Search Worlds Without End

This short story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 2000. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 6 (2001), edited by David G. Hartwell. The story is included in the collection Supertoys Last All Summer Long: and Other Stories of Future Time (2001).

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 on Strange Horizons, 6 July 2009. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 15 (2010), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection The Birdcage Heart & Other Strange Tales (2017).

Read the full story for free at Strange Horizons.

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.

Drawing upon Gary Gygax's list of "inspirational reading" in the 1979 Dungeon Masters' Guide, Appendix N. presents a selection of short fiction and resonant fragments that shaped the world's most popular role-playing game.

Contents:

• Appendix N.: The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons & Dragons - interior artwork by Alex Crispin
• 3 - How Sargoth Lay Siege to Zaremm - (1972) - short story by Lin Carter
• 7 - Tales of the Hawk - novelette by Poul Anderson (variant of The Tale of Hauk 1977)
• 31 - Jewels in the Forest - [Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser] - novelette by Fritz Leiber (variant of The Jewels in the Forest 1939)
• 71 - Empire of the Necromancers - [Zothique] - short story by Clark Ashton Smith (variant of The Empire of the Necromancers 1932)
• 81 - Turjaan of Miir - [Dying Earth] - short story by Jack Vance (variant of Turjan of Miir 1950)
• 99 - A Hero at the Gates - [Cyrion] - (1979) - short story by Tanith Lee
• 115 - Tower of the Elephant - [Conan] - novelette by Robert E. Howard (variant of The Tower of the Elephant 1933)
• 145 - Song of Swords - short fiction by Fred Saberhagen
• 151 - Dreaming City - [The Elric Saga] - novelette by Michael Moorcock (variant of The Dreaming City 1961)
• 185 - The Doom That Came to Sarnath - [Dream Cycle] - (1920) - short story by H. P. Lovecraft
• 193 - Tower of Darkness - [Marcus & Diana] - (1975) - novelette by David Madison
• 217 - Straggler from Atlantis - [Kardios] - (1977) - novelette by Manly Wade Wellman
• 245 - The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles - (1951) - short story by Margaret St. Clair
• 251 - Pit of Wings - [Ryre] - short story by Ramsey Campbell (variant of The Pit of Wings 1978)
• 267 - Black God's Kiss - [Jirel of Joiry] - (1934) - novelette by C. L. Moore
• 299 - The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth - (1908) - short story by Lord Dunsany
• 319 - Sword of Dragons - short fiction by Frank Brunner
• 327 - Afterword (Appendix N.: The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons & Dragons) - essay by Ann VanderMeer
• 331 - Notes on the Stories (Appendix N.: The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons & Dragons) - essay by Peter Bebergal
• 335 - Appendix N: Inspirational and Educational Reading - essay by Peter Bebergal
• 337 - Acknowledgements (Appendix N.: The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons & Dragons) - essay by Peter Bebergal

This short story originally appeared in Nature, June 10, 2010. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 16 (2011), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection The Best of Gregory Benford (2015).

Read the full story for free at Nature.

Nebula Award nominated novella. The full title is On the Street of the Serpents or, The Assassination of Chairman Mao, as Effected by the Author in Seville, Spain, in the Spring of 1992, a Year of No Certain Historicity. It originally appeared in the anthology Science Fiction Emphasis 1 (1974), edited by David Gerrold. It can also be found in the collection Blooded on Arachne (1982).

An inexplicable wave of murders has the country gripped with terror. Ordinary men and women are suddenly going mad, committing brutal and horrific killings before slaying themselves in equally gruesome ways. General Charles Kirk of British Foreign Intelligence thinks the case has something to do with the most evil man he has ever encountered: Tommy Ryde, a British spy who defected to the Nazis during the Second World War and who seemed to possess a strange hypnotic power. But Ryde has been dead for forty years - or has he? Kirk and his colleague Bill Easter are determined to find out. The trail takes them first to Berlin to seek answers from a notorious Nazi war criminal, then to an underwater search of a sunken U-boat off the Scottish coast, and finally to the torture chambers beneath a madman's Gothic castle in Dartmoor, where they will come face to face with the living incarnation of evil...

This mesmerising collection from World Fantasy Award-winner James P. Blaylock offers seven brilliant excursions into one of the most idiosyncratic imaginations of our time. Highlighted by the acclaimed novella, "The Trismegistus Club" - a brilliant riff on the antiquarian ghost story - In for a Penny goes from strength to strength, taking us deep into the heart of a quirky, deeply engaging fictional world that no one but Blaylock could have created.

Other high points include "Home Before Dark," which chronicles one man's first few hours in the afterlife. Its thematic companion, "Small Houses," recounts an aging widower's last few hours on earth. Both stories constitute deeply felt, lovingly detailed farewells to the things and places of this world.

In "The other Side," a minor precognitive episode leads the hero to an obsessive fascination with the hidden mysteries of the universe. In "His Own Back Yard," a story worthy of the great Jack Finney, a middle-aged man finds himself stranded in the haunted territory of his childhood. The blackly funny "War of the Worlds" uses a bowling ball and the imminent end of Life As We Know It to illuminate the fault lines in a modern marriage. Finally, in the wonderfully imagined title story, the single-minded pursuit of treasure - of something for nothing - leads Blaylock's protagonist to a harrowing confrontation with his own worst self.

Table of Contents

• Introduction - essay
• The Other Side - (2000) - novelette
• The War of the Worlds - (2000) - novelette
• His Own Back Yard - (2001) - novelette
• Home Before Dark - (2000) - shortstory
• In for a Penny or The Man Who Believed in Himself - (2002) - novelette
• Small Houses - (2001) - shortstory
• The Trismegistus Club - novelette

Table of Contents:

• By Way of Introduction - essay
• The Cloak - (1939) - short story
• Beetles - (1938) - short story
• The Fiddler's Fee - (1940) - short story
• The Mannikin - (1937) - short story
• The Strange Flight of Richard Clayton - (1939) - short story
• Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper - (1943) - short story
• The Seal of the Satyr - (1939) - short story
• The Dark Demon - (1936) - short story
• The Faceless God - (1936) - short story
• House of the Hatchet - (1941) - short story
• The Opener of the Way - (1936) - short story
• Return to the Sabbath - (1938) - short story
• The Mandarin's Canaries - (1938) - short story
• Waxworks - (1939) - novelette
• The Feast in the Abbey - (1935) - short story
• Slave of the Flames - (1938) - short story
• The Shambler from the Stars - (1935) - short story
• Mother of Serpents - (1936) - short story
• The Secret of Sebek - (1937) - short story
• The Eyes of the Mummy - (1938) - short story
• One Way to Mars - (1945) - short story

Seventeen hard science fiction tales by today's top authors

Hard science fiction is the literature of change, rigorously examining the impact--both beneficial and dangerous--of science and technology on humanity, the future, and the cosmos. As science advances, expanding our knowledge of the universe, astounding new frontiers in storytelling open up as well.

In Carbide Tipped Pens, over a dozen of today's most creative imaginations explore these frontiers, carrying on the grand tradition of such legendary masters as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and John W. Campbell, while bringing hard science fiction into the 21st century by extrapolating from the latest scientific developments and discoveries. Ranging from ancient China to the outer reaches of the solar system, this outstanding collection of original stories, written by an international roster of authors, finds wonder, terror, and gripping human drama in topics as diverse as space exploration, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, climate change, alternate history, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, interplanetary war, and even the future of baseball.

From tattoos that treat allergies to hazardous missions to Mars and beyond, from the end of the world to the farthest limits of human invention, Carbide Tipped Pens turns startling new ideas into state-of-the art science fiction.

Includes stories by Ben Bova, Gregory Benford, Robert Reed, Aliette de Bodard, Jack McDevitt, Howard Hendrix, Daniel H. Wilson, and many others!

Table of Contents:

• Preface - essay by Eric Choi
• The Blue Afternoon That Lasted Forever - shortstory by Daniel H. Wilson
• A Slow Unfurling of Truth - novelette by Aliette de Bodard
• Thunderwell - novelette by Doug Beason
• The Circle - novelette by Cixin Liu
• Old Timer's Game - shortstory by Ben Bova
• The Snows of Yesteryear - novelette by Jean-Louis Trudel
• Skin Deep - novelette by Leah Petersen and Gabrielle Harbowy
• Lady with Fox - novelette by Gregory Benford
• Habilis - novelette by Howard V. Hendrix
• The Play's the Thing - (2013) - shortstory by Jack McDevitt
• Every Hill Ends with Sky - shortstory by Robert Reed
• She Just Looks that Way - novelette by Eric Choi
• Siren of Titan - novelette by David DeGraff
• The Yoke of Inauspicious Stars - novelette by Kate Story
• Ambiguous Nature - novelette by Carl Frederick
• The Mandelbrot Bet - shortstory by Dirk Strasser
• Recollection - shortstory by Nancy Fulda
• About the Contributors - essay by uncredited

With his health failing, the great mage Donn has chosen to pass on his Talents to a new generation: an old era is drawing to a close, a new era about to begin. But with change comes instability. War looms and a rogue church leader threatens to set loose the wild powers of the First City. Donn's children must oppose this man but, also, they must contend with Donn himself: the old mage has not finished with his children yet.

On the run from the religious repression of the mainland, Leeth Hamera joins a group of outcasts on the Serpent's Back, a continually changing island continent in the middle of a lava sea. Leeth has never lived up to the expectations of his wealthy merchant family and his only magical skill is the lowly Talent of bonding with animals. But, as he learns, the greatest Talents can sometimes be the slowest to emerge.

The leader of the outcasts is Chi, son of Donn and the greatest healer of his generation. Chi is in exile for breaking the Embodied Church's edict against intervening in the natural order: many years ago Chi used his skills to revive his son from the dead. That son, Lachlan Pas, is now a church leader tortured by the guilty knowledge of what his father had to do to return him to life. When he learns Chi is still alive, he orders his execution, determined that his secret should never be exposed.

Until now, Chi has been content to live in exile but now he knows that his son's insane and cruel rule must be stopped. Chi summons his half-siblings from throughout the inhabited lands of the Rift valley. The need for action is confirmed when one of them reveals that Lachlan and his mage, Oriole, are rebuilding the ancient city of Samhab--an act which will release the powers of the earth with unforeseeable consequences.

Welcome to the magical island city of Zigané, endlessly adrift in the southern lava sea; the searing soda plains home of the Morani warriors; the impenetrable Zochi jungle, full of illusion and hidden hazard; the charmed fortress-like City of the Divine Wall; and Samhab, the fantastic First City of the True, built at the geographical centre of the Rift, where the magical powers of the earth rise up to be set free by the earth-charmers and mages. The novel's cast of shape-changers, earth-charmers, healers and illusionists must battle to save civilization from the evil rule of Lachlan Pas and his followers.

For whoever controls the power of Samhab controls the future of the world.

When a young tug pilot's career is ruined by a collision in Earth orbit he has no choice but to accept a commission to fly an eccentric ship builder to a planet far from the trade routes. When they discover alien ruins on the planet and the hulk of a missing generation ship they are thrown into the centre of a conspiracy that reaches back centuries.

Meanwhile on earth a young Indian police officer is trying to track down a serial killer little suspecting that the killer is linked to what is happening on a planet light years away and that her own past holds the key to everything that is happening. Eric Brown has written a novel that brings together an extraordinary imagination, rare sensitivity to character and a love of Eastern philosphy. A key novel from one of the UK's favourite SF writers.

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

Read the full story for free at Uncanny.

The walking dead from 15 centuries haunt this compendium of ghostly visitations through the ages, exploring the history of our fascination with zombies and other restless souls.

Since ancient times, accounts of supernatural activity have mystified us. Ghost stories as we know them did not develop until the late nineteenth century, but the restless dead haunted the premodern imagination in many forms, as recorded in historical narratives, theological texts, and personal letters. The Penguin Book of the Undead teems with roving hordes of dead warriors, corpses trailed by packs of barking dogs, moaning phantoms haunting deserted ruins, evil spirits emerging from burning carcasses in the form of crows, and zombies with pestilential breath. Spanning from the Hebrew scriptures to the Roman Empire, the Scandinavian sagas to medieval Europe, the Protestant Reformation to the Renaissance, this beguiling array of accounts charts our relationship with spirits and apparitions, wraiths and demons over fifteen hundred years, showing the evolution in our thinking about the ability of dead souls to return to the realm of the living--and to warn us about what awaits us in the afterlife.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, March 2018.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

The authorized biography of the creator of Middle-earth. In the decades since his death in September 1973, millions have read THE HOBBIT, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, and THE SILMARILLION and become fascinated about the very private man behind the books. Born in South Africa in January 1892, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was orphaned in childhood and brought up in near-poverty. He served in the first World War, surviving the Battle of the Somme, where he lost many of the closest friends he'd ever had. After the war he returned to the academic life, achieving high repute as a scholar and university teacher, eventually becoming Merton Professor of English at Oxford where he was a close friend of C.S. Lewis and the other writers known as The Inklings.

This collection will entertain all who appreciate the art of masterful letter writing. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien sheds much light on Tolkien's creative genius and grand design for the creation of a whole new world: Middle-earth. Featuring a radically expanded index, this volume provides a valuable research tool for all fans wishing to trace the evolution of THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

"A harrowing, humane, and very beautiful book." --Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You

A searing dystopian vision of a young boy's flight through an unnamed, savaged country, searching for sanctuary and redemption--a debut novel from one of Europe's bestselling literary stars.

A young boy has fled his home. He's pursued by dangerous forces. What lies before him is an infinite, arid plain, one he must cross in order to escape those from whom he's fleeing. One night on the road, he meets an old goatherd, a man who lives simply but righteously, and from that moment on, their paths intertwine.

Out in the Open tells the story of this journey through a drought-stricken country ruled by violence. A world where names and dates don't matter, where morals have drained away with the water. In this landscape the boy--not yet a lost cause--has the chance to choose hope and bravery, or to live forever mired in the cycle of violence in which he was raised. Carrasco has masterfully created a high stakes world, a dystopian tale of life and death, right and wrong, terror and salvation.

This short story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1998. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection (1999), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Year's Best SF 4 (1999), edited by David G. Hartwell.

The Horror of the Heights & Other Strange Tales collects fourteen vintage stories, told as only a master of the Victorian terror tale can tell them.

In these sophisticated fictions souls change bodies, monsters haunt the upper atmosphere, séances summon creatures from the astral plane, and mummies stalk the fog shrouded streets of London.

This volume features the best of Doyle's incomparable tales of the macabre, including:

• "The Captain of the 'Pole-Star' " -- In the wild wastes of the arctic, a sea captain confronts the specter of a memory that has haunted him for much of his life.
• "Lot No. 249" -- Woe betide the man who crossed Bellingham, a student of Egyptian lore who could reanimate the dead to do his bidding.
• "The Parasite" -- Who was safe from the irresistible Miss Penclosa, a woman who could insert herself into a person's thoughts and assert her will against their wishes?
• "The Leather Funnel" -- Anyone who slept in the room with the antique artifact endured horrible dreams of cruel tortures.
• "The Horror of the Heights" -- The first aeronaut to ascend to the stratosphere finds it populated by a species that is alien -- and hostile.

Open this book and enter a world of gas-lit thrills and chills, where the most logical thing of all is to be scared.

Bored with their work, three Milanese editors cook up "the Plan," a hoax that connects the medieval Knights Templar with other occult groups from ancient to modern times. This produces a map indicating the geographical point from which all the powers of the earth can be controlled-a point located in Paris, France, at Foucault's Pendulum. But in a fateful turn the joke becomes all too real, and when occult groups, including Satanists, get wind of the Plan, they go so far as to kill one of the editors in their quest to gain control of the earth.

Orchestrating these and other diverse characters into his multilayered semiotic adventure, Eco has created a superb cerebral entertainment.

Hugo and Nebula Award winning short story.

A rebel inhabits a world where conformity and punctuality are top priorities and the Ticktockman cannot accept the Harlequin's presence in his perfectly ordered world.

The story originally appeared in Galaxy Magazine, December 1965. It has been reprinted many times and can be found in the anthologies:

• Nebula Award Stories 1965 (1966), edited by Damon Knight
• World's Best Science Fiction: 1966, edtied by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr
• The Tenth Galaxy Reader (1967), edited by Frederik Pohl
• The Hugo Winners, Volume 2 (1971), edtied by Isaac Asimov
• The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume III (1981), edited by Arthur C. Clarke and George W. Proctor
• The Best of the Nebulas (1989), edited by Ben Bova
• The Science Fiction Century (1997), David G. Hartwell
• Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century (2001), edited by Orson Scott Card
• Future Crimes (2003), edited by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann
• Brave New Worlds: Dystopian Stories (2011), edited by John Joseph Adams
• The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016), edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer

The story is included in the collections:

• Paingod and Other Delusions (1965)
• Alone Against Tomorrow (1971)
• The Essential Ellison: A 35-Year Retrospective (1987)
• Troublemakers (2001)
• The Top of the Volcano: The Award-Winning Stories of Harlan Ellison (2015)

This short story originally appeared in audio in PodCastle, #375. The first print edition appeared in Lightspeed, July 2016.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

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

Whether that spirit is human or alien.

When Rudd, a troubled teenager, embarks on a school research project, he runs across the secret Mormon ritual of blood sacrifice, and its role in a 1902 murder committed by the grandson of Brigham Young. Along with his newly discovered half-brother, Rudd becomes swept up in the psychological and atavistic effects of this violent, antique ritual.

Hugo Award nominated story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1960. The story is included in the collections Strange Relations (1960), The Book of Philip José Farmer (1973) and The Best of Philip Jose Farmer (2006).

In an explosion of love's metaphors, Fowler's debut collection of stories, SUSPENDED HEART, takes on American fabulism with a cast of unexpected heroines in the narratives of life and loss: women whose hearts fall out at public malls, women whose bodies bloom with changing seasons, women who sprout blades or have multiple eyes, sleep as snakes, or birth saints like lapis lazuli babies. Where there is struggle and sadness, there is also humor: Fowler's fictive voice has been compared to both Franz Kafka and Donald Barthelme. There's a fearlessness to this prose, a melody of life and magic and loss.

Selected stories in this volume have been published online and in Australia.

Thirteen original tales of werewolves, witches, the dead. the undead, and the demonic who have found their way from darkness to light...

Table of Contents:

• 9 - Introduction (The Repentant) - essay by Brian M. Thomsen
• 12 - Lycanthrope Summer - novelette by Jeff Grubb
• 36 - The Salem Trial - novelette by Jody Lynn Nye
• 63 - The Den Mother - short story by Edo van Belkom
• 82 - Brothers in the Flesh - novelette by Fiona Patton
• 109 - Heat - novelette by Jean Rabe
• 132 - She Dwelleth in the Cold of the Moon - novelette by James Lowder
• 154 - Scleratus - novelette by Tanya Huff
• 175 - Slaughter - novelette by P. N. Elrod
• 202 - A Hollywood Tradition - short story by Brian M. Thomsen
• 218 - Intercession - novelette by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
• 268 - The Devil You Know - novelette by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
• 289 - The Recall of Cthulhu - novelette by Tom Dupree
• 306 - Redeemed - short story by Allen C. Kupfer

Contents:

• 3 - Busby's Rat - short fiction
• 20 - The Rabbit Prince - (1949) - short story
• 39 - Radio - short fiction
• 50 - One Foot in the Grave - (1948) - short story
• 63 - Moonshine - short fiction
• 75 - The Man Who Stole the Moon - short fiction
• 84 - Nobody's Watching! - short fiction
• 101 - The Horsehair Trunk - (1946) - short story
• 116 - The Blue Glass Bottle - short fiction
• 133 - Wynken, Blynken and Nod - short fiction
• 149 - Return of Verge Likens - (1950) - short story
• 161 - Where the Woodbine Twineth - (1964) - short story (variant of You Never Believe Me)

Over the last thirty years, M. John Harrison has been inspiring readers and writers alike across the world. His return to science fiction in 2002 with the magnificent space opera LIGHT was a monumental triumph, shortlisted for every major award in the genre. He combines brilliant storytelling with complex plots and evocative, mesmerising writing. THINGS THAT NEVER HAPPEN is M. John Harrison's definitive collection of short fiction, twenty-four dazzling stories of science fiction and fantasy; the perfect introduction to one of Britain's most brilliant writers.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: The Limits of Vision(aries) - (2002) - essay by China Miéville
• Author's Introduction - (2002) - essay
• Settling the World - (1975) - short story
• Running Down - (1975) - novelette
• The Incalling - (1978) - novelette
• The Ice Monkey - (1980) - short story
• Egnaro - (1981) - novelette
• The New Rays - (1982) - short story
• Old Women - (1984) - short story
• The Quarry - (1983) - short story
• A Young Man's Journey to London - (1985) - novelette
• The Great God Pan - (1988) - novelette
• Small Heirlooms - (1987) - short story
• The Gift - (1988) - novelette
• Suicide Coast - (1999) - short story
• The Neon Heart Murders - (2000) - short story
• Black Houses - (1998) - short story
• Science & The Arts - (1999) - short story
• The East - (1996) - short story
• The Horse of Iron and How We Can Know It and Be Changed by It Forever - (1989) - short story
• Gifco - (1992) - novelette
• Empty - (1995) - novelette
• Seven Guesses of the Heart - (1996) - short story
• I Did It - (1996) - short story
• Anima - (1992) - short story
• Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring - (1994) - novelette
• Story Notes - (2002) - essay

This short story originally appeared in Territory, issue II, August 2016, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, June 2018.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

The Magical Carpenter of Japan was first published in 1808, but it was one hundred years later that a translated edition appeared in England. The Magical Carpenter of Japan is a fast-moving adventure story with a love-interest, the supernatural, and wicked villains filling the misadventures of Suminawa. The book is lavishly illustrated with woodcuts by one of the greatest 'ukiyo-e', Hokusai.

Hokusai, according to Rokujiuyen, "pestered" him to write the story of Suminawa. Hokusai, who was at the time forty-six, had already published his Famous Sights of the Eastern Capital series, and two years before had started working on his Fifty-Three Stages Along the Tokaido. Why was he so anxious to have Rokujiuyen write the story of Suminawa? Did he simply want work to do? Almost certainly not. Hokusai, who all his life was dogged by creditors, wasn't the kind of man to worry about such things as security and comfort. When a fire destroyed his home, and all his notes and sketches, he could philosophically remark "I came into the world without much." Many of the books illustrated by him bear signs of having been executed in a hurry. Not so in this case. Without wishing to read too much into them, these prints suggest that the artist did not consider them a task to be done as quickly as possible, so he could go back to drawing what he wanted. It seems more likely that the well-known folk tale appealed to his artist's imagination, and that he considered it a challenging assignment. "I find that in all representations of Japanese and Chinese warriors," he wrote, "there is a lack of power and of movement, which are the essence of such subjects. Disappointed by this imperfection, I have been on fire to remedy it and so to supply what was lacking." Although he might not agree, he seems to us to have admirably caught these elusive qualities in some of the illustrations here.

If the Story of Rokujiuyen seems now to be overshadowed by the prints of Hokusai, this is not as it should be. Together they form a delightful combination, and this adventure story, fairy tale, love story, call it what you will, can be read today with a good deal of the excitement and pleasure it must have given its original readers in 1808.

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.

Chilling real-life accounts of witches, from medieval Europe through colonial America, compiled by the New York Times bestselling author of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane and Conversion

From a manual for witch hunters written by King James himself in 1597, to court documents from the Salem witch trials of 1692, to newspaper coverage of a woman stoned to death on the streets of Philadelphia while the Continental Congress met, The Penguin Book of Witches is a treasury of historical accounts of accused witches that sheds light on the reality behind the legends. Bringing to life stories like that of Eunice Cole, tried for attacking a teenage girl with a rock and buried with a stake through her heart; Jane Jacobs, a Bostonian so often accused of witchcraft that she took her tormentors to court on charges of slander; and Increase Mather, an exorcism-performing minister famed for his knowledge of witches, this volume provides a unique tour through the darkest history of English and North American witchcraft

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

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

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

Note: Not really a novel. Rather, it is an illustrated fictional "non-fiction" book containing snippets / anecdotes about the lives and habits of "Australian gnomes".

AUSTRALIAN GNOMES live in all parts of our country but they are not native to Australia (although Douglas Lockwood, the well-known outback writer, supports the theory that 'Aboriginal' gnomes also are present but simply have not cared to reveal themselves). The first gnomes to land here were the Hairy Peruvians. They sailed across the Pacific in their vessel the Poppykettle, but unfortunately all traces of them have been lost. The gnomes now living here are descended from those who later arrived from overseas: the Lepri-gnomes from Ireland, the Boccherini gnomes from the Mediterranean, the Beijing gnomes from China, and the European or Forest gnomes from Britain and Europe. The Gaucho gnomes were assisted migrants, imported by cattle rustlers in the 1880s. The descendants of these twigs of the Greater Gnome Family have adapted themselves to the needs of the Australian environment. Many are helpful to humans and other animals. They include the Rain Forest gnomes of Queensland, the Reach gnomes of the River Murray, the Knacker-gnomes of the copper mines, and the Pagagnomes who aid musicians.

Others, such as the Marram gnomes, resent our violation of the environment and have ways of making their protest felt. But the majority of Australian gnomes simply live in harmony with the environment, with their human neighbours, and with each other. Much of their time is spent in celebration, in accordance with the Gnome Calendar worked out by Ludwig Thursday. A comprehensive work on Australian Gnomology has been a long-felt need, but Robert Ingen was able to prepare this book only because of a chance meeting with Theresa Green. One of the most respected of gnome leaders, she helped him to present a book which covers many aspects of the life and lore of Australian Gnomes.

This short story originally appeared on Omni Online, April 1997. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection (1998). It was later expanded to the full novel Headlong (1999).

A collection of ten stories creates a realm of "irrelevant miracles," where civilization-building is a pastime and death is an art, and offers unique interpretations of fear, love, guilt, greed, obligation, and obsession.

Table of Contents:

• The Breath of Suspension
• Living Will
• Many Mansions
• The Death Artist
• At the Cross-Time Jaunters' Ball
• Above Ancient Seas
• Deathbinder
• The Ring of Memory
• Beneath the Shadow of Her Smile
• A Deeper Sea

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

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Sturgeon Award nominated short story. It originally appeared on Sci Fiction, March 24, 2004. The story can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best Fantasy 5 (2005), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Eighteenth Annual Collection (2005), edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant. It is included in the collections The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories (2008) and The Collected Kessel (2012).

A long-awaited collection of fourteen stories that intersect imaginatively with Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, The Wizard of Oz, and Flannery O'Connor. Kessel, whose story "A Clean Escape" was filmed as part of ABC's Masters of Science Fiction, ranges through genres with a lean, graceful style that incorporates everything from future autobiography, alternate history, phone sex, perpetual motion, and his modern classic sequence of four stories about life on the moon.

Table of Contents:

• The Baum Plan for Financial Independence - (2004)
• Every Angel Is Terrifying - (1998)
• The Red Phone - (2005)
• The Invisible Empire - (2002)
• The Juniper Tree - (2000)
• Stories for Men - (2002)
• Under the Lunchbox Tree - (2003)
• Sunlight or Rock - (2006)
• The Snake Girl - (2006)
• It's All True - (2003)
• The Last American - (2007)
• Downtown - (2007)
• Powerless - (2008)
• Pride and Prometheus - (2008)

The folks at the seance hung on Tricia Mumford's every word. They were believers. Everybody except Roger Kant: He was a skeptic. He didn't believe in psychic phenomena, and he especially didn't believe in Tricia Mumford, the world-famous trance medium. Roger made a career of debunking fakes like Tricia; now he'd have a field day. He'd write a book, exposing her trickery. He'd speak on the radio, too. He'd tell the truth...

Then the violent headaches began--the small accidents--the nightmares--the horrific visions. Roger the skeptic shrugged it all off as mere coincidence; maybe he'd been working too hard. Then he started getting panic attacks when he spoke on the radio. And he couldn't write a word...

Someone--something--was determined to teach Roger Kant just what was real and what wasn't. The hard way. And the lessons were just beginning...

Save the World... With Pizza?!

After being struck and killed by a delivery bike, Kaito is given the opportunity to be reborn in an alternate world as one of three "hero" classes:

1. A swordsman
2. A magician
3. A hero who saves the world with pizza

When the first two options are quickly taken, Kaito is forced to live his second life as a hero endowed with the power of pizza in a land of herbivorous elves...one of whom happens to be his new wife! What kinds of pizza-related adventures lie ahead for our High-Calorie Hero and his food-obsessed elf bride?

In a world where male children are rare, a man is a valuable commodity -- to be sold to the highest bidder...

It isn't easy being the oldest boy in a house run by women -- especially for Jerin Whistler. The grand-matriarchs of his clan are descended from soldiers, spies, and thieves. That's partly what's kept their family alive in the wilderness. But it also means Jerin's doomed to marry the girls next door -- a fate he's convinced is worse than death. But Jerin gets in even worse trouble when, in the process of a daring rescue, he falls in love with a royal princess who's as high above his station as it's possible to be.

Ren knows that Jerin is too far below her class to be an appropriate match for her and her royal sisters. But then she hears rumors of a long-held Whistler family secret -- one that might provide a way for them to finally be together. Unfortunately, she still has four sisters to convince. And that's before Jerin even comes to the capital -- where simmering political tensions will threaten not just their love, but all their lives...

Blast Away to Adventure!

The Very Large Object That ATE the Other Very Large Objects!

The Sargasso. Space ships go in, and they don't come back. But as the all-destroying Nefrim drive humanity from the stars, everything depends on one captain's desperate gambit: to dial his stardrive to zero--to ''fall off the map''--and plunge into the ocean-covered pocket universe that is the Sargasso. Within is a secret that can change a galaxy. And, though escape is a trick generations of trapped starfarers have tried and failed to master--now the fate of two universes depends on Mikail Volkov being the first to GET OUT!

The dawn of a new hard-hitting space adventure by the winner of the 2003 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer!

REBUILD A LIFE, SAVE A CITY

Silas Decker had his world destroyed when he was attacked by vampires outside of New Amsterdam. He has rebuilt his life a dozen times in the last three hundred years--each time less and less successfully. Now he lives alone, buried under a hoarding habit, struggling to find some reason to wake up with the setting of the sun.

Eloise is a Virtue, pledged to hunting evil. What she doesn't know is how to live alone in a city full of strangers who know nothing about monsters.

Seth is the sixteen-year old Prince of Boston, ward of the Wolf King. Now he is left in a city that desperately needs his protection with enemies gathering all around.

Joshua believes he is a normal, college-bound high school senior. His life is shattered when he wakes up in a field, covered with blood, and the prom committee scattered in pieces about him like broken dolls.

These four must now come together to unravel a plot by Wickers, witches who gain power from human sacrifices and have the power to turn any human into their puppet. Four people who lost everything struggle to save Boston by saving each other.

It was the end of summer of the year 2035. The Global Village that was the World was ruled by a Kangaroo Court of Compassionate Aldermen who ordered assassinations when it was deemed to be for the common good. As a sign of their openness, they wre always experimenting to find new ways of looking at the World. Most of these experiments would fail; some of them would succeed to an extent; and others would succeed only too well, and so would have to be crushed in the shell for the good of the World.

The Lynn-Randal Experiment raised three children together almost from infancy. Of these three, Lord randal was human (though somewhat enhanced and tampered with). Axel belonge to the gargoyle-faced 'Golden People' ("God believes they are the most beautiful creatures he ever made,' a theologian said. 'and there will be hell to pay when he finds out that we don't agree'). And the third child was Inneal who often elicited the comment 'she's really something different, isn't she!' Yes, she was. All of these were super-mega-persons, which meant that they might be able to change the world itself. But why did they begin to change the Ocean first?

When these three were just short of ten years old, they were merged with other children of three other experiments and formed with them a Magic Dozen. Immediately they began to have an astonishing effect on the World. And the fate of the children themselves hung in the balance.

Was the experiment too successful? Was their effect on the World too dangerous? Would their group be, as other groups had been, adjudged to be a 'Serpent's Egg' that had to be crushed in the shell for the good of the World?

The Three Days of Summerset, the End of Summer, would give the answer.

This story was originally published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies #143 in March 2014. It can also be found in The Long List Anthology: More Stories from the Hugo Awards Nomination List, edited by David Steffen.

Read the full story for free at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

It Can't Happen Here is the only one of Sinclair Lewis's later novels to match the power of Main Street,Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.

Written during the Great Depression, when the country was largely oblivious to Hitler's aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a president who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime, and a liberal press.

Called "a message to thinking Americans" by the Springfield Republican when it was published in 1935, It Can't Happen Here is a shockingly prescient novel that remains as fresh and contemporary as today's news.

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

Read the full story for free at Uncanny.

Kelly Link has been called "the most impressive writer of her generation" by Peter Straub and "a national treasure" by Neil Gaiman. Publications from Time to the Village Voice, from Locus to Salon, have lauded her as wildly talented and widely influential. In 2001, Link caused the literary world to catch its breath with Stranger Things Happen, one of the first great single-author collections of the new century. When it debuted, the book broke new ground in fantastic literature, and still reads as fresh, provocative, and dazzlingly original.

These stories are strange, quirky, smart -- and like no others. In "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose," a dead man sends letters to his living wife. In "The Specialist"s Hat," the rhymes and games of two children and their babysitter come to define, but not explain, a uniquely haunted house. In "The Girl Detective," the case of the tap-dancing bank robbers means a trip to the underworld. Among the eleven stories gathered here, readers will find dictators and extraterrestrials, an apocalyptic beauty pageant and two women named Louise.

Stories from Stranger Things Happen won Nebula, World Fantasy, and Tiptree Awards, and the volume garnered widespread acclaim. Link continues to earn accolades and find new readers with each story she publishes.

Table of Contents:

• Stranger Things Happen - interior artwork by Kathleen Jennings
• Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose - (1998) - shortstory
• Water Off a Black Dog's Back - (1995) - shortstory
• The Specialist's Hat - (1998) - shortstory
• Flying Lessons - (1996) - novelette
• Travels with the Snow Queen - (1996) - novelette
• Vanishing Act - (1996) - shortfiction
• Survivor's Ball, or, The Donner Party - (1998) - shortfiction (variant of Survivor's Ball, or The Donner Party)
• Shoe and Marriage - (2000) - shortfiction
• Most of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water - (2001) - shortstory
• Louise's Ghost - (2001) - novelette
• The Girl Detective - (1999) - novelette

Tiptree nominated short story. First appeared in a collection of the same name.

Someone is causing havoc in East End Cottage, and for once it isn't James. When strange scrawled notes start appearing all over his new family home in the old Oxfordshire village of Ledsham, 10-year-old James seems the obvious culprit. But only he knows the troublemaker's true identity - Thomas Kempe, a petulant 17th-century sorcerer who has taken up residence as a poltergeist in his new bedroom. And to make matters worse, no one will believe him. So, to avoid missing out on pocket money and pudding for the rest of his life, it will be up to James to find out why Thos. Kempe Esq., Sorcerer, has returned, and how to get rid of him.

The Ghost of Thomas Kempe won the Carnegie Medal for British children's books.

Something Happened Here, But We're Not Quite Sure What It Was by Paul McAuley is a complex sf story about politics and xenophobia when human colonists on an Earth-like planet are faced with the possibility of reaching out to alien cultures, especially when a big organization that has previously done harm is in charge of the operation.

This story is included in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017, edited by Rich Horton.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Nebula Award nominated short story. Originally appeared in Artemis #5, Summer 2001. It can also be found in the Nebula Awards Showcase 2004, edited by Vonda N. McIntyre, and the collections Outbound (2006) and Cryptic: The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt (2009).

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

HE HAS GONE TO FOLLOW THE CRUSADES.

She must do everything to defend their Irish home.

It is the time of Richard the Lion heart, the time of the Crusades and the mysterious Knights Templar. Donal, an Irish chieftain, and Robert, his Norman lord, travel to the Holy Land as their fathers did before them. But before Donal leaves, he gives his wife Eilish a token - half of a penny broken by the tilecutter. Should she receive the other half, she will know he is dead.

As Donal and Robert become entwined in the dangerous intrigues of he Knights Templar in the Holy Land, Eilish must also deal with intrigues at home.

From the lush beauty of the twelfth-century Ireland to the dangerous secrets of a desert fortress, The Tilecutter's Penny is a rich and gripping story of action and adventure, love and betrayal, and legendary treasures worth more than life itself...

I may only be in fourth grade, but I know more than most adults. I take notes every day and read all kinds of books, so I have a solid grasp on the world around me.

But suddenly, there are penguins in my town! I know it has something to do with the lady at the dentist and her weird powers, so I'm going to get to the bottom of it...

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, December 2017.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Catherine Helstone's brother, Laon, has disappeared in Arcadia, legendary land of the magical fae. Desperate for news of him, she makes the perilous journey, but once there, she finds herself alone and isolated in the sinister house of Gethsemane. At last there comes news: her beloved brother is riding to be reunited with her soon -- but the Queen of the Fae and her maniacal court are hard on his heels.

An unusually gripping Victorian-tinged fantasy set in a richly imagined High Gothic world.

Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time is a collection of indigenous science fiction and urban fantasy focusing on LGBT and two-spirit characters. These stories range from a transgender woman undergoing an experimental transition process to young lovers separated through decades and meeting in their own far future. These are stories of machines and magic, love and self-love.

Table of Contents:

• 7 - Letter from the Editor (Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time) - essay by Hope Nicholson
• 9 - Beyond the Grim Dust of What Was to a Radiant Possibility of What Could Be: Two-Spirit Survivance Stories - essay by Grace L. Dillon
• 12 - Returning to Ourselves: Two Spirit Futures and the Now - essay by Niigaan Sinclair
• 20 - Aliens - short story by Richard Van Camp
• 31 - Legends Are Made, Not Born - short story by Cherie Dimaline
• 38 - Perfectly You - short story by David A. Robertson
• 54 - The Boys Who Became the Hummingbirds - short story by Daniel Heath Justice
• 60 - Né Le!? - short story by Darcie Little Badger
• 77 - Transitions - short story by Gwen Benaway
• 87 - Imposter Syndrome - short story by Mari Kurisato
• 103 - Valediction at the Star View Motel - short story by Nathan Adler
• 116 - Parallax - poem by Cleo Keahna

"The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin" is a novel by P. D. Ouspensky. It follows the unsuccessful struggle of Ivan Osokin to correct his mistakes when given a chance to relive his past. The conclusion fully anticipates the Fourth Way Philosophy which typified Ouspensky's later works, in particular the final chapter's description of the shocking realization of the mechanical nature of existence, its consequences, and the need to work in an esoteric school.

In this fantasy retelling of King Lear , Paxton intriguingly posits that the daughters' treatment of the old king demonstrates a conflict between matrilineal and patrilineal cultures. Leir, a leader of the Quiritani people from the Great Land, conquers the Painted People of Iron Age Britain. He fathers a daughter with each of three major queens, his favorite child being the youngest, Cridilla, who is trained, like her sisters, to join a long line of women warriors. When famine overtakes the land in Lier's old age, his oldest daughters secretly agitate his overthrow and a return to the rule of the Goddess. Cridilla, who loves a chieftain of the Quiritani of the Great Land, refuses to join her sisters when they make their false and honeyed promises to the king and is banished when her pregnancy is revealed. Later, Cridilla determines to battle her sisters and save her father, since she realizes that the old ways cannot return.

A MAN... A GIRL... AND CIVILIZATION IN THE BALANCE!

An uprising of subversive Earth mutants...

An attack by enemy aliens...

And Terra 10, Earth's only defense, is in the rebels' hands!

The outcome of this crisis will determine whether mankind will survive upon his planet-and one man, Zachary Whaleman, a blond giant of incredible strength and intelligence, holds the balance of power!

What will determine man's fate-Zach's Earth-normal upbringing or his tradition-defying love for one of the rebel girls?

"Our home began, as all things do, with a wish."

Jane Edwards hasn't spoken since she was eleven years old, when armed riders expelled her family from their hometown along with every other Black resident. Now, twelve years later, she's found a haven in the all-Black town of Awenasa. But the construction of a dam promises to wash her home under the waters of the new lake.

Jane will do anything to save the community that sheltered her. So, when a man with uncanny abilities arrives in town asking strange questions, she wonders if he might be the key. But as the stranger hints at gods and ancestral magic, Jane is captivated by a bigger mystery. She knows this man. Only the last time she saw him, he was dead. His body laid to rest in a rushing river.

Who is the stranger and what is he really doing in Awenasa? To find those answers, Jane will journey into a sunken world, a land of capricious gods and unsung myths, of salvation and dreams made real. But the flood waters are rising. To gain the miracle she desires, Jane will have to find her voice again and finally face the trauma of the past.

"Never make a deal with shadows at night, especially ones that know your name."

Washington D. C., 1925: Clara Johnson can talk to spirits - a gift that saved her during her darkest moments, now a curse that's left her indebted to the cunning spirit world. So when a powerful spirit offers her an opportunity to gain her freedom, Clara seizes the chance, no questions asked. The task: steal a magical ring from the wealthiest woman in the District.

Clara can't pull off this daring heist alone. She'll need the help of an unlikely team, from a handsome jazz musician able to hypnotize with a melody to an aging actor who can change his face, to pull off the impossible. But as they race along DC's legendary Black Broadway, conflict in the spirit world begins to leak into the human one - an insidious mystery is unfolding, one that could cost Clara her life and change the fate of an entire city.

Time is a weapon wielded by the rich, who have excess of it, against the rest, who must trade every breath of it against the promise of another day's food and shelter. What kind of world have we made, where human beings can live centuries if only they can afford the fix? What kind of creatures have we become? The same as we always were, but keener.

In the ancient heart of Oxford University, the ultra-rich celebrate their vastly extended lifespans. But a few surprises are in store for them. From Nina and Alex, Margo and Fidget, scruffy anarchists sharing living space with an ever-shifting cast of crusty punks and lost kids. And also from the scientist who invented the longevity treatment in the first place.

Everything Belongs to the Future is a bloody-minded tale of time, betrayal, desperation, and hope that could only have been told by the inimitable Laurie Penny.

The King was bored. For five hundred years he had been King of the country of Myth and Shadow, and he was a good king, if a slightly bewildered one.

Read the full story for free at Tor Reactor.

All prayers are answered, but sometimes the answer is no. And sometimes the answer is "let me talk to my manager and get back to you."

This short story can also be found in the anthology Worlds Seen in Passing: Ten Years of Tor.com Short Fiction (2018), edited by Irene Gallo.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

A 21st-Century Utopia

Two of England's most distinguished thinkers have created a bold and startling vision of a new society escaping the ashes of the old.

In the not-so-distant future, Man will have begun to colonize our planetary neighbor, Mars. Entrenched corporate and national interests have footed the bill, but a few visionary people attempt to keep Mars free of the hidebound ideologies that have plagued the Earth and turned it into a polluted wasteland of war and hunger.

The colony has barely begun to take root in the Martian soil when all communication with EUPACUS--as the industrialized nations of Earth are known--is cut off completely. Environmental and economic stresses have finally spun out of control, and civilization as we know it has collapsed. With no hope of escape or support from Earth, the Martians must overcome the dire obstacles that face them and forge a new alliance for survival.

Led by the brave Tom Jefferies, the colonists struggle to build a new way of living based on the search for knowledge, the improvement of human conditions, and the elimination of the hatreds and delusions that lead to misery in the past.

Included in an appendix is the complete text of the Charter for an Independent Mars, written by Dr. Laurence Lustgarten, a renowned expert on international law.

Elysium, Oklahoma, is a town like any other. Respectable. God-fearing. Praying for an end to the Dust Bowl. Until the day the people of Elysium are chosen by two sisters: Life and Death. And the Sisters like to gamble against each other with things like time, and space, and human lives. Elysium is to become the gameboard in a ruthless competition between the goddesses. The Dust Soldiers will return in ten years' time, and if the people of Elysium have not proved themselves worthy, all will be slain.

Nearly ten years later, seventeen-year-old Sal Wilkinson is called upon to lead Elysium as it prepares for the end of the game. But then an outsider named Asa arrives at Elysium's gates with nothing more than a sharp smile and a bag of magic tricks, and they trigger a terrible accident that gets both Sal and Asa exiled into the brutal Desert of Dust and Steel. There Sal and Asa stumble upon a gang of girls headed by another exile: a young witch everyone in Elysium believes to be dead. As the apocalypse looms, they must do more than simply tip the scales in Elysium's favor--only by reinventing the rules can they beat Life and Death at their own game in this exciting fantasy debut.

By night, the Ankou is a legendary, permanently young mercenary--the most fearsome sword for hire in all of the Five Lands, and its most abiding mystery. But when the sun rises, a dark magic leaves him no more than bones. Cursed with this cycle of death and resurrection, the Ankou wants only to find the final rest that has been prophesied for him, no matter the cost.

When the kingdom of Kaer-Ise is sacked, Flora, handmaiden to the royal family, is assaulted and left for dead. Wounded, heartbroken, and the sole survivor of the massacre, Flora wants desperately to be reunited with the princess she served and loved. She and the Ankou make a deal: He will help Flora find her princess, and train Flora in combat, in exchange for her aid in breaking his curse. But it isn't easy to kill an immortal, especially when their bond begins to deepen into something more...

London 1893. When Cora Seaborne's husband dies, she steps into her new life as a widow with as much relief as sadness: her marriage was not a happy one, and she never suited the role of society wife. Accompanied by her son Francis - a curious, obsessive boy - she leaves town for Essex, where she hopes fresh air and open space will provide the refuge they need.

When they take lodgings in Colchester, rumours reach them from further up the estuary that the mythical Essex Serpent, once said to roam the marshes claiming human lives, has returned to the coastal parish of Aldwinter. Cora, a keen amateur naturalist with no patience for religion or superstition, is immediately enthralled, convinced that what the local people think is a magical beast may be a previously undiscovered species. As she sets out on its trail, she is introduced to William Ransome, Aldwinter's vicar.

Like Cora, Will is deeply suspicious of the rumours, but he thinks they are founded on moral panic, a flight from real faith. As he tries to calm his parishioners, he and Cora strike up an intense relationship, and although they agree on absolutely nothing, they find themselves inexorably drawn together and torn apart, eventually changing each other's lives in ways entirely unexpected.

Nebula Awrd winning novelette

Luce and her band are one of the last independent musical groups, traveling and performing and not selling out to the Big Music Corporation. When they lose everything, will they give up their principles to get it all back?

Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, June 2015. The story can also be found in the anthology Nebula Awards Showcase 2017, edited by Julie E. Czerneda.

Read this story online for free at the author's website.

Inspired by the rich history of Chinese mythology, this sweeping fantasy is set in the ancient Kingdom of Xia and tells the coming of age story of Skybright, a young girl who worries about her growing otherness. As she turns 16, Skybright notices troubling changes. By day, she is a companion and handmaid to the youngest daughter of a very wealthy family. But nighttime brings with it a darkness that not even daybreak can quell. When her plight can no longer be denied, Skybright learns that despite a dark destiny, she must struggle to retain her sense of self - even as she falls in love for the first time.

A delightfully funny, fantastically inventive collection of twenty newly unearthed short stories by Sir Terry Pratchett, the award-winning and bestselling author of the phenomenally successful Discworld fantasy series. This special trove--featuring charming woodcut illustrations--is a must-have for Pratchett fans of all ages and includes a foreword by Neil Gaiman.

These rediscovered tales were written by Terry Pratchett under a pseudonym for British newspapers during the 1970s and 1980s. The stories have never been attributed to him until now, and might never have been found--were it not for the efforts of a few dedicated fans.

As Neil Gaiman writes in his introduction, "through all of these stories we watch young Terry Pratchett becoming Terry Pratchett." Though none of the short works are set in the Discworld, all are infused with Pratchett's trademark wit, satirical wisdom, and brilliant imagination, hinting at the magical universe he would go on to create.

Meet Og the inventor, the first caveman to cultivate fire, as he discovers the highs and lows of progress; haunt the Ministry of Nuisances with the defiant evicted ghosts of Pilgarlic Towers; visit Blackbury, a small market town with weird weather and an otherworldly visitor; and embark on a dangerous quest through time and space with hero Kron, which begins in the ancient city of Morpork...

Irresistibly entertaining, A Stroke of the Pen, is an essential collection from the great Sir Terry Pratchett, a "master storyteller" (A. S. Byatt) who "defies categorization" (The Times); a writer whose "novels have always been among the most serious of comedies, the most relevant and real of fantasies" (IndependentUK).

After her grandmother is murdered in a home invasion, Tamsin Culver leaves her cushy programming job in San Francisco and returns to her Midwestern hometown to settle the estate. What she doesn't expect is to find out her grandmother's life-changing secret: She's not an Earth native, but an exile from another level of the Nigh-Space continuum, an adjacent reality with technology far more advanced than ours. What's more, her grandmother ruled there as an oligarch, meaning Tamsin is the heir to vast wealth only accessible by someone from her bloodline... but the enemies who tried to exterminate her family won't be happy to see her return.

Back in the Bay Area, grad student Glenn makes a startling discovery about his girlfriend Vivy. She's a secret agent for the Interventionists: an interdimensional organisation devoted to protecting the inhabitants of Nigh-Space from those trying to take advantage of less-developed worlds. When she lands in trouble, Glenn finds himself on a sapient starship in a distant level of the continuum, racing to save her. But when Glenn and Vivy's plans clash with Tamsin's, and secret connections among them all are revealed, their situation becomes catastrophically complicated.

It's a princess of Nigh-Space versus a champion of Nigh-Space in a reality-spanning adventure that ranges from alien planets to mysterious space stations to Bay Area bars, with starship battles, cyborg augmentation, abductions, snark, betrayal, and fallout both nuclear and emotional.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, August 2018.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, December 2011.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

While Oppenheimer and his team race to develop the atomic bomb, a member of their team wants something more devastating: a bomb based on the principles of nuclear fusion -- the mechanism that feeds the sun.

Edward Teller's research into the sun leads to a terrifying discovery: that within decades the sun will eject its outermost layer, destroying the inner solar system, including Earth.

As the war ends with the dropping of the fission bombs on Japan, the group of scientists dedicate themselves for decades to saving the future of humanity. Despite the best efforts of the brightest scientists, the prospects for survival look bleak unless these genius can find a way to save humanity.

This Sturgeon Award nominated short story originally appeared in Apex Magazine, December 2018.

Read the full story for free at Apex Magazine.

Driving home late one night, Etain Larkin finds a corpse on a pitch-black country road deep in the Irish countryside. She takes the corpse to a remote farmhouse. So begins a night of unspeakable horror that will take her to the very brink of sanity.

She will never speak of it again.

Two decades later, Betty Fitzpatrick, newly arrived at college in Dublin, has already fallen in love with the drama society, and the beautiful but troubled Ashling Mallen. As their relationship blossoms, Ashling goes to great lengths to keep Betty away from her family, especially her alcoholic mother, Etain.

As their relationship blossoms, Betty learns her lover's terrifying family history, and Ashling's secret obsession. Ashling has become convinced that the horrors inflicted on her family are connected to a seemingly innocent children's TV show. Everyone in Ireland watched this show in their youth, but Ash soon discovers that no one remembers it quite the same way. And only Ashling seems to remember its star: a small black goat puppet who lives in a box and only comes out if you don't behave. They say he's never come out.

Almost never.

When the door between the known and unknown opens, it can never close again.

One woman. Endless options. Every choice has consequences.

Meek, play-it-safe Marsh has just turned forty-five, and her life is in shambles. Her career is stagnant, her marriage has imploded, and her teenage daughter grows more distant by the day. Marsh is convinced she's missed her chance at everything - romance, professional fulfillment, and adventure -- and is desperate for a do-over.

She can't believe her luck when she's selected to be the star of the global sensation All This and More, a show that uses quantum technology to allow contestants the chance to revise their pasts and change their present lives. It's Marsh's only shot to seize her dreams, and she's determined to get it right this time.

But even as she rises to become a famous lawyer, gets back together with her high school sweetheart, and travels the world, she begins to worry that All This and More's promises might be too good to be true. Because while the technology is amazing, something seems a bit off....

Can Marsh really make her life everything she wants it to be? And is it worth it?

Set in a dangerous near future world, The Book of M tells the captivating story of a group of ordinary people caught in an extraordinary catastrophe who risk everything to save the ones they love. It is a sweeping debut that illuminates the power that memories have not only on the heart, but on the world itself.

One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man's shadow disappears--an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories.

Ory and his wife Max have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day Max's shadow disappears too.

Knowing that the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to Ory, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up the time they have left together. Desperate to find Max before her memory disappears completely, he follows her trail across a perilous, unrecognizable world, braving the threat of roaming bandits, the call to a new war being waged on the ruins of the capital, and the rise of a sinister cult that worships the shadowless.

As they journey, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a new force growing in the south that may hold the cure.

Some places you won't find on any map. Others are only within maps.

Nell Young's whole life and greatest passion is cartography. Her father, Dr. Daniel Young, is a legend in the field, and Nell's personal hero. But she hasn't seen or spoken to him ever since he cruelly fired her and destroyed her reputation after an argument over an old, cheap gas station highway map.

But when Dr. Young is found dead in his office at the New York Public Library, with the very same seemingly worthless map hidden in his desk, Nell can't resist investigating. To her surprise, she soon discovers that the map is incredibly valuable, and also exceedingly rare. In fact, she may now have the only copy left in existence... because a mysterious collector has been hunting down and destroying every last one--along with anyone who gets in the way.

But why?

To answer that question, Nell embarks on a dangerous journey to reveal a dark family secret, and discover the true power that lies in maps...

More than a hundred years from now, an arborist fighting to save the last remaining forest on Earth discovers a secret about the trees - one that changes not only her life, but also the fate of our world.

Read the full story for free at Tor Reactor.

Set in 1938, this novel tells the story of the Corbetts, a family preparing for the coming war. As the world begins to collapse around them, Peter Corbett, a local lawyer, his wife, Joan, and their children make the decision to move away from the war zone after their house, and Corbett's offices, are destroyed. They quickly realise that escaping all the mayhem will be no easy task at all.

The novel addresses the issues of the aftermath of bombing, such as the spread of disease from lack of clean water, lack of food, lack of electricity, and what may be done to relieve the distress of those affected by the ills of modern warfare.

Identical twins Sean and Eric have been chosen for a daring experiment. One of them will travel into the distant past. The other into the distant future. But each swing of the time pendulum means they will be further and further apart Will the experiment work? And if it does, will the twins ever meet again?

Don't get out of bed... whatever happens.

This short story originally in chapbook edition in 2009. It can also be found in the anthologies The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 21 (2010), edited by Stephen Jones, The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Two (2010), edited by Ellen Datlow, and The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2010, edited by Paula Guran. The story is included in the collection Everything You Need (2013).

This short story originally appeared in the collection The Return of Count Electric and Other Stories (1993). It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eleventh Annual Collection (1994), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Christmas Magic (1994), edited by David G. Hartwell.

This novelette originally appeared in Tomorrow Speculative Fiction, December 1995. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF (1996), edited by David G. Hartwell. The story is included in the collection The Ocean and All Its Devices (2006).

Browning's latest excursion into horror and humor finds his oddball characters passionately contending with chaos, self-help, alcoholism, recovery, and --of course--real monsters.

Philip Kenan does not appear to be the most reliable narrator. Obsessed with H. P. Lovecraft's Great Old Ones, he keeps malign cosmic entities at bay by constantly revising his novel, The Despicable Quest. While Philip's preoccupied with the monsters lurking behind every cubicle at his dead-end job, his exasperated girlfriend flees — heading straight into the horror that lies at the heart of the corporate world.

William Browning Spencer's imaginative update on Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos offers a witty and wicked satire of office culture. This macabre masterpiece from one of America's foremost cult authors won the 1995 International Horror Critics Guild Award for Best Novel.

"If Woody Allen had ever written a Cthulhu Mythos novel, it might have come out like this." —The New York Review of Science Fiction

"An explosive story of menace, suspense, mystery, and love. Don't miss it." — Roger Zelazny

Author William Browning Spencer is "a brilliant writer of fantasy who's also a very considerable serious novelist." — Kirkus Reviews

WFA nominated novelette. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 2002. The story can also be found in the anthology New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (2011), edited by Paula Guran. It is included in the collection The Ocean and All Its Devices (2006).

This short story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 2000, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, December 2013. It is included in the collection The Ocean and All Its Devices (2006).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Lord of the Fantastic: Stories in Honor of Roger Zelazny (1998), edited by Martin H. Greenberg, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, #94 July 2014. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection (1999), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Dangerous Games (2007), edited by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann. The story is included in the collection The Ocean and All Its Devices (2006).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Fans of William Browning Spencer have been waiting more than ten years for this, his second collection of short stories. The Ocean and All Its Devices won't disappoint.

Spencer's first collection, The Return of Count Electric was acclaimed byreviewers in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Cemetery Dance, Publishers Weekly and other magazines and newspapers. Science fiction legend Roger Zelazny, once introduced to Spencer's work, became a lifelong devotee. He wrote: "William Browning Spencer is one of those rare short story writers who comes along once in a generation--like Saki, Collier, Sheckley--and manages to combine all of the virtues within that restricted format."

The Ocean and All Its Devices collects some of Spencer's finest published work. Three of these stories appeared in "year's best" anthologies. Another, "The Death of the Novel," was a finalist for a Bram Stoker Award, while "The Essayist in the Wilderness" was on the final ballot for a World Fantasy Award.

In stories within:

• The proprietor of a seaside resort puzzles over the yearly off-season pilgrimage of a curiously solemn couple and their fey child. ("The Ocean and All Its Devices")
• A marriage made in a heaven of parallel worlds is tested by impossible luck, both good and bad. ("The Oddskeeper's Daughter")
• A virtual reality addictions counselor is on the run with his zoned-out client, pursued by the relentless architects of a seductive virtual game called Apes and Angels. ("The Halfway House at the Heart of Darkness")
• A young girl, who speaks only in lines of poetry culled from world literature, is poised between two universes while a social worker struggles to save her--and, perhaps, doom a universe. ("Foster Child")
• A circus magician races against time as the world threatens to end, not with a bang or a whimper, but with the flick of a switch. ("The Lights of Armageddon")

Here, at last, are these stories and other uncollected gems, the rest of William Browning Spencer's short fiction.

Limited: 750 signed numbered hardcover copies

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by William Browning Spencer
• The Ocean and All Its Devices - (1994)
• The Oddskeeper's Daughter - (1995)
• The Death of the Novel - (1995)
• Downloading Midnight - (1995)
• Your Faithful Servant - (1993)
• The Foster Child - (2000)
• The Halfway House at the Heart of Darkness - (1998)
• The Lights of Armageddon - (1994)
• The Essayist in the Wilderness - (2002)

Another decade has elapsed, and William Browning Spencer has produced another superlative collection of short stories that commingle horror and humor.

A number of these tales are cautionary ones. After reading "The Tenth Muse," you might not wish to interview a reclusive writer who wrote one wildly popular novel and has been silent for decades, even if your father was his closest friend.

You might not wish to become a writer at all. "The Indelible Dark" portrays one lost in a dystopian novel he is writing, coming to the slow and unsettling discovery that he carries his own darkness into the mundane world.

These monsters aren't metaphors. Alcoholism might be the monster in "Penguins of the Apocalypse," but the disease has its own familiar, a creature born in folklore, nothing as warm as that oversized rabbit that Jimmy Stewart talked to in "Harvey." And it's got your son.

"Stone and the Librarian" isn't a monster story. It is the story of an unhappy young man who is trying to find his place in a Robert E. Howard world of swords and sorcery but is constantly dragged back to the effete world of his pale and sickly classmates. They read a book by some famous guy, a book called The Catcher in the Rye, in which a kid named Holden keeps going on about how phony everything is. Stone's book report begins, "If I met Holden Caulfield in an alley, I would kill him with a rock."

In "The Unorthodox Dr. Draper," a psychologist has abandoned the strict rigor of his professional life for something more improvisational with a client who tells him, "I know when they follow me. I am like a mouse that knows the shadow of the owl because the mouse must be quick or she is dead."

If this is your first encounter with Mr. Spencer's stories, it is a good introduction. If you have read other books by him, The Unorthodox Dr. Draper and other stories is essential.

There are two versions of Harry Gainesborough's bestselling children's book Zod Wallop: the published version, written second, and the original version, stolen by Harry's zealous fan, Raymond Story, while Harry and Raymond were both patients in a mental hospital. The published version has a happy ending; the private version was Harry's confrontation with the death of his child. And the private version, emotionally true and infused with the power of a group hallucination, ending with the destruction of the world, is becoming real.

It's inevitable that Zod Wallop will be compared to The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll; both are about authors of Oz-like children's books whose literary creations leak over into our world. Both are dark in tone, and in both death and denial are key elements, but Spencer's poignant story owes as much to Philip K. Dick as to Carroll.

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Harry Gainesborough, ex-writer of children's books, just wants to be left alone. But the world--several worlds, actually--won't let him. Raymond Story, escaped from Harwood Psychiatric (and now married to Emily, a catatonic girl that Raymond declares is the Frozen Princess) has enlisted some of his fellow patients and is intent on saving the world--with Harry's help.

Nonsense, of course. But a Ralewing (a nasty sort of flying sting ray that Harry invented for his book) appears to have eaten the paint from the roof of Harry's car; the ruthless executive of a large pharmaceutical company bears an unsettling resemblance to Zod Wallop's evil Lord Draining, and a hotel in Florida could be about to host the end of the world...

The conspirators gathered... from all walks of life. the soldier, the gambler, the minstrel, the scholar. The Queen's own waiting woman. The Queen's own son. They gathered to prove the treachery of a duke who wanted the kingdom for his own. But the duke had the trust of the queen. And the sorcery of the Serpent's Egg.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, January 2015. It can also be found in the anthology Wilde Stories 2016: The Year's Best Gay Speculative Fiction, edited by Steve Berman.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Unity Penfold arrives home one day to her quiet residential street to find that her house has vanished into thin air. Worse, her children's school has no record of them, and no trace of her husband can be found. Her neighbors and friends show no signs of recognizing her as anything but a complete stranger.

When she is taken to hospital and informed that she has been identified as a missing woman, Sarah Davies, no one will believe her desperate protests about her true identity. Is she the victim of a monstrous practical joke? Is she delusional or insane? Or has she somehow slipped into some sort of alternate reality? To avoid the asylum, she has no choice but to become Sarah as she sets out to search for answers to the bizarre and horrific nightmare in which she suddenly finds herself.

Margaret Tabor's Unity Penfold (1980), repackaged for the American paperback horror market in 1982 as Nightmare Street, is a weird and suspenseful story in the vein of The Twilight Zone that will keep readers guessing until its final surprising revelation. This new edition features both the original British ending and the alternate extended ending from the American edition.

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

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

A space opera adventure set in a universe controlled and run by Jewish religious authorities. An enforcer is sent to a distant planet where he discovers an android who changes his mind about what is right and wrong.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

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

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

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

Pendulum collects six previously unpublished short works by A.E. van Vogt, along with a non-fiction essay detailing his thoughts at witnessing the launch of Apollo Seventeen and one story from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction that he wrote in collaboration with Harlan Ellison.

Contents:

• 7 - Pendulum
• 38 - The Male Condition
• 51 - Living with Jane
• 82 - The First Rull
• 102 - Footprint Farm
• 114 - The Non-Aristotelian Detective
• 123 - The Human Operators
• 142 - The Launch of Apollo XVII

Decades before Field of Dreams there was The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, the classic baseball fable that became the hit movie and musical Damn Yankees. Now a new generation is ready to discover this delightful book, restored to its original title, with a new introduction by baseball writer Bill James.

Baseball lovers everywhere can identify with Joe Boyd, a die-hard Washington Senators fan who puts his soul in hock to help them wrest the pennant away from the hated, all-conquering Yankees. Transformed by the sulfurous Mr. Applegate's satanic magic into twenty-two-year-old phenom Joe Hardy, he leads the hapless Senators in a torrid late-season pursuit of the men in pinstripes. Joe has until September 21st before the deal becomes final--and eternal. With the luscious temptress Lola to distract him, he'll have a hell of a time wriggling out of the bargain...

This short story originally appeared in Beloit Fiction Journal, Spring 2016. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017, edited by Rich Horton, and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017, edited by Charles Yu and John Joseph Adams. The story is included in the collection Children of the New World (2016).

Deals with an ominous Near Future, where the advancement in Communications will allow Subliminal messages to control populations.

The sixties ... a foreign country: they did things differently then. Or did they?

An Englishman's home, supposedly, is his castle, and property developer Rod Gawfrey was incensed when a gang of hooligans gate-crashed his son's party, infiltrating the luxury residence that was also home to his wife's parents and her sister Jane.

He had no inkling then of the mayhem that was on its way, as the nation's youth rose up in revolt, social order gave way to anarchy, and he and his family were reduced to penury.

Jane hadn't seen it coming either, despite her professional and more personal connection to Professor Walter Staunton, the opportunist and lascivious academic bent on fomenting the revolution.

A pendulum, though, once set in motion, must inevitably swing back. And who would have guessed that Martin, Jane's timid, God-fearing brother, would have a key role to play in the vicious wave of righteous retribution that would next sweep the land?

When the strange hourglass-shaped time machine crashed out of the twentieth century and into the Caribbean Sea of fourteen hundred years ago, Neil Falsen realized how unprepared he was to head the expedition that his father had organized back through time. Of the four men who had flown through centuries to solve the mystery of an ancient Mayan god, two had died in the shattering crash. Only Neil and ship's pilot Dave remained to cope with the language and customs of a people who had disappeared into the darkness of history.

It was confusing enough not to know which century the machine had fallen into. But Neil was sure his eyes were playing tricks when he spotted a Norse ship cutting proudly through southern seas. How ancient Vikings, Mayas and two twentieth-century Americans met - and fought - amid the splendors of a civilization that today dots the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico with its ruins, makes a tale as unique in telling as it is in content.

In scenes that throb with drama and thunder with excitement, Dave and Neil found frightening evidence of the approaching Mayan collapse. With a common modern device, Neil stepped into a tense religious ceremony to prevent human sacrifice. Without realizing it, he discovered the secret of the white god among the Mayan Indian dieties.

One of history's most intriguing suppositions forms the basis for this tale of the secret behind the legend of a lost civilization.

Pennterra is a beautiful and fertile planet and humanity’s last hope for survival. But Pennterra is already inhabited. After warning other colony ships to stay away, the small advance colony of Quakers has adapted to life on Pennterra. Heeding the empathic warnings of the native hrossa, they have settled in a single valley, sharply limited their population, and continued to use no heavy machinery in their building and farming. But surviving under these conditions has left the Quakers little time to learn more about their native neighbors. Catastrophe or peace—Tanka Wakan, the omnipotent master spirit of Pennterra, will decide.

Star Trek: The Next Generation blended speculative science fiction and space opera in its portrayal of communication. Multiple modes of communication used between characters are presented and the multilevel tapestry of communication in the series is critical in its appeal.

This book proposes that these patterns of communication reveal a foundational philosophy of Star Trek (while enticing millions of viewers).

These patterns serve both to cause strong empathetic connections with characters and to impel viewers to form relationships with the show, explaining their extreme devotion.

Table of Contents:

• A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions - short story
• Muir on Shasta - short story
• A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations - (1991) - novelette

At the beginning of the 22nd century, Earth colonies were established on Mars and Venus. But the ultimate dream - to travel to the stars - was still an impossibility. A few enlightened men believed that the Vorsters and the Harmonists could solve this seemingly insurmountable problem, if they could only forget their differences and work together.

Rowan faces her most dangerous monster-slaying challenge yet, confronting what could be the most infamous monster of all, in the third book in this fantastical series by New York Times bestselling author, Kelley Armstrong.

Rowan is Tamarel's Royal Monster Hunter, and her twin brother, Rhydd, will be its king. After the events of The Gryphon's Lair, Rowan, along with her friends, her brother and an entourage of monstrous companions, makes her way back to the Dunnian Woods to deal with the pack of dropbears the group trapped in an abandoned cabin after a vicious attack. The dropbears are just one of a number of rare monster species acting erratically in Tamarel.

After a swarm of colocolos nearly tramples the group, Rowan becomes convinced that someone (or something) is driving these monsters out of their natural habitats. But nothing can prepare the Royal Monster Hunter for the truth of the matter: monsters even bigger and deadlier than gryphons have returned to the world, and their nest-building, as well as the actions of the humans trying to drive them out, has upset the balance of nature in Tamarel.

Do Rowan's monster magnet skills work against the most fearsome monsters imaginable? Find out in this exciting third book in the Royal Guide to Monster Slaying series!

The guerilla war against the Second Alliance and its plans for a European apartheid intensifies in this second volume of John Shirley's A Song Called Youth trilogy. From its beginning, thwarting the Second Alliance has been the first priority of the New Resistance; now the SA has decided it was time to return the favor, Resistance could not be allowed to interfere with the progress of the SA's master plan. Eliminating the rebels will clear the way for Project Total Eclipse, which in turn would stretch the SA's shadow over every remaining outpost of humanity--selecting scapegoats, directing violence, and creating an immutable new order. And the penumbra of the Eclipse would establish complete SA control over the Grid, the space colony and the survivors of the war... and also it to decide the fate of humanity.

Anok Wati, a young warrior of the streets, strikes a pact with an ancient and forbidden god who gives him a seemingly impossible task. To unravel the mysteries of the past and avenge his father's death, Anok must join the sinister cult of the snake-god Set--and destroy them from within.

In an all-new "Alien Nation novel, a chance encounter with a mysterious woman from his past propels Detective Matt Sikes into an investigation of a lethal Newcomer drug, and forces the woman he loves to risk her life for someone she's never even met. Meanwhile, tension mounts between Sikes and his Newcomer partner, George Francisco, as each is forced to deal with the range of emotions evoked by this unusual case. As they delve deeper into the intricate maze of L.A.'s illegal drug market, Fransicso and Sikes discover that some Newcomers will do anything to assimilate into human society-- even face the horrifying and deadly consequences that could destroy them all.

The constellation of Hydri, also called the Serpent, became an undesirable destination during the era of humanity's most prolific interstellar colonization. For Hydri was under strict quarantine because it harbored an intelligent and dangerous alien race, the insectoid majat. Yet human colonies predating the quarantine did exist in this sector of space, which they called Serpent's Reach. Cut off from others of their own kind, they had their own inbred culture and special relationships with the alien majat.

Raen was the only survivor of the massacred Sul family, and she had made a pledge to devote her life to seeking vengeance for her slain clan. Her thirst for revenge would take her not only across the worlds of the Reach, but into the very center of an alien webwork that knit the stars of the forbidden constellation into a complex of interbred alien hives that no outsider could hope to unravel, and where most of humanity dared not go.

Margerit Sovitre did not expect to inherit Baron Saveze's fortunes--even less his bodyguard, a ruthlessly efficient swordswoman known only as Barbara. Wealth suddenly makes Margerit a highly eligible heiress and buys her the enmity of the new Baron. He had expected to inherit all, and now eyes her fortune with open envy.

Barbara proudly served as the old Baron's duelist but she had expected his death to make her a free woman. Bitterness turns to determination when she finds herself the only force that stands between Margerit and the new Baron's greed.

At first Margerit protests the need for Barbara's services, but soon she cannot imagine sending Barbara away. And Barbara's duty has become something far more hazardous to her heart than the point of a sword. But greater dangers loom than one man's hatred--the Prince of Alpennia is ill. Deadly intrigue surrounds the succession and the rituals of divine power known as The Mysteries of the Saints.

Heather Rose Jones debuts with a sweeping story rich in intrigue and the clash of loyalties and love.

Antuniet Chazillen lost everything the night her brother was executed. In exile, she swore that treason would not be the final chapter of the Chazillen legacy in Alpennia's history. A long- hidden book of alchemical secrets provides the first hope of success, but her return to the capital is haunted by an enemy who wants those secrets for himself.

Jeanne, Vicomtesse de Cherdillac is bored. The Rotenek season is flat, her latest lover has grown tediously jealous and her usual crowd of friends fails to amuse. When Antuniet turns up on her doorstep seeking patronage for her alchemy experiments, what begins as amusement turns to interest, then something deeper. But Antuniet's work draws danger that threatens even the crown of Alpennia.

The alchemy of precious gems throws two women into a crucible of adversity, but it is the alchemy of the human heart that transforms them both in this breathtaking follow-up to the widely acclaimed Daughter of Mystery.

Winner of the Gaylactic Spectrum Best Novel Award

All her life, Serafina Talarico has searched in vain for a place where she and her mystical talents belong. She never found it in Rome--the city of her birth--where her family's Ethiopian origins marked them as immigrants. After traveling halfway across Europe to study with Alpennia's Royal Thaumaturgist, her hopes of finding a home among Margerit Sovitre's circle of scholars are dashed, for Serafina can perceive, but not evoke, the mystical forces of the Mysteries of the Saints and even Margerit can't awaken her talents.

When Serafina takes lodgings with Luzie Valorin, widowed music teacher and aspiring composer, both their lives are changed forever. Luzie's music holds a power to rival the Mysteries, and Serafina alone has the vision to guide her talents. For sorcery threatens the fate of Alpennia--indeed of all of Europe--locking the mountains in a malevolent storm meant to change the course of history. Alpennia's mystic protections are under attack and the key to survival may lie in the unlikeliest of places: Luzie's ambition to write an opera on the life of the medieval philosopher Tanfrit.

Enter the world of Sky Knife: A Mayan youth who was cursed with an unlucky name from birth. From a vision given to his mother, Sky Knife is pledged to honor whatever destiny the gods have decreed. Farmer, soldier, merchant--all these roads are closed to him. He isn't even worthy as a sacrifice to the gods. Sometimes, however, the gods have a very wicked sense of humor... and what some sages think of as the worst cosmic luck may in fact be the touch of the gods' own hands.

From temple pariah to hero, Sky Knife discovers the magic within him and not only thwarts all the evil plots surrounding his king, but wins the hand of the beautiful and beloved Jade Flute in the process. Enemies vanquished and evil magic dispelled, life is good. And as Sky Knife prepares for the birth of a long-awaited child, it seems like the fates have given him all that he desires. But it appears the gods aren't quite done with Sky Knife just yet. He is to be sent to the distant city-kingdom of Teotihuacan, to bring greetings and to reopen diplomatic ties with these strange people.

From missed meetings to strange guides, corrupt counselors to a bizarre court, Sky Knife feels his world shifting dangerously out of balance. And when the Teotihuacan king is killed and bad luck seems to descend upon his kingdom, it is left to Sky Knife to solve the riddle of his death. Or he will be slaughtered in the killer's stead.

Vampire hunter Anita Blake has always managed to overcome everything she faces. But this time there's a monster that even she doesn't know how to fight...

A remote Florida island is the perfect wedding destination for the upcoming nuptials of Anita's fellow U.S. Marshal and best friend, Edward. For Anita, the vacation is a welcome break, as it's the first trip she gets to take with just wereleopards Micah and Nathaniel. But it's not all fun and games and bachelor parties...

In this tropical paradise, Micah discovers a horrific new form of lycanthropy, one that has afflicted a single family for generations. Believed to be the result of an ancient Greek curse, it turns human bodies into a mass of snakes.

When long-simmering resentment leads to a big blow-up within the wedding party, the last thing Anita needs is more drama. But it finds her anyway when women start disappearing from the hotel, and worse, her own friends and lovers are considered the prime suspects. There's a strange power afoot that Anita has never confronted before, a force that's rendering those around her helpless. Unable to face it on her own, Anita is willing to accept help from even the deadliest places. Help that she will most certainly regret--if she survives at all, that is...

In the lost world of prehistory, a girl is born. Is she a goddess? Cija herself believes that she is. For seventeen years her mother, the Dictatress, has kept her imprisoned in an isolated tower. When she is released, it is with a mission: to seduce Zerd, the snake-scaled general of an occupying army--and stab him to death. This fantastic story of love, jealousy and sudden death is unlike anything you have ever read. It grips the imagination from start to finish.

This novel was later split into two books titled The Serpent and The Dragon.

In the lost world of prehistory, a girl is born. Is she a goddess? Cija herself believes that she is. For seventeen years her mother, the Dictatress, has kept her imprisoned in an isolated tower. When she is released, it is with a mission: to seduce Zerd, the snake-scaled general of an occupying army--and stab him to death. This fantastic story of love, jealousy and sudden death is unlike anything you have ever read. It grips the imagination from start to finish.

This is the first half of the novel originally published under the same title in 1963 by Hodder and Stoughton. The second volume is called The Dragon.

There are four sons of Lot at court and Sir Gaheris knows himself to be the least of them. Yet the charismatic and headstrong young knight Sir Lamorak looks up to him, despite more obvious choices, and when Lamorak catches his mother's eye, Gaheris knows there's trouble brewing. Soon he finds himself at the centre of family tensions, deceit and tragedy. Can he prevent the bloodshed that seems inevitable?

Moon, once a solitary wanderer, has become consort to Jade, sister queen of the Indigo Cloud court. Together, they travel with their people on a pair of flying ships in hopes of finding a new home for their colony. Moon finally feels like he's found a tribe where he belongs. But when the travelers reach the ancestral home of Indigo Cloud, shrouded within the trunk of a mountain-sized tree, they discover a blight infecting its core. Nearby they find the remains of the invaders who may be responsible, as well as evidence of a devastating theft. This discovery sends Moon and the hunters of Indigo Cloud on a quest for the heartstone of the tree - a quest that will lead them far away, across the Serpent Sea.

Calliope just wants to make it big in the Big Apple like any other working girl. But Callie is also Death's Daughter, no matter how much she tries to stay out of the family business. And now her older sister has made a deal with the Devil himself to engage in a hostile takeover of both Death Inc. and Heaven-once they get Callie out of the way.

Margaret Atwood returns with a shrewd, funny, and insightful retelling of the myth of Odysseus from the point of view of Penelope. Describing her own remarkable vision, the author writes in the foreword, "I've chosen to give the telling of the story to Penelope and to the twelve hanged maids. The maids form a chanting and singing Chorus, which focuses on two questions that must pose themselves after any close reading of the Odyssey: What led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really up to? The story as told in the Odyssey doesn't hold water: there are too many inconsistencies. I've always been haunted by the hanged maids and, in The Penelopiad, so is Penelope herself." One of the high points of literary fiction in 2005, this critically acclaimed story found a vast audience and is finally available in paperback.

An elite young man with a dark side develops a deep, aggressive relationship with his former doctor.

Wealthy and handsome, yet mentally unstable--He Yu has returned home from overseas with one goal in mind: to win the heart of Xie Xue, the girl of his dreams. However, in his time away, he has nursed more than unrequited feelings. He must confront his long-held grudge against Xie Xue's overprotective brother, Xie Qingcheng, who doesn't think He Yu capable of love.

But history is not easily rewritten. As He Yu's former doctor, Xie Qingcheng is the only person in the world who truly understands He Yu's volatile mental illness. When the two are involved in an explosive incident that exposes a dark secret, Xie Qingcheng's suspicions about He Yu are confirmed. Now, He Yu must confront his own demons... including his dark obsession with Xie Qingcheng.

A final confrontation between old and new, between tyrannical magic and freedom, and between an empire and a growing nation - state that will determine the fate of millions - and not least the brave band of colonists who set out from Hamilay to settle Kydan with courage and hope in their hearts.

Meet Lady Amelia Smallhope, for whom there is no problem that can't be solved by a drink and a think.

And Pennyroyal, for whom there is no problem. Ever.

Everyone's favourite bounty hunters. Sorry - recovery agents. No bad guy they can't handle. No expense account too flexible. No adventure too outrageous.

Join them as they settle scores, break every rule in the book and take the world by storm. Fasten your seatbelts. The timeline doesn't know what's hit it.

Emma Develle is a struggling artist trying to eke out a living in the big city. The violent and apparently supernatural death of her Aunt Johanna begins a strange series of events that will change Emma's life forever.

Staying in her aunt's house, Emma is drawn to a mural that seems to change before her eyes. Like a modern-day Alice in Wonderland Emma discovers a doorway to the magical world of Eronth, where ancient goddesses are engaged in a bloody power battle with a clan of fallen angels, the Azephim. These dark angels are intent on charging the sacred Eom crystal, the single source of power for all known worlds. Their possession of this crystal will hurl these worlds into desolation and chaos.

Khartyn the Crone and her apprentice Rosedark are Emma's guides in Eronth. Wise Khartyn recognises Emma as the prophesied 'Crossa', a time traveller with the ability to prevent the Eom crystal from charging. The Azephim are determined to capture and brainwash Emma to use her as a pawn in their evil and destructive game. Emma must use every part of her being to save herself from violent obvlivion.

Despite Emma Develle's best efforts, the sacred Eom crystal has started to recharge, throwing the magical Goddess-worshipping world of Eronth into deadly turmoil. Meanwhile, Maya, daughter of Emma and the mysterious Stag Man, is raised to womanhood oblivious to both her identity and destiny in the struggle to come.

Maya finds herself in a world threatened with destruction. The sinister Lightcaster feeds off the Eom's dark energy to orchestrate bloody witch hunts; the Sea Hags fulfil ancient prophecies by invading the land; and the Azephim dark angels scheme to realise their dreams of supremacy by harnessing the Eom's power and Maya's future. Amid this chaos Maya begins on a long road to self-discovery, helped by the Wizards of the Circle of Nine, freed after thousands of years trapped in stone.

On Earth, Emma's house is occupied by a New-Age cult whose leader's esoteric powers are frighteningly real. But he knows little about his own angelic lineage and even less about the Azephim and other dangerous entities drawn to the house's portal between the worlds.

Maya's destiny unfolds as she falls in love with Bwani, leader of the Circle of Nine – but are their combined powers enough to stop the dark forces destroying not only Eronth, but Earth too?

First came the flies and the bees. Then the wild dog attacks and sightings by locals of terrifying beings. The wail of the Banshee is heard. Erinyes, Pan and the Wild Hunt are on the move. The old ones demand blood... the killings begin.

In Circle of Nine a coven of witches unleashed chaos by opening a portal to Eronth, a parallel world where magic, prophecy and ancient myths are real. Now the coven return to close the portal. But dark forces are working against them. Is one of their own betraying them?

Eronth is on the edge of ruin. Its cunning folk have been decimated by witch hunts and are beset by invaders. Behind all this chaos lies the Eom crystal, ever growing in power and now with an offspring of equal evil.

The faith and strength of Khartyn, Gwyndion, Maya and others are pushed to the limit as they face the horrific culmination of deadly energies. Not all of them will prove equal to the challenge. Heroes will fall by the wayside. Who will make the ultimate sacrifice?

Readers have learned to expect the unexpected from Peter F. Hamilton. Now the master of space opera focuses on near-future Earth and one most unusual family. The result is a coming-of-age tale like no other. By turns comic, erotic, and tragic, Misspent Youth is a profound and timely exploration of all that divides and unites fathers and sons, men and women, the young and the old.

2040. After decades of concentrated research and experimentation in the field of genetic engineering, scientists of the European Union believe they have at last conquered humankind's most pernicious foe: old age. For the first time, technology holds out the promise of not merely slowing the aging process but actually reversing it. The ancient dream of the Fountain of Youth seems at hand.

The first subject for treatment is seventy-eight-year-old philanthropist Jeff Baker. After eighteen months in a rejuvenation tank, Jeff emerges looking like a twenty-year-old. And the change is more than skin deep. From his hair cells down to his DNA, Jeff is twenty--with a breadth of life experience.

But while possessing the wisdom of a septuagenarian at age twenty is one thing, raging testosterone is another, as Jeff discovers when he attempts to pick up his life where he left off. Suddenly his oldest friends seem, well, old. Jeff's trophy wife looks better than she ever did. His teenage son, Tim, is more like a younger brother. And Tim's nubile girlfriend is a conquest too tempting to resist.

Jeff's rejuvenated libido wreaks havoc on the lives of his friends and family, straining his relationship with Tim to the breaking point. It's as if youth is a drug and Jeff is wasted on it. But if so, it's an addiction he has no interest in kicking.

As Jeff's personal life spirals out of control, the European Union undergoes a parallel meltdown, attacked by shadowy separatist groups whose violent actions earn both condemnation and applause. Now, in one terrifying instant, the personal and the political will intersect, and neither Jeff nor Tim--or the Union itself--will ever be the same again.

Conan joins a mercenary band working for Prince Ivor who seeks to usurp his Uncle Strabonus. When Ivor unexpectedly reconciles with his uncle, he determines to kill the mercenaries rather than pay them.

In the ancient land of Shem, Conan joins with tomb-robbers to loot the untold wealth piled up in the huge royal mausoleum, yet so simple a decision enmeshes the mighty Cimmerian in intrigues and danger on every side.

In the ancient land of Nemedia, Conan of Cimmeria agrees to impersonate Baron Eihnarson's son and heir in order to escape a foul prison cell--at least until he can escape completely, with a pouch full of gold. Calissa, the Baron's sensuous daughter, has other plans for Conan, as does Evadne, the voluptuous rebel maiden. Palace intrigues swirl--poison in the cup and the assassin's dagger in the dark--and Conan must lead the army of Diander against the Cult of the Snake, the demon which burns and slays all whom it does not concert to half-serpent slaves of an ancient evil. In mouldering tombs the dead Lords of Einharson stir, and rise to strike down any who would threaten their line.

In the steaming jungles of Venji, Conan of Cimmeria fights in a war seemingly without end, a war against drug-crazed raiders who strike without warning and vanish like smoke, a war against the implacable wizard, Mojourna. Yet his enemies are not only those he can see.

The intrigues of the powerful court eunuchs reach south from Imperial Aghrapur, and the plottings of generals who would sit on the throne, and even the conjurings of his own mind, will be turned against him.

Only one man could survive. Only one man could triumph. Only Conan the Hero.

Conan of Cimmeria, who swaggered into the civilized lands as a youthful warrior with a strong sword and arm, has now used that sword to take a kingdom. He is King Conan of Aquilonia, but armies--led by a bloodthirsty, long-forgotten god--march to pull him down.

The ancient hierarchs of the desert city of Qjara did not want the young man called Conan of Cimmeria inside their walls with his strange, northland ways.He did not even worship the One True Goddess. yet some would ensnare him in the city's intrigues: the beautiful Princess Afrianda, with powers she does not fully understand herself, and Zaius, foremost swordsman of the Temple warriors. Their paths are like nothing Conan has seen before, following labyrinthine trails he cannot imagine, thrusting him toward banishment or death. And in the dying city of Sark, the soulless High Priest Khumanos wields the legendary Sword of Onothimantos and schemes for the return of ancient gods.

Qjara does not want Conan, but only one man can prevent the sacrifice of the city to the Tree of Mouths. Only one-- Conan the Outcast.

After a gambling dispute erupts into violence and death, Conan of Cimmeria is condemned to the hellish mine pits of Brythunia where no man has ever escaped--or survived. But Conan breaks free and disappears into the wilderness, far from civilization, and into the eager arms of Songa, a forest maiden. Still the demon-goddess Ninga has seized control of Brythunia and her insatiable appetite for human sacrifice threatens to devour the world. Only one man can strike at the very heart of Ninga's religion of blood. A man who carries death in his eyes.

Sailing under the grim skull-jack flag of the Red Brotherhood, Conan is the most feared pirate to prowl the Vilayet Sea, claiming as hi booty even Philiope, the beautiful black-haired daughter of a powerful nobleman. But in the domed imperial palace of Aghrapur, the decadent Emperor Yildiz and his corrupt allies plot the destruction of the powerful barbarian the know only as Amra the Lion.

As Conan carves a pirate empire with cutlass and dagger, the Turanian navy takes to the seas, aided by hellish sorcery of the darkest sort. Mighty ships manned by undead zombies, and a titanic monster summoned from the nether depths, are pitted against the deadly sword of one man... Conan of the Red Brotherhood.

Conan, hailed and feared as chief of the pirate brotherhood, has built an island kingdom on the stormy waters of the Vilayet. He plays off one mainland empire against another amid the stirrings of a sorcerous war that will set the sea aboil with blood. The lure of ancient treasure draws Conan into a trap woven by the arch-wizard Croyalus.

When Conan puts Roganthus the Strongman out of commission in a street brawl he soon finds himself drawn in by the slender Sathilda and her pet panther as part of a travelling troupe. What starts as an innocent pastime turns into a deadly game when the circus is called to the Arena of the Stygian capital of Luxor. There they are forced to fight for their lives against exotic warriors and all manner of wild beasts. no one has yet survived the whims of the tyrannical Emperor Commodorus.

And then there are the foul sorceries of the black-robed priests of the snake-god Set...

When Queen Rufia entreats the Cinnerian to save her city from the undead with Zeriti's spell, the mighty warrior must strive to overcome his dread of the supernatural. For to undo the hex he must journey through the nightmare world of the dead. There lies the Silver Lotus, the only antidote tothe nefarious incantation. But thee also dwells the witch's bloodthirsty lover, who Conan must defeat should he wish to return to the world of the living.

Awakened from a centuries-long spell of sleep, Serroi finds the world she once knew is now haunted by a strange evil force. As this terrifying enemy scourges the land, Serroi is forced into a struggle against evil she barely understands.

THEIR BATTLES ENDED IN VICTORY

Lydia returns to Mudaire to enter training at the healing temple. But instead of fighting to save lives, she's convinced she is doing more harm than good. She delves into the history of the gods only to discover a truth that will change her life forever.

His birthright as commander of the Royal Army is finally in his grasp, but Killian feels anything but victorious. Burdened by his past, he embraces the darker side of his mark--and in doing so, risks starting a war.

BUT THE WAR HAS ONLY JUST BEGUN

Having defeated the tyrant Urcon, Marcus struggles to form a lasting alliance with the Arinoquians. But he is plagued by the knowledge that there is a traitor among his friends, and it could cost him everything that he's fought for.

Torn between her growing allegiance to the Thirty-Seventh legion and her need to liberate her people, Teriana finds herself mired in a web of secrets. She embarks upon a path that will either save everyone she loves - or put them all in their graves.

Summer, 1936. In England, an assassin is loose. Someone is killing young people who possess Talents. As terror overtakes Britain, Kim Tavistock, now officially employed by England's Secret Intelligence Service, is sent on her first mission: to the remote Sulcliffe Castle in Wales, to use her cover as a journalist to infiltrate a spiritualist cult that may have ties to the murders. Meanwhile, Kim's father, trained spy Julian Tavistock runs his own parallel investigation -- and discovers the terrifying Nazi plot behind the serial killings.

Cut off from civilization, Sulcliffe Castle is perched on a forbidding headland above a circle of standing stones only visible at low tide. There, Kim shadows a ruthless baroness and her enigmatic son, plying her skills of deception and hearing the truths people most wish to hide. But as her cover disguise unravels, Kim learns that the serial killer is closing in on a person she has grown to love. Now, Kim must race against the clock not just to prevent the final ritual killing -- but to turn the tide of the looming war.

Rescued from unspeakable horror, Ishbel Brunelle has devoted her life to the Order of the Coil, a sacred cult that reads the future in the entrails of its human sacrifices. But the Serpent has loftier plans for the archpriestess, and an eerie, eldritch warning: Prepare for the Lord of Elcho Falling.

Perils abound in a realm beset by treachery, and above all looms the DarkGlass Mountain -- once known as the Threshold -- as the terrible Dark God Kanubai prepares to emerge from his prison in exile.

The Circle are the modern-day successors of the Knights of the Round Table. Armed with the latest military hardware and operating from a hidden fortress on the South Bank, they protect 21st-century Britain from certain very specific threats - criminals who, like the Circle's own Knights, have characters from Arthurian legend living inside their heads.

Jory Taylor, the Knight bearing the device of Sir Gawain, has grappled on the Circle's behalf with mercenaries, serial killers and far-right terrorist cells. However, when he is captured by Gawain's traditional enemy the Green Knight, he discovers a new side to the myths he lives by - one which, as he learns more about this clandestine world, becomes both threateningly personal and terrifyingly political. The legends of King Arthur are not the only stories with influence on the British psyche - and some of the others have their own, very different agendas.

A smart, contemporary political thriller and a new kind of urban fantasy, The Pendragon Protocol is the first volume in The Devices Trilogy.

A ferocious killer is stalking the Arkansas swamp! As the Man of Bronze and loyal companions venture forth to unmask the dread villain, they encounter some of the most horrifying perils of their careers -- including the Crimson Serpent itself!

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

As a young dragoneer moves through the ranks of the prestigious Serpentine Academy, her challenges grow greater and her time grows short to draw out a series of deadly threats, in this thrilling coming-of-age fantasy novel.

Sixteen-year-old Ileth is now an Apprentice Dragoneer, with all of the benefits and pitfalls that her elevation in rank entails. But her advancement becomes less certain after she's attacked by an unknown enemy, and Ileth begins to suspect that someone deadly may be hiding within the walls of the academy.

Outside of the walls there is a different challenge. The Rari Pirates are strangling the Vale Republic. What they lack in dragon firepower, they make up for in the brutality of their ever-expanding raids, making hostages or slaves of the Republic's citizens. Surrounded by enemies, Ileth will need to learn what kind of dragoneer she wants to be. And as she makes decisions about her future, Ileth will have the chance to uncover the secrets of her past. Both will irrevocably change the course of her life.

Magic is real. A handful of sorcerers wield arcane power against demons and the forces of darkness. These protectors of the powerless are the best magic-users in the world. Unfortunately, Dru isn't one of them. She's got magical potential. She uses crystals to see enchantments, and she can research practically anything in the library in the back of her little store, sandwiched between a pawnshop and a 24-hour liquor mart. She sells enough crystals, incense, and magic charms to scrape by.

Everything changes the day a handsome mechanic pulls up in a possessed black muscle car, his eyes glowing red. Just being near Greyson raises Dru's magical powers to dizzying heights. But he's been cursed to transform into a demonic creature that could bring about a fiery doomsday. There's only one chance to break Greyson's curse--and it's about to fall into Dru's inexperienced hands....

The kingdoms of Elsira and Lagrimar have been separated for centuries by the Mantle, a magical veil that has enforced a tremulous peace between the two lands. But now, the Mantle is cracking and the True Father, ruler of Lagrimar and the most powerful Earthsinger in the world, finally sees a way into Elsira to seize power.

All Jasminda ever wanted was to live quietly on her farm, away from the prying eyes of those in the nearby town. Branded an outcast by the color of her skin and her gift of Earthsong, she's been shunned all her life and has learned to steer clear from the townsfolk... until a group of Lagrimari soldiers wander into her valley with an Elsiran spy, believing they are still in Lagrimar.

Through Jack, the spy, Jasminda learns that the Mantle is weakening, allowing people to slip through without notice. And even more troubling: Lagrimar is mobilizing, and if no one finds a way to restore the Mantle, it might be too late for Elsira. Their only hope lies in uncovering the secrets of the Queen Who Sleeps and Jasminda's Earthsong is the key to unravel them.

Thrust into a hostile society and a world she doesn't know, Jasminda and Jack race to unveil an ancient mystery that might offer salvation.

The Mantle that separates the kingdoms of Elsira and Lagrimar is about to fall. And life will drastically change for both kingdoms.

Born with a deadly magic she cannot control, Kyara is forced to become an assassin. Known as the Poison Flame in the kingdom of Lagrimar, she is notorious and lethal, but secretly seeks freedom from both her untamed power and the blood spell that commands her. She is tasked with capturing the legendary rebel called the Shadowfox, but everything changes when she learns her target's true identity.

Darvyn ol-Tahlyro may be the most powerful Earthsinger in generations, but guilt over those he couldn't save tortures him daily. He isn't sure he can trust the mysterious young woman who claims to need his help, but when he discovers Kyara can unlock the secrets of his past, he can't stay away.

Kyara and Darvyn grapple with betrayal, old promises, and older prophecies--all while trying to stop a war. And when a new threat emerges, they must beat the odds to save both kingdoms.

The Mantle dividing Elsira and Lagrimar has fallen. As the two kingdoms struggle to unify, one threat stands above them all.

As desperate Lagrimari flee their barren land for a chance at a better life in Elsira, a shadowy group with ties to the Elsiran government launches an attack on their own soil. With threats of more violence, an unlikely crew is assembled to investigate. Among them are Lizvette Nirall, a disgraced socialite seeking redemption for past mistakes, and Tai Summerhawk, a foreign smuggler determined to keep a promise he made to a dead man.

It's a race against time in this world of deadly magic, secret agendas and court intrigue to discover those responsible before the next assault. And in another land a new enemy awakens--one that will strike terror into the hearts of gods and men.

Civil unrest plagues the nation of Elsira as refugees from their old enemy, Lagrimar, seek new lives in their land.

Queen Jasminda is determined to push the unification forward, against growing opposition and economic strife. But the True Father is not finished with Elsira and he may not be acting alone. He has built a powerful army. An army that cannot be killed. An army that can only be stopped by Nethersong and the help of friends and foes of Elsira alike to stop it.

Former assassin Kyara will discover that she is not the only Nethersinger. She will need to join the others to harness a power that can save or end Elsira. But time is of the essence and they may not be ready by the time the True Father strikes.

Sisterhood novitiate Zeli will go to the reaches of the Living World to unlock a secret that could save the kingdoms. When armies meet in the battlefield, a new world will be forged--whether by the hands of gods or men, remains to be seen.

As the south is in turmoil, an old terror emerges in the north...

Maniye, child of both Wolf and Tiger clans, has been named Champion of her people. But they're unsure if she's an asset - or a threat. To buy time, she joins Prince Tecuman's warband of outcasts and heads south, to help him gain his crown. She wants to discover her true place in the world, but instead heads into the jaws of a fierce new conflict.

Civil war threatens as Tecuman and his twin sister battle for the throne, for only one can rule. Yet whoever triumphs will carry a heavy burden, as a great doom has been foreseen that will fall across their whole world. And soon Maniye finds herself at the heart of a political storm.

Danger is also shadowing her old home, where Lord Thunder and his bear clan are attempting to unite the northern tribes. But only extreme peril will end age-old rivalries. An adversary from the most ancient of times is preparing to strike, putting their lands and their very souls in danger. And neither north nor south will be spared the terror to come.

Beauty Meets Beast in San Francisco

Accepting employment as a governess after hard times hit her family, medieval scholar Rosalind Hawkins is surprised when she learns that her mysterious employer has no children, no wife, and she is not to meet with him face to face. Instead, her duties are to read to him, through a speaking tube, from ancient manuscripts in obscure, nearly forgotten dialects.

A requirement for the job was skill in translating medieval French, and she now understands the reason for that requirement, and assumes her unseen employer's interest in the descriptions of medieval spells and sorcery is that of an eccentric antiquary. What she does not realize is that his interest is anything but academic. He has a terrible secret and is desperately searching for something that can reverse the effects of the misfired spell which created his predicament.

Stories exploring the fascinating realm of Elfhome, a world where modern day Pittsburgh has collided with the kingdom of the Elves. A special entry in the the best-selling Romantic Times Sapphire award winning Elfhome series. Contains some of Wen Spencer's best shorter works including gems "Bare Snow Falling on Fairywood," "Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden," "Peace Offering," and more tales set in the world of best-selling Elfhome series entries Tinker, Wolf Who Rules, Elfhome, and Wood Sprites!

Pittsburgh: a sprawling modern Earth city stranded in the heart of a virgin forest on Elfhome. Sixty thousand humans, twenty thousand black-winged tengu, ten thousand elves, an unknown number of invading oni, four unborn siblings of an elf princess, three dragons, and a pair of nine-year olds geniuses.

For every story written, there's a thousand others not told. Lives interweave. Fates intersect. People change one another, often without realizing the impact they've made on others. They come together like a mosaic, little pieces creating a greater picture.

Project Elfhome tells the stories of those impacted by Tinker and Windwolf as they struggle to make Pittsburgh a safe haven. Some of the characters are familiar: Stormsong, Pony, Blue Sky, and Lain. Others are new to readers.

Law forages for wild plants and fish to sell to elf enclaves. A social misfit, she drives a hundred year old Dodge, has a pet porcupine, and saves damsels in distress in her spare time. A mysterious phone call sets her on a collision course with danger as she races to save a young female elf.

Jane Kryskill is the producer for the popular TV series Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden. She spends her days keeping her host, Hal Rogers, from getting himself killed as he takes on man eating plants. She's not happy when the network drops famed naturalist Nigel Reid and his cameraman in her lap to film Chased by Monsters.

Olivia is sixteen, a runaway wife of a religious cultist, illegal immigrant, and soon to be mother. As Pittsburgh plunges into war, she makes a desperate bargain with the mad elf lord, Forest Moss.

As the war between the elves and the oni builds to a head, these three women struggle with their own problems, supported by a circle of unique friends, yet entangled with each other.

Tinker, girl genius and inventor, lives in a near-future Pittsburgh which exists mostly in the land of the elves, where she tries to keep the local ambient level of magic down with her gadgets. When a pack of wargs chase an Elven noble into her scrapyard, life as she knows it takes a detour.

The popular fantasy novel Tinker introduced the inventor-heroine of the same name, who lives in a near-future Pittsburgh, which shares an interdimensional border with the land of the elves. In this sequel, Wolf Who Rules, the elven noble whose destiny is intertwined with Tinker, finds himself besieged from all sides. Viceroy and head of the Wind Clan, he had been able to guarantee the safety of everyone in his realm, but faced with an oni invasion, he has had to call in royal troops and relinquish his monopoly of Pittsburgh, which is now entirely stranded on Elfhome. He now struggles to keep the peace between the humans, the newly arrived Stone Clan, the royal forces, a set of oni dragons, the half-oni children who see themselves as human, and the tengu trying to escape their oni enslavement. Meanwhile, Tinker strives to solve the mystery of a growing discontinuity in Turtle Creek. She's plagued with inexplicable nightmares that may hold the keys to Pittsburgh's future. The only clue from the Queen's oracle to help Tinker is a note with five English words on it: Follow the Yellow Brick Road. Oni, and dragons and tengu - oh my!

Elfhome. A world of powerful magic, beautiful elves, man-eating trees, frost-breathing wargs, and god-like dragons. Pittsburgh. A city that has been stranded deep in virgin elfin forest to stave off an invasion by the merciless oni. Its population of sixty thousand humans and a handful of elves are pitted in war that will only end in genocide. Winter is coming. Supplies are running low. All political ties are fraying. Hidden somewhere in Pittsburgh's crumbling neighborhoods, a vanguard of oni are growing in number and attacking from the shadows.

And children are disappearing.

Girl genius Tinker was once a human orphan, growing up on the Pittsburgh streets. Now she's an elf princess with all the bells and whistles. She rules over a melting pot of humans, elves, half-oni, and the crow-like tengu. Prejudices are rampant, pitting even the elves against each other. Hoverbike races, concerts of rock and roll fused with elf music, and artist communes of human and elves are proof that Pittsburgh can be a place where races and species can meet and meld in freedom.

Tinker is determined to make her city a place of such freedom. She's going to have to kick butt and take names. And she has to do it quickly. Seven elf children are already missing -- and the oni eat their prisoners when they outlive their usefulness.

Tinker uncovers ancient secrets and a web of betrayal as she searches for the children. The oni will stop at nothing to win, so neither can she. At five foot nothing, Tinker's greatest weapon has always been her intelligence. Politics, she discovers, is a battle of wits, and she's heavily armed.

Even though they attend a school of gifted students in New York City, child geniuses Louise Mayer and her twin sister Jillian have always felt alone in the world, isolated by their brilliance. Shortly before their ninth birthday, they make an amazing discovery. They're not alone.

Their real mother was astronaut Esme Shenske and their father was the famous inventor, Leonardo Dufae. They have an older sister, Alexander, living on the planet of Elfhome, and four siblings still in cryogenic storage at the fertility center. There's only one problem: the frozen embryos are scheduled to be destroyed within six months. The race is on to save their baby brother and sisters.

As a war breaks out on Elfhome and riots start in New York City, the twins use science and magic to plow over everything standing in their way. But when they come face to face with an ancient evil force, they're soon in over their heads in danger.

The war against the oni heats to a flashpoint even as Tinker learns that the enemy has a dangerous new weapon, the nactka. What's more, the Stone Clan has sent its most famous warlords, the Harbingers, to take control of the allied war effort. Are these elves friends or foes? Tinker's newfound baby siblings are up for grabs. The babies, though, are wood sprites and aren't going to take things lying down. Team Mischief go!

THE GODDESS OF WAR RIDES, HERALDED BY STORM FURIES

The oni have invaded Pittsburgh on Elfhome. And, so far, it looks like they are winning. All this is according to prophecy. But the prophecy is big on symbols and light on specifics. Tinker and her allies are doing the best they can to defend the city and the civilians caught in the crossfire of a war between elves that's been brewing for centuries. But the enemy has no hesitation whatsoever in involving innocents. All the pieces in this deadly game are in place - and everyone trusts Tinker will save them. All she needs is a plan. And then the lights go out, and the storm begins to rage...

New York Times bestselling author Christopher Moore channels William Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe in The Serpent of Venice, a satiric Venetian gothic that brings back the Pocket of Dog Snogging, the eponymous hero of Fool, along with his sidekick, Drool, and pet monkey, Jeff.

Venice, a long time ago. Three prominent Venetians await their most loathsome and foul dinner guest, the erstwhile envoy of Britain and France, and widower of the murdered Queen Cordelia: the rascal Fool Pocket.

This trio of cunning plotters--the merchant, Antonio; the senator, Montressor Brabantio; and the naval officer, Iago--have lured Pocket to a dark dungeon, promising an evening of spirits and debauchery with a rare Amontillado sherry and Brabantio's beautiful daughter, Portia.

But their invitation is, of course, bogus. The wine is drugged. The girl isn't even in the city limits. Desperate to rid themselves once and for all of the man who has consistently foiled their grand quest for power and wealth, they have lured him to his death. (How can such a small man, be such a huge obstacle?). But this Fool is no fool... and he's got more than a few tricks (and hand gestures) up his sleeve.

Enter the mysterious world of the snake-like yuan-ti...

Hlondeth - A city populated by the humanoid serpents known as the yuan-ti, and ruled by House Extaminos...

This powerful House of Serpents is the ultimate target of The Pox, a human cult whose members worship the goddess of plague and disease, and who begins to work the deadly will of Sibyl's Chosen, a dangerous cabal of yuan-ti who will turn every human in the city into a freakish tainted one, unless Dediana, a yuan-ti half-blood, can stop them all.

The second in a gripping trilogy from R.A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen author Lisa Smedman.

Viper's Kiss is the second title in a new trilogy exploring the political intrigues of the yuan-ti race, the details of which have been little explored in previous Forgotten Realms products. Lisa Smedman will pen the entire trilogy, which will affect many other storylines in the Forgotten Realms setting.

AUTHOR BIO: Formerly a magazine editor, Lisa Smedman splits her week between working as a reporter/editor at a weekly newspaper and writing fiction. She is a frequent contributor to various science fiction and fantasy magazines, and her most recent credits include authoring Extinction: R.A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen, Book IV, Heirs of Prophecy, and Venom's Taste, and contributing a short story to The Halls of Stormweather.

Medusanna
A priestess of terrifying power convinces the
Se'sehen
A yuan-ti tribe from the distant jungles of Chult to serve her growing cult of
Sseth
The merciless god of the serpent people who languishes in the foul plane of
Smaragh
Where a trapped and desperate Karell can only hope Arvin will find her before the
House of Serpents
Finally destroys their last hope for freedom.

Goddesses vie for the soul of people...

Halisstra Melarn, convert to the cause of the goddess Eilistraee, was sent to the deepest depths of the Outer Planes to kill the demon goddess she once worshiped, but instead was transformed into a hideous creature bent to the vengeful will of her former mistress.

For the Queen of the Demonweb Pits not only survived her Silence but evolved into something greater than she was before - something that no longer needs to share the domain she calls her own.

Could it be that the War of the Spider Queen has just begun?

Drow god vs. Drow god!

When Lolth and Eilistraee, two drow goddesses, compete for control of the dark elves of Faerûn, more than just the drow are caught in the middle. Though the drow will survive their game, what's at stake is the very nature of what it means to be a dark elf.

Is it the end for the Lady Penitent? Is it the end for Lolth?

Lolth has come out of hibernation with a plan that may seem too ambitious even for her, and to pull it off she'll need the help of a drow who's betrayed her at least once already--a drow she's transformed into the demonic Lady Penitent. The shocking conclusion to a trilogy that will change the Forgotten Realms world forever.

In 17th Century Venice exists a mysterious establishment known only as the Gameshouse.

There, fortunes are made and fortunes are broken over games of chess, backgammon and every other game under the sun.

But those whom fortune favours may be invited to compete in the higher league... a league where the games played are of politics and empires, of economics and kings. It is a league where Capture the Castle involves real castles, where hide and seek takes place on a scale as big as the British Isles.

Not everyone proves worthy of competing in the higher league. But one woman, who is about to play, may just exceed everyone's expectations.

Though she must always remember: the higher the stakes, the more deadly the rules...

One of the original female sci-fi writers, Margaret St. Clair was a trailblazer, writing mainly in the pulp magazines in the 1940s and 50s. St. Clair wrote under her own name and her pseudonym Idris Seabright as well as the house pseudonym of Wilton Hazzard at Planet Stories. Here is a collection of 62 short stories penned by St. Clair up to 1962, including many which have been out of print since before her death.

Felicia, Lizbeth Rose's half-sister and a student at the Grigori Rasputin school in San Diego--capital of the Holy Russian Empire--is caught between her own secrets and powerful family struggles. As a granddaughter of Rasputin, she provides an essential service to the hemophiliac Tsar Alexei, providing him the blood transfusions that keep him alive.

Felicia is treated like a nonentity at the bedside of the tsar, and at the school she's seen as a charity case with no magical ability. But when Felicia is snatched outside the school, the facts of her heritage begin to surface. Felicia turns out to be far more than the Russian-Mexican Lizbeth rescued. As Felicia's history unravels and her true abilities become known, she becomes under attack from all directions. Only her courage will keep her alive.

The world-changing events of The Amber Spyglass are behind them, and Lyra and Pan find themselves utterly changed as well. In Serpentine, they journey to the far North once more, hoping to ask the Consul of Witches a most urgent question.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Robert Adams
• Battle at Kahlkopolis by Robert Adams (aka Battle of Kahlkhopolis)
• A Vision of Honor by Sharon Green
• Rider on a Mountain by Andre Norton
• Maureen Birnbaum on the Art of War (as told to Bitsy Spiegelman Fein) by George Alec Effinger
• The Last Time by Joel Rosenberg
• High Road of Lost Men by Brad Linaweaver
• Yelloweye by Steven Barnes
• Ties of Faith by Gillian Fitzgerald
• The Courage of Friends by Paul Edwards
• The Swordsman Smada by John Steakley
• Sister of Midnight by Shariann Lewitt
• Nightfriend by John F. Carr and Roland J. Green

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Robert Adams
• Precious Treasure by Harry Turtledove
• Damnation by Sharon Green
• The Swordsman's Place by John Steakley
• Traitors by Susan Shwartz
• Dirt Brother by Roland J. Green and John F. Carr
• Seek a Clan Sword by Paul Edwards
• The Fear-Beast by Sharon Green
• Killsister by Steven Barnes
• The Enemy of My Enemy by Mercedes Lackey

The Mathematics of Magic was probably the greatest discovery of the ages - at least Professor Harold Shea thought so. With the proper equations, he could instantly transport himself back in time to all the wondrous lands of ancient legend. But slips in time were a hazard, and Shea's magic did not always work - at least, not quite as he expected...

Two days before Independence Day, the skies look as if they are on fire. All satellite communications are interrupted, as fear grips the cities of the world. When the skies return to normal, it becomes clear that a force of incredible magnitude has arrived on Earth. Its mission: to eliminate all human life on the planet.

The Tie for the movie.

The No. 1 blockbuster movie Independence Day was only part of the story. After the alien invaders are downed and teams are sent out to find survivors, only some personal belongings of Dr. Brackish Okun, head scientist of Area 51, are found.

Okun's story is amazing, yet completely believable. It begins in the 1970s when this CalTech genius arrives at Area 51 to work with the National Security Agency (NSA) and the CIA on the study of a downed spaceship retrieved from Roswell, New Mexico.

But there is much more to the job than Okun realized. Soon, he begins to suspect that a massive government cover-up has successfuly buried all evidence of alien visitation throughout the years--a cover-up in which Okun is now an unwilling participant. His perseverance leads him to the truth behind the studies at Area 51, the government's fear of an alien invasion and a mysterious encounter in the Mexican desert at a place known as "La Manta de Silencia": The Silent Zone.

It is the Fourth of July. Reeling from the enemy onslaught, a few surviving military pilots gather in the Saudi Arabian desert. Two of the best fliers, flight instructors Reg and Faisal, self-appointed leaders of the Saudi Forces, can barely contain their animosity when a message from the Americans forces them to unite.

A weak point has been found in the alien "City Destroyers." The air war against them was costly--but it worked!... Or did it? Too late, Reg and Faisal discover their "victory" was an illusion--part of a secret ambush that will open the planet to unimaginable horror, unless these overmatched warriors from several Middle Eastern nations can overcome long-standing hatreds and unite against the aliens in the fiercest hand-to-hand combat of the war.

Cities were crushed by the falling spacecraft--but one ship didn't crash. It remained intact, and disgorged hordes of alien soldiers determined to fight to the death.

The abandoned vessels also contained a wealth of advanced technology. Led by David Levinson, the greatest minds of our world developed deadly new hybrid weapons. Bases were built on the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

A new generation of defenders had to be trained, for the invaders would return. In the headlong rush to prepare, however, not everyone would survive...

Hybrid fighters merging human and alien technology. Massive cannon emplacements on the Moon and Mars. A planetary defense force with the finest military personnel ever trained. For two decades we've known the enemy would return.

The nations of Earth have collaborated on a unified defense program designed to defend the planet. Yet nothing could prepare us for the immensity of their new assault, and only the courage and skill of a few brave men and women can hope to bring our world back from the brink of extinction.

The novelization for the movie.

Our universe is ruled by physics and faster than light travel is not possible -- until the discovery of The Flow, an extra-dimensional field we can access at certain points in space-time that transport us to other worlds, around other stars.

Humanity flows away from Earth, into space, and in time forgets our home world and creates a new empire, the Interdependency, whose ethos requires that no one human outpost can survive without the others. It's a hedge against interstellar war -- and a system of control for the rulers of the empire.

The Flow is eternal -- but it is not static. Just as a river changes course, The Flow changes as well, cutting off worlds from the rest of humanity. When it's discovered that The Flow is moving, possibly cutting off all human worlds from faster than light travel forever, three individuals -- a scientist, a starship captain and the Empress of the Interdependency -- are in a race against time to discover what, if anything, can be salvaged from an interstellar empire on the brink of collapse.

The Interdependency, humanity's interstellar empire, is on the verge of collapse. The Flow, the extra-dimensional conduit that makes travel between the stars possible, is disappearing, leaving entire star systems stranded. When it goes, human civilization may go with it -- unless desperate measures can be taken.

Emperox Grayland II, the leader of the Interdependency, is ready to take those measures to help ensure the survival of billions. But nothing is ever that easy. Arrayed before her are those who believe the collapse of the Flow is a myth -- or at the very least, an opportunity that can allow them to ascend to power.

While Grayland prepares for disaster, others are preparing for a civil war, a war that will take place in the halls of power, the markets of business and the altars of worship as much as it will take place between spaceships and battlefields. The Emperox and her allies are smart and resourceful, but then so are her enemies. Nothing about this power struggle will be simple or easy... and all of humanity will be caught in its widening gyre.

The collapse of The Flow, the interstellar pathway between the planets of the Interdependency, has accelerated. Entire star systems -- and billions of people -- are becoming cut off from the rest of human civilization. This collapse was foretold through scientific prediction... and yet, even as the evidence is obvious and insurmountable, many still try to rationalize, delay and profit from these final days of one of the greatest empires humanity has ever known.

Emperox Grayland II has finally wrested control of her empire from those who oppose her and who deny the reality of this collapse. But "control" is a slippery thing, and even as Grayland strives to save as many of her people as possible from impoverished isolation, the forces opposing her rule will make a final, desperate push to topple her from her throne and power, by any means necessary. Grayland and her thinning list of allies must use every tool at their disposal to save themselves, and all of humanity. And yet it may not be enough.

Will Grayland become the savior of her civilization... or the last emperox to wear the crown?

BSFA winning and Hugo and Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, July 2011. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection (2012), edited by Gardner Dozois and the collection A Better Way to Die: The Collected Short Stories (2015).

This is the Ultimate Fantasy: a quest of epic reach spanning the globe under the mythologies of five great cultures - and finally crossing the barrier between life and death.

Jack Churchill, archaeologist and dreamer, walks out of the mist and into Celtic Britain more than two thousand years before he was born, with no knowledge of how he got there. All Jack wants is to get home to his own time where the woman he loves waits for him. Finding his way to the timeless mystical Otherworld, the home of the gods, he plans to while away the days, the years, the millennia, until his own era rolls around again... but nothing is ever that simple. A great Evil waits in modern times and will do all in its power to stop Jack's return. In a universe where time and space are meaningless, its tendrils stetch back through the years... Through Roman times, the Elizabethan age, Victoria's reign, the Second World War to the Swinging Sixties, the Evil sets its traps to destroy Jack.

Mark Chadbourn gives us a high adventure of dazzling sword fights, passionate romance and apocalyptic wars in the days leading up to Ragnarok, the End-Times: a breathtaking, surreal vision of twisting realities where nothing is quite what it seems.

After a long journey across the ages, Jack Churchill has returned to the modern world, only to find it in the grip of a terrible, dark force. The population is unaware, mesmerised by the Mundane Spell that keeps them in thrall. With a small group of trusted allies, Jack sets out to find the two 'keys' that can shatter the spell.

But the keys are people - one with the power of creation, one the power of destruction - and they are hidden somewhere among the world's billions. As the search fans out across the globe, ancient powers begin to stir. In the bleak North, in Egypt, in Greece, in all the Great Dominions, the old gods are returning to stake their claim. The odds appear insurmountable, the need desperate.... This is a time for heroes.

It is the beginning of the end ...The end of the axe-age, the sword-age, leading to the passing of gods and men from the universe. As all the ancient prophecies fall into place, the final battle rages, on Earth, across Faerie, and into the land of the dead.

Jack Churchill, Champion of Existence, must lead the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons in a last, desperate assault on the Fortress of the Enemy, to confront the ultimate incarnation of destruction: the Burning Man. It is humanity's only chance to avert the coming extinction. At his back is an army of gods culled from the world's great mythologies - Greek, Norse, Chinese, Aztec, and more.

But will even that be enough? Driven to the brink by betrayal, sacrifice and death, his allies fear Jack may instead bring about the very devastation he is trying to prevent ...

Attentive readers of Lady Trent's earlier memoir, A Natural History of Dragons, are already familiar with how a bookish and determined young woman named Isabella first set out on the historic course that would one day lead her to becoming the world's premier dragon naturalist. Now, in this remarkably candid second volume, Lady Trent looks back at the next stage of her illustrious (and occasionally scandalous) career.

Three years after her fateful journeys through the forbidding mountains of Vystrana, Mrs. Camherst defies family and convention to embark on an expedition to the war-torn continent of Eriga, home of such exotic draconian species as the grass-dwelling snakes of the savannah, arboreal tree snakes, and, most elusive of all, the legendary swamp-wyrms of the tropics.

The expedition is not an easy one. Accompanied by both an old associate and a runaway heiress, Isabella must brave oppressive heat, merciless fevers, palace intrigues, gossip, and other hazards in order to satisfy her boundless fascination with all things draconian, even if it means venturing deep into the forbidden jungle known as the Green Hell... where her courage, resourcefulness, and scientific curiosity will be tested as never before.

In Expendable, the first volume of the League of Peoples, Festina Ramos is assigned to escort an unstable admiral to planet Melaquin. Little is known about Melaquin, for every explorer who's landed there has disappeared. It's come to be known as the "planet of no return," and the High Council has made a habit of sending troublesome admirals there in an attempt to get rid of them. It's clear that this is intended to be Ramos's last mission, but she doesn't plan on dying, no matter how expendable she may be.

Atlantis lies between Europe and the East Coast of Terranova. For many years, this land of opportunity lured dreamers from around the globe with its natural resources, offering a new beginning for those willing to brave the wonders of the unexplored territory.

It is a new world indeed: ripe for discovery, for plunder, and eventually for colonization?but will its settlers destroy the very wonders they had journeyed to Atlantis to find?

From the moment Mary Poppins arrives at Number Seventeen Cherry-Tree Lane, everyday life at the Banks house is forever changed. This classic series tells the story of the world's most beloved nanny, who brings enchantment and excitement with her everywhere she goes. Featuring the charming original cover art by Mary Shepard, these new editions are sure to delight readers of all ages.

Mary Poppins reappears just in time! According to her tape measure, Jane and Michael have grown "Worse and Worse" since she went away. But the children won't have time to be naughty with all that Mary has planned for them. A visit to Mr. Twigley's music box-filled attic, an encounter with the Marble Boy, and a ride on Miss Calico's enchanted candy canes are all part of an average day out with everyone's favorite nanny.

What if you discovered that everything you knew about the world was a lie? That's the question at the heart of Philip K. Dick's futuristic novel about political oppression, the show business of politics and the sinister potential of the military industrial complex. This wry, paranoid thriller imagines a future in which the earth has been ravaged, and cities are burnt-out wastelands too dangerous for human life. Americans have been shipped underground, where they toil in crowded industrial ant hills and receive a steady diet of inspiring speeches from a President who never seems to age. Nick St. James, like the rest of the masses, believed in the words of his leaders. But that all changes when he travels to the surface - where what he finds is more shocking than anything he could possibly imagine.

Winner of both the Hugo and John W. Campbell awards for best novel, widely regarded as the premiere science fiction writer of his day, and the object of cult-like adoration from his legions of fans, Philip K. Dick has come to be seen in a literary light that defies classification in much the same way as Borges and Calvino. With breathtaking insight, he utlizes vividly unfamiliar worlds to evoke the hauntingly and hilariously familiar in our society and ourselves.

A Winner of the Alex Award, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle.

The Great Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon away from life as a San Francisco web-design drone and into the aisles of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. But after a few days on the job, Clay discovers that the store is more curious than either its name or its gnomic owner might suggest. The customers are few, and they never seem to buy anything — instead, they "check out" large, obscure volumes from strange corners of the store. Suspicious, Clay engineers an analysis of the clientele's behavior, seeking help from his variously talented friends. But when they bring their findings to Mr. Penumbra, they discover the bookstore's secrets extend far beyond its walls.

It is August 1969. The Summer of Love is a fading memory. The streets of San Francisco pulse to the sounds of Led Zeppelin and Marvin Gaye. And of jackhammers: A futuristic pyramid of a skyscraper is rising a few blocks from City Lights bookstore and an unprecedented subway tunnel is being built under the bay. Meanwhile, south of the city, orchards are quickly giving way to a brand-new industry built on silicon.

But young Ajax Penumbra has not arrived in San Francisco looking for free love or a glimpse of the technological future. He is seeking a book--the single surviving copy of the Techne Tycheon, a mysterious volume that has brought and lost great fortune for anyone who has owned it. The last record of the book locates it in the San Francisco of more than a century earlier, and on that scant bit of evidence, Penumbra's university has dispatched him west to acquire it for their library. After a few weeks of rigorous hunting, Penumbra feels no closer to his goal than when he started. But late one night, after another day of dispiriting dead ends, he stumbles across a 24-hour bookstore, and the possibilities before him expand exponentially...

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

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

A contemporary fantasy of mystery and death as American expats battle Japanese gods and monsters to retrieve an ancient artifact that can destroy the world.

On Saturday afternoon, Nikki Delany thought, "George Wilson, in the kitchen, with a blender." By dinner, she had killed George and posted his gory murder to her blog. The next day, she put on her mourning clothes and went out to meet her best friend for lunch to discuss finding a replacement for her love interest.

Nikki is a horror novelist. Her choice of career is dictated by an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that forces her to write stories of death and destruction. She can't control it, doesn't understand it, but can use it to make money anywhere in the world. Currently "anywhere" is in Japan, hiding from her mother who sees Nikki's OCD as proof she's mentally unstable. Nikki's fragile peace starts to fall apart when the police arrest her for the murder of an American expatriate. Someone killed him with a blender.

Reality starts to unravel around Nikki. She's attacked by a raccoon in a business suit. After a series of blackouts, she's accompanied by a boy that no one else can see, a boy who claims to be a god. Is she really being pursued by Japanese myths--or is she simply going insane?

What Nikki does know for sure is that the bodies are piling up, her mother has arrived in Japan to lock her up for the rest of her life--and her novels always end with everyone dead.

October Daye is finally something she never expected to be: married. All the trials and turmoils and terrors of a hero's life have done very little to prepare her for the expectation that she will actually share her life with someone else, the good parts and the bad ones alike, not just allow them to dabble around the edges in the things she wants to share. But with an official break from hero duties from the Queen in the Mists, and her family wholly on board with this new version of "normal," she's doing her best to adjust.

It isn't always easy, but she's a hero, right? She's done harder.

Until an old friend and ally turns out to have been an enemy in disguise for this entire time, and October's brief respite turns into a battle for her life, her community, and everything she has ever believed to be true.

The debts of the Broken Ride are coming due, and whether she incurred them or not, she's going to be the one who has to pa

Count Hamnet Thyssen is a minor noble of the drowsy old Raumsdalian Empire. Its capital city, Nidaros, began as a mammoth hunters' camp at the edge of the great Glacier. But that was centuries ago, and as everyone knows, it's the nature of the great Glacier to withdraw a few feet every year. Now Nidaros is an old and many-spired city; and though they still feel the breath of the great Glacier in every winter's winds, the ice cap itself has retreated beyond the horizon.

Trasamund, a clan chief of the mammoth-herding Bizogots, the next tribe north, has come to town with strange news. A narrow gap has opened in what they'd always thought was an endless and impregnable wall of ice. The great Glacier does not go on forever--and on its other side are new lands, new animals, and possibly new people.

Ancient legend says that on the other side is the Golden Shrine, put there by the gods to guard the people of their world. Now, perhaps, the road to the legendary Golden Shrine is open. Who could resist the urge to go see?

For Count Hamnet and his several companions, the glacier has always been the boundary of the world. Now they'll be travelling beyond it into a world that's bigger than anyone knew. Adventures will surely be had...

Once the great Glacier enclosed the Raumsdalian Empire. Now it's broken open, and Count Hamnet Thyssen faces a new world. With the wisecracking Ulric Skakki, the neighboring clan leader Trasamund (politely addressed as Your Ferocity), and his lover, the shaman Liv, Hamnet leads an exploration of the new territory in hopes of finding the legendary Golden Shrine.

But dangers abound. A violent and implacable group known as the Rulers has already killed many, and now they attack again. Riding deer and woolly mammoths and using powerful magic, the Rulers triumph and force the Raumsdalians to flee.

In the spring another battle ends even more badly for Hamnet's side, but the Glacier is also retreating, so they are able to escape. Meeting a tribe whose desperate living conditions have led them to overcome the Raumsdalian taboo against eating fallen foes, they find unexpected allies. Now, returning to the capital city and its intrigues, Hamnet prepares to lead an army against the merciless Rulers. The world, once so bounded and comprehensible, will never be the same...

Continuing the alternate-Bronze-Age epic begun in Beyond the Gap:

The glaciers came and covered the world with ice. Now they are in retreat. North of the city of Nidaros, north of the forest, north of the steppes where the nomadic Bizogots hunt, a gap has opened in the ice-wall. And down through that gap come the men who call themselves "Rulers."

Their terrifying cavalry rides wooly mammoths. Their bows can shoot arrows farther than those of the southerners. Their wizards wield power that neither the shamans of the Bizogots nor the wizards of Raumsdalian Empire can match, a magic that can melt the stone beneath a man's feet, call down blasting fire from the sky, or decimate a tribe with plagues that have no cure. Scattered survivors of the Bizogot tribes hide from the Rulers. The Empire is shattered. The feckless Emperor Sigvat II is in hiding.

Against the Rulers stands Count Hamnet Thyssen and his small band of friends. Jarl Trasamund of the Three Tusk Bizogots. The adventurer Ulric Skakki. And, most important, Marcovefa, the female shaman of a cannibal tribe that lives atop the Glacier itself. Marcovefa has magic that the Rulers cannot counter.

But there are many Rulers, and they have many wizards. Marcovefa is but one.

Perhaps Hamnet and his allies can save their lands from the Rulers. But first they must seek out the legendary Golden Shrine--and the Golden Shrine has not been seen by human eyes since the time before the glaciers came.

Freedom. Liberty. Free Will. Independence. Choice. Everyone wants to be free. But at what point does freedom become irresponsibility? What happens when one person's choice causes another's oppression?

The Seventh Doctor's on a simple mission to return a communications device he borrowed years previously. Being a Time Lord, he can return it before anyone misses it.

But events in the Mendeb system have moved more quickly than the Doctor estimated, and he lands in the ruins of a civilisation devastated by mysterious invaders.

Seventeen-year-old Penelope (Pen) has lost everything--her home, her parents, and her ten-year-old brother. Like a female Odysseus in search of home, she navigates a dark world full of strange creatures, gathers companions and loses them, finds love and loses it, and faces her mortal enemy.

In her signature style, Francesca Lia Block has created a world that is beautiful in its destruction and as frightening as it is lovely. At the helm of Love in the Time of Global Warming is Pen, a strong heroine who holds hope and love in her hands and refuses to be defeated.

In The Island of Excess Love, Pen has lost her parents. She's lost her eye. But she has fought Kronen; she has won back her fragile friends and her beloved brother. Now Pen, Hex, Ash, Ez, and Venice are living in the pink house by the sea, getting by on hard work, companionship, and dreams. Until the day a foreboding ship appears in the harbor across from their home. As soon as the ship arrives, they all start having strange visions of destruction and violence. Trance-like, they head for the ship and their new battles begin.

This companion to Love in the Time of Global Warming follows Pen as she searches for love among the ruins, this time using Virgil's epic Aeneid as her guide. A powerful and stunning book filled with Francesca Lia Block's beautiful language and inspiring characters.

Just days before a massive exhibition opens at the popular New York Museum of Natural History, visitors are being savagely murdered in the museum's dark hallways and secret rooms. Autopsies indicate that the killer cannot be human...

But the museum's directors plan to go ahead with a big bash to celebrate the new exhibition, in spite of the murders.

Museum researcher Margo Green must find out who-or what-is doing the killing. But can she do it in time to stop the massacre?

Hidden deep beneath Manhattan lies a warren of tunnels, sewers, and galleries, mostly forgotten by those who walk the streets above. There lies the ultimate secret of the Museum Beat. When two grotesquely deformed skeletons are found deep in the mud off the Manhattan shoreline, museum curator Margo Green is called in to aid the investigation. Margo must once again team up with police lieutenant D'Agosta and FBI agent Pendergast, as well as the brilliant Dr. Frock, to try and solve the puzzle. The trail soon leads deep underground, where they will face the awakening of a slumbering nightmare... in Reliquary.

FBI agent Pendergast discovers thirty-six murdered bodies in a New York City charnel house... and now, more than a century later, a killer strikes again.

In an ancient tunnel underneath New York City a charnel house is discovered.

Inside are thirty-six bodies -- all murdered and mutilated more than a century ago.

While FBI agent Pendergast investigates the old crimes, identical killings start to terrorize the city.

The nightmare has begun.

Again.

When a series of murders strikes small-town Kansas, FBI Special Agent Pendergast must track down a killer or a curse -- either way, no one is safe.

A small Kansas town has turned into a killing ground.

Or is it a darker force, a curse upon the land?

Amid golden cornfields, FBI Special Agent Pendergast discovers evil in the blood of America's heartland.

No one is safe.

In the wake of series of bizarre murders in which claw prints are found near each of the victims, agent Pendergast teams up with officer Vincent d'Agosta in an investigation with apparent ties to the supernatural that takes them from the luxury estates of Long Island to the castles of Italy.

Hot on the trail of a killer in Manhattan, FBI Special Agent Pendergast must face his most brilliant and dangerous enemy: his own brother.

Two brothers.
One a top FBI agent.
The other a brilliant, twisted criminal.

An undying hatred between them.
Now, a perfect crime.
And the ultimate challenge:
Stop me if you can...

The final battle between good and evil. Only one will survive...

The New York Museum of Natural History receives their stolen gem collection back... ground down to dust. Diogenes, the psychotic killer who stole them in DANCE OF DEATH, is throwing down the gauntlet to both the city and to his brother, FBI Agent Pendergast, who is currently incarcerated in a maximum security prison.

To quell the PR nightmare of the gem fiasco, the museum decides to reopen the Tomb of Senef. An astounding Egyptian temple, it was a popular museum exhibit until the 1930s, when it was quietly closed. But when the tomb is unsealed in preparation for its gala reopening, the killings - and whispers of an ancient curse - begin again. And the catastrophic opening itself sets the stage for the final battle between the two brothers: an epic clash from which only one will emerge alive.

At a remote Tibetan monastery, FBI Special Agent Pendergast must find a powerful and ancient artifact before it falls into the wrong hands.

A luxury ocean liner on its maiden voyage across the North Atlantic, awash in wealth and decadence...

An ancient Tibetan box, its contents unknown, sealed with a terrifying warning...

An FBI agent destined to confront what he fears most--himself...

Pendergast, the world's most mysterious FBI Special Agent, investigates a murderous cult in New York City that no one has ever survived.

William Smithback, a New York Times reporter, and his wife Nora Kelly, a Museum of Natural History archaeologist, are brutally attacked in their apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Eyewitnesses claim, and the security camera confirms, that the assailant was their strange, sinister neighbor--a man who, by all reports, was already dead and buried weeks earlier.

While Captain Laura Hayward leads the official investigation, Pendergast and Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta undertake their own private--and decidedly unorthodox--quest for the truth. Their serpentine journey takes them to an enclave of Manhattan they never imagined could exist: a secretive, reclusive cult of Obeah and vodou which no outsiders have ever survived.

As he stalks his wife's traitors from Scotland to New York City, Special Agent Pendergast discovers layers of deception and conspiracy that will shatter everything he believed to be true.

Yesterday, Special Agent Pendergast still mourned the loss of his beloved wife, Helen, who died in a tragic accident in Africa twelve years ago

Today, he discovers she was murdered

Tomorrow, he will learn her most guarded secrets, leaving him to wonder: Who was the woman I married? Why was she murdered? And, above all... Who murdered her?

Revenge is not sweet: It is essential.

Twelve years ago, Special Agent Pendergast's beloved wife was murdered during an African safari -- and now, he's on a quest for revenge.

Devastated by the discovery that his wife, Helen, was murdered, Special Agent Pendergast must have retribution. But revenge is not simple. As he stalks his wife's betrayers--a chase that takes him from the wild moors of Scotland to the bustling streets of New York City and the darkest bayous of Louisiana--he is also forced to dig further into Helen's past. And he is stunned to learn that Helen may have been a collaborator in her own murder.

Peeling back the layers of deception, Pendergast realizes that the conspiracy is deeper, goes back generations, and is more monstrous than he could have ever imagined--and everything he's believed, everything he's trusted, everything he's understood... may be a horrific lie.

Join Agent Pendergast in the heart of the South American jungle as he investigates a string of murders that lead him to his wife's kidnappers -- and spark memories that may haunt him forever.

After his wife, Helen, is brazenly abducted before his eyes, Special Agent Pendergast furiously pursues the kidnappers, chasing them across the country and into Mexico. But then, things go terribly, tragically wrong; the kidnappers escape; and a shattered Pendergast retreats to his New York apartment and shuts out the world.

But when a string of bizarre murders erupts across several Manhattan hotels-perpetrated by a boy who seems to have an almost psychic ability to elude capture-NYPD Lieutenant D'Agosta asks his friend Pendergast for help. Reluctant at first, Pendergast soon discovers that the killings are a message from his wife's kidnappers. But why a message? And what does it mean?

When the kidnappers strike again at those closest to Pendergast, the FBI agent, filled anew with vengeful fury, sets out to track down and destroy those responsible. His journey takes him deep into the trackless forests of South America, where he ultimately finds himself face to face with an old evil that-rather than having been eradicated-is stirring anew... and with potentially world-altering consequences.

Confucius once said: "Before you embark on a journey of revenge, first dig two graves." Pendergast is about to learn the hard way just how true those words still ring.

Past and present collide as Special Agent Pendergast uncovers mysterious connections between a string of 19th century bear attacks in a Colorado mining town, a fabled, long-lost Sherlock Holmes story, and a deadly present-day arsonist.

In 1876, in a mining camp called Roaring Fork in the Colorado Rockies, eleven miners were killed by a rogue grizzly bear. Corrie Swanson has arranged to examine the miners' remains. When she makes a shocking discovery, town leaders try to stop her from exposing their community's dark and bloody past.

Just as Special Agent Pendergast of the FBI arrives to rescue his protege, the town comes under siege by a murderous arsonist who-with brutal precision-begins burning down multimillion-dollar mansions with the families locked inside. Drawn deeper into the investigation, Pendergast discovers a long-lost Sherlock Holmes story that may be the key to solving both the mystery of the long-dead miners and the modern-day killings as well.

Now, with the ski resort snowed in and under savage attack-and Corrie's life suddenly in grave danger-Pendergast must solve the enigma of the past before the town of the present goes up in flames.

When a longtime enemy shows up dead on Pendergast's doorstep, the murder investigation leads him into his own dark past as a vengeful killer waits in the shadows.

It begins with murder. One of Pendergast's most implacable, most feared enemies is found on his doorstep, dead. Pendergast has no idea who is responsible for the killing, or why the body was brought to his home. The mystery has all the hallmarks of the perfect crime, save for an enigmatic clue: a piece of turquoise lodged in the stomach of the deceased.

The gem leads Pendergast to an abandoned mine on the shore of California's Salton Sea, which in turn propels him on a journey of discovery deep into his own family's sinister past. But Pendergast learns there is more at work than a ghastly episode of family history: he is being stalked by a subtle killer bent on vengeance over an ancient transgression. And he soon becomes caught in a wickedly clever plot, which leaves him stricken in mind and body, and propels him toward a reckoning beyond anything he could ever have imagined...

When a straightforward murder case spirals out of control, Pendergast and his ward investigate an ancient witches' colony in a sleepy New England town where a terrible evil awaits...

A secret chamber.
A mysterious shipwreck.
A murder in the desolate salt marshes.

A seemingly straightforward private case turns out to be much more complicated-and sinister-than Special Agent A.X.L. Pendergast ever could have anticipated.

Pendergast, together with his ward Constance Greene, travels to the quaint seaside village of Exmouth, Massachusetts, to investigate the theft of a priceless wine collection. But inside the wine cellar, they find something considerably more disturbing: a bricked-up niche that once held a crumbling skeleton.

Pendergast and Constance soon learn that Exmouth is a town with a very dark and troubled history, and this skeleton may be only the first hint of an ancient transgression, kept secret all these years. But they will discover that the sins of the past are still very much alive. Local legend holds that during the 1692 witch trials in Salem, the real witches escaped, fleeing north to Exmouth and settling deep in the surrounding salt marshes, where they continued to practice their wicked arts. Then, a murdered corpse turns up in the marshes. The only clue is a series of mysterious carvings. Could these demonic symbols bear some relation to the ancient witches' colony, long believed to be abandoned?

A terrible evil lurks beneath the surface of this sleepy seaside town-one with deep roots in Exmouth's grim history. And it may be that Constance, with her own troubled past, is the only one who truly comprehends the awful danger that she, Pendergast, and the residents of Exmouth must face...

After Pendergast is presumed dead from a supernatural encounter, his bodyguard Proctor is the only one who can chase a kidnapper across international waters and into the deadly unknown.

A TRAGIC DISAPPEARANCE
After a harrowing, otherworldly confrontation on the shores of Exmouth, Massachussetts, Special Agent A.X.L. Pendergast is missing, presumed dead.

A SHOCKING RETURN
Sick with grief, Pendergast's ward, Constance, retreats to her chambers beneath the family mansion at 891 Riverside Drive--only to be taken captive by a shadowy figure from the past.

AN INTERNATIONAL MANHUNT
Proctor, Pendergast's longtime bodyguard, springs to action, chasing Constance's kidnapper through cities, across oceans, and into wastelands unknown.

BUT IN A WORLD OF BLACK AND WHITE, NOTHING IS AS IT SEEMS
And by the time Proctor discovers the truth, a terrifying engine has stirred-and it may already be too late...

Special Agent Pendergast must stop a serial killer who is terrorizing New York City with a trail of headless victims.

When Grace Ozmian, the beautiful and reckless daughter of a wealthy tech billionaire, first goes missing, the NYPD assumes she has simply sped off on another wild adventure. Until the young woman's body is discovered in an abandoned warehouse in Queens, the head nowhere to be found.

Lieutenant CDS Vincent D'Agosta quickly takes the lead. He knows his investigation will attract fierce scrutiny, so D'Agosta is delighted when FBI Special Agent A.X.L. Pendergast shows up at the crime scene assigned to the case. "I feel rather like Brer Rabbit being thrown into the briar patch," Pendergast tells D'Agosta, "because I have found you here, in charge. Just like when we first met, back at the Museum of Natural History."

But neither Pendergast nor D'Agosta are prepared for what lies ahead. A diabolical presence is haunting the greater metropolitan area, and Grace Ozmian was only the first of many victims to be murdered... and decapitated. Worse still, there's something unique to the city itself that has attracted the evil eye of the killer.

As mass hysteria sets in, Pendergast and D'Agosta find themselves in the crosshairs of an opponent who has threatened the very lifeblood of the city. It'll take all of Pendergast's skill to unmask this most dangerous foe-let alone survive to tell the tale.

FBI Agent Pendergast reluctantly teams up with a new partner to investigate a rash of Miami Beach murders... only to uncover a deadly conspiracy that spans decades.

After an overhaul of leadership at the FBI's New York field office, A. X. L. Pendergast is abruptly forced to accept an unthinkable condition of continued employment: the famously rogue agent must now work with a partner.

Pendergast and his new colleague, junior agent Coldmoon, are assigned to investigate a rash of killings in Miami Beach, where a bloodthirsty psychopath is cutting out the hearts of his victims and leaving them with cryptic handwritten letters at local gravestones. The graves are unconnected save in one bizarre way: all belong to women who committed suicide.

But the seeming lack of connection between the old suicides and the new murders is soon the least of Pendergast's worries. Because as he digs deeper, he realizes the brutal new crimes may be just the tip of the iceberg: a conspiracy of death that reaches back decades.

Racing to uncover the mystery of several severed feet found floating in the Gulf of Mexico, Agent Pendergast is faced with the most inexplicable challenge of his career.

A startling crime with dozens of victims. Appearing out of nowhere to horrify the quiet resort town of Sanibel Island, Florida, dozens of identical, ordinary-looking shoes float in on the tide and are washed up on the tropical beach--each one with a crudely severed human foot inside.

A ghastly enigma with no apparent solution. Called away from vacation elsewhere in the state, Agent Pendergast reluctantly agrees to visit the crime scene--and, despite himself, is quickly drawn in by the incomprehensible puzzle. An early pathology report only adds to the mystery. With an ocean of possibilities confronting the investigation, no one is sure what happened, why, or from where the feet originated. And they desperately need to know: are the victims still alive?

A worthy challenge for a brilliant mind. In short order, Pendergast finds himself facing the most complex and inexplicable challenge of his career: a tangled thread of evidence that spans seas and traverses continents, connected to one of the most baffling mysteries in modern medical science. Through shocking twists and turns, all trails lead back to a powerful adversary with a sadistic agenda and who--in a cruel irony--ultimately sees in Pendergast the ideal subject for their malevolent research.

Agent Pendergast faces his most unexpected challenge yet when bloodless bodies begin to appear in Savannah, GA.

A fabulous heist:
On the evening of November 24, 1971, D. B. Cooper hijacked Flight 305--Portland to Seattle--with a fake bomb, collected a ransom of $200,000, and then parachuted from the rear of the plane, disappearing into the night... and into history.

A brutal crime steeped in legend and malevolence:
Fifty years later, Agent Pendergast takes on a bizarre and gruesome case: in the ghost-haunted city of Savannah, Georgia, bodies are found with no blood left in their veins--sowing panic and reviving whispered tales of the infamous Savannah Vampire.

A case like no other:
As the mystery rises along with the body count, Pendergast and his partner, Agent Coldmoon, race to understand how--or if--these murders are connected to the only unsolved skyjacking in American history. Together, they uncover not just the answer... but an unearthly evil beyond all imagining.

FBI Special Agent Pendergast and Constance Greene cross paths with New York's deadliest serial killer: Pendergast's own ancestor... and now his greatest foe.

AN INCREDIBLE JOURNEY
Astoundingly, Constance has found a way back to the place of her origins, New York City in the late 1800s, leaping at the chance, although it means leaving the present forever.

A DESPERATE OPPORTUNITY
Constance sets off on a quest to prevent the events that lead to the deaths of her sister and brother. But along the road to redemption, Manhattan's most infamous serial killer, Dr. Enoch Leng, lies in wait, ready to strike at the slightest provocation.

UNIMAGINABLE ODDS
Meanwhile, in contemporary New York, Pendergast feverishly searches for a way to reunite with Constance--but will he discover a way back to her before it's too late?

A desperate bargain is broken...

Constance Greene confronts Manhattan's most dangerous serial killer, Enoch Leng, bartering for her sister's life -- but she is betrayed and turned away empty-handed, incandescent with rage.

A clever trap is set...

Unknown to Leng, Pendergast's brother, Diogenes, appears unexpectedly, offering to help--for mysterious reasons of his own. Disguised as a cleric, Diogenes establishes himself in New York's notorious Five Points slum, manipulating events like a chess master, watching Leng's every move... and awaiting his own chance to strike.

A vengeful angel will not be deterred...

Meanwhile, as Pendergast focuses on saving the unstable Constance in her fanatical quest for vengeance, she strikes out on her own: to rescue her beloved siblings from a tragic fate and take savage retribution on Leng. But Leng is one step ahead and has a surprise for them all...

This story begins with the tragedy of Atlantis and the arrival in Britain of King Avallach and the heroic figure of Prince Taliesin. In the twilight of Rome's power, a tale is told of a love that spawns the miracle of Merlin and Arthur, and a destiny that is more than a kingdom.

He was born to greatness, the son of a druid bard and a princess of lost Atlantis. A trained warrior, blessed with the gifts of prophecy and song, he grew to manhood in a land ravaged by the brutal greed of petty chieftains and barbarian invaders.

Merlin: Respected, feared and hated by many, he was to have a higher destiny. for It was he who prepared the way for the momentous event that would unite the Island of the Mighty—the coming of Arthur Pendragon, Lord of the Kingdom of Summer.

They called him unfit to rule—a lowborn, callow boy, Uther's bastard. But his coming had been foretold in the songs of the bard Taliesin. He had learned the uses of power from his guide and protector, Merlin. He was Arthur, Pendragon of the Island of the Mighty—who would rise to legendary greatness in a Britain torn by violence, greed and war; the Lord of Summer who would usher in a glorious reign of peace and prosperity . . . and whose noble, trusting heart would be broken by treachery.

Arthur is King—but darkest evil has descended upon Britain's shores in many guises. In this black time of plague and pestilence, Arthur's most trusted counselor Myrddin—the warrior, bard, and kingmaker whom legend will name Merlin—is himself to be tested on a mystical journey through his own extraordinary past. So the noble king must stand alone against a great and terrible adversary. For only thus can he truly win immortality—and the name he will treasure above all others: Pendragon.

Drought, plague, and war have left the Isle of the Mighty battered and its heart, the beloved Arthur, grievously injured—until a secret relic is brought before the dying KIng; a Holy Grail that heals his wounds and restores his vigor. But soon evil enters the royal court in the guise of a beautiful maiden; a soulless, malevolent force capable of seducing the King's loyal champion, confounding the sage whom some call Merlin, and carrying the sacred Grail—and Arthur's adored Queen—off into the dark unknown. And now Arthur faces the greatest challenge of his sovererignty: a quest of recovery that must lead the noble liege through realms of magic and the undead, on a trail that winds inexorably toward a grim confrontation with his most foul nemesis . . . and his destiny.

It has been fortold: In the hour of Britain's greatest need, King Arthur will return to rescue his people.

In Portugal, the reprobate King Edward the Ninth has died by his own hand.

In England, a dark scenario conceived by the power-hungry Prime Minister, Thomas Waring, is about to be realized: the total destruction of the British monarchy in the twenty-first century.

And in the Scottish Highlands, a mystical emissary named Mr. Embries--better known as "Merlin"--informs a young captain that he is next in line to occupy the throne. For James Arthur Stuart is not the commoner he has always believed himself to be--he is Arthur, the legendary King of Summer, reborn. But the road to England's salvation is rocky and dangerous, with powerful waiting to ambush: Waring and his ruthless political machine...and the agents of an ancient, far more potent evil. For Arthur is not the only one who has returned from the mists of legend. And Merlin's magic is not the only sorcery that has survived the centuries.

In the world between worlds, a dark age has come. The gods struggle to contain eight terrible dragons, restless in their sky prisons, while Vous, the people's 'friend and lord', descends into madness. This is Levaal, the world between worlds. When a small red door appears in a graffiti-clad train bridge, journalist Eric Albright and his friend, the homeless drunk Stuart Case, give no thought to what may be on the other side. Now they will discover why some doors should not be opened...

When Eric Albright opened a battered red wooden door in an old railway arch he found Levaal, a world populated by mages, stoneflesh giants, pit devils, tunnel-dwelling groundmen, and much else besides. Levaal is a world divided: behind the ancient great Wall at World's End lie the mysteries of the unknown southern realm. But the Wall has been destroyed, and now Levaal stands naked before its twin world. War is looming: Tormentors roam the land and dragons strain against their prisons in the sky. The Arch Mage seeks to unseat Vous, the insane Lord, before he joins the gods. And one of the dragons is rumoured to have escaped. A Dark Age has dawned and all over Levaal, loyalties are fractured, while in the south an alien force is rising. Its name is Shadow. "

When Eric Albright, a luckless London slacker, and his pal Stuart Casey went through a battered red door under a railway bridge, the last thing they expected to find was another world. There lay the strange, dark realm of Levaal, whose tyrant lord Vous has ascended to godhood. The great wall which has divided the land has been brought down, setting loose a horde of demonic Tormentors. In their sky prisons, the dragons are stirring, set to defy their slumbering creator and steal humanity's world.

Shilen, a dragon cloaked in human form, has convinced Eric and Aziel, Vous's daughter, to help free the dragons from their sky-prison, or Earth will be destroyed. She promises great power, and safety for all Eric's favoured people, but Shilen has an ulterior motive, for the dragons wish to control humankind completely.

In Will Elliott's World's End, the third volume in The Pendulum Trilogy, Levaal is facing the final battle in this age-old war between worlds and forces more ancient than any human, god, or dragon.

Leaping into the body of one of his own ancestors, Sam Beckett finds himself at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, where his actions depend upon whether the Beckett from the past was a Tory, patriot, or double spy.

In farthest space lie hidden fortunes... and unknown enemies.

BATTLE OF THE MINDS

The Tathas was bigger than any Rikard had ever seen and each of its tendrils was tipped in red. It was this which was broadcasting the devastating psychic weapon.

Rikard's panic was overwhelming. He knew all too well the kind of madness those alien thoughts could engender, the horror of being touched by one of those degenerate things, being dissolved and eaten while still alive. He fought to control his fear, fumbled for his gun. But even as he pulled the gun, his vision blurred from the effects of the Tathas' psychic attack.

He tried to reach under his shirt for the dragongem, the one thing which, once long ago, had helped him against this evil, but he couldn't get his hand to work. There was a gun in it. He let the gun go, tried to raise his head, saw raiders coming out of the balcony, down ramps, across the floor from first level entrances. The Tathas loomed large, its carrier zombies striding, clumsy but purposeful, toward him.

He concentrated all his energy in retaining awareness...

Penguin Island (1908) has been called "the best social satire ever written" (Toni Ungerer).

The story takes place in Antarctica, where a fictional penguin population mirrors the foibles of human beings. With the devil's help, a missionary arrives in Antartica and baptizes the local penguins. With God's help, he then turns them into human beings. As a result, the penguins must now try to figure out how to live together and create a civilization. They experience their own barbaric Ancient Times and Middle Ages, and in their efforts to create a modern age, they undergo social conflicts and devastating wars.

Written in the spirit of rationalism and enlightenment,Penguin Island is a wickedly funny, incisive portrait of religious fanatacism.

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

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

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

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

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

He'd been held captive in the land of the Sidhe, and when he returned home to Los Angeles, all he wanted was to live like a normal, average man again.

But there are hauntings in the city streets, and strange bodies in a crumbling old hotel, a Song of Power in the air and an ancient creature summoning him from beneath the waters of a loch in Scotland.

Michael had returned to Caligornia at last. But the Sidhe were following him home.

After the disappearance of Captain James T. Kirk, and before Captain Jean-Luc Picard took the helm of the Enterprise, the Federation and the Romulans clashed head on in a confrontation that would change the course of history.

Early in his five-year mission commanding the U.S.S. Enterprise, Captain James T. Kirk found himself caught up in a growing conflict on the planet Neural. To maintain the balance of power against a force being armed by the Klingons, he provided weapons to his new friends, the Hill People. Years later, Admiral Kirk learns that the Klingon presence on Neural has grown considerably, and in possible violation of the Treaty of Organia. Did his impulse as a young captain turn out disastrously wrong? Could he have done more to eliminate the Klingon threat? To find out, Kirk must embark on a secret mission back to Neural--where he might just be the only person who can prevent an interstellar war....

Open Secrets is the fourth instalment of the compelling new Vanguard series, which returns to the original Star Trek era, but with an entirely new perspective. These novels run parallel to Captain Kirk's original five-year misson, but feature all-original characters who uncover the hidden secrets and flesh-out the complex relationships between the allies and enemies first featured in the original Star Trek series.

Open Secrets begins on a space station in the vast and remote region of space known as Taurus Reach. A new commander has taken control of Starbase 47 while his predecessor stands trial for treason. Meanwhile, the station's intelligence officer fights for her life and her very mind, while the ever-present tension with the Klingons escalates into all-out war. Building upon the drama of its Vanguard predecessors, Reap the Whirlwind, Summon the Thunder and Harbinger, Open Secrets uncovers new truths and features all-new characters to offer a completely new take on the classic Star Trek era.

THE FUTURE JUST GOT A WHOLE LOT HARDER

Serge LaRoche was a gifted musician, until a freak accident took away his hands. Now he's focusing on his career as an instructor at StarBridge Academy. His newest student, brilliant but undisciplined Heather Farley, is looking forward to StarBridge being her first chance at the security and stability that she has lacked her entire life. But now an archaeological find beneath the cold surface of the school's asteroid base threatens their hopes for the future... and possibly the future for StarBridge itself.

The young and beloved Emperor Spinel-alpha of the planet Qsaprinel has been taken captive by the allies of his jealous twin brother, whose deformities of birth have left him jealous and scheming for the throne. The Emperor and all his subjects are large crustaceans of a philosophical bent, and there is more to the situation than meets the Emperor's compound eye. A conspiracy revolving around an enigmatic enzyme found in the bodies of the Qsaprinli and the rumors of an illegal human colony hidden somewhere on the world's single continent has entangled the planet; on the Emperor's request, it falls to Dun Kinnear, Sector Co-ordinator and class-two ESP and Khreng and Prandra's daughter Emerald and her lover Raanung, to untangle the mystery and defend Qsaprinel from its attackers.

This is not a direct sequel to A Judgement of Dragons, as it can be read without any prior knowledge of Gotlieb's world, but fans of the earlier novel will enjoy the reappearance of familiar characters and races.

Half-breed human star navigator Jaqi, working the edges of human-settled space on contract to whoever will hire her, stumbles into possession of an artifact that the leader of the Rebellion wants desperately enough to send his personal guard after. An interstellar empire and the fate of the remnant of humanity hang in the balance.

Although this is published as part of Tor.com's Novella line, it is a novel of ~55,000 words.

Jaqi, Araskar and Z are on the run from everyone - the Resistance, the remnants of the Empire, the cyborg Suits, and right now from the Matakas - and the Matakas are the most pressing concern because the insectoid aliens have the drop on them. The Resistance has a big reward out for Araskar and the human children he and Jaqi are protecting.

But Araskar has something to offer the mercenary aliens. He knows how to get to a huge supply of pure oxygen cells, something in short supply in the formerly human Empire, and that might be enough to buy their freedom. Araskar knows where it is, and Jaqi can take them there. With the Matakas as troops, they break into Shadow Sun Seven, on the edge of the Dark Zone.

At the heart of the Dark Zone, a duel for the universe rages.

In an ancient Jorian temple, Jaqi faces John Starfire, the new ruler of the Empire. He has set all the worlds aflame in his quest to destroy humankind. Jaqi has sworn to stop him. Problem is, Jaqi isn't much of a fighter.

Meanwhile, the sun-eating cosmic spiders, the Shir, have moved out of the Dark Zone and are consuming the galaxy. Araskar knows that he must hold them back, but to do that, he has to give himself over to the Resistance, under the command of John Starfire's wife. And she wants him dead more than she wants the stars to live.

If Jaqi and Araskar can fight their way out, they can use a secret at the heart of the Dark Zone to free the galaxy, and end John Starfire's new tyranny. They lose, and every star in the sky will go dark.

A now classic monograph on the Life, Fantasy works, and Influence of Charles Williams.

The Star Company, a renegade theatre troupe, was run off of Earth, so they set their sites on New Venus. The name sounded good, but life on the planet was thoroughly regulated by Amalgamated Petroleum--where even the air and water came at a high cost. Enter the Star Company, with its incendiary mix of veteran troupers, innocent ingenues, and volatile prima donnas. When Amalgamated approved a production of MACBETH, little did anybody imagine how much trouble those three witches would stir up!

With the universe's wormholes collapsed, darkness has fallen across interstellar civilization, and superstition once again holds sway over the masses, until Dr. Karl Woodward, commander of the starship The Mountain, ventures to an uncharted world and into a terrifying confrontation with a ruthless gang of space pirates.

When Sergeant Hallie Michaels comes back to South Dakota from Afghanistan on ten days' compassionate leave, her sister Dell's ghost is waiting at the airport to greet her.

The sheriff says that Dell's death was suicide, but Hallie doesn't believe it. Something happened or Dell's ghost wouldn't still be hanging around. Friends and family, mourning Dell's loss, think Hallie's letting her grief interfere with her judgment.

The one person who seems willing to listen is the deputy sheriff, Boyd Davies, who shows up everywhere and helps when he doesn't have to.

As Hallie asks more questions, she attracts new ghosts, women who disappeared without a trace. Soon, someone's trying to beat her up, burn down her father's ranch, and stop her investigation.

Hallie's going to need Boyd, her friends, and all the ghosts she can find to defeat an enemy who has an unimaginable ancient power at his command.

A dazzling blend of military history, high-flying fantasy, and edge-of-your-seat adventure, Naomi Novik's Temeraire novels, set in an alternate Napoleonic era in which intelligent dragons have been harnessed as weapons of war, are more than just perennial bestsellers-they are a worldwide phenomenon. Now, in Tongues of Serpents, Naomi Novik is back, along with the dragon Temeraire and his rider and friend, Capt. Will Laurence.

Convicted of treason despite their heroic defense against Napoleon's invasion of England, Temeraire and Laurence-stripped of rank and standing-have been transported to the prison colony at New South Wales in distant Australia, where, it is hoped, they cannot further corrupt the British Aerial Corps with their dangerous notions of liberty for dragons. Temeraire and Laurence carry with them three dragon eggs intended to help establish a covert in the colony and destined to be handed over to such second-rate, undesirable officers as have been willing to accept so remote an assignment-including one former acquaintance, Captain Rankin, whose cruelty once cost a dragon its life.

Nor is this the greatest difficulty that confronts the exiled dragon and rider: Instead of leaving behind all the political entanglements and corruptions of the war, Laurence and Temeraire have instead sailed into a hornet's nest of fresh complications. For the colony at New South Wales has been thrown into turmoil after the overthrow of the military governor, one William Bligh-better known as Captain Bligh, late of HMS Bounty. Bligh wastes no time in attempting to enlist Temeraire and Laurence to restore him to office, while the upstart masters of the colony are equally determined that the new arrivals should not upset a balance of power precariously tipped in their favor. Eager to escape this political quagmire, Laurence and Temeraire take on a mission to find a way through the forbidding Blue Mountains and into the interior of Australia. But when one of the dragon eggs is stolen from Temeraire, the surveying expedition becomes a desperate race to recover it in time-a race that leads to a shocking discovery and a dangerous new obstacle in the global war between Britain and Napoleon.

At the bottom of the world lies a Serpent, the last of its kind. Finding the Serpent will change lives.

Tess is a girl on a mission to save a friend.
Spira is a dragon seeking a new identity.
Marga is an explorer staking her claim on a man's world.
Jacomo is a priest searching for his soul.

There are those who would give their lives to keep it hidden. And those who would destroy it.

But the only people who will truly find the Serpent are those who have awakened to the world around them--with eyes open to the wondrous, the terrible, and the just.

When the members of the Kindred pass through a portal and are scattered across the twelve claims, they face the dark threat of being discovered by Those of the Serpent. As each group journeys towards the fateful rendezvous, it finds unexpected allies.

The depraved evil of the Serpent threatens to engulf them. Will their Quest against Discord be successful? Will their faith in the Brother save them?

Lady Sandrilene fa Toren knows all about unusual magic--she herself spins and weaves it like thread. But when she witnesses a boy dancing a spell, even she is confounded. To her dismay she gets news of a mysterious murderer stalking a clan of local merchants. The killer employs the strangest magic of all: the ability to reduce essence to nothingness. As the murders mount and the killer grows bolder, Sandry's teaching takes on a grave purpose. It becomes clear to everyone that the killings can only be stopped by the combined magic of two people: the young teacher and her even younger student.

Briar Moss been training four years as a plant mage, but he hasn't put his past behind him. He meets a street girl, Evvy, using powerful magic to polish stones for a merchant, and resolves to find her a teacher. But Briar understands the city's gangs as well as he understands Evvy. When gang warfare breaks out, he discovers that the fiercest gang is seeking a stone mage to lead them to hidden gems. Only Briar and his magic can offer Evvy protection. Swept up in a bloody conflict, Briar must decide if he's ready to make the final step away from his former life as a "street rat".

Daja and Frostpine expect to have a peaceful winter's visit with old friends in Kugisko, a port in the vast empire of Namon. But there is no peace when mysterious fires begin to blaze across the vulnerable city. Daja assists Bennat Ladradun, a local firefighter with a tragic past, to fight the flames. The two become fast friends-until they realize the fires have been deliberately set, and their relationship is deeply tested. Daja's magic helps her track down the firestarter, but no magic can protect her or Ben from the effects of madness and betrayal.

Kethlun Warder was a gifted glassmaker until his world was shattered in a freak accident. Now his remaining glass magic is mixed with lightning, and Tris must teach him to control it (if she can teach him to control his temper first). But there's more at stake than Keth's education. With his strange magic, he creates glass balls that reflect the immediate past and expose the work of a murderer. If he can harness his power properly, he'll be able to see the crimes as they take place. Keth and Tris race against time, and the local authorities, to identify a killer who's living in plain sight.

Shadow demons plague the city reservoir, and Red King Consolidated has sent in Caleb Altemoc -- casual gambler and professional risk manager-to cleanse the water for the sixteen million people of Dresediel Lex. At the scene of the crime, Caleb finds an alluring and clever cliff runner, Crazy Mal, who easily outpaces him.

But Caleb has more than the demon infestation, Mal, or job security to worry about when he discovers that his father -- the last priest of the old gods and leader of the True Quechal terrorists -- has broken into his home and is wanted in connection to the attacks on the water supply.

From the beginning, Caleb and Mal are bound by lust, Craft, and chance, as both play a dangerous game where gods and people are pawns. They sleep on water, they dance in fire... and all the while the Twin Serpents slumbering beneath the earth are stirring, and they are hungry.

After the four worlds Alfred has at last found his people on Chelstra, the realm of sea. But his travels have taught him to be cautious... and Alfred soon realizes his caution is justified, even among his own kind. The one person Alfred can trust is, strangely, Haplo the Patryn. But Haplo's lord has decreed all Sartan to be the enemy, and Haplo dares not go against his lord. Now the companions have arrived in a land where humans, elves, and dwarves have learned to live in peace. Unaware of an even greater threat to all the realms, it is Sartan and Patryn who will disrupt this alliance of the lesser races in their struggle to gain control of all four worlds. Only Alfred and Haplo realize that they have a much older -- and more powerful -- enemy than each other...

Recently, Vampire Queen Carling's power has become erratic, forcing her followers to flee. Wyr sentinel Rune is drawn to the ailing Queen and decides to help find a cure for the serpent's kiss-the vampyric disease that's killing her. With their desire for each other escalating they will have to rely on each other if they have any hope of surviving the serpent's kiss...

Table of Contents

• Preface - (1989) - essay by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois
• Algy - (1976) - short story by L. Sprague de Camp
• Out of Darkness - (1987) - short story by Lillian Stewart Carl
• Leviathan! - (1970) - short story by Larry Niven
• The Horses of Lir - (1981) - short story by Roger Zelazny
• The Mortal and the Monster - (1976) - novella by Gordon R. Dickson
• Man Overboard - (1960) - novelette by John Collier
• The Dakwa - (1977) - short story by Manly Wade Wellman
• The Kings of the Sea - (1968) - novelette by Sterling E. Lanier
• Grumblefritz - (1981) - short story by Marvin Kaye
• The Devil of Malkirk - (1982) - novella by Charles Sheffield
• Further Reading - (1989) - essay by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois

Humanity in the year 2071 is straining at the limits of terrestrial and solar sustainability. With billions of people placing a demand on Earth's finite resources, an outlet is needed. Robot probes have identified planets in other systems capable of supporting human life. But before they can be colonized they must be proven - a high-risk prospect. Enter the Expendables: a group of highly talented criminals and misfits who combine technical expertise in their chosen fields with checkered pasts. Led by James Conrad, a former commander in the United Nations Space Service, they are sent out to explore Kratos, the first viable planet discovered by the probes. Yet not only must the team determine the planets viability as a colony for humans, they must also answer an additional question - just who or what left the large ruts scarring the planet's surface?

First they went to Kratos - and faced the Deathworms. Then they went on to Tantalus and tried to fathom the Rings - which could only have been fabricated with the help of highly sophisticated machinery. And then they discover an alien spaceship orbiting the planet in strict silence and incommunicability. When they finally boarded the vessel, it was obvious that it had been derelict for centuries - as a result of some dreadful battle. Meanwhile down below, the enigmatic Rings lay waiting to deal with intruders - as they did the deadly vampire tree. Once again, Commander James Conrad and his team of Expendables faced their mission to find planets suitable for colonization.

Zelos seemed an ideal planet for colonization. Possessing one large continent and numerous archipelagos, it had a climate and vegetation comfortably like that of Earth.

Captain James Conrad and his crew of Expendables started on their initial reconnaissance of the planet. For the first time they found human beings already in residence. But this was a society remote from anything they had ever before experienced. For the Emperor of this strange world controlled his domain through the great annual War Games.

Only the fittest could survive - and only they were allowed to procreate. Through this "death control" the population was limited to twenty thousand. There was only one way the Expendables could get permission to establish a colony on Zelos. Risking their own lives, they must compete in the dreaded War Games. And, somehow, they must win.

The Expendables had struck it lucky at last. After grappling with the revolting Death Worms of Kratos, the deadly Rings of Tantalus and the weirdly anachronistic military society of Zelos, their fourth mission looked an easy one. Argus was an earth-type planet with one major continent, comfortably covered with vegetation. But that was before The Expendables encountered the deadly harpoon tree, or the low-lying plant which grasped greedily at anyone who dared to set foot on it, or the hornets that paralyzed their victims - so as to enjoy their food in peace. Worst of all the lurking horrors of Argus was the deadly hallucinogenic pollen which turned quiet Santa Maria crew members into vicious maniacs

In a daring and deadly heist thieves have made away with an artifact of terrible power--the death mask of Louis Charbon. Made by a master craftsman, it is imbued with the spirit of a monster from history, a serial murderer who terrorized the city with a series of gruesome murders.

Now Charbon is loose once more, killing from beyond the grave. But these murders are different from before, not simply random but the work of a deliberate mind probing for answers to a sinister question.

It is up to Krona Hirvath and her fellow Regulators to enter the mind of madness to stop this insatiable killer while facing the terrible truths left in his wake.

Krona and her Regulators survived their encounter with Charbon, the long-dead serial killer who returned to their city, but the illusions of their world were shattered forever.

Allied with an old friend they will battle the elite who have ruled their world with deception, cold steel, and tight control of the magic that could threaten their power, while also confronting beasts from beyond the foggy barrier that binds their world.

Now they must follow every thread to uncover the truth behind the Thalo, once thought of as only a children's tale, who are the quiet, creeping puppet masters of their world.

They are each other's fiercest love, greatest danger, and only hope.

Séverin and his team members might have successfully thwarted the Fallen House, but victory came at a terrible cost -- one that still haunts all of them. Desperate to make amends, Séverin pursues a dangerous lead to find a long lost artifact rumored to grant its possessor the power of God.

Their hunt lures them far from Paris, and into the icy heart of Russia where crystalline ice animals stalk forgotten mansions, broken goddesses carry deadly secrets, and a string of unsolved murders makes the crew question whether an ancient myth is a myth after all.

As hidden secrets come to the light and the ghosts of the past catch up to them, the crew will discover new dimensions of themselves. But what they find out may lead them down paths they never imagined.

A tale of love and betrayal as the crew risks their lives for one last job.

Returning to the dark and glamorous 19th century world of her New York Times instant bestseller, The Gilded Wolves, Roshani Chokshi dazzles us with another riveting tale as full of mystery and danger as ever in The Silvered Serpents.

With the future of the Great Library in doubt, the unforgettable characters from Ink and Bonemust decide if it's worth saving in this thrilling adventure in the New York Times bestselling series.

The corrupt leadership of the Great Library has fallen. But with the Archivist plotting his return to power, and the Library under siege from outside empires and kingdoms, its future is uncertain. Jess Brightwell and his friends must come together as never before, to forge a new future for the Great Library... or see everything it stood for crumble.

Over a hundred years have passed since a group of violent killers went on the rampage, murdering innocent victims for fun. But even back then, sorcerer Nate Garrett, aka Hellequin, knew there was more to it than simple savage pleasure--souls were being stolen.

Nate's discovery of the souls' use, and of those supporting the group's plan, made him question everything he believed.

Now the group Nate thought long dead is back. Violent, angry, and hell-bent on revenge, they have Hellequin firmly in their sights. And if he won't come willingly, they'll take those closest to him first.

The battle begins again.

He's b-a-a-ack! Despite their best efforts, Carter and Sadie Kane can't seem to keep Apophis, the chaos snake, down.

Now Apophis is threatening to plunge the world into eternal darkness, and the Kanes are faced with the impossible task of having to destroy him once and for all.

Unfortunately, the magicians of the House of Life are on the brink of civil war, the gods are divided, and the young initiates of Brooklyn House stand almost alone against the forces of chaos.

The Kanes' only hope is an ancient spell that might turn the serpent's own shadow into a weapon, but the magic has been lost for a millennia. To find the answer they need, the Kanes must rely on the murderous ghost of a powerful magician who might be able to lead them to the serpent's shadow... or might lead them to their deaths in the depths of the underworld.

Nothing less than the mortal world is at stake when the Kane family fulfills its destiny in this thrilling conclusion to the Kane Chronicles.

For two weeks now it has been the same message again and again, and it's getting stronger; death and destruction, the end of all things, Armageddon.

In an attempt to lift the Doctor out of his irritable and erratic mood, Bernice suggests he investigates the mystery of the Seven Planets - an entire planetary system that disappeared without trace several decades before Bernice was born.

One of the Seven Planets is a nameless giant, quarantined against all intruders. But when the TARDIS materialises, it becomes clear that the planet has other visitors: a hit-squad of killer androids; a trespassing scientist and his wife; and two shape-changing criminals with their team of slaves.

As riot and anarchy spread on the system's colonised worlds, the Doctor is flung into another universe while Bernice closes in on the horror that is about to be unleashed - a horror that comes from a terrible secret in the Time Lords' past.

Private Eye John Taylor is the only thing standing between his not-quite-human mother and the destruction of the magical realm within London known as the Nightside.

A HANDSOME COMMANDER IS THE CURE!

One day, twenty-nine-year-old accountant Seiichirou Kondou is accidentally transported to another world. As compensation, the Romany Kingdom promises to take care of all his living expenses, but the workaholic Seiichirou still asks for a job. Once he's placed in the Royal Accounting Department, he starts whipping his lackadaisical colleagues into shape. But when he gets in over his head and nearly dies from overwork, the handsome Commander Aresh steps in to save him, and the two develop a unique physical relationship... as a form of medical treatment?!

His heart and life are on the line!

Seiichirou Kondou used to be a regular Japanese salaryman, but now he's an accountant in another world! He is still a workaholic, but the handsome and doting Commander Aresh refuses to let him continue his unhealthy lifestyle. The young commander oversees everything from his diet to his working hours. Thanks to their special physical relationship, he also looks after Seiichirou in bed, tenderly wrapping him in protective magic and painstakingly filling the man's body with magical energy. But make no mistake--this is not a honeymoon! Before Seiichirou can address Aresh's deepening feelings, his caretaker leaves on a dangerous mission. And Seiichirou has his own harrowing assignment that involves an audit of the church--even if the profound levels of magic there make it a brush with death!

The boy-king Arthor has beaten back the berserker wolf warriors of the Saxon god, uniting his island kingdom -- but at a terrible cost. For the Grail, the chalice of the Last Supper and the magical shield of Britain, has been stolen.

Without the Grail's protection, Britain lies parched and barren, a demon-haunted landscape where sulfurous vapors taint ther air. To find the Grail, Arthor's mother, Ygrane, must strike a dark bargain with Bright Night, elf-prince of the "pale people,"in the hollow hills. Merlin must use his magic to show the way. But it is Arthor himself who must confront the Serpent, Sword in hand.

What if you knew how and when you will die?

Csorwe does--she will climb the mountain, enter the Shrine of the Unspoken, and gain the most honored title: sacrifice.

But on the day of her foretold death, a powerful mage offers her a new fate. Leave with him, and live. Turn away from her destiny and her god to become a thief, a spy, an assassin--the wizard's loyal sword. Topple an empire, and help him reclaim his seat of power.

But Csorwe will soon learn--gods remember, and if you live long enough, all debts come due.

Two years ago, Csorwe and Shuthmili defied the wizard Belthandros Sethennai and stole his gauntlets. The gauntlets have made Shuthmili extraordinarily powerful, but they're beginning to take a sinister toll on her. She and Csorwe travel to a distant world to discover how to use the gauntlets safely, but when an old enemy arrives on the scene, Shuthmili finds herself torn between clinging to her humanity and embracing eldritch power.

Meanwhile, Tal Charossa returns to Tlaanthothe to find that Sethennai has gone missing. As well as being a wizard of unimaginable power, Sethennai is Tal's old boss and former lover, and Tal wants nothing to do with him. When a magical catastrophe befalls the city, Tal tries to run rather than face his past, but soon learns that something even worse may lurk in the future. Throughout the worlds of the Echo Maze, fragments of an undead goddess begin to awaken, and not all confrontations can be put off forever...

A dread darkness is descending upon a great land called Midkemia -- a powerful and malevolent race of monsters that has slipped through a hole in the dimensions. And two unlikely young heroes -- a bastard heir denied his birthright and an irrepressible scoundrel with a penchant for thievery -- must take up arms in the struggle to protect their besieged world...two friends chosen by Destiny to stand at the fore of the battle that is to come against the gargantuan reptile army of the terrible Emerald Queen.

Surviving the wrath of the fearsome Sauur -- a hideous race of invading serpents -- noble Erik and cunning Roo have delivered a timely warning to the rulers of the Midkemian Empire, and are now free to pursue their separate destinies. Erik chooses the army -- and the continuing war against Midkemia's dread enemies. Roo lusts for wealth and power -- rising high and fast in theworld of trade. But with luxury comes carelessness and a vulnerability to the desires of the flesh. And a beautiful seductress with her ruthless machinations threatens to destroy everything Roo has built and become -- summoning catastrophe into his future...and terror into his world.

A loyal soldier and a wealthy merchant have served bravely in the flames of an enduring war that is ravaging their land. But swords, bows, wits and courage will no longer be enough to defeat the scourge that is descending upon their home. For a foul and terrible thing has escaped from a world already devoured to feed on one consumed by chaos -- an insatiable nightmare creature of dark and murderous nature which seeks to own and corrupt the very source of life itself

The final conflict is joined, pitting serpent against man and magician against demon. For those who battle in the cause of good, there will be victory...or there will be doom for all.

There can be no other outcome.

Winter's icy grasp is loosening on the world. The Emerald Queen's vanquished army has its broken back to the Bitter Sea. And treachery is its only recourse.

A lackey has declared himself Lord of the defeated, amassing the still fearsome remnants of a ruthless fighting force together for one final assault on a weakened, vulnerable realm.

For the warriors who remained steadfast against terrible numbers, for the courageous souls who barely survived a devastating onslaught upon their homeland, the time to rebuild and renew has not yet come. The war is not over in Midkemia. And Jimmy and Dash--two young noble brothers who stand at the center of a gathering storm--are impelled to action that could secure a tenuous peace...or turn triumph into catastrophe.

The demon is no more.

The enemy has been routed. But all is not well...

Seventeen years ago, King Odysseus sailed to war with Troy, taking with him every man of fighting age from the island of Ithaca. None of them has returned, and the women of Ithaca have been left behind to run the kingdom.

Penelope was barely into womanhood when she wed Odysseus. While he lived, her position was secure. But now, years on, speculation is mounting that her husband is dead, and suitors are beginning to knock at her door.

No one man is strong enough to claim Odysseus' empty throne--not yet. But as everyone waits for the balance of power to tip, Penelope knows that any choice she makes could plunge Ithaca into bloody civil war.

On the isle of Ithaca, queen Penelope maintains a delicate balance of power. Many years ago, her husband Odysseus sailed to war with Troy and never came home. In his absence, Penelope uses all her cunning to keep the peace--a peace that is shattered by the return of Orestes, King of Mycenae, and his sister Elektra.

Orestes' hands are stained with his mother's blood. Not so long ago, the son of Agamemnon took Queen Clytemnestra's life on Ithaca's sands. Now, wracked with guilt, he is slowly losing his mind. But a king cannot be seen to be weak, and Elektra has brought him to Ithaca to keep him safe from the ambitious men of Mycenae.

Penelope knows destruction will follow in his wake as surely as the furies circle him. His uncle Menelaus, the battle-hungry king of Sparta, longs for Orestes' throne--and if he can seize it, no one will be safe from his violent whims.

Trapped between two mad kings, Penelope fights to keep her home from being crushed by a war that stretches from Mycenae and Sparta to the summit of Mount Olympus itself. Her only allies are Elektra, desperate to protect her brother, and Helen of Troy, Menelaus' wife. And watching over them all is the goddess Aphrodite, who has plans of her own.

Each woman has a secret. And their secrets will shape the world.

Many years ago, Odysseus sailed to war and never returned. For twenty years his wife Penelope and the women of Ithaca have guarded the isle against suitors and rival kings. But peace cannot be kept forever, and the balance of power is about to break...

A beggar has arrived at the Palace. Salt-crusted and ocean-battered, he is scorned by the suitors - but Penelope recognises in him something terrible: her husband, Odysseus, returned at last. Yet this Odysseus is no hero. By returning to the island in disguise, he is not merely plotting his revenge against the suitors - vengeance that will spark a civil war - but he's testing the loyalty of his queen. Has she been faithful to him all these years? And how much blood is Odysseus willing to shed to be sure?

The song of Penelope is ending, and the song of Odysseus must ring through Ithaca's halls. But first, Penelope must use all her cunning to win a war for the fate of the island and keep her family alive, whatever the cost...

Gavril Nagarian, Lord Drakhaon of Azhkendir, is believed dead - perished in the heat of battle. Yet he still lives, and is entrusted with a sacred mission: to rescue the aged Magus, who has been kidnapped and in whose possession are the five priceless rubies that compose the fabled Tears of Artamon. Ancient law decrees that whoever possesses the stones has the power to impose his will over the Empire of New Rossiya. But the task exacts a cost. The drakhaoul that destroyed his forebears has penetrated Gavril's psyche and is gaining power over his soul. As these dark forces seek immortality inside him, so Gavril must feed on the blood of innocents - or die.

Toppled by the loss of the Tears of Artamon, Emperor Eugene of Tielen is tormented by his own daemon, but he must defend his lands against King Enguerrand of Francia who claims ownership of the Tears. Yet both men share a common goal: to destroy Gavril Nagarian and the Drakhaoul that lives within him once and for all.

Ingenious and unforgettable, Children of the Serpent Gate delivers a thrilling conclusion to the epic trials of a man of honour in a world in chaos - one that can only be laid to rest by an Emperor's Tears.

Behind the front lines of a crusade to scour the world of magic, the crew of a field hospital confront the horrors of war.

City-by-city, kingdom-by-kingdom, the Palleseen have sworn to bring Perfection and Correctness to an imperfect world. As their legions scour the world of superstition with the bright flame of reason, so they deliver a mountain of ragged, holed and scorched flesh to the field hospital tents just behind the front line.

Which is where Yasnic, one-time priest, healer and rebel, finds himself. Reprieved from the gallows and sent to war clutching a box of orphan Gods, he has been sequestered to a particularity unorthodox medical unit.

Led by 'the Butcher', an ogre of a man who's a dab hand with a bone-saw and an alchemical tincture, the unit's motley crew of conscripts, healers and orderlies are no strangers to the horrors of war. Theirs is an unspeakable trade: elbow-deep in gore they have a first-hand view of the suffering caused by flesh-rending monsters, arcane magical weaponry and embittered enemy soldiers.

Entrusted -- for now -- with saving lives deemed otherwise un-saveable, the field hospital's crew face a precarious existence. Their work with unapproved magic, necromancy, demonology and Yasnic's thoroughly illicit Gods could lead to the unit being disbanded, arrested or worse.

Beset by enemies within and without, the last thing anyone needs is a miracle...

As a witch in the walled city of Chernograd, Kosara has plenty of practice treating lycanthrope bites, bargaining with kikimoras, and slaying bloodsucking upirs. There's only one monster she can't defeat: her ex, the Zmey, known as the Tsar of Monsters. She's defied him one too many times and now he's hunting her. Betrayed by someone close to her, Kosara's only choice is to trade her shadow - the source of her powers - for a quick escape.

Unfortunately, Kosara soon develops the deadly sickness that plagues shadowless witches - and only reclaiming her magic can cure her. To find it, she's forced to team up with a suspiciously honorable detective. Even worse, all the clues point in a single direction: To get her shadow back, Kosara will have to face the Foul Days' biggest threats without it. And she's only got twelve days.

But in a city where everyone is out for themselves, who can Kosara trust to assist her in outwitting the biggest monster from her past?

With her magic reclaimed and her role in the community of Chernograd restored, Kosara's life should finally be back to normal - but, of course, things can't possibly be that simple.

She is now in possession of twelve witch's shadows. Holding them may grant her unprecedented power, but that doesn't mean they're always willing to do her bidding.

Across the wall in Belograd, Asen chases his only lead on the latest witch murder case. He follows the trail of smuggling kingpin Konstantin Karaivanov to an underground monster auction - which leads him right back to Chernograd.

There, sinister events follow one after another: snow falls in midsummer, a witch with two shadows is found dead, and monsters that should only appear during the Foul Days are sighted. The barrier between worlds thins... and Kosara is certain it's her fault - and her job to fix.

Hugo-winning and Locus-nominated Novella

On his way to his betrothal, young Lord Penric comes upon a riding accident with an elderly lady on the ground, her maidservant and guardsmen distraught. As he approaches to help, he discovers that the lady is a Temple divine, servant to the five gods of this world. Her avowed god is The Bastard, "master of all disasters out of season", and with her dying breath she bequeaths her mysterious powers to Penric. From that moment on, Penric's life is irreversibly changed, and his life is in danger from those who envy or fear him.

Hugo Award nominated novella. Sequel to the Hugo Award winning Novella "Penric's Demon"

In The World of the Five Gods, four years after the events in "Penric's Demon", Penric is a divine of the Bastard's Order as well as a sorcerer and scholar, living in the palace where the Princess-Archdivine holds court. His scholarly work is interrupted when the Archdivine agrees to send Penric, in his role as sorcerer, to accompany a "Locator" of the Father's Order, assigned to capture Inglis, a runaway shaman charged with the murder of his best friend.

However, the situation they discover in the mountains is far more complex than expected. Penric's roles as sorcerer, strategist, and counselor are all called upon before the end.

In his thirtieth year, Penric fell in love with light...

Learned Penric, a sorcerer and divine of the Bastard's Order, travels across the sea to sunlit Cedonia on his first covert diplomatic mission, to attempt to secure the services of a disaffected Cedonian general for the Duke of Adria. However, nothing is as it seems: Penric is betrayed and thrown into a dungeon, and worse follows for the general and his kin.

At ~45,300 words, this is technically a Novel, and is outside the Hugo Award's 45,000 word limit for Novellas in 2017.

In this sequel to the novella Penric's Mission, the injured Penric, a Temple sorcerer and learned divine, tries to guide the betrayed General Arisaydia and his widowed sister Nikys across the last hundred miles of hostile Cedonia to safety in the Duchy of Orbas.

In the town of Sosie the fugitive party encounters unexpected delays, and even more unexpected opportunities and hazards, as the courtesan Mira of Adria, one of the ten dead women whose imprints make up the personality of the chaos demon Desdemona, comes to the fore with her own special expertise.

Some eight months after the events of "Penric and the Shaman", Learned Penric, sorcerer and scholar, travels to Easthome, the capital of the Weald. There he again meets his friends Shaman Inglis and Locator Oswyl. When the body of a sorceress is found in the woods, Oswyl draws him into another investigation; they must all work together to uncover a mystery mixing magic, murder and the strange realities of Temple demons.

In this sequel to Mira's Last Dance, Temple sorcerer Penric and the widow Nikys have reached safety in the duchy of Orbas when a secret letter from a friend brings frightening news: Nikys' mother has been taken hostage by her brother's enemies at the Cedonian imperial court, and confined in a precarious island sanctuary.

Their own romance still unresolved, Nikys, Penric, and of course Desdemona must infiltrate the hostile country once more, finding along the way that family relationships can be as unexpectedly challenging as any rescue scheme.

When the ship in which they are traveling is captured by Carpagamon island raiders, Temple sorcerer Penric and his resident demon Desdemona find their life complicated by two young orphans, Lencia and Seuka Corva, far from home and searching for their missing father. Pen and Des will need all their combined talents of mind and magic to unravel the mysteries of the sisters and escape from the pirate stronghold.

This novella follows about a year after the events of "The Prisoner of Limnos".

When a mysterious plague breaks out in the army fort guarding Vilnoc, the port capital of the duchy of Orbas, Temple sorcerer Penric and his demon Desdemona are called upon by General Arisaydia to resurrect Penric's medical skills and solve its lethal riddle. In the grueling days that follow, Pen will find that even his magic is not enough to meet the challenges without help from dedicated new colleagues and the god of mischance.

Bastard's Eve is a night of celebration for most residents in the canal city of Lodi – but not for sorcerer Learned Penric and his Temple demon Desdemona, who find themselves caught up in the affairs of a shiplost madman, a dangerous ascendant demon, and a very unexpected saint of the fifth god.

This novella falls between Penric's Mission and Penric's Fox in the internal chronology of the Penric & Desdemona tales.

An unholy attack upon his brother-in-law General Arisaydia pitches sorcerer Learned Penric and his Temple demon Desdemona headlong into the snake-pit of Cedonian imperial politics. But they will not travel alone. The mission from his god brings Penric some of his strangest new allies yet, and the return of some of his most valued old ones.

This novel-length story takes place two years after the events of The Physicians of Vilnoc.

When a corpse is found floating face-down in Vilnoc harbor that is not quite as dead as it seems, Temple sorcerer Penric and his chaos demon Desdemona are drawn into the uncanny investigation. Pen's keen questions will take him across the city of Vilnoc, and into far more profound mysteries, as his search for truths interlaces with tragedy.

A six-year-old shiplost girl draws the kin Jurald family of Vilnoc into complex dilemmas, and sorcerer Learned Penric and his Temple demon Desdemona into conflict - with each other. It will take all of Penric's wits, his wife Nikys's wisdom, and the hand of the fifth god's strangest saint to untangle the threads of their future.

Strange company...

When Rozakajin, road-weary bandit and army deserter, spots a hapless blond young man in a country inn with an intriguing treasure map, he thinks he's scouted an easy and lucrative victim. Attaching himself to odd traveler Penric seems simple enough, but when Roz's old enemies catch up from behind, his plans take a turn for the much worse. When Pen's claim that I never travel alone proves true in ways Roz never imagined, his world becomes more frightening still - but also much wider than he'd ever dared to dream.

Nou Occitan is a place where duels are fought with equal passion over insults and artistic views alike. Giraut--swordsman, troubador, lover--is a creature of this swashbuckling world, the most isolated of humanity's Thousand Cultures.

But the winds of change have come to Nou Occitan. As the invention of the "springer"--instantaneous interstellar travel, at a price--spreads throughout the human galaxy, the stability and purity of no world, no matter how isolated, is safe. Nor can Giraut's life remain untouched. To his wonder, his is about to find himself made an ambassador to a different human world, a place strange beyond his wildest imaginings.

Jon of Dun Add has created a civilization where before there had only been isolated pockets of humanity in a shattered cosmos.

Young knight Pal is one of the most respected members of Lord Jon's Hall of Champions. But Pal's greatest talent lies not on the field of battle, though he's no slouch there. He is also a Maker, one who can repair the tools the Ancients had left--sometimes. Moreover, he has learned to use his warrior dog's ability to predict motion better than any human could, an ability that has saved his skin and won the day more than once.

Now, Pal will need all his talent--as a fighter, as a Maker, and as a Champion--to deal with the monsters the Waste throws at him--and to deal with his fellow humans. For there are those who would destroy Dun Add and Lord Jon's vision of a humanity united in peace from within...

Abandoned as a child and raised by a pack of wolves, Ukiah Oregon uses his unique talents--heightened senses and a photographic memory--to make a living as a private investigator tracking down missing persons and fugitives, until he crosses paths with a criminal gang known as the Pack.

Half-man, half-alien Ukiah Oregon is tracking a missing woman when he discovers he may actually be the long-lost "Magic Boy"-who vanished back in 1933.

From Wen Spencer, finalist for the John W. Campbell Award...In this brand-new adventure in the multiple award-winning series, half-human, half-alien tracker Ukiah Oregon must put his skills to the ultimate test-because kidnappers have taken his son.

On the run from a fanatical cult, Ukiah Oregon is surprised to discover Atticus Steele, a brother he didn't know he had. He's even more surprised when Atticus involves them in the traffic of an alien drug that could end up getting them both killed.

The bestselling Gotrek & Felix series continues

Gotrek and Felix: unsung heroes of the Empire, or nothing more than common thieves and murderers? The truth perhaps lies somewhere in between, and depends entirely upon whom you ask... Travelling to the mysterious south in search of a mighty death, the Slayer Gotrek Gurnisson and his human companion, Felix Jaeger, find themselves caught up in a battle between warring kingdoms. Captured by the sinister Queen Khalida and forced to do her bidding, the adventurers must brave the horrors of the sun-soaked Land of the Dead, where the dead do not rest easy.

After a series of failures, Grey Seer Thanquol is offered a chance to redeem himself by going to the island of Lustria to kill the Prophet of Sotek. Dogged by assassins and stranded in a foreign land of giant lizards, temple cities and endless jungle, Thanquol must use all of his cunning and magic if he is to come out alive.

THE WHITE WITCH - She is Aztira, one of the magical Amanackire race, a pure white albino with powers both mysterious and terrifying. She can grant life and defy death, enchant men - or destroy them!

AND THE WARRIOR - He is Rehger. Sold into slavery at the age of four, he will become one of the finest warriors and charioteers in the land. Yet all his prowess with arms will not save him from the spell of the White Witch, a dangerous bewitchment that will lead him to challenge the mightiest of mortals and immortals ... and to embark on a fearsome quest in search of the legendary city that is home to the Amanackire.

The kingdom of Lyssia remains ravaged by war. Drew, the rightful heir to the werelord throne, is locked in battle against Ratlords and Crowlords, when the unexpected return of the evil wereserpent, Vala, throws the war into an entirely new direction. As the battle lines change, so does Drew's friend Hector, who embraces his powers of dark magistry and transforms into Drew's most dangerous enemy yet. The Wolf and his allies have never been in graver peril.

During the nights between Christmas and New Year's, the witches of New York--Adelaide Thom, Eleanor St. Clair and the youngest, Beatrice Dunn--gather before the fire to tell ghost stories and perform traditional Yuletide divinations. (Did you know that roasting chestnuts was once used to foretell one's fate?)

As the witches roast chestnuts and melt lead to see their fate, a series of odd messengers land on their doorstep bearing invitations for a New Year's Eve masquerade hosted by a woman they've never met. Gossip, dreams and portents follow, leading the witches to question the woman's motives. Is she as benevolent as she seems or is she laying a trap? And so, as Gilded-Age New York prepares to ring in the new year, the witches don their finery and head for the ball, on the hunt for answers that might well be the end of them.