A Storm of Wings

Author	Michael Moorcock
ISBN	0671834126

Behold the Man…

 
Who else but Michael Moorcock, in all his devious craftiness, could employ Satan, Heaven & Hell, souls, damnation, and a quest for the Holy Grail, as tools for a story whose central premise is a call for humanity to eschew religious belief and embrace scientific...

Author	Michael Shea
ISBN	0879977833

Come then, Mortal. We Will Seek Her Soul:
At the behest of an apparition, Nifft and Haldar kidnap a disgraced warrior and take him to the land of the dead to be reunited with her in exchange for the Wizard's Key. Only things don't go as planned...

The first Nifft story was quite good, a trip to...

Author	Geoff Ryman
ISBN	0553263447

In his “History of Science Fiction”, Adam Roberts came up with a nifty way of dividing hard science fiction (SF) from soft SF or fantasy, saying that fantasy and soft SF followed in the footsteps of Dante and others who've a more catholic, a more religious or spiritual bent to their writing. Think...

Author	Sarban
ISBN	0722176511

Alan Querdilion, a young naval lieutenant, is captured by the Germans and wakes up in a hospital bed - more than 100 years later. The Germans have won the war, and the Third Reich stretches from the Urals to the Atlantic. Non Aryans are bred as slaves. Deprived of speech and intelligence by the surgeon's...

Author	Fritz Leiber
ISBN	0441080383

One of them was a huge, brawny, full-bearded barbarian from the northlands of Nehwon. His name was Fafhrd, his weapon a broadsword.

The other was a small, nimble man dressed all in gray. Men called him the Gray Mouser, and he carried both rapier and dirk.

They were known throughout the...

Author	Tanith Lee
ISBN	0879974419

"The soul is a magician. Only living flesh hampers it." -- from Death's MasterDeath's Master, winner of the August Derleth Award for Fantasy, is the second book of the stunning arabesque high fantasy series Tales from the Flat Earth, which, in the manner of the One Thousand and One Nights, portrays...

Author

Angela Slatter

A Feast of Sorrows—Angela Slatter’s first U.S. collection—features twelve of the World Fantasy and British Fantasy Award-winning Australian author’s finest, darkest fairy tales, and adds two new novellas to her marvelous cauldron of fiction.

Stories peopled by women and girls—fearless,...

Author	Christopher Priest
ISBN	0575075791

Cameraman Richard Grey's memory has blanked out the few weeks before he was injured in a car bomb explosion. When he is visited by a girl who seems to have been his lover, his attempts to recall the forgotten period produce an odyssey through France and conflicting accounts of what happened. When Susan...

Author	Michael Frayn
ISBN	0140040633

An utter delight.

Even though it was written in the 1970s, it still feels completely fresh & topical today. It's a lovely, optimistic satire of man & covers many of the Big Ideas. I know when Life of Pi was so very popular, various reviews said it would affirm/renew your faith in God (a...

Author	Lisa Goldstein
ISBN	0553050907

I can’t remember how I found out about this novel, presumably a list of recommendations somewhere? The combination of surrealists, dreams, time travel, and revolution had obvious appeal and the library didn't have it, so I bought a cheap copy off eBay. Unfortunately I think it had been stored in a...

Author	Avram Davidson
ISBN	0441661564

ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.

The Phoenix and the Mirror, written by Avram Davidson and published in 1966, is based on the medieval legend that the poet Vergil (The Aeneid) was a mage and sorcerer. Queen Cornelia of Carsus has taken hostage part of Vergil’s soul. This leaves him...

Author	R.A. Lafferty
ISBN	0441245900

Fourth Mansions was inspired by Teresa of Ávila's Interior Castle, & contains quotations from the book, which quotations Lafferty uses as chapter headings. The Interior Castle is a metaphor for an individual's soul; its different rooms, different states of the soul. In the middle of the Castle...

Author	Joy Chant
ISBN	0345021789

When I was a young girl Joy Chant was part of the triarchy from whom I bought and read everything I could get my hands on (the other two being Joan D. Vinge and Elizabeth A. Lynn). So I thought it was about time after all those years to get re-acquainted with my childhood dreams.

As things turned out...

Author	David Barnett
ISBN	0765334259

Nineteenth century London is the center of a vast British Empire, a teeming metropolis where steam-power is king and airships ply the skies, and where Queen Victoria presides over three quarters of the known world—including the east coast of America, following the failed revolution of 1775.

Young...

Author	Thomas Burnett Swann
ISBN	0583123945

Lost Monsters

Thea watched their torch-bearing captors recede into the distance and leave them to the cave's darkness. Her brother Icarus whispered "forgive me - I wanted to come to the Country of the Beasts, not to the Cave of the Minotaur".

Then they heard the soft padding of feet...

Author	Brian Moore
ISBN	0452278678

When an appalling boating accident off the coast of Nice allegedly kills Dr. Alex Davenport, his attractive young wife Marie finds herself in the ironic position of widow of a husband she had been planning to leave for another man. But Alex's body suddenly disappears from the morgue, and his plane ticket...

Author	Brian W. Aldiss
ISBN	0061000639

Charmed Malacia! In the wilderness beyond its fortress walls, in dreary chasm, tangled forest, or endless mountainside, the forces of many kinds of evil struggled for supremacy. Within our winding streets serenity seemed to prevail.

"seemed" is the key word in this brief introduction...

Author	William Kotzwinkle
ISBN	1569247870

synopsis: a noirish adventure in Europe, mid-19th century. The psychic Lazare captivates the upper classes of Paris. The redoubtable Inspector Picard is less than captivated.

William Kotzwinkle is perhaps most well-known for his World Fantasy Award-winning novel Doctor Rat, or for his...

Author

Rudy Rucker

Perhaps I should say why I have read this book in the first place: Rudy Rucker is a mathematician, a set theorist to be precise, and this book, his opera prima, was written around a central theme: infinity. To write fiction trying to convey Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers is no minor feat, and that...

Author	James Blish
ISBN	0671698605

This is an omnibus book of the novella Black Easter and its sequel The Day After Judgement. What Stoker's Dracula and King's Salem's Lot is to vampires, The Devil's Day is to demons. Blish said in his Author's Note to Black Easter that every one of the "novels, poems and plays about magic and witchcraft"...

Author

James P. Blaylock

Southern California—sunny days, blue skies, neighbors on flying bicycles…ghostly submarines…mermen off the Catalina coast…and a vast underground sea stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Inland Empire where Chinese junks ply an illicit trade and enormous creatures from ages past...

Author	Thomas M. Disch
ISBN	0425137465

Voices From the Grave

I am fascinated by the abiding religious influence of ‘secular’ writers, especially when they demonstrate a commonality which is otherwise difficult to articulate. The Catholic Thomas Disch, for example, is remarkably like the Jewish Stanley Elkin. Each wrote...

Author	J.G. Ballard
ISBN	0871404044

Like the antihero of Werner Herzog’s masterwork Fitzcarraldo, the narrator of Ballard’s novel is a semi-cracked basket case with an insane dream and an insane level of stamina and persistence. In Fitzcarraldo, the mission is to build an opera house for the Peruvian people through hauling a ship...

Author	Kaori Yuki
ISBN	1421508990

Born under an evil moon harboring dark secrets, Earl Cain C. Hargreves, the youthful heir of the aristocratic Hargreves family, is a man on a quest to find the truth about his family's past. Written in dark, harrowing episodes, The CAIN Saga chronicles how Cain solves the strange crimes that seem to plague...