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5428853 | /m/0dlgp_ | Serpent's Reach | C. J. Cherryh | 1980-05 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The novel begins on a Family estate at Kethiuy on Cerdin, where the Sul sept of the Meth-maren House is attacked by the rival Ruil sept, with the help of Red and Gold Majats. The Ruil sept is seeking to wrest control of the Blue Majat from the Sul sept. A young Raen a Sul hant Meth-maren is the only survivor, and she seeks refuge in the nearby Blue Majat Hive. There she persuades the Blue Queen to help her regain control of Kethiuy. The Blue Warriors and their azi succeed in destroying the Ruil sept, but the Blue Hive is decimated and Raen is captured and brought before the Kontrin Council. Moth, the second oldest Kontrin, protects Raen from the Kontrin conspirators seeking to destroy her, and Raen is banished from Cerdin. Raen adopts a low profile and drifts from planet to planet in the Reach. She survives several assassination attempts but never gives up her desire for revenge against the Kontrin Council and those who destroyed her family. After Council Eldest Lian is assassinated, Moth takes control of the Council. She watches Raen's movement but does not interfere. Raen's final move is to board a Beta passenger spaceliner, Andra's Jewel bound for Istra, the only planet in the Reach accessible from the Outside. Istra has no permanent Kontrin presence, only Betas, who deal with Outsiders and the Majat, who were brought here by the Kontrin hundreds of years previously. To amuse herself on Andra's Jewel's long voyage, Raen plays Sej, a dicing game every night with a ship azi named Jim. They agree that at the end of the voyage Raen will buy his contract, and if Jim is the overall winner, he will be a free man, but if he loses, he will become her azi. Jim narrowly loses and serves her for the remainder of the story. On Istra, Raen and Jim, now her second in command, establish a presence on the planet. She manipulates the Betas and gains control of their affairs. She also allies herself with the local Blue Majat Hive. But the Majat Hives are restless and soon turn on each other. The Blue, Green and Red Queens are killed and the surviving Gold Queen unites all the Hives under her. The Hive revolt spreads to all planets of the Reach and all the Kontrin perish, except for Raen, who now lives with the Majat on Istra. With the Kontrin Company no longer in control, the Betas take charge of the Reach. All the azi are gone, having self-terminated at their maximum age of 40, and no new azi are created. Jim, however, at Raen's request, is given immortality by the Majat and lives with her in the Gold Hive. |
5429764 | /m/0dlhfy | An Elephant for Aristotle | L. Sprague de Camp | 1958 | {"/m/0hwxm": "Historical novel"} | The novel concerns the adventures of Leon of Atrax, a Thessalian cavalry commander who has been tasked by Alexander the Great to bring an elephant captured from the Indian ruler Porus, to Athens as a present for Alexander's old tutor, Aristotle. Leading a motley crew that includes an Indian elephantarch to care for the creature, a Persian warrior, a Syrian sutler and a Greek philosopher, Leon sets out to cross the whole of the ancient known world from the Indus River to Athens. The journey is long and adventurous, involving frequent skirmishes with bandits, unruly noblemen, Macedonian commanders with ideas of their own about who's in charge, and a runaway Persian noblewoman. It doesn't help that the goal of the whole enterprise is essentially a malicious prank concocted by Alexander on his former teacher: he gifts Aristotle with the elephant but no funds for its upkeep, while sending the funds (but no elephant) to the savant's arch-rival Xenocrates. The story is founded on the fact that Aristotle's writings include an apparently eye-witness description of an Indian elephant, though the circumstances under which he might have come into contact with such an animal are unknown. |
5430388 | /m/0dlh_2 | Billiards at Half-past Nine | Heinrich Böll | 1959 | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | Architect Robert Faehmel's secretary, Leonore, describes Robert and the knowledge that something in her routine life is not ordinary. Robert is meticulous in everything he does. An old friend of Robert arrives at the office but Leonore sends him to the Prince Heinrich Hotel where Robert is, daily, from 9:30 to 11:00. Trouble is afoot for the entire Faehmel family, which includes three generations of architects: Heinrich Faehmel, his son Robert and Robert's son Joseph. The man who wants to see Robert is named Nettlinger, but the Hotel bellboy, Jochen, refuses to let the man disturb his patron who is in the billiard room. Upstairs, Robert is telling Hugo about his life and we discover that Nettlinger was once a Nazi policeman. Robert and his friend Schrella, both of whom were schoolmates with Nettlinger, had opposed the Nazis, refusing to take "the Host of the Buffalo," a reference both to the devil and the Nazis. Schrella had disappeared after being beaten by Nettlinger and Old Wobbly, their gym teacher, also a Nazi policeman. Nettlinger and Old Wobbly had not only beaten Schrella and Robert, but had corrupted one of Robert's three siblings, Otto, who died in 1942 at the Battle of Kiev. His mother, Johanna Kilb, is committed to a mental institution because she tried to save Jews from the cattle cars going to the extermination camps. It is now Heinrich's 80th birthday. Heinrich and Robert meet in a bar after visiting Johanna, sitting down and talking for the first time in many years. Meanwhile, Schrella has returned to Germany and talks with Nettlinger, who tries to make amends for his past life despite the fact that he has not really changed, and remains an opportunist. Schrella goes to visit his old home. We meet Joseph Faehmel and his girlfriend Marianne. Joseph has just learned that Robert was the one who destroyed the beautiful Abbey his grandfather had built and this greatly upsets him. Marianne tells him the story of her own family: her father was a Nazi who committed suicide at the end of the war. Before taking his own life, he had ordered Marianne's mother to murder the children. She hanged Marienne's little brother but the arrival of some strangers prevented her from doing the same to Marianne. Johanna, in control of her wits, leaves the sanatorium with a pistol which she intends to use on Old Wobbly for his past sins. The entire family gathers in the Prince Heinrich Hotel for the birthday party and Johanna shoots at a Secretary of State who was watching a military parade from a hotel balcony. This act was intended to signal Johanna's inadaptation in a society ruled by "The Buffalo", whose members already forgot the horrors of the world. At the conclusion, Robert adopts the bellhop Hugo. A birthday cake which is shaped like the Abbey is carried in. Heinrich slices it and hands the first piece to his son. |
5432223 | /m/0dllx7 | Seven Little Australians | Ethel Turner | 1894 | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature"} | The seven children of the title live in 1880s Sydney with their father, an army Captain who has little understanding of his children, and their twenty year-old stepmother Esther who can exert little discipline on them. Accordingly they wreak havoc wherever possible, for example by interrupting their parents while they entertain guests and asking for some of their dinner (implying to the guests that the children's own dinner is inadequate). After a prank by Judy and Pip embarrasses Captain Woolcot at his military barracks he orders that Judy, the ringleader, be sent away to boarding school in the Blue Mountains. Meg comes under the influence of an older girl, Aldith, and tries to improve her appearance according to the fashions of the day. She and Aldith make the acquaintance of two young men, but Meg believes she has fallen in love with the older brother of one, Alan. When Aldith and Meg arrange to meet the young men for a walk, Meg is embarrassed after a note goes astray and Alan comes to the meeting instead and reproaches her for becoming 'spoilt', rather than remaining the sweet young girl she was. Meg returns home and later faints, having tight-laced her waist until it affects her health. Unhappy away from her siblings, Judy runs away from school and returns home, hiding in a barn. Despite her ill-health as a result of walking for several days to get home, the other children conceal her presence from their father, but he discovers her. He plans to send her back to school however realises that she is suffering from tuberculosis, and she is allowed to remain at home. In part to assist Judy's recuperation, the children and Esther are invited to visit Esther's parents at their sheep station Yarrahappini. One day the children go on a picnic far away from the property. A ringbarked tree falls and threatens to crush the youngest child, 'the General'. Judy, who promised 'on her life' not to allow him to be harmed on the picnic, rushes to catch him and her body protects him from the tree. However her back is broken and she dies before help can be fetched. After burying Judy on the property, the family returns home to Sydney sobered by her death. While ostensibly things remain the same, each character is slightly changed by their experience. In particular Captain Woolcot regrets the fact that he never really understood Judy and tries to treasure his remaining children a little more. |
5435751 | /m/0dlr_6 | Around the Moon | Jules Verne | 1870 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction"} | Having been fired out of the giant Columbiad space gun, the Baltimore Gun Club's bullet-shaped projectile, along with its three passengers, Barbicane, Nicholl and Michel Ardan, begins the five-day trip to the moon. A few minutes into the journey, a small, bright asteroid passes within a few hundred yards of them, but luckily does not collide with the projectile. The asteroid had been captured by the Earth's gravity and had become a second moon. The three travelers undergo a series of adventures and misadventures during the rest of the journey, including disposing of the body of a dog out a window, suffering intoxication by gases, and making calculations leading them, briefly, to believe that they are to fall back to Earth. During the latter part of the voyage, it becomes apparent that the gravitational force of their earlier encounter with the asteroid has caused the projectile to deviate from its course. The projectile enters lunar orbit, rather than landing on the moon as originally planned. Barbicane, Ardan and Nicholl begin geographical observations with opera glasses. The projectile then dips over the northern hemisphere of the moon, into the darkness of its shadow. It is plunged into extreme cold, before emerging into the light and heat again. They then begin to approach the moon's southern hemisphere. From the safety of their projectile, they gain spectacular views of Tycho, one of the greatest of all craters on the moon. The three men discuss the possibility of life on the moon, and conclude that it is barren. The projectile begins to move away from the moon, towards the 'dead point' (the place at which the gravitational attraction of the moon and Earth becomes equal). Michel Ardan hits upon the idea of using the rockets fixed to the bottom of the projectile (which they were originally going to use to deaden the shock of landing) to propel the projectile towards the moon and hopefully cause it to fall onto it, thereby achieving their mission. When the projectile reaches the point of neutral attraction, the rockets are fired, but it is too late. The projectile begins a fall onto the Earth from a distance of 160,000 miles, and it is to strike the Earth at a speed of 115,200 miles per hour, the same speed at which it left the mouth of the Columbiad. All hope seems lost for Barbicane, Nicholl and Ardan. Four days later, the crew of a US Navy vessel USS Susquehanna spots a bright meteor fall from the sky into the sea. This turns out to be the returning projectile, and the three men inside are found to be alive and are rescued. They are treated to lavish homecoming celebrations as the first people to leave Earth. |
5435899 | /m/0dls77 | Thieves' Picnic | Leslie Charteris | 1937 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery"} | After Simon Templar intercepts a mysterious message intended for a jewel-smuggling ring during a trip to Spain, he and his sidekick Hoppy Uniatz follow the message's trail to Tenerife, Canary Islands where they rescue an elderly Dutch diamond cutter and his daughter from being beaten to death. Templar learns that the old man is a reluctant member of the smuggling ring and, assisted by the daughter, sets out to bring down the gang. Things become more complicated when Templar learns that the man had been in possession of a lottery ticket worth the equivalent of $2 million, and that this ticket is now missing. So not only does The Saint have to rescue the diamond cutter and his daughter from the smuggling ring, he also has to track down the missing lottery ticket, which has sparked instability within the gang. Soon after, Hoppy and the diamond cutter go missing. Templar, using his frequent "Sebastian Tombs" cover name, infiltrates the gang, posing as a freelance diamond cutter who is hired to replace the old man. (This despite the fact that Templar hasn't the slightest idea as to how to cut diamonds.) From within the gang, Templar plans to start the members double-crossing each other, but finds his work is already half done thanks to that missing lottery ticket. Some later editions of this book include an afterword entitled "The Last Word" in which Charteris invites readers to join The Saint Club, a fan club that he founded in the 1930s. The annual dues for the club, Charteris writes, went to support the Arbour Youth Club located in east London, which at the time Charteris composed "The Last Word" was still recovering from the Blitz of World War II. |
5437029 | /m/0dlv6f | Doctor Wortle's School | Anthony Trollope | null | null | The novel takes place in the respectable, fictional parish of Bowick, Victorian England, with the main plot concerning itself with the renowned Dr. Wortle's Christian seminary academy. The community's morals are outraged and the school's credibility wounded upon the discovery that Mr. and Mrs. Peacocke, a respectable American couple hired to the academy by Wortle, are indeed improperly married. Their wedlock was rendered asunder by their chance meeting, some years prior, of Mrs. Peacocke's first husband, an abusive drunkard named Colonel Ferdinand Lefroy. Hearing that an ambiguous Colonel Lefroy was killed during the Civil War, the two rightfully assumed it was Ferdinand and married. Yet it is their strange persistence in living as husband and wife, even after the shocking revelation, that creates a scandal. Wortle, though religious, sympathizes with the Peacockes and is understanding of their love for each other and hatred for Colonel Lefroy. The book is thus of the interest in providing multiple stories: that of Wortle's attempt to rebuild his reputation, provide rebuttal for malicious slander and all the while insist he was right in hiring the Peacockes; Mr. Peacocke's journey to America in search of Ferdinand's true status; the sexual concerns of the Wortles' daughter Mary and the insights of the community members who see the intentional bigamy as a sin. |
5438574 | /m/0dlxvv | The Saint in Miami | Leslie Charteris | 1940 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | One of Patricia Holm's friends sends an invitation for Patricia and her friend, Simon Templar to visit Miami. Upon arrival, however, The Saint, Patricia and sidekick Hoppy Uniatz discover Pat's friend and her husband are nowhere to be found. The trio take up residence in the friend's house. A few days later, a tanker explodes off the Florida coast, and soon after, Simon discovers the dead body of a sailor washed up on shore; attached to the wrist of the body is a lifebelt from the British submarine H.M.S. Triton. Simon suspects a link between the disappearance of Patricia's friends, the explosion, and a millionaire yachtsman named Randolph March. March's yacht is moored not far from the explosion, and Templar and Hoppy launch the investigation by climibing aboard the yacht, leaving the sailor's corpse in a stateroom for the police to find, and challenging March to give up his secrets. Afterwards, Templar finds himself targeted not only by March, but by an eager local sheriff who proves to be almost as fast-witted as the Saint, himself. Soon, the Saint uncovers a Nazi ring operating out of Florida. |
5439414 | /m/0dlzbd | The Saint Steps In | Leslie Charteris | 1943 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | In Washington, D.C., a young woman whose father has invented a new form of synthetic rubber requests Simon Templar's aid when she receives a threatening note. Before long, The Saint is drawn into a web of war-related intrigue involving what appear to be gangsters, but soon turns out to be groups with differing opinions as to what it takes to be patriotic. The book reveals that, instead of enlisting to fight in the war, Templar has instead been working behind the scenes, carrying out quiet missions against enemy agents and, unusually for the character, his efforts in this case are actually supported by law enforcement. This is the third Saint book in a row to be set in the United States (previously most of Templar's adventures took place in England), following The Saint in Miami and The Saint Goes West, and direct reference is made to the Miami novel. |
5441482 | /m/0dm103 | Portrait of the Artist, as an Old Man | Joseph Heller | null | null | The story is of Eugene Pota, a prominent writer who, in his old age, is struggling for that last piece of fiction that could be his magnum opus, or at least on par with his earlier writings. Littered throughout the novel are many of Pota's ideas and drafts of possible stories, such as the sexual biography of his wife, or of Hera's trouble with Zeus. |
5442262 | /m/0dm1x8 | Hex | Rhiannon Lassiter | 1998 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The story opens with the introduction of a brother and a sister: Wraith and Raven. Both of whom are of considerable maturity for their age, Raven being only 15 and very independent. She is a Hex, whereas Wraith is not. The two are meeting up after three days of separation from arriving in England. It is presumed that formerly they were in the United States because there is a reference to Denver. Raven and Wraith had to grow up fast, being orphans in a blockhouse from which they escaped. Wraith got out first by joining a gang and Raven later on, becoming a hired computer hacker. The two are able to travel so easily because Raven is able to hack many systems and can create fake bank accounts, identification cards, and profiles of people. While the siblings escaped living in the blockhouses, their younger sister Rachel was adopted. The two haven't heard from her in years, and Wraith is determined to find out where she is located. Entering the slums of London, Wraith mets a boy by the name of Kez who is dirty, homeless, and knows the streets. He helps Wraith find the Countess, a woman who mans a headquarters (or fortress) responsible for locating people, providing weapons, muscle, and information for a price. Kez tags along with Wraith to a hotel, where Raven meets up with the two of them. The next morning, Raven decides to dive into the Net searching for information about her sister Rachel. During the search, she runs into another Hex, who is completely inexperienced. Raven discovers everything about the other Hex, who is a sixteen year old girl by the name of Ali. A rich and spoiled daughter of a man who owns vidchannels. Kez, Wraith, and Raven move to the Belgravia Complex, the same rich neighborhood that Ali lives in, partly because Raven has high taste. The first day involves Kez exploring the area on his own and running into Ali's clique by accident. Earlier, Raven had spoken to him about 20th century music and the information comes in handy as he tries to hold his own in a conversation with the very spoiled girls. Ali then tells her father about how Kez's "cousin" (Raven) owns a vidchannel and can perhaps help him with one of his failing channels. Over the course of the novel, Wraith discovers that Rachel had been taken from her adopted parents by the CPS. Raven, collaborating with Ali's father on a vidchannel to bring its failing ratings up, is invited to a party in which she meets Ali, who somehow feels terrified at seeing Raven because she inexplicably knows it is the same girl she ran into in the Net. Wraith becomes discouraged at the news of Rachel's disappearance but regains hope when Raven hacks various systems and reports that she thinks Rachel might still be alive. In an attempt to successfully break into the CPS facility that holds Hexes and possibly Rachel, Wraith tries to convince Ali to be caught and taken there. She refuses. At which point, Raven and Kez devise a plan to lie to Wraith and Ali and say that the CPS is already on their way to get her. By coincidence, the CPS comes and takes Ali away and she is transported to the CPS facility. Prior to that, Raven had told her in the presence of Wraith and Kez that she was getting taken and had implanted a communication device behind her ear. Suiting up for the raid, Wraith contacts the Countess for muscle. Three soldier-like "gangers" are assigned to the mission by the name of Melek, Finn, and Jeeva. Ali has, in the mean time, befriended some fellow inmates and discovers the experimenting on these 'test subjects' is going on. She asks to see the remaining Hexes that did survive and Luciel, a boy she befriends, takes her to see Revenge. Raven tells Ali to speak in such a way to see if it is Rachel or not, because the girl is clearly insane. It turns out to be Rachel but the girl now calls herself Revenge because of her intent. Many violent gun fights ensue as the small group makes its way to the main room computer room so Raven can gain control over the facility. Becoming aware of what is happening, the main scientist in charge of the experiments, Dr. Kalden is determined to stop the group and is intrigued at the idea of experimenting on Raven. One of the gangers (Melek) dies when Wraith finds Revenge as the CPS guards open fire on them. Barely escaping, Raven, Wraith, Kez, Finn, Jeeva, Ali and her friend Luciel make it to the roof of the facility. Before leaving, Raven sends out images of the experiments going on to vidchannels across England. In an attempt to cover up the evidence, the scientists blow up the building and escape also. The book ends with Raven and Wraith, as well as the rest of the group watching the government broadcast news that the facility and the experiments shown from Raven's broadcasts never happened. The Prime Minister then states that Raven's group were terrorists responsible for the damages and deaths, and that they will be caught. The group as a whole decide that they should stick together and fight the tyranny of the government as well as the belief that Hexes are mutants that should be killed. |
5446038 | /m/0dm7vg | The Regime | Tim LaHaye | 11/15/2005 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | After his horrifying trials in the wasteland, Nicolae Carpathia's influence grows in business and politics. However anyone who gets in his way tends to disappear, permanently. He hires kingmaker and soon-to-be False Prophet Leon Fortunato as a deputy and consultant. Over the course of a few years, Carpathia rises to power within the Romanian government, manipulating people and events for his own personal gain and often resorting to murder and blackmailing to achieve his goals. He often calls upon the influence of his "spirit guide" (later revealed to be Satan himself) for advice. Jonathan Stonagal begins to grow regretful with his involvement with Carpathia, fearing the young Antichrist is already out of his control. Airline pilot Rayford Steele's home life is suffering, but gains a truce-like quality, while his wife is concerned that he has already risen as far his career will take him. Now a born-again Christian, Irene slowly begins to grow in her newfound faith, even leading her son Raymie Steele to salvation. However, Rayford and her daughter, Chloe, reject Irene's religious beliefs, and Irene is desperate to help them find Christ before it is too late. Abdullah Smith, a Jordanian pilot, is shocked when his wife, Yasmine, and his two teenagers become followers of Christianity. After many heated arguments, she leaves him, taking the children with her. This later leads Abdullah to become an alcoholic and have affairs with several women, though it is clear that he is desperate for his family back in place of this destructive new lifestyle. He fears it is the work of Allah as punishment for growing lax in his Muslim faith. Rayford, meanwhile, is considering pursuing a relationship with Hattie Durham, a young flight attendant and his co-worker. At first it seems impossible for Rayford, though he slowly begins to warm to the idea, often having dinner with her and giving her rides home. He slowly begins to contemplate taking their relationship to a whole new level. Celebrated journalist Buck Williams becomes a feature writer for the Boston Globe, coming from an Ivy League education at Princeton University. After writing several revered pieces, Buck is hired for Global Weekly, a job that has been his dream for all his life. In Israel, he meets and interviews renowned scientist Chaim Rosenzweig, who has recently developed a formula that makes plant life grow in desert soil. Suddenly, an immense military strike against Israel commences and the entire nation stands on the brink of complete annihilation. |
5446041 | /m/025th4p | Desecration | Jerry B. Jenkins | 10/30/2001 | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel", "/m/0hc1z": "Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Nicolae Carpathia stages a gruesome and evil desecration of the temple. Hattie publicly confronts him and is burned to death by Leon, the False Prophet. As millions take the Mark of the Beast, the first Bowl Judgment rains down as foul and loathsome sores appear on the bodies of all who have taken the mark, including Nicolae's inner circle. When the temple is defiled, millions of Jews and Gentiles rebel against Nicolae and many of them become believers. The Tribulation Force launches "Operation Eagle", a mass exodus of the believers to the refuge city of Petra. Leading them is none other than Dr. Chaim Rozensweig turned into a modern-day Moses, who, calling himself Micah, and along with Buck Williams, confronts Nicolae and leads the faithful to refuge. Meanwhile, David Hassid, the first to arrive at Petra, is murdered by two renegade GC soldiers left over from a confrontation between the Trib. Force and the GC. The second Bowl Judgment hits as all the oceans and seas turn into blood. In Chicago, Chloe wanders off into the night and finds a group of believers (whom she eventually aids) hiding in a basement near the safe house. In Greece, the rescue of the two teenagers that Buck helped escape is attempted by the Trib Force's newest man: George Sebastian. One of the teens is replaced with a look-alike who kills the other teen, along with Lukas "Laslos" Miklos. George is captured and taken away. Tsion Ben-Judah arrives at Petra to address the throng as the Antichrist launches an all-out attack against them. The book ends with Nicolae hysterical as he believes he is about to wipe out one million believers, Rayford Steele and Tsion Ben-Judah among them. |
5448719 | /m/0dmc_c | Rimrunners | C. J. Cherryh | 1989-06 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | The long, bitterly fought Company War between Earth and Union had ended – for everyone, except Conrad Mazian, commander of the Earth Company Fleet. By refusing to accept the peace, he and his loyal Mazianni became outlaws, hunted by all sides. Elizabeth 'Bet' Yeager had been one of Mazian's marines, a twenty year veteran. Stranded on Pell Station when the Fleet was forced to pull out abruptly (as told in Downbelow Station), she managed to blend in with the many displaced war refugees. Since then, she survived by taking whatever starship berths she could find. Her luck begins to run out when her latest ship, the freighter Ernestine, is forced to return to Pell for major repairs, a destination too fraught with danger for her. She stays behind on the decrepit, dying Thule Station. Day after day, she goes to the employment office, but there is little work. Few starships call and the ones that do, do not need her. Late one night, while trying to sleep in a dockside washroom, she is attacked by a man and barely manages to kill him. In desperation, weak from hunger, she moves in with a lowlife bartender. When he tries to control her, with threats to go to the authorities about his suspicions about her, she dispatches him too. With time running out before his body is discovered, she signs up with the ship Loki, a barely legitimate 'spook' that survives by gathering intelligence and selling it. Loki is not a typical merchanter ship; instead of a close-knit family, the crew consists of unrelated hire-ons. As a result, various competing cliques have formed aboard and Bet has to navigate her way among them. She becomes friends with Musa, a universally respected crewman who claims to have served on one of the ancient sublighters, the original nine vessels that predated faster-than-light ships. She is also strongly attracted to Ramey, an ex-merchanter and surly outcast with a nickname of NG (no good). She gradually makes a place for herself and even manages to get the reluctant NG tentatively readmitted back into shipboard society. Things get complicated when she is forced to reveal her past, especially since Loki is currently hunting a Mazianni ship. Long overdue for a major overhaul, Loki limps into Thule, hooks up to the sole starship fuel pump and takes on all the available fuel. While there, the ship they were searching for (Keu's India) shows up. The Mazianni ship had been harried and hunted by Alliance and Union forces to the point that it was blocked from its regular supply bases and is desperately low on fuel. Keu needs to take the precious pump and fuel intact, so he can not just blow Loki up. Instead, he sends boarding parties of armored marines, but Bet and NG between them manage to hold them off. Then the Alliance warship Norway arrives to close the trap and administer the coup de grâce. Bet's actions during the battle prove to her crewmates that she can be trusted; she has found a (relatively) safe haven. |
5449185 | /m/0dmdmm | Merchanter's Luck | C. J. Cherryh | 7/1/1982 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | Sandor ('Sandy') Kreja is the sole survivor of a moderately prosperous merchanter family that had operated in Union space. When he was a young boy, all but two of his relatives were killed or taken by the renegade Mazianni, once soldiers in the service of Earth, who had refused to accept the end of the Company War and turned pirate in order to keep on fighting. The three remaining Krejas had continued to run their aged freighter, Le Cygne, as best they could, but an accident had killed one and a shady deal gone bad the other, leaving Sandy both impoverished and preposterously wealthy — the sole owner of a starship. By the dangerous expedient of hiring crewmen when possible and running solo when not, the young man had kept his ship running (under constantly changing names), but as unpaid debts piled up, he had begun to run out of safe Union ports. At Viking station, as Edward Stevens of Lucy, Sandy has a chance sleepover with another merchanter, Allison Reilly, which proves to be pivotal to his future. Allison, one of the powerful Reillys of the superfreighter Dublin Again, lets slip that she is going "across the line" to Pell, the Alliance star system. Having heard rumours that trade between Pell and Earth might be re-established and wanting desperately to see her again, he decides to try his luck in Alliance space. Sandy races Dublin Again to her next port, but the only way he can catch the much faster ship is by taking chances. He performs a dangerous double-jump and arrives at Pell groggy, causing a stir when he barely manages to dock. As a result, he is questioned by Alliance security, but is released when the Reillys come to his aid, not for his sake, but to protect their reputation. At Allison's suggestion, they offer to refit Sandy's ship and provide a crew and cargo as a loan. The Reillys are also interested in the Earth trade, and the small ship would be an ideal conduit. Sandy swallows his pride and accepts the generous deal. As it turns out, Allison has an ulterior motive. She is a junior officer in charge of her own small group within the much larger group in command of Dublin Again, but many, many years stand between her and a 'posted' position with real responsibility. By transferring with her crew to the smaller ship, she can satisfy her ambition immediately. Things seem to be going well for once. Then Sandy is called in to meet the head of the Alliance military, the notorious Signy Mallory, who had once been one of the renegade Mazian's captains. She gives him a sealed priority military cargo to be delivered to stations being reopened Earthward. The trip is tense; Sandy and his new crew do not trust each other. He refuses to release the computer safeguards that have protected him in the past, preferring to size up the Reillys first. Curran, Allison's second in command, tries to force him to give up the security codes, but Sandy refuses to back down and a fight breaks out. The result is an ugly, festering stalemate. When they arrive at the Venture star system, they are intercepted and boarded by Mazianni from the warship Australia. Sandy orders his crew to hide, while he and Curran try to talk their way out. He is taken to Tom Edger, Mazian's senior captain. Sandy offers to work for him and is then told that his cargo is worthless scrap. Mallory had used him as bait to flush out her enemy. Edger decides he might have a use for Sandy, but Curran is taken away. Fighting to get his crewman back, both Sandy and Curran are shot and left for dead as the Mazianni begin to evacuate. At that moment, Mallory's Norway, the armed Alliance superfreighter Finity's End, and Dublin Again rush in to engage the fleeing Edger (although he gets away) and free the station. Sandy and Curran survive the battle. When the dust settles, Mallory clears Sandy's name and title to his ship in return for having put him in mortal danger. His crew now trust him wholeheartedly and Sandy has the nucleus he needs to revive the Kreja family, returning his ship to its original name, Le Cygne. |
5449235 | /m/0dmdq0 | Tripoint | C. J. Cherryh | 1994-09 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | Twenty years in the past, merchanter ships Sprite and Corinthian were docked at Mariner Station. What started out as a friendly sleepover between the inexperienced Marie Hawkins of Sprite and Austin Bowe of Corinthian turned into rape, with Marie becoming pregnant. She elected to raise the child, Thomas Bowe-Hawkins, on Sprite, but was consumed with rage. Tom grew up with an ambivalent mother and was never fully accepted by his family. When Austin later became senior captain of Corinthian, Marie started tracking Corinthian's movements in order to expose what she suspected was smuggling. When the two ships cross paths again, this time at Viking, Marie is ready for her revenge. She and Tom scour the docks for information about Corinthian's cargo, but Tom is caught snooping and is imprisoned aboard Corinthian, forcing the ship to depart prematurely for Pell Station via Tripoint. At Marie's insistence, Sprite pursues Corinthian. On Corinthian, Tom meets Austin, his domineering father, and Capella, second chief navigator and night-walker. When Corinthian docks at Pell Station, Tom's younger half-brother, Christian Bowe-Perrault tries to solve the problem by shipping him off to Sol Station, but Tom escapes and hides on the docks. Christian and Capella search frantically for him, unaware that Sabrina Perrault-Cadiz, Christian's cousin, has already found and befriended him. When Capella contacts old acquaintances for assistance, it attracts the unwanted attention of a dissident faction within the outlawed Mazianni Fleet. Capella is an ex-Fleet navigator with knowledge of Fleet routes and drop-points, which the dissidents want. When Corinthian prepares to depart for Tripoint, Tom returns voluntarily to the ship and is no longer treated as a prisoner. He learns the ship's secret: they are illegally trading with the renegade Fleet. Austin justifies this by maintaining that supplying the Fleet means it won't have to raid merchanter ships. Sprite arrives at Pell Station shortly after Corinthian's departure and takes off again in pursuit. During Corinthian's jump to Tripoint, Capella is aware of Sprite and a Mazianni spotter following and performs a premature system-drop near an abandoned freighter, causing the other ships to overshoot. Corinthian immediately starts frantically offloading to the freighter, a Fleet drop-point. As the spotter and Sprite approach, Tom and Christian activate the freighter's weapons and destroy the spotter. Tom tells his mother he is staying with Corinthian because he is more at home on his father's ship than his mother's. Marie, having taken the captaincy of Sprite from her weak brother, does not expose Corinthian's illegal trade because of Tom and because Corinthian outguns Sprite. Austin realizes too many people know about his connection with the Fleet and decides to leave Alliance-Union space for good. As amends for the past, Austin offers Marie the access codes to the hulk at Tripoint and the opportunity to take over Corinthians profitable trade, but she declines and the ships part company. During Corinthians next jump, Capella tells Tom about a new drop-point she discovered that leads to a habitable planet with forests. The Mazianni are building a new secret colony there and Corinthian is now part of that future. |
5449258 | /m/0dmdr1 | Finity's End | C. J. Cherryh | 1997-08 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | It is eighteen years after the end of the Company War, at least as stationers experience time, less for merchanters subject to the effects of time dilation in the course of their travels. Regardless, the threat of the piratical Mazianni is ebbing. The Neiharts and their superfreighter Finity's End had spent the post-war years assisting the Alliance militia hunt down the renegades. But now the oldest of all existing merchanter families wants to return to trading. When the ship docks at Pell Station, the heart of the Alliance, the family retrieves one of its own. Fletcher Neihart's mother had been stranded there by the fortunes of war, giving birth to him on the station. Unable to adjust to stationer life, she had committed suicide when he was five years old, leaving him to suffer through a succession of foster homes. The lonely outsider had been befriended by a couple of hisa, the gentle, intelligent natives of Pell's World. Now a young man of seventeen with dreams of working on the planet and no wish to take up the family business, he is furious when he is handed over against his will to his relatives as part of a deal between Elene Quen, Stationmaster of Pell, and senior Captain James Robert Neihart. Finity's End had suffered enormous casualties in the war and afterwards; half the crew died in one catastrophic decompression. Due to this and also because it was impractical to raise children in wartime, the youngest generation consists of only three orphaned "junior-juniors": Jeremy (Fletcher's new roommate), Vince and Linda. Fletcher should have been in the same age group, but due to time dilation, he is four or five years older. Fletcher is a surly anomaly; he is as old as the more numerous "senior-juniors", but has less shipboard knowledge and experience than the junior-juniors. This is finally resolved by putting him in charge of the three youngsters. Despite a botched, unofficial initiation that results in a fistfight between Fletcher and Chad, a senior-junior cousin, the responsibility (and implied trust) as well as his friendship with Jeremy gradually reconcile him to his new life. Even the initially hostile Vince and Linda look to him for leadership and approval. It all comes crashing down when Fletcher's spirit stick, a valuable gift from the hisa Satin (from Downbelow Station), is stolen. Suspicion and distrust grow on both sides. When Chad provokes another fight, Jeremy finally confesses that he was responsible. To safeguard the artifact from resentful relatives, he had hidden it in his hotel room at their last stop, Mariner, only to have it stolen. The merchanter Champlain is one of the suspects. Meanwhile, Captain Neihart has vastly more important issues to deal with. He is trying to shut down the smugglers and the black market, from which the Mazianni resupply themselves. At every port of call, he forges agreements with merchanters, Union and stationmasters to bring about a transition to peacetime, legitimate trade. When they find Champlain docked at their next stop, Esperance, Jeremy drags Fletcher to various curio stores, hoping to find the spirit stick. He succeeds, but as the senior captains are locked in vital negotiations, Fletcher is instructed to keep his charges in the sleepover to wait. However, the impatient twelve-year-old Jeremy takes it upon himself to go back to the shop and try to shoplift it, leading to his capture. Fletcher attempts to rescue Jeremy but is caught as well. As they are being led away at gunpoint to be quietly disposed of, Fletcher manages to engineer their escape. The resulting investigation pressures the corrupt, reluctant stationmaster into agreeing with Captain Neihart's proposals. Fletcher wins the approval of his family and he accepts Finity's End as his new home. |
5452045 | /m/0dmj1z | The Friends of Eddie Coyle | George V. Higgins | null | {"/m/0lsxr": "Crime Fiction", "/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | Eddie Coyle is an aging, low-level gunrunner for a crime organization in Boston, Massachusetts. He is awaiting sentencing after being convicted of a driving a hijacked truck in New Hampshire. Eddie had been driving the truck for Dillon, a convicted felon and career criminal who is well connected to the syndicate. Coyle has refused to give Dillon up to the authorities in exchange for leniency. Coyle's last chance to avoid a prison term is a sentencing recommendation from ATF Special Agent Dave Foley, who demands that Coyle become an informer in return. A gang led by Jimmy Scalise and Artie Van has been pulling off a series of daring day-time bank robberies with pistols supplied by Coyle. One of Coyle's sources for the pistols is a young gun runner, Jackie Brown, who is involved in a deal to supply military submachine guns for other clients. When taking the delivery of the pistols, Coyle finds out about the submachine guns and sets up Jackie for Foley. Jackie is apprehended by Foley and his agents and realizes he has been double-crossed by Coyle. Coyle feels he has fulfilled his end of the deal, but Foley puts the squeeze on Eddie, demanding more information for his cooperation. Acting on a tip, Foley and their agents are able to arrest Scalise and Van's gang in the commission of a robbery. A desperate Coyle approaches Foley with the only information of value he has, the identity of the gang pulling off the bank robberies, but it is too late for Eddie as Foley has already made the pinch. Scalise believes that he has been double-crossed by Eddie and the head of the syndicate is angry because one of his relatives was arrested as part of the gang. The syndicate boss wants Coyle killed, and Dillon gets a contract for a hit on Coyle, which he carries out. Dillon, who has had to live with the chance that Coyle might have given him up to the authorities to avoid prison, has been an informer for Foley and it is he, not Coyle, who has fingered Scalise and Van. When Foley asks his informant Dillon for information on Coyle's murder, Dillon demurs. |
5454096 | /m/0dmm2v | Enrique's Journey | Sonia Nazario | 2006 | {"/m/05h83": "Non-fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | When Enrique is five years old, his mother, Juanita, leaves Honduras to find a job the United States. The move allows her to send money back home to Enrique so he can go to school past the third grade. Lourdes promises Enrique she will return quickly. But she struggles in America. Years pass. He begs for his mother to come back. Without her, he becomes lonely and troubled. When she calls, Lourdes tells him to be patient. Enrique despairs of ever seeing him again. After eleven years apart, he decides he will go find her. Enrique sets off alone from Tegucigalpa, with little more than a slip of paper bearing his mother’s North Carolina telephone number. Without money, he will make the dangerous and illegal trek up the length of Mexico the only way he can–clinging to the sides and tops of freight trains. With gritty determination and a deep longing to be by his mother’s side, Enrique travels through hostile, unknown worlds. Each step of the way through Mexico, he and other migrants, many of them children, are hunted like animals. Gangsters control the tops of the trains. Bandits rob and kill migrants up and down the tracks. Corrupt cops all along the route are out to fleece and deport them. To evade Mexican police and immigration authorities, they must jump onto and off the moving boxcars they call El Tren de la Muerte–The Train of Death. Enrique pushes forward using his wit, courage, and hope–and the kindness of strangers. It is an epic journey, one thousands of immigrant children make each year to find their mothers in the United States. |
5454113 | /m/0dmm46 | Kira-Kira | Cynthia Kadohata | 2004 | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | In the 1950s, Katie and her family live in Iowa, where her parent own a unique Asian supermarket. When the family's store goes out of business, the family moves to an apartment home in Georgia where Katie's parents work at a hatchery with other Japanese families. Throughout the novel, Katie's best friend is her older sister Lynn, who Katie looks up to as the most intelligent person she knows, citing Lynn's ability to beat their Uncle Katsuhisa, a self-proclaimed chess grand master, at his own game as an example. Katie holds close to her heart the word Japanese phrase "kira-kira", which Lynn taught her and they use to describe things that sparkle in their lives. When Katie enters school, she has difficulty being the only Japanese-American in her class. Her grades are solid average C's, in comparison to Lynn's consistent A's. Lynn becomes friends with a popular girl, Amber, whom Katie dislikes immensely, and starts becoming interested in boys, often dropping Katie to go hang out with people her age. Katie eventually becomes friends with a girl named Silly Kilgore, whom she meets while waiting in the car at her mother's job. Silly's mother backs having a union at the plant to fight for higher wages and better working conditions, though Katie's mother opposes it. Meanwhile, Lynn becomes ill with lymphoma and becomes even sicker when Amber dumps her as a friend. The family moves into a house of Lynn's choice to help her recover, which appears to work. However, Lynn relapses from distress when her younger brother Sammy is caught in a metal animal trap on the vast property owned by Mr. Lyndon, the owner of the hatchery. Lynn's condition continues to deteriorate and she becomes blank and irritable. Katie's parents eventually tell her about Lynn's illness and Katie realizes that Lynn is dying. When Katie falls asleep without reconciling with Lynn after an argument, she is woken by her father the next day to be told that Lynn has died. Katie realizes why Lynn had taught her the word kira-kira; she wanted to remind her to always look at the world as a shining place and to never lose hope though there might be harsh hurdles in life. Katie keeps Lynn's belongings on her desk as an altar. The family feels that Lynn's spirit will stay around as long as they have her belongings around, though Katie thinks that Lynn's spirit will only stay around 49 days after she dies from an old story her uncle told her. The same day Lynn dies, Katie's usually calm and restrained father breaks into an angry rage after seeing Sammy struggle with his limp. He takes Katie and goes and wrecks Mr. Lyndon's car, an act which shocks her. Later on, he goes to Mr. Lyndon and owns up to what he did, resulting in him getting fired. Katie is appalled that her father is now unemployed, but he tells her that there is another hatchery opening up in Missouri, where he will probably work next, even though it will be a longer drive. Katie is left with Lynn's diary, and upon reading it, she realizes that Lynn knew she was going to die and that Lynn has written a will dated several days before her death. Soon after, Katie's mother attends a pro-union meeting at the Kilgore house. One of the things that the union wanted to achieve was having a three-day grief leave for families handling adversities. Though Katie's mother knows it's a little late for their family, if she voted for the union, it wouldn't be too late for the next family suffering grief. To cheer everyone up, Katie's family decides to take a wonderful, beautiful vacation. Katie recommends California because that is where Lynn would have wanted to go; California is where the sea she loved is and it is where Lynn wanted to live when she got older. The family arrives, and while Katie walks on the beach, she can hear Lynn's voice in the waves: "Kira-kira, kira-kira." |
5454580 | /m/0dmmq5 | Life Among the Savages | null | null | null | Jackson — speaking as the nameless mother who serves as narrator — relates a period of roughly six years in the life of her family, focusing particularly on her attempts to keep peace and domestic efficiency despite her increasing number of children. As the book's primary incidents begin the mother has "two children and about five thousand books" and predicts that before they leave their home they will have "twenty children and easily half a million books". The two children are Laurie and Jannie, named for and based largely on Jackson's two eldest children. Laurie is five, just beginning kindergarten, and "clamoring for the right to vote on domestic policies"; Jannie is nearly two. Eventually a third child, Sally — likewise named for and based upon Jackson's own third child — is introduced into the often overwhelming hilarity and chaos of domestic life, as the three children evolve into highly independent personalities. The book closes with the birth of yet another baby, Barry, who is again a fictional stand-in for Jackson's youngest child. |
5455476 | /m/0dmp3c | A Feast Unknown | Philip José Farmer | 1969 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | The two main characters are thinly-veiled versions of two of Farmer's favorite characters, Tarzan and Doc Savage. Called "Lord Grandrith" and "Doc Caliban", respectively, the two are recognizable as the iconic characters, but still unique. The two, half-brothers with the same father (the infamous Victorian era serial killer, Jack the Ripper) share a horrible affliction thanks to the powerful elixir that gives them near-eternal life. At the start of the novel they have discovered that they can no longer engage in sexual activity except during acts of violence (their penises become erect only during an act of violence) and they ejaculate after taking lives. By the end of the novel, Grandrith and Caliban will have grappled with each other in the nude, punching, clawing and biting, each of them sporting massive erections. The novel begins with Grandrith under attack by three parties: the Kenyan army, a group of Albanian mercenaries, and Doc Caliban who believes that Grandrith has killed Caliban's cousin and one true love. In addition, both Caliban and Grandrith have been summoned for their annual appear before The Nine, a powerful group of near immortals, who have given them both the secret of immortality in return for their obedience. However, Caliban and Grandrith ultimately find a common enemy among the Nine that is revealed to be controlling the world, and to have been manipulating their own lives, and indeed, the entire preceding battle between the two. The two iconic warriors vow to defeat the Nine together—that tale is told in the intertwining sequels, Lord of the Trees and The Mad Goblin. |
5459336 | /m/0dmt_5 | Eternity | Greg Bear | 1988 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | In Eon, Axis City split into two: one segment of Naderites and some Geshels took their portion of the city out of the Way and through Thistledown into orbit around the Earth; they spend the next thirty years aiding the surviving population of Earth heal and rebuild from the devastating effects of the Death. This effort strains their resources and the government of the Hexamon. As time passes, sentiment grows to have Korzenowski reopen the Way. Firstly, to learn what has happened to the Geshels' long-sundered brethren (who took their portion of Axis City down the Way at relativistic near-light speed). And, secondly, to benefit from the commercial advantages of the Way (despite a very real risk that the Jarts will be waiting on the other side). In a parallel Earth, known as Gaia, the mathematician Patricia Vasquez (who was the primary protagonist of Eon), dies of old age; she never found her own Earth where the Death did not happen and her loved ones were still alive, but remained on the one she discovered (in which Alexander the Great did not die young and his empire did not fragment after his death). She passes her otherworldly artifacts of technology to her granddaughter, Rhita, who appears to have inherited her gifts. Rhita moves away from the academic institute the "Hypateion" (a reference to Hypatia) which Patricia founded and to that world's version of Alexandria. Patricia's clavicle claims that a test gate has been opened onto this world of Gaia, and that it could be expanded further. Ser Olmy is distracted by three concerns; the growth of his son, the prospects of the Way being re-opened (which he believes inevitable) with the attendant consequences, and by the revelation to him by an old friend that one of the deepest secrets of the Hexamon was a captured Jart whose body died in the process but whose mind was uploaded. Its mentality was alien and powerful enough that it took over or killed many of the researchers who attempted to connect to and study it, so it was hidden away deep in the Stone. As he studies the Jart, Olmy comes to believe that the Jart had been captured on purpose, that it was in fact a Trojan Horse. The Jart reveals tidbits about the Jart civilization: in essence, they are a hierarchical meta-civilization that ruthlessly modifies itself, attempting to absorb all useful intelligences and ways of thinking that it encounters, in the service of the Jarts' ultimate goal - to transmit all the data they can possibly gather to "descendant command". Olmy investigates further and discovers that descendant command is the Jart name for what they know as the "Final Mind" - a Teilhardian (or Tiplerian) conception of an ultimate intelligence which will be created at the end of the universe when all intelligences merge themselves into a single transcendent intellect which will effectively be a god. Olmy underestimates the Jart, and it begins to slowly take over his body and mind. Its original mission, assigned to it hundreds of years ago was to engage in sabotage and transmit its freshly acquired understanding of humanity back to present command, but the arrival of Pavel Mirsky changes everything. Pavel Mirsky had elected to go with the Geshels down the Way more than thirty years ago, after which the Way had been sealed off. It should have been impossible for him to return, but yet one day he quietly re-appears on Earth to deliver an urgent message. He had indeed traveled down the Way when the Way was sealed off with that portion of Axis City, and he and its citizens had voyaged hundreds of years and billions of kilometers; they advanced and changed radically on the way. At the end of the Way was a finite but unbounded cauldron of space and energy - a small proto-universe. They transformed themselves into ineffable beings of energy in order to survive the transition. They became as gods to this place, and for a time their creating went well. But it began to corrode and collapse without conflict and contrast between the creators, threatening to take the would-be gods with it. But they were rescued by the Final Mind of this universe, which took pity on them and freed them from the Way. The Final Mind is not quite omniscient or omnipotent, however, and many grand efforts are being balked and frustrated by the precocious accomplishment that the Way is. Mirsky had been reconstituted from what he had become and sent back in time to try to persuade the Hexamon to order the re-opening of the Way - and its destruction. On Gaia, Rhita persuades the aging queen to support her like the queen had supported Patricia. Their expedition leaves for the location of the test gate somewhere in the barbarous hinterlands of Central Asia in the nick of time, as the queen is deposed during their trip. Rhita's clavicle succeeds in expanding the test gate to a usable size, but it warns her that whoever opened the gate in the first place was not human. That night, the Jarts arrive on Gaia en masse. They begin the mammoth task of storing and digitizing all the data and life forms on Gaia to transmit down to descendant command. Rhita's consciousness is of special interest to the Jarts, particularly what she knows of Patricia. In the meantime on Earth proper, consensus has been reached to re-open the Way but not to destroy it. Mirsky disappears. Another entity who should not be there, Ry Oyu, the former gate opener for the Gate Guild, appears. He prods the president of the Hexamon into covertly ordering Korzenowski into destroying the Way regardless of the decision of the citizens. The backlash destroys the Stone. Ry Oyu, Korzenowski, Ser Olmy (who connived at the destruction), and the Jart controlling Olmy, outrun the Way's destruction and arrive at a Jart defense station located over Gaia. The Jarts respect the wishes of Ry Oyu as a representative of descendant command, and before the Way dies, transmit their accumulated data in a single immensely long fluctuation along the singularity/flaw of the Way to the Final Mind. Korzenowski has himself digitized and sent with the transmission. Olmy is dropped off on the homeworld of the Frants, a communal mind civilization whom he likes. Ry Oyu has Rhita's mind freed; her consciousness gives Ry Oyu the last piece of data needed to reconstitute Patricia Vasquez. Ry Oyu intends to make up for his failure to instruct Patricia properly when she was trying to open a gate back home in Eon; he correctly opens the gate, and bare moments before the Way completely disintegrates around him, finally sends her back home to an Earth where the Death did not happen. Rhita is also returned to Gaia, a Gaia where she never opened a test gate and where the Jarts did not invade. And Pavel Mirsky, still unsatisfied, returns to the beginning of the universe to witness all interesting events between then and the Final Mind, when he will return and report back to it. |
5465108 | /m/0dn1y8 | The Two of Them | Joanna Russ | 1978 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | Irene, a female galactic agent, rescues a young woman, Zubeydeh, from a male-dominant culture of a colonized planet, Ala-ed-deen, where women are kept in purdah. |
5466499 | /m/0dn3_6 | The Saint and the Fiction Makers | Leslie Charteris | 1968 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery"} | The dashing Simon Templar is hired by a friend in the book publishing trade to protect one of his stars, a secretive recluse named Amos Klein who writes a popular (and lucrative) series of adventure novels about a manly and suave spy. When he arrives at Klein's house in the country, he hears a woman's screams and several gunshots. Rushing to the rescue, he finds a woman tied up and gripping a revolver behind her back. After untying her, he finds out that she is "Amos Klein", a woman who adopted a male nom de plume to increase sales of her novels. She explains that she has to be able to do everything her character in the novels does and that she was just doing some research. The pair are soon kidnapped by a group of people who claim to be members of S.W.O.R.D., the evil organization from Amos Klein's novels. Their leader, "Warlock", the mastermind of the group, believes that Simon Templar must be the Amos Klein he is looking for and that the woman must be his secretary. They then find out what the group of madmen want: for Amos Klein to write the plot of their next grandiose heist. |
5466643 | /m/0dn44d | The Saint in Pursuit | Leslie Charteris | 1970 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery"} | To be added. |
5468760 | /m/0dn7bq | The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate | L. Sprague de Camp | 1961 | {"/m/0hwxm": "Historical novel"} | The novel concerns the quest of Bessas of Zarispa, a young officer of the 'Immortals' regiment, for the ingredients of a potion that the King has been told will give him immortality; the blood of a dragon and the ear of a king. Unbeknownst to Bessas, the third ingredient is the heart of a hero, and therefore Bessas' own. Relying on information given him by the priests of Marduk in Babylon that a reptile depicted in reliefs on their temple, the sirrush, is a real dragon and lives at the headwaters of the Nile, Bessas sets out for the source of the Nile, accompanied by his former tutor, Myron of Miletos, who is bored of teaching and wants to make a name for himself in the field of philosophy. |
5468826 | /m/0dn7h6 | The Blue Equinox | Aleister Crowley | null | null | The Blue Equinox opens with Crowley's poem "Hymn to Pan", a devotional work devoted to the ancient Greek deity Pan. This is followed by an editorial, in which Crowley discusses Thelema, the A∴A∴ and the O.T.O., and the important role which he believed that they had to play in the Aeon of Horus. #Editorial #Præmonstrance of A∴A∴ #Curriculum of A∴A∴ #Liber II [The Message of the Master Therion] #The Tent #Liber DCCCXXXVII [The Law of Liberty] #Liber LXI [vel Causae A∴A∴] #A Psalm #Liber LXV [Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente] #Liber CL [De Lege Libellum] #A Psalm #Liber CLXV [A Master of the Temple] #Liber CCC [Khabs am Pekht] #Stepping Out of the Old Aeon into the New #The Seven Fold Sacrament #Liber LII [Manifesto of the O.T.O.] #Liber CI [An Open Letter to Those Who May Wish to Join the Order] #Liber CLXI [Concerning the Law of Thelema] #Liber CXCIV [An Intimation with Reference to the Constitution of the Order] #Liber XV (The Gnostic Mass) #Nekam Adonai! #A La Loge #The Tank *Special Supplement: Liber LXXI [The Voice of the Silence: The Two Paths, The Seven Portals] |
5468954 | /m/0dn7sl | Lord of the Trees | Philip José Farmer | 1970 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | At the end of A Feast Unknown, Grandrith and Doc Caliban (a thinly disguised Doc Savage) cease fighting each other upon learning that their personal war and indeed their entire lives were engineered by the Nine, a megalomaniacal and powerful secret society. The two men have a sexual affliction in common; they are impotent except when performing acts of violence; a temporary side effect of a serum that grants them eternal life—another product of the Nine. Angered by the ways they have been manipulated, the two heroes split up to overthrow the Nine, ultimately meeting up at the end. Lord of the Trees shows the story from Grandrith's point of view. The Mad Goblin tells the same story from Doc Caliban's viewpoint. During the events of the book, Grandrith kills two of the Nine, Mubaniga and Jiizfan. The oldest member of the Nine, XauXaz, died previously of extreme old age in A Feast Unknown. Iwaldi, the The Mad Goblin, is also killed. In the end, only five of the Nine remain alive. |
5470395 | /m/0dn9xc | Never End | Åke Edwardson | 2006 | {"/m/0lsxr": "Crime Fiction"} | A nineteen year-old woman, Jeanette Bielke, is raped whilst walking home during the night. Inspector Winter is perturbed when he realises that the rape occurred in exactly the same spot as a similar crime, which in this case ended in murder, five years ago. That case remains unsolved, and looms even further into Winter's site when another rape occurs, and this one ends in murder again. |
5470763 | /m/0dnbfr | The Saint and the People Importers | Leslie Charteris | 1971 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery"} | This novel captures some flavour of the early-seventies English society by thrusting its titular hero against the immigration rackets exploiting the masses of underprivileged Asian workers (in this case, Pakistani) during the times when England "called the Empire home". The action starts when, getting in a cab in London, Simon Templar spots a particularly lurid headline on the frontpage of a newspaper forgotten by some previous customer, describing the horrible death of a Pakistani immigrant in Soho. |
5470991 | /m/0dnbp2 | Walkabout | null | null | null | The book opens with two siblings, Peter and Mary, in a gully with diminishing food supplies. They are lost as a result of a plane crash and after swimming, and eating the last of their food, they decide to walk to Adelaide which, unknown to them, is across the continent. They leave and start walking across the desert. They climb some hills and Peter sees what he thinks is the ocean. Mary looks and realizes it is nothing more than salt in the desert. To keep this knowledge from Peter, she tells him they will rest below the hill. In the night, Mary dreams about what happened. They were in a cargo plane when the engine caught on fire and the plane crashed. Everyone survived including the pilots, but they were killed when the plane exploded while Mary and Peter were at a safe distance. The incident stranded them in Sturt Plain in the Northern Territory. The next day they keep walking and searching for food. Their efforts are in vain and they don't find food. They keep walking even more and Peter thinks he notices someone. Suddenly out of nowhere an Aborigine seems to appear and startles Mary and Peter mostly due to his nudity. Hoping to make him leave out of shame, Mary glares at him. Eventually Peter sneezes and the Aborigine laughs. Hoping to find out about the strangers, he inspects both of them and finds nothing, so he leaves. Peter and Mary, shocked that their only hope for survival had just left, soon follow. Peter attempts to communicate with him through gestures of eating and drinking and the Aborigine comprehends their situation. He indicates that they should follow him and the children do. He arrives at a waterhole where the children drink to their fill. Then, the Aborigine finds a plant which he prepares as food. After this, he begins to lead the children to the next waterhole. On the way, Mary has an idea. She removes her pants from under her dress and gives them to the Aborigine in hopes of clothing him. Peter assists in the attempt and the Aborigine puts on the pants. Just then, Peter notices that they are girl's pants and starts jumping around mocking the Aborigine. The Aborigine suddenly thinks that the pants are decorations for a dance that Peter had just started and starts dancing himself. His movements depict two men fighting as a victory dance. At the end of the dance the pants snap and fall off. Mary is shocked and the Aborigine looks at her face. He is terrified for he thinks that Mary's shock is because she had seen the Spirit of Death in him. They arrive at the next waterhole where the symptoms of the 'flu start to show in the Aborigine due to the fact Peter had the disease and had passed it on to him. He begins to worry and decides to tell the children he needs a burial platform to keep bad spirits from his body after he dies. Peter is gathering firewood so to avoid interrupting a man at work, the Aborigine seeks Mary who is bathing. The Aborigine doesn't see a bath as something that private in his culture so there is nothing to stop him. He arrives at the pool and Mary is terrifed and begins to threaten the Aborigine with snarls and a rock. He is confused why this is happening and becomes depressed that he will not get his burial platform. Mary goes to Peter and tells him to leave with her. Peter wonders about the Aborigine though, and a hesitant Mary is forced to stay. Peter goes back to Mary and tells her that the Aborigine is very sick. Peter begins to realize that the Aborigine will die while Mary refuses to believe that can happen from the flu. Soon, Mary goes to investigate. Finally, she acknowledges that he is actually dying and forgives him. She lays his head in her lap and he touches her hair, during this moment Mary realizes that they are not so different, despite his appearance and language. He dies later in the night. They bury him and leave for the food and water-filled valley Peter was told about by the Aborigine before he died. They stop at a pool where they eat some yabbies and observe platypus and leave. After crossing many hills they come across the valley. They discover some wet clay which they use to draw pictures with. Peter draws nature while Mary draws stylish women and her dream house. Eventually the children see smoke and see Aboriginal swimmers. They arrive at the Aboriginal settlement where one of the swimmers, a man, sees the drawings. He sees Mary's dream house and realises who Mary and Peter are. In a wide variety of gestures and drawings, he tells the children that there is a house like that across the hills and demonstrates how to get there. The overjoyed children begin their trek back to their civilization. The book has 125 pages |
5471038 | /m/0dnbrx | The Saint and the Hapsburg Necklace | Leslie Charteris | 1976 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | To be added. |
5471458 | /m/0dncbl | Locked Rooms | Laurie R. King | 2005 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/028v3": "Detective fiction", "/m/02p0szs": "Historical fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | On their way back to Britain from India, Holmes and Russell stop at Russell's childhood home in San Francisco. As they approach San Francisco, Russell becomes more and more distracted. Holmes concludes from this, and her recurring dreams of falling objects, a faceless man, and locked rooms, that she is repressing some unpleasant memory. Russell denies this and tries to track down the psychiatrist who helped her recover from the trauma she suffered when she precipitated the car accident that killed her family. On the way, she meets a Chinese man, Long, who was the son of her parents' good friends. Long saves her from a murder attempt before introducing himself and saying that his own parents were killed shortly after her own parents died. When Russell finally tracks down the name of her psychiatrist, she learns that she was murdered after Russell departed for England several years ago. Holmes determines from the fact that there was a recent break-in at Russell's house, Russell's anxiety and distraction, the murder of the psychiatrist, and the most recent attempt on Russell's life, that there is something serious amiss. He hires Dashiell Hammett to join his investigation. They conclude that Russell was present during the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, despite her denial of this fact, and it was this experience that produced the dream about falling objects. He learns from an interview with a survivor of the earthquake that Russell was very frightened by a man with several bandages on his face looking for her father — he had covered up his face because he had been burned while fighting a fire, and this made him appear faceless. Both Russell and Hammett visit the site of the Russell family car accident. Russell then takes a vacation to her family's summer home with her friends Flo and Donny. During the vacation, she recovers her wits enough to realize that somebody is trying to murder her and all the people that could possibly be connected with the car accident that killed her parents, from Long's parents to her psychiatrist. She visits the garage that collected the remainder of her parents' car and learns that the brake rod was cut and she is not to blame for their deaths; they were murdered. Russell returns to her city house, fully recovered and determined to find out who was behind all the murders. Using fengshui, which Long's family was very interested in, they dig up the garden and find a box with a confession, written by Russell's father, and several valuable items in it. In the letter, he says that he helped a man get away with murder of a policeman, looting, and arson to cover up the evidence during the 1906 earthquake. The man in question was the one posing as a rescuer with the bandaged face. The letter concludes with the statement that Mr. Russell is going to disclose this information in order to free his conscience, and adds that he warned the person responsible of his intentions. The letter was written only days before the family members' deaths. Holmes had previously set up Irregulars in the form of street kids to spy on Hammett's house in case of an attempt on Hammett's life. They report on a break-in involving the two suspects, the burnt man and his "sister". They end up on a chase that takes them to Chinatown, where one of Long's friends calls on the crowd to prevent them from getting away. Russell confronts the two before they are arrested, and finally unlocks the last "room" — a memory she had of seeing the man near her parents' car the day they died. |
5474467 | /m/0dnh1c | Lost | Gregory Maguire | 10/2/2001 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Winifred Rudge is an American writer who travels to London to visit a distant cousin, and to research a new novel about a woman haunted by the ghost of Jack the Ripper. When she arrives, she discovers that her cousin has vanished, his apartment (once owned by a common ancestor of theirs: a man who was supposedly the inspiration for Ebenezer Scrooge) is being renovated, and strange sounds are coming from the chimney. It seems the apartment is now haunted by a supernatural presence. Although the plot of the novel revolves around Winifred trying to chase down the ghost in her cousin's apartment, along the way a deep mystery that exists between Winifried and her cousin, John Comestor, is revealed. While trying to solve the mystery Winifried is forced to face the ghosts of her own past and examine her choices and motivations. |
5476214 | /m/0dnjs4 | Exquisite Corpse | Poppy Z. Brite | 1996 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/03npn": "Horror"} | The novel unfolds in alternating chapters from the points of view of the four main characters. Andrew Compton, a convicted serial killer (based on real life serial killer Dennis Nilsen), leaves his prison cell as a dead man in a self-induced cataleptic trance and rises again to build a new life. His journey takes him to New Orleans' French Quarter-- to the decadent bars and frivolous boys that haunt the luscious dark corners of a town brought up on Voodoo and the dark arts. Anticipating a willing victim, he finds an equal in Jay Byrne, a decadent artist (based on real life serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer), who shares the same dangerous desires--torture, murder and cannibalism. They fixate on Tran, a young Vietnamese runaway, as their perfect victim. As Tran's long-standing attraction to Jay threatens to lead him straight to his demise, Tran's estranged older gay lover, Lucas Ransom (pirate talk radio personality "Lush Rimbaud"), seeks to find and reunite with him. The four collide in a horrific climax. |
5480268 | /m/0dnqfc | The Saint and the Templar Treasure | Leslie Charteris | 1979 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | To be added. |
5482401 | /m/0dntfb | When the People Fell | Frederik Pohl | 1959-04 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The setting is the type of benign Venus imagined before the first space probes penetrated the clouds of that planet. Colonization has become stymied by the native inhabitants (loudies), who are apparently sentient bubbles that float around the landscape, getting in the way of human progress. Attempts to communicate with them produce no response. Confining them is useless (they drift back) and killing them produces a deadly explosion that contaminates a thousand acres (4 km²). The non-Chinese authorities of the early Instrumentality government have no answer. The ruler of Goonhogo (the entity that replaced China under the early Instrumentality) decrees that 82 million Chinesians (men, women, and children) be dropped from space, parachuting down to the surface. Each one has a simple mission — herd the bubbles together. Many die in the process, both in landing and from the bubbles exploding. The rest corralled the loudies together into herds, where they eventually starve, wiping out the species. Meanwhile, more Chinese parachute down with rice seeds and begin planting. Eventually, by sheer weight of numbers, the Chinese conquer Venus. Smith's point in the story is evidently to demonstrate how Chinese attitudes such as fatalism and obedience to authority, coupled with their large numbers, could outperform the "Yankee ingenuity" and "self-reliant individual" attitudes predominant in mainstream 1950s American science fiction of the time. (However, it is implied that the separate Chinese government and Chinese ethnic identity of the time of the Venus colonization no longer exist in the same form by the time of the story's "frame" interview.) |
5482474 | /m/0dntk5 | Half-Life | Aaron Krach | 2004 | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | Two weeks before high school graduation and the geography of 18 year-old Adam Westman's life is about to change dramatically. Many of the familiar landmarks will remain—his best friend Dart riding shotgun; the suburban house where he lives with his dad and younger sister; and the numerous on-ramps and off-ramps that connect him to his hometown of Angelito in the center of centerless Los Angeles. But when death and love, perhaps, arrive unexpectedly, Adam must learn that trouble sometimes has to rumble through a tidy world to make room for the kind of magical connections that make life worth living. |
5486177 | /m/0dnz35 | Hell's Kitchen | null | null | {"/m/0lsxr": "Crime Fiction"} | The book follows Pellam as he tries to prove the innocence of an old woman, Ettie, whom he had interviewed for a documentary on the area of New York referred to as Hell's Kitchen. When Ettie's apartment catches fire, she is blamed for the crime and jailed. Pellam believes she is innocent and is determined to prove it and set her free. Along the way he meets several characters who try to interrupt his search as it uncovers many underlying crimes of different people. All the while, the real arsonist, a man named Sonny, has been continuing to burn buildings and chase Pellam. Towards the end of the book, Sonny finally confronts Pellam, attempting to kill him (and Sonny himself in the process). However, just when it appears Pellam is about to die, two friends he has made along his investigation come to his aid and save him from Sonny. Pellam gathers the evidence needed to prove Ettie innocent and she is set free. |
5486216 | /m/0dnz4k | Freckles | Gene Stratton-Porter | 1900 | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/01qxvh": "Romance novel"} | The hero is an adult orphan, just under twenty years of age, with bright red hair and a freckled complexion. His right hand is missing at the wrist, and has been since before he can remember. Raised since infancy in a Chicago orphanage, he speaks with a slight Irish accent, "scarcely definite enough to be called a brogue." Exhausted after days of walking, he applies for a job with the Grand Rapids lumber company, guarding timber in the Limberlost Swamp. The lumber company field manager, McLean, is impressed by the boy's polite assertiveness and hires him despite his youth and disability. He gives his name only as "Freckles", insisting that he has no name of his own. He claims the name given him in the orphanage (which we never learn) "is no more my name than it is yours". So that he has a name to put down on the books, McLean gives Freckles the name of his own father, James Ross McLean. Freckles' duty is to twice a day walk the perimeter of the lumber company's land, a seven-mile trek through lonely swampland, and to be on the watch for those who aim to steal the expensive timber. McLean's chief worry is Black Jack Carter, who has sworn to smuggle several priceless trees out of the swamp. Freckles' weapons are limited to a revolver and a stout stick, which he carries at all times and uses to test to wire that marks the company's boundaries. At night Freckles boards with Duncan, head teamster for the lumber company, and Duncan's wife, who becomes a mother figure to Freckles. Initially terrified of the wilderness after a lifetime in an urban environment, Freckles first conquers his fears and then develops an interest in the wildlife of the swamp. He is touched by the beauty he sees, and his frustration and curiosity leads him to purchase several books on natural history, and look upon the creatures of the swamp as his friends. He creates a "room" in the swamp, where he has transplanted the most unique plant specimens he can find. After a year in the swamp, his hard work and faithfulness lead McLean to offer a thousand dollars to anyone who can show him a cut stump from a tree stolen under Freckles’ watch. Freckles gets an opportunity to prove his capabilities as a guard when Wessner, a recently fired lumberman, comes upon Freckles on his rounds and offers him five hundred dollars to look the other way while Black Jack’s gang of thieves steals several prime trees. After initially playing dumb to gain information, Freckles puts his gun and stick aside and fights Wessner using only his one fist. He wins, and drives Wessner from the swamp. The next day, while he is reading in his room in the swamp, a lovely and wealthy girl about sixteen years of age appears. Freckles instantly falls in love with her for both her beauty and her bravery, as she is not bothered by the thought of rattlesnakes and the other deadly creatures of the swamp. The girl's name is never given, but she has come to the swamp with a local photographer known as the Bird Woman and has become lost. Freckles conducts her back to her carriage, and names her "the Swamp Angel." In the days that follow, the Bird Woman comes to the swamp repeatedly to take photographs while Freckles sings for the Swamp Angel and shows her the wonders of the swamp. One day the Bird Woman spots two men in the process of sawing down a tree. Although Freckles' first instinct is to protect the women, the Bird Woman and the Swamp Angel join him with revolvers of their own, and under the cover of the swamp all three drive off the thieves. Her skill with a gun gives Freckles further reason to love the Swamp Angel. The next day he returns the Swamp Angel's hat to her father at work, rather than going to her home, and this gentlemanly behavior makes a positive impression. Meanwhile, Freckles continues to secretly worship the Swamp Angel, while believing her to be far above him in social class and out of his reach. Freckles is granted a second revolver and the use of a bicycle, so that if thieves should reappear he can alert the camp swiftly. In spite of these precautions, Black Jack manages to capture Freckles, and ties him to a tree while the rest of the thieves cut down several trees. When they finish, Freckles is to be left for Wessner to kill personally, and his body will be hidden so that it will look like he joined the thieves, killing his reputation as well. However, the Swamp Angel finds them, pretends to think they are on official camp business, flirts with Black Jack to make him trust her, and rides off on Freckles’ bicycle to bring the rest of the camp to his aid. When she returns with reinforcements, she finds that the Bird Woman has freed Freckles and shot Black Jack in the arm. The fallen logs are recovered and the thieves captured, except for Black Jack who swears vengeance on Freckles, the Bird Woman, and the Swamp Angel, and escapes into the swamp. For a week, Freckles pushes himself to the point of exhaustion by guarding the trees during the day and the home of the Swamp Angel at night. Finally, it is discovered the Black Jack was killed by the creatures of the swamp, and Freckles is able to relax his watch. He and the Swamp Angel find several trees that Black Jack had marked, but when the last one is felled it nearly crushes the Swamp Angel. Freckles rushes toward her and pushes her out of danger, but the blow from the tree falls on him instead, and smashes almost all the bones in his chest. The Swamp Angel and her father rush him to the finest hospital in Chicago, but Freckles’ belief that the Swamp Angel deserves a better husband causes him almost to lose the will to live. He fears that he is descended from criminals, who abused their baby and cut off his hand intentionally. The Swamp Angel declares her love for Freckles, and promises that she will find his parents and prove that they were respectable people. Her inquiries at his former orphanage lead her to Lord and Lady O’More, Irish nobility who have been searching Chicago for Lord O’More’s lost nephew. They prove themselves to be kind and noble, and explain that Freckles’ father had been disinherited when he married a clergyman’s daughter, and both had perished in the fire that took his hand. Freckles’ true name is Terence Maxwell O’More of Dunderry House in County Clare. The virtue of his parents proven, Freckles revives and becomes engaged to marry the Swamp Angel. With the help of McLean, whom he still regards as a foster father, Freckles plans out what the next few years will hold. Rather than go to Ireland and live as a lord, he will go to college in the United States and then join McLean in managing the lumber company, so that he can always be near the Limberlost. |
5487527 | /m/0dn_9l | The Winthrop Woman | Anya Seton | null | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0hwxm": "Historical novel"} | The Winthrop Woman begins with young Elizabeth Fones and her family travelling to visit their family at their grandfather's countryside estate. Elizabeth's uncle, John Winthrop, is especially pious and strict about Protestantism; and he chides his sister for not taking proper care of her children, Elizabeth in particular, who is hot-headed and capricious. Elizabeth is caught blaspheming and is beaten, resulting in her becoming areligious and instilling in her a hatred for her uncle. Years later, Elizabeth Fones has become a beautiful young woman working in her ailing father's apothecary. Though she is in love with her cousin John ("Jack") Winthrop, Jr., it is Jack's friend Edward Howes who seeks to marry her. Just as she becomes engaged to Howes, her cousin Henry Winthrop (or "Harry"), Jack's younger brother, returns from his adventures in Barbados. Unlike his father and brother, Harry is wild and carefree, reckless to the point that he has depleted all his money and nearly brought his family to financial ruin. Unwilling to return to his father, Harry instead stays at Thomas Fones's house and spends his time frolicking with his equally profligate friends. One night, Harry and Elizabeth spend an especially long night out, their lust overcomes them, and they sleep together in a garden. In yet another reckless act, Harry declares that he is in love with Elizabeth and demands her hand in marriage. The couple are wed, much to the dismay of both fathers (John Winthrop both believes that his son could do better than a Fones and is not fond of Elizabeth; Thomas Fones is dismayed because his daughter was already engaged to marry Edward Howes). Elizabeth and Harry move to the Winthrop estate in the countryside (John Winthrop is no longer resides there as he has taken a position elsewhere). For a while, the couple live a happy life. However, it soon comes obvious just how profligate Harry is as he neglects his wife and family to have his own fun. In the meantime, Jack returns. It is apparent that he and Elizabeth still have strong feelings for each other; but, while attempting to cover his feelings for his brother's wife, Jack accidentally kisses Martha, Elizabeth's younger sister, and soon the two are wed. Finally, in an attempt to control his son, John Winthrop forces Harry to come to New England with him. In a final act of recklessness, Harry drowns when he attempts to jump in and swim. Elizabeth is left a pregnant widow. After she gives birth to her daughter (Martha, she, Jack, Martha, and John Winthrop's wife, Margaret, all depart for Massachusetts. In the strict colony in the New World, Elizabeth runs into more trouble than ever. On her uncle's suggestion, Elizabeth marries Robert Feake, a weak-willed and strangely disturbed man who often has nightmares and commits odd deeds in his sleep. She also attempts to befriend Anne Hutchinson and chooses a tainted squaw, Telaka, for her maid. Eventually, Elizabeth and Robert are driven out of their house in Watertown because the other colonists believe Telaka to be a witch. The Feakes then settle in Greenwich in the colony of New Haven. After run-ins with Indians, Elizabeth and the other leader of the town, Daniel Patrick, join Greenwich to the Dutch colony of New Netherland. After Daniel Patrick is murdered by an old enemy, Elizabeth's husband, Robert, becomes completely mad and attempts to return to England. Meanwhile, Joan marries Thomas Lyons, who turns out to be a prospective gold-digger. When William Hallett, a previous acquaintance of Elizabeth's, begins courting her and gains more and more control over the Feake household, Lyons grows jealous. Finally, Elizabeth and her lover are accused of adultery after not having married properly under English law, and all their lands are confiscated. Elizabeth and William Hallett hide under the protection of Jack Winthrop, who is now an important member of another town in Connecticut. After Jack does all he can for his cousin and ex-lover, Elizabeth and William Hallett are once more free to move back to Greenwich, where Indians then set their house afire. Elizabeth and William Hallett have no choice but to start anew once more, their hearts heavy but their wills strengthened. |
5487849 | /m/0dn_nz | The Darkest Road | Guy Gavriel Kay | 1986 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | Kim and Matt, with the help of Tabor and Imraith-Nimphais, rescue the Paraiko. Ruana, their leader, chants kanior -- a ritual of forgiveness and lamentation for the dead that is tied to the Paraiko's non-violent nature and the bloodcurse that protects them. So powerful is his performance that it invokes not only all the Paraiko that have died through the centuries but even their enemies; both he and Kim sense a finality in it, as is proven when the Baelrath blazes and summons Kim to change the Paraiko's pacifist natures so they can fight against Maugrim. Due to the loss of their pacifism, however, the magical bloodcurse that had protected the Paraiko for centuries was also lost forever. Kim returns to Ysanne's cottage where she meets Darien and gives him the Circlet of Lisen. As she puts it on his head, the light of the gem goes out, and Darien interprets this as a sign that he is evil. In despair he takes Lökdal, the dagger that Ysanne used to kill herself, and flees. Kim calls after him to tell him where his mother is, hoping that Jennifer will be able to comfort him. Jennifer, waiting in Lisen's tower for Prydwen to return, listens to Flidais' tale of the Wild Hunt and how its randomness, being outside the Weaver's control, gifts the Weaver's creatures with freedom of choice. That wildness also made Maugrim possible; and because Maugrim came from outside the Tapestry there is no thread in it with his name on it, Flidais explains, and so he cannot die. Darien arrives at the tower, looking for love and acceptance. Believing as she does that their only hope lies in leaving Darien completely free, Jennifer tells him simply that he must make his own choice and that she will not influence it, except to say that his father wanted her dead so that he would never be born. Darien believes that his choice was made for him when the light of Lisen's Circlet went out and so departs to seek his father. Prydwen returns in the midst of a terrible storm and Jennifer immediately sends Lancelot away, charging him to follow Darien and protect him. Lancelot battles an ancient stone creature of the wood, a demon named Curdardh, only managing to defeat it with Darien's help. In a moment of clarity Darien realizes that his mother sent him away because she is not afraid of what he will do if he is left free to choose: she trusts him. Lancelot finally loses sight of Darien as he crosses Daniloth in the form of a white owl. Meanwhile, the Dalrei, the lios alfar, and the men of Brennin and Cathal are gathering on the plain to face Maugrim's army. Jaelle's view of men as lesser beings has been challenged by Kevin's unflinching sacrifice and she and Paul/Pwyll begin to tentatively shape a friendship. As they talk on the shore below Lisen's Tower, a ghostly ship appears to take all of them to Andarien in time to meet Aileron and the rest of the host of the Light. Loren, Matt and Kim return to the kingdom of the dwarves where Matt competes against Kaen and Blöd to regain his rightful position as King of the Dwarves. The Crystal Dragon of Calor Diman awakens but despite the blazing summons of the Baelrath, Kim refuses to bind it to help them against Maugrim, realizing that she still has the power to choose and that there is a point where the ends do not justify the means. She uses the ring's power instead to take Loren, Matt and herself to the Plain in time for Matt to reclaim the Dwarves and lead them to join the rest of the forces opposing Maugrim's hordes. A giant urgach issues a challenge to single combat and Arthur, hearing that the name of the plain was once Camlann, recognizes that his time has come: "I never see the end." But while they debate, Diarmuid seizes the moment and takes the challenge on himself. He fights brilliantly and kills the urgach but is mortally wounded, and dies in Sharra's arms. The next morning the battle begins. Among Maugrim's army are Avaia and her black brood of swans and, more terribly, a giant black dragon. Kim, realizing that it was for this the Baelrath had demanded the Crystal Dragon, is sick with self-reproach but Imraith-Nimphais and Tabor fight valiantly and kill many of the swans. Finally, realizing there is only one way to defeat the dragon, the unicorn shakes Tabor from her back midair and plunges into the dragon's heart, killing both herself and the dragon. Tabor is saved from his death plunge by magical intervention. Despite this unexpected victory, the battle is not going well for the Light as Darien arrives in Starkadh. He faces his father in a room at the top of a tower whose windows magically reflect the battle going on miles away. Maugrim tries to batter his way into Darien's mind, and when he fails guesses who Darien is. Realizing that a child of his getting binds him into the Loom and thus makes him mortal, he gloats that now he will kill Darien himself and thus restore his immortality. He takes Lökdal from Darien; Darien, seeing the horror and death on the battlefield, at last makes his choice for the Light. When he does so, Lisen's Circlet blazes up, temporarily blinding Maugrim; in that moment Darien steps forward onto the knife, and so Maugrim kills without love in his heart and the curse of Lökdal destroys him. The tide of battle turns and Maugrim's army scatters, but Galadan, who since Lisen's death a thousand years ago has wanted nothing more than the annihilation of everything, blows Owein's Horn to summon the Wild Hunt. They arrive, but before they can begin to destroy everything in Fionavar Leila, far away in Paras Derval but still linked to Finn, slams the double-headed axe down on the altar and demands in the name of the Goddess that he come home. When Finn tries to turn his horse, Iselin throws him and he falls to his death. Ruana of the Paraiko arrives and, telling Owien that since they have once again lost the Child who leads them they must be returned to their slumber, binds them once again as Connla did so long ago -- though he comforts them by saying that one day they will be free again. Paul, recognizing that Galadan's ability to hear the Horn means that he is not altogether evil, leaves him free to go, and Cernan takes him away to find healing. Paul then calls the sea in to wash the plain clean; with the sea comes a boat, and Jennifer/Guinevere, Lancelot and Arthur (who has survived to see the end) are also freed from their penance and sail away together at last. Paul decides to stay in Fionavar with Jaelle, who has stepped aside as High Priestess in favor of Leila. Ceinwen, the Goddess of the Hunt, appears one last time to Dave and reminds him that he cannot remain in Fionavar, but as a final gift she asks him what he would name a child of the andain, a son, if he had one. He chooses the name "Kevin" and he and Kim return to our world. |
5489053 | /m/0dp18y | Moondyne | John Boyle O'Reilly | 1879 | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | In 1848, convict Joe is assigned as a labourer to settled Isaac Bowman in Western Australia. Joe escapes and takes refuge with a tribe of aborigines led by Te Mana Roa, who tell him about a mountain of gold. Bowman recaptures Joe, who tells him about the mine. Bowman goes to the mine, kills the king and loads his horse with gold, but ends up perishing in the desert, leaving Joe with his aboriginal friends. |
5489318 | /m/0dp1lb | The Flanders Panel | Arturo Pérez-Reverte | 1990 | {"/m/0lsxr": "Crime Fiction"} | Julia, an art restorer and evaluator living in Madrid, discovers a painted-over message on a 1471 Flemish masterpiece — appearing as the cover of the book —called La partida de ajedrez (The Chess Game) reading "Qvis Necavit Eqvitem", written in Latin (English: "Who killed the knight?"). With the help of her old friend and father-figure, the flamboyantly homosexual César, and Muñoz, a quiet local chess master, Julia works to uncover the mystery of a 500-year-old murder. At the same time, however, Julia faces danger of her own, as several people helping her along her search are also murdered. |
5489505 | /m/0dp1t9 | The Secret World of Og | Pierre Berton | 1961 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature"} | In this fantasy adventure, four children — Penny, the leader; Pamela, her common-sense sister; Peter, whose life’s ambition is to become a garbageman; and Patsy, who collects frogs in her pockets — set out in search of their baby brother, Paul, better known as “The Pollywog,” who has vanished mysteriously from their playhouse. Accompanied by their fearless pets, the children descend through a secret trapdoor into a strange underground world of mushrooms, whose green inhabitants know only one word: “OG!” |
5490661 | /m/0dp3j4 | The Fourth Bear | Jasper Fforde | null | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | DCI Jack Spratt heads the Berkshire Nursery Crime Division, handling all inquiries involving nursery rhyme characters and other PDRs (persons of dubious reality). After doubts arise concerning his handling of the Great Red-Legg'd Scissorman's arrest and the Red Riding Hood affair, he is suspended pending a mental health review. His DS Mary Mary promises to consult him on all cases, to bypass the suspension. They begin an investigation of porridge-smuggling by anthropomorphic bears. Jack's troubles increase when the argumentative Punches move in next door and his son adopts a sly and sticky-fingered pet. He is forced to reveal to his shocked wife that he is himself a PDR (Person of Dubious Reality). Furthermore, his psychiatrist is particularly sceptical about his claim that his new car repairs itself when no one is watching, and the car salesman who can prove his sanity cannot be found. His self-esteem is somewhat restored when the newspaperman who has been hounding him begs Jack's help in finding his missing sister "Goldilocks". It seems she was working on an explosive story involving cucumber growers. Meanwhile the Gingerbreadman, the notorious murderous biscuit, (or possibly cake, occasionally cookie) escapes custody leaving a trail of bodies; Jack is frustrated when the case is given to an unimaginative officer outside NCD. While Jack and Mary are making enquiries about Goldilocks, they twice encounter the fugitive biscuit, but fail to capture him. It emerges that Goldilocks was involved in the porridge-smuggling after her body is discovered in the grim theme park SommeWorld. Jack begins to suspect the Gingerbreadman is a hired assassin and attempts to question the Quangle-Wangle, a reclusive industrialist. The solution to the mystery involves secret industrial and government conspiracies and the mysterious Fourth bear... After more investigations Jack comes across a cottage of three bears who knew Goldilocks. They say that she ate the little bear's porridge and broke his bed, like the rhyme. He also makes investigations into Ursine Developments, the flats for bears. You came across these at the start of the book when Jack caught them smuggling oats into the flats for oat addicts. This is illegal for bears to eat as well as marmalade,honey and large amounts of porridge as it has the same effect of drugs. |
5490729 | /m/0dp3m8 | Holding the Man | Timothy Conigrave | null | null | In 1976, Timothy Conigrave fell in love with the captain of the football team, John Caleo. So began a relationship that was to last for 15 years, a love affair that weathered disapproval, separation and, ultimately death. With honesty and insight, 'Holding the Man' explores the highs and lows of their life partnership: the intimacy, constraints, temptations, and the strength of heart both men had to find when they tested positive to HIV. The story opens at Kostka, Xavier's junior [preparatory] school in Melbourne. Here, the author begins to sexually experiment with other boys, and comes to the realisation that he is gay. Several years later, on his first day at Xavier College (the Jesuit senior school), Conigrave sees John Caleo for the first time. On the far side of the crush I noticed a boy. I saw the body of a man with an open, gentle face: such softness within that masculinity. He was beautiful, calm. I was transfixed. He wasn't talking, just listening to his friends with his hands in his pockets, smiling. What was it about his face? He became aware that I was looking at him and greeted me with a lift of his eyebrows. I returned the gesture and then looked away, pretending something had caught my attention. But I kept sneaking looks. It's his eyelashes. They're unbelievable. [31] The two form a friendship, and at the suggestion of Pepe, one of Tim's female friends, John is invited to a dinner party at Tim's house. The girls know Tim is in love with John, and 'pass a kiss' around the table for his benefit. Juliet kissed Pepe. Their kiss lingered. Pepe came up for air. 'Tim'. As I kissed her she opened her mouth. Her tongue was exploring mine. I felt trapped. I was afraid to stop kissing her because I knew what was coming. I don't want John to think I'm enjoying this. Before I knew it my hand was on his knee, as if to let him know it was him I wanted. His hand settled on mine as Pepe continued kissing me. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was a virgin being led to the volcano to be sacrificed. I turned to face him. He shut his eyes and pursed his lips. Everything went slow motion as I pressed my mouth against his. His gentle warm lips filled my head. My body dissolved and I was only lips pressed against the flesh of his. I would have stayed there for the rest of my life, but I was suddenly worried about freaking him out and I pulled away. I caught sight of his face - fresh, with chocolate-brown eyes, and a small, almost undetectable smile. [74] A few weeks later, Tim rings John at home, and asks "John Caleo, will you go round with me?" The reply is an unambiguous "Yep". The two graduate from High School in 1977, Tim attending Monash University and John studying to be a chiropractor at College. Despite parental opposition, Conigrave's eventual move to Sydney and NIDA, and youthful experimentation and infidelities, the relationship continues. Tragically, when Tim and John finally move in together in Sydney and are genuinely happy, they are diagnosed with HIV. The year is 1985. Until 1990, the men have relatively mild symptoms. Sadly, in the Autumn of 1991, John begins to rapidly deteriorate, suffering from lymphoma. Tim cares for his partner, whilst nursing symptoms of his own. The misery of HIV/AIDS is laid bare before the reader, with Conigrave sparing nothing in detailing the cruel progression of the disease. He watches as his lover's once-strong body is ravaged. The reader helplessly looks on as the story moves to its devastating conclusion. At Christmas, in 1991, John is admitted to the Fairfield Hospital in Melbourne. A month later, on Australia Day 1992, he dies of an AIDS-related illness, with his lover by his side, gently stroking his hair. Nearly three years later, shortly after finishing 'Holding the Man', Tim Conigrave passes away in Sydney. The final passages of the book are some of its most poignant: I guess the hardest thing is having so much love for you and it somehow not being returned. I develop crushes all the time, but that is just misdirected need for you. You are a hole in my life, a black hole. Anything I place there cannot be returned. I miss you terribly. Ci vedremo lassu, angelo. [286]. |
5490754 | /m/0dp3pq | The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold | Evelyn Waugh | 1957 | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Gilbert Pinfold is a middle-aged Catholic novelist teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown. In an attempt to cure his nerves he doses himself liberally with bromide, chloral and crème de menthe. He books a passage on the SS Caliban, assuming it will be a nice break; however his crisis deepens and he slips into madness. it:La prova di Gilbert Pinfold ru:Испытание Гилберта Пинфолда |
5491759 | /m/0dp5mj | Letter to a Christian Nation | Sam Harris | 2006-09 | {"/m/05h83": "Non-fiction"} | The underlying premise Harris takes is one of utilitarianism. He states: "Questions about Morality are questions about happiness and suffering." Harris addresses his arguments to members of the conservative Christian Right in America. In answer to their appeal to the Bible on questions of morality, he points to selected items from the Old Testament Mosaic law, (death for adultery, homosexuality, disobedience to parents etc.), and contrasts this with, for example, the complete non-violence of Jainism. Harris argues that the reliance on dogma can create a false morality, which is divorced from the reality of human suffering and the efforts to alleviate it; thus religious objections stand in the way of condom use, stem cell research, abortion, and the use of a new vaccine for the human papilloma virus. Harris also addresses the problem of evil—the difficulty in believing in a good God who allows disasters like Hurricane Katrina—and the conflict between religion and science. A 2005 Gallup poll suggested that 53% of Americans are creationists, so Harris spends some time arguing for evolution and against the notion of Intelligent Design. Harris considers the variety of religions in the world, citing a religious basis for many ethnic and inter-communal conflicts. Contrary to those who advocate religious tolerance, mutual respect, and interfaith dialogue, Harris contends that such values only make it more difficult to criticize faith-based extremism. While holding that spiritual experiences can be valuable and life-affirming—he expends considerable space in The End of Faith in arguing that they are necessary—Harris rejects their link to religious beliefs. He argues that religion may have served some useful purpose for humanity in the past, but that it is now the greatest impediment to building a "global civilization." |
5495673 | /m/0dpcxd | The Right to Arm Bears | Gordon R. Dickson | 2000-12 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The planet Dilbia is in a vital spot for both human and Hemnoid space travel. Both are trying to convince the Dilbians to work with them to use the planet as a way station. *Spacial Delivery (Originally published in 1961) In the first story, a biologist is drafted into the diplomatic corps to aid the human ambassador to Dilbia. He sends John Tardy (Half-Pint Posted) to hunt down a Dilbian, the Streamside Terror, who has kidnapped Ty Lamorc (Greasy Face), another human. While being delivered by stalwart Dilbian postman Hill Bluffer, Tardy learns more of the situation, and is attacked and eventually captured by Boy Is She Built (Streamside Terror's girlfriend) and the Hemnoid Tark-ay. Tardy gets free, and learns that things aren't quite as they seem on the planet or with the situation. As he solves the dilemma of rescuing Lamorc, he gains a victory for humanity over the Hemnoids, and a deeper insight into the Dilbians for humanity's future dealings. *Spacepaw (Originally published in 1969) Bill Waltham is a terraforming specialist sent to Muddy Nose village on Dilbia to teach the natives to use basic farming tools. When he arrives, the agricultural group leader and assistant are missing. The assistant, Anita Lyme, has been kidnapped by a local group of bandits led by Bone Breaker. Hill Bluffer returns as a freelance consultant to help Bill (Pick-and-Shovel) continue the Shorty tradition of overcoming tough Dilbian customers. The outlaws are holed up in a valley, and Bill discovers, upon visiting, that Anita is a "guest". The whole story is a plan by Bone Breaker to get beaten by a human, but not lose face, so that he can retire from being an outlaw. *The Law-Twister Shorty (Originally published in 1971) High school student Malcolm O'Keefe is sent in to avoid a diplomatic incident as Gentle Maiden attempts to adopt some stranded human tourists. Village law allows her to do this, and Malcolm must defeat Iron Bender in order to have them released. Instead, he is able to make new laws by moving the Stone of the Mighty Grappler. |
5497401 | /m/0dpgn7 | The Snake, the Crocodile, and the Dog | Barbara Mertz | 1992 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/0hwxm": "Historical novel"} | After returning from their adventure at the Lost Oasis, the Emersons try to get Nefret, their new ward, integrated into English country life. She has difficulty with the immaturity and meanness of girls her age, but is determined to learn the ways of her newly adopted culture. Nefret decides she will stay in England to study while the Emersons return to Egypt as usual in the fall, and Walter and Evelyn Emerson glady take her in. Ramses also decides to stay in England, as his crush on Nefret becomes more obvious to his mother (but no one else). So Amelia and the Professor sail east, to begin a new season with a new project - the complete clearing of an entire archaeological site. Despite Amelia's hopes that this will be a second honeymoon for them, Emerson is kidnapped—but no ransom demand or explanation is forthcoming. Amelia, Abdullah, and their circle of friends scour Luxor for any sign of Emerson, with the help of Cyrus Vandergelt, who appears on the scene just when Amelia needs him most. When Adbullah finally finds Emerson, imprisoned in a backyard shed, Amelia finds out that his captor wants information about their previous year's travels and the possibility of a lost Meroitic civilization (complete with artifacts and treasures to exploit). Unfortunately for the kidnapper, Emerson is the victim of amnesia and doesn't know anything about the Lost Oasis. Unfortunately for Amelia, it turns out Emerson doesn't remember her either—and is just as annoyed by her as when they first met. (See Crocodile on the Sandbank.) Back in England, Ramses and Nefret also seem targeted for abduction, and Ramses' harrowing letters do not add to Amelia's peace of mind. Meanwhile, Cyrus is beginning to look at Amelia with more affection than she expected, but she's not going to give Emerson up without a fight. |
5499267 | /m/0dpldr | The Charnel Prince | Gregory Keyes | 8/17/2004 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | In this sequel to The Briar King, Anne, her maid Austra, and her protectors Cazio and z'Acatto are working to earn passage by sea to her home in Eslen, while trying to keep a low profile. Anne and Austra experience further trials with their friendship and Anne learns more about her destiny and undergoes a transformation into a mature and powerful adult. Sir Neil, against his wishes, and still haunted by the death of his love, Fastia, travels south to find Anne and meets with treachery and unexpected kindness. Meanwhile, Aspar, Winna, and Stephen Darige are tasked by Praifec Hespero to hunt down and kill the awakened Briar King. However, they discover that his presence might not be as harmful as the Church fears and discover more evidence that makes them question the Church's motives. Queen Muriele governs Eslen with a much wiser hand than her husband ever did, but she is faced with many challenges and finds unexpected allies. The book ends with her in prison after a palace coup by her brother-in-law Sir Robert, who has literally returned from the dead, but she has managed to keep her son safe and out of harm's way. In addition to the familiar characters from The Briar King, The Charnel Prince introduced a new main character, a composer and a musical genius Leovigild "Leoff" Ackenzal. Heading to the royal castle to meet the late king William. Leoff accidentally stumbles on an evil plot to drown the Lowlands under waters. He helps to thwart the attempt and becomes a small hero. This helps him to get a position as the court composer and to start his masterwork, an opera-styled musical composition that brings together singers and an orchestra of 30 players for the first time in the history of the world. However, to finish his work, he has to find his way through the complex political situation of the court and the censorship of Praifec Hespero. |
5499708 | /m/0dpm9g | The Sweetest Fig | Chris Van Allsburg | 10/25/1993 | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | Monsieur Bibot is a self-centered wealthy dentist. He lives alone in Paris, France, in a fancy apartment with his dog, Marcel, whom he mistreats, often by beating him over little things, such as sitting on furniture, and he often drags Marcel around town as part of his "walks". Everything in his life seems quite satisfactory until an impoverished old woman stops by his office to get her tooth extracted. He seems to almost enjoy inflicting pain in this woman. After removing the tooth with a pair of pliers, and about to give a prescription for the painkillers, Bibot is upset when the woman can't pay his fee in cash. Instead, she pays him by giving him two figs which she claims will make his dreams come true. Naturally, Bibot scoffs at the thought of magical figs, and refuses to give her the painkillers. Later that evening, Bibot proceeds to eat one of the figs as a midnight snack. The old woman is right: Bibot finds himself walking Marcel in Paris in his underwear, stared at by the passers-by, and the Eiffel Tower has drooped over; everything in the dream that he had last night has come true. Horrified and embarrassed by this mishap, Bibot vows to hypnotize himself to control his dreams so that he may become the richest man on Earth. This typically self-centered plan involves ditching Marcel, who he has continued to harm in more ways than one, for a string of Great Danes from a dream he had the night before. But one day, when Bibot is preparing dinner, the dog gobbles up the second fig sitting on the table. Bibot is furious and chases the dog around the house. Heartbroken over the fig, Bibot goes to sleep. The next morning, however, Bibot wakes up underneath his bed - as the dog. Needless to say, Bibot is horrified and realizes that the dog was dreaming about finally getting his revenge on his cruel master all along. Marcel, who's now in Bibot's form, tells Bibot it's time for his walk. Bibot tries to yell, but all he can do is bark. |
5500123 | /m/0dpmx7 | Modesty Blaise | Peter O'Donnell | 1965 | {"/m/012h24": "Comics", "/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction", "/m/01vnb": "Comic book", "/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/09kqc": "Humour", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | Willie Garvin has lost the will to live. He had worked for Modesty Blaise for six years in The Network, Modesty's criminal organization, and rose to the position of her right-hand man and became her very best friend. Willie was on top of the world. But then Modesty disbanded The Network and retired, and Willie didn't know what to do with himself. He got involved as a mercenary in a South American revolution, but his heart wasn't in it. He was captured and is now sitting in a primitive prison, waiting listlessly to be executed. Fortunately, Sir Gerald Tarrant, head of a British secret service organization, knows about Willie's situation, and he needs the services of Modesty and Willie for a very special mission. Sir Gerald visits Modesty and lays his cards on the table. Modesty is very grateful, and agrees to help Sir Gerald as soon as she has rescued Willie. This is the start of the adventure. Sir Gerald's job turns out to be a perilous intervention against the criminal mastermind Gabriel, who intends to steal a huge consignment of diamonds. The action starts in the south of France, where Willie causes Paco (who is on Gabriel's payroll) to lose his head (literally). On to Egypt, where Modesty and Willie get captured by Gabriel's gang. The diamond heist succeeds, and the action moves to a small island in the Mediterranean where Modesty has to vanquish the incredible Mrs. Fothergill in unarmed combat. But then all of Gabriel's gang are in pursuit, and there is nowhere to run. |
5500192 | /m/0dpm_b | Sabre-Tooth | Peter O'Donnell | 1966 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | Karz is a military leader who has never known defeat. The huge Mongol is now assembling and training a large and well-equipped army of mercenaries in a hidden valley in the Hindu Kush Mountains bordering on Afghanistan. His objective: The invasion and occupation of oil-rich Kuwait. Karz does have one problem though; he lacks a couple of top lieutenants to command two sections of his growing army. His choice falls on Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin, even though he knows they are not for hire. Meanwhile, Sir Gerald Tarrant, who runs a secret service organization under the British government, has noticed that many mercenaries are being recruited by some unknown employer and disappearing. This worries Sir Gerald, and he asks Modesty and Willie to investigate. So while Modesty and Willie are looking for Karz (without knowing who they're looking for), Karz has Lucille (a child dear to Modesty and Willie) kidnapped, and commands Modesty and Willie to report for duty. There is no possible way that Modesty and Willie can both save Lucille and sabotage the invasion of Kuwait. Modesty plays a long shot and is forced to fight the fearsome Twins, two men joined at the shoulders, a four-legged four-armed fighting animal impossible to defeat. And even if she survives that fight, how will Modesty escape from the isolated valley so far from civilization? |
5500227 | /m/0dpn1f | A Taste for Death | Peter O'Donnell | null | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | Canadian Dinah Pilgrim (blind since 11) and her sister Judy are vacationing in Panama. They're attacked on a lonely beach by a pair of gunmen, and Judy is killed and Dinah is taken prisoner. Fortunately, Willie Garvin is nearby and he intervenes, killing the two gunmen, and incidentally determining that they work for Gabriel, the villain from the first Modesty Blaise book. Willie and Dinah go into hiding, knowing that Gabriel can mobilize the entire Panamanian underworld to search for Dinah. Modesty comes to their aid, and a deadly cat-and-mouse game ensues, with both Modesty and Willie barely surviving traps that should not possibly be survivable. Back in England, Modesty encounters Simon Delicata, a huge man with an ape-like build, and strength to match. A friend of Sir Gerald Tarrant is dead, and Simon Delicata is the killer. And Willie knows Simon Delicata from long ago, having been beaten senseless and near-fatally injured by him in a barroom fight. Then Dinah is brutally kidnapped, and it becomes obvious that Gabriel and Simon Delicata are working together. Modesty and Willie travel to Algeria and The Sahara to rescue Dinah. But they're up against the most formidable opponents they've ever crossed swords with. Literally in fact; Modesty has to defeat the fencing master Wenczel in a duel to the death, and he's wearing a protective steel mesh jacket. The final fight, set in an abandoned Foreign Legion fort, occurs with Modesty incapacitated from a serious sword wound and Willie having to go one-on-one unarmed against the man-ape Delicata. |
5500277 | /m/0dpn34 | The Impossible Virgin | Peter O'Donnell | 1971 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | Mischa Novikov had never even considered defecting from Russia until one day when his analysis of a satellite picture of a tiny bit of central Africa awakens an unbridled greed in him. Hidden in an almost inaccessible valley he can see untold riches, and he is the only man on earth who knows about them. Eight months later Novikov dies in a small hospital not far from his hidden treasure, the victim of Brunel's over-zealous torture. And a few days later Modesty Blaise happens by and intervenes when two of Brunel's men start interrogating Doctor Pennyfeather, who had been at Novikov's deathbed. Brunel refuses to accept that Novikov took his secret into the grave with him. The story moves to London where Modesty and Willie Garvin manage to sabotage one of Brunel's operations. But then Lisa, Brunel's adopted daughter, tricks Willie, and in France Brunel turns the tables and captures Modesty and Willie and Dr. Pennyfeather. Back to Africa, to Brunel's plantation, where Modesty finds herself imprisoned, alone and drugged and being brainwashed, while Brunel slowly tortures Dr. Pennyfeather. As if this isn't bad enough, Adrian Chance, Brunel's right-hand man, succumbs to delusions of grandeur and manages to coerce Lisa into killing Brunel. Adrian Chance then vents his deep-rooted hatred for Modesty by locking her and Pennyfeather in a huge cage with a vicious gorilla. But then the fuel store goes up in flames, and the story takes a surprising twist. Finally, during a fight with machetes and quarterstaffs, Modesty sinks lifeless to the ground, and Adrian Chance rushes in for the kill. |
5500325 | /m/0dpn67 | Last Day in Limbo | Peter O'Donnell | 5/6/1976 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | Maude Tiller, one of the few female agents in Sir Gerald Tarrant's secret service, is miserable. Her last assignment involved her having to submit to degrading treatment by Paxero, the man she had been sent to spy on. And she hadn't even learned anything about the rich and enigmatic Paxero to justify the disgusting things she had let herself be subjected to. Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin discover how their good friend Maude has been mistreated, and they decide to teach Paxero a lesson. But when they break into his villa on the outskirts of Geneva they find a Breguet watch that was a gift from Modesty to Danny Chavasse, a very close friend of Modesty's. Everyone thought Danny had died when a cruise ship sank two years ago, but finding his watch indicates that Danny's fate was not as simple as that. This is the start of the journey that leads to Limbo, Paxero's secret and hidden plantation in the jungles of Guatemala. Limbo is farmed by slaves, very special slaves, rich and famous men and women who have been kidnapped and will now spend the rest of their lives at hard labor, watched over by armed guards. The "last day in Limbo" occurs when Paxero decides to shut the plantation down, and orders the guards to kill all of the slaves - which now includes Modesty, who has let herself be captured in order to infiltrate Limbo. Modesty leads a slave uprising, and Willie and Maude arrive just in time after having hacked their way through the jungle. A final battle ensues, with Paxero and his heavily armed guards holed up in the big house, waiting for reinforcements to arrive by airplane. |
5500372 | /m/0dpn89 | Dragon's Claw | Peter O'Donnell | 10/5/1978 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction"} | While sailing a small yacht single-handedly from Australia to New Zealand, Modesty Blaise rescues Luke Fletcher, the world-renowned painter, from drowning. But how in the world did Luke Fletcher end up adrift in the Tasman Sea, after having disappeared in the Mediterranean two months earlier? Luke Fletcher is not the only person from the world of the arts who has disappeared in the last couple of years, but he is the only one who has turned up alive later. Back in England, Modesty and her good friend Willie Garvin refuse to get involved in trying to unravel the mystery, preferring to leave well enough alone. But then Luke Fletcher is killed, and Modesty and Willie make it their goal to find out who is behind it all and bring him/her down. The trail leads back to the Tasman Sea, to Dragon's Claw Island, but Modesty and Willie make a mistake and find themselves in captivity. They've solved the puzzle of why certain people with artistic flair have disappeared, but will they live long enough to make use of this knowledge? Willie, ever the resourceful one, manages to break out of his cell, but then he's recaptured. After that the bad guys don't intend to give Modesty or Willie another chance to escape. They force Modesty to fight a gun duel against the Reverend Uriah Crisp, the gun-toting minister who has proven that he is faster on the draw than Modesty. Modesty is given her own gun and holster, her gun loaded with one bullet. She waits calmly as the crazy priest advances, a prayer book in one hand and a six-shooter on his hip. |
5500432 | /m/0dpnbr | The Xanadu Talisman | Peter O'Donnell | 1981 | {"/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction"} | Nanny Pendergast, the middle-aged Scottish woman who is the driving force behind "El Mico", may not be the typical criminal mastermind. Nevertheless, she and her two young charges, Jeremy and Dominic Silk, have made El Mico the most potent underworld force in North Africa, filling the void left when Modesty Blaise disbanded The Network. El Mico has just achieved its greatest triumph, the clandestine theft of an object of immense value. And El Mico has also suffered its greatest setback; Bernard Martel, one of their top lieutenants, has double-crossed them and stolen the object. Modesty happens to be present when an El Mico assassin tries to kill Bernard Martel, and both Modesty and Willie Garvin are present when Jeremy Silk succeeds in killing him at Modesty's house in Tangier. For Modesty and Willie this signals the start of two parallel quests: To find "the object" and to rescue the beautiful young Tracy Martel, Bernard's wife, who is being held captive as a harem girl in the isolated palace called Xanadu, high in the Atlas Mountains. First Modesty figures out where Bernard Martel has hidden "the object", and she and Willie retrieve it. But then Modesty and Willie are captured by El Mico and find themselves imprisoned in Xanadu. All they have to do now to rescue Tracy Martel is to survive several coliseum-style fights to the death and escape from captivity and free Tracy from the harem and steal a jeep and flee down a slow twisting mountain road with a helicopter full of armed men in hot pursuit. |
5500478 | /m/0dpncs | The Night of Morningstar | Peter O'Donnell | 10/21/1982 | {"/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | "The Watchmen" is an international terrorist organization that has sprung out of nowhere and is making major assaults, for example killing the entire Turkish Embassy staff in Madrid, wrecking a French nuclear power plant, and blowing up a dam in Utah. Nobody knows who they are or what their real motives are. CIA agent Ben Christie, an old friend of Modesty Blaise, is trying to infiltrate The Watchmen. But Modesty runs into Ben in San Francisco and blows his cover. Things go from bad to worse when Modesty tries to hang around to help Ben if necessary and gets captured by The Watchmen. She and Ben are held at gun point on a small fishing boat in San Francisco Bay as The Watchmen make final preparations to destroy the Golden Gate Bridge. Modesty manages to escape, but without gaining any way of localizing The Watchmen. Back in England, she and Willie Garvin eventually get a lead on one of the top leaders of The Watchmen, Major the Earl St. Maur, formerly leader of a British Marine Commando battalion. Following St. Maur's trail to Madeira Island off the coast of Morocco leads to several surprises, not the least of which is that The Watchmen intend to kill the President of the United States and France, and Prime Ministers of United Kingdom and West Germany. This has to be prevented, of course, but before Modesty and Willie can get a warning out they are captured by The Watchmen and imprisoned and drugged such that they can not possibly escape. The Watchmen's plan: To leave Modesty's and Willie's dead bodies at the scene of the attack, clothed in Watchmen uniforms. |
5500564 | /m/0dpnj7 | Dead Man's Handle | Peter O'Donnell | 10/3/1985 | {"/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction"} | The headquarters of "The Hostel of Righteousness" is an old monastery on the small Greek island Kalivari. But this does not imply that the organization is a particularly holy one. On the contrary, Dr. Thaddeus Pilgrim and his followers are among the most unholy people you could have the misfortune of meeting. By chance, Willie Garvin and Modesty Blaise are targeted by Dr. Pilgrim, who has an obsession for creating "interesting scenarios". Dr. Pilgrim sends Sibyl and Kazim, his two top assassins, to England to capture Willie Garvin and bring him to Kalivari under heavy sedation. There Dr. Janos Tyl subjects Willie to the most diabolical brainwashing possible for him; he is made to think that a woman called Delilah has brutally murdered Modesty, and that he must now avenge Modesty's death by killing Delilah. Willie is shown pictures of this she-devil Delilah, in reality pictures of Modesty Blaise. In other words, Willie is now programmed to kill Modesty on sight, at which point he will regain his memory, and presumably go insane when he realizes what he has done. Modesty manages to pick up Willie's trail, and she eventually arrives at Kalivari, waiting until after dark to go ashore. Dr. Pilgrim has ensured that Modesty and Willie encounter each other in the old amphitheater, suddenly seeing each other when the spotlights are switched on. Willie doesn't hesitate a moment, he draws his throwing knife and throws it. The story does not end here, and soon Dr. Pilgrim's obsession with interesting scenarios goes horribly wrong (for him) when Sibyl and Kazim are killed in gladiator-style duels and Dr. Janos Tyl is felled by a heavy round shield thrown frisbee-style by Willie. And finally, the ungodly Dr. Pilgrim meets his fate at the hands of one of his own assassins. |
5500861 | /m/0dpnwd | Jack Maggs | Peter Carey | 1997 | {"/m/0fr3y1": "Parallel novel", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | Set in 19th century London, Jack Maggs is a reworking of the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations. The story centres around Jack Maggs (the equivalent of Magwitch) and his quest to meet his 'son' Henry Phipps (the equivalent of Pip), who has mysteriously disappeared, having closed up his house and dismissed his household. Maggs becomes involved as a servant in the household of Phipps's neighbour, Percy Buckle, as he attempts to wait out Phipps or find him in the streets of London. He eventually cuts a deal with the young and broke up and coming novelist Tobias Oates (a thinly disguised Charles Dickens) that he hopes will lead him to Phipps. Oates, however, has other plans, as he finds in Maggs a character from whom to draw much needed inspiration for a forthcoming novel which he desperately needs to produce. |
5501173 | /m/0dpp7h | Amy Foster | Joseph Conrad | 1901-12 | null | A poor emigrant from Central Europe sailing from Hamburg to America is shipwrecked off the coast of England. The residents of nearby villages, at first unaware of the sinking, and hence of the possibility of survivors, regard him as a dangerous tramp and madman. He speaks no English; his strange foreign language frightens them, and they offer him no assistance. Eventually "Yanko Goorall" (as rendered in English spelling) is given shelter and employment by an eccentric old local, Mr. Swaffer. Yanko learns a little English. He explains that his given name Yanko means "little John" and that he was a mountaineer (a resident of a mountain area — a Goorall), hence his surname. The story's narrator reveals that Yanko hailed from the Carpathian Mountains. Yanko falls in love with Amy Foster, a servant girl who has shown him some kindness. To the community's disapproval, they marry. The couple live in a cottage given to Yanko by Swaffer for having saved his granddaughter's life. Yanko and Amy have a son whom Amy calls Johnny (after Little John). Amy, a simple woman, is troubled by Yanko's behavior, particularly his trying to teach their son to pray with him in his "disturbing" language. Several months later Yanko falls severely ill and, suffering from a fever, begins raving in his native language. Amy, frightened, takes their child and flees for her life. Next morning Yanko dies of heart failure. It transpires that he had simply been asking in his native language for water. |
5502759 | /m/0dprg4 | Inside Outside | Philip José Farmer | null | {"/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | Jack Cull (a pun on the word "jackal") finds himself in a bizarre location called "Hell". A huge sphere with a sun in the center, Hell's population consists of deceased humans and demons; the humans have the same mind and body as when they died, there is no disease or famine, and deaths are reversed within hours. Earthquakes are frequent occurrences. Humans have taken control of Hell, and they have replaced the traditional inscription (as imagined by Dante), "Abandon all hope..." (written in Italian) with a new one: "Do not abandon hope" (written in Hebrew). Cull goes to his workplace, and hears that the mysterious "X", an analogue of Jesus Christ, has been killed by an unruly mob. Along with Phyllis and Fyodor, based on Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jack investigates his death. Travelling into a sewer, they find out that "Hell" is in fact a massive spacecraft, controlled by hyper-moral, ultra-powerful alien beings with the means of capturing many if not most of the souls they come upon, incorporating them in immortal bodies (provided they are fed regularly). However, the capturing of souls is an imperfect process, and many souls are lost to the void. Although the bodies are more or less immortal, there comes a time when the aliens destroy them when they feel the souls have progressed to an acceptable level. Even then, not all of the bodies are destroyed, and some continue on with the spaceship as it travels about the galaxy. |
5504214 | /m/0dpv5_ | Who Killed Kennedy | David Bishop | null | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | The book's credited co-writer, fictional journalist James Stevens, investigates the events occurring in 1970s Britain and the connection between them, the anarchist terrorist Victor Magister (also known as "the Master"), the organisation known as UNIT, their scientific adviser known as "the Doctor" and the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. |
5504833 | /m/0dpw8h | The Gospel According to Adam | Muhammad Aladdin | 2006 | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | A young man walks a scorching Cairo street. At the entrance to the city’s pivotal main square, he notices a succulent girl. Ineluctably drawn into her magnetic field, and the swirling, palpitating square ahead, he starts to fantasize about how he would talk to her, seduce her, rape her, love her, abandon her, cherish her were he, for example, a Brazen Rake, a Brutal Bohemian, a Sensitive Painter, or a Bald Mechanic, jumping from persona to persona as his imaginings become more and more feverish, while in his mind the girl goes through a similar series of transformations. These characters—a circus parade of Egypt’s contemporary human menagerie—are not, however, mere dress-up costumes to be donned and discarded at their author’s whim. They, and others who emerge from the side alleys of his mind, strut their stuff, accost one another, argue, and shout until eventually they leave him, on a scorching Cairo street, peering after an infinite succession of receding, parallel clamorous worlds, from whose possibilities he must draw his own conclusions. |
5504986 | /m/0dpwgf | Atlantis Mystery | null | null | null | During a speleological expedition deep in the caves of the Azores, Blake and Mortimer are cut off by their old enemy Olrik, trapping them in a gaseous cavern. Surviving the odds, they are captured by a race of technologically advanced men ... who claim to be descendants of survivors from Atlantis! Then, immersed in a sinister plot led by Commander Magon to topple the wise Basileus and lead modern Atlantis in conquest of the surface world, they ally themselves with Crown Prince Ikaros to thwart Magon's megalomaniac plans. But the outcome is far from certain... |
5507751 | /m/025thwq | Race, Evolution and Behavior | J. Philippe Rushton | null | null | The book grew out of Rushton's 1989 paper, "Evolutionary Biology and Heritable Traits (With Reference to Oriental-White-Black Difference)". The 1st unabridged edition was published in 1995, the 2nd unabridged edition in 1997, and the 3rd unabridged edition in 2000. Rushton argues that Mongoloids, Caucasoids, and Negroids fall consistently into the same one-two-three pattern when compared on a list of 60 different behavioral and anatomical variables. (Rushton's 2000 book, like other population history works, e.g. Cavalli-Sforza 1994, uses the terms Mongoloid, Caucasoid, and Negroid to describe these groups broadly conceived, but these terms have since been replaced in the scientific literature—the MeSH terminology as of 2004 is Asian Continental Ancestry Group, African Continental Ancestry Group and European Continental Ancestry Group.)The decline in usage of these terms can be seen year by year in a Google Scholar search, and the change of terms can be seen in, for example, the US National Library of Medicine's Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), which in deleted the -oids (as well as terms such as Black and White) in favor of terms such as African Continental Ancestry Group: The MeSH descriptor Racial Stocks, and its four children (Australoid Race, Caucasoid Race, Mongoloid Race, and Negroid Race) have been deleted from MeSH in 2004 along with Blacks and Whites. Race and ethnicity have been used as categories in biomedical research and clinical medicine. Recent genetic research indicates that the degree of genetic heterogeneity within groups and homogeneity across groups make race per se a less compelling predictor. Rushton uses averages of hundreds of studies, modern and historical, to assert the existence of this pattern. Rushton's book is focused on what he considers the three broadest racial groups, and does not address other populations such as South East Asians or Australian aboriginals. The book argues that Mongoloids, on average, are at one end of a continuum, that Negroids, on average, are at the opposite end of that continuum, and that Caucasoids rank in between Mongoloids and Negroids, but closer to Mongoloids. His continuum includes both external physical characteristics and personality traits. Citing genetic research by Cavalli-Sforza, the African Eve hypothesis, and the out of Africa theory, Rushton writes that Negroids branched off first (200,000 years ago, Caucasoids second 110,000 years ago, and Mongoloids last 41,000 years ago), arguing that throughout all of evolution, more ancient forms of life (i.e. plants, bacteria, reptiles) are less evolved than more recent forms of life (i.e. mammals, primates, humans) and that the much smaller variation in the races is consistent with this trend. "One theoretical possibility," said Rushton "is that evolution is progressive and that some populations are more advanced than others". Rushton argues that this evolutionary history correlates with, and is responsible for, a consistent global racial pattern which explains many variables such as worldwide crime statistics or the global distribution of AIDS. {| class="wikitable" |- | colspan=4 | Claimed Average Differences Among Blacks, Whites, and Orientals from Race, Evolution, and Behavior |- | || Blacks || Whites || Orientals¹ |- | colspan=4 | Brain size |- | Cranial capacity (cubic centimeters) || 1,267 || 1,347 || 1,364 |- | Cortical neurons (millions) || 13,185 || 13,665 || 13,767 |- | colspan=4 | Intelligence |- | IQ test scores || 85 || 100 || 106 |- |- | Cultural achievements || Low || High || High |- | colspan=4 | Reproduction |- | 2-egg twinning (per 1000 births) || 16 || 8 || 4 |- | Hormone levels || Higher || Intermediate || Lower |- | Sex characteristics || Larger || Intermediate || Smaller |- | Intercourse frequencies || Higher || Intermediate || Lower |- | Permissive attitudes || Higher || Intermediate || Lower |- | Sexually transmitted diseases || Higher || Intermediate || Lower |- | colspan=4 | Personality |- | Aggressiveness || Higher || Intermediate || Lower |- | Cautiousness || Lower || Intermediate || Higher |- | Impulsivity || Higher || Intermediate || Lower |- | Self-concept || Higher || Intermediate || Lower |- | Sociability || Higher || Intermediate || Lower |- | colspan=4 | Maturation |- | Gestation time || Shorter || Longer || Longer |- | Skeletal development || Earlier || Intermediate || Later |- | Motor development || Earlier || Intermediate || Later |- | Dental development || Earlier || Intermediate || Later |- | Age of first intercourse || Earlier || Intermediate || Later |- | Age of first pregnancy || Earlier || Intermediate || Later |- | Lifespan || Shortest || Intermediate || Longest |- | colspan=4 | Social organization |- | Marital stability || Lower || Intermediate || Higher |- | Law abidingness || Lower || Intermediate || Higher |- | Mental health || Low || Intermediate || Higher |- | colspan=4 align=right | Source: 2nd Special Abridged edition, Race, Evolution, and Behavior (p. 9). |} Rushton writes that his collection of 60 different variables can be unified by a single evolutionary dimension known as the r and K scale. His theory attempts to apply the inter-species r/K selection theory to the much smaller inter-racial differences within the human species. While all humans display extremely K-selected behavior, Rushton believes the races vary in the degree to which they exhibit that behavior. He argues that Negroids use a strategy more toward an r-selected strategy (produce more offspring, but provide less care for them) while Mongoloids use the K strategy most (produce fewer offspring but provide more care for them), with Caucasoids exhibiting intermediate tendencies in this area. He further asserts that Caucasoids evolved more toward a K-selected breeding strategy than Negroids because of the harsher and colder weather encountered in Europe, while the same held true to a greater extent for Mongoloids. Rushton argues that the survival challenges of making warm clothes, building durable shelter, preserving food, and strategically hunting large animals all selected genes for greater intelligence and social organization among the populations that migrated to cold climates. Rushton invokes genetics to explain his data arguing that purely environmental theories fail to elegantly explain what he sees as such a consistent pattern of both behavioral and physiological differences, but instead just provide a long list of ad hoc explanations. Rushton argues that science strives to organize and simplify data, and seeks the simplest explanation possible, and claims that r/K selection theory explains all of his data parsimoniously. |
5507953 | /m/0dq09y | The Wild Geese | Mori Ogai | null | {"/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/01qxvh": "Romance novel", "/m/0hwxm": "Historical novel"} | Suezo, a moneylender, is tired of life with his nagging wife, so he decides to take a mistress. Otama, the only child of a widower merchant, wishing to provide for her aging father, is forced by poverty to become the moneylender's mistress. When Otama learns the truth about Suezo, she feels betrayed, and hopes to find a hero to rescue her. Otama meets Okada, a medical student, who becomes both the object of her desire and the symbol of her rescue. |
5508711 | /m/0dq1p9 | After the First Death | Robert Cormier | 1979 | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | After the First Death describes the terrorist hijacking of a summer camp bus full of children. The main characters include Kate, a high school student driving the bus, Miro, one of the terrorists, and Ben, the son of a general for an anti-terrorism group. The story is mostly written from the point of view of Kate, Miro and Ben, switching back and forth, and brief sections are told from the point of view of some other characters. Kate is driving the bus when it is hijacked by four terrorists, Miro, Artkin, Antibbe and Stroll. The terrorists force Kate to drive the bus to an old, worn-down railroad bridge, where a drawn-out siege begins, the terrorists threatening to kill one child for every attack by the police or death of a terrorist. The terrorists are working to "free" their homeland, which is never named specifically but could be assumed from their descriptions to be a Middle Eastern, or African Country. |
5509095 | /m/0dq2bb | Un Lun Dun | China Miéville | 2007-01 | {"/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The book begins with two twelve-year old girls, Zanna and Deeba, who have begun to notice several strange things happening around them, all of them centering on Zanna. After she and her friends are attacked by a dark cloud, Zanna spends the next two nights at Deeba's house. Deeba is awoken in the middle of the night and spies a moving broken umbrella. The girls follow it into the basement of a building, where they are drawn through a gap between the worlds of London and Un Lun Dun (or UnLondon). UnLondon is a nonsensical mirror version of London, inhabited by various creatures and animated items who have been discarded by the inhabitants on London. A boy named Hemi saves them from a roving pile of trash but is later shooed away by the tailor Obaday Fing who reveals that the boy is a ghost who was trying to get close enough to them to possess one of them. In conversation he realizes that Zanna is the "Shwazzy", a prophesied chosen one who is destined to save UnLondon from the Smog - an evil, sentient cloud of pollution. With the help of Fing, Skool (a friend of Fing's in an old-fashioned diving suit), Conductor Jones, Rosa the bus driver, and the Slaterunners (a tribe of people who walk only on roofs), Zanna and Deeba make their way to the Propheseers where they learn more about the Smog. Apparently, after the Smog was created in London, a group of weatherwitches called the "Armets" battled it with a magic weapon called the "Klinneract." However, the Smog was not killed. Instead, it travelled to UnLondon. It is prophesied in The Book (a talking tome) that the Shwazzy would come one day and save UnLondon. But, in spite of what is prophesied, Zanna fails in her first battle against the Smog. Brokkenbroll, master of broken umbrellas (or unbrellas) arrives in time to shoo the Smog away using a new technique he and Benjamin Unstible (a Propheseer who was presumed dead) came up with. Zanna is severely injured and is sent home with Deeba with her memories of the city erased. Instead, the city turns to Brokkenbroll and Unstible who begin handing out Smog-resistant unbrellas to defend the people of UnLondon. However, Deeba, who still remembers UnLondon, begins to search for things related to it on the internet, hoping she can find someone to talk to. She discovers that Armets is really RMetS. This leads her to question everything she's learned. Upon further investigation she discovers that Unstible has been reported dead but that he had been studying the Clean Air Act. Just as UnLondoners misheard "RMetS" as "Armets," they misheard "Clean Air Act" as "Klinneract." She decides to travel back to UnLondon. After several tries, she finally finds a way back. She goes to Wraithtown, the town of ghosts, where, with the help of Hemi she verifies Unstible's death and sets out to warn the Propheseers. Unfortunately, on the way, Deeba and Hemi are taken to Brokkenbroll, who is revealed to be working with the Smog, which has re-animated Benjamin Unstible's body. They escape to warn the Propheseers, who refuse to listen to her. They run from them as well, escaping with The Book, which, although it has proved to be less-than-accurate, agrees to help them fulfil the Shwazzy's tasks and defeat the Smog in the limited time Deeba has before everyone in London forgets that she exists (this happens to everything that comes to UnLondon). With the help of Obaday, Rosa, Jones; the utterlings Diss, Bling and Cauldron; Yorick Cavea and Curdle the milk carton; Deeba and Hemi collect the UnGun, an ultimate weapon which can be loaded with anything. Deeba, under the banner of 'the Unchosen One', uses it to defeat the Smog and save UnLondon. Since Deeba takes Zanna's place as the savior of UnLondon, she is called "the UnChosen." On Zanna's first day at Kilburn Comprehensive, Deeba is able to make her laugh, something most people can't do. She likes to do things her own way, and is not your stereotypical hero. Along the way, she is joined by her pet milk carton, Curdle, and a talking prophecy book that often gets information wrong. Zanna has the title "the Shwazzy," which is related to the French adjective "choisi," meaning "chosen". She hates her given name, "Susanna," but she hates "Sue" even more. She is tall and striking, with blond hair, but she always tries to stay in the background. This doesn't work very well. When she is attacked by a Smog-Junkie, a servant of the Smog, in UnLondon, she breathes in Smog and falls ill. Zanna is sent back to London by Brokkenbroll, leader of unbrellas, with her memories of UnLondon erased forever. Hemi is a half-ghost - the result of a union between an UnLondoner and a dead Londoner. While normal ghosts cannot speak in a way that non-ghosts can hear them, Hemi can speak to both ghosts and non-ghosts. He has trouble fitting-in because both ghosts and non-ghosts despise him for being a 'half-breed'. Most inhabitants of Wraithtown do not have to eat. Since Hemi does, he's taken to stealing or "extreme shopping," as he calls it. The Smog is a living gas cloud that was created by a different mixture of chemicals in the air of London. It thinks of no one but itself and consuming new gases to add to its mixture. It is also hungry for knowledge and absorbs any information contained in books that are burned and their smoke added to the mixture. The Smog attacked London years ago but was beaten by the "Klinneract", which was really the 1956 Clean Air Act, seeped into UnLondon, and is now trying to take over UnLondon. Working for it is Brokkenbroll, the leader of unbrellas, or broken umbrellas from London. It creates servants from its Smog, such as Smombies, or corpses re-animated with Smog, Smoglodytes, disfigured creatures made from Smog, and Smog-Junkies, humans forced to be addicted to the Smog. |
5511036 | /m/0dq5s8 | The Green Odyssey | Philip José Farmer | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | The Green Odyssey is a relatively straightforward adventure story, involving an astronaut named Alan Green stranded on a primitive planet, where he is claimed as a gigolo by a duchess and is married to a slave woman. Upon hearing of two other stranded astronauts, he escapes from the duchess, and sets sail to find them. However, because of the peculiar geography of the planet, there is a vast expansive plain, instead of an ocean to cross. Green uses a ship equipped with large rolling pin-like wheels along the bottom to traverse the plains of this world. After his escape from the duchess he is followed by his slave woman wife and her children (one is his). There follow several fairly standard adventure plots with cannibals, pirates, floating islands (that turn out to be giant lawnmowers), and the deus ex machina, a female black cat named Lady Luck. |
5511039 | /m/0dq5s_ | Mutineers' Moon | David Weber | 1991-10 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | The book’s premise is that the moon is a massive space ship controlled by a self-aware computer that wants its rightful crew back aboard. The book begins with a prologue recording a mutiny aboard the planetoid-sized Utu-class starship of the Fourth Imperium (a 55,000+ year old technologically advanced multi-star system empire), the Dahak, led by its Chief of Engineering, the ambitious and psychopathic Captain Anu. Anu's ostensible reason for mutiny is to lead his followers to refuge on some remote planet where presumably the genocidal wrath of the "Achuultani", a mysterious alien race that periodically exterminates all intelligent life it can find, and which has destroyed the previous two Imperiums, will pass over them. The loyal crew is taken by surprise, and unable to defeat the mutineers. Faced with no choice, the captain orders Dahak to execute "Red Two Internal"—a command which will flood the entirety of the interior of the vessel with extremely deadly gases and compounds; this action will force both mutineers and loyalists to the lifeboats, and the vessel will then, acting on its other orders from the captain, allow back in the Dahak only the loyal crew and blow the disloyal members out of space. Red Two unfortunately entails the death of the captain as well. Because of his death, he is unable to command Dahak to destroy the mutineers as they leave aboard warships, not lifeboats, and the captain is equally unable to undo Anu's systematic sabotage of the power generators, intended to kill Dahak by starving it of power and thereby rendering it open to conquest by Anu's forces. Unfortunately for Anu, Dahaks computer systems catch the sabotage before it utterly wrecks all the power plants, but the damage is so severe that it is forced to cease all communications and non-necessary expenditures of power. Indeed, the damage takes decades to repair—by which point none of the loyal crew is still alive or able to contact the Dahak, which places the ship in a dilemma in which it cannot return to the Imperium as it has been ordered to, but nor can it exterminate the mutineers as other, equally important, orders dictate. This impasse lasts for approximately 50,000 years, until the Earthling's early space program sends up one Lieutenant Commander Colin MacIntyre to map the dark side of the heavenly body Dahak had camouflaged itself as—the Moon, as a "dress rehearsal" for a similar trip scheduled for Mars. His mission is hijacked by Dahak and his death is faked; had MacIntyre returned with his data, Dahak’s cover would have been blown. While aboard, Dahak (the AI, not the vessel proper) explains the situation to MacIntyre, and prevails upon him to, as a descendant of the loyalists, to become Dahak’s newest captain, and to quickly exterminate the mutineers—quickly, because Imperium installations are being methodically destroyed, sure signs of the beginning of the latest Achuultani incursion. MacIntyre reluctantly accepts. The first step to making him the true captain is to massively revamp his body surgically, granting him nigh superhuman resilience, speed, and strength, in addition to the built-in electronics granting matchless control of Imperium technology. While Dahak has known for thousands of years where Anu's forces have bunkered up—under the South Pole in Antarctica—their base is protected by extremely strong force fields, force fields so strong that to penetrate them and destroy the base would require Dahaks heavy weaponry, which would inevitably kill a significant percentage of the human population of Earth; an untenable action, to say the least. MacIntyre returns to his old home to renew contacts with his elder brother, Sean, and to enlist him in a scheme to discover the mutineers' agent in the space program. It initially succeeds, but when he and Sean attempt to contact the agent, they discover their scan of the space program building was detected, and that it was a trap. MacIntyre and Sean fend off some of the mutineers (at the cost of Sean's life), but is rescued by an acquaintance, who sends him through a tunnel where he is captured by another group of mutineers. This group, led by former missile tech Horus, was a dissident splinter faction of Anu's, which turned against him after the mutiny. Despite supporting Anu during the mutiny itself, Horus and his crew committed a double mutiny against Anu and fled into hiding on Earth. Once they reached Earth, they entered stasis so that the crew would be able to survive however long it would take for civilization to reappear on Earth (Anu at the time enforced primativism). Now, with civilization and technology emerging on Earth, his group has begun a passive, behind-the-scenes war against Anu. Because they are heavily outnumbered in weaponry, they have been forced to always play it very carefully. As a result, the crew of the battleship has created a huge network of humans, many of whom are descendants of Nergal's crew. However, the arrival of the MacIntyre means that the end has begun, for Dahak has at last taken a hand in the game. Eventually, this group and its battleship, the Nergal, joins MacIntyre, and they embark on a grand plan to destroy Anu: first, they rapidly and effectively destroy a number of important installations that Anu's terrorists and other forces are based out of (convincing Anu to withdraw all of his important personnel back to the main base), then they have their agents inside the Antarctica base steal the codes to gain access for them; finally, they fake a major defeat, and when Anu relaxes, certain that they were cowed and hurt, their now-at-liberty agents send them the codes and they launch a full assault, backed up by Dahak's orbital weaponry. The assault costs them dearly, but Anu is killed and his forces captured or dead. With the full revelation of Dahak’s power, the world's governments have little choice but to submit to the Planetary Governor MacIntyre. However, Colin has little time to unify the world, because the Achuultani draw ever nearer, and the Imperium is silent, even when Dahak’s communication systems are repaired. At the end, MacIntyre leaves the world under the care of old Horus, and departs for the nearest Fleet Imperium base, hoping to call upon Imperial assistance. |
5512550 | /m/0dq7qf | The Keeper of the Isis Light | Monica Hughes | 1980 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature"} | The story begins with Olwen and Guardian, who live alone on the planet of Isis, manning the Isis Light, the means with which they communicate with Earth. It is Olwen's 16th birthday (10th on Isis), and Guardian tells her that settlers are coming from Earth. Olwen is in distress thinking that these settlers will ruin her perfect world. Guardian explains that she must wear a special protective suit to protect her from the viruses and bacteria the settlers might be carrying. One of the younger settlers, Mark London, falls in love with Olwen, and Olwen wishes Guardian to allow her to see Mark without her suit. Guardian refuses. One day, Mark overhears Guardian discussing some of Olwen's blood samples with Dr. Macdonald and he thinks Olwen might be in trouble so he climbs up towards her house. He suffers an accident and falls from the top of Lighthouse Mesa because of Olwen's appearance. Later, Guardian tells Olwen the truth about the death of her parents, and that her mother gave care of Olwen to him. To keep Olwen safe, he changed her genetically, so the ultraviolet rays from Isis' sun, Ra, would not harm her, so she could climb to the heights, as Isis is a planet of mountains. When the settlers see Olwen as her true self, they are disgusted, and Olwen refuses to wear the suit or see any of the settlers again. Then there is a solar storm and Olwen goes out and rescues a young boy, Jody, who was outside in it. The settlers do not know how to react. The story ends with Olwen deciding to leave the settlers' valley, Cascade Valley, and live in isolation with Guardian and her "dog" which is really a dragon, Little Hobbit. We also find out that Guardian is actually a robot called DaCoP (Data Collector and Processor). |
5513825 | /m/0dq9p7 | Echoes of the great song | David Gemmell | null | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The Avatars were immortal and lived like kings - even though their empire was dying. Their immortality was guaranteed by magic crystals, crystals whose influence was now waning. But when two moons appeared in the sky, and the ruthless armies of the Crystal Queen swarmed across the land, bringing devastation and terror, the Avatars united with their subjects to protect their universe. The story is set in the world of the Avatars - an immortal race of humans, who are convinced that they are gods, undying. Their empire was destroyed when the seas upturned. A few - around 200 - escaped when one of the spiritual leaders, Questor Anu, predicted the fall of the world. The group of 200 moved north from the city of Parapolis, to the city of Pagaru. The day after they arrived, the world was turned upside down, and Questor Anu gained the title of The Holy One. Other than the group who travelled with Questor Anu, the Holy One, about 300 other Avatars survived the end of the world. The Avatars rely upon magic crystals to keep them alive and healthy. Their power is fading, however, and an expedition attempts to recharge power chests by creating a link with their great power source within the previous capital city, Parapolis, which was covered in ice. They succeed - partly - charging four of the six chests. The chests are used to power the only Avatar ship, the Serpent Seven, as well as recharge the primary Avatar weapons - the zhi-bow. The zhi-bow is a bow that shoots the equivalent of plasma bolts. The humans who are ruled by the Avatars, known as the Vagars, are starting a secret rebellion in the remaining cities of the Avatar. The group calls themselves the Pajists - a group set out to see the fall of the Avatar. The Pajists are a group of assassins who are headed by a Vagar woman known as Mejana. Mejana is motivated to bring down the Avatar Empire by the killing of her daughter, who disobeyed the race laws by falling in love with an Avatar. She was crystal-drawn, meaning that her life force was sucked out of her and into the crystals of the Avatar, which grant them immortality. Crystal drawing cannot be infinitely continued, however, so Anu the Holy One begins the construction of a great pyramid which will supposedly absorb the suns energy and then power the crystals of the Avatar. However, the real purpose behind the pyramid is to destroy all the Crystals, as Anu foresaw the arrival of foreign invaders, led by a great crystal power. There are greater problems for the Avatar and the people with them, however. A people known as the Almecs, who are headed by Almeia, the Crystal Queen, managed to avoid the fall of their own world by teleporting their continent to the world of the Avatars. They learn of the Avatars, and their fragile position in the world. Thinking the Avatars will realize the obvious, they sail to the new capital city, Egaru, where they are greeted courteously by the Avatar rulers. They give a blunt message: hand over power to the Almecs and live, or fight and die. The Avatar council decides to fight, as they believe the war is winnable. Using the power of the Sunfire, a giant laser beam, they sink several Almec ships and force them off. The treasures of the other cities, power chests and the remaining Avatars, are called back to Egaru, which the Avatar council claims is easier to defend. From now on, the Avatar leadership moves fast. It reaches out to the nomad tribes and to the king of the 'mud men', Vagars living in an ordered society outside of Avatar rule. This move largely fails, with the mud men refusing help and subsequently being slaughtered. The next move on behalf of the Avatars is to repair ties with their Vagar underlings, largely the order known as the Pajists. The leader, Mejana, eventually comes over to the Avatar side, but many changes to the way things are run are made. The Avatar council becomes half Avatar, half Vagar, and the army's officers the same. This, however, leads to many poor decisions in the field, and the Almecs manage to besiege Egaru. After a long and costly fight for both sides, the Almec General, Cas-Coatl, proposes a truce between the two sides. The Vagar population will be slaughtered in order to feed the Crystal Queen's thirst for blood, but the Avatars will survive and be allowed into the Almec society. The Avatars gather in the town hall together to discuss this, but as they are doing so, Almeia, the Crystal Queen, discovers the true purpose of Anu's pyramid, which will destroy her when complete. She immediately orders the deaths of the Avatars, who were clustered together. The siege weapons of the Almecs kill all the Avatar who were not warrior males. Rael, the Questor General and leader of the Avatars, surrounds himself with the remaining members of his endangered species, his warriors. They, distraught over the extinction of their species, as all the females have been killed, prepare for a death ride. They charge the Almec line, hoping to destroy their siege weapons. They succeed, but all save one are killed. This move gives the Vagars time to mobilize, and they defeat the Almecs. fr:L'Écho du grand chant |
5514133 | /m/0dqb3x | Conundrum | null | null | {"/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | The book Conundrum follows a boat of gnomes, named the Indestructable, to sail around the world of Krynn. However, when they reach the doorway to the bottom of Krynn, things change. |
5515184 | /m/0dqcpp | Cuckoo's Egg | C. J. Cherryh | 1985-03 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | The back-story presented in the novel describes the first contact between the Shonunin and humans, which occurred when a damaged human probe with five crewmembers entered the Shonunin's home system. The contact, however, turned violent. It was not clear who fired the first shot, but the Shonunin, who had only recently put themselves into space, chased the crippled human ship for two years (the ship had lost the ability to jump through hyperspace) before overpowering it. Having suffered losses themselves, the Shonunin killed all the humans aboard. They knew the probe had been sending messages out of the solar system and the Shonunin, incapable of interstellar travel themselves, now feared retribution from the technologically superior humans. A Shonun, Dana Duun Shtoni no Lughn (Duun), was charged with the task of saving the Shonunin world from the potential threat the humans posed. Duun's solution was to raise a human child to adulthood who could serve as an emissary to his race and hopefully prevent a major conflict when humans return to the Shonunin system. Scientists cloned one of the dead human crewmembers to produce the male human child, whom Duun named Haras, meaning Thorn. Raising a human in their midst, an alien and the enemy, sparked fear among the Shonunin, but Duun elected to undertake the task himself, uncertain whether the creature would turn on him. The novel is set during the period following Thorn's birth, and the first chapters concern Thorn's infancy and early childhood. As Thorn grows, Duun trains him according to the ways of the warrior Guild to which Duun belongs, the Hatani. The Hatani are a class of warrior-judges revered by most Shonunin, and Duun believes that raising Thorn under the Hatani code will be the best possible preparation for the boy's eventual ambassadorial duties. To be Hatani is to be respected but isolated. But by raising Thorn to be one of their Hatani, he makes Thorn part of the framework of society, not an isolated experiment. *Dana Duun Shtoni no Lughn (Duun) – a Shonun of the Hatani warrior Guild. (Cherryh has stated that she based the character Duun in large part on her own father.) *Haras (Thorn) – a Human, raised by Duun as an Hatani *Betan – a fellow student and Thorn's first love interest *Sagot – a teacher |
5516305 | /m/0dqfg8 | The Lioness | Nancy Varian Berberick | 6/1/2002 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The evil green dragon Beryl oppresses the kingdom of Qualinesti with the aid of her Dark Knights. A resistance leader, a mysterious Kagonesti woman who is known as 'The Lioness' arises to battle her. |
5516915 | /m/0dqh5l | Dark Thane | Miller Lau | 2003-11 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | After a series of ugly battles and incidents, the dwarven community becomes increasingly isiolationist in its city under the mountains. Unfortunately dark magic, backstabbings, betrayal and power grabs threaten to destroy the already destabilized dwarf society. A Thane is a ruler of a dwarven faction. |
5517226 | /m/0dqhv5 | Vampirates: Demons of the Ocean | Justin Somper | 6/6/2005 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/03npn": "Horror", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature"} | The year is 2505. The oceans have risen. A new era of piracy is dawning. A vicious storm separates twins Connor and Grace Tempest, destroying their boat and leaving them fighting for their lives in the cruel, cold water. Picked up one of the more notorious pirate ships, Connor soon finds himself wielding a cutlass. But does he have the stomach to be a pirate? Grace finds herself aboard a more mysterious ship of vampire pirates |
5517347 | /m/0dqj6b | Spin | Robert Charles Wilson | 2005 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The story opens when Tyler Dupree is twelve years old. Tyler and his mother live in a guest house on the property of aerospace millionaire E.D. Lawton and his alcoholic wife Carol. Tyler is friends with the couple's fourteen year old twins Jason, a brilliant student who is being groomed to take over the family business, and Diane, whom Tyler is in love with. One night while stargazing, the three children witness all the stars simultaneously disappear. Telecommunications suffer as every satellite falls out of orbit simultaneously. It turns out that an opaque black membrane, later dubbed a "spin membrane" has been placed around the entire earth. Eventually it is determined that the membrane has slowed down time so that approximately 3.7 years pass outside the membrane for every second within. The membrane is permeable to spacecraft, but protects the earth from the harmful effects of concentrated stellar radiation and cometary impact. A simulated sun on the inside of the membrane allows for a largely normal life cycle to continue on earth. However, the greatly increased passage of time outside the membrane means that all life on earth will end in a few decades when the sun's expansion makes that region of the solar system uninhabitable. The membrane is apparently being controlled by a pair of city sized objects floating over both of Earth's poles. A Chinese attack on the devices using nuclear weapons causes a brief visual disturbance of the membrane but not change in the time dilation and other attempts to interfere with it are called off. In the wake of what becomes known as "the Spin", Jason studies science and joins his father at Perihelion an aerospace research firm which eventually gets folded into the government and coordinates efforts to deal with the Spin. Tyler, attends medical school and becomes a doctor, while Diane marries a man named Simon and deals with the Spin through a newfound religious faith. Jason eventually rises to run the day to day operations of Perihelion and hires Tyler as staff physician. Jason explains that Perihelion intends to terraform Mars by releasing bacteria and plant seeds to change the habitat into one that is survivable by humans. Because of time dilation this process, which will occur over millions of years, will be finished in a few months of subjective Earth time. When the terraforming is complete, Perihelion and its counterparts in other nations launch manned colonization missions to Mars. While months pass on Earth these colonists will have hundreds of thousands of years to build a Martian civilization and possibly discover more about the Spin and the alien Hypotheticals responsible for it. A mere two years after the terraforming process begins, they receive satellite images confirming the existence of sophisticated human civilizations on Mars. Soon afterwards Mars is enclosed in its own Spin membrane. Before the membrane went up the Martians sent their own manned mission to Earth. The Martian ambassador, Wun Ngo Wen, is part of a civilization hundreds of thousands of years old which has been experimenting with high end biotechnology for centuries. Jason, who has developed an acute form of multiple sclerosis which is incurable by terrestrial medicine, takes a Martian bioegineering product which extends his life by decades, putting him into a fourth stage of life past adulthood. Jason and Wun Ngo Wen then intend to seed nanotechnology through the outer solar system. This technology will eventually expand to other star systems over the course of millions of years and search for other worlds enclosed by Spin membranes, hopefully discovering why they were created and if anything can be done to stop them. Wun Ngo Wen is accidentally killed shortly after this, but the plan moves ahead. Tyler leaves Perihelion after being betrayed by his girlfriend, and moves to California. There he gets a desperate call from Dian's husband, Simon, stating that she is terribly sick. Diane and Simon had moved from mainstream religious belief to join a more cult like fringe movement which was trying to hasten the second coming through genetic engineering of cattle. As Tyler heads to meet Diane the Spin membrane seems to falter and fail, allowing the stars to return to the sky. The next day, the sun rises huge and red in the sky causing terrible heat and high winds. Thousands across the world panic as the apparent end has come. Tyler finds Diane suffering from a fatal cardiovascular disease which crossed from cows to humans. The only cure is to give her the same treatment that Jason has taken. He and Simon drive Diane back to Diane's childhood home where Tyler had hidden some of the biotech along with notes from Wun Ngo Wen. He discovers that Jason is there, dying of a mysterious ailment. Jason explains that he has become a human receiver for the nanotechnology which they have seeded throughout the galaxy. He also explains his conclusions about the nature of the Hypotheticals and the Spin. The Hypotheticals are intelligent von neumann machines which were spread throughout the galaxy billions of years previously. Horrified at the rise and fall of biological societies they saw around them they devised a plan whereby they would enclose planets on the verge of societal collapse in Spin membranes to slow their advancement until a way could be found to save them. Jason dies shortly after explaining this and has Tyler mail copies of the information to trusted informants. Tyler gives the Martian treatment to Diane, who recovers. Shortly after the membrane partially reasserts itself, allowing the stars to be seen, and synchronizing earth time with that of the universe, but filtering the solar radiation to a survivable level. It's discovered that the Spin membrane had been retracted in order to let a massive ring shaped object descend and embed itself in the Indian Ocean. The "Arch", as it becomes known, acts as a portal to another world, one engineered by the Hypotheticals to give mankind a new chance at life. A decade after the appearance of the Arch, Diane and Tyler, now married, flee from agents of the US government who seek to arrest them for possessing forbidden Martian technology. Tyler takes the same cure the Lawton's did, becoming a "Fourth" himself, and the two pass through the Arch with a group of Indonesian refugees. |
5519382 | /m/0dqmlp | Mosquitoes | William Faulkner | 1927 | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/01z4y": "Comedy"} | Mosquitoes opens in the apartment of one of the story’s main characters, a reserved and dedicated sculptor named Gordon. Ernest Talliaferro, a friend of the artist, joins him in the apartment, watching intently as the Gordon chisels away at a sculpture. Talliaferro engages the sculptor in a largely one-sided ‘conversation’ about his abilities with women. The artist works around the chatty Talliaferro, indifferently agreeing with every claim and question, yet declines the offer to attend an evidently aforementioned boat trip hosted by the wealthy Mrs. Maurier. Leaving the apartment to get a bottle of milk for Gordon, he meet’s Mrs. Maurier, the hostess of the upcoming yachting trip, who is accompanied by her niece, Pat. A quick return to Gordon’s apartment follows where Mrs. Maurier personally extends the offer for him to join the yachting excursion. Though Gordon maintains a distant and uninterested aura, it becomes evident through the stream-of-consciousness passages that follow that he is at odds with himself over his sudden attraction to Pat that changes his mind about the trip. When Talliaferro takes leave of Gordon and the women, his path through the city and the path’s of other characters that diverge in his wake serve to introduce the multifaceted New Orleans artistic community around which the plot focuses. At a dinner that follows, Talliaferro’s visit with Gordon, the conversations about art that ensue as well as the sexual tensions that are hinted at in the interactions of Talliaferro, Julius Kaufmann, and Dawson Fairchild set the stage for the interactions and themes that come to typify rest of the novel. The second section opens as Mrs. Maurier welcomes all her guests onto the Nausikaa. The cast of characters in attendance is diverse and is typologically split into artists, non-artists, and youths. Though it, at first provides a chronological foundation to the activities that Mrs. Maurier has planned for her guests, it becomes evident that her guests, especially the men, are uncontrollable and more interested in drinking whisky in their rooms while gossiping about women and discussing art, than in participating in any activity she offers. The first day on the yacht concludes with a minor cliffhanger when Mr. Talliaferro makes it known that he has his sights set on one of the women on the ship, but only speaks her name behind closed doors. During the second day the activities on the boat take an even further backseat to the development of the characters and their interactions with one another. Similar conversations among the men over drinks continue, but the second day of the trip becomes largely defined by interactions between pairs of characters that result in misguided sexual tension that is fostered between them. Mrs. Jameson’s advances on Pete, for instance, go unnoticed or unreciprocated by the young man. Similarly, Mr. Talliaferro’s interest in Jenny grows, though as is always the case with him, he is not able to realize any relationship with the girl. Mrs. Maurier shares in the disappointment of unrequited love as she watches all of the men on the boat fawn over Jenny and Pat. These two subjects of male gaze share their own brief sexually charged interaction as they lay together in the room they share. The only openly reciprocal feelings that seem to develop over the course of the day are between Pat and the nervous steward, David West, who she goes to meet for a midnight swim after her intimate encounter with Jenny. Two scenes diametrically opposed conclude the chapter as David West and Pat return in youthful joy from a midnight swim off of the now marooned boat, while Mrs. Maurer lies in bed sobbing in her loneliness. The third day on the yacht begins as Pat and David decide to leave the boat and elope to the town of Mandeville. The chapter cuts back and forth between the characters on the boat and Pat and David as they make their way through a seemingly endless swamp to their intended destination. The sexual advances and artistic discussion continue among characters on the boat. The most notable change in this chapter is the dominant role Mrs. Wiseman comes to play both in her sexual exploits and in her display of intelligence. Mrs. Wiseman’s interest in Jenny is evident in her ever-present gaze upon the girl. Prior to this chapter, conversations on the merits of artistic production took place almost exclusively among the male passengers of the boat, but now, following her revealed gaze upon Jenny, Mrs. Wiseman holds a strong place in a debate between Fairchild, Julius, and Mark Frost. Mrs. Maurier too is present, but her idealistic thoughts on the “art of Life” are hardly heard. Eventually growing tired of talking, sitting, and eating, the passengers on the boat join together to try to pull the boat from where it is marooned. Their struggle to release the boat is mirrored by the Pat and David’s struggle for survival as they continue to trudge, dehydrated through the swamp. Failing to free the boat, the characters return to the yacht and the brief reprieve from explorations of sexuality and art ends. These main themes return quickly as Mrs. Wiseman kisses Jenny and the rest of the men return to drinking and talking. Pat and David soon return and everything returns to normal by the end of the day. The fourth day opens and David is gone again in pursuit of a better job. The excitement of the third day has vanished. The boat still stranded and no one knows where Gordon has gone. Eventually the same man who brought back Pat and David also brings Gordon back and everyone is once again accounted for. With David out of the way, Gordon is finally given a chance to explore his attraction to Pat that brought him on the boating trip in the first place. They get in an argument that ends in a bizarre manner with him spanking her like a child. Thereafter however, she lays in his arms and they get to know one another. The tugboat comes and frees the marooned yacht and everyone, including Gordon, spends the evening dancing. Mr. Talliaferro fall victim to a trick by Fairchild and Julius that leads him into a room which he thinks is Jenny’s room but is in fact the room of Mrs. Maurier, to whom he is now apparently engaged. The epilogue follows the Nausikaa’s passengers onto land and back into their individual lives, tying up many loose ends. Jenny and Pete return to their families. Major Ayers attends a meeting to propose an invention of digestive salts that continually mentions throughout the story. Mark Frost and Mrs. Jameson, the two unimaginative artists, find love in each other and begin a relationship. Gordon, Julius, and Fairchild have one last discussion of art and Gordon reveals that he has shifted from working with marble to clay and has molded from it a likeness Mrs. Maurier, much departed from his prior artistic obsession with representing the young female nude that he worked on in the beginning of the book. In the last section, Mr. Talliaferro visits Fairchild, distressed again by his ineptitude with women. After returning home, Talliaferro comes to what he thinks is a revelation regarding how he can be more successful with women. The novel ends as he tries to call Fairchild, but on the other end is only the operator, who says sarcastically “You tell ‘em, big boy; treat ‘em rough.” |
5520100 | /m/0dqnhc | Fear is the Key | Alistair MacLean | 1961 | {"/m/01jfsb": "Thriller"} | In the prologue, set in May 1958, Talbot, owner of "Trans Carib Air Charter Co" was in radio contact with one of his planes en route to Tampa, Florida, as it is being shot down by an American military plane. This resulted in the death of Talbot's family. Two years later, Talbot has apparently turned to a life of crime, for which he is now facing sentencing in a courtroom. He escapes, taking a young woman hostage. A reward is put out on his head, and he is captured by a thug who turns him in to the hostage's father. Instead of turning him over to the police, however, the father hires him for some not entirely legitimate tasks. The father, it turns out, has been consorting with some shady characters including a born killer. The story becomes straight action with car chases, gunfights, the mafia, a beautiful woman, mysterious doings aboard an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, and a sunken DC-3 at the bottom of ocean with a secret treasure, as Talbot searched for answers to his long quest to find the murderers of his family. In typically MacLean style, the reader comes to find that nothing in this complicated plot is quite as it seems. In addition to a clever story, the level of tension is pitched extremely high. There is scarcely a let up from the action until reaching a gripping climax. |
5523451 | /m/0dqtzn | Borkmann's Point | Håkan Nesser | 1994 | {"/m/0lsxr": "Crime Fiction", "/m/02n4kr": "Mystery"} | The novel is set in the early 1990s when Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, a 30-year veteran of police work who appreciates fine food and drink, cuts short his vacation to help the police chief of the remote town of Kaalbringen and his small crew investigate two ax murders. Another identical murder occurs in the weeks leading up to the retirement of Police Chief Bausen and it's expected that solving them would not only complete their work while Van Veeteren is available, but would be a high point for Bausen's career exit. Bausen is determined that the cases are solved quickly and the public is safe again before he departs. At a loose end in Kaalbringen, Van Veeteren accepts Bausen's collegial hospitality. A widower, Bausen generously shares from his expensive wine cellar and together they draw close over a love of chess. The sympathetic Van Veeteren wants to resolve the difficult investigation for his old friend's sake, which Bausen also appreciates. The problem is that the killings are random with the victims completely unrelated, and the murderer is too clever to be found or even noticed. Significantly the corpses are discovered axed precisely in the same way with a butcher's chopper which shows the killer's attention to detail. Just when it seems that the Ax Murderer – so dubbed by the press – is on a roll, the killings stop at three. The work to find a connecting thread is shared by a crew that includes Beate Moerk a dedicated, single female colleague with dreams of becoming a private detective; Münster, a detective whose career is creating cracks in his marriage and family life; and others like the nerdish Kropke who bring their professional skills as well as their personality traits to bear. All strive to solve the puzzle as time runs out, especially when Beate Moerk goes missing while jogging late at night. |
5524262 | /m/0dqwbj | Dr. Franklin's Island | Gwyneth Jones | 2001 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature"} | A plane to a research facility in Ecuador crashes in the deep forest and the only three survivor children are Semi Garson, the narrator, Miranda, a brave girl, and a boy called Arnie. Soon Arnie disappears and the girls are taken hostage in an island by some Dr Franklin and his assistant Dr Skinner, who perform transgenetic experiments on them. This transforms the girls into a bird and a manta ray, who can still communicate through radio chips planted in their new bodies. It is revealed that the missing Arnie, also a prisoner, is eavesdropping on them, and reporting their conversations to the scientists. Arnie tells the two girls that there is a cure to their condition and says that he will try to help them by obtaining it. Semi soon begins to covertly receive the treatment, learning that Skinner is getting her the doses of antidote. Skinner frees her from the lockup, horrified by the experiments. Semi, now a full human again, finds a snake and discovers that it is Arnie. They are recaptured by Franklin's who also have Miranda trapped in a net. Miranda Hart is the best They attack in a desperate last stand, and the scientist smashes into the electric fence. The voltage kills Franklin almost instantly. Semi, Miranda and Arnie escape to the mainland in a boat. On the way home, Semi gives Miranda and Arnie the antidote, and the return to being human. They arrive in Ecuador, where they tell a cover story for their adventures (not mentioning Franklin's "treatment"), and are returned happily to their parents. The story ends with Semi's concerns that the transgenic DNA is still in their cells, and that they may have specific cues that will return them to being animals, and her dreams for a world that will allow her and Miranda to become the creatures they were on the island without barriers between them. |
5524514 | /m/0dqwkv | Memoirs of a Survivor | Doris Lessing | 1974 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The story takes place in a near-future Britain where society has broken down due to an unspecified disaster. Family units themselves have broken down and survivors band together into loose units for basic survival. The unnamed narrator ends up with 'custody' of a teenage girl named Emily Cartwright. Emily herself has unspecified trauma in her past that the main character does not probe at. Hugo, an odd mix of cat and dog, comes with Emily. Due to the growing scarcity of resources, the animal is in constant danger of being eaten. Periodically, the narrator is able, through meditating on a certain wall in her flat, to traverse space and time. Many of these visions are about Emily's sad childhood under the care of her harsh father and distant mother. At the end of the novel, the main character's strange new family breaks through dimensional barriers via the wall, and walks into a much better world. |
5525294 | /m/0dqxkq | The Twenty-Seventh City | Jonathan Franzen | 9/1/1988 | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | A complex, partly satirical thriller that studies a family unraveling under intense pressure, the novel is set amidst intricate political conspiracy and financial upheaval in St. Louis, Missouri in the year 1984. |
5525358 | /m/0dqxmw | Anno Domini 2000 - A Woman's Destiny | Julius Vogel | 1889 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | The novel describes the exploits of Hilda Fitzherbert, former 23-year-old Under Secretary for Home Affairs, and then Imperial Prime Minister, in a future where the British Empire has achieved both female suffrage (which New Zealand granted in real life in 1893) and become an Imperial Federation, apart from an independent Ireland, although Sir Reginald Paramatta, a villainous Australian republican, has his eyes set on the abduction and wooing of Miss Fitzherbert. Miss Fitzherbert foils the Republican plans, and then she falls in love with Emperor Albert, the dashing young ruler of the Federated British Empire. Unfortunately, their plans hit a snag when the Emperor refuses the hand of the female US President's daughter, which precipitates an Anglo-American war, which the Empire wins, leading to the dissolution of the United States and its reabsorption into the Empire, and the ensuing marriage of Hilda and the Emperor. Several years later, the Emperor and his Empress find that their opinions about male primacy in royal succession have reversed themselves, when faced with a brilliantly competent princess and bookish, scholarly prince as prospective heirs apparent to the throne. There are large slabs of intrusive detail about the intricacies of finance and federal Imperial politics and the novel did not sell well initially. It has attracted posthumous recognition for its uncanny representation of New Zealand's female-dominated political, judicial and corporate executive hierarchies in 2000. However, the book lacks any mention of Māori protagonists, despite its other significant innovations. It was reissued in 2001, and the University of Hawaii Press published its first American edition in 2002. |
5525893 | /m/0dqycf | The Bancroft Strategy | Robert Ludlum | 10/17/2006 | {"/m/01jfsb": "Thriller", "/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Todd Belknap, a field agent for Consular Operations, is cut loose from the agency after a job gone wrong. But when his best friend and fellow agent is abducted abroad and the government refuses to step in, Belknap decides to take matters into his own hands. Meanwhile, Andrea Bancroft learns she’s about to inherit 12 million dollars from a cousin she never met—with one condition: She must sit on the board of the Bancroft family foundation. Having been estranged from her father’s family for most of her life, Andrea is intrigued. But what exactly is the Bancroft’s involvement with “Genesis,” a mysterious person working to destabilize the geopolitical balance at the risk of millions of lives? In a series of devastating coincidences, Andrea and Belknap come together to form an uneasy alliance if they are to uncover the truth behind “Genesis”—before it is too late. |
5526778 | /m/0dqzb8 | Parallelities | Alan Dean Foster | 1995-03 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Max is sent to interview a rich man, Barrington Boles, who claims to have invented a machine that can break through the barrier between parallel worlds, or "paras." Max first assumes the man is a typical loony, but after returning home, he finds his apartment burglarized by identical triplets who don't seem to know one another. Later, he meets four "sisters" who look almost but not quite identical, and who claim never to have met before the previous night. Mystified, he rushes back to Boles's place to ask the inventor what on earth is going on. Boles informs him that the machine must have turned Max into a nexus who pulls the inhabitants of other worlds into his own. Max is frantic, but Boles reassures him that the effect will probably wear off in a few days, and that if it doesn't, he should come back on Tuesday. Max tries to resume his life, but his neighbor's canary turns into a hundred identical birds, and the next day Max runs into a double of himself at work. The double (whom he calls "Mitch" to avoid confusion) has no idea what's going on, apparently coming from a para where Max never interviewed Boles. After Max explains the situation to him, they decide to pose as twins. They go to a zoo to work on a story about a painting elephant, only to find the zoo overrun by fifty female chimps. Sensing that the situation has gotten out of hand, Max and Mitch decide to visit Boles again. But on the way, they spot a herd of bighorn sheep and a condor, species extinct in Los Angeles. Max realizes that he's no longer simply pulling things from other worlds into his own, but drifting into other worlds (apparently taking Mitch with him). When they arrive at Boles's mansion, this version of Boles doesn't remember their second meeting and has no idea how to help them. On their way home, Max and Mitch encounter two identical pairs of English-speaking aliens who don't understand why the local spaceport has vanished. Later, Max gets briefly separated from Mitch, and when he returns, Mitch has been replaced by a female version of Max who is an actress rather than a reporter. After he successfully convinces her what has happened, the two go home and make love, realizing that they're the only two people who know exactly how to satisfy each other. In this para, Australia has become the dominant power in the world due to discovering a cheap form of electricity. After falling asleep on a couch at her workplace, he wakes up in his own workplace, where a familiar coworker invites him to a basketball game on the weekend. He assumes that the effect has finally worn off and that he has returned to his original world, until he discovers that the entire world has been taken over by Elder Gods (of H. P. Lovecraft fame), who demand weekly human sacrifices. Somehow, earth's populace has adapted to this reality so completely that everyone continues to live relatively "normal" lives that include tabloid newspapers and professional basketball. After fleeing his building and entering a subway station, he shifts to a new para where the entire world has been destroyed, and he meets a sickly version of himself who informs him that this was the result of the "Boles Effect." Max next finds himself in a utopian, futuristic version of Los Angeles with hovercars, courteous citizens, and no pollution. While he would love to remain there, he has no control over the Boles Effect, and soon he finds himself back in a more familiar version of L.A. He goes home, but when he wakes up the next day he discovers that he's a ghost, because the local Max died in a shooting. He wanders out onto the beach, converses with an old man ghost, and soon encounters two identical couples who have just died—implying that the Boles Effect works even on the dead. After shifting to a para where he's alive once again, Max is at the end of his ropes, bewildered by the metaphysical truths he has learned, disillusioned by the Boles Effect that never seems to end. After contemplating suicide, he finally goes home and sleeps again. During the night, he has a series of bizarre dreams in quick succession, and he concludes that he must have been "para dreaming," implying that "not only was the cosmos composed of para realities, it was rife with para unrealities as well." When he drives to work, he discovers that he's entered a para where every man, woman, and child in the world is a version of himself. Everyone not only looks like him, but has aspects of his personality too, and for the first time in his life he becomes aware of how unpleasant a person he is. His boss assigns him to interview a man named Max Parker, who lives in what Max thinks is his own apartment. This local Max claims to be experiencing dreams where a man named Barrington Boles has zapped him with a condition that makes him sail through parallel worlds. Max doesn't recognize the name of the newspaper that this Max works for, The National Enquirer. Max has had enough. He concludes that so many parallel worlds must exist that "a single universe [is] but a pinprick." After having met so many clones of himself, his whole sense of individual identity is coming apart. His mind can't take it anymore. He drives to Boles's house, witnessing some bizarre sights on the way, but hoping against hope that by the time he arrives he will have found a version of Boles who can end Max's condition. This Boles remembers their second meeting and works the machine on Max once again, attempting to destroy the effect. After all that he's been through, Max will not allow himself to believe that everything is back to normal. But as he leaves Boles's mansion and returns home to his apartment, he grows more and more relaxed—until the reflection in his mirror frowns at him while he's still smiling. |
5529131 | /m/0dr1kp | The Motel Life | Willy Vlautin | 4/5/2007 | null | Frank and Jerry Lee Flannigan are two down-and-out brothers who live a meager existence in Reno, Nevada. Both men are high school dropouts who live in cheap motel rooms, work at odd jobs for money, and drink heavily. One night, while driving drunk during a blizzard, Jerry Lee accidentally hits and kills a teenage boy on a bicycle. Although the accident is the boy's fault, there are no witnesses, and Jerry Lee is certain that the police will put the blame on him. He convinces Frank to leave town with him and flee to Montana. Along the way, Jerry Lee abandons Frank in Wyoming and then burns the car in a secluded Idaho forest. Both men return separately to Reno. The police seem to take no interest in the case, so both men attempt to settle back into their Reno lives. Frank adopts an abused, half-frozen dog he finds during a snowstorm. Acting on a tip from a friend, he scrapes together $800 and bets it on the Tyson-Holyfield boxing match, winning more than $5,000. He also tracks down the family of the dead teenager and stands outside their home, watching them come and go. Jerry Lee, meanwhile, becomes consumed by guilt and attempts suicide, shooting himself in the leg. He survives and lands in the hospital. On the day of the Tyson-Holyfield fight, the police come to question Jerry Lee; they have discovered the burned-out wreck of his car in Idaho. Once again, Jerry Lee convinces Frank to flee Reno. Frank uses his winnings to buy a used car. He leaves $1,000 at the home of the dead teenager, sneaks Jerry Lee out of the hospital, and heads to the town of Elko, Nevada to hide from the police. Frank's ex-girlfriend Annie lives in Elko, and he secretly hopes to run into her. But Jerry Lee's wounds are far from healed and he quickly becomes very sick. |
5531936 | /m/0dr6bt | The Hippopotamus Pool | Barbara Mertz | 1996 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/0hwxm": "Historical novel"} | Amelia and Emerson are in Cairo to greet the 20th century, when a mysterious Mr. Shelmadine presents them with a gold ring from a unknown tombe bearing the cartouche of Queen Tetisheri. The same Shelmadine then goes in a fit that spell out a new case for Amelia. Not even this time will Amelia's archeological season be left alone by criminals and tomb robbers. Only this time she's up against two unknown parties, one to save, one to avenge. This book also introduces David Todros, Ramses's lifelong friend and partner in crime. Evelyn and Walter Emerson come back to the land of the pharaohs for the first time since their romance in the ruins of the heretical pharaoh's city, Amarna. |
5533292 | /m/0dr8dd | Ode to Gallantry | Louis Cha | 1965 | {"/m/08322": "Wuxia"} | The plot centers on a case of mistaken identity between a pair of identical twins, which in his afterword Jin Yong acknowledges resemble some works of William Shakespeare (cf. Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors). The protagonist, who refers to himself as "Gouzazhong" (狗雜種; literally means "the mongrel dog", a colloquialism for "bastard"), first appears as a young beggar living on the streets of Kaifeng, searching for his lost mother. He witnesses a fight between several wulin pugilists and meets the Shi couple and members of the Snowy Mountain Sect (雪山派). An accident causes him to be taken away from Kaifeng by a martial artist called Xie Yanke, to Xie's secluded home on Motian Cliff. Xie Yanke, who is frequently bothered by Gouzazhong, decides to teach him martial arts. Gouzazhong learns qi cultivation techniques under Xie Yanke's tutelage for six years. Gouzazhong is unaware that Xie Yanke actually harbours ill intentions towards him and has been teaching him the wrong methods, in hope that Gouzazhong will sustain internal wounds and die eventually. At the same time, the leader of the Changle Sect, Shi Potian (whose real name is Shi Zhongyu), mysteriously disappears. The greater part of the novel deals with the complications that arise as Gouzhazhong is mistaken to be Shi Zhongyu, not only by members of the sect (for ulterior motives), by also by Shi Zhongyu's parents, the Shi couple, Shi Zhongyu's lover Ding Dang, and members of the Snowy Mountain Sect. Although the two bear a splitting resemblance, their characters cannot be more different: Gouzhazhong is simple, honest and clever, while Shi Zhongyu, the son of the Shi couple, has a bad reputation as a lewd and sly womaniser. In the process Gouzhazhong acquires consummate martial arts skills. Gouzazhong is hounded by members of the Snowy Mountain Sect who mistake him for Shi Zhongyu, who had molested A'xiu, the granddaughter of the Snowy Mountain Sect's leader. He acquires A'xiu as his girlfriend after various episodes, during which the misunderstandings are resolved. The novel culminates in an episode when the leaders of various sects are coerced into going to a secluded island by a pair of mysterious, highly skilled messengers to celebrate the Laba Festival by eating Laba congee. The story then leads to a surprising conclusion: revelations on the island and more revelations concerning Gouzhazhong's true parentage. |
5534091 | /m/0dr9rt | What Dreams May Come | Richard Matheson | 1978-09 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/03v9sb": "Bangsian fantasy", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01qxvh": "Romance novel", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The prologue is narrated by a man telling of his visit by a psychic woman, who gives him a manuscript she claims was dictated to her by his deceased brother Chris. Most of the novel consists of this manuscript. Chris, a middle-aged man, is injured in a car accident and dies in the hospital. He remains as a ghost, at first thinking he's having a bad dream. Amid a failed séance that helps further convince his wife Ann that he didn't survive death, an unidentified man keeps approaching Chris and telling him to concentrate on what's beyond. But Chris disregards this advice for a long time, unable to leave his wife. After finally following the man's advice, focusing his mind on pleasant memories, he feels himself being elevated. He wakes up in a beautiful glade which he recognizes as a place where he and Ann used to travel. Understanding by now that he is dead, he is surprised that he looks and feels alive, with apparently a complete physical body and sensation. After exploring the place for a while, he finds Albert, his cousin, who reveals himself as the unidentified man. Albert explains that the place they occupy is called Summerland. Being a state of mind rather than a physical location, Summerland is practically endless and takes the form of the inhabitants' wishes and desires. There is no pain or death, but people still maintain occupations of sorts and perform leisure activities. The book spends several chapters depicting Summerland in great detail, through Chris's eyes. Chris feels somehow uneasy, being haunted by nightmares ending in Ann's death. Soon he learns that Ann has killed herself. Albert, who is as shocked as Chris, explains that by committing suicide, Ann has placed her spirit in the "lower realm" from Summerland, and that she will stay there for twenty-four years — her intended life span. Albert insists that Ann's condition is not "punishment" but "law" - a natural consequence of committing suicide. Albert's job is to visit the lower realm, and Chris asks to be taken there so he can help Ann. Albert initially refuses, warning Chris that he might inadvertently find himself stuck in the lower realm, thus delaying his eventual, inevitable reunion with Ann. Chris eventually convinces Albert to attempt the rescue, even though Albert insists that they will almost certainly fail. The lower realm (which the book only later refers to as "Hell") is cold, dark, and barren. Albert and Chris are able to use their minds to make their surroundings slightly more bearable, but Albert warns Chris that this will become harder to do as they travel further. They eventually reach a place occupied by people who were violent criminals while they were alive. Chris is forced to witness a series of dreadful sights and gets gruesomely attacked by a mob, though he soon discovers that the attack occurred only in his mind. They finally depart from that particularly violent section of Hell, arriving at last at Ann's place. It resembles a dark, depressing version of the neighborhood where he and Ann used to live. Albert explains that she will not immediately recognize Chris, and that he can only gradually convince her who he is and what has happened to her. Ann believes that she is living alone in her house where nothing seems to work, grieving her husband's death. This is her private "Hell" - an exaggerated version of what she had been experiencing prior to her suicide. Identifying himself as a new neighbor, Chris makes numerous unsuccessful attempts to make her realize the true situation. He describes details of his own life so that she will be reminded of her husband. He calls her attention to the improbably negative conditions of the house. He drops in clues, gradually leading her to the truth, but she seems to block out anything that will cause recognition. He finally tells her the truth straight out. She gets angry and calls him a liar. Because she does not believe in afterlife, she finds it impossible that he could be her dead husband. After a moment of disorientation where he starts to forget his own identity, the atmosphere of Hell gradually drawing him in and threatening to trap him there, he delivers a long monologue of appreciation for her, detailing all the ways in which she enriched his life. He finally makes the most dreaded decision of all: he decides to stay with her and not return to Summerland. As he begins losing consciousness, Ann finally recognizes him and realizes what has happened. Chris awakens in Summerland once again. Albert, who is amazed that Chris was able to rescue Ann, informs him that she has been reborn on Earth, because she is not ready for Summerland. Chris wants to be reborn too, despite Albert's protests. Chris learns that he and Ann have had several previous lives, and in all of them they had a special connection with each other. As the manuscript comes to a close, Chris explains that he is soon going to be reborn and will forget all that has happened. He ends with a message of hope, telling his readers that death is not to be feared, and that he knows in the future he and Ann will ultimately be reunited in Heaven, even if in different form. |
5535961 | /m/0drdms | Now It's My Turn | Mary Cheney | 2006 | {"/m/016chh": "Memoir"} | Mary Cheney writes about her experience as a campaign staffer during the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, when she worked for her father, Dick Cheney. She recounts what she learned in 2000 about campaign staffers's job, laying out pointers. Moving on to the re-election of 2004, she expresses her repudiation of the Marriage Protection Act supported by George W. Bush. As openly lesbian, she considered leaving the campaign; she only stayed because she believed George W. Bush to be the best commander-in-chief during the War on Terror. She also expresses outrage at the way John Kerry's campaign made use of her personal life when the issue of same-sex marriage came up. |
5536702 | /m/0drftq | The Peacekeepers | Gene DeWeese | 9/1/1988 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | While investigating an alien derelict, Geordi La Forge and Data are sent to a solar system several light-years away by a transporter with interstellar range, to a similar derelict orbiting an Earth-like planet. Once there, they are mistaken for "the Builders", those who the planet's native populace, a culture similar to late-20th-century Earth, believe are the creators of the derelict, which they call the "Repository of the Gifts". One of the natives, Shar-Lon, discovered the Repository some years before and used its "Gifts" (advanced technology) to end planetary wars that were leading to a possible nuclear holocaust. However, Shar-Lon's use of the Gifts since that time has led to a worldwide perception of himself and his supporters, the Peacekeepers, as a suppressive force that has limited the social and technological advancement of their people. Assuming the role of "Builders" in order to assess their situation, La Forge and Data are drawn into the social politics of the Peacekeepers and their world, and must extract themselves from the situation and find a way back to the Enterprise without further harming the natives' culture and violating the Prime Directive. |
5536719 | /m/0drfvd | The Children of Hamlin | null | null | null | The Hamlin colony had been attacked some time previously by the alien Choraii. All the adults had been slain and the children kidnapped. Now the Choraii are back, bargaining for precious metals. Captain Picard plans to use the Choraii's needs to get the children back. |
5536817 | /m/0drfzm | Survivors | Jean Lorrah | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The Enterprise is called in to deal with Treva, a human colony on the fringes of known space. For a time, it was thought to be a suitable candidate for Federation membership. Now it has sent a distress call because a brutal warlord has seized power and a revolution has sprung up. Natasha Yar is sent down with the android Data. The two soon discover the situation is more complicated than originally thought. The warlord wants Federation weapons to use against the rebels and is willing to kill whomever it takes to accomplish this goal. The novel also focuses on the unique relationship between Yar and Data and how the current situation correlates with Yar's brutal childhood. |
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