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The End of Harry Potter? (Gollancz S. F. Ser.)
by David LangfordTHE END OF HARRY POTTER is the perfect companion volume for all Harry Potter fans. Award-winning writer and Potter fan David Langford delves into the six Harry Potter books to explore J.K. Rowling's universe and characters, and shows in detail how cleverly J.K. Rowling has woven her world.This is the book for you if you are one of the gazillions of readers who find themselves wondering about horcruxes and Deatheaters and Dark Lords ... Langford looks at questions like:*What are the remaining horcruxes, the places He Who Shall Not Be Named has stashed his soul so he can never die?*Does Harry himself bear a part of the Dark Lord's soul in his scar?*Is that why Harry understands Parseltongue - and if not, why does he speak the language of the serpentssss?*What will happen when Harry is technically a grown-up, and no longer under the protection of his Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia?*Is Albus Dumbledore really dead?*Whose side is Severus Snape really on?*Will Hogwarts survive the final, apocalyptic battle between Harry and You-Know-Who?Don't know the answers? Then read THE END OF HARRY POTTER!
Angels' Dance: A Guild Hunter Novella (The Guild Hunter Series #4)
by Nalini SinghA never-before published novella set in the world of Nalini Singh's Guild Hunter seriesWarrior angels, vampire hunters and angels gone bad heat up this altogether sizzling paranormal alternate universe, from the bestselling author Nalini Singh.Angels' Dance is a compelling story of passion, love and danger in the Guild Hunter world. Jessamy, a beautiful flightless angel, has always held her own in the world of angels and archangels ... until she meets Galen and begins to dream of flying ...Galen is fierce and passionate, but he finds himself growing protective towards Jessamy: so vulnerable, and so strong at the same time. It's clear there is something growing between them; will they find a way to dance together?This is a compelling, sexy addition to the Guild Hunter universe.
Proxima: An Sf Epic Of A New World And Billion Year Old Secrets (A\proxima Novel Ser. #1)
by Stephen BaxterAn awe-inspiring Planetary Romance from Terry Pratchett's co-author on the Long Earth BooksThe very far future: The Galaxy is a drifting wreck of black holes, neutron stars, chill white dwarfs. The age of star formation is long past. Yet there is life here, feeding off the energies of the stellar remnants, and there is mind, a tremendous Galaxy-spanning intelligence each of whose thoughts lasts a hundred thousand years. And this mind cradles memories of a long-gone age when a more compact universe was full of light ...The 27th century: Proxima Centauri, an undistinguished red dwarf star, is the nearest star to our sun - and (in this fiction), the nearest to host a world, Proxima IV, habitable by humans. But Proxima IV is unlike Earth in many ways. Huddling close to the warmth, orbiting in weeks, it keeps one face to its parent star at all times. The 'substellar point', with the star forever overhead, is a blasted desert, and the 'antistellar point' on the far side is under an ice cap in perpetual darkness. How would it be to live on such a world?Yuri Jones, with 1,000 others, is about to find out ...PROXIMA tells the amazing tale of how we colonise a harsh new eden, and the secret we find there that will change our role in the Universe for ever.
Ultima (A\proxima Novel Ser. #2)
by Stephen BaxterFresh from his latest collaboration with Terry Pratchett on the Long Earth sequence Stephen Baxter now returns to the mysteries and challanges first hinted at in his acclaimed novel PROXIMA.In PROXIMA we discovered ancient alien artifacts on the planet of Per Ardua - hatches that allowed us to step across light years of space as if we were stepping into another room. The universe opened up to us. Now in ULTIMA the consequences of this new freedom make themselves felt. And we discover that there are minds in the universe that are billions of years old and they have a plan for us. For some of us. But as we learn the true nature of the universe we also discover that we have countless pasts all meeting in this present and that our future is terrifyingly finite. It's time for us to fight to take back control.This is grand scale, big idea SF of the best possible sort. It is set to build on the massive success of PROXIMA and define Stephen Baxter's work going forward.
Davy: Post-Holocaust Stories Book 1 (Gateway Essentials)
by Edgar PangbornDavy is set in the far future of our world, in the fourth century after the collapse of what we describe as the twentieth-century civilisation. In a land turned upside-down and backwards by the results of scientific unwisdom, Davy and his fellow Ramblers are carefree outcasts, whose bawdy, joyous adventures among the dead ashes of Old-Time culture make a novel which has been hailed as "a frightening, ribald, poignant look at the imaginary future," as "this chilling and fascinating book," as "superb entertainment - unique," as "so unusual as the make it both refreshing and thought provoking."
The Judgement of Eve: Post-Holocaust Stories Book 2 (Gateway Essentials)
by Edgar PangbornEve: she was the true descendant of the first Woman - still craving the knowledge of life in the new world after the holocaust. Claudius: Only he remembered the world before the One-Day War. Would this memory help him find the truth? Ethan: He had the heart of a lion. But to conquer Eve he needed the heart of a man. Kenneth: He had confronted both the lady and the tiger. Now he would have to face the judgment of Eve.
The Company of Glory: Post-Holocaust Stories Book 3
by Edgar PangbornBehold Demetrios!With the same rich imagination and dazzling insights that won him the International Fantasy Award, Edgar Pangborn weaves a magical tapestry set far in man's future.It is a time when man, struggling to rise above the ashes of nuclear holocaust, has returned to the simpler values and lifestyle of medieval times. And in this society, Demetrios the storyteller is revered among men for his captivating tales of the Old Time, with its miraculous Telephones, and Jet Planes, and TV, and Automobiles. But Demetrios is also feared - for one storyteller with a head full of ancient truth can be dangerous.So Demetrios is forced to flee, with six compatriots, and together they embark on a journey full of unexpected sorrows, and unimagined delights, a journey through realms of fantasy, philosophy, and rich human possibility, which the reader will be delighted and privileged to share.
West of the Sun
by Edgar PangbornSeveral light-years west of the Earth's Sun lay the planet, Lucifer, circling a sun of its own, circled by its own two moons. The five specially selected and trained passengers of the "Argo" found much on Lucifer to remind them of the Earth they had left eleven years before. The air was invigorating, the vegetation lush, and there were people - a race of friendly white giants and a swarming population of wary pygmy tribes. The Earth pioneers soon faced the problem of survival on the red-green planet, and also the founding of a democratic civilization among the strife-torn pygmies. However, they were soon entwined in a brutal war between opposing pygmy forces. On the outcome of this war hinged the very fate of the new way of life on Lucifer...
A Mirror for Observers (Gateway Essentials)
by Edgar PangbornThe Martians, long exiled from their home planet, have for millennia been observers of the world of men. Forbidden by their laws to interfere with human destiny, they wait for mankind to mature.From the turmoil of mid twentieth-century America, word comes to the Observers that one of their renegades is hoping to encourage humanity in its headlong rush to self-destruction through corruption of a single rare intellect. The struggle between Observer and Abdicator for the continuance of the human species is one the classic conflicts in the annuals of science fiction.
Still I Persist in Wondering: Post-Holocaust Stories Book 4
by Edgar PangbornThe waters rose, and darkness was upon the earth.For a few decades after the Twenty-Minute War and the Red Plague, there were those who remembered the ways and pleasures of civilization, but soon the harsh realities of life in the flooded seaboard of North America pushed the survivors into a new Dark Age - an age of superstition and brutality, but one of seeking and poetry as well. This is the world of Edgar Pangborn's classic Davy, portrayed here over centuries of its change and growth. Here are heretics, and harpers, crusaders and cowards, magicians and mundane folk, in a stunning cycle of stories that have timeless quality of legend.
Good Neighbors and Other Strangers
by Edgar PangbornIn the corner gas station, the local saloon, on the down-east farm, in the settings of EVERYDAY - there appear UNEXPECTEDLY THE ALIEN, THE WEIRD, THE MYSTERIOUSThe title story tells of one tearful stray from a herd of alien livestock which crushes most of Manhattan and causes apologetic herders to make amends. There is a shivery novelette about the abduction of a country wife by a hairy beast, and the story of a pickup truck full of mythical characters asking directions to Olympus. Then there are the ten-legged blue bugs from inner - or outer - space that can give you a dream - or a nightmare; the shadow-monkeys who have the absurd habit of following along and changing by what you think; the tiny angel that hatches from an egg; and the 'wrens' that hatch from Grandpa's beard the summer he was 106.
Angels' Flight: A Guild Hunter Collection (The Guild Hunter Series)
by Nalini SinghWarrior angels, vampire hunters and angels gone bad heat up this altogether sizzling paranormal alternate universe.This anthology of novellas features Angels' Wolf, Angels' Judgement, Angels' Pawn and the never-before-published Angels' Dance.
Cirque (Gateway Essentials)
by Terry CarrMillennia in the future, Earth has become a backwater planet, ignored by others in the galaxy. Its one jewel is Cirque - the city on the Abyss, a city of love and harmony, with inspiring religious rites. But in the Abyss there lives the Beast, formed from the castoff hates of the Cirquians: a beast whose body is refuse, whose mind is black as sin. Feeble weapons are no match for the Beast. And now, after centuries, it's climbing out of the Abyss to claim its own...
The Light at the End of the Universe
by Terry CarrTerry Carr has been called the editor with impeccable taste, the man who knows which stories will be Hugo and Nebula award winners months before he puts them in his justly famous Best SF of the Year series. There are 15 stories in this anthology. Judge for yourself. He is the fantasist of the first rank.
Warlord of Kor
by Terry Carr"Horng sat opposite the tiny, fragile creature who held a microphone, its wires attached to an interpreting machine. He blinked his huge eyes slowly, his stiff mouth fumblingly forming words of a language his race had not used for thirty thousand years. 'Kor was . . . is . . . God . . . Knowledge.' He had tried to convey this to the small creatures who had invaded his world, but they did not heed. Their ill-equipped brains were trying futilely to comprehend the ancient race memory of his people."
Faces
by Leigh KennedyIt is hard to say how it started - all the unexplained little signs of a new baby about the house in 'The Silent Cradle' - but soon none of the O'Bannons could deny that there had been a highly irregular addition to the family. In 'Max Haunting' a middle-aged hippie, preserved almost intact from the Sixties, starts showing up on the doorsteps of his old friends and loves who, in acquiring jobs and furniture, have 'sold out' rather less than he thought. Hauntings of curious varieties continue in other stories: the sort manufactured out of glass by a man who thinks his godly wife deserves a miracle; the visitation of a mother's cruelty into the mind of her daughter as she confronts the frustrations of coping with her own child; the specters of opportunities lost or spurned which nag to be laid, like ghosts. Elsewhere Leigh Kennedy considers the impulse of cannibalism in a future world whose greed has induced ecological upheaval, and the phenomenon of speaking in tongues as investigated by a sociology professor. She views the world through the eyes of a victim of seizures and of a primatologist whose devotion to apes has gone a bit too far.
The Journal of Nicholas the American (Gateway Essentials)
by Leigh KennedyCollege student Nicholas Dal shares the family talent, or curse - he is an empath, a man who experiences the emotions of other people. Too-powerful emotion can induce seizures, so to stay sane he must live alone and dull his senses with vodka.This, in itself, would be enough for anyone to bear, but Nicholas ias also haunted by a secret from his family's past in Russia. Now someone is looking for him and he fears the worst. To further complicate things, a relationship is forming with a young woman, Jack, and his feelings for her threaten to break through his isolation. Will Nicholas risk his love, his sanity - his life - to be with Jack?
Saint Hiroshima
by Leigh KennedyAs a boy Phil Benson tried to summon up an enthusiasm for baseball. He could see that his real passion, classical music, was considered somehow subversive - not really American. That is why Mr Tackett's became such a haven for him. Away from the uninspiring pitch and the disapproving ear of his father at home, Phil found at his piano teacher's a sanctuary for his musical conspiracy with the universe to flourish.Katie Doheney was the victim of another sort of conspiracy - or so she was convinced from the first brush of her childhood logic with the real-life spectacle of death in a road accident and the image of the Hiroshima mushroom on television. The threat of nuclear holocaust stalked Katie's every moment. Meanwhile Katie stalked Phil Benson.By the time Phil was ready to go East and make everyone proud of him, no ordinary bond had grown up between Katie and himself. They understood each other's obsessions. Phil's keyboard was Katie's bomb shelter and from Cuban missile crisis to the raid on Tripoli the curious duet played on.Leigh Kennedy's disarming and irresistible novel follows Katie into unlikely matrimony and Phil into the arms of a gun-toting St Louis actress. But that's the least you would expect from two people who alone, as far as we know, have already been through World War Three.
The Solarians
by Norman SpinradEarth was programmed for destruction in the mad war of the computer worlds - unless the Solarians could stop the machines!Three hundred years ago the Solarians retreated to the safety of their Fortress as Earth became embroiled in the first of the computer wars with the dread Duglaari Empire.The Solarians' final word to all humanity was a promise to reappear one day and bring it to victory. Suddenly, with Earth on the verge of becoming a helpless victim of the merciless Duglaars, the Solarians made contact with Fleet Commander Jay Palmer. It was an offer of aid.But the Solarians' plan was so cunning, so fraught with danger, that Jay faced the greatest decision of his life - and that of Earth's:Accept their ingenious strategy as a stroke of genius or reject it as a trick designed to destroy human life forever.
Agent of Chaos
by Norman SpinradThe Great Tyrant rules the solar system with absolute terror. Only one man dares to fight back.The time is the 24th century. Humankind populates the entire solar system from icy Pluto to boiling Mercury. Great domed cities, humming factories, hordes of workers, all feed the power of the dictatorship that controls all life. Only a small group among the cowed population dares rebel in a struggle that pits democracy against tyranny.But there is a third force at work as well. A mysterious band of assassins whose final solution to the problem of humanity's fate is as terrifying as it is irresistible - one of them is known as the AGENT OF CHAOS.
The Men in the Jungle (Gateway Essentials)
by Norman SpinradBart Fraden came looking for a planet to conquer - and found the hell-hole of the galaxy: Sangre - the killer planet. For three centuries Sangre had been dominated by the sadistic Brotherhood of Pain, a priesthood dedicated to torture, slavery and cannibalism. Bart sensed the kind of revolutionary potential that he could manipulate to make himself ultimate ruler. But he hadn't counted on the apathy of a people bred as meat animals and the dreadful power wielded by the Brotherhood. Sangre might cost him more than his life - it might destroy his soul . . .
The Iron Dream (Gateway Essentials)
by Norman SpinradNorman Spinrad's 1972 alternate history, gives us both a metafictional what-if novel and a cutting satire of one of the 20th century's most evil regimes . . .In 1919, a young Austrian artist by the name of Adolf Hitler immigrated to the United States to become an illustrator for the pulp magazines and, eventually, a Hugo Award-winning SF author.This volume contains his greatest work, Lord of the Swastika: an epic post-apocalyptic tale of genetic 'trueman' Feric Jagger and his quest to purify the bloodline of humanity by ruthlessly slaughtering races of the genetically impure - a quest Norman Spinrad expertly skewers through ironic imagery and over-the-top rhetoric.Spinrad hoped to expose some unpalatable truths about much of SF and Fantasy literature and its uncomfortable relationship with fascist ideologies - an aim that was not always apparent to neo-fascist readers. In order to make his aims clear to the hard-of-understanding, Spinrad added an imaginary critical analysis by a fictional literary scholar, Homer Whipple, of New York University.
A World Between
by Norman SpinradPacifica was a monument to freedom and equality-until the off-worlders came. The Femocrats, a party of female separatists, and the Transcendental Scientists, an institute of technofascists dedicated to male supremacy. Carlotta Madigan, Pacifica's prime minister, and Royce Lindblad, her handsome young lover and media adviser, had to find a way to stop the Pink and Blue War-without becoming casualties themselves.
Songs from the Stars
by Norman SpinradHe was Clear Blue Lou, perfect master of the Clear Blue Way, at one with the law of muscle, sun, wind and water governing Aquaria. She was Sunshine Sue, always in a hurry in a world that was too slow, Queen of Word of Mouth. Their meeting had been arranged - but by whom? and why? Beyond the beginning of where the world ended, beyond the highest peaks of its primeval majesty, lay a radio active hell and the lairs of the black sorcerers, the Spacers. The black scientists had not forgotten man's old dream of touching the stars: they wanted the Age of Space reborn. But they needed a little help.
The Void Captain's Tale
by Norman SpinradWelcome aboard the sex-drive void ship . . .Captain Genro commands the giant spaceship Dragon Zephyr - on board are ten thousand passengers in electrocoma, a smaller number of conscious passengers eagerly utilising the ship's dream chambers - and a Pilot.In the context of space travel, the Pilot is merely a biological component in the machine. Always a woman, her function is to launch the ship into the Jump by means of a cosmic orgasm. She is a pariah, shunned by all.Void Captain Genro should never even have spoken to his Pilot, let alone tried to embark on a relationship with her. When he did so, the result was every space traveller's nightmare.A Blind Jump into the Void . . .