"The Answer" is a science fiction short story written by H. Beam Piper. It is not a part of either Piper’s Terro-Human Future History series nor his Paratime series.

It made its first appearance in the December 1959 issue of Fantastic Universe Science Fiction.^[1]

Synopsis[link]

It is 1984, fifteen years since the nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union devastated the entire northern half of the planet Earth, and now nuclear scientists Professor Doctor Lee Richardson and Comrade Professor Alexis Petrovitch Pitov are working together on a project in Argentina. During their research, they have created fifteen kilograms of negamatter iron, and they are going to drop it from space to see what happens.

The resulting explosion has a very distinctive signature, and Dr. Richardson realizes that that signature is the same as the one that occurred at Auburn, New York. The American government had assumed that the explosion was the result of a premeditated attack by the Soviets, and had retaliated, resulting in a general exchange of nuclear weapons. During the course of analyzing the Argentinean explosion Dr. Richardson realizes that the “Auburn Bomb” was not a bomb after all, but a negamatter meteor.

References[link]

• "The Answer" at Project Gutenberg

Look up answer in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

The Answer may refer to:

Music[link]

• The Answer (band), a rock band from Northern Ireland
• The Answer, an album by Peter Bardens
• The Answer (album), an album by Gloria Gaynor
• "The Answer" (song), a song by Britney Spears
• "The Answer", a song on the Bloc Party EP Banquet
• "The Answer", a song on Bad Religion's 1992 album Generator

Other uses[link]

• The Answer - Justice, a book by Alexander McClelland.
• Allen Iverson's nickname
• The Answer (comics), a fictional character in Marvel Comics
• The Answer (Animorphs), a book in the Animorphs series
• The Answer, a 1929 Paramount Cabinaire used for a Non-stop endurance record attempt.
• "The Answer" (short story), a 1959 science fiction short story by H. Beam Piper

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Grace Paley (December 11, 1922 – August 22, 2007) was an American-Jewish short story writer, poet, and political activist.

Biography[link]

Grace Paley (née Goodside) was born in the Bronx to Isaac and Manya Ridnyik Goodside, who anglicized the family name from Gutseit on immigrating from Ukraine. Her father was a doctor.^[1] The family spoke Russian and Yiddish along with English. The youngest of the three Goodside children (sixteen and fourteen years younger than brother and sister Victor and Jeanne, respectively), Paley was a tomboy as a child.

In 1938 and 1939, Paley attended Hunter College, then, briefly The New School, but never received a degree. In the early 1940s, Paley studied with W. H. Auden at the New School for Social Research. Auden's social concern and his heavy use of irony is often cited as an important influence on her early work, particularly her poetry. On June 20, 1942, Grace Goodside married cinematographer Jess Paley, and had two children, Nora (1949-) and Danny (1951-). They later divorced. In 1972 Paley married fellow poet (and author of the Nghsi-Altai series) Robert Nichols.

She taught at Sarah Lawrence College. In 1980, she was elected to the National Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1989, Governor Mario Cuomo made her the first official New York State Writer. She was the Vermont State Poet Laureate from March 5, 2003 until July 25, 2007. She died at home in Thetford, Vermont at the age of 84 of breast cancer. In a May 2007 interview with Vermont Woman newspaper – one of her last – Paley said of her dreams for her grandchildren: "It would be a world without militarism and racism and greed – and where women don't have to fight for their place in the world."

Academic career[link]

Paley taught writing at Sarah Lawrence College from 1966 to 1989, and helped to found the Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York in 1967. She also taught at Columbia University, Syracuse University and the City College of New York. Paley summarized her view of teaching during a symposium on "Educating the Imagination" sponsored by the Teachers & Writers Collaborative in 1996:

"Our idea," Paley said, "was that children—by writing, by putting down words, by reading, by beginning to love literature, by the inventiveness of listening to one another—could begin to understand the world better and to make a better world for themselves. That always seemed to me such a natural idea that I’ve never understood why it took so much aggressiveness and so much time to get it started!"^[2]

Political activism[link]

Paley was known for pacifism and for political activism. She wrote about the complexities of women's and men's lives and advocated for what she said was the betterment of life for everyone. In the 1950s, Paley joined friends in protesting nuclear proliferation and American militarization. She also worked with the American Friends Service Committee to establish neighborhood peace groups, through which she met her second husband Robert Nichols.

With the escalation of the Vietnam War, Paley joined the War Resisters League. In 1968, she signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War,^[3] and in 1969 she came to national prominence as an activist when she accompanied a peace mission to Hanoi to negotiate the release of prisoners of war. She served as a delegate to the 1974 World Peace Conference in Moscow and, in 1978, was arrested as one of "The White House Eleven" for unfurling an anti-nuclear banner (that read "No Nuclear Weapons—No Nuclear Power—USA and USSR") on the White House lawn.^[4]

Writings[link]

After a number of rejections, Paley published her first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man (1959) with Doubleday. The collection features eleven stories of New York life, several of which have since been widely anthologized, particularly "Goodbye and Good Luck" and "The Used-Boy Raisers." The collection introduces the semi-autobiographical character "Faith Darwin" (in "The Used-Boy Raisers" and "A Subject of Childhood"), who later appears in six stories of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and ten of Later the Same Day. Though as a story collection by an unknown author, the book was not widely reviewed, those who did review it (including Philip Roth and The New Yorker book page) tended to rate the stories highly. Despite its initial lack of publicity, The Little Disturbances of Man went on to build a sufficient following for it to be reissued by Viking Press in 1968.

Goodbye and Good Luck was adapted as a musical by Mabel Thomas (book), Muriel Robinson (lyrics) and David Friedman (music) in 1989 and is currently being reworked.

Following the success of Little Disturbances of Man, Paley's publisher encouraged her to write a novel. After several years of tinkering with drafts, Paley went back to short fiction. With the aid of Donald Barthelme, she assembled a second collection of fiction in 1974, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. This collection of seventeen stories features several recurring characters from Little Disturbances of Man (most notably the narrator "Faith," but also including Johnny Raferty and his mother), while continuing Paley's exploration of racial, gender, and class issues. The long story, "Faith in a Tree," positioned roughly at the center of the collection, brings a number of characters and themes from the stories together on a Saturday afternoon at the park. Faith, the narrator, climbs a tree to get a broader perspective on both her neighbors and the "man-wide world" and, after encountering several war protesters, declares a new social and political commitment. The collection's shifting narrative voice, metafictive qualities, and fragmented, incomplete plots have led most critics to classify it as a postmodernist work.

Paley continues the stories of Faith and her neighbors in the Later the Same Day (1985). All three volumes were gathered in her 1994 Collected Stories, which was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Awards and recognition[link]

Paley's honors include a 1961 Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction, the Edith Wharton Award (1983), the Rea Award for the Short Story (1993), the Vermont Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts (1993), and the Jewish Cultural Achievement Award for Literary Arts (1994). In 1988, American composer Christian Wolff set eight poems from Leaning Forward (1985) for soprano, bass-baritone, clarinet/bass-clarinet, and cello.

Published works[link]

• The Little Disturbances of Man (short stories, 1959)
• A Subject of Childhood and a conversation with the author in New sounds in American fiction editor Gordon Lish (1969)
• Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (short stories, 1974)
• Later the Same Day (short stories, 1985)
• Leaning Forward (poetry, 1985)
• 365 Reasons Not to Have Another War (with Vera Williams, nonfiction, War Resisters League 1989 Peace Calendar 1989)
• Long Walks and Intimate Talks (stories and poems, 1991)
• New and Collected Poems (1992)
• The Collected Stories (1994)
• Just As I Thought (semiautobiographical collection of articles, reports, and talks, 1998)
• Begin Again: Collected Poems (2000)
• Fidelity (2008), posthumous [1]

Documentary[link]

A documentary film entitled "Grace Paley: Collected Shorts" (2009), directed by Lily Rivlin, was presented at the Woodstock International Film Festival and other festivals in 2010. The film contains interviews with Paley and friends, footage of her political activities, and readings from her fiction and poetry.

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Arcana, Judith. "Going to School with Grace Paley," TRIPLOPIA April 15, 2006 [triplopia.com]
• Arcana, Judith. Grace Paley's Life Stories, A Literary Biography. University of Illinois Press:1993/1994.
• Graham, Philip. "Sip by Sip," The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon. University of Chicago Press, 2009. 137-140.
• "Grace Paley," Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2003.
• Lavers, Norman. "Grace Paley," Critical Survey of Short Fiction. Salem, 2001.
• Sorkin, Adam. "Grace Paley," Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 28: Twentieth-Century American-Jewish Fiction Writers. Ed. Daniel Walden. Gale, 1984. 225-231.
• Hopson, Jacqueline. Voices in Grace Paley's Short Stories. (Master's thesis) University of Exeter, School of English, 1990.

External links[link]

• Grace Paley at FSG
• REA award biography
• The Miniaturist Art of Grace Paley by Joyce Carol Oates
• Interview with the War Resisters League
• Interview with Poets & Writers Magazine

Terry Brooks
Born	(1944-01-08) January 8, 1944 (age 68) Sterling, Illinois, U.S.
Occupation	author, former attorney
Nationality	United States
Genres	epic fantasy, urban fantasy
Influences J. R. R. Tolkien, William Faulkner, Alexandre Dumas [1]
www.terrybrooks.net

Terence Dean "Terry" Brooks (born January 8, 1944) is an American writer of fantasy fiction. He writes mainly epic fantasy,^[2] and has also written two movie novelizations. He has written 23 New York Times bestsellers during his writing career,^[2] and has over 21 million copies of his books in print.^[3] He is one of the biggest-selling living fantasy writers.^[4]

Biography[link]

Brooks was born in the rural midwestern town of Sterling, Illinois, and spent a large part of his life living there.^[5] He is an alumnus of Hamilton College, earning his B.A. in English literature in 1966.^[5] He later obtained a J.D. from Washington and Lee University. He was a practicing attorney before becoming a full-time author and now resides in Seattle, Washington, with his wife, Judine.^[5] Brooks' thorough familiarity with and love for the city of Seattle are clearly expressed in "A Knight of the Word" whose plot is set in that city.

Brooks had been a writer since high school, writing mainly in the genres of science fiction, western, fiction, and non-fiction.^[5] One day, in his early college life, he was given a copy of The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, which inspired him to write in one genre.^[5] While Tolkien inspired the genre, Brooks stated at the Charlotte Literary Festival that he credits the inspiration of his style of writing to William Faulkner's works. With this inspiration, he then made his debut in 1977 with his first novel The Sword of Shannara.^[5] This novel became the first fantasy book ever to appear on the New York Times bestseller list, where it stayed for five months.^[5]

After finishing two sequels to The Sword of Shannara, Brooks moved on to the series which would become known as the Landover novels.^[5] Brooks then wrote a four-book series titled The Heritage of Shannara.^[5] For the next fourteen years, he wrote more Landover books, then went on to write The Word and Void trilogy. Continuing the Shannara series, Brooks wrote the prequel to The Sword of Shannara, titled First King of Shannara. He then wrote two series, The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara and High Druid of Shannara and recently finished a third, Genesis of Shannara, a trilogy bridging his Word and Void and Shannara series. His latest project, A Princess of Landover, was released in August 2009. Legends of Shannara, a duology taking place after the events of Genesis of Shannara, was recently completed. The first installment, entitled Bearers of the Black Staff, was released in August 2010. The second installment, The Measure of the Magic, was released in August 2011.

Novels versus short stories[link]

After writing "Indomitable", a short story constituting an epilogue to The Wishsong of Shannara, Terry Brooks declared:

I find it much harder to write short stories than long fiction. I feel cramped by the lack of space and the dictates of the form. There is considerable difference in long and short fiction disciplines, and I am not good with the latter. I hope not to have to do many more of them, but you never know. I must have written Indomitable anywhere from four to five times, each effort different. Give me a five hundred page sprawl as an assignment any day.^[6]

Bibliography[link]

Note: The list below represents Terry Brooks' suggested reading order for new readers. ^[7] View the Shannara page for chronological order, but heed this note from the Terry Brooks site: "It is important to make a note right now for new readers. If as a new reader you read the novels in chronological order, you will be significantly spoiling your foray through Terry’s work."

[edit] Shannara series

[edit] The Original Shannara Trilogy

1. The Sword of Shannara (1977)
2. The Elfstones of Shannara (1982)
3. The Wishsong of Shannara (1985)
4. Indomitable (2012) (epilogue to Wishsong)
5. Dark Wraith of Shannara (2008) (Graphic Novel, epilogue to Wishsong)

[edit] The Heritage of Shannara tetralogy

1. The Scions of Shannara (1990)
2. The Druid of Shannara (1991)
3. The Elf Queen of Shannara (1992)
4. The Talismans of Shannara (1993)

[edit] Prequel to the Original Shannara Trilogy

1. First King of Shannara (1996)

[edit] Word & Void series

The Word & Void series precedes the action in Genesis of Shannara trilogy and serves as the very start of the Shannara saga.

1. Running with the Demon (1997)
2. A Knight of the Word (1998)
3. Angel Fire East (1999)

[edit] The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara trilogy

1. Ilse Witch (2000)
2. Antrax (2001)
3. Morgawr (2002)

[edit] High Druid of Shannara trilogy

1. Jarka Ruus (2003)
2. Tanequil (2004)
3. Straken (2005)

[edit] Genesis of Shannara trilogy

1. Armageddon's Children (August, 2006)
2. The Elves of Cintra (August 28, 2007)
3. The Gypsy Morph (August 26, 2008)^[8]

[edit] Legends of Shannara duology

1. Bearers of the Black Staff (August 2010)
2. The Measure of the Magic (August 2011)

[edit] The Dark Legacy of Shannara trilogy

These books will take place 100 years after the events in the High Druid of Shannara trilogy.^[9]

1. The Wards of Faerie (August 2012)
2. Book 2 (March 2013)
3. Book 3 (August 2013)

[edit] Shannara related works

• The Guide to Shannara (1986)
• Shannara computer game (1995) by Lori Ann Cole and Corey Cole
• The World of Shannara (2001) (companion book) with Teresa Patterson (Revised edition Fall 2009)
• Indomitable (2003) (short story published in anthology Legends II)
• Dark Wraith of Shannara (2008) (graphic novel) ^[10]

[edit] Magic Kingdom of Landover series

Note: This is not part of the Shannara series.

1. Magic Kingdom For Sale -- SOLD! (1986)
2. The Black Unicorn (1987)
3. Wizard at Large (1988)
4. The Tangle Box (1994)
5. Witches' Brew (1995)
6. A Princess of Landover (August 18, 2009)^[11]

Other[link]

• Imaginary Friends (1991) (short story published in anthology Once Upon a Time: A Treasury of Modern Fairy Tales)
• Indomitable (2003) (short story published in anthology Legends II)
• Why I Write About Elves (2005) (short story published as an Amazon short)
• The Writers Complete Fantasy Reference: An Indispensable Compendium of Myth and Magic (Writer's Digest Books, 2000), with Michael J. Varhola
• Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life (2003)

References[link]

External links[link]

• Terry Brooks Official Site
• Terry Brooks at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• An audio interview with Terry Brooks (MP3 format) from Hour 25

Garet Jax is a fictional character from Terry Brooks' epic fantasy^[2] novel The Wishsong of Shannara. He is known as the "Weapons Master",^[1] and it is said that no matter what weapon you choose, even your hands and feet, Garet Jax is better with it. He claims to have never lost a fight, and all who have seen him fight stand by that statement. He is seeking the one opponent who can finally defeat him in a battle.