Showing results by narrator "Stefan Rudnicki" in All Categories

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.

When a human team is sent to scout a few hundred light-years in front of the death wave, it encounters a civilization far in advance of our own, a civilization of machine intelligences.These sentient, intelligent machines have existed for eons and have survived earlier "death waves" - gamma-ray bursts from the core of the galaxy. They are totally self-sufficient, completely certain that the death wave cannot harm them, and utterly uninterested in helping to save other civilizations.

Given that the suns of Draco stretch almost 16 light-years from end to end, it stands to reason that the cost of transportation is the most important factor driving the 32nd century. And since Illyrion is the element most needed for space travel, Lorq von Ray is plenty willing to fly through the core of a recently imploded sun in order to obtain seven tons of it.

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.

Matt Helm, one-time special agent for the American government during the Second World War, has left behind his violent past to raise a family in Santa Fe, New Mexico. When a former colleague turns rogue and kidnaps his daughter, Helm is forced to return to his former life as a deadly and relentless assassin.

1972. The Munich Olympics. Palestinian members of the Black September group murder 11 Israeli athletes. Nine hundred million people watch the crisis unfold on television, witnessing a tragedy that inaugurates the modern age of terror.

The Age of Napoleon, the 11th and final volume of the Story of Civilization, surveys the amazing chain of events that wrenched Europe out of the Enlightenment and into the age of democracy. In this masterful work, listeners will encounter the French Revolution from the storming of the Bastille to the guillotining of the king; and the revolution's leaders - Danton, Desmoulins, Robespierre, and Saint-Just - all cut down by the reign of terror they inaugurated.

“Investments” finds Gareth Martinez has accepted a meaningless post as Inspector General of Chee, a newly settled world. Intending nothing more than a pleasant vacation with his family, he first stumbles across a murderous conspiracy. In “The Stickpin,” set in the Naxid War, Caroline Sula leads the resistance against the Naxid occupiers, and shows how a pleasant afternoon stroll can have deadly consequences to the enemy. Then in Impersonations, Caroline Sula has been posted to the planet Earth, a dismal backwater where careers go to die.

Someone is stealing the children of the galaxy’s elite, and Kirth Gersen suspects that the kidnapper is Kokor Hekkus—second of the Demon Princes. Deciphering a complex pattern of clues and coincidences, Gersen tracks his quarry to a barbaric world, where Hekkus is protected by an invincible war machine. To confront Hekkus, Gersen must resort to a desperate plan.

Is it space travel that children dream of, or merely visiting other worlds? Todd had always set his heart on being an astronaut, but when he meets an alien and travels to another world, he doesn't use a spaceship; he just hangs out in his own back yard.

Seven years after the indomitable Doug Stavenger has realized his cherished dream of establishing a colony on the inhospitable lunar surface, Moonbase is a thriving community, a marvel of scientific achievement created and supported by nanotechnology: virus-sized machines that can build, cure, and destroy. But nanotechnology has been declared illegal by the home planet’s leaders, and a powerful despot is determined to lay claim to Stavenger’s peaceful city - or obliterate it, if necessary.

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.

Moscow has resurrected the mammoth, but someone must teach them how to be mammoths, or they are doomed to die out, again. The late Dr. Damira Khismatullina, the world’s foremost expert in elephant behavior, is called in to help. While she was murdered a year ago, her digitized consciousness is uploaded into the brain of a mammoth. Can she help the magnificent creatures fend off poachers long enough for their species to take hold? And will she ever discover the real reason they were brought back?

A deathbed promise leads a daughter on an incredible journey to write about her grandfather who was a famous war hero. But this journey had a terrible destination: the discovery that he was a Nazi war criminal.

This novel centers on the figure of Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, a member of the dying class of the landed gentry, who spends most of his time lying in bed gazing at life in an apathetic daze, encouraged by his equally lazy servant Zakhar and routinely swindled by his acquaintances. But this torpid existence comes to an end when, spurred on by his crumbling finances, the love of a woman, and the reproaches of his friend, the hardworking Schtoltz, Oblomov finds that he must engage with the real world and face up to his commitments.

Step Fletcher, his pregnant wife DeAnne, and their three children move to Steuben, North Carolina, with high hopes. But Step's new job with a software company turns out to be a snake pit, and 8-year-old Stevie's school is worse. As Stevie retreats into himself, focusing more and more on a mysterious computer game and a growing troop of imaginary friends, the Fletchers' concern turns to terror.

Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Luhzin Defense.

In a not-too-distant future that is not quite ours, there has been a major scientific breakthrough. It is a way to open windows into the past, permitting historical researchers to view, but not participate, in the events of the past.

In one of the most powerful and thought-provoking novels of his remarkable career, Orson Scott Card interweaves a compelling portrait of Christopher Columbus with the story of a future scientist who believes she can alter human history from a tragedy of bloodshed and brutality to a world filled with hope and healing.

The Age of Louis XIV is the biography of a period (1648 - 1715) that Spengler considered the apex of modern European civilization. "Some centuries hence," Frederick the Great correctly predicted to Voltaire, "they will translate the good authors of the age of Pericles and Augustus." Those authors are lovingly treated here.

The fourth Demon Prince, Lens Larque, combines murderous criminality with a taste for horrific practical jokes. Escaping Gersen once, Larque flees to his home world of Dar Sai, known for its strange mating rituals and the violent winner-take-all game of hadaul. Gersen follows his quarry to the milder world of Methel, where Larque plans a revengeful prank on a wealthy man. Gersen has a more final vengeance in mind.