A Call to Arms

A Call to Arms PDF Author: Alan Dean Foster
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0575131721
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
For eons, the Amplitur had searched space for intelligent species, each of which was joyously welcomed to take part in the fulfillment of the Amplitur Purpose. Whether it wanted to or not. When the Amplitur and their allies stumbled upon the races called the Weave, the Purpose seemed poised for a great leap forward. But the Weave's surprising unity also gave it the ability to fight the Amplitur and their cause. And fight it did, for thousands of years. Will Dulac was a New Orleans composer who thought the tiny reef off Belize would be the perfect spot to drop anchor and finish his latest symphony in solitude. What he found instead was a group of alien visitors - a scouting party for the Weave - looking for allies among what they believed to be a uniquely warlike race: Humans. Will tried to convince the aliens that Man was fundamentally peaceful, for he understood that Human involvement would destroy the race. But all too soon, it didn't matter. The Amplitur had discovered Earth...

A Call to Arms

A Call to Arms PDF Author: Alan Dean Foster
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0575131721
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description
For eons, the Amplitur had searched space for intelligent species, each of which was joyously welcomed to take part in the fulfillment of the Amplitur Purpose. Whether it wanted to or not. When the Amplitur and their allies stumbled upon the races called the Weave, the Purpose seemed poised for a great leap forward. But the Weave's surprising unity also gave it the ability to fight the Amplitur and their cause. And fight it did, for thousands of years. Will Dulac was a New Orleans composer who thought the tiny reef off Belize would be the perfect spot to drop anchor and finish his latest symphony in solitude. What he found instead was a group of alien visitors - a scouting party for the Weave - looking for allies among what they believed to be a uniquely warlike race: Humans. Will tried to convince the aliens that Man was fundamentally peaceful, for he understood that Human involvement would destroy the race. But all too soon, it didn't matter. The Amplitur had discovered Earth...

Taltos

Taltos PDF Author: Steven Brust
Publisher: Ace Books
ISBN: 9780441182008
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Steven Brust's first three novels featuring assassin Vlad Taltos and his jhereg companion were collected in one volume as The Book of Jhereg. The Book of Taltos continues the adventure with books four and five in the series -Taltos and Phoenix. Vlad Taltos is an assassin unlike no other. Not only is he quick with a sword, but he also possesses a gift for witchcraft conjuring. The latest addition to his already formidable arsenal is a leathery-winged jhereg who shares a telepathic link with Vlad -making him twice as deadly The adventures chronicled in Taltos and Phoenix find Vlad accepting a job in the Land of the Dead, but a living human being cannot walk the paths of the dead and return, alive, to the land of men. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view), the Demon Goddess is willing to rescue him - if Vlad is willing to grant her a favor in return.

The Humans

The Humans PDF Author: Matt Haig
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476727929
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The bestselling, award-winning author of The Midnight Library offers his funniest, most devastating dark comedy yet, a “silly, sad, suspenseful, and soulful” (Philadelphia Inquirer) novel that’s “full of heart” (Entertainment Weekly). When an extra-terrestrial visitor arrives on Earth, his first impressions of the human species are less than positive. Taking the form of Professor Andrew Martin, a prominent mathematician at Cambridge University, the visitor is eager to complete the gruesome task assigned him and hurry home to his own utopian planet, where everyone is omniscient and immortal. He is disgusted by the way humans look, what they eat, their capacity for murder and war, and is equally baffled by the concepts of love and family. But as time goes on, he starts to realize there may be more to this strange species than he had thought. Disguised as Martin, he drinks wine, reads poetry, develops an ear for rock music, and a taste for peanut butter. Slowly, unexpectedly, he forges bonds with Martin’s family. He begins to see hope and beauty in the humans’ imperfection, and begins to question the very mission that brought him there. Praised by The New York Times as a “novelist of great seriousness and talent,” author Matt Haig delivers an unlikely story about human nature and the joy found in the messiness of life on Earth. The Humans is a funny, compulsively readable tale that playfully and movingly explores the ultimate subject—ourselves.

Through Wolf's Eyes

Through Wolf's Eyes PDF Author: Jane Lindskold
Publisher: Obsidian Tiger Inc
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 689

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Book Description


The Last Human

The Last Human PDF Author: Zack Jordan
Publisher: Del Rey
ISBN: 0451499832
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
The last human in the universe must battle unfathomable alien intelligences—and confront the truth about humanity—in this ambitious, galaxy-spanning debut “A good old-fashioned space opera in a thoroughly fresh package.”—Andy Weir, author of The Martian “Big ideas and believable science amid a roller-coaster ride of aliens, AI, superintelligence, and the future of humanity.”—Dennis E. Taylor, author of We Are Legion Most days, Sarya doesn’t feel like the most terrifying creature in the galaxy. Most days, she’s got other things on her mind. Like hiding her identity among the hundreds of alien species roaming the corridors of Watertower Station. Or making sure her adoptive mother doesn’t casually eviscerate one of their neighbors. Again. And most days, she can almost accept that she’ll never know the truth—that she’ll never know why humanity was deemed too dangerous to exist. Or whether she really is—impossibly—the lone survivor of a species destroyed a millennium ago. That is, until an encounter with a bounty hunter and a miles-long kinetic projectile leaves her life and her perspective shattered. Thrown into the universe at the helm of a stolen ship—with the dubious assistance of a rebellious spacesuit, an android death enthusiast on his sixtieth lifetime, and a ball of fluff with an IQ in the thousands—Sarya begins to uncover an impossible truth. What if humanity’s death and her own existence are simply two moves in a demented cosmic game, one played out by vast alien intellects? Stranger still, what if these mad gods are offering Sarya a seat at their table—and a second chance for humanity? The Last Human is a sneakily brilliant, gleefully oddball space-opera debut—a masterful play on perspective, intelligence, and free will, wrapped in a rollicking journey through a strange and crowded galaxy.

Heart in Conflict

Heart in Conflict PDF Author: Michael Grimwood
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820333700
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Heart in Conflict is a study of two periods of intense vocational crisis in William Faulkner's career as a writer: his time of apprenticeship, before the composition of The Sound and the Fury, and the beginnings, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, of the long season of decline that followed the completion of Absalom, Absalom! These periods of crisis, Michael Grimwood argues, grew out of an ongoing tension between the divided components of Faulkner's personality between two versions of himself: the illiterate bumpkin and the sophisticated aesthete. It was a collaboration between these two postures that formed Faulkner's vocation, that created the impulse to translate the rural, unlettered world of Oxford, Mississippi, into a literature of the highest ambitions. But Faulkner was neither bumpkin nor aesthete. His awareness of the fraudulence of both his self-images, and ultimately his art, caused him to create, beginning with The Wild Palms in 1939, novels divided against themselves both structurally and thematically, novels whose complexities emanate from their author's own complex personality. Grimwood traces the formation of Faulkner's divided personality in his childhood and youth, in the conflicting influences of literature and landscape, in the conflicting urges wrought by a mother who called him to the rigors of the schoolhouse and a father whose interests led to the diffuse pleasure of the world outside. The conflict gained dimension when Faulkner's earliest poems, written in the style of the European pastoral, were mocked by students in the pages of the University of Mississippi literary magazine. Faulkner internalized this mockery, and it would emerge in the late 1930s and early 1940s as a destructively self-critical compulsion to write novels--The Wild Palms, The Hamlet, Knight's Gambit, and Go Down, Moses--that were simultaneously pastoral and mock-pastoral, that reflected both an impulse to bequeath his own substance through words and a virtual surrender to illiteracy. In many ways, the tensions that divided Faulkner--tensions between pastoral ideal and rural reality, between flights of language and attachment to the wordless soil--also divided the whole of southern literature and society from the time of its origins. Such conflicts can be found in the writings of Thomas Jefferson, philosopher of democracy and slaveowner; in the southwestern humor and plantation fiction that dominated southern letters in the 1830s; and in the works of the agrarian writers of the 1930s, whose European poesy belies their dirt-road political beliefs. Showing how the tensions in the narratives mirrored tensions in the author and in his society, Heart in Conflict reveals William Faulkner as he struggled with his inheritance both as a southerner and as a southern writer.

Black Sun Rising

Black Sun Rising PDF Author: C.S. Friedman
Publisher: Astra Publishing House
ISBN: 1101464321
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
Over a millennium ago, Erna, a seismically active yet beautiful world was settled by colonists from far-distant Earth. But the seemingly habitable planet was fraught with perils no one could have foretold. The colonists found themselves caught in a desperate battle for survival against the fae, a terrifying natural force with the power to prey upon the human mind itself, drawing forth a person's worst nightmare images or most treasured dreams and indiscriminately giving them life. Twelve centuries after fate first stranded the colonists on Erna, mankind has achieved an uneasy stalemate, and human sorcerers manipulate the fae for their own profit, little realizing that demonic forces which feed upon such efforts are rapidly gaining in strength. Now, as the hordes of the dark fae multiply, four people—Priest, Adept, Apprentice, and Sorcerer—are about to be drawn inexorably together for a mission which will force them to confront an evil beyond their imagining, in a conflict which will put not only their own lives but the very fate of humankind in jeopardy.

The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories

The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories PDF Author: T. A. Shippey
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780192803825
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 499

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Book Description
'So you won't sell me your soul?' said the Devil. 'Thank you,' replied the student, 'I had rather keep it myself, if it's all the same to you.' So begins this rich and intriguing collection of fantasy stories. Figures such as the devil, trolls and werewolves, sorcerers and dragons have long been part of the human psyche, and the authors of these marvellous tales draw upon this deep well of images, characters, and landscapes with great imagination and subtlety. With thirty-one tales by writers as diverse as John Buchan and Mervyn Peake, Angela Carter and Terry Pratchett, this is an anthology for the newcomer and dedicated fan alike.

Spirit Fox

Spirit Fox PDF Author: Mickey Zucker Reichert
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1473224764
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Kiarda lives in a magic-laced land where peace is guarded so fiercely that those who train as warriors are outcast . . . until the arrival of a well-trained foreign army bent on conquest and determined to use everything in their power, including mages trained in the deadliest of the six magic arts: the magic of destruction. Kiarda should have been spirit-linked to a fox, but the cub died at the moment of their birth. Now that spirit lurks deep inside her, and at the time of her greatest need, it could prove her greatest ally . . .

The fantasy fiction formula

The fantasy fiction formula PDF Author: Deborah Chester
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 178499605X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
There's more to writing a successful fantasy story than building a unique world or inventing new magic. How exactly is a plot put together? How do you know if your idea will support an entire novel? How do you grab reader attention and keep it? How do you create dynamic, multi-dimensional characters? What is viewpoint and do you handle it differently in urban fantasy than in traditional epics? What should you do if you're lost in the middle? How do you make your plot end up where you intend it to go? From the writing of strong, action-packed scenes to the handling of emotions, let award-winning fantasy author Deborah Chester guide you through the process of putting a book together. Convinced there's no need to shroud the writing process under a veil of mystery, Chester supplies tips that are both practical and proven. They are exactly what she uses in writing her own novels and what she teaches in her writing courses at the University of Oklahoma. Along with explaining story construction step-by-step, Chester illustrates each technique with examples drawn from both traditional and urban fantasy. The technique chapters include exercises to assist novices in mastering the craft of writing fantasy as well as suggestions for avoiding or solving plot problems. More experienced writers will find tips for taking their work to the next level. With an introduction by author Jim Butcher, The fantasy fiction formula provides the information you need to gain skill and proficiency in writing fantasy like a pro.