Showing results by narrator "Allyson Johnson" in All Categories

On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all.

Having made a superior look a fool, Honor Harrington has been exiled to Basilisk Station in disgrace and set up for ruin. Her demoralized crew blames her for their ship's humiliating posting to an out-of-the-way picket station. The aborigines of the system's only habitable planet are smoking homicide-inducing hallucinogens.

Honor Harrington has survived ship-to-ship combat, assassins, political vendettas, and duels. But this time, Honor and her crew, ambushed and captured, are aboard an enemy ship, bound for a prison planet aptly named "Hell" - and her scheduled execution. Yet the one lesson Honor has never learned is how to give up. She and her people are going home--even if it means conquering hell to get there!

Since Darwin's day, we've been told that sexual monogamy comes naturally to our species. Mainstream science - as well as religious and cultural institutions - has maintained that men and women evolved in families in which a man's possessions and protection were exchanged for a woman's fertility and fidelity. But this narrative is collapsing....

The People's Republic of Haven's sneak attack on the Kingdom of Manticore has failed. The Peeps are in disarray, their leaders fighting for power in bloody revolution, and the Royal Manticoran Navy stands victorious.

The Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Republic of Haven have been enemies for Honor Harrington's entire life, and she has paid a price for the victories she's achieved in that conflict. And now the unstoppable juggernaut of the mighty Solarian League is on a collision course with Manticore. The millions who have already died may have been only a foretaste of the billions of casualties just over the horizon, and Honor sees it coming.

Despite political foes, professional jealousies, and the scandal which drove her into exile, Capt. Honor Harrington has been offered a chance to reclaim her career as an officer of the Royal Manticoran Navy. But there's a catch. She must assume command of a "squadron" of jury-rigged armed merchantmen with crew drawn from the dregs of her service and somehow stop the pirates who have taken advantage of the Havenite War to plunder the Star Kingdom's commerce.

It's hard to give peace a chance when the other side regards conquest as the only option and a sneak attack as the best means to that end. That's why the Kingdom of Manticore needs allies against the Republic of Haven, and the planet Grayson is strategically situated to make a very good ally indeed. But Her Majesty’s Foreign Office overlooked a “minor cultural difference” when they chose Honor Harrington to carry the flag: women on the planet of Grayson are without rank or rights and Honor’s mere presence is an intolerable affront to every male on the planet.

The rulers of the People's Republic of Haven are in trouble and revolt is brewing, so it's high time for a short victorious war. But Honor Harrington is going to give them a war that's neither short nor victorious.

Peril and strife strike on a double front for Honor Harrington and company. After a brutal attack on the Manticoran home system, Honor Harrington and the Star Kingdom she serves battle back against a new, technologically powerful, and utterly nefarious enemy. And as if that weren’t task enough, Honor must also face down a centuries-old nemesis in the crumbling, but still mighty, Solarian League.

The People's Republic of Haven made a tiny mistake when it announced the execution of Honor Harrington. It seemed safe enough. After all, she was already dead. Unfortunately, they were wrong. Now Honor has escaped from the prison planet called Hell and returned to the Manticoran Alliance with a few friends. Almost half a million of them, to be precise including some who know what really happened when the Committee of Public Safety seized power in the PRH.

The Solarian League's navy counts its superdreadnoughts by the thousands. Not even its own government knows how enormous its economy truly is. And for hundreds of years, the League has borne the banner of human civilization, been the ideal to which humanity aspires in its diaspora across the galaxy. But the bureaucrats known as the "Mandarins," who rule today's League, are not the men and women who founded it so long ago. They are corrupt, venal, accountable to no one...and they've decided the upstart Star Kingdom of Manticore must be destroyed.  

For eight years, Commodore Honor Harrington was in the forefront of the battle between the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the powerful People's Republic of Haven. Then she was captured and publicly executed. But Honor is far from dead, what's more, she's going home and taking her people with her.

What price victory? The war with the Republic of Haven has resumed . . . disastrously for the Star Kingdom of Manticore. Admiral Lady Dame Honor Harrington, Steadholder and Duchess Harrington, the single victorious Allied commander of the opening phase of the new war, has been recalled from the Sidemore System to command Eighth Fleet. Everyone knows Eighth Fleet is the Alliance's primary offensive command, which makes it the natural assignment for the woman the media calls "the Salamander."

No one wanted another war. Thomas Theisman didn't. Not after risking his life to overthrow the Committee of Public Safety's reign of terror and restore the Republic of Haven's ancient Constitution. Baron High Ridge didn't. The Prime Minister of Manticore was perfectly happy with the war he had. No one was shooting anyone else at the moment, and his government could continue to milk all those "hostilities only" tax measures for their own partisan projects.

I have exactly 5 hours and 10 minutes to get from Boston to New York City or the professional opportunity of a lifetime disappears. My only travel option? The second to last seat on a discount bus. Across from the bathroom. Wearing last night’s clothes (don’t ask). All worth it if I can make it in time.

Two irresistible forces are rushing together to crush the planet Grayson between them, and only one woman, uncertain of her capabilities, weary unto death, and marked for murder -stands between her adopted planet and its devastation.

Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, How Beautiful We Were tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean-up and financial reparations to the villagers are made-and ignored. The country's government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interest only. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back.

There is an obesity epidemic in this country, and poor Black women are particularly stigmatized as "diseased" and a burden on the public health-care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat Black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than 200 years ago. 

Zero, Nyx, and the other Pathfinder colonists have adjusted to life on Kaguya. But Earth has built much faster starships-the Dreamcatcher arrives 10 years early, and the Stargazer arrives so early it actually got there before the Pathfinder did! Now the Stargazer is a lost shipwreck, and the race is on to find it, and who should show up looking for it but Nyx's dangerous family: Big Mama, Jim, and Kratt. Nyx and Zero will face kidnappers, pirates, shipwrecks, warlords, dragons, and maybe a new ally or two on their way to save the day once again.