The story opens in the 25th Century, when a small force of human warships encounter a larger group of Kanga ships ''forty light-months from anywhere in particular''. The Kanga are a violently xenophobic alien race who have tried and failed to wipe out humanity in a war they are losing, which has lasted over 400 years. It becomes apparent that the Kanga force is a final desperate attempt to defeat the humans by using an untried time travel theory to go back in time many thousands of years and wipe out humanity before it became a threat. They will have to stopped by any means! They were partially successful and both humans and kangas arrived in the outer solar system in early 21st century. A final battle results in a single human space fighter chasing a kanga tender and its escort of fighters to the outer atmosphere of Earth. Only the accidental involvement of a task force of the US Navy prevented the death of humanity. The human fighter crashed into the ocean and one enemy fighter survived. The badly injured human pilot survives her crash landing and is rescued by a passing yacht. The yacht is crewed singlehanded by a US Navy SEAL on his retirement cruise (Captain Dick Aston). The very young looking pilot is in a coma and has a hole right through her. The wound starts to heal before Dick’s eyes and he spends the next 4 days feeding her while she remains in a healing trance. When she wakes she informs Dick she is Colonel Ludmilla Leonovna of the Terran Marines and no she isn’t a Russian. Ludmilla tells the story of the war and her arrival in 2007. Her healing is caused by a symbiote which came from a mutated bio-weapon of the Kanga, it helps its host in many ways. She also tells Dick that the enemy fighter is ‘crewed’ by a Troll. A Troll is psychopathic cyborg with a human brain created by the Kanga as warriors. Trolls hate both humanity and kangas and love to kill cruelly. Trolls also have a limited telepathic ability to read and influence about 30% of minds. Ludmilla is convinced the Troll will try to enslave or destroy humanity! The next ten chapters deal with letting the world know about the troll without the troll knowing they know! Plans to destroy the troll are made while waiting for the troll to reveal itself. An impossible theft of Plutonium in the US concentrates plans there. Eventually the troll reveals itself by inculcating racial hatreds in a circular area of the southern US. A final battle with the troll and its minions takes place in the mountains of North Carolina. Ludmilla destroys the troll at great risk to herself. However in the process Dick is struck with a lethal weapon, and in desperation Ludmilla injects him with a sample of her own blood which while almost certainly lethal (as the bio-weapon is to more than 99% of the human race) hardly matters now. Sometime later Dick revives and finds himself growing younger with his own symbiote in place, as he recovers the President visits and confirms that the Trolls ship was captured intact and he outlines plans to reverse engineer it and create a world government ensuring that this time the Kanga''s won''t get anywhere near Earth, and humanity will be spared five centuries of war. The President allows the two to slip away into hiding listed as dead in battle, and a few months later the couple are on their new yacht in the Pacific as they await a flash in the night sky, the silent monument to a crew who died centuries from home to save an Earth not their own.

The Apocalypse Troll

The novel is primarily written from the perspective of Renisenb, a young widow who is just reacquainting herself with her family when her father, Imhotep, brings Nofret into their lives. Nofret soon disrupts and antagonises Imhotep''s sons, Yahmose, Sobek and Ipy, as well as their wives. After Imhotep is called away, Satipy and Kait, the elder sons'' wives, try to bully Nofret with tricks, but the plan backfires when Nofret appeals to Imhotep and he threatens to throw all his sons and their families out of the household on his return. Suddenly everyone has a motive to kill Nofret and when she is found dead at the foot of a cliff, an accident seems unlikely. Next Satipy is killed when she apparently throws herself to her death in terror from the same cliff while walking with Yahmose. Is it Nofret’s vengeful spirit that she was looking at over Yahmose’s shoulder moments before her death? These rumours only gather pace when Yahmose and Sobek drink poisoned wine. Sobek dies, but Yahmose lingers on, perhaps due to a more insidious slow-acting poison. A boy who suggests that he saw Nofret’s ghost poisoning the wine himself dies of poison shortly afterwards. Ipy starts to boast about his new, better position with his father and plots to get rid of Henet after talking to his father and tells her so. That next morning, Ipy was found dead in the lake, drowned. Kameni seems to have fallen in love with Renisenb, and eventually asks her to marry him. Unsure whether she loves him or Hori, whom she has known since she was a child when he mended her toys, she leaves the choice effectively in her father’s hands and becomes engaged to Kameni. She realises, however, that his relationship with Nofret was closer than she had supposed, and that jealousy may have influenced Nofret’s bitter hatred towards the family. As Renisenb, Hori, and Esa begin to investigate the possibility of a human murderer, the field of suspects is further narrowed when Ipy, himself a likely suspect, is drowned. Esa attempts to flush out the murderer by dropping a hint about the death of Satipy, but is herself murdered by means of an unguent made of poisoned wool fat. Henet – momentarily powerful in the chaos - is smothered in linen. It is on the same cliff path where Nofret was murdered that the killer makes one final attempt. Renisenb hears footsteps behind her and turns to see a look of murderous hatred in the eyes of her brother, Yahmose. On the brink of her own death, she realises that Satipy was not looking in fear at anything beyond Yahmose … she was looking straight at him. His consumption of the poisoned wine had been cleverly limited, and his recovery deliberately was made to seem less rapid than it was while he committed the later murders. Even as Renisenb realises some of this, Hori slays Yahmose with an arrow and she is saved. Her final choice is which of the scribes to marry: Kameni, a lively husband not unlike her first, or Hori, an older and more enigmatic figure. She makes her choice and falls into Hori’s arms.

Death Comes as the End

"Who Killed Zebedee?," opens with a direct address to the readers by an otherwise unnamed narrator. On his deathbed, our narrator, a Roman Catholic, feels compelled to make a confession to the readers about his involvement in an unsolved murder case back when he was still a young police constable in London. The recounting of the death of Zebedee opens with a distraught young woman, Priscilla Thurlby, the cook at the Zebedee''s boarding house, rushing into the police station with a blood-curdling scream. Priscilla informs the skeptical assembly that, "A young woman has murdered her husband in the night!" While the police initially believe the young woman to be intoxicated, they eventually visit the boarding house to find that a young, married man has been stabbed in the back with a knife. The police immediately begin an inspection of the scene of the crime. The lodgers of the boarding house are interviewed, all of whom prove to be eccentric, however, during the interviews, the young constable and his fellow officers become increasingly suspicious of Mr. Deluc, a smarmy cigar agent, who had made repeated amorous advances towards Mrs. Zebedee. Unfortunately, this suspicion is confounded by Mrs. Zebedee, who is positive she has killed her husband in her sleep. A sleepwalker, Mrs. Zebedee had read a story about a young woman who had murdered her husband in her sleep before falling asleep on the night her husband was murdered. The police suspect the real answer might hinge on the half-inscribed knife, "To John Zebedee-" still wedged in Zebedee''s back, but a preliminary search reveals nothing. After several false leads, interest in the case wanes, until the police and the public abandon the case entirely. Finally, the young constable is the only one left with a vested interest. Over the course of the investigation, the constable falls in love with Priscilla Thurlby, and proposes marriage. Priscilla rejects him on the basis of their both being working class and unable to afford a marriage. The constable become convinced that if he can solve the case, they can have their marriage and so Priscilla acquiesces and invites him home to her village to meet her family. On the way to Priscilla''s country home, the constable is detained by an incompetent railroad station attendant and ends up temporarily stranded in the town of Waterbank. As he waits for the next train, he notices a shopfront, James Wycomb, Cutler etc., and begins to wonder whether the London police have fully exhausted all cutlers in their investigation. The discovery the constable makes inside brings the case to its dramatic conclusion.

Who Killed Zebedee?

The Old Man and the Sea is the story of a battle between an old, experienced Cuban fisherman and a large marlin. The novel opens with the explanation that the fisherman, who is named Santiago, has gone 84 days without catching a fish. Santiago is considered "salao", the worst form of unlucky. In fact, he is so unlucky that his young apprentice, Manolin, has been forbidden by his parents to sail with the old man and been ordered to fish with more successful fishermen. Still dedicated to the old man, however, the boy visits Santiago''s shack each night, hauling back his fishing gear, getting him food and discussing American baseball and his favorite player Joe DiMaggio. Santiago tells Manolin that on the next day, he will venture far out into the Gulf to fish, confident that his unlucky streak is near its end. Thus on the eighty-fifth day, Santiago sets out alone, taking his skiff far onto the Gulf. He sets his lines and, by noon of the first day, a big fish that he is sure is a marlin takes his bait. Unable to pull in the great marlin, Santiago instead finds the fish pulling his skiff. Two days and two nights pass in this manner, during which the old man bears the tension of the line with his body. Though he is wounded by the struggle and in pain, Santiago expresses a compassionate appreciation for his adversary, often referring to him as a brother. He also determines that because of the fish''s great dignity, no one will be worthy of eating the marlin. On the third day of the ordeal, the fish begins to circle the skiff, indicating his tiredness to the old man. Santiago, now completely worn out and almost in delirium, uses all the strength he has left in him to pull the fish onto its side and stab the marlin with a harpoon, ending the long battle between the old man and the tenacious fish. Santiago straps the marlin to the side of his skiff and heads home, thinking about the high price the fish will bring him at the market and how many people he will feed. While Santiago continues his journey back to the shore, sharks are attracted to the trail of blood left by the marlin in the water. The first, a great mako shark, Santiago kills with his harpoon, losing that weapon in the process. He makes a new harpoon by strapping his knife to the end of an oar to help ward off the next line of sharks; in total, five sharks are slain and many others are driven away. But the sharks keep coming, and by nightfall the sharks have almost devoured the marlin''s entire carcass, leaving a skeleton consisting mostly of its backbone, its tail and its head. Finally reaching the shore before dawn on the next day, Santiago struggles on the way to his shack, carrying the heavy mast on his shoulder. Once home, he slumps onto his bed and falls into a deep sleep. A group of fishermen gather the next day around the boat where the fish''s skeleton is still attached. One of the fishermen measures it to be from nose to tail. Tourists at the nearby café mistakenly take it for a shark. Manolin, worried during the old man''s endeavor, cries upon finding him safe asleep. The boy brings him newspapers and coffee. When the old man wakes, they promise to fish together once again. Upon his return to sleep, Santiago dreams of his youth—of lions on an African beach.

The Old Man and the Sea

On a beautiful and cloudless day, a middle-aged couple celebrate their union with a picnic. Joe Rose and his long-term partner Clarissa Mellon are about to open a bottle of wine when a cry interrupts them. A hot air balloon, with a 10-year-old boy in the basket and his grandfather being dragged behind it, has been ripped from its moorings. Joe immediately joins several other men in an effort to bring the balloon to safety. In the rescue attempt, one man, John Logan, dies. Another of the would-be-rescuers is Jed Parry. Joe and Jed exchange a passing glance, a glance that has devastating consequences and that indelibly burns an obsession into Jed''s soul, for Jed suffers from de Clerambault''s syndrome, a disorder that causes the sufferer to believe that someone else is in love with him or her. Delusional and dangerous, Jed gradually wreaks havoc in Joe''s life, testing the limits of his beloved rationalism, threatening Clarissa''s love for him, and driving him to the brink of murder and madness. During a lunch with Clarissa and her godfather, Joe witnesses the attempted murder of another man, resulting in the man being shot in the shoulder. However, he realises that the bullet was meant for him and that the similar character of the people at the other table had misled the killers into thinking the other man was their target. Before the hitman can deliver the fatal shot, Jed, orchestrator of the event, intervenes to save the innocent man''s life before fleeing from the scene. In the subsequent interrogation, Joe insists that it was Jed who was behind this, but the detective does not believe him, possibly because he appears to get many of the facts of the incident incorrect. Joe leaves dissatisfied, knowing that Jed is still out there and looking for him. Like the detective, however, Clarissa becomes skeptical that Jed is stalking Joe and that Joe is in any danger. This, plus the stress Joe suffers at Jed''s hands, strains their relationship. Fearing for his safety, Joe purchases a gun through an acquaintance. On the journey home, he receives a call from Jed, who is at Joe''s home with Clarissa. Upon arriving at his apartment, Joe sees Jed sitting on the sofa with Clarissa. Jed then asks for Joe''s forgiveness, before taking out a knife and pointing it at his own neck. To prevent Jed from killing himself, Joe shoots him in the arm. He escapes without charges. In the first of the novel''s appendices (a medical report on Jed''s condition) we learn that Joe and Clarissa are eventually reconciled and that they adopt a child. In the second (a letter from Jed to Joe), we learn that after three years, Jed remains uncured, and is now living in a psychiatric hospital.

Enduring Love

In the first part, entitled First Encounters (1939-1967), Kapuściński writes about the 1939 entry of the Red Army into Pińsk, his home town in the Polesie area, and about the poverty and terror he experienced during the ensuing Soviet rule. He continues to describe his postwar experiences in the Soviet Union, including his travel on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and his trips to exotic Central Asian and Transcaucasian republics of the Soviet Union, today Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. The second part of the book, From a Bird''s-eye View (1989-1991), makes up over one half of the book, and is a travelogue from his lone trips around the Soviet Union during its collapse. In the European part of the USSR Kapuściński visited, among others, Brest, Moscow and Donetsk, in the Far North - Magadan and Vorkuta, in the South - Tbilisi and Yerevan. During these voyages he traveled over 60,000 km, mostly by plane. The last, shortest part, The Sequel Continues (1992-1993), is a summary. It is also an attempt to analyze the changes in the countries that arose from the disintegration of the USSR. According to the author himself, the whole work does not end with a higher and final synthesis, but with the reverse, because during its writing the subject and theme of the book, the great Soviet Empire, has disappeared. no:Imperiet (polsk bok) pl:Imperium (reportaż)

Imperium

Admiral Gilad Pellaeon admits that the Empire, down to only a few sectors, is now fighting a losing battle. He initiates preliminary peace talks with Princess Leia, who acts as the New Republic representative. However, several Imperial officials are vehemently anti-surrender, the most notable being Moff Disra. He hires a con artist, Flim, to impersonate Grand Admiral Thrawn, the idea being that Imperial Forces would rally, and many systems would rejoin the Empire, due to Thrawn''s "returning from the dead." Another Imperial plot is underfoot, to provoke civil war in the New Republic, involving the Caamas Document. Caamas was a world destroyed by the Empire shortly after the Clone Wars, and it is revealed in the book that this was made possible by Bothan sabotage of that planet''s planetary shield. Various alien races take sides over treatment of the Bothans and what would be justice for Caamas; more than a hundred alien warships gather in orbit over the Bothans'' homeworld of Bothawui. Several of this book''s plotlines revolve around major characters seeking an unaltered copy of the Camaas Document, in an attempt to settle the issue. Han Solo and Lando Calrissian travel to an Imperial base at Bastion in an attempt to find it. Meanwhile, Garm Bel Iblis attempts a raid on an Imperial Ubiqtorate base at Yaga Minor. The Empire hopes that the confrontation over Bothawui will reach a flash point, and three Imperial Star Destroyers lie in wait to ''finish off'' the survivors. Furthermore, an Imperial sabotage team successfully knocks out a major section of the Bothawui planetary shield. Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade successfully sneak into a fortress called the Hand of Thrawn (so called because of its ''four fingers and a thumb'' shape). Many secrets are revealed there, including mention of an expedition by Thrawn to the galaxy''s Unknown Regions. Luke and Mara are about to die, when Luke proposes to Mara, she accepts. They escape and at the end of the novel, a peace treaty is signed by Admiral Pellaeon and New Republic president Ponc Gavrisom. fr:Vision du futur

Vision of the Future

Eric “Moby” Calhoune’s best friend Sarah Byrnes is catatonic, sitting in the mental ward of Sacred Heart Hospital. The staff there suggests that he recall some moments that may jog her memory and bring her out of her catatonic state and back to reality. Eric and Sarah Byrnes (who insists on being called Sarah Byrnes, rather than just Sarah) have been friends for a long time, originally because he was extremely overweight and she was severely burned as a child leaving her with scars on her hands and face. They were picked on regularly and began to write an underground newspaper called Crispy Pork Rinds, focusing an article on the bully Dale Thornton. After the ensuing events, they recruited Dale as “protection”, and their lives became a bit easier. Eric is recruited to the swim team, and as he improves in skill his weight decreases. Out of fear of losing his friend Sarah Byrnes, he continues to eat, even more excessively, so he can “stay fat for Sarah Byrnes”. Eric’s search for a “cure” to Sarah Byrnes’s catatonia, leads him to seek out Dale Thornton, and Eric learns that she had an abusive father and that the facial scarring was no accident. Shortly after being confronted with this information, Sarah Byrnes begins speaking to Eric, and he discovers that her catatonia has been a ruse, and that she is terrified that her father, who has been declining into further mental illness, is going to kill her. She has been hiding out in the hospital because it is the only place she feels safe from him. But Virgil Byrnes appears to be on to Sarah, and time is running out. Confused as to what to do, Eric reveals all to his teacher and swim coach, Ms. Lemry. She hatches a plan to hide Sarah Byrnes in the apartment above her garage. Ms. Lemry teaches the Contemporary American Thought (CAT) class which includes discussions on abortion, suicide, religion, body image, social justice, and many other topics. Through these moments, Eric, Steve Ellerby, Jody Mueller, and Mark Brittain (classmates with conflicting views), develop and explore their personal views on these issues. During the course of this class, Mark is confronted with the truth of his actions—that he encouraged Jody to have an abortion—and he has difficulty reconciling his actions with his beliefs and later attempts suicide. Ms. Lemry agrees to take Sarah Byrnes to Reno to look for her mother, who is the only witness to the abuse Sarah has suffered at the hands of her father. While they are gone, Virgil Byrnes hunts down Eric after school and threatens to kill him, and eventually stabs him in the back. Eric makes his way to Dale Thornton’s house where he passes out, and Dale and his father rescue him and take him to the hospital. Sarah attempts to run away because she doesn’t want any more of her friends to get hurt, but Eric and Ms. Lemry stop her. Eric’s mother’s boyfriend Carver Middleton (former Vietnam Special Forces soldier) figures out that Virgil Byrnes must be hiding out in his house and lays a trap for him, capturing him after a brief struggle.

Staying Fat For Sarah Byrnes

The story is set in a research facility (known as the "farm") involving two groups of people. The first group contains several teenagers with IQs above 150. These teenagers (Greg, Mikki, Lesley, Gordon, Gretel, Katie and Chris) call themselves the "Think Tank". However, this group is merely a smokescreen for the real subjects of the research - five seven year-olds who are able to communicate telepathically, known as the "Babies". The Babies are called Pep, Ricardo, Ian, Rachael and Myriam. The Babies were all born around the same time in the same hospital. When the members of the first group are "contacted" by the Babies, they learn of the researchers'' exploitation, and, with the help of compassionate workers at the facility (Susan and Erik), investigate the reason for the Babies'' condition. The Babies need help as the head researcher, Larsen, will stop at nothing to solve the mystery. The Think Tank, as well as researcher Susan and young orderly Erik provide this help. They trick the head researcher, John Larsen, so they can escape. The story ends with the Think Tank six years into the future. They turned the think tank into ''Think Tank Inc.'', a company worth three million dollars. The Babies, Think Tank and newly married Erik and Susan all live together. The title, ''A Cage of Butterflies'' refers to the fact that Larsen and the research staff keep both the Babies and the think tank under constant supervision and keep them ''caged'' or ''prisoners'', since they do not allow them to move around freely.

A Cage of Butterflies

The story takes up immediately after the events of Looking Backward with the main characters from the first novel, Julian West, Doctor Leete, and his daughter Edith. West tells his nightmare of return to the 19th century to Edith, who is sympathetic. West''s citizenship in the new America is recognized, and he goes to the bank to obtain his own account, or "credit card", from which he can draw on the annual stipend all citizens receive. He learns that Edith and her mother do not normally wear the long skirts he has seen them in (they have been wearing them so his 19th century sensibilities will not be shocked), and when Edith learns that he would not be shocked to see them dressed otherwise, immediately runs into the house and comes out dressed as a modern woman in a pants suit. Clothing varies widely, since it is made of strengthened paper, and is recycled when dirty and replaced at very small expense (shoes and dishes are made of variations on the same substance). Julian learns that women are free to compete in many of the same trades as men; the manager of the paper factory he goes to view is a woman. Edith herself is in the second year of the three year general labor period required of everyone before choosing a trade, but is on leave from that employment. The two tour a tenement house, in which no one now lives, kept as a reminder of things how used to be and a reminder not to go back to them. Julian opens his safe (a device unknown in 2000 outside museums). Dr. Leete sees his mortgages and securities not as long-obsolete claims to ownership interest in things, but rather in people and their labor. The papers are worthless except as antiquities, as most of such papers were burned at the conclusion of the economic transition, in a great blaze on the former site of the New York Stock Exchange. The gold coins in the safe are admired for their prettiness, but are also worthless. Julian learns more about the world of the year 2000. Handwriting has been virtually replaced by phonograph records, and jewelry is no longer used, since jewels are now worthless. Julian is amazed by a television-like device, called the electroscope. World communication is simplified, since everyone now speaks a universal language in addition to his native tongue. Not only are there motor cars, but also private air cars. Everyone is now vegetarian, and the thought of eating meat is looked upon with revulsion. The book concludes with an almost uninterrupted series of lectures from Dr. Leete and other characters, mostly concerning how the idyllic state West has arrived in was achieved.

Equality

The Russian author Kartsev, living in Munich in 1982 (just like Voinovich himself), time travels to the Moscow of 2042. After the "Great August Revolution", the new leader referred to as "Genialissimus" has changed the Soviet Union... up to a certain point. After Vladimir Lenin''s dream of the world revolution narrowed down to Joseph Stalin''s theory of "Socialism in one country", Genialissimus has decided to start from building "Communism in one city", namely in Moscow. The ideology has changed somewhat, into a hodgepodge of Marxism-Leninism and Russian Orthodoxy (Genialissimo himself is also Patriarch). The decay from which the Soviet Union suffered has worsened. The rest of the Soviet Union, where people barely survive, has been separated by a Berlin type of wall from the "paradise" of Moscow, where communism has been realised. Within the wall everyone gets everything "according to his needs". Only their needs are not decided by themselves, but by the wise Genialissimus. Most people have "ordinary needs", but a chosen few have "extraordinary needs". For the first-mentioned group, life is dismal even within the privileged "Moscow Republic". The situation finally gets so desperate that people throw themselves in the arms of the "liberator", a fellow dissident writer and (kind of) friend of Kartsev, the Slavophile Sim Karnavalov (apparently inspired by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn), who enters Moscow on a white horse and proclaims himself Tsar Serafim the First. Thus, communism is abandoned and society progressed back into feudal autocracy. This novel is considered to be a masterpiece of dystopian satire.

Moscow 2042

Nearly all reviewers of the book mention the Byzantine nature of the plot. Louis Menand in The New Yorker gives a simple description:The New Yorker Menand, Louis, "Do the Math: Thomas Pynchon''s latest novel", The New Yorker, November 27, 2006 edition, posted November 20, accessed November 28, 2006 : "[T]his is the plot: An anarchist named Webb Traverse, who employs dynamite as a weapon against the mining and railroad interests out West, is killed by two gunmen, [...] who were hired by the wicked arch-plutocrat Scarsdale Vibe. Traverse''s sons [...] set out to avenge their father’s murder. [...] Of course, there are a zillion other things going on in Against the Day, but the Traverse-family revenge drama is the only one that resembles a plot [...] that is, in Aristotle’s helpful definition, an action that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The rest of the novel is shapeless [...]" As to the multitude of plot dead-ends, pauses and confusing episodes that return to continue much later in the narrative, Menand writes: : "[T]he text exceeds our ability to keep everything in our heads, to take it all in at once. There is too much going on among too many characters in too many places. [...] This [including tone shifts in which Pynchon spoofs various styles of popular literature] was all surely part of the intention, a simulation of the disorienting overload of modern culture."

Over 8000 Takeaways For Your Brain!

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The Apocalypse Troll

By David Weber

Death Comes as the End

By Agatha Christie

Who Killed Zebedee?

By Wilkie Collins

The Old Man and the Sea

By Ernest Hemingway

Enduring Love

By Ian McEwan

Imperium

No Author Listed

Vision of the Future

By Timothy Zahn

Staying Fat For Sarah Byrnes

By Chris Crutcher

A Cage of Butterflies

By Brian Caswell

Equality

By Edward Bellamy

Moscow 2042

By Vladimir Voinovich

Against the Day

By Thomas Pynchon