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The Lost World (Professor Challenger Book #1)
by Sir Arthur Conan DoyleEdward Malone goes on the adventure of a lifetime when he accompanies Professor Challenger on an expedition to a secret world populated by living dinosaurs. But when the group is abandoned by their local guides and then captured by a race of "ape-men," their futures depend on picking the winning side in a war between the "ape-men" and a distant tribe.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
by Mark TwainHank Morgan is shocked to awaken not in his native Connecticut, but in the medieval world of King Arthur's Court. Using his knowledge of nineteenth century technology, Hank attempts to improve the lives of the people of Camelot, and alters the course of history.
Critique of Fantasy, Vol. 3: The Block of Fame
by Laurence A. RickelsIn The Block of Fame, Edmund Bergler, like the thirteenth fairy in the “Sleeping Beauty,“ uninvited because there wasn’t an extra place setting, crashes the psychoanalytic poetics of daydreaming with a curse. He charges that the overview, according to which art making rarefies daydreaming and delivers omnipotence, overlooks the underlying defense contract. We are hooked to creativity, because it offers the best defense against acknowledging the ultimate and untenable masochistic wish to be refused. Bergler’s bleak view, which Gilles Deleuze alone acknowledged in his study of Sacher-Masoch, doesn’t make any overall contribution to the aesthetics of fantasying that this critique addresses. However, it is a good fit with the centerpiece of the final volume: the wish for fame or, rather, the recoil of the wish in the wreckage that success brings. Following the opening season of mourning and the experience of phantoms, there is the second death, which is murder. In addition to the deadening end that can only be postponed – the killing off of the dead until dead dead – there is another second death that concludes the wish for fame with a ritual stripping of badges and insignia. Not only are the medals thrown to the ground and the sword broken, but a life’s work passes review. At the close of his career, Freud returned to the environs of the wish, the cornerstone of his science. While his disciples Otto Rank and Hanns Sachs carried out his 1907 insights regarding the poetics of daydreaming to illuminate, respectively, the mythic origin of the hero and the evolution of art out of the mutual daydream, Freud battened down for the end of his world by revisiting the so-called primal fantasy, the myth of the primal father, in Moses and Monotheism. The animal setting that was a given of its premier articulation in Totem and Taboo was a wrap this time around with Freud’s translation of Marie Bonaparte’s transference gift, a memoir recounting her premature mourning for her sick chow and the dog’s recovery from cancer of the jaw. In Bergler’s unconscious system, plagiarism is the conscious variation on the block basic to authorship. Theodor Adorno interpreted the ascendancy of the culture industry leading to and through the Third Reich in terms of the theft of modernism’s critical strategies for promoting the transformation of wish fantasy into the social relation of art. In the course of writing his essay “Notes on Kafka” between 1942 and 1952, Adorno was able to reclaim for aesthetic theory after Auschwitz the “constellation” that he and Benjamin had originally developed to outlast the culture industry’s depravation of the hopefulness of wishing. Adorno gives the sense or direction of the constellation’s recovery when he argues that Kafka’s work stages the final round of the contest between fantasy and science fiction by extrapolating doubling and déjà vu as the portals to a collective future. The wish for fame or to be refused it and the wish to steal this book or undo the delinquency demarcate the final movement of the third volume, which follows out, beginning with Susan Sontag and Gidget, a veritable Bildungsroman of the post-war era’s star, the teenager. Fantasying to make it big time means to be in training for big ideas and big feelings. The romance of fantasying was also reconfigured out of a station break. The Nazi elevation of youth to superego in the Heimat of the Teen Age neutralized adolescent innovation by forgoing the Hamletian stage of metabolization of the death wish. Switching to the other patient, the other teenager at heart, no longer the German but now the American or Californian, this study enters the termination phase of the analysis in the environs of a reach for the stars that is legend. It is the legend to the final volume’s mapping of our second nature as daydreamer believers.
Critique of Fantasy, Vol. 2: The Contest between B-Genres
by Laurence A. RickelsIn The Contest between B-Genres, the “Space Trilogy” by J.R.R. Tolkien’s friend and colleague C.S. Lewis and the roster of American science fictions that Gotthard Günther selected and glossed for the German readership in 1952 demarcate the ring in which the contestants face off. In carrying out in fiction the joust that Tolkien proclaimed in his manifesto essay “On Fairy-Stories,” Lewis challenged the visions of travel through time and space that were the mainstays of modern science fiction. In the facing corner, Günther recognized in American science fiction the first stirrings of a new mythic storytelling that would supplant the staple of an expiring metaphysics, the fairy-story basic to Tolkien and Lewis’s fantasy genre. The B-genres science fiction and fantasy were contemporaries of cinema’s emergence out of the scientific and experimental study and recording of motion made visible. In an early work like H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, which Tolkien credited as work of fantasy, the transport through time – the ununderstood crux of this literary experiment – is conveyed through a cinematic–fantastic component in the narrative, reflecting optical innovations and forecasting the movies to come. Although the historical onset of the rivalry between the B-genres is packed with literary examples, adaptation (acknowledged or not) followed out the rebound of wish fantasy between literary descriptions of the ununderstood and their cinematic counterparts, visual and special effects. The arrival of the digital relation out of the crucible of the unknown and the special effect seemed at last to award the fantasy genre the trophy in its contest with science fiction. And yet, although science fiction indeed failed to predict the digital future, fantasy did not so much succeed as draw benefit from the mere resemblance of fantasying to the new relation. While it follows that digitization is the fantasy that is true (and not, as Tolkien had hoped, the Christian Gospel), the newly renewed B-genre without borders found support in another revaluation that was underway in the other B-genre. Once its future orientation was “history,” science fiction began indwelling the ruins of its faulty forecasts. By its new allegorical momentum, science fiction supplied captions of legibility and history to the reconfigured borderlands it cohabited with fantasy. The second volume also attends, then, to the hybrids that owed their formation to these changes, both anticipated and realized. Extending through the topography of the borderlands, works by J.G. Ballard, Ursula Le Guin, and John Boorman, among others, occupy and cathect a context of speculative fiction that suspended and blended the strict contest requirements constitutive of the separate B-genres.
The Goths & Other Stories
by Sasha Kaoru Zamler-CarhartIn the winter of 476 A.D. the Ostrogoths, hungry and exhausted from wandering for months along the barren confines of the Byzantine Empire, wrote to Emperor Zeno in Constantinople requesting permission to enter the walled city of Epidaurum and just kinda crash and charge their phones. Closer to home, Orpheus walks Eurydice through a suburban refrigerator as a matter of tax planning. In The Goths & Other Stories, sexual desire, food, space, and anger are distorted; prose fiction, experimental poetry, philosophy, and design theory intersect and breed. The poetics of car accidents, capitalist consumption, and anarchist terrorism unfold at a Southern California car dealership. Readers of all centuries will feel at home in this book. The smell of seafood and speculative urban planning merge into a 1990s computer game, Abidjan has 12,756 streets with no way to go from one to another, an apocalypse of tax law and classical mythology descends upon suburbia and reveals a medieval theology of design, theater, and light. The book’s six stories are set in different times and places – sometimes within the same narrative – but have in common a slippery approach to the boundaries between fiction and theory, between ontological planes, between the comical and the moral. Together they also form a treatise on the nature of writing as a branch of design – one whose medium is easier to reveal than to define.
Critique of Fantasy, Vol. 1: Between a Crypt and a Datemark
by Laurence A. RickelsCritique of Fantasy, Vol. 1: Between a Crypt and a Datemark addresses both the style or genre of fantasy and the mental faculty, long the hot property of philosophical ethics. Freud passed it along in his 1907 essay on the poetics of daydreaming when he addressed omnipotent wish fantasy as the source and resource of the aspirations and resolutions of art, which, however, the artwork can never look back at or acknowledge. By grounding his genre in the one fantasy that is true, the Gospel, J.R.R. Tolkien obviated and made obvious the ethical mandate of fantasy’s restraining order. With George Lucas’s Star Wars we entered the borderlands of the fantasy and science fiction genres, a zone resulting from and staggering a contest, which Tolkien inaugurated in the 1930s. The history of this contested borderland marks changes that arose in expectation of what the new media held in store, changes realized (but outside the box of what had been projected) upon the arrival of the unanticipated digital relation, which at last seemed to award the fantasy genre the contest prize. Freud’s notion of the Zeitmarke (datemark), the indelible impress of the present moment that triggered the daydream that denies it, already introduced the import of fantasy's historicization. Science fiction won a second prize that keeps it in the running. No longer bound to projecting the future, the former calling which in light of digitization it flunked, science fiction becomes allegorical and reading in the ruins of its failed predictions illuminates all the date marks and crypts hiding out in the borderlands it traverses with fantasy. To motivate the import of an evolving science fiction genre, Critique of Fantasy makes Gotthard Günther's reflections in the 1950s on American science fiction – as heralding a new metaphysics and a new planetary going on interstellar civilization – a mainstay of its cultural anthropology with B-genres.
The Royal Secret (His Majesty's Paladins Ser. #1)
by Christopher KeenePicking up where the Super Dungeon Series left off, The Royal Secret takes readers into the heart of Crystalia as Otto tries to protect his father's legacy and uncover an evil plot. This action-packed middle grade novel includes beloved characters from the board game Super Dungeon Explore.
Stuck in the Game
by Christopher KeeneMost gamers would love being stuck in the Dream State—a virtual world full of thrilling quests, perilous dungeons, and wicked monsters—but for Noah, it&’s the most dangerous place he could be. Perfect for fans of video games and adventure alike, Stuck in the Game will keep you logged in until the very end!
Etherwalker
by Cameron DaytonReaders will go on an epic adventure across a dangerous world where dying magic and fallen machines have brought ancient legends—and monsters—to life.
The Midnight Queen
by Christopher KeeneThe stunning conclusion to the fantasy phenomenon Super Dungeon Series. Based on the board game Super Dungeon Explore, this hilarious children's series follows the adventures of questing heroes as they take down evil and rescue the missing princesses of Crystalia.
War of Kings and Monsters
by Christopher KeeneChristopher Keene has once again enthralled readers with a one-of-a-kind medieval world full of spectacular magic and fantastic beasts that only a few can tame.
The Dungeons of Arcadia
by Dan AllenBased on the board game Super Dungeon Explore, this hilarious children's series follows the adventures of questing heroes as they take down evil and rescue the missing princesses of Crystalia.
The Supes
by Matthew PrittA group of failed teenage superheroes-in-training must unite not only to prove themselves worthy of the Super title but also to protect their school and loved ones. Readers will be gripped by this book chock-full of quick action and laughs.
The Stone Bearers
by Jacque StevensIn a fantastic world of magic and mythical creatures, fifteen-year-old Ashira desperately seeks to add some excitement and romance to her dull destiny. Fans of fairy tales and Greek mythology will love Jacque Stevens&’s The Stone Bearers.
The King's Summons
by Adam Glendon Sidwell Zachary JamesFrom the epic fantasy world of Super Dungeon comes the first novel in a riveting new series. Based on the board game Super Dungeon Explore, this hilarious children's series follows the adventures of questing heroes as they take down evil and rescue the missing princesses of Crystalia.
The Hunger
by Michael D. YoungAzil leads a quiet, scholary life until a failed assassination attempt and a mysterious stranger push him into a quest to fulfill a world-saving prophecy. Fans of high fantasy will be enthralled by volatile magic, clan politics, and a reluctant adventurer&’s journey through a land ruled by hunger.
The Glauerdoom Moor
by David J. WestBased on the board game Super Dungeon Explore, this hilarious children's series follows the adventures of questing Heroes as they take down evil and rescue the missing princesses of Crystalia. Kids will love this spooky adventure, and fans of the game will love the Heroes and villains of The Glauerdoom Moor.
The Forgotten King
by D. W. VogelFrom the epic fantasy world of Super Dungeon comes the second novel in the series. Based on the board game Super Dungeon Explore, this hilarious children's series follows the adventures of questing heroes as they take down evil and rescue the missing princesses of Crystalia.
The Exalting
by Dan AllenIn Dan Allen&’s thrilling novel The Exalting, teenage Dana changes everything when she discovers a lost mind-bending crystal. Now she must confront the draw of the crystal&’s forbidden power and dangerous enemies who seek its magic even as galactic war threatens her home planet.
Storms
by Kevin L. NielsenThis sequel to the bestselling Sands takes readers outside the desert that has Lhaurel's whole world and into a land with far more powerful and dangerous people than anything they could have imagined.
Skies (Sharani Ser.)
by Kevin L. NielsenFrom Kevin L. Nielsen, #1 bestselling author of Sands, comes book 3 in the Sharani Series. The masterful blend between war and magic keeps readers wishing they, too, could be part of the Rahuli people.
Sentinel
by Josi RussellThe last installation to Josi Russell&’s bestselling Caretaker Chronicles is a thrilling and heroic adventure that will take over readers&’ imaginations. Young Rigel must master his telepathic powers, travel to different planets, and save an entire race from destruction.
Sands
by Kevin L. NielsenThis fantasy novel takes readers into a world of deserts and elemental magic and cultures that rarely get explored in fantasy novels. Readers will love the strong female protagonist as she fights society's rules, her own struggling magic, and the elements of nature to save people.
Ridgerunners
by Micky NeilsonReaders won&’t want to miss this riveting space opera from New York Times Bestselling Author Micky Nielsen. When a small band of space smugglers gets their hands on next-generation tech, they seize their one chance to challenge the solar system&’s corrupt rulers. Chased by government agents and weighed down by a hefty bounty, they are one ship against the universe—but they aren&’t going down without a fight.
Mythica: Official Movie Novelization
by Kevin L. NielsenWinner of the Best Directed and Best Feature awards in the California Women&’s Film Festival, and dubbed Official Selection at the Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, Arrowstorm Entertainment&’s Mythica: A Quest for Heroes has become an action-packed book that readers will not be able to put down.