Description: "On an isolated island, seven people with a desperate need for
money play a game conceived by an intelligence of perfect evil. The rules are
simple; each player will perform an act; each of the others must duplicate it,
or be eliminated. All that the players have in common is their desperation.
One is a mercenary soldier with a taste for proving his manhood through
self-torture. Another is a porno-starlet. A third is a perfectly ordinary
mother whose seven-year-old's life depends on a million-dollar medical
treatment...Each of the seven thinks he or she will do anything...all but one
of them are wrong."
Earthman's Burden
Description: "It could almost have been Earth - or so thought Ensign Alexander
Braithwaite Jones, who crash-landed on the planet Toka, 500 light-years from
the Solar System. Then he met the Hokas, a race of teddy-bear-like aliens,
with the astounding ability to transform outdated Earth stories into riotous
real-life adventures.
"From the guns and slang of an Old West saloon to a hair-raising drug bust in
Victorian England led by a button-nosed, pipe-puffing Hokan Sherlock Holmes,
the Hokas demand that Alex Jones live it all along with them.
"Suddenly his ordinary military career is changed into a crazy world of
intergalactic adveture, as he tries, without much success, to bring his furry,
alien charges along the road to civilization, sanity, and a more respectable
social rating in the Interbeing League."
The Gods Laughed
Description: "Since before the Age of Space itself, the men and women of
Planet Earth have yearned Outward, knowing on the deepest level that the
Race's future lay not in the soft comfort of the planetary womb, but in the
cold and empty spaces between the Stars, with the unknown rewards and certain
dangers of a future all unbounded. Always these brave ones have seen
themselves as the carriers of the lamp of civilized humanity unto alien
savages sitting in darkness. But what if reality is different - what if, on
the arrival of humans bearing the gift of millennia of culture and all our
aspirations, The Gods Laughed?"
Maurai & Kith
Description: "After Armageddon the People of the Sea created a new kind of
civilization, one based on the integrity of Life and the moral as well as
pragmatic necessity of conservation. But the Sky People live by a different
vision, and they have come to enforce it...."
The Merman's Children
Description: "The Merman's Children is the tragic chronicle of how the
scattered remnants of faery lived and scrambled to survive in the last days of
Magic. During the waning days of the thirteenth century, in a climate of
superstition, greed and curious excitement, Western Europe embarked on a great
new age of expansion and discovery - a renaissance had begun, a rebirth
fostered and urged by the powerful Church.
"The Merman's Children is the story of one family of mer-folk cast
adrift in a world that had no more need of them. It chronicles the adventures
of seven mer-children who return to their underwater city to find it
shattered, exorcised and their family and friends departed. The story of how
they seek their kind across the western sea in Iceland and Vinland, of their
travels down the coast of Europe and through the straits of Gibralter is
buoyant with magic, epic in its tragedy. All the elements are here: Faeries,
superstitious villagers, lost treasure, Holy Crusaders, battle, piracy,
beautiful women, brave heroes, and magic."
A Midsummer Tempest
Description: "Suppose every event in history had at least two causes. And led
to and from a separate universe in space and time.
"Then there would be an infinity of alternate worlds.
"Imagine a world in which every word written by Shakespeare was literally
true. A world in which Prince Rupert of the Rhine could fight for Charles I
of England and escape the Puritans by hopping a railroad locomotive, on the
right track but 200 years before its time. A world in which aging Caliban
could pace the lonely shore, yearning for the return of his lost love,
Miranda.
"And where all these universes, and more, intersected, there lay a tavern
where infinite possibilities met - if only for a night!"
Orion Shall Rise
Description: "Orion Shall Rise is a grand saga of future humanity
struggling back from near-ruin after a planet-wide nuclear war. The survivors
face a life-threatening limitation of resources as they strive to rise once
again to great heights of civilization.
"Orion Shall rise has a cast of countries: The Domain, dominated by
Skyholm - a giant platform floating thirty miles above Europe, savior during
destruction but now maintaining a reactionary and repressively stratified
society; Northwest Union, a loose-knit network of Scandinavian-style lodges
founded by survivors in the Pacific Northwest of North America; the Maurai
Federation, descendants of Maori natives from New Zealand who pursue a policy
of developing technology to use the natural energy of wind, sun and sea; the
many tribes and countries of the Mong who fled Asia over an ice bridge and
settled in the middle of North America. Already wars are being fought again,
most recently between the Normen of the Union, who wish to revive a benign
form of nuclear technology and the Maurai, who are unalterably opposed to its
use.
"There is a cast of characters throughout: Talence lern Ferlay, a noble son of
Skyholm who loses his home through treachery; Ronica Birken, Survivor and
master of the Northwestern wilderness; Terai Lohannaso, sailor, trader and
intelligence man for the Maurai. These and dozens of others - spies,
peasants, librarians, minstrels, heroes and villains - show us a complex and
strange world as adventure follows adventure until a searing confrontation
brings the remnants of mankind once more to the edge of destruction - or the
fragile chance for new life for the race."
Time and Stars
Description: "Turning Point: That morning they invented the wheel; in the
afternoon, the sailing ship; now night was falling and they looked up to the
beckoning stars...Epilogue: Mankind and Earth meet again, at the Billion-year
Reunion...No Truce With Kings: The Hugo Award-winning novella of a feudal
America at war..."
