12 Novels by Bob Shaw
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Overview: Bob Shaw (1931 – 1996) was born in Northern Ireland in 1931. After working in structural engineering, industrial public relations and journalism he became a full time writer in 1975. Among his novels are Other Days, Other Eyes, The Ragged Astronauts, The Wooden Spaceships and The Fugitive Worlds. He died in 1996.
Genre: Fiction > Sci-Fi/Fantasy
The Two-timers (1968)
Defying time, Jack Breton crosses into a parallel world to regain Kate – the wife who, nine years earlier, was found raped and strangled in a lonely park. But, in the alternate time-stream Kate is married to his double, John. And for one husband to remain either Jack or John must die.
The Palace of Eternity (1969)
Shrouded by its shell of drifting lunar fragments, the planet Mnemosyne is a refuge for creative artists and poets, a place isolated from the desperate, losing struggle of the humans against the Syccans. But then COMsac, theFederation’s High Command, come to Mnemosyne, and suddenly the planet is more a military colony than a place for artists. For Mack Taverner, the dilemma is stark: either go along with the brutal military visitation or join the hopeless resitance and become a ‘traitor’. His choice has awesome and extraordinary consequenses . . .
Shadow of Heaven (1970)
Heaven is a giant anti-gravity floating disc. Government regulations make it almost impossible for humans on an overcrowded Earth to get there, but Vic Sterling manages it.
Ground Zero Man (1971) ( see also The Peace Machine)
First published in 1971 as Ground Zero Man, this novel was revised by the author and published in 1985 as The Peace Machine . It is 1988, and an obscure scientist, Lucas Hutchman, has made a momentous discovery. He can build a neutron resonator: a device which, once triggered, will detonate every nuclear warhead in the planet. In a future on the brink of nuclear suicide (Damascus has just been wiped out by a terrorist nuclear bomb), the temptation is irresistible to use his invention as a gun held against the heads of the world’s leaders. Lucas constructs the machine, and then sends plans to prominent scientists and politicians everywhere, giving a deadline on which he will activate it. They will be forced to dismantle their weapons, and the world will breathe again. Very quickly, Lucas discovers that he has pitched himself into a world with which he is ill-equipped to cope: the world of secret agents, espionage, kidnapping and murder. His problem is to stay under cover and survive long enough to implement his plan.
A Wreath of Stars (1976)
Ironically, for Gilbert Snook who considered himself the human equivalent of a neutrino, a particle able to travel through the Earth without disturbing any other particle it all started with the panic that followed the sighting of the anti neutrino planet as it approached Earth. Earth was unaffected but Snook ended up in a small African Republic teaching English to diamond miners. Then the miners started seeing ghosts and Snook found himself at the centre of a bizarre and far reaching scientific discovery and in the middle of some very dirty political infighting.
Medusa’s Children (1977)
The Clan live in a strange undersea world, amid a cluster of nets and metal objects anchored to the root system of a giant plant. This is the Home and outside it lie the hazards of the deep – especially the voracious and many tentacled Horra. Their dead are cast out to sink slowly into the depths where the mysterious deity Ka is waiting. Now their environment is slowly changing. A new current is growing daily stronger and flowing downwards, drawing everything down towards the realm of Ka.
Ship of Strangers (1978)
Dave Surgenor works as one of twelve crewmen on board a survey ship that visits and maps planets in an ever expanding bubble from Earth. The book is a series of short stories about their more interesting forays. 1) They meet a "Gray Man" that is left over from a civilization 7000 years ago and can change shape at will in its efforts to take over the space ship. The battle is won when the Gray Man does not realize, until it’s too late, that Captain Aesop is a computer and thus not subject to mind control. 2) Some of the ship’s crew try out Trance-Port tapes that give you a dream girlfriend that users of the tapes believe are real. The end results are unsettling when two crewmembers end up with the same girl. 3) The crew has a run-in with automated homing torpedoes from a centuries ago civilization. The theme of this story is chances and odds as they need to hit the exact same torpedo twice out of a swarm of 362 and they have 26 shots left. 4) They run into a civilization that travels in time as casually as we do in three-dimensionalspace. A military ship comes along and believes they can kidnap one of the time travelers but everyone gets hit by a "time bomb" and dropped millions of years into the past along with a portal that will allow two people to go back to normal time. Surgenor ends up being one of the two. 5) In the last story they run into a "Dwindlestar" where they end up shrinking into nothingness. But, it turns out they are now larger than the universe and by adjusting the ship’s center of gravity they are able to steer themselves back into their spot in the normal universe and Surgenor then retires after 20 years in the Cartographical Service.
Vertigo (1978) aka Terminal Velocity
The invention of a cheap and easy to use anti-gravity harness revolutionises society. Humanity takes to the skies in its millions, with huge resultant problems for governments and police. Virtually all aircraft are grounded, because of the risk of collision with a stray flyer. Airborne delinquents and criminals are practically impossible to control and can be lethal. Robert Hasson is a good policeman. But a near-fatal airborne confrontation with a psychopath has left him shattered, both physically and mentally. Sent to Canada to recuperate (and to escape the attentions of a local businessman whose son he has put away), Hasson is a broken man, unable to face human company, haunted by nightmares and certain that he will never again put on an anti-gravity harness. But his Canadian host, police chief Al Werry, has a major problem on his hands in the shape of a towering unfinished hotel, the Chinook, whose upper levels are inaccessible from the ground, and are used as an illegal meeting place by local gangs of flyers. Worse, the hotel’s owner, Buck Morlacher, intends to take the law into his own hands to deal with them. The violence that has been simmering in the town threatens to erupt and Werry seems powerless to stop it. Unwillingly, Hasson finds himself drawn into the conflict and forced to face his own problems. "Vertigo" is vintage Bob Shaw, fast-moving, intelligent and immensely readable.
"Terminal Velocity" (1991) contains the same story as "Vertigo" but also includes, as a prologue, an 11-page short story by Bob Shaw that was first published as "Dark Icarus" in Science Fiction Monthly vol. 1, No. 4 (1974), then retitled as "A Little Night Flying" for "If – Worlds of Science Fiction" (August 1974), and also included in "Cosmic Kaleidoscope" (1976).
Dagger of the Mind (1980)
John Redpath is a member of a research project investigating telepathy at the Jeavons Institute in Calbridge. The work is uneventful – until one morning he looks through the peephole of his front door and sees a hideous apparition. Are the drugs that he is taking having side effects? Has his subconscious been playing tricks on him? Or is it real?
The Ceres Solution (1981)
This is the gripping story of the collision between two vastly different human civilisations. One is Earth in the early 21st century, rushing toward self-inflicted nuclear doom. The other is the distant world of Mollan, whose inhabitants have achieved great longevity and the power to transport themselves instantly from star to star.
Bob Shaw’s novel unfolds a tale which spans thousands of years and the reaches of interstellar space. On Earth’s side, there is Denny Hargate, whose indomitable courage drives him to alter the course of history. On their side is the Gretana ty Iltha, working on Earth as a secret observer, who dreams of returning to the delights of her world’s high society, but who gets caught up in a cosmic train of events leading to an explosive climax.
Fire Pattern (1984)
When Ray Jerome, a crotchety journalist on the Whiteford Examiner, is asked to investigate a case of spontaneous human combustion, his first reaction is to ridicule the idea – but he is not able to back out of doing the story. To his own surprise, he becomes fascinated by the phenomenon of people who burn up for no obvious reason. It is a fascination that will make 1986 the most unbelievable year of his life.
The Peace Machine (1985)
First published in 1971 as Ground Zero Man, this novel was revised by the author and published in 1985 as The Peace Machine.
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