Search Worlds Without End

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.

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.

Table of Contents:

• 7 - Introduction (A World of Difference) - essay
• 13 - The Firebird - (1971) - novella
• 101 - Jahweh - short story
• 107 - The Diminishing Dragon - novelette
• 133 - The Snow Crystals - (1970) - short story
• 145 - Second Chance - (1971) - short story
• 169 - I Am a Ghost - (1960) - short story

Summer 1971. A marvellous spell of weather, idyllic in its warmth. But new sun-spots had appeared; and with their appearance came a significant increase in the suicide rate. The wonderful summer continued for a decade: simultaneously Radiant Suicide reached endemic proportions, the only people to escape its effects being the supposed transnormals, the obsessionals, the eccentrics and the psychopaths. These were to be the only remnants of the ancient 'homo sapiens'...

He was an anachronism...

He was a twentieth century man who, by a freak of chance, survived to see an age in which working had become a social disgrace; an age in which culture and the arts reigned supreme; an age of mannered ladies and gentlemen, perfectly waited on and cared for by androids - the man-like creations of their own genius. The higher grade androids were doctors, engineers, politicians and personal "companions" to each and every human being. And in whatever they did, they were perfect. No one had to worry about them. For the first time in history, man had completely freed himself from the problems of living:

EXCEPT... When perfect manchines, with perfect performance, are made to perfectly resemble man - who needs man?

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?

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?

Table of Contents:

• 7 - Introduction (Jupiter Laughs and Other Stories) - (1979) - essay
• 13 - Jupiter Laughs - (1975) - short story
• 25 - Falcon Chase - (1956) - short story
• 39 - Death Watch - (1963) - short story
• 50 - The Life and Death of Plunky Goo - (1963) - short story
• 56 - The Menhir - (1968) - short story
• 64 - The Doomsday Story - (1963) - short story
• 77 - Tomorrow's Gift - (1958) - short story
• 89 - The Jar of Latakia - (1954) - short story
• 102 - The Unicorn - (1960) - short story
• 111 - Nineteen Ninety-Four - (1960) - short story
• 133 - M81: Ursa Major - (1956) - short story (variant of The End of the Journey)
• 158 - The Brain Child - (1956) - short story
• 174 - Welcome Home - (1963) - short story
• 189 - Judgment Day - (1963) - short story (variant of Judgement Day)
• 203 - The Butterflies - (1956) - short story

This powerful and horrific novel is set in England in the early part of the 21st century. It tells of the tragic and terrifying events that occur on one day - Christmas Eve - in the life of Maggie Minerva, the attractive widow of a Trade Union boss. These events have startling repercussions not only for the people involved but also for the social structure of Britain.

Table of Contents:

• 7 - The Menhir - short story
• 13 - M81: Ursa Major - (1956) - short story (variant of The End of the Journey)
• 32 - The Enlightened Ones - (1958) - novelette
• 59 - Judgement Day - (1963) - short story
• 70 - The Intruders - (1958) - novelette (variant of Intruders on the Moon 1957)
• 93 - The Butterflies - (1956) - short story
• 106 - The Lizard of Woz - (1958) - short story
• 117 - Welcome Home - (1963) - short story

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 WOULD 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.

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.

Latter editions were just titled "Kronk".

The Civilizations of the First and Second Man have been destroyed by the products of their own technology. Now the world is emerging froma new dark age into the dawn of the second Middle Ages. Britain is dominated by the 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 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.

'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.

Table of Contents:

• Nineteen Ninety-Four - (1960) - short story
• The Jar of Latakia - (1954) - short story
• The Brain Child - (1956) - short story
• Repeat Performance - (1958) - short story
• A Question of Time - (1956) - novelette
• Tomorrow's Gift - (1958) - short story
• Judgement Day - (1963) - short story
• The Piccadilly Interval - (1963) - short story
• Death Watch - (1963) - short story
• Welcome Home - (1963) - short story
• The Snow Crystals - (1970) - short story
• Sanctuary - (1970) - short story

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.

Table of Contents:

• 7 - Welcome Home - (1963) - short story
• 18 - Death Watch - (1963) - short story
• 27 - The Piccadilly Interval - (1963) - short story
• 36 - The Mouse That Roared - (1960) - short story
• 45 - Nineteen Ninety-Four - (1960) - short story
• 61 - When the Saucers Came - (1960) - short story
• 75 - The First Martian - (1960) - short story
• 82 - The Lizard of Woz - (1958) - short story
• 93 - The Life and Death of Plunky Goo - (1963) - short story
• 98 - Judgement Day - (1963) - short story
• 108 - Vertical Hold - (1963) - short story
• 115 - The Doomsday Story - (1963) - short story

Table of Contents:

• The Enlightened Ones - novelette
• The Butterflies - (1956) - short story
• M81: Ursa Major - (1956) - short story (variant of The End of the Journey)
• Intruders - (1957) - novelette (variant of Intruders on the Moon)
• The Jar of Latakia - (1954) - short story
• Falcon Chase - (1956) - short story
• The Brain Child - (1956) - short story
• Repeat Performance - short story
• A Question of Time - (1956) - novelette
• Tomorrow's Gift - (1958) - short story

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 computer, 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.

Table of Contents:

• When the Saucers Came - (1960) - short story
• The Life and Death of Plunky Goo - (1963) - short story
• The Enlightened Ones - (1958) - novelette
• The Butterflies - (1956) - short story
• The Lizard of Woz - (1958) - short story
• M81: Ursa Major - (1956) - short story (variant of The End of the Journey)
• Second Chance - (1971) - short story
• Intruders - (1957) - novelette (variant of Intruders on the Moon)
• The Menhir - (1968) - short story
• Introduction (Unborn Tomorrow) - (1971) - essay

At ten-thirty in the morning the skies over London were clear. Then an arrow formation of five bright points became visible. They appeared to be moving at an amazing speed in tight circles. They were spiralling down to about five thousand feet, and at that altitude their nature was easily discernable. They were the things most of us had discussed and dismissed at one time o another. Flying Saucers. Giant saucers, smooth and lustrous and blinding, more than a hundred yards in diameter. They hung over the city in a neat formation.

Table of Contents:

• 7 - The Unicorn - short story
• 15 - Six Eggs for Mafeking - short story
• 25 - The Boy David - short story
• 33 - The Mouse That Roared - short story
• 44 - I Am a Ghost - short story
• 62 - Nineteen Ninety-Four - short story
• 82 - Sentimental Journey - short story
• 91 - Burnt Umber - short story
• 100 - The Miller's Daughter - short story
• 111 - When the Saucers Came - short story
• 127 - The Lions and the Harp - short story
• 134 - The First Martian - short story
• 143 - Duet for One Finger - short story
• 148 - So I Never Left Home - short story
• 152 - The Last Act - short story

IT WAS EXTERMINATION DAY - THE REMAINING MEN WERE TO BE HUNTED DOWN

Rura 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...

Humanity in the year 2071 is straining at the limits of terrestrial and solar sustainability. With billions of people placing a demand on Earth's finite resources, an outlet is needed. Robot probes have identified planets in other systems capable of supporting human life. But before they can be colonized they must be proven - a high-risk prospect. Enter the Expendables: a group of highly talented criminals and misfits who combine technical expertise in their chosen fields with checkered pasts. Led by James Conrad, a former commander in the United Nations Space Service, they are sent out to explore Kratos, the first viable planet discovered by the probes. Yet not only must the team determine the planets viability as a colony for humans, they must also answer an additional question - just who or what left the large ruts scarring the planet's surface?

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.

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