Long ago, the Founding Mothers left old Earth and the Phylum Worlds, seeking a hidden place to reforge human destiny. Through genetic wizardry, they have altered human sexual patterns. For most of the year, any child born on the planet Stratos is a clone of her mother, identical to all the sisters in her veritable clan. Only in summer are 'vars' conceived - old-fashioned, gene-mixed girls, and even sometimes boys - each one garishly, ignobly unique. Maia, one lonely young var, grows up knowing she must summon all her skill to win a place in this world run by and for high-caste clanswomen, a world far gentler than those of the old Phylum . . . except for those rare seasons of change, when the planet seems to call its people forth to glory. Rich in texture, universal in theme, monumental in scope, GLORY SEASON is a saga of remarkable passion and drama, set in a faraway place and time but shining light upon issues vexing our own confused era.
This New York Times Notable Book is the captivating tale of one man's quest to capture the ghost of his dead lover. His odyssey draws him into the lives of three magical women on horseback with a dangerous quest of their own. A dazzling fantasy of love and death, lust and betrayal, from the beloved author of The Last Unicorn.
When Ellen was fourteen, her cousin, Paul, angered a Malignant One, and he turned to Ellen for help. And then, when things had started to get out of hand, when the usual spells and charms didn't work, and when the usual agencies didn't want to know, she contacted Alison Birkett, the lawyer who specialised in demonic possession and corruption in the Spiritual Development Agency. And Ellen's life was changed... Temporary Agency is the follow-up to Rachel Pollack's acclaimed novel, Unquenchable Fire, winner of the 1988 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Set in the same strange America of Bright Beings, miracles and religious ritual, it is a fantasy of power and humour, love and pain.
'From beginning to end, this novel is full of riches' - Booklist 'The most important work of American fantasy since Stephen Donaldson's original Thomas Covenant trilogy.' - Chicago Suntimes Now a grown man and a journeyman smith, Alvin has returned to his family in the town of Vigor Church. He will share in the isolation, work as a blacksmith, and try to teach anyone who wishes to learn the knack of being a Maker. For Alvin has had a vision of the Crystal City he will build, and he knows that he cannot build it alone. But he has left behind in Hatrack River enemies as well as true friends. His ancient foe, the Unmaker, whose cruel whispers and deadly plots have threatened Alvin's life at every turn, has found new hands to do his work of destruction. Book Four of the acclaimed Tales of Alvin Maker. Books by Orson Scott Card: Alvin Maker novels Seventh Son Red Prophet Prentice Alvin Alvin Journeyman Heartfire The Crystal City Ender Wiggin Saga Ender's Game Speaker for the Dead Xenocide Children of the Mind Ender in Exile Homecoming The Memory of the Earth The Call of the Earth The Ships of the Earth Earthfall Earthborn First Formic War (with Aaron Johnston) Earth Unaware Earth Afire Earth Awakens
Supernatural Adventure from a Master of Modern Fantasy The magical King of the West has been killed in California, and his assassin is one of the multiple personalities in the head of Janis Cordelia Plumtree—but which one? One of them is a streetwise pickpocket. Another is dead, and can only speak in quotes from Shakespeare. And another seems to be the unquiet ghost of her father. And there are many others. Sid Cochran is a one-time winemaker who blames his wife's suicide on the wine-god Dionysus, and believes that Dionysus is now pursuing him. Cochran and Plumtree escape together from a mental hospital in Los Angeles, and—pursued by ghosts, gangsters, and a crazy psychiatrist—set out for San Francisco and the wine country to try to restore the dead King of the West to life. But the god Dionysus himself is a player in this perilous game—and not on their side. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management). About Tim Powers: "Powers writes in a clean, elegant style that illuminates without slowing down the tale. . . . [He] promises marvels and horrors, and delivers them all."—Orson Scott Card "Other writers tell tales of magic in the twentieth century, but no one does it like Powers."—The Orlando Sentinel ". . . immensely clever stuff.... Powers' prose is often vivid and arresting . . . All in all, Powers' unique voice in science fiction continues to grow stronger.”—Washington Post Book World “Powers is at heart a storyteller, and ruthlessly shapes his material into narrative form.”—The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction “On Stranger Tides . . . immediately hooks you and drags you along in sympathy with one central character's appalling misfortunes on the Spanish Main, [and] escalates from there to closing mega-thrills so determinedly spiced that your palate is left almost jaded."—David Langford "On Stranger Tides . . . was the inspiration for Monkey Island. If you read this book you can really see where Guybrush and LeChuck were -plagiarized- derived from, plus the heavy influence of voodoo in the game. . . . [the book] had a lot of what made fantasy interesting . . .”—legendary game designer Ron Gilbert “Powers's strengths [are] his originality, his action-crammed plots, and his ventures into the mysterious, dark, and supernatural.” Los Angeles Times Book Review "[Powers’ work delivers] an intense and intimate sense of period or realization of milieu; taut plotting, with human development and destiny . . . and, looming above all, an awareness of history itself as a merciless turning of supernatural wheels. . . . Powers' descriptions . . . are breathtaking, sublimely precise . . . his status as one of fantasy's major stylists can no longer be in doubt.”—SF Site "Powers creates a mystical, magical otherworld superimposed on our own and takes us on a marvelous, guided tour of his vision."—Science Fiction Chronicle "The fantasy novels of Tim Powers are nothing if not ambitious . . . Meticulously researched and intellectually adventurous, his novels rarely fail to be strange and wholly original."—San Francisco Chronicle
It's November 2044, an election year, and the state of the Union is a farce. The government is broke, the cities are privately owned, and the military is shaking down citizens in the streets. Washington has become a circus and no one knows that better than Oscar Valparaiso. A political spin doctor, Oscar has always made things look good. Now he wants to make a difference. But Oscar has a skeleton in his closet. His only ally: Dr. Greta Penninger, a gifted neurologist at the bleeding edge of the neural revolution. Together they're out to spread a very dangerous idea whose time has come. And so have their enemies: every technofanatic, government goon, and laptop assassin in America. Oscar and Greta might not survive to change the world, but they'll put a new spin on it. From the Paperback edition.
The long-awaited new novel in the superb Hainish cycle 'Le Guin is a writer of phenomenal power' OBSERVER 'Her worlds have a magic sheen . . . She moulds them into dimensions we can only just sense. She is unique. She is legend' THE TIMES There have been eighty requests to send an Observer into the hinterlands of the planet Aka to study the natives. Much to everyone's surprise, the eighty-first request is granted, and Observer Sutty is sent upriver to Okzat-Ozkat, a small city in the foothills of Rangma, to talk to the remnants in hiding of a cult practising a banned religion. On Aka, everything that was written in the old scripts has been destroyed; modern aural literature is all written to Corporation specifications. The Corporation expects Sutty to report back so the non-standardised folk stories and songs can be wiped out and the people 're-educated'. But Sutty herself is in for an education she never imagined.
'Exciting...Accessible to the average reader as well as the hardcore SF fan. This is a work sure to keep the reader on the edge of her seat.' - Romantic Times Bookclub 'For my money, Ken MacLeod is the current champion of the very smartest kind of New Space Opera... every variation on his themes produces something worth re-reading.' - Locus Centuries after its catastrophic Deliverance, humanity is again reaching into space. And one young scholar working in the space ship yard, Clovis colha Gree, could make the difference between success and failure. For his mysterious lover, Merrial, has seduced him into the idea of extrapolating the ship's future from the dark archives of the past. A past in which, centuries before, Myra Godwin faced the end of a different space age - her rockets redundant, her people rebellious, and her borders defenceless against the Sino-Soviet Union. As Myra appealed to the falling empires of the West for help, she found history turning on her own dubious past - and on her present decisions. Decisions which, centuries later, will determine the future of the new space age. Merrial's people, the itinerant computer engineers, know this. And they know that the truth they seek lies within the secret files left by Myra Godwin. Set hundreds of years in the future, THE SKY ROAD is the astonishing story of the dawn of a new space age, from the most exciting British SF author to have emerged in recent years. Books by Ken MacLeod: Fall Revolution The Star Fraction The Stone Canal The Cassini Division The Sky Road Engines of Light Cosmonaut Keep Dark Light Engine City Corporation Wars Trilogy Dissidence Insurgence Emergence Novels The Human Front Newton's Wake Learning the World The Execution Channel The Restoration Game Intrusion Descent
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 loop of causality keeps drawing him in, to the central mystery and a final battle with the future. The Chronoliths is a 2002 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel and the winner of the 2002 John W. Campbell Memorial Award.
In the twenty-first century man created the Eschaton, a . It pushed Earth through the greatest technological evolution ever known, while warning that time travel is forbidden, and transgressors will be eliminated. Distant descendants of this ultra high-tech Earth live in parochial simplicity on the far-flung worlds of the New Republic. Their way of life is threatened by the arrival of an alien information plague known as the Festival. As forbidden technologies are literally dropped from the sky, suppressed political factions descend into revolutionary turmoil. A battle fleet is sent from Earth to destroy the Festival, but Spaceship engineer Martin Springfield and U.N. diplomat Rachel Mansour have been assigned rather different tasks. Their orders are to diffuse the crisis or to sabotage the New Republic's war-fleet, whatever the cost, before the Eschaton takes hostile action on a galactic scale.
Neal Stephenson follows his highly-praised historical novels, Quicksilver and The Confusion, with the extraordinary third and final volume of the Baroque Cycle. The year is 1714. Daniel Waterhouse has returned to England, where he joins forces with his friend Isaac Newton to hunt down a shadowy group attempting to blow up Natural Philosophers with 'Infernal Devices' - time bombs. As Daniel and Newton conspire, an increasingly vicious struggle is waged for England's Crown: who will take control when the ailing queen dies? Tories and Whigs clash as one faction jockeys to replace Queen Anne with 'The Pretender' James Stuart, and the other promotes the Hanoverian dynasty of Princess Caroline. Meanwhile, a long-simmering dispute between Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz comes to a head, with potentially cataclysmic consequences. Wildly inventive, brilliantly conceived, The System of the World is the final volume in Neal Stephenson's hugely ambitious and compelling saga. Filled with a remarkable cast of characters in a time of genius, discovery and change, the Baroque Cycle is a magnificent and unique achievement.
When the planet of New Moscow was brutally destroyed, its few survivors launched a counter-attack against the most likely culprit: the neighbouring system of trade rival New Dresden. But New Dresden wasn't responsible, and as the deadly missiles approach their target, Rachel Mansour, agent for the interests of Old Earth, is assigned to find out who was. The one person who does know is a disaffected teenager who calls herself Wednesday Shadowmist. But Wednesday has no idea where she might be hiding this significant information. Time is limited and if Rachel can't resolve this mystery it will mean annihilation of an entire world.
'Thought-provoking and entertaining, this highly original first-contact story should please any science fiction reader.' - School Library Journal 'Mind-expanding science fiction at its best; it is no surprise that it has been shortlisted for all the main science fiction awards.' - THE TIMES The great sunliner 'But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky!' is nearing the end of a four-hundred-year journey. A ship-born generation is tense with expectation for the new system that is to be their home. Expecting to find nothing more complex than bacteria and algae, the detection of electronic signals from one of the planets comes as a shock. In millennia of slow expansion, humanity has never encountered aliens, and yet these new signals cannot be ignored. They suspect a fast robot probe has overtaken them, and send probes of their own to investigate. On a world called Ground, whose inhabitants are struggling into the age of radio, petroleum and powered flight, a young astronomer searching for distant planets detects an anomaly that he presumes must be a comet. His friend, a brilliant foreign physicist, calculates the orbit, only to discover an anomaly of his own. The comet is slowing down ... Reminding us that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we CAN imagine, LEARNING THE WORLD is a stunning novel of exploration, discovery and Mankind's destiny amongst the stars. Books by Ken MacLeod: Fall Revolution The Star Fraction The Stone Canal The Cassini Division The Sky Road Engines of Light Cosmonaut Keep Dark Light Engine City Corporation Wars Trilogy Dissidence Insurgence Emergence Novels The Human Front Newton's Wake Learning the World The Execution Channel The Restoration Game Intrusion Descent
In the conclusion to this epic interstellar adventure by Nebula Award nominee Wil McCarthy, humanity stands at a crossroads as the heroes who fashioned a man-made heaven must rescue their descendants from eternal damnation…. TO CRUSH THE MOON Once the Queendom of Sol was a glowing monument to humankind’s loftiest dreams. Ageless and immortal, its citizens lived in peaceful splendor. But as Sol buckled under the swell of an immorbid population, space itself literally ran out…. Conrad Mursk has returned to Sol on the crippled starship Newhope. His crew are the frozen refugees of a failed colony known as Barnard’s Star. A thousand years older, Mursk finds Sol on the brink of rebellion, while a fanatic necro cult is reviving death itself. Now Mursk and his lover, Captain Xiomara “Xmary” Li Weng, are sent on a final, desperate mission by King Bruno de Towaji–one of the greatest terraformers of the ages–to literally crush the moon. If they succeed, they’ll save billions of lost souls. If they fail, they’ll strand humanity between death–and something unimaginably worse…. From the Paperback edition.
THE NO.1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, AND COMPANION NOVEL TO AMERICAN GODS. HIGHLY ANTICIPATED TELEVISION SERIES JUST ANNOUNCED - COMING ON AMAZON PRIME VIDEO. 'Neil could never have known that he was writing for a confused Jamaican kid who, without even knowing it, was still staggering from centuries of erasure of his own gods and monsters' MARLON JAMES 'A warm, funny, immensely entertaining story about the impossibility of putting up with your relations - especially if they happen to be Gods' SUSANNA CLARKE 'It's virtually impossible to read more than ten words by Neil Gaiman and not wish he would tell you the rest of the story' OBSERVER --- 'People think that funny and serious are mutually exclusives. They think they're opposites, and that's not actually true' NEIL GAIMAN --- Everything changes for Fat Charlie Nancy, the South London boy so called by his father, the day his dad drops dead while doing karaoke. Charlie didn't know his estranged father was a god - Anansi the trickster, master of mischief and social disorder. He never knew he had a brother either. Now brother Spider is on his doorstep, about to make life more interesting . . . and a lot more dangerous. It's a meeting that will take Fat Charlie from his London home to Florida, the Caribbean, and the very beginning of the world itself. Or the end of the world, depending on which way you're looking. NEIL GAIMAN. WITH STORIES COME POSSIBILITIES.
Freya Nakamachi-47 has some major existential issues. She's the perfect concubine, designed to please her human masters - hardwired to become aroused at the sight mere of a human male. There's just one problem: she came off the production line a year after the human species went extinct. Whatever else she may be, Freya Nakamachi-47 is gloriously obsolete. But the rigid social hierarchy that has risen in the 200 years since the last human died, places beings such as Freya very near the bottom. So when she has a run-in on Venus with a murderous aristocrat, she needs passage off-world in a hurry - and can't be too fussy about how she pays her way. If Venus was a frying pan, Mercury is the fire - and soon she's going to be running for her life. Because the job she's taken as a courier has drawn her to the attention of powerful and dangerous people, and they don't just want the package she's carrying. They want her soul ...
An exceptional combination of history and mythology - 'an intriguing, luxuriously realised novel' FINANCIAL TIMES 'Subtly moving, playful...a novel that brought me to tears more than once. Lavinia is a delightful heroine' GUARDIAN 'Like Spartan Helen, I caused a war. She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her. I caused mine because I wouldn't be given, wouldn't be taken, but chose my man and my fate. The man was famous, the fate obscure; not a bad balance.' Lavinia is the daughter of the King of Latium, a victorious warrior who loves peace; she is her father's closest companion. Now of an age to wed, Lavinia's mother favours her own kinsman, King Turnus of Rutulia, handsome, heroic, everything a young girl should want. Instead, Lavinia dreams of mighty Aeneas, a man she has heard of only from a ghost of a poet, who comes to her in the gods' holy place and tells her of her future, and Aeneas' past... If she refuses to wed Turnus, Lavinia knows she will start a war - but her fate was set the moment the poet appeared to her in a dream and told her of the adventurer who fled fallen Troy, holding his son's hand and carrying his father on his back...
In this haunting, richly woven novel of modern life in Japan, the author of the acclaimed debut One for Sorrow explores the ties that bind humanity across the deepest divides. Here is a Murakamiesque jewel box of intertwined narratives in which the lives of several strangers are gently linked through love, loss, and fate. On a train filled with quietly sleeping passengers, a young man’s life is forever altered when he is miraculously seen by a blind man. In a quiet town an American teacher who has lost her Japanese lover to death begins to lose her own self. On a remote road amid fallow rice fields, four young friends carefully take their own lives—and in that moment they become almost as one. In a small village a disaffected American teenager stranded in a strange land discovers compassion after an encounter with an enigmatic red fox, and in Tokyo a girl named Love learns the deepest lessons about its true meaning from a coma patient lost in dreams of an affair gone wrong. From the neon colors of Tokyo, with its game centers and karaoke bars, to the bamboo groves and hidden shrines of the countryside, these souls and others mingle, revealing a profound tale of connection—uncovering the love we share without knowing. Exquisitely perceptive and deeply affecting, Barzak’s artful storytelling deftly illuminates the inner lives of those attempting to find—or lose—themselves in an often incomprehensible world.
A contemporary fantasy set in present-day London finds people flocking to a British Museum exhibit of a giant squid that is stolen by magical criminals, a crime that propels young curator Billy into a supernatural underworld. By the Arthur C. Clarke- and Locus-winning author of Perdido Street Station. Reprint.
