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4511023 | /m/0c69rv | Ondskan | Jan Guillou | 1981 | {"/m/012jgz": "Autobiographical novel"} | Erik Ponti is a fourteen year old boy living in the 1950s Stockholm lower middle class. His sadistic stepfather beats him every day after dinner and on random occasions, his mother seemingly afraid to protest and his six year old brother taking advantage of him. He excels in school; "He ran the fastest and scored the most goals, could take a gargantuan beating, hit with full strength at the first punch and on top of all that he was the superior student in several subjects", which lends him a position as gang leader and favored student of half his teachers. (He compulsively leads the class to rebel against the other half, who beat the students.) He lives with violence both at home and at school and begins feeling sympathy and pity towards those he beats, when his life comes tumbling down because of the school gang's criminal activities. Betrayed by those he thought of as his friends, the gang, he is expelled from school and "pre-emptively" expelled from every school in Stockholm by his zealous and influential principal. He comes home prepared to face his father "for the last time" but is surprisingly sent to a boarding school outside of the city, the expensive and exclusive Stjärnsberg school. Away from his father and everyone who knew him, Erik is determined to make a new life without violence for himself, but the traditions of the school stop him. Unable to abide the abuse of the senior students, who make it their habit to boss around and beat those below them, "especially new and mouthy kids", he begins a spiral of escalating violence and psychological abuse under the nose of unwitting teachers and adults. Noses are broken, threats are uttered, buckets of feces thrown around and Erik spends a cold winter night soaking wet and tied to the ground. Erik and his friend and roommate Pierre hold in-depth discussions about the nature of evil, the importance of resistance and methods of fighting, while spending summer and winter breaks abroad. Erik develops a forbidden relationship with Marja, a school cook from Savonia, Finland, and wins a swimming trophy in a school championship. He is thrown out of the swimming team as an attempt to make him follow orders, and begins working out obsessively by weightlifting to vent his frustrations, panicked over the prospect of being expelled if he lays a hand on a senior student. When Pierre surrenders to the abuse directed at him to punish Erik and leaves the school, Erik takes to stalking the woods in disguise at night and systematically breaking the nose and teeth of those responsible, when he finds them alone. Marja, fired because of the suspicions of her relationship with Erik, sends him a love letter which the principal uses as grounds to have him expelled, but with the aid of Mr. Ekengren, the family lawyer, Erik threatens legal action over the confiscation of his mail and is allowed to finish his last semester in relative peace. Although not before tracking down his chief tormentor, the chairman of the students' council Otto Silverhjelm, alone in the woods and scaring him into hysteric crying and vomiting. Finishing his basic education with the highest possible grades - barring the lowest possible grade in conduct and behavior - Erik returns home to deal with his father, now that he doesn't need him anymore. . . |
4513902 | /m/0c6h7x | Star Wars Jedi Quest 8: The Changing of the Guard | Judy Blundell | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction"} | When Obi-Wan, Anakin, Siri, and Ferus get a tip that Jenna Zan Arbor is hiding on the planet of Romin under the protection of a tyrannical dictator, they pose as a gang of thieves called the Slams in order to infiltrate the planet. Thanks to the laws of Romin, the Jedi cannot arrest Arbor and take her away. Arbor must leave the planet of her own free will. The Jedi hope to trick her into leaving by offering her a part in a heist, but it soon becomes apparent that she has other plans. Matters are complicated further when a civil war erupts on the planet and the Jedi are thrown into the middle of it. Will our heroes finally capture the evil scientist or will she slip away yet again? |
4515372 | /m/0c6lhd | Stormbreaker | Anthony Horowitz | 9/4/2000 | {"/m/01jfsb": "Thriller", "/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/08sdrw": "Adventure novel"} | After the death of Ian Rider in a "car crash," Alex Rider, his nephew, becomes suspicious of events occurring afterward. First, he finds the Chairman of the bank he worked for, Alan Blunt, with a gun strapped to his side at Ian's funeral, then Ian's study is stripped clean. This leads him to an auto junkyard where he learns Ian was assasinated, as he finds bullet holes in the windshield, after nearly getting killed by the crusher and having a battle with the men at the junkyard. He goes to the bank for Ian's will, but sneaks into the office of his co-worker, John Crawley. After getting into Ian's office, he finds a bunch of mysterious files and papers, including one labeled 'Stormbreaker', John Crawley catches Alex and a guard tranqulizes him. Alex wakes up inside MI6 headquarters. He learns that Alan Blunt is actually the head of MI6, which is revealed to be the angency Ian worked for and meets Mrs Jones, second-in-command of the MI6. Alex is recruited and is sent to be trained at a SAS base. When he completes his training, he is sent to investigate the Stormbreaker computers, which his uncle was investigating and to spy on Egyptian Multimillionaire Herod Sayle, the owner of the Stormbreakers, an advanced computer he's planning to put in every school in Britain. Before he leaves, he is given a yo-yo which has a nylon string and is used for gripping things. He receives a Game Boy Color which is used for contacting, scanning; etc depending on the cartridge, and a zit cream used for burning through metal. Alex learns from MI6 that Ian Rider was killed by a Russian assassin called Yassen Gregorovich. Alex goes under the disguise of Felix Lester (another teenage boy who had earlier won a magazine competition to be the first child to use the Stormbreaker computer). He later arrives at Sayle's mansion. Sayle shows Alex around his own headquarters, which houses a large jellyfish aquarium containing a large Portuguese Man o' War jellyfish. Alex also meets Mr. Grin, a henchman who's name derives from his time as a circus performer, catching knives with his teeth. An accident left him without a tongue and two large scars which give him the appearance of constant smiling and devilish look. Initially the trip goes well, with Alex finding a cryptic diagram made by his Uncle Ian in the canopy of his bed. However, Sayle grows to dislike Alex. While investigating the base, Alex sees several of Sayle's agents unloading metal cases with great care from a nuclear submarine. When one of the agents drops a metal case, he is promptly shot dead by Gregorovich, whom Alex is warned about and would be pulled out if he ever sees him. The next day, Alex goes for a walk through fields close to Sayle's mansion (following recommendation by a German woman called Nadia Vole, an associate of Sayle). He finds himself ambushed by armed guards on two quad bikes, who try to kill Alex. However, one collides with an electric fence and the other falls from a cliff face. Alex decides to investigate the library, because he earlier learned that Ian had spent some time there. Alex finds a map in a book about tin mining which matches the diagram left by Ian. He also learns that Ian had borrowed several books about viruses, and assumes that Sayle plans to use the Stormbreaker network to release a computer virus. Alex investigates the mine and, following the path left by his uncle, discovers a large computer manufacturing facility, where the Stormbreaker computers are being filled with a strange fluid. Alex realizes that the 'viruses' being investigated by Ian were not computer viruses, but biological weapons (a potent form of Smallpox). Alex is detected and nearly escapes but is eventually caught and knocked out by Mr Grin. Alex regains consciousness and finds himself handcuffed to a radiator, two guards come in and bring him to the room with the aquarium and handcuffs him to a chair, Sayle learns of who he is and explains his plan. When Sayle attended school, he was bullied because of his accent and skin colour. The worst bully was none other than the future Prime Minister. As a result, Sayle plans to embarrass the PM by his "April Fools Joke"; when the computers are activated by the Prime Minister, the virus will be released into every school in the country, killing the children. Sayle brags that "a spoonful of the stuff would destroy a city!". Alex is left handcuffed to the chair, who knows that Mr. Grin will come back and give him a slow and painful death. He is left there until Nadia Vole frees him, telling Alex that she is a fellow spy who worked with Ian Rider. However, as they head to find a mobile phone to call MI6 and inform them of Sayle's plan, she triggers a trapdoor which drops Alex into the jellyfish tank, revealing Sayle sent her back to kill him instead of Mr. Grin. Alex eventually gets free by using the acne cream gadget to damage the tank's supporting iron girders, causing it to burst. Vole is caught in the blast of water, and is killed by the jellyfish. Snatching up a harpoon gun, Alex rushes outside to find that Sayle's private helicopter has already left, leaving only a cargo plane on the tarmac. With just a little over an hour until the launch of the Stormbreaker computers, Alex realises he must board the cargo plane. Using the handle of the harpoon gun, Alex knocks out a guard, taking his jeep and pistol. As he starts the jeep, several other jeeps start to pursue him as the cargo plane starts to take off. Through some fancy driving and good fortune, Alex manages to cause the destruction of the hostile jeeps. Tying the nylon cord of the yo-yo gadget to the harpoon with the yo-yo clipped to his belt, Alex shoots the harpoon which catches on the underbelly of the airborne plane. Using the gadget, he raises himself on to the plane where he confronts the pilot, who is none other than Mr. Grin. Alex instructs Mr. Grin to fly to London by threatening him with the pistol. When they are finally over London, Alex realizes that there is not much time left before noon. He spots two parachutes and uses one to jump out of the plane. Mr. Grin turns the plane around hoping to ram into Alex. Alex pulls out the Game Boy Color and activates a smoke bomb disguised as a game called "Bomber Boy" inside the cargo plane. Unable to see, Mr. Grin loses control of the plane and fatally crashes into a dock land near the River Thames. Alex crashes through the roof of the Science Museum and dangles from his parachute which had caught on a beam. Alex draws the gun he took from a guard back at Sayle's mansion and fires blindly at the Stormbreaker computer, one shot hitting the Prime Minister's hand and two shots hitting Sayle. Mrs. Jones orders security not to open fire on him. MI6 immediately recalls all the computers, citing "safety issues". Later, after a debriefing by Alan Blunt and Mrs. Jones, Alex enters a taxi. The driver is in fact Herod Sayle, who survived the bullets that Alex fired at him. He leads Alex to the top of a building where he is about to shoot Alex, but is himself shot by Yassen Gregovich, who lands in a helicopter. Alex questions Yassen about why he shot Sayle. Yassen explains that Sayle was 'embarrassing', so he had to be eliminated. Alex tells Yassen he will one day kill him, but Yassen brushes aside the comment and tells Alex to drop the spy business and become a normal schoolboy again. He then leaves in the helicopter. Just before it goes out of sight, Alex sees Yassen 'salute' him. |
4516338 | /m/02p8939 | Darkwing | Kenneth Oppel | 8/16/2007 | {"/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | A colony of proto-bats called Chiropters live in safety in a giant sequoia on an uninhabited island, having deserted the other mammals due to refusal to participate in The Pact, a union between all beasts to destroy all Saurian eggs to drive their disease-ridden species to extinction. Dusk, a young Chiropter, is being taught by his father to glide. Dusk is different from the other Chiropters, however; whereas his brethren have simple sails, Dusk has wings, and an urge to fly that he has difficulty suppressing. He is regarded as a freak by the other Chiropters, though he finds acceptance with his parents and his sister, Sylph. Dusk learns to fly, but keeps his secret to himself out of fear of being shunned. Carnassial, the Felid (a type of proto-cat) also has a hidden desire. Born with shearing teeth and an insatiable appetite for flesh, he seemingly fulfils the pact when he destroys the last known batch of Saurian eggs. He leads a pack consisting of other flesh-craving Felids to form a new world order. The rogue pack of Felids find their way to Dusk's island and devour many of his colony, among them Dusk's mother. With their island invaded by the deadly new predators, it is up to Dusk and his unique powers of flight and echolocation to find the Chiropters a new home. Carnassial strikes an alliance with the powerful (but unintelligent) Hyaenodons, who claim that the Saurians do still exist, and enlist the Felids to find and destroy their eggs. Carnassial comes to realise that in order for the Felids to rule, it will have to be through cunning rather than through power. Along the way, Dusk and his colony seek refuge with a seemingly peaceful colony of "Tree Runners", only to find out that they plan on sacrificing them to a giant, meat-eating bird; the Diatryma. After escaping, Dusk finds a new home for his fellow Chiropters, but it is on the other side of a savannah, which is home to many predators. While Dusk is scouting for a good place, he meets another creature that looks similar to himself; it calls itself a bat and tells Dusk that there are many others like them. While trying to cross the savannah, the colony encounters Carnassial and the Hyaenodons. They seek refuge inside a hollow tree, only to be attacked by horrible venomous shrew-like creatures called "Soricids". The Soricids overwhelm and devour a Hyaenodon, and nearly kill Dusk, but he is rescued by Sylph. While trying to cross the Savannah, Dusk gets caught in the web of a giant spider, which cuts him loose from its web. He and Sylph are attacked by Carnassial and his Hyaenodons once again, and take refuge in the skeleton of a large dinosaur. Through it, they find their way into an eerie, underground cave, where Dusk and Sylph discover a nest of an unidentified meat-eating Saurian, along with a clutch of mostly unhatched eggs and the rotting carcasses of the parents. Carnassial, meanwhile, discovers the cave but needs the Hyaenodons to find a larger entrance for him. He schemes with his mate, Panthera; they will destroy all but two eggs, and allow them to hatch. This way, he will be able to manipulate the Hyaenodons by using fear of the Saurians to keep them under his control. Sylph and Dusk debate over whether to destroy the eggs. However, before Sylph can destroy any of them Carnassial and Panthera arrive and attack. However, before the Felids can kill them, a young Saurian (having hatched weeks earlier) appears and attacks Panthera. Dusk and Sylph escape when Carnassial fights against the Saurian in desperation to help his mate. The Saurian follows Dusk and Sylph out of the cave, where it encounters the Hyaenodons outside and attacks them. Eventually, Dusk leads the Chiropters to their new home, and the book ends with him leaving the colony and promising his sister to come back if he doesn't like life with bats. |
4517548 | /m/0c6qnh | Three for the Chair | Rex Stout | null | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/028v3": "Detective fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | David Fyfe, a high school English teacher, brings Wolfe a problem regarding a contract and inheritance. His brother Bert has just died of pneumonia and left his estate to David, another brother Paul, and their sister Louise Fyfe Tuttle. But under the terms of an agreement with Bert's business partner, Johnny Arrow, all assets from their uranium mining operation go to Arrow, and the assets represent nearly all of Bert's five million dollar estate. Paul Fyfe thinks that Arrow might have killed Bert before he could shelter his assets by giving them to his relatives. The family hires Wolfe to determine whether there's enough evidence of a crime to refer the matter to the police. Twenty years earlier, Bert was charged with the murder of his father. Bert was acquitted, largely on the basis of an alibi provided by Vincent Tuttle, at the time his roommate and later his brother-in-law. After his acquittal Bert broke contact with his family and moved to Canada, where, in partnership with Arrow, he struck it rich in uranium. Having recently returned to New York to re-establish ties with his family, Bert invited them to his hotel suite for dinner, and to a Broadway show. But Bert fell ill with pneumonia and required bed rest and 24-hour nursing care. Paul, a masher, manhandled nurse Anne Goren, who phoned the attending physician to send another nurse. Louise Tuttle volunteered to watch Bert, and Miss Goren left. Then Paul got into a fistfight with Arrow over Miss Goren, who had aroused romantic and protective feelings in Arrow. Arrow beat Paul so badly that he was arrested and spent the night in jail. That night, Bert died, and his doctor certifies that the death was due to pneumonia. Paul now suggests that Arrow might have found a way to substitute something toxic for the morphine that the doctor had left with the nurse. There are several strange aspects to Bert's death. One is that Bert's father had died in a similar fashion 20 years earlier – someone had opened the bedroom windows on a snowy winter night as the father lay asleep, also suffering from pneumonia. Louise Tuttle has felt guilty ever since, because she was supposed to be looking after him but had fallen asleep in the next room. Then there's the matter of the missing ice cream. Paul had brought two quarts of ice cream to Bert's hotel room and put them in the refrigerator. It went uneaten due to the subsequent events, but somehow it has disappeared. Wolfe sends Archie to see Paul, Louise and Vincent in Mount Kisco to check on the morphine, and while he's there to investigate the ice cream's disappearance. Yet another strange aspect is that when Bert's body was found, there were two hot water bags next to him. The presence of the bags was expected; that they were both empty was not. |
4517915 | /m/0c6rcf | The Ezekiel Option | Joel C. Rosenberg | null | null | (note: this list is incomplete) Americans * President James Michael "Mac" MacPherson, (June 3, 1950-August 31, 2016), first elected in 2008 with 53% of the vote, and was re-elected in 2012 with 55% of the vote. During the Vietnam War MacPherson served as a Navy F-4 Phantom pilot, and shot down three NVA planes. He served as Governor of Colorado from 2003-2009. He is married to Julie MacPherson, and they have two daughters. * Vice President Willim Havard Oaks, (born: January 6, 1943-September 2, 2016), before he became MacPherson's Vice President he served in Naval Intelligence for about ten years. After leaving the Navy he entered the private sector, after becoming a millionaire he entered politics in his home state of Virginia. He served as Governor of Virginia 1978-1982, and after this served in the US Senate from 1983-2009. He was added to the MacPherson ticket for much the same reasons as George W. Bush asked Dick Cheney to be his vice president. Served as Vice President 2009-2016. 45th. President 2016. * Marsha Kirkpatrick, National Security Advisor, 2009–2015; Secretary of State, 2015–2016 * Jack Mitchell, Director of National Intelligence * Burt Trainor, Secretary of Defense 2009-2016. Vice President, 2016 *Nick Warner Secretary of State, 2011–2015 *Lee Alexander James (1948–2016) Secretary of Homeland Security, 2009–2016; Vice President 2016; 46th. President, 2016 * Jon Meyers Bennett, Senior Advisor to the President, 2009–2014. (born: June 6, 1967-October 2, 2016) * Bob Corsetti, White House Chief of Staff, 2009–2016 * Ken Costello, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, 2009–2014; Senior Advisor to the President, 2015; National Security Advisor, 2016 * Erin Christina McCoy, Aide to Jon Bennett and CIA operations officer. (born: 1977-2016) * Indira Rajiv, Director of the NAMESTAN desk, CIA * Chuck Murray, White House Press Secretary, 2009–2016 * Paul Jackson, Governor of California, 2011–2016; 2016 Republican nominee for President. *Elena Martinez U.S. Senator from Illinois, 2005-; 2016 Democratic nominee for President. Israelis * David Doron, Prime Minister of Israel 2009-, (born: 1939-) * Dr. Eliezer Mordechai, former head of Mossad (born: May 28, 1930-January 12, 2015) RUSSIANS * Grigoriy Vadim, President of the Russian Federation, 2008-2014. * Aleksandr Golitsyn, Russian Foreign Minister, 2008-2014. * Andrei Zyuganov, Director of Presidential Administration (Chief of Staff) * Sergei Ilyushkin, Deputy Seaker of the Duma; Protege of Vladimir Zhirinovsky Al-Nakabah leaders * Yuri Gogolov, Russian Co-Founder of the Al-Nakbah Terrorist Movement * Mohammed Jibril, Iranian Co-Founder of the Al-Nakabah Terrorist Movement Others * Natasha Gogolov, Wife of Yuri Gogolov * Mustafa Al-Hassani, President of Iraq, 2010–2015; President of the United States of Eurasia 2015-2016. * Ruth Bennett, Mother of Jon Bennett * Salvador Lucente, European Union Foreign Minister, 2009–2015; Secretary-General of the United Nations, 2015-. * Ibrahim Sa'id, Palestinian Prime Minister, 2010-2014. * Ifshahan Kharrazi, President of Iran, 2009–2014 * Dmitri Galishnikov CEO Medexco In his previous book, the Last Days, very large oil deposits were discovered in Israel and the occupied territories, and a peace treaty was proposed between Israel and the Palestinians which setup a joint oil production company and made every Israeli and Palestinian a shareholder (making them instantly rich). This book picks up on from the end of Mr. Rosenberg's previous book. This book starts off with an Aeroflot flight from Moscow to New York being hijacked and diverted toward Washington. The flight carries several Duma members, the CEO of Lukoil, and forty-one children. The plane gets shot down by the United States military on live television at the order of the President of the United States before it reaches Washington and causes significant damage. Also, at this time the Palestinian Prime Minister that signed the Israeli-Palestinian Oil Peace Treaty is assassinated in Saudi Arabia by parties unknown. This happens while the former Israeli head of the Mossad is visiting the new country of Babylon, built on the ruins of post-Saddam Iraq. While mourning for his friend the Palestinian PM, the former Mossad head is warned of impending coup in Russia, but his warning comes too late. At the same time, Jon Bennett, an envoy of the President and main architect of the Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty, is in Moscow in preparation for treaty related discussions with the Russian government. However, the airplane shooting incident causing a significant cooling of relations between the U.S. and Russia, and gives a boost to the right wing LDPR party which calls for cutting off relations with the US while enhancing Russia's military. When Mr. Bennett is summoned to meet with the Russian President Mr. Vadim, the LDPR with support of the Russian military orchestrates a coup and kills the President. The new Czar Gogolov of Russia severs all diplomatic relations with the US, removes Russia's embassy from the US and expels all US citizens from Russian soil. Mr Bennett is injured and is sent back to the US. However, his fiance (a CIA operative) who was with him in the Kremlin at the time of the coup is kidnapped by the new Russian government in order obtain CIA encryption codes. Via a secret envoy, Russia proceeds to sell twenty five nuclear warheads to Iran to formalize the military alliance that has been growing between the two countries since the 1990s. Russian President/Czar Gogolov then proceeds to convince or in some cases blackmail European countries into support Russia's upcoming fight vs. the United States and Israel (the blackmail is made possible by the fact that Russia is a major gas supplier to Europe). At the same time, Russia convinces Cuba to sign the NPT. Mr. Gogolov then speaks at the United Nations proposing UNSC resolution 2441 which gives Israel thirty days to disarm itself from nuclear weapons, allow International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors in and sign the NPT. This is done in a fashion similar to how the U.S. proceeded against Iraq. Russia also proceeds to turn world opinion against the US by painting that nation as a war monger which shot down a civilian airplane without any proof that a hijacking was in fact in progress. Additionally, Russia asks for one billion dollars/passenger killed reparation payment from the US before resuming diplomatic relations (for a total of $173 billion). Most US allies abandon the US, and side with Russia including EU countries. Before the UNSC resolution comes to vote, the US President sends Mr. Bennett to Israel to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Doron, as well as the former head of Mossad, Dr. Mordechai. PM Doron makes it clear that if the U.S. lets the resolution pass, Israel will not comply. If matters come to war, Israel will then execute the Samson option. After meeting with the PM, Mr. Bennett proceeds to meet with Dr. Mordechai who lays out the case for the current events being the Biblical War of Gog and Magog. Please see War of Ezekiel 38-39 for more information. Dr. Mordechai interprets this as an alliance led by Russia together with Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Sudan and Saudi Arabia against Israel and proposes a new policy called The Ezekiel Option (as opposed to the Samson option). This proposed policy states that Israel should not launch nuclear weapons but rather sit back and allow God to wage war against its enemies. He hands a brief to Mr. Bennett to take back to the President of the United States. Meanwhile the US prepares to expose the Russia/Iran relationship regarding nuclear weapons in order to make Russia lose prestige in the eyes of the world before the UNSC vote takes place. However, the President's speech is pre-empted by Iranian announcement of renouncement of all nuclear energy and agreeing to unrestricted inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (having obtained nuclear weapons Iran no longer needs the civilian nuclear energy program). Mr. Bennett takes the brief back to the US and hands it over to the President prior to the UNSC vote on resolution 2441. When the resolution comes to vote, the resolution passes 12 to 2 with one abstention (USA). Here is how the voting goes (bold indicate permanent members): {| border="1" |- | Argentina || For |- | China || For |- | France || For |- | Germany || For |- | Philippines || Against |- | Indonesia || For |- | Japan || For |- | Libya || For |- | Poland || Against |- | Italy || For |- | Russia || For |- | Turkey || For |- | Britain || For |- | U.S. || Abstains |} The Russian government orchestrates a fake assassination attempt on the life of Czar Gogolov by supposed agents of the Mossad and the Israeli government. This is done in order to have an excuse for first strike against Israel. Meanwhile, massive amounts of troops are being moved toward Israeli borders, all ostensibly in preparation for implementation of the UNSC resolution by force in case Israel refuses to dismantle its nuclear capabilities. Armies from the following countries are participating: Russia, former USSR republics, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Algeria, Austria, Bahrain, Ethiopia, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Oman, Qatar, Sudan, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. In addition, Russia and former USSR Republics begin naval wargames off the coast of Israel. There are also unknown number of nuclear warheads aimed at Israel from Russian and Iran. Coalition troops are supplemented by numerous horses for the benefit of cavalry troops. Nine days before the UN resolution deadline expires (October 8), the Israeli nuclear forces go on full alert. Russia's forces go on full alert as well to match. The U.S. follows suit by moving to Defcon 2. After the UNSC vote, Mr. Bennett storms the Oval Office to question the President about the vote. After a heated argument, he resigns and leaves. After a trip to visit his mother in Florida, he smuggles himself back into Russia with the help of Dr. Mordechai in order to find and save his fiance. After crossing the border to Iran, Mr. Bennett sends a letter to Dr. Mordechai pleading with him to make the Ezekiel Option public information by sending his brief to a New York Times reporter. Meanwhile his fiance manages to escape her captors and flee to the streets of Moscow with a massive manhunt underway for her. Mr. Mordechai decides to go to the NY Times with his brief. However, the NYT keeps delaying the publication of the story until Drudge leaks it to the world. Following the leak, NYT publishes the story followed by interviews on numerous television stations. The Russian president laughs at the brief: The Jews were always a pathetic lot. Let them pray to their god. Eventually Mr. Mordechai is invited to the Israeli command bunker where he discusses the brief with the Israeli PM. At the same time Mr. Bennett finally reaches Moscow where he is reunited with his fiance. On the last day before the UNSC resolution deadline (October 16), Russia launches a nuclear tipped SS-18 missile at Israel from the city of Tobolsk. The U.S. moves to Defcon 1 while Israel prepares to execute The Samson Option to launch all of its nuclear missiles as follows: * 100 to target Russia * 50 to target former USSR republics * 25 to target Iran * 15 to target Germany and Austria * 8 to target Saudi Arabia * 6 to target Syria * 6 to target Turkey * Remaining missiles to target the capital cities of the rest of the coalition and the troops massing on the borders Meanwhile Mr. Bennett and his fiance are chased by security forces in Moscow which is empty of most citizens who have fled to escape the expected Israeli nuclear attack. At the same time, Dr. Mordechai is trying to convince the Israeli PM not to launch nuclear weapons but rather execute The Ezekiel Option which calls for taking no action and letting God save Israel. The Russian Czar Gogolov and his second in command meanwhile evacuate Moscow via helicopter to a secure command bunker in the Ural Mountains. With 8 minutes left to war, suddenly a massive earthquake takes place with the epicenter near Jerusalem. However, unlike normal earthquakes this one is felt all over the world in fulfilment of Ezekiel's prophecy (38:19-20): 19. For in my jealousy and in the fire of my wrath have I spoken, Surely in that day there shall be a great shaking in the land of Israel; 20. So that the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the heaven, and the beasts of the field, and all creeping things that creep upon the earth, and all the men that are upon the face of the earth, shall shake at my presence, and the mountains shall be thrown down, and the steep places shall fall, and every wall shall fall to the ground. At 2 minutes left to impact, massive fireballs originating from space begin to attack Russia, Iran and other coalition countries. In Russia, the buildings in the Kremlin complex and the Red Square are hit and destroyed including St. Basil's Cathedral and Lenin's Tomb. Afterward, every Russian military base and missile silo is also hit. In Iran, Libya and other coalition countries military and government installations are being targeted. In Saudi Arabia fireballs hit Mecca and Medina, incinerating thousands of people on live television. The Blue Mosque in Turkey and the Reichstag in Germany follow. Near Israel, troops massing on the borders are being massively firebombed and destroyed. In Jerusalem a series of fireballs destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock and all other buildings on the Temple Mount. The book ends with the helicopter carrying the Russian czar and his second in command, Jibril, being destroyed by a fireball, and the Russian president czar being carted off by demons. At the same time Mr. Bennett and his fiance, Erin, escape the burning city of Moscow via a speed boat in the Moskva River. |
4518855 | /m/0c6t0j | The Knight of the Sacred Lake | Rosalind Miles | 6/12/2001 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/0hwxm": "Historical novel"} | As High King and Queen, Arthur and Guenevere reign supreme across the many kingdoms of Great Britain. Still, Guenevere secretly mourns the loss of her beloved Lancelot, who has returned to the Sacred Lake of his boyhood, hoping to restore his faith in chivalry in the place where he learned to be a knight. In a glittering Pentecost ceremony, new knights are sworn to the Round Table, including Arthur's nephews, Agravain and Gawain. After many years of strife, peace is restored to Guenevere's realm. But betrayal, jealousy, and ancient blood feuds fester unseen. Morgan le Fay, now the mother of Arthur's only son, Mordred, has become the focus of Merlin's age-old quest to ensure the survival of the house of Pendragon. From the east comes the shattering news that Guenevere may have a rival for Lancelot's love. A bleak shadow falls again across Camelot—and across the sacred isle of Avalon, where Roman priests threaten the life of the Lady herself. At the center of the storm is Guenevere, torn between her love for her husband, her people, and Sir Lancelot of the Lake. |
4519034 | /m/0c6t9v | The Princess of Dhagabad | Anna Kashina | 5/15/2000 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | A magical book written with the exotic flavor of Arabian Nights, The Princess of Dhagabad is the first in a trilogy of fantasy novels. This sensuous and vividly imagined novel is about the coming-of-age of an Arabian princess, who is destined to be heiress to the throne of Dhagabad, and her relationship with Hasan, an all-powerful djinn who becomes her slave, teacher and steadfast companion. The Princess of Dhagabad follows the princess as she grows from a child of twelve into a young woman of seventeen, at which age she proves, against all tradition, that she is more than capable of taking her destiny-and the destiny of Dhagabad-in hand. Hasan, her devoted djinn, whose power and omniscience crush him under an unbearable burden, gradually releases himself from his centuries-old pain and apathy. He grows to enjoy spending time with his mistress, until one day-against all odds-he discovers a power greater than wisdom or immortality, greater than suffering—love. |
4519856 | /m/0c6vlx | Fade to Black | Robert Goldsborough | 1990-10 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery"} | Nearly all the principals in the book have something to hide, and therefore something for Archie and Wolfe to inquire about, but not every secret is criminal, and the balance between private lives (including a passionate but commercially meaningless liaison between two hostile principals) and responsible disclosure is handled adroitly, and far better than in most Rex Stout novels. Just as in Before Midnight the agency partners have strong personality clashes, but this is seen in this book as a price that is paid for complementary talents in a boutique firm. Wolfe's right-hand man and amanuensis Archie Goodwin is attending a Super Bowl party thrown by his "good friend" Lily Rowan at her East Side penthouse in Manhattan. During the game, there is a spectacular commercial involving parachutists, acrobats, and more promoting a cherry-flavored soft drink call Cherr-o-kee. One of the partners of the ad agency that put on that stunt, Rod Mills, is also at the party, and takes Goodwin aside to say that he'd like help with a problem. Later, all three partners of Mills/Lake/Ryman meet at Wolfe's office discuss an acute problem of industrial espionage they've been having lately: their best ideas being discovered and used by a larger agency representing another cherry-flavored soft drink. The problem as presented by M/L/R is simple: to find the spy within the agency: the source of the industrial esponiage. Therefore, Goodwin has to look into possible links between members of the firm and its rival. While this remains elusive, it becomes clear that the executive of the rival drink's campaign is the recipient of the information, but it isn't long before he is found dead in his apartment (by Archie, who else?). This prompts the owner of Cherr-o-kee, a reclusive part-Cherokee billionaire named Acker Foreman to pay Wolfe a visit, along with his two adult sons, Arnold and Stephen. Despite the tense situation, Wolfe gains Acker Foreman's respect with his knowledge of his career and of Cherokee history, especially the Trail of Tears (documented poignantly by de Tocqueville in Democracy in America). Arnold, however, displays the same hostility as he has to M/L/R personnel. After further investigation, Wolfe gathers the interested parties at his brownstone to lay out his proposed solution, this time without enough evidence to please law enforcement. However, since his mandate is simply to stop industrial espionage, he can (arguably) collect his fee. The rest is left for the reader to discover. |
4520362 | /m/0c6w3q | Half Moon Investigations | Eoin Colfer | 2006 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Fletcher Moon is a natural born investigator. Knowing this, April, a girl from his school comes to him for help in finding a lock of hair that she believes to have been stolen. Fletcher agrees to help her and starts off by investigating all suspects which eventually get him threatened by a thirteen year old named Red Sharkey. Fletcher holds Red as a prime suspect due to his family's criminal reputation. Fletcher then looks up the Sharkey family’s criminal records by hacking police files, leading him to discover a series of unsolved crimes that have occurred in his county. He hears something outside at night and when he goes to check it out, he is assaulted by a hurling stick and knocked unconscious. Upon awakening in hospital, he discovers that the hurling stick must have had 'Red' embossed on it and therefore comes to the conclusion that it was Red attacked him with his hurl, embossed with his name. Fletcher then goes to visit April’s cousin May to photograph this new found evidence but ends up at the wrong house where he catches sight of somebody catching fire to May’s lucky dancing costume. He passes out in the yard due to the anesthetic from the hospital and later awakens to find a torch in his hand and all evidence for the arson pointing to him. Following an interrogation by the police, Fletcher is rescued by Red Sharkey. Red claims he was framed for the hurl assault. Half-Moon and Red team up to solve the chain of mysteries within 24 hours. Following a suspicious story to April's house, the boy detectives discover the truth behind Les Jeunes Etudiantes, the girls club, their true goal being to get rid of all the boys ruining their education. Three recent expulsions can be attributed to these girls, and the boys feel they need to be stopped. Unfortunately, they are found out, and the girls manage to imprison the boys in the cellar. They are, however, saved by May, April's cousin. Fletcher and Red previously heard the girls practicing the lines that they planned to use to accuse Red's brother, Herod of assault. Red is able to send a text message to the present police officer informing him of the lines they would use. The police officer puts two and two together and exposes the girls for the liars they are, and Herod Sharkey is found innocent, saving him from expulsion. Fletcher knows that this still does not solve the mysteries that included his assault so he meets a secret informant, and in exchange for the password of the police account he hacked earlier in the story, receives the information that he desired. He finds that the link between the crimes ended up being the upcoming talent show at his school and it turns out that the victims each had a part in the show in some way. After trying to protect May from becoming involved with the criminal Fletcher at last finds the answer he had been looking for all along. All the victims of these crimes had been ranked higher than May in the talent show. So, Red suggests that May was behind all this. However, on stage, Fletcher proves that it was May's father, Gregor Devereux who was the culprit. In the epilogue, Red and Fletcher decide to form a detective group. Red suggests "Moon Investigations" while Fletcher replies saying "You're half right". |
4520380 | /m/0c6w5f | Pamela | Samuel Richardson | 1740 | {"/m/02ql9": "Epistolary novel", "/m/01qxvh": "Romance novel", "/m/05nd8bf": "Georgian romance"} | Epistolary novels—novels written as series of letters—were extremely popular during the 18th century, mainly because of Richardson's Pamela. Richardson and other novelists of his time argued that the letter allowed the reader greater access to a character's thoughts. Richardson claimed that he was writing "to the moment": that is, Pamela's thoughts were recorded nearly simultaneously with her actions. In the novel, Pamela writes two kinds of letters. At the beginning, while she decides how long to stay on at Mr B's after his mother's death, she tells her parents about her various moral dilemmas and asks for their advice. After Mr. B. abducts her and imprisons her in his country house, she continues to write to her parents, but since she does not know if they will ever receive her letters, the writings are also considered a diary. In Pamela, the letters are almost exclusively written by the heroine, restricting the reader's access to the other characters; we see only Pamela's perception of them. In Richardson's other novels, Clarissa (1748) and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), the reader is privy to the letters of several characters and can more effectively evaluate the characters' motivations and moral values. |
4523848 | /m/0c71gw | The Status Civilization | Robert Sheckley | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/02p0szs": "Historical fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Earth is a uniform, weakly structured, utopian society based on the mutual trust and conformity of its citizens. It is sleepy and stagnant, developing neither socially nor technologically. Its striking social stability is maintained by robots brainwashing children in "closed classes." The ideologies of both Earth and Omega resemble one another, differing only in words. On Omega, the citizens worship Evil (always capitalized) in a cult dedicated to an entity called The Black One. On Earth, the world religion is an amalgam of all the "good" aspects of previous Earth religions. Its institution is the Church of the Spirit of Mankind Incarnate. As Barrent comes closer to the truth about the reasons for his incarceration, his Omegan consciousness conflicts with his subconsciousness which was programmed in the closed classes by the robots when he was a child. The subsequent psychological struggle is played out by repeating all of the previous fights and battles which Barrent experienced throughout the book, eventually making clear the vision (or "skrenning") which the mutant girl on Omega foresaw of Barrent's death. |
4525393 | /m/0c74gk | Death of a Ghost | Margery Allingham | 1934 | {"/m/0lsxr": "Crime Fiction", "/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | John Lafcadio, who modestly described himself as "probably the greatest painter since Rembrandt", has left a bizarre legacy - a collection of twelve sealed paintings, to be unveiled one at a time at an annual event commencing ten years after his death. While the first seven ceremonies went smoothly, the eighth starts with family ructions, when John's granddaughter Linda finds her boyfriend Tommy has returned from a painting trip to Rome with a model, whom he has married to get into the country. Albert Campion, a friend of Belle and the family, persuades her to attend the show, just in time to be there when Tommy is stabbed to death during a power outage. Campion calls in his old friend Stanislaus Oates to help avoid scandal, but Oates is convinced Linda must be guilty, as she has the only obvious motive. Max Fustian, a hanger-on to Lafcadio's coat-tails and now a flourishing art dealer, confesses to the crime, but his confession is laughable and a clear attempt to clear Linda. No further proof can be found however, and thanks to pressure from some important dignitaries attending the show, the matter is hushed up. The mystery continues, however, as Tommy's art and possessions slowly vanish, until no trace of him remains. Campion meets up with Max Fustian, and finds himself entertaining strange suspicions of the odd little man. Some weeks later, Belle visits Claire Potter in her studio in the garden and finds her dead, face down on the couch. Nicotine poisoning is diagnosed, and suspicion falls at first on her husband, who had skipped work that day and had returned home for a minute an hour before the body was discovered, only to leave again in a hurry. Potter reveals his wife suffered from alcoholism, and frequently drank herself unconscious; he had assumed she had done this once more, washed her glass and left her there. Seeking the source of the poisoned booze, Campion and Oates discover that Claire took in wood-blocks for cleaning from Max Fustian, and had returned a parcel that very day. Questioning the delivery boy, they find that he once dropped a similar package, and was surprised to find the wrapping wet. Convinced of Fustian's guilt but lacking proof, Campion seeks a motive. He learns from the model Rosa-Rosa that Tommy had a cottage in the country, and from the cook Lisa that Lafcadio, despite his determination to defeat his rival and keep his fame alive, had only managed to complete eight of the twelve paintings of his legacy, filling the remaining packages with junk as a joke. Campion visits Tommy's cottage and finds Max there, all traces of Tommy burnt. He returns to Little Venice later, and finds Max in a blazing row with Belle - he has insisted he must take the remaining Lafcadio works abroad and sell them, and she has refused to let him. Sure now that Max had Tommy fake the last four paintings for him, Campion gets further proof in the form of a drawing uncovered in Paris by Linda. He meets Max and they go out to dinner, where Max has him sample a strange and rare wine from Romania. Too late, Campion recalls the wine has a terribly intoxicating effect if taken after spirits - and Max had made sure Campion drank lots of gin before dinner. After a drunken tour of town, Max leads Campion to the edge of a Tube platform, and pushes hard - only to be stopped by the plain-clothes men Oates has had on their tail, after a meeting with Campion that morning. Visiting Fustian in prison, Campion finds him a gibbering lunatic, his mind pushed over the edge by the defeat of his schemes. |
4525412 | /m/0c74hy | The Torture Garden | Octave Mirbeau | 1899 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Published at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, Mirbeau’s novel is a loosely assembled reworking of texts composed at different eras, featuring different styles, and showcasing different characters. Beginning with material stemming from articles on the 'Law of Murder' discussed in the "Frontispice" ("The Manuscript"), the novel continues with a farcical critique of French politics as seen in "En Mission" : a French politicians' aide is sent on a pseudo-scientific expedition to China, while his presence at home would be compromising ("The Mission"). Then it moves on to an account of a visit to a Cantonese prison by a narrator accompanied by the sadist/hysteric Clara, who delights in witnessing flayings, crucifixions and numerous tortures, all done in beautifully laid out and groomed gardens, and explaining the beauty of torture to her companion. Finally she attains hysterical orgasm and passes out in exhaustion, only to begin again a few days later ("Le Jardin des supplices", "The Garden"). |
4525718 | /m/0c74z6 | The Gate of Time | Philip José Farmer | 1966 | {"/m/0mz2": "Alternate history", "/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | Roger Two Hawks, an Iroquois serving as a combat pilot in WWII, is shot down during a raid on Ploieşti, Romania. While parachuting he feels a strange dizziness. Being hidden by locals, he realises that they neither look nor speak like Romanians, but rather resemble Native Americans and speak a language distantly resembling that of his own tribe. The mystery is resolved when he sees a globe and finds that he is in a world where the continent of America does not exist, having been drowned for the whole of humanity's tenure on Earth. As a result, the ancestors of the various Native American tribes did not cross the non-existent Bering Strait but wandered westward into Europe, taking the general place of the Slavs in our history. Thus, the Iroquois live in Romania and the Ukraine, the Aztecs in Russia, and so on. Though very different from our world, in this reality, too, a war is going on resembling the one which Two Hawks left behind, with a kind of aggressive Germany-analogue trying to conquer everybody else (though its dominant people are not Germanic but rather Lithuanian). Two Hawks very quickly gets involved. His knowledge and abilities are very much in demand, since this world does not yet have heavier-than-air flight, and its possession could decide the war. He goes through a very fast-paced series of adventures, involving such elements as Hittites who survived into the 20th century, a Luftwaffe pilot who also ended up in this world, an England which had never known a Roman Empire nor a Norman Conquest but has many Cretan and Semitic elements in its makeup, an unknown chapter in the life of Elizabethan adventurer Humphrey Gilbert, an Arab-colonised South Africa and a mysterious island on the site of our world's Colorado, where an underground Polynesian temple is to be found. As can be expected, Two Hawks also experiences a most tempestuous love affair. |
4528209 | /m/0c78pd | Rogue in Space | Fredric Brown | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | In the book a sentient and powerful asteroid arrives in the solar system's asteroid belt after countless aeons of wandering interstellar space. Passing by another asteroid, the living asteroid makes its first ever encounter with other living beings - a likeable criminal involved in a life-and-death struggle with a corrupt and power-mad judge. The judge is eventually killed, but so too is his beautiful wife who had allied herself with the criminal, the couple falling in love. Whilst the god-like living asteroid builds a new world around itself, and blocks all mankind's efforts to investigate it, eventually the criminal returns to the planet with a small group. The sentient asteroid allows them to make planetfall, but only the criminal can accept living in the new Eden created for him, and they eventually depart. The alien then resurrects the late judge's wife. |
4530578 | /m/0c7dfc | Superior Saturday | Garth Nix | 7/1/2008 | {"/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature"} | The book begins with Saturday discussing with her new Dusk (who was younger brother to Saturday's former Dusk) her plan to invade Sunday's realm, the Incomparable Gardens, which she has been trying to reach since the Architect disappeared. Arthur, returning to Earth with Friday's captives, discovers that the national army (under orders from General Pravuil, who is secretly Saturday's servant) is planning to destroy his hometown with nuclear bombs to prevent a disease outbreak, and uses the Fifth Key to stop time so that he can find a way to forestall this disaster. He then discovers that he is now more than 60% contaminated by sorcery, and is therefore irrevocably turning into an immortal Denizen of the House. Seeing no other choice, he returns to the Lower House (leaving his friend Leaf to deal with Lady Fridays' Sleepers) to find it empty and on the verge of being annihilated by Nothing. He barely escapes, but reaches the Deep Coal Cellar, which is partially protected by the sorceries surrounding the Old One's prison. After finding his advisor Dr. Scamandros in the Cellar, Arthur confronts the Old One, who has grown in power and has destroyed his clockwork jailers. He is now surrounded by flowers, which he calls a sign of impending change. After talking to the Old One (receiving no definite answers to his questions), Arthur returns to the Citadel in the Great Maze and plans a pre-emptive strike against Saturday. Arthur hence learns that Saturday (as Dame Primus suspected in Lady Friday) has deliberately destroyed the Lower House and Far Reaches to stunt the growth of the Drasil trees that lift Sunday's realm higher than Saturday can build. She believes that even if the rest of the House is destroyed, the Incomparable Gardens will remain. Dame Primus wishes for Arthur to fortify the rest of the House against the influx of Nothing, but is reluctantly convinced to split herself into two (Dame Quarto and Dame Septum) to administer the House while Arthur seizes the last Keys from Saturday and Sunday. Before she splits, Dame Primus tells Arthur that the Nothing which had destroyed the Far Reaches and Lower House cannot be held off for ever unless the Seventh Key is recovered. Arthur requests Dame Primus to give him the Compleat Atlas of the House, but Dame Primus evasively tells him that she does not have it. He suspects she is lying, but has no idea of her motive. Arthur, accompanied by Suzy Turquoise Blue, who has appointed herself General of a small regiment consisting solely of Piper's Children, infiltrates the Upper House using the Simultaneous Bottles (see quantum entanglement) owned by the Raised Rats. There, they find that Saturday is preparing her assault on the Incomparable Gardens, which are now within reach of her Tower. Finding that the Sixth Part of the Will is dispersed in the rain that constantly falls in the Upper House, Arthur goes to a holding tank for the water to reconstitute the Will (whereupon it assumes the shape of a raven), but is separated from Suzy when they are attacked by Artful Loungers. Flushed down to the lowest levels of the Upper House, he encounters a force of New Nithlings, led by the Piper, preparing to attack the Upper House. Throughout all this, Arthur finds that this part of the Will is more agreeable to him than the first four, though not more so than the fifth, and more humble than any of them. His own metamorphosis is a subject of much attention in preceding chapters, wherein he discusses the changes with himself and Suzy and struggles to control a ferocious arrogance and accompanying impatience that seem to have become part of his personality as a result of his transformation. It is suggested several times that he is not a typical Denizen, on the basis that his blood is golden rather than blue and his eyes, unlike any Denizen's, are luminous. With the Will's help, Arthur disguises himself as a Sorcerous Supernumerary (the lowest-ranked and most terminally depressed sorcerer) in hopes of rescuing Suzy, but is caught up in Saturday's assault force. In the Incomparable Gardens, Arthur tries to take advantage of Saturday's distraction by Sunday's insectile guards to call the Sixth Key to him, but is thrown off the edge of the Gardens by Superior Saturday's spell as he completes the necessary incantation. The outcome is unrevealed. The epilogue shows Leaf trying to get as many people into the hospital's bomb shelter as she can before the bombs are launched. With the help of staff-member Martine, she brings at least fifty-three into safety; but the others are killed as the bombs arrive. As the book concludes, she calls for Arthur to return and set things right. |
4530946 | /m/0c7dxf | Lord Sunday | Garth Nix | 3/1/2010 | {"/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature"} | Falling from the Incomparable Gardens in Superior Saturday, Arthur, having won the Sixth Key, escapes impalement on Saturday's Tower by entering the Improbable Stair. His uncontrollable falling leads the Stair to spit him out somewhere completely unexpected - he is under attack from sentient plants in the Secondary Realms, and is unable to concentrate to use the Fifth Key to escape. Meanwhile, Suzy Turquoise Blue, Arthur's friend, plots to escape from her prison in Saturday's Tower while battle rages above and below her. Saturday's forces are pressing into the Incomparable Gardens, but are also engaged in a fierce struggle to keep the Piper and his army of Newniths at the bottom of the Upper House. Suzy is being held by the intelligent but forgetful Sorcerous Supernumerary (meaning he failed his final sorcery exams), Giac. She, with some help from the sixth part of the Will, persuades Giac to free her and accompany her to the Citadel in the Incomparable Gardens. On Earth, Leaf, responsible for the Sleepers from Lady Friday, struggles to cope with the aftermath of a nuclear strike and desperately needs help, especially since she herself has become a target for intruders from the House, namely Lord Sunday's Dusk and his 'pet'. Within the House, Nothing continues to rise and must be stopped before it can destroy the entire House and Universe. Sunday intends to hold Arthur to ransom by controlling Leaf and his mother; to this end, he dispatches the "Reaper" (Sunday's Dusk) to take Leaf through the Front Door. It is then revealed that the Door is filled with Nithlings (and is, indeed, collapsing through contamination by Nothing). The Lieutenant-Keeper of the Door is vanquished in battle with them; the Reaper comes to his aid a few minutes too late, and the Keeper dies (handing over the post to an unwilling Leaf). Leaf, being the new Lieutenant-Keeper, cannot be compelled to leave the Front Door, so the Reaper goes back to Lord Sunday to report his failure. Arthur returns from the unknown planet in the Secondary Realms by a supreme effort of will and control over the Improbable Stair, due to the fact his ear was shot off before he fully entered the Stair; once healed, he believes he has returned to his bedroom on Earth, but as he searches his house he finds his mother (who went missing during the events of "Lady Friday") in the living room. As he approaches her he realizes that she can't see him. It is later revealed that Arthur's mother is trapped in a time loop and is being displayed as an exhibit in the Incomparable Gardens. He cannot interact with her; when he looks out of the windows he can see nothing but green leaves draped against them. Soon after, a Piper's child (employed as a gardener) enters the house with a flaming pitchfork; Arthur grabs and deactivates it, and forces the boy to lead him out of the house. The boy professes not to have heard of the upheavals among the Trustees; he thinks Arthur is the Reaper (leading Arthur to suspect that the Reaper is Sunday’s Dawn, Noon or Dusk). As they leave Arthur's house, they are ambushed by Sunday's Dawn and Noon; and the Piper's child reveals himself to be Lord Sunday in disguise. After chaining him up by his arms to a colossal dragonfly, (the form of transport commonly used in the Gardens) they fly him over the Gardens to a smaller replica of the clock face that the Old One is bound to. Arthur, his Keys overcome by the superior power of the Seventh Key, tries to escape by using his own innate powers to form something out of Nothing; he fails to create anything, but he brings his childhood toy, Elephant, to life. He sets it to search for his confiscated Keys; meanwhile, he calls the Mariner to come and rescue him. Hours later, the Keys are sent to him and Arthur is able to free himself. Leaf has ventured to the Middle House via portal and has joined forces with Suzy's band of motley Raiders in an attempt to infiltrate the Upper House, in order to prepare elevators for the Army of the Architect to get through to the Gardens. Fred Initial Numbers Gold, during an attack by the Piper's army, accidentally picks up Leaf's sword, and with it the post of Lieutenant-Keeper of the Front Door. Arthur battles with Lord Sunday, who also has to contend with an invasion by the combined forces of the Piper and the subservient Saturday. The battle is taken to the Elysium, the epicenter of creation; it is here that the seventh part of the Will (a withered apple tree) is kept in a gilt cage. The Mariner opens it at Arthur's behest, but is killed in the process. The freed Will traps Sunday while Arthur claims the Seventh Key (in the form of a small key). When Dame Primus bites into an apple from the manifestation of Part Seven of the Will, the Will is made whole; Arthur unknowingly becomes its channel for its intended purpose - the destruction of the House. The Old One is freed, and He steps into the Will; it is explained that the Architect split Herself in two at the beginning of Creation to speed the evolutionary process, and the Old One is in fact a part of Her (but he had to be chained up when his views grew distinct from Hers), and the manifestation of the Will is the Architect in Her entirety. She reveals that, bored with life, She wished to return to Nothing, to see what it was like to die. She could not do so, however, without destroying the House, because in her anger She had chained the Old One to the fate of the House, and the Old One was anchoring her to existence. The Architect destroys the remnants of Creation with the powers of the Keys. Arthur, now omnipotent, survives and is anointed "New Architect" by the fading thoughts of the Architect. This is why She needed a mortal Heir, to provide a creative spirit to renew the Universe. Arthur decides to remake the Universe exactly as it was, using the Compleat Atlas of the House to provide the template. Because the Atlas holds a record of the House and Realms a few seconds before the destruction, Arthur is unable to save his mother, but he does split himself into the New Architect and the human Arthur, before his transformation into a denizen of the house. The new Arthur is not quite the same, being immune to all disease and with all the knowledge he acquired on his journey. He sends Arthur and Leaf back to Earth, by recreating the Seven Dials. In the new Creation of the Universe, Suzy reveals her desire to be the new Lady Sunday, and pressures the New Architect to remake the House. The New Architect reveals he will soon bring back Doctor Scamandros, Fred, and Giac, the sorcerer, who could all help with the creation of new Denizens. |
4531629 | /m/0c7g5f | Before Midnight | Rex Stout | null | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/028v3": "Detective fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | Although Nero Wolfe is, by his own immodest measure, a great detective, and in particular the greatest murder specialist in Manhattan, this allows him to charge outrageous fees, working only when he is short of money or Archie Goodwin, his live-in right hand man, manages to goad him into it, preferring instead to read books, tend a magnificent orchid conservatory on the roof of his brownstone, or consult (annoy) his live-in world-class chef Fritz Brenner. Archie therefore considers pestering Wolfe about his literary knowledge to be fitting repartée. He also wants to go to the Flamingo nightclub with his girlfriend Lily Rowan, but cannot get away on a Tuesday night unless he irritates Wolfe enough to boot him out. So he starts quoting Wolfe poetic riddles from a national contest promoting Pour Amour, a new brand of perfume. At first Wolfe tolerates it, and even humors Archie by telling him about Nell Gwyn and Charles II of England, but a fourth riddle exhausts Wolfe's patience and Archie gets his wish and goes out. The very next morning, as Archie is eating a wonderful breakfast prepared by Fritz, he gets a call from attorney Rudolph Hansen, representing the advertising firm LBA, which is conducting the perfume contest. Louis Dahlmann, the executive in charge of that account, has been murdered the night before, but Hansen is calling about something more urgent! The concept of something more urgent than murder gets Archie's attention and he makes an appointment for Hansen and the three partners of LBA to meet Wolfe at 11 am that morning. At the meeting, it is revealed that two million people submitted entries to identify twenty famous women – real and fictional – identified by cryptic little poems, and the winners would split $1 million in prizes. Of the two million entries, 72 had all 20 answers right. Dahlmann was ready for that: a further set of 5 poetic riddles was sent out to each of the 72 with a tight deadline, and the result had been a quintuple tie. So it came down to a final run-off of five contestants, flown from all over the country to New York, to identify the women behind a new very much harder set of poems created by young Dahlmann, who is also the only person on earth who knows the correct answers to the questions. The questions had been handed out to the contestants the night before at a restaurant dinner, and Dahlmann had shown (at a distance) a small sheet of paper which (he said) contained the answers. He stuffed the paper in his wallet and the contestants departed. Since the contestants (see below) were expecting to return home to various parts of the country, they were given staggered deadlines before which to return their answers, all approximately a week in the future and requiring a postmark of midnight. However, the next morning, Dahlmann was found dead in his apartment by a servant, and his wallet was missing. The contestants have about a week to submit their answers by mail, but from the narrow perspective of the agency, Dahlmann's death is not the most problem — his wallet is also missing, thereby compromising the contest's integrity. Since a lot of prize money is at stake, the working assumption is that one of the contestants stole Dahlmann's wallet and killed him in the process, and so the events are likely but not certainly connected. In any event, the theft of Dahlmann's wallet is the problem LBA wants Wolfe to solve Before Midnight a week hence. This somewhat perverse set of priorities allows Wolfe and Inspector Cramer, of the Manhattan Homicide Squad, to put aside the usual complaint from Cramer that private detectives should leave the investigation of murder to the police, since Wolfe is, in fact, merely trying to resolve the theft of a wallet, and the amicable resolution of a popular advertising stunt is surely not meddling in police business. As Cramer says, "I have never yet bumped into you in the course of my duties without conflict ... but I don't say it couldn't possibly happen." First, Wolfe has Archie get the copy of the answers to the contest which has been sealed in a vault, since he argues that the contest can never really be decided by those riddles under the circumstances, despite the desire of everyone concerned to get to the bottom of it. Archie is allowed to see, but not take, the information on the critical sheet of paper guarded like a state secret. He copies the information into his notebook, and gives it to Wolfe, who merely puts it in the office safe. Under pretense of simply being part of the contest team, Wolfe then meets most of the contest finalists, except for Rollins, who is sick in bed at his hotel, and whom Goodwin visits. The contestants and their reasons and sacrifices for being in the contest are the heart of the book. In particular, Ms Frazee (see below), who is against cosmetics and devotes her life to promoting that view, has entered such a contest. But her Women's Nature League is also a secret weapon: a hidden army of people to help her, even though she is trapped in New York. Talbott Heery, owner of Heery Products, also calls upon Wolfe, and offers to supersede LBA as client since his own interests are paramount, but Wolfe counters that it would be unethical and in any event unnecessary. Soon, the contestants all receive mysterious anonymous letters solving the riddles, and Archie thinks that that was the mysterious errand of Saul Panzer, but when LBA partners attempt to congratulate Wolfe for his coup, he denies it. Meanwhile, the détente between Wolfe and Cramer dissolves when Vernon Assa, one of the LBA partners, dies during a conference at Wolfe's office. This causes Wolfe to erase the artificial distinction between solving the murders and finding the thief. However, after the culprit is identified, LBA is reluctant to pay Wolfe his full fee, since, as noted above he denied sending the answers. Wolfe responds that among the expenses on his final bill will be $40 for a used typewriter, now at the bottom of the Hudson! |
4532026 | /m/0c7gwp | Morning Star | H. Rider Haggard | 6/21/1984 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The plot revolves around the behaviour of a 12-year-old boy called Marius Stern, who is suspended from his boarding school for hitting another boy. Scientist Ptolemaeos Tunne, with the assistance of Jeremy Morrison, attempt to get to the bottom of Marius' behaviour. Marius has a crush on Jeremy and persuades him to share his bed, though nothing sexual happens. |
4532148 | /m/0c7h5r | The Black Mountain | Rex Stout | null | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/028v3": "Detective fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | In The Black Mountain Nero Wolfe's oldest friend and fellow Montenegrin Marko Vukcic is murdered by a Yugoslavian agent who has already made his escape from New York. Without hesitation, Wolfe is compelled to go back to his homeland to avenge Marko's death and bring the killer back to American justice; this desire is intensified by the news that Carla Lovchen, his adopted daughter, has also been killed. As they covertly negotiate through one of the most dangerous places on earth, Archie sees Wolfe as he has never seen him before. In Over My Dead Body (1940), Wolfe plays a part in impeding the control of Bosnia and Croatia by Nazi Germany. In The Black Mountain, Marko's nephew is part of a subversive group to gain Montenegro's independence from Yugoslavia. In the context of 1953 politics, such a concept was unrealistic, and supported by the guerrilla formations of komite and Zelenaši. Montenegro eventually became an independent country once again in 2006. |
4532707 | /m/0c7j6c | Apollyon | Tim LaHaye | 2/1/1999 | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel", "/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/0hc1z": "Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Cameron "Buck" Williams and Rayford Steele have become international fugitives. New believers like Condor 216 first officer Mac McCullum and computer programmer David Hassid take their places as moles in the Global Community (GC) and use his infrastructures to evangelize and thwart Carpathia’s attempts to find members of the Tribulation Force. Ray and Ken Ritz go to the States to check in on Hattie Durham and the safe house. Hattie confesses to Rayford that Amanda White was entirely innocent of supposed collaboration with Carpathia - the e-mail texts were simply an elaborate smear campaign ordered by Carpathia himself. At the prophesied conference of witnesses, held at Teddy Kollek Stadium and hosted by Tsion Ben-Judah, the Potentate makes an unwelcome visit. At this time, the world's water turns to blood, which Carpathia blames on the Two Witnesses. Jacov, Chaim Rosenzweig's driver, becomes a believer; later that night he is found in a bar, telling people that Jesus is Messiah. The next day at the conference, Tsion tells the audience they are waiting for the next Trumpet Judgment, in which the sun, moon, and stars will darken by 1/3. He also explains that 3/4 of the population since the Rapture will die prior to the end of the Tribulation. The last night of the conference, the Two Witnesses appear at the stadium. Then a GC attack breaks out while the Trib. Force retreats to Chaim's estate which, being an old embassy, has a helipad. Ken flies to the house in GC1, Nicolae's helicopter, and gets the force into the chopper. While transferring the force at the airport, Ken Ritz is shot trying to give Rayford as much time as he needs. Hattie, now desperate to live only for the life of her child, is raced to a hospital, where they meet another believer named Leah Rose. She and Tribulation Force physician Floyd Charles try to deliver the baby, but after some work, the baby is stillborn. According to Floyd, Hattie had been poisoned by Carpathia, resulting in the death of her child. Buck is still in Israel after a failed attempt to get him on the plane, returning to Chaim's estate. During the GC news report, Chaim tells about the truth of the judgments, endorses Tsion's lesson and tells the world about his website. Several weeks later, the Fifth Trumpet Judgement falls and a horde of demonic locusts swarm the earth, attacking everyone who does not bear the mark of the believer, in which it is so horrible that men try to kill themselves but are not allowed to die. As the months pass and the locusts continue to attack, Chloe's pregnancy comes to an end. Buck is still in Jerusalem trying to get Chaim to accept Jesus, but returns home in time for the birth of his child. Chloe Steele Williams goes into labour, and after a scare delivers a healthy baby boy in the most chaotic period in human history. She names him Kenneth Bruce Williams in memory of Ken Ritz and the late Bruce Barnes. |
4533526 | /m/0c7k6x | Postmortem | Patricia Cornwell | 1990 | {"/m/0lsxr": "Crime Fiction"} | The novel opens as Dr. Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner for the state of Virginia, receives an early-morning call from Sergeant Pete Marino, a homicide detective at the Richmond Police Department with whom Scarpetta has a tense working relationship. She meets him at the scene of a woman's gruesome strangling, the latest in a string of unsolved murders in Richmond. The killer leaves behind few clues; among them are a mysterious substance which fluoresces under laser light, traces of semen, and in the vicinity of the last murder, an unusual smell. Scarpetta and Marino work with FBI profiler Benton Wesley to attempt to piece together a profile of the killer. Initial evidence appears to point to the fourth victim's husband, but Scarpetta suspects otherwise despite Marino's insistence. (The book references DNA profiling as a relatively new technique, and characters briefly bemoan the lack of a criminal DNA database which could provide better leads to suspects, given available evidence.) Meanwhile in her personal life, Scarpetta must deal with the presence of her extremely precocious ten-year-old niece, Lucy, as well as an uncertain romantic relationship with the local Commonwealth's attorney. During the investigation, a series of news leaks about the murders appear to be coming from a source within the medical examiner's office. The leaks threaten Scarpetta's position, especially after she is forced to admit that her office database has been compromised. Believing that the killer thrives on media attention and hoping to flush him out by provoking his ego, Scarpetta, Wesley, and local investigative reporter Abby Turnbull (whose sister was the fifth victim) conspire to release a news story which suggests that the killer has a distinctive body odor due to a rare metabolic disease and implies that the killer may be mentally disordered. While attempting to find another link between the five murders, Scarpetta discovers that all five intended victims had recently called 911; she suspects that the killer is a 911 operator and chose his victims based on their voices. Scarpetta is awakened in the middle of the night by the killer, who has broken into her home. As she attempts to reach a gun she has kept nearby for protection, Marino bursts into her bedroom and shoots the intruder, having realized that the news article would make Scarpetta a likely target. Scarpetta's suspicion proves to be correct; the killer was a police and sometime 911 dispatcher. |
4534218 | /m/0c7l7q | Everyone in Silico | Jim Munroe | 2002 | null | The story is set in Vancouver, 2036. San Francisco was struck by an earthquake and a company called Self, which is somehow related to Microsoft, set up an AI system to replace the city, with a virtual environment called Frisco. The story follows several people, both in Vancouver as well as in Frisco. |
4534918 | /m/0c7mgd | Cider with Rosie | Laurie Lee | null | {"/m/0xdf": "Autobiography", "/m/017fp": "Biography", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Rather than follow strict chronological order Lee uses thematic chapters as follows: * First Light describes Laurie arriving with his mother and family at their cottage in Slad, Gloucestershire, Cotswolds. The young children gorge themselves on the fruit bushes and bread as their harassed mother tries to get the cottage and their furniture into some kind of order. The house relies on a small wood-fire for the cooking and a hand pump in the scullery for its water. They are visited by a man in uniform who is sleeping out in the surrounding woods — he visits them in the mornings for food and to dry out his damp clothes. He is finally taken off by men in uniform as a deserter. The chapter ends with the villagers riotously celebrating the end of the Great War. * First Names describes Laurie still sleeping in his mother's bed but eventually forced out of it by his younger brother, Tony, and made to sleep with the two elder boys. As he grows older, he starts to recognise the villagers as individuals — people like Cabbage-Stump Charlie, the local bruiser, Albert the Devil, a deaf mute beggar and Percy-from-Painswick, a clown and ragged dandy, who likes to seduce the girls with his soft tongue. Owing to its location, the cottage is in the path of the floods that flow into the valley and Laurie and his family have to go outside to clear the storm drain every time there is a heavy downpour, but even this sometimes fails to stop the sludge despoiling their kitchen from time to time. * Village school The dame teacher is called Crabby B, owing to her predilection to suddenly hit out at the boys for no apparent reason. However, she meets her match in Spadge Hopkins, a burly local farmer's boy, who leaves the classroom one day after placing her on top of one of the cupboards. She is replaced by Miss Wardley, from Birmingham, who "wore sharp glass jewellery", who is more refined and 'her reins looser but stronger.' * The Kitchen The Lee's domestic life in the cottage. At the beginning, Laurie Lee makes a reference to his father who had abandoned them, saying that he and his brothers never knew any male authority. After working in the Army Pay Corps, he entered the Civil Service and settled in London for good. As Lee says, :Lee describes each of the family members and also their daily routine, his sisters going off to work in Stroud to the shops or looms, and the younger boys trying to avoid their mother's chores. In the evenings the whole family sits around the big kitchen table, the girls gossiping and sewing as the boys do their homework and the eldest son, Harold , who is working as lathe handler, mends his bicycle. * Grannies in the Wainscot describes the two old women who are the Lee's neighbours - Granny Trill and Granny Wallon - who are permanently at war with each other. Granny Wallon or 'Er-Down-Under spends her days gathering the fruits of the surrounding woods and countryside and turning them into delicious perfumed wines that slowly ferment over a year in their bottles. Granny Trill or 'Er-Up-Atop spends her days combing her hair and reading her almanacs. She lived as a young girl with her father, who was a woodsman, and still seeks her comfort in the forest. The two old women arrange everything so they never meet - they shop on different days, use different paths down the bank to their houses and continuously rap on their floors and ceilings. One day Granny Trill is taken ill and quickly fades away and is soon followed by Granny Wallon who loses her will to live. * Public Death, Private Murder describes the murder of a New Zealander, a local villager made good who returns to the village one year to visit his family, boasting about his wealth and flaunting his money in the local pub. Being the last to leave, he makes his drunken way home and is set upon by some local youths and is found frozen to death the next morning. The police try to find his attackers but are met by a wall of silence and the case is never closed. * Mother is Lee's tribute to his mother, Annie (née Light). Having been forced to leave school early because of her mother's death and the need to look after her brothers and father, she then went into domestic service for the Gentry, working as a maid in various large houses. Having left this to then work for her grandfather in his pub, The Plough, a small Sheepscombe inn, she then answered an ad - Widower (four children) Seeks Housekeeper - which is how she met Lee's father. After four happy years together and three more children, he upped sticks and abandoned them. Lee's description is very affectionate - he describes his mother as having a love for everything and an extraordinary ability with plants, being able to grow anything anywhere. As he says, * Winter and Summer describes the two seasons affecting the village and its inhabitants. One particularly cold winter, the village boys go foraging with old cocoa-tins stuffed with burning rags to keep their mittenless-hands warm. The week before Christmas the Church Choir goes carol singing which involves a five mile tramp through the deep snow. However, calls at the Squire's house and the doctors, the merchants, the farmers and mayors soon fills their wooden box with coins as they light their way home with candles in jam jars. The long hot summers are spent outdoors in the fields and games at night of 'Whistle-or-'Oller-Or-We-shall-not-foller!'. * Sick Boy Lee recounts the various illnesses he suffers as a young boy, some which bring him to the brink of death. He also writes about the death of his four year sister Frances, his mother's only biological daughter, who died unexpectedly when Lee was an infant. * The Uncles is a vivid description of his mother's brothers - Uncle Charlie, Ray, Sid and Tom. All of them fought as cavalrymen in the Great War and settle back on the land. Uncle Ray is perhaps the liveliest, having emigrated to Canada on the transcontinental railway, the Canadian Pacific. He blows himself up with dynamite whilst working in the Rockies and is revived by a Tamworth schoolteacher, Lee's Aunt Elsie. * Outings and Festivals A chapter devoted to the annual village jaunts and events. Peace Day in 1919 is a colourful affair, the procession ending up at the Squire's house where he and his elderly mother make speeches. The family also makes the four mile hike to Sheepscombe to visit their grandfather and Uncle Charlie and his family. There is also a village outing on charabancs to Weston-super-Mare - the women sunbathe on the beach, the men disappear down the side-streets into pubs and the children amuse themselves in the arcade on the pier, playing the penny machines. There is also the Parochial Church Tea and Annual Entertainment to which Laurie and his brother Jack gain free admittance for helping with the arrangements. They finally get to gorge themselves on the food laid out on the trestle-tables in the schoolhouse and Laurie plays his fiddle accompanied by Eileen on the piano to raucous applause. * First Bite at the Apple describes the growth of the boys into young adolescents and the first pangs of love. Lee states that 'quiet incest flourished where the roads were bad' but states that the village neither approved nor disapproved but neither did it complain to authority. This is the time when Laurie is seduced by Rosie Burdock underneath a hay wagon after drinking cider from a flagon: :There is also a plan among half a dozen of the boys to rape Lizzy Berkeley, a fat adolescent sixteen-year-old who writes religious messages on trees in the wood on the way back from church. They wait for her one Sunday morning in Brith Wood but, when Bill and Boney confront her, she slaps them twice and they lose courage, allowing her to run away down the hill. Lee says that Rosie eventually married a soldier, Jo, his young first love, grew fat with a Painswick baker and lusty Bet, another of his sweethearts, went to breed in Australia. * Last Days describes the gradual break up of the village community with the appearance of the motor car and bike. The death of the Squire is almost in parallel with the death of the church's influence over its younger parishioners and the old people just dropped away: :Lee's own family breaks up as the girls are courted by young men arriving on their motorbikes. It is also the end of his rural idyll and emergence into a larger, more looming world. :This is also the time when Laurie Lee experiences the first stirrings of poetry welling up inside him. |
4535237 | /m/0c7n1j | The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan | Beatrix Potter | 1905-10 | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Potter declared the tale her next favourite to The Tailor of Gloucester, but the tale is not popular among modern children, perhaps because they have difficulty following the complications involving the pies and because they have no experience with old-fashioned ovens and fireplaces. The pictures however are some of the most beautiful Potter ever created, especially the profusions of flowers in the doorways and garden plots. The colours in the illustrations are not the muted browns and greens the reader expects in a Potter illustration, nor are they the contrasting colours such as the muted reds and blues Potter uses occasionally to give her illustrations a splash of colour. Instead, the colours are bright oranges, violets, and yellows seldom seen in her other books. Even Ribby's lilac dress and Duchess's black mane illustrate Potter's concern for colour in this book. Potter's own three-door oven, her hearthrug, her indoor plants, her coronation teapot, and her water pump are minutely detailed with more colour than in other productions. The large format of the original edition, the captions accompanying the full page colour illustrations, and the occasional lack of coordination between picture and text all display Potter's delight in the pictures, sometimes at the expense of the text. "Once upon a time", Ribby, a "Pussy-cat" invites a little dog called Duchess to tea with plans to serve her "something so very very nice" baked in a pie dish with a pink rim. Ribby promises Duchess she shall have the entree entirely to herself. Duchess accepts the invitation but hopes she will not be served mouse. "I really couldn't, couldn't eat mouse pie. And I shall have to eat it, because it is a party." Duchess has prepared a ham and veal pie in a pink-rimmed dish (just like Ribby's dish), and would much rather eat her own pie. "It is all ready to put into the oven," she says, "Such a lovely pie-crust; and I put in a little tin patty-pan to hold up the crust." She reads the invitation again and realises she will have the opportunity to switch the pies when Ribby leaves on an errand. Ribby has two ovens, one above the other, and she puts her mouse pie in the lower oven. She tidies the house, sets the table, and leaves to buy tea, marmalade, and sugar. Duchess meantime has left home with her ham and veal pie in a basket, passes Ribby on the street, and hurries on to Ribby's house. She puts her pie into the upper oven, and searches quickly for the mouse pie (which she does not find because she neglects to look in the lower oven). She slips out the back door as Ribby returns. At the appointed hour, Duchess appears at Ribby's door and the party begins. Distracted for a moment, Duchess does not see which oven Ribby opens to remove the pie. Duchess eats greedily, believing she is eating her ham and veal pie. She wonders what has happened to the patty-pan she put in her pie, and, not finding it under the crust, is convinced she has swallowed it. She sets up a howl; Ribby is perplexed and annoyed but leaves to find Dr. Maggoty. Duchess is left alone before Ribby's fire, and discovers her ham and veal pie in the oven. "Then I must have been eating MOUSE! ... No wonder I feel ill," she muses. Knowing she cannot adequately explain her ham and veal pie to Ribby, she puts it outside the back door intending to sneak back and carry it home after she leaves for home. Ribby and Dr. Maggoty arrive and, after much fuss, Duchess takes her leave, only to find that the magpie (who has left by the back door) and a couple of jackdaws have eaten her ham and veal pie. Ribby later finds the remains of the pie dish and the patty-pan outside the back door and declares, "Well I never did! ... Next time I want to give a party – I will invite Cousin Tabitha Twitchit!" |
4535346 | /m/0c7n5s | Firethorn | Sarah Micklem | 5/25/2004 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | A mysterious foundling with unique red hair and strange god-given powers, Firethorn is condemned to life as a powerless servant—or so she believes, until one of King Thyrse's noblemen becomes her lover. But, as she accompanies Sire Galan to war, Firethorn discovers she may have traded one form of bondage for another. A soldier's mistress—even a high-born soldier's mistress—is despised as a "sheath," or camp follower. Also, Firethorn's nasty ex-overlord, Sire Pava, has joined the king's army, and she has made a new enemy in her lover's cousin and closest friend, the sadistic Sire Rodela. However, she and Galan share a fiery love that will surely overcome the opposition of both their personal enemies and their kingdom's enemies. Then Sire Galan makes a strange, heart-shattering wager that may not only ruin his honor, but get them both killed.http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743247949 |
4537011 | /m/0c7qz_ | Voice of the Fire | Alan Moore | 1996 | {"/m/02p0szs": "Historical fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The story follows the lives of twelve people who lived in the same area of England over a period of 6000 years, and how their lives link to one another's. The opening chapter, "Hob's Hog", proves challenging for many readers, as the first-person narrative voice is used as Moore attempts to render the language and thoughts of a character from around 4000 BC (similar in fashion, though used in a more immersive manner than Russell Hoban's post-apocalyptic characters in Riddley Walker). Each chapter carries the reader forward in time, but circles around the centre of Northampton, drawing in historical events and touchstones, before finally segueing into metafictional narrative in the closing chapter, as the author himself comments directly upon the previous chapter's ambiguous closing line, before relating a personal (possibly fictional) anecdote about Northampton which relates a personal experience of local myth, and features an appearance by his daughter and son-in-law, the writers Leah Moore and John Reppion. Throughout, the image of the fire sparks resonates between the tales, while Moore finds a different voice for each character - though most are inherently duplicitous in some manner, leading to a further commentary on the disparity between myth and reality, and which is more likely to endure over time. |
4540819 | /m/0c7xq2 | An Act of Terror | André Brink | 1991 | {"/m/01jfsb": "Thriller"} | The novel deals with the lead-up to, execution and consequences of, a bungled assassination attempt whose target is the unnamed State President of South Africa. The story follows the development of Thomas Landman, an Afrikaner who, bit by bit, is indoctrinated in, and comes to whole-heartedly believe, the ethos of black freedom-fighters. Abandoning his family's staid and repressive values for those of the blacks, he embarks on a course which ultimately leads to him becoming South Africa's most wanted terrorist. The story culminates in an escape from South Africa which leaves Landman badly mutilated and his lover dead. Throughout, one is exposed to the hypocrisy and self-delusion that were the necessary supports of the Apartheid regime. At times this book has touches of Wilbur Smith about it. It is mammoth in scope, and involves several long treks across the South African countryside. It is brimming with a wide and colourful set of characters. In Smithian fashion, the lead male protagonist finds capable female companions who embroider the story for a while, and then get killed. This creates the impression that development of the feelings that might surround a long-term relationship seem to be difficult for the author to handle. At other times the book has obvious literary leanings, with classical and historical references, close attention to words and their usage, and an innovative structure. Two characteristics of the structure of the novel are striking. The narrative constantly switches between first and third person. The third-person narrative continues more or less throughout the book. The first-person narrative is made up of short sections contributed by practically every character in the story. There are therefore multiple voices, and multiple points of view. However, the most unusual aspect of the book is that it includes a thirteen-generation history of the fictitious Landman family. This describes the family's move to South Africa in the 17th century, and the events and people that filled the lives of each subsequent generation. At the same time it allows for an expose of the political shaping of South Africa, and presents a context for the events of the main story. This appendix is itself almost book-sized, extending for close to 150 pages. A comparatively long glossary of Afrikaans, Xhosa and other terms completes the book. |
4541568 | /m/0c7ypj | Castle | Garth Nix | 2000-09 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Tal and Milla make it from the shadowy 'Dark World' to the titular castle, a seeming place of peace. Both are unwanted by the castle's inhabitants, Milla the most. The two must avoid conspiracies and other dangers inside the castle, just to survive. |
4541627 | /m/0c7yr7 | Hell to Pay | George Pelecanos | 2002-03 | {"/m/0lsxr": "Crime Fiction", "/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | The novel’s central plotline concerns the murder by drug dealers of a no-account deadbeat over an unpaid debt and the incidental killing of the intended victim’s nephew, starting with the killers’ efforts to locate the victim and continuing through Strange’s investigation of the murders and the killings’ repercussions in the world of the DC drug trade. Secondary plotlines involve efforts by Strange’s white associate, Terry Quinn, to locate a young girl who has disappeared into prostitution, as well as Strange’s background investigation of a potentially shady young man who is engaged to marry the beautiful daughter of Strange’s wealthy friend. ===Explanation of the novel's title=== |
4541710 | /m/0c7yvn | Above the Veil | Garth Nix | 4/1/2001 | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | While Shadowmaster Sushin maintains control over higher ranked chosen, Tal and Milla travel through the Castle's depths where they encounter the Freefolk, a group of the servant class Underfolk who possess a great hatred for all the Chosen. They also meet Lector Jarnil, a famous teacher. Tal and Milla learn more about the intricacies of Castle politics, including that Sushin, a Shadowmaster of the Orange, is the Dark Vizier of the Empress. He deals in unsavory matters and commands others under the authority of the Empress. They also learn that the Veil is maintained by the seven Keystones which lie at the top of each of the seven towers. Most of the Chosen leave the Castle due to the Day of Ascension. To prevent the Veil from failing, Tal, accompanied by the Freefolk leader Crow, climb the Red Tower and defeat the deadly Keeper. They also solve a puzzle of tiles to prevent any alarms from ringing out. Eventually they reach the Red Keystone and discover Lector Jarnil's cousing Lokar trapped inside. As Tal and Crow prepare to depart, they are assaulted by numerous unbound Spiritshadows. Tal is able to construct a miniature Veil in time to hide them, but accidentally binds Adras, his Spiritshadow, into it. As they near the Freefolk base, Crow injures Tal and flees with the Keystone. Tal recovers the keystone and Lokar convinces Tal to go to Aenir and consult the Empress to free Lokar. While Tal and Crow climb the tower, Milla returns to Odris by the labryinth of underground tunnels below the Castle. On her way, she discovers the skeleton where her Primary Sunstone partially originated. Scrutinizing it closer, she notices a long Violet fingernail, which she puts on. Knowing that she will give herself to the Ice, she breathes the Tenth Pattern to assure the completion of her task of getting a Primary Sunstone. On her way, she is attacked by Arla and a band of Shield Maidens for bringing Odris. Milla accidentally kills Arla with her talon. She is then judged by the Crones, who will decide her fate. After reviewing Milla's thoughts and dreams, the Crones debate and decide to attack the Castle to stop the Spiritshadow trade and save the Veil. The Crones choose Milla to lead the attack. |
4541758 | /m/0c7z1w | Aenir | Garth Nix | 1/1/2001 | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | After arriving in Aenir they offer up blood on the hill they are standing on. This summons up two storm shepherds, Aenirian creatures with a heart of thunder and cloud, who then demand a life in exchange for a great gift. Soon the two characters discover that the two shepherds do not like taking lives, but only do it because they were bound thousands of years ago to do that exact task ever more. When they do not take a life and hesitate when Tal offers to make them his and Milla's spiritshadows to release their bind on the hill, the spirit in the hill awakes to sort out the problem. Afraid, the two creatures accept Tal's offer and quickly grab their new chosen and escape the hill, exhilarated to finally be free. Tal's spirit shadow is Adras, a big but dim witted male. While Milla ends up with Odris, a more sharp witted slender female. Neither is very good at reading human emotions and find themselves confused quite often. When Milla realizes that Tal's offer has removed her shadow, she flies into a rage. Tal gets angry at her because he does not fully understand that when he gave away her true shadow, he destroyed her hopes of being a shield maiden, as they are sworn to destroy all spiritshadows, and cannot possibly have one themselves. Going berserk, Milla first threatens him with her merwin horn sword before putting it away and knocking him unconscious. She then storms off by herself. Adras and Odris then have a small talk about the over reactions of humans before deciding that Odris should probably go with Milla to make sure she doesn't get hurt. Adras then turns into a thunder cloud and surrounds Tal, protecting him while he is asleep. Milla ends up at the edge of a burnt field, she calms down and starts to head back to Tal when she realizes there is something underneath her, a quick glance shows that she is on the only patch of green grass in the area. She then jumps just in time as the creature, called a hugthing snaps shut, clasping her legs together. With her hands free she hacks at the hugthing with her sword, but it just bounces off. Just as her ribs are about to break Odris appears in the sky and hurls lighting bolts at the creature. it lets go and runs away making scared noises. She and Milla walk together through the trees when they run into a pack of giant hunting birds, the pack of birds then chase the pair until they reach a giant tower carved from a gigantic tree, where Odris lands on top. Milla takes the stairs to the bottom floor and can't explain why the door is wide open but the birds, called nanuchs remain content to remain outside and wait for them to come out. Meanwhile Tal is waking up and soon finds a pack of bugs making a sign in the ground with their bodies, an arrow pointing east and the letter c. This is because the codex, trapped under a mountain years before, is trying to communicate Tal towards his prison by taking over animal level intelligence creatures. |
4541899 | /m/0c7z8d | Dead On Target | Franklin W. Dixon | 1987-04 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Joe Hardy's girlfriend, Iola Morton, is caught in a car bomb and dies. Joe is unable to believe it. The brothers begin their investigation. They meet a person who calls himself the "Gray Man," from a government agency called "The Network." Frank and Joe take his help to get to the person who planted the bomb. Soon they learn that it is not a person, but a group of terrorists who call themselves "Assassins." Joe vows to kill them. As the story progresses, some Assassins are killed in encounters while others escape. They come to know that the person who killed Iola is a member of The Assassins named Al-Rousasa. When the book is about to end, Frank, Joe, Chet (who is Iola's brother) and their other friends begin searching a shopping mall when they learn that the Assassins plan to kill a presidential candidate giving a speech in Bayport. Soon, Joe and Frank have a fight with Al-Rousasa at the top floor. The fight ends with Al-Rousasa falling to his death, and Joe remembers what he had been told - "Nobody takes an Assassin alive." |
4542093 | /m/0c7zkd | Evil, Inc. | Franklin W. Dixon | 1987-04 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The Hardy Boys come to France for a vacation. When the brothers spot The Gray Man in Manhattan, they learn about an investigation he is working on regarding a terrorist organization in France. While the Gray Man does not want the brothers involved because they are too young and the case is too dangerous, the Hardys secretly work to get themselves in the center of the investigation and soon they find themselves undercover in France as a couple of gun dealers who are into the punk rock scene, complete with dyed hair and grungy clothes. They get caught up in a company called Renyard and Company, which secretly sells guns and other illegal things to people. They are almost killed in a machine when a lady known as Denise helps them escape. The book has an interesting storyline in which almost everybody is betraying each other - Renyard and Company, Denise and many other people. The Hardy Boys are also captured by the French special police known as the Sûreté. They eventually escape by beating everybody up. Soon when the book is about to end, they are chased by the Chairman of Renyard & Company and his other partners. The people try to kill them but Denise saves them at the right moment. The case is then solved by the Hardy Boys and they return back to USA. |
4542304 | /m/0c7zwj | Alta | Mercedes Lackey | 2004-03 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | In this story, Kiron flies on Avatre to the place of his birth, Alta, with the help of the Bedu, nomadic desert dwellers. Upon reaching the outskirts of Alta City (capital of Alta), he rescues a girl, who turns out to be a daughter of a noble from a "river-horse," or a hippopotamus. This girl, Aket-ten, has the power of Speaking to animals with her mind as well as the "Far Seeing Eye" and the "Gift of Silent Speech"(with fellow Winged Ones). She is a Nestling, the designation of acolytes who live outside the temple (acolytes living in the temple are called Fledglings, and priests are Winged Ones). At the temple he tells the Jousters the secret to having tame dragons—and finds himself supervising eight boys about his age, including one of the two male heirs to the throne, in tending to their new dragon eggs. As he trains them and invents new battle tactics, the deceptions of the Magi, magic users in 'service' to the king, are slowly revealed. Eventually, the Magi declare near tyranny over all of Alta, using their superweapon, the eye, to keep the people in control. Kiron and his new friends, one of whom is murdered by the Magi, plot to overthrow the Magi or escape from their grasp. They eventually succeed with the help of a healer by poisoning the supply of tala, the plant that keeps wild dragons tame, and escape only after a fierce battle with the Tian jousters and their dragons. Due to the Tala being contaminated, only Ari, Kiron, and Kiron's wing retain control of their dragons (as they didn't need the tala in the first place, having raised their dragons from the egg). Ari is convinced to side with Kiron and his wing (there is no need for Jousters anymore, as all but a few of the dragons are gone), and enter the desert, guided by the Bedu (desert nomads). With the help of the Bedu (and Kaleth, the other heir to the Altan throne, now Mouth of the Gods), they find their way to Sanctuary, a place of legend that was thought to have been buried by the sands of the desert. The story ends with them deciding to overthrow the magi from Sanctuary, and allowing anyone and everyone who wishes safety from the magi there to have it. |
4542594 | /m/0c7_bh | City of Joy | Dominique Lapierre | 1985 | null | The story revolves around the trials and tribulations of a young Polish priest, Stephan Kovalski, the hardships endured by a rickshaw puller, Hasari Pal (the sufferer) in Calcutta (Kolkata), India and the experiences of a young, American doctor, Max Lowe. Father Stephan joins a religious order whose vows put them in the most hellish places on earth. He chooses not only to serve the poorest of the poor in Calcutta but also to live with them, starve with them, and if God wills it, die with them. In the journey of Kovalski's acceptance as the Big Brother for the slum dwellers, he encounters moments of everyday miracles in the midst of appalling poverty and ignorance. The slum dwellers are ignored and exploited by society and authorities of power are not without their own prejudices. This becomes evident by their attitude towards the lepers and the continuation of the caste system. The story also explores how a peasant farmer Hasari Pal arrives in Calcutta with his family after a drought wipes out the farming village where his family has lived for generations. The third main character is that of a rich American doctor who has just finished med school and wants to do something with purpose before opening up his practice catering to the wealthy. The book chronicles not only the separation of the wealthy from the poor but the separation of the different levels of poverty, caste divisions, and the differences of the many religions living side by side in the slums. It touches on Mother Teresa and her Sisters of Mercy as well. While the book has its ups and downs, both beautiful and horrific, an overall feeling of peace and well being is achieved by the story's end. Despite facing hunger, deplorable living conditions, illness, bone breaking work (or no work at all) and death, the people still hold on to the belief that life is precious and worth living, so much so that they named their slum "Anand Nagar", which translated into English means "The City of Joy". The author has stated that the stories of the characters in the book are true and he uses many of the real names in his book. However, the book is considered fictional since many conversations and actions are assumed or created. The author and his wife traveled to India many times, sometimes staying with friends in "The city of Joy". Half of the royalties from the sale of the book goes towards the City of Joy Foundation that looks after slum children in Calcutta. |
4543339 | /m/0c80ss | 1634: The Ram Rebellion | Virginia DeMarce | null | {"/m/0mz2": "Alternate history", "/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/01tz3c": "Anthology", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The book spot-covers local events and a few related diplomatic discussions from a few days after the Ring of Fire (May–June 1631) to October in the fall of 1634—giving it the largest time footprint of the four—though narrowly focused. The short novel that concludes the work begins in late August 1633 and overlaps many of the shorter works earlier in the book. Two of the three other books set in 1634 refer to the events in the work (usually as the "troubles in Franconia") setting its canonical place in the "greater" neohistorical international politics covered in the other two works. The two Larkin "Birdie" Newhouse tales along with two flashback vignettes by Flint begin the Ram Rebellion book, all four set in the weeks immediately after the Ring of Fire. In the Flint stories which are sandwiched around the Birdie tales, Mike Stearns goes back to school under the tutelage of Melissa Mailey. Stearns has a problem, he has to get a handle on likely complications from the local population, as the stories are set just a few days after he is elected as Chairman of the Emergency Committee. As a result, Mailey gives Stearns several very thick history books on European history in the era. Birdie Newhouse has an immediate problem, he's a farmer with most of his farm's arable land 300 years off and a continent away. The stories by Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett explore the alien land practices and ownership of down-time Germany as Birdie seeks to gain additional lands. Land sales are rare, worse, the lawyers are in control and there are three general levels of vested interest: The tenants, have certain rights and obligations over and above monetary rent while leases are generally for the lesser of three generations or 99 years. In between the owner in fact, and the tenants is usually a monetary transaction which gives the rents to any number of claimants—depending upon the finances of the landholding family. The claimants all have a say in the farm operation to some extent, as do the occupants of the farm villages, which also have the right to disapprove or accept new co-farmers, for the land is farmed cooperatively with another set of obligations and entitlements. Birdie can't just go and buy a piece of land, he has to buy it from three different and diverse groups of people... and get them all to agree to terms. As the story notes, seventeenth century Germany was a lawyers paradise. Flo Richards is a farmer's wife with four grown children who had bought a small flock of type C Delaine Merino sheep and some angora rabbits before the Ring of Fire in the hope that she'd see more of her youngest daughter, Jen, once she'd finished her studies out of town. The Ring of Fire had consequently left Jan behind in the present in which Flo dealt with this loss by concentrating on her livestock. She and her husband JD have local Germans living with them as partners now that farming has become more labour intensive. Flo's laments about the poor quality wool of the locally obtained ram (who comes to be known as Brillo for that reason) strike a chord with someone and subsequently a number of 'Brillo fables' started to appear in the local broadsheet, which concerns the titular ram escaped from his pen and interfered with her merino breeding program. His fame due to the stories spread through Grantville out into the rest of Germany. The Women's League of Voters uses a Ram's Head as its emblem, schoolchildren sing songs about Brillo, and even adapted into a ballet. With the example of future Grantville, a peasant revolt becomes a revolutionary movement in the fractured Holy Roman Empire south and east of Thuringia while the Machiavellian maneuvers in the neohistorical governments and various field armies now dance to counter-act those aimed at the Americans' new heartland. Up-timers, from the original USA space-time want the serfs to succeed and liberate themselves—but also know what a bloodbath the French Revolution became and various individuals act to help one and prevent the others. Avoiding that path will take all sorts of resources and efforts, and Americans from both uptime and down-time act resolutely to mitigate the problems, diplomacy to head off wars headed by authoritarians threatened by the new American ideals, and a deft appreciation of when not to fight and dangle an irresistible carrot instead. In Franconia, schoolteacher Constantin Ableidinger has been reading Common Sense by Thomas Paine. He also finds the Brillo stories interesting. The farmers in Franconia (and Thuringia for that matter) have a history of dissent concerning serfdom and Mike Stearns has hopes of getting some fundamental changes made in the way that Franconia is run as a result of a farmer's rebellion of sorts. He neglects to include this in the briefing given to the civil servants sent down to administer Franconia although these people, Johnny F. and Noelle Murphy, among others have an effect on the schoolteacher's "Ram rebellion". ro:1634: The Ram Rebellion |
4544321 | /m/0c82p6 | Cult of Crime | Franklin W. Dixon | 1987-04 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/028v3": "Detective fiction"} | The Hardy boys hear their father and a person named Emmet Strand talking about his daughter Holly, who has joined the group of Rajah. Holly was a close friend of Frank, so Frank decides to join the group of teenagers who serve the Rajah in order to save Holly. The Rajah claims that he shall give everybody peace, so every teenager who is fed up with life, or are very frustrated joins the group in hope of finding peace. The Rajah is a very powerful man - even police officials are linked to him and do as he says. On a mission to rescue their good friend Holly from the cult of the lunatic Rajah, the boys unwittingly become the main event in one of the madman's deadly rituals--human sacrifice. The Hardy Boys try to escape the ritual, during which, Joe is framed that he kills a person very close to the Rajah, known as Vivasvat. Holly pleads with them to take her along, actually, she is linked with Rajah and wants to kill them. The Hardy Boys escape with Holly. They are chased by a police officer who is linked with the Rajah. When they are travelling on a train, Frank is shot by a bullet and falls of the train. Holly attempts to kill Joe but fails. As the book progresses, the Rajah, taking revenge at the Hardy Boys, starts a riot in the city. He holds captive Emmet Strand. Rajah reveals that he is the son of Emmet Strand's first wife & that he is taking revenge for leaving his mother. Soon, the Hardy Boys catch him and he is handed to the police. Holly, along with her father Emmet leave the country. |
4545547 | /m/0c84s_ | Doomsday 1999 A.D. | Charles Berlitz | null | null | In the book, environment, famine, overpopulation, climate changes, floods, tornadoes, hothouse effect (now commonly referred to as greenhouse effect), etc. are generally predicted to worsen and become acute by the end of the 20th century. Berlitz lists of doomsday years is long. He starts with the year 999, December 31 when many expected Jesus to return, and goes through a great many doomsday prophecies by scientists, prophets, astrologers and others. In chapter 8, he asks whether the world has ended before, mentioning Atlantis, an idea which he revisits later in his books The Mystery of Atlantis and Atlantis: The Lost Continent Revealed. Berlitz suggests that there may have been a flood, an idea which he explores further in his book The Lost Ship of Noah: In Search of the Ark at Ararat (1987) and in chapter 9 where he cites the tales of a great flood from the Bible and the Torah, Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Greek, Indian, Persian, Welsh, Norse, Lithuanian, Irish, Chinese, Aztec-Toltec, Maya records and Chibcha tales. |
4546701 | /m/0c86wp | The Broken Place | Michael Shaara | null | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | The plot concerns a Korean War veteran who comes home from the war mentally depressed. With deep psychological wounds, he only feels alive in the violent world of boxing. Shaara had been an amateur boxer. |
4546935 | /m/0c87d3 | The Magellanic Cloud | Stanisław Lem | 1955 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction"} | The novel is set in the thirty-second century, in a communistic Utopian future. Humanity has colonized all of the Solar System, and is now making its first attempt at interstellar travel. Aboard a vessel called Gaia, 227 men and women leave the Earth for the Alpha Centauri system. After almost eight years of travel, they find signs of organic life on a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, possibly originating on another planet within the Centauri system. One of the planets orbiting Alpha Centauri turns to be inhabited by an advanced civilization. The expedition meets a lifeless human ship of "Atlants", which turns out to be an old artificial war satellite of the USA and its NATO allies, carrying still active biological weapons and nuclear warheads, which had accidentally left Earth orbit and got lost in space during the Cold War era. |
4547131 | /m/0c87sz | Border Country | Raymond Williams | 1960 | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | Matthew Price, a university lecturer in economic history, returns from London to visit his sick father in South Wales. The novel is set in the fictional village of Glynmawr in the Black Mountains, a rural area but closely connected to the nearby coal mining valleys of the South Wales coalfield. His father had been a railway signalman, and the story includes lengthy flashbacks to the 1920s and 1930s, including the General Strike and its impact on a small group of railway workers living in a community made up mostly of farmers. It also describes Matthew Price's decision to leave his own community, studying at Cambridge before becoming a lecturer in London. |
4547309 | /m/0c8852 | Second Generation | null | null | null | Harold Owen, his brother Gwyn, son Peter and wife Kate all experience the contrasts. The book is based on the actual situation in Oxford of the 1960s, where the ancient university was right next to Morris Motors, as it then was. |
4547385 | /m/0c888w | Losing You | Nicci Gerrard | 2005-03 | {"/m/01jfsb": "Thriller", "/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | The story tells about Nina, a mother of two, planning to go on holidays with her new boyfriend. However, the road away from the isolated winter bleakness of Sandling Island seems to be littered with obstacles, frustrating her plans at every turn. Most pressingly of all, her fifteen-year-old daughter, Charlie, has yet to return from a night out. Minute by minute, as Nina's unease builds to worry and then panic, every mother's worst nightmare begins to occur. Has Charlie run away? Or has something more sinister happened to her? And why will nobody take her disappearance seriously? As day turns to night on the island and a series of half-buried secrets lead Nina Landry from sickening suspicion to deadly certainty, the question becomes less whether she and her daughter will leave the island for Christmas and more whether they will ever leave it again. |
4547404 | /m/0c88bl | The Fight for Manod | null | null | null | Matthew Price and Peter Owen both have their roots within the borders of Wales. They each have contributed to a decision on the idea of building a new town, Manod, in the depopulated valleys of South Wales. A splendid idea - or is there more going on behind the scenes than is admitted? |
4547676 | /m/0c88zf | Tales of Pirx the Pilot | Stanisław Lem | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | The stories are set somewhere in the XXI-XXII centuries, in a futuristic Occidental world (as opposed to a Communist Utopia where some of Lem's other novels take place) in which Mankind is starting to colonize the Solar System, has some settlements on the Moon and Mars, and is even beginning the exploration of the other solar systems. Pirx is a cadet, a pilot, and finally a captain of a merchant spaceship, and the stories relate his life and various things that happen to him during his travels between the Earth, Moon, and Mars. |
4547933 | /m/0c899j | Newton's Wake: A Space Opera | Ken MacLeod | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | In the late 20th century, at the start of a war between the European nations and the United States, a US Army AI directing weapons overcame its programming to become self-aware. Then followed the "Hard Rapture", an explosive expansion and evolution of computer systems that left most of humanity dead or devoured while the AIs and assimilated persons progressed into posthumanity beyond human comprehension and departed for parts unknown, leaving behind artifacts on a number of worlds. With the Earth now populated by varyingly dormant, partially sentient war machines, humanity lives offworld. The three main sects are America Offline (AO), the Knights of Enlightenment (KE) and Demokratische Kommunistbund (democratic communist union) (DK). Examination of the posthuman relics has resulted in deep but sporadic knowledge of such things as FTL travel. The main character is Lucinda Carlyle, a member of a Scottish family of entrepreneurs/thugs that controls a system of traversable wormholes known as the Skein. Lucinda is a "combat archeologist", leading a team to the unexplored world of Eurydice to salvage posthuman technology and deal with whatever it tries in response. Not only does she find a motherlode of an artifact, but a lost colony of humans that escaped Earth in the Hard Rapture and are living in a post scarcity society (with cosmic string weapons far beyond those of other groups). Each side is as surprised as the other, having thought themselves the only survivors. Then the Knights of Enlightenment discover that the artifact, originally the crashed colony ship of the Eurydiceans, is the focal point of the Skein. |
4548401 | /m/0c8b5h | Hangman's Curse | Frank E. Peretti | 1/29/2001 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature"} | After successfully initiating a drug bust, Nate and Sarah Springfield and their teenage children, Elijah and Elisha, are handpicked to investigate a outbreak of strange occurrences in an otherwise typical high school. Elijah and Elisha become students at the school and quickly make names for themselves when they debate their teachers on the lesson plans regarding humanism and evolution while their father confronts the tolerated bullying in the school. After several of the football players are injected, Elijah and Elisha quickly learn that a group of gothic cult members have been blamed for the plague; they were bullied as Abel was, and it is believed that the curse is their means of revenge. The assumed leader of the group, Ian Snyder, takes credit at first, but his followers turn on him when he "loses control" of the ghost of Abel; his friend, and a few classmate each die after having hallucinations. Ian drops out of the cult and turns to Elijah for spiritual help. Later, Sarah discovers straws filled with a sugar-like substance in the lockers of the stricken students, their dog, Max, recognizes the scent all over the school. An eccentric scientist named Algernon Wheeling is called into the investigation, and determines that the sugar is actually to keep a male poisonous cross-breed of the African Spotted wolf spider and brown recluse in the straw till he smells the female pheromone on the victim because of the dollar bill, he eats his way out and bites the victim after being agitated at not finding the female. The spiders were trapped in the straws, and the pheromone was spread through dollar bills, that circulated around the school to attract the spiders to the intended victims, who hallucinated and were later hospitalized after being bitten. However, as the dollars were spread around the school, unintended sympathizers of the cult were bitten and suffered from the poison. The mastermind of the entire project, a boy named Norman Bloom, led the cult and allowed them to believe that witches were responsible (Ian Snyder and some others). Due to unbelievably fast reproduction, the school is overrun by the deadly spiders, and, as the school is evacuated, Elisha finds herself trapped under the school and bitten repeatedly, but is saved by Algernon Wheeling's antidote AT490. The hospitalized students recover, and the case is declared closed. |
4552060 | /m/0c8hdv | Prose Tristan | null | null | null | The first part of the work stays closer to the traditional story as told by verse writers like Béroul and Thomas of Britain, but many episodes are reworked or altered entirely. Tristan's parents are given new names and backstories, and the overall tone has been called "more realistic" than the verse material though there are moments where characters sing. Tristan's guardian Governal takes him to France, where he grows up at the court of King Pharamond. He later arrives at the court of his uncle Mark, King of Cornwall, and defends his country against the Irish warrior Morholt. Wounded in the fight, he travels to Ireland where he is healed by Iseult, a renowned doctor and Morholt's niece, but he must flee when the Irish discover he has killed their champion. He later returns, in disguise, to seek Iseult as a bride for his uncle. When they accidentally drink the love potion prepared for Iseult and Mark, they engage in a tragic affair that ends with Tristan being banished to the court of Hoel of Brittany. He eventually marries Hoel's daughter, also named Iseult. Especially after this point, however, the traditional narrative is continually interrupted for side adventures by the various characters and episodes serving to "Arthurianize" the story. Notably, Tristan's rivalry with the Saracen knight Palamedes is given substantial attention. Additionally, in the long version, Tristan leaves Brittany and returns to his first love, and never sees his wife again, though her brother Kahedin remains his close companion. Tristan is compared frequently to his friend Lancelot in both arms and love, and at times even unknowingly engages him in battles. He becomes a Knight of the Round Table (taking Morholt's old seat) and embarks on the Quest for the Holy Grail before abandoning the idea to stay with Iseult at Lancelot's castle. The Grail Quest has been a source of controversy regarding the Tristan en prose. Instead of writing new material, the author chose to insert (or interpolate) the entire Queste del Saint Graal from the Vulgate Cycle into the Tristan story. The result of this copying undermines the sanctity of the Vulgate Quest itself. Manuscripts which do not include the Grail material preserve the earlier version of the lovers' deaths, while the longer versions have Mark kill Tristan while he plays the harp for Iseult, only to see her die immediately afterwards. |
4552182 | /m/0c8hkn | Dragonology: The Complete Book of Dragons | Dugald Steer | 10/1/2003 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | The book is written by nineteenth century author, dragonologist Dr. Ernest Drake purporting to have written the material in ink (needs clarification on what it was actually written in) . The subject matters are dragons; where to find them, information about different species, how to work with them and several tactile "samples" of dragon material, including their wings, scales and skin. Also included in the book is a sealed envelope enclosing dragon-calling spells, dragon riddles, a "letter" from Dr. Drake, a number of illustrations, mostly in color, detailing dragons and their anatomy, and a foldout map showing dragon locations throughout the world. |
4554204 | /m/0c8lg1 | Savrola | Winston Churchill | 1899 | null | Events take place in a fictional country called Laurania, located somewhere on the Mediterranean sea, which is similar to Italy or Spain, but with an overlay of Victorian England. Laurania has an African colony which can be reached via the Suez Canal. It has been a republic for many years, and has a well established constitution. Five years previously (stated to be in 1883) the country was split by a civil war, as a result of which General Antonio Molara became President and Dictator. Unrest has arisen because of Molara's refusal to restore parliamentary rule, and the final events of his dictatorship are described in the book. The story opens with a description of the capital and fast-moving political events there. Molara has bowed to popular pressure for elections, but intends to do so on the basis of a grossly amended electoral register. Savrola is seen as the leader of the revolutionaries, deciding what they are to do, and presiding over conflicting factions with differing aims. Despite the unrest, society still proceeds on the surface in a genteel course, with state balls and society events. Molara decides to ask his young and beautiful wife, Lucile, to attempt to seduce Savrola and discover anything she can about his plans. Unfortunately for him, Lucile finds herself attracted to Savrola and her loyalties confused. Events move from political maneuvering to street fighting when a rebel army invades Laurania. While Savrola knows about the army and intended invasion, he has poor control over it, so the invasion has started without his knowledge or proper preparations. Both sides scramble for a fight, as Molara finds the country's regular troops refuse to obey his orders. He is obliged to despatch most of the loyal Republican Guard from the capital to oppose the invaders, leaving him with a much reduced force to hold the capital. Fierce street fighting takes place in the capital between the revolutionaries of the Popular Party and the Republican Guard. The revolution culminates in the storming of the Presidential Palace and the death on the steps of his palace of General Molara. The revolutionary allies start to break apart in the face of a threat by the Lauranian navy (which remains loyal to the president), to bombard the city unless Savrola is handed over to them. The council of public safety decides the most expedient position would be to agree to this, but Savrola escapes attempts to arrest him and flees with Lucile. The city is subsequently bombarded when Savrola is not produced, and the last scene is of Savrola watching the destruction from outside the city. During 1886 and 1887 there was unrest in the African colony. This was dealt with by the small but very effective Lauranian Army, with the support of the Lauranian Navy. In 1888 a border dispute with the British increased tension in that part of Africa, and the arrival of HMS Aggressor in the area precipitated the despatch of the several Lauranian warships to 'show the flag'. This was also intended to dissuade the British from taking any military action in support of their claim on the disputed area. * 'Three hundred thousand people live there'. * 'The palace stood upon high ground commanding a wide view of the city and harbour ... The red and blue tiled roofs were relieved by frequent gardens and squares whose green and graceful palms soothed and gratified the eye. To the north the great pile of the Senate House and Parliament buildings loomed up majestic and imposing. Westward lay the harbour with its shipping and protective forts'. * Part of the harbour's defences include a military mole, at the end of which is a 'shapeless mound of earth that marked the protecting battery of the harbour ...'. * The seaward battery is armed with 'nine-inch guns', some of which are within embrasures and some are en barbette. * The entrance to the harbour is 'nearly a mile wide, but the navigable channel itself was dangerously narrow and extremely difficult.' * There is a 'great square in front of the Parliament House'. The square is called Constitution Square. * There is a railway line that runs 'right to the frontier'. |
4554788 | /m/0c8mgb | A Boy's Own Story | Edmund White | 9/28/1982 | {"/m/0xdf": "Autobiography", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The story starts when the narrator, aged 15, experiences the physical side of young love with his twelve-year-old friend Kevin O'Brien. Although he is the younger boy, Kevin takes the lead in the sexual activity. Kevin's remoteness keeps the relationship one-sided; he forgets all about it once each session is over, whereas the narrator gets more and more worried about his deep feelings. As the book progresses, he starts to have cravings for anal penetration. The encounters between the two adolescents become infrequent and are kept in the background, and the narrator's soul-searching about his homosexuality continues. |
4555844 | /m/0c8pgb | The Abomination | null | null | null | Santiago Moore Zamora leads a dissolute life of wanton drug-fuelled homosexuality in London, selling his body to despised clients. The story then takes us back to his privileged childhood in the late 1950s. His Spanish mother and English father are surrounded by servants and young 'Iago' sees as much of nanny, cook and gardener as he does his parents who send him off to boarding school. At his prep school he becomes James Moore and at age nine he is abused by a teacher, Mr Wolfe. Moving on to an English public school, James encounters the music teacher, Dr. Fox, who persuades him to attend piano lessons and abuses him for the next few years. |
4555955 | /m/0c8pq0 | What Happened to Mr. Forster? | Gary W. Bargar | 1981-09 | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | Louis Lamb is a twelve-year-old boy who lives in Kansas City in 1958. A new homosexual teacher, Jack Forster, takes an interest in Louis, an attractive but vulnerable child who likes playing with china animals rather than joining in the ball games the other boys love. He gives Louis one-on-one softball coaching and helps him develop his writing talent. Parents in the community, however, are suspicious of the teacher who lives with another man. Forster doesn’t do anything in any way inappropriate with the boy, just occasionally squeezing his shoulder, but they do spend quite a lot of time together. Eventually, some of the children’s parents start a witch-hunt against Forster, assuming that, because he is gay, his interest in Louis must be sexual. He is fired, and effectively blacklisted. Louis is devastated by losing his favourite teacher, a man who improved the boy’s self esteem and developed his latent talents. Louis does not understand, nor does he feel it fair that Mr. Forster, who is such a good teacher and brings out the best in him, has been fired. Louis goes round to Mr. Forster's house to talk to him. Forster immediately rings Louis' Aunt Zona and asks her to come and collect him. In the meantime he sits and talks with Louis. Mr. Forster explains to him that life isn't always fair and that sometimes people just don't understand how other people love each other. On the way home, Aunt Zona says "I think your Mr. Forster is really good at heart. Maybe the Lord will forgive him for being that way." On the last page of the novel, when the children have been asked by their new teacher to write a thought for the day, Louis knew what to do: 'Then I took out my pen, but not to write down the Thought for the Day. I wrote about Mr. Forster.' |
4557609 | /m/0c8s90 | Two Roads Diverge | Richard Kelly | 6/28/2006 | null | June 30, 2008: Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson) wakes up alone in the Nevada desert, he takes out a red syringe and injects himself in the neck. He begins walking through the desert. Fortunio Balducci (Will Sasso) is on a houseboat with Tab Taverner-Former Mayor of Hermosa, his son Ronald Taverner (Seann William Scott) nephew, Jimmy Hermosa and friend, Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar). Fortunio is currently in an online-poker game with several American soldiers in Syria and loses, but the connection is lost because the soldiers were attacked – which means Fortunio is still going to lose his money anyways. Fortunio owes some bookies in Las Vegas $100,000 so Tab suggests that Fortunio get out of Nevada before the holiday weekend begins; this should buy him some time. Fortunio can’t get across the border because he has no interstate visa to get across and will take sometime for him to get one. Krysta Now tells Fortunio that she can get him a visa and to meet her at a bar called Buffalo Bill’s situated at the border. Fortunio leaves the boat and drives towards the border. On his way, he finds Boxer passed out on the road. He pulls over and approaches him. Boxer stirs and says: ‘I am a pragmatic prevaricator, with a propensity for oratorical seniority, which is too pleonastical to be expeditiously assimilated by any of your unequivocal veracities.’ Fortunio puts him inside the car and they begin to drive off again. Fortunio asks Boxer how and what he was doing out in the middle of the desert. Boxer doesn’t know and asks the date. He seems to suffer from amnesia. At the same time, a Nevada park ranger is tipped off about the whereabouts of an abandoned SUV with a burned-up dead body inside. The SUV is a prototype vehicle belonging to Treer which is powered by ‘Fluid Karma’. The vehicle and corpse is taken away to a facility nearby. The facility is broken into by armed-men, killing everyone inside and taking the SUV and corpse. Fortunio asks Boxer can he remember anything. The only thing he seems to remember is a maze made of sand. Fortunio says that he is a big fan of Boxer’s. Boxer is confused and doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Fortunio tells him that he is Boxer Santaros-a very famous action star and ex-pro-football player. He then tells him of the incidents that occurred on July 4, 2005. The two make it to Buffalo Bill’s where Krysta Now is performing on stage but instead of stripping, she begins to sing poetry. Fortunio explains the situation to Krysta, that he found Boxer lying in the desert, picked him up and that he has amnesia, so now he needs two visas. Krysta will get the visas on one condition-play along a game she has created. Using Boxer’s amnesia to her advantage, she will tell Boxer that the two of them were together in Vegas for the weekend, partying and working on a script that she wrote called ‘The Power’, she was researching a character at Buffalo Bill’s (her character in the movie is an intelligent dancer interested in astrophysics). She then goes on to say that Fortunio has to pretend that he is a private detective and was hired to find Boxer and bring him to Krysta, if he doesn’t do it, she will deliver him to the bookies in Vegas. She ends up convincing the naive Boxer. Apparently, the script (‘The Power’) was written solely by Krysta, and that Boxer never had anything to do with it to begin with, but she has convinced him that he is starring in and directing the film also. He asks what it is about and who he plays. Krysta says that Boxer plays a renegade L.A.P.D. cop called Jericho Cane and that it revolves around the end of the world. She gives him a copy of the script to read. Krysta begins talking to Fortunio outside her hotel room. She tells him to contact a lawyer and have him draw up a short form contract for himself for ‘The Power’ and to give himself $100,000 to settle his debt with the bookies. While Boxer is reading the script, the phone begins to ring. He answers and the woman on the other end tells him: ‘is this the Pragmatic Prevaricator?-Stay with the girl, she is your only chance for survival, We saw the Shadows of the Morning Light, The Shadows of the Evening Sun, Until the Shadows and Light were One. Cross the Border At Dawn, Stay with the Girl, and whatever she says, Keep Taking the Injections, and whatever you do-do not board the rollercoaster.’ Krysta enters the room and asks about the script. Boxer says he likes it but there is lots of work to be done on it. Later, Boxer signs the contract given to him by Fortunio and Krysta. He goes to get a check from the bank, he places his thumb on the scanner, which is fed back to US-IDent (who are looking for Boxer). Boxer tells Krysta about the phone call and of his dream in the desert, she was in his dream and he remembers the song she sung in Buffalo Bill’s in the dream also. She tells him that they have to ride the rollercoaster across the road from Buffalo Bill’s. Boxer is hesitant at first but agrees. He takes an injection before they go on. Once they get to the top, Boxer has a vision...a vision of 1902, a Native-America tribe standing there. Boxer waves at one of them. He seems to have created a rupture in the fourth dimension. He goes back to 2008 all of a sudden and he tells Krysta about his vision. The two of them exit the rollercoaster together.... The book takes on a classical storyline and the title, "Two Roads Diverge" derives from Robert Frost's famous poem "The Road Not Taken". The cover also contains a quote from T. S. Eliot, stating that our world will not go out with a bang as we expect, but with a whimper. |
4558107 | /m/0c8t5d | Winds of Fury | Mercedes Lackey | 1993 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The evil Prince Ancar of Hardorn, while experimenting with magic, accidentally draws the equally evil man-cat Mornelithe Falconsbane from his prison in the Void. Meanwhile, Heralds Elspeth and Skif witness the reunion of Clan k'Leysha, a tribe of Hawkbrothers which was divided because of a magical mishap. The two Heralds, together with Elspeth's lover Darkwind k'Sheyna, Skif's lover Nyara (Falconsbane's estranged daughter), the magical sword Need, the gryphons Treyvan and Hydona, the k'Treva mage Firesong, and the kyree Rris, are leaving for Valdemar, where the non-Heralds will be ambassadors for their various clans. Firesong's Gate (a magical portal enabling the person to cross large distances in a single step) is co-opted by the ghost of Herald Vanyel, a Herald-Mage who died saving the kingdom. The party find themselves in the Forest of Sorrows near Valdemar's northern border. Vanyel explains that he 'abducted' them because he is about to remove the magical protections around Valdemar. He feels he must warn them because Ancar of Hardorn may take advantage of the lowered defenses and magically attack. Vanyel then makes a Gate to send the party to his ancestral manor near the western border. They head to Haven with all speed, though the gryphons create a minor sensation along the way. Elspeth discovers that rumors have been circulating that she has been murdered by her stepfather, or that she intends to take the throne from her mother by force. Upon arrival in Haven, she renounces her claim to the monarchy so that she can pursue her new job as the first Herald-Mage since Vanyel. The mages in the group begin finding and training potential mages among the Heralds as quickly as possible. Ancar, prompted by Falconsbane, launches an attack immediately, using magic-controlled troops. Valdemar responds with an assassination team composed of Elspeth, Skif, Darkwind, Nyara, Need, and Firesong, intending to eliminate Ancar, Falconsbane, and Hulda, an evil witch who tried to corrupt Elspeth in her youth. Disguised as a traveling show, they move towards the capital. The situation is complicated somewhat when the assassination team learns that Falconsbane has a secret agent in his head; the evil Adept had found a way to cheat death by arranging to 'take over' the bodies of any member of his bloodline with Adept potential. The victim of the most recent takeover, An'desha, a boy of the Shin'a'in, survived; his personality took refuge in a hidden corner of Falconsbane's mind. Two Avatars of the Shin'a'in Goddess come to him to help him, and he is able to pass information to the assassination party through the Avatars and Need. He slowly becomes aware that it might not be possible to kill Falconsbane without also killing him. Firesong, Nyara, Skif, and Need lure Falconsbane out of the palace. Need deals the body a mortal wound, causing Falconsbane's spirit to flee into the Void. Firesong pursues him there and destroys him for good. Need is able to heal the damage she has caused and allow An'desha to have his body back. Darkwind, Elspeth, and her Companion attack Ancar and Hulda, who both perish, but Darkwind is injured and Elspeth also kills an envoy from the powerful Eastern Empire, causing it to turn its eye on Valdemar. With the death of Ancar, Valdemar has little difficulty repelling the Hardornen army. At the close of the book, An'desha and Nyara are healed from the damage Falconsbane had done to their bodies, and the party settles in to live in Haven. |
4559056 | /m/0c8vzb | World Game | Terrance Dicks | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | Under threat of execution after his conviction by the Time Lords at the end of The War Games, the Doctor is granted a reprieve if he agrees to undertake missions for the Celestial Intervention Agency. Accompanied and supervised by the ambitious Lady Serena, their first mission is to halt attacks upon three key figures in Earth's past: Napoleon Bonaparte, The Duke of Wellington, and Charles Maurice de Talleyrand. The Doctor re-encounters the Player known as the Countess and struggles to end her Grand Plan to allow Napoleon to win his various European campaigns. Her plan to set the City States of Europe against each other is stopped by the Doctor, despite her setting a Raston Warrior Robot and a vampire on him and Serena. In preventing the Countess's assassination scheme on Wellington, Serena is killed. The Countess has many back up plans, and at the Battle of Waterloo, her plan to prevent the Prussians coming to the English army's relief is thwarted when the Doctor imitates Napoleon himself to get through the French lines and deliver new orders to the Prussian commander. After returning to Gallifrey and discovering a traitor in the CIA who had been using the time scoop to assist the Countess, the Doctor is sent on a mission to investigate the time travel experiments of Kartz and Reimer. |
4559717 | /m/0c8wxb | Adiamante | L. E. Modesitt, Jr. | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | After gaining amazing power over genetics and technology, three sects of humanity have developed and split, after a civil war on earth forced them apart. Now, far into the future, the deported sect has returned to force their rule on the remaining citizens of earth. |
4560559 | /m/0c8y9b | The Land of Foam | Ivan Yefremov | null | null | The novel is divided in two parts, separated by more than 1000 years. The first part takes place during the rule of the pharaon Djedefra (26th century BC), who decides to send an expedition to the South, in order to seek the famous and fabled Land of Punt and to seek the limits of the land and the start of the Great Arc, the circular ocean encompassing the entire world in Egyptian cosmology. The second part starts in Ancient Greece during its Aegean Period (no precise dates are provided, but one can assume a date c. 1000-900 BC). A young sculptor named Pandion sets off on a journey to Crete, but a storm finally lands him in Egypt, where he is enslaved. From that point, he is haunted by the thought of coming back home... |
4560846 | /m/0c8yvk | Winds of Fate | Mercedes Lackey | 1991 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The first half of the book alternates between two plots; Herald Elspeth in Haven and Darkwind k'Sheyna in Hawkbrother territory near the Dhorisha Plains. Elspeth is now under the tutelage of Herald-Captain Kerowyn, who arrived in Valdemar during the events of By the Sword. Through Kerowyn's training she narrowly escapes an assassination attempt sent by Ancar of Hardorn, the usuper prince of the kingdom to the east. She is convinced Ancar will attack again and asks permission of the Queen and Council to go looking for mages, since Valdemar has no knowledge of true magic. They agree only after being pressured by the Companions, the horse-shaped beings who are the lifelong partners of the Heralds. Herald Skif goes with her as an escort. Meanwhile, the Hawkbrother clan k'Sheyna is in dire straits. While the clan was moving from their current location to a new one, the clan's Heartstone (a special object which acts as a well of power accessible to mages of the clan) went rogue and shattered. The Gate which connected the two locations failed, stranding half the clan in the new location. Several of the mages who were holding the Gate were killed or injured; many were traumatized. One of them, Songwind, changed his name to Darkwind, renounced the use of magic, and began living outside the Vale (the magically-protected area used as a home by Tayledras clans. His father pressures him to return to magic, but he refuses, fearing in part that he caused the Heartstone to fail. His real allies are a pair of gryphons, Treyvan and Hydona, mages themselves and advance scouts from Clan k'Leshya, the so-called Lost Clan. Lurking at the edges of k'Sheyna territory is the sinister mage Mornelithe Falconsbane, a creature who has changed his form to resemble a giant man-cat. Darkwind's father is an unwilling agent of his; Falconsbane caught and tortured him until he broke. Falconsbane has an obsessive hatred of gryphons and wishes to capture Treyvan, Hydona, or their two young children. Falconsbane's daughter Nyara escapes him and finds her way to Darkwind and the gryphons for protection, but she also is under his control. A young woman, Dawnfire, witnesses Falconsbane's attempt to take or subvert the gyphlets. She and her bond-bird try to drive him off, but she is killed and a lingering trace of her spirit is trapped in the bond-bird, which Falconsbane takes prisoner. Elspeth successfully resists her Companion Gwena's attempt to steer her along a predestinated path to greatness and looks for help among the Shin'a'in. Cryptic clues steer her to k'Sheyna territory, where she encounters Darkwind. After a tense meeting, he begins to believe that she could help him fight off Falconsbane. Skif is wary and suspicious, however. Dawnfire, trapped in her bird's body, arrives with the news that Ancar is planning to attack them. The Tayledras rightly deduce that this is simply a ruse to lead them away from the Heartstone and the gryphons. They try to ambush Falconsbane, but he is too strong for them; the Goddess herself intervenes to drive him away. At the story's conclusion, Darkwind's father has been freed from Falconsbane's control, and the outsiders have been accepted warily into the Hawkbrothers' trust. Dawnfire is chosen by the Goddess as her Avatar and becomes a spirit-being. |
4561031 | /m/0c8z3p | The Wicked Day | Mary Stewart | 1983 | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The novel covers the time after Merlin's self imposed exile and stretches to the deaths of Modred and Arthur. |
4564203 | /m/0c930_ | The Face of the Enemy | David A. McIntee | null | null | The Doctor and Jo have gone off in the TARDIS, leaving the Brigadier and UNIT facing a deadly mystery — and a moral dilemma... Robbery and murder are on the increase in Britain as disputes between underworld gangs escalate into open warfare on the streets. The Master seems inextricably linked to the chaos - despite the fact he is safely under lock and key. Meanwhile UNIT is called in when a plane missing in strange circumstances is rediscovered - contaminated with radiation and particle damage that cannot possibly have occurred on Earth. As the mystery deepens, what little light they can shed on the matter leads the Brigadier to believe that with the Doctor away, Earth's only hope may lie with its greatest enemy... |
4567369 | /m/0c98mr | Fire on the Mountain | Terry Bisson | null | {"/m/0mz2": "Alternate history", "/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The difference from actual US history starts with the participation of Harriet Tubman in Brown's uprising; her sound tactical and strategic advice helps Brown avoid mistakes which in real history led to his downfall. As a result, instead of the American Civil War, the United States faces a full-scale slave revolt throughout the South —- helped by a handful of white sympathizers; by various European revolutionaries such as Giuseppe Garibaldi who take ship across the Atlantic; and by an invasion by Mexico, seeking to regain the territory it lost in 1848. After a great deal of bloody fighting and an increasing dissatisfaction in the North which is required to send troops to fight the rebellious slaves, the Blacks succeed in emancipating themselves and create a republic in the Deep South, led by Tubman and Frederick Douglass. (Brown himself did not survive to see the victory of what he started.) Abraham Lincoln tries to start a war to bring back the secessionist Black states into the Union. He fails and is himself killed in that war, and Blacks remember him as their archenemy. Later, the Black state (named "Nova Africa") becomes Socialist, touching off a whole string of revolutions and civil wars in Europe. The Paris Commune wins out instead of being crushed, a united Ireland gets free of British rule in the 1880s, and the Russian Revolution is just one of many similar revolutions in different countries. Finally Socialism wins out also in the rump US, following a revolutionary outbreak in Chicago. In the book, Socialism works out as predicted by Karl Marx, bringing happiness and prosperity to all of Humanity. (Marx himself is mentioned in the book as an enthusiastic supporter of the rebellious slaves, though he does not personally come to America to help them.) The book has two levels. The overt plot takes place in 1959, in an Utopian Socialist world far in advance of ours in all ways. To mark the centennial of Brown's raid, black astronauts lead a manned landing on Mars. However, the story of the protagonist, a young Black woman trying to bring the blessings of Socialism to the backward society in the rump US, is mainly the framework for excerpts from the vivid diaries of two people who lived through the stirring events of 1859 and its aftermath—her ancestor, who was then a young black slave, and a white Virginian doctor who sympathized with the rebellion. In this world, an alternate history book is published called John Brown's Body, which describes a world in which Brown failed and was executed, the slaves were emancipated by Lincoln rather than by themselves after a war between two white factions, and capitalism survived as a political and economic system. It is considered a dystopia, describing a horrible world in all ways inferior to the one which the people in the book know. |
4568861 | /m/0c9c5w | Many Moons | James Thurber | null | {"/m/016475": "Picture book", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Many Moons is about a sick princess who wants the moon. The princess is perhaps more sick at heart than body. Her father, the king, is enraged when the wizards, the Lord High Chamberlain, and the mathematician court can't get the moon. In the end, it is the jester who realizes that the princess thinks the moon is only as big as her thumbnail and made of gold, so he goes to the goldsmith, who makes a necklace with a gold sphere on it. The jester gives it to the princess. The King then worries that she will see the moon in the sky that night and realize that the necklace was not the real moon. The jester goes to check on her. The princess thinks that whenever something is taken, it is replaced, like her tooth, a unicorn's horn, and flowers. |
4569197 | /m/0c9cnb | Teckla | Steven Brust | 1987-01 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | While deciding what to do with the fortune he made after the events of Jhereg, Vlad is alarmed to discover that his wife has joined a group of revolutionists consisting of Easterners and Teckla from the ghetto of South Adrilankha. One of their members, Franz, has been murdered. Fearing for Cawti's safety, Vlad resolves to investigate the matter. After some aggressive investigation, Vlad learns that the Jhereg boss of South Adrilankha, Herth, ordered the assassination after the revolutionists attacked his businesses. By getting involved, Vlad becomes a target in the ongoing feud. Vlad takes the information back to Kelly, the leader of the revolutionists, but he is unafraid. He plans to not only revolt but to break the Cycle itself. Several of his followers tell Vlad their stories, including a Teckla sorcerer named Paresh, but Vlad is unmoved. He accuses them of parroting Kelly's slogans, which put impossible ideals ahead of individuals. Vlad's relationship becomes strained as Cawti's changing values pull her away from his lifestyle. Distraught over his failing marriage, Vlad lets his guard down and gets captured by Herth's men. They torture him for information about Cawti and the revolutionists until Vlad's men rescue him. Jarred by his brush with total helplessness, Vlad becomes temporarily suicidal, but Cawti drugs him before he can harm himself. After awakening, Vlad remains troubled by the incident, but reaffirms his desire to save Cawti and destroy Herth. Vlad suspects that Herth has sent an assassin after him. He begins casing Kelly's headquarters to watch events unfold and draw out the assassin. The revolutionists attempt to barricade South Adrilankha and the Phoenix Guards are called in to restore order. Amidst the chaos, the assassin strikes, but Vlad fights him off. Vlad identifies the assassin as Quaysh and hires his own assassin, Ishtvan, to kill Quaysh. Vlad decides that the only way to save Cawti is to end the revolution by killing Kelly and his top-ranking followers. He sneaks into Kelly's headquarters, but Franz's ghost appears before he can start the job. After conversing with the ghost, Vlad becomes unnerved and abandons the plan. He returns the next day looking for Cawti, but winds up in an ethical debate with Kelly over their respective lifestyles. Kelly's accusations closely mirror Vlad's own self-doubts. Still committed to saving Cawti from self-destruction with the revolutionists, Vlad concocts a plan to solve all his problems at once. During another altercation between the revolutionists and the Phoenix Guard, Vlad tricks Herth into entering Kelly's headquarters. He hopes that Herth would kill Kelly, the revolutionists would kill Herth, and the Phoenix Guards would kill the revolutionists. Vlad teleports into the headquarters and recklessly decides to kill Herth himself. Miraculously, Vlad disables all of Herth's bodyguards while Ishtvan kills Herth's assassin and disappears. Kelly convinces Vlad against his better judgment to allow Herth to live. The next day, Vlad has an epiphany on how to solve his problems. He offers to buy all of Herth's holdings in South Adrilankha, using the remainder of his fortune. Herth agrees and retires from the Organization, thus ending all of his conflicts with Vlad and the revolutionists. Vlad breaks the news to Cawti and they tearfully embrace. Though many unresolved issues still loom between them, Vlad feels relieved that the most pressing dangers are gone. |
4569237 | /m/0c9cqw | The Devil Goblins from Neptune | Keith Topping | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | The Brigadier is pursued across the world from seeming traitors within UNIT, his own organization. The Doctor and Liz deal with an alien invasion that started with an extraterrestrial mass exploding in the atmosphere. |
4572351 | /m/0c9hq3 | The Tigers of Mompracem | Emilio Salgari | null | {"/m/08sdrw": "Adventure novel"} | The Tigers of Mompracem are a band of rebel pirates fighting against the colonial power of the Dutch and British empires. They are led by Sandokan, the indomitable Tiger of Malaysia, and his loyal friend Yanez de Gomera, a Portuguese wanderer and adventurer. After twelve years of spilling blood and spreading terror throughout Malaysia, Sandokan has reached the height of his power, but when the pirate learns of the existence of a beautiful girl, nicknamed "the Pearl of Labuan", his fortunes begin to change. |
4572405 | /m/0c9hrj | The Pirates of Malaysia | Emilio Salgari | null | {"/m/08sdrw": "Adventure novel"} | Sandokan and Yanez, the protagonists of The Tigers of Mompracem, are back, righting injustices and fighting old foes. Tremal-Naik's misfortunes have continued. Wrongfully imprisoned, the great hunter has been banished from India and sentenced to life in a penal colony. Knowing his master is innocent, Kammamuri dashes off to the rescue, planning to free the good hunter at the first opportunity. When the good servant is captured by the Tigers of Mompracem, he manages to enlist their services. But in order to succeed, Sandokan and Yanez must lead their men against the forces of James Brooke, "The Exterminator", the dreaded White Rajah of Sarawak. Pangeran Macota, Sandokan's ally, was in fact one of James Brooke's bitterest enemies. |
4573248 | /m/0c9jwq | The Shadow Lines | Amitav Ghosh | 1988 | {"/m/0d6gr": "Reference", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The novel follows the life of a young boy growing up in Calcutta and later on in Delhi and London. His family – the Datta Chaudharis - and the Prices in London are linked by the friendship between their respective patriarchs – Justice Dattachaudhari and Lionel Tresawsen. The narrator adores Tridib because of his tremendous knowledge and his perspective of the incidents and places. Tha'mma thinks that Tridib is type of person who seems 'determined to waste his life in idle self-indulgence', one who refuses to use his family connections to establish a career. Unlike his grandmother, the narrator loves listening to Tridib. For the narrator, Tridib's lore is very different from the collection of facts and figures. The narrator is sexually attracted to Ila but his feelings are passive. He never expresses his feelings to her afraid to lose the relationship that exists between them. However one day he involuntarily shows his feelings when she was changing clothes in front of him being unaware of his feelings. She feels sorry for him. Tha'mma does not like Ila. 'Why do you always speak for that whore' - She doesn't like her grandson to support her. Tha'mma has a dreadful past and wants to reunite her family and goes to Dhaka to bring back her uncle. Tridib is in love with May and sacrificed his life to rescue her from mobs in the communal riots of 1963-64 in Dhaka. |
4573961 | /m/0c9knc | City of the Beasts | Isabel Allende | 2002 | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | City of the Beasts begins with the story of Alexander Cold, who is 15 years old and going through a family crisis. While his parents leave for Texas to try to treat his mother's cancer, Alex and his sisters are sent to live with their grandmothers. Despite his desperate pleading, Alex is sent off to New York City to stay with his eccentric grandmother Kate Cold,a reporter for International Geographic Magazine. His sisters, however are sent to live with their Grandmother Carla. Meanwhile, Kate announces that she will be taking Alex with her to the Amazon rainforest during his visit. Once Alex arrives in New York City, and finds out that his grandmother had no intentions of collecting him at the airport and is forced to walk to her apartment, several blocks away. In the process he meets a girl named Morgana who is a very eccentric girl in her mid-20s. She steals his back pack that contained his clothes, his money and his flute. He is greatly saddened by the loss of his precious flute, but Kate gives him the flute belonging to his grandfather, Joseph Cold. When Alex and his Grandmother Kate reach the jungle, they join the rest of the expedition group: Timothy Bruce (photographer); and his assistant Joel Gonzalez. Accompanying them is the famous anthropologist, Ludovic Leblanc, the beautiful Venezuelan physician Dr. Omayra Torres, who is coming along to vaccinate natives, and Cesar Santos, their Brazilian guide. Alex soon befriends Nadia, a girl several years younger than him, who is the daughter of Cesar Santos. The entrepreneur, Mauro Carias, is the man responsible for drawing the magazine's interest to the mysterious Beasts. The group leaves by boat, traveling upriver toward their destination in the World's Eye. Everyone in the group feels uncomfortable, as if someone were watching them constantly. One of the soldiers who is with them dies when he is shot by a poisoned dart. Later, Joel Gonzalez, the photographer's assistant, is attacked and nearly killed by an anaconda. After another soldier's death, this time at the hands of a Beast, they decide to send several people back with the wounded Joel Gonzalez - and they are given the task to send help back to the expedition. When they are left alone, Alex plays his grandfather's flute to relieve the tedium. The music attracts the mysterious People of the Mist, who kidnap the two children. They travel farther into the forest and arrive at a waterfall which they must climb to reach the World's Eye. Due to Alex's skills in rock climbing, this isn't much of a problem for him; however, Nadia is afraid of heights. After they reach the top, Alex is sent back down again to rescue their chief, Mokarita, who had fallen and been mortally wounded. When everyone arrives at the top, they set off for the home of the People of the Mist. When they reach the village, they are welcomed by the Indians - but their happiness is tempered by the death of Mokarita, which follows shortly after. He is given a traditional funeral, which unfortunately sends up a great amount of smoke from the pyre. During the funeral, everyone is given a drug which reveals to Nadia her totem of the eagle. Jaguar and Eagle are initiated into the clan. Alex, being fifteen, is put through a rite of passage into manhood; during the ceremony, unusual things happen. Firstly, he turns into a jaguar, his totem; secondly, he receives a vision of his mom on her hospital bed and he talks briefly with her. After the ceremonies, the Shaman takes them to visit the Beasts, who live in a city deep within the forest. These Beasts are considered gods by the People of the Mist. Jaguar correctly assumes their city to be the famous El Dorado which is really made from fool's gold. Jaguar and Eagle embark on a journey to visit El Dorado and its inhabitants with the help of Walimai, the mystic's spirit wife who will serve as their guide. The city is located inside of an inactive volcano, and the only entrance is through a confusing labyrinth of lava tunnels and caves. They all decide what to do and how to do it. Upon arrival, Alex and Nadia meet with the “Beasts”. The creatures, which look something like giant sloths, function as the living memory of the tribe by remembering long epic poems recited by Walimai and his predecessors. Fearing the capture of these ancient creatures by western scientists, they warn them to be careful of foreigners (such as the expedition group they both belonged to). In exchange for protecting them, the two children ask for gifts: Nadia the "crystal eggs" and Alex the water of life to save his mother. They both manage to get them, but only by giving up that which was really important to them. Nadia gives up the protective necklace given to her by Walimai, and Alex gives up the flute given to him. Upon returning to the village, they discover that it has been taken over by the Expedition, Carias, and Ariosto. After Nadia convinces the Indians to receive vaccinations, the children realize that the vaccines are actually deadly doses of the measles virus, part of Carias's plan to destroy the Amazonian Indians. Karakawe, an expedition member, is revealed to be an officer of the Department for the Protection of Indigenous Peoples; he is shot by Ariosto. The Indians flee into the woods as a full-fledged gunfight breaks out. Luckily, it ends quickly. Ariosto and his soldiers take captive all of the members of the expedition, while Carias (who was given a serious head wound during the fighting) is airlifted to a hospital. The two children manage to escape; the rest of the men are knocked unconscious by the smell of one of the Beasts. Ariosto is knocked out by the stench and then killed by the Beast. After the People of the Mist reach an agreement with the remaining members of the expedition (they will protect that area with all the power, influence, and money they can muster), they leave. In the end, Eagle and Jaguar must part. She gives Alex the three "crystal eggs", which turn out to be giant diamonds. With the money gained from their sale, it was hoped that they would be able to fund a foundation to keep the World's Eye safe. Alex tells her that the best thing about the trip was meeting her, and they agree that they will be best friends forever. |
4576376 | /m/0c9pcq | Abduction | Peg Kehret | 2004-11 | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature"} | Matt, a six year old boy, is kidnapped by his father, Denny, who he had never met. Though he has always dreamed of meeting him, nothing is the way he thought it would be given his father is only using Matt to impress his brother who often brags about his two well-raised sons. With little clues to follow, Matt's mother and sister, and the police, are doing everything they can to find him. Matt's sister, Bonnie, sees Matt at a Mariner's baseball game, but is caught by Denny. Now both captive, the siblings attempt to escape. On the ferry, Bonnie signals to Matt to throw his hardest pitch. The baseball hits Denny, which allows the two to escape. Denny is then apprehended. |
4576928 | /m/0c9q8w | Parasite Eve | Hideaki Sena | 1995 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/03npn": "Horror"} | Mitochondria are the "energy factories" of biological cells. It is thought that they were originally separate organisms, and a symbiotic relationship between them and early cellular life has evolved into their present position as cell organelles with no independent existence (see endosymbiotic theory). The novel's plot supposes that mitochondria, which are inherited through the female line of descent, form the dispersed body of an intelligent conscious life-form, dubbed Eve, which has been waiting throughout history and evolution for the right conditions when mitochondrial life can achieve its true potential and take over from eukaryotic life-forms (i.e. humans and similar life) by causing a child to be born that can control its own genetic code. Eve is able to control people's minds and bodies by signaling to the mitochondria in their bodies. She can cause certain thoughts to occur to them and also make them undergo spontaneous combustion. The conditions Eve has waited for have arrived; she has found the perfect host in the body of Kiyomi Nagishima. At the start of the book, Eve is the mitochondria in Kiyomi's body. She causes Kiyomi to crash her car; Kiyomi survives but is brain dead. Kiyomi's husband is Toshiaki, a research assistant teaching and researching biological science. Eve influences Toshiaki and a doctor to ensure that one of Kiyomi's kidneys is transplanted into the teenage girl Mariko Anzai as an organ donation. As part of Kiyomi's body, the kidney is also a part of Eve; this prepares Mariko to be a suitable host for giving birth to mitochondrial life, as her immune system would otherwise rebel. Eve influences Toshiaki to grow some of Kiyomi's liver cells in his lab in sufficient quantities to provide Eve with an independent body, he thinks that he is doing this as an experiment using different cultures of the liver cells. Forming some of the cells into a body, Eve possesses Toshiaki's assistant Sachiko Asakura and intermittently takes control of Asakura to work upon the cultures. Eventually, she takes control of Asakura during a conference presentation speech and announces her presence. Leaving Asakura's body, she returns to the lab. Toshiaki pursues her, and she rapes him in the form of Kiyomi to capture some of his sperm, which she uses to fertilize an egg of her own production. Moving to the hospital, she implants this egg in Mariko's womb. The egg develops into a child that is born almost immediately. Eve anticipates that her child will be able to consciously change its genetic code, thus being an infinitely adaptable "perfect life form" capable of replacing humanity and similar life-forms. Mariko's body will be host to a new race of these life-forms. The experiment fails, since Toshiaki's sperm carry a separate line of "male" mitochondria (inherited through sperm) that will be wiped out in the new order; these resist the change by fighting for control of the child's body, causing it to switch between male and female forms. The child dies; Toshiaki also dies, merging his body with the child's to control the bursts of psychokinetic-like power it gives out in its death throes that threaten to kill many people. In the novel's epilogue, it is revealed that some samples of the Eve cells in Toshiaki's lab survived. Fortunately, they are destroyed shortly after being found. |
4577165 | /m/0c9qp3 | Excalibur | Sanders Anne Laubenthal | 1973 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | The novel is set in modern times against the background of the legendary Medieval Welsh colonization of Mobile, Alabama under the prince Madoc in the 12th century. The modern Pendragon, King Arthur's secret successor, must recover Arthur's famed sword Excalibur. |
4578096 | /m/0c9r_n | Festival of Death | null | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | 'The Beautiful Death' is a theme park ride that allows people to experience the afterlife. At least, that is the intention. Riders are now turning into brain-damaged shells of their former selves. The Doctor arrives at the end of this disaster and is praised for saving everyone, something he did not actually do yet. With the help of all-new characters, he investigates through time and discovers he did save all in danger. All it took was the sacrifice of his own life. |
4578837 | /m/0c9tbc | A Son Called Gabriel | Damian McNicholl | 2004-06 | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | As he grows up, Gabriel starts to suspect that he is not like other boys, and engages in a series of sexually oriented games with Noel, a young male friend. He is later caught in the act by his childhood friend Fergal. During adolescence, Gabriel is convinced by his cousin Connor to sexually experiment with him, learns he is attracted to his own sex, and tries to fight it by trying to make himself attracted to girls. At sixteen, he is also abused at school by a priest Father Cornelius. The story ends with Brendan's revelation and Gabriel about to leave Ireland to go to University in England, and the reader has to draw his or her own conclusions about whether Gabriel will continue his relationship with Fiona – with whom he is in love but can't have a sexual relationship – or reconcile with his homosexual leanings. |
4579160 | /m/0c9t_v | The World of Normal Boys | K.M. Soehnlein | 8/1/2001 | {"/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The book is written in the present tense. It's 1978, New Jersey: Saturday Night Fever and Grease are big. 13-year-old Robin MacKenzie is caught in a triangular relationship with next-door neighbor Todd Spicer and classmate Scott Schatz. Robin develops a fascination for 17-year-old neighbor Todd who, despite often teasing him, initiates a sexual relationship with the younger boy, whom Todd invites to a party after which they go swimming on a golf course. Robin further forms a close bond with fellow freshman Scott Schatz, whose father is physically abusive. Robin learns that, two years earlier, Todd and Scott were involved in a sexual relationship. Robin is troubled by this, but his relationship with Scott is ultimately unaffected. During the novel, Robin's younger brother Jackson dies some time after falling from a slide and breaking his neck, an incident Robin blames himself for although it isn't anyone's fault. As a result Robin's family begins to break down: his father becomes violent towards Robin, and Robin's longstanding bond with his mother begins to be affected. His younger sister Ruby becomes religious and also closer to Robin. |
4579291 | /m/0c9v8y | Ekaterina | Donald Harington | null | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Ekaterina is an exiled Svanetian princess who arrives in America. There, she gets a job teaching an introductory mycology class at a university. Meanwhile, she rents a room from a woman, Loretta, who lives there with her twelve year old son, Kenny, who immediately takes a precocious liking to her. She befriends the 12-year-old boy called Kenny who reminds her of two young pubertal boys she had relationships with in Russia, Islamber and Dzhordzha. Harington describes the attractive boy as a faunlet, a male counterpart to Vladimir Nabokov's nymphet in Lolita. After two months, the 27-year-old Ekaterina seduces Kenny and they have sex. During the course of their sexual relationship, Kenny, already a juvenile delinquent, steals contraceptives to avoid pregnancy. When Kenny confesses his sexual relationship with Ekaterina after being caught stealing car parts, his mother forces Ekaterina to leave. She settles in town called Stick Around where she befriends a woman named Sharon, who indirectly introduces her to a boy named Jason. Later, she engages Jason on his twelfth birthday by giving him an all-over massage in the bath while baby-sitting him. With the help of a novelist and improbable creative writing teacher named Ingraham, Ekaterina matures as a writer, eventually publishing not only a successful autobiography, Louder, Engram! (invoking Nabokov's revised autobiography, Speak, Memory), but also several works of fiction, one of which, a novel called Georgie Boy, becomes a bestseller, allowing her to move from "Stick Around," this novel's disguise for Stay More, the primal setting for all of Harington's novels except his first, The Cherry Pit, to a hotel in Arcaty, the novel's counterpart to the real Arkansas Ozarks town of Eureka Springs. In Arcaty, she meets young Travis Coe, another twelve-year-old boy, who moves into her luxurious penthouse apartment as her houseboy. After getting the lice out of his hair, Ekaterina invites Travis into her bed – just twelve days after they meet. Travis turns out to be a considerably more complex presence than his new employer has anticipated, and the relationship does not last. Ekaterina discovers that Travis was not a virgin and kicks him out, becoming obsessed with how he lost his virginity. Travis does go on to star in Hollywood's screen adaptation of Georgie Boy. Ekaterina also benefits by turning her investigation of the girl to whom Travis lost his virginity into a series of short stories that propel her fame further by being published in Playboy magazine. Ekaterina's relationships with pubescent boys constitute only one facet of this character's ingeniously layered life-story. Donald Harington’s writing is sometimes described as magic realism, but that term hardly begins to suggest the narrative pyrotechnics of Ekaterina, which the author has aptly described as not so much a tribute to Nabokov's Lolita as an apotheosis of it. |
4579435 | /m/0c9vfw | Dream Children | A. N. Wilson | 1998-08 | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | Paedophilia is at the heart of the story. Oliver Gold's pure thoughts, and seemingly asexual life contrast with the reality of his desires and deeds. Oliver abuses Bobs over a long period. |
4579565 | /m/0c9vr0 | Anachrophobia | null | null | null | Whilst travelling in time, the TARDIS suddenly shakes violently. The Eighth Doctor shuts it down, concluding that it is tearing itself apart attempting to escape a force that is forcing to land. As the Doctor, Anji and Fitz emerge onto a wasteland, they are captured by soldiers. They learn that they have landed on a planet that is host to a war between two factions of humans: the Plutocratic empire and rebels known as Defaulters. Both sides have weapons that can slow the flow of time, or speed it up in small areas, but because of this, both sides have reached a stalemate. The soldiers take the Doctor to an officer called Lane. She assumes that the Doctor is the time expert the Plutocrats were sending, and the Doctor decides to agree. Lane takes them to a military outpost called Station 40. When they arrive, one of the soldiers, a man called Bishop, who had his arm aged by a time storm, is placed in a decelerated time capsule until his fate is decided. The commander of the base, Commander Bragg, reveals that one of his scientists, Dr Patterson, has developed a time capsule, which they plan to use to stop the war from ever happening. Two men, Ash and Norton, get inside the machine and go back in time, but the machine spins out of control. The Doctor brings the machine back to the present, and Ash and Norton are placed in quarantine and develop disorientation, anachrophobia, memory loss and physical trauma. The Doctor finds a breach in the machine's walls, meaning that the machine's interior was exposed to the time vortex. Meanwhile Norton's condition is getting worse: time is moving more slowly around him and he cannot recognise his own face as his past is slowly being erased. The Doctor decides to travel in the time capsule and Fitz demands to go with him, but Bragg learns that the Doctor is not the time expert and stops Anji from carrying on with controlling the capsule. Meanwhile, inside the capsule, time slows down and something begins banging on the door. Lane goes to check Ash and Norton, but they attack her and in her rush to leave she tears her time proof suit. Time then jumps back one minute, and lane contacts Bragg, giving Anji the chance to overpower him and return The Doctor and Fitz to the present. However another staff member, Shaw, overpowers Anji and locks the Doctor and his companions away. Time begins to flow more slowly over Lane and time jumps back a minute, confirming that Ash and Norton infected lane, who has now infected Bragg. A man call Mistletoe arrives at the station, claiming to be an auditor sent to review the experiments. Shaw releases the Doctor, Fitz and Anji and brings them to the lab as Mistletoe moves Bishop to the quarantine ward. Bishop becomes infected and Ash, Norton and Bishop face's all turn into clock faces. The Doctor uses gas to knock out the infected and after examining them, reveals that they are turning into clocks. Elsewhere, Patterson sees Bragg's face turn into a clock, but when he reaches the Doctor to warn him, his face turns into a clock, and he finds that he can travel throughout his own lifetime. The Doctor warns him not to, as he fears that the infected are offered the chance to change their personal timelines, but if they do, they have their history erased and become empty vessels for the clock creatures to take over. After hearing this, Patterson commits suicide. Fitz and Shaw go looking for the others, but as they do, a Defaulter bombing causes safety doors to lower. Shaw takes Fitz down to the lower levels, leaving The Doctor and Anji trapped with Bragg. The Doctor opens the door and seals it again, but Bragg rewinds time to get through. The Doctor and Anji seal themselves in the control room with Mistletoe, but it is too late for the clock creatures to rewind time. Fitz and Shaw are attacked by Lane, but due to her time reversal abilities, he cannot shoot her. Lane releases Ash, Bishop and Norton from the quarantine ward as Doctor, Anji and Mistletoe flee to the medical bay. the Doctor exams battle reports and finds them full of strange tactics. Mistletoe then admits that the war is being prolonged to increase profit for the empire. The Doctor then decides to use mustard gas on the creatures as it takes an hour to take effect and the clocks will not be able to rewind time far enough to save themselves. Fitz and Shaw retrieve Mustard gas from the stores and release it. Anji cannot find the Doctor, until Fitz brings him back into the medical bay, having found him outside with no gas mask on. The infected people slowly die, but Mistletoe remembers that Bishop was taken to Station One, the main headquarters of the Plutocrats, to study his infection. The station has a population of 60,000, all of whom will be infected. The survivors sent out in a van in pursuit of Dr. Hammond, only to find his van ambushed by Defaulters, but the whole area has been frozen in time due to Bishop's capsule being smashed. Dr. Hammond reveals himself to be a robot while Shaw reveals that he is a Defaulter agent. As Shaw prepares to shoot everyone, an accelerated time bomb brings time back to normal, and a Defaulter soldier shoots Shaw and injures Bishop. Hammond's power supply explodes, which kills the Defaulter. Bishop uses his powers to rewind time, kill the defaulter and flee from Hammond. however, his face turns into a clock. Plutocratic soldiers mistakenly rescue Bishop, but as the Doctor pursues them, they go through a small patch of decelerated time with broken shielding and arrive at station One months later. They find that all of station One has been converted, but they are allowed to pass through unharmed. At the central audit bureau, they meet the Actuaries, robot accountants who have been running both sides of the war for profit. However, they cannot remember why they are making money or who for, as they have not received any contact from the Empire for one hundred years. They funded the time travel experiments to try to find their purpose. However Bishop enters and infects the Doctor. As the clocks try to tempt him, he remembers that as the clocks exist outside of normal time, they depend on the hole in time that the capsule tore. The Doctor travels along his own timeline to the point where he sealed the airlock before the mustard gas was released. He runs to the lab and fills the time capsule with chrononium, the material used to make the time weapons, then he sets up a clockwork timer. After exposing himself to the gas, he returns to the present, without having changed history. The capsule then launches, sealing the hole. the clocks are killed, and the Doctor passes out. Mistletoe reveals himself as Sabbath (he is not named in the text, but it is clearly him from the description) to Fitz and Anji. Sabbath explains that the clocks were not invading the universe but fleeing Sabbath's allies in the time vortex, and that both the clocks and the Doctor were manipulated into coming here, in the hope that the Doctor would destroy them. Sabbath then leaves, and Fitz and Anji carry the Doctor to the TARDIS. |
4579836 | /m/0c9wf4 | Lord Dismiss Us | Michael Campbell | 1967 | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | Lord Dismiss Us is set in an English boys' public school in the 1960s. The novel deals with the love affair between two boys, together with the internal politics of the school itself. Carleton, a sixth former loves Allen, a boy two years his junior. At the same time the headmaster is trying to enforce a policy against such liaisons. At the time of writing it was a contemporaneous work. As such it now depicts a school at a period in history. It was published in the same year that homosexuality between consenting adults was legalised in the UK. The author, Michael Mussen Campbell, b. 1924, was the grandson of the 1st Lord Glenavy and brother of the 3rd Baron, the humorist Patrick Campbell. He was a Dubliner who attended St Columba's school and Trinity College. Lord Dismiss Us was apparently based on the suicide of a St. Columba’s schoolmaster. Briefly a barrister at the Irish bar, Campbell worked in London for the Irish Times. His other novels included Peter Perry (1956), a ‘story of Dublin Theatrical Life’, and Oh Mary, This London (1959), a fantasy set in London, and Across the Water (1959). Michael Campbell succeeded his brother Patrick in 1980 to become the 4th and last Lord Glenavy. He never married, dying in 1984. |
4582289 | /m/0cb036 | The Empire of Glass | Andy Lane | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | The Doctor, Steven, and Vicki travel to what seems to be Venice in 1609, where they meet a host of historical characters including Galileo Galilei and William Shakespeare. However, with the arrival of Braxiatel and Vicki's kidnapping, the Doctor soon finds himself embroiled in an alien invasion attempt. |
4582395 | /m/0cb0bw | Jhereg | Steven Brust | 1983 | {"/m/057pyk": "Fantasy of manners", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | The novel opens with a brief history of Vlad Taltos and a description of how he acquired his jhereg familiar, Loiosh. Despite being an Easterner in the Dragaeran city of Adrilankha, Vlad is a minor boss in the criminal activities of the Jhereg Organization. One day he is approached by an extremely powerful member of the Organization's ruling Council and offered an assassination job with a staggeringly large reward. The contract is to kill another Jhereg crime lord, Mellar, who has absconded with a fortune from the Jhereg treasury. Vlad accepts. Mellar has become the houseguest of the Dragonlord Morrolan e'Drien in his floating fortress, Castle Black. Vlad is a personal friend of Morrolan and has a standing invitation to Castle Black, which would make the assassination quite easy. However Morrolan holds fast to the Dragonlord traditions of hospitality, and will permit no harm to come to his guests for any reason. The last time a Jhereg assassinated a Dragonlord's houseguest, it resulted in a war between the two Houses that decimated both. Morrolan has invited Mellar to stay for seventeen days, but the Jhereg need the hit performed before that time. Vlad is forced to find a compromise between the interests of his House and his friend. Vlad's other friends, Aliera e'Kieron and Sethra Lavode, are more lax on the rules of hospitality and offer their help. Aliera wants to kill Mellar herself, as it is obvious to everyone, even Morrolan himself, that Mellar manipulated Morrolan and used the Dragonlord's honor as a shield against the Jhereg. This is a grave insult to the House of the Dragon. Sethra, the oldest and wisest of the group, agrees with Aliera's position, but feels that they must still respect Morrolan's wishes and find a way that will not violate his honor. While Vlad looks for a solution, the Jhereg come up with their own plan. The Demon first interviews Vlad to see if he would go along with it, and when it is clear to him that Vlad would not, he tries to have Vlad assassinated. Vlad manages to escape and guesses the Demon's intentions, but he is too late. He arrives at Castle Black to find Morrolan already assassinated. With Morrolan dead, Mellar would no longer be under his protection, and thus his death would not start a second Dragon-Jhereg war. Vlad foils this solution by breaking the enchantment preventing Morrolan's resurrection and has his friend brought back to life. The Jhereg, however, are undeterred. They would rather risk another Dragon-Jhereg War than allow Mellar's humiliating theft to become publicly known. An assassin descends on Mellar, but Vlad and his friends thwart him as well. On reflection, Vlad realizes that Mellar's bodyguards, who are always hovering nearby, were mysteriously absent during the attempt on his life. Vlad manages to deduce, with the help of some other information gathered by his second-in-command, Kragar, that it is Mellar's intention to be assassinated. Mellar is a half-breed—a mix of Dragon, Jhereg and Dzur—and intends, through his death, to get his revenge on all his parent Houses by causing two to erupt into war and leaking information that would forever shame the third. Having solved the mystery of Mellar's crime, Vlad finally realizes how to solve his own dilemma. With the help of nearly all of his friends, Vlad tricks Mellar into thinking he has killed Aliera, which would nullify his guest-rights with Morrolan. Mellar, believing his plan is ruined, flees Castle Black to avoid a purposeless death at the hands of the Jhereg. This actually takes him out of Morrolan's protection. Vlad follows him and engages the master swordsman in a duel. While near defeat, Vlad uses witchcraft to contact a nearby wild jhereg. With this second jhereg's help, Vlad kills Mellar, earning a vast bounty and saving two Houses in the same stroke. Rocza, the name given by Vlad to his second familiar, mates Loiosh. |
4583530 | /m/0cb2nr | I, Q | John de Lancie | 1999 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | The novel opens with a mysterious Lady, who, having grown bored with contemplating the Universe, has decided to bring it to an end. She walks to the beach of the island where she lives alone, and summons a storm. As the storm builds up, a bottle washes up to the shore. The Lady picks up the bottle, takes out a manuscript it contains, and begins to read as the storm stands by and waits for her. Q is deep-sea fishing (literally standing at the bottom of an ocean) with his wife Q and son q, when the ocean begins draining into a giant whirlpool. Q powerlessly watches as his wife and son are taken in, and is only barely able to escape. He arrives in the Holodeck of the Enterprise, where Picard and Data's fishing simulation had been disturbed by the same disaster. In order to investigate what happened, Q takes Picard and Data to the Q Continuum, which they perceive as the fictional world of Dixon Hill. There, they learn that the Universe is ending, and that not only is the Q Continuum powerless to stop it, the Continuum actually welcomes the opportunity. Having explored all there is to explore and experienced all there is to experience, the Continuum is old and bored, and the end of the Universe is seen as a welcomed liberation. Q is unwilling to accept this decision, so the Continuum freeze him as a statue. But with the help of Q2, Q escapes this punishment and the Continuum. Q, Data and Picard return to the site of the whirlpool, to find it has calmed down and turned into a long shaft leading underground, which they proceed to explore. The world down the shaft is actually five superposed worlds, each of which is a level of the Kübler-Ross model of the five stages of grief, populated by members of the multiverse with the appropriate reaction to the end of the universe. Q, Picard and Data go through each level, trying to reach the bottom. While exploring, Q contemplates his existence and that of the Q Continuum, the most powerful beings in existence, since he is convinced God does not exist. He reminisces on a young girl (Melony) he met in Times Square during the 2000 New Year party, in a parallel universe where he was posing as a human. She was insightful and intelligent, and when they kissed, Q thought she could almost feel his true power. In that universe, the celebration in Times Square was the target of a terrorist attack. Q, enraged by this senseless act, immediately puts out the fires and explosions, but not before Melony is killed. He later finds her body amongst the dead. The first level is Denial. This level is populated with beings who try to ignore the fact the universe is ending, focusing instead on their more normal daily problems. Everyone is herded onto a train headed for oblivion, but no one believes it. Q, Picard, and Data battle Locutus in a race to uncouple the train before it incinerates every non-believing being on it. The second level is Anger. Here, Q briefly encounters a parallel-universe version of Jadzia Dax who, following the events of Blood Oath, chose not to return to Deep Space Nine but instead to continue fighting with Kang, Kor and Koloth. Together, the four of them are hunting the Romulans also present on this level, believing the whole thing to be some kind of Romulan ploy. However, Q realizes that the real culprit is his rival from the enemy M Continuum, who tries to blame him for the end of the universe. M stages a trial against Q in front of an infuriated jury, but Data wins the case by acting more angered than M and turning the jury against her. The third level is Bargaining. This level is dominated, appropriately enough, by Grand Nagus Zek, who offers to trade whatever the other residents of the level own for empty promises of an afterlife. Q is finally reunited with his son q. However, q is now an adult, who has lived a long and depressed life believing his father had abandoned him to the whirlpool. After much trouble, Q manages to convince q that he never stopped trying to find him. Relieved, q reverts back to his normal age. The fourth level is Despair. On this level, Q finds his wife; however, she is so depressed that even seeing him is not enough for her to find something to live for, and she like the others on the level sinks into the mire. After she dies, engulfed in despair, Q and the rest of the party enter a small house, which is the fifth and final level, Acceptance. The house consists of a large room with an unopenable door at the far end. When all the members of the party sit down and give up on trying to save the universe, the back wall of the room begins to close in on them. They struggle to push it back, but finally as Q accepts his fate the door flies open and he and q tumble through; Picard and Data are crushed. Q finds himself and his son back in the Q Continuum, which is now seen as a New Year's Eve party, complete with a countdown to the end of the universe. It is the same as it was when he and Picard first arrived at the beginning of the quest. Q supposes that the whole quest was created to make him accept the inevitable. Q2 neither denies nor confirms this, instead offering that the Q Continuum is very much in the dark about all this and that, possibly, they had nothing to do with his adventure. When the countdown reaches zero, the whirlpool starts anew, and the Q Continuum is pulled into it without a fight. q tries to hold on to his dad, but he's pulled in too. Q however resists the pull, refusing to accept that it is the end. He creates a written record of his journey and puts it in a bottle, which he throws into the whirlpool. The story cuts back to the beach, where the Lady finishes reading Q's manuscript. She laughs out loud, and decides to call off the storm. She then finds q, wakes him, and gives him a mud boat to return home. But before he leaves, she writes something on a piece of paper, puts it in Q's bottle and hands it to q, to give to his father. Back in the holodeck, Picard, Data, Q and his wife awaken in the simulated fishing boat. They spot q's mud boat, and Picard orders the computer to "end program". Everything disappears, except for the five individuals and q's boat. q tells his father of the island and the Lady, whom Q recognizes as the girl he met in Times Square. q then gives Q the bottle containing the Lady's message, but Q is too scared to open it. He hands it to Picard, who opens it and reads the message: "Let there be light". |
4584023 | /m/0cb3rd | Icon | Frederick Forsyth | 1996 | {"/m/01jfsb": "Thriller", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The story, set between July 1999 and January 2000, revolves around Russian presidential candidate Igor Komarov, head of the right-wing Union of Patriotic Forces (UPF). A highly popular and charismatic politician, victory is all but guaranteed for Komarov and the UPF in the national elections on January 16, 2000. However, a secret document, later known as the "Black Manifesto", is stolen from his secretary's empty office at UPF headquarters by Leonid Zaitsev, an elderly janitor and ex-soldier who happens to skim through the document while cleaning. The document contains extremely sensitive information regarding Komarov's future policies as president, such as the restoration of slave camps, creation of a one-party state, destruction of political opponents, invasion of the former Soviet republics, and genocide of Russia's ethnic and religious minorities. Komarov's team capture and kill Zaitsev, but not before he gives the document to the British, who later translates and shows it to influential Western leaders. Sir Nigel Irvine, former head of the SIS, comes up with a plan to thwart Komarov's victory. Searching for a suitable man to carry out this plan, former CIA Deputy Director of Operations Carey Jordan recommends Jason Monk, a former recruiter and runner of Soviet agents for the CIA. In parts of the novel, there are flashbacks to earlier years, detailing Monk's background, and recruitment of several Soviets as U.S. agents. These include government figures and a physicist. However, CIA mole Aldrich Ames soon betrays these agents, along with all other CIA agents in the Soviet Union. Nearly all are rounded up by the Soviets, and are either executed or sentenced to hard labour after lengthy interrogation and torture by the ruthless Anatoli Grishin. Colonel Nikolai Ilyich Turkin, the first Soviet to be recruited by Monk, develops a close friendship with him after Monk saves his son from dying of a tropical disease. He is, however, the last CIA agent caught by the Soviets, with Grishin supervising the capture in Berlin as Monk watches close by after their last meeting. Turkin is interrogated and sent to a labour camp. There, dying of typhoid, he pens a letter to Monk detailing his interrogation and torture at the camps, and bids a final farewell. Monk, filled with anger and grief, attacks a bureaucrat known to have aided Ames, and this leads to his expulsion from the CIA. In 1999, he leads a quiet life in the Turks and Caicos Islands, taking tourists on fishing trips. Irvine visits him and talks about the plan against Komarov; Monk refuses, having sworn never to return to Russia, but agrees when he is given the chance to take revenge on Grishin, who is working as Komarov's security chief. He returns to Russia and rounds up a ring of influential figures to his cause by showing them the "Black Manifesto", and, with the aid of the Chechen mafia, whose leader owes Monk his life, he begins a series of schemes aimed at derailing Igor Komarov's presidential campaign. |
4584283 | /m/0cb41s | Yendi | Steven Brust | 1984-07 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | Six months after he took control of his own territory in the criminal Organization, Vlad engages in his first turf war with a rival boss. Each chapter's epigraph is a quote from its chapter. Vlad narrates this story from a point in his life before the events of Phoenix. He quickly summarizes the series of turf wars and assassinations that led him to rise in the ranks of the Organization from low-rung assassin to the boss of his own neighborhood. As the story begins, Vlad has held his territory for six uneventful months, but then he receives word that a neighboring boss, Laris, has started to move in on his territory. A turf war between Vlad and Laris erupts. Vlad receives indirect help from several of his powerful friends in the House of the Dragon, but remains one step behind the better-prepared and better-informed Laris. Vlad survives several attempts on his life, but eventually two of his bodyguards betray him and allow him to be attacked by two female assassins, a Dragaeran and an Easterner. Vlad's lieutenant had received timely warning of the attack and sent word to Vlad's friends, Morrolan and Aliera, who teleport to the scene. They kill the assassins but are unable to rescue Vlad, who is killed by the Easterner assassin. Aliera revivifies Vlad as well as the two assassins. Vlad meets the Easterner assassin, Cawti, and the two quickly fall in love. Aliera discovers that Cawti's partner, Norathar, is the former heir of House Dragon, having fallen into disgrace as a bastard some time ago. The current heir, Aliera, is looking for a way out of the position, and does a genetic test to determine the legitimacy of Norathar's claim. Vlad turns his attention back to his ongoing turf war, now with the help of Cawti. After yet another failed assassination attempt, Vlad begins to suspect that his war with Laris is only a ruse for some larger plot. After Norathar is confirmed as the legitimate heir, Vlad reasons out that the genetic test that incorrectly dubbed her a bastard was part of a plot to keep her from the throne. Further investigation suggests that Vlad's whole war with Laris has been orchestrated to get Norathar killed and to discredit Morrolan and Aliera. Vlad quickly reasons out that the Sorceress in Green, a prominent Yendi, has been working in consort with Sethra the Younger, an ambitious Dragonlord, to put a Dragon heir on the throne who will appoint Sethra as Warlord. Sethra wants to invade the Eastern Kingdoms and needs to install a sympathetic Emperor to achieve her ambitions. Sethra's namesake, Sethra Lavode, learns of her former apprentice's plans and teleports her away to deal with her personally. Morrolan, Aliera, Vlad, Cawti, and Norathar all pursue the Sorceress in Green, who leads them into a trap. Morrolan, Aliera, and Norathar fight through the Sorceress's thirty guards and magical defenses while Vlad and Cawti watch. Once most of the guards are slain, Vlad sneaks behind the Sorceress, destroys her magical wards with Spellbreaker, and threatens to kill her with a Morganti dagger if she does not give him Laris's location. She complies without hesitation. Vlad backs away and allows the battle to reach its conclusion, with Norathar killing the Sorceress. Vlad summons his enforcers and storms Laris's office, killing him without difficulty. Later, he learns that Aliera revived the Sorceress, believing that her humiliation was sufficient punishment (and also, they have used a mind probe on her and wrote down all the schemes in which she is involved). Sethra Lavode tells him how she teleported Sethra the Younger to an alternate dimension to do penance. Vlad and Cawti get engaged to be married and visit Vlad's grandfather. |
4584405 | /m/0cb4b0 | This Earth of Mankind | Pramoedya Ananta Toer | 1980 | {"/m/0hwxm": "Historical novel"} | This Earth of Mankind tells the story of Minke, a Javanese minor royal who studies at a Hogere Burger School (HBS) in an era when only the descendants of the European colonizers can expect to attain this level of education. Minke is a talented young writer whose works are published in several Dutch-language journals and are widely admired. But as a "native", Minke is disliked by many of his fellow-students, who all claim some European descent. He is portrayed as being bold in opposing the injustices imposed upon his fellow Javanese as well as challenging aspects of his own culture. Minke is introduced to an extremely unusual Indonesian woman, Nyai Ontosoroh, who is the concubine of a Dutch man called Herman Mellema. Minke falls in love with their daughter, Annelies, whom he eventually marries in an Islamic wedding in accordance with "native" customs, but which, according to Dutch law, has no legal validity because it was conducted without the consent of the under-aged Annelies' legal, Dutch, guardians. In that period, it was common for women to become the concubines of Dutch men living in the East Indies. They were considered to have low morals because of their status as concubines, even if, as in Nyai Ontosoro's case, they had no choice in the matter. Their children had uncertain legal status - either considered illegitimate "natives" with a corresponding lack of legal rights, unless legally acknowledged by their father, in which case they were considered "Indos", and their mother lost all rights over them in favor of the father. As a concubine, Nyai Ontosoro suffers because of her low status and lack of rights, but, significantly, is aware of the injustice of her suffering and believes education is the route by which her basic humanity can be acknowledged. She believes that learning is the key to opposing indignity, stupidity, and poverty. However, the decision to have the children of their relationship legally acknowledged as Herman Mellema's children has catastrophic consequences by the end of the book. For Pramoedya, education is the key to changing one's fate. For instance, Nyai Ontosoro, who had no formal schooling and who was educated by her experiences, from books, and from her daily life, was a far more inspiring educator than Minke's high school teachers. However, This Earth of Mankind also powerfully portrays the reality of Dutch colonial government in Indonesia through the lives of the characters, where Minke's education and Nyai Ontosoro's success in business count for little when ranged against the unyielding Dutch colonial law. |
4584493 | /m/0cb4jy | The Roundheads | Mark Gatiss | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Landing in December of 1648 after the end of Second English Civil War, the TARDIS crew gets involved with intrigue involving both the victorious Oliver Cromwell and the doomed Charles I. |
4587263 | /m/0cb9hc | Child of the Dark Prophecy | T. A. Barron | 2004-10 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature"} | Avalon started its life as a magical seed that beat like a heart, planted by Merlin in Barron's previous series, The Lost Years of Merlin. Soon it grew into a huge tree, having members of every existing species living in its 7 root-realms. Élano, the sap of the Great Tree, is a liquid that has the power to create, with powers far greater than that of Merlin himself. For the first several centuries of Avalon's existence, the creatures lived in harmony, guided by the religion of Avalon, the Society of the Whole, its followers known as Drumadians, named after a wood in The Lost Years of Merlin. The Society was started by Elen and Rhiannon, mother and sister to Merlin respectively, also characters from The Lost Years of Merlin. The Society promotes harmony between all races, and the upkeep of the Great Tree, which sustains them all. However, sometime after Elen died, Rhiannon, called Rhia, resigned as High Priestess and left, never to be seen again. Peace is shattered by the War of Storms, a war that included almost all of the races in Avalon and lasted for several centuries. The beginning of the war was heralded by the darkening of the stars in the constellation the Wizard's Staff. The war was only resolved by the Treaty of the Swaying Sea, crafted by the mysterious Lady of the Lake and by Merlin. After the war ended, Merlin said that he would probably not return to Avalon, and that Avalon's problems must be solved by Avalonians. As a parting gift he, with the help of his friend Basilgarrad the dragon, flew up to the stars and rekindled the darkened constellation. All was well until the Lady of the Lake again appeared, this time to make a prophecy about a year wherein all of Avalon's stars would go dark, and a child would be born who is destined to destroy Avalon. However, there was hope: the true heir of Merlin could save them all, if he was found. During the foretold Dark Year, the majority of creatures in Avalon forbade childbirth, killing all children born in spite of the moratorium. Despite this, rumors persist of a child being born in the Flamelon stronghold in the root-realm Rahnawyn. 17 years after the Dark Year, things are going badly. A drought appears in realms Olanabram, Brynchilla, and El Urien; humans become anthropocentric and arrogant; and the stars in the Wizard's Staff are again darkening, one by one. Characters Tamwyn, Elli, Nuic, Henni, Llynia, and later Batty Lad, must journey to the Lady of the Lake to find out what is happening, and how they can stop it. Eventually, it is revealed that a sorcerer, Kulwych of the White Hands, has dammed the river that sustains the three realms named above with the sole purpose of collecting enough of the élano-bearing water thereof to produce a pure crystal of the substance. For this, he needs Merlin's staff, Ohnyalei, which has been for seventeen years in the keeping of Tamwyn's foster-brother, the eagleman Scree. Tamwyn is himself revealed to be Merlin's grandson; to be the Child of the Dark Prophecy; and to be the Heir. With the aid of his friends Elli, Nuic, Henni, Batty Lad, Shim, and Brionna, as well as of Scree and the staff Ohnyalei, Tamwyn destroys the dam and drives Kulwych into hiding. It is later revealed that Kulwych is a servant of Rhita Gawr, an evil spirit warlord. |
4589704 | /m/0cbdwz | Terre Haute | null | 1989 | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | Jared McCaverty has a sexual encounter with a friend, Paul Herzog, but his father finds out and beats him. He buys a gay magazine, but his father finds it and cannot accept his son's sexual inclinations. He then has another homosexual episode with Randy Sparks, a school friend, but his father discovers them having sex in Jared's bedroom. Jared meets Julian Clay, the new curator of the local museum, and a sexually abusive relationship ensues. Jared faces rejection by Julian and threatens him. Julian Clay then commits suicide. It is likely that he did so because Jared threatened to expose him as a pedophile and a rapist, and Jared blames himself for Julian's death. In the closing pages, Jared meets Alexandre, a sympathetic twenty-year-old Frenchman, and the reader is led to believe that Jared will have found true love. |
4589813 | /m/02p8c5_ | Eon | Greg Bear | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The asteroid itself is an elongated prolate spheroid which appears to be virtually identical to Juno, a large asteroid in the main belt. It has been hollowed out along its long axis, and subdivided into seven vast cylindrical chambers. It rotates to provide artificial gravity. The chambers are terraformed, the second and third containing abandoned cities which appear to be built by humans from Earth's future. The humans who built the Stone seem to come from approximately 1,200 years in the future. Their libraries record that human civilization was nearly destroyed by "The Death," a calamitous World War involving nuclear weapons, in 2005. Events recorded in the libraries prior to The Death (with the exception of the arrival of the Stone itself) are almost identical to events occurring on Earth in the explorers' present time. Rising tensions between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., now exacerbated by both rumors of the information in the libraries and the general situation on the Stone (the Soviets and their allies have only limited access to the asteroid), suggest that not only is such a war imminent, but the appearance of the Stone may actually make it worse than recorded. Since the Stone appears immediately prior to the recorded date of The Death, and there is no record of its own appearance at the time, the scientists reason that the Stone may come from an alternate future. Patricia Luisa Vasquez, a brilliant but naïve young theoretical physicist from Caltech, is hastily sent to the Stone to determine if The Death can be avoided on the current timeline, and to work out the mysteries of the corridor. A startling discovery is that the Stone is larger on the inside than outside: the seventh chamber extends beyond the end of the asteroid and appears to go on forever. When Patricia is mysteriously abducted by a strange looking human and an alien, an expedition is sent after her. They travel down the final chamber (called "the corridor" or "the Way"), where they encounter humanity's descendants. The society of human descendents, called the Hexamon, live in the Axis City, a large structure on the axis of the Way, one million kilometers from the Stone, which they call Thistledown. The Hexamon is presided over by a governing body known as the Nexus. It is loosely divided into two social groups, Naderites and Geshels, based on widely differing cultural and political viewpoints. The conservative Naderites reject much of the high technology trappings of their society for a simpler life. They are in fact, followers of Ralph Nader, whom they call "the Good Man". Nader, who was "martyred" during The Death, came to be canonized by the followers who took his name. This was largely because he opposed the technology (particularly nuclear energy) that led to the catastrophic war. The futuristic Geshels, on the other hand, embrace all manner of technological advances including human augmentation and artificial bodies. Many radical Geshels go so far as to choose non-human (or neomorphic) shapes for themselves, as opposed to moderate ones who choose a more human (or homorphic) appearance. |
4595523 | /m/0cbqhj | Planet of the Apes:The Fall | null | null | null | As the crew of the space station Oberon search for their missing pilot Captain Leo Davidson, a time dilation storm pulls the station into its heart forcing the Oberon to crashland on an alien planet. With most of the crew dead, the marooned survivors embark on a controversial genetics program to reengineer the various apes that survived the crash, into a strong-subservient and intelligent labor force to help them create a new colony. However, beneath the surface of the world, there exists a new threat. Now the survivors must transform the primates into a genetically enhanced Army to help defend them, before their greatly reduced technological resources are depleted. |
4595808 | /m/0cbqzs | The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster | Bobby Henderson | 3/28/2006 | {"/m/06nbt": "Satire", "/m/02mdj1": "Religious text", "/m/09kqc": "Humour"} | The Gospel presents the tenets of Pastafarianism—often satires of creationism—elaborating on the "beliefs" established in the open letter. Furthermore, Henderson discusses the original Pastafarian "belief" that the decline in the number of pirates, who are revered by Pastafarians, has directly led to a rise in global temperature. He provides further "evidence" of this relationship with the observation "that many people dress up as pirates for Halloween, and the months following October 31 are generally cooler than those that precede it." The claim that declining numbers of pirates have resulted in rising temperatures is meant to demonstrate that correlation does not imply causation. The book urges readers to try Pastafarianism for 30 days, saying, "If you don't like us, your old religion will most likely take you back." Henderson states on his website that more than 100,000 copies of the book have been sold. The Gospel begins with the creation of the universe by an invisible and undetectable Flying Spaghetti Monster. Between drunken nights and clumsy afternoons, the Flying Spaghetti Monster produced seas and land (for a second time, accidentally, because he forgot that he created it the day before) along with Heaven and a midget, which he named Man. Man and an equally short woman lived happily in the Olive Garden of Eden for some time until the Flying Spaghetti Monster caused a global flood in a cooking accident. This creation, "claimed" by Pastafarians to be only 5,000 years ago, would be considered laughable by many scientists. In addition to parodying certain biblical literalists, Henderson uses this unorthodox method to lampoon intelligent design proponents, who he believes first "define [their] conclusion and then gather evidence to support it". The book contains the Eight "I'd Really Rather You Didn'ts", adherence to which enables Pastafarians to ascend to heaven, which includes a stripper factory and beer volcano. According to The Gospel, Mosey the Pirate captain received ten stone tablets as advice from the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Of these original ten "I'd Really Rather You Didn'ts", two were dropped on the way down from Mount Salsa. This event "partly accounts for Pastafarians' flimsy moral standards." The "I'd Really Rather You Didn'ts" address a broad array of behavior, from sexual conduct to nutrition. One reviewer commented that this parody of the Ten Commandments "reads like a bitter shopping list of the same criticisms" given to organized religions. One commandment is "I'd really rather you didn't build multimillion-dollar synagogues / churches / temples / mosques / shrines to [His] Noodly Goodness when the money could be better spent ending poverty, curing diseases, living in peace, loving with passion and lowering the cost of cable." |
4595898 | /m/0cbr5d | The Acceptance World | Anthony Powell | 1955 | {"/m/06nbt": "Satire", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | In the book, Nick meets Uncle Giles for tea at the Ufford Hotel and is introduced to the clairvoyant Mrs. Erdleigh who proceeds to tell their fortunes. Jenkins arranges to meet Members at the Ritz, but the appointment is kept by Quiggin who has replaced Members as secretary to novelist St John Clarke; Nick eventually dines with Peter & Mona Templer and Jean Duport and is invited for a weekend at the Templers' in Maidenhead. This house party sees the start of an affair with Jean. Quiggin is invited for Sunday, but has to leave due to concerns over his master. Mrs. Erdleigh is also there with Jimmy Stripling in tow, and presides over a seance. Later in spring 1933 Nick spends a day in encounters with Quiggin and Members including a demonstration led by St John Clarke, wheeled in his chair by Quiggin and Mona. There follow various further encounters with Jean and a visit to Foppa's restaurant. Summer 1933 sees Jenkins, Templer, Stringham and Widmerpool at the Le Bas dinner for Old Boys at the Ritz. Stringham arrives the worse for drink and Widmerpool makes an uninvited, boring and pompous speech, silenced only by Le Bas collapsing with a stroke. Widmerpool and Jenkins take the drunken Stringham home to bed. The book ends with intimations of an end to Nick's affair with Jean. |
4595920 | /m/0cbr6f | At Lady Molly's | Anthony Powell | 1957 | {"/m/06nbt": "Satire", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | It is 1934 and Nick is working, without great success, as a script writer at a film company. He gets invited by a colleague, Chips Lovell, to a party at the home of Lady Molly Jeavons. There he learns that Widmerpool is to marry the twice widowed, somewhat notorious (somewhat insane according to Nick) Mrs. Mildred Haycock. Nick subsequently has to endure having to lunch with Widmerpool and fending-off questions from Widmerpool's prospective in-laws becomes, for Nick, a motif throughout the novel. Also re-encountered at Lady Molly's gathering is old Alfred Tolland. A chance meeting by Nick with Quiggin (at a cinema where Man of Aran is showing) leads to a surprising and rather mysterious invitation of a weekend visit to the country. Quiggin and Mona Templer are staying, it transpires, in a cottage loaned to them by Erridge (Lord Warminster, eccentric head of the Tolland family). While there they all visit the Tolland ancestral home, Thrubworth Park, for a frugal but eventful dinner. Just as the meal is finishing two Tolland sisters, Susan and Isobel, arrive. Some while later Nick meets Lady Molly's husband, Ted Jeavons, in a Soho pub and they visit Umfraville's nightclub. They encounter Widmerpool (suffering another bout with jaundice), Mrs Haycock and Templer. In Autumn 1934 Jenkins becomes engaged to Isobel. Erridge, wanting to study conditions for himself, goes to China at a time when the Japanese army are undertaking offensive operations. Mona goes with him, ditching Quiggin. Widmerpool's engagement to Mildred Haycock is broken off in farcical and, to most men, crushing circumstances. However, Widmerpool remains undaunted. *Adapted in part from material published by the Anthony Powell Society with consent |
4596028 | /m/0cbrf1 | The Kindly Ones | Anthony Powell | 1962 | {"/m/06nbt": "Satire", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | This, the last volume before World War II, begins with a flashback to Jenkins' boyhood at the outbreak of the Great War. The day of the Sarajevo assassination sees General and Mrs Conyers lunching with Jenkins' parents, and Uncle Giles arriving unexpectedly for tea. Equally unexpectedly, the Jenkins' cook, Albert, gives notice. This causes the parlourmaid, Billson, who loves Albert but is loved by the soldier servant, Bracey, to appear naked in the drawing room. The occultist, Dr Trelawney, and his disciples are seen out for a run. In Autumn 1938 Jenkins is staying with the Morelands at their cottage near Stourwater. Templer collects the party for dinner with the tycoon Sir Magnus Donners at Stourwater. After dinner all are photographed by Donners performing tableaux of the Seven Deadly Sins, as portrayed in the castle's tapestries; this triggers a nervous attack on the part of Templer's second wife, Betty. At the end of the evening, Widmerpool appears in army uniform on urgent business. In Summer 1939 Nick has to clear up Uncle Giles's affairs after his death at a small seaside hotel, the Bellevue. This hotel is run by Albert (the Jenkins' former cook), and here Nick meets Bob Duport who, during an evening's drinking, tells Nick of Jean's series of lovers, a disclosure Nick still finds painful. In a scene suffused with black humor Dr Trelawney, now in the grip of drug addiction, anticipates his eventual expiration at the Bellevue. Late 1939 finds Jenkins attempting to gain a commission in the Army, eventually effected by Ted Jeavons' brother. Nick re-encounters Moreland, now homeless but taken in by Lady Molly after being deserted by Matilda for Donners. *Adapted in part from material published by the Anthony Powell Society with consent |
4597024 | /m/0cbswx | The Deathlord of Ixia | John Grant | 1992 | {"/m/03ff00": "Gamebook", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature"} | ==Receptio |
4598682 | /m/0cbw9g | Exile | Aaron Allston | 2/27/2007 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Jacen Solo increases in popularity with each victory over the Corellian rebels. He attempts to advance his goal of galactic peace in the midst of war. Most of his family opposes Jacen's new attempts, as they fear that the war is being exploited by a mysterious power for personal gain. Luke Skywalker experiences Force visions leading him to believe the entity in question is Lumiya, Dark Lady of the Sith, but Jacen himself shows ever-increasing signs of trouble. The Corellians set a trap for the Alliance, by sending out a false trail by claiming that they are hosting a secret election to choose a leader. The Alliance falls for it by planning an attack at the election and their fleet gets trapped in a mine field. Jacen Solo also gets trapped on the gas planet the fake election was being held and his family and Lumiya help him to escape. Luke and Lumiya shake hands without attacking each other. All of the main characters survive. Another conspiracy leads Luke's son Ben to Ziost, a Sith homeworld. It is filled with many dangers, the largest being the sheer amount of dark side power that would rattle even the strongest Jedi. His journey on Ziost leads Ben to find a Sith Meditation Sphere, which he uses to escape the planet. |
4598712 | /m/0cbwbh | Sacrifice | Karen Traviss | 5/29/2007 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The book starts where Exile left off, with Ben returning to Jacen aboard the Sith Meditation Sphere he found on Ziost. The novel follows Jacen as he manipulates politics, introducing a new law that allows him to rewrite other laws. Using this and Cal Omas' betrayal to the Galactic Alliance as leverage, he and Admiral Niathal stage a bloodless coup, arresting Omas and installing themselves as joint Chiefs of State. At the same time, Jacen sends Ben to assassinate Dur Gejjen, throwing the Corellian-led Confederation into chaos. Meanwhile, Boba Fett and Mirta Gev are still in search of a cure to Fett's illness after finding Kad Skirata, the son of a clone. In exchange for the promise of making the Mandalorians a united people, he cures Boba, giving him another thirty or so years to live. Ben overhears a conversation between Lumiya and Jacen and, horrified, confesses all to his mother, Mara Jade Skywalker. Mara, livid with Jacen for attempting to turn Ben to the dark side, sets out to kill him. This backfires, however, as Jacen kills Mara as his final sacrifice. This sacrifice kills Ben's love for Jacen, making the prophecy complete. Thinking that Lumiya killed Mara, Luke hunts her down and kills her. Ben then reveals that Mara's killer could not have been Lumiya, since Ben was with her at the time. At the end of the book, Jacen Solo assumes his Sith name: Darth Caedus. |
4598986 | /m/0cbwsn | Ilsa | Madeleine L'Engle | 1946 | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The title character, Ilsa Brandes, initially lives with her naturalist father, Dr. John Brandes, in a house on a beach, outside a fictional town in the American Deep South. 13-year-old Ilsa is a vibrant, outgoing, seemingly carefree person. She immediately captivates the book's narrator, Henry Randolph Porcher, who is ten years old as the book opens. Henry's mother hates Ilsa and Dr. Brandes, even to the point of refusing their help when her home is on fire. After the fire, Henry and his family go to stay with relatives in Charleston, where Henry gets his first hints about the family scandals that explain his mother's attitude. The circumstances of Ilsa's birth are the subject of controversy, both locally and in Charleston. After the death of her father, Ilsa goes to live with Henry's cousin, Anna Silverton. Henry's mother dies soon after this. Henry finally sees Ilsa again, and renews his friendship with her. Unfortunately for Henry, Ilsa later marries Monty Woolf, another cousin of Henry's. Despite his continuing love for Ilsa, Henry does little to further a romance with her, even after Monty's death. Nevertheless, he keeps returning to her side over the years. Ilsa and Henry experience numerous personal setbacks - including Ilsa's blindness and Henry's failure as a musician - and few if any triumphs. |
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