Search Worlds Without End

Unique twisted visions from the edges and the center of science fiction, these are stories that carry Adam Roberts' trademark elegance of style and restless enquiry of the genre he loves so much. Some of them have appeared in magazines, some in anthologies, and some are appearing for the first time. These are stories to make readers think, laugh, and wonder as well as to make readers uneasy. These tales ask questions, sew mysteries, and always entertain.

Table of Contents:

• Preface (2013) - essay by Adam Roberts
• Adam Robots - (2009)
• Shall I Tell You the Problem with Time Travel? - (2011)
• A Prison Term of a Thousand Years - (2008)
• Godbombing - (2013)
• Thrownness - (2011)
• The Mary Anna - (2010)
• The Chrome Chromosome - (2009)
• The Time Telephone - (2004)
• Review: Thomas Hodgkin, Denis Bayle: a Life - (2013)
• S-Bomb - (2008)
• Dantean - (2013)
• Remorse® - (2007)
• The World of the Wars - (2013)
• Woodpunk - (2009)
• The Cow - (2010)
• The Imperial Army - (2002)
• And Tomorrow and - (2006)
• The Man of the Strong Arm - (2008)
• Wonder: A Story in Two - (2007)
• Pied - (2013)
• Constellations - (2013)
• The Woman Who Bore Death - (2013)
• Anticopernicus - (2010)
• Me:topia - (2013)

This short story originally appeared in Postscripts, Summer 2005. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 11 (2006), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

First contact: despite our cosmic littleness, the aliens have come to visit. But they have parked their interstellar craft on the outskirts of the solar system, and despite friendly interaction (their English if fluent and idiomatic) they will come no closer. So an Earth ship, the "Leibniz", crewed by the best and the brightest, begins the slow haul towards the Oort cloud, in the hopes that meeting these alien creatures will answer the most profound questions humanity can ask. "Anticopernicus" is not their story, though. It is the story of Ange Mlinko, an ordinary individual working the Earth-Mars trade routes, largely uninterested in the arrival of alien intelligences. And because the focus is on her, it remains to be seen whether this short novel can answer the following questions: why have the aliens come? Why won't they come any closer than the furthest edges of the solar system? What does this have to do with the nature of the mysterious 'dark energy' pervading the cosmos? What about the celebrated Fermi Paradox? And most pressingly: could Copernicus have been wrong all along?

A man is about to kill a cow. He discusses life and death and his right to kill with the compliant animal. He begins to suspect he may be about to commit murder. But kills anyway...

It began when the animal rights movement injected domestic animals with artificial intelligences in bid to have the status of animals realigned by the international court of human rights. But what is an animal that can talk? Where does its intelligence end at its machine intelligence begin? And where might its soul reside?

As we place more and more pressure on the natural world and become more and more divorced, Adam Roberts' new novel posits a world where nature can talk back, and can question us and our beliefs.

Adam Roberts is an award-winning author at the peak of his powers and each new novel charts an exciting new direction while maintaining a uniformly high level of literary achievement.

"Bethany" is a time-travel narrative in the tradition of Moorcock's "Behold the Man", and a theological novel in the tradition of Nabokov's "Invitation to a Beheading". A time traveler returns to the Holy Land in the early years of the first-century AD with the following macabre mission: to shoot Jesus with a 21st-century rifle, *after* he has been crucified and resurrected but *before* he ascends to heaven.

Is he a radical atheist? An agent of Satan? Or does he intend to test the status of the post-resurrection Jesus? We might assume that such an action would have three possible outcomes: Christ might be simple killed, and remain dead; Christ might be killed and then simply re-resurrect; or Christ might prove unkillable. But could so blasphemous an action be motivated by mere curiosity?

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Crises and Conflicts (2016), edited by Ian Whates. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017, edited by Rich Horton, and The Year's Best Military & Adventure SF: Volume 3 (2017), edited David Afsharirad.

In a world where we have been genetically engineered so that we can photosynthesise sunlight with our hair hunger is a thing of the past, food an indulgence. The poor grow their hair, the rich affect baldness and flaunt their wealth by still eating. But other hungers remain... The young daughter of an affluent New York family is kidnapped. The ransom demands are refused. A year later a young women arrives at the family home claiming to be their long lost daughter. She has changed so much, she has lived on light, can anyone be sure that she has come home? Adam Roberts' new novel is yet another amazing melding of startling ideas and beautiful prose. Set in a New York of the future it nevertheless has echoes of a Fitzgeraldesque affluence and art-deco style. It charts his further progress as one of the most important writers of his generation.

Gradisil is an epic space opera of family revenge and the birth of a nation.

Not very long from now, if you are wealthy, space can be yours, space to grow. New technology has seeded a rebirth of the pioneer spirit. A new breed of adventurer has slipped the bonds of gravity and begun a fresh life in orbit, free from interference by government, free from the petty concerns of earth.

Who wouldn't want such freedom? Who wouldn't want to escape from society's tangles--from the claws of the corporations, from the stifling love of family?

But tradition, fear, and revenge carry a murderous weight, a gravity that is not so easy to escape. The death of Gradisil's grandfather, floating high in the uplands above earth, was only the beginning. And now the US government is looking up at the new nation above our heads with jealous eyes.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology When It Changed: Science Into Fiction (2009), edited by Geoff Ryman, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, Issue 106, July 2015. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection (2010), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Golden Age SF meets Golden Age Crime from the author of Swiftly, New Model Army, and Yellow Blue Tibia-an innovative literary voice working at the height of his powers

Jack Glass is the murderer-we know this from the start. Yet as this extraordinary novel tells the story of three murders committed by Glass, the reader will be surprised to find out that it was Glass who was the killer and how he did it. And by the end of the book our sympathies for the killer are fully engaged. Riffing on the tropes of crime fiction (the country house murder, the locked room mystery) and imbued with the feel of golden age SF, this is another bravura performance from Roberts. Whatever games he plays with the genre, whatever questions he asks of the reader, Roberts never loses sight of the need to entertain.

This novel has some wonderfully gruesome moments, is built around three gripping HowDunnits, and comes with liberal doses of sly humor. Roberts invites us to have fun and tricks us into thinking about both crime and SF via a beautifully structured novel set in a society whose depiction challenges notions of crime, punishment, power, and freedom.

Jupiter, magnified so as to fill half the sky, appears in the night sky suddenly. All the world sees it. From that night onwards, life continues as best it can under this sublime and overwhelming apparition in the heavens. People everywhere struggle to come to terms with what the apparition means, with how it can have happened. Is it portent of the end of the world? Or something more positive, something magical? Is it a freak of physics, or is it a message--and if so, how can it be decoded? For Stina Ekman, a frustrated poet and e-zine editor, this extraordinary omen seems to promise fearful and exotic changes for her blocked life.

Stina's narrative recounts the impact of this inexplicable event upon an ordinary life. All her life she has been fascinated by light and the effects of light on life; this enormous new fact in the sky forces her to confront the routines into which her life has fallen, the silence which has infected her poetry, the possibilities of existence itself.

This complex novella interrogates the way symbol and image govern our lives; the ways in which we attempt to bring meaning to the things with which life presents us; the balance we strive for between purity and admixture. It is an exploration the ways poetry, science and fiction might interact.

THE LAND OF THE HEADLESS is set in a far future where mankind has taken his religious dogma and the divsions that result from it out into space.

On a planet where society is shaped by a strict adherance to the word of God as laid out in the Old Testament and Quran a poet is accused of the rape of a woman. Found guilty he must face the punishment laid down in the Good Book; beheading.

Beheaded, he is fitted with a neck valve, ordinator and basic sensory equipment and sent out into the world. But he bears a terrible and very visible stigma. the only way he can make a living is to join the army and serve in the war against the neighbouring planet. And plan his revenge against the man he believes is really guilty.

LAND OF THE HEADLESS is a searing satire of religious fundamentalism, a novel of love and war and a study of self-delusion. It is an elegantly written, thought-provoking and unique SF novel.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Forbidden Planets (2006), edited by Peter Crowther. It can also be found in the anthology Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2007 Edition, edited by Rich Horton. The story is included in the collection Adam Robots (2013).

From a literary master of SF comes a savage satire on our capacity for war and a celebration of our need for love.

A giant has brought war to the fields and towns of England's heartland. When the British army brings in air support and deploys heavy weapons he simply melts away, only to form again somewhere else and deliver another devastating blow. He is called Pantegrel, and he is a New Model Army-a giant whose thoughts flow through countless wireless connections, whose intelligence comes from the internet and real-time camera updates, whose mind is made up of thousands of minds, each deciding what he will choose to do. He has chosen the joy of the fight, and his fury is truly democratic-he is me and you. This is a terrifying vision of a near future war as new technologies allow the world's first truly democratic army to wrest control from the powers that be. Taking advances in modern communication and the new eagerness for power from the bottom upwards, Adam Roberts has produced at once an exciting war novel and a philosophical examination of war and democracy. It shows an exciting and innovative literary voices working at the height of his powers and investing SF with the literary significance that is its due.

Tighe lives on the wall. It towers above his village and falls away below it. It is vast and unforgiving and it is everything he knows. Life is hard on the wall, little more than a clinging on for dear life.

And then one day Tighe falls off the wall. And falls, and falls, and falls...

Lavishly praised everywhere from Asimov's magazine to Interzone, ON is proof positive that Adam Roberts is a new author whose potential for greatness is rapidly being realised.

ON is at once a vertiginous concept novel, a coming of age saga, a picaresque journey across a changed world and an epic adventure in the very best traditions of SF.

Overpopulation has crammed the world full-to-bursting and the last spaces for wild animals have long since been used up.

Only Park Polar and Park Antarctica remain, two natural wildernesses where beasts can roam free. But these are genetically-engineered creatures, created and patented by the giant companies that run the world.

McCullough, a company scientist, makes a routine visit to Park Polar to introduce a species of kangaroo to the snow-wastes. But competition between the companies is fierce and can often be fatal... and when terrorists descend, threatening the fragile equilibrium of the northern park, matters spiral rapidly and violently out of control.

McCullough is soon running for her life through the hostile wilderness.

Adam Roberts' fourth novel is his most ambitious yet. In a feat of extraordinary world building he creates a universe where a breathable atmosphere extends out between the planets, where aristocrats cruise interstellar space in biplanes and skywhals make mysterious distant orbits. Then, with bravura plotting, he undermines our own notions of reality and leaves the reader unsure which universe to believe in.

Gaining a reputation as one of the UK's leading SF stylists and masters of the high-concept, Roberts, shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke award with his debut novel SALT, confirms his extraordinary potential with POLYSTOM.

An interstellar craft is decelerating after its century-long voyage. Its destination is V538 Aurigae, a now-empty planet dominated by one gigantic megastructure, a conical mountain of such height that its summit is high above the atmosphere. The ship's crew of five hope to discover how the long-departed builders made such a colossal thing, and why: a space elevator? a temple? a work of art? Its resemblance to the mountain of purgatory lead the crew to call this world Dante.

In our near future, the United States is falling apart. A neurotoxin has interfered with the memory function of many of the population, leaving them reliant on their phones as makeshift memory prostheses. But life goes on. For Ottoline Barragão, a regular kid juggling school and her friends and her beehives in the back garden, things are about to get very dangerous, chased across the north-east by competing groups, each willing to do whatever it takes to get inside Ottoline's private network and recover the secret inside.

Following on from last year's highly successful 'Sibilant Fricative' (described by the BSFA's Vector magazine as "one of the finest collections of essays that genre criticism has ever produced", acclaimed author and critic Adam Roberts now takes on the genre output of 2014. Insightful, irreverent, witty, and always thought-provoking, Adam's prose is as sharp and entertaining as ever.

After 37 years on a brutal and dangerous journey through space, a federation of settlers finally arrives on the planet Salt. Thus begins the colonization of this brave new world--a process that inevitably slips into a tragedy of biblical proportions. The two communities who undertook the voyage originally united in peace and a shared vision of a fresh beginning. Once isolated in a landscape of cruel majesty and minimal resources, however, ancient enmities begin to tear them apart. Related alternately by Petja, from the Alsist people, and Barlei (a Senaarian), their different voices, perspectives, and experiences come together to make an unusually rich and complex story about the fragility of life.

"Adam Roberts makes everything wonderful. If he wrote non-fiction about drying paint, I would still be the first in line to read it." - Jared Shurin of Pornokitsch.

An award winning author in his own right, Adam Roberts makes no concessions when appraising the work of others. His reviews are honest, forthright, and never timid. In Sibilant Fricative Adam considers a broad spectrum of speculative fiction, from fantasy to science fiction, from literature to films. The book opens with insightful consideration of Philip K Dick's oeuvre followed by Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and closes with a volume-by-volume analysis of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time opus. Along the way we stop off for a review by text among other amusements - one thing the author never loses sight of is the need to entertain.

"Titan is one of the blandest pieces of fiction I have come across in four decades of reading novels. If the Campbell shortlist is a high-class curry restaurant of delicious, spicy and stimulating food, then Titan is a single slice of white bread and margarine on a white plate under the neon light of a truck drivers' café." (on Titan by Ben Bova)

"Let me see if I can boil down Crossroads of Twilight's 700-pages for you. Drivel. There you go." (on Crossroads of Twilight by Robert Jordan)

When Hector discovers his father has channelled the family fortune into a bizarre cult who await the imminent destruction of the Earth, he is wracked by feelings of betrayal and doubt. Things change, however, the night an asteroid plummets from space and shatters the planet, leaving Hector and the remnants of the human race struggling for survival on a splinter of the Earth.

And that's when the asteroid starts talking to him...

Splinter is inspired by the classic Jules Verne novel Hector Servadac, and features a lengthy afterword by the author.

Sprung from a prison in the centre of a star the universe's last criminal is employed to kill the population of a planet. It is a crime that will tear apart an interstellar utopia. Keeping ahead of detection and preparing the crime the killer voyages to numerous worlds and hones the instincts required for murder. And wonders who is behind the contract. Roberts' new novel is an extraordinary fusing of ideas, exotic locations, personal drama and an enquiry into the nature of crime in a society that thinks it has forgotten how to commit it.

Not to be confused with the 2004 collection of the same name.

It is 1848 and the British Empire has grown rich exploiting Lilliputian slaves - the finesse of their working allowing unheard of feats of minature engineering; even Babbage's computing device has been made to work.

But now the French have formed a regiment of previously peaceful Brobdingnagian giants and invasion looms. In a world where humanity is both smaller and larger than it once was, love and hate loom large.

Mankind discovers itself at the centre of scale. Lilliputians are twelve times smaller than us but there are those twelve times smaller than them, and twelve times smaller again and so on. And the scale of being goes up from Swift's giants also...

Adam Roberts has written both a rip roaring 19th century adventure, a love story and a thought-provoking pre-atomic SF novel about our place in the universe.

Arthur C. Clarke Award-nominated writer Adam Roberts (The Thing Itself) and François Schuiten, recipient of the Angoulême International Comics Festival's prestigious lifetime achievement award, present The Compelled, part one of a two-part sci-fi novella series and the first book-length science fiction publication that Schuiten has illustrated.

A mysterious change has occurred in humanity. Nobody knows how, why or exactly when this change came about, but disparate, seemingly unconnected people have become afflicted with the uncontrollable desire to take objects and move them to other places, where the objects gather and begin to form increasingly alien, monolithic structures that appear to have vast technological implications. Some of the objects are innocuous everyday things--like a butter knife taken still greasy from a breakfast table or a dented cap popped off a bottle of beer. Others are far more complex--like the turbine of an experimental jet engine or the core of a mysterious weapon left over from the darkest days of WWII.

Where is the Compulsion coming from? And--possibly more importantly--when the machines they're building finally turn on, what are they going to do?

The first comprehensive critical history of SF for thirty years, this book traces the origin and development of science fiction from Ancient Greece, via its rebirth in the seventeenth century, up to the present day. Concentrating on literary SF and (in the later chapters) cinema and TV, it also discusses the myriad forms this genre takes in the contemporary world, including a chapter on graphic novels, SF pop music, visual art and ufology. The author is ideally placed to write it: both an academic literary critic and also an acclaimed creative writer of science fiction, with five novels and many short stories to his credit. Written in lively, accessible prose, this study is specifically designed to bridge the worlds of academic criticism and the SF fandom.

The History of Science Fiction argues that, even today, this flourishing cultural idiom is shaped by the forces that determined its rise to prominence in the 1600s: the dialogue between Protestant and Catholic worldviews, the emerging technologies of the industrial age, and the cultural anxieties and excitements of a rapidly changing world. Now available in paperback, it will be of interest to all students, researchers and fans of SF.

This book is the definitive critical history of science fiction. The 2006 first edition of this work traced the development of the genre from Ancient Greece and the European Reformation through to the end of the 20th century. This new (2016) 2nd edition has been revised thoroughly and very significantly expanded. An all-new final chapter discusses 21st-century science fiction, and there is new material in every chapter: a wealth of new readings and original research. The author's groundbreaking thesis that science fiction is born out of the 17th-century Reformation is here bolstered with a wide range of new supporting material and many hundreds of 17th- and 18th-century science fiction texts, some of which have never been discussed before. The account of 19th-century science fiction has been expanded, and the various chapters tracing the twentieth-century bring in more writing by women, and science fiction in other media including cinema, TV, comics, fan-culture and other modes.

So The Lord of the Rings swept the Oscars--all the more reason to continue to tweak, spoof, and lampoon the cult of Tolkien. Despite its title, The Sellamillion isn't a satire of The Silmarillion; how could it be? Though every one of the author's fans has a copy on the shelf, on the shelf is where it's stayed; almost no one actually managed to read past page three. The fun here lies in the parody of everything Tolkien created as he worked on his famous trilogy: The History of the Elderly Days. Early missing drafts of the novels. Correspondence between the writer and publisher on whether the magic talisman should be a Bellybutton Stud of Doom rather than a Ring of Power. And, most hilarious of all, an experimental version of Lord of the Rings in the style of Dr. Seuss. Whether you love the original trilogy and (maybe especially) if you hate it, this will have you laughing non-stop.

The new Adam Roberts novel is a story of global apocalypse, old hatreds and new beginnings. It is his best novel to date. And this is how the world will end ...'The snow started falling on the sixth of September, soft noiseless flakes filling the sky like a swarm of white moths, or like static interference on your TV screen - whichever metaphor, nature or technology, you find the more evocative. Snow everywhere, all through the air, with that distinctive sense of hurrying that a vigorous snowfall brings with it. Everything in a rush, busy-busy snowflakes. And, simultaneously, paradoxically, everything is hushed, calm, as quiet as cancer, as white as death. And at the beginning people were happy.' But the snow doesn't stop. It falls and falls and falls. Until it lies three miles thick across the whole of the earth. Six billion people have died. Perhaps 150,000 survive. But those 150,000 need help, they need support, they need organising, governing. And so the lies begin. Lies about how the snow started. Lies about who is to blame. Lies about who is left. Lies about what really lies beneath.

Bingo Grabbins is a soddit who enjoys a comfortable life (apart from his feet, of course). But his contentment is disturbed when the wizard, Gandef, and a company of bizarrely Welsh dwarves drag him away on an adventure. They have a plot to raid the treasure hoard (or so they say) guarded by Smug, a large and very tedious dragon. Bingo is reluctant to take part in this insane venture, but a dwarven dagger held to his throat soon surprises even himself and off the companions go on a quest that seems truly epic (well, until you read about what later happened to Bingo's cousin, at any rate). Oh, and Bingo finds this ring thing...

Adam Roberts turns his attention to answering the Fermi Paradox with a taut and claustrophobic tale that echoes John Carpenters' The Thing.

Two men while away the days in an Antarctic research station. Tensions between them build as they argue over a love-letter one of them has received. One is practical and open. The other surly, superior and obsessed with reading one book - by the philosopher Kant.

As a storm brews and they lose contact with the outside world they debate Kant, reality and the emptiness of the universe. The come to hate each other, and they learn that they are not alone.

The This is the new social media platform everyone is talking about. Allow it to be injected into the roof of your mouth and it will grow into your brain, allow you to connect with others without even picking up your phone. Its followers are growing. Its detractors say it is a cult. But for one journalist, hired to do a puff-piece interview with their CEO, it will change the world forever.

Adan just wants to stay at home with his smart-companion Elegy - phone, friend, confidante, sex toy. But when his mother flees to Europe and joins a cult, leaving him penniless, he has to enlist in the army. Sentient robots are invading America, but it seems Adan has a surprising ability to survive their attacks. He has a purpose, even if he doesn't know what it is.

And in the far future, war between a hivemind of Ais and the remnants of humanity is coming to its inevitable end. But one woman has developed a weapon which might change the course of the war. It's just a pity she's trapped in an inescapable prison on a hivemind ship.

This novelette originally appeared in Solaris Rising 3: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction (2014), edited by Ian Whates, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, Issue 127, April 2017. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection (2015), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Reach for Infinity (2014), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015, edited by Rich Horton. The story is included in the collection Saint Rebor (2015).

Adam Roberts's Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea revisits Jules Verne's classic novel in a collaboration with the illustrator behind a recent highly acclaimed edition of The Hunting of the Snark

It is 1958 and France's first nuclear submarine, Plongeur, leaves port for the first of its sea trials. On board, gathered together for the first time, are one of the Navy's most experienced captains and a tiny skeleton crew of sailors, engineers, and scientists. The Plongeur makes her first dive and goes down, and down and down. Out of control, the submarine plummets to a depth where the pressure will crush her hull, killing everyone on board, and beyond. The pressure builds, the hull protests, the crew prepare for death, the boat reaches the bottom of the sea and finds nothing. Her final dive continues, the pressure begins to relent, but the depth gauge is useless. They have gone miles down. Hundreds of miles, thousands, and so it goes on. Onboard the crew succumb to madness, betrayal, religious mania, and murder. Has the Plongeur left the limits of our world and gone elsewhere?

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Solaris Rising 1.5: An Exclusive Ebook of New Science Fiction (2012), edited by Ian Whates. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection (2013), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Seven (2013), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collection Saint Rebor (2015).

Russia, 1946. With the Nazis recently defeated, Stalin gathers half a dozen of the top Soviet science fiction authors in a dacha in the countryside. Convinced that the defeat of America is only a few years away-and equally convinced that the Soviet Union needs a massive external threat to hold it together-Stalin orders the writers to compose a massively detailed and highly believable story about an alien race poised to invade the earth. The little group of writers gets down to the task and spends months working until new orders come from Moscow to immediately halt the project. The scientists obey and live their lives until, in the aftermath of Chernobyl, the survivors gather again, because something strange has happened: the story they invented in 1946 is starting to come true.

Award winning author Adam Roberts is one of the smartest, most insightful and downright entertaining writers of short fiction around. This, his second collection, consists of ten short stories and a poem, all previously uncollected. They include two stories that have never appeared in print before and three that are completely original to this book. The collection opens with "What Did Tessimond Tell You", which was selected by both Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan for their Year's Best anthologies, and it builds from there.

"Roberts is not just a great sci-fi writer, he's a phenomenally interesting writer per se." The Scotsman

"Adam Roberts' strength is that he sees SF as both cerebral and playful..." Strange Horizons

Contents:

• Introduction
• What Did Tessimond Tell You?
• Mocputer
• Moon Poem
• Gerusalemme Liberace
• Anhedonia
• The Sixth Star
• Noose
• Trademark Bugs
• A Distillation of Grace
• Metametamorphosis
• Saint Rebor

Alma is a private detective in a near-future England, a country desperately trying to tempt people away from the delights of Shine, the immersive successor to the internet. But most people are happy to spend their lives plugged in, and the country is decaying.

Alma's partner is ill, and has to be treated without fail every 4 hours, a task that only Alma can do. If she misses the 5 minute window her lover will die. She is one of the few not to access the Shine.

So when Alma is called to an automated car factory to be shown an impossible death and finds herself caught up in a political coup, she knows that getting too deep may leave her unable to get home.

What follows is a fast-paced Hitchcockian thriller as Alma evades arrest, digs into the conspiracy, and tries to work out how on earth a dead body appeared in the boot of a freshly-made car in a fully-automated factory.

Private Investigator Alma is caught up in another impossible murder. One of the world's four richest people may be dead - but nobody is sure which one. Hired to discover the truth behind the increasingly bizarre behaviour of the ultra-rich, Alma must juggle treating her terminally ill lover with a case which may not have a victim.

Inspired by the films of Kubrick, this stand-alone novel returns to the near-future of THE REAL-TOWN MURDERS, and puts Alma on a path to a world she can barely understand. Witty, moving and with a mystery deep at its heart, this novel again shows Adam Roberts' mastery of the form.

Historical fiction meets science fiction and the paranormal in this gripping novella set in the Lake District. Cynthia lives in a lakeside parish in Cumbria, where none suspect her blemished past. Then a ghostly scar-faced boy starts to appear to her and strange lights manifest over Blaswater. What of the astromomer Mr Sales, who comes to study the lights but disappears, presumed drowned, only to be found wandering naked days later with a fanciful tale of being 'hopped' into the sky and held within a brass-walled room? What of married mother of two Eliza, who sets Cynthia's heart so aflutter?

Young Forktongue Davy has visions; epilepsy, his Ma calls it. He's barely able to help around the family farm.

But something about the lad is attracting attention: the menacing stranger who might be the angel of death himself; the women-only community at Wycombe; Daniel, sent by the mysterious Guz.

They all want Davy for their own reasons.

But what use can he be to anyone? He has visions of flight, but how can flight ever be possible in this shattered world?

A simple farmboy, caught up in events beyond his power to control--but his visions may be the key to the future.

This is the second book in The Aftermath series. The first book is Shelter, by Dave Hutchinson.

When two strangers ask the manager at Kabul Station to take them into the Afghanizone he refuses. What sane person wouldn't? Thought to be the result of an alien visitation, the zone is deadly. Nothing works there. Electrical items are your enemy; they malfunction or simply blow up. The pair go in anyway, and the biggest surprise is when one of them walks out again. Nobody survives the zone, so how has she?