Fast paced Superhero Gaming! Polyverse Supers allows a GM to create campaigns with colorful npcs, heroes and villains. Included are rules for creation of bases and vehicles as well as random character creation. Super Hero Roleplaying!Make the superhero YOU want!70 customizable powers!Adders and Subtractors make powers unique!Over 100 Problems to make characters stand out!Create bases and vehicles!Random character creation rules!Point based system!

The first tale in this collection of ten short stories describes a universe that accidentally discovers how to give its people superpowers. But with heroes come villains, and at times it’s difficult to tell them apart. Next it’s on to a universe where cat people have developed a means of commercial interstellar flight. After that, galactic intrigue develops when several governments try to locate a simple star fighter pilot who is not what she seems. Then it’s on to a dystopian world where its star has changed colors. The ensuing carnage destroys civilization and ecosystems around the planet. One of the destroyed cities, known now as Skeleton City, lives on even in death. This is followed by a lighthearted look at a combination of science fiction and magic in which the author has created all new rules. In a future where Earth is attacked by a race that “seeks to bring peace to the galaxy,” the aliens’ idea of peace is death. Travel to a different world where the population receives a human signal, but most don’t think it’s real. Those who do must meet in secret to decipher the code. What would happen in a world where companions are manufactured to do whatever they are told? The most popular models, of course, are feminine in appearance. In one story, a young man must learn all he can about mysticism before he goes to an arcane postsecondary school. In the final story, Crocs have attacked Earth and have nearly wiped out humanity. Those who survive try to kill the enemy, but at what cost?

Polyverse is just that: a verse of many forms and possibilities. Taking its cue from a wide range of modern and postmodern poetics - Gertrude Stein's multiple formal innovations, Emily Dickinson's condensations, the improvisation of Whitman and the Beat poets, the New York School's intertwining poles of "the everyday," and the wild peripatetic leaps and innovation of "Language" writing - Brown's work enacts an exciting and suggestive poetry of possibility.

Poetry. Introduction by Michael Magee. GOD'S LIVESTOCK POLICY is Stan Apps's self-ordained "mini-Bible sort of a commentary on the real Bible." Employing satire as incisive as that which one might find in e.e. cummings and The New Republic, Apps's poems problematize God, configuring the deity as a grasping extension of Man's urge for sovereignty, a populist construct by which we are roped, doped, and branded. Heaven here is a bureaucratic machine, earth a lamentable mistake, and humans the lowing livestock. GOD'S LIVESTOCK POLICY is published as part of the Trench Art Parapet series. With visual art by Danielle Adair."

Through close analysis of Eureka and The Purloined Letter, Swirski evaluates Poe's epistemological theses in the light of contemporary philosophy of science and presents literary interpretation as a cooperative game played by the author and reader, thereby illuminating how we read fiction. The analysis of Poe's little-studied Eureka provides the basis for his discussion of Lem's critique of scientific reductionism and futurological forecasts. Drawing on his own interviews with Lem as well as analysis of his works, Swirski considers the author's scenarios involving computers capable of creative acts and discusses their socio-cultural implications. His analysis leads to bold arguments about the nature of literature and its relation to a broad range of other disciplines.

“Carl Sagan meets Umberto Eco. . . . Bursting with pungent historical detail . . . this dense, provocative novel offers big rewards to patient readers.” —Entertainment Weekly The alien world of medieval Europe lives again, transformed by the physics of the future, by a winner of the Heinlein Award. Over the centuries, one small town in Germany has disappeared and never been resettled. Tom, a historian, and his theoretical physicist girlfriend Sharon, become interested. By all logic, the town should have survived. What’s so special about Eifelheim? Father Dietrich is the village priest of Eifelheim, in the year 1348, when the Black Death is gathering strength but is still not nearby. Dietrich is an educated man, and to his astonishment becomes the first contact person between humanity and an alien race from a distant star, when their ship crashes in the nearby forest. It is a time of wonders, in the shadow of the plague. Tom and Sharon, and Father Deitrich have a strange destiny of tragedy and triumph in Eifelheim, the brilliant science fiction novel by Michael Flynn. “Heartbreaking. . . . Flynn masterfully achieves an intricate panorama of medieval life, full of fascinatingly realized human and [alien] characters whose fates interconnect with poignant irony.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “Meticulously researched, intense, mesmerizing novel . . . for readers seeking thoughtful science fiction of the highest order.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review “Eifelheim may turn out to be the best science fiction novel this year.” —Orson Scott Card, Hugo Award–winning author of Ender’s Game