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Marsupial Tracks
As a jaded regular in the city’s underground music scene, the only thing that mattered to Jacob Blythe was punk rock. When the arrival of a mysterious girl tempts him into seeing a vision of the world that exists beyond the confines of his cosmic nihilism, Jacob finds himself helpless to resist it.
Now, sitting alone in an unfamiliar train station, and possessing no memory of how he got there, Jacob has no choice but to piece together the scattered remnants of this fractured past before he is consumed by the sinister creature chasing him.
With time running out and one of the greatest punk bands of all time about to take the stage, Jacob has only one chance to discover the answers to life’s most complicated questions.
If only he and his friends hadn’t drunk so much first…
£10.99 -
Lorela: Dog Warriors
Lorela is a red planet…a dead planet! For several hundred years, the human colony of Lorela was thought to have been wiped out but they survived deep underground, out of sight of those who would use them. The lucky ones made it to the mines, locked in away from the harmful radiation. The unfortunate ones wept, surviving as best they could. Over time, the humans that were left breathing in polluted fetid air began to mutate. As the generations passed, all they knew were howls in the dark and the taste of flesh, bitten from that of those who howled with them.
Memphis Grimm was the first to step out to view a tortured landscape; his pack hounded by those who would consume them. Pack Grimm raced across the barren landscape, in search of sanctuary, freedom from the pack lands and a place they could call their own. None could have known how far this journey would take them, not even those who watched from a distance—far across the galaxy, amused at what crawled out from the darkness.£11.99 -
Jimbo's Assumption
Homo sapiens: development is deviating from projections. With 10 billion Earth-years of galactic experience, the Intelligence, the ethereal presence led by the Energy Masters, discerns something special in this complex creature and its accelerating scientific capabilities.
Their sub-processor and Earth project manager will surely explain. After 100,000 years with his client, the Homo sapiens, can 221 offer enlightenment?
Jimbo, a hesitant hero, knew that Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital, was a great place to grow up and study science. Summer, 1996: pleasingly unexceptional, with good friends in a wonderful city. The recent creation of Dolly the Sheep gave him vacation work, cataloguing mathematical models. Happy days. Until his sleep is interrupted by the nebulous 221, obliging him to rescue the models from nocturnal thieves. A chase ensues, across and underneath the city, but armed gangsters are no match for Jimbo’s new night vision and his galactic minder, 221. The police are doubtful.
221 tries to account for his client’s extraordinary progress, while the Energy Masters struggle from suspicion through bemusement to inconclusiveness. Fortunately, Jimbo participates, while he sleeps.
A story of human development, described to our hero in 100 seconds. Meet an eclectic assortment of scientific wizards who created our modern world. Humour exists, galactically rare. 221 believes the human brain is the galaxy’s most complex machine, running on only 20 watts.
Set in beautiful Edinburgh and the wider Milky Way.
£12.99 -
Jack the Ripper?
Readers are transported to Victorian London and introduced to Inspector Doyle, a modern-day detective with eternal life, who discovers that he has been wrongly named as ‘Jack the Ripper’, the Victorian serial killer. Nobody wants that label at any time in history, so with the aid of time travel he returns to the year 1888 in an attempt to clear his name.
Another complication for Inspector Doyle is that his modern-day daughter, Flora, who he has left behind to travel back several centuries, is becoming increasingly suspicious of her father’s identity. This is after making her way into his Shrewsbury study, that she is forbidden to enter.
The only good thing about returning to 1888 is that Inspector Doyle is able to rekindle his relationship with daughter Alice and wife Eleanor, who he had to leave behind all those centuries ago. Alice can then only but marvel at her father’s abilities to answer a question that only he knows the answer to, because he has travelled into the future and back.
The story references many Victorian objects that have been meticulously researched and then used to tell a story that is only possible through time travel and a rather clever inventor who may or may not be still alive. Many elements of the original Jack the Ripper case are also detailed as are the horrors of Whitechapel.
Find out whether Inspector Doyle manages to clear his name by discovering who the real Jack the Ripper is, and expect a twist at the end that involves both daughters and a Victorian book that, unlike the rest of Inspector Doyle’s objects, is unable to exist in parallel between the two time zones.
£8.99 -
Ixora
June 2037: Singaporean immunology professor Warren Er is woken in the early morning to answer a question he had written five years ago. The classified protocol he had designed has been activated. It summons the world’s best scientists to respond to the possible discovery of an unknown, potentially dangerous organism foreign to science.
Flying to China’s Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre, Warren realizes the situation is anything but what he had planned for. He and his five colleagues are sealed into a secret underground facility, alongside a visiting US-Chinese bilateral delegation now detained in the name of national security.
In Beijing, China’s First Vice-Premier sees a chance to strengthen his position as the Party Congress looms; in the US, the newly appointed President’s Science and Technology Adviser finds herself a key part of an American response handicapped by geopolitical realities.
Facing unfamiliar circumstances rapidly evolving beyond their control, all those involved must protect their own interests and themselves…
£12.99 -
Hunted
Those that are dead are the lucky ones. Most of the Earth’s population has been wiped out. Those that were spared are doomed to go on living in an empty world full of memories and ghosts. Mark is one of those few, surviving in the forest on the edge of his hometown in crippling isolation. His existence is purposeless. He scavenges for what he can whilst doing everything to avoid the Hunters, deadly creatures that stalk through the ruins in search of prey. Then one day, Mark finds something on one of his journeys. Something he never imagined he could find. A child – completely helpless and destined to be the world’s next victim. Mark knows what he must do. He takes the child and raises him as his own. But in a world fraught with danger and with no hope of a future, he soon finds himself tortured by his decision. And it won’t be long before they face a new threat – one far more dangerous than Hunters – that will push that decision to its breaking point.
£9.99 -
HMS Rutland
A Royal Navy frigate, HMS Rutland, is conducting a scientific experiment when something goes terribly wrong, and they find themselves with no engines and confronted by a Royal Navy sloop from 1805.
Julia Mitchenson, the Captain of Rutland, and Charles Austen, of HMS Indian combine to destroy a French frigate and outwit the powerful Invisible squadron in a race to reverse the time slip. Julia and Charles are drawn to each other, as are Lt Benna Garret and Lt William Mends.
The story combines the sly humour of Patrick O’Brien and the social observation of Jane Austen in a gripping and well-researched story that has action, romance and more than a touch of science fiction.
£8.99 -
Ground
In an England shattered almost beyond repair by the Great Catastrophe and the war that followed, Mark Norman is brought up in one of a few fertile Grounds, Grounds surrounded by land that is, at best, liable to cause sterility and, at worst, to be lethal to all who venture into it. His doubts about the truth of what he is taught increase and when duty calls him to sterile service in the Domain, ruled by a sterile but near-immortal nobility, he flees to the Outland, the land where rebels have maintained a fragile truce with the Domain for more than 200 years. His flight is a catalyst, provoking violent reactions on both sides. In the chaos that follows, his recall of vital information acquired in his escape determines the future that is unfolding.
£13.99 -
Gravity Zero
By the close of our century, the Lagrange Archipelago is clinically free of mental illness. When three notable colonists succumb to madness and death, the established order is threatened. The International Space Agency sends Inspector Charles Franklin Price and Dr Sybil McCreery to determine the precise origin and meaning of these events. At every turn, they are hindered by the enigmatic leader of the Lagrange Platform, Ching-shan, and his Court. Why? They cannot fathom. Only when they explore the dark worlds of physics and psyche do they find the ultimate truth of the Lagrange system’s existence—where experiments into matter-antimatter conversion are not just the launching place for mankind into interstellar space, but the terminus for his terrifying encounter with something thoroughly alien to his spirit and species.
£8.99 -
Get Real
Justin lives in a future when Earth’s humanity has become largely desensitized to violence and regard for others. He is a Delivery Real superstar whose daily cargo is the soon-to-be exploited, and the already-voided synthetic life forms that look human but are not. He – like the world around him – views artificially created intelligent beings as either property or slaves designed to be used and used up by their human masters without remorse of conscience.
In Justin’s world, everything is up for grabs if you have what it takes, and if you are fit enough to take it. Such is the state of affairs on an increasingly sterile planet with increasingly sterile people who no longer know how to appreciate the gift of life. It isn’t until Justin is introduced to the wise stillness of silence under the tutelage of Mother Entity that he begins to discover what lies just beneath the barren violence of his home planet.
£6.99 -
Ever Young
Jack Branson is an aspiring journalist for a large publishing company. He is assigned to report on a government-supported medical scheme called Ever Young, a gene-editing procedure that promises to eliminate all genetic frailties and negative medical conditions. Those who commit to the scheme will be guaranteed good health until the age of 95, whereupon they would submit to the government’s terms of termination. Magnum, a world-famous German computer company, has taken control of the Ever Young scheme, and their deep pockets allow them control of the government.
But Jack discovers Magnum’s deeply concerning wartime history. The corruption and violence that ensue when these eugenicists are entrusted with data of a now intimately networked world threaten the entire global order. Governments stand and fall by their capricious nature. Who dares to confront the truth?
Although Ever Young is fictional it is loosely based on the true actions of a major multinational technology corporation who benefitted significantly from their involvement in the Holocaust.
£15.99 -
End Of Times
End of Times emanates from a voice from another time, in fact, the end of time. It tells an epic story over hundreds of years in classic science fiction fashion, which encompasses religious beliefs, potential dystopian futures, space, and time travel, and addresses eternal questions such as who we are, what is our purpose, what do we want, what is good and evil, is there a god and so on. It offers the reader a rollercoaster ride which expands to different time zones and multiverses, and it examines what reality actually is. Is there hope for humankind? Is there a connected plan to life, and if so, what is it? End of Times takes the reader on a compelling journey which begins with one single disembodied voice from the end of time. I listened to it, and this is its story.
£16.99