Showing results by author "Gene Doucette" in All Categories

Dib is an Earthlike planet, only slightly smaller, with shorter days and longer years, in orbit around twin suns. On the continent of Geo, in the city of Velon in the nation of Inimata, a man lies dead in his study. In life, Professor Orno Linus was a world-class scholar: an astrophysicist, a dead-language linguist, and an expert in (and apparent true believer of) the religious concept of the Cull, i.e., the end of the world. Widely respected, nothing about Linus’s expertise suggests somebody might want him dead.

When a spaceship landed in an open field in the quiet mill town of Sorrow Falls, Massachusetts, everyone realized humankind was not alone in the universe. With that realization everyone freaked out for a little while. Or almost everyone. The residents of Sorrow Falls took the news pretty well. This could have been due to a certain local quality of unflappability, or it could have been that in three years the ship did exactly nothing other than sit quietly in that field, and nobody understood the full extent of this nothing the ship was doing better than the people who lived right next door.

When Adam decides to leave the safety of the island, it’s for a good reason: Eve, the only other immortal on the planet, appears to be dying, and nobody seems to understand why. But when Adam - with his extremely capable girlfriend Mirella - tries to retrace Eve’s steps, he discovers a world that’s a whole lot deadlier than he remembered. Adam is supposed to be dead. He went through a lot of trouble to fake that death, but now that he’s back, it’s clear someone remains unconvinced.

In the heart of the authoritarian country of Wivvol, astronaut Xto Djbbit is about to embark on his first mission off-planet when the exiled High Hat of Chnta comes to him with an unusual request: Help smuggle a Septal artifact out of Wivvol. It’s an impossible favor to ask of Xto, but it’s also impossible to refuse; the High Hat of Chnta is also his uncle. Meanwhile, waiting for Xto in space? His estranged father - who has his own impossible favors - and a mysterious anomaly whose secrets Xto is uniquely positioned to unlock.

In Velon, after being tasked with the infamous Linus murder case and House vault robbery, Detective Makk Stidgeon is back, and this time he has county attorney Pillick Quibb asking him questions. Meanwhile in Totus, Battine Alconnot, an unblessed descendent of Ho, Lady Delphina, and her sister Queen Porra find themselves tied up in the mystery....

A disease threatening the lives of everyone - human and nonhuman - has been loosed upon the world by an archenemy Adam didn’t even know he had. That’s just the first of his problems. Adam’s also in jail, facing multiple counts of murder, at least a few of which are accurate. He may never see the inside of a courtroom because there remains a bounty on his head - put there by the aforementioned archenemy - that someone is bound to try to collect while he’s stuck behind bars.

Adam is on vacation in an island paradise, with nothing to do and plenty of time to do nothing. It's exactly what he needed: beautiful weather, beautiful girlfriend, plenty of books to read, and alcohol to drink. Most importantly, either nobody on the island knows who he is, or, nobody cares. Nothing last forever, though, and that includes the opportunity to do nothing. One day, unwelcome visitors arrive in secret, with impossible knowledge of impossible events, and then the impossible things arrive: a new species.

The first three books in the Immortal Series, in one box set! Book one: Immortal...in the twenty-first century, Adam confronts new dangers - someone has found out what he is... Book two: Hellenic Immortal; an oracle has predicted the sojourner’s end, which is a problem for Adam insofar as he has never encountered an oracular prediction that didn’t come true... Book three: Immortal at the Edge of the World; Adam will have to complete a quest he gave up on a thousand years earlier, for an object that may no longer exist....

Annie Collins emerged from the wreckage of the last invasion of Sorrow Falls with a spaceship in her garden, a loud alien idea in her head, and—because returning to college was out of the question—a lot of free time. What she chose to do with the idea, the spaceship, and all that free time, kickstarted a worldwide technological boom. Now, nine years later, it seems as if not a day passes without the announcement of a new breakthrough in something, be it quantum computing, nuclear energy, neurobiology, or some other esoteric corner of cutting-edge science.

Annie Collins is back! Becoming an overnight celebrity at age 16 should have been a lot more fun. Not helping matters: she’s the only kid in school with her own pet spaceship. She would love it if things found some kind of normal, but as long as she has control of the most lethal - and only - interstellar vehicle in existence, that isn’t going to happen. Worse, things appear to be going in the other direction.

Surviving 60,000 years takes cunning and more than a little luck. But in the 21st century, Adam confronts new dangers - someone has found out what he is, a demon is after him, and he has run out of places to hide. Worst of all, he has had entirely too much to drink.

In his very long life, Adam had encountered only one person who seemed to share his longevity: the mysterious red-haired woman. She appeared throughout history, usually from a distance, nearly always vanishing before he could speak to her. In his last encounter, she actually did vanish - into thin air, right in front of him. The question was how did she do it? To answer, Adam will have to complete a quest he gave up on 1,000 years earlier, for an object that may no longer exist.

An oracle has predicted the sojourner's end, which is a problem for Adam insofar as he has never encountered an oracular prediction that didn't come true...and he is the sojourner. To survive, he's going to have to figure out what a beautiful ex-government analyst, an eco-terrorist, a rogue FBI agent, and the world's oldest religious cult all want with him, and fast.

The whateverpocalypse. That’s what Touré, a twenty-something Cambridge coder, calls it after waking up one morning to find himself seemingly the only person left in the city. Once he finds Robbie and Carol, two equally disoriented Harvard freshmen, he realizes he isn’t alone, but the name sticks: Whateverpocalypse. But it doesn’t explain where everyone went. It doesn’t explain how the city became overgrown with vegetation in the space of a night. Or how wild animals with no fear of humans came to roam the streets.

Adam has a lot of stories to tell, which is fair given he's been alive for over sixty-thousand years. All of the stories are interesting, many involve alcohol, and five are collected for the first time in The Immortal Chronicles!

When Oliver Naughton joins the Tenth Avenue Writers Underground, headed by literary wunderkind Wilson Knight, Oliver figures he'll finally get some of his wild imaginings out of his head and onto paper. But when Wilson takes an intense interest in Oliver's writing and his genre stories of dragons, aliens, and spies, things get weird. Oliver's stories don't just need to be finished: they insist on it.

Graduate students from a local university are dying, and former lover and FBI agent Maggie Trent is the only person who believes their deaths aren't as accidental as they appear. But the truth can only be found in something from Corrigan Bain's past, and he's not interested in sharing that past, not even with Maggie. To stop the deaths, Corrigan will have to face up to some old horrors, confront the possibility that he may be going mad, and find a way to stop a killer no one can see.

I knew she was bad news the minute she walked into the bar. She was a redhead. I always had a thing for redheads. One in particular, actually. She was dead, but that didn't mean I wasn't holding my breath for a second or two every time I saw another girl with red hair. This one was very much alive, and once she walked in she was also the life of the room.

Corrigan Bain was retired. It wasn’t something he ever thought he’d be able to do. The problem was that the job he wanted to retire from wasn’t actually a job at all: Nobody paid him to do it, and nobody else did it. With very few exceptions, nobody even knew he was doing it. Corrigan called himself a fixer, because he fixed accidents that were about to happen. It was complicated and unrewarding, and even though doing it right meant saving someone, he didn’t enjoy it.

For most of humankind, the woman calling herself Eve has been nothing more than a shock of red hair glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, in a crowd, or from a great distance. She's been worshipped, feared, and hunted, but perhaps never understood. Now, she's trying to reconnect with the world, and finding that more challenging than anticipated. Can the oldest human on Earth rediscover her own humanity? Or will she decide the world isn't worth it?