Search Worlds Without End

This short story originally appeared on the author's Patreon site and was reprinted in Lightspeed, December 2017.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

The third collection by Hugo Award-winning author Tim Pratt-- whose previous collection Hart & Boot and Other Stories was a World Fantasy Award finalist--gathers 23 of his best recent works of science fiction and fantasy. Stories include Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award nominee "Her Voice in a Bottle," Bram Stoker Award finalist "The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft" (with Nick Mamatas), and three new stories appearing here for first time: contemporary fantasy novelette "The Fairy Library," science fiction short story "The Haunted Mech Suit," and a new story set in the author's popular Marla Mason urban fantasy series, "Cages." Also included are such fan favorites as "The River Boy," "A Programmatic Approach to Perfect Happiness," and "Another End of the Empire," plus many more, with illustrations by acclaimed artists Kat Beyer and Bradley K. McDevitt. Cover by Jenn Reese.

Table of Contents:

• The River Boy - (2008) - shortstory
• The Secret Beach - (2011) - shortstory
• Luminous - (2011) - shortfiction
• Artifice and Intelligence - (2007) - shortstory
• Fiddle - (2010) - shortstory
• Troublesolving - (2009) - novelette
• A Programmatic Approach to Perfect Happiness - (2009) - shortfiction
• On a Blade of Grass - (2008) - shortfiction
• The Haunted Mech Suit - (2013) - shortfiction
• Scientific Romance - (2010) - poem
• Unexpected Outcomes - (2009) - shortstory
• Her Voice in a Bottle - (2009) - shortstory
• The Fairy Library - (2013) - novelette
• Gingerbread - (2007) - shortfiction
• Right Turns - (2012) - shortfiction
• Antiquities and Tangibles - (2011) - novelette
• The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft - (2008) - shortstory and Nick Mamatas
• From Around Here - (2007) - shortfiction
• The Crawlspace of the World - (2006) - shortstory
• The Frozen One - (2008) - shortstory
• Cages - (2013) - shortfiction
• Restless in My Hand - (2007) - shortstory
• Another End of the Empire - (2009) - shortstory

This short story originally appeared on Strange Horizons, 6 August 2007. It can also be found in the anthologies Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition, edited by Rich Horton, Year's Best SF 13 (2008), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and Robots: The Recent A. I. (2012), edited by Rich Horton. The story is included in the collection Antiquities and Tangibles & Other Stories (2013).

Read the full story for free at Strange Horizons.

Darrin's life has been going downhill ever since his girlfriend Bridget walked out on him without a word of explanation six months ago. Soon after losing her, he lost his job, and his car, and eventually his enthusiasm for life. He can't imagine things getting worse - until he sees Bridget again, for the first time since she walked out, just moments before she leaps to her death from a bridge. In his quest to find out why Bridget took her own life, he encounters a depressive (and possibly immortal) cult leader; a man with a car that can drive out of this world and into others; a beautiful psychotic with a chrome shotgun; and a bridge that, maybe, leads to heaven. Darrin's journey leads him into a place called the Briarpatch, which is either the crawlspace of the universe, or a series of ambitious building projects abandoned by god, or a tangle of alternative universes, depending on who you ask. Somewhere in that disorderly snarl of worlds, he hopes to find Bridget again... or at least a reason to live without her.

Tim Pratt's (Little Gods, The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl) Hart & Boot is a stunning collection of thirteen stories of the fantastic. Critics have called Pratt's short fiction "Quite Gaimanesque..." and this comparison is not unfounded. His straightforward storytelling techniques, combined with an uncanny ability to convey a sense of wonder and the fantastic, are part of the reason why the title story to this collection was selected by Michael Chabon for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 2005 anthology.

Tim Pratt has been nominated for the Nebula, the John W. Campbell, and the Mythopoeic Fantasy awards, and his work (including "Bottom Feeding," herein) routinely finds its way to the Locus Recommended Reading lists. In 2005, he won the Norton Award. His fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, including Polyphony, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, Lenox Avenue, The Third Alternative, and Realms of Fantasy.

Table of Contents:

• Hart & Boot - (2004) - shortstory
• Life in Stone - (2004) - shortstory
• Cup and Table - (2006) - shortstory
• In a Glass Casket - (2004) - shortstory
• Terrible Ones - (2004) - shortstory
• Romanticore - (2003) - shortstory
• Living with the Harpy - (2003) - shortstory
• Komodo - (2007) - shortstory
• Bottom Feeding - (2005) - shortstory
• The Tyrant in Love - (2005) - shortstory
• Impossible Dreams - (2006) - shortstory
• Lachrymose and the Golden Egg - (2004) - shortstory
• Dream Engine - (2006) - novelette
• Story Notes - essay

Recent art school graduate Bekah thought she'd hit the jackpot: an unknown relative died, and she inherited a small fortune and a huge house in the mountains of North Carolina.

Trey Howard, the lawyer who handled the estate, is a handsome man in his twenties and they hit it off right away--and soon become more than friends. Bekah expected a pleasant year to get her head together and have a romantic fling. Problem is, the house is full of junk...and siblings she didn't know she had are willing to kill her for it.

More important, the junk in her new house is magical, she's surrounded by monsters, and her life seems to be in mortal peril every time she ventures into a new room. As Bekah discovers more about her mysterious benefactor and the magical world he inhabited, she's realizes that as tough and resourceful as she is, she might just be in over her head...

Heirs of Grace is a tale of family and magic, action and wonder, blending the strong heroine, cheeky humor, and dark fantasy that have become the hallmarks of Tim Pratt's writing.

Sturgeon Award nominated short story. It originally appeared on Subterranean Online, Winter 2009. The story is included in the collection Antiquities and Tangibles & Other Stories (2013).

Read the full story for free at Subterranean.

Table of Contents:

• Ts'its'tsi'nako - poem
• Dream Sketches - poem
• Eight Transformations - poem
• Visions - (2000) - poem
• While You're in St. Augustine - poem
• Holly Grove - poem
• Diminishing - (2006) - poem
• Intermittence - poem
• Joy - poem
• How to Love a Fairy Maid - (2002) - poem
• Other Altars of the Heart - (2005) - poem
• Slumbering - poem
• Ghost - poem
• Cupid's Arrows - poem
• My Night with Aphrodite - (2003) - poem
• Nidhigg - poem
• Ongoing - poem
• Early Times - poem
• The Fey Girl at Home - poem
• Mask - (2001) - poem
• Bacchanal - (2001) - poem
• Neither Eat Nor Drink There - poem
• Forking Paths - poem
• An Incident in the Country - poem
• Poor Bahamut - poem
• Orpheus Among the Cabbages - (2001) - poem
• Soul Searching - (2004) - poem
• Daughter and Moon - (2001) - poem
• Muse Trap - (2002) - poem
• Still Life, with Frog - (2003) - poem
• Sometimes Another Dream - poem
• Crossing - poem
• Talking to Your Sleep - poem

Hugo Award winning short story. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, July 2006. The story can also be found in the anthology Other Worlds Than These (2012), edited by John Joseph Adams. It is included in the collection Hart & Boot & Other Stories (2007).

Nebula Award nominated short story. Originally appeared at Strange Horizons where it can still be read for free. Later included in a collection of the same name (2003).

Tim Pratt's debut collection brings together four poems and fifteen stories, including the Nebula-nominated "Little Gods" and a previously unpublished novelette, "Pale Dog." Within these pages you will encounter a train to the underworld, a feral bicycle, a thief with peculiar eating habits, an amnesiac superhero, a haunted zoot suit, star-crossed monsters, fallen angels on vacation, and other wonders. From fast-paced sorcererpunk to weird Westerns, from the loss of childhood innocence to the heat death of the universe, these stories will delight, surprise, and move you.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Michaela Roessner
• Little Gods - (2002) - shortstory
• The Fallen and the Muse of the Street - (2000) - shortstory
• The Witch's Bicycle - (2002) - novelette
• Annabelle's Alphabet - (2001) - shortstory
• The Scent of Copper Pennies - shortstory
• The God of the Crossroads - (2001) - poem
• Fable from a Cage - (2003) - shortstory
• Bleeding West - shortstory
• Behemoth - (2001) - shortstory
• Bone Sigh - (2002) - shortstory
• Daughter and Moon - (2001) - poem
• Captain Fantasy and the Secret Masters - (2003) - shortstory
• Entropy's Paintbrush - shortstory
• My Night with Aphrodite - (2003) - poem
• Unfairy Tale - (2002) - shortstory
• Down with the Lizards and the Bees - (2003) - shortstory
• Orpheus Among the Cabbages - (2001) - poem
• Pale Dog - novelette
• The Heart, a Chambered Nautilus - (2002) - shortfiction
• Afterword (Little Gods) - essay

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, May 2016.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 12, September-October 2016.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny Magazine.

The best writers of our generation retell classic tales.

From Sir Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene to E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops," literature is filled with sexy, deadly, and downright twisted tales. In this collection, award-winning and bestselling authors reimagine their favorite classic stories, the ones that have inspired, awed, and enraged them, the ones that have become ingrained in modern culture, and the ones that have been too long overlooked. They take these stories and boil them down to their bones, and reassemble them for a new generation of readers.

Written from a twenty-first century perspective and set within the realms of science fiction, dystopian fiction, fantasy, and realistic fiction, these short stories are as moving and thought provoking as their originators. They pay homage to groundbreaking literary achievements of the past while celebrating each author's unique perception and innovative style.

Today's most acclaimed authors use their own unique styles to rebuild the twelve timeless stories:

• Sir Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene - Saladin Ahmed
• W. W. Jacobs's "The Monkey's Paw" - Kelley Armstrong
• Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla" - Holly Black
• "Sleeping Beauty" - Neil Gaiman
• The Brothers Grimm's "Rumpelstiltskin" - Kami Garcia
• Kate Chopin's The Awakening - Melissa Marr
• Rudyard Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King" - Garth Nix
• Henry James's "The Jolly Corner" - Tim Pratt
• E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" - Carrie Ryan
• Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto - Margaret Stohl
• William Seabrook's "The Caged White Werewolf of the Saraban" - Gene Wolfe
• Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birth-Mark" - Rick Yancey

Even ordinarily, cloudmining can be dangerous -- those silver linings are heavy and potentially lethal -- but it's nothing compared being a cloudminer on the run.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

The Devil is known by many names: Serpent, Tempter, Beast, Adversary, Wanderer, Dragon, Rebel. His traps and machinations are the stuff of legends. His faces are legion. No matter what face the devil wears, Sympathy for the Devil has them all. Edited by Tim Pratt, Sympathy for the Devil collects the best Satanic short stories by Neil Gaiman, Holly Black, Stephen King, Kage Baker, Charles Stross, Elizabeth Bear, Jay Lake, Kelly Link, China Mieville, Michael Chabon, and many others, revealing His Grand Infernal Majesty, in all his forms. Thirty-five stories, from classics to the cutting edge, exploring the many sides of Satan, Lucifer, the Lord of the Flies, the Father of Lies, the Prince of the Powers of the Air and Darkness, the First of the Fallen... and a Man of Wealth and Taste. Sit down and spend a little time with the Devil.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Tim Pratt
• The Price - (1997) - short story by Neil Gaiman
• Beluthahatchie - (1997) - short story by Andy Duncan
• Ash City Stomp - (2003) - short story by Richard Butner
• Ten for the Devil - (1998) - novelette by Charles de Lint
• A Reversal of Fortune - (2007) - short story by Holly Black
• Young Goodman Brown - (1835) - short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Man in the Black Suit - (1994) - short story by Stephen King
• The Power of Speech - (1974) - short story by Natalie Babbitt
• The Redemption of Silky Bill - (1994) - short fiction by Sarah Zettel
• Sold to Satan - (1923) - short story by Mark Twain
• MetaPhysics - (2007) - short fiction by Elizabeth M. Glover
• Snowball's Chance - (2005) - short story by Charles Stross
• Non-Disclosure Agreement - (2001) - short fiction by Scott Westerfeld
• Like Riding a Bike - (1999) - short story by Jan Wildt
• Bible Stories for Adults, No. 31: The Covenant - (1989) - short story by James Morrow
• And the Deep Blue Sea - (2005) - short story by Elizabeth Bear
• The Goat Cutter - (2003) - short story by Jay Lake
• On the Road to New Egypt - (1995) - short story by Jeffrey Ford
• That Hell-Bound Train - (1958) - short story by Robert Bloch
• The God of Dark Laughter - (2001) - short story by Michael Chabon
• The King of the Djinn - (2008) - short story by David Ackert and Benjamin Rosenbaum
• Summon Bind Banish - (2007) - short story by Nick Mamatas
• The Bottle Imp - (1891) - novelette by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Two Old Men - (2000) - short story by Kage Baker
• ... With By Good Intentions - (2006) - short story by Carrie Richerson
• Nine Sundays in a Row - (2008) - short story by Kris Dikeman
• Lull - (2002) - novelette by Kelly Link
• We Can Get Them for You Wholesale - (1989) - short story by Neil Gaiman
• Details - (2002) - short story by China Miéville
• The Devil Disinvests - (2000) - short story by Scott Bradfield
• Faustfeathers - (1992) - novelette by John Kessel
• The Professor's Teddy Bear - (1948) - short story by Theodore Sturgeon
• The Heidelberg Cylinder - (2000) - novella by Jonathan Carroll
• Mike's Place - (2008) - short fiction by David J. Schwartz
• Thus I Refute Beelzy - (1940) - short story by John Collier
• Inferno: Canto XXXIV - poem by Dante Alighieri

After her grandmother is murdered in a home invasion, Tamsin Culver leaves her cushy programming job in San Francisco and returns to her Midwestern hometown to settle the estate. What she doesn't expect is to find out her grandmother's life-changing secret: She's not an Earth native, but an exile from another level of the Nigh-Space continuum, an adjacent reality with technology far more advanced than ours. What's more, her grandmother ruled there as an oligarch, meaning Tamsin is the heir to vast wealth only accessible by someone from her bloodline... but the enemies who tried to exterminate her family won't be happy to see her return.

Back in the Bay Area, grad student Glenn makes a startling discovery about his girlfriend Vivy. She's a secret agent for the Interventionists: an interdimensional organisation devoted to protecting the inhabitants of Nigh-Space from those trying to take advantage of less-developed worlds. When she lands in trouble, Glenn finds himself on a sapient starship in a distant level of the continuum, racing to save her. But when Glenn and Vivy's plans clash with Tamsin's, and secret connections among them all are revealed, their situation becomes catastrophically complicated.

It's a princess of Nigh-Space versus a champion of Nigh-Space in a reality-spanning adventure that ranges from alien planets to mysterious space stations to Bay Area bars, with starship battles, cyborg augmentation, abductions, snark, betrayal, and fallout both nuclear and emotional.

Welcome to THE NEX. Teenager Miranda Candle finds a mysterious necklace and is suddenly transported to The Nex, the bizarre city at the center of all possible universes, where she falls in with a pair of would-be revolutionaries--the skinshifter Howlaa and the bodiless Wisp--fighting the oppressive regime of the city-state's Regent and his army of steam colossi, cynical cyborgs, and the depraved royal orphans. This is a classic story filled with new twists. Featured in this volume are two related bonus stories, "Dream Engine" and "We Go Back".

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #16 January 2008. It can also be found in the anthology Realms 2: The Second Year of Clarkesworld Magazine (2010), edited by Nick Mamatas and Sean Wallace. The story is included in the collection Antiquities and Tangibles & Other Stories (2013).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

In this debut novel, acclaimed short-story author Tim Pratt delivers an exciting heroine with a hidden talent-and a secret duty. Witty and suspenseful, here is a contemporary love song to the West that was won and the myths that shape us....

As night manager of Santa Cruz's quirkiest coffeehouse, Marzi McCarty makes a mean espresso, but her first love is making comics. Her claim to fame: The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, a cowpunk neo-western yarn. Striding through an urban frontier peopled by Marzi's wild imagination, Rangergirl doles out her own brand of justice. But lately Marzi's imagination seems to be altering her reality. She's seeing the world through Rangergirl's eyes-literally--complete with her deadly nemesis, the Outlaw.

It all started when Marzi opened a hidden door in the coffeehouse storage room. There, imprisoned among the supplies, she saw the face of something unknown...and dangerous. And she unwittingly became its guard. But some primal darkness must've escaped, because Marzi hasn't been the same since. And neither have her customers, who are acting downright apocalyptic.

Now it's up to Marzi to stop this supervillainous superforce that's swaggered its way into her world. For Marzi, it's the showdown of her life. For Rangergirl, it's just another day...

This short story was originally published through Patreon.com in August 2015, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, September 2016.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

A nightmarish power unleashed from the depths infiltrates Arkham...

When dissolute fisherman Abel Davenport discovers an ancient temple in the deep ocean, he under the influence of a long dead god. In his attempts to restore the god's cult, Abel unleashes a plague of twisted doppelgangers on Arkham. Horrified by the consequences, Davenport realizes that he alone cannot stop the monsters from resurrecting the Ancient One. Sometimes the only way to end one cult is to start another... Teaming up with redeemed cultist Diana Stanley and notorious thief Ruby Standish is the first step. The second is convincing Carl Sanford, the powerful leader of Arkham's Silver Twilight Lodge, to join their cause. Together they might be the only hope of averting a cataclysmic eldritch invasion.

What would you do if you woke up and found yourself in a parallel universe under an alien sky? This is the question Zax Delatree must answer every time he closes his eyes.

Every time Zax Delatree falls asleep, he travels to a new reality. He has no control over his destination and never knows what he will see when he opens his eyes. Sometimes he wakes up in technological utopias, and other times in the bombed-out ruins of collapsed civilizations. All he has to live by are his wits and the small aides he has picked up along the way - technological advantages from techno-utopias, sedatives to escape dangerous worlds, and stimulants to extend his stay in pleasant ones.

Thankfully, Zax isn't always alone. He can take people with him, if they're unconscious in his arms when he falls asleep. But someone unwelcome is on his tail, and they are after something that Zax cannot spare - the blood running through his veins, the power to travel through worlds...

Every time Zaxony Delatree falls asleep he wakes up on a new world. His life has turned into an endless series of brief encounters. But at least he and Minna, the one companion who has found a way of travelling with him, are no longer pursued by the psychotic and vengeful Lector.

But now Zax has been joined once again by Ana, a companion he thought left behind long ago. Ana is one of the Sleepers, a group of fellow travellers between worlds. Ana tells Zax that he is unknowingly host to a parasitic alien that exists partly in his blood and partly between dimensions. The chemical that the alien secretes is what allows Zax to travel. Every time he does, however, the parasite grows, damaging the fabric of the Universes. Anas is desperate to recruit Zax to her cause and stop the alien.

But there are others who are using the parasite, such as the cult who serve the Prisoner - an entity trapped in the dimension between universes. Every world is like a bar in its prison. The cult want to collapse all the bars of the worlds and free their god. Can Zax, Minna, Ana and the other Sleepers band together and stop them?

The adventures of Marla Mason, chief sorcerer and protector of the city of Felport, have been chronicled in novels including Blood Engines, Poison Sleep, Dead Reign, Spell Games, Broken Mirrors, and Grim Tides. Now, for the first time, her origins are revealed. Bone Shop chronicles Marla's early days in the city, her rise to power, and the terrible tragedies that shaped her extraordinary life. This is a story of questions answered and shadows forecast. This is the story of Marla Mason.

Meet Marla Mason--smart, saucy, slightly wicked witch of the East Coast....

Sorcerer Marla Mason, small-time guardian of the city of Felport, has a big problem. A rival is preparing a powerful spell that could end Marla's life--and, even worse, wreck her city. Marla's only chance of survival is to boost her powers with the Cornerstone, a magical artifact hidden somewhere in San Francisco. But when she arrives there, Marla finds that the quest isn't going to be quite as cut-and-dried as she expected...and that some of the people she needs to talk to are dead. It seems that San Francisco's top sorcerers are having troubles of their own--a mysterious assailant has the city's magical community in a panic, and the local talent is being (gruesomely) picked off one by one.

With her partner-in-crime, Rondeau, Marla is soon racing against time through San Francisco's alien streets, dodging poisonous frogs, murderous hummingbirds, cannibals, and a nasty vibe from the local witchery, who suspect that Marla herself may be behind the recent murders. And if Marla doesn't figure out who is killing the city's finest in time, she'll be in danger of becoming a magical statistic herself....

The bad girl of the magical underworld is back and badder than ever

Someone wants Marla Mason dead. Usually that's not news. As chief sorcerer of Felport, someone always wants her dead. But this time she's the target of a renegade assassin who specializes in killing his victims over days, months, or even years. Not to mention a mysterious knife-wielding killer in black who pops up in the most unexpected places. To make matters worse, an inmate has broken out of the Blackwing Institute for criminally insane sorcerers-a troubled psychic who can literally reweave the fabric of reality to match her own traumatic past.

With her wisecracking partner Rondeau reluctantly in tow, Marla teams up with a "love-talker" whose dangerous erotic spells not even she can resist. Together they're searching the rapidly transforming streets of Felport for a woman who's become the Typhoid Mary of nightmares, infecting everything-and everyone-she touches with a chaos worse than death itself.

Death has come calling, and one woman has what he wants most of all...

As chief sorcerer of Felport, Marla Mason thought she'd faced every kind of evil the magical world had to offer. But she's never faced a killer like this. He's dark, glib, handsome as the devil-and exactly who he says he is. Death-in the flesh. He's arrived in Felport with a posse composed of a half-insane necromancer and the reanimated corpse of John Wilkes Booth, and he isn't leaving until he gets what he came for. Only Marla is crazy enough to tell Death to go back to Hell.

With the Founders' Ball just around the bend, drawing together the brightest, meanest, and most dangerous of Felport's magical elite, the last thing Marla needs is all-out war with the King of the Underworld, but that's exactly what she's got. As the battle lines are drawn, she can count on her hedonistic, body-hopping partner Rondeau...but how many of her old allies will stand by her side when facing the ultimate adversary? To save her city, Marla will have to find a way to cheat Death... literally.

Brain-eating fungi, wannabe sorcerers, long-lost relations–does even a hard-core witch stand a chance?

Mad sorcerers, psychic vampires, an army of vengeful demons, Marla Mason would rather face them all than a flesh-and-blood ghost from her dysfunctional family past: her con artist brother, Jason. As Felport’s chief sorcerer, Marla would ordinarily consider it her duty to protect her town from such an unscrupulous ne’er-do-well. As his sister, things are a lot…trickier. Now, as Marla attempts to train an apprentice oracle whose magical wires have gotten crossed, Jason is setting up an elaborate sting and drawing her ever-so-corruptible partner Rondeau into the ruse.

Their patsy is a filthy-rich wannabe mage and their bait is something so valuable, so dangerous, so sought after, it probably doesn’t exist. But now word’s gotten out that the Borrichius spores do exist and instead of a sucker Jason and Rondeau have a much bigger–and much deadlier–fish on their line: a reclusive sorcerer whose devotion to the mushroom god and command of vegetal magic could bring a fungal apocalypse to Felport. It’ll be the mother of all bad trips unless Marla can pull off the ultimate magical switcheroo…and somehow live to tell about it.

A Marla Mason novel! She's an ass-kicking sorcerer who doesn't wear a leather catsuit, doesn't suffer from low self-esteem, doesn't wallow in angst, and is almost always absolutely certain she's right... even when she's dead wrong.

What about Broken Mirrors? It's got monsters. It's got sarcasm. It's got death, betrayal, ancient gods, dark doppelgangers, mirror worlds, wisecracks, artifacts, oracles, and magical daggers. Oh... and a cloak.

Marla Mason, ousted chief sorcerer for the city of Felport, is languishing in exile on the island of Maui with her best friend, the psychic (and rather hedonistic) Rondeau. She's making a living of sorts as an occult detective, but for the most part, she's just marking time. Driven from the city she loves, Marla is adrift, nearly friendless, and stripped of almost all her power and resources.

Obviously, it's the perfect time for old enemies to try and kill her.

A group of sorcerers, all with their own reasons to want Marla dead, assemble and prepare to attack her while she's at her most vulnerable. The members of this Marla Mason Revenge Squad include the one-armed witch Nicolette, the cheerfully murderous psychopath Crapsey, a criminally insane shapeshifter, a man who hunts werewolves for fun, and a master of anti-magic, among others.

But they aren't taking chances with an enemy as formidable as Marla. They hire the world's most notorious -- and deadly -- chaos witch, Elsie Jarrow, to lead their assault. But Elsie is impossible to predict and just as hard to control, and may well have an agenda of her own.

Besides, Marla isn't as helpless as they think -- she's still got a few friends in high (and low) places, including a god or two. And no matter how bad her life is, there's nothing Marla loves more than a good fight. There's bound to be trouble in paradise....

Marla Mason has been a mercenary, chief sorcerer and protector of an entire city, and an occult detective, and now she's a goddess of Death... but only part-time. She gets to spend six months a year living as a mortal woman on Earth, and she's decided to devote those months to hunting monsters for fun and personal redemption. Armed with axe and dagger, with the living severed head of her worst enemy in a birdcage for a traveling companion, she sets off by motorcycle into the American Southwest on a journey of self-discovery and other-destruction.

No rest for the wicked... or anyone else!

Welcome to the world of Marla Mason, part-time goddess of Death and former chief sorcerer of the Felport. It is a a world full of snark, violence, weirdness, bad choices with surprising consequences, friendship, betrayal, villainous living severed heads, magic motorcycles, axes made of fragments of moonlight, monsters from beyond the multiverse, and other delights.

Alternating one month in the mortal world and one month in the underworld, while Marla is on Earth, she tries to do good and remember what it means to be mortal--often having to remind her adversaries of their own mortality. In Lady of Misrule, Marla awakens for her month on Earth and finds her allies missing, and an old enemy causing trouble in her home city of Felport. If that wasn't bad enough, a charming gentlemen from beyond the multiverse has decided that murdering gods might make for an amusing pastime. He figures he will start with Marla.

Now, with the help of her former apprentice Bradley Bowman, Marla must rescue her friends, crush her enemies, and eliminate the aforementioned existential threat--before her month runs out and she returns to the underworld.

This is the first novella collection set in the world of Pratt's popular Axiom space opera trilogy. In this collection of previously unpublished novellas, Hugo Award-winner Tim Pratt returns to the acclaimed sci-fi universe of his Axiom trilogy. Each of these three stories takes fans and new readers alike deeper into the rich world of the Axiom than ever before, revisiting the crewmembers of the White Raven as they strike out on new and enthralling adventures.

Contents

• The Artificial Stars - the machine intelligence (and head of the Trans-Neptunian Authority) Shall sends an instance of his consciousness on a secret mission to an uncharted star system to investigate a mysterious message... which apparently came from a splintered and corrupted version of Shall himself.
• The Augmented Stars - engineer and "radical self-improvement" advocate Ashok, probably the character most profoundly changed by the events of the the trilogy, takes his own ship (and a crew including both new and familiar faces) on a treasure hunt in search of a legendary trove of alien technology. (Which will, of course, try to kill them all.)
• The Alien Stars - everyone's favorite squidlike alien Liar, Lantern, has to take arms (well, pseudopods) against her former superiors, the elders of a secret cult devoted to protecting the grim legacy of the Axiom... and the elders won't go down without trying to take the rest of the galaxy with them.

The shady crew of the White Raven run freight and salvage at the fringes of our solar system. They discover the wreck of a centuries-old exploration vessel floating light years away from its intended destination and revive its sole occupant, who wakes with news of First Alien Contact. When the crew break it to her that humanity has alien allies already, she reveals that these are very different extra-terrestrials... and the gifts they bestowed on her could kill all humanity, or take it out to the most distant stars.

Ancient aliens, the Axiom, will kill us all - when they wake up. In deep space, a swarm of nanoparticles threatens the colonies, transforming everything it meets into computronium - including the colonists. The crew of the White Raven investigate, and discover an Axiom facility filled with aliens hibernating while their minds roam a vast virtual reality. Sebastien wakes up, claiming his altered brain architecture can help the crew deactivate the swarm - from inside the Axiom simulation. To protect humanity, Callie must trust him, but if Sebastien still plans to dominate the universe using Axiom tech, they could be in a whole lot of trouble...

The ancient alien gods are waking up, and there's only one spaceship crew ready to stop them, in this dazzling space opera sequel to The Wrong Stars and The Dreaming Stars.

Aliens known as the Liars gave humanity access to the stars through twenty-nine wormholes. They didn't mention that other aliens, the ancient, tyrannical - but thankfully sleeping - Axiom occupied all the other systems. When the twenty-ninth fell silent, humanity chalked it up to radical separatists and moved on. But now, on board the White Raven, Captain Callie and her crew of Axiom-hunters receive word that the twenty-ninth colony may have met a very different fate. With their bridge generator they skip past the wormhole, and discover another Axiom project, fully awake, and poised to pour through the wormhole gate into all the worlds of humanity.

Captain Felix Duval and the crew of the Temerarious quietly patrol a remote Mentak Coalition colony system where nothing ever happens. But when they answer a distress call from a moon under attack, that peaceful existence is torn apart. They rescue a scientist, Thales, who's developing revolutionary technology to create new wormholes. He just needs a few things to make it fully operational... and now, ordered to aid the scientist, the Temerarious is targeted by two rival black-ops teams intent on reacquiring Thales. Can Felix trust Thales? Or is this a conspiracy to tip the balance of power in the galaxy forever?

Bianca Xing has spent a lifetime on a provincial planet, dreaming of travelling the stars. When her planet is annexed by the Barony of Letnev, Bianca finds herself being taken into custody, told that she's special - the secret daughter of a brilliant scientist, hidden away on a remote planet for her own safety. But the truth about Bianca is stranger. There are secrets hidden in her genetic code that could have galaxy altering consequences. Driven by an incredible yearning and assisted by the fearsome Letnev Captain, Dampierre, Bianca must follow her destiny to the end, even if it leads to places that are best left forgotten.

The balance of power is shifting, with bold new alliances, unknown invaders, and the rumored return of the galaxy's ancient masters. When black-ops spy Amina Azad saves a Hacan ambassador from assassination, she draws him into her investigation of a vast conspiracy: unseen forces are destabilizing the whole galaxy, at the worst possible time. Pursued by agents from dozens of other factions, they can only make progress by allying with their apparent enemies. But even they might be compromised--duped into action by a secret puppet-master. How can they trust an alliance when they can't trust themselves?