Showing results by narrator "Aiello" in All Categories

These fourteen science fiction stories reveal Lem’s fascination with artificial intelligence and demonstrate just how surprisingly human sentient machines can be.

Kaiden Jericho would rather skip the death part, thank you very much. He wants a little information and perhaps a little payback. He has some information on where an AO stronghold is located. He will need to retrieve vital proof to help get the council to believe the ghost-like organization exists. But can he get the support he needs to make a run at it? Before long, it becomes obvious this isn't a small outpost; more like a major outpost with a lot of support. Kaiden can't wing this operation.

Recruited to follow the last signal of the mysterious Elders to a system halfway across the galaxy, Andy joins the crew of the James Bowie for another adventure into the unknown. The journey will be filled with mystery and wonder, with strange life seeded on far-flung worlds by the godlike Elders…and with danger. For the Elders didn’t leave our galaxy of their own accord. They were driven out by an implacable enemy, something beyond their understanding…and ours.

The Jon Ryan of the distant future has an uncontrollable knack for mischief. Now it's really gotten him in trouble. If the universe had a principal's office, he'd be sitting outside it for the next million years! They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Look that up, and you'll find Jon's picture in the Wikipedia article. After the evil clan no-time Earth, he simply wanted to restore his home world. And Jon did, but was he satisfied? No. Then he decided to try to repair that timeline to the exact one it had originally been. Talk about a harebrained notion.

When 10-year-old Megan helps her uncle invent the Thumbtop, the world's smallest computer, mice are overjoyed, and they want one for every mouse hole. The Big Cheese, leader of the Mouse Nation, has orders: Follow that girl - even if it means high-tailing it to Megan's new home on the other side of the country. While Megan struggles as the new girl, the mice wait for their chance.

Encompassing nearly 2,000 years of heists and tunnel jobs, break-ins and escapes, A Burglar's Guide to the City offers an unexpected blueprint to the criminal possibilities in the world all around us. You'll never see the city the same way again. At the core of A Burglar's Guide to the...

The year is 2016. Not our 2016. Theirs. Earth is dying, the result of a worldwide nuclear holocaust caused by America’s dictatorial President-for-Life Lewis Henderson, a man who will use any means necessary to maintain power and survive. Enter: The Splitter. A machine capable of splitting off an exact replica of Henderson’s world. A world where the cataclysmic events causing its destruction have yet to occur. That world is ours.

This madness is going to end one way or another. If Kaiden has his way, it will end violently, with his hands around the neck of the one who killed his friend. AO has pushed to the extreme, now the Academy students are making a difference. Will they be in time? It’s the final do-or-die engagements to bring this war to a conclusion. Will Kaiden’s friends be able to win all the battles so they can push through the final defenses?

En route to London from New York, Flight 305 suddenly loses power and crash-lands in the English countryside, plunging a group of strangers into a mysterious adventure that will have repercussions for all of humankind. Struggling to stay alive, the survivors soon realize that the world they've crashed in is very different from the one they left. But where are they? Why are they here? And how will they get back home?

NATIONAL BESTSELLER Two sensational unsolved crimes—one in the past, another in the present—are linked by one man’s memory and self-deception in this chilling novel of literary suspense from National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Wall...

For years, Connor and others in the colony have unraveled the mysteries of New Earth and the global catastrophes that nearly destroyed its previous inhabitants. Their work led to the discovery of other worlds beyond the known universe. It became clear that many of those worlds had been attacked by an interdimensional invader that left untold amounts of manipulation, hardship, and annihilation in its wake. It’s only a matter of time before the colony becomes the next target.

Years after the first interstellar colony ship departed from Earth, a contagion known as the Vemus spread across all mammalian life on the planet, giving rise to monstrosities that nearly wiped out all humanity. Hundreds of years later, the interstellar colonists sent an expeditionary force back to Earth to help the survivors. Among the refugees were a cadre of human survivors who had adapted to resist the Vemus by becoming a hybrid of both.

Trurl and Klaupacius are constructor robots who try to out-invent each other. Over the course of their adventures in The Cyberiad, they travel to the far corners of the cosmos to take on freelance problem-solving jobs, with dire consequences for their unsuspecting employers.

Being blindsided is never easy, even when you’re on the right track. Experimenting with technology that stretches our understanding of the universe, Connor and a small group of survivors find themselves stranded on a ship far beyond known space. The answers they seek may lie in a distant star system, but Connor is about to find out that not all encounters are by chance.

The alien race known as the Ancients vanished before Earth's last ice age - but not before building interconnected rings that form a highway system across the galaxy. Humanity has used these rings for years but has never figured out how to build its own, or even how to alter the connection pattern. Now, the Imperial starship Pandora is on a mission to discover and explore new interstellar connection points. While on Venus, an unexpected guest arrives - Marvin, a rogue robot who puts his strange mind to work on reconnecting the rings into a new pattern. Everything goes haywire.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, continues to inspire interest ranging from well-meaning speculation to bizarre conspiracy theories and controversial filmmaking. But in this landmark audiobook, reissued with a new afterword for the 40th anniversary of the assassination, Gerald Posner examines all of the available evidence and reaches the only possible conclusion: Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

Brand-new stories by: Daniel Woodrell, Matthew Eck, Catherine Browder, Nancy Pickard, John Lutz, J. Malcolm Garcia, Kevin Prufer, Linda Rodriguez, Nadia Pflaum, Phong Nguyen, Andres Rodriguez, and others. Kansas City: where East and West collide, where naked ambition meets broken dreams, where blues and the night go together like rye whiskey, vermouth, and bitters. Yes, Kansas City is a surprising place of grit, gore, and betrayal, at least in the imaginations of our diverse lineup of contributors.

Beloved stage and screen actor Danny Aiello’s big-hearted memoir reveals a man of passion, integrity, and guts - and lays bare one of the most unlikely success stories ever told. Danny Aiello admits that he backed into his acting career by mistake. That’s easy to see when you begin at the beginning: Raised by his loving and fiercely resilient mother in the tenements of Manhattan and the South Bronx, and forever haunted by the death of his infant brother, Danny struggled early on to define who he was and who he could be.

People work; folk play. That is how it has been in this country for as long as Sam can remember. He is happy, and he understands that this is the way it should be. People are bigger than folk. They are stronger. They do not need food or water. They do not need the warmth of a fire. All they need are jobs to do and a blacksmith to fix them when they break. The people work so the folk can drink their moonshine, fish a little, and throw horseshoes. But once Sam starts to wonder why the world is like this, his life will never be the same.

Jon's growing concern with what he sees as a corrupted time line is beginning to look like an obsession. Yeah, those never end well. Every attempt he tries to repair Earth's post-resurrection time line only make time/space worse. The impossible and the hazardous are happening everywhere in the universe. Not only that, but they are occurring with ever-increasing frequency and bone-chilling severity. Even Jon's minor tweaks to past events backfire with an intensity that would give pause to a normal person. But not Jon Ryan! The man's relentless.