Positronic Publishing imprint: 381 books

“Now and then Mrs. Groener used to scream,” the big man explained, “when she’d been drinking heavily I’d leave the bedroom. It may have been a rebuke or summons to me, or a fighting challenge to the whiskey bottle, or simply an expression of her rather dark evaluation of life. But it had never meant anything more real than that—until tonight.”

They are the aliens among us—and their ways and wonders are stranger than extraterrestrials!

“You forget, baroness, the runic rhymes of the Prussian Nostradamus,” said Dr. Rumanescue, Vividy’s astrologist and family magician. “Wenn der Kassette-Teufel . . . ’—or, to translate roughly, ‘When the casket-demon is let out, The life of the Von Sheer is in doubt.’”

Jamie Bingham Walsh should have been known as Schizo Jimmie. People with whom he came in really close contact had their minds split and started to live in dream worlds.

Have you found out about the Big Engine? It’s all around us, you know—can’t you hear it even now?

“So the last fly has obligingly walked into the spider’s parlor,” he murmured, with a laugh.

There was an old Simorgyan legend, Fafhrd had insisted, according to which on the seventh day of the seventh moon of the seventh year of the Sevens-Cycle the king of the sea journeyed to the other end of the earth, leaving his opalescently beautiful green wives and faintly silver-scaled slim concubines...

Time traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun it’s cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I’d hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, “Look, Buster, do you want to live?”

Jules de Grandin's talk of cats and mice seemed utterly irrelevant.

Was it a trick of tired nerves, the retention of the light-image upon my retina in the dark?

“Rig ship for the snowbank orbit! Snowbank orbit with stinger! Mr. Grunfeld, raise the fleet.” Aft, Croker muttered, “Rig our shrouds, don’t he mean? Rig shrouds and firecrackers mounted on Fourth of July rockets.” Ness said, “Cheer up. Even the longest strategic withdrawal in history has to end some time.”

Piracy in the past has acquired the gaudy technicolor of high romance. In the present, piracy is as tawdry as tabloid headlines. But piracy in the far future, when presented as vividly as in this story, can be scary stuff.

Once again it is up to Jamie Retief to save another diplomatic mission. Terra has recently signed a treaty with the planet Petreac. But revolution threatens and the Terrans must save the Nenni cast or their mission will end in abject failure.

Thomas Wills is a claims adjuster. That doesn't sound like much, but the insurance company he works for rules the world with an Iron fist. Thomas Wills believes he is working for the greatest company in the history of mankind. But when he meets Rena dell'Angela he learns that everything is not as...