The Shadow People. John Russell Fearn
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into the future—first into the outer solar system, and thence to the stars. So with the seventh novel, he introduced a new main character, Abna of Atlantis—someone as equally intelligent, and even stronger than herself. These dynamics provided him with an interstellar canvas, thus ensuring that the series would remain ahead of reality.
Fearn’s strategy was a great success, and the Amazon novels retained their popularity, ending only with his tragically early death in 1960. By then he had written a further twenty Amazon novels, and made preliminary notes for his next (which would later be written by Fearn’s biographer, Philip Harbottle).
Long after Fearn’s death, his entire Amazon series would eventually see print from the pioneering US small press Gryphon Books in limited paperback editions, and later by the Canadian Battered Silicon Dispatch Box small press in their hardcover Omnibus series.
This new Borgo Press paperback series will be the first trade edition of all twenty-one of these later novels by Fearn, beginning with the seventh novel in the original series. First published in 1949 as Conquest of the Amazon, I have edited it slightly as World Beneath Ice (The Golden Amazon Saga, Book One) so that it can be read and enjoyed by new readers who may be totally unfamiliar with what had gone before. Subsequent novels have also been slightly edited for modern readers.
The publishers hope that this new series may create many more “fans of the Amazon.” Meanwhile, any reader interested in seeking out the earlier six Golden Amazon novels will find that they are readily available on the internet, and in numerous earlier paperback and hardcover editions.
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To date, readers can enjoy the following new Borgo Press editions:
Book One: World Beneath Ice
In destroying the threat of an alien invasion, the Golden Amazon had inadvertently caused a decline in the sun’s heat, encasing Earth in an ice sheet that threatens to eliminate humanity. The Amazon encounters Abna, a descendant of Atlantis, stronger and even more scientifically advanced than she, and the ruler of an Atlantean colony still surviving in a protected environment on Jupiter. She refuses his offer of marriage, but agrees to form an alliance in order to restore the sun and save the Earth. One thing that Abna has not told the Amazon is that all the females of his race have been wiped out by a bacilli infection.…
Book Two: Lord of Atlantis
A gigantic ridge of land rises from the Atlantic floor, causing massive tidal waves on either side of the ocean. Even stranger, both England and America are then assailed by an invasion of prehistoric monsters! A gigantic domed city rests on the newly risen plateau, whilst out in space an alien spacecraft orbits the Earth. Such are the mysteries and challenges facing the Golden Amazon, self-appointed governess of Earth, as she struggles to unravel the maze of mystery that was the deadly legacy of Atlantis!
Book Three: Triangle of Power
The marriage of Violet Ray Brant—better known as The Golden Amazon—and Abna of Atlantis should have ushered in an era of peace and scientific prosperity to the people of Earth. But an unexpected turn of events finds Abna betrayed and marooned on a satellite of Jupiter, and the Amazon flung far beyond the Solar System. With Earth’s two protectors removed, the planet is now at the mercy of another Atlantean, the master scientist Sefner Quorne.…
Book Four: The Amethyst City
The metaphysical union of the Amazon and Abna results in the mental creation of a fully mature daughter—Viona. Quorne, still struggling for domination, forces Viona into a marriage ceremony, and impregnates her. But with the intervention of Tarnec Brodix, a super-mind from an external universe, Quorne and Viona are separately flung into an ultra-dimensional limbo. Abna chooses to follow after his daughter, leaving the Amazon to brood over the disaster, alone in the Amethyst City of Saturn.
Book Five: Daughter of the Amazon
A miscalculation by the super-mathematician Tarnec Brodix destroys his universe, and the fault spreads into the Earth universe in the form of a Dark Tide of Absolute Nothingness. Unable to save himself, Brodix transfers his knowledge into the one mind powerful enough to receive it: that if Sefian, the son who has been born to Viona and Quorne. Sefian rapidly evolves, and, no longer human, after saving the Earth universe, vanishes into the greater universe, to seek new challenges. Then the Amazon is confronted with a further puzzle—a large section of the planet Neptune is discovered to be an exact duplicate of the Earth!
Book Six: Quorne Returns
The bacterial intelligences of Neptune plan to conquer Earth by replacing humans in key positions with alien duplicates. The Neptunians are themselves subjugated by the sinister Atlantean scientist, Sefner Quorne. Alerted to the threat, the Golden Amazon hits back by creating the ultimate doomsday weapon—only to precipitate a reprisal from the denizens of another universe.…
Book Seven: The Central Intelligence
The Golden Amazon’s arch-enemy, Sefner Quorne, discovers that all mental gifts, such as memory and creativity, are something that is broadcast throughout the universe by a Central Intelligence—and then interpreted according to the quality of the individual brain of the recipient. At the surprising suggestion of his wife, Viona, the Amazon’s daughter, Quorne travels with her to the very center of the universe, in order to wrest the secrets of mentality from the very source itself!
Book Eight: The Cosmic Crusaders
The Golden Amazon renounces all ties with Earth when, together with her husband, Abna, and her daughter, Viona, she sets off on a journey to explore the cosmos. On the strange worlds of Alpha Centauri, she encounters Mizanu, the embodiment of evil—a planet-sized hypertrophied brain! Its baleful, crushing mental power threatens to reach out beyond the double-system of Alpha and Proxima Centauri to engulf the Earth and all the other inhabited planets of the galaxy—unless the Amazon can destroy it first!
Book Nine: Parasite Planet
The Cosmic Crusaders discover a fantastic world of mental parasites drawing form and substance from our own Earth, fifty light years distant. The planet is ruled by a being identical to the Golden Amazon herself—but an Amazon who’s coldly scientific and vicious, mirroring the original Amazon as she had once been early in her career. Inevitably, they become locked in a deadly duel—to the death!
Book Ten: World Out of Step
The Cosmic Crusaders find themselves on a planet that seems mysteriously not to conform with natural law, a world out of step with the universe. It leaps ahead into time at unexpected moments, thereby suddenly adding many years of age to the flower-like inhabitants, and killing tens of thousands of individuals through death and old age. In trying to find the alien menace responsible, The Golden Amazon and her fellow Crusaders are flung backwards and forwards through time and space, threatening their own survival.…
CHAPTER ONE
EMERGENCE
Here was the unbelievable. The highly trained scientific minds of the Golden Amazon of Earth, and her husband, Abna of Jupiter, were grappling with the completely unexpected—a vision such as they had never hoped to see; and now they did see it, they could not understand it.
The space machine in which they were traveling was nearly motionless. It hung in a lavender haze, an infinite space, in which there was no top or bottom. It extended to the limit of vision—and yet here and there were glittering stars, brightly scintillating points that suggested there were other worlds. Yet how could this be when occasionally across the vastness there marched the shadows of gigantic people—shadows so enormous that they plunged the space machine into eclipse every time they passed.
At last the Amazon stirred from the wonder of the view. She turned a face of phenomenal beauty and intelligence to the man beside her, and Abna, the seven-foot giant of Jupiter, merely shrugged.
“I don’t understand it, Vi,” he admitted. “We’ve been in lots of queer places, but never one like this.”
“There’s Viona’s space machine, anyway,” the Amazon said, nodding to the infinity.
“Yes.…”