So has her talent for clever dialogue, and pointed social commentary with a light touch.The Anvil of the World is her first fantasy novel, a journey across a fantastic landscape filled with bizarre creatures, human and otherwise. It is the tale of Smith, of the large extended family of Smiths, of the Children of the Sun. They are a race given to blood feuds, and Smith was formerly an extremely successful assassin. Now he has wearied of his work and is trying to retire in another country, to live an honest life in obscurity in spite of all those who have sworn to kill him.His problems begin when he agrees to be the master of a caravan from the inland city of Troon to the seaside city of Salesh. The caravan is dogged with murder, magic, and the brooding image of the Master of the Mountain, a powerful demon, looking down from his mountain kingdom upon the greenlands and the travelers passing below. In Salesh, Smith becomes an innkeeper, but on the journey he befriended the young Lord Ermenwyr, a decadent demonic half-breed. Each time Ermenwyr turns up, he brings new trouble with him.The outgrowth of stories Baker has been writing since childhood, as engaging as Tolkien and yet nothing like him, Smith's adventure is certainly the only fantasy on record with a white-uniformed nurse, gourmet cuisine, one hundred and forty-four glass butterflies, and a steamboat. This is a book filled with intrigue, romance, sudden violence, and moments of emotional impact, a cast of charming characters, and echoes of the fantasy tradition from Lord Dunsany and Fritz Leiber to Jack Vance and Roger Zelazny.

    As she confronts the Queen of Fairies and battles an ancient, bodiless evil, she is aided (and most ably abetted) by the six-inch-high, fightin', stealin', drinkin' Wee Free Men.Laugh-out-loud humor and breathtaking action combine in the books that launched the unforgettable adventures of a determined young witch and her tiny but fierce blue friends.

    This text uses place names to describe some of these meanings.

    It's not their fault that they decide to settle on Lucky, a raccoon god of good fortune. At first, everything seems to be working fine. But they will soon learn that the world of divine powers is not to be entered into casually.

    Opposing him, though, is the evil and manipulative Lord Hong and his army of 750,000 men.Oh?Rincewind is also aided by Twoflower - Discworld's first tourist and the author of a subversive book, about his visit to Ankh-Morpork, which has inspired the rebels in their struggle for freedom.The book is called "What I Did On My Holidays".

    Unfortunately, this results in no customers, no cargo jobs and no hope of paying off the huge loan on his precious ship.When a debt collector kicks in his airlock and threatens his life, Hal grabs the nearest job and blasts off without reading the fine print. Can he deliver the freight and pay off his debt, or is this Hal’s last cargo run?

    But Lister didn't have a choice. All he remembered was going on a birthday celebration pub crawl through London. When he came to his senses again, with nothing in his pockets but a passport in the name of Emily Berkenstein.So he did the only thing he could. Amazed to discover they would actually hire him, he joined the space corps----and found himself aboard Red Dwarf, a spaceship as big as a small city that, six or seven years from now, would get him back to Earth. What Lister couldn't forsee was that he'd inadvertently signed up for a one--way jaunt three million years into the future---a future which would see him the last living member of the human race, with only a hologram crew mate and a highly evolved cat for company. Of course, that was before the ship broke the light barrier and things began to get really weird...

    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!

    A circle of fried doughy perfection. A source of comfort in trying times, perhaps. For Theo Bernstein, however, it is far, far more.Things have been going pretty badly for Theo Bernstein. An unfortunate accident at work has lost him his job (and his work involved a Very Very Large Hadron Collider, so he's unlikely to get it back). His wife has left him. And he doesn't have any money.Before Theo has time to fully appreciate the pointlessness of his own miserable existence, news arrives that his good friend Professor Pieter van Goyen, renowned physicist and Nobel laureate, has died.By leaving the apparently worthless contents of his safety deposit to Theo, however, the professor has set him on a quest of epic proportions. A journey that will rewrite the laws of physics. A battle to save humanity itself.This is the tale of a man who had nothing and gave it all up to find his destiny -- and a doughnut.

    The next minute, they're in a horse-drawn cart surrounded by soldiers pointing crossbows at them. Tim now has the voice and physique of a prepubescent girl. Dave finds that while he lost a foot or two in height, he somehow acquired a suit of armor and a badass beard. Julian's ears have grown ridiculously long and pointy. And Cooper... well Cooper has gotten himself a set of tusks, a pair of clawed hands, and a bad case of the shits. He also finds that he's carrying a bag with a human head in it - a head that he had chopped off when they were still just playing a game.Shit just got real, and if they want to survive, these four friends are going to have to tap into some baser instincts they didn't even know existed in their fast-food and pizza delivery world.It's fight, flight, or try to convince the people who are trying to kill them that they don't really exist.Meanwhile, a sadistic game master sits back in the real world eating their fried chicken.

    There's just one problem: They're hideously ugly and they smell like rotting fish. So getting humanity's trust is a challenge. The Yherajk need someone who can help them close the deal. Enter Thomas Stein, who knows something about closing deals. He's one of Hollywood's hottest young agents. But although Stein may have just concluded the biggest deal of his career, it's quite another thing to negotiate for an entire alien race. To earn his percentage this time, he's going to need all the smarts, skills, and wits he can muster.

    Smart, dedicated, gorgeous, and, thanks to her last movie before she hung up on Hollywood, rich, she's a pleasure to oblige when she says Rob has to witness this channeler Ariaura's act--on her, not the Eye's, nickel--despite channelers being so last year. It's quite a show, all right, for in the midst of Ariaura's particular ancient wise guy's basso spiel, a gravelly baritone interrupts (both voices emanate from the channeler's female mouth) to berate the audience as "yaps" and the act as "claptrap." Why is Ariaura undermining herself? Or is she? After all, she angrily accuses Rob and Kildy of scheming to destroy her. Could the baritone belong to a genuine channeled spirit? Willis, one of sf's most spirited writers, rounds on the New Age; pays tribute to a great, skeptical journalist; and affectionately parodies pulp fiction at its best in this irresistible entertainment.

    When Greyboar, a professional strangler, discovers the Supreme Philosophy of Life, he becomes a new man--but how can a villain in good standing pay the bills with his philosophical exploration getting in the way? Then Greyboar's long-lost sister asks him to help persecuted dwarves escape their human oppressors.

    Told in the same fanciful, irreverent style as the Hitchhiker trilogy, with scraps of scripts, letters and comments from Adams, Don't Panic is the perfect companion to one of the most successful series in publishing history.

    Incomprehensible horrors from beyond are going to devour our world but that’s no excuse to get all emotional about it. Morag Murray works for the secret government organisation responsible for making sure the apocalypse goes as smoothly and as quietly as possible. In her first week on the job, Morag has to hunt down a man-eating starfish, solve a supernatural murder and, if she’s got time, prevent her own inevitable death. The first book in a new comedy series by the creators of ‘Clovenhoof’, Oddjobs is a sideswipe at the world of work and a fantastical adventure featuring amphibian wannabe gangstas, mad old cat ladies, ancient gods, apocalyptic scrabble, fish porn, telepathic curry and, possibly, the end of the world before the weekend.