Only as interstellar mercenaries can humans go to the stars; the aliens who already dominate the galaxy allow no other recourse. But when Swordsman Third Class Kana Karr and his comrades-in-arms are betrayed and abandoned on a hostile world by their alien masters, the warriors from Earth begin a desperate but glorious march across a planet whose every sword is against them. Their actions may doom humanity's future...or lead the way to an empire of their own!

The birth of a hero is never easy. Clumsy as an elephant in high heels, he is nothing like his legendary scout father. But inside that bull-moose-of-a-body lies the heart of a hero whose moment has arrived! Next, a boy survives alien invasion - but must learn to think and act like his reptilian enemy to exact retribution for slaughter. These and two other tales of coming-of-age-through-peril from the writer who invented the genre, Andre Norton.

Centuries after the civilized world destroyed itself in a dimly-remembered final war, a few rebels courageously searched through the shattered cities-trying to regain old knowledge.

It was the time of the Moon of the Three Rings when the Free Trader ship Lydis landed on the planet Yiktor and junior crew member Krip Vorlund visited a beast show. He was strangely attracted to the owner of the show animals, a delicate and mysterious woman named Maelen. Soon Krip was caught in a vicious struggle by powerful opponents over the fate of Yiktor - and he learned the nature of Maelen's sorcery when he found his mind trapped in the body of a wolf-like creature.

Sea Siege: The nuclear war had come at last, and the research team on an island in the West Indies thought they had been lucky to survive. But survival was going to require more than luck, when they found themselves under attack by sea creatures out of darkest legend. Star Gate: Long ago, the Star Lords had come from a dying Earth to Gorth, where they helped the inhabitants build a civilization. Now some of the Lords have resumed wandering among the stars, but others have decided to travel through an interdimensional gate to another Gorth in a parallel universe.

Two Andre Norton Forerunner novels, Forerunner and Forerunner: The Second Venture, featuring young Forerunner/human hybrid Simsa, collected for the first time in one volume.

Set on a planet in a parallel universe where magic is a reality, these three high fantasy novels from the Witch World series transport you to the eastern continent of Estcarp, illustrating why prolific author Andre Norton was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Contains Trey of Swords, Ware Hawk, and The Gate of the Cat.

This volume contains two novels. Perilous Dreams: Tamisen the Dreamer is trained to walk through her dreams to other places, other worlds. But when she is asked by the crippled star traveler Lord Starrex to take him into a dream world where he can regain his legs and his life, something goes terribly wrong. Knave of Dreams: For Ramsay Kimble, sleep means nightmares, and he avoids it whenever possible. But now a car accident has catapulted him into the very world he most dreads: the horror world of his own dreams.

The planet Korwar was a glittering jewel of a world, inhabited by the galaxy's wealthiest, visited by the upper classes of other worlds in search of diversion. The jewel had a flaw: the Dipple, its name coming from a contraction of "displaced person", where the misfits, the hopeless, the penniless eke out a wretched existence on the dole. Two young men hoped to escape from the Dipple.

In a future where humanity has scattered itself across the stars and Earth itself is now a dimly remembered place of legend, two worlds of near-supernatural strangeness challenge two naive but courageous heroes.

An orphan, Blake Walker has never really known who he was, and his strange flashes of intuition have always set him apart from those who raised him and everyone else he has known. Acting on one of those flashes, he prevented a murder. But neither the assailant nor his intended victim were from the world Walker had always known - he had stumbled onto the greatest secret of the ages. Our Earth is only one of an infinite number of Earths, each with a slightly different history from the others, each separated from the others in a crosstime dimension.

Two masters of epic fantasy have combined in this brilliant collaboration to create a rousing tale. This is the story of Shana, a half-breed born of the forbidden union of an Elvenlord father with a human mother. Her exiled mother dead, Shana was rescued and raised by dragons, a proud, ancient race who existed unbeknownst to elven or human kind. From birth, Shana was the embodiment of the Prophecy that the all-powerful Elvenlords feared. Her destiny is the enthralling adventure of a lifetime.

Impoverished and without hope, Naill Renfro sells himself into indentured servitude and is transported across the galaxy to the far-off jungle world of Janus. Naill hopes to work off his debt and begin his life again. But the harsh masters of Janus are destroying the priceless treasures of the planet's ancient culture - and when Naill, entranced by the beauty of an alien artifact, is caught trying to hide it, he is exiled and left to die in the jungle. But Naill inexplicably begins to remember another life, in another time - a time when he was not human, but something else

In a sweeping generational saga, the story of Warlock is told by three humans: Shann Lontee was the lowest-ranking member of an exploration team sent to the newly discovered planet Warlock. When the insectile Throgs attacked the base, only he and two trained wolverines escaped. Charis Nordholm was sold into slavery by the outlaw colony on the planet Demeter. The trader, Jogon, who holds her contract, was on his way to Warlock to trade with the Wyvern. But the alien witches had ominous plans of their own....

Left homeless by the war that reduced Terra to a radioactive cinder, Hosteen Storm - Navaho commando and master of beasts - is drawn to the planet Arzor, to kill a man he has never met. On that dangerous frontier world, aliens and human colonists share the land in an uneasy truce. But something is upsetting the balance, and Storm is caught in the middle. He had thought the war was over - but was it?

Moth was a beautiful planet, the only one with wings - two great golden clouds suspended in space around it. Here was a wide-open world for any venture a man might scheme. The planet attracted unwary travelers, hardened space-sailors, and merchant buccaneers - a teeming, constantly shifting horde that provided a comfortable income for certain quick-witted fellows like Flinx and his pet flying snake Pip.

It is the second stage of human colonization - the first age, humanity's initial attempt to people the stars, ended in disaster when it was discovered that Earth's original superluminal drive did permanent genetic damage to all who used it - mutating Earth's far-flung colonists in mind and body. Now, one of Earth's first colonies has given humanity back the stars, but at a high price - a monopoly over all human commerce.

Welcome to Ringworld, an intermediate step between Dyson Spheres and planets. The gravitational force created by a rotation on its axis of 770 miles per second means no need for a roof. Walls 1,000 miles high at each rim will let in the sun and prevent much air from escaping. Larry Niven's novel, Ringworld, is the winner of the 1970 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the 1970 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the 1972 Ditmars, an Australian award for Best International Science Fiction.

Beyond the Aquila Rift: It's shorthand for the trip no one ever hopes to make by accident. The one that will screw up the rest of your life, the one that creates the ghosts you see haunting the shadows of company bars across the whole Bubble. Men and women ripped out of time, cut adrift from families and lovers by an accident of an alien technology we use but rarely comprehend.

A wicked snowstorm had blown in from the north and the roads were a mess. Recently split from his one-time girlfriend, there was now nothing holding Cameron Decker here in the little backwater mountain town of Larksburg Stand. Time to get back to college, back to Stanford. Seeing a guy knee-deep in slush at the side of the road, he pulled to the curb and waved him over. The guy smacked his head getting in - knocked his watch cap askew. Only then did Cameron notice - noticed that the individual couldn't possibly be human. Cameron decided to help his stranded passenger - a decision he'd soon come to regret. Along with his rust-bucket of a pickup truck, he was soon heading deep into space aboard an interstellar spacecraft. After the vessel crash-landed onto an alien world, he would now have to contend with a murderous droid and a slew of strange alien life forms.

The Peacemaker-enforced ceasefire brought an end to the hostilities, but not a resolution, and now it’s up to the Four Horsemen to forge a lasting peace. Alexis Cromwell, despite her pregnancy, heads off to Capital with Nigel Shirazi to obtain justice from the enigmatic Mercenary Guild Council, but when they arrive, they’re quickly embroiled in galactic politics, and find out the situation is far, far worse than they could possibly have imagined.

For Meredith Gale, ending her life seems like her only choice, and that choice is the reason she’s dangling by her fingertips from a bridge high above the freezing water of the San Francisco Bay. But someone or some thing has other plans for Meredith, and as her fingers slip from the cold steel of the bridge, a disembodied voice asks her a simple question: “Candidate 13: Do you wish to be saved?” Realizing her mistake too late, Meredith screams “Yes!” and instantly finds herself transported to a mysterious island, alongside hundreds of other Candidates like her.

Conquered by the Jao twenty years ago, the Earth is shackled under alien tyranny - and threatened by the even more dangerous Ekhat, one of whose genocidal extermination fleets is coming to the solar system. The only chance for human survival is in the hands of an unusual pair of allies: a young Jao prince, newly arrived to Terra to assume his duties, and a young human woman brought up amongst the Jao occupiers. But, as their tentative alliance takes shape, they are under pressure from all sides.

They are the last survivors of their race, beings who live on and communicate through energy, who are capable of assuming the shape of any other species. When their youngest member is assigned to a world considered safe to explore, she is captured by the natives. To escape, she must violate the most important rule of her kind, and reveal the existence of her species to a fellow prisoner - a human being. Now her race is in danger of extinction, for even if the human does not betray her, the Enemy who has long searched for her people may finally discover their location.

His name was Biron Farrill and he was a student at the University of Earth. A native of one of the helpless Nebular Kingdoms, he saw his home world conquered and controlled by the planet Tyrann - a ruthless, barbaric Empire that was building a dynasty of cruelty and domination among the stars. Farrill’s own father had been executed for trying to resist the Tyrann dictatorship and now someone was trying to kill Biron. But why? His only hope for survival lay in fleeing Earth and joining the rebellion that was rumored to be forming somewhere in the Kingdoms.

In this story, an alien race known as the "Throgs" attacks a Terran survey camp without warning. "Eye-searing lances of energy lashed back and forth across the base with methodical accuracy, and a single cowering witness, flattened on a ledge in the heights above, knew that when the last of those yellow-red bolts fell, nothing human would be left alive down there."

Critically acclaimed author Alastair Reynolds holds a well-deserved place “among the leaders of the hard-science space opera renaissance." ( Publishers Weekly). In Blue Remembered Earth, Geoffrey Akinya wants nothing more than to study the elephants of the Amboseli basin. But when his space-explorer grandmother dies, secrets come to light and Geoffrey is dispatched to the Moon to protect the family name - and prevent an impending catastrophe.

An epic clash between the forces of light and dark, between the Galactic Republic and the Separatists, between brave heroes and brilliant villains, the fate of the galaxy is at stake in the Emmy Award-winning animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars. In this exciting anthology, 11 authors who are also fans of the series bring stories from their favorite show to life. Gathered here are memorable moments and stunning adventures, from attempted assassinations to stolen bounties, from lessons learned to loves lost.

Cade is settling into a new boarding school, contemplating his future, when he finds himself transported to another realm. He soon discovers their new world is populated with lost remnants from the past: prehistoric creatures, ancient relics, and, stranger still - people. Overwhelmed by his new surroundings, Cade has little time to adjust, for soon he and his fellow classmates are forced to become contenders in a brutal game, controlled by mysterious overlords.

Earth is a dying planet. To survive, humanity founds the Circuit, a string of colonies across the solar system, dedicated to mining resources vital to preserving what remains of mankind. Here there are no heroes or villains, only those willing to do what's necessary to survive. The New Earth Tribunal, a powerful religious faction, has risen to rule the Circuit. They believe a Spirit within the Earth will one day appear and welcome humanity back home.

The Stars Are Ours: Dard Nordis is a hunted man. His brother was murdered for covert activities as a scientist in a world in which scientists and engineers are blamed for the global war that smashed civilization. Star Born: Centuries after the desperate flight from Earth, Pax has been overthrown and humanity again reaches for the stars. Rof Kurbi's spaceship reaches the planet Astra, but he and the crew do not know that the planet already has a colony established centuries ago.

The planet Korwar was a glittering jewel of a world, inhabited by the galaxy's wealthiest, visited by the upper classes of other worlds in search of diversion. The jewel had a flaw: the Dipple, its name coming from a contraction of "displaced person", where the misfits, the hopeless, the penniless eke out a wretched existence on the dole. Two young men hoped to escape from the Dipple.

Only as interstellar mercenaries can humans go to the stars; the aliens who already dominate the galaxy allow no other recourse. But when Swordsman Third Class Kana Karr and his comrades-in-arms are betrayed and abandoned on a hostile world by their alien masters, the warriors from Earth begin a desperate but glorious march across a planet whose every sword is against them. Their actions may doom humanity's future...or lead the way to an empire of their own!

It was the time of the Moon of the Three Rings when the Free Trader ship Lydis landed on the planet Yiktor and junior crew member Krip Vorlund visited a beast show. He was strangely attracted to the owner of the show animals, a delicate and mysterious woman named Maelen. Soon Krip was caught in a vicious struggle by powerful opponents over the fate of Yiktor - and he learned the nature of Maelen's sorcery when he found his mind trapped in the body of a wolf-like creature.

In a sweeping generational saga, the story of Warlock is told by three humans: Shann Lontee was the lowest-ranking member of an exploration team sent to the newly discovered planet Warlock. When the insectile Throgs attacked the base, only he and two trained wolverines escaped. Charis Nordholm was sold into slavery by the outlaw colony on the planet Demeter. The trader, Jogon, who holds her contract, was on his way to Warlock to trade with the Wyvern. But the alien witches had ominous plans of their own....

Sea Siege: The nuclear war had come at last, and the research team on an island in the West Indies thought they had been lucky to survive. But survival was going to require more than luck, when they found themselves under attack by sea creatures out of darkest legend. Star Gate: Long ago, the Star Lords had come from a dying Earth to Gorth, where they helped the inhabitants build a civilization. Now some of the Lords have resumed wandering among the stars, but others have decided to travel through an interdimensional gate to another Gorth in a parallel universe.

The young man in question, Ross Murdock, is about to embark upon the adventure of his life. In order to avoid prosecution, he reluctantly joins Operation Retrograde, whose members are exploring various time periods. Their goal? To find out where – and when – the ‘Reds’ are obtaining certain scientific breakthroughs, in order to maintain the balance of global power. An outsider in his own time, Ross becomes an outsider in other times as well, and faces one challenge after another.

This volume contains two novels. Perilous Dreams: Tamisen the Dreamer is trained to walk through her dreams to other places, other worlds. But when she is asked by the crippled star traveler Lord Starrex to take him into a dream world where he can regain his legs and his life, something goes terribly wrong. Knave of Dreams: For Ramsay Kimble, sleep means nightmares, and he avoids it whenever possible. But now a car accident has catapulted him into the very world he most dreads: the horror world of his own dreams.

Left homeless by the war that reduced Terra to a radioactive cinder, Hosteen Storm - Navaho commando and master of beasts - is drawn to the planet Arzor, to kill a man he has never met. On that dangerous frontier world, aliens and human colonists share the land in an uneasy truce. But something is upsetting the balance, and Storm is caught in the middle. He had thought the war was over - but was it?

In a future where humanity has scattered itself across the stars and Earth itself is now a dimly remembered place of legend, two worlds of near-supernatural strangeness challenge two naive but courageous heroes.