This is the first comprehensive history of the world's roads, highways, bridges, and the people and vehicles that traverse them, from prehistoric times to the present. Encyclopedic in its scope, fascinating in its details, Ways of the World is a unique work for reference and browsing. Maxwell Lay considers the myriad aspects of roads and their users: the earliest pathways, the rise of wheeled vehicles and animals to pull them, the development of surfaced roads, the motives for road and bridge building, and the rise of cars and their influence on roads, cities, and society. The work is amply illustrated, well indexed and cross-referenced, and includes a chronology of road history and a full bibliography. It is indispensable for anyone interested in travel, history, geography, transportation, cars, or the history of technology.
There is only the war. Otto Behr is a German agent, fighting his Russian counterparts across three millennia, manipulating history for moments in time that can change everything. Only the remnants of two great nations stand and for Otto, the war is life itself, the last hope for his people. But in a world where realities shift and memory is never constant, nothing is certain, least of all the chance of a future with his Russian love...
In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity
With these dazzling stories, discover just how different things might have been! Alternate History: The What-If? fiction that has finally come into its own! Shedding light on the past by exploring what could have happened, this bold genre tantalizes your imagination and challenges your perceptions with thrilling reinventions of humanity's most climactic events. Enter worlds that are at once fanciful and familiar, where fact and fiction meld in a provocative landscape of infinite possibilities. . . . "An Ink from the New Moon" by A. A. Attanasio "We Could Do Worse" by Gregory Benford "The West Is Red" by Greg Costikyan "The Forest of Time" by Michael F. Flynn "Southpaw" by Bruce McAllister "Over There" by Mike Resnick "An Outpost of the Empire" by Robert Silverberg "Aristotle and the Gun" by L. Sprague de Camp "Must and Shall" by Harry Turtledove "How I Lost the Second World War and Helped Turn Back the German Invasion" by Gene Wolfe
In 1974, when John Dominelli was twenty years old, he left his home in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, on what he originally thought would be a six-month “working holiday” in New Zealand. However, not long into his journey, feeling the seductive pull of the vast and mysterious world, what started as a planned sojourn eventually turned into an epic three-year spiritual odyssey, taking him from New Zealand to Australia, Asia, India, Europe, and many points between. John’s journey was interrupted and enriched by a psycho-emotional “meltdown,” two serious illnesses, a powerful psychedelic interlude with psilocybin mushrooms, and a mystical encounter with Nisargadatta Maharaj, the now well-known sage from Bombay. An epic coming-of-age memoir that is part love letter to a bygone age and part inspirational text, stirring a desire in readers to seek out a life less ordinary.
Forget what you know about the nature of magic. In a world where an industrial revolution is powered by magic, Tyen, a student of archaeology, unearths a sentient book called Vella. Once a young sorcerer-bookbinder, Vella was transformed into a useful tool by one of the greatest sorcerers of history. Since then she has been collecting information, including a vital clue to the disaster Tyen's world faces. Elsewhere, in an land ruled by the priests, Rielle the dyer's daughter has been taught that to use magic is to steal from the Angels. Yet she knows she has a talent for it, and that there is a corrupter in the city willing to teach her how to use it -- should she dare to risk the Angels' wrath. But not everything is as Tyen and Rielle have been raised to believe. Not the nature of magic, nor the laws of their lands. . . and not even the people they trust. AN EPIC NEW FANTASY ADVENTURE BEGINS.
Hunted by Death, one man will face the forces of Hell to get back home. Former Baltimore cop Eustace "Ace" Grant is on a quest to find lost sorcery. An apprentice shaman, Ace walks the spirit realm in search of a cure for his terminal illness. When asked to recover a Civil War sword, Ace finds traces of a magic more potent than he's ever experienced. Forged in England by a smith in possession of the Primal Flame, the blade had been intended for a different battle entirely - the one at the end of time. That battle upon us, it's up to Ace to recover the sword. Without it, the world as we know it will be plunged into a nightmare. He'll find the sword or die trying. That is if his ghostly mentor, Atofo, will only let go of his soul...
The complexities and storms of the Telnarian Histories are brought to their unexpected and rousing climax. Following a palace coup, in the midst of intrigue and turmoil, Otto, the blond barbarian giant, King of the Otungs, a tribe of the Vandal Nation, has set aside the boy emperor, Aesilesius, and seized the throne of the vast, unstable, threatened Telnarian Empire. A raging torrent of complex, perilous events ensues. Can the throne be held? Can the empire survive? In The Emperor, we meet again fierce Abrogastes, the Far Grasper, lord of the Drisriaks, hegemonic tribe of the dreaded Aatii Nation, enemy to the Vandal Nation; his envious, treacherous son, Ingeld, aspirer to the High Seat of the Drisriaks; Sidonicus, devious, unscrupulous exarch of Telnar, seeker of power through the perversion of religion; envious Fulvius, his ambitious subordinate; a corrupt senate, an unruly citizenry, and private armies; Atalana, superstitious and cunning Empress Mother; her son, the reclusive boy emperor, Aesilesius; his lovely sisters, Alacida and Viviana, one of whom will learn chains and the whip; Julian, of the Aureliani, scion of an embittered and divided aristocracy; and many other players in the games of betrayal, blood, and power.
Anne Spencer between Worlds provides an indispensable reassessment of a critically neglected figure. Looking beyond the poetry she published during the Harlem Renaissance, Noelle Morrissette provides a new critical lens for interpreting Spencer’s expansive life and imagination through her archives, giving particular focus to her manuscripts authored from 1940 to 1975. Through its attentiveness to Spencer’s published and unpublished work, her work as a librarian and an activist, and the political dimensions of her writing, Anne Spencer between Worlds transforms our understanding of Spencer. It offers a sustained examination of poetry and ecology, and the relationships among race, gender, and archives, through its analysis of the manuscripts that Spencer produced and revised throughout her life. Morrissette argues that the expansiveness, depth, and range of Spencer’s writing has not been appreciated because she did not publish this incomplete, ongoing work. She also demonstrates that careful reading of the manuscripts challenges many of the assumptions that have governed Spencer’s reception. In Anne Spencer between Worlds, Spencer emerges as a deeply engaged political poet who used the creative possibilities of the unpublished manuscript to explore pressing political and cultural concerns and to develop experimental cultural forms. In her unpublished manuscripts, Spencer pushed beyond the lyric mode to develop experimental forms that were alert to the expressive possibilities of the epic, prose, correspondence, and mixed genres. Indeed, Spencer’s manuscripts serve as witnesses of historical and poetic junctions for the poet and for the attentive reader of her archives.