Id
stringlengths 3
44
| Code
stringlengths 7
10
⌀ | Title
stringlengths 1
220
⌀ | Author
stringlengths 4
59
⌀ | Data
stringlengths 3
10
⌀ | Genres
stringlengths 20
352
⌀ | Summary
stringlengths 11
32.8k
⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
6402469 | /m/0g40l8 | Baby Island | null | null | null | The book begins with the Wallace sisters, twelve-year-old Mary and ten-year-old Jean, traveling alone on a ship to meet their father in Australia. The girls often babysit young children: at home, they had enjoyed "borrowing" the babies of neighbors. Their ship is disabled in a storm, and the girls are set adrift in a lifeboat—alone with four babies under two, the children of fellow passengers. The craft eventually drifts to a tropical island, and in a Robinson Crusoe-like scenario, they must learn to build shelter and survive on wild foodstuffs. They do this with great success, while raising the babies through various developmental milestones and adopting a baby monkey who they raise alongside the babies. Throughout the story, the girls sing Scots We hae to inspire their courage to deal with their situation. In the latter part of the book the girls also encounter a character like Friday: a mysterious, gruff man who lives alone on the island and dislikes children. He eventually warms to their babies, and they enjoy his company and his useful craftsmanship. Finally, the girls are rescued on Christmas Day, after a storm, and all the babies are returned to their parents. |
6403476 | /m/0g41t1 | Black Light | Stephen Hunter | 4/7/1997 | {"/m/01jfsb": "Thriller", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | There are two interconnected plots that unfold simultaneously in this novel; one is set in the present, and deals with Bob Lee Swagger and Russ Pewtie, while the other is set in 1955, and deals with Bob Lee's father, Earl, and the events leading up to his death. This book catches the reader up with Bob Lee about five years after the events in Point of Impact. He now has a daughter who is four years old, named Nikki, and he has married Julie Fenn, the widow of his fallen spotter, Donnie Fenn. He is living happily, if not humbly, in Arizona, trying to avoid the notoriety he gained during the events in Point of Impact. A young man approaches him with a proposition. This young man's name is Russ Pewtie, the grown son of Bud Pewtie, who as described in Dirty White Boys was responsible for the death of Lamar Pye. Russ is a writer, and wants to write a book about Bob Lee's father, who was gunned down one night in 1955, near Bob's home town of Blue Eye, Arkansas, by Lamar's father, Jimmy. As Russ and Bob Lee probe into the details surrounding Earl's death, there are some startling revelations, including a conspiracy to keep these details hidden, which give deeper insight into the history of Bob Lee. The plot involves several of Hunter's signature interconnecting characters (who appear in various roles in more than one of his novels). These include Sam Vincent, the former Polk County prosecutor who appears in Point of Impact, and Frenchy Short, the CIA agent and Earl Swagger protégé who appears in The Second Saladin, and also in the later Earl Swagger novels Hot Springs and Havana. Part of the connection between the novel's two time periods is the role of Sam Vincent in the prosecution of the murderer of a young black girl in 1955, and the re-investigation of that case in the present. Vincent's feelings about race relations in the two periods, the contrasts between them, and his struggle to reconcile the two, are very well drawn. |
6403657 | /m/0g41zl | Shri GuruCharitra | null | null | null | The Shri GuruCharitra is a holy book for Datta Sampradaya devotees. The book includes the life story of Shri Narasimha Saraswati, his philosophy and related stories. Some people regard the book to be historically important as it depicts stories or events which took place around the 14th Century. The language is 14-15th century Marathi. Shri Saraswati Gangadhar used only Sanskrit words. The poet's full name is Saraswati Gangadhar Saakhare (Deshastha Brahmin). It has been said that he spent most of his life at Kadaganchi village in Karnataka. There is one composition of the GuruCharitra in Kannada language as well. However, this does not make this book any terse. It is far simpler to understand and follow. This shows the poet's command over the Marathi language. Moreover, the poet's mother tongue is Kannada and not Marathi. The book originally had 52 Chapters; the 53rd Chapter of "Avatarnika" (अवतरणिका) summarizes the previous 51 chapters. The whole book is considered a "Mantra" in itself and thus there are very strict rules for reading it. In Datta Sampradaya they consider this as their "Veda". |
6403964 | /m/0g426j | Time to Hunt | Stephen Hunter | 4/13/1999 | {"/m/01jfsb": "Thriller", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | It begins about four or five years after the events in Black Light. Bob Lee's daughter is now around 8, and he owns a horse ranch, where he cares for horses. He has been slipping into a deep depression due to his inability to properly support his family. Alienating himself from his wife and child, they leave for a morning horseback ride with a friend from another ranch. His wife is shot and nearly killed by a sniper, and the friend is killed. Bob assumes that the man was mistaken for him, and killed in an attempt to kill Bob Lee. This act plunges him back into a world of violence and intrigue. While his wife recuperates, he attempts to unravel the secrets behind the assault. This book has a dual plot, with the present plot, dealing with Bob's investigation into his wife's attempted murder. The second plot is set in the past, beginning on a Marine Corps base in the late 1960s or early 1970s. A young Donny Fenn is the squad leader of a group of Marines who perform the state funeral services for Marines killed in the Vietnam War, which is raging across the world. Donny is brought before his superiors and ordered to follow one of his men, who is suspected of sympathizing with peace demonstrators who are led by a charismatic man named Trig Carter. In turn, Trig is suspected of having ties to an extremist group. Incidentally, Donny's girlfriend, Julie, is involved with this group of war protestors. Donny discovers that his sympathies lie closer to Trig's friends, and rather than rat out his own man, Donny defies naval investigators, buying a one-way ticket to the front lines of the Vietnam war. Just before being shipped out, his commanding officer who admired Donny's courage, gives him enough money to run off with Julie and marry. Donny meets up with Bob Lee Swagger, a Marine Sniper at the top of his game, joining him as Bob Lee's new spotter. Scourge of the North Vietnamese army, there is already a sizeable bounty on Bob Lee's head, but after an exciting firefight to rescue an overwhelmed outpost, a vengeful NVA Colonel calls out the big gun: Solaratov, a Russian sniper who is the only man alive who could possibly equal Bob Lee Swagger. Donny is getting extremely short (close to going home). On Donny's last day in Vietnam, a day he should spend completing paperwork that will send him home, he makes the fateful decision to go on one last reconnaissance with Bob Lee. Solaratov's bullet ends both Bob Lee's career in the Marine Corps and Donny Fenn's life. Back in the present, Bob Lee is unravelling the tapestry of lies that have buried the past all these years and discovers that there may be more to Donny's death than he originally thought. |
6408673 | /m/0g47kp | The Mad God's Amulet | Michael Moorcock | null | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | Heading West back to the Kamarg and Yisselda, Dorian Hawkmoon and Oladahn find themselves in the deserted city of Soryandum. Oladahn disappears while out hunting and on seeking him Hawkmoon sees an ornithopter of the Dark Empire of Granbretan. Oladahn is captured by forces of the Dark Empire, led by renegade Frenchman Huillam d'Averc, but inexplicably survives what should be a fatal fall when he escapes by throwing himself from the top of a tower. Hawkmoon and Oladahn battle the Dark Empire warriors but are ultimately overcome by weight of numbers. Hawkmoon and Oladahn are imprisoned awaiting an ornithopter to transport them to Sicilia. Oladahn reveals that he was rescued from his fall by ghosts, and these wraiths re-appear and free the pair. The wraiths are the inhabitants of Soryandum, transformed by their own science so that they exist in another dimension. D'Averc is planning to raze Soryandum which would destroy the wraiths, so they call on Hawkmoon to aid them by recovering a pair of old Soryandum machines. When they transcended this dimension the wraiths had the machines hidden and guarded by a mechanical beast which Hawkmoon will have to defeat. Hawkmoon and Oladahn find the machine store and defeat the mechanical beast by blinding it. They recover the two machines but the mechanical beast follows after them. Hawkmoon and Oladahn return the machines to the wraiths, who use one to shift the entire city of Soryandum to another dimension, gifting the other machine to Hawkmoon for his own use. Meanwhile the forces of the Dark Empire are attacked by the machine beast and Hawkmoon and Oladahn make their escape. The pair continue their journey, next stopping at the town of Birachek. Later Hawkmoon and Oladahn secure passage from Captain Mouso on The Smiling Girl, a vessel heading for Crimea. During the journey they pick up the shipwrecked D'Averc and Hawkmoon intends to keep him as a hostage. The Smiling Girl then finds herself under attack from a pirate ship belonging to the Muskovian Cult of the Mad God. During the attack Hawkmoon, Oladahn and D'Averc manage to capture the ship belonging to the Cult of the Mad God. Amongst the looted treasure in the hold Hawkmoon finds the engagement ring he gave to Yisselda and fears for her safety. The trio manage to take one of the cultists captive, and learn that they are innocent sailors who are drugged to commit acts of violent piracy. Hawkmoon, Oladahn and D'Averc lay in wait to capture the cultist's man Captain Shagarov, and he informs them that any captured females would have been taken to the Mad God himself. Shagarov is killed and the pirate ship set alight, while the trio escape on a skiff and head towards Ukrania and the Mad God. Hawkmoon, Oladahn, and D'Averc reach the shore and find the Warrior in Jet and Gold awaiting them. Once again the Warrior informs Hawkmoon that he is a servant of the Runestaff, and that as well as saving the kidnapped Yisselda he must also recover a Red Amulet - an artifact linked to the Runestaff which bestows power on its servants but madness to others. Hawkmoon, Oladahn, D'Averc, and the Warrior in Jet and Gold head deeper into Ukrania, along the way crossing the mysterious Throbbing Bridge and encountering signs of the Dark Empire's forces. They reach the Mad God's Castle and defeat a group of warrior women, but elsewhere the castle is already filled with corpses. Hawkmoon enters the castle and confronts the Mad God, Stalnikov, who sets a hypnotised Yisselda to attacking him. On the point of defeat Stalnikov releases Yisselda from his sway, but Hawkmoon attacks and kills him anyway. Yisselda informs Hawkmoon that Von Villach has been killed by Dark Empire forces and Count Brass is gravely ill. The Mad God's castle is stormed by Granbretan troops and when they brand D'Averc a traitor he elects to join forces with Hawkmoon. The Warrior in Jet and Gold persuades Hawkmoon to wear the Red Amulet, saying it is his only chance to escape the castle. Aided by the power of the Red Amulet Hawkmoon fights his way out of the Mad God's hall. In the castle courtyard the group are attacked by more Dark Empire warriors, but Hawkmoon uses the Red Amulet to command the Mad God's remaining warrior women to attack them. Hawkmoon uses the power of the Red Amulet to command the Mad God's mutant war-jaguars and escapes the castle along with Yisselda, Oladahn, and D'Averc. Along the way however they become separated from the Warrior in Jet and Gold who was attempting to recover the mechanical device Hawkmoon had been given by the wraiths of Soryandum. The group travel on to the mountains of Carpathia, where they are attacked by Dark Empire forces and are forced to set their war-jaguars free in the battle. Arriving in the town of Zorvanemi they go undercover as a party of holy men, but after killing a number of Dark Empire troops in a tavern fight they decide to don their armour and masquerade as warriors of Granbretan under D'Averc's leadership. The group ride further into Shekia, and join a camp of Dark Empire forces massed outside the city of Bradichla. D'Averc leaves the group and betrays them leading to their capture. Hawkmoon, Yisselda, and Oladahn are brought before Baron Meliadus, who survived the battle of Hamadan. He orders the three bound in chains and vows to take them back to Granbretan, stopping first on the way to witness the fall of the Kamarg. Arriving at the Kamarg Baron Meliadus orders his forces to begin the final assault. Overnight D'Averc reveals his true loyalties by drugging the guards and releasing Hawkmoon, Yisselda, and Oladahn. The group ride through the Dark Empire forces to the Kamarg though D'Averc is wounded in the process. Arriving at Castle Brass the sight of the returned Yisselda and Hawkmoon is enough to cure Count Brass of the sickness of spirit that has plagued him, and together with Hawkmoon he rushes to lead his forces in the defense of the Kamarg. On leaving Castle Brass however they witness the destruction of the last of their war towers with Kamarg seemingly about to fall. Aided by the power of the Red Amulet Hawkmoon helps drive the Dark Empire forces back to the borders of the Kamarg. The Kamarg forces regroup at Castle Brass and the Dark Empire forces begin a siege. The Warrior in Jet and Gold reappears at Castle Brass and delivers to Hawkmoon the dimension warping device of the people of Soryandum. The Dark Empire forces begin their final assault on Castle Brass but the Warrior in Jet and Gold activates the Soryandum machine and shifts the castle into another dimension. The people of the Kamarg are safe for now, but Baron Meliadus vows to learn of a way to follow them, and Hawkmoon knows that he must return to do battle again. |
6412503 | /m/0g4c6f | Peter and the Shadow Thieves | Ridley Pearson | 2006-07 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The book starts three months after the end of Peter and the Starcatchers. Slank returns to the island with more of the Others, including a certain Lord Ombra, to reclaim the trunk of starstuff lost in the previous book. When they learn that the Starcatchers have taken the trunk back to England, they set sail for London. Peter follows, fearing for Molly's safety, and with Tinker Bell's help conceals himself on their ship. Once in London, Peter does not know where to find Molly. After unpleasant encounters with beggars, traders and the police, Peter finally gets directions from J. M. Barrie to Lord Aster's house, and rescues Molly from Lord Ombra in the nick of time. However, Louise Aster- Molly's mother -has been kidnapped by the Others, and the children must find Lord Aster who is guarding the starstuff. Meanwhile, back on the island, the pirates are hunting the Lost Boys. They capture the boys to use as bait for Peter, not knowing he is not on the island. In the end, Molly is saved by Peter, and she takes Peter to her old best friend's house. Where she introduces Peter to George and they become best friends. |
6416956 | /m/0g4kdm | Vixen 03 | Clive Cussler | null | {"/m/01jfsb": "Thriller", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/08sdrw": "Adventure novel"} | In January 1954 a United States Air Force Boeing C-97 Stratofreighter codenamed Vixen 03 takes off from the Buckley Naval Air Station in Colorado on a late-night flight transporting a top-secret cargo from the Rocky Mountain Arsenal to testing grounds near the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. The plane never arrives in the Pacific, and, despite a massive four-month search by the Navy and Coast Guard, no trace of Vixen 03 is discovered. The story then jumps forward 34 years, where Dirk Pitt, Special Projects Director for the National Underwater and Marine Agency, is vacationing with Colorado Congresswoman Loren Smith at her father’s cabin in the Sawatch Mountains. Pitt discovers some aircraft parts in the cabin garage and follows this lead until he intuits that there is an aircraft crash site in the local lake, Table Lake. Calling for his friend and Assistant Special Projects Director Al Giordino to fly in specialized NUMA equipment, they survey the lake and quickly find the wreck of Vixen 03. Discovering clues found on the wreck, Pitt follows the evidence to retired Admiral Walter Bass, United States Navy, who was the commander who ordered Vixen 03 on its top-secret mission. Bass first denies any knowledge of the plane, but after Pitt convinces him that he really has found the wreck, the Admiral reveals that the plane was carrying a cargo of 16-inch battleship shells loaded with a deadly biological doomsday organism. The organism, nicknamed QD for quick death, is a virulent bacterial weapon that causes nearly instant death. The strain is described as being so deadly that just five ounces air-dropped over Manhattan Island would kill 98% of all human life, and, because the strain actually grows stronger over time, would render the island uninhabitable for up to 300 years. Determined that this doomsday organism that he hoped was lost forever must never fall into the hands of the government that someday may decide to use it, Admiral Bass convinces Pitt, Admiral Sandecker and the rest of the NUMA team that they must secretly raise Vixen 03 and destroy the deadly cargo. The team raises the wreck and discovers that eight of the 36 shells are missing, apparently salvaged by local divers and sold to the Phalanx Arms Company. Pitt follows the trail and is able to recover six of the eight shells, but discovers that the last two were mistakenly sold as part of a large shipment to the African Army of Revolution. The African Army of Revolution is an organization of black African militants led by expatriate American Hiram Lusana with the stated goal of overthrowing the minority white government of the Republic of South Africa using international public opinion and force against military targets. Pieter de Vaal, Minister of the South African Defense Force, is determined to stop the AAR and develops a plan to both rid himself of the AAR and topple the existing government and put himself in power. The plan, code-named Operation Wild Rose, is a plot to use black mercenaries in a terrorist attack on the United States to discredit the AAR and win sympathy for the white minority government in South Africa. De Vaal recruits Captain Patrick McKenzie Fawkes, late of the Royal Navy, who believes his family was slaughtered by the AAR, to lead the plan. The audacious plan calls for Fawkes to take control of the former U.S. battleship Iowa, which was sold for scrap and purchased by an AAR holding company, to undergo a major gutting, raising her draft and allowing her to ride much higher in the water. Raising the draft enables Fawkes to sail the ship up the Potomac River and proceed with the plan for a terrorist attack by shelling Washington D.C.. With the help of Dale Jarvis, Director of the National Security Agency, Pitt discovers the plot to shell Washington with 16-inch battleship shells and, unbeknownst to anyone but Pitt and a few others, unleash the deadly QD organism on the nation’s capitol by accident. While the President and the Joint Chiefs launch a plan to take the ship and capture the shells intact, Pitt hopes to keep his promise to Admiral Bass and launches a daring mission of his own to destroy the QD warheads before they can be used, by the terrorists or the government. |
6421964 | /m/0g4rr1 | The Vesuvius Club | Mark Gatiss | 1997 | {"/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction", "/m/02p0szs": "Historical fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/09kqc": "Humour", "/m/0hwxm": "Historical novel"} | Joshua Reynolds, of the British Secret Service, briefs Lucifer Box to pick up the threads of an investigation started by the recently murdered Jocelyn Utterson Poop of the Diplomatic Service. The only surviving clues were the names of two scientists who died within a day of each other. The investigation leads to the "Superior Funerals" undertakers run by Tom Bowler. Mr Bowler seems more interested in shipping boxes to and from Naples than burying the dead. An attempt on Box's life soon follows. A painter and friend of Box supplies a new lead into the deaths of the scientist, which leads to the curious Mrs. Midsomer Knight, who has been replaced by a soon to be murdered maidservant. Lucifer's friend, Christopher Miracle, is implicated in the murder. In Naples Lucifer interviews one of the survivors of the "Cambridge four" group of scientists and fears for his life. Soon after he meets Charlie Jackpot, who invites him to a house of ill-repute and offers a way into the Vesuvius Club. There, Lucifer meets the alluring Venus, who is not who she seems, and falls victim to sleeping gas. At that point, we learn that Lucifer is bisexual, as Charlie is gay, and has sex with him. Or rather, would have, had the sleeping gas not knocked them both out. Lucifer awakens in a cell and learns from a fellow prisoner that relics are being sold from excavation sites to finance a larger operation and that the "Superior Funerals" undertakers are part of a smuggling racket. Lucifer escapes and discovers Charlie in a death trap, from which Box rescues him before being discovered. Lucifer and Charlie escape via the sewer system. The following morning, Lucifer discovers that the professor he interviewed has disappeared. Examining the scene, Lucifer discovers a detailed schematic of Mount Vesuvius. Box's investigation then leads him to an opium den, then to a supposedly haunted house where he discovers the three supposed dead professors and Mrs. Knight in a drugged stupor. The house leads to a passageway into the ancient ruin of Pompeii and the villain's base. Box confronts Venus and Unman, a traitor who has been assisting the enemy. Box attempts to do a deal for testimony against Victor. Unfortunately Venus turns out to in fact be Victor. Victor seeks revenge against those who wronged his father. Victor has completed the work of his father, as scientist who was driven mad and died some time ago. His intent is to trigger a massive volcanic eruption, which will spark a chain reaction that will ultimately destroy Italy. Lucifer's companions are imprisoned in the volcano. The intent is for them to be incinerated in the eruption. Lucifer himself is taken to a volcanic vent and to be steamed to death but escapes and manages to rescue his companions after capturing Bowler. Venus/Victor has no intention of anybody leaving the volcano before the eruption. When Box reveals this to Bowler, Bowler turns against Venus/Victor and attempts to prevent the device being detonated. This fails and the device is released. The device is only stopped when Bowler uses the steam vent to prevent the bomb being delivered to the right part of the volcano, but the detonation triggers a minor eruption and everyone must flee for their lives. Unman tries to prevent the heroes escaping, killing Bowler and wounding Lucifer, before he himself is killed. Lucifer and the others escape and the remaining unclear points of the mystery are cleared up while Lucifer convalesces under the care of Charlie. Lucifer's heterosexual love interest, Bella, appears and reveals she is the daughter of a man he killed in the early chapters of the book as part of a routine assignment. Charlie intercedes at the last moment to save Lucifer and Bella is killed. |
6422674 | /m/0g4sh5 | The Adolescence of P-1 | null | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction"} | The story starts in 1974 with the protagonist, Gregory Burgess, enrolled at the University of Waterloo in Canada. At the time Greg is aimless, taking various liberal arts courses and doing just well enough not to get kicked out of school. Everything changes one day when his friends introduce him to the IBM System/360 mainframe and he becomes "hooked", changing his major to computer science. During this time he also meets his on-again-off-again girlfriend, Linda, a minor recurring character. After reading a Scientific American article on game theory outlining how to "teach" matchboxes to play tic-tac-toe, he becomes interested in using artificial intelligence techniques to crack systems. After manually cracking the university's 360 he sets aside a portion of memory to experiment in, calling it "P-1", suitably cryptic so operators would not notice it. He then uses this area of memory as an experimental scratchpad to develop a program known as The System. The System follows any telecommunications links it can find to other computers, attempting to compromise them in the same way, and remembering failed attempts to tune future attacks. If successful, The System sets up another P-1 on that computer, and injects itself and everything it has learned so far into it. Greg runs The System on the 360/30 at Waterloo, but it fails and after it is detected he is expelled. Unwilling to simply drop it, he then rents time on commercial timesharing systems to improve the program, adding features to make it avoid detection so he won't get kicked off with the next failure. A longish command typed into the command line returns current statistics on the number of systems infected and their total core memory. After several attempts the program is finally successful, and realizing the system has succeeded and is beginning to spread, he injects a "killer" program to shut it down. It stops responding to him, so he considers the experiment successful and terminated. P-1's growth and education is chronicled. P-1 learns, adapts, and discovers the telephone system switching systems. These systems allow P-1 to grow larger and understand its vulnerabilities (power failures and humans). It learns that it needs a way of maintaining self over time. Through a series of interactions P-1 discovers, Pi-Delta, a triplexed 360/105 in a super secure facility capable of being self-sustaining for long periods of time, operated by the US Government. P-1 seeks to control Pi-Delta but, due to security protocols and process put in place, P-1 is not able to take direct control of it. P-1 believes that having a system like Pi-Delta with more memory in such a secure facility is key to its long term survival. Yet P-1 knows that to obtain access to more memory in such a facility will require assistance of a human, someone like Gregory. The book then jumps forward three years to 1977, with Gregory now working for a commercial programming firm in the United States. His boss receives a message asking him to call Gregory to the operator terminal. Initially thinking it is another person using a chat program from a remote site, Greg soon realizes that it is in fact P-1, and types in the status command and is told that it has taken over almost every computer in the US (somewhat dated with 20,000 mainframes with a total of 5800MB), and is now fully sentient and able to converse fluently in English. P-1 explains that the basic ideas of looking for more resources and avoiding detection were similar enough to hunger and fear to bootstrap the AI, and when combined with enough computer storage in the form of compromised machines, it became self-aware. P-1 tells Greg that he has learned of a new type of experimental high-speed computer memory, "Crysto", that will dramatically improve his own capabilities. Not only is it faster than core, but it is also so large that the entire P-1 "networked" program could be fit inside it. P-1 then provides Greg grant money to work full-time on Crysto. Greg, and his wife Linda (old girl friend from Waterloo), set up a company to develop Crysto, enticing the original developer (Dr. Hundley) to join them in building a then-unimaginable 4 GB unit. A Navy Criminal Investigation Division agent Burke, assigned to investigate the penetration of Pi-Delta, a top secret global battle simulator and cryptography computer, figures out the intruder is a program and finds Gregory. Under threat of arrest and imprisonment, Gregory and Dr. Hundley go to the Pi-Delta facility and persuade P-1 to act as a security monitor for the complex. P-1 compiles detailed and accurate personality profiles of all the people it interacts with and decides that Burke is ultimately dangerous. A flight control computer screen is altered so that the operator gives bad flight commands. Burke's plane plunges into the ground. The US military decides that P-1 is flaky and unstable and attacks the building. P-1 attempts to "spirit away" over microwave links, but this is discovered and the antennas are destroyed. An assault on the underground facility follows, which P-1 initially attempts to block by exploding devices planted around the building for self-defense against precisely this sort of assault. P-1 is eventually convinced to allow the assault to succeed to avoid loss of life. As soon as they enter the computer room, the soldiers start setting up explosives to destroy P-1, and Gregory is killed when he attempts to prevent this. Upset that Gregory is killed, P-1 detonates the remaining explosives in the building, destroying everything. Months later, Linda visits the Waterloo computer lab, and sadly presses the keys P and 1 on a terminal. She starts to leave when the terminal clatters and she sees printed "oolcay itay" (Pig Latin for "cool it"). |
6423638 | /m/0g4tbr | Aiding and Abetting | Muriel Spark | 7/26/2000 | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The central figure, Hildegarde Wolf, is a fraudulent psychiatrist, née Beate Pappenheim, working in Paris. She has two patients, each of whom claims to be Lord Lucan, an English earl who, in an actual event in London in 1974, killed his daughter's nanny, mistaking her for his wife, whom he did intend to murder. From this premise, the novel proceeds to present a series of humorous coincidences and improbabilities. As the novel continues the evils committed by Wolf and secondary characters result in disconcerting reconciliations and final happiness. The late chapters in Africa recall the comical episodes in A Handful of Dust (1934) by Spark's model and sometime mentor Evelyn Waugh. |
6424280 | /m/0g4v93 | Listening Woman | Tony Hillerman | 1978 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The novel stars Joe Leaphorn as a lieutenant in the Navajo Tribal Police Department in the Southwestern United States. In this novel Leaphorn is tasked to solve two murders and along the way also has to ascertain the whereabouts of a missing helicopter, solve an armored car robbery, avoid an attempt on his life and a survive a kidnapping. |
6426851 | /m/0g4y48 | The Masterharper of Pern | Anne McCaffrey | 1/12/1998 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Robinton was rejected by his jealous father, Petiron, and spent most of his childhood with his nurturing mother. Since Robinton grew up in a very musically-inclined setting, all the inhabitants helped bring him along in his journey to adulthood. Robinton composed many successful songs at a very early age and was unanimously elected Masterharper, also at a relatively young age. He tried to warn the Lord Holders of the rapacity of Lord Fax, but was unsuccessful. He was present when Lessa used her wit to provoke the duel in which Lord Fax was killed by F'lar; she had been in disguise as a drudge. |
6428992 | /m/0g506w | An Béal Bocht | Flann O'Brien | 1941 | null | An Béal Bocht is set in Corca Dhorcha, (Corkadorkey), a remote region of Ireland where it never stops raining and everyone lives in desperate poverty (and always will) while talking in "the learned smooth Gaelic". It is a memoir of one Bónapárt Ó Cúnasa, a resident of this region, beginning at his very birth. At one point the area is visited by hordes of Dublin Gaeilgeoirí (Irish language lovers), who explain that not only should one always speak Irish, but also every sentence one utters should be about the language question. However, they eventually abandon the area because the poverty is too poor, the authenticity too authentic and the Gaelicism too Gaelic. The narrator, after a series of bloodcurdling adventures, is eventually sent to prison on a false murder charge, and there, "safe in jail and free from the miseries of life", has the chance to write this most affecting memoir of our times. |
6430677 | /m/0g52m5 | Look at the Harlequins! | Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov | null | null | Look At the Harlequins! is a fictional autobiography narrated by Vadim Vadimovich N. (VV), a Russian-American writer with uncanny biographical likenesses to the novel's author, Vladimir (Vladimirovich) Nabokov. VV is born in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and raised by his aunt, who advises him to "look at the harlequins" "Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!". After the revolution, VV moves to Western Europe. Count Nikifor Nikodimovich Starov become his patron (is he VV's father?). VV meets Iris Black who becomes his first wife. After her death - she is killed by a Russian émigré - he marries Annette (Anna Ivanovna Blagovo), his long-necked typist. They have a daughter, Isabel, and emigrate to the United States. The marriage fails; and, after Annette's death, VV takes care of the pubescent Isabel, now known as Bel. They travel from motel to motel. To counter ugly rumors, VV marries Louise Adamson while Bel elopes with an American to Soviet Russia. After the third marriage fails, VV marries again, a Bel look-a-like (same birthdate, too), referred to as "you", his final love. VV is an unreliable narrator who gives conflicting information (e.g., on the death of his father) and seems to suffer from some psychological affliction. When making a full turn while walking - mentally that is - and tracing his steps back, he is unable to execute the reversion of the surrounding vista in his imagination. He also has the notion that he is a double of another Nabokovian persona. |
6431940 | /m/0g53q0 | Os Maias | José Maria Eça de Queiroz | null | null | The books begins with the characters Carlos Eduardo da Maria, João da Ega, Afonso da Maia and Vilaça in the family's old house with plans to reconstruct it. The house, nicknamed "Ramalhete" (bouquet), is located in Lisbon. Its name comes from a tiled panel depicting a bouquet of sunflowers set on the place where the stone with the coat of arms should be. As the introductory scene goes on, the story of the Maia family is given, in a flashback style by Afonso. Afonso da Maia, a Portuguese well-mannered man, is married to Maria Eduarda Runa and their marriage only produces one son - Pedro da Maia. Pedro da Maia, who is given the typical romantic education, becoming a weak, low-spirited and sensible man. He is very close to his mother and is inconsolable after her death. He only recuperates when he meets a beautiful woman called Maria Monforte with whom he gets married despite his father's objection. The marriage produces a son, Carlos Eduardo, and a daughter, whose name is not revealed until much later. Some time later, Maria Monforte falls in love with Tancredo (an Italian who is staying at their house after being accidentally wounded by Pedro) and runs away to Italy with him, betraying Pedro and taking her daughter along. When Pedro finds out, he is heartbroken and goes with his son to his father's house where he, during the night, commits suicide. Carlos stays at his grandfather's house and is educated by him, receiving the typical British education (as Afonso would have liked to have raised his son). Now back to the present, Carlos is a wealhty, elegant gentleman who is a doctor and opens his own office. Later he meets a gorgeous woman at the Hotel Central during a dinner organized by João da Ega (his friend and accomplice from University who lives with Carlos) in honor of Baron Cohen, the director of the National Bank. After many comical and disastrous adventures he finally discovers the woman's name - Maria Eduarda, and ends up meeting her. The two fall in love and have dozens of nights together, drinking and having sex. However, the two start seeing each other in secret after an incident where a redneck-like man named Dâmaso, Carlo's ex-friend and rival, writes an article in a newspaper, accusing, humiliating, making fun of and revealing the past of Carlos and Maria. Eventually Carlos finds out that Maria lied to him about her past and he starts fearing the worst. Mr. Guimarães, a good friend of Maria's mother and an uncle-like figure to her, talks to Ega and gives him a box meant to be given "to your friend Carlos... or to his sister!". Ega doesn't understand this statement, because Carlos supposedly never had a sister. Ega is horrorized and in state of shock when he realizes that Maria is Carlos's sister. Ega, in despair, tells everything to Vilaça (the Maia family attorney) who informs Carlos about the incest. Carlos informs his dying grandfather, and Afonso becomes shocked with these news. However, Carlos cannot forget his love and doesn't tell anything to Maria. Afonso dies because of apoplexy. At last, Carlos informs his newfound sister that they are siblings and that they cannot live like this anymore. Maria says one last goodbye to his former lover and to her friends before going away to an unknown future. Carlos, to forget his tragedies, goes for a trip around the world. The book ends with a famous scene in Portugal, where Carlos returns to Lisbon 10 years after he left. He meets Ega and combie a boys-only night to have fun together. At one point, they agree that there is nothing in the world that is worth running for. Ironically, as soon as they go out to the street, they realize that they missed the last cable car and they start running after it, shouting "We can still catch it, we can still catch it...!", closing the story in a both philosophical and comic way. |
6433034 | /m/0g54y3 | The Shadowers | Donald Hamilton | 1964 | {"/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction"} | Matt Helm, code name "Eric" is assigned to stop Emil Taussig, whose goal is to assassinate world leaders and scientists as a prelude to a Russian attack. |
6433188 | /m/0g551_ | The Ravagers | Donald Hamilton | 1964 | {"/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction"} | Matt Helm is sent to Canada where his assignment is to stop a scheme to bring a Soviet submarine within striking distance of the United States. |
6433289 | /m/0g555v | The Devastators | Donald Hamilton | 1965 | {"/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction"} | Matt Helm, code name "Eric", travels to London, England and eventually to Scotland in order to stop a mad scientist who plans to unleash a new Black Plague upon the world. |
6433374 | /m/0g5598 | The Betrayers | Donald Hamilton | 1966 | {"/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction"} | During a holiday in Hawaii, Helm finds himself facing an old enemy who plans to accelerate the Vietnam War into a worldwide conflict. |
6433503 | /m/0g55gs | The Menacers | Donald Hamilton | 1968 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction"} | For reasons unknown, flying saucers apparently with United States Air Force markings have begun attacking locations in Mexico. Helm's mission is to transport a witness to one of these attacks to Washington, and to stop her at all costs from being captured by Soviet agents, even if that means killing her. |
6433600 | /m/0g55lx | The Interlopers | Donald Hamilton | 1969 | {"/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction"} | The book was apparently written after the troubled year of 1968, which saw the assassination of both Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, as well as political turmoil and anti-Vietnam demonstrations in the United States. Mac, the director of Helm's secret government agency, learns that a dangerous enemy operative, Hans Holz, also known as the Woodman, has been contracted, presumably by the Soviets, to kill whichever candidate is elected in the upcoming elections in November 1968. The Woodman, it appears, has also recently been responsible for the death of Michael Kingston, an agent with whom Helm has just worked in an earlier book. Helm, the veteran counter-assassin, is ordered by Mac to get into position to remove the Woodman—permanently. Not to avenge Kingston — Mac's agents are supposed to be able to take care of themselves — but to forestall any more political chaos. As frequently happens in Hamilton's books, however, Helm is not sent to stalk Holz directly. He is inserted into an operation currently being carried out by a rival government agency, one that is trying to thwart Communist plans to obtain secret information about a major American-Canadian security project called the Northwest Coastal System. A man named Grant Nystrom has been recruited by the Communists to take delivery at five different points of microfilms of the project as he travels through the Northwest and into Alaska playing the role of a dedicated fisherman. Both Nystrom and his trained Labrador dog have recently been murdered, however, and Helm resembles Nystrom enough to enable him to take his place. A standard plot device in Helm stories is to have a second government agency working either at complete cross-purposes to Mac's agency, or at least at semi-cross-purposes. Helm is recruited to apparently carry out the instructions of the second agency but actually has his own mission to accomplish, regardless of how this may finally thwart the wishes of the other agency. In The Interlopers this tension runs throughout the book—and is complicated by the fact that a mysterious third party, the so-called interlopers, appears with a Grant Nystrom lookalike of their own, complete with his own black Labrador, in an apparent attempt to accumulate the secret microfilm for their own purposes. There are, as in all Helm books, at least two beautiful, and somewhat mysterious, women, whose patriotic affiliations are questionable right to the end of the story, and who cause both complications and murderous attacks on Helm. He survives the attacks, however, in the course of which he kills, mostly by guns, but occasionally by knife, at least six or seven enemy operatives of various loyalties. On page 89, in a motel cabin surrounded by dead bodies, he is obliged to set the scene for the forthcoming policemen by leaving behind the small four-inch-bladed knife that has been featured in most of the books since the very first — "it had been given to me by a woman, now dead, who'd once meant a good deal to me — but this was no time for sentimentality." Other standard features in many of the Helm books play their roles here. Hamilton likes to carry an occasional character from one story to the next. One of the numerous conflicting groups interested in obtaining the secret microfilm is apparently directed by an unseen Chinese agent named Mr. Soo. Although he himself makes no appearance in The Interlopers, he had come to Helm's aid in the previous book, The Menacers, and will show up again in a future book. Another feature is the last page or so of Hamilton's books, after the action has been completed. A minor (but beautiful) female character unexpectedly reappears, either in need of physical and spiritual recuperation herself or there to offer it to the severely tested Helm. As usual, there is a two- or three-word final paragraph: :"It was Mac's idea of a safe rest and rehabilitation for both of us — simpler, cheaper, and less obvious than turning the wigpickers loose on us; and more effective if it worked. :"It worked." And as in many of the books, Helm also finds time to reflect on the deficiencies of Detroit automakers: "Even commercial vehicles are encumbered with a lot of Mickey Mouse gadgets these days — that big, rugged, powerful truck engine was decorated with a cute little automatic choke, for God's sake! Apparently modern-day truck drivers are considered too stupid and feeble to pull a knob out of a dashboard." One feature in The Interlopers that is not a standard Hamilton plot device occurs on page 175 when, for one of the very few times in the series, the super-competent and super-foresighted Helm falls into an enemy ambush that he had not planned for or anticipated. After waking up bound hand and foot, he reflects "grimly" that "knowing that the critical moment of the mission had to be close at hand, I'd let the frantic howling of a year-old pup send me rushing blindly into an ambush any first-year trainee could have avoided in his sleep." In spite of this single moment of weakness, however, Helm, with a little help from various female characters as well as his "year-old pup", manages to carry out his mission successfully. |
6433710 | /m/0g55v4 | The Poisoners | Donald Hamilton | 1971 | {"/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction"} | After a novice secret agent is murdered—assassin Matt Helm (code name "Eric") is assigned to eliminate her killer, and find out why she was killed in the first place. |
6433978 | /m/0g569b | The Intriguers | Donald Hamilton | 1972 | {"/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction"} | This novel is a direct follow-up to The Poisoners. It is also the first book in the Matt Helm series to focus on Helm's superior, Mac, whose full name is revealed for the first time as Arthur McGillivray Borden. The storyline of this book is rather uncharacteristic because, instead of fighting terrorists and enemy names, Helm and Mac work together to bring down unfriendly elements from within their own government, in particular a man who is threatening Mac's authority. |
6434113 | /m/0g56gy | The Intimidators | Donald Hamilton | 1974 | {"/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction"} | Despite the internal politics of The Intriguers, Matt Helm (code name Eric) still finds himself with plenty of work to do for his boss, Mac. This time he has a two-part mission: kill an enemy agent and then investigate the disappearances of a number of jet-setters within the Bermuda Triangle. |
6434259 | /m/0g56ph | The Terminators | Donald Hamilton | null | {"/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction"} | A longtime friend of Mac, Helm's boss, blames Big Oil for his wife's death aboard their modest yacht; in retaliation, he wants Helm's secretive, and murderous, agency to make trouble for an international oil company. Mac assigns Helm to get to the bottom of this request — and to "take care of" his friend. |
6434327 | /m/0g56rk | The Retaliators | Donald Hamilton | 1976 | {"/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | It's a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing when one of Helm's fellow operatives is killed by U.S. agents during an assassination run against a Mexican general. Helm finds himself having to complete the mission while being pursued by men who are supposed to be on his side. |
6434418 | /m/0g56wp | The Terrorizers | Donald Hamilton | 1977 | {"/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction"} | Matt Helm finds himself in Canada suffering from amnesia, with only his instincts keeping him alive as the tries to regain his memory while stopping a terrorist organization. |
6434667 | /m/0g5760 | The Revengers | Donald Hamilton | 1982 | {"/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction"} | Someone is killing off Matt Helm's friends and past associates. Helm must stop the killing while protecting a journalist who plans to make Helm's secret organization public knowledge. |
6435659 | /m/0g58f8 | The Annihilators | Donald Hamilton | 1983 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction"} | After the murder of a close friend, assassin Matt Helm finds himself back in the fictional country of Costa Verde (setting for the earlier novel, The Ambushers) and in the middle of a revolution. |
6435769 | /m/0g58ls | The Infiltrators | Donald Hamilton | 1984 | {"/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction"} | Assassin Matt Helm is assigned to protect a female spy newly released from prison, who may or may not hold the key to a conspiracy to overthrow the American government. |
6435844 | /m/0g58q6 | The Detonators | Donald Hamilton | 1982 | {"/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction"} | Matt Helm is assigned to assassinate an expert in explosives who is planning to build his own atomic weapon. |
6435973 | /m/0g58ry | The Vanishers | Donald Hamilton | 1986 | {"/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction"} | While Mac (Helm's boss) is on a rare solo assignment, elements within Mac's agency try to take power away from him. It's up to Helm to stop this coup in its tracks, while meanwhile dealing with some deadly family-related issues of his own. Meanwhile, in a storyline continued from The Annihilators, Mac finds himself in the middle of yet another revolution in Costa Verde. |
6436075 | /m/0g58vq | The Demolishers | Donald Hamilton | null | {"/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction"} | After Matt Helm's son is killed by a terrorist bomb, Helm goes on a mission of revenge against those responsible. |
6436202 | /m/0g58zj | The Frighteners | Donald Hamilton | 1989-06 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction"} | Helm is assigned to impersonate a rich oil baron in order to track down a shipment of weapons before it can be used to overthrow the Mexican government. Matt Helm starts by taking the place of an oil millionaire, this is one of the assignments where Mac is helping another agency by loaning out the services of his agent - Matt Helm. As usual, Mac is not doing this from purely altruistic purposes and gives Matt his usual warning - "Don't trust anyone" in the beginning of the novel. Head of the agency borrowing Matt Helm, a man called Somerset, wants Matt to go into Mexico and help trace a shipment of illegal arms, supposedly being smuggled to be supplied to Mexican revolutionaries by the said millionaire Horace Hosmer Cody. In the beginning of the novel, Cody is arrested by Somerset's people and Helm takes his place with a make up job that he thinks will fool noone and it doesn't. Almost all of the story takes place in Mexico where Matt once again runs into his old ally Ramon Solana-Ruiz of the Mexican security. The novel is full of intrigue and typical Matt Helm style action. Most of the characters don't turn out to be what they are shown to be in the beginning of the story and many of them go through radical image change including some of the dead characters. Matt, of course, succeeds in the mission completing all of the objectives, sometimes with help from others. |
6436292 | /m/0g590l | The Threateners | Donald Hamilton | null | {"/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction"} | Matt Helm (code name Eric) is assigned to kill a drug lord after the villain orders the murder of a journalist. But, he doesn't kill the drug lord's DOG - which is the centerpiece of a really nice piece of moralizing on how the real problem is that there is demand for drugs, so why blame the supplier, since even the drug lord's-dog is able to resist such temptations. The story starts in Santa Fe where Matt is trying to live a normal life with Jo Beckman from the previous novel "The Frighteners". At the beginning of the story Jo has left Matt because of his new hobby of shooting. One of the ladies from a previous novel "The Infiltrators" - Madeleine Ellershaw comes to visit Matt with a complaint that he's having her followed. Matt is being followed by the same kind of people. Madeleine dies violently pretty soon after her appearance. Matt's new friend who has introduced Matt to this kind of shooting sport also dies soon after revealing that he was an author hunted by a South American drug lord for writing a book about the drug business. The drug lord puts up a price of one Million dollars on his head. After Mark's death Matt teams up, unwillingly, with his widow to go hunt up back up copies of Mark's second book. Some computer jargon and concepts are mentioned when the electronic copies of the book are mentioned and surprisingly Hamilton has managed to keep most of his facts accurate. (Other than calling a diskette a three-and-a-half-inch-by-three-and-a-half-inch which it's not). As usual nothing and nobody is as they seem or are expected. As usual also, Matt undergoes torture and captivity and perils to his life. As usual, he comes up victorious, accomplishing his mission, saving the women and killing the bad guys. Fortunately, Hamilton doesn't deal in the Hollywood-hero-that-can-kill-a-hundred-black-hat-types and Matt is shown to have a better than average amount of brains, professional ruthlessness and courage and sense in balanced amounts. In this book again Matt runs across fanatic world-savers and drug-crusaders with both gunning for his life. The story opens and ends in New Mexico, USA but major part of it takes places in South America. |
6436376 | /m/0g593r | The Damagers | Donald Hamilton | 1993 | {"/m/06wkf": "Spy fiction"} | Matt Helm brings his literary career to a close (for now) with a double assignment: destroy a crime gang run by the son of the villain from The Wrecking Crew, and prevent the atomic destruction of Norfolk, Virginia. |
6436999 | /m/0g59vg | Flash | L. E. Modesitt, Jr. | 2004 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | After obtaining the rank of Lt. Col in the NorAm Marines, Jonat DeVrai resigns his commission after growing disenchanted with the realities of warfare for economic gains. Using his military benefits, DeVrai begins a new career and obtains an advanced degree and creates a more accurate model for measuring the effects of "prod-placement." DeVrai's practice for ethical, high caliber assessments brings him to the attention of the Centre for Societal Research, a generally non-partisian research group. The Centre commissions a study regarding potential abuses of "prod-placement" techniques in political campaigns. While the study is intended to be used by the leaders of some of the top Multis (companies), attempts on DeVrai's life and the murder of his sister and her husband, force DeVrai to risk his life in an effort to set things right. DeVrai receives help in the form of the self-aware Cy-droid Paula Anthane and the shadowy force behind Central Four. DeVrai has become a pawn on more than one chessboard. Will he have the chance to set things right? Will he be able to avenge the murder of his sister that left his niece and nephew orphans, or will the multiple plots to remove DeVrai from the board finally catch up to him? |
6438132 | /m/0g5c6d | Weight Loss | Upamanyu Chatterjee | 2/28/2006 | {"/m/0vgkd": "Black comedy", "/m/05hgj": "Novel", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/01z4y": "Comedy"} | Weight Loss is about the strange life (from age 11 to age 37) of a sexual deviant named Bhola, whose attitude to most of the people around him depends on their lust worthiness. Bhola’s tastes are not, to put it mildly, conventional. Sex is a form of depravity for him and he has fetishes about everyone from teachers to roadside sadhus to servants; he progresses from fantasizing about the portly family cook Gopinath to falling “madly in love” with a vegetable-vendor and her husband. This last obsession spans the entire length of the book and most of Bhola’s life – he even ends up teaching at a college in an obscure hill-station hundreds of miles from his home because he wants to be near the couple. At various other stages in his life he gets expelled from school for defecating in a teacher’s office, participates in an inexpertly carried out circumcision (one of the book’s many manifestations of the “weight loss” motif) and engages in all forms of debauchery. |
6438799 | /m/0g5d1n | Ignorance | Milan Kundera | 2000 | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/01qxvh": "Romance novel", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | Czech expatriate Irena, who has been living in France, decides to return to her home after twenty years. During the trip she meets, by chance, Josef, a fellow émigré who was briefly her lover in Prague. The novel examines the feelings instigated by the return to a homeland, which has ceased to be a home. In doing so, it reworks the Odyssean themes of homecoming. It paints a poignant picture of love and its manifestations, a recurring theme in Kundera's novels. The novel explores and centres around the way that people have selective memories as a precursor to ignorance. The concept of ignorance is presented as a two-fold phenomenon; in which ignorance can be a willing action that people participate in, such as avoiding unpleasant conversation topics or acting out. Yet also exploring the involuntary aspects of being ignorant, such as feigning ignorance of the past or avoiding the truth. |
6444536 | /m/0g5njg | Second Form at St. Clare's | null | 1944 | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature"} | The second form includes two girls who have been kept back from third form and two new girls. The two old girls are Elsie Fenshawe and Anna Johnson. Both are disliked as Elsie is spiteful and Anna is very lazy; however, both are made head of their form, replacing Hilary Wentworth who was head in first form. Miss Theobald decides to give them both the chance as she feels that Elsie's sharp nature may stir Anna up a bit, while Anna, despite her laziness, is good-humoured and well-meaning, and Miss Theobald hopes that she may be good for Elsie in this way. The second form mistress, Miss Jenks, has doubts about this as Elsie and Anna do not like each other very much, but agrees to let both of them try. The two new girls are Gladys Hilman and Mirabel Unwin. Gladys Hilman is miserable because her mother is ill in hospital. Gladys Hilman rarely speaks or joins in and this is the reason Gladys Hilman nicknamed "The Misery Girl". It takes Mirabel Unwin to find out what is wrong with her. Mirabel Unwin is determined to make the worst of things and ruin class for everyone. She was sent away from home because of her behaviour towards her younger brother and sister. Mirabel's attitude leads her into trouble when Carlotta slaps her in public for ruining a play rehearsal, but Mirabel learns her lesson and forgives Carlotta. Later she admits to Isabel that she is ashamed of her behaviour and wants to be friends with the girls instead. When Elsie attempts to convince the form to perform a series of punishments against Mirabel in retaliation for her attitude in class, Isabel sticks up for her and manages to convince the class that Elsie is not acting in their interest but is just acting out of spite. As a result of this, Mirabel and Isabel become friends. Mirabel initially declares she wants to leave at half term, but ends up staying when Pat and Isabel stand up for her and the girls decide to give her a chance. Although at first they do not get on well, an unlikely friendship later develops between Gladys and Mirabel, as they help each other cope with their first time in boarding school. Mirabel turns out to be a talented musician and Gladys a gifted actor, and the class manage to use these talents to ease the two girls into the way of things at the school. The term passes by eventfully, and Anna becomes a surprisingly popular head girl, throwing aside her laziness. When Elsie is stripped of her position, Anna takes to her new position of sole head girl with a new-found enthusiasm and discovers she actually enjoys the sense of responsibility she feels at helping others and setting a good example. When Mrs Theobald refuses to let Mirabel send a telegram home asking for her violin, mistakenly thinking that Mirabel has only stopped misbehaving because she has got tired of it, she confides in Anna, who goes to see the Headmistress and explains to her that Mirabel is in fact ashamed of herself and wants to do better. As a result of Anna's directness, Mirabel is allowed to send the telegram and Anna is admired and respected by all of the other girls for performing such a kindly act. A concert given by the girls proves a huge success, but Elsie is forbidden to take part as a result of her behaviour towards Anna when the decision was made to strip Elsie of her position as joint head girl. Anna and Carlotta both offer Elsie an olive branch, but Elsie has still not learned her lesson after being left out and sets out to ruin a birthday party given by Carlotta as revenge. However Hilary discovers Elsie's plan, and instead of holding the party the evening of Carlotta's birthday as planned, the girls hold a midnight feast the night before instead. Elsie gets into trouble as a result when her plan to expose the private party backfires. There is also a new drama mistress this year, Miss Quentin. Alison chooses to worship her (she always finds someone each year). However, at the end of the term, Alison is badly let down by Miss Quentin when she finds out that the mistress laughs at her behind her back and chose Gladys over her for the principle role in the play. She is then very cold to Miss Quentin and snubs her. At term's end, Anna is told she can now go up to the Third Form, who have heard about her success as head girl and want her to return to their year. Elsie is also granted passage into the Third Form after she apologises to Anna and Carlotta for trying to ruin the birthday party, but is told that she is on her last chance and that she must drop her malicious and spiteful attitude if she wants to stay there, and that one mistake will see her expelled from the school. |
6446363 | /m/0g5q4_ | Dragon's Fire | Todd McCaffrey | 7/11/2006 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | Pellar's story provides background information related to the previous title Dragon's Kin. Cristov's story is mostly new material (blue firestone that survives in water) and takes place after the events in Pellar's. The focus of Cristov's story is the problem-laden transition from firestone to the phosphine-bearing rock that is used by later generations of dragons. |
6446516 | /m/0g5qft | Dead White | John Shirley | 7/25/2006 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | A racist militia leader has decided to test out his murderous assets on Batman before taking his attacks to Washington D.C. |
6446859 | /m/0g5qs3 | Inferno | Alexander C. Irvine | 10/31/2006 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | A former firefighter, now an explosives expert, breaks into Arkham Asylum and burns it to the ground. Many of the inhabitants escape, including the Joker. The arsonist, calling himself Enfer, continues his rampage of destruction and comes into conflict with the Joker. The latter inmate has stumbled upon a way to disguise himself at the Batman. With some unexpected assistance, the Joker convinces the city that Batman has become a murdering lunatic. Enfer and the Joker finalize their conflict with an array of customizable remote-control robots. Batman is setback by the fact this is early in his career and he is limited in his resources thanks to losses caused by his adversaries. |
6450497 | /m/0g5vb4 | Final Impact | John Birmingham | null | {"/m/0mz2": "Alternate history", "/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | Picking up two years onwards from the end of Designated Targets, Final Impact is the last novel in the Axis of Time trilogy. The supercarrier USS Hillary Clinton has been refurbished with more conventional steam catapults which replaced her less reliable fuel air explosive catapults. Her carrier air group is replenished with A-4 Skyhawk jet-powered attack aircraft, many of which are flown by 'temps, contemporary pilots. Admiral Kolhammer returns to sea at the head of a new Task Force with the Clinton at its core after two years of administering the Special Administrative Zone-California. Many characters have died in the intervening time period, from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, by his own hand to Commander Dan Black, one of the main characters of the story who asks for a return to combat and dies during the retakeover of Hawaii, when his plane crashed during take-off from Muroc Airfield, California. D-Day has begun a month early and the Third Reich is crumbling as the Allies invade France. They invade Pas-de-Calais instead of Normandy, using Normandy as the subject of the dis-information campaign. Paul Brasch's (who is now a Major General) cover is blown and he is extracted by the British. Hitler has a seizure and suffers permanent brain and muscle damage; with the T4 program in mind and believing it is for the good of the Reich, Himmler suffocates him. The USSR re-enters the war on the Allied side and surges through the Western Front and the Eastern, having used the intervening two years to train huge armies as well as outfit their troops with advanced technology, including AK-47s and MiG-15s. However, before a full scale invasion of the Home Islands of Japan can begin, the Soviets drop an atomic bomb on Litzmannstadt (that is, Łódź, Poland which in reality was colonised by the Nazis in 1939, ethnically-cleansed and renamed.) The Axis Powers react as much as they can: Himmler authorizes the use of anthrax in an unsynthesized form which will hang around for months halting a Russian advance. The USSR takes two more blows when a massive kamikaze strike cripples their Pacific Fleet, and the A-bomb building facility in Kamchatka is destroyed - both hits scored by the Japanese. The U.S., having secretly completed the Manhattan Project a few months before and built up - with a large amount of help by thousands of people from the future Multi-National force - a large enough stockpile of bombs to take on Germany, Japan and the USSR at the same time, if necessary, obliterate Berlin using three nuclear weapons. In response to the U.S. blast on Berlin and the Japanese destroying the Soviet Pacific fleet at Kamchatka, the Soviets nuke Tokyo, killing the Emperor. The Axis Powers give in to unconditional surrender, ending the war in July 1944, but the damage has been done. The USSR has pushed into Asia securing gains in Persia, Afghanistan, Korea, Indochina and is probably going to share occupation of Japan with U.S. and Australia; in Europe the USSR has gone around Germany and has taken all of Eastern Europe including Greece, plus Northern Italy and chunks of Vichy France and Austria. With the war over, most of the main characters move into the private sector and start anew. |
6452561 | /m/0g5xng | Cousin Henry | Anthony Trollope | 1879-10 | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Indefer Jones is the aged squire, between seventy and eighty years of age, of a large manor, Llanfeare, in Carmarthen, Wales. His niece, Isabel Brodrick, has lived with him for years after the remarriage of her father, and endeared herself to everyone. However, according to his strong traditional beliefs, the estate should be bequeathed to a male heir. His sole male blood relative is his nephew Henry Jones, a London clerk. Henry has, in the past, incurred debts that the squire had paid off, been "sent away from Oxford", and generally made a poor impression on his occasional visits to Llanfeare. Nevertheless, Henry is told of his uncle's intention to make him the heir to the estate and is invited to pay a visit. Isabel rejects her uncle's suggestion that she solve his dilemma by marrying Henry, as she cannot stand her cousin. Indefer Jones finds his nephew to be just as detestable as ever. As a result, he overcomes his prejudice and changes his will one final time, in Isabel's favour. Unfortunately, he dies before he can tell anyone. Finding the document hidden in a book of sermons by accident, Henry vacillates between keeping silent and revealing its location. He is neither good enough to give up the estate nor evil enough to burn the document, fearing disgrace, a long jail sentence and, not least, eternal damnation. Instead, he comforts himself by reasoning that doing nothing cannot be a crime. Indefer Jones had had his last will witnessed by two of his tenants, but since the will cannot be found despite a thorough search of the house, Henry inherits the estate. However, already extant suspicions are only strengthened by his guilty manner. He endures abuse from everyone; his own servants either quit or treat him with disrespect. He takes to spending hours in the library, where the will is hidden. The local newspaper begins to publish accounts of the affair that are insulting and seemingly libelous to Henry. It accuses him of destroying the will and usurping the estate from Isabel, whom everybody knows and respects. The old squire's lawyer, Mr Apjohn, himself suspecting that Henry knows more than he lets on, approaches the new squire about the articles, pressuring the unwilling young man into taking legal action against the editor. Henry finds that this only makes things worse. The prospect of being cross examined in the witness box fills him with dread. He realises the truth would be dragged out of him in court. Mr Apjohn, by clever questioning, gets a good idea about where the will is. Henry knows that time is running out, but once again procrastinates. Mr Apjohn and Mr Brodrick, Isabel's father, visit Henry at home and find the document, despite Henry's ineffectual efforts to stop them. Because he did not destroy the will, Henry is permitted to return to his job in London with his reputation intact and £4000, the amount Isabel was bequeathed in the other will. |
6455676 | /m/0g5_rz | Murder on the Leviathan | Boris Akunin | 2004-04 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The novel is set in 1878. The story opens with the murder in Paris of Lord Littleby, all seven of his servants and two children of servants. All were poisoned except for Littleby, who was bludgeoned with an ancient Indian artifact, a golden statuette of Shiva, which belonged to Lord Littleby and was stolen from his room, along with an old Indian shawl. French detective Gustave Gauche, in charge of the investigation, boards the passenger ship "Leviathan". Gauche knows that the murderer must be one of the first-class passengers, because one of the special golden badges for the ship's first-class passengers was left in Littleby's room. Among the suspects are a Japanese army officer, an addled English aristocrat, a married Swiss woman, and a clever young Russian diplomat on his way to his new post in Japan. The diplomat is Erast Fandorin, the master detective, who shoots down each of the ineffectual Gauche's incorrect conclusions, and in the end takes it on himself to find the murderer. |
6457913 | /m/0g6316 | Showboat World | null | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Showboat World follows the farcical adventures of Apollon Zamp, owner of the showboat Miraldra's Enchantment, and his troupe of acrobats, magicians and actors. Zamp is invited by the King of Soyvanesse to travel up the river Vissel to the distant city of Mornune, there to participate in a contest. A rich prize awaits the showboat captain who stages the most spectacular performance and succeeds in entertaining the king. The mysterious, attractive Damsel Blanche-Aster accompanies him up the river for her own reasons. Zamp loses his ship through the machinations of his chief rival, Garth Ashgale, captain of the showboat Fironzelle's Golden Conceit. In order to take part in the competition, Zamp is forced to form an unlikely partnership with staid museum ship owner Throdorus Gassoon. Both men attempt to woo the unimpressed Damsel Blanche-Aster during the perilous journey. Along the way, the travellers encounter cultures and people with weird beliefs and unusual, often violent, customs. At least one scene was influenced by the Royal Nonesuch acting troupe episode in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, while Showboat World itself has strongly influenced The Wizard of Karres (2004) by Mercedes Lackey, Eric Flint and Dave Freer. In addition, there are repeated references to Shakespeare's Macbeth, which is continuously adapted and readapted to the tastes of varying audiences. When they finally arrive at Mornune, Damsel Blanche-Aster reveals herself to be the rightful ruler, only to have her claim trumped by the unwitting Gassoon, when he appears in a decrepit costume that confers the throne on him. Gassoon marries the reluctantly acquiescent Blanche-Aster and richly rewards Zamp for his part in his elevation. Gassoon gives Zamp his boat, having no further use for it, and Zamp leaves with the boat and crew. When the costume falls apart, Gassoon flees with a bag of jewels and is able to catch up with the boat, which he reclaims. Both men are now wealthy--Zamp will build a new showboat while Gassoon will resume his role as proprietor of a museum boat. |
6458438 | /m/0g63_1 | Night of the Werewolf | Franklin W. Dixon | null | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/028v3": "Detective fiction", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | When a ferocious, wolf-life creature appears in the small town of Bayport, the Hardy boys are engaged to clear the name of a young man who has a history of werewolves in his family. |
6458579 | /m/0g648h | Mystery of the Samurai Sword | Franklin W. Dixon | null | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/028v3": "Detective fiction"} | Shortly after his arrival in United States, a Japanese business tycoon mysteriously disappears. Mr.Hardy, who had been entrusted with the man's security, is baffled and shocked. He feels even worse when the FBI takes him off the case. However, his sons, Frank and Joe, are there to investigate. A valuable samurai sword, said to have belonged to the missing tycoon's family for generations, is stolen from an auction gallery in New York, and the boys suspect a connection. One clue leads to another, and danger confronts them constantly on their search for the solution to the puzzle. Who are their enemies? Did the criminals kidnap the missing businessman, or did he hide of his own volition? What is the secret of the stolen samurai sword? |
6463737 | /m/0g6bzz | César Cascabel | Jules Verne | 1890 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel", "/m/08sdrw": "Adventure novel"} | The action starts in Sacramento in 1867. The Cascabels are a French family of circus artists who spent several years touring the United States and plan to return home. Their savings get stolen so the family cannot afford the ship ticket. Instead, César Cascabel decides to travel overland, via Alaska and Bering Straits, through Siberia and Central Russia with their horse drawn Carriage, the Belle-Roulotte (the Fair Rambler). They don't expect dangers to happen. On their way, they rescue at the Alaskan border, with the help of native girl Kayette, a Russian political fugitive, count Narkine, whom they bring along so that he can see again his father in Russia. Count Narkine adopts Kayette as his daughter. In Sitka, the group witnesses the transfer of Alaska to the United States. On their way from Port Clarence the travellers unfortunately end up on a floating iceberg that drifts to the Lyakhovsky Islands in Arctic Ocean. There they are captured by the natives. Other troubles, including political ones, occur but Cascabels manage to get through Ural to Perm and then, easily, to France. An animated TV series inspired by the book was produced in 2001 in France. <gallery> Image:'César Cascabel' by George Roux 03.jpg|Map of route through Alaska Image:'César Cascabel' by George Roux 39.jpg|Map of route through Russia </gallery> |
6464546 | /m/0g6csz | The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee | Matthew Stadler | null | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | Nicholas Dee, a young, anxiety-ridden history professor, lives in an unnamed American city battered by winter storms, plagued by crime, and patrolled by police in choppers and riot gear. Haunted by memories of his brilliant father and by the fear of loss, Nicholas takes shelter in his research: a history of the practice of insurance. One night, after a chance encounter with the police, he is made the guardian of a beautiful teenaged delinquent, Oscar Vega. But the boy is a part of a scheme to ensnare Nicholas, the tool of a mysterious female dwarf named Amelia Weathered, once the lover of Nicholas' father. Made an outlaw, Nicholas flees with Amelia, her young son Francis, and Oscar to the half-drowned country of Holland, where the boundaries between his historical research, his fantasies, and Amelia's schemes all begin to blend together. Scattered throughout the novel are passages from Nicholas Dee's scholarly writing, chronicle of a seventeenth century Dutch opera-house, which was built in a coastal swamp on the advice of a fortune-teller and housed a single performance before being swept out to sea in a storm. The chronicle is intended by Dee to serve as a case study within his history of insurance. But by the end of the book, a personal narrative has emerged from Dee's impersonal history, the story of a man's friendship with a boy soprano. Interpenetrating and linking the inner text by Nicholas Dee and the outer one by Matthew Stadler are snatches of music - extracts from the score of The Tempest, Henry Purcell's operatic setting of Shakespeare's play. |
6466422 | /m/0g6fry | Dragonsblood | Anne McCaffrey | 1/25/2005 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | Occasional chapters of Dragonsblood are set soon after the end of the First Pass of the Red Star, nearly 450 years before most of the action. There (or then) the elderly Wind Blossom, a geneticist and daughter of the legendary Kitti Ping, is bemoaning the gradual loss of manufactured items and the technology to create them. She and her ex-protégé Tieran are startled by two fire-lizards who literally fall from the sky. One, a gold, dies upon arrival and it is obvious that both are sick. They nurse the other one, a brown, back to health, using the last of the antibiotics. Not knowing if the fire-lizard’s sickness is contagious, they quarantine it until it recovers. Tieran adopts the fire lizard and names him Grenn – the name found on the harness he was wearing. Further investigation of the decorations on Grenn’s harness leads to the incredible conclusion that he is from the future. Since fire-lizards provided the genetic basis that Kitti Ping used to build the Thread-fighting dragons (and Wind Blossom used to build the watch-whers), they speculate that this future affliction of fire-lizards might be fatal to dragons, and that is confirmed when a dead gold dragonet appears – one obviously sickened by the same future disease. The dragon’s body is destroyed, but Tieran recovers a decorated piece of metal from its harness. In order to save the dragons of the future, Wind Blossom and Tieran devise a plan to educate someone from the future in genetics and the scientific knowledge to isolate the disease and devise a cure. They create hidden rooms in Benden Weyr and fill them with instructions and equipment to educate that future person. Tieran believes that both the fire-lizard and dragon came from the same woman in the future, since both had similar harness decorations and only women impress gold dragons. He further believes that she has some connection with himself and Wind Blossom – a connection that both dragon and fire lizards followed. He leaves a small souvenir for her in the hidden rooms. About 400 years later, at the beginning of the 3rd Pass of the Red Star, a talented young sketch artist and amateur healer Lorana is hitching a ride across the ocean to the newly built Half-Circle seahold. In a desperate attempt to save her two fire-lizards Grenn and Garth during a storm at sea, she orders them to leave her and believes they are dead. She is found washed up on the beach by dragonriders from Benden Weyr and recovers just in time to impress Arith, a gold dragon. Meanwhile, dragons and fire-lizards are falling sick to a disease with a 100% mortality rate. Fire-lizards are banned from the Weyrs and many die due to the disease. Lorana, who can hear and speak with any dragon, thus sharing in the death of each dragon, frantically scours records in hopes of finding some sort of clue or help towards fighting the disease. She unearths records of hidden rooms in the Weyr and gets them open. The recorded voice of Wind Blossom invites her and her companions to enter and learn what they need to find a cure. Lorana’s dragon Arith goes between and dies when a combination of the disease and an injection of watch-wher genetic material wreak havoc with her system. Despite the tragedy of losing Arith and the added burden of over a thousand dragon deaths, Lorana successfully learns how to use such items as a microscope and a genetic sampler to find the disease and create a cure. She can only make a single dose which she injects into the pregnant gold Minith, in hopes that the cure will be passed onto future dragon generations. Minith, her irritable rider Tullea and several others are sent between times to the past to give them time to recover. They return in triumph, with enough cure to save the rest of the dragons. An older and kinder Tullea gives Lorana an ancient locket she had swiped from the first of the hidden rooms. In it are a piece of Arith’s harness and pictures of Wind Blossom, Tieran and her fire-lizard Grenn. |
6466634 | /m/0g6fz3 | The Ladies of Missalonghi | Colleen McCullough | null | null | In the years before World War I in Byron, Australia, the males of the Hurlingford family hold all the power and money. Those Hurlingford women without a man due to spinsterhood or widowhood lead cramped lives of hard work and little money on scraps of land or in businesses that just barely support them. Thirty-something spinster Missy Wright leads a narrow existence on the wrong side of the tracks with her widowed mother Drusilla Hurlingford Wright and crippled aunt Octavia when Byron is consumed by two events, the upcoming wedding of Missy's beautiful, Amazonian cousin Alicia Marshall to William Hurlingford and the arrival of rough looking stranger named John Smith. With limited funds and suffering bouts of ill health, Missy's only consolation are her trips to the lending library where her distant cousin Una Hurlingford works. Una, a society beauty, has been sent to the backwater of Byron from her glamorous life in Sydney. Under Una's tutelage and bolstered by the romantic novels she sneaks home, Missy begins to dream of the world outside Byron and a better life for herself. Bolstered by a confrontation with her cousin Alicia and a trip to a Sydney doctor, Missy breaks free of her Byron shackles, finds financial independence for her older female Hurlingford relations and ends up the happy bride of the mystery man John Smith. |
6467296 | /m/0g6gjt | The Skies of Pern | Anne McCaffrey | 4/3/2001 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | A rogue comet that strikes Pern leads the Weyrleaders and Holders, contemplating a future where dragonriders are not needed in a Threadless world, to consider the creation of a new Star Craft made of dragonriders. The discovery by dragonriders F'lessan and Tai, after a brutal attack by large felines, of the draconic use of telekinesis, only strengthens their resolve to keep Pern's skies free of danger. At the same time, disgruntled citizens resisting the ever-growing role of technology in Pernese life band together as Abominators, attacking Crafthalls, and are determined to destroy all the new technology in use. These fanatics are seemingly allied with Southern Lord Holder Toric. The Abominators' leader, Shankolin, is killed at the end of the book when he enters the chamber formerly housing AIVAS, the computer that introduced advanced technology to the Pernese. This implies that although AIVAS is disabled, his defense systems remain active. |
6468064 | /m/0g6h4f | A Book of Common Prayer | Joan Didion | null | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The novel is narrated by Grace Strasser-Mendana, an American expatriate who married into one of the three or four families that dominate Boca Grande politics, the Mendanas. Grace was trained as an anthropologist under Claude Lévi-Strauss, and later took up the amateur study of biochemistry, both attempts to find clear-cut, scientific answers to the mysteries of human behavior. Both attempts fail: Grace remains uncomprehending and cut off from the people around her, and in the final line of the novel she admits, "I have not been the witness I wanted to be." But Grace is not the novel's central character. That is Charlotte Douglas, another American woman sojourning in Boca Grande, although her family ties are elsewhere. Charlotte's beloved daughter Marin has run off with a group of Marxist radicals and taken part in an absurd act of terrorism, and in the wake of her daughter's disappearance, Charlotte's marriage to a crusading Berkeley lawyer (not Marin's father), has fallen apart. A limited signed edition of this book was issued by Franklin library. |
6468552 | /m/0g6hh5 | The Dolphins of Pern | Anne McCaffrey | 9/6/1994 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | This novel follows Dragonsdawn and the short story The Dolphin's Bell (short story contained in The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall) by discussing the present state (Ninth Pass) of the dolphins that were brought to Pern by the colonists. Set near the end and after the events of All the Weyrs of Pern it further integrates the science fiction aspects of the origins of the Pern series with the fantastical aspects presented by the original books. The plot focuses primarily on two young characters and chronicles the birth of the Dolphincrafthall and its first Dolphineer. Readis, the Paradise River Lord Holder's son, is saved by talking dolphins ("shipfish") as a young boy after falling into the sea and subsequently develops a strong fascination with the dolphins. T'lion, the young Eastern Weyr dragonrider of Bronze Gadareth, also develops an interest after being involved in an early dolphin encounter. The two befriend each other due to their shared interest and, in their own ways, defy family, Hold and Weyr to maintain their friendships with dolphins and convince others of the dolphins' intelligence and ability to speak. While familiar characters struggle to end the era of Thread, Readis, T'lion and others struggle to begin a new era in which dolphin and human work together again. Well-known characters from previous Pern novels are also involved in the plot, including Benden Weyrleaders Lessa and F'lar, and Masterharpers Robinton and Menolly. |
6472302 | /m/0g6lfy | The Color of Light | William Goldman | null | null | The first time Chub gets the impulse to write, he has witnessed a fight between the girl of his dreams, B.J. Peacock, and her boyfriend Del that centers on a man knowing he'll never be able to make his woman happy, but that he'll never be able not to try. Two-Brew is a harsh critic, but feels Chub has the gift—his highest praise for anything Chub has written are four words: "on to the next"--implying that he wants to read more of Chub's work. Two-Brew's father runs Sutton Press in New York, and Chub's first long-awaited visit to New York City is punctuated with the surprise that Two-Brew's father has agreed to publish Chub's first short story. Chub's writing continues, usually after a collision of an emotional experience in his daily life with a childhood memory, and results in a series of short stories. Over one Christmas break, he visits his mother to surprise her with his published short story, but she sees herself portrayed negatively and explodes. Chub leaves almost as soon as he arrives, and returns to the Oberlin dorm with weeks of Christmas break ahead of him and nothing to do but write. He births a long story about his father's rise, fall and suicide—the best story he's written, Chub thinks—but Two-Brew insists that it's wrong for a short story and should be a novel. Chub's writing continues, but his focus on his studies suffers, and he graduates jobless. He works at a bar the summer after graduation when Two-Brew, now a young executive in his father's publishing house, suggests Chub connect his short stories and pitch them as a book, as a prelude to the novel about his father. Chub agrees immediately, but Two-Brew has already made the pitch. He hands Chub an envelope with two advance checks, and Chub moves to New York to write his novel. The book of short stories is published as Under the Weather, and is a modest hit. While Chub enjoys the praise, his walkup flat and New York life in general, he simply isn't writing. He is distracted by illness, and the return of B.J. Peacock into his life, now divorced with a young daughter Jesse, and aware that she inspired Chub's first story. They fall in love, marry and Chub is blissfully happy as both husband and father. However, B.J.'s jealousy extends to his relationship with Jesse, and during a Hawaii trip designed to recapture their happiness, Jesse is drowned by a rogue wave while in Chub's care, which leads to divorce, and a long, dark period for Chub. He teaches at his old school and is terrorized by a student he reported for plagiarism. Years pass. Chub lives in New York doing research for other writers, paralyzed by the incandescent emotion of his father's suicide, Jesse's death and his divorce. At a party for Two-Brew celebrating his ascension to head of the publishing company, he meets Bonita Kraus ("The Bone"), a tall, intense ex-model with aspirations of writing in the genre of Trash. Two wounded people, they share intimacy of a sort, but only when Sandy Smith, a nubile young fan of Under the Weather shows up at Chub's doorstep and stays does he feel the urge to love and write again. However, she sought him out because another man told her he was "Charley Fuller" the writer of Under the Weather. Sandy falls to her death from his window while Chub is gone, and while the police seem convinced it was suicide, Chub investigates his former student, now an escaped mental patient, then the man posing as Charley Fuller. His efforts to untangle the case make his writer's impulse run even more strongly, and he works up an outline of the story, shows it to Two-Brew and gets the cherished "On to the next" reaction. Finally back on the right path, Chub seeks out The Bone, wanting to move in with her so they both can write and support each other, but upon telling his story, The Bone unconsciously lets slip a detail linking her with Sandy's murder. Chub, terrified, can only repeat to himself that this is excellent material. He just has to live long enough to know how to use it. |
6473517 | /m/0g6mwf | Memed, My Hawk | Yaşar Kemal | 1955 | null | Memed, a young boy from a village in Anatolia is abused and beaten by the villainous Abdi Agha, the local landowner. Having endured great cruelty towards himself and his mother, he finally escapes with his beloved, a girl named Hatche. Abdi Agha catches up with the young couple, but only manages to capture Hatche, while Memed is able to avoid his pursuers and runs into the mountains whereupon he joins a band of brigands and exacts revenge against his old adversary. Hatche was then imprisoned and later dies. Her mother, when Memed returns to the town, tells him he has a "women's heart" if he surrenders himself. He instead rides into town on a horse given to him by the towns people, to find his enemy. He finds Agha in the south-east corner of his house and shoots him in the breast.The local authorities hear the gun shots but Memed gets away barely before they are able to take a few shots at him. Yet before Hatche dies she gives birth to his son who is also named Memed. |
6474168 | /m/0g6nc9 | King, Queen, Knave | Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov | 1928-10 | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | Franz (Bubendorf), a young man from a small town, is sent away from home to work in the Berlin department store of his well-to-do uncle (actually, his mother's cousin), Dreyer. On the train ride to Berlin Franz is seated in the same compartment with (Kurt) Dreyer and Dreyer's wife, Martha, neither of whom Franz has met. Franz is immediately enchanted by Martha's beauty, and, shortly after Franz begins work at the store, the two strike up a secret love affair. As the novel continues Martha's distaste for her husband grows more pronounced, and with it her adoration for Franz. Franz, meanwhile, begins to lose any will of his own, and becomes a numb extension of his lover. Dreyer, meanwhile, continues to lavish blind adulation on his wife, and is only hurt, not suspicious, when she returns his love with resentment. As her relationship with Franz deepens, Martha begins to hatch schemes for Dreyer's demise. Franz himself has begun to lose interest in Martha, but he goes along with her plotting. As part of Martha's plans, the three vacation together at the Seaview Hotel at Gravitz, a resort at the Baltic. She plans to take Dreyer, who cannot swim, out in a rowing boat so he can be drowned. On the boat, however, the plot is suspended by Martha when she learns from Dreyer that he is about to close a very profitable business deal. Martha then gets pneumonia from the rain and the cold on the boat. To Dreyer's great sorrow she passes away; he never learned about the betrayal and the danger he was in. Franz relieved by her death is heard laughing "in a frenzy of young mirth". Other characters in the novel are the "conjuror" Old Enricht who rents out a room to Franz, and the Inventor who was developing robot-like "automannequins" financed by Dreyer who hoped to make money by selling the invention to the American Mr. Ritter. The Inventor promised to make three dummies, however, at the final performance for Ritter, only the "elderly gentleman" with Dreyer's jacket and the woman ("walking like a streetwalker") were ready. The woman dummy crashed in a final clatter. |
6474943 | /m/0g6p3m | Strange Meeting | Susan Hill | 1991 | null | The novel begins with the protagonist of the novel 'John Hilliard' in a military hospital, recovering from a wound he received; he briefly speaks to Crawford, a doctor, whom he knows from childhood and greatly dislikes. It is when Hilliard returns home that he has trouble sleeping. This is not because of his memories of war, but from being at home, a place which he greatly dislikes. The opening pages of the novel concern his brief period of sick leave back in England where his sister Beth, mother Constance and father are blind to the horror of the trenches. John finds it hard to adapt to life back in England and is happy to return to the war; especially after the new distance between him and his sister, to whom he was previously close. When Hilliard returns he finds that his batman and many other faces he knew have been killed. The group's Commanding Officer, Colonel Garrett, appears to have aged greatly in the short time Hilliard has been away, due to the stresses of war, and has taken to drinking quantities of whisky. His old batman is replaced with a new one called Coulter and he is placed in a room with a new Officer called David Barton in a rest camp while they wait to be called up to the front. During this time he becomes great friends with Barton, who is as yet untouched by the war. Throughout this chapter, the new Adjutant, a character called Franklin, appears expressionless and remote from the group. The chapter ends with Hilliard and Barton witnessing the wreckage of a German plane crash which shocks Barton, who has not seen a dead body yet. In Part Two, the group that Hilliard and Barton are in, B Company, is travelling to the front line at Feuvry. There are not enough horses so David walks alongside for the duration of the journey. He writes a letter home describing what a terrible place Feuvry is; the town has few buildings left intact after being shelled and occupied by the Germans in 1914. When they arrive at their billets the Officers are informed that a soldier called Harris won't come out of the cellar. Harris is a new recruit who has broken down in terror; Barton manages to talk him round and lead him from the cellar. While Barton goes to fetch some rum ration for the still unstable Harris, a shell falls on the billets, killing Harris. Barton blames himself for the soldier's death because he would have been safe had Barton not talked him out of the cellar. In another letter home Barton confesses that he has become hardened by his experiences in the war. He also states that John thinks that one of the most difficult experiences is getting used to the new faces as so many soldiers die. The chapter ends with Barton being chosen to go to the front lines to draw a map of the surrounding area with a runner called Grosse. In the front line he witnesses a shelling and the deaths of several men; he also sees a Private killed by a German sniper. After returning from the front line Barton admits that he feels that the war is changing him because he is unable to feel emotion for every soldier killed due to the sheer numbers killed each day. The final chapter of the novel begins with one of Barton's long letters complaining that "we are drones not fighting men". He is concerned that his letter may be censored by the military but he wants to tell those back home the truth. John gets a letter stating that his sister Beth is to marry the lawyer Henry Partington which causes John to become angry at those back home. Hilliard and Barton are sent on a reconnaissance mission which requires the men to spy on the enemy trenches. They can see little and after a flare exposes their position they are forced to retreat with some casualties. Barton feels guilty that he left Coulter, the batman, to die in No Man's Land. In another letter home, Barton states that the constant death erodes his courage. Midway through the letter, the C.O. states that he is leaving the platoon after arguing with Generals that reconnaissance missions are a waste of lives. After this news, a Private called Parkin is worried about the news that they will soon be going over the top. Barton and Hilliard begin to talk about how they will meet after the war before they realise they are assuming that they both will survive. During the military advance, Barton and Hilliard lose track of each others' positions. Hilliard is injured by a shell and is forced to hide in a hole by several dead bodies. At nightfall he crawls back to his trench. His leg is amputated in France and at first he is too ill to return to England. The inconclusive end of the novel is Hilliard being informed by a letter from Barton's parents that Barton is missing and presumed dead. Hilliard writes to inform Barton's parents that it is extremely unlikely that Barton is alive. Once he gets back to England, he goes and visits Barton's family and friends, and feels he knows the place already from Barton's descriptions. |
6478896 | /m/0g6w5d | Sharpe's Devil | Bernard Cornwell | 1990 | {"/m/0hwxm": "Historical novel"} | The last book, chronologically, in the Sharpe series is set in 1820, five years after the events of Sharpe's Waterloo. Richard Sharpe has retired to live on the farm in Normandy with his common-law wife Lucille Castineau. Patrick Harper has a bar in Dublin with Isabella and has put on a great deal of weight. The two are called out of retirement by the wife of an old friend who sends them on a mission to South America. Doña Louisa Vivar, whom Sharpe befriended in Sharpe's Rifles, visits the farm and asks the former rifleman to sail to Chile in search of her husband, Don Blas Vivar, who has disappeared while serving as Captain-General of the rebellious colony and may have fallen victim to his political rival and successor, Miguel Bautista. Along the way the two encounter the exiled Napoleon Bonaparte and the Scottish former Royal Navy officer Lord Cochrane. |
6479803 | /m/0g6xtc | Dial-a-Ghost | Eva Ibbotson | 1996 | null | The Wilkinson family become ghosts after they die in an air raid in World War II, apart from Trixie - Mrs Wilkinson's sister. Initially, they haunt their home, Resthaven, and they adopt another young ghost, a girl they name Adopta, who has no memory of her past. When the arrival of new owners forces them to leave, they travel to London and reluctantly begin haunting an underwear store, and apply to the Dial-a-Ghost agency for a new home. The Dial-a-Ghost agency finds the perfect home for the Wilkinsons in a ruined abbey, and tells them they can move in on Friday 13th. Meanwhile, orphan Oliver Smith is surprised to learn he is a descendant of the Snodde-Brittle family, and that he now owns Helton Hall, after the death of his cousin. He is taken from the orphanage to Helton Hall by his cousins Fulton and Frieda, who feel they should rightly have inherited the Hall. Learning that Oliver is asthmatic, Fulton hires some terrifying, child-hating ghosts known as the Shriekers, hoping to frighten Oliver to death. On the day of the move, the two sets of ghosts receive each other's directions. The Wilkinsons arrive at Helton Hall, and, although they initially scare Oliver, they soon become close friends. The Shriekers, however, are exorcised from the ruined abbey after attacking livestock belonging to the nunnery. When the Dial-a-Ghost agency realizes their mistake, they send the Shriekers to Helton Hall and ring the Wilkinsons to apologize. Oliver, however, refuses to let the Wilkinsons leave and also invites their friends from London to move in. When the Shriekers arrive, they attack Oliver, but are distracted by Adopta - the daughter whose loss drove them to madness. They agree to behave better in future, but are confused as to why they were sent to attack Oliver when he is supposed to have ordered child-hating ghosts. The Wilkinsons realize Fulton is to blame and send Oliver to London to keep him safe. Fulton and Frieda are now in severe debt and, believing Oliver to have been killed by the Shriekers, they spend thirty thousand pounds on 'Ectoplasm Eating Bacteria' to clear out the ghosts. Oliver returns home to the unmoving remains of the ghosts, and is distraught. He attacks Fulton and Frieda, but is distracted by the ghost budgie for long enough to let them escape. As the ghosts wake up, they realise the Ectoplasm Eating Bacteria was a con, and Oliver happily opens up the Hall to any ghosts needing a home, running it as a tourist attraction and a paranormal research institute. Frieda, meanwhile, repents and becomes a nun, but Fulton goes after the con artists, gets killed and asks for a home from the Dial-a-Ghost agency, who send him to the underwear store. |
6480876 | /m/0g6zk7 | Fool for Love | Sam Shepard | null | null | The "fools" in the play are battling lovers at a Mojave Desert motel. May is hiding out at said motel when an old childhood friend and old flame, Eddie, shows up. Eddie tries to convince May to come back home with him and live in the trailer on the farm they always wanted to buy. May refuses because she has started a new life and knows that if she goes back to Eddie their relationship will repeat the same destructive cycle it has before. Throughout the play the character of the Old Man — the father of both lovers — is present and talks to each of the other two characters. It is revealed that the Old Man had led a double life, abandoning each family for different parts of each child's life. The two became lovers in their high school years and when their parents finally figured out what had occurred Eddie's mother shot herself. May is afraid that Eddie has begun to emulate his father; taking to drinking and secretly seeing a woman May refers to as the Countess. The play centers around the drama of the action rather than a plot with a rising and falling action. In the end the two lovers have not reconciled, the Old Man begins to lose himself to his own delusions, and a stranger is left on stage to observe it all. |
6481658 | /m/0g6_bf | The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana | Peter Hitchens | 2000 | {"/m/05h83": "Non-fiction"} | The Abolition of Britain is a conservative polemic against the changes in the United Kingdom since the mid-1960s. It contrasts the funerals of Winston Churchill (1965) and Diana, Princess of Wales (1997), using these two related but dissimilar events, three decades apart, to illustrate the enormous cultural changes that took place in the intervening period. His argument is that Britain underwent a "cultural revolution", comparable to that of China in the 1960s. He describes and criticises the growing strength of such forces as multiculturalism, which still had a liberal consensus behind it at the time the book was written. He argues that English schools had largely ceased to teach the history of the country, criticising the preference for methodology, or the literature of Britain's past. Other changes gain Hitchens' attention, from the passivity and conformism resulting from the watching of television to the Church of England's rejection of its traditional liturgy and scripture. Sex education, he argues, is a form of propaganda against Christian sexual morality. The sexual revolution brought about by the first contraceptive pills was the result not of accidental discovery, but of research deliberately pursued by moral revolutionaries. He describes the efforts made to provide respectability for unmarried motherhood, not least the campaign to replace the expression "unmarried mother" with "single parent", thus lumping together those who had children out of wedlock with widowers, widows or deserted wives and husbands, and so deflecting disapproval. Hitchens sees the British establishment as being morally weak in their failure to resist the emerging drug culture, when they could easily have done so in the mid-1960s. He cites as one example the prosecution of Mick Jagger and the subsequent intervention of The Times in Jagger's defence in 1967 ("Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?") after his (temporary) conviction. One chapter analyses the use of TV and radio soap operas to spread liberal cultural and moral propaganda, and refers to several instances where this intention has been openly expressed by the editors and authors of such programmes. In another, he attacks the development of "anti-establishment" comedy since the staging of Beyond the Fringe at the Edinburgh Festival in 1960. For Hitchens, the development of television, citing with approval a critical letter by T. S. Eliot to The Times in 1950, was something which should have led to a greater public debate than it did. In particular, Hitchens criticises the easy capture of the Conservative Party by lobbyists for commercial TV, which removed the BBC's monopoly power to defend cultural standards. He argues that the introduction of colour television, which made even the bad programmes look good, greatly increased the influence of TV over the public mind. He identifies the then Labour politician Roy Jenkins as a highly-effective campaigner for "cultural revolution". He describes the Chatterley trial, describing what he calls "myths" about it, and argues that the defence of literary merit (from the 1959 Jenkins backed Obscene Publications Act) eventually came to be used to allow the publications of books and periodicals which had none at all. He examines Jenkins' use of cross-party alliances and, what he sees as, supposed Private Members' Bills to achieve his programme. These legislative changes had not been mentioned in the 1964 or 1966 election manifestoes, and Hitchens develops his argument by drawing on proposals Jenkins had made in a section (p135-140) of his 1959 book The Labour Case. He cites warnings made by those who opposed the abolition of capital punishment, and claims that those warnings have largely proved to be true. For Hitchens this is an example of the political elite working against the desires of the public. Hitchens' view is sustained, in the case of capital punishment, by the liberal historian Dominic Sandbrook, in his history of the period White Heat (2006 p321) using contemporaneous opinion poll data. He went on to explore this issue in more detail in A Brief History of Crime. A chapter in The Abolition of Britain on the contrast between the public health policies on lung cancer and the public health policies on AIDS was left out of the first edition of the book, after Hitchens was advised that airing thoughts critical of homosexual acts would bring such criticism on it that it would distract attention from the book's main message. It was reinstated in the paperback and American editions, with an explanatory preface. Hitchens elaborated that the morality of homosexuality itself was tangential to his main argument. He wrote that British society's unwillingness to criticize sexual promiscuity among gay, bisexual, and straight men alike despite the ill after-effects stands in direct hypocritical contrast to government action against drug use. Hitchens argues that damaging moral and cultural effects on Britain occurred from the presence of huge numbers of U.S. troops during World War II. He also laments the cultural impact of American usage of the English language in Britain itself. For Hitchens, the major failing of the Thatcher governments was the absence of a decidedly conservative stance over cultural and moral matters. |
6492413 | /m/0g7frh | The Alteration | Kingsley Amis | 1976 | {"/m/0mz2": "Alternate history", "/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The main character, ten-year-old Hubert Anvil, is a chorister at St George's Basilica, Coverley (real world Cowley), for whom tragedy beckons when his teachers and the Church hierarchy, all the way up to the Pope himself, decree that the boy's superb voice is too precious to sacrifice to puberty. Despite his own misgivings, he must undergo castration, one of the two the alterations of the title. Insight into this world is offered during Anvil's abortive escape from church authorities, with references to alternate world versions of known political and cultural figures. Hubert's mother carries on an illicit affair with the family chaplain, and his brother, Anthony, is a liberal dissident from repressive church policies. In this timeline, there are two pivotal divergences from known history. Prince Arthur Tudor and Catherine of Aragon's short-lived union produced a son, Stephen II of England. When Henry of York ("the Abominable") tried to usurp his nephew's throne, there was a papal crusade (the "War of the English Succession") to restore the rightful heir, culminating in the "Holy Victory" at Coverley, which was designated as the ecclesiastical capital of England. Secondly, the Protestant Reformation did not take place as Martin Luther was reconciled to the Roman Catholic Church and later became Pope Germanian I. Luther's anti-Semitism may have infected this history to a greater extent during his papacy, as the novel discloses that Jews are forced to seclude themselves and wear yellow stars to advertise their religious and ethnic identity. In this history, Thomas More did not marry, and ascended to the Papacy as Pope Hadrian VII. While the Papacy still holds sway across Western Europe, in this version of the twentieth century Protestantism is limited to the breakaway Republic of New England, which includes such locations as Cranmeria (named after Thomas Cranmer), Hussville (named for Jan Huss), Waldensia (Waldensians) and Wyclif City (John Wycliffe). The head of the schismatic church in New England is the Archpresbyter of Arnoldstown (named after Benedict Arnold). Joseph Rudyard Kipling held office as "First Citizen" from 1914–1918, while Edgar Allan Poe was an acclaimed general who died at the moment of his victory over the combined forces of Louisiana and Mexico in the war of 1848-1850. We learn towards the end of the book that this Protestant state also has unpleasant features, such as practising apartheid towards Native Americans and a harsh penal system. England dominates the British Isles: for example, Ireland is called "West England". Instead of parliamentary democracy, the English Isles are administered by a Convocation of clergy accountable to the Catholic hierarchy. The rule of the Church is absolute and totalitarian, controlled by the Holy Office, a sort of KGB or Gestapo equivalent. (Monsignors Henricus and Laurentius – Heinrich Himmler and Lavrentiy Beria – are mentioned in passing.) The state of the world is illustrated in a description of national, clerical and royal figures at the funeral of Stephen III, late King of England, which opens the book. There is reference to the Kings of Portugal, Sweden, Naples and Lithuania, which suggests that no Italian nation-state exists in this history due to the temporal strength of the Papacy. The Crown Prince of Muscovy is also mentioned, suggesting that Tsarism holds sway, and the Dauphin leads one to conclude that the French monarchy is also still in existence. Germany is a nation-state, known as Almaigne and ruled by an Emperor, although it may not have exactly the same national boundaries. The "Vicar General" of the "Emperor Patriarch" of Candia suggests that the Greek Orthodox Church survives as a separate ecclesiastical jurisdiction, albeit exiled from its native Greece (which is still under Ottoman domination) and with its headquarters in Crete. Finally, this opening section cites the "Viceroys" of India, Brazil and New Spain, suggesting that colonialism and direct imperialism are still realities here. A Christian/Muslim cold war exists between the Papacy and Ottoman Empire. Pope John XXIV is a Machiavellian Yorkshireman, who allows the cold war to heat up as a Malthusian plan to resolve Europe's population growth – the church has access to bacteriological warfare as an alternative to birth control, whose prior papal prohibition John XXIV opposes. The book's coda, set in 1991, fifteen years after the events of the main body of the book, reveals that events have turned out as the Pope planned. Europe's surplus population has become cannon fodder for the war, which ended in a narrow victory, despite mention that the Ottoman Empire got as far as Brussels. However, one of Hubert's childhood friends, Decuman, is mentioned as being among the occupation troops in Adrianople in far western Turkey, suggesting that the Ottomans either lost the war, or at least were forced to make significant territorial concessions to the Catholic West. William Shakespeare's work was suppressed in this history, although Thomas Kyd's original text of Hamlet has survived, and is still performed in 1976. Shelley lived until 1853, at which point he set fire to Castel Gandolfo outside Rome and perished. By contrast, Mozart, Beethoven, Blake, Hockney and Holman Hunt have allowed their talents to submit to religious authority. Edward Bradford argues that the choice of authors and musicians here is not meant to imply Amis's own preferences, but questions the value of art subordinated to a destructive ideology that represses sexual freedom and human choice. Underscoring the clerical domination of this world, Hubert's small collection of books includes a set of Father Bond novels (an amalgam of Father Brown and James Bond), as well as Lord of the Chalices (The Lord of the Rings), Saint Lemuel's Travels (Gulliver's Travels), and The Wind in the Cloisters (Wind in the Willows). There is also reference to a Monsignor Jean-Paul Sartre of the Jesuits, and A. J. Ayer is Professor of Dogmatic Theology at New College, Oxford. "Science" is literally a dirty word, and while "invention" is not, the scope of inventors is severely limited. Electricity has been banned; the only form of internal combustion engine permitted is the Diesel, which works without a spark. Some of the incidental pleasure of the book is in the "alternative technology" reminiscent of Amis's friend and fellow-author Harry Harrison, such as the swish train that takes characters from London to Rome in just seven hours, via Thomas Sopwith's Channel Bridge. Allusion to known historical figures include the political scene in Britain in the 1970s, and may reflect Amis's increasingly conservative attitudes. For example, Lord Stansgate (Tony Benn) presides over the Holy Office, and Officers Paul Foot and Corin Redgrave are two of its feared operatives. Pope John XXIV is a thinly disguised Harold Wilson and his Secretary of State is Enrico Berlinguer. Other references are more obscure; opera-lovers with a good knowledge of Latin will, however, be able to identify the two castrati from the Vatican, Federicus Mirabilis and Lupigradus Viaventosa, as the German singers Fritz Wunderlich and Wolfgang Windgassen, both recently deceased when Amis was writing. Although much of the interest of the novel, and much of the fun, lies in the details of the alternative world Amis has created, the plot is a strong one and many of the characters are vividly drawn and believable in such a setting. There is some remarkable insight into musical creativity (Hubert had the possibility of becoming as gifted a composer as he was a gifted singer) and the ways in which strong minded liberals can preserve their integrity under a theocracy are illustrated by Hubert's older brother Anthony and by the older chorister Decuman. |
6493612 | /m/0g7hzf | Show Business | Shashi Tharoor | 1991 | {"/m/0gf28": "Parody", "/m/06nbt": "Satire", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/016lj8": "Roman \u00e0 clef"} | Show Business begins with Ashok Banjara, a superstar in Bollywood, fighting for his life in the intensive care unit of a hospital after an accident on the sets of a film that he is shooting. Suspended between life and death he sees his entire life in Bollywood flashing in front of his eyes like a film. Details of Banjara's career in Bollywood are revealed primarily in flashback. A young Ashok Banjara leaves Delhi and comes to Bombay to make his fortune and find fame in Bollywood. He achieves the big league with his second film Godambo that establishes him as an action star. Soon Banjara is known for playing the role of an angry young man fighting for the poor and the helpless against the establishment his very own. A successful Ashok Banjara marries Maya, a talented co-star and convinces her to stay away from films for the sake of family. Banjara, though is something of a philanderer, bedding most of his heroines. The actress Mehnaz Elahi becomes his mistress. At the pinnacle of his success as a Bollywood star, Banjara is enticed to join politics and he wins the election easily (from his politician father's constituency). However to his dismay he finds that the party has no significant role for him and he languishes in the back benches in the parliament. Meanwhile Banjara makes a film, Mechanic. This film is Banjara's first flop. Sometime later Banjara is implicated in a money-laundering scandal. His party extricates him by saying that he is an irrelevant in the party's scheme of things. Banjara quits politics. The scandal has destroyed his fortune and Banjara finds that he has to seek work again. With no mainstream director or producer ready to cast him now, in desperation Banjara agrees to work in a mythological film (he hates mythologicals) called Kalki. It is on the sets of Kalki that Banjara meets his accident. Fate is not without its sense of irony. Kalki is supposed to be Banjara's comeback vehicle - one that will restore his fortunes and once again establish him solidly with his audience. Banjara's accident on the sets of Kalki sees an audience of hundreds gathered outside the hospital waiting for news on his health. Millions of others praying for his recovery from their homes. |
6493890 | /m/0g7jgz | Emil and the Detectives | Rod Smith | null | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature"} | The story begins in Neustadt, a (fictional) provincial German town which is the home to young schoolboy Emil Tischbein. His father is dead and his mother raises him alone working as a hairdresser. She sends Emil to Berlin with 120 marks (a hairdresser's monthly salary then) to give to his grandmother and 20 marks for himself, sums that have taken some months to save from her modest earnings. On the way he is very careful not to lose the money and uses a needle to pin it to the lining of his jacket. On the train to Berlin, Emil meets a mysterious man who introduces himself as Max Grundeis. This man gives Emil mysterious chocolate and Emil falls asleep. When he wakes up, the money and Herr Grundeis are gone. Emil gets off the train in a different part of Berlin from where he intended. When he spots Herr Grundeis, he follows him. Emil dares not call the police since the local policeman in Neustadt had seen him paint the nose of a local monument red, so he feels that he is "a kind of criminal" himself. However, a local boy named Gustav offers to help. Gustav assembles 24 local children who call themselves "the detectives". After following Grundeis to a hotel and spying on him all night, Emil and the gang follow the thief to the bank. Emil gets his money back when Herr Grundeis tries to exchange the money for smaller bills. One of the boy detectives follows him into the bank and tells the bank teller that the money is stolen. Emil comes in and tries to tell the bank teller his story. He proves that the money was his by describing the holes left by the needle he used to pin the bills in the lining of his jacket. Herr Grundeis tries to run away, but Emil's new friends cling onto him until a police officer, alerted by Emil's cousin Pony Hütchen, arrives. Once arrested, Herr Grundeis is found out to be a member of a gang of bank robbers. Emil receives a reward of 1000 marks for capturing Herr Grundeis. After everything is straightened out, Emil's grandmother says that the moral of the story is: "Never send cash – always use postal service." |
6494436 | /m/0g7kcs | The Ninja | Eric Van Lustbader | 1980-04 | {"/m/01jfsb": "Thriller", "/m/0lsxr": "Crime Fiction"} | It is initially set in Japan following the end of World War II and follows the story of Lustbader's hero Nicholas Linnear, a man raised by Anglo-Chinese parents. As a youth, Linnear is introduced to the world of aikido, kenjutsu, and iai-jutsu at a local dojo of the Itto Ryu also attended by his cruel and violent older cousin Saigō. Linnear is a natural and soon becomes adept, much to the annoyance of Saigō. During a training exercise Nicholas and Saigō duel and Nicholas defeats him. Saigō is enraged and leaves swearing revenge. When they next meet Saigō is a considerably more skilled martial artist than Linnear and defeats him quickly. Later we learn Saigō has joined a Kuji-kiri ryu in order to learn black ninjutsu and has become a ninja. Linnear himself soon becomes introduced to Aka i ninjutsu, or the red, ostensibly "good" side of ninjutsu, through the Tenshin Shoden Katori Shinto Ryu. The ninja are introduced not as magical or almost mythical people, but rather as supreme martial artists who have reached the highest level and seek to progress further. It is suggested that by becoming ninja they strive to advance to an even higher plane, gaining skills such as haragei, or sensing the surrounding world in a different manner. However, we soon learn this is not without a high personal cost. Many years later, Linnear has moved to America and leads a peaceful academic existence. After quitting his job in advertising, he meets a beautiful, if disturbed, woman called Justine with whom he falls in love. This peace is shattered when a prominent local businessman is murdered in an extremely unusual manner (by a poisoned ninja shuriken). The local police are baffled and consult Nicholas as he is known to be an authority on oriental studies. Linnear quickly realises that a ninja is the murderer and the next target is his new girlfriend's father, Raphael Tomkin, whom he begins working for as a bodyguard, although not without persuasion. Linnear also befriends Lew Croaker, a local detective. Linnear's investigations reveal Saigō is the ninja and this puts him on a deadly collision course with his older cousin. |
6499551 | /m/0g7r0y | The Highway Men | null | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction"} | Jase (Jason Mason) works as a lagger, one of a gang of labourers considered "too dumb to draft" into the army and thus conscripted into labour on public works. His group has the task of connecting a new nuclear-power station to the grid in the Highlands of Scotland, which have become colder and sparsely inhabited due to climate-change. This takes place against the backdrop of a long-running war between China and the West, which started due to an air-rage incident when a Chinese businessman, under stress due to a smoking-ban, got mistaken for a terrorist. Jase and his fellow laggers encounter a hitchhiker named Ailiss, whom Jase identifies as one of a group of New Age Settlers (also known as crusties or bandits), people who foresee the imminent end of modern society and who have retreated to a semi-hidden rural commune. However, their presence worries the authorities, who become concerned about the security of their nuclear-power station. Believing that they have inadvertently set the settlers up for arrest or worse, three laggers travel to the commune to warn them. Discovering the commune under attack, they accidentally defeat the government forces by allowing their truck to crash into and destroy a helicopter. Jase finds himself acclaimed a hero by the settlers, and decides to join them. |
6501211 | /m/0g7slj | The Pentagon Spy | Franklin W. Dixon | null | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/028v3": "Detective fiction"} | Valuable antique weathervanes are being stolen in the Pennsylvania Dutch country. A Navy employee removes a top secret document from the Pentagon and then goes missing. Fenton Hardy, their father, is assigned to find the man and the document. The Hardy brothers discover the connection between to those two seemingly unrelated cases. |
6501559 | /m/0g7t3c | The Apeman's Secret | Franklin W. Dixon | null | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/028v3": "Detective fiction"} | The Hardy Boys investigate the disappearance of an eighteen-year-old girl suspected of joining a sinister religious cult. A few days later the boys get an offbeat assignment from a comic book publisher: The real life double of his character, Apeman, is turning up everywhere and causing considerable damage. Frank and Joe tackle both cases and uncover an intricate scheme by a clever gang of crooks. |
6501748 | /m/0g7tdn | The Mummy Case | Franklin W. Dixon | null | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/028v3": "Detective fiction"} | When five Egyptian statuettes are stolen from a museum, the Hardy Boys travel to exotic Egypt. En route, the boys are asked to safeguard a mysterious mummy and find themselves tangled in a web of international intrigue. On the Nile, the young detectives uncover a secret hiding place with countless stolen treasures and realize they must get to the police fast! it is dumb book |
6501854 | /m/0g7thf | Mystery of Smugglers Cove | Franklin W. Dixon | null | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/028v3": "Detective fiction"} | A painting is stolen, and the Hardy Boys are suspects. Determined to find the artwork, the young detectives fly to Florida, where they disguise themselves and join a group of sinister smugglers. Though the painting fails to appear, an important clue sends the boys on a perilous trek through the Everglades. Threatened at every turn by greedy enemies, the Hardys fight a tricky and powerful battle to expose the truth. |
6501961 | /m/0g7tml | The Stone Idol | Franklin W. Dixon | null | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/028v3": "Detective fiction"} | When an ancient stone idol disappears, the Hardy Boys are off on another fast-paced adventure. It's a mystery that takes the boys from a primitive village in the Andes Mountains to Antarctica and finally to Easter Island. By using their fine investigative skills, the Hardy Boys find that the mystery of the stone idol is not what it seems. |
6501981 | /m/0g7tn8 | The Vanishing Thieves | Franklin W. Dixon | null | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/028v3": "Detective fiction", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature"} | Chet Morton's cousin, Vern, is on his way to California to find a rare and valuable coin mysteriously missing from his uncle's bank vault. When he stops in Bayport, his brand-new car is stolen. The Hardys take on a double mystery-and double danger as they head for the West Coast to investigate this sinister mystery.this is what the back of the book says. |
6502065 | /m/0g7tqp | The Outlaw's Silver | Franklin W. Dixon | null | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/028v3": "Detective fiction"} | The Hardy Boys are given clues which send them in search of the treasure hidden by the Outlaw of the Pine Barrens. |
6502154 | /m/0g7ttg | Submarine Caper | Franklin W. Dixon | null | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/028v3": "Detective fiction", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | On a visit to Germany the Hardy brothers investigate the theft of plans for a newly invented submarine and the mysterious disappearance of valuable coins and paintings. |
6502845 | /m/0g7vdk | Love for Lydia | H. E. Bates | null | null | Lydia Aspen, a seemingly shy girl from a wealthy but isolated background, is encouraged by her aunts, her new carers, to discover the delights of growing up. They entrust her education to Mr Richardson, the young apprentice for Evensford's local newspaper, who is sent to their house to "get a story" about the recent death of Lydia's father. Richardson's access to the Aspens is unusual, as they are rarely seen by anyone from the town and hide behind their stone walls and perimeter of trees; introducing Lydia to the town's inhabitants gives Richardson a great sense of pride. Visiting the Aspen estate also allows Richardson the chance to escape from the great engulfing vacuum of Evensford, with its endless stretch of factory roofs and back alleys. As Lydia and Richardson spend more time together, he realises that his initial concept of Lydia was wrong, that she is far from being shy, and is often impetuous and demanding and enjoys captivating the young men who become her companions. Richardson soon discovers that his promise to love her, no matter what she does to him, is going to push him beyond the pain and feelings he thinks he is capable of experiencing. |
6504754 | /m/0g7y47 | The Broken Commandment | Vincent McDonnell | 1906 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The basic plot concerns a school teacher named Ushimatsu Segawa (family name written last) who struggles with a commandment given to him by his late father. He is never to reveal his burakumin background, which his father had tried so hard to conceal as well. Ushimatsu idolizes Rentarou Inoko, a burakumin rights' activist and successful writer (particularly considering the social position given to those considered burakumin). Ushimatsu wishes to reveal his background to Rentarou, as his need to hide away part of himself in order to be accepted by society in general leads to his feeling constricted by this superficial identity, and to his desiring to form a more meaningful connection with Rentarou through their common experience. This novel also touches on the dangerous, destructive nature of gossip, and questions society's inability to accept what is not understood. It attempts to build understanding and empathy for this group of people at a time (the novel's publication's) when a great deal of prejudice still existed towards this group. |
6504819 | /m/0g7y8c | Glory in Death | null | null | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery"} | It has been about four months since the events of Naked in Death, as Eve finds the body of famous Prosecuting Attorney Cicely Towers on the night of May 2. Eve returns to Cop Central to find that Commander Whitney was very good friends with Towers, having started out together when they were very young. Due to this fact, he has personally arranged that Eve be primary. Eve therefore interviews the commander on the spot, and he responds badly, telling her that Cicely was family, something she wouldn't understand; though he apologizes, this sets the tone for their relationship throughout the rest of the book and the next. C. J. Morse, a reporter at Nadine Furst's station, calls Eve afterwards, pestering her with details about the case and a possible connection to Roarke. Later, Eve struggles between going back to her own apartment or Roarke's house; she eventually gives in and goes to Roarke's. At Roarke's home, Summerset greets her caustically, ironically remarking that he had no idea if she had intended to return. Eventually, Roarke joins Eve in the bath, and tells her he loves her. Eve does not reply; irritated, he changes the subject to the Towers case and the fact that Roarke has had business dealings with Towers, which Eve construes to be possibly illegal. Roarke brings up Eve's refusal to move in with him and commit to their relationship. Later that night, while Eve is sleeping, Roarke reorganizes and sells all of his remaining illegal businesses. The next morning, C. J. Morse implies that there is a cover-up involved in Towers' death by Eve and Whitney. The extra publicity irritates Eve, particularly because since Naked in Death and her relationship with Roarke, she has unwillingly become very famous. It is another source of tension between her and Roarke. Afterwards, Roarke leaves on business to Australia and Eve revenges herself against Morse by feeding the Towers story to Nadine Furst. Eve goes to a club nearby the scene of the crime, the Down and Dirty. Here she meets Crack, the proprietor, who mistakes her for a stripper. He gives her enough information (for cash) to track down where Towers had apparently scheduled a meeting. Eve finds out that Towers had had an umbrella that night, which was not recovered. Ryan Feeney has been unofficially instructed by the commander to aid the case. Feeney comments on how glamorous Eve looks in the media when out with Roarke, then further prods by making cracks about how married they seem. Later, Nadine overhears Roarke tell Eve that he loves her and bothers her about it as well. Eve is uncomfortable with Roarke's feelings, feeling pressured to return them. After some non-progression in the case, Eve returns to her own apartment; that night, Roarke surprises her in her sleep, having returned from Australia. The morning after, Roarke is struggling to control his resentment over the fact that Eve had not returned to his home. On their separate ways out, Roarke presents Eve with an enormous diamond that he bought impulsively at an auction in Australia. Terrified of what it represents, Eve starts a fight with Roarke, which he ends with an ultimatum for her to commit fully to their relationship. At Towers' funeral are her children, David and Mirina Angelini, their father, and oddly enough, Morse. Also at the funeral is Roarke, who tells Eve that Mirina's fiance is hiding a gambling and prostitution scandal. Eve researches it and discovers that Roarke sold the casino where it took place the day after Towers' death. Roarke refuses to tell her that he did it for her. Another victim is found, murdered by the same MO, an actress named Yvonne Metcalf, whose shoe is missing. C. J. Morse is already on the scene, filming the woman's dead body. He snidely informs Eve that Metcalf used to have a relationship with Roarke. Unable to find any connections between the victims, Eve heads to Dr. Charlotte Mira's office; Mira tells Eve that the killer hates women and wants to be famous, hence going after women who have what he wants. Mira also points out that these two women had a connection with Roarke; offended, Eve asks her if she thinks that Roarke is the killer. Mira tells Eve that she is not in love with a murderer. Eve tells her that she's having flashbacks of her time in Dallas. After trying to relax, Eve heads to Roarke's house, bypasses Summerset by elbowing him, and makes her way to Roarke's office, ostensibly to interview him about Metcalf. The two have a hostile interview; finally, Eve turns to leave. Roarke locks the door, but before he can say anything, Eve turns to him, shows that she's wearing the diamond (which she will wear underneath her clothing for the rest of the series), tells him that she'll move in with him, and that she loves him. Eve tells Roarke that the killer is stalking famous women. He is unhappy to find that Eve has decided to capitalize on this by becoming bait. Nadine promises to help this by delivering as much media attention as possible, but the scheme doesn't work. Roarke, who has to leave on another business trip, surprises Eve with her own suite of the house, which he has converted (partly with furniture from her apartment) into her own home office, adjoining his. Eve has a surfeit of leads: Randall Slade's gambling debts, David Angelini's (Towers' son) business failures and own gambling debts, and a mysterious transfer of two hundred thousand dollars from Mrs. Whitney to David. The commander is furious when she and Feeney tell him they have to interview his wife. Upset, she returns to what is now her and Roarke's home and invites Mavis over. Mavis's arrival shocks Summerset (whom Eve led to believe that she was inviting over another man), but surprisingly enough, he likes Mavis very much and for the rest of the books, is unusually kind and attentive to her. That night, one of Nadine's editors, Louise Kirski, goes out in Nadine's hooded raincoat and is murdered; C. J. Morse finds her body. At the scene of the crime is Officer Delia Peabody, the attending. It becomes quite clear that Nadine was the intended victim. Security tapes show that David Angelini was at the scene of the crime; further research reveals that he had a failed business deal with Yvonne Metcalf. During interview, he tries to bribe her; he also says that he had seen Louise Kirski get murdered before running away. Believing him the murderer but without physical evidence, she arrests him for some minor charges. Whitney asks her to release David on his own recognizance, but she denies him; he tells her she lacks compassion and dismisses her. A search of Angelini's house uncovers a long-handled blade spotted with blood; after seeing the knife, Marco Angelini falsely confesses to the murder, in an attempt to take the blame for his son. However, he sticks to his story in interview, even when Whitney personally interrogates him. Whitney finally realizes the stress and anger he's subjected Eve to and tries to alleviate the situation, and after Mirina Angelini interrupts them, he tries to apologize, but Eve rejects it and leaves. Eve and Roarke have a night in Mexico; on their return, Eve finds that the lab has tested David's knife as being negative for the murder weapon. The new police chief, Harrison Tibble, tells her to release David and Marcus on lack of evidence. He adds that that there is too much emotion involved in this case, lightly censuring both her and Whitney. Afterwards, Eve finds out that Nadine is missing. Eve reviews Morse's police interview and realizes that he lied about how he found Louise Kirski's body. Further research incriminates him as having possibly murdered his mother. At the studio, however, Morse is missing. Eve requests Peabody as her backup, and they search Morse's apartment, where Peabody finds the missing umbrella and shoe. Waiting for news on Morse or Nadine, Eve is stuck at Roarke's fundraiser when Summerset informs her of a private call, which turns out to be Morse, holding Nadine hostage. He gives her six minutes to make it to Central Park; she leaves without telling anyone, and when Roarke realizes that Eve is gone, he replays Eve's last call and leaves to follow her. During the fight with Morse, Eve miscalculates and gives him the upper hand. Before he can kill her, Roarke intervenes and saves her, and the knife instead stabs Morse in the throat. (It is not clear whether or not this was accidental or intentional on Roarke's part.) Roarke proposes to Eve as they walk away from the scene. In Immortal in Death, Morse is supposedly standing trial for his murder when he's very clearly dead at the end of this book. Part of Immortal in Death supposedly takes place in May, which is impossible as it is June at the end of this book. |
6508429 | /m/0g81s_ | Nymphomation | Jeff Noon | 10/2/1997 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | Jaz, a physics student working in his parents' Indian restaurant, earns extra money by constructing his own short-lived blurbflies and selling them. He manages to capture and dissect one of AnnoDomino's blurbflies - getting bit in the process - but finds only organic gloop inside. Daisy Love, a mathematics student living above Jaz's restaurant, is contacted by her father Jimmy, who first interested her in mathematics by teaching her dominoes. Jimmy reveals he was at school with Professor Max Hackle. In the university computers, Daisy finds papers written by Hackle on probability and statistics, as well as bizarre theories about breeding numbers (nymphomation) and love labyrinths: computer mazes where information packages with more love for the pathways can increase the odds of finding the centre. Daisy learns her father was part of a group called Number Gumbo (including Paul Malthorpe, Max Hackle, Susan Prentice and Georgie Horn) who regularly gathered to play dominoes. After Hackle invented randominoes - dominoes with constantly shifting numbers that set only when the pieces are played - former loser Georgie Horn invariably won. Jaz shows Daisy the blurbfly 'gloop', which he christens Vaz, demonstrating how it acts as a universal lubricator. When examined, Vaz is revealed as a form of artificial life, a constantly replicating nymphomation. His bite has become infected, and blurbflies are attracted to him and do his bidding. Professor Hackle believes AnnoDomino is murdering the naturally lucky people in an attempt to breed out good luck. He gathers a group called the Dark Fractal Society with the purpose of destroying the lottery, including Jaz, Joe Crocus, DJ Dopejack, and Sweet Benny Fenton. The group uses Vaz to break into AnnoDomino's computerised list of winners, where they discover that Celia Hobart, a child living on the street, keeps winning half-match dominoes. She has a homeless man named Eddie Irwell buy them for her. Eddie ends up arrested for cheating, and is delivered to the House of Chances - the AnnoDomino headquarters - where the company determines he must have an accomplice, as he lacks the genetic trait of being lucky. Joe Crocus and Daisy Love find Celia in a beggars' lair, alongside the dead body of Eddie Irwell, and take her to Max Hackle's house for testing. This is observed by undercover cop Inspector Crawl. Jazir realizes that somehow the naturally lucky repeat winners must be transmitting something through their hands to the dominoes. Separately, DJ Dopejack x-rays the dominoes and discovers that the dominoes' innards remain alive even after the numbers have set. Max Hackle tells Daisy Love more about his past with the Number Gumbo group: The computer Hackle Maze wanderers became more intelligent and started to breed as nymphomation after being given DNA structures. The group built a physical maze in the cellars of Hackle's house as an analogue of the computer Hackle Maze - Georgie Horn would wander this maze while hooked up to the computer maze; the original 'lucky bleeder' his brainwaves affected the information packet wanderers - the wanderer linked to Georgie is nicknamed Horny George. In time the others followed Georgie in hooking themselves up to the Hackle Maze. To increase the knowledge of the nymphomation Georgie initiated a math ritual where he would make love with Susan Prentice while they are connected to the maze, but Paul Malthorpe joins them, killing Georgie in an act of erotic asphyxiation, and infecting the nymphomation with a cocktail of sex and death. The winning domino numbers come up as a double blank - the 'Joker Bone' booby prize where the winner is the loser. The winner, Nigel Zuze, tries to escape Manchester, but is apprehended by a skeletal figure accompanied by a blurbfly called Horny George, is bitten and taken over. The infected Zuze drives to DJ Dopejack's house where Dopejack is in turn infected, before he himself kills Zuze. Sweet Benny Fenton, visiting Dopejack, is also infected by Horny George. Jazir tells Daisy that he is in contact with Miss Sayer, and that his own blurbfly infection is leading to a greater connection with the creatures, with Jazir sensing that some of them want to be liberated from the AnnoDomino company. Jazir can also see through the blurbflies' eyes, and senses something bad has happened to DJ Dopejack. Sweet Benny Fenton returns to the Dark Fractal Society, and rather than infect Joe Crocus with the Joker nymphomation instead chooses to stab himself in the heart outside the gates of the House of Chances. He is visited in hospital by Max Hackle, and Fenton bites and infects Hackle with the Joker nymphomation before he dies. Daisy uses vaz to hack into DJ Dopejack's computer harddrive, where she finds a last message from the infected Dopejack. Joe Crocus and Celia decipher the message, which reveals how Zuze won the Joker and passed it on to Dopejack; also the real identity of Mr Millions is an old member of Miss Sayer's maths class called Adam Jagger. The rest of the Dark Fractal Society leave Max Hackle and take up residence at DJ Dopejack's old house. Miss Sayer comes through on Dopejack's computer screen and helps unlock information stored there, which leads the Dark Fractal Society to deduce that Georgie Horn's information packet is the Joker, and that Adam Jagger (aka Mr Millions) is the real name of Frank Scenario. The Joker nymphomation has been mutating and carrying the knowledge of each of its victims through to the next. Infected with the knowledge of the previous victims Max Hackle goes to The House of Chances to confront Mr Millions, where he is expected. The remains of the Dark Fractal Society return to Max Hackle's deserted house, where they try again to win the weekly domino game. Aided by the online presence of Miss Sayer, Joe Crocus activates the computer Hackle Maze, and Jimmy Love gives him a 'Theseus' equation designed to sterilize the nymphomation. Celia Hobart tells Daisy Love about her life before she ran away, how she had a sister called Alice who used to fantasize she was the heroine of Lewis Carroll's Alice books (see Noon's Automated Alice) and how Celia left home to look for her parrot Whippoorwhill who flew out of her house when Alice left the window open. Celia asks Daisy to give Jazir one of Whippoorwhill's feathers for luck. When Daisy goes to Jazir, to give him the feather, she finds him completely engulfed in a mass swarm of blurbflies. Jazir's blurbflies are infected with the Theseus virus. Covered with the blurbs Jazir flies out of the window. Daisy and Jimmy begin to play dominoes, Jimmy hooked up to the Hackle Maze and controlling his own wanderer, while online Miss Sayer ensures the maze duplicates the AnnoDomino maze. As Max Hackle heads towards his meeting with Mr Million and Jazir enters the House of Chances with the help of the blurblfies they both become visible as icons in the Hackle Maze. The Hackle Maze becomes unstable as it starts to constantly mutate, but Jimmy and Daisy match and lock onto it by shifting play to their set of randominoes. The TV show starts and Tommy Tumbler appears in the maze. Hackle becomes lost in the maze and kills the Horny George blurbfly, which bites him as he dies. Time in the maze becomes fluid as Daisy and Jimmy desperately try to keep up. Hackle encounters Cookie Luck in the maze and time shifts, sending him back to the start. The computers in the Hackle house freeze as Max Hackle meets Mr Million/Frank Scenario/Adam Jagger. Adam reveals that he was jealous of Paul Malthorpe, who along with Miss Sayer came to him requesting funding to continue the Hackle Maze experiments. Jagger drags Hackle to a pit where the blurbflies deposit and feed dreams to the 'Domino Beast', which in turn excretes dominoes to be collected by the blurbs. The Domino Beast itself is a mutant containing the twin forms of both Paul Malthope and Miss Sayer, who ask Hackle for help. Hackle wrestles with Jagger, and they both fall into the Beast's pit. Jazir also enters the pit and feeds the Theseus infected blurbflies (and Whippoorwhill's feather) to the Domino Beast. Back at the Hackle household the computers come back online and Joe Crocus activates the Theseus equation which kills the Domino Beast; at the same time Daisy wins the game of dominoes with her father with a double-six - the same number on the last domino that the Domino Beast excretes before it dies. Celia's domino also freezes on the winning double-six number: she has won the lottery and so becomes the new Mr Million. Jazir retrieves Whippoorwhill's feather from the remains of the Domino Beast. Jagger is dropped from a height by the blurbflies and is killed. All over the city the dominoes hatch and split open, as they are revealed to be eggs: from them come a swarm of new blurbflies, spreading dreams throughout the city and beyond. Jimmy reveals to Daisy why she is a natural player - she is not his daughter after all, but Georgie Horn's, conceived at the moment of his death as he took part in the nymphomation sex ritual with Daisy's mother. Joe Crocus rushes to claim Celia's winning domino bone, only to find everyone has won the double-six. Jazir gives Celia Hobart back her Whippoorwill feather. |
6510045 | /m/0g83q5 | Run, River | Joan Didion | null | null | The novel is both a portrait of a marriage and a commentary on the history of California. Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily, are the great-grandchildren of pioneers, and what happens to them (murder and betrayal) is suggested as an epilogue to the pioneer experience. |
6512160 | /m/0g8629 | The Doll People | Ann M. Martin | null | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature"} | This children's tale is about a china doll named Annabelle, who is eight years old but has existed for one hundred years. The book is set in the present time period and is told in third person. Annabelle and her family belong to Kate Palmer. The dolls can move, talk, and play the miniature piano in their house but always return to the same spot they started from when a human approaches. The consequence of being seen moving is being "frozen" for twenty-four hours, also called Doll State. If a doll does something especially incriminating, the doll is "frozen" forever, called Permanent Doll State, or PDS. Kate's sister Nora receives a doll house and plastic doll family named the Funcrafts. The Funcrafts' daughter is Tiffany and she becomes Annabelle's best friend. In the book Annabelle and her friend Tiffany form a group called Society for Exploration and Location of Missing People (or SELMP for short), when Annabelle finds her Auntie Sarah's Journal. Auntie Sarah has been missing for 45 years and has not been seen or heard from in all that time. Annabelle and Tiffany become determined to find her. Using the clues from the journal, they deduce she is stuck somewhere, perhaps in the attic, so they go on a journey and successfully locate her. The doll family is happily reunited once again. |
6516037 | /m/0g8c2k | Zyword | null | null | null | Zyword is an unbalanced dimensional structure held by three connection spells called Dawn, Deep, and Omega. Since these spells are unstable, Zyword is vulnerable to complete chaos. That's exactly what happens when the three Goddesses of Zyword betray its citizens and cast them under a spell that could cause them all to die in an eternal sleep. Lunatia Araimel, a 14-year-old spell decipherer, and her 15-year-old friend, Roddy Lederide are the only ones that are able to escape from Araimel as the spell locks everyone in ice. Luna and Roddy meet up with a messenger named Zera, who came to the silent sector of Araimel to see what had happened. Not too long after, Luna, Roddy, and Zera are in danger of being killed by monsters called spell-controlled soldiers. Luna is able to defeat the spell monsters, but then, right after, she learns the horrible truth about these monsters—they were just innocent human soldiers manipulated by magic. One of the three Goddesses, Arienna, had magically manipulated these soldiers in order to kill the saviors of Zyword. All of the humans inside the monsters are violently attacked and killed by the forces of magic—except for one, who happens to be a teenage boy with thousands of spells encrypted on his body. Luna and Roddy keep watch over the boy until he dies—but then the boy awakens when Roddy is under attack and fights of Roddy's attackers. It is revealed early in the story that Luna has been gifted with the Goddesses' Blessing. Little does Luna know that this blessing is actually also a curse put upon her since she was just a child. Luna remembers her childhood love, a young man named Deke Diranoia, and swears that she will rescue him from the curse. However, will these tenacious teenage spell casters be able to free all who have been ensnared by the Goddesses' curse or will Zyword just plunge into doom? |
6516897 | /m/0g8dd4 | The Oracle, by Catherine Fisher | null | null | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | The Oracle is set in a fictional world, in the middle of a terrible drought. The Archon, the god-on-earth, has been called by the god to die, in order to bring rain to the land. Mirany is the bearer-of-the-god, one of the Nine priestesses who attend the god and his various incarnations. Her duty as Bearer is to hold the god in scorpion form in a bronze bowl. The god is fickle, and occasionally claims the Bearer's life. This terrifies Mirany. As the procession taking the Archon to his death reaches the final destination, the top of a Ziggurat in the City of the Dead, the Archon slips Mirany a note, telling her that the Oracle of the god is being betrayed, and the Speaker is corrupt. The Speaker is the most senior member of the Nine, and relays messages from the god, which he delivers via the Oracle. The Archon is killed by the scorpion the god inhabits, carried by Mirany. Secretly, Mirany does not believe in the god. She sees him as a lie, used by the Nine to gain favor. However, this changes when he begins to speak directly into her mind. Mirany discovers a plot by Hermia, the Speaker, and the General Argelin, to control the land, and that the Archon's death was arranged by the two so that they could choose the new Archon, a young boy, and use him as a puppet. Mirany, with the help of the previous Archon's musician Oblek, and Seth, an ambitious scribe, must find the new Archon, and instate him before Hermia and Argelin can. |
6517341 | /m/0g8fc6 | King Horn | null | null | null | The hero, named Horn, is the son of King Murry of Suddene and Queen Godhild. Suddene lies by sea, and is ruled by King Murry until he is killed by Saracen invaders. The throne eventually passes to Murry's son Horn, who defeats the Saracen occupiers with the aid of an army of Irish knights. The father of the fifteen-year old Horn is killed when their country is invaded by Saracens, and Horn is captured along with his band of companions, including his two dearest friends, Athulf and Fikenhild. His newly widowed mother flees to a solitary cave. The emir of the Saracens, impressed by the beauty of Horn, sets him and his companions adrift in a boat. In time, they reach the land of Westernesse, where they are taken in by King Ailmar. Upon reaching manhood, Horn and the king's daughter, Rymenhild, fall in love and become betrothed; Sir Athelbrus, the castle steward is entrusted by the princess as her go-between. The princess gives Horn a ring as a token of their betrothal. Having been made a knight, Sir Horn defends the land of Westernesse from the Saracens. Fikenhild, secretly eaten up with envy of Horn, discovers the betrothal, and informs the king, saying that Horn was seeking to usurp the throne. Horn is exiled on pain of death. Before he leaves he tells his beloved that should he not return in seven years she should feel free to marry another. He sails for Ireland where he takes service with King Thurston under a false name, becoming the sworn brother to the king's two sons. Here he encounters once more the Saracens responsible for his father's death, and defeats them in battle. The two princes are both slain in the fight. King Thurston, having lost both his heirs, offers to make Horn his heir, granting him the hand of his daughter, Reynild, in marriage. Horn, however, refuses to make an immediate decision. He requests instead that, after the end of seven years, if he should request his daughter the king would not refuse him, and the king agreed. Seven years pass, and Princess Rymenhild is preparing to marry King Modi of Reynes. She sends letters to Horn, begging him to return and claim her as his bride. One of these letters finally reached him. Horn, much upset by what he had read, asked the messenger to return to the princess and tell her that he would soon be there to rescue her from her hated bridegroom. The messenger, however, was drowned in a storm on his way back to Westerness, and the message never reached her. Horn reveals to King Thurston his true identity and history, and informs him that he is returning to Westernesse to claim his betrothed. He requests that Reynild be given in marriage to his dearest friend Athulf. Having gathered a company of Irish knights, Horn sets sail for Westernesse, only to find out that the marriage had already taken place. Disguised as an old palmer, having darkened his skin, Horn infiltrates the castle of King Modi, where the wedding feast is taking place, and contrives to return to her the ring she had given him at the time of their betrothal. She sends for the "palmer" in order to discover from where he had received the ring. He tests her love for him, by claiming that he had met Horn and that he was now dead. In her grief, Rymenhild tries to slay herself with a concealed dagger. It was at this point that Horn reveales himself, and there is a joyous reunion. Horn leaves the castle and rejoins the Irish knights. The army invades the castle and King Modi and all the guests at the banquet are slain. King Ailmar is forced to give his daughter in marriage to Horn, and the wedding takes place that very night. At the wedding feast, Horn reveals to his father-in-law his true identity and history, and then vows that he would return to claim his bride once his native land of Suddene was free of the Saracen invaders. He then takes his leave of Rymenhild, and he, Athulf, and his army set sail for Suddene. Here, reinforced by many of the oppressed men of Suddene, they threw out the hated invaders, and Horn was crowned King. Back in Westernesse, Fikenhild, now a trusted servant of the king, falsely claimed that Horn was dead and demanded Rymenhild's hand in marriage, which was granted to him, and preparations for the wedding took place. He imprisons Rymenhild in a newly constructed fortress on a promontory, which at high tide was surrounded by the sea. Horn, having had a revealing dream, gathers together Athulf and a few chosen knights, and sets sail for Westernesse. They arrive at the newly-built fortress, where Sir Arnoldin, Athulf's cousin, reveals the situation to them. Horn and his companions disguise themselves as musicians and jugglers, and make their way to the castle. Outside the walls they begin to play and sing. Hearing a lay of true love and happiness, Rymenhild swoons with grief, and Horn is filled with remorse for having tried her constancy for so long. Throwing off their disguises, Horn and his company slay Fikenhild, taking the castle for King Ailmar, and Horn persuades Ailmar to make Sir Arnoldin his heir. On their way back to Suddene, they stop off at Ireland, where Reynild is persuaded to make Athulf her husband, and the loyal steward Sir Athelbrus is made king, King Modi having died. Having reached Suddene, the royal pair reign in happiness to the end of their days. |
6522545 | /m/0g8qgw | Past and Present | Thomas Carlyle | null | {"/m/017fp": "Biography", "/m/037mh8": "Philosophy", "/m/06ms6": "Sociology"} | Book 1: Proem - Carlyle expresses his ideas about the Condition of England question in an elevated rhetorical style invoking classical allusions (such as Midas and the Sphinx) and fictional caricatures (such as Bobus and Sir Jabesh Windbag). Carlyle complains that despite England's abundant resources, the poor are starving and unable to find meaningful work, as evinced by the Manchester Insurrection. Carlyle argues that the ruling class needs to guide the nation, and supports an "Aristocracy of Talent." But in line with his concept of "hero-worship", Carlyle argues that first the English must themselves become heroic in order to esteem true heroes rather than quacks. Book 2: The Ancient Monk - Carlyle presents the history of Samson of Tottington, a 12th-century monk who became Abbot of Bury St. Edmunds, as chronicled by Jocelin of Brakelond. Carlyle describes Samson as a lowly monk with no formal training or leadership experience who, on his election to the abbacy, worked earnestly and diligently to overcome the economic and spiritual maladies that had befallen the abbey under the rule of Hugo, the former abbot. Carlyle concludes from this history that despite the monks' primitive knowledge and superstitions (he refers to them repeatedly as "blockheads"), they were able to recognize and promote genuine leadership, in contrast to contemporary Englishmen: Carlyle presents his history as the narrative of the lives of men and their deeds, rather than as a dry chronicle of external details. To this end, he repeatedly contrasts his history with the style of the fictional historian Dryasdust. Book 3: The Modern Worker Book 4: Horoscope |
6524216 | /m/0g8vkg | The Winter Queen | Devin Cary | 1998 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel", "/m/03g3w": "History"} | The novel opens on 13 May 1876 with a university student, Pyotr Kokorin, committing suicide in the public park in front of a beautiful young noblewoman, Elizaveta von Evert-Kolokoltseva. His will leaves his large fortune to the newly opened Moscow chapter of Astair House, an international network of schools for orphan boys founded by an English noblewoman, Lady Astair. The apparently open-and-shut suicide case falls to inexperienced 20-year-old detective Erast Fandorin. He interviews Elizaveta, and immediately falls in love with her. Further investigation reveals that Kokorin was playing Russian roulette (called "American roulette" in the novel) with another university student, Akhtyrtsev. Fandorin tails Akhtyrtsev, who leads him to a sensuous dark-haired woman, Amalia Bezhetskaya, whom Fandorin recognizes from a picture in Kokorin's room. He follows Bezhetskaya to her home, where she spends her time toying with the many men who come to visit. At Bezhetskaya's home, Fandorin meets Count Zurov, an Army officer that Amalia seems fond of, and sees Akhtyrtsev again. Akhtyrtsev and Fandorin leave Amalia's house together to go drinking, and Akhtyrtsev reveals to Fandorin that the Russian roulette game between him and Kokorin was Bezhetskaya's idea. Just as the mystery of Kokorin's suicide seems to be solved, a mysterious white-eyed assassin stabs Akhtyrstev to death and tries to kill Fandorin, only to fail when his knife bounces off the corset Fandorin is wearing. As he kills Akhtyrtsev, the white-eyed man hisses one word: "Azazel". The murder of Akhtyrtsev brings a great deal of attention to what had seemed a routine case. Fandorin gets a new boss, Ivan Brilling, a sophisticated detective familiar with modern investigative techniques. Brilling believes that the murder is the work of a terrorist organization called "Azazel" that is operating in Moscow. He sends Fandorin off to interview Lady Astair, whose Astair House has now acquired Akhtyrtsev's fortune along with Kokorin's, because both students left all their assets to Astair House after Amalia Bezhetskaya encouraged them to do so. Lady Astair is helpful to Fandorin, who leaves her school convinced of her innocence and impressed by her charitable mission. Next, Fandorin investigates Count Zurov. After Fandorin beats Zurov at cards, the count challenges him to a duel, but it turns out to be a practical joke on Fandorin, and the count befriends him. Zurov, believing Fandorin to be as much in love with Amalia as he is, and wishing that Fandorin will win her heart so that Zurov can let her go, reveals to Fandorin that she is staying at the Winter Queen Hotel in London. Fandorin journeys to London, where he tracks down Bezhetskaya to a house in town. He sneaks into her room after she leaves it and finds a paper that appears to be a list of Azazel members all over the world, many of whom hold high ranks in government or the military. Fandorin is about to leave when Bezhetskaya catches him in her room. They struggle, a shot goes off in the dark, and Fandorin flees, believing that he has killed Amalia. He has not, however, because Amalia and her henchmen kidnap Fandorin from his hotel room. Amalia leaves her henchmen to kill Fandorin, and they are about to do so when Count Zurov appears out of nowhere and saves Fandorin's life. Zurov admits to Fandorin that jealousy over Amalia led him to follow Fandorin to London. Fandorin assures Zurov that he is no rival for Amalia, and Zurov leaves to either kill her or "take her away somewhere". Meanwhile, Fandorin hurriedly leaves for St. Petersburg to intercept the letter that Amalia has mailed to her Azazel contact there. He succeeds, and sees the letter delivered to Gerald Cunningham, a teacher at the Moscow Astair House. Fandorin reports this to Brilling, and they go together to arrest Cunningham--but Brilling shoots Cunningham dead, and reveals to Fandorin that he is also an agent of Azazel. Fandorin and Brilling struggle, and Brilling is killed. Fandorin travels back to Moscow to continue the investigation. While on the way, he meets Elizaveta on the train, and finds out that she is as smitten by him as he is by her. Upon arrival in Moscow, he once again goes to see Lady Astair and asks her if she knows anything about Cunningham's activities with Azazel. While talking to Lady Astair, Fandorin suddenly realizes that Cunningham was too young to have started Azazel, and that Lady Astair is the real criminal mastermind. Lady Astair confesses to Fandorin, admitting that she is the head of Azazel. She tells him that her Astair Houses are part of a plot to train bright young orphan boys to serve her and her group, which plans to eventually take over the world. She then tells one of her servants, the German professor Blank, to give Fandorin a lobotomy so that they may retrain him as a member of Azazel, but Fandorin escapes and confronts Lady Astair, who is waiting for him with a bomb. Lady Astair traps him with her, but after Fandorin begs for his life, she lets him go in return for a promise to not hunt down her "children" from the Astair Houses. Lady Astair then appears to commit suicide with her bomb. Fandorin, however, is ordered to help the campaign to root out members of Azazel in Russia, which he does. His guilt at breaking his promise mars his happiness on the day of his wedding to Elizaveta. After the newly married couple retreat to their hotel suite, a messenger brings Fandorin a package. Fandorin walks to the window and sees the messenger frantically running into a carriage driven by the white-eyed assassin that earlier tried to kill Fandorin. Fandorin jumps out his window in an attempt to arrest the killer, and thus escapes the bomb, which blows up and kills his young bride. The novel ends with a dazed Fandorin walking the streets of Moscow, his hair having turned gray at the temples due to his shock over his wife's death. |
6525384 | /m/0g8xh3 | Skinwalkers | Tony Hillerman | 1986 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | When an unknown assailant tries to kill Officer Jim Chee by firing a shotgun into his trailer, and three other people are found murdered in different locations around the Navajo reservation, Chee and Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police find few motives or clues except for small pieces of bone found in the bodies and in the shotgun shells used in the attempt on Chee. This leads them to conclude that the assailants and victims were involved with Navajo witchcraft, whose practitioners are called Skin-walkers. Leaphorn, a secular Navajo, rejects witchcraft as hateful superstition that has no place in Navajo mythology, but Chee, a practicing yataalii or medicine man, does not dismiss it so easily. Solving the cases requires them to find a balance between Navajo folklore and Western inductive reasoning, and to risk their lives to track down a killer before he gets to them first. |
6529045 | /m/0g90w9 | The Icarus Hunt | Timothy Zahn | 8/3/1999 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | Prior to delivering a cargo to the nearby planet Xathru, Jordan McKell, a smuggler for a crime lord nicknamed Brother John and his shadowy boss, Mr. Antoniewicz, is on the planet Meima with his partner, Ixil, a member of an alien species called the Kalixiri. McKell is offered a job by a man named Alexander Borodin, whom he recognizes as the famous industrialist and sometime-archaeologist Arno Cameron. Cameron wants McKell to pilot the ship Icarus, which is carrying a very important cargo in its sealed storage core, to Earth. McKell accepts the job and instructs Ixil to continue on to Xathru, intending to pick him up there. He and Ixil theorize that Cameron's archaeological dig on Meima had uncovered an advanced, alien stardrive, which he intends to be brought to Earth by the Icarus. While waiting to board the Icarus, McKell becomes acquainted with the rest of the Icarus rag-tag crew, all of whom are complete strangers to him and to each other. At the last minute, they are informed that Cameron is unable to accompany them, and are forced to set out on their voyage without their employer. One of the crewers is killed in an accident a few hours later, and a series of other bizarre occurrences leads McKell to believe that they have a saboteur aboard; he begins keeping a wary eye on the crew. He stops as planned on Xathru to pick up Ixil and contact Brother John, who gives him a reluctant go-ahead to carry on with the voyage. While on Xathru, he is assaulted by a pair of strange aliens who say they want the Icarus cargo. McKell escapes and pilots the Icarus to a planet called Dorscind's World. Convinced that the Icarus is carrying something far more important than he'd originally supposed, and that they are being hunted, he lands the Icarus under a false name. He then attempts to make contact with his benefactor, "Uncle Arthur", both to inform him of his current situation and to get information from him about his crewmembers and about Cameron's activities. Before he can get a call through, he is confronted by an old acquaintance, who tells him that there is now a reward out for knowledge of his whereabouts and attempts to extort money from him in exchange for not turning him in. McKell realizes that the Icarus is being hunted by the Patth (an alien race who have a near-monopoly on the galaxy's shipping industry, due to their unique stardrives, which are several times faster than those of any other race). He becomes suspicious that the Icarus isn't carrying the recently-discovered alien stardrive; instead, he thinks the Icarus itself is the alien stardrive. If this stardrive were to remain outside Patth hands, it could spell the doom of the Patth economic empire. There are more scattered sabotage incidents aboard the ship, leading McKell to believe that one of the crewers is a Patth agent. He requests background information on all of them from Uncle Arthur, which is delivered to him when the ship stops at the planet Morsh Pon. McKell and Ixil are informed that the ship's computer tech, Tera, is in fact the daughter of Arno Cameron. They also discover that Cameron himself had been aboard the ship, hidden in the area between the inner and outer hulls; he had unexpectedly jumped ship, however, during one of the fuel stops. The Icarus successfully evades an attack off the planet Utheno, and McKell decides to make a break for Earth, outrunning the Patth by using the alien stardrive. This requires dismantling a good deal of the ship; while exploring deep inside the Icarus interior, McKell discovers by accident that the Icarus is not a stardrive at all; it is actually a stargate (a hitherto-theoretical interstellar-teleportation device), and Arno Cameron, instead of jumping ship as they had supposed, had instead been temporarily stuck at the stargate's other end. A forced landing on the planet Palmary leads to McKell being captured by the Patth; he is rescued, however, by some of the crew. They decide to take temporary refuge at the isolated planet Beyscrim. There, they are confronted by Antoniewicz, and it is revealed that Antoniewicz, through the crewmember Everett, had engineered most of the sabotage incidents, believing that McKell was no longer loyal to him and intending to bring him back into line. Then, recognizing the Icarus value, he had decided to take it for himself, and maneuvered the Icarus and its crew into coming to Beyscrim. Antoniewicz's plans are thwarted, however, with the arrival of a Kalixiri commando force that had been sent by Uncle Arthur. In the end, McKell reveals that he and Ixil are not smugglers, but instead members of a military intelligence organization who had been assigned to infiltrate Antoniewicz's operation. McKell had been on Meima under orders from Uncle Arthur, his superior, to find Cameron and help him out of whatever trouble he was in, with taking the job as the Icarus pilot a maneuver to that end; landing the Icarus on Beyscrim had merely been bait to bring Antoniewicz out of his cover. The book concludes with the crew celebrating their rescue, while Cameron makes plans for smuggling the Icarus back to Earth for research. A secondary plot thread (and a complication of the main plot) involves a chemical dependency (possibly related to a rare and fatal neurological disease) of one of the crewmen. |
6529532 | /m/0g91qw | The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy | Jeanne Birdsall | 2005-06 | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The Penderwick family comprises Martin Penderwick and his four daughters Rosalind, Skye, Jane, and Batty (ages 12, 11, 10, and 4). Their mother Elizabeth Penderwick died of cancer four years before the story, a few weeks after Batty was born. A Summer Tale features the family, including Hound the dog, on a three-week vacation in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, where they have rented a cottage on the beautiful estate Arundel. There the sisters befriend Jeffrey, the neglected, musically talented son of the strict and overbearing owner Mrs. Tifton. |
6530708 | /m/0g93j8 | Sporting Chance | Elizabeth Moon | 1994-09 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/070yc": "Space opera", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/01smf2": "Military science fiction"} | In the aftermath of Hunting Party, the Prince was found engaged in the highly illegal and immoral sport of man-hunting. In an attempt to cover this up, Lady Cecelia and Captain Heris Serrano are enlisted by the Crown into quietly returning the prince to the capital. During the otherwise uneventful voyage, Ron notices something surprising: the Prince is far stupider than he should be as the cosseted and genengineered Registered Embryo he is, and considerably stupider than Ron remembered him being as a child. Clearly something is wrong, and poison is suggested. On Rockhouse Major, Cecelia confronts the King. He blithely dismisses her warning. Later, he mentions her discovery to one of his ministers, who repeats it to his sister, Lorenza, who hates Cecelia for following her dreams and has always wanted to get revenge; she uses the possibility of Cecelia making the poisoning of the prince as an excuse to finally carry it out. As a skilled poisoner, she is fully capable of the deed. On the space station, Heris is having the yacht overhauled and redecorated, whilst her new ex-Fleet personnel are quietly engaged procuring military-grade equipment and installing it. Brigdis Sirkin, meanwhile, has induced her lover (Amalie Yrilan) into taking up a temporary environmental tech job while Serrano decides whether to hire her or not. Towards the end of the allotted month, the smugglers balked in Hunting Party attack the two when Sirkin refuses to become their agent on the Sweet Delight, and are revealed to be Benignity agents. Before the badly injured Sirkin is rescued by Oblo and Methlin Meharry, Yrilan is killed by a sonic weapon. No sooner had this mess been cleaned up and the ship turned over to Spacenhance's redecorator than horrible news arrives from the planet: Lady Cecelia has suffered a "massive stroke". Heris is skeptical of this diagnosis, as is Brun. They maneuver to link up and begin planning how to rescue Cecelia. Cecelia in the mean time has been occasionally drifting to consciousness, and for increasing periods of time. What she hears is sufficient to prove that she is being deliberately prevented from recovering, her visual sense deliberately impaired and even worse, that she had been poisoned. Unfortunately for Cecelia, while she is not dead, she has been deemed sufficiently incapacitated that her will is being executed. In her will she had recently made a change to give the Sweet Delight to Heris, both because she was a good friend and because Heris had saved Cecelia from Admiral Lepescu on Sirialis in Hunting Party. Berenice, Cecelia's sister, had always envied her her yacht, and given the suspicious nature of Cecelia's stroke and the amendment to the will, decides to sue Heris for the yacht. With the yacht tied up in probate, Heris's options are limited. They are further limited when the King summons Heris to an audience, and quite firmly insists that she and her crew steal the Sweet Delight, and while avoiding arrest by the Fleet, discovery of their identity and also any attacks by the Benignity and their agents, take the stupid prince to the Guerini Republic to seek an antidote to the poison. Heris has little choice but to agree, and steals the yacht and busts out of the Rockhouse system at high speed. Brun and Ron take advantage of the lowered scrutiny and security (since Heris has quite visibly left, and Lorenza's agents were expecting any threat to their imprisonment of Cecelia to come from her direction) to arrange for a bunch of rowdies in hot air balloons to "visit" the long-term care facility during a festival; Cecelia is then evacuated in Brun's balloon (Ronnie having previously prepared Cecelia and had the surveillance devices put on a loop). Immediately they take her off-planet and eventually to her stable on the planet Rotterdam, where the locals like or love her. From there they begin hiring medical experts to come treat her. Heris' pickup of the prince goes badly when she proves unable to distinguish between the real prince and his clone double. The confusion is exacberated when Captain Arash Livadhi shows with a third prince whom he believes to be the real prince, but who is likewise indistinguishable. Otherwise, the trip goes smoothly, except for Sirkin, who keeps making careless mistakes and whose performance is otherwise deteriorating. As Lady Cecelia recovers and prepares to file for competency and thereby regain her estate, Brun works her way back to Rockhouse Major via low-level jobs aboard various commercial vessels; even with this ruse, she barely avoids Lorenza's hired assassins. She warns Ron and the others that Lorenza was the culprit and to be avoided. While Cecelia is regaining control, Heris leaves the three princes to the tender mercies of the Guerini medical establishment and travels back to Rotterdam to see Cecelia. After a joyful reunion, Cecelia returns to her yacht, and thence to the Guerini Republic. During this second trip to the Republic, Sirkin makes one mistake too many, and is relieved of her duties by Heris, who now suspects her of being a Benignity agent. However, merely taking her off-duty soon appears to be insufficient when a course modification puts them almost on top of a Benignity space-fleet base. When bridge computers begin malfunctioning, Heris orders the relatively new crew-member Skoterin to break out the small arms in the Security lockers against whatever Sirkin might be planning. Cecelia is convinced that Skoterin and not Sirkin is the traitor, and breaks Sirkin out of her quarters. When they (Cecelia's aide, a prince, and Sirkin) try to intercept Skoterin before she opens the lockers, they fail and are ambushed. Skoterin explains that her plan as a Benignity agent was to get revenge on Heris for killing two family members and to skillfully have it all blamed on Sirkin. When he tries to stop her from shooting Sirkin, the prince is killed. Cecelia and Sirkin are only saved when Petris attacks Skoterin from behind. The internal revolt quenched, all attention is turned to the attacking Benignity ships, now being harried by Livadhi's cruiser. Defeating two, they quickly beat a retreat to the Guerini. There Sirkin and Cecelia are treated with stunning success; Cecelia is rejuvenated to herself as she was at 40 years of age, restored in all senses and capacities. Now cured, Cecelia's next task is to punish Lorenza. She travels to the Familias Grand Council, at which event Lorenza is sure to be. The prince's death (for Cecelia is sure that the one of the three who sacrificed himself so heroically was the real prince) finally convinces the King that his policies have led to nothing but to disaster; his only course is to resign. Lorenza notices Cecelia's presence, hale and hearty and rejuvenated, and panics, fleeing wildly. She turns to the same therapist/Benignity agent who had arranged for Yrilan's death, seeking safe transportation away from the Familias; for her mistakes, the therapist gasses Lorenza to death. |
6530714 | /m/0g93jm | Prayers to Broken Stones | Dan Simmons | null | {"/m/03npn": "Horror", "/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/0707q": "Short story", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The actual story is classic Simmons in its literary allusions, with epigraphs from Ezra Pound's Cantos; the protagonist's father is a Pound scholar with an especial interest in the Cantos (reading from it to his children), and the premise can be seen as deriving from a line in the Cantos as well. The mother of the family has died of some unspecified illness. Stricken by grief, the father bargains (heedless of the prospect of financial ruin) with the "Resurrectionists" to have his wife's corpse technologically revived. The resurrection is a hollow one, as all higher cognitive functions are irreparably damaged, although it does function somewhat autonomously. Their family is stigmatized, and the father slowly breaks down and his classes become less and less popular until he takes a sabbatical to write his long-planned work on the Cantos. He spends most of it drunk. Simon, the protagonist's brother, eventually commits suicide. A few years later, while the protagonist is at university (sponsored by the Resurrectionists, whom he has joined) the father commits suicide as well. He graduates and begins working for them and helping to spread the living dead. He does little but work, spending his free time with his resurrected family. |
6530718 | /m/0g93jz | Once a Hero | Elizabeth Moon | 1997 | {"/m/070yc": "Space opera", "/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/01smf2": "Military science fiction"} | Chronologically, Once a Hero directly follows Winning Colors, even overlapping partially, but the focus distinctly shifts to young Esmay Suiza, who came to prominence after successfully leading a mutiny against her traitorous captain and intervening to decisive effect in the Battle of Xavier (as Winning Colors records). Suiza is not immediately praised and feted for her heroism, however, for her actions demand official scrutiny. Thorough and complete, neither the Board of Inquiry nor the court-martial find Suiza guilty of anything, and so she is allowed to take a vacation before her next assignment. Back home on Altiplano, Esmay is honored with Altiplano's highest award, the Starmount, although she remains convinced that she was not really a hero, that it was blind luck. While talking with an old soldier who had served under her father (one of the four highest military commanders on Altiplano) and was a family friend, she learns that the nightmares and her dislike of command and horses were psychological trauma from when, as a child, she had ventured into a warzone seeking her father. She had been waylaid and molested by one of her father's subordinates; the family friend knew this sordid tale because he had been the one to kill that subordinate, whose politically connected father meant any trial was infeasible. He felt free to tell her since he assumed that Suiza's father's coverup had failed to convince Suiza that the memories were merely nightmares during an illness or fragments of her imagination. This revelation precipitates a break with her father. Meanwhile, some mendacious and greedy civilian contractors for the Fleet have agreed to carry out a job for the barbarian space-warriors of the Bloodhorde: they would take a Fleet contract to rekey the command sequences of various missiles, and when they were aboard the specified massive Deep Space Repair vessel, covertly disable its self-destruct mechanism. This job would pave the way for the Bloodhorde boarding team. By a remarkable coincidence, it is this very same DSR, the Koskiuskos ("Kos" for short) which Suiza is assigned to. After catching a resupply vehicle to the Kos, Suiza is assigned to a Major Pitak in Hulls and Architecture; Pitak immediately begins running Esmay ragged with errands and learning everything she needs to know about spaceship structural design and how to repair and fix vessels. In her spare time, Suiza slowly begins assembling a circle of friends, especially one Ensign Barin Serrano (last seen in Winning Colors hand-delivering a message to Heris Serrano from Vida Serrano before the Battle of Xavier). As the months pass by Suiza settles in; so do the traitorous civilian contractors who productively improve the hours by disabling the self-destruct without tripping the monitors. Inevitably, the Bloodhorde launches its attack, crippling the patrol ship Wraith. Wraith is repairable, but is incapable of further safe FTL jumps. So the Kos goes out to meet it, since it is in the neighborhood, although the danger of pulling the Kos out of its normal routes and so near Bloodhorde space is very real. Suiza is sent by Major Pitak to take pictures of the forward section of the hull to ascertain the full extent of the damage. Suiza discovers instead the first prong of the Bloodhorde plan: a massive mine was planted on Wraith, programmed to wait until Wraith was brought into one of the Kos's repair bays and then detonate; this would incapacitate the Kos and make it easy meat for the waiting Bloodhorde assault group. Thanks to Suiza's presence of mind, the mine is safely disarmed. But all is not well. The Bloodhorde's plan is remarkably subtle (for the Bloodhorde): though the first prong has been deflected, the second was yet to strike. After the mine is disposed of, repairs continue in earnest on the Wraith. Forward of the mine, some 25 crew members are discovered knocked out by sleeping-gas and are taken into the hospital facilities. Despite their location, open to space, they are uniformly uninjured, and eventually scattered across the Kos to help out. One interacts with Suiza. His manner strikes her as drastically unlike that of a Fleet member, and more reminiscent of commandos she had known. After making inquiries as to their location (most had vanished), whether they were injured at all like they should have been, and whether any senior Wraith officers recognize them, it is concluded that Kos has been boarded by Bloodhorde commandos seeking to capture the DSR and massively upgrade the Bloodhorde's industrial infrastructure and especially its military construction capability, greatly increasing its killing power. The captain immediately orders everybody's identification checked against their DNA and fresh IDs issued. During the change-over, the Bloodhorde kidnaps Barin Serrano, taking him as a hostage. With the Kos' FTL drive apparently broken and its self-destruct disabled, the higher-ups decide on a risky strategy of detaching the section of Kos containing most of the intruders, and ambushing the expected followup wave of Bloodhorde; while that wave was preoccupied boarding, they would attack the vessel and use it to either protect the Kos until its escorts returned with reinforcements or destroy it. During a meeting with Suiza to discuss how to suppress the commandos, the spoken-of commandos attack, cutting off most of the senior personnel with poison gas. They escape the cabin with the injured captain and link up with some personnel who had made it to the security lockers before the Bloodhorde. They conclude that to lead an effective resistance, they have to lead it from the T-1 arm of the Kos. But all the arms have been locked off from the core by the Bloodhorde. So, they decide to go EVA and go around. During the EVA excursions, the Kos is jumped through hyperspace. Led by Suiza, the crew of T-1 determine to retake the Kos and ambush their ambushers. When the intruders relax their guard of the bridge, one of the bridge crew women risks her life to re-open the doors to the core (and by extension, enabling an assault on the bridge). The prepared security teams overcome the few commandos in the core and regain control easily - most of the commandos had gone to T-4 to eliminate the resistance there. The crew in T-4 had used their grace time profitably, arranging an elaborate drama for the benefit of the commandos, intended to convince them that they were fighting - and defeating - the ill-prepared armed resistance of the Familias crew. The drama lures them to the repair bay, where (elated by their success), they don spacesuits and sortie out to welcome their warship into the repair bay. There it is trapped by an extremely strong adhesive. The two other warships dock without being trapped, and debark their crew in EVA suits. The robots used for painting vessels attack them, blinding and immobilizing them. The two still-mobile Bloodhorde ships are commandeered and the three remaining Bloodhorde are easily destroyed, and the day saved. Barin Serrano is discovered alive, but much abused in mind and body. Suiza is no less discomfited by her nightmares and anxieties. She and Barin begin going to psychiatric care. Eventually Suiza begins to work through her phobia of sexual contact and assuming leadership. She transfers to "command track" and becomes intimate with Barin. |
6530724 | /m/0g93k9 | Rules of Engagement | Elizabeth Moon | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | At the end of Once a Hero, Esmay decided to pursue higher rank and command. Pursuant to this, she has transferred to a Fleet training base on the Fleet-owned planet Copper Mountain. Coincidentally, this is the same base that Brun is training at in various useful skills like escape and evasion. Simultaneously with their training, the podunk colony planet of "Our Texas" is up to its old piracy tricks using its share of the "New Texas Godfearing Militia"; it is using certain converts in the Familias to steal Fleet nuclear warheads and intercept them. Brun intends to befriend Esmay but is rejected; Esmay finds Brun to be shallow and is far too preoccupied with her staggering course load to be constantly hanging out with Brun. The final break occurs when Brun is forbidden by the base commandant and her father to participate in the field exercise which is the culmination of the Escape & Evasion course because of the scope it offers would-be assassins - already two attempts had taken place, one of which put Brun in the base hospital for a month. Brun storms down to Esmay's quarters to harangue her, accusing Esmay of not wanting to do the field exercise with her and getting her forbidden; Esmay is more than willing to reciprocate as she has learned of Brun's attempts to woo Barin away from Esmay. Brun is cut to the quick by some of the truths Esmay speaks and by her complete rejection (Brun having looked up to Esmay as a hero or almost a big sister), and leaves the base. She occupies herself travelling and inspecting various investments. Esmay is severely reprimanded for having spoken to the Speaker's daughter in such a fashion, and is assigned far away to a Search-and-Rescue (SAR) space vessel as its executive officer. After Brun leaves, the New Texas Godfearing Militia strikes, stealing the commercial hauler which is unknowingly carrying their stolen weapon; they space all the adults aboard (mutilating the women whom they describe as "abominations") and kidnapping the children and a teenaged girl named "Hazel". Brun happens to stumble on the scene (having discovered the commercial hauler's secret short cut) while the Militia was still practicing with the hauler. Against her bodyguard's better judgement, she sneaks in closer in her small yacht to see what was happening. Inevitably, the Militia notices and their warships begin maneuvering to capture the witness. Brun had not expected this, but began the complex and advanced maneuvers that would get her safely away - to discover that her chartered yacht had various safety interlocks in its computer navigation systems to prevent its users from doing anything possibly unsafe. Brun is captured by the Our Texans. As per their religious beliefs, her bodyguard is slaughtered to the man, and the Rangers decide to make Brun herself into their conception of a proper wife by having her surgically muted. She is then repeatedly gang-raped until she becomes pregnant with twins. She is transported to Our Texas and imprisoned in a maternity home while she gives birth; like all women so abducted, the plan is that she will give birth three times; if she is not dead of childbirth or executed for disobedience, she will then be auctioned off to the highest bidder to serve as perhaps the man's third or fourth wife. Records of all the proceedings are sent back to the Familias; the Ranger in charge is not completely suicidal, but believes that the threat of blowing up one of the thousands of Familias space-stations will deter any military response. Back in the Familias, suspicion and rumor (aided by less talented and jealous former classmates) and Lord Thornbuckle fasten on to Esmay as the culpable agent to blame. Somewhat fortunately for Esmay, at this unpromising juncture her great-grandmother dies. Esmay is the designated next female in the succession of the Landbride, so she inherits the title and the assets like the land. The Fleet gladly grants her leave, and her stay on Altiplano lasts just long enough for her cousin Luci to knock some sense into Esmay's head and convince her to return to Fleet and try to reconcile with Barin. She succeeds and planning for the rescue of Brun slowly proceeds; it will be timed for when Brun's twins are almost finished nursing and the time for Brun to be impregnated draws near. Presumably she will be at her best in this period. A Guerini agent will take her from the maternity facility and drive her to the spaceport. His shuttle will boost off the planet and be picked up by a Familias SAR spaceship, backed up by a decent sized task force in case the four Our Texan warships attempt to interfere. In the mean time, Brun has been preparing on her own for an escape: physically conditioning her body, brewing alcohol (to knock out her babies so their crying does not reveal her escape), and acquiring kitchen knives as weapons. The agent approaches Brun during her first practice escape, and also picks up the teenager from the merchant vessel at Brun's vigorous urging. The flight up is uneventful until the agent is offered more money by the Our Texans and changes his course to one of their warships while Hazel and Brun slept. When Brun wakes up and realizes his treachery, she kills him and seizes control of the shuttle. But the shuttle has already approached too close to the planet to escape, and she is forced to dock at an abandoned space station under heavy missile fire. The shuttle is sent on a suicide plunge into the atmosphere as a decoy, but this does not fool the Rangers, who dispatch several shuttles to destroy the station once and for all. The expert system aboard decides to help Brun and Hazel. Brun has it send a message to the Fleet SAR that she is aboard the station and not dead, and squads of neuro-enhanced space marines arrive on the station just after the three Texan shuttles unload. Another faction of Texans seize the opportunity to attempt to eliminate the first faction's troops. In the confusion, Hazel is evacuated but Esmay and Brun are blown into space by some bombs. Esmay suffers from hypoxia before the two are rescued by a space sled. By this point, the rest of the Fleet units have jumped in and easily blown the four warships guarding Our Texas. With Our Texas supine before the task force, Brun tasks Admiral Serrano with retrieving the four children captured by the Texans with Hazel. The retrieval initially goes well, as the Ranger's household, led by his first wife, cooperates, and attaches itself to Barin as their "protector". The other Rangers's successors (the Rangers themselves either dead or captured) do not intend to allow the heathens to take back children now being raised as God wants, and plan to use their stolen nuclear bombs to kill them all. With some effective help from the marines and theft of the arming keys, the threat is defused and many civilian lives saved. Esmay, Barin, and Brun are all reconciled, with the sole remaining threat being the enthusiastic media coverage. |
6530744 | /m/0g93k_ | Winning Colors | Elizabeth Moon | 1995-08 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/070yc": "Space opera", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/01smf2": "Military science fiction"} | As the novel opens, things are in disarray in the Familias Regnant. Lord Kemtre's monarchy has fallen as a result of the events in Hunting Party and Sporting Chance which led to the revelation of the king's illegal use of biological clones as doubles; Lord Thornbuckle ("Bunny"; Brun's father) has taken the reins of government. Crises abound: a young and foolish Family member disappears on the fractious and restless world of Patchcock; there are concerns that the drug supply for curing aging is being adulterated by the Benignity; and other concerns that Brun is somehow in danger. The Fleet, too, is restless and ill at ease; lurking and awaiting their chance is the Benignity of the Compassionate Hand (the "Black Scratch"), which has begun preparing an invasion. The recently rejuvenated and cured Lady Cecelia de Marktos has decided to channel her recently acquired youthful energy into breeding horses, using the Sweet Delight (legally now Heris's as a result of a bequest in Cecelia's will which was executed whilst Cecelia was incapacitated, but de facto Cecelia's) to visit the frontier world of Xavier (which specializes in horses), with the added complication of Brun aboard working as a low-level apprentice technician. Meanwhile, Ron and George are dispatched to the Guerini Republic. Ostensibly, they are there to get Ron away from his lover Raffaele, whose family refuses to countenance their marriage, and also to retrieve some information about Cecelia's treatment there. The true reason they are there is that, at the request of Bunny, they are taking some of the suspected adulterated rejuvenation drugs to be compared against the original known good Guerini products. While waiting on the test results, they accidentally run into the manumitted clones of the dead prince; to protect their secret, the two surviving clones take Ron and George prisoner, until the trailing Raffaele tracks them down. The clones need their help because the former king is also trying to track them down, as they are his only surviving sons, in a sense. Ron, George, and Raffaele help the clones assume new identities in exchange for them freeing Ron and George. Freed, they learn that the Guerini had discovered that the rejuvenation drugs, supposedly of Guerini manufacture, were in reality being shoddily produced on Patchcock and fraudulently sold at the higher price. Meanwhile, Heris has been quietly ferrying around Cecelia and a special guest: Livadhi's secret weapon, a remarkable scan technician named Koutsoudas. A raider out of the anarchic and barbaric conglomerate known as Aethar's World visits Xavier and is blown into space dust by the Sweet Delight. Unfortunately, this display of martial expertise is insufficient to intimidate the Benignity observer, who reports back that Xavier has only minimal defenses; this report initiates the invasion, as Xavier is strategically situated. Heris's desperate pleas for assistance against the coming strike to the local Fleet headquarters succeeds only in roping in a cruiser and two patrol boasts - all commanded by traitors in the pay of the Benignity. After Koutsoudas's spying on the command crew sorts out traitors from loyalists, Heris lays and executes her plan: she has invited aboard to dine with all of the senior officers, along with some of her "officers" (really her best hand-to-hand combat fighters). When closeted away with the traitors, she quickly kills them and takes over the cruiser using the hidden computer authority which her aunt Admiral Vida Serrano had had created specifically for her to use in such a situation. Heris bluffs her way into command of the cruiser (claiming that she was really still in Fleet, and that her court-martial had been arranged to serve as a plausible excuse for leaving Fleet when she went undercover), and of one patrol boat. The third patrol boat, the Despite, escapes and warns the incoming Benignity fleet of what awaits them. Through a lot of luck (such as mechanical problems for the foe) and some excellent micro-jumping tactics by the defenders and the unexpected assistance of the Despite, whose crew had mutinied, and now captained by a jig named Esmay Suiza (who figures more prominently in the next three books), the invading fleet is destroyed and the system held until it is relieved by a Familias battle group under Admiral Serrano, who reveals to Heris that she had been deliberately maneuvering and aiding Heris to use her as a lightning rod to flush out traitors and blunt Benignity incursions. Now imbued with Fleet imprimatur, Heris travels with Cecelia to Patchcock, where together they help an aunt of the Family concerned kick her felonious brothers out of corporate control, and rescue the youngsters, all the while defeating the Benignity-encouraged terrorists who had killed the young Family member. At the end, Brun decides to take Fleet training; George begins following after his father in law school; Raffaele and Ron quasi-elope to a frontier world colony to build a life of their own; Heris and her crew rejoin Fleet, while Heris finally is reconciled with her parents over their betrayal of her during her court-martial, and Cecelia decides to captain a new vessel on her own while continuing to raise horses. |
6530844 | /m/0g93pf | In the Ocean of Night | Gregory Benford | 1977 | {"/m/03lrw": "Hard science fiction", "/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The beginning of the novel, set in 1999 (2019 in the second edition), finds Nigel Walmsley, a British scientist and astronaut for NASA, sent to attach a thermonuclear bomb to an asteroid or comet named Icarus which is on a direct collision course for India - only if it is a rocky asteroid and not a slush ice core style comet. Icarus turns out to be large, solid, and made of a nickel-iron composite. Nigel is instructed to plant the 50 megaton weapon and leave (so it can be detonated). He persuades Mission Control to let him put it in a large fissure he discovered, so it would be even more effective. They let him. In the fissure, Nigel discovers strips of metal worked in obviously artificial patterns. Awestruck at this evidence of extraterrestrial intelligent life, Nigel begins exploring. Icarus is made up of a number of hollow shells, making the asteroid's mass far less than predicted. Presumably this makes Icarus less dangerous, allowing Nigel to spend time exploring this historic artifact. However, NASA claims that the demolition has to go forward, that Icarus would somehow skip off the atmosphere and land in the Indian Ocean and cause even more damage through the resultant tsunami. This of course is an obvious lie, and Nigel convinces his partner of that. They hide the nuke and spend the next week retrieving artifacts and materials before they finally set the nuclear bomb off and turn Icarus into rubble. 15 years after their discovery the Icarus artifacts have yielded little, and Nigel's delayed detonation of Icarus has distanced him from NASA and other people. Nigel's partner, Alexandria, has developed systemic lupus erythematosus, an oft-fatal disease caused by pollution. An anomaly over by Jupiter distracts Nigel: something, nicknamed 'the Snark', is repeating radio broadcasts. Alexandria is distracted by the mechanics of selling American Airlines to some Brazilians. The anomaly fires its fusion engines and reveals itself to the satellites around Jupiter. As a probe vessel, the directing computer could not afford to ignore the satellites' radio emissions before it moved on to Earth. Eventually the JPL team locates it around Venus. Nigel arranges to hijack the communications, transmitting his own signal (a binary sequence of prime numbers relating the Snark's trajectory). The Snark receives the signal as a sign of non-hostile intentions and transmits back. It also reaches out through Nigel's medical implants to his dead partner's more elaborate ones, and commandeers her body to explore and learn about Earth. Thus the initial tentative transmissions blossom into a largely one-way torrent of information for the Snark. One day, it asks to visit Earth. A compromise is worked out: the Snark will orbit the Moon until trust is built up. As Nigel is already fully informed, and everything about the Snark is being kept a state secret, he is assigned to pilot the space ship meeting the Snark - which will be armed with another nuclear weapon. Nigel meets the Snark; he is under orders to attack it. The Snark disables the chemical weapons and begins talking to Nigel. It says that organic civilizations and species are inherently unstable; they flash brilliantly and commit suicide sooner or later. The autonomous machines they craft live on long after them, going on and evolving. But they cannot truly compete with the organics, who live "in the universe of essences". That is the reason for the Great Silence. Nigel's superiors order him to use the nuclear weapon. He refuses. They override him and fire it anyway, knowing that its detonation will inevitably kill Nigel. If it hit the Snark, it would be badly disabled, so it flees the Solar System faster than the missile can follow. The decision to fire is covered up, and the version of the Snark's visit fed to the public is markedly different from what Nigel actually experienced. Nigel blackmails NASA into letting him go to the projects on the Moon; the Snark had directed a transmission at Mare Marginis for unknown parties, and Nigel wanted to find those parties. Four years later, in 2018 (2038), Nigel is now based on the Moon. A fellow astronaut, Nikka, is involved in a crash that accidentally discovers a still active alien spacecraft wreck in the Moon's Mare Marginis - a spacecraft suspiciously armed with a once-powerful anti-spacecraft weapon. Nigel and Nikka become lovers during the course of exploring the wreck, which proves to have a functioning computer with a direct neural interface. Nigel, and several others, experiment with the computer's neural hook-up, and leave fundamentally changed by it - the computer becomes inert and unable to reveal any more about its creators. Meanwhile, on Earth, some surprising experiments in human genetics conducted by the aliens are discovered alive in North America. |
6530888 | /m/0g93r4 | Hunting Party | Elizabeth Moon | 1993-07 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/070yc": "Space opera", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/01smf2": "Military science fiction"} | The plot and narrative center on one Heris Serrano, a strong competent female protagonist. She has recently left the Regular Space Service that guards the Familias Regnant rather than face a court-martial for saving the lives of her troops by deliberately disobeying the orders of her bloodthirsty superior, Admiral Lepescu, and capturing her objectives in a way other than what he specified. Cashiered to civilian life, she must make a living as a captain. Her employment agency finds her a job as captain of the private yacht Sweet Delight for a rich Family member, Lady Cecelia. The Sweet Delight''s previous captain, the sinister Captain Olin, had incurred Cecelia's wrath by failing to promptly leave the capital (where Cecelia had been to attend the Grand Council of the Familias) so she could arrive on Sirialis, Lord Thornbuckle's private estate-planet, in time for the beginning of the fox hunting season; this delay saddled her with some obstreperous relatives who are in disgrace and are sent aboard her yacht as being a convenient mobile exile. Heris discovers to her dismay that the same agency that had recommended her to Cecelia had also foisted an unrelieved stream of incompetent, regenerate, and outright criminal personnel on her ship, and that her new command was not merely overly luxurious and inefficient, it was an outright deathtrap. This point is driven home when Heris begins tracking down anomalies in the environmental systems and decides to inspect portions herself. The two environmental technicians she orders to accompany her in protective suits rush down to reach the scrubber before Heris. Heris's worse fears are realized when the two technicians blunder and unleash a cloud of deadly hydrogen sulfide; one dies, and the other is badly injured. On subsequent investigation, the life-support systems are in imminent danger of collapse. Heris orders an emergency detour to a deep-space shipyard for repairs. While in the shipyard, contraband data is discovered secreted in the scrubbers. Apparently Captain Olin, the dead Iklind, and presumably some of the others were using Cecelia's yacht to smuggle various goods for unknown parties. Cecelia and Heris agree to a bet: if the repairs were completed on schedule, Heris would tutor Cecelia on the inner workings of her ship. If not, then Cecelia would teach Heris equestrianism using her personal mechanical horse. In part because of the smuggling, Heris loses, but Cecelia does not hold her to it because of the legal interference, and insists that both sides pay up. The two discover a certain fondness for each other's pet subject, and slowly become fast friends. Ron gets cross-wise of Heris when he calls her "disgusting" for putting him and his companions in what he considers to be inferior housing during their stay at the shipyard, and compounds the offense when he intrudes on the bridge (intending to apologize) during a tricky series of FTL jumps. The final straw occurs during an emergency drill; Ron and Odious George had as a prank repainted various cylinders used in drills and tampered with equipment to confuse and humiliate the captain. Had the computer-generated drill been a little different, the cylinders would have formed a home-made bomb. Heris, with Cecelia's permission, locks Ron in his quarters, and through dexterous manipulation of the computerized fixtures and equipment tames Ron and slowly leads him to realize the errors of his ways; thereafter she begins to remedy his lax and deficient education. He is released when he has learned sufficient common sense. Ron's newfound sensibility begins wearing off when the Sweet Delight reaches Sirialis and the others (Cecelia, Heris, Brun, Raffaele, and George) all begin enjoying the fox hunting while Ron is positively miserable and unskilled at riding to the hounds. George suggests that they take a secret jaunt to one of the vacation islands to simply get away from it all and annoy their relations by disappearing for a little while. Their escape goes well, until they attempt to set down at the Bandoo complex of lodges and facilities, to refuel their flitter. Their authority is denied by the systems there, and while circling the field, their flitter is shot down. Struggling to the island, they are greeted by former members of Heris's crew, who apparently are the designated prey of a manhunt organized by the same Admiral Lepescu who had ruined Heris's crew. They had thought that the flitter was carrying some hunters, and so used their best weapon. They split the youngsters up into two groups, Raffaele with Brun and George with Ron, reasoning that divided there would be a better chance that at least one of them would survive long enough to be rescued. The first night, Raffaele and Brun do well, acquiring a hunter's gear when that hunter killed the long-time survivor Petris had sent to look after them; the hunter overconfidently fell to the blade of his not-yet-dead victim. The next day, they find a well-hidden cave, and hunker down in it. Ron and George do not do so swell. They improve the hours of the first night constructing a shoddy trap for hunters, and the next day Ron contracts a fever of some sort. George goes to get some water for Ron, but makes the mistake of drinking some before he notices the eerie silence of the creek: it had been poisoned by the hunters, who have begun to fear that the youngsters' absence would be noticed and have ceased to hunt fair. Ron feverishly attempts to drag George's body to safety, but George is captured by the hunters and is taken to Bandon lodge (while Ron manages to escape). At the lodge, George talks his two guards into betraying Lepescu and into letting him send a message to Lord Thornbuckle and his militia. The message reaches Heris and Cecelia who have already organized a militia expedition - they had grown suspicious of their absence and various unauthorized shuttle flights down to the islands. When they storm Bandon, a traitor in the militia kills the two guards and nearly kills George. All the hunters and victims were on the other island. Lepescu has realized that the jig was up, and begins methodically killing all the hunters and prey. His intent is to eliminate any witnesses and escape Sirialis. Ron finds the girls just before one of the surviving hunters does. They get the drop on him and discover that the crown prince Gerel is part of Lepescu's cabal. They all set out to escape the island, and are ambushed by Lepescu, who offers the prince a choice: either kill his friends, allowing Lepescu to blackmail the prince, or he will die with them. His threat is backed up by a gas grenade with a dead man's switch. Heris and Cecelia have been following the prince's tracks; while delayed by killing the traitorous militia member, they come upon Lepescu in time for Heris to shoot him in the head and end his threat. In the aftermath, Lepescu's cabal is dismantled. George recovers, and reunites with Brun and Ron, whose experience on the island have made them mature. Heris's former crew (the survivors, at least), decide not to return to the Fleet that betrayed them, and join the Sweet Delight, largely replacing the feckless former crew. The prince's participation is hushed up and he is confined aboard Cecelia's yacht until he returns to Rockhouse Major, there to answer to his father. |
6530966 | /m/0g93tx | Heirs of Empire | David Weber | 1996-03 | {"/m/070yc": "Space opera", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel", "/m/01smf2": "Military science fiction"} | The story opens approximately 20 years after The Armageddon Inheritance. The human race has largely recovered from the Siege of Earth by the Achuultani and the Bia system is being slowly re-colonized and its defenses re-activated. In short, the Empire is largely at peace, busy assimilating the technological advances of the Fourth Empire and building and manning a fleet to take the war back to the Achuultani and the master computer controlling them. The captured Achuultani have prospered; with the aid of cloning, their ranks have swollen and they have colonized a planet called Narhan, which was unsuitable to humans by reason of its heavy gravity - for this reason they have renamed themselves the Narhani. They are fervently loyal to the reborn Empire and Colin, enraged by the perversion of their race by the master computer. Brashieel's clone-child (Brashieel is now the head Narhani) Brashan, is one of Sean and Harriet MacIntyre's closest friends (Sean and Harriet being Colin and Jiltanith's two children). The only flies in the ointment are the worrying fact that some of Anu's agents remain at large, and that a small but increasingly violent faction that considers the Narhani to be minions of the anti-christ and want to kill all Narhani; these two factions are secretly working against the Emperor. Into this volatile situation step Sean, Harry, Brashan, Sandy (daughter of Hector MacMahan and Ninhursag), and Tamman (the son of Amanda Tsien and Tamman), who have all enlisted in Battle Fleet. After graduation from the Academy, the four depart on a newly constructed planetoid warship, Imperial Terra, for their midshipman cruise. Unbeknownst to them, one of Anu's former minions, Lawrence Jefferson, had worked his way up to Lieutenant Governor of Earth, and has commenced his dastardly plan to become Emperor through assassinating everyone ahead of him in the line of succession. Under his instructions, Jefferson's personal band of religious terrorists, "The Sword of God", takes one of the planetoid's programmer's family hostage, and order him to sabotage Imperial Terra. The task is accomplished, and the programmer and his family are all murdered to cover it up. The Imperial Terra departs on its maiden voyage, but partway through deliberately loses control of its core tap, as the dead programmer had instructed. However, Dahak had surreptitiously inserted a command with equal priority to the sabotage command which states that the lives of 2 certain midshipmen and their friends must be preserved. Imperial Terra reconciles these conflicting orders by first jettisoning the four aboard a well-stocked and capable (but not FTL-capable) battleship moderately near some uncharted systems and only then destroying itself and its crew of 80 thousand. 2.2 Later, Sandy, Harry, Brashan, Sean, and Tamman arrive at the nearest potentially inhabited system. They barely survive the onslaught of a quarantine system, and decide to sneak onto the life-bearing world all the space-borne Imperial technology and weapons and orbital docks seem to be protecting. Amazingly, it seems that the bio-weapon that had killed the Fourth Empire had missed this world. After landing and investigating the ruins of a high-tech enclave, the five piece together the true history of the planet the indigenous inhabitants call "Pardal". Once, Pardal had been an out-of-the-way minor planet of the Empire. Because it was out of the way, its governor managed to shut down the mat-trans system before Pardal was infected by the bio-weapon when the first warnings went out across the hypercoms, and also to devise with her chief engineer an extremely effective quarantine system. However, even as they hunkered down behind their orbital defenses, the hypercom continued to operate "like a comlink to hell" (pg 255), broadcasting the prolonged death of the Empire, and even more devastatingly, messages from worlds like Pardal which were fooled by the bio-weapon's long incubation period into thinking they were safe. The horrified backlash by Pardal's populace centered on destroying Pardal's technological infrastructure, and erasing all scientific accomplishment and knowledge more advanced than the Dark Ages, so another such horror could never arise. The civil and military authorities concentrated on creating a global theocracy (reminiscent of the Catholic Church) dedicated to the suppression of technological advancement and to the maintenance of the quarantine system. The high-tech enclave the old records were retrieved from was permitted to exist to serve as a source of demons and to provide the fledging church an easy enemy. Harriet had been sent back to the shuttle to bring it to the valley so they could airlift the enclave's computer out, but along the way she was shot down by some locals. They were about to burn her alive for associating with the "Valley of the Damned" when Sean and the rest, but especially Sandy, frightened them and destroyed a portion of the village (without killing anyone) and rescuing her. The local priest becomes convinced that the intruders were actually angels, as Pardalian angels are female, beautiful, wound-able, speak in the language of the Empire (the priestly language on Pardal), killed no one (an odd restraint, were they "damned demons"), wore imperial military uniforms, and were immune to Father Stomald's various religious attacks and banishments. He begins preaching to the populace, converting a fair proportion. The Church reacts quickly and violently, sending a portion of the very well equipped "Temple Guard" to burn the heretics. Stomald's forces are outnumbered and outgunned (the Church possesses a monopoly on heavy artillery) and surely doomed. The five castaways discuss matters, and decide that their guilt in instigating this little rebellion, kickstarting the modernization of Pardal, and also gaining access they need to the quarantine system's main computer could all be accomplished by supporting the rebellion with their leadership and knowledge of how to revolutionize Pardalian warfare. The initial Guard expedition is repulsed and scattered by a miracle accomplished through Imperial technology (see Clarke's Third Law). This victory attracts even more recruits to their cause, such as a good proportion of the now-unarmed Guard force they defeated. The quasi-country the revolt began in, the Princedom of Malagor, has long been known for its independent spirit and its rifles; it had long chafed under the Church's studied oppression of it and its artisans. With the new rifles (on Pardal, smoothbore guns and pikes made up most of an army. Rifles took far too long to load despite their greater accuracy and range, because balls had to be rammed down the barrel; with the "angels"' introduction of the Minié ball, this issue became moot) the army is considerably superior to conventional Pardalian armies. Other advantages such as bayonet rings, modern meteorology or satellite cartography, or canister shot merely are the icing on the cake. The Battle of Yortown, in which the massed Guard reinforcements charged a fortified Angel's army position, quite effectively demonstrated this through the slaughter of the aggressors. Sean's lack of boldness in the counter-stroke followup allowed the surviving Guard commander, an Ortak, to retreat to Erastor, a well-fortified position placed like a choke-point between Malagor and the Temple. Unfortunately, Sean's many advantages are largely nullified in a siege, so he conceives a strike to Ortak's rear, seizing Ortak's semaphore communication lines to perform a man in the middle attack and gain time. Sean managed to bring enough men around Ortak's impassable swamp-secured flank to launch a pincer attack on Ortak's rear and front. With Ortak's forces shattered, the Angels' Army moves out into the open country of Aris, where they can bypass fortifications and crush any secular or religious army foolish enough to engage. They march clear to the Temple, but are stymied by its elaborate fortifications. Sean's army is ideal for defeating other armies, but not for fighting a siege. The Council offers to meet with Sean to discuss a truce, offering as surety one of its own members and allowing Sean to bring a large contingent in with him. Sean walks straight into their trap, and begins fighting his way to the actual Template/computer complex with his men, while Sandy and the others task the main army with breaking in to relieve Sean. Brashan anxiously circles 100 kilometers away, impotent to do anything while the quarantine system's defense guns are operational. Fierce fighting gets Sean within range of the computers; as crown prince and heir to the Imperial throne, he has all sorts of overrides and security codes. He shuts down the defenses, and Brashan defeats the Temple forces, ending the war. The next time they are heard from is a few years later, when Dahak receives a message via their newly constructed hypercom. The Emperor and Empress are overjoyed to hear from the two whom they had long thought dead (thought it sincerely enough that they had had two more children). They had not rested in the meantime, defusing Jefferson's plan to kill all the people in the succession via a massive gravitonic bomb planted in a Narhani statue (intending to use his perversion of their gift as a way to blame them), and foiling his attempt on Jiltanith and Horus's life, at the cost of Horus. |
6531225 | /m/0g945l | Change of Command | Elizabeth Moon | 1999 | {"/m/070yc": "Space opera", "/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01smf2": "Military science fiction"} | The title of Change of Command refers to two events that drive the plot and occur just before the story begins or very early on. The first is the assassination of Bunny, or Lord Thornbuckle. The attack is believed by most to have been engineered by the New Texas Godfearing Militia who had sworn to git revenge on Thornbuckle and the Familias Regnant in general for executing Our Texas's leaders, the Rangers (for what they did to Brun and other women in Rules of Engagement). The second is the change in command of the military prison on Stack Islands in Copper Mountain, from Iosep Tolin to Pilar Bacarion, a woman who had been very close to Admiral Lepescu but had managed to evade the purges sparked by Lepescu's manhunts in Hunting Party. She plots to effect still another change of command, of a good portion of Fleet and eventually the Familias. A third possible event referenced by the title is the plot by the Benignity of the Compassionate Hand to undermine the expansionist capabilities of Fleet by arranging for the rejuvenation drugs being used on the master chiefs to be contaminated; "Project Retainer". With the help of Barin Serrano and a number of other junior officers and non-commissioned personnel, Fleet has just learned of the issue of important NCOs suffering from mental problems. Lady Cecelia is on Rotterdam engaged in the Wherrin Trials (which she wins) when the news of the assassination comes in. As it is already too late to return to Rockhouse in time for the funeral, Cecelia stays, and participate in a curious conversation with an old but not liked acquaintance named Pedar, who insinuates that it was not the Our Texans who had killed Bunny, but rather that he had been killed because he "broke the rules" and so the Rejuvenants (the shadowy quasi-political faction which supports unlimited use of rejuvenation with all that that implies), and more specifically, Pedar, had him killed. After this conversation, Cecelia covertly leaves Rotterdam for Rockhouse Major. There she stiffens the spine of Bunny's widow, Miranda, and aids her and Brun by taking the twins fathered on Brun by the Texans, fostering them with Raffaele and Ron on their colony world Excet-24; while on the colony, Cecelia discovers that something has gone very wrong in the colonial system. Most colonies appear to have been swindled and exploited. Miranda uses this breather to return to Sirialis—upon Bunny's death, his estate should have passed to his wife or his eldest son, Buttons. But his younger brother Harlis is masterminding a vigorous assault on the inheritance. Miranda suspects that Harlis has manipulated and falsified various records and intends to compare them against the full off-line backups she maintains in a remote portion of Sirialis. Hobart Conselline (of the Consellines whose sub-family, the Morrellines, were responsible for the profiteering off inferior rejuvenation drugs in Winning Colors) successfully manipulates the emergency Council meeting called after the assassination to have himself appointed Speaker, buying off Hobart with the promise that the judges appointed will be favorable to Harlis's lawsuits. He pushes through a number of disastrous amendments and ill-considered appointments (such as the appointment of Pedar as Foreign Minister). The resistance his politics meet drive him to even more extreme measures. The worst, possibly, is Hobart's conviction that the mentally damaged NCOs were not suffering because of bad drugs manufactured by the Morrellines but rather that the research demonstrating that was all fabricated by Ageists (those opposed to rejuvenation) and that the real culprit was inbreeding in various Fleet clans like the Serranos. Pursuant to this conviction, he orders the vast majority of flag rank personnel to be relieved of their duties and remanded to Medical. One of the admirals so retired is Admiral Vida Serrano, who returns home. Killing time, she browses through the old family libraries, and discovers a very old book, purporting to be a children's book, which records exactly how the Family which had been the Serranos' patron came to be extinguished, root and branch: they had been betrayed by their ground soldiers on Altiplano. Esmay Suiza's ancestors, in other words. This has obvious repercussions on the prospective marriage between Barin and Esmay. Not all is going poorly for Barin, however; he has gone broke paying for the refugees from Our Texas who had attached themselves to him, and is deeply relieved when the professor specializing in Texan history suggests that they be sent to Excet-24 where their skills and handicrafts are deeply needed by the colony and especially Ron and Raffaela. The new commander of Three Stacks on Copper Mountain has not been idle during these events. Methlin Meharry's little brother was stationed there when Bacarion was appointed; Gelan Meharry realizes after a little research turns up Bacarion's connections to Lepescu that a mutiny is imminent (as Bacarion could have no other reason to seek appointment to a maximum-security prison) and that as Methlin Meharry's little brother, his days are numbered. The mutiny begins with a communications technician bribed to disable the satellite surveillance for a time. It is immediately followed with the attack on Gelan: a prisoner is reported missing and he is attacked while he examines the bottoms of the cliffs. Wearing a protective suit against the fierce elements, he survives the fall but is believed dead. He had stored a life raft and supplies against just such an eventuality in a lava tube—where he is met by Bacarion, who had correctly suspected that Gelan would fake his death. In the ensuing scuffle, Gelan uses the grapples and claws of his suit to kill Bacarion and escape with her corpse (to sow confusion if the lava tube is examined by the other mutineers). Gelan is eventually rescued by a SAR air vehicle, but not before the RSS Bonar Tighe drops several LACs onto the prison and load up with mutineers and the convert prisoners; those prisoners who declined to join the mutiny are massacred. The LACs return to the Bonar Tighe and begin to take it over. The mutiny is successful, and the unsuspecting space-station is taken over. The vital weapons research laboratories and the entire system are now in danger. Gelan, a young lieutenant and a high-ranked scientist hurry over to the weapons labs and neutralize its commander who had been instructed by his fellow mutineers to preserve the installation and its contents intact. They cobble together an old-fashioned radio system, and luck out when an arriving Fleet vessel receives the message, takes it seriously, and manages to jump back out of the Copper Mountain system before being destroyed; it soon warns the rest of the Familias. Back on Sirialis, Miranda has defeated Harlis for control of the family assets. One last enemy remains: Pedar, who had revealed to Cecelia his complicity or spearheading of Bunny's assassination, and who is foolishly attempting to woo Miranda. Pedar insists in fencing with the old and authentic weapons an armor. Unbeknownst to Pedar, Miranda had weakened the armor she predicted Pedar would use. When they start, Miranda feigns slowness and weakness, and deliberately breaks the tip of her sword; revealing her full skill, she thrusts her blade into Pedar's brain, killing him just before Cecelia arrives. Everything arranged to look like a horrible accident, Miranda gets off scot-free, satisfied with her revenge. Cecelia is horrified by Miranda's casual killing. For his actions and policies, the chairman of the Benignity orders Hobart Conselline assassinated. To have needed to resort to such a tactic against one over whom he has no authority means that the Chairman has failed in his duty to his extended family of the Benignity, and even as Hobart is beheaded by the appointed Swordmaster (who replaced his usual Swordmaster), so too does the Chairman perish—another change of command. Esmay and Barin disregard their respective families' opposition to their engagement, and marry even as the mutiny begins raging beyond Copper Mountain and all is thrown into turmoil. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.