Showing results by narrator "Gabrielle de Cuir" in All Categories

Silvariah Frandelle, a brilliant and beautiful business woman, falls from wealth and success into exile and poverty, indentured - barely one step above slavery - as an off-world laborer to escape prison. Her last calculated risk as a free woman, paid for with years of service, becomes the key to surviving hostile environments. Space, gravity, and Mars wastelands were expected. Intrusive AIs, obscure experiments, and shadowy foes were not.

Dedicated to keeping her home immaculate and organized, Evangeline Knapp runs a tight ship, with the Knapp family constantly on edge. Meanwhile, her husband Lester, a dreamer, drifts through his bookkeeping job. Both feel depressed and out of place. Suddenly, after a near-fatal accident, their roles are reversed: Lester is confined to home in a wheelchair and his wife must work to support the family. Evangeline dedicates herself to improvement and customer service, something she learned working in her father’s store as a child.

It is the year 2049, and humanity is on the brink of extinction. Tania Deeley has always been told that she's a rarity: a human child in a world where most children are sophisticated androids manufactured by Oxted Corporation. When a decline in global fertility ensued, it was the creation of these near-perfect human copies, called teknoids, that helped to prevent the utter collapse of society.

The year is 1666. The king and parliament vie for power, fighting one another with politics and armies alike. Below, the faerie court has enemies of its own. The old ways are breaking down, and no one knows what will rise in their place. But now, a greater threat has come, one that could destroy everything. In the house of a sleeping baker, a spark leaps free of the oven - and ignites a blaze that will burn London to the ground.

Lewis Dodd, a young, troubled composer, arrives at “Sanger’s Circus”, a wild gathering consisting of precocious children, a slovenly mistress, and an assortment of hangers-on in the Austrian Alps overseen by the eccentric Albert Sanger, a composer himself. Tessa, Sanger’s lively 14-year-old daughter, falls in love with their handsome visitor. After Albert’s death leaves Tessa and her siblings penniless, they must implore extended family members for assistance. Florence, Tessa’s 28-year-old cousin, graciously steps in to help and she falls in love with Lewis.

After the world's governments collapsed, the corporations took control. Houston's Pulsystems has sent an expedition to the lost Martian colony of Frontera to search for survivors, but Reese, aging hero of the US space program, knows better. The colonists are not only alive; they have discovered a secret so devastating that the new rulers of Earth will stop at nothing to own it.

At first blush, Widdershins is a conventional haunted house story involving an unsuccessful writer who moves into an empty house in hope that isolation will help his failing creativity. His sensitivity and imagination are enhanced by his seclusion, but his art, his only friend, and his sanity are all destroyed in the process. It can be interpreted as narrating the gradual possession of the protagonist by a mysterious, possessive feminine spirit, or as a realistic description of a psychotic outbreak culminating in catatonia and murder, told from the psychotic subject’s view.

The Crux is the story of group of women who move from New England to Colorado in order to run a boardinghouse for men. One of these women, the young Vivian Lane, falls in love with a man who has both gonorrhea and syphilis. It then falls to Vivian, when she learns of his illnesses, to decide whether she should marry and have children with this man. She is torn between her own heart and the “duty” of motherhood, as one doctor in the novel puts it, to have children with a healthy father.

Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, with the help of his friend newspaper reporter Hutchison Hatch, solves a variety of mysteries using cold, hard logic. No matter how twisted the trail of clues or how clever the perpetrator, Professor Van Dusen, aptly dubbed “The Thinking Machine”, reminds us that “two and two make four, not some times, but all the time”.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction has submitted ten of its best of 2002. Although the collection is a veritable cornucopia of styles and subjects, each story is somehow notable for its compassion and humanity.

Livvy Foster has a new heart and home and a place in the powerful halls of House Windhook. The fall of Sliver was only the beginning of a civil war that sees angels from across the sky challenge each other to lead a world in which the past and the future are connected by a storm crafted from time, ambition, and power. When House Selinus attempts to bend the light of days in order to become the supreme power in an apocalyptic future, they confront a goddess who is older than time itself - and she'll stop at nothing to get the one soul who escaped her deadly grasp: Livvy.

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.

Buffy - a fat, 40ish, divorced mother - encounters a talking frog and, ignoring the warnings of fairy tales, does not turn the frog back into a prince. Trouble ensues when Buffy's rebellious teenage daughter Emily does kiss the frog; soon she and handsome Prince Adamus disappear into the enchanted land of Fair Peril. It is up to Buffy to rescue Emily and, in the process, learn that magic does exist in the most ordinary of lives.

Hooking up, marriage, childbirth, infidelity, divorce, menopause, widowhood - women's lives have many stages, changes, and challenges. A prevailing question on women's minds as they age is, "How do I handle the shifts in my sexuality caused by these transitions?" In Sex After…, veteran journalist and New York Times best-selling author Iris Krasnow tackles this question head-on. Krasnow traveled the country, interviewing over 150 women, from waitresses to CEOs, ages 20 to 88. Here she shares their varied stories.

Lightspeed was founded on the core idea that all science fiction is real science fiction and that science fiction is vast. It is inclusive. Science fiction is about people, and queer people, no matter how they identify, are a big part of that. They always have been. They're just sometimes harder to see. So, in the interests of visibility, Queers Destroy Science Fiction! shows just how wide the spectrum of sexuality and gender identity can really be.

These ladies aren't waiting. Twenty best-selling and award-winning authors offer enchanting tales of women and girls forging paths through darkness and peril. Cleverness, curiosity, and determination make worthy heroines in fantastical new worlds. Featuring stories by: Elmdea Adams, Sarah Bartsch, Robyn Bennis, Lou J. Berger & Ian Berger, Jeffrey Cook & Katherine Perkins, Katie Cross, Lee French, Fulvio Gatti, Connie J. Jasperson, Frog and Esther Jones, Edward J. Knight, Robert J. McCarter, Jody Lynn Nye, Raven Oak, Dawn Vogel, Matt Youngmark, and Jeremy Zimmerman.

Young Jennifer is forced to put all of her extraordinary gifts to the test when the land of Rhadaz faces its final battle against the forces of a mad emperor and the influences of death-worshiping outer worlds.

Lord Angle Theta and his men seemed unstoppable and unbeatable, no matter the odds. But when they met their match in the swamps of storied jutenheim, Lomerian blood ran like rivers. Ector and Malcolm Eotrus had a simple duty: Keep their family's mighty fortress safe, as had their ancestors for untold centuries. They failed. Time and again, Lomerian wizards conquered challenges that brawn and brain alone could not master. But magic has a weighty price. Even the greatest sorcerers cannot escape the Wizard's Toll.

Storytellers have long imagined what exists beyond the edges of the map. The need to seek and discover the unknown is embedded in who we are, no matter the culture or era. To celebrate this sense of wonder, award-winning editor John Joseph Adams has gathered together some of the best SF&F writers working today, collecting adventure and mystery in this spectacular anthology. Explore the rich tradition begun centuries ago with this all-new compilation full of imagination and delights. What lies beyond the edge of the unknown? Only you, brave listener, can find out.

Leigh Koslow doesn't care who claims to see the specter of a Civil War soldier skulking around her neighbor's farm; she does not believe in ghosts. Never mind that the farm in question was settled by a veteran of the Battle of Gettysburg, and never mind that its occupants have complained of floating lights, shadowy figures, and poltergeist-style vandalism for a solid half century. When her amiable neighbor Archie Pratt, beloved captain of a local unit of reenactors, vanishes from the farmhouse without a trace, Leigh is certain there is a rational explanation.