High Fidelity meets The Magicians in this ‘90s punk rock fantasy by triple threat guitarist, author, and Hugo Award–winning editor Jason Heller.Peter, a punk rock guitar player with OCD tendencies—It’s why everyone calls him rePeter—works at The Wax Rack, a record store in Denver. Pete has a talent he couldn’t understand until he attends a by-invitation-only concert at a secret warehouse location.Pete can do things if he p...

HE'S BACK.AND HE'S THE BIGGEST THING IN POLITICS.He is the perfect presidential candidate. Conservatives love his hard-hitting Republican résumé. Liberals love his peaceful, progressive practicality. The media can’t get enough of his larger-than-life personality. And all the American people love that he’s an honest, hard-working man who tells it like it is.There’s just one problem. He is William Howard Taft . . . and he was already p...

A Hugo Award-winning author and music journalist explores the weird and wild story of when rock ’n’ roll met the sci-fi world of the 1970sAs the 1960s drew to a close, and mankind trained its telescopes on other worlds, old conventions gave way to a new kind of hedonistic freedom that celebrated sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Derided as nerdy or dismissed as fluff, science fiction rarely gets credit for its catalyzing effect on this revolution.In Strang...

Cybernetics. Neuroscience. Nanotechnology. Genetic engineering. Hacktivism. Transhumanism. The world of tomorrow is already here, and the technological changes we all face have inspired a new wave of stories to address our fears, hopes, dreams, and desires as Homo sapiens evolve—or not—into their next incarnation. Cyber World presents diverse tales of humanity’s tomorrow, as told by some of today’s most gripping science fiction visionaries.

A speculative fiction safari that riffs on the traditional ideals of automata to explore our strange and competitive relationship with the natural world. Biomimicry is no stranger to literature, with canonical authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hans Christian Anderson, and Jules Verne setting the tone for a trope that has expounded and expanded upon what exactly separates humans from the animal kingdom as well as the boundary between machines and living beings. Featuring 15 original stories...

The second of a two-book set that contains the early myths and legends which led to the writing of Tolkien’s epic tale of war, The Silmarillion.The Book of Lost Tales stands at the beginning of the entire conception of Middle-earth and Valinor, for the Tales were the first form of the myths and legends that came to be called The Silmarillion.Embedded in English legend, they are set in the narrative frame of a great westward voyage over the Ocean b...

This revised and updated examination of how J.R.R.Tolkien came to write his original masterpiece The Hobbit includes his complete unpublished draft version of the story, together with notes and illustrations by Tolkien himself.The Hobbit was first published on 21 September 1937. Like its sequel, The Lord of the Rings, it is a story that ‘grew in the telling’, and many characters and plot threads in the published text are quite different f...

The Wheel of Time is now an original series on Prime Video, starring Rosamund Pike as Moiraine!Since its debut in 1990, The Wheel of Time® by Robert Jordan has captivated millions of readers around the globe with its scope, originality, and compelling characters. The definitive encyclopedia of the series, the companion sheds light on some of the most intriguing aspects of the world, including biographies and motivations of many characters that never made i...

For many years, hiding under a cloak of anonymity, the most penetrating critic of the field of magazine science fiction was known as "William Atheling, Jr." It soon became a challenge to guess his real identity. And that was no easy game, for Atheling's dissection did not spare even his other ego, the noted science-fiction writer James Blish.Having shed his protective covering, Mr. Blish has assembled many of the Atheling papers and edited them into the present book. While it cover...

So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of 1984 tells you what you need to know—before or after you read George Orwell's book.Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader.This short summary and analysis of 1984 includes:Historical contextChapter-by-chapter overviewsCharacter analysisImportant quote...

This collection of new essays seeks to define the unique qualities of female heroism in literary fantasy from Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings in the 1950s through the present. Building upon traditional definitions of the hero in myth and folklore as the root genres of modern fantasy, the essays provide a multi-faceted view of an important fantasy character type who begins to demonstrate a significant presence only in the latter 20th century. The essays contribute to the empowermen...

One of the great intellectual achievements of the 20th century, Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces is an elaborate articulation of the monomyth: the narrative pattern underlying countless stories from the most ancient myths and legends to the films and television series of today. The monomyth's fundamental storyline, in Campbell's words, sees "the hero venture forth from the world of the common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encou...