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‘Time To Think’ is a collection of eight short tales about how to cope with such things as unwelcome evangelists, visitors, praise, sexual attention, living in a nursing home, relations, genetic modification and sexual urges....

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Spreading the Word Sebastian gazed unseeing from the verandah into the sun filled garden. As usual a zillion thoughts jostled aside all attempts to attain a state of Zen-like relaxation. With an impatient sigh he sat up, dusted a few crumbs from the divan, rearranged the pillows then lay back with his hands at his side. Yogic breathing—that would do the trick. He managed to hold his mind still for at least three seconds before a large spider constructing an intricate web among the rafters caught his attention. He was already on his feet to get a broom when he remembered, and slumped back. ‘Your tendons will never repair if you're always on the go,’ the slim young doctor had snapped only an hour before. ‘Why can’t you just lie back and relax?’ ‘Because it’s not my nature,’ Sebastian had answered with a fetching sigh. ‘Perhaps if you were to massage me...?’ ‘And risk Reginald’s wrath? Not bloody likely.’ ‘Wouldn’t it be worth a broken arm?’ Sebastian grinned. ‘Not even you are worth that, Sebastian. Shut up and let the sounds of nature lull you to somnolence.’ But Sebastian couldn’t. Time plodded. He began to fidget. Struggled to...

Table of Contents Details
•‘Spreading the Word’ • ‘Time to Think’ • ‘Free Will’ •‘A Misunderstanding’ •‘Useless Things’ • ‘I Arrived a Week Early’ • ‘Poisoned Chalice’ •‘Mens Sana in Corpore Sano’ ...

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Dome of Death is a slightly shocking and occasionally thought provoking romantic thriller about two young men who’d love to be as cool as James Bond in the face of extreme danger, but discover reality is not like fiction. When Max, the director of an Art Gallery in Queensland, falls to his death, Peter, the exhibiting artist who is also Max's ex-lover, unwillingly accepts the widow’s pleas to take over the job. After rescuing a strange young man from a raging sea, Peter’s suspicions about the accident and an investigation into what he thinks is an art swindle, puts him in great danger. He is raped and left for dead, but escapes, only to discover that he and his new friend Jon are wanted for murder. What follows is a hair-raising chase to clear their names. Murder, torture, cyclones, tidal surges, and snuff porn shows are but a few of the complications to be navigated in their search for justice, happiness and love....

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Chapter One Exposing oneself in public is not for the faint-hearted. En masse and expertly illuminated the paintings gave viewers rather more insight into the private spaces of my mind than I’d bargained for. The fact that the gallery’s patrons were also baring their souls with every critical utterance and every painting bought was scant consolation – especially as no one was buying! After an hour of eavesdropping among the usual crush of wine-sipping social scramblers, I wished I hadn’t. Stepping back, I collided with an elderly, shapeless little woman loosely wrapped in a sari decorated with mirrors. ‘Young man!’ she demanded as though I’d been caught spraying graffiti, ‘Are you the artist?’ How to respond? People who call themselves artists remind me of Napoleon seizing the jewelled cap, crowning himself and living to rue the day. Such accolades are for others to bestow. If, as frequently happens, a painter’s efforts delight no one but himself, then the labour has been little but therapy. Only those whose works impose order on the chaos of existence and reinvigorate flagging spirits by giving the viewer a glimpse of a le...

Table of Contents Details
Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six ChapterSeven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-one Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-three Chapter Twenty-Four...

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The magnetic field of the passing asteroid is generating enough energy to pull Grailem towards it. Waking from an aimless sleep he tries to use his precious energy to move closer. It had been aeons since he had stood on, or even felt a solid surface beneath his feet. Grailem had been drifting aimlessly through space since his spacecraft had exploded, maybe a million years ago now. The exploding fuel tanks had thrown him out into the cold of space with such a force that he had almost achieved the speed of light. The clouds of dust and gases of forming nebula he passed through slowed him down as he flew uncontrolled through the cosmos. With no propulsion system to aid him, the friction of forming nebulae of dust and gas eventually brought his speed down to a few kilometres per second. The years passed slowly for him as he had little to distract his thoughts and he had long wished for the release of death. The only part of him that is human is his brain; and this has been incorporated completely into an artificial body. The body had been especially designed to cope with all environments; including the vacuum of space, but with...

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Mankind had been incorporating humans with artificial limbs and internal organs for generations. The more that Man depended on technology, the physically weaker the human race had become. Many humans were regularly being born with disabilities like missing limbs, blindness and also the inability to speak. Substituting the missing limbs with man-made ones and combining computer technology, the blind could see better than with normal healthy eyes (though mechanical and lacking any sign of emotion), and the disabled could walk and run. To have a disability proved to be an advantage in this new world; as the replacement limbs and internal organs were far superior to that created by nature. All those who could afford it had mechanical hearts and kidneys. Some had arms and legs deliberately amputated so that they could be fitted with far superior man-made ones. Life expectancy became measured in centuries rather than years. After three thousand years the human part of the body mysteriously changed, making the body susceptible to disease and death. Not many people lived beyond three thousand years; it was as if the body had an inte...

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Table of Contents Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen The Author...

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Space Force Grunts is a Science Fiction novel playing several generations into the future. After the human race has invented hyperspace flight, thousands of planets are colonised. Those new societies maintain their independence until the human race encounters an alien civilisation that also masters space flight and hyperspace travel. Being so very different from the human race, those aliens are at first not even recognised as an eminent civilisation commanding over impressive, seemingly sheer unlimited means and a proficient use of advanced technologies. When the mistake is discovered, it is too late already for avoiding a clash of civilisations and a violent conflict has already started. The worlds settled by the human race gradually unite ever more under the leadership of a political movement. Conscription is introduced to provide for the military forces’ need for soldiers. People with sufficient means can purchase freedom from conscription and escape the draft. The funds obtained by the administration via that purchase of freedom are used to supply the military with materials means like weapons and to pay the soldiers who get dra...

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Base 18 on Planet DN-DU-144/5 was a place that could only be found on detailed military maps. This planet was circling a sun situated at the border between our Local Bubble of stars in the Milky Way and the much bigger Loop 1 Bubble, another assembly of suns and planets. DN-DU-144/5 was the fifth planet in outward direction, when counted from the local star as centre. Base 18 now consisted of a dozen bunkers, a few deep wells and a couple of cisterns appendant to them, a makeshift front-line spa, and most importantly a maintenance station for fighter robots and combat drones. Base 18 on planet DN-DU-144/5 was in principle a bleak place. Though at that moment it was officially day-time at the location of base 18, there was actually just a little twilight. The far sun, going by the less-than-poetic name of DN-DU-144, illuminated only the abundant clouds enfolding the planet decently. Little light ever made it through to the surface. ‘I just love it’ Master Sergeant Koon had sarcastically said when arriving at this place, together with all the other soldiers of the 5th company. They had taken this base over from a unit that had suffe...

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Not Applicable

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A Study in Scarlet, a short novel published in 1887, was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes story. At the beginning of the book, Dr. Watson meets the detective for the first time and we ride along with them to the scene of a murder. The crime baffles the Scotland Yard detectives, but of course Holmes solves it easily. In the second half of the story, the scene shifts to Utah as we learn the murderer's history. The action returns to London in the last two chapters. In his first adventure, Holmes demonstrates many of the traits for which he later became well known: meticulous study of a crime scene, brilliant deductive reasoning, aptitude for chemistry and music, and the somewhat annoying habit of withholding crucial facts from Watson (and consequently the reader) until the conclusion of the case. (Summary by Laurie Anne Walden)...

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Mystery, Adventure, Teen/Young adult

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The whole paradoxist distich should be as a geometric unitary parabola, hyperbola, ellipse at the borders between art, philosophy, rebus, and mathematics – which exist in complementariness. The School of Paradoxist Literature, which evolved around 1980s, continues through these bi-verses closed in a new lyric exact formula, but with an opening to essence. For this kind of procedural poems one can elaborate mathematical algorithms and implement them in a computer: but, it is preferable a machine with … soul!...

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I M M O D E S T With the shame Shamelessness U N D E C I D E D Fighting Himself J A Z Z ( I ) Melodious Anarchy J A Z Z ( I I ) Anarchic Melody...

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Fore/word and Back/word _________ 3 The making of the distich : _____ 3 Characteristics: ______________ 3 Historical considerations: _____ 5 Types of Paradoxist distiches ___ 8 1. Clichés paraphrased: ___ 8 2. Parodies: _____________ 8 3. Reversed formulae: ____ 8 4. Double negation _______ 8 5. Double affirmation, ____ 8 6. Turn around on false tracks: _________________ 8 7. Hyperboles (exaggerated): __________________ 8 8. With nuance changeable from the title: ________ 8 9. Epigrammatic: ________ 8 10. Pseudo-paradoxes: ___ 8 11. Tautologies: ________ 9 12. Redundant: _________ 9 13. Based on pleonasms: _ 9 14. or on anti-pleonasms: 9 15. Substitution of the attribute in collocations ___ 9 16. Substitution of the complement in collocations 9 17. Permutation of various parts of the whole: ___ 9 18. The negation of the clichés ______________ 10 19. Antonymization (substantively, adjectively, etc.) ________________ 10 20. Fable against the grain: _________________ 10 21. Change in grammatical category (preserving substitutions’ homonymy): ________________ 10 22. Epistolary or colloquia style: _________...

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A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder is the most popular of James De Mille's works. It was serialized posthumously in Harper's Weekly, and published in book form by Harper and Brothers of New York City in 1888. This satiric romance is the story of Adam More, a British sailor. Shipwrecked in Antarctica, he stumbles upon a tropical lost world of prehistoric animals, plants, and a cult of death-worshipping primitives. He also finds a highly developed human society which has reversed the values of Victorian society. Wealth is scorned and poverty revered; death and darkness are preferrable to life and light. Rather than accumulating wealth, the natives seek to divest themselves of it as quickly as possible. At the beginning of each year, the government imposes wealth (the burden of reverse taxation) upon its unfortunate subjects as a form of punishment. A secondary plot about the four yachtsmen who find the manuscript forms a frame for the central narrative. [Condensed from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Strange_Manuscript_Found_in_a_Copper_Cylinder ]...

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Adventure, Satire