Showing results by narrator "Stefan Rudnicki" in All Categories

For a hundred years, Delbin has lived on Earth, voluntarily cut off from his birth land, Moranaia. He's learned to hide his elven nature and use his mind magic without getting noticed - until he accidentally wields it on the Moranaian scout sent to check on him.

A 21st century U.S. aerospace company has developed the first permanent human settlement on the Moon, made possible by major scientific breakthroughs, particularly in the practical use of nanotechnology. But conflict within the company's founding family and growing protests against the technology from radical environmentalists and religious fundamentalists on Earth put Moonbase in danger of closure

Best-selling writer Orson Scott Card founded the online magazine Intergalactic Medicine Show in 2006. It has been a big success, drawing submissions from well-known science fiction and fantasy writers, as well as fostering some amazing new talents. This collection contains some of the best of those stories.

In The Best Cases of The Continental Op, an original compilation of eight stories from Skyboat Media, the Op walks, stalks, and runs down the steep streets of San Francisco to solve crimes of blackmail, murder, stolen identities, and arson, and each story contains so many twists and turns you’ll be hooked until the very (surprising) end....

Dan Randolph never plays by the rules. A hell-raising maverick with no patience for fools, he is admired by his friends, feared by his enemies, and desired by the world's loveliest women. Acting as a 21st privateer, Randolph broke the political strangle-hold on space exploration, and became one of the world's richest men in the bargain.

The surface of Venus is the most hellish place in the solar system, its ground hot enough to melt aluminum, its air pressure high enough to crush spacecraft landers like tin cans, its atmosphere a choking mix of poisonous gases. This is where the frail young Van Humphries must go—or die trying.

All eyes are on famous prosecutor Teodor Szacki when he investigates a skeleton discovered at a construction site in the idyllic Polish city of Olsztyn. Old bones come as no shock to anyone in this part of Poland, but it turns out these remains are fresh, the flesh chemically removed. Szacki questions the dead man's wife, only to be left with a suspicion she's hiding something. Then another victim surfaces - a violent husband, alive but maimed - giving rise to a theory: someone's targeting domestic abusers.

Among worlds populated by slave-takers and poisoners, Kirth Gersen is hunting the third Demon Prince, Viole Falushe, an Earthman who conceals his true identity while ruling a remote planet from his decadent Palace of Love. Posing as a journalist and accompanied by the mad poet Navarth, Gersen infiltrates the palace and uncovers a history of erotic obsession. Somewhere among the revelers lurks Falushe, whom Gersen schemes to identify, before delivering harsh justice.

One of the best-known experimental novels of the 1960s, Beautiful Losers is Cohen's most defiant and uninhibited work. As imagined by Cohen, hell is an apartment in Montreal, where a bereaved and lust-tormented narrator reconstructs his relations with the dead. In that hell, two men and a woman twine impossibly and betray one another again and again. Memory blurs into blasphemous sexual fantasy - and redemption takes the form of an Iroquois saint and virgin who has been dead for 300 years but still has the power to save even the most degraded of her suitors.

A quiet mission of assassination is no sweat for legendary agent Matt Helm - until a shapely foreign agent he never got around to finishing off lures him into a strange trek in the wilds of Northern Mexico. And when a Russian missile is smuggled out of Cuba, it falls into the hands of a political fanatic much too close to home.

The Devil's Advocates shows us the crimes and trials that have captivated the public, cases that illuminate the underlying principles of the American criminal-justice system.

The colony world Adirondack and Silvern fell to the Troft forces almost without a struggle. Outnumbered and on the defensive, Earth made a desperate decision. It would attack the aliens not from space, but on the ground - with forces the Trofts did not even suspect. Thus were created the cobras, a guerrilla force whose weapons were surgically implanted, invisible to the unsuspecting eye, yet undeniably deadly.

It's been one year since a virus triggered junk DNA and people all over the world started changing, becoming something else, craving blood. It's been 10 months since the word vampire stopped being something from old monster stories and Hollywood movies. It's been six months since our world and theirs erupted into war, two since an uneasy peace was signed, and one hour since that peace was shattered. The war is here again - the vampire war.

As the world continues to change around them, new friendships are forged, answers are found, and lives are lost as the survivors journey deeper into treacherous areas. New dangers rise each day, and the survivors find themselves faced with only one conclusion … Sometimes the end of everything they knew is only the beginning of something more.

Nearly 100 years before the events of Orson Scott Card's bestselling novel Ender's Game, humans were just beginning to step off Earth and out into the Solar System. A thin web of ships in both asteroid belts; a few stations; a corporate settlement on Luna. No one had seen any sign of other space-faring races; everyone expected that First Contact, if it came, would happen in the future, in the empty reaches between the stars. Then a young navigator on a distant mining ship saw something moving too fast, heading directly for our sun.

It was not a peaceful way to die, but there was nothing Matt Helm could do for his fellow agent. He had found him in a Canadian motel room - his once-handsome face eaten away, corroded by acid. Scratch one agent. The women wouldn't be lining up for him now. But it created further problems. The most likely culprit was a woman Helm had orders to protect - no matter what the cost.

Part love story, part historical epic, part tragedy, The House of Special Purpose illuminates an empire at the end of its reign. Living in England with his beloved wife, Zoya, Georgy prepares to make one final journey back to the Russia he once knew and loved, the Russia that both destroyed and defined him. As Georgy remembers days gone by, we are transported to Saint Petersburg, to the Winter Palace of the tzar, in the early twentieth century - a time of change, threat, and bloody revolution.

The US has abandoned its quest for the stars, and an old enemy has moved in to fill the void. The potential wealth of the universe is now in malevolent hands. Rebel billionaire Dan Randolph - possessor of the largest privately owned company in space - intends to weaken the stranglehold the new despotic masters of the solar system have on the lucrative ore industry. But when the mineral-rich asteroid he sets in orbit around the Earth is commandeered by the enemy, and his unarmed workers are slaughtered in cold blood, the course of Randolph’s life is changed forever.

The compelling, beautiful narrative of Code Name God is one man's rags-to-riches story and, more profoundly, the vision of a world-class physicist seeking to integrate the findings of science, religion, and spiritual quest.

When 10-year-old Dinah Kirkham saw her father leave their Manchester home in the middle of the night, she asked when he would be back. “Soon,” he replied. But he never came back. On that night in 1829, John Kirkham laid the foundation of his daughter’s certainty that the only person Dinah could ever really trust was herself.