Showing results by publisher "Wildside Press LLC" in Science Fiction & Fantasy

A panoramic novel of men and machines, Kiteworld presents a future world in which sturdy, highly trained crews launch daring pilots into the stratosphere, borne aloft on giant Cody manlifter kites to watch the horizon and the skies for demonic monsters strikingly suggestive of guided missiles and aircraft. Intense, detailed, and meticulously observed, the world of the novel is a future in which our world,after a catastrophe that has severed humanity from its past, is such a vague memory that details survive only as myth.

"I challenge you to a duel of desert islands!" Dr. Grimes cries, when Professor Bulfinch accuses him of not being practical. Grimes plans to go ashore on an uninhabited desert island, and the professor on another. After a month they will see who has survived the best!

The planet Toy was a bauble of a world, designed for the pleasure of those who owned it. It was founded long ago as a corporate Utopia, and had the oldest computer banks in the Galaxy. Now Toy was in the hands of a decadent young Toy Master, whose greatest pleasure was the pain of others. Dumarest had come to Toy to consult the great Library, in hopes of locating long-lost Earth. He stayed to fight for his life.

Still driven by his search for Man's fabled birthplace, Earl Dumrest accepts a commission to guard the Lady Derai, heiress to the proud House of Caldor, on the feudal world of Hive. On Derai's home planet, Dumarest had hoped to meet a living witness to Earth. But instead he finds himself in the lists of the deadly Contest on Folgone - with the Lady of Caldor as prize.

Somewhere on Dradea is an assassin who will stop at nothing. But Dumarest will take the assignment - for also on Dradea lies a clue to his obsessive quest for a planet that may be only a legend... a planet called Earth.

A dying man's last words brought Dumarest to Loame, "the garden planet". Its name was a mockery - Loame's gentle citizens could only watch in horror as their fields were ravaged by a mutated vine that destroyed all it touched. They were sure the acid-dripping vine was the work of their enemy world, Technos.

Mars: the skull of a planet picked clean by the wind of time.... Beyond the desert of Meroe, past the ancient cliffs of the dust-locked continents, past the dry wharts of a city that was old when Earth was new, the caravan crept into the unmapped wasted called Umbra. It was into this shadowed land that the lost nation of the People had ridden - and vanished - in a tme beyond memory. And it was here that the outworlder Ryker followed the golden-eyes of Valarda and found the Child-of-Stars.

The first published novel in this best-selling series asks the question: "What if the basic human nature suddenly changed?" Hugh Valleroy of the Gen Police undertakes a covert mission into Sime Territory to rescue the woman he loves from the Sime kidnappers who would use her to destroy his government. His protector and guide? A Sime who carefully and deliberately plans to kill him!

Ourelle was the closest planet to legendary Earth that Earl Dumarest had reached. There the legend of the Original People persisted among the several strange races that populated this world out along a far arm of the Milky Way. Somehow the boy named Jondelle held the key to further data in Earl's quest, but before he could obtain it, the child was kidnapped.

The planet was without a star of its own. It was from another galaxy. It was uninhabited and it was sentient. In its own way it might have been the most powerful single intelligent entity in the universe. But it knew nothing about humanity. So when it picked up the survivors of a wrecked space-liner, it was confronted by mysteries. What were men? What were women? What was emotion? What, especially, was love?

On a future Earth wracked by strife and shortages, Roy Cos buys into a lifetime of ease through the Deathwish Policy, but his privileged status makes him a target for killers hired by the elite Worldgov.

Ju-hai had troubles enough without spirit entanglements. He had a powerful enemy, seeking to destroy his family to seize their lands. Somehow, Ju-hai had to rescue his father, illegally impressed to fight a distant war, even though success meant outlawry. Then he had to win justice and vengeance against the enemy. It was a task to confound a mighty warrior and magician. And, of course, there was the matter of Hsi-feng, the little slave girl.

A humorous sendup of the movie industry, mysteries, science fiction, and pulp movie serials. Is Peter Tinsley imagining things? Or did that frail, beautiful doll, Tracy Flynn, flip the gangster Dime Gallardo to the ceiling just as Dime was about to make macaroni out of Pete's skull? Pete can't get an explanation out of Tracy, and he's got his hands full trying to grope his way into a cozier position with her. All of which make it tough to concentrate on the Martian extravaganza he's supposed to be writing for Star Spangled Studios....

Earl Dumarest was on his way back to his home world - the mythical homeland of cosmic humanity he called Earth. Gradually, dangerously, he had picked up clue after clue to its galactic whereabouts as his quest moved outward from the crowded center of the Milky Way.

Island One, the U.S.'s first space colony and symbol of an American renaissance, is in trouble. Low morale, shoddy workmanship, unexplained malfunctions, and avoidable accidents have become a way of life, and nobody seems to know why. Is it the Russians? Home-grown anti-technologists? Arabs afraid of cheap solar power from space - or something even more sinister?

Mercenaries are gamblers - they fight for pay but they die without honor. To sell yourself as a soldier in someone else's war makes no sense unless your side wins. No one becomes a mercenary except desperate men, natural killers, and someone like Earl Dumarest. Earl sold himself because he had a quest and he always needed money to continue his search for the way home, home to Earth, a world whose existence nobody believed.

When the first Martian capsule lands, Alex Smith is drawn to the scene out of curiosity and wonder. But soon he must flee, when the great alien striders begin devastating the countryside and harvesting the living bodies of men and women to drain their blood. Smith wanders south, being drafted into the Army, witnessing major battles between the Martians and the American troops, and following the trail of destruction all the way to San Francisco. There he finds a city deserted of human life. Mankind seems doomed, unless... A grand science-fiction adventure, inspired by H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds.

Long before their award-nominated and awarded stories and novels, these two writers word jammed together, learning the music of story writing and the blood and bones of distinctive prose. And all these early efforts were published! Here they are again, together in one place - 10 riveting stories of science fiction, as entertaining as they were fun to write, including the previously unpublished tale "The Standard Crisis Scenario"!

Jarl had gotten his riddle from a kindly, grandmotherly sort of witch. But friendly or not, she'd told him pretty firmly he had to solve it if he was to become a hero who could fight off evil and find his way home to Earth. She didn't warn him, however, that this very riddle would also lead him into the most bizzare adventures imaginable - and that he would soon find himself contending with ogres, bandits, talking trees, and the dark minions of the Shadowlord himself.

The Not-World: One would not have expected to find the last hideout of the ancient weird folk of legend and prehistory in an English forest of two centuries ago - and yet in that land which has always been haunted by the lore of little folk there had to be some truth behind such universal belief.