In the year 5876ad. the Blue Kite club and the tower above it is the center of the East Hdengragger region of the Ydlontrostl cities. On this particular evening a well known band playing songs of the 'Caravan' genre is there instead of their usual acts which primarily play 'Lectroshock'. The club is where the most sexually active come for entertainment most of the time. Kessil has friends who frequent it but she only comes by occasionally, mostly when there is someone on stage she wants to...

Dorrick has now been on Kassidor ten Earth years, a decade and forty as he tells time now, and they are living comfortably in the Yakhan. Best of all, TongSu has remained with him. Then his old friend Bulf, with whom he'd done some light work in the past, invites him to a reunion dinner in Kex. He wonders how Bulf ever got the money to do that, but because Bulf promised that Jason and Vio would also be there, he thinks it would be nice to surprise TongSu with an all-expenses-paid trip to t...

Dorrick has landed a new assignment from the University of Kex on Centorin. They are assisting the Kassikan in locating the last of Feanor's crystals using a ground penetrating imager. The crystal is believed to lie somewhere in the ruins of the Dark Lord's black tower in a has-been tourist trap called Mordor.Just getting there was an adventure in itself, it was a year's flight from Knidola over lands filled with Orcs and other mutants from early genetic science. They have to rescu...

Dorrick is restless. He doesn't know if it's TongSu's recuperation, boredom with the farm or boredom with Bordzvek. He knows he feels 'kept' at her farm, no matter how much he tries to help. Most of all he worries if it is boredom with TongSu. He worries that he's seen her thru this convalescence out of guilt. He knows he feels guilt over going to the East Basin and he's faced the fact that he did it for his own adrenaline needs and not Honshu's.TongSu knows Dorrick is getting bore...

The East Bordzvek basin is known thruout Kassidor as a place of certain death. It is too hot for human life, the ground is too rugged and broken to traverse, but most of all, the wildlife is too deadly for even the most heavily armed expeditions to survive. Only the fringes of the basin had been seen, other than that, unmanned balloons and orbital vehicles were the only things that had ever seen it.Honshu is falling back into her loon addiction, uninterested in anything else of lif...

Klowa had been working the docks as a loss investigator for three centuries, seven hundred and something Earth years. He had gradually built a reputation for results, and for discretion. It is that reputation for discretion that gets him his first case working for one of the captains of the cabal of companies that move almost all cargo in the basin. Someone is putting his ships under unqualified captains, and the losses are piling up.This case calls for the utmost in discretion, fo...

In 3818ad. the stargate has only recently opened to the planet Kassidor and people from other planets can now reach this huge and ancient world. Dorrick's new field assignment is to take a scientist to a distant city on this primitive planet to study the ancient sex slavers of the Borlunth basin. They are of special interest because they seem so uncharacteristic of the peaceful and pastoral world of Kassidor. Only one eccentric professor had studied that culture in depth, and written three...

This is the hardest science fiction in the Gordon's Lamp series. Quantum entanglement, dark matter, Bose-Einstein condensates and quantum computing all figure heavily in this story. Gordon's Lamp is returning from 61 Cygni, their data corrupted by a crewman's hack, their mission to seed the planet with mortal humans thwarted by the biodisaster the planet had become, their chance of Angel colonization thwarted by the lack of exploitable resources. While en route, war breaks out between mort...

Leand was a respected man in the town of Sinbara who befriended Jorma after a bad burn out. Jorma treasured his friendship and the chance for a new start he'd been given. Then Leand had a beautiful, smart, lusty and driven daughter named Tdeshi who became Jorma's lover once she was grown. But after only a year sharing his cabin, she became determined to continue her education in the distant city of Kassidor Yakhan. Neither Jorma nor Leand could convince her to change those plans and his fr...

This war is completely different than anything mankind has fought so far. At first humans do not even understand what type of being they are actually fighting. It has calculating intelligence but its behavior patterns are written in its DNA over the millions of years it has been riding the galactic currents in mankind's direction, determined to be the only multicellular animated life in any oxygen atmosphere in the galaxy. It is over a century before humanity understands the true extent of...

Alan was doing remarkably well in his courses. With some off-the-record help from their Systems Administrator, he finds he can make his way into secured data areas. When he does he finds secrets about his parents and crew that shock him, almost as much as the secrets he finds out about himself.This is a novelette of an episode in Alan's life on Gordon's Lamp four years before he touches Kassidorian soil. It introduces the important members of the crew of Gordon's lamp. Also in this...

Among the phantasmagorical erosion of the Zil escarpment is one of the most remote and primitive societies on the planet of Kassidor with literacy and a semblance of civilization not arriving til the 50th century. Here we find people still living in caves and still hunting dangerous beasts as a way of life. It is one of the few places remaining on the planet with organized conflict between villages, or between any groups of people. The Instinct may prevent violence between people, but it d...