Search Results for: fools

GENOCIDE – IN THE NAME OF LOVE

Across the planet, only a handful of giant, overcrowded, doomed cities exist – cities like Norcal, where multiple marriages are recommended and drug-taking is encouraged.

Across the planet, everyone waits for the reclamation of a lost technology that can save them. Everyone, that is, except for the members of the Order of St Jerome in Norcal. The Order of St Jerome believes in peace, in morality, in two-person marriages and old-fashioned values.

The trouble is, in the name of love the Order of St Jerome has decided to sacrifice the Earth…

Somewhere in a far galaxy a being inconceivably alien is surging tumultuously from an unimaginable womb.

In a solitary prison cell on the Underworld, the vast prison-satellite in perpetual Earth-orbit, Terra Viridian is tormented by a vision, an imperative which has already driven her to an insane bloodletting.

On an Earth embalmed in peace by a ubiquitous bureaucracy, the Magician weaves his musical spells and tried to close his mind to the thoughts of others.

– just three links in a chain stretching across space and time towards a testing as awesome as it is unpredictable.

Wise, witty and just a little weird, FOOLS ERRANT wryly strolls the satirical path laid down by Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett and Jack Vance, heralding the brilliant debut of a gifted new voice. Foppish young Filidor Vesh wants only to dally among his shallow pastimes. But a simple errand for his uncle, the vaguely all-powerful Archon of those parts of Old Earth still populated by human beings, becomes a frenetic odyssey across a planet speckled with eccentric nations pursuing odd aims with intense determination. Harried at every step by the irascible dwarf, Gaskarth, and frequently at the peril of wild beasts, enraged mobs and a particularly nasty thaumaturge, Filidor makes a relucant progress toward a final encounter with an ancient and possibly world-ending evil.

Praise for Matthew Hughes:

“Matthew Hughes does Jack Vance better than anyone except Jack himself” – George R.R. Martin
“Heir apparent to Jack Vance” – Booklist
“Hughes’s boldness is admirable”- New York Review of Science Fiction
“Hughes effortlessly renders fantastic worlds and beings believable”- Publishers Weekly
“A towering talent”- Robert J. Sawyer
“A treasure” – David Gerrold

A series of horrifying murders rips through a sanatorium – and only the patients can stop the killings.

‘Baffling crimes, brilliant writing’ SATURDAY REVIEW

‘Quentin is a craftsman of the first class’ TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Peter Duluth turned to drink after his wife’s untimely death; now, two years later and desperate to dry out, he enters a sanitorium, hoping to turn his life around. But he doesn’t quite get the calm relaxation he expected. Strange, malevolent occurrences plague the hospital – and Peter hears his own voice crying out the warning ‘There will be murder.’

With a murderer is on the loose, and the staff every bit as erratic as the idiosyncratic patients, everyone is a suspect – including Peter, who is desperate to clear his name before the killer strikes again.

Death gave its warning in the form of a luscious brunette. She walked into the office of Donald Lam and Bertha Cool, calmly announced that her employer was about to be killed, and paid them a healthy fee to keep the boss alive.

For Cool this case meant cold cash. For Lam it meant warm curves. But before long it meant murder …

In another sparkling and slightly askew adventure in the mode of Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams and Jack Vance, Fools Errant’s Filidor Vesh sashays once more through the penultimate age, finding that love is a many splintered thing.
The dandified Archon’s apprentice is literally bowled over by beautiful Emmlyn Podarke — she knocks him flat and steals his credentials, daring him to pursue her to a remote and mostly forgotten corner of Old Earth. Now Filidor must cope with philosophical pirates, prophet-seeking aliens, light-fingered mummers, and a tiny, bothersome voice in his left ear. Meanwhile, the Archon may or may not have been kidnaped, and somebody’s digging up a mysterious ancient artefact buried on the Podarke family farm.

Praise for Matthew Hughes:

“Matthew Hughes does Jack Vance better than anyone except Jack himself” – George R.R. Martin
“Heir apparent to Jack Vance” – Booklist
“Hughes’s boldness is admirable”- New York Review of Science Fiction
“Hughes effortlessly renders fantastic worlds and beings believable”- Publishers Weekly
“A towering talent”- Robert J. Sawyer
“A treasure” – David Gerrold

Summer 1971. A marvellous spell of weather, idyllic in its warmth. But new sun-spots had appeared; and with their appearance came a significant increase in the suicide rate. The wonderful summer continued for a decade: simultaneously Radiant Suicide reached endemic proportions, the only people to escape its effects being the supposed transnormals, the obsessionals, the eccentrics and the psychopaths. These were to be the only remnants of the ancient ‘homo sapiens’ . . .

Arriving home one night, Ronnie Bart, an English journalist, finds a woman in his apartment. She is wearing only his dressing gown and eating the remains of his breakfast. Her stay is brief, for she is soon arrested by the police, accused of murdering a young man.

Trying to prove her innocence, Bart is drawn into a complex and dangerous affair.