Search Worlds Without End

Named one of science fiction's 100 best books by noted genre editor David Pringle, Thomas M. Disch's On Wings of Song is at once allegory, social satire, political fable, and brilliantly written science fiction of the ultimate out-of-body experience. In Disch's dazzlingly imagined future America, Daniel Weinraub dreams of escaping the repressive midwest of the mid-twenty-first century through an electronic device with which the user takes flight into cyberspace when activated with a quasi-musical code called "The Symphonette." Daniel's adventures take him from Iowa's God-fearing police state and its "correctional" labor camps for the sinful to Manhattan's mean streets and "cyberspatial flight paths."

Curiosity was discouraged in the Greene tribe. Its members lived out their lives in cramped Quarters, hacking away at the encroaching ponics. As to where they were - that was forgotten.

Roy Complain decides to find out. With the renegade priest Marapper, he moves into unmapped territory, where they make a series of discoveries which turn their universe upside-down...

Non-Stop is the classic SF novel of discovery and exploration; a brilliant evocation of a familiar setting seen through the eyes of a primitive.

An unusually brilliant and mind-stretching metaphysical quest from one of the most exciting talents in science fiction.

John Deacon uses hypnosis to help his patients reach altered states of consciousness. One of his subjects, Michael Peacocke, is unusually susceptible and in their first session together, Michael recalls a "close encounter"--in both senses of the term--with an alien. Deacon, skeptical of the story, dismisses it as an adolescent sexual fantasy. But then strange things begin to happen and Deacon is forced to reconsider. Could UFOs be symbols projected from the collective unconscious? Are they messages from the biomatrix? Does the mind have the ability to project objects and people that are physically real...yet somehow illusory?

A wonderfully fascinating, mind-bending voyage.

A careful selection of what the author considered was his most telling short work from the mid-Seventies.

Table of Contents:

• Author's Note - (1977) - essay by Brian W. Aldiss
• Last Orders - (1976)
• Creatures of Apogee - (1977)
• Within the Black Circle - (1975)
• Killing Off the Big Animals - (1975)
• What Are You Doing? Why Are You Doing It? - (1975)
• Enigma 2: Diagrams For Three Stories - (1974) - essay by Brian W. Aldiss
• The Girl in the Tau-Dream - (1974)
• The Immobility Crew - (1974)
• A Cultural Side-Effect - (1974)
• Live? Our Computers Will Do That for Us - (1974)
• The Monsters of Ingratitude IV - (1974)
• Waiting for the Universe to Begin - (1975)
• But Without Orifices - (1975)
• Aimez-Vous Holman Hunt? - (1975)
• Backwater - (1977)
• The Eternal Theme of Exile - (1973)
• All Those Enduring Old Charms - (1973)
• Nobody Spoke Or Waved Goodbye - (1973)
• The Expensive Delicate Ship - (1973)
• Carefully Observed Women - (1975)
• The Daffodil Returns the Smile - (1975)
• The Year of the Quiet Computer - (1975)
• Appearance of Life - (1976)
• Wired for Sound - (1974)
• Journey to the Heartland - (1976)

A space vehicle from Earth's distant future is trapped in the 18th Century, lands in the Caribbean Sea, and it's crew boards the pirate ship Orinda. The unwitting pirate, Captain Fletcher, must cope with the uncanny problems posed by time-displacement, an alien "cabin boy," captives sentenced to walk the plank who drown but do not die, and an ominous battleship that had sneaked in from a differnt point in the galaxy.

How the "cabin boy" struggles to restore his ship, flight off the enemy battleship, and prevent Earth's history from being irrevocably changed, makes for a wonderful adventure that blends futuistic time-travel with the swashbuckling excitement of 18th-Century pirates.

Originally appeared in Ace Double D-31 (1953).

Did you ever hear of the Inter-Time Society for Psychological Adjustments? Well, neither had Morton Cargill in 1953 when he accidentally killed a girl. A year later that very girl turned up, apparently alive, and announced that the mysterious society had condemned him to death! Cargill's astounding adventures began when he escaped the execution chamber to find himself in the far future. Three conflicting societies were hunting for him, to use him in their own desperate schemes. There were the Floaters, a nation of aerial vagabonds. There were the Tweeners, who dreamed of world conquest. And finally, interwoven through everything, were the sinister figures of the Shadow Men-supermen without visible substance.

This novel is set in a future world where the equipment of ordinary, everyday life has become indestructible; there are everlasting lightbulbs and infallible cars, but no-one knows where they have come from.

First published in 1953, this most celebrated of Sturgeon's works won the International Fantasy Award, as has been touted as "a masterpiece of provocative storytelling" (The Herald Tribune).

A group of remarkable social outcasts band together for survival and discover their combined powers renders them superhuman.

One of the finest writers in the golden age of science fiction--and inventor of the intricatley plotted form of SF known as the "space opera"--offers the story of a flawed hero possessing almost superhuman strength. When his wife is kidnapped, war veteran Jim Pendrake embarks upon a search that takes him to a lost colony on the moon--and a secret, sinister society.

Also published as Moonbeast.