But as their sky began burning, who could blame the Russians for thinking that the Americans had attacked....?

    Another wet summer, another year of storm surges and high tides. But this time the Thames Barrier is breached and central London is swamped. The waters recede, life goes on, the economy begins to recover, people watch the news reports of other floods around the world. And then the waters rise again. And again.Lily, Helen, Gary and Piers, hostages released from five years captivity at the hands of Christian Extremists in Spain, return to England and the first rumours of a flood of positively Biblical proportions…Sea levels have begun to rise, at catastrophic speed. Within two years London and New York will be under water. The Pope will give his last address from the Vatican before Rome is swallowed by the rising water. Mecca too will vanish beneath the waves.The world is drowning. A desperate race to find out what is happening begins. The popular theory is that we are paying the price for our profligacy and that climate change is about to redress Gaia’s balance. But there are dissenting views. And all the time the waters continue to rise and mankind begins the great retreat to higher ground. Millions will die, billions will become migrants. Wars will be fought over mountains.

    Here is a novel to equal Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End. It tells with frightening clarity of a desperately stricken earth-wracked by overpopulation and plagued by famine and despair. It tells, too, of a new breed of men and women--21st century lotus eaters caught up in a mysterious euphoria which will ultimately threaten all life on this planet; the drug-induced world of "happy dreams." Do these "happy dreamers" herald the end of the human species--or the next extraordinary step in the evolution of humanity?

    So the Terran government made a law--no further contact would be allowed with sentient creatures anywhere in the galaxy. Therefore Doona could be colonized only if an official survey established that the planet was both habitable and uninhabited.But Spacedep had made a mistake--Doona was inhabited. Now the colonists' choice was limited. Leave Doona and return to the teeming hell of an overpopulated Terra. Or kill the catlike Hrrubans. Or learn, for the first time in history, how to coexist with an alien race.

    It is the pivot of Marion Zimmer Bradley's novel of Darkover during the final flaming days of the Ages of Chaos.This is the story of the era when the planet of the Bloody Sun was divided into a hundred warring kingdoms and civilization teetered on the edge of oblivion.It is the story of Bard di Asturien, ambitious soldier-outlaw, and of his opponent, Varzil the Good, who struggled to establish the Compact. And it is also the story of a man from distant Terra named Paul Harrell who was the exact duplicate of Varzil's enemy.Two to Conquer is a novel of social forces in combat, of the use and misuse of science, of war, of rape, and of witchcraft.

    Otherwise, the same contents.

    His name was Jerg Algan. He had done almost nothing except roam the Earth like anyone, without the slightest gloryAnd then one day he had to leave the refuge of men. He landed in the star galaxy - in the most distant fold of space, in this strange place where perhaps the solutions of time-honored problems lay. There were vast black citadels there, like gigantic pawns erected on the squares of an endless chessboard.So Jerg Algan undertook the last phase of his struggle: the gambit of the stars.

    He was leaving Earth in an untested ship with a crew chosen by necessity and with nothing but faith to guide him. His only hope was to find habitable worlds in the unexplored reaches of space ahead.Thus began Man's first mission to the uncharted universe.Shore had no illusions. Before him lay danger, probable disappointment - even death. But nothing had prepared him for the nightmare he would have to face on the planet of the Gray-Furs...for the menace of the Golden People who had driven all other races from Galactic Center - or for what awaited him if he returned to the world he called home!

    This reborn civilization is one in which every individual is incorporated at birth, and spends many years trying to attain control over his or her own life by getting a majority of his or her own shares. Life extension has made life very long indeed.Now the incredible has happened: a billionaire businessman from our time, frozen in secret in the early twenty-first century, is discovered and resurrected, given health and a vigorous younger body. Justin Cord is the only unincorporated man in the world, a true stranger in this strange land. Justin survived because he is tough and smart. He cannot accept only part ownership of himself, even if that places him in conflict with a civilization that extends outside the solar system to the Oort Cloud.  People will be arguing about this novel and this world for decades.

    Here we see, with all the vivid detail for which Pournelle is known, the Fall of the West, and how in its death throes it gave birth to a society that would conquer the stars themselves, as real people battle desperate odds, both for their own survival and for something more - for High Justice.

    The only problem is that the Confederacion needs him as one of its twelve Prime Operators for its secret service, the TBII. The TBII wants him as a spy, thief & assassin. It's not, of course, a problem for the Confederacion, which simply uses immersion therapy & hypnotic personality overlay for Otto's training, then sends him out in deep cover, encased in plastiflesh, on a variety of dangerous missions on a number of bizarre worlds. But for him, it's a different matter: what he has to witness & what he's forced to do take a terrible toll. Always he returns to his original self--his conscience stabbed by the memory of all those he'd killed in the service of interstellar harmony.

    Now the lethal high technology of the Amtrak Federation's underground stronghold is unleashed on Earth's other survivors - the surface-dwelling Mutes.

    His twin brother, Leo Foss, was a researcher in government work that he couldn't talk about. Then the helicopter they were flying crashed.When he woke up, Lionel learned that both he and Leo had sustained fatal injuries, and he was only alive because the surgeon had used organs from Leo to repair Lionel's slightly less damaged body. More than half of Lionel's brain was gone, and had been replaced with Leo's. Lionel, in fact, had become "His Brother's Keeper!"

    His task is to infiltrate the native culture--But once there he discovers that an alien plot of ground can become home.This brand-new story leads off a collection of sixteen tales by Piers Anthony--including eleven stories published here for the first time in paperback!Also included is a fascinating essay on writers and writing, written with insight, and revealing many facets of Anthony's extraordinary career.Each story in Alien Plot has an all-new introduction by Piers Anthony.

    Strange fireballs race through the sky above the deepest trenches of the oceans. Something is about to show itself, something terrible and alien, a force capable of causing global catastrophe.