HOSPITAL STATION

Ballantine Books paperback, 1962. Cover artist uncredited.

"SECTOR GENERAL is the home of many strange creatures, including humans. It is a vast, sectionalized hospital, set up in space to care for all kinds of extra-terrestrials including those that 'breathe' methane gas, or live under water, or come from planets with pressures and gravities altogether different from those of Earth. 

Each section of the hospital is rigged to duplicate the living requirements of its various patients. But the doctors, human and otherwise, must of necessity shift to one kind of space-suit to another in the course of their rounds. How to devise a working spacesuit for a delicately expert surgeon with eight legs so fragile that mere earth gravity would crush them? How discover what is ailing the incommunicable, elephant-sized infant offspring of some vast behemoth before "baby" wrecks the joint? How get close enough to teat a mangled crew-member whose life-force is hard radiation? 

These and many other problems - funny, dangerous, dramatic - are the daily bread of Sector General. But above all there is the job of keeping the hospital going, maintaining harmony and discipline among a wildly disparate group of aliens - this is the job that falls to a human."

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? BOOK 1

Sphere SF paperback, 1974. Cover artist uncredited.

"Isaac Asimov maintains that 'science fiction has potential as an inspiring and useful teaching device' and proves it with this selection of classic short stories. Each story was chosen for its scientific content as much as its literary merit and each is followed by Dr. Asimov's own comments on the problems and questions created."

Contents:


A Martian Odyssey, by Stanley G Weinbaum
Night, by Don A. Stewart
The Day Is Done, by Lester del Rey
Heavy Planet, by Milton A. Rothman
'-And He Built A Crooked House-', by Robert A. Heinlein
Proof, by Hal Clement
A Subway Named Moebius by A. J. Deutsch
Surface Tension, by James Blish

S.O.S. FROM THREE WORLDS

Ace paperback, 1966. Cover painting by Jack Gaughan.

"Virtually the only connecting links between the innumerable colonized planets were the med ships -- lone starships carrying only one man and one beast. These trained teams of super-medical engineers took their lives in their hands on every planetfall. And for the team of Calhoun and Murgatroyd, three calls for help meant three challenges beyond all the experiences of all their systems. Plague, mystery, and menace marked the missions -- and the human enemies they faced on each world were just as virulent as the microscopic ones. Murray Leinster, dean of science-fiction writers, is at his thought provoking best in this exciting space adventure."

THE EMBEDDING

Quartet paperback, 1975. Cover artist uncredited.

"With undue smugness, civilized man continues his attempts to master inner and outer space. Psycholinguistic and space-travel projects extend, in different directions, the limits of our knowledge and understanding. But there are already others in touch with realities which scientists can barely comprehend: a tribe of Amazonian indians has evolved, under drugs, ways of seeing and expressing which shatter conventional ideas of the real world, and beings from a planet 1103 light years away arrive to offer the secrets of inter-stellar space travel - at a price. Can we face these challenges, offered by simple savages an ultra-sophisticated aliens? Or are these enormous strides forward too much for us to grasp? In a brilliant novel of staggering invention but powerful scientific authenticity Ian Watson portrays the dilemma of a civilization blinkered by its own outlook and recoiling from its own progress."

SPACE, TIME AND NATHANIEL

NEL paperback, 1971. Cover painting by Bruce Pennington.

"SPACE: T - the inhabitant of a machine that was built by an ancient race of non-humans - had just one duty, to totally destroy a planet from our solar system! 

TIME: Every day, Rodney Furnell awoke to a groaning bedspring. Every day he leaned over and gently kissed his wife's forehead. Every day an audience laughed at him! 

NATHANIEL: He is told a story about the ultimate bureaucrat. A man who brings prosperity to a backward world just by filling in forms and filing reports. 

In these, and eleven other stories, Britain's leading writer of science fiction explores the outer vastness of space and the inner obscurity of man." 

 Contents:

T
Our Kind Of Knowledge
Psyclops
Conviction
Not For An Age
The Shubshub Race
Criminal Record
The Failed Men
Supercity
There Is A Tide
Pogsmith
Outside
Panel Game
Dumb Show

RODERICK AT RANDOM

Granada paperback, 1983. Cover illustration by Tim White.

"Roderick wasn't exactly happy, but at least he was holding down a job, even if it was only as a bowl-washer at Danton's Doggie Dinette. He didn't know they were out to get him. He didn't know that in the whole wide world of lunatic game shows, maniacal religious cults, tentacular business corporations, murderous governments, crazy consumerism and pill-popping people, there was no place for one mild-mannered robot."

GRAY MATTERS

Sphere paperback, 1974. Cover artist uncredited.

"It is the twenty-fifth century. People have been reduced to Cerebromorphs - disembodied brains stored in tanks and wired to computers, passing from layer to layer, awaiting liberation at the top level as enlightened beings rehoused in new perfect bodies. But there is one brain that can out-think central intelligence. A brain that engineers a spectacular escape - with bizarre and tragic repercussions for its fellow Cerebromorphs."

ANALOG AUGUST 1980

Cover Painting by John Schoenherr.

ANALOG AUGUST 1976

Cover painting by John Schoenherr.

ANALOG JULY 1975

Cover painting by John Schoenherr.

ANALOG NOVEMBER 1972

Cover painting by John Schoenherr.

ANALOG OCTOBER 1967

Cover painting by John Schoenherr.

ANALOG APRIL 1962

Cover painting by John Schoenherr.

DOORWAYS IN THE SAND

Star Books paperback, 1978. Cover painting by Bob Haberfield.

"Man is no longer alone in the cosmos...The aliens have given a precious relic to the people of earth, the star-stone, but when it vanishes the harmony of the galaxy is threatened. 

Fred Cassidy is a perpetual student cruising his way smoothly through life and human knowledge. All he knows about the star-stone is that it came to earth in an interplanetary cultural exchange for the Mona Lisa and the Crown Jewels. But other sentient beings seem to think otherwise... 

Accused of stealing the stone, he is pursued by telepathic psychologists, extraterrestrial hoodlums, and galactic police in bizarre disguise. He flees into multiple realities, flipping in and out of alien perspectives, through doorways in the sand..."

THE STEEL TSAR

Granada / Mayflower paperback, 1982. Cover illustration by
Melvyn Grant.

"IN THE RUSSIAN SECTOR OF A BATTLE-TORN UNIVERSE, CAPTAIN OSWALD BASTABLE CONFRONTS THE MYTHICAL AGENTS OF DESTRUCTION AND DEATH 

In his epical adventures in the alternate twentieth century, Chrononaut Bastable, member of the League of Temporal Adventurers, has crossed and re-crossed many different time-streams... 

THE STEEL TSAR finds him travelling backwards in time from a shell-shocked Singapore to a Tsarist empire seething with conflict, and preyed on by motley bands of rogues and adventurers. Here he meets up with fellow-time-traveller miss una persson, and together they change the course of a history whose mythical deeds go beyond the boundaries of everyday imagination and glitter in the exuberant land of the eternal present..."