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A great book
In the world of "The Web" series, people are hooked up to the internet by using suits that take their minds to the web. Sarah is one of the many users on the Web, and on world peace day takes a friend and her annoying little brother on a trip to the Gulliver Zone, a virtual magical kingdom. However, after meeting a small race of people called lilliputians, Sarah and her brother are shrunk down to the lilliputian's size. Now Sarah, George, and a lillputian named Cefven must go to the castle of the sorceress, grow back to normal, save her friend, and save a race of people from an evil tyrant before they are all stuck in the Gulliver Zone.

"The Gulliver Zone," set in a not so distant future, begins and ends as a great book. The plot is really good and it made me not want put the book down. The premise for the book, though not original, makes a lot of sense and the writer did a good job of playing that out.

Reviewed by a student reviewer for Flamingnet Book Reviews
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Preteen and young adult book reviews and recommendations
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Patrick Wormald was a brilliant interpreter of the Early Middle Ages, whose teaching, writings and generous friendship inspired a generation of historians and students of politics, law, language, literature and religion to focus their attention upon the world of the Anglo-Saxons and the Franks. Leading British, American and continental scholars - his colleagues, friends and pupils - here bear witness to his seminal influence by presenting a collection of studies devoted to the key themes that dominated his work: kingship; law and society; ethnic, religious, national and linguistic identities; the power of images, pictorial or poetic, in shaping political and religious institutions.Closely mirroring the interests of their honorand, the collection not only underlines Patrick Wormald's enormous contribution to the field of Anglo-Saxon studies, but graphically demonstrates his belief that early medieval England and Anglo-Saxon law could only be understood against a background of research into contemporary developments in the nearby Welsh, Scottish, Irish and Frankish kingdoms.He would have been well pleased, therefore, that this volume should make such significant advances in our understanding of the world of Bede, of the dynasty of King Alfred, and also of the workings of English law between the seventh and the twelfth century. Moreover, he would have been particularly delighted at the rich comparisons and contrasts with Celtic societies offered here and with the series of fundamental reassessments of aspects of Carolingian Francia.Above all these studies present fundamental reinterpretations, not only of published written sources and their underlying manuscript evidence, but also of the development of some of the dominant ideas of that era. In both their scope and the quality of the scholarship, the collection stands as a fitting tribute to the work and life of Patrick Wormald and his lasting contribution to early medieval studies. ... Read more

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October, 1962: Liverpool - A time of Teddy Boys and Beat Girls, Mods and Rockers. Dr. No is in the cinemas and the Beatles are playing the Cavern. Teens fill the streets, the clubs, the shops, thrilling to the new electric music and fashions, as their parents pine for the simplicity and structure of the War Years. A world away, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro are playing an atomic chess game. And a newcomer named Laura Mann carries the key that will unlock the difference between the future and the end of the world. For Laura Mann is... The H-Bomb Girl! Pursued by futuristic forces beyond her wildest imagination, Laura must find answers before time runs out. Who is the mysterious and familiar Miss Wells? Who is the menacing Minuteman? And just what is the secret that Laura's father has been keeping from her? ... Read more

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A Mixed Bag
I found the story rather predictable - I had the story arc pretty much figure out by 1/3 of the book.However, the backdrop and the characters are very well done and Baxter's prose kept my interest.And though the story is supposedly "YA", Baxter doesn't sugarcoat anything....

I'd recommend this to older teens as well as adults who haven't read quite so many alternate universe tales as I have.
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This is an unabridged audio collection of the best of the best science fiction prose originally written in 2008 by current and emerging masters of the genre as narrated by top voice talents. Exhalation, by Ted Chiang, tells the story of a world totally unlike Earth where mechanical men use the gas argon as air, replacing their lung tanks daily from an underground well. Exhalation won both the 2009 British Science Fiction Association Award for best story and the 2009 Locus Award for the best short story. The Ray-Gun: A Love Story, by James Alan Gardner, tells the story of a boy who discovers a ray-gun that affects his life in unanticipated ways, both good and bad. This story won the 2009 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. In Stephen Baxter s Turing s Apples two brothers reluctantly work together to decode an alien signal picked up by a radio telescope on the far side of the moon. In a homeage to H.P. Lovecraft, a black naturalist, just before World War II, investigates the biology of shoggoths (blobs of jelly) on the New England coast in Elizabeth Bear s Shoggoth s in Bloom. A scientist slowly goes mad trying to prove that the distant stars are made of diamond and that matter is just light slowed down in Jeffrey Ford s The Dream of Reason. In Kij Johnson s 26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss, a woman buys a traveling monkey show that pretty much runs it self as all the monkeys know what they re doing. A steel company will do what it takes to prevent two scientists from releasing the secret of making carbon nanotubes in The Art of Alchemy by Ted Kosmatka. In Paul McAuley s The City of the Dead, the town constable in a settlement on a planet in the Sagittarius arm of the Milky Way befriends a woman who researches dangerous hive rats. A genetically enhanced psychopathic secret agent battles the Rebirths for the survival of the human race in Robert Reed s Five Thrillers. Finally, in Fixing Hanover, by Jeff VanderMeer, a man reluctantly repairs the remains of a mechanical man that washed up on a beach and may be a link to his enigmatic past. ... Read more

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Excellent read
Baxter has written a very clever book, very enjoyable. I really liked the way he uses things like Feynman's radio in the story. ... Read more

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Aurora Award Nominee, 2006

Gathered here for the first time are the finest science-fiction stories, including the previously unpublished novelette "Alexander's Road," by the award-winning Karl Schroeder. The Engine of Recall tales are of ordinary people in astonishing circumstances. Whether stranded alone on the frigid oceans of Saturn's moon Titan, or searching for stolen nuclear bombs under the rusting oil derricks of Azerbaijan, Schroeder's characters assert their humanity in inhuman circumstances.

Combining classic adventure and sophisticated speculation, the ten stories in this collection are sure to satisfy a broad range of readers.

Includes an introduction by Stephen Baxter.

The original story "Alexander's Road" was nominated for the Aurora Award -- Canada's top Science Fiction award -- for best short work in English. ... Read more

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A top pick for science fiction fans and community library collections
Overwhelming circumstances - they're usually left to superheroes and the supernatural. "The Engine of Recall" is a compilation of stories about people who don't usually face these odds - the every day average Joe and Joanna. Pitting these normal humans against insurmountable odds, Schroeder's stories come off as human even in the strange foreign alien worlds that they must trudge through to get through their lives and survive. "The Engine of Recall" is a top pick for science fiction fans and community library collections catering to them.

Impressive collection from a new star of Hard SF
Canada has been the source of a great deal of intriguing SF over the past decade or so, much of it at least moderately "hard SF." One of the most rigorously "hard SF" writers to come out of this "Canadian Renaissance" is Karl Schroeder, author of the impressive novels Ventus, Permanence, and Lady of Mazes. Now Schroeder has published his first story collection, The Engine of Recall.

The first thing that struck me about the Table of Contents was the relative unfamiliarity of most of the stories. This was a source of mild embarrassment to me, as I consider myself generally very up to date on short SF. It turns out that one engine of the "Canadian Renaissance" I mentioned above has been some Canadian outlets for SF, most notably the magazine On Spec and the anthology series Tesseracts, that to some extent slip under the radar of often US- and/or UK-centric SF readers. So Schroeder managed to publish a passel of first-rate stories without generating quite the buzz he deserved -- though one story here, "The Dragon of Pripyat", was reprinted in Gardner Dozois' The Year's Best Science Fiction, Seventeenth Annual Edition, and another, "Halo", was chosen for David Hartwell's anthology The Hard SF Renaissance.

Well, that's one reason for story collections -- to bring to light stuff that might have been missed on first publication. And the stories here are well worthy of this exposure. Take "The Dragon of Pripyat." Gennady Malianov is a morose Russian (or Ukrainian) man hired to investigate a threat to release radioactive material from the remains of Chernobyl. Malianov heads directly to the ghost town of Pripyat. There he meets a curious squatter, and also encounters the mysterious "dragon." He and a remote friend figure out the somewhat mundane (though interesting) nature of the dragon -- the heart of the story, though is the paradoxical landscape of Pripyat. Malianov turns up again in the collection's only original, "Alexander's Road." This time the threat is some missing nuclear warheads in Azerbaijan. Malianov's investigation, however, turns up a couple of further, even scarier, nuclear threats.

One of my favorite stories here is "Halo", set in the same future as Schroeder's novel Permanence. Elise Cantrell is a resident of Dew, a planet of Crucible, a brown dwarf star. Dew has just managed to install an artificial "sun," but this hopeful step is endangered when Elise discovers a message from a hijacked ship, taken over by fanatics who plan to destroy the fragile colony on Dew. She forges a tenuous relationship with one of the original crew of the hijacked ship, but they both know the only ultimate hope for Dew is to destroy the attacking ship, complete with innocent crew members as well as hijackers. This is an excellent example of a moving human story essentially set in an exotic, purely SFnal, environment. Another such story, not quite as successful but still enjoyable, is "The Pools of Air," in which a crew filming in Jupiter's atmosphere are placed in peril by a freak accident to their ship. "The Cold Convergence" is also set in the outer Solar System, this time on Saturn's moon Titan. A psychologist is hired to try to treat a man who has just wandered alone into the Titanian wilderness. The interesting story of the man is undermined a bit by an implausible resolution involving unconvincing real estate laws.

"Making Ghosts" is an interesting story about pioneers in transferring human consciousness to computers, while "The Engine of Recall" involves using such "ghosts" to pilot spaceships in such dangerous environments as the neighborhood of a neutron star.

"Allegiances" tells of a woman in war-torn former Yugoslavia who is cursed by the ability rob other people of the facial recognition sense. An intriguing idea that I don't think the story quite used well. "Hopscotch" is a rather Fortean story, in which the narrator is in love with a woman obsessed with statistical analysis of unusual events such as UFO sightings and raining fish. "Solitaire" tells of a young human criminal who manages to be "adopted" as sort of an interpreter by a solitary, uncommunicative, alien. The ending nicely violates traditional SFnal expectations.

It is clear to readers of Karl Schroeder's novels that he is a fascinating writer of Hard SF. The short stories in The Engine of Recall showcase that imagination effectively -- strong stories that aren't afraid to be adventure stories while also portraying cool ideas.

An Awesome Short Story Collection
I am not sure why I originally ordered this book from Amazon. I had never read Karl Schroeder before and I normally steer clear of short story collections. I have always preferred novels to story collections, probably because a good short story often leaves you wanting more. Despite my mystification on why I got this book let me emphatically say that I am glad I did so!!!

Wow, there are ten perfect stories here. Each one is a wonderful read, and while a few did leave me wanting more (espcially the two featuring Gennady, an Ukrainian arms inspector) each story was like a perfect jewel, a perfect encapsulation of a story and just the right length. I started reading this last night because I am expecting an overnight delivery of the next Jack Reacher novel today and I didn't want to be stuck in another novel when it arrives shortly. I thought some short stories were the perfect solution to while away an hour before falling asleep. It didn't quite work out that way....I wound up reading this collection, start to finish in one go last night. I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes science fiction or likes near-term speculative fiction. The stories span a time scale from the near-term future to the far future and are rife with striking ideas that leave you thinking. It is simply an excellent book and I am going to start ordering the novels this author has written based upon the strength of his short stories. ... Read more

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1885, the North West Frontier. Rudyard Kipling is witness to a bizarre encounter between the British army and what appears to be an impossibly advanced piece of Russian technology. And then to a terrifying intervention by a helicopter from 2037. Before the full impact of this extraordinary event has even begun to sink in, Kipling, his friends and the helicopter crew stumble across Alexander the Great's army. Mankind's time odyssey has begun. It is a journey that will see Alexander avoid his premature death and carve out an Empire that expands from Carthage to China, beating the time-slipped army of Ghenghis Khan in a battle outside the ruins of Babylon in the process. And it will present mankind with two devastating truths. Aliens are amongst us and have been manipulating our past and our future. And that future extends only as far as 2037, for that is the date Earth will be destroyed. This is SF that spans countless centuries and carries cutting edge ideas on time travel and alien intervention. It shows two of the genre's masters at their groundbreaking best. ... Read more

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The books that launched Stephen Baxter's career; the creation of one of the most astonishingly ambitious universes in SF's history: brought together in one astounding volume. Stephen Baxter's epic sequence of Xeelee novels was introduced to a new generation of readers with his highly successful quartet, Destiny's Children, published by Gollancz between 2003 and 2006. But the sequence of novels began with RAFT in 1991.From there it built into perhaps the most ambitious fictitious universe ever created. Beginning with the rise and fall of sub-quantum civilisations in the first nano-seconds after the Big Bang and ending with the heat death of the universe billions of years from now the series charts the story of mankinds epic war against the ancient and unknowable alien race the Xeelee.Along the way it examines questions of physics, the nature of reality, the evolution of mankind and its possible future. It looks not just at the morality of war but at the morality of survival and our place in the universe.This is a landmark in SF. ... Read more

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Voyage is a 1996 hard science fiction novel by British author Stephen Baxter. The book depicts a manned mission to Mars as it might have been in another timeline, one where John F. Kennedy survived the assassination attempt on him in 1963. Voyage won a Sidewise Award for Alternate History, and was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1997. It has since been made into a radio serial for BBC Radio 4.The book covers history from the Point of Divergence in 1963. John F. Kennedy was wounded in the assassination (It is implied that Jacqueline Kennedy was killed, in the renaming of the Kennedy Space Center as the Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center), and was crippled. ... Read more

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Chapters: . Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 14. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Stephen Baxter (born 13 November 1957) is a prolific British hard science fiction author. He has degrees in mathematics and engineering. Strongly influenced by SF pioneer H. G. Wells, Baxter has been a distinguished Vice-President of the international H. G. Wells Society since 2006. His fiction falls into three main categories, each with a very different style and tone. His Xeelee Sequence stories are set in the far future, where humans are rising to become the second most powerful race in the universe, next to the god-like Xeelee. Character development in these stories takes second place to the depiction of advanced theories and ideas, such as the true nature of the Great Attractor, naked singularities and the great battle between Baryonic and Dark matter lifeforms. Examples of novels written in this style: Ring, Timelike Infinity. Stephen Baxter at the Science-Fiction-Tage NRW in Dortmund, Germany, March 1997His present-day Earth stories are much more human, with characters portrayed with greater depth and care. They typically indulge in "if only" whimsy or outright alternate history, dreaming about what humanity could achieve in the exploration of space. NASA features prominently, and a great deal of research has obviously been done into its internal structuring and methods. However, these novels have a much darker tone than any of his other stories and do not often portray much hope for humanity as a moral species. Examples of novels written in this style include his NASA Trilogy, including Voyage (winner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History), Titan, and Moonseed); and his as-yet unnamed disaster series, including Flood and Ark. Each novel of the Manifold trilogy is focused on a potential explanat...http://booksllc.net/?id=57826 ... Read more

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Chapters: Phase Space, Vacuum Diagrams, Traces, Resplendent. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 20. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Phase Space (subtitled Stories from the Manifold and Elsewhere) is a 2003 science fiction collection by Stephen Baxter containing twenty-three thematically linked stories, in which the human relationship with the universe is explored: whether humanity is truly alone in the universe, if there are other intelligent species, if these have turned their backs on us, or if expansion itself is destined to fail. Written in the same style as most of Stephen Baxter's work, Phase Space is a collection of more or less scientifically based stories in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke. The stories are mostly set in the same Multiverse as the books in his Manifold series, with a few stories related to his separate NASA Trilogy. The book contains the following short stories: Dreams (I) Earths Worlds Manifold Paradox Dreams (II) ...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=379199 ... Read more