Into the maelstrom

Sample

(by) E.E. 'Doc' Smith

From back cover of Jove/HBJ paperback February 1979: **terror from space** The pirates of Boskone raided at will, menacing the whole structure of interstellar civilization. Masterminded by a super-scientist, their fleets outgunned even the mighty space cruisers of the Galactic Patrol. When lensman Kim Kinnison of the Patrol found the secret Boskonian base, it was impregnable to outside attack. But a single infiltrator **might** penetrate its defenses -- if he wanted to take on million-to-one odds! Kinnison took them -- with the future of the civilized Universe riding on his shoulders!

Sample

Robert Sheckley

It is a dying Earth's defiant answer to a seemingly hopeless future. While the world's remaining population struggles to survive on a planet made barren by humanity's own greed, a small, select group of men and women seek wealth and glory in the challenge of death itself. They are the Hunters. and they are also the Victims, co-conspirators in a mutual duel of destruction played out for the world's vicarious entertainment. One by one, the have come to the small Caribbean island where the Hunt is held. And two by two, computers have assigned them their roles - Hunter and Victim - to Kill or be killed by any means fair or fowl.

Sample

Piers Anthony

Knot, mutant-bred and exiled from mankind to serve on an alien world, has personal reasons for opposing the Galactic Empire's omnipotent Coordinating Computer. But Finesse, a sensuous, seductive imperial agent--added by Hermine, a slyly psychic weasel, and Mit, a telepathic hermit crab--lures Knot into serving the Computer. Their perilous odyssey takes them across time and space to a forbidding world ruled by the renegade Piebald, who has harnessed the fearsome extrasensory forces of his lobotomized minions...has gained mastery over the Computer...and who now threatens the very future of humanity.

Sample

Karen Traviss

The worlds orbiting Cavanagh's Star are in turmoil.Civil war on Umeh—ignited by outsiders—threatens to annihilate the teeming masses of a grossly overpopulated planet. On Bezer'ej, the handful of native aquatic creatures who survived extermination must take extraordinary and terrible steps to ensure the future of their kind... And the interlopers from a distant planet called Earth can only watch the chaos they helped, in part, to create—knowing their home world will be next to suffer.The day of reckoning is rapidly approaching when the powerful Eqbas will remake the Earth at the expense of its dominant species. And Shan Frankland—once a police officer, once human, now something much more—must decide where her loyalties truly lie: among the gethes, on a planet she once called home, or here, where a dying species presents her with a new and unexpected crisis.