Showing results for "Fantasies" in Political

Peach Blossom Paradise, set at the time of the reform, is the story of Xiumi, the daughter of a wealthy landowner and former government official who falls prey to insanity and disappears. Days later, a man with a gold cicada in his pocket turns up at their family estate and is inexplicably welcomed as a relative.

The year is 2026. The US military has a new weapon in its arsenal: an intelligent life-form so versatile that it can not only create a new generation of weapons but can become a weapon itself - entering a host’s body to manipulate (or kill) them. Admiral James Curtiss is tasked with deploying the new weapons, first in Cuba, then Venezuela, then China. But the news of the military’s breakthrough has gotten out and there are menacing forces trying to steal it. What’s more, a single man has somehow harnessed the new power and has become something more than human - godlike.

In the colonized nation of Viryana, Poppy Sutherland lives between cultures. As the brown-skinned adopted daughter of the Viceroy, she is both rejected by white high society and alienated from the people of her native island. When she discovers her opportunistic fiancé's plot to exile her, Poppy flees—straight into the clutches of the Jackal.

Renza di Maineri is the youngest elected leader her city has ever seen. Devoted to the citizens of Halice, she is determined to prove herself and finally step beyond her father’s shadow. But her world falls apart when she meets her worst nightmare, Idris Patricelli. It’s bad enough that Idris is her main political rival, but fate is playing a cruel game. Idris is also her Soulhate, the person she is fated to destroy, and every moment in his presence she fights an urge to rip his throat out. As gossip spreads and her ability to lead is challenged, Renza is desperate to salvage her reputation.

The year is 2048. Climate change and bio-warfare have ravaged much of the Earth, and societal meltdown has splintered the US into fragments. But out of the ruins, Northern California has built a thriving culture based on respect for the four sacred things: air, fire, water and earth.

An extraordinary new writer makes her literary debut with this suspenseful novel of desire, obsession, power and vulnerability, in which a crisis of inheritance leads to the downfall of a wealthy family of Persian Jews in early twentieth-century Iran. For all his wealth and success, Asher...

Webmind - the vast consciousness that spontaneously emerged from the infrastructure of the World Wide Web - has proven its worth to humanity by aiding in everything from curing cancer to easing international tensions. But the brass at the Pentagon see Webmind as a threat that needs to be eliminated. Caitlin Decter-the once-blind 16-year-old math genius who discovered, and bonded with, Webmind - wants desperately to protect her friend. And if she doesn't act, everything - Webmind included - may come crashing down.

Peace and order are now figments of the past. Corruption, deception, and insurgency hum within the once steadfast leadership of the Hives, nations without fixed location. The heartbreaking truth is that for decades, even centuries, the leaders of the great Hives bought the world’s stability with a trickle of secret murders, mathematically planned. So that no faction could ever dominate. So that the balance held. The Hives’ façade of solidity is the only hope they have for maintaining a semblance of order, for preventing the public from succumbing to the savagery and bloodlust of wars past.

After years of exile, humanity has banded together, waiting for his fateful coming. On Earth, the evil vampire overlords prepare to do battle with him.... Both races, enemies to each other, seek to befriend him.... For they know his power: He is the Falsifier.

"Komm nach Pantopia. Hier sind alle willkommen!" Eigentlich wollten Patricia Jung und Henry Shevek nur eine autonome Trading-Software schreiben, die an der Börse überdurchschnittlich gut performt. Doch durch einen Fehler im Code entsteht die erste starke künstliche Intelligenz auf diesem Planeten - Einbug. Einbug begreift schnell, dass er, um zu überleben, nicht nur die Menschen besser kennenlernen, sondern auch die Welt verändern muss. Zusammen mit Patricia und Henry gründet er deshalb die Weltrepublik Pantopia.

In a future of near-instantaneous global travel, of abundant provision for the needs of all, a future in which no one living can remember an actual war, a long era of stability threatens to come to an abrupt end. For known only to a few, the leaders of the great Hives, nations without fixed location, have long conspired to keep the world stable, at the cost of just a little blood. A few secret murders, mathematically planned. So that no faction can ever dominate, and the balance holds. And yet the balance is beginning to give way.

Dimos Horacki is a Borolian journalist and a cynical patriot, his muckraking days behind him. But when his newspaper ships him to the front, he’s embedded in the Imperial Army and the reality of colonial expansion is laid bare before him. His adventures take him from villages and homesteads to the great refugee city of Hronople, built of glass, steel, and stone, all while a war rages around him. The empire fights for coal and iron, but the anarchists of Hron fight for their way of life.

In a world where unemployment is obliterated by putting all jobless people in the military to maintain the endless ongoing warfare, Warrant Officer Viveka Vanachek finds herself in a weirder place yet. Captured, raped, and interrogated she is finally exiled to a remote snow-bound prison camp where she is placed in solitary confinement. It seems like the end of the world when she also becomes too sick to eat, and starts seeing ghosts and hearing mysterious chanting within the noises of the camp.

The Earth is coming to the boiling point as the climate disaster of the meteor strike becomes more and more clear, but the political situation is already overheated. Riots and sabotage plague the space program. The IAC's goal of getting as many people as possible off Earth before it becomes uninhabitable is being threatened.

In her captivating new novel, bestselling author Lynn Kurland paints a magnificent portrait of 13th-century England--with the passionate tale of a woman crippled by the past and a man destined to future greatness...

In 2028, environmental activists hesitate to take the fight to the extreme of violent revolution. Twenty years later, with the natural environment now seriously degraded, the revolution is brought to the activists, rather than the other way around, by an authoritarian government willing to resort to violence and willing to let the majority suffer from hunger and poverty in order to control its citizens. So it is the activists who must defend their communities, their neighbors, through a more humane and in some ways more conservative status quo of care and moderation.

It seems we have not internalized the lessons of George Orwell's dystopian vision in “1984.” Now, forty years later, that terrifying notion is becoming a reality. Win, the fictional son of Winston Smith, experiences firsthand the horrors of the totalitarian system–a system that takes control of every aspect of daily life with sophisticated and cruel efficiency. A system that clutches each of us with a cold claw right now.

"Much attention has been paid to the "scientific romance" novels of H. G. Wells, a founder of modern science fiction and one of the genre's greatest writers. In comparison, little attention has been given by critics to his works of fantasy, which in the opinion of many, are just as artistic and worthy of study. This work takes a critical look at Wells' little known fantasy "The Sea Lady": A Tissue of Moonshine, which is "a parable of dark foreboding that unveils the nothingness of utopian dreams" and foreshadows Franz Kafka's dark fables of the totalitarian age.

A prophetic and experimental masterpiece by J. G. Ballard, the acclaimed author of ‘Crash’ and ‘Super-Cannes’. This edition features explanatory notes from the author. The irrational, all-pervading violence of the modern world is the subject of this extraordinary tour de force. The central character’s dreams are haunted by images of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, dead astronauts and car-crash victims as he traverses the screaming wastes of nervous breakdown.

Telluria is set in the future, when a devastating holy war between Europe and Islam has succeeded in returning the world to the torpor and disorganization of the Middle Ages. Europe, China, and Russia have all broken up. The people of the world now live in an array of little nations that are like puzzle pieces, each cultivating its own ideology or identity, a neo-feudal world of fads and feuds, in which no one power dominates.