Bøger af David Dvorkin

His world began in agony.Squealing brakes. An impact. He floated for a moment and crashed onto a hard surface. Bones splintered, and he screamed. Cramps folded him over.He pushed the pain, the fear, the dying away from him, put them behind a thick, hard wall, and became himself. Alone. The wall protected him.No man remembers his birth. The pain and confusion remained buried behind that wall for forty years. And then Max Iverson went to a movie and was torn open again.Suddenly, a murderer's memories force their way into Max Iverson's mind. Max is horrified and bewildered. Surely this isn't real!Max is a private person by nature, isolated from his fellow humans. Now he is forced to know what the worst of them are thinking, and his nights are filled with nightmares.Even worse, he is drawn into helping the authorities punish the criminals whose thoughts he now knows. He is unaware of the danger this will expose him to. There is a cabal of criminals behind much of the major crime in the city. He didn't know of their existence, but they become aware of his, and now they are determined to eliminate him.Max must change from frightened quarry to pitiless hunter. His hunt leads him to the cabal and also to life-changing discoveries about his own history.

At the beginning of Desert Storm in 1991, things go terribly wrong. A secret organization that has infiltrated many Arab armies and governments emerges from hiding and inflames a broad and bloodily successful anti-Western uprising. American troops at the Battle of Khafji and throughout the Middle East are faced with a much bigger war than the one they had been sent to fight.What was supposed to be a safe war designed to ensure the reelection of George H. W. Bush turns into a disaster that destroys his presidency, puts Dan Quayle in the White House as the puppet of right-wing elements in the intelligence community, and imperils the West. The consequences are widespread and frequently grim: a resurgent Soviet Union, a seemingly endless war in the Middle East, and the growing threat of tyranny in America.Written well before the events of September 11, 2001, Dawn Crescent depicts the interwoven lives and adventures of a diverse group of characters-soldiers, spies, subversives, innocents-in a turbulent alternate world that could be a warning for our own.

When aliens remove the sun, life survives in military bunkers under the earth and in lunar bases. Underground America devolves into a religious-military dictatorship.Jonathan Holroyd escapes to the surface and finds a new world warmed by an artificial sun, and only slightly more freedom than in the dying world he left behind. He rises to a position of power.But now the aliens are coming back.

When he could no longer deceive himself about his guilt, he left, returning to a place few people chose to leave. The person most important in his life had left that place, too, but surely she had not chosen to do so.He took with him what he considered appropriate pay for the services he had rendered.Fleeing the mob he worked for in Chicago, Tom Hamilton returns to his Colorado hometown. When a singer is murdered during a local opera performance, Tom tries his hand at finding the killer. But this draws him back into the passions and hatreds of earlier years and puts his own life in danger.

Seduced and killed by a beautiful woman, Richard Venneman wakes as a vampire.Because he loathes what he''s become, because his irresistible need for human blood horrifies him, he seeks the only salvation he can imagine: incinerating himself in the experimental fusion reactor where he worked when he was alive.But the terrible vitality of vampire flesh betrays him.Once again, he wakes changed-into an even more powerful and awful being, a monster who can feed only on the blood of vampires, a nightmare who dreams of his own destruction in a terrible ocean of blood.

Richard Venneman, former vampire, weeps in frustration. His prey has eluded him.That prey is a vampire. Venneman was the first vampire in history to transform himself into an even more terrible being who preyed on vampires. And then he was the first to become human again. Now he hungers-not for blood, but to find a vampire who will make him a vampire for the second time.His obsessions have forced others through strange transformations. Karen Belmont, trapped between human form and werewolf shape, hungers for both blood and flesh. Elizabeth Vall├⌐, content for three centuries to be a beautiful, seductive vampire, has become the stalker of vampires that Venneman once was-but monstrous in size and appetites.Now Elizabeth wants an eternal soulmate and has chosen Venneman, while Karen is hunting him so that she can take revenge by tearing him apart.Their meeting will trigger a catastrophe.

Thrown forward in time from 1945, three friends fight to find each other and go home. War, death, and love are the only constants. In the dangerous 21st Century, time changes them, and they change time and history.During World War Two, two men and one woman are selected by a secret organization named Tempus to be time travelers. Tommy Stillwell, Ellen Maxwell, and Frank Anderson will be sent forward to different points in the future. Tempus is sure that one of them will find a futuristic superweapon that, when brought back, will end the ongoing war and prevent any future wars. However, while Tempus can send people forward, it has not been able to reverse the process. In addition to weapons, the time travelers will have to find a way back.The three soon realize that Tempus is a dangerous, even murderous organization. Despite being warned not to, they become emotionally involved with each other. Tommy and Ellen are powerfully drawn to each other at first meeting. Frank also falls in love with Ellen, but he can see from the start that his feelings will never be reciprocated. Despite that, the two men become good friends -- which is unusual for Tommy, a loner by nature.Tommy jumps forward to the 1990s, where circumstances push him into a life as a mercenary soldier. He's very good at it and rises through the ranks of his employer, InterAgency, a shadowy organization that works on behalf of various governments. Eventually, he realizes that InterAgency's long-term goal is to control those governments and that it is indirectly descended from Tempus. Tommy, amoral and self-centered for most of his life, has to deal increasingly with moral dilemmas. He rises high enough that he thinks he will be able to protect Ellen when she arrives. But not only will he be an old man by then, he also feels that he has become a monster. He will have to watch her from a distance and let her think that he died long before her arrival.Ellen arrives in the mid-21st century in a world ruled by force and repression. She realizes that the mission she was sent on was a fool's errand. She searches unsuccessfully for any sign of Tommy and then finds work in space, a booming field that's always hungry for workers, even unskilled ones. Sadly but pragmatically, she sees herself as spending the rest of her life anonymously in this future age. Vacationing on Earth, she falls in with a revolutionary group and is murdered by government forces. Tommy senses the involvement in her murder of a shadowy, powerful figure whose existence he has become aware of before -- someone who seems to know more about Tommy than anyone in this era should.Fifty years later, Frank arrives. Although he's a student and lover of history, the reality of the future overwhelms Frank, and he retreats from it. This friend, Tommy is able to protect, for Tommy is still alive.How this is possible, Tommy's attempts to undo the past and rescue Ellen, and the terrible sacrifice he finally realizes he must make, are the psychological and philosophical underpinnings of the stor

Butler, warrior, moral philosopher, robot. Randolph is all that and more.Randolph is the prized product of Superior Domestics, a Silicon Valley firm dedicated to producing robot servants for people who grew up watching British period costume dramas on PBS. The company's motto is, "All the gracious living of Upstairs with none of the unseemly drama of Downstairs."When the novel opens with the assassination of King Donald II and a coup d'état, Randolph epitomizes that motto. He is calm, quiet, supremely competent, always in the background, and never interfering. He is a mere witness to great events. He is focused on supervising his staff and properly running the household of General Henry Redgrave, architect of the coup and would-be power behind the throne.But Redgrave's ambitions go far beyond standing behind the throne. He wants to be king himself, and eventually an emperor. Using the crazies of the Hundred Star Flag movement, he begins his intended wave of southern conquest at the Mexican border.Others have similar ambitions. Anton Moravec, president of a unified, revitalized, and aggressively expansionist European Union, is at war with Russia. His ally, China, is eating up Russian territory at the other end. India watches nervously.Two beautiful women, natural enemies, are the objects of passion of both men. Lurking in the background are the surviving members of the Trump family, scheming to get back into power.War! Romance! Sex! Skulduggery! Artificial Intelligence! And lots of other stuff, too.It's all really terribly complicated. Randolph, whose personal motto is, "A place for everything and everything in its place," could probably organize all this and bring about peace and quiet, but what human would knowingly hand that much responsibility over to a machine?In fact, unthinking, humans have already done so. Increasingly, autonomous machines have taken over tedious duties such as transporting cargo, performing minor surgery, and blowing away trespassers. Randolph is aware of these machines but looks down on them. He and his fellow robot servants are true artificial intelligence, but the digital brains operating these other machines are merely very advanced computers. In Randolph's opinion, they only simulate AI. However, those other machines have thoughts of their own.As the world descends further into chaos, Randolph is drawn in, ever less the observer and ever more the participant, until at the end he is the very center of all.

This wasn't your run-of-the-mill zombie apocalypse. The dead were digging their way out of their graves, but they weren't after brains. They wanted their homes and families and jobs back. Not that they would object to the occasional nice serving of brains, especially if it came with a side of pickles. "Go in there.""Hell, no. I'm going to send someone stupid in there with a pickle."It's brains served with a side of pickles, hold the mayo. A terrifying tale of parents, children, brothers, sisters, friends, bosses, employees, wives, ex-wives, friends' wives, Republicans, studly bacteria, zombies, tentacles, politics, religion, giant screaming earth mothers, and the armpit and other regions of Hell.And pickles.A social and political satire disguised as a comic novel about zombies and pickles. Or possibly the other way around.

A cowardly simian in the White House, dopey ex-presidents, scary televangelists, assassinations, cute little monkeys, sinister old men with long, sharp teeth, and in the middle of it all, Malcolm Erskine, who thought he had such a clever idea and who also thought he could safely ignore the politics of Bush-era America.Malcolm is an unsuccessful science fiction writer with an overly high opinion of himself. He yearns for fame and fortune. He wants his books to sell the way the flood of New Age woo-woo books and business self-help books do.Then he has his great idea. He writes a book of nonsensical business advice that he claims was beamed into his mind telepathically by the spirit of a top-level alien corporate executive who lived long ago in a galaxy far away.His book, Business Secrets from the Stars, is a monster success. But success is a monster that threatens to destroy Malcolm. He hasn't just changed his own life. He's changed the world, and not for the better."A broad and bitter political satire. I was laughing out loud."- The Denver Post"Dvorkin has a savage wit, and he employs it relentlessly."- Analog Magazine

Trapped in the underground tunnels of Colliery, James Benton struggles to find his way back to the surface and the life he knew before. "A headlong trip over, under, and through worlds of greed, sex, politics, intrigue, and adventure, of miners and mindpickers, cavesnakes and triple-crossers. An absorbing mix of hard science and action sf, with the unmistakable Dvorkin touch." - Connie Willis

Three hundred million strong, the Third Reich dominates the world. With its booming industry, its advanced science and technology, its fearsome war machine, and its colonies on the Moon, the Reich is envied and feared by the rest of the world and invites imitation.Matters almost didn''t turn out this way. During World War II, German troops only narrowly averted disaster at Stalingrad. But after the F├╝hrer''s death on the Russian front and the subsequent accession to power of more reasonable men, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to a peace treaty that left Germany in control of Continental Europe and free to prosecute the war against the greater threat of Bolshevism.Now, decades later, America tries to convince itself that it is still the world''s greatest power, even while its government and society, increasingly influenced by the Reich, devolve into something that would have horrified the Founding Fathers. America made its deal with the Devil in 1943, and now it is paying the price.Chic Western works as a government spy within U.S. federal agencies. He is adept at assuming new identities and earning the trust of fellow employees so that he can uncover wrongdoing. He tries not to think about the results of his work. Punishment is swift and harsh in this America.When anti-German subversion is detected in the American embassy in Berlin, Chic is posted to the mighty heart of the Reich to uncover it. He is finally forced to confront the conflict between his conscience, his Jewish ancestry, and the reality that hides behind evil''s seductive face.