FRIENDS COME IN BOXES

Sphere paperback, 1976. Cover artist uncredited.

"The problem of immortality was solved in the 21st century: at forty, your brain was transferred to the head of a six month old child. Thus you gained another forty years of active life, until you could do it all over again. 

But then the birthrate fell - and a growing horde of brains waited in the friendship boxes for host bodies. And on the sidelines a rebellious minority fought the system, seeking to raise their children in freedom to live a normal life. 

Inevitably, the factions moved towards confrontation: a day of final reckoning."

INDOCTRINAIRE

NEL paperback, 1973 reprint. Cover artwork by Bruce Pennington.

"In the very depths of the densest jungle in Brazil, there exists a circular plain of stubble. A perfect circle. 

This is the Panalto district, and no man has ever come out of it alive. Elias Wentik might, perhaps, be the exception. He finds himself imprisoned in the very centre of the plain, subject to humiliation and bizarre sessions of interrogation. And this visit, so completely contemporary in its paranoid vision of strangeness, has revealed to him the incredible secret of the Panalto. It exists two hundred years in the future."

SUM VII

Magnum paperback, 1981. Cover illustration by Chris Moore.

"A medical research trip to Egypt leads to the opening of a magnificent new tomb and the discovery of a unique mummy. Code-named SUM VII, the mummy is so perfectly preserved that specialists are able to revive the body - a being considered dead for nearly 5000 years! Believed to be a high priest to a Pharaoh, SUM VII reveals awesome powers. Soon a fugitive hunted by the men who returned him to life, his true identity is stranger and more mysterious yet..."

THE DARK DESIGN

Grafton paperback, 1988 reprint. Cover by Joe Petagno.

"Who are the weavers of the dark design? The myriad dead of thirty thousand centuries have awakened to find themselves resurrected, naked and hairless, on the banks of the great river which winds itself round the awe-inspiring planet Riverworld. A few resourceful and intrepid individuals attempt to trace the source of the river, among them Sir Richard Francis Burton, Mark Twain and Peter Jairus Frigate. Together they seek to find some purpose to the dark design in which they find themselves enmeshed..."