Tandis que l'humanité s'apprête à entrer dans le troisième millénaire, la surpopulation est devenue telle que les res¬sources naturelles ne suffisent plus à couvrir ses besoins. La nourriture et l'eau sont rationnées, il n'y a plus de pétrole, plus guère d'animaux. Trente-cinq millions de New-Yorkais, pour la plupart sans emploi ni logement, se battent pour survivre.
Andy Rush a un travail, lui. Tous les jours, avec les autres policiers de sa brigade, il part disperser les émeutes de la faim qui se produisent lors de chaque nouvelle distribution de nourriture de synthèse. Alors, qu'importe si un nabab aux activités louches s'est fait descendre ? S'il parvenait à attraper le meurtrier, Andy le remercierait presque pour services rendus...
Bill was a peaceful farm boy until he was lured by the martial music of a passing recruitment sergeant, drugged, and made to enlist in the Empire Space Corps. His basic training is sheer hell, but somehow he manages to stay alive and achieve the rank of Fusetender 6th Class in the process.
En route to an engagement with the lizard-like Chingers, Bill's spaceship is involved in a supreme contest and by accident Bill is the man who saves the ship and wins the day. A grateful Galaxy awards him its highest accolade, the Purple Dart, to be presented by the Emperor himself on the fabulous aluminium-covered capital planet, Helior. And then his adventures really start to take off in the most bizarre and nastily surprising ways...
James Bolivar 'Slippery Jim' diGriz, Special Corps agent, master conman and interstellar criminal (retired), is living high on the hog with his lovely, vivacious wife Angelina on the luxury planet Moolaplenty when long-lost Cousin Elmo arrives. And Cousin Elmo's not alone: he's got a ship full of porcuswine and their keepers, and they're all looking for a new home. And before he's even finished his first cocktail, his bank account's been drained and he and Angelina are off wandering the stars on a sabotaged ship.
In this darkly satiric work Harry Harrison brings his most famous character out of retirement for a grand tour of the galaxy, cocktail in hand, his luscious wife by his side, a smile on his lips and larceny in his heart. He's in search of adventure, gravitons, and a way to get the porcuswine out of his life ... for ever!
In the vastness of space, the crimes just get bigger and Slippery Jim diGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat, is the biggest criminal of them all. He can con humans, aliens and any number of robots time after time. Jim is so slippery that all the inter-galactic cops can do is make him one of their own.
The planet was unknown¿ a savagely primitive place where every man had to kill every other man - or live as a slave.
The inhabitants lived in the early Bronze Age one minute, and in the early Machine Age the next. Technology had degenerated into a number of mysteries jealously guarded by separate brotherhoods.
But Jason dinAlt was a gambler. He realised that if he was ever going to get a winning hand in this game, the brotherhoods would need a shuffle¿
Someone was tampering with time, altering the past to eliminate the present, fading people out of existence into a timeless limbo.
One of the victims was Angelina, the lovely, lethal wife of James Bolivar di Griz - better known as the Stainless Steel Rat. That put Slippery Jim on the trail of the villains, a trail that went back to 1984 and an ancient nation called the United States of America. The Stainless Steel Rat was determined to rescue his wife. And before he was through he'd thrown dozens of centuries through time in both directions. But then he didn't have much choice: to save Angelina he had to save the world. Again.
The planet was called Pyrrus, a strange place where all the beasts, plants and natural elements were designed for one specific purpose: to destroy man.
The settlers there were supermen, twice as strong as ordinary men and with milli-second reflexes. They had to be. For their business was murder.
It was up to Jason dinAlt, interplanetary gambler, to discover why Pyrrus had become so hostile during man's brief habitation.
Colonel McCulloch was up to no good. That was becoming very clear indeed. He had stashed away a quarter of a million dollars in gold, and was a prime suspect in a couple of murder cases.
But secret agent Troy Harman can find no trace of his whereabouts. McCulloch has vanished into thin air.
When Harman visits the research station where McCulloch worked as security chief, he realises the awful truth.
To follow McCulloch, to try to put an end to his insane mission - Troy Harman has to embark on a strictly one-way trip . . .
Unexpectedly, long thought lost, the first manned Jupiter probe has returned - but only a madman would have tried to land it at Kennedy International! The result is the biggest air disaster in history. And that's only the beginning . . .
The largest spaceship ever made is hurtling overhead, falling. Six people are trapped inside with no escape. If it strikes the Earth it will explode with the force of an atomic bomb; what can be done?
The mighty 2,000-tonne Prometheus is the largest piece of space hardware ever launched - a joint Soviet-American project to harness solar energy before the power resources of the world run out. But politically and technically the project is doomed, and the nerve-racking predicament of the crew of six shrinks to nothing beside the horrifying destruction which threatens hundreds of thousands of people if no way can be found to move the satellite from it's ever-decreasing orbit towards Earth . . .
Skyfall is a tale of incredible terror, giving a foresight of the global disaster which could one day become reality.
Two hilariously inventive stories about a very surprising kind of interstellar patrol, which uses everything from pigs to heavy-duty robots to help it carry out its duties.
Chuck and Jerry, two fun-loving students at an American College discover a faster-than-light space drive and smuggle it into the football team's plane. They, together with the lovely Sally Goodfellow, crusty Pop and loveable old John view with horror a practical joke gone awry as the plane screams off to Titan, a frozen moon of Saturn.
But that's only the beginning. When loveable old John's true and awful identity becomes known, a wild battle across the Universe and through centuries ensues, catapulting friends and deadly foes into the midst of a yarn spun from the grandest tradition of the classic space opera.
Code word - "onion bagel"
That little phrase would put FBI agent Tony Hawkin in touch with the Israeli commando unit at Cohn's Fancy Bakery in London, should he ever need help. And Tony needed help like he needed air to breathe!
The trouble was, he wasn't cut out for the FBI. He couldn't shoot straight, and had a tendency to panic when things went wrong. But somehow he'd got himself handcuffed to a case containing two million dollars, bundled aboard a hijacked DC-10 and whisked off to darkest Scotland, where he found himself hotly pursued by a lot of people who wanted to get their hands on the money - and around his throat. People like the hijackers. And a bunch of fanatical Scots patriots. And some Cuban thugs led by a mad Colonel. And the police.
Tom Hawkin was lost and terrified in an apparently crazy country. Which was why he yelled Onion Bagel at the first opportunity...
In a Twentieth Century Parallel world, the renegade George Washington has long been decently and quietly liquidated and Britain's greatest colony, America, is to be connected to the Mother of Parliaments by the strongest of umbilical cords - a Transatlantic Tunnel.
'We are all dead men,' said First Engineer Holtz when the space ship Johannes Kepler was hit by a meteorite. But Lieutenant Donald Chase refused to give in to the general spirit of despair. Something could be done and somehow they would reach Mars safely.
The valley was isolated in time and space, a land of barbarous science and human sacrifice.
Coatlice the Dreadful stalked the night, her twin serpent heads dealing death to taboo-breakers.
Citallatonac the First Priest sacrificed anyone believed to be possessed by the gods.
Chimal rebelled: he wanted to escape the atavistic confines of his lost civilisation, to venture into the unknown world beyond the valley, a world of hope, and nightmare, too.
L M Greenspan, the head of ailing Climactic Studios, gave producer, Barney Hendrickson, five days to get a major movie in the can - and Climactic out of it.
Impossible?
Not with Professor Hewett's miraculous presto chango time machine, the answer to Hollywood producer's prayer.
Nipping back to AD 1,000 with a whole film crew and two glam stars, Barney sets out to prove that the Vikings discovered America five hundred years before Columbus - and to film the event in glorious Technicolour. But it's not as easy as it sounds, as they realise when history lets them down and their Viking Columbus fails to show up in the New World.
Dis was a planet, a wasteland, a world of death where living was dying and dying was much better than living.
Dis was a scorching desert, its people crude, barbaric, backward and miserable - and they would become seven million blackened corpses unless Ihjel stopped the H-bombs. But Ihjel had forseen his sudden death, and only one man could take his place - Brian Brandd, Champion of Champions and master of a secret power.
Earthly medicine - helpless in the face of a plague from space.
Unexpectedly, long thought lost, the first manned Jupiter probe has returned - but only a madman would have tried to land it at Kennedy International! The result is the biggest air disaster in history. And that's only the beginning: now comes The Jupiter Plague.
You can't keep a good rat down, not one as slippery as Jim di Griz, alias the Stainless Steel Rat. And you can't keep his nose out of trouble either.
Jim and the lethal, luscious Angelina owe themselves a honeymoon and Paraiso-Aqui looks like the place. Settled long ago by voyagers from the southern continent of Earth (or Dirt as it was known) Paraiso is warm and easy. But all is not well in paradise. The serpentine tyrant General Julio Zapilote is about to sail back into office in another rigged election, and the chance to scupper him is just too good for Jim to miss. Corruption, bribery, graft and chicanery - for the Rat it's just like coming home.
Slippery Jim di Griz - the Stainless Steel Rat - is still recovering from his efforts to save his beloved Angelina from the notorious Interstellar Internal and External Revenue when he is called upon to perform the impossible. Saving the galaxy. But can he pull it off? The galaxy is being attacked by every kind of alien race - untold billions of tentacled, slimy, green, clawed mutations - and time is running out. Aided and abetted by his wife Angelina and his teenage sons, James and Bolivar, Jim infiltrates the nerve centre of the enemy council chambers. But he hasn't reckoned on the grey men and their commitment to a 'holy crusade' to destroy mankind - permanently!
In this brilliant acclaimed novel dinosaurs still rule the Earth.
The cosmic catastrophe that ended the Age of the Dinosaurs 65 million years ago never happened. The evolution of the great reptiles continued, climaxing with the Yilanè, the most intelligent and advanced race on Earth.
But when the onset of a new Ice Age forces them to cross the ocean to explore and colonize a vast contingent, they clash violently with a savage new breed of mammal that they have never before encountered. Mammals that walk erect, hunt and use crude stone tools - and weapons . . .
Wheelworld: An unforgiving planet where the sun is about to rise and will not set for another four years; where an ancient peasant hierarchy still rules a society equipped with the highest technology; where the people are as dependent on visiting ships as they are on the very air that they breathe; home for some, but for Jan Kulozik it is an eternal prison.
And when ships don't come, Jan finds himself at the centre of an epic struggle for power, and survival...
Homeworld is heaven on earth.
If you don't ask questions.
Homeworld is stable at last, hundreds of years after the collapse of the 20th Century economy. For the millions of proles, life is still a grim ordeal, but for the lucky few, like Engineer Jan Kulozik, there is every kind of luxury. Except one. On Homeworld, where everything and everyone is monitored by the faceless power of government, there is no freedom.
Jan Kulozik knew nothing of the Resistance; he probably didn't want to. But suddenly, he is part of it. And running for his life.
