Search Worlds Without End

In The End of the Dream, venerated science-fiction author Philip Wylie trains his sights on the ultimate catastrophe - the destruction of the world through human beings' unheeding and willful poisoning of the atmosphere, the land, the seas and rivers, and finally of the human race itself. The End of the Dream describes a horrific future when toxic chemicals, mutated creatures, and noxious gases all contribute to the eventual death of the human race and of the Earth itself through a choking, painful, and pitiless exposure to foul air, disease, and the eruptions of outraged nature.

Shortly before his death in 1971, Wylie wrote this warning on the dangers of pollution in the hope that constructive action against environmental disasters might yet be possible. Although many positive changes have taken place in the intervening for 40 years, Wylie's haunting tale still points out many unaddressed abuses - abuses that still have the potential to cause enormous damage to the ecosystem and humanity. The End of the Dream is still relevant today - its dire tableau highlights now as earlier the problems and choices we continue to face.

A graduate student stumbles across an insidious plot to unleash nuclear terror on America's greatest cities in a blood-chillingly prescient tale from one of thriller fiction's twentieth-century masters

Personable, good-looking, and a whiz at physics, graduate student Allan Diffenduffer "Duff" Bogan has a bright future ahead of him. But while staying at the home of an invalid widow in Florida, Duff makes a discovery that freezes his blood: a cache of uranium hidden in the locked closet of a fellow guest. The FBI is initially skeptical, but Duff knows all too well what his findings portend. Suddenly, not only is his future in jeopardy, the fate of millions of Americans hangs in the balance as well. If he cannot expose the horrific plot his nation's enemies set in motion years before, entire cities will be reduced to piles of radioactive rubble in an unthinkable nuclear nightmare stretching from coast to coast. And time, it seems, is rapidly running out.

"'What would you do if you were the strongest man in the world, the strongest thing in the world, mightier than the machine?' He made himself guess answers for that rhetorical inquiry. 'I would run the universe single-handed. I would scorn the universe and turn it to my own ends. I would be a criminal. I would rip open banks and gut them. I would kill and destroy. I would be a secret, invisible blight. I would set out to stamp crime off the earth.'"

Hugo Danner is the strongest man on earth, the result of a monstrous experiment by his scientist father. Nearly invulnerable, he can run faster than a train, leap higher than trees, lift a wrecked vehicle to rescue its pinned driver, and hurl boulders like baseballs. His remarkable abilities, however, cannot gain him what he desires most--acceptance--for Hugo Danner is desperately lonely, shunned and feared for his enormous strength.

An enduring classic in speculative fiction and the reported inspiration for the original comic hero, Superman, Gladiator is a melancholic tale of a boy set apart because of his unique gift and his lifelong struggle to come to terms with it.

"The female of the species vanished on the afternoon of the second Tuesday of February at four minutes and fifty-two seconds past four o'clock, Eastern Standard Time. The event occurred universally at the same instant, without regard to time belts, and was followed by such phenomena as might be expected after happenings of that nature."

On a lazy, quiet afternoon, in the blink of an eye, our world shatters into two parallel universes as men vanish from women and women from men. After families and loved ones separate from one another, life continues in very different ways for men and women, boys and girls. An explosion of violence sweeps one world that still operates technologically; social stability and peace in the other are offset by famine and a widespread breakdown in machinery and science. And as we learn from the fascinating parallel stories of a brilliant couple, Bill and Paula Gaunt, the foundations of relationships, love, and sex are scrutinized, tested, and sometimes redefined in both worlds. The radically divergent trajectories of the gendered histories reveal stark truths about the rigidly defined expectations placed on men and women and their sexual relationships and make clear how much society depends on interconnection between the sexes.

Written over a half century ago yet brimming with insight and unsettling in its relevance today, The Disappearance is a masterpiece of modern speculative fiction.

Betrayed by his wife, Stephen Stone spirits his son, Henry, away to a remote tropical island and trains him to be an ideal physical specimen and a perfect gentleman. After years of isolation, Henry Stone is now a young man, standing a full six feet two inches tall and weighing 190 pounds. His hair is bronze, his eyes turquoise, his skin mahogany--a magnificent man. When Henry finally returns to civilization, he finds that his father's business has grown into a news empire. Though he is the owner of this huge conglomerate, a great conversationalist and excellent company, well versed in etiquette, and extraordinarily nice, Henry has never seen a woman. Indeed his father has taught him never to trust a female and that love itself is a myth. When Henry collides with the contemporary world and the modern woman, the collision is necessarily fascinating and complicated for both Henry and the society he is discovering.

The scientific community has always shunned William Carpenter. A strange, hulking giant, a talented biochemical investigator, and the self-styled "greatest mind in the western world," he has locked himself inside a house with no windows, in the most desolate reaches of New Jersey, where he can conduct his experiments in peace and isolation. Here in his personal sanctuary, Carpenter has found something astonishing that could alter life on Earth as we know it: a chemical compound that can render all matter invisible, from rocks to plants to people.

But the twisted genius has no intention of using this breakthrough to benefit the planet. Instead, he is about to declare war on all humankind by launching an unseen campaign of terror and destruction. For years the world has ignored William Carpenter, labeling him insane, sociopathic, or worst of all, insignificant. And now the world will have to pay.

A runaway planet hurtles toward the earth. As it draws near, massive tidal waves, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions wrack our planet, devastating continents, drowning cities, and wiping out millions. In central North America, a team of scientists race to build a spacecraft powerful enough to escape the doomed earth. Their greatest threat, they soon discover, comes not from the skies but from other humans.

A crackling plot and sizzling, cataclysmic vision have made When Worlds Collide one of the most popular and influential end-of-the-world novels of all time. This Bison Frontiers of Imagination edition features the original story and its sequel, After Worlds Collide.

After Worlds Collide (1934) was a sequel to the 1933 science fiction novel, When Worlds Collide, both of which were co-written by Philip Gordon Wylie and Edwin Balmer. After Worlds Collide first appeared as a six-part monthly serial (November 1933 - April 1934) in Blue Book magazine.

Much shorter and less florid than the original novel, this one tells the story of the survivors' progress on their new world, Bronson Beta, after the destruction of the Earth.