About this product: Critics have compared the engrossing space operas of Peter F. Hamilton to the classic sagas of such sf giants as Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert. But Hamilton’s bestselling fiction—powered by a fearless imagination and world-class storytelling skills—has also earned him comparison to Tolstoy and Dickens. Hugely ambitious, wildly entertaining, philosophically stimulating: the novels of Peter F. Hamilton will change the way you think about science fiction. Now, with Pandora’s Star, he begins a new multivolume adventure, one that promises to be his most mind-blowing yet.
The year is 2380. The Intersolar Commonwealth, a sphere of stars some four hundred light-years in diameter, contains more than six hundred worlds, interconnected by a web of transport “tunnels” known as wormholes. At the farthest edge of the Commonwealth, astronomer Dudley Bose observes the impossible: Over one thousand light-years away, a star . . . vanishes. It does not go supernova. It does not collapse into a black hole. It simply disappears. Since the location is too distant to reach by wormhole, a faster-than-light starship, the Second Chance, is dispatched to learn what has occurred and whether it represents a threat. In command is Wilson Kime, a five-time rejuvenated ex-NASA pilot whose glory days are centuries behind him.
Opposed to the mission are the Guardians of Selfhood, a cult that believes the human race is being manipulated by an alien entity they call the Starflyer. Bradley Johansson, leader of the Guardians, warns of sabotage, fearing the Starflyer means to use the starship’s mission for its own ends,.
Pursued by a Commonwealth special agent convinced the Guardians are crazy but dangerous, Johansson flees. But the danger is not averted. Aboard the Second Chance, Kime wonders if his crew has been infiltrated. Soon enough, he will have other worries. A thousand light-years away, something truly incredible is waiting: a deadly discovery whose unleashing will threaten to destroy the Commonwealth . . . and humanity itself.
Pandora released seven deadly sins—now the first is in paperback! Pandora Atheneus Andromaeche Helena (or Pandy for short) has the perfect prop for her school project: a box given to her father by Zeus himself. Pandy knows the box must never be opened, but of course accidents happen and soon seven forms of evil and misery have escaped. Now it’s up to Pandora to capture all seven—starting with jealousy—or go down in history as the girl who ruined the world. “Debut novelist Hennesy’s Hollywood comedian background shows in her witty juxtapositions of modern popular culture and classical Greek legend.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“It won’t be hard to sell this to Rick Riordan fans.” —Kirkus Reviews
Pandora and her friends Alcie, Iole, and Homer are practically evil-hunting experts. Jealousy, Vanity, and Laziness are all safely in the box and they already know Lust is lurking on Mount Pelion, so this fourth task should be super easy.
Just one teeny tiny problem: the evil is hiding at a wedding that took place 1,300 years ago. Luckily, the messenger god, Hermes steps in to help Pandy and her friends travel back in time—with just one rule: don’t change anything. At the wedding, they recognize most of the gods and goddesses, but nobody recognizes them. (Duh, they haven’t been born yet.) So they can search for the evil without drawing attention to themselves. But then Lust appears in the middle of a fateful argument between three of the most powerful goddesses. There’s no way Pandora can capture the evil without making a big scene. And worse, if she takes it at the wrong moment, she won’t just change the course of history—she’ll be history. Yup, this quest is totally under control . . . gulp!
It’s time to track down the next evil, Laziness—and you won’t believe where Pandora finds it!
Pandora’s search for Laziness is not going well: Hera’s kidnapped her beloved dog, Dido, and Pandy got separated from the rest of her friends and is totally alone in the middle of nowhere. But with the fate of the world still in her hands (which is so not fair), Pandy can’t afford to be lazy herself. Full of humor, sharp dialog, and cinematic storytelling, this third installment in the Pandora series is a perfect fit for tween readers who love light fantasy or Greek mythology.
The craziest field trip ever continues as Pandora and her BFFs, Alcie and Iole, are on the hunt for the next evil, vanity, which is hiding in Egypt. But, as usual, the goddess Hera is so not helping and throws as many obstacles as she can in their way. It’s totally distracting (not to mention life-threatening!), and they keep getting pulled off course. Fortunately the other gods and goddesses aren’t nearly as nasty as Hera, and they secretly help out the gang whenever they can. Pandy and her friends (including a new, totally adorable boy-slash-bodyguard) see it all, from a wild thunderstorm at sea and a group of talking dolphins to an . . . um . . . eye-thingy monster that’s just really, really scary. It sounds crazy, but don’t worry: Pandy can handle it . . . right?
A field guide to Pandora—the mesmerizing world of James Cameron's Avatar.
Four years in the making—and 15 years since its conception—Avatar is a live action film with a new generation of special effects, delivering a fully immersive cinematic experience of a new kind, where the revolutionary technology invented to make the film disappears into the emotion of the characters and the sweep of the story.
In Avatar: A Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora we are introduced to Pandora—a pristine and beautiful moon in a distant solar system—its exotic ecosystems, and the indigenous race called the Na'vi. By piecing together photographs, scientific field notes, and research data, citizens on Earth have collected the information in this field guide as a way to highlight the lessons Pandora can teach the people of Earth, who have struggled to survive as their planet's critical resources are depleted.
Though Pandora has proven to be an exceedingly profitable source of natural resources, the environment—from its gravity-defying floating mountains to the small but venomous hellfire wasps and the gigantic carnivorous thanator—poses continual dangers to RDA. Catalogued with unparalleled precision and access, this field guide provides highly detailed descriptions of the unique creatures and plants found on Pandora, the culture, language, and physiology of the native population, as well as RDA technology and weapons.
Eager to save the Earth, the activists have culled this information in hopes to expose the corporate greed and disregard for the native inhabitants and their environment that governs RDA's presence on the foreign moon.
This is the evidence in their case to save Pandora—and themselves.
About this product: The air of celebration surrounding fifteen-year-old Oz Vessalius's coming-of-age ceremony quickly turns to horror when he is condemned for a sin about which he knows nothing. He is thrown into an eternal, inescapable prison known as the Abyss from which there is no escape. There, he meets a young girl named Alice, who is not what she seems. Now that the relentless cogs of fate have begun to turn, do they lead only to crushing despair for Oz, or is there some shred of hope for him to grasp on to?
For as long as she can remember, successful young physician Megan Blair has tried to silence the voices in her head—voices that bring her to the edge of madness and terror. Megan possesses psychic powers that have been dormant for years, hidden deep in the past she’s tried so desperately to forget. But now everything has come to a boiling point—someone is trying to kill her, and others are trying to use her, including the deadly and seductive Neal Grady. Shocking secrets about her life and her mother’s death bombard her as she fights to take control of her heritage and save herself and everything she believes in. Grady holds the key to understanding her future, a future in which Megan’s life will never be the same.
About this product: Anne Rice fans will greet Pandora: New Tales of the Vampires, the first of her new vampire chronicles, as hungrily as the Fang Gang facing a fresh new neck. Our heroine, Pandora, a senator's daughter in Augustus Caesar's day, flees to Antioch when her family gets killed and discovers the antidote to stern Roman rationalism in the occult wisdom of the East. "Something attacked my reason," Pandora writes. "The very thing the Roman Emperors had so feared in Egyptian cults and Oriental cults swept over me: mystery and emotion which claim a superiority to reason and law."
Pandora gets her sexy vampire initiation at the fangs of handsome Marius (who later inducted Rice's famed vampire Lestat). Pandora tells how a nice Roman girl became a vampire in modern Paris, but mostly the book celebrates the sights and sounds (and philosophical bloodlettings) of the classical world. Pandora is more like Robert Graves's sublime I, Claudius than Rice's The Complete Vampire Chronicles.
Yet Pandora is a logical extension of Rice's work, and Pandora is a combination of her past vampire heroes and the nakedly, horrifyingly autobiographical heroine of Rice's 1997 novel Violin. Now, Violin is remarkably messy, but it captures the volcanic passion that erupts in her best work--Rice calls it "a study in pain." Pandora is really a dramatized debate between passion and reason, which Pandora calls "male reason." She teases her vampire mentor: "Marius guarded his delicate rationality as a Vestal Virgin guards a sacred flame. If ever any ecstatic emotion took hold of me, he [would] tell me in no uncertain terms that it was irrational, irrational, irrational!" (To hear how close Pandora's voice is to her passionate creator, listen to the 1997 audiocassette Interview with Anne Rice.)
Rice's research gives fresh blood to her storytelling. Even her chronic third-act problem scarcely slows down this brisk romp of a novel. Pandora has intellectual thirst as well as blood lust, and she conveys the high old time Rice obviously had imbibing historical lore. "It is fun to read these mad Gnostics!" exults Pandora in the early Christian era. It is also fun to read this mad Pandora. Anne Rice hasn't been this fun to read in years.
About this product: The St. Lawrence Seaway was considered one of the world's greatest engineering achievements when it opened in 1959. The $1 billion project - a series of locks, canals, and dams that tamed the ferocious St. Lawrence River - opened the Great Lakes to the global shipping industry. Linking ports on lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario to shipping hubs on the world's seven seas increased global trade in the Great Lakes region. But it came at an extraordinarily high price. Foreign species that immigrated into the lakes unleashed a biological shift that reconfigured the world's largest freshwater ecosystems. "Pandora's Locks" is the story of politicians and engineers who, driven by hubris and handicapped by ignorance, demanded that the Seaway be built at any cost. It is the tragic tale of government agencies that could have prevented ocean freighters from laying waste to the Great Lakes ecosystems, but failed to act until it was too late. Blending science with compelling personal accounts, this book is the first comprehensive account of how inviting transoceanic freighters into North America's freshwater seas transformed these wondrous lakes. Photographs, maps, notes, references, index.