Showing results by narrator "Michael Fenton" in All Categories

Most of us grow up having always known to touch wood or cross our fingers, and what happens when a princess kisses a frog or a boy pulls a sword from a stone, yet sadly, some of these things are now beginning to be forgotten. Legends, myths, and fairy tales: our world is made up of the stories we told ourselves about where we came from and how we got there. It is the same on Discworld, except that beings which on Earth are creatures of the imagination - like vampires, trolls, witches, and possibly, gods - are real, alive and in some cases kicking on the Disc.

It's 2045-2059. After the cataclysmic upheavals of Step Day and the Yellowstone eruption humanity is spreading farther into the Long Earth, and society, on a battered Datum Earth and beyond, continues to evolve. Now an elderly and cantankerous AI, Lobsang, lives in disguise with Agnes in an exotic, far-distant world. He’s convinced they’re leading a normal life in New Springfield - they even adopt a child - but it seems they have been guided there for a reason.

The acclaimed Science of Discworld centred on an original Pratchett story about the Wizards of Discworld. In it they accidentally witnessed the creation and evolution of our universe, a plot which was interleaved with a Cohen & Stewart non-fiction narrative about Big Science. In The Science of Discworld II our authors join forces again to see just what happens when the wizards meddle with history in a battle against the elves for the future of humanity on Earth. London is replaced by a dozy Neanderthal village.

John learns that museums in outer space are anything but boring when his class travels to the museum planet of Archivus Major. But the field trip goes badly wrong when two rival tribes of aliens are accidentally released from cryogenic storage.

In the 'fantasy' universe of the phenomenally bestselling Discworld series, everything runs on magic and common sense. The world is flat and million-to-one chances happen nine times out of ten. Our world seems different - it runs on rules, often rather strange ones. Science is our way of finding out what those rules are. The appeal of Discworld is that it mostly makes sense, in a way that particle physics does not.

When John Riley gets on the wrong coach, he ends up at an elite academy on an enormous spaceship, where his classmates are aliens, the food is disgusting, and the penalty for failing exams is harsh. Can he show that he deserves a place at Hyperspace High?

Lottie is tired of long-term boyfriends who don’t want to commit to marriage. When her old boyfriend Ben reappears and reminds her of their pact to get married if they were both still single at 30, she jumps at the chance. There will be no dates and no engagement - just a straight wedding march to the altar! Next comes the honeymoon on the Greek island where they first met. But not everyone is thrilled with Lottie and Ben’s rushed marriage, and family and friends are determined to intervene. Will Lottie and Ben have a wedding night to remember…or one to forget?

It's competition time at Hyperspace High as the students build robots to compete in the annual Robot Warriors contest. John and Kaal are in with a chance of winning, but will competition get in the way of friendship?

Brighton, 1957: a sunny seaside resort with a sinister underbelly. This den of villainy is policed by the touchingly innocent Inspector Steine, who naively believes he wiped out all the hoodlums in the Middle Street Massacre six years earlier. Can long-suffering Sergeant Brunswick and keen Constable Twitten persuade him that a criminal mastermind is at large - and that the station's charlady, Mrs Groynes, might bear investigation?

In his first book, David Jason told us about himself from his early years training as an electrician through to making it as one of Britain's actors. This autumn, in a follow-up autobiography, he tells us about the many other lives he has lived - his characters. From Del Boy to Granville, Pop Larkin to Frost, he takes us behind the scenes and under the skins of some of the best loved acts of his career. And in the process he reflects on how those characters changed his life, too.

The fourth book in the Science of Discworld series, and this time around dealing with the really big questions, Terry Pratchett’s brilliant new Discworld story Judgement Day is annotated with very big footnotes (the interleaving chapters) by mathematician Ian Stewart and biologist Jack Cohen, to bring you a mind-mangling combination of fiction, cutting-edge science and philosophy.Marjorie Daw is a librarian, and takes her job – and indeed the truth of words – very seriously. She doesn’t know it, but her world and ours – Roundworld – is in big trouble.

The Western Front, 1916. Private Percy Blakeney wakes up. He is lying on fresh spring grass. He can hear birdsong, and the wind in the leaves in the trees. Where have the mud, blood, and blasted landscape of No Man's Land gone? Madison, Wisconsin, 2015. Cop Monica Jansson is exploring the burned-out home of a reclusive - some said mad, others dangerous - scientist when she finds a curious gadget: a box containing some wiring, a three-way switch and a potato. It is the prototype of a life-changing invention....

It's nearly time for the annual Space Spectacular show, and John and his friends are preparing a battle demonstration for the students’ parents. But when the school's battle droids go on the attack, the students must work together to save the day.

'I don't much like working for clients. It means that I have to follow someone else's instructions, and I've never been too good at that. When those instructions came from a spirit guide at a seance, I just had to laugh. Well, you would, wouldn't you? The rather attractive young woman whose husband the spook had said I should help her to find took me on a quest that turned into a trail of lucrative antiques deals, spoiled only when the police came plodding in and I found myself up to my neck in forgeries and murders.'

It’s the end of term, and the students are in the grip of revision fever…until a real fever takes over. The only possible cure lies in a distant nebula, but with the whole school under quarantine, who will be brave enough to go and get it?

John’s class is being examined by the mysterious Scholars of Kerallin. If that isn't stressful enough, a former student with a grudge arrives unexpectedly and puts them all in danger.

The victim, and two other antiques dealers who also came to a sticky end, were all working the same Scottish connection that I had been cultivation, so I decided to make myself scarce for a while. Where better to hide than at the root of the problem in the wilds of Scotland? There may be nothing very Scottish about me but, when my life's on the line, I can blend into the Highlands like a haggis in the heather. It was also the best place to find out why the antiques trade down south had become such a dangerous business.

From Hiroshima to Chernobyl, Fukushima to the growing legacy of lethal radioactive waste, humanity's struggle to conquer atomic energy is rife with secrecy, deceit, human error, blatant disregard for life, short-sighted politics and fear. Fallout is an eye-opening odyssey through the first eight decades of this struggle and the radioactive landscapes it has left behind. We are, he finds, forever torn between technological hubris and all-too-human terror about what we have created. 

A generation after the events of The Long Earth, mankind has spread across the new worlds opened up by Stepping. Where Joshua and Lobsang once pioneered, now fleets of airships link the stepwise Americas with trade and culture. Mankind is shaping the Long Earth - but in turn the Long Earth is shaping mankind...

You know things are going badly when you've been stabbed, hospitalized and arrested for a crime that, not only did you not commit, you actively attempted to prevent. Top that off with a pending appearance in court before a judge whose wife you know rather better than he does, and you start to think that visiting an ancient Irish tomb with a gang of ruthless villains sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. All you have to do is to make sure that you don't end up joining the ancient Irish tomb's ancient Irish inhabitants.