Search Worlds Without End

A powerful story about loss of freedom and individuality, V FOR VENDETTA takes place in a totalitarian England following a devastating war that changed the face of the planet.

In a world without political freedom, personal freedom and precious little faith in anything comes a mysterious man in a white porcelain mask who fights political oppressors through terrorism and seemingly absurd acts. It's a gripping tale of the blurred lines between ideological good and evil.

One summer weekend in 1949-but not our 1949-the well-connected "Farthing set", a group of upper-crust English families, enjoy a country retreat. Lucy is a minor daughter in one of those families; her parents were both leading figures in the group that overthrew Churchill and negotiated peace with Herr Hitler eight years before.

Despite her parents' evident disapproval, Lucy is married-happily-to a London Jew. It was therefore quite a surprise to Lucy when she and her husband David found themselves invited to the retreat. It's even more startling when, on the retreat's first night, a major politician of the Farthing set is found gruesomely murdered, with abundant signs that the killing was ritualistic.

It quickly becomes clear to Lucy that she and David were brought to the retreat in order to pin the murder on him. Major political machinations are at stake, including an initiative in Parliament, supported by the Farthing set, to limit the right to vote to university graduates. But whoever's behind the murder, and the frame-up, didn't reckon on the principal investigator from Scotland Yard being a man with very private reasons for sympathizing with outcasts - and looking beyond the obvious.

As the trap slowly shuts on Lucy and David, they begin to see a way out-a way fraught with peril in a darkening world.

He is the greatest hero of our time--Doc Savage!

Philip José Farmer, three-time Hugo award winner and Science Fiction Grand Master, has turned his superb research and narrative skills to one of the greatest heroes of our time: Doc Savage, the bronze champion of justice.

Now, at last, the incredible life story of the real man behind the Doc Savage pulp novels, including:

His true name and family background, covering his relationship to Lord Greystoke, Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, James Bond, and Fu Manchu.

Detailed information on some of his most devilish opponents--John Sunlight, the Mystic Mullah, and Mr. Wail.

A summation of some of Doc's most amazing inventions.

Biographies of the Fabulous Five--Monk, Ham, Renny, Long Tom, and Johnny--as well as the group's Lady Auxiliary and Bronze Knockout, Pat Savage!

Together with other data and brilliant deductions, Philip José Farmer offers an amazing account of this remarkable man's astonishing career!

When the body of a murdered woman is found in the extraordinary, decaying city of Bes el, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks like a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he probes, the evidence begins to point to conspiracies far stranger, and more deadly, than anything he could have imagined. Soon his work puts him and those he cares for in danger. Borlu must travel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own, across a border like no other.

In a future world racked by violence and environmental catastrophes, George Orr wakes up one day to discover that his dreams have the ability to alter reality. He seeks help from Dr. William Haber, a psychiatrist who immediately grasps the power George wields. Soon George must preserve reality itself as Dr. Haber becomes adept at manipulating George's dreams for his own purposes.

What is Un Lun Dun?

It is London through the looking glass, an urban Wonderland of strange delights where all the lost and broken things of London end up . . . and some of its lost and broken people, too–including Brokkenbroll, boss of the broken umbrellas; Obaday Fing, a tailor whose head is an enormous pin-cushion, and an empty milk carton called Curdle. Un Lun Dun is a place where words are alive, a jungle lurks behind the door of an ordinary house, carnivorous giraffes stalk the streets, and a dark cloud dreams of burning the world. It is a city awaiting its hero, whose coming was prophesied long ago, set down for all time in the pages of a talking book.

When twelve-year-old Zanna and her friend Deeba find a secret entrance leading out of London and into this strange city, it seems that the ancient prophecy is coming true at last. But then things begin to go shockingly wrong.

Anthologies seldom make history, but Dangerous Visions is a grand exception. Harlan Ellison's 1967 collection of science fiction stories set an almost impossibly high standard, as more than a half dozen of its stories won major awards - not surprising with a contributors list that reads like a who's who of 20th-century SF.

Table of Contents:

• Foreword 1-The Second Revolution - (1967) - essay by Isaac Asimov
• Foreword 2-Harlan and I - (1967) - essay by Isaac Asimov
• Thirty-Two Soothsayers - (1967) - essay by Harlan Ellison
• Evensong - (1967) - shortstory by Lester del Rey
• Flies - (1967) - shortstory by Robert Silverberg
• The Day After the Day the Martians Came - (1967) - shortstory by Frederik Pohl
• Riders of the Purple Wage - (1967) - novella by Philip José Farmer
• The Malley System - (1967) - shortstory by Miriam Allen deFord
• A Toy for Juliette - shortstory by Robert Bloch
• The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World - novelette by Harlan Ellison
• The Night That All Time Broke Out - (1967) - shortstory by Brian W. Aldiss
• The Man Who Went to the Moon - Twice - (1967) - shortstory by Howard Rodman
• Faith of Our Fathers - novelette by Philip K. Dick
• The Jigsaw Man - (1967) - shortstory by Larry Niven
• Gonna Roll the Bones - novelette by Fritz Leiber
• Lord Randy, My Son - (1967) - shortstory by Joe L. Hensley
• Eutopia - (1967) - novelette by Poul Anderson
• Incident in Moderan - (1967) - shortstory by David R. Bunch
• The Escaping - (1967) - shortstory by David R. Bunch
• The Doll-House - (1967) - shortstory by James Cross
• Sex and/or Mr. Morrison - shortstory by Carol Emshwiller
• Shall the Dust Praise Thee? - (1967) - shortstory by Damon Knight
• If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister? - (1967) - novella by Theodore Sturgeon
• What Happened to Auguste Clarot? - (1967) - shortstory by Larry Eisenberg
• Ersatz - (1967) - shortstory by Henry Slesar
• Go, Go, Go, Said the Bird - (1967) - shortstory by Sonya Dorman
• The Happy Breed - shortstory by John Sladek
• Encounter with a Hick - (1967) - shortstory by Jonathan Brand
• From the Government Printing Office - (1967) - shortstory by Kris Neville
• Land of the Great Horses - shortstory by R. A. Lafferty
• The Recognition - shortstory by J. G. Ballard
• Judas - (1967) - shortstory by John Brunner
• Test to Destruction - (1967) - novelette by Keith Laumer
• Carcinoma Angels - (1967) - shortstory by Norman Spinrad
• Auto-da-Fé - (1967) - shortstory by Roger Zelazny
• Aye, and Gomorrah... - (1967) - shortstory by Samuel R. Delany

Multiverse travel is finally possible, but there's just one catch: No one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive. Enter Cara, whose parallel selves happen to be exceptionally good at dying – from disease, turf wars, or vendettas they couldn't outrun. Cara's life has been cut short on 372 worlds in total.

On this dystopian Earth, however, Cara has survived. Identified as an outlier and therefore a perfect candidate for multiverse travel, Cara is plucked from the dirt of the wastelands. Now what once made her marginalized has finally become an unexpected source of power. She has a nice apartment on the lower levels of the wealthy and walled-off Wiley City. She works – and shamelessly flirts – with her enticing yet aloof handler, Dell, as the two women collect off-world data for the Eldridge Institute. She even occasionally leaves the city to visit her family in the wastes, though she struggles to feel at home in either place. So long as she can keep her head down and avoid trouble, Cara is on a sure path to citizenship and security.

But trouble finds Cara when one of her eight remaining doppelgängers dies under mysterious circumstances, plunging her into a new world with an old secret. What she discovers will connect her past and her future in ways she could have never imagined – and reveal her own role in a plot that endangers not just her world, but the entire multiverse.

Three armies march on New Prentisstown, each one intent on destroying the others.

Todd and Viola are caught in the middle, with no chance of escape.

As the battles commence, how can they hope to stop the fighting? How can there be peace when they’re so hopelessly outnumbered? And if war makes monsters of men, what terrible choices await?

But then a third voice breaks into the battle, one bent on revenge…

The electrifying finale to the award-winning Chaos Walking trilogy. Publishing May 2010 in the UK, Ireland and Australia, and September 2010 in the United States and Canada.

BEHIND THE WALLS OF TERRA .... LAY THE SECRET NO MAN COULD BE ALLOWED TO LEARN!

Kickaha was the name by which Paul Janus Finnegan, adventurer had been known on the artificial universes created by that super-race known as the Lords. And though Earthman and mortal, he had survived the worst they could throw at him.

But it was to be upon his return to Earth that Kickaha was to face his greatest trial. For once back on the streets of an American city, armed with the knowledge of the forces that moved the heavens, he was a target for the cosmic venom of the powers that contended for this very universe.

BEHIND THE WALLS OF TERRA lay a secret no human could learn - and live. But Kickaha had learned it - and he was not going to take it lying down!

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Galaxy Magazine, October 1968. The story can aslo be found in the anthologies Worlds of Maybe (1970) edited by Robert Silverberg, Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction (1980), edited by Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander, and The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century (2001), edited by Harry Turtledove and Martin H. Greenberg. It is included in the collecions All the Myriad Ways (1971), N-Space (1990) and The Best of Larry Niven (2010).

In a decadent world of cheap pleasures and easy death, Marid Audrian has kept his independence the hardway. Still, like everything else in the Budayeen, he's available... for a price.

For a new kind of killer roams the streets of the Arab ghetto, a madman whose bootlegged personality cartridges range from a sinister James Bond to a sadistic disemboweler named Khan. And Marid Audrian has been made an offer he can't refuse.

The 200-year-old "godfather" of the Budayeen's underworld has enlisted Marid as his instrument of vengeance. But first Marid must undergo the most sophisticated of surgical implants before he dares to confront a killer who carries the power of every psychopath since the beginning of time.

On October 11 the television star Jason Taverner is so famous that 30 million viewers eagerly watch his prime-time show. On October 12 Jason Taverner is not a has-been but a never-was -- a man who has lost not only his audience but all proof of his existence. And in the claustrophobic betrayal state of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, loss of proof is synonymous with loss of life.

Taverner races to solve the riddle of his disappearance", immerses us in a horribly plausible Philip K. Dick United States in which everyone -- from a waiflike forger of identity cards to a surgically altered pleasure -- informs on everyone else, a world in which omniscient police have something to hide. His bleakly beautiful novel bores into the deepest bedrock self and plants a stick of dynamite at its center.

It's 2015, and Patricia Cowan is very old. "Confused today," read the notes clipped to the end of her bed. She forgets things she should know--what year it is, major events in the lives of her children. But she remembers things that don't seem possible. She remembers marrying Mark and having four children. And she remembers not marrying Mark and raising three children with Bee instead. She remembers the bomb that killed President Kennedy in 1963, and she remembers Kennedy in 1964, declining to run again after the nuclear exchange that took out Miami and Kiev.

Her childhood, her years at Oxford during the Second World War--those were solid things. But after that, did she marry Mark or not? Did her friends all call her Trish, or Pat? Had she been a housewife who escaped a terrible marriage after her children were grown, or a successful travel writer with homes in Britain and Italy? And the moon outside her window: does it host a benign research station, or a command post bristling with nuclear missiles?

Two lives, two worlds, two versions of modern history; each with their loves and losses, their sorrows and triumphs. Jo Walton's My Real Children is the tale of both of Patricia Cowan's lives... and of how every life means the entire world.?

BUG-EYED MONSTERS ON BROADWAY Pulp SF magazine editor Keith Winton was answering a letter from a teenage fan when the first moon rocket fell back to Earth and blew him away. But where to? Greenville, New York, looked the same, but Bems (Bug-Eyed Monsters) just like the ones on the cover of Startling Stories walked the streets without attracting undue comment. And when he brought out a half-dollar coin in a drugstore, the cops wanted to shoot him on sight as an Arcturian spy. Wait a minute. Seven-foot purple moon-monsters? Earth at war with Arcturus? General Dwight D. Eisenhower in command of Venus Sector? What mad universe was this? One thing was for sure: Keith Winton had to find out fast - or he'd be good and dead, in this universe or any other.

Lew Nichols is in the business of stochastic prediction. A mixture of sophisticated analysis and inspired guesswork, it is the nearest man can get to predicting the future. And Nichols is very good at it. So good that he is soon indispensable to Paul Quinn, the ambitious and charismatic mayor of New York whose sights are firmly set on the presidency. But there is nothing paranormal about stochastic prediction: Nichols can't actually see the future. However, Martin Carvajal apparently can and he offers to help Nichols do so too. It's an offer Nichols can't resist, even though he can clearly see the devastating impact that knowing in advance every act of his life has on Carvajal. For Carvajal has even seen his own death.

The original novel that inspired the films!

First published more than fifty years ago, Pierre Boulle's chilling novel launched one of the greatest science fiction sagas in motion picture history.

In the not-too-distant future, three astronauts land on what appears to be a planet just like Earth, with lush forests, a temperate climate, and breathable air. But while it appears to be a paradise, nothing is what it seems.

They soon discover the terrifying truth: On this world humans are savage beasts, and apes rule as their civilized masters. In an ironic novel of nonstop action and breathless intrigue, one man struggles to unlock the secret of a terrifying civilization, all the while wondering: Will he become the savior of the human race, or the final witness to its damnation? In a shocking climax that rivals that of the original movie, Boulle delivers the answer in a masterpiece of adventure, satire, and suspense.

A photographer returns to a near-future Britain after the death of his wife in a terrorist incident in Afghanistan. And finds that Britain has, itself, been suffering terrorist attacks. But no-one knows quite what is happening or how. Just that there are similarities between what killed the photographer's wife and what happened in West London. Soon he is drawn into a hall of mirrors at the heart of government.

In the First World War a magician is asked to travel to the frontline to help a naval aerial reconnaissance unit hide its planes from the German guns. On the way to France he meets a certain H.G. Wells. In the Second World War on the airfields of Bomber Commands there is also an obsession with camouflage, with misdirection. With deceit.

And in a garden, an old man raises a conch shell to his ear and initiates the first Adjacency.

In Radio Free Albemuth, his last novel, Philip K. Dick morphed and recombined themes that had informed his fiction from A Scanner Darkly to VALIS and produced a wild, impassioned work that reads like a visionary alternate history of the United States. Agonizingly suspenseful, darkly hilarious, and filled with enough conspiracy theories to thrill the most hardened paranoid, Radio Free Albemuth is proof of Dick's stature as our century's greatest science fiction writer.

Five hundred miles beneath the earth's surface lies a fantastic, timeless world of eternal daylight, prehistoric beasts, and primeval peoples--Pellucidar. Pellucidar is a world within our world, a place where the horizon curves upward and merges with the sky. Here time stands still, for Pellucidar is illuminated by a miniature sun that never sets but hovers motionless in the sky. Scattered throughout the savage, prehistoric wilderness are communities of distrustful humans and the cities of the reptilian, highly evolved Mahars.

David Innes and Abner Perry break through into this mysterious inner world. Their discovery of Pellucidar and the ensuing struggle to unite the human communities and overthrow the Mahars is a top-notch, thrilling tale of conquest, deceit, and wonder.

This commemorative edition features an introduction by Gregory A. Benford and an afterword on the science of At the Earth's Core by Phillip R. Burger. Also included are a map of Pellucidar, a glossary of terms and names by Scott Tracy Griffin, a contemporary review, and the classic J. Allen St. John illustrations.

E. C. "Scar" Gordon was on the French Riviera recovering from a tour of combat in Southeast Asia , but he hadn't given up his habit of scanning the Personals in the newspaper. One ad in particular leapt out at him:

"ARE YOU A COWARD? This is not for you. We badly need a brave man. He must be 23 to 25 years old, in perfect health, at least six feet tall, weigh about 190 pounds, fluent English, with some French, proficient in all weapons, some knowledge of engineering and mathematics essential, willing to travel, no family or emotional ties, indomitably courageous and handsome of face and figure. Permanent employment, very high pay, glorious adventure, great danger. You must apply in person, rue Dante, Nice, 2me etage, apt. D."

How could you not answer an ad like that, especially when it seemed to describe you perfectly? Well, except maybe for the "handsome" part, but that was in the eye of the beholder anyway. So he went to that apartment and was greeted by the most beautiful woman he'd ever met. She seemed to have many names, but agreed he could call her "Star." A pretty appropriate name, as it turned out, for the empress of twenty universes.

Robert A. Heinlein's one true fantasy novel, Glory Road is as much fun today as when he wrote it after Stranger in a Strange Land. Heinlein proves himself as adept with sword and sorcery as with rockets and slide rules and the result is exciting, satirical, fast-paced, funny and tremendously readable -- a favorite of all who have read it. Glory Road is a masterpiece of escapist entertainment with a typically Heinleinian sting in its tail. Tor is proud to return this all-time classic to hardcover to be discovered by a new generation of readers.

TV megastar Jack Barron hosts the wildly popular Bug Jack Barron, a phone-in show that listens to public gripes and puts politicians and bosses on the spot--live. Naturally Barron pulls his punches for safety's sake... until he tangles with paranoid billionaire Benedict Howards, peddler of cryonic immortality, and walks into a minefield of deadly cover-ups. Violence erupts. Howards believes he can buy anyone, even Barron's estranged wife, even Barron. Barron doesn't mind selling out if the coin is immortality.

Fleeing the city of New York on the TransContinental atmospheric transport vehicle, Dran Florrian is traveling with Palimpsest -- the ultimate proof of a lifetime of scientific theorizing.

When a rogue organization attempts to steal the device, however, Dran takes drastic action.

But his invention threatens to destroy the very fabric of this and all other possible universes, unless Dran -- or someone very much like him -- can shut down the machine and reverse the process.

75th Anniversary Edition!

Among the best-written and most emotionally complex stories of the Pulp Era, the tales of intergalactic smuggler Northwest Smith still resonate strongly 75 years after their first publication. From the crumbling temples of forgotten gods on Venus to the seedy pleasure halls of old Mars, Northwest Smith blazes a trail through the underbelly of the solar system in 13 action-packed stories you won’t soon forget.

Contents:

• Teaching the World to Dream - essay by C. J. Cherryh
• Shambleau (1933) - novelette
• Black Thirst (1934) - novelette
• Scarlet Dream (1934) - novelette
• Dust of Gods (1934) - novelette
• Julhi (1935) - novelette
• Nymph of Darkness (1935) - short story with Forrest J. Ackerman
• The Cold Gray God (1935) - novelette
• Yvala (1936) - novelette
• Lost Paradise (1936) - novelette
• The Tree of Life (1936) - novelette
• Quest of the Starstone (1937) - novelette with Henry Kuttner
• Werewoman (1938) - novelette
• Song in a Minor Key (1940) - short story

Note: The Singularity & Co. e-book of Moore's Northwest Smith stories has the same contents as the 1982 Ace Books collection (Northwest Smith), and does not include "Nymph of Darkness", "Quest of the Starstone", and "Werewoman".

It's influenced William Gibson and been listed as one of the ten essential works of science fiction. Most importantly, Joanna Russ's THE FEMALE MAN is a suspenseful, surprising and darkly witty chronicle of what happens when Jeannine, Janet, Joanna, and Jael--four alternate selves from drastically different realities--meet.

Of all the cities on all the planets of the Solar System, Marsport was the most corrupt. So when one-time prize-fighter, cop, and reporter, Bruce Gordon ends up with a one way ticket to Mars, it was only natural that he would find himself walking a beat collecting graft like the rest of the force. Just trying to survive, he finds himself caught in the middle between two rival gangs as they battle for control of the planet.