An End

an end by Paul Evan Hughes has been chosen as the winner of the 2003 Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) in the science fiction/fantasy category. The award winners were chosen May 19, 2003, and will be presented at BookExpo America in Los Angeles on May 30th.  he is knowing... and this heart i contain for You i have come again to zam zam? rupture rend rive split cleave please don't let it-- is it too late? he knew what she couldn't believe. she knew very little, but she knew beyond a doubt that she loved chocolate milk. it was a beautiful hand. Paul Hughes's follow-up to his 2000 science fiction debut enemy, an end transports the reader to another universe ravaged by the alien force known as "silver." an end first appeared as a serial on silverthought.com. Now, for the first time, the five segments, "amidst silver," "the stillness between," "a loss so dear," "the machinery of night," and "les soldats perdus: a plague journal" are available in one collection. an end is the story of warship commander Hunter Windham, taken from earth at age five with a group of boys and the sole surviving human girl to wage a war against an alien race they cannot possibly comprehend. A disconcerting blend of tender moments between Hunter and Lilith, the Catalyst of the Sixth Extinction, and the jarring horrors of war, an end deals with the struggle for identity, the conflict between reality and illusion, and the realization that the good guys are sometimes the bad guys. Rounding out the cast are painter James McNeill Whistler, a cowboy named Hank, God, an assembly of artificial humans and a mysterious child named Mother, the focal point of the war. The novel fluidly races across space and time, weaving the past, present, and future in a seamless, touching story of impossible love made possible and the ultimate sacrifice. The fifth and final segment is an homage to Samuel Delany's pivotal scifi masterpiece, "Dhalgren." Laden with nicotone and silver, an end is a science fiction novel unlike any other. my lips remember the echoes of that night and in these final moments, in this final terror, I find stillness.