Charles Sheffield – författare

There were problems with the Form Change process. One or two malfunctions at first: people emerging from the tanks in an incorrect form or completely unchanged.For three years it had been getting worse. Now there had been deaths, and on the Space Farms panic was setting in. People were refusing to go into the tanks. Yet out in the Cloudlands, they needed continuous small form corrections just to stay effective. As the faults increased, their society was on an exponential curve to disaster. Behrooz Wolf, down in the Inner System, was sent for. But far gone in despair, he was in no state to help. He himself was going mad. Like a hallucination, the Dancing Man would come capering across his field of vision. Dressed in skin-tight scarlet, he danced up to him, mouthing gibberish, then skipping backwards, tantalisingly, out of sight. While, hidden in the Kernel Ring, Black Ransone bided his time, waiting for the disintegration of the empires, waiting to inherit the universe.

In the 22nd century biofeedback techniques to control by will the processes of one''s own body have reached their ultimate expression: the ability to transform the body into virtually any viable form whatsoever. What began as an innocent technique to reduce anxiety without recourse to drugs has raised fundamental questions about what it is to be human, since form is no longer sufficient nor even relevant.Enter the Humanity Test: in a future when other techniques can change the forms of animals, so far it has been a guaranteed one hundred percent successful means of determining whether a life form started out as human. But now strange life forms, vicious and bestial, are proliferating throughout the Solar System. They are clearly not human, and clearly their nervous systems are too underdeveloped for them to have been human. But though the beasts threaten havoc and death to all the far flung isolated stations, the simple solution of shooting the varmints is impossible: for life forms that according to the Humanity Test started out human the law is very clear: Thou Shalt Not Kill.

For millennia, humankind and the other intelligent races had studied the bizarre and unfathomable constructs of the legendary beings known as Builders. But for all that study, they were still no closer to figuring out who - or what - the Builders had been, or where they had gone. Then, on the world called Quake, in the midst of the violent planetary upheaval that was Summertide, a small group of humans and aliens witnessed the culmination of all those years of watching and waiting: the planet Quake opened up, and something came out - and it looked as if, at long last, the discovery of the Builders themselves was at hand.All her life, Darya Lang had dreamed of finding the Builders, whose artifacts she had single-handedly catalogued for the rest of the universe. Troubleshooter and adventurer Hans Rebka had his own dreams of unraveling the mystery of those artifacts. To Louis Nenda and the Cecropian Atvar H''sial, the Builder artifacts represented a once-in-a-lifetime shot at untold wealth. And close behind them came the others: Councilor Julius Graces, who did not trust anyone to make first contact unassisted; the slavesJ''merlia and Kallik, who craved only a reunion with their masters; and the embodied computer E.C. Tally, charged with finding out just what the rest were up to.The trail that began at Quake led to unexpected Builder artifacts full of traps for the unwary and answers for those who knew how to ask the questions. But the biggest question of all would remain an enigma, while their search unleashed the greatest threat to civilization ever imagined...

The Zardalu were the greatest menace ever known to the worlds of the spiral arm, enslaving entire races and exterminating others, guided by an unswerving belief in their own supremacy. Then their slaves rose up against them, and for eleven thousand years the Zardalu had been extinct and the spiral arm had known a kind of peace.But now the Zardalu are back . . .The search for the Builders, the legendary alien race whose unfathomable constructs continued to perplex scholars and explorers alike, had led Builder expert Darya Lang, adventurer Hans Rebka, and treasure hunters Louis Nenda and Atvar H''sial to an unknown Builder artifact far outside the spiral arm. There they found the Zardalu - just a few who had been trapped in stasis all those millennia, held there for purposes known only to the Builders. And in the struggle that ensued the Zardalu had been set loose, transported by Builder technology to to galactic parts unknown - free to ravage any world and any race within their grasp. The only chance to eliminate the Zardalu threat was to find them and wipe them out before they had time to breed back up to strength and once again threaten civilized beings everywhere. The problem was that no one believed the story. Only Darya Land and her companions had actually seen the aliens - and no evidence existed to support their claims. And so the course seemed clear: get a ship themselves and search out the Zardalu. But the way would not be easy. Even once they managed to locate the Zardalu, they still had the Builders to deal with. For the closer they got to their quarry, the more clear it became that the Zardalu and their world were closely entwined with the fate - and the plans - of the Builders themselves.

Humans first reached out to the stars travelling at a painfully slow sublight crawl - then they found the Bose network, which allowed ships to jump instantaneously from one node in the galactic arm to another. Once in the Network they found the Artifacts: enigmatic structures, millions of years old, left by a vanished race. Incomprehensible to both human ad non-human minds, the Artifacts seemingly defy natural law. Now, after millions of years, a new Artifact has appeared - and previously discovered Artifacts are showing strange changes in their inexplicable activities. When a motley crew of human and alien scientists and adventurers set out to examine still more Artifacts, they should have considered the fat that some changes are more dangerous than others...

Twenty-five years ago there was a great interplanetary war in the Solar System. It was a suicidal spasm in which terrible weapons were created and used; in which nine billion people were killed. The rivalries that led to the war are not gone. And a few of those deadly weapons remain - some still orbiting the sun in the debris of destroyed ships, some deliberately placed in storage.Now Cyrus Mobarak, the man who perfected the fusion engine, is determined to bring human settlement to the protected seas of Europa. Opposing him is Hilda Brandt, Europe''s administrator. And caught between them are three remarkable young people: Jon Perry, Camille Hamilton, and Wilsa Sheer.

Lola Belman was a refugee. She and her younger brother were on one of the last ships to leave Earth as the bombs began to fall; by the time they left lunar orbit, they were orphans. Lola is now practicing as a therapist on Ganymede, and she has a new patient whose past is a mystery.During those years of chaos, many records were lost and histories forgotten, and it was an ideal time for anyone who wanted to conceal his or her identity. Now there is a small, dangerous group who will stop at nothing to keep Lola from exploring the past and discovering their existence.

The Solar System is finally recovering from the Great War - a war that devastated the planets and nearly wiped out the human race - and the population of the outer moons, orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, is growing. On one of those moons, Alex Ligon, scion of a great interplanetary trading family has developed a wonderfully accurate new population model and cannot wait until the newly reconstituted "Seine", the interlinked network of computers that spans the planets and moons and asteroids, comes back online. But when it does, and he extends his perfect model a century into the future, it predicts the complete destruction of the human race.On another moon, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence goes on, undaunted by generations of failure. And to her amazement, Millie Wu, a young genius newly recruited to the project, has found a signal... a signal that is coming from outside the solar system.And in his new retreat on a minor moon of Saturn, the cranky genius Rustum Battachariya is still collecting weapons from the Great War. He thinks he may have stumbled on an unexpected new one...but he''ll need to disarm it before it destroys the Sun.

It''s 2026, and the Alpha Centauri supernova has risen like a second sun, rushing Earth toward its last summer. Floods, fires, starvation and disease paralyze the planet. A flash of gamma rays has destroyed all microchips worldwide, leaving an already devastated Earth without communications, transportation, weaponry or medicine.The disaster sets three groups of survivors on separate quests. A militant cult seizes the opportunity to free their leader from her long court-mandated coma. Three cancer patients also search for a man in judicial sleep: the brilliant scientist - and monstrous criminal - who alone can continue the experimental treatment that keeps them alive. From a far greater distance come the survivors of the first manned Mars expedition, struggling homeward to a world that has changed far beyond their darkest fears. And standing at the crossroads is one man, U.S. President Saul Steinmetz, who faces a crucial decision that will affect the fate of his own people... and the world.

Rob Merlin was the best engineer who had ever lived. That was why "The King of Space" had to have him for the most spectacular construction project ever - even though Rob was a potentially fatal threat to his power...Thus begins a breakthrough novel by the former President of the American Astronautical Society, about an idea whose time has come: a shimmering bridge between Earth and space that mankind will climb to the stars!

Lionel Salkind was glad for a visit from his twin brother Leo; the two rarely saw each other. Tehn their plane went down, and as he lost consciousness Lionel knew that Leo was dead. Lionel woke up in a hospital, to the eerie news that he owed his life to bits of his dead brother''s brain transplanted into his own skull. It was a very experimental operation, but it seemed to have been successful. And then the memories began. Terrifying snatches of memory that had no place in Lionel''s own quiet past. Leo''s memories, calling him somewhere to finish a job half-done - a dangerous job whose importance to the world Lionel had not even begun to grasp.

The power of one...Job. Against all evidence he never lost faith in his fellow man.Job. Born on he bottom rung in an age that made ours seem Golden, his life went rapidly downhill from there.Job. Cast adrift into a world he never made, but would change forever.Job. Sometimes, one true man can make the difference.

Cut off suddenly, unexpectedly, from interstellar trade, the colony of Erin found itself confined to the slow in-system shuttles and asteroid miners that were the only spaceships left at Muldoon Port. The human population slowly dwindled, unable to thrive in Erin''s marginal ecosystem.Jay Hara grew up on isolated Erin, longing for the legendary days when the Godspeed ships spanned he galaxy, and a young man''s dreams could take him to the stars. So when an old, sick spacer named Paddy Enderton shows Jay some very strange devices and tells him that he has found a Godspeed base out in the asteroid belt, Jay was eager to believe.

A Trader had no home - yet was at home everywhere.From the Chill settlements to Cap City, from the Strine Interior to the Darklands and out to the space colonies, the Traders were always on the move.They did the deals, turned contacts into contracts. They collected information, exchanged technologies, undertook espionage...Always outsiders, welcomed warily at best, at risk always, they and their systems were everywhere but belonged nowhere.To be a Trader was to live by your wits, survive through training and experience and to relax only with other Traders.Mikal Asparian was about to enter the world of the Traders.

The brain of an Einstein - the mind of an engineer...Presenting the space adventures of Arthur Morton McAndrew, space-time expert and scientist extraordinaire, and his long-suffering companion, spaceship skipper Jeanie Roker. Jeanie first met McAndrew on a routine run to Titan and quickly learned he was a genius of the caliber of Newton and Einstein. When McAndrew invented a space drive that let frail humans survive hundreds of gravities of acceleration, he disappeared while testing it, and Jeanie had to find him, using a trail of cryptic messages he had left behind.That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, in spite of the gray hairs that Jeanie began accumulating as a result of McAndrew''s impractical nature and his talent for getting himself into trouble with much more practical villains...

Lawyers in space?!Well, yes. It''s a terrifying thought. But there are lawyers and lawyers. And then, there are Henry Carver and Waldo P. Burmeister. Sometimes it''s not clear if their greatest skill lies in getting their clients out of trouble - or getting themselves into it. Whether it''s Waldo doggedly trying to escape The Dalmation of Faust or Henry''s grim internal struggle against Parasites Lost, or the two working together, because so much is riding With the Knight Male, their adventures are sure to entertain every reader - and lead most to consider a long time before daring to seek legal representation.

18th Century Europe: Superstition is giving way to the force of reason, and no man so fully embodies the spirit of the times as Dr Erasmus Darwin. Thinker, healer, and explorer of he seemingly supernatural, no mystery can stand for long against Darwin''s enlightened analysis. And there are more mysteries than history records...For Erasmus Darwin''s world is filled with oddities that most cannot believe: from unknown beings lurking just outside the boundaries of civilization, to mysterious deaths that give rise to fears of malevolent sorcery. And when the renowned Dr Darwin is called upon to heal a man dying of an ailment that seems impossible, he has no idea that it is the beginning of a quest that will lead him to the darkest corners of Europe, and an encounter with the most famous inhabitant of a certain Scottish loch...

It was just before Summertide, when the planet Quake would orbit closest to its sun, subjecting itself to vast tidal forces. It was to be the most violent Summertide ever, creating something that only happened every 350,000 years.

Access to the unstable Quake was supposed to be prohibited, but some very insistent travelers were determined to make the trip. Professor Darya Lang, who studied artifacts left by the long-vanished aliens called the Builders, had a hunch that she might find the Builders themselves. And Councilor Julius Graves was hunting murderers. Planetary Administrators Hans Rebka and Max Perry had no choice but to go to Quake, risking their lives to protect the others—and to learn, just maybe, the secret of Summertide and the Builders.

For millennia, humankind and the other intelligent races have studied the bizarre and unfathomable constructs of the legendary beings known as the Builders. But still, they are no closer to figuring out who—or what—the Builders were, or where they have gone. For Darya Lang, who has single-handedly cataloged their artifacts for the rest of the universe, finding the Builders has been a life-long dream. To Louis Nenda and the Cecropian Atvar H''sial, the Builder artifacts represent a once-in-a-lifetime shot at untold wealth, and adventurer Hans Rebka has his own dreams of unraveling their mystery.

Then, on the world called Quake, during a period of planetary upheaval known as Summertide, a small group of humans and aliens witness the culmination of all those years of watching and waiting as the planet opens up—and something comes out.

The search for the Builders, the legendary alien race whose unfathomable constructs continued to perplex scholars and explorers alike, had led Builder expert Darya Lang, adventurer Hans Rebka, and treasure hunters Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial to an unknown Builder artifact far outside the spiral arm. There they found the Zardalu, once the greatest menace ever known to the worlds of the spiral arm, enslaving entire races and exterminating others, guided by an unswerving belief in their own supremacy.

The only chance to eliminate the Zardalu threat was to wipe them all out before they had time to breed back up to strength and once again threaten civilized beings everywhere. But as they closed in, it was becoming clear that the Zardalu and their world were closely entwined with the fate—and the plans—of the Builders themselves.