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The Brave Free Men
The Durdane series is a trilogy of science fiction books written by Jack Vance between 1971 and 1973, and detail the adventures of Gastel Etzwane on the world Durdane. The trilogy, as a whole, portrays his rise from common boy to the autocrat The Anome, and finally, as a saviour of his world against the alien Asutra of the third book. The three books in the trilogy are, in reading and publication order: * '' The Anome'' * '' The Brave Free Men'' * '' The Asutra'' Plot summary The land of Shant on the planet Durdane is ruled by a purposely anonymous dictator called the Anome or Faceless Man. He maintains control by virtue of the torc, a ring of explosive placed around the neck of every adult in Shant. The Anome is the product of a self-perpetuating, self-selecting dynasty. When one Anome grows old, he chooses his successor, a system hundreds of years old. The reason for this harsh system of government is the extreme individuality of the folk of Shant. They are divided into doz ...
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Science Fiction
Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel universes, extraterrestrial life, sentient artificial intelligence, cybernetics, certain forms of immortality (like mind uploading), and the singularity. Science fiction predicted several existing inventions, such as the atomic bomb, robots, and borazon, whose names entirely match their fictional predecessors. In addition, science fiction might serve as an outlet to facilitate future scientific and technological innovations. Science fiction can trace its roots to ancient mythology. It is also related to fantasy, horror, and superhero fiction and contains many subgenres. Its exact definition has long been disputed among authors, critics, scholars, and readers. Science fiction, in literature, film, television, and other media, ...
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Gaean Reach
The Gaean Reach is a fictional region in space that is a setting for some science fiction by Jack Vance. All of his series and standalone works that are set in a universe evidently including the Gaean Reach, perhaps set inside it or outside it, have been catalogued as the Gaean Reach series or super-series. The Gaean Reach includes all worlds colonized by humans, among which trade and travel flow freely for the most part. Its name apparently means "the range (''reach'') of he people fromEarth ( ''Gaea'')"; it could also be derived from Old English 'rice' (pronounced reech-e), meaning 'realm' (cf. German ''Reich''). Some of these worlds are advanced and cosmopolitan, such as Alphanor; others, like Thamber, are inhabited by shipwrecked and forgotten people, who have reverted to feudalism. Some, like the world of Wyst in the Alastor Cluster, are undeniably strange in their culture and customs. The period of the Gaean Reach spans several centuries, if not millennia, at an indetermi ...
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Science Fiction Book Series
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for scientific reasoning is tens of thousands of years old. The earliest written records in the history of science come from Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in around 3000 to 1200 BCE. Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, whereby formal attempts were made to provide explanations of events in the physical world based on natural causes. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek conceptions of the world deteriorated in Western Europe during the early centuries (400 to 1000 CE) of the Middle Ages, but was preserved in the Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age and later by the efforts of Byzantine Greek scholars who brought Greek man ...
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Wedlock (film)
''Wedlock'' is a 1991 American science fiction-action television film from HBO Pictures, directed by Lewis Teague and starring Rutger Hauer, Mimi Rogers, Joan Chen, and James Remar. It received an Emmy Nomination for Sound Editing. Synopsis After stealing diamonds in a robbery, diamond thief Frank Warren is betrayed by his best friend Sam and his fiancée Noelle, who turns him in to the authorities. Frank is sentenced to 12 years imprisonment at Camp Holliday, an experimental prison where each convict is fitted with an electronic collar containing an explosive device which is electronically connected to another inmate. If any inmate tries to escape from Camp Holliday, or is even just separated from their collar-mate by more than 100 yards, both their collars will explode. Frank learns the inmate he is connected to is Tracy Riggs, and Tracy and Frank both escape with their collars intact. On the run from the authorities, Frank and Tracy find they are being pursued by Sam and Noel ...
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Jim Burns
Jim Burns (born 10 April 1948) is a Welsh artist born in Cardiff, Wales. He has been called one of the Grand Masters of the science fiction art world. In 1966 he joined the Royal Air Force, but soon thereafter he left and signed up at the Newport School of Art for a year's foundation course. After that, he went on to complete a 3-year Diploma in Art and Design at Saint Martin's School of Art in London. When he left Saint Martin's in 1972 he had already joined the recently established illustration agency Young Artists. He has been with this agency, later renamed Arena, ever since. He is today a contemporary British science fiction illustrator. His work mostly deals with science fiction with erotic overtones. His paintings are generally intricate photo-realistic works of beautiful women set against advanced machines and spaceships. While his preparatory sketches are more erotically focused, his final works and published book covers have a more academic tone portraying far ...
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Coronet Books
Coronet Books was established in 1966 as the paperback imprint of Hodder & Stoughton. The imprint was closed in 2004 but then relaunched in 2010, publishing fiction and non-fiction in hardback and paperback, including works by Chris Ryan, Lorna Byrne, and Auberon Waugh. Selected works * ''The French Connection (book), The French Connection'' – Robin Moore * ''The Anderson Tapes'' – Lawrence Sanders (1971) * ''The Shakeout'' - Ken Follett (1975) * ''Bring on the Empty Horses'' – David Niven (1977) * R. F. Delderfield, including the Avenue series and the A Horseman Riding By trilogy * P. G. Wodehouse, including ''Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit'' (1977), ''Joy in the Morning'' (1977), ''Plum Pie'' (1983) * ''The Moon’s a Balloon'' – David Niven (1981) * Jeffrey Archer, including ''Kane and Abel (novel), Kane and Abel'' (1981), ''The Prodigal Daughter'' (1983), and ''Shall We Tell the President?'' (1984) * Mary Stewart (novelist), Mary Stewart, including the Mary Stewart's Me ...
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Dell Publishing
Dell Publishing Company, Inc. is an American publisher of books, magazines and comic books, that was founded in 1921 by George T. Delacorte Jr. with $10,000 (approx. $145,000 in 2021), two employees and one magazine title, ''I Confess'', and soon began turning out dozens of pulp magazines, which included penny-a-word detective stories, articles about films, and romance books (or "smoochies" as they were known in the slang of the day). During the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, Dell was one of the largest publishers of magazines, including pulp magazines. Their line of humor magazines included ''1000 Jokes'', launched in 1938. From 1929 to 1974, they published comics under the Dell Comics line, the bulk of which (1938–68) was done in partnership with Western Publishing. In 1943, Dell entered into paperback book publishing with Dell Paperbacks. They also used the book imprints of Dial Press, Delacorte Books, Delacorte Press, Yearling Books, and Laurel Leaf Library. Dell was acquired ...
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The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction
''The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction'' (usually referred to as ''F&SF'') is a U.S. fantasy and science fiction magazine first published in 1949 by Mystery House, a subsidiary of Lawrence Spivak's Mercury Press. Editors Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas had approached Spivak in the mid-1940s about creating a fantasy companion to Spivak's existing mystery title, ''Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine''. The first issue was titled ''The Magazine of Fantasy'', but the decision was quickly made to include science fiction as well as fantasy, and the title was changed correspondingly with the second issue. ''F&SF'' was quite different in presentation from the existing science fiction magazines of the day, most of which were in pulp format: it had no interior illustrations, no letter column, and text in a single column format, which in the opinion of science fiction historian Mike Ashley "set ''F&SF'' apart, giving it the air and authority of a superior magazine". ''F&SF'' ...
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The Asutra
''The Asutra'' is a novel by Jack Vance published in 1974. Plot summary ''The Asutra'' is a novel in which the hero must overthrow the rulers of his world. Reception Dave Langford reviewed ''The Asutra'' for ''White Dwarf'' #99, and stated that "Some of the freshness leaked out of this series by book 3: ''The Asutra'' isn't actively bad but seems perfunctory, the result of over-hasty production." Reviews *Review by Chris Evans (1977) in Vector Vector most often refers to: *Euclidean vector, a quantity with a magnitude and a direction *Vector (epidemiology), an agent that carries and transmits an infectious pathogen into another living organism Vector may also refer to: Mathematic ... 84https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1231 *Review by Robin Marcus (1977) in Paperback Parlour, December 1977 *Review by Jerry L. Parsons (1979) in Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Review, August 1979 *Review by Bruce Gillespie (1989) in SF Commentary, #67 References 1974 American n ...
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Jack Vance
John Holbrook Vance (August 28, 1916 – May 26, 2013) was an American mystery, fantasy, and science fiction writer. Though most of his work has been published under the name Jack Vance, he also wrote several mystery novels under pen names. Vance won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1984, and he was a Guest of Honor at the 1992 World Science Fiction Convention in Orlando, Florida. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America made him its 15th SFWA Grand Master, Grand Master in 1997, and the EMP Museum#Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Science Fiction Hall of Fame inducted him in 2001, its sixth class of two deceased and two living writers. His most notable awards included Hugo Awards in 1963 for ''The Dragon Masters'', in 1967 for ''The Last Castle (novella), The Last Castle'', and in 2010 for his memoir ''This Is Me, Jack Vance!''; the Nebula Award in 1966, also for ''The Last Castle''; the Jupiter Award (science fiction award), Jupiter Award in 1975 and the ...
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Canton (subnational Entity)
A canton is a type of administrative division of a country. In general, cantons are relatively small in terms of area and population when compared with other administrative divisions such as counties, departments, or provinces. Internationally, the most politically important cantons are the Swiss cantons. As the constituents of the Swiss Confederation, theoretically and historically, they are semi-sovereign states. The term is derived from the French word ''canton'', meaning "corner" or "district" (from which "cantonment" is also derived). In specific countries Cantons exist or previously existed in the following countries: * Cantons of Belgium * Cantonal Government of Bohol *Cantons of Bolivia * Cantons of Bosnia and Herzegovina: federal units of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina *Canada: Canadian French equivalent for the English word "township", since the translation ''municipalité'' is already used for a different level of government (see township). ** Cantons of ...
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Torc
A torc, also spelled torq or torque, is a large rigid or stiff neck ring in metal, made either as a single piece or from strands twisted together. The great majority are open at the front, although some had hook and ring closures and a few had mortice and tenon locking catches to close them. Many seem designed for near-permanent wear and would have been difficult to remove. Torcs are found in the Scythian, Illyrian, Thracian, Celtic, and other cultures of the European Iron Age from around the 8th century BC to the 3rd century AD. For the Iron Age Celts, the gold torc seems to have been a key object. It identifies the wearer as a person of high rank, and many of the finest works of ancient Celtic art are torcs. The Celtic torc disappears in the Migration Period, but during the Viking Age torc-style metal necklaces, now mainly in silver, came back into fashion. Torc styles of neck-ring are found as part of the jewellery styles of various other cultures and periods. ...
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