From the pages of UK comic Valiant - a series of amazing text stories featuring the strangest hero of all time! Accidental exposure to a form of natural radiation had caused scientist Jason Hyde's eyes to turn colourless and emit blue rays which gave him the power to see through solid objects and to read the thoughts of human beings. Hyde has dedicated his life to investigating strange phenomena and protecting the world from all manner of abnormal threats! From giant sentient spiders to a warlike race of subterranean humanoids, Jason Hyde is the Earth's only hope!

Cheyne Scarne was a gambler... and he took the big plunge when he bet his life to get to the inner circle of the Grand Wheel. Because the Wheel was the ultimate Syndicate - the final Mafia - that controlled all that was illegal in all the planets under human control. But Cheyne was not to know whether he had won or lost when he gained his point. Because the Wheel had plans for him. And they made him the historic offer he could not refuse. There was, it seemed, a similar gambling combine in the rest of the galaxy, bigger by far than the little group of stars held by Earthlings. And the Wheel wanted a cut in this. So Cheyne Scarne found himself selected to be humanity's own player in a game in which nobody knew the value of the cards and the rules of the game were infinitely variable!

Cheyne Scarne was a gambler... and he took the big plunge when he bet his life to get to the inner circle of the Grand Wheel. Because the Wheel was the ultimate Syndicate - the final Mafia - that controlled all that was illegal in all the planets under human control. But Cheyne was not to know whether he had won or lost when he gained his point. Because the Wheel had plans for him. And they made him the historic offer he could not refuse. There was, it seemed, a similar gambling combine in the rest of the galaxy, bigger by far than the little group of stars held by Earthlings. And the Wheel wanted a cut in this. So Cheyne Scarne found himself selected to be humanity's own player in a game in which nobody knew the value of the cards and the rules of the game were infinitely variable!

Karl Krabbe and Boris Bouche, partners, explorers, interstellar chancers, don't care much for the law. They don't care much for anything -- except profit. Their staff bondman nuclear engineer, Roncie Northrop, doesn't care much about anything either, except that he's already tried to abscond from the control of the rapacious and illegally operating pair once. good business opportunity. Tenacity is waterless, a desert planet. But it had water once, and they realize that with some adroit but spectacular geological engineering it can be given its oceans back. That suits the dominant lobster-like Tlixix fine. They are tired of living like aliens in their domed refuges. Of course, the numerous intelligent species which have evolved since the great dehydration will perish, but so what? but what can he do? He's only a bondman. Krabbe & Bouche strike a deal, and business is business...

The Sinners of Erspia are the inhabitants of a bizarre world, ruled and guided by the hands of Ormazd and Ahriman, twin gods of good and evil. Histrina, a child of Ormazd, is taken by the evil hordes to a world of terror where she meets Laedo, a man stranded far from his home. Together they start on a hallucinatory journey to understand and to escape from the surreal world that holds them prisoner. This is a novel about the susceptibility of the human mind and how it adapts to the extremes of terror and delight. A novel that could only have escaped from the astounding imagination of Barrington Bayley. "Bayley is the zen master of modern science fiction." -- Bruce Sterling "The most original SF writer of his generation." -- Michael Moorcock