The Custodians tells of a visitor to a French monastery, and of one specially built tiny room which is constructed precisely on the intersection of mysterious force fields, so that anyone who enters is able to foresee the future. Paradise Beach is the story of a wall-screen whose image of the sea attunes itself to the individual perceptions of the onlooker. Piper at the Gates of Dawn is set towards the end of the next millennium when the stories about the coming of the mysterious white bird of kinship become associated with the travels of an old story-teller and his young nephew, whose pipe seems to have a magical quality. Finally, The Hertford Manuscript tells of the remarkable discovery of a seventeenth-century book with some pages purporting to be the journals of a nineteenth-century time traveller.

When Jimmy Haverill, an assistant lecturer at Hampton University, meets Dr Dumpkenhoffer, Head of the newly-founded Parapsychology Research Department, he is unaware that the meeting is to divert the whole course of his life. Haverill’s involvement in the Doctor’s experiments follows so naturally, so casually that it seems impossible for him to conceive that the matter might have been, in some inexplicable manner, preordained. But as he becomes more deeply involved with the Doctor and with the psychic prodigy Rachel Bernstein, he finds the university becoming ever less substantial and himself “moving about in worlds not realized”, an unwitting focal point of forces beamed into the future from beyond the dawn of history. As those forces threaten to break loose and engulf him, dream metamorphoses into nightmare and the protagonists discover themselves to be the pawns in a game of destiny played out a million years ago.In its penetrating exploration of the twilit hinterland of E.S.P. and Psi, Breakthrough makes a unique contribution to the literature of Science Fiction, and introduces a writer who has already made his name in more orthodox fields.

Tom Jones is naïve, impressionable and very, very willing. His chief talent is conversing with dolphins in the Aquatic Mammals Division of HMS Profundis, a gargantuan submarine destined to roam the ocean depths for a century following the nuclear holocaust.Years pass and mad captain succeeds mad captain. Eventually the ship falls under the command of one Admiral Prood, a kind, understanding man who finally comes to a startling conclusion. He is God the Father. The Almighty Himself. And all he needs now is a son to sit at his right hand.Enter the innocent Tom Jones.

Alvin is a clone. One of four, all raised separately, all with unnatural powers. Terrified by their potential, their creator attempts to wipe their recent memories, their knowledge of the talents. But the process goes wrong, and all four are left with no memory at all. They see the world with brand new eyes.Sent to a remote research station, kept under the guidance of an intelligent ape, Alvin begins to recover his memories. Desperate to rediscover his brothers, he sets off to London in a desperate search for their creator. But when he is kidnapped by criminal apes, the trouble really begins.

Mel was different from other Roamers. He was always asking questions: Why are men forbidden from the upper Levels? What is “Outside”? What is the difference between Roamers and Plants? Why are man’s numbers shrinking? The answer was always “Godswill” But who was God, and where did he get his authority?Mel’s boldness and curiosity drove him to learn more and more about his perfectly ordered but strangely unbalanced subterranean world. Eventually, he and his wife, his sister and brother-in-law, and his faithful partner become refugees in the Outside, where they are befriended by an alien anthropologist and pursued by a mechanical intelligence whose nature and goals they could hardly grasp.Richard Cowper has written a fast-paced story of adventure, suspense and the unfathomed powers of the mind, set against a background of a computer-dominated 42nd-century Earth.