John Glasby – författare

Men had fought wars throughout history, but never such a war as the one which destroyed the cities of earth and turned vast areas into badlands, stretches of intense radioactivity where nothing could grow and no one could live. It also produced the deviates, mutants who had warped bodies and strange talents.But there were others who had still stranger talents, mental powers exceeding those of the mutants, and whose bodies did not bear the sign of the deviate. Their origin could not be traced to an atomic war; even they themselves had no idea whence they came.Forced to take part in the abortive war between the Eastern and Western Federations, one man and one man eventually escaped and discovered creatures similar to themselves. But to discover their origin they had to go back five thousand years; and the answer lay not on earth, but somewhere in the stars.

They came out of the void, from Venus, only to find there was no answer to their radio signals. Earth seemed dead. And on the Moon, Man''s greatest achievement, the Lunar Military Base was a mass of rubble and blasted wreckage.Here, the crew of the Stellar Polaris, led by Commander John Forrest, discovered one sole survivor. He was mad! To their questions he could only answer that the children had destroyed the armed might of the Military Base.When they finally reached Earth, they found that what he had said was true. The children had taken over control of the world. But then, these were no ordinary children - and their little weapons were almost enough to overthrow the armed superiority of the Stellar Polaris herself!

"My God!" he yelled. "What''s happening now?" Stevens stared. Then he started abruptly to his feet. Even afterwards, when he looked back on the incident, he could never actually decide what really happened. He had a persistent, oddly unshakable memory of a man flowing suddenly into liquid. Inside the blue and gray uniform of the Interstellar Passenger Service, the man began to melt, to change into a thick gooey substance that dripped and trickled away between the rising pillars of steel. Desperately, he fought down the rising sense of nausea that tugged at the muscles of his stomach. The picture was so utterly impossible that he screwed his eyes tightly to shut it out of his mind. When he looked again, there was nothing there and Blair was looking across at him, his jaw slack and an expression of stark disbelief in his dark eyes.

The world that Man has known for close on twenty thousand years had been overthrown in a holocaust of atomic fire and annihilation. The immense and complex system of civilisation had been utterly destroyed almost overnight and only a scant handful of true humans remained.Stretched out between the rivers of radioactive fire, the cities were growing wildernesses of shattered stone and brick, splintered glass and silent streets. But here and there in quiet places sheltered from the deadly rains, men waited for the fires to subside and hoped to rebuilt something a little like the civilisation which had existed before.This is the stirring and sometimes terrible story of the supreme struggle for survival, when the continued existence of the human race on Earth is uncertain after such a tremendous catastrophe, and when all life is menaced by the wandering bands of mutants, creatures spawned and tainted by the deadly radiation.

The vast federation of outworld states that formed the Terran Empire smarted under the unjust, evil influence of the Emperor Jrun. Daily, his tax-gatherers swooped down on the member planets, wringing the people dry of money and goods. But away from the decadent shell that Jrun had built up, out among the lonely suns of the Edge, a new power was growing. It had fallen on Kelda, the young star-king of Zandyr to form the union known as the Cosmic Echelon. A fleet of ships that dared to match the armed might of Imperial Terra.The ultimate weapon belonged to Jrun, a battleship which no power could withstand, and a force that could shatter the bodies of men.Here, you can follow Kelda and his warrior princess, Irrena, through the star-strewn wastes of Space; across the Dark Gap in which the empty wrecks of once proud vessels floated forever, manned by crews long-dead.And realise as Jrun did, that there are two kinds of laws. Those made by Man himself, which can be broken - and the laws of the Universe, which are inviolate.

They came out of the star-strewn wilderness around Sol, these alien creatures. And their object was the vicious, total destruction of the Federation of Worlds.Earth was one of the last pf the planets to be attacked and here they were opposed by the Earth Council: six men who held the destinies of a hundred billion people in their hands.But in the end, there remained only one man out of the six to fight. Velga Dorne, Earth Councillor and Member of the Triumvirate of Worlds. And he himself was a hunted man. Death and terrible destruction followed him across the wastes of space in the search for the crazy, nightmare planet that had spawned these creatures. Fear and terror were his only companions. Until he reached the nameless planet of a still more insignificant sun and learned that there were others to join him in the struggle against the black, inhuman monsters. These were the Hheroni, scientists whose achievements had progressed along a slightly different path of research to humanity. And Astraea, the girl who went with him on the suicidal mission to where the Aliens originated: on a world that no one in their wildest dreams had thought possible to exist, one which even science said was impossible.

Over the long years, ships of the Interplanetary Confederation had scoured the empty wastes surrounding Sol, searching desperately for a sister planet; a companion for the isolated worlds of the Solar System. Of the ships that were sent out, many returned. But always the answer was the same.There were no planets! The worlds of Sol were alone in the Great Dark that swirled across the boundless heavens. It was not until Steve Rane and Nick Brodine, in the Exploratory Ship Vega, reached across the yawning gulf of light years to Sirius, that they found the strange planet that rotated in its complicated orbit around the twin sun. It was an event transcending all others. A discovery that plunged the planets of Sol into the greatest race of all time. For whoever controlled the alien planet, controlled the Solar System. And away from the watchful eye of the IPC it would be possible to build the greatest space armada in history and attack the Interplanetary Confederation without warning.To Steve Rane, the order came from Earth Central. Zero Point has been set for three months hence. The ship of Jupiter must not reach the new planet first.

To the crew of the Exploratory Ship Canopus, outward bound on the first intergalactic voyage to the flaring suns of mighty Andromeda, the evil whisperings that spilled out from the nebula into deep space came as a warning. This was something far beyond their previous experience. Nor were they the only ones to come under the malignant influence of the alien intelligence. In the empty, murmuring void, virtually half-way between the two galaxies of stars, a solitary sun streaked away from Andromeda, dragging its lonely, ammonia-laden planet with it. And it was here that the explorers first gained their glimpse of the black horror that lay straddled across the intergalactic darkness. Something that had being. Something that existed where it seemed impossible that anything could.It fell on Klau-Telph, the only non-Terran on board the Canopus, to finally track down and destroy the inhuman monster that threatened to drive the inhabitants of a trillion planets over the red edge of madness. Not until it was done did he find that the hidden reason behind the insidious whisperings was not what it seemed. In fact, it was something that even he, with his strange double mind, had never thought possible...

They came out of the long grey ages of Time, killing and plundering, and their object was to take back captives to appease the blood-thirsty mobs. The city was burning when Paul Sanders drove into it that wet and foggy evening, the streets filled with tall, cruel-faced warriors.Taken prisoner by them, he and a handful of others found themselves transported in Time to the world of a million years hence. A strange world filled with the weirdest anachronisms where a superstitious people were held in thrall by three men, the Time Kings, who alone knew the secret of time travel.The ancient knowledge had been destroyed by a people smarting under utter defeat. During the long ages there had been three Interstellar Empires when Earth had reigned supreme throughout the galaxy, but it remained for a group of men from the early dawn of the Atomic Age to overthrow the anarchy which prevailed and to restore Earth to her previous position of greatness, leading the people back to the stars which were their destiny.

Earth was threatened with attach from the huge space-fleets of the Hundred Suns of Andromeda - an attack that the Terran Fleet could not hope to defeat.Only one chance remained to prevent Earth''s destruction, and that was the chance that a skilled and experienced saboteur might just have time strike his blow before the enemy could launch the attack.It was Captain Blair whose mission this became, and it was his ace-saboteur who raced against death in planet after planet, as the zero-hour approached when Earth would face the attacking fleets of DARK ANDROMEDA.

The logical outcome of the space race, and the preliminary step towards the Moon, was the manned satellite, the Big Wheel moving in a stable orbit about the Earth, integrating the data necessary for a landing on the Moon, and eventually acting as a fuelling station for the Lunar rockets.After several failures, the station is ready, but even there, danger exists, unseen, unheard, invisible and terrible. Forced to exist in the belt of cosmic radiation surrounding the planet, men die within weeks from aplastic anaemia. Seeking a solution to the problem, Doctor Paul Russell is sent up to the satellite and here learns of the two men from the previous crew who vanished without a trace after spotting an unidentified spaceship in orbit further out from Earth than themselves.

The Colony on Rigel IV had been founded seven hundred years earlier but for the past six centuries, they had been forced to exist on the bottoms of the great oceans of the planet, kept there by the tremendously potent weapons of the alien star-race which had swept down out of space and wiped them off the land masses of the new world.Kerrel Stevens found himself trapped in one of the Shells, unable to remember how he came to be there, aware only that for some strange reason, he held the secret which could release these people from their terrible existence, but that his memory and all of the knowledge which could help in the struggle against the aliens had been erased from his mind.In the Shells, he finds what he is seeking - others like himself, different from the people who had become used to this life on the sea bottom, where science had gradually given way to superstition and witchcraft - and this chance meeting provides the key which unlocked the amnesia in his mind. For him, it opened the doorway to the surface of this strange, impossible planet, plunging him breathlessly towards the stars- and the unbelievable secret which spelt destruction for the alien star-race.