Showing results by narrator "Stefan Rudnicki" in All Categories

Half-Navajo geologist Jamie Waterman has been selected for the ground team of the first manned expedition to our mysterious neighbor planet. Joining an international team of astronauts and scientists, he endures the rigors of training, the dangers of traveling an incredible distance in space, the challenges of an alien landscape, and the personal and political conflicts that arise when the team must face the most shocking discovery of all.

After more than a century of exploring the stars, Keith Stoner returns to Earth to find that the world he has come back to does not match the one he left. The planet is suffering the consequences of disastrous greenhouse flooding. Most nations have been taken over by ultraconservative religion-based governments, such as the New Morality in the United States. With population ballooning and resources running out, Earth is heading for nuclear war.

Shakespeare, Our Contemporary is a provocative, original study of the major plays of Shakespeare. More than that, it is one of the few critical works to have strongly influenced theatrical productions.

After nearly fifty years in the killing business, the hitman known as Quarry was enjoying a comfortable retirement–until the grown daughter he only recently met mysteriously went missing. Now it’s up to the old man to show he hasn’t lost a step and, with the help of a femme fatale from his past, prove he’s as ruthless, deadly and unstoppable as any man half his age.

Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there...the population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. And into this disaster zone comes a young man - a poet, a lover, and an adventurer - known only as the Kid.

"I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man", a nameless voice cries out. And so, from underground, emerge the passionate confessions of a suffering man; the painful self-examination of a tormented soul; the bristling scorn of a lonely individual who has become one of the greatest anti-heroes in all literature.

In music, counterpoint is the art of writing melodies that play in conjunction with one another, according to a strict set of rules, in order to emphasize the melody by contrast. In debate, point/counterpoint is a means of persuasion in which the speaker begins by conceding to their opponent’s argument before refuting it wholeheartedly. Aldous Huxley follows these traditions in his masterpiece Point Counter Point. The polarity between passion and reason in the intellectual life of the 1920s is demonstrated both in form and in theme in Huxley’s ambitious satire.

Perhaps no figure in biblical scholarship has been the subject of more controversy and debate than Mary Magdalene. Although she is discussed in the gospels of Philip, Thomas, Peter, and Bartholomew in the collection of writings known as the Gnostic gospels that were rejected by the early Christian church, there is no better insight into this mysterious and influential woman than Mary's own gospel.

Renowned throughout the land of Ankhana as the Blade of Tyshalle, Caine has killed his share of monarchs and commoners, villains and heroes. He is relentless, unstoppable, simply the best there is at what he does. At home on Earth, Caine is Hari Michaelson, a superstar whose adventures in Ankhana command an audience of billions.

There is a book that is shrouded in mystery. Some even say it's a myth. Within its pages is a play - one that brings madness and despair to all who read it. It is the play of the King in Yellow, and it will haunt you for the rest of your days. The King in Yellow is a collection of stories interwoven loosely by the elements of the play, including the central figure himself.

Six years after the first manned Martian expedition, a second has been announced, this one motivated purely by its profitable potential. Half-Navajo geologist Jamie Waterman, a veteran of the first mission, feels his conflicted soul beckoning him back to the eerie, unforgiving planet. As commander of the new exploratory team, he will have to contend with a bitter and destructive rivalry, a disturbing new emotional attraction, and deadly, incomprehensible "accidents" that appear to be sabotage.

In Rip-Off!, 13 of today’s best and most honored writers of speculative fiction face a challenge even they would be hard-pressed to conceive: Pick your favorite opening line from a classic piece of fiction (or even non-fiction) - then use it as the first sentence of an entirely original short story.

In a near future, the air pollution is so bad that everyone wears gas masks. The infant mortality rate is soaring, and birth defects, new diseases, and physical ailments of all kinds abound. The water is undrinkable - unless you're poor and have no choice. Large corporations fighting over profits from gas masks, drinking water, and clean food tower over an ineffectual, corrupt government.

The war is over, yet Dr. Doll, a loner and "moderate pessimist", lives in constant fear. By night, he is still haunted by nightmarish images of the bombsite in which he is trapped - he, and the rest of Germany. More than anything, he wishes to vanquish the demon of collective guilt, but he is unable to right any wrongs, especially in his position as mayor of a small town in northeast Germany that has been occupied by the Red Army. Dr. Doll flees this place for Berlin, where he finds escape in a morphine addiction: each dose is a "small death."

Do you want to break free from your addictions? If so, you need to optimize your brain. The brain plays a central role in your vulnerability to addiction and your ability to recover. Brain dysfunction is the number one reason people fall victim to addiction, why they can't break the chains of addiction, and why they relapse.

In the aftermath of his terrible war, Ender Wiggin disappeared, and a powerful voice arose: the Speaker for the Dead, who told the true story of the Bugger War. Now, long years later, a second alien race has been discovered by Portuguese colonists on the planet Lusitania. But again the aliens' ways are strange and frightening...again, humans die. And it is only the Speaker for the Dead, who is also Ender Wiggin the Xenocide, who has the courage to confront the mystery...and the truth.

A wave of death is spreading through the Milky Way galaxy, an expanding sphere of lethal gamma radiation that erupted from the galaxy's core 28,000 years ago. Every world it touched was wiped clean of all life. But it's possible to protect a planet from gamma radiation. Now, guided by the ancient intelligent machines called the Predecessors, men and women from Earth seek out those precious, rare worlds that harbor intelligent species, determined to save them.

Weird Women, edited by award-winning anthologists Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger, collects some of the finest tales of terror by authors as legendary as Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, alongside works of writers who were the best sellers and critical favorites of their time - Marie Corelli, Ellen Glasgow, Charlotte Riddell - and lesser known authors who are deserving of contemporary recognition.

Harlan Ellison’s work shaped the science-fiction, fantasy, and horror genres in the twentieth century, and this collection of his best-known and most-acclaimed stories is a perfect treasury for old Ellison fans as well as listeners discovering this zany, polyphonic writer for the first time.

North America, 2047. For the small Pacific Coast community of San Onofre, life in the aftermath of a devastating nuclear attack is a matter of survival, a day-to-day struggle to stay alive. But young Hank Fletcher dreams of the world that might have been, that might yet be - and dreams of playing a crucial role in America's rebirth.