Search Worlds Without End

A planetary system, consisting of a star and five planets, is travelling through our galaxy and will pass close to Earth. The four largest planets are gaseous, but the fifth, named Achilles, appears capable of supporting life. Two rival expeditions - one Anglo-American and one Russian - set out to land on Achilles and explore its mysteries. But almost from the moment of their arrival things begin to go terribly wrong... and when they return to Earth, something not human will be coming back with them.

From a great distance the Yela's recorded message crackled through on the micro-earpiece: 'For the time being you have won. But I am not defeated so easily.'

That had been three years ago, after Dick Warboys had repulsed the invading Yela by firing a lithium bomb into the Sun. But now that threat seems near fulfilment as appalled scientists detect the rapid approach of a vast, engulfing cloud of hydrogen. Can humanity survive on Earth or must selected pioneers abandon it in search of a safer region of the Galaxy?

To find the answer Dick and his allies from Space suffer a perilous voyage into the realms that reach the ultimate in understanding the physical universe.

Renowned scientist John Sinclair and his old school friend Richard, a celebrated composer, are enjoying a climbing expedition in the Scottish Highlands when Sinclair disappears without a trace for thirteen hours. When he resurfaces with no explanation for his disappearance, he has undergone an uncanny alteration: a birthmark on his back has vanished. But stranger events are yet to come: things are normal enough in Britain, but in France it's 1917 and World War I is raging, Greece is in the Golden Age of Pericles, America seems to have reverted to the 18th century, and Russia and China are thousands of years in the future.

Against this macabre backdrop of coexisting time spheres, the two young men risk their lives to unravel the truth. But truth is in the mind of the beholder, and who is to say which of these timelines is the 'real' one? In October the First Is Too Late (1966), world-famous astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) explores fascinating concepts of time and consciousness in the form of a thrilling science fiction adventure that ranks among his very best.

In the 1970 of this story, Eire has become an authoritarian police state, made somewhat acceptable to the population by the vast wealth flowing from a secret and forbidden science zone occupying a large area of the South-West. Here is based the mysterious 'Industrial Corporation of Éire' which has produced a range of new technologies. Its enigmatic founders are not Irish: they settled there and resist all attempts to find out who they are. A young British scientist agrees to be sent as a spy to find out just what is going on.

It is the early twenty-first century. Humans are seeking signs of life elsewhere in the universe, but all exploratory ships have been lost without a trace--except for DSP 15. Thirty years after leaving Earth, and given up for lost, DSP 15 suddenly appears on radar screens at the space station at Mildenhall, England.

Her crew has been frozen to prevent aging, and as the ship settles to a landing, Dr. Richard Warboys eagerly waits with other scientists for word of what DSP 15 has found. But there is no crew, only a message scratched into a metal surface, signed by the captain: "If this ship returns to Earth, then mankind is in deadly peril--God help you."

Mike Jerome, a likable young TV writer, visits Professor Smitt, a physicist, who gives him an idea for a TV script: using some source of light, perhaps a laser beam, one could reduce the human structure to a form that could be transmitted into the future as electrical pulses - and thus create time travel.

On the way home Mike is hit by a taxi, and when he recovers he finds the date is 1979 - ten years in the future. This is but the beginning of a series of bewildering, fascinating ten year jumps. Mike is living the time change himself! Jumps to 1989, 1999 and so on, take Mike into such far-reaching places as London, the Northern Territory of Australia, California and the Italian Alps, for a rousing series of adventures in all sorts of bizarre circumstances.

Earth was dying...

One fourth of its population was dead. The rest had little time to live.

A mass of interstellar matter had invaded the solar system, fling planets out of orbit and blocking off the sun. In that titanic disaster, Man had one small chance to survive: Appeal to an alien intelligence that might exist and that might - or might not - care enough to help!

Young Peter, a student of Byzantine Art at Moscow University, receives, through a cryptic sentence in a lecture, a message to buy two books of his choice at a specific hour in the University bookshop. When he opens the package, a third book has been included. It is this third book which sends Peter on a series of adventures leading to the unravelling of a mysterious power source guiding the destinies of planet Earth. His quest is also intimately linked with his father's baffling disappearance.

Cameron, a tall, testy, whisky-drinking, nationalist-minded, Scottish physicist, may not have been an astronomer, but he knew the off things in the sky when he saw them. From an Australian mountaintop where he was advising on the location of a radiotelescope he saw what looked like Mars, in the wrong spot in the sky. But it wasn't Mars at all, it was a supernova... no, not a supernova but a quasar.

Knowing what would happen, Cameron dashed home to Scotland and found himself at a crossroads of his life. In the face of total catastrophe, and of intense heat, darkness and rain, he took over as natural leader with both the north and south of the United Kingdom turning to him for help.

In addition to being the man who coined the term 'the Big Bang', world-renowned astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle also produced a fine body of science fiction. The Andromeda Anthology contains the acclaimed duology A for Andromeda and Andromeda Breakthrough, co-written with John Elliot.

The close-knit group of scientists who work at the new radio telescope are shocked to receive a mysterious signal from the heart of the Andromeda galaxy. Working with mathematician Christine Jones, Dr John Fleming interprets the signal as the instructions to build a super-computer. When the computer begins to relay the information it receives from Andromeda, scientists find themselves possessing knowledge previously unknown to mankind, knowledge that could threaten the security of human life itself.

Table of Contents:

• A for Andromeda (1962)
• Andromeda Breakthrough (1964)

It concerns a group of scientists who detect a radio signal from a distant galaxy that contains instructions for the design of an advanced computer. When the computer is built, it gives the scientists instructions for the creation of a living organism named Andromeda, but one of the scientists, John Fleming, fears that Andromeda's purpose is to subjugate humanity.

From the dead constellation of Andromeda flashed continuously a long and intensely complicated message. Picked up during the testing of the world's most powerful radio-telescope, it proved to be a blueprint of a computer so advanced that it made all earth-built computers seem like children's counting beads and even produced a thinking, living human-being to interpret its needs. Could this be part of a fantastic plan to take over the earth?