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This short story originally appeared in the anthology Press Start to Play (2015), edited by John Joseph Adams. It can also be found in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, edited by Karen Joy Fowler and John Joseph Adams.

Read the full story for free here.

IN A VESSEL THAT SAILS ON A TIMELESS SEA, A GOD SINGS OF HUMAN MORTALITY...

Hear then of a time when the Lochlannach first came a viking into Eire, of a time when the gentle Christos was new-come to the land and an elder magic flickered still--and once in a great while, under just the right conditions and with a very special curse, might flare up into full life again.

Contains Nebula Award-winning Novella "The Spacetime Pool" and Nebula-nominated Novella "Aurora in Four Voices"

• Introduction - essay by Kate Dolan
• Aurora in Four Voices - (1998) - novella
• Ave de Paso - (2001) - shortstory
• The Spacetime Pool - (2008) - novella
• Light and Shadow - (1994) - novelette
• The City of Cries - (2005) - novella
• A Poetry of Angles and Dreams - essay
• Afterword - essay by Aly Parsons
• Bibliography - essay by Steven H Silver

The Nebula-winning Novella "The Spacetime Pool" can be read online here:

• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8

"A Poetry of Angles and Dreams" can be read online here

Megan O'Flannery, an expert in robotics and Artificial Intelligence, is hired by a secret military-funded project that has created four self-aware androids. Only one of these androids has survived, and Megan finds herself in danger almost immediately, as she begins her work with the remaining android. Ander, as this android now calls himself, has the capabilities of a high-speed computer, superhuman reflexes and strength, the looks of an Adonis, and behaves like an angry, unpredictable adolescent. When an internationally renowned robotics genius, Raj Sundaram, is also hired for this project, Megan finds herself attracted to him but afraid that Raj may have a deadly agenda of his own. Added to her troubles is Ander's fierce animosity towards Raj.

Kidnappings and pursuits by mercenaries ensue, and all three – Ander, Megan, the mysterious Raj – must fight for their survival, while Megan struggles to comprehend the nature and motives of her strange companions.

This exciting collection includes Asaro's Nebula Award-winning novella "The Spacetime Pool," her Skolian Empire story "Light and Shadow", and the author's essay "A Poetry of Angles and Dreams", with new Introductions to the fiction works.

"The Spacetime Pool" begins as Janelle, a brilliant young MIT graduate, is pulled against her will into an alternate world of medieval-level warfare but with advanced mathematics, harems, breathtakingly beautiful Moorish architecture... and two ruling brothers locked in a deadly power struggle to which Janelle holds the key to victory.

Asaro's story "Light and Shadow" proves mathematics can be stranger than most fiction, as Kelric Valdoria, a young pilot recovering from a great personal loss, flies a sentient aircraft with a new starship drive - against his commander's orders - up to and surpassing the speed of light. Kelric returns (at least, most of him does!) with a new lust for life.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (The Spacetime Pool) - essay
• The Spacetime Pool - (2008) - novella
• Introduction (Light and Shadow) - essay
• Light and Shadow - (1994) - novelette
• A Poetry of Angles and Dreams - essay

The first 3 chapters of the Nebula-winning Novella "The Spacetime Pool" can be read online here:

• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3

"A Poetry of Angles and Dreams" can be read online here

Nebula Award winning novella. It originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, March 2008. The story can also be found in the anthology Nebula Awards Showcase 2010, edited by Bill Fawcett. It is included in the collection The Spacetime Pool (2012).

The first 3 chapters of this story can be read on the author's blog (01, 02, 03).

Winner of the Homer Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.

Ballerina Lucia del Mar has two great passions: dance, which consumes most of her waking hours, and the World Wide Web, which brings the outside world into her tightly regimented life. Lucia's two passions collide when a White House performance and reception leads to an encounter with handsome Moroccan businessman Rashid al-Jazari, creator of a brilliant technology that has set the Internet rumor mill afire.

A second, seemingly chance meeting with Rashid will plunge Lucia into a deadly world of desire and intrigue. For although his work has implications she cannot foresee, there are those who do understand and would turn its great power to their own destructive purposes. As she is drawn deeper and deeper into Rashid's life and work, cut off from the outside world, she finds herself becoming more attracted to him. But is her seclusion within Rashid's well-guarded Moroccan home intended to ensure her safety...or her silence? And is it already too late to stop the terrible consequences his new technology could unleash?

This short story originally appeared in the collection The Line Between (2006) and was reprinted in Lightspeed, July 2012. It can also be found in the anthology Tails of Wonder and Imagination (2010), edited by Ellen Datlow.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Life might emerge under the most unlikely conditions... or in the last extremity.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1974. The story can also be found in the anthology The 1975 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Arthur W. Saha. It is included in the collections Blooded on Arachne (1982) and The Door Gunner and Other Perilous Flights of Fancy: A Michael Bishop Retrospective (2012).

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Omni, September 1991. The story can also be found in the anthologies Magicats II (1991), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, Nebula Awards 28 (1994), edited by James Morrow and Tails of Wonder and Imagination (2010), edited by Ellen Datlow. The story is collected in At the City Limits of Fate (1996) and The Door Gunner and Other Perilous Flights of Fancy: A Michael Bishop Retrospective (2012).

Lou has a magic box. It makes people do things they normally wouldn't. And Lou likes to watch.

Terry Bisson's 1990 short story "Bears Discover Fire" won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards, and his all-dialogue story "They're Made Out of Meat" is one of the most widely-reprinted SF stories of the last several decades. He has published several volumes of short fiction, including Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories. His novels include Talking Man, Fire on the Mountain, Voyage to the Red Planet, Pirates of the Universe, and The Pickup Artist.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Full Moon City (2010), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Darrell Schweitzer. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Five (2011), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top (2012) edited by Ekaterina Sedia.

Paul Danton was a member of a subversive political party which had an answer: make peace with Venus. But the only way to peace was through the overthrow of Security. And Danton had found the one weapon which would make Security's fall possible: the long-forgotten duplication machine.

It had been well forgotten, for a machine which could make up to five duplicates of any living person was too dangerous to have around. But now, what if the top members of Security were kidnapped briefly, and then, suddenly there were five of each? No government could endure such chaos.

As in his most recent major fiction collections, One More for the Road (1999) and Driving Blind (1997), Ray Bradbury has once again pulled together a stellar group of stories sure to delight readers of all ages. In The Cat's Pyjamas we are treated to a treasure trove of Bradbury gems old and new -- eerie and strange, nostalgic and bittersweet, searching and speculative -- all but two of which have never been published before. The Cat's Pyjamas is a joyous celebration of the lifelong work of a literary legend.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Eclipse Four: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (2011), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection (2012), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Adrift in the Noösphere: Science Fiction Stories (2012).

Originally published as The 100th Millennium in Ace Double D-362 in 1959.

A hundred thousand years from now, it was discovered that a star was approaching the world on a collision course. Its discoverer, Creohan, figured there might be time to save the world if he could arouse everyone to the danger.

But the Earth had become a strange and kaleidoscopic place in that distant era. Too many empires had risen and fallen, too many cultures had spread their shattered fragments across a planet whose very maps had long since been forgotten. People were too busy with their own private dreams to pay attention to one more new alarm.

The story Creohan's effort to Catch a Falling Star is one of John Brunner's most colourful science-fiction concepts.

This short story originally appeared in the collection Xenowealth: A Collection (2015), and was reprinted in Lightspeed, May 2017.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Cold sleep had given Earth the stars, but at what price?

Filled with the hope of a new life on a new world, many a voyager had entered the cryo-containers aboard the titanic starships sent to populate Jayvee 9, Earth's lone far-flung colony. For some that hope was fulfilled, for others there was no awakening at journey's end. And for those like ex-marshal Walker, a man permanently scarred by the madness and loneliness of seven years of cold sleep, the sole way to find peace was in space itself, flying the starways as a solitary mining pilot.

With the empathic alien Nis as his only companion, Walker combed the giant asteroid rings near Jayvee, searching for ore and returning periodically to his base at Hephaestus Station. It might not have been much of a life, but for Walker it was enough.

But the discovery of a massive derelict, the sleeper-ship E.S.S. Republic, found floating in the debris of Ring Belt 3 signaled an end to Walker's personal seclusion. Assigned to investigate this wreck which had been lost for more than a century, Walker and a team of anthropologists led by the renowned Dr. Elaine Bartlett, were about to confront an alien presence far more terrifying than Walker's most shocking cold-sleep nightmares!

This short story originally appeared Interfictions Online, Issue 5, Spring 2015, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, Issue 104, January 2019. The story is included in the collection Speaking to Skull Kings and Other Stories (2017)

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Sheltering beneath Das Kagel, the cloud-scraping structure rumored to be the Tower of Babel, the sacred Monastery of the Eastern Gate descends into bedlam. Their ancient oracle, Quite Testiyont--whose prophesies helped protect the church--has died, leaving the monks vulnerable to the war raging between the living and the dead. Tasked by the High Church to deliver a new oracle, Barry Follett and his group of hired mercenaries are forced to confront wicked giants and dangerous sirens on their mission, keeping the divine creature alive by feeding it marrow and confessing their darkest sins.

But as Follett and his men carve their way through the treacherous landscape, the world around them spirals deeper into chaos. Dominic, a young monk who has mysteriously lost his voice, makes a pilgrimage to see surreal paintings, believing they reveal the empire's fate; a local woman called Mad Meg hopes to free and vindicate her jailed son and becomes the leader of the most unexpected revolution; and the abbott of the monastery, influential as he is, seeks to gain even more power in this world and the next.

This debut collection from Nebula-nominated author Beth Cato brings together works that span history and space, a showcase of vividly imagined speculative stories that range from introspective and intense to outright whimsical. Here you'll find the souls of horses bonded into war machines of earth and air, toilet gnomes on the rampage, magical pies, a mad scientist mother, a bitter old man who rages against giant extraterrestrial robots, and a sentient house that longs to be a home. The book features 28 stories and 6 poems, and includes Cato's acclaimed story "The Souls of Horses."

This shot story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 15, March-April 2017.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny Magazine.

You're next...

Carol and Nessa are strangers but not for much longer.

In a luxury apartment and in the walls of a modern hospital, the evil that was done continues to thrive. They are in the hands of an entity that knows no boundaries and crosses dimensions - bending and twisting time itself - and where danger waits in every shadow. The battle is on for their bodies and souls and the line between reality and nightmare is hard to define.

Through it all, the words of Lydia Warren Carmody haunt them. But who was she? And why have Carol and Nessa been chosen?

The answer lies deep in the darkness...

Maddie had forgotten that cursed summer. Now she's about to remember...

When Maddie Chambers inherits her Aunt Charlotte's gothic mansion, old memories stir of the long-forgotten summer she turned sixteen. She has barely moved in before a series of bizarre events drives her to question her sanity.

The strains of her aunt's favorite song echo through the house, the roots of a faraway willow creep through the cellar, a child who cannot exist skips from room to room, and Maddie discovers Charlotte kept many deadly secrets.

Gradually, the barriers in her mind fall away, and Maddie begins to recall that summer when she looked into the face of evil. Now, the long dead builder of the house has unfinished business and an ancient demon is hungry. Soon it is not only Maddie's life that is in danger, but her soul itself, as the ghosts of her past shed their cover of darkness.

Don't play the game.

In 1893, Evelyn and Claire leave their home in a Yorkshire town for life in a rural retreat on their beloved moors. But when a strange toy garden mysteriously appears, a chain of increasingly terrifying events is unleashed. Neighbour Matthew Dixon befriends Evelyn, but seems to have more than one secret to hide. Then the horror really begins. The Garden of Bewitchment is all too real and something is threatening the lives and sanity of the women. Evelyn no longer knows who - or what - to believe. And time is running out.

Ghosts have always walked there. Now they're not alone...

In the depths of Edinburgh, an evil presence is released.

Hannah and her colleagues are tour guides who lead their visitors along the spooky, derelict Henderson Close, thrilling them with tales of spectres and murder. For Hannah it is her dream job, but not for long. Who is the mysterious figure that disappears around a corner? What is happening in the old print shop? And who is the little girl with no face?

The legends of Henderson Close are becoming all too real. The Auld De'il is out - and even the spirits are afraid.

What should be a simple summer internship in the county morgue is transformed into the most unusual experience of Lia Thantos's life when she unthinkingly violates ancient protocols and summons Charon, the Ferryman. The dead have never frightened Lia--until now.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

In the vibrant city-state of Castellane, the richest of nobles and the most debauched of criminals have one thing in common: the constant search for wealth, power, and the next hedonistic thrill.

Kel is an orphan, stolen from the life he knew to become the Sword Catcher--the body double of a royal heir, Prince Conor Aurelian. He and Conor are as close as brothers, but his destiny is to die for Conor. No other future is possible.

Lin Caster is a physician from a small community whose members still possess magical abilities. But despite her skills, she cannot heal her best friend without access to forbidden knowledge.

After a failed assassination attempt brings Lin and Kel together, they are drawn into the web of the mysterious Ragpicker King, the ruler of Castellane's criminal underworld. But as long-kept secrets begin to unravel and forbidden attractions arise, they must ask themselves: Is knowledge worth the price of betrayal? And will their discoveries plunge their nation into war - and the world into chaos?

The Dead Cat Tail Assassins are not cats.

Nor do they have tails.

But they are most assuredly dead.

Eveen the Eviscerator is skilled, discreet, professional, and here for your most pressing needs in the ancient city of Tal Abisi. Her guild is strong, her blades are sharp, and her rules are simple. Those sworn to the Matron of Assassins -- resurrected, deadly, wiped of their memories -- have only three unbreakable vows.

First, the contract must be just. That's above Eveen's pay grade.

Second, even the most powerful assassin may only kill the contracted. Eveen's a professional. She's never missed her mark.

The third and the simplest: once you accept a job, you must carry it out. And if you stray? A ?nal death would be a mercy. When the Festival of the Clockwork King turns the city upside down, Eveen's newest mission brings her face-to-face with a past she isn't supposed to remember and a vow she can't forget.

Walter Van Tilburg Clark's classic novel -- a tale of four men who fear a marauding mountain lion but swear to conquer it -- is a gripping exploration of the conflict between good and evil.

Call them the spare parts of people. They chose the risk - jail for convicted crimes or semi-freedom as someone's bonded servant for the same term. The price was that they were body insurance. If their master lost a leg or an internal organ, they would have to supply the missing part. That was the risk. Sagar used bondsmen in his other-world farm where he raised exotic alien pelts to sell to the rich. He had no thoughts on the bondsmen problem, pro or con. But when Carioca Jones, 3-V star, visited him he met her bonded companion, the lovely girl with the musical talent.

It's dangerous to fall in love with a bondsmaiden. Doubly so when her mistress is in love with you. Triply so when it might set off the social explosion that had been smouldering beneath the delicately balanced surface of their post-cataclysmic Peninsula.

This unforgettable, magical novel takes for its premise an inspired bit of speculation based firmly in history: Leonardo da Vinci's conception of a marvelous flying machine. Set against the colorful backdrop of Italy and Persia in the 1400s, The Memory Cathedral masterfully calls forth a dazzling era when magic and science were one and the same.

This novelette originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue Five, July-August 2015.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny.

This is the definitive biography of Robert E. Howard, a giant of the pulp era, who created the archetypal brooding fantasy figure. To the general public, he is virtually unknown, but millions are familiar with the name and exploits of his most famous creation: Conan, the barbarian.

In this whimsical, original folktale, written and illustrated throughout in vibrant full color by two celebrated masters of modern fantasy, a young girl's journey becomes an enchanting coming-of-age story about magic, friendship, and the courage to shape one's own destiny.

Lillian Kindred spends her days exploring the Tanglewood Forest, a magical, rolling wilderness that she imagines to be full of fairies. The trouble is, Lillian has never seen a wisp of magic in her hills--until the day the cats of the forest save her life by transforming her into a kitten. Now she must set out on a perilous adventure that will lead her through untamed lands of fabled creates--from Old Mother Possum to the fearsome Bear People--to find a way to make things right.

Marta, a graduate student researching indigenous life on isolationist Dray's Planet, discovers an animal that can't be indigenous, but which can't have come from anywhere else. The puzzle convinces the Children of the Second Revelation to bring two Unbelievers into their closed society. As the rival offworld scientists trek into the harsh desert to determine the creature's origins, Marta stumbles onto another mystery: why do folk tales speak of roarings and screechings from the planet's second continent, the uninhabitable Land Beyond the Gates? And why are the Faithful forbidden to set foot there?

Religious leaders will not sanction a trip to the uncharted land they deem uninhabitable. Marta must keep her expedition from coming to their attention, while keeping her difficult offworlders on task. After that, uncovering the secrets of the prohibited place ought to be the easy part. But they still have to live to tell the tale...

A young woman raised within the sterile limits of a Biodome longs to be free...taking her chances Outside, a place where the victims of a devastating virus dwell. But even greater dangers await Outside: the warring factions that have turned the once-beautiful mesas into a slaughterground, the Edgewalkers who tread a fine line between sanity and madness, and the astonishing truth about her own destiny, which may trigger the ultimate destruction of both worlds!

Ahmed is a doctor working in a far flung outpost of humanity. His way was paid for by the leaders of his faith and his atheism is a guarded secret. His encounters with the "kite people" will cause him to doubt his whole worldview however when the aliens start dying and escalating tensions between religious extremists threatens to destroy the colony's peace. WHEN THE STARS ARE SCATTERED is a moving story about alien contact, religious intolerance, and the redemptive power of the divine channeled through the spirit.

Whether that spirit is human or alien.

Jack, a struggling art student, is hired to drive a mute, crippled girl across the country. Tappy Concord can barely communicate, but something about her touches Jack, so much so that he follows her into the mountains - and through the gateway to another world.

There he finds himself surrounded by strange, alien creatures, and pursued by the relentless agents of the Gaol, an all-powerful galactic empire. Only one force in all the cosmos can hope to overcome the tyranny of the Gaol: The Imago, an immortal spirit capable of evolving into a being of immense power. The Imago can be anywhere or anyone... maybe even a crippled human girl.

The Caterpillar's Question is a world-spanning science fiction odyssey - as only Piers Anthony and Philip José Farmer could tell it.

The worlds rarest gemstones... worth countless millions on the market and far more to those who can decipher the messages etched on their flaming surface... a messages that offers the key to global mastery and bears witness to a vanished civilization far superior to -and more technologically advance than- our own.

They come from the Catacombs-a crystalline burial cave of unparalleled splendor hidden in the volcanic depths of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Their discovery sets the stage for a duel of superpowers that will be fought with a terrible vengeance... a race against time -and eternity- for a terrifying, earth-shattering prize.

It has been said (by Mark Twain) that "If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat." In this volume we explore the many and manifest reasons why humans should voluntarily accord first place in space to their feline brethren.

Table of Contents:

• 3 - The Game of Rat and Dragon - [The Instrumentality of Mankind] - short story by Cordwainer Smith
• 21 - Mouse - short story by Fredric Brown
• 33 - Ship of Shadows - novelette by Fritz Leiber
• 83 - Schrödinger's Cat - short story by Ursula K. Le Guin
• 93 - Tales of a Starship's Cat - poem by Judith R. Conly
• 97 - Who's There? - short story by Arthur C. Clarke
• 103 - Bullhead - novelette by David Drake
• 143 - Ordeal in Space - [Future History] - short story by Robert A. Heinlein
• 161 - Space-Time for Springers - [Gummitch the Cat] - short story by Fritz Leiber
• 175 - The Tail - short fiction by M. J. Engh
• 179 - Well Worth the Money - short story by Jody Lynn Nye
• 203 - Chanur's Homecoming (Chapter 12) - short fiction by C. J. Cherryh
• 231 - Duty Calls - [The Fleet] - novelette by Anne McCaffrey
• 263 - Black Destroyer - [Space Beagle] - novelette by A. E. van Vogt
• 299 - The Pride - short fiction by P. J. Beese and Todd Cameron Hamilton
• 327 - The Ballad of Lost C'mell - [The Instrumentality of Mankind] - novelette by Cordwainer Smith
• 351 - The Man Who Would Be Kzin - [Man-Kzin Wars] - novella by Greg Bear and S. M. Stirling

Women of Wonder: Celebrating Women Creators of Fantastic Art features works from 66 women artists working in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. Introduction by Lauren Panepinto.

See some of the gorgeous artwork featured in the collection at Tor.com.

Artists Featured:

• Kei Acedera
• Mia Araujo
• Alicia Austin
• L.D. Austin
• Anita Kunz
• Anna Balbusso
• Elena Balbusso
• Wylie Beckert
• Jasmine Becket-Griffith
• Kelsey Beckett
• Mary Blair
• Laurie Lee Brom
• Margaret Brundage
• Marina Bychkova
• Rovina Cai
• Kristina Carroll
• Echo Chernik
• Hannah Christenson
• Kinuko Y. Craft
• Camilla d'Errico
• Mélanie Delon
• Zelda Devon
• Diane Dillon
• Julie Dillon
• Lisa Falkenstern
• Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale
• Anne Yvonne Gilbert
• Elizabeth Shippen Green
• Christina Hess
• Kimberly Kincaid
• Andrea Kowch
• Jody A. Lee
• Sacha Lees
• Vanessa Lemen
• Rebecca Leveille-Guay
• Lindsey Look
• Alexandra Manukyan
• Carly Mazur
• Tara McPherson
• Ilene Meyer
• Brandi Milne
• Rowena Morrill
• Sho Murase
• Winona Nelson
• Victo Ngai
• Tran Nguyen
• Terese Nielsen
• Rose O'Neill
• Karla Ortiz
• Barbara Remington
• Forest Rogers
• Virginie Ropars
• Ruth Sanderson
• Marie Severin
• Cynthia Sheppard
• Yuko Shimizu
• Jessie Wilcox Smith
• Annie Stegg
• Heather Theurer
• Heather Watts
• Shelly Wan
• Claire Wendling
• Terryl Whitlatch
• Sulamith Wülfing
• Rebecca Yanovskaya
• Chie Yoshii
• Lizbeth Zwerger

A teenage girl with a past arrives in a city: new name, new identity, new foster family. She is nursing a secret from her early childhood, a secret that produces new terrors for her the moment she fears her identity has been spotted.

Another gem in this anthology is Richard Calder's "The Catgirl Manifesto: An Introduction," a weird story masquerading as a scholarly introduction on the origin and effects of an extremely seditious document. It successfully builds what feels like a complete reality even though it only gives us tantalizing glimpses of the alternate historical events that take place in it. The "story" raises some disturbing issues about gender, sexuality, and death making it perhaps The James Tiptree Award Anthology 1's most successful attempt at pushing back the boundaries of the gender debate. -- The SFSite

Tiptree nominated short story. Anthologized in Album Zutique, edited by Jeff Vandermeer, and in The James Tiptree Award Anthology 1 (2005).

A GAME OF CAT... AND CAT?

Movie star Jason Carter is on vacation in Peru. All he wants is a break, but what he finds is a lost civilization of extra-dimensional Incas bent on conquest of the entire world!

Nor is Carter alone. His allies include a bloodthirsty Amazon, an archaeologist, a bank robber, three alien vegetables and a scoop-crazed gossip columnist - and not one of them knows what to do next.

Only Carter's cat seems unruffled by the growing danger. In true feline fashion, she acts like she's in charge of the planet.

Maybe she is.

Nebula and Sturgeon Award-nominated short story

Before civilization fell to a plague of zombies, Aisa was a ballet dancer. Now, she spends her time in an abandoned theater, dancing on an abandoned stage for an imaginary audience.

This story was originally published in Daily Science Fiction in September 2014. It can also be found in the anthologies Nebula Awards Showcase 2016, edited by Mercedes Lackey, and The Long List Anthology: More Stories from the Hugo Awards Nomination List, edited by David Steffen. An audio version was published on Pseudopod #428 in March 2015.

Read this story online for free at Daily Science Fiction, or listen to the audio version on Pseudopod.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Songs of the Dying Earth: Stories in Honour of Jack Vance (2009), edited by Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin, and was reprinted Lightspeed, October 2013. It is included in the collection Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances (2015).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Deep in the forgotten hills of Massachusetts stands Saint Perpetua's College. Isolated and ancient, it is not a place for timid girls. Here, secrets are currency, ambition is lifeblood, and strange ceremonies welcome students into the fold.

On her first day of class, Laura Sheridan is thrust into an intense academic rivalry with the beautiful and enigmatic Carmilla. Together, they are drawn into the confidence of their demanding poetry professor, De Lafontaine, who holds her own dark obsession with Carmilla.

But as their rivalry blossoms into something far more delicious, Laura must confront her own strange hungers. Tangled in a sinister game of politics, bloodthirsty professors and magic, Laura and Carmilla must decide how much they are willing to sacrifice in their ruthless pursuit of knowledge.

From dark felines crossing your path to shattered looking glasses, Black Cats and Broken Mirrors dares to ask the question: "What if some of those long-treasured superstitions are actually true?" Join Jane Yolen, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, Michelle West, Charles de Lint, Nancy Springer, Peter Crowther, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Esther Friesner, and more as they explore the lighter and darker sides of our fears in this original anthology featuring stories ranging from urban fantasy and magical realism to horror!

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (1998) - essay by John Helfers
• How It All Began - (1998) - novelette by Esther M. Friesner
• Thirteen Ways to Water - (1998) - shortstory by Bruce Holland Rogers
• Whirlwinds - (1998) - shortstory by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
• Dead Tired - (1998) - shortstory by Russell Davis
• Shards of Glass - (1998) - novelette by Kristin Schwengel
• The Cat Who Wasn't Black - (1998) - shortstory by Josepha Sherman
• Something Blue - (1998) - shortstory by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
• Crossroads - (1998) - shortstory by Genevieve Gorman
• The Song of a Gift Horse - (1998) - shortstory by Dean Wesley Smith
• Caretaking - (1998) - shortstory by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
• Soul Cages - (1998) - shortstory by Carol Rondou
• Auspicious Stars - (1998) - novelette by Jane Lindskold
• Frogged - (1998) - shortstory by Nancy Springer
• Step on the Crack - (1998) - shortstory by Michelle West
• Front-Page McGuffin and the Greatest Story Never Told - (1998) - novelette by Peter Crowther
• To the Edge of the World - (1998) - shortstory by Zane Stillings
• The Pennymen - (1998) - shortstory by Charles de Lint

Einstein hath no formula for the fury of a woman scorned!

This short story is contained in the collections:

• Living Way Out, By Wyman Guinn, (1967)
• Beyond Bedlam, by Wyman Guin (1973)
• Neglected Visions, by Martin Harry Greenberg, Barry N. Malzberg, Joseph D. Olander (1967)

At high-pressure chemical plants in the United States and Germany, the race to process a new wonder chemical is on. The stakes are high - and the competition is reckless, desperate and fierce.

Trialine. Wonder Drug. If synthesized, its possibilities are endless. Fabulous. It will revolutionise the 21st century. And it will make somebody famous. And somebody very, very rich.

But the key to the process is held by somebody who doesn't know it. Somebody who will be transformed forever. Somebody who is destined to be...

In The Cat Who Walked through Walls, Heinlein creates his most compelling character ever: Dr. Richard Ames, ex-military man, sometime writer, and unfortunate victim of mistaken identity.

When a stranger attempting to deliver a cryptic message is shot dead at his dinner table, this precipitates his marriage to Gwen Novak and sends the newlyweds scurrying to the Moon and then to the planet Tertius, headquarters of the Time Corps.

Ames is thrown headfirst into danger, intrigue, and other dimensions where Lazarus Long still thrives, where Jubal Harshaw lives surrounded by beautiful women, and where a daring plot to rescue the sentient computer called Mike can change the direction of all human history. A physical description follows...

Katsuk, a militant Native American student, kidnaps 13-year-old David Marshall—the son of the US Undersecretary of State. The two flee into the deepest wilds of the Pacific Northwest, where they must survive together as teams of hunters try to track them. David begins to feel a growing bond of respect for his captor, even as he struggles to escape. What the boy does not know, however, is that he has been chosen as an innocent from the white world for an ancient sacrifice of vengeance. And Katsuk may be divinely inspired . . . or simply insane.

Set in a terrifyingly familiar near-future, with massive floods leading to rampant homelessness and devastation, a government-sanctioned regime called The Boots seizes on the opportunity to round up communities of color, the disabled, and the LGBTQ+ into labor camps.

In the shadows, a new hero emerges. After he loses his livelihood as a drag queen and the love of his life, Kay joins the resistance alongside Bahadur, a transmasculine refugee, and Firuzeh, a headstrong social worker. Guiding them in the use of weapons and close-quarters combat is Beck, a rogue army officer, who helps them plan an uprising at a major televised international event.

With her signature "raw yet beautiful, disturbing yet hopeful" (Booklist) prose, Catherine Hernandez creates a vision of the future that is all the more frightening because it is very possible. A cautionary tale filled with fierce and vibrant characters, Crosshairs explores the universal desire to thrive, love, and be loved for being your true self.

In this eerily up-to-date collection, Highsmith's incisive prose chronicles a world gone slightly mad, its catastrophes precipitated by human folly and excess. From the White House under siege by the homeless to a 190-year-old woman perpetually near death and dimly glowing, each tale unfolds the illogical extremes of humanity in the late twentieth century. Highsmith transmogrifies the face of daily existence to lay bare its manifold dark motives. These stories leave us haunted with "afterimages that will tremble" but "stay in our minds" (The New Yorker).

Table of Contents:

• The Mysterious Cemetery - (1987) - short story
• Moby Dick II; or The Missile Whale - (1987) - short story
• Operation Balsam; or Touch-Me-Not - (1987) - short story
• Nabuti: Warm Welcome to a UN Committee - (1987) - short story
• Sweet Freedom! And a Picnic on the White House Lawn - (1987) - short story
• Trouble at the Jade Towers - (1987) - novelette
• Rent-a-Womb vs. the Mighty Right - (1987) - short story
• No End in Sight - (1987) - short story
• Sixtus VI, Pope of the Red Slipper - (1987) - novelette
• President Buck Jones Rallies and Waves the Flag - (1987) - novelette

This psychologically complex science-fiction novel focuses on a sensitive adolescent making the difficult transition from childhood into adolescent sexuality and adult society. A boy, fleeing a bullying classmate, inadvertently makes first contact with a race of aliens who live beneath the surface of his planet. Exploring such subjects as the dynamics of dysfunctional families and human society's greed-based political system, the book has eerie psychological undercurrents and tells an emotionally compelling and surprisingly sensual story.

A guided tour though the many worlds of a New York Times best-selling master of authentic science fact and riveting science fiction.

James P. Hogan stands among the foremost writers of science fiction today, and is renowned for his ability to combine accurate science from the cutting edge of present-day research with living, breathing characters in fast-paced, suspenseful stories. Catastrophes, Chaos & Convolutions gives Hogan's thousands of avid readers both a solid-chunk of high-quality science fiction and a look behind the scenes, as Hogan describes how his work came to be written, with biographical details. Add a dash of science fact articles, often on controversial topics (suppose, for example, that Velikovsky was right and the orthodox scientists wrong), and you have a volume that is an essential purchase for Hogan fans everywhere.

Table of Contents:

• The Guardians - (2005) - novelette
• Getting Better Connected - essay
• Impossible Rhymes - (1998) - poem
• Frog Fantasies - (1998) - essay
• Convolution - (2001) - novelette
• The Modern Medievalism - essay
• Global Flooding - (2000) - essay
• Word Games - (2000) - essay
• The Tree of Dreams - (2005) - novella
• Nuclear Waste - (1998) - essay
• Who Will Remember the Deep End? - (2003) - essay
• The Trouble With Utopias - essay
• Decontamination Squad - (2005) - shortfiction
• The Cosmic Power Grid - essay
• Sword of Damocles - novella
• Cryptic Crossword - (2000) - essay
• More Globes Warming - (2003) - essay
• Animal Quackers - (2004) - essay
• Take Two - (2001) - novelette
• Intelligence Test - essay
• Old, Unimproved Model - essay
• Children Need to Get Out and Play - (2003) - essay
• Pioneer 10 Signing Off - (2003) - essay
• The Falcon - (2005) - novelette
• Crossword Solution - essay

Named one of the Los Angeles Times's Best Science Fiction Books in 2007, Dance Dance Revolution is a genre-bending tour de force told from the perspective of the Guide, a former dissident and tour guide of an imagined desert city.

Kat Howard has already been called a "remarkable writer" by Neil Gaiman and her "dark and enticing" (Publishers Weekly) debut novel, Roses and Rot, was beloved by critics and fans alike.

Now, you can experience her collected shorter works, including two new stories, in A Cathedral of Myth and Bone. In these stories, equally as beguiling and spellbinding as her novels, Howard expands into the enchanted territory of myths and saints, as well as an Arthurian novella set upon a college campus, Once, Future, which retells the story of King Arthur -- through the women's eyes.

Captivating and engrossing, and adorned in gorgeous prose, Kat Howard's stories are a fresh and stylish take on fantasy. "Kat Howard seems to possess a magic of her own, of making characters come alive and scenery so vivid, you forget it exists only on the page" (Anton Bogomazov, Politics and Prose).

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• A Life in Fictions (2010) - short story
• The Saint of the Sidewalks (2014) - short story
• Maiden, Hunter, Beast (2016) - short story
• Once, Future - novella
• Translatio Corporis (2015) - short story
• Dreaming Like a Ghost (2014) - short story
• Murdered Sleep (2012) - short story
• The Speaking Bone (2011) - short story
• Those Are Pearls (2015) - short story
• All of Our Past Places (2014) - short story
• Saints' Tide - short story
• Painted Birds and Shivered Bones (2013) - novelette
• Returned (2015) - short story
• The Calendar of Saints (2011) - short story
• The Green Knight's Wife (2016) - short story
• Breaking the Frame (2012) - short story

A thief who can travel through mirrors, a video game that threatens to spill out of the virtual world, a doomsday cult on a collision course with destiny, and a missing teenager at the center of it all. With the world on the brink of every kind of apocalypse, humanity needs a hero. What it gets is Sid Catchpenny.

Sidney Catchpenny has had a bad run. Laid low by a years-long bout of debilitating depression, he's all but squandered his reputation as one of the most uniquely talented thieves in LA. There aren't many who can do what Sid does. He's a sly, a special kind of crook with the uncanny ability to move through mirrors. And the spoils he's after are equally unusual. Forget jewels and cold cash -- Sid steals ;curiosities -- items imbued with powerful mojo, a magical essence gleaned from the accumulated emotion that seeps into interesting, though often banal objects. That spot on the carpet where your old dog used to lay at your feet? The passed-down family heirloom nobody wants but everybody refuses to throw away? These curiosities are full of mojo, which is both the currency of the criminal underground and the secret source of magic in the world.

When a friend from Sid's past comes looking for his help with an important client, and the chance to pay off old debts presents itself, Sid seizes the opportunity... as best he can. But the case he stumbles into is more complicated than it seems, and it portends a seismic shift in the world, one that will leave no one untouched. As the fog of his depression begins to lift, Sid sees connections everywhere he looks, and the once disparate threads of the case -- a missing teenage girl, an entire bedroom saturated with mojo, and Sid's own long-dead wife -- begin to coalesce.

This short story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 28, May-June 2019.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny.

The great fire of 1835 burned most of New York City's wooden downtown and, like many others, Archie Prescott thinks he's lost all that's dear to him. His home is a smoldering ruin and his wife is dead--and next to her body is a child's corpse he assumes was his daughter. It seems as though it's the end of everything...

But it is only the beginning. In the midst of ancient magic, murderous conspiracies, and a crafty Mesoamerican demon-god who is plotting the end of humanity, Archie finds himself with the power to save the world—or drown it in sacrificial blood.

This short story originally appeared on Strange Horizons, 1 April 2002. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection (2003), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Unintended Consequences (2003).

Read the full story for free at Strange Horizons.

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, March 2010. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Eighth Annual Collection (2011), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Eleven-year-old Jane Grandison, tormented by her stutter, sits in the back seat of a car, letter in hand inviting her to live and study at the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children. Founded in 1890 by Headmistress Sybil Joines, the school--at first glance--is a sanctuary for children seeking to cure their speech impediments. Inspired by her haunted and tragic childhood, the Headmistress has other ideas.

Pioneering the field of necrophysics, the Headmistress harnesses the "gift" she and her students possess. Through their stutters, together they have the ability to channel ghostly voices communicating from the land of the dead, a realm the Headmistress herself visits at will. Things change for the school and the Headmistress when a student disappears, attracting attention from parents and police alike.

Set in the overlapping worlds of the living and the dead, Shelley Jackson's Riddance is an illuminated novel told through theoretical writings in necrophysics, the Headmistress's dispatches from the land of the dead, and Jane's evolving life as Joines's new stenographer and central figure in the Vocational School's mysterious present, as well as its future.

When a fire destroys her home and scatters her colony, Small Cat sets out to find the home of her ancestor, the Cat From the North, and to make her own name along the way.

Read this story online for free at Tor.com.

Big Cat and Other Stories gathers together the author's finest work from the past decade and features a brand new story, "Stella and the Adventurous Roots", which inspired the cover image. It includes tales that revisit the world of Bold as Love and also the Aleutian Universe (White Queen etc), as well as venturing into brand new possible tomorrows.

Full of passion, vivid imagination, and portent, this collection showcases a master storyteller at her best.

Table of Contents:

• Big Cat
• Stella And The Adventurous Roots
• The Flame Is Roses
• A Planet Called Desire
• The Old Schoolhouse
• The Kianna
• The Vicar Of Mars
• Bricks, Sticks, Straw
• Emergence
• The Seventh Gamer
• Cheats
• About the Author

Rehearsals Are Now Underway for The Antic Tour of Interspecies Marvels A Scofflaw Circus! Dogs & Cats & Humans As You've Never Seen Them!

The circus is in town, and on the planet Boon, that's big, potentially riotous news. The delicate, decaying political balance maintained by the cloned human grands at the expense of the uplifted dog and cat populations is in danger of toppling under the influence of mysterious forces both outer and inner. When Gio Barbaro - clone descendant of one of Boon's ancient leaders, junior Senator, known friend to dogs and secret iconoclast - is recruited by the ringmaster cat, Scratch, he's knowingly going against everything his family and class believes in. The question, though, is what Gio believes in.

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #80 May 2013. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014, edtied by Rich Horton, and Clarkesworld: Year Seven (2015), edited by Sean Wallace and Neil Clarke.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

World Fantasy Award winning novelette. It originally appeared in Subterranean, Spring 2013. The story can aslo be found in the anthology The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2014, edited by Paula Guran. It is included in the collection Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume Two) (2015).

Read the full story for free at Subterranean.

Once upon a time, in the haunted city of Derry (site of IT and INSOMNIA), four young boys did a brave thing; something that changed them in ways they hardly understand. A quarter-century later, the boys are men who still get together once a year, to go hunting in the north woods of Maine. But this time, a man comes stumbling into their camp, lost, disoriented and muttering about lights in the sky. Before long, these old friends will be plunged into the most remarkable events of their lives and a terrible struggle with a creature from another world. Their only chance of survival is locked in their past and in the boy they once rescued as a child.

This short story originally appeared in Cavalier, June 1977. Later publications have all been substantially revised. It can also be found in the anthologies:

• The Second Book of Unknown Tales of Horror (1978), edited by Peter Haining
• The Year's Finest Fantasy (1978), edited by Terry Carr
• Magicats! (1984), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois
• Twists of the Tale: Cat Horror Stories (1996), edited by Ellen Datlow

The story is included in the collection Just After Sunset (2008).

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, June 2010. The story can also be found in the anthology Lightspeed: Year One (2011), edited by John Joseph Adams.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron (2012), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Seven (2013), edited by Jonathan Strahan, The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2013, edited by Paula Guran. The story is included in the collection Wicked Wonders (2017).

Hugo and Locus Award winning and Nebula Award nominated short story. It was published in Clarkesworld, Issue 100 and can also be found in The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016, edited by Rich Horton The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 1 (2016), edited by Neil Clarke, Nebula Awards Showcase 2017, edited by Julie E. Czerneda, and Clarkesworld Year Nine: Volume One (2018), edited by Sean Wallace and Neil Clarke. It is included in the collection Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories (2017).

Read the full story for free at Clakesworld.

Acclaimed writer Naomi Kritzer's marvelous tales of science fiction and fantasy are collected in Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories. Here are seventeen short stories, including her Hugo Award-winning story "Cat Pictures Please," about what would happen if artificial intelligence was born out of our search engine history. Two stories are previously unpublished. Kritzer has a gift for telling tales both humorous and tender. Her stories are filled with both wit and intelligence, and require thoughtful reading.

Table of Contents::

• "Cat Pictures Please"
• "Ace of Spades"
• "The Golem"; "Wind"
• "In The Witch's Garden"
• "What Happened at Blessing Creek"
• "Cleanout"; "Artifice"
• "Perfection"
• "The Good Son"
• "Scrap Dragon"
• "Comrade Grandmother"
• "Isabella's Garden"
• "Bits"
• "Honest Man"
• "The Wall"
• "So Much Cooking"

This short story originally appeared in the anthology The Wilful Eye (2011), edited by Isobelle Carmody and Nan McNab. The story can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Six (2012), edited by Jonathan Strahan, The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012, edited by Paula Guran, and Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold (2016), edited by Paula Guran. The story is included in the collection Yellowcake (2013).

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Science Fiction Age, September 1994 and can also be found in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Eighth Annual Collection (1995), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.

This short story originally appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, #166, February 2015. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016, edited by Rich Horton.

Read the full story for free at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

The Earth was in shambles after the final quake had leveled the cities.

For Mal Irish the last hold on reality was the embossed gold coin he had taken from the pocket of the dead man - the man who with his last breath had told him of mastodons buried in ice and men who weren't human.

Once in possession of the coin, Mal found himself on a mysterious quest which led him to discover even stranger things - the girl who spoke the language of another world, the city under the ocean floor, and the deadly little men who followed him. He was in the power of something beyond his understanding, and he meant to find out its source before it put him to its own unfathomable uses.

About midday the white cat emerged from Grace's open window and walked along the sills of the Rookery, jumping from disastrous ledge to ledge, and down and up the vertiginous heights.

It surveyed the slums, the winding streets that were in parts so narrow, only cats could walk two abreast. Also, from the roof, later, the distant avenues of infamous Black Church where, in antique times, dark priests had had a monastery and worshipped the Devil.

Then, in the night, as the moon rose, the white cat sang. It sang in a high and sacred voice...

Grace is green-eyed, beautiful, a psychic healer--and also a whore. She walks the streets of Black Church to make a living.

After years of horror and poverty as a brothel slave, Saul Anger was adopted into a life of ease, and he has now taken on the mantle of his dead uncle's house, as well as the leadership of a secret society whose figurehead is Anubis, the jackal god of Egypt. Dedicated to justice and retribution, this society will destroy those it deems evil. There must always be blood.

One midnight, in the great clock-tower of the city a man hangs himself--and secret desires are let loose. A demon now stalks the streets and alleys, slaying the wicked and the innocent alike. But can Saul locate the source of destruction and tame it?

Or will beautiful Grace--who has fallen in love with him--be able to stem this tide of madness and primeval terror? For, aided by the goddess Pasht and by all the cats of the city, perhaps she alone can turn back the clock.

This Sturgeon Award nominated short story originally appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, #244, February 2018. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Volume Thirteen (2019), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2019, edited by Rich Horton.

Read the full story for free at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Hugo and Nebula Award winning short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1975. The story can be found in the anthologies The 1976 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Arthur W. Saha, Nebula Award Stories 11 (1976), edited by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Hugo Winners, Volume 4: (1976-79) (1985), edited by Isaac Asimov, The Best of the Nebulas (1989), edited by Ben Bova, and The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories (2010), edited by Ian Whates and Ian Watson. It is also included in the collections The Worlds of Fritz Leiber (1976), Ship of Shadows (1979), The Leiber Chronicles: Fifty Years of Fritz Leiber (1990), and Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories (2010).

This short story originally appeared in the anthology McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales (2003), edited by Michael Chabon, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, December 2012. It can also be found in the anthologies:

• The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 14 (2003), edited by Stephen Jones
• Year's Best Fantasy 4 (2004), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
• Tails of Wonder and Imagination (2010), edited by Ellen Datlow
• My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (2010), edited by Kate Bernheimer
• Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful (2012), edited by Paula Guran.

The story is included in the collection Magic for Beginners (2005).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

even ingeniously reinvented fairy tales that play out with astonishing consequences in the modern world

Finding seeds of inspiration in the Brothers Grimm, seventeenth-century French lore, and Scottish ballads, Kelly Link spins classic fairy tales into utterly original stories of seekers--characters on the hunt for love, connection, revenge, or their own sense of purpose.

In "The White Cat's Divorce," an aging billionaire sends his three sons on a series of absurd goose chases to decide which will become his heir. In "The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear," a professor with a delicate health condition becomes stranded for days in an airport hotel after a conference, desperate to get home to her wife and young daughter, and in acute danger of being late for an appointment that cannot be missed. In "Skinder's Veil," a young man agrees to take over a remote house-sitting gig for a friend. But what should be a chance to focus on his long-avoided dissertation instead becomes a wildly unexpected journey, as the house seems to be a portal for otherworldly travelers--or perhaps a door into his own mysterious psyche.

Twisting and winding in astonishing ways, expertly blending realism and the speculative, witty, empathetic, and never predictable--these stories remind us once again of why Kelly Link is incomparable in the art of short fiction.

Table of Contents:

• The White Cat's Divorce - (2019) - novelette
• Prince Hat Underground - novelette
• The White Road - novelette
• The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear - (2019) - short story
• The Game of Smash and Recovery - (2015) - short story
• The Lady and the Fox - (2014) - novelette
• Skinder's Veil - (2021) - novelette

This short story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 17, July-August 2017.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny Magazine.

This short story originally appaered in Lightspeed, May 2016. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2017, edited by Paula Guran.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Seventeen-year-old Aisha hasn't seen her sister June for two years. And now that a calamity is about to end the world in nine months' time, she and her mother decide that it's time to track her down and mend the hurts of the past. Along with Aisha's boyfriend, Walter and his parents (and Fleabag the stray cat), the group take a roadtrip through Malaysia in a wildly decorated campervan - to put the past to rest, to come to terms with the present, and to hope for the future.

This short story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 2009. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2010, edited by Rich Horton.

In Rome, surrendering to secular pressures, the Fourth Vatican Council is stirring a revolution with their official denial of the church's core doctrines. They've abolished clerical dress and private confession; the Eucharist is recognized only as an outdated symbol; and they're merging with the tenets of Buddhism. They're also unsettled by the blind faith of devout pilgrims from around the world congregating on a remote island monastery in Ireland--the last spot on earth where Catholic traditions are defiantly alive. At the behest of the Vatican, Father James Kinsella has been dispatched to Muck Abbey with an ultimatum: Adhere to the new church or suffer the consequences.

But in Abbot Tomás O'Malley, Kinsella finds less an adversary than a man of bewildering contradictions--unyieldingly bound to his vows, yet long-questioning his devotion to God. Now, between Kinsella and O'Malley comes an unexpected challenge that will reveal their truths, their purpose, their faith, and their doubt.

Jirel of Joiry, the first of the great female warriors, the beautiful commander of the strongest fortress in the kingdom, would face any danger to defend her beloved country. She wielded her bright sword against mighty armies, the sinister magic of evil sorcerers and fearsome castles guarded by the dead, even daring to descend into Hell itself...

Northwest Smith, the scarred and weathered outlaw, the legendary hero of the spaceways, forced to confront the terrible mysteries, the terrifying, mythic monsters of the universe...

Jirel of Joiry and Northwest Smith are C.L. Moore's greatest creations and she used them not only to spin spellbinding tales but also to explore the mysteries of the human psyche.

This is the omnibus edition of the collections Jirel of Joiry (aka Black Gods) and Scarlet Dream (aka Northwest Smith).

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?

During World War II, four bitter enemies are pulled forward a billion years in time by a master being from an alien galaxy. They arrive on a dying Earth--to Carcasilla, Earth's last citadel--where the mutated remnants of humanity are making their final stand against the monstrous creations of a fading world.

Thrust in the middle of this desperate struggle for survival, the last humans must put aside their differences and stop the looming Armageddon.

This novelette originally appeared in the collection No Boundaries (1955). It can also be found in the anthologies S-F: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy (1956), edited by Judith Merril, and Asleep in Armageddon (1962), edited by Michael Sissons.

The fierce, proud, and relentless commander of warriors, standing tall above her enemies and simmering with rage, Jirel bids farewell to the world of treacherous men and walks through a forbidden door into Hell itself in pursuit of freedom, justice, and revenge.

Table of Contents:

• Jirel Meets Magic (1935) - novelette
• Black God's Kiss (1934) - novelette
• Black God's Shadow (1934) - novelette
• The Dark Land (1936) - novelette
• Hellsgarde (1939) - novelette

The original book publication of Judgement Night was issued by Gnome Press, which included four shorter works in addition to the novel. Subsequent publications of Judgement Night did not always include these shorter works.

Table of Contents:

• Judgment Night - (1952) - novel
• Paradise Street - (1950) - novella
• Promised Land - (1950) - novelette
• The Code - (1945) - novelette
• Heir Apparent - (1950) - novelette

Here is an anthology that explores the furthest reaches of imagination and the closest areas of emotion with power and with humour and with a sense of human purpose. This is Kuttner and Moore at their best.

Table of Contents:

• Vintage Season - (1946) - novelette
• The Devil We Know - (1941) - novelette
• Home There's No Returning - novelette
• Exit the Professor - (1947) - short story
• Two-Handed Engine - (1955) - novelette
• About the Authors - essay by uncredited

From on high of Mount Olympus comes an adventure in mythology, penned by a Hugo-nominated master of the genre.

Jay Seward remembered a former life in a land of magic, gods, and goddesses--a time when he was Jason of Iolcus, sailing in the enchanted ship Argo to steal the Golden Fleece from the serpent-temples of Apollo. But one night the memories became startlingly real, as the Argo itself sailed out of the spectral mists and a hauntingly beautiful voice called: "Jason... come to me!" And suddenly he was on the deck of the Argo, sailing into danger and magic.

Two-Handed Engine is the largest collection of science fiction and fantasy by Henry Kuttner & C.L. Moore ever published. It features a frontispiece by Richard Powers, and an introduction by the book's editor, David Curtis.

The stories, ranging from across their entire career, include: Shambleau, The Graveyard Rats, Mimsy Were the Borogoves, Vintage Season, Private Eye, and more.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (Two-Handed Engine) - (2005) - essay by David Curtis
• Shambleau - (1933) - novelette by C. L. Moore
• The Graveyard Rats - (1936) - shortstory by Henry Kuttner
• A Gnome There Was - (1941) - novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Henry Kuttner]
• The Twonky - (1942) - novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]
• Compliments of the Author - (1942) - novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]
• Mimsy Were the Borogoves - (1943) - novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]
• Shock - (1943) - novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]
• Reader, I Hate You! - (1943) - shortstory by Henry Kuttner
• The World Is Mine - (1943) - novelette by Henry Kuttner [as by Lewis Padgett]
• When the Bough Breaks - (1944) - novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]
• The Cure - (1946) - shortstory by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]
• The Code - (1945) - novelette by C. L. Moore [as by Lawrence O'Donnell]
• Line to Tomorrow - (1945) - shortstory by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]
• Clash by Night - (1943) - novella by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lawrence O'Donnell]
• Ghost - (1943) - shortstory by Henry Kuttner
• The Proud Robot - (1943) - novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]
• Nothing But Gingerbread Left - (1943) - shortstory by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Henry Kuttner]
• No Woman Born - (1944) - novelette by C. L. Moore
• Housing Problem - (1944) - shortstory by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Henry Kuttner]
• What You Need - (1945) - shortstory by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]
• Absalom - (1946) - shortstory by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Henry Kuttner]
• Call Him Demon - (1946) - novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Keith Hammond]
• Daemon - (1946) - shortstory by C. L. Moore
• Vintage Season - (1946) - novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lawrence O'Donnell]
• Dark Angel - (1946) - novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (variant of The Dark Angel) [as by Henry Kuttner]
• Before I Wake - (1945) - shortstory by Henry Kuttner (variant of Before I Wake...)
• Exit the Professor - [Hogben - 2] - (1947) - shortstory by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Henry Kuttner]
• The Big Night - (1947) - novelette by Henry Kuttner [as by Hudson Hastings]
• A Wild Surmise - (1953) - shortstory by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore
• Don't Look Now - (1948) - shortstory by Henry Kuttner
• Private Eye - (1949) - novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]
• By These Presents - (1953) - shortstory by Henry Kuttner
• Home Is the Hunter - (1953) - shortstory by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore
• Or Else - (1953) - shortstory by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Henry Kuttner]
• Year Day - (1953) - shortstory by Henry Kuttner
• A Cross of Centuries - (1958) - shortstory by Henry Kuttner
• Two-Handed Engine - (1955) - novelette by C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner

Arlene is a fiercely independent old woman who rescues cats and dogs: she spends her social security money on decent pet food and forages in trash cans for her own dinner. One day she hears a kittenish wail and finds, on a high windowsill, the ugliest kitten she's ever seen: huge ears, tiny eyes, practically no nose... luckily he has splendidly silky fur. He's also very smart. And rather special. And because Arlene knows what happens to special kitties, she makes the right call.

Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October-November 2001. The story can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 7 (2002), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. It is included in the collections The Cat's Pajamas & Other Stories (2004) and Reality by Other Means: The Best Short Fiction of James Morrow (2015).

Terminal baptism, erotic performance art, and voodoo economics with actual voodoo.

An integrity gene is harvested from the brain of an unwilling schoolteacher. Christopher Columbus lands in modern-day Manhattan. John Wayne seeks treatment from a cinematic oncologist. Sports fans save the universe every day.

The Cat's Pajamas is a provocative collection of satiric short fiction from Nebula and World Fantasy award-winning author James Morrow. Included is "Auspicious Eggs," in which ritual procreation and compulsory abortion are mandated by the Catholic Church. Two original pieces were written specifically for The Cat's Pajamas: the play "Come Back, Dr. Sarcophagus," and the short story "Fucking Justice."

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Good Morrow to Our Waking Souls - (2004) - essay by Terry Bisson
• The War of the Worldviews - (2002) - shortstory
• The Wisdom of the Skin - (2002) - shortstory
• Martyrs of the Upshot Knothole - (2004) - shortstory
• Come Back, Dr. Sarcophagus - (2004) - shortstory
• The Fate of Nations - (2003) - shortstory
• The Eye That Never Blinks - (1988) - shortstory
• Director's Cut - (1994) - shortstory
• Auspicious Eggs - (2000) - novelette
• Apologue - (2001) - shortstory
• Fucking Justice - (2004) - shortstory
• Isabella of Castile Answers Her Mail - (1992) - shortstory
• The Zombies of Montrose - (2004) - shortstory
• The Cat's Pajamas - (2001) - novelette

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, June 1958. There are no other known publications available at this time.

There is a door in an artist's garden: an elaborate carved passageway into a realm ruled by a dark sorceress queen. There entities strange and wondrous roam the Netherworld--yet none as astonishing as the shape-shifting Catswold...

Raised by the oldwitch Mag, Melissa discovers a perilous secret. She has more than one form--human girl and magical cat--and once inhabited two worlds. And it is her destiny to return to a mystic realm of wonder and terror, to do battle for her people's liberation and the crown that is rightfully hers.

A man beset by tragedy, painter Braden West is intrigued by the calico cat who has charmed her way into his studio. But his "guest" is more than she seems, and Braden's very existence will be radically altered as he follows Melissa from the Hell Pit into the dread perils of an evil ruling court, thrust into the heart of a magical conflict with more at stake than he could possibly have imagined.

Bookish high school student Rintaro Natsuki is about to close the secondhand bookstore he inherited from his beloved bookworm grandfather. Then, a talking cat appears with an unusual request. The feline asks for--or rather, demands--the teenager's help in saving books with him. The world is full of lonely books left unread and unloved, and the cat and Rintaro must liberate them from their neglectful owners.

Their mission sends this odd couple on an amazing journey, where they enter different mazes to set books free. Through their travels, the cat and Rintaro meet a man who leaves his books to perish on a bookshelf, an unwitting book torturer who cuts the pages of books into snippets to help people speed read, and a publishing drone who only wants to create bestsellers. Their adventures culminate in one final, unforgettable challenge--the last maze that awaits leads Rintaro down a realm only the bravest dare enter...

When Kevin Taylor joins the Manhattan criminal law firm of John Milton & Associates, he's hit the big time. At last, he and his wife can enjoy the luxuries they've so desired -- money, a chauffeur-driven limo, and a stunning home in a high-rise. Then Milton assigns Kevin one of the most notorious cases of the year, with a file that had been put together prior to the crime. Throwing himself into his work, Kevin begins to see a pattern of evil emerging from behind the firm's plush facade. Acquittal after acquittal, every criminal client walks free, and Kevin's suspicions slowly give way to terror. For Kevin has just become The Devil's Advocate.

Another dazzling collection of fact, fiction, and wit from the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning master of hard science fiction!

Larry Niven is the New York Times bestselling author of such classic science fiction novels as Ringworld and Destiny's Road. His previous collection, N-Space, was lauded by the Houston Post as "outstanding... hours of entertainment," while Publishers Weekly called it "a must for science fiction fans." A follow-up volume, Playgrounds of the Mind, was similarly praised by Kirkus Reviews: "An abundance of Niven's curious yet disciplined inventiveness and his fun-filled knack for turning seemingly absurd notions into credible, absorbing fiction. Grand entertainment."

Now, ten years later, Scatterbrain collects an equally engaging assortment of Niven's latest work, all in one captivating volume. Here are choice excerpts from several of his most recent novels, including his upcoming Ringworld's Child and Rainbow Mars, as well as numerous short stories, nonfiction articles, interviews, editorials, collaborations, and correspondence. True to its title, Scatterbrain roams all over a wide variety of fascinating topics, featuring Niven's singular insights into everything from space stations to convention etiquette.

So give yourself a treat, and feel free to pick the brain-or Scatterbrain-of one of modern science fiction's most fascinating thinkers.

Table of Contents:

• Autograph Etiquette - (2003) - essay
• Canon for the Man-Kzin Wars - (2003) - essay
• Collaboration - (1984) - essay
• Destiny's Road: Excerpted from Novel - (2003) - shortfiction
• Did the Moon Move for You Too? - (2003) - essay
• Discussion with Brenda Cooper Re: "Ice and Mirrors" - (2003) - essay
• Epilogue: What I Tell Librarians - (2003) - essay
• Handicap - (2003) - essay
• How to Save Civilization and Save a Little Money - (2003) - essay
• Hugo Award Anecdotes - (2003) - essay
• Ice and Mirrors: Collaboration with Brenda Cooper (excerpt) - (2003) - shortfiction with Brenda Cooper
• Intercon Trip Report - (2003) - essay
• Introduction to Pete Hamilton Story "Watching Trees Grow" - (2003) - essay
• Introduction: Where Do I Get My Crazy Ideas? - (2003) - essay
• Introductory Material for Man-Kzin Wars II - (2003) - essay
• Learning to Love the Space Station - (2003) - essay
• Loki - (2000) - shortstory
• Mars: Who Needs It? - (2003) - essay
• Procrustes - (1993) - novella
• Ringworld's Children (excerpt) - shortfiction
• Saturn's Race (Excerpt) - (2003) - shortfiction with Steven Barnes
• Saturn's Race: Collaboration with Steven Barnes - (2003) - essay
• Smut Talk: A Draco Tavern Story - [Draco Tavern] - (2003) - shortstory (variant of Smut Talk 2000)
• Tabletop Fusion - (1993) - essay
• Telepresence - (2003) - essay with Marvin Minsky
• The Burning City: Collaboration with Jerry Pournelle (Excerpt) - (2003) - shortfiction with Jerry Pournelle
• The Ringworld Throne: Excerpted from Novel - (2003) - shortfiction
• The Woman in Del Rey Crater - (1995) - novelette

A Soviet political prisoner is ordered to use her unique talents to explore a strange scientific phenomenon. It could be a trap... or a way out.

Read the full story for free at Tor Reactor.

1915

Following a horrific experience at Verdun, Private Tommy Catkins - shell-shocked and suffering head injuries - is sent to a mysterious island hospital in Wiltshire, where he is subjected to the primitive treatments of the era.

But the island appears to be a portal to the enigmatic land of Onderwater, where lives a race of blue-skinned people with tails.

Will Tommy be tempted by Onderwater, or will the love of Nurse Vann pull him back to reality, and recovery?

SARENA

All of the creatures in the Canyon feared her, for none could stand against a determined puma on the hunt. All, that is, but Lanakila the eagle. Lanakila was master of the skies as Sarena was of the earth. They befriended one another, for each knew the pain of loneliness. Both had searched for their entire lives in hopes of finding another of their kind.

Yet even as Sarena found true friendship for the first time, both puma and eagle realized they might soon lose not only this new companionship but their lives. Each had received dream warnings from the animal gods, warnings of invaders in the Canyon -- and soon the hunting would begin. Even now the killers were scenting Sarena's trail. And if the four-legged murderers failed, puma and eagle would still face pursuit by the deadliest predators of all -- those who stalked on two legs and held the power of thunder in their hands.

A breakthrough in quantum physics has shattered the boundaries between alternate worlds. History is in chaos as billions of possible futures collide.

As a conquering army mounts an invasion of neighoboring realities, a handful of men and women from a dozen different timelines risk their lives to safeguard an infinity of worlds.

Blending thrilling suspense with brilliant scientific speculation, Frederik Pohl's THE COMING OF THE QUANTUM CATS is a triumph of the imagination by a Hugo and Nebula winning master of science fiction.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, September 2010. It can also be found in the anthologies Lightspeed: Year One (2011), edited by John Joseph Adams and War & Space: Recent Combat (2012), edited by Rich Horton and Sean Wallace. The story is included in the collection Near + Far (2012).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed." – First Corinthians 15:52

From New York Times bestselling author, Harry Turtledove, critically-acclaimed novelist, James Morrow, and Nebula Award finalist, Cat Rambo, comes a masterful anthology of three sensational novellas depicting a dark fictional future of the United States.

And the Last Trump Shall Sound is a prophetic warning about where we, as a nation, may be headed. Mike Pence is President of the United States after years of divisive, dogmatic control by Donald Trump. The country is in turmoil as the Republicans have strengthened their stronghold on Congress, increasing their dominance. And with the support of the Supreme Court, more conservative than ever, State governments become more marginalized by the authoritarian rule of the Federal government.

There are those who cannot abide by what they view as a betrayal of the nation's founding principles. Once united communities break down and the unthinkable suddenly becomes the only possible solution: the end of the Union.

The authors' depiction of a country that is both unfamiliar and yet unnervingly all too realistic, make you realize the frightening possible consequences of our increased polarization?a dire warning to all of us of where we may be headed unless we can learn to come together again.

Contents

• The Breaking of Nations by Harry Turtledove - novella
• The Purloined Republic by James Morrow - novella
• Because It Is Bitter by Cat Rambo - novella

Nebula Award-nominated Novelette

What do you do when someone else's past forces itself on your own life? Sorting through the piles left behind by a grandmother who was both a stage magician and a hoarder, Persephone Aim finds a magical artifact from World War II that has shaped her family history. Faced with her mother's desperate attempt to take the artifact for herself, Persephone must decide whether to hold onto the past--or use it to reshape her future.

Desiree feels the most at home with her clockwork creations, but Claude worries about all this science and Darwinist nonsense--after all, where do clockwork fairies fall in the Great Chain of Being?

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Small Press newcomer, Paper Golem, debuts the first in a annual series of single author collections by brilliant new authors.

EYES LIKE SKY AND COAL AND MOONLIGHT brings together twenty stories from the extraordinary talent of fantasy author Cat Rambo. Here are tales from seaport city of Tabat, both before and after the sorcerous wars that destroyed the Old Continent. Here are alchemical explanations for failed blind dates. Here you'll find a dryad, the last great elephant, and an uneasy blur of humanity.

Cat Rambo doesn't simply amaze and delight, she restores wonder to her readers with every page. You won't simply believe that pigs can fly, you'll question why you ever doubted the premise at all.

Table of Contents:

• Eight Letters of Wonder - essay by Michael Livingston
• Her Eyes Like Sky, and Coal, and Moonlight - short story
• The Accordion - short fiction
• I'll Gnaw Your Bones, the Manticore Said - [Tabat Short Fiction] - (2007) - short story
• Heart in a Box - short story
• In the Lesser Southern Isles - [Tabat Short Fiction] - short story
• Up the Chimney - (2008) - short story
• The Silent Familiar - short story
• Events at Fort Plentitude - [Tabat Short Fiction] - (2008) - short story
• Dew Drop Coffee Lounge - short story (variant of The Dew Drop Coffee Lounge 2008)
• Narrative of a Beast's Life - [Tabat Short Fiction] - short story
• Eagle-Haunted Lake Sammamish - (2007) - short story
• Sugar - [Tabat Short Fiction] - (2007) - short story
• A Key Decides Its Destiny - [Tabat Short Fiction] - (2007) - short story
• The Towering Monarch of His Mighty Race - (2007) - short story
• In Order to Conserve - (2009) - short story
• Rare Pears and Greengages - [Altered America] - short story
• A Twine of Flame - [Tabat Short Fiction] - short story
• The Dead Girl's Wedding March - [Tabat Short Fiction] - (2006) - short story
• Worm Within - (2008) - short story
• Magnificent Pigs - (2006) - short story

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appaered in the collection Near + Far (2012) and can also be found in the Nebula Awards Showcase 2014, edited by Kij Johnson.

Read the full story for free at the author's website.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, February 2011. The story can also be found in the anthology Lightspeed: Year One (2011), edited by John Joseph Adams. It is included in the collection Near + Far (2012).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Cat Rambo's newest collection of fantasy fiction contains both work original to the collection as well as work from Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Tor.com, and other leading fantasy fiction magazines. The work is presented in the same double-sided format as Rambo's previous collection, Near + Far, of which Don Sakers of Asimov's said, "If you want some really excellent stories, get the e-book. If you also want a physical object to warm the heart of any print-book collector, go for the paper version."

Neither Here showcases alt-world fantasy, including stories set in Tabat, the world of her first novel Beasts of Tabat, while Nor There features stories set in our own world, including "The Wizards of West Seattle," original to the collection. In their starred review, Publishers Weekly said, "This double collection showcases Rambo's versatility within the fantasy genre. Find out Ursula Vernon called Rambo "one of the brightest talents in the field," Jodi Lynn Nye said, "Rambo has a gift for immersing her reader into a vivid universe full of adventure, sensuality, wit, and poignant observation," and NY Times bestselling author Kevin J. Anderson simply advised, "Cat Rambo is endlessly innovative, ingenious, and just plain entertaining. Read her stories."

Table of Contents:

• Neither Here Nor There - interior artwork by Mark W. Tripp
• Love, Resurrected - [Tabat Short Fiction] - (2011) - short story
• The Toad's Jewel - (2013) - short fiction
• The Mage's Gift - [Serendib] - (2016) - short story
• Pippa's Smiles - (2011) - short story
• Karaluvian Fale - (2011) - novelette
• The Subtler Art - [Serendib] - (2015) - short story
• How Dogs Came to the New Continent - [Tabat Short Fiction] - (2014) - short fiction
• Love's Footsteps - (2013) - short story
• To Read the Sea - (2013) - short fiction
• A Brooch of Bone, a Hint of Tooth - (2013) - short fiction
• Call and Answer, Plant and Harvest - [Serendib] - (2016) - short story
• Clockwork Fairies - [Altered America] - (2010) - short story
• Her Windowed Eyes, Her Chambered Heart - [Altered America] - (2014) - short fiction
• The Coffeemaker's Passion - (2011) - short story
• Elections at Villa Encantada - (2014) - short story
• Seven Clockwork Angels, All Dancing on a Pin - [Altered America] - (2016) - short story
• Coyote Barbie - (2010) - short story
• The Wizards of West Seattle - (2016) - short fiction
• Summer Night in Durham - (2014) - short story
• Web of Blood and Iron - [Altered America] - (2016) - short story
• So Glad We Had This Time Together - (2012) - short story
• Snakes on a Train - [Altered America] - (2015) - short fiction
• The Passing of Grandmother's Quilt - (2013) - short story

This short story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March-April 2016. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017, edited by Rich Horton.

Lisen to or read the full story for free at EscapePod.

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, November 2009. It can also be found in the anthologies Clarkesworld: Year Four (2013), edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace, and Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep (2015), edited by Paula Guran. The story is included in the collection Near + Far: Stories of the Near Future and the Far (2012).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

The evolution of crime, punishment, and justice in the future.

What happens when time and technology change the definition of crime and punishment?

Science fiction often focuses on future technology without considering the society housing it. Social norms may change as tech changes -- or not. What will criminals, investigators, judges, and juries look like in a complicated future of clones, uploaded intelligences, artificial brains, or body augmentation? What stories emerge when we acknowledge the possibilities of new laws, new police methods, and the birth of sentient Artificial Intelligence, as well as all the ways they can clash or combine?

The Reinvented Detective presents stories that complicate law and order as well as the concept of criminals, detectives, punishment, and justice for all by showing how shifting technology, the rise of sentient AIs, and shifting social attitudes may affect what is not only acceptable, but expected, within both real world and digital communities--and everything in-between. These stories reinvent detective and true crime tropes, recasting them for the 21st century, and above all, experimenting, astonishing, and entertaining.

In a world where magic is fading and science begun to ascend, a young surgeon in medical school experiences an obsession so forbidden that its realization will change him forever. "She looked as if she were asleep, still with that slight smile, floating on the thick sargassum, glowing from the emerald tincture that would keep the small crabs and other scavengers from her. She looked otherworldly and beautiful." Sometimes life is not enough. Also including five more stories of dark wonder from Rambo and VanderMeer, from "The Dead Girl's Wedding March" to "The Farmer's Cat." Enter a world of rat suitors, severed arms, and Fungi Et Fruits de Mer, served up with prose both appetizing and uncanny. Dark fantasy has never been quite so decadent...

Table of Contents:

• The Surgeon's Tale - (2007) - novella by Jeff VanderMeer and Cat Rambo
• The Dead Girl's Wedding March - (2006) - short story by Cat Rambo
• The Farmer's Cat - (2005) - short story by Jeff VanderMeer
• A Key Decides Its Destiny - (2007) - short story by Cat Rambo
• Three Sons - (2001) - short story by Cat Rambo
• The Strange Case of the Lovecraft Cafe - (2004) - novelette by Jeff VanderMeer, D. F. Lewis and M. F. Korn

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #89 February 2014. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, edited by Joe Hill and John Joseph Adams, and Clarkesworld: Year Eight (2016), edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #56 May 2011. It can also be found in the anthology Clarkesworld: Year Five (2013), edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, September 2008. It can also be found in the anthology Realms 2: The Second Year of Clarkesworld Magazine (2010), edited by Nick Mamatas and Sean Wallace. The story is included in the collection Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight (2009).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld

On the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein, comes a riveting biography of its author, Mary Shelley, whose life reads like a dark gothic novel, filled with scandal, death, drama, and one of the strangest love stories in literary history.

The story of Frankenstein's creator is a strange, romantic, and tragic one, as deeply compelling as the novel itself. Mary ran away to Lake Geneva with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when she was just sixteen. It was there, during a cold and wet summer, that she first imagined her story about a mad scientist who brought a corpse back to life. Success soon followed for Mary, but also great tragedy and misfortune.

Catherine Reef brings this passionate woman, brilliant writer, and forgotten feminist into crisp focus, detailing a life that was remarkable both before and after the publication of her iconic masterpiece. Includes index.

Hugo Award winning and Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, February 2004. The story can also be found in the anthology Nebula Awards Showcase 2006, edited by Gardner Dozois and the collections New Dreams for Old (2006) and Win Some, Lose Some (2012).

Listen to the story at Escape Pod.

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

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

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

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

Like many other stories and novels by Rudy Rucker, "Jack and the Aktuals" is a wild and wooly dramatization of certain principles of higher mathematics, with added talking animals, sentient pencils, and orders-of-infinity nested within one another like Russian dolls. No description can ever encompass the mind-bending experience of reading a Rudy Rucker story.

Among Rudy Rucker's many novels are the Ware tetralogy (Software, Wetware, Freeware, and Realware); White Light, Spacetime Donuts, Mathematicians in Love, and Postsingular. His nonfiction includes such works as Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension and The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning Of Life, and How To Be Happy. He is the great-great-great grandson of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Contents:

• The Zanzibar Cat - interior artwork by Dennis Neal Smith
• Foreword (The Zanzibar Cat) - essay by Marge Piercy
• When It Changed - (1972) - shortstory
• The Extraordinary Voyages of Amélie Bertrand - (1979) - shortstory
• The Soul of a Servant - (1973) - shortstory
• Gleepsite - (1971) - shortstory
• Nobody's Home - (1972) - shortstory
• My Dear Emily - (1962) - shortstory
• The New Men - (1966) - shortstory
• My Boat - (1976) - shortstory
• Useful Phrases for the Tourist - (1972) - shortstory
• Corruption - (1976) - shortstory
• There Is Another Shore, You Know, Upon the Other Side - (1963) - shortstory
• A Game of Vlet - (1974) - shortstory
• How Dorothy Kept Away the Spring - (1977) - shortstory
• Poor Man, Beggar Man - (1971) - novelette
• Old Thoughts, Old Presences - (1975) - shortstory
• The Zanzibar Cat - (1971) - shortstory

This short story originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, July-August 2012. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 18 (2013), edited by David G. Hartwell.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers (1998), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, December 2014. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Twelfth Annual Collection (1999), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, So Fey: Queer Fairy Fiction (2007), edited by Steve Berman, and Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction (2012), edited by Brit Mandelo.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November-December 2012. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 18 (2013), edited by David G. Hartwell.

Table of Contents:

• 7 - Introduction: Seasons of the Witch - essay by Susan Shwartz
• 13 - Boris Chernevsky's Hands - short story by Jane Yolen
• 22 - Mirage and Magia - short story by Tanith Lee
• 40 - Willow - novelette by C. J. Cherryh
• 62 - Moon Mirror - short story by Andre Norton
• 76 - The Sage of Theare - juvenile - [Chrestomanci] - novelette by Diana Wynne Jones
• 102 - The Harmonious Battle - short story by Jessica Amanda Salmonson
• 118 - Science Is Magic Spelled Backwards - short story by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
• 135 - An Act of Faith - novelette by Galad Elflandsson
• 156 - Witch Fulfillment - short story by Jean Lorrah
• 173 - Ishigbi - [Nyumbani Universe] - short story by Charles R. Saunders
• 190 - Bethane - [Deryni Universe] - short story by Katherine Kurtz
• 207 - The Riddle of Hekaitë - [Shanna of Sharteyn] - short story by Diana L. Paxson
• 223 - Reunion - novelette by Jayge Carr
• 252 - Selected Bibliography (Hecate's Cauldron) - essay by Susan Shwartz

Hugo Award nominated story. It originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, June 1959. There are no known reprints but the copyright to the story has expired and it is freely available on sites like Project Guthenberg.

"A nonchalant string of anecdotes and wisecracks, told by a fellow who doesn't have a name, and has never caught a mouse, and isn't much good for anything except watching human beings in action..." -- The New Yorker

Written over the course of 1904-1906, Soseki Natsume's comic masterpiece, I Am a Cat, satirizes the foolishness of upper-middle-class Japanese society during the Meiji era. With acerbic wit and sardonic perspective, it follows the whimsical adventures of a world-weary stray kitten who comments on the follies and foibles of the people around him.

A classic of Japanese literature, I Am a Cat is one of Soseki's best-known novels. Considered by many as the greatest writer in modern Japanese history, Soseki's I Am a Cat is a classic novel sure to be enjoyed for years to come.

A murderer discovers his true nature from a talking infant, a samurai is frustrated in his attempts to meditate, and a dying man bestows his hat on a friend in these surrealistic short stories. The dream-like, open-ended tales by the father of Japanese modernist literature offer thought-provoking reflections on fear, death, and loneliness. Their settings range from the Meiji period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the era in which the tales were written, to the prehistoric Age of the Gods; the twelfth-century Kamakura period, in which the samurai class emerged; and the remote future.

A scholar of British literature, author Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) was also a composer of haiku, kanshi, and fairy tales. The stories of Ten Nights Dreaming, which were originally published as a newspaper serial, constitute milestones of Japanese fantasy. Like Soseki's other writings, they have had a profound effect on readers, writers, and filmmakers. This edition features an expert new English translation by Matt Treyvaud, who has translated the story "The Cat's Grave" for this work as well.

Ditmar Award winning short story. It originally appeared in the anthology Sprawl (2010), edited by Alisa Krasnostein. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 16 (2011), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection The Bride Price (2013).

Ditmar Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Lightspeed, March 2015. It can also be found in the anthology Loosed Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction (2015), edited by John Joseph Adams.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Powerful war machines of the far-future collide across a barren desert world in this post-apocalyptic debut novel from award-winning Australian author Cat Sparks.

Seventeen-year-old Star and her sister Nene are orphans, part of a thirteen-wagon caravan of nomadic traders living hard lives travelling the Sand Road. Their route cuts through a particularly dangerous and unforgiving section of the Dead Red Heart, a war-ravaged desert landscape plagued by rogue semi-sentient machinery and other monsters from a bygone age.

But when the caravan witnesses a relic-Angel satellite unexpectedly crash to Earth, a chain of events begins that sends Star on a journey far away from the life she once knew. Shanghaied upon the sandship Dogwatch, she is forced to cross the Obsidian Sea by Quarrel, an ancient Templar supersoldier. Eventually shipwrecked, Star will have no choice but to place her trust in both thieves and priestesses while coming to terms with the grim reality of her past--and the horror of her unfolding destiny--as the terrible secret her sister had been desperate to protect her from begins to unravel.

Meanwhile, something old and powerful has woken in the desert. A Lotus Blue, deadliest of all the ancient war machines. A warrior with plans of its own, far more significant than a fallen Angel. Plans that do not include the survival of humanity.

WFA winning novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology The Horror Writers Association Presents The Museum of Horrors (2001), edited by Dennis Etchison. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Fifteenth Annual Collection (2002), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and The Apex Book of World SF 1 (2009), edited by Lavie Tidhar. It is included in the collections Opus 50 (2008) and the 2002 and 2013 editions of Dragon's Fin Soup.

Read the full story for free at the author's website.

The master of literary science fiction returns with this dazzling new collection. Michael Swanwick takes us on a whirlwind journey across the globe and across time and space, where magic and science exist in possibilities that are not of this world. These tales are intimate in their telling, galactic in their scope, and delightfully sesquipedalian in their verbiage.

Join the caravan through Swanwick's worlds and into the playground of his mind. Travel from Norway to Russia and America to Gehenna. Discover a calculus problem that rocks the ages and robots who both nurture and kill. Meet a magical horse who protects the innocent, a semi-repentant troll, a savvy teenager who takes on the Devil, and time travelers from the Mesozoic who party till the end of time...

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Michael Swanwick
• Steadfast Castle
• The Man in Grey
• The Dala Horse
• The Woman Who Shook the World-Tree
• Of Finest Scarlet Was Her Gown
• 3 A.M. in the Mesozoic Bar
• Passage of Earth
• From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled...
• For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I'll Not Be Back Again
• Libertarian Russia
• The Scarecrow's Boy
• The She-Wolf's Hidden Grin
• Goblin Lake
• Pushkin the American
• An Empty House with Many Doors
• Tawny Petticoats
• The House of Dreams

Even death is no match for a trio of elderly, stubborn, ever-sparring sisters, who refuse to rest in peace while their grudges live on...

Originally published at Tor Reactor Mag on 10 January 2024, read it for free at Tor.com

A wild, pulpy ride through 1944 Italy--packed with killing Nazis, kissing boys and an ancient snake goddess.

Let the Mountains Be My Grave unfolds at breakneck pace in 1944 Italy, where partisan Veleno thinks of nothing but killing as many Nazis as he can before leaving this world. Beloved by the ancient Italic goddess Angitia, Veleno is the perfect person to recover a strange weapon the Nazis are planning to use against the Allies in the battle of Montecassino, but doing so may force him to confront his death differently than he expects.

They are cool to the touch and alluringly beautiful in their ageless youth. Their laughter seduces, their brilliance beguiles. They guard the secrets of science and history, and the answers to the mysteries of life and death lie within their vastly superior knowledge. In centuries past, they were known as the Illuminati. They are the vampire.

Dr. John Gladstone, a scientist in Victorian London, is thrust into their world after his carriage runs over a young man of angelic beauty named Niccolo. When Niccolo kidnaps Gladstone's child and vanishes, the doctor must go in pursuit, with the help of his daughter, Ursula, who is enticed by the lure of eternal life, and Lady Hespeth, whose demure exterior hides a dangerous obsession. Why are the vampires taking children, and what is the connection to Gladstone's experiments with a deadly virus? And how can he possibly prevail against a race of immortal beings with power and intelligence infinitely beyond his own?

In the Cave of the Delicate Singers by Lucy Taylor is a horror story about a woman with a rare form of synesthesia who can feel sound waves and the dangerous rescue mission she undertakes in a cave with a nasty past.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Catherine House is a school of higher learning like no other. Hidden deep in the woods of rural Pennsylvania, this crucible of reformist liberal arts study with its experimental curriculum, wildly selective admissions policy, and formidable endowment, has produced some of the world's best minds: prize-winning authors, artists, inventors, Supreme Court justices, presidents. For those lucky few selected, tuition, room, and board are free. But acceptance comes with a price. Students are required to give the House three years--summers included--completely removed from the outside world. Family, friends, television, music, even their clothing must be left behind. In return, the school promises its graduates a future of sublime power and prestige, and that they can become anything or anyone they desire.

Among this year's incoming class is Ines, who expects to trade blurry nights of parties, pills, cruel friends, and dangerous men for rigorous intellectual discipline--only to discover an environment of sanctioned revelry. The school's enigmatic director, Viktória, encourages the students to explore, to expand their minds, to find themselves and their place within the formidable black iron gates of Catherine.

For Ines, Catherine is the closest thing to a home she's ever had, and her serious, timid roommate, Baby, soon becomes an unlikely friend. Yet the House's strange protocols make this refuge, with its worn velvet and weathered leather, feel increasingly like a gilded prison. And when Baby's obsessive desire for acceptance ends in tragedy, Ines begins to suspect that the school--in all its shabby splendor, hallowed history, advanced theories, and controlled decadence--might be hiding a dangerous agenda that is connected to a secretive, tightly knit group of students selected to study its most promising and mysterious curriculum.

Sturgeon Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #74 November 2012. The story can also be found in the anthology Clarkesworld: Year Seven (2015), edited by Sean Wallace and Neil Clarke.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, August 2014.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, July 2017.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Step right up! Come one, come all, to Jackson's Unreal Circus and Mobile Marmalade. The steam train may look older than your great-grandmother's china, but within her metal corridors are destinations you have only ever dreamed. They're real, friends, each and every one--and yours for the taking.

Witness Rabi, Vanquisher and Vanisher Extraordinaire, who can make coins and the past vanish before your very eyes. Dare to visit the Beauty and the Beast, our conjoined twins who are terrible and tortured by turns. Sample Beth's marmalade, the sticky sweetness containing the very memory of the day you turned sixteen, and your beloved's lips touched yours once and never again.It's worth the price, traveler. Jackson's Unreal Circus is where you can be whoever or whatever you want. Whether it be a ride on the Ferris wheel, slipping inside a skin that is not your own, or the opportunity to live as you never have before--it is all possible on this, the grandest of tours. The train beckons you--come, come!

For the first time, E. Catherine Tobler has compiled a collection of her popular circus stories. With nine stories ranging from the first publishing within this universe to a previously unpublished piece, this is your ticket to her magical world. Welcome to The Grand Tour.

Contains the following destinations:
"Vanishing Act"
"Artificial Nocturne"
"We, As One, Trailing Embers"
"Liminal"
"Blow the Moon Out"
"Ebb Stung by the Flow"
"Lady Marmalade"
"Every Season" (original to this collection)
"Inland Territory; Stray Italian Greyhound"

Fifteen-year-old Jackson is different from the other children at the foundling hospital. Scales sometimes cover his arms. Tentacles coil just below his skin. Despite this Jackson tries to fit in with the other children. He tries to be normal for Sister Jerome Grace and the priests. But when a woman asks for a boy like him, all that changes. His name is pinned to his jacket and an orphan train whisks him across the country to Macquarie's.

At Macquarie's, Jackson finds a home unlike any he could have imagined. The bronze lions outside the doors eat whomever they deem unfit to enter, the hallways and rooms shift and change at will, and Cressida--the woman who adopted him--assures him he no longer has to hide what he is. But new freedoms hide dark secrets. There are territories, allegiances, and a kraken in the basement that eats shadows.

As Jackson learns more about the new world he's living in and about who he is, he has to decide who he will stand with: Cressida, the woman who gave him a home and a purpose, or Mae, the black-eyed lion tamer with a past as enigmatic as his own. The Kraken Sea is a fast paced adventure full of mystery, Fates, and writhing tentacles just below the surface, and in the middle of it all is a boy searching for himself.

Plagued by the creeping loss of her memory, diplomat Bréone Hemmerli continues to negotiate peace in an increasingly climate-devastated world. The Necessity of Stars brings the alien Tura to Bréone's Normandy garden, a place removed from the world's ruin. Within the garden's shadows, Tura will show Bréone a way forward, even if she can't remember it.

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #69 June 2012. It can also be found in the anthology Clarkesworld: Year Six (2014), edited by Sean Wallace and Neil Clarke.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

For people who both love and hate cats comes the tale of Alec Charlesworth, a librarian who finds himself suddenly alone: he's lost his job, his beloved wife has just died. Overcome by grief, he searches for clues about her disappearance in a file of interviews between a man called "Wiggy" and a cat, Roger. Who speaks to him.

It takes a while for Alec to realize he's not gone mad from grief, that the cat is actually speaking to Wiggy... and that much of what we fear about cats is true. They do think they're smarter than humans, for one thing. And, well, it seems they are! What's more, they do have nine lives. Or at least this one does - Roger's older than Methuselah, and his unblinking stare comes from the fact that he's seen it all.

And he's got a tale to tell, a tale of shocking local history and dark forces that may link not only the death of Alec's wife, but also several other local deaths. But will the cat help Alec, or is he one of the dark forces?

At first Dick refuses to worry about the strange change that has come over his pregnant wife. Miranda - once a happy woman - has become jealous and spiteful.

Dick tries to tell himself that it is only her condition. But when Miranda loses the baby during a mysterious spasm, the change in her personality - and even her looks - is horrifying. For Miranda has assumed the looks and personality of Dick's first wife, an evil, unfaithful woman who drowned several years before - a woman Miranda never met nor even knew existed!

As the change in Miranda becomes complete, Dick is forced to believe the only explanation possible - Miranda's body and soul have been possessed by the spirit of his dead wife...

WFA nominated short story. It originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, May 2008. The story can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best Fantasy 9 (2009), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, Unplugged: The Web's Best Sci-Fi & Fantasy: 2008 Download, (2010), edited by Rich Horton, and Realms 2: The Second Year of Clarkesworld Magazine (2010), edited by Sean Wallace and Nick Mamatas. It is included in the collection Ventriloquism (2010).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Troll's Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales (2009), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Four (2010), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2010, edited by Paula Guran. The story is included in the collection Ventriloquism (2010).

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing (2007), edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, November 2016. It is included in the collection Ventriloquism (2010).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, May 2012.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Locus Award nominated novella.

Sophia was made for him. Her perfect husband. She can feel it in her bones. He is perfect. Their home together in Arcadia Gardens is perfect. Everything is perfect.

It's just that he's away so much. So often. He works so hard. She misses him. And he misses her. He says he does, so it must be true. He is the perfect husband and everything is perfect.

But sometimes Sophia wonders about things. Strange things. Dark things. The look on her husband's face when he comes back from a long business trip. The questions he will not answer. The locked basement she is never allowed to enter. And whenever she asks the neighbors, they can't quite meet her gaze....

But everything is perfect. Isn't it?

Koschei the Deathless is to Russian folklore what devils or wicked witches are to European culture: a menacing, evil figure; the villain of countless stories which have been passed on through story and text for generations. But Koschei has never before been seen through the eyes of Catherynne Valente, whose modernized and transformed take on the legend brings the action to modern times, spanning many of the great developments of Russian history in the twentieth century.

Deathless, however, is no dry, historical tome: it lights up like fire as the young Marya Morevna transforms from a clever child of the revolution, to Koschei's beautiful bride, to his eventual undoing. Along the way there are Stalinist house elves, magical quests, secrecy and bureaucracy, and games of lust and power. All told, Deathless is a collision of magical history and actual history, of revolution and mythology, of love and death, which will bring Russian myth back to life in a stunning new incarnation.

This novelette originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 18, September-October 2017. It is incuded in the collection The Future Is Blue (2018).

Read the full story for free at Uncanny.

Hugo, Nebula and Sidewise award nominated novelette. It was originally published in Clarkesworld Magazine, #71 August 2012. It can be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Seven (2013), edited by Jonathan Strahan and Clarkesworld: Year Six (2014), edited by Neil Clarke, Sean Wallace. The story is collected in The Melancholy of Mechagirl (2013) and The Bread We Eat in Dreams (2013).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Federations (2009), edited by John Joseph Adams, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, January 2018. The story can also be found in the anthology War & Space: Recent Combat (2012), edited by Rich Horton and Sean Wallace. It is included in the collection Ventriloquism (2010).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, August 2010. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 16 (2011), edited by Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell, Lightspeed: Year One (2011), edited by John Joseph Adams, and Twenty-First Century Science Fiction (2013), edited by David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. It is included in the collection Ventriloquism (2010).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

In this provocative and rich retelling of the Greek myth, Orpheus, the musician son of Apollo and Calliope, successfully rescues his wife Eurydice from Hades after her untimely death.

Read the full story for free at Tor Reactor.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology The Future Is Japanese (2012), edited by Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013, edited by Rich Horton. The story is included in the collections The Melancholy of Mechagirl (2013) and The Bread We Eat in Dreams (2013).

The Oracles of the ancient world spoke for the gods, they spoke for the future: but they could not speak for themselves. Here, their voices bubble up from the depths, enraged and sardonic, sorrowing and wild, finding themselves on new ground -- scattered across the American continent, marking a path for the seeker to follow, from New England universities to Hawaiian volcanoes, from dilapidated factories to Chinatown kitchens, from the Old East to the New West...

Osmo Unknown hungers for the world beyond his small town. With the life that Littlebridge society has planned for him, the only taste Osmo will ever get are his visits to the edge of the Fourpenny Woods where his mother hunts. Until the unthinkable happens: his mother accidentally kills a Quidnunk, a fearsome and intelligent creature that lives deep in the forest.

None of this should have anything to do with poor Osmo, except that a strange treaty was once formed between the Quidnunx and the people of Littlebridge to ensure that neither group would harm the other. Now that a Quidnunk is dead, as the firstborn child of the hunter who killed her, Osmo must embark on a quest to find the Eightpenny Woods--the mysterious kingdom where all wild forest creatures go when they die--and make amends.

Accompanied by a very rude half-badger, half-wombat named Bonk and an antisocial pangolin girl called Never, it will take all of Osmo's bravery and cleverness to survive the magic of the Eightpenny Woods to save his town... and make it out alive.

In the Cities of Coin and Spice and In the Night Garden introduced readers to the unique and intoxicating imagination of Catherynne M. Valente. Now she weaves a lyrically erotic spell of a place where the grotesque and the beautiful reside and the passport to our most secret fantasies begins with a stranger's kiss....

Between life and death, dreaming and waking, at the train stop beyond the end of the world is the city of Palimpsest. To get there is a miracle, a mystery, a gift, and a curse-a voyage permitted only to those who've always believed there's another world than the one that meets the eye. Those fated to make the passage are marked forever by a map of that wondrous city tattooed on their flesh after a single orgasmic night. To this kingdom of ghost trains, lion-priests, living kanji, and cream-filled canals come four travelers: Oleg, a New York locksmith; the beekeeper November; Ludovico, a binder of rare books; and a young Japanese woman named Sei. They've each lost something important-a wife, a lover, a sister, a direction in life-and what they will find in Palimpsest is more than they could ever imagine.

This short story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue Four, May-June 2015. It can also be found in the anthology The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, edited by Karen Joy Fowler and John Joseph Adams. It is incuded in the collection The Future Is Blue (2018).

Read the full story for free at Uncanny.

Radiance is a decopunk pulp SF alt-history space opera mystery set in a Hollywood - and solar system - very different from our own.

Severin Unck's father is a famous director of Gothic romances in an alternate 1986 in which talking movies are still a daring innovation due to the patent-hoarding Edison family. Rebelling against her father's films of passion, intrigue, and spirits from beyond, Severin starts making documentaries, traveling through space and investigating the levitator cults of Neptune and the lawless saloons of Mars. For this is not our solar system, but one drawn from classic science fiction in which all the planets are inhabited and we travel through space on beautiful rockets. Severin is a realist in a fantastic universe.

But her latest film, which investigates the disappearance of a diving colony on a watery Venus populated by island-sized alien creatures, will be her last. Though her crew limps home to earth and her story is preserved by the colony's last survivor, Severin will never return.

Radiance is a solar system-spanning story of love, exploration, family, loss, quantum physics, and silent film.

Hugo- and Nebula-nominated Novella

Fantastist Catherynne M. Valente takes on the folklore of artificial intelligence in this brand new, original novella of technology, identity, and an uncertain mechanized future.

Neva is dreaming. But she is not alone. A mysterious machine entity called Elefsis haunts her and the members of her family, back through the generations to her great-great grandmother-a gifted computer programmer who changed the world. Together Neva and Elefsis navigate their history and their future, an uneasy, unwilling symbiote. But what they discover in their dreamworld might change them forever...

Read this story online for free at Clarkesworld: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Hugo- and Nebula-nominated Novella

From New York Times bestselling author Catherynne M. Valente comes a brilliant reinvention of one the best known fairy tales of all time. In the novella Six-Gun Snow White, Valente transports the title's heroine to a masterfully evoked Old West where Coyote is just as likely to be found as the seven dwarves.

A plain-spoken, appealing narrator relates the history of her parents--a Nevada silver baron who forced the Crow people to give up one of their most beautiful daughters, Gun That Sings, in marriage to him. With her mother's death in childbirth, so begins a heroine's tale equal parts heartbreak and strength. This girl has been born into a world with no place for a half-native, half-white child. After being hidden for years, a very wicked stepmother finally gifts her with the name Snow White, referring to the pale skin she will never have. Filled with fascinating glimpses through the fabled looking glass and a close-up look at hard living in the gritty gun-slinging West, readers will be enchanted by this story at once familiar and entirely new.

This novelette originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 11, July-August 2016. It is incuded in the collection The Future Is Blue (2018).

Read the full story for free at Uncanny Magazine.

If you go looking for it, just about halfway uptown and halfway downtown, there's this hotel stuck like a pin all the way through the world. Down inside the Artemisia it's this mortal coil all over. Earthly delights on every floor.

The hotel Artemisia sits on a fantastical 72nd Street, in a decade that never was. It is home to a cast of characters, creatures, and creations unlike any other, including especially Zelda Fair, who is perfect at being Zelda, but who longs for something more. The world of this extraordinary novella--a bootlegger's brew of fairy tales, Jazz Age opulence, and organized crime--is ruled over by the diminutive, eternal, sinister Al. Zelda holds her own against the boss, or so it seems. But when she faces off against him and his besotted employee Frankie in a deadly game that just might change everything, she must bet it all and hope not to lose...

Multiple-award-winning, New York Times' bestselling author Catherynne M. Valente once again reinvents a classic in ''Speak Easy,'' which interprets ''The Twelve Dancing Princesses'' if Zelda Fitzgerald waltzed in and stole the show. This Prohibition-Era tale will make heads spin and hearts pound. It's a story as old as time, as effervescent as champagne, and as dark as the devil's basement on a starless night in the city.

Subterranean Press proudly presents a major new collection by one of the brightest stars in the literary firmament. Catherynne M. Valente, the New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making and other acclaimed novels, now brings readers a treasure trove of stories and poems in The Bread We Eat in Dreams.

In the Locus Award-winning novelette 'White Lines on a Green Field,' an old story plays out against a high school backdrop as Coyote is quarterback and king for a season. A girl named Mallow embarks on an adventure of memorable and magical politicks in 'The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland--For a Little While.' The award-winning, tour de force novella 'Silently and Very Fast' is an ancient epic set in a far-flung future, the intimate autobiography of an evolving A.I. And in the title story, the history of a New England town and that of an outcast demon are irrevocably linked.

The twenty-six pieces collected here explore an extraordinary breadth of styles and genres, as Valente presents readers with something fresh and evocative on every page. From noir to Native American myth, from folklore to the final frontier, each tale showcases Valente's eloquence and originality.

Table of Contents:

• The Consultant - (2013) - shortstory
• White Lines on a Green Field - (2011) - novelette
• The Bread We Eat in Dreams - (2011) - shortstory
• The Melancholy of Mechagirl - (2011) - poem by Catherynne M. Valente
• A Voice Like a Hole - (2011) - shortstory
• The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland -- For a Little While - (2011) - novelette
• How to Raise a Minotaur - (2013) - shortstory
• The Shoot-Out at Burnt Corn Ranch Over the Bride of the World - (2013) - shortstory
• Mouse Koan - (2012) - poem
• The Blueberry Queen of Wiscasset - (2013) - shortstory
• In the Future When All's Well - (2011) - shortstory
• Fade to White - (2012) - novelette
• Aeromaus - (2013) - shortstory
• Red Engines - (2009) - poem
• The Wolves of Brooklyn - (2011) - shortstory
• One Breath, One Stroke - (2012) - shortstory
• Kallisti - (2013) - shortstory
• The Wedding - (2013) - shortstory
• The Secret of Being a Cowboy - (2011) - poem
• Twenty-Five Facts About Santa Claus - (2013) - shortstory
• We Without Us Were Shadows - (2013) - novelette
• The Red Girl - (2013) - shortstory
• Aquaman and the Duality of Self/Other, America, 1985 - (2012) - poem
• The Room - (2013) - shortstory
• Silently and Very Fast - (2011) - novella
• What the Dragon Said: A Love Story - (2012) - poem

This short story originally appeared in Apex Magazine, November 2011. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012, edited by Paula Guran. The story is included in the collection The Bread We Eat in Dreams (2013).

Read the full story for free at Apex.

Subterranean Press is thrilled to present a major new collection from one of the most dazzling, distinctive voices in the literary world. Catherynne M. Valente, the New York Times bestselling and multiple-award-winning author of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making and other acclaimed novels, now brings readers thirteen stories unlike any others.

In the title story, Theodore Sturgeon Award-winning novelette "The Future Is Blue," an outcast girl named Tetley lives on floating Garbagetown, in a world that dreams of the long lost land. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos is explored and reinvented in style in "Down and Out in R'lyeh." In the novelette "The Limitless Perspective of Master Peek, or, the Luminescence of Debauchery," Perpetua masquerades as a man in order to continue her father's business as a glassblower and must fashion a special eye for a queen. And in "The Beasts Who Fought for Fairyland Until the Very End," the wyvern A-Through-L, the warrior Green Wind and his giant cat the Leopard of Little Breezes cope with their broken-hearted disappointment over politicks as the evil Marquess ascends to rule.

Of her previous collection, The Bread We Eat in Dreams, the New York Times said, "Valente's writing DNA is full of fable, fairy tale and myth drawn from deep wells worldwide." With The Future Is Blue she continues to build and invent unforgettable worlds and characters with lyrical abandon, creating stories that feel old and new at once.

The Future is Blue also includes three never-before-printed stories, for almost 30,000 words of work exclusive to this collection: "Major Tom," "Two and Two is Seven," and the long novelette "Flame, Pearl, Mother, Autumn, Virgin, Sword, Kiss, Blood, Heart, and Grave."

Table of Contents:

• The Future Is Blue
• No One Dies in Nowhere
• Two and Two is Seven
• Down and Out in R'lyeh
• The Limitless Perspective of Master Peek, or, the Luminescence of Debauchery
• Snow Day
• Planet Lion
• Flame, Pearl, Mother, Autumn, Virgin, Sword, Kiss, Blood, Heart, and Grave
• Major Tom
• The Lily and the Horn
• The Flame After the Candle
• The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild
• The Beast Who Fought for Fairyland Until the Very End

Charlotte and Emily must enter a fantasy world that they invented in order to rescue their siblings in this adventurous and fiercely intelligent novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making.

Inside a small Yorkshire parsonage, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne Brontë have invented a game called Glass Town, where their toy soldiers fight Napoleon and no one dies. This make-believe land helps the four escape from a harsh reality: Charlotte and Emily are being sent away to a dangerous boarding school, a school they might not return from. But on this Beastliest Day, the day Anne and Branwell walk their sisters to the train station, something incredible happens: the train whisks them all away to a real Glass Town, and the children trade the moors for a wonderland all their own.

This is their Glass Town, exactly like they envisioned it...almost. They certainly never gave Napoleon a fire-breathing porcelain rooster instead of a horse. And their soldiers can die; wars are fought over the potion that raises the dead, a potion Anne would very much like to bring back to England. But when Anne and Branwell are kidnapped, Charlotte and Emily must find a way to save their siblings. Can two English girls stand against Napoleon's armies, especially now that he has a new weapon from the real world? And if he escapes Glass Town, will England ever be safe again?

Together the Brontë siblings must battle with a world of their own creation if they are to make it back to England alive in this magical celebration of authorship, creativity, and classic literature from award-winning author Catherynne M. Valente.

Here Monsters are hidden...

A lyrical anti-quest through a conscious maze without center, borders, or escape--a dark pilgrim's progress through a landscape of vicious Angels, plague houses, crocodile-prophets, tragic chess-sets, and the mind of an unraveling woman, driven on by the mocking guide who seeks to destroy as much as save.

Enter the world of the Labyrinth, where Doors do not wait to be opened, but hunt you in the night. This is Zarathustra in Wonderland, a puzzle which defies solution, a twisted path through language and madness...

But where will you hide?

This short story originally appeared in Fantasy Magazine, December 2015 (Issue 59)--Queers Destroy Fantasy! Special. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Ten (2016), edited Jonathan Strahan, and The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2016, edited by Paula Guran. It is incuded in the collection The Future Is Blue (2018).

Short story originally published serialized in Clarkesworld Magazine issues #100 (January 2015) and #102 (March 2015). The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year' Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2016 edited by Rich Horton, and Clarkesworld Year Nine: Volume One (2018), edited by Sean Wallace and Neil Clarke. It is incuded in the collection The Future Is Blue (2018).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld (part 1, part 2).

A woman who dreams of machines. A paper lantern that falls in love. The most compelling video game you've never played and that nobody can ever play twice. This collection of Catherynne M. Valente's stories and poems with Japanese themes includes the lauded novella "Silently and Very Fast" and the award-nominated "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time," and "Ghost of Gunkanjima"--which originally appeared in a book smaller than your palm, published in a limited edition of twenty-four.

Also included are two new stories: the semiautobiographical metafictional, and utterly magical "Ink, Water, Milk" and the cinematic, demon-haunted "Story No.6."

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Teruyuki Hashimoto
• The Melancholy of Mechagirl - (2011) - poem
• Ink, Water, Milk - shortfiction
• Fifteen Panels Depicting the Sadness of the Baku and the Jotai - (2010) - shortfiction
• Ghosts of Gunkanjima - (2005) - shortstory
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time - (2010) - shortstory
• One Breath, One Stroke - (2012) - shortstory
• Story No. 6 - shortfiction
• Fade to White - (2012) - novelette
• The Emperor of Tsukayama Park - (2005) - poem
• Killswitch - (2007) - shortstory
• Memoirs of a Girl Who Failed to Be Born from a Peach - (2005) - poem
• The Girl with Two Skins - (2008) - poem
• Silently and Very Fast - (2011) - novella
• Afterword: The Melancholy of a Modern Girl, or, Love and Hegemony - (2013) - essay

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, August 2009. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2010, edited by Rich Horton, Clarkesworld: Year Three (2013), edited by Sean Wallace and Neil Clarke, and The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (2014), edited by Alex Dally MacFarlane. It is included in the collection Ventriloquism (2010).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

The lives of six female superheroes and the girlfriends of superheroes. A ferocious riff on women in superhero comics

From the New York Times bestselling author Catherynne Valente comes a series of linked stories from the points of view of the wives and girlfriends of superheroes, female heroes, and anyone who's ever been "refrigerated": comic book women who are killed, raped, brainwashed, driven mad, disabled, or had their powers taken so that a male superhero's storyline will progress.

In an entirely new and original superhero universe, Valente subversively explores these ideas and themes in the superhero genre, treating them with the same love, gravity, and humor as her fairy tales. After all, superheroes are our new fairy tales and these six women have their own stories to share.

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, August 2010. It can also be found in the anthologies Clarkesworld: Year Four (2013), edited by Sean Wallace and Neil Clarke, and Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology (2015), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. The story is included in the collections Ventriloquism (2010) and The Melancholy of Mechagirl (2013).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #3 December 2006. It can also be found in the anthologies Realms: The First Year of Clarkesworld Magazine (2007), edited by Sean Wallace and Nick Mamatas, and Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep (2015), edited by Paula Guran. The story is included in the collection Ventriloquism (2010).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Novelette originally published in Subterranean Press Magazine. It can also be found in the collection The Bread We Eat in Dreams (2013) and the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Six (2012), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and Mythic Journeys (2019), edited by Paula Guran.

Read the full story for free at Subterranean.

In the mind of Ayako, an old woman in exile on a mountain in medieval Japan, nothing is certain, and nothing holds a familiar shape for long. This is a map of a psyche exalted and destroyed by solitude, and on its contorted surface Shinto philosophy, Greek mathematics, Hawaiian goddesses, Egyptian legend, quantum physics, and Babylonian myth meet and merge... In Catherynne M. Valente's second novel since the critically acclaimed The Labyrinth, language and myth construct a strange new geography of the self. This is The Book of Dreams: open it and walk the shadowy paths of this extraordinary landscape.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, February 2013. It can also be found in the anthology Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep (2015), edited by Paula Guran.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Spacepedition!

Nightwind and his cyborg companion were an unlikely team by galactic standards, but they shared a fierce drive for independence and adventure. When they heard about the lost civilization, and its untapped treasures, they wasted no time to search for it. But Rhyl was a barren, unrelenting planet; covered with endless deserts, and deadly sciroccos. They were prepared for that hardship, but not for the beasts-sandcats of Hell!

Ki is a petty thief. Her best friend wills her his solo-flyer--call it a space motorcycle: temperamental, fast as hell, and expensive to maintain. Any reasonable person would sell it to get off the street, but Ki isn't reasonable.

Margot is a military vet at loose ends. She blows her entire back pay on a solo-flyer, a decision she instantly regrets but can't bring herself to undo. Margot meets Ki and thinks she's the sympathetic friend she needs when she feels most alone. Ki thinks Margot is an easy mark for food money. They're both right, but lunch leads to a joy ride to planet Ratana, where Margot is arrested by border control.

Ki enlists Ratanese local Zuleikah, a bored rich girl who can think of no stupider, and therefore better, way to spend her time than busting someone out of jail. Together they rescue Margot, but find themselves trapped on a hostile planet on the cusp of civil war.

When Zuleikah convinces them that their best bet for escape is to kidnap--er, rescue--Prince Thane from his dreary role in the crumbling monarchy, it results in a chase across the desert and into the farthest reaches of the universe.

If they can learn to trust each other, and if the repo men, cops, and three different galactic governments don't catch them, the Galactic Hellcats might just use their solo-fliers to carve a place for themselves among the stars.

One of Vonnegut's major works, this is an apocalyptic tale of the planet's ultimate fate, featuring a cast of unlikely heroes.

On New Year's Eve 1928, as a great thunderstorm beats about the Isle of Altnaharra in the Scottish Highlands, Evelyn Bearings murders her adoptive family; members of the nature-worshipping sect known as the Children.

The Bearings have always been strange. They live away from people in their crumbling castle by the old circle of stones. Though they call themselves the Children they are not a family, but orphans and runaways taken in by Uncle. They dance in the stone circle at dawn, conduct arcane druidic rituals with snakes.

Evelyn is the strangest of them all. She can read minds. Only one of the Children can inherit the Isle from Uncle and become the adder. Eve is certain that it will be her. She is Uncle's favourite. But the Isle holds more secrets than Eve knows. As the year dies and that fateful night approaches her beliefs will be challenged, her loyalties tested to breaking point. Evelyn will be forced to confront truths she has been fleeing for many years -- and it will end in death.

In a cottage overlooking the windswept Maine coast, Wilder Harlow has begun the last book he will ever write.

It is the story about the sun-drenched summer days of his youth in Whistler Bay, and the blood-stained path of the killer that stalked his small vacation town. About the terrible secret he and his companions, Nat and Harper, discovered entombed in the coves off the bay. And how the pact they swore that day echoed down the decades, forever shaping their lives.

But the more Wilder writes, the less he trusts himself and his memory. He starts to see things that can't be real -- notes hidden in the cabin, from an old friend now dead; a woman with dark hair drowning in the icy waters below, calling for help; entire chapters he doesn't recall typing, appearing overnight. Who, or what, is haunting Wilder?

No longer able to trust his own eyes, Wilder begins to fear that this will not only be his last book, but the last thing he ever does.

She comes in the night. She looks into your eyes. One by one, she has taken us all.

For generations they have died young.

Now Iris and her father are the last of the Villarca line.

Their disease confines them to their lonely mansion on Dartmoor; their disease means they must die alone.

But Iris breaks her promise to hide from the world. She dares to fall in love.

And only then do they understand the true horror of the Villarca curse.

This is the story of a murderer. A stolen child. Revenge. This is the story of Ted, who lives with his daughter Lauren and his cat Olivia in an ordinary house at the end of an ordinary street.

All these things are true. And yet some of them are lies.

You think you know what's inside the last house on Needless Street. You think you've read this story before. But you're wrong. In the dark forest at the end of Needless Street, something lies buried. But it's not what you think...

Marvo is a stage magician. His magic is real.

Marvo grows up without knowing his parents, without knowing his heritage, without knowing much about life.

The magicians have always been with us, since the beginning of civilisation. They fill our heads with the mist, keeping us from witnessing the stark reality of existence. But are things so bad that Marvo will bring it down on all of us, forever?

Marvo begins to understand those around him, and his place in the world; he discovers that his remarkable powers can be put to good, or to evil.

He only has to choose...

"I dreamt I was standing in the dark, looking up at the south-west tower... And our Kev was up there on top, in the dark, and screaming as if some wild beast was eating him."

When steeplejack Joe Clarke is hired to repair the stonework at Muncaster Cathedral, he is unprepared for the horror he will encounter. Something unspeakably evil in the medieval tower is seeking victims among the young neighborhood boys... and Joe's son may be next! An unsettling story with a horrifying conclusion, this eerie tale will chill young and old readers alike.

Contents:

• Introduction (The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral) - essay by Orrin Grey
• Brangwyn Gardens - (1991) - novella by Robert Westall
• The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral - (1991) - novella by Robert Westall

Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated Short Story

This short story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 26, January - February 2019.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny.

Trudchen grew up hearing Odette's stories of their monster-slaying mother and a magician's curse. But now that Tru's older, she's starting to wonder if her older sister's tales were just comforting lies, especially because there's nothing fantastic about her own life--permanently disabled and in constant pain from childhood polio.

In 1909, after a two-year absence, Od reappears with a suitcase supposedly full of weapons and a promise to rescue Tru from the monsters on their way to attack her. But it's Od who seems haunted by something. And when the sisters' search for their mother leads them to a face-off with the Leeds Devil, a nightmarish beast that's wreaking havoc in the Mid-Atlantic states, Tru discovers the peculiar possibility that she and her sister--despite their dark pasts and ordinary appearances--might, indeed, have magic after all.

Seventeen-year-old Edgar Poe counts down the days until he can escape his foster family--the wealthy Allans of Richmond, Virginia. He hungers for his upcoming life as a student at the prestigious new university, almost as much as he longs to marry his beloved Elmira Royster. However, on the brink of his departure, all his plans go awry when a macabre Muse named Lenore appears to him. Muses are frightful creatures that lead Artists down a path of ruin and disgrace, and no respectable person could possibly understand or accept them. But Lenore steps out of the shadows with one request: "Let them see me!"

Twenty-five year old Ivy Rowan rises from her bed after being struck by the flu, only to discover the world has been torn apart in just a few short days.

But Ivy's life-long gift--or curse--remains. For she sees the uninvited ones--ghosts of loved ones who appear to her, unasked, unwelcomed, for they always herald impending death. On that October evening in 1918 she sees the spirit of her grandmother, rocking in her mother's chair. An hour later, she learns her younger brother and father have killed a young German out of retaliation for the death of Ivy's older brother Billy in the Great War.

Horrified, she leaves home, to discover the flu has caused utter panic and the rules governing society have broken down. Ivy is drawn into this new world of jazz, passion, and freedom, where people live for the day, because they could be stricken by nightfall. But as her 'uninvited guests' begin to appear to her more often, she knows her life will be torn apart once more, but Ivy has no inkling of the other-worldly revelations about to unfold.

A young child psychologist steps off a train, her destination a foggy seaside town. There, she begins a journey causing her to question everything she believes about life, death, memories, and reincarnation.

In 1925, Alice Lind steps off a train in the rain-soaked coastal hamlet of Gordon Bay, Oregon. There, she expects to do nothing more difficult than administer IQ tests to a group of rural schoolchildren. A trained psychologist, Alice believes mysteries of the mind can be unlocked scientifically, but now her views are about to be challenged by one curious child.

Seven-year-old Janie O'Daire is a mathematical genius, which is surprising. But what is disturbing are the stories she tells: that her name was once Violet, she grew up in Kansas decades earlier, and she drowned at age nineteen. Alice delves into these stories, at first believing they're no more than the product of the girl's vast imagination. But, slowly, Alice comes to the realization that Janie might indeed be telling a strange truth.

Alice knows the investigation may endanger her already shaky professional reputation, and as a woman in a field dominated by men she has no room for mistakes. But she is unprepared for the ways it will illuminate terrifying mysteries within her own past, and in the process, irrevocably change her life.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation (2017), edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 3 (2018), edited by Neil Clarke.

The Royce family has been a plague on the small, Southern town of Lewis for generations. Caleb has heard rumors about the family his whole life, just like he's heard the rumors about a monstrous creature known as Catfish John living in the swamp.

Nebula Award-nominated Novella

When the Royce house burns down, Caleb's father - Lewis's sheriff - takes in the sole survivor, a young girl named Cere. Caleb quickly learns the truth about Archie Royce and the terrible fate he had planned for his daughter. After a woman is brutally murdered, Cere begins to suspect that not all of her family perished in the fire, and she and Caleb set out to stop her father's dark vision from coming to pass.

Years later, Caleb is the sheriff of Lewis, and the monsters of his childhood return. Now Caleb must fight to protect those he loves from Archie Royce's legacy, and his best hope may be a legend he's almost managed to convince himself never existed - Catfish John.

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, August 1996. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection (1997), edited by Gardner Dozois, Year's Best SF 2 (1997), edited by David G. Hartwell, and Robots (2005), edtied by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Strange Travelers (2000).

A retired hunter of alien zoo specimens, William Blackhorse Singer, the last Navajo on a future Earth, has come to what he sees as the end of his life. The world Government calls upon him for aid in protecting an alien diplomat from a powerful and hostile member of his own species. Knowing both the importance of the task and his inability to handle it on his own. Singer goes to confront his greatest conquest with a strange bargain. A shape-shifting alien, the last of his species, sits in a special cage at an institute dedicated to the study of extra-terrestrial beings. Most frequently he projects the aspect of a one-eyed catlike creature, but he can appear as almost anything.

The media vampire has roots throughout the world, far beyond the shores of the usual Dracula-inspired Anglo-American archetypes. Depending on text and context, the vampire is a figure of anxiety and comfort, humor and fear, desire and revulsion. These dichotomies gesture the enduring prevalence of the vampire in mass culture; it can no longer articulate a single feeling or response, bound by time and geography, but is many things to many people.

With a global perspective, this collection of essays offers something new and different: a much needed counter-narrative of the vampire's evolution in popular culture. Divided by geography, this text emphasizes the vampiric as a globetrotting citizen du monderather than an isolated monster.

Fricatives, the second anthology of Short Plays to Nourish the Mind & Soul has positioned Cesi Davidson as a champion of brevity and depth in playmaking. Her years of listening to the collective us, her unconstrained imagination, and her linguistic flexibility result in unusual interpretations of the complexities of American life. Fricativesfollows her first book, Articulation, with an eclectic mix of storytelling providing challenges to performing artists and a roller coaster ride of entertainment for the reader.

The Duplicators

The Duplicators is an expansion of the novella Lord of the Uffts.

A planet where everyone has a machine which can duplicate anything would be the wealthiest world in the galaxy, right? Wrong. And unless the hapless voyager who's trapped on the planet can find a solution to its problem, his voyaging will be over -- permanently.

No Truce with Terra

From: The Shaldron Race
To: The Human Race
Greetings:
Your presence has been noted and the reason for your visit analyzed by our instruments. We have, therefore, taken the liberty of selecting one of your party for first contact, one whom we feel is best suited to grasp the motivations of both our races and arrange for future group contacts.

Peter Collard stared at the message with a cold feeling of foreboding. He felt pity for the poor devil.

"Who is this selected contact:"

"Ah now," Dyson became suddenly interested in the papers on the table. 'Well, I'm sorry and all that, but, as a matter of fact, they want you."

Locating Science Fiction is a ground breaking and potentially paradigm-shifting book, a major intervention into contemporary theoretical debates about SF.

Academic literary criticism has tended to locate SF primarily in relation to the older genre of utopia; fan criticism primarily in relation to fantasy and SF in other media, especially film and television; popular fiction studies primarily in relation to other contemporary genres such as the romance and the thriller. This bold new synthesis relocates SF in relation to each of these other genres and media and also to the historical and geographic contexts of its emergence and development.

Locating Science Fiction effects a series of vital shifts in the way SF theory and criticism has conceptualised its subject, away from prescriptively abstract dialectics of cognition and estrangement and towards the empirically grounded understanding of what is actually a messy amalgam of texts, practices and artefacts. Inspired by Raymond Williams's cultural materialism, Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of culture and Franco Moretti's application of world systems theory to literary studies, Locating Science Fiction draws on the disciplinary competences of Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, Critical Theory and Sociology to produce a powerfully persuasive mode of analysis, engagement and argument.

Beyond Earth's Gates

THE LOVELIEST GIRL IN TWO WORLDS - AND THE DEADLIEST!

Under Eddie Burton's management the ambitious starlet Lorna Maxwell seemed headed for the top of Broadway's glamorous world of make-believe. And then she vanished - through a wall where there was no door. Eddie found himself plunging after her into a city beyond reality.

In that weird twin city to New York, Eddie became a hunted fugitive while his girl friend turned up as an ever-present face and all-pervading voice that awed and mystified the inhabitants. And Eddie learned that between him and return to his natural home stood her new manager, a mysterious figure who ruled by a tyrannical combination of super-scientific miracle and brute force.

Daybreak--2250 A.D

Two centuries after an atomic war on earth, a silver-haired mutant sets out on a dangerous search for a lost city of the ruined civilization.

Contents:

• Intro by Lester Del Rey
• Shambleau
• Black Thirst
• The Bright Illusion
• Black God's Kiss
• Tryst in Time
• Greater Than Gods
• Fruit of Knowledge
• No Woman Born
• Daemon
• Vintage Season
• Afterword by C.L. Moore.

Technos

Dumarest has traced the lost planet of Earth to one remote corner of the galaxy, but he still lacks its precise co-ordinates. Somewhere on the cyber-dominated police-world of Technos lives the mysterious woman who can help him. And the only way to find her is to become a slave...

A Scatter of Stardust

Collection containing:

• The Bells of Acheron - (1957) - shortstory
• Anne - (1966) - shortstory
• Return Visit - (1958) - shortstory
• The Shrine - (1960) - shortstory
• Survival Demands! - (1972) - shortstory
• Little Girl Lost - (1955) - shortstory
• The Eyes of Silence - (1957) - shortstory
• Enchanter's Encounter - (1959) - novelette

For two hundred years Tracato has been the center of enlightenment, as the serrin have occupied human lands and sought to remake humanity anew. But the serrin have not destroyed Rhodaan's feudal families entirely, and as Tracato faces the greatest threat to its survival in two centuries, old rivalries are stirring. Sasha must assist her mentor Kessligh to strengthen the Tracato Nasi-Keth, yet with one royal sister siding with the feudalists and another soon to be married to Tracato's most powerful foe, her loyalties are agonizingly divided.

Worse still, from Sasha's homeland the Army of Lenayin are marching to make war upon Tracato. Can she fight her own people? Or must she join them, and fight not only her lover Errollyn, but to extinguish the brightest light of hope in all the land--serrin civilization itself?

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?!

Who knew that libraries were centres for all evil?

Alcatraz Smedry, practically the world champion of breaking things, never thought his most boring birthday present - a bag of sand - would get him into this much trouble. Yet now he's fleeing from evil Librarians, releasing dinosaurs to create a diversion in the Fiction section, and learning that clumsiness can be a powerful talent!

The evil Librarians strike again - proving that late returns can be deadly!

Alcatraz Smedry is back with a bang - infiltrating the Library of Alexandria, looking for his not-dead-after-all father and discovering a strange golden sarcophagus that might hold the key to his amazing talent for breaking things. Oh, and his best friend Bastille's come along too - for evil-Librarian-bashing purposes, of course.

The evil Librarians are back!

Alcatraz Smedry has made it to the Free Kingdoms. Unfortunately, so have the evil Librarians - including his mother... Now all Alcatraz has to do is find a traitor among the Knights of Crystallia, try to be friends with his very unfriendly father, save one of the last bastions of the Free Kingdoms from the enemy, and get his friend Bastille reinstated as a real knight. No pressure!

A whole army of evil Librarians!

And Alcatraz Smedry has only his friend, Bastille, a few pairs of glasses and an unlimited supply of exploding teddy bears to help him defend the island of Mokia. Even Alcatraz's extraordinary talent for breaking things may not be enough to defeat the evil Librarians' giant robots. Can Alcatraz find a way to save the Free Kingdoms?

The Dark Talent is the fifth action-packed fantasy adventure in the Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians series for young readers by the #1 New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson. This never-before-published, fast-paced, and funny novel is now available in a deluxe hardcover edition, illustrated by Hayley Lazo.

Alcatraz Smedry has successfully defeated the army of Evil Librarians and saved the kingdom of Mokia. Too bad he managed to break the Smedry Talents in the process. Even worse, his father is trying to enact a scheme that could ruin the world, and his friend, Bastille, is in a coma. To revive her, Alcatraz must infiltrate the Highbrary--known as The Library of Congress to Hushlanders--the seat of Evil Librarian power. Without his Talent to draw upon, can Alcatraz figure out a way to save Bastille and defeat the Evil Librarians once and for all?

Sometimes the past is better off buried.

Senior year is finally over. After all they've been through, Dan, Abby, and Jordan are excited to take one last road trip together, and they're just not going to think about what will happen when the summer ends. But on their way to visit Jordan's uncle in New Orleans, the three friends notice that they're being followed... and photographed. Then Dan starts receiving messages from someone he didn't expect to hear from again--someone who died last Halloween.

When the trio arrives in New Orleans and the strange occurrences only escalate, Dan is forced to accept that everything that has happened to him in the past year may not be a coincidence but fate--a fate that ties Dan to a group called the Bone Artists, who have a sinister fascination with notorious killers of the past.

Now Dan's only hope is that he will make it out of his senior trip alive.

Sturgeon Award nominated story. It originally appeared as a self-published ebook. It is included in The Shattered Gears (2016).

In the near future, the only thing growing faster than the criminal population is the Electric Church, a new religion founded by a mysterious man named Dennis Squalor. The Church preaches that life is too brief to contemplate the mysteries of the universe: eternity is required. In order to achieve this, the converted become Monks -- cyborgs with human brains, enhanced robotic bodies, and virtually unlimited life spans.

Enter Avery Cates, a dangerous criminal known as the best killer-for-hire around. The authorities have a special mission in mind for Cates: assassinate Dennis Squalor. But for Cates, the assignment will be the most dangerous job he's ever undertaken -- and it may well be his last.

Avery Cates is a very rich man. He's probably the richest criminal in New York City. But right now, Avery Cates is pissed. Because everyone around him has just started to die - in a particularly gruesome way. With every moment bringing the human race closer to extinction, Cates finds himself in the role of both executioner and savior of the entire world.

Avery Cates is a wanted man. After surviving the worst bioengineered disaster in history, Cates finds himself incarcerated - in Chengara Penitentiary. As Chengara has a survival rate of exactly zero, the system's most famous gunner needs a new plan. And a betrayal or so later, he achieves his goal. At a price.

All he has to do now is defeat some new personal demons, forge some unlikely alliances, and figure out why the people he's killed lately just won't stay dead.

Avery Cates is an army man. Between the army's new dental plan and a set of first class augments, he's been given a second chance - albeit a quick one.

When a corrupt officer decides to make some money on the side by selling new recruits, Cates finds himself in uncharted territory. Sold to the highest bidder, his visions of escape and revenge quickly come to an end when he realizes who's bought him - and for what. Because the high bidder is Canny Orel himself. And he wants Cates to do one last job as the System slides into chaos. Cates will have one shot at getting back at Canny - but this time, Canny is holding all the cards.

The world is dying. With avatars replacing humans and the birth rate non-existent, the human race is almost extinct. In the end, it comes down to Canny Orel; Avery's long sought after nemesis -- transformed now into something other than human.

Orel might hold the secret to humanity's salvation, if he can be convinced -- or forced -- to relinquish it. And when Cates chances on a way to trick his old master, he suddenly has a choice to make: get his long-delayed revenge, or save the world.

After the earth's power under her city is suddenly left unprotected, a young geomancer must rely on her unique magic to survive in this fresh fantasy standalone from the author of the acclaimed The Clockwork Dagger.

In an alternate 1906, the United States and Japan have forged a powerful confederation-- the Unified Pacific--in an attempt to dominate the world. Their first target is a vulnerable China. In San Francisco, headstrong secretary Ingrid Carmichael is assisting a group of powerful geomancer wardens who have no idea of the depth of her own talent--or that she is the only woman to possess such skills.

When assassins kill the wardens, Ingrid and her mentor are protected by her incredible magic. But the pair is far from safe. Without its full force of guardian geomancers, the city is on the brink of a cataclysmic earthquake that will expose the earth's power to masterminds determined to control the energy for their own dark ends. The danger escalates when Chinese refugees, preparing to fight the encroaching American and Japanese forces, fracture the uneasy alliance between the Pacific allies, transforming San Francisco into a veritable powder keg. And the slightest tremor will set it off....

Forced on the run, Ingrid makes some shocking discoveries about herself. Her already considerable magic has grown even more fearsome... and she may be the fulcrum on which the balance of world power rests.

A resourceful young heroine must protect the world from her enemies--and her own power--in this thrilling sequel to the acclaimed Breath of Earth, an imaginative blend of alternative history, fantasy, science, magic, and adventure.

When an earthquake devastates San Francisco in an alternate 1906, the influx of geomantic energy nearly consumes Ingrid Carmichael. Bruised but alive, the young geomancer flees the city with her friends, Cy, Lee, and Fenris. She is desperate to escape Ambassador Blum, the cunning and dangerous bureaucrat who wants to use Ingrid's formidable powers to help the Unified Pacific--the confederation of the United States and Japan--achieve world domination. To stop them, Ingrid must learn more about the god-like magic she inherited from her estranged father--the man who set off the quake that obliterated San Francisco.

When Lee and Fenris are kidnapped in Portland, Ingrid and Cy are forced to ally themselves with another ambassador from the Unified Pacific: the powerful and mysterious Theodore Roosevelt. But even TR's influence may not be enough to save them when they reach Seattle, where the magnificent peak of Mount Rainier looms. Discovering more about herself and her abilities, Ingrid is all too aware that she may prove to be the fuse to light the long-dormant volcano... and a war that will sweep the world.

In this stunning conclusion to the acclaimed Blood of Earth trilogy--a thrilling alternate history laced with earth magic, fantastic creatures, and steampunk elements--geomancer Ingrid must find a way to use her extraordinary abilities to save her world from the woman hell-bent on destroying it.

Thanks to her geomantic magic, Ingrid has successfully eluded Ambassador Blum, the power-hungry kitsune who seeks to achieve world domination for the United Pacific. But using her abilities has taken its toll: Ingrid's body has been left severely weakened, and she must remain on the run with her friends Cy and Fenris.

Hoping to learn more about her magical roots and the strength her bloodline carries, Ingrid makes her way across the Pacific to Hawaii, home to the ancient volcano goddess Madam Pele. What she discovers in this paradise is not at all what she expects--and perhaps exactly what she needs.

But Ambassador Blum comes from the same world of old magic and mythic power. And if Ingrid cannot defeat her once and for all, she knows Blum will use that power to take the lives of everyone she holds dear before escalating a war that will rip the world to pieces.

Aden Onnery is the eldest son of a family of midwives who use their power to eradicate magic. As a boy, he was never meant to take on the Onnery mantle, but an accident of birth has left him marked and strange. His whole life he has believed that the Onnerys destroy the monsters that will bring the end of his people, until he is forced to enter into a bargain with a magical survivor.

In order to save his sister from the harsh law of the colonial powers, Aden chooses to enter the world outside his experience and go against everything he has been taught to believe. He must help save the very thing his family are meant to exterminate--a magical lineage in his people. In doing so, Aden will confront the truth that the monsters are his own family.

EMPTY MONSTERS weaves magic, family, and love into a bitter tonic about growing up and accepting that even the best intentions can exact a terrible price, and love is never simple.

Knowing the future is not about knowing the future. It's about knowing which path to take.

Ilven comes from a family of Saints--future-tellers--but she knows her father didn't waste more than a few grains of the precious drug scriv to see her fate. Now she's facing an arranged marriage to a man she's never met. So, inhaling stolen scriv, she reads three possible futures for herself, searching for the path that will lead to her heart's desire.

"Mother, Crone, Maiden" is a short-story prequel to Cat Hellisen's stunning young-adult fantasy debut, When the Sea Is Rising Red.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

After seventeen-year-old Felicita's dearest friend Ilven kills herself to escape an arranged marriage, Felicita chooses freedom over privilege. She fakes her own death and leaves her sheltered life as one of Pelimburg's magical elite behind. Living in the slums, scrubbing dishes for a living, she falls for charismatic Dash while also becoming fascinated with vampire Jannik.

Then something shocking washes up on the beach: Ilven's death has called out of the sea a dangerous wild magic. Felicita must decide whether her loyalties lie with the family she abandoned... or with those who would twist this dark power to destroy Pelimburg's caste system, and the whole city along with it.

MallenIve is a city of monstrous extremes, where the magical Great Houses live in luxury and play a treacherous game of politics, while the Hobs and vampire clans struggle to survive. It's here that Felicita Pelim has run, leaving behind House Pelim, her family and her birthplace. By breaking propriety and arranging a marriage of convenience to Jannik, a free House vampire, she has been made a pariah.

Felicita's only allies in MallenIve are two social outcasts who hate her for reasons she cannot fully understand, and Jannik, the one person she can trust, is withdrawing more with every passing day.

It's not long before the city's prejudices start seeping into her life and Felicita finds herself slipping back into old patterns.. When a slave vampire is killed, she is shocked out of her complacency. Felicita tries to bring his murderers to justice only to expose a festering secret at the heart of the MallenIve Great Houses. And going up against the House Lords and their magic will cost her everything she has left.

Calliope Reaper-Jones is Death's Daughter. She owes a debt to Cerberus, the three headed dog that guards the gate's of hell-a debt that involves a trip to Purgatory, Las Vegas, ancient Egypt, and a discount department store that's more frightening than any supernatural creature she'll ever encounter.

When first published, readers young and old eagerly devoured the tale of a street-hardened survivor named Cat, a half-human, half-alien orphan telepath. Named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, Cat's story has been continued by Hugo-award winning and international best-selling author Joan D. Vinge with the very popular Catspaw and Dreamfall. Now, 25 years later, this special anniversary edition of Psion contains a new introduction by the author and "Psiren," a story never before included in any trade edition of Psion. This tough, gritty tale of an outsider whose only chance for redemption is as an undercover agent for an interstellar government that by turns punishes and helps him, is as fresh and powerful today as it was in 1982.

CAT: Street Punk, Psion, Telepath, Survivor. . .

Kidnapped by an interstellar corporation and dragged to Earth, Cat is forced to use his skills to protect those he most hates, those who most hate him . . . .

The taMings. A cyber-augmented, DNA-incestuous clan of such wealth and power that their family arguments change the destiny of worlds. Now one taMing is a killer's target. But which? And who would dare?

Seeking answers, Cat finds lies and savagery, passion and atrocity--trails that lead from crystal valleys to clubs for silver-skinned beauties. From the homicidal enclaves of drug kings to a fanatic's pulpit. From the halls of the Assembly to a cyberspace hell. Seeking assassins, Cat discovers a mystery that could cost him his future. His sanity. His life.

Because Cat is no longer a bodyguard . . .

Cat, the halfbreed telepath hero of Catspaw and Psion, joins a research team on Refuge, homeworld of his mother's people, the Hydrans. Immediately, he finds trouble when he helps a Hydran woman escape human pursuers.

The decimated Hydran population of Refuge is confined to a bleak "homeland," by a huge corporate state, Tau Biotech. Tau also controls Refuge's one unique natural resource, "Dreamfall." The tangible residue of cast-off thoughts from beautiful, enigmatic "cloud whales," dreamfall forms vast reefs, sacred to the Hydrans, but mere exploitable data to Tau.

Caught between Tau and desperate Hydrans who fight to reclaim their world, Cat must somehow forge the ruins of the past into a means to defeat Tau's brutality to save his people--and himself.

Tsia had dreamed all her life of becoming a guide, attuned to her world through a telepathic gate to another lifeform. At last, she took the guide virus that would mutate her body to create the gate she so desperately craved. But the lifeform her body took was the one lifeform forbidden--the felines, who had scouted the planet for the First Droppers and, in exchange, been promised their freedom forever from human domination. By laws of the Guide Guild and the First-Landing Pact, she could never call to the cats, never speak with them, never approach them. But then capture and imprisonment, torture and slavery took the place of an empty future. Suddenly Tsia's only hope lay with her gate--and once she had touched the cats, there would be no turning back...

On Risthmus, the Landing Pact was law: felines were off limits. And for ten years Tsia, the rogue guide, had tried to honor that Pact and ignore the irresistible pull of her forbidden link to the cats.

For ten years, she had hidden among the mercenaries. But now her latest mission was going awry. A crash landing was followed by one deadly mishap after another. The cougar cub Tsia had rescued from a storm refused to leave her -- even when she tried to send it away.

Tsia could save the mission -- if she deliberately broke the Landing Pact to enter the mind of the cat and command his help. But if she was found out, punishment would be the loss of her biogate, her telepathic link with the felines. Her past was about to catch up with her, and only if she faced it -- and used it -- could she hope to forge a new future...with the cats!

Here are thirteen stories, three haiku, and a conventional poem, all involving cats. A few, like "The Cats of Ulthar," by H. P. Lovecraft, and "Kreativity for Kats," by Fritz Leiber, are wellknown classics; others, like "Creeper Shadows," by Fred Chappell are freshly written and came meowing to us in search of a home. This volume in this series is devoted mostly to fantasy stories -- a deal with the Devil, a re-incarnation, and a long tale of Medieval magic, even a dragon -- along with a couple of murders and a science-fiction story.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (Cat Tales) - essay by George H. Scithers
• Not Another Black Cat Story - shortfiction by Geoffrey Maloney
• Scout - shortfiction by Mary A. Turzillo
• American Curls - shortfiction by Nancy Springer
• The Cats of Ulthar - [Dream Cycle] - (1920) - shortstory by H. P. Lovecraft
• Kreativity for Kats - [Gummitch the Cat] - (1961) - shortstory by Fritz Leiber
• Non-Existent Cats - (2002) - shortstory by Tony Richards
• Angelique's - shortfiction by Sandra Beswetheric
• Three Haiku - poem by Mark Budman
• The Cat - poem by Charles P. Baudelaire (variant of Le Chat 2004) [as by Charles Baudelaire ]
• Black Pumps & a Skanky Tom - shortfiction by Pat Esden
• Dragon Dreams - shortfiction by Shereen Vedam
• Cat Call - shortfiction by K. D. Wentworth
• A Christmas Carol - shortstory by Jack Williamson
• The Eyes of Ra - shortfiction by Jim C. Hines
• Creeper Shadows - shortfiction by Fred Chappell

The second volume in the Cat Tales series collects 17 original tales and poems concerning cats (plus one classic story by Edgar Pangborn and an essay by H.P. Lovecraft) into the purr-fect anthology for cat lovers! Here you will find "If Wishes Were Fishes," by P.D. Cacek; "The Case of the Unfortunate Mrs Ripley's Cat," by Jeff Crook; "The Problem with Polly," by Scott William Carter, and much more. Edited by four-time Hugo Award-winning editor, George Scithers.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by George H. Scithers
• If Wishes Were Fishes - shortstory by P.D. Cacek
• A Cat's Wish - poem by P.D. Cacek
• The Case of the Unfortunate Mrs. Ripley's Cat - shortstory by Jeff Crook
• Alphonse - shortstory by Sandra Beswetherick
• Tree - poem by Geoffrey A. Landis
• A Small Sacrifice - shortstory by Michael Northrup
• Muezza's Garden - shortstory by Paula A. Stiles
• The Clowder - shortstory by Orrin Grey
• The Scribe Vanishes - shortstory by T. Lee Harris
• The Problem With Polly - shortstory by Scott William Carter
• Delayed Reaction - shortstory by Gareth D. Jones
• MRRRAR! - shortstory by Edgar Pangborn
• Two Haiku - poem by Rae Schidlo
• Homing Instinct - shortstory by Ann Marstong
• Princess of Sozopol - shortstory by Anna Sykora
• A Cry to Wake the Dead - shortstory by Christine Sutton
• Invasion Thwarted - shortstory by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff
• Romeo's Kiss - shortstory by Gabriel Beyers
• Cats and Dogs - essay by H.P. Lovecraft

Two of the biggest names in the fantasy field have put together a unique collection of fantastical cat tales for friends of furry felines. Cats work a special magic in these stories from the future, from the past, and from dimensions people never dream of.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Speaking of Cats - A Very Weighty Subject - essay by Andre Norton
• The Gate of the Kittens - novelette by Wilanne Schneider Belden
• The Damcat - novelette by Clare Bell
• Borrowing Trouble - novelette by Elizabeth H. Boyer
• Day of Discovery - shortstory by Blake Cahoon
• Wart - shortstory by Jayge Carr
• Yellow Eyes - novelette by Marylois Dunn
• It Must Be Some Place - novelette by Donna Farley
• The Dreaming Kind - novelette by C. S. Friedman
• Trouble - novelette by P. M. Griffin
• SKitty - shortstory by Mercedes Lackey
• The Game of Cat and Rabbit - shortstory by Patricia Shaw Mathews
• From the Diary of Hermione - shortstory by Ardath Mayhar
• It's a Bird, It's a Plane, Its... Supercat! - shortstory by Ann Miller and Karen Elizabeth Rigley
• Noble Warrior - novelette by Andre Norton
• Bastet's Blessing - shortstory by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

Pad along this paw print covered pathway to such fur-raising adventures as those of a noble Siamese out to defend its young mistress from evil, a bioengineered tabby who proves a diplomat beyond all human expectations, a wizard's hazardous encounter with his own familiar's kittens, and other imaginative escapades certain to capture the hearts of fantasy and cat lovers alike.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Andre Norton and Martin H. Greenberg
• Bomber and the Bismarck - (1991) - novelette by Clare Bell
• A Puma and a Panther - (1991) - shortstory by Wilanne Schneider Belden
• The Last Gift - (1991) - novelette by Elizabeth H. Boyer
• Papercut Luck - (1991) - shortstory by Patricia B. Cirone
• Shado - (1991) - shortstory by Marylois Dunn
• In Bastet's Service - (1991) - shortfiction by P. M. Griffin
• Shadows - (1991) - shortfiction by Caralyn Inks
• The Execution - (1991) - shortstory by A. R. Major
• Hermione at Moon House - (1991) - shortstory by Ardath Mayhar
• Quest of Souls - (1991) - shortfiction by Karen Elizabeth Rigley and Ann Miller
• Ede's Earrings - (1991) - shortfiction by Sasha Miller
• Clara's Cat - (1991) - shortfiction by Elizabeth Moon
• Hob's Pot - (1991) - shortfiction by Andre Norton
• The Queen's Cat's Tale - (1991) - shortfiction by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
• The Keep-Shape Spell - (1991) - shortfiction by Mary H. Schaub
• Of Age and Wisdom - (1991) - shortstory by Roger C. Schlobin
• Critical Cats - novelette by Susan Shwartz
• In Carnation - shortstory by Nancy Springer

Here are all-new tales about those magical, mysterious dominators of humankind: the cats! Return to the cats' hunting ground with this third collection of stories. Twenty fur-flying fantasies are sure to capture the hearts of cat lovers everywhere.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (1994) - essay by Andre Norton
• A Woman of Her Word - (1994) - shortstory by Lee Barwood
• A Tangled Tahitian Tail - (1994) - novelette by Clare Bell
• Saxophone Joe and the Woman in Black - (1994) - shortstory by Charles de Lint
• Teddy Cat - (1994) - shortstory by Marylois Dunn
• Cat o' Nine Tales - (1994) - shortstory by Charles L. Fontenay
• Partners - (1994) - shortstory by P. M. Griffin
• ...But a Glove - (1994) - shortstory by John E. Johnston, III
• Fear In Her Pocket - (1994) - shortstory by Caralyn Inks
• A Tail of Two Skittys - (1994) - shortstory by Mercedes Lackey
• Hermione as Spy - shortstory by Ardath Mayhar
• Moon Scent - (1994) - shortstory by Lyn McConchie
• Cat's World - (1994) - shortstory by Cynthia McQuillin
• Snake Eyes - (1994) - shortstory by Ann Miller and Karen Elizabeth Rigley
• One Too Many Cats - (1994) - shortstory by Sasha Miller
• Noble Warrior Meets With a Ghost - (1994) - shortstory by Andre Norton
• Connecticat - (1994) - shortstory by Elisabeth Waters and Raul S. Reyes
• The Cat-Quest of Mu Mao the Magnificent - (1994) - shortstory by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
• The Cat, the Wizards, and the Bedpost - (1994) - novelette by Mary H. Schaub
• To Skein a Cat - (1994) - shortstory by Lawrence Schimel
• Asking Mr. Bigelow - (1994) - shortstory by Susan Shwartz

This latest volume of 17 new cat stories offers both familiar characters returning for further adventures as well as new furry friends to capture your heart. Meet wizards' four-footed helpers, who are often brighter than their so-called masters, a real cool cat who's the ultimate jazz connoisseur, and other terrific tabbies sure to make you purr with delight.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Andre Norton
• The Last Answer - (1996) - shortfiction by Wilanne Schneider Belden
• The Quincunx Solution - (1996) - shortfiction by Anne Braude
• Circus - (1996) - shortfiction by Jayge Carr
• Tybalt's Tale - (1996) - shortstory by India Edghill
• The Tale of the Virtual Cat - (1996) - shortfiction by Heather Gladney and Don Clayton and Alan Rice Osborn
• Arrows - (1996) - shortfiction by Jane Hamilton
• Miss Hettie and Harlan - (1996) - shortfiction by Charles L. Fontenay
• The Neighbor - (1996) - shortfiction by P. M. Griffin
• Tinkerbell - (1996) - shortfiction by Sharman Horwood
• SCat - (1996) - shortstory by Mercedes Lackey
• Professor Purr's Guaranteed Allergy Cure - (1996) - shortfiction by Brad Linaweaver and Dana Fredsti
• Noh Cat Afternoon - (1996) - shortfiction by Jane Lindskold
• Totem Cat - (1996) - shortfiction by A. R. Major
• Deathsong - (1996) - shortfiction by Lyn McConchie
• Noble Warrior, Teller of Fortunes - (1996) - shortfiction by Andre Norton
• Born Again - (1996) - shortfiction by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
• The Cat, the Sorcerer, and the Magic Mirror - (1996) - shortfiction by Mary H. Schaub
• One With Jazz - (1996) - shortfiction by Janet Pack

In these all-original stories, you'll meet the cats of the past, cats of the stars-wide future, cats who take power into their own paws, and cats who can face down Death itself. These are 24 tales certain to capture the hearts and imaginations of feline-lovers everywhere.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Andre Norton
• The Golden Cats - shortstory by Robin Wayne Bailey
• Grow Old Along with Me - shortstory by Lee Barwood
• Puss - novelette by Jayge Carr
• Goliath - shortstory by Russell Davis
• Dragon, The Book - shortstory by David Drake
• The Courtesan Who Loved Cats - shortstory by India Edghill
• The Maltese Feline - shortstory by Rosemary Edghill
• A Cat's Tale - shortstory by Paul Goode
• Tenth-Life Cat - shortstory by P. M. Griffin
• Kindred Hearts - shortstory by Caralyn Inks
• A Better Mousetrap - shortstory by Mercedes Lackey
• The Big Ice - shortstory by Sharon Lee
• Preliminary Report - shortstory by Barry B. Longyear
• Lullaby - shortstory by Lyn McConchie
• The Very Early Hermione - shortstory by Ardath Mayhar
• Miss Lotte - shortstory by Sandra Miesel
• Kitten Claws - shortstory by Sasha Miller
• Noble Warrior and the "Gentleman" - shortstory by Andre Norton
• The Cat, The Sorceress, The Buttons, and Why - shortstory by Mary H. Schaub
• Hobson's Choice - shortstory by Susan Shwartz
• Rosemary for Remembrance - shortstory by Estelle Traylor
• Patches' Pride - shortstory by Laura J. Underwood
• Trixie - shortstory by Lawrence Watt-Evans
• Pick, Cry, and Grin (Ag'in) - shortstory by Rose Wolf

Sturgeon Award winning and Nebula Award nominated novella.

Love is only science fiction.

With wedding photos and videos and mementos of all kinds, newlyweds attempt to hold on to their special day and to cherish it forever. Someday technology may enable us to record not only our appearance and voices but everything we know, feel, fear, and love at the moment the shutter clicks. Then our wedding mementos, like Anne and Ben's in this story, take on a life of their own in a world where love may be eternal, but the world is not. Till deletion do us part...

The story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, June 1999. It can also be found in the Gardner Dozois anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventeenth Annual Collection (2000), Supermen (2002) and Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction (2005), as well as the anthologies Nebula Awards Showcase 2001, edited by Robert Silverberg and Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology (2007), edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel. It is included in the collection Getting to Know You (2007).

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.

Lizelle the liar, Merry the priest, Thraas the barbarian, the mysterious Catseye Yellow... bound on a fool's quest to the top of the world to ask the Wisest One the oldest riddle of them all...

Why do cats have no lord?

A harmless enough question, isn't it? So why is someone moving heaven and hell to make sure it will never be asked...?

Kevin Fikkan is a reckless computer game test runner whose history is a series of betrayals. Janny Laias is a game designer determined to create a realistic fantasy world and rule over it as a god. But Janny's world has a treacherous programming bug that can only be solved by running the game without a safety system--through the demon-infested Tangled Lands.

Catseye, P.I.

Name's Gomez. I'm a cat. And yeah, I talk. Because in an age of magic, nothing's quite what it seems. When you combine magic with genetic engineering, predators and crooks take on a thousand different forms. So do the good guys.

Denver was a new town, new turf for an old stray tom like me. I came in search of a fresh start, but what I found was criminal. It all began when Susan Jacobs, an ambitious and beautiful young broadcaster, met up with a car bomb that blew a lot more than her ratings sky high. After what happened in New Mexico, I needed a case like this like I needed a big hairball. But Susan Jacobs had a sexy little calico whose lambent golden eyes had a look in them that made it really hard to just say no....

So together with a Zippo-snapping, studded leather rebel cop named Leventhal, I'm prowling the streets and alleys of the Mile High City among political whack-jobs, religious nuts, media weasels, talking snakes, gutter sorcerers and wizard wannabes, on a cat-and-mouse hunt for a killer.

And when I find out who it is, the fur is really gonna fly...

When the Catteni ships descended on earth it was one of the most terrifying experiences humankind had ever known. Kris Bjornsen, along with thousands of others, found herself herded by forcewhips into the hold of giant spaceships to be transported to the slave compounds of an alien planet. And even then it wasn't over. For, after a partially successful escape attempt, Kris was once more shipped across space - to an apparently empty and untamed planet. The Catteni just dumped an assorted load of humans and aliens on the strange world and left them to see what would happen.

Brilliantly the refugees began to organize themselves into a pattern of survival. The planet was eerie and not as empty as it seemed. For someone - something - had built giant storage barns - the planet was being used as a huge larder - for an entity they could not comprehend.

As Kris and her patrol set out to explore the enigmatic world she had yet another problem to contend with - the presence of Zainal, the high-ranking patrician Catteni who had been abandoned with the rest of them. Zainal was strong, brilliant, and...kind, and Kris was puzzled by his presence, his personality, and above all by the tenuous tie she felt towards this man - who was not a man but one of the hated Catteni.

They had called the planet Botany, after the old penal colony on earth. For that is what they were - prisoners and dissidents from other worlds whom the hated Catteni had banished to an empty planet - or what they thought was an empty planet.

Kris Bjornsen and her fellow slaves had survived very well - and one reason was that amongst their number was Zainal, a high ranking Catteni who was as trapped on Botany as they were. Zainal knew the Catteni ways and the Catteni technology, and he had plans for fighting back. For, as he explained, the Catteni too were victims - subject to the mighty and terrifying Eosi race who used the Catteni as a galactic police force - and also used them in more grisly and horrifying ways.

And over Zainal's daring and secret plans, over the surveying expeditions and the exploration of the strange hidden valleys, hung a further mystery - to whom did Botany really belong? Who had created the giant grain sheds - the mammoth machinery that tilled the great fields? The new inhabitants of Botany called them the 'Farmers' - and waited for the day they would come to harvest their crops.

And when that happened, the refugees were awed into silence - for the Farmers were greater than anything the universe had ever seen.

The inhabitants of Botany - a mixture of humans and extra terrestrials - had managed to build a thriving and productive world out of what had originally been intended as a slave planet. And now they had plans to try and overthrow the terrible Eosi, who for centuries had existed by subsuming members of the Catteni race, living in their bodies and ruling space through them.

And the Botanists had received mysterious and unexpected help from the great beings they knew only as 'Farmers' - for the Farmers had thrown a huge impervious space bubble round Botany. Even as the Eosi ships tried to pulverise the rebellious planet, the bubble held firm.

But, safe though they were behind the protective device, Kris Bjornsen, Zainal and all of the Council knew they had to go out and destroy the Eosi on their own ground. It fell to Zainal to risk his life in a desperate and daring mission to vanquish the monster life forms forever.

The inhabitants of the penal planet Botany had fought a grim and dangerous war to free themselves from their Eosi overlords. Now the Eosi were gone, and both Botany and Earth were free again - free, but in serious trouble as the theft of all their communications satellites by the Catteni (working for their Eosi masters) had left them isolated and in a desperate situation.

Hoping that everything stolen from them would be returned, they found that Catteni greed had triumphed. The merchants of Barevi refused to give up the stolen goods unless a substantial ransom was paid.

Earth was in a particularly bad way: disease, vandalism, starvation and the breakdown of their mechanical world had left its people fighting for survival. They desperately needed the goods the Barevi were hoarding.

And so Zainal, Kris, and a courageous team from Botany set off to try and outwit the thieving merchants. It was an expedition that led to a horrifying replay of an old nightmare for Kris - and only Zainal could save her and the future of both Earth and Botany.

The Mist Village has an insidious history. Terrible atrocities have etched themselves into the very sones of The Land. Just beneath the thin veener of joy and life, the sins of the past lie in wait. Richter will lean that some debts do not just fade away, and more importantly, must be paid.

Luckily, he is not alone. The village itself comes alive as his people show thier worth. Fighters and smiths, magicians and hunters, Richter's people prove the old adage; 'It take a village, to crush your enemies!'

This is a world of wonder and horror.

This is a world of pain and joy.

This is the world that you were meant to fight for.

Welcome back my friends.

Welcome back... to The Land!

Adamantine "Ada" Garland has an empathic connection to food and wine, a magical perception of aromas, flavors, and ingredients. Invaluable property of the royal court, Ada was in service to the Five Gods and to the Gods-ordained rulers of Verdania--until she had enough of injustice and bloodshed and deserted, seeking to chart her own destiny. When mysterious assassins ferret her out after sixteen years in hiding, Ada, now a rogue Chef, and her beloved Grand-mère run for their lives, only to find themselves on a path toward an unexpected ally.

A foreign princess in a strange court, Solenn unknowingly shares more with Ada than an epicurean gift. They share blood. With her newfound magical perception, she becomes aware of a plot to kill her fiancé, the prince. It's part of a ploy by adversarial forces in the rival country of Albion to sow conflict, and Solenn is set up to take the blame.

As Ada's and Solenn's paths converge, a mother and her long-lost daughter reunite toward a common goal, and against a shadowy enemy from Ada's past who is out for revenge. But what sacrifices must be made? What hope is there when powerful Gods pick sides in a war simmering to eruption?

Princess Solenn's marriage into royalty should have unified the continental neighbors of Verdania and Solenn's homeland of Braiz against a common enemy: the country of Albion. Thanks to Albion's cunning sabotage, Verdania is now Braiz's lethal rival. And the dead Braizian sailors washed ashore near Solenn's château are just the beginning.

Arriving in the midst of danger, Ada Garland, rogue Chef to the Gods, is desperate to reunite with her daughter, Solenn. Not only has open war begun; it's become heart-wrenchingly personal. Ada's long-lost, beloved Braizian musketeer, Captain Erwan Corre, is being held in a Verdanian prison, with execution imminent. And her daughter has been tasked with the near-doomed responsibility of uniting violently adversarial countries in peace.

Can Solenn and Ada, coming together, stop their land from descending into all-out war? And what will Solenn become to achieve victory? As ambassador between the human and magical worlds, Solenn must now draw from both to prevent catastrophe, and this time, even the Gods are working against her.

Romy escapes her hardscrabble upbringing when she becomes courtesan to the Shadow Lord, a revolutionary noble who brings laws and comforts once reserved for the wealthy to all. When her brother, Neri, is caught thieving with the aid of magic, Romy's aristocratic influence is the only thing that can spare his life - and the price is her banishment.

Now back in Beggar's Ring, she has just her wits and her own long-hidden sorcery to help her and Neri survive. But when a plot to overthrow the Shadow Lord and incite civil war is uncovered, only Romy knows how to stop it. To do so, she'll have to rely on newfound allies - a swordmaster, a silversmith, and her own thieving brother. And they'll need the very thing that could condemn them all: magic.

Romy and her three partners in crime - a sword master, a silversmith, and her thieving brother - have embraced their roles as the Shadow Lord's agents, using their forbidden magic to accomplish tasks his other spies cannot.

Now, the Shadow Lord needs them to infiltrate the home of the Mercediaran Ambassador and prevent him from obtaining information that would lead to all-out war with Cantagna's most dangerous enemy.

To succeed, they will have to resurrect long-buried secrets, partner with old enemies, and once again rely on the very magics that could get them sentenced to death.

Catagna has been shaken to its core.

The philosophists insist that a disastrous earthquake has been caused by an ancient monster imprisoned below the earth, who can only be freed with magic. In every street and market, the people of Catagna are railing against magic-users with a greater ferocity than ever before, and magic hunters are everywhere.

Meanwhile, Romy has been dreaming.

Every night, her dreams are increasingly vivid and disturbing. Every day, she struggles to understand the purpose of the Chimera's most recent assignment from the Shadow Lord.

As Romy and the others attempt to carry out their mission, they find themselves plunged into a mystery of corruption and murder, myth and magic, and a terrifying truth: the philosophists may have been right all along.

Finally - finally! - Max has that nice office job she's always wanted. The one with no heavy lifting and no one tries to kill her. Well, one out of two's not bad...

Punching well above their weight, Max and Markham set out to bring down a sinister organisation founded in the future - with a suspicious focus on the past.

Max's focus is staying alive long enough to reunite with Leon and Matthew, alternately helped and hindered by St Mary's. Who aren't always the blessing they like to think they are.

But non-stop leaping around the timeline - from witnessing Magna Carta to disturbing a certain young man with a penchant for gunpowder - is beginning to take its toll. Is Max going mad? Or are the ghosts of the past finally catching up with her?

The obsidian mirror. Its power is great and terrible. Men have been lost in it, the dead brought back to life through it, and the future annihilated by it. Or this is what will happen unless the mirror is destroyed. Three people seek the mirror: the first has been sent from the future to shatter its power; the second will protect the mirror at all costs, obsessed with its power; and the third needs the mirror to find a murdered father and save his life. But only one can succeed.

The mirror can send you to the past, but it will not bring you back.

Jake, Sarah, and Oberon Venn continue their fight for control of the Obsidian Mirror, and whoever wins will either save a life, change the past, or rescue the future.

But the Mirror has plans of its own.

It's Midsummer Night. It's hot. And everyone in Wintercombe Alley is dreaming strange and disturbing dreams -- until Jake and Sarah are swept through the Obsidian Mirror and time itself into a nightmare world of revolution and murder. Meanwhile, Oberon Venn faces a choice between staying mortal or losing his soul in the tangled green wildwood of the faerie realm. Catherine Fisher, master of world-building and plot twists -- from a masked ball to a desperate struggle at the very foot of the guillotine -- continues the breathtaking and dangerous search for those who Time has snatched away.

A great storm brews out at sea and batters the Devon coast, flooding vast swathes of land. At Wintercombe Abbey the preceding weeks have been spent in a ferment of experimentation, as Jake Wilde's father, David and Maskelyne work furiously on Operation Leah. They have been practising changing tiny events in the past, in preparation for the rescue of Venn's wife Leah from death, the culmination of their work with the Obsidian Mirror. But in the aftermath of the storm, the Abbey is a drowned house. Where is the Mirror? What has happened to the two halves of the Janus coin? Whose is the mysterious boat wrecked up on the nearby beach? And what plans of mischief and mayhem lay in store for Halloween -- the day chosen for Leah's return?

Conan the Barbarian is a novelization of the feature film of the same name.

OUT OF A DARK AGE COMES THE GREATEST WARRIOR OF ALL TIME...

In a land of darkling twilight, a world of ancient wizards and dazzling treasures of raging monsters and valiant warriors, the fate of kingdoms balances on his blade alone...

As a child he saw his parents slaughtered by the Snake Cult. In slavery he grew to mighty manhood, trained as a master swordsman and gladiator. As he slaved in chains he planned for freedom and murderous revenge. His day would come. For he was destined to become the warrior who would rule all...

Thief. Warrior. Gladiator. King.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN.

The Vindication of Man is the epic and mind-blowing continuation of John C. Wright's visionary space opera series surpasses all expectation.

Menelaus Montrose, having renewed his enmity with his immortal adversary, Ximen del Azarchel, awaits the return of the posthuman princess Rania, their shared lost love. Rania brings with her the judgment of the Dominions ruling the known cosmos, which will determine the fate of humanity, once and for all. Vindication or destruction? And if it is somehow both, what manner of future awaits them?

In a world of magic, where computers and nanotechnology are long gone, where thoughtless gods struggle for power with little regard for those below, one unlucky man must make some tough decisions...

Maximillian the Vaguely Disreputable isn't sure what's going on in the village of Roosing Oolvaya. Someone - probably a god - has trapped Max's friend, the Great Karlini, in a castle that keeps trying to move at the most inconvenient times, and naturally it's up to Max to figure out how to spring him. But the gods throwing their weight around in Roosing Oolvaya are more than Max bargained for, and soon he's caught between necromancers, working with a detective named the Creeping Sword, and even dancing with Death itself in a desperate attempt to save the city from catastrophe.

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, October-November 2002. The story is included in the collection The Dog Said Bow Wow (2007).

Sixteen-year-old dock boy Will is on the run, pursued by the men who killed his mother. Then an old servant tells him of his destiny to fight beside the Stewards, who have sworn to protect humanity if the Dark King ever returns. Will is thrust into a world of magic, where he starts training for a vital role in the oncoming battle against the Dark.

As London is threatened and old enmities are awakened, Will must stand with the last heroes of the Light to prevent the fate that destroyed their world from returning to destroy his own.

The big cat cried "danger!" Troy Horan heard it with his mind just as he had heard the fox's warning and the kinkajou's. He didn't understand how he could communicate with the animals or why they were contacting him. But from the moment he began work at Kyger's pet emporium on Korwar he was enmeshed in a perilous intrigue... an intrigue that would leave more than one man dead, an entire government in jeopardy, and Horan himself both master and captive of the most extraordinary band of warriors his world had ever known.

This is the story of a place that never was: the kingdom of Prester John, the utopia described by an anonymous, twelfth-century document which captured the imagination of the medieval world and drove hundreds of lost souls to seek out its secrets, inspiring explorers, missionaries, and kings for centuries. But what if it were all true? What if there was such a place, and a poor, broken priest once stumbled past its borders, discovering, not a Christian paradise, but a country where everything is possible, immortality is easily had, and the Western world is nothing but a dim and distant dream?

Brother Hiob of Luzerne, on missionary work in the Himalayan wilderness on the eve of the eighteenth century, discovers a village guarding a miraculous tree whose branches sprout books instead of fruit. These strange books chronicle the history of the kingdom of Prester John, and Hiob becomes obsessed with the tales they tell. The Habitation of the Blessed recounts the fragmented narratives found within these living volumes, revealing the life of a priest named John, and his rise to power in this country of impossible richness. John's tale weaves together with the confessions of his wife Hagia, a blemmye--a headless creature who carried her face on her chest--as well as the tender, jeweled nursery stories of Imtithal, nanny to the royal family.

Hugo and World Fantasy award nominee Catherynne M. Valente reimagines the legends of Prester John in this stunning tour de force.

When the mysterious daughter of Prester John appears on the doorstep of her father's palace, she brings with her news of war in the West--the Crusades have begun, and the bodies of the faithful are washing up on the shores of Pentexore. Three narratives intertwine to tell the tale of the beginning of the end of the world: a younger, angrier Hagia, the blemmye-wife of John and Queen of Pentexore, who takes up arms with the rest of her nation to fight a war they barely understand, Vyala, a lion-philosopher entrusted with the care of the deformed and prophetic royal princess, and another John, John Mandeville, who in his many travels discovers the land of Pentexore--on the other side of the diamond wall meant to keep demons and monsters at bay. These three voices weave a story of death, faith, beauty, and power, dancing in the margins of true history, illuminating a place that never was.

No one escapes their past as the crew of the You Sexy Thing attempts to navigate the hazards of opening a pop-up restaurant and the dangers of a wrathful pirate-king seeking vengeance...

Life's hard when you're on the run from a vengeful pirate-king...

When Niko and her crew find that the intergalactic Gate they're planning on escaping through is out of commission, they make the most of things, creating a pop-up restaurant to serve the dozens of other stranded ships.

But when an archaeologist shows up claiming to be able to fix the problem, Niko smells something suspicious cooking. Nonetheless, they allow Farren to take them to an ancient site where they may be able to find the weapon that could stop Tubal Last before he can take his revenge.

There, in one of the most dangerous places in the Known Universe, each of them will face ghosts from their past: Thorn attempts something desperate and highly illegal to regain his lost twin, Atlanta will have to cast aside her old role and find her new one, Dabry must confront memories of his lost daughter, and Niko is forced to find Petalia again, despite a promise not to seek them out.

Meanwhile, You Sexy Thing continues to figure out what it wants from life--which may not be the same desire as Niko and the rest of the crew.

One rat, popping up here and there, squeaking loudly, and taking a bath in the cream, could be a plague all by himself. After a few days of this, it was amazing how glad people were to see the kid with his magical rat pipe. And they were amazing when the rats followed hint out of town.

They'd have been really amazed if they'd ever found out that the rats and the piper met up with a cat somewhere outside of town and solemnly counted out the money.

The Amazing Maurice runs the perfect Pied Piper scam. This streetwise alley cat knows the value of cold, hard cash and can talk his way into and out of anything. But when Maurice and his cohorts decide to con the town of Bad Blinitz, it will take more than fast talking to survive the danger that awaits. For this is a town where food is scarce and rats are hated, where cellars are lined with deadly traps, and where a terrifying evil lurks beneath the hunger-stricken streets....

Winner, Asimov's Annual Readers' Poll

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

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

"Explode the buoys? But that will destroy the Earth!"

"Oh dear, so it will. Pass on my apologies to the humans, won't you?"

Earth has been invaded. Twice. Thousands of years ago by a race searching for a new power source. More recently by the galactic marauders known as the Cat-People, who intend to continue the work done by the earlier visitors, with devastating results.

The recently regenerated Doctor, along with companions Ben and Polly, teams up with a group of amateur ghost-hunters and a mysterious white witch on a journey that takes them from twentieth-century Cumbria to the Arabian deserts of folklore and Australia 40,000 years in the past. Can the Doctor stop the invaders and disarm the bombs left buried beneath the planet's surface -- or have the ancient Aborigines of Australia sung the seeds of their own destruction?

1980: The Democratic People's Republic of Laos is proud to be competing in its first-ever Olympics. Of course, half the world is boycotting the Moscow Summer Olympic Games to protest Russia's recent invasion of Afghanistan, but that has made room for athletes from countries that are usually too small or underfunded to be competitive--countries like Laos.

Ex-national coroner of Laos Dr Siri Paiboun may be retired, but he and his wife, Madame Daeng, would do just about anything to have a chance to visit Moscow, so Siri finagles them the job of medical oversight for the Olympians. Most of the athletes are young and innocent village people who have never worn shoes, never mind imagined anything as marvelous as the Moscow Olympic Village. As the competition heats up, however, Siri begins to suspect that one of the athletes is not who he says he is. Fearing a conspiracy, Siri and his friends investigate, liaising in secret with Inspector Phosy back home in Laos to see if the man might be an assassin. But Siri's progress is derailed when another Lao Olympian is accused of murder. Now in the midst of a murky international incident, Dr. Siri must navigate not one but two paranoid and secretive government machines to make sure justice is done.

Everyone knows kender can't do magic. But Sindri Suncatcher--the greatest kender wizard in the world--can.

Back at Cairngorn Keep, the black-robed wizard Maddoc has made Sindri his apprentice. But a mysterious stranger interrupts Sindri's training, and soon Sindri finds himself chased by strange monsters and receiving cryptic messages. Will these extraordinary events lead to Sindri's destiny--or his doom?

Everyone knows that kender can't do magic. But Sindri Suncatcher - the greatest kender wizard in the world - can.

Now that Sindri knows who has been trying to kill him, he sets out on a mission to find out why. But the friends who accompany him have confusing motivations. The black robed wizard Maddoc has lied to Sindri one too many times. And the renegade hunter who once vowed to imprison Sindri now acts like a true friend.

As Sindri and his friends break into a mechanical maze guarded by a frightening gorgon, the kender apprentice must tackle a grave lesson: how not to trust.

Sindri Suncatcher is back in this thrilling conclusion to the Suncatcher Trilogy!

Sindri has defeated the evil wizard Anica, but the conflict is far from over. Old foes endanger Sindri's home village in Kendermore, while old friends add confusion to an already frenzied situation. And in the midst of all the chaos, Sindri must make the hardest choice of his life.

Jeff Sampson's final book in the Suncatcher Trilogy shows the power of friendship - and learning which friends you can trust.

As a young child, Serroi was held in thrall to Ser Noris, the powerful and villainous mage who saved her from certain death only to exploit her as a tool in his unholy experiments in necromancy and demonic possession. After being cast aside, she became a chosen warrior of the meie, though nightmarish memories continue to haunt her. As for the dark sorcerer, his power and malevolence have since increased a thousandfold. Having achieved eternal life, no evil in this world can compare with his, and now Ser Noris, bored with a lack of worthy opponents, has challenged the Goddess herself, She who lives at the center of all things.

Only Serroi can truly recognize the terrible depth of the darkness that is overtaking her world. And as she sets forth on a desperate quest to locate the last remaining power capable of defeating Ser Noris's insidious plot--the enigmatic and wildly unpredictable hermit Coyote--a young girl in a faraway village, whose fate will soon be intertwined with Serroi's, is coming of age in a time of violence and fear.

But what chance do mere mortal heroes have when faced with malevolence so powerful and brazen that it dares to take on a goddess, and would obliterate an entire world on a whim?

Ninette Dupond was a dancer with the Paris Opera Ballet. She had been very lucky--if she had not been pretty, and a natural dancer, she could only have become what her mother had been: a washerwoman.

But Ninette's good luck ended the day that the lead dancer sprained her ankle and Ninette was chosen to dance her part at a matinee. Her reviews had been very good--too good. Shortly thereafter, Ninette had been fired in an attempt to soothe the wounded ego of the ballet's primary soloist.

Alone, unemployed, and filled with despair, Ninette had returned to her apartment to find a thin, rangy, tabby-striped tomcat sitting on her windowsill. He seemed like just another stray, until abruptly he spoke to her, mind-to-mind.

Ninette though she was going mad, but the cat offered her an alternative to a life of destitution, albeit a very odd one. He proposed that she impersonate a renowned Russian ballerina, Nina Tchereslavsky, and go to work in a specific music hall in Blackpool, England. The cat also told her that he would take care of her in every way--he would somehow convey the English and Russian languages to her, supply her with money, and guide her every move. With no other option open to her, she place her life in his paws.

What Ninette didn't know was that the cat was an Elemental Spirit sent to protect her, and that the music hall in Blackpool was owned by an Elemental Master. But she also didn't know that the real Nina Tchereslavsky no longer existed. For the real Nina had been "absorbed" by an Elemental Spirit of the darkest kind that was now bent on Ninette's destruction....

One heartbeat of blistering darkness to die into. One brief dying to return from.

Beginning where Enemy Glory leaves off, Hecate's Glory continues Llewelyn's strange deathbed account of his alliance with evil, the tale of his life as a highly adept priest of the goddess Hecate. Torn between his love of artistic beauty and his mandate to destroy it, Llewelyn continues to stand trial for his life. Or is it for his death?

Captain Rogers, despite his best attempts to do otherwise, has become the acting admiral of the 331st Meridan fleet. His first task: worrying. A lot.

The rival Thelicosan fleet, under the influence of bad intelligence, a forbidden romance, and a communication officer with an eardrum injury, is about to break a two-hundred-year-old nonaggression pact. They have offered a vague, easily misinterpreted message: "We're invading." Rogers isn't sure, but he thinks that's probably bad.

War is hell, especially when you've forgotten how to fight one.

The third novel in Peter Clines' bestselling Ex series.

"All of us try to cheat death. I was just better prepared to do it than most folks."

In the years since the wave of living death swept the globe, St George and his fellow heroes haven't just kept Los Angeles' last humans alive--they've created a real community, a bustling town that's spreading beyond its original walls and swelling with new refugees.

But now one of the heroes, perhaps the most powerful among them, seems to be losing his mind. The implacable enemy known as Legion has found terrifying new ways of using zombies as pawns in his attacks. And outside the Mount, something ancient and monstrous is hell-bent on revenge.

As Peter Clines weaves these elements together in yet another masterful, shocking climax, St. George, Stealth, Captain Freedom, and the rest of the heroes find that even in a city overrun by millions of ex-humans...

...there's more than one way to come back from the dead.

This original short story tells the tale of how a girl named Mallow defeated King Goldmouth with the help of the Red Wind, Mr. Map, and many fairyland friends new and old--from Catherynne M. Valente, author of the children's fantasy sensation The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making.

This story is anthologized in Rich Horton's The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2012 (2012 )and collected in The Bread We Eat in Dreams (2013).

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Twelve-year-old September lives in Omaha, and used to have an ordinary life, until her father went to war and her mother went to work. One day, September is met at her kitchen window by a Green Wind (taking the form of a gentleman in a green jacket), who invites her on an adventure, implying that her help is needed in Fairyland. The new Marquess is unpredictable and fickle, and also not much older than September. Only September can retrieve a talisman the Marquess wants from the enchanted woods, and if she doesn't... then the Marquess will make life impossible for the inhabitants of Fairyland. September is already making new friends, including a book-loving Wyvern and a mysterious boy named Saturday.

With exquisite illustrations by acclaimed artist Ana Juan, Fairyland lives up to the sensation it created when the author first posted it online. For readers of all ages who love the charm of Alice in Wonderland and the soul of The Golden Compass, here is a reading experience unto itself: unforgettable, and so very beautiful.

September has longed to return to Fairyland after her first adventure there. And when she finally does, she learns that its inhabitants have been losing their shadows--and their magic--to the world of Fairyland Below. This underworld has a new ruler: Halloween, the Hollow Queen, who is September's shadow. And Halloween does not want to give Fairyland's shadows back.

Fans of Valente's bestselling, first Fairyland book will revel in the lush setting, characters, and language of September's journey, all brought to life by fine artist Ana Juan. Readers will also welcome back good friends Ell, the Wyverary, and the boy Saturday. But in Fairyland Below, even the best of friends aren't always what they seem....

September misses Fairyland and her friends Ell, the Wyverary, and the boy Saturday. She longs to leave the routines of home and embark on a new adventure. Little does she know that this time, she will be spirited away to the moon, reunited with her friends, and find herself faced with saving Fairyland from a moon-Yeti with great and mysterious powers.

Twelve-year-old September lives in Omaha, and used to have an ordinary life, until her father went to war and her mother went to work. One day, September is met at her kitchen window by a Green Wind (taking the form of a gentleman in a green jacket), who invites her on an adventure, implying that her help is needed in Fairyland. The new Marquess is unpredictable and fickle, and also not much older than September. Only September can retrieve a talisman the Marquess wants from the enchanted woods, and if she doesn't... then the Marquess will make life impossible for the inhabitants of Fairyland. September is already making new friends, including a book-loving Wyvern and a mysterious boy named Saturday.

September has been crowned as Queen of Fairyland but the Kingdom is in chaos. The magic of a Dodo egg has brought every King, Queen, or Marquees of Fairyland back to life, each with a claim on the throne and their own plots and histories. In order to make sense of it all, and to save their friend from a job she doesn't want, A-Through-L and Saturday devise a Royal Race, a Monarchical Marathon, in which every would-be ruler will chase the Stoat of Arms across the nation, and the first to seize the poor beast will be crowned. Caught up in the madness are September's parents, who have crossed the universe to find their daughter.

Walk the line between magic and madness in Erin M. Evan's passionate story about the dragons of the City of Splendors...

Tennora would give anything to be a wizard. And Clytemorrenestrix, a strange woman with uncanny blue eyes, whose name means "She Will Thunder in the Sky," and who claims to be a dragon, promises to make her just that - in return for aid in returning her to her true form. But soon after Tennora seals the deal, a bounty hunter presses a note into her hands claiming the dragon woman is actually a human - a violent, criminally insane human who murders those who fail her.

The God Catcher is gripping tale of identity, intrigue, and obsession set in the classic City of Splendors and presented by Forgotten Realms campaign setting creator and celebrated author Ed Greenwood. You don't want to miss out on this exciting glimpse into what the latest edition of the Realms has to offer.

The eagerly awaited finale of a modern SF classic--May's Galactic Milieu Trilogy, which began with Jack the Bodiless and continued with Diamond Mask. The mystery involving Jack the Bodiless, the metaphysically talented Dorothea, and Fury, the insane metaphysic creature determined to become sole ruler over all humankind, explodes anew. At last, the momentous secret at the heart of the trilogy is revealed.

Terrifying disturbances have been reported in the Uranium mines of Fortuna. The minors have come to believe that they are haunted, and the delays in production have attracted the attention of the Royal Atomic Energy Commission. Their agent arrives to discover one of the mine's owners, a young woman of unknown origin, living in terror of the other, an old man with mad dreams of immortality. They follow a mysterious and ruthless would-be goddess into another world, where masked beings of pure energy have enslaved the population for thousands of years, drawing their titanic power from the unfathomable Well of the Worlds.

A Variant Title for The Fairy Chessmen:

A mathematician whose research involves a type of chess played with variable rules ("fairy chess") is the only one able to solve an "equation from the future" in which the constants are treated as variables that the "bad guys" are going to use to win World War III.

Locus and Strugeon Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Drowned Worlds (2016), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven (2017), edited by Jonathan Strahan, The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2017, edited by Paula Guran, and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017, edited by John Joseph Adams and Charles Yu. It is incuded in the collection The Future Is Blue (2018).

This story comprises the first quarter of the book The Past Is Red and it can be read for free at Clarkesworld.

The future is blue. Endless blue... except for a few small places that float across the hot, drowned world left behind by long-gone fossil fuel-guzzlers. One of those patches is a magical place called Garbagetown.

Tetley Abednego is the most beloved girl in Garbagetown, but she's the only one who knows it. She's the only one who knows a lot of things: that Garbagetown is the most wonderful place in the world, that it's full of hope, that you can love someone and 66% hate them all at the same time.

But Earth is a terrible mess, hope is a fragile thing, and a lot of people are very angry with her. Then Tetley discovers a new friend, a terrible secret, and more to her world than she ever expected.

The first quarter of this book was published as the novelette The Past Is Red and it can be read for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1996, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, August 2013.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Sir Julius Vogel Award-winning and Aurealis and Ditmar-nominated Novella

She took her helmet off.
That's where it starts; that's where it ends.
That's all there is.

Tanja Morgenstein, daughter of a wealthy industrialist and a geochemist, is dead from exposure to Titan's lethal, chilled atmosphere, and Guerline Scarfe must determine why.

Rasim is no stranger to bad luck. Orphaned at birth, he holds his place in the Seamasters' Guild by dint of quick thinking and sheer stubbornness. Possessed of little magic but a sharp mind, his greatest talent seems to be finding trouble--or perhaps escaping it just in time.

No one is more surprised than Rasim when he earns a place on the fleet's flagship, sent North for a daring mission. Storm, treachery, piracy, and outright war sail with them. One half-strength foundling can't hope to save the fleet, his friends, or even himself.

But Rasim is determined to try. He'll use every bit of cleverness and magic he has available to outwit his enemies and protect his friends. In doing so, he just may save his country, and become what he's always wanted to be...

A Seamaster.

It's good luck to earn the king's regard... isn't it?

Seamaster journeyman Rasim's quick wits have helped to save his beloved home city and earned him the dubious honor of studying with the diplomatic Sunmasters. But not everyone is happy that magical knowledge is being shared, and when the king orders the guilds back to the Northlands on a sensitive political mission, it may well cost Rasim his life.

Seamaster-born, Sunmaster-trained, Rasim now faces a fight that can only be won by a Stonemaster...

A city hidden for 5,000 years.

A man so ancient his early history is lost to time.

A woman who has nothing to lose.

Lorhen, oldest and most ruthless of the immortal Timeless, put aside the sword long ago for a quiet life. But peace doesn't last forever, especially for a man whose age can be counted in epochs, and the mortal life he's built unravels as the Keepers, a society of historians who record Timeless lives, learn that he's been hiding in their midst.

Then an archaeologist's claims of finding Atlantis brings back millennia-old memories, and Lorhen is drawn unwillingly into intrigues aeons in the making - and deadly enough that he may yet face the heartstrike blow that will unleash his power on the world.

Time Conquers All...

Led by Lord Milo the Undying One, the men of the Horseclans are slowly reuniting the continent once known as the United States of America using the strength of their swords and their very special mental talents. But the Ehleenee, too, have dreams of power--dreams that have led them into a full-scale religious war of conquest.

Lord Milo must enlist the help of men like Bili Morguhn, whose skill with axe, sword, and mind control makes him a natural clan leader, if he is to contain the menace of the Ehleenee rebels and save civilization from destruction...

Battle to the Death!

When Milo Morai, the Undying High Lord, and his Horseclans warriors found the tower ruins, they welcomed it as the perfect citadel from which to hold off the packs of ravenous wolves eager for their blood.

But the ancient building hid a secret far more dangerous than either wolves or any human foe, for in its depths waited The Hunter--the penultimate product of genetic experimentation gone wild, one of the few descendants of a powerful breed that had long outlasted its human creators.

The Hunter--who, with fang, claw, and blood-chilling speed--would challenge the Undying Lord himself to a battle to the death.

Incarceron is a prison so vast that it contains not only cells and corridors, but metal forests, dilapidated cities, and wilderness. It has been sealed for centuries, and only one man has ever escaped. Finn has always been a prisoner here. Although he has no memory of his childhood, he is sure he came from Outside. His link to the Outside, his chance to break free, is Claudia, the warden's daughter, herself determined to escape an arranged marriage. They are up against impossible odds, but one thing looms above all: Incarceron itself is alive...

Finn has escaped Incarceron, but Keiro and Attia are still Inside. Outside, things are not at all what Finn expected - and both Finn's and Claudia's very lives hang on Finn convincing the Court that he is the lost prince. Back Inside, Keiro and Attia are on the hunt for Sapphique's glove, which legend says he used to escape. In order to find it, they must battle the prison itself. Incarceron has built itself a body and it wants to go Outside -- just like Sapphique, the only prisoner Incarceron ever loved.

Hugo-nominated Novella

Vishnu at the Cat Circus is a novella set in the same world as Ian McDonald's 2004 novel River of Gods. It depicts a futuristic India in 2047, a century after its independence from Britain, characterized both by ancient traditions and advanced technologies such as artificial intelligences, robots and nanotechnology.

The genetically-improved Vishnu looks back on his life, in a story of a sibling rivalry with some very unexpected results.

Jirel returns to the terrifying dark land beneath Joiry to undo a wrong she committed in Black God's Kiss.

The Jirel of Joiry series is not numbered but this is the second published story of such.

This novelette is included in the collection "Jirel of Joiry".

It first appeared in the December, 1934 Issue of Weird Tales, available free on Internet Archives.

Jirel visits the haunted castle of Hellsgarde to retrieve a treasure.

The Jirel of Joiry series is not numbered but this is the sixth published story of such.

This novelette is included in the collection "Jirel of Joiry"

It first appeared in the April, 1939 Issue of Weird Tales, available free on Internet Archives.

The story of a warrior maid and the tremendous adventure that awaited her beyond the castle window-

The Jirel of Joiry series is not numbered but this is the third published story of such.

This novelette is included in the collection "Jirel of Joiry".

It first appeared in the July, 1935 Issue of Weird Tales, available on Internet Archives.

A gripping story of a warrior maid who went down into a land of unthinkable evil in search of a strange weapon.

The Jirel of Joiry series is not numbered but this is the first published story of such.

This novelette is included in the collection "Jirel of Joiry".

It first appeared in the October, 1934 Issue of Weird Tales, available on Internet Archives.

Jirel is snatched from her deathbed by Pav of the dark land of Romne.

The Jirel of Joiry series is not numbered but this is the fourth published story of such.

This novelette is included in the collection "Jirel of Joiry".

It first appeared in the January, 1936 Issue of Weird Tales, available free on Internet Archives.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Fast Forward 2 (2008), edited by Lou Anders. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2009, edited by Rich Horton. The story is included in the collection A Better Way to Die: The Collected Short Stories (2015).

THROUGH THE UNSTABLE LANDS

Etjole Ehomba is a herdsman whose simple sense of honor demands that he fulfill the dying wish of a ship-wrecked stranger. Even though his promise means that Ehomba--armed only with a bone knife and a sky-metal sword--must walk the length of a world, cross lands of unceasing peril, sail an impassable ocean, vanquish an unstoppable evil, and resuce a woman he has never met for the sake of a dead man he did not know.

No wizard or warrior would attempt such a mad quest. But a man who poses questions to everything he meets may find answers that no wizard could imagine...

ACROSS THE LETHAL NATIONS

Etjole Ehomba has led his companions through jungle, veldt, and desert. Now to reach the fabled port of Hamacassar, the simple herdsman must trek through deadly "civilized" lands where flowers wage war, dogs herd lightning, demons govern darkness, and Time itself can be held captive.

In this new world, the tribesman must rely upon his friends, wondrous weapons, and the magic of memories so potent they can raise the dead or bring the sea to dry land. But no matter where he goes, evey seer and sage Ehomba meets offers the same prophecy: his quest will end in failure... and death.

"The skeleton that dismounted was neither the tallest nor the most stout of those pale white specters that were arrayed against the travelers, but it strode forward with a stiff-jointed dignity none of its demised confederates could not match. With plucked feathers streaming from the gilded helmet that rocked atop its bleached skull, it approached the living. Halting barely a spear length sway, the skeleton placed one bony arm across its splayed rib cage--and bowed..."

When Rick Luban's high school prank to impress his buddies gets him thrown out of school, a long-suffering teacher recommends he apply for a job with a mining company in space. So begins an exciting adventure, the kind that one day will be open to many young men and women.

It's a typical day of bureaucracy and stress for President and First Lady Jeff and Kitty Katt-Martini, in part because Kitty's been tapped to represent Earth in the Galactic Council. Kitty feels that's a bad idea, and she might be right.

When her first official TV morning show goes awry, it's only the quick thinking of the actor determined to make the "Code Name: First Lady" movie a reality that saves the day. It also forces Kitty to work with Hollywood.

Meanwhile, the Embassy Daycare kids are all about to enter "real school"--and none of them want to go. They may have grounds to be concerned because many of the other students and their familes seem shady, and everyone seems to have an evil agenda.

Dealing with the assimilation of the aliens who have come to Earth, while fending off advances from a variety of Hollywood types, seems like Kitty's biggest challenge. But then she and Jeff discover that Stephanie Valentino--Jeff's niece and the true Heir Apparent to the original Mastermind--is back.

Can Jeff and Kitty thwart the most insidious attacks yet, while keeping tenuous peace on Earth and goodwill toward all sentient species going? And can they also find time to be part of the most truly terrifying organization they've ever encountered--the school's parent-teacher association?

Project Kon-tiki, the world's first extra-solar colony expedition, is just weeks away from departure, and tension is mounting at Lakenheath Base. Psychologist Kat Manning is one of the eighteen specialist whose clone will be sent to the stars, and her job is to work with the original specialists, the 'left behind', to monitor and support them through their dislocation... But when Kat is kidnapped by the Allianz, a faction opposed to the colonisation program, more than just her safety is at stake. The entire mission is in jeopardy.

When our protagonist Andrei discovers that his girlfriend has cheated on him, he finds himself with an unexpected choice to make: a quick death, or a new life in another world he knows absolutely nothing about. Andrei chooses life, and sets off alongside his pet, a ginger cat with a limp, for a primeval world fraught with danger. The trouble is... who is whose pet becomes entirely unclear; the man's consciousness is split between both creatures, and the little cat gets a far greater share of intelligence and wit than his hulking master. What do you do as a weak little kitty? Abandon the clumsy human who always seems to get into trouble, go in search of a new master? Or protect your human body in the hope of one day returning to it?

It's Not Over Til The Skinny Lady Sings . . .

Working off of a piece of intelligence from our alien allies, the Vorpal Blade is dispatched to investigate rumors of an ancient and powerful civilization that may have been the creators of the “black box” that drives humanity's only space ship. Any remnant technology would be nice but what the Blade finds is much more than they bargained for. Worse, the ship is infested by an alien species of scorpion-like arachnoids that has the potential to wipe out a world. Worst of all, instead of being Astrogator, Captain William Weaver is now the XO and he is not getting along with the new commander. And the new commander does not get along with Weaver, the ship's female savant-linguist or most of the rest of the original crew. And what is that weird noise the ship makes every time it's in hard maneuvers?

Leave it to the oddball geniuses of the Blade to sort it all out. And the Dreen are not going to like the answers.

Return to the the epic tale of the Lord of the Isles, David Drake's saga of magic and might.

For the first time in a thousand years, the Kingdom of the Isles has a government and a real ruler: Prince Garric of Haft. The enemies joining against him intend to destroy not only the kingdom but humankind as well.

The rebels gathering in the West outnumber the royal army and the magic they wield can strike into the heart of the palace itself, but far greater dangers lie behind those. On the far fringes of the Isles, ancient powers ready themselves for a titanic struggle in which human beings are mere pawns--or fodder!

Reptilian and insect monsters from out of the ages march on the kingdom, commanded by wizards no longer human or never human at all. If unchecked, their ravening slaughter will sweep over the Isles as destructively as a flood of lava. Garric, ripped from his time and body, must make new allies if he and his kingdom are to survive.

Watching them all from the blackness of a tomb walled off in time and space, the Mistress waits...

And her fangs drip poison!

This novelette originally appeared on the Angry Robot website, December 2011. It can also be found in the anthologies:

• Year's Best SF 17 (2012), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
• Imaginarium 2012: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing (2012), edited by Sandra Kasturi and Halli Villegas
• Twenty-First Century Science Fiction (2013), edited by David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden
• More Human Than Human: Stories of Androids, Robots, and Manufactured Humanity (2017), edited by Neil Clarke.

Read the full story for free at Angry Robot.

Carroll Locklear was up to his ears in Kzinti. He hadn't planned it tht way; what sane human would want to be trapped cheek by furry jowl with a bunch of homicidal bearcats? But when he was taken prisoner, somehow the subject of Locklear's likes and dislikes never came up, and now he finds himself stranded on a planet of prehistoric Kzinti. To survive, he must find common cause, if not with the males, then with the females of that antique species...

Table of Contents:

• Cathouse - (1988) - novella by Dean Ing
• Briar Patch - (1989) - novella by Dean Ing

The 'Outer Regions' were created by the artist Karen Kuykendall, whose book of paintings, The Cat People, and her justly famous Tarot cards immortalized these fantastic lands and peoples. There exists among Ms. Kuykendall's records a complete "Travelers' Report" upon which this book is based."-Andre Norton, from her introduction to Mark of the Cat/Year of the Rat In Mark of the Cat multiple award-winning Andre Norton presents a novel of magic and adventure-the unforgettable story of a boy's journey of discovery, from trial to triumph. Hynkkel, commanded by his father to travel into the unknown in a test of survival, starts out with almost nothing, but the red-gold sandcat pendent worn around his neck as a reminder of his killed cat. His trek will bring him to a cave where he will enter the secret world of the cat... to a trial that will mark his destiny. In Year of the Rat, Andre's never before published sequel to Mark of the Cat, we find the natural water sources of the five queendoms of the Outer Region drying up. Hynkkel, not fully recovered from his previous trials, must now find a way to stop this loss and recover the missing water. For in a desert climate, water is the key of life. To do so he must first find out who, or what, is causing the water loss and where it is going. When he and Murri, his sandcat, set out on their journey they make another, even more startling, discovery. A being of ancient evil has returned and along with it has brought the desert rats, hoards and hoards of deadly desert rats, bent on one thing-to destroy the queendoms one by one. Can Hynkkel both find the missing water and stop the rats before all succumb to The Year of the Rat?

In the five queendoms, the kotti is a sacred animal, believed to possess magical powers. To young Hynkkel, the kotti Mieu is his treasured companion, his friend, his kin... until she is cruelly taken from him in a drunken rage by his violent brother, leaving Hynkkel's heart as barren as the deserts of his homeland.

Commanded by his father to Solo - to travel into the unknown in a test of survival - Hynkkel sets out with little more than the red-gold sandcat pendant, bestowed upon him by a woman, worn around his neck as a reminder of his loss. He begins his journey with nothing...

But his trek will bring him to a cave where he will enter the secret world of the cat...

And to a trial that will mark his destiny.

A breathtaking, enchanting new series by debut author Jessica Townsend, about a cursed girl who escapes death and finds herself in a magical world--but is then tested beyond her wildest imagination

Morrigan Crow is cursed. Having been born on Eventide, the unluckiest day for any child to be born, she's blamed for all local misfortunes, from hailstorms to heart attacks--and, worst of all, the curse means that Morrigan is doomed to die at midnight on her eleventh birthday.

But as Morrigan awaits her fate, a strange and remarkable man named Jupiter North appears. Chased by black-smoke hounds and shadowy hunters on horseback, he whisks her away into the safety of a secret, magical city called Nevermoor.

It's then that Morrigan discovers Jupiter has chosen her to contend for a place in the city's most prestigious organization: the Wundrous Society. In order to join, she must compete in four difficult and dangerous trials against hundreds of other children, each boasting an extraordinary talent that sets them apart--an extraordinary talent that Morrigan insists she does not have. To stay in the safety of Nevermoor for good, Morrigan will need to find a way to pass the tests--or she'll have to leave the city to confront her deadly fate.

Morrigan Crow may have defeated her deadly curse and joined the mystical and prestigious Wundrous Society, but her journey has only just begun....

The people of the secret, magical city of Nevermoor have a long memory of the monstrous attacks orchestrated by the only other known Wundersmith, Ezra Squall-and they seem to think Morrigan's own knack for Wunder makes her just as deadly.

And so it's no surprise that when citizens of the Wundrous Society begin to go missing, Morrigan is the number one suspect.

Now it's up to Morrigan and her friends, new and old, to prove her innocence-before she's expelled from the Wundrous Society, her only home, for good.

Morrigan Crow and her friends have survived their first year as proud scholars of the elite Wundrous Society, helped bring down the nefarious Ghastly Market, and proven themselves loyal to Unit 919. Now Morrigan faces a new, exciting challenge: to master the mysterious Wretched Arts, and control the power that threatens to consume her.

But a strange and frightening illness has taken hold of Nevermoor, turning infected Wunimals into mindless, vicious Unnimals on the hunt. As victims of the Hollowpox multiply, panic spreads. And with the city she loves in a state of fear, Morrigan quickly realizes it's up to her to find a cure for the Hollowpox, even if it will put her -- and everyone in Nevermoor -- in more danger than she ever imagined.

The Nebula Awards Showcase volumes have been published annually since 1966, reprinting the winning and nominated stories in the Nebula Awards, voted on by the members of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America(R). The editor selected by SFWA's anthology committee (chaired by Mike Resnick) is two-time Nebula winner, Catherine Asaro. This year's volume includes stories and excerpts by Connie Willis, Jo Walton, Kij Johnson, Geoff Ryman, John Clute, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Ferrett Steinmetz, Ken Liu, Nancy Fulda, Delia Sherman, Amal El-Mohtar, C. S. E. Cooney, David Goldman, Katherine Sparrow, E. Lily Yu, and Brad R. Torgersen.

Table of Contents:

• A Harmony of Thoughts - (2013) - essay by Catherine Asaro
• The Paper Menagerie - (2011) - shortstory by Ken Liu
• The Ice Owl - (2011) - novella by Carolyn Ives Gilman
• Ado - (1988) - shortstory by Connie Willis
• The Migratory Pattern of Dancers - (2011) - novelette by Katherine Sparrow
• Peach-Creamed Honey - (2010) - poem by Amal El-Mohtar
• The Axiom of Choice - (2011) - shortstory by David W. Goldman
• Club Story - (2011) - essay by John Clute
• What We Found - (2011) - novelette by Geoff Ryman
• Among Others (excerpt) - (2011) - shortfiction by Jo Walton
• Movement - (2011) - shortstory by Nancy Fulda
• Sauerkraut Station - (2011) - novelette by Ferrett Steinmetz
• The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees - (2011) - shortstory by E. Lily Yu
• Ray of Light - (2011) - novelette by Brad R. Torgersen
• The Freedom Maze (excerpt) - (2011) - shortfiction by Delia Sherman
• The Sea King's Second Bride - (2010) - poem by C. S. E. Cooney
• The Man Who Bridged the Mist - (2011) - novella by Kij Johnson
• 2012 Nebula Awards Winners, Nominees, and Honorees - essay by uncredited
• Past Nebula Awards Winners - essay by uncredited

DESTINY IN DEATH

Egypt, 1908

Eminent archeologist Dr. Emeryk Quintillus has unearthed the burial chamber of Cleopatra. But this tomb raider's obsession with the Queen of the Nile has nothing to do with preserving history. Stealing sacred and priceless relics, he murders his expedition crew, and flees--escaping the quake that swallows the site beneath the desert sands...

Vienna, 1913

Young widow Adeline Ogilvy has accepted employment at the mansion of Dr. Quintillus, transcribing the late professor's memoirs. Within the pages of his journals, she discovers the ravings of a madman convinced he possessed the ability to reincarnate Cleopatra. Within the walls of his home, she is assailed by unexplained phenomena: strange sounds, shadowy figures, and apparitions of hieroglyphics.

Something pursued Dr. Quintillus from Egypt. Something dark, something hungry. Something tied to the fate and future of Adeline Ogilvy...

LEGACY IN DEATH

Egypt, 1908

University student Lizzie Charters accompanies her mentor, Dr. Emeryk Quintillus, on the archeological dig to uncover Cleopatra's tomb. Her presence is required for a ceremony conducted by the renowned professor to resurrect Cleopatra's spirit--inside Lizzie's body. Quintillus's success is short-lived, as the Queen of the Nile dies soon after inhabiting her host, leaving Lizzie's soul adrift...

Vienna, 2018

Paula Bancroft's husband just leased Villa Dürnstein, an estate once owned by Dr. Quintillus. Within the mansion are several paintings and numerous volumes dedicated to Cleopatra. But the archeologist's interest in the Egyptian empress deviated from scholarly into supernatural, infusing the very foundations of his home with his dark fanaticism. And as inexplicable manifestations rattle Paula's senses, threatening her very sanity, she uncovers the link between the villa, Quintillus, and a woman named Lizzie Charters.

And a ritual of dark magic that will consume her soul...

INFINITY IN DEATH

Vienna, 1908

Gabriele Ziegler is a young art student who becomes infatuated with charismatic archeologist Dr. Emeryk Quintillus. Only too late does she realize his true designs on her. He is obsessed with resurrecting Cleopatra and has retained the famed artist Gustav Klimt to render Gabriele as the Queen of the Nile, using ashes from Cleopatra's mummy mixed with the paint. The result is a lifelike portrait emitting an aura of unholy evil...

Vienna, 2018

The Mortimer family has moved into Quintillus's former home, Villa Dürnstein. In its basement they find an original Klimt masterpiece--a portrait of Cleopatra art scholars never knew existed. But that's not all that resides within the villa's vault. Nine-year-old Heidi Mortimer tells her parents that a strange man lives there.

Quintillus's desire to be with Cleopatra transcends death. His spirit will not rest until he has brought her back from the netherworld. Even if he has to sacrifice the soul of a child...

WFA nominated short story.

Lillian is an orphan who lives with her aunt on a homestead miles from anyone, surrounded by uncharted forest. She wanders the woods, chasing squirrels and rabbits and climbing trees. Free-spirited and independent Lillian is a kindred spirit to the many wild cats who gather around the ancient beech tree. One day, while she is under the beech, Lillian is bitten by a poisonous snake. The cats refuse to let her die, and use their magic to turn her into one of their own. How she becomes a girl again is a lyrical, original folktale.

Set in the countryside north of de Lint's fictional Newford, with some of the same characters as the duo's recent, acclaimed Seven Wild Sisters, A Circle of Cats is the long-awaited first picture book by long-time friends Charles de Lint and Charles Vess, whose masterful art is as magical as the story.

Illustrations by Charles Vess.

This short story was originally published in the fanzine Scienti-Snaps, February 1940, and reprinted in Fantastic Universe in January, 1957. It was later anthologized in Echoes of Valor II, edited by Karl Edward Wagner (1989), and collected in Scarlet Dream (1981) and in Northwest of Earth: The Complete Northwest Smith (2008).

Read this story for free at Project Gutenberg.

Northwest of Earth is a 1954 collection of science fiction and fantasy short stories by C. L. Moore. It was first published by Gnome Press in 1954 in an edition of 4,000 copies. The collections contains stories about Moore's characters Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry. The stories all originally appeared in the magazine Weird Tales.

Table of Contents:

• 7 - Dust of Gods - [Northwest Smith] - (1934) - novelette (variant of Dust of the Gods)
• 35 - Lost Paradise - [Northwest Smith] - (1936) - novelette
• 61 - The Dark Land - [Jirel of Joiry] - (1936) - novelette
• 89 - Julhi - [Northwest Smith] - (1935) - novelette
• 121 - Hellsgarde - [Jirel of Joiry] - (1939) - novelette
• 155 - The Cold Gray God - [Northwest Smith] - (1935) - novelette
• 183 - Yvala - [Northwest Smith] - (1936) - novelette

Shambleau and Others is a 1953 collection of science fiction and fantasy short stories by American writer C. L. Moore. First published by Gnome Press in 1953 in an edition of 4,000 copies the collection contains stories about Moore's characters Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry. The stories all originally appeared in the magazine Weird Tales.

Table of Contents:

• Black God's Kiss - (1934) - novelette
• Shambleau - (1933) - novelette
• Black God's Shadow - (1934) - novelette
• Black Thirst - (1934) - novelette
• The Tree of Life - (1936) - novelette
• Jirel Meets Magic - (1935) - novelette
• Scarlet Dream - (1934) - novelette

75th Anniversary Edition!

Among the best-written and most emotionally complex stories of the Pulp Era, the tales of intergalactic smuggler Northwest Smith still resonate strongly 75 years after their first publication. From the crumbling temples of forgotten gods on Venus to the seedy pleasure halls of old Mars, Northwest Smith blazes a trail through the underbelly of the solar system in 13 action-packed stories you won’t soon forget.

Scarlet Dream is a collection of science fiction short stories by C. L. Moore with illustrations by Alicia Austin. It was first published in 1981 by Donald M. Grant, Publisher, Inc. in an edition of 1,820 copies, of which 220 were bound in buckram, boxed, and signed by the author and artist. The stories feature Moore's character Northwest Smith. All but the last story originally appeared in the magazine Weird Tales.

Table of Contents:

• Scarlet Dream - interior artwork by Alicia Austin
• 11 - Shambleau - [Northwest Smith] - (1933) - novelette
• 48 - Black Thirst - [Northwest Smith] - (1934) - novelette
• 93 - The Tree of Life - [Northwest Smith] - (1936) - novelette
• 127 - Scarlet Dream - [Northwest Smith] - (1934) - novelette
• 156 - Dust of Gods - [Northwest Smith] - (1934) - novelette (variant of Dust of the Gods)
• 188 - Lost Paradise - [Northwest Smith] - (1936) - novelette
• 218 - Julhi - [Northwest Smith] - (1935) - novelette
• 256 - The Cold Gray God - [Northwest Smith] - (1935) - novelette
• 289 - Yvala - [Northwest Smith] - (1936) - novelette
• 326 - Song in a Minor Key - [Northwest Smith] - (1940) - short story

75th Anniversary Edition!

Among the best-written and most emotionally complex stories of the Pulp Era, the tales of intergalactic smuggler Northwest Smith still resonate strongly 75 years after their first publication. From the crumbling temples of forgotten gods on Venus to the seedy pleasure halls of old Mars, Northwest Smith blazes a trail through the underbelly of the solar system in 13 action-packed stories you won’t soon forget.

Contents:

• Teaching the World to Dream - essay by C. J. Cherryh
• Shambleau (1933) - novelette
• Black Thirst (1934) - novelette
• Scarlet Dream (1934) - novelette
• Dust of Gods (1934) - novelette
• Julhi (1935) - novelette
• Nymph of Darkness (1935) - short story with Forrest J. Ackerman
• The Cold Gray God (1935) - novelette
• Yvala (1936) - novelette
• Lost Paradise (1936) - novelette
• The Tree of Life (1936) - novelette
• Quest of the Starstone (1937) - novelette with Henry Kuttner
• Werewoman (1938) - novelette
• Song in a Minor Key (1940) - short story

Note: The Singularity & Co. e-book of Moore's Northwest Smith stories has the same contents as the 1982 Ace Books collection (Northwest Smith), and does not include "Nymph of Darkness", "Quest of the Starstone", and "Werewoman".

Hugo Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology A Fantasy Medley 2 (2012), edited by Yanni Kuznia. It was reprinted in Lightspeed Magazine, March 2016.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

A jubilant Third Doctor has been given freedom again by the Time Lords to roam time and space. But when he and Sam arrive on the planet of Catastrophea, he begins to wish perhaps his exile on Earth had remained imposed, for the Doctor becomes embroiled in the schemes of off-world drug-smugglers.

Retrieval Artist Miles Flint has a mission: take down the law firm of Wagner, Stuart, and Xendor. He enlists the aides of old friends and old enemies. But as the mission gets underway, one member of his team dies horribly. Flint can no longer take on the entire universe. He violated the rules of his Retrieval Artist mentor and now has a lot to lose. But he can't reverse the events he set in motion — and the crisis he caused might destroy everything — and everyone — he loves.

First in a new science fiction trilogy, set in the same universe as the Clan Chronicles, by the Prix Aurora Award-winning Julie E. Czerneda.

To save their world, the most powerful of the Om'ray left their homes. They left behind all memory of their past. Calling themselves the Clan, they settled among Humanity, hiding in plain sight, using their ability to slip past normal space to travel where they wished, using their ability to control minds to ensure their place and security.

They are no longer hidden.

For the Clan face a crisis. Their reproduction is tied to individual power, and their latest generation of females, Choosers, are too strong to safely mate. Their attempt to force others to help failed until Sira di Sarc, their leader and the most powerful of their kind, successfully Joined with a human, Jason Morgan, starship captain and telepath. With Morgan, Sira forged the first peace between her kind and the Trade Pact.

But it is a peace about to shatter. Those the Clan have controlled all these years will rise against them. Her people dying around her, war about to consume the Trade Pact, Sira will be left with only one choice. She must find the way back. And take the Clan home.

Betrayed and attacked, the Clan fled the Trade Pact for Cersi, believing that world their long-lost home. With them went a lone alien, the Human named Jason Morgan, Chosen of their leader, Sira di Sarc. Tragically, their arrival upset the Balance between Cersi's three sentient species. And so the Clan, with their newfound kin, must flee again.

Their starship, powered by the M'hir, follows a course set long ago, for Clan abilities came from an experiment their ancestors--the Hoveny--conducted on themselves. But it's a perilous journey. The Clan must endure more than cramped conditions and inner turmoil.

Their dead are Calling.

Sira must keep her people from answering, for if they do, they die. Morgan searches the ship for answers, afraid the Hoveny's tech is beyond his grasp. Their only hope? To reach their destination.

Little do Sira and Morgan realize their destination holds the gravest threat of all....

Jason Morgan is a troubling mystery to friends and enemies alike: once a starship captain and trader, then Joined to the most powerful member of the Clan, Sira di Sarc, following her and her kind out of known space.

Only to return, alone and silent.

But he's returned to a Trade Pact under seige and desperate. The Assemblers continue to be a threat. Other species have sensed opportunity and threaten what stability remains, including those who dwell in the M'hir. What Morgan knows could save them all, or doom them.

For not all of the Clan followed Sira. And peace isn't what they seek.

I decided that Orion Lake needed to die after the second time he saved my life.

Everyone loves Orion Lake. Everyone else, that is. Far as I'm concerned, he can keep his flashy combat magic to himself. I'm not joining his pack of adoring fans.

I don't need help surviving the Scholomance, even if they do. Forget the hordes of monsters and cursed artifacts. I'm probably the most dangerous thing in the place. Just give me a chance and I'll level mountains and kill untold millions, make myself the dark queen of the world.

At least, that's what the world expects me to do. Most of the other students in here would be delighted if Orion killed me like one more evil thing that's crawled out of the drains. Sometimes I think they want me to turn into the evil witch they assume I am. The school itself certainly does.

But the Scholomance isn't getting what it wants from me. And neither is Orion Lake. I may not be anyone's idea of the shining hero, but I'm going to make it out of this place alive, and I'm not going to slaughter thousands to do it, either.

Although I'm giving serious consideration to just one.

The sequel to the cult classic The Illuminatus! Trilogy, this is an epic fantasy that offers a twisted look at our modern-day world--a reality that exists in another dimension of time and space that may be closer than we think.

I look like an all-American grad student. But I am a werecat, a shape-shifter, and I live in two worlds.

Despite reservations from my family and my Pride, I escaped the pressure to continue my species and carved out a normal life for myself. Until the night a Stray attacked.

I'd been warned about Strays--werecats without a Pride, constantly on the lookout for someone like me: attractive, female and fertile. I fought him off, but then learned two of my fellow tabbies had disappeared.

This brush with danger was all my Pride needed to summon me back... for my own protection. Yeah, right. But I'm no meek kitty. I'll take on whatever--and whoever--I have to in order to find my friends. Watch out, Strays--'cause I got claws, and I'm not afraid to use them...

Rebellious werecat Faythe is shocked when the bodies of murdered men begin turning up in her Pride's territory, especially as the killings can be traced back to her former life as an ordinary college student. But could a message from an old friend provide a chilling clue?

Faythe knows that a past indiscretion may have led to these men's deaths. She also risks exposing her family's supernatural secret. Faced with a terrifying choice, Faythe must decide: pray the tribal council grant her mercy--or risk everything to pursue her own brand of justice.

The werecat council has three cardinal laws--and headstrong Faythe stands accused of breaking two of them: infecting a human with her supernatural skills and killing him to cover her tracks. With the death penalty hanging over her head, Faythe has no escape route left.

That is, until a shapeshifter informs the pride of a rash of rogue strays terrorising his land. Yet this threat is nothing like any they've seen before. Only Faythe has the knowledge to save the pride, but can she prove her worth? Or will the council's verdict condemn them all...?

A battle is coming, and Faythe will not allow the Pride to become prey... Faythe has finally come to accept that she will someday be Alpha of the Pride, and she is hell-bent on changing the sexist Tribal Council from the inside. But first she must ensure that there will still be a Pride left to lead. Her father's role as Alpha is at risk, as is his control over the territory they all love. At the same time, Faythe's exiled boyfriend is under attack from rogues somehow connected to the political schemes of the tribal council. With her world collapsing around her, Faythe must fight to keep her friends and family together, as their enemies conspire against them.

Being the first female werecat enforcer isn't easy. Scars accumulate, but I'm stronger in so many ways.

As for my personal life? It's complicated. Choices worth making always are. Ever since my brother's death and my father's impeachment, it's all I can do to prevent more blood from spilling. Now our Pride is under attack by a flight of vicious thunderbirds. And making peace with our new enemies may be the only way to get the best of our old foe.

With the body count rising and treachery everywhere, my instincts tell me to look before I leap. But sometimes a leap of faith is the only real option?

Power, revenge, and justice--prepare yourself for the final battle! In the final chapter of "The Shifters Series", Faythe and her Pride must fight a tyrannical werecat intent on taking over the territorial council, and the south-central Pride in particular. It's down to Faythe to take on the role of Alpha before she feels completely ready for the job. Forced to rise to the occasion, Faythe must balance experience, advice, and the urge for vengeance. She must also finally choose between Marc and Jace... No decisions will be is easy, and not everyone will survive this epic fight to the death.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology World Fantasy 1983: Sixty Years of Weird Tales (1983), edited by Robert Weinberg. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection (1984), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Magicats! (1984), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collections Endangered Species (1989) and The Castle of the Otter (2016).