Showing results by author "S.P. Somtow" in All Categories

The decadence of Imperial Rome comes to life in S.P. Somtow's Literary Titan Award-winning novel about one of ancient history's wildest characters. The historian Suetonius tells us that the Emperor Nero emasculated and married his slave Sporus, the spitting image of murdered Empress Poppaea. But history has more tidbits about Sporus, who went from "puer delicatus" to Empress to one Emperor and concubine to another, and ended up being sentenced to play the Earth-Goddess in the arena. World Fantasy Award winner S.P. Somtow weaves a vivid adventure about one of the most colorful personalities ...

Captured by pirates and sold to a Roman aristocrat as a sex slave, Sporus attracted the attention of no less a personage than the Emperor Nero, ruler of the known world. Would-be poet, patron of the arts, aesthete, and brutal autocrat, the Divine Nero saw in the boy a startling resemblance to the Empress Poppaea - and made him an empress as well. Suetonius, Tacitus, and other Roman historians have given tantalizing glimpses into the incredible life story of the boy who became twice an empress to two emperors, and was condemned to die in the arena by a third. In this meticulously researched ...

★★★★★ "A well-written memoir that uplifts while it teaches through story. And funny too. Worthwhile!" - Reader review ___ Memoir meets self-help in this true account about the meaning of buddhism, meditations, and living a spiritually abundant life! Novelist, composer and conductor Somtow Sucharitkul (who writes books under the name S.P. Somtow) had an extraordinary epiphany while driving downthe California coast. At almost 50 years of age, having spent very little time in his native Thailand, Somtow was seized by an overwhelming desire to enter a Buddhist monastery. This is the ...

The Inquestor Series was a classic science fiction series of the 1980s — and has now been reincarnated for the 21st century, with more adventures, more spectacle, and more extras. Tachyon bubbles, people bins and galactic empires — and profound family conflicts — Greek tragedy writ large. Light on the Sound, the book that started it all, begins with one lonely planet and three lost souls, and ends with galactic revolution. For twenty thousand years, the godlike Inquestors have held sway over the one million worlds of the Dispersal of Man. S.P. Somtow’s limitless ...

The conclusion of S.P. Somtow's award-winning epic set during the time of the Emperor Nero, based on the true story of a slave who ended up as Nero's empress. The Emperor has returned to Rome after a triumphant tour of Greece in which he won all the major laurels at the Olympic games, even though he did not compete in an Olympiad year. Now he and Sporus must face conspiracy and downfall, and the boy-empress must navigate the treacherous currents of imperial politics when four Emperors compete for power in a single year.

Now acknowledged as one of the most important classics of 20th-century gothic literature, S.P. Somtow's tale of a 12-year-old rock star vampire, his Jungian analyst, and the Wagnerian conductor who is his nemesis turned the entire genre upside down in the 1980s and is considered the ancestor of the "splatterpunk" movement. Vampire Junction has been voted one of the top 40 horror books of all time.

It is A.D. 69 and the Emperor Nero has been declared "Damnatio Memoriae" — his memory is to be erased from the world. But what will happen to Sporus, once a slave boy, then the emasculated Empress of the mad Caesar? The third instalment of the saga provides a brief respite to the drama as Nero takes Sporus on a Greek tour ... where the dream becomes a nightmare. The third volume of the award-nominated trilogy by S.P. Somtow, this work completes a tale of magnificence, corruption and decadence seen from a unique worm's eye view of a character who is usually relegated to a footnote in ...

The conclusion of the three-book series that began with Delicatus and continued with Imperatrix. Captured by pirates as a boy and trafficked to the slave markets of Rome, Sporus rose from a poet's plaything to one of the most powerful figures in the Roman Empire. The historian Suetonius tells us that the Emperor Nero emasculated and married his slave Sporus, the spitting image of murdered Empress Poppaea. But history has more tidbits about Sporus, who went from "puer delicatus" to Empress to one Emperor and concubine to another, and ended up being sentenced to play the Earth-Goddess in the ...

In one volume at last — all of world fantasy award winning author S.P. Somtow's vampire stories — from the sci-fi Vampire of Mallworld to the courtroom drama of Vanilla Blood, to stories about Timmy Valentine, some of which were not incorporated into the three volumes of the Timmy Valentine Trilogy. Includes the International Horror Guild Award winning story Brimstone and Salt, which describes what really might have happened in Gomorrah, the Los Angeles fairy tale The Ugliest Duckling, in which a vampire searches for human connection during the era of AIDS, Red as Jade, a standalone ...

The Millennial War left a sullen void where civilization once stood. But then the whales began their song - a mysterious song that resounded throughout the polluted seas and told an ancient heartbreaking tale that moved the survivors to revive and honored ritual....

After forty years, S.P. Somtow has produced a fifth novel in the Chronicles of the High Inquest, one of the most lauded galactic empire epics of the 1980s. Critically acclaimed yet never previously in print as a complete set, the series has passionate adherents — and they have finally persuaded the author to enrich the universe with more novels. Homeworld of the Heart is the first of a trilogy within a trilogy. The songs of Sajit were known and loved through the million worlds of the Dispersal of Man. He was the favorite of Elloran, most powerful, most compassionate of the godlike ...

The sequel to Vampire Junction finds Brian, PJ, and Terry ten years after the disappearance of vampire rock star Timmy Valentine, remembering the terrible night in Junction and fighting the Gods of Chaos who believe Timmy is still alive.

As a family travels to a cancer clinic in Mexico, son Theo has been having strange dreams. And, as they're passing through Arizona, "the walls between worlds dissolve and Theo is kidnapped by the vampire prince Thorn".

Firmly rooted in modern archaeological discoveries about Bronze Age cultures, The Shattered Horse paints a vivid picture of a decaying golden age seen through the eyes of the survivors of Trojan War. At the center of the story is Prince Astyanax: heir to the Trojan kingdom, marked for death as a child by the Greek conquerors, escaping, perhaps by divine intervention, and doomed, perhaps, to repeat history.

The widowed Mrs. Dorrit lives a marginal existence with her brother, a vicar, and twin daughters in a cottage on the estate of her wealthy cousin, Lord Chuzzlewit, in the West London village of Little Chiswick. As the season dawns and a rakish Earl takes up residence in the once-abandoned Flanders House nearby, their lives, and the marital prospects of Emma's daughters, become immeasurably complicated when a starship lands in her apple orchard. A rollicking satire that blends the world of Jane Austen with the sci-fi universes of E.T. and The Day the Earth Stood Still by World Fantasy Award-...

Vampire Junction, S. P. Somtow's groundbreaking novel of vampiric horror, introduced Timmy Valentine, a world-famous rock star with the body of a 12 year old boy...and the ageless soul of a bloodthirsty predator. Timmy returned in Valentine, in which he finally shed his undead curse forever. Or did he? In Vanitas, Timmy Valentine has relinquished his immortality and transferred his vampiric essence to young Angel Todd.

In the sequel to Riverrun, young Theo Etchison is drawn into Strang's terrifying dimension and begins a bizarre odyssey across an inverted land.

Based on an acclaimed short story that was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, "Darker Angels" takes the reader from the bloodstained battlefields of Virginia to the slave auctions of Haiti. Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, Lord Byron, and Marie Leveau, the legendary voodoo queen of New Orleans, all have a part to play in the epic tale of a mysterious, one-eyed shaman who dares to raise the dead from the battlefields of the Civil War.

On this alternate Earth, Rome rules all...including the New World, known in other dimensions as America but here as Terra Novo. General Titus Papinianus is governor of that untamed land, and Aquila, chief of the savage Lacoti nation, is a Roman senator. But official titles aside, their duty is to Caesar. So when Caesar sends them on a quest for the fabled land of China, thought to be somewhere in Terra Novo, off they go.

35 years after the first Mallworld story was produced, S.P. Somtow has produced the Ultimate, Ultimate, Ultimate Mallworld collection. Included are all the original stories (and the one story left out of the Starblaze trade edition), all the ads for the Mallworld products (left out in the TOR mass market re-printing), and all the original artwork by Karl Kofoed (the artwork was not included in the TOR edition) and Kofoed's cover art (left out of the Meisha Merlin edition!) With a new introduction by the author. Mallworld was an iconic science fiction novel of the 1980s and a pungent satire ...