Download or read book The Outback Within written by Mark Byrne and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-09-23 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is it about the Australian outback? For nearly two centuries, narratives of outback journeys have been suffused with the aura of death. Why? It is not just that the desert is big, dry, hot and apparently empty. The outback is Australia’s “mythological crucible,” and journeys there have become rites of passage. It is where settler Australians go to die and perhaps be reborn. This book explores the landscape of this evolving national mythology. It argues that a more conscious engagement with the process of symbolic death and rebirth is needed for Australians to enter into a deeper understanding of themselves and their relationship to the land and its Indigenous people.

Download or read book To the Land of the Living written by Robert Silverberg and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2011-11-14 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if there were an Afterworld? Not Heaven or Hell in the conventional sense, but a place where everyone who has ever lived reawakens when they die, to live again and die again and live again, seemingly forever. This is the premise of Robert Silverberg's brilliantly inventive new fantasy novel. The central character is the legendary warrior-king Gilgamesh, who has been in the Afterworld longer than almost anyone else save the Hairy Men from before the Flood, and who in recent centuries (insofar as you can count time) has seen it change beyond recognition, as the newly dead from industrial times import their machinery, their weaponry and their attitudes. Gilgamesh's adventures in the course of the novel take him to the Afterworld realms of other quasi-mythical figures like Prester John and Simon Magus, bring him into contact with such figures from more recent history as Walter Ralegh and Pablo Ruiz (known to some as Picasso), and eventually send him in search of a gateway which is rumoured to exist somewhere in the land of the dead - a gateway which leads back to the land of the living.

Download or read book Gilgamesh written by Joan London and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book from the author of The Golden Age. “A remarkable study of a young woman’s most literal rite of passage” (The Baltimore Sun). Gilgamesh is a rich, spare, and evocative novel of encounters and escapes, of friendship and love, of loss and acceptance, a debut that marked the emergence of a world-class talent. It is 1937, and the modern world is waiting to erupt. On a farm in rural Australia, seventeen-year-old Edith lives with her mother and her sister, Frances. One afternoon two men, her English cousin Leopold and his Armenian friend Aram, arrive—taking the long way home from an archaeological dig in Iraq—to captivate Edith with tales of a world far beyond the narrow horizon of her small town of Nunderup. One such story is the epic of Gilgamesh, the ancient Mesopotamian king who traveled the world in search of eternal life. Two years later, in 1939, Edith and her young son, Jim, set off on their own journey, to Soviet Armenia, where they are trapped by the outbreak of war. Rich, spare, and evocative, Gilgamesh won The Age Book of the Year Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. “Bold and beautiful . . . [An] astonishing saga . . . A woman as epic hero? It’s high time.” —Cathleen Medwick, O, The Oprah Magazine

Download or read book Babylonian Mythology written by Don Nardo and published by Greenhaven Publishing LLC. This book was released on 2012-09-07 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume looks at Babylonian Mythology, drawing connections between ancient Babylonian culture and its myths, explaining how the beliefs, values, and experiences of that culture are represented in its treasured stories. Readers are treated to a map of ancient Mesopotamia, a family tree of the major gods, a table of major characters with name pronunciations with brief descriptions, sidebars, and fact boxes.

Download or read book Strange Gifts written by Robert Silverberg and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Each story preceded by 1-2 paragraphs of commentary.

Download or read book To the Land of the Living written by Robert Silverberg and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-07-28 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hugo Award–winning author returns to the mythical world of Gilgamesh the King in this adventurous sequel: “An enthralling quest.” —The Times (London) The warrior-king Gilgamesh—part man, part god—is not only larger than life; he is larger than death. Trapped in the Afterworld, a bizarre reality in which everyone who has ever died lives again . . . only to die again and again in endless succession, Gilgamesh sets out to find his lost friend Enkidu and fight his way back to the land of the living. Along the way, he encounters a rogue’s gallery of figures from history, literature, and myth—including H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard—and travels from the ancient city of Uruk to modern-day Manhattan. But the Afterworld is not so easily escaped.

Download or read book An Informal History of the Hugos written by Jo Walton and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engaged, passionate, and consistently entertaining, An Informal History of the Hugos is a book about the renowned science fiction award for the many who enjoyed Jo Walton's previous collection of writing from Tor.com, the Locus Award-winning What Makes This Book So Great. The Hugo Awards, named after pioneer science-fiction publisher Hugo Gernsback, and voted on by members of the World Science Fiction Society, have been presented since 1953. They are widely considered the most prestigious awards in science fiction. Between 2010 and 2013, Jo Walton wrote a series of posts for Tor.com, surveying the Hugo finalists and winners from the award's inception up to the year 2000. Her contention was that each year's full set of finalists generally tells a meaningful story about the state of science fiction at that time. Walton's cheerfully opinionated and vastly well-informed posts provoked valuable conversation among the field's historians. Now these posts, lightly revised, have been gathered into this book, along with a small selection of the comments posted by SF luminaries such as Rich Horton, Gardner Dozois, and David G. Hartwell. "A remarkable guided tour through the field—a kind of nonfiction companion to Among Others. It's very good. It's great."—New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing on What Makes This Book So Great At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Download or read book The Prestimion Trilogy written by Robert Silverberg and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2023-09-19 with total page 1607 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The epic sci-fi fantasy Majipoor Cycle continues with the saga of Lord Prestimion, whose rise to power is beset by war and madness. Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author Robert Silverberg returns to the richly imagined world of Majipoor. Collected here in one volume is the complete Prestimion Trilogy, set hundreds of years before the events of the first three novels. In Sorcerers of Majipoor, a peaceful transfer of power is threatened by a cunning rival to the throne. In Lord Prestimion, peace returns to Majipoor, but at a terrible price. And in King of Dreams, Prestimion prepares to ascend to the role of Pontifax as a plague of nightmares spreads across the planet.

Download or read book Novel Ideas Fantasy written by Brian M. Thomsen and published by Astra Publishing House. This book was released on 2006-03-07 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do novels get their start? The answers to that question often prove as varied as the authors who create them. In Novel Ideas: Fantasy, seven of the genre's most talented tellers of tale are represented by eight masterful short works--many of them award winners--which laid the groundwork for some of the most acclaimed fantasy novels and series in the field.

Download or read book Receptions of the Ancient Near East in Popular Culture and Beyond written by Agnes Garcia-Ventura and published by Lockwood Press. This book was released on 2020-03-01 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an enthusiastic celebration of the ways in which popular culture has consumed aspects of the ancient Near East to construct new realities. The editors have brought together an impressive line-up of scholars-archaeologists, philologists, historians, and art historians-to reflect on how objects, ideas, and interpretations of the ancient Near East have been remembered, constructed, reimagined, mythologized, or indeed forgotten within our shared cultural memories. The exploration of cultural memories has revealed how they inform the values, structures, and daily life of societies over time. This is therefore not a collection of essays about the deep past but rather about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Download or read book The Iron Chancellor written by Robert Silverberg and published by Rosetta Books. This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A robot controls a family’s diet with disturbing exactitude in this 1958 novella by the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author—with a new forward. Celebrated author Robert Silverberg was twenty-two years old when he wrote The Iron Chancellor, his second contribution to the pioneering science fiction magazine Galexy. It tells the story of a man who purchases a robot to help himself and his family lose weight. The scheme goes awry as the robot assumes totalitarian control over the household. This early work demonstrates Silverberg’s prodigious talent as well as his influences, such as Henry Kuttner’s Gallegher stories and Robert Sheckley’s AAA Ace Series. Fans of Silverberg’s renowned novels, such as Sailing to Byzantium and Gilgamesh in the Outback, will enjoy this early work by the SFWA Grand Master.

Download or read book Novel Ideas Science Fiction written by Brian M. Thomsen and published by Astra Publishing House. This book was released on 2006-04-04 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time in one volume, seven classic, award-winning stories which were the genesis for some of the most memorable novels and series in the field of science fiction.

Download or read book Reflections and Refractions written by Robert Silverberg and published by Gateway. This book was released on 2013-11-28 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly twenty years ago Robert Silverberg began writing a monthly column of opinion and commentary, for Galileo Magazine, Amazing Stories, and then for Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Now he has chosen the liveliest and most relevant of his hundreds of magazine columns for the present collection. They constitute a vivid chronicle of events both in science fiction and the world in general over the past two decades. Robert Silverberg is one of the great veterans of fantasy and science fiction. During the course of a career that has now stretched across more than forty years, he has written dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories, many of them considered classics of the genre. He has won more major award nominations than any other writer in his field, and no less than nine Hugo and Nebula awards, the key s-f/fantasy trophies. His books have been translated into some eighteen languages and his short stories have appeared in every science-fiction and fantasy magazine in the world, as well as in Omni, Playboy, and Penthouse.

Download or read book Science Fiction 101 written by Robert Silverberg and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2024-12-24 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Grand Master details his development as a writer and shares thirteen favorite sci-fi stories from his youth and what they taught him about writing. Every writer must start somewhere. Robert Silverberg was once simply a young man learning the art and craft of writing before he found success. But how did he get from there to winning four Hugo Awards, three Locus Awards, and six Nebula Awards, as well as being named a Grand Master of science fiction? In Science Fiction 101, the prolific author looks back to his roots in the genre to answer that question. With thought-provoking essays, Silverberg details the inspiration, lessons, strategies, and skills he gained from thirteen groundbreaking science fiction stories from the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s—all included in this volume. It’s an entertaining and enlightening read, perfect for those interested in sci-fi history and the craft of writing. Featuring thirteen classic stories from Brian W. Aldiss, Alfred Bester, James Blish, Philip K. Dick, Damon Knight, Cyril M. Kornbluth, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, Frederik Pohl, Bob Shaw, Robert Sheckley, Cordwainer Smith, and Jack Vance. Previously published as Robert Silverberg’s Worlds of Wonder Praise for Science Fiction 101 “An excellent introduction to the most important roots of modern SF.” —The Washington Post “Offers encouragement and sound counsel . . . Anyone interested in writing science fiction and fantasy will profit from this book.” —San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle “A virtual primer on the writing of science fiction . . . a fascinating portrait of a young man becoming a writer . . . Finally, we have the 13 stories, almost all of which are classics in the field, wonderful to reread and in some cases to encounter for the first time.” —Publishers Weekly “A unique and successful work.” —Los Angeles Times

Download or read book Science Fiction Rebels written by Michael Ashley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fourth volume in Mike Ashley's acclaimed set on the history of science-fiction magazines. This volume looks at the 1980s.

Download or read book The Robert E Howard Reader written by Darrell Schweitzer and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 2010-08-01 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology presents a wide range of analysis, criticism, and opinion about one of the most influential fantasy authors of the twentieth century, with contributions by such well-known writers and critics as: Poul Anderson, Fritz Leiber, George H. Scithers, L. Sprague de Camp, S. T. Joshi, Howard Waldrop, Steve Tompkins, Darrell Schweitzer, Leo Grin, Robert Weinberg, Mark Hall, Charles Hoffman, Don D'Ammassa, Robert M. Price, Gary Romeo, and Scott Connors. A "must buy" for every fan of Robert E. Howard.

Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature written by Allen Stroud and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-06-12 with total page 579 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fantasy is a genre in motion, gradually expanding its reach and historical sources to embrace a global identity Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature, Second Edition is a snapshot of the genre in this moment, identifying new themes and sources that are emerging to inspire, enhance and invigorate the published works of fantasy writers.