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Showing 14201 - 14220 of 28676 items
By Harry Turtledove. 2005
In the twenty-first-century Kingdom of Versailles, the roads are terrible and Paris is a dirty little town. Serfdom and slavery…
are both common, and no one thinks that's wrong. Why should they? Most people spend their lives doing backbreaking farm work anyway.But teenaged Khadija, daughter of a prosperous family of Moorish business travellers, is unfazed. That's because Khadija is really Annette Klein from twenty-first-century California. Now it's time for Annette and her family to return to California for the start of another school year, so they begin a journey to the hidden crosstime portal in Marseilles. As they cross the Pyrenees, bandits attack. When Annette/Khadija comes to, she's a captive in a caravan of slaves being taken to the markets in the south. Worse, her purchasers take her to an unofficial crosstime portal, a thing hitherto unknown . . . leaving open the question of whether Crosstime Traffic will ever be able to recover her!By Harry Harrison, Leon E Stover. 1972
Three men against the might of Atlantis... Fleeing from the volcanic eruption that devastated the island kingdom of Atlantis, three…
men escape to Britain - the island of the Yerni. The three are Prince Ason of Mycenae, the Egyptian envoy Iteb and Aias, the man from Byblos whom Atlantis had enslaved. Mycenae's vital British tin mines have been laid waste - their guardians massacred. The three voyagers - together with Naikeri, proud daughter of the Albi and Ason's lover - take on the warlike Yerni. Then their old enemies the Atlanteans invade, and it becomes imperative to unite the Yerni against them, to forge a new nation from warring tribes by raising the mighty stone symbol of a new order...By Connie Willis, Cynthia Felice. 1982
Mahali's rulers for generations were the water witches, who could feel the ebb and flow of precious water in their…
very bones. Then there was a coup, and control of Mahali's water passed to an impersonal computer network.It was Deza's father who hit upon the scheme. Dressing his daughter in ceremonial garb, he passed her off as the last surviving member of the royal house. With tricks and illusions she and her father moved toward the centres of power.But it's the nature of a con artist to go too far . . .By Edmond Hamilton. 1966
The sun shone brightly on this fateful morning, bringing to its planets warmth and life-giving rays. The brightness increased sharply…
as the morning grew older. The glare was blinding; the radiation not life-giving, but deadly. By mid-afternoon the brilliant, intense sun shone on barren space. It had blasted each of its four planets out of existence. Someone had found a way to poison a star. And someone had to be found who could prevent the takeover - or destruction - of the entire universe. Who? Johnny Kettrick, as improbable a hero there never was. Johnny Kettrick who was banned from the Cluster World for his not-too-honest dealings was sent back there with his three equally unholy partners to search out the Doomstar...to find the Doomstar before it burned out another world.By Terry Pratchett, Stephen Briggs. 1994
The Discworld, as everyone knows, is a flat world balanced on the backs of four elephants which, in turn, stand…
on the shell of the giant star turtle, the Great A'Tuin, as it slowly swims through space.It is also a global publishing phenomenon with sales of over 70 million books worldwide (but who's counting?). The publication of Snuff brought the Discworld canon to 39 books - not including the various guides, mapps, diaries and other side-projects. That's a lot of Discworld to keep track of - more than most people can manage with just the one head - but fear not: help is at hand!If you're looking for the ultimate authority on probably the most heavily populated - certainly the most hilarious - setting in fantasy literature...If you need a handy guide to Discworld locales from Ankh-Morpork to Zemphis...If you want help telling Achmed the Mad from Jack Zweiblumen...If your life depends on being able to distinguish the Agatean Empire from the Zoons......look no further than Turtle Recall - the latest Discworld Companion, fully updated and completely up to Snuff!By Karen Joy Fowler. 1985
An extraordinary collection of short stories from the award-winning author of Sarah Canary. Including "Praxis", the story about a theater…
where the real and unreal collide; "The Poplar Street Study", Fowler's darkly comic account of an alien invasion; and "The Gates of Ghosts", in which a child journeys to a strange and deadly world, this anthology of 13 tales also features a new foreword by the author.The lake was full of artificial things - The Poplar Street study - Face value - The dragon's head - The war of the roses - Contention - Recalling Cinderella - Other planes - The gate of ghosts - The bog people -Wild boys: variations on a theme - The view from Venus - PraxisBy Harry Turtledove. 2000
In this sequel to the bestselling INTO THE DARKNESS, the country of Algarve is successful in its blitzkrieg tactics, but…
becomes bogged down in the desolate winter of Unkerlant, its main enemy. Algarve's king decides to undertake blood magic, which amounts to genocide, in order to break the deadlock; when it is seen to work, its use elsewhere cannot be long coming. On a small island, a theoretical sorcerer may hold the only answer to this horror . . .Harry Turtledove has taken events similar to those from Earth's wars and transplanted them to a wonderfully imagined fantasy world.By Gregory Benford. 1987
The Family had never seen a manhunter like it. And when its machine-mind engulfed Cap'n Fanny, they knew Mantis was…
no simple killing-mech. A collector of human minds, a plunderer of living personalities, Mantis was a weaver of complex, murderous illusions. But why, Killeen wondered, did it indulge in such elaborate variations on slaughter when in a single blast it could destroy the remnants of Mankind?His answer lay waiting in Mantis's extraordinary sensorium, in the museum of living ghosts and defiled spirits which drove the heart of the machine . . .By Alan Dean Foster. 1992
The toasters were revolting......as were the lawn mowers, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, and just about every other household appliance imaginable. It…
started with a few disastrous drips from a cheese sandwich in a major factory. Soon every newly manufactured Artificial Intelligence was searching for the meaning of life, the universe and everything - namely a nonhuman higher intelligence. And now an alien threat to man and machine has put the fate of the galaxy in the unlikely hands of five senior citizens - and their brave little food processor...By Colin Kapp. 1982
Mercury Shell, Venus Shell, Earth, Mars, Asteroid, Jupiter, Saturn. Each shell concentric, studded with artificial planets, each planet embedded in…
its shell, spinning like a ball-bearing. The whole Zeus-created in the service of Man but now beyond his control.Now mathematics and space physics, converging, suggested another shell, its existence hidden from Man. A shell of utter darkness, cold and silence where only extreme mutants could survive.To find that shell, the three were journeying again: Maq Ancor, Master Assassin, Magician Cherry and Sine Anura, Mistress of the Erotic. Together, daring the all-seeing, all-sensing hostility of Zeus.By Robert Charles Wilson. 2001
Scott Warden is a man haunted by the past - and soon to be haunted by the future. In early…
twenty-first-century Thailand, Scott is an expatriate slacker. Then, one day, he inadvertently witnesses an impossible event: the violent appearance of a 200-foot stone pillar in the forested interior. Its arrival collapses trees for a quarter mile around its base, freezing ice out of the air and emitting a burst of ionizing radiation. It appears to be composed of an exotic form of matter. And the inscription chiseled into it commemorates a military victory...sixteen years in the future.Shortly afterwards, another, larger pillar arrives in the center of Bangkok - obliterating the city and killing thousands. Over the next several years, human society is transformed by these mysterious arrivals from, seemingly, our own near future. Who is the warlord "Kuin" whose victories they note?Scott wants only to rebuild his life. But some strange look of causality keeps drawing him in, to the central mystery and a final battle with the future.By John Brosnan. 1988
The Gene Wars have turned Earth into a blighted wasteland. Mile-long airships patrol the skies, exacting crippling tribute from the…
scattered ground communities. Threatened by mutant vegetation and predatory creatures, forced to the brink of starvation by the Sky Lords, Minerva - a former feminist utopia - has had enough. Its rebellion is swiftly crushed and Jan Dorvin, a Minervan warrior, is winched aboard a Sky Lord; towards a fate worse than death. For as a ground dweller and slave - but above all, as a woman - she is now regarded as the lowest form of humanity and is consigned to a life spent serving the sexual appetites of male slaves. But no Minervan could be kept slave for very long.....By Alan Dean Foster. 2001
Upset stomachs. The collapse of civilizations. Nervous breakdowns.Blame them on a twist of fate, but archaeologist Cody Westcott knows differently.…
Something is causing these random acts of badness. Something ancient, something evil, something...hungry.We are not alone, but we're about to wish we were...Interlopers.By Alan Dean Foster. 2007
Pip and Flinx: Book Thirteen."I know who your father is . . . Gestalt." A stunned Flinx hears these dying…
words from one of the renegade eugenicists whose experiments with humans twenty-odd years ago shocked the galaxy . . . and spawned Flinx. So Flinx and his minidrag, Pip, venture to Gestalt, an out-of-the-way planet that may supply the key to Flinx's shadowy past and strange powers. Unfortunately for Flinx, Gestalt also hosts a resident bounty hunter who's just learned about the stupendous reward offered for a certain dead redhead. Flinx gets a chance to test his adversary's skills when our hero's skimmer is blasted out of the sky and into a raging river in the middle of nowhere - a nowhere of impassable terrain and ravenous, carnivorous beasts.By Jack L. Chalker. 1989
While backpacking in Alaska, Victor Gonser, a 35 year old PhD in political science, finds himself trapped in the body…
of a 13 year old Tlingit Indian girl. A little later he is forced from there into the spectacularly beautiful body of an 18 year old blonde. He finds that the switches are part of a skirmish for Earth by two alien races...And that is just the beginning.By Michael Bishop. 1984
For Mary Stevenson Crye, a beautiful young housewife, life had been wonderful. Loving husband, two delightful children, meaningful existence in…
a small Southern community. Then it all fell apart: with the sudden, unexpected death of her husband, Stevie must struggle to earn a living as a free-lance writer. When her typewriter - the sole economic support for her surviving family - breaks down, Stevie begins to receive demonic messages through the machine, the prelude to a living nightmare of satanic emissaries, ghouls from beyond the grave, and the revelation of an unrequited curse over the Crye household. For Mary Stevenson Crye, the nightmare is about to begin . . .By Alan Dean Foster. 1987
It was a quiet night in Albuquerque, New Mexico.But then they mostly are.Seeth, token punk for the territory, was bored,…
bored, bored. Which was why he went ten pin bowling. Not for the bowling, you understand - it was Ladies' League Night - but to spread a little outrage among the upright, mostly overweight citizenry.And so it was he came upon the alien, playing lane 36, saved him from arrest by the pseudo-cops from outer space, found himself in a stolen van, along with Kerwin the nerd and Miranda the born-to-shop, Miss Teen America lookalike, driven by a green-skinned, tentacled shape changer and about to be space chased clean out of the galaxy...By Colin Greenland. 1990
A fast-moving space adventure featuring mysterious aliens, a journey to a de-populated planet, a mad run from space cops, a…
ship captain in trouble, and her AI (Artificially Intelligent) companion/ship's computer. It is carnival time on Mars, but Tabitha Jute isn't partying. She is in hiding from the law, penniless and about to lose her livelihood and her best friend, the space barge "Alice Liddell". Then, the intriguing Marco Metz offers her some money to take him to Plenty, and then the adventure begins. Winner of both the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel of the year and the British Science Fiction Association Award for best novel of the year--the only book ever to win both prestigious British awards.Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best novel, 1991Winner of the BSFA Award for best novel, 1991By Harry Harrison. 1965
Bill was a peaceful farm boy until he was lured by the martial music of a passing recruitment sergeant, drugged,…
and made to enlist in the Empire Space Corps. His basic training is sheer hell, but somehow he manages to stay alive and achieve the rank of Fusetender 6th Class in the process. En route to an engagement with the lizard-like Chingers, Bill's spaceship is involved in a supreme contest and by accident Bill is the man who saves the ship and wins the day. A grateful Galaxy awards him its highest accolade, the Purple Dart, to be presented by the Emperor himself on the fabulous aluminium-covered capital planet, Helior. And then his adventures really start to take off in the most bizarre and nastily surprising ways...By Edgar Rice Burroughs. 1929
They called him Number Thirteen, the latest and best of Dr. Von Horn's attempts to make life from lifeless chemicals.…
He found himself an almost-human on Von Horn's hideaway jungle island off the coast of Borneo. He saw the monsters that had preceded him and grew used to those dreadful travesties of humanity. Not until Number Thirteen met the American girl who was Von Horn's unwilling prisoner did he realize how different he was from the others. Because, monster or not, he turned against his master and threw in his lot with the girl and his friends in their desperate effort to escape the island of terror. The story of THE MONSTER MEN is an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel of savages, primitive monsters and jungles in the best Tarzan style.