David D. Levine0.0 This Endeavour Award-winning collection pulls together 15 critically acclaimed science fiction and fantasy stories that take readers from a technicolor cartoon realm to an ancient China that never was, and from an America gone wrong to the very ends of the universe. Including the Hugo Award-winning "Tk'Tk'Tk," the Writers of the Future Award winner "Rewind," "Nucleon," "The Tale of the Golden Eagle," and many other highly-praised stories, Space Magic shows David D. Levine's talents not only as a gifted writer but as a powerful storyteller whose work explores the farthest reaches of space as well as the depths of the human heart.
Стивенсон создает планету далекого будущего, похожую на Землю, под названием Арб, где ученые, философы и математики – сами по себе религиозный орден — заперты за стенами монастырей. Их роль – хранить знание, одновременно защищая его от превратностей иррационального светского внешнего мира. Среди ученых 19-летний Раз, которого забрали в монастырь в возрасте 8 лет, и который теперь является десятилетником (тем, кому разрешены контакты за пределами цитадели раз в десять лет). Но тысячелетние правила разрушены, когда появляется инопланетная угроза, и Раза и его товарищей – в какой-то момент участвующих в интеллектуальном споре, в другой борющихся как непослушные подростки – призывают спасти мир.
The nobles of Aureity have been breeding their children for psychic powers for generations. Women’s powers are mental, including psychic control and mind-reading, making them ideal rulers. Men have superhuman strength and can teleport to any place they have previously visited. Consequently, young noblemen make their fortune by competing in psychic gladiatorial contests to display their powers in the hope of being hired—and married—by women of high rank.
When Quirt, an older man with obvious skill but little known record, first enters the arena, the combat circuit is abuzz wondering who he might be. But his mystery is almost eclipsed by the young cub who has been entering competitions anonymously and winning them all. Barely in his teens, full of raw power but short on training or patience, Humate is so horrified when he’s bested by Quirt that he insists on finding out where he came from.
Unfortunately for Humate, the answer reaches far beyond his birth: back to the terrible wrongs done to Quirt’s mother and his new wife by one of Humate’s relatives, and back to Quirt’s sentencing, a doom which takes away his identity until he can bring the culprit to justice. Humate is in deep denial about this familial scandal generations deep, but Quirt must try to covince him to help, compelled by his doom and by the stirrings of a new love that cannot possibly be realized in his nameless condition.
With these 17 tales, Ken Scholes invites you to his Imagination Forest. You'll find a toy bear of Little Brain tasked with a Very Long Walk and a mysterious metal man with the power to bring down a city and the heart to weep for it. Follow Meriwether Lewis west, seeking the source of a mysterious scrap of currency from the future. Laugh and cry as Andro Giantslayer recounts the highlights of his dungeon-crawling, dragon-slaying and diaper-changing career with Luendyl the Fierce and Fair. Learn exactly how Cain found himself a wife, see what superheroes get up to in their sunset years, and watch Hodgson and Houdini as they traverse the landscape of Hell in search of Michelangelos Crystalline Ear. And along the way, keep your eyes open. You'll meet alien babies, messianic Santas, typing chimps and maybe, if you look carefully, you'll find some off-brand love and a little bit of hope in Drum Farrellys supply room. Buckle up. Hang on. A ride in the Imagination Forest is bound to be a strange journey...
In Bright of the Sky, Kay Kenyon introduced a milieu unique in science fiction and fantasy: The Entire, a five-armed radial universe that exists in a dimension without stars and planets and is parallel to our own universe. Stretched over The Entire is a lid of plasma, called the bright, which ebbs and flows, bringing day and twilight. Under the vast canopy of the bright live many galactic species, copied from our own universe.
Former star pilot Titus Quinn loves The Entire, but now he must risk annihilating it by destroying the fortress of Ahnenhoon. To sustain a faltering Entire, Ahnenhoon's great engine will soon reach through the brane separating the universes and consume our own universe in a concentrated ball of fire.
Quinn sets off on a journey across The Entire armed with the nan, a small ankle bracelet containing nanoscale military technology that can reduce Ahnenhoon and its deadly engine to chaos. He must pursue his mission even though his wife is held prisoner in Ahnenhoon and his own daughter has sent the assassin MoTi to hunt him down.
As he traverses the galactic distances of The Entire, he learns more of the secrets of its geography, its fragile storm walls, its eons-long history, and the factions that contend for dominance. One of these factions is led by his daughter, who though young and a slave, has at her command a transforming and revolutionary power.
As Quinn wrestles with looming disaster and approaches the fabled concentric rings of Ahnenhoon's defenses, he learns that in the Entire, nothing is what it appears. Its denizens are all harboring secrets, and the greatest of these is the nature of the Entire itself.
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