Showing results by narrator "Stefan Rudnicki" in All Categories

Etchison's fiction is justly famous for its creepy ambience, and explores the terrain mapped out by Philip K. Dick, Thomas Harris, and any number of black and white horror movies. This is his legendary first collection, carefully corrected by the author for this new edition. The title story won both the World Fantasy Award and the British Fantasy Award in 1982, the first time a single work received both major awards. Contents include 16 groundbreaking stories and an introduction by Ramsey Campbell.

In a post-apocalyptic America, Deaver Teague makes a living salvaging things left behind from before the war. When he hears some truck drivers talking about a hidden cache of gold in a Mormon temple in flooded Salt Lake City, he enlists some friends to look for it.

This story is included in Orson Scott Card's collection The Folk of the Fringe.

Betrayed by his most trusted adviser, Roman Emperor Valerian has been captured by the Sassanid barbarians. The shame of the vanquished beats down mercilessly like the desert sun as the frail old emperor prostrates himself before Shapur, king of kings. Ballista looks on helplessly but vows under his breath to avenge those who have brought the empire to the brink of destruction with their treachery.

Martians, Go Home,originally published in 1955, is a comic science fiction novel that tells the story of Luke Devereaux, a science fiction writer who witnesses an alien invasion of little green men. These Martians haven't come to Earth to harm anyone - just to annoy people.

In A.D. 256, the specter of treachery hangs ominously over the Roman Empire. The sparks of Christian fervor have spread through the empire like wildfire, and the imperium is alive with the machinations of dangerous and powerful men. All the while, Sassanid forces press forward relentlessly along the eastern frontier. The battle-bloodied General Ballista returns to the imperial court from the fallen city of Arete only to find that there are those who would rather see him dead than alive.

This novel centers on the figure of Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, a member of the dying class of the landed gentry, who spends most of his time lying in bed gazing at life in an apathetic daze, encouraged by his equally lazy servant Zakhar and routinely swindled by his acquaintances. But this torpid existence comes to an end when, spurred on by his crumbling finances, the love of a woman, and the reproaches of his friend, the hardworking Schtoltz, Oblomov finds that he must engage with the real world and face up to his commitments.

First published in 1906, The Mirror of the Sea was the first of Joseph Conrad’s two autobiographical memoirs. Discussing it, he called the book “a very intimate revelation...I have attempted here to lay bare with the unreserve of a last hour’s confession the terms of my relation with the sea, which beginning mysteriously, like any great passion the inscrutable Gods send to mortals, went on unreasoning and invincible, surviving the test of disillusion, defying the disenchantment that lurks in every day of a strenuous life"....

Is it space travel that children dream of, or merely visiting other worlds? Todd had always set his heart on being an astronaut, but when he meets an alien and travels to another world, he doesn't use a spaceship; he just hangs out in his own back yard.

1972. The Munich Olympics. Palestinian members of the Black September group murder 11 Israeli athletes. Nine hundred million people watch the crisis unfold on television, witnessing a tragedy that inaugurates the modern age of terror.

Gangs ruled Cantilucca. Guns were the only law, and there was no lack of guns. It was hard to imagine matters getting worse. Until the survey team arrived.... Major Matthew Coke was not a squeamish man, but the state of affairs on Cantilucca turned his stomach. He was only human after all. Where some of the rest of his team were concerned, it was difficult to be sure: five professional mercenaries who'd learned the hard way that in the end they could defeat anything - except their own consciences.

Dib is an Earthlike planet, only slightly smaller, with shorter days and longer years, in orbit around twin suns. On the continent of Geo, in the city of Velon in the nation of Inimata, a man lies dead in his study. In life, Professor Orno Linus was a world-class scholar: an astrophysicist, a dead-language linguist, and an expert in (and apparent true believer of) the religious concept of the Cull, i.e., the end of the world. Widely respected, nothing about Linus’s expertise suggests somebody might want him dead.

From National Book Award finalist David I. Kertzer comes the gripping story of Pope Pius XI’s secret relations with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. This groundbreaking work, based on seven years of research in the Vatican and Fascist archives, including reports from Mussolini’s spies inside the highest levels of the Church, will forever change our understanding of the Vatican’s role in the rise of Fascism in Europe.

The Age of Louis XIV is the biography of a period (1648 - 1715) that Spengler considered the apex of modern European civilization. "Some centuries hence," Frederick the Great correctly predicted to Voltaire, "they will translate the good authors of the age of Pericles and Augustus." Those authors are lovingly treated here.

From Tim Weiner, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, an urgent and gripping account of the 75-year battle between the US and Russia that led to the election and impeachment of an American president.

Throughout his life, Joseph Campbell was deeply engaged in the study of the Grail Quests and Arthurian legends of the European Middle Ages. In this new volume of the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell, editor Evans Lansing Smith collects Campbell’s writings and lectures on Arthurian legends, including his never-before-published master’s thesis on Arthurian myth, “A Study of the Dolorous Stroke.” Campbell’s writing captures the incredible stories of such figures as Merlin, Gawain, and Guinevere as well as the larger patterns and meanings revealed in these myths.

Into the darkness within; or else the light.... When Margaret Atwood wrote these words, she left open the possibility that even our darkest tales may harbor a glimmer of hope. In Or Else the Light, the third and final entry in the Dystopia Triptych, more than a dozen of the best minds in science fiction conclude their stories with a descent into darkness, or perhaps a ray of light.

As AI and robotics eliminate jobs across the spectrum, governmental revenues will plummet while the debt increases dramatically. This crisis of limited resources on all levels - underfunded or nonexistent pensions, health problems, lack of savings, and job destruction without comparable job creation - will drive many into homelessness and produce a dramatic rise in violence as we fight over shrinking resources.

This two-story compiliation, read by Stefan Rudnicki, offers two stories from David Drake's popular Hammer's Slammers series. In At Any Price, Col. Alois Hammer's indomitable Slammers are called in to support human colonists against a native uprising in this novel-length adventure. But even though the natives' off-world weapons are no match for the Slammers, their ability to teleport gives them a frightening advantage! In Rolling Hot, the battle-crazed troop of recruits and vets, led by Captain Ranson, must cover 300 miles of hostile enemy territory.

A powerful world government has scientists transported from an overpopulated earth to a satellite on the eve of their discovery of a method to modify the human embryo.

In Drawn, a mysterious little boy has begun appearing in the paintings of an artist who can't remember ever actually seeing him. A partially blind, disfigured agoraphobic who suffers crippling panic attacks if he even tries to leave his apartment is forced out by an unseen entity. A lonely widower begins to suffer terrifying nightmares that his long-missing, presumed-dead son is still alive and in mortal danger. A young runaway realizes that a man he thought was his traveling companion is actually his captor...and a predator.