Search Worlds Without End

They find a hauntingly beautiful planet, MC6, capable of supporting human life. But the planet does not surrender its secrets. Fighting time, the team desperately explores clusters of strange geometric structures scattered around MC6, slowly discovering traces of an advanced civilization.

Then the head of the Probe teams finds a key, turns it and is sucked screaming into a black hole where he encounters an intelligence radically different from any other encountered before or since.

"If a water animal can change into a land animal, why should not a land animal sometimes change into a water animal?"

That was the goal of the research conducted at Cobb Seamount, an underwater experimental station. Then they reveived the mysterious "Red Tide" broadcast - something about widespread epidemics... military retaliation... - and suddenly there wasn't any surface to return to. Now life in Cobb Seamount was no experiment - it was survival.

Gildoran was an Explorer. Despite the number of planets found and tied into the Transmitter network that enabled everyone else to travel instantly from planet to planet, his home was his Ship, and the only people he could count on were her crew. For Explorers traveled through space to find new planets, and their years were decades or centuries to anyone not on the Ship. As they found and struggled to survive on unknown worlds, the rest of the Galaxy moved on, so when they returned to "civilization" anything could have happened, and the world they left was not the one to which they returned--even if it was on the same planet.

An interstellar 2nd-class cruiser called Invincible, lands on Regis III which seems bleakly uninhabited, to investigate the loss of sister ship, Condor. The crew finds evidence of a form of quasilife, born thru evolution of autonomous, self-replicating machines. The evolution was controlled by robot wars. The survivors are swarms of minuscule, insectoid machines. Individually or in small groups they're harmless & capable of only simple behavior. However, when bothered, they form huge swarms displaying complex behavior arising from self-organization & are able to defeat an intruder by a powerful surge of EMI. Some members of the crew suffer complete memory erasure as a consequence. Big clouds are also capable of high speed travel to the troposphere. The angered crew attempts to fight the enemy, but eventually recognize the meaninglessness of their efforts in the most direct sense of the word.

The novel turns into an analysis of the relationship between different life domains & their place in the cosmos. It's a thought experiment demonstrating that evolution may not necessarily lead to dominance by intellectually superior life forms. The plot also involves a Conrad-like dilemma, juxtaposing human values & the efficiency of mechanical insects.

Growing Up in Tier 3000 (1975), is set in a world very similar to that of many of the tales, and deploys a similarly searching sense of the surface of events and of identities, though its plot moves with some difficulty: in an energy-quarantined, savagely competitive, complexly automated Dystopian future society, young children - in a reductio ad absurdum of the hypothesis, first promulgated by Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941), that language structure shapes our conceptualization of the world - show their readiness to take over from their elders because they understand the languages that in effect embody hyperkinetic new realities.

Challenge the Hellmaker is an intriguing new novel by a husband and wife team of scientists.

Drawing on their exhaustive knowledge and imagination they have conjured up a near-future world dominated by the repressive U.N. Security Corps. The last barrier to its total dictatorship is a small group of international scientists isolated on a space station miles above the Earth... and the Hellmaker.

The Tournament of Thorns is a beautiful and sensitive work created by an artist who has for decades enchanted readers throughout the world. In this superior novel, Thomas Burnett Swan draws upon his ability to blend history and legend, fashioning a brilliant tale of the Middle Ages.

A Plague of All Cowards sends space mercenary (and former war criminal) Zoltan Tharkie on a galactic quest to capture a dangerous assassin and unmask his hidden masters.

Twenty-first century medicine has wiped out all the deadly diseases. But suddenly, a large American city is gripped by epidemics of smallpox, diptheria and other killers that were supposed to have disappeared forever. Only a few top government officials know what's going on. And for their sakes, the citizens of the threatened city must never be allowed to find out.