I'm a longtime fan of Octavia E. Butler, who often takes the reader to unexpected places with the originality of her characters and stories. Sadly, she passed much too young, age 58, leaving her fans with a fairly small number of books. Over the years I've kind of rationed my reading, not wanting to get to the point where I've nothing new of hers to read. So it's been a while since I've read any of her work, and Bloodchild did not disappoint.
A perfect introduction for new readers and a must-have for avid fans, this New York Times Notable Book includes "Bloodchild," winner of both the Hugo and the Nebula awards and "Speech Sounds," winner of the Hugo Award. Appearing in print for the first time, "Amnesty" is a story of a woman named Noah who works to negotiate the tense and co-dependent relationship between humans and a species of invaders. Also new to this collection is "The Book of Martha" which asks: What would you do if God granted you the ability—and responsibility—to save humanity from itself? Like all of Octavia…
I'm the perfect age for this book that is steeped in 1980s nostalgia. I listened to much of the same music on my Walkman and even worked in a VHS movie rental store—the cover design of the paperback mimics VHS packaging, including the "Be Kind Please Rewind" sticker. If you were in your teens or early twenties in the '80s you'll love all the references. If you weren't, you're getting a great glimpse into the time. And it's also truly creepy and scary!
The year is 1988. High school sophomores Abby and Gretchen have been best friends since fourth grade. But after an evening of skinny-dipping goes disastrously wrong, Gretchen begins to act different. She s moody. She s irritable. And bizarre incidents keep happening whenever she s nearby. Abby s investigation leads her to some startling discoveries and by the time their story reaches its terrifying conclusion, the fate of Abby and Gretchen will be determined by a single question: Is their friendship powerful enough to beat the devil? Like an unholy hybrid of Beaches and The Exorcist, My Best Friend s…
I'm a fan of classic sci-fi of the '50s, and you don't get much more classic than Andre Norton. There's a lot of interesting nuts and bolts stuff going on for a book written before we landed on the moon. Of course, the science is dated, the characters are all men, and there are a couple of unfortunate colonizer-type comments expressed toward extraterrestrials, but if you're able to look past those outdated viewpoints, it's an interesting yarn, and the beginning of a four-book series featuring the crew of the starship Solar Queen.
Stellar exploration—and depredation—in the exciting first novel in the Solar Queen series from a “superb storyteller” (The New York Times).
In the future, venturing out into the stars is more than a way for humanity to chart the cosmos—it’s big business. Every time a new planet is discovered, the highest bidder gets first dibs with exclusive property rights for a year. Anything they can find, they can keep.
The planet Limbo was considered a waste of rock to most, which is the only reason apprentice cargo master Dane Thorson and the rest of the crew of the Solar Queen could…
This collection features a dozen of my short stories, nine previously published in various anthologies and three which aren't available elsewhere. They cover the spectrum of speculative fiction, including the 1950s nostalgia of "The Day It Came from Beyond Outer Space," the Cthulhu comedy of "The Squid That Came to Phil's Basement," the military sci-fi of "Finders Keepers," the ambiguous reality of "The Thing From Over the Lake," the dark occult science of "The Final Ritual of Thomas Haumann," and the H. G. Wells homage "In the Time of the Martians," which brings together the characters of The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds.
The title story, "The Sad Rains of Mars"—published here for the first time—features a native Martian detective struggling to work with the Metropolitan Police on a murder in her jurisdiction on a Mars colonized by the Victorian British Empire. Also included are "The Shadows under Mariana Base," "The Ghosts of Glenmirror," and "On My Side," as well as "The Creature in Jay Cook Park" and "The Loneliness of Monsters,” two stories from the Tales of the Weird World War series, co-created by myself and William Leisner.
