

UNCERTAIN VISION

For a twentieth-century man, Conrad Stargard had done a lot in thirteenth-century Poland. In just nine years, he had "discovered" universal education, aircraft, radios, steamboats, and machine guns. More important, he had prepared Poland to defeat the bloodthirsty Mongols in 1241.

But now that the Mongol hordes had arrived, something was disturbing the flow of history. Even the Time Masters who secretly watched over Conrad couldn't predict his future, because they no longer even knew their own past . . .

Lady Francine, a French woman known as one of the two most beautiful women in Poland (the other lives with Conrad, but as an heretical Muslim can't or won't marry him) maneuvers Conrad into marrying her.

ONWARD AND OUTWARD

Conrad Stargard has come a long way since he was first transported from the twentieth century to the thirteenth. Thanks to his knack for "inventing" such astonishing things as steam engines, machine guns, radios, and riverboats, he's turned Medieval Poland into a military powerhouse--capable of repelling invasions by marauding Mongols and Teutonic troops alike.

Now, with enemies vanquished, industry booming, and peace in the land, it is time to continue Poland's remarkable technological progress. And doing so requires harvesting raw materials only Lord Conrad knows where to "discover." Thus is founded the Explorer's Corps, whose intrepid members set out to map new frontiers from the Arctic Circle to the Amazon. But can even Conrad's knowledge of the far future prepare him and his subjects for what lies just beyond the borders of their kingdom?

AND THE STREETS WERE MADE OF GOLD....

He was a rugged, hardened combat veteran who had gone to hell and back--in virtual reality! Now he had to face the real thing...

The planet New Kashubia started out as a gas giant, but when its sun went supernova, lighter elements were blasted into space. All that was left was a ball of heavy metals, heated to 8,000 degrees. As it cooled, tungsten solidified first at the surface, and layers of other metals continued down to a ball of mercury at the center. The sun meanwhile evolved into a pulsar with a deadly beam of radiation that baked the planet's surface. The New Kashuhians lived inside the planet, in tunnels drilled in a thousand foot thick layer of solid gold.

Still without carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, or even dirt, the colonists were the poorest people in the universe.

But when they combined virtual reality with tank warfare, giving their warriors symbiosis with their intelligent tanks, neither war nor the galaxy would ever be the same. Not to mention sex...

A general in virtual reality warfare, now he was in danger of becoming a low-ranking corpse in realtime!

New Kashubia was a planet rich in heavy metals, but utterly lacking in carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. Even dirt had to be imported at great expense. The colonists, moved there from Earth against their will, lived in tunnels drilled through solid gold but still were the poorest people in the universe. Since their only resource was people, they sent draftees out as mercenaries, fighting in tanks in symbiosis with a highly intelligent computer. And Mickolai Derdowski had fought bravely and brilliantly for nearly a decade, losing many friends in the process, and risen to the rank of General--he thought.

But then he found out that it was all in virtual reality. The war had been faked, no one had died, and he was still just a tank commander, not a general at all. But New Kashubia had been well paid by the planet that had hired the mercenaries for the war they had faked, severe food rationing back home was no longer necessary, and people could now afford such extravagant luxuries as food, homes and clothing.

There was just one problem. A real war was looming on the horizon and this one couldn't be settled in cyberspace. A lot of people might get really, permanently killed. Such as Mickolai...

The virtual-reality mercenaries of a boy and his tank face a new menace -- and there's nothing virtual about it!

First, the involuntary colonists of New Kashubia rescued their planet from crushing debt by becoming virtual-reality mercenaries, then they successfully revolted against the oppressive government of Earth, but now they are menaced by the Mitchegai, a species whose biology has made them inherently evil. The carnivorous adults lay and abandon vast numbers of eggs, some of which grow into vegetarian juveniles, which are the adults' only food supply. Their culture has no family life, they eat only meat, have nothing like sex, and their main pleasures are gambling, art, and killing each other. They are an ancient civilization, millions of years old, with thousands of densely populated star systems in their realm. Lacking an immune system, they must completely sterilize any planet before they colonize it. The region of the galaxy they occupy is rapidly expanding... and Human Space is their next frontier!