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A quiet backwater outpost on Mars gets a surprise in the form of a new police recruit - in a box! Yep, it's a prototype robot cop sent to the backwater station for testing. And Harrison tells the strange, funny and scary things that begin to happen after that, as only he can....
Science fiction
Valeria Brinton marries Eustace Woodville despite objections from Woodville's family leading to disquiet for Valeria's own family and friends. Just a few days after the wedding, various incidents lead Valeria to suspect her husband is hiding a dark secret in his past and she discovers that he has been using a false name. He refuses to discuss it leading them to curtail their honeymoon and return to London where Valeria learns that he was on trial for his first wife's murder by arsenic. He was tried in a Scottish court and the verdict was 'Not Proven' rather than 'not guilty' implying his guilt but without enough proof for a jury to convict him. Valeria sets out to save their happiness by proving her husband innocent of the crime. In her quest, she comes across the disabled character Miserrimus Dexter, a fascinating but mentally unstable genius, and his devoted female cousin, Ariel. Dexter will prove crucial to uncovering the disturbing truth behind the mysterious death....
Mystery
Clotel; or, The President's Daughter is a novel by William Wells Brown (1815-84), a fugitive from slavery and abolitionist and was published in London, England in December 1853. It is often considered the first African-American novel. This novel focuses on the difficult lives of mulattoes in America and the degraded and immoral condition of the relation of master and slave in the USA (Brown). It is about the tragic lives of Currer, Althesea, and Clotel. In the novel, Currer is the former mulatto mistress of President Thomas Jefferson who together have two daughters, Althesea and Clotel. Because she was beautiful and the mistress of Jefferson, Currer and her daughters lived a confortable life, this changed when her master passes away. In the end, Currer and Althesea are auctioned to the notorious slave trader, Dick Walker. Clotel is bought by her lover Horatio Green. The separation of these three women is just the beginning of the injustices they face. It gained notoriety amid the unconfirmed rumors regarding Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings. Brown was still considered someone else's legal property within the borders of the United...
Historical Fiction
George Sand (the pen name of Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin 1804-1876) is famous for flaunting the convertions of behaviour expected of women of her standing in France at the time and for her numerous romantic liaisons including her long standing affair with Frederic Chopin. The Devil’s Pool (published in 1846 as La Mare au Diable) is one of several short pastoral novels drawn from her childhood experiences in the rural French region of Berri. It tells the story of a young widower, Germain, who, at the insistence of his father-in-law, sets out to remarry so that he will have someone to help raise his three young children. (Summary by the reader)...
Literature
Candide is a relentless, brutal assault on government, society, religion, education, and, above all, optimism. Dr. Pangloss teaches his young students Candide and Cunegonde that everything in this world is for the best, a sentiment they cling to as the world steps in to teach them otherwise. The novel is brilliant, hilarious, blasphemous. . . and Voltaire never admitted to writing it....
Frederick Schiller Faust (1892-1944), is best known today for his western fiction. Faust was born in Seattle, Washington and at an early age moved with his parents to the San Joaquin Valley in California where he worked as a ranchhand. After a failed attempt to enlist in the Great War in 1917 and with the help of Mark Twain's sister he met Robert Hobart Davis, editor of All-Story Weekly and became a regular contributor writting under his most used pseudonym “Max Brand”. He wrote in many genres during his career and produced more than 300 western novels and stories. His most famous characters were Destry and Dr. Kildare, both of which were produced in film. Faust was killed in Italy in 1944 as a front line war correspondent at the age of 51. He is buried in the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery in Nettuno, Italy. Ronicky Doone (1926) is a hero of the west, respected by the law-abiding citizen and hated by bushwhacking bandits. Bill Gregg is a man in love, not about to be deflected from meeting his lady love for the first time, and willing to stand up to the living legend to reach her. This initial meeting leads to a friendship between th...
Westerns
On a journey to Tuscany with her young friend and traveling companion Caroline Abbott, widowed Lilia Herriton falls in love with both Italy and a handsome Italian much younger than herself, and decides to stay. Furious, her dead husband's family send Lilia's brother-in-law to Italy to prevent a misalliance, but he arrives too late. Lilia marries the Italian and in due course becomes pregnant again. When she dies giving birth to her child, the Herritons consider it both their right and their duty to travel to Monteriano to obtain custody of the infant so that he can be raised as an Englishman. (Summary from Wikipedia)...
Clifford Simak deals with the implications of time travel in his own unique way in this story. What if a group of guys did it on their own, without any help from government or industry? On a shoestring,so to speak? Would anyone believe them? What would you do if you could go back 150,000 years to a time when mastodons and saber toothed tigers roamed North America? And what happens when they run out of money? All these questions are explored in the usual humorous, wry Simak way in this story....
Bleak House is the ninth novel by Charles Dickens, published in 20 monthly parts between March 1852 and September 1853. It is widely held to be one of Dickens' finest and most complete novels, containing one of the most vast, complex and engaging arrays of minor characters and sub-plots in his entire canon. Dickens tells all of these both through the narrative of the novel's heroine, Esther Summerson, and as an omniscient narrator. Memorable characters include the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn, the friendly but depressive John Jarndyce and the childish Harold Skimpole. The plot concerns a long-running legal dispute (Jarndyce and Jarndyce) which has far-reaching consequences for all involved. (Summary from Wikipedia)...
If it is possible to conquer space, then perhaps it is also possible to conquer time. At least that was the theory American scientists were exploring in an effort to explain the new sources of knowledge the Russians possessed. Perhaps Russian scientists had discovered how to transport themselves back in time in order to learn long-forgotten secrets of the past. That was why young Ross Murdock, above average in intelligence but a belligerently independent nonconformist, found himself on a hush-hush government project at a secret base in the Arctic. The very qualities that made him a menace in civilized society were valuable traits in a man who must successfully act the part of a merchant trader of the Beaker people during the Bronze Age. For once they were transferred by time machine to the remote Baltic region where the Russian post was located, Ross and his partner Ashe were swept into a fantastic action-filled adventure involving Russians, superstitious prehistoric men, and the aliens of a lost galactic civilization that demanded every ounce of courage the Americans possessed. (Summary by Gutenberg text)...
If it is possible to conquer space, then perhaps it is also possible to conquer time. At least that was the theory American scientists were exploring in an effort to explain the new sources of knowledge the Russians possessed. Perhaps Russian scientists had discovered how to transport themselves back in time in order to learn long-forgotten secrets of the past.
Widowed cattle rancher Hetty Thompson had done all right for herself since Big Jim’s death. She had Barney, a loyal if dim-witted ranch hand, and Johnny her assistant manager whom she rescued from a drunken father years before. When the government carves out a huge piece of Frenchman’s Flat for an atomic testing ground Hetty and her neighbors object, but the millitary fences in the range anyway. It wasn’t so bad for a while. Then Hetty’s chickens began laying golden eggs, and her prize Guernsey produced explosive milk. Nevada ranch folk are tough but are they ready for mutant livestock? (Summary by Gregg Margarite)...
A contemporary of Arthur Conan Doyle, Maurice Leblanc (1864-1941) was the creator of the character of gentleman thief Arsène Lupin who, in France, has enjoyed a popularity as long-lasting and considerable as Sherlock Holmes in the English-speaking world. This is the delightful first of twenty volumes in the Arsène Lupin series written by Leblanc himself. In an unprecedented act of literary pastiche and cross-over, Sherlock Holmes and Lupin actually meet, briefly in this first volume, and more substantially in the next. But after legal objections from Conan Doyle, the name was changed to Herlock Sholmes. (adapted from Wikipedia by a.r.dobbs)...
Le Père Goriot est un roman d’Honoré de Balzac, écrit en 1834, dont la publication débute dans la Revue de Paris et qui paraît en 1835 en librairie. Il fait partie des Scènes de la vie privée de la Comédie humaine. Le Père Goriot établit les bases de ce qui deviendra un véritable édifice : la Comédie humaine, construction littéraire unique en son genre, avec des liens entre les volumes, des passerelles, des renvois. (Résumé par Wikipédia) Le Père Goriot (English: Father Goriot or Old Goriot ) is an 1835 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), included in the Scènes de la vie privée section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine . Set in Paris in 1819, it follows the intertwined lives of three characters: the elderly doting Goriot; a mysterious criminal-in-hiding named Vautrin; and a naive law student named Eugène de Rastignac. (Summary from Wikipedia)...
The Eye of Osiris is an early example from the Dr. Thorndyke series of detective stories written by R. Austin Freeman. In these stories, the author drew on his extensive medical and scientific knowledge for his main character, a medico-legal expert who relies on forensic evidence and logical deduction in solving cases. In this case, Thorndyke steps in to investigate the disappearance of one John Bellingham, an English gentleman and amateur Egyptologist, who has vanished under very mysterious circumstances. Thorndyke's involvement in the case arises from a both purely professional interest in the unique character of the case, as well as from the fact that a young doctor and former student of his has recently become closely acquainted with the missing man's brother and niece. (summary by J.M. Smallheer)...
Elusive Isabel is a novel by Jacques Futrelle (April 9, 1875 - April 15, 1912) first published in 1909. Set in Washington, D.C., it is a spy novel about an international conspiracy of the Latin countries against the English-speaking world with the aim to take over world control.Plot summary: The eponymous heroine, Isabel Thorne, is a young woman, half British, half Italian, who works for the Italian secret service and who has been commissioned to bring about the signing of the secret contract right in the capital of the enemy by representatives of all countries involved, both European and American. Her brother, an inventor, has devised a secret weapon by which missiles can be fired from submarines which will, it is hoped, secure military dominion over the rest of the world.Members of the U.S. Secret Service, who have been alerted, are assigned to prevent the signing of this Latin compact and bring to justice those involved who have no diplomatic immunity. One young representative by the name of Grimm, however, although absolutely loyal to his government, falls in love with the beautiful foreign agent.In the end Isabel Thorne, who re...
Spy stories
The Galactic Empire is slowly 'welcoming' into the family of civilized worlds those systems so far off in the backwater of the galaxy that they have been overlooked and ignored for the past 500 years or so. This is purely routine work because every planet offered the chance has eagerly accepted the invitation. Mainly because the enlightened Empire lets the planetary government continue to rule and do whatever it wants...with a few minor restrictions of course; and because the they are shown what happens to planets who decide not to accept the invitation. Aditya is the system in question here. Forgotten for almost a millennium but surviving, thank you very much, with an economy based entirely on slavery. Everyone is a slave except for the few thousand Lords Master. What happens when the this type of society meets the Constitution of the Galactic Empire which forbids any type of slavery? What happens when the poor, oppressed slaves are given their freedom? Funny you should ask .......
Set in a future in which humanity’s dream of total equality is fully realized and poverty in terms of material wealth has been eliminated, humanity has straight-jacketed itself into the only social system which could make this possible. Class differentiation is entirely horizontal rather than vertical and no matter what one’s chosen field, all advancement is based solely on seniority rather than ability. What is an intelligent and ambitious man to do when enslaved by a culture that forbids him from utilizing his God-given talents? If he’s a military officer in time of war, he might just decide to switch sides. If said officer is a true believer in the principles that enslave him and every bit as loyal as he is ambitious, that’s tantamount to breaking a universal law of physics, but Colonel Sebastian MacMaine has what it takes to meet the challenge. (Summary by Lee)...
But the Knyght was a little less than perfect, and his horse did not have a metabolism, and his 'castle' was much more mobile - timewise! - than it had any business being! In 2178, once time travel had become a simple task, it had also been outlawed. Those who chose to ingnore this law were known as time-thieves, and Tom Mallory was among the best of them. When he learns the precise whereabouts of the Holy Grail in 542, he sets out to obtain it with the intention of returning it to the 22nd century to make a handsome profit and to settle on Get-Rich-Quick Street. Off to the year 542 he travels to the castle of Carbonek where the great Knight Sir Launcelot is said to have possession of the Sangraal. (Summary by Roger Melin with quote from Analog Science Fact & Fiction July 1963)...
Amongst the great popular novelists of the nineteenth century who are still read today, Anthony Trollope stands alongside his contemporary, Charles Dickens. His two series of novels, the political (The Pallisers) and the clerical (The Barsetshire Chronicles) are the best known. This book is the first of the Barsetshire series and was also Trollope’s first really successful novel. In the mid nineteenth century there were a number of financial scandals in the Church of England including those of Rochester, where the endowments which should have supported the King’s School Canterbury had been diverted to the Dean and Chapter; and of the hospital of St Cross at Winchester where the Rev. Francis North, later the Earl of Guildford, had been appointed to the mastership of the hospital by his father the bishop. The revenues of the hospital were very considerable, the work involved minimal. The scandal soon broke. Trollope based ‘The Warden’ on the St Cross case, but in the novel the Warden is a kindly, devoted, priest, beloved by all that knew him and is racked by fear that he is accepting money to which he is not entitled. His antagonist i...