Well World

At the heart of a bizarre planet lay the goal of every being that had ever lived.… Below average in height and unprepossessing in appearance, Nathan Brazil is an unassuming if cynical starship owner, carrying passengers and cargo for a living - hardly the sort of person to hold the fate of the entire universe in his hands. But when Nathan detours from his route to answer a distress call, a hidden stargate hurls him and his passengers to the Well World, the master control planet for the cosmos. Billions of years ago, a godlike race unlocked all the secrets of space and time and remade the universe according to their grand design.

Antor Trellig, head of a ruthless interstellar syndicate, has seized a supercomputer with godlike powers that could make him omnipotent. The Council offers master criminal Mavra Chang any reward she desires if she can stop Trellig - and horrible, lingering death if she fails. But neither Trellig nor Mavra has taken the Well World into consideration. Built by the ancient Markovians, the Well World controls the design of the cosmos. When the opponents are drawn across space to the mysterious planet, they find themselves in new, alien bodies and in the middle of a battle where strange races fight desperately.

Lucid Dreaming - conscious awareness during the dream state - is an exhilarating experience. Because the world you are experiencing is one of your own creation, you can do the impossible and consciously influence the outcome of your dreams.

The twenty-four yoga meditations in Transparent Body, Luminous World were transcribed and selected from several hundred guided meditations that Rupert Spira gave at meetings and retreats in Europe and the USA since 2012. The meditations explore the experience of the body and world as a continuously changing flow of sensations and perceptions appearing in, known by and made of Awareness. In this approach to meditation – which Spira calls the Tantric Yoga of Sensation and Perception – Awareness turns again towards the objects of experience.

An expedition of groundlings from the Empire of Kish have traveled through the Three Worlds to the Indigo Cloud court of the Raksura, shape-shifting creatures of flight that live in large family groups. The groundlings have found a sealed ancient city at the edge of the shallow seas, near the deeps of the impassable Ocean. They believe it to be the last home of their ancestors and ask for help getting inside.

Mavra Chang was once a master criminal, notorious throughout the galaxy. But for 11 long years she has been trapped in a nonhuman body on the Well World - the master control planet for the universe, where untold numbers of strange races exist, separated by barriers erected by the mysterious, vanished race that built the Well World billions of years ago. Orbiting the planet is a planetoid concealing Obie, a supercomputer that could restore Mavra Chang to her original form - if she can reach it. Unfortunately, the only spaceship on the planet is hidden in the northern hemisphere, a place no living creature can survive.

From the breakout SFF superstar author of Murderbot comes the remarkable sequel to the USA Today and Sunday Times bestselling novel, Witch King. A fantasy of epic scope, Queen Demon is a story of power and friendship, of trust and betrayal, and of the families we choose. Dahin, a beloved member...

First published by H. G. Wells in 1898, The War of the Worlds is the granddaddy of all alien invasion stories. The novel begins ominously, as the lone voice of a narrator intones, "No one would have believed in the last years of the 19th century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's."

This book is considered a prophetical novel foretelling the advent of nuclear weapons. A constant theme in Wells’ work, such as his 1901 nonfiction book Anticipations, was the role of energy and technological advance as a determinant of human progress. The novel opens with this: "The story of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal...."

Just outside of Tokyo lies Aokigahara, a vast forest and one of the most beautiful wilderness areas in Japan...and also the most infamous spot to commit suicide in the world. Legend has it that the spirits of those many suicides are still roaming, haunting deep in the ancient woods. When bad weather prevents a group of friends from climbing neighboring Mt. Fuji, they decide to spend the night camping in Aokigahara. But they get more than they bargained for when one of them is found hanged in the morning - and they realize there might be some truth to the legends after all.

When a massive solar flare kills the grid, Rose and her brother must survive a burning city and lawless seas. With only a sailboat and each other, they face hunger, strangers, and the unknown in a world that may never recover.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Change Your Mind, a panoptic exploration of consciousness—what it is, who has it, and why—and a meditation on the essence of our humanity.

Sloths are the slowest mammals on earth. They can hardly see. They live in rainforests among jaguars, pumas, and countless other predators. Yet they survive. And they do it by being so incredibly slow, and living a life covered in algae. In this episode, we hang with a sloth in the jungle of Costa Rica as he spends a month digesting one single leaf, and we see the symbiosis and collaboration that surrounds him.

An old-fashioned quest by a modern-day adventurer. When A. J. Mackinnon quits his job in Australia, he knows only that he longs to travel to the well at the world’s end, a mysterious pool on a remote Scottish island whose waters, legend has it, hold the secret to eternal youth.

Forgetting playboy Wells Silver was supposed to be easy. If only he didn’t make it impossible. Secrets are made on the sandy shores and in the sweet small towns of Silver Island, where friendships run deep, passions run hot, and the sexy Silvers are considered island royalty. Love in Bloom novels are written to stand alone and may also be enjoyed as part of the larger series, so dive right in and devour this fun, steamy romance.

In the first chapter of this epic trilogy, the outcome of the historic War of the Ancients is forever altered by the arrival of three time-lost heroes: Krasus, the dragon mage whose great power and memories of the ancient conflict have inexplicably diminished; the human wizard Rhonin, whose thoughts are divided between his family and the seductive source of his now-growing power; and Broxigar, a weathered orc veteran who seeks a glorious death in combat.

The sun sinks over the Rio Grande, the mountains around it glow orange, and the world slows down. The Mexican free-tailed bats inside the Jornada Cave are just starting to stretch and murmur. In this episode, we visit the nursery where all the baby bats stay together, and we accompany a new mother as she journeys into the sky with the rest of her crew for a night of hunting bugs via echolocation.

Dung beetles might sound dirty, but the ancient Egyptians believed their god took the form of a dung beetle to roll the morning sun across the sky every day. In this episode, we roll with dung beetles around the world as they push their precious dung—often in balls many times larger than they are—over Florida pastures, Armenian highlands, and the vast South African savanna.

The most fatal virus known to science, rabies kills nearly 100 percent of its victims once the infection takes root in the brain. From Greek myths to zombie flicks, from the laboratory heroics of Louis Pasteur to the contemporary search for a lifesaving treatment, Rabid is a fresh, fascinating, and often wildly entertaining look at one of mankind’s oldest and most fearsome foes.

Plenty of experts argue that anyone who wants to develop a skill, play an instrument, or lead their field should start early, focus intensely, and rack up as many hours of deliberate practice as possible. But a closer look at research on the world’s top performers shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule. David Epstein examined the world’s most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters and scientists. He discovered that in most fields—especially those that are complex and unpredictable—generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel.