The thrills and tragedies of everyday living come into focus in realistic fiction. These stories take on the issues that matter to everyone- from relationships with family and friends to struggles against discrimination and illness. Whether it is comic or tragic, reliastic fiction sends characters through many challenges, and readers learn something about life as the story pulls them along.
Science fiction spinds real scientific facts and ideas into imaginative tales. These stories can show us life in a future world or in another world altogether. Science fiction can send characters on travels through time and space or pit them against the forces of evil, showing us the dangers and wonders the future may hold.
Provides tips on how to write historical fiction stories, including how to get started, how to create characters, and how to develop plots. Includes suggestions from famous authors. Readers become writers with tips from expert authors. Each book concentrates on a particular genre, providing writing activities, excerpts from well-known works, and a writer’s timeline to help translate imagination into real stories.
P. D. James examines the genre of detective fiction from top to bottom, beginning with the mystery plots at the hearts of such novels as Great Expectations and Jane Eyre, and bringing us firmly into the present with such writers as Amanda Cross and Henning Mankell. Along the way she writes about Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Josephine Tey, among many others. She traces the facts of their lives into and out of their work; clarifies their individual styles; and gives us indelible portraits of the characters they've created...
Watch out – the Earth just fell into a dark sun’s orbit! Or maybe you’d rather visit a theme park called Hell? These are just two of the strange and unnerving tales you’ll find in this collection of great science fiction and fantasy stories. Take your imagination into futuristic and mystical worlds where gravity can kill and humans become walking biochip labs. See the world through the eyes of a four-legged creature in Susan Shwartz’s “Critical Cats”, and meet an electronic storyteller in Isaac Asimov’s “Someday”.
