LITMIR.BIZ

Kirk Markham returns to his home town of Leeds in 1999 after three years at university «down south.» In order to support himself while he tries to find a respectable career, he gets a job in a call center, which proves more challenging than he had anticipated, both professionally and socially. There he meets and falls in love with goth-girl Sheena, who is not like other girls, to put it mildly. Her uniqueness only makes her more attractive to him, and he makes every possible effort to live up to her hopes and expectations. At first, he treats his necessary involvement with the vampires of Atlantis as an intriguing game of make-believe, at which he considers himself to be a clever player, but as the game becomes increasingly serious, the possibility grows that he might be out of his depth.

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The Shoggoths attack: «They had been so horrible before that I dare not say that they were any MORE horrible when they came again.... They were still unspeakable, still unthinkable–but whether I could speak or think of them or not, they were HERE.» Auguste Dupin is one of the few persons who can identify the rare Cthulhu Encryption etched in the flesh of a dying woman. The Comte de Saint-Germain owns a companion cryptogram that he believes is the key to finding a fabulous treasure buried by the pirate Levasseur. Harassed by Shoggoths and tracked by Saint-Germain, Dupin must find the key to the complex puzzle. Can the might of Cthulhu be held at bay? And even if he finds an answer, can he and his friends escape with their lives? <P> A riveting horror novel set in H.P. Lovecraft's Cthuhlu Mythos!

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They call them the “rat-catchers.” They’re the crew of the spaceship Daedalus, which an economically destitute Earth has dispatched on a mission to re-establish contact with its far-flung, long-lost colonies in space. Alex Alexander, the ship’s biologist, together with his staff, must help solve the mysteries of human and alien ecosystems that he encounters light-years from home. <P> Dendra is a stable world, covered by a huge, unchanging forest—except that nothing living can really be free of change. The planet has no seasons, but its animal life still undergoes life-cycles involving birth, maturation, metamorphosis, and death. The Earth colony sent to tame the world has failed, at least in the terms expected of it, and seems beyond redemption; but the crew of the Daedalus still has to find out exactly why and how the program has gone wrong. Provided, of course, that they can survive the investigation itself!

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They call it Asgard, the Home of the Gods. Beneath its artificial shell are at least three vast cave-systems, each one the size of an Earth-like world; and beneath those, possibly many more. No one knows how many layers there might be, and no one knows what secrets might be buried down at the «center»–if there is a center. At some time in the distant past, Asgard had suffered a terrible catastrophe. Now its outer layers are cold, its builders presumed dead. Explorers and exploiters from a hundred different worlds and races are scavenging among the ruins–but deep down, there might still be light, warmth, life…and perils unknown. Mike Rousseau was one of the first humans to come to Asgard, decades earlier. Now he's challenged by both friends and foes–and it's hard to tell them apart on this icebound planet. He might also be the one man who can solve the biggest puzzle in the galaxy…if only he can stay alive! The first novel in a thrilling trilogy of science fiction adventure and discovery.

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The gods of Asgard are in deep trouble. If they can’t defeat their internal enemies, the starlet in the macroworld’s core will blow up, killing trillions humanoids in its various layers. Only one man can save this articifial planet, and he can only do that by duplicating himself. Unfortunately, the software version of himself that's trying to operate within Asgard’s virtual space is fighting on the adversary’s home ground, and seems to have even less chance of success than the flesh-and-blood version. Even if they both get through, and contrive somehow to save the macroworld from destruction, how can they ever get together again to become a whole man–and at what cost? The thrilling conclusion to a magnificent sci-fi saga!

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Asgard's not an easy world to get away from. Mike Rousseau only wants to take a vacation in his home system, but he's back before he has time to draw breath, and he's been drafted into the Space Force once again. His new mission is even more dangerous than the last one, the number of his enemies has increased vastly, and his friends haven't improved at all. By way of compensation, he has another chance to get closer to the mystery at Asgard's heart–but the inhabitants of the megaplanet's core are no longer content to sit quietly and wait to be found. They've discovered the outside universe, and are trying to decide what to do about it–but they have problems of their own. Only Rousseau can cross the boundaries between species, and offer each of the races a possible solution. Another great entry into an exciting SF series!

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Sheena is a vampire from Leeds who works in a call center, and has a dark secret that even she doesn't know about. Her boyfriend has to discover it the hard way, alas. Like the other two vampire stories included in the book, both of which feature vampire babies, «Sheena» is a love story, which shares the life-enhancing attributes common to all love stories. Here are ten tales of the fantastic, the horrific, and the gothic, including: «Rose, Crowned with Thorns,» «Rent,» «Tenebrio,» «Behind the Wheel,» «Innocent Blood,» «Emptiness,» «The Woman in the Mirror,» «Regression,» «Heartbreaker,» and «Sheena.» Great reading by a great writer!

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In the longest story in this collection, an eleven-year-old girl has a strange adventure in an overgrown garden, and probably saves the world from a fate worse than any conventional apocalypse. Her parents would undoubtedly think that she’s been dreaming if she attempted to explain what had happened, but that’s what parents do, because they think it’s what they ought to do. The other stories all describe similarly equivocal victories, which sometimes don’t appear to the other characters in the stories to be victories at all—but they are: every last one of them. You just have to look at them the right way—and it really is worth doing that? After all, who among us really wants to get stuck in the way things want to seem? Eight scintillating stories of science fiction by a master of the genre!

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In an alternate history of 1572, five intrepid British adventurers venture into the ether to seek out new life and new civilizations. They discover a galaxy-wide invertebrate empire, including the insect-like inhabitants of the moon. But the empire is under attack from enemies both without and within–and so is the planet Earth!–and the five men must find a way to thwart the Selenites and save our world from an insect tyranny. Grand space opera in the unique Stablefordian style!

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This collection brings together the ten earliest stories in Brian Stableford’s series of «Tales of the Biotech Revolution,» all written in the 1980s, except for one anomalous example from the 1960s. The dates in some of the stories, located a comfortable distance in the future when the stories were written, have now long past, revealing certain anomalies of early expectation; but they have been left unaltered, as nostalgic samples of yesterday’s long-dead and perhaps much-lamented tomorrows. The collection begins and ends, as is surely only appropriate, with flamboyant utopian fantasies boldly asserting the perfectibility of humankind and the world of which the species has custody. Great science-fiction reading by a master of the form!

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