Jeremy Garnet, hearing that his old friend Ukridge has called while he was out, and fearing that the peace he needs in order to plan his next book is about to be disturbed, decides to leave London for a time. But he is too late. Ukridge arrives, with his wife Millie in tow and immediately starts explaining his new get-rich-quick scheme, involving producing hen''s eggs on a farm in Dorset. Giving in to Ukridge''s forceful personality, Garnet agrees to accompany him to the farm; there will, Ukridge assures him, be plenty of golf and sea-bathing available. On the train to Dorset, they are joined in a compartment by a pretty, brown-haired girl named Phyllis and her elderly Irish father. By coincidence, Phyllis is reading a copy of Garnet''s new novel, given to her by Molly MacEachern. They arrive at the house, meet hired man Beale and his wife, and settle in. Next day a consignment of hens arrives, and they spend some busy days putting up fences and building coops; Ukridge buys various supplies on credit, and begins to arrange to supply eggs to various outlets. One day, chasing an escaped hen, Garnet tumbles into a garden containing the girl from the train, her father Professor Derrick, and a friendly young navy lieutenant named Tom Chase, whose familiarity with Phyllis irks Garnet. They recapture the chicken, and Garnet is invited to lunch, stays to play croquet afterwards, and his love for Phyllis is sealed. Soon the Ukridges invite their new neighbours over for dinner, but the cat gets stuck up the chimney and they are unable to cook. Fed cold food, and upset by Ukridge''s small talk, especially on the topic of Irish Home Rule, the Professor storms out, and Garnet finds himself in his beloved''s father''s bad books. The chickens become ill, and Garnet, on his way to fetch help, runs into Phyllis, who shows him some friendliness. Later, bathing at the beach, he spies the Professor, fishing from a boat. He hatches a plan, bribes a local, Harry Hawk, to upset the Professor''s boat, and saves him from the sea, restoring the man''s faith in him. He visits Phyllis, but is interrupted in his wooing by Chase, who hints that he is wise to Garnet''s boat plot, and thrashes Garnet at tennis. With the chicken farm struggling, a local informs Derrick of Garnet''s boat plot, and he finds himself once again despised. He buries himself in the farm and his writing, but after a week he comes across Phyillis alone, and explains his actions to her. He declares his love, and she returns it, revealing that Chase is in fact engaged to her sister Norah, but adds that her father, loathing Garnet, would never consent to them marrying. On Ukridge''s advice, they beard the man in the sea, and Garnet announces his love for Phyllis, but only makes Derrick angrier. Garnet finds himself up against the Professor in the final of a local golf tournament, which, he has learned, the Professor has long been desperate to win. He plays a bad game, and wins the Professor round, giving him the match but winning his consent. Returning to the farm, he finds the Ukridges disappeared, apparently bolted to London to flee their creditors. A swarm of said creditors arrive, and begin ransacking the farm; they have turned to the chickens when Ukridge returns, bearing wealth courtesy of Millie''s Aunt Elizabeth. He berates the assembled throng, and sends them off with fleas in their ears. Later, Garnet finds Ukridge on the beach, and hears of his plan - to start up a duck farm...

Love Among the Chickens

The novel features scenes and events including the discovery of a near-dead alien in the desert, who clearly says in English, "I''m sorry, but there is bad news," and this alien''s subsequent interrogation and autopsy; the discovery of an artificial geological formation and its subsequent nuclear destruction by a desperate military; and the Earth''s eventual destruction by the mutual annihilation of a piece of neutronium and a piece of antineutronium dropped into Earth''s core. There is another alien faction at work, however, represented on Earth by small spider-like robots that recruit human agents through some form of mind control. They frantically collect all the human data, biological records, tissue samples, seeds, and DNA from the biosphere that they can, and evacuate a handful of people from Earth. In space, this faction''s machines combat and eventually destroy the attackers, though not before Earth''s fate is sealed. The evacuees eventually settle a newly terraformed Mars while some form the crew of a Ship of the Law to hunt down the home world of the killers, a quest described in the sequel, Anvil of Stars. One of the point of view characters is Arthur Gordon, a scientist who, with his wife Francine and son Martin is among those rescued from the destruction of Earth. Some other characters are close to an American president who fails to take action against the threat. The two books show at least one solution to the Fermi paradox, with electromagnetically noisy civilisations being snuffed out by the arrival of self-replicating machines designed to destroy any potential threat to their (possibly long-dead) creators. (A similar theme is explored in Fred Saberhagen''s Berserker novels.)

The Forge of God

In the Wedded Bliss, the author mainly puts the focus on his wife Chen Yun as showing his sorrow to beauty. Chen Yun’s is not so beautiful, but she pursues beauty by nature. She takes painting and embroidering as a necessity to composing poem and regards the simple life as the ideal situation. Shen Fu treats her like a close friend who can share with his hobbies and feelings, but the idea is not recognized by the orthodox society, which only remains as the author’s yearning for beauty. The Little Pleasures of Life gives a vivid description of the leisure time activities of Shen Fu: his joys of his childhood, his adult life cultivating flowers, and the experiences of composing poems with other scholars. He tends to be close to nature in childhood and takes delight in nature. While in the adulthood, he has very little time to focus on nature, and is often chained to worldly possessions. Many of the episodes are involved with discussions of aesthetic experiences, which are really worthy of careful thinking. In Sorrow, Shen Fu points out that most of his life frustrations are out of his uprightness and his commitment to words. Though this chapter opens with the author’s own sorrow, actually its large content deals with the bumpy life of Chen Yun which is also due her characters. The content is full of the author’s endless love for his wife and resentment to the unfaire fate. The Joys of Travel not only portrays beautiful scenic spots the author had visited but also records anecdotes, local customs and historical allusions. Different from others, the author holds the belif that the gaining of experience counts rather than having a rough view and following what others said.

Six Records of a Floating Life

Seven-year-old Anwell lives in a prestigious but coldly distant family with a mother who is always sick and a father who punishes him with physical abuse. Anwell has no friends and is on a very tight leash. He is sitting in the back yard one day when he meets wild boy his age named Finnigan, his alter-ego or second personality. Anwell now named Gabriel is never to be angry and never to fight. Finnigan is to always be angry and to always fight. If Gabriel (Anwell) wants revenge or anything bad done, he asks Finnigan to do it for him. Finnigan becomes Anwell''s only friend, and Anwell confides in him what he has never told anyone else, of how he accidentally killed his handicapped older brother Vernon. His brother, though he was three years older than Anwell, "was never the elder of us". His parents, disgraced and humiliated by Vernon, refuse to take care of him, leaving Anwell to do the job at the young age of seven. Enjoying his task, Anwell routinely feeds, washes, and entertains his brother. One Sunday, while his father is out to church and his mother is sleeping due to a migraine, Anwell is again taking care of Vernon. When Anwell is trying to feed Vernon, he refuses, would not stop crying, and scratches Anwell on his cheek, drawing blood. Out of frustration, and anxiety their mother will wake up and be irate, Anwell puts fabric in Vernon''s mouth to quiet him and throws his brother in a refrigerator. Finnigan becomes the town arsonist, lighting the town aflame piece by piece in an act of revenge for Gabriel, but Finnigan is soon out of control and the only way for Gabriel to stop Finnigan is for Gabriel to kill himself at the young, "martyr''s age" of twenty by condemning himself to a mentally caused illness.

Surrender

The novel begins with Gurney, a young British officer, entering a deserted chateau as the British advance in November 1918. Inside he finds three corpses, and is astonished when he recognises one of them as a fellow officer, Gerard Bretherton, the more so since Bretherton is wearing the uniform of a German general. The story of how Bretherton met his fate is built up over a two-year period over the rest of the narrative. The story is told from the points of view of several of Bretherton''s friends and acquaintances. Gerard Bretherton, English but brought up partly in Germany and a fluent speaker of the German language, is taken prisoner during an attack on the enemy lines, and loses his memory, taking on the identity of a German officer with whom he was acquainted before the war. Having recovered his memory, he escapes and returns to Britain, where, after telling his story, he is recruited by the security forces who persuade him to masquerade as a German officer in order to infiltrate the German armed forces and supply them with information. While joining an escape attempt from a British P.O.W. camp (set up by the authorities) along with a German officer, Bretherton is trapped in a barrel in which he has hidden during the sea voyage across the Channel. The traumatic experience causes him to lose his memory again, and he reverts to the personality of a German. Recovering his memory on the brink of the end of the war in 1918, he returns to his own side, but heroically volunteers to re-cross the German lines in an effort to minimize the loss of life before the Armistice is officially signed. He succeeds in his task, but is himself killed before the British troops arrive on the scene.

Bretherton:Khaki or Field Grey?

Friedrich Fromhold Martens, born in Pärnu, Estonia on 27 August 1845, was a renowned expert in international law. He attended the University of St. Petersburg where he later became a professor. He was a polyglot, jurist, arbitrator, and a member of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He represented the Russian Government at many international conferences including the Hague Peace Conference in 1899. He was a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1902 and was mistakenly reported by some as the winner. During a train journey from his home town of Pärnu to St. Petersburg he recalls many events of his life. He remembers meeting his wife Kati for the first time at her father''s house. He describes the discovery of his "double", Georg Friedrich Martens, a man who lived an almost parallel life to Friedrich eighty-nine years previously. Georg was born in Hamburg, Germany, attended the University of Göttingen and also became a professor of international law. Some of the recollected events, for example the Great Flood of Hamburg in 1770 and a fire in a wooden suburb of Göttingen actually took place during Georg''s life and not his own. He describes the arrest of his nephew, Johannes. He remembers his meeting with the Imperial Chancellor, Prince Alexander Mikhailovich Gorchakov, to discuss the publication of a compendium of treaties between Russia and other nations. He formulates his theory of "comparativist psychology". With some embarrassment he relates the story of his candidacy for the Nobel Peace Prize and the mistaken reports that he was the winner. He outlines his "doctrine of respect for human rights". He describes his affair with an art student, Yvette Arlon, a woman that later bore his child, married and fled to the Congo. Friedrich discusses politics with a fellow train passenger, an Estonian lady and socialist, Hella Wuolijoki. He wonders how differently he would have lived his life if given another chance. He recalls the embarrassing episode of the Treaty of Portsmouth; Friedrich was a member of the Russian delegation but his name was mistakenly omitted from the initial list of delegates and so the Japanese did not allow him to participate in most of the talks. He remembers Mr. Saebelmann, the son of the man who was rumored to have ousted Friedrich''s father from the parish clerk''s cottage. Mr. Saebelmann became a composer of some note but later died in Poltava. He describes the death of his double, Georg, in Frankfurt am Main, just before meeting his own demise at the stop-off at Valga.

Professor Martens'' Departure

Robert Luzcak is sent by the magazine he works for to Calcutta to locate recently written poetry alleged to have been written by a poet, M. Das, who has been thought dead for the last eight years. He travels there with his Indian wife and their infant child. On arriving, he is met by Krishna, a local intellectual who claims to have been asked to assist them by a mutual friend. The next day he meets with the local writers guild who were the source of the few bits of poetry that made their way to America. When he asks to meet Das, he is told that it is out of the question. Robert considers leaving Calcutta at this point, his duty done, but feels that something is missing and that he doesn''t have enough material for an interesting article at this point. The night before he and his family are to leave, Krishna returns and takes Robert to a man who can provide him with information relevant to his story. The man tells how he and a friend had tried to join a religious secret society dedicated to Kali, a Hindu goddess associated with death and destruction. One of the prerequisites was for each initiate to bring a corpse to a secret temple, there to be laid at the feet of a statue of Kali. This man''s corpse, bloated and decayed after being dredged from the river is chosen by Kali and vivified by her, becoming animated. The corpse is that of the poet, Das. Armed with this tale, Robert again insists on the writers guild allowing him to see Das. This time they agree. He is brought to the poet, who seems to be in the advanced stages of leprosy. Das seems to corroborate the story of his return from death, but Robert again refuses to believe it. Robert is given an extensive collection of Das''s poetry, which is very different from his earlier work, describing dark, mystical, grotesque, and apocalyptic happenings. He is asked by Das to bring him books of poetry. Becoming concerned at the eerie, and sometimes frightening, events that he has experienced, Robert attempts to send his wife and child home, but they are unable to get a flight. Concealing a gun (given to him previously by Krishna) in one of the books he has bought for Das, he returns to the poet. He leaves the books and goes, but, as he exits the house, hears two gunshots. Das is dead. Robert is captured by guards and knocked unconscious. He awakens being taken somewhere in the back of a truck, but manages to escape, with Krishna''s help. He returns to the hotel, to find that their child has been kidnapped. After a couple of days of dead-end leads, a couple is caught trying to smuggle jewels hidden within the child''s body. With their child dead, Robert and his wife return to America. Robert decides to destroy the poetry, and, gradually, their relationship returns to normal. Whispers can still be heard, though, of the Song of Kali, the condition of humanity dominated by hatred and violence, perfectly embodied by the squalor and chaos of Calcutta.

Song of Kali

In the last pages of Midnight Lamp a secret military test of the Neurobomb went live, and the altered-brain neuronauts died in the act of wiping out the planet’s reserves of fossil fuel. Like the bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the "A team event" seemed both horrific and benign. The latest US/Islamic conflict was over at a stroke, the terminal sickness of post-peak-oil mercifully cut short. No way back to "business as usual": now there must be a new world, a better world. Band of Gypsys opens, some months later, with a complete change of pace. Having failed to make terms with a corrupt and dangerous Westminster government, the Triumvirate are in Paris, conducting a mordant John and Yoko style, "bed-in" in protest against conditions in English labour camps. Ax gets some bad news. US President Fred Eiffrich, the man who "Banned the Bomb", is doomed: brought down by a cunningly manufactured scandal. The hour is getting late. The rescue of Ax''s family, held as hostages for his good behaviour, shows Ax and friends doing what they do best: extracting bloodless victory from a nasty situation. There''s a festival at Reading, there''s a clandestine mind/matter tech space programme in the basement of the Heads'' Battersea HQ. The ideals of the Rock and Roll Reich are alien to a new, post-Crisis generation. The leaders of fashion are neo-feudalist dandy Jack Vries MP (secret chief of the secret police), and Toby Starborn, sinister young virtual artist. Ax ''n Sage ''n Fiorinda are outdated icons, corpses in the mouths of the bourgeoisie. When Ax and Sage are engulfed in the Lavoisier Massacre Scandal a moment''s shocking loss of control precipitates disaster. The Triumvirate find themselves — like many English Royals before them — incarcerated. Once more they are forced to provide rockstar window-dressing for a reactionary and degenerate Green regime, but this time Ax Preston has no miraculous solutions. Locked away in the shadowy, haunted fortress of Wallingham House, the prisoners hear distant echoes of a new blitzkrieg. The Chinese, emerging from their own struggle with the Crisis years, are taking over in Central Asia. They are almost at the gates of Europe. Unlike previous episodes, Band Of Gypsys can''t easily be read as a stand alone. In Midnight Lamp the past, seen from a fresh angle, illuminated character and motivation. Now the past is all there is. A freezing garret in Montmartre, where the three enacted the miserable fate of England''s former hedonistic consumers, turns out to have been the last glimpse of open sky, a viable future. Fiorinda''s hopes of pregnancy fade, as she plods through the motions of her national sweetheart role. Ax and Sage see the life ahead of them as a dreadful imprisonment, long before Ax self-destructs. Finally we are facing the real, monstrous bulk of the evils Ax tried to combat, and it''s too late: it was always too late. England was never going to be saved. It''s relentless, claustrophobic stuff. Fans might have preferred the saga to end on the high note of Midnight Lamp. Yet this bleak downturn is as rich as ever in outrageous invention, black humour and acute social commentary — and true, on many levels, to what has gone before. Camelot moments do not endure, Ax told us at the start that he was bound to be defeated in the end. When a civilised country dies the first shocks may be exhilerating, even liberating, but then the grim symptoms appear in earnest, and there''s no more dancing in the streets. In 1969, Hendrix felt he’d reached a dead end, and embarked on a major career change. It did him no good. His new band, (Band Of Gypsys: the title of the novel honours Hendrix’s misspelling), didn’t last, and in a few months he was dead. The Rock and Roll Reich version ends differently, in passages of elegiac beauty and steely hope. An idealised England that never was cannot return, horror broods over the birth of a new world, but the Triumvirate are still standing, and la lutte continue.

Band of Gypsys

David Garth, M.D., has fallen in love with the beautiful widow Betty, Lady Calder. Detective-Inspector Twigg of Scotland Yard tries to warn Dr. Garth about the chequered past of Lady Calder, but it takes all the nerve of Garth''s friend Cullingford Abbot, assistant to the Commissioner of Scotland Yard, to state that, among other things, Betty danced for three seasons at the Moulin Rouge and is thought to have joined a Satanist group in Paris. She is also reputed to be a blackmailer responsible for at least two suicides. However, Betty herself raises the possibility that she is being mistaken for the machinations of her sister Glynis. When Glynis is found dead on the beach near a bathing-pavilion, in the middle of a stretch of unmarked sand, Betty is suspected of arranging the death (although no one can suggest how it might have happened). It takes Dr. Garth''s special knowledge of both medicine (the new science of "psychanalysis") and literature like Gaston Leroux''s The Mystery of the Yellow Room to solve the impossible crime and reveal the criminal.

The Witch of the Low Tide

In a town highly suspicious of the government and of outsiders in general, the arrival of a charismatic figure from the desert—Oyster—occasions an intensification of the town''s insularity and repression of dissident voices. The conjunction of conservative forms of Christianity and anti-government landowners is ripe for the messianic presence of Oyster and the cult community he establishes, a community closely integrated into the shadowy capitalism of the area''s illegal opal trafficking. The fragmented structure of the novel, in which various moments in the past are interspersed with events in the present, generates heightened suspense and tension as its several sub-plots come together in the apocalyptic destruction of the town and the cult. The paranoia and violence with which the town polices its "lost" status are repeatedly delineated, until events come to a head and the vicious forms of control begin to unravel. Women are crucial to the destabilisation and destruction of the menace represented above all by powerful men. The discourse of proud outsiderness on the part of these men is highlighted as being hypocritical and self-serving, while the real outsiders are revealed to be mostly women, and men who do not wield social power.

Oyster

White Plume Mountain is set in the World of Greyhawk, a campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons. The earliest known inhabitant of the volcano known as White Plume Mountain is the druid Aegwareth. Aegwareth is later slain by the evil wizard Keraptis, who took over the mountain with his gnomish servitors. The premise of White Plume Mountain is that thirteen hundred years ago, Keraptis descended into the volcanic mountain with a company of gnomes, and disappeared. The adventure is a dungeon crawl, to rescue the magical weapons from Keraptis'' lair. The adventure''s 16 pages are divided into 27 encounters. The player''s characters begin in a cave at the base of White Plume Mountain. In the first numbered encounter, the characters find a spiral staircase in the cave which leads to a "mangy, bedraggled" gynosphinx. Encounter seven involves a large cave with a floor of boiling mud. Circular wooden platforms are suspended from the ceiling, and the characters must jump from platform to platform while dodging geysers of hot mud. In the eighth encounter, the characters confront a vampire who is guarding the magical war hammer Whelm in a room of permanent darkness. In encounter 17, a corridor leads the characters to a boiling lake. According to the adventure, "The corridor from the dungeon continues out into the lake under a rubbery magical forcefield that keeps out the waters by forming a sort of elastic skin of super-tension." The watery tunnel opens into a watery dome, where the characters must defeat a giant crab in order to collect the magical trident Wave. Encounter 22 involves a frictionless room with spikes, and in encounter 23, the characters kayak on a stream suspended in mid air. In the 26th encounter, the characters must fight various creatures in a magical ziggurat where each level is guarded by a different monster including sea lions, giant crayfish, giant scorpions, and manticores. In the last encounter, an ogre mage must be defeated in order to win the magical sword Blackrazor. An end note recommends that the Dungeon Master add an encounter with two efreet if the characters have succeeded in taking two or three of the magic weapons.

White Plume Mountain

The stories and brief synopses in the book are as follows: # Haunted Flight by George Frangoulis - A boy, Nick, wakes up to find he is alone in the world; after searching in vain, it is revealed that he is in fact dead. # Some Pencils are Smarter than People by Erwin A. Steinkamp - A young man purchases a pencil from a street vendor, and discovers, to his delight, that when he takes tests with the pencil, it always writes down the correct answers. # The New Friend by D.J. Gregoirio - A young man discovers his classmate is an Extraterrestrial. # The Mysterious Rescue at Sea - Author Unknown - A ship becomes stuck to an iceberg, and is only found by another ship due to a case of Astral Projection. # Space Mission 21 by E.M. Deloff - Astronauts land on a strange planet with an odd, glowing, golden orb in the sky, and inhabited by beings with only two arms which ride in vehicles with the words D-U-N-E B-U-G-G-Y on the side. # The Case of the Strange TV Channel by Jaqueline W. Mcmann - A young man, watching a television broadcast with his family of the first unmanned probe to land on Pluto, ends up having his consciousness transmitted to the landing site, leaving his body behind in his living room, dead. # Be Tough! by Tom Gunning - A young High School Football player, stuck in his burning home after rescuing his family, is inspired to "Be Tough" and keep crawling to safety despite the burning pain by his Football Coach continually shouting it from outside the burning home; it is later revealed that the Coach had died earlier that evening, prior to the fire. # The Perfect Place to Live by Tom Gunning - A man, driven to his last nerve by the stress, hustle and bustle of the big city, opts to live on a colonized planet known as Utopia; he later discovers that peace, quiet, and perfect order can be quite boring, and returns to Earth and the big city, far less bothered by and in fact even enjoying the noise and activity. # The Joker by Tony Gaignat - A young man assists another boy who jokes about being a Werewolf in training for the track team, only to find that it was no joke, and finds himself face to face with a Werewolf.

Over 8000 Takeaways For Your Brain!

Read - Listen - Learn

Love Among the Chickens

By P. G. Wodehouse

The Forge of God

By Greg Bear

Six Records of a Floating Life

No Author Listed

Surrender

By Sonya Hartnett

Bretherton:Khaki or Field Grey?

No Author Listed

Professor Martens' Departure

By Jaan Kross

Song of Kali

By Dan Simmons

Band of Gypsys

By Gwyneth Jones

The Witch of the Low Tide

By John Dickson Carr

Oyster

By Janette Turner Hospital

White Plume Mountain

By Lawrence Schick

Strange happenings

No Author Listed