There was a time when the Earth had three moons, and when the seductive sorceress Avalona could alter futures and bend "happentracks" with her spells. Indeed, in this vast chaotic universe called the Greataway, with its many imaginable futures, anything is possible. Especially when Nyneve, Avalona's bewitching human disciple, conjures up the complete legend of Camelot and when the roguish gnome Fang, slayer of the dread daggertooth, stumbles into the human happentrack, causing hum...

Michael Greatrex Coney was a British-born author who spent the last three decades of his life in Canada - including 16 years in the British Colombia Forest Service. His early work carried a sense of Cold War-inspired paranoia, but his repertoire was wide and perhaps his best novel, HELLO SUMMER, GOODBYE, is a wistful story of adolescent love on a far-distant planet. The titles collected in this omnibus come from the fertile beginning of his career and include his debut novel MIRROR IMAGE, ...

The planet Arcadia was on the verge of economic collapse. Its human colony had been decimated by the strange Relay Effect; in the aftermath, still more colonists were leaving for other worlds. The Hetherington Organisation promised to change that. If the remaining colonists put themselves entirely in their hands for a five-year period, they would transform Arcadia into the most prosperous planet settled by mankind, while preserving its great natural beauty.It was an offer the Arcad...

A secret research station near the Cornish fishing village of Falcombe has discovered the existence of an apparently infinite series of parallel worlds, each a slightly distorted reflection of our own. It has also developed a technique for investigating these worlds; but the only person who can possibly visit and explore a parallel world is the rare individual whose counterpart has lately died there and whose place he can therefore take - which in turn presages his own death on his version...

Millennia ago Starquin visited the Solar System. Because he is huge - some say bigger than the Solar System itself - he could not set foot on Earth personally. yet events here were beginning to interest him, and he wanted to observe more closely.So he sent down extensions of himself, creatures fashioned after Earth's dominant life-form. In one of Earth's languages they became known as Dedos, or Fingers of Starquin. Disguised, they mingled with Mankind.We know this ...

Call them the spare parts of people. They chose the risk - jail for convicted crimes or semi-freedom as someone's bonded servant for the same term. The price was that they were body insurance. If their master lost a leg or an internal organ, they would have to supply the missing part. That was the risk. Sagar used bondsmen in his other-world farm where he raised exotic alien pelts to sell to the rich. He had no thoughts on the bondsmen problem, pro or con. But when Carioca Jones, 3-V star,...

The countryside is hundreds of feet deep in snow, and a small community is managing to exist in the bell-tower of a church, just above the snow level. For sustenance they make journeys to the shops of the village far below by tunnels. They also stay alive by hunting the ferocious and telepathic bear-like animals known as Pals.The individuals in the small group are brilliantly portrayed, in turn defeatist, boastful, querulous, selfish and generous. They are obsessive, they argue; bu...

Once there was a Hero who confronted the dreaded Daggertooth and slew it. Unfortunately he was also slain by it - but the legend persisted. If it could be done once, then another Hero could be raised to do it again. Because the Daggertooth was dangerous to hibernating humanity. All people - all that anyone knew of - lived far underground in tunnels built for safety and hibernation. The Daggertooth was a mass killer - more so even than the hideous Oddlies, the outcasts of the darker tunnels...

Pursued by the interplanetary police for a crime he did not commit, space traveller Tyg is forced down on the planet Storm, where he finds a revolution brewing among the Tadda against King Caiman, the planet's tyrannical ruler.He must prove his innocence of the crime with which he is charged, as he fights for survival beneath the Storm's seething oceans, where the very existence of the Tadda is threatened by the deadly undersea volcano known as NEPTUNE'S CAULDRON.

Once every fifty-two years Arcadia's six erratic moons come together in a constellation that plays havoc with the ecological balance of the planet.As a marine biologist at Riverside Research Centre, Mark Swindon is chiefly concerned about the effect of catastrophic tides on his precious fish pens.Then, without warning, a wave of seemingly motiveless violence sweeps through the normally sleepy colony - and Mark too feels himself drawn against his will into a mysterious cycle...

The criminal underworld of New York City is a dark and brutal place, but it's never seen horror like this... In the opening salvo of this bestselling series, created by industry legends MARC SILVESTRI and GARTH ENNIS, up-and-coming mobster Jackie Estacado discovers a nightmarish new inheritance—the supernatural power known only as the Darkness! Weighing his conscience against the ability to mold the shadows to his will, Jackie finds himself dealing with worse than the usual wiseguys: an an...

Ian Watson's brilliant debut novel was one of the most significant publications in British SF in the 1970s. Intellectually bracing and grippingly written, it is the story of three experiments in linguistics, and is driven by a searching analysis of the nature of communication.Deep in the Brazilian jungle, an isolated tribe face eviction from their ancestral lands - and the psychedelic fungus that makes their religious language possible.In a British laboratory, a brilliant l...