Outlander Kurt Strom is on a mission to the half-submerged, frozen city of Chicago on a hunt for relics and clues to the cause of the 'Great Fall' that has left but puny, tiny isolated pockets of humanity surviving in the Cold World of 2309. He finds much more than he bargained for. Strom is abducted from an office building roof-top atop Lake Michigan by a strange Alien Force. He and his Inuit partner Sabo are transported to the opposite ends of the Earth. Kurt discovers they are marooned with an unlikely host of others finding themselves abducted and dumped upon an island prison of fire and ice. Together they try to work to beat impossible odds of survival, escape. If successful, they would then have to find a way to battle a Force of Darkness which orbits the Earth from a thousand miles high, controlling its destiny.

Taken from her people as a foal, Saga is plunged into a world completely foreign to her. All Travelers know other worlds exist, but they don't expect to actually experience them until they are adults. Saga must learn to adapt to her new surroundings if she wants to survive until she's old enough to be able to Travel among worlds and return to her people. Jarl is the son of the Vanir High Mages and heir to the throne. Though young, his parents entrust him with the care and training of the captured Traveler foal. However, none of the Vanir understand just how intelligent the Travelers are and they may have given Jarl more than he can handle. When Saga escapes, the High Mages decide she is too much trouble and has to be killed. Jarl defies his parents and goes after her. Will they remain enemies when Jarl finds her, or will they form a bond of friendship strong enough to save Saga's life?

"This volume contains the papers, updated in some cases, presented at the first AISMC (Artificial Intelligence and Symbolic Mathematical Computations)conference, held in Karlsruhe, August 3-6, 1992. This was the first conference to be devoted to such a topic after a long period when SMC made no appearance in AI conferences, though it used to be welcome in the early days of AI. Some conferences were held recently on mathematics and AI, but none was directly comparable in scope to this conference. Because of the novelty of the domain, authors were given longer allocations of time than usual in which to present their work. As a result, extended and fruitful discussions followed each paper. The introductory chapter in this book, which was not presented during the conference, reflects in many ways the flavor of these discussions and aims to set out the framework for future activities in this domain of research. In addition to the introduction, the volume contains 20 papers."--PUBLISHER'S WEBSITE.