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The dragons of Eden: speculations on the evolution of human intelligence
By Carl Sagan. 1977
Essays by an award-winning scientist about the possible development of human intelligence, written for nonspecialists. Discusses the biological functions of…
sleep, increasing brain size, and language learning among chimpanzees. Chronicles advances in understanding the brain and implications for the future. BestsellerTrue talents
By David Lubar. 2007
The friends from Edgeview Alternative School wanted to keep their Hidden Talents (RC 56815) secret, but someone learns that Trash…
can move objects with his mind and kidnaps him. Torchie, Cheater, Lucky, Flinch, and Martin must use their talents to rescue Trash. For grades 5-8. 2007Manual del guerrero de la luz
By Paulo Coelho. 2003
A collection of philosophical sketches prefaced by the brief parable of a grown man returning to the beach of his…
childhood. There he is inspired to write about the "Warrior"--one who is "capable of understanding the miracle of life." Inspirational companion to El Alquimista (DB 46982). Spanish language. 1998Seven years in Tibet: Official Agents' Handbook
By Heinrich Harrer, Dawn Margolis. 1996
Harrer recalls how in 1943 he escaped from a British internment camp in India and, after an arduous journey, arrived…
on foot in Lhasa, the holy capital of Tibet. He was granted refuge and later became a tutor to the Dalai Lama. In late 1950, the Chinese invasion of Tibet forced Harrer to leave Lhasa, which had become his spiritual home. BestsellerWilliam Shakespeare's Star Wars: Verily, a new hope (William Shakespeare's Star Wars #4)
By Ian Doescher. 2013
The story of Star Wars: Episode IV; a New Hope told in the format of a Shakespearean play. Luke Skywalker…
purchases two droids, one of which carries a secret message from a captured princess. They draw Luke into a battle with the Empire. Young adult appeal. Some violence. Bestseller. 2013I. Asimov: A Memoir ("robots En El Tiempo" De I. Asimov Ser.)
By 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.John Brunner
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.Ursula K. Le Guin: and Other Conversations (The Last Interview Series)
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.Genus Homo
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.This is Me, Jack Vance
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.Time and Chance: An Autobiography
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.The Exegesis of Philip K Dick
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.The Natural Way of Things: 'The Handmaid's Tale for our age' (Economist)
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 AwardHigh Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
By Erik Davis. 2019
An exploration of the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and…
Robert Anton Wilson.A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality—but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America? In High Weirdness, Erik Davis—America's leading scholar of high strangeness—examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America's West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social upheaval to present a new theory of the weird as a viable mode for a renewed engagement with reality.The End of Mr. Y: A Novel
By Scarlett Thomas. 2006
A cursed book. A missing professor. Some nefarious men in gray suits. And a dreamworld called the Troposphere? Ariel Manto…
has a fascination with nineteenth-century scientists--especially Thomas Lumas and The End of Mr. Y, a book no one alive has read. When she mysteriously uncovers a copy at a used bookstore, Ariel is launched into an adventure of science and faith, consciousness and death, space and time, and everything in between. Seeking answers, Ariel follows in Mr. Y's footsteps: She swallows a tincture, stares into a black dot, and is transported into the Troposphere--a wonderland where she can travel through time and space using the thoughts of others. There she begins to understand all the mysteries surrounding the book, herself, and the universe. Or is it all just a hallucination? With The End of Mr. Y, Scarlett Thomas brings us another fast-paced mix of popular culture, love, mystery, and irresistible philosophical adventure.Edge of Here: Stories from Near to Now - ‘Perfect for Black Mirror fans’ - Elle
By Kelechi Okafor. 2023
Enter a world very close to our own...One in which technology can allow you to explore an alternate love-life with…
a stranger. A world where you can experience the emotions of another person through a chip implanted in your brain.And one where you can view snippets of a distant relative's life with a little help from your DNA.But remember: these experiences will not be without consequences . . .In this stunning debut collection, Kelechi Okafor combines the ancient and the ultramodern to explore tales of contemporary Black womanhood, asking questions about the way we live now and offering a glimpse into our near future. Uplifting, thought-provoking, sometimes chilling, these are tales rooted in the recognisable, but not limited by the boundaries of our current reality-where truth can meet imagination and spirituality in unexpected ways. Allow yourself to be taken on a journey into worlds that are blazing with possibility, through stories that will lead you right up to the Edge of Here . . .Blue Book Volume 1: 1961
By James Tynion Iv. 2023
An ambitious, non-fiction comic book experience depicting true stories of UFO abductions with an eye to capturing the strange essence…
of those encounters.From the New York Times bestselling and multi-Eisner award-winning co-creators of Something is Killing the Children, The Nice House on the Lake, The Department of Truth, and Powers.In Blue Book, teaming with artist Michael Avon Oeming and letterer Aditya Bidikar, Tynion presents what he calls his &“True Weird&” stories. Tales of ordinary people encountering the strange and the impossible.Volume 1 retells the infamous case of the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill of New Hampshire in 1961 — the very first widely-publicized UFO abduction that went on to shape and influence all future encounter stories.Collects the Dark Horse Comics series Blue Book #1—#5, originally published on Substack.Dreamer of Dune: The Biography of Frank Herbert
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.Dreamer of Dune: The Biography of Frank Herbert
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.Dreamer of Dune: The Biography of Frank Herbert
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.