The "undesirable" creatures of legend have been driven from their lands, magic has been forsaken, the old gods reduced to myth.Now humans will rule the kingdoms of the island continent of Pentania. But they are not alone.Alson's king has been assassinated, its capital besieged by a malevolent wizard. The chaos and terror now sweeping the land have come to the remote village of Diln -- sending young Jarom far from his home to seek aid against the nefarious usurper. But a mysterious council has decreed Jarom must find one of the mythical Swords of Asahiel -- the divine talismans the elven avatars used to forge the earth -- in order to save a quarrelsome, fledgling humanity. For a Demon Queen has awakened from the abyss -- and humankind is about to discover its powerlessness in the face of the ancient terrors of the world.

    Little does Henghis Hapthorn realize, but the path of discovery will lead to deeper questions, a mysterious assignment from the Archon himself, and the ancient and powerful secret name ... Majestrum!

    The moment Grafton crosses the border he is in trouble, much more than he could have imagined. His passport is taken by guards, and then he is detained for not having it. He is released into the custody of a family, but is again detained. It becomes evident that there are supernatural agencies at work, but they are not in some ways as threatening as the brute forces of bureaucracy and corruption in that country. Is our hero in fact a spy for the CIA? Or is he an innocent citizen caught in a Kafkaesque trap?Gene Wolfe keeps us guessing until the very end, and after.

    Still, like everything else in the Budayeen, he’s available…for a price.For a new kind of killer roams the streets of the Arab ghetto, a madman whose bootlegged personality cartridges range from a sinister James Bond to a sadistic disemboweler named Khan. And Marid Audrian has been made an offer he can’t refuse.The 200-year-old “godfather” of the Budayeen’s underworld has enlisted Marid as his instrument of vengeance. But first Marid must undergo the most sophisticated of surgical implants before he dares to confront a killer who carries the power of every psychopath since the beginning of time.Wry, savage, and unignorable, When Gravity Fails was hailed as a classic by Effinger’s fellow SF writers on its original publication in 1987, and the sequence of “Marid Audrian” novels it begins were the culmination of his career.

    Ignored by his family, he is forced to flee his home after he's betrayed. But he vows to return to claim his inheritance-a magical key that could help him change his destiny.

    It was a land of centaurs and dragons and basilisks.For Bink of North Village, however, Xanth was no fairy tale. He alone had no magic. And unless he got some - and got some fast! - he would be exiled. Forever!But the Good Magician Humfrey was convinced that Bink did indeed have magic. In fact, both Beauregard the genie and the magic wall chart insisted that Bink had magic. Magic as powerful as any possessed by the King or by Good Magician Humfrey - or even by the Evil Magician TrentBe that as it may, no one could fathom the nature of Bink's very special magic. Bink was in despair. This was even worse than having no magic at all..and he would still be exiled!

    Omnibus edition including the three novels in the series.

    a flaming spider who must help stop a goddess from conquering a science fiction convention ... a goblin nursery worker who finds herself trapped in the middle of a war. This collection features five humorous short stories that explore the fantasy realm from the perspective of the lowest of the low, the unlikeliest of unheroes: the goblins.Includes the following stories from the author of the GOBLIN QUEST trilogy:Goblin LullabyThe Haunting of Jig's EarGoblin HunterSchool SpiritMightier than the SwordEach story includes an afterward by the author.

    Near-future Oakland is a brave new world where evolved animals are members of society, the police monitor citizens by their karma levels, and mind-numbing drugs such as Forgettol and Acceptol are all the rage.Metcalf has been shadowing Celeste, the wife of an affluent doctor. Perhaps he's falling a little in love with her at the same time. When the doctor turns up dead, our amiable investigator finds himself caught in a crossfire between the boys from the Inquisitor's Office and gangsters who operate out of the back room of a bar called the Fickle Muse.Mixing elements of sci-fi, noir, and mystery, this clever first novel from the author of Motherless Brooklyn is a wry, funny, and satiric look at all that the future may hold.

    Its people are ushering in a new era of technology, dazzled each day by new inventions. Airships soar in the skies over the city, whilst ground trains rumble through the streets and clockwork automatons are programmed to carry out menial tasks in the offices of lawyers, policemen and journalists. But beneath this shiny veneer of progress lurks a sinister side. For this is also a world where ghostly policemen haunt the fog-laden alleyways of Whitechapel, where cadavers can rise from the dead and where Sir Maurice Newbury, Gentleman Investigator for the Crown, works tirelessly to protect the Empire from her foes. When an airship crashes in mysterious circumstances, Sir Maurice and his recently appointed assistant Miss Veronica Hobbes are called in to investigate. Meanwhile, Scotland Yard is baffled by a spate of grisly murders and a terrifying plague is ravaging the slums of the city. So begins an adventure quite unlike any other, a thrilling steampunk mystery and the first in the series of "Newbury & Hobbes" investigations.

    . . .Being an Inquisitor is no job for a nice Jewish boy. But when Sacha Kessler learns he can see witches, he’s yanked out of everyday life on Hester Street and apprenticed to the New York Police Department’s star Inquisitor, Maximillian Wolf.The Inquisitor’s mission is to stop magical crime. And New York at the beginning of the twentieth century is a magical melting pot where each ethnic group has its own brand of homegrown witchcraft and magical gangs rule the streets from Hell’s Kitchen to Chinatown.Soon Sacha has teamed up with fellow apprentice Lily Astral, daughter of one of the city’s richest Wall Street Wizards—and a spoiled snob, if you ask Sacha. Their first job is to find out who’s trying to kill Thomas Edison.Edison has invented a mechanical witch detector that could unleash the worst witch-hunt in American history. Every magician in town has a motive to kill him. But as the investigation unfolds, all the clues lead back to the Lower East Side. And Sacha soon realizes that his own family could be accused of murder!

    In the adventure of the Singing Sword our avenging heroes find themselves pittedagainst the nauseating Nekros,killer of Ronan's noble swordsmith father and then unexpectedly in league with the wizard Anthrax,whose skills are second to none(if you really want to hear your psychopathic donkey's every thought,that is).Ronan must find the singing sword and put to death the evil Nekros, but will that be the end of it-only time will tell.And it's doubtful,given the nature of these things.

    He aims to seek his fortune among those who tend and sail the awesome nautical juggernauts-the dragonships. With this in mind, Blithe gladly accepts his rank as Midshipwizard and becomes a member of the crew who man the dragonships-vessels which harness the bodies and strength of living dragons with seafaring technology. Combining elements of Hornblower with Harry Potter, and Robert Louis Stevenson with Robin Hobb, Midshipwizard Halcyon Blithe is a nautical tale rich in magic and intrigue. A tale set against a panorama of fantastic naval battle as we follow the career of a young midshipwizard as he moves up through the ranks of His Majesty's Navy.

    And it isn’t even the strangest thing to happen to him that week.Nick and his Dungeons & Dragons-playing friends are used to living in their imaginations. But when a new girl, Mia, joins the group and reality becomes weirder than the fantasy world they visit in their weekly games, none of them are prepared for what comes next. A strange—yet curiously familiar—man is following Nick, with abilities that just shouldn’t exist. And this man bears a cryptic message: Mia’s in grave danger, though she doesn’t know it yet. She needs Nick’s help—now.He finds himself in a race against time to unravel an impossible mystery and save the girl. And all that stands in his way is a probably terminal disease, a knife-wielding maniac and the laws of physics.Challenge accepted.

    Cleveland just hadn't been the same since, what with electronic devices pretty much useless--unless you were willing to spend a fortune in digital protection and redundancy equipment--and all the dragons, elves, gnomes, dwarves, gargoyles, etc. who'd come through the Portal to take up residence within the areas covered by the Portal's magical field.For Kline Maxwell, City Hall reporter for the Cleveland Press, magic-based Cleveland had long since become the status quo. At least until a fellow reporter named Morgan came down with a case of eyeballs growing all over his body. The diagnosis: stay out of Portal territory and he'd be just fine. But that meant Maxwell and all the other reporters were going to have to take up the slack. And Maxwell hated the thought of doing "fuzzy gnome" stories. Still, he took his job seriously, and when he was assigned to cover a dragon's death by crash-landing into the Cuyahoga, he headed over to the accident site with only a modest number of curses. But what should have been a simple accident report soon led Maxwell in search of a much bigger story--one that would see him kidnapped by elves, framed for murder, holding secret meetings with dragons, and fleeing not only from the cops but from pretty much everyone....