Search Worlds Without End

Sturgeon and Hugo Award nominated novelette.

The Art of Space Travel by Nina Allan is a science fiction novelette. In 2047, a first manned mission to Mars ended in tragedy. Thirty years later, a second expedition is preparing to launch. As housekeeper of the hotel where two of the astronauts will give their final press statements, Emily finds the mission intruding upon her thoughts more and more. Emily's mother, Moolie, has a message to give her, but Moolie's memories are fading. As the astronauts' visit draws closer, the unearthing of a more personal history is about to alter Emily's world forever.

This story is included in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 11 (2017), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection (2017), edited by Garder Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

From the author of the Hugo-winning "Six Months, Three Days," a new wrinkle on the old story of three wishes, set after the end of the world.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Mixing the invented and the real, The House of Rumour explores WWII spy intrigue (featuring Ian Fleming), occultism (Aleister Crowley), the West Coast science fiction set (Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and Philip K. Dick all appear), and the new wave music scene of the '80s. The decades-spanning, labyrinthine plot even weaves in The Jonestown Massacre and Rudolf Hess, UFO sightings and B-movies. Told through multiple narrators, what at first appears to be a constellation of random events begins to cohere as the work of a shadow organization--or is it just coincidence?

Tying the strands together is Larry Zagorski, an early pulp fiction writer turned US fighter pilot turned "American gnostic," who looks back on his long and eventful life, searching for connections between the seemingly disparate parts. The teeming network of interlaced secrets he uncovers has personal relevance--as it mirrors a book of twenty-two interconnected stories he once wrote, inspired by the Major Arcana cards in the tarot.

Hailed as an heir to Don DeLillo's Underworld by The Guardian, The House of Rumour is a tour de force that sweeps the reader through a century's worth of secret histories.

Sixteen of the author's own favorite science fiction stories.

Table of Contents:

• The Voices of Time - (1960)
• The Drowned Giant - (1964)
• The Terminal Beach - (1964)
• Manhole 69 - (1957)
• Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer - (1966)
• The Sound-Sweep - (1960)
• Billenium - (1961)
• Chronopolis - (1960)
• Build-Up - (1957)
• The Garden of Time - (1962)
• End Game - (1964)
• The Watch-Towers - (1962)
• Now Wakes the Sea - (1963)
• Zone of Terror - (1960)
• The Cage of Sand - (1962)
• Deep End - (1961)

The definitive cult, post-modern novel -- a shocking blend of violence, transgression and eroticism.

When our narrator smashes his car into another and watches a man die in front of him, his sense of sexual possibilities in the world around him becomes detached. As he begins an affair with the dead man's wife, he finds himself drawn with increasing intensity to the mangled impacts of car crashes.

Then he encounters Robert Vaughan, a former TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the expressway, who has gathered around him a collection of alienated crash victims and experiments with a series of erotic atrocities, each more sinister than the last. But Vaughan craves the ultimate crash - a head-on collision of blood, semen, engine coolant and iconic celebrity.

First published in 1973 'Crash' remains one of the most shocking novels of the second half of the twentieth century and was made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenburg.

Starduster Yes, I'm Max Andrews. I'm one of the guys who fought and bled and worked to get to Mars. I figure what I gave up in those early years gave me the right to pilot the next big jump. I've lied and stolen for that right. I'd have killed, too, but I didn't have top. Instead, I let a woman give her life so I could have my chance, my door to space. You think I'd stop at anything, now? I'll be on that rocket, blasting away on America's biggest adventure, the hop out into the stars themselves Only Fred Brown could have written this deeply moving science fiction novel about one man's epic, life-long struggle to open mankind's pathway to the star

There was a cure for depression and unemployment.

There was a cure for war, madness and national hatreds.

There was a cure for prejudice, crime and mass hysteria.

But there were those who wanted the cure suppressed until the world collapsed!

A novel of the fever-pitched fight against the end of the world, reminiscent of 1984 or A Clockwork Orange - but with an amazing difference.

In a world where global power has shifted east and revolution is brewing, two women embark on vastly different journeys--each harrowing and urgent and wholly unexpected.

When Meena finds snakebites on her chest, her worst fears are realized: someone is after her and she must flee India. As she plots her exit, she learns of The Trail, an energy-harvesting bridge spanning the Arabian Sea that has become a refuge for itinerant vagabonds and loners on the run. This is her salvation. Slipping out in the cover of night, with a knapsack full of supplies including a pozit GPS system, a scroll reader, and a sealable waterproof pod, she sets off for Ethiopia, the place of her birth.

Meanwhile, Mariama, a young girl in Africa, is forced to flee her home. She joins up with a caravan of misfits heading across the Sahara. She is taken in by Yemaya, a beautiful and enigmatic woman who becomes her protector and confidante. They are trying to reach Addis Abba, Ethiopia, a metropolis swirling with radical politics and rich culture. But Mariama will find a city far different than she ever expected--romantic, turbulent, and dangerous.

As one heads east and the other west, Meena and Mariama's fates are linked in ways that are mysterious and shocking to the core.

Written with stunning clarity, deep emotion, and a futuristic flair, The Girl in the Road is an artistic feat of the first order: vividly imagined, artfully told, and profoundly moving.

Sharp-eyed Marianne lives in a white tower made of steel and concrete with her father and the other Professors. Outside, where the land is thickly wooded and wild beasts roam, live the Barbarians, who raid and pillage in order to survive. Marianne is strictly forbidden to leave her civilized world but, fascinated by these savage outsiders, decides to escape. There, beyond the wire fences, she will discover a decaying paradise, encounter the tattooed Barbarian boy Jewel and go beyond the darkest limits of her imagination.

Playful, sensuous, violent and gripping, "Heroes and Villains" is an ambiguous and deliriously rich blend of post-apocalyptic fiction, gothic fantasy, literary allusion and twisted romance.

The novel is set in the future of 1960 and depicts a world that is geopolitically broadly similar to that of 1906, with Britain and the U.S. as the world's major colonial powers. The novel follows the romance of two young upper-class women, the Briton Aurora Cunningham and the American Margaret MacDonald, who attend the same ladies' seminary in Cornwall and pursue a secret romantic relationship.

It's 2038 and Jacinda (Jake) Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich vacationers in one of the world's last remaining forests. It's 2008 and Liam Greenwood is a carpenter, sprawled on his back after a workplace fall, calling out from the concrete floor of an empty mansion. It's 1974 and Willow Greenwood is out of jail, free after being locked up for one of her endless series of environmental protests: attempts at atonement for the sins of her father's once vast and violent timber empire. It's 1934 and Everett Greenwood is alone, as usual, in his maple-syrup camp squat, when he hears the cries of an abandoned infant and gets tangled up in the web of a crime, secrets, and betrayal that will cling to his family for decades.

Published in 1937, twelve years before Orwell's 1984, this novel projects a totally male-controlled fascist world that has eliminated women as we know them. They are breeders, kept as cattle, while men in this post-Hitlerian world are embittered automatons, fearful of all feelings, having abolished all history, education, creativity, books, and art. The plot centers on a "misfit" who asks, "How could this have happened?"

Harry Benson suffers from violent seizures. So violent that he often blackouts when they take hold. Shortly after severely beating two men during an episode, the police escort Benson to a Los Angeles hospital for treatment. There, Dr. Roger McPherson, head of the prestigious Neuropsychiatric Research Unit, is convinced he can cure Benson with an experimental procedure that would place electrodes deep in his brain's pleasure centers, effectively short-circuiting Harry's seizures with pulses of bliss. The surgery is successful, but while Benson is in recovery, he discovers how to trigger the pulses himself. To make matters worse his violent impulses have only grown, and he soon escapes the hospital with a deadly agenda...

"Are you happy with your life?"

Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the masked abductor knocks him unconscious.

Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits.

Before a man Jason's never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back, my friend."

In this world he's woken up to, Jason's life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college physics professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.

Is it this world or the other that's the dream? And even if the home he remembers is real, how can Jason possibly make it back to the family he loves? The answers lie in a journey more wondrous and horrifying than anything he could've imagined -- one that will force him to confront the darkest parts of himself even as he battles a terrifying, seemingly unbeatable foe.

Dark Matter is a brilliantly plotted tale that is at once sweeping and intimate, mind-bendingly strange and profoundly human -- a relentlessly surprising science-fiction thriller about choices, paths not taken, and how far we'll go to claim the lives we dream of.

The Circle is the exhilarating new novel from Dave Eggers, best-selling author of A Hologram for the King, a finalist for the National Book Award.

When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world's most powerful internet company, she feels she's been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users' personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company's modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can't believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world--even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman's ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.

Containing three Finney favorites:

• The Woodrow Wilson Dime,
• Marion's Wall,
• The Night People

in an omnibus edition that brilliantly displays his bold and unmistakable imagination. Certain to delight anyone with a penchant for penetrating imaginary realms of fantasy and adventure.

In the nineteenth century, a small group of American idealists managed to actually build Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine and use it to develop Cliology, mathematical models that could chart the likely course of the future. Soon they were working to alter history's course as they thought best. By our own time, the Society has become the secret master of the world. But no secret can be kept forever, at least not without drastic measures. When her plans for some historic real estate lead developer and ex-reporter Sarah Beaumont to stumble across the Society's existence, it's just the first step into a baffling and deadly maze of conspiracies.

In the distant future, a police marshal stationed at a remote mining colony on the Jupiter moon of Io uncovers a drug-smuggling conspiracy, and gets no help from the populace when he later finds himself marked for murder.

Marshal W.T. O'Niel is assigned to a mining colony on Io, one of Jupiter's moons. During his tenure miners are dying - usually violently. When the marshal investigates, he discovers the one thing all the deaths have in common is a lethal amphetamine-type drug, which allows the miners to work continuously for days at a time until they become "burned out" and expire. O'Niel follows the trail of the dealers, which leads to the man overseeing the colony. Now O'Niel must watch his back at every turn, as those who seek to protect their income begin targeting him...

An innocent alien from a distant planet learns what it means to be a man in love.

When his spacecraft is shot down over Wisconsin, Starman arrives at the remote cabin of a distraught young widow, Jenny Hayden, and clones the form of her dead husband. The alien convinces Jenny to drive him to Arizona, explaining that if he isn't, he'll die. Hot on their trail are government agents, intent on capturing the alien, dead or alive. En route, Starman demonstrates the power of universal love, while Jenny rediscovers her human feelings for passion.

In the winter of 1982, a twelve-man research team at a remote Antarctic research station discovers an alien buried in the snow for over 100,000 years. Once unfrozen, the form-changing alien wreaks havoc, creates terror and becomes one of them.

In order to protect the reputation of the American space program, a team of scientists stages a phony Mars landing. Willingly participating in the deception are a trio of well-meaning astronauts, who become liabilities when their space capsule is reported lost on re-entry. Now, with the help of a crusading reporter, they must battle a sinister conspiracy that will stop at nothing to keep the truth a secret.

It begins in Toronto, in the years after the smart drug revolution. Any high school student with a chemjet and internet connection can download recipes and print drugs, or invent them. A seventeen-year-old street girl finds God through a new brain-altering drug called Numinous, used as a sacrament by a new Church that preys on the underclass. But she is arrested and put into detention, and without the drug, commits suicide.

Lyda Rose, another patient in that detention facility, has a dark secret: she was one of the original scientists who developed the drug. With the help of an ex-government agent and an imaginary, drug-induced doctor, Lyda sets out to find the other three survivors of the five who made the Numinous in a quest to set things right.

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?

Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist, she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

In 1879, Rosa Tolliver, a college-educated blueblood, marries a wealthy man who turns out to be a brute. She flees her Philadelphia mansion with her 14-year-old son, Daniel, and the two of them make their way to Dodge City, Kans. Rosa retrospectively describes the trip in incredible detail: the modes of transportation they took; the people they met; the books she read. With each carefully placed detail, Rosa weaves the tapestry of her life, and among the threads, she hints at a destiny: something extraordinary happens to her, and each book she reads, each decision she makes, in retrospect has something to do with this destiny. Her stay in Dodge City lasts only four years, and she and Daniel flee again when a Pinkerton detective tracks them down. Another well-documented trip-this time to the Alaska gold fields-follows. Toward the end, an Indian shaman, Raven, shows her alien wonders and a vision of a future Earth in which humanity's destiny is intertwined with her own.

The story of a detective investigating the murder of a Titan, one of society's most powerful, medically-enhanced elites...

Cal Sounder is a detective working for the police on certain very sensitive cases. So when he's called in to investigate a homicide at a local apartment, he's surprised by the routineness of it all. But when he arrives on scene, Cal soon learns that the victim--Roddy Tebbit, an otherwise milquetoast techie--is well over seven feet tall. And although he doesn't look a day over thirty, he is ninety-one years old. Tebbit is a Titan--one of this dystopian, near-future society's genetically altered elites. And this case is definitely Cal's thing.

There are only a few thousand Titans worldwide, thanks to Stefan Tonfamecasca's discovery of the controversial T7 genetic therapy, which elevated his family to godlike status. T7 turns average humans into near-immortal distortions of themselves--with immense physical proportions to match their ostentatious, unreachable lifestyles. A dead Titan is big news... a murdered Titan is unimaginable. But these modified magnates are Cal's specialty. In fact, his own ex-girlfriend, Athena, is a Titan. And not just any--she is Stefan's daughter, heir to the massive Tonfamecasca empire.

As the murder investigation intensifies, Cal begins to unravel the complicated threads of what should have been a straightforward case, and it becomes clear he's on the trail of a crime whose roots run deep into the dark heart of the world.

On her fiftieth birthday, Dorrit Weger is checked into the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material: a state-of-the-art facility in Sweden where she will make new friends, enjoy generous recreational activities and live out her remaining days in comfort with people who are just like her. Here, women over the age of fifty and men over the age of sixty who are single and childless are saved from a life devoid of value and converted into productive members of society.

The price? Their bodies, harvested piece by piece for the 'necessary' ones (those on whom children depend) and sometimes their minds, as they take part in social and psychological experiments, until the day comes when they make their Final Donation and complete their purpose in life.

Despite the ruthless nature of this practice, the ethos of this near-future society and the Unit is to take care of others. Resigned to her fate as a 'dispensable', Dorrit finds her days there to be peaceful and consoling. For the first time in her life she no longer feels like an outsider - a single woman in a world of married couples with children. But when she meets a man inside the Unit and falls in love, everything changes.

After several years of drifting between school and go-nowhere jobs, a young man is drawn back into the big city of his youth. The magnet is his beloved older sister, Grace: always smart and charismatic even when she was rebelling, and always his hero. Now she is a promising graduate student in psychophysics and the center of a group of friends who take "Little Brother" into their fold, where he finds camaraderie, romance, and even a decent job.

But it soon becomes clear that things are not well with Grace. Always acerbic, she now veers into sudden rages that are increasingly directed at her adoring boyfriend, John, who is also her fellow researcher. When Grace disappears, and John shortly thereafter, the narrator makes an astonishing discovery in their apartment: a box big enough to crawl inside, a lab rat, and a note that says This is the only way back for us. Soon he embarks on a mission to discover the truth, a pursuit that forces him to question time and space itself, and ultimately toward a perilous confrontation at the very limits of imagination.

This kinetic novel catapults the classic noir plot of a woman gone missing into the twenty-first-century city, where so-called reality crashes into speculative science. Jay Hosking's Three Years with the Rat is simultaneously a mind-twisting mystery that plays with the very nature of time and the story of a young man who must face the dangerously destructive forces we all carry within ourselves.

Suzu, a seventeen-year-old high school student living in rural Kochi Prefecture, has kept the world at arm's length ever since her mother's death years ago. But at a friend's urging, she decides to dip her toes into another world: U, the largest online community in history. As her avatar, Belle, Suzu reveals her hidden singing talent and instantly becomes a global internet sensation, leading her to cross paths with a mysterious beast known as the Dragon. Who is this ferocious yet lonely stranger, and what will come of their fateful encounter...?

Plucked from her life on the streets of post-apocalyptic Santo Domingo, young maid Acilde Figueroa finds herself at the heart of a voodoo prophecy: only she can travel back in time and save the ocean - and humanity - from disaster. But first she must become the man she always was - with the help of a sacred anemone.

Tentacle is an electric novel with a big appetite and a brave vision, plunging headfirst into questions of climate change, technology, Yoruba ritual, queer politics, poverty, sex, colonialism and contemporary art. Bursting with punk energy and lyricism, it's a restless, addictive trip: The Tempest meets the telenovela.

The new novel from Simon Ings is a story that balances on the knife blade of a new technology. Augmented Reality uses computing power to overlay a digital imagined reality over the real world. Whether it be adverts or imagined buildings and imagined people with Augmented Reality the world is no longer as it appears to you, it is as it is imagined by someone else. Ings takes the satire and mordant satirical view of J.G. Ballard and propels it into the 21st century. Two friends are working at the cutting edge of this technology and when they are offered backing to take the idea and make it into the next global entertainment they realise that wolves hunt in this imagined world. And the wolves might be them. A story about technology becomes a personal quest into a changed world and the pursuit of a secret from the past. A secret about a missing mother, a secret that could hide a murder. This is no dry analysis of how a technology might change us, it is a terrifying thriller, a picture of a dark tomorrow that is just around the corner.

'The Sun always has ways to reach us.'

From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change for ever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans.

In Klara And The Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly-changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?

Why did Professor Sharpey, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist, commit suicide by throwing himself from a fast-moving train? And why were briefcases stuffed with cash found beside his shattered corpse? Major Hall of British Intelligence suspects Sharpey was a traitor selling secrets to the Communists. But Sharpey's colleague, Dr Harry Longman, believes his friend's strange behaviour is connected with his groundbreaking experiments using an isolation tank to test the effects of sensory deprivation. There's only one way for Longman to discover what really happened to Sharpey and clear his friend's name: he must subject himself to the same frightening experiments. But the terror he undergoes in the isolation tank is nothing compared to the horror that will follow: for what emerges from the lab is no longer Longman, but something else entirely...

The first time the lightning strikes Laura Shane is born...

The second time is strikes the terror starts...though eight-year-old Laura is saved by a mysterious stranger from the perverted and deadly intentions of a drug-crazed robber. Throughout her childhood she is plagued by ever more terrifying troubles, and with increasing courage she finds the strength to prevail - even without the intervention of her strange guardian. But, despite her success as a novelist, and her happy family life, Laura cannot shake the certainty that powerful and malignant forces are controlling her destiny.

Then the lightning strikes once more and shatters her world. The adventure - and the terror - have only just begun...

Captivating audiences of all ages, this timeless story follows the unforgettable journey of a lost alien and the 10-year-old boy he befriends. Join Elliot, Gertie, and Michael as they come together to help E.T. find his way back home.

Tesla Crane, a brilliant inventor and an heiress, is on her honeymoon on an interplanetary space liner, cruising between the Moon and Mars. She's traveling incognito and is reveling in her anonymity. Then someone is murdered and the festering chowderheads who run security have the audacity to arrest her spouse. Armed with banter, martinis, and her small service dog, Tesla is determined to solve the crime so that the newlyweds can get back to canoodling--

And keep the real killer from striking again.

Ravaged by the Change, an island nation in a time very like our own has built the Wall – an enormous concrete barrier around its entire coastline. Joseph Kavanagh, a new Defender, has one task: to protect his section of the Wall from the Others, the desperate souls who are trapped amid the rising seas outside and are a constant threat.

Failure will result in death or a fate perhaps worse: being put to sea and made an Other himself. Beset by cold, loneliness, and fear, Kavanagh tries to fulfill his duties to his demanding Captain and Sergeant, even as he grows closer to his fellow Defenders. A dark part of him wonders whether it would be interesting if something did happen, if they came, if he had to fight for his life...

A publishing event: Bestselling author Ken Liu selects his award-winning science fiction and fantasy tales for a groundbreaking collection--including a brand-new piece exclusive to this volume.

With his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, taking the literary world by storm, Ken Liu now shares his finest short fiction in The Paper Menagerie. This mesmerizing collection features all of Ken's award-winning and award-finalist stories, including: "The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary" (Finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards), "Mono No Aware" (Hugo Award winner), "The Waves" (Nebula Award finalist), "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species" (Nebula and Sturgeon award finalists), "All the Flavors" (Nebula award finalist), "The Litigation Master and the Monkey King" (Nebula Award finalist), and the most awarded story in the genre's history, "The Paper Menagerie" (The only story to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards).

A must-have for every science fiction and fantasy fan, this beautiful book is an anthology to savor.

Table of Contents:

• Preface
• The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species
• State Change
• The Perfect Match
• Good Hunting
• The Literomancer
• Simulacrum
• The Regular
• The Paper Menagerie
• An Advanced Reader's Picture Book of Comparative Cognition
• The Waves
• Mono no aware
• All the Flavors
• A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel
• The Litigation Master and the Monkey King
• The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary

Part science fiction, part dystopian fantasy, part radical socialist tract, Jack London's The Iron Heel offers a grim depiction of warfare between the classes in America and around the globe. Originally published nearly a hundred years ago, it anticipated many features of the past century, including the rise of fascism, the emergence of domestic terrorism, and the growth of centralized government surveillance and authority. What begins as a war of words ends in scenes of harrowing violence as the state oligarchy, known as "the Iron Heel," moves to crush all opposition to its power.

The Star Rover is a novel by American writer Jack London published in 1915. In the United Kingdom it was published under the title, The Jacket.

A framing story is told in the first person by Darrell Standing, a university professor serving life imprisonment in San Quentin State Prison for murder. Prison officials try to break his spirit by means of a torture device called "the jacket," a canvas straight-jacket which can be tightly laced so as to compress the whole body. Standing discovers how to withstand the torture by entering a kind of trance state, in which he walks among the stars and experiences portions of past lives. The accounts of these past lives form the body of the work. They are in effect a series of powerfully written, but disconnected and unresolved, short stories.

This short story originally appeared in Omni, June 1984. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Second Annual Collection (1985), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Sixth Omni Book of Science Fiction (1989), edited by Ellen Datlow.

What would life in England look like in 1940 had the British lost World War I, replacing Germany 's role in history?

A powerfully gripping story of a closeted homosexual trying to survive in an alternate history England, Hugo finalist Ian R. MacLeod's novella The Summer Isles took readers by storm in 1998. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, the novella explored what might happen had England become the equivalent of Nazi Germany. The novella went on to become a finalist for the 1999 Hugo Award and took home both the 1999 World Fantasy Award and the 1999 Sidewise Award for Alternate History, but has never been published in its original form... until now.

Fighting has spread across the Middle East and Central Asia to the borders of China. In the US, refugees from climate-change disaster subsist in FEMA camps. Images of official executions circulate on the Internet like al Qaeda videos. State agencies sponsor conspiracy theories as cover-ups. As the troops of the last superpower stand astride the last of the oil, China and Russia aren't the only states considering their options: certain nations of Old Europe are quietly preparing for the worst.

James Travis is a middle-aged middle manager in a software company. He has a son in the army, a daughter in a peace-protest camp outside a USAF base, and a compromising relationship with a foreign intelligence service. When his cover is blown hours before a nuclear explosion destroys the base, Travis, his son, and his daughter are all in serious trouble. And as the spooks and disinformation specialists focus their efforts on his capture, Travis knows that all it will take is one mistake and his only memorial will be another grainy video on... The Execution Channel.

Edwin St Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

How far would you go to find The One?

A simple DNA test is all it takes. Just a quick mouth swab and soon you'll be matched with your perfect partner--the one you're genetically made for.

That's the promise made by Match Your DNA. A decade ago, the company announced that they had found the gene that pairs each of us with our soul mate. Since then, millions of people around the world have been matched. But the discovery has its downsides: test results have led to the breakup of countless relationships and upended the traditional ideas of dating, romance and love.

Now five very different people have received the notification that they've been "Matched." They're each about to meet their one true love. But "happily ever after" isn't guaranteed for everyone. Because even soul mates have secrets. And some are more shocking than others...

A word-of-mouth hit in the United Kingdom, The One is a fascinating novel that shows how even the simplest discoveries can have complicated consequences.

Comus, the communications network/police force, has spread its web of power all across an America paralyzes by the after-effects of limited nuclear war. But in California, resistance is building against the dictatorship of Comus and Andrew Raleigh, president for life. For now Raleigh is dying and the powers of Comus are fading. It's the perfect time for the Californian revolutionaries to activate the secret weapon that alone can destroy America's totalitarian system and re-establish democracy. Yet Comus too has powers at its disposal, chief among them Howard Rohan. A washed-up actor until Comus offers him a second chance, Rohan will head a troupe of players touring in the heart of rebel territory. Howard Rohan, double agent, caught between the orders of Comus and rebels demands Which side will he choose? Who will he play false - himself or the entire country?

Amelia dreams of Mars. The Mars of the movies and the imagination, an endless bastion of opportunities for a colonist with some guts. But she's trapped in Mexico City, enduring the drudgery of an unkind metropolis, working as a rent-a-friend, selling her blood to old folks with money who hope to rejuvenate themselves with it, enacting a fractured love story.

And yet there's Mars, at the edge of the silver screen, of life.

This novella can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection (2018), edited by Gardner Dozois.

News From Nowhere, one of the most significant English works on the theme of utopia, is the tale of William Guest, a Victorian who wakes one morning to find himself in the year 2102 and discovers a society that has changed beyond recognition into a pastoral paradise, in which all people live in blissful equality and contentment. A socialist masterpiece, News From Nowhere is a vision of a future free from capitalism, isolation and industrialisation.

A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger's cinematic storytelling that makes the novel's unconventional chronology so vibrantly triumphant.

An enchanting debut and a spellbinding tale of fate and belief in the bonds of love, The Time Traveler's Wife is destined to captivate readers for years to come.

It's the day after tomorrow and the Arctic sea ice has melted. While global business carves up the new frontier, cruise ships race each other to ever-rarer wildlife sightings. The passengers of the Vanir have come seeking a polar bear. What they find is even more astonishing: a dead body.

It is Tom Harding, lost in an accident three years ago and now revealed by the melting ice of Midgard glacier. Tom had come to Midgard to help launch the new venture of his best friend of thirty years, Sean Cawson, a man whose business relies on discretion and powerful connections - and who was the last person to see him alive.

Their friendship had been forged by a shared obsession with Arctic exploration. And although Tom's need to save the world often clashed with Sean's desire to conquer it, Sean has always believed that underneath it all, they shared the same goals.

But as the inquest into Tom's death begins, the choices made by both men - in love and in life - are put on the stand. And when cracks appear in the foundations of Sean's glamorous world, he is forced to question what price he has really paid for a seat at the establishment's table.

Just how deep do the lies go?

Why has a species more advanced than ourselves--which surely must exist somewhere in the universe--not openly contacted us yet?

Brenda Pearce's exciting story suggests a reason for secrecy and projects such a superhuman species with a far developed view of the cosmos and their own position--and ours-- in it that we mere humans have only dimly conceived.

But the secrecy theory presents a dilemma to Margaret and Alan who have to explain their absense in practical down-to-earth terms while "forgetting" much of their nerve-racking but marvellous experience.

A team of scientists travel the width and breadth of the solar system, solving scientific puzzles as they do.

What if--whoosh, right now, with no explanation--a number of us simply vanished? Would some of us collapse? Would others of us go on, one foot in front of the other, as we did before the world turned upside down?

That's what the bewildered citizens of Mapleton, who lost many of their neighbors, friends and lovers in the event known as the Sudden Departure, have to figure out. Because nothing has been the same since it happened--not marriages, not friendships, not even the relationships between parents and children.

Kevin Garvey, Mapleton's new mayor, wants to speed up the healing process, to bring a sense of renewed hope and purpose to his traumatized community. Kevin's own family has fallen apart in the wake of the disaster: his wife, Laurie, has left to join the Guilty Remnant, a homegrown cult whose members take a vow of silence; his son, Tom, is gone, too, dropping out of college to follow a sketchy prophet named Holy Wayne. Only Kevin's teenaged daughter, Jill, remains, and she's definitely not the sweet "A" student she used to be. Kevin wants to help her, but he's distracted by his growing relationship with Nora Durst, a woman who lost her entire family on October 14th and is still reeling from the tragedy, even as she struggles to move beyond it and make a new start.

With heart, intelligence and a rare ability to illuminate the struggles inherent in ordinary lives, Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers is a startling, thought-provoking novel about love, connection and loss.

This shot story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 15, March-April 2017. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2018, edited by Rich Horton.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny Magazine.

Everybody's getting one.

Val and Julie just want what's best for their kids, David and Sophie. So when teenage son David comes home one day asking for a Pilot, a new brain implant to help with school, they reluctantly agree. This is the future, after all.

Soon, Julie feels mounting pressure at work to get a Pilot to keep pace with her colleagues, leaving Val and Sophie part of the shrinking minority of people without the device.

Before long, the implications are clear, for the family and society: get a Pilot or get left behind. With government subsidies and no downside, why would anyone refuse? And how do you stop a technology once it's everywhere? Those are the questions Sophie and her anti-Pilot movement rise up to answer, even if it puts them up against the Pilot's powerful manufacturer and pits Sophie against the people she loves most.

Tim Bedford, a young English painter, has made a promise to his dying cousin to find her husband, a scientist who vanished while working on a top-secret project in South America. The only clue is a scrap of paper with a scribbled list of words and a curious symbol resembling a figure 8 over a wavy line. As he follows the trail from Cambridge to New York to the sultry streets of Lima, the remote Peruvian desert, and the volcanic coast of southern Chile, Bedford finds himself facing danger at every turn. The action and suspense build towards a thrilling climax in the mountains of Australia, where Bedford will uncover the truth behind a sinister conspiracy that threatens the entire world... but can it be stopped, or is it already too late?

One of the most popular and critically successful of J.B. Priestley's later novels, Saturn Over the Water (1961) is a fast-paced and clever mix of adventure, mystery, and science fiction that remains, as David Collard writes in the new introduction to this edition, 'an entertaining and marvellously eccentric jeu d'esprit.'

The time is the future. The government is a corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy, mainly concerned with protecting the profits of large corporations. The Movement is a new and non-violent revolutionary group seeking to replace the political mess with a just and scientifically efficient socioeconomic system.

The Movement was staffed by some of the world's greatest intellectuals and scientists; unfortunately, they were amateurs in the business of revolution. The government could call on an army of ruthless professional agents - and they had no scruples about using violence.

It happened one night, without warning: 90% of the human race disappeared without a trace. There were no bodies and no clue as to where they went or whether they would ever return. After years of violence spawned by fear and rage, an uneasy peace is restored. But fanatics still rove the land, trying to discover what caused the Vanishing.

CTRL + ALT + DEL YOUR LIFE

Etsuro Sakagami is a college freshman who simply drifts through life, but when he logs on to the combat MMO Versus Town, he becomes Tetsuo, a karate champ on his way to becoming the most powerful martial artist around. While his relationship with new classmate Fumiko goes nowhere, Etsuro spends his days and nights online in search of the invincible Ganker Jack. Drifting between the virtual and the real, will Etsuro ever be ready to face his most formidable opponent?

Geneticist Pierre Tardivel may not have long to live-he's got a fifty-fifty chance of having the gene for Huntington's disease. But if his DNA is tragic, his girlfriend's is astonishing: Molly Bond has a mutation that gives her telepathy. Both of them have attracted the interest of Pierre's boss, Dr. Burian Klimus, a senior researcher in the Human Genome Project who just might be hiding a horrific past. Avi Meyer, a dogged Nazi hunter, thinks Klimus was the monstrous "Ivan the Terrible" of the Treblinka Death Camp.

As Pierre races against the ticking clock of his own DNA to make a world-changing scientific breakthrough, Avi also races against time to bring Klimus to justice before the last survivors of Treblinka pass away.

Two girls, two stories, one epic novel.

From Lauren Oliver, New York Times best-selling author of Before I Fall and the Delirium trilogy, comes an epic, masterful novel that explores issues of individuality, identity, and humanity. Replica contains two narratives in one: Lyra's story and Gemma's story. The stories can be listened to separately, one after the other, or in alternating chapters. The two distinct parts of this astonishing novel combine to produce an unforgettable journey.

Lyra's story begins in the Haven Institute, a building tucked away on a private island off the coast of Florida that from a distance looks serene and even beautiful. But up close the locked doors, military guards, and biohazard suits tell a different story. In truth Haven is a clandestine research facility where thousands of replicas, or human models, are born, raised, and observed. When a surprise attack is launched on Haven, two of its young experimental subjects - Lyra, or 24, and the boy known only as 72 - manage to escape.

Gemma has been in and out of hospitals for as long as she can remember. A lonely teen, her life is circumscribed by home, school, and her best friend, April. But after she is nearly abducted by a stranger claiming to know her, Gemma starts to investigate her family's past and discovers her father's mysterious connection to the secretive Haven research facility. Hungry for answers, she travels to Florida, only to stumble upon two replicas and a completely new set of questions.

While the stories of Lyra and Gemma mirror each other, each contains breathtaking revelations critically important to the other story. Using a downloadable enhancement, listeners can decide how they would like to listen to the audiobook, as with the print version. They can listen to the story of Gemma or Lyra straight through first, followed by the other girl's story, or they can move between chapters in Lyra's and Gemma's sections. No matter how it is listened to, Replica is an ambitious, thought-provoking masterwork.

"Stage four. Surgery. Recovering." While those are the simple words that once described Dr. Francine Burk's situation, the reality is much more complex. Her new reality is bacon rinds for breakfast and feeling unduly thrilled by her increasing ability to walk across a room without assistance. And it's being offered a placement at a prestigious research institute where she can put to good use her recent award money. With the Foundation's advanced technological resources and a group of fascinating primates, Francine can begin to verify her subversive scientific discovery, which has challenged the foundations of history--her Theory of Bastards.

Frankie finds that the bonobos she's studying are as complex as the humans she's working alongside. Their personalities are strong and distinct, and reigning over it all is Mama, the commanding matriarchal leader of the group. Frankie comes to know the bonobos and to further develop her groundbreaking theory with the help of her research partner, a man with a complicated past and perhaps a place in her future. And then something changes everything, and the lines that divide them--between subject and scientist, between colleague and companion--begin to blur.

With deft skill and heartbreaking honesty, Audrey Schulman delves into the very nature of her characters. Her newest novel explores the nuances of communication, the implications of unquestioned technological advancement, and the enduring power of love in a way that is essential and urgent in today's world. This thrilling literary novel will resonate, long after the final page is turned.

Would a truly intelligent person bother to interact with people?

Tetrasomy Two is the name for the extra chromosome pair that a young psychiatrist discovers in his vegetable patient. A patient that seems to have much more influence on his environment than one would expect from someone who hasn't spoken or moved for nearly 50 years. The search for answers is on, and now the doctor tries to walk the very fine line between sanity and madness in discovering the disturbing truth, which could imperil all of Earth.

Cable worker Roy Neary, who, along with several other stunned bystanders, experience a close encounter of the first kind - witnessing UFOs soaring across the sky. After this life-changing event, the inexplicable vision of a strange, mountain-like formation haunts him. He becomes obsessed with discovering what it represents, much to the dismay of his wife and family.

Meanwhile, bizarre occurrences are happening around the world. Government agents have close encounters of the second kind - discovering physical evidence of extraterrestrial visitors in the form of a lost fighter aircraft from World War II and a stranded military ship that disappeared decades earlier only to suddenly reappear in unusual places. Roy continues to chase his vision to a remote area where he and the agents follow the clues that have drawn them to reach a site where they will have a close encounter of the third kind - contact.

This remarkable and acclaimed debut novel by the Newbery-winning author of When You Reach Me introduces readers to a captivating, hidden world below the ice...

Peter is thrilled to join his parents on an expedition to Greenland. But when they finally reach the ice cap, he struggles to understand a series of frightening yet enticing visions.

Thea has never seen the sun. Her extraordinary people, suspected of witchcraft and nearly driven to extinction, have retreated to a secret world they've built deep inside the arctic ice.

As Thea dreams of a path to Earth's surface, Peter's search for answers brings him ever closer to her hidden home in this dazzling tale of mystery, science, and adventure at the top of the world.

Aboard the hyperspace liner Redshift, the first sign of trouble is the apparent suicide of a passenger. When first officer Jason Kraft discovers that she was murdered, Kraft wants to know why. Before long, a desperate group of people tries to use the hyperspace craft for their evil purposes, and Kraft is the only person in their way.

From the PASSENGER GUIDE. WARNING: Read This Guide Before Boarding the Redshift.

The environment aboard a hyperspace craft is quite safe as long as you are careful. The management reminds you that the speed of light on board this craft is ten meters per second, or about 30 million times slower than what you are used to. This means you will frequently encounter relativistic effects and optical illusions...

When Inspector Peter Glebsky arrives at the remote ski chalet on vacation, the last thing he intends to do is get involved in any police work. He's there to ski, drink brandy, and loaf around in blissful solitude.

But he hadn't counted on the other vacationers, an eccentric bunch including a famous hypnotist, a physicist with a penchant for gymnastic feats, a sulky teenager of indeterminate gender, and the mysterious Mr. and Mrs. Moses. And as the chalet fills up, strange things start happening--things that seem to indicate the presence of another, unseen guest. Is there a ghost on the premises? A prankster? Something more sinister? And then an avalanche blocks the mountain pass, and they're stuck.

Which is just about when they find the corpse. Meaning that Glebksy's vacation is over and he's embarked on the most unusual investigation he's ever been involved with. In fact, the further he looks into it, the more Glebsky realizes that the victim may not even be human.

In this late novel from the legendary Russian sci-fi duo--here in its first-ever English translation--the Strugatskys gleefully upend the plot of many a Hercule Poirot mystery--and the result is much funnier, and much stranger, than anything Agatha Christie ever wrote.

Koushun Takami's notorious high-octane thriller envisions a nightmare scenario: a class of junior high school students is taken to a deserted island where, as part of a ruthless authoritarian program, they are provided arms and forced to kill until only one survivor is left standing. Criticized as violent exploitation when first published in Japan--where it became a runaway best seller--Battle Royale is a Lord of the Flies for the 21st century, a potent allegory of what it means to be young and (barely) alive in a dog-eat-dog world.

Made into a controversial hit movie of the same name, Battle Royale is already a contemporary Japanese pulp classic, now available in a new English-language translation.

Security consultant "Jane Smith" receives an envelope with a key to a storage unit that holds a taxidermied hummingbird and clues leading her to a taxidermied salamander. Silvina, the dead woman who left the note, is a reputed ecoterrorist and the daughter of an Argentine industrialist. By taking the hummingbird from the storage unit, Jane sets in motion a series of events that quickly spin beyond her control.

Soon, Jane and her family are in danger, with few allies to help her make sense of the true scope of the peril. Is the only way to safety to follow in Silvina's footsteps? Is it too late to stop? As she desperately seeks answers about why Silvina contacted her, time is running out – for her and possibly for the world.

Not content with investing his fortune and watching it grow, multibillionaire Howard Christian buys rare cars that he actually drives, acquires collectible toys that he actually plays with, and builds buildings that defy the imagination. But now his restless mind has turned to a new obsession: cloning a mammoth...

In a barren province of Canada, a mammoth hunter financed by Christian has made the discovery of a lifetime: an intact frozen woolly mammoth. But what he finds during the painstaking process of excavating the huge creature baffles the mind. Huddled next to the mammoth is the mummified body of a Stone Age man around 12,000 years old. And he is wearing a wristwatch.

It looks like Howard Christian is going to get his wish--and more...

First contact was supposed to change the course of human history. But it turns out, you still have to go to work the next morning.

This story is included in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection (2014), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Worlds Seen in Passing: Ten Years of Tor.com Short Fiction(2018), edited by Irene Gallo.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

"In the Year 2889," which was first published in 1889, portrays a futuristic day in the life of a 20th century newspaper editor. Much of the story sounds like an episode of "The Jetsons." For example, a man is clothed by a mechanical dresser before being whisked off to work. The story, which is set in New York City (now called Centropolis), delves into what the future world might look like, including technological advancements, international relations, and social mores.

First published n 1889 under the name of Jules Verne, "In the Year 2889" may be chiefly the work of Jules Verne's son, Michel Verne. Michel, who was in charge of publishing his father's work late in Jules Verne's life, may have had financial motivation to utilize his Jules Verne's well-known pen name. Regardless of actual authorship, many of the topics covered in "In the Year 2889" echo the ideas of Jules Verne, and the tenor of the book is generally in keeping with Jules Verne's optimistic view of future possibilities.

Has also appeared under the titles: In the Twentyninth Century: A Day in the Life of an American Jounalist in 2889 and In the 29th Century.

THE LITERARY DISCOVERY OF THE CENTURY

In 1863 Jules Verne, famed author of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days, wrote a novel that his literary agent deemed too farfetched to be published. More than one hundred years later, his great-grandson found the handwritten, never-before published manuscript in a safe. That manuscript was Paris in the Twentieth Century, an astonishingly prophetic view into the future by one of the most renowned science fiction writers of all time...

The novel is set in Paris in 1960. Money and technology have taken over society and the narrator, a young poet, is forced to work in a bank. Verne's vision of our mechanized time is prescient: there are fax machines, automobiles, computers, subways, and electronic musical instruments.

Back from the dead: the first ever zombie story

Before there was Dracula, there was The Castle in Transylvania. In its first new translation in over 100 years, this is the first book to set a gothic horror story, featuring people who may or may not be dead, in Transylvania.

In a remote village cut off from the outside world by the dark mountains of Transylvania, the townspeople have come to suspect that supernatural forces must be responsible for the menacing apparitions emanating from the castle looming over them.

But a visiting young count scoffs at their fears. He vows to liberate the villagers by pitting his reason against the forces of superstition--until he sees his dead beloved walking the halls of the castle....

Miner James Starr, after receiving a letter from an old friend, leaves for the Aberfoyle mine. Although believed to be mined out a decade earlier, James Starr finds a mine overman, Simon Ford, along with his family living deep inside the mine. Simon Ford has found a large vein of coal but must deal with mysterious and unexplainable happenings in and around the mine.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (Yesterday and Tomorrow) - (1964) - essay by I. O. Evans
• The Eternal Adam - (1957) - novelette by Jules Verne and Michel Verne (1910)
• The Fate of Jean Morénas - (1964) - shortstory by Jules Verne and Michel Verne (1910)
• An Ideal City - (1964) - shortstory by Jules Verne (1875)
• Ten Hours Hunting - (1964) - shortstory by Jules Verne (1881)
• Frritt-Flacc - (1959) - shortstory by Jules Verne (1884)
• Gil Braltar - (1958) - shortstory by Jules Verne (1887)
• In the Twentyninth Century: A Day in the Life of an American Journalist in 2889 - (1891) - shortstory by Jules Verne
• Mr. Ray Sharp and Miss Me Flat - (1964) - shortstory by Jules Verne (1893)

A "Lost World" Science fiction novel by A. Hyatt Verrill in the same genre as Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost World" and H. Rider Haggard's "She".

Drawing on Hyatt Verrill's experiences in Central and South America, this is an adventure set in the lost Mayan kingdom of "Mictolan". The narrator comes across an ancient Mayan codex which leads him (by many preliminary adventures) to Mictolan. Here he trades knowledge with the Mayan inhabitants and enjoys Mayan culture for a brief time. But before he can leave with his beloved Itza back across the Bridge of Light he must deal with a malevolent high-priest and gain freedom for the Mayans.

Deadeye Dick is Kurt Vonnegut's funny, chillingly satirical look at the death of innocence. Amid a true Vonnegutian host of horrors--a double murder, a fatal dose of radioactivity, a decapitation, an annihilation of a city by a neutron bomb--Rudy Waltz, aka Deadeye Dick, takes us along on a zany search for absolution and happiness. Here is a tale of crime and punishment that makes us rethink what we believe... and who we say we are.

In the tradition of H. G. Wells's The Shape of Things to Come, W. Warren Wagar's A Short History of the Future is a memoir of postmodern times. Cast in the form of a history book, the narrative voice of the book's powerful vision is that of a far-future historian, Peter Jensen, who leaves this account of the world from the 1990s to the opening of the twenty-third century as a gift to his granddaughter. A dazzling and imaginative combination of fiction and scholarship, Wagar's speculative history of the future alternates between descriptions of world events and intimate glimpses of his fictive historian's family through the ages.

Jensen's tale traces the flow of the future from the early twenty-first-century reign of a megacorporate global economy, to its sudden collapse in 2044, when nuclear catastrophe envelops the world. In the traumatic aftermath, a socialist world commonwealth comes into being in the year 2062, followed by a lengthy transition to a decentralized order of technologically mature autonomous societies, many located in outer space. The riveting literary interludes that follow each chapter take the form of letters and documents from the history of Jensen's family, evoking the everyday lives of people in the midst of these global-historical events. Here we meet a woman in Brazil whose son is dying from a new immuno-deficiency disease, two brothers comparing life on earth with life in a space colony, and many more.

Neither fiction nor nonfiction, Wagar's brilliantly creative work is not meant to forecast the future, but rather to draw attention to possibilities and alternatives for humankind and planet Earth. In doing so, it also serves as an unforgettable reminder that the future is being made now.

A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the pursuit of happiness in America. Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.

Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human - and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.

A short story about a poet and her legacy, and how people handle it in the age of the internet and social media. Traslated by Ken Liu. This story is included in the anthology Ex Libris: Stories of Librarians, Libraries & Lore (2017), edited by Paula Guran

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Anne Hatley is a sharp-witted and acerbic young teacher from the South, in need of a reprieve from the drudgery of work and an increasingly tedious relationship. She accepts an invitation to the nation's largest research colony, where scientists--DNA pioneer James D. Watson among them--hope to "cure" Anne of a rare gene that affects her bone growth: She is missing a leg and walks with a prosthesis. Anne feels fine the way she is, and she strives to maintain her resolve under pressure from her peers and from doctors eager to pioneer an experimental procedure, which would make her the first patient to generate a new leg. Meanwhile, she falls into a reluctant romance with the rakish Nick, possessor of the "suicide gene"; befriends Charles Darwin, who is on site digging through the eugenics archive; and attempts to come to terms with her first love.

The Colony is the story of one young woman struggling to accept who she is, and who she will become. But it is also a novel that mines some of the most polarizing issues of our time--among them, medical ethics, body image, and genetic engineering.

In a strange alternate society that values law and truth above all else, Laszlo Ratesic is a nineteen-year veteran of the Speculative Service. He lives in the Golden State, a nation standing where California once did, a place where like-minded Americans retreated after the erosion of truth and the spread of lies made public life and governance impossible.

In the Golden State, knowingly contradicting the truth is the greatest crime--and stopping those crimes is Laz's job. In its service, he is one of the few individuals permitted to harbor untruths, to "speculate" on what might have happened.

But the Golden State is less a paradise than its name might suggest. To monitor, verify, and enforce the truth requires a veritable panopticon of surveillance and recording. And when those in control of the facts twist them for nefarious means, the Speculators are the only ones with the power to fight back.

Back in print after two decades, this fantasy tells of a young man who lives in a village deep in the forest in medieval times. Mark finds himself torn between his hero worship for charming highwayman Wat and his growing suspicion of Wat's cold savagery. And Mother Cloot, who may have sorcerous powers, works in equally suspicious ways--perhaps for evil, perhaps for good.

Identity crises, consumerism, and star-crossed teenage love in a futuristic society where people connect to the Internet via feeds implanted in their brains.

For Titus and his friends, it started out like any ordinary trip to the moon - a chance to party during spring break and play with some stupid low-grav at the Ricochet Lounge. But that was before the crazy hacker caused all their feeds to malfunction, sending them to the hospital to lie around with nothing inside their heads for days. And it was before Titus met Violet, a beautiful, brainy teenage girl who has decided to fight the feed and its omnipresent ability to categorize human thoughts and desires. Following in the footsteps of George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr., M. T. Anderson has created a not-so-brave new world — and a smart, savage satire that has captivated readers with its view of an imagined future that veers unnervingly close to the here and now.

Helius is an entrepreneur with an interest in space travel. He seeks out Professor Mannfeldt, a visionary who has written a treatise on the likelihood of finding gold on the moon, only to be ridiculed by his peers. Helius recognizes the value of Mannfeldt's work, but a gang of evil businessmen, intent on controling the world's gold reserves, have also taken an interest in Mannfeldt's theories.

Meanwhile, Helius's assistant Windegger has announced his engagement to Helius's other assistant, Friede. This is disconcerting to Helius, who secretly loves Friede, so he avoids their engagement party. He is mugged on the way home from his meeting with Mannfeldt by henchmen of the evil businessmen, commanded by an American, Walter Turner. They steal the research that Professor Mannfeldt had entrusted to him and also burgle Helius's home, taking other valuable material. They then present him with an ultimatum: they know he is planning a voyage to the moon; either he includes them in the project, or they will sabotage it and destroy his rocket. Reluctantly, Helius agrees to their terms.

The rocket team is assembled: Helius, Mannfeldt, Windegger, Friede and Turner, who represents the interests of the evil businessmen. After the rocket blasts off, they discover that Gustav, a young boy who has befriended Helius, is aboard as a stowaway with his collection of science fiction pulp magazines. During the journey, Windegger emerges as a coward, and the feelings of Helius toward Friede become known to her, creating a romantic triangle.

Once they get to the far side of the Moon, Mannfeldt and Turner prove Mannfeldt's theory that there is gold on the moon. They struggle in a cave, and Mannfeldt falls to his death in a crevasse. Turner attempts to hijack the rocket, and in the struggle, he is shot and killed. Gunfire damages the oxygen tanks, and they come to the grim realization that there is not enough oxygen for all to make the return trip. One person must remain on the moon, in it's breathable atmosphere on the far side.

Helius and Windegger draw straws to see who must stay and Windegger loses. Seeing Windegger's anguish, Helius decides to drug Windegger and Friede with a last drink together and take Windegger's place, letting Windegger return to Earth with Friede. Friede senses that something is in the wine. She pretends to drink and then retires to the compartment where her cot is located, closes and locks the door. Windegger drinks the wine, becoming sedated. Helius makes Gustav his confidant and the new pilot for the ship. Helius counts down the time for the ship's liftoff from a distance away. He watches it depart. He realizes that he is alone on the moon. As he lowers his head and resignedly starts to move towards the survival camp originally prepared for Windegger, Helius discovers that Friede has decided to stay with him on the moon. He throws his arms wide as Friede runs to him. They embrace.

Also published as The Girl in the Moon.

Prepare for a full dive!

Even in the future, all the advances and innovation in the world can't change the dynamics of the school playground. And for Haruyuki Arita, a fat kid in junior high, that means he's destined to always be at the bottom of the food chain, prime pickings for the school bullies. But when he is approached by Kuroyukihime, a beautiful and aloof upperclassman, Haruyuki's life is turned on its head as he dives into Brain Burst, a mysterious computer program, and the Accelerated World with her help. It's in the Accel World that Haruyuki casts off his depressing reality and takes hold of the chance to become a Burst Linker, a knight to protect his princess!

Since meeting Kuroyukihime, Haruyuki has managed to grow up a bit. But suddenly this mature Haruyuki is confronted by Tomoko, an elementary school girl he's never met before--who calls him "big brother"?! When Kuroyukihime sees the two of them flirting, the look she gives Haruyuki is like a cold knife stabbing him in the gut! Meanwhile, in the Accelerated World, something very mysterious is taking place...

A cursed piece of Enhanced Armament called the Armor of Catastrophe is making the rounds, polluting the minds of the duel avatars that don it and causing those avatars to attack at random with no regard for friend or foe. Only Silver Crow, the sole duel avatar with the power of flight, can apprehend the relic. Is Haruyuki up to the challenge on this mission to subjugate the Armor?!

Since meeting Kuroyukihime, the most beautiful girl in school, Haruyuki has grown up into a magnificent knight, fat and bullied though he might be. As the season turns to spring, a strange new student appears before Haruyuki and his friends, now in eighth grade. This mysterious seventh grader has mastered the art of using Brain Burst in everyday life, despite being curiously absent from the duel-matching list. With Kuroyukihime away on a field trip for the ninth grade class, this new member of the student body, in the guise of a warped duel avatar called Dusk Taker, steals "something precious" from Haruyuki with overwhelming force. Cast once again to the bottom rungs of the school-hierarchy ladder, Haruyuki is driven into a corner, and his only course of action is--?!

Prepare for a full dive!

Seiji Nomi is a mysterious new student whose skillful use of Brain Burst abilities in the real world has boosted him to astonishing heights of achievement (not to mention astonishing heights of jerkitude). When Haruyuki's wings are stolen by Seiji's cunning and ability, Haruyuki suffers a crushing defeat. Stripped of his greatest ability, will Haruyuki ever be able to rise again...?

Seiji Nomi's scheming from his position atop the school social hierarchy has ceased. Sky Raker has returned to the Accelerated World, and upon joining Nega Nebulus, he and Kuroyukihime have become a force to be reckoned with. But one day, Haruyuki hears the news that the social camera network has been expanded to include the Hermes Cord space elevator, and he realizes what the next stage of the game will be: space. Upon arriving, he gets help from a mysterious operator in taking on the biggest mission in the history of Brain Burst! Plus, Kuroyukihime and Haruyuki have a chance to experience their first overnight event--except that Sky Raker and Fuko end up crashing it!

The silver wings responsible for the rise of Nega Nebulus, the legion led by Kuroyukihime, are weakening! During the battle with the mysterious Acceleration Research Society, Haruyuki sustained corrosion damage from the revived Chrome Disaster, and he has still been unable to escape its effects. The Seven Kings of Pure Color take this very seriously, and soon they hand down their judgement: purification. Now Haruyuki is faced with a choice--undergo the grueling purification process, or have a bounty on his head and risk being cast out of the Accelerated World altogether!

In order to cleanse Silver Crow (aka Haruyuki), Kuroyukihime and the rest of Nega Nebulus launch an operation to rescue Ardor Maiden. In the midst of this dangerous mission, Silver Crow manages to make contact with Ardor Maiden, but in doing so, he invades the forbidden territory of the Imperial Palace. There he has a vision of Chrome Falcon and Saffron Blossom--but what do they have to do with Haruyuki?!

Haruyuki's desperate battle with his friend Takumu has taken him to the brink, and he finally activates the Destiny, a purified version of the notorious Armor of Catastrophe. It's light versus dark as their fierce fight continues, and the stakes couldn't be higher. If Haruyuki can't rid his friend of the sinister ISS kit that's infected him, Takumu could be lost to the darkness forever. And he just might take Haruyuki with him...

"I will never forgive you. I will kill you. I will continue to kill you until all your Burst Points are gone and you vanish from the accelerated world."

Having turned into Chrome Disaster once more, Haruyuki slaughters with the force of a vengeful god the avatars who made Ash Roller suffer. And then he fuses completely with the Armor of Catastrophe, down to his deepest depths. Silver Crow soars above the accelerated world, seeking out enemies to destroy. For his next target, he turns the spearhead of his hatred toward the creators of the ISS kit, the Acceleration Research Society.

A berserker no one can control. Before this raging figure, a long avatar stands to block his way. His name: Green Grandé. The absolute defense of the Green King, bearer of the most powerful shield, the Strife, collides fiercely with the madness of the cursed avatar! The conclusion to the Armor of Catastrophe arc!

"The Sound of Water on a Distant Day"

2046. Haruyuki, a.k.a Silver Crow, member of the reborn Nega Nebulus, makes a certain blunder and sees a sudden, precipitous drop in Burst Points. Given that he is backed up against the wall, Takumu suggests he hire an Accelerated World "bouncer."

Spring 2047. Haruyuki is plunged into an unprecedented crisis due to the machinations of new student Seiji Nomi. At the same time in Okinawa on a school trip, Kuroyukihime is set up for a "duel" by a strange Burst Linker.

The Acceleration Research Society, a mysterious organization maneuvering in secret, makes their headquarters at the top of Tokyo Midtown Tower, where the Archangel Metatron is enshrined. This completely invincible Legend-class Enemy guards the Society from all would-be attackers, and so the Seven Kings meet in order to devise some means to defeat the Enemy and the Acceleration Research Society along with it.

The secret plan they come up with necessitates that Silver Crow gain a new ability, Theoretical Mirror.

Although he's been ordered to obtain this ability--which can withstand even the instant death of Metatron's ultimate laser--abilities require action to trigger their manifestation, in contrast with the way Incarnate techniques are generated through the imagination. Thus, Haruyuki's powerful imagination won't help him this time!

While Haruyuki is stumped at how to even begin this difficult task, Ardor Maiden (a.k.a. Utai Shinomiya) begins relating a sad past...

A new hotshot Burst Linker appears, taking Silver Crow down. Haruyuki, still struggling to obtain the Theoretical Mirror ability, sees Wolfram Cerberus as a roadblock in his larger quest to get stronger and defeat Archangel Metatron. He soon meets Chocolat Puppeteer, a duel avatar made out of... chocolate?! With her help, will Silver Crow finally grow into the fighter all seven legions need to successfully carry out their mission against Metatron?

Prepare for a full dive!

Umesato Junior High's culture festival is just around the corner, and Haruyuki is busy helping his classmates prepare for their exhibit. While everything may appear calm in the real world, however, the Accelerated World is steadily falling into chaos. Magenta Scissors is zeroing in on Silver Crow from an unexpected direction, and even his newfound Optical Conduction ability may not be enough to avert a tragedy!

Prepare for a full dive!

Sparks have been flying on the Umesato campus ever since Kuroyukihime discovered that Haruyuki invited not one but multiple girls to the exciting school festival. However, when Rin collapses in the real world after Magenta Scissor infects her with an ISS kit, Haruyuki and the others put aside their issues to save their friend! The first step of their plan is to pull off a daring rescue to free Aqua Current, but lying in wait at the Castle's gate is Seiryu, one of the Four Gods...Even if they have Aqua Current on their side, how will they overcome Seiryu's horrifying ability Level Drain?!

In the wake of the culture festival, a new challenge awaits Haruyuki in the fifteenth volume of the light novel series from acclaimed author Reki Kawahara!

After receiving the archangel Metron's blessing, Haruyuki sets off with Takumu, Chiyuri, and Blood Leopard still determined to fulfill his vow to save Nico from imprisonment. When they charge into the Acceleration Research Society's main base, they overcome several obstacles and eventually face off against Black Vise and Argon Array! But the moment they think the true fight is beginning, a mysterious red light descends, heralding the birth of Disaster Armor Mk. 2!!

Prepare for a full dive!

After their battle with the Acceleration Research Society, Kuroyukihime and the other members of Nega Nebulus have finally resolved to face the White Legion, Oscillatory Universe! To have a fighting chance against White Cosmos, Nega Nebulus knows that forming an alliance with the Green Legion is paramount. So after scheduling peace talks with the Green Legion's Master, Green Grandé, Haruyuki travels to their home base, located in the Shibuya Ward. But when he arrives, he discovers that the one awaiting him is none other than...Kuroyukihime in a swimsuit?!

Prepare for a full dive!

Before Kuroyukihime graduates, Haruyuki makes it his mission to travel to the Castle with Sky Raker and learn the clear conditions of Brain Burst as well as what lies at the pinnacle of the Accelerated World. When they arrive, they are warmly received by the dark silhouette of the dual-bladed swordsman, Graphite Edge! But Haruyuki can't afford to be stopped at this critical juncture. For in addition to finding the answers he seeks, Haruyuki learns that the Castle is home to The Fluctuating Light!

In the Unlimited Neutral Field, members of the new Black Legion fall victim to a surprise attack at the hands of Orchid Oracle, a Burst Linker long considered lost to Brain Burst. Thinking quickly, Silver Crow retreats to the Highest Level with Metatron in an attempt to grasp hold of the situation, but there they are greeted by a brand-new adversary! Snow Fairy, an F-Type avatar of the White Legion unleashes her devastating attack and severs the link between them! It's up to Kuroyukihime and Niko to save their Legion members!

Prepare for a full dive!

Despite their grueling battle and narrow victory over Oscillatory Universe, Nega Nebulus was unable to get any hard evidence of the connection between the White Legion and the Acceleration Research Society... or so they thought. Thanks to a key exchange captured by Chocolat Puppeter's replay card, they've got all the proof they need! It's time to expose the White Legion's crimes before the entire Accelerated World! Let the fourth meeting of the Seven Kings begin!

At long last, Haruyuki and the others have exposed the White Legion as the villains they've always been! Sadly, their celebration is short-lived. Kuroyukihime and the other Kings soon find themselves in a deadly trap laid by White Cosmos herself! And to save them, Haruyuki will have to face his toughest opponent yet: the Sun Goddess, Inti...

Physical attacks and special abilities mean almost nothing against the overwhelming might of the Sun Goddess Inti. But her defeat is the key to accessing Snow White, which means everyone's hopes once again rest with Haruyuki and his Lucid Blade. In order to succeed in this death-defying mission, he'll have to master the mysterious Omega style of swordsmanship. His Instructor? The Third Chrome Disaster-Centaurea Sentry...

Following a narrow triumph against the Sun God Inti, Haruyuki and company are immediately faced with a new adversary: The Deity of Demise, Tezcatlipoca, whose appearance heralds the ends of the Accelerated World as they know it. To stand a chance against this powerhouse, Haruyuki will once again have to dig deep and discover new reserves of untapped power. At the same time, the battle against White Cosmos and her Legion enters its endgame. As the Burst Linkers fall one by one to these mighty foes, Haruyuki makes his most difficult decision yet...

PREPARE FOR A FULL DIVE!

The Deity of Demise, Tezcatlipoca, has visited pandemonium upon the Accelerated World and driven Haruyuki to withdraw from Nega Nebulus! Parting ways with Kuroyukihime proves difficult, and harder still is surrendering himself to none other than the White King! Now finding himself among the ranks of Oscillatory Universe, Haruyuki pays a visit to Eternal Girls' Academy, the White Legion headquarters. There, he'll come face-to-face with the true identities of the Seven Dwarves and undergo a special trial of his own. But given that Haruyuki and Kuroyukihime are no longer connected by the Black Legion, what will become of their bond...?

A new novel of the fantastic unknown by the national bestselling author of Time Travelers Never Die.

Eccentric Sunset Tuttle spent his life searching in vain for forms of alien life. Thirty years after his death, a stone tablet inscribed with cryptic, indecipherable symbols is found in the possession of Tuttle's onetime lover, and antiquities dealer Alex Benedict is anxious to discover what secret the tablet holds. It could be proof that Tuttle had found what he was looking for. To find out, Benedict and his assistant embark on their own voyage of discovery-one that will lead them directly into the path of a very determined assassin who doesn't want those secrets revealed.

After being lost in space for eleven years, Gabe finally makes his triumphant return to reunite with Alex and Chase and retrieve a possibly alien artifact--which may lead them to solve the greatest archaeological mystery of their careers, in the eighth installment of the Alex Benedict series.

After his return from space, Gabe is trying to find a new life for himself after being presumed dead--just as Alex and Chase are trying to relearn how to live and work without him. But when a seemingly alien artifact goes missing from Gabe's old collection, it grants the group a chance to dive into solving the mystery of its origins as a team, once again.

When a lead on the artifact is tied to a dead pilot's sole unrecorded trip, another clue seems to lead to one of the greatest lingering mysteries of the age: the infamous disappearance of a team of scientists aboard a space station orbiting a black hole--the Amelia Earhart of their time. With any luck, Alex, Chase, and Gabe may be on the trail of the greatest archaeological discovery of their careers...

The time--a future closer than we know. Where groups of extraterrestrial aliens have become familiar members of our society.

The place--Los Angeles. Still a town of fast times and hard crime, touching every life form inside the city limits.

The cops--Sykes, earthman, and Francisco, alien. Facing a menace meaner than the meanest streets on their beat. Fighting an enemy as terrifying as the darkest forces in a vast, unfathomable universe. Battling back with the best--and the deadliest--of both their worlds.

Decades after economic and environmental collapse destroys much of civilization in the United States, the Coast Road region isn't just surviving but thriving by some accounts, building something new on the ruins of what came before. A culture of population control has developed in which people, organized into households, must earn the children they bear by proving they can take care of them and are awarded symbolic banners to demonstrate this privilege. In the meantime, birth control is mandatory.

Enid of Haven is an Investigator, called on to mediate disputes and examine transgressions against the community. She's young for the job and hasn't yet handled a serious case. Now, though, a suspicious death requires her attention. The victim was an outcast, but might someone have taken dislike a step further and murdered him?

In a world defined by the disasters that happened a century before, the past is always present. But this investigation may reveal the cracks in Enid's world and make her question what she really stands for.

Set in the same universe as some of the author's short stories, which can be read here:

• "Amaryllis" (2010)
• "Astrophilia" (2012) read free online at Lightspeed Magazine
• "Bannerless" (2015) read free online at WIRED.com

A century after environmental and economic collapse, the people of the Coast Road have rebuilt their own sort of civilization, striving not to make the mistakes their ancestors did. They strictly ration and manage resources, including the ability to have children.

Enid of Haven is an investigator, who with her new partner, Teeg, is called on to mediate a dispute over an old building in a far-flung settlement at the edge of Coast Road territory. The investigators' decision seems straightforward -- and then the body of a young woman turns up in the nearby marshland. Almost more shocking than that, she's not from the Coast Road, but from one of the outsider camps belonging to the nomads and wild folk who live outside the Coast Road communities. Now one of them is dead, and Enid wants to find out who killed her, even as Teeg argues that the murder isn't their problem.

In a dystopian future of isolated communities, can our moral sense survive the worst hard times?

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 lurid mix of Jules Verne's futuristic air warfare fantasies, the utopian visions of News from Nowhere and the future war invasion literature of Chesney and his imitators, it told the tale of a group of terrorists who conquer the world through airship warfare. Led by a crippled, brilliant Russian Jew and his daughter, the 'angel' Natasha, 'The Brotherhood of Freedom' establish a 'pax aeronautica' over the earth after a young inventor masters the technology of flight in 1903. The hero falls in love with Natasha and joins in her war against society in general and the Russian Czar in particular.

The novel is a sequal to The Angel of the Revolution, the tale of a worldwide brotherhood of anarchists fighting the world, armed with fantastical airships. The ending is on an apocalyptic note when a comet smashes into the earth.

After being fired out of the giant Columbiad space gun, the bullet-shaped projectile along with its three passengers, Barbicane, Nicholl and Michel Ardan, begins the five-day trip to the moon.

"The Purchase Of The North Pole" is the sequel to "From the Earth to the Moon", set twenty years later.

Some members of the Baltimore Gun Club have purchased large tracts of land around the North Pole, but for what reason? Their plan is shortly thereafter revealed to the world: using the same mechanics of their cannon which propelled them on their Moon Journey, these members of the Baltimore Gun Club planned to tilt the Earth's axis in order to establish a more stable climate for the world. Can their grandoise plan succeed?

Also published as Topsy-Turvy.

Reynolds has turned his productive imagination towards the growing phenomenon of mobile living in America. Taking us decades into the future, he tells the story of a world where people have taken to the road EN MASSE, in huge mobile 'towns' composed of hundreds, or even thousands of inhabitants, attempting to deal with a hostile and over organized world.

How much does the internet know about YOU?

Because her mom is always on the move, Steph hasn't lived anyplace longer than six months. Her only constant is an online community called CatNet - a social media site where users upload cat pictures - a place she knows she is welcome. What Steph doesn't know is that the admin of the site, CheshireCat, is a sentient A.I.

When a threat from Steph's past catches up to her and ChesireCat's existence is discovered by outsiders, it's up to Steph and her friends, both online and IRL, to save her.

When a mysterious entity starts hacking into social networks and chat rooms to instigate paranoia and violence in the real world, it's up to Steph and her new friend, Nell, to find a way to stop it – with the help of their benevolent AI friend, CheshireCat.

High above the skyscrapers of New York, Doc Savage engages in deadly combat with the red-fingered survivors of an ancient, lost civilization. Then, with his amazing crew, he journeys to the mysterious "lost valley" to search for a fabulous treasure and to destroy the mysterious Red Death.

Lester Dent authored this book under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

More information about The Man Of Bronze available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

With a mysterious black Chinaman, Doc Savage and his amazing crew journey to the jungles of Indo-China in a desperate gamble to destroy the infamous Thousand-headed Man.

Lester Dent authored this book under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

More information about The Thousand-Headed Man available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Doc Savage and his fabulous crew journey to Tibet in pursuit of their most dangerous adversary, the evil genius Mo-Gwei. Battling against overwhelming odds, they try to stop him from conquering the world with a diabolical machine known as the Blue Meteor, a screaming blue visitor from space that turns men into raving animals!

Lester Dent authored this book under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

More information about Meteor Menace available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Menaced by "the strange clicking danger," Doc Savage and his fabulous five-man army take a desperate journey on a polar submarine in search of a missing ocean liner and a dazzling treasure. Their only clue is a map tattooed on the back of a blind violinist. Awaiting them at their destination is the most terrible killer the Arctic has ever known.

Lester Dent authored this book under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

More information about The Polar Treasure available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Seeking to avenge his brother's murder, Doc Savage and his daring crew become involved in a desperate hunt for the lost treasure of the pirate, Henry Morgan. Stalking them every inch of the way is the archfiend, El Rabanos, and his strange ally, the werewolf's paw!

Lester Dent authored this book under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

More information about Brand of the Werewolf available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

While seeking to solve the mystery of "the trained vampire murders," Doc Savage and his amazing crew suddenly find themselves prisoners of Sol Yuttal and Hadi-Mot aboard a hijacked Zeppelin. Their deadly destination is a fabulous lost diamond mine guarded by carnivorous plants and monstrous, bloodsucking bats.

More information about The Lost Oasis available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Lester Dent authored this book under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

A vile greenish vapor was all that remained of the first victim of the monstrous Smoke of Eternity. There would be thousands more if Kar, master fiend, had his evil way. Only Doc Savage and his mighty five could stop him. But the corpse-laden trail led to mortal combat with the fiercest killing machines ever invented by nature.

Lester Dent authored this book under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

More information about The Land of Terror available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

It was an ageless thing that had existed since the beginning of time -- a monstrous green face that spoke sudden death. With its legions of ghostly, nebulous soul slaves, it had begun to terrorize the world. Even Doc Savage and his fantastic five were helpless against its awesome power, until....

Lester Dent authored this book under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

Arabian thieves led by the diabolically clever Molallet set one fiendish trap after another for Doc Savage and his mighty five. Only "Doc," with his superhuman mental and physical powers, could have withstood this incredible ordeal of endurance which led from the cavern of the crying rock through the pitiless desert of Rub' Al Khali and its Phantom City to a fight to the death against the last of a savage prehistoric race of white-haired beasts.

Lester Dent authored this book under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

It was all a great mystery. Who was this man called Dan Thunden who claimed he was one hundred and thirty years old? Did he really have the secret of the fountain of youth? What was this island called Fear Cay that spelled horror and death? What was the strange thing that turned men to bone? These were the mysteries that Doc Savage and his fearless crew had to solve at peril of their very lives.

Lester Dent authored this book under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

It started when a Viking Dragon ship attacked a yacht in the waters outside New York. Next, "Ham" was stabbed with a 1,200 year-old Viking knife. Then Johnny was captured and frozen solid in a block of arctic ice. Finally, even the mighty man of bronze himself -- Doc Savage -- is kidnapped and enslaved by the chilling menace. What is his plan this time? Can he save himself and his friends from almost certain destruction?

Lester Dent authored this book under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

With the fate of America hanging in the balance, Doc Savage and his fearless crew battle a hideously white-faced man named Ool who kills merely with a touch of his finger. The only clue to his diabolical power is a mysterious pair of dark goggles which brings death to whomever possesses them. The trail leads to a fabulous lost super-civilization hidden deep in the bowels of the earth, where Doc Savage and his fabulous five face their supreme challenge.

Walter Ryerson Johnson authored this book under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

It looked just like any other deserted island. But hidden under its tropical sands was a monstrous slave empire, a vast underground network of death pits, giant carnivorous crabs and prehistoric beasts, ruled by the blood-crazed Count Ramadanoff. Blasting their way into this nightmare of horror, Doc Savage and "the fabulous five" embark on their most daring adventure.

Walter Ryerson Johnson authored this book under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

It began with a series of quakes which tore huge, gaping holes in the surface of the earth. Soon the sky over the Northwest was filled with the bodies of strange floating men playing a weird melody of death. Was the world doomed? Could Doc Savage and his Fabulous five save it from almost certain destruction? Join them as they race to the center of the earth for a titanic battle with the power-crazed leaders of a fantastic super-civilization.

Laurence Donovan authored this book under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

The entire city of New York is swept up in a wave of terror, as an evil international conspiracy devises a crime so sinister that only Doc Savage and his five mighty cohorts can halt its fiendish plan. Led by a phantom master criminal with stupefying supernatural powers, the conspiracy sets trap after trap for Doc. Finally, in a fantastic underground empire, the fearless bronze giant and his courageous crew must fight for their lives against a diabolical enemy that cannot even be seen.

Lester Dent authored this book under the pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

The Headless Horseman rides again in Sleepy Hollow -- this time streaking down the sky with flashing speed causing destruction and horror wherever he lands. Here is a puzzle worthy of the penetrating powers of the Man of Bronze -- a deception so devious it would have to be solved on two continents.

William G. Bogart authored this novel under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

Graduates of Doc's college for criminals who revert to their former identities. A master trickster who will stop at nothing to further his evil plans. A ferocious monster that turns men's minds to mush. All are part of a cunning scheme which the Man of Bronze and his loyal companions must smash -- or die trying.

Harold A. Davis authored this novel under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

From the frozen heart of the American continent comes a nameless prehistoric terror of unspeakable savagery, leaving a broken trail of mangled victims that shocks and baffles the world. Only the superhuman Man of Bronze can meet this horrifying menace on its own bloody ground -- and uncover the even greater evil that spawned it.

Lester Dent authored this novel under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

It came out of nowhere and turned men into mummies. It threatened the construction of the mighty Yellow River Dam. But when it came after Hardrock Hennesey, the tough little mucker summoned the Man of Bronze -- the sensational mind who could smash the diabolical forces behind the mind-boggling mystery.

William G. Bogart authored this novel under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

World War II is drawing to a close. Hitler rigs an assassination of a look-alike double in a daring plot to save his ruined Reich -- then disappears. America calls on its greatest hero -- Doc Savage -- to track down this most evil of adversaries and stop the phony martyrdom. Joining him in this last-ditch crusade are a wide assortment of Allied agents -- one of whom may be the fleeing Fuhrer himself!

Lester Dent authored this novel under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

The original Doc Savage magazine (Street & Smith) title was Violent Night.

Doc smuggles himself into Moscow on his most daring mission yet! The Man of Bronze tangles with a deadly military secret, some sinister Soviets, and -- most dangerous of all -- a heroine of the Russian underground who is as treacherous as she is beautiful.

Lester Dent authored this novel under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

More information available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Satan Black

The Man of Bronze is pegged for murder in a family feud over a pipeline stretching from Arkansas to the Atlantic. The precious oil it carries is needed by the army for the invasion of Europe that will end the war. Only Doc Savage and his fearless sidekicks can find the real culprit and see that the pipeline gets built -- at the risk of death by dynamite!

This is # 97 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about Satan Black available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Cargo Unknown

Doc Savage's men are on a top secret mission aboard the Pilotfish when the submarine explodes and sinks to the ocean floor. The Man of Bronze tracks down the treacherous vipers behind the sabotage and searches for the purgatory of terror 200 feet below the ocean surface -- with only 12 hours of air left!

This is # 98 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about Cargo Unknown available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Lester Dent authored both novels under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

Hell Below

A mad refugee from Hitler's crumbling Reich has set up a powerful fortress in Mexico. The plan? Capture Doc Savage and bring him by submarine to the desert hideout... enlist his aid in carrying out the "New Effort" -- the one that will succeed where Hitler failed!

This is # 99 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about Hell Below available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

The Lost Giant

Across the Arctic wastes, Doc Savage races deadly enemy agents on skis and in bombers -- to a remote island off the Greenland coast. The quarry is a secret so great that the future of nations hinges on Doc and his crew... and their ability to stand solidly against menacing forces of evil.

This is # 100 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about The Lost Giant available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Lester Dent authored both novels under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

One-Eyed Mystic

A criminal master of mind-control conspires to sell the ultimate weapon of terror and destruction to the Nazis. Only Doc and his daring crew can stop him. They trail their malevolent quarry to the frozen Arctic sea -- and fall into an icy evil trap of machine guns, U-boats and sheer insanity!

This is # 111 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about One-Eyed Mystic available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

The Man Who Fell Up

Out of the darkness, yellow and bodiless eyes peer into the faces of Doc Savage and his crew. And when Monk vanishes inside a locked room, Doc leaps to the rescue -- plunging straight into a vicious international maelstrom that could change the course of history!

This is # 112 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about The Man Who Fell Up available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Lester Dent authored both novels under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

Pirate Isle

A murderous madman is holding a South Sea atoll in terror. His aim? Nothing less than pirating the secret of turning sea water into gold. His obsession? Set a deadly trap -- then obliterate the Man of Bronze and his bold crew!

This is # 115 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about Pirate Isle available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

The Speaking Stone

To unlock the secret of a mysterious talking stone, Doc travels to an ancient utopia high in the mountains. A vicious army of vipers are hot on his heels, racing him to the city in the clouds. To get the secret, Doc's awesome talents are soon tested when he must protect the lives of his crew -- and the lives of everyone in the city!

This is # 116 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about The Speaking Stone available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Lester Dent authored both novels under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

The Golden Man

A murderous madman is holding a South Sea atoll in terror. His aim? Nothing less than pirating the secret of turning sea water into gold. His obsession? Set a deadly trap -- then obliterate the Man of Bronze and his bold crew!

This is # 117 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about The Golden Man available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Peril in the North

250 people are abandoned in the Arctic wilderness at the mercy of a murderous madman. Only Doc Savage can prevent wholesale slaughter on ice. Following a gun- and bomb-blasting battle on the New York docks, the Man of Bronze and his crew face northward to smash a sinister plot -- and to expose the cruel secret of a bloodthirsty foreign dictator!

This is # 118 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about Peril in the North available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Lester Dent authored both novels under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

The Laugh of Death

Doc's trusty crew suddenly disappears. The only clue is an unearthly laughter that arises from nowhere and destroys the will. Doc, alone, must save his sidekicks before they die -- but when the laughter attacks him, the Man of Bronze becomes the helpless puppet of evil!

This is # 119 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about The Laugh of Death available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

The King of Terror

A ruthless madman is plotting to rule the world. His ingenious plan involves an enigmatic woman, a psychotic surgeon, and a strange and powerful fog that muddles men's minds. First, they have to kill Doc Savage. And Doc's vengeance begins only after he is dead!

This is # 120 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about The King of Terror available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Lester Dent authored both novels under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

The Three Wild Men

The FBI is after the Man of Bronze. The U.S. government believes he's conducting bizarre experiments to transform the world's wealthiest and most powerful men into brutal, mindless creatures. From posh New York apartments to murky Virginia swamps, Doc Savage races one step ahead of the G-men as he seeks the true evil genius behind the maniacal plot of worldwide terror!

This is #121 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about The Three Wild Men available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

The Fiery Menace

A ruthless madman is plotting to rule the world. His ingenious plan involves an enigmatic woman, a psychotic surgeon, and a strange and powerful fog that muddles men's minds. First, they have to kill Doc Savage. And Doc's vengeance begins only after he is dead!

This is # 122 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about The Fiery Menace available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Lester Dent authored both novels under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

Devils of the Deep

A mysterious "sea monster" is sighted by fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico. Then a pirated submarine, using a powerful secret weapon, begins to terrorize shipping along the entire Atlantic seaboard. Hundreds die as warships of all nations join together to find and destroy the deadly menace. The chief suspects: Doc Savage and his loyal crew!

This is # 123 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about Devils of the Deep available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Harold A. Davis authored this novel under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

The Headless Men

A mad scientist has invented a way to decapitate people and let them live as his headless slaves. The Man of Bronze and his crew pursue this deadly genius to Central America, where they are all trapped and captured. Only Doc Savage can prevent the headless horde from taking over the world -- but he is strapped to a sacrificial altar and is scheduled to lose his head at midnight!

More information about The Headless Men available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Alan Hathway authored this novel under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

The Spook of Grandpa Eben

Can an ancient ring put a curse on its hapless victims? Doc and his crew must uncover the incredible truth -- or be condemned for murder!

This is # 135 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about The Spook of Grandpa Eben available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Measures for a Coffin

Doc becomes a helpless pawn in a diabolical plot to steal millions. If his trusty crew can't save him, the Man of Bronze will surely die!

This is # 136 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about Measures for a Coffin available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

The Three Devils

A strange supernatural beast stalks the northern wilds. Can Doc put an end to its reign of terror -- before a ruthless band of fanatics puts an end to Doc?

This is # 137 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about The Three Devils available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Strange Fish

A gorgeous heiress, a mysterious fat man, an unlovely fish, and murder -- they all bring Doc and his crew to a Midwest ranch, a bloody playground for the most cunning madmen on earth!

This is # 138 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about Strange Fish available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Lester Dent authored all four novels under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

No Light to Die By

An eerie illumination in the moonless night sky lights a path to destruction for Doc Savage -- as the Man of Bronze must defuse the most explosive threat to mankind since the atom bomb!

This is # 143 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about No Light to Die By available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

The Monkey Suit

Why are people being murdered for a rented, moth-eaten ape costume? Doc and his crew battle to unmask the deadly mystery -- and to keep a billion-dollar scientific breakthrough out of the hands of gangland gorillas.

This is # 144 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about The Monkey Suit available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Let's Kill Ames

When a beautiful but unscrupulous con-artist gets herself entangled in a poisonous extortion plot, only Doc Savage and his bold crew can discover the hidden antidote for murder.

This is # 145 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about Let's Kill Ames By available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Once Over Lightly

Sudden death turns a carefree vacation into a captive hell, as Doc races to prevent a terrifying transaction that could reduce America's cities to radioactive rubble!

This is # 146 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about Once Over Lightly By available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

I Died Yesterday

Sudden death turns a carefree vacation into a captive hell, as Doc races to The corpse of a young man in a beauty parlor, an ice pick, a camera, plants, chemistry, and Doc's meddlesome cousin Pat Savage all add up to a frightening plot -- and an all-out mission to rescue the Man of Bronze!

This is # 147 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about I Died Yesterday available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

The Devil's Black Rock

A mysterious black rock with the power to unleash deadly explosions is about to be sold to the Nazis -- the destructive mineral will change the outcome of the war unless Doc can muscle in on the buy!

This is # 164 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about The Devil's Black Rock available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Waves of Death

A freak tidal wave occurs in the normally placid waters of Lake Michigan -- suddenly Doc and his crew find themselves on the trail of a mad inventor with the power to hold the world hostage!

This is # 165 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about Waves of Death available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Terror and the Lonely Widow

Doc and crew are en route to the South Sea Islands where an evil mastermind plans to start WWIII by selling an atomic bomb to the highest bidder -- but Doc's search is cut short when the madman hijacks their plane!

This is # 166 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about Terror and the Lonely Widow available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

The Too-Wise Owl

Doc is lured to the criminal hideout of an evil genius and an experiment with the incredible Vitamin M -- a nutrient that can make a man incredibly smart -- or terminally stupid!

This is # 167 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about The Too-Wise Owl available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Lester Dent authored all four novels under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

Se-Pah-Poo

Doc and his crew arrive at a remote archaeological dig in Arizona where scientists are being cooked alive and uncover the mummified hand of an angry god -- and an amazing weapon of death!

This is # 168 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about Se-Pah-Poo available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Colors For Murder

A kidnapping, a killing, and a young woman on the run set Doc on an explosive trail of conspiracy and intrigue that leads straight to a group of mysterious, multicolored whales!

This is # 169 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about Colors For Murder available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Three Times a Corpse

All Doc wanted was a quiet vacation, but what he gets instead is a femme fatale with a curious lucky streak, a bottle of poisoned bourbon, and a man who dies three times!

This is # 170 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about Three Times a Corpse available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Death is a Round Black Spot

Doc is summoned to a small Missouri town where violent death is a way of life -- and a black spot marks the next victim!

This is # 171 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about Death is a Round Black Spot available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

The Devil is Jones

A man, a woman, or the devil himself: who -- or what -- is the elusive, mysterious Jones? Doc better find out quick, before he's framed for murder!

This is # 172 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about The Devil is Jones available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Lester Dent authored all four novels under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

Bequest of Evil

One of Doc's friends inherits a Canadian estate, but they all get more than they bargained for, including kidnappers, torture, an Arctic colony of slaves -- and a diabolical madman with a plot to rule the world!

This is # 173 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about Bequest of Evil available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

William G. Bogart authored this novel under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

Death in Little Houses

A group of bearded mountain men steals pieces of a miniature model home and a lady trucker is marked for death -- only Doc can put the pieces of this bizarre puzzle together before murder rules the road.

This is # 174 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about Death in Little Houses available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

William G. Bogart authored this novel under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

Target for Death

When a seemingly innocent letter leaves a trail of dead bodies, Doc tracks the mysterious sender halfway round the world to stamp out a killer whose punishment is long overdue.

This is # 175 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about Target for Death available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

William G. Bogart authored this novel under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

The Death Lady

Doc and the gang head for the Brazilian jungle to rescue a missing heiress, but instead of a damsel in distress they find a lovely lady with a heart of darkness.

This is # 176 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about The Death Lady available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

William G. Bogart authored this novel under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

The Exploding Lake

A lake vanishes in a fireball, a gregarious blonde with an ocelot cub, and a far-off land of mystery spell trouble for Doc and his crew -- and finis for the world as we know it.

This is # 177 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about The Exploding Lake available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Harold A. Davis authored this novel under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

Contents:

• The Derelict of Skull Shoal
  In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean a dog howls -- launching Doc and his crew on a high-seas adventure involving bloodthirsty pirates, man-eating sharks, and an island of zombie-killers!
  • This is # 178 in the Doc Savage Novels series. More information about The Derelict of Skull Shoal available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.
  
  
• Terror Wears No Shoes
  When one of his trusty crew mysteriously vanishes in the Orient, Doc's investigation leads to a beautiful glamour-puss, a deadly virus, and a diabolical plot to poison America!
  • This is # 179 in the Doc Savage Novels series. More information about Terror Wears No Shoes available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.
  
  
• The Green Master
  In a secret fortress high in the Andes, Doc and his crew are enslaved by a race of extrasensory super-blondes who worship a strange green stone with a life of its own!
  • This is # 180 in the Doc Savage Novels series. More information about The Green Master available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.
  
  
• Return from Cormoral
  When an eccentric young millionaire suddenly starts predicting the future with unerring accuracy, Doc has to find out how and why fast -- because the next prediction is of his own death!
  • This is # 181 in the Doc Savage Novels series. More information about Return from Cormoral available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.
  
  
• Up From Earth's Center
  A shipwrecked lunatic, a mysterious cavern, and a plump little man with a fear of fire lead Doc on his strangest and most legendary adventure ever -- straight to the gates of hell itself!
  • This is # 182 in the Doc Savage Novels series. More information about Up From Earth's Center available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.
  
  
• Afterword, essay by Will Murray
  
  
• Afterword, essay by Philip José Farmer
  
  

Lester Dent authored all five novels under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

Note: This Omnibus is the last of the Doc Savage Novels of the the pulp era. The remaining Doc Savage Novels were authored by Philip José Farmer or Will Murray, from notes or concept by Lester Dent.

The Year: 2085. Humanity has spread throughout the solar system. A stable lunar colony is agitating for independence. Lunar tourism is on the rise...

Against this background, professional "Close Protection" specialist Scotty Griffin, fresh off a disastrous assignment, is offered the opportunity of a lifetime: to shepherd the teenaged heir to the Republic of Kikaya on a fabulous vacation. Ali Kikaya will participate in the first live action role playing game conducted on the Moon itself. Having left Luna--and a treasured marriage--years ago due to a near-tragic accident, Scotty leaps at the opportunity.

Live Action Role Playing attracts a very special sort of individual: brilliant, unpredictable, resourceful, and addicted to problem solving. By kidnapping a dozen gamers in the middle of the ultimate game, watched by more people than any other sporting event in history, they have thrown down an irresistible gauntlet: to "win" the first game that ever became "real." Pursued by armed and murderous terrorists, forced to solve gaming puzzles to stay a jump ahead, forced to juggle multiple psychological realities as they do...this is the game for which they've prepared their entire lives, and they are going to play it for all it's worth.

Lumen was first published by Camille Flammarion (1842-1925) in 1872 as part of the Stories of Infinity collection. Flammarion was a well-known French astronomer, writer and highly successful popularizer of science during the late 19th century.

This famous novel, written in the form of a philosophical dialogue, features a cosmic spirit named Lumen who reveals the scientific wonders of the celestial universe to Quaerens, a young seeker of knowledge. Within its pages, the author mixes empirical observations about the nature and speed of light with vivid speculations about such diverse subjects as reincarnation, time travel, the reversibility of history and the ecospheres of alien planets. Lumen is one of the first science fiction novels to include detailed descriptions of alien life forms and the first to imagine (30 years before Einstein's theory of relativity) the differences in perception that might result from traveling at velocities close to and beyond the speed of light.

This Wesleyan edition is the first English translation of the original French text in over a hundred years. The volume includes notes, appendices and a critical introduction.

The bizarre idea that the earth's interior is hollow and, perhaps, even populated has been put to effective literary use by writers ranging from Edgar Allen Poe and Jules Verne to Rudy Rucker and Edgar Rice Burroughs. This notion had respectability as a scientific hypothesis until the early 1800s, and the theory that the earth "is hollow and inhabitable within" continues to find believers as an alternative description of the earth to this day.

The hollow earth is one of the most important settings in the literature of the imagination that fed into early science fiction. Subterranean Worlds presents a fascinating look at the theme of the hollow earth and its history, as well as the geological theories which produced many of these stories. It excerpts key passages from the major subterranean world fictions, some translated into English for the first time. With helpful introductions to each selection and a comprehensive bibliography, this book is the definitive treatment of this entertaining topic.

Contents:

• A Bluffer's Guide to The Underworld: An Introduction to the Hollow Earth
• Theories and Descriptions of the Inner Earth, from Kicher to Symmes
• Relation D'Un Voyage Du Pole Arctique Au Pole Antarctique
• Lamekis ou les voyages extraordinaries d'un Egyptien dans la terre interieure
• The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground
• The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins
• A Voyage to the World in the Center of the Earth
• L'aventurier Francois
• L'Icosameron
• John Cleves Symmes Jr. and Symzonia
• Collin de Plancy: Voyage au centre de la terre
• Edgar Allen Poe and "the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym"
• Jules Verne: Voyage au centre de la terre
• After Verne: Later Developments

Written for serial publication in 1822 under the pseudonym Horace de Saint-Aubin, this Faustian tale by Balzac has never before been available in English. More than a long-lost curiosity by an important writer, The Centenarian is also a seminal work of early science fiction, crucial to understanding both the development of the genre and the craft of this great author.

Beringheld, a 400-year-old "mad scientist," discovered the fluid necessary to human life, but he must extract the vital fluid of others to enlarge his own powers.

Balzac intertwines the mythic and the modern in ways that would prove enormously influential to science fiction. Like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, this novel bridges the gap that separates alchemy and magic from the practice and problems of science. It is also crucial to an understanding of Balzac's oeuvre, as it anticipates significant themes of power, knowledge, and secrecy.

This Wesleyan edition features notes, appendices, and a critical introduction.

On the eve of Earth's destruction, a young scientist discovers something too precious to lose, in a story of cataclysm and hope by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Divergent trilogy.

It's only two weeks before an asteroid turns home to dust. Though most of Earth has already been evacuated, it's Samantha's job to catalog plant samples for the survivors' unknowable journey beyond. Preparing to stay behind and watch the world end, she makes a final human connection.

As certain doom hurtles nearer, the unexpected and beautiful potential for the future begins to flower.

A video game developer becomes obsessed with a willful character in her new project, in a mind-bending exploration of what it means to be human by the New York Times bestselling author of Recursion.

Maxine was made to do one thing: die. Except the minor non-player character in the world Riley is building makes her own impossible decision--veering wildly off course and exploring the boundaries of the map. When the curious Riley extracts her code for closer examination, an emotional relationship develops between them. Soon Riley has all new plans for her spontaneous AI, including bringing Max into the real world. But what if Max has real-world plans of her own?

Nature or nurture? Neither. Discover a bold new way to raise a child in this unsettling story of the near future by the New York Times bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow.

When Sam's wife first tells him about Vitek, a twenty-first-century fertility lab, he sees it as the natural next step in trying to help their future child get a "leg up" in a competitive world. But the more Sam considers the lives that his child could lead, the more he begins to question his own relationships and the choices he has made in his life.

In the near future, if Vegas games are ingeniously scam-proof, then the heists have to be too, in this imaginative and whip-smart story by the New York Times bestselling author of The Martian.

An IT whiz at the Babylon Casino is enlisted to upgrade security for the game of keno and its random-number generator. The new quantum computer system is foolproof. But someone on the inside is no fool. For once the odds may not favor the house--unless human ingenuity isn't entirely a thing of the past.

The Sleeper Awakes is H. G. Wells's wildly imaginative story of London in the twenty-second century and the man who by accident becomes owner and master of the world. In 1897 a Victorian gentleman falls into a sleep from which he cannot be waked. During his two centuries of slumber he becomes the Sleeper, the most well known and powerful person in the world. All property is bequeathed to the Sleeper to be administered by a Council on his behalf. The common people, increasingly oppressed, view the Sleeper as a mythical liberator whose awakening will free them from misery.

The Sleeper awakes in 2100 to a futuristic London adorned with wondrous technological trappings yet staggering under social injustice and escalating unrest. His awakening sends shock waves throughout London, from the highest meetings of the Council to the workers laboring in factories in the bowels of the city. Daring rescues and villainous treachery abound as workers and capitalists fight desperately for control of the Sleeper.

By the year 2137 Europe has become a largely forgotten, savage wilderness. Fierce bands of hunters rove the crumbling ruins of once mighty, war-ravaged cities. On the other side of the Atlantic a prosperous Pan-American Federation has emerged, claiming all lands and seas between the 30th and 175th longitudes and forbidding contact with the rest of the world. All who cross beyond thirty are sentenced to death.

Beyond Thirty is the story of Captain Jefferson Turck and the crew of his aero-submarine, who through accident and sabotage are forced beyond the thirtieth longitude and embark on an epic quest to rediscover the legendary lands of the Old World. Their adventures stand as one of Edgar Rice Burroughs's most imaginative and subtly crafted tales. Burroughs wrote the story in 1915 in reaction to the growing horrors of the First World War, and his devastating vision of its consequences provides a haunting and enduring warning for the twenty-first century.

Has also been published as The Lost Continent.

"From nearly two hundred centres, and every week added to their number, roared the unquenchable crimson conflagrations of the atomic bombs. The flimsy fabric of the world's credit had vanished, industry was completed disorganised, and every city, every thickly populated area was starving or trembled on the verge of starvation. Most of the capital cities of the world were burning; millions of people had already perished, and over great areas government was at an end."

The Last War erupts in Europe, rapidly escalating from bloody trench warfare and vicious aerial duels into a world-consuming, atomic holocaust. Paris is engulfed by an atomic maelstrom, Berlin is an ever-flaming crater, the cold waters of the North Sea roar past Dutch dikes and sweep across the Low Countries. Moscow, Chicago, Tokyo, London, and hundreds of other cities become radioactive wastelands. Governments topple, age-old cultural legacies are destroyed, and the stage is set for a new social and political order.

The Last War is H. G. Wells's chilling and prophetic tale of a world gone mad with atomic weapons and of the rebirth of human-kind from the rubble. Written long before the atomic age, Wells's novel is a riveting and intelligent history of the future that discusses for the first time the horrors of the atomic bomb, offering a startling vision of humanity purged by a catastrophic atomic war.

Originally and alternatively published as The World Set Free.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the invention of the airplane revolutionizes warfare and precipitates a devastating world war. Nations race to build armadas of airships; cities across the globe are bombed; flying navies clash above the Alps and India. The United States is invaded from the east and the west. German and American airships duel over the Atlantic, and New York is bombarded by German flying machines. Confederation of Eastern Asia airships soar above the Rockies, soon engaging in deadly dogfights with the German air fleet above Niagara Falls.

In The War in the Air, the astonishingly prophetic vision of H. G. Wells reveals how one invention can change the world. Before the World Wars, Wells predicted that airplanes would be used for bombing, that urban areas would become especially vulnerable to aerial attacks, that dogfights and stealth attacks by air fleets would become a normal part of warfare, and that distance and the expanse of oceans no longer would be guarantors of safety for America or other countries. Visionary in its time and chillingly relevant a century later, The War in the Air continues to remind us that humankind's greatest evil lies in devices of its own making.

What did our ancestors dream of when they gazed up at the stars and looked beyond the present? Wildly imaginative but grounded in reasoned scientific speculation, A Journey in Other Worlds races far ahead of the nineteenth century to imagine what life would be like in the year 2000. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Earth is effectively a corporate technocracy, with big businesses using incredible advances in science to improve life on the planet as a whole. Seeking other planets habitable for the growing human population, the spaceship Callisto, powered by an antigravitational force known as apergy, embarks on a momentous tour of the solar system. Jupiter proves to be a wilderness paradise, full of threatening beasts and landscapes of inspired beauty, where the explorers must fight for their lives. Dangers less tangible but equally deadly await the Callisto crew on Saturn, which yields profound secrets about their fate and the ultimate destiny of mankind.

Thoughtful, adventurous, and replete with a dazzling array of futuristic devices, A Journey in Other Worlds is a classic, unforgettable story of utopias and humankind's restless exploration of the stars.

"'What would you do if you were the strongest man in the world, the strongest thing in the world, mightier than the machine?' He made himself guess answers for that rhetorical inquiry. 'I would run the universe single-handed. I would scorn the universe and turn it to my own ends. I would be a criminal. I would rip open banks and gut them. I would kill and destroy. I would be a secret, invisible blight. I would set out to stamp crime off the earth.'"

Hugo Danner is the strongest man on earth, the result of a monstrous experiment by his scientist father. Nearly invulnerable, he can run faster than a train, leap higher than trees, lift a wrecked vehicle to rescue its pinned driver, and hurl boulders like baseballs. His remarkable abilities, however, cannot gain him what he desires most--acceptance--for Hugo Danner is desperately lonely, shunned and feared for his enormous strength.

An enduring classic in speculative fiction and the reported inspiration for the original comic hero, Superman, Gladiator is a melancholic tale of a boy set apart because of his unique gift and his lifelong struggle to come to terms with it.

Betrayed by his wife, Stephen Stone spirits his son, Henry, away to a remote tropical island and trains him to be an ideal physical specimen and a perfect gentleman. After years of isolation, Henry Stone is now a young man, standing a full six feet two inches tall and weighing 190 pounds. His hair is bronze, his eyes turquoise, his skin mahogany--a magnificent man. When Henry finally returns to civilization, he finds that his father's business has grown into a news empire. Though he is the owner of this huge conglomerate, a great conversationalist and excellent company, well versed in etiquette, and extraordinarily nice, Henry has never seen a woman. Indeed his father has taught him never to trust a female and that love itself is a myth. When Henry collides with the contemporary world and the modern woman, the collision is necessarily fascinating and complicated for both Henry and the society he is discovering.

The First English Translation of Verne's Original Manuscript.

Widely rumored to exist, then circulated in a corrupt form, Jules Verne's final and arguably most daring and hauntingly beautiful novel--his own "invisible man"--appears here for the first time in a faithful translation. Readers of English can rediscover the pleasures of Verne's storytelling in its original splendor and enjoy a virtually unknown gem of action, adventure, and style from a master of French literature.

Wilhelm Storitz, the son of a famous Prussian scientist (and possessor of his father's secrets--even, perhaps, a formula that confers invisibility), vows revenge on the family that has denied him the love of his life, Myra Roderich. Wilhelm's actions on the eve of Myra's wedding unfold in a surprising and sinister way, leading to an ending that will astonish the reader.

Like many works left unpublished when Jules Verne died, The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz was prepared and edited by his son, Michel. After a century of obscurity, this unique work in Verne's oeuvre is finally in the hands of readers, in a fine, authentic translation.

THE ETERNAL LOVE TRIANGLE...

This is the story of how two men and one woman reach a solution to the eternal love triangle through the use of a secret scientific device--a machine that will reproduce anything... or anyone!

Fame and honor come to them, and then this incredible situation turns savage. For there is no escape from the net of the four-sided love triangle...

The novel concerns Lieutenant Commander Frank Jacklin who is blown up in a thorium bomb explosion while on the battleship Alaska. He awakens in the body of Winnie Tompkins who had perpetrated the explosion. As Tompkins, he learns of a plot by German agents to poison Franklin D. Roosevelt and he tries to warn the authorities. He continues to become involved in intrigue until another accident restores Tompkins to his body, leaving Jacklin in the body of a dog.

His first sf novel, The City in the Sea (1951), deals with a matriarchal culture which begins to re-invade a USA reverted to savagery.

Seeds of Life, in short, is the story of Neils Bork, an alcoholic and failure raised to supernal heights of scientific genius and altruism by a scientific accident. And it is the story of what became of his golden dream of free, limitless energy for all, and of the marriage he thought would be crowned with glorious offspring.

"Murder in Space," is a great mystery set in deep space. There was a place in the asteroid belt called the Hive. It was a deadly whirl of destruction filled with thousands of spiraling asteroids--where no spaceship could enter and return in one piece. And deep within it lurked an unsolved murder.

Terwilliger Ames was the best attorney this side of Earth; but when he was swayed by the charms of a beautiful young woman into accepting a murder case, he had no idea his life would soon be in grave danger, and that his adventures would lead him to the deepest part of the asteroid belt in search of a cold-blooded killer.

An exceptional, thought-provoking outer space murder mystery.

Double Jeopardy is a science fiction fix-up novel by Fletcher Pratt.

It was first published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1952, and is a combination of two shorter pieces, the novellas "Double Jeopardy" and "The Square Cube Law," originally published in the magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories in the issues for April, 1952 and June, 1952, respectively.

The story features Pratt's detective hero George Helmfleety Jones in two adventures dealing with the ramifications of a newly discovered matter-duplication process. The first concerns a case of industrial espionage involving the bootlegging of duplicated drugs, and includes Jones's marriage to a duplicated woman. The second is a locked-room mystery in which a fortune is somehow stolen from a sealed, pilotless cargo plane.

The accidentals were human... but not human enough for Earth. Humans had abolished nearly every disease, deformity, and defect; but there were still a few that couldn't be fixed by surgery or cures. Those people who couldn't be cured or repaired to reflect the perfection of the rest of the populace just didn't belong. They were called accidentals. Their home was an asteroid called Handicap Haven--the residents called it the Junkpile. But there were those among the accidentals who longed for something better--a greater sense of freedom, and the vast reaches of space seemed to hold promise of that. So against the wishes of the Solar Committee, the Junkpile was piloted out of the solar system, toward the Centauri cluster. The only question remaining was whether or not the renegade asteroid could reach its new home before the long arm of the committee could reach out and stop them.

Also published as The Deviates.

In a world where but one man in a hundred, and eight women in a hundred, could produce children, only one science counted: Genetics. And the most respected, feared, and hated man in the world was the Chief of the Genetics Bureau, Robert Wellton. It was under his direction that gene charts were made of every citizen, and where those who dared to take the test discovered their fate. A few were Normals, who could be parents; the majority were Deviate-carriers, whose progeny would be monsters -- Uglies, as the Deviates were called.

Wellton alone knew the truth. The Genetics Program was failing, for fewer Normals were discovered every year. More and more citizens were falling back on their legal right not to be tested, not daring to learn that they might be Deviate-carriers. The whole world hungered for children, but each man and woman wanted to be the parents of the children they reared; and the fortunate few were hated by the vast majority.

But Wellton's father, who had been Genetics Chief before him, had discovered that not all Deviates were Uglies -- Nature's failures. Some were successes, improved human beings. These were telepathic and long-lived; their average intelligence level was that of the most intelligent Normals. They were what humanity needed.

Humanity could not accept them. Bitter and hate-filled, they would not believe that a Deviate could be anything but a monster; and the legal forces of the entire world were committed to the extermination of all Uglier on sight. Thus, Adam Wellton's giant plan was devised. And when he was assassinated, Robert Wellton carried it on. The plan called for the creation of a secret people -- the Children.

Born of Normal mothers, they were all Wellton's sons and daughters, bearing his improved genes. Telepathic as he was, Wellton was in mental contact with the Children from the moment of their birth, comforting and guiding them, sending them away from civilization to a hidden colony in the Canadian wilds. Here, under the direction of Wellton's first son, Barron, they built their own world. Here they waited for the mysterious being they knew only as the Father, who had promised to come to them some day and lead them to their destiny. For Wellton had never seen any of the Children -- nor had any of them seen him.

Then disaster struck, while the second generation of Children was growing up. A powerful committee, headed by a bitter man who suspected the existence of concealed Deviates, started an investigation. Wellton knew that Rossi and his associates would discover the secret, sooner or later. And there would be only one result: the Children would be hunted down and wiped out.

Thus starts a moving novel of fear and hope in a world where the only hope for humanity lay in that which all men feared.

TO SAVE THE WORLD, THEY PLOTTED TO WIPE OUT ALL MALES!

This science fiction classic begins when Larry Finlay, a young and unsuspecting chemist, discovers sinister forces have taken an interest in his new approach to the seemingly innocuous problem of hemophilia. Soon, Finlay is unwittingly caught up in a nightmare plot of violence and counter-violence. Behind it is the sinister cabal that calls itself The White Widows. But who are what are they? When Larry learns all these events are tied in to the concept of parthenogenesis, he realizes that a certain woman scientist has found the secret of giving birth without the need of males. She and the other White Widows are determined to end war, greed, violence, poverty, and the idea of cut-throat competition by eliminating all men! Particularly the man named Larry Finlay! The only person he can turn to for help is the woman he loves. If he can trust her with his life... And he'll have to!

Events move fast in Umbalathorp, the capital city of the new African republic of Goya. When Soames Noyes, a young Englishman of the old school (public, of course) arrives, he finds himself caught in more than one stream of conflicting ideas - and more than one bed of conflicting women... An incisive and current investigation of sexual response, politics, and the drives which govern men.

This is scientific romance about a disenchanted gold maker who has discovered a way to turn lead into solid gold and uses his wealth to help people. But when he sees that his philanthropic activities don't benefit anyone, he becomes disillusioned.

Raffles Haw, a mysterious millionaire, moves to Staffordshire, England amid much gossip and speculation such is the grandeur of his new home. Upon his arrival, Haw befriends the McIntyre family. McIntyre senior was a wealthy gun merchant before going bankrupt and losing his sanity. But this is only the start of the mysterious family's tale and the deadly secrets they hold close.

A young man finds that his old science teacher and benefactor, Professor Colson, is in contact with another world. The information the Professor is receiving has made him rich, but has also made him a powerful enemy who will stop at nothing to discover the Professor's secret and use it for his own ends.

The Land of the Changing Sun (1894), is a Lost-World tale featuring an Underground society named Alpha, which the author seems to have conceived of as a Utopia; founded 200 years earlier under the Arctic - in caverns, however, not inside a Hollow Earth - by a group of inventive Englishmen, it is lit and heated by an artificial sun, which moves on tracks and changes colour pleasingly. A cruel Eugenic regime causes the exiling of any person deemed defective. Intruding magma threatens this world, and its inhabitants decide to evacuate Alpha in advanced submarines.

Pharaoh's Broker: Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner (Written by Himself).

This novel, publishsed in 1899, is an interplanetary romance set on Mars. Parallel Evolution has resulted in a society almost identical to that of Egypt in the time of Joseph. In the end the hero, having been a grain-broker in Chicago, is able to take on Joseph's role.

Iter Lunare; Or, A Voyage to the Moon, Containing Some Considerations on the Nature of That Planet, the Possibility of Getting Thither, with Other Pleasant Conceits About the Inhabitants, Their Manners, and Customs.

Originally published in 1703, Iter Lunaire is one of the first books to discuss the real possibility of exploring space, the methods of doing so and what might be found there.

Taking Cyrano De Bergerac's classic "Comic History" Voyage to the Moon (1657) and Francis Godwin's novel The Man in the Moone (1638) as jump-off points, author Russen discusses the pros and cons of the French writer's fanciful methods of space travel... and adds some of his own, including what may be the most unusual method of traveling to the Moon ever suggested. Along the way, Russen anticipates such modern scientific developments as the germ theory of disease and hyperlinked reference books.

In Armageddon: A Tale of Love, War, and Invention (1898), Anglo-American supremacy over the rest of the world is achieved through the use of an armoured dirigible Airship in a near-future Future War.

Inch by inch, day by day, Scott Carey is getting smaller. Once an unremarkable husband and father, Scott finds himself shrinking with no end in sight. His wife and family turn into unreachable giants, the family cat becomes a predatory menace, and Scott must struggle to survive in a world that seems to be growing ever larger and more perilous--until he faces the ultimate limits of fear and existence.

Subsequently re-published as The Incredible Shrinking Man.

Storm's beast master skills and animal partners are needed to unravel the mystery behind a huge gathering of indigenous Norbies. Only Storm and Logan Quade can penetrate the Norbie's clan secrets and discover what is behind the threat of an uprising that could destroy the tenuous peace between the colonists and the aliens who share the planet.

A Grand new Beast Master adventure...

Death-which-Comes-in-the-Night

More than thirty years ago in Beast Master and Lord of Thunder, Andre Norton created a memorable character, Hosteen Storm. A Native American soldier for Earth, he barely escaped his doomed home world when the Xic destroyed it. Armed with his soldier's skills, his ancestors' insights, and an uncanny ability to communicate mind-to-mind with animals, Storm is a hero unlike any other in science fiction.

Now, science fiction Grand Master Andre Norton has teamed up with Lyn McConchie to pit Storm against his most dangerous enemy yet: Death-which-Comes-in-the-Night.

It is silent. It leaves no tracks. The only evidence that remains is the perfectly cleaned bones of its victims. And it has developed a taste for humans.

No one has survived an attack yet, and the natives of Storm's adopted planet, Arzor, are moving in on human territory as they try to escape the silent scourge. The already high tensions between Humans and Natives soar, sparking a race against time as Storm attempts to solve the mystery of Death-which-comes-in-the-Night before Humans and Natives clash.

But he can't do it without help from Tani, a genetic engineer from the Ark, a ship traveling space with genetic material from across the galaxy, including the destroyed Earth. But Tani has been poisoned against Beast Masters by her mother. She must conquer her own unreasoning hatred, and awaken the powerful Beast Master in herself, before she and Storm can conquer Death-which-Comes-in-the-Night and uncover the great conspiracy that threatens not only Arzor, but all human-occupied planets.

Someone is kidnapping the animals of beast masters' teams. On planet after planet, telepathically gifted people are being attacked-some of them murdered-by a conspiracy to take their precious animals.

Laris, an orphan who trains exotic alien creatures for an interstellar circus, knows that somehow her employer is connected to the deadly plot. She also knows that those involved will kill her if she talks.

Beast master Hosteen Storm has heard about the plot, but when the circus comes to Arzor, he doesn't realize his mortal peril. The circus, with its many colorful acts, is danger cloaked in the swirling excitement of the show. Laris loves all animals, and is herself able to communicate with them. When she meets Hosteen and becomes friends with him and his family, she desperately wants to warn him, to save him and his animals. But as the circus nears the end of its stay on Arzor, the deadly plotters prepare to strike at those Laris cares about... and at her, if she interferes!

Laris is a young orphaned ex-refugee gifted with the beast master ability allowing her to communicate with animals. Her closest companion is a remarkably intelligent and mysterious cat-like creature named Prauo, whose origin is shrouded in mystery. Laris, having made a home for herself with the Quades, a family of Arzor ranchers, also has become friends with beast masters Tani and Hosteen Storm, who help her develop her beast master skills.

When Laris inherits a spaceship from a distant relative, she realizes that she might now fulfill her dream of finding Prauo's home planet. But it won't be easy, and she is relieved when she is able to convince her new extended family to embark with her on a journey into the unknown depths of space.

What Laris and her friends find in space, however, tests their beast master abilities and threatens their lives. Prauo's homeworld is beset by dangers the intrepid travelers could not have anticipated. It will take all of their talents and experience to get back to Arzor alive.

The story of a man who has been placed in suspended animation for 100 years.

The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man; Relating Particularly his Shipwreck near the South Pole; his wonderful Passage thro' a subterraneous Cavern into a kind of new World; his there meeting with a Gawry or flying woman, whose Life he preserv'd, and afterwards married her; his extraordinary Conveyance to the Country of Glums and Gawrys, or Men and Women that fly. Likewise a Description of this strange Country, with the Laws, Customs, and Manners of its Inhabitants, and the Author's remarkable Transactions among them.

The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins is somewhat on the same plan as Robinson Crusoe, the special feature being the gawry, or flying woman, whom the hero discovered on his island, and married.

From the foreword to the 1915 edition: This book is the result of an attempt to carry the monopolistic principle to its logical conclusion.

Isaac Flint, a greedy billionaire businessman, plots to extract oxygen from the air and then sell it back to people if they want to live. Through bribes, blackmail and threats, he forces a group of scientists to develop a means of extracting the oxygen and forces politicians to cooperate with his plan. Soon, surrounded by a private army of guards to prevent the outraged populace from stopping him, Flint has "cornered" the oxygen market, and people everywhere have no choice but to pay for the air they breathe--or see themselves and their families die for lack of oxygen.

2788. Only the handicapped live on Earth. While everyone else portals between worlds, 18-year-old Jarra is among the one in a thousand people born with an immune system that cannot survive on other planets. Sent to Earth at birth to save her life, she has been abandoned by her parents. She can't travel to other worlds, but she can watch their vids, and she knows all the jokes they make. She's an 'ape', a 'throwback', but this is one ape girl who won't give in.

Jarra invents a fake background for herself - as a normal child of Military parents - and joins a class of norms that is on Earth to excavate the ruins of the old cities. When an ancient skyscraper collapses, burying another research team, Jarra's role in their rescue puts her in the spotlight. No hiding at back of class now. To make life more complicated, she finds herself falling in love with one of her classmates - a norm from another planet. Somehow, she has to keep the deception going.

A freak solar storm strikes the atmosphere, and the class is ordered to portal off-world for safety - no problem for a real child of military parents, but fatal for Jarra. The storm is so bad that the crews of the orbiting solar arrays have to escape to planet below: the first landing from space in 600 years. And one is on collision course with their shelter.

What if you could go anywhere in the world, in the blink of an eye? Where would you go? What would you do

Davy can teleport. To survive, Davy must learn to use and control his power in a world that is more violent and complex than he ever imagined. But mere survival is not enough for him. Davy wants to find others like himself, others who can Jump.

Shintarou Kisaragi, a NEET-person "Not in Education, Employment, or Training"-has refused to leave the comfort of his room for two whole years. But Shintarou's easy and solitary life is about to take an unexpected turn when his computer crashes and he is forced to venture into the world he was happy to shut out forever... and stumbles into the middle of a hostage situation!

He's gotten through one ridiculous crisis, but now former shut-in Shintaro Kisaragi might have bigger problems. Now that he knows about the Blindfold Gang, they've decided to draft him as their newest member-whether he likes it or not! Meanwhile Ene and Momo are about to learn the secrets behind the founding of the Gang, along with a shocking revelation about Ene's connection to it. Will Shintaro ever get his beloved NEET lifestyle back?

The past is never really gone.

On a certain summer day, a certain boy and girl meet. What is it that lurks behind the strange experience they chance to have? What is the link that connects all of this? The truth is finally coming to light, but can the Mekakushi-dan, armed with only their eyes, solve the riddle? The third novel from Internet phenomenon and multimedia creator JIN is here!

A certain boy and girl meet on a certain endless summer day. They thought they were alone, misunderstood by everyone, but the powers they hold in their eyes lead them to a group that does understand them: the Mekakushi-dan. They're not alone anymore, but now they have a new mystery to solve: What is the phenomenon of the "kagerou daze," and who is the shadowy figure behind it?

Despite their youth, sorrow stalks Kano, Kido, and Seto. Their strange powers prevent them from fitting in at their orphanage, so finally, they escape. The trio is taken in by the Tateyama household, where the cheerful Ayano lives--but the peace is short-lived...

It was a never ending long, long summer day when Shintarou feels a sudden change in his body. While this is happening, he has a momentous meeting with his upperclassman, who tells Shintarou the secret truths about this world's past. What in the world is going on?

After escaping from a burning house, a younger Kido wanders into the Kagerou Daze itself, where she encounters Azami and is provided with a certain gift. Meanwhile, in the "outside" world, the entire Blindfold Gang finally gathers back together, standing up to unravel the mystery that's caught all of them in its sights!

It was a certain summer day when they met. It was a day that would go on for a long time... forever. As their enemies stood in their path, members of the Mekukashi-dan fell one after another. After temporarily stalling their opponents, Azami came up with a radical plan to seal them away, but it could only succeed at the cost of the life of one of their own.... As their enemies began advancing again, what fate with the Mekukashi-dan choose...?

In the spirit of Station Eleven and Never Let Me Go, this dazzling and ambitious literary debut follows three generations of beekeepers from the past, present, and future, weaving a spellbinding story of their relationship to the bees--and to their children and one another--against the backdrop of an urgent, global crisis.

England, 1852. William is a biologist and seed merchant, who sets out to build a new type of beehive--one that will give both him and his children honor and fame.

United States, 2007. George is a beekeeper fighting an uphill battle against modern farming, but hopes that his son can be their salvation.

China, 2098. Tao hand paints pollen onto the fruit trees now that the bees have long since disappeared. When Tao's young son is taken away by the authorities after a tragic accident, she sets out on a grueling journey to find out what happened to him.

Haunting, illuminating, and deftly written, The History of Bees joins these three very different narratives into one gripping and thought-provoking story that is just as much about the powerful bond between children and parents as it is about our very relationship to nature and humanity.

Being the History of the Discovery of the Interior World and Conquest of Atvatabar...

is a Utopian hollow Earth novel using Symmesian geography from the ideas of John Cleves Symmes, Jr.

Entering the interior of the world via a Symmes Hole, the protagonists from the world above find an advanced civilization who use spiritual power to do everything from maintain youth to resurrect the dead. In a civil war that erupts following the Atvatabar Goddess's love for a surface man, Lexington White, the ruling powers are overthrown and Lexington White becomes the new king of Atvatabar, the Goddess his queen, and rich trade relations with the surface are opened.

Wireheads, addicted to an electric current led into the pleasure centers of the brain, are the new junkies. Karen, a former wirehead who barely escaped death by pleasure, is determined to bring down those who sell the wireheading equipment, but she and her lover Joe intead turn up evidence of a shadowy global conspiracy - not to control the world, but to keep anyone from realizing that the masters of mind control have been controllling us all for some time now...

June Bellamy had gone for a walk in a park - and came back with memories missing. She didn't know that, but her partner could tell because she'd told her answering machine about strange people in the park. Now June and Paul are on the run from insidious superhumans who can edit their memories and track them down no matter where or how well they hide. They are desperate - but not nearly as desperate as their pursuers...

Martin Hench is 67 years old, single, and successful in a career stretching back to the beginnings of Silicon Valley. He lives and roams California in a very comfortable fully-furnished touring bus, The Unsalted Hash, that he bought years ago from a fading rock star. He knows his way around good food and fine drink. He likes intelligent women, and they like him back often enough.

Martin is a?contain your excitement?self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He knows computer hardware and software alike, including the ins and outs of high-end databases and the kinds of spreadsheets that are designed to conceal rather than reveal. He's as comfortable with social media as people a quarter his age, and he's a world-level expert on the kind of international money-laundering and shell-company chicanery used by Fortune 500 companies, mid-divorce billionaires, and international drug gangs alike. He also knows the Valley like the back of his hand, all the secret histories of charismatic company founders and Sand Hill Road VCs. Because he was there at all the beginnings. He's not famous, except to the people who matter. He's made some pretty powerful people happy in his time, and he's been paid pretty well. It's been a good life.

Now he's been roped into a job that's more dangerous than anything he's ever agreed to before?and it will take every ounce of his skill to get out alive.

Table of Contents:

• Prima Belladonna - (1956)
• The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista - (1962)
• Cry Hope, Cry Fury! - (1967)
• Venus Smiles - (1957)
• Studio 5, The Stars - (1961)
• The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D - (1967)
• Say Goodbye to the Wind - (1970)
• The Screen Game - (1963)

After touring the rural areas of Panga, Sibling Dex (a Tea Monk of some renown) and Mosscap (a robot sent on a quest to determine what humanity really needs) turn their attention to the villages and cities of the little moon they call home.

They hope to find the answers they seek, while making new friends, learning new concepts, and experiencing the entropic nature of the universe.

An exciting account of a jungle expedition’s encounter with living dinosaurs, written with the same panache exhibited in the author’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries. This 1912 novel, the first installment of the Professor Challenger series, follows an eccentric paleontologist and his companions into the wilds of the Amazon, where they discover iguanodons, pterodactyls, and savage ape-people.

A "completion" of Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838).

In this early work of science fiction narrated by an Englishman in America on business, Doctors Bainbridge and Castleton discover that their patient is one Dirk Peters, a character from Edgar Allan Poe's novel The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym. Bainbridge recounts the story Peters tells, of his journey with Pym to a strange land at the South Pole, where they find an island utopia inhabited by descendants of fourth-century Romans.

The first complete English translation of Jules Verne's epic fantasy novel. The Full Text of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe is also included.

Decades after Edgar Allan Poe's longest and weirdest tale, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, was published--the protagonist disappearing into the misty, mystifying Antarctic seas; his fate unknown--Jules Verne took up the challenge to answer what had happened to him.

In The Sphinx of the Ice Realm, he penned the most amazing journey of his fabled career: a voyage across the bottom of the world! An astonishing mix of manhunt, sea story, scientific speculation, and polar nightmare, Verne's epic fantasy novel appears here for the first time as a new and complete translation by noted Verne expert Frederick Paul Walter. The book is a treat for any fan of science fiction and fantasy, and includes many fascinating notes for students and scholars alike. In addition, the book features a complete, reader-friendly rendition of the original Poe tale that sparked Verne's uniquely imaginative response.

The story has also been published under various titles: The Sphinx of the Ice Fields, An Antarctic Mystery, The Sphnix of the Ice.

The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem has been blown to bits by extremists, and, in retaliation, thousands have died in another major attack on the United States. Now the FBI has been dispatched to deal with a new menace. A plague targeted to ethnic groups--Jews or Muslims or both--has the potential to wipe out entire populations. But the FBI itself is under political assault. There's a good chance agents William Griffin, Fouad Al-Husam, and Jane Rowland will be part of the last class at Quantico. As the young agents hunt a brilliant homegrown terrorist, they join forces with veteran bio-terror expert Rebecca Rose. But the plot they uncover--and the man they chase--prove to be far more complex than anyone expects.

The world just keeps getting tougher and more complicated. America teeters on the edge of bankruptcy because of crushing foreign debt and an apparent savior, The Talos Corporation, delivers training for soldiers and security forces around the world, logistical support and badly-needed troops economically, but with a hidden cost that's both sinister and disturbing.

The three rookie FBI agents who survived the challenges portrayed in Quantico, have gone their separate ways but seem fated to be drawn back together in an alliance against a surprising challenge for which no one seems prepared. Rebecca Rose is brought back from an extended sabbatical when the President is shot and her second-in-command is implicated in an horrific crime--and all the threads point deeper into Talos's secretive activities. Fouad Al-Husam, working undercover inside Talos, has uncovered and been forced to hide vital information of a takeover plot that threatens America's independence.

Nathan Trace, victim of a violent incident in the Middle East, struggles with post-traumatic stress and seems to be recovering through participation in a treatment program, code-named Mariposa, which has unexpected side-effects that turn patients into brilliant, detached and sociopathic individuals--very smart and extremely deadly.

Only a desperate combination of misfits and survivors can combat an apparently inevitable collapse of American organization that will lead to the fall of democracy.

Robur the Conqueror is a science fiction novel by Jules Verne. The story begins with strange lights and sounds, including blaring trumpet music, reported in the skies all over the world. The events are capped by the mysterious appearance of black flags with gold suns atop tall historic landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty in New York, the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. These events are all the work of the mysterious Robur (Latin for "oak"), a brilliant inventor who intrudes on a meeting of a flight-enthusiast's club called the Weldon Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Read a tale of one of the original evil inventors - the genius Robur - who, like his successors, wants to take over the world. The key to Robur's power lies in his latest invention, a vehicle called The Terror. It can travel by land, air, or sea, reaching such speed that it can only be seen as a blur. John Strock, federal police officer, is assigned to investigate. But he soon finds that stopping Robur is more difficult than he bargained on!

Written in 1904, this novel by the pioneering science fiction writer Jules Verne will delight anyone who likes a flight of fancy with their adventure.

A tale in the manner of Tom Swift about a rocket-sled vehicle that journeys across Alaska toward the North Pole.

Exciting Rocket fueled adventures beneith the waves.

Rockets make everything easier. Seeking lost cities in the middle of the remotest desert is now within reach.

Rip roaring adventures in an era when the sky was the frontier; rockets included.

Also Published as: A Narrative of the Life and Astonishing Adventures of John Daniel, a Smith at Royston in Hertfordshire, For a Course of Seventy Years.

In which Daniel is shipwrecked on an Island south of Java, his industrious Robinsonade life being transformed when his companion turns out to be a woman, with whom he has eleven children; as the children grow, Sex issues are resolved by incest. Daniel's son, Jacob, invents a flying machine capable of Space Flight; father and son undertake a realistically-described Fantastic Voyage to the Moon, where they encounter an Alien civilization, and a ur-Food Pill in the shape of a leaf which relieves hunger and thirst. On their return to Earth, they discover on a Pacific Island a race of benign Monsters, the consequence of cross-breeding between humans and intelligent creatures from the deeps. Further adventures ensue, in Lapland and elsewhere; Daniel then returns to England to tell his tale to "Ralph Morris".

Gulliver Joi: His Three Voyages; Being an Account of His Marvelous Adventures in Kailoo, Hydrogenia and Ejario.

Contents:

• Voyage to Kailoo - (1851) - novella
• Voyage to Hydrogenia - (1851) - novella
• Voyage to Ejario - (1851) - novella

Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World (1896), features an ambulatory Moon which after falling into the Pacific Ocean makes it possible for the narrator of the tale, with companions, to fly to Mars in a Balloon, where they discover a new defence of Christianity in the form of parallel Evolution and multiple incarnations of Christ.

The Conquest of the Moon: A Story of the Bayouda 1889), in which plans are made to drag the Moon from its orbit to land in the Sahara Desert, where its resources can be plundered; but the executors of the plan are drawn to the Moon instead.

The tale itself is divided into two parts.

In "The Voyage", the protagonists learn how to create a new Power Source - an Antigravity element capable of propelling the Spaceship they have had constructed by an eccentric Inventor - and travel to the Moon.

In part two, "The Ideal Life", they discover a Utopia inhabited by "amnesiac reincarnations of select Earthmen", four feet tall, communitarian, pacific. Transportation is via giant roc-like birds. The protagonists, in strong contrast to the behaviour of most visitors to other worlds in the nineteenth century, neither leave nor destroy the world they have discovered.

The protagonist of the SF novel, To the Moon and Back in Ninety Days: A Thrilling Narrative of Blended Science and Adventure (1922), hitches a ride on a spaceship powered by an Antigravity device, and goes to the Moon. The discovery of Selenites there turns out to be a hoax but the trip was real.

Told in a documentary style, it is profusely illustrated with photos and diagrams, including photos of the spacecraft and space-suited astronauts. Indeed, the books contains a remarkably detailed description of a working space suit (Including a photo!).

A mundain SF novel that sets the stage for the early rounds of the contact phenomenon.

The Moon Colony (1937), in which the protagonists, adventurously travelling to the Moon, find there a Planetary Romance-style colony, complete with giant grasshoppers which can be ridden like horses.

Julian Epworth the head of secret service for Atlantic Pacific Airlines and his co-pilot Billy pursue a huge sky pirate zeppelin about to steal 1 million dollars in gold.

A fast paced ultra modern sci-fi adventure: planes being shot out of the sky, air pirates in liquid fueled planes, a mad scientists Herman Toplinsky scheming to colonize the moon is the leader of the sky jackers. Toplinsky has captured Julian, Billy and stowaway Joan, Julian"s sister, they are all off to the Moon, only to be greeted by an army of mammoth cricket-shaped creatures in military formation, large as a man, with six legs and two sharp antennas, holding steel pointed lances. Riding on top of the cricket creatures are men-shaped humps, small bodies with legs and arms, and an enormous knotty projection for their heads, seeing through large wide eyes, and this is only the beginning.

"The Moon Conquerors" is a Space Opera implausibly involving the Moon, though the tale is notable for the suggestion of an electromagnetic drive to launch a Spaceship to the Moon.

Its companion piece, "The War of the Planets" is presented as the text of a work discovered on the Moon. It is the first novel describing the history of the solar system and how a black race established 'human' life on Earth about 30,000 years ago in Africa.

Romans' book is also a uniquely science fictional plea for racial tolerance.

"The Brick Moon" is a short story by Edward Everett Hale, published serially in The Atlantic Monthly starting in 1869. It is a work of speculative fiction containing the first known depiction of an artificial satellite.

"The Brick Moon" is written as if it were a journal. It describes the construction and launch into orbit of a sphere, 200 ft. in diameter, built of bricks. It is intended as a navigational aid, but is accidentally launched with people aboard. They survive, and so the story also provides the first known fictional description of a space station.

Zero to Eighty: Being my Lifetime Doings, Reflections, and Inventions: Also my Journey Around the Moon comprises the slightly wooden memoirs of "Kad" Pseudoman, whose early life incorporates some elements of the Edisonade - he discovers a gold mine in the West from which he profits mightily; he creates various Inventions, usually to do with Transportation; and he saves a country from its enemies, though the country is not America but Switzerland - but who mainly concerns himself with technical and pictorial accounts of the building of an electric-pulse gun, a tube 200 kilometres long whose muzzle is located at the top of Mount Popocatapetl, launching a Spaceship in which Pseudoman circumnavigates the Moon in 1961. The memoir ends with a visit to the Lenin Underground Village, a vast Keep built two kilometres Underground beneath Moscow as an exercise in the engineering of Utopia.

Lenox, the Earl of Redgrave, has made the greatest scientific discovery in the history of the world: a flying ship with the power to break free of Earth's gravity and take to the stars. But before he uses it to expand humanity's understanding of the universe, he has some personal business to attend to--namely, wooing an old flame.

The lady in question is Zaidie, the daughter of Lenox's colleague Professor Rennick. With Zaidie about to be forced into a loveless marriage, Lenox knows he must do something drastic. He steals her away and takes her out of this world--literally.

Griffith's accounts of other planets are spectacularly engaging--from subterranean civilizations on the moon to the warlike Martians to the musical inhabitants of Venus. This remarkable adventure makes for a memorable honeymoon indeed.

A Trip to Venus (1897) is an account of a journey by Spaceship - powered by a new Antigravity as a sustaining Power Source - to an idyllic Utopia on Venus, with a brief excursion to Mercury.

A turn of the last-century boys adventure, which takes the heros into space, to Mars, and the wonders there.

The story starts with a comet called Gallia, that touches the Earth in its flight and collects a few small chunks of it. The disaster occurs on January 1 around Gibraltar. On the territory that is carried away by the comet there remain a total of thirty-six people of French, English, Spanish and Russian nationality. These people do not realize at first what has happened, and consider the collision an earthquake. During a new collision of the comet with Earth two years later, the castaways return to earth in a balloon they put together.

This novel has has also been split into two parts: To the Sun? & Off on a Comet!

This is a lost race novel of an Atlantean Kingdom remnant, living beneath the ocean off the Azores, under a glass dome.

In the 'The End of Books', which is a transcript of an impromptu speech given in 1894, Octave Uzanne brilliantly anticipated the invention of the walkman, radio, TV, Ipods, hearing problems and anticipated the modern form of the 'demise of books argument' by a century.

(Good fun when read upon a kindle or any other ebook platform.)

Written for a younger audiance, a futurist submarine ventures to where no one has gone before: the North Pole.

The Earth-Tube (1929), a Yellow Peril sub-genre novel, in which Asians take advantage of their possession of the invulnerable metal undulal to tunnel under South America, which they soon conquer. After a young hero has penetrated the secret, catastrophic explosions close the tunnel, inundating South America but sparing the USA, which has transformed itself into a socialist regime in response to the free gold which the Asians have been raining from the skies in an effort to destabilize the great capitalist democracy.

This a classic novel of adventure reflecting the tangled milieu of the Middle East just after World War I. It is a flying adventure story reflecting the enthusiasm for air travel and constantly improving technology of the period. The super aircraft of the Flying Legion, The Eagle of the Sky, could come, in effect, from the magazine covers of Science and Mechanics of the period.

If you like first rate derring do, cliff hanging situations, heroic characters fighting down to the last ditch against impossible odds, this is it!

A country farmer uncovers remnants of an advanced civilization that contain a woman, asleep in suspended animation for two thousand years.

Upon awakening, the woman, Earani, teleports herself into the office of the Australian Prime Minister and reveals her plans to take over the world -- through mind control!

Does the beautiful Earani mean to save humanity or destroy it?

This novel is an expansion of "A Voice Across the Years," a story first published in Amazing Stories Quarterly, Winter 1932.

Two Earthmen, Merrick Wells and Alvin Schierstedt, meet Ashembe of Murashema, who has come from beyond the stars on an urgent mission.

This city of the future encompasses two worlds: that of the hedonistic ruling class and that of a segregated subculture, toilers in a mechanized underworld who labor to provide the rich with their pleasures. When a charismatic leader arises, she seeks a savior to unite the disparate social orders. "Between the brain that plans and the hands that build," she declares, "there must be a mediator? the heart."

At first the virus wiping out grass and crops is of little concern to John Custance. It has decimated Asia, causing mass starvation and riots, but Europe is safe and a counter-virus is expected any day. Except, it turns out, the governments have been lying to their people. When the deadly disease hits Britain they are left alone, and society starts to descend into barbarism. As John and his family try to make it across country to the safety of his brother’s farm in a hidden valley, their humanity is tested to its very limits.

Published in the USA as: No Blade of Grass.

The United States never recovered from The War for Southern Independence. While the neighboring Confederacy enjoyed the prosperity of the victor, the U.S. struggled through poverty, violence, and a nationwide depression.

The Industrial Revolution never occurred here, and so, well into the 1950s, the nation remained one of horse-drawn wagons, gaslight, highwaymen, and secret armies. This was home for Hodgins McCormick Backmaker, whose sole desire was the pursuit of knowledge. This, he felt, would spirit him away from the squalor and violence.

Disastrously, Hodgins became embroiled in the clandestine schemes of the outlaw Grand Army, from which he fled in search of a haven. But he was to discover that no place could fully protect him from the world and its dangerous realities....

This third book in a major series by a bestselling science fiction author, Printz Award winner, and National Book Award finalist is the gripping story of the most provocative character from his acclaimed novels Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities.

Tool, a half-man/half-beast designed for combat, is capable of so much more than his creators had ever dreamed. He has gone rogue from his pack of bioengineered "augments" and emerged a victorious leader of a pack of human soldier boys. But he is hunted relentlessly by someone determined to destroy him, who knows an alarming secret: Tool has found the way to resist his genetically ingrained impulses of submission and loyalty toward his masters... The time is coming when Tool will embark on an all-out war against those who have enslaved him. From one of science fiction's undisputed masters comes a riveting page-turner that pulls no punches.

In 1949, eight years after the "Peace with Honor" was negotiated between Great Britain and Nazi Germany by the Farthing Set, England has completed its slide into fascist dicatorship. Then a bomb explodes in a London suburb.

The brilliant but politically compromised Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard is assigned the case. What he finds leads him to a conspiracy of peers and communists, of staunch King-and- Country patriots and hardened IRA gunmen, to murder Britain's Prime Minister and his new ally, Adolf Hitler.

Against a background of increasing domestic espionage and the suppression of Jews and homosexuals, an ad-hoc band of idealists and conservatives blackmail the one person they need to complete their plot, an actress who lives for her art and holds the key to the Fuhrer's death. From the ha'penny seats in the theatre to the ha'pennies that cover dead men's eyes, the conspiracy and the investigation swirl around one another, spinning beyond anyone's control.

In this brilliant companion to Farthing, Welsh-born World Fantasy Award winner Jo Walton continues her alternate history of an England that could have been, with a novel that is both an homage of the classic detective novels of the thirties and forties, and an allegory of the world we live in today.

In 1941 the European war ended in the Farthing Peace, a rapprochement between Britain and Nazi Germany. The balls and banquets of Britain's upper class never faltered, while British ships ferried “undesirables” across the Channel to board the cattle cars headed east.

Peter Carmichael is commander of the Watch, Britain's distinctly British secret police. It's his job to warn the Prime Minister of treason, to arrest plotters, and to discover Jews. The midnight knock of a Watchman is the most dreaded sound in the realm.

Now, in 1960, a global peace conference is convening in London, where Britain, Germany, and Japan will oversee the final partition of the world. Hitler is once again on British soil. So is the long exiled Duke of Windsor—and the rising gangs of "British Power" streetfighters, who consider the Government "soft," may be the former king's bid to stage a coup d'état.

Amidst all this, two of the most unlikely persons in the realm will join forces to oppose the fascists: a debutante whose greatest worry until now has been where to find the right string of pearls, and the Watch Commander himself.

Dane Thorson of the space-trader Solar Queen found himself embroiled in a desperate battle of minds between the rational science of the spaceways and the hypnotic witchcraft of the mental wizard that ruled the Voodoo Planet.

Only once in several lifetimes does the world get such a man as Richard Henry Benson, known as The Avenger.

A man who had amassed a fortune in his early years, he was ready to enjoy life to the fullest with his wife and daughter when disaster struck, which vacuumed his soul right out of his body.

His family was taken from him by crime, and to make matters worse, no one believed him. He was forced into an insane asylum. He escaped.

His facial muscles were paralyzed by the tragedy, so he could press his face into any position to adopt any guise. From that day on, The Avenger's only drive in life was to bring destruction to crooks who operated beyond the law, and usually he made sure it was by their own hand.

Paul Ernst authored this novel under the pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

The hidden gold of the Aztecs. A gang of criminals kill to find it and unleash the wrath of The Avenger

In the roaring heart of the crucible, steel is made. In the raging flame of personal tragedy, men are sometimes forged into something more than human.

It was so with Dick Benson. He had been a man. After the dread loss inflicted on him by an inhuman crime ring, he became a machine of vengeance dedicated to the extermination of all other crime rings.

He turned into the the person we know now: A figure of ice and steel, more pitiless than both; A mechanism of whipcord and flame; A symbol to crooks and killers; A terrible, almost impersonal force, masking chill genius and super normal power behind a face as white and dead as a mask from the grave. Only his pale eyes, like ice in a polar dawn, hint at the deadliness of the scourge the underworld heedlessly invoked against itself when crime's greed turned millionaire adventurer Richard Benson into The Avenger.

Paul Ernst authored this novel under the pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

A harsh, droning sound from an invisible plane. A man mysteriously walking in the sky, and huge skyscrapers collapse like matchsticks. Can the Avenger halt a master criminal's reign of death and destruction?

Paul Ernst authored this novel under the pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

A message traced in blood reads "The devil's horns"; a political boss lies paralyzed. The city he controls now in the hands of killers; and The Avenger must decipher the bloody message - or die!

Paul Ernst authored this novel under the pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

A fine, white powder like snow settles on one human body and a plague of death is alive in the world's greatest city. One man's greed has created the deadly powder- and only The Avenger can stop its murderous spread.

Paul Ernst authored this novel under the pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

One of Jules verne's most exciting and prophetic science-fiction adventures has been altogether unknown to English-speaking readers until the publication of the present translation. This was the long novel Verne called The Astonishing Adventure of the Barsac Mission, the first book of which is Into The Niger Bend. An adventure novel as well as a novel of mystery and intrigue, this unusual story brings a group of daring men into the unexplored heart of Africa. Their experiences on their scientific quest under increasingly strange circumstances wil inevitably remind readers of the works of H. Rider Haggard and other masters of jungle novels.

The second book of a two book series called "The Astonishing Adventure of the Barsac Mission" about a group of Frenchmen & an Englishwoman traveling in Africa who're captured by a leader of a criminal group who have a secret oasis city in the desert.

Jules Verne, one of the founding fathers of science fiction, was the author of such thrilling and perennial favorites as Around the World in Eighty Days, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, as well as more than sixty other novels of adventure and exploration. One hundred years after his death, this magnificent new collection celebrates Verne's amazing vision. A host of today's top science fiction authors pay homage to Verne's genius with a series of stories inspired by his groundbreaking imagination and original characters.

In this anthology are extraordinary voyages of discovery and adventure from the four corners of the globe, and even within it. Following the tradition of Verne's original tales, Ian Watson tells of a journey deep into the center of the Earth, where Verne himself does battle with occultist Nazis, and Adam Roberts takes us to latter-day California, where a descendant of Verne's character Hector Servadac is preparing for the end of the world as we know it. These and many more compelling adventures add up to an anthology that will introduce a new generation to the wonder of Jules Verne and delight readers already familiar with the master.

Contents:

• Introduction: Return to the Centre of the Earth - (2005) - essay by Mike Ashley
• A Drama on the Railway - (2005) - shortstory by Stephen Baxter
• Jehan Thun's Quest - (2005) - novelette by Brian Stableford
• Six Weeks in a Balloon - (2005) - shortstory by Eric Brown
• Londre au XXIe Siècle - (2005) - shortstory by James Lovegrove
• Giant Dwarfs - (2005) - novelette by Ian Watson
• Cliff Rhodes and the Most Important Journey: A Land at the End of the Working Day Story - (2005) - novella by Peter Crowther
• The True Story of Barbicane's Voyage - (2005) - novelette by Laurent Genefort (trans. of Le véritable voyage de Barbicane 1999)
• Columbiad - (1996) - shortstory by Stephen Baxter
• Tableaux - (2005) - novelette by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre
• The Secret of the Nautilus - (2005) - novelette by Michael Mallory
• Doctor Bull's Intervention - (2005) - novelette by Keith Brooke
• The Very First Affair - (2005) - novelette by Johan Heliot
• Eighty Letters, Plus One - (2005) - shortstory by Kevin J. Anderson and Sarah A. Hoyt
• The Adventurers' League - novelette by Justina Robson
• Hector Servadac, fils - (2005) - novelette by Adam Roberts
• The Mysterious Iowans - (2005) - novelette by Paul Di Filippo
• Old Light - (2005) - shortstory by Tim Lebbon
• The Selene Gardening Society - (2005) - shortstory by Molly Brown
• A Matter of Mathematics - (2005) - novelette by Tony Ballantyne
• The Secret of the Sahara - novelette by Richard A. Lupoff
• The Golden Quest - (2005) - shortstory by Sharan Newman
• The True Story of Wilhelm Storitz - (2005) - shortstory by Michel Pagel
• The Shoal - (2005) - shortstory by Liz Williams

The course of World War One is interrupted by messages from a mysterious Scientist known only as PAX, who is threatening superscientific punishments if the war is not stopped. After some demonstrations, featuring Rays, a flying ship, atomic energy and the slowing of Earth's orbit, which causes vast earthquakes, the nations obey; unfortunately, PAX turns Mad Scientist, but dies before he can turn Europe into an Arctic wilderness.

This novel is notable for describing what an atomic detonation would look like in 1915, thirty years before the United States detonated the first atomic bomb.

The character who discovered the dead PAX in The Man Who Rocked the Earth must now defend Earth against an approaching Asteroid. He travels with a proto-Feminist mathematician who found the errant asteroid; they change the course of the asteroid so it becomes a second Moon, and then marry.

Gloriana XII--The Original Wolf of Wall Street.

In this hilarious sequel to The Mouse That Roared, Grand Fenwick is at it again, this time upsetting the world's economy. The tiny country's secret weapon this time is its Grand Pinot chewing gum. When sales boom during an anti-smoking campaign, Grand Fenwick's investment is suddenly worth millions.

In an attempt to rid Grand Fenwick of its crippling budget surplus, Duchess Gloriana XII decides the stock market is the perfect place to lose it all. Instead, she makes millions more and ends up wreaking havoc on the world economy.

Never has "the money game" been more deliciously exposed than in this ingenious satire.

The fourth book in the bestselling The Mouse That Roared series brings the Duchy of Grand Fenwick's most extraordinary achievement yet--the defeat of OPEC and the happy solution to the world's oil crisis, which came about through the best that international diplomacy has to offer: duplicity and dumb luck.

It all began when the Count of Mountjoy, the prime minister of Grand Fenwick, was unable to get a hot bath because of the fuel shortage...

They were feared as witches and demons...

They possessed superhuman powers...

They could read minds, free objects from gravity, fly through the air...

They lived alone and outcast in an isolated canyon...

They were THE PEOPLE!

The apocalypse will be asymmetrical.

In the aftermath of a plague that has decimated the world population, the unnamed midwife confronts a new reality in which there may be no place for her. Indeed, there may be no place for any woman except at the end of a chain. A radical rearrangement is underway. With one woman left for every ten men, the landscape that the midwife travels is fraught with danger. She must reach safety -- but is it safer to go it alone or take a chance on humanity? The friends she makes along the way will force her to choose what's more important. Civilization stirs from the ruins, taking new and experimental forms. The midwife must help a new world come into being, but birth is always dangerous... and what comes of it is beyond anyone's control.

In the gripping sequel to the Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, one woman undertakes a desperate journey to rescue the future.

Etta comes from Nowhere, a village of survivors of the great plague that wiped away the world that was. In the world that is, women are scarce and childbearing is dangerous... yet desperately necessary for humankind's future. Mothers and midwives are sacred, but Etta has a different calling. As a scavenger. Loyal to the village but living on her own terms, Etta roams the desolate territory beyond: salvaging useful relics of the ruined past and braving the threat of brutal slave traders, who are seeking women and girls to sell and subjugate.

When slavers seize those she loves, Etta vows to release and avenge them. But her mission will lead her to the stronghold of the Lion--a tyrant who dominates the innocent with terror and violence. There, with no allies and few weapons besides her wits and will, she will risk both body and spirit not only to save lives but also to liberate a new world's destiny.

First part of La maison à vapeur (1880).

Steam engines, steam vessels... why not steam land cars? Such was Jules Verne's thinking in the Age of Steam, the fabulous century of invention that paved the way for the present. And if a steam car, why not use it for exploration, for adventure and daring deeds?

And what more exotic, more adventurous place than India, the vast sub-continent of rajahs and temples and weird cults - and in Verne's time also a seething rebel-torn colony of the Victoria's Empire?

So developed Verne's marvelous adventure novel of the steam elephant, of a courageous English colonel seeking refuge and revenge, and of the steam-driven jungle caravan that took him and his band into the very heart of India's unexplored mysteries.

Second part of La maison à vapeur (1880).

Trailers and luxury travellers were ideas that Jules Verne dreamed up a century before our time...and wrote them into the most exotic scenery and the most exciting adventures.

Consider Colonel Munro's marvelous steam elephant that pulled a train of palatial houses-on-wheels through the deepest jungles of India. Add a land beset with internal chaos, banditry, and rebellious local chieftians, and you have the grounds for one of Verne's most exciting novels.

Such is Tigers and Traitors, a novel packed with such wonders as a terrifying tiger hunt, a mysterious white goddess, a fight against rampaging elephants, and the pursuit of the steam caravan by an army of furious fanatics. It's fast-paced science-fiction adventure.

Run For The Stars:

The Kyben demolished Deald's World and their armada was heading for Earth. All that stood in their way was a man on Deald's World named Benno Tallant, about as lousy a candidate for hero as one could imagine: junkie, looter, coward, betrayer. The retreating Earth forces decide to make him the last man on Deald's World. They surgically implant a cataclysmic bomb in his body, turn him loose, and let the Kyben hunt him down.

See Benno Run. Run, Benno, Run Like Hell.

Echoes of Thunder:

No man, Mohawk or white, walks the high steel like John Stranger.

Contents of Tor Double:

• 1 - Introduction: Beauty, Stupidity, Injustice, and Science Fiction - essay by Damon Knight (variant of Beauty, Stupidity, Injustice, and Science Fiction 1990)
• 19 - Rule Golden - (1954) - novella by Damon Knight
• 103 - Double Meaning - (1953) - novella by Damon Knight Note: An expanded version of this story was published under the title "The Rithian Terror" by Ace Books(1965).

Rule Golden:

As a newspaper publisher, Robert James Dahls found the news disconcerting; in fact, inexplicable. News items like two boxers simultaneously knocking each other out, prison guards sick and unable to guard the prisoners, policemen shooting fleeing culprits and collapsing themselves, battered wives with husbands suffering the same injuries that they inflicted.

Dahl catches wind of a large experimental facility that is being led by the U.S. Department of Defense. His suspicions coincide with the strange, beyond-coincidental behavior that he's been observing. For what's on the grounds of the facility is much more radical than anything that was claimed to be found in Roswell. Not just an alien but one that has a strange effect on the human race. Where the Golden Rule in reversed: Be done by as you do to others. How can we get along without conflict? What will happen to the human race? Dahl soon finds himself a fugitive helping a bizarre alien save or destroy the Earth!

Double Meaning:

A psychological thriller that follows an Earth security officer in the future who is racing against time to locate an alien spy.

First published in 1953, this is probably the first sci-fi book to feature a surveillance drone.

Silent Thunder:

A techno thriller. A unique mix of Sci-Fi and historic fiction. It's said to resonate with political events of the 1991 timeframe.

Universe:

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.

A Journey of Discovery by Three Englishmen in Africa.

One of the great "first novels" in world literature is now available in a complete, accurate English translation. Prepared by two of America's leading Verne scholars, Frederick Paul Walter and Arthur B. Evans, this edition honors not only Verne's farseeing science, but also his zest, style, and storytelling brilliance.

Initially published in 1863, Five Weeks in a Balloon was the first novel in the author's Extraordinary Voyages series. It tells the tale of a 4,000-mile balloon trip over the mysterious continent of Africa, a trip that wouldn't actually take place until well into the next century. Fusing adventure, comedy, and science fiction, Five Weeks has all the key ingredients of classic Verne: sly humor and cheeky characters, an innovative scientific invention, a tangled plot that's full of suspense and surprise, and visions of an unknown realm.

As part of the Early Classics of Science Fiction series, this critical edition features extensive notes, all the illustrations from the original French edition, and a complete Verne biography and bibliography. Five Weeks in a Balloon will be a prized addition to libraries and science fiction reading lists, and a must-read for Verne fans and steampunk connoisseurs.

Phileas Fogg is a rich English gentleman living in solitude. Despite his wealth, Fogg lives a modest life with habits carried out with mathematical precision. Very little can be said about his social life other than that he is a member of the Reform Club. Having dismissed his former valet, James Foster, for bringing him shaving water at 84 °F (29 °C) instead of 86 °F (30 °C), Fogg hires a Frenchman by the name of Jean Passepartout as a replacement.

At the Reform Club, Fogg gets involved in an argument over an article in The Daily Telegraph stating that with the opening of a new railway section in India, it is now possible to travel around the world in 80 days. He accepts a wager for £20,000 (equal to about £1.6 million today) from his fellow club members, which he will receive if he makes it around the world in 80 days. Accompanied by Passepartout, he leaves London by train at 8:45 P.M. on Wednesday, October 2, 1872, and is due back at the Reform Club at the same time 80 days later, Saturday, December 21, 1872.

When two European scientists unexpectedly inherit an Indian rajah's fortune, each builds an experimental city of his dreams in the wilds of the American Northwest. France-Ville is a harmonious urban community devoted to health and hygiene, the specialty of its French founder, Dr. François Sarrasin. Stahlstadt, or City of Steel, is a fortress-like factory town devoted to the manufacture of high-tech weapons of war. Its German creator, the fanatically pro-Aryan Herr Schultze, is Verne's first truly evil scientist. In his quest for world domination and racial supremacy, Schultze decides to showcase his deadly wares by destroying France-Ville and all its inhabitants.

Both prescient and cautionary, The Begum's Millions is a masterpiece of scientific and political speculation and constitutes one of the earliest technological utopia/dystopias in Western literature. This Wesleyan edition features notes, appendices, and a critical introduction as well as all the illustrations from the original French edition.

This work has also been published under the name The Begum's Fortune.

The descriptions of the quaint villagers of Werst, their costumes, manner of living, and belief in the supernatural world would in themselves prove an interesting narrative, but when coupled with the exciting adventures of Nic Deck, the two Counts, the cowardly Doctor, and the beautiful La Stilla, the story is undoubtedly one of the most enchanting ever offered. This mysterious tale takes place in the area which in just a few years would become known as Dracula's homeland. Jules Verne has the knack of it. He knows how to make the scientifically romantic story. You might not know what a "nyctalop" was, but if you saw one flapping his wings around the dark fortress in the Carpathians, you would run for it, as did Nic Deck. Orfanik is head conjurer, and in his trial he explains how he brought into play for a wicked purpose a variety of ingenious inventions. Includes unique illustrations!

The Self-Propelled Island is the first unabridged English translation of Jules Verne's original story featuring a famous French string quartet that is abducted by an American businessman and taken to Standard Island to perform for its millionaire inhabitants. The quartet soon discovers that Standard Island is not an island at all, but an immense, futuristic ship possessing all the features of an idyllic haven. Equipped with the most opulent amenities, Standard Island travels the Pacific Ocean, traversing the south archipelagos and stopping at many "sister" islands for the pleasure of its well-heeled inhabitants. These inhabitants soon meet with the danger, in its various forms, that is inherent in ocean travel. Meanwhile, the French quartet is witness to the rivalry that exists between the two most powerful families onboard, a rivalry that keeps the future of the island balancing on the edge of a knife.

First published in English in 1896 as The Floating Island, or The Pearl of the Pacific, the novel was originally censored in translation. Dozens of pages were cut from the story because English translators felt they were too critical of Americans as well as the British. Here, for the first time, readers have the pleasure of reading The Self-Propelled Island as Verne intended it.

"Facing the Flag" is one of the earliest stories dealing with a very modern theme: the development of weapons of mass destruction, and the international community's attempts to reconcile this. Thomas Roch, a celebrated inventor, has supposedly created a weapon so devastating that he demands enormous amounts of money to contract it to the nations of the world. However, his acclamations are not only heard by the sovereign nations; his superweapon is also intently sought after by a villianous mind, striking from his secret island fortress...

First English edition of a classic Verne adventure, with a unique feminist twist.

Jules Verne (1828-1905) was the first author to popularize the literary genre of science fiction. Written in 1898 and part of the author's famous series Voyages Extraordinaires, The Mighty Orinoco tells the story of a young man's search for his father along the then-uncharted Orinoco River of Venezuela. The text contains all the ingredients of a classic Verne scientific-adventure tale: exploration and discovery, humor and drama, dastardly villains and intrepid heroes, and a host of near-fatal encounters with crocodiles, jungle fever, Indians and outlaws -- all set in a wonderfully exotic locale. The Mighty Orinoco also includes a unique twist that will appeal to feminists -- readers will need to discover it for themselves. This Wesleyan edition features notes, and a critical introduction by renowned Verne scholar Walter James Miller, as well as reproductions of the illustrations from the original French edition.

Deepest Africa... mysterious lights... an attack by enraged elephants... a lost race of ape-men... and an unknown kingdom ruled by a mystic monarch... An action-packed adventure novel by Jules Verne - the author that foresaw the submarine and the airplane - that takes you deep into the exotic Africa.

Castaways on a barren island in the South Seas, Karl and Pieter Kip are rescued by the brig James Cook. After helping to quell an onboard mutiny, however, they suddenly find themselves accused and convicted of the captain's murder. In this story, one of his last Voyages Extraordinaires, Verne interweaves an exciting exploration of the South Pacific with a tale of judicial error reminiscent of the infamous Dreyfus Affair. This Wesleyan edition brings together the first English translation with one of the first detailed critical analyses of the novel, and features all the illustrations from the original 1902 publication.

Jules Verne, celebrated French author of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days, wrote over 60 novels collected in the popular series "Voyages Extraordinaires." A handful of these have never been translated into English, including Invasion of the Sea, written in 1904 when large-scale canal digging was very much a part of the political, economic, and military strategy of the world's imperial powers.

Instead of linking two seas, as existing canals (the Suez and the Panama) did, Verne proposed a canal that would create a sea in the heart of the Sahara Desert. The story raises a host of concerns -- environmental, cultural, and political. The proposed sea threatens the nomadic way of life of those Islamic tribes living on the site, and they declare war. The ensuing struggle is finally resolved only by a cataclysmic natural event.

This Wesleyan edition features notes, appendices and an introduction by Verne scholar Arthur B. Evans, as well as reproductions of the illustrations from the original French edition.