Gathered together for the first time are seven strange stories of the future from the wondrous imagination of Philip E. High.

Man was bringing life to the planets: a carefully balanced programme of flora and fauna, but that life had to come from Earth, pre-adapted to survive and flourish. Man smote the ice-bound worlds with a rod of fire; he breathed air upon their surfaces, built clouds in their skies, and granted life below. They were the lords of creation—or so they thought.

The cataclysm tore apart all they had known. Forced into hiding and shelter, mankind had lived for a thousand years beneath the Earth’s ravaged surface. But now they were digging upwards, to Topside, and a strange resurrection: to find themselves aliens on their own planet.

The Ancient Enemy arrived to wipe out humanity, but man possessed a peculiar defence mechanism it did not expect.

When the first interstellar explorer returned to Earth, the world, this new world, with its strange new Risk Economy was not at all as he remembered it.

Those who held a Time Ticket for a voyage into Earth’s past were about to discover that any past action must effect the future.

Praise for Philip E. High

‘Philip E High’s hard-action adventure-SF dominated the British magazines of the 1950s and 1960s… his preference is to tinker within the established genre spectrum, modifying ideas, picking up discarded threads here and there, meshing them together into startling juxtapositions, re-walking old or forgotten paths, albeit wearing new anti-grav spaceboots.’ - Miles Higher

‘…presents often interesting ideas in fast-paced, exciting and entertaining stories typical of the best of the Golden Age of science fiction.’ – Eric Brown, Infinity Plus

Philip E High was an English science fiction author. Born in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire on 28 April 1914 his writing career spanned over 50 years before his death in Canterbury, Kent on 9 August, 2006. In the course of his career he published some 14 novels and numerous short stories. Philip E High made his name initially in the 1950s with a series of short stories for magazines such as Authentic Science Fiction, New Worlds and Nebula. A collection of these short stories The Best of Philip E High was published in 2002.

Sign up now to get the most out of Books2Read

Discover something great at Books2Read.

Thanks for signing up for Books2Read notifications!