Showing results by narrator "Noelle North" in All Categories

Step into twenty science fiction short stories where strange possibilities become immediate human problems—and ingenuity, courage, ambition or sheer stubbornness may be the only way out. Buy a planet where the laws of physics refuse to cooperate. Escape a tyrannical Earth aboard the last rebel ship. Hunt the Great Secret of the Universe. Race to save a dying world. Watch reality disappear because everyone believes it should. Travel through time to Nero's Rome. And meet aliens, inventors, engineers, soldiers, con men and unlikely heroes confronting problems no one has faced before.

Gold miner Billy Newman thinks he has made the deal of a lifetime when he buys a remote island in the Philippines. Then crops fail, disease spreads and the islanders insist there is only one explanation: Billy has angered Tadamona, the giant god who claims the island as his own. Billy trusts medicine, dynamite and his own nerve—not superstition. But when Tadamona proves terrifyingly real, disbelief is no protection. With a young girl marked for sacrifice and an island in panic, Billy has to find a way to fight something everyone else believes cannot be defeated. A plague is spreading.

Captain Gordon lives like he flies - by the seat of his pants, taking on any job and all comers. Now he’s bound for the forbidding mountains along the shores of the Arabian Sea, transporting a team of anthropologists on the trail of Alexander the Great. But ancient history is about to come to dangerous life with the discovery of a long-buried map - a map leading to high adventure, untold treasure, and cold-blooded murder.

The revolt has failed. Executions have begun. And the Bellerophon—the last rebel ship—hangs beyond Earth with nowhere left to run. Firstin Guide and the surviving colonists refuse to surrender to the regime that crushed their rebellion. Their only hope is a new fuel capable of carrying them across thousands of light-years to another habitable world. Escape could save them—but leaving Earth means abandoning everyone they love. They flee tyranny to survive. They build toward a return.

George Marquis Lorrilard is a space exploiter with one dependable motive: profit. In a future where complacency has weakened the drive to explore and rival powers threaten the balance of worlds, Lorrilard’s appetite for wealth may be exactly the force no one expected to need. Armed with nerve, ambition and a technology that can turn air itself into an invisible barrier, he enters a struggle where personal gain and planetary power become impossible to separate. He wants a fortune. The world needs an advantage.