Captain Nemo: The Fantastic History of a Dark Genius (77 page)

Jules Verne’s characters could not have hoped for a better fellow adventurer.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

During the researching, writing, and editing of this novel, I have valued the insights, suggestions, and expertise of a great many people, including my agents Matt Bialer and Robert Gottlieb at the Trident Media Group, John Ordover at Pocket Books, Diane Jones and Diane Davis Herdt at WordFire, Inc., friends and/or fellow authors Erwin Bush, Steve Baxter, Piers Anthony, Harry Turtledove, and of course my wife, Rebecca Moesta Anderson

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kevin J. Anderson is the author of nearly 100 novels, 48 of which have appeared on national or
international bestseller lists
; he has over 20million
books in print
in thirty languages. He has won or been nominated for the Nebula Award,
Bram Stoker Award
, the
SFX
Reader's Choice Award, and
New York Times
Notable Book.

Anderson
has co-authored eleven books in the DUNE saga with
Brian Herbert
. Anderson's popular epic SF series, The
Saga of Seven Suns
, is his most ambitious work, and he is currently at work on a sweeping fantasy trilogy,
Terra Incognita
, about sailing ships,
sea monsters
, and the crusades. As an innovative companion project to Terra Incognita, Anderson co-wrote (with wife Rebecca Moesta) the lyrics for two ambitious rock CDs based on the novels. Performed by the supergroup Roswell Six for ProgRock Records, the two CDs feature performances by rock legends from Kansas,
Dream Theater
, Asia, Saga, Rocket Scientists, Shadow Gallery, and others.

His novel
Enemies & Allies
chronicles the first meeting of
Batman
and
Superman
in the 1950s; Anderson also wrote
The Last Days of Krypton
. He has written numerous STAR WARS projects, including the
Jedi Academy trilogy
, the
Young Jedi Knights
series (with Moesta), and
Tales of the Jedi
comics from Dark Horse. Fans might also know him from his X-FILES novels or
Dean Koontz's Frankenstein
:
Prodigal Son
.

His Web site is www.wordfire.com.

Look for these and other digital works by Kevin J. Anderson:

RESURRECTION, INC.

In the future, the dead walk the streets—Resurrection, Inc. found a profitable way to do it.
 
A microprocessor brain, synthetic heart, artificial blood, and a fresh corpse can return as a Servant for anyone with the price.
 
Trained to obey any command, Servants have no minds of their own, no memories of their past lives.

Supposedly.

Then came Danal.
 
He was murdered, a sacrifice from the ever-growing cult of neo-Satanists who sought heaven in the depths of hell.
 
But as a Servant, Danal began to remember.
 
He learned who had killed him, who he was, and what Resurrection, Inc. had in mind for the human race.

CLIMBING OLYMPUS

They were prisoners, exiles, pawns of a corrupt government.
 
Now they are Dr. Rachel Dycek’s
adin
, surgically transformed beings who can survive new lives on the surface of Mars.
 
But they are still exiles, unable ever again to breathe Earth’s air.
 
And they are still pawns.

For the
adin
exist to terraform Mars for human colonists, not for themselves.
 
Creating a new Earth, they will destroy their world, killed by their own success.
 
Desperate,
adin
leader Boris Tiban launches a suicide campaign to sabotage the Mars Project, knowing his people will perish in a glorious, doomed campaign of mayhem—unless embattled, bitter Rachel Dycek can find a miracle to save both the Mars Project and the race she created.

BLINDFOLD

Atlas is a struggling colony on an untamable world, a fragile society held together by the Truthsayers.
 
Parentless, trained from birth as the sole users of Veritas, a telepathy virus that lets them read the souls of the guilty.
 
Truthsayers are Justice—infallible, beyond appeal.

But sometimes they are wrong.

Falsely accused of murder, Troy Boren trusts the young Truthsayer Kalliana…until, impossibly, she convicts him.
 
Still shaken from a previous reading, Kalliana doesn’t realize her power is fading.
 
But soon the evidence becomes impossible to ignore.
 
The Truthsayers’ Veritas has been diluted and someone in the colony is selling smuggled telepathy. Justice isn’t blind—it’s been
blinded
.

From an immortal’s orbital prison to the buried secrets of a regal fortress, Kalliana and Troy seek the conspiracy that threatens to destroy their world from within.
 
For without truth and justice, Atlas will certainly fall…

GAMEARTH

Book 1 of the Gamearth Trilogy

By Kevin J. Anderson

It was supposed to be just another Sunday night fantasy role-playing game for David, Tyrone, Scott, and Melanie.
 
But after years of playing, the game had become so real that all their creations—humans, sorcerers, dragons, ogres, panther-folk, cyclops—now had existences of their own.
 
And when the four outside players decide to end their game, the characters inside the world of Gamearth—warriors, scholars, and the few remaining wielders of magic—band together to keep their land from vanishing.
 
Now they must embark on a desperate quest for their own magic—magic that can twist the Rules enough to save them all from the evil that the players created to destroy their entire world.

GAMEPLAY

Book 2 of the Gamearth Trilogy

By Kevin J. Anderson

The Gamearth Trilogy continues.
 
It was written in the Rules—Save the World!
 
Over the past two years, a group of four players had given so much to their role-playing world that it had developed a magic of its own.
 
The creatures, warriors, sorcerers, thieves—all had come alive.
 
And now there is an odd connection between the gamers and their characters, splitting into factions to determine the fate of the Game itself and both the inside and the outside worlds.

GAME'S END

Book 3 of the Gamearth Trilogy

By Kevin J. Anderson

The finale to the Gamearth Trilogy.
 
It’s all-out war between the players and characters in a role-playing game that has taken on a life of its own.
 
The fighter Delrael, the sorcerer Bryl, as well as famed scientists Verne and Frankenstein, use every trick in the Book of Rules to keep the world of Gamearth intact while the outside group of players does everything possible to destroy it.

Short stories:

“Drumbeats”

A chilling story cowritten with
Rush
drummer and lyricist Neil Peart.
 
A rock drummer bicycling through the African wilderness encounters a village that makes very special drums.
 
This one will make your heart skip a beat.

“Frog Kiss”

A humorous fantasy tale.
 
An evil wizard has turned the entire royal family into frogs and set them loose in the marshes, and only a kiss can restore them to their natural forms . . . but there are so many frogs, and so much swamp, who is willing to kiss them all?

“Fondest of Memories”

Everyone tends to edit their memories of lost loved ones, emphasizing the admirable qualities and good times, downplaying the unpleasant aspects.
 
For a man given the chance to have his dead wife cloned, he can rebuild and restore her memories . . . with a few slight modifications.

“Redmond’s Private Screening”

A hard-edged horror tale.
 
For a shady filmmaker in the early days of Hollywood, it seems like a great opportunity when a disgraced samurai offers to commit seppuku before the cameras.
 
But the cameras are rolling.

“Job Qualifications”

The expectations we place on our politicians seem impossible for any person to achieve.
 
A candidate needs to be all things, know all walks of life, understand every segment of his constituency.
 
How could one person achieve so much . . . without a little help from a handful of clones.

“Prisons”

Co-written with Doug Beason. On a harsh prison planet, the warden and the staff are as much prisoners as the convicts, but a risky prison break might free them all.

“Collaborators”

Co-written with Rebecca Moesta. A collaboration is a close synergy between two creative artists, where one idea is a catalyst for another, and another.
 
But when two people join their minds to create virtual universes, the artwork is so vast they begin to lose their own identities.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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