Showing results by narrator "Stefan Rudnicki" in All Categories

Half-Navajo geologist Jamie Waterman has been selected for the ground team of the first manned expedition to our mysterious neighbor planet. Joining an international team of astronauts and scientists, he endures the rigors of training, the dangers of traveling an incredible distance in space, the challenges of an alien landscape, and the personal and political conflicts that arise when the team must face the most shocking discovery of all.

The colony world Adirondack and Silvern fell to the Troft forces almost without a struggle. Outnumbered and on the defensive, Earth made a desperate decision. It would attack the aliens not from space, but on the ground - with forces the Trofts did not even suspect. Thus were created the cobras, a guerrilla force whose weapons were surgically implanted, invisible to the unsuspecting eye, yet undeniably deadly.

Raised in a small Native American village by the sea, Thomas Witka Just has just married his childhood sweetheart when an ill-fated decision to fight in Vietnam changes his life forever. Cut off from his community and traumatized by war, he finds refuge in another tribal village there and fathers a child with another woman. When he returns home many years later, he finds his tribe in conflict over a decision to hunt a whale, a spiritual symbol for his people.

The mob couldn’t kill him, the cops couldn’t catch him, and even time wouldn’t slow him down. His name’s Nolan...a shrewd, restless tough guy with a talent for theft. With a lifetime of heists under his belt and a bullet in his side, he’s ready to retire. And the Mafia’s eager to help him along...permanently. They think he’s got a debt to pay - with his life. But at all these years, they might be willing to settle for 100 grand instead. Nolan’s got to pull a bank job to try to save his ass.

The planet Majipoor is shared by humans and several alien races, including four-armed Skandars, three-eyed Liiman, and the native, shape-shifting Metamorphs. All are watched over by the King of Dreams, the labyrinth-dwelling Pontifex, and the priestess of the Isle of Sleep, while the Coronal officially rules from atop Castle Mount.

Men of War on the Dorsai worlds, men of Faith on the Friendly Worlds of Harmony and Association, men of Science, the Exotics of Kultis and Mara, and the Splinter cultures which had produced even stranger new talents. Those who knew said it was the Dorsai who supplied soldiers to the sixteen worlds. The Friendlies supplied cannon fodder, common soldiers who could be relied on to obey orders at all times. But even cannon fodder can sometimes produce genius.

A young gunslinger is changed for the better by meeting a beautiful woman. A classic range-war Western, this novel features that powerful, romantic, strangely compelling vision of the American West for which L'Amour's fiction is known. In the author's words, "It was a land where nothing was small, nothing was simple. Everything, the lives of men and the stories they told, ran to extremes."

Early one morning in West Berlin, a nervous courier delivers the handwritten manuscript of a dissident Russian novel to Paul Christopher. Minutes after the handoff, the courier's spine is neatly snapped by an impact with a passing black sedan. Meanwhile, in Rome, Christopher's wife Cathy takes a famous film director as a lover to stir her husband out of the stoicism that defines his personality.

The war is over, yet Dr. Doll, a loner and "moderate pessimist", lives in constant fear. By night, he is still haunted by nightmarish images of the bombsite in which he is trapped - he, and the rest of Germany. More than anything, he wishes to vanquish the demon of collective guilt, but he is unable to right any wrongs, especially in his position as mayor of a small town in northeast Germany that has been occupied by the Red Army. Dr. Doll flees this place for Berlin, where he finds escape in a morphine addiction: each dose is a "small death."

North America, 2027. Southern California is a developer's dream gone mad: an endless sprawl of condos, freeways, and malls. Jim McPherson, the affluent son of a defense contractor, is a young man lost in a world of fast cars, casual sex, and designer drugs. But his descent in to the shadowy underground of industrial terrorism brings him into a shattering confrontation with his family, his goals, and his ideals.

“Investments” finds Gareth Martinez has accepted a meaningless post as Inspector General of Chee, a newly settled world. Intending nothing more than a pleasant vacation with his family, he first stumbles across a murderous conspiracy. In “The Stickpin,” set in the Naxid War, Caroline Sula leads the resistance against the Naxid occupiers, and shows how a pleasant afternoon stroll can have deadly consequences to the enemy. Then in Impersonations, Caroline Sula has been posted to the planet Earth, a dismal backwater where careers go to die.

Even now, after more than 15 years, it is hard to see the invasion of Iraq through the cool, considered gaze of history. For too many people, the damage is still too palpable, and still unfolding. Most of the major players in that decision are still with us, and few of them are not haunted by it, in one way or another. Perhaps it's that combination, the passage of the years and the still unresolved trauma, that explains why so many protagonists opened up so fully for the first time to Robert Draper.

The Age of Louis XIV is the biography of a period (1648 - 1715) that Spengler considered the apex of modern European civilization. "Some centuries hence," Frederick the Great correctly predicted to Voltaire, "they will translate the good authors of the age of Pericles and Augustus." Those authors are lovingly treated here.

Terraform hones the predictive capacity of science fiction and seeks new, vivid, and visceral ways to depict the future we’re hurtling toward, translating the decay and anxiety that surround us into something else, something unexpected, something that burns like a beacon and upends the conventional ideas of where we’ll end up next. Section by section—Watch/Worlds/Burn—the book takes on surveillance, artificial intelligence, and climate collapse. With a potent roster of established names and rising talents, it confronts the issues that orbit our everyday existence.

The Damned & Other Stories of the Macabre is Skyboat Media’s second original compilation of stories by Algernon Blackwood, featuring six of his most unique and macabre stories that contemplate the true meaning of reality and nature of the making of the world.

This original compilation from Skyboat Media features the most inventive and poetic of Alexander Pushkin’s short fiction. Exposed to French culture at a young age, Pushkin’s work reflects these sensibilities, and he combines this with stories of his Russian ancestors that his grandmother would relate to him and his siblings during their summers near Moscow.

All eyes are on famous prosecutor Teodor Szacki when he investigates a skeleton discovered at a construction site in the idyllic Polish city of Olsztyn. Old bones come as no shock to anyone in this part of Poland, but it turns out these remains are fresh, the flesh chemically removed. Szacki questions the dead man's wife, only to be left with a suspicion she's hiding something. Then another victim surfaces - a violent husband, alive but maimed - giving rise to a theory: someone's targeting domestic abusers.

Sherlock Holmes has not only captivated readers for more than a century and a quarter, he has fascinated writers as well. It is little wonder, then, that when the renowned Sherlockians Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger invited their writer-friends and colleagues to be inspired by the Holmes canon, a cornucopia of stories sprang forth. Now, King and Klinger have invited another 15 masters to become In League with Sherlock Holmes. The contributors to this volume include award-winning authors of horror, thrillers, mysteries, westerns, and science fiction.

Empathic Flinx and his minidrag, Pip, have saved the universe more times than they can count, but the return of an old friend pulls the duo from their retirement and plunges them into a story of intrigue and imagination. The planet of Largess has recently opened itself to trade with the human-dominated Commonwealth. But when the daughter of a powerful chieftain goes missing, authorities believe a covert agent to be the cause. They need someone to track down the princess and roust the troublemaker and to do so without alerting the whole planet.

His very name inspires awe, horror, and, for some of the greatest masters of contemporary science fiction, a strong affection. Find out why in this special collector's edition of the original 1932 novelization of Wallace and Cooper's movie that includes commentary by masters of science fiction Ray Bradbury, Ray Harryhausen, Orson Scott Card, Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, Catherine Asaro, Jack Williamson, and Marc Zicree.