Search Worlds Without End

Poul Anderson himself has put together a retrospective collection of his recent writings, fiction and nonfiction, under the title All One Universe. This is the first major Poul Anderson collection in a decade. It encompasses all his strengths as a teller of tales and, in addition, provides a running commentary in the story notes and in the essays on other literary figures such as Rudyard Kipling, Johannes B. Jensen, and John W. Campbell, Jr., commentary that illuminates the fiction, gives personal insight into the mind of this fine writer, and provides a unifying personality for All One Universe. All One Universe, then, represents the new best of Poul Anderson. It is a rich, varied selection of quintessential science fiction as well as four essays, mostly from recent years, by one of the great science fiction writers of the century. His stories are filled with roaring energy, the soul of poetry, and dark imaginings.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (1996) - essay
• Strangers - (1988) - novelette
• Neptune Diary - (1990) - essay
• Requiem for a Universe - (1987) - shortstory
• John Campbell - (1996) - essay
• In Memoriam - (1992) - shortstory
• The House of Sorrows - (1989) - novelette
• Uncleftish Beholding - (1989) - essay
• Losers' Night - (1991) - shortstory
• Science Fiction and History - (1989) - essay
• Rokuro - (1991) - shortstory
• Rudyard Kipling - (1996) - essay
• The Forest - (1985) - novelette
• Johannes V. Jensen - (1981) - essay
• Fortune Hunter - (1972) - shortstory
• Wolfram - (1975) - shortstory
• The Visitor - (1974) - shortstory
• Wellsprings of Dream - essay
• The Voortrekkers - (1974) - novelette

The World of Kinsmen

Family is everything. Talent is power. And revenge is sweet.

In a distant, future world Kinsmen--small powerful groups of genetically and technologically advanced families--control vast financial empires. They are their own country, their own rulers, and their only limits are other Kinsmen. The struggle for power is a bloody, full-contact sport: in business, on the battlefield...and sometimes in the bedroom.

Silent Blade:

Old hatreds die hard. Old love dies harder.

On the planet Rada, Meli Galdes' family is of minor rank, and were relying on her marriage to Celino, the razor-smart, ruthless leader of the powerful Carvanna empire. When he abruptly breaks their engagement, he ruins her family and guarantees that Meli will never marry, as no suitor will oppose the rich and influential Carvannas.

But Meli has a rare, secret, lethal--and valuable--talent. As a melder of energy, she's capable of severing anything in her path. So she 'leaves' her family and trains to become one of the best and most lethal of assassins, all the while covertly guarding her family's interests. Now she's ready to quit; but she has one more assignment.

To kill the man who ruined her life.

Silver Shark:

Claire Shannon is a killer... and her weapon is her mind.

Born on a planet torn by war for over 300 years, Claire is a soldier: a psycher, with the ability to read, control, and destroy the minds of enemy psychers and to infiltrate the biological network where they battle to death.

When Claire's faction loses the war, she barely escapes extermination from both sides, as her talent brands her as too dangerous to society. By so-deeply burying her ability that she avoids detection, Claire is instead deported to Rada as a refugee, where she must find work to remain. She finds a job as personal assistant to Venturo Escana, a premiere kinsman; one of Rada's most wealthy entrepreneurs--and most powerful psychers.

She thought she had left war behind, but now she must hide her skills and her growing feelings from Venturo...and this battle might just cost her everything...

A Mere Formality:

The leader of the fierce Reigh people expires during an intergalactic summit, putting 30 million colonists' lives and livelihoods in jeopardy. When the new heir to the Reigh throne, Lord Nagrad, demands restitution, the phrase "'a life for a life" turns the intergalactic calamity into an arranged marriage contract between Lord Nagrad and sharply intelligent diplomatic analyst Deirdre Lebed... and the negotiation of terms becomes anything but formal!

Here come the Peteys! Vacuum jellyfish the size of small moons, they drift through our solar system like messengers from another universe. Some worship them, others study them, and still others hunt them for their skins, which are more valuable than gold or even oil on the ruined, depleted Earth.

Gunther is a hunter. He knows the rules. He knows the risks. He knows the rewards. What he doesn't know, is that he's being hunted too.

The award-winning Uplift novels comprise one of the greatest achievements in science fiction history. Dramatic, thought-provoking, and inventive, these books describe a fully realized world rich in character, detail, and ideas. Now Uplift author David Brin collaborates with acclaimed artist Kevin Lenagh to compile the definitive guide to the species, societies, and technology of one of the greatest feats of literary world-building ever accomplished.

Here in the form of a handbook for Terran field agents is a detailed look at Uplift's many alien races--from the friendly Tymbrimi to the warlike Tandu, from the wise and enigmatic Kanten to the fiercely reptilian Soro, from the bureaucratic Hoon to the manipulative Thennanin--their physiology, psychology, history; their clans and alliances; and their shifting attitudes toward Earth and its representatives.

Here, too, is a history of Earth's contact and challenging interactions with the mysterious and powerful Civilization of Five Galaxies, a look at its institutions, languages, and customs, plus a time line of momentous events going back 3 billion years. For the millions of fans of the Uplift novels, this long-awaited guide will be an essential reference work, filled with vital information and never-before-seen illustrations that reveal, for the first time in one volume, the keys to the ambitious vision and bold speculation of the Uplift universe.

BUG-EYED MONSTERS ON BROADWAY Pulp SF magazine editor Keith Winton was answering a letter from a teenage fan when the first moon rocket fell back to Earth and blew him away. But where to? Greenville, New York, looked the same, but Bems (Bug-Eyed Monsters) just like the ones on the cover of Startling Stories walked the streets without attracting undue comment. And when he brought out a half-dollar coin in a drugstore, the cops wanted to shoot him on sight as an Arcturian spy. Wait a minute. Seven-foot purple moon-monsters? Earth at war with Arcturus? General Dwight D. Eisenhower in command of Venus Sector? What mad universe was this? One thing was for sure: Keith Winton had to find out fast - or he'd be good and dead, in this universe or any other.

Terry Carr has been called the editor with impeccable taste, the man who knows which stories will be Hugo and Nebula award winners months before he puts them in his justly famous Best SF of the Year series. There are 15 stories in this anthology. Judge for yourself. He is the fantasist of the first rank.

Table of Contents:

• Nice Guys Finish Somewhere in the Middle - essay by Harlan Ellison
• The Dance of the Changer and the Three - (1968) - shortstory
• The Winds at Starmont - (1973) - novella
• Ozymandias - (1972) - shortstory
• Rejoice, Rejoice, We Have No Choice - (1974) - shortstory
• Hop-Friend - (1962) - shortstory
• Touchstone - (1964) - shortstory
• Brown Robert - (1962) - shortstory
• Changing of the Gods - (1973) - novelette
• Stanley Toothbrush - (1962) - shortstory
• The Colors of Fear - (1974) - shortstory
• Sleeping Beauty - (1967) - shortstory
• In His Image - (1973) - shortstory
• The Old Man of the Mountains - (1963) - shortstory
• The Robots Are Here - (1967) - novelette
• They Live on Levels - (1973) - shortstory

General Benjamin Shore was heading for the stars under forged orders - and in defiance of the commands of the President. He was leaving Earth in an untested ship with a crew chosen by neccesity and with nothing but faith to guide him. His only hope was to find habitable worlds in the unexplored reaches of space ahead.

Thus began Man's first mission to the uncharted universe.

Shore had no illusions. Before him lay danger, probable disappointment - even death. But nothing had prepared him for the nightmare he would have to face on the planet of the Gray-Furs... for the menace of the Golden People who had driven all other races from Galactic Center - or for what awaited him if he returned to the world he called home. Either way, the human race was doomed!

Carson is on the East Coast when the electrical grid goes down. Desperate to find Beatrix, a woman on the West Coast who holds his heart, he sets off along a cross-country railroad line, where he encounters lost souls, clever opportunists, and those seeking salvation. Meanwhile, Beatrix and her neighbors begin to construct a cooperative community, working to turn the end of the world into the possibility of a bright beginning.

Without modern means of communication, will Beatrix and Carson be able to find their way to each other? The answer may lie with one fifteen-year-old girl, whose actions could ultimately decide the fate of the lovers.

No one knows the true motives of Kees vaan Loo-Macklin. He's a mastermind criminal who gave up his place at the head of the dark underworld to become a legitimate member of Evenwaith's cities. But soon he was reaching out to powerful enemies--the slimy aliens called the Nuel. Loo-Macklin negotiates an illusory peace agreement and gains precious alien secrets in the process. Is he after peace, power or pure evil? With enemy starships beginning to amass, we won't have to wait long to find out.

When young Ira arrives for her appointment, she is prepared to be transported to The Gateway to Heaven, 6,070 light years away. But the technicians shepherding her through the process fear there's more to it than what's advertised.

Read the full story for free at Tor Reactor.

Twenty-one-year-old Chimal wants desperately to escape his native valley, home to an ancient Aztec civilization sealed off from the outside world. The valley is ruled by priests who enforce despotic laws and perpetuate a life of fear. Chimal escapes and discovers that his world is in fact a vast space ship on a journey from Earth to Proxima Centauri.

The Wit and Wisdom of Robert A. Heinlein, author of multiple New York Times best sellers, on subjects ranging form Crime and Punishment to the Love life of the American Teenager; from Nuclear Power to the Pragmatics of Patriotism; from Prophecy to Destiny; from Geopolitic to Post-Holocaust America; fro the Nature of Courage to the Nature of Reality; it's all here and it's all great-straight from the mind of the finest science fiction writer of them all. But beware: after reading it, you too will occupy an Expanded Universe!

Table of Contents:

• Foreword (Expanded Universe) - (1980) - essay
• Life-Line - [Future History] - (1939) - shortstory
• Successful Operation - (1940) - shortstory
• Blowups Happen - [Future History] - (1940) - novelette
• Solution Unsatisfactory - (1941) - novelette
• The Last Days of the United States - (1980) - essay
• How to Be a Survivor - (1980) - essay
• Pie from the Sky - (1980) - essay
• They Do It With Mirrors - non-genre - (1947) - shortstory
• Free Men - (1966) - novelette
• No Bands Playing, No Flags Flying - (1973) - shortstory
• A Bathroom of Her Own - (1980) - shortstory
• On the Slopes of Vesuvius - (1980) - shortstory
• Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon - (1949) - novelette
• Pandora's Box - (1966) - essay
• Where To? - (1952) - essay
• Cliff and the Calories - (1980) - shortstory
• The Answers - (2005) - essay
• Ray Guns and Rocket Ships - (1952) - essay
• The Third Millennium Opens - (1956) - essay (variant of As I See Tomorrow... The Third Millenium Opens)
• Who Are the Heirs of Patrick Henry? - (1958) - essay
• "Pravda" Means "Truth" - (1960) - essay
• Inside Intourist - (1960) - essay
• Searchlight - [Future History] - (1962) - shortstory
• The Pragmatics of Patriotism - (1973) - essay
• Paul Dirac, Antimatter, and You - (1975) - essay
• Larger Than Life: A Memoir in Tribute to Dr. Edward E. Smith - (1980) - essay
• Spinoff - (1980) - essay
• The Happy Days Ahead - (1980) - essay

This novelette was combined with its sequel, "Common Sense", to form "Orphans of the Sky" in 1963.

The gigantic, cylindrical generation ship Vanguard, originally destined for "Far Centaurus", is cruising without guidance through the interstellar medium as a result of a long-ago mutiny that killed most of the officers. Over time, the descendants of the surviving loyal crew have forgotten the purpose and nature of their ship and lapsed into a pre-technological culture marked by superstition. They come to believe the "Ship" is the entire universe, so that "To move the ship" is considered an oxymoron, and references to the Ship's "voyage" are interpreted as religious metaphor. They are ruled by an oligarchy of "officers" and "scientists". Most crew members are simple illiterate farmers, seldom or never venturing to the "upper decks" where the "muties" (an abbreviation of "mutants" or "mutineers") dwell. Among the crew, all identifiable mutants are killed at birth.

It first appeared in the May, 1941 Issue of Astounding Science Fiction, available on Internet Archives.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, April 2015.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

The stories in The Universe of Things span Jones's career, from "The Eastern Succession," first published in 1988, to the just-published "Collision." Each opens a window into a richly depicted culture in which intelligent, resourceful characters struggle to make sense of the mysteries of their world.

In the introduction by Steven Shaviro, author of Doom Patrols and Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society, Shaviro notes, "As a feminist writer, Jones refuses to accept compromises that leave gender inequities in place--and recognizes how they may well have staved off something worse. And as a science fiction writer, Jones shows deep awareness of how provisional, and fragile, all our acceptances and reconciliations can be, for there are always new potentials, new cultural or technological disruptions in the offing. Jones envisions a future that is different enough from the present that we are forced to recognize the contingency--and changeability--of the things we take most for granted."

Table of Contents:

• iii - Introduction (The Universe of Things) - essay by Steven Shaviro
• 1 - In the Forest of the Queen - (2007) - short story
• 25 - Total Internal Reflection - (2000) - short story
• 28 - Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland - (1996) - short story
• 48 - The Universe of Things - (1993) - short story
• 62 - Blue Clay Blues - (1992) - novelette
• 90 - Grazing the Long Acre - (1998) - short story
• 106 - Collision - [Buonarotti Transit] - (2009) - short story
• 121 - One of Sandy's Dreams - (1988) - short story
• 122 - Gravegoods - (1989) - novelette
• 148 - La Cenerentola - (1998) - short story
• 170 - Grandmother's Footsteps - (1990) - novelette
• 194 - The Early Crossing - (1998) - short story
• 196 - The Eastern Succession - (1988) - novelette
• 225 - The Thief, the Princess, and the Cartesian Circle - (1993) - short story
• 243 - Identifying the Object - (1990) - novelette (variant of Forward Echoes)

Short story translated from Japanese by Toyoda Takashi and Gene van Troyer. The Japanese original appeared in 1981. The first English edition appeared in the anthology Speculative Japan: Outstanding Tales of Japanese Science Fiction and Fantasy (2007) edited by Gene Van Troyer and Grania Davis. It can also be found in the anthology The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Mars-Tube - (1941)
• Trouble in Time - (1940)
• Vacant World - (1940)
• Best Friend - (1941)
• Before the Universe - (1940)
• Nova Midplane - (1940)
• The Extrapolated Dimwit - (1942)
• Afterword

A mild-mannered actuary, Fletcher Weschel lives at the crossroads of Bland and Humdrum--or so he thinks until a cosmic contest catapults him into the fantasy world he made up as a boy. Suddenly his childhood bedroom is aswarm with aliens, all bent on discovering the human who best personifies their mission--in this case, the deeply serious pursuit of fun.

Ejected from the boring comfort of his office chair, Fletcher finds himself astride the bare back of a horse, in front of a safe (that he happens to be cracking), and then... in the cabin of a weight-loss camp for kids? Apparently adventures come in all shapes and sizes, and it's up to Fletcher to make the most of these, conducted by his alien guide, Tandala, who takes on the corporeal form of a big-boned Jamaican and tends to get distracted by Earth's many surprising pleasures (garlic! libraries! love!).

But even fantasies can have consequences, and as Fletcher struggles through them, he is cheered and assisted by Wanda Plum, a plucky second-grade teacher who helps him realize what his ultimate role really is on this highly mysterious, infinitely marvelous pale-blue dot in a vast universe.

Once upon a time the Crown Prince of Jupiter glimpsed a miniature of Esmerelda, Princess of the Sun, and fell instantly in love. But was that really such a good idea?

Read the full story for free at Tor Reactor.

Table of Contents:

• Busy About the Tree of Life - (1988) - novella
• The Heat Death of the Universe - (1967) - shortstory
• The Holland of the Mind - (1969) - novelette
• Instructions for Exiting This Building in Case of Fire - (1985) - shortstory
• Sheep - (1981) - novella

The Outer limit. When man's ambition expanded to fill the solar system, his technology expanded to take him as far as he wanted to go. Technology went on expanding. So did man's ambitions. But there was a danger only dimly suspected, and only poorly comprehended when it began to make itself felt. It was that man's ambition would outleap his imagination; that his technology would outstrip his emotional capacity. It might be that it was just too big, the universe. That there was just too much to of nothing for man to bear.

originally published under the pseudonym K. M. O'Donnell

This collection of all new short fiction by thirteen of today's top science fiction writers represents a memorial to the late Terry Carr and includes contributions by Ursulai K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and Robert Silverberg, among others.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (1988) - essay by Beth Meacham
• House of Bones - (1988) - short story by Robert Silverberg
• Kore 87 - (1988) - short story by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Slack Lankhmar Afternoon Featuring Hisvet - (1988) - short story by Fritz Leiber
• Isosceles - (1988) - short story by Kate Wilhelm
• Transients - (1988) - short story by Carter Scholz
• The Dragon Line - (1988) - short story by Michael Swanwick
• Le Hot Sport - (1988) - short story by R. A. Lafferty
• The Lunatics - (1988) - novelette by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Deadboy Donner and the Filstone Cup - (1988) - short story by Roger Zelazny
• Lukora - (1988) - short story by Gene Wolfe
• At the Double Solstice - (1986) - short story by Gregory Benford
• The Dance of the Changer and the Three - (1968) - short story by Terry Carr
• Last Words about Terry - (1988) - essay by Harlan Ellison

Hugo, Nebula and Sturgeon Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, April-May 2006. The story is included in the collection Ten Sigmas & Other Unlikelihoods (2008) and was later expanded to the full novel The Walls of the Universe (2009).

Collects the renowned author's award-winning horror stories in one chilling volume that takes readers into a dark realm where nothing is what it seems and terror hides in the shadows.

Table of Contents:

• xiii - Preface (Dark Universe: Stories 1951-2001) - (2001) - essay
• xvii - Introduction (Dark Universe: Stories 1951-2001) - (2001) - essay by Christopher Conlon
• 1 - The Underdweller - (1957) - short story (variant of Small World)
• 17 - And Miles to Go Before I Sleep - (1958) - short story
• 25 - One of Those Days - (1962) - short story
• 31 - The Party - (1967) - short story
• 43 - He Kilt It with a Stick - (1968) - short story
• 51 - Violation - (1973) - short story
• 59 - Starblood - (1972) - short story
• 73 - Coincidence - (1974) - short story
• 81 - Kelly, Fredric Michael: 1928-1987 - (1973) - short story
• 89 - Dead Call - (1976) - short story
• 95 - Saturday's Shadow - (1979) - novelette
• 117 - The Partnership - (1980) - short story
• 131 - A Real Nice Guy - (1980) - short story
• 145 - The Pool - (1981) - short story
• 157 - Lonely Train A'Comin' - (1981) - short story (variant of The Train)
• 173 - Fair Trade - (1982) - short story
• 181 - Something Nasty - (1983) - short story
• 193 - Ceremony - (1985) - novelette
• 215 - The Final Stone - (1986) - short story
• 239 - The Halloween Man - (1986) - short story
• 251 - The Yard - (1987) - short story
• 261 - My Name Is Dolly - (1987) - short story
• 267 - Major Prevue Here Tonight - (1989) - short story
• 279 - The Cure - (1988) - short story
• 297 - Stoner - (1989) - short story
• 303 - On 42nd St. - (1989) - short story
• 315 - Gobble, Gobble! - (1990) - short story
• 323 - The Francis File - (1994) - short story
• 333 - Him, Her, Them - (1991) - short story
• 351 - Babe's Laughter - (1991) - short story
• 357 - Vympyre - (1995) - short fiction
• 361 - The Visit - (1992) - short story
• 367 - The Giant Man - (1994) - short story
• 375 - On Harper's Road - (1993) - short story
• 391 - At Diamond Lake - (1994) - short story
• 401 - Boyfren - (1995) - novella (variant of Boyfriend)
• 407 - Fyodor's Law - (1994) - short story
• 419 - An Act of Violence - (1995) - short story
• 429 - A Good Day - (1997) - short story
• 437 - Freak - (2000) - short story
• 447 - Heart's Blood - (2000) - short story

Raffi works in an observational cosmology lab, searching for dark matter and trying to hide how little they understand their own research. Every chance they get, they escape to see Britt, a queer sculptor who fascinates them for reasons they also don't - or won't - understand. As Raffi's carefully constructed life begins to collapse, they become increasingly fixated on the multiverse and the idea that somewhere, there might be a universe where they mean as much to Britt as she does to them... and just like that, Raffi and Britt are thirteen years old, best friends and maybe something more.

In Universes is a mind-bending tour across parallel worlds, each an answer to the question of what life would be like if events had played out just a little differently. The universes grow increasingly strange: women fracture into hordes of animals, alien-infested bears prowl apocalyptic landscapes. But across them all, Raffi reaches for a life that feels authentically their own.

A beautifully illustrated, fascinating exploration of the mysteries of the cosmos and beyond, featuring original fiction by award-winning science fiction authors and essays by the leading scientists in the field. In this book, we gather together the scientists, the intellectuals, and the artists, to learn about and speculate upon the cosmos. The world right now desperately needs both the physicist and the dreamer. G-d has blessed us with the most magnificent world imaginable. We have barely made the first steps in seeing all the light in the darkness. Perhaps it is the dreamer who will find out the nature of dark matter; perhaps it is the scientist who will find solutions to needless hunger and mindless war. For them both, the bounty of the Earth and the cosmos is the currency of hope. Humanity must use what it has been blessed with to survive. Then, as in Paul Simon s phrase, we all might be dancing together with diamonds on the soles of our shoes. They will be the diamonds of the stars and it will be a dance of peace.

Table of Contents:

• Frontier - essay by Byron Preiss
• The Universe: An Introduction - essay by Andrew Fraknoi
• What is the Universe? - essay by Isaac Asimov
• What is the Universe? - interior artwork by Darrel Anderson
• Art and Science Fiction: Unbuilt Cities / Realized Dreams - essay by Ray Bradbury
• Art and Science Fiction: Unbuilt Cities / Realized Dreams - interior artwork by Moebius
• Our Galaxy - essay by Eric J. Chaisson
• Mandikini - shortstory by Gregory Benford
• Mandikini - interior artwork by B. E. Johnson
• Star Birth and Maturity - essay by Martin Cohen
• To Touch a Star - shortstory by Ben Bova
• To Touch a Star - interior artwork by Pat Rawlings
• Supernovae: Creative Catclysms in the Galaxy - essay by David J. Helfand
• The Iron Star - novelette by Robert Silverberg
• The Iron Star [I] - interior artwork by Bob Eggleton
• The Iron Star [II] - interior artwork by Bob Eggleton
• The Black Hole - essay by William J. Kaufmann
• Schwarzschild Radius - shortstory by Connie Willis
• Schwarzschild Radius - interior artwork by Jim Burns
• Galaxies and Clusters - essay by Hyron Spinrad
• Bubbles - shortstory by David Brin
• Bubbles - interior artwork by David A. Cherry
• Quasars and Active Galaxies - essay by Harding E. Smith
• For Thus Do I Remember Carthage - shortstory by Michael Bishop
• For Thus Do I Remember Carthage - interior artwork by John Collier (artist)
• The Intergalactic Medium - essay by Wallace Tucker
• The Man Who Was a Cosmic String - shortstory by Rudy Rucker
• The Man Who Was a Cosmic String - interior artwork by Ron Miller
• Cosmology: The Quest to Understand the Creation and Expansion of the Universe - essay by Allan Sandage
• Requiem for a Universe - shortstory by Poul Anderson
• Requiem for a Universe - interior artwork by John Harris
• The New Physics and the Universe - essay by James Trefil
• All the Hues of Hell - shortstory by Gene Wolfe
• All the Hues of Hell - interior artwork by Kikuo Hayashi
• Who Will Speak for Earth? An Essay on Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Contact - essay by Donald Goldsmith
• The Dark Shadow - shortstory by Frederik Pohl
• The Dark Shadow - interior artwork by Lebbeus Woods

Table of Contents

• In Exorcising Texas: An Introduction - essay by Harlan Ellison
• Back to the Stone Age - shortstory by Jake Saunders
• The Sweetwater Factor - shortstory by Tom Reamy
• Woman Waiting - novelette by Lisa Tuttle
• The Recent Semifinals - shortstory by Robert Lory
• From the Tower of Eridu - shortstory by T. R. Fehrenbach
• Ghost Seas - shortstory by Steven Utley
• Fiddle Ess - novelette by Glenn Lewis Gillette
• The Invasion of Dallas - shortstory by James Sallis
• Story of a Strange Relative - shortstory by Larry Holden
• The Migration - shortstory by Geo. W. Proctor
• Man-Made Self - shortstory by Bruce Sterling
• And Death Once Dead - shortstory by Joseph F. Pumilia
• Every Day in Every Way - novelette by H. H. Hollis
• Community Study - novelette by Chad Oliver
• The Talking - shortstory by Neal Barrett, Jr.
• Unsleeping Beauty and the Beast - shortstory by Howard Waldrop
• The Coming of Bast - poem by Robert E. Howard

A magical boy named Steven has adventures with a team of guardians of humanity. Along the way, he pursues his heroic destiny and tries to perfect his special powers. Believe in Steven!

Elation, compulsion, exploration, love and exquisitely timed bullying, a lascivious oyster, a man called Eggplant, the dangers of smelling like honey pudding, the enticement of innocent toadlets, the unending day of deadness. The daughter of a part-time magician and a Las Vegas showgirl turns to science, destiny points a young man to brassiere design, suddenly orphaned siblings try to protect their most vulnerable, fortunes craze in neighbourhoods living cheek-by-jowl. Unintendeds abound, as life cavorts in all its unclassifiable contrariness.

Table of Contents:

• What I Don't Know and Do About Anna Tambour - (2015) - essay by Jeffrey Ford
• The Oyster and Alice O. - (2011) - short story
• Lab Dancer - (2015) - short fiction
• Strange Incidents in Foreign Parts - (2005) - short story
• Marks and Coconuts - (2013) - short fiction
• The Walking-Stick Forest - (2014) - short story
• The Jeweller of Second-Hand Roe - (2007) - short story
• High Life - (2015) - short fiction
• Baad-hin'jan and the Chickpea - (2015) - short story
• The Eye of Nostradamus Summit - (2010) - short story
• The Old Testacles - (2014) - short story
• Rocket Fantazyor - (2015) - short fiction
• Sincerely, Petrified - (2009) - short fiction
• The Dog Who Wished He'd Never Heard of Lovecraft - (2012) - short story
• Bufo of Oahu: Ukulele Ululatress - (2015) - short story
• How Galligaskins Sloughed the Scourge - (2010) - short story
• There Is No Rice Pudding in the Sea - (2006) - short story
• Dreadnought Neptune - (2010) - short story
• The Shoe in SHOES' Window - (2007) - short story
• The Emperor's Backscratcher - (2005) - short story
• King Wolf - (2012) - short story
• Gladiolus Exposed - (2008) - short story
• Pococurante - (2007) - short story
• The Age of Fish, Post-Flowers - (2008) - short story
• Tap - (2015) - short story
• Bowfin Island - (2013) - short story

Can a story save your life?

Meg Carpenter is broke. Her novel is years overdue. Her cell phone is out of minutes. And her moody boyfriend's only contribution to the household is his sour attitude. So she jumps at the chance to review a pseudoscientific book that promises life everlasting.

But who wants to live forever?

Consulting cosmology and physics, tarot cards, koans (and riddles and jokes), new-age theories of everything, narrative theory, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, and knitting patterns, Meg wends her way through Our Tragic Universe, asking this and many other questions. Does she believe in fairies? In magic? Is she a superbeing? Is she living a storyless story? And what's the connection between her off-hand suggestion to push a car into a river, a ship in a bottle, a mysterious beast loose on the moor, and the controversial author of The Science of Living Forever?

Smart, entrancing, and boiling over with Thomas's trademark big ideas, Our Tragic Universe is a book about how relationships are created and destroyed, how we can rewrite our futures (if not our histories), and how stories just might save our lives.

Contents:

• vii - Introduction (Destination: Universe!) - essay
• 3 - Far Centaurus - (1944) - short story
• 39 - The Monster - (1948) - short story (variant of Resurrection)
• 69 - Dormant - (1948) - short story
• 99 - Enchanted Village - (1950) - short story
• 125 - A Can of Paint - (1944) - short story
• 151 - Defense - (1947) - short story
• 155 - The Rulers - (1944) - short story
• 189 - Dear Pen Pal - (1949) - short story
• 201 - The Sound - [Rull] - (1949) - novelette
• 243 - The Search - (1943) - novelette

"Think what it would mean! To prove that we aren't alone! To find other worlds, other races -- older and wiser than we are! Out on the moon, I hope to find an answer. If we do pick up a signal from space, it will be the great turning point in our history. It will give our lives a meaning." Yet to make his words good, Adam Cave had to break with his family and society, and pit himself against his own world. But once out there on the far side of the moon, where an isolated band kept pushing Earth's call letters into the void, the picture changed startlingly, shockingly. For Cave learned the truth that had been held back from a placid world for so long....

Table of Contents:

• First Love, First Fear (1972)
• Starcrossed (1973)
• Assassins of Air (1973)
• Parks of Rest and Culture (1973)
• The Water Sculptor (1970)
• Rope of Glass (1973)
• Heathen God (1971)
• Interpose (1973)
• The History Machine (1972)
• The Cliometricon (1975)
• Stance of Splendor (1973)
• The Monadic Universe (1972) with Gerald Hull

The Coils of Time

Dr. Henshaw had created what he though was a time travel machine and he had sent guinea pigs through it. But now he needed a human guinea pig to test it with.

Christopher Wilkinson thought the whole idea was absurd, until a book that had been sent through the machine came back with a thumb print on it, the fingerprint of Vanessa, his long lost sweetheart!

So Wilkinson agreed to the experiment. He stood in the white circle facing the machine as it began to gleam and spin, pulling him down through the tortuous coils of time....

Into the Alternate Universe

Others called their expedition a "wild ghost chase." But for Space Commodore John Grimes and the beautiful Sonya Verrill who had initiated the project, it was strictly scientific research. Their trip along the rim of the galaxy in search of two men - two dead men - was also an investigation of the long-puzzling phenomenon of the Rim Ghosts. They would do this by penetrating into alternate universes.

There was only one real problem involved in this study - how to report its results. For once the breakthrough to an alternate world was achieved, there was no known way of getting out....

Operating a bulldozer may be exciting, but it's not normally exciting in the way that Ross Allen found it. The fact that he was a science fiction writer on the side had nothing to do with it. There was something strange about the rock he struck with his machine. Even stranger was what he found inside it. But that was only the beginning. It led him to Orl who was brilliant and likeable, even if a bit odd by human standards. It brought him to Kari who was beautiful, but far different from any woman he'd ever met before. It led him to a world he could never have dreamed up himself.

Contestations over the meaning and practice of sexuality have become increasingly central to cultural self-definition and critical debates over issues of identity, citizenship and the definition of humanity itself. In an era when a religious authority can declare lesbians antihuman while some nations legalise same-sex marriage and are becoming increasingly tolerant of a variety of non-normative sexualities, it is hardly surprising that science fiction, in turn, takes up the task of imagining a diverse range of queer and not-so-queer futures.

The essays in Queer Universes investigate both contemporary and historical practices of representing sexualities and genders in science fiction literature. Queer Universes opens with Wendy Pearson's award-winning essay on reading sf queerly and goes on to include discussions about 'sextrapolation' in New Wave science fiction, 'stray penetration' in William Gibson's cyberpunk fiction, the queering of nature in ecofeminist science fiction, and the radical challenges posed to conventional science fiction in the work of important writers such as Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Joanna Russ. In addition, Queer Universes offers an interview with Nalo Hopkinson and a conversation about queer lives and queer fictions by authors Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge.

Table of Contents:

• 1 - Introduction (Skyrocket Steel Conquers the Universe and Other Media Tales) - essay
• 3 - Street Magic - (1984) - short story
• 23 - Hello from Hollywood - [Max Kearny] - (1983) - short story
• 47 - Crusoe in New York - (1982) - short story
• 61 - Skyrocket Steele Conquers the Universe - [Skyrocket Steele] - (1985) - short story
• 81 - Groucho - (1981) - short story

Table of Contents:

• 1 - Introduction (Nine Hard Questions About the Nature of the Universe) - essay
• 7 - Snowbirds - (1982) - short story
• 21 - Soldier, Sailor - short story
• 37 - Kings of the Afternoon - (1980) - short story
• 55 - Tommy and the Talking Dog - (1982) - short story
• 67 - Omphalos - short story
• 71 - Promises - (1982) - short story
• 75 - Dancers - (1987) - short story
• 87 - Plague - (1983) - short story
• 93 - Nine Hard Questions about the Nature of the Universe - (1983) - novelette

Sleator's most diabolical science-fiction novel in a decade.

William Sleator, of such classics as House of Stairs, Strange Attractors, Interstellar Pig, and Singularity, explores the strange, fascinating quantum world in this gothic sci-fi thriller. From their isolated house, fourteen-year-old Susan and her wheelchair-bound brother, Gary, venture daily into the tangled, sprawling garden planted by their late uncle and tended by a mysterious gardener. Overgrown with impossibly large plants and exotic flowers, the garden holds at its heart a hedge maze that hides a quantum secret, outside the laws of the macro world. And Susan and Gary may not return from the labyrinth unchanged. AUTHOR BIO: For more than thirty years, William Sleator has thrilled readers with his inventive books. His House of Stairs was named one of the best novels of the twentieth century by the Young Adult Library Services Association. He divides his time between homes in Boston and rural Thailand.

The World of Null-A

It is the year 2650 and Earth has become a world of non-Aristotelianism, or Null-A. This is the story of Gilbert Gosseyn, who lives in that future world where the Games Machine, made up of twenty-five thousand electronic brains, sets the course of people's lives. Gosseyn isn't even sure of his own identity, but realizes he has some remarkable abilities and sets out to use them to discover who has made him a pawn in an interstellar plot.

The Universe Maker

Did you ever hear of the Inter-Time Society for Psychological Adjustments? Well, neither had Morton Cargill in 1953 when he accidentally killed a girl. A year later that very girl turned up, apparently alive, and announced that the mysterious society had condemned him to death! Cargill's astounding adventures began when he escaped the execution chamber to find himself in the far future. Three conflicting societies were hunting for him, to use him in their own desperate schemes. There were the Floaters, a nation of aerial vagabonds. There were the Tweeners, who dreamed of world conquest. And finally, interwoven through everything, were the sinister figures of the Shadow Men-supermen without visible substance.

National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award winner Charles Yu delivers his debut novel, a razor-sharp, ridiculously funny, and utterly touching story of a son searching for his father . . . through quantum space–time.

Minor Universe 31 is a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction, where paradox fluctuates like the stock market, lonely sexbots beckon failed protagonists, and time travel is serious business. Every day, people get into time machines and try to do the one thing they should never do: change the past. That’s where Charles Yu, time travel technician—part counselor, part gadget repair man—steps in. He helps save people from themselves. Literally. When he’s not taking client calls or consoling his boss, Phil, who could really use an upgrade, Yu visits his mother (stuck in a one-hour cycle of time, she makes dinner over and over and over) and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. Accompanied by TAMMY, an operating system with low self-esteem, and Ed, a nonexistent but ontologically valid dog, Yu sets out, and back, and beyond, in order to find the one day where he and his father can meet in memory. He learns that the key may be found in a book he got from his future self. It’s called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and he’s the author. And somewhere inside it is the information that could help him—in fact it may even save his life.

Wildly new and adventurous, Yu’s debut is certain to send shock waves of wonder through literary space–time.

Asimov's Readers' Award Finalist Novella

In a future where massive online multiplayer videogame characters are sentient composites of real people, one character decides they’ve had enough of being used for worldbuilding scenery, and makes plans to use a flaw in the operating system to escape to a safe place that's only rumored to exist.

This story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, September-October 2018. The story is included in the collection The Best of Greg Egan (2019).

Read this story for free at Asimov's.

The AIs who escaped from Sludgenet's control in 3-Adica now face a different threat; Sludgenet is going out of business, and they're utterly dependent on its hardware resources.

This story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, March-April 2019. The story is included in the collection The Best of Greg Egan (2019).

Table of Contents:

• 1 - Into the Alternate Universe
• 167 - Contraband from Otherspace

A love out of time. A spaceship built of secrets and murder.

Seventeen-year-old Amy joins her parents as frozen cargo aboard the vast spaceship Godspeed and expects to awaken on a new planet, three hundred years in the future. Never could she have known that her frozen slumber would come to an end fifty years too soon and that she would be thrust into the brave new world of a spaceship that lives by its own rules.

Amy quickly realizes that her awakening was no mere computer malfunction. Someone-one of the few thousand inhabitants of the spaceship-tried to kill her. And if Amy doesn't do something soon, her parents will be next.

Now Amy must race to unlock Godspeed's hidden secrets. But out of her list of murder suspects, there's only one who matters: Elder, the future leader of the ship and the love she could never have seen coming.

Godspeed was fueled by lies. Now it is ruled by chaos.

It's been three months since Amy was unplugged. The life she always knew is over. And everywhere she looks, she sees the walls of the spaceship Godspeed. But there may just be hope: Elder has assumed leadership of the ship. He's finally free to enact his vision - no more Phydus, no more lies.

But when Elder discovers shocking news about the ship, he and Amy race to discover the truth behind life on Godspeed. They must work together to unlock a puzzle that was set in motion hundreds of years earlier, unable to fight the romance that's growing between them and the chaos that threatens to tear them apart.

In book two of the Across the Universe trilogy, New York Times bestselling author Beth Revis mesmerizes us again with a brilliantly crafted mystery filled with action, suspense, romance, and deep philosophical questions. And this time it all builds to one mind-bending conclusion: They have to get off this ship.

The final book in the New York Times bestselling trilogy, perfect for fans of Battlestar Gallactica and Prometheus!

Amy and Elder have finally left the oppressive walls of the spaceship Godspeed behind. They're ready to start life afresh--to build a home--on Centauri-Earth, the planet that Amy has traveled 25 trillion miles across the universe to experience.

But this new Earth isn't the paradise Amy had been hoping for. There are giant pterodactyl-like birds, purple flowers with mind-numbing toxins, and mysterious, unexplained ruins that hold more secrets than their stone walls first let on. The biggest secret of all? Godspeed's former passengers aren't alone on this planet. And if they're going to stay, they'll have to fight.

Amy and Elder must race to discover who--or what--else is out there if they are to have any hope of saving their struggling colony and building a future together. They will have to look inward to the very core of what makes them human on this, their most harrowing journey yet. Because if the colony collapses? Then everything they have sacrificed--friends, family, life on Earth--will have been for nothing.

FUELED BY LIES.
RULED BY CHAOS.
ALMOST HOME.

From Every Storm is a chapbook compilation of three Liaden Universe® stories, one of them never before published. The storms of the title spring not so much from the desert or the deep blue sea but from the minds and hearts of humanity, where greed wars with truth and justice, and where sometimes the supposed end of storm is a mere hurricane eye portending greater potential for damage ahead.

First up is Standing Orders, a finalist for 2022's WSFA's Small Press Award for Short Fiction, originally published in Derelict, a 2021 ZNB anthology. What happens at the end of a war that no one really won, where victory came at the price of acting more like the enemy than the High Command ever should?

Next is the previously unissued Songs of the Fathers a story dealing with Shan yos'Galan's sometime trade partner Lomar Fasholt and her family as they struggle to follow her Mother's religion as it morphs from loving to acquisitive, from flexible to aggressively rule-bound. Lomar's a good mother and wife but her self-exiled family's suffered greatly through this storm of changes. Will they find hope amidst the tumult?

Finally, there's From Every Storm a Rainbow, the 2021 holiday story from Baen.com, wherein Sinit Caylon comes face to face with the perfidy of her absent brother while the accountant's guild is trying to help Clan Mizel come about after years of of her mother's abdication of responsibilities to Ran Eld. Sinit thinks the storm must be about over until it become obvious that between them her mother and brother may have fatally endangered the clan's brightest future.

Ridley Scott's 1979 Alien has attained classic status and is one of the most analysed films by scholars. But until now, there have been no published studies of its audiences. This book presents the findings of a major project exploring how different kinds of viewers engage with the film. Based on over 1,000 responses, the authors uncover some surprising patterns and tendencies. These disclose, among other things, the remarkable role played by parents and other relatives in 'gifting' the film to their children, raising important questions about the idea of 'age-inappropriate' viewing, a fascinating ambiguity over the role of 'acting' in the notorious 'chestburster scene' and an important shift in the way audiences see Alien as 'more than just a film' once imitations and parodies become prevalent. Some particularly long and rich responses reveal how this film can go on arousing strong visceral responses, even after repeated viewings. Richly illustrated with quotations, this book will shift current understandings of horror film audiences.

An original young adult novel of the Alien universe

Olivia and her twin sister Viola have been dragged around the universe for as long as they can remember. Their parents, both xenobiologists, are always in high demand for their research into obscure alien biology.

Just settled on a new colony world, they discover an alien threat unlike anything they've ever seen. And suddenly the sisters' world is ripped apart.

On the run from terrifying aliens, Olivia's knowledge of xenobiology and determination to protect her sister are her only weapons as the colony collapses into chaos. But then a shocking family secret bursts open -- one that's as horrifying to Olivia as the aliens surrounding them.

The creatures infiltrate the rich wildlife on this untouched colony world -- and quickly start adapting. Olivia's going to have to adapt, too, if she's going to survive...

The Covenant mission is the most ambitious endeavor in the history of Weyland-Yutani. A ship bound for Origae-6, carrying two thousand colonists beyond the limits of known space, this is make-or-break investment for the corporation--and for the future of all mankind.

Yet there are those who would die to stop the mission. As the colony ship hovers in Earth orbit, several violent events reveal a deadly conspiracy to sabotage the launch. While Captain Jacob Branson and his wife Daniels complete their preparations, security chief Daniel Lopé recruits the final key member of his team. Together they seek to stop the perpetrators before the ship and its passengers can be destroyed.

An original novel by the acclaimed ALAN DEAN FOSTER, author of the groundbreaking Alien novelization, Origins is the official chronicle of the events that led up to Alien: Covenant. It also reveals the world the colonists left behind.

Ridley Scott returns to the universe he created, with Alien: Covenant, a new chapter in his groundbreaking Alien adventure.

The crew of the colony ship Covenant, bound for a remote planet on the far side of the galaxy, discovers what they think is an uncharted paradise. But it is actually a dark, dangerous world. When they uncover a threat beyond their imaginations, they must attempt a harrowing escape.

Acclaimed author Alan Dean Foster also returns to the universe he first encountered with the official novelization of the original Alien film. Alien: Covenant is the pivotal adventure that preceded that seminal film, and leads to the events that will yield one of the most terrifying sagas of all time.

A dramatic new Alien novel, as Weyland-Yutani seeks to recover from the failure of Hadley's Hope, and successfully weaponize the Xenomorphs.

With the failure of Hadley's Hope, Weyland-Yutani has suffered a devastating setback--the loss of the Aliens they aggressively sought to exploit. Yet there's a reason the Company has risen to the top of the food chain. True to form, they have a redundancy already in place... the facility known as The Cold Forge.

Remote station RB-232 has become their greatest asset in weaponizing the Xenomorphs. However, when Dorian Sudler is sent to RB-232 to assess their progress, he discovers that there's a spy aboard--someone who doesn't necessarily act in the company's best interests. For Dorian, this is the most unforgivable of sins. When found, the perpetrator will be eliminated with extreme prejudice. If unmasked, though, this person may be forced to destroy the entire station... and everyone on board. That is, if the Xenomorphs don't do the job first...

A crew of spaceship Nostromo is suddenly woken up from a cryogenic sleep because of mysterious signals coming from an unknown planet and received by a ship computer. The astronauts land on the planet surface and go to investigate an alien spaceship where one of them is attacked by an alien which fasten itself on his face. When the crew returns to their ship and abandon the planet, nobody forefeels that the real horror will begin very soon...

In the sequel to the 1979 film Alien, Ellen Ripley is persuaded to return to planet LV-426, where her crew encountered the hostile Alien creature. There they discovered hundreds of eggs, and just one alien slaughtered everyone but Ripley. A colony has been established there, but suddenly all contact with the settlers has been lost. This time she's accompanied by a unit of Colonial Marines, but even their firepower may not be enough for them to survive and learn the fate of the colony known as Hadley's Hope.

Fury 161 is a wretched planet – a penal colony and industrial complex manned by violent prisoners. When an escape pod from the USS Sulaco crash-lands there, Ellen Ripley appears to be the only passenger left alive.

Then inmates begin to die, all at the hands of another survivor. A creature which encounters Ripley, and spares her life! Desperate to know why, she seeks out an answer – and discovers terror unlike any she's ever known.

Science fiction master Alan Dean Foster returns to the Alien universe to reveal the ultimate destinies of Ellen Ripley and her eternal foe, the xenomorph known as the Alien.

This is the official adaptation of the original screenplay for Alien 3, written by William Gibson, the award-winning science fiction author of the cyberpunk cult classic Neuromancer. You'll see familiar characters and places – but not all is the same in this horrifying Cold War thriller.

After the deadly events of the film Aliens, the spaceship Sulaco carrying the sleeping bodies of Ripley, Hicks, Newt, and Bishop are intercepted by the Union of Progressive Peoples. What the U.P.P. forces don't expect is another deadly passenger that is about to unleash chaos between two governmental titans intent on developing the ultimate cold war weapon of mass destruction.

At the farthest reaches of the solar system, Ellen Ripley awakens on board the space station Auriga. Her last memory is of her own fiery death. And yet she is somehow alive. Ripley discovers that her "resurrection" is a result of an incredible experiment which has altered both her and the creature she has been carrying. To combat the incalculable alien menace, she teams up with a renegade band of space smugglers.

A direct sequel to Aliens and Alien 3--Weyland-Yutani, the Colonial Marines, and Bishop's creator all pursue the android for the deadly Xenomorph data contained in his brain...

"Do me a favor. Disconnect me. I could be reworked, but I'll never be top of the line again. I'd rather be nothing." Lance Bishop, model 341-B, on Fiorina 161

The USCSS Patna has been found.

Although the synthetic Bishop asked to be shut down forever, his creator has other plans. Michael Bishop seeks the Xenomorph knowledge stored in the android's mind, and brings Bishop back to life--but for what reason? No longer an employee of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, Michael tells his creation that he seeks to advance medical research for the benefit of humanity. Yet where does he get the resources needed to advance his work, and with whom do his new allegiances lie?

The USCSS Patna is pursued by Colonial Marines Captain Marcel Apone, commander of the Il Conde and younger brother of Master Sergeant Alexander Apone, one of the casualties of the doomed mission to LV-426. Also on his trail are the "Dog Catchers," commandos employed by Weyland-Yutani.

There are many who would profit from Lance Bishop's intimate knowledge of the deadliest creatures in the galaxy.

In a dramatic twist, this novel will return us to that time, to Ellen Ripley, and to never-before-revealed secrets of the Weyland-Yutani Corporations... secrets which launch a terrifying new adventure that bridges the gap between Alien and Aliens.

Officially sanctioned and true to the Alien canon, Alien: Out of the Shadows expands upon the well-loved mythos and is a must for all Alien fans.

As a deputy commissioner for the ICC, Alan Decker's job is to make sure the settlements on LV178 follow all the rules, keeping the colonists safe. But the planet known as New Galveston holds secrets, lurking deep beneath the toxic sands dubbed the Sea of Sorrows.

The Weyland-Yutani Corporation has secrets of its own, as Decker discovers when he is forced to join a team of mercenaries sent to investigate an ancient excavation. Somewhere in that long-forgotten dig lies the thing the company wants most in the universe--a living Xenomorph.

Decker doesn't understand why they need him, until his own past comes back to haunt him. Centuries ago, his ancestor fought the Aliens, launching a bloody vendetta that was never satisfied. That was when the creatures swore revenge on the Destroyer... Ellen Ripley.

When Ellen Ripley finally returns to Earth, she learns that the planet LV-426--now called Acheron--has been colonized. But LV-426 is where Ripley and the crew of the Nostromo found the original Xenomorph--the killing machine known as the Alien.

Protected by the Colonial Marines, the colonists seek to terraform the storm-swept planet. Two such residents are Anne and Russell Jorden, seeking a fortune that eluded them on Earth. On Acheron, Anne gives birth to the colony's first newborn. Rebecca Jordan, also known as Newt.

The wildcatters discover a vast, decaying spaceship. The horseshoe-shaped vessel is of particular interest to Weyland-Yutani, and may be the answer to their dreams. But what Anne and Russ find on board proves to be the stuff, not of dreams, but of nightmares.

This exquisitely produced, Smythe-sewn, embossed hardcover volume features an Aliens tale written by today's master of horror comics, Steve Bissette, accompanied by 24 full-color paintings by the most sought-after painter in the field, Dave Dorman.

An Alien has been detected on board a space station orbiting Earth, and a crack extermination team sets out to destroy it. The success of their mission depends on one man's sinister secret.

The story is presented in the traditional text format accompanied by full-page color paintings by Dorman. This book also features a dust jacket illustrated by Dorman.

Wilks was a space marine with a near-fatal flaw: he had a heart. Billie was a child, the only survivor of a far-flung colony outpost. Thrown together in the last hellish night of an alien invasion, Billie and Wilks helped each other get out alive. Thirteen years later Wilks is in prison, and Billie lives in a mental institution, the nightmare memories of the massacre at Rim seared into her mind.

Now the government has tapped Wilks to lead an expedition to the aliens' home planet to bring back a live alien. But the competition on Earth to develop the aliens as a new weapons system is brutal. When Wilks's team departs on their mission, a trained assassin trails them. And what follows is no less than guerrilla warfare on the aliens' planet - and alien conquest on Earth!

Wilks, Billie, and Bueller were the last survivors of a devastating assault on the aliens' home planet. But once their retum to the solar system made them refugees once more, fleeing Earth and its alien infestation in a desperate attempt to stay alive. Now, in an otherwise unmanned military transport, they hurtle through space. Destination: unknown.

Little do they know that the cargo they carry with them is a legacy of death that they will ultimately have to face. Nor do they know that they head toward a remote colony and military outpost. This pocket of humanity at the very edges of space is at the mercy of a general names Spears with an agenda all his own. Now Billie, Wilks, and Bueller face a new nightmare, and it is nothing they could ever have imagined: a gift of madness from an alien world, unbalanced mind, and the experiences of a mysterious pilot named Lieutenant Ellen Ripley.

Billie only wanted what all children want -- the warmth and security of family, the human connectedness that comes from belonging. What she got was a nightmare without end.

Ripley is a leader of humanity's forces against a new invasion where aliens have overrun the Earth--and the human population has been abandoned to alien appetites.

Their queen is dead and the hive mind has been left to flounder on its own. On a world bereft of its only guiding force a schism is taking place: two strains of alien, formerly united by one all-powerful mother, now divide their forces for a world-shattering, acid-drenched war.

On Earth, after a generation of rebuilding in the wake of alien infestation, athletes from every corner of the world are flocking to humanity's Goodwill Games. But some come with a dangerous new tool: a drug called Fire, distilled from the very essence of the aliens' body chemistry. The military wants it, Pharmaceutical kingpin Daniel Grant wants it. And the only place the essential ingredient can be found is on a world convulsed by alien holocaust.

This time the humans are taking the offensive! Stan Myakovsky is a once-famous scientist fallen on hard times. Now he dodges spaceship repo men and dreams of the marketability of his cybernetic ant. Then a woman named Julie Lish walks into his life. She is beautiful, mysterious, and totally amoral. She is also skilled in the arts of thievery and Oriental self-defense. What's more, she has a plan so outrageous there might be one chance in a million to pull it off.

Together Stan and Julie become the most unlikely pair of pirates in the universe. With a hijacked spaceship and a crew of hardcase misfits, they're searching for the ultimate pot of gold at the end of a bloody intergalactic rainbow: royal jelly from an alien hive. The only problem is that the fortune lies on the universe's most godforsaken planet. And once they get their hands on it, the'll have to fight their way past the aliens to get off the planet alive.

Professor Ernst Kliest wants to create a tame alien by genetically engineering creatures with the violence bred out of them. Alas, his dream withers when spies infiltrate the base to steal his research and his supposedly tame creation goes on a murderous rampage, killing humans and aliens alike.

Colonel Doctor Paul Church has discovered that aliens communicate telepathically and that human will can alter an alien's behavior. Colonel Doctor Tony Crespi is happy to be in on the action--until he discovers the truth. Church's experiments are only a front for one of the most warped projects ever, one that could turn the toughest of Army stomachs.

New York City, 2124: The streets are clogged with the Jelly-addicted and the homeless, while the elite cluster in glittering office towers. Among them: the ruthless head of an entertainment conglomerate who seeks revenge by giving a maniacal artist his ultimate desire - an alien.

Damon Eddington will shock the world with his newest composition, the Symphony of Hate. Wrapped within its bizarre music can be found the most tortured of human sounds, combined with the razor-steel screams of a Homeworld alien. Yet the supreme cry continues to elude him and, obsessed with complete his musical creation and controlled by his need for the life-form's harshest voice, Eddington knows that the sound he seeks lies deep inside the ruthless creature he has named Mozart. And he will stop at nothing to free it....

It is called a Berserker teamreckless, desperate volunteers recruited by the Company to destroy alien infestations.

Based on the spaceship Nemesis, it consists of three brutal ex-cons who do all the grunt work and the Berserker itself, code-named MAX: an armed and armored exoskeleton powered by the living brain of what was once a human, configured into an unstoppable killing machine.

When the Nemesis is sent to a massive space station, D.S. 949, the team finds an alien hive, the largest in history, with nearly a thousand hapless humans cocooned and incubated. The team mission: to destroy the aliens while leaving the terminal intact. The mission seems like suicide to the bug hunters and their small support staff. And that is perfectly fine for the Company... which wants no witnesses left to the terrifying secret of D.S. 949.

THE ADVENTURES OF ELLEN RIPLEY CONTINUE!

Nearly three centuries ago, the Wyland-Yutani starship Nostromo investigated what appeared to be a distress call emanating from the barren planet Acheron.

What the crew of the Nostromo found was an alien life form-a hidious, slavering killer, quicker and more powerful than anything known before. Only Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley managed to escape with her life, destroying the Nostromo rather than giving the monster a chance to reach Earth.

But she hadn't seen the last of the breed. Now, centuries after the death of the original Ripley, her clone has taken up the fight. And she has found, with the help of an android named Call, a brutal hired gun named Johner, and a paraplegic mechanic named Vrless, that there is more to the alien horror than meets the eye...

In an inhospitable galaxy, the planet Rosamond 6 is a rare find. With a moon, an atmosphere, and a thriving bio-system the world has all the keys necessary for human habitation. But while Rosamond 6 may look like an oasis among the stars, it harbors a fatal secret: the world is infested with the murderous xenomorphic aliens that have wiped out every life form in their path. Eager to prove her theory that the aliens can be reasoned with, anthropologist Jocasta Malvaux has set up an observation post on Rosamond 6.

But when the monsters become aware of Malvaux and her expedition, something unexpected happens: the aliens don't attack. When Jocasta's son Rory races to the planet to save her, she won't leave. What is the secret behind the aliens' seeming lack of concern for the humans? Are the monsters evolving? Or is it simply a matter of time before every person on the planet is in a fight for their lives? The war is about to begin.

On the spaceship Umiak, an elite troupe of cadets is forced into servitude by an unscrupulous captain taking the ship to a smuggler's rendezvous. During the transaction aboard the eerily silent Virginia, the cadets unwittingly transport an unexpected cargo: a hive of hibernating aliens. As the aliens begin to awake, a terrifying battle erupts between the cadets, the smugglers, the captain, and the emergent monsters. The cadets soon realize that in space, no one can hear them scream.

Someone on Earth knew about the aliens. Someone battled them, and survived. Before Ripley, there was a first encounter. Aliens and humans have fought before! When a human spaceship discovers a vast egg-shaped vessel in Saturn's orbit, the crew powers in to investigate. Thinking the ship might contain usable metal for Earth, they force their way aboard. Three teams split up to explore the ship. Already the aliens have awoken. The first of all the battles unfolds.

Thomas Chase wakes up from cryosleep to his first day at a new job - as a pilot for a contraband drug company dropping a shipment on Fantasia, a rock-planet terraformed to hide an elaborate drug manufacturing operation. Everything from synthetic heroin to MX7 is cooked here, in protected caves guard-dogged by the savage Aliens. When Chase's craft touches down on Fantasia, a chain of events begins that can not be stopped.

As criminals and competitors try to take over the drug-empire from the dangerous kingpin, Chase and his brother Pete are caught in the crossfire... with the Aliens adding blood to the mix.

After thirty years of cryogenic sleep, Detective Anders Kramm awakens to a changed world. The alien threat has been subdued. Company interests dominate universal trade. Terraforming is big money now, with powerful men willing to do anything to assure dominance over other worlds.

But Kramm has a secret. He knows why The Company killed twelve of its top scientists. He knows why the aliens have been let loose on the surface of a contested planet. He knows that the information he has is valuable, and that The Company will do everything it can to stop him from telling his secret to the world. Haunted by memories of the brutal murder of his family, Kramm is set adrift amid billion dollar stakes... with aliens around every corner, waiting for him to make a mistake!

If an alien creature can so perfectly imitate a human being that not only is it physically and mentally indistinguishable from a man but it actually believes itself to be one, what do you do with it? Is it human?

This is the question which confronts Alex Stordahl, supervisor of the harsh planet Marilyn. Initially nobody had suspected anything unusual about the largely reptilian animal life. Then Stordahl discovered the amorphs - shapeless in their natural state, but possessing a unique defence mechanism: when closely approached by a possible aggressor, they could adopt the form least likely to be attacked by the creature.

When it transpires that the creatures are harmless they are quickly absorbed into the colony to provide extra labour. The the ruthless owner of the development corporation arrives from Earth. He wants to test the amorphs, and brings with him a group of four brilliant, but totally egotistical men. And trouble soon starts...

Once every fifty-two years Arcadia's six erratic moons come together in a constellation that plays havoc with the ecological balance of the planet.

As a marine biologist at Riverside Research Centre, Mark Swindon is chiefly concerned about the effect of catastrophic tides on his precious fish pens.

Then, without warning, a wave of motiveless violence sweeps through the normally sleepy colony - and Mark too feels himself drawn against his will into a mysterious cycle of death and rebirth.

The planet of Arcadia was on the verge of economic collapse -- its human colony decimated by the Relay Effect. More and more colonists leaving for other worlds. Then the Hetherington Organisation came up with an offer the Arcadians couldn't refuse -- a five-year plan to transform the planet into a new prosperity.

A power-driven young woman has just one chance to secure the status she craves and regain priceless lost artifacts prized by her people. She must free their thief from a prison planet from which no one has ever returned.

Ingray and her charge will return to her home world to find their planet in political turmoil, at the heart of an escalating intergalactic conflict. Together, they must make a new plan to salvage Ingray's future, her family, and her world, before they are lost to her for good.

The mystery of a missing translator sets three lives on a collision course that will have a ripple effect across the stars...

Qven was created to be a Presger translator. The pride of their Clade, they always had a clear path before them: learn human ways, and eventually, make a match and serve as an intermediary between the dangerous alien Presger and the human worlds. The realization that they might want something else isn't "optimal behavior". I's the type of behavior that results in elimination.

But Qven rebels. And in doing so, their path collides with those of two others. Enae, a reluctant diplomat whose dead grandmaman has left hir an impossible task as an inheritance: hunting down a fugitive who has been missing for over 200 years. And Reet, an adopted mechanic who is increasingly desperate to learn about his genetic roots--or anything that might explain why he operates so differently from those around him.

As a Conclave of the various species approaches--and the long-standing treaty between the humans and the Presger is on the line--the decisions of all three will have ripple effects across the stars.

Masterfully merging space adventure and mystery, and a poignant exploration about relationships and belonging, Translation State is a triumphant new standalone story set in the celebrated Imperial Radch universe.

"Night's Slow Poison" is from the same universe as Leckie's Ancillary series, and tells a rich, claustrophobic story of a galactic voyage that forces one guardsmen to confront his uneasy family history through the lens of a passenger with his lost lover's eyes. Anthologized in Galactic Empires (2017), edited by Neil Clarke.

Read this story online for free at Electric Velocipede.

Read this story online for free at Tor.com.

"She Commands Me and I Obey" is a haunting story of a ball-game sports tournament where the stakes are much higher than merely winning a trophy.

Read this story online for free at Strange Horizons (part 1) (part 2).

On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest.

Breq is both more than she seems and less than she was. Years ago, she was the Justice of Toren -- a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of corpse soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy.

An act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with only one fragile human body. And only one purpose -- to revenge herself on Anaander Mianaai, many-bodied, near-immortal Lord of the Radch.

Breq -- the soldier who used to be a spaceship -- is serving the emperor she swore to destroy. She's been given her own warship, her own crew, and ordered to the only place in the galaxy she would have agreed to go: to Athoek Station, to protect the family of the lieutenant she murdered in cold blood.

Athoek was annexed by the Empire some 600 years ago, and by now everyone is fully 'civilised'. Or should be - but everything is not as tranquil as it appears. Old divisions are still troublesome, Athoek Station's AI is restless, and it looks like the alien Presger might have taken an interest in what's going on. With no guarantees that their interest is benevolent.

For a moment, things seem to be under control for the soldier known as Breq. Then a search of Atheok Station's slums turns up someone who shouldn't exist -- someone who might be an ancillary from a ship that's been hiding beyond the empire's reach for three thousand years. Meanwhile, a messenger from the alien and mysterious Presger empire arrives -- as does Breq's enemy, the divided and quite possibly insane Anaander Mianaai, ruler of an empire at war with itself.

Anaander is heavily armed and extremely unhappy with Breq. She could take her ship and crew and flee, but that would leave everyone at Athoek in terrible danger. Breq has a desperate plan. The odds aren't good, but that's never stopped her before.

For fifteen years, Earth has had a scientific station on an exoplanet orbiting Gliese 876, humanity's only presence outside the Solar System. But a new and powerful telescope at L5 can detect no evidence of Phaeton Base, even though it should be able to do so. So the US has sent Colonel Bradley Elliott, USAF, to investigate. Twenty years before, Elliott was the first, and to date only, man to land on the Martian surface. What he discovered there gave the US the stars, but it might also be responsible for the disappearance of Phaeton Base...

The first collection by writer Matthew Hughes, and the perfect companion to his acclaimed novel Black Brillion, The Gist Hunter and Other Stories features nine stories taking place in the universe of The Archonate, as well as four non-series stories. The stories of Henghis Hapthorn, Old Earth's "foremost freelance discriminator", combine mystery and science fantasy while simultaneously recalling the arch irony of Gene Wolfe and the sly fancies of Jack Vance.

Table of Contents:

• From the Discourses and Edifications of Liw Osfeo
• Mastermindless - [Henghis Hapthorn] - (2004)
• Relics of the Thim - [Henghis Hapthorn] - (2004)
• Falberoth's Ruin - [Henghis Hapthorn] - (2004)
• Finding Sajessarian - [Henghis Hapthorn] - (2005)
• The Gist Hunter - [Henghis Hapthorn] - (2005)
• Thwarting Jabbi Gloond - [Henghis Hapthorn] - (2005)
• A Little Learning - [Guth Bandar] - (2003)
• Inner Huff - [Guth Bandar] - (2005)
• Help Wonted - [Guth Bandar]
• Shadow Man
• The Devil You Don't - (2005)
• Go Tell the Phoenicians - (2005)
• Bearing Up - (1996)

Boro Harkless has devoted his life to the service of the Archonite Bureau of Security, the force tasked with keeping the peace among and within the city-states of Old Earth. An idealist driven by the memory of his heroic father, he comes to the city of Sherit, seeking the notorious Luff Imbry.

Luff Imbry has devoted his life to the enjoyment of wealth. A gourmet, a charmer, and an ever-so-stylish fop, he has come to the city of Sherit to pursue a new fortune. Not, mind you, his own, for Luff is also a mountebank, swindler, and forger of the first water.

Tossed together by circumstance, they form an uneasy truce when they discover a common goal: capturing the grandest con-man of them all, Horselan Gebbling. Gebbling, who made off with Imbry's previous fortune, is posing as Father Olwyn, Sacerdotal Eminence of the Assembly of Tangible Unity, and has chosen as his prey the victims of the first new disease in millennia, the invariably fatal ailment known as the lassitude.

Dangled in front of the victims is the fabled relic of past glories, the gemstone called black brillion. About black brillion, learned men agree on only two things: it can do anything, and it doesn't exist. But Gebbling boasts of having it, and its effects on the lassitude are nothing short of magical.

Riding a landship across the unnatural prairie known as the Swept, Boro and Luff get caught up in an ever-growing tangle of mysteries. Nonsense chants lead to miracle cures. Guests end up crushed beneath the ship's giant wheels. The crew have secrets of their own.

The dangers are not merely physical. On the ship is a noönaut, an explorer of the Commons, the dream realm which contains the memories and emotions of hundreds of thousands of years of human existence. Something in the Commons is calling to Boro to claim him for its own.

What lurks beneath the Swept? What hides within the Commons, eager to come out? And exactly what game is Gebbing playing?

When professional duelist Conn Labro escapes indentured servitude as the star player of Horder's Emporium, he abandons the gaming world of Thrais and sets out on an interstellar journey filled with murder, deceit, and self-discovery. His only friend on Thrais, discovered dead and tortured, left him enough money to buy himself out of his contract and a curious encrypted "bearer deed" to a mysterious property on the distant edge of the galactic Spray.

With the seductive, secretive showgirl Jenore Mordene at his side and a villainous pleasure cult dogging his every move, Labro sets out to learn the truth behind his bearer deed and more about his own past than he had ever dared bargain for.

Science Fiction Book Club release, containing the full and unabridged text of Fools Errant and Fool Me Twice.

In the Penultimate Age of the Archonate, callow young fop Filidor Vesh is perfectly content to spend his days in the pursuit of shallow amusements, until he is summoned by a wizened old dwarf in need of a voluntary good deed - deliver a parcel to his uncle, the all -powerful and original 98th Archon, sole ruler of the world. So begins Filidor's reluctant odyssey through peculiar provinces peopled with odious denizens, including such road killers as mutant rodents, alien ants and a vengeful thamaturge. Now in terra incognito, his narrow conception of life shaken to the extreme, Filidor will strive to say and do the right things...and grow up in the process.

After returning from his quest to save the world from his uncle, Filidor Vesh now stumbles blindly through an attempt to squelch the machinations of a would-be political usurper. As a result, he must contend with evil agents as well as his true love.

Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appaered in the February and March 2007 issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. There are no other known publications available at this time.

This novelette originally appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 102, November 2018.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This novelette originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 2004. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 10 (2005), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection The Gist Hunter and Other Stories (2005).

This novelette originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 2005. IT can alos be found in the anthologies Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2006 Edition, edited by Rich Horton, and Best Short Novels: 2006, edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collection The Gist Hunter and Other Stories (2005).

When Hapthorn is hired by Lord Afre to investigate the motives of his daughter's new companion, a young man of indeterminate circumstances, he takes the job expecting it to allow him the opportunity to explore and understand his changing universe. Little does Henghis Hapthorn realize, but the path of discovery will lead to deeper questions, a mysterious assignment from the Archon himself, and the ancient and powerful secret name... Majestrum!

It was bad enough when Henghis Hapthorn, Old Earth's foremost discriminator and die-hard empiricist, had to accept that the cosmos was shortly to rewrite its basic operating system, replacing rational cause-and-effect with detestable magic. Now he finds himself cast forward several centuries, stranded in a primitive world of contending wizards and hungry dragons, and without his magic-savvy alter ego. Worse, some entity with a will powerful enough to bend space and time is searching for him through the Nine Planes, bellowing "Bring me Apthorn!" in a voice loud enough to frighten demons.

As magic begins to reassert its ancient dominion, Old Earth's foremost freelance discriminator, Henghis Hapthorn, and his intuition (now a separate person named Osk Rievor), are living apart, though they remain on good terms. But now there comes between them a woman of alluring mystery. Who is Hespira? Does she truly want either of them? Or has she come to destroy them both?

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, March 2015.

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This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, February 2014.

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This novelette originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, February 2013, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, September 2013.

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This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, November 2014.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, January 2014.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, March 2014.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, November 2013.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, January 2015.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, May 2014.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, May 2015.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, September 2014.

Read the full story for free at Ligthspeed.

Erm Kaslo is at the top of his game: a hardboiled confidential operative in the ultra-high-tech civilization of The Ten Thousand Worlds that spans the entire galactic arm known as The Spray. But the universe is about to arbitrarily change its fundamental operating premise from science to magic. Technology will cease to function and all of Kaslo's hard-won skills and abilities will be useless.

Meet Luff Imbry, an insidiously clever confidence man... He likes good wine, good food, and good stolen goods, and he always maintains the upper hand. When a business rival gets the drop on him, he finds himself abandoned on Fulda-a far-off, isolated world with a history of its own. Unable to blend in and furious for revenge, Imbry has to rely on his infamous criminal wit to survive Fulda's crusade to extinguish The Other.

Hailed as the heir apparent to Jack Vance, Matthew Hughes brings us this speculative, richly imagined exploration of society on the far edges of extreme. A central character in Black Brillion, Luff Imbry is at last front and center in Hughes's latest rollercoaster adventure through a far-future universe.

Dr. Michael Drake, a great medical researcher, chose to disappear into the jungles of the world called Bushveld, but now the Human-settled Galaxy needs him to combat a new plague. Journalist-adventurer Robert Markham has determined to locate Drake and bring him back to civilization. But Markham is not after Drake for the same reason as the millions who may die. He is interested in his own reputation as a great explorer - and in the money he will make from selling his story.

How far would you go to unlock the mysteries of an alien culture? Journalist and adventurer Xavier William Lennox becomes obsessed with the rituals of the Fireflies, an alien culture of gold-skinned inhabitants living on the planet Medina. When he gets too close to their mysterious society, he's captured, tortured, and banished for defying their laws, but vows to learn what the aliens are so desperate to hide, even if it means becoming one of them. His curiosity doesn't end there.

As opportunities arise to study more alien races, Lennox takes cultural immersion to the breaking point. He not only buries himself in the language and customs of the aliens, but also undergoes severe surgeries to become one of them. Each time his humanity is stretched until he faces his biggest challenge-trying to return to the ordinary life of a man who has experienced the universe in ways he was never meant to.

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, December 1999. The story can also be found in the collections Hunting the Snark and Other Short Novels (2002), Dreamwish Beasts and Snarks (2009) and Win Some, Lose Some (2012).

In the year 6303, when earth is bare of anything larger than an insect or a mouse and most people have left for the stars, Duncan Rojas receives a most unusual visitor. His name is Bukoba Mandaka, and he is the last of the Maasai. Mandaka wants Rojas, senior researcher for Braxton's Records of Big Game, to find the tusks of the Kilimanjaro Elephant, tusks that weigh over 200 lb. each. Why? Mandaka will not say, but he will pay enormous sums for them. And Rojas cannot resist the challenge of tracing something lost for 3000 years. Back and forth through time, in card games, wars, and rivalries, Rojas searches. But as he begins to glimpse the elusive, lost power of ancient Africa, he is seduced, and before long the quest has become his own.

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, July 2003. The story can also be found in the anthologies Robots (2005) edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, and L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 30 (2014), edited by Dave Wolverton. It is included in the collections New Dreams for Old (2006) and Win Some, Lose Some: The Hugo Award Winning (and Nominated) Short Science Fiction and Fantasy of Mike Resnick (2012).

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

Seven views of Olduvai Gorge is one of the most celebrated novellas ever written. It not only won both the Hugo and Nebula, but also the Homer award and the SF Chronicle Poll and was a nominee for the Locus Award and the Sturgeon Award. It was alo nominated for a number of international awards, winning the Ignotus and the Universitat Polytechnica Awards in Spain, the Prix Ozone award in France and the Futura Award in Croatia.

In the future, eons after the demise of Humanity and its far-flung galactic empire, a group of alien archiologists visits Earth to uncover the secret of the dead race's initial overwhelming success and its ultimate death.

Digging through layers of Archaeological strata at Olduvai Gorge, they discover seven unique artifacts, each related to a different era of humanity's history and each telling a unique story about humankind's strengths and weakness.

But are they prepared for the final discovery, which will change their worlds forever?

Read this story online for free at Subterranean Press.

Hugo Award winning and Sturgeon Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, December 1997. The story can also be found in the anthology Alien Contact (2012), edited by Marty Halpern. It is included in the collections A Safari of the Mind (1999), New Dreams for Old (2006) and Win Some, Lose Some (2012).

Read the full story for free at Marty Halpern's blog.

Award-winning author Mike Resnick takes us back to his wild and wooly Inner Frontier in this tall-tale of an adventure novel.

On the planet Henry II, orbiting the twin suns Plantagenet and Tudor, at the very edge of the great black hole at the center of the Milky Way, there is a tavern called The Outpost. Through the doors of The Outpost have come the greatest heroes, villains, and adventurers of the galaxcy - to drink, to brag, and to swap tales.

The Outpost is neutral territory where fighting is forbidden and blood enemies can have a drink together and tell stories of battles past. After all bounty hunters, con men, intinerant preachers, thieves, and assassins have more in common with each other than they do with the rest of the mundane galaxy.

But their pleasant life of recalling murder and mayhem is interrupted by an alien invasion, and to save their way of life these rugged individualists must try to work together for a change.

A professional hunter in the future forms a strange relationship with the creature he is hired to kill, and an obsession that begin like Ahab's for Moby Dick very subtly morphs into something closer to The Flying Dutchman.

He killed 11 million men in the death camps of Pilor IX during the brief reign of the mad Emperor Justacious. He killed 17 million men on Boriga II in a manner that made the gas ovens of ancient Earth and its Reich seem compassionate. He killed 5 million women and children on New Rhodesia. He killed 3,017 men on Cambria III, each in a different way. He invented torture devices that even Spica VI, which was in revolt against the Republic, would not use.

No photograph, holograph, or videodisc of him is known to exist. He has never been fingerprinted. There is no voice or retina identification pattern on him in any computer. He has no bank account on any world, no financial or property holdings that anyone has been able to trace. His planet of origin is unknown. Many men have served him; all but seven are dead, and none of those seven have ever seen him.

He is a fugitive.

His name is Conrad Bland and he is, for the moment, safe. But someone has sent an assassin to find him - and end him.

Chief Detective John Sable is caught between his badge and his conscience as the two most famous executioners of all time prepare to do battle in his territory.

The Earth-like planet Peponi has vast riches, an abundant and opulent wildlife, much like Kenya on old-Earth, and most importantly, compliant natives. But now that humanity is on the brink of opening up an entirely new world, has it learned its lessons from the past? Covers the time from colonization to independence.

When Karimon is claimed by human colonists, which bears an uncanny resemblence to Zimbabwe on old-Earth, the planet's intelligent reptile inhabitants fight back by forging an alliance with the invaders' enemies. Covers the time from colonization to independence.

A small group of humans hope to avoid the mistakes that destroyed many other worlds. They are raising the Jasons from barbarism to civilization, on a planet which has much in comman with Uganda from old-Earth, but something goes hideously wrong.

William Masterson must try to find out why Jehanum, a showplace planet with a model government, productive farms, and a thriving tourist industry, has descended into bloody barbarism. One dictator after another rises to power, and the culture of the world is torn to fragments.

The Democracy is at war with the alien Traanskei Coalition. War hero Colonel Nathan Pretorius has a record of success on dangerous behind-enemy-lines missions, missions that usually leave him in the hospital. Now he's recruited for a near-impossible assignment that may well leave him dead.

At the cost of many lives, the Democracy has managed to clone and train General Michkag, one of the Traanskei's master strategists. Colonel Pretorius and a hand-picked team must kidnap the real Michkag if they can, assassinate him if they can't, but no matter which, put the clone in his place, where he will misdirect the enemy's forces and funnel vital information to the Democracy.

Against the odds, Pretorius, along with Cyborg Felix Ortega, computer expert Toni Levi, convict and contortionist Sally "Snake" Kowalski, the near-human empath Marlowe, the alien Gzychurlyx, and Madam Methuselah - the Dead Enders - must infiltrate the Fortress in Orion, accomplish their mission, and escape with their lives.

The Traanskei Coalition's greatest weapon is the Q bomb, and after years of failure, the Democracy has come up with a defense against it. The problem is that they killed most of the team that created it. The sole survivor, Edgar Nmumba, was kidnapped by the Coalition. Only Nmumba can duplicate the work fast enough to prevent the loss of another dozen populated planets.

Nathan Pretorius and his team of Dead Enders will require all their skills and cunning to rescue him, sane and in one piece, from the Coalition's best-hidden and best-guarded prison, somewhere in the Antares sector. But in a game of cross and double-cross, can they find him before it's too late?

A crisis has arisen. In the first book of the series, THE FORTRESS IN ORION, Pretorius and his Dead Enders kidnapped the real General Michkag and substituted a clone who had been raised and trained in the Democracy. But now they find that the clone likes being the most powerful man in the hundred-world Traanskei Coalititon - and having been raised on Earth, he knows how humans think and react.

This becomes a many-layered problem for Pretorius and what is left of his Dead Enders. As the only humans on a totally militarized alien world, they must first find where the best-guarded member of the enemy's military - Michkag - is hiding and how many aliens, or regiments, or divisions, are guarding him, and then they must find a way past all his lines of defense to kill or capture him.

Larger than life, they stride the untamed galaxy. Heroes and villains, spacers and bounty hunters, with legendary names like Cemetery Smith, the Forever Kid, the Iceman, the Mock Turtle.

But the most dangerous - and wanted - being in the universe is a frightened little girl with the unearthly power to forsee, control or destroy. Her name is Penelope Bailey.

The furure will call her... Soothsayer.

Since she was a little girl, all humanity has been frightened by Penelope Bailey's awesome psychic talent and her ability to bend events--and men--to her will. Now a grown woman and living on the planet Hades, Penelope is caught in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with a bounty hunter, a government agent, and an out-for-profit, outlaw cyborg--none of who suspect the true depths of her power.

This is the final volume of a trilogy which started with "Soothsayer" and "Oracle". In this volume, the Ice Man is beseiged by people trying to kill him, five in one month. As he sends the Gravedancer to find out who wants him dead, what he really wants to know is why the Prophet has allowed him to live.

An epic novel of human expansion across the stars.

This brilliant science fiction novel constructs a blueprint of mankind's history-social, political, economic, scientific, and religious - for the next eighteen thousand years. Through a series of adventures, it illustrates clear, focused ideas about our birthright and our destiny.

Bandit, murderer, known to all, seen by none...has he killed a thousand men? Has he saved a dozen world? His legend is as large as the Rim itself, his trail as elusive as a wisp of starlight in the empty realms of space. The reward for him is the largest in history.

Bandit, murderer, known to all, seen by none....

Has he killed a thousand men? Has he saved a dozen worlds? His legend is as large as the Rim itself, his trail as elusive as a wisp of starlight in the empty realms of space. The reward for him is the largest in history.

She was old when the world was young. Her image appears in painting from before the Renaissance - but also from the Earth of 3,000 years from now, and from a dozen or more far-flung worlds around the galaxy. Who is she, and what is her secret? It remains for an alien art critic named Leonardo by his human associates to find the answer, and to put himself, his friends, and even some of those worlds at risk in the process.

The starship Theodore Roosevelt is fighting on the far outskirts of a galactic war, its crew made up of retreads and raw recruits. A new first officer reports, Wilson Cole, a man with a reputation for exceeding his orders (but getting results). He's been banished to the Teddy R. for his actions, but once there he again ignores his orders....

This is the first of five novels about the starship Theodore Roosevelt. The next four will be, in order, Pirate, Mercenary, Rebel, and Flagship.

The date is 1967 of the Galactic Era, almost three thousand years from now. The Republic, created by the human race but not yet dominated by it, is in the midst of an all-out war with the Teroni Federation. After his latest exploit saved millions of lives but embarrassed his superiors, Captain Wilson Cole, a man with a reputation for exceeding orders but getting results, found himself the victim of the media feeding frenzy, a political scapegoat despite years of dedicated military service. Faced with a court martial, he was rescued by the loyal crew of his ship, the Theodore Roosevelt. Now branded mutineers, the crew of the Teddy R. has quit the Republic, never to return.

Seeking to find a new life for themselves, Wilson Cole and comrades remake the Teddy R. as a pirate ship and set sail for the lawless Inner Frontier. Here, powerful warlords, cut-throat pirates, and struggling colonies compete for survival in a game where you rarely get a second chance to learn the rules.

But military discipline is poor preparation for a life of pillaging and plundering, and Cole's principles naturally limit his targets. Seeking an education on the nature of piracy, Cole hunts more knowledgeable players. Enter the beautiful but deadly Valkyrie, Val for short, and the enigmatic alien fence known as David Copperfield. But hanging over everything is the fearsome alien pirate -- the Hammerhead Shark.

With Starship: Pirate, five-time Hugo winner Mike Resnick continues the story begun in his very first military SF. Will the galaxy ever be the same?

The date is 1968 of the Galactic Era, almost three thousand years from now. The Republic, created by the human race but not yet dominated by it, is in the midst of an all-out war with the Teroni Federation. Captain Wilson Cole, a man with a reputation for exceeding orders but getting results, found himself the victim of a media feeding frenzy, a political scapegoat despite years of dedicated military service. Faced with a court martial, he was rescued by the loyal crew of his ship, the Theodore Roosevelt. Branded mutineers, the Teddy R. has quit the Republic, never to return.

Seeking to find a new life, Wilson Cole first remade the Teddy R. as a pirate ship plying the spaceways of the lawless Inner Frontier. But military discipline and honor were a poor match for a life of pillaging and plundering, and Cole's principles naturally limited his targets. Taking on a new role, the Teddy R. becomes a mercenary ship, hiring out to the highest bidder. Whether it's evacuating a hospital before war can reach it, freeing a client from an alien prison, or stopping a criminal cartel from extorting money from a terrified planet, the crew of the Teddy R. proves equal to the task. Along the way they form a partnership with the once human Platinum Duke, team up with a former enemy, and make the unique Singapore Station their headquarters.

But the life of a mercenary is not always predictable, and eventually circumstance pits Cole and the Teddy R. against his right-hand woman, the former Pirate Queen known as the Valkyrie. Soon the fragile trust that has grown between these two legends is put to the test as they find themselves on opposite sides of a job.

The date is 1968 of the Galactic Era, almost three thousand years from now. The Republic, dominated by the human race, is in the midst of an all-out war with the Teroni Federation.

Almost a year has passed since the events of Starship: Mercenary. Captain Wilson Cole now commands a fleet of almost fifty ships, and he has become the single greatest military force on the Inner Frontier.

With one exception. The Republic still comes and goes as it pleases, taking what it wants, conscripting men, and extorting taxes, even though the Frontier worlds receive nothing in exchange. And, of course, the government still wants Wilson Cole and the starship Theodore Roosevelt. He has no interest in confronting such an overwhelming force, and constantly steers clear of them.

Then an incident occurs that changes everything, and Cole declares war on the Republic. Outnumbered and always outgunned, his fleet is no match for the Republic's millions of military vessels, even after he forges alliances with the warlords he previously hunted down.

It's a hopeless cause... but that's just what Wilson Cole and the Teddy R. are best at.

The date is 1970 of the Galactic Era, almost three thousand years from now, and the Republic, created by the human race but not yet dominated by it, finds itself in an all-out war against the Teroni Federation, an alliance of races that resent Man's growing military and economic power.

The rebel starship, the Theodore Roosevelt, under the command of Wilson Cole, is preparing to lead Cole's ragtag armada into the Republic, even though he is outnumbered thousands to one. Cole is convinced that the government has become an arrogant and unfeeling political entity and must be overthrown.

The trick is to avoid armed conflict with the vast array of ships, numbering in the millions, in the Republic's Navy. For a time Cole's forces strike from cover and race off to safety, but he soon sees that is no way to conquer the mightiest political and military machine in the history of the galaxy. He realizes that he must reach Deluros VIII, the headquarters world of the Republic (and of the race of Man), in order to have any effect on the government at all—but Deluros VIII is the best-protected world in the Republic.

But a new threat looms on the horizon. Cole, the Valkyrie, David Copperfield, Sharon Blacksmith, Jacovic, and the rest of the crew of the Teddy R face their greatest challenge yet, and the outcome will determine the fate of the entire galaxy.

Traveling carnival owner Thaddeus Flint swindles the owner of a freak show into an unlikely business partnership. When Flint discovers that the freaks are a group of undercover alien tourists, he keeps the secret from the outside world and looks for an opportunity to expand his carny tour out to the stars.

Traveling carnival owner Thaddeus Flint expands his tour from the American Northeast out to the stars, only to discover that some of the attractions don't quite hold the audience like they did back on Earth. Realizing that his strip show has no more appeal to an alien audience than watching a saddle come off a horse, he reassigns his girls to work the game booths on the midway. When one of the girls can't make the transition, he improvises an alien solution.

The carnival has left Earth and is touring the stars, and is finding out that making a living light-years from Earth is no easier than doing it here. Thaddeus Flint and his crew have to come up with fresh solutions to totally unexpected problems. The carnival tries a typical carny scam that backfires when their animal trainer and his sentient "animal" go to war every night in the big cage.

Five years into his traveling carnival tour of the galaxy, Thaddeus Flint and his alien business partner are rolling in the dough for the Corporation. When Billybuck Dancer, the trick shot artist, gets bored and starts taking dangerous chances with his own safety, Flint captures his attention by arranging a much-publicized and highly-profitable showdown between Dancer and his nemesis, Doc Holliday.

The Velvet Comet is one of the most profitable and popular pleasure palaces in space. The company that owns it is hit by internal power struggles for dominance.

Harry Redwine is sent onboard to secretly ruin the palace but finds more of a fight than he bargained for against the Leather Madonna palace ruler and her lovely no-holds barred crew of women.

Arrogant and overbearing Syndicate detective Andrew Crane arrives aboard the Velvet Comet to investigate a murder. When Crane discovers that the murderer is setting a trap to lure a notorious criminal aboard the Comet, the consequences of solving the mystery forces Crane to become judge, jury, and executioner.

In an attempt to financially persuade the Reverend Thomas Gold to discontinue his public condemnations the Velvet Comet, the Vainmill Syndicate invites the popular cult leader to a charity event aboard the galaxy's most notorious house of ill repute. But when the Reverend is exposed to an alien twist on the sins of the flesh, his own weakness threatens to topple his ministry - and his sanity.

Screenwriter and novelist Nate Page arrives aboard the empty Velvet Comet twenty-three years after it is decommissioned by the Vainmill Syndicate. The light-topic musical holographic production that Nate is writing is based on the Velvet Comet in its prime, and requires research available only through Cupid, the ship's still-functioning and nearly-self-aware onboard computer.

As the cynical screenwriter and the unemotionally truthful computer struggle to create a work of fiction true to the reality of life aboard the Comet, Nate's agent makes it clear that prostituting your art is not any different from prostituting your body.

One of the major voices in science fiction, Mike Resnick presents the first volume in a bold new trilogy.Jefferson Nighthawk--known and feared by many as the Widowmaker, the consummate bounty hunter--has been frozen for a century in order to defeat a deadly disease. Only now the cost of his care has risen, so the Widowmaker is called out of retirement for one special commission, and a very large chunk of cash. A notorious assassin has been wrecking havoc on the Frontier; who better but the Widowmaker to defeat him?

Jefferson Nighthawk, once the galaxy's most feared killer, is cloned again and given a new mission. This time he is not only armed with the Widowmaker's killing skills, but also with his lifetime of knowledge. Nighthawk's new mission involves the rescue of a corrupt politician's daughter, and the assassination of the rebel leader who holds her captive. But the daughter puts a wrinkle in the plan when she offers her father's fortune if Nighthawk kills her father instead. While the odds are overwhelming, the price may be right.

Jefferson Nighthawk -- the Widowmaker -- is finally cured of his disease. A man in his sixties, who has been in a coma for a century, all he wants to do is live out his life peacefully and tend his garden...but he is continually sought out, not by his own enemies who are long dead, but by enemies made by his two clones, men he has never seen before, perfect strangers who are out to kill him. His retirement will have to be put on hold until he solves this ongoing and deadly problem.

Jefferson Nighthawk, the original Widowmaker, is married and retired, looking forward to a peaceul old age. But when his two clones try to kill each other, he realizes that he can't turn his back on the situation -- or the fact that there is an alien menace out there that will require the combined might of all three Widowmakers, if even that is enough.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Impossible Futures (2013), edited by Judith K. Dial and Thomas Easton, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, October 2016.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Welcome to a world of wind and bone, songs and silence, betrayal and courage.

Kirit Densira cannot wait to pass her wingtest and begin flying as a trader by her mother's side, being in service to her beloved home tower and exploring the skies beyond. When Kirit inadvertently breaks Tower Law, the city's secretive governing body, the Singers, demand that she become one of them instead. In an attempt to save her family from greater censure, Kirit must give up her dreams to throw herself into the dangerous training at the Spire, the tallest, most forbidding tower, deep at the heart of the City.

As she grows in knowledge and power, she starts to uncover the depths of Spire secrets. Kirit begins to doubt her world and its unassailable Laws, setting in motion a chain of events that will lead to a haunting choice, and may well change the city forever-if it isn't destroyed outright.

After the dust settles, the City of living bones begins to die, and more trouble brews beneath the clouds in this stirring companion to Fran Wilde's Updraft.

When Kirit Densira left her home tower for the skies, she gave up many things: her beloved family, her known way of life, her dreams of flying as a trader for her tower, her dreams. Kirit set her City upside down, and fomented a massive rebellion at the Spire, to the good of the towers--but months later, everything has fallen to pieces.

With the Towers in disarray, without a governing body or any defense against the dangers lurking in the clouds, daily life is full of terror and strife. Naton, Kirit's wing-brother, sets out to be a hero in his own way--sitting on the new Council to cast votes protecting Tower-born, and exploring lower tiers to find more materials to repair the struggling City.

But what he finds down-tier is more secrets--and now Nat will have to decide who to trust, and how to trust himself without losing those he holds most dear, before a dangerous myth raises a surprisingly realistic threat to the crippled City, in Cloudbound.

A City of living bone towers crumbles to the ground and danger abounds. Kirit Densira has lost everything she loved the most--her mother, her home, and the skies above. Nat Brokenwings--once Kirit's brother long before the rebellion tore them apart--is still trying to save his family in the face of catastrophe. They will need to band together once more to ensure not just their own survival, but that of their entire community.

Table of Contents:

• Teddy Bug and the Hot Purple Snowball
• Moondo Bizarro
• Crowns of Creation
• The Quonset Hut
• Fleshnappers of Jasoom
• The Spokesthing
• Trees
• Doctor Quick
• Corpse on M544-9
• Messiah
• Within the Pale
• Conrad of Dreams
• The Siege of Stamnor
• The Buzz of Joy
• The Hero

The Gatekeepers limit mankind to the Sol System, forbidding travel beyond its boundaries, until a band of Souldancers stumble on a truth that leads them to challenge the Gatekeepers themselves.

An American frigate, tracking down a ship-sinking monster, faces not a living creature but an incredible invention -- a fantastic submarine commanded by the mysterious Captain Nemo. Suddenly a devastating explosion leaves just three survivors, who find themselves prisoners inside Nemo's death ship on an underwater odyssey around the world from the pearl-laden waters of Ceylon to the icy dangers of the South Pole . . .as Captain Nemo, one of the greatest villians ever created, takes his revenge on all society.

More than a marvelously thrilling drama, this classic novel, written in 1870, foretells with uncanny accuracy the inventions and advanced technology of the twentieth century and has become a literary stepping-stone for generations of science fiction writers.

At a time when Verne is making a comeback in the US as a mainstream literary figure, Wesleyan is pleased to publish a new translation of one of his best-known novels, The Mysterious Island. Although several editions under the same title are in print, most reproduce a bowdlerized nineteenth-century translation which changes the names of the characters, omits several important scenes, and ideologically censors Verne's original text.

The Mysterious Island was published in 1874, and it is one of Verne's longest novels.

The books is based on the true story of Alexander Selkirk, who survived alone for almost five years on an uninhabited island off the coast of Chile.

The book tells the adventures of five Americans on an uncharted island in the South Pacific. The story begins in the American Civil War, during the siege of Richmond, Virginia. As famine and death ravage the city, five northern prisoners of war decide to escape by the unusual means of hijacking a balloon.

After flying in stormy weather for several days, the group crash-lands on a cliff-bound, volcanic, unknown island. They name it Lincoln Island. With the knowledge of the brilliant engineer Smith, the five are able to sustain themselves on this fantastic island of bewildering goings-on, as they strive to uncover the island's many secrets.

A marvelous adventure story, The Mysterious Island is also notable for its modern retelling of the utopian deserted-island myth, with repeated echoes of Robinson Crusoe and the Swiss Family Robinson. This Wesleyan edition features notes, appendices and an introduction by Verne scholar William Butcher, as well as reproductions of the illustrations from the original French edition.

Saving the world is easy for Constance Verity: she's used to doing the impossible on a daily basis. Everything that comes after is the tricky part.

Connie has accepted and secured her place in the universe. There isn't a foe she can't outfight or a peril she can't outwit - until she discovers she herself might be the greatest threat to the world she's spent her life saving.

All the signs are pointing to impending doom, and not just for Connie. Her friends, her enemies and the universe itself are all at risk. She's always known she was destined for a glorious death, but she never suspected she'd be taking everyone and everything else with her.

With her trademark determination, Constance Verity sets out to avert a cosmic plan millions of years in the making - and save the universe from herself.

A new science fiction epic from the national bestselling and Hugo Award-winning author.

Expelled from the Union Astronautica space fleet and facing charges of grand theft, Jules Truffant agrees to sign up as shuttle pilot aboard the freighter Pride of Cucamonga in exchange for amnesty. After botching Pride's mission to RhoCorenae and upsetting an alien culture in the process, Jules must take part in a voyage across the galaxy to place a probe squarely in the path of a black hole as it plows through an inhabited star system.

The two-time Hugo Award-winner expands the universe of his Coyote saga.

The danui, a reclusive arachnid species considered the galaxy's finest engineers, have avoided contact with the Coyote Federation. Until, that is, the danui initiate trade negotiations, offering only information: the coordinates for an unoccupied world suitable for human life-a massive sphere, composed of billions of hexagons.

But when the Federation's recon mission goes terribly wrong, the humans realize how little they know about their new partners...

The EASS Galileo disappeared decades ago while investigating an unidentified object, code-named Spindrift. Now the Galileo's shuttle has returned carrying three surviving expedition members, who still appear to be the same age they were when they departed. They report that they have, indeed, made contact with an extraterrestrial race-and become enmeshed in a conflict that brought them face to face with the most apocalyptic force in the galaxy.

Hugo Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, January 2001. There are no other known publications but the novella is incorporated in the fix-up novel Coyote (2002).

This novelette originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, May 2003. The story can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 9 (2004), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. It was incorporated in the novel Coyote Rising (2004).

"The master of science-fiction intrigue" (Washington Post) returns to the Coyote universe.

The planet of Coyote has become the last, best hope of humankind, but it has also become the principal point of contact with the hjadd, the alien race encountered by a European starship many years earlier. Although the hjadd have built an embassy near the original colony, they remain a mystery.

And as the colonists make preparations to explore the rest of the new world, ex-convict Hawk Thompson discovers more about the hjadd than anyone has learned before-and his knowledge will change human history...

"The best space colonization saga to come along in decades" (Rocky Mountain News) continues.

The unexpected arrival of a ship from Earth after their long isolation from their home world leaves the inhabitants of Coyote both hopeful and wary. The lone passenger brings news-both good and bad.

The good news is that there was a survivor of the long-ago explosion of the Robert E. Lee and he is living still on Earth, in the ruined city called Boston. The bad news is that the person responsible for that act of terrorism is also still alive-and somewhere on Coyote...

Coyote marks a dramatic new turn in the career of Allen Steele, Hugo Award-winning author of Chronospace. Epic in scope, passionate in its conviction, and set against a backdrop of plausible events, it tells the brilliant story of Earth's first interstellar colonists-and the mysterious planet that becomes their home.

The crime of the century begins without a hitch. On July 5th, 2070, as it's about to be launched, the starship Alabama is hijacked-by her captain and crew. In defiance of the repressive government of The United Republic of Earth, they replace her handpicked passengers with political dissidents and their families. These become Earth's first pioneers in the exploration of space. Captain R.E. Lee, their leader. Colonel Gill Reese, the soldier sent to stop Lee. Les Gilles, the senior communications officer, a victim of a mistake that will threaten the entire mission. Crewman Eric Gunther, who has his own agenda for being aboard. His daughter, Wendy, a teenager who will grow up too quickly.

Jorge and Rita Montero, ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. And their son Carlos, who will become a hero in spite of himself. After almost two-and-a-half centuries in cold sleep, they will awaken above their destination: a habitable world named Coyote. A planet that will test their strength, their beliefs, and their very humanity. In Coyote, Allen Steele delivers a grand novel of galactic adventure-a tale of life on the newest of frontiers.

The continuing epic of Earth's first space colonists--and their fight against a repressive government to reclaim their world in the name of freedom.

The revolution that won Coyote's independence from Earth is 20 years past. Coyote's aging computers, aircraft, and medical equipment are badly in need of replacement. And the colony's survival is in question. Now the colony's hard-won independence depends on the descendants of Coyote's original settlers-versus help from Earth that may be more of a detriment than a boon.

Former freedom fighter Carlos Montero, now in his fifties and burdened with the responsibilities of leadership. Manuel Castro, the Savant and former Lieutenant Governor of New Florida, now a hermit who may hold the key to the survival of those whose company he has renounced. Jonas Whittaker, the genius inventor haunted by the loss of the wife and daughter he sacrificed to save. And Morgan Goldstein, an entrepreneur seeking to exploit Coyote's natural resources-even if it means ruining the planet itself.

As Coyote's future hangs in the balance, a larger question looms: can the human race settle a new world without bringing forward the problems of the world it left behind?

Egypt, 1912. In an alternate Cairo infused with the otherworldly, the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities investigate disturbances between the mortal and the (possibly) divine. What starts off as an odd suicide case for Special Investigator Fatma el-Sha'arawi leads her through the city's underbelly as she encounters rampaging ghouls, saucy assassins, clockwork angels, and plot that could unravel time itself.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Cairo, 1912: The case started as a simple one for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities -- handling a possessed tram car.

Soon, however, Agent Hamed Nasr and his new partner Agent Onsi Youssef are exposed to a new side of Cairo stirring with suffragettes, secret societies, and sentient automatons in a race against time to protect the city from an encroaching danger that crosses the line between the magical and the mundane.

Nebula, Locus, and Alex Award-winner P. Djèlí Clark returns to his popular alternate Cairo universe for his fantasy novel debut, A Master of Djinn

Cairo, 1912: Though Fatma el-Sha'arawi is the youngest woman working for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, she's certainly not a rookie, especially after preventing the destruction of the universe last summer.

So when someone murders a secret brotherhood dedicated to one of the most famous men in history, al-Jahiz, Agent Fatma is called onto the case. Al-Jahiz transformed the world fifty years ago when he opened up the veil between the magical and mundane realms, before vanishing into the unknown. This murderer claims to be al-Jahiz, returned to condemn the modern age for its social oppressions. His dangerous magical abilities instigate unrest in the streets of Cairo that threaten to spill over onto the global stage.

Alongside her Ministry colleagues and a familiar person from her past, Agent Fatma must unravel the mystery behind this imposter to restore peace to the city--or face the possibility he could be exactly who he seems...

Finalist, Asimov's Annual Readers' Poll

Mae, chief linguist on the Ivoire, heads a diplomatic mission to Ukhanda. Her handling of relations with the Quurzod lead to a battle that causes the Ivoire's anacapa drive to malfunction, stranding the ship in foldspace. Mae can't remember what she did wrong on the mission: all she knows is that she's one of the few survivors. If she doesn't recall it, she won't be able to prevent another disaster when the Ivoire escapes foldspace. If the Ivoire escapes foldspace. Because what no one talks about -- and everyone fears -- is that the Ivoire is becalmed... forever.

This standalone novella first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction in April-May 2011. It has been collected in The Diving Bundle.

Winner, Asimov's Annual Readers' Poll

The Fleet. In Boss' time, a thing of legend. Long before Boss and her crew found their first Dignity Vessel, long before the Room of Lost Souls claimed its first life, the Fleet used its advanced technology to explore the galaxy. But even in its heyday that technology sometimes malfunctioned. And occasionally, that malfunction exacted an unfathomable price.

This novella first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction in October-November 2010. In a slightly modified form, it is contained in its entirety within the novel City of Ruins. It has been collected in The Diving Bundle.

Winner, Asimov's Annual Readers' Poll

Boss dives derelict space vessels, for money, yes, but more for their historical value. So, when Boss uncovers the find of a lifetime, she enlists the best divers she can convince to help her pursue it -- off the grid and under the Empire's radar. But the more they discover, the less they realize they know -- and the more it will cost them all.

This novella first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction in December 2005. In a slightly modified form, it is contained in its entirety within the novel Diving Into The Wreck. The story is included in the anthology The Final Frontier (2018), edited by Neil Clarke. It has been collected in Recovering Apollo 8 and Other Stories and The Diving Bundle.

Finalist, Asimov's Annual Readers' Poll

The Fleet. In Boss' time, a thing of legend. Long before Boss and her crew found their first Dignity Vessel, long before the Room of Lost Souls claimed its first life, the Fleet used its advanced technology to explore the galaxy. But even in its heyday that technology sometimes malfunctioned. And occasionally, that malfunction exacted an unfathomable price.

This novella first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction in October-November 2013. In a slightly modified form, it is contained in its entirety within the novel Skirmishes.

When the captain and senior crew abandon the Renegat, linguist Raina Serpell assumes command. She needs to get the ship and remaining crew home.

As the ship comes under attack from the planet below, Raina must first figure out how to operate the ship's firepower. Harder still, she must battle her own past to become captain in more than just name alone.

This novella was originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, September-October 2019.

This novella was first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, November/December 2018.

It is included in its entirety in the novel The Renegat.

Asimov Readers Choice Award Finalist Novella

Maelstrom: The Final Voyage of the Gabriella

by Nedda Ferguson-Lithe

Recreating the last days of a lost ship proved a difficult writing challenge for me. I had already chosen an older form of storytelling as my medium, because I believed - and still believe - that this form suits my purposes best.

But I also need to maintain my journalistic standards, for my sake as well as the sake of the story. Many others have told tales of lost ships over hundreds of years, and those storytellers have all chosen to fictionalize certain parts of the narrative, if not the entire story.

My training will not allow me to do that.

Besides, that's not why I wrote this. I wrote this to find answers, sometimes to questions I hadn't even realized that I had. My need to know comes from a personal place. I lost my father on the Gabriella. I needed to know what, exactly, happened to him. I did not learn that. Not exactly.

But I learned more than I had known before.

I have spent years researching, interviewing, and organizing the information into something that resembles a narrative. We will never know what those final days were like for the crew of the Gabriella, but we have enough information to make an educated guess.

Which is what this is.

This novella was first published in the September-October 2020 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction. Read it for free at the publisher's website.

Finalist, Asimov's Annual Readers' Poll

Stealth tech: a lost science everyone wants to reclaim. The woman who helped Boss dive the Dignity Vessel, known then as Squishy, claims a long and storied history with stealth tech. Her research into the lost science caused deaths before, and she failed to prevent them during that fateful dive. Now, she vows to find a way to destroy the technology once and for all.

This novella first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction in October-November 2010. In a slightly modified form, it is contained in its entirety within the novel Boneyards. It has been collected in The Diving Bundle.

Starbase Kappa. The Room of Lost Souls. An abandoned space station with different names but one certainty: People die there. Still, a soldier can't argue with orders, no matter how bad a place's reputation. Enterran Empire Operations Commander Elissa Trekov's most famous relative died there, so she thinks she knows the Room better than the rest of her team. But when strangers turn up on the so-called abandoned station -- strangers who seem to know a lot more about its function than they pretend -- she realizes the Room's legendary history only scratches the surface of the dangers lurking within.

This novella, in a slightly modified form, is contained in its entirety within the novel Skirmishes. It has been collected in The Diving Bundle.

Winner, Asimov's Annual Readers' Poll

The Fleet. In Boss' time, a thing of legend. Long before Boss and her crew found their first Dignity Vessel, long before the Room of Lost Souls claimed its first life, the Fleet used its advanced technology to explore the galaxy. But even in its heyday that technology sometimes malfunctioned. And occasionally, that malfunction exacted an unfathomable price.

This standalone novella first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction in August 2013. It has been collected in Warrior Women, edited by Paula Guran.

This novella was first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, September/October 2023.

Read the full story for free here.

This novella was first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, July/August 2023.

Read the full story for free here.

This novella was first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, January/February 2018.

It is included in its entirety in the novel The Renegat.

Winner, Asimov's Annual Readers' Poll

Boss remembers the Room. It haunts her. Her mother died there. Now, a client wants her to go back. She wants Boss to help her uncover the Room's mysteries. But the truths she discovers might destroy everything Boss holds sacred.

This novella first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction in April-May 2008. In a slightly modified form, it is contained in its entirety within the novel Diving Into The Wreck. It has been collected in The Diving Bundle.

Finalist, Asimov's Annual Readers' Poll

The Spires of Denon doesn't involve Boss or her crew. Instead, this standalone novella follows Meklos Verr, hired to guard an archeological dig near the mysterious Spires of Denon. There Verr encounters the prickly Gabrielle Reese who heads the dig, and he meets some cave divers who aren't quite what they seem. Verr knows that someone wants to harm the dig, but he isn't sure if the attack will come from outside the tall mountain range or from the group of archeologists within. Verr must figure out the threat before it destroys him, his crew, and the beautiful Spires of Denon.

This novella first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction in April-May 2009. It has been collected in The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack.

Boss loves to dive historical ships, derelict spacecraft found adrift in the blackness between the stars. Sometimes she salvages for money, but mostly she's an active historian. She wants to know about the past--to experience it firsthand. Once she's dived the ship, she'll either leave it for others to find or file a claim so that she can bring tourists to dive it as well. It's a good life for a tough loner, with more interest in artifacts than people.

Then one day, Boss finds the claim of a lifetime: an enormous spacecraft, incredibly old, and apparently Earth-made. It's impossible for something so old, built in the days before Faster Than Light travel, to have journeyed this far from Earth. It shouldn't be here. It can't be here. And yet, it is. Boss's curiosity is up, and she's determined to investigate. She hires a group of divers to explore the wreck with her, the best team she can assemble. But some secrets are best kept hidden, and the past won t give up its treasures without exacting a price in blood.

What Boss finds could rewrite history, cost lives, and start an intergalactic war.

This novel includes, in slightly modified form, the complete text of the novellas Diving Into The Wreck and The Room of Lost Souls.

Boss, a loner, loved to dive derelict spacecraft adrift in the blackness of space...

But one day, she found a ship that would change everything-an ancient Dignity Vessel-and aboard the ship, the mysterious and dangerous Stealth Tech. Now, years after discovering that first ship, Boss has put together a large company that finds Dignity Vessels and finds "loose" stealth technology.

Following a hunch, Boss and her team come to investigate the city of Vaycehn, where fourteen archeologists have died exploring the endless caves below the city. Mysterious "death holes" explode into the city itself for no apparent reason, and Boss believes stealth tech is involved. As Boss searches for the answer to the mystery of the death holes, she will uncover the answer to her Dignity Vessel quest as well-and one more thing, something so important that it will change her life-and the universe-forever.

This novel includes, in slightly modified form, the complete text of the novella Becoming One With The Ghosts.

Searching for ancient technology to help her friends find answers to the mystery of their own past, Boss ventures into a place filled with evidence of an ancient space battle, one the Dignity Vessels lost.

Meanwhile, the Enterran Empire keeps accidentally killing its scientists in a quest for ancient stealth tech. Boss's most difficult friend, Squishy, has had enough. She sneaks into the Empire and destroys its primary stealth tech research base. But an old lover thwarts her escape, and now Squishy needs Boss's help.

Boss, who is a fugitive in the Empire. Boss, who knows how to make a Dignity Vessel work. Boss, who knows that Dignity Vessels house the very technology that the Empire is searching for.

Should Boss take a Dignity Vessel to rescue Squishy and risk losing everything to the Empire? Or should Boss continue on her mission for her other friends and let Squishy suffer her own fate?

Filled with battles old and new, scientific dilemmas, and questions about the ethics of friendship, Boneyards looks at the influence of our past on our present and the risks we all take when we meddle in other people's lives.

This novel includes, in slightly modified form, the complete text of the novella Stealth.

The answers Captain Jonathon "Coop" Cooper and the crew of the Ivoire seek lie in the Boneyards. But they must wait for Boss and her team to dive it, explore the wrecks, and piece together what happened in that faraway place.

Boss loves the challenge. Thousands of ships, centuries of history, all play to her strengths. In her absence, she trusts Coop to defend the Nine Planets Alliance against the Enterran Empire.

But an encounter from Coop's recent past shows up to haunt him, an encounter he never told Boss about, an encounter that could threaten her future, his life, and the fragile peace between the Alliance and the Empire.

This novel includes, in slightly modified form, the complete text of the novellas Strangers at the Room of Lost Souls and Encounter on Starbase Kappa.

Fleet sector bases close as the Fleet moves on. Everyone knows and expects it. But still, the announcement that Sector Base E-2 will close -- although still thirty years in the future -- breeds a mood of tension and anxiety.

So, when Rajivk Agwu finds two pairs of shoes on a trail near Fiskett Falls, but no sign of their occupants, his already heightened senses warn of danger.

Those on the base fare no better. Bristol Iannazzi, working on the notoriously delicate anacapa drive for a runabout, also notices something strange, something out of place, something dangerous...

Asimov's Reader's Choice Award-nominated Novella

A graveyard of spaceships, abandoned by the mysterious Fleet thousands of years earlier. Boss calls it "The Boneyard." She needs the ships inside to expand her work for Lost Souls Corporation. Yash Zarlengo thinks the Boneyard will help her discover if the Fleet still exists.

Boss and Yash, while exploring the Boneyard, discover a small ship with a powerful and dangerous problem: The ship's active anacapa drive.

To escape the Boneyard, Boss must deal with the drive. Which means she'll have to dive the ship on limited time and under extremely dangerous conditions. And she can't go alone.

This short novel of 42,677 words was originally published in its entirety in the April/May 2017 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction. Read this story for free at Asimov's Science Fiction.

Leaving Boss behind to continue diving the Boneyard, Ivoire Engineer Yash Zarlengo returns to the Lost Souls Corporation's headquarters to analyze the data from the runabout they discovered there.

Convinced that the experience in the Boneyard proves the Fleet still exists, Yash buries herself in her work, interested in little else.

Ivoire Captain Jonathan "Coop" Cooper notices Yash's growing obsession with finding the Fleet and joins her in her search.

For the first time in six years, the crew of the Ivoire feels real hope. Coop and Yash know all too well the dangers hope can pose. But this time their hope might just lead them somewhere no one expected.

Parts of this novel appeared in different forms as the novella Dix (Asimov's March-April 2018) and the novelette Lieutenant Tightass (Asimov's July-August 2018).

As a young recruit, brilliant engineer Nadim Crowe accidentally destroys an entire Boneyard full of ships. Now, decades later, he ends up on the crew of the Renegat, the only ship in the Fleet ever sent on a mission backwards to investigate an ancient Boneyard.

Something invaded that Boneyard and the Fleet wants to know what. Or who.

The Renegat: The only ship the Fleet dares risk. The Renegat: A ship of misfits and screw-ups sent on an impossible mission. All alone in deep space.

Parts of this novel appeared in different forms as the novellas The Rescue of the Renegat (Asimov's January-February 2018) and Joyride (Asimov's November-December 2018).

As the surviving crew of the Renegat face court-martial for mutiny -- 100 years in their future -- the case makes everyone nervous. Prosecutors worry the survivors will prove too sympathetic to convict. The defense worries about the reliability of the defendants. But the survivors worry about what might happen should the truth -- the whole truth -- finally come to light.

This novel was first published in 2 parts in Asimov's Science Fiction, September/October 2022 and November/December 2022. Read the full novel for free at Asimov's website.

A race against time.

Weeks after Boss' injury from the runabout dive, she continues the mission to salvage Fleet wrecks for the Lost Souls Corporation But Boss feels like she lost something after that fateful dive. Until something happens in the Boneyard to catch her attention. Something that sparks her interest with an intensity she thought she had lost.

Now, Boss must assemble a team - her old team - to dive this new discovery. But Boss worries that someone knows her plans. That the Boneyard might prove more sentient than she knows. She feels the clock ticking - and she worries time will run out once and for all.

Boss' team leader Squishy, who had a mysterious past involving military intelligence, enlisted others to help her destroy stealth tech in the novel Boneyards. But exactly what happened to those teams remained a mystery - until now.

Ten people signed up to help Squishy in her fateful mission. Only five returned.

Paired up in teams of two, they set out across the Enterran Empire to infiltrate and sabotage the Empire's bases which were being used to back up their stealth tech research.

But what exactly happened on those bases? Who survived? Squishy's Teams provides the answers to those burning questions and reveals twists to the ongoing saga no one sees coming.

The author strongly encourages reading Boneyards before picking up Squishy's Teams.

On the run.

After fleeing pursuers from two different missions, Boss and Coop reconvene at the Lost Souls Corporation headquarters. Both share exciting but troublesome news. And a whole lot of questions.

But before they begin to even scratch the surface of the new information, they face threats from all quarters. And when an old adversary of Coop's gets involved, Boss questions who to trust to survive and find some long-awaited answers.

When the discovery of a bunker reveals a treasure trove of ancient artifacts, interested parties throughout the Empire--from collectors to academics to researchers--want a piece of the action. But the finds draw attention from outside the Empire as well. Attention from someone willing to do whatever it takes to outmaneuver the Empire and secure the collection.

It was touch and go for Earl Dumarest when the slavers of the Matriarchy of Onorldi struck his work camp. Had he not captured the Matriarch herself during the fight, it might have spelled his doom when the slavers triumphed.

Because, even though the odds had turned heavily against him, he was able to strike a bargain. The Matriarch's child daughter Iduna had disappeared into the mind-trap of the Tau. If he could follow, find her, and return with her, he would have his freedom and a chance to locate the lost Earth he sought.

But Dumarest had to outwit her monster playthings, outfight her hideous horrors, and outdream her satanic fantasies...

Set two years before Dune: Princess of Dune is the never-before-told story of two key women in the life of Paul Muad'Dib--Princess Irulan, his wife in name only, and Paul's true love, the Fremen Chani. Both women become central to Paul's galaxy-spanning Imperial reign.

Raised in the Imperial court and born to be a political bargaining chip, Irulan was sent at an early age to be trained as a Bene Gesserit Sister. As Princess Royal, she also learned important lessons from her father--the Padishah Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV. Now of marriageable age, Princess Irulan sees the machinations of the many factions vying for power--the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood, the Spacing Guild, the Imperial throne, and a ruthless rebellion in the Imperial military. The young woman has a wise and independent streak and is determined to become much more than a pawn to be moved about on anyone's gameboard.

Meanwhile, on Arrakis, Chani--the daughter of Liet-Kynes, the Imperial Planetologist who serves under the harsh rule of House Harkonnen--is trained in the Fremen mystical ways by an ancient Reverend Mother. Brought up to believe in her father's ecological dream of a green Arrakis, she follows Liet around to Imperial testing stations, surviving the many hazards of desert life. Chani soon learns the harsh cost of Fremen dreams and obligations under the oppressive boot heel of the long Harkonnen occupation.

Collected for the first time, these three previously unpublished Dune novellas by bestselling authors Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson shine a light upon the darker corners of the Dune universe. Spanning space and time, Sands of Dune is essential reading for any fan of the series.

The world of Dune has shaped an entire generation of science fiction. From the sand blasted world of Arrakis, to the splendor of the imperial homeworld of Kaitain, readers have lived in a universe of treachery and wonder.

Now, these stories expand on the Dune universe, telling of the lost years of Gurney Halleck as he works with smugglers on Arrakis in a deadly gambit for revenge; inside the ranks of the Sardaukar as the child of a betrayed nobleman becomes one of the Emperor's most ruthless fighters; a young firebrand Fremen woman, a guerrilla fighter against the ruthless Harkonnens, who will one day become Shadout Mapes.

Frank Herbert's magnificent Dune saga sprawls across countless planets and tens of millennia. Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have written thirteen international bestselling novels set in this epic universe. But the wealth of material leaves many side tales or interesting ideas that can be told, hors d'oeuvres to accompany the exotic main course. Sometimes, a short story is exactly what's needed.

Tales of Dune collects eight of Herbert and Anderson's Dune short stories, ranging from the period of the Butlerian Jihad, to the time of young Paul Atreides, to a story set during the events of the novel Dune, to the very end of Frank Herbert's future history. These are the missing pieces in the epic of Dune.

This edition is an expanded edition of the 2011 ebook published by WordFire Press. New material consists of the story "Red Plague" and the essays introducing each story.

Table of Contents:

• i - Introduction (Tales of Dune: Expanded Edition) - essay
• 2 - Hunting Harkonnens Introduction - essay
• 4 - Hunting Harkonnens - [Legends of Dune] - (2002) - novelette
• 45 - Whipping Mek Introduction - essay
• 46 - Whipping Mek - [Legends of Dune] - (2003) - short story
• 66 - The Faces of a Martyr Introduction - essay
• 68 - The Faces of a Martyr - [Legends of Dune] - (2004) - short story (variant of The Faces of a Martyr: A Tale of the Butlerian Jihad)
• 93 - Red Plague Introduction - essay
• 94 - Red Plague - [Schools of Dune] - (2016) - short story
• 114 - Wedding Silk Introduction - essay
• 115 - Wedding Silk - [Heroes of Dune] - (2011) - short fiction
• 131 - A Whisper of Caladan Seas Introduction - essay
• 132 - A Whisper of Caladan Seas - [Dune] - (1999) - short story
• 162 - Sea Child Introduction - essay
• 163 - Sea Child - [Dune] - (2011) - short story (variant of Sea Child: A Tale of Dune 2006)
• 184 - Treasure in the Sand Introduction - essay
• 185 - Treasure in the Sand - [Dune Sequels] - (2006) - short story

Frank Herbert's Dune is widely known as the science fiction equivalent of The Lord of the Rings. The Road to Dune is a companion work comparable to The Silmarillion, shedding light on and following the remarkable development of the bestselling science fiction novel of all time.

Herein, the worlds millions of Dune fans can now read at long last unpublished chapters and scenes from Dune and Dune Messiah. The Road to Dune also includes correspondence between Frank Herbert and famed editor, John W. Campbell, Jr.; excerpts from Herbert's correspondence during his years-long struggle to get his innovative work published; and the article, They Stopped the Moving Sands, Herbert's original inspiration for Dune.

The Road to Dune features Spice Planet, an original sixty-two thousand-word novel by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, based on a detailed outline left by Frank Herbert. The Road to Dune is a treasure trove of essays, articles, and fiction that every reader of Dune will want to add to their shelf.

Tarzan of the Apes, Jason Gridley, and the crew of the airship O-220 return to Pellucidar, the world at the Earth's core, on a wartime mission to stop the Nazis from obtaining a powerful superweapon. But when the Lord of the Jungle's murderous adversaries partner with the Mahars--Pellucidar's routed reptilian overlords--and his adventurous granddaughter Suzanne goes missing on a reconnaissance mission, can Tarzan prevent the conquest and enslavement of all humanity in both the inner and outer worlds?

Orson Scott Card offers a Christmas gift to his millions of fans with this short novel set during Ender's first years at the Battle School where it is forbidden to celebrate religious holidays.

The children come from many nations, many religions; while they are being trained for war, religious conflict between them is not on the curriculum. But Dink Meeker, one of the older students, doesn't see it that way. He thinks that giving gifts isn't exactly a religious observation, and on Sinterklaas Day he tucks a present into another student's shoe.

This small act of rebellion sets off a battle royal between the students and the staff, but some surprising alliances form when Ender comes up against a new student, Zeck Morgan. The War over Santa Claus will force everyone to make a choice.

After twenty-three years, Orson Scott Card returns to his acclaimed best-selling series with the first true, direct sequel to the classic Ender's Game.

In Ender's Game, the world's most gifted children were taken from their families and sent to an elite training school. At Battle School, they learned combat, strategy, and secret intelligence to fight a dangerous war on behalf of those left on Earth. But they also learned some important and less definable lessons about life.

After the life-changing events of those years, these children-now teenagers-must leave the school and readapt to life in the outside world.

Having not seen their families or interacted with other people for years-where do they go now? What can they do?

Ender fought for humanity, but he is now reviled as a ruthless assassin. No longer allowed to live on Earth, he enters into exile. With his sister Valentine, he chooses to leave the only home he's ever known to begin a relativistic-and revelatory-journey beyond the stars.

What happened during the years between Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead? What did Ender go through from the ages of 12 through 35? The story of those years has never been told. Taking place 3000 years before Ender finally receives his chance at redemption in Speaker for the Dead, this is the long-lost story of Ender.

For twenty-three years, millions of readers have wondered and now they will receive the answers. Ender in Exile is Orson Scott Card's moving return to all the action and the adventure, the profound exploration of war and society, and the characters one never forgot.

On one of these ships, there is a baby that just may share the same special gifts as Ender's old friend Bean....

Hugo Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, August 1977. The story has been reprinted many times and can be found in the anthologies:

• The Spear of Mars (1980), edited by Reginald Bretnor
• The Analog Anthology #2 (1982), edited by Stanley Schmidt
• There Will Be War (1983), edited by John F. Carr and Jerry Pournelle
• Visions of Wonder (1996), edited by David G. Hartwell and Milton T. Wolf
• The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century (2001), edited by Harry Turtledove and Martin H. Greenberg
• Future Games (2013), edited by Paula Guran

It is included in the collections Unaccompanied Sonata and Other Stories (1981), Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card (1990), and First Meetings: Three Stories From The Enderverse (2002).

The story was later expanded to the full novel Ender's Game (1985).

Contains:

• The Polish Boy
• Teacher's Pest
• The Investment Counselor

Later editions also include the novelette Ender' Game (1977).

In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race's next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program but didn't make the cutyoung Ender is the Wiggin drafted to the orbiting Battle School for rigorous military training.

Ender's skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle Room, where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers Ender suffers greatly from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of the alien invaders. His psychological battles include loneliness, fear that he is becoming like the cruel brother he remembers, and fanning the flames of devotion to his beloved sister.

Is Ender the general Earth needs? But Ender is not the only result of the genetic experiments. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway for almost as long. Ender's two older siblings are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If, that is, the world survives.

In the aftermath of his terrible war, Ender Wiggin disappeared, and a powerful voice arose: The Speaker for the Dead, who told the true story of the Bugger War.

Now, long years later, a second alien race has been discovered, but again the aliens' ways are strange and frightening... again, humans die. And it is only the Speaker for the Dead, who is also Ender Wiggin the Xenocide, who has the courage to confront the mystery... and the truth.

The war for survival of the planet Lusitania will be fought in the hearts of a child named Gloriously Bright.

On Lusitania, Ender found a world where humans and pequininos and the Hive Queen could all live together; where three very different intelligent species could find common ground at last. Or so he thought.

Lusitania also harbors the descolada, a virus that kills all humans it infects, but which the pequininos require in order to become adults. The Startways Congress so fears the effects of the descolada, should it escape from Lusitania, that they have ordered the destruction of the entire planet, and all who live there. The Fleet is on its way, a second xenocide seems inevitble.

With Children of the Mind, Card returns to the story of Ender Wiggin: hero of the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Enders Game, the original Speaker for the Dead, and the hated Xenocide who murdered an entire planet. Now his adopted world, Lusitania, is threatened by the same planet-destroying weapon that he himself used so many thousands of years before.

Enders oldest friend, Jane, the computer intelligence that has evolved with him over 3000 years, is about to be killed by the Starways Congress, which has finally discovered her existence and fears her control of the galaxy-wide interlocked network of computers and ansibles.Jane can save the three sentient races of Lusitaniathe Pequeninos, the Hive Queens daughters, and the human colony. She has learned how to move ships outside the universe, and then instantly back to a different world, abolishing the light-speed limit. But it takes all the processing power available to her, and the Starways Congress is shutting down the Net world by world.

Orson Scott Card brings us back to the very beginning of his brilliant Ender Quartet, with a novel that allows us to reenter that world anew.

With all the power of his original creation, Card has created a parallel volume to Ender's Game, a book that expands and compliments the first, enhancing its power, illuminating its events and its powerful conclusion.

The human race is at War with the "Buggers", an insect-like alien race. The first battles went badly, and now as Earth prepares to defend itself against the imminent threat of total destruction at the hands of an inscrutable alien enemy, all focus is on the development and training of military geniuses who can fight such a war, and win.

The long distances of interstellar space have given hope to the defenders of Earth--they have time to train these future commanders up from childhood, forging then into an irresisible force in the high orbital facility called the Battle School.

Andrew "Ender" Wiggin was not the only child in the Battle School he was just the best of the best. In this new book, card tells the story of another of those precocious generals, the one they called Bean--the one who became Ender's right hand, part of his team, in the final battle against the Buggers.

Bean's past was a battle just to survive. He first appeared on the streets of Rotterdam, a tiny child with a mind leagues beyond anyone else's. He knew he could not survive through strength he used his tactical genius to gain acceptance into a children's gang, and then to help make that gang a template for success for all the others. He civilized them, and lived to grow older.

Bean's desperate struggle to live, and his success, brought him to the attention of the Battle School's recruiters, those people scouring the planet for leaders, tacticians, and generals to save Earth from the threat of alien invasion. Bean was sent into orbit, to the Battle School. And there he met Ender....

The War is over, won by Ender Wiggin and his team of brilliant child-warriors. The enemy is destroyed, the human race is saved. Ender himself refuses to return to the planet, but his crew has gone home to their families, scattered across the globe. The battle school is no more.

But with the external threat gone, the Earth has become a battlefield once more. The children of the Battle School are more than heros they are potential weapons that can bring power to the countries that control them. One by one, all of Ender's Dragon Army are kidnapped. Only Bean escapes and he turns for help to Ender's brother Peter.

Peter Wiggin, Ender's older brother, has already been manipulating the politics of Earth from behind the scenes. With Bean's help, he will eventually rule the world.

Bestselling author Orson Scott Card brings to life a new chapter in the saga of Ender's Earth.

Earth and its society has been changed irrevocably in the aftermath of Ender Wiggin's victory over the Formics--the unity enforced upon the warring nations by an alien enemy has shattered. Nations are rising again, seeking territory and influence, and most of all, seeking to control the skills and loyalty of the children from the Battle School.

But one person has a better idea. Peter Wiggin, Ender's older, more ruthless, brother, sees that any hope for the future of Earth lies in restoring a sense of unity and purpose. And he has an irresistible call on the loyalty of Earth's young warriors. With Bean at his side, the two will reshape our future.

Here is the continuing story of Bean and Petra, and the rest of Ender's Dragon Army, as they take their places in the new government of Earth.

Bean's past was a battle just to survive. He first appeared on the streets of Rotterdam, a tiny child with a mind leagues beyond anyone else. He knew he could not survive through strength; he used his tactical genius to gain acceptance into a children's gang, and then to help make that gang a template for success for all the others. He civilized them, and lived to grow older. Then he was discovered by the recruiters for the Battle School.

For Earth was at war -- a terrible war with an inscrutable alien enemy. A war that humanity was near to losing. But the long distances of interstellar space has given hope to the defenders of Earth -- they had time to train military geniuses up from childhood, forging them into an irresistible force in the high-orbital facility called the Battle School. That story is told in two books, the beloved classic Ender's Game, and its parallel, Ender's Shadow.

Bean was the smallest student at the Battle School, but he became Ender Wiggins' right hand. Since then he has grown to be a power on Earth. He served the Hegemon as strategist and general in the terrible wars that followed Ender's defeat of the alien empire attacking Earth. Now he and his wife Petra yearn for a safe place to build a family -- something he has never known -- but there is nowhere on Earth that does not harbor his enemies -- old enemies from the days in Ender's Jeesh, new enemies from the wars on Earth. To find security, Bean and Petra must once again follow in Ender's footsteps. They must leave Earth behind, in the control of the Hegemon, and look to the stars.

Ender’s Shadow explores the stars in this all-new novel...

At the end of Shadow of the Giant, Bean flees to the stars with three of his children--the three who share the engineered genes that gave him both hyper-intelligence and a short, cruel physical life. The time dilation granted by the speed of their travel gives Earth’s scientists generations to seek a cure, to no avail. In time, they are forgotten--a fading ansible signal speaking of events lost to Earth’s history. But the Delphikis are about to make a discovery that will let them save themselves, and perhaps all of humanity in days to come.

For there in space before them lies a derelict Formic colony ship. Aboard it, they will find both death and wonders--the life support that is failing on their own ship, room to grow, and labs in which to explore their own genetic anomaly and the mysterious disease that killed the ship’s colony.

One planet.

Three sapient species living peacefully together.

And one deadly virus that could wipe out every world in the Starways Congress, killing billions.

Is the only answer another great Xenocide?

The mining ship El Cavador is far out from Earth, in the deeps of the Kuiper Belt, beyond Pluto. Other mining ships, and the families that live on them, are few and far between this far out. So when El Cavador's telescopes pick up a fast-moving object coming in-system, it's hard to know what to make of it. It's massive and moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light.

El Cavador has other problems. Their systems are old and failing. The family is getting too big for the ship. There are claim-jumping corporate ships bringing Asteroid Belt tactics to the Kuiper Belt. Worrying about a distant object that might or might not be an alien ship seems...not important.

They're wrong. It's the most important thing that has happened to the human race in a million years. The first Formic War is about to begin.

One hundred years before Ender's Game, the aliens arrived on Earth with fire and death. This is the story of the First Formic War.

Victor Delgado beat the alien ship to Earth, but just barely. Not soon enough to convince skeptical governments that there was a threat. They didn't believe that until space stations and ships and colonies went up in sudden flame.

And when that happened, only Mazer Rackham and the Mobile Operations Police could move fast enough to meet the threat.

The story of The First Formic War continues in Earth Awakens.

Nearly 100 years before the events of Orson Scott Card's bestselling novel Ender's Game, humans were just beginning to step off Earth and out into the Solar System. A thin web of ships in both asteroid belts; a few stations; a corporate settlement on Luna. No one had seen any sign of other space-faring races; everyone expected that First Contact, if it came, would happen in the future, in the empty reaches between the stars. Then a young navigator on a distant mining ship saw something moving too fast, heading directly for our sun.

When the alien ship screamed through the solar system, it disrupted communications between the far-flung human mining ships and supply stations, and between them and Earth. So Earth and Luna were unaware that they had been invaded until the ship pulled into Earth orbit, and began landing terra-forming crews in China. Politics and pride slowed the response on Earth, and on Luna, corporate power struggles seemed more urgent than distant deaths. But there are a few men and women who see that if Earth doesn't wake up and pull together, the planet could be lost.

From Orson Scott Card, award-winning and bestselling author of Ender's Game, his first solo Enderverse novel in years.

Children of the Fleet is a new angle on Card's bestselling series, telling the story of the Fleet in space, parallel to the story on Earth told in the Ender's Shadow series.

Ender Wiggin won the Third Formic war, ending the alien threat to Earth. Afterwards, all the terraformed Formic worlds were open to settlement by humans, and the International Fleet became the arm of the Ministry of Colonization, run by Hirum Graff. MinCol now runs Fleet School on the old Battle School station, and still recruits very smart kids to train as leaders of colony ships, and colonies.

Dabeet Ochoa is a very smart kid. Top of his class in every school. But he doesn't think he has a chance at Fleet School, because he has no connections to the Fleet. That he knows of. At least until the day that Colonel Graff arrives at his school for an interview.

Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston return to their Ender's Game prequel series with this first volume of an all-new trilogy about the Second Formic War in The Swarm.

The first invasion of Earth was beaten back by a coalition of corporate and international military forces, and the Chinese army. China has been devastated by the Formic's initial efforts to eradicate Earth life forms and prepare the ground for their own settlement. The Scouring of China struck fear into the other nations of the planet; that fear blossomed into drastic action when scientists determined that the single ship that wreaked such damage was merely a scout ship.

There is a mothership out beyond the Solar System's Kuiper Belt, and it's heading into the system, unstoppable by any weapons that Earth can muster.

Earth has been reorganized for defense. There is now a Hegemon, a planetary official responsible for keeping all the formerly warring nations in line. There's a Polemarch, responsible for organizing all the military forces of the planet into the new International Fleet. But there is an enemy within, an enemy as old as human warfare: ambition and politics. Greed and self-interest. Will Bingwen, Mazer Rackam, Victor Delgado and Lem Juke be able to divert those very human enemies in time to create a weapon that can effectively defend humanity in the inexorable Second Formic War?

New York Times bestselling authors Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston return to the prequels to Ender's Game following The Swarm with The Hive, book two in the Second Formic War.

Card and Johnston continue the fast-paced hard science fiction history of the Formic Wars--the alien invasions of Earth's Solar System that ultimately led to Ender Wiggin's total victory in Ender's Game.

A coalition of Earth's nations barely fought off the Formics' first scout ship. Now it's clear that there's a mother-ship out on edge of the system, and the aliens are prepared to take Earth by force. Can Earth's warring nations and corporations put aside their differences and mount an effective defense?

Ender's Game is one of the most popular and bestselling science fiction novels of all time. The Formic War series (The First Formic War and The Second Formic War) are the prequels to Ender's story.

In a Europe fractured by a flu pandemic and crippled by economic collapse, the continent has fractured into a hundred tiny principalities of ever-shifting loyalties, borders and covert operations.

For Carey Tews, a former operative with Les Coureurs des Bois -- a clandestine organisation of high-risk smugglers -- Europe and the coureurs are in her past. Her legend in Hungary is blown six way from Sunday, and even if she could go back to working in Europe, she wouldn't. That is until an old friend and lover is declared dead in mysterious circumstances.

What she doesn't know is that the investigation will take her to places she couldn't even imagine.

She was born in poverty, in a dusty village under the equatorial sun. She does not remember her mother, she does not remember her own name-her earliest clear memory is of the day her father sold her to the tall pale man. In the Court of the Pomegranate Tree, where she was taught the ways of a courtesan... and the skills of an assassin... she was named Emerald, the precious jewel of the Undying Duke's collection of beauties.

She calls herself Green.

The world she inhabits is one of political power and magic, where Gods meddle in the affairs of mortals. At the center of it is the immortal Duke's city of Copper Downs, which controls all the trade on the Storm Sea. Green has made many enemies, and some secret friends, and she has become a very dangerous woman indeed.

Acclaimed author Jay Lake has created a remarkable character in Green, and evokes a remarkable world in this novel. Green and her struggle to survive and find her own past will live in the reader's mind for a long time after closing the book.

Green is back in Copper Downs. Purchased from her father in sunny Selistan when she was four years old, she was harshly raised to be a courtesan, companion, and bedmate of the Immortal Duke of Copper Downs. But Green rebelled. Green killed the Duke, and many others, and won her freedom. Yet she is still claimed by the gods and goddesses of her world, and they still require her service. Their demands are greater than any duke's could have been.

Godslayers have come to the Stone Coast, magicians whose cult is dedicated to destroying the many gods of Green's world. In the turmoil following the Immortal Duke's murder, Green made a God out of her power and her memories. Now the gods turn to her to protect them from the Slayers.

Jay Lake brings us an epic fantasy not "in the tradition of Tolkien," but, instead, sensual, ominous, shot through with the sweat of fear and the intoxication of power.

This sequel to Green and Endurance takes Green back to the city of Kalimpura and the service of the Lily Goddess.

Green is hounded by the gods of Copper Down, and the gods of Kalimpura, who have laid claim to her and her children. She never wanted to be a conduit for the supernatural, but when she killed the Immortal Duke and created the Ox god with the power, she released she came to their notice.

Now she has sworn to retrieve the two girls taken hostage by the Bittern Court, one of Kalimpura's rival guilds. But the Temple of the Lily Goddess is playing politics with her life.

The survivors live underground, as far from the Original World as possible and protected from the ultimate evil, Radiation. Then terrible monsters, who bring with them a screaming silence, are seen and people start to disappear. One young man realises he must question the nature of Darkness itself.

Set more than four thousand years in the future, Summertide introduces a galaxy widely populated by humans and a variety of intelligent aliens, all of whom live in the shadow of the vanished race known only as the Builders. Nothing is known about the Builders, but the gigantic artifacts they have left behind - many of them still hardly understood - dominate the areas of space in which they are found. One such is the double-planet system of Opal and Quake - the former covered in water, the latter in desert - connected by a Builder device called the Umbilical. It is to this system that a variety of humans and aliens come, ostensibly to witness Summertide - the annual tidal wave which sweeps across Opal.

For millennia, humankind and the other intelligent races had studied the bizarre and unfathomable constructs of the legendary beings known as Builders. But for all that study, they were still no closer to figuring out who - or what - the Builders had been, or where they had gone. Then, on the world called Quake, in the midst of the violent planetary upheaval that was Summertide, a small group of humans and aliens witnessed the culmination of all those years of watching and waiting: the planet Quake opened up, and something came out - and it looked as if, at long last, the discovery of the Builders themselves was at hand.

All her life, Darya Lang had dreamed of finding the Builders, whose artifacts she had single-handedly catalogued for the rest of the universe. Troubleshooter and adventurer Hans Rebka had his own dreams of unraveling the mystery of those artifacts. To Louis Nenda and the Cecropian Atvar H'sial, the Builder artifacts represented a once-in-a-lifetime shot at untold wealth. And close behind them came the others: Councilor Julius Graces, who did not trust anyone to make first contact unassisted; the slavesJ'merlia and Kallik, who craved only a reunion with their masters; and the embodied computer E.C. Tally, charged with finding out just what the rest were up to.

The trail that began at Quake led to unexpected Builder artifacts full of traps for the unwary and answers for those who knew how to ask the questions. But the biggest question of all would remain an enigma, while their search unleashed the greatest threat to civilization ever imagined...

The Zardalu were the greatest menace ever known to the worlds of the spiral arm, enslaving entire races and exterminating others, guided by an unswerving belief in their own supremacy. Then their slaves rose up against them, and for eleven thousand years the Zardalu had been extinct and the spiral arm had known a kind of peace.

But now the Zardalu were back...

The search for the Builders, the legendary alien race whose unfathomable constructs continued to perplex scholars and explorers alike, had led Builder expert Darya Lang, adventurer Hans Rebka, and treasure hunters Louis Nenda and Atvar H'sial to an unknown Builder artifact far outside the spiral arm. There they found the Zardalu - just a few who had been trapped in stasis all those millennia, held there for purposes known only to the Builders. And in the struggle that ensued the Zardalu had been set loose, transported by Builder technology to to galactic parts unknown - free to ravage any world and any race within their grasp.

The only chance to eliminate the Zardalu threat was to find them and wipe them out before they had time to breed back up to strength and once again threaten civilized beings everywhere. The problem was that no one believed the story. Only Darya Land and her companions had actually seen the aliens - and no evidence existed to support their claims. And so the course seemed clear: get a ship themselves and search out the Zardalu.

But the way would not be easy. Even once they managed to locate the Zardalu, they still had the Builders to deal with. For the closer they got to their quarry, the more clear it became that the Zardalu and their world were closely entwined with the fate - and the plans - of the Builders themselves.

Humans first reached out to the stars travelling at a painfully slow sublight crawl - then they found the Bose network, which allowed ships to jump instantaneously from one node in the galactic arm to another. Once in the Network they found the Artifacts: enigmatic structures, millions of years old, left by a vanished race. Incomprehensible to both human ad non-human minds, the Artifacts seemingly defy natural law.

Now, after millions of years, a new Artifact has appeared - and previously discovered Artifacts are showing strange changes in their inexplicable activities. When a motley crew of human and alien scientists and adventurers set out to examine still more Artifacts, they should have considered the fat that some changes are more dangerous than others...

Hans Rebka, interstellar trouble-shooter, had solved the mystery of the gigantic Artefacts built by a race that vanished millions of years ago, and at the same time had defeated the warlike Zardalu, onetime tyrannical rulers of the galaxy. But that was only a warm-up for the main event. In one arm of the galaxy, something is destroying whole stellar systems. Investigating the wave of stellar destruction, Rebka and his motley crew of humans and aliens discover a battle beginning that may determine the ultimate fate of the galaxy itself. Rebka and company must act quickly. Unfortunately, they are trapped on a planet directly in the path of destruction...

THE STRANGEST SOLDIERS AND REBELS CLASH ON THE MOST INCREDIBLE BATTLEFIELD

They were no longer human—they were hybrids, genetic/cyborg soldiers. They fought each other in savage battles through the ice forests of Saturn's moon. They held the constant terror of death and destruction at bay only by indulging in fantastic cybernetic dreams and games, genetically engineered drugs, and the disturbing pleasures of their altered flesh.

A Combat Hybrid ...

Joints reinforced with polymer mesh. Nictating occular membranes. Sphincters where there were none before. Regenerated limbs. Subcutaneous vitalium wires instead of hair. They were no longer human. They were combat hybrids—genetically-modified cyborgs bioformed for fhe express purpose of waging war in hostile environments.

Marc Detrs hadn't wanted to become a hybrid. But it was that or jail. That or have his true past discovered. That or be forced to reveal his knowledge of the all-seeing timestone. He became a hybrid, fighting for the chance to die in a guerrilla war that is waged in the frozen methane forests of Saturn's moon.

And then Grychn reappeared–a ghost from his past, the lover who knew all his secrets. They would either kill each other or help each other to find the timestone, the most valuable object in the Universe.

Don't miss Dream Games, the second novel of the Hybrid Universe.

"A rousing and evocative future war novel in the tradition of STARSHIP TROOPERS and THE FOREVER WAR. Readers will remember it long after they put the book down."–George R. R. Martin, Winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards

"Makes Heinlein's Starship Troopers look like a pack of cub scouts." — Edward Bryant, twice winner of the Nebula Award

"More real than life, more painful, and, in the end, more beautiful. Hansen really goes for the jugular!" — Orson Scott Card, author of A Planet Called Treason

THE DREAM HUNTERS

The only humans left on Earth are aristocratic immortals, doomed to live out their perpetual youth as sex-cultists, lost in the euphoria of the dream game. Meanwhile, the all-powerful computer Cybermind commands the galaxy with its army of youthful Hybrid super-soldiers, captured and equipped with artificial memories and passions.

But random acts of terror have broken out—massive robberies and brutal mind-deaths that are perpetrated while the helpless victims swoon in the imagined ecstasies of virtual reality passion.

Enemies of the Cybermind, masters of illusion, two rebel Hybrid soldiers have become the ultimate terrorists. Fighting against the decadence of Earth, in search of their own pasts, Nate and Rissa are now the most feared of warriors. Living, loving, and killing as one, they are the Dream Hunters...

WE WERE HUNTING AGAIN

We stalked our prey. They were everywhere below, huddled together in their villages, sleeping, thinking they were safe. But they dreamed. Their dreams rose from their minds like smoke from a fire.

We hovered over a particular village, plucking dream filaments at random, following them back, letting their images unravel: hunting bison on horseback, stalking deer, pounding gold into sheets and making jewelry, making love with your friend's wife.

Dawn was near. Dream-hunters hunted best at night. We retreated before the advancing day, floating back the way we had come, dropping back to the garrison, going back to our bodies...

Sweeping through the Small Magellanic Cloud, leaving a trail of ravished worlds and destroyed civilization, is the Udef -- the Unidentified Death Force. The best scientific minds of two galaxies can make nothing of it. The Udef is invisible. No scientific instrument can detect its presence. The only marks of its passing are the screams of its victims and the piles of dead left in its wake.

Momentarily safe on the world of Montura, Jan Darzek's strategy against the Udeffalters. He and his assistant Effie have been ordered there by a supreme computer -- that isn't telling why. There is nothing to do on Montura but frantically wheel and deal in its spectacular interworld trading market. Supreme has also sent a perplexed Dr. Malina Darr from Earth, whose apparent purpose is to cure an unknown disease in an alien life form no one has ever seen...

The three of them must content with a mad mixture of Montura's mysterious race of natives, the melange of self-serving life forms in the marketplace, and the Kloatraz -- the universe's strangest "living" computer -- while the Udef comes ever closer to wiping out every intelligent life form in the universe. Somehow it must be stopped before no one is left to fight it.

If the broken neon signs, shuttered storefronts, and sub-standard housing didn't tip you off, you've just wandered into the city of "Undisclosed". You don't want to be caught dead here, because odds are you just might find yourself rising from the grave. That hasn't stopped tourists from visiting to check out the unusual phenomena that hangs around our town like radioactive fallout. Interdimensional parasites feeding on human hosts, paranormal cults worshipping demonic entities, vengeful teenage sorcerers, we've got it all.

Did I mention the possessed toy? It's a plastic football-sized egg that's supposed to hatch an adorable, colorful stuffed bird when a child "feeds" it through a synchronized smartphone app. What's actually inside is an otherworldly monstrosity that's enticing impressionable wayward youth into murdering folks and depositing their body parts inside the egg as if it's a hungry piggy bank to trigger the end of the world.

That's where Dave, John, and Amy come in. They face supernatural threats so the rest of us don't have to--and sometimes even earn a couple of bucks to so do. But between the bloody ritual sacrifices and soul-crushing nightmares, our trio realizes this apocalypse is way above their pay grade.

Retired Colonel Ray Longknife and Marine Captain Terrence "Trouble" Tordon come to Savannah via different routes, but what they find is the same. One bully strongman is intent on keeping power no matter what the new rules are for peace. He's got the population cowered by thugs, and tanks at the ready. He expects to win the coming elections handily.

He doesn't expect trouble. Or, in this case, Mrs. Trouble--aka Ruth Tordon--a Marine wife on a mission to find the drug lords that almost killed her and her husband and put them out of business--and she's not about to be stopped by some barely trained roughnecks.

Abandoned by their strongman and desperate in defeat, the heavy armor get ready to roll into town over anybody in their way. But Ray Longknife, Trouble and Ruth are standing in their way...and nothing is going to flatten them.

The war is over. Hooray!

Half the fleet is back in mothballs, but out on the rim of human space, ships are disappearing. Some are merchant ships going about their. business. Others are exploration ships on deep space probes. What's happening to them? Captain Rita Nuu Longknife is ready to take the heavy cruiser Exeter to space and see what's there. She may have a nursery next to the captain's cabin and a two month old baby on her hip, but she's taking a warship out there and nobody better get in her way.

The victory parades are over and half the fleet is back in mothballs. The Navies better start getting them back in Commission! Rita Longknife, commander of the heavy cruiser Exeter, has proof. Proof that there is something else out there. Proof we are not alone in the galaxy. Aboard her ship is evidence that we have blown up an alien ship, and they have blown up one of ours. So far, contact with the aliens is being made by pirates, the worst scum humanity has. How do the right people take over making contact? Is there already too much bad blood between us? Have we already blown first contact?

FOUR SOLDIERS. ONE WAR.

Asteroid miner Mary Rodrigo and freighter owner Mattim Abeeb are green draftees of the Society of Humanity, forced to fight for Earth--a planet they've never even seen.

Major Ray Longknife and his lover, Senior Pilot Rita Nuu, are career soldiers, invested with the cause of the Unity Party--and its ambitious new president.

These four soldiers on opposing sides of the battle are about to discover the true nature of this terrible war: a quest for profit--from the high command of both sides. What they will risk is nothing less than their lives. For although truth may be the first casualty of war, it's not going to be the last...

THE WAR IS OVER. THE TREATY IS SIGNED. AND ALL IS WELL IN THE GALAXY...

Izzy Umboto is a hero of the conflict between the Society of Humanity and the Unity Party. Instead of retiring and living out her days quietly, she's wrangled command of her very own warship. Unfortunately, that ship is the less-than-state-of-the-art Patton.

Lieutenant Terrence Tordon, called "Trouble" by both his enemies and his friends, and even himself, is a career marine. The word "quit" isn't in his vocabulary.

Now Lieutenant Trouble and his troops have signed on with Commander Umboto, trading a higher paycheck for the promise of action.

For all is not well in the galaxy. On the scattering of planets along the rim, remnant thugs of the Unity Party still hold power. In the shipping lanes of rim space, pirates roam freely.

Umboto and Tordon will soon learn that enforcing the peace can be just as expensive as fighting the war--and the cost will be counted in human lives...

A WAR WITHIN

Colonel Ray Longknife and Marine Captain Mary Rodrigo were once enemies in an interstellar war. Now they're working together to keep the peace. But can they protect themselves from an enemy they can't even see?

When a bad space jump flings their starship thousands of light-years away from home, Longknife and Rodrigo make an amazing discovery: a planet inhabited by the descendants of a ship's crew--lost three hundred years earlier.

As acting ambassador, Longknife is eager to welcome the planet's population back into the fold of humanity. But Rodrigo is suspicious. She senses that something is wrong under the planet's veneer of peace and prosperity. And she's right....

Atlanta was always a dangerous city. Now, as waves of magic and technology compete for supremacy, it's a place caught in a slow apocalypse, where monsters spawn among the crumbling skyscrapers and supernatural factions struggle for power and survival.

Eight years ago, Julie Lennart left Atlanta to find out who she was. Now she's back with a new face, a new magic, and a new name--Aurelia Ryder--drawn by the urgent need to protect the family she left behind. An ancient power is stalking her adopted mother, Kate Daniels, an enemy unlike any other, and a string of horrifying murders is its opening gambit.

If Aurelia's true identity is discovered, those closest to her will die. So her plan is simple: get in, solve the murders, prevent the prophecy from being fulfilled, and get out without being recognized. She expected danger, but she never anticipated that the only man she'd ever loved could threaten everything.

One small misstep could lead to disaster. But for Aurelia, facing disaster is easy; it's relationships that are hard.

College students, human and nonhuman, raised together on the same planet, search for the origins of civilization in the Galaxy and find old magic and a vast, implacable conspiracy. Can they forge bonds of friendship and understanding among themselves strong enough to stand against greed, lust for power, and absolute domination of a hundred planets? If not, then why does the enemy fear them?

Older and wiser, the humans and nonhumans of Molt Brother now suffer the consequences of their actions. They have stirred the karma of their lifetimes lived billions of years ago - when they were responsible for the destruction of a Galactic Civilization, the First Lifewave. Now they must seize the object of power that corrupted them the first time - to keep it from the hands of an implacable enemy. Can they resist its lure and save the Second Lifewave?

Star-trading Clan Korval--known to Terrans as the Tree-and-Dragon Family and to the locals simply as "the Dragon"--has been convicted of crimes against the homeworld. No matter that one of the "crimes" consisted of saving the elitist planet of Liad from very real internal threats, the Council of Clans wanted Korval heads to roll. Unfortunately for the Council, the Dragon's allies conspired to impose a milder punishment for saving the world: banishment, rather than execution.

Now relocated to the free-for-all world of Surebleak, the Dragon is under contract to keep the Port Road open to all traffic, and to back the New Bosses in imposing law and order on a society originally based on larceny and assassination. This modest rustication is going surprisingly well, until Korval discovers that the enemy they'd sought to destroy. . .wasn't quite destroyed, and is more determined than ever to eradicate Korval.

While the banishment killed no one initially, many of Korval's trading allies are spooked, and some are reneging on ancient agreements, leaving the Dragon to make its own way. The clan's efforts to stealthily recruit new allies is going haywire, and a secret death toll is rising even as the clan's adherents endure increasing exposure to danger and deceit off-world.

To make matters worse, an active portion of Surebleak's native population liked the Old Ways just fine, and are conspiring to take the New Bosses--and the Dragon--down, and are sure they have the firepower and people to do it.

The exiled Dragon has to make an urgent choice--accept an alliance with criminals or face down each and every enemy in person, one by one.

The kompani see none as an enemy, and yet few as friend. The kompani exist in many places, living quietly in the shadows, thriving off the bounty that others have no wit to secure, nor skill to defend. Their private history is unwritten; their recall rooted in dance and dream. The Clan Korval is in many ways the opposite of the kompani. The interstellar trading clan is wealthy in enemies, fortunate in friends. Korval protects itself with vigor, and teaches even its youngest children the art of war.

And when representatives of Clan Korval arrive on the planet Surebleak where the kompani has lived, secret and aloof, the lives of three people intersect-- Kezzi, apprentice to the kompani's grandmother; Syl Vor, Clan Korval's youngest warrior; and Rys, a man without a world, or a past.

Necessity's Child is a standalone adventure in the popular and exciting Liaden Universe.

A door never closes, but a window opens...

With origins in the Old Universe, the malevolent, acquisitive intelligence of Tinsori Light sought to infect others with itself, and send those agents out into the wide new universe to infect even more.

For centuries, two heroes stood between Tinsori Light and the vulnerable universe--Light Keepers Jen Sin yos'Phelium and Lorith of the Sanderat.

Just when it seemed that they--merely human--must fail, Tinsori Light, enfeebled by aged systems, succumbed to the stress of a unique spatial event . . . and died, leaving the station a shell.

Luckily, the light keepers have back-up. A mismatched team of arcane specialists are on-station, working non-stop to preserve the Light, build trustworthy systems, and open the refurbished station for business.

In fact, ships are already incoming, and it becomes a matter of urgency to sort friend from foe. In particular, the Lyre Institute wishes to acquire Tinsori Light, and will do anything, spend anyone, to achieve that goal.

Fleeing the scene of his latest mission, Val Con yos'Phelium finds himself saving the life of ex-mercenary Miri Robertson, a young Tarren on the run from interplanetary assassins. Thrown together by circumstances, Val Con and Miri struggle to elude their enemies and stay alive without slaying each other-or surrendering to the unexpected passion that flares between them.

Sixteen-year-old Priscilla Delacroix was declared legally dead by her mother, High Priestess of the Goddess. Banished to survive on her own, Priscilla has roamed the galaxy for ten years as an outcast--to become a woman of extraordinary skill....

An experienced officer assigned to the Liaden vessel Doxflon, she's been abandoned yet again. Betrayed by her captain and shipmates, she's left to fend for herself on a distant planet. But Priscilla is not alone. Starship captain Shan yos'Galen is about to join Priscilla's crusade for revenge. He has his own score to settle with the enemy. But confronting the sinister crew will be far easier--and safer--than confronting the demons of Priscilla's own mysterious past.

On the run from interplanetary assassins, covert operative Val Con yos'Phelium and former mercenary sergeant Miri Robertson have wound up stranded on a distant planet with no rescue in sight. Until they figure out a way back to Liad, these two lost souls must find a way to trust each another--and let their love heal the dark wounds of their past....

Back on Liad, Shan yos'Galan, Val Con's cousin and foster brother, and his life-partner, Priscilla Mendoza, have initiated their own search for the missing member of Clan Korval. But what they don't know is that those who seek to destroy Val Con and Miri are just as determined to bring down Clan Korval. All the deadly enemy needs is someone to unwittingly lead them to their target....

Val Con yos'Phelium is a fugitive. The heir of Clan Korval is wanted by the covert Liaden agency known as the Department of the Interior, whose rulers have declared unofficial war against the entire clan. With only his love, Miri Robertson, by his side, Val Con plans a desperate gamble by forming an alliance with Clan Erob on the planet where Miri was born.

But Val Con's cousin, Shan yos'Galan, can't wait for help that may never arrive. With enemy agents closing in, he invokes Plan B--setting in motion a series of events that will have dire consequences not only for him and his life-mate Priscilla Mendoza, but for all of Liad...

Each person shall provide his clan of origin with a child of his blood, who will be raised by the clan and belong to the clan. And this shall be Law for every person of every clan...

Master trader Er Thorn knows the local custom of Liaden is to be matched with a proper bride, and provide his prominent clan Korval with an heir. Yet his heart is immersed in another universe, influenced by another culture, and lost to a woman not of his world. And to take a Terran wife such as scholar Anne Davis is to risk his honor and reputation. But when he discovers that their brief encounter years before has resulted in the birth of a child, even more is at stake than anyone imagined. Now, an interstellar scandal has erupted, a bitter war between two families--galaxies apart--has begun, and the only hope for Er Thorn and Anne is a sacrifice neither is prepared to make...

All of her life, Aelliana Caylon has lived by the rules of her overbearing brother, the head of the Caylon family. Though she is a brilliant mathematician, he has convinced her that she has no worth beyond what value she might have in an arranged marriage.

Then, on a dare, she plays a game of chance--and wins a starship. It is her way to escape her home, her planet, her drab life--if she can qualify as a pilot.

Enter the accomplished Scout and Master Pilot known only as Daav. Aelliana hires him as her instructor. She finds him gifted teacher. He finds her a quick study.

And they also find an unexpected attraction, one that could have dangerous repercussions for them both...

Lee and Miller's eagerly awaited conclusion to the Agent of Change sequence, of their Liaden Universe series.

This long-awaited culmination of the Locus best-selling Agent of Change sequence of Sharon Lee and Steve Miller's internationally acclaimed Liaden Universe® novels, pits unexpected friends and enemies against each other in a war that spans planets and races and threatens to bring interstellar violence to the very surface of fabled Liad. Val Con yos'Phelium--a Scout, former Agent of Change, husband, brother to Turtles, and designated heir to Clan Korval's fortune and mission.. .whether you considered him respectable or not, no one would call him a gambling man. When he reappears demanding Balance and retribution, on his capable shoulders the fate of his Clan, his world, and his civilization...

Pat Rin yos'Phelium--fond father, bon vivant, ne'er-do-well... and a professional gambler. The enemies of Korval have offered Pat Rin the Ring that would make all of Korval's holdings his own and a Juntavas Judge has offered Pat Rin a world... When he appears with hired guns in tow no one is expecting him and no one knows what he'll do. For you see, Pat Rin is a gambling man.

Aelliana Caylon has endured much, and finally, she appears to have won all: a spaceship, comrades, friends--and the love of a pilot she adores.

Even better that her lover--the man who was destined for her, a man as much a loner as she--is also the Delm of Korval, arguably the most powerful person on all of Liad. He has the power to remove her and protect her from the toxic environment of her home Clan. Best of all, he agrees to sit as her co-pilot and her partner in a courier business.

Even happy endings sometimes show a few flaws. Such as Aelliana's home clan being not as agreeable to letting her go as it had first seemed. And the fact that someone is stealing pilots in the Low Port, which falls within the Delm of Korval's honor. Oh, and the revelation that the man she loves--the man who is destined for her--isn't entirely the man she thought he was. And finally, she discovers that even the lift from Liad she'd so fervently desired, is part of a larger plan, a plan requiring her to be someone she never thought she was, or could be.

Beset by the angry remnants of the Department of the Interior, challenged at every turn by opportunists on their new homeworld of Surebleak, and somewhat low on funds, Clan Korval desperately needs to reestablish its position as one of the top trading clans in known space. To this end, Master Trader Shan yos'Galan, aboard Korval's premier trade ship, Dutiful Passage, is on a mission to establish new business associations and to build a strong primary route that links well with existing Loops and secondary routes.

But reestablishing trade and preserving the lives of the few remaining members of the clan aren't all of Korval's problems. Matters come to a head as Dutiful Passage, accustomed to being welcomed and feted at those ports on its call-list, finds itself denied docking, and blacklisted, while agents of the DOI mount armed attacks on others of Korval's traders, under the very eyes of port security systems.

Traveling with Dutiful Passage on this unsettling journey is Padi yos'Galan, the master trader's heir and his apprentice. Padi is eager to make up for time lost due to Korval's unpleasantness with the Department of the Interior. She is also keeping a secret so intense that her coming of age, and perhaps her very life, is threatened by it.

The only bridge between past and future is a leap of faith.

Pursued by enemies, exiled Liaden clan Korval is settling into a new base on backworld Surebleak. Moving is expensive, as is war, and Korval is strapped for cash. Delm Korval has therefore instructed Master Trader Shan yos'Galan to design and implement new trade routes, quickly.

But this is no easy task. Dutiful Passage is targeted by Korval's enemies, denied docking at respectable ports, and cheated at those less respectable. Struggling to recuperate from an attack on his life, while managing daughter Padi's emerging psychic talents, Shan is running out of options--and time. His quest to establish the all-important trade route puts him at odds with his lifemate, while doubting crew desert the ship. Facing the prospect of failure, Shan accepts the assistance of chancy allies and turns the Passage toward a port only just emerging from Rostov's Dust and awash with strange energies.

Without trade, Clan Korval will starve. Will a trader's leap of faith save everything - or doom all?

First collection in one volume. Seventeen short tales of the Liaden Universe brought together for the first time. Space opera and romance on a grand scale in a galaxy full of interstellar trading clans.

Thirty-three shorter tales of the Liaden Universe brought together for the first time in two mega-volumes. Seventeen tales to start with in Volume One!

The nationally best-selling Liaden Universe novels are treasured by space opera aficionados for their wit, world-building, strong characterizations, tender romance, and edge-of-the-chair action.

Since 1995, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller also created shorter tales, illuminating additional facets of the Liaden experience. Here is a vast tapestry of tales of the scouts, artists, traders, priestesses, sleight of hand magicians, and pilots who fill the Liaden Universe with the excitement, action, and romance that readers of the hit series have come to adore.

Celebrating 25 Years of the Liaden Universe.

BOOK 2 in The First Liaden Universe Collection. Fifteen short tales of the Liaden Universe brought together for the first time. Space opera and romance on a grand scale in a galaxy full of interstellar trading clans.

Thirty-three shorter tales of the Liaden Universe® brought together for the first time in two mega-volumes. Fifteen tales complete Volume Two!

The nationally best-selling Liaden Universe® novels are treasured by space opera aficionados for their wit, world-building, strong characterizations, tender romance, and edge-of-the-chair action.

Since 1995, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller also created shorter tales, illuminating additional facets of the Liaden experience. Here is a vast tapestry of tales of the scouts, artists, traders, priestesses, sleight of hand magicians, and pilots who fill the Liaden Universe® with the excitement, action, and romance that readers of the hit series have come to adore.

Celebrating 25 Years of the Liaden Universe.

BOOK 3 in the multivolume Liaden Universe short fiction collection. Tales of the Liaden Universe brought together for the first time. Space opera and romance on a grand scale in a galaxy full of interstellar trading clans.

A dozen recent Liaden Universe short works are added to the collection in the third volume of A Liaden Universe Constellation. Ranging from comic to cosmic, only one of these works was first published before 2011. These welcome new additions bring the collected Constellation of Lee & Miller Liaden short stories to 45 works in three mega-volumes.

The nationally best-selling Liaden Universe novels are treasured by space opera aficionados for their wit, world-building, strong characterizations, tender romance, and edge-of-the-chair action.

Since 1995, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller also created shorter tales, illuminating additional facets of the Liaden experience. Here is a vast tapestry of tales of the scouts, artists, traders, priestesses, sleight of hand magicians, and pilots who fill the Liaden Universe® with the excitement, action, and romance that readers of the hit series have come to adore. Contains all new entries published after 2011.

For more than thirty years, the Liaden Universe novels by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller have captivated readers with their unique blend of action adventure, science fiction, and romance. In addition to twenty-one novels (and counting), Lee and Miller have written dozens of shorter works based in the Liaden Universe, featuring the strong characterization, detailed world-building, wit, and derring-do that readers of the series adore.

This fourth volume collecting Lee aned Miller's shorter Liaden Universe stories features four novelettes, two novellas, and two short stories.

Sure to delight longtime fans and newcomers alike, these tales highlight why the nationally best-selling Liaden Universe® novels are treasured by space opera aficionados, with amazing settings, strong characterizations, compelling romance, and edge-of-the-chair action in stories that range from cosmic to comic.

Table of Contents:

• Friend of a Friend (2016) - novelette
• Street Cred (2017) - novelette
• Due Diligence (2017) - novella
• Degrees of Separation (2018) - novella
• Excerpts from Two Lives - (2018) - novelette
• Revolutionists - (2018) - short story
• Cutting Corners (2017) - short story
• Block Party (2017) - novelette

For more than thirty years, the Liaden Universe® novels by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller have captivated readers with their unique blend of action adventure, science fiction, and interpersonal relationships. In addition to twenty-one novels (and counting), Lee and Miller have written dozens of shorter works based in the Liaden Universe®, featuring the strong characterization, detailed worldbuilding, wit, and derring-do that readers of the series adore.

Sure to delight longtime fans and newcomers alike, these tales highlight why the nationally best-selling Liaden Universe® novels are treasured by space opera aficionados, with amazing settings, strong characterizations, compelling romance, and edge-of-the-chair action in stories that range from cosmic to comic.

Table of Contents:

• 3 - Authors' Foreword (A Liaden Universe Constellation: Volume 5) - essay by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
• 5 - Fortune's Favors - [Liaden Universe short fiction] - (2019) - novella by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
• 57 - Opportunity to Seize - [Liaden Universe short fiction] - short story by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller (variant of Surebleak: Dudley Avenue and Farley Lane 2019)
• 63 - Shout of Honor - [Adventures in the Liaden Universe - 29] - (2019) - novella by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
• 133 - Command Decision - [Liaden Universe short fiction] - (2019) - short story by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
• 147 - Dark Secrets - [Liaden Universe short fiction] - (2019) - short story by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
• 171 - A Visit to the Galaxy Ballroom - short story by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
• 187 - The Gate That Locks the Tree - [Adventures in the Liaden Universe - 30] - novella by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller (variant of The Gate That Locks the Tree: A Minor Melant'i Play for Snow Season 2020)
• 269 - Ambient Conditions - (2020) - novelette by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
• 303 - Dead Men Dream - [Liaden Universe short fiction] - (2021) - novella by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

Assistant Trader Jethri Gobelyn is an honest, hardworking young Terran who knows a lot about living onboard his family's space going trade ship 'Gobelyn's Market', something about trade, finance, and risk taking and a little bit about Liadens.

Oddly enough, it's the little bit he knows about Liadens that seems likely to make his family's fortune--and his own. In short order, however, Jethri Gobelyn is about to learn a lot more about Liadens... like how far they might go to protect their name and reputation. Like the myriad of things one might say--intentionally or not--with a single bow. Like how hard it is to say "I'm sorry!" in Liaden. Like how difficult it is to deal with a beguiling set of Liaden twins who may very well know exactly what he's thinking.... Soon it became clear that as little as he knew about Liadens, he knew far less about himself. With his very existence a threat to the balance of trade, Jethri needs to learn fast, or become a pawn in a game that will destroy all he has come to hold dear.

Star-spanning galactic trader Jethri Gobelyn's story continues in the seventeenth entry in the Liaden Universe series by master storytellers Sharon Lee and Steve Miller.

In a universe full of interstellar intrigue and burgeoning commerce novice Terran trader Jethri Gobelyn, adopted by a Liaden clan after an ill-directed bow of honor insulted the scion of a major Liaden house, is alive and whole to tell the tale. Convinced that the adoption has saved his life and made his future he settles into a comfortable and even elite routine, a Trader's Ring his goal.

Even as Jethri's initiation into the mysteries and joys of Liaden Festival bring him to manhood he's forced to face Necessity and the facts of life: his adoption has also invigorated a net of unfinished Balance far more complex and potentially deadly than a simple Terran blood feud. He must embrace his Terran birthright as well as his Liaden connections while leaving behind the safety of the great Liaden trade ship Elthoria to defend his honor and that of shipmates past and present. Forced to sit Second Board as a back-up pilot on a Liaden Scout ship, Jethri's convinced he's already at wit's end--when several familiar faces threaten all that he knows of himself, and all that he wishes to do.

Celebrating 25 Years of the Liaden Universe.

Jethri Gobelyn has risen far: from despised youngest on a Terran family Loop ship to second trader on premier Liaden tradeship Elthoria under the guidance of his unlikely foster-mother Norn ven'Deelin Clan Ixin. Master Trader ven'Deelin has taught Jethri much, and she expects great things from him. Indeed, one might say she demands them.

Jethri has inherited a mission from his father, a plan that will allow family Loop ships like the one he grew up on to survive the encroachment of Rostov's Dust. In this, he's backed by several prominent Looper families who are scheduled to meet and plan at the South Axis Trade Fair.

In what seems to be a fortunate pairing of missions, Master Trader ven'Deelin sees Jethri become lead trader on his own small ship, which is scheduled to arrive at the South Axis Fair.

Unfortunately, that "fortunate coincidence" may instead be a test of Jethri's loyalties, as he's thrust into a tangle of grey-trading, mistaken identity, misinformation, and galactic politics....

Suddenly, staying alive is more than a personal problem...

In a galaxy worn down by generations of war against an implacable foe, a star pilot's mission brings him an unexpected ally and a chance to serve his troop--and mankind.

M. Jela Granthor's Guard is a soldier who was born to be a~ soldier, a solider whose genes were selected before birth, whose life was chosen for him as one of service and dedication.

Cantra yos'Phelium is an ace pilot and a thoroughgoing rogue. She trades the dark and the gray markets along the war-torn Rim, running solo, and with an eye firmly on her own profit.

When chance deals her an ex-soldier, she's inclined to leave him where she found him. That was before mutual trouble arose, and Jela proved himself a good man in a tight spot. Still, she thought to ditch him next planet down the line.

Only he wasn't being easy to ditch. Worse, he had a puzzle going that just naturally drew a pilot's close attention.

So the two of them form an unlikely--and uncomfortable - alliance, the soldier intent on his mission; the pirate intent on her survival.

And neither one, in the face of alien technology, outlaws, and the enemy's renewed assaults, can quite forget a life lesson shared by people who live on the edge of chance:

Sometimes, no matter what, you're just going to lose...

You can't go home again...

What do you do when home is a conspiracy that's been 3 discovered and destroyed? When home is a planet in a star system that's gone missing? When home means working for the destroyers of galaxies When home is a spaceship that's calling out to the enemy? Cantra 'yos Phelium isn't a quitter, but she has more than a little problem: the Enemy has accelerated its attacks and how do you fight an Enemy whose, major form of attack is the de-crystallization of everything around itself? A smuggler with a rogue soldier for a co-pilot, and a tree with an attitude for crew, Cantra's the only one who can get close to the man who holds equations that might, that just might&--thwart the Enemy.

All she has to do is help a young pilot from a missing world, juggle a slippery promise she never quite made to a pair of wizards, and then forget who she is along with everything, and everyone, she's ever known.

Theo Waitley has lived all her young life on Delgado, a Safe World that is home to one of the galaxy's premier institutions of higher learning. Both Theo's mother, Kamele, and Kamele's onagrata Jen Sar Kiladi, are professors at the university, and they all live comfortably together, just like they have for all of Theo's life, in Jen Sar's house at the outskirts of town.

Suddenly, though, Theo's life changes. Kamele leaves Jen Sar and moves herself and Theo back into faculty housing, which is not what Theo is used to. Once settled back inside the Wall, Kamele becomes embroiled in faculty politics, and is appointed sub-chair of her department. Meanwhile, Theo, who has a notation in her file indicating that she is "physically challenged" has a series of misadventures, including pulling her best friend down on the belt-ride to class, and hurting a team mate during a scavage game.

With notes piling up in her file, Theo only wants to go "home," to the house in the suburbs, and have everything just like it used to be.

Then, Kamele uncovers evidence of possible dishonest scholarship inside of her department. In order to clear the department, she and a team of senior professors must go off-world to perform a forensic document search. Theo hopes this will mean that she'll be left in the care of the man she calls "Father," Professor Kiladi, and is horrified to learn that Kamele means to bring Theo with her!

Theo Waitley is a Nexus of Violence. Thrust mid-year into a school for pilots far from the safe haven of her birth home on scholarly Delgado, young Theo Waitley excels in hands-on flying while finding that she's behind the curve in social intricacies as well as in math. Her mentors try to guide her studies and training into the channels best suited to her special abilities and inclinations, including suggesting that she should join in the off-world student association, a plan resulting in mixed success.

After a series of confrontations, fights, and ultimately a riot after which she is thanked for not killing anyone, Theo is named a "nexus of violence" by the school's administration. Facing suspension and carrying little more than a hastily procured guild card, a pistol taken from an attacker, and the contents of her pants pockets, Theo must quickly decide if she's ready to return to Delgado in disgrace, or launch herself into the universe as a freelance pilot with credentials she's already earned.

The sequel to Fledgling, Saltation is the tenth book in the Liaden Universe series.

The new novel in the Liaden Universe series. Over a quarter million copies sold in this series to-date! Space ships, action, adventure--all tied together with a strong dollop of romance and family saga--make this a compelling series for a wide range of readers, from romance to military SF lovers alike.

Theo Waitley is an ace starship pilot--and pure maverick. Her mom is a renowned Terran scholar and her birth father is an interstellar aristocrat in hiding. Whatever, thinks Theo. She still feels like a socially-challenged misfit. But after being selected to train with the best-of-the-best at the pilot academy, she figures she can leave behind those gawky, misfit days of teenage angst that made life so complicated before! But for Theo, life is about to get even MORE complicated--and deadlier still. For even though she's survived the Academy and become one of the best pilots in the galaxy, the past is about to blast her with gale-force winds. Theo can run, but she can't hide. Her destiny as master pilot and leader of a powerful Liaden clan calls, and there are LOTS of enemies who will try to make sure she's quite dead before she has the chance to make an answer.

First Class courier pilot Theo Waitley was already known as a nexus of violence--and then she inherited the precarious captaincy of a mysterious self-aware ship. Now she has a trade route to run for Clan Korval while she convinces the near mythic ghost ship Bechimo--and herself--that she wants to commit herself as the human side to their immensely powerful symbiosis. While her former lover battles a nano-virus that's eating him alive, Theo is challenged to rescue hundreds of stranded pilots and crewmen from an explosive situation in near orbit around a suddenly hostile planet. Lovers, enemies, an ex-roomie, and a jealous spaceship are all in peril as Theo wields power that no one in the universe is sure of, especially her.

The luck runs rough around Theo Waitley. Not only are people trying to kill her and capture the self-aware intelligent ship Bechimo to whom Theo is bonded, they're also trying to arrest her crew members, and throw the dignity of an important passenger, the duly-constituted norbear ambassador Hevelin, into question.

No wonder Theo and her crew felt the need of a break, and retired to what Bechimo refers to as "safe space." Unfortunately, safe space may not be so safe, anymore. It seems that things are leaking through from another universe, and another time. In fact, whole spaceships are coming through. One of those ships is a blasted battleship seemingly fleeing a long-lost war. What's more, its crew may be members of Theo's ancient ancestral line--her relatives. It's certain that they are in dire need of help. Theo has a choice to make. It seems that Bechimo's "safe space" is about to become deadly perilous.

Menace from Back Space Looming out of the Dust of Time

The Complex Logic Laws were the result of a war waged hundreds of years in the past, when two human powers threw massive AI navies at each other and nearly annihilated themselves. Being human, they blamed their tools for this near miss; they destroyed what was left of the sentient ships, and made it illegal to be, manufacture, or shelter an independent logic.

Strangely, however, the Free Ships and other AIs did not turn themselves in or suicide, they merely became wary of humans, and stayed under their scans. A clandestine support network grew up, including hidden yards where smart ships were manufactured, and mentors--humans specially trained to ease a new intelligence into the universe--socialized them, and taught them what they needed to know to survive.

Among those with a stake in the freedom of Independent Logics is Theo Waitley, who is somewhat too famously the captain of intelligent ship Bechimo. Theo's brother, Val Con yos'Phelium, presides over a household that has for a generation employed an AI butler. Recently, he approved the "birth" of the butler's child, who was sent, with human mentor Tolly Jones, to rescue or destroy an orphaned AI abandoned at a remote space station.

Then there's Uncle, the shadowy mastermind from the Old Universe, whose many projects often skirt the boundaries of law, both natural and man-made--and the puppet-masters at the Lyre Institute, whose history is just as murky--and a good deal less honorable.

All have an interest in the newly-awakening Self-Aware Logic that is rumored to have the power to destroy universes.

The question is: Who will get to it first?

Exiled from Liad after bombing a city to save it from The Department of the Interior's infernal weapons and plans, Clan Korval has gone to ground on the back-water planet Surebleak, whose people are as untamed as its weather. The old Boss-controlled fiefdoms largely fell to Pat Rin yos'Phelium's influence, but the world is restive, the influx of outworld lawyers, guns, and money a brewpot for armed dissatisfaction.

Far beyond the surface of frigid Surebleak Korval's farflung trade network needs a serious reset to recover from exile. From flagship Dutiful Passage to the experimental--if centuries old--self-aware Bechimo co-captained by the Delm's blood-sister Theo Waitley, the clan's ships are prowling space lanes seeking trade. Meanwhile, Old Tech from a failed universe--the ancient but revived Tinsori Light--and the machinations of the mysterious Uncle are coalescing into dangerous opportunity or nefarious trap.

And the Department of the Interior is not done with Clan Korval yet. They seek a final fully reckoned revenge, with Surebleak and Korval's ships and people everywhere in the crosshairs.

Sergeant Corrie Welling--the young constabulary officer from Maradaine--has been abducted and confined on a ship bound for distant shores, where her captors have nefarious plans for her. With fortune and ingenuity, Corrie escapes, but finds herself stuck in a sprawling metropolis on the other side of the world: The Mocassa.

The Mocassa is a test unlike anything Corrie has ever faced. She doesn't speak the language, doesn't know the culture, and is forbidden from leaving the city until she pays off a colossal debt. Even if she's able to find decent work, it will take her years to settle her accounts and get home.

But Corrie Welling will not be cowed. She will work, fight, and hold her chin high. As a fringe faction of an apocalyptic faith spreads throughout the city, threatening the new friends she's sworn to protect, she'll continue to stand up for the values instilled in her as a member of the Maradaine Constabulary. Even if, as her darkest day approaches, she has to do it alone.

Originally appeared in Ace Double D-31 (1953).

Did you ever hear of the Inter-Time Society for Psychological Adjustments? Well, neither had Morton Cargill in 1953 when he accidentally killed a girl. A year later that very girl turned up, apparently alive, and announced that the mysterious society had condemned him to death! Cargill's astounding adventures began when he escaped the execution chamber to find himself in the far future. Three conflicting societies were hunting for him, to use him in their own desperate schemes. There were the Floaters, a nation of aerial vagabonds. There were the Tweeners, who dreamed of world conquest. And finally, interwoven through everything, were the sinister figures of the Shadow Men-supermen without visible substance.

On a top-secret dive into the Pacific Ocean's deepest canyon, Jonas Taylor found himself face-to-face with the largest and most ferocious predator in the history of the animal kingdom. The sole survivor of the mission, Taylor is haunted by what he's sure he saw but still can't prove exists - Carcharodon megalodon, the massive mother of the great white shark. The average prehistoric Meg weighs in at twenty tons and could tear apart a Tyrannosaurus rex in seconds.

Taylor spends years theorizing, lecturing, and writing about the possibility that Meg still feeds at the deepest levels of the sea. But it takes an old friend in need to get him to return to the water, and a hotshot female submarine pilot to dare him back into a high-tech miniature sub. Diving deeper than he ever has before, Taylor will face terror like he's never imagined. MEG is about to surface. When she does, nothing and no one is going to be safe, and Jonas must face his greatest fear once again.

Isabel remembers nothing before the prince rode into her forest to take her back to the castle. Nothing about who she is supposed to be, or the powers she is supposed to have. Prince Rokan needs Isabel to be his Shifter. He needs her ability to shift to animal form, her lethal speed, and her superhuman strength. And he needs her loyalty--because without it, she may be his greatest threat. Isabel knows that her prince is lying to her, but she can't help wanting to protect him from the dangers and intrigues of the court... until a deadly truth shatters the bond between them.

Now Isabel faces a choice that threatens her loyalty, her heart... and everything she thought she knew.

Here be ghosts, the maps said, and that was all.

In this haunted kingdom, ghosts linger--not just in the deepest forests or the darkest caverns, but alongside the living, as part of a twisted palace court that revels all night and sleeps through the daylight hours. Darri's sister was trapped here as a child. And now Darri has a chance to save her sister... if she agrees to a betrothal with the prince of the dead. But nothing is simple in this eerie kingdom--not her sister, who has changed beyond recognition; not her plan, which will be thrown off track almost at once; and not the undead prince, who seems more alive than anyone else.

Can Darri's warrior heart withstand the most wrenching choice of all?

A short stand-alone digital novella set in the world of Leah Cypess's Nightspell, where ghosts exist alongside humans and nearly every lavish ball is part murder mystery.

In the kingdom of Ghostland, every murdered soul comes back as a ghost, and every ghost has only one desire--vengeance. Emilie had everything she'd ever wanted--beautiful dresses, a perfectly decorated room, a party every night, and the eye of a nobleman. But then she's killed. And now she'll stop at nothing to find out who did it. No one in the palace of Ghostland is above suspicion--not even the people closest to her. This haunting fantasy novella is filled with supernatural thrills and surprising plot twists.

Epic Reads Impulse is a digital imprint with new releases each month.

The 22nd Century. Mankind is free from the age-old misery and poverty that have kept it in bondage, free to create a new world, to explore the universe, to confront the mysteries of human existence. Russia's greatest S-F writeres, Arkday and Boris Strugatsky, have produced a futuristic masterpiece of epic proportions and breathtaking vision.

Two interplanetary adventurers hurtle through space at a speed faster than light, and are flung a hundred years into the 22nd century. They find themselves on a planet both like and unlike the earth they abandoned so very long ago--and so recently.

It is a planet ruled by wisdom, where automated farms feed tens million inhabitants, where a complete system of moving roads brings the farthest outposts into close communion, where an advanced science in mechanization approaches the mysterious complexity of life itself. Here all effort is bound to the exhilarating art if discovery--way below the planet's waters, deep into the endless reaches of space and far beyond the boundless zones of the human mind.

Contents:

• Night on Mars
• Almost the Same
• Old-timer
• The Conspirators
• Chronicle
• Two from the Taimyr
• The Moving Roads
• Cornucopia
• Homecoming
• Langour of the Spirit
• The Assaultmen
• Deep Search
• The Mystery of the Hind Leg
• Candles Before the Control Board
• Natural Science in the Spirit World ilgrims and Wayfarers
• The Planet with all the Conveniences
• Defeat
• The Meeting
• What You Will Be Like

Three short science fiction novellas by the Strugatsky brothers: Escape Attempt, The Kid from Hell and Space Mowgli.

Anton is an undercover operative from future Earth, who travels to an alien world whose culture has not progressed beyond the Middle Ages. Although in possession of far more advanced knowledge than the society around him, he is forbidden to interfere with the natural progress of history. His place is to observe rather than interfere - but can he remain aloof in the face of so much cruelty and injustice...?

The Snail on the Slope takes place in two worlds. One is the Administration, an institution run by a surreal, Kafkaesque bureaucracy whose aim is to govern the forest below. The other is the Forest, a place of fear, weird creatures, primitive people and violence. Peretz, who works at the Administration, wants to visit the Forest. Candide crashed in the Forest years ago and wants to return to the Administration. Their journeys are surprising and strange, and readers are left to puzzle out the mysteries of these foreign environments. The Strugatskys themselves called The Snail on the Slope "the most perfect and the most valuable of our works."

The publishing history of the novel The Snail on the Slope is somewhat untidy. The novel was based on on a previously written novella. The novel itself first appeared in two parts, and in two different publications: the "Forest" part in 1966, and the "Directorate" part in 1968. Various translations of the complete novel appeared well before the complete novel was finally published in Russia in 1988.

Note: this version of the novel is the one based on a heavily censored source.

The novel is set in the 22nd century of the Noon Universe. Mankind is the prevalent race in the Galaxy, capable of interstellar travel. Human social organization is presumably Communist, and can be described as a highly technologically advanced anarchistic meritocracy.

When Maxim Kammerer, a young space explorer from twenty-second-century Earth, crash-lands on an uncharted world, he thinks of himself as a latter-day Robinson Crusoe. Eager to establish first contact with the planet's humanlike inhabitants, he finds himself increasingly entangled in their primitive way of life. After his experiences in their nightmarish military, criminal justice, and mental health systems, Maxim begins to realize that his sojourn on this radioactive and war-scarred world will not be a walk in the park.

The Inhabited Island is one of the Strugatsky brothers' most popular and acclaimed novels, yet the only previous English-language edition (Prisoners of Power) was based on a version heavily censored by Soviet authorities. Now, in a sparkling new edition by award-winning translator Andrew Bromfield, this land-mark novel can be newly appreciated by both longtime Strugatsky fans and new explorers of the Russian science fiction masters' astonishingly rich body of work.

Today, Russian authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are counted among the best science fiction writers of the twentieth century.

In their Noon Universe novels, they imagined twenty-second-century Earth as a space-faring communist utopia, devoted to guiding the progress of civilization on alien worlds. But as the authors became increasingly disillusioned with life in the Soviet Union, their Noon Universe stories grew darker and more complex as well.

The Beetle in the Anthill reintroduces Maxim Kammerer, the main character of their novel The Inhabited Island. Once an intrepid young space explorer, Kammerer is now an investigator with COMCON-2, the covert agency in charge of countering threats to the homeworld. He is tasked with tracking "progressor" Lev Abalkin, who has returned to Earth after a routine mission went tragically wrong. Do the secrets of Abalkin's past pose a grave danger to humanity--or is he an innocent caught up in a deadly misunderstanding?

This new edition by lauded translator Olena Bormashenko joins updated translations of Hard to Be a God, The Inhabited Island, and The Waves Extinguish the Wind to continue the ever-deepening saga of the Noon Universe.

Today, Russian authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are counted among the best science fiction writers of the twentieth century.

In their Noon Universe novels, they imagined twenty-second-century Earth as a space-faring communist utopia, devoted to guiding the progress of civilization on alien worlds. But as the authors became increasingly disillusioned with life in the Soviet Union, their Noon Universe stories grew darker and more complex as well.

The Waves Extinguish the Wind provides the epic conclusion to the Noon Universe saga, as eighty-nine-year-old Maxim Kammerer looks back at his most earth-shattering investigation, which brought an entire era of human civilization to an end. Searching for evidence that the mysterious alien Wanderers were interfering in Earth's development, Kammerer and his young trainee Toivo Glumov discovered a deeper and more disturbing secret within humanity itself.

This new translation by Daniels Umanovskis joins updated editions of Hard to Be a God, The Inhabited Island, and The Beetle in the Anthill to bring the saga of the Noon Universe to its fitting end: a search for truth and answers in a universe that provides only questions.