Reeling from a painful break-up, English instructor and avid book lover Wesley Smith is haunted by his ex-girlfriend's parting shot: "Why can't you just read off the computer like everyone else?" He buys an e-book reader out of spite, but soon finds he can use the device to glimpse realities he had never before imagined, discovering literary riches beyond his wildest dreams...and all-too-human tragedies that surpass his most terrible nightmares.

    Invasion by the warlike Ousters looms, and the mysterious schemes of the secessionist AI TechnoCore bring chaos ever closer.On the eve of disaster, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set fourth on a final voyage to the legendary Time Tombs on Hyperion, home to the Shrike, a lethal creature, part god and part killing machine, whose powers transcend the limits of time and space. The pilgrims have resolved to die before discovering anything less than the secrets of the universe itself.THE FALL OF HYPERIONThe mysterious Time Tombs are opening and the Shrike that has risen from them may well control the fate of all mankind. The Ousters are laying siege to the Hegemony of Man and the AIs we created have turned against us to build the Ultimate Intelligence; God. The God of Machines. His genesis could mean annihilation for man.Something is drawing the Hegemony, the Ousters, the Als, the entire universe to the Shrike.Here is a superb vision of future technology and ancient religions, of scientific revelation and timeless mystery, of transcendent joy and mind-bending horror. Here is a Hugo Award-winning landmark in Science Fiction.

    The Separation suggests an alternate history lying along a road not taken in World War II. But there are complications. In 1999, history author Stuart Gratton is intrigued by a minor mystery of the European war which ended on 10 May 1941. The British-German armistice signed that month has had far-reaching consequences, including a resettlement of European Jews in Madagascar. In 1936, the identical twin brothers Joe and Jack Sawyer win a rowing medal for Britain in the Berlin Olympics: it's presented to them by Rudolf Hess. The brothers are separated not only by a twin's fierce need "to be treated as a separate human being", but by sexual rivalry and even ideology. When war breaks out Jack becomes a gung-ho bomber pilot, Joe a conscientious objector. Still they're inescapably linked, and sometimes confused. Both suffer injuries and hauntingly similar ambulance journeys. Churchill writes a puzzled memo (later unearthed by Gratton) about the anomaly of a registered-pacifist Red Cross worker flying planes for Bomber Command. Hess has significant, eventually incompatible meetings with both men. Contradictions are everywhere. As in his magical 1995 novel The Prestige Priest is fruitfully fascinated by the legerdemain of twins, doubles, impostors, symmetrical roles. Churchill's double briefly appears. So does the famous conspiracy theory that the Hess who flew to Britain with his quixotic peace deal wasn't the real Hess ring true? Clearly The Separation was impressively, extensively researched. Its evocations of bombing raids--from either side of the bomb sites--are memorable. The unfolding story strands become increasingly disorienting and hallucinatory; the easy escape route of dismissing one strand as delusion is itself subtly undermined. The Separation is filled with a sense of the precariousness of history; of small events and choices with extraordinary consequences. --David Langford

    Somewhere in Time won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and the 1980 movie version, starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, remains a cult classic whose fans continue to hold yearly conventions to this day.

    The Servants of Wrath have deified Carlton Lufteufel and re-christened him the Deus Irae. In the small community of Charlottesville, Utah, Tibor McMasters, born without arms or legs, has, through an array of prostheses, established a far-reaching reputation as an inspired painter. When the new church commissions a grand mural depicting the Deus Irae, it falls upon Tibor to make a treacherous journey to find the man, to find the god, and capture his terrible visage for posterity.

    Wells as a time-traveling investigator.Characters real and imaginary come vividly to life in this whimsical triple play of intertwined plots, in which a skeptical H. G. Wells is called upon to investigate purported incidents of time travel and to save lives and literary classics, including Dracula and The Time Machine, from being wiped from existence.What happens if we change history?

    The Terran explorers have made an uneasy truce with the Sholen, their first extraterrestrial contact: so long as they don’t disturb the Ilmataran habitat, they’re free to conduct their missions in peace.But when Henri Kerlerec, media personality and reckless adventurer, ends up sliced open by curious Ilmatarans, tensions between Terran and Sholen erupt, leading to a diplomatic disaster that threatens to escalate to war.Against the backdrop of deep-sea guerrilla conflict, a new age of human exploration begins as alien cultures collide. Both sides seek the aid of the newly enlightened Ilmatarans. But what this struggle means for the natives—and the future of human exploration—is anything but certain, in A Darkling Sea by James Cambias.

    103 pages of summaries and analysis on Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.This comprehensive study guide includes the following sections written by BookRags.com: Plot Summary, Chapter Summaries & Analysis, Characters, Objects/Places, Themes, Style, and Topics for Discussion.

    The first subject chosen for treatment is Jeff Baker, the father of the datasphere (which replaced the Internet) and philanthropist extraordinaire. After 18 months in a German medical facility, the 78-year-old patient returns home looking like a healthy 20-year-old. "Misspent Youth" follows the effect his reappearance has on his friends and family -- his young ex-model wife Sue, his teenage son Tim, and his long term pals, themselves all pensioners, who are starting to resent what Jeff has become.

    They take with them everything they could possibly need - food, clothes, tools, weapons, even wives.But an unanticipated discovery shatters their dream and replaces it with a very different one.The colonists feel sure that their friendship will keep them together. Only then do they begin to realize that they've brought with them rather more than they bargained for. For one of them, it seems, has been hiding a terrible secret from the rest of the company. And when the truth begins to emerge, it soon becomes clear that the war is far from over.

    For Weer's imagination has the power to obliterate time and reshape reality, transcending even death itself.

    Two men while away the days in an Antarctic research station. Tensions between them build as they argue over a love-letter one of them has received. One is practical and open. The other surly, superior and obsessed with reading one book - by the philosopher Kant. As a storm brews and they lose contact with the outside world they debate Kant, reality and the emptiness of the universe. The come to hate each other, and they learn that they are not alone.

    The city was captured by a rebellious lord, Palicrovol, who overthrew the cruel king, Nasilee, hated by his people.Palicrovol, too, was cruel, as befitted a king. He took the true mantle of kinghood by forcing Asineth, now Queen by her father's death, to marry him, raping her to consummate the marriage. [But he was not cruel enough to rule.] He let her live after her humiliation; live to bear a daughter; live to return from exile and retake the throne of Hart's Hope.But she, in turn, sent Palicrovol into exile to breed a son who would, in the name of the God, take back the kingdom from its cruel Queen.

    Trying not to miss his girlfriend (away studying in Mexico), the nameless writer steadily crafts his literary effort--until strange things begin happening around him.Starting with a series of peculiar phone calls, the writer then finds clumps of seaweed on his doorstep. But as the incidents escalate, his friends fall victim to a series of mysterious "accidents"--some of them fatal. Aided by Elmo Crumley, a savvy, street-smart detective, and a reclusive actress of yesteryear with an intense hunger for life, the wordsmith sets out to find the connection between the bizarre events, and in doing so, uncovers the truth about his own creative abilities.

    But Julie Katz, the half-sister of Jesus, has been born to a celibate father. Soon poor Julie is tempted by the Devil and challenged by neo-Christian zealots-and that’s just the beginning of her fantastic odyssey through Hell, a seceded New Jersey, and her own confused soul. Winner of a 1991 World Fantasy Award.