Science Imagination

In a world where the sun dims over the last continent, Zothique, two exiled necromancers—Mmatmuor and Sodosma—seek to create their empire in a kingdom of the dead. Driven from Tinarath, they journey to the deserted land of Cincor, where plague has left only bones and mummies behind. Using forbidden spells, they raise the dead to serve their dark will, constructing an undead empire of forced labor and eerie splendor. Yet, deep in this kingdom, a spark of rebellion stirs among the dead.

On the continent of Zothique, beneath the dying sun of a withering Earth, the sorcerer Namirrha devises a scheme of revenge powerful enough to shatter an entire empire. His reputation is dark, his allies fearsome beings from hell, but his goal is singular: to confront Emperor Zotulla, the one who, years before, condemned Namirrha—then a beggar boy named Narthos—to a life of degradation. Now he returns under the cloak of night, prepared for a reckoning that may shake the heavens and earth alike.

There is a box. Anything you imagine will appear inside. You have one go, one chance to create anything you want. What would you pick? That's exactly the question 10-year-old Timothy Hart gets to answer after discovering The Imagination Box. The greatest toy on earth. The top-secret contraption transforms his life, but when the box's inventor, Professor Eisenstone, goes missing, Tim knows he has to investigate.

Science writer Sadie Dingfelder has always known that she’s a little quirky. But while she’s made some strange mistakes over the years, it’s not until she accosts a stranger in a grocery store (whom she thinks is her husband) that she realizes something is amiss. With a mixture of curiosity and dread, Dingfelder starts contacting neuroscientists and lands herself in scores of studies. In the course of her nerdy midlife crisis, she discovers that she is emphatically not neurotypical.

In the heart of the savage Hyborian Age, Conan the Cimmerian embarks on a perilous journey that will etch his name into legend. Fleeing from the law, he joins forces with the enigmatic and fierce pirate queen, Bêlit, whose beauty is as deadly as her blade. Together, they carve a path of terror and plunder along the treacherous Black Coast.

The founder of the international Transition Towns movement asks why true creative, positive thinking is in decline, asserts that it's more important now than ever, and suggests ways our communities can revive and reclaim it.

"The Time Machine," first published in 1895, is one of the most important novels in the history of world science fiction literature. The plot focuses on the fate of the scientist, the Time Traveler, who, with the help of a self-constructed device, travels to the distant future, where he encounters two distinct human races–the Eloi and the Morlocks.

When a desperate nomad warns Conan about the sinister innkeeper Aram Baksh, whose guests vanish without a trace, Conan is undeterred. But as darkness falls, the city’s true horrors emerge. Cannibalistic slaves lurk in the shadows, and a mysterious woman named Zabibi seeks Conan’s help to save her lover from a madness inflicted by the malevolent priest Totrasmek. In a high-stakes adventure through cursed temples and treacherous streets, Conan must confront merciless enemies, uncover ancient secrets, and survive the deadly Dance of the Cobras.

Myths are usually seen as stories from the depths of time—fun and fantastical, but no longer believed by anyone. Yet, as Philip Ball shows, we are still writing them—and still living them—today. From Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein to Batman, many stories written in the past few centuries are commonly, perhaps glibly, called "modern myths." But Ball argues that we should take that idea seriously. Our stories of Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Sherlock Holmes are doing the kind of cultural work that the ancient myths once did.

At a time when speculative fiction seems less and less far-fetched, Margaret Atwood lends her distinctive voice and singular point of view to the genre in a series of essays that brilliantly illuminates the essential truths about the modern world. This is an exploration of her relationship with the literary form we have come to know as "science fiction”, a relationship that has been lifelong, stretching from her days as a child reader in the 1940s, through her time as a graduate student at Harvard, where she worked on the Victorian ancestor of the form.

When Tilly, Oskar, Milo and Alessia venture into Arthurian legend to find the first bookwanderer – the wizard Merlin – they discover that everything they thought they knew about bookwandering might be wrong. Working together to figure out how to untangle the Alchemist's grip on the world's imagination, save Pages & Co. and defeat an unexpected enemy, they learn about the true power of imagination in a journey through myths and legend that will help them to save the very foundations of bookwandering.

Stories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. The promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, the doors are often barred. The Dark Fantastic is an engaging and provocative exploration of race in popular youth and young adult speculative fiction. Grounded in her experiences as YA novelist, fan-fiction writer, and scholar of education, Thomas considers four black girl protagonists from some of the most popular stories of the early 21st century.

For over half a century, scholars have labored to show that C. S. Lewis' famed but apparently disorganized Chronicles of Narnia have an underlying symbolic coherence, pointing to such possible unifying themes as the seven sacraments, the seven deadly sins, and the seven books of Spenser's Faerie Queene. None of these explanations has won general acceptance, and the structure of Narnia's symbolism has remained a mystery.

Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition.

Kojo Koram traces the tale of how, after the end of the British empire, an interconnected group of well-heeled British intellectuals, politicians, accountants and lawyers offshored their capital, seized assets and saddled debt in former 'dependencies'. This enabled horrific inequality across the globe, as ruthless capitalists profited and ordinary people across Britain's former territories in colonial Africa, Asia and the Caribbean were trapped in poverty.

Kelley unearths freedom dreams in this exciting history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora in the 20th century. Focusing on the visions of activists from C. L. R. James to Aime Cesaire and Malcolm X, Kelley writes of the hope that Communism offered, the mindscapes of Surrealism, the transformative potential of radical feminism, and of the 400-year-old dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow.

First published in 2002, Freedom Dreams is a staple in the study of the Black radical tradition. Unearthing the thrilling history of grassroots movements and renegade intellectuals and artists, Kelley recovers the dreams of the future worlds Black radicals struggled to achieve.

“Black Colossus” unfolds in the mysterious ruins of Kuthchemes, where the ancient sorcerer Thugra Khotan is awakened from his three-thousand-year slumber by the bold yet ill-fated Zamorian thief, Shevatas. Thugra awakens with dreams of world domination. Taking the name Natohk, the “Veiled One,” he gathers an army of desert tribes and sets out to conquer the nations of Hyboria.

Mabel lives with her parents in the Mermaid Hotel, where she keeps an eye on all the guests, particularly her friend, the endlessly fascinating Madame Badobedah. Madame Badobedah, who considers herself part of a long tradition of daring women such as Amelia Earhart and Zora Neale Hurston, has pirouetted through pyramids, swum with mermaids and helped a triceratops with a toothache. Just opening one of the drawers in her dressing table full of mementos elicits tales of banshees and curses and an exciting new quest – a reverse jewel heist!

This highly understandable audiobook offers a contemporary interpretation of the political thought of Edmund Burke, drawing on his experiences to illuminate and address fundamental questions of politics and society that are of particular interest today. In Edmund Burke for Our Time, Byrne asserts that Burke's politics is reflective of unique and sophisticated ideas about how people think and learn, and about determinants of political behavior.