October 26,1588. A Spanish warship of the Armada wrecks in a storm on the coast of Northern Ireland. In 1967, divers find the Girona's remains and recover its treasures. As our story begins five years later, it seems these relics still have the power to inspire the best and worst of human endeavor. HE’S LOOKING FOR AN ILL-FATED RELATIVE. AN ILL FATE IS LOOKING FOR HIM. July 4, 1972. A restless young Californian arrives in western Ireland to search for a long-lost relative and ponder his un...

It’s 1979 and near the end of the International Decade of Ocean Exploration. In San Diego, marine science technician Neil Bricker chafes at having missed out on the deep-sea discovery of a lifetime. On a university training cruise, he finds traces of another major discovery on the seafloor: a massive new energy source that could transform the nation’s economy. Journalism student Cate Rosario witnesses the event and decides to write the story. Neil joins a private expedition to validate the...

For every television series, the original vision grows within a press of forces-both social and artistic expectations, conventions of the business, as well as conventions of the art. Bad television-predictable, commercial, exploitative-simply yields to the forces. Good television, like the character of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, fights them. Fighting the Forces explores the struggle to create meaning in an impressive example of popular culture, the television series phenomenon Buffy the Vam...

June 1981, Galveston Harbor. Historian Urban McLean, newly retired from the American Embassy in Bogotá, takes his yacht Aluna on a dramatic speaking tour along the Gulf Coast from Texas to Florida. He’s reenacting characters and incidents from an ill-fated Spanish expedition to La Florida in 1528, led by the mercurial Pánfilo de Narváez, a flawed character McLean portrays all too easily. Joining the tour: McLean’s half-Colombian daughter on college vacation from California; an exiled Boliv...

When European explorers began their initial forays into southeastern North America in the 16th and 17th centuries they encountered what they called temples and shrines of native peoples, often decorated with idols in human form made of wood, pottery, or stone. The idols were fascinating to write about, but having no value to explorers searching for gold or land, there are no records of these idols being transported to the Old World, and mention of them seems to cease about the 1700s. Howev...

Fantastic Universe' started publishing in 1953 and continued until March 1960. It was one of the better magazines to launch during the boom in science fiction magazines publishing. It published many important stories' by some of the fields best known writers. Collected in this over sized edition are more than 175,000 words of science fiction and fantasy. Escape back to the golden age of science fiction! 'Exile from Space' by Judith Merril 'Cogito, Ergo Sum' by John Foster West 'Grove of th...

Russian Social Science Reader is one of a series designed for non-linguists who need knowledge of the Russian language in order to pursue their interests in fields other than language or literature. The purpose of this book is to provide real assistance to the trained social scientist who, having already mastered his own discipline, is willing to devote a little time to mastering the Russian language for the purpose of reading specialist material in his own field. The book begins with disc...

As an aspiring or seasoned writer, do you feel like you aren't making headway, stumbling on what to write next, or wondering if you're even on the right path? Are you unable to find the motivation to charge up your computer and put your fingers on the keyboard after that last rejection?Between the pages of What I Wish I'd Known: For Writers, 100 highly accomplished authors share their time, energy, and knowledge to pay it forward and inspire other writers, experienced or a...

An examination of two seemingly incongruous areas of study: classical models of argumentation and modern modes of digital communicationWhat can ancient rhetorical theory possibly tell us about the role of new digital media technologies in contemporary public culture? Some central issues we currently deal with—making sense of information abundance, persuading others in our social network, navigating new media ecologies, and shaping broader cultural currents—also pre...

The "Vampire Tales" is the biggest, hungriest, undeadliest collection of vampire stories ever assembled. Dark, stormy, and delicious, once it sinks its teeth into you there's no escape. Vampires! Whether imagined by Bram Stoker or Anne Rice, they are part of the human lexicon and as old as blood itself. They are your neighbors, your friends, and they are always lurking. Now we have compiled the darkest, the scariest, and by far the most evil collection of vampire stories ever, with over 80...

This collection examines the child’s role in contemporary post-apocalyptic films and television.. By exploring the function of child characters within a dystopian framework, this volume illustrates how traditional notions of childhood are tethered to sites of adult conflict and disaster, a connection that often works to reaffirm the “rightness” of past systems of social order.

Weird fiction is an incredibly rich and varied genre, running the gamut from supernatural horror to imaginary-world fantasy to psychological terror. This anthology seeks to exhibit the wide range of themes, motifs, and imagery that weird fiction allows, as embodied in the work of some of the leading contemporary writers in the field.The ghost or revenant is a venerable motif, and stories by John Shirley, Lynda E. Rucker, and Reggie Oliver ring fascinating changes on it. Allied to t...