Cover art by Barclay Shaw
Narabedla Ltd. is a science fiction novel by American writer Frederik Pohl, published by Ballantine Books in 1988. "Narabedla" is the name of the star Aldebaran written backwards.
Narabedla Ltd. is a science fiction novel by American writer Frederik Pohl, published by Ballantine Books in 1988. "Narabedla" is the name of the star Aldebaran written backwards.
Narabedla Ltd. is a corporation that is owned by aliens and run by their human agents. The main character is an accountant who specializes in doing the tax returns of singers, dancers, and other performers. He had been majoring in singing himself, with a minor in accounting, when he comes down with an adult case of mumps. Mumps makes one's glands swell. It can ruin a singing voice by making the glands in the throat swell and it can make a man's testes swell, rendering him impotent.
The main character notices some of his clients disappearing. Their disappearances follow a similar pattern. They are talented, but bad reviews or other kinds of bad luck have prevented them achieving full success. They experience a period of no gigs. They confide in the main character that they have signed mysterious contracts for a long, lucrative tour of private gigs. Then they disappear. What his clients are not aware of is that their tour will be for aliens, on alien planets.
The main character does some amateur detective work. He begins to suspect that the President of the mysterious Narabedla corporation is involved. He gets knocked out and wakes up on an alien planet dozens of light years away from Earth. His imprisonment is quite pleasant. There is a small community of Earth artists, some of whom are perfectly happy spending the rest of their lives performing before appreciative alien audiences. The main character decides that he will try to escape.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is a 1965 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1965. Like many of Dick's novels, it utilizes an array of science fiction concepts and explores the ambiguous slippage between reality and unreality. It is one of Dick's first works to explore religious themes.
A parallel universe, also known as a parallel dimension, alternate universe, or alternate reality, is a hypothetical self-contained plane of existence, co-existing with one's own. The sum of all potential parallel universes that constitute reality is often called a "multiverse".
John DeChancie is an American author. A Pittsburgh native, he is most famous for his comic fantasy Castle series, and his science fiction Skyway series. He is currently engaged in writing screenplays, teleplays, and prose fiction.
This Island Earth is a 1955 American science fiction film from Universal-International, produced by William Alland, directed by Joseph M. Newman and Jack Arnold, starring Jeff Morrow, Faith Domergue and Rex Reason. It is based on the eponymous 1952 novel by Raymond F. Jones, which was originally published in the magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories as three related novelettes: "The Alien Machine" in the June 1949 issue, "The Shroud of Secrecy" in December 1949, and "The Greater Conflict" in February 1950. The film was released in 1955 as a double feature with Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy.
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Tracker is a 2001 Canadian science fiction television series starring Adrian Paul and Amy Price-Francis. The series is based on a short story by Gil Grant and Jeannine Renshaw. The pilot episode and two other episodes were edited into the film Alien Tracker.
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