The Dragons of Babel
The Dragons of Babel

Author: Michael Swanwick

Publisher: Tor Books

Published: 2008-01-08

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 1429924993

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A fantasy masterpiece from a five-time Hugo Award winner! A war-dragon of Babel crashes in the idyllic fields of a post-industrialized Faerie and, dragging himself into the nearest village, declares himself king and makes young Will his lieutenant. Nightly, he crawls inside the young fey's brain to get a measure of what his subjects think. Forced out of his village, Will travels with female centaur soldiers, witnesses the violent clash of giants, and acquires a surrogate daughter, Esme, who has no knowledge of the past and may be immortal. Evacuated to the Tower of Babel -- infinitely high, infinitely vulgar, very much like New York City -- Will meets the confidence trickster Nat Whilk. Inside the Dread Tower, Will becomes a hero to the homeless living in the tunnels under the city, rises as an underling to a politician, and meets his one true love–a high-elven woman he dare not aspire to. You've heard of hard SF: This is hard fantasy from a master of the form. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Genreflecting
Genreflecting

Author: Diana Tixier Herald

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2019-05-24

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 1440858489

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Librarians who work with readers will find this well-loved guide to be a treasure trove of information. With descriptive annotations of thousands of genre titles mapped by genre and subgenre, this is the readers' advisor's go-to reference. Next to author, genre is the characteristic that readers use most to select reading material and the most trustworthy consideration for finding books readers will enjoy. With its detailed classification and pithy descriptions of titles, this book gives users valuable insights into what makes genre fiction appeal to readers. It is an invaluable aid for helping readers find books that they will enjoy reading. Providing a handy roadmap to popular genre literature, this guide helps librarians answer the perennial and often confounding question "What can I read next?" Herald and Stavole-Carter briefly describe thousands of popular fiction titles, classifying them into standard genres such as science fiction, fantasy, romance, historical fiction, and mystery. Within each genre, titles are broken down into more specific subgenres and themes. Detailed author, title, and subject indexes provide further access. As in previous editions, the focus of the guide is on recent releases and perennial reader favorites. In addition to covering new titles, this edition focuses more narrowly on the core genres and includes basic readers' advisory principles and techniques.

Evaporating Genres
Evaporating Genres

Author: Gary K. Wolfe

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 2012-01-01

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0819571040

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A series of provocative essays on how the fantastic genres evolve and grow In this wide-ranging series of essays, an award-winning science fiction critic explores how the related genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror evolve, merge, and finally "evaporate" into new and more dynamic forms. Beginning with a discussion of how literary readers "unlearned" how to read the fantastic during the heyday of realistic fiction, Gary K. Wolfe goes on to show how the fantastic reasserted itself in popular genre literature, and how these genres themselves grew increasingly unstable in terms of both narrative form and the worlds they portray. More detailed discussions of how specific contemporary writers have promoted this evolution are followed by a final essay examining how the competing discourses have led toward an emerging synthesis of critical approaches and vocabularies. The essays cover a vast range of authors and texts, and include substantial discussions of very current fiction published within the last few years.

Dragon
Dragon

Author: Martin Arnold

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2018-06-15

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 1780239416

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From the fire-breathing beasts of North European myth and legend to the Book of Revelation’s Great Red Dragon of Hell, from those supernatural agencies of imperial authority in ancient China to the so-called dragon-women who threaten male authority, dragons are a global phenomenon, one that has troubled humanity for thousands of years. These often scaly beasts take a wide variety of forms and meanings, but there is one thing they all have in common: our fear of their formidable power and, as a consequence, our need either to overcome, appease, or in some way assume that power as our own. In this fiery cultural history, Martin Arnold asks how these unifying impulses can be explained. Are they owed to our need to impose order on chaos in the form of a dragon-slaying hero? Is it our terror of nature, writ large, unleashed in its most destructive form? Or is the dragon nothing less than an expression of that greatest and most disturbing mystery of all: our mortality? Tracing the history of ideas about dragons from the earliest of times to Game of Thrones, Arnold explores exactly what it might be that calls forth such creatures from the darkest corners of our collective imagination.

War of Babel
War of Babel

Author: Angel Hong

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2019-04-09

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1532073038

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Zion is on an amazing journey. It begins with the cherishing of Nature—the fundamental beginning of enlightenment. His narrative spans from the dawn of man, perhaps before, to the twenty-first century. Blurring the lines between history, magic, tradition, and conspiracy theory, Zion’s quest culminates in a mind-bending twist. War of Babel is an engrossing and entertaining trip through humanity’s most positive and also darkest yearnings. Author Angel Hong reinterprets tales that thread through conspiratorial groups—particularly the freemasons and illuminati—in pursuit of regaining the first real civilization of mankind and saving the Earth before it’s completely destroyed.

Works
Works

Author: Emanuel Swedenborg

Publisher:

Published: 1814

Total Pages: 586

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Iron Dragon's Mother
The Iron Dragon's Mother

Author: Michael Swanwick

Publisher: Tor Books

Published: 2019-06-25

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 9781250198259

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Award-winning author Michael Swanwick returns to the gritty, post-industrial faerie world of his New York Times Notable Book The Iron Dragon’s Daughter with the standalone adventure fantasy The Iron Dragon’s Mother. Caitlin of House Sans Merci is the young half-human pilot of a sentient mechanical dragon. Returning from her first soul-stealing raid, she discovers an unwanted hitchhiker. When Caitlin is framed for the murder of her brother, to save herself she must disappear into Industrialized Faerie, looking for the one person who can clear her. Unfortunately, the stakes are higher than she knows. Her deeds will change her world forever.

Parabolas of Science Fiction
Parabolas of Science Fiction

Author: Brian Atterby

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 2013-10-21

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 081957368X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Essays about the inherently collaborative nature of science fiction As a geometric term, parabola suggests a narrative trajectory or story arc. In science fiction, parabolas take us from the known to the unknown. More concrete than themes, more complex than motifs, parabolas are combinations of meaningful setting, character, and action that lend themselves to endless redefinition and jazzlike improvisation. The fourteen original essays in this collection explore how the field of science fiction has developed as a complex of repetitions, influences, arguments, and broad conversations. This particular feature of the genre has been the source of much critical commentary, most notably through growing interest in the "sf megatext," a continually expanding archive of shared images, situations, plots, characters, settings, and themes found in science fiction across media. Contributors include Jane Donawerth, Terry Dowling, L. Timmel Duchamp, Rachel Haywood Ferreira, Pawel Frelik, David M. Higgins, Amy J. Ransom, John Rieder, Nicholas Ruddick, Graham Sleight, Gary K. Wolfe, and Lisa Yaszek.