In a galactic culture that extends from quasi-utopian worlds, like New Alexandria, to vermin-infested slums, like Old Earth, starship pilots have become the great romantic heroes of the day. When Star-Pilot Grainger is rescued from a shipwreck, he finds himself pressed into reluctant service to...

Having finally escaped from his contract with Titus Charlot, Grainger finds that freedom is not as easy or rewarding as he'd hoped. The Caradoc Company is anxious to take him back into its employ in order to pick his brains-by any means necessary-to extract everything that he knows about his...

The atmosphere of Mormyr is so dense and turbulent that the surface is unreachable by any conventional means - which apparently made it the ideal place for the enigmatic Gallacellans to abandon a spaceship in the distant past. Now they want it back, and have approached Titus Charlot to enlist...

The Florians is the first in an outstanding six-book series known as The Daedelus Mission, which ranks among the best of Stableford's works. Like the original Star Trek series, the Daedalus is on a multi-year mission to visit remote planets and check on previous colonization attempts. But the...

Before the hyper-space vessels could go from planet to planet, stations had to be set up. And that meant manned spaceships cut off from Earth for decades. The explorer vessel Ariadne had gone toward galactic center and was considered lost - until its call came in appealing for a xenobiologist...

The planet called Dendra seemed too good to be true: one vast forest world, marvelous climate, few dangerous beasts, a balanced hospitable ecology -- all should have speed out a good place for a human colony. But the original survey team had registered doubts, listed it as borderline without...

Peter Bell the Third, accidentally named from the title of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, is called upon to renew his old friendship with Rowland Usher, who was deliberately named after the protagonist of a story by Edgar Allan Poe. In the new House of Usher that Rowland is building in the...

"They had been so horrible before that I dare not say that they were any more horrible when they came again, but their presence was certainly more visible and more tangible, if no less easily describable. They were still unspeakable, still unthinkable - but whether I could speak or think of them...