Humor Fiction Adventure

After being approached by the military with a contract he couldn't refuse, James winds up uploaded into a virtual-reality game as a beta tester. Waking up in the Great Savanna, James struggles with a less-than-useful interface before he comes across two creatures locked in battle. The shoulder-high grass allows him glimpses of a lionesque creature fending off a torrent of scales and claws. He grows to love the beauty of the Great Savanna and his adopted game brother, whose life he saved.... That is until Patrick arrives and the tranquility of the game is shattered.

Amiah is given the opportunity to discover what true adventuring is like. She ends up participating in person rather than merely reading about it in a book or watching it in a movie. Something terrible has happened to the lidra of Ti's Nest and it is up to Amiah to help her friends through harrowing and comical challenges that take on a creepy edge when they realize the enemy they are up against is a spider-like people. Perhaps the privilege of riding a giant saber tooth cat will make it worth it!

In this science fiction satire of westerns, after the American West was destroyed in a series of biological disasters, rebuilding it is a lot like building it in the first place, but there are crucial differences. For example, new, partly mechanical cattle with computer brains are called steerites. They speak and sing a lot more than the original steers. Most of the cowboys, outlaws, and lawmen are partly mechanical, too, except for those few humans called control-naturals. That group has to keep all their original equipment, just like the original cowboys.

Dr. Eve Zachara, a smart, sexy, tech executive and expert in martial arts, is on a mission to save the world from total annihilation. In the future, the fight between Apple and Google has grown into a deadly world war. Corporate fighter jets roar over the deserts of Central Asia, machine guns blast in the jungles of Africa, and high above the planet, vast battles are waged by opposing space fleets. Google has vowed to nuke the Earth from their space based nuclear platform, right after Steve Job's new Keynote speech.

Chuck never thought too deeply about whether aliens existed - not until Jopp, an intergalactic transport pilot, drunkenly crashed on Earth and tried to steal his truck. Now Chuck finds himself unwittingly roped into helping Jopp work off a debt to the universe's most powerful corporation, the Prime Partners Intergalactic Consortium. Through a series of mishaps and misfortune, the duo find themselves in possession of a mysterious black case. In order to survive, they must fend off murderous marauders, an interplanetary police force, and a peculiar crime boss.

Action and adventure are mixed with a healthy dose of offbeat humor in this P. Howard classic, set in the second half of the 1930s. Harrincourt is dishonorably discharged from the French Naval Academy for a prank. He realizes that his carefree behavior put the livelihood of his widowed mother and teenage sister in jeopardy. To secure their financial future, he pays the premium on his life insurance policy and joins the French Foreign Legion destined to Africa, where his death “in the course of professional duty “would be all but guaranteed.

The Cheeseman family is back from back in time. In other words, they're in the present time. Well, presently, at least. They're soon to journey back again - only just a few years this time - to save the life of their beloved mother. But when they get to the not-so-distant-past, they meet something utterly surprising. Something wilder than anything they've seen before - including cowboy poets and good-natured pirates. They are about to meet...the alternate versions of themselves!

Train. Car. Plane. Boat. Feet. He'll get there. Won't he? Stranded in the middle of nowhere, a 15-year-old boy's attempts to get somewhere make for absorbing listening.

When Ren Sharpe was 14, she was kidnapped by a shadowy organization called FATE and trained to be a human weapon. Now, four years later, she receives her assignment: protect Gareth Young at all costs. Currently a student at Texas A&M, Gareth will someday change the world. FATE calls people like Gareth "FIPs" - future important people - and they're everywhere, each with a FATE-trained shadow.

A year ago, Boy, the son of Frankenstein's monster, had never even met a human. Now he's living with his human "family", the descendants of Dr. Frankenstein, in Switzerland. That is until the maniacal genius Dr. Moreau, long-ago banished to a remote island for his crimes against humanity, asks for Boy's help.

For Max Schreiber, World War II was an idyll. It is the return home to Connecticut that feels like entering a combat zone. Ridiculed by his wife and daughter, bored by his legal practice, Schreiber spends his evenings drinking and eating alone, hoping that when he goes to sleep he will dream of France and Micheline, the beautiful young woman who may have broken his heart but at least made him feel alive.

Back on the Road to Key West reintroduces the somewhat reluctant adventurers Kansas Stamps and Will Bell, casting them into one bizarre situation after another while capturing the true flavor and feel of Key West and the Caribbean in the early 1980s.

Hundreds of alien creatures gather at the Collundrome, an asteroid party venue, for the Pan-Galactic Prom Show, the biggest bash in the known universe. Funk Toast, an Earth band, is slated to headline the event. But Knolar Jex, intergalactic pirate and terrorist, has his own nefarious plans for this year’s extravaganza.

Echoing a narrative line that includes Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, William Giraldi’s Busy Monsters has been hailed as one of the most exciting fiction debuts in years. Penned with a linguistic bravado that explores the diaphanous line between fiction and fact, this "very funny, very inventive dbut novel" ( The New Yorker) has at last revived the great American picaresque tradition.

The Road to Key West is an adventurous/humorous sojourn that cavorts its way through the 1970s Caribbean, from Key West and the Bahamas, to Cuba and Central America. In August of 1971, Kansas Stamps and Will Bell set out to become nothing more than commercial divers in the Florida Keys, but adventure, or misadventure, seems to dog them at every turn.

This tells the often hilarious story of two middle-aged women, Pat and Sam, intent on fleeing hearth and home for a blissful, family-free fortnight of drawing and cooking classes – only to end up at leaky old Hartley House. There, the ever-resourceful Aunt Biddy is struggling to get her nephew Tom’s life back on track by opening his only asset as an idyllic country retreat.

Pregnancy was pretty rough for sixteen-year-old Elvie Nara, what with the morning sickness, constant food cravings, and the alien race war she found herself in the middle of. But if she thought giving birth to an extraterrestrial’s baby would be the hard part, she was sorely mistaken.

The Remarkable History of the Legendary Christmas Dragon: How an Innocent Young Dragon Found a Forever Friend, a Name, and became Santa's Pocket Alarm. ("No more Clement Moores!") This imaginative American fable for the Holidays confronts the mysteries of dragons, vampire bats, sea serpents, time travel and the North Pole with wry, heartwarming humor as the pleasant, ordinary lives of the citizens of a tiny Medieval kingdom are interrupted by an angry witch "vanishing" their beloved royal twins.

Elliot Vail is a floundering San Francisco stand-up comedian who will do anything for a cheap place to live. So when strange Edward Bockman offers him free rent in exchange for some odd dos and don'ts, Elliot thinks his luck is about to change. After all, despite Bockman's over-active imagination, head-to-toe Robin Hood costume and locked bedroom door, he seems nice enough.

In The Royalscope Fe-As-Ko, Northwest cattle rancher Royal Leckner finds himself in the middle of another fe-as-ko, this time in 1915 Hollywood. Dreams of stardom for her daughter, Elsie, and for herself entice Royal's wife, E.M., to buy a silent film company. She quickly renames it Royalscope Productions in order to convince her fuming husband it's a gift.