Something dark is moving in distant nations, and ancient powers ready themselves for a final confrontation. A Dark Queen has raised a standard in remote lands and is gathering armies of unmatched might. Into this battleground of good and evil come a band of 'desperate men' who will embark on a quest that is at best dangerous and at worst suicidal. Among them is Nakor the Isalani, a gambler who knows more magic than most magicians, yet who claims magic doesn't exist. He alone...

The art of the magician has been banned in Thrandor for 200 years, and has become a byword for myth and legend, or so a young teenager called Calvyn thinks. Unbeknown to him, a magical talisman has been recovered, and the whole of Thrandor stands blissfully unaware that disaster is poised to strike.

This is the strange, compelling story of Roger Bacon. Ambitious, impatient, mutinous, Bacon was a man of his times with a vision reaching far beyond even our own day. Subject to the harsh, narrow confines of Church-dominated "science", Bacon dared to venture into the deep waters of theory, risking deadly accusations of heresy and black magic. Against a vividly realised backdrop of thirteenth-century England, Paris and Rome, James Blish wrote an engrossing account of this lonely...

Livak is bored. Winter in the Kellarin colony has its amusements but she's pretty much exhausted them and is eager to be doing something else. When Ryshad and Temar tell her of their plan to reclaim the southern settlement established by the original colonists, Livak reckons she may as well go along too. What she doesn't reckon on are the pirates looting the midway islands. Meanwhile In Hadrumal, the wizards are increasingly enmeshed in their own politics .