Fred Saberhagen was an American science fiction and fantasy author, most renowned for his "Berserker" and Dracula stories. His works frequently explore the conflict between humanity and machines, delving into dark themes and questioning the nature of life and artificial intelligence. Saberhagen also crafted expansive series of post-apocalyptic mytho-magical and sword-and-sorcery novels, which examined battles between good and evil and explored heroic archetypes.
This is the third in a series of eight titles to be published in the Berserker saga and involves members of an expedition getting into problems while hunting on "Berserker's Planet". The author has written on scientific topics for the "Encyclopaedia Britannica".
Pinnacle of creation, or...? It all began on Planet Earth, sometime in the Middle Pleistocene. A ground-running ape stood erect, gazed at the stars...and wondered. Since that distant time and place we humans have ranged far indeed, and changed much - and the traveling and the changing have left us sundered. But no matter how new planets reshape our bodies and new gods reshape our souls, we, and we alone are the EARTH DESCENDED.
For countless millennia the dreadful Berserker fleets have ranged across the galaxies in a relentless war against all living things, and it has fallen to Man - one of the least evolved of intelligent species - to champion the cause of organic life. This book is the fourth in the Berserker series.
In the distant future, society has crumbled. Dark forces now rule the land, keeping all humans under their oppressive thumbs. In the darkness of the shadows and whispered on the winds, there is talk of a rebellion. In the swamps, a small band has formed. Determined to regain their freedom, the rebellion, heavily outnumbered, plans to overthrow an army of thousands . . . with the help of one incredible weapon. It is only a legend, a story left over from the Old World before magic and the wizards came to the land. A weapon of technology. It is the mystical Elephant, and whoever masters it holds the key to freedom, or defeat. One young man, determined to avenge the death of his family, sets out to join the rebellion and find Elephant. What he discovers will change everything.
Crime makes strange partnerships, and none is stranger than that between Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula. But when Holmes must track down a ring of criminal masterminds infesting London with plague, he must team up with Dracula to bring them to justice.
Long ago, in a distant part of the galaxy, two alien races met--and fought a war of mutual extinction. The sole legacy of that war was the weapon that ended it: the death machines, the BERSERKERS. Guided by self-aware computers more intelligent than any human, these world-sized battlecraft carved a swath of death through the galaxy--until they arrived at the outskirts of the fledgling Empire of Man. These are the stories of the frail creatures who must meet this monstrous and implacable enemy--and who, by fighting it to a standstill, become the saviors of all living things.
This second novel in the Berserkers science fiction series is a space adventure in which the Berserkers use human history as a deadly weapon. They possess a new mode of attack in the form of a time weapon which destroys key figures of the past whose achievements ensured mankind's survival.
Harry Silver has already had a lifetime of trouble from ordinary Berserkers, the automated killing machines programmed an age ago to denude the galaxy of life. Now when his own family is kidnapped, he faces a deviant machine, a good fit for some or all of the Galactic Dictionary's definitions of (1) A deceitful, double-dealing evildoer .. . (4) A fierce elephant or stamodont that has been banished from the herd . . . (10) Having a peculiarly malevolent or unstable nature . . . (11) No longer loyal, affiliated, or recognized, and hence not governable or accountable . . . erring, apostate. - Galactic Dictionary of the Common TongueOrdinary Berserkers armed with weapons powerful enough to kill an entire planet were enough of a nightmare. What worse deviltry will a killing machine gone rogue attempt-and even if Silver can stop it, will he ever see his family alive again?
Pilgrim, a traveler lost in time and space, whose only hope for returning home is to alter history, attempts to prevent the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln
The terror began the very first night that Dan Post spent with his children in the old house on the hill. In his sleep he felt his identity dissolving, merging with human beings of the distant past, creatures who had somehow returned to life as they invaded his defenseless mind. At first Dan Post thought he was going mad. Then he discovered the truth about the house that he and his children lived in ... what waited for them at the end of the tunnel behind the basement wall ... And Dan Post could only wish that he was mad ... that the nightmare was only a dream that the horror was not inescapably real...
