A Choice of Gods is a "What the hell happened to everyone?" story, where a handful of survivors wander a mysteriously depopulated Earth. (Other examples that jump to my mind are Joe Haldeman's recent Forever Free and The Quiet Earth by Craig Harrison, the basis for a quirky but interesting low-budget film from New Zealand, but I'm sure there are many others. Heck, they even...
A Choice of Gods is a "What the hell happened to everyone?" story, where a handful of survivors wander a mysteriously depopulated Earth. (Other examples that jump to my mind are Joe Haldeman's recent Forever Free and The Quiet Earth by Craig Harrison, the basis for a quirky but interesting low-budget film from New Zealand, but I'm sure there are many others. Heck, they even...
Old Mose Abrams was out hunting cows when he found the alien. He didn't know it was an alien, but it was alive and it was in a lot of trouble and Old Mose, despite everything the neighbors said about him, was not the kind of man who could bear to leave a sick thing out there in the woods. It was a horrid-looking thing, green and shiny, with some purple spots on it, and it was...
Space is an illusion, and time as well. There is no such factor as either time or space. We have been blinded by our own cleverness, blinded by false perceptions of those qualities that we term eternity and infinity. There is another factor that explains it all, and once this universal factor is recognized, everything grows simple. There is no longer any mystery, no longer any...
Space is an illusion, and time as well. There is no such factor as either time or space. We have been blinded by our own cleverness, blinded by false perceptions of those qualities that we term eternity and infinity. There is another factor that explains it all, and once this universal factor is recognized, everything grows simple. There is no longer any mystery, no longer any...
A mysterious invisible barrier suddenly encloses a small, out-of-the-way American town. It's been put there by a galactic intelligence intent on imposing harmony and cooperation on the different peoples of the universe. But to the inhabitants, the barrier evokes stark terror.
A mysterious invisible barrier suddenly encloses a small, out-of-the-way American town. It's been put there by a galactic intelligence intent on imposing harmony and cooperation on the different peoples of the universe. But to the inhabitants, the barrier evokes stark terror.
Once again the universe was spread far out before him and it was a different and in some ways a better universe, a more diagrammatic universe, and in time, he knew, if there were such a thing as time, he'd gain some completer understanding and acceptance of it. He probed and sensed and learned and there was no such thing as time, but a great foreverness. He thought with pity of...
Earth: expensive, elite graveyard to the galaxy. Ravaged 10,000 years earlier by war, Earth was reclaimed by its space-dwelling offspring as a planet of landscaping and tombstones. None of them fully human, Fletcher, Cynthia, and Elmer journey through this dead world, discovering human traits and undertaking a quest to rebuild a human world on Earth.
City is a 1952 science fiction fix-up novel by Clifford D. Simak. The original version consists of eight linked short stories, all originally published between 1944 and 1951, along with brief "notes" on each of the stories. These notes were created especially for the book, and serve as a bridging story of their own. The book was reprinted as ACE #D-283 in 1958, cover...
City is a 1952 science fiction fix-up novel by Clifford D. Simak. The original version consists of eight linked short stories, all originally published between 1944 and 1951, along with brief "notes" on each of the stories. These notes were created especially for the book, and serve as a bridging story of their own. Notes on the first tale. City. Notes on the second tale....
Cosmic Engineers is a science fiction novel by author Clifford D. Simak. It was published in 1950 by Gnome Press in an edition of 6,000 copies, of which 1,000 were bound in paperback for an armed forces edition. The novel was originally serialized in the magazine Astounding in 1939. Reviewer Groff Conklin found the 1950 text to be "rather pleasant...old-fashioned [with a]...
Captain Mike Ross finds himself leading an interplanetary expedition to an anonymous planet that welcomes them with a homing beam and then seals shut around them. Their ship is sealed against them and they are hurled into a wholly inhospitable desert.
Spencer Chambers wants to make the solar system his own personal Empire. A trillionaire and industrialist he owns the ships that can carry humanity to freedom and plenty in the untapped riches of the solar system. In return he wants to charge exorbitant prices making it so that he will end up owning every planet and asteroid. Gregory Manning has a different idea. He sees a...
A manuscript is stolen from a library and from a young man's obstinate questions emerges an answer of stupendous import as the quest for an elder civilization becomes a terrifying ordeal. The author is a Hugo and Nebula award-winner whose previous novels include "Off Planet" and "City".
A manuscript is stolen from a library and from a young man's obstinate questions emerges an answer of stupendous import as the quest for an elder civilization becomes a terrifying ordeal. The author is a Hugo and Nebula award-winner whose previous novels include "Off Planet" and "City".
Inspector Drayton sat, solidly planted behind the desk, and waited. He was a raw-boned man with a face that looked as if it might have been hacked, by a dull hatchet, out of a block of gnarled wood. His eyes were points of flint and at times they seemed to glitter, and he was angry and upset. But such a man, Peter Maxwell knew, would never give way to any kind of anger. There...
"One of the best-loved authors in SF, Simak has built an appealing private universe with his rural settings and Midwestern ethos. His new novel once again questions material progress that scants moral values. A family of refugees flees into the past to escape the Infinites, aliens who are seducing Earth people away from their apathetic utopia and toward a transformation to an...
"The time trails led him to mastodons, money and the most amazing mystery of all: time." Published as Catface in the UK. A cat-faced alien stranded in drift-free Wisconsin befriends locals and time-engineers portals into prehistoric epochs, where they establish a new nation: Mastodonia
Coming from the future, our children's children walked through holes in the air. The holes were time tunnels and down them were fleeing our after-generations, escaping from an invasion of intelligent yet murderously savage aliens. From the author of "Ring Around the Sun".
Coming from the future, our children's children walked through holes in the air. The holes were time tunnels and down them were fleeing our after-generations, escaping from an invasion of intelligent yet murderously savage aliens. From the author of "Ring Around the Sun".
Out of their minds and the force of their imagination, men have created countless beings, from demons and monsters of legend to comic-strip characters. What if their world were real-if dragons, devils and Don Quixote hobnobbed with Dagwood Bumstead and Charlie Brown? Such a world would have its facinations.and its dreadful perils-if it existed. Horton Smith found out that it...
Out of their minds and the force of their imagination, men have created countless beings, from demons and monsters of legend to comic-strip characters. What if their world were real-if dragons, devils and Don Quixote hobnobbed with Dagwood Bumstead and Charlie Brown? Such a world would have its facinations.and its dreadful perils-if it existed. Horton Smith found out that it...
The return of Simak's favorite themes-including esp, robots & religion-in a thoughtful, gentle, delightfully original treatment. On the remote planet End of Nothing, a colony of advanced robots has established project Vatican-17: the building of an infallible computerized pope whose accumulated wisdom will eventually create a truly universal religion. Gathering data for the...
The return of Simak's favorite themes-including esp, robots & religion-in a thoughtful, gentle, delightfully original treatment. On the remote planet End of Nothing, a colony of advanced robots has established project Vatican-17: the building of an infallible computerized pope whose accumulated wisdom will eventually create a truly universal religion. Gathering data for the...
Vickers got up at an hour outrageous for its earliness, because Ann had phoned the night before to tell him about a man in New York she wanted him to meet. He had tried to argue about it. "I know it breaks into your schedule, Jay," she said "but I don't think this is something you can pass up." "I can't do it, Ann," he'd told her. "I've got the writing now and I can't get...
There was no time, Hezekiah had said. No such thing as time in the terms of normal human thought. Time was bracketed and each of its brackets contained a single phase of a universe so vastly beyond human comprehension that it brought a man up short against the impossibility of envisioning it. And time itself? Time was a never-ending medium that stretched into the future and the...
Carter Horton and three other crew members are sent on a mission to find a planet which would be suitable for human life. They are put in a deep sleep in until they arrive. However, due to a systems malfunction, Carter is the last one left alive. When he makes it to the planet he finds that he has been in deep sleep for about two thousand years and that the ship he made it...
A college professor and other oddballs are dropped onto a bleak world near a giant blue cube - with no idea how to proceed. Keith's review: A little more than a year ago, I moved from a city where I'd lived a third of my life to a city I'd only visited twice, and where I only knew a handful of people. I had no money, no job, no car and no specific purpose. I was low on options...
Strangers in the Universe (1956, contents revised in 1957 & 1958). Paperback has 7 of 11 stories from the first hardcover edition: Target Generation, Mirage, Beachhead, TheAnswers, Retrograde Evolution, The Fence & Shadow Show.
This was medieval England in the 1970's, again beset by the ancient Evil that had kept the Dark Ages from ever lightening. Half the country was in the grip of the fell Harriers, and it was through these Haried Lands that DUncan of Standish would have to make his way to Oxenford. His mission was to authenticate a long-lost testament which offered the only hope against the...
This was medieval England in the 1970's, again beset by the ancient Evil that had kept the Dark Ages from ever lightening. Half the country was in the grip of the fell Harriers, and it was through these Haried Lands that DUncan of Standish would have to make his way to Oxenford. His mission was to authenticate a long-lost testament which offered the only hope against the...
"First-class entertainment" (The Sunday Times) from a classic SF author. En route to an interplanetary research mission, a scientist is abducted by a strange, shadowy race of aliens and taken to a previously uncharted planet, a storehouse of information that would be invaluable-even to an Earth so advanced that time travel allows goblins, dinosaurs, even Shakespeare to coexist.
"First-class entertainment" (The Sunday Times) from a classic SF author. En route to an interplanetary research mission, a scientist is abducted by a strange, shadowy race of aliens and taken to a previously uncharted planet, a storehouse of information that would be invaluable-even to an Earth so advanced that time travel allows goblins, dinosaurs, even Shakespeare to coexist.
The book outlines contact between Earth & the titular Visitors, a group of mysterious objects from deep space. Visitors are simple black oblong boxes, large as buildings, which take up orbit round the Earth before descending to the USA. Their nature remains mysterious. It's unclear if they're vehicles or living things. They're apparently unable to communicate with humans...
The book outlines contact between Earth & the titular Visitors, a group of mysterious objects from deep space. Visitors are simple black oblong boxes, large as buildings, which take up orbit round the Earth before descending to the USA. Their nature remains mysterious. It's unclear if they're vehicles or living things. They're apparently unable to communicate with humans...
Andrew Blake is found in a space capsule on a distant planet and is brought back to an unfamiliar Earth, where antigravity devices have replaced the wheel, and houses talk and even fly! Yet nothing is as strange as Blake's own feelings. Tormented by eerie sensations and loss of memory, he doesn't know who he really is or exactly where he has come from. His destiny only begins...
Andrew Blake is found in a space capsule on a distant planet and is brought back to an unfamiliar Earth, where antigravity devices have replaced the wheel, and houses talk and even fly! Yet nothing is as strange as Blake's own feelings. Tormented by eerie sensations and loss of memory, he doesn't know who he really is or exactly where he has come from. His destiny only begins...
Without setting foot on another planet, people like Shep Blaine were reaching out to the stars with their minds, telepathically contacting strange beings on other worlds. But even Blaine was unprepared for what happened when he communed with the soul of an utterly alien being light years from Earth. After recovering from his experience, he becomes a dangerous man: not only has...
Without setting foot on another planet, people like Shep Blaine were reaching out to the stars with their minds, telepathically contacting strange beings on other worlds. But even Blaine was unprepared for what happened when he communed with the soul of an utterly alien being light years from Earth. After recovering from his experience, he becomes a dangerous man: not only has...
Enoch Wallace, an American Civil War veteran, is chosen by an alien called Ulysses to administer a way station for interplanetary travel. Wallace is the only human being who knows of the existence of these aliens, until almost a hundred years later, when the US government becomes aware of and suspicious about his failure to age or die. Factions in the galactic federation want...
Enoch Wallace, an American Civil War veteran, is chosen by an alien called Ulysses to administer a way station for interplanetary travel. Wallace is the only human being who knows of the existence of these aliens, until almost a hundred years later, when the US government becomes aware of and suspicious about his failure to age or die. Factions in the galactic federation want...
Immortality - The ultimate reward: To come back to life - and never die again - that's what Forever Center promises the human race. And that's why, in the year 2148, people spend their whole lives in poverty, giving all their money to Forever Center to ensure their happiness and comfort in the next eternal life. Daniel Frost is a key man at Forever Center. When he accidentally...
Immortality - The ultimate reward: To come back to life - and never die again - that's what Forever Center promises the human race. And that's why, in the year 2148, people spend their whole lives in poverty, giving all their money to Forever Center to ensure their happiness and comfort in the next eternal life. Daniel Frost is a key man at Forever Center. When he accidentally...
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