An SF Gateway eBook: bringing the classics to the future.
It began with a few small items in the newspapers - dead dogs and cats, a mutilated child, a series of unexplained fires. Then suddenly it exploded into a full sized catastrophe.
Huge mutants - half rat, half man - began to take over the world, stealing children for slaves and destroying their populations.
Only a few people escaped, among them Tim Barrett, his wife Jane, and a handful of survivors. Alone on the high seas in a small ship, they set off to find the island where Dr. Theodore Piper had been experimenting with a sonic death ray.
They knew Dr. Piper was their only hope for personal and world survival - if he was still alive... if the King Rats hadn't forced him to serve their evil purpose... and if he could find a way to stop the spreading horror of invasion.
A. Bertram Chandler (1912-1984)
Arthur Bertram Chandler was a British-Australian science fiction author born in Aldershot, England in 1912. He sailed the world in everything from tramp steamers to troop transports and emigrated to Australia in 1956, where he commanded merchant ships under Australian and New Zealand flags until his retirement in 1975. Chandler's first published work was "This Means War!" for Astounding in May 1944 and he concentrated on short fiction for nearly two decades, often writing under various pseudonyms. He won the Ditmar Award four times and the A Bertram Chandler Award for lifetime achievement in sf in Australia has been presented in his memory since 1992.