Search Results for: awakening,-the

Zerfall awakens in an alley, wounded and unable to remember her past. Chased by an assassin out into the endless wastes of the desert, she is caught, disfigured, and left for dead. Her scabbard is empty, but the need for answers-and the pull of her sword-will draw her back to the city-states.

When Jateko, a naïve youth, accidentally kills a member of his own tribe, he finds himself outcast and pursued across the desert for his crimes. Crazed from dehydration, dying of thirst and hunger, he stumbles across Zerfall.

Hunted by assassins and bound by mutual need, both Zerfall and Jateko will confront the Täuschung, an ancient and deranged religion ruled by a broken fragment of Zerfall’s mind. Swarm, the Täuschung hell, seethes with imprisoned souls, but where gods-real or imagined-meddle in the affairs of man, the cost is high.

In Swarm and Steel, the power of belief can manifest and shape reality, and for political and religious leaders, faith becomes a powerful tool. But the insane are capable of twisting reality with their delusions as well, turning increasingly dangerous as their sanity crumbles. It is here that a long prophesied evil will be born, an endless hunger. The All Consuming will rise.

Set in the wake of a galaxy-wide war and the destruction of a human empire, The Dangerous Type follows the awakening of one of the galaxy’s most dangerous assassins and her quest for vengeance. Entombed for twenty years, Raena has been found and released.

Thallian has been on the lam for the last fifteen years; a wanted war criminal whose entire family has been hunted down and murdered for their role in the galaxy-wide genocide of the Templars. His name is the first on Raena’s list, as he’s the one that enslaved her, made her his assassin, and ultimate put her in a tomb. But Thallian is willing to risk everything-including his army of cloned sons-to capture her. Now it’s a race to see who kills whom first.

Alternatively, Gaven has spent the last twenty years trying to forget about Raena, whom he once saved and then lost to the clutches of Thallian. Raena’s adopted sister, Ariel, has been running from the truth: the one about Raena, about her and Gaven, and doesn’t know if she’ll be able to face either of them.

Nicole Gunther-Perrin is a modern young professional, proud of her legal skills but weary of childcare, of senior law partners who put the moves on her, and of her deadbeat ex-husband. Following a ghastly day of dealing with all three, she falls into bed asleep – and awakens the next morning to find herself in a different life, that of a widowed tavernkeeper in the Roman frontier town of Carnuntum around 170 A.D.

Delighted at first to be away from corrupt, sexist modern America, she quickly begins to realise that her new world is as complicated as her old one. Violence, dirt, and pain are everywhere – and yet many of the people she comes to know are as happy as those she knew in twentieth-century Los Angeles. Slavery is a commonplace, gladiators kill for sport, and drunkenness is taken for granted – but everyday people somehow manage to face life with humour and good will.

No quitter, Nicole manages to adapt to her new life despite endless worry about the fate of her children “back” in the twentieth century. Then plague sweeps through Carnuntum, followed by brutal war. Amid pain and loss on a level she had never imagined, Nicole finds reserves of strength she had never known.

On an artificial world created and seeded with ten thousand bloodlines by the long-vanished Preservers, young Yama’s ancestry is unique, for he appears to be the last remaining scion of the Builders, closest of all races to the worshipped architects of Confluence. And on a day near the end of the world, Yama must finally acknowledge the power he neither anticipated nor desires.
In the dust of many crumbling bureaucracies, Yama searches for an identity and a history – awed and fearful of his ever-growing capacity to awaken the terrible machines of destruction that his world’s absent gods left slumbering. To the common folk – the unshaped and aboriginal – he is the fulfillment of age-old prophecies. To the functionaries of the Department of Indigenous Affairs, he is a weapon to be molded and used in the bloody civil war raging at the planet’s midpoint – a seemingly endless battle that pits those who revere the Preservers’ laws against the dangerous Heretics who would obliterate all antiquated values and codes of conduct.
But there are still others who have taken notice of Yama as he pursues the hidden secrets of his past. Intelligent powers older than the Builders – as old, perhaps, as the Preservers themselves – are pursuing Yama in turn. And they will stop at nothing to control his present-and, as a result, the future of everything that lives-in anticipation of the ultimate triumph of the Ancients of Days.

In a world stripped bare of digital images and promotainment, unveiled with the audiovisual overlay of the ImmaNet, in an exposed world, a naked world, Amon Kenzaki awakens, lost and alone. He must now travel deep into the District of Dreams in search of Anisha Birla, the one person that might help him unravel the mystery of jubilee. But deprived of the apps and informational tools he’s depended on his entire life, traversing the largest bankdeath camp on Earth is no easy task.

Inside an ephemeral labyrinth of slowly-dissolving disposable skyscrapers clogged to the limit with the bankdead masses, Amon soon finds himself face to face with two dangerous groups: a luddite cult called the Borginans, who preach bizarre superstitions about electronic banking, and a supposedly humanitarian army called the Charity Brigade, whose mandate of protecting the bankdead conceals opportunistic motives.

Taking refuge in a hospital that strives to improve conditions in the camps, Amon begins to work towards its cause and reconciles himself to his newfound poverty. But when political forces threaten the community’s existence and the lives of its members, he is forced to team up with a vending-machine designer, an Olympic runner, a fertility researcher, a corporate tycoon, and many others to expose the heinous secret festering at the heart of the action-transaction market he once served.

In book two of the Jubilee Cycle, Eli K. P. William delves beneath the surface of his cyber-dystopian Tokyo to unearth the fate of outcasts trapped in its depths and shine a light on the financial obstacles blocking one individual’s efforts to help them.

One star-chained evening in a Manhattan bathroom, Carl Schirmer spontaneously combusts! His body transforms into light, mysteriously snatched from his banal life by an alien intelligence 130 billion years in the future. There, all spacetime is collapsing into a cosmic black hole, the Big Crunch – and a bold, cosmic destiny awaits Carl. Rebuilt from the remnants of his light by extraterrestrials for a cryptic purpose, he awakens in time’s last world, the strangest of all – the Werld.

At the edge of infinity, Carl discovers the Foke, nomadic humans who travel among the floating islands of the Werld. The Foke teach him how to live – and love – at the end of time, and he loses his heart to his plucky guide, the beautiful Evoë. Their life together in this blissful kingdom that knows no aging or disease brings them to rapture – until Evoë falls prey to the zotl, a spidery intelligence who hunt the Foke and eat the chemical by-products of their pain. In order to save his beloved from a gruesome death, Carl must return to Earth – 130 billion years earlier – where he is shocked to discover that the Earth he’s come back to is not the one he left.

Can he meet the harsh demands of his task before the zotl find him and begin ravishing the Earth?

Author’s Note: The volumes of this series can each be read independently of the others. The feature that unifies them is their individual observations of science fiction’s sub-genre: “space opera,” which the editors David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer define as “colorful, dramatic, large-scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character and plot action, and usually set in the relatively distant future, and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone. It often deals with war, piracy, military virtues, and very large-scale action, large stakes.”

In the late 1930’s as the threat of war is building in Germany, twelve year old Julia arrives to spend the summer with her famous playwright father, only to find herself alone with Trudl, her Austrian stepmother. With Trudl preoccupied by the plight of her fellow countrymen in Europe, Julia retreats into the scary Gothic novels left behind by her older siblings, and becomes haunted by dreams of Joshua Harken, the notorious alchemist who built the 17th century house, and then disappeared, accused of murder. Even after she joins forces with local boy Tim Bellyap to investigate the stories of Joshua’s ghost, she is afraid to tell anybody about the terrifying voices coming unbidden from somewhere inside her chest…

In a compelling exploration of loneliness and adolescent insecurities, peopled by ghosts from the old house, this is the powerful story of Julia’s awakening from her nightmare world.

Also published as Voices, and set in Joan Aiken’s own supposedly haunted childhood home, Jeake’s House in Rye, Sussex, this Y.A. ghost story draws on some of her own childhood memories to create an unusual thriller.

“When reduced to its essence, Julia’s story may not be so very different from that of Aiken’s Wolves Chronicles heroine Dido Twite: each girl must cope with a distant, unreliable father and learn to survive in a world peopled with self-absorbed adults. It is the exploration of these issues, even more than the fine storytelling, which makes this novel so compelling” Publisher’s Weekly
“Joan Aiken is the godsend to children who are at the age when they read as if there were no tomorrow” Washington Post

“An entertaining read, for readers who like to read suspenseful ghost stories with a hint of real menace. The ghostly elements of this story are nicely mirrored by the historical menace of the times, as Julia ruminates on the dangers of Hitler, whom she sees as a sort of spider, spreading his web out over Europe” Goodreads reviewer