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Kage Baker's stories and novels of the mysterious organization that controls time travel, The Company, have made her famous in SF. So has her talent for clever dialogue, and pointed social commentary with a light touch. The Anvil of the World is her first fantasy novel, a journey across a fantastic landscape filled with bizarre creatures, human and otherwise. It is the tale of Smith, of the large extended family of Smiths, of the Children of the Sun. They are a race given to blood feuds, and Smith was formerly an extremely successful assassin. Now he has wearied of his work and is trying to retire in another country, to live an honest life in obscurity in spite of all those who have sworn to kill him. His problems begin when he agrees to be the master of a caravan from the inland city of Troon to the seaside city of Salesh. The caravan is dogged with murder, magic, and the brooding image of the Master of the Mountain, a powerful demon, looking down from his mountain kingdom upon the greenlands and the travelers passing below. In Salesh, Smith becomes an innkeeper, but on the journey he befriended the young Lord Ermenwyr, a decadent demonic half-breed. Each time Ermenwyr turns up, he brings new trouble with him. The outgrowth of stories Baker has been writing since childhood, as engaging as Tolkien and yet nothing like him, Smith's adventure is certainly the only fantasy on record with a white-uniformed nurse, gourmet cuisine, one hundred and forty-four glass butterflies, and a steamboat. This is a book filled with intrigue, romance, sudden violence, and moments of emotional impact, a cast of charming characters, and echoes of the fantasy tradition from Lord Dunsany and Fritz Leiber to Jack Vance and Roger Zelazny.
The chronicles of The Winter of the World echo down the ages in half-remembered myth and song - tales of mysterious powers of the Mastersmiths, of the forging of great weapons, of the subterranean kingdoms of the duergar, of Gods who walked abroad, and of the Powers that struggled endlessly for dominion. In the Northlands, beleaguered by the ever-encroaching Ice and the marauding Ekwesh, a young cowherd, saved from the raiders by the mysterious Mastersmith, discovers in himself an uncanny power to shape metal - but it is a power that may easily be turned to evil ends, and on a dreadful night he flees his new home, and embarks on the quest to find both his own destiny, and a weapon that will let him stand against the Power of the Ice. His wanderings will bring him great friends but earn him greater enemies, and eventually they will transform him from lowly cowherd to a mastersmith fit to stand with the greatest of all men.
Deadly radiation from a passing comet is about to destroy life on Earth. In desperation, the U.S. Government constructs a series of underground shelters to protect as many people as possible. They are expected to be underground for 20 years before returning back to the surface. But can they survive their time within the confines of the underground shelter... and what will they find when they finally emerge? A parallel story to 'The Ark', 'The Anvil' is a riveting story of survival and courage in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi setting.
This groundbreaking book examines the role of rulers with nomadic roots in transforming the great societies of Eurasia, especially from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. Distinguished historian Pamela Kyle Crossley, drawing on the long history of nomadic confrontation with Eurasia’s densely populated civilizations, argues that the distinctive changes we associate with modernity were founded on vernacular literature and arts, rising literacy, mercantile and financial economies, religious dissidence, independent learning, and self-legitimating rulership. Crossley finds that political traditions of Central Asia insulated rulers from established religious authority and promoted the objectification of cultural identities marked by language and faith, which created a mutual encouragement of cultural and political change. As religious and social hierarchies weakened, political centralization and militarization advanced. But in the spheres of religion and philosophy, iconoclasm enjoyed a new life. The changes cumulatively defined a threshold of the modern world, beyond which lay early nationalism, imperialism, and the novel divisions of Eurasia into “East” and “West.” Synthesizing new interpretive approaches and grand themes of world history from 1000 to 1500, Crossley reveals the unique importance of Turkic and Mongol regimes in shaping Eurasia’s economic, technological, and political evolution toward our modern world.
From the award-winning online worldbuilding service - World Anvil - comes a collection of novelettes from their community that span the breadth of imagination and beyond. Explore ten realms of the fantastic from the eyes of the people who inhabit them, each showcasing a creation from the World Anvil community.
The siege of Kerbryhaine had been raised, the Ekwesh hordes vanquished, the Mastersmith slain. But for Alv - now Elof the Smith - the war was not yet won: Kerbryhaine was still a divided city; the Ekwesh, bloodily defeated, would look for revenge; and the Ice, implacably malevolent, continued its inexorable march southward. So from divided Kerbryhaine Elof, Kermorvan and his companions mounted an expedition to the legendary lost cities of the East; if they managed to reunite the war-torn tribes, perhaps they could stand together against the menace of the Ice. But to Elof and Kermorvan the journey would also bring knowledge: of the Powers ranged for and against them; and the secrets within themselves waiting to be revealed - secrets that would play a part in the war yet to come.
The tenet of this book is provide a tool for artists/blacksmiths and metalworkers. It tells how to work metal: heating it, cutting it, upsetting it, drawing it out, twisting it, forge welding it and shaping and assembling it. It tells about metallurgy and tool making, metal finishes and corrosion, sources of information and supplies, charts and guidelines for many tasks. It explains the process of design, how to use the computer in metal design, how to set up a business and how to manage it. Providing an inspiration for all blacksmiths are portfolios of the wrought iron work of Martin Rose and Samuel Yellin, two of America's premier metalworkers of the past. To further inspire and to show the new focus of blacksmithing in the metal arts, six contemporary metalworkers show a series of demonstration pieces of their iron work. This 256 page book is bound with an improved binding system (Otabind) that allows the pages to lay flat.
'The Inanimate World' is an affecting suite of stories, with a novella-length piece at its core. The stories within 'The Inanimate World' traverse both rural and urban landscapes, exploring the terrain of the personal as much as the geographic. They span the time period of 1980 to the present, providing relevant insights into the private lives of people living through rapid social transformation and an unstable changing economy. Sincere, germane, and tender tales of longing-for love, understanding, acceptance, and peace."The stories have a narrative stability not often found in first collections, the writing is sure and mature, and there, and there's a range of approaches on display, from experimental to intimate to epic." - Malahat Review
A Ship of the Law travels the infinite enormity of space, carrying 82 young people: fighters, strategists, scientists; the Children. They work with sophisticated non-human technologies that need new thinking to comprehend them. They are cut off forever from the people they left behind. Denied information, they live within a complex system that is both obedient and beyond their control. They are frightened. And they are making war against entities whose technologies are so advanced, so vast, as to dwarf them. Against something whose psychology is ultimately, unknowably alien.