Review

Obviously, Isaac Asimov had a lot of fun concocting this merry tangle of interplanetary power politics. . . .  If it isn't often science-fiction, it is always beautifully contrived melodrama. The reader will have just as much fun as Mr. Asimov.”
--_The New York Times_ on The Currents of Space

"Science fiction on the larger scale is Isaac Asimov's specialty. . . .  Clear writing and excellent suspense make this book a welcome addition to the science fiction lists."
--_The New York Times_ on _The Stars, Like Dust

_“How do you explain Isaac Asimov to Earth men?  How do you even begin to describe that glorious union of all-American optimism, bleeding-heart Yiddishkeit, and cutting-edge science speculation?  You can’t.  He’s one of a kind. . . .  Psycho-history buffs will love this book for its through-the-looking-glass view of the Foundation series.  Everyone else will love it because it’s fun, fun, fun.”
--Fantasy & Science Fiction on Pebble in the Sky

Product Description

High above planet Florinia, the Squires of Sark live in unimaginable wealth and comfort. Down in the eternal spring of the planet, however, the native Florinians labor ceaselessly to produce the precious kyrt that brings prosperity to their Sarkite masters.

Rebellion is unthinkable and impossible. Not only do the Florinians no longer have a concept of freedom, any disruption of the vital kyrt trade would cause other planets to rise in protest, resulting in a galactic war. So the Trantorian Empire, whose grand plan is to unite all humanity in peace, prosperity, and freedom, has allowed the oppression to continue.

Living among the workers of Florinia, Rik is a man without a memory or a past. He has been abducted and brainwashed. Barely able to speak or care for himself when he was found, Rik is widely regarded as a simpleton by the worker community where he lives. As his memories begin to return, however, Rik finds himself driven by a cryptic message he is determined to deliver: Everyone on Florinia is doomed...the Currents of Space are bringing destruction. But if the planet is evacuated, the power of Sark will end-so there are those who would kill the messenger. The fate of the Galaxy hangs in the balance.

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Product Description

It was supposed to be just another Sunday night fantasy role-playing game for David, Tyrone, Scott, and Melanie. But after years of playing, the game had become so real that all their creations—humans, sorcerers, dragons, ogres, panther-folk, cyclops—now had existences of their own. And when the four outside players decide to end their game, the characters inside the world of Gamearth—warriors, scholars, and the few remaining wielders of magic—band together to keep their land from vanishing. Now they must embark on a desperate quest for their own magic—magic that can twist the Rules enough to save them all from the evil that the players created to destroy their entire world.

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Product Description

The finale to the Gamearth Trilogy. It’s all-out war between the players and characters in a role-playing game that has taken on a life of its own. The fighter Delrael, the sorcerer Bryl, as well as famed scientists Verne and Frankenstein, use every trick in the Book of Rules to keep the world of Gamearth intact while the outside group of players does everything possible to destroy it.

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From Publishers Weekly

That Anthony has attempted to write a multicultural work is laudable, if bemusing. Yet Anthony clearly cares about this book and, as in Isle of Women, the first volume in this series, imbues its serious, ambitious text with the frenetic action and joie de vivre for which he is known. Covering several thousand years, Anthony presents sets of similarly named characters in assorted situations and cultures. The always left-handed but never sinister Hugh and his wife Ann (and variant names thereon) are the good couple, while Bub and Sis do ill from Neanderthal times up through the near-future. Anthony can't quite manage to present any character who comes off as truly evil-Bub never rises above caricature, while Sis has several redemptive moments-but the effort here is honest, one whose spiritual antecedent appears to be Will Cuppy's The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody. There are moments when the Anthony that many condemn comes through, mostly in the early sections (for example, when a woman whose baby is killed before her eyes immediately has sex with the killer), but, overall, this is an encouraging work. There's enough action to satisfy Anthony's Xanth readers, while those who stopped reading him around the time of Macroscope may be pleasantly surprised by what they will find here.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Spanning the ages from humanity's primate roots to the 21st century, a series of connected stories traces the development of civilization and its environmental repercussions in this companion volume to Isle of Women (Tor Bks., 1994). The use of similar names for the protagonists in each tale evokes the universality of the human experience, while the author's choices of locale-the Orkney Isles of 1500 B.C., the Levantine Coast of 1000 B.C., southern Japan of the third century A.D.-provide a refreshing smorgasbord of cultures. Filled with fascinating anthropological speculation, Anthony's latest novel showcases both his passionate convictions and his storytelling talent. This deserves a wide readership.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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From Publishers Weekly

The fourth volume of the Geodyssey series explores the evolution and history of our species from the distant past (500,000 years ago) to the near future by examining the use of such diverse (and dubious) arts as curiosity, healing, story, expression, drama, seduction, arrogance, ploy and justice. Anthony creates a family of archetypes (Pul the Warrior, Heath the Healer, Od the Scientist, Dillon the Hunter, Bata the Wise Woman, Melee the Seductress, etc.) and sets them in different historical situations to show how each of these arts was used. The author is at his best explaining how science flourished: Ods curiosity about volcanoes helps save not only his life but those of other homo erectus smart enough to listen to a physically weak but intellectually superior man. Other scenarios, such as Melees interminable seduction of Dillon in the Olmec culture (around 900 B.C.), seem more like an excuse for peeking up a beautiful womans skirt. Anthony fails to impart a proper period flavor to the chapters, so both the writing and the history remain flat. Even after half a million years of civilizing arts, moreover, at the end of the novel, as at its beginning, men tell women what to do, women influence men through sex, and warlike stupidity still fractures mankind into small tribes bent on their own survival. In his introduction, Anthony refers to this as a message novel; the (likely unintended) message seems to be that the more things change, the more they remain the same.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

A primitive mans curiosity, an old womans healing knowledge, and a clever girls ability to use stories to change the minds of her people begin the discovery of the arts of survival that carry the human race from prehistory to the near-future. This latest addition to Anthonys epic story cycle, which includes Hope of Earth (LJ 4/15/97), examines the progress of humanity through the vehicle of short stories and vignettes that feature recurring characters and common themes. Ambitious in scope, highly personal in execution, this stand-alone tale of epic events and common people belongs in most fantasy collections.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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From Publishers Weekly

Anthony's latest novel is one of his most minor efforts, a mechanical working out of an absurd, rattletrap plot, overwhelmed by talk and introspection. The story is set in a future in which a law has been passed (the Miscegenation Act) forbidding the marriage of two people of the same race (this in response to "savage race riots" and the need to slow population growth). Kerr Shetland, captain of the Meg IIa "timeship" traveling beyond the farthest reaches of the universe in search of new energy sources for an energy-poor Earthand his crew of six spend the trip in a paroxysm of racial, sexual and psychological self-examination, finally reaching some sort of epiphany when the ship breaks up on the rim of a Black Hole, and they are transformed into pure spiritall to little effect.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Description

When Space Captain Shetland, commander of an experimental deep-time ship, happens upon a ghost universe, his crew are shattered into beings of pure will, and he must help them to regain their humanity.

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Review

"Ghost Ship: A Port Chatham Mystery" is the 2nd book in Alderman's lively and fun-filled series. The characters are personable, smart and full of curiosity, which makes them great sleuths. --Sharon Galliger-Chance, Las Vegas Review Journal

Mixing the supernatural with the mystery is not unusual, but it is unusual to see it done well... Alderman goes for the slightly wacky, charming approach, and pulls it off brilliantly. --Mark Rose, Bookgasm

"Readers will thoroughly enjoy this paranormal amateur sleuth... P.J. Alderman writes a scintillating supernatural whodunit" --Harriet Clausner

"Lush, descriptive writing is the hallmark of P.J. Alderman's novel, Haunting Jordan." --New York Times Bestselling Author Diane Mott Davidson

Product Description

RITA-nominated author P. J. Alderman’s delightful new mystery series blends haunting ghosts with hunting criminals as therapist Jordan Marsh dives deep into the past to solve a modern murder.

A recent transplant to Washington State’s charming seaside town of Port Chatham, Jordan is still getting used to sharing her slightly run-down but historic lodging with ghosts. As if living with the long-deceased isn’t enough of a challenge, she’s just found a corpse: The town’s notorious womanizer Holt Stillwell is lying on the beach with a bullet in his head.

Before Jordan can reel in a suspect, another victim surfaces. And this one isn’t taking murder lying down. Holt’s ancestor Michael Seavey, the Pacific Northwest’s most infamous shanghaier, has materialized in Jordan’s house, seeking to solve his own death in a suspicious shipwreck in 1893. With two murders to solve and a killer on the loose, Jordan faces yet another equally terrifying prospect: her growing attraction to the very alive and criminally attractive pub owner Jase Cunningham.

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Review

This 2001 novel, Ajvaz’s most brilliantly complicated, is a fictional travelogue, part philosophical ethnography and part potboiling fairy tale. (Jonathan Bolton - CONTEXT )

Michal Ajvaz is a literary magician creating worlds of worlds, worlds of words, worlds of objects. He is the fantastical baby of Borges and Timothy Leary. He is a cartographer on mescaline. He is Czech. (Salonica )

Product Description

Heir to the philosophical-fantastical tradition of Borges, Calvino, and Perec, The Golden Age is Michal Ajvaz’s greatest and most ambitious work.

The Golden Age is a fantastical travelogue in which a modern-day Gulliver writes a book about a civilization he once encountered on a tiny island in the Atlantic. The islanders seem at first to do nothing but sit and observe the world, and indeed draw no distinction between reality and representation, so that a mirror image seems as substantial to them as a person (and vice versa); but the center of their culture is revealed to be “The Book,” a handwritten, collective novel filled with feuding royal families, murderous sorcerers, and narrow escapes. Anyone is free to write in “The Book,” adding their own stories, crossing out others, or even ap- pending “footnotes” in the form of little paper pouches full of extra text—but of course there are pouches within pouches, so that the story is impossible to read “in order,” and soon begins to overwhelm the narrator’s orderly treatise.

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En el año 2008 se realizan decididos avances en el área de la nanotecnología, lo que abre a la humanidad posibilidades inimaginables. Desde hace mucho, trabaja en este campo Rochelle 'Rocky' Jackson, alto mando de las fuerzas de la armada de Estados Unidos. Ella deberá luchar por su supervivencia cuando el portaaviones USS Ronald Reagan es hundido por el ataque de un enemigo desconocido. El ataque procede de un submarino equipado con la más moderna tecnología. El Goliath. Un proyecto en el que Rocky estuvo implicada y cuyos planos fueron destruidos por su antiguo amante, Gunnar Wolfe. Aparte de su tecnología armamentística superior, el Goliath cuenta con una decisiva ventaja. Un nano ordenador bioquímico, una inteligencia autosuficiente que gobierna la nave por sí sola y una tripulación humana superflua. ¿Quién ha construido el Goliath? ¿Quién lo gobierna? Rocky averiguará que la respuesta a esta pregunta afecta directamente al destino de la humanidad.Un thriller de alta tecnología, que a través de su espesa atmósfera y su escenario casi real, aporta una visión del futuro de la humanidad.<

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