The Year's Best Science Fiction No 5

Wheelworld: An unforgiving planet where the sun is about to rise and will not set for another four years; where an ancient peasant hierarchy still rules a society equipped with the highest technology; where the people are as dependent on visiting ships as they are on the very air they breathe; home for some, but for Jan Kulozik it is an eternal prison. And when the ships don't come, Jan finds himself at the center of an epic struggle for power... and survival. Wheelworld is the second visionary volume in Harry Harrison's phenomenal To the Stars trilogy.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1861 edition. Excerpt: ... these lines being adjusted, straight lines must be made on the outer circle, as C, E, to make the straight tops of the sides of the basket exactly parallel with the inner hexagon. The outer form of the basket being thus delineated on the card-board, if the young artist wishes to make any ornaments upon the sides, he must draw and cut them out carefully ere he separates the sides from the surrounding board. The ornament shown in our figure is well adaped for this shaped basket, and has a pretty effect when cut through, and a delicately tinted, paper put behind it. When detaching the side-pieces from the sheet of card-board and inner hexagon, the operator must be cautious to cut with great steadiness and accuracy; and when joining the sides together, he should use the wire clamps to hold them in their proper places till the cement is quite dry. A Basket With Bent Sides.--The plan of this basket is similar to that of the former, but as its sides are curved inwards, a different method of shaping them is necessary. After the inner and outer hexagons have been drawn, and the squares of the sides adjusted, to give them the proper degree of curve, put the point of the compasses in A, and afterwards in B, and draw with the pencil point of the compasses two ares which intersect each other in C; this done, place the compass point at C, and then describe the arc A B, which will give the necessary curve to one side, and then from the points D and E draw two arcs crossing each other at F. From this last point the arc T E, may be described, and care must be taken that F is precisely the same distance from D and E that C is from A and B, otherwise the curve of the sides will not be true. To produce the curved line, G, for the top of the side, the compass point...

THE STORY: As told by Kerr in the New York Herald-Tribune: Playwright Harry Kurnitz has hit upon a background that generates its own chaos: the sleek, effusive and cheerfully dishonest world of the art experts. He has set up a gullible millionaire

xi 359p hardback, steel-blue cloth without jacket, very good condition, little to no wear, binding intact, pages very clean and bright

A Harvard professor and former Dean of Harvard College offers his provocative analysis of how America's great universities are failing students and the nation

In a gripping novel of alternate history, King Avram, determined to restore unity to the kingdom of Detina and free the blond serfs, finds the civil war between the North and South coming to a head when the use of sorcery becomes extremely unpredictable, forcing the South to battle the North.

"What would happen if the ancient prophecy of the End of Days came true? It is certainly the last thing Eric Katz--a secular archeologist from Los Angeles--expects to discover during what should be a routine dig in Jerusalem. But perhaps higher forces have something else in mind. For when a sign presaging the rising of the Third Temple is located in America and a dirty bomb is detonated in downtown Tel Aviv, events conspire to place a team of archaeologists in the tunnels deep under the Temple Mount. And there, Eric is witness to a discovery of such monumental proportions that nothing will ever be the same again"--

Atlantis and Other Places includes twelve amazing stories of ancient eras, historical figures, mysterious events, and out-of-this- world adventures from the incomparable Harry Turtledove.

Count Hamnet Thyssen is a minor noble of the drowsy old Raumsdalian Empire. Its capital city, Nidaros, began as a mammoth hunters’ camp at the edge of the great Glacier. But that was centuries ago, and as everyone knows, it’s the nature of the great Glacier to withdraw a few feet every year. Now Nidaros is an old and many-spired city; and though they still feel the breath of the great Glacier in every winter’s winds, the ice cap itself has retreated beyond the horizon. Trasamund, a clan chief of the mammoth-herding Bizogots, the next tribe north, has come to town with strange news. A narrow gap has opened in what they'd always thought was an endless and impregnable wall of ice. The great Glacier does not go on forever--and on its other side are new lands, new animals, and possibly new people. Ancient legend says that on the other side is the Golden Shrine, put there by the gods to guard the people of their world. Now, perhaps, the road to the legendary Golden Shrine is open. Who could resist the urge to go see? For Count Hamnet and his several companions, the glacier has always been the boundary of the world. Now they'll be traveling beyond it into a world that's bigger than anyone knew. Adventures will surely be had...

An adventure in a Bronze Age that never was, in this sequel to "Beyond the Gap."

In a parallel-world 21st-century San Francisco where the Kaiser's Germany won World War One and went on to dominate the world, Paul Gomes and his father Lawrence are secret agents for our timeline, posing as traders from a foreign land. They run a storefront shop called Curious Notions, selling what is in our world routine consumer technology-record players, radios, cassette decks--all of which is better than anything in this world, but only by a bit. Their real job is to obtain raw materials for our timeline. Just as importantly, they must guard the secret of Crosstime Traffic--for of the millions of parallel timelines, this is one of the few advanced enough to use that secret against us. Now, however, the German occupation police are harassing them. They want to know where they're getting their mysterious goods. Under pressure, Paul and Lawrence hint that their supplies comes from San Francisco's Chinese...setting in motion a chain of intrigues that will put the entire enterprise of Crosstime Traffic at deadly risk. Curious Notions is the second book in Harry Turtledove's Crosstime Traffic series.