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Celebrate 100 years of John Carter of Mars with this all-new collection of original stories and art!

Readers of all ages have read and loved Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom series since the first book, A Princess of Mars, was published in 1912. Now, in time for the 100th anniversary of that seminal work, comes an anthology of original stories featuring John Carter of Mars in brand-new adventures. Collected by veteran anthology editor John Joseph Adams, this anthology features stories from titans of literature such as Peter S. Beagle and Garth Nix and original art from Mark Zug, Charles Vess, and many more--plus an introduction by Tamora Pierce and a glossary of Mars by Richard A. Lupoff.

Table of Contents:

• Story Notes - essay by John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley
• Foreword - essay by Tamora Pierce
• Introduction - essay by John Joseph Adams
• The Metal Men of Mars - (2012) - novelette by Joe R. Lansdale
• Three Deaths - shortfiction by David Barr Kirtley
• The Ape-Man of Mars - shortfiction by Peter S. Beagle
• A Tinker of Warhoon - shortfiction by Tobias S. Buckell
• Vengeance of Mars - shortfiction by Robin Wasserman
• Woola's Song - shortfiction by Theodora Goss
• The River Gods of Mars - shortfiction by Austin Grossman
• The Bronze Man of Mars - shortfiction by L. E. Modesitt, Jr.
• A Game of Mars - shortfiction by Genevieve Valentine
• A Sidekick of Mars - shortstory by Garth Nix
• The Ghost That Haunts the Superstition Mountains - shortfiction by Chris Claremont
• The Jasoom Project - shortfiction by S. M. Stirling
• Coming of Age on Barsoom - shortfiction by Catherynne M. Valente
• The Death Song of Dwar Guntha - shortfiction by Jonathan Maberry
• Appendix: A Barsoomian Gazetteer, or, Who's Who and What's What on Mars - essay by Richard A. Lupoff

The Crescent Moon Kingdoms, land of djenn and ghuls, holy warriors and heretics, Khalifs and killers, is at the boiling point of a power struggle between the iron-fisted Khalif and the mysterious master thief known as the Falcon Prince. In the midst of this brewing rebellion a series of brutal supernatural murders strikes at the heart of the Kingdoms. It is up to a handful of heroes to learn the truth behind these killings:

Doctor Adoulla Makhslood, "The last real ghul hunter in the great city of Dhamsawaat," just wants a quiet cup of tea. Three score and more years old, he has grown weary of hunting monsters and saving lives, and is more than ready to retire from his dangerous and demanding vocation. But when an old flame's family is murdered, Adoulla is drawn back to the hunter's path.

Raseed bas Raseed, Adoulla's young assistant, a hidebound holy warrior whose prowess is matched only by his piety, is eager to deliver God's justice. But even as Raseed's sword is tested by ghuls and manjackals, his soul is tested when he and Adoulla cross paths with the tribeswoman Zamia.

Zamia Badawi, Protector of the Band, has been gifted with the near-mythical power of the Lion-Shape, but shunned by her people for daring to take up a man's title. She lives only to avenge her father's death. Until she learns that Adoulla and his allies also hunt her father's killer. Until she meets Raseed.

When they learn that the murders and the Falcon Prince's brewing revolution are connected, the companions must race against time--and struggle against their own misgivings--to save the life of a vicious despot. In so doing they discover a plot for the Throne of the Crescent Moon that threatens to turn Dhamsawaat, and the world itself, into a blood-soaked ruin.

First published in 1776, the nine gothic tales in this collection are Japan's finest and most celebrated examples of the literature of the occult. They subtly merge the world of reason with the realm of the uncanny and exemplify the period's fascination with the strange and the grotesque. They were also the inspiration for Mizoguchi Kenji's brilliant 1953 film Ugetsu.

The title Ugetsu monogatari (literally "rain-moon tales") alludes to the belief that mysterious beings appear on cloudy, rainy nights and in mornings with a lingering moon. In "Shiramine," the vengeful ghost of the former emperor Sutoku reassumes the role of king; in "The Chrysanthemum Vow," a faithful revenant fulfills a promise; "The Kibitsu Cauldron" tells a tale of spirit possession; and in "The Carp of My Dreams," a man straddles the boundaries between human and animal and between the waking world and the world of dreams. The remaining stories feature demons, fiends, goblins, strange dreams, and other manifestations beyond all logic and common sense.

The eerie beauty of this masterpiece owes to Akinari's masterful combination of words and phrases from Japanese classics with creatures from Chinese and Japanese fiction and lore. Along with The Tale of Genjiand The Tales of the Heike, Tales of Moonlight and Rain has become a timeless work of great significance. This new translation, by a noted translator and scholar, skillfully maintains the allure and complexity of Akinari's original prose.

This short story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 24, September - October 2018.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny.

Hugo Award winning novelette. It originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, November 1978. The story can also be found in The Hugo Winners, Volume 4: (1976-79) (1985), edited by Isaac Asimov and Medea: Harlan's World (1985), edited by Harlan Ellison. It is included in the collections Space Folk (1989) and The Saturn Game (2010).

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology New Worlds 7 (1974) edited by Hilary Bailey, Charles Platt. In the US this anthology was published as New Worlds #6 in 1975. The story can also be found in the anthologies The New Women of Wonder (1978), edited by Pamela Sargent and The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990 (1993), edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery. It is included in the collection Ordinary People (2005).

The speaker is a hickory-faced crone trying to explain to Chet, a shy kid with eyeglasses and pocket protector, why he can't take her granddaughter to the high school dance. For quiet, elfin Flannery is not like other kids. A living Blud-eye-eth, she has caught the attention of the faerie, beautiful evil creatures from a mysterious Otherworld, who seduce their victims with moonlight raves before feeding them to a dragon and hunting souls with a supernatural black dog of prodigious evil. And they have taken Flannery for one of their own. And she won't be going to the school dance-not unless Chet rescues her.

A young bookkeeper in upstate New York, Sigrid Lindo is painfully aware that her life has narrowed down to working a dull job and caring for her widowed mother, when she steps out on Tappan Down to hear the moon's velvet voice asking her to be his wife. It is a seduction Siggy will resist with all the stoic reason and practicality she has learned from her beloved father. But the moon's gift of glamour is powerful and beyond her control.

Every year, the people of the Protectorate leave a baby as an offering to the witch who lives in the forest. They hope this sacrifice will keep her from terrorizing their town. But the witch in the Forest, Xan, is kind. She shares her home with a wise Swamp Monster and a Perfectly Tiny Dragon. Xan rescues the children and delivers them to welcoming families on the other side of the forest, nourishing the babies with starlight on the journey.

One year, Xan accidentally feeds a baby moonlight instead of starlight, filling the ordinary child with extraordinary magic. Xan decides she must raise this girl, whom she calls Luna, as her own. As Luna's thirteenth birthday approaches, her magic begins to emerge--with dangerous consequences. Meanwhile, a young man from the Protectorate is determined to free his people by killing the witch. Deadly birds with uncertain intentions flock nearby. A volcano, quiet for centuries, rumbles just beneath the earth's surface. And the woman with the Tiger's heart is on the prowl...

Hugo Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Science Fiction Age, March 1997. The story can also be found in the anthologis The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection (1998), edited by Gardner Dozois and Other Worlds Than These (2012), edited by John Joseph Adams.

Read the full story for free at Infinity plus.

Locus Award winning novelette. It originally appeared in the collection We Never Talk About My Brother (2009). The story can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Four (2010), edtied by Jonathan Strahan.

Rising above the city of Collis is the holy Sanctum. And watching over its spires is Catrin, an orphan girl with unique skills--for she alone can spot the building's flaws in construction before they turn deadly.

But when Catrin witnesses a murderer escaping the scene of his crime, she's pulled into a dangerous chain of events where the only certainty is that the killer will strike again. Assigned to investigate is the mysterious and brilliant Simon, whose insights into the mind of a predator are frighteningly accurate.

As the grisly crimes continue, Catrin finds herself caught between killer and detective while hiding her own secret--a supernatural sight granted by the moon, destined to make her an outcast, and the only thing that might save her and those she loves from becoming the next victims...

In the future, on the island of Ongladred, mankind has survived two enigmatic, civilization-destroying setbacks. Now a third holocaust is anticipated. The people fear destruction from invading barbarians, the reappearance of a semi-mythical sea creature, and the devious intervention of the neo-human Parfects.

This imminent disaster is very much the concern of Ingram Marley, a government spy sent to keep surveillance over Stonelore, a secluded haven and the center of free thought on Ongladred, and Gabriel Elk, Stonelore's resident genius.

While panic and fear rage outside, deep inside Stonelore the mysteries of life are pursued - reanimation of the dead, the invention of powerful laser weapons, and the secrets of "old earth" knowledge. Amidst harrowing dangers of sea battles and land invasions, Michael Bishop explores the transformation of Ingram Marley, a man caught in the middle.

Contents:

• 7 - The White Otters of Childhood - (1973) - novella
• 85 - Beneath the Shattered Moons - (1976) - novel (variant of And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees)

Hitler is dead. The German scientists have joined the victors. What started as inspired collaboration at Peenemunde turns into a fatal race as the brilliant 'lunatics' scatter across the earth to join up with the big powers in the desperate race to put the first man on the moon. Convention, morality and genius crumble when an inspired contender engineers the world's greatest upset.

Here is Science Fiction at its most Thrilling... A Truly Amazing Story of the Future!!

Giant metal-hungry bats in Space-Ships invade The Earth. Called in to investigate, Neal Vaughan, the hero of this story, finds himself involved in some strange and horrific adventures.... including a journey to The Moon....

Sturgeon Award nominated short story. It originally appeared on Subterranean Online, Spring 2010. 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, The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011, edited by Rich Horton, Year's Best SF 16 (2011), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Eighth Annual Collection (2011), edited by Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collection Adrift in the Noösphere: Science Fiction Stories (2012).

Read the full story for free at Subterranean.

A collection of stories from a master of the form. Imagine... Ghosts, gods, and devils – heavens and hells – cities in the sky and cities beneath the sea. Time machines, spaceships – certainly you can imagine Martians, but what about interplanetary vampires? Or a mouse that isnt a mouse?

Honeymoon in Hell proves that Fredric Brown has a special vision, a sight beyond our wildest nightmares, a perception of things we couldn't even begin to imagine.

Table of Contents:

• Honeymoon in Hell - novelette
• Too Far - short story
• Man of Distinction - short story
• Millennium - short story
• The Dome - short story
• Blood - short story
• Hall of Mirrors - short story - short story
• Experiment - [Two Timer - 1] - short story
• The Last Martian - short story
• Sentry - [Two Timer - 2] - short story
• Mouse - short story
• Naturally - short story
• Voodoo - short story
• Arena - novelette
• Keep Out - short story
• First Time Machine - short story
• And the Gods Laughed - short story
• The Weapon - short story
• A Word from Our Sponsor - short story
• Rustle of Wings - short story
• Imagine - poem

Rogue Moon is a novella by Algis Budrys. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1960.

Campbell's seventh novel is set in Northern England, in the small bleak town of Moonwell, edged by moors pitted with treacherous mineshafts. To Moonwell comes the preacher Godwin Mann, whose particularly intolerant brand of fundamentalism appeals to the inhabitants. They rally almost as one behind him and ostracize and persecute the few independent souls who do not.

Mann descends into the pit in which the ancient malignant being worshipped by the Druids millenia past is said to dwell. Intending to exorcise the demon and claim the land for God, he is instead overwhelmed. What emerges from the pit is the monstrous creature, clothed now in the flesh of Mann, and it is only the town's pariahs who can see that something is radically wrong, that an evil has been unleashed on the community.

Slowly Moonwell is isolated from the world, as telephone lines break down, a cloud cover brings continuous darkness, watches and clocks stop, roads mysteriously lead nowhere. And within this isolation, the monster's power grows unimpeded.

A planet manned by robots - three human beings captured and carried off from Earth to that planet: this is the theme of Paul Capon's latest science thriller for young people.

When young Stephen Craig came over from America to stay with his girl friend Daney and her father, all seemed set for a peaceful, happy holiday on the coast, with Mr. Salgado painting landscapes, Daney and Steve swimming and boating. Their weirdest dreams would have seemed tame beside the reality of what befell these three when, while swimming one morning, they were snatched out of the sea by a mechanical monster and transported by it through space.

Phobos is one of the moons which revolve round Mars - so the astronomers say. In Paul Capon's story he tells us that it is really an artificial satellite set going by the Martians - a gigantic mechanical brain which controls the automatons it reproduces.

To this nightmare world the three humans were taken, a world peopled by creatures which could perform superhuman tasks, but could not feel any emotion. What hope of understanding or pity could there be from them? How could Mr. Salgado, Stephen and Daney escape with their lives?

Paul Capon tells the story of their dangers and eventual triumph with that mixture of the factual and the bizarre which make his stories so vivid. However exotic the fantasy it always has its roots in scientific possibilities.

Also published as Phobos, The Robot Planet

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #9 June 2007. It can also be found in the anthlogy Realms: The First Year of Clarkesworld Magazine (2007), edited by Sean Wallace and Nick Mamatas.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

A bandit walks into a coffeehouse, and it all goes downhill from there. Guet Imm, a young votary of the Order of the Pure Moon, joins up with an eclectic group of thieves (whether they like it or not) in order to protect a sacred object, and finds herself in a far more complicated situation than she could have ever imagined.

Time is running out for the passengers and crew of the tourist-cruiser "Selene", incarcerated in a sea of choking lunar dust. On the surface, her rescuers find their resources stretched to the limit by the pitiless and unpredictable conditions of a totally alien environment.

Sanna has been living as a mermaid -- but she is only half seavish. The night of her birth, a witch cast a spell that made Sanna's people, including her landish mother, forget how and where she was born.

Now Sanna is sixteen and an outsider in the seavish flok, where women rule and mothers mean everything. She is determined to go to land and learn who she is. So she apprentices herself to the ancient witch, Sjældent, to learn the magic of making and unmaking. With a new pair of legs and a mysterious quest to complete for her teacher, she follows a clue that leads her ashore on the Thirty-Seven Dark Islands.

Her fellow mermaids wait floating on the seaskin as Sanna stumbles into a wall of white roses thirsty for blood, a hardscrabble people hungry for miracles, and a baroness of fading beauty who will do anything to live forever, even at the expense of her own children.

Table of Contents:

• Reaching for the Moon: An Introduction - essay by Isaac Asimov
• from The Man in the Moone, or A Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales The Speedy Messenger (excerpt) - shortstory by Francis Godwin
• from The Discovery of a New World, ... with a Discourse Concerning the Possibility of a Passage Thither (excerpt) - shortstory by John Wilkins
• from The Comical History of the States and Empires of the World of the Moon (excerpt) - shortstory by Cyrano de Bergerac
• from A Voyage to Cacklogallinia (excerpt) - shortstory by Captain Samuel Brunt
• from The Life and Astonishing Transactions of John Daniel . . (excerpt) - shortstory by Ralph Morris
• A Journey Lately Performed Through the Air, in an Aerostatic Globe ... To the Newly Discovered Planet, Georgium Sidus - (1784) - shortstory by Vivenair
• Hans Pfaall--A Tale - (1835) - shortstory by Edgar Allan Poe (variant of Hans Phaall--A Tale)
• from Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made by Sir John Herschel ... at the Cape of Good Hope (excerpt) - shortstory by Richard Adams Locke
• The Great Steam-Duck - (1841) - shortstory by unknown

When Nuala Dennehy returned to Ireland after fifteen years away, a male relative was designated responsible for her actions. She was assigned a church to report to, denied any birth control devices, issued a compulsory ID chip, and sent on her way--wondering what in the world had happened to her beloved country. No matter that the twenty-first century had arrived, bringing alien contact and human colonization of the stars; church-ruled Ireland had met the millennium with a social backlash landing squarely on women.

A few Irish women were fighting the erosion of their rights in small ways--and Nuala quickly joined the rabble-rousers. She was a professor, not a leader, but she could at least plan disturbances and write pamphlets. But when an arrest became a deadly firefight, the stakes grew higher: Nuala emerged a fugitive--and a national symbol of rebellion. Then she began to see what one woman--one strong, determined woman who knew the inspiring history of the Irish--could do to awaken a nation...

The first interstellar starship, John Glenn, fled a Solar System populated by rogue AIs and machine/human hybrids, threatened by too much nanotechnology and rife with political dangers. The John Glenn's crew intended to terraform the nearly pristine planet Ymir, in hopes of creating a utopian society that will limit intelligent technology.

But by some miscalculation they have landed in another solar system, and extremely low on the antimatter needed to continue to Ymir, they must shape the nearby planet Harlequin's moon, Selene, into a new, temporary home. Their only hope of ever reaching Ymir is to rebuild their store of antimatter through decades of terraforming the moon.

Gabriel, the head terraformer, must lead this nearly impossible task, with all the wrong materials. His primary tools are the uneducated and nearly illiterate children of the original colonists, born and bred to build Harlequin's moon into a virtual antimatter factory. With no concept of the future and with life defined as duty, one girl, Rachel Vanowen, begins to ask herself the question: what will become of the children of Selene once the terraforming is complete.

On July 20, 1969, the United States astronauts landed on the moon. To commemorate the 30th anniversary of that historic event, many of the top writers in the science fiction field have agreed to write individual stories centered on the moon. Included, as well, is an introduction by noted science fiction and science fact writer and editor Ben Bova.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Ben Bova
• An Apollo Asteroid - short fiction by Brian W. Aldiss
• Has Anybody Seen Junie Moon? - short story by Gene Wolfe
• Ashes and Tombstones - short fiction by Brian Stableford
• The Way to Norwich - short fiction by Colin Greenland
• Steps Along the Way - short story by Eric Brown
• The Moon Tree - short fiction by Jerry Oltion
• The Last Man on the Moon - short fiction by Scott Edelman
• Carry the Moon in My Pocket - short story by James Lovegrove
• Moon Hunters - short fiction by Kathleen M. Massie-Ferch
• The Little Bits That Count - short story by Alan Dean Foster
• People Came from Earth - short story by Stephen Baxter
• Visions of the Green Moon - short fiction by Robert Sheckley
• How We Lost the Moon, a True Story by Frank W. Allen - short story by Paul J. McAuley
• The Man Who Stole the Moon - novelette by Paul Di Filippo
• Elegy - short fiction by Michelle West
• Breakfast on the Moon, with Georges - short fiction by Ian McDonald

Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon. (1657)

The States and Empires of the Sun. (1662)

Arguably Cyrano's greatest work and model for much of Gulliver's Travels, Munchausen and so many other fantasy books.

First published in the 17th Century, this elegant satire takes its hero into the solar system, where he can freely speak on matters of sex, religion and humanity. Join Cyrano as he wanders from the Earth to the Moon, meeting up with Beast-Men, the Solen people, and a representative from the Kingdom of Love.

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, April 1995, was reprinted in infinity plus, August 1998, and was reprinted again in Lightspeed, July 2015. The story is included in the collection The Robot's Twilight Companion (1999).

Read the full story for free at infinity plus or Lightspeed.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Infinity Wars (2017), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection (2018), edited by Gardner Dozois, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Twelve (2018), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and The Eagle Has Landed: 50 Years of Lunar Science Fiction (2019), edited by Neil Clarke.

His name when he was human was Kern. Now he is the most feared of beings: a werewolf. When the change first came upon him, his parents drove him away with silver daggers. Later, he sought human companionship, but he could not hide the truth for long. And so he kept running until he ran headlong into the deadliest pursuer of all-a harper bent on stealing his life away. By chance Kern was able to find refuge at the Inn of the Yellow Tinker, and the woman he was destined to love. But can he risk both human and harper vengeance to keep her?

Sturgeon Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in the anthology Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better World (2014), edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. The story is also included in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection (2015), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Imaginarium 4: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing (2016), edited by Sandra Kasturi and Jerome Stueart, and was collected in Overclocked: More Stories of the Future Present (2016).

Read this story for free at boingboing.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Mission: Tomorrow (2015) edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection (2016), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Set in the legendary Ireland of swirling mists and powerful magic, Ravenmoon is a fantasy adventure of heroes and gods, and frightful creatures from the Otherworld.

When a child is born to the Dèsi clan, he is named by the druid Aonghus Gae-adúath - Aonghus the Terrible Spear - the man who will drive the people out of their land by a single cast of his spear.

Despite attempts to prevent this curse coming true, the terrible day dawns when the Dèsi must flee from the High King's wrath and their home in Eire.

What follows is a fearsome story of journeying and incidents, of monsters and magic, and the ultimate fate of the Dèsi...

This short story originally appeared in the collection The Start of the End of It All and Other Stories (1990). It can also be found in the anthololgy The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Fifth Annual Collection (1992), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and the collection The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller Vol. 1 (2011).

From the Jove edition:

Man had colonized the planets, and lost his birthright. Civilization was a lonely chain of space stations linked by terror.

The Empire kept the pioneers enslaved with a weapon that shattered any protest into screaming insanity.

All they had left was the dream of someday returning home. Until their dream exploded in the holocaust that destroyed the Earth.

But the embers of their dead planet sparked a brain-blasting revolution that swept the galaxy. A revolution of exiles in an alien universe - with nothing left to lose...

Jobe, Child of Storm, could change the path of a planet's future…

This book presents a series of tales about high adventure and exotic interplanetary romances that capture the exhilarating sense of wonder from SF's Golden Age.

Table of Contents:

• Preface - essay
• Gypsy Trade - (1992) - novella
• Four Kings and An Ace - (1990) - novelette
• Cast on a Distant Shore - (1989) - novelette
• The Moon Maid - (1996) - novelette
• Gone to Glory - (1995) - novelette
• The Wagon God's Wife - (1989) - novelette
• The Other Magpie - (1993) - novelette
• Werewolves of Luna - (1994) - novella

This novelette originally appeared in Amazing Stories, September 1987. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection (1988), edited by Gardner Dozois.

The peaceful Eldarin were the last of three ancient races. The mystical Oltor, healers and poets, had fallen before the dread power of the cruel and sadistic Daroth. Yet in one awesome night the invincible Daroth had vanished from the face of the earth. Gone were their cities, their armies, their terror. The Great Northern Desert was their only legacy. Not a trace remained for a thousand years...

The War of the Pearl had raged for seven years and the armies of the four Duchies were exhausted and weary of bloodshed. But the foremost of the Dukes, Sirano of Romark, possessed the Eldarin Pearl and was determined to unravel its secrets.

Then, on one unforgetable day, a dark moon rose above the Great Northern Desert, and a black tidal wave swept across the land. In moments the desert had vanished beneath lush fields and forests and a great city could be seen glittering in the morning sunlight.

From this city re-emerged the blood-hungry Daroth, powerful and immortal, immune to spear and sword. They had only one desire: to rid the world of humankind for ever.

Now the fate of the human race rests on the talents of three heroes: Karis, warrior-woman and strategist; Tarantio, the deadliest swordsman of the age; and Duvodas the Healer, who will learn a terrible truth.

Ariane came to visit Sylvie at midwinter, hoping to rekindle the old magic of their girlhood game: the Nine Worlds, a fantastical universe founded in a handful of marbles and a tarot of cards, whose myths and kingdoms the two friends had chronicled between them. But when Sylvie disappeared in a moonlit wood, Ariane followed her - not into the familiar ground of their fantasy, but into the thorns and winter of a Cloud they had never invented, a world where ballads were constellations and the moon hunted souls by night.

Arguably the first work of science fiction in English, Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone was published in 1638, pseudonymously and posthumously.

The novel, which tells the story of Domingo Gonsales, a Spaniard who flies to the moon by geese power and encounters an advanced lunar civilization of Christians who live in a Utopian state.

The work had an enormous impact on the European imagination for centuries after its initial publication, due to its discussion of advanced ideas about astronomy and cosmology. The novel is an important example of both popular fiction and scientific speculation.

A Faerie Queen and her court invade Elizabethan London and fight a magical battle for the reborn King Arthur, in a tale of dragons, faeries, and alchemy.

This short story originally appeared in Realms of Fantasy, June 2007, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, June 2013. I can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best Fantasy 8 (2008), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold (2016), edited by Paula Guran.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

In the dim future, the energy crisis has forced most of the world's populations into huge urban centers, and countries have banded together in protective political confederations. Noram (the confederation of North and South America) is currently involved in maneuvers to avoid being sucked into another world war. Premier Alton and his Consuls have decided to stage a mock revolution in order to convince their allies that Noram is in no shape or position to wage war on so many fronts.

To lend credence to their plot, they plan to accuse Shanlon Raille, a magician by trade and a minor lobbyist, of fomenting the revolution. And while that much of the plan works, little else does. And Shanlon Raille, while running for his life and trying to establish his own innocence, must battle all the harder because he knows that if he fails, if the jockeying for power at the top succeeds while people are dying in the streets, Noram will collapse, and with it the world...

DANGER LURKS IN THE HEART OF THE CITY... BUT NOT ALWAYS WHERE YOU EXPECT IT.

From New York to Los Angeles to Bucharest, fifteen never-before-published tales by some of the world's finest fantasy and horror writers celebrate the newest incarnations of an age-old terror that strikes when the moon is full... the werewolf. No longer confined to the forests, these modern monsters can be found in places you frequent every day--and never before thought to fear.

CARRIE VAUGHN's popular werewolf radio host Kitty Norville is drawn into a controversy as to whether it's fair to ban lycanthropy from professional sports. New York's famous Plaza Hotel is the setting for ESTHER M. FRIESNER's tale of one very grisly little girl, while Beverly Hills may never quite recover from RON GOULART's middle-aged Hollywood screenwriter who falls prey to a most unusual problem. Celebrated fantasy author PETER S. BEAGLE tells a chillingly lyrical story of three Louisiana loup garoux locked into a deadly dance of death. Plus many more biting tales from award-winning authors.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Children of the Night - essay by Darrell Schweitzer
• The Truth About Werewolves - short fiction by Lisa Tuttle
• Innocent - short fiction by Gene Wolfe
• Kitty Learns the Ropes - short fiction by Carrie Vaughn
• No Children, No Pets - short fiction by Esther M. Friesner
• Sea Warg - short fiction by Tanith Lee
• Country Mothers' Sons - short story by Holly Phillips
• A Most Unusual Greyhound - short fiction by Mike Resnick
• The Bitch - short fiction by P. D. Cacek
• The Aarne-Thompson Classification Revue - short story by Holly Black
• Weredog of Bucharest - short fiction by Ian Watson
• I Was a Middle-Age Werewolf - short fiction by Ron Goulart
• Kvetchula's Daughter - short story by Darrell Schweitzer
• And Bob's Your Uncle - short fiction by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
• The Bank Job - short fiction by Gregory Frost
• La Lune T'Attend - novelette by Peter S. Beagle

There was terrible danger among the moons circling this world, but even greater menace on its surface.

This novel first appeared in the December, 1942 Issue of Amazing Stories magazine.

A free copy of The World with a Thousand Moons is available from The Project Gutenberg.

Beginning her first year at the University of the Archangels, Katherine Sweeney Cassidy accidentally discovers the existence of the Benandanti, a clandestine order that has been secretly manipulating the world's governments and institutions.

Deep in the heart of London, a photographer walks the streets and captures whatever catches his eye: an old man drinking coffee; a beautiful woman sipping champagne in St. Pancras station; a cloud of moths, disturbed, taking flight across the sky.

But with each photo, he captures something unseen by the eye, and as each negative develops - revealing a person he hadn't met, a danger he hadn't noticed, and a world he hadn't seen - he is drawn further into a hidden war. One which he has been drawn into many times before... and every time, had his memories of the truth, and of the woman he loves, stolen from him.

As Tom pieces fragments of the truth together, he realizes he must weave through the war and fight his own battle: both for the woman he loves, and for himself.

This short story originally appeared in Electric Velocipede, Issue #17/18, Spring 2009, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, May 2015.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Project Moonbase contains the screenplay for the now classic sf film, plus eleven finished teleplays and two story outlines for a projected television show, The World Beyond. In addition to original tales (the story outlines "Home Sweet Home" and "The Tourist") Project Moonbase also contains teleplay adaptations of such RAH classics as "Delilah and the Space Rigger," "And He Built a Crooked House" and much more.

Contents:

• Project Moonbase
• Ring Around the Moon
• Space Jockey
• The Black Pits of Luna
• The Long Watch
• Ordeal in Space
• Delilah and the Space Rigger
• Life-Line
• Requiem
• And He Built a Crooked House--
• We Also Walk Dogs
• Misfit
• Home Sweet Home (story outline)
• The Tourist (story outline)

Retro Hugo-winning Novella

D. D. Harriman is a billionaire with a dream: the dream of Space for All Mankind. The method? Anything that works. Maybe, in fact, Harriman goes too far.

But he will give us the stars....

Published in the anthology A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, Volume Two and in the collections The Man Who Sold the Moon, The Past Through Tomorrow, and The Robert Heinlein Omnibus.

D. D. Harriman is a billionaire with a dream: the dream of Space for All Mankind. The method? Anything that works. Maybe, in fact, Harriman goes too far.

But he will give us the stars....

Table of Contents:

• Preface (The Man Who Sold the Moon) - (1950) - essay
• Introduction (The Man Who Sold the Moon) - (1950) - essay by John W. Campbell, Jr.
• Life-Line - [Future History] - (1939) - short story
• 'Let There Be Light' - [Future History] - short story (variant of Let There Be Light 1940) [as by Robert Heinlein ]
• The Roads Must Roll - [Future History] - (1940) - novelette
• Blow-Ups Happen - [Future History] - (1940) - novella (variant of Blowups Happen) [as by Robert Heinlein ]
• The Man Who Sold the Moon - [D. D. Harriman] - (1950) - novella
• Requiem - [D. D. Harriman] - (1940) - short story

Robert A. Heinlein was the most influential science fiction writer of his era, an influence so large that, as Samuel R. Delany notes, "modern critics attempting to wrestle with that influence find themselves dealing with an object rather like the sky or an ocean." He won the Hugo Award for best novel four times, a record that still stands. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was the last of these Hugo-winning novels, and it is widely considered his finest work.

It is a tale of revolution, of the rebellion of the former Lunar penal colony against the Lunar Authority that controls it from Earth. It is the tale of the disparate people--a computer technician, a vigorous young female agitator, and an elderly academic--who become the rebel movement's leaders. And it is the story of Mike, the supercomputer whose sentience is known only to this inner circle, and who for reasons of his own is committed to the revolution's ultimate success.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is one of the high points of modern science fiction, a novel bursting with politics, humanity, passion, innovative technical speculation, and a firm belief in the pursuit of human freedom.

In a dramatically altered near-future, the world's newest technology resurrects a plague of apparent global madness that not only destroys ten thousand years of urban civilization, but also creates a world under the sway of the full moon--and a human race transformed in astonishing ways.

The nightmare begins before you sleep

He had fled from the terrors of his past, finding refuge in the quietness of the Island. For a time he lived in peace - until the "sightings" began, visions of horror seeping into his mind like poisonous tendrils; violent acts that were hideously macabre and the thought becoming intense. He witnessed the grotesque acts of another thing, one that glorified murder and mutilation, a monster that soon became aware of the observer within its own mind - and relished contact. The creature would eventually come to the island to seek him out.

A renegade rocket man haunted by his past. A beautiful daredevil who thinks she can do it all--until she finds herself on the adventure of her life. A death-defying mission so risky, so audacious that no one would try it...unless the fate of the world depended on its success.

Jack Medaris doesn't "borrow" the space shuttle Columbia to be a hero or a villain. A man of science driven by the memory of the woman who once inspired him, Jack risks his life, his name, and everything he has, to sidetrack the shuttle crew and take her on an unscheduled detour to the moon, where the secrets of his past--and the future of the world--await him. But when the meticulously plotted launch goes fatally wrong, and payload specialist Penny High Eagle further complicates Jack's plan, he must confront unforeseen challenges both in space and on the ground, where deadly forces are amassing to prevent the Columbia from reaching the moon.

When teenager Keith Rosen runs away from his Florida home - inexplicably taking along a motherless baby - his divorced mother is perplexed and terrified. she takes off on her own journey to find him. Turtle Moon follows their path in a suspenseful, beautifully written story that confirms once again the exquisite talent of Alice Hoffman.

There's Something About Cyrene...

Two development teams have utterly vanished planet-side. A third is on the way to set things back on track. But ruthless mercenary "facilitator" Myles Callen and his crew are in for a surprise--for they about to encounter a planet as magnificently strange as the vast alien artifacts of Arthur C. Clarke or Stanislaw Lem's sentient oceans. And behind it all a new physical law so unexpected and fundamental that it may change the universe forever!

New York Times best-seller James P. Hogan delivers another stunningly visionary tale in the grandest tradition of SF!

Meredith Ambrose was nicknamed "Merry" by her parents when she was a baby, but now that she can express her own opinions, they find her "boring". While visiting the family estate, she witnesses the crash landing of a strange boy (Mikel Goodman) who comes from the space habitat that Earth now calls the Shepherd Moon. Although those around her do not seem to recognize the danger that Mikel represents with his astounding abilities, she is able to convince her grandfather, the powerful General Ambrose, that Mikel is indeed a threat. In the 48th century, Earth has all but forgotten that the miniature "moons" that accompany Luna were the cause of the collapse of Earth's high-tech civilization and are still inhabited.

The New Moon's Arms is a mainstream magical realism novel set in the Caribbean on the fictional island of Dolorosse. Calamity, born Chastity, has renamed herself in a way she feels is most fitting. She's a 50-something grandmother whose mother disappeared when she was a teenager and whose father has just passed away as she begins menopause.

With this physical change of life comes a return of a special power for finding lost things, something she hasn't been able to do since childhood. A little tingling in the hands then a massive hot flash, and suddenly objects, even whole buildings, lost to her since childhood begin showing up around Calamity.

One of the lost things Calamity recovers is a small boy who washes up on the shore outside her house after a rainstorm. She takes this bruised but cheerful 4-year-old under her wing and grows attached to him, a process that awakens all the old memories, frustrations and mysteries around her own mother and father. She'll learn that this young boy's family is the most unusual group she's ever encountered-and they want their son back.

This novelette originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January-February 2016. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven (2017), edited by Jonathan Strahan and The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 2 (2017), edited by Neil Clarke.

Lumi is an Earth-born healer whose Mars-born spouse Sol disappears unexpectedly on a work trip. As Lumi begins her quest to find Sol, she delves gradually deeper into Sol's secrets -- and her own.

While recalling her own path to becoming a healer under the guidance of her mysterious teacher Vivian, she discovers an underground environmental group called Stoneturners, which may have something to do with Sol's disappearance. Lumi's search takes her from the wealthy colonies of Mars to Earth that has been left a shadow of its former self due to vast environmental destruction. Gradually, she begins to understand that Sol's fate may have been connected to her own for much longer than she thought.

In this debut collection of body-horror fairy tales and mid-apocalyptic Catholic cyberpunk, memory and myth, loss and age, these are the tools of storyteller Jarboe, a talent in the field of queer fabulism. Bodily autonomy and transformation, the importance of negative emotions, unhealthy relationships, and bad situations amidst the staggering and urgent question of how build and nurture meaning, love, and safety in a larger world/society that might not be "fixable."

Table of Contents:

• The Marks of Aegis
• Here You Are, Near Me
• Self Care
• The Nothing Spots Where Nobody Wants to Stay
• The Heavy Things
• The Seed and The Stone
• We Did Not Know We Were Giants
• The Android That Designed Itself
• As Tender Feet of Cretan Girls Danced Once Around an Altar of Love
• Estranged Children of Storybook Houses
• My Noise Will Keep The Record
• Wake Word
• Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel
• First Contact, Communion
• I Am a Beautiful Bug!
• The Thing in Us We Fear Just Wants Our Love

Moonbase One is in trouble. The first colony on the moon has only a thirty-day emergency food supply now that their hydroponic farm and its valuable store of water has been destroyed. Unless something can be done quickly, the moonbase will fail and the space settlers will have to be returned to Earth.

Like all pioneering colonies, Moonbase One includes families with children. Three space-age teenagers -- Tom Wood, Benny Howard and Dave Mason -- participate as much in the daily routine of the colony as their parents do.

In the struggle to save the moon colony and find ways of replacing the water supply, the three boys and their misfit companion, George Garrison, learn what kind of courage and skill it takes to colonize a new world. They learn how meaningless the technical skills of scientists are if the necessary human qualities are not also present. When the success of the moon colony is finally assured, the teenagers set their eyes on the distant goal of Mars.

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

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

John Kessel, one of the most visionary writers in the field, has created a rich matriarchal utopia, set in the near future on the moon, a society that is flawed by love and sex, and on the brink of a destructive civil war.

In the middle of the twenty-second century, over three million people live in underground cities below the moon's surface. One city-state, the Society of Cousins, is a matriarchy, where men are supported in any career choice, but no right to vote--and tensions are beginning to flare as outside political intrigues increase.

After participating in a rebellion that caused his mother's death, Erno has been exiled from the Society of Cousins. Now, he is living in the Society's rival colony, Persepolis, when he meets Amestris, the defiant daughter of the richest man on the moon.

Mira, a rebellious loner in the Society, creates graffiti videos that challenge the Society's political domination. She is hopelessly in love with Carey, the exemplar of male privilege. An Olympic champion in low-gravity martial arts and known as the most popular bedmate in the Society, Carey's more suited to being a boyfriend than a parent, even as he tries to gain custody of his teenage son.

When the Organization of Lunar States sends a team to investigate the condition of men in the Society, Erno sees an opportunity to get rich, Amestris senses an opportunity to escape from her family, Mira has a chance for social change, and Carey can finally become independent of the matriarchy that considers him a perpetual adolescent. But when Society secrets are revealed, the first moon war erupts, and everyone must decide what is truly worth fighting for.

The late-1980s launching of a mammoth, full-scale Soviet space station prompts the United States to a crash program that, by 2010, surpasses all Soviet endeavors, results in an unprecedented economic boom, and catapults humankind fully into space.

Hugo Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, December 1979. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction Novellas of the Year #2 (1980), edited by Terry Carr, The Endless Frontier, Vol. II (1982), edited by Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr. and Baker's Dozen: 13 Short Science Fiction Novels (1985) edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh. It was later expanded to the full novel The Moon Goddess and the Son (1986).

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Life on Mars: Tales from the New Frontier (2011), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Six (2012), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collection Wicked Wonders (2017).

When Dylan O'Conner, together with his autistic brother, Shepherd, pulls into a motel off the interstate highway, all he wants is a good night's sleep. Yet within the hour he finds himself bound, gagged and being injected with a mysterious fluid by a lunatic doctor, who claims Dylan will be the carrier of 'his life's work'.

Comedian Jillian Jackson is midway through a tour of seedy venues, accompanied by her pet pot-plant Fred. But her plans for stardom are dramatically altered when she too falls victim to the eccentric scientist. The doctor warns his victims that he is being pursued and that they too are now targets. If they are caught, they will be killed. Both are sceptical.

Before long, they are beginning to wonder if the lunatic doctor wasn't quite so mad after all...

Table of Contents:

• Everybody Knows Joe - (1953) - shortstory
• Kazam Collects - (1941) - shortstory
• Make Mine Mars - (1952) - novelette
• Passion Pills - shortstory
• Shark Ship - novelette (variant of Reap the Dark Tide)
• The Adventurer - (1953) - shortstory
• The Events Leading Down to the Tragedy - (1958) - shortstory
• The Last Man Left in the Bar - (1957) - shortstory
• The Little Black Bag - (1950) - novelette
• The Meddlers - (1953) - shortstory
• The Slave - (1957) - novelette
• The Words of Guru - (1941) - shortstory
• Time Bum - (1953) - shortstory
• Two Dooms - (1958) - novella
• Virginia - (1958) - shortstory

In Douglas Lain's debut novel set during the turbulent year of 1968, Christopher Robin Milne, the inspiration for his father's fictional creation Winnie the Pooh, struggles to emerge from a manufactured life, in a story of hope and transcendence.

Billy Moon was Christopher Robin Milne, the son of A. A. Milne, the world-famous author of Winnie the Pooh and other beloved children's classics. Billy's life was no fairy tale, though. Being the son of a famous author meant being ignored and even mistreated by famous parents. He had to make his own way in the world, define himself, and reconcile his self-image with the image of him known to millions of children. A veteran of World War II, a husband, and a father, he is jolted out of midlife ennui when a French college student revolutionary asks him to come to the chaos of Paris in revolt. Against a backdrop of the apocalyptic student protests and general strike that forced France to a standstill that spring, Milne's new French friend is a wild card, able to experience alternate realities of the past and present. Through him, Milne's life is illuminated and transformed, as are the world-altering events of that year.

In a time when the global political landscape eerily mirrors the political turbulence of 1968, this magic realist novel is an especially relevant and important book.

This story tells how Mark and Meg Tremaine, two young people from Lower Earth, burst through a tunnel between universes, and find themselves West of the Moon in Middleworld - they grow up, are involved in war, magic, and a new form of space travel to the great living Moon of the Middleworld - and Mark at least is tempted to betray Middleworld.

There is not just one universe, but three - stacked on above the other or one inside the other, in the dimension of distance from the One. Our universe is the outermost or lowest, and to the people of the world above, it is known as Hardol (Ironworld). And in magical Middleworld the most magical country is Vornemana, West of the Moon - a country threatened by war and deadly enemies lurking within.

Dogs in the Moonlight_ showcases yet another of the powerful voices of one of speculative fiction's hottest new writers. Less than three years after his first publication, Jay Lake has already been nominated for the John W. Campbell Award, the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award. His stories, appearing in dozens of markets worldwide, have been translated into five languages. This collection of mixed reprints and new work focuses on Lake's Texas roots. He covers old myths and new from the Lone Star state, with tales of ghosts, angels, gods and aliens. Visit the past, present and future, and learn the truth about flying saucers from the writer that Locus magazine has called "one of SF's fastest rising talents."

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (2004) - essay by Ray Vukcevich
• Dogs in the Moonlight - (2003)
• Arrange the Bones - (2002)
• The Oxygen Man - (2003)
• Like Cherries in the Dark - (2003)
• Shattering Angels - (2004)
• Mr. Heaven - (2004)
• The Goat Cutter - (2003)
• Christmas Season - (2002)
• Twilight of the Odd - (2004)
• Nameless and Homeless on Golgotha - (2002)
• Ancient Wine - (2004)
• Sparrows, Two for a Penny - (2004)
• Mama She Truck - (2004)
• Pax Agricola - (2004)
• Gratitude - (2004)
• Hitching to Aurora - (2004)

From an Edgar award-winning author comes the gripping and unexpected tale of a lost town and the dark secrets that lie beneath the glittering waters of an East Texas lake.

Daniel Russell was only thirteen years old when his father tried to kill them both by driving their car into Moon Lake. Miraculously surviving the crash--and growing into adulthood--Daniel returns to the site of this traumatic incident in the hopes of recovering his father's car and bones. As he attempts to finally put to rest the memories that have plagued him for years, he discovers something even more shocking among the wreckage that has ties to a twisted web of dark deeds, old grudges, and strange murders.

As Daniel diligently follows where the mysterious trail of vengeance leads, he unveils the heroic revelation at its core.

In Jonathan Lethem's wryly funny second novel, we meet a young man named Chaos, who's living in a movie theater in post-apocalyptic Wyoming, drinking alcohol, and eating food out of cans.

It's an unusual and at times unbearable existence, but Chaos soon discovers that his post-nuclear reality may have no connection to the truth. So he takes to the road with a girl named Melinda in order to find answers. As the pair travels through the United States they find that, while each town has been affected differently by the mysterious source of the apocalypse, none of the people they meet can fill in their incomplete memories or answer their questions. Gradually, figures from Chaos's past, including some who appear only under the influence of intravenously administered drugs, make Chaos remember some of his forgotten life as a man named Moon.

This story originally appeared in New Pathways, November 1990. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighth Annual Collection (1991), edited by Gardner Dozois.

What if Hitler had not lost the Second World War?

After developing his own atom bomb, Hitler conquered most of Europe and Russia but reached a stalemate with America. In the ensuing cold war, Germany suffers renewed inflation and is stifled by an overstratified bureaucracy while America prospers but devolves into a fractured country of rugged individualists. This warped mirror image of our world is seen through the eyes of New York editor Alan Whittmore and through two of his publications.

Thirty years after the war's end, Hilda Goebbels, the daughter of Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and now a world-famous anarchist, threatens to release her father's long-suppressed diaries - revealing the bizarre fantasies at the core of Nazi doctrine, which could destroy the Reich.

Nebula nominated novella. It originally appeared in Amazing Science Fiction Stories, March 1982. It can also be found in the anthologies Hitler Victorious (1987), edited by Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenberg and The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century (2001), edited by Harry Turtledove and Martin H. Greenberg. It was later expanded to the full novel Moon of Ice (1988).

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, May 2018.

Read the full story for fee at Lightspeed.

Ken Liu's "Seventh Day of the Seventh Moon," tells the story of Jing and Yuan, a pair of young women in love for the first time in their lives, who're about to be parted by circumstances beyond their control. On Qixi, the Festival of the Cowherd and Weaver Girl, the legendary lovers give the young women some help and advice.

The story was originally published in the anthology Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories (2014), edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #68 May 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.

World Fantasy Award winning novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Amazons! (1979), edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson. The story can also be found in the collections The Woman Who Loved the Moon and Other Stories (1981) and Tales from a Vanished Country (1990).

Father Mak Wycliffe is a Roman Catholic priest and space engineer. One the Moon, he meets Jessica, a teenage girl in a Catholic school uniform. Jessica loves to shop and hang out at nightclubs. But Jessica also claims to be Jesus Christ. Will Jessica use her special powers to start a nuclear armageddon? Will Father Wycliffe, the Virgin Mary, scientists, and clergy be able to stop Jessica from carrying out her Father's will? While the mortals and Jessica's immaculate mother try to foil her, Jessica happily splurges on designer clothes, luxuries she never had in first century Judea. "The Moon Under Her Feet" combines space opera, ghost story, and theology in a way never before seen in science fiction.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Moon Shots (1999), edited by Peter Crowther. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventeenth Annual Collection (2000), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Eagle Has Landed: 50 Years of Lunar Science Fiction, edited by Neil Clarke. The story is included in the collections Little Machines (2005) and A Very British History (2013).

It's the 21st century, and all is right with the world. Or so it seems.

Vice President Charlie Haskell, who will travel anywhere for a photo op, is about to cut the ribbon for the just-completed American Moonbase. The first Mars voyage is about to leave high orbit, with a woman at the helm. Below, the world is marveling at a rare solar eclipse.

But all that is right is about to go disastrously wrong when an amateur astronomer discovers a new comet. Named for its discover, Tomikois a "sun-grazer,"an interstellar wanderer with a hundred times the mass and ten times the speed of other comets. And it is headed straight for our moon.

In less than five days, if scientists' predictions are right, Tomiko will crash into the moon, shattering it into a cloud of superheated gas, dust, and huge chunks of rock that will rain down on the earth, causing chaos and killer storms, possibly tidal waves inundating entire cities... or worse: a single apocalyptic worldwide "extinction event."

In the meantime, the population of Moonbase must be evacuated by a hastily assembled fleet of shuttle rockets. There isn't room, or time enough, for everyone. And the vice president, who rashly promised to be last off ("I will lock the door and turn off the lights"), is trying to figure out how to get away without eating his words.

Welcome to Babylon, a typical sleepy southern town, where years earlier the Larkin family suffered a terrible tragedy. Now they are about to endure another: fourteen-year-old Margaret Larkin will be robbed of her innocence and her life by a killer who is beyond the reach of the law.

But something strange is happening in Babylon: traffic lights flash an eerie blue, a ghostly hand slithers from the drain of a kitchen sink, graves erupt from the local cemetery in an implacable march of terror... And beneath the murky surface of the river, a shifting, almost human shape slowly takes form. Night after night it will pursue the murderer. And when the full moon rises over Babylon, it will seek a terrible vengeance...

In seventeenth-century France, Louis XIV rules with flamboyant ambition. In his domain, wealth and beauty take all; frivolity begets cruelty; science and alchemy collide. From the Hall of Mirrors to the vermin-infested attics of the Chateau at Versailles, courtiers compete to please the king, sacrificing fortune, principles, and even the sacred bond between brother and sister.

By the fiftieth year of his reign, Louis XIV has made France the most powerful state in the western world. Yet the Sun King's appetite for glory knows no bounds. In a bold stroke, he sends his natural philosopher on an expedition to seek the source of immortality -- the rare, perhaps mythical, sea monsters. For the glory, of his God, his country, and his king, Father Yves de la Croix returns with his treasures: one heavy shroud packed in ice...and a covered basin that imprisons a shrieking creature.

To everyone who knows them, best friends Miel and Sam are as strange as they are inseparable. Roses grow out of Miel's wrist, and rumors say that she spilled out of a water tower when she was five. Sam is known for the moons he paints and hangs in the trees and for how little anyone knows about his life before he and his mother moved to town. But as odd as everyone considers Miel and Sam, even they stay away from the Bonner girls, four beautiful sisters rumored to be witches. Now they want the roses that grow from Miel's skin, convinced that their scent can make anyone fall in love. And they're willing to use every secret Miel has fought to protect to make sure she gives them up.

Contents:

• ABCs in Zero-G
• A Delicate Adjustment
• If Nudity Offends You
• Too Wet to Plow
• Gut Feelings
• Gravesite Revisited
• Just Another Day at the Weather Service
• The Generic Rejuvenation of Milo Ardry
• New World Symphony
• Those Who Walk in Darkness

Over the past two decades, few authors have garnered the critical acclaim and fan following of Elizabeth Moon, Nebula Award-winning author of The Speed of Dark, The Deed of Paksenarrion, and Remnant Population. Moon Flights, the definitive Elizabeth Moon short story collection, represents the highlights of an impressive career. Gathering together fifteen tales of fantasy, alternative history, and science fiction, Moon Flights features an original story, ?Say Cheese," set in the Vatta's War cosmology, and an all-new introduction by Anne McCaffrey, legendary creator of the Dragonriders of Pern series.

Contents:

• Bargains
• ABCs in Zero-G
• A Delicate Adjustment
• Too Wet to Plow
• Gut Feelings
• The Generic Rejuvenation of Milo Ardry
• New World Symphony
• Just Another Day at the Weather Service
• Politics
• In Suspect Terrain
• The Happy Frog
• Horse of Her Dreams
• Knight of Other Days
• Aura
• Those Who Walk in Darkness

For forty years, Colony 3245.12 has been Ofelia's home. On this planet far away in space and time from the world of her youth, she has lived and loved, weathered the death of her husband, raised her one surviving child, lovingly tended her garden, and grown placidly old. And it is here that she fully expects to finish out her days--until the shifting corporate fortunes of the Sims Bancorp Company dictates that Colony 3245.12 is to be disbanded, its residents shipped off, deep in cryo-sleep, to somewhere new and strange and not of their choosing. But while her fellow colonists grudgingly anticipate a difficult readjustment on some distant world, Ofelia savors the promise of a golden opportunity. Not starting over in the hurly-burly of a new community... but closing out her life in blissful solitude, in the place she has no intention of leaving. A population of one.

With everything she needs to sustain her, and her independent spirit to buoy her, Ofelia actually does start life over--for the first time on her own terms: free of the demands, the judgments, and the petty tyrannies of others. But when a reconnaissance ship returns to her idyllic domain, and its crew is mysteriously slaughtered, Ofelia realizes she is not the sole inhabitant of her paradise after all. And, when the inevitable time of first contact finally arrives, she will find her life changed yet again–in ways she could never have imagined....

In the near future, disease will be a condition of the past. Most genetic defects will be removed at birth; the remaining during infancy. Unfortunately, there will be a generation left behind. For members of that missed generation, small advances will be made. Through various programs, they will be taught to get along in the world despite their differences. They will be made active and contributing members of society. But they will never be normal.

Lou Arrendale is a member of that lost generation, born at the wrong time to reap the awards of medical science. Part of a small group of high-functioning autistic adults, he has a steady job with a pharmaceutical company, a car, friends, and a passion for fencing. Aside from his annual visits to his counselor, he lives a low-key, independent life. He has learned to shake hands and make eye contact. He has taught himself to use "please" and "thank you" and other conventions of conversation because he knows it makes others comfortable. He does his best to be as normal as possible and not to draw attention to himself.

But then his quiet life comes under attack. It starts with an experimental treatment that will reverse the effects of autism in adults. With this treatment Lou would think and act and be just like everyone else. But if he was suddenly free of autism, would he still be himself? Would he still love the same classical music–with its complications and resolutions? Would he still see the same colors and patterns in the world–shades and hues that others cannot see? Most importantly, would he still love Marjory, a woman who may never be able to reciprocate his feelings? Would it be easier for her to return the love of a "normal"?

There are intense pressures coming from the world around him–including an angry supervisor who wants to cut costs by sacrificing the supports necessary to employ autistic workers. Perhaps even more disturbing are the barrage of questions within himself. For Lou must decide if he should submit to a surgery that might completely change the way he views the world... and the very essence of who he is.

Thoughtful, provocative, poignant, unforgettable, The Speed of Dark is a gripping exploration into the mind of an autistic person as he struggles with profound questions of humanity and matters of the heart.

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It was originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, July-August 2000. No other publications are known at this time.

Table of Contents:

• Moonfoam and Sorceries - interior artwork by Roy Hunt
• 3 - Moonfoam and Sorceries - poem
• 11 - Queen Bee - novelette
• 37 - Deathbound - poem
• 41 - A Strange View of a River - (1947) - short story
• 49 - The Ruins - poem
• 53 - Temple of the Frog - short fiction
• 77 - Star Odyssey - poem
• 81 - The Night Watchman - short fiction
• 99 - The Song of Soo - poem
• 109 - The Sender of Dreams - short fiction
• 123 - Night of the Carnival - poem
• 129 - The Tavern of the Winds - (1946) - short story
• 141 - Necromancy - (1947) - poem
• 145 - The Ophidians - short fiction
• 159 - Demon Possession - poem
• 163 - All Cats Are Grey at Night - short fiction
• 171 - Theme of Night - poem
• 173 - The Gods of Shipapu - short fiction
• 199 - Parable of Destiny - poem
• 201 - Seven Against Death - short fiction
• 217 - Time Capsule - poem
• 221 - The Guardian - short fiction
• 229 - Rada Drums - poem
• 235 - Night of Serpents - short fiction
• 255 - The Undertaker's Horse - poem
• 259 - The King of Ghostland - short fiction

Imagine you live with your aunt, who hates you so much she's going to sell you into a dreadful apprenticeship. Imagine you run away before that can happen. Imagine that you can see ghosts--and talk with the dead. People like you are feared, even shunned.

Now imagine... the first people you encounter after your escape are a mysterious stranger and a ghost boy, who seem to need you desperately--though you don't understand who they are or exactly what they want you to do. So you set off on a treacherous journey, with only a ghost dog for company. And you find that what lies before you is a task so monumental that it could change the world.

What if the moon were used as a way station for non-human aliens with recessive genes? What if these vegetative aliens were programmed with a single goal: destroy Earth? What if the Earth were vulnerable to their attack?

BFA and WFA nominated novella. It originally appeared in the anthology The Mammoth Book of Werewolves (1994), edited by Stephen Jones. It can also be found in the anthology The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 6 (1995), edited by Stephen Jones. The story is included in the collection Famous Monsters (1995).

Hugo Award winning short story. It originally appeared in the collection All the Myriad Ways (1971). The story can also be found in the anthologies:

• Best Science Fiction for 1972 edited by Frederik Pohl
• The Hugo Winners, Volume 3: (1970-75) (1977), edited by Isaac Asimov
• The Best of All Possible Worlds (1980), edited by Spider Robinson
• The World Treasury of Science Fiction (1989), edited by David G. Hartwell
• Armageddons (1999) edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois
• Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century (2001), edited by Orson Scott Card
• L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 31 (2015), edited by David Farland

It is included in the collections Inconstant Moon (1973), N-Space (1990) and The Best of Larry Niven (2010).

Stan and Leslie watch as the moon becomes impossibly bright; then the sky lights up and seems on fire. Has the sun gone nova and these are their last few hours alive? As Los Angeles drowns in storms and people move from shock to terror, Stan and Leslie face their own mortality, as Stan seeks to understand what has happened.

Written with intelligence and humor, Larry Niven's Hugo Award-winning short story became an "Outer Limits" episode. "Inconstant Moon" invites you to ask yourself, "How would you spend your last night on Earth?"

Table of Contents:

• Inconstant Moon - (1971)
• Wait It Out - (1968)
• Bordered in Black - (1966)
• Not Long Before the End - (1969)
• How the Heroes Die - (1966)
• At the Bottom of a Hole - (1966)
• Passerby - [State] - (1969)
• The Deadlier Weapon - non-genre - (1968)
• Convergent Series - (1967)
• One Face - (1965)
• Becalmed in Hell - (1965)
• Death by Ecstasy - (1969)

Thora is the Chosen One. Pressed against her breast is the sacred jewel, possessing all the powers of the Moon. Makil is the Man of Pure Light, from the valley of enchantment and the swaying, sensual dance. In the golden scabbard at his side is the magical Sword of Lur.

Together they descend into an underground world of soulless machines and eternal night. High Priestess and Warrior, Jewel and Sword, they must join in blood and battle against the Dark Lord. To fail would mean the Holy Force would fail, and Thora and Makil would forever be entombed in the flesh of evil.

Effortlessly spinning tales of adventure through the distant worlds of outer space and the inner worlds of dream and psychic experience, Andre Norton sends you on a breathtaking journey of the imagination in this collection of her finest works. Follow the path to Moon Mirror, and enter the shimmering lands that lay beyond.

Table of Contents:

• How Many Miles to Babylon? - novelette
• The Toymaker's Snuffbox - shortstory
• Teddi - (1973) - novelette
• Desirable Lakeside Residence - (1973) - novelette
• The Long Night of Waiting - (1974) - shortstory
• Through the Needle's Eye - (1970) - shortstory
• One Spell Wizard - (1972) - shortstory
• Outside - (1974) - novella
• Moon Mirror - (1982) - shortstory

Romeo and Juliet meets Chinese mythology in this magical novel...

Hunter Yee has perfect aim with a bow and arrow, but all else in his life veers wrong. He's sick of being haunted by his family's past mistakes. The only things keeping him from running away are his little brother, a supernatural wind, and the bewitching girl at his new high school.

Luna Chang dreads the future. Graduation looms ahead, and her parents' expectations are stifling. When she begins to break the rules, she finds her life upended by the strange new boy in her class, the arrival of unearthly fireflies, and an ominous crack spreading across the town of Fairbridge.

As Hunter and Luna navigate their families' enmity and secrets, everything around them begins to fall apart. All they can depend on is their love... but time is running out, and fate will have its way.

The Moon smells like gunpowder. Every lunar walker since Apollo 11 has noticed it: a burnt-metal scent that reminds them of war. Caden Dechert, the chief of the U.S. mining operation on the edge of the Sea of Serenity, thinks the smell is just a trick of the mind -- a reminder of his harrowing days as a Marine in the war-torn Middle East back on Earth.

It's 2072, and lunar helium-3 mining is powering the fusion reactors that are bringing Earth back from environmental disaster. But competing for the richest prize in the history of the world has destroyed the oldest rule in space: Safety for All. When a bomb kills one of Dechert's diggers on Mare Serenitatis, the haunted veteran goes on the hunt to expose the culprit before more blood is spilled.

But as Dechert races to solve the first murder in the history of the Moon, he gets caught in the crosshairs of two global powers spoiling for a fight. Reluctant to be the match that lights this powder-keg, Dechert knows his life and those of his crew are meaningless to the politicians. Even worse, he knows the killer is still out there, hunting.

In his desperate attempts to save his crew and prevent the catastrophe he sees coming, the former Marine uncovers a dangerous conspiracy that, with one spark, can ignite a full lunar war, wipe out his team... and perhaps plunge the Earth back into darkness.

Every teenage girl thinks she's different. When government agents kick down Claire Forrester's front door and murder her parents, Claire realises just how different she is.

Patrick Gamble was nothing special until the day he got on a plane and, hours later, stepped off it, the only passenger left alive. A hero.

President Chase Williams has vowed to eradicate the menace. Unknown to the electorate, however, he is becoming the very thing he has sworn to destroy.

Each of them is caught up in a war that so far has been controlled with laws and violence and drugs. But an uprising is about to leave them damaged, lost, and tied to one another for ever.

The night of the red moon is coming, when an unrecognizable world will emerge, and the battle for humanity will begin.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Fantasy (2007), edited by Sean Wallace and Paul Tremblay. It can also be found in the anthology Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition, edited by Rich Horton. The story is included in the collection At the Edge of Waking (2012).

Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in If, September 1965. The story can also be found in the anthology The Second If Reader of Science Fiction (1968). It is included in the collection Day Million (1970).

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

It is thirty years from now, and we have colonized the moon.

American Fred Fredericks is making his first trip, his purpose to install a communications system for China's Lunar Science Foundation. But hours after his arrival he witnesses a murder and is forced into hiding.

It is also the first visit for celebrity travel reporter Ta Shu. He has contacts and influence, but he too will find that the moon can be a perilous place for any traveler.

Finally, there is Chan Qi. She is the daughter of the Minister of Finance, and without doubt a person of interest to those in power. She is on the moon for reasons of her own, but when she attempts to return to China, in secret, the events that unfold will change everything - on the moon, and on Earth.

The Moon Room was first published in the Spring 2020 issue of Kaleidotrope.

Read the story for free on Kaleidotrope.

Carlo Morse and Jimmy Ganzer pioneered dream-fabbing, but these days people only want to close their eyes to trashy stuff -- not the mention the kids and their fancy imported tech. It's a good thing Schwartz's Deli is still the same.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Table of Contents:

• The Little Dirty Girl - (1982) - novelette
• Sword Blades and Poppy Seed - (1983) - shortstory
• Main Street: 1953 - (1987) - shortstory
• How Dorothy Kept Away the Spring - (1977) - shortstory
• This Afternoon - (1987) - shortstory
• This Night, at My Fire - (1966) - shortstory
• "I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket... But By God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!" - (1964) - shortstory
• Come Closer - (1965) - shortstory
• It's Important to Believe - (1987) - shortstory
• Mr. Wilde's Second Chance - (1966) - shortstory
• Window Dressing - (1970) - shortstory
• Existence - (1975) - shortstory
• Foul Fowl - (1987) - shortstory
• A Short and Happy Life - (1969) - shortstory
• The Throaways - (1987) - shortstory
• The Cliches from Outer Space - (1984) - shortstory
• Elf Hill - (1982) - shortstory
• Nor Custom Stale - (1959) - shortstory
• The Experimenter - (1975) - novelette
• Reasonable People - (1974) - shortstory
• Life in a Furniture Store - (1987) - shortstory
• The View from This Window - (1970) - novelette
• Old Pictures - (1987) - essay
• Visiting - (1967) - shortstory
• Visiting Day - (1970) - shortstory
• The Autobiography of My Mother - (1975) - shortstory
• Old Thoughts, Old Presences - (1975) - shortstory
• Daddy's Girl - (1975) - shortstory

A vanished star. A haunted film. A mystery only love can unravel...

1968: Gemma Turner once dreamed of stardom. Now she's on the cusp of obscurity. When she's offered the lead in a radical new horror film, Gemma believes her luck has changed - but her dream is about to turn into a nightmare. One night, between the shadows of an alleyway, Gemma disappears on set and is never seen again. Yet she's still alive. She's been pulled into the film. And the script - and the monsters within it - are coming to life. Gemma must play her role perfectly if she hopes to survive.

2007: Gemma Turner's disappearance is one of Hollywood's greatest mysteries - one that's haunted film student Christopher Kent ever since he saw L'Étrange Lune for the first time. The screenings only happen once a decade, and each time, there is new, impossible footage of Gemma that shouldn't exist. Curiosity drives Christopher to unravel the truth. But answers to the film's mystery may leave him trapped by it forever.

This novelette originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, July 2008. It can also be found in the antholgy The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection (2009), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Table of Contents:

• 1 - Andre Norton: Beyond the Siege Perilous (Moonsinger's Friends) - essay by Susan Shwartz
• 16 - Sea Wrack - novelette by Marion Zimmer Bradley
• 42 - Lior and the Sea - novelette by Diane Duane
• 74 - The Pale Girl, the Dark Mage, and the Green Sea - short story by Tanith Lee
• 80 - The Forest - novelette by Poul Anderson
• 112 - The Shadow Hart - short story by Sandra Miesel
• 122 - The Woman Who Loved Reindeer - novelette by Meredith Ann Pierce
• 157 - The Price of Lightning - novelette by Jayge Carr
• 183 - Bright-Eyed Black Pony - short story by Nancy Springer
• 201 - A Flock of Geese - short story by Anne McCaffrey
• 217 - Of Law and Magic - novelette by C. J. Cherryh
• 246 - Team Venture - novelette by Jo Clayton
• 278 - Sky Sister - short story by Diana L. Paxson
• 298 - Defender of the Faith - short story by Judith Tarr
• 314 - Catalyst - short story by Katherine Kurtz
• 327 - The Foxwife - short story by Jane Yolen
• 336 - An Open Letter to Andre Norton (Moonsinger's Friends) - essay by Joan D. Vinge

Table of Contents:

• A Happy Day in 2381 - (1970) - shortstory
• After the Myths Went Home - (1969) - shortstory
• Passengers - (1968) - shortstory
• To Be Continued - (1956) - shortstory
• Nightwings - (1968) - novella
• We Know Who We Are - (1970) - shortstory
• The Pleasure of Their Company - (1970) - novelette
• The Songs of Summer - (1956) - shortstory
• A Man of Talent - (1966) - shortstory
• Collecting Team - (1956) - shortstory
• Going Down Smooth - (1968) - shortstory

A collection of Silverberg's best short fiction, as selected by the author.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay
• The 1950s: Introduction - essay
• Road to Nightfall - (1958) - novelette
• The Macauley Circuit - (1956) - short story
• Sunrise on Mercury - (1957) - short story
• Warm Man - (1957) - short story
• The 1960s: Introduction - essay
• To See the Invisible Man - (1963) - short story
• Flies - (1967) - short story
• Passengers - (1968) - short story
• Nightwings - (1968) - novella
• Sundance - (1969) - short story
• The 1970s: Introduction - essay
• Good News from the Vatican - (1971) - short story
• Capricorn Games - (1974) - novelette
• Born with the Dead - (1974) - novella
• Schwartz Between the Galaxies - (1974) - novelette
• The 1980s: Introduction - essay
• The Far Side of the Bell-Shaped Curve - (1982) - novelette
• The Pope of the Chimps - (1982) - short story
• Needle in a Timestack - (1983) - short story
• Sailing to Byzantium - (1985) - novella
• Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another - (1989) - novelette
• The 1990s: Introduction - essay
• Hunters in the Forest - (1991) - short story
• Death Do Us Part - (1996) - short story
• Beauty in the Night - (1997) - novelette
• The 2000s: Introduction - essay
• The Millennium Express - (2000) - short story
• With Caesar in the Underworld - (2002) - novella

It is eleven thousand years from now... A lot has happened, and yet a lot is still very familiar.

Ariel is a boy in a small town under a wizard's rule. Like many adventurers before him, Ariel is called to explore a world full of unimaginable glories and challenges: unknown enemies, a mission to save the world, a girl. Here, as they say, be dragons. But none of this happens before Ariel comes across an artifact from an earlier civilization, a sentient, record-keeping artificial intelligence that carries with it the perspective of the whole of human history -- and becomes both Ariel's greatest ally and the narrator of our story.

A splendid debut collection of speculative fiction that traverses the connections between earth and the heavens, the living and the spectral, human and animal.

In Cosmic, a former drug addict has a chance to redeem herself and restore honor to her family's name. In, Harvest, a woman tasked with providing for her community ponders her inability to bear live children. In the title story,Two Moons, a young woman falls in love with the moon, and is astonished by the moon's response. In What the Heart Wants, a rejected lover discovers that her physical and emotional desires are incongruent with the organ pumping blood through her veins.

Sensitive, ethereal, humorous, and at times, heart-breaking, Smith's collection of speculative fiction signals the arrival of a writer who understands that Black girls are indeed magic.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, December 2016.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Curt Newton has spent most of his life hidden from the rest of humankind, being raised by a robot, an android, and the disembodied brain of a renowned scientist. This unlikely trio of guardians has kept his existence a closely guarded secret after the murder of Curt's parents.

Curt's innate curiosity and nose for trouble inadvertently lead him into a plot to destabilize the Solar Coalition and assassinate the president. There's only one way to uncover the evil mastermind--Curt must become Captain Future.

With the permission of the Edmond Hamilton estate, Allen Steele revives the exciting adventures of Captain Future.

Jenna Rosen returns to the place in Alaska where her young son, Bobby, disappeared without a trace two years before. Jenna is determined to lay to rest the aching mystery of his death. But ancient legends may have had a hand in Bobby's fate, forcing Jenna to sift through her own Native American ancestry to uncover the truth.

Wrangell, Alaska, offers Jenna little comfort beyond the constant and tender attention of Eddie, a local fisherman. When ancient legends begin to suggest a frightening new possibility about Bobby's fate, Jenna digs deeper into the menacing forces at work in the wilderness. A Tlingit shaman named Dr. David Livingstone warns Jenna not to disturb the legendary kushtaka--soul stealing predators that stalk a netherworld between land and sea, the living and the dead. But Jenna is desperate for answers, and she appeals to both Livingstone and Eddie to help her sort fact from myth, and face the unthinkable possibilities head-on.

Set against a brilliant panorama of European expansion into the West in the late 1800s, Moon Dance is the horrifying tale of the illegitimate son of the Count von Bachl-Wolfling, leader of a pack of Viennese werewolves, and of the boy's all-too-human governess, Speranza. The pack has decided to emigrate to America, in search of wild lands and unsuspicious human prey. But unbeknownst to them, the Dakota territory is already home to the Shungmanitu--a clan of the Lakota Sioux who become wolves by the light of the full moon.

S.P. Somtow's L.A. Fairy Tales, collected together for the first time in this new edition. Somtow puts a new spin on some classic themes in this volume of 10 short stories set in the back alleys of downtown L.A. A must-have for the modern horror reader and collector.

Table of Contents:

• Gingerbread
• A Thief in the Night
• The Hero's Celluloid Journey
• Dr. Rumpole
• The Sleeping Ice Princess
• Though I Walk Through the Valley
• Mr. Death's Blue-eyed Boy
• A Hummingbird Among Angels
• Tagging the Moon
• The Other City of Angels: A Pictorial

The four men had been scrutinized, watched, investigated, and intensively trained for more than a year. They were the best men to be found for that first, all-important flight to the Moon--the pioneer manned rocket that would give either the East or the West control over the Earth. Yet when the race started, Adam Crag found that he had a saboteur among his crew... a traitor! Such a man could give the Reds possession of Luna, and thereby dominate the world it circled. Any one of the other three could be the hidden enemy, and if he didn't discover the agent soon--even while they were roaring on rocket jets through outer space--then Adam Crag, his expedition, and his country would be destroyed!

In MOONDUST, Thomas Burnett Swann stakes as his setting the city of Jericho under the siege; yet it is not a Biblical story nor a tale of warfare, but rather a marvelous science-fiction novel about a non-human intelligent species hidden from the world's eye, a mesmerizing narrative about their human and humanoid subjects, wrapped in the wizardry of a science older than humanity.

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in the limited edition collection Moon Dogs (2000). It was reprinted in Asimov's Science Fiction, March 2000.

Table of Contents:

• Michael Swanwick: The Chameleon Eludes the Net - essay by Gardner Dozois
• Author Profile: Michael Swanwick (1997) - essay by Michael Swanwick
• Moon Dogs (2000) - shortstory by Michael Swanwick
• The Death of the Magus: Two Myths (1994) - essay by Michael Swanwick
• Mickelrede, or, The Slayer and the Staff - shortfiction by Avram Davidson and Michael Swanwick
• Vergil Magus: King Without Country (1998) - novelette by Avram Davidson and Michael Swanwick
• Jane Swanwick and the Search for Identity (1998) - essay by Michael Swanwick
• The Hagiography of Saint Dozois (1997) - essay by Michael Swanwick
• Ancestral Voices (1998) - novella by Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick
• The City of God (1995) - novella by Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick
• The Dead (1996) - shortstory by Michael Swanwick
• They Fell Like Wheat (1996) - essay by Michael Swanwick
• A User's Guide to the Postmoderns (1986) - essay by Michael Swanwick
• Ships (1996) - novelette by Michael Swanwick and Jack Dann
• In the Tradition ... (1994) - essay by Michael Swanwick
• Growing Up in the Future (1997) - essay by Michael Swanwick
• Griffin's Egg (1991) - novella by Michael Swanwick

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #53 February 2011. It can also be found in the anthology Clarkesworld: Year Five (2013), edited by Sean Wallace and Neil Clarke. The story is included in the collection How the World Became Quiet: Myths of the Past, Present, and Future (2013).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Things happen when Greg is around...all kinds of things bet broken, yet you can't relaly say he's destructive because you never see him break anything. Other kids are getting hurt or getting into trouble all the time, yet you can't put your finger on just what he does...it's as if he spends all his energy being furious withthe world; anger is the only consistent thing he's ever had and he'll hold on to it with a vengeance.

When Breanne Novak adopts eleven-year-old Greg, she knows she has troubles ahead. But Greg has an uncanny ability to *make things happen* and Breanne soon realises that she had been totally unprepared for the full impact of the struggle about to rock her life.

A planet-killer asteroid is hurtling to Earth and everyone is freaking out. But not Manon Fontaine. She knows what the asteroid really is and it's hers. Once she controls it, she'll revive the world's post-war economy and also her mother's mining company. But first, she needs to navigate family betrayals and kidnapping attempts before she can finally determine her own fate.

Meanwhile, Ann Wilson, an augmented Union super-soldier, has been having problems (beyond the mental strains of indiscriminate killing): her last targets were blown up with fractional deuterium devices, and made things very messy. Ann hates messes. What she hates more is a commanding officer who jerks her around and then sends her, of all places, to Luna City. Little does she know she's conducting illegal missions to gain control of the asteroid.

In the middle of it all, is Eric Lin, a Union-born-Chinese thruster mechanic. Because of the war with the PPA, he's been ostracized and forced off-planet to Luna City and the orbital colonies. All he wants is to be accepted and left in peace. This apparently is too much to ask, as both the Union and the PPA send soldiers to drag him away for the-hell-knows what. The reason is in fact that he holds the key to controlling the asteroid.

Amidst traitorous double-agents and assassinations, Manon, Ann and Eric's paths collide, leaving a wake of destroyed orbital stations and rampaging mobs, ultimately leading them into a confrontation on the moon.

It was many years ago that humans came and settled the world of Newholme-cruelly bending the planet to their will; setting down roots and raising up cities and farms and a grand temple to their goddess.But now the ground itself is shaking with ever-increasing violence. And the Great Questioner, official arbiter of the Council of Worlds, has come to this isolated orb to investigate rumors of a terrible secret that lies buried deep within Newholme's past-a past that is not dead, not completely. And it will fall to Mouche, a beautiful youth of uncommon cleverness and spirit, to save his imperiled home by dicovering and embracing that which makes him unique among humans. For every living thing on newholme is doomed, unless Mouche can appease something dark and terrible that is coiled within...and surrender to the mysterious ecstatic revelry that results when the six moons join.

Reindeer Moon may well come to be regarded as the supreme contemporary novel of our prehistory. It opens up corridors to the imagination that lead us back toward the long echoes of our distant human past, and its characters, as vivid as any alive, live on in the mind long after the book has been set down.

Reindeer Moon is the first novel, but not the first book, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of classic anthropological accounts of hunters and gatherers. Yanan, its headstrong heroine, lived twenty thousand years ago near Woman Lake in central Siberia among places you will not find on any modern map. Yanan, only thirteen when her story begins, is passionate and courageous, and her companions--hunters of deer, gatherers of roots and twigs, shamans, babies at the breast--are all, like her, bound to the harsh realities of hunger, cold, death by violence or childbirth, and the cycles of love and jealousy, of marriage and kinship. As Yanan recounts the terrible adventures of her brief life she departs, from time to time, on spirit journeys that evoke the lives of animals with extraordinary intimacy, for Yanan's fate is like ours but conceived in different terms.

On the airless surface of the Moon the 'cold war' continues, with the bases of the major world powers watching each other and waiting...

The dedicated personnel of Britain's Moon Base seemed well-adjusted to their peculiar existence despite a series of mysterious happenings. What bothers them most is the visit of a Royal Commission sent by an economically-worried British Government to investigate expenditure. Travelling with the Commission, but under separate and secret orders, is Felix Larsen, who's investigations are of quite a different nature.

Larsen, alive to the possibilities of espionage, soon finds himself faced with the inexplicable. Why should one man fall a thousand feet and escape with minor bruises while another dies after falling a mere eighteen inches? Why does a desperate man, bent on suicide and with all the means at hand, find it absolutely impossible to kill himself? What are the strange messages emanating from the Base - and from whence do they come? And what is the fantastic thing that has been conceived in the research department?

A collection of Vance's early stories, including The New Prime (1950), The Men Return (1955), Green Magic (1956), Ullward's Retreat (1957), Dodkin's Job (1958), The Moon Moth (1960), Alfred's Ark (1964), Sulwen's Planet (1966), and Rumfuddle (1972).

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Stars: Original Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian (2003), edited by Janis Ian and Mike Resnick. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 9 (2004), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection The John Varley Reader (2004).

This story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 16, May-June 2017.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny Magazine.

This short story originally appeared in Electric Velocipede, Issue #11, Fall 2006. It can also be found Year's Best SF 12 (2007), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

Here are thirty-three weird, wonderful stories concerning men, women, teleportation, wind-up cats, and brown paper bags. By turns whimsical and unsettling -- frequently managing to be both -- these short fictions describe family relationships, bad breakups, and travel to outer space.

Vukcevich's loopy, fun-house mirror take on everyday life belongs to the same absurdist school of work as that of George Saunders, David Sedaris, Ken Kalfus, and Victor Pelevin.

A love lost in time. An eternity to find it.

The Wang family is hiding a secret - they all have the ability to time travel. When parents Joshua and Lily depart for the past and never return, their children Tommy and Eva are forced to deal with their grief alone. Eva tries to find her place in the present, while Tommy is pulled further and further into a past that he hopes holds the truth. When he falls in love with a woman from 1930s London Chinatown, his inability to confront his own history has serious ramifications for the people who can truly bring him happiness.

According to legend, Zorn's distant ancestors had vanquished fiery devils from the Demon Moon. Now, a thousand years later, that bloody red world looms closer every day.

But Zorn knows little of the past. For generations, his family have been Lords of Wolver Riding, flying their winged unicorns to protect the land from werewolves, wyverns and other deadly threats. As Zorn grows, he finds his world increasingly strange. Where did the werewolves come from? How did unicorns fly?

His questions end the day his evil uncle usurps the throne. Torn between ancient fears and modern science, wooed by a seductive temptress and plagued by a demonic priest, Zorn must unlock secrets shrouded in the mists of time - or watch everything he loves be consumed in the hellfire of the...DEMON MOON

An international agency, COSMOS, is in charge of space exploration in the not very distant future. Odd forms of life have been discovered on Mars, Venus, and Jupiter; there may be a life form on Mercury; and finally something utterly mystifying is discovered on the moon. Three astronauts land and examine an installation that all three perceive as radically different - one sees a heap of gold, one a fort bristling with guns, one a space platform and space craft. They return to Earth with some crystals picked up at the mystery site.

All three soon produce children - the moon children, gifted, precocious, and seemingly damned by the crystals their fathers had handled. Two are eerily beautiful, the third a grotesque monster. And the three soon discover that they are Earth's hope for survival, as interplanetary invasion brings overwhelming alien forces to bear on mankind.

The Moon Era is a novella by Jack Williamson. It originally appeared in Wonder Stories, February 1932.

All is not well in Glassholm. Life under the moon has always been so predictable: day follows night, wax phases to wane and, after the despair of every Darkday, a person's mood soars to euphoria at Full. So it has been for five hundred years, ever since the Lunane captured the moon and tethered it to the city.

Now, all that has changed. Amidst rumours of unsettling dreams and strange whispering children, society is disintegrating into unrest and violence. The very sea has turned against Glassholm and the island's luck monkeys have gone wild, distributing new fates to all and sundry. Turmoil is coming.

Three people find themselves at the eye of the storm: a former policeman investigating a series of macabre murders, an outsider artist embroiled in the murky intrigues of revolution, and a renegade engineer tasked with fixing the ancient machine at the city's heart. Each must fulfil their role or see Glassholm shaken apart, while all are subject to the machinations of their inscrutable and eternal monarch, The Moon King.

Hugo Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, January 1984. The story can also be found in the anthologies Best SF of the Year #14 (1985), edited by Terry Carr and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Second Annual Collection (1985), edited by Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collection Fire Watch (1985) and The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (2007).

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Moon Shots (1999), edited by Peter Crowther. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 5 (2000), edited by David G. Hartwell. The story is included in the collections Starwater Strains (2005) and The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009).

In "One Against the Moon" Donald A. Wollheim spins a tale about a stowaway, on the first rocket to the moon! Trapped in an underground cavern of the moon, Robin Carew faced possible death-alone! Starvation was postponed only briefly. He had the two rabbits and a monkey that had accompanied him in the untested atomic rocket not designed for human passengers. Rescue was unlikely. No one had discovered him hidden within the rocket before the blast-off. He could rely only on himself. From the moment this latter-day Robinson Crusoe discovers edible plants within the lightless cavern, hope of survival grows in him. An underground river leads him to other caverns, where he encounters weird creatures and another being one who speaks in an incomprehensible language. Thus begins a series of remarkable adventures, climaxed by the arrival of a second rocket that brings both danger and good fortune.

Xin is an ansible, using her song magic to connect the originworld of the Imperial Authority and its far-flung colonies-- a role that is forced upon magically-gifted women "of a certain closeness". When a dead body comes through her portal at a time of growing rebellion, Xin is drawn deep into a station-wide conspiracy along with Ouyang Suqing, one of the station's mysterious, high-ranking starmages.

This novelette is included in the anthology Worlds Seen in Passing: Ten Years of Tor.com Short Fiction (2018), edited by Irene Gallo.

This novelette originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 25, November-December 2018. It was subsequently included in the collection Never Have I Ever.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny.

Table of Contents:

• 1 - Polished Stones: An Introduction - essay
• 9 - Scorched Supper on New Niger - (1980) - novelette
• 61 - Evil Thoughts - (1990) - novelette

It's been decades since anyone set foot on the moon. Now three ordinary teenagers, the winners of NASA's unprecedented, worldwide lottery, are about to become the first young people in space--and change their lives forever.

Mia, from Norway, hopes this will be her punk band's ticket to fame and fortune.

Midori believes it's her way out of her restrained life in Japan.

Antoine, from France, just wants to get as far away from his ex-girlfriend as possible.

It's the opportunity of a lifetime, but little do the teenagers know that something sinister is waiting for them on the desolate surface of the moon. And in the black vacuum of space... no one is coming to save them.

In this chilling adventure set in the most brutal landscape known to man, highly acclaimed Norwegian novelist Johan Harstad creates a vivid and frightening world of possibilities we can only hope never come true.

Men on the Moon

An anthology of short stories about the future of mankind on the moon. Stories include:

• Operation Pumice, by Raymond Z. Gallun
• Jetsam, by A. Bertram Chandler
• Reluctant Heroes, by Frank M. Robinson
• Moonwalk, by H.B. Fyfe
• Keyhole, by Murray Leinster

City on the Moon

Life on the moon under anything less than optimal conditions had always been a nightmare, and as Joe Kenmore and his colleague, Moreau, drove back to the City On The Moon on that day the Earth shuttle was due to land, the nearby mountain supporting critical elements of the shuttle's landing mechanisms crumbled causing an avalanche and resulting in chaos. Optimal conditions were no where in sight that day and as Kenmore and Moreau's investigations lead to their conclusion that explosions had been responsible for the avalanche.

Now they realized that they were in a race against the clock to restore the landing beam before the shuttle had reached it's point of no return prior to landing. Kenmore had more than strictly humanitarian reasons for wanting to prevent a mishap aboard the shuttle that day, because on this particular mission, Arlene Gray was aboard. Kenmore had been anxiously awaiting her arrival, and while in the scope of things Kenmore's comparatively meaningless love life might hang in the balance...

City On The Moon is also published as a stand alone novel.

Jim Stanley, who had helped to build the first space station, was thrilled to return to it as a member of the crew selected to erect the ships which would fulfil Man's age-long dream to reach the Moon. A total effort was being made to surpass the progress achieved in outer space by an enemy Combine. It was believed that if this foreign group scored the initial landing and gained control of the cold planet, the world would be threatened.

The desperate effort to forge ahead of the Combine suddenly turns into a race against death when a young, space-happy boy takes off alone for the Moon in an adequate ship. Although hampered by accidents, false rumors, and conflicts on Earth below, the crew works with frantic haste and grim determination to get the ships underway and to the boy in time. Jim Stanley, as mechanic and pilot, contributes a major share in the task of construction and on the tense rescue journey.

Here is a gripping account of pioneers in space by one of science fiction's best known and most skilful writers. Jim Stanley's adventures on the first flight to the Moon make a lusty and exciting tale for all who love to envision Man's ultimate conquest of space.

Set in the early days of the moon's colonization, this is the exciting story of Fred Halpern's efforts to prove himself worthy of the title Spaceman. Fred, a first-rate but impetuous pilot, was washed out of the Goddard Space Academy for disobeying orders. But he is lucky enough to get one more chance at a career in space when he is asked to join the third expedition to the moon. With the group of explorers, Fred makes his way across the dangerous and desolate lunar terrain, territory which has never been charted before. The men, determined to find some form of life on the moon, are hampered at every turn by breakdowns and bad luck.

Oddly enough, the accidents only seem to happen when Fred is around, and finally the resentful members of the expedition sign a petition requesting he be dismissed. The story reaches a harrowing climax when a spaceship mysteriously crashes, and Fred is driven to mutiny in an effort to save the crew.

This collection of Lynn's early short stories serves as a wonderful introduction to her influential work. Soaring emotions, eloquent prose, and fully-realized worlds are truly a joy to become lost within. That explains why the namesake short story "The Woman Who Loved the Moon" won Lynn one of her two World Fantasy Awards.

Table fo Contents:

• 1 - Wizard's Domain - (1980) - novelette
• 35 - The Gods of Reorth - (1980) - novelette
• 56 - We All Have to Go - (1976) - short story
• 72 - The Saints of Driman - (1977) - short story
• 81 - I Dream of a Fish, I Dream of a Bird - (1977) - short story
• 95 - The Island - (1977) - short story
• 106 - The Dragon That Lived in the Sea - (1979) - short story
• 112 - Mindseye - (1977) - short story
• 123 - The Man Who Was Pregnant - (1977) - short story
• 127 - Obsessions - (1978) - short story (variant of The Fire Man)
• 136 - The Woman in the Phone Booth - (1981) - short story
• 140 - Don't Look at Me - (1978) - short story
• 150 - Jubilee's Story - (1978) - short story
• 159 - The Circus That Disappeared - (1978) - short story (variant of Circus)
• 174 - The White King's Dream - (1979) - short story
• 182 - The Woman Who Loved the Moon - (1979) - novelette

Unspeakable horrors threaten the earth in this fantastic new comic fantasy from the author of Divine Misfortune.

Diana's life was in a rut - she hated her job, she was perpetually single, and she needed a place to live. But then the perfect apartment came along. It seemed too good to be true - because it was.

The apartment was already inhabited - by monsters. Vom the Hungering was the first to greet Diana and to warn her that his sole purpose in life was to eat everything in his path. This poses a problem for Diana since she's in his path...and is forbidden from ever leaving the apartment.

It turns out though that there are older and more ancient monstrous entities afoot - ones who want to devour the moon and destroy the world as we know it. Can Diana, Vom, and the other horrors stop this from happening? Maybe if they can get Vom to stop eating everything...and everyone.

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

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

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

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

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

Also published as The Girl in the Moon.

H. G. Wells' 1901 science fiction novel, "The First Men in the Moon", is the story of an impoverished businessman, Mr. Bedford, who retreats to the countryside for some rest from the weary of modern life and to try his hand at authoring a play. While there he meets an eccentric scientist, Dr. Cavor, who is developing a new material, 'cavorite', which is designed to shield off gravity. When it is discovered that the material works and can be practically fashioned into a spaceship, the two undertake a mission to the moon. There they discover that the moon is inhabited by a sinister alien civilization, whom the call "the Selenites".

Fashioned as a criticism against imperialism, "The First Men in the Moon" draws upon a theme common to Wells' work, that of the impact of technology on society and the challenges that humans face in the modern world.

Back to Mars! At long last - after four years of interplanetary study on Earth - Nelson Parr stepped aboard the Mars-bound space liner that was to carry him to his home planet. By the year 2120, Earth had established a colony on Mars and had explored the land - originally inhabited by Martians, a weird yet intelligent people... a vanished race. But when Nelse discovered the trhee-fingered handprint in his cabin, he couldn't help but wonder whether the intruder might have been Martian. Could it be that the Martians still lived?

The teen-ager reached Mars to hear disheartening news - the inhabitants of the red planet were ordered to return to Earth. But Nelse, his father and four other scientists disobeyed. They rocketed to Phobos, a satellite of Mars, where they set up their equipment to observe phenomena of the red planet...unaware that they, too, were being observed! When, through the telescope, they sighted strange events, it was decided that Nelse and a companion should take up a post on the other satellite, Deimos.

"Crash-landing" into a realm of space-tense adventure, Nelse - his companion murdered by outer-world beings - came to grips with the mysterious forces of space, alone. Capture, escape and capture follow one another in a dizzying spiral of desperate events to this book's hair-raising climax.

"The Moon of Gomrath" is the name of the one night of the year when the Old Magic is at its most powerful. Had Colin and Susan known this, they would never have obeyed the strange compulsion that drove them to light a fire on the Beacon. But now it is too late, the band of ancient horsemen called the Wild Hunt are awake and on the ride, and no one is safe.

Colin is captured, Susan falls under the sway of the hideous Brollachan, and all along Alderley Edge the forces of evil rally for the conflict to come.

For there will be a battle, the likes of which cannot be imagined by mortals. And the outcome -- and all the hopes of the world -- depend on three unlikely champions: Susan, Colin, and their ally, the Wizard Cadellin.

An Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, novel

'Richard was an alpha werewolf. It was his only serious flaw. We'd broken up after I'd seen him eat somebody.'

You never forget your ex-fiance. And when the call came at three in the morning, I thought for a moment it was him. It wasn't. It was his brother. And it wasn't good news.

Apparently the former love of my life had got himself thrown into jail for assaulting a woman. Since I make my living as a preternatural expert, I tend to believe almost anything's possible. But though he may be one of the monsters, Richard would never harm a woman. So it's Anita Blake to the rescue. I've got just a few days to spring Richard and find out who framed him – and why. There's a full moon coming, and if my werewolf love is still behind bars when it rises, he'll be facing a lot worse than an assault charge...

Meet Arcadia Bell: bartender, renegade magician, fugitive from the law....

Being the spawn of two infamous occultists (and alleged murderers) isn't easy, but freewheeling magician Arcadia "Cady" Bell knows how to make the best of a crummy situation. After hiding out for seven years, she's carved an incognito niche for herself slinging drinks at the demon-friendly Tambuku Tiki Lounge.

But she receives an ultimatum when unexpected surveillance footage of her notorious parents surfaces: either prove their innocence or surrender herself. Unfortunately, the only witness to the crimes was an elusive Æthyric demon, and Cady has no idea how to find it. She teams up with Lon Butler, an enigmatic demonologist with a special talent for sexual spells and an arcane library of priceless stolen grimoires. Their research soon escalates into a storm of conflict involving missing police evidence, the decadent Hellfire Club, a ruthless bounty hunter, and a powerful occult society that operates way outside the law. If Cady can't clear her family name soon, she'll be forced to sacrifice her own life... and no amount of running will save her this time.

Contents:

• 5 - Dark of the Moon - (1957) - shortstory
• 19 - The Highest Mountain - (1952) - shortstory
• 35 - The Last Laugh - (1951) - shortstory
• 54 - Back to Nature - (1956) - shortstory
• 65 - The Last Quarry - (1956) - shortstory
• 77 - Star Bright - (1951) - shortstory
• 92 - Jack the Giant Killer - (1955) - shortstory
• 109 - The Barrier - (1951) - shortstory
• 118 - Earth Needs a Killer - (1950) - novelette
• 151 - Dreadful Therapy - (1953) - novelette
• 189 - Last Call - (1952) - shortstory
• 204 - The Last Hero - (1954) - shortstory
• 214 - Doomsday 257 A.G.! - (1952) - novelette
• 244 - To Each His Star - (1952) - shortstory
• 256 - They Will Destroy - (1952) - novelette
• 299 - The Passion of Orpheus - (1954) - novelette

Contents:

• 5 - The Moon Is Green - (1952) - shortstory
• 25 - What's He Doing in There? - (1957) - shortstory
• 33 - The Improper Authorities - (1959) - shortstory
• 48 - Bazaar of the Bizarre - [Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser] - (1963) - novelette
• 79 - The Goggles of Dr. Dragonet - [Dr. Dragonet] - (1961) - shortstory
• 104 - Deadly Moon - (1960) - novelette
• 138 - Bread Overhead - (1958) - shortstory
• 156 - Nice Girl with 5 Husbands - (1951) - shortstory (variant of Nice Girl with Five Husbands)
• 172 - Appointment in Tomorrow - (1951) - novelette
• 206 - The Big Engine - (1962) - shortstory
• 212 - The Creature from Cleveland Depths - (1962) - novelette
• 264 - The Mind Spider - [Change War] - (1959) - shortstory
• 283 - Kreativity for Kats - [Gummitch the Cat] - (1961) - shortstory
• 294 - Martians Keep Out - (2012) - shortfiction (variant of Martians, Keep Out! 1950)

Written almost a century before the daring flights of the astronauts, Jules Verne's prophetic novel of man's race to the stars is a classic adventure tale enlivened by broad satire and scientific acumen.

When the members of the elite Baltimore Gun Club find themselves lacking any urgent assignments at the close of the Civil War, their president, Impey Barbicane, proposes that they build a gun big enough to launch a rocket to the moon. But when Barbicane's adversary places a huge wager that the project will fail and a daring volunteer elevates the mission to a "manned" flight, one man's dream turns into an international space race.

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

High-concept science fiction, deeply human characters, and a weirdly wonderful story drive this sequel to the award-winning Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard

Years after the events of Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard, the lonely young outcast and physically-challenged Fant, Pizlo, is now a teenager. He still believes he hears voices from the planet's moons, imparting secret knowledge to him alone. And so embarks on a dangerous voyage to learn the truth behind the messages. His quest will catapult him offworld for second time is his short life, and reveal things the galaxy isn't yet ready to know.

Elsewhere, Barsk's Senator Jorl, who can speak with the dead, navigates galactic politics as Barsk's unwelcome representative, and digs even deeper into the past than ever before to discover new truths of his own.

This collection of nine proto-science fiction tales, translated and edited by renowned science fiction writer and scholar Brian Stableford, ranges from Louis-Sébastien Mercier's 1768 opening tale, in which the hero communicates with the dead through a beam that anticipates a modern-day laser, to an 1887 story by Guy de Maupassant that speculates on Martian life. In between, we have tales of a heart transplant, a device that can see through time and an alien dragon. The book also includes Albert Robida's classic novella "The Monkey King" in which Saturnin Farandoul, shipwrecked as a baby and raised by apes on a Pacific Island, visits the Mysterious Island and joins forces with Captain Nemo to battle the savage pirate hordes of Bora-Bora. The stories gathered here exemplify the manifest intention of writers from the 18th and early 19th centuries to create a new genre of modern, imaginative fiction, distinctively different from the Utopias and occult romances typical of the times. This edition includes a historical introduction and notes by Stableford.

Table of Contents:

• News from the Moon - short story by Louis-Sébastien Mercier (trans. of Nouvelles de la Lune 1788)
• The Embalmed Hand - short story by Adrien Robert (trans. of La main embaumée 1867)
• The Future Phenomenon - (1992) - short story by Stéphane Mallarmé (trans. of Le phénomène futur 1876)
• The Metaphysical Machine - short story by Jean Richepin (trans. of La machine à métaphysique 1876)
• The Monkey King - short story by Albert Robida (trans. of Le roi des singes 1882)
• The Historioscope - short story by Eugène Mouton (trans. of L'historioscope 1883)
• Tony Wandel's Heart - short story by Georges Eekhoud (trans. of Le cœur de Tony Wandel 1884)
• Martian Mankind - (2004) - short story by Guy de Maupassant (trans. of L'homme de Mars 1887)
• The Red Triangle - short story by Fernand Noat (trans. of Le triangle rouge 1902)

"I've been kidnapped by a bad person. Bring a change of clothes and your homework and come save me!" Duped by this seemingly earnest summons from Tohko, Konoha finds himself forced to spend his summer break at the Himekura villa, writing snacks for his greedy club president. But the shadow of a tragedy from eighty years past threatens to destroy their otherwise peaceful summer! What is the "secret" that stirs the Book Girl's imagination?

Kaleva is Earth's first and only interstellar colony, discovered by Lucky Sariola who was transported there by an Ukko, a mysterious asteriod-like entity that responds to stories told to it - in Lucky's case, those of her Finnish grandmother. Now Queen Lucky, half-mad and newly widowed, is obsessed by relocating that Ukko - but this is potentially disastrous, as the snakelike alien Isi are also on its trail as part of their design to enslave humans. Understanding this, one of Lucky's daughters (with obsessions of her own) crowns herself rival queen. A summer turns into unseasonable winter and elysian peace turns to bitter civil war and Ukko, once more, has a role to play in the history of Kaleva.

Crown Prince Trevyn completes a quest during which he is enslaved and freed, studies to become a sorcerer, visits the land of elves, and returns home to save his kingdom.

A powerful fantasy adventure filled with dark magic and deadly intrigue, from the worldwide bestselling author of the Saga of the Pliocene Exile.

Conrig Wincantor, Prince Heritor of Cathra, has a vision: to unite the whole island of High Blenholme under Cathran sovereignty.

He has so far been thwarted in this ambition by his cautious, aging father, King Olmigon, who, though weak with illness, still clings firmly to the reigns of the government.

Now Conrig has hit upon a scheme that will convince the Lords that his plan can suceed. He has formed an alliance with Ullanoth, princess of the remote northern province of Moss and a fearsome sorceress. With her help his army will have the advantage it needs to subdue the only domain refusing to sign his Edict of Sovereignty.

But before Olmigon will give his consent he insists on making a pilgrimage to the Oracle of Emperor Bazekoy, there to ask the one question permitted to a dying monarch, which the Emperor must answer truthfully.

Meanwhile, Ullanoth tends her own schemes. Posessing the talent to call on the unearthly powers of the Beaconfolk, mysterious otherworldy beings who appear as lights in the sky, her power is undeniable. But the Lights are fickle, and their interference in human affairs unpredictable. If Ullanoth calls on them to help Conrig, they are likely to extract an unforeseeable price.

The continuation of a powerful new fantasy adventure filled with dark magic and deadly intrigue, from the worldwide bestselling author of the SAGA OF THE PLIOCENE EXILE.

King Conrig Ironcrown now rules the entire island of High Blenholme. But the peace he achieved after ruthlessly uniting its four quarrelling kingdoms into a Sovereignty is about to be challenged by enemies both mortal and supernatural.

Rumours abound that his vengeful first wife, Maudrayne, believed to have committed suicide when she discovered his infidelity, is in fact still alive and about to reveal a secret that could cost Conrig his throne.

A more tangible threat is posed by the ambitious sorcerer Beynor, and his crony, Conrig's traitorous former alchymist Kilian, who have stolen a trove of currently inactive moonstones capable of drawing tremendous power from the mysterious supernatural Beaconfolk. After initiating a civil war, the pair hope to utilize this power to vanquish Conrig's fatally divided realm and rule it themselves.

The King's unlikely champion is his royal intelligencer, Deveron, a young man secretly possessed of magical talents. But Deveron is torn between his loyalty to the iron-willed king and his own conscience. The resulting clash involves not only human beings, but also the ancient races who inhabited High Blenholme before them - and who now intend to take back their lost homeland.

The stunning conclusion to a powerful epic fantasy from the worldwide bestselling author of the Saga of the Pliocene Exile.

For sixteen years King Conrig Ironcrown has ruled High Blenholme, battling both to preserve the Sovereignty he ruthlessly established over the four provinces of the island kingdom and to repel the invading Salka monsters that threaten them all. His hope for the future is his heir, Prince Orrion, whose betrothal to a princess of the province of Didion should assure the future peace of High Blenholme. But Orrion has no interest in the girl, and is determined to marry instead his childhood sweetheart, Lady Nyla.

Orrion's madcap twin, Corodon, dreams up a scheme to keep Orry and Nyla together by asking the supernatural Beaconfolk, who appear as lights in the sky, for a magical intercession. The twins are unaware that the Beaconfolk are fighting their own battle with others of their kind; to them all humans, even princes, are but pawns to be used in their own conflict. Their granting of Orrion's wish comes in a manner the twins far from expected, and precipitates chaotic infighting amongst the folk of High Blenholme.

As battles rage both on the ground and in the sky, the only hopes for peace can be found deep in King Conrig's murky past. His former spy, Deveron Austrey, has secret magical powers and no love for the Beaconfolk. And while many of his subjects no longer remember the King's first wife, Maudrayne, she has never forgotten that her son is the true heir to the throne of High Blenholme.

What happens when you get the one thing you wanted most in life? Lonely 16-year-old farm girl Barbara Winton has been following one reality show for years. Then in an instant she goes from fangirl to participant when the call comes from Dr. Keegan Bright: She's been selected out of a horde of applicants to join him on the Moon.

She'll be one of his Bright Sparks, six students with expertise in STEM and plenty of their own ingenuity chosen to work with Dr. Bright and given big responsibilities to undertake new projects important to the growth of the colony. Her first task? Build a radar telescope using an entire crater on the far side of the Moon.

But Barbara soon learns that life on a burgeoning frontier outpost like the Moon is a far cry from safe, civilized Earth. The loner from farm country must find a way to weld a functional team out of fiercely independent thinkers. Not only are they a bit trickier to work with than farm robots, not only is the working environment incredibly dangerous - she also has to perform this miracle in front of millions of fans.

Barbara Winton and the rest of the Bright Sparks, Dr. Keegan Bright's team of young scientists, find themselves facing a challenge that will test all of their scientific skills and personal courage. They are competing in the first ever race to completely circle the Moon. The Sparks, and twenty-five other teams, have to count on one another as they face thousands of kilometers of unknown dangers, where even a simple accident can have fatal consequences. They form close friendships with racers from all over Earth, but also have to deal with former Spark, Pam, a mysterious and threatening figure whose departure from the Sparks program is shrouded in mystery.

While the Sparks compete in the race, Dr. Bright himself is part of a groundbreaking project to seek out rare minerals underneath a crater. On the far side of the Moon, in the airless, frozen depths beneath the lunar surface, disaster strikes. On the thinly settled Moon only the Bright Sparks may be close enough help him. The young scientist find themselves not only racing for victory, but to save their beloved mentor.

Before the Apollo 11 mission succeeded in landing on the Moon in 1969, writers and visionaries were fascinated by how we might get there and what we might find. The Greeks and Romans speculated about the Moon almost 2000 years before H.G. Wells or Jules Verne wrote about it, but interest peaked from the late 1800s, when the prospect of lunar travel became more viable. This anthology presents 11 short stories from the most popular magazines of the golden age of SF, including The Strand Magazine, Astounding Science Fiction, and Amazing Stories, and features classic SF writers as well as lesser-known writers for dedicated fans of the genre to discover.

Contents:

• 7 - Introduction (Moonrise: The Golden Age of Lunar Adventures) - essay by Mike Ashley
• 31 - Dead Centre - novelette by Judith Merril (variant of Dead Center 1954)
• 67 - A Visit to the Moon - [Stories of Other Worlds - 1] - (1900) - short story by George Griffith
• 93 - Sunrise on the Moon - short fiction by John Munro (variant of Sun-Rise in the Moon 1894)
• 105 - First Men in the Moon (excerpt) - [Cavor] - short fiction by H. G. Wells
• 151 - Sub-Satellite - [Sub-Satellite - 1] - (1928) - short story by Charles Cloukey
• 175 - Lunar Lilliput - (1938) - novelette by William F. Temple
• 221 - Nothing Happens on the Moon - (1964) - short story by Paul Ernst (variant of "Nothing Happens on the Moon" 1939)
• 247 - Whatever Gods There Be - (1961) - short story by Gordon R. Dickson
• 269 - Idiot's Delight - [Troons] - (1958) - novelette by John Wyndham (variant of The Moon A.D. 2044)
• 317 - After a Judgement Day - (1963) - short story by Edmond Hamilton
• 335 - The Sentinel - [A Space Odyssey] - (1951) - short story by Arthur C. Clarke

The Endeavour has made rocket ship history. With its automatic pilot and artificial gravity, anyone is qualified to fly to the moon. But the scientists who designed it did not envision the hidden dangers of lunar exploration. Nor did they foresee the kind of violence that could erupt among the five mismatched crew members in a lonely space capsule. The Endeavour's captain, Franz Brunel of the British Space Service, has to contend with the many perils that await him on the surface of the moon. Soon a murderer is among them.

Now, contemporary readers have the chance to enjoy Temple's unusual blend of traditional SF with a darkly ironic tone.

From the winner of the Philip K. Dick Award 2010

AFRICA, 1863.

SIR RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON - AN EXPLORER, A LINGUIST, A SCHOLAR, AND THE KING'S AGENT OR IS HE A PUPPET BEING MANIPULATED BY FORCES HE CANNOT UNDERSTAND?

A RACE TO FIND THE SOURCE OF THE NILE!

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE - A FAMOUS YOUNG FLAME-HAIRED POET, THRILL-SEEKER, AND FOLLOWER OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE. FOR HIM PAIN IS PLEASURE, AND BRANDY IS RUIN!

BACK TO WHERE THE ADVENTURE BEGAN!

It is 1863, but not the one it should be. Time has veered wildly off course, and moves are being made that will lead to a devastating world war. Prime Minister Lord Palmerston believes that by possessing the three Eyes of Naga he'll be able to manipulate events and avoid the war. He already has two of the stones, but he needs Sir Richard Francis Burton to recover the third. For the king's agent, it's a chance to return to the Mountains of the Moon to make a second attempt at locating the source of the Nile. But a rival expedition led by John Hanning Speke stands in his way, threatening a confrontation that could ignite the very war that Palmerston is trying to avoid!

Caught in a tangled web of cause, effect, and inevitability, little does Burton realize that the stakes are far higher than even he suspects.

A final confrontation comes in London, where, in the year 1840, Burton must face the man responsible for altering time—Spring Heeled Jack!

Burton and Swinburne's third adventure completes the three-volume story arc begun in The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack and The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man.

Pinball, Roatax, Faction, Eeekold: Four men and a woman - the most dangerous group in the world - The Cabal! These aliases can be found in Interpol TCID crimino-records, but The Cabal are outside the law-they make their own laws. They are brilliant lethal, feared-and virtually indestuctable. Pinball is on the run from the doffers hiding out in a derelict area of soho with the rest of the cabal unable to contact him. Solitude and depression lead him to the final act of self destruction but through the curtains comes the vision of Woo. Answering her call, Pinball jumps time and space to discover sanctuary with one fatal drawback-a virulent cancer to which even a member of The Cabal is not immune.

I was born a monster. Although truthfully, I was onlyhalf a monster. My mother was human; my father was something… else. Half monster or whole, in the end it didn’t matter. I had my weaknesses,same as anyone else.

And I was facing one of them now.

After saving the world from his fiendish father’s side of the family,Cal Leandros and his stalwart half brother, Niko, have settled down with a new apartment and a new gig-bodyguard and detective work. And in New York City, where preternatural beings stalk the streets just like normal folk, business is good.

Their latest case has them going undercover for the Kin, the werewolf Mafia. A low-level Kin boss thinks a rival is setting him up for a fall, and wants proof. The place to start is the back room of Moonshine, a gambling club for non-humans. Cal thinks it’s a simple in-and-out job. But Cal is very, very wrong.

Cal and Niko are being set up themselves-and the people behind it have bites much worse than their barks…

Curt Newton Leads the Valiant Futuremen in the Thrilling Fight to Preserve a Priceless Lunar Heritage! Follow the World's Greatest Space-Farer, Captain Future, as He Embarks on the Most Perilous Exploits of His Career....

This novel is included in the collection, The Collected Captain Future: Man of Tomorrow, Volume Three (2010).

It first appeared in the spring, 1942 Issue of Captain Future magazine.

A Cruel Plot to Seize the Satellite Styx, Third Moon of Pluto, and Enslave Peaceful Natives, Sends Captain Future and His Loyal Aides Out on the Most Dangerous Adventure of Their Careers!

Edmond Hamilton authored this novels under pseudonym Brett Sterling.

It first appeared in the Winter, 1944 Issue of Captain Future magazine.

To download a free copy of this magazine;

• Go to Luminist Perodical Archives
• Scroll down to or search for Captain Future
• Click on the blue highlight of the above issue, and you follow the intructions for downloading a PDF copy.

Cassandra Palmer recently defeated a god, which you'd think would buy a girl a little time off. But it doesn't work that way when your job description is Pythia-the world's chief clairvoyant. Cassie is busier than ever, trying to learn about her power, preparing for her upcoming coronation, and figuring out her relationship with the enigmatic sexy master vampire, Mircea.

But someone doesn't want Cassie to become Pythia, and is willing to go to any lengths to make sure the coronation ceremony never happens- including attacking her mother before Cassie is even born.

Growing up on the moon, Xingyin is accustomed to solitude, unaware that she is being hidden from the powerful Celestial Emperor who exiled her mother for stealing his elixir of immortality. But when Xingyin's magic flares and her existence is discovered, she is forced to flee her home, leaving her mother behind.

Alone, untrained, and afraid, she makes her way to the Celestial Kingdom, a land of wonder and secrets. Disguising her identity, she seizes an opportunity to learn alongside the Crown Prince, mastering archery and magic, even as passion flames between her and the emperor's son.

To save her mother, Xingyin embarks on a perilous quest, confronting legendary creatures and vicious enemies across the earth and skies. When treachery looms and forbidden magic threatens the kingdom, however, she must challenge the ruthless Celestial Emperor for her dream--striking a dangerous bargain in which she is torn between losing all she loves or plunging the realm into chaos.

Several years after the events in Threshold, Chance and Deacon have married. They're looking ahead to the future, trying to put the past behind them. But new nightmares await them as a woman with a need for violence enters their lives. And something even worse has followed her...

My entire life can be summed up in one sentence: "Well, that didn't go as planned." -- T-Shirt

A typical day in the life of Charley Davidson involves cheating husbands, errant wives, missing people, philandering business owners, and, oh yeah...demons, hell hounds, evil gods, and dead people. Lots and lots of dead people. As a part time Private Investigator and full-time Grim Reaper, Charley has to balance the good, the bad, the undead, and those who want her dead.

Now, Charley is learning to make peace with the fact that she is a goddess with all kinds of power and that her own daughter has been born to save the world from total destruction. But the forces of hell are determined to see Charley banished forever to the darkest corners of another dimension. With the son of Satan himself as her husband and world-rocking lover, will Charley be able to defeat the ultimate evil and find a way to have her happily ever after after all?

Thousands of young people are terminally ill as a result of the radiation produced by the lunar structures destroyed in The Domes of Pico. In an attempt to determine whether the fall-out from the domes can have a curative effect on the disease a joint East-West mission is planned under the auspices of the newly formed United Nations EXploration Agency (UNEXA).

The mission is commanded by Chris Godfrey, accompanied by American, Morrison 'Morrey' Kant and Russian Serge Smyslov. The 'patient' will be Tony Hale, from Aston near Birmingham (who goes on to feature in the rest of the series). The mission starts well, but is soon in trouble when a supply rocket crashes...

Published in the U. S. as Outpost on the Moon.

Barely a teenager, Kaylin Neya is a thief, a fugitive, and an attempted assassin. She also has a smart mouth, sharp wits, and mysterious markings on her skin. All of which make her perfect bait for a child prostitution sting in the city of Elantra - if she survives her first meeting with the Hawks!

Tai-tastigon is burning.

The whole city is in an uproar. And the cause, Jame, and her friend Marc have fled. They are making their way through mountain passes, far too late in the season, hoping to find Jame's brother Tori somewhere on the other side.

Nothing ever goes easily for Jame, least of all this journey. As hints of the past she has forgotten -- of dark and horrid years in the house of Gerridon, betrayer of her people, the Kencyrath, and her god -- come to the surface, she encounters changers from the house of Gerridon, wanting to bring her back into that dark place. Arrin-ken, catlike creatures who are nevertheless a part of her own people, find and judge her. Bandits, brigands and strange remnants from the past of her people--which suggest a dim future for them, their god and their hope of defeating the great enemy, Perimal Darkling -- arise to haunt her. But her determination to find her brother and to avoid falling into eternal darkness only grows stronger.

Meanwhile Tori, who is Highlord of the Kencyrath, leads the wayward lords of the Kencyrath with uneasy grace. He is a compromise for them, a way of avoiding endless battle between them. But he can bind them together only so long as he can tread a narrow way between their varied needs and desires. When a vast and unexpected danger threatens, he must call up the host -- the troops that each lord must muster -- but in so doing he threatens his own position and his sanity, for he cannot avoid the attention this calls to him, attention that seems to bring changers who want to kill him, and odd nightmares that seem to suggest a future he does not want and the reappearance of a sister he both loves and fears.

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.

Fired with hopes of freedom, exiles turn howeward from Pluto, from Mars, and from the unknown to fight one last battle for the Earrth.. and for their souls.

In 2215, a disturbance ripples through space as a ship passes invisibly onward to its destiny. In it is the rebel DeVore, a master of stealth and subterfuge, thought dead by his enemies, but very much alive- and getting ready to bring a terrifying flotilla against the T'ang, the dictators of Earth.

On Mars, another rebel, the long-exiled Hands Ebert, meets with a lost African tribe, the Osu, to reveal his audacious plan- to take them home. And on Earth, the mega-cities of the T'ang begin to crumble as war ripples across the planet.

It is a time of change, of endings, of beginnings. It is an era when the last of the T'angs, Li Yuan, will make a terrifying alliance... when chaos will strike in the form of human-looking androids programmed to kill.. and when Emily Ascher, a woman dedicated to liberty for all the billions the T'ang have kept in chains, will see her vision blossom, though its color will be bloodred and blurred by tears.

In pursuit of the undying wizard, Thulsa Doom, Cormac Mac Art and his giant red-bearded companion Wulfhere Hausakluifr have traveled far and suffered much. At last the sorcerer is theirs, imprisoned in the only way his magic cannot overcome: impaled with two long swords on the mast of Cormac's ship.

Listen as Bas the Druid reads the prophecy found on the walls of the castle of King Kull. But even as the Druid speaks, Cormac's ship seems to shudder - and suddenly the familiar shores of Eirrin are no more. For the wizard, unable to escape his fate, has vanished into another dimension - and has taken his captors with him!

When the council that controlled the world-spanning computer Mother fell out in civil war, it plunged the world in an instant from high-tech utopia to medieval nightmare. Now Herzer Herrick and Megan Trevante have been assigned the mission to capture the spaceship that supplies the fuel for all of Earth. Given that Herzer vaguely thinks orbital decay is something having to do with teeth it should be... interesting. With all the usual combat expected in a John Ringo novel, East of the Sun and West of the Moon sheds new light on the bizarre relationship between Herzer and Megan, the politics of the new born world and fascinating details of space technology battles.

Sasha Trudeau knows all about working beneath the shadows, back-alley deals, and things that go bump in the night. She also knows that the world is unaware of the existence of the paranormal - and that the government would like to keep it that way.

As a highly trained Special Ops soldier, Sasha and her team are an elite group of individuals who are survivors of werewolf attacks, now trained to be loyal to only to each other and their government. But when she returns from a solo mission, she finds that her team has mysteriously gone missing. Shocking government conspiracies, double-dealing vampires, and a host of stunning revelations about who - and what - she really is are only just the beginning...

Sasha Trudeau considers herself a soldier first and a werewolf second. But while her secret government-sanctioned task-force faces its greatest challenge so far, Sasha faces something much more primal: the undeniable pull of the moon - and her own desires.

With rogue wolves savaging both the human and paranormal worlds, Sasha's team of elite operatives has one job: destroy the rogues and isolate the deadly toxin that's poisoned their blood. But the challenge is far more complicated than Sasha could have imagined. Soon she is thrust into a full-scale supernatural war for supremacy - and the only man left who Sasha can turn to might be the biggest danger to her of all... and in more ways than one.

Just one month ago, secret government operative Sasha Trudeau thought she'd tasted victory. Orchestrating detente between the warring factions of the supernatural world had nearly cost her life - but it also opened the door to a future with Max Hunter, her mate and fellow Shadow Wolf.

Until now. A poisonous virus is wreaking havoc on Hunter's immune system. And the passionate man who Sasha loves has become unpredictable, dangerous - and possibly deadly. When Hunter disappears the night a human is found ravaged, Sasha is thrust into a race against the clock to find the cure for her mate... and the traitor who's determined to see them both dead.

Secret government operative Sasha Trudeau arrives at the scene of a murder, only to discover that a Fae creature has been killed - in a whole new kind of way. What is the meaning behind this mysterious ritualistic killing? What did the victim do to deserve it? Sasha fears that the Vampires and Unseelies have formed an unholy alliance... and they're ready to unleash their darkest arsenal of magick yet.

Teaming up with her mate and fellow Shadow Wolf, Max Hunter, Sasha tries to penetrate the paranormal community for clues. Meanwhile, members of the Wolf Clan are turning against one another as they race to uncover the meaning behind an ancient Unseelie curse. Even Sasha is not immune to this powerful magick, and soon finds herself drawn to a sensual, dangerous dance - one that could cost her own life...

The last fight between the werewolf clans spilled onto the streets of New Orleans - and now the whole city's on red alert. Martial law has gone into effect. Mediums, ghost hunters, and other supernatural pundits have taken over the media, swarming the Big Easy to expose the hard truth about lycanthropes. And to make matters worse, a beastly killer is clawing up humans...

Secret government operative Sasha Trudeau doesn't like what she's seeing - a series of brutal and bloody slayings that appear to be wolf-like attacks. It might be the work of a copy cat killer - vampire or Unseelie or some other enemy of the Seelie clan. But while Sasha races to find suspects and motives, the panic level is rising - and the city's human population is clamoring for an all-out wolf hunt...

Secret government operative Sasha Trudeau earned a long vacation with her lover and fellow Shadow Wolf, Hunter, after the brutal wolf-like attacks that left New Orleans in an uproar. But when her team calls with news of vampire slayings, Sasha knows it's only a matter of time before another war breaks out among the supernatural denizens of the world.

The vampires are nobody's ally, but the cold-hearted deaths of their own kind make them even more bloodthirsty than usual. But who is the culprit? With the Seelie and Unseelie courts claiming innocence and aligning together, Sasha's team is at a loss. Until they discover that they're facing ancient creatures from the depths of hell itself, bent on unleashing pure fury.

In Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Sogolon the Moon Witch proved a worthy adversary to Tracker as they clashed across a mythical African landscape in search of a mysterious boy who disappeared.

In Moon Witch, Spider King, Sogolon takes center stage and gives her own account of what happened to the boy, and how she plotted and fought, triumphed and failed as she looked for him. It's also the story of a century-long feud--seen through the eyes of a 177-year-old witch--that Sogolon had with the Aesi, chancellor to the king. It is said that Aesi works so closely with the king that together they are like the eight limbs of one spider. Aesi's power is considerable--and deadly. It takes brains and courage to challenge him, which Sogolon does for reasons of her own.

Features a memorable group of tales set in the land of Darkover, a place where ancient powers have awakened humans to their own hidden talents

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (Four Moons of Darkover) - essay by Marion Zimmer Bradley
• The Jackal - novelette by Vera Nazarian
• Death's Scepter - short story by Joan Marie Verba [as by Joan Verba]
• A King's Ransom - short story by Kay Morgan Douglas
• Man of Impulse - novelette by Marion Zimmer Bradley (variant of A Man of Impulse 1993)
• Swarm Song - short story by Roxana Pierson
• Out of Ashes - short story by Patricia B. Cirone [as by Pat Cirone
• My Father's Son - short story by Meg Mac Donald
• House Rules - short story by Marion Zimmer Bradley
• To Challenge Fate - novelette by Sandra Morrese
• The Devourer Within - short story by Margaret L. Carter [as by Margaret Carter]
• Sin Catenas - short story by Elisabeth Waters
• Circles - novelette by Glenn R. Sixbury [as by G. R. Sixbury]
• Festival Night - short story by Dorothy J. Heydt
• A Laughing Matter - short story by Rachel Walker
• Mourning - short story by Audrey Fulton
• The Death of Brendon Ensolare - novelette by Deborah J. Ross [as by Deborah Wheeler]
• Sort of Chaos - short story by Millea Kenin

Generations have passed since a nuclear blast all but turned America to dust. Out of the ruins emerges a band of warrior-survivalists, led by a one-eyed man called Ryan Cawdor. In their quest to find a better life, they embark on a perilous odyssey across the ravaged wasteland known as Deathlands.

An ambush by a roving group of mutant Stickies puts Ryan and Krysty Wroth in the clutches of a tyrant who plans a human sacrifice as a symbol of his power. The execution is set to take place at the new moon -- one night away. Ryan devises an escape plan but is betrayed by another prisoner. As they break for freedom, the Stickie leader unleashes a team of hunter-trackers among the maze of narrow canyons of the Southwest. For Ryan and Krysty, there's nowhere left to run...

In the Deathlands, the only thing that gets easier is dying.

In the hostile new world of postnuclear America, there are many ways to die, but few are clean or quick. Long ago Ryan Cawdor and his band threw in their lot together--to do or die trying. It was a pact sealed in blood, one of selflessness and sacrifice that put a premium on the value of loyalty, friendship and honor--and the blind faith that survival is a better option than certain death.

Compassion is a luxury in a brutal land where life is cheap, but Dr. Mildred Wyeth holds fast to her physician's oath to show mercy. Now she's stricken by a plague that brings on a deep craving for human flesh. Unwilling to lose one of their own to this pervasive pestilence without a fight, the companions follow the trail to Cajun country, where the mysterious queen of the Cannies is rumored to possess the only antidote to the grim fate that awaits Mildred... and perhaps her warrior friends.

In the nuke-conceived birth of Deathlands, a rare breed of warrior-survivor emerged--born into suffering, hardened by circumstance, forged by endurance and sharpened by combat. Yet in the heart of this warrior, the quest to find a place of peace beats on unrelenting...

LAND OF THE LOST

The pristine coastal waters off San Clemente become a battleground over the island and its abandoned naval station. The rocky shores are rife with the sulfur mines that make Deathlands' richest jack--gunpowder. To maintain hell-fought possession, a ruthless sea baron and his fleet engage rebellion from the land. On this island populated by roaming bio-weap nightmares engineered by predark whitecoats, Ryan Cawdor is caught in a war he has no intention of fighting, but has every determination to survive.

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1991. There are no other known publications available at this time.

Sturgeon Award nominated novella. The story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1995. There are no other known publications available at this time.

A fiery red flash bursts through the silence of the night... a dying green man insists he's been held captive on the moon... a small blue capsule conceals an unearthly medallion. Can the invincible Man of Bronze piece together this weird puzzle in time to save the world from the devilish merchants of international war?

Lester Dent authored this novel under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

'There's no end to the horror in this place - it's like Hell, and there are devils round every corner.'

On Leisure Platform 9 gamblers and villains mix with socialites and celebrities. It's a place where you won't want to win the wrong game.

With Rory kidnapped by a brutal crime lord, the Doctor and Amy infiltrate a deadly contest where fugitives become the hunted. But how long before they realise the Doctor isn't a vicious mercenary and discover what Amy is up to? It's a game that can only end in death, and time for everyone is running out.

The flames of war devour Ansalon. The army of dead souls marches toward conquest, led by the mystical warrior Mina, who serves the powerful One God.

A small band of heroes, driven to desperate measures, leads the fight against overwhelming odds.

Two unlikely protagonists emerge. One is a dragon overlord who will not easily relinquish her rule. The other is an irrepressible kender who has been on a strange and remarkable journey that will end in startling and unforeseen fashion.

The stirring climax of the War of Souls.

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

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

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

The city burned beneath the Dreaming Moon.

In the ancient city-state of Gujaareh, peace is the only law. Upon its rooftops and amongst the shadows of its cobbled streets wait the Gatherers - the keepers of this peace. Priests of the dream-goddess, their duty is to harvest the magic of the sleeping mind and use it to heal, soothe . . . and kill those judged corrupt.

But when a conspiracy blooms within Gujaareh's great temple, Ehiru - the most famous of the city's Gatherers - must question everything he knows. Someone, or something, is murdering dreamers in the goddess' name, stalking its prey both in Gujaareh's alleys and the realm of dreams. Ehiru must now protect the woman he was sent to kill - or watch the city be devoured by war and forbidden magic.

Serroi is unique in her world, and was nearly put to death in infancy as a result. A green-skinned "misborn," small in stature with an unnatural connection to the natural world, she was nonetheless chosen and exceptionally trained as a meie warrior. As such, she fears nothing, except the cold and inscrutable Nor and their dark magic.

Something in Serroi's childhood awakened her to a shocking and terrible truth about these malevolent wizards, one of whom both saved and cursed her in her earliest years. It is her deep-seated terror that causes her to betray and abandon her shieldmate, Tayyan, during a rooftop battle with a magic-wielder, a craven act that threatens to haunt Serroi to the end of her days.

However, it is not cowardice that makes her run, but rather her knowledge of a great evil in the offing. In that instant before flight, Serroi recognizes the coming of something monstrous, though she cannot yet put a name to it. Now it is up to the young warrior to somehow prevent the unthinkable: She must alter a grim destiny that is set to occur on the fateful and fearful night known as Moongather, when demons will be free to enter the world.

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?

As a magical contest between a sorcerer and a goddess races toward its terrible conclusion, a world is left hanging in the balance. But suddenly the rules change.

Once, the meie warrior Sorrei was a helpless pawn of Ser Noris, doing the dark wizard's bidding as he delved into unnatural worlds and demonic arts. No one feared the great sorcerer more than she, which is why Sorrei risked her life to bring Coyote, the Changer, into the game. However, now that the Nor mage has drawn the magical cards that give him the upper hand against the Indweller goddess, the world they have been playing for appears irrevocably his.

But hope lives on in another place and time. A world far removed from Sorrei's own--in an alternate realm shackled by the yoke of cruel political repression, yet where the ignited fires of rebellion burn hot and bright--is where the meie must now turn for help. Sorrei cannot falter, for the warrior has become a priestess in the service of the Changer and in her hands she holds the last hope for the continuation of all things.

Returning to New York following a botanical expedition to the South Seas, Dr. Walter T. Goodwin encounters an old friend who relates a strange story of an exotic island, a strange stone door, and a hypnotic, mysterious light, but when he investigates the tale, he discovers more than he had bargained for.

One of the most gripping fantasies ever written, The Moon Pool embodies all the romanticism and poetic nostalgia characteristic of A. Merritt's writings. Set on the island of Ponape, full of ruins from ancient civilizations, the novel chronicles the adventures of a party of explorers who discover a previously unknown underground world full of strange peoples and super-scientific wonders. From the depths of this world, the party unwittingly unleashes the Dweller, a monstrous terror that threatens the islands of the South Pacific.

Although Merritt did not invent the lost world novel, following in the footsteps of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Burroughs and others, he greatly elaborated upon that tradition. This new edition includes a biography of the author, and an introduction detailing Merritt's many sources and influences, including the occult, mythological, and scientific discourses of his day.

Dreamstone allows people to record and play back their dreams; it can only be found on a certain moon. The Doctor and Sam travel there to prevent its destruction whilst Anton La Serre wants to know why his pleasant dreams have turned into nightmares.

In a quiet corner of the Imperial City, Investigator Narin discovers the result of his first potentially lethal mistake. Minutes later he makes a second.

After an unremarkable career Narin finally has the chance of promotion to the hallowed ranks of the Lawbringers - guardians of the Emperor's laws and bastions for justice in a world of brutal expediency. Joining that honoured body would be the culmination of a lifelong dream, but it couldn't possibly have come at a worse time. A chance encounter drags Narin into a plot of gods and monsters, spies and assassins, accompanied by a grief-stricken young woman, an old man haunted by the ghosts of his past and an assassin with no past.

On the cusp of an industrial age that threatens the warrior caste's rule, the Empire of a Hundred Houses awaits civil war between noble factions. Centuries of conquest has made the empire a brittle and bloated monster; constrained by tradition and crying out for change. To save his own life and those of untold thousands Narin must understand the key to it all - Moon's Artifice, the poison that could destroy an empire.

Twenty-one darker, deeper, more adult takes on some of our favorite childhood fairy tales, from acclaimed contemporary fantasists

Long ago, when we were children, our dreams were inspired by the fairy tales we heard at our mothers' and grandmothers' knees--stories of princesses and princes and witches and wondrous enchantments, by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, and from the pages of 1001 Arabian Nights. But, as World Fantasy Award-winning editors Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling remind us, these stories were often tamed and sanitized versions. The originals were frequently darker--and in Silver Birch, Blood Moon, they turn darker still.

Twenty-one modern Grimms and Andersens--masterful storytellers including Neil Gaiman, Nancy Kress, and Tanith Lee--now reinvent beloved bedtime stories for our time. The Sea Witch gets her say, relating the story of "The Little Mermaid" from her own point of view. "Thumbelina" becomes a tale of creeping horror, while a delightfully naughty spin is put on "The Emperor's New Clothes." Author Caitlin R. Kiernan transports Snow White to a dark, gritty, industrial urban setting, and Patricia Briggs details "The Price" of dealing with a royal and unrepentantly evil Rumpelstiltskin.

Rich, provocative, and unabashedly adult, each of these tales is a modern treasure, reminding us that wishes have consequences and not all genies have our best interests at heart.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (1999) - essay by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow
• Kiss Kiss - (1999) - shortstory by Tanith Lee
• Carabosse - (1999) - poem by Delia Sherman
• The Price - (1999) - shortstory by Patricia Briggs
• Glass Coffin - (1999) - shortstory by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• The Vanishing Virgin - (1999) - shortstory by Harvey Jacobs
• Clad in Gossamer - (1999) - shortstory by Nancy Kress
• Precious - (1999) - shortstory by Nalo Hopkinson
• The Sea Hag - (1999) - novelette by Melissa Lee Shaw
• The Frog Chauffeur - (1999) - shortstory by Garry Kilworth
• The Dybbuk in the Bottle - (1999) - novelette by Russell William Asplund
• The Shell Box - (1999) - novelette by Karawynn Long
• Ivory Bones - (1999) - shortstory by Susan Wade
• The Wild Heart - (1999) - shortstory by Anne Bishop
• You Wandered Off Like a Foolish Child to Break Your Heart and Mine - (1999) - shortstory by Pat York
• Arabian Phoenix - (1999) - shortstory by India Edghill
• Toad-Rich - (1999) - shortstory by Michael Cadnum
• Skin So Green and Fine - (1999) - novelette by Wendy Wheeler
• The Willful Child, the Black Dog, and the Beanstalk - (1999) - novelette by Melanie Tem
• Locks - (1999) - poem by Neil Gaiman
• Marsh-Magic - (1999) - novelette by Robin McKinley
• Toad - (1999) - shortstory by Patricia A. McKillip
• Recommended Reading - essay by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling

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.

After she is forced to resign her post in disgrace, Herris Serrano takes a job as ""captain"" of an interstellar luxury yacht and finds herself fighting a bunch of cutthroats, smugglers, and others.

Spiriting home Prince Gerel, the first in line to the throne, in hopes of avoiding a scandal, yacht owner Lady Cecelia and Captain Heris Serano begin suspecting the sinister nature of Gerel's failing mental capacity.

Captaining a rich lady's interstellar pleasure yacht, former navy fleet officer Heris Serrano finds an opportunity to restore her tarnished reputation by intercepting mafia plans to invade the galaxy.

Despite her family's military history, Esme Suisa believes herself satisfied without the prospect of commanding her own ship, until she finds herself the senior surviving officer in the middle of a vital space battle.

Jeremy Seaman is overjoyed to be offered a trainee-ship by British Industrial Group, but unknown to him the corridors are stalked by a sex-crazed security man, an embittered saboteur, a deputation from the House of Commons, the Fraud Squad and a man from the RSPB.

THEIR UNIVERSE IS FALLING APART!

Rejuvenants fear the backlash caused by bad drugs; they want to ensure that nothing interferes with their pursuit of long life -- or the profit that comes from promising it to others. Neighbor states fear the aggressive expansion of the Familias Regnant, fuelled by population growth and extended lifespan. Within the Regular Space Service, those who have received experimental rejuvenations fear they may have been given bad drugs on purpose. Esmay Suiza's family fears that her marriage to an offworlder will damage their position. Barin Serrano's family fears that his marriage to a Landbride of Altiplano will damage his career and their reputation.

Fear begets violent reactions -- from foreign governments, from great Families determined to maintain or increase their power, from internal rivalries in the Fleet -- and nothing escapes the resultant bloodbath unscathed. As Esmay and Barin struggle to reconcile their families, others have more cosmic struggles to win.

The worst has happened: Fleet is tearing itself apart. Some of the mutineers see injustice in the unequal spread of the rejuvenation drugs that offer virtual immortality to the rich; others are simply thirsty for power, or for blood. The Loyalists, meanwhile, fight desperately to preserve the rule of law in Familias Regnant space. But when Esmay Suiza-Serrano is unceremoniously booted out of Fleet, the apparent victim of Family politics, she has no idea of the whirlwind of conflict into which she is about to be drawn. As the noose tightens on galactic civilization, great battles will be fought and greater loves affirmed ...and old friends will meet their destinies.

Gone from the galaxy...

A startling discovery has shaken Earth's galactic Empire: more than two hundred and fifty thousand people have vanished from the resort moon, Vesa, without a trace! Called to duty, SOTE's most daring secret agents, Jules and Yvette D'Alembert - the former aerialists from the triple-gravity planet Des Plaines, possessed of lightning-reflexes and super-strength - are faced with a lethal and baffling conspiracy.

Together the D'Alemberts have conquered many of the Empire's most dangerous foes, but now the mighty pair must divide forces - each to challenge a deadly evil terror alone!

Stranglers' Moon is the second book in the "Family D'Alembert" series.

Rhiow seems a perfectly ordinary New York City cat. Or so her humans think -- but she is much more than she appears. With her partners Saash and Urruah, she collaborates with human wizards to protect the earth from dark forces and maintain the network of magical gateways that connect to different realities. But amid this amazing secret animal world lies a danger that threatens not only the cats of the world, but humans as well.

For Lt. Commander Colin Maclntyre, it began as a routine training flight over the Moon. For Dahak, a self-aware Imperial battleship, it began millennia ago when that powerful artificial intelligence underwent a mutiny in the face of the enemy. The mutiny was never resolved--Dahak was forced to maroon not just the mutineers but the entire crew on prehistoric Earth. Dahak has been helplessly waiting as the descendants of the loyal crew regressed while the mutineers maintained control of technology that kept them alive as the millennia passed.

But now Dahak's sensors indicate that the enemy that devastated the Imperium so long ago has returned--and Earth is in their path. For the sake of the planet, Dahak must mobilize its defenses. And that it cannot do until the mutineers are put down. So Dahak has picked Colin Maclntyre to be its new captain.

Now Maclntyre must mobilize humanity to destroy the mutineers once and for all--or Earth will become a cinder in the path of galactic conquest.

Rupert didn't especially want to be a prince. And he certainly never asked to be the second son of a royal line that really didn't need a spare. So he was sent out to slay a dragon and prove himself-a quest straight out of legend. But he also discovered the kinds of things legends tend to leave out, as well as the usual demons, goblins, the dreaded Night Witch-and even worse terrors hidden in the shadows of Darkwood.

Rupert did find a fiery dragon-and a beautiful princess to rescue. But the dragon turned out to be a better friend than anyone back at the castle, and with the evil of Darkwood spreading, Rupert was going to need all the friends he could get.

Discover a whole new realm of adventure!

When a wandering swordmage, trained by the elves of Myth Drannor, returns to his boyhood home on the windswept shores of the Moonsea, he finds that corruption has taken hold, leaving his friends and family open to a devastating evil.

Swordmage was the first novel to fully embrace the exciting new elements from the next edition of the Dungeons & Dragons game. This paperback resize releases fresh on the heals of the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide, and showcases a major revision to the Forgotten Realms world that has fans buzzing.

Cross swords with pirates in New York Times best-selling author Richard Baker's latest adventure!

When pirates threaten his home, Geran is elected by the city council to track the blood-thirsty pirates to their hidden base, infiltrate them, and find a way to stop them before it's too late. But the pirates are motivated by more than greed. Kin to his enemies, they seek a deeper revenge, one Geran only begins to glimpse when they kidnap the woman he loves.

Join the revolution with The New York Times best-selling author Richard Baker!

In Avenger, the final volume in the epic adventures of the Blades of the Moonsea, Geran violates his exile to stalk the streets of his former home, hunting down the one who hurt his family and rallying the oppressed people of Hulburg. But Geran's enemies are as numerous as the laws he breaks seeking revenge, and each and every one of them is determined to see him dead.

Blades of the Moonsea is the first series written entirely in the new edition of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, penned by one of its primary creators. Award-winning designer and New York Times best-selling author Richard Baker's Avenger goes to a place and time no Forgotten Realms series has gone before.

The first Forgotten Realms title ever published, now available as an eBook!

Darkwalker on Moonshae was the very first novel ever published in the Forgotten Realms setting. Appearing in 1987, this title launched what has now become a robust and ever-expanding land of adventure for millions of readers.

In this, the sequel to Darkwalker on Moonshae, the Moonshae isles are under the threat of sinister forces. A council of dark sorcerers has usurped the High King. The druid Robyn and the Prince Tristan must join forces with the Goddess for a showdown with the dreaded black wizards.

The ultimate struggle of good and evil.... At stake, the survival of the Moonshae Isles.

Tristan Kendrick, newly crowned High King of the Ffolk, must forge a lasting alliance between the divergent peoples of the Isles. The druid Robyn must confront an evil that has infested the land itself. And together, they must decide if they will face the future as king and queen -- ar as enemies, forever separated by failure and mistrust.

Filled with bizarre creatures and cast against a landscape such as the Isles have never sen, Darkwell is the tumultuos conclusion to the epic begun in Douglas Nile's best-selling Darkwalker on Moonshae and Black Wizards. the Moonshae Trilogy is part of the FORGOTTEN REALMS adventures, TSR's most extensive fantasy campaign.

When the people on the islands of Moonshae forsake their goddess, the Earthmother, it is up to the daughter of the High King Tristan Kendrick to restore their faith.

In the late twentieth century, Admiral Julian 3rd can get no rest, for he knows his future. He will be reborn as his grandson in the next century to journey through space and make an ominous discovery inside the moon; he will live again in the dark years of the twenty-second century as Julian 9th, who refuses to bow down to the victorious Moon Men; and as Julian 20th, the fierce Red Hawk, he will lead humanity's final battle against the alien invaders in the twenty-fifth century. The Moon Maid is Edgar Rice Burroughs's stunning epic of a world conquered by alien invaders from the moon and of the hero Julian, who champions the earth's struggle for freedom, peace, and dignity.

The most complete version of The Moon Maid saga ever made available, this edition contains the story as published serially, along with numerous passages, sentences, and words excised from the magazine version or added later by the author. This edition also features an introduction by Terry Bisson, new illustrations by Thomas Floyd, the classic frontispiece by J. Allen St. John, essays by scholar Richard J. Golsan and writer Phillip R. Burger, a glossary by Scott Tracy Griffin, and a compendium of alterations to the text.

Brigands of the Moon

A startling glimpse into the future--the year 2070. An intimate revelation of the world of our great-great-great grand-children. Told by the foremost pseudo-scientific writer of the day--Ray Cummings.

Greg Haljan--reliable, faithful, competent--is navigator of the space-flyer, Planetara. Because of these qualities and his experience he is not abandoned on a planetoid with the rest of the crew and passengers, by the Martian brigands who seize the ship in mid-space and head it toward the Moon, there to rob Johnny Grantline fo his precious radium ore.

Haljan, attempting to frustrate their plans, wrecks the Planetara in landing, killing most of the Martians but escaping uninjured himself. He immediately dashes to the Grant-line and his followers prepare to defend the radium--and their lives--with their pitifully inadequate weapons but their hopes are dashed to the ground when reinforcements from Mars, bearing death-dealing devices of the most ultra-modern type, arrive on the scene.

Here we have a glorious, imaginative story that sweeps us to new, strange and adventurous thoughts about our future world and its relations with the other planets, as well as a wholly new conception of what may lie beneath the surface of the Moon. Good to the last page!

The Moon Hoax: or, A Discovery that the Moon Has a Vast Population of Human Beings.

"The Great Moon Hoax" refers to a series of six articles that were published in The Sun, a New York newspaper, beginning on August 25, 1835, about the supposed discovery of life and even civilization on the Moon. They were later collected into the book The Moon Hoax. The discoveries were falsely attributed to Sir John Herschel, one of the best-known astronomers of his time.

The story was advertised on August 21, 1835, as an upcoming feature allegedly reprinted from The Edinburgh Courant. The first in a series of six was published four days later on August 25.

The articles described fantastic animals on the Moon, including bison, goats, unicorns, bipedal tail-less beavers and bat-like winged humanoids ("Vespertilio-homo") who built temples. There were trees, oceans and beaches. These discoveries were supposedly made with "an immense telescope of an entirely new principle."

The author of the narrative was ostensibly Dr. Andrew Grant, the travelling companion and amanuensis of Sir John Herschel, but Grant was fictitious.

Eventually, the authors announced that the observations had been terminated by the destruction of the telescope, by means of the Sun causing the lens to act as a "burning glass," setting fire to the observatory.

A Voyage to the Moon: With Some Account of the Manners and Customs, Science and Philosophy of the People of Morosofia, and Other Lunarians.

Joseph Atterley of New York, finding himself in the doldrums after the death of his wife, resolves in 1822 to undertake a sea voyage to the Far East on one of his father's merchant ships. In the Indian Ocean the ship is caught by a mighty cyclone and driven ashore somewhere in the Burmese Empire. Mistaking the Americans for their enemies the British, the Burmese take Atterley and the crew captive. Atterley is eventually placed under rather loose house arrest, which allows him to meet and befriend a reclusive Indian Brahman who lives in the nearby hills. One day the Brahman reveals an astonishing secret: he knows how to build a machine to fly to the moon, and has already been there and back twice.

The "extraordinary"* epic of sorcery, sensuality, and the supernatural... the stunning sequel to Iron Dawn...

After the glories of Greece have begun to fade, Barra the Pict discovers that her efforts to save the Prince of Jericho may be thwarted--by a man named Joshua...

"A planet-stomping space opera that bursts off the page like a tactical nuke."
--John Birmingham, author of Weapons of Choice

The Hammer Worlds--the most brutal and oppressive interstellar government in the universe--have hijacked the Federated Worlds cruise ship Mumtaz, seizing its valuable terraforming cargo and damning its passengers to mining the moons of the prison planet known as Hell.

For Junior Lieutenant Michael Helfort and the crew aboard deep space scout vessel 387, the mission is clear: infiltrate enemy territory, locate the Mumtaz, and rescue the prisoners.

The odds are appalling, and the damage will probably be fatal, but victory is nonnegotiable--especially for Helfort, whose mother and sister were on the Mumtaz.

And Michael Helfort will be damned if he'll let his family rot on the moons of Hell.

Claire is barely scraping a living on her friend's ranch near Tucson, Arizona. She looks after the long-abandoned horse facility, makes occasional attempts to resuscitate her academic career, and pays the bills, more or less, with her skills as an animal communicator. Those skills don't always let her say the tactful thing to the human with the checkbook. Sometimes she has to tell the truth.

After a particularly unfortunate session, Claire gets one last chance to keep her home and her livelihood. A small herd of horses needs a place to live and a person to care for them.

But these are no ordinary horses. They represent an old, old breed, the rarest in the world, and they protect an ancient and terrible secret. And something is hunting them.

The ranch is a perfect sanctuary. The powers that live on and under and above it can protect the horses--if Claire can control them. But first she has to control her own abilities, and learn to believe in herself.

The Starlit Land of Kendrinh fell to Fendarl, the banished Lord of Black Mountain. He was the evil Enchanter of Star Magic. Nowhere in the stricken land was there a champion who could stand against him, who could fend off the black sorcery that became a horrifying reality with each rising of the Red Moon. But unbeknownst to Fendarl, a child was being raised by the Hurnei. A child who would grow to become their greatest warrior. A child who would become a man and learn the paradox of conquest and victory--and the dangers of a prophecy preordained to triumph!

In this thrilling science fiction classic, acclaimed writer K.D. Wentworth sets the stage for her groundbreaking House of Moons series, introducing Haemas Sennay Tal--the Moonspeaker. Haemas must master her extraordinary mindtalents before she is killed--and the fabric of her world is torn asunder.

Haemas Tal, founder of the controversial mindtalent training school called the House of Moons, is no ordinary schoolmistress. She is also the sole initiate of the dangerous timeways of the enigmatic aliens known as the Old Ones and under the protection of the mind-shielded predators called silshas. Now, Lord Chee, a bitter, impoverished lord, wants the rich and beautiful Haemas for himself. And he's found an ancient mind-control weapon that will give him the power to take her....

DESTINY HAS NO ALLEGIANCE.

Four years have passed since the lillipads fell and Etyom slipped into darkness.

The New Black Death has mutated again, spreading to near epidemic proportions. What little order existed in Earth's last city has disintegrated into chaos. Rippers roam the Vapid, robbing and leaving their victims butchered. The Robusts have spilled out of their broken enclaves and hide in any dark corner that will conceal them. Meanwhile, the elite Graciles, fallen from their pristine towers in the sky, have all mysteriously disappeared.

Demitri is a prisoner in his own mind. His demon, Vedmak--now known as the Vardøger--is manipulating Demitri's body and knowledge to execute a secret plan far more disastrous than even the Gracile Leader dared.

Mila, her status among the fractured resistance elevated to that of Paladyn--a protector of the people--leads the fight against zealots intent on destroying what little remains of Etyom. It is a responsibility she never wanted, a calling that prevents her from doing what she truly desires.

Yet, Mila should be careful for what she longs. Caught between annihilation and loyalties that refuse to die, she must reconcile a single immutable truth: following your heart comes at a price.

The fate of the wild fairies that inhabit the modern world lies in the hands of a young Toronto fiddler named Johnny Faw and a handful of human and not-so-human companions in the newest contemporary fantasty by the author of Moonheart. This sequel to Jack the Giant-Killer amply displays de Lint's innate charm and compelling storytelling.

Rise of the Iron Moon is the newest novel set in Stephen Hunt's fantastical steampunk universe

Born into captivity as a product of the Royal Breeding House, friendless orphan Purity Drake suddenly finds herself on the run with a foreign vagrant after accidentally killing one of her guards.

Her strange rescuer claims he is on the run himself from terrible forces who mean to enslave the Kingdom of Jackals much as they conquered his own nation. Purity doubts his story until reports of the terrible Army of Shadows, marching across the continent and sweeping all before them.

Purity has felt little love for her country but realizes that the bad acts of a government gone wrong aren't enough to condemn an entire people.

There's more to Purity than meets the eye. As Jackals girds itself for war against an army of near-unkillable beasts serving an ancient evil, it becomes clear that the country's only hope is a strange little royalist girl and the last, desperate plan of an escaped slave.

Legends, no matter how outlandish, are often grounded in reality. This has been the guiding principle behind the exhilarating career of Jeremy Logan, the "enigmologist" -- an investigator who specializes in analyzing phenomena that have no obvious explanation. Logan has often found himself in situations where keeping an open mind could mean the difference between life and death, and that has never been more true than now.

Logan travels to an isolated writers' retreat deep in the Adirondacks to finally work on his book when the remote community is rocked by the grisly discovery of a dead hiker on Desolation Mountain. The body has been severely mauled, but the unusual savagery of the bite and claw marks call into question the initial suspicions of a wild bear attack. When Logan is asked to help investigate, he discovers no shortage of suspects capable of such an attack -- and no shortage of locals willing to point the finger and spread incredible rumors. One rumor, too impossible to believe, has even the forest ranger believing in werewolves.

The setting is modern India, dark, brooding, and mysterious-a land of legend and magic. Among the characters of the story are: Wu Tu, the Eurasian madam of a Bombay "house of pleasure" and member of an international underworld gang; Zaman Ali, an Afghan adventurer; Taron Ling, a practitioner of Oriental magic; Brigadier-General Frensham, a reputed crank, who vanishes without a trace; Henrietta, his charming daughter; and Blair Warrender, a police officer whose task it is to find Frensham. As Warrender sets out on his quest, the principal scene becomes the ruined keep of Gaglajung in Rajputa, in whose subterranean caverns is locked a mystery of mysteries. Why, how, and whither did the Brigadier-General vanish?

This is the question which keeps the reader in a constant state of suspense. Here is intrigue, murder and counterplotting as the action mounts to a tremendous climax. And here is a passionate love story -- not between adolescents, to whom love might be a mere passing emotion, but between a man and a woman to whom it means something fine, strong, and abiding.

This early work by Ernest Bramah Smith was originally published in 1911. "The Moon of Much Gladness Related by Kai Lung" is the fourth book in the Kai Lung series. The China which Kai Lung inhabits has numerous features of the fantasy Land of Fable, and many of the embedded tales are fantasy; all are told in an ornate manner which ironically, often hilariously, exaggerates the old Chinese tradition of understatement and politesse.

Bramah found commercial and critical success with his first novel, "The Wallet of Kai Lung", but it was his later stories of detective Max Carrados that assured him lasting fame.

Kevin Grierson has a Shadow with a mind of its own. It likes thrills, it likes power, it likes the rush of drugs and danger. From the suburbs of Boston to the streets of New York, from the false glamour of advertising to the dark glamour of hustling and drug-dealing. Grierson's Shadow keeps him walking the edge of destruction and madness. Then a simple robbery goes horribly wrong. With the help of a flawed saint named Leo Dunn, Grierson struggles to banish his Shadow, and succeeds. Temporarily. Years later, sober and settled, at peace with his world, Kevin Grierson meets his Shadow again. And this time it won't go away.

FIRST THE VACTIONERS LAUGHED WITH PLEASURE...

THEN THEY SQUEALED WITH DELIGHT AND THEN THE SCREAMS BEGAN...

The Moon shone brightly down on them. The breeze stroked them. Laughter floated over the water from the excited bingo players at the Blue Ocean Holiday Camp.

And THE CRABS heard...

Tense, shuddering with hunger, they lurched out of the sea maddened with a need to eat. Closer they crawled, the only sound a clickety-click of their piercing, strong, razor-sharp claws...

They had come before. And humankind had beaten them. But now they were back, possessed by an uncanny intelligence, guided by forces no one on earth could understand. Not even scientist Cliff Davenport. He could only watch them coming closer... closer... as the screaming began...

Grifflet, Gwenlliant of Mochdreff sets out on a perilous journey across the Shadow Lands to protect her adopted son, armed only with her failing gift for magic.

Kyreol, daughter of a Healer, knew that beyond the dangerously swirling rapids of Fourteen Falls lay nothing but darkness...

Newly betrothed, Kyreol still burned with the old, haunting questions. Where had her mother disappeared to so long ago? What lay beyond the edge of the world? And what was the meaning of the Moon-Flash, sign of life and hope to her people?

Then one day the Hunter came to her, a mysterious and powerful stranger who entered her dreams. Suddenly she knew what she must do. She must leave home, following the River to the place where the world ends - and then beyond.

She did not yet know that when you leave the world behind, it is forever.

Riverworld was a planet of Eden whose people possessed the power of dreaming the future. Kyreol, daughter of a healer, pierced the vision veil to discover the ultimate truth- that her home world unknowingly hosted the way station of a vast interstellar civilization.

An evil star shone on Kyreol's first mission as an interplanetary agent. Her ship fell out of space, crashing on a lonely, mysterious moon. Rising from its endless plains was the white city - awesome, abandoned, eons-dead - a silent world of secret wonders.

Only her prophetic dreams linked kyreol to Riverworld, but she was hopelessly marooned lightyears away. And she was not alone...

The Earth is coming to the boiling point as the climate disaster of the Meteor strike becomes more and more clear, but the political situation is already overheated. Riots and sabotage plague the space program. The IAC's goal of getting as many people as possible off Earth before it becomes uninhabitable is being threatened.

Elma York is on her way to Mars, but the Moon colony is still being established. Her friend and fellow Lady Astronaut Nicole Wargin is thrilled to be one of those pioneer settlers, using her considerable flight and political skills to keep the program on track. But she is less happy that her husband, the Governor of Kansas, is considering a run for President.

Sev finally knows where to find the cure to Sleeping Sickness. The only problem is that she's trapped in an endless sleep herself after refusing to give up her secrets to Dr. Yang.

Howl is determined to save Sev, but he has no idea where Dr. Yang is keeping her. When he runs into a group fleeing Port North on a mission of their own, he has no choice but to follow and hope they can get him back to the mountains before it's too late.

June, infected with SS by the very people she calls family, has now become the one thing she most fears. She's supposed to be Port North's insurance that Howl and Sev return with the cure, but June has other ideas.

And Tai-ge, reunited with the Reds, is airlifted to the City now overrun by SS. He's charged with getting the factories running again by any means necessary--no matter how many Sephs stand in his way.

There's only one thing strong enough to unite people who have been fighting for years, and Sev holds the key to it inside her mind. If she can't reach the cure in time, there may not be anyone left to save.

The eagerly awaited addition to the series begun with the New York Times best-seller Life As We Knew It, in which a meteor knocks the moon off its orbit and the world changes forever.

It's been more than two years since Jon Evans and his family left Pennsylvania, hoping to find a safe place to live, yet Jon remains haunted by the deaths of those he loved. His prowess on a soccer field has guaranteed him a home in a well-protected enclave. But Jon is painfully aware that a missed goal, a careless word, even falling in love, can put his life and the lives of his mother, his sister Miranda, and her husband, Alex, in jeopardy. Can Jon risk doing what is right in a world gone so terribly wrong?

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1965. There are no other known publications at this time.

Lucky Starr & his sidekick Bigman Jones hunt for a spy and saboteur who is trying to wreck the test flight of the first anti-gravity space ship.

Winnie Wednesday has gotten everything she thought she wanted. She passed the deadly hunter trials, her family has been welcomed back into the Luminaries, and overnight, she has become a local celebrity.

The Girl Who Jumped. The Girl Who Got Bitten.

Unfortunately, it all feels wrong. For one, nobody will believe her about the new nightmare called the Whisperer that's killing hunters each night. Everyone blames the werewolf, even though Winnie is certain the wolf is innocent.

On top of that, following her dad's convoluted clues about the Dianas, their magic, and what happened in Hemlock Falls four years ago is leaving her with more questions than answers.

Then to complicate it all, there is still only one person who can help her: Jay Friday, the boy with plenty of problems all his own.

As bodies and secrets pile up around town, Winnie finds herself questioning what it means to be a true Wednesday and a true Luminary--and also where her fierce-hearted loyalties might ultimately have to lie.

The Moon wants to kill you. Whether it's being unable to pay your per diem for your allotted food, water, and air, or you just get caught up in a fight between the Moon's ruling corporations, the Five Dragons. You must fight for every inch you want to gain in the Moon's near feudal society. And that is just what Adriana Corta did.

As the leader of the Moon's newest "dragon," Adriana has wrested control of the Moon's Helium-3 industry from the Mackenzie Metal corporation and fought to earn her family's new status. Now, at the twilight of her life, Adriana finds her corporation, Corta Helio, surrounded by the many enemies she made during her meteoric rise. If the Corta family is to survive, Adriana's five children must defend their mother's empire from her many enemies... and each other.

A Dragon is dead.

Corta Helio, one of the five family corporations that rule the Moon, has fallen. Its riches are divided up among its many enemies, its survivors scattered. Eighteen months have passed .

The remaining Helio children, Lucasinho and Luna, are under the protection of the powerful Asamoahs, while Robson, still reeling from witnessing his parent's violent deaths, is now a ward--virtually a hostage-- of Mackenzie Metals. And the last appointed heir, Lucas, has vanished of the surface of the moon.

Only Lady Sun, dowager of Taiyang, suspects that Lucas Corta is not dead, and more to the point--that he is still a major player in the game. After all, Lucas always was the Schemer, and even in death, he would go to any lengths to take back everything and build a new Corta Helio, more powerful than before. But Corta Helio needs allies, and to find them, the fleeing son undertakes an audacious, impossible journey--to Earth.

In an unstable lunar environment, the shifting loyalties and political machinations of each family reach the zenith of their most fertile plots as outright war erupts.

Luna: Wolf Moon continues Ian McDonald's saga of the Five Dragons.

The continuing saga of the Five Dragons, Ian McDonald's fast-paced, intricately plotted space opera pitched as Game of Thrones meets The Expanse

A hundred years in the future, a war wages between the Five Dragons--five families that control the Moon's leading industrial companies. Each clan does everything in their power to claw their way to the top of the food chain--marriages of convenience, corporate espionage, kidnapping, and mass assassinations.

Through ingenious political manipulation and sheer force of will, Lucas Cortas rises from the ashes of corporate defeat and seizes control of the Moon. The only person who can stop him is a brilliant lunar lawyer, his sister, Ariel.

Witness the Dragons' final battle for absolute sovereignty in Ian McDonald's heart-stopping finale to the Luna trilogy.

The novel tells the story of the land that people travel to when they dream, and how a young boy finds courage and strength in fighting, but also in accepting, his own deepest fears and nightmares.

Kim is an average German schoolboy who hates math but loves to read the latest copy of Star Fighter. His daydreaming life spirals into a nightmare when his parents inform him that his little sister Rebecca has fallen into a mysterious coma after her appendicectomy. A visitor from the realm of Magic Moon, the wizard Themistocles, tells him there is only one way to free her from the enchantment of eternal sleep: Kim himself must travel into the land of dreams and save her from the dark wizard Boraas, who has captured her soul.

So his next dream pulls Kim into Magic Moon, where he must fly a spaceship, disguise himself as a dark warrior, fight dangerous monsters and fantastical creatures, and journey ever-onward through forests and mountains to the end of the world, only to find out that the answer to saving Rebecca -- and Magic Moon -- lies within himself.

The wizard Themistocles appears to Kim and urges him to return to Magic Moon, the land that people travel to when they dream. When the young boy arrives, he finds the magic realm dramatically changed.

Two years have passed since Kim's first voyage to the magical dream realm of Magic Moon, but then his old friend and advisor, the wizard Themistocles, appears to him in everyday situations, making him realize that something is wrong and that he must return to Magic Moon. After some trouble trying, Kim succeeds, only to find the dream realm very different from how it used to be: machines and greed have found their way into the simple life of the inhabitants, and an overall bitterness even affects his old friends Rangarig and Gorg.

Kim discovers an even more terrifying secret: the children of Magic Moon are mysteriously disappearing; some of them even appear, oblivious to anything around them, in Kim's world! Apparently, the dwarves, who have mysteriously appeared along with the machines, seem to be behind this, but the secret goes much deeper than that, the children or "moon children" have powers to communicate with Satan. These children also have a spiritual connection with living things and the weather like plants, animals, wind, and rain. Their connections can also mix sometimes and can the ability to use the other powers.

Move over, Buck Rogers!

When Mark Nevin was put under general anesthetic, he expected to wake up minus his appendix. That was all. To his shock and horror, he discovered himself 6,000 years in the future, long after mankind had reverted back to savagery.

Fortunately for Mark, the surgeon who accidentally placed him in suspended animation carefully laid him in a crypt containing all the means for survival available in the 20th century. And he would need them, for he was about to plunge into a world more dangerous and primitive in the long-dead one he had known. And Mark Nevin would not be alone. There was the beautiful Nona Barr. And the mysterious Omega, a disembodied moon-mind with the personality of a mischievous child yet possessing the transformative power of a god. Not to mention assorted cannibals and an actual dragon.

GUNPOWDER AND ALCHEMY!

When the Goblin Moon rises, strange things happen. Coffins float down the river, hobgoblins crawl out from their dens, alchemists pore over ancient texts in search of the art of creating life... and one man fights a secret battle against cruelty and injustice, with wit, ingenuity, and a lethal lack of compunction.

When CIA agent Chuck Rittersdorf and his psychiatrist wife, Mary, file for divorce, they have no idea that in a few weeks they'll be shooting it out on Alpha III M2, the distant moon ruled by various psychotics liberated from a mental ward. Nor do they suspect that Chuck's new employer, the famous TV comedian Bunny Hentman, will also be there aiming his own laser gun.

How things came to such a darkly hilarious pass is the subject of Clans of the Alphane Moon, an astutely shrewd and acerbic tale that blurs all conventional distinctions between sanity and madness.

Contents:

• 9 - The Moon Is Hell! - novel by John W. Campbell, Jr.
• 147 - The Elder Gods - (1973) - novella by John W. Campbell, Jr. and Arthur J. Burks

Mercy Thompson's life is not exactly normal. Her next-door neighbor is a werewolf. Her former boss is a gremlin. And she's fixing a VW bus for a vampire. But then, Mercy isn't exactly normal herself.

"I am Meredith Gentry, P.I., and Princess Merry, heir to the throne of Faerie. Now there are those among us who whisper I am more. And who can blame them? I've awakened the dazzling magic that's slumbered in them for thousands of years. But the thing is, I can't figure out why.

"My aunt, Queen of Air and Darkness, is no longer distracted by her sadistic hobbies. Her obsession has turned unwaveringly to me. The mission to get me pregnant and beat my cousin Prince Cel to the crown is taking longer than expected. Even though I spend each night with the Queen's Ravens, my immortal guards, no child has come of our decadent pleasures.

"But something else is happening. My magic courses through me uncontrollably. And as I lock my half-mortal body with their full-Sidhe-blooded ones, the power surges like never before.

"It all began with a chalice. I dreamed of it, and it appeared, cool and hard, beside me when I awoke. My guards know the ancient relic well - its disappearance ages ago stripped them of all of their vital powers. But it is here with us now. My touch resonates with its force, and they're consumed with it, their Sidhe essences lit up by it.

"But even as they cherish me for this unexpected gift, there are those who loathe me for it. Me, a mongrel, only half fey and part mortal. The Unseelie court has suffered for so long, and there are some who would not have it weakened further by an impure queen. My enemies grow in number every day. But they do not know what I am capable of. Nor, for that matter, do I."

In her highly acclaimed novel Angel with the Sword, Hugo Award winner C.J. Cherryh introduced readers to Merovingen. Now, in Festival Moon, she elaborates upon the intricately conceived characters, traditions, and legends from her cornerstone novel.

Table of Contents:

• Festival Moon - short story by C. J. Cherryh
• First Night Cruise - novelette by Leslie Fish
• Festival Moon (reprised) - short story by C. J. Cherryh
• Two Gentlemen of the Trade - short story by Robert Asprin
• Festival Moon (reprised) [2] - short story by C. J. Cherryh
• Cat's Tale - novelette by Nancy Asire
• Festival Moon (reprised) [3] - short story by C. J. Cherryh
• Deathangel - [Merovingen Nights] - novelette by Mercedes Lackey
• Festival Moon (reprised) [4] - short story by C. J. Cherryh
• Sword Play - novella by Janet Morris and Chris Morris
• Festival Moon (reprised) [5] - short story by C. J. Cherryh
• First-Bath - novelette by Lynn Abbey
• Festival Moon (reprised) [6] - short story by C. J. Cherryh
• Night Action - short story by Chris Morris
• Festival Moon (final reprise) - novelette by C. J. Cherryh
• Merovingian Ecology - essay by Mercedes Lackey
• Index to City Maps - essay by C. J. Cherryh
• Merovingian Song: Guardian - (1983) - poem by Leslie Fish
• Merovingian Song: Black Water (Suicide) - (1986) - poem by Mercedes Lackey and C. J. Cherryh
• Merovingian Song: Private Conversation - (1986) - poem by Mercedes Lackey and C. J. Cherryh

With winter looming, a small northern Anishinaabe community goes dark. Cut off, people become passive and confused. Panic builds as the food supply dwindles. While the band council and a pocket of community members struggle to maintain order, an unexpected visitor arrives, escaping the crumbling society to the south. Soon after, others follow.

The community leadership loses its grip on power as the visitors manipulate the tired and hungry to take control of the reserve. Tensions rise and, as the months pass, so does the death toll due to sickness and despair. Frustrated by the building chaos, a group of young friends and their families turn to the land and Anishinaabe tradition in hopes of helping their community thrive again. Guided through the chaos by an unlikely leader named Evan Whitesky, they endeavor to restore order while grappling with a grave decision.

Blending action and allegory, Moon of the Crusted Snow upends our expectations. Out of catastrophe comes resilience. And as one society collapses, another is reborn.

Twelve years after the lights go out...
An epic journey to a forgotten homeland

The hotly anticipated sequel to the bestselling novel Moon of the Crusted Snow

It's been over a decade since a mysterious cataclysm caused a permanent blackout that toppled infrastructure and thrust the world into anarchy. Evan Whitesky led his community in remote northern Ontario off the rez and into the bush, where they've been living off the land, rekindling their Anishinaabe traditions in total isolation from the outside world. As new generations are born, and others come of age in the world after everything, Evan's people are in some ways stronger than ever. But resources in and around their new settlement are beginning to dry up, and the elders warn that they cannot afford to stay indefinitely.

Evan and his fifteen-year-old daughter, Nangohns, are elected to lead a small scouting party on a months-long trip to their traditional home on the north shore of Lake Huron--to seek new beginnings, and discover what kind of life--and what dangers--still exist in the lands to the south.

Bestselling fantasy writer Holly Lisle brings us her children's debut with a lyrical, fast paced fantasy for middle-grade readers!

Mankind is Sunkind
And rules by the light;
Nightlings are Moonkind,
And rule in the night;
Or there will be war.

Human and Nightlings are never to meet, but when Genna and her brother Dan venture into the old forest at night, they encounter a Nightling slave who reveals a terrifying secret: Genna and Dan's village chieftain has made a dangerous deal with Letrin, ruler of the Nightlings, offering the lives of his people in exchange for his own immortality.

In the powerful, lyrical follow-up to THE RUBY KEY, Genna must master her new powers and summon an ancient magic to save her people in the fight for their freedom.

In the battle between nightlings and humans, it's prophesied that the Sunrider is destined to unite the magics of the sun and moon for the good of all. She alone can lead the fight to defeat an immortal evil.

Genna is the chosen Sunrider, and under nightling protection, she must learn the acient magics so she may bring an end to the war between slaves and masters. When she escapes a brutal plot concoted by the evil kai lords, Genna finds herself cast into the depths of the Sun Wizards' world.

A gifted student foretells an apocalypse. Her reward is a sentence of death.

Fleeing into the unknown she is drawn into a team of outcasts:

A broken soldier, who once again takes up the weapons he's forbidden to wield and carves a trail back home.

A drunken prince, who steps out from his beloved brother's shadow and claims a purpose of his own.

An imprisoned thief, who escapes the crushing dark and discovers a gleaming artifact - one that will ignite a power struggle across the globe.

On the run, hunted by enemies old and new, they must learn to trust each other in order to survive in a world evolved in strange, beautiful, and deadly ways, and uncover ancient secrets that hold the key to their salvation.

But with each passing moment, doom draws closer.

WHO WILL CLAIM THE STARLESS CROWN?

To stop the coming apocalypse, a fellowship was formed. A soldier, a thief, a lost prince, and a young girl bonded by fate and looming disaster.

Each step along this path has changed the party, forging deep alliances and greater enmities. All the while, hostile forces have hunted them, fearing what they might unleash. Armies wage war around them. For each step has come with a cost?in blood, in loss, in heartbreak.

Now, they must split, traveling into a vast region of ice and to a sprawling capital of the world they've only known in stories. Time is running out and only the truth will save us all.

At the time of the Moon of Three Rings, the galactic trade ship Lydis lands on the planet Yiktor. On Yiktor, Krip Vorland, a junior crew member, seeks amusement at the beast show. He is strangely attracted to the owner of the show animals, a delicate and mysterious woman, Maelen. When Vorland is kidnapped by a Combine seeking to control the planet, he learns too well the nature of Maelen's sorcery; she transforms him into a wolfish creature, in which form he retains his own soul.

Between them -- Krip and Maelen -- they spin an eerie tale of dreams and visions, of metamorphoses and extra-sensory perception, of timelessness and limitlessness.

The primitive world of Yiktor, evoked from myth and legend and ingeniously fused with the future, will be entered most receptively by readers acquainted with medieval heroes and mysticism. Even the singing prose rings with the cadence of legendary literature.

The Free Trader starship Lydis appears to be making an ordinary run to the planet Thoth, carrying incense for the great temples of Kartum. And so she is - until a civil war lands her in the middle of a battle of ancient powers and nameless evil, with a Forerunner treasure at its heart.

A psychic sorceress, a telepathic adventurer, and deformed ex-slave use their extrasensory powers to stop an intergalactic organization of thieves from looting the planets.

Krip Voreland, interplanetary Free Trader, Maelen, sorceress of the Moon of Three Rings, and Farree, an orphan with iridescent wings, search for the mystery of Farree's ancestry, the secret of this race of winged people known as the Little People and their well-guarded treasure.

Christopher Snow is the best-known resident of 12,000-strong Moonlight Bay, California. This is because 28-year-old Chris has xeroderma pigmentosum (XP)--a light-sensitivity so severe that he cannot leave his house in daylight, cannot enter a normally-lit room, cannot sit at a computer. Chris's natural element is the night, and his parents, both academics, chose to live in Moonlight Bay because in a small town Chris can make the nightscape his own--roaming freely through the town on his bike, surfing in the moonlight, exploring while most people sleep.

But Chris's brilliant mother, a scientist, was killed in a car accident 2 years ago, and as the book opens his father, Steven Snow, is dying of cancer; Chris's protected life is about to change forever. We meet Chris as he is carefully preparing himself to go out in the late-afternoon sun to visit the hospital. In his last moments of life his father tells Chris he is "sorry" and that Chris should "fear nothing"--cryptic words that Chris cannot really relate to.

Steven Snow's body is removed to the hospital basement for transport to the funeral home/crematorium, and when Chris goes downstairs for a final moment of farewell, he witnesses a frightening and clandestine encounter: the funeral director and another man Chris doesn't recognize are substituting the body of a hitchhiker for Steven Snow's body–which is being taken not to the crematorium but to some secret destination.

For Chris, this scene is the first intimation of a conspiracy that he will come to realize envelopes many of his townspeople. His parents knew of it and wanted to protect Chris from it. His best friend has had hints of something wrong because of the frightening nocturnal visitors that have come to his beachhouse. And the first person to try to explain to Chris what's going on--and warn him about the special danger he himself is in--will be hideously murdered.

In the 24 hours this book encompasses, Christopher Snow will find out that, sheltered though he's been, he has the soul of a fighter and an adventurer. By the end of the book he will have killed a man, will have discovered the role his own mother played in the birth of the conspiracy, will have come to recognize the extraordinary guardians that, unknown to him, have watched over him for years. He will realize that some people hate him, others revere him, and neither his own life nor those of anyone he knows will ever be the same.

Moonlight Bay, California: a safe, secluded small town that is at its most picturesque in the gentle nighttimes that inspired its name. But now, somewhere in the night, children are disappearing.

When he sets out to find the missing five-year-old son of a former sweetheart, Christopher Snow believes that the lost children are still alive. He is convinced the disappearances have everything to do with the catastrophic effects of secret research conducted deep within Fort Wyvern. To keep those secrets, extremely violent and powerful forces are willing to conceal even the most heinous crimes.

Never before in Dean Koontz's phenomenal writing career has he created a character quite like Christopher Snow: a creation so complex, so fascinating that the author has felt compelled to return to him. Fans of Fear Nothing already know why. Those who meet him for the first time in Seize the Night will soon join millions of others whose imaginations have been touched by this unique character and the extraordinary, eerie world of Moonlight Bay.

When naturalist Tristam Flattery is summoned to save a plant species with magical, medicinal properties, he is drawn into a political struggle that spans generations, threatens civilization, and leads him to the ends of the known world.

Sent on a voyage halfway around the world, promising young naturalist Tristram Flattery is led by the spirit familiar of his late mage uncle to a remote island, where it has been foretold that he will open the gateway to a magical world.

The Moontide is coming, and the world stands on the brink of war . . . Every twelve years the tides sink and the Leviathan Bridge rises above the waves, linking the Eastern and Western continents . . . and allowing the Rondian Emperor, overlord of the west, to march his crusading armies across Antiopia. But this time the East is ready. As two civilisations clash, three ordinary people – a failed mage, a jaded mercenary and a lowly market girl – are about to discover that their actions may determine the fate of nations.

The Moontide has come, and a scarlet tide of Rondian legions is flooding into the East, slaughtering and pillaging in the name of Emperor Constant. But the Scytale of Corineus, the source of ultimate magical power, has slipped through the emperor's fingers. His ruthless Inquisitors are desperately seeking the artefact, before it falls into the hands of those who would bring down the Empire. But there are some who have pledged to end the cycle of war and restore peace to Urte. They are the unlikeliest of heroes: a failed mage, a gypsy and a lowly market-girl. As East and West clash more violently than ever before, Urte will discover that love, loyalty and truth can be forged into weapons as deadly as swords and magic.

Shaliyah, birthplace of the Prophet, now has a new name: Mother of Victories. In the wake of the devastating battle before her walls, everything has changed: the East is rising, bringing equal measures of hope and despair to the magical world of Urte.

For Elena Anborn and Kazim Makani, Salim's victory is a call to arms against the renegade spymaster Gurvon Gyle. For Queen Cera Nesti of Javon, it is a beacon as she seeks new ways to overthrow her husband, the usurper king, and reclaim Javon for her brother. For Ramon Sensini, trapped behind enemy lines with the shattered remnants of the Southern Army, it is more evidence of a world gone mad.

And while the armies of east and west clash in ever-more-bloody conflict, emperors, Inquisitors, Souldrinkers and assassins all have their attention turned elsewhere as they hunt the Scytale of Corineus. This artefect is the key to ultimate power, and it's in the hands of the most unlikely of guardians: failed mage Alaron Mercer and market-girl Ramita Ankesharan, pregnant widow of the world's greatest mage. What they choose to do with the Scytale could change the world forever.

LOVE. BETRAY. FIGHT. ASCEND.

The last few months of the moontide - when the bridge connecting East and West rises above the sea - has come, and in the West Emperor Constant prepares the final phase of his plan to conquer the East. For failed mage Alaron and his companion Ramita - widow to the mage who built the Leviathan Bridge - the unthinkable has happened. They have lost the Scytale of Corineus, the key to the Rite of Ascendancy, as well as one of Ramita's infant sons, to the hands of their deadliest enemies. In Javon, Cera Nesti, the imprisoned queen, has been freed, and plots to take on the overwhelming might of the Rondian Empire.

But standing between her and her goal is a band of deadly mercenaries playing a dangerous game of their own. And in the East, Seth Korion's Lost Legions must navigate treacherous roads to gain safety, bearing secrets that could bring down the Emperor. The time has come for the Rite of Ascendancy to be performed. New powers must rise to save or damn Urte, and on the mighty Leviathan Bridge itself, all will be decided.

In a future land once known as Britain, nomad tribes are preparing to fight a terrifying enemy - the first-ever mobile city. Before London can launch itself, young engineer Fever Crumb must journey to the wastelands of the North. She seeks the ancient birthplace of the Scriven mutants.

It Eats Planets. And It's Here.

It starts when Venus explodes into a brilliant cloud of dust and debris, showering Earth with radiation and bizarre particles that wipe out all the crops and half the life in the oceans, and fry the ozone layer. Days later, a few specks of moon rock kicked up from the last Apollo mission fall upon a lava crag in Scotland. That's all it takes...

Suddenly, the ground itself begins melting into pools of dust that grow larger every day. For what has demolished Venus, and now threatens Earth itself, is part machine, part life-form: a nano-virus, dubbed Moonseed, that attacks planets.

Four scientists are all that stand between Moonseed and Earth's extinction, four brilliant minds that must race to cut off the virus and save what's left of Earth--a pulse-stopping battle for discovery that will lead them from the Earth's inner core to a daredevil Moon voyage that could save, or damn, us all.

WFA nominated short story. It originally appeared in the anthology Snow White, Blood Red (1993), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and was reprinted in Realms of Fantasy, February 1995. It can also be found in the anthology Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold (2016), edited by Paula Guran. The story is included in the colletions Dreams Underfoot (1993), The Newford Stories (1999) and The Very Best of Charles de Lint (2010).

Familiar to Charles de Lint's ever-growing audience as the setting of the novels Moonheart, Forests of the Heart, The Onion Girl, and many others, Newford is the quintessential North American city, tough and streetwise on the surface and rich with hidden magic for those who can see.

In the World Fantasy Award-winning Moonlight and Vines, de Lint returns to this extraordinary city for another volume of stories set there, featuring the intertwined lives of many characters from the novels. Here is enchantment under a streetlamp: the landscape of our lives as only Charles de Lint can show it.

Seregil and Alec have spent the last two years in self-imposed exile, far from their adopted homeland, Skala, and the bitter memories there. But their time of peace is shattered by a desperate summons from Queen Idrilain, asking them to aid her daughter on a mission to Aurenen, the very land from which Seregil was exiled in his youth.

When Sara and Jamie discovered the seemingly ordinary artifacts, they sensed the pull of a dim and distant place. A world of mists and forests, of ancient magics, mythical beings, ageless bards...and restless evil.

Now, with their friends and enemies alike--Blue, the biker; Keiran, the folk musician; the Inspector from the RCMP; and the mysterious Tom Hengyr--Sara and Jamie are drawn into this enchanted land through the portals of Tamson House, that sprawling downtown edifice that straddles two worlds.

Sweeping from ancient Wales to the streets of Ottawa today, Moonheart will entrance you with its tale of this world and the other one at the very edge of sight...and the unforgettable people caught up in the affairs of both. A tale of music, and motorcycles, and fey folk beyond the shadows of the moon. A tale of true magic; the tale of Moonheart.

THEY CAME FROM INNER SPACE

They woke up in the wreckage of their ship and through the dim light they heard a great crawling twittering sound. Soon began the strangest adventure of their lives as they journeyed deep into the caverns beneath the crater-pocked surface. The world of the Moon People!

A strange tale of space exploration and moon anthropology.

For the first time in nearly twenty years, Elizabeth Moon returns to the thrilling realm of her superb Deed of Paksenarrion trilogy.

Thanks to Paks's courage, the long-vanished heir to the half-elven kingdom of Lyonya has been revealed as Kieri Phelan, a formidable mercenary who earned a title-and enemies-in the neighboring kingdom of Tsaia, where Prince Mikeli suddenly faces the threat of a coup. Acting swiftly, Mikeli strikes at the powerful family behind the attack: the Verrakaien, magelords steeped in death and evil. Mikeli's survival-and that of Tsaia-depend on the only Verrakai whose magery is not tainted with innocent blood. Two kings stand at a pivotal point in the history of their worlds. For dark forces are gathering against them, knit in a secret conspiracy more sinister and far more ancient than they can imagine.

Elizabeth Moon returns to the fantasy world of the paladin Paksenarrion Dorthansdotter-Paks for short-in this second volume of a new series filled with all the bold imaginative flights, meticulous world-building, realistic military action, and deft characterization that readers have come to expect from this award-winning author. In Kings of the North, Moon is working at the very height of her storytelling powers.

Peace and order have been restored to the kingdoms of Tsaia and Lyonya, thanks to the crowning of two kings: Mikeli of Tsaia and, in Lyonya, Kieri Phelan, a mercenary captain whose royal blood and half-elven heritage are resented by elves and humans alike.

On the surface, all is hope and promise. But underneath, trouble is brewing. Mikeli cannot sit safely on his throne as long as remnants of the evil Verrakaien magelords are at large. Kieri is being hounded to marry and provide the kingdom with an heir-but that is the least of his concerns. A strange rift has developed between him and his grandmother and co-ruler, the immortal elven queen known as the Lady. More problematic is the ex-pirate Alured, who schemes to seize Kieri's throne for himself-and Mikeli's, too, while he's at it. Meanwhile, to the north, the aggressive kingdom of Pargun seems poised to invade.

Now, as war threatens to erupt from without and within, the two kings are dangerously divided. Old alliances and the bonds of friendship are about to be tested as never before. And a shocking discovery will change everything.

The action continues fast and furious in this third installment of Elizabeth Moon's celebrated return to the fantasy world of the paladin Paksenarrion Dorthansdotter. This award-winning author has firsthand military experience and an imagination that knows no bounds. Combine those qualities with an ability to craft flesh-and-blood characters, and the result is the kind of speculative fiction that engages both heart and mind.

All is not well in the Eight Kingdoms. In Lyonya, King Kieri is about to celebrate marriage to his beloved, the half-elf Arian. But uncanny whispers from the spirits of his ancestors continue to warn of treachery and murder. A finger of suspicion has been pointed toward his grandmother, the queen of the Ladysforest elves, and that suspicion has only intensified with time and the Lady's inexplicable behavior. Clearly, she is hiding something. But what? And why?

Meanwhile, in Tsaia, the young king Mikeli must grapple with unrest among his own nobility over his controversial decision to grant the title and estates of a traitorous magelord to a Verrakaien who not only possesses the forbidden magic but is a woman besides: Dorrin, once one of Kieri's most trusted captains. When renegade Verrakaien attack two of Dorrin's squires, suspicion and prejudice combine to place Dorrin's life at risk-and the king's claim to the throne in peril.

But even greater danger is looming. The wild offspring of a dragon are on the loose, sowing death and destruction and upsetting the ancient balance of power between dragonkind, humans, elves, and gnomes. A collision seems inevitable. Yet when it comes, it will be utterly unexpected-and all the more devastating for it.

Elizabeth Moon is back with the fourth adventure in her best-selling fantasy epic. Moon brilliantly weaves a colorful tapestry of action, betrayal, love, and magic set in a richly imagined world that stands alongside those of such fantasy masters as George R. R. Martin and Robin Hobb.

The unthinkable has occurred in the kingdom of Lyonya. The queen of the Elves - known as the Lady - is dead, murdered by former elves twisted by dark powers. Now the Lady's half-elven grandson must heal the mistrust between elf and human before their enemies strike again. Yet as he struggles to make ready for an attack, an even greater threat looms across the Eight Kingdoms.Throughout the north, magic is reappearing after centuries of absence, emerging without warning in family after family - rich and poor alike. In some areas, the religious strictures against magery remain in place, and fanatical followers are stamping out magery by killing whoever displays the merest sign of it - even children. And as unrest spreads, one very determined traitor works to undo any effort at peace - no matter how many lives it costs. With the future hanging in the balance, it is only the dedication of a few resolute heroes who can turn the tides...if they can survive.

Acclaimed author Elizabeth Moon spins gripping, richly imagined epic fantasy novels that have earned comparisons to the work of such authors as Robin Hobb and Lois McMaster Bujold. In this volume, Moon's brilliant masterwork reaches its triumphant conclusion.

The mysterious reappearance of magery throughout the land has been met with suspicion, fear, and violence. In the kingdom of Lyonya, Kieri, the half-elven, half-human king, struggles to balance the competing demands of his heritage while fighting a deadly threat to his rule: evil elves linked in some way to the rebirth of magic.

Meanwhile, in the neighboring kingdom of Tsaia, a set of ancient artifacts recovered by the former mercenary Dorrin Verrakai may hold the answer to the riddle of magery's return. Thus Dorrin embarks on a dangerous quest to return these relics of a bygone age to their all-but-mythical place of origin. What she encounters there will change her in unimaginable ways--and spell doom or salvation for the entire world.

Paksenarrion could never have fulfilled her destiny had it not been for one who came before. Gird, the peasant, the armsman, the Liberator who taught his people that they could fight - and win - against oppression. This is his story, the first of two prequels to the "Deed of Paksenarrion" trilogy.

When he breaks his promise never to claim his rightful place as the king's heir and decides to use his magic to reach a distant land, Luap finds himself in a heap of trouble, and only the greatest Paladin can rescue him.

The Fifth Doctor and Turlough materialize on the far side of the moon. The year is 1878, and the Doctor meets up with an expedition led by Captain Richard Halliwell. Why does history hold no record of Victorian space travel?

A new master of terror reigns supreme. And in his most horrifying novel yet, the clash between good and evil explodes in an apocalyptic showdown few will survive...

From A Funfest...

Each year, the residents of Pine Deep host the Halloween Festival, drawing tourists and celebrities from across the country to enjoy the deliciously creepy fun. Those who visit the small Pennsylvania town are out for a good time, but those who live there are desperately trying to survive...

To A Bloodfest

For a monstrous evil lives among them, a savage presence whose malicious power has grown too powerful even for death to hold it back. Only a handful of brave souls stand against the King of the Dead and a red wave of destruction. Daylight is fading and a bad moon is rising over Pine Deep. Keep watching the shadows...

Old Enough to be Used
Young Enough to be Broken

Sassinak was twelve when the raiders came. That made her just the right age: old enough to be used, young enough to be broken. Or so the slavers thought. But Sassy turned out to be a little different from your typical slave girl. Maybe it was her unusual physical strength. Maybe it was her friendship with the captured Fleet crewman. Maybe it was her spirit. Whatever it was, it wouldn't let her resign herself to the life of a slave. She bided her time, watched for her moment. Finally it came, and she escaped.

But that was only the beginning for Sassinak. Now she's a Fleet Captain with a pirate-chasing ship of her own, and only one regret in her life: not enough pirates.

The fate of the galaxy is placed in the hands of Lunzie, who discovers the true nature of a new friend; Fordeliton, who is dying of a mysterious poison; Dupaynil, who is exiled; and Aygar, who tries to prove himself.

Neal Asher takes on first contact, Polity style.

This original novel recounts the first contact between the aggressive Prador aliens, and the Polity Collective as it is forced to retool its society to a war footing. The overwhelming brute force of the Prador dreadnaughts causes several worlds and space stations to be overrun. Prador Moon follows the initial Polity defeats, to the first draws, and culminates in what might be the first Polity victory, told from the point of view of two unlikely heroes.

MAGIC IS A DRUG. IT'LL COST MORE THAN YOU CAN PAY...

When a rare Blue Moon upsets the magical balance in the city, Detective Kate Prospero and her Magic Enforcement colleagues pitch in to help Babylon PD keep the peace. Between potions going haywire and emotions running high, every cop in the city is on edge. But the moon's impact is especially strong for Kate, who's wrestling with guilt over her use of illegal magic.

When a rogue wizard steals dangerous potions from a local coven, Kate's team must find the thief's hideout before the vengeful coven catches him. But the investigation uncovers the rogue's dangerous plot to unleash chaotic magic on the city. Once the Blue Moon rises no-one's secrets will be safe. Not even Kate's.

In a desert world ruled by men, Rifkind has always been one apart. A chieftain's daughter, she has learned to wield a sword while all other women are bound by tribal custom to children and the cooking fire. When her clan is massacred, Rifkind's essential solitude is only confirmed.

Alone, prompted by her Deity, she sets forth on a quest for her destiny, a destiny that will shake and shape the world.

The song. That's what London constable and sorcerer's apprentice Peter Grant first notices when he examines the corpse of Cyrus Wilkins, part-time jazz drummer and full-time accountant, who dropped dead of a heart attack while playing a gig at Soho's 606 Club. The notes of the old jazz standard are rising from the body-a sure sign that something about the man's death was not at all natural but instead supernatural.

Body and soul-they're also what Peter will risk as he investigates a pattern of similar deaths in and around Soho. With the help of his superior officer, Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, the last registered wizard in England, and the assistance of beautiful jazz aficionado Simone Fitzwilliam, Peter will uncover a deadly magical menace-one that leads right to his own doorstep and to the squandered promise of a young jazz musician: a talented trumpet player named Richard "Lord" Grant-otherwise known as Peter's dear old dad.

The Consolidator, or Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon, translated from the Lunar Language by Daniel Defoe.

The Consolidator is at once early science fiction in the form of an early voyage to the moon, a satire on the moral and intellectual currents of the time, a tongue-in-cheek praise of China's contribution to world knowledge, and a Whiggish version of the historical events of the previous 45 years.

Lucian travels with fifty companions to the Moon, where they become embroiled in a space war; they then fly past the Sun and back to Earth, where they land in the sea and are soon swallowed by an enormous whale, from which they escape and visit various Islands, where Lucian's fertile imagination piles marvel upon lunatic marvel, and simultaneously mocks them.

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

The tale itself is divided into two parts.

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

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

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

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

Washington Gladden was a noted clergyman, theologian and social reformer whose many books on these subjects were highly respected. It may have come as a surprise to his admirers to find this delightful fantasy, first published in a children's magazine in 1880. And although Gladden was writing with tongue clearly in cheek, he displays a good knowledge of and appreciation for technology, science and astronomy. Indeed, this story contains one of the first mentions of the need of a life support system for lunar explorers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Mars Via the Moon: An Astronomical Story (1911) recounts the construction of a Spaceship capable of taking its bereaved solitary builder first to the Moon and then to Mars, which is described in accordance with the theories of Percival Lowell; here he finds a Utopia, and the Reincarnation of his dead son. He remains on Mars.

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

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

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

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

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

First published in English in 1931, this novel for young adults is an accurate mirror of many of the space travel concepts that have been discussed by pre-war European experts. The author's imaginative theories about the history of the Earth--many of which presage those of Velikovksy and von Daniken--are explored.

A young German scientist and his uncle, with one mechanic, take off in a rocket-like device, and finally reach the moon. An egotistical young American news reporter succeeds in going with them as a stowaway.

First published in English in 1930, this remarkable science fiction novel details the fate of three astronauts whose Spaceship takes off accidentally from its mooring in the artificial Island of New Atlantis, just west of San Francisco. After a daring trip, they reach the Moon. Based on the pioneering work of Hermann Oberth, this suspenseful novel is an accurate mirror of the state of the art of astronautics of the time.

Ted Dustin, an American inventor, seeks to win a prize of one million dollars by being the first person to touch the moon with an object launched from Earth. He devises a huge gun, which fires upon the surface of the moon. Shortly thereafter, the moon fires back, and war breaks out between the planet and its satellite. Using a videophone he invented, Ted hails communication with the moon. A beautiful woman and her guards first reply, but their transmission is cut off by warlike yellow aliens. Ted eventually heads to the moon in a spacecraft of his own design, and meets the titular character, who turns out to be the beautiful woman from the transmission, as well as a princess of one of the two groups that inhabit the moon.

Salo's queen has finally accepted his desire to be a mystic despite taboos concerning men's use of magic. But her acceptance is not support; it is strategy.

Under a disguise of the queen's making, Salo enters Jungle City as a pilgrim to the Red Temple, only to find a magical barrier barring his entrance. Left at the mercy of the warring political factions that run the city, Salo faces a series of obstacles wrought by an unseen hand, knowing he cannot return home without completing his pilgrimage.

But Isa, King of the Saire clan, has her own plans for Salo. She needs his help to extract the Covenant Diamond from the Red Temple's inner sanctum--an artifact with the power to end her tribe's divisions, prevent a genocide, and even save herself from her fate. His new task in hand, Salo navigates a cursed maze of invisible authority--and when he encounters shocking revelations about the power residing in the depths of the undercity, he must wield his magic to finally bring the truth about his world's history to light.

My name is Eddie Drood, aka Shaman Bond, the very secret agent. And I am a dead man walking.

I've been poisoned by Dr. DOA. There is no cure, no treatment, no chance of a last-minute miracle. So all that is left to me and my love, Molly Metcalf, is to track down my killer and stop him before he can murder anyone else.

So whether that means fighting a secret army on another world; or searching for a forgotten weapon in the Museum of Unattached Oddities; or facing off against Grendel Rex, the Unforgiven God, in the hidden heart of the Moon, for the terrible secret that is Moonbreaker...I will do whatever it takes, while I still can. Because the game isn't over till I say it's over--and I still have one last card to play.

Peace reigns in Elfland. Incredibly, King Oberon and his exquisite but willful queen, Titania, are at peace with one another. But still the FarSeers of the Selieghe Court are uneasy. They fear trouble is coming to the mortal world of England, which is close to Elfhame Avalon. King Henry VIII is ageing but the futures shown when the FarSeers lift the great crystal lens are unchanged. The rule of the son Great Harry finally succeeded in begetting will bring gray lives and a misery of dull oppression to England. Worse will come if his eldest daughter comes to the throne--a queen warped by fanaticism who might easily summon the Inquisition to rule by torture and fire, burning out heresy ... and every bright aspect of life. The prize at the end of the rainbow is the possibility of a red-haired queen with lion-gold eyes, brilliant with interest and curiosity, welcoming the blossoming of art, music, and literature. But now the last image is flickering, edged in a dark menace.

Years before, Prince Vidal had tried to seize the child Elizabeth and replace her with a simulacrum who would soon die. Vidal had been wounded almost to death in the attempt--but so also had Denoriel, Elizabeth's principal protector. Denoriel is now healing--but so, unbeknownst to those of the Bright Court, is Vidal. And when Vidal wakes to himself, his determination to hurl England into a new dark age is fiercer than ever, fueled by his fury over his defeat and injury. Also, his Dark Court feeds on human suffering and dark emotions. To ensure his own power, he must at all costs prevent Elizabeth from coming to the throne. To gain this goal, Vidal has set in motion a plan of which Denoriel and his comrades are dangerously unaware....

Warriors and wisdom-bearers, the race of Dwarfs once peopled the earth. Then came Man, and his new god: time for Wotan to harvest the souls of the Firstborn. The Dwarfs fells in battle, and no more children were born.

Now only song-maker Garroc lives. Gifted with three lifetimes andburdened with the need to preserve the Firstborn tale, he lifts his voice to a human woman... and entrusts to her the last true history of his mighty race.

A breathtaking tale of the last dwarf and his legendary feats of valor. In the chaotic years following Arthur's reign, a king puts the life of his son in the hands of Garroc. The loyal dwarf must lead his princeling through the darkest realm of war and protect him from assassins.

During all recorded history, the Moon has hovered above our heads, a timeless symbol for lovers' ecstasy. Goddesses and Gibson Girls have tripped the light fantastic of her beams while sonneteers and scientists have scanned her changing phases.

Now man had actually reached the Moon, and on it the explorers found a structure, a formation so terrible and incomprehensible that it couldn't even be described in human terms. It was a thing that devoured men; that killed them again and again in torturous, unfathomable ways.

Earthbound are the only two men who could probe the thing: Al Barker, a homicidal maniac, whose loving mistress was death, and Dr. Edward Hawks, a scientific murderer, whose greatest mission was rebirth.

A world not of this world but in it-where a transparent palace hangs suspended in mid-air and tiny fairies twinkle here and there... where a traitorous king holds court before elven lords and ladies... and where fantastical tragedies and capricious romances reach out to entangle mortal souls...

Enter: William Shakespeare

This enchanting fantasy debut begins with the disappearance of young Will Shakespeare's wife and newborn daughter - a mystery that draws the Bard into a realm beyond imagination... and beyond reality. Held captive by the devious ruler of the elves and fairies, Shakespeare's family appears lost to him forever. But an alluring elf named Quicksilver takes a fancy to Shakespeare - and sees a chance to set things right.

Can a mere schoolteacher win his wife back from a king? Or will Shakespeare fall prey to his own desires - and the cunning schemes of the unpredictable elf?

Nell can draw magic from the land around her, and lately she's been using it to help the Psy-Law Enforcement Division, which solves paranormal crimes. Joining the team at PsyLED has allowed her to learn more about her powers and the world she always shunned--and to find true friends.

Head agent Rick LaFleur shifts into a panther when the moon calls him, but this time, something has gone wrong. Rick calls Nell from a riverbank--he's naked, with no memory of how he came to be there, and there's a dead black cat, sacrificed in a witch circle and killed by black magic, lying next to him.

Then more animals turn up dead, and team rushes to investigate. A blood-witch is out to kill. But when it seems as if their leader is involved in the crime, the bonds that hold the team together could shatter at any moment.

The distant past and possible futures. Mysteries revealed and new threats emerging. Shepherd Moon is the first anthology of Space:1999 short fiction featuring classic, present, and future authors spanning the entire history of Moonbase Alpha in its ongoing odyssey of adventure.

Table of Contents:

• Foreword by publisher Mateo Latosa
• "The Touch of Venus" by John Kenneth Muir
• "Fallen Star" by Albert León, Lindsey Scott-Ipsen, Ken Scott and Raja Thiagarajan
• "Cargo" by Brian Ball
• "Futility" by John Kenneth Muir
• "Dead End" by E.C. Tubb
• "Remembering Julia" by Stephen Jansen
• "Mission Critical" by Michael A. Faries
• "The Astelian Gift" by Emma Burrows
• "Spider's Web" by William Latham

A freak explosion blasts the moon out of orbit. And the men and women of Moonbase Alpha unwittingly become courageous travelers on man's first intergalactic odyssey.

Joy turns to terror when Alpha's first infant grows up in a matter of second... an alien "gift" tranforms the barren moon into a sunny Eden... a deadly but primitive rocket from Earth makes Alpha the target for mass revenge... and the interstellar journey becomes a personal hell for the crew when they see how their lives might have been.

In opposing the Triopus project, Grant Kirby was one by himself. Powerful commercial and political lobbies saw him as a threat and wanted him silenced. Was there in fact, a menace in the green planet or was he rationalizing his own growing disillusionment with Earth and its social pattern? Kirby himself only found the answer when the Triopusians entered the equation in a form nobody could expect.

THE SECOND TIME AROUND--IS HARDER...

Decades after the last footprints were left on the Moon, the U.S. was preparing to return to the Lunar surface in a new class of rockets, when the mission suddenly became much more urgent. It would have to be a rescue mission.

Unbeknownst to the rest of the world China had sent its own Lunar expedition. A manned expedition. Until a distress call was received, no human outside of China even knew that the mission was manned--or that their ship had crash-landed and couldn't take off again.

Time was running out, and if the four Chinese astronauts were to be rescued, the American lunar mission would have to launch immediately, with only a skeleton crew. Once the heroic U.S. astronauts were underway the army of engineers and scientists back home had the daunting task of deciding what equipment could be left on the Moon to permit the Lunar lander vehicle vehicle to lift safely from the Moon with the two U.S. astronauts and the four stranded Chinese taikonauts! Could the U.S. mount such a mission successfully--and would thousands of years of instilled honor "allow" the Chinese astronauts to accept a rescue?

Little did Teldin Moore know there was life beyond Krynn's moons... until a crashed spelljamming ship demolished his farm and changed his life! With a dying alien's magical cloak and cryptic words, Teldin quickly discovers that he's a popular fellow. He and his giff companion race to find Astinus of Palanthas and the gnomes of Mount Nevermind to learn why, before the monstrous neogi can find them!

Note: Julie Fortune is a pen-name for Rachel Caine.

The goddess hunts...

Just four days after Major Kawalsky's death, Colonel Jack O'Neill leads the newly commissioned SG-1 on their first mission through the Stargate.

Their destination is Chalcis, a peaceful society at the heart of the Helos Confederacy of planets. But Chalcis harbors a dark secret, one that pitches SG-1 into a world of bloody chaos, betrayal and madness. Battling to escape the living nightmare, Dr Daniel Jackson and Captain Samantha Carter soon begin to realize that more than their lives are at stake. They are fighting for their very souls.

But while O'Neill and Teal'c struggle to keep the team together, Daniel is hatching a desperate plan that will test SG-1's fledgling bonds of trust and friendship to the limit...

Kee Ildez has been many things: hacker, soldier, bounty hunter. She never expected to be a hero, but when a shadowy group of traitors starts trying to goad the galaxy's two superpowers into instigating an interstellar war, Kee throws herself into the search to find out who is responsible--and stop them.

Digging up hidden information is her job, so hunting traitors should be a piece of cake, but the primary suspect spent years in the military, and someone powerful is still covering his tracks. Disrupting their plans will require the help of her entire team, including Varro Runkow, a Valovian weapons expert who makes her pulse race.

Quiet, grumpy, and incredibly handsome, Varro watches her with hot eyes but ignores all of her flirting, so Kee silently vows to keep her feelings strictly platonic. But that vow will be put to the test when she and Varro are forced to leave the safety of their ship and venture into enemy territory alone.

Cut off from the rest of their team, they must figure out how to work together--and fast--because a single misstep will cost thousands of lives.

For the Hunters, the Hunt was a religion. The Sacred Prey, sentient beings collected from all over the galaxy, were literally given a fighting chance--they were allowed to choose weapons from an armory with every imaginable weapon and given time to train. Then they were taken to the place of the Hunt, where death awaited them. Those who survived until the eclipse of the red moon, however, were honored by the Hunters and rewarded with all the wealth they could desire. The trick, of course, was surviving.

After three-hundred years of turmoil, a new era begins for the Underworld. A lost child of Vecta, who seemed to appear out of nowhere, has defeated the Dark God and cemented peace for all the realm. But at the heart of human lands, atop Central Cathedral, Ronie Arabel, newly promoted to Integrity Knight apprentice, receives foreboding words from Kirito.

"War will come again."

It's back to the drawing board as the kidnapper just barely slips from Kirito's grasp. The new plan calls for a visit to the scene of the crime so that Asuna can use her scrying art to peek into the past, though what she learns is troubling to say the least... But before they can act on the new information, the villain strikes again! This time, Ronie and Tiese have been captured, and their fates rest in the claws of a young yellow dragon...!

Set in an imagined medieval Japan, Book Three of the Tales of the Otori is a thrilling-and surprising-follow-up to the previous adventures of Takeo and Kaede. Taking us deeper into the complexities of the loyalties that bind the novel's characters at birth-the fates from which they cannot escape - Brilliance of the Moon goes beyond its transcendent storytelling in demonstrating how we are shaped by forces outside of our control and yet must forge our own destinies all the same.

A thoroughly gripping read, Brilliance of the Moon is also the most powerful novel in the series - a beautiful, haunting evocation of a time and a place just beyond the reach of an outside world.

Dion-Healer, also called Wolfwalker, dared to try to unlock the secrets of aliens. Her courage was rewarded with their fury, and she was nearly destroyed. Now, desperate to put distance between herself and the fate that awaits her, Dion rages against the wolves as much as she rages against the world.

But she cannot elude those who seek her: the Gray Ones, who grow restless with her absence; the brother searching the wilderness for his Wolfwalker twin; and the people of her homeland, who are relying on her to secure their future with her new knowledge. And there is one other: a distant warrior unable to resist the mysterious force that summons him to find a woman whose face he has never seen, whose name he has never heard.

As the forces of destiny converge on Dion, she must fight to keep her secrets safe--secrets that could change Wolfwalker, warrior, and their very world forever.

Once upon a time there was a kingdom that lived in darkness, for the sun, the moon and the stars were hidden in a box, and that box was hidden in a sow's belly, and that sow was hidden in a troll's cave, and that cave was hidden at the end of the world.

Once upon a time there was a studio of artists who feared they were doomed to obscurity, for though they worked and they worked, no one was interested in the paintings that stood in racks along their studio walls.

Steven Brust's fantasy novel The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars is a tale of two quests, of two young men who are reaching for the moon. And the sun. And the stars.

Cullen James is a young woman whose life dictates her dreams-and whose dreams control her life.

In her first dream, she found the perfect man-and the same thing promptly happened in life. Now, she has begun to dream dreams set in Rondua, a fantasy world of high adventure, full of tests of her courage and strength. Slowly and quietly, her dream world is spilling over into her New York City reality and beginning to threaten everything she loves in life. Her friends are gathered to help her-but even her newfound courage may not be enough.

On the planet Abeth, a narrow Corridor of green land is surrounded on all sides by ice plains where only the strong survive. Ice triber Yaz has completed a perilous journey and arrived at the Corridor, and it exceeds and overwhelms all of her expectations. Everything seems different but some constants remain: her old enemies are still two steps ahead, bent on her destruction. She makes her way to the Convent of Sweet Mercy, where nuns train young girls who show the old gifts, but like the Corridor itself the convent is packed with peril and opportunity. Yaz has much to learn from the nuns--if they don't decide to execute her.

The fate of everyone squeezed between the Corridor's vast walls, and ultimately the fate of those laboring to survive out on ice itself, hangs from the moon, and the battle to save the moon centers on the Ark of the Missing, buried beneath the emperor's palace. Everyone wants Yaz to be the key that will open the Ark -- the one the wise have sought for generations. But sometimes wanting isn't enough.

The concluding volume in a series collecting the stories of Jules de Grandin, the supernatural detective made famous in the classic pulp magazine Weird Tales.

Today the names of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and Clark Ashton Smith, all regular contributors to the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the first half of the twentieth century, are recognizable even to casual readers of the bizarre and fantastic. And yet despite being more popular than them all during the golden era of genre pulp fiction, there is another author whose name and work have fallen into obscurity: Seabury Quinn.

Quinn's short stories were featured in well over half of Weird Tales's original publication run. His most famous character, the French supernatural detective Dr. Jules de Grandin, investigated cases involving monsters, devil worshippers, serial killers, and spirits from beyond the grave, often set in the small town of Harrisonville, New Jersey. In de Grandin there are familiar shades of both Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, and alongside his assistant, Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, de Grandin's knack for solving mysteries--and his outbursts of peculiar French-isms (Grand Dieu!)--captivated readers for nearly three decades.

The fifth volume, Black Moon, includes all the stories from "Suicide Chapel" (1938) to "The Ring of Bastet" (1951), as well as an introduction by George Vanderburgh and Robert Weinberg and a foreword by Stephen Jones.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (Black Moon) - essay by George A. Vanderburgh and Robert Weinberg]
• The Further Appearances of Jules de Grandin - essay by Stephen Jones
• Suicide Chapel (1938)
• The Venomed Breath of Vengeance (1938)
• Black Moon (1938)
• The Poltergeist of Swan Upping (1939)
• The House Where Time Stood Still (1939)
• Mansions in the Sky (1939)
• The House of the Three Corpses (1939)
• Stoneman's Memorial (1942)
• Death's Bookkeeper (1944)
• The Green God's Ring (1945)
• Lords of the Ghostlands (1945)
• Kurban (1946)
• The Man in Crescent Terrace (1946)
• hree in Chains (1946)
• Catspaws (1946)
• Lottë (1946)
• Eyes in the Dark (1946)
• Clair de Lune (1947)
• Vampire Kith and Kin (1949)
• Conscience Maketh Cowards (1949)
• The Body-Snatchers (1950)
• The Ring of Bastet (1951)

Refusing to marry a pig farmer and joining the army even if it means never seeing her family again, Paksenarrion begins an adventure that enables her to restore an overthrown ruler.

Paksenarrion, once a sheepfarmer's daughter, now a veteran warrior, meets new challenges as she breaks up a robber gang, dispells an ancient evil possessing an elvish shrine and is accepted for training at an academy for knights. Clearly, a high destiny awaits her.

Running away to become a soldier rather than marry the man her family had chosen for her, Paksenarrion, a sheep farmer's daughter, becomes a legendary heroine to her people.

Having escaped both an Earth on the verge of global collapse and their squabbling parents in a "divorce" at Geosynchronous Station, a newly independent Charles and his two brothers find themselves alone on the Moon with very few prospects. Worse, they are being hunted by ruthless interplanetary corporations who would stop at nothing to come in possession of a memory bar the boys smuggled on board. Can they make it on their own? Who can they trust?

Charles thought the moon would be a new beginning. He will be lucky just to stay alive.

The Emperor of Aria has been murdered, the Empire is in crisis, and Dead Men walk the streets...

But Myla, Fings, and Seth couldn't care less. They're too busy just trying to survive in the Sulk-struck city of Varr, committing petty violence and pettier crimes to earn their keep in the Unrulys, a motley gang led by Blackhand.

When the Unrulys are commissioned to steal a mysterious item to order, by an equally mysterious patron, the trio are thrust right into the bitter heart of a struggle for the Crown, where every faction is after what they have.

Forced to lie low in a city on lockdown, they will have to work together if they want to save their skins... and maybe just save the Empire as well.

The Wraiths have raised an army of the dead. An army of the living is marching on the throne. Caught in the middle, Myla is supposed to be spying on a sorceress who can read minds. Things are not going well.

Far away, Seth and Fings are trying their hardest to have nothing to do with any of this. All Fings has to do is not steal anything. All Seth has to do is not meddle with Forbidden Magics. All they have to do is lie low. And for once, it's all going swimmingly. Until, that is, Fings sees a face he thought they'd left behind in the ashes of Deephaven.

As Seth's past catches up with him and Myla unravels the true nature of the Empire's new Princess-Regent, the trio converge on the dead city of Valladrune. Armed with sinister secret behind an old war, they once more hold the fate of the Empire in their reluctant hands.

If only they knew what the heck to do with it.

Business has been slow. Okay, business has been dead. And not even of the undead variety. You would think Chicago would have a little more action for the only professional wizard in the phone book. But lately, Harry Dresden hasn't been able to dredge up any kind of work — magical or mundane.

But just when it looks like he can't afford his next meal, a murder comes along that requires his particular brand of supernatural expertise.

A brutally mutilated corpse. Strange-looking paw prints. A full moon. Take three guesses — and the first two don't count…

Cerise Mar and her clan are cash poor but land rich, claiming a large swathe of the Mire, the Edge swamplands. When her parents vanish, her clan's long-time rivals are suspect. But all is not as it seems.

Two nations of the Weird are waging a cold war fought by feint and espionage, and their conflict is about to spill over into the Edge-and Cerise's life....

When Grace Andreas's sister, Petra, and her husband are both killed, Grace inherits the Power and responsibilities of the Oracle of Louisville, as well as her sister's two young children--neither of which she is prepared for. Then Khalil, Demonkind and Djinn Prince of House Marid, decides to make himself a part of the household both as guardian and counterpoint to Grace's impudence towards the Elder Races.

In Shadow Moon, war and chaos have gripped the land of Tir Asleen. An ancient prophecy reveals one hope: a savior princess who will ascend to the throne when the time is right. But first, a Nelwyn wanderer must face forces of unimaginable malevolence and dangerous, forbidden rites of necromancy that could bring back a powerful warrior from soulless sleep.

Darkness cannot be caged.

In the land of Cymria, humans and griffins rule side by side. Arren Cardockson is a Northerner, a member of a race that was conquered and enslaved centuries ago. By freak chance he became a griffiner, chosen by a griffin to live beside her and work alongside her to gain power and privilege. But Arren and his partner Eluna live surrounded by those who hate and fear them, and their dreams of grandeur will only lead to betrayal and death. And meanwhile, out in the wildnerness, a savage black griffin with no name hunts for something he cannot name - something that will bring himself and Arren together. But when they meet, only disaster can follow.

The Dark Griffin is a story of prejudice, hatred and revenge. Not the story of a hero, but of a villain.

A man with no soul has nothing left to lose.

Arren Cardockson is dead. But something won't let him rest. Resurrected by dark magic, Arren has no heartbeat, no home and no friends. Hated and hunted, his only companion is Skandar, the giant, maneating black griffin. And now a dark power lives inside him, driving him to acts of murder and cruelty.

Together, he and Skandar flee Northwards in the hopes of finding a place to hide from their enemies, and a cure for the curse that has Arren in its grip. And all the while, the god of death watches...

There is no Arren, Arren is dead. And war is coming.

Arenadd Taranisäii, formerly known as Arren Cardockson, has come to the North, where the Southerners rule and his race are second-class citizens in their own land. But now everything is about to change. Rebellion is in the air. Together with his partner, the dark griffin Skandar, Arenadd promises his allegiance to the savage Night God and prepares to lead his people to freedom - no matter what the cost.

But meanwhile his archenemy Erian, bastard son of the murdered Lord Rannagon, sets out on a journey of his own - to find a sacred weapon that can kill Arenadd, the man without a heart.

Jan, the prince of the unicorns, pursues his destiny to save his kind from their enemies by seeking fire in a distant land of two-footed creatures.

A massive army on the brink of conquest looms large in a world where prophecies are lies, magic is believed in but never seen, and hope is where you least expect to find it.

Welcome to the Five Isles, where war has come in the name of the invading army of Sør Sevier, a merciless host driven by the prophetic fervor of the Angel Prince, Aeros, toward the last unconquered kingdom of Gul Kana. Yet Gault, one of the elite Knights Archaic of Sør Sevier, is growing disillusioned by the crusade he is at the vanguard of just as it embarks on his Lord Aeros' greatest triumph.

While the eldest son of the fallen king of Gul Kana now reigns in ever increasing paranoid isolationism, his two sisters seek their own paths. Jondralyn, the older sister, renowned for her beauty, only desires to prove her worth as a warrior, while Tala, the younger sister, has uncovered a secret that may not only destroy her family but the entire kingdom. Then there's Hawkwood, the assassin sent to kill Jondralyn who has instead fallen in love with her and trains her in his deadly art. All are led further into dangerous conspiracies within the court.

And hidden at the edge of Gul Kana is Nail, the orphan taken by the enigmatic Shawcroft to the remote whaling village of Gallows Haven, a young man who may hold the link to the salvation of the entire Five Isles.

You may think you know this story, but everyone is not who they seem, nor do they fit the roles you expect. Durfee has created an epic fantasy full of hope in a world based on lies.

There is a dream called Moonbase, nurtured by ex-astronaut Paul Stavenger and his wife, Joanna Masterson Stavenger, head of the powerful Masterson Corporation.

There is a future of astonishing possibilities and vital technological development waiting on a lifeless world of astonishing contrasts, where sub-frigid darkness abuts the blood-boiling light -- a future threatened by greed and jealousy, insanity and murder.

The Moon and its mysteries have captivated the Stavenger family, and it will continue to exert its pull upon subsequent generations. For all those who experience its magnificent desolation are haunted by it eternally. Some will be doomed by its pitiless aversion to human life.

And some can never leave.

Ben Bova's extraordinary Moonbase Saga continues with a breathtaking near-future adventure rich in character and incident. The action begins seven years after the indomitable Stavenger family has realized its cherished dream of establishing a colony on the inhospitable lunar surface.

Moonbase is now a thriving community under the leadership of Doug Stavenger, a marvel of scientific ahievement created and supported by nanotechnology: virus-size machines that can build, cure, and destroy. But nanotechnology has been declared illegal by the home planet's leaders. And a powerful despot is determined to lay claim to Stavenger's peaceful city... or obliterate it, if necessary. The people of Moonbase--a colony with no arms or military--must now defend themselves from earth-born aggression with the only weapon at their disposal: the astonishing technology that sustains their endangered home.

Televi, apprentice to the wizard Glastyn, and Ceilyn, the kingdom's most virtuous knight, are accused of witchcraft and robbery respectively.

For just one moonlit, memorable night, Thornfell College of Magic has flung open its doors, inviting guests from around the nation to an outdoor ball intended to introduce the first-ever class of women magicians to society... but one magician and one invited guest have far more pressing goals of their own for the night.

Quietly brilliant Juliana Banks is determined to win back the affections of her secret fiancée, rising politician Caroline Fennell, who has become inexplicably distant. If Juliana needs to use magic to get her stubborn fiancée to pay her attention... well, then, as the top student in her class, she is more than ready to take on that challenge!

Unbeknownst to Juliana, though, Caroline plans to nobly sacrifice their betrothal for Juliana's own sake - and no one has ever accused iron-willed Caroline Fennell of being easy to deter from any goal.

Their path to mutual happiness may seem tangled beyond repair... but when they enter the fey-ruled woods that border Thornfell College, these two determined women will find all of their plans upended in a night of unexpected and magical possibilities.

In the Duchy of Oc, the most precious of creatures are the winged horses blessed by the goddess Kalla. When one is born, it is immediately taken to the Academy of Air to be trained and watched over. But this time, the Academy is getting more than it bargained for.

At Deeping Farm, far in the Uplands, young Larkyn Hamley finds a lone winged horse, starving, exhausted, and about to give birth. The headstrong Larkyn saves the newborn from death. But in the process, the coal-black foal named Tup bonds with Lark--which the horses only do with one human woman, and for life.

So when Mistress Phillipa Winter arrives to inspect Tup, she has little choice but to take the farm girl to the Academy for a "proper" education. There, Lark realizes that her unlikely good fortune may not be so lucky. For in the elite world of the Academy, Lark's kindness and honesty prove to be weak armor against the taunts and cruelty of the high-born girls already there.

Now, with Tup as her only ally, Larkyn Hamley is going to show everyone how high she can fly. Because if she falls, it's a long, long way down.

The Malazan Empire simmers with discontent, bled dry by interminable warfare, bitter infighting and bloody confrontations with the formidable Anomander Rake and his Tiste Andii, ancient and implacable sorcerers. Even the imperial legions, long inured to the bloodshed, yearn for some respite. Yet Empress Laseen's rule remains absolute, enforced by her dread Claw assassins.

For Sergeant Whiskeyjack and his squad of Bridgeburners, and for Tattersail, surviving cadre mage of the Second Legion, the aftermath of the siege of Pale should have been a time to mourn the many dead. But Darujhistan, last of the Free Cities of Genabackis, yet holds out. It is to this ancient citadel that Laseen turns her predatory gaze.

However, it would appear that the Empire is not alone in this great game. Sinister, shadowbound forces are gathering as the gods themselves prepare to play their hand...

Conceived and written on a panoramic scale, Gardens of the Moon is epic fantasy of the highest order--an enthralling adventure by an outstanding new voice.

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

Sean McMullen, one of Australia's leading genre writers, took America by storm with his sweeping Greatwinter Trilogy, a post-apocalyptic science fiction tour de force that won over critics and readers alike.

Now McMullen delivers Voyage of the Shadowmoon, a fantasy epic of daunting skill and scope. The Shadowmoon is a small, unobtrusive wooden schooner whose passengers and crew are much more than they seem: Ferran, the Shadowmoon's lusty captain who dreams of power; Roval, the warrior-sorcerer; Velander and Terikel, priestesses of a nearly extinct sect; and the chivalrous vampire Laron, who has been trapped in a fourteen-year-old body for seven hundred years.

They sail the coast, gathering useful information, passing as simple traders. But when they witness the awful power of Silverdeath, an uncontrollable doomsday weapon of awesome destructiveness, they realize they must act. But every single king, emperor, and despot covets Silverdeath's power. It will take all of their wits and more than a little luck if they hope to prevent one of these power-hungry fools from destroying the world. Their only advantage? The Shadowmoon.

While it seems to be little more that a small trading vessel--too small for battle, too fat for speed--it is actually one of the most sophisticated vessels in the world, one that allows them to travel to places where no others would dare. They can only hope it will be enough to save them all before Silverdeath rains destruction across their entire world.

Sean McMullen, one of Australia's leading genre authors, delivers Glass Dragons, the scintillating sequel to Voyage of the Shadowmoon which Kirkus Reviews called "a brilliantly inventive, marvelously plotted sea-faring fantasy that both mocks and surpasses genre expectations.... Australian author McMullen writes like Roger Zelazny at the peak of his powers: his dashing, flamboyant, cleverly resourceful characters trade off insults and reveal surprising abilities as they swagger bravely from one hair-raising scene to another. Exciting, suspenseful, vividly believable, and great, clever fun: a major fantasy-award contender."

Glass Dragons continues the tale of Laron, the chivalrous 700-year-old vampire, the appallingly dangerous and beautiful Velander, and the long-suffering Terikel, as they investigate a secret project of arcane magic, a magic so dangerous it could destroy their world. A project which threatens to fall into the wrong hands.

Glass Dragons is a broad and complicated tale, filled with wonderful characters both new and old, woven through with low humor and great courage, built upon grand acts of heroism and love. Enjoy.

At first Wayfarer Inspector Danolarian thought the huge oval thing that had fallen from the sky was a dragon's egg. When it opened, however, he knew that it was much, much worse. His world was being invaded by pitiless sorcerers from Lupan, who could sweep whole armies aside, and even defeat the invulnerable glass dragons. Surrender or flight were the only options... but not for Inspector Danolarian, his Wayfarer Constables, and his sweetheart, the sorceress Lavenci.

Although Danolarian is no sorcerer, he's no ordinary Wayfarer either. Faced with civilization crumbling around him, and organized resistance shattered by the invincible magic of the Lupanians, he chances upon an unlikely ally and begins to fight back. It won't be easy, for he has to rally the demoralized sorcerers of Alberin, organize its terrified citizens, stay one step ahead of his own past, and, most importantly, survive a dinner party with Lavenci's mother.

Swords, sorcery, and time travel are a strange and dangerous mix.

Wayfarer Inspector Danolarian saw his world's future and did not approve. The inspector knew about time travel because he had once met his future self. What he did not know was that he would be abducted into the future, and wind up on the run with a constable who had shape-shifted into a cat. Danolarian would also find himself marooned in the ancient past, where he would have to recover his time engine from five thousand naked, psychopathic horsemen.

A faulty repair plunges him another three million years back in time, to a world of strange, beautiful people living idyllic lives in splendid castles. But things are not always as they seem. After being attacked, he learns from his unlikely rescuer that time travel is not entirely real. A furious Danolarian returns to his own time, planning revenge against the time engine's true builders.

Spurred by the Count of Mountjoy, who wants proper plumbing for the kingdom and a Russian sable coat for Her Grace, and by Dr. Kokintz, who sees a potential new source of energy by mixing iron filings and Fenwick Pinot wine, a loan from the U.S. is arranged. A rocket is fired and Grand Fenwick lands on the moon before American and Russian astronauts.

Humanity has expanded out into other solar systems using the remnants of an ancient technology of star gates. But now an alien race has also discovered the gates. In this situation, a new planet is discovered inhabited by a human-like race, and a team of scientists is sent to contact and study them. It isnt long before the killer aliens arrive and the whole powerkeg explodes.

After untold ages of futurity, the world is old. Regret is endless. Deceit is ubiquitous. And for the Weeping Czar, love is new.

Ken Scholes is the author of the five-book Psalms of Isaak sequence, comprising Lamentation, Canticle, the forthcoming Antiphon, and two more in progress. "A Weeping Czar Beholds the Fallen Moon" is set in the same world, about a thousand years before the events of Lamentation.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

In the conclusion to this epic interstellar adventure by Nebula Award nominee Wil McCarthy, humanity stands at a crossroads as the heroes who fashioned a man-made heaven must rescue their descendants from eternal damnation....

TO CRUSH THE MOON

Once the Queendom of Sol was a glowing monument to humankind's loftiest dreams. Ageless and immortal, its citizens lived in peaceful splendor. But as Sol buckled under the swell of an immorbid population, space itself literally ran out....

Conrad Mursk has returned to Sol on the crippled starship Newhope. His crew are the frozen refugees of a failed colony known as Barnard's Star. A thousand years older, Mursk finds Sol on the brink of rebellion, while a fanatic necro cult is reviving death itself. Now Mursk and his lover, Captain Xiomara "Xmary" Li Weng, are sent on a final, desperate mission by King Bruno de Towaji–one of the greatest terraformers of the ages–to literally crush the moon. If they succeed, they'll save billions of lost souls. If they fail, they'll strand humanity between death–and something unimaginably worse...

At the age of seventeen the young nobleman named Jaibriol Qox became ruler of a vast galactic empire - and lost everything he had ever valued.

Born of a clandestine liaison between a renegade daughter of the Skolian Imperialate and a scion of the genetically engineered Eubian Traders, Jai Qox grew up in exile, unaware of the powers that coursed through his noble blood. In the waning days of the bloody Radiance War, which ravaged the galaxy, Jai was captured, and returned to the Traders to play a role as a puppet Emperor in their scheme to consolidate their domination of space.

Now Jai must walk a razor's edge, to seize the power that is his by birthright, without succumbing to its dark seduction, in order to avert a conflagration which threatens to engulf a thousand worlds.

The Aventine Empire is crumbling under the attacks of savages armed with strange and dangerous powers. Exiled from the empire, a powerful telepath named Leonardo is captured by the savages, and finds himself in unfamiliar territory. Prepared for their brutality and mindless aggression, Leonardo learns their world differs from what he has been taught, and he is forced to question all of his previously held assumptions.

Table of Contents:

• 11 - Savage Empire - [The Savage Empire - 1] - (1981) - novel by Jean Lorrah
• 187 - Dragon Lord of the Savage Empire - [The Savage Empire - 2] - (1982) - novel by Jean Lorrah
• 367 - Captives of the Savage Empire - [The Savage Empire - 3] - (1984) - novel by Jean Lorrah

Lilith Le Fey is a strange woman by the standards of pre-war British society. She lives alone, practices ancient magic, and is searching for a priest to help her change the world. She finds that priest in Rupert Malcolm, a renowned neurological doctor with a prickly personality. Malcolm is a vital man, but time and again, he chooses to allow his vitality to be sacrificed to the norms of the society. When he meets Lilith, he undergoes a deep spiritual transformation.

In this novel, a sequel to "The Shot Into Infinity", Gail combines several science fiction themes into a single exciting, suspenseful narrative: Space travel, including one of the first space stations to appear in fiction, which serves to focus solar energy down to Earth. Atlantis, the origins of ancient human cultures and the bizarre World Ice Theory of Hanns Horbiger, which eventually became an official science source for Nazi racial theory.

Although Horbiger was one of the great pseudoscientists of the twentieth century, Gail's descriptions of space travel were based meticulously on the work of astronautics pioneers Hermann Oberth and Max Valier. In addition to being a thrilling novel, this book is also an accurate mirror of the state of the art of astronautics during the time.

In the sequel to Strands of Starlight, Christopher, Baron of Aurverelle, rescues Vanessa, a young peasant girl with extraordinary powers, from the persecution of the Inquisition, and the two join forces with Elvenkind to save the world from murderous rebels.

The second novel in this gripping historical fantasy series, set in an alternate first-century Britain, follows Orla Paorach, freedom fighter and daughter of a Boudica-like warrior.

"Orla! Hurry, girl! You must come with me!"

Orla Paorach's life was overturned for the first time when her mother Voada was beaten senseless, and Orla was taken by Bakir, a minor Mundoan army officer, as his second wife. Now her world is shattered a second time: Bakir has died in battle, and so has her mother, now known as the Mad Draoi of the Cateni.

Orla flees northward to Onglse, the island home of the draoi that is the center of the Cateni rebellion against the Mundoa. She becomes quickly embroiled in battle as well as deceptions from both sides of the conflict, as everyone expects that she's come to take up her mother's mantle. Those who knew her mother offer their help, but can she trust any of them? Can she avoid becoming the Mad Draoi herself, lost in the magic her mother once tried to wield?

An intense, fast-paced novel, A Rising Moon explores trust, courage, and the deep seduction of power.

A navigator joins forces with a female warrior to avenge a murder and save a princess in a fantastic world of madness and magic

Home is calling to Moichi Annai-Nin the navigator, oath-brother to the great Dai-San. But a series of horrific deaths in Sha'angh'sei have tied him indefinitely to this land, and justice must be served before he can set sail for the place where his heart truly dwells. A strange destiny awaits Moichi at the Circus of Souls--a treasure and a curse beyond all imagining--as he joins forces with Chiisai, the bewitching and beautiful Bujun warrior, on a perilous enterprise of rescue and vengeance that will carry them both to the ends of the world. For beyond all human boundaries, in the mysterious land of the opal moon, an unthinkable evil is on the rise--and a mad sorceress will not rest until she gains the awesome power to unleash nightmares on the earth.

The Crescent Empire teeters on the edge of a revolution, and the Five Daughters of the Moon are the ones to determine its future.

Alina, six, fears Gagargi Prataslav and his Great Thinking Machine. The gagargi claims that the machine can predict the future, but at a cost that no one seems to want to know.

Merile, eleven, cares only for her dogs, but she smells that something is afoul with the gagargi. By chance, she learns that the machine devours human souls for fuel, and yet no one believes her claim.

Sibilia, fifteen, has fallen in love for the first time in her life. She couldn't care less about the unrests spreading through the countryside. Or the rumors about the gagargi and his machine.

Elise, sixteen, follows the captain of her heart to orphanages and workhouses. But soon she realizes that the unhappiness amongst her people runs much deeper that anyone could have ever predicted.

And Celestia, twenty-two, who will be the empress one day. Lately, she's been drawn to the gagargi. But which one of them was the first to mention the idea of a coup?

Inspired by the 1917 Russian revolution and the last months of the Romanov sisters, The Five Daughters of the Moon is a beautifully crafted historical fantasy with elements of technology fuelled by evil magic.

We all think we know how the story ends...

With the Crescent Empress dead, a civil war has torn the empire asunder. No one seems able to stop the ruthless Gagargi Prataslav. The five Daughters of the Moon are where he wants them to be, held captive in an isolated house in the far north.

Little Alina senses that the rooms that have fallen in disrepair have a sad tale to tell. Indeed, she soon meets two elderly ladies, the ghosts of the house's former inhabitants.

Merile finds the ghosts suspiciously friendly and too interested in her sisters. She resolves to uncover their agenda with the help of her two dogs.

Sibilia isn't terribly interested in her younger sisters' imaginary friends, for she has other concerns. If they don't leave the house by spring, she'll miss her debut. And while reading through the holy scriptures, she stumbles upon a mystery that reeks of power.

Elise struggles to come to terms with her relationship with Captain Janlav. Her former lover now serves the gagargi, and it's his duty to keep the daughters confined in the house. But if the opportunity were to arise, she might be able sway him into helping them flee.

Celestia is perfectly aware of the gagargi coming to claim her rather sooner than later. She's resolved to come up with a plan to keep her sisters safe at any cost. For she knows what tends to happen to the sisters of the Crescent Empress.