Showing results by author "Harry Turtledove" in All Categories

Once the great Glacier enclosed the Raumsdalian Empire. Now it has broken open, and Count Hamnet Thyssen faces a new world. With the wisecracking Ulric Skakki, the neighboring clan leader Trasamund (politely addressed as "Your Ferocity"), and his lover, the shaman Liv, Hamnet leads an exploration of the new territory in hopes of finding the legendary Golden Shrine.

The glaciers came and covered the world with ice. Now they are in retreat. North of the city of Nidaros, north of the forest, north of the steppes where the nomadic Bizogots hunt, a gap has opened in the ice-wall. And down through that gap come the men who call themselves "Rulers." Their terrifying cavalry rides wooly mammoths. Their bows can shoot arrows farther than those of the southerners.

England has driven the French from Atlantis, giving King George leave to tighten his control over the colonies. The Redcoats have seized the continent's eastern coastal towns, depriving the Atlanteans of the markets where they sell their goods as part of a strategy to bend the colonists to their will.

This time the stage is one of the greatest sea battles ever fought: the Battle of Salamis, 306 BC. The small, free, and independent polis of Rhodes is trying to stay neutral between the local great powers, each ruled by one of Alexander the Great’s marshals: one-eyed Antigonos, who controls Asia Minor, and Ptolemaios, ruler of Egypt. As tensions between the great powers escalate, Menedemos and Sostratos are trying to resolve their own problems, oblivious to the fact that one of the greatest navel fleets in ancient history is about to set sail.

Count Hamnet Thyssen is a minor noble of the drowsy old Raumsdalian Empire. Its capital city, Nidaros, began as a mammoth hunters camp at the edge of the great Glacier. But that was centuries ago, and as everyone knows, its the nature of the great Glacier to withdraw a few feet every year. Trasamund, a clan chief of the mammoth-herding Bizogots, the next tribe north, has come to town with strange news. A narrow gap has opened in what they'd always thought was an endless and impregnable wall of ice.

After some long and perilous journeys, Menedemos and Sostratos finally head back to Athens just in time for the Dionysia, a bacchanalian festival of plays and celebrations. Like earlier installments in the series, Owls to Athens has the cousins going through various adventures, trade negotiations and sexual escapades, all set against a finely painted mosaic of Hellenic life in the fourth century BCE.

A famous naturalist seeks a near-extinct species of bird found only on the rarest of lands in "Audubon in Atlantis." A young American on a European holiday finds himself storming an enchanted German castle in "The Catcher in the Rhine." The philosopher Sokrates plays a key role in the Athenian victory over the Spartans in "The Daimon." Centaurs take a sea voyage aboard "The Horse of Bronze" to a land where they encounter a strange and frightening tribe of creatures known as man.

As Britain faces the full fury of the Nazi war machine, hope comes in the form of American volunteers called the Eagle Squadrons. As these units join their RAF cousins during the Battle of Britain, famous woman aviator Amelia Earhart (who survived her world-circling flight) emerges as a rallying point for those willing to stand against fascism.

Frederick Radcliff is a descendant of the family that founded Atlantis's first settlement, and his grandfather Victor led the army against England to win the nation's independence. But he is also a black slave, unable to prove his lineage, and forced to labor on a cotton plantation in the southern region of the country. Frederick feels the color of his skin shouldn't keep him from having the same freedoms his ancestors fought and died for.

In April 1864, the Union garrison at Fort Pillow was composed of almost 600 troops, about half of them black. The Confederacy, incensed by what it saw as a crime against nature, sent its fiercest cavalry commander, Nathan Bedford Forrest, to attack the fort with about 1,500 men. The Confederates overran the fort and drove the Federals into a deadly crossfire. Only 62 of the colored Union troops survived the fight unwounded.