Showing results by author "Gordon R. Dickson" in All Categories

Life on Earth is good. Disease is checked, hunger ended, and war and suffering abolished, with liberty and justice and a high standard of living for all. But Paul Formain, a strangely gifted young engineer, doesn't believe a word of it. So he comes to Walter Blunt's Chantry Guild, whose motto is "Destruct!" and whose stated goal is the end of civilization. There are Alternate Laws at work in the world, says the Chantry Guild; Walter Blunt has pledged his life to them, and to the principle of destruction as a positive force.

The Interbeing League had been formed to make contact with new intelligent races in the galaxy and offer them membership. But when the League encountered the Hokas, furry creatures strongly resembling the teddy bears of Earth, the league's agent, Alexander Jones, could have been excused for wishing he had a simpler assignment than making sense out of the Hokas - such as singlehandedly stopping an interstellar war.

It's obvious that Cletus Graeme - limping, mild-mannered scholarly - doesn't belong on a battle field, but instead at a desk working on his fourth book on battle strategy and tactics. But Bakhalla has more battlefields than libraries, and Graeme sees his small force of Dorsai - soldiers of fortune - as the perfect opportunity to test his theories. But if his theories or his belief in the Dorsai lead him astray, he's a dead man.

Men of War on the Dorsai worlds, men of Faith on the Friendly Worlds of Harmony and Association, men of Science, the Exotics of Kultis and Mara, and the Splinter cultures which had produced even stranger new talents. Those who knew said it was the Dorsai who supplied soldiers to the sixteen worlds. The Friendlies supplied cannon fodder, common soldiers who could be relied on to obey orders at all times. But even cannon fodder can sometimes produce genius.

Through no fault of his own, the once human Jim Eckert had become a dragon. Unfortunately, his beloved Angie had remained human. But in this magical land anything could happen. To make matter worse, Angie had been taken prisoner by an evil dragon and was held captive in the impenetrable Loathly Tower. So in this land where humans were edible and beasts were magical—where spells worked and logic didn't—Jim Eckert had a big, strange problem.

In The Final Encyclopedia the human race is split into three Splinter cultures: the Friendlies, fanatic in their faith; the truth-seeking Exotics; and the warrior Dorsai. But now humanity is threatened by the power-hungry Others, whose triumph would end all human progress. Hal Mayne is an orphan who was raised by three tutors: an Exotic, a Friendly, and a Dorsai. He is the only human capable of uniting humanity against the Others. But only if he is willing to accept his terrifying destiny... as savior of mankind.

Throughout the Fourteen Worlds of humanity, no race is as feared and respected as the Dorsai. The ultimate warriors, they are known for their deadly rages, unbreakable honor, and fierce independence. No man rules the Dorsai, but their mastery of the art of war has made them the most valuable mercenaries in the known universe. Donal Graeme is Dorsai, taller and harder than any ordinary man. But he is different as well, with talents that maze even his fellow Dorsai. And once he ventures out into the stars, the future will never be the same....

The Dragon Knight is the second book of Gordon R. Dickson's Dragon Knight series. The novel begins five months after the battle at Loathly Tower which took place in The Dragon and the George.

A lone ship piloted by Dorsai Amanda Morgan runs the blockade of the Earth. She has come to rouse Hal Mayne from his research to go to Kultis, where the secretive Chantry Guild holds mastery over the Alternate Forces. The answers they find there may decide humanity's most critical moment.

Coming soon...

Donal Graeme was a Dorsai, a mercenary soldier, and also a mutant gifted with insight into the path forward for the human race. Through his gifts, Donal would come to bend time and live three lifetimes - and, in the process, run into problems he had not expected: first, his own flaws, and second, the existence of another mutant, Bleys Ahrens. Bleys is a man with a clear vision of the struggle in which he's involved - but an increasingly deficient sense of human values.

Lost The New Dorsai Companion contains the Hugo Award winning novella, Lost Dorsai, and Dickson's classic short story Warrior. Plus, the New Dorsai Companion contains, for the first time ever, an all new Concordance of the Childe Cycle—a roadmap of Dickson's massive and brilliant creation.

The human race had settled more than a hundred worlds before it met the Emerging Planets Fairness Court - six alien species who sit in judgment on all galactic newcomers. Soon the human fleets - even the troubleshooting Harriers - find themselves under the eyes of stern overseers known as the Mromrosii.

X Minus One premiered in April 1955 on NBC and ran until January 1958. Like its predecessor series, Dimension X, X Minus One featured stories by the greatest names in modern science fiction: Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Clifford Simak, Robert Bloch, and many more.

Earth is but a memory...the real action these days is in The Magnicate, a league of all the human worlds in the galaxy. At the center of The Magnicate is the Hub, a huge artificial world from which control of Human Space flows. The Hub governmet is in the main, an instrument for progress and social good, but even so control sometimes requires force.. enter the Harriers.

In The Dragon on the Border, Sir James, the Dragon Knight, faces his most terrifying challenge—the Hollow Men, spirits of the dead in empty suits of armor. Their weapons are all too real, and a slain Hollow Man can be resurrected within two days. As long as one of their unholy number endures, no Hollow Man can ever truly die. It's a battle that could test any dragon. Not to mention a knight. Or an American. Or all three in one!

By the workings of chance Bleys Ahrens was born the genetic equal of Hal Mayne, the hero of The Final Encyclopedia, but he was destined by nurture to a far different fate. Raised alone by his unhappy Exotic mother, Bleys was an outcast from every society until his half-brother Dahno claimed him. Disciplined by Friendlies, schooled by Exotics, Dahno was beginning to build an interplanetary network of half-breeds, who called themselves "Others.

Bleys Ahrens is now a political power on the planet Association, home of the Friendlies. His people—his Others, not Dorsai or Friendly or Exotic, but hybrids—are in place on all the new worlds, and are ready to take his message to the greater human public. But within his inner circle is Henry McLean, Soldier of God, and a True Faith-Holder. Henry fears for the soul of his nephew Bleys, and while he guards, he also watches, and judges.

It seemed like a good idea at the time to rescue the tribe of Amuk from their primitive ways and move them into modern society. Pibo, their a-lot-smarter-then-he-looked leader, however, had other ideas. Pibo liked his job too much to allow Scout Lieutenant Holroyd Aldo to bring in the mother ship and its extensive reorientation of his people.