D G Compton

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 from the Settlement reaches their stranded ship? And how will they survive in a primitive environment, an alien system?

Farewell, Earth's Bliss

John Gribbin

The day of ice and fire, that brings in its wake devastation to the world. Dr Robert Graham, noted nuclear physicist, has campaigned hard and long for disarmament. Now his patience is at an end. With an ill-assorted handful of desperate, like-minded 'terrorists', he plans to hold the human race to ransom. His bargaining power is terrifying - nothing short of Ragnarok itself. The world governments must listen - or the countdown to nuclear winter has already begun . . .

Ragnarok

Leo's mother, Madam Sara Bresson, wasn't good with babies. She never claimed to be. She had her Gift, her charisma, her successful career as a Spiritualist medium, and there simply wasn't room in her life for sleepless nights or soggy nappies. Therefore, with her husband (Leo's father Maurice Moon, a music hall conjuror and xylophone player) out of the picture having recently decamped, she donated Leo as soon as was decent to her widowed mother Clare. An agreeably wealthy woman, Clare had conveniently just returned from India following the alcohol-related death of her husband, a senior officer in the British army there. Clare welcomed a grandchild. It was good to be needed. Now, today, eighty-odd years later, Leo is living again in the house in Cheltenham that his grandmother Clare bought all those years ago. And D. G. Compton, previously better known perhaps as a science fiction writer, has set himself a biographical task here, charting at least a few of the more significant vicissitudes, big and little, that have shaped Leo's nature and life, and have left us with this slightly wise (he hopes) old gent.

So Here's Our Leo

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 carriers meeting. So of course Giles Cranston and Tamsin McGillivray meet . . .

A Usual Lunacy

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 . . .

D G Compton

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