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Free Live Free: Gene Wolfe
$10.00Four bizarre characters live free of charge in a run-down rooming house in Chicago: Osgood, unsuccessful salesman of novelty trinkets; Jim, an occasional private eye; Madame Serpentina, a gypsy fortune teller and witch; and Candy, overweight, alcoholic and a part time whore. The house is owned by the mysterious Ben Free who disappears after his tenants have been evicted and the demolition men move in. The four set out to trace him, partly from human concern - but also because they are sure he has great hidden wealth, connected with a strange place called the High Country...but what will they discover there? Cover art by Chris Moore. -
Patera Silk is a dedicated young auger whose parish buildings are about to be sold for taxes. He has made a pact with the wealthy, sinister Blood to get the money to save them. And so Silk has embarked on a quest which reveals to him the hidden secrets of his world, a huge starship illuminated and warmed by the artificial Long Sun, a spaceship so vast that remote cities can be seen in its sky. Silk travels to Lake Limna and visits a shrine which conceals an entrance to the sub surface passages of the ship, to rooms that contain strange machinery and stranger beings - and to rooms with windows...
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Volume III of The Book Of The Short Sun. Horn has embarked on a quest in search of the heroic leader Patera Silk. Horn has travelled from his home planet Blue to the mysterious planet Green, visited the great starship Whorl and even, somehow, reached the distant planet Urth. But Horn's identity has only become more ambiguous, a complex question embedded in the story, whose telling is itself complex; shifting from place to place, present to past. Perhaps Horn and Silk are one being... Cover art by Jim Burns. -
Volume IV of The Book Of The New Sun. Severian the Torturer continues his epic journey across the lands of Urth, a journey as fraught with peril as it is with wonder. Exiled from his guild he is an outcast, but his travels are woven with strange portents. The Claw of the Conciliator, relic of a prophet and promise of a new age, flames to life in his hands. He carries the great sword Terminus Est, the Line of Division. The dwellers in the deep waters offer him a kingdom under the seas. And he is hunted and driven by terrors from beyond Urth. Now all his travels move him inexorably toward a grander fate, a destiny that he dare not refuse. For a devouring blackness gnaws at the heart of the Old Sun, and the fate of Urth rests in the return of the Conciliator, the New Sun long foretold. Cover art by Peter Andrew Jones. -
In a contemporary town in the American midwest where he has no connections, Bax, an educated man recently released from prison, is staying in a motel. He writes letters to his brother and to others, including a friend still in jail, to whom he progressively reveals the intriguing pieces of a strange and fantastic narrative. When he meets a real estate agent who tells him he is, to his utter surprise, the heir to a huge old house in town, long empty, he moves in. He is immediately confronted by an array of supernatural creatures and events, by love and danger. His life is utterly transformed by magic, by another world and by Mr. Black, the sorcerer. Cover art by Cliff Neilson.
