Search Worlds Without End

Table of Contents:

• ix - Introduction (Shards and Ashes) - essay by Kelley Armstrong and Melissa Marr
• 1 - Hearken - novelette by Veronica Roth
• 38 - Branded - [Otherworld] - novella by Kelley Armstrong
• 90 - Necklace of Raindrops - novelette by Margaret Stohl
• 130 - Dogsbody - novelette by Rachel Caine
• 179 - Pale Rider - novelette by Nancy Holder
• 216 - Corpse Eaters - novelette by Melissa Marr
• 247 - Burn 3 - novelette by Kami Garcia
• 277 - Love Is a Choice - [Across the Universe] - novelette by Beth Revis
• 311 - Miasma - novella by Carrie Ryan
• 365 - About the Authors (Shards and Ashes)

Nebula Award nominated short story. It was originally published in Realms of Fantasy, August 1998 and appeared in the UK magazine Odyssey #6, September/October 1998. No other publications appear to be available at this time.

An anthology of high-tech reproduction.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (1999) - essay by Constance Ash
• Hunting Mother - (1999) - novelette by Sage Walker
• Judith's Flowers - (1999) - novelette by Susan Palwick
• A Gift to Be Simple - (1999) - shortstory by Patricia A. McKillip
• Island of the Ancestor - (1999) - shortstory by William F. Wu
• One Day at Central Convenience Mall - (1999) - shortstory by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
• Dead in the Water - (1999) - shortstory by Jack McDevitt
• Raising Jenny - (1999) - novelette by Janni Lee Simner
• There Was an Old Woman-- - (1958) - shortstory by Robert Silverberg
• Remailer - (1999) - shortstory by Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald
• The Leopard's Garden - (1999) - novelette by Constance Ash
• Bouncing Babies - (1999) - shortstory by Kara Dalkey
• Of Bitches Born - (1999) - novelette by Michael Armstrong
• Doppels - (1999) - shortstory by Richard Parks
• Daddy's World - (1999) - novelette by Walter Jon Williams

Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, June 1991. There are no other known publications available at this time.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology The Atlantic Council Art of Future Warfare Project: War Stories from the Future (2015), edited by August Cole, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, #119 August 2016. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection (2016), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

They call it Company Town--a Family-owned city-sized oil rig off the coast of the Canadian Maritimes.

Meet Hwa. One of the few in her community to forego bio-engineered enhancements, she's the last truly organic person left on the rig. But she's an expert in the arts of self-defence, and she's been charged with training the Family's youngest, who has been receiving death threats--seemingly from another timeline.

Meanwhile, a series of interconnected murders threatens the city's stability--serial killer? Or something much, much worse...

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures (2017), edited by Ed Finn, Joey Eschrich and Juliet Ulman. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection (2018), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 3 (2018), edited by Neil Clarke.

This short story originally appeared on Slate.com on March 26, 2018, and was later anthologized in The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Four (2019) edited by Neil Clarke and Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrow (2019) from Unnamed Press.

Read this story for free at Slate.com.

A group of employees and their CEO, celebrating the sale of their remarkable emotion-mapping-AI-algorithm, crash onto a not-quite-deserted tropical island.

Luckily, those who survived have found a beautiful, fully-stocked private palace, with all the latest technological updates (though one without connection to the outside world). The house, however, has more secrets than anyone might have guessed, and a much darker reason for having been built and left behind.

Kristen, the hyper-competent "chief emotional manager" (a position created by her eccentric billionaire boss, Sumter) is trying to keep her colleagues stable throughout this new challenge, but staying sane seems to be as much of a challenge as staying alive.

Being a woman in tech has always meant having to be smarter than anyone expects - and Kristen's knack for out-of-the-box problem-solving and quick thinking has gotten her to the top of her field. But will a killer instinct be enough to survive the island?

This short story origially appeared in the anthology Cyber World: Tales of Humanity's Tomorrow (2016), edited by Joshua Viola and Jason Heller. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 2 (2016), edited by Neil Clarke.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology An Aura of Familiarity: Visions from the Coming Age of Networked Matter (2013), editor uncredited. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight (2014), edited by Jonathan Strahan, The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014, edited by Rich Horton, and Imaginarium 3: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing (2015), edited by Helen Marshall and Sandra Kasturi.

Blade Runner meets Westworld via Resident Evil in this shocking, gripping debut sci-fi/horror novel infused with Nietzschean philosophy, exploring humanity's darkest desire for transcendence.

Seven years after the limitless depths of the Hollow War decimated Earth, leaving only 50,000 humans to fight for survival in Los Angeles, Theo Adams is sent on a mission to destroy the enigmatic being that initiated this apocalypse, confronting the fact that humanity's yearning to transcend reality caused its downfall...

This book is a showcase of the artwork for 46 original covers created for Science Fiction Book Club (SFBC) editions, along with self portraits and autobiographical sketches of the 23 artists.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (The New Visions: A Collection of Modern Science Fiction Art) - (1982) - essay by Frederik Pohl
• Ken Barr
• John Berkey
• Richard Corben
• Tony Fiyalko
• Frank Frazetta
• Tony Gleeson
• Mike Hinge
• Les Katz
• Larry Kresek
• Don Maitz
• Estaban Maroto
• Carlos Ochagavia
• Richard Powers
• Martin Rigo
• David K. Stone
• Ed Valigursky
• Victor Valla
• Boris Vallejo
• Gary Viskupic
• Michael Whelan
• Jack Woolhiser
• James Z. Yost
• Editors' Note (The New Visions: A Collection of Modern Science Fiction Art) - (1982) - essay by Ellen Asher and Joe Miller and Mary Sherwin

The novellas Africa Zero and Africa Plus One in one book. The Collector rampages across a far future Africa populated with gene-spliced vampires, resurrected mammoth, and nutters with APWs. But he can handle it.

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, December 2004. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 10 (2005), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and Twenty-First Century Science Fiction (2013), edited by David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

This novella originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, April-May 2013. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection (2014), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Weaponized is a thrilling far-future adventure by acclaimed science fiction author Neal Asher.

A bright new future for humanity -- or a dark and inescapable past.

With the advent of new AI technology, Polity citizens now possess incredible lifespans. Yet they struggle to find meaning in their longevity, seeking danger and novelty in their increasingly mundane lives.

On a mission to find a brighter future for humanity, ex-soldier Ursula fosters a colony on the hostile planet Threpsis. Here, survival isn't a given, and colonists thrive without their AI guidance. But when deadly alien raptors appear, Ursula and her companions find themselves forced to adapt in unprecedented ways. And they will be pushed to the very brink of what it means to be human.

As a desperate battle rages across the planet, Ursula must dig deep into her past if she is to save humanity's future.

Women disappear from streets, clubs, and rooftops leaving the police dazed and confused. The mystical Soothsayer Task Force must use their special skills to divine the truth and solve the mystery.

Detectives Simantov and Bitton, along with their team of mystic agents, try to make sense of the weird crime scenes and even weirder forensic findings. The victims are seemingly unconnected and the only clues to their disappearances are the small objects they leave behind; a whip, a feather, a lock of hair.

Together with Mazzy's instincts and Yariv's stubbornness, they realise that these abductions signal the start of an apocalypse - a war between opposing hosts of angels, the daughters of Lilith and the Nephilim. The battle for access to heaven is underway and humans are caught in the middle. But strong as they may be, angels will always underestimate the power and weight in human free will.

An alien fungal infection has ravaged a faraway planet, turning all but six of the colonists into ravenous alarinkiri.

Inyama, a mycologist, is her species' last hope. But it's not expertise her fellow survivors want from her.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com

A banished warrior teaches her treacherous uncle that once made, some oaths cannot be broken... and some monsters cannot be chained.

Originally published on 10 May 2023, read it for free at Tor.com

The dust may have just settled in the failed war of conquest between the Holy Vaalbaran Empire and the Ominirish Republic, but the last Emperor's surrender means little to a lowly scribe like Enitan. All she wants is to quit her day job and expand her fledgling tea business. But when her lover is assassinated and her sibling is abducted by Imperial soldiers, Enitan abandons her idyllic plans and weaves her tea tray up through the heart of the Vaalbaran capital. There, she will learn just how far she is willing to go to exact vengeance, free her sibling, and perhaps even secure her homeland's freedom.

When an alien entity sneaks aboard a corporate spaceship, with no motive besides sabotaging the mission and murdering those aboard, commander Uzoma Ifiok launches an investigation - despite knowing that the real danger isn't the one picking off her crew.

Read the full story for free at Tor Reactor.

After fleeing her controlling and murderous family with her fiancée Vinh, Amara embarks on a colonization project, New Belaforme, along with her childhood friend, Jesse.

The planet, beautiful and lethal, produces the Gray, a “self-cleaning” mechanism that New Belaforme’s scientists are certain only attacks invasive organisms, consuming them. Humans have been careful to do nothing to call attention to themselves until a rival colony wakes the Gray.

As Amara, Vinh, and Jesse work to carve out a new life together, each is haunted by past betrayals that surface, expounded by the need to survive the rival colony and the planet itself.

There’s more than one way to be eaten alive.

With her friends vanishing and her home planet of Ayeshij crushed under the weight of occupation, gemologist-turned-con artist Mitayre's planning a very special retirement - the kind with telepathic birds, sharp teeth, and gory retribution...

Originally published at Tor Reactor Mag on 28 February 2024, read it for free at Tor.com

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

Read or listen to the full story for free at PodCastle.

Table of Contents:

• On the Embankment - short fiction by Hugh E. Wright
• The Mystery of the Gables - short fiction by Elsie Norris
• The Missing Word - short fiction by Austin Philips
• Phantom Death - short fiction by Charles H. Mansfield and Walter E. Mansfield
• The Wraith of the Rapier - short fiction by Firth Scott
• The Soul of Maddalina Tonelli - short fiction by James Barr
• Haunted! - short fiction by Jack Edwards
• Our Strange Traveller - short fiction by Percy James Brebner
• A Regent of Love Rhymes - short fiction by C. Ranger Gull
• Amid the Trees - short fiction by Francis Xavier
• The River's Edge - short fiction by Mary Schultze
• A Futile Ghost - short fiction by Mary Reynolds
• Ghosts - short fiction by Lumley Deakin
• Kearney - short fiction by Elizabeth G. Jordan
• When Spirits Steal - short fiction by Philippa Forest
• The House of the Black Evil - short fiction by Eric Purves
• The Woman in the Veil - short fiction by E. F. Benson
• The Treasure of the Tombs - short fiction by F. Britten Austin

THE STARLIGHT MAN Algernon Blackwood has been called the central figure in the British supernatural literature of the twentieth century by Michael Dirda in the New York Review of Books. S. T. Joshi referred to him as a master of narrative pacing. He has been labeled one of the most influential supernatural writers of his time by Storm Constantine, author of The Wraeththu Chronicles. In his essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature, H. P. Lovecraft stated that of the quality of Mr. Blackwood s genius there can be no dispute. Writers and reviewers throughout the last 100 years have been extolling the virtues of Algernon Blackwood s tales.

But Blackwood was a rolling stone and kept virtually no papers or private records. When Mike Ashley decided to research Blackwood's life in 1978 he had no idea that over forty years later he would still be researching. A first edition of the biography was published in 2001 but that had to be edited down, and Ashley knew at that time that there were still many unanswered questions. Since then some of those questions have been answered and though there still remains some mystery about Blackwood and maybe that adds to his aura and fascination Ashley has now brought the biography up to date, restoring the text that was removed and adding more of the results of his researches. Here, now, is the most extensive and thorough study of Blackwood's life and works revealing more about the mystic, the adventurer, the innocent, the seeker.

Featuring hard-to-find short stories published between 1873 and 1930, this original anthology spotlights a variety of important sci-fi pioneers, including Ethel Watts Mumford, Edith Nesbit, and Clare Winger Harris. Imaginative scenarios include a feminist society in another dimension, the east/west division of the United States with men and women on opposite sides, a man who converts himself into a cyborg, a drug that confers superhuman qualities, and many other curious situations.

Editor Mike Ashley provides an informative introduction to the stories. Highlights include "When Time Turned" (1901), which centers on a grieving widower who contrives to relive his life backwards; "The Painter of Dead Women" (1910), the tale of a woman in thrall to a Svengali-like character who promises to preserve her beauty forever; "The Automaton Ear" (1876), in which an inventor struggles to create a machine to detect sounds from the distant past; "Ely's Automatic Housemaid" (1899), a lighthearted fable concerning a robot housemaid; and ten other captivating tales.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Forgotten Pioneers - (2015) - essay by Mike Ashley
• When Time Turned - (1901) - shortstory by Ethel Watts Mumford
• The Painter of Dead Women - (1910) - shortstory by Edna W. Underwood
• The Automaton Ear - (1873) - novelette by Florence McLandburgh
• Ely's Automatic Housemaid - (1899) - shortstory by Elizabeth Bellamy
• The Ray of Displacement - (1903) - novelette by Harriet Prescott Spofford
• Those Fatal Filaments - (1903) - shortstory by Mabel Ernestine Abbott
• The Third Drug - (1908) - shortstory by E. Nesbit
• A Divided Republic: An Allegory of the Future - (1887) - shortstory by Lillie Devereux Blake
• Via the Hewitt Ray - (1930) - novelette by M. F. Rupert
• The Great Beast of Kafue - (1917) - shortstory by Clotilde Graves
• Friend Island - (1918) - shortstory by Francis Stevens
• The Artificial Man - (1929) - shortstory by Clare Winger Harris
• Creatures of the Light - (1930) - novelette by Sophie Wenzel Ellis
• The Flying Teuton - (1917) - shortstory by Alice Brown

The humans are fighting again. Go figure.

As a free A.I., Mal finds the war between the modded and augmented Federals and the puritanical Humanists about as interesting as a battle between rival anthills. He's not above scouting the battlefield for salvage, though, and when the Humanists abruptly cut off access to infospace he finds himself trapped in the body of a cyborg mercenary, and responsible for the safety of the modded girl she died protecting.

A dark comedy wrapped in a techno thriller's skin, Mal Goes to War provides a satirical take on war, artificial intelligence, and what it really means to be human.

Drew Bergen is an Engineer. He builds living things, one gene at a time. He's also kind of a doofus. Six years after the Stupid War - a bloody, inconclusive clash between the Engineered and the UnAltered - that's a dangerous combination. Hannah is Drew's greatest project, modified in utero to be just a bit more than human. She's also his daughter.

Drew's working on a new project now. He thinks his team is developing a spiffy new strain of corn, but Hannah's classmate and her mysterious companion disagree. They think he's cooking up the end of the world. When one of Drew's team members disappears, he begins to suspect that they might be right. Soon they're all in far over their heads, with corporate goons and government operatives hunting them, and millions of lives in the balance.

Energetic and bitingly satirical, The End of Ordinary is a riveting near-future thriller that asks an important question: if we can't get along when our differences are barely skin deep, what happens when they run all the way down to the bone?

Anders Jensen is having a bad month. His roommate is a data thief, his girlfriend picks fights in bars, and his best friend is a cyborg... and a lousy tipper. When everything is spiraling out of control, though, maybe those are exactly the kind of friends you need.

In a world divided between the genetically engineered elite and the unmodified masses, Anders is an anomaly: engineered, but still broke and living next to a crack house. All he wants is to land a tenure-track faculty position, and maybe meet someone who's not technically a criminal-but when a nightmare plague rips through Hagerstown, Anders finds himself dodging kinetic energy weapons and government assassins as Baltimore slips into chaos. His friends aren't as helpless as they seem, though, and his girlfriend's street-magician brother-in-law might be a pretentious hipster - or might hold the secret to saving them all.

Frenetic and audacious, Three Days in April is a speculative thriller that raises an important question: once humanity goes down the rabbit hole, can we ever find our way back?

Based on an earlier short story of the same title, it is set in a dystopian future. In this future, corporations, referred to as Zaibatsu, have moved some aspects of their competition from the economic to the military.

The action takes place among mercenary soldiers. At times, the conflict is under rules of engagement where "killsuits" are used. The killsuit is a reverse poer armour acting to immobilize the soldier when the on-board computer decides that a lethal hit has been sustained. But, sometimes the rules break down, and lethal weapons and violence are used.

This short story, set in the same future as The Water Knife, originally appeared on Matter, 27 June 2015. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Ten (2016), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection (2016), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Matter.

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

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

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

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

This novelette originally appeared in Lightspeed, November 2017.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This novelette originally appeared in Lightspeed, February 2017.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, February 2018.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, June 2018.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, August 2017.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

There was and there was not, as all stories begin, a princess cursed to be poisonous to the touch. But for Soraya, who has lived her life hidden away, apart from her family, safe only in her gardens, it's not just a story.

As the day of her twin brother's wedding approaches, Soraya must decide if she's willing to step outside of the shadows for the first time. Below in the dungeon is a demon who holds knowledge that she craves, the answer to her freedom. And above is a young man who isn't afraid of her, whose eyes linger not with fear, but with an understanding of who she is beneath the poison.

Soraya thought she knew her place in the world, but when her choices lead to consequences she never imagined, she begins to question who she is and who she is becoming... human or demon. Princess or monster.

Sixteen-year-old Mina is motherless, her magician father is vicious, and her silent heart has never beat with love for anyone--has never beat at all, in fact, but she'd always thought that fact normal. She never guessed that her father cut out her heart and replaced it with one of glass. When she moves to Whitespring Castle and sees its king for the first time, Mina forms a plan: win the king's heart with her beauty, become queen, and finally know love. The only catch is that she'll have to become a stepmother.

Fifteen-year-old Lynet looks just like her late mother, and one day she discovers why: a magician created her out of snow in the dead queen's image, at her father's order. But despite being the dead queen made flesh, Lynet would rather be like her fierce and regal stepmother, Mina. She gets her wish when her father makes Lynet queen of the southern territories, displacing Mina. Now Mina is starting to look at Lynet with something like hatred, and Lynet must decide what to do--and who to be--to win back the only mother she's ever known... or else defeat her once and for all.

A Junior Engineer for Monolithic Diversified Enterprises, Jack Burroughs finds himself caught in a tangled cyberweb of corporate double-dealing and virtual espionage. And when he's forced to put his life on-line, it becomes apparent that his grip on (virtual) reality is by no means secure.

Walk through the door and leave all your problems behind... but you don't know what's on the other side. And once you leave, you'll never come back. Will you go through?

Maren Walker told herself she wouldn't need to sell pills for long, that it was only means to an end. But that end seems to be stretching as far away as the other side of Blackdamp County, Kentucky. There's always another bill for Granny's doctor, another problem with the car, another reason she's getting nowhere.

She dreams of walking through her little door to leave it all behind. The doors have appeared to the people in her mountain town for as long as anyone can remember, though no one knows where they lead. All anyone knows is that if you go, you'll never come back.

Maren's mother left through her door when Maren was nine, and her shadow has followed Maren ever since. When she faces the possibility of escaping her struggles for good, Maren must choose just what kind of future she wants to build.

The strange war down south -- with its rumors of gods and monsters -- is over. And while sixteen-year-old Hallie and her sister wait to see who will return from the distant battlefield, they struggle to maintain their family farm.

When Hallie hires a veteran to help them, the war comes home in ways no one could have imagined, and soon Hallie is taking dangerous risks -- and keeping desperate secrets. But even as she slowly learns more about the war and the men who fought it, ugly truths about Hallie's own family are emerging. And while monsters and armies are converging on the small farm, the greatest threat to her home may be Hallie herself.

A collection of all 118 short science fiction and fantasy stories of one of the masters of the vignette, all his short works except two which were rewritten into parts of a novel. Introduction by Barry N. Malzberg. Dustjacket art by Bob Eggleton.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (2001) - essay by Barry N. Malzberg
• Armageddon (1941) - short story
• Not Yet the End (1941) - short story
• Etaoin Shrdlu (1942) - short story
• Star Mouse (1951) - novelette
• Runaround (1942) - short story
• The New One (1942) - short story
• The Angelic Angleworm (1943) - novelette
• The Hat Trick (1943) - short story
• The Geezenstacks (1943) - short story
• Daymare (1943) - novelette
• Paradox Lost (1943) - short story
• And the Gods Laughed (1944) - short story
• Nothing Sirius (1944) - short story
• The Yehudi Principle (1944) - short story
• Arena (1944) - novelette
• The Waveries (1945) - short story
• Murder in Ten Easy Lessons (1945) - short story
• Pi in the Sky (1945) - novelette
• Placet Is a Crazy Place (1946) - short story
• Knock (1948) - short story
• All Good BEMs (1949) - short story
• Mouse (1949) - short story
• Come and Go Mad (1949) - novelette
• Crisis, 1999 (1949) - short story
• Letter to a Phoenix (1949) - short story
• Vengeance Fleet (1950) - short story
• The Last Train (1950) - short story
• Entity Trap (1950) - short story
• Obedience (1950) - short story
• The Frownzly Florgels (1950) - short story
• The Last Martian (1950) - short story
• Honeymoon in Hell (1950) - novelette
• Mitkey Rides Again (1950) - short story
• Six-Legged Svengali (1950) - short story by Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds
• Dark Interlude (1951) - short story by Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds
• Man of Distinction (1951) - short story
• The Switcheroo (1951) - short story by Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds
• The Weapon (1951) - short story
• Cartoonist (1951) - short story by Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds
• The Dome (1951) - short story
• A Word from Our Sponsor (1951) - short story
• The Gamblers (1951) - novelette by Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds
• The Hatchetman (1951) - novelette by Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds
• Something Green (1951) - short story
• Me and Flapjack and the Martians (1952) - short story by Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds
• The Little Lamb (1953) - short story
• Rustle of Wings (1953) - short story
• Hall of Mirrors (1953) - short story
• Experiment (1954) - short story
• Sentry (1954) - short story
• Keep Out (1954) - short story
• Naturally (1954) - short story
• Voodoo (1954) - short story
• Answer (1954) - short story
• Daisies (1954) - short story
• Pattern (1954) - short story
• Politeness (1954) - short story
• Preposterous (1954) - short story
• Reconciliation (1954) - short story
• Search (1954) - short story
• Sentence (1954) - short story
• Solipsist (1954) - short story
• Blood (1955) - short story
• Imagine (1955) - short story
• First Time Machine (1955) - short story
• Too Far (1955) - short story
• Millennium (1955) - short story
• Expedition (1956) - short story
• Happy Ending (1957) - short story by Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds
• Jaycee (1955) - short story
• Unfortunately (1958) - short story
• Nasty (1959) - short story
• Rope Trick (1959) - short story
• Abominable (1960) - short story
• Bear Possibility (1960) - short story
• Recessional (1961) - short story
• Contact (1960) - short story
• Rebound (1960) - short story
• Great Lost Discoveries I - Invisibility (1961) - short story
• Great Lost Discoveries II - Invulnerability (1961) - short story
• Great Lost Discoveries III - Immortality (1961) - short story
• Hobbyist (1961) - short story
• The End (1961) - short story
• Nightmare in Blue (1961) - short story
• Nightmare in Gray (1961) - short story
• Nightmare in Red (1961) - short story
• Nightmare in Yellow (1961) - short story
• Nightmare in Green (1961) - short story
• Nightmare in White (1961) - short story
• The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver I (1961) - short story
• The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver II (1961) - short story
• The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver III (1961) - short story
• Bright Beard (1961) - short story
• Cat Burglar (1961) - short story
• Dead Letter (1961) - short story
• Death on the Mountain (1961) - short story
• Fatal Error (1961) - short story
• Fish Story (1961) - short story
• Horse Race (1961) - short story
• The House (1960) - short story
• The Joke (1948) - short story
• The Ring of Hans Carvel (1961) - short story
• Second Chance (1961) - short story
• Three Little Owls (A Fable) (1961) - short story
• Granny's Birthday (1960) - short story
• Aelurophobe (1962) - short story
• Puppet Show (1962) - short story
• Double Standard (1963) - short story
• It Didn't Happen (1963) - short story
• Ten Percenter (1963) - short story
• Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1965) - short story by Fredric Brown and Carl Onspaugh
• Editor's Notes and Acknowledgements (2002) - essay by Ben Yalow

The Starlost: 2785 A.D.

They had banished Devon from the world of Cypress Corners because he dared to challenge the Elders. And when he defied them again, they hunted him like an animal.

Then Devon stumbled on a secret passage in the hills. His whole life changed in that moment. For Devon had accidentally discovered the giant ark that was ferrying not only Cypress Corners but all other Earth cultures to another planet.

What Devon did not know was that there had been a terrible accident aboard the spaceship. The gear had been damaged, the crew dead. And the ark and all its worlds were now headed straight for destruction.

A woman on the edge of the sea finds a girl on the edge of life.

Brittle but not yet broken, Ia Pendilly ekes out a fierce life in a caravan on the coast of Cornwall. In years of living with Bran - her embattled, battering cousin and common law husband - she's never yet had her own baby. So when she discovers the waif washed up on the shore, Ia takes the risk and rescues her. And the girl, in turn, will rescue something in Ia - bringing back a memory she's lost, giving her the strength to escape, and leading her on a journey downriver.

It will take her into the fringes of a society she's shunned, collapsed around its own isolation. It will take her through a valley ravaged by floods, into a world not too far from reckoning. It will take her in search of her sister, and the dark remembrance of their parting. It will take her, break her, remake her, in the shapes of freedom.

On May 4, 1881, the day that Zianno Zezen -- Z, for short -- turns twelve, his life changes forever. Amid the confusion of a tragic train wreck, he has the first inkling that he is no ordinary boy... that he is not human at all, but instead a member of a race known as the Meq. The Meq have lost all memory of their origins; they do not know why they heal with astonishing speed, or why, once they turn twelve, they stop aging unless they meet the single other member of their race destined to join with them.

Certain Meq possess even more amazing powers, thanks to mysterious Stones they have carried since before the dawn of recorded history. Z's father carried such a Stone, the Stone of Dreams. Now that Stone is Z's to bear... and to protect.

The Meq are far-flung and elusive, but Z finds allies. He will need them; for a challenge comes from the renegade Meq called the Fleur-du-Mal -- the Flower of Evil. A sadistic assassin in the body of a twelve-year-old boy, the Fleur-du-Mal will become Z's archenemy in a story that spans decades and continents and features an unforgettable cast of characters, human and Meq alike.

Jane has lived a mostly ordinary life, raised by her recently deceased aunt Magnolia, whom she counted on to turn life into an adventure. Without Aunt Magnolia, Jane is lost. So she's easily swept away when a glamorous, capricious, and wealthy acquaintance from years ago asks Jane to accompany her to a gala at the extravagant island mansion called Tu Reviens.

Jane remembers her aunt telling her: "If anyone ever invites to you to Tu Reviens, promise me that you'll go." What Jane doesn't know is that the house will offer her five choices that could ultimately determine the course of her life.

One choice leads Jane into a heist mystery. Another takes her into a spy thriller. She finds herself in a gothic horror story, a space opera, and an extraordinary fantasy realm. She might fall in love, she might lose her life, she might come face-to-face with herself. Every choice comes with a price. But together, all the choices will lead her to the truth.

One house. Five choices. Limitless possibilities.

This Nebula Award-winning and Hugo Award-nominated short story originally appeared in Fireside Magazine, February 2018. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Volume Thirteen (2019), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Read the full story for free at Fireside.

Everyone knows about Ashburn House. They whisper its old owner went mad, and restless ghosts still walk the halls. They say it's the dwelling place of something cruel and sinister. But when Adrienne--desperate and in need of a place to stay--inherits the crumbling old mansion, she only sees it as a lifeline... until darkness falls.

Strange messages are etched into the walls. Furniture moves when she leaves the room. There's something here--something powerful, angry, and hell-bent on shaking things up. Worse, a grave hidden in the depths of the forest hints at a terrible, unforgivable secret. Eventually Adrienne can't ignore that a twisted thing lives in the house, its hungry eyes ever-watchful. Chasing the threads of a decades-old mystery, it isn't long before she realizes she's become prey to something deeply unnatural and intensely resentful.

She has no idea how to escape. She has no idea how to survive. Only one thing is certain: Ashburn's dead are not at rest.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, August 2012.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Nebula Award nominated novella.

You might have thought that the Fiesta of the Holy Hermit in the Mexican town of Los Remedios was just another of those quaint colourful ceremonies that the Indian natives put on each year for the mystification of tourists. And perhaps for the past few hundred years it had bee nothing more than that - but this year was to be different.

It originally appeared as and Ace Double together with John Rackham's Danger from Vega. It later appeared in standalone edition as well.

This novelette originally appeared in in Oceans of the Mind, issue 10, Dec 2003. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-First Annual Collection (2004), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy (Volume 1) (2005), edited by Bill Congreve and Michelle Marquardt. The story is included in the collection Amberjack: Tales of Fear and Wonder (2010).

Stories Inspired by Famous First Lines

Pride and Prejudice meets Macbeth by way of The Wizard of Oz and a dollop of the speculative, in this entertaining anthology where authors get inspiration for short stories from the first lines of famous works of literature. Edited by respected anthologist Gardner Dozois, the collection features Mary Robinette Kowal's Hugo Award-winning story "The Lady Astronaut of Mars".

Table of Contents:

• "Fireborn" by Robert Charles Wilson - based on first line of Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Tale
• "The Evening Line" by Mike Resnick - based on first line of Pride and Prejudice
• "No Decent Patrimony" by Elizabeth Bear - based on first line of Marlowe's Edward II
• "The Big Whale" by Allen M. Steele - based on first line of Moby Dick
• "Begone" by Daryl Gregory - based on first line of David Copperfield
• "The Red Menace" by Lavie Tidhar - based on first line of The Communist Manifesto
• "Muse of Fire" by John Scalzi - based on first line of Shakespeare's Henry V
• "Writer's Block" by Nancy Kress - based on 'It was a dark and stormy night...' from Paul by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
• "Highland Reel" by John G. Hemry - based on first line of Macbeth
• "Karin Coxswain, or, Death as She is Truly Lived" by Paul Di Filippo - baed on first line of Huckleberry Finn
• "The Lady Astronaut of Mars" by Mary Robinette Kowal - based on first line of The Wizard of Oz
• "Every Fuzzy Beast of The Earth, Every Pink Fowl of The Air" by Tad Williams - based on first line of the Bible
• "Declaration" by James Patrick Kelly - based on first line of the Declaration of Independence

Nebula Awardd nominated short story. It first appeared in The 1991 World Fantasy Convention and was reprinted in Omni, July 1992. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Sixth Annual Collection (1993), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling and Nebula Awards 29 (1995), edited by Pamela Sargent. It is included in the collections Slippage: Precariously Poised, Previously Uncollected Stories (1997) and The Top of the Volcano: The Award-Winning Stories of Harlan Ellison (2015).

From the moment William Mertoun arrives to catalogue the library at Colonel Barr's old mansion on the desolate Northumbrian moors, he senses something is terribly wrong. Barr's brother Ian has just died, mysteriously and violently, and the Colonel himself is hidden away in a locked room, to which his sinister nurse denies all access. As strange and supernatural events begin to unfold, Mertoun learns the local legend of a ghostly Roman centurion, slain on the site sixteen centuries earlier, who is said to haunt the estate. Mertoun is sceptical at first, but after another murder, a harrowing seance, and an actual sighting of the spirit one lonely night on the moor, he realizes that he and everyone at Barr's mansion are in mortal danger. What does the ghost want, and can it be stopped?

PLAYTHING OF THE GODS

He was Perseus, son of Zeus and Danae, born in disgrace, exiled to perish at sea, fated to survive at heavenly caprice -- until he met his love, defied the Gods and dared to fight them or die.

She was Andromeda, enslaved by her own beauty which beggared the heavens and brought a curse upon her city, her home, her heart.... until Perseus accepted the Devil's own challenge, answered the deadly riddle and rode forth on his winged horse Pegasus to claim his love and to face the last of the Titans, armed only with a bloody hand, a witche's curse, and a severed head...

In the eighteen years since her Crawford Award-winning debut novel Moonwise, Greer Gilman's writing has only grown more complex and entrancing, more beguiling and inventive.

Gilman's second novel, Cloud & Ashes, is a slow whirlwind of language, a button box of words, a mythic Joycean fable that will invite immersion, study, revisitation, and delight. To step into her world is to witness the bright flashes, witty turns, and shadowy corners of the human imagination, limned with all the detail and humor of a master stylist. In Gilman's intricate prose, myth and fable live, breathe, and dance as they do nowhere else.

Cloud & Ashes collects three Winter's Tales ("Jack Daw's Pack," "A Crowd of Bone," and the longest, "Unleaving") centering on folk traditions, harvest rites, the seasons, gods, and trickster figures.

In "Unleaving," Margaret, granddaughter of a goddess, escapes from the underworld into the human realm, Cloud. She is pursued, and, in escaping, brings about an epochal change, separating the kingdom of myth from the human world.

Cloud & Ashes is a work that reaches back to the richness of Shakespeare-Gilman understands that the depth of Shakespeare's work lies in his range-and the reader will rejoice in her counterplay of high myth and bawdry even while being drawn into the world of Cloud. Inventive, playful, and erudite, Gilman is an archeolexicologist rewriting language itself in these long-awaited tales.

Having a resident vampire is just the thing for upper-class New Yorkers--besides being a status symbol, they make excellent butlers or housekeepers. The only thing they require in return is a drop or two of blood and a casket to shut out the dawn's early light.

Tolerated by society only if they follow a strict set of rules, vampires are seen as "less than"--and as the daughter of immigrants, Radhika knows firsthand how this feels. Accused of murder, her undead client Mr. Evelyn More, knows that the cards are stacked against him.

With the help of a journalist friend and a diminutive detective inspector, Miss Dhingra sets out to prove her client's innocence and win his freedom. Failure will mean Mr. More's death, the end of her dreams of becoming a successful attorney, and the loss of the vampire Miss Dhingra has begun to call her friend.

THE 0.01% HAVE DECIDED EARTH IS HISTORY

Dariusz is an engineer whose career ended years ago; now, a man he's never met sits in a bar that doesn't exist and offers him a fresh start... at a price. Cassandra - 'Sand,' to her friends - is a space pilot, who itches to get her hands on the controls and actually fly a ship, rather than watch computers do it for her.

The 'Pointers' - the elite 0.01% who control virtually all wealth - have seen the limitations of a plundered Earth and set their eyes on the stars. And now Dariusz and Sand, and a half-million ambitious men and women just like them, are sent out to extend the Pointers' and the Market's influence across the galaxy.

But the colony fleet is sabotaged and the ESS Adam Mickiewicz crashes, on an alien planet where one hemisphere is seared by perpetual daylight and the other shrouded in eternal night. The castaways have the chance to create society from scratch... if they're not destroyed by the hostile planet - or their own leaders - before they can even begin

When Cisco Collins returns to his home town thirty years after saving it from being swallowed by a hell mouth opened by an ancient pirate ghost, he realises that being a childhood hero isn't like it was in the movies. Especially when nobody remembers the heroic bits -- even the friends who once fought alongside him.

Struggling with single parenting and treated as bit of a joke, Cisco isn't really in the Christmas spirit like everyone else. A fact that's made worse by the tendrils of the pirate's powers creeping back into our world and people beginning to die in bizarre ways.

With the help of a talking fox, an enchanted forest, a long-lost friend haunting his dreams, and some 80s video game consoles turned into weapons, Cisco must now convince his friends to once again help him save the day. Yet they quickly discover that being a ghostbusting hero is so much easier when you don't have schools runs, parent evenings, and nativity plays to attend. And even in the middle of a supernatural battle, you always need to bring snacks and wipes...

A human trader living on a planet of innocent aliens with no religion is joined by a missionary determined to convert them to Christianity.

This short story originally appeared in New Worlds Science Fiction, #122 September 1962, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, September 2012. It has been reprinted many times. It can be found in the anthologies:

• Dark Stars (1969), edited by Robert Silverberg
• The Road to Science Fiction 3: From Heinlein to Here (1979), edited by James Gunn
• The Great SF Stories 24 (1962) (1992), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Isaac Asimov
• Nebula Awards Showcase 2010, edited by Bill Fawcett

The story can be found in the collections Two Tales and Eight Tomorrows (1965), The Best of Harry Harrison (1976), Stainless Steel Visions (1993) and 50 in 50 (2001).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Ninety years from now, a satellite detects a nearby black hole scientists dub Kali for the Hindu goddess of destruction. Humanity embarks on a generations-long project to tap the energy of the black hole, and found colonies on planets across the solar system. Earth and Mars and the moons Europa (Jupiter) and Titan (Uranus) develop radically different societies, with only Kali, that swirling vortex of destruction and creation, and the hated but crucial Artificial Accretion Disk Development association (AADD) in common.

In 1328, Bruges is under siege by the Chatelaine of Hell and her army of chimeras--humans mixed with animals or armour, forged in the deep fires of the Hellbeast. At night, revenants crawl over the walls and bring plague and grief to this city of widows.

Margriet de Vos learns she's a widow herself when her good-for-nothing husband comes home dead from the war. He didn't come back for her. The revenant who was her husband pulls a secret treasure of coins and weapons from under his floorboards and goes back through the mouth of the beast called Hell.

Margriet killed her first soldier when she was 11. She's buried six of her seven children. She'll do anything for her daughter, even if it means raiding Hell itself to get her inheritance back.

Margriet's daughter is haunted by a dead husband of her own, and blessed, or cursed, with an enchanted distaff that allows her to control the revenants and see the future. Together with a transgender man-at-arms who has unfinished business with the Chatelaine, a traumatized widow with a giant waterpowered forgehammer at her disposal, and a wealthy alderman's wife who escapes Bruges with her children, Margriet and Beatrix forge a raiding party like Hell has never seen.

Transcript of Interaction Between Astronaut Mike Scudderman and the OnStar Hands-Free A.I. Crash Advisor originally appeared in Lightspeed, June 2011.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

The narrator of Tenebrae inhabits a decaying, desolate mansion in the remote and wild countryside with his younger brother and their mad old uncle, driven insane by abuse of opium and alcohol. This nameless narrator is a morbid young man who passes most of his time in a room painted all black, poring over arcane manuscripts dealing with the mysteries of death, while sipping garishly coloured liquors brewed by his uncle or cups of coffee flavoured with arsenic.

When he falls in love with a neighbour, he looks forward to marrying her and trading his life of despondency for one of joy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, she finds him rather unpleasant company and instead falls in love with his brother. Driven to murderous jealousy, he resolves upon a brutal crime. But after the consummation of his terrible act, he finds himself haunted by a huge, monstrous spider. Is it a delusion brought on by incipient madness? the reincarnated soul of his murdered victim, returned for vengeance? or does it foretell a fate even more horrifying than can be possibly imagined?

Published in 1898, at the end of a decade in which English writers explored the literary possibilities of the Gothic with such characters as Dorian Gray, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dracula, and The Beetle, Ernest G. Henham's weird horror novel Tenebrae is reminiscent of the works of Poe. Perhaps unequalled in its extreme darkness and gloom, and yet at times grimly, though possibly unintentionally, hilarious, Tenebrae remains one of the strangest productions of this fertile literary period. This newly typeset edition includes the unabridged text of the first edition, as well as an introduction and notes by Gerald Monsman, the foremost scholar of Henham (1870-1946), who later published under the name John Trevena. Also featured is a reproduction of the cover of the incredibly scarce first edition.

Copies of this Novel also appear under the author's actual Name: Ernest G. Henham.

In the remote hamlet of Thorlund stands the manor house known as the Strath, an eerie place that exercises a mysterious hold over anyone who enters it. The site of tragedy in 1742 when its owner, Sir John Hooper, turned highwayman and met his death on the gallows, the Strath has remained vacant for over a century, a pair of hideous masks its only occupants. When the novel opens, the Strath's new owner has just arrived from America to take possession of the house, but he is soon found horribly murdered. Now the next heir, young Charles Conway, has come to the Strath, and the house begins to work its baneful influence on him and on the local residents, causing them to behave in bizarre and violent ways. What is the connection between the sinister power of the Strath and the ghastly masks that adorn the wall? And once Conway and the others are drawn within the evil place, can any of them possibly survive?

When three delinquents hole up in an abandoned general store after their most recent robbery, to their great surprise, a letter drops through the mail slot in the store's shutter. This seemingly simple request for advice sets the trio on a journey of discovery as, over the course of a single night, they step into the role of the kindhearted former shopkeeper who devoted his waning years to offering thoughtful counsel to his correspondents. Through the lens of time, they share insight with those seeking guidance, and by morning, none of their lives will ever be the same.

I am American. We are all Americans.

The year is 1942. A Japanese-American girl's life is turned upside down by Executive Order 9066, and she must cope with a life confined to the barbed wire of an internment camp in the Arizona desert. There, she struggles to weigh her continued loyalty to her country (which has betrayed and ostracized everyone she loves) against a closely guarded family secret that could change the course of history.

This taut and affecting story is by Erin Hoffman, a San Francisco-based video game designer whose Chaos Knight fantasy series--starting with last year's Sword of Fire and Sea and continuing with the recently released Lance of Earth and Sky--is being published by Pyr Books.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Being the Dark Lord and Prince of Evil is not as much fun as it sounds, particularly if you are a basically decent person. King Mordak is just such a person. Technically he's more goblin than person, but the point is that he is really keen to be a lot less despicable than his predecessors.

Not that the other goblins appreciate Mordak's attempts to redefine the role. Why should they when his new healthcare program seems designed to actually extend life expectancy, and his efforts to end a perfectly reasonable war with the dwarves appear to have become an obsession?

With confidence in his leadership crumbling, what Mordak desperately needs is a distraction. Perhaps some of these humans moving to the Realm in search of great homes at an affordable price will be able to help?

Duncan's boss doesn't think he's cut out to be a lawyer. He isn't a pack animal. He lacks the killer instinct. But when his best friend from school barges his way back into Duncan's life, along with a full supporting cast of lawyers, ex-wives, zombies, and snow-white unicorns, it's not long before things become distinctly unsettling. Hairy, even.

The year is 2017. Lucy Pavlov is the CEO of PavSoft Industries, home of a revolutionary operating system that every computer in the world runs on. Her personal wealth is immeasurable, her intelligence is unfathomable, and she's been voted World's Most Beautiful Woman for three years running. To put it simply - she has it all.But not everything is quite right in Lucy's life. For starters, she has no memories prior to 2015. She also keeps having run-ins with a unicorn. And to make matters even worse, a bomb is hurtling through interstellar space, headed straight for Lucy - and the planet known as Earth.

When Kayaguchiya Integrated Circuits III, a genie, is released from the aspirin bottle he's been stuck in for 14 years, there's bound to be trouble. Jane had wanted to end her life in peace, but now she's got a genie, things look up - until the apocalypse rears its ugly head.

The doughnut is a thing of beauty. A circle of fried doughy perfection. A source of comfort in trying times, perhaps. For Theo Bernstein, however, it is far, far more.Things have been going pretty badly for Theo Bernstein. An unfortunate accident at work has lost him his job (and his work involved a Very Very Large Hadron Collider, so he's unlikely to get it back). His wife has left him. And he doesn't have any money.Before Theo has time to fully appreciate the pointlessness of his own miserable existence, news arrives that his good friend Professor Pieter van Goyen, renowned physicist and Nobel laureate, has died.By leaving the apparently worthless contents of his safety deposit to Theo, however, the professor has set him on a quest of epic proportions. A journey that will rewrite the laws of physics. A battle to save humanity itself.This is the tale of a man who had nothing and gave it all up to find his destiny - and a doughnut.

All Malcolm Fisher did was run over a badger. Unfortunately the badger turned out to be Ingolf, last of the giants. With his dying breath he reluctantly gave Malcolm two gifts of power and made him ruler of the world.

From the moment Homo Sapiens descended from the trees, possibly onto their heads, humanity has striven towards civilization. Fire. The Wheel. Running Away from furry things with more teeth than one might reasonably expect-all are testament to man's ultimate supremacy. It is a noble story and so, of course, complete and utter fiction. For one man has discovered the hideous truth: that humanity's ascent to civilization has been ruthlessly guided by a small gang of devious frogs. The man's name is David Perkins, and his theory is not, on the whole, widely admired, particularly not by the frogs themselves, who had invested a great deal of time and effort in keeping the whole thing quiet.

The management buy-out of Hell wasn't going quite as well as had been hoped. For a start, there had been that nasty business with the perjurors, and then came the news that the Most Wanted Man in History had escaped, and all just as the plans for the new theme park, EuroBosch, were underway.

It's amazing the problems drinking can get you into. One little swig from an oddly-shaped bottle and you go from being an ordinary Dutch sea-captain to an unhappy immortal, drifting around the world with your similarly immortal crew, unable to stay in port for long owing to side effects we won't go into right now. You become a creature of myth and legend. Worst of all, Richard Wagner writes an opera about you.

Little does Cornelius Vanderdecker, the Flying Dutchman, suspect that a chance encounter in an English pub might just lead to the end of his cursed life, one way or another.

Together with his crew, A BBC film unit (one of whom is still investigating Milk Marketing Board conspiracy theories), a scientists who invented everything, and Jane Doland, an undercover accountant for the National Lombard Bank, the Dutchman falls into a series of events which even the composer of The Ring of the Nibelungs might consider overly coincidental and chaotic.

Fifteen hundred years have passed and the Holy Grail is still missing, presumed ineffable. The knights have dumped the quest and now deliver pizzas, while the sinister financial services of the lost kingdom of Atlantis threatens the universe with fiscal Armageddon.

All is not well with the universe - cutbacks have taken their toll, and the sun is dirty and late, thanks to being 30 billion miles overdue on its next service. None of the committees can agree on anything, and extreme measures seem called for.

Polly is a real estate solicitor. She is also losing her mind. Someone keeps drinking her coffee. And talking to her clients. And doing her job. And when she goes to the dry cleaner's to pick up her dress for the party, it's not there. Not the dress - the dry cleaner's.And then there are the chickens who think they are people. Something strange is definitely going on - and it's going to take more than a magical ring to sort it out.From one of the funniest voices in comic fiction today comes a hilarious tale of pigs and parallel worlds.

'I was eight years old when I saw my first elf.' And for unlikely hero Michael it was his last. Cruella, Michael's unfortunately named girlfriend, doesn't approve of his obsession with the little people. But the problem is that they won't leave him alone. And who can blame them when it's Michael's own stepfather who's responsible for causing them so much misery? Oh yes. Daddy George knows that elves can do so much more than gardening.

This is the story of Jane who finds the novel she is working on starts to write back. She's already realized novel writing isn't such a piece of cake after all, and the world of fiction is a far more complicated place than she ever imagined.

There are many reasons why British summers are either non-existent or, alternatively, held on a Thursday. Many of these reasons are either scientific, mad, or both-but all of them are wrong, especially the scientific ones. The real reason why it rains perpetually from January 1st to December 31st is, of course, irritable Chinese Water Dragons. Karen is one such legendary creature. Ancient, noble, nearly indestructible and, for a number of wildly improbable reasons, working as a real estate agent, Karen is irritable quite a lot of the time. But now things have changed, and Karen's no longer irritable. She's furious.

This is a comedy set in the Sunnyvoyde Residential Home. Wagner got it wrong. The Twilight of the Gods isn't really that cataclysmic. After all, there's a comfy chair, a welcoming fire and three meals a day.

Something is about to go wrong. Very wrong. What do you expect if the Supreme Being decides to get away from it all for a few days, leaving his naturally inquisitive son to look after the cosmic balance of things? A minor hiccup with a human soul and a welding machine soon leads to a violent belch, and before you know it the human condition-not to mention the lemming condition-is tumbling down the slippery slope to chaos.

There was something wrong! Just as the boiling water was about to be poured on his head and the man with the red book appeared and his life flashed before his eyes, Akram the Terrible, the most feared thief in Baghdad, knew this had happened before. Many times. And he was damned if he was going to let it happen again. Just because he was a character in a story didn't mean that it always had to end this way.

Meanwhile, back in Southampton, it's a bit of a shock for Michelle when she puts on her Aunt Fatima's ring and the computer and the telephone start to bitch at her for past misdemeanors. But that's nothing compared to the story that her kitchen appliances have to tell her.

Guy is a Mosquito pilot in World War II. He is surprised when his dead co-pilot apparently starts speaking to him as they are flying over Northern France. And before you can say 'Bomber Harris', Guy finds himself caught up in time and travel, a search for Richard the Lionheart and a damsel.

Sculptress Bianca Wilson is a living legend. St. George is also a legend, but not living. However, when Bianca's sculpture of the patron saint and his scaly chum gets a bit too lifelike, it opens up a new can of wyrms. The dragon knows that in the battle between Good and Evil, Evil got a raw deal and is looking to set the record straight. And George (who cheated) thinks the record's just fine as it is.

Once upon a time, everything was fine. Humpty Dumpty sat on his wall, Jack and Jill went about their lawful business, the Big Bad Wolf did what big bad wolves do, and the wicked queen plotted murder most foul. But the humans hacked, cried havoc, shut down the wicked queen's system, and corrupted her database-and suddenly everything was not fine at all. But at least we know that they'll all live happily ever after. Don't we?

The team of commercial sorcerers at Dawson, Ahriman & Dawson can help with any metaphysical engineering project, large or small (though by definition they all tend to be pretty large).

They can also create massive great puddles of chaos that might one day swallow up the entire universe.

Take, for example, the decision to recruit a certain bearded fellow whose previous work experience mainly involves reindeer and jingle bells. It might have seemed like a good idea at the time, but is he really the best person to save the world from Tiamat the Destroyer, who has literally gone ballistic?

New Evil.

Same as the Old Evil, but with better PR.

Mordak isn't bad, as far as goblin kings go, but when someone, or something, starts pumping gold into the human kingdoms it puts his rule into serious jeopardy. Suddenly he's locked in an arms race with a species whose arms he once considered merely part of a calorie-controlled diet.

Helped by an elf with a background in journalism and a masters degree in being really pleased with herself, Mordak sets out to discover what on earth (if indeed, that's where he is) is going on. He knows that the truth is out there. If only he could remember where he put it.

When the Supreme Being and his son decide that being supreme isn't for them any more, it's inevitable that things get a bit of a shake-up.

It soon becomes apparent that our new owners, the Venturi brothers, have a very different perspective on all sorts of things. Take Good and Evil, for example. For them, it's an outdated concept that never worked particularly well in the first place.

Unfortunately, the sudden disappearance of right and wrong, while welcomed by some, raises certain concerns amongst those still attached to the previous team's management style.

In particular, there's one of the old gods who didn't move out with the others. A reclusive chap, he lives somewhere up north, and only a handful even believe in him.

But he's watching. And he really does need to know if you've been naughty or nice.

A happy workforce is a productive workforce. At the moment, the Wizard's employees are neither. The goblins are upset with their working conditions, the dragonslayer has thrown a hissy fit over his medical insurance (or lack thereof) and everyone is upset about the terrible canteen coffee.

Yet the Wizard hasn't got time to worry about revolution in the workplace - he's about to see his brilliant business plan (based on entrepreneurial flair and involving one or two parallel worlds) disrupted by a clueless young man. Side effects may include a huge hole in the fabric of reality. This is almost certainly going to be a bad day at the office.

As everyone knows, when great warriors die, their reward is eternal life in Odin's bijou little residence known as Valhalla. But Valhalla has just changed. It has grown. It has diversified. Just like any corporation, the Valhalla Group has had to adapt to survive. Unfortunately, not even an omniscient Norse god could have prepared Valhalla for the arrival of Carol Kortright, one-time cocktail waitress, last seen dead, and not at all happy.

Maurice has just killed a dragon with a breadknife. And had his destiny foretold . . . and had his true love spirited away. That's precisely the sort of stuff that'd bring out the latent heroism in anyone. Unfortunately, Maurice is pretty sure he hasn't got any latent heroism.

Meanwhile, a man wakes up in a jar in a different kind of pickle (figuratively speaking). He can't get out, of course, but neither can he remember his name, or what gravity is, or what those things on the ends on his legs are called . . . and every time he starts working it all out, someone makes him forget again. Forget everything.

Only one thing might help him. The answer to the most baffling question of all.

WHEN IS A DOOR NOT A DOOR?

Digging up the remains of an ancient band of Vikings, archaeologist Hildy is astounded when they rise from the dead, bearing an appetite for seagulls, a twelve-thousand-year-old grudge, and a thirst for war.

It was a busy day on Lake Chicopee, where an eclectic bunch of sightseers and tourists had the strange local residents rubbing their hands with delight. Among them was a young man from England, who was there because he knew about the legend of the ghost of Okeewana and what she promised.

Being a hero bothers Jason Derry. It's easy to get maladjusted when your mom's a suburban housewife and your dad's the Supreme Being. It can be a real drag slaying monsters and retrieving golden fleeces from fire-spitting dragons, and then having to tidy your room before you can watch Star Trek. But it's not the relentless tedium of imperishable glory that finally brings Jason to the end of his rope; it's something so funny that it's got to be taken seriously. Deadly seriously.

A timely, powerful story of survival set in the not-too-distant future, reminding us to always hold on to hope, even in the worst of times.

With fires devastating much of America, Lark and his family first leave their home in Maryland for Maine. But as the country increasingly falls under the grip of religious nationalism, it becomes clear that nowhere is safe, not just from physical disasters but also persecution. The family secures a place on a crowded boat headed to Ireland, the last place on earth rumored to be accepting American refugees.

Upon arrival, it turns out that the safe harbor of Ireland no longer exists either--and Lark, the sole survivor of the trans-Atlantic voyage, must disappear into the countryside. As he runs for his life, Lark finds two equally lost and desperate souls: one of the last remaining dogs, who becomes his closest companion, and a fierce, mysterious woman in search of her lost son. Together they form a makeshift family and attempt to reach Glendalough, a place they believe will offer protection. But can any community provide the safety that they seek?

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a short story by American author Washington Irving, contained in his collection of 34 essays and short stories entitled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Written while Irving was living abroad in Birmingham, England, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" was first published in 1820. Along with Irving's companion piece Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is among the earliest examples of American fiction with enduring popularity.

Read this story online for free at Tor.com.

1989, Lamesa, Texas. A small west Texas town driven by oil and cotton - and a place where everyone knows everyone else's business. So it goes for Tolly Driver, a good kid with more potential than application, seventeen, and about to be cursed to kill for revenge.

Here Stephen Graham Jones explores the Texas he grew up in, the unfairness of being on the outside, through the slasher horror he lives but from the perspective of the killer, Tolly, writing his own autobiography. Find yourself rooting for a killer in this summer teen movie of a novel gone full blood-curdling tragic.

When a scientist experimenting on a humans in a sanatorium near Moscow gives growth serum to a dwarf oil mogul, the newly heightened businessman runs off with the experimenter's wife, and a series of mysterious deaths and crimes begins. Fantastical and wonderfully strange, this political parable has an uncanny resonance with today's Russia under Putin.

Oleg Kashin is a famous Russian journalist and activist who, in 2010, was beaten to within an inch of his life by unknown assailants in an attack most likely politically motivated by his reporting. The events of Fardwor, Russia! (the title is taken from a flag with a slogan--"Forward, Russia!"--gone wrong) could seem grotesque, if they did not so eerily echo the absurd state of affairs in modern Russia. Under Putin's regime, an author dares to criticize the state of affairs and affairs of the state only through veiled satire--and even then, as Kashin's experience shows, the threat of repercussions is real.

A witty, playful, brave, and incisive work that blends science fiction with political satire, Fardwor, Russia! is a must-read for anyone interested in contemporary Russia--or the hilarious and frightening follies of power.

A young sword prodigy must impersonate a lost princess and throw her life into a deadly political game, in this kinetic epic fantasy novel by the author of the award-winning Majat Code series.

Naia dreams of becoming a Jaihar Blademaster, but after assaulting a teacher, her future seems ruined. The timely intervention of a powerful stranger suddenly elevates her into elite Upper Grounds training. She has no idea that the stranger is Dal Gassan, head of the Daljeer Circle. Seventeen years ago he witnessed the massacre of Challimar's court and rescued its sole survivor, a baby girl. Gassan plans to thrust a blade into the machinations of imperial succession: Naia. Disguised as the legendary Princess Xarimet of Challimar, Naia must challenge the imperial family, and win. Naia is no princess, but with her desert-kissed eyes and sword skills she might be close enough...

The girl who said no to death.

Bibi Blair is a fierce, funny, dauntless young woman--whose doctor says she has one year to live.

She replies, "We'll see."

Her sudden recovery astonishes medical science.

An enigmatic woman convinces Bibi that she escaped death so that she can save someone else. Someone named Ashley Bell.

But save her from what, from whom? And who is Ashley Bell? Where is she?

Bibi's obsession with finding Ashley sends her on the run from threats both mystical and worldly, including a rich and charismatic cult leader with terrifying ambitions.

Here is an eloquent, riveting, brilliantly paced story with an exhilarating heroine and a twisting, ingenious plot filled with staggering surprises. Ashley Bell is a new milestone in literary suspense from the long-acclaimed master.

Instead of simply designing clothes, fashion designers now create drug-induced emotional fashions, a new one every three months.

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, January 1997 and was reprinted in Lightspeed, January 2012. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 3 (1998), edited by David G. Hartwell. The story is included in the collection Beaker's Dozen (1998).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Science-fiction superstar and multiple Hugo and Nebula Award winner Nancy Kress comes to YA in this brain-twisting thriller

How far would you go?

The Collapse has ransacked the economy, making work almost impossible to find and forcing Amy from college hopeful to sole provider for her terminally-ill grandmother and rebellious younger sister. To make ends meet, Amy auditions for a slot on a new reality TV show, which promises both a hefty salary and full medical benefits for her entire family. Somehow, she gets chosen, and she leaps to sign a contract despite her misgivings.

The show in which she'll take part has an irresistible premise: audience members can win millions by predicting the behavior of each member of the cast in a crisis. But the producers are willing to do anything to maintain ratings, including using blatant setups, 24/7 surveillance, and even state-of-the-art holographic technology to simulate danger. But soon, the danger becomes all too real, and Amy--on and off the camera--must fight for her life....

This is an English-language anthology dedicated to the short stories of Kurahashi Yumiko (1935-), a Japanese novelist of profound intellectual powers. The eleven stories included in this volume suggest the breadth of the author's literary production, ranging from parodies of classical Japanese literature to cosmopolitan avant-garde works, from quasi-autobiography to science fiction. Her subversive fiction defies established definitions of "literature", "Japan", "modernity" and "femininity", and represents an important intellectual aspect of modern Japanese women's literature.

Table of Contents:

• An Extraterrestrial
• We Are Lovers
• The House of the Black Cat
• The Woman with the Flying Head
• The Trade
• The Witch Mask
• Spring Night Dreams
• The Passage of Dreams
• A Special Place
• Flower Abstraction
• The Long Passage of Dreams

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, October 2014.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

A compelling coming-of-age artificial intelligence novel from Philip K. Dick Award-nominated author Douglas Lain.

Seventeen-year-old Matthew Munson is ranked thirteenth in the state in Bash Bash Revolution, an outdated video game from 2002 that, in 2017, is still getting tournament play. He's a high school dropout who still lives at home with his mom, doing little but gaming and moping. That is, until Matthew's dad turns up again.

Jeffrey Munson is a computer geek who'd left home eight years earlier to work on a top secret military project. Jeff has been a sporadic presence in Matthew's life, and much to his son's displeasure insists on bonding over video games. The two start entering local tournaments together, where Jeff shows astonishing aptitude for Bash Bash Revolution in particular.

Then, as abruptly as he appeared, Matthew's father disappears again, just as he was beginning to let Jeff back into his life.

The betrayal is life-shattering, and Matthew decides to give chase, in the process discovering the true nature of the government-sponsored artificial intelligence program his father has been involved in. Told as a series of conversations between Matthew and his father's artificial intelligence program, Bash Bash Revolution is a wildly original novel of apocalypse and revolution, as well as a poignant story of broken family.

Seventeen-year-old Dayna Walsh is struggling to cope with her somatic OCD; the aftermath of being outed as bisexual in her conservative Irish town; and the return of her long-absent mother, who barely seems like a parent. But all that really matters to her is ascending and finally, finally becoming a full witch-plans that are complicated when another coven, rumored to have a sordid history with black magic, arrives in town with premonitions of death. Dayna immediately finds herself at odds with the bewitchingly frustrating Meiner King, the granddaughter of their coven leader.

And then a witch turns up murdered at a local sacred site, along with the blood symbol of the Butcher of Manchester-an infamous serial killer whose trail has long gone cold. The killer's motives are enmeshed in a complex web of witches and gods, and Dayna and Meiner soon find themselves at the center of it all. If they don't stop the Butcher, one of them will be next.

Sturgeon Award nominated short story. It originally appeard on Strange Horizons, October 17th 2015. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016, edited by Rich Horton and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection (2016), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Strange Horizons.

In 1862, Union army infantryman Samuel Dakota changed history when he spilled a bottle of pilfered moonshine in the Virginia dirt and stumbled upon the biochemical secret of flight. Not only did the Civil War come to a much quicker close, but Dakota Aeronautics was born.

Now, in Andy Marino's Uncrashable Dakota, it is 1912, and the titanic Dakota flagship embarks on its maiden flight. But shortly after the journey begins, the airship is hijacked. Fighting to save the ship, the young heir of the Dakota empire, Hollis, along with his brilliant friend Delia and his stepbrother, Rob, are plunged into the midst of a long-simmering family feud. Maybe Samuel's final secret wasn't just the tinkering of a madman after all....

What sinister betrayals and strange discoveries await Hollis and his friends in the gilded corridors and opulent staterooms? Who can be trusted to keep the most magnificent airship the world has ever known from falling out of the sky?

The world for some comes to an end, while for others it is a new beginning. Tam, who loves her privacy and hates children has her world interrupted by its ending. Faced with children with no parents and no one to look after them, she embarks on a journey that saves her and all those who she embraces.

Set in a post-apocalyptic Australia Lyn McConchie takes the reader to a place where nothing works properly and the future is bleak. But Lyn knows enough about survival to add a deep sense of realism in this novel, and a deep sense of care for others.

In a world that seems to have lost all hope, Lyn digs out the remnants of life and gives it new meaning.

Beneath the earth it sleeps, upon your soul it feeds.

Lady Javere, nicknamed Javerri, is the favored child of Qai, Lord of Third Province. Though women are not allowed to rule, Javerri has been trained in all the skills of a Lord: she fights like a seasoned veteran, rides a horse like a man, and understands well the deadly games of political intrigue - all of which have prepared her for her father's dying wish. On his deathbed, Lord Qai names Javerri not only his heir, but also his son. By this unprecedented act, the life of Javerri is changed forever.

This short story originally appeared in Lighspeed, September 2017.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed Magazine.

When you're chasing memories to survive, it's better to leave the past behind...

Seven is a thief with a difference - he steals downloadable memories from banks and memoriums to sell onto London's black market, trading secrets and hidden pasts for a chance at a future of his own. He makes sure he keeps some special stuff back to 'surf' himself though - it's the only real form of entertainment he can afford. But one night, as Seven is breaking into a private memorium in a wealthy part of London, he is caught in the act by one of its residents: Alba, the teenage daughter of London's most famous criminal prosecutor. Instead of giving him away, Alba promises to keep Seven's secret - as long as he allows her to go memory-surfing herself. In doing so, they discover a hidden memory about Seven's past, revealing a shocking secret about his childhood, the government and a mysterious experiment known as The Memory Keepers...

Now Seven and Alba will have to race against time to unlock the maze of The Memory Keepers - but can they keep themselves out of harm's way before the London Guard - and Alba's father - catches up with them?

Zaïdmouth is a far-future paradise. Its five communities are intertwined by artificial flower networks so complex they combine to create the virtual realities through which Zaïdmouth is run. Yet into this vivid world a bad seed is about to be sewn.

Mansuruquyn, Priestess-Interpreter, has broken the rules of the Shrine of the Crone. Exiled, she is forced to live in Zaïdmouth for one season. But who are the two mysterious men who run the empty inn in which she shelters? And what is their connection with the metal beasts of the Cemetery?

Nuïy is a young man leaving the stifling home he hates. Making for the Shrine of the Emerald Man, he discovers a world of order and domineering wills. But what secret plan do the leaders of the Shrine foment? And why do they embrace Nuïy's unique skill with such enthusiasm?

It is the fate of Mansuruqyun and Nuïy to come together in a struggle to determine the future of Zaïdmouth. There will be battles covert and open, betrayal and loyalty, capture and escape. But after all this, which single person will provide the blueprint for the future? Who can make a good flower from a bad seed?

Cerys is safe in the Kingdom of Aloriya. Here there are no droughts, disease, or famine, and peace is everlasting. It has been this way for hundreds of years, since the first king made a bargain with the Lady who ruled the forest that borders the kingdom. But as Aloriya prospered, the woods grew dark, cursed, and forbidden.

Cerys knows this all too well: When she was young, she barely escaped as the woods killed her friends and her mother. Now Cerys carries a small bit of the curse--the magic--in her blood, a reminder of the day she lost everything.

As a new queen is crowned, however, things long hidden in the woods descend on the kingdom itself. Cerys is forced on the run, her only companions a small and irritating fox from the royal garden and the magic in her veins. It's up to her to find the legendary Lady of the Wilds and beg for a way to save her home.

But the road is darker and more dangerous than she knows, and as secrets from the past are uncovered amid the teeth and roots of the forest, it's going to take everything she has just to survive.

Joe Tournier has a bad case of amnesia. His first memory is of stepping off a train in the nineteenth-century French colony of England. The only clue Joe has about his identity is a century-old postcard of a Scottish lighthouse that arrives in London the same month he does. Written in illegal English-instead of French-the postcard is signed only with the letter "M," but Joe is certain whoever wrote it knows him far better than he currently knows himself, and he's determined to find the writer.

The search for M, though, will drive Joe from French-ruled London to rebel-owned Scotland and finally onto the battle ships of a lost empire's Royal Navy. In the process, Joe will remake history, and himself.

In the wake of environmental catastrophe, January, once a principal in London's Royal Ballet, has become a refugee on Tharsis, the terraformed colony on Mars. In Tharsis, January's life is dictated by his status as an Earthstronger-a person whose body is not adjusted to Mars's lower gravity and so poses a danger to those born on, or naturalized to, Mars. January's job choices, housing, and even transportation options are dictated by this second-class status, and now a xenophobic politician named Aubrey Gale is running on a platform that would make it all worse: Gale wants all Earthstrongers to be surgically naturalized, a process that is always disabling and can be deadly.

When Gale chooses January for an on-the-spot press junket interview that goes horribly awry, January's life is thrown into chaos, but Gale's political fortunes are damaged, too. Gale proposes a solution to both their problems: a five year made-for-the-press marriage that would secure January's future without immediate naturalization and ensure Gale's political future. But when January accepts the offer, he discovers that Gale is not at all like they appear in the press. They're kind, compassionate, and much more difficult to hate than January would wish. But as their romantic relationship develops, the political situation worsens, and January discovers Gale has an enemy, someone willing to destroy all of Tharsis to make them pay - and January may be the only person standing in the way.

Distinguished for his talents as a rat killer, the nameless protagonist of Hye-young Pyun's City of Ash and Red is sent by the extermination company he works for on an extended assignment in C, a country descending into chaos and paranoia, swept by a contagious disease, and flooded with trash. No sooner does he disembark than he is whisked away by quarantine officials and detained overnight. Isolated and forgotten, he realizes that he is stranded with no means of contacting the outside world. Still worse, when he finally manages to reach an old friend, he is told that his ex-wife's body was found in his apartment and he is the prime suspect. Barely managing to escape arrest, he must struggle to survive in the streets of this foreign city gripped with fear of contamination and reestablish contact with his company and friends in order to clear his reputation.

But as the man's former life slips further and further from his grasp, and he looks back on his time with his wife, it becomes clear that he may not quite be who he seems.

Finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Related Work

You've heard the stories about the dark side of the internet - hackers, #gamergate, anonymous mobs attacking an unlucky victim, and revenge porn - but they remain just that: stories. Surely these things would never happen to you.

Zoë Quinn used to feel the same way. She is a video game developer whose ex-boyfriend published a crazed blog post cobbled together from private information, half-truths, and outright fictions, along with a rallying cry to the online hordes to go after her. They answered in the form of a so-called movement known as #gamergate - they hacked her accounts; stole nude photos of her; harassed her family, friends, and colleagues; and threatened to rape and murder her. But instead of shrinking into silence as the online mobs wanted her to, she raised her voice and spoke out against this vicious online culture and for making the internet a safer place for everyone.

In the years since #gamergate, Quinn has helped thousands of people with her advocacy and online-abuse crisis resource Crash Override Network. From locking down victims' personal accounts to working with tech companies and lawmakers to inform policy, she has firsthand knowledge about every angle of online abuse, what powerful institutions are (and aren't) doing about it, and how we can protect our digital spaces and selves.

Crash Override offers an up-close look inside the controversy, threats, and social and cultural battles that started in the far corners of the internet and have since permeated our online lives. Through her story - as target and as activist - Quinn provides a human look at the ways the internet impacts our lives and culture, along with practical advice for keeping yourself and others safe online.

A thought-provoking novel that imagines what would have happened if the British had succeeded in kidnapping General George Washington.

British special agent Jeremiah Black, an officer of the King's Guard, lands on a lonely beach in the wee hours of the morning in late November 1780. The revolution is in full swing but has become deadlocked. Black is here to change all that.

His mission, aided by Loyalists, is to kidnap George Washington and spirit him back to London aboard the HMS Peregrine, a British sloop of war that is waiting closely offshore. Once he lands, though, the "aid by Loyalists" proves problematic because some would prefer just to kill the general outright. Black manages--just--to get Washington aboard the Peregrine, which sails away.

Upon their arrival in London, Washington is imprisoned in the Tower to await trial on charges of high treason. England's most famous barristers seek to represent him but he insists on using an American. He chooses Abraham Hobhouse, an American-born barrister with an English wife--a man who doesn't really need the work and thinks the "career-building" case will be easily resolved through a settlement of the revolution and Washington's release. But as greater political and military forces swirl around them and peace seems ever more distant, Hobhouse finds that he is the only thing keeping Washington from the hangman's noose.

Drawing inspiration from a rumored kidnapping plot hatched in 1776 by a member of Washington's own Commander-in-Chief Guard, Charles Rosenberg has written a compelling novel that envisions what would take place if the leader of America's fledgling rebellion were taken from the nation at the height of the war, imperiling any chance of victory.

This short story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1994, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, March 2013.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

A scientific experiment begins, and as the button is pressed, the unexpected occurs: everyone in the world goes to sleep for a few moments while everyone's consciousness is catapulted more than twenty years into the future. At the end of those moments, when the world reawakens, all human life is transformed by foreknowledge.

New readers will be amazed at Jane Saint's bizarre adventures on her journey through the sticky Quagmire of patriarchal ideas, and those who followed her in earlier travails will be delighted to meet up again with Mr Rochester the cat, the loyal demon Zip and Agatha Hardcastle the witch of Hepstonhall.

Table of Contents:

• 1 - Introduction (Jane Saint and the Backlash) - essay
• 9 - The Consciousness Machine (revised) - novelette
• 43 - Jane Saint and the Backlash - [Jane Saint] - novella

Seventeen-year-old Anaïs just wants tonight to end. As an outsider at the kingdom's glittering anniversary ball, she has no desire to rub shoulders with the nation's most eligible (and pompous) bachelors--especially not the notoriously roguish Prince Leo. But at the stroke of midnight, an explosion rips through the palace, killing everyone in its path. Including her.

The last thing Anaïs sees is fire, smoke, chaos... and then she wakes up in her bedroom, hours before the ball. No one else remembers the deadly attack or believes her warnings of disaster.

Not even when it happens again. And again. And again.

If she's going to escape this nightmarish time loop, Anaïs must take control of her own fate and stop the attack before it happens. But the court's gilded surface belies a rotten core, full of restless nobles grabbing at power, discontented commoners itching for revolution, and even royals who secretly dream of taking the throne. It's up to Anaïs to untangle these knots of deadly deceptions... if she can survive past midnight.

Fabulous Beasts by Priya Sharma is a horror novelette about a strange woman living in luxury with her lover, but irrevocably tied to her childhood of deprivation and dark secrets in northwest England. The woman recalls the unravelling of the family upon her uncle's release from prison.

This story is included in the anthology The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2016, edited by Paula Guran.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

The sister of an abducted child is haunted by a sinister figure who may or may not be real...

Originally published on 4 October 2023, read it for free at Tor.com

Uprooted from Bath by his father's failures, Gideon Belman finds himself stranded on Ormeshadow farm, an ancient place of chalk and ash and shadow. The land crests the Orme, a buried, sleeping dragon that dreams resentment, jealousy, estrangement, death. Or so the folklore says. Growing up in a house that hates him, Gideon finds his only comforts in the land. Gideon will live or die by the Orme, as all his family has.

This historical novella is about a farming family, the Belmans; their estrangements, jealousies, adultery, abuse, and suicide, as seen through the eyes of Gideon Belman from childhood to young man. The Belman fabled fortune and personal myths are rooted in the Orme, a land named from the Norse word for dragon. The Orme legends become a cornerstone for Gideon when he loses everything that he loves. Burning with resentment and intrigue, this fantastical family drama invites readers to dig up the secrets of the Belman family, and wonder whether myths and legends are real enough to answer for a history of sin.

Rag and Bone, by Priya Sharma, is about Tom, who buys unwanted household items and scavenges other materials (including bones) and resells them in an alternative 19th century Liverpool in which the wealthy use the poor for parts from the inside out, should they need them. Colorful, disturbing, and moving as Tom maneuvers warily between the masters he serves and the poor from whom he scavenges.

This story in included in Jonathan Strahan's The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight and Paula Guran's The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2014.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

This Nebula-winning and Hugo-nominated novelette was collected in Out of the Everywhere and Other Extraordinary Visions (1981) and Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1990) and anthologized in The 1978 Annual World's Best SF (1978), Nebula Winners Thirteen (1980), Armageddons (1999) and Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology (2015).

Read this story online for free at the Sci Fiction archive.

This novelette originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 18, September-October 2017.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Firebirds: An Anthology of Original Fantasy and Science Fiction (2003), edited by Sharyn November. It was reprinted in Lightspeed, August 2012.

Read the full story for free at Lightispeed.

This short story originally appeared in Realms of Fantasy, April 2008. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best Fantasy 9 (2009), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2009, edited by Rich Horton.

In a hilarious tale reminiscent of T. H. White, a lost boy finds himself an unlikely apprentice to the very old, vaguely evil, mostly just grumpy Wizard Smallbone.

When twelve-year-old Nick runs away from his uncle's in the middle of a blizzard, he stumbles onto a very opinionated bookstore. He also meets its guardian, the self-proclaimed Evil Wizard Smallbone, who calls Nick his apprentice and won't let him leave, but won't teach him magic, either. It's a good thing the bookstore takes Nick's magical education in hand, because Smallbone's nemesis--the Evil Wizard Fidelou--and his pack of shape-shifting bikers are howling at the borders. Smallbone might call himself evil, but compared to Fidelou, he's practically a puppy. And he can't handle Fidelou alone. Wildly funny and cozily heartfelt, Delia Sherman's latest is an eccentric fantasy adventure featuring dueling wizards, enchanted animals, and one stray boy with a surprising knack for magic.

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

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales (2007), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Twenty-First Annual Collection (2008), edited by Kelly Link, Gavin J. Grant and Ellen Datlow.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Thirteen-year-old Sophie isn't happy about spending summer at her grandmother's old house in the Bayou. But the house has a maze Sophie can't resist exploring once she finds it has a secretive and playful inhabitant. When she makes an impulsive wish, she slips one hundred years into the past, to the year 1860. Once she makes her way, bedraggled and tanned, to what will one day be her grandmother's house, she is taken for a slave.

"The Ghost of Cwmlech Manor", by Delia Sherman, is a delightful tale set on the border of Wales. Young Tacy Gof has always wished to see the ghost of Cwmlech Manor, and she may yet get her wish when a new master moves in....

This story originally appeared in the anthology Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories, edited by Kelly Link, Gavin J. Grant.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

When Sir Arthur Cwmlech's home is robbed and the Illogic Engine--his prize invention--stolen, it is only natural that he and his clever assistant Miss Tacy Gof consult with another inventor, the great Mycroft Holmes, about who has taken it. But it is really Mr. Holmes' Reasoning Machine who they are there to see, for it is only fitting for one automaton to opine on a matter concerning the fate of another of its kind. This charming story by award-winning fiction writer Delia Sherman is a delightful romp set within an a slightly altered version of one of our most beloved literary universes.

This story is included in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 11 (2017), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

WFA nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1999. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Thirteenth Annual Collection (2000), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.

Berthe Duvet, chambermaid to a French duchess, narrates this tale of eighteenth-century Paris, describing the dazzling world of Marie Antoinette, Beaumarchais, and the Marquis de Sade, already living in the shadow of the guillotine.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Poe: 19 New Tales of Suspense, Dark Fantasy and Horror (2009), edited by Ellen Datlow, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, August 2016.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

A mirror foretold her execution--yet the sorceress Margaret would deny such a fate..would even sacrifice her daughter Elinor to shatter the mirror's prophecy. A witch, however, cannot spill the blood of her offspring and long remain of this world. And so, Margaret must somehow bring about her daughter's demise without death coming directly from her own hand......

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 2005. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Nineteenth Annual Collection (2006), edited by Ellen Datlow, Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link, Year's Best Fantasy 6 (2006), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer and Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful (2012), edited by Paula Guran.

In her vivid and sly, gentle and wise long anticipated first collection, Delia Sherman takes seemingly insignificant moments in the lives of artists or sailors—the light out a window, the two strokes it takes to turn a small boat—and finds the ghosts haunting them, the magic surrounding them. Here are the lives that make up larger histories, here are tricksters and gardeners, faeries and musicians, all glittering and sparkling, finding beauty and hope and always unexpected, a touch of wild magic.

Table of Contents:

• "Young Woman in a Garden"
• "The Ghost of Cwmlech Manor"
• "The Red Piano"
• "La Fée Verte"
• "Walpurgis Afternoon"
• "The Parwat Ruby"
• "The Fairy Cony-Catcher"
• "Sacred Harp"
• "The Printer's Daughter"
• "Nanny Peters and the Feathery Bride"
• "Miss Carstairs and the Merman"
• "The Maid on the Shore"
• "The Fiddler of Bayou Teche"
• "Land's End"

This story can be found in the collection Young Woman in a Garden (2014) and is anthologized in Flying Cups and Saucers: Gender Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy (1998) and Xanadu 2 (1994).

Read the full story for free at Uncanny.

A strange pall has settled over Alanda. Everywhere representatives of the Church seek to ferret out unauthorized magic -- and music, because it is magic at its roots, has come under suspicion. And that which is suspect, if it cannot be crushed altogether, must be stripped of its mystery, made tame and answerable to the power of the priests. Throughout the lands the Free Bards, those who will not or cannot join the priest-condoned Guild, are being driven away. But all who are Free are free to choose: to flee or to fight.

Hauberin, ruler of a Faerie princedom, has never lived an easy life. A young man in an ageless court, and (most shamefully) part human, he has been the target of plots from the day he first ascended his throne. But the curse of a dying foe proves more dangerous than any plot.

Denied sleep until he dies, Hauberin can break the spell only by learning his mother's father's name--an ancient nomer which may set him free--but destroy him utterly.

To that end Hauberin must search Earth, the world from which his mortal mother came, a world where Cold Iron promises hot death to anyone of Faerie, and even the hint of magic can lead to a fiery end.

Percinet, half-human son of a queen of Faerie, falls in love with a mortal, the daughter of a medieval count, and leaves his realm of magic to defend her against her cruel stepmother, a secret sorceress.

Having won his Faerie love, Ailanna, at great peril to himself, young Aidan finds himself torn between a call to aid his embattled half-brother, the king, and a mighty oath sworn to the Lord of Faerie.

A refugee from the dark realm he was born to rule as wizard, Ilaron Highborn comes to the aid of Denise Sheridan, curator of an art museum in New York City threatened with destruction by a Sumerian demon.

Princess Marya, ruler of Astyan, finds her land imperiled when her innocent husband frees an evil being with awesome powers from a secret, locked room in the cellars of her castle.

Ljuba, the evil sorceress, plots to unleash dark forces over the world, while the exiled Maria, daughter of a betrayed lord, nurses the dying Prince of Kirtesk, formerly the shining falcon, back to health.

The United States is near total collapse. But 87% of the population doesn't care: they're addicted to flashback, a drug that allows its users to re-experience the best moments of their lives. After ex-detective Nick Bottom's wife died in a car accident, he went under the flash to be with her; he's lost his job, his teenage son, and his livelihood as a result.

Nick may be a lost soul but he's still a good cop, so he is hired to investigate the murder of a top governmental advisor's son. This flashback-addict becomes the one man who may be able to change the course of an entire nation turning away from the future to live in the past.

A provocative novel set in a future that seems scarily possible, FLASHBACK proves why Dan Simmons is one of our most exciting and versatile writers.

This novelette originally appeared in the collection Lovedeath (1993). It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eleventh Annual Collection (1994).

It's 2012. Do you know where your androids are? In the near future, the world will grow complacent and a brilliant, if misguided, mind will seek to capitalize on that complacency by providing the common man and royalty alike with just the convenience he needs to aid him in his day to day labors. But what if suddenly those companions were to turn on their masters, sowing the seeds of destruction and death across the land? What if man's helper became his killer, and no one knew why or how to stop it? The Growing is the story of such a post-apocalyptic vision, and of the brave men and women who give everything they have to save the world from its eventual destruction. It is also the story of two lonely hearts, bitter enemies at first, who learn to trust and to love again in a world falling down all around them. Koda Rivers is a Lakota veterinarian and shaman whose roots run deep in her culture and in the soil of her native Black Hills. Kirsten King, Ph.D., is a brilliant cyberscientist and the sole surviving member of President Hillary Clinton's Cabinet. Each drawn by her own mission to destroy the androids, they meet in fire and blood at the North Dakota facility where the insurgent machines are manufactured. The Growing has all the bells and whistles of a classical epic: sweeping battles, a heroic love story, Amazon warriors, a blind bard, the gods of the land and a monster or two. The challenges present are met by our two heroes and their companions. These include Dakota's remarkable father and her warrior brother, Tacoma; Maggie Allen, USAF Colonel and crack pilot; an extraordinary German Shepherd named Asimov; and the spirits of the land in their various forms.

In 1927, H.P. Lovecraft wrote about Clark Ashton Smith: "In sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Mr. Smith is perhaps unexcelled by any other writer dead or living. Who else has seen such gorgeous, luxuriant, and feverishly distorted visions of infinite spheres and multiple dimensions and lived to tell the tale?" If you relish horror or dark fantasy, and you have yet to discover Klarkash-Ton, you have a real treat in store. This beautifully produced Arkham House collection is a bejeweled corridor into the dark worlds of vampire-cursed Averoigne, Zothique of the dying sun, primordial Hyperborea (which, with its black, amorphous god Tsathoggua, is close in spirit to Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos), and others. Smith is a consummate stylist whose evocations of lush exoticism and languid evil led critic Brian Stableford to call him "the poet of American Decadence," and yet his tales are also humorous--in a wry, macabre way. A Rendezvous in Averoigne collects 30 tales, with illustrations by J.K. Potter and an introduction by Ray Bradbury.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (A Rendezvous in Averoigne) - essay by Ray Bradbury
• The Holiness of Azédarac - (1933)
• The Colossus of Ylourgne - (1934)
• The End of the Story - (1930)
• A Rendezvous in Averoigne - (1931)
• The Last Incantation - (1930)
• The Death of Malygris - (1934)
• A Voyage to Sfanomoë - (1931)
• The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan - (1932)
• The Seven Geases - (1934)
• The Tale of Satampra Zeiros - (1931)
• The Coming of the White Worm - (1941)
• The City of the Singing Flame - (1931)
• The Dweller in the Gulf - (1960)
• The Chain of Aforgomon - (1935)
• Genius Loci - (1933)
• The Maze of Maal Dweb - (1938)
• The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis - (1932)
• The Uncharted Isle - (1930)
• The Planet of the Dead - (1932)
• Master of the Asteroid - (1932)
• The Empire of the Necromancers - (1932)
• The Charnel God - (1934)
• Xeethra - (1934)
• The Dark Eidolon - (1935)
• The Death of Ilalotha - (1937)
• The Last Hieroglyph - (1935)
• Necromancy in Naat - (1936)
• The Garden of Adompha - (1938)
• The Isle of the Torturers - (1933)
• Morthylla - (1953)

Table of Contents:

• Red World of Polaris: The Adventures of Captain Volmar - interior artwork by Jason Van Hollander
• 1 - The Magellan of the Constellations - essay by Ronald S. Hilger and Scott Connors
• 11 - Marooned in Andromeda - [Captain Volmar - 1] - (1930) - novelette
• 39 - A Captivity in Serpens - [Captain Volmar - 2] - (1931) - novelette
• 79 - The Red World of Polaris - [Captain Volmar] - novelette
• 109 - The Ocean-World of Alioth - [Captain Volmar] - (1984) - short story
• 113 - Captain Volmar and Crew: An Afterword - essay by Donald Sidney-Fryer

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (1995) - essay by Will Murray
• The Empire of the Necromancers - (1932) - short story
• The Isle of the Torturers - (1933) - short story
• The Charnel God - (1934) - novelette
• The Dark Eidolon - (1935) - novelette
• The Voyage of King Euvoran - (1933) - novelette
• The Weaver in the Vault - (1934) - short story
• The Tomb-Spawn - (1934) - short story
• The Witchcraft of Ulua - (1934) - short story
• Xeethra - (1934) - novelette
• In the Book of Vergama - (1935) - short story by The Last Hieroglyph
• The Last Hieroglyph - (1935) - short story
• Shapes of Adamant - (1984) - short story
• Necromancy in Naat - (1936) - novelette
• The Black Abbot of Puthuum - (1936) - novelette
• The Death of Ilalotha - (1937) - short story
• The Garden of Adompha - (1938) - short story
• Zothique - (1951) - poem
• The Master of the Crabs - (1948) - short story
• Morthylla - (1953) - short story
• Mandor's Enemy - (1984) - short story
• The Dead Will Cuckold You - (1963) - short fiction
• Postscript - (1995) - essay by Will Murray

Not just any fantasy, horror, and science fiction author could impress H. P. Lovecraft into calling him “unexcelled by any other writer, dead or living” or compel Fritz Lieber to employ the worthy term sui generis. Clark Ashton Smith—autodidact, prolific poet, amateur philosopher, bizarre sculptor, and unmatched storyteller—simply wrote like no one else, before or since. This new collection of his very best tales and poems is selected and introduced by supernatural literature scholar S. T. Joshi and allows readers to encounter Smith’s visionary brand of fantastical, phantasmagorical worlds, each one filled with invention, terror, and a superlative sense of metaphysical wonder.

Contents:

• ix - Introduction (The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies) - (2014) - essay by S. T. Joshi
• 3 - The Tale of Satampra Zeiros - [Satampra Zeiros] - (1931) - short story
• 16 - The Last Incantation - [Malygris] - (1930) - short story
• 21 - The Devotee of Evil - (1933) - short story
• 34 - The Uncharted Isle - (1930) - short story
• 45 - The Face by the River - (2004) - short story
• 52 - The City of the Singing Flame - (1940) - novelette
• 70 - The Holiness of Azédarac - [Averoigne] - (1933) - novelette
• 91 - The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis - [Mars (Clark Ashton Smith)] - (1932) - novelette
• 112 - Ubbo-Sathla - [Hyperborea] - (1933) - short story
• 120 - The Double Shadow - [Poseidonis] - (1933) - short story
• 133 - The Maze of the Enchanter - [Maal Dweb] - (1933) - short story (variant of The Maze of Maal Dweb)
• 149 - Genius Loci - (1933) - short story
• 167 - The Dark Eidolon - [Zothique] - (1935) - novelette
• 195 - The Weaver in the Vault - [Zothique] - (1934) - short story
• 208 - Xeethra - [Zothique] - (1934) - novelette
• 229 - The Treader of the Dust - (1935) - short story
• 238 - Mother of Toads - [Averoigne] - (1938) - short story
• 247 - Phoenix - (1954) - short story
• 261 - The Image of Bronze and the Image of Iron - (1965) - poem
• 262 - The Memnons of the Night - (1917) - poem
• 263 - The Demon, the Angel, and Beauty - (1922) - poem
• 264 - The Corpse and the Skeleton - (1965) - poem
• 266 - A Dream of Lethe - (1922) - poem
• 268 - Ennui - (1918) - poem
• 270 - The Litany of the Seven Kisses - (1922) - poem
• 271 - In Cocaigne - (1922) - poem
• 272 - The Flower-Devil - (1922) - poem
• 273 - The Shadows - (1922) - poem
• 274 - The Passing of Aphrodite - [Prose Pastels - 5] - (1934) - poem
• 276 - To the Daemon - [Prose Pastels - 6] - (1943) - poem
• 277 - The Abomination of Desolation - (1938) - poem
• 278 - The Mirror in the Hall of Ebony - [Prose Pastels - 2] - (1934) - poem
• 279 - The Touch-Stone - (1988) - poem (variant of The Touchstone 1965)
• 280 - The Muse of Hyperborea - [Prose Pastels - 3] - (1934) - poem
• 283 - The Last Night - (1912) - poem
• 283 - Ode to the Abyss - (1912) - poem
• 285 - A Dream of Beauty - (1911) - poem
• 286 - The Star-Treader - (1912) - poem
• 290 - Retrospect and Forecast - (1912) - poem
• 290 - Nero - (1912) - poem
• 293 - To the Daemon Sublimity - (1961) - poem (variant of To the Daemon of Sublimity)
• 293 - Averted Malefice - (1912) - poem
• 294 - The Eldritch Dark - (1912) - poem
• 294 - Shadow of Nightmare - (1912) - poem
• 295 - Satan Unrepentant - (1918) - poem
• 297 - The Ghoul - poem
• 298 - Desire of Vastness - (1922) - poem
• 298 - The Medusa of Despair - (1913) - poem
• 299 - The Refuge of Beauty - (1918) - poem
• 299 - The Harlot of the World - (1915) - poem
• 300 - Memnon at Midnight - (1918) - poem
• 300 - Love Malevolent - (1922) - poem
• 301 - The Crucifixion of Eros - (1918) - poem
• 302 - The Tears of Lilith - (1922) - poem
• 302 - Requiescat in Pace - (1920) - poem
• 303 - The Motes - (1922) - poem
• 304 - The Hashish-Eater: or, The Apocalypse of Evil - (1922) - poem
• 319 - A Psalm to the Best Beloved - (1922) - poem
• 320 - The Witch with Eyes of Amber - (1923) - poem
• 320 - We Shall Meet - (1923) - poem
• 322 - On Re-Reading Baudelaire - (1971) - poem (variant of On Reading Baudelaire 1923)
• 322 - To George Sterling: A Validation - poem
• 324 - Anterior Life - poem
• 325 - Hymn to Beauty - poem
• 326 - The Remorse of the Dead - poem
• 326 - Exorcism - (1971) - poem
• 327 - Nyctalops - (1929) - poem
• 328 - Outlanders - (1937) - poem
• 329 - Song of the Necromancer - (1937) - poem
• 330 - To Howard Philips Lovecraft - poem
• 331 - Madrigal of Memory - (1942) - poem
• 332 - The Old Wheel-Whell - poem
• 333 - The Hill of Dionysus - (1961) - poem
• 334 - If Winter Remain - (1971) - poem
• 335 - Amithaine - (1951) - poem
• 336 - Cycles - (1963) - poem
• 339 - Explanatory Notes (The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies) - essay by S. T. Joshi

From the vampire-haunted alleyways of mediaeval Averoigne to the shining spires of dying Zothique, Clark Ashton Smith weaves his literary sorcery, transporting us to forgotten realms of necromancies and nightmares, lost worlds and other dimensions. In the enchanted regions of Hyperborea, Atlantis and Xiccarph, encounter malefic magic and demonic deeds beneath the last rays of a fading sun...

For the first time ever, this volume encompasses Clark Ashton Smith's entire career as a writer. Smith virtually stopped writing stories in 1937, for reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained, but he left behind a unique legacy of fantasy fiction which is as imaginative and decadent today as when it was first published in the pulp magazines more than half a century ago.

Contents: series are in [ ]

• On Fantasy (1934), essay
• Song of the Necromancer (1937), poem
• The Abominations of Yondo (1926), short story
• The Ninth Skeleton (1928), short story
• The Last Incantation, [Malygris] (1930), short story
• A Rendezvous in Averoigne, [Averoigne] (1931), short story
• The Return of the Sorcerer, [Cthulhu Mythos] (1931), short story
• The Tale of Satampra Zeiros, [Satampra Zeiros] (1931), short story
• The Door to Saturn, [Hyperborea] (1932), short story
• The Gorgon (1932), short story
• The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan, [Hyperborea] (1932), short story
• The Nameless Offspring (1932), novelette
• The Empire of the Necromancers, [Zothique] (1932), short story
• The Hunters from Beyond (1932), short story
• The Isle of the Torturers, [Zothique] (1933), short story
• The Beast of Averoigne, [Averoigne] (1933), short story
• Genius Loci (1933), short story
• Ubbo-Sathla, [Hyperborea] (1933), short story
• The Kiss of Zoraida (1933), short story
• The Seed from the Sepulcher (1933), short story
• The Weaver in the Vault, [Zothique] (1934), short story
• The Ghoul (1934), short story
• The Charnel God, [Zothique] (1934), novelette
• The Death of Malygris, [Malygris] (1934), short story
• The Tomb-Spawn, [Zothique] (1934), short story
• The Seven Geases, [Hyperborea] (1934), novelette
• Xeethra, [Zothique] (1934), novelette
• The Dark Eidolon, [Zothique] (1935), novelette
• The Flower-Women, [Maal Dweb] (1935), short story
• The Treader of the Dust (1935), short story
• The Black Abbot of Puthuum, [Zothique] (1936), novelette
• Necromancy in Naat, [Zothique] (1936), novelette
• The Death of Ilalotha, [Zothique] (1937), short story
• The Garden of Adompha, [Zothique] (1938), short story
• Mother of Toads, [Averoigne] (1938), short story
• The Double Shadow, [Poseidonis] (1933), short story
• The Coming of the White Worm, [Hyperborea] (1941), short story
• The Root of Ampoi (1949), short story
• Morthylla, [Zothique] (1953), short story
• An Offering to the Moon (1953), short story
• The Theft of Thirty-nine Girdles, [Satampra Zeiros] (1958), short story
• Symposium of the Gorgon (1958), short story
• Told in the Desert (1964), short story
• Prince Alcouz and the Magician(1977), short story
• A Good Embalmer (1989), short story
• The Mortuary (1971), poem
• Afterword: The Lost Worlds of Klarkash-Ton,essay by Stephen Jones

The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith gathers together the adventure, juvenile and other non-fantastic fiction of Smith. While he is known best for his fantastic work, these adventure and mainstream stories shed light on the development of Smith's writing and his constantly evolving style. The Miscellaneous Writings is a perfect companion to the five volume Collected Fantasies set. As with that set, editors Scott Connors and Ron Hilger have prepared this volume by compared original manuscripts, various typescripts, published editions, and Smith's notes and letters, in order to prepare a definitive set of texts.

It Is That Spawn Which the Hidden Dweller in the Vaults Has Begotten Upon Mortality.

This short story is included in the collections:

• A Vintage From Atlantis: Volume Three of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith (2007), Clark Ashton Smith
• The Klarkash-Ton Cycle: Clark Ashton Smith's Cthulhu Mythos Fiction (2008), Clark Ashton Smith
• The Emperor of Dreams (2002), Clark Ashton Smith

It first appeared in the June 1932 issue of Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror available free on Internet Archives.

A bizarre and fantastic tale, about the procession of nine grisly skeletons that horrified the dreamy lover.

This short story is included in the collections:

• The End of the Story (2006) , Clark Ashton Smith
• The Emperor of Dreams (2002), Clark Ashton Smith

It first appeared in the September, 1929 Issue of Weird Tales, available free on Internet Archives.

Selected carefully by well-respected editor Robert Weinberg and with an introduction by award-winning author Gene Wolfe, The Return of the Sorcerer: The Best of Clark Ashton Smith offers both readers and scholars a definitive collection of short fiction and short novels, by an overlooked master of fantasy, horror and science-fiction.

Table of Contents: [] contains series

• Introduction The Return of The Sorcerer) (2009), essay by Gene Wolfe
• The Return of The Sorcerer [Cthulhu Mythos] (1931), short story
• The City of Singing Flame [Singing Flame, 1] (1931), novelette
• Beyond The Singing Flame [Singing Flame, 2] (1931), novelette
• The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis [Mars (Clark Ashton Smith)] (1932), novelette
• The Double Shadow [Poseidonis] (1933), short story
• The Monster of The Prophecy (1932), novelette
• The Hunters from Beyond (1932), short story
• The Isle of The Torturers [Zothique] (1933), short story
• A Night in Malnéant (1933), short story
• The Chain of Aforgomon (1935), short story
• The Dark Eidolon [Zothique] (1935), novelette
• The Seven Geases [Hyperborea] (1934), novelette
• The Holiness of Azédarac [Averoigne] (1933), novelette
• The Beast of Averoigne [Averoigne] (1933), short story
• The Empire of tThe Necromancers [Zothique] (1932), short story
• The Disinterment of Venus [Averoigne] (1934), short story
• The Devotee of Evil (1933), short story
• The Enchantress of Sylaire [Averoigne] (1941), short story

Kanda has a good life until shadows from her past return threatening everything she loves. And Kanda, like any parent, has things in her past she does not want her children to know. Red war is coming: pursued by an ancient evil, Kanda must call upon all her strength to protect her family. But how can she keep her children safe, if they want to stand as warriors beside her when the light fades and darkness rises?

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Orbit 5 (1969), edited by Damon Knight. The story can also be found in World's Best Science Fiction: 1970, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr and The Road to Science Fiction 3: From Heinlein to Here (1979), edited by James Gunn. It is included in the collections No Direction Home (1975) and The Star-Spangled Future (1979).

Tech troubleshooter Tony Ricci has been recruited by Saint Vidicon--the patron saint of computer geeks--to combat the forces of evil that wreak havoc within all things technological.

Only once in a great while does a writer come along who defies comparison--a writer so original he redefines the way we look at the world. Neal Stephenson is such a writer and Snow Crash is such a novel, weaving virtual reality, Sumerian myth, and just about everything in between with a cool, hip cybersensibility to bring us the gigathriller of the information age.

In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo's CosaNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he's a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that's striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about Infocalypse. Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous...you'll recognize it immediately.

From the subversive to the antic, the uproarious to the disturbing, the stories of Bruce Sterling are restless, energy-filled journeys through a world running on empty--The visionary work of one of our most imaginative and insightful modern writers.

They live as strangers in strange lands. In the worlds that have fallen--or should have. They wage battles in wars already lost and become heroes--and sometimes martyrs--in their last ditch efforts to preserve the dignity and individuality of humanity.

A hack Indian filmmaker takes the pulse of a wounded and declining civilization--21st century Britain. A pair of swashbuckling Silicon Valley entrepreneurs join forces to make a commercial killing--in organic underground slime and computer-generated jellyfish. A man in a Japanese city takes orders from a talking cat while pursuing a drama of danger and adventure that has become the very essence of his life.

From "The Littlest Jackal", a dark hilarious thriller of mercs and gunrunners set in Finland, to a stark vision of a post-atomic netherworld in his haunting tale "Taklamakan", Bruce Sterling once again breaks boundaries, breaks icons, and breaks rules to unleash the most dangerously provocative and intelligent science fiction being written today.

Table of Contents:

• Maneki Neko - (1998) - shortstory
• Big Jelly - (1994) - novelette with Rudy Rucker
• The Littlest Jackal - (1996) - novella
• Sacred Cow - (1993) - shortstory
• Deep Eddy - (1993) - novelette
• Bicycle Repairman - (1996) - novelette
• Taklamakan - (1998) - novelette

A few generations from now, the coastlines of the continent have been redrawn by floods and tides. Global powers have agreed to not produce any new plastics, and what is left has become valuable: garbage is currency.

In the region-wide junkyard that Appalachia has become, Coral is a "plucker," pulling plastic from the rivers and woods. She's stuck in Trashlands, a dump named for the strip club at its edge, where the local women dance for an endless loop of strangers and the club's violent owner rules as unofficial mayor.

Amid the polluted landscape, Coral works desperately to save up enough to rescue her child from the recycling factories, where he is forced to work. In her stolen free hours, she does something that seems impossible in this place: Coral makes art.

When a reporter from a struggling city on the coast arrives in Trashlands, Coral is presented with an opportunity to change her life. But is it possible to choose a future for herself?

The Fellowship raised Lark to kill monsters.
His partner betrayed them to the Feds.

But Lark knows his magic is real, and he'll do anything to complete his quest.

For thirty years, the Fellowship of the Anointed isolated its members, conditioning them to believe that pain is power. That magic is suffering. That the world beyond the fence has fallen prey to monsters. But when their leader is arrested, all her teachings come into question.

Those touched by the Fellowship face a choice: how will they adjust to the world they were taught to fear, and how will they relate to the cult's last crusader, Lark? For Kane, survival means rejecting the magic he and his lover suffered for. For Deryn, the cult's collapse is an opportunity to prove they are worth as much as their Anointed brother. For Calvin, Lark is the alluring embodiment of the magic he's been seeking his entire life.

But for Lark, the Fellowship isn't over. Before he can begin to discover himself and heal a lifetime of traumas, he has a monster to slay.

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

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Operation Arcana (2015), edited by John Joseph Adams. Ik can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best Young Adult Speculative Fiction 2015 (2016), edited by Julia Rios and Alisa Krasnostein, and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Ten (2016), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Visions - Visions of love and conflict, anguish and Tomorrow. Of outcasts who must bridge the obsessions of two post Holocaust worlds; and an astronaut who finds her life's quest betrayed by a device from a alien past. A prince who became a beggar, with the power of the dragon; and a feudal serf who met a high tech lord, with he magic of a peddler. A Cat how had lost his mind powers and a Dreamweaver who had lost her mind. A barbarian priestess whose beauty challenged the world and whose child could melt the heart of an aliern God-on a crippled Earth that swam beneath a vast Cyclopean eye. The visions of Joan D Vinge.

Table of Contents:

• Phoenix in the Ashes - (1978) - novelette
• Afterword - Phoenix in the Ashes - essay
• Voices from the Dust - (1980) - shortstory
• Afterword - Voices from the Dust - essay
• The Storm King - (1980) - novelette
• Afterword - The Storm King - essay
• The Peddler's Apprentice - (1975) - novelette and Vernor Vinge
• Afterword - The Peddler's Apprentice - essay
• Psiren - (1981) - novella
• Afterword - Psiren - essay
• Mother & Child - novella
• Afterword - Mother and Child - essay

In 1995 Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, on a rare family vacation, seven-year-old Nainoa Flores falls overboard a cruise ship into the Pacific Ocean. When a shiver of sharks appears in the water, everyone fears for the worst. But instead, Noa is gingerly delivered to his mother in the jaws of a shark, marking his story as the stuff of legends.

Nainoa's family, struggling amidst the collapse of the sugarcane industry, hails his rescue as a sign of favor from ancient Hawaiian gods--a belief that appears validated after he exhibits puzzling new abilities. But as time passes, this supposed divine favor begins to drive the family apart: Nainoa, working now as a paramedic on the streets of Portland, struggles to fathom the full measure of his expanding abilities; further north in Washington, his older brother Dean hurtles into the world of elite college athletics, obsessed with wealth and fame; while in California, risk-obsessed younger sister Kaui navigates an unforgiving academic workload in an attempt to forge her independence from the family's legacy.

When supernatural events revisit the Flores family in Hawai'i--with tragic consequences--they are all forced to reckon with the bonds of family, the meaning of heritage, and the cost of survival.

The cult phenomenon Battle Royale has been lauded as a masterpiece and decried as exploitative gore, but it's always remained in the public consciousness. This collection of essays by some of the best science fiction, horror, and thriller writers working today explore the depth, details, and controversies surrounding Battle Royale in an intelligent, accessible fashion.

While the human race spreads throughout the universe, a man gifted with telepathy considers his talent a curse, until a fateful encounter with an alien species convinces him about the potential of his powers.

Hugo Award nominated story. It originally appeared in Analog Science Fact -> Fiction, October 1960. The story can also be found in the anthology What If? Volume 2 (1981) edited by Richard A. Lupoff. It is included in the collection Unwillingly to Earth (1992).

"A good, original, space-setting adventure" (Piers Anthony) from a Hugo Award nominee. Raised on a backwater miners' planet thousands of light-years from civilization, Lysistrata Lee is surprised to receive a scholarship to the most prestigious university in the galaxy. And in the process of getting an education, Lizzie manages to solve a murder, prevent a planetary war, and find a little romance.

Table of Contents:

• Unwillingly to School - (1958) - novelette
• Rats in the Moon - (1982) - novella
• Fatal Statistics - (1988) - novella
• The Lost Kafoozalum - (1960) - novella

Hugo Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, January 1958. The story is included in the collection Unwillingly to Earth (1992).

"She saw: first, a square opening, about eight inches wide, in the lowest step... finally she saw that there was a walnut shell, or half one, outside the nearest door... she went to look at the shell--but looked with the greatest astonishment. There was a baby in it."

So ten-year-old Maria, orphaned mistress of Malplaquet, discovers the secret of her deteriorating estate: on a deserted island at its far corner, in the temple long ago nicknamed Mistress Masham's Repose, live an entire community of people--"The People," as they call themselves--all only inches tall. With the help of her only friend--the absurdly erudite Professor--Maria soon learns that this settlement is no less than the kingdom of Lilliput (first seen in Gulliver's Travels) in exile. Safely hidden for centuries, the Lilliputians are at first endangered by Maria's well-meaning but clumsy attempts to make their lives easier, but their situation grows truly ominous when they are discovered by Maria's greedy guardians, who look at The People and see only a bundle of money.

Sturgeon and Hugo Award nominated novella.

Long after the Towers left the world but before the dragons came to Daluça, the emperor brought his delegation of gods and diplomats to Olorum. As the royalty negotiates over trade routes and public services, the divinity seeks arcane assistance among the local gods.

Aqib bgm Sadiqi, fourth-cousin to the royal family and son of the Master of Beasts, has more mortal and pressing concerns. His heart has been captured for the first time by a handsome Daluçan soldier named Lucrio. in defiance of Saintly Canon, gossiping servants, and the furious disapproval of his father and brother, Aqib finds himself swept up in a whirlwind romance. But neither Aqib nor Lucrio know whether their love can survive all the hardships the world has to throw at them.

A Taste of Honey is a new novella in the world of Kai Ashante Wilson's The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps.

This story originally appeared in Fantasy Magazine, December 2015, Queers Destroy Fantasy! special issue. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Ten (2016), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2016, edited by Paula Guran.

Gian returns to Sea-john from the Kingdom's wars certain that he has skills beyond killing, death and destruction. He needs to prove to himself that love is just as strong, if not stronger, than his hate. The Summer King gives him this opportunity.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Scant years after the Civil War, a mysterious family confronts the legacy that has pursued them across centuries, out of slavery, and finally to the idyllic peace of the town of Rosetree. The shattering consequences of this confrontation echo backwards and forwards in time, even to the present day.

This novelette is included in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine (2015), edited by Jonathan Strahan, Nebula Awards Showcase 2016, edited by Mercedes Lackey, 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.

In Kai Ashante Wilson's The Lamentation of Their Women, the Prince of Darkness selects a young woman from the Bronx as his chief lieutenant. Content warning for mature themes and graphic violence.

This story is included in the anthologies The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2018, edited by Paula Guran, and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Twelve (2018), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Critically acclaimed author Kai Ashante Wilson makes his commercial debut with this striking, wondrous tale of gods and mortals, magic and steel, and life and death that will reshape how you look at sword and sorcery.

Since leaving his homeland, the earthbound demigod Demane has been labeled a sorcerer. With his ancestors' artifacts in hand, the Sorcerer follows the Captain, a beautiful man with song for a voice and hair that drinks the sunlight.

The two of them are the descendants of the gods who abandoned the Earth for Heaven, and they will need all the gifts those divine ancestors left to them to keep their caravan brothers alive.

The one safe road between the northern oasis and southern kingdom is stalked by a necromantic terror. Demane may have to master his wild powers and trade humanity for godhood if he is to keep his brothers and his beloved captain alive.

Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Future Power (1976), edtied by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. The story can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction of the Year #6 (1977), edited by Terry Carr. It is included in the collections The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories (1980) and The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009).

In this hip, accessible primer to the music, literature, and art of Afrofuturism, author Ytasha Womack introduces readers to the burgeoning community of artists creating Afrofuturist works, the innovators from the past, and the wide range of subjects they explore. From the sci-fi literature of Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, and N. K. Jemisin to the musical cosmos of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and the Black Eyed Peas' will.i.am, to the visual and multimedia artists inspired by African Dogon myths and Egyptian deities, the book's topics range from the "alien" experience of blacks in America to the "wake up" cry that peppers sci-fi literature, sermons, and activism. With a twofold aim to entertain and enlighten, Afrofuturists strive to break down racial, ethnic, and social limitations to empower and free individuals to be themselves.

Under the fountain in Washington Square Park, there lives an incompetent wizard...

David has just moved to New York City from Connecticut, and he's a bit lonely. He hasn't made any friends yet, and the city is so big. But one Saturday afternoon in Washington Square Park, David and his dog, D. Dog, meet a girl named Leilah. Leilah tells David that there's a wizard in the park--a wizard who lives under the Washington Square fountain. At first, David thinks Leilah is just making things up--until he encounters the real live wizard! Unfortunately, the wizard's spells work at the most inconvenient times, and he accidentally turns David's dog into a marble statue. Before the wizard can change D. Dog back, a sneaky antiques dealer grabs the statue and races uptown to sell it. Can David's new friends help him get D. Dog back?

Sturgeon Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #81 June 2013. It can also be found in the anthology Clarkesworld: Year Seven (2015), edited by Sean Wallace and Neil Clarke.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This story originally appeared in English in the collection 12 Collections & The Teashop (2007). It can also be found in the anthology Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition, edited by Rich Horton. The story is included in the collection Compartments (2010). Translation into English by Alice Copple-Tosic.

In the far future, the Heliothane Dominion is triumphant in the solar system, after a bitter war with their Umbrathane progenitors. But some of the Umbrathane have escaped into the distant past, where they can position themselves to wreak havoc across time and undo their defeat. The most fanatical of them is the superhuman Cowl, more monstrous than any of the creatures outside his prehistoric redoubt.

Cowl sends his terrifying hyperdimensional pet, the torbeast, hunting through all the timelines for human specimens. It sheds its scales -- each one an organic time machine -- where its master orders. Anyone who picks one up is dragged back to the dawn of time, where Cowl awaits. Then the beast can feed, growing ever larger . . .

In our own near-future, Tack is one of U-gov's programmable killers. When a scale latches onto him, his doom seems inevitable, but the Heliothane have other ideas: they can use Tack against Cowl. Tack is no stranger to violence, but the Heliothane, hardened in their struggle for humanity's very existence, have much to teach him. He will need it all for his encounter with Cowl.

Once one of Tack's targets, Polly escaped with her life when a torbeast scale snatched her. Now, like Tack, she must learn fast as she is dragged back to Day Zero. To cheat death again, she will have to help him save the human race.

With Cowl, Neal Asher, acclaimed author of Gridlinked and The Skinner, has created his most powerful novel yet.

Mysterious aliens...ruthless terrorists...androids with attitude...genetic manipulation...punch-ups with lasers...giant spaceships...what more do you want?

In the eight years since his first full-length novel, "Gridlinked" was published by Pan Macmillan, Neal Asher has firmly established himself as one of the leading British writers of Science Fiction, and his novels are now translated in many languages. Most of his stories are set in a galactic future-scape called 'The Polity', and with this collection of marvellously inventive and action-packed short stories, he takes us further into the manifold diversities of that amazing universe. No one does monsters better than Neal Asher, so be prepared to revisit the lives and lifestyles of such favourites as the gabbleduck and the hooder, to savour alien poisons, the walking dead, the Sea of Death, and the putrefactor symbiont.

This third volume in Mike Ashley's study of the science-fiction magazines, focuses on the turbulent years of the 1970s, when the United States emerged from the Vietnam War into an economic crisis. It saw the end of the Apollo moon programme and the start of the ecology movement. This proved to be one of the most complicated periods for the science-fiction magazines. Not only were they struggling to survive within the economic climate, they also had to cope with the death of the father of modern science fiction, John W. Campbell, Jr., while facing new and potentially threatening opposition. The market for science fiction diversified as never before, with the growth in new anthologies, the emergence of semi-professional magazines, the explosion of science fiction in college, the start of role-playing gaming magazines, underground and adult comics and, with the success of Star Wars, media magazines. This volume explores how the traditional science-fiction magazines coped with this, from the death of Campbell to the start of the major popular science magazine Omni and the first dreams of the Internet.

Mike Ashley's acclaimed history of science-fiction magazines comes to the 1980s with Science-Fiction Rebels: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines from 1981 to 1990. This volume charts a significant revolution throughout science fiction, much of which was driven by the alternative press, and by new editors at the leading magazines. The period saw the emergence of the cyberpunk movement, and the drive for, what David Hartwell called, 'The Hard SF Renaissance', which was driven from within Britain. Ashley plots the rise of many new authors in both strands: William Gibson, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, John Kessel, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker in cyberpunk, and Stephen Baxter, Alistair Reynolds, Peter Hamilton, Neal Asher, Robert Reed, in hard sf. He also shows how the alternative magazines looked to support each other through alliances, which allowed them to share and develop ideas as science-fiction evolved.

The Rise of the Cyberzines concludes Mike Ashley's five-volume series, which has tracked the evolution of the science-fiction magazine from its earliest days in the 1920s to its current explosion via the internet. This series has traced the ways in which the science-fiction magazine has reacted to the times and often led the way in breaking down barriers, for example in encouraging a greater contribution by women writers and stimulating science fiction globally. Magazines have continued to build upon past revolutions such as the 'new wave' and 'cyberpunk', producing a blend of high-tech science fiction and expansive speculative fiction that has broadened the understanding of science and its impact on society. This final volume, which covers the years 1991-2020, shows how the online magazine has superseded the print magazine and has continued to break down barriers, especially for the LGBTQ community and for writers of colour.

Originally conceived as a trilogy, this is the first of five volumes that chart the history of the science fiction magazine from the earliest days to the present. This first volume looks at the exuberant years of the pulp magazines. It traces the growth and development of the science fiction magazines from when Hugo Gernsback launched the very first, Amazing Stories, in 1926 through to the birth of the atomic age and the death of the pulps in the early 1950s. These were the days of the youth of science fiction, when it was brash, raw and exciting: the days of the first great space operas by Edward Elmer Smith and Edmond Hamilton, through the cosmic thought variants by Murray Leinster, Jack Williamson and others to the early 1940s when John W. Campbell at Astounding did his best to nurture the infant genre into adulthood. Under him such major names as Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, A. E. van Vogt and Theodore Sturgeon emerged who, along with other such new talents as Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke, helped create modern science fiction. For over forty years magazines were at the heart of science fiction and this book considers how the magazines, and their publishers, editors and authors influenced the growth and perception of this fascinating genre.

This is the second volume, which charts the history of the science fiction magazine from the earliest days to the present. The first volume Time Machines traced the development of the sf magazine from its earliest days and the creation of the first specialist magazine, Amazing Stories. Transformations takes up the story to reveal a turbulent period that was to witness the extraordinary rise and fall and rise again of science. Britain's foremost sf historian, Mike Ashley charts the sf boom years in the wake of the nuclear age that was to see the 'The Golden Age' of Science Fiction with the emergence of magazines such as Galaxy, Startling Stories and Fantastic, as well as authors like Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick and Frank Herbert. He then goes on to explore the bust years of 1954-1960 followed by the renaissance in the 1960s led by the new wave of British authors like Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard and the rise in interest of fantasy fiction, encouraged by Lord of the Rings and the Conan books of Robert E. Howard. Transformations concludes with an examination of the new found interest in sf magazines during the late 1960s and the incredibly influential roles Star Treck , the film 2001: A Space Odyssey and, above all, the first manned Moon landing played in transforming the sf magazine.

Danger from Vega

Shot down on an ennemy-occupied planet.

Clash of Star-Kings

The night the stars fell and the spacemen rose.

Planet of Exile

The Earth colony of Landin has been stranded on Werel for ten years, and ten of Werel's years are over 600 terrestrial years, and the lonely and dwindling human settlement is beginning to feel the strain. Every winter, a season that lasts for 15 years, the Earthmen have neighbors: the humanoid hilfs, a nomadic people who only settle down for the cruel cold spell. The hilfs fear the Earthmen, whom they think of as witches and call the farborns. But hilfs and farborns have common enemies: the hordes of ravaging barbarians called gaals and eerie preying snow ghouls. Will they join forces or be annihilated?

Mankind Under the Leash

Ever since the alien Masters had taken control, domesticating mankind with their energy-technology and the all-powerful mental Leash, the human condition had changed from toil and trouble to Total Wish Fulfillment. Only the Dingoes, the obstinate ones who resisted the Masters' Leash, weren't invited to the cosmic party. Poor Dingoes!

Starhaven

Johnny Mantell, beachcomber and broke bum, is blamed for the accidental death of a tourist. Seeing no better alternative, he steals a Star Patrol ship and flies to Starhaven, an artificial planet made to protect pirates, murderers, and villains of all kinds: an anarchic planet free of social mores and constraints.

The Sun Smasher

"It can't be true! It must be some kind of hoax!"

These are the words that go spinning through Neil Banning's mind when the Greenville authorities tell him that the house he had grown up in, the aunt and uncle who had raised him, never existed. Soon Banning finds himself in jail, charged with disturbing the peace, and maybe insanity. But when a stranger from outer space visits his cell at midnight and hails him as the Valkar of Katuun. Banning decides that maybe the authorities are right and he is crazy. Because his only alternative is to believe the impossible: that he really is the Valkar of Katuun, exiled emperor of a star empire, and the personality of Neil Banning nothing more than an elaborate fraud.

It doesn't really matter, though, who is right. For Banning finds himself starnapped, on his way to Katuun, whether he likes it or not. And as Banning, or the Valkar, he has to save that star-world from the terror of the Sun Smasher or perish with the loyal subjects he might never even have known!

Considered George MacDonald's greatest work, Lilith (1895) is among the most popular and profound fantasy novels of the Victorian era. This collection of critical essays is the first book-length study of this important literary work. The selections function in working dialogue with one another, driven by the central idea of liminality in fantasy literature. In addition to providing fresh interpretations of the novel, these essays implement esteemed background scholarship on Lilith, including that of notable author C.S. Lewis. Analytical topics include MacDonald's rhetorical strategy as a writer of prose romance, the implications of the novel's famous "endless ending," and the significance of Lilith in the development of modern fantasy.

Written by international experts from a range of disciplines, these essays examine the uniquely British contribution to science fiction film and television. Viewing British SF as a cultural phenomenon that challenges straightforward definitions of genre, nationhood, authorship and media, the editors provide a conceptual introduction placing the essays within their critical context. Essay topics include Hammer science fiction films, the various incarnations of Doctor Who, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, and such 21st-century productions as 28 Days Later and Torchwood.

In twelve critical and interdisciplinary essays, this text examines the relationship between the fantastic in novels, movies and video games and real-world debates about nationalism, globalization and cosmopolitanism. Topics covered include science fiction and postcolonialism, issues of ethnicity, nation and transnational discourse. Altogether, these essays chart a new discursive space, where postcolonial theory and science fiction and fantasy studies work cooperatively to expand our understanding of the fantastic, while simultaneously expanding the scope of postcolonial discussions.

Contents:

• 1 - Foreword (The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics and Science Fiction) - essay by Donald M. Hassler
• 5 - Introduction (The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics and Science Fiction) - essay by Swaralipi Nandi and Masood Ashraf Raja
• 17 - Science Fiction as Experimental Ground for Issues of the Postcolonial Novel - essay by Michele Braun
• 30 - Truth Is Stranger: The Postnational "Aliens" of Biofiction - essay by Karen Cardozo and Banu Subramaniam
• 46 - Forms of Compromise: The Interaction of Humanity, Technology and Landscape in Ken MacLeod's Night Sessions - essay by Adam Frisch
• 56 - The Language of Postnationality: Cultural Identity via Science Fictional Trajectories - essay by Chris Pak
• 73 - The "Popular" Science: Bollywood's Take on Science Fiction and the Discourse of Nations - essay by Swaralipi Nandi
• 88 - Postcolonial Ethics and Identity in Kirinyaga - essay by Jenn Brandt
• 100 - The Frontier Myth and Racial Politics - essay by Angel Mateos-Aparicio Martin-Albo
• 125 - Dystopia and the Postcolonial Nation - essay by Suparno Banderjee
• 141 - Body Speaks: Communication and the Limits of Nationalism in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy - essay by Katherine R. Broad
• 156 - Engineering a Comopolitan Future: Race, Nation, and World of Warcraft - essay by Jason W. Ellis
• 174 - When "Nation" Stops Making Sense: Mexico and Giorgio Agamben's "State of Exception" in Children of Men - essay by Stacy Schmitt Rusnak
• 188 - Fantastic Language/Political Reporting: The Postcolonial Science Fiction Illocutionary Force Is with Us - essay by Marleen S. Barr

1963: Emran Greene is a successful corporate accountant, a hopeful soon-to-be-father, and an unremarkable husband - except for the lingering effects of an experimental wartime truth serum, his ex-boyfriend, the impossibility of his conceiving a child, and all of the other secrets he keeps from his wife and his employer. One of these, the secret of the lonely grave he visits regularly in Riverport's Castleview Cemetery, holds a tragedy that just won't stay gone...

Sex is a force of nature. ""A woman stood behind him-no, no mere woman: a bombshell, a vamp, a va-va-voom-a gypsy queen, a menace from Venus."" Raedawn Somershoe lives in a trailer on the banks of the Fox River. She likes men and men like her. It runs in the family: her mother, Gelia, can seduce a man just by walking across a road. When they set their sights on a man, something magical happens. Alexander Caebeau drives a bucketloader for a construction company. He's lonely, homesick, tired of cutting down trees and putting up ugly buildings. He'd like to go back to the Bahamas, but his grandmother won't let him come home. When Alexander met Raedawn Somershoe, something magical happened. Raedawn has just lost her lover. Her mother is keeping secrets from her, her childhood sweetheart is coming home, riverfront developers want Rae and her family gone. She may just be falling in love with Alexander Caebeau. And the Fox River is beginning to rise. . .something magical is about to happen.

In Merridale, semi-transparent blue apparitions have appeared. These aren't ghosts, exactly. They are visions of the dead in their final moments – the last seconds of their lives portrayed for all to see. They don't move, and they don't speak.

Ash Wednesday is a thoughtful horror story about what happens to people when they are forced to gaze into the face of death and, specifically, the face of their own personal dead: their friends and family, those they believed to be dead and gone. Murders are revealed, rapes and other crimes. People despair, and try to create new lives out of the wreckage. Two of these are Bradley Meyers, a vet already driven half-crazy by his experiences in Vietnam, confronted by the sight of his dead son, and now barely capable of containing his rage, and Jim Callender, whose son has died in the same accident, for which he is partly responsible. As Callender sinks into guilt, Meyers moves toward murder.

He was the greatest telepath the world has ever known. he was Archimedes, Leonardo da Vinci, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and a Children of the Earth terrorist all rolled into one...He was Dennis Guise, idiot child, whose mind had been suffocated and nearly obliterated by a universe of other people's thoughts...And he was Earth's last hope against an enemy that had created the human race but would destroy it all again if Dennis Archimedes Leonardo Jean Jacques Humanity Guise could not meet this enemy on its own terms and win.

George R. R. Martin, a writer of unsurpassed vision, power, and imagination, has created a landmark of fantasy fiction. In his widely acclaimed A Game of Thrones, he introduced us to an extraordinary world of wonder, intrigue, and adventure. Now, in the eagerly awaited second volume in this epic saga, he once again proves himself a master myth-maker, setting a standard against which all other fantasy novels will be measured for years to come.

Time is out of joint. The summer of peace and plenty, ten years long, is drawing to a close, and the harsh, chill winter approaches like an angry beast. Two great leaders--Lord Eddard Stark and Robert Baratheon--who held sway over an age of enforced peace are dead...victims of royal treachery. Now, from the ancient citadel of Dragonstone to the forbidding shores of Winterfell, chaos reigns, as pretenders to the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms prepare to stake their claims through tempest, turmoil, and war.

As a prophecy of doom cuts across the sky--a comet the color of blood and flame--six factions struggle for control of a divided land. Eddard's son Robb has declared himself King in the North. In the south, Joffrey, the heir apparent, rules in name only, victim of the scheming courtiers who teem over King's Landing. Robert's two brothers each seek their own dominion, while a disfavored house turns once more to conquest. And a continent away, an exiled queen, the Mother of Dragons, risks everything to lead her precious brood across a hard hot desert to win back the crown that is rightfully hers.

A Clash of Kings transports us into a magnificent, forgotten land of revelry and revenge, wizardry and warfare. It is a tale in which maidens cavort with madmen, brother plots against brother, and the dead rise to walk in the night. Here a princess masquerades as an orphan boy; a knight of the mind prepares a poison for a treacherous sorceress; and wild men descend from the Mountains of the Moon to ravage the countryside.

Against a backdrop of incest and fratricide, alchemy and murder, the price of glory may be measured in blood. And the spoils of victory may just go to the men and women possessed of the coldest steel...and the coldest hearts. For when rulers clash, all of the land feels the tremors.

Audacious, inventive, brilliantly imagined, A Clash of Kings is a novel of dazzling beauty and boundless enchantment--a tale of pure excitement you will never forget.

Sasha is a fighter, the like of which the highland country of Lenayin has never seen.

Spurning her royal heritage to be raised by the great warrior, Kessligh, her exquisite swordplay astonishes all who witness it. But Sasha is still young, untested in battle and often led by her rash temper. In the complex world of Lenayin loyalties, her defiant wilfulness is attracting the wrong kind of attention.

Lenayin is a land almost divided by its two faiths: the Verenthane of the ruling classes and the pagan Goeren-yai, amongst whom Sasha now lives. The Goeren-yai worship swordplay and honour and begin to see Sasha as the great spirit the Synnich who will unite them. But Sasha is still searching for what she believes and must choose her side carefully.

When the Udalyn people -- the symbol of Goeren-yai pride and courage -- are attacked, Sasha will face her moment of testing. How will she act? Is she ready to lead? Can she be the saviour they need her to be?

Matt read the forbidden runes and found himself in a world where reciting verses worked magic. He got himself locked in a dungeon, created a fire-breathing dragon, and eventually discovered a beautiful princess he swore to save. Little did he guess how hard that would be....

Matt Mandrell, unsuspecting graduate student, never imagined his research would lead him to a strange scrap of parchment that would change his life forever....

Crossing the void of time and space, Matt is whisked away to an enchanted world where speaking in rhymes works the most dazzling magic. There he wins not only fame and power as the Lord High Wizard, but the heart of the beautiful Queen Alisande. His dreams are shattered, though, when he learns that he can't marry his true love; wizard or not, Matt is just a commoner in this bizarre land.

So Matt makes a foolish vow: to conquer a kingdom, any kingdom, if that's what it takes to claim his bride. But, as Matt discovers, in this world of enchantment, such an oath cannot be broken. He has truly committed himself to win a crown or die trying.

In search of lands to conquer, Matt sets his sights on neighboring Ibile, where the evil Gordorgrosso rules with an iron fist and sinister magic. Matt marches off against the tyrant, gathering a small band of unlikely allies, including a surly dracogriff, a well-spoken cyclop, and a damsel in distress. But against Gordogrosso's foul genius, Matt is going to need much more than a few stout-hearted companions and some clever rhymes....

Oathbound Wizard is the newest addition to the Del Rey Imagine program, which offers the best in fantasy and science fiction for readers twelve and up.

Saul didn't have so many friends that he would give one up without a fight. So when Matt disappeared, Saul started a search that led through Matt's kitchen window -- straight into a world of magic and desperate danger!

Saul discovered that in this world, his love of verse made him a wizard. But his newfound magic earned him a dreadful foe: Queen Suettay, a false monarch without peer for wickedness and corruption. A fearsome sorceress herself, with armies steeped in evil ready to obey her every sinful command, she determined to break Saul's growing power -- or win his soul for Satan.

Fortunately, Saul earned some stalwart friends, as well: Gruesome the troll and young Squire Gilbert; Saul's own guardian angel, and the beautiful -- if unsubstantial -- Angelique. But he'd need the help of the mysterious Spider King to spin a web strong enough to trap this tyrant!

THE WANDERING WIZARD

In sunny Latruria, the wicked old king was dead, and the new king spurned the rule of Evil. But turmoil began to spread, even across the border, when the new king also resisted Good! In nearby Merovence, Lord Wizard Matt Mantrell donned a disguise and set off to investigate--never dreaming that Latruria's sinister prime minister was mobilizing his minions...

"Minstrel" Matt sang his way south, dodging deadly enemies and music critics alike. He was teamed with a lovesick lad, menaced by a manticore, haunted by a ghost from Greece, and swept along in a flood of youngsters fleeing the provinces for the "glamour" of the city. But when they all washed up in the capital, harsh reality awaited them, not gold-paved streets.

And even harsher reality awaited Matt. The Lord Wizard faced the ultimate test of magic--and he would need a lot of help to pass!

A WORLD OF TROUBLES--TIMES TWO!

Matt Mantrell--Her Majesty's Wizard--conjured himself from magical Merovence to Jersey City for a long-delayed visit to his parents. Back in his hometown vicious, drug-dealing gangs had reduced Matt's old neighborhood to a wasteland, driven his father out of business, and forced his parents to the brink of destitution and homelessness. The only answer was for Matt to transport them--permanently--to Merovence.

But once back in that realm with his parents in tow, Matt found that Merovence and the neighboring Kingdom of Ibile faced imminent subjugation by the conquest-hungry Moors. As Queen Alisande led her army to engage the enemy head-on, Matt launched his own campaign--with the aid of his fledgling wizard father, the faithful dragon Stegoman, and a hapless tag-along thief. Grappling with djinnis, matching wits with a Moorish military genius, and trading spells with sinister sorcerers, they sought to root out the real enemy behind the mayhem: a cunning and deadly wizard who served the most evil master of all...

Don't lose any time! Join Christopher Stasheff and return to the wondrous, adventure-filled world of A Wizard in Rhyme!

CAN THE WIZARD OF RHYME SOLVE A ROYAL CRIME?

There's little love lost between the kindly monarchs of Merovence and the scheming sovereigns of Bretanglia. But when the brutish Prince Gaheris--heir apparent to the Bretanglian throne--is murdered during a brawl in a Merovence tavern, any pretense of civility between the two kingdoms flies out the window faster than the mysterious brigand who committed the dastardly deed.

While the outraged king and queen of Bretanglia declare their intention to lay siege to Merovence, royal wizard Matthew Mantrell suspects the slain prince was done in by one of his own "loyal" subjects.

As both sides gird for battle, Matt sets out--with trusty dragon in tow--to catch the killer. But the road to royal justice is rocky indeed, and a powerful sorcerer, a sinister cult of false druids, and a mischievous spirit are just some of the obstacles Matt must conquer--by wit or wizardry--to save his enchanted land from unholy forces of darkness...

THE WIZARD AT WAR

From beyond the mountains, a monstrous scourge sweeps down the steppes--a bloodthirsty barbarian horde, seemingly endless in numbers and hell-bent on conquest. With each nation that falls before their murderous onslaught, the marauders draw closer to Merovence, where good Queen Alisande rules with the help of her husband, Royal Wizard Matt Mantrell.

Now Matt and Alisande receive an urgent call for help from Jerusalem-- destined to be the barbarians' next target. But when Matt arrives in the Holy City to assess the imminent threat, he makes a shocking discovery: The power-mad khan who rules the ravaging minions is in league with a far greater and more dreadful enemy! With the aid of his old ally the djinn princess, a giant talking bird, and a fledgling enchantress with the power to change into a cat, Matt must call upon every resource, magical and mortal, to defy the triumph of pure evil...

A CAT-NAPPED PRINCESS

The feline sorceress Balkis has returned to Maracanda to reclaim her royal title. But a vengeful foe sprouts a diabolical scheme to spirit away the Princess of the Eastern Gate and send her tumbling forever through unknown worlds. Now an unprecedented search is begun, led by Balkis's mentor, Royal Wizard Matthew Mantrell.

But the hardship of finding his apprentice cannot compare to Balkis's own struggle to escape the strange world in which she has landed. With the aid of a soul-weary young boy named Anthony, Balkis mounts a magnificent, though treacherous, journey. Together they must rely on each other and their powers--both mortal and magic--to defy the forces of darkness and embrace the destiny they are fated to share...

Not all magicians go to schools of magic.

Adam Binder has the Sight. It's a power that runs in his bloodline: the ability to see beyond this world and into another, a realm of magic populated by elves, gnomes, and spirits of every kind. But for much of Adam's life, that power has been a curse, hindering friendships, worrying his backwoods family, and fueling his abusive father's rage.

Years after his brother, Bobby, had him committed to a psych ward, Adam is ready to come to grips with who he is, to live his life on his terms, to find love, and maybe even use his magic to do some good. Hoping to track down his missing father, Adam follows a trail of cursed artifacts to Denver, only to discover that an ancient and horrifying spirit has taken possession of Bobby's wife.

It isn't long before Adam becomes the spirit's next target. To survive the confrontation, save his sister-in-law, and learn the truth about his father, Adam will have to risk bargaining with very dangerous beings... including his first love.

LEADERS ARE FORGED IN THE FIRES OF WAR

Iron Age warriors Dug and Lowa captured Maidun castle and freed its slaves. But now they have conquered it, they must defend it.

A Roman invasion is coming from Gaul, but rather than uniting to protect their home, the British tribes battle each other - and see Maidun as an easy target.

Meanwhile, Lowa's spies infiltrate Gaul, discovering the Romans have recruited bloodthirsty British druids, and Maidunite Ragnall finds his loyalties torn when he meets Rome's charismatic general, Julius Caesar.

War is coming. Who will pay its price?

Ian Cormac's Early Years!

Raised to adulthood during the end of the war between the human Polity and a vicious alien race, the Prador, Ian Cormac, is haunted by childhood memories of a sinister scorpion-shaped war drone and the burden of losses he doesn't remember. Cormac signs up with Earth Central Security and is sent out to help restore and maintain order on worlds devastated by the war.There he discovers that though the Prador remain as murderous as ever, they are not anywhere near as treacherous or dangerous as some of his fellow humans, some closer to him than he would like. Amidst the ruins left by wartime genocides, Cormac will discover in himself a cold capacity for violence and learn some horrible truths about his own past while trying to stay alive on his course of vengeance.

Gridlinked is a science fiction adventure in the classic, fast-paced, action-packed tradition of Harry Harrison and Poul Anderson, with a dash of cyberpunk and a splash of Ian Fleming added to spice the mix.

Cormac is a legendary Earth Central Security agent, the James Bond of a wealthy future where "runcibles" (matter transmitters controlled by AIs) allow interstellar travel in an eye blink throughout the settled worlds of the Polity. Unfortunately Cormac is nearly burnt out, "gridlinked" to the AI net so long that his humanity has begun to drain away. He has to take the cold-turkey cure and shake his addiction to having his brain on the net.

Now he must do without just as he’s sent to investigate the unique runcible disaster that's wiped out the entire human colony on planet Samarkand in a thirty-megaton explosion. With the runcible out, Cormac must get there by ship, but he has incurred the wrath of a vicious psychopath called Arian Pelter, who now follows him across the galaxy with a terrifying psychotic killer android in tow. And deep beneath Samarkand's surface there are buried mysteries, fiercely guarded.

This is fast-moving, edge-of-the-seat entertainment, and a great introduction to the work of one of the most exciting new SF talents in years.

Outlink station Miranda has been destroyed by a nanomycelium and, because of this method of sabotage, the alien bioconstruct, Dragon – a creature as untrustworthy as it is gigantic – is thought to be involved. Sent on the titanic Polity dreadnought, the Occam Razor, Agent Cormac must investigate this, and resolve the question of Masada, a world about to be subsumed when the line of polity is drawn across it.

But the biophysicist Skellor has not been captured, and controls something so potent that Polity AIs are prepared to hunt him down forever, to prevent him using it.

On Masada the rebellion can never rise above ground as the slave population is subjugated by orbital laser arrays controlled by the Theocracy in their cylinder worlds, and by the fact that they cannot leave their compounds. For the wilderness of Masada is without breathable air, and out there roam the monstrous hooders, siluroynes, and the weird and terrible gabbleducks.

The knight errant Anderson is hunting a dragon on the primitive Out-Polity world of Cull, little knowing that far away a man has resurrected a brass killing machine to assist in a similar hunt that encompasses star systems. When agent Cormac learns that an old enemy still lives, he sets out in pursuit aboard the attack ship Jack Ketch … whilst scientist Mika begins discovering the horrifying truth about that ancient technology ostensibly produced by the alien Jain, who died out five million years ago.

On a planet roamed by ferocious insectile monsters the people of Cull must struggle to survive, while they build the industrial base to reach their forefathers’ starship still orbiting far above them. An entity calling itself Dragon assists them, but its motives are questionable having created genetic by-blows of humans and the hideous local monsters, before growing bored with that game. And now Cull, for millennia geologically inactive, suffers earthquakes...

Meanwhile a brass killing machine seeks to escape a bloody past it can neither forget nor truly remember. So mindlessly will continue its search for sanity, which it might find in an instant or not for a thousand years.

From 800 years in the future, a runcible gate is opened into the Polity and those coming through it have been sent specially to take the alien 'Maker' back to its home civilization in the Small Magellanic cloud. Once these refugees are safely through, the gate itself is rapidly shut down - because something alien is pursuing them. The gate is then dumped into a nearby sun.

From those refugees who get through, agent Cormac learns that the Maker civilization has been destroyed by pernicious virus known as the Jain technology. This, of course, raised questions: why was Dragon, a massive bioconstruct of the Makers, really sent to the Polity; why did a Jain node suddenly end up in the hands of someone who could do the most damage with it?

Meanwhile an entity called the Legate is distributing pernicious Jain nodes ...and a renegade attack ship, The King of Hearts, has encountered something very nasty outside the Polity itself.

The Polity is under attack from melded AI entity controlling the lethal Jain technology, but the attack seems to have no coherence. When one of Erebus’s wormships kills millions on the world of Klurhammon, a high-tech agricultural world of no real tactical significance, Cormac is sent to investigate, though he is struggling to control an ability no human being should possess, and beginning to question the motives of his AI masters.

Further attacks and seemingly indiscriminate slaughter ensue, but only serve to bring some of the most dangerous individuals in the Polity into the war. Mr Crane, the indefatigable brass killing machine sets out for vengeance. Orlandine, a vastly-augmented haiman who herself controls Jain technology, seeks a weapon of appalling power and finds allies from an ancient war.

Meanwhile Mika, scientist and Dragon expert, is again kidnapped by that alien entity and dragged to the heart of things; to wake the makers of Jain technology from their five million year slumber.

But Erebus’s attacks are not indiscriminate, and could spell the end of the Polity...

Sabaa Tahir's AN EMBER IN THE ASHES is a thought-provoking, heart-wrenching and pulse-pounding read. Set in a rich, high-fantasy world with echoes of ancient Rome, it tells the story of a slave fighting for her family and a young soldier fighting for his freedom.

Laia is a slave. Elias is a soldier. Neither is free.

Under the Martial Empire, defiance is met with death. Those who do not vow their blood and bodies to the Emperor risk the execution of their loved ones and the destruction of all they hold dear.

It is in this brutal world, inspired by ancient Rome, that Laia lives with her grandparents and older brother. The family ekes out an existence in the Empire's impoverished backstreets. They do not challenge the Empire. They've seen what happens to those who do.

But when Laia's brother is arrested for treason, Laia is forced to make a decision. In exchange for help from rebels who promise to rescue her brother, she will risk her life to spy for them from within the Empire's greatest military academy.

There, Laia meets Elias, the school's finest soldier--and secretly, its most unwilling. Elias wants only to be free of the tyranny he's being trained to enforce. He and Laia will soon realize that their destinies are intertwined--and that their choices will change the fate of the Empire itself.

Elias and Laia are running for their lives.

Following the events of the Fourth Trial, an army led by Masks hunts the two fugitives as they escape the city of Serra and journey across the vast lands of the Martial Empire.

Laia is determined to break into Kauf--the Empire's most secure and dangerous prison--and save her brother, whose knowledge of Serric steel is the key to the Scholars' future. And Elias is determined to stay by Laia's side... even if it means giving up his own chance at freedom.

But Elias and Laia will have to fight every step of the way if they're going to outsmart their enemies: the bloodthirsty Emperor Marcus, the merciless Commandant, the sadistic Warden of Kauf, and, most heartbreaking of all, Helene--Elias's former friend and the Empire's newest Blood Shrike.

Helene's mission is horrifying, unwanted, and clear: find the traitor Elias Veturius and the Scholar slave who helped him escape... and kill them both.

Beyond the Empire and within it, the threat of war looms ever larger.

The Blood Shrike, Helene Aquilla, is assailed on all sides. Emperor Marcus, haunted by his past, grows increasingly unstable, while the Commandant capitalizes on his madness to bolster her own power. As Helene searches for a way to hold back the approaching darkness, her sister's life and the lives of all those in the Empire hang in the balance.

Far to the east, Laia of Serra knows the fate of the world lies not in the machinations of the Martial court, but in stopping the Nightbringer. But while hunting for a way to bring him down, Laia faces unexpected threats from those she hoped would aid her, and is drawn into a battle she never thought she'd have to fight.

And in the land between the living and the dead, Elias Veturius has given up his freedom to serve as Soul Catcher. But in doing so, he has vowed himself to an ancient power that will stop at nothing to ensure Elias's devotion--even at the cost of his humanity.

The long-imprisoned jinn are on the attack, wreaking bloody havoc in villages and cities alike. But for the Nightbringer, vengeance on his human foes is just the beginning.

By his side, Commandant Keris Veturia declares herself Empress, and calls for the heads of any and all who defy her rule. At the top of the list? The Blood Shrike and her remaining family.

Laia of Serra, now allied with the Blood Shrike, struggles to recover from the loss of the two people most important to her. Determined to stop the approaching apocalypse, she throws herself into the destruction of the Nightbringer. In the process, she awakens an ancient power that could lead her to victory--or to an unimaginable doom.

And deep in the Waiting Place, the Soul Catcher seeks only to forget the life--and love--he left behind. Yet doing so means ignoring the trail of murder left by the Nightbringer and his jinn. To uphold his oath and protect the human world from the supernatural, the Soul Catcher must look beyond the borders of his own land. He must take on a mission that could save--or destroy--all that he knows.

It is April 1962. The Korean War has escalated and the US is struggling to keep the Russians and Chinese north of the 38th parallel. All the men are away fighting, but that doesn't mean the Space Race is lost. NASA decides to look elsewhere for its astronauts: the thirteen women pilots who passed the same tests as the original male candidates. These are the Mercury 13: Jerrie Cobb, Janey Hart, Myrtle Cagle, Jerri Sloan, Jan Dietrich, Marion Dietrich, Bernice Steadman, Wally Funk, Sarah Gorelick, Gene Nora Stumbough, Jean Hixson, Rhea Hurrle and Irene Leverton. One of these women will be the first American in space. Another will be the first American to spacewalk. Perhaps one will even be the first human being to walk on the Moon. Beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, deep in the Puerto Rico Trench north of San Juan, lies a film bucket from a KH-4 Corona spy satellite. It should have been caught in mid-air by a C-130 from the 6549th Test Group. That didn't happen. So the US Navy bathyscaphe Trieste II must descend twenty thousand feet to retrieve the bucket, down where light has never reached and the pressure is four tons per square inch. But there is more in the depths than anyone had expected, much more. This is not our world. But it very nearly was.

Ten years ago, Jonat deVrai was a rising star in the Marines. But he shocked his superiors by walking away from the Corps after witnessing atrocity and hypocrisy during the Reclamation of Guyana. Starting his life over, he established himself as the world's expert on the effectiveness of "prod"-- product placement, the only advertising which viewers will allow through the sophisticated filters they all use against unwanted intrusions on their electronic link networks. Prod, reinforced with sublims and the "res" -- resonant frequencies, a form of sonic branding -- is the wave of the future.

Jonat now advises multinational corporations on their prod campaigns, his busy life only occasionally disturbed by vivid flashbacks to his military years. Then his comfortable world is upset when the Centre for Societal Research approaches him to study the effects of res and prod on political campaigns.

After a res-heavy political rally for Laborite Republican Senatorial candidate Juan Carlismo, armed thugs jump deVrai in a parking garage. A day later, a sniper ambushes him. What looked like a safe, lucrative contract has suddenly turned dangerous. The stakes raise further when deVrai foils a remote-controlled cydroid assassination attempt on a Popular Democrat candidate. Cydroids built from deVrai's stolen DNA are turning up dead throughout NorAm.

Suspicion and conspiracy race around Jonat. Who wants him dead? Candidate Juan Carlismo's use of prod is skirting the limits of legality. The Centre has its own obscure agenda and may want deVrai as a martyr. The terrorist group PAMD is targeting ascendents in deVrai's family. And one of his clients is known for holding legendary grudges - could he have gone over the edge?

With his life on the line, deVrai must sort flash from fact before it's too late.

Flash is a blend of all-out thriller and thoughtful social, political, and technological exploration that that gets into your mind in a way even res and prod could never match.

Cinderella retold

In the wake of her father's death, Ash is left at the mercy of her cruel stepmother. Consumed with grief, her only joy comes by the light of the dying hearth fire, rereading the fairy tales her mother once told her. In her dreams, someday the fairies will steal her away, as they are said to do. When she meets the dark and dangerous fairy Sidhean, she believes that her wish may be granted.

The day that Ash meets Kaisa, the King's Huntress, her heart begins to change. Instead of chasing fairies, Ash learns to hunt with Kaisa. Though their friendship is as delicate as a new bloom, it reawakens Ash's capacity for love-and her desire to live. But Sidhean has already claimed Ash for his own, and she must make a choice between fairy tale dreams and true love.

Entrancing, empowering, and romantic, Ash is about the connection between life and love, and solitude and death, where transformation can come from even the deepest grief.

Nature is out of balance in the human world. The sun hasn't shone in years, and crops are failing. Worse yet, strange and hostile creatures have begun to appear. The people's survival hangs in the balance.

To solve the crisis, the oracle stones are cast, and Kaede and Taisin, two seventeen-year-old girls, are picked to go on a dangerous and unheard-of journey to Tanlili, the city of the Fairy Queen. Taisin is a sage, thrumming with magic, and Kaede is of the earth, without a speck of the otherworldly. And yet the two girls' destinies are drawn together during the mission. As members of their party succumb to unearthly attacks and fairy tricks, the two come to rely on each other and even begin to fall in love. But the Kingdom needs only one huntress to save it, and what it takes could tear Kaede and Taisin apart forever.

The exciting adventure prequel to Malinda Lo's highly acclaimed novel Ash is overflowing with lush Chinese influences and details inspired by the I Ching, and is filled with action and romance.

Witchsign follows the stories of two siblings, Steiner and Kjellrunn, who live in a godforsaken province of the Scorched Republics.

The dragons are long dead, but the Solmindre Empire looms over the continent threatening, keen on eradicating any sign of the arcane that is associated with the dragons, the so called witchsign, by forcing every child to undergo the Invigilation. Those found positive to the taint of the dragons are taken away, and no one knows what happens to them.

Steiner had successfully passed his Invigilations, until a spiteful Hierarch of the Empire mistakenly assumes Steiner bears the witchsign instead of his sister, and he is taken away to Vladibogdan, a prison island hosting dangerous secrets, and dangerous magic. To Steiner's astonishment, the children taken away are not executed; on the contrary, they attend the four elemental schools of the Academy situated on the island, and they are forced to serve the Empire that uprooted them from their homes.

Without witchsign, Steiner's position is precarious. While he struggles to survive and outsmart his vicious enemies, Kjellrunn tries to master her skills and find a way to bring her brother back. In their respective quests, Steiner and Kjellrunn uncover conspiracies and secrets regarding their family, the Empire, and the entire world. But those aware of such knowledge are bound to be silenced. In a permanent fashion.

Steiner, blacksmith, hero, has taken a hammer to the Empire, freeing the dead and children with witchsign alike from their fiery prison. Now he plans to finish what he started.

Kimi, dragon-speaker, princess, must seek her father's court and win the support of his armies before news of her escape dooms her people.

Silverdust, ancient, dead, journeys to the heart of the empire as a prisoner to meet the Emperor for what he hopes will be the final time.

Kjellrun, witch, killer, still reeling from the loss of her uncle when she is ripped from her family, fears this power within her. But she must harness that force and soon if she hopes to survive.

Scattered by fortune, plagued by danger, Steiners crew rise against the dark rule that has cost them so much. The old gods are waking. The dragons are free. May gods help those who bear the sign of the witch.

The Annurian Empire is disintegrating. The advantages it used for millennia have fallen to ruin. The ranks of the Kettral have been decimated from within, and the kenta gates, granting instantaneous travel across the vast lands of the empire, can no longer be used.

In order to save the empire, one of the surviving Kettral must voyage beyond the edge of the known world through a land that warps and poisons all living things to find the nesting ground of the giant war hawks. Meanwhile, a monk turned con-artist may hold the secret to the kenta gates.

But time is running out. Deep within the southern reaches of the empire and ancient god-like race has begun to stir.

What they discover will change them and the Annurian Empire forever. If they can survive.

Wren MacAvoy works as a coal miner for a domed city that was constructed in the mid-nineteenth century to protect the royal blood line of England when astronomers spotted a comet on a collision course with Earth. Humanity would be saved by the most groundbreaking technology of the time. But after nearly 200 years of life beneath the dome, society has become complacent and the coal is running out. Plus there are those who wonder, is there life outside the dome or is the world still consumed by fire?

When one of Wren's friends escapes the confines of the dome, he is burned alive and put on display as a warning to those seeking to disrupt the dome's way of life. But Alex's final words are haunting. "The sky is blue."

Wren's world has changed. The thing that she fought for, escaping the dome has come to fruition, but it's not the paradise she thought it would be. Most of the shiners have died, and according to James, she is to blame for many of the deaths, a burden which sits heavy on her shoulders. Still some have survived and Wren is determined to keep them safe as they fight to establish a home outside while hiding from the rovers who have weapons that can kill from far away. But as long as she has Pace she knows everything will be fine. Still Wren wonders, as she sees the smoke that continually pours forth from the dome, how did her friends inside fare? Will they ever find out if Lucy, David, Jill and Harry, along with Pace's mother survive the explosions?

Meanwhile, someone else has also seen the smoke. A band of explorers from across the sea arrive in an airship, curious about the dome, and offering help to those who survive. When Wren meets the handsome Levi Addison, she suddenly questions her love for Pace as Levi offers to show her the world from his airship. Does she really love Pace? Or was it just the circumstances that made her think she did? Meanwhile, word arrives from inside via Pip, and Wren is forced to go back inside the dome, a thing that terrifies her more than anything else, to save her friends. Once she's back inside will she be able to escape again?

Wren's father takes her on a journey through the dome where she sees the after effects of the destruction caused by her friends and the blue coats who came into the tunnels. What he doesn't realize is that instead of subduing her, he is giving more purpose and fuel to her cause. When he realizes his plan has backfired, he sells Wren and her friends caught inside to the rovers. They manage to escape and add more fuel to the hatred between the rovers and the dome. Wren and her friends from inside the dome and America are caught in the middle as the battle escalates and whoever wins the battle wins the right to life.

It's up to Wren to make both sides see that the only way they can survive is by working together.

Many visitors to Yellowstone National Park don't realize that the boiling hot springs and spraying geysers are caused by an underlying supervolcano. It has erupted three times in the last 2.1 million years, and it will erupt again, changing the Earth forever.

Fifteen-year-old Alex is home alone when the supervolcano erupts. His town collapses into a nightmare of darkness, ash, and violence, forcing him to flee. He begins a harrowing trek in search of his parents and sister, who were visiting relatives 140 miles away.

Along the way, Alex struggles through a landscape transformed by more than a foot of ash. The disaster brings out the best and worst in people desperate for food, clean water, and shelter. When an escaped convict injures Alex, he searches for a sheltered place where he can wait--to heal or to die. Instead, he finds Darla. Together, they fight to achieve a nearly impossible goal: surviving the supervolcano.

It's been over six months since the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano. Alex and Darla have been staying with Alex's relatives, trying to cope with the new reality of the primitive world so vividly portrayed in Ashfall, the first book in this series. It's also been six months of waiting for Alex's parents to return from Iowa. Alex and Darla decide they can wait no longer and must retrace their journey into Iowa to find and bring back Alex's parents to the tenuous safety of Illinois. But the landscape they cross is even more perilous than before, with life-and-death battles for food and power between the remaining communities. When the unthinkable happens, Alex must find new reserves of strength and determination to survive.

The Yellowstone supervolcano nearly wiped out the human race. Now, almost a year after the eruption, the survivors seem determined to finish the job. Communities wage war on each other, gangs of cannibals roam the countryside, and what little government survived the eruption has collapsed completely. The ham radio has gone silent. Sickness, cold, and starvation are the survivors' constant companions. When it becomes apparent that their home is no longer safe and adults are not facing the stark realities, Alex and Darla must create a community that can survive the ongoing disaster, an almost impossible task requiring even more guts and more smarts than ever--and unthinkable sacrifice.

If they fail... they, their loved ones, and the few remaining survivors will perish. This epic finale has the heart of Ashfall, the action of Ashen Winter, and a depth all its own, examining questions of responsibility and bravery, civilization and society, illuminated by the story of an unshakable love that transcends a post-apocalyptic world and even life itself.

Syd Chambers knows that there's life on other planets because he's descended from it. His father was from a distant world called Denza and has been missing--presumed dead--for years.

When Syd discovers a device his father left behind which shows not only that he's alive, but where he is, Syd must set out on a mission of his own. But along the way, he discovers a deadly, unbearable secret that could destroy Denza, Earth, and the universe.

Syd Chambers grew up on Earth with his human mother and barely remembers his alien father from Denza, who left on a mission when Syd was very young. After leaving Earth, Syd learned the truth of his father's disappearance on the planet Ashfall--his father had died protecting a devastating secret about the history between humans and Denzans.

Syd is now faced with a choice--free humanity from imprisonment on Earth, which will allow them to come into physical power beyond their wildest dreams; or destroy Earth so that humans never have a chance to enslave, torment, and kill other species again. It has been prophesied that Syd is destined to become a world-killer, but Syd is determined to choose his own fate, and knows there must be another path forward that will honor his father's sacrifice.

Streetfighter, fugitive, hero... Aubry Knight is now a powerful man with powerful friends. And someone wants to kill him.

Their opening shot is the death of one of Aubry's dearest friends. Their next attack is on Aubry's child. Knight is drawn inexorably toward New Africa, toward the mysteries of his own past, and toward a future that may take him far from Los Angeles and the only life he's ever known.

To win this battle, and save his family, Aubry Knight must defeat himself.

From the award winning author of Firedance, comes this new novel in the Ashlu Cycle. King Asp has died the ritual death, but may live if his sword can be reforged; and the young potter Moth may become a wizard if he can survive.

>The Ashuak Chronicles, follows the fortunes of the new Ashuak Imperial General, Sukaal Vekesh, appointed to the southern province, Sekesu. Sukaal has more than rebels to worry about, he has problems within his own ranks also...

The second book in a fabulous trilogy of power and violence, love and hatred, slavery and the call to freedom.

Shana is sent to the marble mines of Ashua. She is the top gladiator in Vechwer but has angered too many influential people. Eventually escaping, she raises an army against those who feed her people to the dragons. Sukaal Veskesh, an Ashuak provincial governor and military leader who is trying to bring reform to relations between the Jaru and the Ashuak, is nearly defeated by Shana's band. Sukaal's moderate stance is obliterated when he is posted elsewhere, and his replacement institutes the cruel and violent rule that had been in place before Sukaal came?ucifixion is a new and even harsher punishment for the Jaru people.

And the dragon priests of Ashua are looking after their own intereststhey believe Alwyn is the key to finding the Genesis Stone, the stone the priests have promised to recover from the Alfwyn for the dragons. And time is running out for them all...

Erin has to face the truth about himself. As the battle continues between those who want their freedom and those defending the absolute rule of the Ashuak, the dragon priests are discovering the dragons will not wait forever.

A strange tale about a lamia who dwelt beneath the ruins of the Castle of Fausses flammes.

This short story is included in the collections:

• A Rendezvous in Averoigne: The Best Fantastic Tales of Clark Ashton Smith (1988), Clark Ashton Smith
• Out of Space and Time (1942), Clark Ashton Smith

It first appeared in the May, 1930 Issue of Weird Tales, available free on Internet Archives.

Clark Ashton Smith's influential Zothique sequence of stories, the majority of which were orignally published during the 1930s, collected in a signle volume. Number 16 in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, edited by Lin Carter.

Contents:

• About Zothique, and Clark Ashton Smith: When the World Grows Old - essay by Lin Carter
• Map of Zothique
• Zothique (1951 poem)
• Xeethra (1934)
• Necromancy in Naat (1936)
• The Empire of the Necromancers (1932)
• The Master of the Crabs (1948)
• The Death of Ilalotha (1937)
• The Weaver in the Vault (1934)
• The Witchcraft of Ulua (1934)
• The Charnel God (1934)
• The Dark Eidolon (1935)
• Morthylla (1953)
• The Black Abbot of Puthuum (1936)
• The Tomb-Spawn (1934)
• The Last Hieroglyph (1935)
• The Isle of the Torturers (1933)
• The Garden of Adompha (1938)
• The Voyage of King Euvoran (1933)
• Epilogue: The Sequence of the Zothique Tales - essay by Lin Carter

Contents:

• [viii] - Hyperborea (map) - interior artwork by Lin Carter
• ix - About Hyperborea and Clark Ashton Smith: Behind the North Wind - essay by Lin Carter
• 3 - The Muse of Hyperborea - [Prose Pastels - 3] - (1934) - poem
• 4 - The Seven Geases - [Hyperborea] - (1934) - novelette
• 30 - The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan - [Hyperborea] - (1932) - short story
• 41 - The White Sybil - [Hyperborea] - (1934) - short story
• 53 - The Testament of Athammaus - [Hyperborea] - (1932) - short story
• 77 - The Coming of the White Worm - [Hyperborea] - (1941) - short story
• 94 - Ubbo-Sathla - [Hyperborea] - (1933) - short story
• 104 - The Door to Saturn - [Hyperborea] - (1932) - short story
• 128 - The Ice-Demon - [Hyperborea] - (1933) - short story
• 148 - The Tale of Satampra Zeiros - [Satampra Zeiros] - (1931) - short story
• 164 - The Theft of Thirty-nine Girdles - [Satampra Zeiros] - (1958) - short story
• 181 - The Abominations of Yondo - (1926) - short story
• 190 - The Desolation of Soom - poem (variant of The Abomination of Desolation 1938)
• 192 - The Passing of Aphrodite - [Prose Pastels - 5] - (1934) - poem
• 195 - The Memnons of the Night - (1917) - poem
• 197 - Notes on the Commoriom Myth-Cycle - essay by Lin Carter

Contents:

• 3 - About Xiccarph and Clark Ashton Smith: Other Stars and Skies - essay by Lin Carter
• 9 - To the Daemon: an Invocation - [Prose Pastels - 6] - poem (variant of To the Daemon 1943)
• 15 - The Maze of Maal Dweb - [Maal Dweb] - (1933) - short story
• 37 - The Flower-Women - [Maal Dweb] - (1935) - short story
• 58 - Vulthoom - [Mars (Clark Ashton Smith)] - (1935) - novelette
• 94 - The Dweller in the Gulf - [Mars (Clark Ashton Smith)] - (1933) - novelette
• 121 - The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis - [Mars (Clark Ashton Smith)] - (1932) - novelette
• 147 - The Doom of Antarion - short story (variant of The Planet of the Dead 1932)
• 168 - The Demon of the Flower - (1933) - short story
• 185 - The Monster of the Prophecy - (1932) - novelette
• 239 - Sadastor - (1930) - poem
• 244 - From the Crypts of Memory - (1917) - poem

Contents:

• 1 - About Poseidonis and Clark Ashton Smith: The Magic of Atlantis - essay by Lin Carter
• 9 - An Editor's Note (Poseidonis) - essay by Lin Carter
• 11 - The Muse of Atlantis - [Poseidonis] - poem (variant of From a Letter 1922)
• 12 - The Last Incantation - [Malygris] - (1930) - short story
• 18 - The Death of Malygris - [Malygris] - (1934) - short story
• 33 - Tolometh - (1958) - poem
• 35 - The Double Shadow - [Poseidonis] - (1933) - short story
• 50 - A Voyage to Sfanomoë - [Poseidonis] - (1931) - short story
• 59 - A Vintage from Atlantis - [Poseidonis] - (1933) - short story
• 67 - Atlantis - [Poseidonis] - (1912) - poem
• 71 - Editor's Note [2] (Poseidonis) - essay by Lin Carter
• 73 - In Lemuria - (1921) - poem
• 75 - An Offering to the Moon - (1953) - short story
• 88 - The Uncharted Isle - (1930) - short story
• 101 - Lemurienne - (1971) - poem (variant of The Lemurienne 1923)
• 105 - Editor's Note [3] (Poseidonis) - essay by Lin Carter
• 107 - The Epiphany of Death - (1934) - short story
• 115 - Editor's Note [4] (Poseidonis) - essay by Lin Carter
• 116 - In Cocaigne - (1922) - poem
• 117 - Symposium of the Gorgon - (1958) - short story
• 127 - The Venus of Azombeii - (1931) - novelette
• 158 - The Isle of Saturn - (1951) - poem
• 160 - The Root of Ampoi - (1949) - short story
• 177 - The Invisible City - (1932) - short story
• 202 - Amithaine - (1951) - poem
• 203 - The Willow Landscape - (1931) - short story
• 209 - The Shadows - (1922) - poem

A young bard faces webs of lies and deception in a world where nothing is as it seems - and everything is a trap for the unwary - When young Kevin became a bard's apprentice, he thought that his new life would be filled with excitement and adventure; so when his new Master's first task for him is a perfectly ordinary manuscript copying errand to the castle of Count Volmar his disappointment knew no bounds. Why the Count was not even involved in Court politics!

But when the Count's niece is kidnapped by elves and the Count asks for his help in recovering her, Kevin is convinced that the adventure he craves is at last at hand. What he cannot know is that the distressed damsel is not really Count Valmar's niece, that the abductors are not really elves - and that even the rescue is not what it appears to be.

The Dark Elf Naitachal, once a Necromancer who gained power by depriving others of their life forces, is now happy in the more peaceful role of Bard. But shadows from his past linger.

Naitachal's Dark Elf clan sees him as the worst of traitors for daring to turn towards the Light. They mean to take revenge. They create a trap, the Chaos Gate, a sorcerous portal that is meant to draw him into their lands and into their power.

Only Kevin, once Naitachal's apprentice, now a full Bard and Count in his own castle, stands between the Dark Elf and certain doom. But can even the powers of Bardic Magic be enough to vanquish the Darkness?

In the wake of his crushing victory at Waterloo, Napoléon unleashes his vicious French general Marc Thibault and his brigade of giant battlesaurs to strike terror across Europe. England stands alone, but an invasion is looming. Its only hope is a secret attack led by Willem, a magician's son, deep inside enemy territory, to the very heart of Napoléon's terrifying new army.

Deception and betrayal threaten the mission from its outset, but the courage and perseverance of Willem the "saur killer" and his compatriots lead to a clash of titanic proportions.

THE PRICE OF VICTORY

David McCarthy returns to Kathil a hero -- one of the few surviving members of the First Kathil Uhlans, who fought so fiercely in the war to defeat the Clans. But David returns from Clan space with haunting memories of the cost of victory....

With the Federated Commonwealth on the brink of civil war, David joins the planetary militia on Kathil -- and steps into a powder keg. Opposing forces wrangle for control of the planet and its orbital shipyards, which berth a portion of FedCom's mighty WarShip fleet. The Eighth Regimental Combat Team -- loyal to Archon Katrina -- refuses to turn over control of the planet to the militia.

Caught in the power struggle between supporters of Katrina and those of her brother, Victor, McCarthy vows that he won't fail the people of his homeworld, even if that means leading his untested MechWarriors against the Eighth's superior firepower -- and dredging up a past he'd rather forget....

Elin's family has an important responsibility: caring for the fearsome water serpents that form the core of their kingdom's army. So when some of the creatures mysteriously die, Elin's mother is sentenced to death as punishment. With her last breath, she manages to send her daughter to safety.

Alone and far from home, Elin soon discovers that she can communicate with both the terrifying water serpents and the majestic flying beasts that guard her queen. This skill gives her great power, but it also involves her in deadly plots that could cost her life. Can she save herself and prevent her beloved beasts from being used as tools of war? Or is there no escaping the terrible battles to come?

Ten years after the fateful clash between two opposing sides of the Divine Kingdom of Lyoza, Elin lives a peaceful life with her family. She tries to stay as far away from her past as possible?the girl who communicated with creatures and befriended a Royal Beast wants no part in the power struggles of humans. But when Elin is called upon to investigate a mysterious illness that's stricken the Toda, she uncovers a startling plot?one that could threaten everything she holds dear.

In this thrilling sequel to The Beast Player, Elin must confront her destiny and heed the dire warnings of history. Is a final battle between the Toda and the Royal Beasts inevitable? And will it mean destruction for all?

The Lore is over. For Ben Garston, the fight is just beginning.

The uneasy truce between the human and the mythical world has shattered. Betrayed by his oldest friend, with a tragic death on his hands, there isn't enough whiskey in England to wash away the taste of Ben's guilt. But for a one-time guardian dragon, there's no time to sit and sulk in the ruins.

Because the Long Sleep has come undone. Slowly but surely, Remnants are stirring under the earth, unleashing chaos and terror on an unsuspecting modern world. Worse still, the Fay are returning, travelling across the gulfs of the nether to bring a final reckoning to Remnants and humans alike.

A war is coming. A war to end all wars. And only Ben Garston stands in the way ...

In the gripping conclusion to the action-packed "standard bearer" (Booklist) of zombie series, the threat of death is given new life.

Benny Imura and his friends have found the jet and Sanctuary—but neither is what they expected. Instead of a refuge, Sanctuary is a hospice, and the soldiers who flew the plane seem to be little more than bureaucrats who have given up hope for humanity's future. With Chong hovering between life and death, clinging to his humanity by a thread, Benny makes a startling discovery: A scientist may have discovered a cure for the zombie plague. Desperate to save Chong, Benny and his friends mount a search and rescue mission. But they're not the only ones on the hunt. The reapers are after the cure too, and they want to use it turn all the zombies into superfast shock troops—and wipe humanity off the face of the earth.

In this riveting conclusion to the Rot & Ruin series, the battle to end all battles is just beginning.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Moon Shots (1999), edited by Peter Crowther. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 5 (2000), edited by David G. Hartwell, The Eagle Has Landed: 50 Years of Lunar Science Fiction, (2019), edited by Neil Clarke. The story is included in the collection The Cure for Love and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution (2007).

Jefferson Nighthawk -- the Widowmaker -- is finally cured of his disease. A man in his sixties, who has been in a coma for a century, all he wants to do is live out his life peacefully and tend his garden...but he is continually sought out, not by his own enemies who are long dead, but by enemies made by his two clones, men he has never seen before, perfect strangers who are out to kill him. His retirement will have to be put on hold until he solves this ongoing and deadly problem.

Ash may have escaped the immortal-worshipping cult that killed her mother, but the love of her life is still under its thrall. Dane has been possessed by his diabolical ancestor Coronado, a man who's fabulously wealthy, dripping with fame, and the leader of Europe's most dangerous immortal network. Dane begs Ash to join him at Coronado's castle in Spain, and swears that his blood bond with Ash is stronger than Coronado's hold over him. Ash is desperate to help Dane vanquish Coronado without having to sacrifice herself to the darkness. But when you're all in, blood and salt, the only way to hold on to the light might just be by setting everything on fire.

In the north, a fire rages through the world-spanning forest of Beltrevan. Out of the flames is born a terrifying being with monstrous powers--Taws, Messenger of the fire-god Ashar. The ancient prophecies say he will raise a great Horde from the warlike tribes of the north to bring destruction to the peaceful Kingdoms of Tamur, Ust alich, and Kesh.

In the south, a young prophetess of the order of the Lady forsakes her vows of celibacy to bear a child, for the Book of Kyrie says that a champion will arise from Tamur to meet the challenge of the Usurper. The boy is named Kedryn. And as he nears manhood it seems that he may indeed be the child of prophecy, for he wields powers that none outside the Sisterhood have ever claimed. He may be the last, desperate hope for the survival of the Kingdoms, but the Usurper has learned of Kedryn as well, and his armies are on the march

When a mysterious Scotsman suddenly appears in the middle of the road, Klara thinks the biggest problem is whether she hit him with her car. But, as impossible as it sounds, Callum has stepped out of another time, and it's just the beginning of a deadly adventure.

Klara will soon learn that she is the last Pillar of Time--an anchor point in the timeline of the world and a hiding place for a rogue goddess's magic. Callum believes he's fated to protect her at all costs after being unable to protect the previous Pillar, his best friend, Thomas. A dark force is hunting the Pillars to claim the power of the goddess--and Klara and Callum are the only two people standing in the way. Thrown together by fate, the two have to learn to trust each other and work together... but they'll need to protect their hearts from one another if they're going to survive.

History tore them apart. Can they survive their future?

While consumed in a devastating battle with the demigod Llaw, Klara is mysteriously catapulted five hundred years into the past, suddenly alone and distraught that she and her fated love Callum killed the demigod at the expense of Callum's own life.

As the last Pillar of Time, an anchor point in the timeline of the world, Klara must navigate dangerous magic, confusing visions, and powerful adversaries to determine the fate of the world and avenge the life of her love.

But with all the treacherous enemies--magical and human alike--chasing Klara in 1500s Scotland, she has no idea what, and whom, she actually left behind on the battlefield in 2022. In a battle across history and the present, life and death, Klara must fight to choose her own fate.

These ten short stories from the golden age of science fiction feature classic SF writers including H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury and J.G. Ballard, as well as lesser-known writers from the genre. An antique shop owner gets a glimpse of the red planet through an intriguing artefact. A Martian's wife contemplates the possibility of life on Earth. A resident of Venus describes his travels across the two alien planets. From an arid desert to an advanced society far superior to that of Earth, portrayals of Mars have differed radically in their attempt to uncover the truth about our neighbouring planet. Since the 1880s, writers of science fiction have delighted in speculating on what life on Mars might look like and what might happen should we make contact with the planet's inhabitants. In these stories, they reveal much about how we understand our place in the universe.

Contents:

• A Martian Odyssey - [Tweel - 1] - (1934) - novelette by Stanley G. Weinbaum
• The Time-Tombs - (1963) - novelette by J. G. Ballard
• The Crystal Egg - (1897) - short story by H. G. Wells
• Crucifixus Etiam - (1953) - short story by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
• Ylla - [The Martian Chronicles] - (1950) - short story by Ray Bradbury
• Without Bugles - (1952) - short story by E. C. Tubb
• The Forgotten Man of Space - (1933) - short story by P. Schuyler Miller
• The Great Sacrifice - (1903) - short story by Geo. C. Wallis [as by George C. Wallis]
• Measureless to Man - (1962) - novelette by Marion Zimmer Bradley (variant of The Dark Intruder)
• Letters from Mars - [Letters from the Planets - 2] - short story by W. S. Lach-Szyrma (variant of Letters from the Planets: Letter the Second 1887)

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

Contents:

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

Sound the sirens! The end is here, and it comes in many forms in this new collection of apocalyptic short stories from the classic age of science fiction. Join humanity on the brink of destruction in 13 doom-laden visions from the 1890s to the 1960s, featuring rare tales from the Library's vaults.

Tales of plague seizing an over-polluted capital, a world engulfed in absolute darkness by some cosmic disaster, and of poignant dreams of a silent planet after the last echoes of humanity have died away.

Extreme climate change, nuclear annihilation, comet strike; calamities self-inflicted and from beyond the steer of humankind vie to deal the last blow in this countdown from the first whisper of possible extinction to the Earth's final sunrise.

"It's a hazardous experiment," they all said, "putting in new and untried machinery."

Caution beware the menace of the machine: a man is murdered by an automaton built for playing chess; a computer system designed to arbitrate justice develops a taste for iron-fisted, fatal rulings; an AI wreaks havoc on society after removing all censorship from an early form of the internet.

Assembled with pieces by SF giants such as Isaac Asimov and Brian W Aldiss as well as the less familiar but no less influential input of earlier science fiction pioneers, this new collection of classic tales contains telling lessons for humankind's gradual march towards life alongside the thinking machine.

The fact that humanity is not alone in the universe has long preoccupied our thoughts.

In this compelling new collection of short stories from SF's classic age our visions of 'other' are shown in a myriad of forms - beings from other worlds, corrupted lifeforms from our own planet and entities from unimaginable dimensions.

Amongst these tales, the humble ant becomes humanity's greatest foe, a sailor awakes in a hellish landscape terrified by a monstrous creature from the deep, an extra-terrestrial apocalypse devastates our world but also brings us together, and our race becomes the unwitting agent of another species' survival. Be prepared to face your greatest fears and relinquish your hold on reality as you confront the menace of the monster.

Contents:

• The War of the Worlds (abridgement) - [The War of the Worlds] - (1920) - short story by H. G. Wells
• The Cloud Men - (1911) - short story by Owen Oliver (variant of The Cloud-Men, Being a Foreprint from the London News Sheet of March 9, 1915)
• The Dragon of St. Pauls - (1899) - short fiction by Reginald Bacchus and C. Ranger Gull
• De Profundis - (1914) - short fiction by Coutts Brisbane
• Dagon - (1919) - short story by H. P. Lovecraft
• In Amundsen's Tent - (1928) - novelette by John Martin Leahy
• King Kong - [King Kong] - (1933) - short story by Draycot M. Dell and Edgar Wallace
• The Monster from Nowhere - (1939) - short story by Nelson S. Bond
• Discord in Scarlet - [Space Beagle] - (1939) - novelette by A. E. van Vogt
• Monster - (1950) - short story by John Christopher
• Resident Physician - [Sector General] - (1961) - novelette by James White
• Personal Monster - (1955) - short story by Margaret St. Clair [as by Idris Seabright]
• Alien Invasion - (1954) - short story by Marcia Kamien
• The Witness - (1951) - novelette by Eric Frank Russell

Time travel has long been a staple of science fiction. Removing the bonds of time on a story allows for many interesting possibilities, but it also presents complicated problems and paradoxes.

In this collection, featuring stories from the 1880s to the 1960s, we are taken to the remote future and back to the distant past. We are trapped in an eternal loop and met with visitors and objects from the future. We come face to face with our past selves, and experience the chaos of living out of sync with everyone else in the universe.

These are just some of the thrilling narratives to discover as we unwind the constraints of time.

Contents:

• Introduction (Beyond Time: Classic Tales of Time Unwound) - (2019) - essay by Mike Ashley
• The Clock That Went Backward - (1881) - short story by Edward Page Mitchell
• The Queer Story of Brownlow's Newspaper - (1932) - short story by H. G. Wells
• Omega - (1932) - short story by Amelia Reynolds Long
• The Book of Worlds - (1929) - short story by Miles J. Breuer, M.D.
• The Branches of Time - (1935) - short story by David R. Daniels
• The Reign of the Reptiles - (1935) - novelette by Alan Connell
• Friday, the Nineteenth - (1950) - short story by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
• Look After the Strange Girl - (1953) - short story by J. B. Priestley
• Manna - (1949) - novelette by Peter Phillips
• Tenth Time Around - (1959) - novelette by J. T. McIntosh (variant of Tenth Time Round)
• The Shadow People - (1958) - short story by Arthur Sellings
• Thirty-Seven Times - (1957) - short story by E. C. Tubb
• Dial 'O' for Operator - (1958) - novelette by Robert Presslie
• Story Sources (Beyond Time: Classic Tales of Time Unwound) - (2019) - essay by Mike Ashley

Science fiction has always confronted the concerns of society, and its greatest writers have long been inspired by the weighty issue of humanity's ecological impact on the planet. This volume explores a range of prescient and thoughtful stories from SF's classic period, from accounts of exhausted resources and ecocatastrophe to pertinent warnings of ecosystems thrown off balance and puzzles of adaptation and responsibility as humanity ventures into the new environments of the future.

Featuring stories crucial to the evolution of eco-science fiction from Philip K. Dick, Margaret St. Clair, J. D. Beresford and more, this timely collection is a trove of essential reading.

Contents:

• 7 - Introduction (Nature's Warnings: Classic Stories of Eco-Science Fiction) - essay by Mike Ashley
• 21 - Survey Team - (1954) - short story by Philip K. Dick
• 39 - The Dust of Death - [The Doom of London] - (1903) - short story by Fred M. White
• 59 - The Man Who Hated Flies - (1929) - short fiction by J. D. Beresford
• 71 - The Man Who Awoke - [The Man Who Awoke - 1] - (1933) - novelette by Laurence Manning
• 113 - The Sterile Planet - novelette by Nat Schachner (variant of Sterile Planet 1937) [as by Nathan Schachner]
• 145 - Shadow of Wings - short fiction by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding [as by Elizabeth Sanxay Holding]
• 175 - The Gardener - (1949) - short story by Margaret St. Clair
• 191 - Drop Dead - (1956) - novelette by Clifford D. Simak
• 229 - A Matter of Protocol - [Contact (Jack Sharkey)] - (1962) - short story by Jack Sharkey
• 247 - Hunter, Come Home - (1963) - novelette by Richard McKenna
• 297 - Adam and No Eve - (1941) - short story by Alfred Bester

On Mercury: How do you outrun the dawn and its lethal sunrise?

On Jupiter: When humans transfer their minds into the local fauna to explore the surface, why do they never return?

On Pluto: How long must an astronaut wait for rescue at the furthest reaches of the system?

We have always been fascinated by the promise of space and the distant lure of our fellow planets orbiting the Sun. In this new collection of classic stories, Mike Ashley takes us on a journey from the harsh extremes of Mercury to the turbulent expanses of Saturn and beyond, exploring as we go the literary history of the planets, the influence of contemporary astronomy on the imagination of writers, and the impact of their storytelling on humanity's perception of these hitherto unreachable worlds. Featuring the talents of Larry Niven, Robert Silverberg, Clare Winger Harris, and more, this collection offers a kaleidoscope of innovative thought and timeless adventures.

Contents:

• 7 - Introduction: Solar Tour (Born of the Sun: Adventures in Our Solar System) - essay by Mike Ashley
• 19 - Sunrise on Mercury - (1957) - short story by Robert Silverberg
• 41 - The Hell Planet - (1932) - novelette by Leslie F. Stone
• 97 - Foundling on Venus - (1954) - short story by Dorothy de Courcy and John de Courcy
• 117 - The Lonely Path - (1961) - novelette by John Ashcroft
• 175 - Garden in the Void - (1952) - novelette by Poul Anderson
• 221 - Desertion - [City] - (1944) - short story by Clifford D. Simak
• 245 - How Beautiful with Banners - (1966) - short story by James Blish
• 261 - Where No Man Walks - (1952) - short story by E. R. James
• 287 - A Baby on Neptune - (1929) - novelette by Miles J. Breuer, M.D. and Clare Winger Harris
• 324 - Wait It Out - [Known Space] - (1968) - short story by Larry Niven

From the enrapturing tales of H. G. Wells to the punishing dystopian visions of 1984 and beyond, the evolution of science fiction from the 1890s to the 1960s is a fascinating journey to undertake. Setting out this span of years as what we can now recognize as the 'classic' period of the genre, Mike Ashley takes us on a tour of the stars, utopian and post-apocalyptic futures, worlds of AI run amok and techno-thriller masterpieces asking piercing questions of the present.

This book does not claim to be definitive; what it does offer is an accessible view of the impressive spectrum of imaginative writing which the genre's classic period has to offer. Towering science fiction greats such as Asimov and Aldiss run alongside the, perhaps unexpected, likes of C. S. Lewis and J. B. Priestley and celebrate a side of science fiction beyond the stereotypes of space opera and bug-eyed monsters; the side of science fiction which proves why it must continue to be written and read, so long as any of us remain in uncertain times.

Astronauts constructing a new space station must avert destruction from a missile sent by an unknown enemy; a generation starship is rocked by revelations of who their secret passengers in the hold truly are; a life or death struggle tests an operating surgeon -- in orbit, with an alien patient never seen before. Since space flight was achieved, and long before, science fiction writers have been imagining a myriad of stories set in the depths of the great darkness beyond our atmosphere.

From generation ships -- which are in space so long that there will be generations aboard who know no planetary life -- to orbiting satellites in the unforgiving reaches of the vacuum, there is a great range of these insular environments in which thrilling, innovative, and deeply emotional stories may unfold. With the Library's matchless collection of periodicals and magazines at his fingertips, Mike Ashley presents a stellar selection of tales from the infinite void above us, including contributions from Judith Merril, Jack Vance, and John Brunner.

Contents:

• 7 - Introduction (Spaceworlds: Stories of Life in the Void) - essay by Mike Ashley
• 19 - Umbrella in the Sky - (1961) - short story by E. C. Tubb
• 47 - Sail 25 - (1962) - novelette by Jack Vance (variant of Gateway to Strangeness)
• 87 - The Longest Voyage - (1967) - novelette by Richard C. Meredith
• 113 - The Ship Who Sang - [The Ship Who...] - (1961) - novelette by Anne McCaffrey
• 139 - O'Mara's Orphan - [Sector General] - (1960) - novelette by James White
• 185 - Ultima Thule - (1951) - short story by Eric Frank Russell
• 207 - The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years - (1940) - novelette by Don Wilcox
• 253 - Survival Ship - (1951) - short story by Judith Merril
• 267 - Lungfish - (1957) - novelette by John Brunner
• 317 - Story Sources (Spaceworlds: Stories of Life in the Void) - essay by Mike Ashley

Assignment 1: Find party responsible for murders by space virus.

Assignment 2: Investigate 'accidental' deaths on orbital solar shield.

Assignment 3: Apprehend criminal possessing short term time machine.

Science fiction meets crime in this new anthology exploring one of the genre's most popular themes: mystery and detection. Pitching detectives against time paradoxes, alien intruders, AI gone bad and psychic mutation are ten stories embodying the exciting range of the sub-genre, rarely given the recognition it deserves in the literary sphere. With fascinating settings such as robot society, asteroid belt space stations, and worlds similar to our own but uncannily altered, these stories are masterpieces of satisfying setups, memorable mysteries, and timeless twists.

Contents:

• Introduction: Crimes Beyond Time - essay by Mike Ashley
• Elsewhen - [Fergus O'Breen] - (1943) - novelette by Anthony Boucher
• Puzzle for Spacemen - (1955) - novelette by John Brunner
• Legwork - (1956) - novelette by Eric Frank Russell
• Mirror Image - [Elijah Baley / R. Daneel Olivaw] - (1972) - short story by Isaac Asimov
• The Flying Eye - [Paul Darraq] - short story by Jacques Futrelle (variant of The Secret Exploits of Paul Darraq, III: The Flying Eye 1912)
• Nonentity - (1955) - short story by E. C. Tubb
• Death of a Telepath - (1959) - short story by George Chailey
• Murder, 1986 - (1970) - novelette by P. D. James
• Apple - [Talents (Anne McCaffrey)] - (1969) - novelette by Anne McCaffrey
• The Absolutely Perfect Murder - (1965) - short story by Miriam Allen deFord

Long ago, a magical war destroyed an empire, and a new one was built in its ashes. But still the old grudges simmer, and two siblings will fight on opposite sides to save their world in the start of Django Wexler's new epic fantasy trilogy.

Gyre hasn't seen his beloved sister since their parents sold her to the mysterious Twilight Order. Now, twelve years after her disappearance, Gyre's sole focus is revenge, and he's willing to risk anything and anyone to claim enough power to destroy the Order.

Chasing rumors of a fabled city protecting a powerful artifact, Gyre comes face-to-face with his lost sister. But she isn't who she once was. Trained to be a warrior, Maya wields magic for the Twilight Order's cause. Standing on opposite sides of a looming civil war, the two siblings will learn that not even the ties of blood will keep them from splitting the world in two.

From international sensation Ashok K. Banker, pioneer of the fantasy genre in India, comes the first book in a ground-breaking, epic fantasy series inspired by the ancient Indian classic, The Mahabharata

In a world where demigods and demons walk among mortals, the Emperor of the vast Burnt Empire has died, leaving a turbulent realm without a sovereign. Two young princes, Adri and Shvate, are in line to rule, but birthright does not guarantee inheritance: For any successor must sit upon the legendary Burning Throne and pass The Test of Fire. Imbued with dark sorceries, the throne is a crucible -- one that incinerates the unworthy.

Adri and Shvate pass The Test and are declared heirs to the empire. But there is another with a claim to power, another who also survives: a girl from an outlying kingdom. When this girl, whose father is the powerful demonlord Jarsun, is denied her claim by the interim leaders, Jarsun declares war, vowing to tear the Burnt Empire apart -- leaving the young princes Adri and Shvate to rule a shattered realm embroiled in rebellion and chaos...

Queen Aqreen of Aquila leaves her husband Jarsun and flees across the Red Desert. She is determined to keep her daughter from being used by Jarsun to stake his claim to the Burning Throne of Hastinaga, seat of the all-powerful Burnt Empire. But Jarsun is vengeful and can summon legions of demoniac forces at will. The Red Desert is vast, and the journey dangerous.

Aqreen and Krushita's caravan of ten thousand wagons will take several years to reach the only safe harbor, the queendom of Reygar. Jarsun's pursuit is relentless and his vengeance terrible, but hope shines from the growing powers of little Krushita herself, along with the four-armed, twin-bodied Vanjhani wagon train leader and their band of valiant desert militia. Fierce battles are in store.

There are other players in this great game of demigods and mortals, each pursuing their own agendas. The powerful seer-mage Vessa seeks to join Krushita's talents with that of Drishya, an avatar destined to confront and kill Tyrak, Jarsun's diabolical son-in-law. Ladislew the assassin aligns with Tyrak for her own reasons. All paths culminate in a feverish finale on the hot sands of Reygar, as father, mother, and daughter confront each other in one ultimate showdown.

The Demonlord Jarsun is poised to claim the Burning Throne and cement his rule over the Burnt Empire. Standing in his way is his daughter, now reincarnated into a new avatar named Krushni, who is determined to avenge her mother's death by his hand--and put an end to her father's reign of terror once and for all. Aligned with him is the vast army of the Empire, the One Hundred children of Emperor Adri, and their former guru, the legendary warrior Dronas.

Krushni has allies too. Also opposing the tyrant Jarsun are the children of his nephew Shvate--the supernaturally-gifted quintet known as the Five. But Krushni and The Five are vastly outnumbered, while other rogue individuals like Ladislew, the warrior-witch, serve their own secret agendas.

In this final volume of Banker's epic saga of the Krushan dynasty, the land of Hastinaga will be torn asunder as the final battle for the empire rages between father and daughter, uncle and nephew, lover and enemy. And the Burning Throne will revel in the violence of it all.

The eighth book in the Cal Leandros series that began with Nightlife, Slashback is clever, ironic and hugely entertaining urban fantasy in the vein of Jim Butcher by the New York Times bestselling author, Rob Thurman.

I stopped and let them circle me, first because it was intriguing and, second, because, honestly, what could they do? Only knives, but all armed, and that made them even more interesting. Interesting. Fun.

Play-time...

Taking on bloodthirsty supernatural monsters is how Caliban and Niko Leandros make a living. But years ago - before they became a force to be reckoned with - the brothers were almost victims of a very human serial killer.

Almost.

Unfortunately for them, that particular depraved killer was working as apprentice to a creature far more malevolent - the legendary Spring-heeled Jack. He's just hit town. He hasn't forgotten what the Leandros brothers did to his murderous protégé. He hasn't forgotten what they owe him

And now they are going to pay... and pay... and pay...

Part two of the Caledon Saga.

For five years Queen Mhairi has endured a tumultuous monarchy. The lords, hungry for power and personal gain, are divided. But Mhairi has found a new friend amid the turmoil - Lady Mordance, the widow of the lord of Barruist. Confidant, advisor, and ally, Mordance is a welcome light among the petty lords.

But Mordance too seeks power over Caledon, and to further her ends she has made a pact with the inhabitants of the Mists. Caught between rebel lords and Mordance's witchcraft, Mhairi's very soul is in peril.

The dashing chieftain Rorin McRann has returned from abroad, but before he can help his queen, he is betrayed and imprisoned by his own kinsmen. Making his escape with the aid of the renegade Feyan, Lord Charion, he must undertake a terrifying journey into the very heart of the Mists to rescue Mhairi from the fate Mordance has planned for her. It is here he will confront the King of Bones - the dreaded ruler of the Mistlings - in mortal combat, to save all that he holds dear.

Contents:

• v - Introduction to The Klarkash-Ton Cycle - essay by Robert M. Price
• 1 - The Ghoul - (1934) - shortstory
• 8 - A Rendering from the Arabic - shortstory
• 25 - The Hunters from Beyond - (1932) - shortstory
• 44 - The Vaults of Abomi - shortstory
• 67 - The Nameless Offspring - (1932) - novelette
• 88 - Ubbo-Sathla - [Hyperborea] - (1933) - shortstory
• 98 - The Werewolf of Averoigne - [Averoigne] - (1984) - shortstory
• 115 - The Eidolon of the Blind - shortfiction
• 133 - Vulthoom - [Mars (Clark Ashton Smith)] - (1935) - novelette
• 162 - The Treader of the Dust - (1935) - shortstory
• 172 - The Infernal Star - (1989) - novelette
• 203 - Story Intros (The Klarkash-Ton Cycle) - essay by Robert M. Price

The second book continuing the stories of the neighborhood tavern to all of time and space. Pull up a chair, grab a glass and listen to stories spun by the most entertaining characters in this galaxy and beyond.

From internationally bestselling crime writer Natsuo Kirino comes a mythical feminist noir about family secrets, broken loyalties, and the search from truth in a deceitful world.

In a place like no other, on a mystical island in the shape of tear drop, two sisters are born into a family of oracles. Kamikuu is admired far and wide for her otherworldly beauty; small and headstrong Namima learns to live in her sister's shadow. On her sixth birthday, Kamikuu is chosen to become the next Oracle, serving the realm of light, while Namima is forced to serve the realm of darkness--destined to spend eternity guiding the spirits of the deceased to the underworld.

As the sisters serve opposite fates, Namima embarks on a journey that takes her from the experience of first love to the aftermath of scalding betrayal. Caught in an elaborate web of treachery, she travels between the land of the living and the Realm of the Dead, seeking vengeance and closure.

At the heart of this exquisitely dark tale, Kirino masterfully reimagines the ancient Japanese creation myth of Izanami and Izanaki. A provocative, fantastical saga, The Goddess Chronicle tells a sumptuous story of sex, murder, gods and goddesses, and bittersweet revenge.

Neef is a changeling, a human baby stolen by fairies and replaced with one of their own. She lives in "New York Between," a parallel Manhattan of elves, fairies, demons, and mythological spirits. Neef has always been protected by her (rat) nursemaid,Astris, until she winds up breaking Fairy Law. Now, unless she can meet the challenge of the Lady of Central Park, she'll be sacrificed to the bloodthirsty Wild Hunt. But Neef is a native New Yorker, streetwise and sharp, and she's determined to beat the rap.

Neef, the official Changeling of Central Park, has survived a life-threatening quest, but that's nothing compared to her first experiences at Changeling school. At Miss Van Loon's, she meets her counterparts from all over Manhattan, learns the basics of diplomacy, and, of course, gets in trouble. This time Neef must recover the Magic Mirror, or else New York Harbor's Mermaid Queen will turn all of the city's fresh water to salt—and everything will die.

Ada Lamarr may have gotten to the spaceship wreck first, but looter's rights won't get her far when she's got a hole in the side of her ship and her spacesuit is almost out of air. Fortunately for her, help arrives in the form of a government salvage crew--and while they reluctantly rescue her from certain death, they are not pleased to have an unexpected passenger along on their classified mission.

But Ada doesn't care--all that matters to her is enjoying their fine food and sweet, sweet oxygen--until Rian White, the government agent in charge, starts to suspect that there's more to Ada than meets the eye. He's not wrong--but he's so pretty that Ada is perfectly happy to keep him paying attention to her--at least until she can complete the job she was sent to pull off. But as quick as Ada is, Rian might be quicker--and she may not be entirely sure who's manipulating who until it's too late...

Charlie Asher is a pretty normal guy with a normal life, married to a bright and pretty woman who actually loves him for his normalcy. They're even about to have their first child. Yes, Charlie's doing okay--until people start dropping dead around him, and everywhere he goes a dark presence whispers to him from under the streets. Charlie Asher, it seems, has been recruited for a new position: as Death.

It's a dirty job. But, hey! Somebody's gotta do it.

In San Francisco, the souls of the dead are mysteriously disappearing--and you know that can't be good--in New York Times bestselling author Christopher Moore's delightfully funny sequel to A Dirty Job.

Something really strange is happening in the City by the Bay. People are dying, but their souls are not being collected. Someone--or something--is stealing them and no one knows where they are going, or why, but it has something to do with that big orange bridge. Death Merchant Charlie Asher is just as flummoxed as everyone else. He's trapped in the body of a fourteen-inch-tall "meat puppet" waiting for his Buddhist nun girlfriend, Audrey, to find him a suitable new body to play host.

To get to the bottom of this abomination, a motley crew of heroes will band together: the seven-foot-tall death merchant Minty Fresh; retired policeman turned bookseller Alphonse Rivera; the Emperor of San Francisco and his dogs, Bummer and Lazarus; and Lily, the former Goth girl. Now if only they can get little Sophie to stop babbling about the coming battle for the very soul of humankind...

Story set in Staveley's Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne. Contains spoilers for the first book in the series.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Terri Windling
• From the World to the Border - essay by Terri Windling
• Oak Hill - (1998) - short story by Patricia A. McKillip
• The Path from the True and Only Realm to the False Lands and the City of Illusion (Translation for Humans: How to Get from Elfland to Bordertown) - essay by Terri Windling
• Dragon Child - (1998) - novelette by Midori Snyder
• First Things First: So You Need a Place to Stay - essay by Terri Windling
• Socks - novelette by Delia Sherman
• The Gangs: And Life's Other Little Annoyances - essay by Terri Windling
• Half Life - novelette by Donnárd Sturgis
• What to Eat: A Tasteful Guide to Border Cuisine - essay by Terri Windling and Teresa Nielsen Hayden
• Hot Water: A Bordertown Romance - short story by Ellen Kushner
• The Music Scene: What's Up and What Ain't - essay by Terri Windling and Teresa Nielsen Hayden
• Arcadia - short story by Michael Korolenko
• Nightlife: Where to Find It - essay by Terri Windling
• Changeling - novelette by Elisabeth Kushner
• So You Want to Be a Star: Get Real - essay by Terri Windling
• May This Be Your Last Sorrow - short story by Charles de Lint
• Uptown: How the Other Half Lives - essay by Terri Windling
• Rag - short story by Caroline Stevermer
• The Peculiar Joy of Cooking on the Border - essay by Terri Windling and Teresa Nielsen Hayden
• When the Bow Breaks - short story by Steven Brust
• A Human Guide to Elvin Etiquette - essay by Terri Windling and Mimi Panitch
• Argentine - novelette by Ellen Steiber
• A Trueblood Guide to Human Peccadillos - essay by Terri Windling
• Cover Up My Tracks with Rain - novelette by Micole Sudberg
• Famous Last Words - essay by Terri Windling
• How Shannaro Tolkinson Lost and Found His Heart - novelette by Felicity Savage

The sixth installment of David Wingrove's director's cut of his epic vision of the future

It is 2206. As Chung Kuo's population continues to swell, the Seven—the ruling T'angs—are forced to make further concessions, laws must be relaxed and the House at Weinmar reopened. Change is coming, whether the Seven like it or not. The tides of unrest unleashed by earlier wars grow faster even than the population. DeVore secretly allies with newly appointed general, Hans Ebert. It seems that DeVore's plans are coming to fruition. But Ebert has his own schemes and plots—he intends to depose the Seven and control the whole of Chung Kuo. Includes more than 30 pages of character listing and Mandarin glossary.

APOCALYPSE!

When the scientists of the wandering planet, journeying through inter-galactic space, heard the sound of hydrogen atoms coming into existence out of nothing, they realized that they had accidentally discovered the birthplace of continuous creation. They had lifted the curtain and caught an instant's glimpse of the Unknowable. But to have looked it full in the face could have been no more fatal... For later, much later, they were to learn that they had also uncovered mankind's Day of Judgment!

Also published as: The Triumph of Time

When a spaceship crashes, the survivors are in peril for their lives. When the planet and its inhabitants are unknown to the survivors, fear becomes tangible among them. When the survivors are a crippled man and his four children the odds against survival increase dramatically. When the entire family has lived a controlled, docile, protected life and has been deliberately kept passive by the managers of the society on earth from which they came, the situation looks hopeless. But when two of the survivors are Peder and Inga Evenson there is always hope. This is their story.

For the thirteen years since the Evenson space yacht crash-landed on the richly vegetated planet of Iduna, Soren Evenson and his four children have lived among the native Thrulls--gentle, nonviolent, fishlike mammals.

But now the peaceful way of life on Iduna is being threatend. A scouting party of corrupt government leaders has come from Evensons' native planet, Earth, on pretext of finding a habitable planet for the starving billions they have left behind them.

It soon becomes apparent, though, that they do not intend to report back to the dying planet. They have decided to abandon Earth and rule Iduna instead.

In a world where viewers watch films with emotional implants, the balance between enjoyment and danger is very precarious. When Cass, Moke and Dosh sign a film contract they hope to earn enough to get off the planet, until the fiction turns out to be a killer reality.

Two years after taking part in a cyber-film to make enough money to leave Earth--a film that left their friend Dosh dead and them fleeing for their lives--Cass and Moke return to uncover the truth about the tragedy.

In order to avert imminent war, the Earth's government agrees to negotiate with alien invaders. The military's representative is Swordfish, a veteran of the Third Alien War. A delegation travels to meet the aliens--an enemy whose nature no human being will ever truly know or trust again

Maggie Graham's life is a mess. First, she loses her job. Then, her bathroom ceiling collapses. Hoping a weekend getaway will restore her spirits, she drives to Vermont and stumbles upon the Crossroads Theatre. Although she has no intention of auditioning, she soon finds herself part of a very odd summer stock company that includes moody and mysterious director Rowan Mackenzie, a man with the uncanny ability to transform a train wreck of a show into something magical. Before the season ends, Maggie is determined to discover the truth about the Crossroads. She never imagines that she'll discover secrets about her past - and Rowan's - that will change their lives forever.

It's not easy losing the love of your life...

But when Maggie Graham freed Rowan Mackenzie from the curse that bound him to this world, she took the first step toward her new life as director of the Crossroads Theatre. As a hectic new season begins, magic takes a back seat to ticket sales as Maggie balances the demands of her interfering board president and a company of actors that includes bewildered amateurs, disdainful professionals, a horde of children, and an arthritic dog. But magic is hard to banish from the old white barn, where memories lurk like ghosts in the shadowy wings and the unexpected is as time-honored a tradition as the curtain call. And when the tangled spells of the past turn Maggie's life upside down, it will take more than magic to ensure the happy-ever-after ending she longs for.

At first Killashandra Ree's ambitions to become a Crystal Singer, get rich, and forget her past, were going just as she had hoped. But after she grew wealthy, a devastating storm turned her claim to useless rock. In short order she was broke, she had crystal sickness so bad she thought she was going to die, and the only way she could be true to the man she loved was to leave him....

Into the Dark Magic of the House of Carnby There Comes a Visitor of Dread.

This short story is included in the collections:

• The Return of the Sorcerer (2012), Clark Ashton Smith
• Out of Space and Time (1942), (Clark Ashton Smith
• Rod Serling's Night Gallery Reader (1987), editors Martin H. Greenberg, Carol Serling, Charles G. Waugh
• The Door to Saturn: Volume Two of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith (2007), Clark Ashton Smith

It first appeared in the September 1931 Issue of Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror available free on Internet Archives.

Three nights of terror at the house called Edbrook. Three nights in which David Ash, there to investigate a haunting will be the victim of horrifying and maleficent games. Three nights in which he will face the blood-chilling enigma of his own past. Three nights before Edbrook's dreadful secret will be revealed... And the true nightmare will begin. Remember with Fear!

Investigating a series of strange and ghostly occurrences in the otherwise peaceful town of Sleath, psychic detective David Ash is forced to confront the demons of his own past, which threaten to drive him to the brink of insanity.

Deep in the countryside, ghost hunter David Ash is investigating a mysterious, secluded stately home. Reports from locals regarding strange goings-on make him think the house is haunted...But not even David Ash's long professional history of warding off evil spirits can prepare him for the shocking discovery that awaits.

International Bestselling horror writer James Herbert weaves a terrifying narrative featuring his best-loved character, David Ash, the skeptical detective of the paranormal introduced in UK number one bestsellers, Haunted and The Ghosts of Sleath.

Prepare to be chilled to the marrow....

Everything's better with zombies - not. The electrifying final instalment of Lily Herne's Mall Rats series...

Struggling to cope with their physical and mental scars, the remaining Mall Rats limp back home to Cape Town. They think they have the answer to all the enclave's problems. They think they're going to get a hero's welcome. But things have changed since they've been gone. And not for the better...

Meanwhile, the Army of the Left is preparing to wipe out the dead once and for all. Its leaders think they've come up with a faultless plan. They think they have a secret weapon that will set the city free once and for all.

They're wrong.

Seven years ago, as Camm Smith herded a pack of little trick-or-treaters past the decaying mansion in her hometown of Trona, California, her young neighbor Hugh disappeared, becoming the latest in a string of vanished children. Now a high school senior, Camm is still haunted by the old tragedy and is convinced the answer lies hidden in the abandoned house. Joining forces with her best friend, Cal--who happens to be Hugh's older brother--Camm naively begins a perilous search for the truth. Events quickly spiral out of control, however, and as more people begin to die, Camm and Cal discover it will take all of their combined ingenuity to fend of the evil being lurking deep within the bowels of the mansion and federal agents determined to keep old secrets permanently hidden. The two friends must race against the clock to discover the truth about the house before they, too, disappear without a trace.

In Trona, California, an isolated mining town deep in the Mojave Desert, an unearthly creature preyed upon the town's folk for decades. Armed with secrets from a peculiar puzzle box, only Camm and Cal stood against the creature. Finally safe and far from the horror, the teenagers believe they have destroyed the monster--until they hear news that Trona's children are still disappearing. Caught in the nightmare since her childhood, Camm feels personally responsible for the town's children. As her life-long best friend, Cal feels responsible for Camm. With unsuspecting friends in tow, they return to warn the innocent people of Trona of the true nature of the creature.

But things have changed.

Death comes in a new form. The balance between dimensions is altered. Crossovers multiply. Trona is evacuated. Cal is pulled into another dimension. The situation spirals out of control.

Only Camm and a few misfits can stop the coming desolation--but it may already be too late.

In an ongoing fight with the unearthly predators invading their small hometown of Trona, California, Camm and Cal have watched their feelings for each other deepen. However, well-meaning but misguided federal agents have torn them apart, arresting Cal and expanding the manhunt for Camm. Attempting to protect Camm, Cal strikes a deal with the agents to guide an expedition through the portal in the Searles Mansion to the parallel dimension of the deadly Mojave Green, where Cal's friend, Lenny is lost. The agents believe the mansion holds the secret to controlling alien crossovers and believe Cal can help them uncover an ancient secret. Not understanding what Cal is doing, Camm is devastated by Cal's apparent betrayal. Making matters worse, Agent Allen, Camm's secret ally, is compelled also to join the mission to save Lenny. Camm is left alone to face her worst nightmare: a seemingly indestructible creature of unknown origins who is filled with a burning hatred and an all-consuming desire to track her down and eat her alive.

Dr Siri never really wanted to be Laos's national coroner. And now that he is in his mid-70s, he longs to spend some time with his wife before the untimely death that is sure to befall him, according to the local fortune-teller. But retirement will have to wait (again) until he has completed one last job for the Lao government: supervising an excavation for the remains of a US fighter pilot who went down in the remote northern Lao jungle ten years earlier. And the stakes are high.

The presence of American soldiers in Laos is controversial, and the search party includes high-level politicians and scientists. So when a member of the party is found dead, Dr Siri suspects it may not have been an accident. Can Dr Siri get to the bottom of the MIA pilot's mysterious story before the body count rises and the fortune-teller's prediction comes true?

The latest title from best-selling author and Dragonlance setting co-creator Margaret Weis, Amber and Ashes takes up where the War of Souls left off with the central character Mina. While following her story, this new trilogy will also explore the chaos that is post-war Krynn. This is Weis's first solo hardcover since the publication of the extremely popular Dragonlance title The Soulforge in 1998.

Eleanor Robinson's life had shattered when Father volunteered for the Great War, leaving her alone with a woman he had just married. Then the letter came that told of her father's death in the trenches and though Eleanor thought things couldn't get any worse, her life took an even more bizarre turn.

Dragged to the hearth by her stepmother Alison, Eleanor was forced to endure a painful and frightening ritual during which the smallest finger of her left hand was severed and buried beneath a hearthstone. For her stepmother was an Elemental Master of Earth who practiced the darker blood-fueled arts. Alison had bound Eleanor to the hearth with a spell that prevented her from leaving home, caused her to fade from people's memories, and made her into a virtual slave.

Months faded into years for Eleanor, and still the war raged. There were times she felt she was losing her mind--times she seemed to see faces in the hearth fire.

Reginald Fenyx was a pilot. He lived to fly, and whenever he returned home on break from Oxford, the youngsters of the town would turn out to see him lift his aeroplane--a frail ship of canvas and sticks--into the sky and soar through the clouds.

During the war, Reggie had become an acclaimed air ace, for he was an Elemental Master of Air. His Air Elementals had protected him until the fateful day when he had met another of his kind aloft, and nearly died. When he returned home, Reggie was a broken man plagued by shell shock, his Elemental powers vanished.

Eleanor and Reginald were two souls scourged by war and evil magic. Could they find the strength to help one another rise from the ashes of their destruction?

Since his birth in the back of a truck, Crispin Kateralbin has been a daemon handler, a trapeze artist, a fighter pilot, a street entertainer, a deckhand, a dock laborer, and a wanted man.

Now the war that divided Oceania for a hundred years is over, and Crispin has achieved wealth and anonymity as a middleman for a drug-smuggling monopolist.

On the far side of the continent, Crispin's first lover Rae Akila has joined a cult that worships daemons.

And in Okimako, Mickey Ash fights Greater Significance for the right to live.

When these three come together again, the world will change.

Contents:

• Mutineers' Moon
• The Armageddon Inheritance
• Heirs of Empire

For Colin MacIntyre, it began with a routine training flight over the moon. For Dahak, a self-aware Imperial battleship, it began millennia ago, standing guard against an unknown enemy which once devastated the galaxy-and now has returned. So Dahak grabbed MacIntyre's ship and informed him that he was drafted to be its new captain and lead the fight against the ancient enemy.

MacIntyre had doubts that he could handle the job, but Dahak had definitely picked the right man. Before it was all over, MacIntyre would:

Defeat a cadre of mutineers, formerly part of Dahak's crew, kept alive through untold generations by alien technology, who have been secretly manipulating life on earth for thousands of years...

Mobilize the planet into a fighting force that might have a slender chance of stopping the ancient alien menace from eradicating all intelligent life in its path...

And resurrect the ancient galactic empire, which had fallen into chaos and barbarism, with himself as Emperor-which meant that he immediately became the target of a plot to assassinate him, and strand his son and daughter on a planet where their chances of surviving in a superstitious pre-tech society would be zero for the average human...

Fortunately for the galaxy, Colin MacIntyre and his heirs have never even heard of average, and anyone, human or alien, who got in their way was going to be very, very sorry.

The first volume in legendary master and New York Times bestselling author Raymond E. Feist's epic heroic fantasy series, The Firemane Saga--an electrifying tale of two young men whose choices will determine a world's destiny.

For centuries, the five greatest kingdoms of North and South Tembria, twin continents on the world of Garn, have coexisted in peace. But the balance of power is destroyed when four of the kingdoms violate an ancient covenant and betray the fifth: Ithrace, the Kingdom of Flames, ruled by Steveren Langene, known as "the Firemane" for his brilliant red hair. As war engulfs the world, Ithrace is destroyed and the Greater Realms of Tembria are thrust into a dangerous struggle for supremacy.

As a Free Lord, Baron Daylon Dumarch owes allegiance to no king. When an abandoned infant is found hidden in Daylon's pavilion, he realizes that the child must be the missing heir of the slain Steveren. The boy is valuable--and vulnerable. A cunning and patient man, Daylon decides to keep the baby's existence secret, and sends him to be raised on the Island of Coaltachin, home of the so-called Kingdom of Night, where the powerful and lethal Nocusara, the "Hidden Warriors," legendary assassins and spies, are trained.

Years later, another orphan of mysterious provenance, a young man named Declan, earns his Masters rank as a weapons smith. Blessed with intelligence and skill, he unlocks the secret to forging King's Steel, the apex of a weapon maker's trade known by very few. Yet this precious knowledge is also deadly, and Declan is forced to leave his home to safeguard his life. Landing in Lord Daylon's provinces, he hopes to start anew.

Soon, the two young men--an unknowing rightful heir to a throne and a brilliantly talented young swordsmith--will discover that their fates, and that of Garn, are entwined. The legendary, long-ago War of Betrayal has never truly ended... and they must discover the secret of who truly threatens their world.

Flash Gordon, aided by his friends Dale Arden and Dr. Hans Zarkov, attempts to prevent Ming the Merciless of Mongo from destroying the earth.

THE LION MEN OF MONGO is the first of a series inspired by the world famous comic strip FLASH GORDON, read daily and Sunday by millions of fans throughout the world.

After crash landing on the planet Mongo, Flash, Dale, and the eminent scientist, Dr. Zarkov, fight against the evil forces of Emperor Ming, who seeks to perpetuate his rule by ruthless and savage methods.

Second in a series of novels based on the original comic strip sequences. Thrill to a spaceship captured in a magnetic field and pulled beneath the earth into an underground city. Flash Gordon jumps to safety only to be caught in the web of a giant man-eating spider, then saved by a titian-haired beauty. Pan, a lunatic musician, seeks to rule a planet by the shattering effects of ultra-high frequency sound. Only Earth's greatest hero stands between him and success.

Flash Gordon is kidnapped and forced to perform as a trapeze artist in a circus of slaves. Flash foils his captors and forms an expedition to end the tyranny on the planet Mesmo.

From centuries in the future, a descendant of Ming the Merciless sends a crew of assassins back through time to change the course of history by killing Flash Gordon!!

Victimized by a psychic teenage prankster, Flash Gordon, Dale Arden, and Dr. Zarkov find themselves instantly transported to the planet Mongo, where Flash is captured and drugged by the ravishing witch Queen Azura and her evil cohort -- none other than Ming the Merciless, Jr! But Zarkov and Dale escape to Arboria, and enlist the aid of Prince Barin, who, by use of a brilliant ruse, sets in motion a series of violent encounters and hair's breadth escapes that place Flash's life in imminent peril.

Twelve detection satellites mysteriously vanish while on routine space probes. Dr. Zarkov and Flash Gordon are sent to investigate. They encounter an amazing series of adventures when their space ship crashes on a gypsy planet inhabited by robots and plagued by an endless war. Two beautiful queens cast interested eyes toward Flash's visage. Zarkov's scientific genius saves our heroic pair from certain annihilation.

Contents:

• ix - Of Swordsmen and Sorcerers - essay by Lin Carter
• 1 - The Sadness of the Executioner - [Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser] - shortstory by Fritz Leiber
• 15 - Morreion - [Dying Earth] - novella by Jack Vance
• 69 - The Merman's Children - [The Merman's Children] - novella by Poul Anderson
• 129 - The Higher Heresies of Oolimar - [Amalrik the Mangod] - novella by Lin Carter

Contents:

• ix - Flashing Swords and Black Magicians - essay by Lin Carter
• 3 - The Rug and the Bull - [Pusadian] - novelette by L. Sprague de Camp
• 45 - The Jade Man's Eyes - [The Elric Saga] - novelette by Michael Moorcock
• 99 - Toads of Grimmerdale - [Witch World Secrets] - novella by Andre Norton (variant of The Toads of Grimmerdale)
• 157 - Ghoul's Garden - [Brak] - novelette by John Jakes

Contents:

• 11 - Warriors and Wizards: The Introduction - essay by Lin Carter
• 17 - L. Sprague de Camp - essay by Lin Carter
• 19 - Two Yards of Dragon - [Incorporated Knight] - novelette by L. Sprague de Camp
• 61 - Fritz Leiber - essay by Lin Carter
• 63 - The Frost Monstreme - [Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser] - novelette by Fritz Leiber
• 111 - Andre Norton - essay by Lin Carter
• 113 - Spider Silk - novelette by Andre Norton
• 175 - Lin Carter - essay by Lin Carter
• 177 - The Curious Custom of the Turjan Seraad - [Amalrik the Mangod] - novelette by Lin Carter
• 217 - Avram Davidson - essay by Lin Carter
• 219 - Caravan to Illiel - novella by Avram Davidson

Contents:

• Of Warriors and Wizards - essay by Lin Carter
• Jack Vance - (1976) - essay by Lin Carter
• The Bagful of Dreams - novelette by Jack Vance
• Poul Anderson - essay by Lin Carter
• The Tupilak - novelette by Poul Anderson
• John Jakes - essay by Lin Carter
• Storm in a Bottle - novella by John Jakes
• Katherine Kurtz - essay by Lin Carter
• Swords Against the Marluk - novelette by Katherine Kurtz
• Michael Moorcock - (1976) - essay by Lin Carter
• The Lands Beyond the World - novella by Michael Moorcock

Contents:

• vii - Where Magic Reigns - essay by Lin Carter
• 1 - Tower of Ice - [Dilvish] - novella by Roger Zelazny
• 56 - A Thief in Korianth - novelette by C. J. Cherryh
• 94 - Parting Gifts - novelette by Diane Duane
• 131 - A Dealing with Demons - [The Ebenezum Trilogy] - novelette by Craig Shaw Gardner
• 159 - The Dry Season - novelette by Tanith Lee

In the wake of the war brought on by the Sundering, Farideh's adopted father Mehen has been called back by the clan that cast him out, and Farideh and Havilar mean to go with him. Just as Mehen confronts the head of his former clan, a clutch of young dragonborn is found in the catacombs, brutally murdered, an infernal summoning circle that looks all-too-familiar to Farideh, nearby.

An artist, poet, and prolific contributor to Weird Tales, Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1967) is an influential figure in the history of pulp fiction. A close correspondent and collaborator with H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, Smith was widely celebrated as a master by his contemporaries. Back in print for the first time since 1971, Out of Space and Time showcases the many facets of Smith's unique prose that make him one of the greatest American writers of macabre and fantastic tales.

Here are tales of Averoigne, tales belonging to the Cthulhu, stories of sheer horror, and one or two of sardonic comedy. Jeff VanderMeer provides an introduction for this Bison Books edition.

Contents:

• v - Introduction (Out of Space and Time) - essay by Jeff VanderMeer
• xv - Clark Ashton Smith: Master of Fantasy - (1942) - essay by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei
• 3 - The End of the Story - [Averoigne] - (1930) - novelette
• 25 - A Rendezvous in Averoigne - [Averoigne] - (1931) - shortstory
• 43 - A Night in Malnéant - (1933) - shortstory
• 51 - The City of the Singing Flame - [Singing Flame - 1] - (1931) - novella
• 100 - The Uncharted Isle - (1930) - shortstory
• 115 - The Second Interment - (1933) - shortstory
• 129 - The Double Shadow - [Poseidonis] - (1933) - shortstory
• 144 - The Chain of Aforgomon - (1935) - novelette
• 165 - The Dark Eidolon - [Zothique] - (1935) - novelette
• 198 - The Last Hieroglyph - [Zothique] - (1935) - shortstory
• 218 - Sadastor - (1930) - poem
• 222 - The Death of Ilalotha - [Zothique] - (1937) - shortstory
• 236 - The Return of the Sorcerer - [Cthulhu Mythos] - (1931) - shortstory
• 257 - The Testament of Athammaus - [Hyperborea] - (1932) - shortstory
• 280 - The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan - [Hyperborea] - (1932) - shortstory
• 291 - Ubbo-Sathla - [Hyperborea] - (1933) - shortstory
• 303 - The Monster of the Prophecy - (1932) - novelette
• 347 - The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis - [Mars (Clark Ashton Smith)] - (1932) - novelette
• 367 - From the Crypts of Memory - (1917) - poem
• 369 - The Shadows - (1922) - poem

An artist, poet, and prolific contributor to Weird Tales, Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1967) is an influential figure in the history of pulp fiction. A close correspondent and collaborator with H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, Smith was widely celebrated as a master by his contemporaries. Back in print for the first time since 1971, Lost Worlds brings together twenty-three of Smith's classic stories, all of which were originally published in Weird Tales. Rather than center his works on heroes, Smith created fantastical worlds around which he built cycles of stories. Included here are tales from the realms of Averoigne, Zothique, Hyperborea, and others. Told in lush poetic prose, these haunting stories bring to life dark, dreamlike realms full of gothic monsters and mortals. Jeff VanderMeer provides an introduction for this Bison Books edition.

Contents:

• viii - Introduction (Lost Worlds) - essay by Jeff VanderMeer
• 3 - The Tale of Satampra Zeiros - [Satampra Zeiros] - (1931) - shortstory
• 18 - The Door to Saturn - [Hyperborea] - (1932) - shortstory
• 42 - The Seven Geases - [Hyperborea] - (1934) - novelette
• 67 - The Coming of the White Worm - [Hyperborea] - (1941) - shortstory
• 85 - The Last Incantation - [Malygris] - (1930) - shortstory
• 91 - A Voyage to Sfanomoë - [Poseidonis] - (1931) - shortstory
• 101 - The Death of Malygris - [Malygris] - (1934) - shortstory
• 119 - The Holiness of Azédarac - [Averoigne] - (1933) - novelette
• 144 - The Beast of Averoigne - [Averoigne] - (1933) - shortstory
• 159 - The Empire of the Necromancers - [Zothique] - (1932) - shortstory
• 171 - The Isle of the Torturers - [Zothique] - (1933) - shortstory
• 190 - Necromancy in Naat - [Zothique] - (1936) - novelette
• 214 - Xeethra - [Zothique] - (1934) - novelette
• 239 - The Maze of Maal Dweb - [Maal Dweb] - (1933) - shortstory
• 255 - The Flower-Women - [Maal Dweb] - (1935) - shortstory
• 271 - The Demon of the Flower - (1933) - shortstory
• 283 - The Plutonian Drug - (1934) - shortstory
• 296 - The Planet of the Dead - (1932) - shortstory
• 311 - The Gorgon - (1932) - shortstory
• 325 - The Letter from Mohaun Los - (1932) - novelette (variant of Flight into Super-Time)
• 366 - The Light from Beyond - (1933) - novelette
• 390 - The Hunters from Beyond - (1932) - shortstory
• 410 - The Treader of the Dust - (1935) - shortstory

Lei is a member of the Paper caste, the lowest and most persecuted class of people in Ikhara. She lives in a remote village with her father, where the decade-old trauma of watching her mother snatched by royal guards for an unknown fate still haunts her. Now, the guards are back and this time it's Lei they're after -- the girl with the golden eyes whose rumored beauty has piqued the king's interest.

Over weeks of training in the opulent but oppressive palace, Lei and eight other girls learns the skills and charm that befit a king's consort. There, she does the unthinkable -- she falls in love. Her forbidden romance becomes enmeshed with an explosive plot that threatens her world's entire way of life. Lei, still the wide-eyed country girl at heart, must decide how far she's willing to go for justice and revenge.

Lei, the naive country girl who became a royal courtesan, is now known as the Moonchosen, the commoner who managed to do what no one else could. But slaying the cruel Demon King wasn't the end of the plan---it's just the beginning. Now Lei and her warrior love Wren must travel the kingdom to gain support from the far-flung rebel clans. The journey is made even more treacherous thanks to a heavy bounty on Lei's head, as well as insidious doubts that threaten to tear Lei and Wren apart from within.

Meanwhile, an evil plot to eliminate the rebel uprising is taking shape, fueled by dark magic and vengeance. Will Lei succeed in her quest to overthrow the monarchy and protect her love for Wren, or will she fall victim to the sinister magic that seeks to destroy her?

"Don't struggle, Lei-zhi. It's time to take you back to the Hidden Palace. You're going home."

The final pages of Girls of Storm and Shadow brought a jaw-dropping conclusion that had the fates of Lei and Wren hanging in uncertainty. But one thing was certain - the Hidden Palace was the last place that Lei would ever consider home. The trauma and tragedy she suffered behind those opulent walls would plague her forever. She could not be trapped there with the sadistic king again, especially without Wren.

The last Lei saw of the girl she loved, Wren was fighting an army of soldiers in a furious battle to the death. With the two girls torn apart and each in terrorizing peril, will they find each other again or have their destinies diverged forever?

Aria Ash shouldn't exist...

Born to a were mother and vampire father, Aria Ash is the perfect blend of two races, and in their world, that's a death sentence. Hunted for as long as she can remember, she now hides in plain sight in the city of Skarva, and will do anything to keep her secret safe.

Sebastian Talien is an alpha were with a troubled past. Ever since his pack went rogue and tried to kill three innocent pups, he's been dedicated to rescuing children in need. Now an invitation has him heading to Skarva, to help a child he thought he'd failed...

Level 1: Whisper, Chant, Prayer, Awaken

Haruhiro awakens to darkness and amnesia, among a group of strangers who can only remember their own names...and nothing else. When they make it into the light, they discover Grimgar?a fantasy world that's like something out of an RPG game. Without apparent skills or knowledge of their surroundings, Haruhiro and his newfound friends band together to form an adventuring party. Only by cooperating, using their wits, and learning new skills can they hope to survive in this dangerous land of monsters and magic.

Level 2: Everything is Precious

DANGER IN THE DUNGEON

With a little experience under their belts, Haruhiro and the others decide it's time to level up. They head to a new dungeon, the Cyrene Mines, where Haruhiro expects things to go smoothly--but they don't. The mines were the site of tragedy in the past--and tragedy may soon strike again! Not only does a member of their party go missing, but a giant kobold is on the loose. Will the adventurers gain the experience they seek--or lose everything in the attempt?

The light novel fantasy epic that inspired a critically-acclaimed anime!

Level Three: You Have to Accept That Things Won't Always Go Your Way...

"Choco. Wait, could it be that Choco...?"

Haruhiro and his comrades have become famous due to achievements no one expected from them. With his comrades more confident, Haruhiro is still agonizing over what to do when more experienced volunteer soldiers come to him. Among them is a girl whose name is still in Haruhiro's memories.

At that same time, the town of Alterna moves to retake the Deadhead Watching Keep held by orcs. Looking to earn some of the reward money, Haruhiro's party ends up joining their first raid alongside Renji and Choco.

The light novel fantasy epic that inspired a critically-acclaimed anime!

Level Four: The Leaders and The Led

"Don't scare me like that, Moguzo."

"Sorry, sorry."

Moguzo let out an embarrassed laugh and scratched the back of his head. Still, he sure is bleeding a lot, Haruhiro thought. With all that blood, it's impossible to tell what kind of face he's making. But, well, it looks like he's fine somehow.

Haruhiro and his party reached the end of one major battle. However, with there being some comrades they couldn't save, they couldn't be entirely happy with how things were. Meanwhile, because they managed to accomplish more than anyone had expected, some members of the party receive offers from other teams wanting to poach them, too. As Haruhiro agonizes over what to do as a leader, he is forced to come to grips with what the party wants to do once again.

The story of adventure born from the ashes now enters a new stage!

The light novel fantasy epic that inspired a critically-acclaimed anime!

Level Five: Hear Me Out And Try Not to Laugh...

"...So, this thing, what do you think it is?"

It has now been some months since the party came to the Wonder Hole. Haruhiro and his companions have been slowly but steadily improving their skills as they clear the labyrinth. One day, while exploring, they find a "hole" they've never seen before. A hole that, as far as they know... wasn't there when they passed through the area three days earlier. It may lead to a new and unexplored area, which would be highly profitable for them if they are the first to set foot in it. Haruhiro is hesitant on whether to go inside or not, but Team Tokimune, a group known for being full of eccentrics, but still highly capable, appear and propose exploring it together.

The tale of adventure born from the ashes continues with new encounters.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, WE'RE TURNING BACK?

Level 6: Towards a Glory Not Worth Taking

The Dusk Realm has begun to attract attention as a new hunting ground. However, all is not well-there's been a rise in cultist and white giant activity, and massive new monsters have emerged! Together with Soma, the head of the Day Breakers, Haruhiro and the Tokkis get caught up in large-scale military offensive against the inhabitants of the Dusk Realm. Can they make it back to the Day Realm-and if the way is cut off, where will they go?

TO FIND A WAY HOME

Level 7: The Rainbow on the Other Side

Haruhiro and the others narrowly escape the Dusk Realm, only to find themselves in a world that isn't Grimgar-a world where the sun never rises. Abandoned by Lala and Nono, the party must rely on their own wits to survive in this World of Night. But when a faint chance of returning home to Grimgar appears, will they take it, even if it means risking their lives? And is Grimgar truly their home-or is it somewhere else entirely?

Level 8: And so we Walk for Tomorrow

DON'T SPLIT THE PARTY!

Haruhiro and his team have fought their way back to Grimgar-only to emerge in a harsh and desolate region, beset by orcs and undead! When a series of misfortunes separates them from each other, the individual members do what they must to survive, including teaming up with the factions they find. What they don't expect, however, is to end up facing each other as enemies! When friend becomes foe, how does one win?

Level 9: Here and Now, to Far, Far Away

SOLITUDE

As the battle against the orc Jumbo and his group Forgan descends into utter chaos, the party faces a crisis unlike any before: Ranta has betrayed them to join Forgan. From there, they are split up again and fight an intense retreating battle. Not knowing where their friends are, or if they're safe, Haruhiro and his comrades must face the greatest challenge of all in the misty Thousand Valley... being alone!

Level 10: Love Songs Won't Reach

THIS WORLD AND BEYOND

Leaving Thousand Valley for Alterna, Haruhiro and team are attacked on the road by massive ape-like monsters that force them to flee to a hidden orc village for safety. Meanwhile, a volunteer soldier lies on the verge of death in the mountains, recalling fragments of the world he once inhabited. What is the true nature of this world called Grimgar... and what will tomorrow hold for them all?

Level 11: At That Time, We Each Dreamed on Our Own Paths

REGRETS

Ranta flees desperately across Thousand Valley, pursued by Takasagi. Meanwhile, Haruhiro and his companions are struggling to cope with the death of one of their own when a chance at resurrection presents itself... for a price. How far will they go to get their friend back?

Level 12: That was the Beginning of a Legend Revolving Around a Certain Island and Dragons

Still trying to find a way to return to Alterna, Haruhiro and his party fetch up on the shores of the sea. Falling in with a mysterious pirate girl named Momohina, the group ventures forth to the Emerald Archipelago, rumored abode of dragons from ages past. What they aren't expecting, though, is to find a secret pirate haven?at the exact moment that it's being attacked by dragons!

WELCOME TO PARANO!

Level. 13 - Heart, Open, A New Door

Saying goodbye to Yume, Haruhiro and the remainder of the party travel onward to the free city of Vele. On the way, a standard job escorting a trading caravan turns into something none of them could have foreseen when they run into something from legend: the mysterious, traveling campsite of a famed sorcerer. But the real shock comes when they enter the camp?and find themselves teleported to yet another new world, one that's definitely not the one they wanted to find!

SEEING THINGS

Level 14: parano-mania [parano_mania]

Scattered once again in Parano, the other world where dream monsters and mages run wild, Haruhiro and his comrades must push through trickery and illusions alone, without their trusty comrades by their sides. Can they make it back to Grimgar?and what awaits them if they do?!

OLD FRIENDS, NEW TALES

Level 14.5: Things Cannot Remain the Same & If I Could Meet You Again

While Team Haruhiro is trapped in Parano, life in Grimgar continues! Far away from Alterna, Ranta struggles to survive behind enemy lines while concealing his identity behind a mask. Meanwhile, Yume trains her hardest to become strong for her comrades and to reforge her very self.

Six other tales round out this special anthology of Volumes 14+ and 14++, revealing new stories about the party's early days in Alterna.

Level 15: A Fleeting New Game Plus

BEGINNING OF THE END

Haruhiro and his companions wake in darkness yet again, with no memories but their names. This time, they step into a world where Alterna has been destroyed! Piecing together the skills their bodies remember and the memories that Merry retained, they race to Grimgar's frontier in search of aid-only to find the forces of Arabakia preparing to take Alterna back. The adventure born from the ashes enters its endgame!

Level 16: Without Even Knowing the Reason for Our Goodbye

HELLOS AND GOODBYES

The Arabakia Kingdom Expeditionary Force took back Alterna by the skin of its teeth, but Haruhiro is ground down by the weight of everything he's lost. When one of Haruhiro's party is taken hostage, they are forced onto a dangerous mission--to somehow forge an alliance with goblins! As the team struggles against insurmountable odds, an old ally appears...!

Level 17: Someday We Shall Bid Farewell to These War-Torn Days

A LIFE OR DEATH BATTLE

With the Frontier Army newly independent and an alliance with the goblin king achieved, Haruhiro and his team are sent on a vital infiltration mission to disrupt the enemy from within and take Mount Grief. But despite working alongside members of Shinohara's Orion, Team Renji, and the Tokkis, their goals prove to be further out of reach than they ever imagined. Forget the mission--can the team even survive?

Level 18: The World Hates Me

A WORLD OF PAIN

The Frontier Army has finally captured Mount Grief, but before they can mourn those they've lost along the way, a messenger from the dwarven kingdom comes begging for help! The dwarves are under siege in the Kurogane Mountain Range, and Haruhiro and his friends must repel the invasion! To reach the kingdom, they have to travel across the Quickwind Plains, a treacherous land of giants and monsters. What awaits them on the other side just might change the world forever!

Level 19: To Embrace This World Is Pain

THE ALL-CONSUMING VOID

Haruhiro's party has suffered crushing losses attempting to flee the Ironblood Kingdom. No one had the power to prevent Jumbo's gruesome slaughter of Kuzaku, or the orc's great black eagle feasting upon Setora... No one except the No-Life King sleeping inside Merry. With his awakening comes great upheaval, and now the fearsome sekaishu has overrun Grimgar, eating away at the world. Soldiers, innocents, and even those who ought to be dead fight for survival in the chaos--but at every step, their self-spun tales of adventure in a world stained black may very well end.

A web browser that threatens to conquer the world. The longest, loneliest railroad on Earth. A North Korean nuke hitting Tokyo, a hollow asteroid full of automated rice paddies, and a specialist in breaking up virtual marriages. And yes, giant robots. These thirteen stories from and about the Land of the Rising Sun run the gamut from fantasy to cyberpunk, and will leave you knowing that the future is Japanese!

Contributors include cyberpunk legends Pat Cadigan and Bruce Sterling, New York Times bestselling author Catherynne Valente, the enormously popular and prolific Japanese writer Hideyuki Kikuchi, and hot new writers Rachel Swirsky, David Moles, and Ken Liu--who have won or been nominated for the Nebula and Hugo awards.

Table of Contents:

• Foreword - essay by Masumi Washington
• Revolving Around a Rising Sun - essay by Nick Mamatas
• Mono no Aware - shortstory by Ken Liu
• The Sound of Breaking Up - shortstory by Felicity Savage
• Chitai Heiki Koronbin - shortstory by David Moles
• The Indifference Engine - shortstory by Project Itoh
• The Sea of Trees - shortstory by Rachel Swirsky
• Endoastronomy - shortstory by Toh EnJoe
• In Plain Sight - shortstory by Pat Cadigan
• Golden Bread - shortstory by Issui Ogawa
• One Breath, One Stroke - shortstory by Catherynne M. Valente
• Whale Meat - shortstory by Ekaterina Sedia
• Mountain People, Ocean People - shortstory by Hideyuki Kikuchi
• Goddess of Mercy - novelette by Bruce Sterling
• Autogenic Dreaming: Interview with the Columns of Clouds - shortstory by TOBI Hirotaka

The secret history of the most famous secret agent in the world. A bunny costume that reveals the truth in our souls. The unsettling notion that Japan itself may be a dream. The tastiest meal you'll never have, a fedora-wearing neckbeard's deadly date with a yokai, and the worst work shift anyone--human or not--has ever lived through. Welcome to Phantasm Japan.

Table of Contents:

• Gary A. Braunbeck: "Shikata Ga Nai: A Bag Lady's Tale"
• Nadia Bulkin: "Girl, I Love You"
• Quentin S. Crisp: "The Last Packet of Tea"
• Project Itoh: "From the Nothing, With Love"
• Yusaku Kitano: "Scissors or Claws, and Holes"
• Jacqueline Koyanagi: "Kamigakari"
• Alex Dally MacFarlane: "Inari Updates the Map of Rice Fields"
• Zachary Mason: "Five Tales of Japan"
• Miyuki Miyabe: "Chiyoko"
• James A. Moore: "He Dreads the Cold"
• Lauren Naturale: "Her Last Appearance"
• Tim Pratt: "Those Who Hunt Monster Hunters"
• Benjanun Sriduangkaew: "Ningyo"
• Seia Tanabe: "The Parrot Stone"
• Joseph Tomaras: "Thirty-Eight Observations on the Nature of the Self"
• Dempow Torishima: "Sisyphean"
• Sayuri Ueda: "Street of Fruiting Bodies"

Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan --

The latest in Haikasoru's anthology series that began with the acclaimed The Future is Japanese, Hanzai Japan gathers weird crime and mystery stories from an international list of best-selling authors and some of the brightest, and darkest, new writers working today.

A murderer doing time in Hell. A girl who just wants to win her high school band contest... no matter what it takes. Sumo wrestlers with a supernatural secret. A future Tokyo where vampires are menial laborers nursing long-held grudges against humanity. And even a very conscientious, if unstable, Universal Transverse Mercator projection. These crime and mystery stories from and about Japan explore myth, technology, the sharpness of a sleuth's mind, and the darkness in the hearts of criminals. Read these stories and learn that hanzai means crime!

• Ray Banks
• Libby Cudmore
• Brian Evenson
• Kaori Fujino
• Jyouji Hayashi
• Naomi Hirahara
• Yumeaki Hirayama
• Violet LeVoit
• Yusuke Miyauchi
• S. J. Rozan
• Hiroshi Sakurazaka
• Setsuko Shinoda
• Jeff Somers
• Genevieve Valentine
• Carrie Vaughn

A quiet summer night...a neat suburban house...and another innocent, happy family is shattered - the latest victims of a grisly series of hideous sacrificial killings that no one understands, and no one can stop. Nobody lives to tell of the unimaginable carnage. Only the blood-stained walls bear witness.

All hope rests on Special Agent Will Graham, who must peer inside the killer's tortured soul to understand his rage, to anticipate and prevent his next vicious crime. Desperate for help, Graham finds himself locked in a deadly alliance with the brilliant Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the infamous mass murderer who Graham put in prison years ago.

As the imprisoned Lecter tightens the reins of revenge, Graham's feverish pursuit of the Red Dragon draws him inside the warped mind of a psychopath, into an unforgettable world of demonic ritual and violence, beyond the limits of human terror.

As part of the search for a serial murderer nicknames "Buffalo Bill," FBI trainee Clarice Starling is given an assignment. She must visit a man confined to a high-security facility for the criminally insane and interview him.

That man, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, is a former psychiatrist with unusual tastes and an intense curiosity about the darker corners of the mind. His intimate understanding of the killer and of Clarice herself form the core of The Silence of the Lambs--an unforgettable classic of suspense fiction.

You remember Hannibal Lecter: gentleman, genius, cannibal. Seven years have passed since Dr. Lecter escaped from custody. And for seven years he's been at large, free to savor the scents, the essences, of an unguarded world. 

But intruders have entered Dr. Lecter's world, piercing his new identity, sensing the evil that surrounds him. For the multimillionaire Hannibal left maimed, for a corrupt Italian policeman, and for FBI agent Clarice Starling, who once stood before Lecter and who has never been the same, the final hunt for Hannibal Lecter has begun. All of them, in their separate ways, want to find Dr. Lecter. And all three will get their wish. But only one will live long enough to savor the reward.

Hannibal Lecter emerges from the nightmare of the Eastern Front, a boy in the snow, mute, with a chain around his neck.

He seems utterly alone, but he has brought his demons with him.

Hannibal's uncle, a noted painter, finds him in a Soviet orphanage and brings him to France, where Hannibal will live with his uncle and his uncle's beautiful and exotic wife, Lady Murasaki.

Lady Murasaki helps Hannibal to heal. With her help he flourishes, becoming the youngest person ever admitted to medical school in France.

But Hannibal's demons visit him and torment him. When he is old enough, he visits them in turn.

He discovers he has gifts beyond the academic, and in that epiphany, Hannibal Lecter becomes death's prodigy.

Seventeen-year-old Ana is a scoundrel by nurture and an outlaw by nature. Found as a child drifting through space with a sentient android called D09, Ana was saved by a fearsome space captain and the grizzled crew she now calls family. But D09--one of the last remaining illegal Metals--has been glitching, and Ana will stop at nothing to find a way to fix him.

Ana's desperate effort to save D09 leads her on a quest to steal the coordinates to a lost ship that could offer all the answers. But at the last moment, a spoiled Ironblood boy beats Ana to her prize. He has his own reasons for taking the coordinates, and he doesn't care what he'll sacrifice to keep them.

When everything goes wrong, she and the Ironblood end up as fugitives on the run. Now their entire kingdom is after them--and the coordinates--and not everyone wants them captured alive.

What they find in a lost corner of the universe will change all their lives--and unearth dangerous secrets. But when a darkness from Ana's past returns, she must face an impossible choice: does she protect a kingdom that wants her dead or save the Metal boy she loves?

Once Ana was an orphaned space outlaw. Then she was the Empress of the Iron Kingdom. Now, thought dead by most of the galaxy after she escaped from the dark AI program called the HIVE, Ana is desperate for a way to save Di from the HIVE's evil clutches and take back her kingdom.

Ana's only option is to find Starbright, the one person who hacked into the HIVE and lived to tell the tale. But when Ana's desperation costs the crew of the Dossier a terrible price, Ana and her friends are sent spiraling through the most perilous reaches of the Iron Kingdom to stop the true arbiter of evil in her world: an ancient world-ending deity called the Great Dark.

Their journey will take their sharp-witted pilot, Jax, to the home he never wanted to return to and the dangerous fate he left behind. And when Robb finds out who Jax really is, he must contend with his own feelings for the boy he barely knows, and question whether he truly belongs with this group of outcasts.

When facing the worst odds, can Ana and her crew of misfits find a way to stop the Great Dark once and for all?

For centuries the legendary sword has brought death and the Quickening. Now the sword has mysteriously been delivered into Joe Dawson's hands, with instructions that tell Dawson the secret society of mortals who have observed immortals.

In Captive Soul, warrior Duncan McLeod and his friend Methos notice a particular sword on display in a NY museum. Methos recognises the weapon from his days in Ancient Egypt.

Three millennia past, Methos aided the Ancient Egyptian pharaohs when the Hyksos invaded. He reluctantly becomes a spy inside the Hyksos royal house, when he meets the Immortal - and thoroughly insane - Prince Khyan. Methos misses his chance to take the madman's head, a mistake that returns to haunt him as the Oldest Immortal returns to find his sword, killing all in his path.

Choose your player.

The "ironborn" half-fae outcast of her royal fae family.
A tempestuous Fury, exiled to earth from the Immortal Realm and hellbent on revenge.
A dutiful fae prince, determined to earn his place on the throne.
The prince's brooding guardian, burdened with a terrible secret.

For centuries, the Eight Courts of Folk have lived among us, concealed by magic and bound by law to do no harm to humans. This arrangement has long kept peace in the Courts--until a series of gruesome and ritualistic murders rocks the city of Toronto and threatens to expose faeries to the human world.

Four queer teens, each who hold a key piece of the truth behind these murders, must form a tenuous alliance in their effort to track down the mysterious killer behind these crimes. If they fail, they risk the destruction of the faerie and human worlds alike. If that's not bad enough, there's a war brewing between the Mortal and Immortal Realms, and one of these teens is destined to tip the scales. The only question is: which way?

Wish them luck. They're going to need it.

After thwarting the man behind the gruesome ironborn murders--and breaking several fae laws to do so--all Arlo wants is a quiet summer. As the deity of luck's Hollow Star, capable of bringing about endless possibilities, this shouldn't be too much to ask, right?

But someone is still trying to summon the mythical Seven Deadly Sins. All signs point to immortal meddling, and if this is the gods' attempt at returning to the Mortal Realm, it's Arlo they're going to use to do it.

When Queen Riadne offers to host Arlo at the Seelie Summer palace, she jumps at the chance. She'll get to see more of Vehan and Aurelian and perhaps even work out her complicated feelings for the gorgeous ex-Fury, Nausicaä. But no one trusts the infamous Queen of Light, even as Arlo wonders if she's just been greatly misunderstood.

With the Summer Solstice quickly approaching, everyone expects Riadne to finally challenge the High King for his crown. And as Arlo struggles to get control of her powers and take charge of her destiny, she'll soon be faced with a choice that won't only change the fate of the Mortal Realm forever but could condemn it to a cruelty the likes of which the Courts have never known.

The die is cast.
The era of Spring is over.

Riadne's bloody coup on the Summer Solstice changed Arlo's life forever. In one fell swoop and a fool's bargain, she lost both her family and free will to the newly crowned High Queen. Now, with Arlo forced to use her powers as Luck's Hollow Star to help summon the rest of the seven deadly sins, Riadne stands closer than ever to achieving her dark goals.

And Arlo isn't the only one trapped in a frightening new role. Her ex-Fury girlfriend, Nausicaä, is determined to do whatever it takes to stay by Arlo's side, even if that means becoming Riadne's pet assassin. Aurelian and Vehan, torn apart, struggle to survive on their own.

Meanwhile, Celadon has been revealed as Riadne's illegitimate son--and heir to both Spring and Summer, the ultimate offense in the faerie world. But the High Prince has secret plans of his own, plans made all the more complicated when the beautiful and deadly immortal Hunter Lethe takes an interest in him...

Five budding legacies will need more than luck if they hope to stand a chance against the greatest adversary the Courts have faced. For nothing's more dangerous than a faerie tale... except the one who tells it, and maybe what they're going to need is no longer that story's hero but its villain.