THE GODDESS OF WAR RIDES, HERALDED BY STORM FURIES
The oni have invaded Pittsburgh on Elfhome. And, so far, it looks like
they are winning. All this is according to prophecy. But the prophecy is
big on symbols and light on specifics. Tinker and her allies are doing the
best they can to defend the city and the civilians caught in the crossfire
of a war between elves that’s been brewing for centuries. But the enemy
has no hesitation whatsoever in involving innocents. All the pieces in this
deadly game are in place—and everyone trusts Tinker will save them.
All she needs is a plan. And then the lights go out, and the storm begins
to rage. . . .
Everyone could see it coming. But one man could do something about it. Oh, he couldn’t avert the nuclear holocaust, but a scientist in Austria, ruthlessly using billions of research dollars for his own purposes, set up an out for himself; he created a time machine, and filled a warehouse with low-tech survival gear. Too bad he didn’t get to use it himself.
Instead, a team of American grad students, led by their professor, is sent back to the late Roman Empire in the time of Marcus Aurelius. Even though they are experts in this time and place, they are about to realize that reading books and living experience are very different things.
If they can survive, they hope to remake the world into a better place. But that’s a big “if.”
Imagine a revival of suits of armor, but with structural strength undreamed
of by medieval knights, and powered by built-in motors, giving each soldier
the invulnerability of a tank, but even more mobility, and mechanical
muscle strong enough to carry light artillery, rocket launchers, laser cannon,
and weapons not even on the drawing boards yet. Add on the ability
to fly, or at least jump for a kilometer at a time, using rocket boosters,
or even powerful leg motors, or a combination of both. If it’s possible,
history teaches us, it will be done. Here’s a sneak peek by expert dreamers
putting the battle-hardened reader at the sharp end of tomorrow.
THEY WANT TO RESCUE DAMSELS IN DISTRESS. THEY HAVE TO PAY THE BILLS.
The continuing adventures of Indrajit and Fix.
WELCOME TO KISH
Indrajit and Fix are the founding partners of the Protagonists, a jobber company in Kish. Since the seven great families of Kish farm out all tasks they and the city need doing, a jobber might one day unblock a well; the next, man a tollgate for the fair; and on the third, hunt down a murderer on the loose, all in a corrupt old city that isn’t so much governed as kept barely in bounds.
Indrajit is a poet of a dying race, looking for his successor. Fix is a failed monk, pining for his lost love. They’re swordsmen and thinkers, heroes in their hearts and in their deeds. They also recover stolen documents, unravel financial fraud, escort shipwrecked diplomats, and hunt in the ruins beneath the city for missing academics. Meanwhile, the criminals they investigate, rival jobbers, sorcerers, spies, assassins, and other mysterious parties get more and more reason to want the Protagonists dead.
The fate of Russia hangs in the balance as up-timers and down-timers battle for freedom!
The United Sovereign States of Russia struggles to set in place the traditions and legal precedents that will let it turn into a constitutional monarchy with freedom and opportunity for all its citizens.
At the same time, they’re trying to balance the power of the states and the federal government. And the USSR is fighting a civil war with Muscovite Russia, defending the new state of Kazakh from invasion by the Zunghars, building a tech base and an economy that will allow its money to be accepted in western Europe, establishing a more solid claim to Siberia, and, in general, keeping the wheels of civilization from coming off and dumping Russia back into the Time of Troubles. Or, possibly even worse, reinstalling the sort of repressive oligarchy that they just got rid of.
The Ring of Fire that transported the town of Grantville from West Virginia in the year 2000 to the region of Thuringia in the middle of Europe in the year 1631 produced an enormous cascade of changes in world history. Some of those changes were big, others were huge—and some were more modest in scale. Modest, at the least, to the universe, if not necessarily to those immediately affected.
Count Ludwig Guenther of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt builds a Lutheran church on his own land, not far from Grantville, and calls in a Saxon pastor of a Phillipist bent to serve the Lutheran refugee population of the area. Shortly thereafter, in April 1634, the pastor's older daughter meets and elopes with a Catholic up-timer, which prompts Kastenmayer to get Lutheran girls to marry unchurched up-timers and thereby recruit them into the parish.
In the years that follow, Pastor Kastenmeyer copes with both existing ecclesio-political strands of down-time religion (from Stiefelite Lutheran heretics to Flacian Lutheran ultra-orthodox) and the strange new up-time world of shorts, blue jeans, and unknown religious denominations. His struggles and travails have a surprisingly revolutionary impact on seventeenth-century Lutheranism—perhaps to no one’s greater surprise than the pastor himself.
