A plain-spoken introduction to the art form, including its history, its most well-known composers, its most famous singers, and profiles on a few "listener-friendly" operas.

From its beginning, opera has been an impossible art. Its first practitioners, in seventeenth-century Florence, set themselves the unreachable goal of reproducing the wonders of ancient Greek drama, which no one can be sure was sung in the first place. Opera?s greatest artists have striven to fuse multiple art forms?music, drama, poetry, dance?into a unified synesthetic experience. The composer Matthew Aucoin, a rising star of the opera world, posits...

"A revolution brewing for generations has begun in fire. It will end in blood. The Free Navy - a violent group of Belters in black-market military ships - has crippled the Earth and begun a campaign of piracy and violence among the outer planets. The colony ships heading for the thousand new worlds on the far side of the alien ring gates are easy prey, and no single navy remains strong enough to protect them. James Holden and his crew know the strengths...

Sent to the Roseblood Conservatory to study voice, Rune German develops a friendship with Thorn, a mysterious masked boy, but Thorn is torn between his feelings for Rune and his loyalty to his father, the Phantom, who haunts Roseblood and has sinister plans for Rune.

"Science fiction's supreme masterpiece, Dune will be forever considered a triumph of the imagination. Set on the desert planet Arrakis, it is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, who will become the mysterious man known as Muad'Dib. Paul's noble family is named stewards of Arrakis, whose sands are the only source of a powerful drug called "the spice." After his family is brought down in a traitorous plot, Paul must go undercover to seek revenge, and...

An invaluable reference book exploring the background to 400 years of opera--the composers and singers, and the building and festivals that showcase them.

A melodrama about a strange man who lives in the catacombs below the Paris Opera House and his love affair with an opera starlet whom he tutors.

"What if you once had thousands of bodies and near god-like technology at your disposal? And what if all of it were ripped away? The Lord of the Radch has given Breq command of the ship Mercy of Kalr and sent her to the only place she would have agreed to go -- to Athoek Station, where Lieutenant Awn's sister works in Horticulture. Athoek was annexed some six hundred years ago, and by now everyone is fully civilized -- or should be. But everything...