When Marianne's parents died, leaving control of their fortune to her feared older brother, she struggled to make her way as a student in America - and her old home began to seem as unreal as a fairy tale, her childhood there as distant as a dream . . . Until the Magus came to claim her, and the Black Madame to destroy her, and the Manticore to hunt her down through the streets of another world - for there is magic in Marianne's blood, and magic in her soul. And in a battle fought in an everchanging world of warped time and wicked magic, it is the souls of Marianne and her family that are the ultimate prizes. Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods is the second volume of Sheri S. Tepper's acclaimed Marianne Trilogy.

Henry and Jessie’s middle school robotics team is going to the regional competition! But it seems like someone doesn’t want their team to compete. Can the Aldens use their sleuthing skills and what they’ve learned about robotics to find the culprit and save the day?

The Animorphs' alien friend Ax is in trouble. He's come down with a virus called "yamphut", and it's making him very sick. The Animorphs discover the virus could be deadly--but they can't take an "alien" to the hospital. They need to come up with a plan--or lose their friend forever.

May 1975. St. Louis. In a snow-swept street, a cop finds the body of a man who died fifty years ago. It's still warm. July 1866, Lidice, Bohemia: A teenage girl calmly watches her parents die as another being takes control of her body. August 2058, Prague: Three political rebels flee in to the past, taking with them a terrible secret. As past, present, and future collide, one man holds the key to the puzzle. And if he doesn't fit it together, the world he knows will fall to pieces. It's just A Matter of Time!

A collection of adventure/science fiction novels featuring John Carter. Book One: A Princess of Mars Book Two: The Gods of Mars Book Three: The Warlord of Mars Book Four: Thuvia, Maid of Mars Book Five: The Chessmen of Mars Bonus Short Story: The Terrible Planet This collection includes a new, original artwork and illustrations, and a linked table of contents for Kindles & Kindle apps

Asimov's Mysteries, published in 1968, is a collection of 14 short stories by Isaac Asimov, all of them science fiction mysteries. The stories were all originally published in magazines between 1954 and 1967. Four stories in the collection feature the character of Wendell Urth, who is a leading extra-terrologist. Urth is eccentric in that he has a phobia of all mechanical forms of transport. Physically Urth resembles Norbert Wiener. He appears in the stories when he is consulted by an agent of the Terrestrial Bureau of Investigation, H. Seton Davenport, in cases which have him baffled - a parallel with the way in which Inspector Lestrade consults Sherlock Holmes. In a fifth story in the collection, The Dust of Death, Asimov shows Davenport a generosity that Conan Doyle never extended to Lestrade in demonstrating the former's ability to solve a case for himself without outside assistance.

When a stranger attempting to deliver a cryptic message is shot dead at his table, Dr. Richard Ames is thrown headfirst into danger, intrigue, and other dimensions, where a plot to rescue a sentient computer could alter human history...

From Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs; Chuck Klosterman IV; and Eating the Dinosaur, these essays are now available in this ebook collection for fans of Klosterman’s writing on film and television.

LET THE GAMES BEGIN... Quillan is a territory on the verge of destruction. The people have lost control of their own future and must struggle simply to survive. The only chance they have of finding a better life is by playing the Quillan Games. Hosted by a strange pair of game masters, Veego and LaBerge, the games are a mix of sport and combat. They use the people of Quillan as pawns for their amusement as they force them to enter competitions that range from physical battles, to impossible obstacle courses, to computer-driven tests of agility. To triumph in the games is to live the life of a king. To lose is to die. This is the dangerous and deadly situation Bobby Pendragon finds on Quillan. He quickly realizes that the only way to save this troubled territory is to beat Veego and LaBerge at their own games and dismantle their horrible fun house. But there is more at stake for Bobby. The prize for winning the Quillan Games may be discovering the truth of what it really means a Traveler.

In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. He shows how many intellectuals have denied the existence of human nature by embracing three linked dogmas: the Blank Slate (the mind has no innate traits), the Noble Savage (people are born good and corrupted by society), and the Ghost in the Machine (each of us has a soul that makes choices free from biology). Each dogma carries a moral burden, so their defenders have engaged in desperate tactics to discredit the scientists who are now challenging them. Pinker injects calm and rationality into these debates by showing that equality, progress, responsibility, and purpose have nothing to fear from discoveries about a rich human nature. He disarms even the most menacing threats with clear thinking, common sense, and pertinent facts from science and history. Despite its popularity among intellectuals during much of the twentieth century, he argues, the doctrine of the Blank Slate may have done more harm than good. It denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces hardheaded analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of government, violence, parenting, and the arts. Pinker shows that an acknowledgement of human nature that is grounded in science and common sense, far from being dangerous, can complement insights about the human condition made by millennia of artists and philosophers. All this is done in the style that earned his previous books many prizes and worldwide acclaim: wit, lucidity, and insight into matters great and small.

In his novel Mainspring, Lake created an enormous canvas for storytelling with his hundred mile high Equatorial Wall that holds up the great Gears of the Earth. Now in Escapement, he explores more of that territory. Paolina Barthes is a young woman of remarkable intellectual ability – a genius on the level of Isaac Newton. But she has grown up in isolation, in a small village of shipwreck survivors, on the Wall in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. She knows little of the world, but she knows that England rules it, and must be the home of people who possess the learning that she so desperately wants. And so she sets off to make her way off the Wall, not knowing that she will bring her astounding, unschooled talent for sorcery to the attention of those deadly factions who would use or kill her for it.

In Counter-Clock World, one of the most theologically probing of all of Dick’s books, the world has entered the Hobart Phase–a vast sidereal process in which time moves in reverse. As a result, libraries are busy eradicating books, copulation signifies the end of pregnancy, people greet with, “Good-bye,” and part with, “Hello,” and underneath the world’s tombstones, the dead are coming back to life. One imminent old-born is Anarch Peak, a vibrant religious leader whose followers continued to flourish long after his death. His return from the dead has such awesome implications that those who apprehend him will very likely be those who control the fate of the world. Winner of both the Hugo and John W. Campbell awards for best novel, widely regarded as the premiere science fiction writer of his day, and the object of cult-like adoration from his legions of fans, Philip K. Dick has come to be seen in a literary light that defies classification in much the same way as Borges and Calvino. With breathtaking insight, he utilizes vividly unfamiliar worlds to evoke the hauntingly and hilariously familiar in our society and ourselves. From the Trade Paperback edition.

In 1951 John Wyndham published his novel The Day of the Triffids to moderate acclaim. Fifty-two years later, this horrifying story is a science fiction classic, touted by The Times (London) as having “all the reality of a vividly realized nightmare.” Bill Masen, bandages over his wounded eyes, misses the most spectacular meteorite shower England has ever seen. Removing his bandages the next morning, he finds masses of sightless people wandering the city. He soon meets Josella, another lucky person who has retained her sight, and together they leave the city, aware that the safe, familiar world they knew a mere twenty-four hours before is gone forever. But to survive in this post-apocalyptic world, one must survive the Triffids, strange plants that years before began appearing all over the world. The Triffids can grow to over seven feet tall, pull their roots from the ground to walk, and kill a man with one quick lash of their poisonous stingers. With society in shambles, they are now poised to prey on humankind. Wyndham chillingly anticipates bio-warfare and mass destruction, fifty years before their realization, in this prescient account of Cold War paranoia.

Appearing in book form for the first time, The Atheist in the Attic is a suspenseful and vivid historical narrative, recreating the top-secret meeting between the mathematical genius Leibniz and the philosopher Spinoza caught between the horrors of the cannibalistic Dutch Rampjaar and the brilliant “big bang” of the Enlightenment. Also Delany’s “Racism and Science Fiction” combines scholarly research and personal experience in the unique true story of the first major African-American author in the genre. This collection features a bibliography, an author biography, and the candid and uncompromising Outspoken Interview.

Enslaved is book number 14 in the Brides of the Kindred series. It is a plus-length novel of around 168,000 words Anything for you Mistress… Thrace S’ver is an unwilling slave. Drugged and bound, he is taken to the Flesh Bazaar and put up for sale to the highest bidder. But this is not the first time Thrace has been on the auction block—he has a past full of horrors he doesn’t intend to repeat. Desperate to be free, he swears he’ll kill whoever buys him. Lonnara Trin is the Captain of a merchant ship from the all female planet of Zetta Prime where sexual relations with a male are considered unnatural and wrong. She has no use for males personally, but she needs a big, muscular slave or her business will suffer—Thrace fits the bill. Soon Mistress and slave are embroiled in a desperate conflict which draws them intimately together. To her surprise, Trin actually begins to have feelings for her slave. And though Thrace swore to be free, he finds himself devoted to his new Mistress. When their differences threaten to tear them apart, Trin tries to grant Thrace his freedom. But she doesn’t realize that his heart has already been… Enslaved.