Joshua David Bellin

In a futuristic landscape ravaged by war, a colony’s hopes for survival hinge on one teenage boy in this fast-paced, action-packed story. Querry Genn is in trouble. He can’t remember anything before the last six months. And Querry needs to remember. Otherwise he is dead weight to the other members of Survival Colony 9, one of the groups formed after a brutal war ravaged the earth. And now the Skaldi have come to scavenge what is left of humanity. No one knows what the Skaldi are, or why they are here, just that they impersonate humans, taking their form before shedding the corpse like a skin. Desperate to prove himself after the accident that stole his memory, Querry is both protected and tormented by the colony’s authoritarian commander, his father. The only person he can talk to is the beautiful Korah, but even with her, he can’t shake the feeling that something is desperately wrong. Whatever is going on, Querry is at the center of it, for a secret in his past not only makes him a target of the Skaldi’s wrath, but the key to the colony’s future.

Survival Colony 9

Cam is eager to leave Earth with the rest of the elite 1% until he connects with one of the 99%, Sofie, and joins her in the fight for Lowerworld rights.

Freefall

Michelle Simmons watched the eerie yellow fire consume the countryside on her seventeenth birthday. Cut off from home, she's lost in the desolation that remains. When Michelle is discovered by other survivors under the command of Jason, a ruthless leader with a mysterious past, she fears she may never be freed to search for her missing family. And when a video surfaces showing nightmarish creatures with the ability to mimic human beings, Michelle is sure the end has come.But then Kareem, a teenage boy, arrives in Jason's camp claiming to have lost all memory except one: there is a city nearby, a city that holds the secret to the attacks that shattered Michelle's world. He can take her there, if she's willing to risk leaving Jason's camp behind. What Michelle doesn't know is that there are other, more sinister secrets hiding in the ruined city. And that Kareem might not be what he claims to be.

Daughter of Dust

Myriad has been in so many timestrands she’s lost count – hiding from her feelings about her brother’s death she works to prevent crimes from happening but finds herself committing one instead… Agent Miriam Randle works for LifeTime, a private law enforcement agency that undertakes short-term time travel to erase crimes before they occur. Haunted by the memory of her twin brother’s unsolved murder at the age of six, Miriam thinks of herself as Myriad—an incarnation of the many lives she’s lived in her journeys to rearrange the past. When a routine assignment goes wrong and Miriam commits a murder she was meant to avert, she is thrown into the midst of a conspiracy that reaches to the highest levels of LifeTime. Along with her partner Vax, Miriam flees into the past in an attempt to unravel the truth before LifeTime agents catch up with her. But then her brother’s killer reappears, twenty years to the day since he first struck. And he’s not through with the twin who survived, not by a long shot. MYRIAD is a mind-bending time travelling sci-fi thriller that will keep readers guessing to the very end. File Under: Science Fiction [ Myrioi | Baked In | Three Ravens | The Dark Backward ]

Myriad

"Querry and the members of Survival Colony 9 have defeated a whole nest of the creatures called Skaldi, who can impersonate humans even as they destroy them. But now the colony is dangerously low in numbers and supplies. Querry's mother is in command, and is definitely taking them somewhere but where? Some secret from her past seems to be driving her relentlessly forward. When they do finally reach their destination, Querry is amazed to discover a whole compound of humans organized, with plenty of food and equipment. But the colonists are not welcomed. Everything about them is questioned, especially by Mercy, the granddaughter of the compound s leader. Mercy is as tough a fighter as Querry has ever seen and a girl as impetuous as Querry is careful. But the more Querry learns about Mercy and the others, the more he realizes that nothing around him is as it seems."--Provided by publisher.

Scavenger of Souls

The trap closes. The hunt nears its end. Sixteen-year-old Aleka travels the western desert with Survival Colony 9, a small group of renegades seeking shelter from the Skaldi that have overrun the land. The daughter of Diana the Huntress and a part-Skaldi father, Aleka was left as a baby with the woman she knows as Auntie, who swore to protect her from those who would exploit her unique ancestry. Unaware of what she is, Aleka spends her days searching the tunnels beneath the desert and dreaming of freedom from Auntie's domineering rule.Then Aleka meets a desert nomad calling himself Aesir, who proposes that she join his band of teen runaways in a daring plan to defeat the Skaldi for good. What Aleka doesn't know is that the Skaldi high command inhabiting the city by the great salt lake have a plan of their own, one they cannot put into effect without reclaiming the girl who shares their genetic history. Their final assault will come soon, and Aleka will need to discover her own powers with the aid of an unlooked-for ally if her colony is to survive.Scarred City is the final volume in the Book of the Huntress series by speculative fiction author Joshua David Bellin.

Scarred City

After their fatal confrontation with the Skaldi in the Pennsylvania woodlands, Michelle and her fellow survivors travel west in search of a safe haven untouched by the creatures. In her case, Michelle hopes to find the mountains where she and Kareem dreamed of starting a new life.What she finds instead is a country turned into a wasteland, with the Skaldi rapidly replacing the human population. When Michelle learns that she is pregnant, she seeks refuge in the western desert, where she is welcomed by a group of military scientists occupying a heavily fortified base. But there are those among the scientists who are working to develop an even deadlier strain of Skaldi, and Michelle must fight to protect her colony-and her unborn child-before this new terror is unleashed on the world.

Dark's Dominion

In recent years, the study and teaching of Native American oral and written art have flourished. During the same period, there has been a growing recognition among historians, anthropologists, and ethnohistorians that Indians must be seen not as the voiceless, nameless, faceless Other but as people who had a powerful impact on the historical development of the United States. Literary critics, however, have continued to overlook Indians as determinants of American—rather than specifically Native American—literature. The notion that the presence of Indian peoples shaped American literature as a whole remains unexplored. In The Demon of the Continent, Joshua David Bellin probes the complex interrelationships among Native American and Euro-American cultures and literatures from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. He asserts that cultural contact is at the heart of American literature. For Bellin, previous studies of Indians in American literature have focused largely on the images Euro-American writers constructed of indigenous peoples, and have thereby only perpetuated those images. Unlike authors of those earlier studies, Bellin refuses to reduce Indians to static antagonists or fodder for a Euro-American imagination. Drawing on works such as Henry David Thoreau's Walden, William Apess' A Son of the Forest, and little known works such as colonial Indian conversion narratives, he explores the ways in which these texts reflect and shape the intercultural world from which they arose. In doing so, Bellin reaches surprising conclusions: that Walden addresses economic clashes and partnerships between Indians and whites; that William Bartram's Travels encodes competing and interpenetrating systems of Indian and white landholding; that Catherine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie enacts the antebellum drama of Indian conversion; that James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow struggled with Indian authors such as George Copway and David Cusick for physical, ideological, and literary control of the nation. The Demon of the Continent proves Indians to be actors in the dynamic processes in which America and its literature are inescapably embedded. Shifting the focus from textual images to the sites of material, ideological, linguistic, and aesthetic interaction between peoples, Bellin reenvisions American literature as the product of contact, conflict, accommodation, and interchange.

Indians and the Shaping of American Literature

The Demon of the Continent

Laura L. Mielke

Long before the Boston Tea Party, where colonists staged a revolutionary act by masquerading as Indians, people looked to Native Americans for the symbols, imagery, and acts that showed what it meant to be “American.” And for just as long, observers have largely overlooked the role that Native peoples themselves played in creating and enacting the Indian performances appropriated by European Americans. It is precisely this neglected notion of Native Americans “playing Indian” that Native Acts explores. These essays—by historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and folklorists—provide the first broadly based chronicle of the performance of “Indianness” by Natives in North America from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. The authors’ careful and imaginative analysis of historical documents and performative traditions reveals an intricate history of intercultural exchange. In sum, Native Acts challenges any simple understanding of cultural “authenticity” even as it celebrates the dynamic role of performance in the American Indian pursuit of self-determination. In this collection, Indian peoples emerge as active, vocal, embodied participants in cultural encounters whose performance powerfully shaped the course of early American history.

Indian Performance, 1603-1832

Native Acts

Beginning with celebrated classics, the author locates King Kong (1933) within the era of lynching to evince how the film protects whiteness against supposed aggressions of a black predator and reviews The Wizard of Oz (1939) as a product of the Depression's economic anxieties. From there, the study moves to the cult classic animated Sinbad Trilogy (1958-1977) of Ray Harryhausen, films rampant with xenophobic fears of the Middle East as relevant today as when the series was originally produced. Advancing to more recent subjects, the author focuses on the image of the monstrous woman and the threat of reproductive freedom found in Aliens (1986), Jurassic Park (1993), and Species (1995) and on depictions of the mentally ill as dangerous deviants in 12 Monkeys (1996) and The Cell (2000). An investigation into physical freakishness guides his approach to Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Beauty and the Beast (1991).

Fantasy Film and Social Alienation

Framing Monsters

The Ecosystem is at warThe dark queen Miriam has attacked the City of the Queens. Commanding an army of creatures from legend and nightmare, she appears unstoppable. Sarah is forced to flee into the treacherous mountains north of the city, where she seeks to discover word of the missing queen, Celestina. Only with their combined strength, Sarah believes, is there any hope of contesting the dark queen's might.But to wage the final battle against the dark queen, Sarah will have to overcome an ancient curse that threatens not only the survival of the city but the existence of the Ecosystem itself. And she will have to decide whether to save Isaac, the boy she loves, at the cost of losing everything else she holds dear.House of Earth, House of Stone is a riveting fantasy-adventure set in a world where Nature holds dominion over humankind. The final book in the Ecosystem trilogy, it completes the journey Sarah began in Ecosystem and The Devouring Land.

Joshua David Bellin

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