The novel tells of the doomed love between the Carthaginian princess Salammbô and the rebel leader Matho, set against the backdrop of the real revolt of Carthage's unpaid mercenaries after the First Punic War.
I was enchanted by Flaubert's combination of flamboyant 19th-century French romanticism with meticulous historical research. The culture depicted is as alien as anything in science fiction or fantasy but seems utterly real.
All the characters are larger-than-life, everything is over-the-top, it's great fun and a thrilling read.
Sin duda, Salambó es una novela histórica hasta ahora no superada, y que desde su aparición ha servido como modelo del género. Los acontecimientos que narra ocurren al finalizar la primera guerra púnica, cuando el ejercito de mercenarios formado por hombres de distintos pueblos se levanta contra Cartago. Las profundas investigaciones y lecturas que llevó a cabo Flaubert para esta prodigiosa reconstrucción histórica lo acercaron tanto a aquella realidad, que incluso hoy sigue causando asombro entre los estudiosos de esa antigua civilización. Descubrimientos arqueológicos posteriores a su muerte han demostrado la veracidad de muchos de sus detalles sobre aquella civilización…
I
started playing Dungeons & Dragons back in 1977, and this book chronicles
the rise of the game and the conflicts among the men who created it: Gary Gygax
and Dave Arneson.
I saw a lot of this history from the outside, via hobby
magazines and gossip, but Peterson's exhaustive and detailed research helped me
understand what was really going on. He paints a fair picture of flawed people
trying to understand the new type of game they invented, and come to grips with
the new hobby community that grew up around it.
One comes away feeling a little
sorry for two creators who lost their friendship over business, then lost the
business as well.
The story of the arcane table-top game that became a pop culture phenomenon and the long-running legal battle waged by its cocreators.
When Dungeons & Dragons was first released to a small hobby community, it hardly seemed destined for mainstream success--and yet this arcane tabletop role-playing game became an unlikely pop culture phenomenon. In Game Wizards, Jon Peterson chronicles the rise of Dungeons & Dragons from hobbyist pastime to mass market sensation, from the initial collaboration to the later feud of its creators, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. As the game's fiftieth anniversary approaches, Peterson--a noted authority on role-playing games--explains…
Shards of Earth is a rip-roaring science fiction
adventure story full of the things I love.
A rag-tag space
salvage crew trying to survive and maybe profit against a backdrop of war and
invasion finds themselves at the very center of events with the fate of
humanity in the balance. There are vast, inscrutable alien death machines
wrecking whole planets for reasons nobody can figure out. It even has weird human
societies and weirder extraterrestrials.
It's a great space opera with vivid
characters, amazing but plausible technology, and a grand scope.
From the author of the thrilling science-fiction epic Children of Time, winner of the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award. Shards of Earth is the first high-octane, far-future space adventure in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Final Architecture trilogy.
'One of the most interesting and accomplished writers in speculative fiction' - Christopher Paolini
The war is over. Its heroes forgotten. Until one chance discovery . . .
Idris has neither aged nor slept since they remade his mind in the war. And one of humanity's heroes now scrapes by on a freelance salvage vessel, to avoid the attention of greater powers.
Solana Sina is a scarab, salvaging
wrecked and abandoned space habitats among the Billion Worlds of the Tenth
Millennium. She and an oddball crew—a raven, a cyborg, and a dinosaur—board the
derelict colony Safdaghar, hoping to score some loot before the colony gets
catapulted into the outer reaches of the Solar System.
But Solana and the
scarabs come face-to-face with a gang of vicious pirates looking for slaves and
treasure and a mysterious stranger intent on preserving an explosive secret.
Solana must overcome her own horrifying past to survive and escape before it’s
too late.
But there’s an even more dangerous threat lurking in the dark
passages and ruined buildings of Safdaghar...
