Download or read book Brute Orbits written by George Zebrowski and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Like his previous tales of technocratically engineered futures (Macrolife; Stranger Suns; etc.), Zebrowski's latest evokes the pioneering SF of social philosopher Olaf Stapledon... In the 21st century, Earth incarcerates its undesirables in mined-out asteroids launched into new orbits for the duration of their sentences. "This use of distance as a better prison wall" is more than just an ingenious application of technology to the penal system: it's also a convenient trick for disposing of the socially misfit, since orbits are "accidentally" miscalculated to prevent their return. The narrative follows the histories of several of these "rocks" as their prisoners fight, unite and ultimately set out to create superior, self-contained cultures free of the taint of earthly ways. Individual asteroids house specific groups of offenders, ranging from hardened convicts to sexual deviants, juvenile delinquents and unwanted foreigners... Zebrowski argues his points with conviction. Publishers Weekly "A brilliant and dramatic philosophical reflection on the nature of society, technology . . . and humanity itself. Zebrowski is a deep thinker who writes about the big questions' in the grand tradition of Wells, Stapledon, and Clarke." -- Jack M. Dann, award-winning author of The Silent and The Memory Cathedral High Crimes Call for High Punishment. It is the twenty-first century. Convicts are sentenced to asteroids that move in ever-widening solar orbits, timed to return when their terms run out. But a few ambitious administrators discover that small "errors" in velocity can rid them of selected groups altogether: the hardcore violent, the mentally defective, and especially the political dissidents. Enduring the black vise of interstellar space-time, these human rejects--men and women mixed together--create their own Darwinian societies, struggling to survive. Back on Earth, a handful of sympathetic and curious scientists have not forgotten these lost citizens. When a technological breakthrough makes it possible to overtake these scattered asteroids, a courageous team sets out to go where none has willingly gone before. What they discover in these "brute orbits" is both provocative and moving--a startling vision of humanity you will never forget.
Download or read book Paratexts written by James Gunn and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2013-04-18 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mid-1980s, Easton Press began publishing a series of leather-bound collector editions called “Masterpieces of Science Fiction” and “Masterpieces of Fantasy,” which featured some of the most important works in these genres. James Gunn was commissioned to write introductions to these works, which allowed him to pay tribute to many authors who inspired and influenced his own work. In Paratexts: Introductions to Science Fiction and Fantasy, Gunn has collected the most significant essays produced for the Easton series, along with prefaces he wrote for reprints of his own novels. Cited here are some of the most significant works of 19th and 20th century science fiction and fantasy, such as The Island of Dr. Moreau, 1984, Stranger in a Strange Land, A Clockwork Orange, Speaker for the Dead, The Postman, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, The Dead Zone, The Mists of Avalon, Dragon’s Eye, Nine Princes in Amber, Blue Mars, The Last Unicorn, and The Lord of the Rings. Drawing upon Gunn’s lifetime of work in the field, these introductions include analyses of the individual works and the fields in which they were written. Gunn also briefly discusses each novel’s significance in the science fiction canon. Collected here for the first time, these prefaces and introductions provide readers with insight into more than seventy novels, making Paratexts a must-read for science fiction and fantasy aficionados.
Download or read book Brute Orbits written by George Zebrowski and published by Eos. This book was released on 1999 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the future of crime and punishment, convicts are sent off to prisons on asteroids with long-term solar orbits, where they have no hope of ever returning. When a curious and courageous group of Earth scientists attempts to discover the fate of these lost prisoners, their findings are moving and unforgettable.
Download or read book Future Americas written by John Helfers and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-06-03 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "16 original stories about America in the near and distant future"--Cover.
Download or read book Garth Of Izar written by Pamela Sargent and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-10-08 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Captain Garth of Izar, hero of the battle of Axanar which helped secure the future of the Federation, was once a legendary Starfleet Captain whose exploits were required reading at Starfleet Academy. In the 2260s he suffered serious injuries in an incident on Antos IV. The inhabitants of Antos repaired his body by teaching him the art of cellular metamorphosis, but did not realise that his injuries had rendered him criminally insane. After ordering the destruction of Antos IV, Garth was committed to the Federation rehab colony on Elba II, where, in 2268, he overpowered his keepers, escaping with the aid of the cellular-metamorphosis process, mastery of which enabled him to take on the appearance of any person he wished. Before his eventual recapture he had proclaimed himself lord of the universe and attempted to commandeer the Starship Enterprise. Now cured of his insanity by new techniques of experimental medicine, Garth of Izar must rebuild his shattered life. The opportunity to do so is provided on a mission to solve a diplomatic crisis -- a crisis that requires Garth to return to the very planet that caused his insanity so many years ago.
Download or read book Speaking of the Fantastic II written by Darrell Schweitzer and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Another selection of fascinating, informal conversations with the creators of Science Fiction and Fantasy, presented exactly as originally published.Here are authentic voices from 1983 through 2002: Peter S. Beagle, Octavia Butler, Philip Jose Farmer, Charles L. Harness, Michael Kandel, R.A. Lafferty, Jack McDevitt Tim Powers, Charles Sheffield, Susan Shwartz, Michael Swanwick, Evangeline Walton, Gene Wolfe, Jane Yolen, and George Zebrowski."
Download or read book X Y Z T written by Damien Broderick and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Damien Broderick has had a major impact as an Australian SF writer since 1964. He is undoubtedly the leading Australian theorist of the SF genre' (Russell Blackford, Van Ikin, Sean McMullen, Strange Constellations). Now, Broderick draws upon his skills as both critic and novelist to analyze science fiction of the last two decades, and its earlier roots. The book proposes sf as a distinctive form of writing, the extreme narrative of difference, then closely reads authors such as John Barnes, Jamil Nasir, Wil McCarthy, Robert Grossbach and Poul Anderson. While concentrating on exciting work published in the USA and Britain, Broderick does not neglect his own country's contributions, discussing sf by George Turner and other Australians. His critical voice is wry, entertaining and occasionally scathing.
Download or read book Swift Thoughts written by George Zebrowski and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of stories showcases the work of George Zebrowski, one of science fiction’s masters and a writer Hugo and Nebula Award winner Robert J. Sawyer has called “one of the most philosophically astute writers in science fiction.” Like the writers Olaf Stapledon, Arthur C. Clarke, and Stanislaw Lem, Zebrowski explores the “big questions”—the expansion of human horizons, and the growth of power over our lives and the world in which we live. In the title story, scientists push the boundaries of human mentality to keep pace with ever-evolving AIs. In “The Eichmann Variations,” a finalist for the Nebula Award, exact copies of captured Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann stand trial for his crimes against humanity, while in “The Word Sweep,” all speech must be rationed because spoken words take on physical form. In “Wound the Wind,” another Nebula Award finalist, unchanged humans roam freely until captured by those who know what’s best for them, and in “Stooges,” a visiting alien hijacks the persona of Curly Howard. From hard science fiction (“Gödel’s Doom”) to alternate history (“Lenin in Odessa”) to first alien contact (“Bridge of Silence”), and with an introduction by renowned physicist/writer Gregory Benford, this collection presents one of the most distinctive voices writing in the field of science fiction today.
Download or read book Alternate Worlds written by James Gunn and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-08-24 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alternate Worlds was first published in 1975 and became an instant classic, winning a Hugo award. This third edition brings the history of science fiction up to date, covering developments over the past forty years--a period that has seen the advent of technologies only imagined in the genre's Golden Age. As a literature of change, science fiction has become ever more meaningful, presaging dangers to humanity and, as Alvin Toffler wrote, guarding against "the premature arrival of the future." The world has begun to recognize science fiction in many different ways, incorporating its elements in products, visual media and huge conventions.
Download or read book The Sunspacers Trilogy written by George Zebrowski and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sunspacers Trilogy is a trio of novels of an alternate, earth-based civilization. In Sunspacer, young and idealistic philosophy student Joe Sorby must come to terms with adulthood while negotiating the gross injustices of interplanetary commerce. In Stars Will Speak, an alien signal is broadcast from the farthest reaches of the known galaxy . . . but will the scientists of earth decipher its warning in time? In Behind the Stars, young Max Sorby returns to Earth after spending all of his life on a mobile space habitat, fearing that the only home he has ever known will be lost to him forever.
Download or read book Black Pockets written by George Zebrowski and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this masterful collection of horror stories, George Zebrowski divides these nineteen tales into personal, political, and metaphysical terrors—stories to scare you individually, stories to frighten you as a social animal, and stories that should terrify the entire human race. In “I Walked with Fidel,” a young man encounters a once politically powerful zombie; “Jumper” focuses on a young woman with a dark and troubled past, while in “The Coming of Christ the Joker,” the lighthearted banter of a celebrity TV talk show becomes something far more serious. “A Piano Full of Dead Spiders” is an eerie story of genius, its demands, and its delusions; in “Passing Nights,” the truth behind a recurring nightmare is revealed; “The Soft Terrible Music” depicts a man who must hide his past even from himself. And in the title story, the novella “Black Pockets,” Zebrowski asks: What happens to a man when his desire for revenge becomes all-consuming? With an introduction by Howard Waldrop and an afterword by the author, George Zebrowski reveals himself in Black Pockets and Other Dark Thoughts as a writer who can play on our more disturbing emotions even as he impels us to deeper thoughts.
Download or read book Empties written by George Zebrowski and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detective discovers bodies without brains—and wonders if he’s losing his mind—in this tale of nightmarish terror. What do you tell yourself when impossible things begin to happen? What can you say? You’re a police detective, but maybe you’re just not good enough and that’s what you have to admit, whether you like it or not. You see evidence of things that can’t be real, but you just don’t observe well enough to explain it in any natural way. Can you ask rational questions and still be crazy? Does it help any that you know your mind is gone? You’re trapped in a black comedy with a beautiful but fatal woman right out of an old poem by Keats, hoping to wake up from the nightmare, even if on a cold hillside—as long as you wake up sane. Detective William Benek is faced with an impossible crime: bodies are turning up without their brains and without any indication of how the organs were removed. His only lead—an attractive woman—becomes more than a lead, and then drives him into a world of terror, where his sanity is questioned and he must stop a monster he can barely comprehend. Listed as a Best Book of 2009 by Edge Boston.
Download or read book The Fiction Writer s Guide to Alternate History written by Jack Dann and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-07-13 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive guide to the speculative sub-genre of alternate history fiction, this book maps the unique terrain of this vibrant mode of storytelling and then explains how to write it. First giving a concise conceptual overview and the critical tools to differentiate the different forms of counterfactual fiction, Jack Dann lays out the 'tricks of the trade' such 'Heinleining', how to create recognizable 'divergent points' and how to employ paratextual elements and 'layering' to overcome readers' unfamiliarity with invented counterfactual events and cultures. Alongside this, Dann takes you step-by-step through a complete short story to demonstrate, line-by-line, how alternative history fiction works. As well as Dann's exacting methodology for writing professional quality alternate history stories, this book also features a live-on-the-page Q&A with some of the most esteemed alternate history writers working today, including Kim Stanley Robinson, John Birmingham and Lisa Goldstein among many others, who will detail their own particular hacks, theories, processes, methods and strategies. Combining extensive and deep knowledge of the field with accessible writing advice, this is the ultimate guidebook to the broad and complex sub-genre of counterfactual and alterative history fiction.
Download or read book Macrolife written by George Zebrowski and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Subtitled “A Mobile Utopia,” this pioneering novel about the meaning of space habitats for human history, presents spacefaring as no work did in its time, and since. A utopian novel like no other, presenting a dynamic utopian civilization that transcends the failures of our history. Epic in scope, Macrolife opens in the year 2021. The Bulero family owns one of Earth’s richest corporations. As the Buleros gather for a reunion at the family mansion, an industrial accident plunges the corporation into a crisis, which eventually brings the world around them to the brink of disaster. Vilified, the Buleros flee to a space colony where young Richard Bulero gradually realizes that the only hope for humanity lies in macrolife—mobile, self-reproducing space habitats. A millennium later, these mobile communities have left our sunspace and multiplied. Conflicts with natural planets arise. John Bulero, a cloned descendant of the twenty-first century Bulero clan, falls in love with a woman from a natural world and experiences the harshness of her way of life. He rediscovers his roots when his mobile returns to the solar system, and a tense confrontation of three civilizations takes place. One hundred billion years later, macrolife, now as numerous as the stars, faces the impending death of nature. Regaining his individuality by falling away from a highly evolved macrolife, a strangely changed John Bulero struggles to see beyond a collapse of the universe into a giant black hole. Inspired by the possibilities of space settlements, projections of biology and cosmology, and basic human longings, Macrolife is a visionary speculation on the long-term future of human and natural history. Filled with haunting images and memorable characters, this is a vivid and brilliant work.
Download or read book Solaris Rising 3 written by Benjanun Sriduangkaew and published by Solaris. This book was released on 2014-08-26 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FEATURING NEW WRITING BY Benjanun Sriduangkaew // Chris Beckett // Julie E. Czerneda // Ken Liu // Tony Ballantyne // Sean Williams // Laura Lam // Aliette de Bodard // Ian Watson // Gareth L. Powell // Nina Allan // Adam Roberts // George Zebrowski // Cat Sparks // Rachel Swirsky // Benjamin Rosenbaum // Alex Dally MacFarlane // Ian R. MacLeod & Martin Sketchley Award-nominated editor Ian Whates showcases the best in contemporary science fiction, celebrating new writing by a roster of diverse and exciting authors. Here you will discover how this ‘literature of ideas’ produces stories of astonishing imagination and incisive speculation. Solaris Rising 3 thrillingly demonstrates why science fiction is the most relevant, daring and progressive of genres.
Download or read book Behind the Eyes of Dreamers written by Pamela Sargent and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an untamed garden, a woman discovers the price of freedom Aniya is a perfect creature. Using the power of the Net, she has banished all of her painful memories, allowing herself to live in a state of perfect contentment on a far-future Earth. In order to have companions, she creates two eidolons—living beings imprinted with all of Aniya’s thoughts, feelings, and desires. Of the two creatures, Orielna is happy to live in her creator’s shadow, but Josef is not. When the pain inside him becomes overwhelming, he commits a murder and flees into the tangle of the Garden, a place where death has not been conquered. To rescue him, Orielna follows him to the Garden and discovers that behind its walls lie impossible dangers—and unknown joys. In this bewitching collection, Pamela Sargent explores what becomes of humanity when all its pains are stripped away.
Download or read book Book Guy written by Howard Overend and published by TouchWood Editions. This book was released on 2001 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Book Guy is unique. It's a librarian's story of getting books into the hands of rural school children and people in isolated places in the Peace River country and up the Alaska Highway. The story also tells how the mobile service began 50 years ago and traces-not without humour-the remarkable efforts of successive true-grit librarians to overcome the obstacles of poor working conditions, severe cold and the hazards of dust and ice and muddy roads.
