検索キーワード： ナレーター "Stefan-Rudnicki" すべてのカテゴリー

Edgar Allan Poe wrote “The Masque of the Red Death” nearly 180 years ago, yet its narrative and characters continue to mystify and captivate. The short story is driven by Prince Prospero’s attempt to evade the “Red Death”, a fatal plague infecting his kingdom, by hiding in his abbey, where he indulges in pleasures and delights with other nobles. He soon finds out that no one can escape their end. Steven Archer has recast the characters of “The Masque” and illuminated the narrative in a novel and perhaps more visceral light.

Science fiction dwells mostly in the realm of possibility, where mysteries proliferate nevertheless, meaning is never static, and “time and history have convinced us that things are not as they seem”. So, too, does all language, argues Samuel Delany, in his vigorous justification for the writing life. Chronicling his struggle with dyslexia, the evolution of his gay and Black identity during the AIDS crisis, and his experiences and relationships through five decades as a writer of fiction and nonfiction, Delany is a longtime observer of language’s inner workings. 

Maxim Jakubowski has edited all the great names in crime fiction, and stories from his anthologies have won the CWA Dagger six times. Now he has collected 19 Dagger Award-winning stories in one volume, making it the first retrospective deep dive into the CWA’s archive of Dagger Award winners. Edgy, twisted, and disturbing, Daggers Drawn is visceral and thrilling collection showcasing the very best modern crime fiction has to offer.

Civilization has an off switch. The Russians call it Lunnaya Pesnya. Moon Song. They bring the device aboard the International Space Station disguised as an experimental electromagnetic propulsion system. Just a harmless EmDrive prototype, ferried into space for testing in microgravity. But the device is not what it appears to be, and it’s far from harmless. When military cosmonauts hijack the ISS, Russia’s plans of global conquest are revealed. Moon Song is a game-changing electromagnetic pulse weapon, capable of attacking any location on Earth from orbit.

The Dread Empire of the Shaa is no more, following the death of the last oppressor. But freedom remains elusive for the myriad sentient races enslaved for 10 centuries, as an even greater terror arises. The Naxids - a powerful insectoid species themselves subjugated until the recent Shaa demise - plan to fill the vacuum with their own bloody domination and have already won a shattering victory with superior force and unimaginable cruelty. But two heroes survived the carnage at Magaria: Lord Gareth Martinez and the fiery, mysterious gun pilot Lady Caroline Sula.

For millennia, the Shaa have subjugated the universe, forcing the myriad sentient races to bow to their joyless tyranny. But the Shaa will soon be no more. The Dread Empire is in its rapidly fading twilight, and with its impending fall comes the promise of a new galactic order...and bloody chaos. A young Terran naval officer marked by his lowly birth, Lt. Gareth Martinez is the first to recognize the insidious plot of the Naxid - the powerful, warlike insectoid society that was enslaved before all others - to replace the masters’ despotic rule with their own.

Silvariah and Walter’s little girl is in danger, and facing the tyrant, Penn, is the only recourse left. In a brazen act of desperation, they travel to the Moon, convinced it holds the secret to his nefarious empire. They know Penn is baiting them. They go anyway. When Scarlet disappears, they face off against their enemy with all their wits and strength, hoping it will be enough. Penn is confident he can’t lose - but there are factors no one could have anticipated.

Working on opposite sides of the galaxy - one in deep space, the other undercover on an occupied planet - and haunted by personal ghosts, Captain Gareth Martinez and Lieutenant Lady Caroline Sula fight to save the Empire from the vicious alien Naxid. In a desperate, audacious bid to stop the Naxid fleet, Martinez makes a move that could win the war…and lose his career. Meanwhile, Sula’s guerilla tactics may not be enough to stop the Naxid - until she tries one deadly final gambit. 

After the death of her soulbonded 20 years ago, Lynia has struggled to find her place. Her son, Lyr, has the estate well in hand, and there are no pressing duties for her to attend. Aside from keeping peace between their many visitors and ignoring her growing attraction to the cranky healer, her days blur into uncomfortable monotony. Not even her work doing research brings much excitement. Then an unexpected prophesy shoves her into sudden action - and the healer’s company - as a plague threatens all she holds dear.

In an unknown year (either 1800, 1801, or 1802 according to the later recollection of his brother) was born Hannali Innominee of the Okla Hannali District of the Choctaw Nation. Hannali would be a big man and would almost exactly fill a century. Hannali was a farmer, a blacksmith, a boatbuilder, a ferryman, a distiller, a tanner, and the founder of an estate that was a town. 

After a failed revolutionary attempt leads Abel, a young European explorer, to seek refuge in the primeval forests of Venezuela, the curious call of an unseen bird lures him deeper and deeper into the jungle, where he encounters the source of the siren song - a lovely, half-wild girl with mysterious powers. Thus, in the “green mansions” of the forest, begins the romance between Abel and Rima, who speaks the languages of birds and longs to return to the land of her birth.

Sam, the P.V.O. Kid! is a fun book that was created by Lifestyle Not A Trend LLC to teach children discipline; how to count, manage, and save money; and how to start a business.

Ghost ship Impris, lost during the War of a Thousand Suns, is the stuff of legend. Her very name conjures the perils of interstellar travel. But no mere legend, she is real - glimpsed on occasion in the hyperdimensional Flux and then gone. Her passengers and crew live on in a strange limbo, their fate hopelessly caught up in quantum defects in space-time, interstellar piracy, and galactic coverup.

The story begun in The Reefs of Time continues. The time-tides caused by Karellia’s defenses have brought the malicious Mindaru AI out of the deep past into the present, threatening Bandicut and Li-Jared, who have arrived at the backwater planet - Li-Jared’s homeworld - to find it on the brink of interplanetary war. Somehow they must forge a peace between Karellia and its neighboring world if the Mindaru threat is to be broken.

The Mindaru are dead, or so exiled Earthman John Bandicut and his alien companions believe, after their intervention to save the Orion Nebula and surrounding worlds. But now a part of this ancient and malicious AI colony is swarming toward the present from its birthplace deep in the past. Their opening: a temporal disturbance in the starstream, a hyperspatial thoroughfare used by myriad civilizations. The disturbance emanates from the planetary defenses of nearby Karellia, whose people know nothing of the starstream or the galaxy-threatening Mindaru.

John Bandicut and his company have been rewarded for their heroism in saving Shipworld. The prize: to be flung back into inhabited space — not to their home planets, as they had hoped, but to the bottom of an alien sea. Helpless and sinking, they are rescued by strange mer-creatures and brought to an undersea city, where a race of sea-people known as the Neri live in perpetual twilight. The Neri are well adapted to their world, but their survival is in jeopardy.

John Bandicut and his companions are summoned to a star-cloud called Starmaker, known to humans as the Orion Nebula, to discover what force threatens newborn stars - and possibly every world within a thousand light-years. Their journey takes them not just into the perils of a stellar nursery, but into confrontation with the Mindaru, a billion-year-old AI and adversary of life as they know it. The task is daunting. But with the aid of Deep and Dark, sentient clouds who are perhaps the strangest beings they have met yet in their exceedingly strange journey, there may be hope.

Orphaned in Poland at the age of 13, Tadeusz "Tad" Haska survived World War II on the run, narrowly evading the Nazis every step of the way. After the war, he daringly escaped jail from the Soviet Secret Police, fled to Sweden, and launched an elaborate plan to smuggle his wife in a coffin on an all-male naval ship. Discover how Tad's knowledge of nine languages helped him survive in the face of unspeakable adversity.

Katharine can’t believe what she’s seeing. Her world has always been planned and orderly, but now, she’s petrified that she’s going insane, and she’s equally afraid that she’s not. What if the strange creatures she’s seeing really are disappearing and the messages showing up in Latin actually mean something?

Dr. Becky Sorenson has found a cache of frogs with a very high mutation rate...and some odd behaviors. Dr. David Carter’s core earth samples seem to indicate the next polar reversal will be worse than predicted. And CDC researchers Jordan and Jillian are looking at a strange new disease. When the four scientists delve deeper, they discover they are all looking at the leading edge of a sweeping magnetic polar reversal. As humanity ignores their increasingly panicked warnings, the scientists will have to fight to save everyone...if they even can.