Search Results for: on-the-run

The Lyonesse sequence evokes the Elder Isles, is a baroque land of pre-Arthurian myth now lost beneath the Atlantic, where powerful sorcerers, aloof faeries, stalwart champions, and nobles eccentric, magnanimous, and cruel pursue intrigue among their separate worlds . . .

When Princess madouc discovers that she is actually a changeling left by fairies in place of a baby boy, she sets out, with her servant and companion Pymfyd, to find her true identity. Madouc locates her mother, the fairy Twisk, easily enough, but her paternity poses a problem: Twisk is not certain who fathered her child.

Meanwhile, her uncle, King Casmir, attempts to conquer the whole island of Hybras, on which Lyonesse is located, and thwart the prophesy of Persilian the Magic Mirror that his sister’s son would one day rule. He is foiled at every turn by King Aillas of Troicinet and his son Dhrun, who is actually the child of the prophesy, but is older than expected because of a youth spent in the fairy shee (home), where time runs differently. A sly mixture of satire and epic, Vance’s medieval tale is a delightful conclusion to an epic fantasy trilogy.

Winner of the World Fantasy Award for best novel, 1990

What if you could change your gender with barely a thought?
Cory Lanus is a teen out of place. He doesn’t fit in. He doesn’t act right. There’s something off about him. Or so his friend Jaz Andrews believes.
Jaz is a typical teenage girl with too much schoolwork, grief at home, and a huge crush on the new guy. She spends as much time with him as she can, to the chagrin of her friends, yet she can’t get close enough to him. Surely he likes her as much as she likes him.
Cory is out of place. Far out of place. On the run from his family’s enemy, Corilanus has literally landed on earth, his home world’s only hope for survival. He finds comfort on this seemingly backward planet that puts so much emphasis on what everyone expects you to be. Cory finds being a boy comfortable enough, but sometimes being a girl works too.
But when someone from his home comes looking for him, Cory’s new found peace is set for destruction because those he left behind have come to finish what they started and nothing, especially not his new friends, are going to stand in their way.

Set after the Third Great War, North and South America are united into one country: Imperial America. A slave state run by a small noble elite who flaunt their wealth by using, and abusing, the one commodity that only the rich can have: human labour. But working underground, persecuted by the police, is an organization dedicated to the overthrow of government and the existing way of life and the establishment of freedom.

The Society of Thieves was the only organization that flouted authority in America Imperial: they robbed the rich to buy freedom for the slaves. They were well equipped and trained for their job and had friends and informers in high places ready to reveal where the wealth of the nobles was hidden. And Alar was the best Thief of them all – for he had senses not found in ordinary men, senses that accurately warned him when danger was near. But Alar had amnesia and did not know his true identity though sometimes he sensed that there was a purpose in his actions that was not entirely his own volition.

When Keiris, wife of the Imperial Chancellor saw him, she sensed that he was something special and helped him to elude pursuit even though it put her own life in danger. And in trips to the Moon and even the Sun itself, Alar begins to see what part he is destined to play in the struggle for men’s freedom.

Richard Garrison was once a corporal in the British Military Police, until a terrorist’s bomb destroyed his eyesight and his career. Repaying Garrison for saving his wife and child from the blast, millionaire industrialist Thomas Schroeder introduced him to the Psychomech, an amazing machine that could either gift its users with astonishing mental powers – or destroy them utterly.


Having successfully harnessed the Psychomech, Garrison discovered the Psychosphere, a strange plane of existence where mental abilities were all. Thought became intent, word became deed, and Garrison became unto a god.


Two decades later, Garrison is utilising his unique powers to explore the universe. On Earth, his son, Richard Stone, is happily in love, until his beloved falls victim to “The Gibbering”, a plague of madness that destroys men and women by destroying their minds. There is no obvious cause. There is no cure. There are no survivors.


When Richard Stone is himself infected by The Gibbering, the mental powers he inherited from his father enable him to defeat the madness, at least for a while. Then, to his horror, Stone discovers that the Psychomech has run amok and that The Gibbering is the result! Even though the insanity it creates batters his struggling mind, Stone realises he is the only man with the knowledge and power capable of destroying the berserker mind-machine.

As the sole survivor of a massacre, Bibi was only saved from a life as a concubine when Lady Nef, the General’s wife, intervened, earning Bibi’s undying loyalty.

When a diplomatic mission turns sour, Bibi is imprisoned with her saviour, and through her learns of the greatest treasure imaginable: an uninhabited, unspoiled, perfect planet. When Lady Nef dies and bequeaths Bibi her rank and power, Bibi steals Spirit, an instantaneous-transit space pod, and runs with nothing other than a set of coordinates.

Twenty years after Lady Nef’s capture, the Princess of Bois Dormant debuts in capital Speranza and dazzles high society. No-one could imagine this diamond of the Diaspora had an ulterior motive, forged in the darkness of a prison cell. But revenge isn’t simple when more than one person pulled a trigger. Bibi must decide what’s more important – personal vendettas, or uncovering a conspiracy that reaches far beyond just her.

A twisty tale of murder, betrayal, and revenge served ice cold, the sequel to Gwyneth Jones’ critically acclaimed Aleutians Trilogy, set in the same universe, is an epic story of intergalatic high society and the complex webs it weaves.

You can find more information about Spirit at http://www.gwynethjones.uk/SPIRIT.htm

In the near future, the debt-laden U.S. owns a technology that renders it “the world’s best-defended Third World country.” The only real outer-space planning is in Common Europe, so young American “space cadet” Jerry Reed goes to work in Paris. He falls in love with and marries Soviet career bureaucrat Sonya Gagarin and the story jumps ahead 20 years, blending world events with a focus on their family. Sonya’s star has risen with the Euro-Russians’ while Jerry has been stymied by pervasive anti-Americanism. Daughter Franja has her father’s space fever and enrolls in a Russian space school; son Bob, fiercely curious about an earlier, admired America before it was run by xenophobic “Gringos,” enters Berkeley. Ten years later the U.S. is a pariah, Euro-Russia the pet of the civilized world and the Reeds scattered – politics forced Jerry and Sonya’s divorce, Franja speaks only to her mother and Bob is trapped in “Festung Amerika.” A series of odd, occasionally tragic events brings the family (and the world) together. Despite some tech-talk this is not science fiction: the first two-thirds of this hefty book is chillingly logical, if sometimes very funny, and while the “happy” ending may seem forced, Spinrad ( Bug Jack Barron ) gives us a wild, exhilarating ride into the next century.

Imagine a living specimen of a multimillion-year-old hominid species, Homo habilis, encountering the contemporary world.

Told in the first-person narrative of Paul Loyd, divorced owner of a small town restaurant, Ancient of Days tells the story of a habiline man found wandering in a Georgia pecan orchard, a living descendant of a habiline tribe, brought from Africa via Haiti as a slave. Paul’s ex-wife, RuthClaire, takes in the living fossil, appropriately naming him Adam, and as an artist she discovers Adam’s mute but vibrant artistic sensibility, falls in love with him, and marries him – much to Paul’s confusion and dismay.

And then the story begins to widen out onto a broader canvas, as Adam first faces persecution by small town Georgia Klansmen, then, surviving that, moves with RuthClaire to Atlanta and encounters the whole spectrum of American culture, from art critics and media spectacles to evangelists and punk clubs.

Throughout the peregrinations and travails of Adam, however, runs a rich and developing strain of self-conscious spiritual, intellectual, and artistic growth, interwoven with Adam’s genuine anguish over the problematic nature of his true humanity.

In the end, the central characters come together on the Haitian island of Montarez in the aftermath of crisis, and in a moment of illumination and revelation meet the mysterious and extraordinary origins of Adam and his race in human prehistory.

Set in Sagramanda, a city of one hundred million, this is the story of Taneer, a scientist who has absconded with his multinational corporation’s secret project code and who is now on the run from both the company and his father. Depahli, the fabulously beautiful woman from the “untouchable” class, would die for him, just as surely as his father would like to kill him for shaming his very traditional family with such a relationship. Chalcedony “Chal” Schneemann doesn’t want to kill Taneer, if he doesn’t have to, but it wouldn’t upset him terribly much if it came to that, and he’ll stop at nothing to recover the stolen property from the company that pays him very, very well to solve big problems discreetly and quickly. Sanjay Ghosh, a poor farmer-turned-merchant in the big city of Sagramanda, would like to help Taneer unload his stolen items for the thirty million dollars his 3 percent fee is worth. Jena Chalmette – the crazy French woman pledged to Kali – simply wants to kill for the glory of her god, and she’s very good at it. Chief inspector Keshu Singh would like to put this sword wielding serial killer away as quickly as possible before the media gets ahold of the story.

Then there’s a man-eating tiger that’s come in from the nearby jungle reserve, just looking for his next meal.

Today the names of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and Clark Ashton Smith, all regular contributors to the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the first half of the twentieth century, are recognizable even to casual readers of the bizarre and fantastic. And yet despite being more popular than them all during the golden era of genre pulp fiction, there is another author whose name and work have fallen into obscurity: Seabury Quinn.

Quinn’s short stories were featured in well more than half of Weird Tales‘s original publication run. His most famous character, the supernatural French detective Dr. Jules de Grandin, investigated cases involving monsters, devil worshippers, serial killers, and spirits from beyond the grave, often set in the small town of Harrisonville, New Jersey. In de Grandin there are familiar shades of both Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, and alongside his assistant, Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, de Grandin’s knack for solving mysteries-and his outbursts of peculiar French-isms (grand Dieu!)-captivated readers for nearly three decades.

The third volume, The Dark Angel, includes all of the Jules de Grandin stories from “The Lost Lady” (1931) to “The Hand of Glory” (1933), as well as “The Devil’s Bride”, the only novel featuring de Grandin, which was originally serialized over six issues of Weird Tales.

Top Gun heads to outer space in this throwback to the classic science fiction of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein.

Strapped in to artificial wings spanning twenty-five feet across, your arms push a tenth of your body weight with each pump as you propel yourself at frightening speeds through the air. Inside a pressurized dome on the Moon, subject to one-sixth Earth’s gravity, there are swarms of chiseled, fearless, superbly trained flyers all around you, jostling for air space like peregrine falcons racing for the prize. This was the sport of piloting, and after Helium-3, piloting was one of the first things that entered anyone’s mind when Borealis was mentioned.

It was Helium-3 that powered humanity’s far-flung civilization expansion, feeding fusion reactors from the Alliances on Earth to the Terran Ring, Mars, the Jovian colonies, and all the way out to distant Titan. The supply, taken from the surface of the Moon, had once seemed endless. But that was long ago. Borealis, the glittering, fabulously rich city stretched out across the lunar North Pole, had amassed centuries of unimaginable wealth harvesting it, and as such was the first to realize that its supplies were running out.

The distant memories of the horrific planetwide devastation spawned by the petroleum wars were not enough to quell the rising energy and political crises. A new war to rival no other appeared imminent, but the solar system’s competing powers would discover something more powerful than Helium-3: the indomitable spirit of an Earth-born, war-weary mercenary and pilot extraordinaire.

Lucius Shepard is a grand master of dark fantasy, famed for his baroque yet utterly contemporary visions of existential subversion and hallucinatory collapse. In Dagger Key, his fifth major story collection, Shepard confronts hard-bitten loners and self-deceiving operators with the shadowy emptiness within themselves and the insinuating darkness without, to ends sardonic and terrifying. The stories in this book, including six novellas, are:


“Stars Seen Through Stone” – in a small Pennsylvania town, mediocrity suddenly blossoms into genius; but at what terrible cost?


“Emerald Street Expansions” – in near-future Seattle, echoes of the life of a medieval French poet hint at either reincarnation or a dire conspiracy.


“Limbo” – a retired criminal on the run from the Mafia encounters ghosts, and much worse, on the shores of a haunted lake.


“Liar’s House” – in the grip of the legendary dragon Griaule, destiny is a treacherous and transformative thing.


“Dead Monty” – a small-time New Orleans criminal ventures outside his proper territory, and poker and voudoun conspire to bring him down.


“Dinner at Baldassaro’s” – a gang of immortals debates the future in an Italian resort, only for events to outrun any of their expectations.


“Abimagique” – a glib college loser falls in love with a witch, becoming an involuntary part of a world-saving – or world-destroying – magical ritual.


“The Lepidopertrist” – a small boy on a Caribbean island witnesses the creation of preternatural beings by a Yankee wizard…


“Dagger Key” – off the coast of Belize, the ghost of a famous pirate seems to control a spiral of murder and intrigue; or is someone else responsible?

A cyber-dystopian thriller unlike any other.

In a near future Tokyo, every action-from blinking to sexual intercourse-is intellectual property owned by corporations that charge licensing fees. A BodyBank computer system implanted in each citizen records their movements from moment to moment, and connects them to the audio-visual overlay of the ImmaNet, so that every inch of this cyber-dystopian metropolis crawls with information and shifting cinematic promotainment.

Amon Kenzaki works as a Liquidator for the Global Action Transaction Authority. His job is to capture bankrupt citizens, remove their BodyBank, and banish them to BankDeath Camps where they are forever cut off from the action-transaction economy. Amon always plays by the rules and is steadily climbing the Liquidation Ministry ladder.

With his savings accumulating and another promotion coming, everything seems to be going well, until he is asked to cash crash a charismatic politician and model citizen, and soon after is charged for an incredibly expensive action called “jubilee” that he is sure he never performed. To restore balance to his account, Amon must unravel the secret of jubilee, but quickly finds himself asking dangerous questions about the system to which he’s devoted his life, and the costly investigation only drags him closer and closer to the pit of bankruptcy.

In book one of the Jubilee Cycle, Cash Crash Jubilee, debut novelist Eli K. P. William wields the incisive power of speculative fiction to show how, in a world of corporate finance run amok, one man will do everything for the sake of truth and justice.

Robert Charles Wilson, says The New York Times, “writes superior science fiction thrillers.” His Darwinia won Canada’s Aurora Award; his most recent novel, The Chronoliths, won the prestigious John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Now he tells a gripping tale of alien contact and human love in a mysterious but hopeful universe.

At Blind Lake, a large federal research installation in northern Minnesota, scientists are using a technology they barely understand to watch everyday life in a city of lobster like aliens upon a distant planet. They can’t contact the aliens in any way or understand their language. All they can do is watch.

Then, without warning, a military cordon is imposed on the Blind Lake site. All communication with the outside world is cut off. Food and other vital supplies are delivered by remote control. No one knows why.

The scientists, nevertheless, go on with their research. Among them are Nerissa Iverson and the man she recently divorced, Raymond Scutter. They continue to work together despite the difficult conditions and the bitterness between them. Ray believes their efforts are doomed; that culture is arbitrary, and the aliens will forever be an enigma.

Nerissa believes there is a commonality of sentient thought, and that our failure to understand is our own ignorance, not a fact of nature. The behavior of the alien she has been tracking seems to be developing an elusive narrative logic–and she comes to feel that the alien is somehow, impossibly, aware of the project’s observers.

But her time is running out. Ray is turning hostile, stalking her. The military cordon is tightening. Understanding had better come soon….

Blind Lake is a 2004 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel.

Welcome to Argylle, where the ruling family – a brilliant, flighty, civilized and occasionally dangerous clan of nearly-immortal warriors and magicians – are hoping for a few years of relative peace.

True, their Father Gaston has vanished, leaving both throne and family while he pursues some unexplained errand. His absence has stretched into years. True as well that their powerful Uncle Dewar has also wandered off without leaving a forwarding address, and hasn’t been heard from for a worrisome length of time. It’s a bad habit of running off that this family’s elders have.

But now young Prince Gwydion’s been stuck with ruling the Dominion of Argylle, and with any luck, life can go back to being a satisfactory mixture of intrigue, gossip and viniculture, periodically enlivened by amateur theatricals and the odd quest or two.

Yet Gwydion is finding this arrangement uncomfortable. Strange things keep turning up. A plague of monsters appears out of nowhere, attempting to take up residence in the local barns and forests. These are trumped by the arrival of a ravenous Great Dragon – ancient, sorcerous, profoundly cunning – so big you can see it thirty miles away. Meanwhile, a mysterious young woman has shown up, claiming to be Gwydion’s long-lost – indeed, quite unexpected – sister. And then there are the high-tech aliens, who say they just want to conduct a legal investigation. It’s enough, Gwydion thinks, to make a ruler want to find some nice long errand that’ll take him away from his homeland for a spell…

The Well-Favored Man is a courtly, complex, bloody-minded fantasy for those who love Roger Zelazny’s Amber, Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint and the fantasy adventures of Steven Brust.

“What does a cockatrice enjoy most for dinner? Anyone it can find.”

So the alarmed inhabitants of England discover when a plague of monsters–known as cockatrices–invade their country and begin gobbling them up. They must be stopped! A plucky band of survivors dubbed the Cockatrice Corps–including youngsters Dakin and Sauna–decide to fight back. But how?

A rollicking adventure filled with breathtaking twists and turns, The Cockatrice Boys is Joan Aiken at her comic best.

But there is also a powerful message in her only full length Sci- Fi (or even Cli-Fi!) YA novel as Joan Aiken imagines the result of human folly, in an earlier version of global warming, with the hole created in the ozone layer becoming a channel for evil to arrive on earth as an invasion of monstrous creatures.

Joan Aiken believed in the power of the imagination, and using stories to prepare us for our future.
In The Cockatrice Boys she wrote:

“People need stories…to remind them that reality is not only what we can see or smell or touch. Reality is in as many layers as the globe we live on itself, going inwards to a central core of red-hot mystery, and outwards to unguessable space. People’s minds need detaching, every now and then, from the plain necessities of daily life. People need to be reminded of these other dimensions above us and below us. Stories do that.”

“Besides being a daringly original, funny, scary, and morally instructive book, it also contains one of the strongest statements of the purpose of fantasy stories and fairy tales . . . This book was excellent, I highly recommend it . . . buy it now!” Mugglenet.com


“Readers will be reminded of Alice in Wonderland . . . and the movie trilogy Star Wars” School Library Journal

“This one is a real page-turner – as usual for Aiken – and sometimes really quite sinister, with a lot of gallows humour. It’s suitable for all adults and most children… just as creepy as anything by M.R. James” Amazon Reviewer

“Like all Aiken’s best work, there is a deeply scary, nightmare thread running through this book, which makes it thrilling and involving for older readers and adults …but the monsters are especially entertaining – drawn from Lewis Carroll, ancient mythology, and even Monty Python, they are scary and funny at the same time. A brilliant book” Amazon Reviewer