Showing results by author "Kyle Johnson" in All Categories

Aranos destroyed a Nightmare Beast and wounded a god. The Darkness cannot let his actions stand. Armies are marching, and the lands of the Light are scattered, disorganized, and unprepared for the battles to come. Cities lay under a pall of Corruption, their leaders serving the Darkness while pretending to follow the Light. It's up to Aranos to unite the lands and forge their armies into a force that can withstand the Darkness. To do that, though, he'll have to face hidden enemies, battle the rulers of nations, and convince the people of the Light to march under his banner.

John Gilliam, the Faceless Man, is one of the premier assassins in the world. His skills are legendary, and he's never failed in a mission. When a job goes wrong, though, he discovers that there's an entire universe beyond what he knows, one where magic and monsters exist and his skills and talents are frail shadows of the powers that be: the Doorverse.

Death is the one, true constant in the Shift. This is something Troias has learned in his journey to become Baron of Wisconsin, and most of that death has come from his hands. He's battled monsters spawned from legends and nightmares and slaughtered powerful guardians of energy-rich Vortices. Now, though, he faces a new sort of enemy: his fellow man.

When strength is not enough for survival in the Collective, cunning, skill, and ruthlessness must serve... Benning Kidd, the Stellar Marauder, criminal in every civilized system of the Collective, has faced the mighty Fleet...and won. Now, she faces an even more terrible foe: a member of the Nobility. Shielded by the System itself and armed with resources Benning can't even begin to imagine, Lauren Doheny is an impossible enemy to fight, even for the most ruthless woman in the Collective, especially when she unleashes her newest weapon, one that drains Benning's strength with each passing day.

There are still mysteries appearing in Eredain. The High Roads are far more dangerous than anything Aranos faced in the Blightlands, and the city of Antas has already repelled assaults from both human and elven armies...with no survivors returning. Discovering the more potent Enhanced Aspects of magic will help Aranos penetrate the Library of Antas and its secret Vault, but just using them could destroy him.

Murf is a professional gambler, a confessed liar and thief. He's a coward who's known to be overly friendly to other men's wives and daughters, and he's fled more than one town just a step ahead of people who want his head on a pole--or something much more painful. Cards are his life and livelihood, but he's never taken one of the Unity's magic cards into his soul to become a Holder because honestly, it seems like a horrible way to live to him.

The Singularity - the merger of man and machine into a greater whole - is finally within humanity's grasp. When programmer Jeff Lawing gets the opportunity to join Singularity Online, the world's first realistic VRMMO and the testing ground that will lead to the Singularity, he leaps to accept. Singularity is much more realistic and darker than Jeff had imagined, though.

Aranos has done the impossible: He's freed the first Fallen Realm in mortal reckoning and returned victorious. He and his follower Geltheriel should be hailed as heroes and celebrated throughout the Stronghold of Eredain. Instead, Aranos finds himself surrounded by elves that are both secretly and openly hostile. He and his new party descend nightly into the corrupted Blightlands to battle the Darkness and to try and reclaim more lands for the Light, but each day the elves place more obstacles in his path, from attempts at treachery to outright attacks.

Troias and Annalise survived the Shift, defeated the wendigo, and began the process of gathering followers together in safety. Now, they must learn how to manage their burgeoning empire, call even more followers under their banner, and the differences between leading and ruling. Troias must battle vortices of energy that affect his mind, deadly new creatures, and face a monster that is beyond even his ability to defeat. In the Shift, life and death are in constant flux, and Troias must learn how to command and control his powers in a way that none have ever done before.

Sheriffs on flying monsters. Marshals dueling with magic cards. Showdowns fought with creatures instead of pistols. Epic beasts destroying whole towns. And me, stuck in the middle once more. In one step, John went from a beautiful woman's embrace to the middle of a monster battle in a dusty, Old West town. His last mission could only loosely be considered a success, but he's determined to do better with this one. Or at least, not leave entire towns in flames behind him.

Geltheriel's Cleansing Quest is an impossible task, one set by a treacherous elven elder who wants Aranos to fail. To complete it, he has to travel to the lands of humans and dwarves, where he'll find new enemies and have to build new alliances, all while rediscovering powers lost for centuries. His enemies aren't idle, though, and now the dark god Morx has taken a hand in the Sorcerer Ascendant's defeat. Restoring the Arcane Doors is impossible. Freeing the lands of Darkness is impossible. Facing the Lord of Nightmares is impossible. But Aranos is determined to do the impossible.

Troias Drakos awakens to find that the world he knew is gone. Most of Earth's life was killed in a single instant, and those that survived have been granted powers and abilities that seem almost magical. Unfortunately, this world is filled with terrors and monsters that are equally powerful or far more so. Only by uniting and learning to use their new abilities will humanity survive. Troias has been given a unique set of powers. He must learn to master these and become a true Spirit Warrior. Will even his great abilities be enough to survive the Quantum Shift?

Benning Kidd is a Drone, the lowest class of humanity. She exists without memory, purpose, or more than the most basic awareness of herself and the world around her. An accident changes all that, and Benning becomes a Citizen of the Collective, the first Drone to do so in history. She is uniquely talented and unscrupulously driven, choosing a path of battle and glory that will take her from arena to arena and out among the stars themselves.

After seizing the battle frigate Merciless, Benning Kidd is finally captain of her own vessel, but her fate still seems to be out of her control. Bounty hunters swarm her at every opportunity, and she's only safe in the gladiatorial arenas of the Collective. Old enemies plague her, and new ones arise wherever she goes. To make matters worse, strange memories that aren't her own start cropping up in her thoughts. If Benning can't trust her own mind, then she can't trust anyone or anything!

With the liberation of Chicago, Troias' new County gained a measure of security and prosperity it's never experienced before. That prosperity brings problems, though, in the form of warlike neighbors, potential allies, and new monsters. Everyone and everything demands Troias' time and attention, including the new President of the United States. The Shift upsurge brought a new level of danger, and Troias has to meet it with his Facets and his blade, but how can he do that when his most powerful weapon might be slowly killing him?

After completing his first mission, John finds himself trapped in what looks like a zombie apocalypse. This new mission seems simple: stop the zombies, save the world, and maybe get the girl. No problem! Things are never that simple in the Doorverse, though. John's native talents in this world set him against the dominant religion, and if he's found out, he'll probably be executed. His mark—whoever they are—knows he's coming and hunts him at every step. And getting the girl turns out to be a lot more complicated than he imagined.

What if I don't know how to "do stuff" all the other gays can do? What if I don't know the name of that gay Netflix movie? What if I'm not obsessed with Jennifer Coolidge like everyone else? Am I really bad at being gay? While being gay has become more socially and legally acceptable, there's a...

Benning Kidd has been hunted since the day the System tried and failed to destroy her, turning her from a Drone into a Citizen in the process. Bounty hunters, vengeful enemies, and near-omnipotent Nobles have hounded her through the Collective. She's avoided them when she could and tried to convince them to leave her be when she couldn't. With the Fleet seeking her, intending to steal her hard-earned levels and rob her of her accomplishments, though, that's no longer an option.

Is the top still spinning? Was it all a dream? In the world of Christopher Nolan's four-time Academy Award-winning movie, people can share one another's dreams and alter their beliefs and thoughts. Inception is a metaphysical heist film that raises more questions than it answers: Can we know what is real? Can you be held morally responsible for what you do in dreams? What is the nature of dreams, and what do they tell us about the boundaries of "self" and "other"?

Black Mirror - the Emmy-winning Netflix series that holds up a dark, digital mirror of speculative technologies to modern society-shows us a high-tech world where it is all too easy to fall victim to ever-evolving forms of social control. In Black Mirror and Philosophy, original essays written by a diverse group of scholars invite you to peer into the void and explore the philosophical, ethical, and existential dimensions of Charlie Brooker's sinister stories.