Edmund Cooper – författare

First they went to Kratos - and faced the Deathworms. Then they went on to Tantalus and tried to fathom the Rings - which could only have been fabricated with the help of highly sophisticated machinery.And then they discover an alien spaceship orbiting the planet in strict silence and incommunicability.When they finally boarded the vessel, it was obvious that it had been derelict for centuries - as a result of some dreadful battle. Meanwhile down below, the enigmatic Rings lay waiting to deal with intruders - as they did the deadly vampire tree. Once again, Commander James Conrad and his team of Expendables faced their mission to find planets suitable for colonization.The second of a new series of books, The Rings of Tantalus seems guaranteed to further launch Richard Avery as a very special writer of modern science fiction novels. And there are more to come.

Zelos seemed an ideal planet for colonization. Possessing one large continent and numerous archipelagos, it had a climate and vegetation comfortably like that of Earth. Captain James Conrad and his crew of Expendables started on their initial reconnaissance of the planet. For the first time they found human beings already in residence. But this was a society remote from anything they had ever before experienced. For the Emperor of this strange world controlled his domain through the great annual War Games. Only the fittest could survive - and only they were allowed to procreate. Through this ''death control'' the population was limited to twenty thousand. There was only one way the Expendables could get permission to establish a colony on Zelos. Risking their own lives, they must compete in the dreaded War Games. And, somehow, they must win.

The Expendables had struck it lucky at last. After grappling with the revolting Death Worms of Kratos, the deadly Rings of Tantalus and the weirdly anachronistic military society of Zelos, their fourth mission looked an easy one. Argus was an earth-type planet with one major continent, comfortably covered with vegetation.But that was before The Expendables encountered the deadly harpoon tree, or the low-lying plant which grasped greedily at anyone who dared to set foot on it, or the hornets that paralyzed their victims - so as to enjoy their food in peace. Worst of all the lurking horrors of Argus was the deadly hallucinogenic pollen which turned quiet Santa Maria crew members into vicious maniacs.

The Civilizations of the First and Second Man have been destroyed by the products of their own technology. Now the world is emerging from a new dark age into the dawn of a second Middle Ages. Britain is dominated by a Luddite Church and by the doctrine that all machines are evil.Into this strange world comes Kieron, an artist''s apprentice who is inflamed by a forbidden dream - to construct a flying machine which will enable man to soar through the air like a bird.

The year is 2032 A.D. The Gloria Mundi, a star ship built and manned by the new United States of Europe, touches down on the planet, Alatair Five.Disaster strikes, leaving only one apparent survivor - an Englishman named Paul Marlow, whose adventures in the lair of the strange primeval race known as the Bayani leads him firstly to their God, the omnipotent and omniscient Oruri, and eventually to an unlimited power that is so great it must include an in-built death sentence. The forces that have remained static for centuries overcome both the forces of the future and the quest for unlimited knowledge.

The twenty-first century is drawing to an end. Earth''s social structure has undergone a complete reversal - women dominate society and men have been reduced to the status of manipulated objects.Into this world comes Dion Quern, a self-styled troubadour who refuses to conform to the social norm. But he discovers that women are superior to men in both bodily strength and number. And how can one man hope to change a whole society?

The Day Gabriel Chrome, a failed book sculptor contemplating suicide on the Thames Embankment, stumbled on the suicide bid of the naked Camilla Greylaw, was a day of hopeful redemption for a corrupt and violent world.For the lovely form that he chanced to preserve was the sole carrier of a contagious venereal disease. A bug which could inhibit the aggressive instinct, rendering total placidity in all humans.At once Gabriel''s life has new meaning and purpose. To save mankind becomes his hardened ambition. But mankind seems far from hope.

The devastated Earth had only a handful of inhabitants - now even their future was in the balance.The Twenty-Second Century had been and gone - and with it, the worst war in the bloody history of mankind: the War of the Black Rising. The Earth was devastated, the moon blasted out of the sky, it was only on Mars, many millions of miles away, that humanity had survived - in the shape of a few Black colonists.But out of that few had grown a new civilization - a civilization which now, some two thousand years later, had successfully launched its first space exploration - destination, the ''dead'' planet Earth.

A boy''s struggle to grasp the forbidden truth about his world...Michael was quite young when he discovered that some of his playmates bled if they cut themselves, and some didn''t. For a long time he didn''t think about it. Nor did it seem strange to see Zeppelins being attacked by jet fighters above London''s force field, or glimpse Queen Victoria walking with Winston Churchill in the Mall. Not at first.But later he thought about these things - he couldn''t help it. The world was real, and yet unreal. It was all desperately worrying. So Michael and his friends formed a society to investigate the world around them.Despite the terrible things they discovered, things that made some of them insane, they never actually guessed the truth about the Overman culture. Until Mr Shakespeare told them.

Vanessa Smith looked like any normal seventeen year old girl. But Vanessa wasn''t normal at all.She possessed extraordinary telepathic powers - and in the 1990s telepathy was the ultimate weapon in psychological warfare. Vanessa, along with other gifted children, was virtually a prisoner at Random Hill Residential School, developing her abilities for Government exploitation.So when she escaped, Vanessa became a political embarrassment. Questions were asked by the Opposition. It was vital for the Prime Minister, the ruthlessly dictatorial Sir Joseph Humbolt, that everything that marked Vanessa''s existence should be erased. And orders were given that she should be hunted down - using telepaths like herself - and destroyed.

At first he though it was all part of some crazy nightmare. But it wasn''t.Russell Graheme, M.P. was one of a handful of passengers flying from Stockholm to London. One moment flying peacefully in the sky, the next lying in an un-Earthly green coffin.Grahame was the first to emerge from this strange resting place. But for him, as well as for the others, it had been only the ecliptical experience. Soon all were to find themselves lost in a bizarre world of Mediaeval knights, Stone Age warriors and gremlins, caught unalterably in the weirdest cocoon of Time.

TEN MEN AND WOMEN ESCAPED IN THE STARSHIP - THE ONLY HOME THEY WOUKD KNOW FOR GENERATIONS - THE SEED FROM WHICH THEY WOULD BUILD A NEW RACE.The Solarian was a hundred metres high and, at its broadest point, twenty metres in diameter. It was designed to carry an initial crew of ten people - five men and five women - with provisions for subsequent children. Yet in that vast hull every cubic metre of space was indispensable, for the ship was a self-contained world, required to support human life independently for centuries.No member of the crew, male or female, could regard themselves as a separate entity, an individual personality. But each person was a part of a total life-unit, a dedicated nucleus that might one day expand into a tribe; that might, phoenixlike, bring forth a new human race.

''Welcome to Heaven'', said the voice. ''The acquisition programme is entirely for females; but the occasional enterprising male does not displease us.''Berry, Chief of his clan, knew his people could survive the dangers of the forest; and when winter came he made them build barricades against raiders from other clans. But no barricades were strong enough to hold against the Night Comers - huge silver beings of horrifying strength who carried away the womenfolk and were drastically lowering the human population.Were the Night Comers men, monsters or gods? Berry believed they were men; and when the inevitable night came when the women of his clan were seized, he managed to follow. He followed them to a huge tapering column of metal, which took him away from the world he had known to an island in the sky called ''heaven''.And there Berry realised that he had to defeat the Lords of Heaven if the people on Earth were to survive.

The Dag Hammarskjold takes off from Woomera, Australia for the new human settlement on Mars. Planet Earth is being eaten away by uncontrollable pollution, starvation and disease. Its life expectancy is nil. This is the last spaceship, its passengers the last people on earth with any hope. But it is never to reach its objective. Five thousand years later its captain wakes up to a new world undiscovered in his time and to a bitter experience he must fight alone.

It lay in the grass, tiny and white and burning. He stooped, put out his fingers. And then there was nothing. Nothing but darkness and oblivion. A split second demolition of the world of Richard Avery. From a damp February afternoon in Kensington Gardens, Avery is precipitated into a world of apparent unreason. A world in which his intelligence is tested by computers, and which he is finally left on a strange tropical island with three companions, and a strong human desire to survive.But then the mystery deepens: for there are two moons in the sky, and the rabbits have six legs, and there is a physically satisfying reason for the entire situation.

They called him the Survivor - a 20th Century man ''reborn'' in 2113.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.

IT WAS EXTERMINATION DAY - THE REMAINING MEN WERE TO BE HUNTED DOWNRura Alexandra, Madam Exterminator, had recently graduated into a 25th century world where men had become biologically less important, where women could reproduce as they wished by cloning and parthenogenesis. Her task was simple - in theory, if not in practice: to wipe out the last few thousand men who had taken refuge in the Highlands of Scotland.But an ambush near Lock Lomond led to rape, and the killing of her fellow-exterminators. And Diarmid MacDiarmid, the last remaining rebel chieftain, proved too much of a fascination . . .

Philip Shane, journalist for the London Sunday Sentinel and undercover agent for the British Government, sets out, at the Prime Minister''s request, to investigate the death of key scientists on the moon. His fellow travellers are Claire Scott, daughter of Sir Fabian Scott, pioneer of Lunar City; Professor Denis Quarles, a one-man Investigating Commission; Gaff Midley, a psychiatrist; the Ferry Rocket Commander and crew.At Woomera, firing base for the Ferry Rockets in the year AD 2050, Shane is drugged and sabotage occurs. On the Commonwealth Space Station, 1079 miles above the Earth the Ferry Rocket Commander is killed.Who is responsible, and why?

This collection contains one long novella, ''The Firebird'', which some critics regard this as Edmund Cooper''s finest work. Two stories were written especially for the collection and the remaining stories were written and published over a number of years in various magazines but have not been collected together before in book form.The theme of all the stories is fantasy. Edmund Cooper is fascinated by worlds of the imagination as much as the real world which he sometimes satirises in his books. In this collection, there are elements of tragic fantasy and also of humorous and satirical fantasy. Here are the best of his fantasy stories in one volume.This book contains the following:IntroductionThe FirebirdJahwehThe Diminishing DragonThe Snow CrystalsSecond ChanceI Am a Ghost