Brian Stableford

The Shoggoths attack: "They had been so horrible before that I dare not say that they were any MORE horrible when they came again.... They were still unspeakable, still unthinkable--but whether I could speak or think of them or not, they were HERE." Auguste Dupin is one of the few persons who can identify the rare Cthulhu Encryption etched in the flesh of a dying woman. The Comte de Saint-Germain owns a companion cryptogram that he believes is the key to finding a fabulous treasure buried by the pirate Levasseur. Harassed by Shoggoths and tracked by Saint-Germain, Dupin must find the key to the complex puzzle. Can the might of Cthulhu be held at bay? And even if he finds an answer, can he and his friends escape with their lives? A riveting horror novel.

"Cthulhu has many instruments, but all of them are possessed of free will, and magnetic power can only operate mysteriously, even on the most primitive and stubborn brains." Written to complete and conclude a series of metaphysical fantasies featuring Auguste Dupin, a character invented by Edgar Poe, which involve him with characters and entities invented by H. P. Lovecraft, as well as actual historical figures and occasional devices appropriated from other works of weird fiction, The Cthulhu Palimpsest, A Romance of Termination is a must-have, both for fans of the series and for fans of Brian Stableford, who produced this long-projected final volume with the pen of a master story-teller.

The mad scientist is a stereotypical, archetypal scientist who is often a clich or commonplace in popular fiction. He can be absent-minded and harmless, or wicked and dangerous. French science fiction, in particular, features a remarkable number of novels and stories on this theme, enough to justify the three volumes that we intend to devote to this topic. In this thematic collection we have gathered six remarkable stories by Andr Caroff, Georges Espitallier, Henri Falk, Arnould Galopin, Gustave Le Rouge and Jules Verne, published between 1874 and 1964, that encapsulate the basic archetypes of the mad scientist: he is obsessed with his research; he develops innovative technologies at the cutting edge of his era's knowledge, often out of sheer daring; he appears to be lacking in common sense; he likes to play God without realizing the consequences of his actions. Each of the authors featured in this volume were privileged witnesses to prodigious scientific advances that were at the root of profound social transformations. The fears aroused by some of these, particularly in biology and chemistry, combined with the stubborn positivism of seeing science as the ultimate solution to all ills, crystallized into the figure of the mad scientist. The rich tradition of the French roman scientifique provides a striking illustration of the archetype inspired by the myths of Prometheus and Faust. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction by J.-M. & Randy LofficierJules Verne: Dr. Ox's Experiment Georges Espitallier: The Nickel Man Arnould Galopin: The Man With the Blue Face Gustave Le Rouge: The Sculptor of Human Flesh Henri Falk: The Master Of The Three States Andr Caroff: The Sinister Mme Atomos

Tom Andersley returns to his family estate in Yorkshire after serving in France throughout the Great War of 1914-18, but like many of his fellow survivors he finds the estate very different and is not the same man who departed: a victim of "shell shock." Unable to reconnect with his wife and daughter, who have endured traumatic experiences of their own, he retreats obsessively into his old hobby, entrenching himself in his greenhouses in order to carry out meticulous experiments in the cross-breeding of fruit trees. He is interrupted in his existential paralysis by the mysterious arrival of an old friend from Eton, Lawrence Oates, whom everyone believes to be dead, having walked out of Robert Scott's tent in an Antarctic blizzard in 1912 in order not to slow down his companions in their doomed attempt to reach safety. Oates tells Tom that he was picked up and preserved by mysterious alien entities that have been entrenched in the Antarctic ice for millions of years, engaged in a long war fought with biological weaponry, against equally-mysterious adversaries, unknown to humankind, recent arrivals of their battlefield. Having learned about Tom's research from Oates, the aliens have sent the latter back to his homeland in the hope that Tom's expertise might enable him to bring a number of "seeds" to maturity, apparently as a clandestine move in their long-stalemated war. But what will the consequences be, for Tom, his family and humankind, of the failure or success of the mission into which he has been conscripted?

Charles Barbara (1817-1866), though principally remembered today for being "a friend of Baudelaire," was, arguably, one of the more influential writers of his time, being one of the earliest authors of science fiction, Naturalism, and the roman policier. The present volume, originally published as Histoires mouvantes in 1856, and here offered in English for the first time in a translation by Brian Stableford, brings together nine of the author's highly innovative tales. Marked by their unusual narrative points, the work presented here, both strange and subtle, is that of a fine writer, as heroic in his ambitions as he was in his tribulations, and he left behind some first-rate works, including that assembled in this major collections.

In this breathless sequel to Revelations of Time and Space, Brian Stableford guides us through the hours aboard the spaceship Minerva during which psychic contact with the Saturnian intelligences now known as "the Bells" is renewed. In the claustrophobic, would-be Utopia of the small spaceship, with the fate of the disaster-stricken human race at stake, the minutes and hours are as expansive as those during experimental surgery, and that's without the subtle manipulations of time that Denise Corcoran senses are taking place, with the spaceship under the Bells' influence. Will Zephaniah Corcoran's second contact with the Bells answer the questions raised by the first contact? Can Captain Kemmering keep the pressure cooker of the Saturn-orbiting spaceship from exploding? Can the crew of the Minerva, and the human race who are watching from Earth, trust these unearthly intelligences? After the Revelation, a brilliant novel by one of science fiction's great veterans, takes us into the real-time suspense of the characters facing these questions.

The Postmortal Reservation might not be Heaven exactly, but for Peterkin the piano player it's good enough. His afterlife is unclouded by the anxieties of mortality. After all, he's a skeleton. He only has to look in the mirror to see what squishy folk take for the image of death itself. True to their permanent smile, skellies are a happy-go-lucky species. There is nothing they love more than dancing, and cutting a rug with Melissa at the Palais de Danse Macabre, Peterkin thinks he might be at the start of something beautiful. It's true he's not in the best of neighbourhoods, but things are looking up, until . . . the incident with the zombies at the train track and the appearance of a suspicious-looking discoloration spreading from the carpal area of his left arm. Soon he has to place himself in the hands, both fleshy and spectral, of experts who might not have his best interests at heart and, humble piano player though he is, play his own part in the fate of the Ghetto itself. Set in a future world where ghosts, vampires, werewolves and zombies are finally recognised as real, Meat on the Bone is a unique excursion into modes of possible human existence beyond our familiar fleshy mortality. Part grinning graveyard caper, part science fiction, part oddball existentialism, this is a novel in which we learn that one man's death is another man's dance hall.

Zephaniah Corcoran has just returned to Earth after a seven-year jaunt to Jupiter where his special--some would say dubious--talents were put to the test in attempted communication with the Jovian cloud-whales. With no time to adjust to life on an Earth half alarmed and half fatalistic at the prospect of final catastrophe, he is headhunted for a reprise of his old job: being projected by the brilliant but asocial Walter Halleck's Coincidence-driven Sling into the far future to make empathic contact with the various successors to the human race. In the meantime, he is discovering a close and mysterious bond with Denise, a doctor of evolutionary biology and the younger sister he has hardly known, who has been noticed by the same big players who have noticed Zeph. But nothing goes quite according to plan, and as the fate of humanity dangles on a thread grown very frayed, Zeph's empathic skills are expanded in unexpected ways, not so much by coincidence, as by Coincidence, bringing Zeph and those around him into contact with what are perhaps only the beginning of ongoing revelations of time and space whose grandeur match the universe that Zeph and his colleagues must now begin to explore.