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Showing 1 - 18 of 18 items
By David Lubar. 2003
Eighth-grader Taylor and her twin brother, Ryan, are complete opposites. So when trouble-making Ryan discovers mysterious alien disks that enable…
him to become legends from the past--Babe Ruth, Albert Einstein, and others--Taylor tries to keep him out of trouble. For grades 5-8. 2003By Isaac Asimov. 1994
Arguably the greatest science fiction writer who ever lived, Isaac Asimov also possessed one of the most brilliant and original…
minds of our time. His accessible style and far-reaching interests in subjects ranging from science to humor to history earned him the nickname "the Great Explainer. "I. Asimovis his personal story--vivid, open, and honest--as only Asimov himself could tell it. Here is the story of the paradoxical genius who wrote of travel to the stars yet refused to fly in airplanes; who imagined alien universes and vast galactic civilizations while staying home to write; who compulsively authored more than 470 books yet still found the time to share his ideas with some of the great minds of our century. Here are his wide-ranging thoughts and sharp-eyed observations on everything from religion to politics, love and divorce, friendship and Hollywood, fame and mortality. Here, too, is a riveting behind-the-scenes look at the varied personalities--Campbell, Ellison, Heinlein, Clarke, del Rey, Silverberg, and others--who along with Asimov helped shape science fiction. As unique and irrepressible as the man himself,I. Asimov is the candid memoir of an incomparable talent who entertained readers for nearly half a century and whose work will surely endure into the future he so vividly envisioned.By Jad Smith. 2012
Under his own name and numerous pseudonyms, John Brunner (1934-1995) was one of the most prolific and influential science fiction…
authors of the late twentieth century. During his exemplary career, the British author wrote with a stamina matched by only a few other great science fiction writers and with a literary quality of even fewer, importing modernist techniques into his novels and stories and probing every major theme of his generation: robotics, racism, drugs, space exploration, technological warfare, and ecology. In this first intensive review of Brunner's life and works, Jad Smith carefully demonstrates how Brunner's much-neglected early fiction laid the foundation for his classic Stand on Zanzibar and other major works such as The Jagged Orbit, The Sheep Look Up, and The Shockwave Rider. Making extensive use of Brunner's letters, columns, speeches, and interviews published in fanzines, Smith approaches Brunner in the context of markets and trends that affected many writers of the time, including Brunner's uneasy association with the "New Wave" of science fiction in the 1960s and '70s. This landmark study shows how Brunner's attempts to cross-fertilize the American pulp tradition with British scientific romance complicated the distinctions between genre and mainstream fiction and between hard and soft science fiction and helped carve out space for emerging modes such as cyberpunk, slipstream, and biopunk.By Ursula K. Le Guin, David Streitfeld. 2019
“Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.” —Ursula K. Le Guin…
When she began writing in the 1960s, Ursula K. Le Guin was as much of a literary outsider as one can be: a woman writing in a landscape dominated by men, a science fiction and fantasy author in an era that dismissed “genre” literature as unserious, and a westerner living far from fashionable East Coast publishing circles. The interviews collected here—spanning a remarkable forty years of productivity, and covering everything from her Berkeley childhood to Le Guin envisioning the end of capitalism—highlight that unique perspective, which conjured some of the most prescient and lasting books in modern literature.Today the names of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and Clark Ashton Smith, all regular contributors to…
the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the first half of the twentieth century, are recognizable even to casual readers of the bizarre and fantastic. And yet despite being more popular than them all during the golden era of genre pulp fiction, there is another author whose name and work have fallen into obscurity: Seabury Quinn.Quinn’s short stories were featured in well more than half of Weird Tales’s original publication run. His most famous character, the supernatural French detective Dr. Jules de Grandin, investigated cases involving monsters, devil worshippers, serial killers, and spirits from beyond the grave, often set in the small town of Harrisonville, New Jersey. In de Grandin there are familiar shades of both Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, and alongside his assistant, Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, de Grandin’s knack for solving mysteries-and his outbursts of peculiar French-isms (grand Dieu!)-captivated readers for nearly three decades.Collected for the first time in trade editions, The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, edited by George Vanderburgh, presents all ninety-three published works featuring the supernatural detective. Presented in chronological order over five volumes, this is the definitive collection of an iconic pulp hero. The first volume, The Horror on the Links, includes all of the Jules de Grandin stories from "The Horror on the Links” (1925) to "The Chapel of Mystic Horror” (1928), as well as an introduction by George Vanderburgh and Robert Weinberg.As you ride down the intergalactic bike path, you come to a crossroads. Which path will you take? Your choice…
could determine your future, or the future of all humanity, forever. These twelve stories explore a variety of intersections set in distant, outlandish, or disturbingly realistic futures and dimensions—all involving bicycles and the breaking of gender stereotypes. A bicycle race spans a rift between worlds. A teenager learns a valuable lesson from her prepper mom. A young fruit seller gets closer to her dream of becoming an astronaut. An overwhelmed mom finds unexpected solace at a bicycle collective. And much more! Contributors include Tuere T.S. Ganges, Gretchin Lair, Ayame Whitfield, Julia K. Patt, Elly Bangs, Osahon Ize-Iyamu, Monique Cuillerier, Kat Lerner, Hella Grichi, and Summer Jewel Keown, with illustrations by Elly Bangs and Paul Abbamondi.By Sergio De La Pava. 2018
"Ambitious, affecting, intelligent, plangent, comic, kooky and impassioned. I've read a lot of novels this year, between judging the Man…
Booker prize and the Granta Best of Young British Novelists, and I've yearned for this kind of exuberant, precise fiction" Stuart Kelly, Guardian on A Naked SingularityIt would take something huge to put Paterson, New Jersey on the map.But Nina Gill is determined to do just that. She is the daughter of the ageing owner of the Dallas Cowboys and the well-kept secret to their success. Shocked when her brother inherits the team, leaving her with the Paterson Pork, New Jersey's only Indoor Football League franchise, she vows to take on the N.F.L. and make her new team the pigskin kings of America.Meanwhile, Nuno DeAngeles - a brilliant criminal mastermind - contrives to be thrown into Rikers Island prison to commit one of the most audacious crimes of all time. Now he's on the inside, he has two good reasons to get out. But how does a person of culture go about breaking out of the penal system when the whole of the land of the free is addicted to keeping him in it?Without knowing it, or ever having met, Nina and Nuno have already had a profound effect on each other's lives. As his bid for freedom and her bid for sporting immortality reach crisis point, their stories converge in the countdown to an epic conclusion. Thrilling, touching, insightful and shockingly hilarious, De La Pava's extraordinary novel gets under the skin and into the minds of a vast cast of characters from the fringes of society - immigrants, exiles and outsiders.By Dean Koontz. 1976
A desperate struggle for survival... Set in the Arctic icefields, Dean Koontz's Icebound is a compelling thriller that delivers icy…
chills. Perfect for fans of Harlan Coben and Richard Laymon. 'Jammed with the tensions of imminent disaster. The whole thing unfolds with the timing of a quartz watch' - Chicago TribuneA widespread drought is causing murderous famine. There is one possible solution: Arctic ice could be moved south to parched coastlines and melted for water. In an Arctic icefield, a special team of scientists have planted bombs that will detonate automatically at midnight to break away some of the ice. Before they withdraw to the safety of their base camp, a shattering tidal wave breaks loose the ice on which they are working. Now they are marooned on an iceberg during the worst winter storm of the decade. The bombs in the ice beneath them are buried irretrievably deep... and ticking. Abruptly thrown into a desperate struggle for survival, the scientists are plagued by the discovery that one of them is a ruthless killer on a strange mission of his own... What readers are saying about Icebound: 'The thrilling chain of events that follows, in the race to disarm all the explosives, is positively gripping''The plot unfurls with a frozen precision that grips you with its icy fingers, always intriguing, always willing you to guess what comes next''I read this book in one sitting. Just could not put it down. Can Koontz get any better?'By L. Sprague DeCamp, P. Schuyler Miller. 1950
Twenty-five men and women against a world of evolution gone mad!Here is the vivid story of their adventures and terrors…
- the monster in the forest - the city of giant beavers - and the secret of the incredible race that had supplanted mankind.By Jack Vance. 2009
Jack Vance has long been one of the most influential, admired and imitated writers in science fiction and fantasy literature,…
the award-winning author of such widely acclaimed works as The Dying Earth, the Lyonesse trilogy, the adventures of Cugel the Clever, the Demon Princes series, and many other masterful tales set among the stars, in exotic fantasy realms or on our own Earth.For much of his career, Vance has also been one of the field's most private writers, an author who preferred to let his work speak for him. Now, at last, to coincide with the release of the tribute anthology Songs of the Dying Earth, Jack gives us this intimate and fascinating glimpse into his rich and eventful life, and a valuable insight into how he went about practicing his craft.For fans of the Grand Master's work, these memoirs are something to be treasured.By L. Sprague DeCamp. 1992
Time and Chance is the autobiography of Hugo, World Fantasy and SFWA Grand Master Award-winning author, L. Sprague de Camp.…
It is a fascinating insight into a man who began writing in the late 1930's and remained an active voice in the genre up until his death in the last year of the twentieth century, and who was a prime mover in the formation of the fields of Science Fiction and Fantasy as we know them today.By Philip K. Dick. 2011
Based on thousands of pages of typed and handwritten notes, journal entries, letters, and story sketches, The Exegesis of Philip…
K. Dick is the magnificent and imaginative final work of an author who dedicated his life to questioning the nature of reality and perception, the malleability of space and time, and the relationship between the human and the divine. Edited and introduced by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, this will be the definitive presentation of Dick's brilliant, and epic, final work. In The Exegesis, Dick documents his eight-year attempt to fathom what he called "2-3-74", a postmodern visionary experience of the entire universe "transformed into information". In entries that sometimes ran to hundreds of pages, Dick tried to write his way into the heart of a cosmic mystery that tested his powers of imagination and invention to the limit, adding to, revising, and discarding theory after theory, mixing in dreams and visionary experiences as they occurred, and pulling it all together in three late novels known as the VALIS trilogy. In this abridgment, Jackson and Lethem serve as guides, taking the reader through the Exegesis and establishing connections with moments in Dick's life and work.By Charlotte Wood. 2015
'Savage: think Atwood in the outback' Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train'An unforgettable reading experience' Liane Moriarty,…
author of Big Little Lies'Ferocious... recalls the early Elena Ferrante' NPR'A masterpiece' Guardian'Devastating' EconomistShe hears her own thick voice deep inside her ears when she says, 'I need to know where I am.'The man stands there, tall and narrow, hand still on the doorknob, surprised.He says, almost in sympathy, 'Oh, sweetie. You need to know what you are.'"Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in a brokendownproperty in the middle of a desert.Strangers to each other, they have no idea where they are or how they came to be therewith eight other girls, their heads shaved, guarded by two inept yet vicious jailers.Doing hard labour under a sweltering sun, the prisoners soon learn what links them: ineach girl's past is a sexual scandal with a powerful man.They pray for rescue but as the hours turn into days and the days into weeks and months,it becomes clear only the girls can rescue themselves. Winner, 2016 Stella PrizeWinner, 2016 Indie Book of the Year AwardWinner, Fiction Book of the Year, 2016 Indie Book AwardWinner, 2016 Prime Minister's Literary Award for FictionWinner, Reader's Choice, 2016 ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year Shortlisted, 2016 Miles Franklin Literary AwardShortlisted, 2016 ABA Nielsen BookData Booksellers Choice AwardLonglisted, 2017 International Dublin Literary AwardBy Agnieszka Gajewska. 2022
This book is a groundbreaking study of one of the greatest science fiction writers, the Polish master Stanisław Lem. It…
offers a new direction in research on his oeuvre and corrects several errors commonly appearing in his biographies. The author painstakingly recreates the context of Lem’s early life and his traumatic experiences during the Second World War due to his Jewish background, and then traces these through original and brilliant readings of his fiction and non-fiction. She considers language, worldbuilding, themes, motifs and characterization as well as many buried allusions to the Holocaust in Lem’s published and archival work, and uses these fragments to capture a different side of Lem than previously known. The book discusses various issues concerning the writer’s life, such as his upbringing in a Jewish, Zionist-minded family, the extensive relations between the Lem family and the elite of Lviv at that time, details of the Lem family killed during the German occupation and attempts to reconstruct what happened to Lem’s parents and to the writer himself after escaping the ghetto. Part of the Studies in Global Genre Fiction series, this English translation of the Polish original, which has already been considered a milestone in Lem studies, offers a fresh perspective on the writer and his work. It will be an important intervention for scholars and researchers of Jewish studies, Holocaust literature, science fiction studies, English literature, world war studies, minority studies, popular culture, history and cultural studies.By Brian Herbert. 2023
Everyone knows Frank Herbert's Dune. This science fiction epic combines politics human evolution and ecology and has captured the imagination…
of generations of readers. It is one of the most popular science fiction novels ever written, has won awards, sold millions of copies around the world and spawned multiple motion-picture adaptations. Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert's eldest son, tells the provocative story of his father's extraordinary life in this honest and loving chronicle. He has also brought to light all the events in Herbert's life that would find their way into speculative fiction's greatest epic. From his early years in Tacoma, Washington, through his time at university and in the Navy, to the difficult years of poverty while struggling to become a published writer, Herbert worked long and hard before finding success after the publication of Dune in 1965. Brian Herbert writes about these years with a truthful intensity that brings every facet of his father's brilliant, and sometimes troubled, genius to full light. Insightful and provocative, this absorbing biography offers Brian Herbert's unique personal perspective on one of the most enigmatic and creative talents of our time.By Brian Herbert. 2023
Everyone knows Frank Herbert's Dune. This science fiction epic combines politics human evolution and ecology and has captured the imagination…
of generations of readers. It is one of the most popular science fiction novels ever written, has won awards, sold millions of copies around the world and spawned multiple motion-picture adaptations. Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert's eldest son, tells the provocative story of his father's extraordinary life in this honest and loving chronicle. He has also brought to light all the events in Herbert's life that would find their way into speculative fiction's greatest epic. From his early years in Tacoma, Washington, through his time at university and in the Navy, to the difficult years of poverty while struggling to become a published writer, Herbert worked long and hard before finding success after the publication of Dune in 1965. Brian Herbert writes about these years with a truthful intensity that brings every facet of his father's brilliant, and sometimes troubled, genius to full light. Insightful and provocative, this absorbing biography offers Brian Herbert's unique personal perspective on one of the most enigmatic and creative talents of our time.By Brian Herbert. 2023
Everyone knows Frank Herbert's Dune. This science fiction epic combines politics human evolution and ecology and has captured the imagination…
of generations of readers. It is one of the most popular science fiction novels ever written, has won awards, sold millions of copies around the world and spawned multiple motion-picture adaptations. Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert's eldest son, tells the provocative story of his father's extraordinary life in this honest and loving chronicle. He has also brought to light all the events in Herbert's life that would find their way into speculative fiction's greatest epic. From his early years in Tacoma, Washington, through his time at university and in the Navy, to the difficult years of poverty while struggling to become a published writer, Herbert worked long and hard before finding success after the publication of Dune in 1965. Brian Herbert writes about these years with a truthful intensity that brings every facet of his father's brilliant, and sometimes troubled, genius to full light. Insightful and provocative, this absorbing biography offers Brian Herbert's unique personal perspective on one of the most enigmatic and creative talents of our time.By Peekash Press. 2016
"The Caribbean has a powerful, modern tradition of fantastic literature that's on full display in this anthology of original fiction…
by writers from Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and Bermuda...None of these writers is likely to be familiar to American audiences, but all are worth getting to know. Readers who love the writing of Nalo Hopkinson, Tobias S. Buckell, and Lord herself will savor this volume."--Publishers Weekly, Starred review"New Worlds, Old Ways fulfills its promise of arriving at a recognizable genre of Caribbean speculative fiction. Prior to this collection we have not had any reader-friendly approaches that have directly addressed the genre of Caribbean speculative fiction. Lord, and the various writers in this collection, have given readers access to a hitherto unexplored genre, one that differentiates as well as connects to the treasure trove of Caribbean literature. The collection is a boon for scholars and reading aficionados of the Speculative Fiction genre. And as the editor states, true to its world, New Worlds, Old Ways offers both depth and delight without disappointment. It suggests tthat if one looks closely enough, they will find that Caribbean fiction has always been speculative."--SX SalonDo not be misled by the "speculative" in the title. Although there may be robots and fantastical creatures, these common symbols are tools to frame the familiar from fresh perspectives. Here you will find the recent past and ongoing present of government and society with curfews, crime, and corruption; the universal themes of family, growth and death, love and hate; the struggle to thrive when power is capricious and revenge too bittersweet. Here too is the passage of everything—old ways, places, peoples, and ourselves—leaving nothing behind but memories, histories, and stories.This anthology speaks to the fragility of our Caribbean home, but reminds the reader that although home may be vulnerable, it is also beautifully resilient. The voice of our literature declares that in spite of disasters, this people and this place shall not be wholly destroyed.Read for delight, then read for depth, and you will not be disappointed.Brand-new stories by: Tammi Browne-Bannister, Summer Edward, Portia Subran, Brandon O'Brien, Kevin Jared Hosein, Richard B. Lynch, Elizabeth J. Jones, Damion Wilson, Brian Franklin, Ararimeh Aiyejina, and H.K. Williams.New Worlds, Old Ways is the third publication of Peekash Press, an imprint of Akashic Books and Peepal Tree Press committed to supporting the emergence of new Caribbean writing, and as part of the CaribLit project.