Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of speculative fiction dealing with imaginative concepts such as futuristic settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, time travel, faster than light travel, parallel universes and extraterrestrial life. Science fiction often explores the potential consequences of scientific and other innovations, and has been called a "literature of ideas." It usually eschews the supernatural, and unlike the related genre of fantasy, historically science fiction stories were intended to have at least a faint grounding in science-based fact or theory at the time the story was created, but this connection has become tenuous or non-existent in much of science fiction.

Definitions

Science fiction is difficult to define, as it includes a wide range of subgenres and themes. Author and editor Damon Knight summed up the difficulty, saying "science fiction is what we point to when we say it", a definition echoed by author Mark C. Glassy, who argues that the definition of science fiction is like the definition of pornography: you do not know what it is, but you know it when you see it.

Paranormal romance

Paranormal romance is a subgenre of both romantic fiction and speculative fiction. Paranormal romance focuses on romantic love and includes elements beyond the range of scientific explanation, blending together themes from the speculative fiction genres of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Paranormal romance may range from traditional category romances, such as those published by Harlequin Mills & Boon, with a paranormal setting to stories where the main emphasis is on a science fiction or fantasy-based plot with a romantic subplot included. Common hallmarks are romantic relationships between humans and vampires, shapeshifters, ghosts, and other entities of a fantastic or otherworldly nature.

Beyond the more prevalent themes involving vampires, shapeshifters, ghosts, or time travel, paranormal romances can also include books featuring characters with psychic abilities, like telekinesis or telepathy. Paranormal romance has its roots in Gothic fiction. Its most recent revival has been spurred by turn of the 21st century technology, e.g. the internet and electronic publishing. Paranormal romances are one of the fastest growing trends in the romance genre.

Amazon

The Amazons are a nation of female warriors in Greek myth.

Amazon or Amazone may also refer to:

Geography

People

Commerce

Amazon.com

Dale Maharidge

Dale Maharidge (born 24 October 1956) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist best known for his collaborations with photographer Michael Williamson.

Maharidge and Williamson's book And Their Children After Them won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1990. It was conceived as a revisiting of the places and people depicted in Walker Evans's and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Also with Williamson, Maharidge wrote Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass, which singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen has credited as an influence for songs such as "Youngstown" and "The New Timer".

Reared in Ohio, Maharidge was a staff writer for The Plain Dealer and the Sacramento Bee. It was while at the Bee that he formed his partnership with Williamson, who was a news photographer for the paper. The pair have traveled and lived among the rural poor as they documented the underside of American prosperity. Maharidge has also contributed to publications including Rolling Stone and the New York Times.

Novella

A novella is a work of written, fictional, narrative prose normally longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. The English word "novella" derives from the Italian "novella", feminine of "novello", which means "new". The novella is a common literary genre in several European languages.

History

The novella as a literary genre began developing in the early Renaissance by the Italian and French literatura, principally Giovanni Boccaccio, author of The Decameron (1353).The Decameron featured one hundred tales (novellas) told by ten people (seven women and three men) fleeing the Black Death by escaping from Florence to the Fiesole hills in 1348. This structure would then be imitated by subsequent authors, notably the French queen Marguerite de Navarre, who wrote a Heptaméron (1559) that included seventy-two original French tales and was modeled after the structure of The Decameron.

Not until the late 18th and early 19th centuries did writers fashion the novella into a literary genre structured by precepts and rules, generally in a realistic mode. At that time, the Germans were the most active writers of the Novelle (German: "Novelle"; plural: "Novellen"). For the German writer, a novella is a fictional narrative of indeterminate length—a few pages to hundreds—restricted to a single, suspenseful event, situation, or conflict leading to an unexpected turning point (Wendepunkt), provoking a logical but surprising end. Novellen tend to contain a concrete symbol, which is the narrative's focal point.