Quorne Returns. John Russell Fearn
move the Amazon further 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 Sefnor 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!
CHAPTER ONE
QUORNE TAKES OVER
The slim man with the jet-black hair and heliotrope-colored eyes stood thinking. Then he began to inspect his dusty uniform, marked from the moment he had been thrown in the dust by the superwoman, the Golden Amazon of Earth. He smiled a little as he began to move.
A chance traveler through the Solar System who had lost his planetary bearings would have declared upon landing upon a particular portion of this planet that he was on Earth—but he would have been mistaken. Here was the planet Neptune, last of the outermost giants and a world of surprises.
Here existed the bacteria race of high intelligence, originally born in the poisonous wastes of Uranus, whose amazing powers of adaptability made them capable of assuming any form by electrical processes. Here on this distant world existed a duplicate of conditions reigning on Earth, even to the extent of vast numbers of its inhabitants being ‘carbon copied’ to resemble the originals.
Here, too, existed a man who was the greatest menace the Solar System had ever known, a man believed to be dead—Sefner Quorne of Jupiter.
Quorne left the spaceport where he had his final unsuccessful brush with the Golden Amazon, her husband Abna of Jupiter, and their daughter Viona. He walked through streets that were indistinguishable from those of futuristic London, and concluded his journey at the gigantic edifice duplicating the one in normal London from where there was administered government.
Head of the government of this mystery world of Neptune was Dral, looking exactly like an Earthman since he was patterned after one. He also looked to be in an extremely bad temper when Sefner Quorne was shown into his big private office.
“Well, captain, what have you to say for yourself?” Dral demanded bitterly, using his own language. “You, the captain of the guard, allowed those three captives to escape! Why didn’t you order an immediate corps of space machines to pursue them?”
“Because it would have been useless,” Sefner Quorne replied calmly. “The Golden Amazon used every scrap of energy which her spaceship, the Ultra, possessed, and that meant they flew into the void at a speed infinitely greater than any pursuers could stand.”
“You seem to have forgotten,” Dral snapped, “how dangerous they can be now they’ve escaped. This secret territory of ours on this far-flung planet will be secret no longer.”
“Correct,” Quorne admitted. “Had I known those three people had arrived here, I might have been able to warn you against the impossibility of holding them. Their science and mental powers sets them in a class apart.”
“They are only Earth people.”
“You are mistaken, Dral. The Golden Amazon alone is Earth-born, and she became a superwoman both physically and mentally because of a scientist’s experiment when she was an infant. As for her husband Abna, he was formerly the ruler of Jupiter, and his strength and intelligence outclass even those of his wife. Viona, the younger woman, is the product of both of them, and she was not born in the normal material way. She is the product of unified intellects and pure scientific conception. There,” Quorne finished, “you face danger, Dral, as I have good reason to know.”
“You! A captain of my defence guard! Don’t be ridiculous.”
Quorne smiled coldly. “You believe I am that. You believe I am one of your own bacterial race who has taken on the pattern of an Earth being?”
“I know you are, because I was present in the laboratory when you assumed your present identity. We came here because our own world was too limiting. You know that