ANYTHING YOU CAN DO

Mayflower-Dell paperback, 1963. Cover artist uncredited.

"That the Nipe had embarked on its incredible career of robbery and murder had been, more or less, an accident. After all, it was a civilised being of high intelligence, intent only on establishing contact with the Earth's real people. These pitiful creatures with only two eyes and four limbs, with their very slow reflexes and their savage weapons, couldn't be the ruling life form! Why, they didn't even keep the customs - and any civilised species must surely adhere to ritual."

Another double, I prefer my American Lancer paperback edition - incidentally, Darrel T. Langart is a pseudonym and anagram of Randall Garrett. 

EIGHT KEYS TO EDEN

Pan paperback, 1965. Cover artist uncredited.

"Eden, the Earth colony eleven light years away in the black void of space, has failed to answer the anxious signals of the communications operator on earth. Eventually the E-S, the key scientists - the master brains in the world of the future - decide to send a junior E to investigate."

WATERS OF DEATH

Lancer paperback, 1967. Cover artist uncredited.

Rear-cover synopsis: 

"Food. In the year 2160, it was man's greatest problem. With the enormous increase in population and the extension of longevity, there simply wasn't enough to go around. The sea farms were the only solution - but they were in themselves a potential threat to man's future. Science and technology had advanced fantastically, of course. The real trouble was...People. Human beings had not changed. The sea farmers had good reasons for being rebellious; their work was hard and dangerous and the rewards small. And the rest of the population was rapidly becoming a total police state, but one which might revolt at any moment. Then the harvests from the sea began to drop off...And the government decided to hand the whole problem to just one man. Dr. Robert Wilde found himself as no man had ever before: with a clouded past, hated by those he was trying to help, harassed by powerful men seeking more power....Did he have any future? Did the world?"

ODYSSEY TO EARTHDEATH

Belmont paperback, November 1968. Cover artist uncredited.

"Psych-Sickness is the term they used when a citizen of cityside rebelled against the wholesale manufacture of death...Against the fact-clock which voiced the conquer-kill count each minute...Against the daily launching of bio-bombs into Landsend, to "keep the peace." strangely, not one citizen of cityside had been killed by a Landsender. But the citysiders were being lost in droves to psych-sickness. Circus was the answer. The plan of the brutal Supreme Priestman Pume was to alleviate the Psych-Sickness. Or did he intend to create a greater evil?"

THE GREKS BRING GIFTS

Madfadden paperback, second printing, February 1968.
Cover artist uncredited.

"THE GREKS WERE PEOPLE-HATERS 

They came to Earth in their space ship, bearing fabulous gifts - such as machines that did any day job automatically, and fertilizer that made plants shoot up overnight. But they presented their gifts with contempt, and with a look in their eyes that made people feel "creepy". 

Still, because of the brave new world they promised, they Greks could be forgiven anything - until they left and people discovered the machines were breaking down. Then their only choice was to beg the Greks to come back, on their own terms. And they knew the terms would be hard..."

CYCLE OF FIRE

Corgi paperback, 1966. Cover artist uncredited.

"The planet had two suns - a red dwarf and a blue giant. And when the red dwarf ascended, the planet boiled and the ice caps melted. 

Dar Lang Ahn had only a short time in which he and his generation must prepare for the cycle of death. The death that meant life to the next civilisation of Abyormen."

MINDSWAP

Mayflower paperback, 1969 reprint. Cover artist uncredited.

"Inter-stellar travel is only for the rich, the colonists, the administrators. But Marvin Flynn, tucked away in the sleepy town of Stanhope, longs to travel in space. 

So he answers the advertisement to swap bodies with a Martian. 

It is his passport to the most amazing science-fiction adventure you will ever read!"

CHILDREN OF THE VOID

Consul paperback, 1963. Cover artist uncredited.

"The earth is annihilated by a nuclear explosion and a handful of survivors are isolated on a planet shifted from its rotation around the sun and veering off its axis to drift aimlessly in the void of space to a destiny unknown. 

In this sequel to world in eclipse, William Dexter creates a horrifying glimpse of the future. 

The bewildered and terrified refugees drift to the moons of Jupiter, meet the beast men of Varang-Varang and hear the noises of the wise ones who speak in every known language. Perhaps only they can help the destitute colony, groping helplessly in an everionment so fearful as to scar the imagination."

JOURNEY BEYOND TOMORROW

Corgi paperback, 1966. Cover artist uncredited.

"Joenes was a man of the fabulous twentieth century, that remote and misty period of time about which very little is known.

Many tales are told of Joenes and his travels through the last years of the old era and the first years of the new but now, for the first time, the stories of Joenes have been carefully collected and together they present a fascinating picture of that mythical period of time known as the twentieth century."

SINISTER BARRIER

Paperback Library paperback, second printing, December 1966,
cover painting by Ed Valigursky (thanks, Mark).

"TIME - 21ST CENTURY 

PLACE - AMERICA 

CRISIS - A WORLD GONE MAD 

PRESIDENT'S WARNING - 

DESTROY THE VITON MENACE - 

OR EARTH HAS ONLY 80 HOURS TO LIVE! 

Bill Graham was among the scientists and government leaders left who heard the president's message. He shuddered at the thought of the last Viton rampage of kidnapping, ghastly murder and madness. Hidden somewhere in the vastness of the galaxy, the hideous blobs of Viton, that fed on men's fears and emotions, planned a last-ditch attack to destroy the universe. Only Bill Graham had a one-in-a-million chance to stop them. But the Vitons were so deadly that even to think about them risked instant annihilation."

BRING THE JUBILEE

Four Square SF paperback, 1965. Cover artist uncredited.

"New York contained a population of nearly a million, representing the greatest concentration of people in the United States though, of course, it did not compare with the great cities of the Confederacy, Washington (now spreading to Baltimore), and Leesburg (once Mexico City). In this New York: buildings sometimes reached more than ten stories. Balloons moved gracefully through the air. Telegraph wires joined houses and nearly everyone knew morse code. Bicycles were thick as flies. And when darkness fell, gas-lamps - lit simultaneously by telegraphic sparks - glowed at sparked on every street corner. A young man from the country, in the city for the first time, was knocked out and robbed. And thus started a chain of events that was to mean the re-writing of history, the creation of another, almost unbelievable, world - where the Confederate states had not won their independence!"

THE SHORES OF SPACE

Corgi SF paperback, 1965 reissue. Cover artist uncredited,
though I've been reliably informed that it's Josh Kirby (thanks: Mark).

"It was getting dark and he couldn't be sure of what he saw. He stood paralysed and numb, staring with blood-drained face at the thing that moved across the ground towards the man's body; the thing that had a shape, yet not shape, that crept like a current of shimmering jellies. 

A terrified gagging filled his throat. He tried to move, but couldn't. He didn't want to hear the hideous gurgling sound, the turbid bubbling that was like vats of boiling tallow. 

Then the man was gone from the earth. Les stared at the place where he had been, stared at the luminous mass that pulsated there. He stared at it until the man had been completely eaten... 

'Being', one of thirteen extraordinary stories of fantasy and science fiction in this collection by Richard Matheson" 

Contents:

Being

Pattern For Survival

Steel

The Test

Clothes Make The Man

Blood Son

Trespass

When Day Is Dun

The Curious Child

The Funeral

The Last Day

Little Girl Lost

The Doll That Does Everything

GIANT OF WORLD'S END

Belmont paperback, February 1968. Illustration: Jeff Jones.

"An unlikely band of heroes - a woman who loved in vain, a magician who loved only wisdom, and a warrior to whom love was a genetic impossibility - fought the doom that filled the skies of their strange world. 

And it came to pass that Zolobion the magician and Ganelon Silvermane set forth from the land of the great stone face and took the first steps of their gigantic journey across the world, a journey so long and fearful and so filled with wonders that no man since time began until that hour had undertaken a like adventure. 

But their mission was a logical impossibility. Hence what purpose is undertaking it? Only that the moon was falling."

THE NIGHT OF PUUDLY

NEL/Four Square paperback, Feb 1968. Cover artist uncredited.

"The Puudly was a dangerous thing, not only because it was strong and quick, but because it was intelligent. 

It reasoned and it planned and schemed. It could talk, though not as a human talks...Probably better than a human ever could. For it could not only talk words, but it could talk emotions.

It lured its victims to it by the thoughts it put in their minds; it held them entranced with dreams and visions until it slit their throats. 

It would not hunt for hunger, not the sheer madness of the kill, but because of the compelling conviction that no Puudly would be safe until Earth was wiped clean of life."

Contents:

The Night Of The Puudly

Crying Jag

Instalment Plan

Condition Of Employment

Project Mastodon.

SPACE TUG

Belmont SF paperback, Nov 1968. Illustration by Jack Gaughan.

"There had been two attempts to blast it with atomic bombs, but it was aloft now, floating grandly around the earth. - this was the space platform. The crew badly needed food, air, water and means of self-defense. It was up to Joe Kennmore to make the first flight to carry a cargo into outer space; but the opponents of the platform hadn't given up..."