After a devastating atomic holocaust, mankind had now turned to the machine to solve his problems. Which led to the androids - descended from the robot, they were hardly distinguishable from real humans. By the year 2113 they ran society - leaving man to a life of leisure. It was into this world that John Markham emerged after spending 146 years of suspended animation in an underground deep-freeze unit. But his new lease of life was likely to be a short one. A man with his outdated ideas could be very dangerous - a fact the androids realized only too well.

    Where was everybody? It was almost as if humankind, when separated by cosmic distances from Mother Earth, could not survive.

    Humanity takes to the skies in its millions, with huge resultant problems for governments and police. Virtually all aircraft are grounded, because of the risk of collision with a stray flyer. Airborne delinquents and criminals are practically impossible to control and can be lethal. Robert Hasson is a good policeman. But a near-fatal airborne confrontation with a psychopath has left him shattered, both physically and mentally. Sent to Canada to recuperate (and to escape the attentions of a local businessman whose son he has put away), Hasson is a broken man, unable to face human company, haunted by nightmares and certain that he will never again put on an anti-gravity harness. But his Canadian host, police chief Al Werry, has a major problem on his hands in the shape of a towering unfinished hotel, the Chinook, whose upper levels are inaccessible from the ground, and are used as an illegal meeting place by local gangs of flyers. Worse, the hotel's owner, Buck Morlacher, intends to take the law into his own hands to deal with them. The violence that has been simmering in the town threatens to erupt and Werry seems powerless to stop it. Unwillingly, Hasson finds himself drawn into the conflict and forced to face his own problems. "Vertigo" is vintage Bob Shaw, fast-moving, intelligent and immenselyreadable.

    Yes, that seemed normal enough---but what was this talk about "death trauma"?Thus was Thomas Blaine introduced to the year 2110, where science had discovered the technique of transferring a man's consciousness from one body to another. Where a man's mind could be snatched from the past, when his body was at the point of death, and brought forward into a "host body" in this fantastic future world. But that was only a small part of it. For the future had proved the reality of life after death, and discovered worlds beyond or simultaneous with our own---worlds where, through scientific techniques, a man could live again, in another body, when he died here. And in the process, the reality of ghosts, poltergeists, and zombies was also established. What did it all mean? How had this discovery of what they called the "hereafter" shaped the world of 2110? Thomas Blaine found himself living in a future where the discoveries and techniques imagined by people of his time, while having come about, were completely overwhelmed by discoveries no one had ever dreamed of.

    Equally amazing is the manner in which his stories unfold, from a lovely description of how rainbows are made, to the water clear logic in his refutation of the "judo arguments" - scientific proofs of the existence of God. Provocative, entertaining, and, as always, generously interspersed with sparkling Asimov wit, The Planet That Wasn't debunks old myths and offers fresh perspectives on the wonders of our solar system and ourselves.-from the back cover of the Avon paperback edition

    But even bigger things were at stake: Full-scale war would attract the attentions of the deadly Denebian aliens, who were slowly advancing towards Earth.Only David Raven - and a few others like him - knew about the Denebians. But Raven had powers no human or mutant had every[sic] dreamed of, and he was looking out for humanity...[From Back cover][Front Page]Pawn to KingThe notion of a supertelepathic superlevitator was patently absurd - but the opposition would swallow the absurdity when it came along in the guise of a self-evident fact. There would be considerable boosting of blood pressure in the hidden Venusian hierarchy when they learned that the first act of Earth's new chess piece was to abolish a natural law.The thought gratified him. To date he had achieved nothing spectacular by the standards of the day and age. That was good because it was highly undesirable to be too spectacular. But at least he'd created considerable uneasiness in the ranks of the formerly overconfident enemy. Indeed, if they had bolted this multitalent mutant notion and speculated on the dire possibility of still more formidable types yet to come, they would have every reason to feel afraid.It was a pity they could not be told the truth.

    Set in a countryside swarming with sabertooths and dinosaurs, Jamestown is home to a small band of American and allied scientist-adventurers.But there are flies in this ointment - and not only the Venusian dragonflies, with their yard-wide wings. The biologists studying Venus's life are puzzled by the way it not only resembles that on Earth, but is virtually identical to it. The EastBloc has its own base at Cosmograd, in the highlands to the south, and relations are frosty. And attractive young geologist Cynthia Whitlock seems impervious to Marc's Cajun charm.Meanwhile, at the western end of the continent, Teesa of the Cloud Mountain People leads her tribe in a conflict with the Neanderthal-like beastmen who have seized her folk's sacred caves. Then an EastBloc shuttle crashes nearby, and the beastmen acquire new knowledge… and AK47's.Jamestown sends its long-range blimp to rescue the downed EastBloc cosmonauts, little suspecting that the answer to the jungle planet's mysteries may lie there, among tribal conflicts and traces of a power that made Earth's vaunted science seem as primitive as the tribesfolk's blowguns. As if that weren't enough, there's an enemy agent on board the airship…

    When the Terrans came, they found a world of dead sea-bottoms, lost civilizations, and secretive tribes bitterly resenting the intrusion of the Terrans on the fading glory of an ancient planet. The Earthmen looked down upon the crumbling ruins of a brilliant culture, and laughed at the stories of invincible gods and forgotten magic lingering in the forbidden cities of Jekkara, Barrakesh, Valkis ...But the dangers were real--and only a few renegade Earth-born adventurers who had adopted the Martian way of life could understand the planet-wide disaster that was building up.

    But some of the Umbrathane have escaped into the distant past, where they can position themselves to wreak havoc across time and undo their defeat. The most fanatical of them is the superhuman Cowl, more monstrous than any of the creatures outside his prehistoric redoubt. Cowl sends his terrifying hyperdimensional pet, the torbeast, hunting through all the timelines for human specimens. It sheds its scales -- each one an organic time machine -- where its master orders. Anyone who picks one up is dragged back to the dawn of time, where Cowl awaits. Then the beast can feed, growing ever larger . . . In our own near-future, Tack is one of U-gov's programmable killers. When a scale latches onto him, his doom seems inevitable, but the Heliothane have other ideas: they can use Tack against Cowl. Tack is no stranger to violence, but the Heliothane, hardened in their struggle for humanity's very existence, have much to teach him. He will need it all for his encounter with Cowl.Once one of Tack's targets, Polly escaped with her life when a torbeast scale snatched her. Now, like Tack, she must learn fast as she is dragged back to Day Zero. To cheat death again, she will have to help him save the human race. With Cowl, Neal Asher, acclaimed author of Gridlinked and The Skinner, has created his most powerful novel yet.

    Only one weapon—the terrifying Disruptor— can win the struggle for the Empire Forces. But it is so powerful that unless John uses it correctly it could destroy not only the enemy but the cosmos.Could his 20th Century mind cope with the technology of 200,000 years from now?

    He finds himself on a collision course that results in a desperate romance, and a journey into the ecstasy and dread that mirror each other at the heart of the postmodern experience.

    The crew must fight to survive in a savage nightmare world. From the Hugo Award-winning author, Murray Leinster.

    A planet where eerie time displacements, like winds, can dump alien artefacts from the past and future into now, or sweep things away from now into anywhen.''A planet that attracts both scientists and fortune hunters, rummaging among the strangenesses, risking oblivion, carrying with them their own hang-ups, desperations, odd urges and searches.'You won't easily forget this haunting, fully-realised world.' TRIBUNE.

    Lars Powderdry and Lilo Topchev are counterpart weapons fashion designers for a world divided into two factions - Wes-bloc and Peep-East. Since the Plowshare Protocols of 2002, their job has been to invent elaborate weapons that only seem massively lethal. But when alien satellites hostile to both sides appear in the sky, the two are brought together in the dire hope that they can create a weapon to save the world, a task made all the more difficult by Lars falling in love with Lilo even as he knows she's trying to kill him.

    As the pandemic draws nearer to Britain shelters are hastily constructed, but when the death toll rises and the populace finds themselves sacrificed for the sake of the elite, the cry for revolution rings out amidst the sirens. Charles Eric Maine's subversive novel shows that even the heroes may succumb to brutality as humanity descends into a desperate scramble for survival. Charles Eric Maine was the pseudonym of David McIlwain (1921-1981), a prolific writer of science fiction novels in the 1950s and 1960s. Maine was renowned for fast-paced thriller plotlines, which explored the unintended consequences of scientific progress.