Richard Cowper – författare

The first coming was the Man:The second was Fire to burn Him;The third was water to drown the Fire;The fourth is the Bird of Dawning.Twenty years have passed since the martyrdom of the Boy-piper at York, twenty years in which his legacy, the movement of Kinship, has challenged the tyranny of the Church Militant in Britain''s seven island kingdoms.Now his namesake, Tom, bearing the Boy''s own pipes and perhaps himself imbued with the spirit of the White Bird, is wandering Europe in company with the girl, Witchet. But disaster overtakes them and Tom, in a fury of vengeance, breaks his vow of Kinship.A terrible path lies before him, one that transcends his own world. As he travels it, Tom must come to understand the true nature of the wild White Bird, of The Bride of Time and her Child, and of the Song the Star Born sang.

The ability to distinguish reality from fantasy is supposedly the root of sanity.But if a man lives in two worlds, and both are real, what then? Is he mad, or sane? One person, or two? And if one of his worlds should begin to grow dim, a shadow world, could one say he was in danger of going sane?

In the 24th Century, mankind lives in Utopia. Everyone is happy, apart from one man. ''A misfit, a throwback, a genuine freak'' is how eighteen year old Bard (with typical eighteen year old romanticism) describes himself.''The Last Romantic'' was full of bravado, for in the perfect society individualism was not encouraged, and the threat of ''rehabilitation'' was ever present. But Bard had a plan - he would enter the Caves of Sleep until he was twenty-one, his own man without let or hindrance, and in control of a fairly large fortune. But even in Utopia, plans have a way of going awry.

Alvin is a clone. One of four, all raised separately, all with unnatural powers. Terrified by their potential, their creator attempts to wipe their recent memories, their knowledge of the talents. But the process goes wrong, and all four are left with no memory at all. They see the world with brand new eyes.Sent to a remote research station, kept under the guidance of an intelligent ape, Alvin begins to recover his memories. Desperate to rediscover his brothers, he sets off to London in a desperate search for their creator. But when he is kidnapped by criminal apes, the trouble really begins.

As a young boy, Laurie Linton encountered a strange apparition: a ghostly man who urgently mouthed a message:KILL MAGOBION!Years later, as a member of the UN Narcotics Security Agency, Linton and the beautiful Carol Kennedy were assigned a special duty: investigation of a mysterious drug which endowed its addicts with superhuman powers.Now, that investigation leads Linton and Carol into a bewildering maze where past and future slide by each other at terrifying speed...where international peace teeters in the balance...and where all blues point to the top-secret Ministry of Internal Security and its prestigious, powerful leader - COLONEL PIERS MAGOBION.

On the murky outskirts of our solar system, a lonely star has exploded, emitting monstrous doses of radiation . . . The year is 1983. The exploding star Briareus Delta, 132 light years away, provokes only mild interest from planet Earth. Suddenly, appalling tornadoes and storms ravage the cities and countryside, leaving death and desolation in their wake. Then mankind realises another terrifying side-effect - every adult in the world has been rendered infertile. Schoolteacher Calvin Johnson discovers he is one of the select few to have acquired strange psychic powers. Termed ''Zetas'', these people experience mental flashes of the future - a future of freezing isolation, snow-swept landscapes and bleak, ice-bound cities.A second ice-age is imminent as man faces the ultimate horror . . . extinction.

George Cringe is a middle-aged school-teacher, married with several children. His marriage, while not a failure, is hardly a great success, and he is somewhat drawn towards a fellow teacher, Jennifer Lawton, who is much younger than he is. For relaxation, George has taken to creating an endless SF saga set on the planet Agenor, where his hero and heroine, Zil Bryn and Orgypp, face various problems, their current one involving an outbreak of psychedelic mushrooms.Meanwhile, on the other side of the galaxy, on the planet Chnas, life Zil Bryn and his wife Orgypp. Bryn is currently composing a long weird narrative called Shorge Gringe''s Pilgrimage, set on a strange world called Urth . . .

Tom Jones is naïve, impressionable and very, very willing. His chief talent is conversing with dolphins in the Aquatic Mammals Division of HMS Profundis, a gargantuan submarine destined to roam the ocean depths for a century following the nuclear holocaust.Years pass and mad captain succeeds mad captain. Eventually the ship falls under the command of one Admiral Prood, a kind, understanding man who finally comes to a startling conclusion. He is God the Father. The Almighty Himself. And all he needs now is a son to sit at his right hand.Enter the innocent Tom Jones.

Both "Drink Me, Francesca" and "Out There Where the Big Ships Go" examine - in differing but related ways - humanity''s first encounter with other intelligent life, and its inevitable profound consequences. In the former, one member of an interstellar expeditionary force is drawn into communion with an intangible, superior being; in the latter an astronaut, believed long dead, returns to Earth bringing with him an alien game whose subtleties the human race must master in order to show itself worthy of membership in the galactic community. "The Attleborough Poltergeist" is an eerie account of an apparently paranormal phenomenon which proves to have an even stranger scientific explanation, while the long title story is a surprising - and successful - departure: a full-blooded, adventurous fantasy reminiscent of Rider Haggard. A Victorian Army officer, doing surveying work in Asia Minor, stumbles upon a hidden valley in a remote mountain range. There he discovers a cult whose members literally tend and spin the loom of human destiny, and who await his long-predicted arrival to fulfil a strange and unexpected role in their society.