GODENGINE

AN ORIGINAL DOCTOR WHO NOVEL

'We're on Mars, we're surrounded by Ice Warriors, and the TARDIS has been destroyed.  Business as usual, I suppose.'

Stranded on Mars, the Doctor and Roz team up with a group of colonists on a journey to find much needed supplies at the North Pole.  But when their expedition is joined by a party of Ice Warrior pilgrims, tensions are stretched to breaking point.  Meanwhile Chris finds himself on Pluto's moon, trapped with a group of desperate scientists in a deadly race against time.

The year is 2157: the Earth has been invaded, and forces are at work on Mars to ensure that the mysterious invaders are successful.  Unless the Doctor can solve the riddle of the GodEngine, the entire course of human history will be changed.

DOCTOR WHO

Craig Hinton is the author of two previous Doctor Who novels and is a regular contributer to TV Zone and Cult Times magazines.  Although he lives on a different planet from most people, he often visits Earth to frighten the natives.

CHRISTMAS ON A RATIONAL PLANET

AN ORIGINAL DOCTOR WHO NOVEL

'An end to history.  An end to certainty.  Is that too much to ask?'

December, 1799.  Europe is recovering from the Age of Reason, the Vatican is learning to live with Napoleon, and America is celebrating a new ara of independence.  But in New York State, something is spreading its own brand of madness through the streets.  Secret societies are crawling from the woodwork, and there's a Satanic conspiracy around every corner.

Roz Forrester is stranded in a town where festive cheer and random violence go hand-in-hand.  Chris Cwej is trapped on board the TARDIS with someone who's been trained to kill him.  And when Reason itself breaks down, even the Doctor can't be sure who or what he's fighting for.

Christmas is coming to town, and the end of civilization is following close behind...

LAWRENCE MILES feels the back cover will look a bit empty if he doesn't say something interesting about himself, especially now they've taken away the 'previously unexplored realms of space and time' bit.  He has a finite number of cats.

RETURN OF THE
LIVING DAD

AN ORIGINAL DOCTOR WHO NOVEL

'It's me, daddy. It's Bernice.'

Bernice Summerfield was seven years old when her father disappeared. They said he turned and ran from the Daleks in battle. They said he was a coward.

They were wrong.

For years Benny has searched for her father. Now a clue snatches her from her honeymoon, back to the TARDIS, and on to England in the year 1983. There she at last discovers Admiral Isaac Summerfield, leading a motley crew of aliens, psychics and fanboys. Their mission: to save extra-terrestrials stranded on Earth.

But what is Benny's father doing five hundred years in his own past? And why has he been waiting for the Doctor to arrive? Can Benny really trust the man she's been looking for all her life?

DOCTOR WHO

KATE ORMAN lives on the InterNet, and occasionally in Sydney, Australia.  This is her fourth New Adventure.

THE DEATH OF ART

AN ORIGINAL DOCTOR WHO NOVEL

He did not know if his powers could save him until the horses' hooves had crushed his ribs and his heart had stopped beating. After that, it was obvious.

1880s France: the corrupt world of the Third Republic. A clandestine brotherhood is engaged in a desperate internal power struggle; a race of beings seeks to free itself from perpetual oppression; and a rip in time threatens an entire city. The future of Europe is at stake, in a war fought with minds and bodies altered to the limits of human evolution.

Chris finds himself working undercover with a suspicious French gendarme; Roz follows a psychic artist whose talents are attracting the attention of mysterious forces; and the Doctor befriends a shape-shifting member of a terrifying family. And, at the heart of it all, a dark and disturbing injustice is being perpetrated. Only an end to the secret war, and the salvation of an entire race, can prevent Paris from being utterly destroyed.

DOCTOR WHO

SIMON BUCHER-JONES is yet another civil servant woth a long-standing love of SF, Fantasy and DOCTOR WHO.  He currently pretends to know about computers for the Home Office, but would rather you all bought his book.

DAMAGED GOODS

AN ORIGINAL DOCTOR WHO NOVEL

'Wherever this cocaine has travelled, it hasn't gone alone. Death has been its attendant. Death in a remarkably violent and inelegant form.

The Doctor, Chris and Roz arrive at the Quadrant, a troubled council block in Thatcher's Britain. There's a new drug on the streets, a drug that's killing to a plan. Somehow, the very ordinary people of the Quadrant are involved. And so, amidst the growing chaos, a bizarre trio moves into number 43.

The year is 1987: a dead drug dealer has risen from the grave, and an ancient weapon is concealed beneath human tragedy. But the Doctor soon discovers that the things people do for their children can be every bit as deadly as any alien menace - as he uncovers the link between a special child, an obsessive woman, and a desperate bargain made one dark Christmas Eve.

DOCTOR WHO

RUSSELL T DAVIES is an award-winning TV dramatist, having created the controversial adult soap opera Revelations and the acclaimed BBC children's serieals Century Falls and Dark Season.  He loves Doctor Who, and all television.

'If you step into history,' said the Doctor, 'I won't be able to protect you.'
'This isn't history,' said Roz. 'This is family.'

The Earth Empire - the Imperium Humanum, upon which a thousand suns never set - is dying.

The Great Houses of the Empire manoeuvre and scheme for advantage; alliances are made; and knives flash in the shadows. Out among the moons of Jupiter, another battle is just beginning, as an ancient brotherhood seeks limitless power and long-overdue revenge.

The Doctor returns to the thirtieth century, searching for the source of a terrifying weapon. He fears a nightmare from his own past may be about to destroy the future. Nothing must be allowed to get in his way.

But the Doctor has reckoned without the power of history - which has its own plans for the wayward daughter of the House of Forrester.

BAD THERAPY

AN ORIGINAL DOCTOR WHO NOVEL

'We're not like you - we can't be whole on our own.'

Seeking respite after the traumatic events in the thirtieth century, the Doctor and Chris travel to 1950's London.  But all is not well in bohemian Soho: racist attacks shatter the peace; gangs struggle for territory; and a bloodthirsty driverless cab stalks the night.

While Chris enjoys himself at the mysterious and exclusive Tropics club, the Doctor investigates a series of ritualistic murders with an uncommon link - the victims all have no past.  Meanwhile, a West End gangster is planning to clean up the town, apparently with the help of the Devil himself.  And, in the quiet corridors of an abandoned mental hospital, an enigmatic psychiatrist is conducting some very bad therapy indeed.

As the stakes are raised, healing turns to killing, old friends appear in the strangest places - and even toys can have a sinister purpose.

DOCTOR WHO

MATTHEW JONES wrote 'The Nine-Day Queen' for Doctor Who short story collection Decalog 2.  He also writes a regular column, 'Fluid Links', for Marvel's Doctor Who Magazine.  He lives in east London and this is his first novel.

ETERNITY WEEPS

'The flood is come!  Oh God save us all; the day of judgement is come!'

Turkey, 2003: Bernice and Jason join two rival expeditions attempting to find Noah's Ark.  While one team follows the Bible and its own beliefs, the other relies on more exact science - but both paths lead to the same revelation.  And, as the region moves ever closer to war, they uncover the key to a timeless mystery and a terrible secret.

The Doctor and Chris are called in to a situation fast getting out of control, as countless numbers flee a biological terror.  The world is about to undergo a new genesis.  While Chris gets himself a job with NASA, the Doctor must unravel the ties between Mount Ararat, the moon, and an ancient exedus.

Mankind faces apocalypse.  But can the aid of a far older race, alongside companions past and present, prevent the planet being twisted into the image of a long-dead world?

THE NEW ADVENTURES

JIM MORTIMORE lives in Bristol, and has reluctantly agreed to the removal of all jokes from this biog.

THE ROOM WITH NO DOORS

'Dear Doctor,' wrote Chris, 'I give up.'

Swordplay, samurai, demons, magic, aliens, adventure, excitement...  Who needs them?

The Doctor and Chris travel to sixteenth-century Japan, a country gripped by civil war as feudal lords vie for contol. Anything could tip the balance of power.  So when a god falls out of the sky, everyone wants it.

As villagers are healed and crops grow far too fast, the Doctor and Chris try to find the secret of the miracles - before two rival armies can start a war over who owns the god.

Chris soon finds himself alone - except for an alien slaver, a time-travelling Victorian inventor, a gang of demons, and old friend with suspicious motives, a village full of innocent bystanders, and several thousand samurai.

Without the Doctor, someone has to take up the challenge of adventure and stop the gods falling into the wrong hands.  Someone has to be the hero - but Chris isn't sure he wants to ge a hero any more.

THE NEW ADVENTURES

KATE ORMAN lives in Sydney, Australia.  The Doctor has somehow survived her four previous New Adventures.

LUNGBARROW

'Nonsense, child,' retorted the Doctor.  'Grandfather indeed!  I've never seen you before in my life!'

All is not well on Gallifrey.  Chris Cwej is having someone else's nightmares.  Ace is talking to herself.  So is K-9.  Leela has stumbled on a murderous family conspiracy. And the beleaguered Lord President, Romanadvoratrelunder, forsees one of the most tumultuous events in her planet's history.

At the root of all is an ancient and terrible place, the House of Lungbarrow in the southern mountains of Gallifrey.  Something momentous is happening there.  But the House has inexplicably gone missing.

673 years ago the Doctor left his family in that forgotten House.  Abandoned, disgraced and resentful, they have waited.  And now he's home at last.

In this, the seventh Doctor's final New Adventure, he faces a threat that could uncover the greatest secret of them all.

THE NEW ADVENTURES

MARC PLATT wrote Ghost Light, the last Doctor Who story recorded by the BBC.  He also wrote the New Adventures Cat's Cradle: Time Crucible and the Missing Adventure Downtime.  He is told that he lives in Islington, but would not be surprised if that were Time Lord propaganda.

Cover design: Slatter~Anderson
Cover painting: Fred Gambino

THE DYING DAYS

6 MAY 1997
THE DYING DAYS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

On the Mare Sirenum, British astronauts are walking on the surface of Mars for the first time in over twenty years.  The National Space Museum in London is the venue for a spectacular event where the great and the good celebrate a unique British achievement.

In Adisham, Kent, the most dangerous man in Britain has escaped from custody while being transported by helicopter.  In Whitehall, the new Home Secretary is convinced that there is a plot brewing to overthrow the government.  In west London, MI5 agents shut down a publishing company that got too close to the top secret organisation known as UNIT.  And, on a state visit to Washington, the Prime Minister prepares to make a crucial speech, totally unaware that dark forces are working against him.

As the eighth Doctor and Professor Bernice Summerfield discover, all these events are connected.  However, soon all will be overshadowed.

This time, the Doctor is already too late.

THE NEW ADVENTURES

LANCE PARKIN is the author of the highly successful series chronology A History of the Universe and the ground-breaking Missing Adventure Cold Fusion.  His first New Adventure Just War received unprecedented acclaim for a debut novel.

Cover design: Slatter~Anderson
Cover painting: Fred Gambino

'The King's balls get bigger every year!'

Bernice Surprise Summerfield is settling into her new job as Professor of Archaeology at St Oscar's University on the planet Dellah — one of the most prestigious centres of learning in the Milky Way. She wants to put the past, especially her failed marriage, behind her.

So she's glad when she gets the chance to take her tutorial group to investigate the lost civilisation of Perfecton. Three whole weeks of archaeological research in the field. The perfect way to forget your worries.

She doesn't bank on three things.

That Menlove Stokes, Professor of Applied Art, and various other academics would be along for the ride. That vicious alien marauders would decide to explore the planet at the same time. And that a reactivated Perfecton device would plunge her into a situation that can only be described as — panto.

'Trouble?'
'What makes you think that?'
'Oh, you know, the usual. Cordoned-off area, security guards swapping war stories,' Benny said, smiling. 'The fact that you're here.'

The Gamalian Dragon — a jewel-encrusted statuette captured by the Imperator Gamaliel from the Knights of Jeneve at the legendary Battle of Bocaro.

When Bernice Summerfield gets asked on an expedition by Gamaliel's descendant, Romolo Nusek, it is an offer her department can't afford to let her refuse. But, as usual, there are a few problems.

For one thing, Nusek is an evil warlord out to consolidate his power by any means necessary. For another, there's a body in the Theatrology building — and the dead man had an appointment with Benny's old friend, the mysterious Irving Braxiatel. Most worrying of all, the Gamalian Dragon, one of the best guarded and most valuable archaeological relics in known space, seems to be lying in a battered Gladstone bag on the floor of Benny's bedroom.

Aided only by Braxiatel and historian Nicholas Clyde, Benny must unravel the dragon's ancient mystery before the warlord's plan reach completion — and an assassin closes in for the kill.

'You're on your own, Bernice.'

Bernice Summerfield has drawn the short straw. Not for her the pleasures of intergalactic conferences and highbrow lecture tours. Oh no. She's forced to take two overlooked freshers on their very first dig. And just when it seems things can't get any worse, her no-good ex-husband Jason turns up, claiming that he is in deadly danger. Benny finally begins to believe his wild claims, but unfortunately only after he has been kidnapped from his hotel room.

Feeling guilty, she sets out to rescue him. Well, let's face it, no one else is going to. Her only clue is a dusty artefact that Jason claimed was part of an ancient and powerful weapon. But Professor Bernice Summerfield PhD knows that's just silly nonsense. She's been an archaeologist long enough to know that lost alien civilisations do not leave their most powerful weapons lying around for any nutter to find. Do they?

Once again Benny is all that stands between Jason and his own mistakes, as she tries to prevent the wrong people acquiring this terrible and somewhat unlikely weapon - a weapon rumoured to have powers beyond the sun.

'So who do I have to kill to get off this cruise?'

When Krytell Industries offered Benny a small, slightly dubious and, um, unofficial job aboard the majestic space cruise-liner, the Titanian Queen, she jumped at the chance. After all, with an unlimited expense account, an entire new wardrobe and more strings of pearls and other jewels than you could shake an Art Deco stick at, what more could a poor girl want?

That was then.

Now, the luckless if remarkably deserving passengers of the Titanian Queen are dropping like flies. Are the deaths the work of the mysterious criminal known as the Cat's Paw? Or is the super-rich businessman Krytell himself somehow involved? And will the great detective, Emil Dupont, finally stop getting things completely and utterly wrong and solve it all in time for tea and muffins?

Whatever's happening, Benny had better discover the truth for herself, and discover it soon. Before she suddenly finds herself another highly deplorable crime statistic.

'Mankind expects pain. However it appears to outsiders.'

Tyler's Folly: a colony world on the unattractive side of Earthspace, a planet wracked by earthquakes and crawling with off-world bodysnatchers. When the local authorities pull a bedraggled Professor Bernice Summerfield out of the ocean in an off-limits 'quake zone', they naturally want to know what she is doing there... but the professor can only mumble something about woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers.

According to Bernice, the planet is hollow, its interior inhabited by warring tribes of cavemen and strangely unconvincing prehistoric monsters. Some dark and ancient god rules this underground kingdom — albeit a dark and ancient god with a penchant for thirties pulp adventures and Saturday morning action serials.

Can Bernice's claims be true? Is Tyler's Folly really under threat from an ageless subterranean horror? And why does so much of her story revolve around the utterly amoral alien known as !X...?

'We've a killer brain-eater on board, half of us are dead, and all you want to do is discuss your wretched fish. Do you sense a problem with your priorities?'

Jason Kane is out to impress his ex-wife, Bernice, and he has found the perfect way of doing it. He's convinced she knows the location of the legendary planet of Ardethe - a site of untold riches and forbidden knowledge. So, after rifling through her bag for information, he sets off with his trusty crewman Emile to a barren and isolated rock.

As usual, Jason's plans go awry. Very soon people begin to die - and die quite horribly. They have awakened something beneath the planet's surface that's feasting on human brains. And when a ship full of hard-bitten female convicts arrives in the skies about the desolate world, the situation becomes even more complicated.

Someone is pulling the strings and watching the carnage. It could be any of the desperate prisoners, the reclusive crew, or the suspicious governor. Not knowing who the true foe is, Jason calls for help. Assistance arrives in the form of his old companion Christopher Cwej - just the man you'd want by your side in a tricky situation. but something terrible has happened to Chris, and now he can't even remember his own name.

In the evening, when the sky was the colour of burnt umber, the factories crawled down the continental shelf to drink.

The Spire is an inhuman artefact, a construction almost three hundred miles high. But it is more than just a big dumb object. Those close to it can look into the future - a future which is going to be arriving sooner than they think, and which is as bad as can be.

In the here and now, Professor Bernice Summerfield, doyenne of twenty-sixth century archaeology and seedy space-port bars, is used to seeing strange thing in her rooms. So it takes the unexpected arrival of an angel to get her away from increasingly desperate professional deadlines and off to investigate one of the seven hundred and seventy-six wonders of the galaxy.

However, Benny is not the only one interested in the Spire. A mysterious race of weaponsmiths, a mutogenic assassin and a sect of fanatically anti-religious reptiles all have their reason for learning - or concealing - the structure's secrets. And, as she struggles to unlock this ancient mystery, it soon become clear that the life of an eccentric professor is of very little consequence indeed.

'It's got to be stopped; it's an abomination, a crime against humanity.'

The Project: a criminal scheme so grand in scale that it casts a shadow across a hundred worlds. So secret that none but an elusive inner circle know its nature or its purpose. It could involve drugs, computer crime or a brilliant new con. Everyone has a theory; no one really knows.

On a trip to the sprawling den of iniquity that is Megacity, an ex-Adjudicator called Roz Forrester heard of this elaborate scheme. Her interest piqued, she asked her squire to return one day with her. After all, a crime against humanity is everyone's business.

Chris Cwej is not a man to forget such a promise. His old partner may be dead, but the Project case will be one for her memory - a way to say goodbye. All he needs is a new confederate: someone ready to risk all for the old time's sake. Fortunately, it's the end of term and Professor Bernice Summerfield is looking for excitement. So, a new crime-fighting duo is forged in the bars of Dellah - one prepared to take on a faceless foe and expose the ultimate crime.

Smith consulted his watch very deliberately. 'You have one hour to find the Imnulate and hand it over to me. If you do not, I will tear this train and its passengers apart piece by piece!'

Tempest: a wild and untamed world perpetually wreathed in cloud and storms. The only means of long-distance travel across its surface are the great transcontinental monorails that traverse its lonely and dangerous wastelands. Returning home from a lucrative lecture, Professor Bernice Summerfield finds herself on the most celebrated of these mighty trains.

The Drell Imnulate: a fabulous and unique religious idol. Precious enough to kill for. So important to those rival factions who follow the way of its maker that they will dare anything to ensure its return.

Isolated in the wilderness and far from civilisation, death strikes the luxurious Polar Express, and a routine journey turns into a nightmare. But can Bernice save a train on the brink of disaster?

'I'm scared of letting all these people down. Like the whole human race. At least if I get blown up as well, they can say I died heroically. Assuming I ever existed at all.'

When Bernice Summerfield visits the People - an incredibly advanced civilisation living in a Dyson sphere - she discovers that ever in utopia they still have their problems.

An illegal time-travel experiment threatens a war that could destroy them all. Rather than risk it, the People and their ultra-powerful computer, God, are prepared to eradicate the source of the problem - the ancient city of Babylon. But such action would involve the death of a quarter of a million human beings, and do incalculable damage to Earth's history.

Babylon - and the human race - have one hope. Benny returns to the cradle of civilisation to try and stop the interference. She has just one week to prevent a catastrophe that could mean she will never be born. Her only assistance comes from a Victorian linguist who has stumbled across the experiment himself. But he's no help at all - even though he has a power neither of them suspects.

Roz snarled up into the face of her abductor. 'If you touch me I'll kill you. Who are you? Just what the hell is going on?' The blond man looked down at her with a mixture of what looked like fear and pain. 'My name's Chris Cwej,' he said. 'And as to what's going on, hell is probably as good a word for it as any.'

Something has burst through the worn and patchwork fabric of the universe, like a high-velocity round through a rotten apple. The timelines are cut loose and whipsawing - alternative pasts, presents and futures slicing through the world we think of as real.

At the centre of the disruption three adventurers, Nathan li Shao, Leetha and Kiru, are trapped on a parallel Earth - flung from one twisted alternative to another by a man called Deed, who has usurped the power of the Godhead. If their friend Sgloomi Po cannot reach them in time they will be obliterated. Deed is attempting to forge his own reality and consign all others to oblivion.

To help end the chaos, Sgloomi has assembled a number of old friends: Bernice Summerfield, the feckless Jason Kane and Christopher Rodonante Cwej... but there has been one small mistake. A miscalculation has placed someone among them who should not be there. Someone who should be dead.

'Bernice Summerfield?'
'That rather depends on who wants to know.'
'I'd like to offer you a job. I think you'll find it interesting.'
'Isn't this just a little inappropriate? I mean, we're at a funeral.'
'That rather depends on the job.'

Medusa — an experimental spaceship developed by the Advanced Research Department of St Oscar's University. Missing since it was launched, presumed lost in the wars, it was a project so secret that it has never been declassified.

Now, twenty years on, Medusa is coming home.

After one of the investigation team dies suspiciously, Professor Bernice Summerfield is assigned to help discover what went wrong. But to do so she must solve a riddle. What is the strange link between the original crew and the team now on board the drifting ship? And why do their ghosts still haunt Medusa?

'I am going to make you immortal.'

Bored with her job, bored with being perpetually skint, Bernice Summerfield leaps at the chance of a free holiday arranged by her new friend Maeve Ruthven, St Oscar's Professor of Comparative Religion.

But all is not what it seems.

Benny's holiday rapidly goes from bad to worse to downright dangerous. For a start, the 'luxury cruise' is a religious pilgrimage, and alcohol is forbidden to those on board. Then she is attacked, badly injured and confined to a wheelchair.

And that's before the murder.

Benny finds herself caught in a web of intrigue - not knowing who on board can be trusted or which way to turn. And with the future of more than one world depending on her actions, she must decide who to believe, expose the hidden killer and prevent a ruthless grab for power.

'I'm sure the Beach Boys didn't have mutant elephants in mind when they wrote "Surfin' USA.".'

When Bernice Summerfield finds human skull fragments containing her own DNA in the stomach of a mummified dinosaur, she embarks on a trail of murder and betrayal. From the alien jungles of France to the primal continent of Pangaea, the trail leads ever further back in time. Together with Patience, the cloned smart-raptor, Benny must brave alien hybrids, agents of the Knights Templar guarding a secret older than time - and have breakfast with the man who would be Emperor of Earth.

All to find the fabled Sword of Forever, a mythical device with the power to destroy and create civilisations - but at what price?

Everything goes critical as Bernice and Patience travel across 120 million years and two universes - where ancient traps guard crumbling ruins, love is unrequited, time is running out, treasure is always buried and X never fails to mark the spot.

'I'm being stalked. I'm sure of it now. I'm frightened, and I need a friend.'

Lizbeth Fugard is an archaeologist working on a backwater rock of a world. She's bankrolled by a government she despises, and has recently split up with her partner. And, just when she thinks life can't get any worse, someone starts following her - keeping to the shadows, but always there. Watching. Waiting. Eyes boring into her soul. The most beguiling eyes she has ever seen - and the most terrifying.

All she can think of is to call on the help of her old friend Professor Bernice Summerfield, and Bernice is only too happy to get away from her own work and see a bit more of the galaxy.

But on arrival she is soon immersed in sabotage, political secrets, gun-running, and an age-old love affair that ended indisaster and disgrace. To end a cycle of violence and hate, Bernice and Lizbeth must discover the truth - but doing so could have implications far beyond this obscure world.

'Professor Summerfield, your very presence here has raised this hotel's insurance premiums by seven point two percent.'

It is the year 2595. Mars, once the distant target of humanity's ambitions in space, has been colonised for five hundred years. To mark the anniversary, the planet's university is holding an academic conference. Naturally, esteemed expert on Martian archaeology Bernice Summerfield is invited to present a paper based on her long career in this field.

But other matters distract Bernice from academia. Decades ago, hostile aliens invaded Mars. At their moment of greatest need, Mars' human population was betrayed by its leader. And although the occupation was swiftly ended, the anger of those who fought to save Mars still runs deep.

So when a veteran of the war is found dead, old wounds are reopened. Bernice finds herself investigating a murder with the least reliable of allies - and soon discovers that the consequences of the Siege of Mars are far from being ancient history.

'Do You Believe?'

Something very odd is happening on the cosmopolitan planet of Dellah, home to Bernice Summerfield, famed archaeologist, adventurer, raconteur and barfly. A long- ignored religion is rapidly gaining recruits. The faithful rejoice and talk of their God walking the land once more. And in secret rooms on campus, arcane arts are practised with dangerously successful results.

Behind these seeming absurdities, something far darker is going on, something that has consequences for everyone. The most powerful races of the universe are running scared, withdrawing to their own strongholds, and leaving the lesser races to their fate.

But what can have warped reality in this way? And why? Or has the time of the gods finally come? As Bernice and her friends begin to investigate, they soon realise that in the terrible conflict to come each of them will have to choose sides.

'Bernice Summerfield seemed to hold the key. She was in it up to her neck, and she was the one person left who could tell me what I needed to know. I rather hoped it wouldn't be necessary to snap said neck and kill her.'

The planet Dellah was once one of the cultural centres of the galaxy. Now, it lies in ruins and things walk through the barren landscape, twisting the unfortunates who remain there to their unholy will.

The tragic effects of this cataclysm have been felt throughout local space, from cruel and draconian Thanaxos to the multiplexal chaos of the Proximan Chain Rafts. All know the ultimate result: a war is coming - is inevitable - and is set to blow the fragile stability of the galactic sector apart.

Only one person has the pieces of the puzzle that might prevent the coming collapse - Bernice Summerfield. The problem is, she's missing, and what's more she's not feeling precisely herself. And if Benny doesn't find out exactly who she is, and how she can fit into her newly shattered world, there isn't going to be a world for her to come back to at all.

'All right, let's start with the basics. The world ended on the twelfth of October, Nineteen Seventy...'

I don't know why I'm writing this. It's not like anybody's going to read it. At least, nobody who cares about the fact that I'm a desperate, dying, 23-year-old human being who's just had the whole of history taken away from her.

To whoever's out there, to whatever's left, this is the way things were, just before the end. This is the story about the last days of London, about murder and love and waking up in the ruins, about all the people buried in the wreckage...

I'm lying, obviously. This is my story. This is what I was doing, when October the twelfth came. Because, let's face it, I'm the only one who really matters.

I'm the only one who got out alive.

'Benny, you're ill. Let us help you. We want to help you. Really we do. This paranoia. These delusions. What you've done - it's driven you insane. Nobody wants to hurt you. We're your friends.'

On Dellah, the shattered former home of Bernice Summerfield, only the Advanced Research centre still survives - the last remnant of the once famous university. But it's under siege from from fanatical groups of religious inquisitors, searching for new converts or dangerous heretics.

Benny would have to be mad to go back.

Jason Kane, Bernice's one-time husband and all-time opportunist, has found the ancient remains of the Oracle of the Lost on an obscure planetoid known only as KS-159. Or so he says.

Benny would have to be mad to believe him.

The mysterious Irving Braxiatel is looking for somewhere quiet to house his huge collection of... everything.

Benny would have to be mad to suggest KS-159.

The Oracle of the Lost, legend says, can answer any question. but the cryptic answers she gives are never helpful, and often dangerous.

Benny would have to be mad to reawaken her.
Or ask a question.
Or believe the answer.

'I gazed up at the smoking hole the bomb had made - and then I realised something was wrong. Benny lay beside me, slack and tangled like a discarded rag doll, unnaturally pale, and unbreathing. She was dead.'

Nothing is ever simple, and nothing ever ends. Feed some drugs to laboratory rats and, two hundred generations down the line, the monsters start being born.

The fragile stability of the Dellahan quarantine has been compromised, and something has escaped. Now, a man in the incipient stages of identity-collapse and a dying Bernice Summerfield have to search the byzantine cities of the Proximan Chain for an entity that killed his lover and her friend - an entity that will turn the Chain into its own version of hell.

'Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes... it's worse than Samuel Beckett.'

Benny has had enough. Enough of the angst and the heartache. Enough of Jason and the others. She needs a holiday, and so she's heading to the Eastern Rim, a part of the galaxy where there is still a frontier, and adventure to be had. She's packed her trowel. She's off.

Her friends are concerned. Drug barons, war lords, criminal cartels and outlaws have fled to the Rim from authority and order. There's a distinct risk of getting into trouble, not to mention life-threatening peril. It's not so much that Benny might come to harm; she might find she likes it out there. But Benny finds the Eastern Rim almost suspiciously ordinary: no violence, no action, no excitement. So when she is asked by a shady curio dealer to help him find Dorpfeld's Prism, it seems just another cursed relic to recover before retiring to the bar. In a place this dull, nothing dangerous can possibly happen. Can it?

'Oh, why not,' Benny said. 'After all, I've died before and it never did me any harm then.'

The once peaceful planet of Dellah lies in ruins. The god-like beings who infest the place have lured the inhabitants into holy wars, suicide cults and genocidal pogroms. As they run out of victims, the deities plan to invade more planets - and other races are preparing pre-emptive strikes to stop them. Humankind's small sector of the galaxy is about to become the battleground of leviathans.

There is just one hope. Professor Bernice Summerfield is, surprisingly, alive and well. And she's coming home. Bernice and her friends are determined to dispose of the gods once and for all - at any cost.