Science Fiction

"In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river...
This is the way the world ends--
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."

Nevil Shute placed this quote from T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" on the title page of his chilling bestselling 1957 novel about life and death in Australia after a nuclear war in the northern hemisphere. The novel focuses on the crew of an American ship stranded in Australia after all of the northern hemisphere has destroyed itself in nuclear war. Radiation slowly travels south with the winds, and we meet memorable characters who try to grab what enjoyment life can offer before the inevitable end comes. Stanley Kramer's 1959 film starring Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck was very faithful to the book. This title is also available as a recorded book.

While the totalitarianism that provoked George Orwell into writing 'Nineteen Eighty- Four' seems to be passing into oblivion, his harrowing, cautionary tale of a man trapped in a political nightmare has had the opposite fate, and its relevance and power to disturb our complacency seem to grow decade by decade. This book was challenged in 1981 in the state of Florida in large part because it was viewed as "pro-Communist."

“Doris Lessing is one of the most important writers of the twentieth century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her first novel, The Grass is Singing, was published in 1950. Among her other celebrated novels are The Golden Notebook, The Fifth Child and Memoirs of a Survivor.” The second volume of her autobiography is entitled, Walking in the Shade.

"It's a massive hospital space station on the Galactic rim--384 levels, a staff of thousands--where human and alien medicine meet. But Patient Hewlitt, new to Sector General, doesn't want to meet alien medicine--or alien doctors, or alien nurses, or aliens of any kind. Which is just too bad; he's an interesting case, and he'll have to get used to it. In the meantime, it's always been an article of faith among Sector General's multispecies staff that infections can't pass from one alien race to another. But in this season of anomalies, it looks like they might have their first-ever interstellar virus on their hands, their tentacles, their cilla...."

Molecular biologist Kaye Lang's theory -- that ancient diseases encoded in the DNA of humans can return to life -- has become a chilling reality. The shocking evidence: a "virus-hunter" has tracked down a flu-like disease that kills expectant mothers and their offspring.

An intelligent microbe race that can live symbiotically in other intelligent beings is colonizing the human race throughout the civilized universe.

Torpedoed by a German U-boat in the South Pacific during World War I, a group of adventurers find themselves marooned on Caprona, a hidden and impregnable island seemingly suspended in time, inhabited by dinosaurs, Neanderthals, scattered bands of humans, and cities of fierce humanoids. As they explore this otherworldly place, the protagonists struggle to unlock the fabulous secret at its heart.

"'You said that you wanted danger, didn't you,' says McArdle, the editor of the Daily Gazette. And he sends his young reporter, Malone, on a strange journey into South America with the famous Professor Challenger. Challenger believes he can find a lost world full of dinosaurs in the middle of the Amazon forest. But this world is dangerous to reach, and, once the Professor and his small group of explorers arrive, things get even more dangerous for them. Will they return alive?"

A 19th-century classic from the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

Bingtown is a hub of exotic trade and home to a merchant nobility famed for its liveships--rare vessels carved from wizardwood, which ripens magically into sentient awareness. The fortunes of one of Bingtown's oldest families rest on the newly awakened liveship Vivacia.
For Althea Vestrit, the ship is her rightful legacy unjustly denied her--a legacy she will risk anything to reclaim. For Althea's young nephew Wintrow, wrenched from his religious studies and forced to serve aboard ship, Vivacia is a life sentence.

But the fate of the Vestrit family--and the ship--may ultimately lie in the hands of an outsider. The ruthless pirate Kennit seeks a way to seize power over all the denizens of the Pirate Isles...and the first step of his plan requires him to capture his own liveship and bend it to his will....

First of the Liveship Traders series.