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If you control our sleep, then you can own our dreams... And from there, it's easy to control our entire lives.

January is a dying planet--divided between a permanently frozen darkness on one side, and blazing endless sunshine on the other. Humanity clings to life, spread across two archaic cities built in the sliver of habitable dusk.

But life inside the cities is just as dangerous as the uninhabitable wastelands outside.

Sophie, a student and reluctant revolutionary, is supposed to be dead, after being exiled into the night. Saved only by forming an unusual bond with the enigmatic beasts who roam the ice, Sophie vows to stay hidden from the world, hoping she can heal.

But fate has other plans--and Sophie's ensuing odyssey and the ragtag family she finds will change the entire world.

The irrational, all-pervading violence of the modern world is the subject of this extraordinary tour de force.

The central character's dreams are haunted by images of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, dead astronauts and car-crash victims as he traverses the screaming wastes of nervous breakdown. Seeking his sanity, he casts himself in a number of roles: H-bomber pilot, presidential assassin, crash victim, psychopath. Finally, through the black, perverse magic of violence he transcends his psychic turmoil to find the key to a bizarre new sexuality.

Table of Contents:

• You and Me and the Continuum - (1966)
• Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan - (1968)
• You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe - (1966)
• The Assassination Weapon - (1966)
• The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race - (1966)
• The Atrocity Exhibition - (1966)
• Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy - (1966)
• Crash! - (1969)
• Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A. - (1968)
• Tolerances of the Human Face - (1969)
• The Summer Cannibals - (1969)
• The Great American Nude - (1968)
• The University of Death - (1968)
• Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown - (1967)
• The Generations of America - (1968)

A Brazilian freelance journalist confronts the grim reality her past choices created when she covers a community of people living in a landfill and what they must do to survive...

Read the full story for free at Tor Reactor.

Gwynn and Raule are rebels on the run, with little in common except being on the losing side of a hard-fought war. Gwynn is a gunslinger from the north, a loner, a survivor... a killer. Raule is a wandering surgeon, a healer who still believes in just - and lost - causes. Bound by a desire to escape the ghosts of the past, together they flee to the teeming city of Ashamoil, where Raule plies her trade among the desperate and destitute, and Gwynn becomes bodyguard and assassin for the household of a corrupt magnate. There, in the saving and taking of lives, they find themselves immersed in a world where art infects life, dream and waking fuse, and splendid and frightening miracles begin to bloom...

A collection of 15 short stories ranging from science fiction to fantasy to contemporary fiction with a fantastic edge.

Table of Contents:

• Beginnings - (1993) - shortstory
• 000-00-0000 - (1986) - shortstory
• Snapshots from the Butterfly Plague - (1990) - shortstory
• Among the Handlers or, The Mark 16 Hands On Assembly of Jesus Risen, Formerly Snake-o-rama - (1996) - novelette
• At the City Limits of Fate - (1982) - novelette
• Epistrophy - (1995) - shortstory
• For Thus Do I Remember Carthage - (1987) - shortstory
• Allegra's Hand - (1996) - novelette
• God's Hour - (1987) - shortstory
• In the Memory Room - (1987) - shortstory
• Life Regarded as a Jigsaw Puzzle of Highly Lustrous Cats - (1991) - shortstory
• Reading the Silks - (1989) - shortstory
• Icicle Music - (1989) - shortstory
• The Ommatidium Miniatures - (1989) - shortstory
• I, Iscariot - (1995) - novelette

Between the incessant music of the stars and the spectre of a giant squid caught inside a locket ball, it is difficult for Don Horacio to maintain a restful mind.

This story is included in the collection The Door Gunner and Other Perilous Flights of Fancy: A Michael Bishop Retrospective (2012).

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Tankar Holroy, Lieutenant in the Stellar Guard of earth's Empire, floats in space after his spaceship is sabotaged. Rescued by an enormous, unknown ship, he awakes to discover himself saved by the People of the Stars who are born and live in space with minimal contact with planets and their occupants whom they call, with contempt, planetaries.

The chilly welcome he receives from the ship's leader, the Teknor, is followed by overt hostility from the other inhabitants of the Tilsin. Only a woman named Orena reaches out to him.

Tankar soon realizes that he was rescued for his knowledge of tracers, the technology that allows Empire ships to track others through hyperspace, a technology the People of the Stars lack. Out of spite, he refuses to deliver the one piece of knowledge that can protect the people who saved but now spurn him - and the consequences will be catastrophic.

A tour-de-force, a disciplined exercise peopled originally by wooden or ivory or jade figurines, now fleshed and clothed and given dramatic life in a battle as old as the classic conflict of chess. But these are real people. When heads roll, blood gouts out and drenches the remaining players while they watch in horrified fascination - until their turn comes. For it is a real game. And the players cannot tell the outcome. Even when their lives depend on it....

The book is presented as a dialogue between "a Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitaller and a Genoese Sea-Captain". Inspired by Plato's Republic and the description of Atlantis in Timaeus, it describes a theocratic society where goods, women and children are held in common. It also resembles the City of Adocentyn in the Picatrix, an Arabic grimoire of astrological magic.

In the final part of the work, Campanella prophesies--in the veiled language of astrology--that the Spanish kings, in alliance with the Pope, are destined to be the instruments of a Divine Plan: the final victory of the True Faith and its diffusion in the whole world. While one could argue that Campanella was simply thinking of the conquest of the New World, it seems that this prophecy should be interpreted in the light of a work written shortly before The City of the Sun, The Monarchy in Spain, in which Campanella exposes his vision of a unified, peaceful world governed by a theocratic monarchy.

This short story originally appeared in the collection Sunfall (1981) and was reprinted in Lightspeed, April 2014. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 8 (1982), edited by Arthur W. Saha, and is included in the collection The Collected Short Fiction of C. J. Cherryh (2004).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Men had built cities before, but never such a city as Diaspar; for millennia its protective dome shutout the creeping decay and danger of the world outside. Once, it held powers that rules the stars. But then, as legend had it, The invaders came, driving humanity into this last refuge. It takes one man, A Unique to break through Diaspar's stifling inertia, to smash the legend and discover the true nature of the Invaders.

This is a revised and expanded version of Against the Fall of Night.

Futuristic visions of the fantastic way man will someday live.

Table of Contents:

• 11 - Introduction: Why the City? - essay by the editors
• 15 - Of Dreams and Nightmares: Visions of the City - essay by the editors
• 18 - The City as a Way of Life: New York A.D. 2660 - essay by the editors
• 19 - New York A.D. 2660 (Excerpt) - short fiction by Hugo Gernsback
• 32 - Jesting Pilot - essay by the editors
• 33 - Jesting Pilot - short story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore
• 46 - Chicago - essay by the editors
• 47 - Chicago - short story by Thomas F. Monteleone
• 62 - Utopian Visions: Street of Dreams, Feet of Clay - essay by the editors
• 63 - Street of Dreams, Feet of Clay - short story by Robert Sheckley
• 78 - Dystopian Visions: The Vanishing American - essay by the editors
• 79 - The Vanishing American - short story by Charles Beaumont
• 90 - Yesterday's Dreams, Today's Problems, Tomorrow's Nightmares? - essay by the editors
• 92 - The Competition for Space - essay by the editors
• 94 - Billennium - short story by J. G. Ballard
• 109 - Total Environment - novelette by Brian W. Aldiss
• 151 - Future Ghetto: Race and the City - essay by the editors
• 155 - Black Is Beautiful - short story by Robert Silverberg
• 169 - In Dark Places - short story by Joe L. Hensley
• 178 - Fouling the Nest: Pollution in the City - essay by the editors
• 181 - East Wind, West Wind - novelette by Frank M. Robinson (variant of "East Wind, West Wind")
• 208 - Disposal - short story by Ron Goulart
• 216 - Fear in the City: The Problem of Crime - essay by the editors
• 218 - The Undercity - short story by Dean R. Koontz
• 231 - Rivers of Asphalt, Oceans of Concrete: Transportation Problems - essay by the editors
• 233 - Gas Mask - short story by James D. Houston
• 243 - Traffic Problem - short story by Bill Earls
• 252 - The Grass is Always Greener: The Flight to the Suburbs - essay by the editors
• 254 - Gantlet - short story by Richard E. Peck
• 266 - City's End - novelette by Mack Reynolds
• 282 - The Slime Dwellers - short story by Scott Edelstein
• 289 - A Happy Day in 2381 - [Urban Monad] - short story by Robert Silverberg

Hugo-nominated Novella

A moderately modern city, pulsing with music and commerce, seemingly of infinite length, yet only as broad as a wide avenue, flanked on one side by Heaven, on the other by Hell. Such is the milieu intimately familiar to -- and mostly unquestioned by -- the millions of average humans who inhabit the Linear City. Yet a small band of seekers do indeed ponder their odd lot, the genesis and fate of their strange habitation. Among the speculatively minded are a small group of writers who specialize in what they call "Cosmogonic Fiction." And among these men and women we find Diego Patchen, one of the younger luminaries of his set. A Year in the Linear City is the story of Diego and his friends, their loves and rivalries, their failures and triumphs, during one pivotal year beneath the Seasonsun and Daysun, in forbidding sight of The Other Shore and The Wrong Side of the Tracks. Careers will flourish, comrades will part forever, subterranean adventures will endanger both soul and city, and a fateful expedition to faroff Blocks will bring new and challenging perspectives, leaving no one unchanged.

Table of Contents:

• 1 - Introduction: The Creation of Rome (The Eternal City) - essay by David Drake
• 5 - Delenda Est - [Time Patrol - 5] - novelette by Poul Anderson
• 47 - Nightfall on the Dead Sea - short story by Ray Nelson
• 65 - The Prince - novella by C. J. Cherryh
• 103 - The Bottom of the Gulf - short story by Barry Pain
• 107 - An Elixir for the Emperor - novelette by John Brunner
• 129 - Some Very Odd Happenings at Kibblesham Manor House - short story by Michael Harrison
• 145 - Time Grabber - short story by Gordon R. Dickson
• 163 - Survey of the Third Planet - short story by Keith Roberts
• 181 - Don't Be a Goose - [Murchison Morks] - short story by Robert Arthur
• 197 - Domitia. - short story by Mrs. Richard S. Greenough
• 215 - Survival Technique - short story by Poul Anderson and Kenneth Gray
• 233 - Ranks of Bronze - [Ranks of Bronze] - short story by David Drake
• 245 - Kings of the Night - [Bran Mak Morn] - novelette by Robert E. Howard

This short story originally appeared in Interzone, #222 June 2009. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 15 (2010), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

Written in a voice that is accessible to both mainstream and genre readers, this gripping tale contains a contemporary political subtext that is packed with humanism, complexity, and subtle humor. This inventive story centers on a mysterious enclave protecting a lost culture, a hidden city in the wilderness where stranded aliens struggle to preserve their fragile society. Hoping for a better life, many have fled the Secret City in favor of trying to survive in the harsh human world; others remain concealed, living out a fading memory in hope of deliverance. When the mythical rescuers suddenly arrive, insisting on an immediate interplanetary return, these very-human aliens discover that neither world is truly their own.

Stefin-Dae should have died on Slabour, like all good diggers do. After a few years of grubbing in the earth for Creelium - the most precious metal known to man - Stefin's lungs should have been so full of red dust that there was no room left for air. But Stefin got lucky (or maybe it was just his destiny). He escaped from Slabour, stumbled upon the key to the Universe, the Secret of Synchronicity - and became the most dangerous man in the inhabited galaxies!

Sixteen-year-old Sorina has spent most of her life within the smoldering borders of the Gomorrah Festival. Yet even among the many unusual members of the traveling circus-city, Sorina stands apart as the only illusion-worker born in hundreds of years. This rare talent allows her to create illusions that others can see, feel and touch, with personalities all their own. Her creations are her family, and together they make up the cast of the Festival's Freak Show.

But no matter how lifelike they may seem, her illusions are still just that--illusions, and not truly real. Or so she always believed...until one of them is murdered.

Desperate to protect her family, Sorina must track down the culprit and determine how they killed a person who doesn't actually exist. Her search for answers leads her to the self-proclaimed gossip-worker Luca. Their investigation sends them through a haze of political turmoil and forbidden romance, and into the most sinister corners of the Festival. But as the killer continues murdering Sorina's illusions one by one, she must unravel the horrifying truth before all her loved ones disappear.

In the 28th century, Valerian and Laureline are a team of special operatives charged with maintaining order throughout the human territories. Under assignment from the Minister of Defense, the two embark on a mission to the astonishing city of Alpha--an ever-expanding metropolis where species from all over the universe have converged over centuries to share knowledge, intelligence and cultures with each other.

There is a mystery at the center of Alpha, a dark force which threatens the peaceful existence of the City of a Thousand Planets, and Valerian and Laureline must race to identify the marauding menace and safeguard not just Alpha, but the future of the universe.

In 1925, earthquakes and a rising sea level left Lower Manhattan submerged under more than thirty feet of water, so that its residents began to call it the Drowning City. Those unwilling to abandon their homes created a new life on streets turned to canals and in buildings whose first three stories were underwater. Fifty years have passed since then, and the Drowning City is full of scavengers and water rats, poor people trying to eke out an existence, and those too proud or stubborn to be defeated by circumstance.

Among them are fourteen-year-old Molly McHugh and her friend and employer, Felix Orlov. Once upon a time Orlov the Conjuror was a celebrated stage magician, but now he is an old man, a psychic medium, contacting the spirits of the departed for the grieving loved ones left behind. When a seance goes horribly wrong, Felix Orlov is abducted by strange men wearing gas masks and rubber suits, and Molly soon finds herself on the run.

Her flight will lead her into the company of a mysterious man, and his stalwart sidekick, Joe Golem, whose own past is a mystery to him, but who walks his own dreams as a man of stone and clay, brought to life for the sole purpose of hunting witches.

Nebula Award-nominated author Maria Dahvana Headley has always loved Damon Runyon's stylized faux-reporting on New York City. This is her version of a Runyon tale--this one dealing with the architectural guys and dolls of New York City--and a valentine to all the beautiful buildings she knows.

It's Valentine's Day, 1938, and the Chrysler Building's tired of waiting on the corner of Forty-second and Lex for a certain edifice to notice her. Here's the story of what might happen if two of New York's greatest creations met on a day built for romance.

This story is included in the anthologies The New Voices of Fantasy (2017), edited by Peter S. Beagle and Jacob Weisman, New York Fantastic (2017), edited by Paula Guran, and Worlds Seen in Passing: Ten Years of Tor.com Short Fiction (2018), edited by Irene Gallo.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Shirley Jackson nominated short story. It originally appeared in Cemetery Dance, #58, 2008. It can also be found in the chapbook The Inner City (2013), the eponymous collection The Inner City (2013), and the anthology Invaders: 22 Tales from the Outer Limits of Literature (2016), edited by Jacob Weisman.

Looking for a job, a woman discovers a hidden underground city manipulating the city she lives in. Will she be hired?

Heuler's stories dart out at what the world is doing and center on how the individual copes with it. Anything is possible: people breed dogs with humans to create a servant class; beneath one great city lies another city, running it surreptitiously; an employee finds that her hair has been stolen by someone intent on getting her job; strange fish fall from trees and birds talk too much; a boy tries to figure out what he can get when the Rapture leaves good stuff behind. Everything is familiar; everything is different. Behind it all, is there some strange kind of design or merely just the chance to adapt? In Heuler's stories, characters cope with the strange without thinking it's strange, sometimes invested in what's going on, sometimes trapped by it, but always finding their own way in.

Table of Contents:

• FishWish - (2011)
• The Inner City - (2008)
• Down on the Farm - (2007)
• The Great Spin - (2013)
• The Escape Artist - (2013)
• The Large People - (2011)
• After Images - (2009)
• Creating Cow - (2013)
• Beds - (2013)
• How Lightly He Stepped in the Air - (2013)
• The Difficulties of Evolution - (2008)
• Thick Water - (2011)
• The Hair - (2013)
• Ordinary - (2013)
• Landscape, with Fish - (2008)

In the state of Liberty, water is rationed at alarming prices, free speech is hardly without a cost, and Texas has just declared itself its own country. In this society, paranoia is well-suited because eyes and ears are all around, and they are judging. Always judging. This terrifying (and yet somehow vaguely familiar) terrain is explored via Eleanor, a young woman eagerly learning about the gifts of her magic through the support of her coven.

But being a white witch is not as easy as they portray it in the books, and she's already been placed under "house arrest" with a letch named Stan, a coworker who wronged her in the past and now exists in the form of a cat. A talking cat who loves craft beers, picket lines, and duping and "shooting" people.

Eleanor has no time for Stan and his shenanigans, because she finds herself helping another coven locate a missing witch which she thinks is mysteriously linked to the shortage of water in Liberty.

It is the early years of the reign of Basil II, who became one most successful, and most feared, Byzantine emperors. But for now, Basil rules as a co-emperor with his brother Constantine, and makes war on a would-be usurper, Bardas Phokas, son of a General who Basil supplanted.

Basil's most trusted troops are foreign mercenaries, the Varangian guard hired from the North. Rus and Norsemen, Viking raiders and wild horsemen from the steppes, they fall upon the elegant city of Constantinople like wolves on a garden party. Among them is the wily young son of an Irish slave, who comes to the notice of the emperor's wife. But being noticed by an angry emperor is not safe at all.

Seven years on the run from her abusive father, and with no hope of sanctuary among the dwindling pockets of human civilization, Lark is out of options. Her only leverage is a cursed power: she can thrust fear onto others, leaving all threats fleeing in terror. It's a means of survival as she searches for a place to call home. If the campfire myths of her childhood are true, Lark's sole chance for refuge could lie in Cagmar, the city of trolls?a brutal species and the sworn enemies of humanity.

Valuing combat prowess, the troll high council is intrigued. Lark could be much more useful than the low-caste humans who merely labor in Cagmar. Her gift makes her invaluable as a monster slayer to fight off the unspeakable creatures that torment the trolls' hanging city, suspended from a bridge over an endless dark canyon.

Lark will do anything to make Cagmar her home, but her new role comes with a caveat: use her power against a troll, and she'll be killed. Her loyalty is quickly put to the test when she draws the hatred of a powerful troll who loathes humankind. Still, she finds unexpected friendship in the city and, even more surprisingly, love. But if everything else doesn't undo her, being caught in the arms of a troll surely will. Now in the fight of her life, Lark has a lot to learn?about her past, about trust and hope when all seems lost, and above all, about the extraordinary power of fear itself.

Emmi Itäranta's prose combines the lyricism of Ishiguro's NEVER LET ME GO. This is her second novel, following the award-winning MEMORY OF WATER.

The tapestry of life may be more fragile than it seems: pull one thread, and all will unravel.

In the City of Woven Streets, human life has little value. You practice a craft to keep you alive, or you are an outcast, unwanted and tainted. Eliana is a young weaver in the House of Webs, but secretly knows she doesn't really belong there. She is hiding a shameful birth defect that would, if anyone knew about it, land her in the House of the Tainted, a prison for those whose very existence is considered a curse.

When an unknown woman with her tongue cut off and Eliana's name tattooed on her skin arrives at the House of Webs, Eliana discovers an invisible network of power behind the city's facade. All the while, the sea is clawing the shores and the streets are slowly drowning.

Note: Also published as The Weaver.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology The Company He Keeps (2010), edited by Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers, and was reprinted in Uncanny Magazine, Issue Six, September/October 2015.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny Magazine.

The city changed my life and showed me that the world is deeply mysterious. I need to tell you about her and some terrible things and wonderful things and amazing things that happened... and how I am still haunted by them. Including one night when I died and woke and lived again.

Here is the riveting, soul-stirring story of Jonah Kirk, son of an exceptional singer, grandson of a formidable "piano man," a musical prodigy beginning to explore his own gifts when he crosses a group of extremely dangerous people, with shattering consequences. Set in a more innocent time not so long ago, The City encompasses a lifetime but unfolds over three extraordinary, heart-racing years of tribulation and triumph, in which Jonah first grasps the electrifying power of music and art, of enduring friendship, of everyday heroes.

The unforgettable saga of a young man coming of age within a remarkable family, and a shimmering portrait of the world that shaped him, The City is a novel that speaks to everyone, a dazzling realization of the evergreen dreams we all share. Brilliantly illumined by magic dark and light, it's a place where enchantment and malice entwine, courage and honor are found in the most unexpected quarters, and the way forward lies buried deep inside the heart.

Anima is an extrasensory human tasked with surveilling and protecting Ora's citizens via a complex living network called the Gleaming. Although ær world is restricted to what æ can see and experience through the Gleaming, Anima takes pride and comfort in keeping Ora safe from harm.

When a mysterious outsider enters the city carrying a cabinet of curiosities from around with the world with a story attached to each item, Anima's world expands beyond the borders of Ora to places - and possibilities - æ never before imagined to exist. But such knowledge leaves Anima with a question that throws into doubt ær entire purpose: What good is a city if it can't protect its people?

Ziaparr: a city being rebuilt after years of mechanized and magical warfare, the capital of a ravaged nation on the verge of renewal and self-rule. But unrest foments as undercaste cycle gangs raid supply trucks, agitate the populace and vandalize the city. A revolution is brewing in the slums and shantytowns against the occupying government, led by a voice on the radio, connected through forbidden magic.

Wenthi Tungét, a talented cycle rider and a loyal officer in the city patrol, is assigned to infiltrate the cycle gangs. For his mission against the insurgents, Wenthi must use their magic, connecting his mind to Nália, a recently captured rebel, using her knowledge to find his way into the heart of the rebellion.

Wenthi's skill on a cycle makes him valuable to the resistance cell he joins, but he discovers that the magic enhances with speed. Every ride intensifies his connection, drawing him closer to the gang he must betray, and strengthens Nália's presence as she haunts his mind.

Wenthi is torn between justice and duty, and the wrong choice will light a spark in a city on the verge of combustion.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Behind the Mask: An Anthology of Heroic Proportions (2017), edited by Tricia Reeks and Kyle Richardson. It can also be found in the anthology The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018, edited by N.K. Jemisin and John Joseph Adams.

When the body of a murdered woman is found in the extraordinary, decaying city of Bes el, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks like a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he probes, the evidence begins to point to conspiracies far stranger, and more deadly, than anything he could have imagined. Soon his work puts him and those he cares for in danger. Borlu must travel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own, across a border like no other.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Engineering Infinity (2010), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, Issue 123, December 2016. It can also be found in the anthologies War & Space: Recent Combat (2012), edited by Rich Horton and Sean Wallace, and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection (2012), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

YOU ARE
an astronaut turned into a machine, and now searching for your stolen humanity...
a woman volunteering to be frozen for a hundred thousand years to await the return of your lover...
a survivor of a holocaust stumbling over a nightmare landscape toward a dream-like city shimmering in the distance...
a new kind of soldier beginning to doubt his mission as an infinitely powerful instrument of destruction...
a man hunted by computers through the streets, buildings, and sewers of a vast and murderous metropolis...
an explorer returning over time and space to the horror that he still thinks of as home...

YOU ARE
an inhabitant,
a slave,
a victim,
an enemy,
a witness of...
THE TIME-SWEPT CITY

More than a decade ago, Michael Moorcock's extraordinary Mother London gave stunning new breath and style to contemporary literature. With Bruce Chatwin's Utz and Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, the novel was short-listed for Britain's prestigious Whitbread Prize. Now, with scathing wit and enthralling vision, the author whom the Washington Post has praised as "one of the most exciting discoveries in the contemporary English novel [in] 40 or so years" returns to a city transformed and transforming, and in peril of its life.

These are the times and trials of Dennis Dover, former rock guitarist, photojournalist, and paparazzo. Denny inhabits a world of vibrant color, smell, and sound, where novel experience and unpredictability are anchored by steadfast tradition and history. Mother London's many vagaries give Denny Dover joy and succor, always seducing him home from the Earth's terrible places, where the face of death is as common as the blood that stains the local dirt. And London is where Rosie Beck is, when she isn't off elsewhere combating the planet's great ills.

Denny's brilliant, beautiful, socially conscious cousin has always been an indispensable part of his being -- his soul mate and his soul. Since childhood they have been inseparable, delighting in the daily discoveries of a life with no limits. But now the metropolis that nurtured them is threatened by a powerful, unstoppable force that consumes the past indiscriminately and leaves nothing of substance in its wake.

The terminator is named John Barbican Begg. A hanger-on from Denny and Rosie's youth, he has become the morally corrupt center of their London and the richest, most rapacious creature in the Western Hemisphere. Now, as their cherished landmarks tumble, conspiracy, secrets, lies, and betrayal become the centerpieces of Rosie and Dennis's days. For Barbican has but one goal: to devour the entire world. And the only choice left is to join in, drop out... or plot to destroy.

A sprawling work of incomparable invention, King of the City is eccentric and remarkable, a unique urban love story with a pit-bull bite that confirms the unparalleled literary genius of the amazing Michael Moorcock.

Half a generation ago, a gesture in the name of peace turned out to spread plague and disaster. In San Francisco, the survivors are heir to a city transformed. It is a haunted, dreaming place peopled with memories, and in a strange way nearly alive itself. And although it is only beginning to recover from near-ultimate disaster, the city is at risk again. An army of power-hungry men are descending on San Francisco. Teenagers Jax and Danny-boy must lead the fight for freedom using the only weapons they have-art, magic, and the soul of the city itself.

A deadly plague has devastated Earth, killing all adults. Lisa and her younger brother Todd are struggling to stay alive in a world where no one is safe. Other children along Grand Avenue need help as well. They band together to find food, shelter, and protection from dangerous gangs invading their neighborhood.

When Tom Logan and his army start making thrats, Lisa comes up with a plan and leads her group to a safer place. But how far is she willing to go protect what's hers?

THE KINGDOM'S HEART is the City. The City's heart is the King. The King's heart is the Prince. The Prince is missing.

Ever since the Prince disappeared, nothing has been right in the Kingdom. Something has disturbed the strange, old magic that whispers around its borders... something cunning and powerful. And the disturbance extends to the farthest reaches of the Kingdom, including the idyllic village where Timou is learning to be a mage under her father's tutelage.

When Timou's father journeys to the City to help look for the Prince, but never returns, Timou senses that the disturbance in the Kingdom is linked to her--and to the undiscovered heritage of the mother she never knew. She must leave her village, even if it means confronting powers greater than her own, even though what she finds may challenge everything she knows. Even if it means leaving love behind.

Chicago, 1893. For Alter Rosen, this is the land of opportunity, and he dreams of the day he'll have enough money to bring his mother and sisters to America, freeing them from the oppression they face in his native Romania.

But when Alter's best friend, Yakov, becomes the latest victim in a long line of murdered Jewish boys, his dream begins to slip away. While the rest of the city is busy celebrating the World's Fair, Alter is now living a nightmare: possessed by Yakov's dybbuk, he is plunged into a world of corruption and deceit, and thrown back into the arms of a dangerous boy from his past. A boy who means more to Alter than anyone knows.

Now, with only days to spare until the dybbuk takes over Alter's body completely, the two boys must race to track down the killer--before the killer claims them next.

No one cares that you cured cancer if you also cloned a horde of dinosaurs and let them rampage down the street.

Supergenius and quasi-villain Rex normally can't go a week without accidentally endangering Decimen City with her science shenanigans. It's been two weeks since her genetically engineered dinosaurs rampaged through town - a good streak for her - but the peace is broken when actual villain Last Dance sets his sights on Decimen. And he wants Rex's help. Before Rex can say "I didn't do it," superheroes who've dragged her to jail on her worst days are crowding her lab to conscript her into quasi-herodom.

Rex would rather stay out of it and deal with the dinosaurs that keep calling her Mom, but she can't ignore that she was somewhat responsible for Last Dance's villainy. She'd kept a very disorganized lab. And he was such a nosy brother. She failed to help him back then, but maybe if she stops him now, and keeps the heroes fooled, she can finally set things right.

The magnum opus of Russia's greatest science fiction novelists translated into English for the first time

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are widely considered the greatest of Russian science fiction masters, and their most famous work, Roadside Picnic, has enjoyed great popularity worldwide. Yet the novel they worked hardest on, that was their own favorite, and that readers worldwide have acclaimed as their magnum opus, has never before been published in English. The Doomed City was so politically risky that the Strugatsky brothers kept its existence a complete secret even from their closest friends for sixteen years after its completion in 1972. It was only published in Russia during perestroika in the late 1980s, the last of their works to see publication. It was translated into a host of European languages, and now appears in English in a major new effort by acclaimed translator Andrew Bromfield.

The Doomed City is set in an experimental city whose sun gets switched on in the morning and switched off at night, bordered by an abyss on one side and an impossibly high wall on the other. Its inhabitants are people who were plucked from twentieth-century history at various times and places and left to govern themselves, advised by Mentors whose purpose seems inscrutable. Andrei Voronin, a young astronomer plucked from Leningrad in the 1950s, is a die-hard believer in the Experiment, even though his first job in the city is as a garbage collector. And as increasinbly nightmarish scenarios begin to affect the city, he rises through the political hierarchy, with devastating effect. Boris Strugatsky wrote that the task of writing The Doomed City "was genuinely delightful and fascinating work." Readers will doubtless say the same of the experience of reading it.

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, September 14, 1981. The story can also be found in the anthology The 1982 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Arthur W. Saha. It is included in the collection Fire from the Wine Dark Sea (1983).

Slip into a lush world of magic, stardust, and monsters...

For centuries, the Everlys have seen their best and brightest disappear, taken as punishment for a crime no one remembers, for a purpose no one understands. Their tormentor, a woman named Penelope, never ages, never grows sick -- and never forgives a debt.

Violet Everly was a child when her mother left on a stormy night, determined to break the curse. When Marianne never returns, Penelope issues an ultimatum: Violet has ten years to find her mother, or she will take her place. Violet is the last of the Everly line, the last to suffer. Unless she can break the curse first.

Imagine a world without hunger. With clothing and shelter for everyone. A world that is never too warm or too cold. A world where there are no decisions to be made, because everything is decided upon for the inhabitants.

A utopia? Or a prison? Because paradise has a price.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Lawrence Watt-Evans
• Cloister - (1991) - shortstory by Piers Anthony
• Getting Real - novelette by Susan Shwartz
• The Cleanest Block in Town - shortfiction by Janet Asimov
• Another Dime, Another Place - novelette by A. J. Austin
• Watching New York Melt - shortfiction by Lawrence Watt-Evans and Julie Evans
• Post Time in Pink - novelette by Mike Resnick
• Learning Experience - shortfiction by Laurence M. Janifer
• Ties - shortfiction by Martha Soukup
• Wild Thing - shortfiction by Eric Blackburn
• Rise and Fall - shortfiction by Stephen L. Antczak
• Shadows on the Moon - shortstory by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
• The Baby Track - shortfiction by Howard Mittelmark
• Clash of Titans (A New York Romance) - shortfiction by Kurt Busiek
• What Lives After - shortfiction by Robert Frazier
• Slow Burn in Alphabettown - shortfiction by S. N. Lewitt
• Let Me Call You Sweetheart - shortstory by Michael A. Stackpole
• Tomb w/ View - shortfiction by P. D. Cacek
• A Walk Through Beirut - novelette by John Shirley
• The Last Real New Yorker in the World - shortfiction by James D. Macdonald and Debra Doyle
• Tunnel Vision - shortfiction by Esther M. Friesner
• A Nice Place to Visit - shortfiction by Warren Murphy and Molly Cochran
• Long Growing Season - novella by Robert J. Howe
• Candelabra and Diamonds - shortfiction by Don Sakers
• In the Good Old Summer Time - shortfiction by B. W. Clough
• Afterword - essay by Eric S. Johansson

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Synergy SF: New Science Fiction (2004), edited by George Zebrowski. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 10 (2005), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is inclued in the collection Death at the Blue Elephant (2016).

Dan Wells won instant acclaim for his three-novel debut about the adventures of John Wayne Cleaver, a heroic young man who is a potential serial killer. All who read the trilogy were struck by the distinctive and believable voice Wells created for John.

Now he returns with another innovative thriller told in a very different, equally unique voice. A voice that comes to us from the realm of madness.

Michael Shipman is paranoid schizophrenic; he suffers from hallucinations, delusions, and complex fantasies of persecution and horror. That's bad enough. But what can he do if some of the monsters he sees turn out to be real?

Who can you trust if you can't even trust yourself? The Hollow City is a mesmerizing journey into madness, where the greatest enemy of all is your own mind.

Wellington. The wind city. New Zealand's home of art and culture, but darker forces, forgotten forces, are starting to reappear. Aotearoa's displaced iwi atua--the patupaiarehe, taniwha, and ponaturi of legend--have decided to make Wellington their home, and while some have come looking for love, others have arrived in search of blood.

A war is coming, and few can stand in their way. Saint (lovably fearless, temporarily destitute, currently unable to find a shirt) may be our only hope. Tony, suddenly unemployed and potentially a taniwha herself, has little choice but to accept the role her bloodline dictates. And Hinewai, who fell with the rain? If she can't find her one true love, there's a good chance that none will live to see the morning.

Wellington will never be the same again.

The metal City towers at the center of the mountain-ringed Heartland, standing astride the deep chasm of the Canyon like a malevolent giant, ruled with an iron fist by the First Officer and his Provosts in the name of the semi-mythical Captain. Within its corroding walls lies a stratified society, where the Officers dwell in luxury on the Twelfth Tier while the poor struggle to survive on the First and Second, and outcasts scrabble and fight for whatever they can find in the Middens, the City's rubbish heap, filling the Canyon beneath its dripping underbelly.

Alania, ward of an Officer, lives on Twelfth. Raised among the privileged class, Alania feels as though she is some sort of pampered prisoner, never permitted to explore the many levels of the City. And certainly not allowed to leave the confines of the City for any reason. She has everything a young woman could want except a loving family and personal freedom.

Danyl, raised by a scavenger, knows no home but the Middens. His day-to-day responsibility is to stay alive. His sole ambition is to escape from this subsistence existence and gain entrance to the City--so near and yet so far out of reach--in hopes of a better life.

Their two very different worlds collide when Alania, fleeing from an unexpected ambush, plunges from the heights of the City down to the Middens, and into Danyl's life.

Almost immediately, both of them find themselves pursued by the First Officer's Provosts, for reasons they cannot fathom--but which they must uncover if they are to survive. The secrets they unlock, as they flee the Canyon and crisscross the Heartland from the City's farmlands to the mountains of the north and back again, will determine not only their fate, but the fate of the City... and everyone who lives there.

WFA nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Northern Frights 4 (1997), edited by Don Hutchison and was reprinted in Realms of Fantasy, October 1998. The story is included in the collection The Perseids and Other Stories (2000).

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.

Neeve meets Valentine at her Work Unit. A tentative friendship develops between them and together they summon the courage to leave the regimen of the Sixth Compound. Then Lol, unrepenatant law-breaker and member of the underground movement, blasts into their lives and their friendship takes a path none of them could have forseen.

What is the secret contained in Philip Schuyler's painting? Who was the woman he depicted, the innocent woman and her dark stalker? The Kreunen sisters know, but they must re-bury the past. And Jacob Lerner, artist flailing in a sea of commerce, can only press forward, explore his own art and the mystery of Schuyler's painting, aided and manipulated by an animate marionette of rosy glass...

Manhattan, summer, in the rosy dawn of the 21st century, the sculptor Jacob Lerner sees a painting at a friend's apartment and is drawn into an obsessive search for traces of its long-dead painter, fictional 19th-century artist Philip Schuyler, and his subject, a woman called Madame Burgundy. The search leads to the remains of a once-powerful but still wealthy Dutch-American secret society, and carries Lerner through real and surreal Manhattan streets, buildings, and countryside. Finding Schuyler's journal draws Lerner in deeper. Finding the dapper marionette makes it impossible for Lerner to escape.

In this stunning follow-up to his acclaimed debut, Thunderer, Felix Gilman's brave hero returns from one thrilling and dangerous quest only to confront another. In a magical landscape where time is meaningless, reality precarious, and countless selves work toward countless possible futures, one man must seek a city's truth-and rediscover his own.

Imprisoned with a prophetic half human, half beast, the lost man learns his name: Arjun. Slowly the terrible memories emerge, and at last he remembers where-and when-he has been....

In the last days of the once great city of Ararat, Arjun is just another ghost lost in the shadows of the Mountain. To some, the Mountain is a myth, to others, a weapon. Above all, it is a dark palace leaving its seekers to wander the city below. For no matter how far one walks, the Mountain never draws closer, and time itself becomes another trap.

Rescued by two sisters from the mindless Know-Nothings who erode what's left of the city, Arjun volunteers to retrieve their long-lost third sister from a ghost like himself: Brace-Bel, another man out of time. It will require a perilous trek through ruins to a decadent mansion-one surrounded by traps and devices that could not possibly exist yet. And what awaits Arjun inside is something he could not possibly have imagined.

As he struggles to recover the lost girl and piece the fragments of his life back together, Arjun knows he must finally return to the beast to hear the rest of its prophecy. But each step is more treacherous than the last... and the beast who knows his fate may pose the most deadly trial yet.

A spellbinding novel of imagination and intrigue, Gears of the City will propel you into an adventure like no other, in a world like no other.

Endless Peril...Anguished Fate!

Rescued by a bold sailor, held in the confines of a lascivious brothel, Cija faces yet another life-and-death ordeal.

She escapes but her respite is short-lived. Treachery and betrayal sweep her into the temple of her hated father, beyond a terrifying, sensual interlude in the Arena of Apes.

With the seed of her ape-man lover growing within her she is carried to her ultimate destiny inside the monstrous walls of Atlan...

With Wall Maria breeched, communities within the Quinta district have been cut off from each other creating famine and chaos. A young field commander named Rita is tasked with a mission to reconnect transit across the massive district while putting her troops and residence right in the vanguard as Titans descend on her town.

Shinganshina has been breached, and humanity has retreated to Wall Rose-for the most part. Quintra District, situated at the western end of Wall Maria, is holding out despite being hemmed in by the Titans on both the exterior and the formerly interior sides.

In this concluding half of this side story, Rita Iglehaut, acting commander of the local forces, struggles to turn her isolated hometown into something of a city of its own. Her draconian methods, however, shock the residents, not least Mathias Kramer, her childhood friend.

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

Ambassador to the alien world of Minbar, former Babylon 5 commander Jeffrey Sinclair, is one of the first to learn the truth about the Shadows, the ancient race pursuing the destruction of the galaxy. Sinclair also discovers a startling secret: he is the linchpin in the plan to stop them. Now, Sinclair is asked to revive the legendary Minbari warrior group, the Rangers, but it may cost him his one chance to love... and his life.

Catherine Sakai, a commercial pilot and planetary surveyor, has lost her heart to Jeffrey Sinclair. Not even an attack by the Shadows can stop her from going to Minbar to join him... and the Rangers. As she trains with other pilots, including the mysterious Marcus Cole, the time is coming when their skills will be tested on their first mission. Led by Sinclair, they will venture into deepest space, into a battle of stealth and might, and toward a fate that none but the bravest can face... and none but the luckiest will survive.

Many hundreds of years ago, the city of Ember was created by the Builders to contain everything needed for human survival. It worked - but now the storerooms are almost out of food, crops are blighted, corruption is spreading through the city and worst of all - the lights are failing. Soon Ember could be engulfed by darkness-But when two children, Lina and Doon, discover fragments of an ancient parchment, they begin to wonder if there could be a way out of Ember. Can they decipher the words from long ago and find a new future for everyone? Will the people of Ember listen to them?

Hugo Award nominated novelette. The story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1973. It is included in the collection Budayeen Nights (2003).

The final part of the Caledon Saga.

For centuries the royal line of Caledon has been the guardian of the Anchorstone, a mysterious - and dangerous - artifact that commands the terrible power of the Mists. But now Queen Mhairi of Caledon and her nemesis, King Edwin of Beringar, are summoned to the City of Exile on Feylara to end the war between their two kingdoms forever. In an unprecedented act of goodwill, Mhairi is prepared to give up possession of the Anchorstone.

But the Berings have no such harmonious motives in mind. Their wish is to kill the queen by summoning a demonic force so evil that it could disrupt the legacy of the Anchorstone. Meanwhile her husband Fannon, with his companions of old, has journeyed to a distant island. Here he will find an unsuspected secret that might save or ruin the queen, but to gain it he must face dangers greater than any he has encountered before.

As all sides come together in the City of Exile, the mysterious secrets of the Feyan are revealed and Mhairi learns that more is at stake than her own kingdom. The entire world is under threat from a menace almost beyond imagining.

Seven years have passed since the Siege?a time when the hungry dead had risen?but the memories still haunt Illi Basbowen. Though she was trained to be an elite assassin, now the Basbowen clan act as Ghadid's militia force protecting the resurrected city against a growing tide of monstrous guul that travel across the dunes.

Illi's worst fears are confirmed when General Barca arrives, bearing news that her fledgling nation, Hathage, also faces this mounting danger. In her search for the source of the guul, the general exposes a catastrophic secret hidden on the outskirts of Ghadid.

To protect her city and the realm, Illi must travel to Harthage and confront her inner demons in order to defeat a greater one?but how much can she sacrifice to protect everything she knows from devastation?

She could hear that laughter again, and for a moment Velody was confused, not sure which dead man was mocking her.

Velody now holds the leadership of the Creature Court. The unsteady alliances within the Court are beginning to fracture, as a series of murders and disappearances throw suspicion on one of their own. Ashiol finds Aufleur's many festivals frivolous, until a major one is cancelled. Unease grows. It seems nothing can save the city from a massacre ... nothing but the ultimate sacrifice from one of the Creature Kings.

The post-Katrina New Orleans of The City of Lost Fortunes is a place haunted by its history and by the hurricane's destruction, a place that is hoping to survive the rebuilding of its present long enough to ensure that it has a future. Street magician Jude Dubuisson is likewise burdened by his past and by the consequences of the storm, because he has a secret: the magical ability to find lost things, a gift passed down to him by the father he has never known -- a father who just happens to be more than human.

Jude has been lying low since the storm, which caused so many things to be lost that it played havoc with his magic, and he is hiding from his own power, his divine former employer, and a debt owed to the Fortune god of New Orleans. But his six-year retirement ends abruptly when the Fortune god is murdered and Jude is drawn back into the world he tried so desperately to leave behind. A world full of magic, monsters, and miracles. A world where he must find out who is responsible for the Fortune god's death, uncover the plot that threatens the city's soul, and discover what his talent for lost things has always been trying to show him: what it means to be his father's son.

The fourth landing of the Daedalus Mission confronts Alex and his companions with a colonial culture seemingly modeled on a classic Utopian dream, but all of its inhabitants are infected with a mysterious alien parasite, and they no longer seem entirely human. Are they being controlled by the parasite, or has the parasite merely enabled them to transform themselves? Can the visitors from Earth avoid infection themselves, and what will the consequences be if they cannot?

For once, the risks of the contact seem potentially far greater than any possible reward--but that still leaves the visitors with the necessity of passing judgment and deciding what to do, in an exceedingly awkward situation. Daedalus Mission, Book Four.

Nahri has never believed in magic. Certainly, she has power; on the streets of eighteenth-century Cairo, she's a con woman of unsurpassed talent. But she knows better than anyone that the trades she uses to get by--palm readings, zars, and a mysterious gift for healing--are all tricks, both the means to the delightful end of swindling Ottoman nobles and a reliable way to survive.

But when Nahri accidentally summons Dara, an equally sly, darkly mysterious djinn warrior, to her side during one of her cons, she's forced to reconsider her beliefs. For Dara tells Nahri an extraordinary tale: across hot, windswept sands teeming with creatures of fire and rivers where the mythical marid sleep, past ruins of once-magnificent human metropolises and mountains where the circling birds of prey are more than what they seem, lies Daevabad, the legendary city of brass--a city to which Nahri is irrevocably bound.

In Daevabad, within gilded brass walls laced with enchantments and behind the six gates of the six djinn tribes, old resentments run deep. And when Nahri decides to enter this world, her arrival threatens to ignite a war that has been simmering for centuries.

Spurning Dara's warning of the treachery surrounding her, she embarks on a hesitant friendship with Alizayd, an idealistic prince who dreams of revolutionizing his father's corrupt regime. All too soon, Nahri learns that true power is fierce and brutal. That magic cannot shield her from the dangerous web of court politics. That even the cleverest of schemes can have deadly consequences.

After all, there is a reason they say to be careful what you wish for...

Scorpia - the last city of Aquais - where the Ar Antarians rule, the machine-breeds serve and in between a multitude of races and species eke out an existence somewhere between the ever-blazing city lights and the endless darkness of the underside.

As a spate of murders and abductions grip the city, new recruit Silho Brabel is sent to the Oscuri Trackers, an elite military squad commanded by the notorious Copernicus Kane. But Silho has a terrible secret and must fight to hide her strange abilities and monstrous heritage.

As the team delve deeper into Scorpia's underworld, they discover a nightmare truth.

Hunted by demons, the Trackers must band together with a condemned fugitive, a rogue wraith and a gangster king and stake their lives against an all-powerful enemy to try to save one another and their world.

Scorpia City enters a new era. The Androts have fallen and the gangsters rule.

The Trackers stand scarred but together, unaware that a new threat stalks them from the shadows of a dying world. A nightmare from Silho's past returns to claim her, driven by an evil more formidable than anything the team has faced before. The Indemeus X has risen.

As the team is ripped apart, new alliances are forged, enemies unite and friendships fall apart. Diega and Shawe fight to survive a new and violent world, while Eli ventures into the darkest levels of the city, making a shocking discovery that will change everything.

Meanwhile, in a forgotten place built on secrets and lies, a city spirals into madness, and hope emerges from the darkness.

The second Detective Inspector Chen novel (after Snake Agent) returns us to Singapore Three. A mysterious murder sends Chen and his demonic partner Zhu Irzh on the trail of a conspiracy between hell and one of the heavenly hosts.

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

Lester Dent authored this book under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

Let's face it, none of us deserve to be saved. None of us are wiser, smarter, stronger or prettier than all those we watch die. Whatever criteria Down uses, how worthy we are doesn't come into it.

Since escaping London's inferno, Mary and Dalip have fought monsters and won - though in the magical world of Down, the most frightening monsters come from within. Now they hold the greatest of treasures: maps that reveal the way to the White City, where they can find the answers they're looking for and learn the secrets of Down. But to get there they must rely on Crows, who has already betrayed them at every turn.

As they battle their way towards the one place in all of Down without magic, they must ask themselves how far they will go to find their way home. After all, if there's one thing the White City offers those brave enough to enter, it's more than they bargained for.

Simon Morden's Down Station was an extraordinary quest for meaning and identity. Now he's leading us to the kind of truths that leave us changed.

Nebula Award nominated short story in Bowes' Dust Devil setting. It first appeared on Sci Fiction, June 15, 2005. It can be found the anthologies Horror: The Best of the Year: 2006 Edition (2006), edited by Sean Wallace and John Gregory Betancourt, Digital Domains: A Decade of Science Fiction & Fantasy (2010), edited by Ellen Datlow and Ghosts: Recent Hauntings (2012), edited by Paula Guran and In the Shadow of the Towers: Speculative Fiction in a Post-9/11 World (2015), edited by Douglas Lain. It is also included in the collection If Angels Fight (2013)

Read the full story for free at Nightmare.

Fitz, Anji, and the Doctor are in New Orleans in 2000 to relax, but find the city is a center for the occult as practitioners converge on an ancient graveyard. The Doctor is also having strange dreams of something is seeking him out. A bone artifact found on board the TARDIS may be the key to a chain of murders, but can the Doctor and his companions discover the true source of the evil?

Ravens Bluff

The City of Ravens

For the first time, Jack Ravenwild's designs exceed his talents. His ambitions plunge him into the middle of a plot to destroy the city, a noble quest to find a lost hoard, and a conspiracy to seize the reins of power through the nobility's Game of Masks. Worse yet, Jack must choose between a life of freedom and saving the city he doesn't even know he loves.

In the streets of Waterdeep, conspiracies run like water through the gutters, bubbling beneath the seeming calm of the city's life. As a band of young, foppish lords discovers there is a dark side to the city they all love, a sinister mage and his son seek to create perverted creatures to further their twisted ends.

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

The Industrial Revolution has escalated into all-out warfare. It has been sixteen years since the Heterodyne Boys, benevolent adventurers and inventors, disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Today, Europe is ruled by the Sparks, dynasties of mad scientists ruling over - and terrorizing - the hapless population with their bizarre inventions and unchecked power, while the downtrodden dream of the Hetrodynes' return.

At Transylvania Polygnostic University, a pretty, young student named Agatha Clay seems to have nothing but bad luck. Incapable of building anything that actually works, but dedicated to her studies, Agatha seems destined for a lackluster career as a minor lab assistant. But when the University is overthrown by the ruthless tyrant Baron Klaus Wulfenbach, Agatha finds herself a prisoner aboard his massive airship Castle Wulfenbach - and it begins to look like she might carry a spark of Mad Science after all.

From Phil and Kaja Foglio, creators of the Hugo, Eagle, and Eisner Award-nominated webcomic Girl Genius, comes Agatha H and the Airship City, a gaslamp fantasy filled to bursting with Adventure! Romance! and Mad Science!

In The Half-Made World, Felix Gilman took readers deep into a world on the cusp of forging an identity. The Line, a cult of Industry, and the Gun, a mission of Chaos, were engaged in a war for dominance. The Line was winning city by city, enslaving the populations it conquered. A doctor of psychology, Liv Alverhuysen, was caught in the middle, unknowingly guarding a secret that both sides would do anything to have.

Now, in the amazing sequel Rise of Ransom City, Liv is lost on the edge of the world with Creedmor, an agent of the Gun, and the powerful Line will stop at nothing to find them. But Harry Ransom, half con man, half mad inventor, is setting the edge of the world aglow. Town by town he is building up a bankroll and leaving hope in his wake because one of his inventions is actually working. But his genius is not going unnoticed, and when he crosses paths with the two most wanted outlaws in the "unmade world," his stage becomes even larger and presents an opportunity more lucrative than any of his scams or inventions combined.

Orphaned and left to fend for herself in the slums of Averalaan, Jewel Markess- Jay to her friends-meets an unlikely savior in Rath, a man who prowls the ruins of the undercity. Nursing Jay back to health is an unusual act for a man who renounced his own family long ago, and the situation becomes stranger still when Jay begins to form a den of other rescued children in Rath's home. But worse perils lurk beneath the slums: the demons that once nearly destroyed the Essalieyan Empire are stirring again, and soon Rath and Jay will find themselves targets of these unstoppable beings.

Irritating Horseye!

Many worlds of the Humanx Commonwealth boasted of "natural wonders" but Horseye was truly unique -- the planet had the most spectacular river valley anywhere in the known universe and was home to three alien cultures.

The fascinating planet just cried out for proper study, and after months of impatient quarantine Etienne and Lyra Redolw had finally received permission to begin a voyage of exploration to the source fo the River Skar, a mere 12,000 kilometers Upriver.

Old hands at cracking new planets, the Redowls studied the aliens languages, took local guides, and provided for emergencies. But nothing could prepare them for the awesome treachery of the natives or the unbelievable natural obstacles. And not even the natives understood the planet's deepest secret...

The conclusion to the saga of the DNA Cowboys. The travellers continue their exploration of the world, this time dealing with a mad tyrant.

Built as a refuge from a war-ravaged world outside, THE SILENT CITY is the final stronghold of science and knowledge. A self-perpetuating technology maintains the City in which only a handful of humans survive, despite rejuvenation treatments and cybernetics. Into this doomed world Elisa is born, child of her father's obsession with creating a human form with the ability to self-heal. Elisa devotes herself to her father's cause...until she begins to see the truth about the City and its occupants. Rebelling against her father/lover, Elisa discovers her unique gift for changing herself and the world around her. But time is running out. The human race is threatened by a virus that prevents the conception of male babies -- and women bear the blame. Elisa must determine her future...and the future of humanity.

Corruption and conspiracy have infected the city of Maradaine, from the top levels of power to the very depths beneath the city. Dayne Heldrin and Jerinne Fendall, elite warriors of the Tarian Order, have no idea how close they truly are to the center of the city's dark secrets. But when they learn that children are going missing, they know they must investigate further--no matter the cost.

They are soon joined by others, each with their own reasons for seeking the children. Veranix Calbert, the vigilante known as the Thorn, thinks his enemies are responsible for the missing children. Inspectors Minox Welling and Satrine Rainey fear the disappearing children are tied to corruption in the city Constabulary. Asti and Verci Rynax hope to protect the kids from their streets, one of whom barely escaped the kidnappers. And a mysterious young cloistress seeks to lead each of them deeper down into the depths of enigmas beneath the city, to the dark, unholy cult known as the Brotherhood, and the horrors that are growing within it.

The only hope Maradaine might have against the impending darkness is if these champions can work together to protect all the people of the city....

For centuries, the White City has graced the banks of the Moskva River. But in the early years of a twentieth century not quite analogous to our own, a creature even more ancient than Moscow's fortress heart has entered its medieval walls.

In the wake of political success and personal loss, the immortal detective Don Sebastien de Ulloa has come to Moscow to choose his path amid the embers of war between England and her American colonies. Accompanied by his court--the forensic sorcerer Lady Abigail Irene and the authoress Phoebe Smith--he seeks nothing but healing and rest.

But Moscow is both jeweled and corrupt, and when you are old there is no place free of ghosts, and Sebastien is far from the most ancient thing in Russia.

The wild second adventure for unforgettable antiquities thief Owl--a modern-day "Indiana Jane" who reluctantly navigates the hidden supernatural world--from the pen of rising urban fantasy star Kristi Charish. For fans of Kim Harrison, Jim Butcher, Jennifer Estep, Jenn Bennett, and the like. The series also includes Owl and the Japanese Circus and Owl and the Electric Samurai.

Alix Hiboux, better known as Owl, international antiquities thief for hire, is settling into her new contract job for Vegas mogul Mr. Kurosawa, a red dragon with a penchant for ancient, supernatural artifacts. And now he has his sights set on some treasures of the mysterious Syrian City of the Dead that are sitting in a recluse's private collection.

There's just one wrinkle. To stop the resurrection of an undead army that could wreak havoc on Los Angeles, Owl must break into a heavily guarded archaeological sight in one of the most volatile regions in the world. A detour through Libya and a run-in with Somali pirates sends the clock ticking hastily toward total paranormal disaster.

Meanwhile, Alexander and the Paris vampires have stopped stalking Owl's apartment, but they have by no means forgotten their death grudge against her. To top everything off, Owl finds out the hard way that there is nothing heavenly about the City of Angels...

Join Dorothy and the Wonderful Wizard as they take Aunt Em and Uncle Henry on a fabulous tour of Oz. During their journey they encounter such amazing and amusing people as King Kleaver with his Spoon Brigade and Miss Cuttenclip of the land of paper dolls. But while Dorothy and her friends play, the wicked Nome King has joined forces with the terrible Whimsies, the fearsome Growleywogs, and the evil Phanfasms in a plot to capture the Emerald City. Will Dorothy's friends discover the danger before it's too late?

Jenny Jump captures a leprechaun and forces him to make her into a fairy, but he only does half the job before escaping. Jenny then jumps to Oz using her half-fairy gifts. She soon sets up a fashionable Style Shop with a magic turnstile which will give anyone high style and challenges Ozma to an ozlection to become ruler of the Land of Oz.

Aru Shah and her sisters--including one who also claims to be the Sleeper's daughter--must find their mentors Hanuman and Urvashi in Lanka, the city of gold, before war breaks out between the devas and asuras.

Aru has just made a wish on the tree of wishes, but she can't remember what it was. She's pretty sure she didn't wish for a new sister, one who looks strangely familiar and claims to be the Sleeper's daughter, like her.

Aru also isn't sure she still wants to fight on behalf of the devas in the war against the Sleeper and his demon army. The gods have been too devious up to now. Case in point: Kubera, ruler of the city of gold, promises to give the Pandavas two powerful weapons, but only if they win his trials. If they lose, they won't stand a chance against the Sleeper's troops, which will soon march on Lanka to take over the Otherworld.

Aru's biggest question, though, is why every adult she has loved and trusted so far has failed her. Will she come to peace with what they've done before she has to wage the battle of her life?

Filled with wondrous magic, unforgettable creatures, manipulative gods, and laugh-out-loud dialogue, this fourth book in the Pandava series, a fantasy adventure loosely based on mythology, will leave readers wishing they could read the finale right now.

Clive and Neville Folliot and their companions in the Dungeon face their ultimate peril in the Ren and the Chaffri, the masters of the Dungeon maze.

This graphic novel, Illustrated by Ian Miller, is the fourth of James Herbert's "Rat" novels, after "The Rats", "Lair" and "Domain". It maps the chilling post-apocalyptic future where the pathetic remnants of mankind scrape out an existence in the ruins under the new order; the rats.

Imprisoned in Sorrowgate Tower, Rhiannon awaits trial for murder and treason. While her days are spent in anticipation of Lewen's visits, her nights are haunted by the malevolent ghost of a dead queen, hungry to live again. But not many care to listen to the prophetic dreams of a girl who has already been convicted in most people's minds.

Then Lewen begins to cool toward her, and Rhiannon suspects one of the princesses has worked a spell to steal his heart. In a world filled with dark spirits and forbidden magic, conspiracy and intrigue, Rhiannon vows to win back her lover and escape once more, to save the land before it's too late....

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

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

Hidden under the surface of everyday London is a city of monsters and miracles, where wild train spirits stampede over the tracks and glass-skinned dancers with glowing veins light the streets.

When a devastating betrayal drives her from her home, graffiti artist Beth Bradley stumbles into the secret city, where she finds Filius Viae, London's ragged crown prince, just when he needs someone most. An ancient enemy has returned to the darkness under St Paul's Cathedral, bent on reigniting a centuries-old war, and Beth and Fil find themselves in a desperate race through a bizarre urban wonderland, searching for a way to save the city they both love.

The City's Son is the first book of The Skyscraper Throne: a story about family, friends and monsters, and how you can't always tell which is which.

Without warning, Phiblizo appears and attacks Chaos Dragon Gaav. He kidnaps Gourry by using the Sword of Light and taunts Lina to join them in Sairaag, a city that is now a barren wasteland with only a single Flagoon since the demon's resurrection. But Lina doesn't have time to think about the consequences--she has to settle things with the Hellmaster once and for all!

The original teleplay that became the classic Star Trek episode, with an expanded introductory essay by Harlan Ellison 'The City on the Edge of Forever' has been surrounded by controversy since the airing of an "eviscerated" version-which subsequently has been voted the most beloved episode in the series' history.

In its original form, 'The City on the Edge of Forever' won the 1966-67 Writers Guild of America Award for best teleplay. As aired, it won the 1967 Hugo Award (the only teleplay ever to do so!). 'The City on the Edge of Forever' is, at its most basic, a poignant love story. Ellison takes the reader on a breathtaking trip through space and time, from the future, all the way back to 1930s America. In this harrowing journey, Kirk and Spock race to apprehend a renegade criminal and restore the order of the universe. It is here that Kirk faces his ultimate dilemma: a choice between the universe-or his one true love.

This edition makes available this astonishing teleplay as Ellison intended it to be aired. The author's introductory essay (expanded by 15,000 words from the limited edition) reveals all of the details of what Ellison describes as a "fatally inept treatment" of his creative work. Was he unjustly edited, unjustly accused, and unjustly treated?

Centuries before the Clone Wars or the Empire, in the early days of the High Republic, it was an age of exploration in a galaxy far, far away....

Daring pilots chart new routes through hyperspace, while Pathfinder teams make contact with frontier worlds to invite them to join the Republic. When a Pathfinder team's communications droid is found drifting in space, damaged and bearing a cryptic message, Jedi Knight Silandra Sho and her Padawan, Rooper Nitani, are sent to find the missing team members. Their investigation leads them to the planet Gloam, a ravaged world said to be haunted by mythical monsters.

Can the Jedi find the missing Pathfinders and unravel the mystery of the monsters? The answers lie in a hidden city beneath the planet's surface....

When Tarzan of the Apes frees a man being tortured by cruel bandits, he is surprised to learn that the stranger comes from no race or country the ape-man knows. He is from the fabled land of Onthar, where lie two ancient cities unknown to the outside world. One is Athne, city of ivory; the other is Cathne, city of gold and evil. There great prides of trained lions are used to hunt down men and wage eternal war. And there Tarzan meets the beautiful queen Nemone, who is determined to have Tarzan as her king... or feed him to the lions!

Tarzan cared little for the fate of adventurer Brian Gregory, drawn to the legendary city of Ashair by the rumor of the Father of Diamonds, the world's hugest gem. But to the ape-man the tie of friendship is unbreakable, and Paul d'Arnot's pleas move him to agree to guide the expedition Gregory's father and sister have organized for his rescue. The enigmatic Atan Thome is also obsessed with the Father of Diamonds, and has planted agents in the Gregory safari to spy out its route and sabotage its efforts. Both parties reach their goal, remote Ashair... as prisoners of its priests, doomed to die in loathsome rites.

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

Welcome to Bezim, where tribes of sword-slinging bravi race through the night, and where rich and idle alchemists make magic out of mixing the four planes of reality.

Siyon Velo, Dockside brat turned petty alchemist, scrapes a living hopping between the planes to harvest ingredients for the city's alchemists. But when Siyon accidentally commits and act of impossible magic, he's catapulted into the limelight - which is a bad place to be when the planes start lurching out of alignment, threatening to send the city into the sea.

It will take a miracle to save Bezim. Good thing Siyon has pulled off the impossible before. Now he has to master it.

Siyon Velo might be acknowledged as the Alchemist. He may have even stabilized the planes and stopped Bezim from ever shaking into the sea again. But that doesn't mean he has any idea what's he doing-and it won't be long before everyone knows it.

Then mythical creatures once confined to operas and myths are spotted around Bezim. A djinn invades one of Zagiri's garden parties, and whispers of a naga slithering through the Flower District are all Anahid hears at the card table.

Magic is waking up in the Mundane. It's up to Siyon to figure out a way to stop it, or everything he's worked hard to save will come crashing down.

In a post-apocalyptic world of endless snow, Captain Romulus Buckle and the stalwart crew of the Pneumatic Zeppelin must embark on a perilous mission to rescue their kidnapped leader, Balthazar Crankshaft, from the impenetrable City of the Founders. Steaming over a territory once known as Southern California - before it was devastated in the alien war - Buckle navigates his massive airship through skies infested with enemy war zeppelins and ravenous alien beasties in this swashbuckling and high-octane steampunk adventure. Life is desperate in the Snow World - and death is quick - Buckle and his ship's company must brave poisoned wastelands of noxious mustard and do battle with forgewalkers, steampipers and armored locomotives as they plunge from the skies into the underground prison warrens of the fortress-city.

Captain Romulus Buckle must lead the Pneumatic Zeppelin and its crew of never-do-wells on a desperate mission where he must risk everything to save Balthazar and attempt to prevent a catastrophic war which could wipe out all that is left of civilization and the entire human race.

In her debut solo novel, Stella Gemmell, coauthor of the "powerful" (Booklist) conclusion to David Gemmell's Troy series, weaves a dark epic fantasy about a war-torn civilization and the immortal emperor who has it clutched in his evil grasp.

The City is ancient, layers upon layers. Once a thriving metropolis, it has sprawled beyond its bounds, inciting endless wars with neighboring tribes and creating a barren wasteland of what was once green and productive.

In the center of the City lives the emperor. Few have ever seen him, but those who have recall a man in his prime, though he should be very old. Some grimly speculate that he is no longer human, if he ever was. A small number have come to the desperate conclusion that the only way to stop the war is to end the emperor's unnaturally long life.

From the mazelike sewers below the City, where the poor struggle to stay alive in the dark, to the blood-soaked fields of battle, where few heroes manage to endure the never-ending siege, the rebels pin their hopes on one man-Shuskara. The emperor's former general, he was betrayed long ago and is believed to be dead. But, under different aliases, he has survived, forsaking his City and hiding from his immortal foe. Now the time has come for him to engage in one final battle to free the City from the creature who dwells at its heart, pulling the strings that keep the land drenched in gore.

The emperor is dead... long live the emperor!

The fervent hope of the victorious rebels and the survivors of the uprising that liberated the City from tyranny is that the accession of Archange to the imperial throne will usher in a new era of freedom, peace and stability. If only that were so...

As the the City struggles to return to something resembling normal life after the devastation brought on by the rebellion, word arises of a massive army gathering to the north. No one knows where it has come from or who leads it, but it soon becomes apparent that its sole purpose is to destroy the City and annihilate all - man, woman and child - who live within its battered walls. And while warriors go forth to fight and die on the battlefield in defence of their homeland and all that they believe in, bitter family feuds and ancient rivalries, political and personal betrayals, and mindless murder surface within the palaces and corridors of power: it seems the City is under siege - from both without and within...

With this new novel, Stella Gemmell brings the astonishing story of the City to a spectacular climax and confirms her place as a master of the genre.

The City Imperishable's secret master and heir to the long-vacant throne has vanished from a locked room, as politics have turned deadly in a bid to revive the city's long-vanished empire. The city's dwarfs, stunted from spending their childhoods in confining boxes, are restive. Bijaz the Dwarf, leader of the Sewn faction among the dwarfs, fights their persecution. Jason the Factor, friend and apprentice to the missing master, works to maintain stability in the absence of a guiding hand. Imago of Lockwood struggles to revive the office of Lord Mayor in a bid to turn the City Imperishable away from the path of destruction. These three must contend with one another as they race to resolve the threats to the city.

The battle has been fought and won, and all have been transformed by the struggle. Imago of Lockwood has become Lord Mayor of the City Imperishable, though at a price beyond his wildest imagination. Bijaz the Dwarf has been imbued with a godlike power and a responsibility he scarcely understands. And Jason the Factor, resurrected from death at the hands of his sister, the Tokhari sandwalker Kalliope, has become the sula ma-jieni na-dia, the fabled Dead Man of Winter.

When a beautiful mountebank arrives in the City Imperishable, offering to lead an expedition to uncover the lost tomb of the Imperator Terminus, she stirs up the mob with promises of treasure and imperial power... but what will her quest unleash? Political intrigue, adventure, and all-out war await the principles and inhabitants of the City Imperishable. Through it all, the City may endure, but none will remain untouched by the Madness of Flowers...

The Four Realms--Life, Death, Light, and Darkness--all converge on the City of Dusk. For each realm there is a god, and for each god there is an heir.

But the gods have withdrawn their favor from the once vibrant and thriving metropolis. And without it, all the realms are dying.

Unwilling to stand by and watch the destruction, the four heirs--Angelica, an elementalist with her eyes set on the throne; Risha, a necromancer fighting to keep the peace; Nikolas, a soldier who struggles to see the light; and Taesia, a shadow-wielding rogue with a reckless heart--will become reluctant allies in the quest to save their city.

But their rebellion will cost them dearly.

Zoey has only ever known a world with few women and a society capable of unimaginable evil. Now she's about to learn she may be the only hope it has for salvation.

After she and her companions flee a vicious attack, barely escaping with their lives, Zoey finds herself faced with a new threat: video evidence suggesting she is the mother of an unborn baby girl--and the key to mankind's survival. Knowing that her former captors will stop at nothing to control the power that lies within her, Zoey sets out on her own for the last American city, Seattle, in search of answers. But a new enemy awaits her there, and the truth she seeks may lead to her destruction as well as that of all humankind.

Jian begins a brutal and bloody climb up the ranks of the Daechen as the Emperor's long plans near fruition.

Sulema is likewise initiated into the ways of Atualon and the power of Atulfah, and finds that her father's bright city is built on a foundation of dark and terrible secrets.

Hafsa Azeina begins a trek down paths stranger and more dangerous than even she could have imagined.

And the Zeeranim must face not only their traditional, external enemies, but treachery and betrayal from within.

Four decades after the Oblivion Crisis, Tamriel is threatened anew by an ancient and all-consuming evil. It is Umbriel, a floating city that casts a terrifying shadow - for wherever it falls, people die and rise again.

And it is in Umbriel's shadow that a great adventure begins, and a group of unlikely heroes meet. A legendary prince with a secret. A spy on the trail of a vast conspiracy. A mage obsessed with his desire for revenge. And Annaig, a young girl in whose hands the fate of Tamriel may rest...

Welcome to Sunder City. The magic is gone but the monsters remain.

I'm Fetch Phillips, just like it says on the window. There are a few things you should know before you hire me: 1. Sobriety costs extra. 2. My services are confidential. 3. I don't work for humans.

It's nothing personal – I'm human myself. But after what happened, to the magic, it's not the humans who need my help.

In a world that exists in the shadow of our own, the conflict between the Brethren and the Travellers reaches its devastating climax...

Struggling to protect the legacy of his Traveller father, Gabriel faces troubling questions and relentless threats from enemies old and new.

His brother Michael, now firmly allied with the sinister Brethren, pursues his ambition to wrest power from their leader, whatever it takes.

And Maya, the Harlequin warrior pledged to protect Gabriel at all costs, is forced to make a choice that will change her life forever...

Deep in the polar south stands a city like no other, a city built aeons ago by a civilisation mighty and wise. Locked in a race with a rival engineer, Trassan Kressind's great iron ship crosses uncharted seas. The City of Ice promises the secrets of the ancients to whomever can reach it first. It may prove too little knowledge too late, for the closest approach of the Twin in 4000 years draws near, an event that has heralded terrible destruction in past ages.

As the Kressind siblings pursue their fortunes, the world stands upon the dawn of a new era, but may yet be consumed by a darkness from the past.

Industry and magic, gods and steam-power collide in the epic sequel to The Iron Ship.

After the Great War, Alejandro Ferreira wandered across Europe, unable even to remember his name, until one night in Lisboa, a young woman recognizes him. She brings him home to his family -- one he can't recall, but very much wants to keep.

His seer's gift has been as much of a trial as a blessing. It didn't keep him out of trouble during the Great War, either -- someone cursed him to lose his memory. Someone else is after him, wanting him to keep a secret he doesn't even remember he has. And he quickly learns that all is not well between himself and his lovely wife. Without his memories or his seer's gift, can Alejandro rebuild his life and unveil his stalker before they eliminate him?

Genoveva Jardim's father was a monster -- a defrocked priest who used his healer's gift to murder instead. Determined to make amends for the deaths her father brought to the Golden City, she turned her back on her life among the aristocracy. She's chosen to work for the Special Police, learning how to use the healer's gift she'd never even known she had. She wants to save lives instead of killing like her father.

Rafael Pinheiro has kept an eye on Miss Jardim for some time now. The very first time he met her, his seer's gift told him he would someday marry her. What he can't figure out is why he would choose her. She's young and an aristocrat -- hardly a match for a mere police captain raised in an orphanage. They don't seem to have anything in common.

But when Miss Jardim's life is threatened, everything changes...

For two years, Oriana Paredes has been a spy among the social elite of the Golden City, reporting back to her people, the sereia, sea folk banned from the city's shores....

When her employer and only confidante decides to elope, Oriana agrees to accompany her to Paris. But before they can depart, the two women are abducted and left to drown. Trapped beneath the waves, Oriana survives because of her heritage, but she is forced to watch her only friend die.

Vowing vengeance, Oriana crosses paths with Duilio Ferreira--a police consultant who has been investigating the disappearance of a string of servants from the city's wealthiest homes. Duilio also has a secret: He is a seer and his gifts have led him to Oriana.

Bound by their secrets, not trusting each other completely yet having no choice but to work together, Oriana and Duilio must expose a twisted plot of magic so dark that it could cause the very fabric of history to come undone....

Magical beings have been banned from the Golden City for decades, though many live there in secret. Now humans and nonhumans alike are in danger as evil stalks the streets, growing more powerful with every kill....

It's been two weeks since Oriana Paredes was banished from the Golden City. Police consultant Duilio Ferreira, who himself has a talent he must keep secret, can't escape the feeling that, though she's supposedly returned home to her people, Oriana is in danger.

Adding to Duilio's concerns is a string of recent murders in the city. Three victims have already been found, each without a mark upon her body. When a selkie under his brother's protection goes missing, Duilio fears the killer is also targeting nonhuman prey.

To protect Oriana and uncover the truth, Duilio will have to risk revealing his own identity, put his trust in some unlikely allies, and consult a rare and malevolent text known as The Seat of Magic....

Even as the branches of peace are being offered, there are some who still believe those who are not human should be used as chattel. And they are willing to go to great lengths to retain their power.

Newlywed siren Oriana Paredes has been appointed Ambassador to her home islands now that communication between Northern Portugual and the magical races has been restored. But convincing her people that the new Portuguese Prince's intentions are honorable after years of persecution is difficult. And her husband, Duilio, faces his own obstacles among the sirens where males are a rare and valuable commodity with few rights.

In addition to their diplomatic mission, the two hope to uncover the truth behind Oriana's mother's death. Evidence suggests that Spain – a country that has been known to enslave magical beings – may have infiltrated the siren authority. Unable to leave their post, Oriana and Duilio must call on Inspector Joaquim Tavares to root out the truth.

But even his seer's gift cannot prepare him for what he will discover.

Hugo Award nominated short story.

New York City is about to go through a few changes. Like all great metropolises before it, when a city gets big enough, old enough, it must be born; but there are ancient enemies who cannot tolerate new life. Thus New York will live or die by the efforts of a reluctant midwife... and how well he can learn to sing the city's mighty song.

This story originally appeared on Tor.com, September 28, 2016. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017, edited by John Joseph Adams and Charles Yu, New York Fantastic (2017), edited by Paula Guran, and Worlds Seen in Passing: Ten Years of Tor.com Short Fiction (2018), edited by Irene Gallo.

Read this story online for free at Tor.com.

Every great city has a soul. Some are as ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York City? She's got six.

But every city also has a dark side. A roiling, ancient evil stirs in the halls of power, threatening to destroy the city and her six newborn avatars unless they can come together and stop it once and for all.

Librarian-spy Irene is working undercover in an alternative London when her assistant, Kai, goes missing. She discovers he's been kidnapped by the fae faction, and the repercussions could be fatal -- not just for Kai, but for whole worlds.

Kai's dragon heritage means he has powerful allies but also powerful enemies in the form of the fae. With this act of aggression, the fae are determined to trigger a war between their people -- and the forces of order and chaos themselves.

Irene's mission to save Kai and avert Armageddon will take her to a dark, alternate Venice where it's always Carnival. Here Irene will be forced to blackmail, fast talk, and fight. Or face death.

Created as an experiment by the time-traveling goddess Pallas Athene, the Just City is a planned community, populated by over ten thousand children and a few hundred adult teachers from all eras of history, along with some handy robots from the far human future--all set down together on a Mediterranean island in the distant past.

The student Simmea, born an Egyptian farmer's daughter sometime between 500 and 1000 A.D, is a brilliant child, eager for knowledge, ready to strive to be her best self. The teacher Maia was once Ethel, a young Victorian lady of much learning and few prospects, who prayed to Pallas Athene in an unguarded moment during a trip to Rome--and, in an instant, found herself in the Just City with grey-eyed Athene standing unmistakably before her.

Meanwhile, Apollo--stunned by the realization that there are things mortals understand better than he does--has arranged to live a human life, and has come to the City as one of the children. He knows his true identity, and conceals it from his peers. For this lifetime, he is prone to all the troubles of being human.

Then, a few years in, Sokrates arrives--the same Sokrates recorded by Plato himself--to ask all the troublesome questions you would expect. What happens next is a tale only the brilliant Jo Walton could tell.

From acclaimed, award-winning author Jo Walton: Philosopher Kings, a tale of gods and humans, and the surprising things they have to learn from one another. Twenty years have elapsed since the events of The Just City. The City, founded by the time-traveling goddess Pallas Athene, organized on the principles espoused in Plato's Republic and populated by people from all eras of human history, has now split into five cities, and low-level armed conflict between them is not unheard-of.

The god Apollo, living (by his own choice) a human life as "Pythias" in the City, his true identity known only to a few, is now married and the father of several children. But a tragic loss causes him to become consumed with the desire for revenge. Being Apollo, he goes handling it in a seemingly rational and systematic way, but it's evident, particularly to his precocious daughter Arete, that he is unhinged with grief.

Along with Arete and several of his sons, plus a boatload of other volunteers--including the now fantastically aged Marsilio Ficino, the great humanist of Renaissance Florence--Pythias/Apollo goes sailing into the mysterious Eastern Mediterranean of pre-antiquity to see what they can find--possibly the man who may have caused his great grief, possibly communities of the earliest people to call themselves "Greek." What Apollo, his daughter, and the rest of the expedition will discover... will change everything.

Necessity: the sequel to the acclaimed The Just City and The Philosopher Kings, Jo Walton's tales of gods, humans, and what they have to learn from one another.

More than sixty-five years ago, Pallas Athena founded the Just City on an island in the eastern Mediterranean, placing it centuries before the Trojan War, populating it with teachers and children from throughout human history, and committing it to building a society based on the principles of Plato's Republic. Among the City's children was Pytheas, secretly the god Apollo in human form.

Sixty years ago, the Just City schismed into five cities, each devoted to a different version of the original vision.

Forty years ago, the five cities managed to bring their squabbles to a close. But in consequence of their struggle, their existence finally came to the attention of Zeus, who can't allow them to remain in deep antiquity, changing the course of human history. Convinced by Apollo to spare the Cities, Zeus instead moved everything on the island to the planet Plato, circling its own distant sun.

Now, more than a generation has passed. The Cities are flourishing on Plato, and even trading with multiple alien species. Then, on the same day, two things happen. Pytheas dies as a human, returning immediately as Apollo in his full glory. And there's suddenly a human ship in orbit around Plato--a ship from Earth.

Bob Howard is a computer-hacker desk jockey, who has more than enough trouble keeping up with the endless paperwork he has to do on a daily basis. He should never be called on to do anything remotely heroic. But for some reason, he is.

In the title piece, Alan Turing, the father of modern computer science, completes his theorem on 'Phase Conjugate Grammars for Extra-dimensional Summoning'. Turing's work paves the way for esoteric mathematical computations that, when carried out, have side effects that leak through a channel underlying the structure of the Cosmos. Out there in the multiverse are 'listeners' who can sometimes be coerced into opening gates.

In 1945, Nazi Germany's Ahnenerbe-SS, in an attempt to escape the Allied onslaught, performs just such a summoning on the souls of more than six million. A gate opens to an alternate universe through which the SS move people and material - to live to fight another day. But their summoning brings forth more than the SS have bargained for - an evil, patiently waiting all this time while learning the ways of humans, now poises to lunch on Earth. Secret intelligence agencies, esoteric theorems, Lovecraftian horrors, Middle East terrorist connections, a damsel in distress, and a final battle on the surface of a dying planet round out this story.

Includes the Hugo-award-winning novella "The Concrete Jungle", which can be read for free here.

Mars: the skull of a planet picked clean by the wind of time.

North. Beyond the desert of Meroe, past the ancient cliffs of the dust-locked continents, past the dry wharts of a city that was old when Earth was new, the caravan crept into the unmapped wastland called Umbra. It was into this shadowed land that the lost nation of the People had ridden - and vanished - in a tme beyond memory. And it was here that the outworlder Ryker followed the golden-eyes of Valarda and found the Child-of-Stars.

Originally published in 1977, Lin Carter's sword-and-planet fantasy of Mars is grand adventure in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Symir -- the Drowning City. home to exiles and expatriates, pirates and smugglers. And violent revolutionaries who will stop at nothing to overthrow the corrupt Imperial government.

For Isyllt Iskaldur, necromancer and spy, the brewing revolution is a chance to prove herself to her crown. All she has to do is find and finance the revolutionaries, and help topple the palaces of Symir. But she is torn between her new friends and her duties, and the longer she stays in this monsoon-drenched city, the more intrigue she uncovers -- even the dead are plotting.

As the waters rise and the dams crack, Isyllt must choose between her mission and the city she came to save.

THE VRIL ARE HERE. THE WAR FOR HUMANITY HAS BEGUN

The Germans have lost control of their most deadly discovery. The alien Vril have awakened and are scouring the Earth for ancient relics.

From the Hollywood lights of LA to the bloody devastation of Stalingrad, Major Guy Pentecross and the team at Station Z must uncover the mystery and stop the Vril and Nazis alike.

Failure will mean the end of life as we know it.

Lady Luck has hired John Taylor to investigate the origins of the Nightside--the dark heart of London where it's always 3 A.M. But when he starts to uncover facts about his long-vanished mother, the Nightside--and all of existence-- could be snuffed out.

The world we knew is gone. What world will rise in its place?

The Twelve have been destroyed and the terrifying hundred-year reign of darkness that descended upon the world has ended. The survivors are stepping outside their walls, determined to build society anew--and daring to dream of a hopeful future.

But far from them, in a dead metropolis, he waits: Zero. The First. Father of the Twelve. The anguish that shattered his human life haunts him, and the hatred spawned by his transformation burns bright. His fury will be quenched only when he destroys Amy--humanity's only hope, the Girl from Nowhere who grew up to rise against him.

One last time light and dark will clash, and at last Amy and her friends will know their fate.

In a land riven with plague, inside the infamous Walled City, two families vie for control: the Medicis with their genius inventor Leonardo; the Lorraines with Galileo, the most brilliant alchemist of his generation.

And when two star-crossed lovers, one from either house, threaten the status quo, a third, shadowy power - one that forever seems a step ahead of all of the familial warring - plots and schemes, and bides its time, ready for the moment to attack...

Assassination; ancient, impossible machines; torture and infamy - just another typical day in paradise.

A travel writer takes a job with a shady publishing company in New York, only to find that she must write a guide to the city - for the undead! Because of the disaster that was her last job, Zoe is searching for a fresh start as a travel book editor in the tourist-centric New York City. After stumbling across a seemingly perfect position though, Zoe is blocked at every turn because of the one thing she can't take off her resume --- human.

Not to be put off by anything -- especially not her blood drinking boss or death goddess coworker -- Zoe delves deep into the monster world. But her job turns deadly when the careful balance between human and monsters starts to crumble -- with Zoe right in the middle.

Dev is a desperate man. After narrowly surviving a smuggling job gone wrong, he’s now a prisoner of the Alathian Council, held hostage to ensure his friend Kiran — former apprentice to one of the most ruthless mages alive — does their bidding.

But Kiran isn’t Dev’s only concern. Back in his home city of Ninavel, the child he once swore to protect faces a terrible fate if he can’t reach her in time, and the days are fast slipping away. So when the Council offers Dev freedom in exchange for his and Kiran’s assistance in a clandestine mission to Ninavel, he can’t refuse, no matter how much he distrusts their motives.

Once in Ninavel the mission proves more treacherous than even Dev could have imagined. Betrayed by allies, forced to aid their enemies, he and Kiran must confront the darkest truths of their pasts if they hope to save those they love and survive their return to the Tainted City.

Simeon was the "brain" running a peaceful space station--but when the invaders arrived, his only hope of protecting his crew was to become "the city who fought". Previous titles in this bestselling series include "The Ship Who Searched, The Ship Who Won", and "PartnerShip".

In The Burning City, Alaya Dawn Johnson continues the trilogy begun with her debut, Racing the Dark, delving deeper into the world of magic wielded by women who understand the dark trade-offs of power and sacrifice. Lana, the heroine, has become the black ange l —a harbinger of destruction unheard of in the islands for 500 years. Nui'ahi, the sleeping volcano of the great city Essel, has erupted. In the chaos, the city is reshaping itself and violence threatens from all corners. A rebel movement has formed in the destroyed heart of the city, determined to oust Kohaku, the mad Mo'i of Essel. Lana wants no part of the rebels' cause — the death spirit still chases her, and the great witch Akua has kidnapped Lana's mother. But the more Lana looks for her mother, the more she is drawn into the city's political conflicts. As Kohaku descends deeper into madness, determined to subdue the city by any means necessary, his wife has run away to the fire temple, where she too is slowly converted to the rebel's cause. When long-running tensions spill over into civil war, Lana must make her hardest decision yet: her mother's life, or a city's freedom?

Using the lore and the folk-magic of the men and women who settled North America, Orson Scott Card has created an alternate world where magic works, and where that magic has colored the entire history of the colonies. Charms and beseechings, hexes and potions, all have a place in the lives of the people of this world. Dowsers find water, the second sight warns of dangers to come, and a torch can read a person's future---or their heart.

In this world where "knacks" abound, Alvin, the seventh son of a seventh son, is a very special man indeed. He's a Maker; he has the knack of understanding how things are put together, how to create them, repair them, keep them whole, or tear them down. He can heal hearts as well as bones, he build a house, he can calm the waters or blow up a storm. And he can teach his knack to others, to the measure of their own talent.

Alvin has been trying to avert the terrible war that his wife, Peggy, a torch of extraordinary power, has seen down the life-lines of every American. Now she has sent him down the Mizzippy to the city of New Orleans, or Nueva Barcelona as they call it under Spanish occupation. Alvin doesn't know exactly why he's there, but when he and his brother-in-law, Arthur Stuart, find lodgings with a family of abolitionists who know Peggy, he suspects he'll find out soon.

But Nueva Barcelona is about to experience a plague, and Alvin's efforts to protect his friends by keeping them healthy will create more danger than he could ever have suspected. And in saving the poor people of the city, Alvin will be put to the greatest test of his life---a test that will draw on all his power. For the time has come for him to turn to his old friend Tenskwa-Tawa, the Red Prophet who controls the lands to the west of the Mizzippy. Now Alvin must take the first steps on the road to the Crystal City that was shown to him in a vision so long ago.

The final breathtaking volume in the Tamuli series.

The pace, as always, is white hot – as are the special effects. As readers will know from Book Two, the Shining One Xanetia can melt her enemies with a touch. Fortunately, she is on the side of our hero, and so is the god Edaemus, whose (literally) volcanic rage will be useful in the continuing fight to save the Tamul Empire from the ravages of sinister King Cyrgon of the Cyrgai. Cyrgon has called forth Bhelliom's equal in supernatural power, Klael, the very essence of evil.

And while Sparhawk is leading armies of Pandion Knights, Atan giants and Trolls in battle, Queen Ehlana is taken hostage in Matherion by the renegade Styric Zalasta and the madman Scarpa. The price for her return is no less than the Blue Rose.

Taken in chains first to the jungles of Arjuna in the South, Ehlana is tracked by Sparhawk using both Delphaeic and Styric magic. But by then Sephrenia has been murdered and Ehlana has been removed to the Hidden City of the Cyrgai. The City is protected by magic and by the invincible Klael. The ultimate battle must be fought.

Long ago, the Tripods--huge, three-legged machines--descended upon Earth and took control. Now people unquestioningly accept the Tripods' power. They have no control over their thoughts or their lives. But for a brief time in each person's life--in childhood--he is not a slave. For Will, his time of freedom is about to end--unless he can escape to the White Mountains, where the possibility of freedom still exists. The Tripods trilogy follows the adventures of Will and his cohorts, as they try to evade the Tripods and maintian their freedom and ultimately do battle against them. The prequel, When the Tripods Came, explains how the Tripods first invaded and gained control of the planet.

In the distant future, a medieval system rises from the ruins of a technology that destroyed itself. Armored knights ride their horses across dunes of rust, battling for the honor of the Queen. But the knights find more to menace them than mere swords and lances. A brave quest leads them face to face with the awesome power of a complex, lethal technology that has been erased from the face of the Earth - but lives on, underground.

Disillusioned by the excesses of the French Revolution, Manfred von Bek flees to the city of Mirenburg, where a Scottish balloonist, an elusive duchess, and a fallen angel become his companions on a journey to the mystical Mittelmarchthe land between landsin search of the Holy Grail. More elaborate in style than his Eternal Champion stories, Moorcock's latest picaresque fantasy, a sequel to The War Hound and the World's Pain , demonstrates his talent for quasihistorical fantasy.

A sci-fi noir trilogy explores the sordid past of a murdered scientist, deified in death, through the eyes of a man who once committed unspeakable crimes for her...

Year 2142: Earth is forty years past a near-collision with the asteroid Sessho-seki. Akira Kimura, the scientist responsible for eliminating the threat, has reached heights of celebrity approaching deification. But now, Akira feels her safety is under threat, so after years without contact, she reaches out to her former head of security, who has since become a police detective.

When he arrives at her deep-sea home and finds Akira methodically dismembered, this detective will risk everything--his career, his family, even his own life--and delve back into his shared past with Akira to find her killer. With a rich, cinematic voice and burning cynicism, Midnight, Water City is both a thrilling neo-noir procedural and a stunning exploration of research, class, climate change, the cult of personality, and the dark sacrifices we are willing to make in the name of progress.

We follow a detective from the depths of earth's oceans to the moon as he unravels a cosmic conspiracy that threatens to destroy the remnants of human life...

Year 2150: Eight years after the murder of Akira Kimura, Water City's renowned scientist and anointed "God," the nameless antihero who tracked down Akira's killer is no longer a detective, but a stay-at-home dad. While his wife climbs the corporate ladder of the city's police department, he raises their now nine-year-old daughter and occasionally takes the odd job as a bounty hunter.

His domestic bliss is threatened when Ascalon's Scar--the mark left by Akira's destruction of Sessho-seki, the asteroid that nearly wiped out life on Earth--vanishes from the sky and a familiar face thought dead returns from the ocean depths to exact revenge on humanity. On a journey to the moon and back, Water City's antihero will risk everything, including his family, to save the last of the human race--even if it means unraveling the dark conspiracy at the heart of their world.

Faith, power, and tech clash when our nameless protagonist passes the responsibility of saving the world to his teenage daughter...

Year 2160: It's been ten years since the cataclysmic events of Eventide, Water City, where 99.97 percent of the human population was possessed or obliterated by Akira Kimura, Water City's renowned scientist and Earth's former savior.

Our nameless antihero, a synesthete and former detective, and his daughter, Ascalon, navigate through a post-apocalyptic landscape populated by barbaric Zeroes--the permanent residents of the continent's biggest landfill, The Great Leachate--who cling to the ways of the old world. They live in opposition to Akira's godlike domination of the planet--she has taken control of the population that viewed her as a god and converted them into her Gardeners, zombie-like humans who plod along to build her vision of a new world.

What that world exactly entails, Ascalon is not entirely sure, but intends to find out. Now nineteen, she, a synesthete herself, takes over this story while her father succumbs to grief and decades of Akira's manipulation. Tasked with the impossible, Ascalon must find a way to free what's left of the human race.

The nightmare metropolis called the Well-Built City exists because the satanic genius and Master, Drachton Below, wished it so. And few within its confines hold the power of Physiognomist First Class Cley. With scalpels, calipers, and the other instruments of his science, Cley can divine good and evil, determine character and intelligence, uncover dark secrets and foretell a person's destiny, through the careful study of facial and bodily features.

But now the Master has ordered the great physiognomist out of the City on a seemingly trivial assignment into the rural hinterlands. but there, removed from Below's omnipresent scrutiny, even the most loyal servant of logic and order can fall prey to seductions of the flesh and spirit. And in this strange and unfamiliar place possessing terrors uniquely its own, there are stark truths awaiting the eminent Cley -- and inescapable revelations that could shatter his perceptions of himself, his profession, and his world.

After beholding the destruction of the Well-Built City, physiognomist Cley is now a simple healer seeking peace and atonement in the happy village of survivors. When the town falls into a deadly sleeping sickness, Cley must make a dangerous trip to the ruins of City—now beset by mechanical birds and werewolves—to seek out an antidote. The evil Master Below is still alive, but an accidental exposure to the sickness that he created has put him into a coma. With the help of Below’s adopted demon son, found in the wreckage of the laboratory, Cley ventures into the mind and intricate memories of Below to search for a cure. Cley will encounter wonders and dangers undreamed of in the second installment of this classic trilogy.

Shunned by the village he saved and seeing no future in the ruins of the Well-Built City, the reformed physiognomist, Cley, ventures into the wilderness to seek forgiveness from a woman that he once hideously harmed. Wandering through this eerie land known as “The Beyond," he encounters ghosts, monsters, omnivorous trees, and more on his quest. Meanwhile, Cley’s demon friend pursues his own dangerous, drug-induced journey to seek out his own humanity. This is the conclusive leg in the bizarre life-journey of one of the most gripping and complex characters in the fantasy genre.

Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1984. The story can also be found in the anthology Nebula Awards 20 (1985), edited by George Zebrowski. It is included in the collections The Years of the City (1984) and Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories (2005).

In the New York City of the next century, twin domes over Manhattan control extremes of weather, illegal hang-gliding is common, and many old problems have been solved--but the rage of some Gothamites cannot be controlled.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Frederik Pohl
• When New York Hit the Fan - novella
• The Greening of Bed-Stuy - (1984) - novella
• The Blister - (1984) - novella
• Second-Hand Sky - novella
• Gwenanda and the Supremes - novella

Edited by Robert Lynn Asprin and Lynn Abbey. Cover art by Gary Ruddell. Cover: The witch Ischade bursts from her window and flies on the wind across Sanctuary.

Welcome to Sanctuary, a city of outlaws and advernturers in a world of war and wizardry, peopled with colorful characters created by today's top fantasy adventure talents, including:

• Lynn Abbey
• C.J. Cherryh
• Janet Morris

In this dramatic eighth volume, Tempus returns to Sanctuary, a city ravaged by war and upheaval, seething with crime and chaos -- a dark bedlam of magic forces thrown out of balance, and disasters, both natural and unnatural...

Contents:

• Dramatis Personae by Lynn Abbey
• Power Play by Janet Morris
• Dagger in the Mind by C.J. Cherryh
• Children of All Ages by Lynn Abbey
• Death in the Meadow by C.J. Cherryh
• The Small Powers that Endure by Lynn Abbey
• Pillar of Fire by Janet Morris

The fourth adventure of Thongor of Lemuria

Thongor the Barbarian, Sark of Sarks, Lord of the Five Cities, had driven from his lands the accursed and demon-worshipping Druids who had long sought power over the Nine Cities of the West. But in the years that followed, the ominous shadow of Zaar fell darkening from the remotest edge of the world. On the Black Altars of Chaos the Nine Wizards of Zaar vowed a terrible vengeance against the warrior king of Patanga.

They swore with a dreadful oath that the Doom of Thongor should be so unspeakable that its memory would haunt the minds of men for untold ages to come. But more than Thongor's fate was at stake. The Wizards of Zaar planned the conquest of the whole of Lemuria, and only Thongor and his mighty Valkarthan broadsword stood in their way.

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology New Voices in Science Fiction (1977), edited by Martin himself. It is also included in the collections Sandkings (1981) and GRRM: A RRetrospective (2003).

The Amulet of Living Flame, the most powerful talisman in existence. Its magic brought the dead back to life. They all wanted it, but only one of them could possess it. It could make Fost Longstrider an invincible warrior. It could make his lover Moriana triumphant over her evil twin sister. It could even make the hideous Prince Rann a most expert executioner.

Unfortunately the amulet was encased in living ice within the City in the Glacier. And only a lecherous genie knew the path to take.

With the three children of prophecy-the seers Spar and Graize, and the warrior Brax-now grown, and the young God Hisar ready to stake his claim to a place in the pantheon of Anavatan, a time of chaos and change is fast approaching. For only if sworn enemies Spar and Graize can come together as Hisar's priests will the God stand any chance of surviving the coming battles with both the hungry spirits seeking to devour him, and the war with the mortal invasion fleet, which is even now sailing for Anavatan.

"There's never a shortage of people other people want dead." Spector felt on familiar footing now that he saw the entire game.

All a hit man wants can be as simple as a bottle of bourbon and a time to dream, but when you're Spector, the work never ends, in Walton "Bud" Simons' Tor.com Original, The City That Never Sleeps.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Optimus Yarnspinner, a young writer, inherits from his beloved godfather an unpublished short story by an unknown author. The search for the author's identity takes Yarnspinner to Bookholm - the so-called City of Dreaming Books. On entering its streets, our hero feels as if he has opened the door of a gigantic second-hand bookshop. His nostrils are assailed by clouds of book dust, the stimulating scent of ancient leather, and the tang of printer's ink. Soon, though, Yarnspinner falls into the clutches of the city's evil genius, Pfistomel Smyke, who treacherously maroons him in the labyrinthine catacombs underneath the city, where reading books can be genuinely dangerous.