This monograph contends that attending to Pratchett’s work could help to save our world. It draws attention to the astonishing capacity of Pratchett’s novels to inspire and argues that Pratchett’s fantasy novels directly address many of the most significant challenges people in the world face: the explosion of weapons technology; the myriad issues involved in the envelopment of human life by corporatized information technology; the destructive human inattention to, and interactions with, the Earth and its life forms; and the problem of devalued labor. Paradoxically, it is Pratchett’s choice of fantasy that lets him address the reality of major issues that humanity and the rest of life confront now. Pratchett’s novels show us how to better understand and confront the problems the world is contending with. The book will interest both scholars and fans.

This monograph contends that attending to Pratchett’s work could help to save our world. It draws attention to the astonishing capacity of Pratchett’s novels to inspire and argues that Pratchett’s fantasy novels directly address many of the most significant challenges people in the world face: the explosion of weapons technology; the myriad issues involved in the envelopment of human life by corporatized information technology; the destructive human inattention to, and interactions with, the Earth and its life forms; and the problem of devalued labor. Paradoxically, it is Pratchett’s choice of fantasy that lets him address the reality of major issues that humanity and the rest of life confront now. Pratchett’s novels show us how to better understand and confront the problems the world is contending with. The book will interest both scholars and fans.

From the pen of Sir Terry Pratchett, beloved and bestselling author of the Discworld fantasy series, comes a reality-bending tale of virtual heroism that will leaves readers breathless from laughter, and suspense. The alien spaceship is in his sights. His finger is on the Fire button. Johnny Maxwell is about to set the new high score on the computer game Only You Can Save Mankind. Suddenly: We wish to talk. Huh? We surrender. The aliens aren't supposed to surrender -- they're supposed to die! Now what is Johnny going to do with a fleet of alien prisoners who know their rights under the international rules of war and are demanding safe-conduct? It's hard enough trying to save Mankind from the Galactic Hordes. It's even harder trying to save the Galactic Hordes from Mankind. But it's just a game, isn't it? Isn't it...? Read more of Johnny Maxwell's adventures in Johnny and the Dead and Johnny and the Bomb!

Why we all deserve a life worth living and a death worth dying for ‘Most men don’t fear death. They fear those things – the knife, the shipwreck, the illness, the bomb – which precede, by microseconds if you’re lucky, and many years if you’re not, the moment of death.’ When Terry Pratchett was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in his fifties he was angry - not with death but with the disease that would take him there, and with the suffering disease can cause when we are not allowed to put an end to it. In this essay, broadcast to millions as the BBC Richard Dimblebly Lecture 2010 and previously only available as part of A Slip of the Keyboard, he argues for our right to choose - our right to a good life, and a good death too.

The aim of the book is to propose new interpretations of poets who are among the most valued and discussed in the British Enlightenment. In fulfilling its aim, the book covers English poetry—and intellectual history—from the Restoration to the later eighteenth century. It examines how the myth of the donna angelica (the angelic lady), ancient in origin but given its best-known form within the medieval literature of fin’amor, lives on beyond the Middle Ages and the Renaissance into the Enlightenment. To be more precise, it studies how some major Augustan poets appropriate and recreate what, for convenience, can be called the donna angelica topos (or, the angelic lady motif). They do so for a great many reasons linked with quite diverse circumstances. Nevertheless, the myth’s intellectual richness, emotional intensity, and inherent ambiguities mean that it offers each of them a powerful way for articulating, interpreting, exploring refractions of eros—whether singly or diversely directed, concerned with sexuality or spirituality, informing personal or public experience. The myth has as many faces, so to speak, as does desire; it is one and yet many. Thus, the book pursues a particular fable of eros that appears in a multiplicity of texts in a multiplicity of guises. It studies how some of the most interesting poets from Dryden to Crabbe bring the angelic lady motif into modernity.

After twelve-year-old Johnny Maxwell suddenly starts seeing and talking to ghosts, he and his friends become involved in a battle to save the local cemetery.

SF masters Gregory Benford and Larry Niven spin a tale of alien encounters and strange technologies on an epic scale In Bowl of Heaven, the first collaboration by science fiction authors Larry Niven (Ringworld) and Gregory Benford (Timescape), the limits of wonder are redrawn once again as a human expedition to another star system is jeopardized by an encounter with an astonishingly immense artifact in interstellar space: a bowl-shaped structure half-englobing a star, with a habitable area equivalent to many millions of Earths...and it's on a direct path heading for the same system as the human ship. A landing party is sent to investigate the Bowl, but when the explorers are separated—one group captured by the gigantic structure's alien inhabitants, the other pursued across its strange and dangerous landscape—the mystery of the Bowl's origins and purpose propel the human voyagers toward discoveries that will transform their understanding of their place in the universe. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.