On board an obsolete ship, nine weeks out from home, the latest batch of colonists arrive at their destination. A grim penal settlement in a wilderness worlds away from the homes they will never see again. TASMANIA? BOTANY BAY? No.For this is tomorrow, not yesterday. The dumping ground for social outcasts and political deportees is Mars, barren, unproductive, but invaluable as a convict settlement. What kind of welcome will the twenty-four deportees receive when the reception party...

THE NEW REVISED EBOOK EDITION RELEASED IN 2019 WITH THE AUTHOR'S PREFERRED TEXT!A few years in the future, medical science has advanced to the point where it is practically unheard of for people to die of any cause except old-age. The few exceptions provide the fodder for a new kind of television show for avid audiences who lap up the experience of watching someone else's dying weeks. So when Katherine Mortenhoe is told that she has about four weeks to live she kno...

D.G. Compton is best known for his prescient 1974 novel, THE CONTINUOUS KATHERINE MORTENHOE, which predicted the 21st century's obsessions with media voyeurism and 'reality television'. It was filmed as DEATH WATCH in 1980 by Bertrand Tavernier. This omnibus collects three of his incisive SF novels, ASCENDANCIES, SYNTHAJOY and THE STEEL CROCODILE.ASCENDANCIES: Into a future where a depleted fuel supply had the world spiralling down into grinding poverty and constant war came ... Mo...

In the near future, the super-modern city of Gloucester has been transformed - completely redesigned and rebuilt to the principles of 'scientific city planning'. This gleaming city is threatened with extinction by a mysterious spore from space that brings mankind's proud structures crashing to the ground . . .

Have a Happy Golden Straub Day!The message floated in the sky for all to read; citizens chanted it to each other, motorists tooted it on their car horns as they drove the uncongested freeways. Earth had become a paradise, courtesy of Cordwainer Hardware International; population dwindling, war a thing of the past, free, untrammelled sex the right of all. But is paradise everything . . .?In this vividly realised novel, S. G. Compton charts the growth of CHI and the bland, id...

Into a future where a depleted fuel supply had the world spiralling down into grinding poverty and constant war came . . . Moondrift. Mysterious white flakes of alien matter that was the perfect fuel - clean powerful, dependable.But the aliens - or whatever they were - who sent Moondrift seemed to demand a heavy ransom in return. After each Moondrift comes an eerie sound, as pure as a children's choir, heard all over the world. It mesmerises all who hear it with it's beauty - and w...

In a governmental Punishment and Protection centre, Charge Nurse Landon is wondering why one of the new inductees seems familiar. Meanwhile Chief Inspector Duncan is driving home from a stakeout in Liverpool. When the two men's destinies meet, the result is a complex mystery with a political edge.

The spaceship landed on the planet Earth to bring it the message of a new religion and a new way of life that would fit the terrestrial barbarians to take their place in the great community of the Galaxy.Their motives were beyond reproach. Their objectives were honourable. It was not their fault that humanity distrusted their motives, repudiated their objectives - and did its best to drive the missionaries back into space . . .

In answer to an unanswerable future, science has created Bohn, the omnipotent computer whose flashing circuits and messianic pronouncements dictate what tomorrow will - or will not - be.But Matthew Oliver is flesh and blood and full of questions - not nearly as certain as the machine he's appointed to serve.And the right hand of science seldom knows what the left hand is doing . . .

The time: 1979The place: a top-secret US Air Force base in the CotswoldsThe actors: carefully selected, healthy-living personnelThe missions: long-range reconnaissance flightsThe problem: is there any connection between these flights and the growing menace of a strange blood-cancer disease that is spreading through the world? Several of the more intelligent and intuitive realise that there is. There are those who retain their integrity, and doing so, lose th...

It makes people positively ache with happiness. It puts the roses back in their cheeks and the itch back in their blood. "It" is the Scholes Virus - proper medical term for what used to be called, out of mawkish ignorance but with uncanny prescience, the "love bug".Professor Trevor Scholes has discovered, isolated and classified every variety of the infection that now bears his name. One variety, B79/K, is so rare that the odds are fifty thousand to one against two compatible carri...

The Attrition. It was a bloodless, bureaucratic word, chosen to hide the appalling reality of the plague that had changed the face of civilisation.Now Dr Harriet Ryder-Kahn, born four years into the Attrition, thinks she may have an answer. But in a world convulsed by trauma she finds there are those who do not want a solution.And they are prepared to go as far as it takes to silence her . . .