Book picks similar to
The Smoky God, Or, a Voyage to the Inner World by Willis George Emerson
science-fiction
hollow-earth
fantasy
fiction
The Walled City
Ryan Graudin - 2014
That's how many days I've been trapped.18. That's how many days I have left to find a way out.DAI, trying to escape a haunting past, traffics drugs for the most ruthless kingpin in the Walled City. But in order to find the key to his freedom, he needs help from someone with the power to be invisible....JIN hides under the radar, afraid the wild street gangs will discover her biggest secret: Jin passes as a boy to stay safe. Still, every chance she gets, she searches for her lost sister....MEI YEE has been trapped in a brothel for the past two years, dreaming of getting out while watching the girls who try fail one by one. She's about to give up, when one day she sees an unexpected face at her window.....In this innovative and adrenaline-fueled novel, they all come together in a desperate attempt to escape a lawless labyrinth before the clock runs out.
Time Out of Joint
Philip K. Dick - 1959
But if that is the case, what is his real world like, and what is he actually doing every day when he thinks he is guessing 'Where Will The Little Green Man Be Next?'
Infernal Devices
K.W. Jeter - 1986
But idle sometime-musician George has little talent for clockwork. And when a shadowy figure tries to steal an old device from the premises, George finds himself embroiled in a mystery of time travel, music and sexual intrigue. A genuine lost classic, a steampunk original whose time has come.
Etidorhpa: Strange History of a Mysterious Being and an Incredible Journey Inside the Earth
John Uri Lloyd - 1895
Written well over a century ago, John Uri Lloyd was a visionary who spoke of far distant worlds, dead civilizations, other dimensions and in particular, a world few of us will ever get to visit. A world hidden beneath our feet inside the earth. Inspired by the fantastic -- in particular the art of alchemy -- the author reveals in this long lost manuscript how he joined a secret society and was introduced into the sphere of mysticism. A part of this spiritual journey included the opportunity to establish contact with a super-human, eyeless being, inside a cave in Kentucky. Together they journey to another realm filled with magic and wonderment. Some have placed it in the category of Alice in Wonderland; where does the mind magic start and end? You decide.
A House-Boat on the Styx
John Kendrick Bangs - 1895
The book begins with the ferryman Charon being startled & annoyed by the arrival of a houseboat on the Styx. At first afraid that the boat will put him out of business, he later finds out that he is actually to be appointed its janitor. What follows are 11 more stories which are set on the houseboat. There's no central theme. The purpose appears to be as a literary thought experiment to see what would happen if various famous dead people were put in the same room with each other. Each chapter is a short story featuring various souls from history & mythology. In the 12th chapter the houseboat disappears, leading into a sequel, Pursuit of the House-Boat. The book sold for $1.25 in 1895.
Against the Day
Thomas Pynchon - 2006
No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.--Thomas PynchonAbout the Author:Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland and, most recently, Mason and Dixon. He received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.
The Rozabal Line
Ashwin Sanghi - 2007
When the mystified librarian opens it, she screams before she falls unconscious to the floor. An elite group calling itself the Lashkar-e-Talatashar has scattered around the globe, the fate of its members curiously resembling that of Christ and his Apostles. Their agenda is Armageddon. In the labyrinthine recesses of the Vatican, a beautiful assassin swears she will eliminate all who do not believe in her twisted credo. In Tibet, Buddhist monks search for a reincarnation while in strife-torn Kashmir, a tomb called Rozabal holds the key to an ancient riddle. Father Vincent Sinclair, has disturbing visions of himself and of people familiar to him, except that they seem located in other ages. He goes to India to piece together the violent images burnt onto his mind. Shadowing his every move is a clandestine society, which would rather wipe out creation than allow an ancient secret to be disclosed.
The Sign
Raymond Khoury - 2009
Like the first two, this new thriller combines gripping contemporary suspense with a high-concept mystery rooted in history, philosophy, religion, and science. And like those novels, it is bound for bestseller lists nationwide.
In Antarctica, a scientific expedition drops anchor for a live news feed. As the CNN journalist begins her report, a massive, shimmering sphere of light suddenly appears in the sky, enveloping the ship in luminous white light before disappearing as mysteriously as it arrived, the entire event witnessed by an incredulous world audience.Meanwhile in a dusty bar in Egypt, a dozen men are lazily discussing the state of the world when the brilliant, glowing symbol on the television stops them cold. One man breaks out in a sweat, crosses himself repeatedly, and rushes out of the bar muttering the same phrase over and over again: It can't be.Across the Internet and around the globe, a stunning controversy threatens to consume the world: Has God finally decided to reveal himself? Or is something more sinister at hand?
Raymond Khoury/Steve Berry interview
STEVE BERRY: Your new thriller, THE SIGN. I'm gonna come right out and say it: I think it's your best one yet. What do you think?RAMOND KHOURY: Tough call. It's my new baby, and much as I adore its elder siblings, it does have that newborn magic to it.STEVE: Trust me, it is. It's also a bit of a departure from your first two books, in that it doesn't have the past-and-present storylines. Knowing how stories kind of take on a life of their own, that wasn't a conscious decision from the get-go, was it?RAYMOND KHOURY: No, it wasn't premeditated. It's just the way the story came out. The whole story happens in the present. It takes place over a few manic days, I think you're familiar with that pacing, right? And it deals with the present, it's about a what if situation that's very today and now, there's a mystery, something to figure out, but there's no throwback to the past, no long lost secret to uncover.STEVE BERRY: It's also very topical. Your editors must be pleased.RAYMOND: I guess it happened that way because the story came out of some very strong feelings I had, feelings about what was going on around the world, in the US and abroad.STEVE: Tell me about that process. Where the story came from.RAYMOND: It's where they all come from, isn't it? That kernel, that one thought or one observation you have that just sticks and triggers a book, the one that bugs you late at night and that you can't shake. This one came to me while watching the news one day, and every item, one after another, it was all bad news. Not just bad, but it was like a lot of people were behaving so insanely in so many places around the world, and, sadly, a lot of it was fuelled by the manipulation or distortion of religious faith.STEVE: By intolerance?RAYMOND: Exactly. Intolerance and closed minds. And it got me thinking. About how divided we are, about how so many people all over the world believe in the absolute infallibility of their faith and how it rules every aspect of their lives, you know what I mean, we're right, everyone else is wrong, that medieval mindset and wondering if anything could ever unite the planet under a single faith.STEVE: One global religion. RAYMOND: Well, imagine if something did happen that convinced everyone that what we had until now, all these different religions that have grown over the last few thousand years, what if something new came along that was so overwhelming that it was impossible to ignore? Would we listen? Would we drop our previous faiths and embrace it?STEVE: But your book's about much more than that. Without wanting to give too much away, it's really a political thriller, isn't it?RAYMOND: It's always so hard to talk about a book without giving too much away.STEVE: It's the fine line we walk.RAYMOND: True. But yes, you're right, it's really about the absolute power something like that would bring, and how it could be abused. Cause above all else, it's a thriller. There's got to be a brilliantly dastardly scheme, right?STEVE: Always. And this one certainly is dastardly. One thing I've noticed, though, in all three of your books so far, they're all, essentially, about the big questions that face us: why we believe, whether or not we have to die. Religion, longevity, life and death, science vs. faith ... Big questions. And in this one, you revisit, though in a completely different way, the power of religion, the good it can bring as well as the bad, something that was also central to The Last Templar. Will this always be your signature genre, books that have a big, central theme at their core?RAYMOND: You asked me earlier about where the story came from. For me, in order to get excited about a book, it has to have a big central theme about how we live at its heart, something I'm interested in exploring. It's got to be about something I care about deeply. That's what drives the story and the characters forward for me. That's what I hope makes the books stand out. That they're not just page-turners, which ain't easy in itself, but that they're also about something. I see it in your books too. A point of view about things, a passion for laying out interesting information about a topic that interests you. Michael Crichton used to do that very successfully. Dan Brown, of course, does it brilliantly. That's what makes the books worth writing, I think.STEVE: And in reading the book, it's clear you still had tons of research to do, even though there isn't a historic mystery to unravel?RAYMOND: Absolutely. Some of it was about history, the monasteries in Egypt, for one. Again, part of the story, organically. Had to be done, and we do love our history, don't we?STEVE: Guilty as charged.RAYMOND: But for this book, I didn't need to do that much of it's nothing like what you did for THE CHARLEMAGNE PURSUIT, for instance. Which I loved, by the way. Particularly since you beat me to using the Voynich Manuscript in a story!STEVE: We do seem to be spookily in sync with our writing as further evidenced by THE SIGN's opening in Antarctica?RAYMOND: I know!STEVE: So tell me, Matt and Gracie. Are we going to see them again?RAYMOND: I don't know. On the one hand, I envy your situation with Cotton Malone, you've got a solid anchor for your books, you're building this great world around him, his son and Stephanie and Henrik and Cassiopeia, who I hope we see again real soon, and it's meaty and it's epic and like the rest of your readers, I'm hooked and I want to know what they do next. You've got that, Lee Child has had it since day one with Reacher, Harlan Coben with Myron Bolitar, the list goes on. Great characters. I'd love to do that one day, but it has to feel right. I wasn't in that frame of mind in my first two books, certainly the world after the end of THE SANCTUARY would be a very different place from the world Mia started out in at the beginning of that book. Tess and Reilly, I could maybe bring back. A lot of fans have asked for that. But with THE SIGN, Iinitely think Matt and Gracie are characters that I could bring back. I'd like to put them through another wringer, and it feels like it would come naturally. But before I do that, I'm writing the next book which introduces a new lead character, so they'll be getting a bit of a breather.STEVE: They sure can use it. Good luck with the book.RAYMOND: Thank you.
Who Built the Moon?
Christopher Knight - 2005
It does not obey the known rules of astrophysics and there is no theory of its origin that explains the known facts--in fact it should not really be there...The authors of Civilization One return, bringing new evidence about the Moon that will shake up our world. Christopher Knight and Alan Butler realized that the ancient system of geometry they presented in their earlier, breakthrough study works as perfectly for the Moon as it does the Earth. On further investigation, they found a consistent sequence of beautiful integer numbers when looking at every major aspect of the Moon--no such pattern emerges for any other planet or moon in the solar system. In addition, Knight and Butler discovered that the Moon possesses few or no heavy metals and has no core—something that should not be possible. Their persuasive conclusion: if higher life only developed on Earth because the Moon is exactly what it is and where it is, it becomes unreasonable to cling to the idea that the Moon is a natural object. The only question that remains is, who built it?
Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows
James Lovegrove - 2016
Sherlock Holmes, in the infancy of his detecting career, deduces a connection between these sinister “shadows” and an Oriental drug lord who is bent on expanding his criminal empire. Yet there are even more sinister forces at work, as the great detective faces a challenge so fearsome and deadly that his career may be over almost as soon as it has begun.
Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos
Jim TurnerFritz Leiber - 1990
His chilling mythology established a gateway between the known universe and an ancient dimension of otherworldly terror, whose unspeakable denizens and monstrous landscapes - dread Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, the Plateau of Leng, the Mountains of Madness - have earned him a permanent place in the history of the macabre.In Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, a pantheon of horror and fantasy's finest authors pay tribute to the master of the macabre with a collection of original stories set in the fearsome Lovecraft tradition.Contents:- Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn! (1990) by Jim Turner [as by James Turner] - The Call of Cthulhu (1928) by H.P. Lovecraft- The Return of the Sorcerer (1931) by Clark Ashton Smith- Ubbo-Sathla (1933) by Clark Ashton Smith- The Black Stone (1931) by Robert E. Howard- The Hounds of Tindalos (1929) by Frank Belknap Long- The Space-Eaters (1928) by Frank Belknap Long- The Dweller in Darkness (1944) by August Derleth- Beyond the Threshold (1941) by August Derleth- The Shambler from the Stars (1935) by Robert Bloch- The Haunter of the Dark (1936) by H.P. Lovecraft- The Shadow from the Steeple (1950) by Robert Bloch- Notebook Found in a Deserted House (1951) by Robert Bloch- The Salem Horror (1937) by Henry Kuttner- The Terror from the Depths (1976) by Fritz Leiber- Rising with Surtsey (1971) by Brian Lumley- Cold Print (1969) by Ramsey Campbell- The Return of the Lloigor (1969) by Colin Wilson- My Boat (1976) by Joanna Russ- Sticks (1974) by Karl Edward Wagner- The Freshman (1979) by Philip José Farmer- Jerusalem's Lot (1978) by Stephen King- Discovery of the Ghooric Zone (1977) by Richard A. LupoffCover illustration by John Jude Palencar
The Atlantis Gene
A.G. Riddle - 2013
They will set off a race to unravel the deepest secrets of human existence--and an event that could change humanity forever.
Mythology
Edith Hamilton - 1942
We meet the Greek gods on Olympus and Norse gods in Valhalla. We follow the drama of the Trojan War and the wanderings of Odysseus. We hear the tales of Jason and the Golden Fleece, Cupid and Psyche, and mighty King Midas. We discover the origins of the names of the constellations. And we recognize reference points for countless works of art, literature, and cultural inquiry--from Freud's Oedipus complex to Wagner's Ring Cycle of operas to Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra. Praised throughout the world for its authority and lucidity, Mythology is Edith Hamilton's masterpiece--the standard by which all other books on mythology are measured.
Bobby Singer's Guide to Hunting
David Reed - 2011
In twenty-four hours I’m gonna lose my memory. So here’s everything you need to know.Monsters, demons, angels, vampires, the boogeyman under your bed: I’ve seen it, I’ve hunted it, I’ve killed it. I’m not the only hunter out here, but there aren’t as many as there used to be. Not near as many as there need to be. I’ve learned everything I can about every damned critter that walks, crawls, or flies, and I’m not gonna let that all be for nothing. I’m not going down without a fight. I’m not letting everything I’ve learned disappear. So that’s what you’re holding in your hands—everything I know. Anything that’d be useful for Sam, Dean, and the hunters that come after me.It’s a guide to hunting...it’s a guide to me. My last will and testament. Ya idjits.