“The Southland’s a different place,” Gus said once, “with secret towns and secret highways, filled with secret people wearing secret smiles.”

While growing up, I always thought he was talking in metaphors.

Years later, long after college, I discovered I was wrong.

Great story, great narration, great audio production. Good job Pseudopod!

Speculative fiction is the literature of change and discovery. But every now and then, a book comes along that changes the rules of science fiction for everybody. Certain great books inspire scores of authors to create something new. Here are 21 of the most influential science fiction and fantasy books.

Do you like fiction and mathematics? Are you looking for a book or story that might be useful for the students in your math class? Are you interested in what our society thinks about mathematicians? Then you've come to the right place. This database lists over one thousand short stories, plays, novels, films, and comic books containing math or mathematicians.

The following list combines the best of the online resources for DRM-free science fiction suggested by the BoingBoing community with the excellent “13 DRM-free ebook sites” resource by Mark Gladding at Text2Go Blog.

Escape Pod is the premier science fiction podcast magazine. Every week we bring you short stories from some of today’s best science fiction stories, in convenient audio format for your computer or MP3 player.

A reconstructed life story of Nacht, one of workers who was part of building king Kufu's great pyramid.

The 19th century was a turbulent time for mathematics, with many new and controversial concepts, like imaginary numbers, becoming widely accepted in the mathematical community. Putting Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in this context, it becomes clear that Dodgson, a stubbornly conservative mathematician, used some of the missing scenes to satirise these radical new ideas.

Our Discussion Forum is the largest gathering of alternate history fans on the internet.

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Alternate history is the exercise of looking at the past and asking "what if"? What if some major historical event had gone differently, and how could that have changed the world? Popular "what if" questions that you may have seen in fiction include "what if the Nazis had won the Second World War?" and "what if the South had won the US Civil War?", but it can be just as interesting to think about Aztecs resisting Spanish colonization or a Japan that did not turn its back on the world under the Shogunate. Alternate history is a literary genre, but here we're mainly interested in history itself - and the politics, strategy, culture, and more that define it. We spend most of our time debating our own ideas about history and how it could have gone differently, so this is a community focused on creativity and learning.

Ett brev från det förflutna skakar om familjepappan William. Hans sökande efter svar leder in honom på en farlig väg. Han får kontakt med ett tusenårigt sällskap som delar med sig av omskakande insikter om vår värld. Tillsammans försöker de sätta stopp för ett attentat som kan leda fram till en ny och omänsklig världsordning, orkestrerad av en rituell organisation med mytologiska rötter.

Reynholm Industries was founded by ground-breaking businessman Denholm Reynholm, with nothing but a simple dream, and 6 million pounds.