A collection of science fiction stories written by acclaimed author Poul Anderson.Poul Anderson is best known for sci-fi adventure stories in which larger-than-life characters succeed gleefully or fail heroically. Anderson's also famous for writing 'Call Me Joe' (not included in this volume) which featured the premise of a paralyzed man whose mind is remotely controlling an alien body. This same theme also appears in James Cameron's 2009 movie "Avatar" – similar enough that some reviewers are calling for Anderson to receive some form of credit.Included in this volume:Story One: Duel on SyrtisBold and ruthless, he was famed throughout the System as a big-game hunter. From the firedrakes of Mercury to the ice-crawlers of Pluto, he'd slain them all. But his trophy-room lacked one item; and now Riordan swore he'd bag the forbidden game that roamed the red deserts ... a Martian!Story Two: SecurityIn a world where Security is all-important, nothing can ever be secure. A mountain-climbing vacation may wind up in deep Space. Or loyalty may prove to be high treason. But it has its rewards...Story Three: The Valor of Cappen VarraWe have said that there are many and strange shadows, memories surviving from dim pasts, in this fantastic universe of ours...Story Four: Industrial RevolutionEver think how deadly a thing it is if a machine has amnesia—or how easily it can be arranged…Story Five: The Sensitive ManOne man stood between a power-hungry cabal and world mastery--but a man of unusual talents...These are the original and unabridged versions of these classic science fiction treasures. A must-have for fans of classic sci-fi!

    But she’s a welcoming committee that’s hard to ignore. Thin walls and thick defenses prove to be no match for her irresistible charm.The Winning HandTaking the biggest gamble of her life, Darcy Wallace slips her last three dollars into a slot machine—and hits the jackpot. But the real prize is casino manager Robert MacGregor. He’s not the marrying kind, but Darcy knows that true love is worth the risk…The MacGregor BridesThere is nothing Daniel MacGregor would rather see than his three eldest granddaughters—Laura, Gwendolyn, and Julia—married. But the three cousins have one-track minds, and love is taking a back seat to career success. Until Daniel handpicks three unsuspecting candidates for grooms—and throws them in their paths…The MacGregor GroomsFresh from the success of sending his granddaughters down the aisle, Daniel MacGregor turns his matchmaking sights on his stubbornly single grandsons: D.C., Duncan, and Ian. And though each man will put up a good fight, they’ll be no match for the women chosen by Daniel to tempt and tease them all the way to the altar. Rebellion & In from the ColdSet in 1745, Rebellion tells the story of Serena MacGregor, whose hatred of all things English extends to her brother’s friend Brigham Langston. He’ll prove himself worthy of the MacGregor’s respect, but piercing Serena’s pride will take all the passion he can muster. In from the Cold follows the MacGregors during the American Revolution. Injured minuteman Ian MacGregor flees into the wilderness, where he finds refuge for his body and soul with Irish spitfire Alanna Flynn.

    In the dim light the effect was distinctly pleasing. The camel's face was a study in pessimism, decorated with numerous abrasions, and it must be admitted that his coat was in that state of general negligence peculiar to camels--in fact, he needed to be cleaned and pressed--but distinctive he certainly was. He was majestic. He would have attracted attention in any gathering, if only by his melancholy cast of feature and the look of hunger lurking round his shadowy eyes.

    FOREVER.Had anyone told Alice Bell that her entire life would change course between one heartbeat and the next, she would have laughed. But that's all it took. One heartbeat. A blink, a breath, a second, and everything she knew and loved was gone.Her father was right. The monsters are real.To avenge her family, Ali must learn to fight the undead. To survive, she must learn to trust the baddest of the bad boys, Cole Holland. But Cole has secrets of his own, and if Ali isn't careful, those secrets might just prove to be more dangerous than the zombies.Don't miss FIRSTLIFE, book 1 of Gena Showalter's action-packed, romantic and exhilarating new series, the Everlife novels!

    Follow along as Michael Talbot, part-time prepper, along with his best friend BT “Big Tiny” and the anti-hero Mrs. Deneaux are pulled into another realm, seemingly spun from the mind of the ever stoned John the Tripper in a desperate bid to right what has gone wrong.

    Eleven Doctors, eleven stories, eleven unique interpretations of the Doctor, his terrifying alien enemies and his time-travelling adventures.

     The world is still reeling from the devastation of the final battle between the world’s strongest metahumans. Empire City has been left in shambles as it struggles to rebuild. Overnight, the world’s metabands, mysterious bracelets that offer their owner’s superhuman powers and abilities, have all ceased working. Guilt ridden over his possible hand in all of this, the masked vigilante Midnight has hung up his cowl. Instead of fighting crime, he now spends his sleepless nights searching for clues to recover the device that might be responsible for all of it before it can fall into the wrong hands. Along the way he meets Amanda Khan, a teenage girl with a metahuman history in search of her missing friend. Both find the clues to what they’re both searching for lead them to The Receptive, a secretive cult which offers a path to meta humanity to its most loyal followers and may just hold the answers to the missing device. Don't forget to check out the other books in the Meta series, including Meta, The Second Wave and Rise of The Circle.

    At the urging of Whorl’s religious leader, Patera Silk, the people left the ship for an uncertain future on Blue – a world already inhabited by the inhumi, blood-drinking aliens who take human form.Now The Book of the Short Sun carries the story forward to the years after the great exodus, to let Horn, narrator of the earlier work, tell his own story.Horn and his family have made a decent life for themselves on Blue, though crime, pollution and poverty have become so rampant in the city of New Viron that he is called upon to find Patera Silk. Horn must go to the still-orbiting Whorl and convince his old friend and mentor to return to Blue, for the legendary hero is the only one who can restore order and lead them to prosperity. But Horn isn’t even sure Silk still lives.Setting sail in a small boat, the aging Horn embarks on a long and difficult journey across the planet, trying to get to the Whorl. With the undine Seawrack, his adopted inhumi son, Krait, and his eldest son, Sinew, Horn makes it to the last working lander – only to be highjacked to the jungles of Green, where the inhumi imprison the passengers as slaves. There, he encounters the mysterious alien Neighbors who were once native to Blue, but whom the inhumi have all but exterminated. Horn joins their fight for freedom, is fatally wounded… and finds himself on another world, wearing a different body.As his inability to find Silk weighs heavily on his mind, Horn is further tormented by the fact that his new body bears a striking resemblance to the lost Caldé. In the end, he will have to answer a troubling question: has he truly failed in his sworn task, or has he become the very man he sought?Includes:On Blue's WatersIn Green's JunglesReturn To The Whorl

    In this series of perfectly rendered vignettes, written just as he was starting to find his comic voice, Kurt Vonnegut paints a warm, wise, and funny portrait of life in post—World War II America–a world where squabbling couples, high school geniuses, misfit office workers, and small-town lotharios struggle to adapt to changing technology, moral ambiguity, and unprecedented affluence. Here are tales both cautionary and hopeful, each brimming with Vonnegut's trademark humor and profound humanism. A family learns the downside of confiding their deepest secrets into a magical invention. A man finds himself in a Kafkaesque world of trouble after he runs afoul of the shady underworld boss who calls the shots in an upstate New York town. A quack psychiatrist turned "murder counselor" concocts a novel new outlet for his paranoid patients. While these stories reflect the anxieties of the postwar era that Vonnegut was so adept at capturing– and provide insight into the development of his early style–collectively, they have a timeless quality that makes them just as relevant today as when they were written. It's impossible to imagine any of these pieces flowing from the pen of another writer; each in its own way is unmistakably, quintessentially Vonnegut.Featuring a Foreword by author and longtime Vonnegut confidant Sidney Offit and illustrated with Vonnegut's characteristically insouciant line drawings, Look at the Birdie is an unexpected gift for readers who thought his unique voice had been stilled forever–and serves as a terrific introduction to his short fiction for anyone who has yet to experience his genius. Contents: Letter from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., to Walter J. Miller, 1951. Confido F U B A R Shout About It from the Housetops Ed Luby's Key Club A Song for Selma Hall of Mirrors The Nice Little People Hello, Red Little Drops of Water The Petrified Ants The Honor of a Newsboy Look at the Birdie King and Queen of the Universe The Good Explainer

    The minds of those long dead are taking over the bodies of the living, in increasingly alarming numbers. Joshua Calvert is desperately trying to recover a "doomsday weapon", an instrument that might blast the dead back into oblivion--but in the wrong hands, it could mean the end of the human race.

    Now Anders must decide quickly—stay and fight or cut cables and run.Either way, it’s too late. Someone has other plans for them. The trap has been set, they’ve rescued the woman and taken the bait, and before long Anders and what’s left of his dwindling crew must navigate with caution through the grips of the military and an especially vile outlaw.But Anders doesn’t captain just another team flying the black. With a genius mechanic who uses his ragtag high-tech machine shop to aid them in getting in and out of trouble, they’ve earned a reputation as the best of the best. With Anders’s careful planning, this motley crew must band together and flip the military to use them on a monster heist and dig themselves out from the heat pressing in from both sides of the law.Fly with them. They are clever, they are fierce, they are Lockheed Elite.

    "I just got caught in a downdraft and blown off course. Let me sit down for a moment, and then I'll be on my way. Speaking of way, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract."A tesseract (in case the reader doesn't know) is a wrinkle in time. To tell more would rob the reader of the enjoyment of Miss L'Engle's unusual book.

    It was featured in the episode "The Angels Take Manhattan", with The Doctor reading it.The story of "The Angels Take Manhattan" is formed in The Angel's Kiss: A Melody Malone Story.Synopsis:On some days, New York is one of the most beautiful places on Earth.This was one of the other days…Melody Malone, owner and sole employee of the Angel Detective Agency, has an unexpected caller. It’s movie star Rock Railton, and he thinks someone is out to kill him. When he mentions the ‘kiss of the Angel’, she takes the case. Angels are Melody’s business…At the press party for Railton’s latest movie, studio owner Max Kliener invites Melody to the film set of their next blockbuster. He’s obviously spotted her potential, and Melody is flattered when Kliener asks her to become a star. But the cost of fame, she’ll soon discover, is greater than anyone could possibly imagine.Will Melody be able to escape Kliener’s dastardly plan – before the Angels take Manhattan?

    He never saw them again. Their bodies were never found, and Adam himself was discovered with his back pressed against an oak tree and his shoes filled with blood. The Likeness: Still traumatised by her brush with a psychopath, Detective Cassie Maddox transfers out of the Murder squad and starts a relationship with fellow detective Sam O'Neill. When he calls her to the scene of his new case, she is shocked to find that the murdered girl is her double. Faithful Place: The course of Frank Mackey's life was set by one defining moment when he was nineteen. The moment his girlfriend, Rosie Daly, failed to turn up for their rendezvous in Faithful Place, failed to run away with him to London as they had planned. Broken Harbour: In Broken Harbour, a ghost estate outside Dublin - half-built, half-inhabited, half-abandoned - two children and their father are dead. The mother is on her way to intensive care. Scorcher Kennedy is given the case because he is the Murder squad's star detective. The Secret Place: Even in her exclusive boarding school, in the graceful golden world that Stephen has always longed for, bad things happen and people have secrets. The previous year, Christopher Harper, from the neighbouring boys' school, was found murdered on the grounds. The Trespasser: Being on the Dublin Murder squad is nothing like Detective Antoinette Conway dreamed. Her working life is a stream of thankless cases and harassment. Antoinette is tough, but she's getting close to the breaking point.

    Chapters: Harrison Bergeron, Epicac, 2br02b, Welcome to the Monkey House, Miss Temptation, Report on the Barnhouse Effect, All the King's Horses, Who Am I This Time?, Deer in the Works. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: "Harrison Bergeron" is a satirical, dystopian science fiction short story written by Kurt Vonnegut and first published in October 1961. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the story was re-published in the author's collection, Welcome to the Monkey House in 1968. In the story, social equality has been achieved by handicapping the more intelligent, athletic or beautiful members of society. For example, strength is handicapped by the requirement to carry weight, beauty by the requirement to wear a mask and so on. This is due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th amendments to the United States Constitution. This process is central to the society, designed so that no one will feel inferior to anyone else. Handicapping is overseen by the United States Handicapper General, Diana Moon-Glampers. Harrison Bergeron, the protagonist of the story, has exceptional intelligence, strength, and beauty, and thus has to bear enormous handicaps. These include headphones that play distracting noises, three hundred pounds of weight strapped to his body, eyeglasses designed to give him headaches, a rubber ball on his nose, black caps on his teeth, and shaven eyebrows. Despite these societal handicaps, he is able to invade a TV station, declare himself Emperor, strip himself of his handicaps, then dance with a ballerina whose handicaps he has also discarded. Both are shot dead by the brutal and relentless Handicapper General. The story is framed by an additional perspective from Bergeron's parents, who are w...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=18941