Search Worlds Without End

In a violent storm, Tom Hark lands his shuttlecraft near a rumbling volcano. He'd been trying to find his crewmates' shuttlecraft, which was downed earlier under mysterious and alarming circumstances during a moon phase the local's radio called Double Nocturne. The mothership in orbit is computer-controlled, operating automatically because no on is left on board. Unless Hark can return to the mothership before the set deadline, it will return to the Homeworlds, leaving the crew stranded.

The crew's mission was to replace the Artificial Intelligence left on the planet seventy-five years earlier. Decades ago the AI had failed, but war back on Homeworlds had delayed this mission until now. No one knew what strange influences the AI might have had on the colony's culture in the years of the machine's decent from intelligence to eventual brain death. Hark soon learns that conditions have changed enormously on the planet. No longer is there a Homeworlds modeled civil authority or a democratic society but instead feudal matriarchies that marginalize men. Everything Tom Hark knew, all the facts of life he took for granted were suddenly dangerous heretical assumptions that might get him killed.

So he had to use his wits and whatever other assets he could make valuable. He knew that somewhere on the planet lived a scientist who had witnessed his landing. If he could find her, he might survive the ordeal he currently endured. But Islands conspired against him: its high gravity, its scheming politics, its barbarian customs that threatened to get him killed. By the next Double Nocturne he would either be dead, or safely away. And strangely, love--in this exotically beautiful yet treacherous place--would either damn him or save him.

In this science fiction adventure, lovers Calla and Jason are forced apart by the obligations of duty when Calla stands alone against a power-hungry tyrant who would destroy the universe in order to rule it.

This is a big, broad-canvas novel of romance and conflict on a far from Earth, water-starved planet.

When a young anthropologist leaves a dying Earth for Serensunar, she finds more than she bargained for. There are the eclipses that come frequently because Serensunar is one of a double planet system. And there is the volatility of the crust of the planet, which heaves and tosses every few years, knocking down dams and aqueducts the colonists erect.

Yet Serensunar is lush and fertile, mainly because the vision of one man, old Calib the Water Baron. He built a personal Empire by controlling the continent's main watershed, which insured the continued balance of man and nature on this planet. It is Calib and his heir, Aram, who enable Beth to continue her search for the Lost Expedition despite limited funding. Aram is smitten early on by this young woman who is working alone in the wilderness and feeling lucky to have gotten the chance. And while she is more wary of their budding relationship, it is finally her commitment to Aram in which Beth finds the beginnings of personal peace.

But it's a peace that is shattered. Both are strong individuals, and peace in their life together begins to seem like an unsustainable dream. Aram has come into his inheritance, the Earth's social system collapses and more and more colonists arrive, disturbing the delicate ecological balance. Then even more ships arrive from Earth with tales of increasing disasters--and hordes of immigrants. Aram is forced to make the hard decisions about whether to wake the cryogenically sleeping passengers, which would strain the already limited water supply on the planet. Beth, herself a fortunate refugee, wishes to accommodate them all. And Aram's own children side with their mother. Soon, Beth and their children are battling Aram the Water Baron for control of their planet's destiny.

Felice's novel combines political, economic, and ecological speculations to explore the nature of power and love.

Heao is a member of Academe, a future group of intelligentsia on a planet in the throes of a receding ice age. She and all her people have been conquered by a primitive king whose dreams of destruction haunt him, and may doom all her kind. Heao is intelligent and loving, a devoted helpmate and mother. But Heao is not an ordinary woman. She is a member of a feline race, and her body, along with those of her peers, is covered with fur and ends in a long busy tail. She is a member of the master race of Shadowland, the race that keeps human slaves to do their work for them, the race that stands in powerless awe of the fiery ball of light she sees once a year--Godsfire!

In Heao's world she is a pathfinder, a mapmaker, and she is the Galileo of her world, determined to bring light and wisdom to her shadowed world where most folk see slaves not as merely different but inferior. Heao knows better and won't deny her belief that slaves are intelligent and if not human, certainly more than animals. Her temple adversary, Tarana, would subdue and control, the young pathfinder to steal her dream-goal, or kill her if that fails. The king-conqueror, with tortured dreams of his own, needs Heao's mapmaking skills as much as he needs the Temple's support. Even Heao helper-in-life, Baltsar, and her trusted slave, Teon, are affected by the unintended consequences of Heao's convictions and her quest to follow her dream-goal. It will take all of them through the Evernight Mountains to discover the truth about her world and the blinding vision of--Godsfire!

Her People left earth long ago. Jacinta was a starborn noblewoman, ignorant of the strange ways of planet earth in its second ice age. but then her uncle arranged for her marriage to one of the native icemen...a clever scheme to unite the two families of the human race.

Blazing action. High-tech devastation. Explosive intrigue. The ultimate future was has begun.

The world as we know it has changed considerably. A civil war is raging between the eastern half of North American and the west. The latest methods of destruction are frightening, brutal, inescapable. They are called light raids--massive laser-beam assaults that are as effective as they are merciless.

Seventeen-year-old Hellene Ariadne, daughter of a prominent Western scientist, has been evacuated to Victoria for her protection. But when letters from her parents suddenly stop, followed by a supposedly innocent lunch with a family friend, Ariadne quickly begins to suspect that things will never be the same. The unexpected happens in an instant and Ariadne is forced to leave the safety of the North and return to her home in Denver Springs. There she finds her house in ruins, the city devastated by a savage light raid.

Ariadne assumes that her parents are dead. But the truth is much worse. Her mother is in prison, accused of sabotage and treason, and her father is left helpless, an emotional cripple.

It is up to Ariadne to clear her mother's name. But, as she plunges deeper and deeper into a fatal web of intrigue and deception, she discovers there are truths far more shocking than war, more devastating than the fiercest light raids and she is alone with a secret she must protect at all costs, even if it means placing her life - and her heart - in the hands of Joss, the so-called and compelling equerry to the prince.

Fast-paced, exciting and unforgettable, Light Raid is an electrifying achievement for authors Connie Will and Cynthia Felice.

Delanna Milleflores hasn't set foot on Keramos since she was a little girl. Now her mother has died, and she's returned only to settle and sell her estate. But Keramos has some surprising laws. To sell her farm, Delanna must first live on it for one year. And along with the land comes one Tarleton Tanner, heir to the adjoining land. A man who, at the moment of her mother's death, became Delanna's husband. He has plans of his own for their co-joined estates. Delanna is determined that she will inherit and that this marriage to the Tanner bumpkin will be in name only. Their clashing personalities and the conflicting goals threaten to put both their plans asunder, heatedly and repeatedly.

The exploitation of Cestry Prime was supposed to be a simple operation. But neither the Company nor their beautiful technician Sindon Liang counted on Rukmani Khan... and his incredible powers of Persuasion.

The Khan can cleave stone with his touch, draw gold from the hills -- and touch a woman's soul like no Earthman ever could. And his proud and independent people have ruled over Cestry Prime since long before the Company first coveted its resources.

Even with their advanced technology, the Earthmen may not be able to resist the Khan.

Sindon Liang is not sure she wants to...

The whole thing with that stone just dropped into Allis's life like a bomb. So did Dan's death, but not until after he'd lied his way into her life. Now she's been shanghaied by the space faring gypsies of the Sovereign Sun, gypsies who are threatened on all sides. Their captain, Milane, is a stone-carrier, too, and Dan's lover. Allis is their new stone-carrier and she's no help at all and not inclined to try to be. But Allis alone holds the power to face down a cabal of ancient enemies, not to mention villainous rival gypsies. And now she's running out of time. She didn't know about the clock inside her belly, but when she does, we see Allis in her full push-back mode, surviving one crisis after another. This is space opera with grand vista!

On the desert world of Mahali, he who controls water rules an empire. Mahali's rulers for generations were Water Witches, who could feel the ebb and flow of precious water in their very bones. But the royal family was slaughtered in a bloody coup, and control of Mahali's water passed to the impersonal hands of an immense computer network.

It was Deza's father who hit upon the scheme, dressing Deza in ceremonial garb and passing her off as the last surviving member of the royal house. Deza demonstrated water control with tricks and illusions, and in turn she and her father would be lavishly fed and bribed by off-world traders who dreamed of wealth beyond measure. When their tricks ceased to please, they would cut their losses and move on to the next con.

They were very, very good. But it's the nature of a con man not to know when he's about to get in over his head...