hc = hardcover, tp = trade (oversized) paperback, [UK ed] = British publication, [CDN ed] = Canadian publication. Default is US publication.
Please note that this listing is not exhaustive; we have many more (several hundred more) titles coming during this period.
In a future scarred by fracking and ecological collapse, Jenna Hoolman's world is dominated by illegal smartdog racing: greyhounds genetically modified with human DNA. When her young niece goes missing that world implodes.
As Fanim war-drums beat just outside the city, the Empress Anasurimbor Esmenet searches frantically throughout the palace for her missing son Kelmomas. Meanwhile and many miles away, Esmenet's husband's Great Ordeal continues its epic march further north. But in light of dwindling supplies, the Aspect-Emperor's decision to allow his men to consume the flesh of fallen Sranc could have consequences even he couldn't have foreseen.
The Republic of Aligned Worlds deploys mechanized armoured infantry to deal with pirate raids on the planet Montana. Leading the assault is Marine Corps Lieutenant and Montanan expatriate Promise Paen. Years earlier, Promise was driven to join the Marines after her father was killed by such a raid. Payback is sweet, but it comes at a devastating cost. Meanwhile, the forces of the RAW's most bitter rival, the Lusitanian Empire, have been awaiting the right moment to gain a beachhead in Republic territory, and with Promise's Marines decimated, they believe the time to strike is now.
Master Sergeant Michael Venn's investigation into the Drifters - ancient artifacts suddenly reawakened on the Red Planet - is interrupted when another front in the war leads his team to Saturn's moon, Titan. Here, in the cauldron of war, hides new truths about the Drifters, the origin of life in our solar system and the plans of the supposedly benevolent Gurus, who have been "sponsoring" and supporting humanity in their fight against outside invaders.
In the city of Sharakhai, Ceda fights in the pits to scrape by a living. She, like so many in the city, pray for the downfall of the cruel, immortal Kings of Sharakhai. Then on the holy night when the powerful yet wretched creatures known as the Asirim wander the city and take tribute in order to protect the Kings, one of them tells Ceda the origin of their dark bargain. And this dangerous secret may be the very key she needs to throw off the iron grip the Kings have had over Sharakhai...
After a devastating battle, Mara has no one to turn to for help against the Autarch but the legendary Lady of Pain and Fire. Living within the Lady's castle, cut off from her friends, Mara immerses herself in her training. Still, she can't entirely escape from hearing dark hints about the Lady, rumours that the Lady may, in her own way, be as ruthless as the Autarch himself. Driven by the Lady's thirst for revenge, will Mara and all her friends fall victim in a duel to the death between two masters of magic?
A huge space station orbits the Earth, holding the last of humanity. It's broken, rusted, falling apart. We've wrecked our planet, and now we have to live with the consequences: a new home that's dirty, overcrowded and inescapable.What's more, there's a madman hiding on the station. He's about to unleash chaos. And when he does, there'll be nowhere left to run.
More of the best from a decades-spanning career in hard science fiction.
Captain Grimm and his merchant ship, Predator, have been assisting Spire Albion in the cold war with Spire Aurora by attacking their cargo vessels. After Predator is severely damaged in combat, Albion offers to repair Predator if Grimm will join a team of agents on a vital mission. Soon Grimm learns that the conflict between the Spires is merely a premonition of things to come. Humanity's ancient enemy, silent for more than ten thousand years, has begun to stir once more. And death will follow in its wake...
Jess Brightwell has survived his introduction to the sinister, seductive world of the Library, but serving in its army is nothing like he envisioned. His best friend is lost, and Morgan, the girl he loves, is locked away in the Iron Tower and doomed to a life apart. Embarking on a mission to save one of their own, Jess and his band of allies make one wrong move and suddenly find themselves hunted by the Library's deadly automata and forced to flee Alexandria, all the way to London.
Rue and the crew of the Spotted Custard return from India with revelations that shake the foundations of England's scientific community. Queen Victoria is not amused, the vampires are tetchy, and something is wrong with the local werewolf pack. To top it all off, Rue's best friend Primrose keeps getting engaged to the most unacceptable military types.
At his wit's end, Zacharias Wythe, Sorcerer Royal of the Unnatural Philosophers, ventures to the border of Fairyland to discover why England's magical stocks are drying up, an adventure that brings him in contact with Prunella Gentlewoman, a woman with immense power and an unfathomable gift, and sets him on a path which will alter the nature of sorcery in all of Britain - and the world at large...
When her mother and brother are murdered, young noblewoman Accala Viridius's cries for vengeance fall on deaf ears. But the empire is being torn apart by a galactic civil war, and her demands fall on deaf ears. In order to confront her enemies in the Imperial Games, she trains as a common gladiator, mastering the razor-sharp discus that always returns when thrown. But instead Accala finds herself drugged, cast into slavery and forced to fight on the side of the men she set out to kill.
Earth is a toxic, sparsely inhabited wasteland - the perfect hiding place for a fugitive ex-chronman. James is on the run from the authorities and the full military might of benighted solar system ruled by corporate greed and a desperate fear of what James will do next. At the forefront of their efforts to stop him is Kuo, the ruthless security head, who wants James's head on a pike and will stop at nothing to obtain it.
Claire, a red wolf shifter, is sent to Luna Lake to investigate the kidnapping of Sazi children. There she meets Alek, who before the war was part of a wolf pack in Chicago. In Luna Lake he was adopted by a parliament of Owls, defying Sazi tradition. The kidnappings are a painful reminder that his little sister disappeared a decade ago. When Claire and Alek meet, sparks fly - but the desperate race to find the missing children forces them to set aside their mutual attraction and focus on the future of their people.
Classic. When Katherine is diagnosed with a terminal brain disease caused by an inability to process an ever-increasing volume of sensory input, she immediately becomes a celebrity to the pain-starved public. She doesn't realize that from the moment of her diagnosis, she's been watched, not only by television producers but by a new kind of reporter, one with no visible camera, who is always recording behind his never-blinking eye.
Divided, hunted and short on resources, the surviving members of the Relic Guild are in real trouble. Their old enemy, the Genii, and their resurrected master have infiltrated Labrys Town and taken over the police force. So the Relic Guild must flee their home, and set off on a dangerous journey across the worlds of the Aelfir - one that will lead them to a weapon which might destroy the Genii. Or the whole universe.
In Kolkata, India, college professor Alok encounters a mysterious stranger and agrees to transcribe a collection of battered notebooks, weathered parchments, and once-living skins. From these documents spills the chronicle of a race of people at once more than human yet kin to beasts. It features a rough wanderer in 17th-century Mughal India who finds himself irrevocably drawn to a defiant woman and destined to be torn asunder by two clashing worlds. With each chapter Alok's interest in the stranger grows and evolves into something darker and more urgent.
Humanity has grown used to a world without gods, a world where they were masters of all - including the terrifying dragons. But the dragons have awakened, the hole in reality is expanding, and the shackles that kept the half-gods controlled have been broken. The Black Moon lives on in the body of Berren Crowntaker, and has taken control. With an army behind him, the dragons above and the Dragon Queen at his side, he goes to war with his brother.
AD 1215: The year of Magna Carta. As rebellion brews across the country and Robin Hood and his men are dragged into the war against the French in Flanders, a plan is hatched that will bring the former outlaws and their families to the brink of catastrophe - a plan to kill the King. England explodes into bloody civil war and Alan and Robin must decide who to trust - and who to slaughter.
The annual collection, and perhaps the most extensive, of the year's best.
Jessamy's life is a balance between acting like an upper class Patron and dreaming of the freedom of the Commoners. But at night she can be whomever she wants when she sneaks out to train for The Fives, an intricate, multi-level athletic competition that offers a chance for glory to the kingdom's best competitors. Then Jes meets Kalliarkos, and an unlikely friendship causes heads to turn. When a scheming lord tears Jes's family apart, she'll have to test Kal's loyalty and risk the vengeance of a powerful clan to save her mother and sisters from certain death.
500 years ago a group of conquistadors finds the Fountain of Youth and slaughters the tribe who guard it, all but one - Shako, the chief's daughter, who swears eternal vengeance. Now, today, the source of the fountain has been destroyed and the conquistadors hire scientist David Robinton, on the brink of a medical breakthrough. But then Robinton discovers the truth about his employers and the exotic woman he loves.
Novella. Big Man is trying to make his way inside the City, supposedly a place of pure Buddha-nature which is shared by all who are allowed to dwell there. When he is denied entrance, he asks his would-be lover Angela to find him a way in through the back. But this attracts unwelcome attention.
Sequel to ONE SECOND AFTER. The survivors of Black Mountain, North Carolina are beginning to recover technology and supplies they had once taken for granted. Then a "federal administrator" arrives in a nearby city and young men and women in the community are drafted into the "Army of National Recovery", despite the vehement protests of town administrator John Matherson.
The narrator returns to Sussex to attend a funeral and finds himself drawn to a farm near where his childhood home once was. The past and present become confused. He is a 7 year old boy and he brings a predator into the world. It transforms itself into a demonic housekeeper who imprisons him and torments his family. Nebula nominee.
After the fall of the Veil and the political machinations of men and mierothi and valynkar start to manifest on a global scale, there are a few playing their own games. Whether it's the powerful combination of Vashodia and Jasside trying to carve out a country for those freed from the Veil, or the warrior Mevon and assassin Draevenus forming an unlikely alliance in search of the dark god Ruul, the world is in chaos...which might be exactly what some are counting on.
After her husband, the powerful leader of her people, commmits suicide, Magda Searus finds herself isolated in a society that seems to be crumbling around her. Despite her grief, she is driven to find the reasons behind why her husband would do such a thing - why he would abandon her and her people at such a profoundly dangerous time. Without anyone to help her, she knows that she must embark on a mission to find a mysterious spiritualist, if she even exists, so that she may speak with the dead. This quest may also be her last chance to unravel what is really behind the mysterious events befalling her people.
Energetic young inventor Jack Straker believes he has created a weapon to defend the Crown: a reanimated, clockwork-enhanced corpse he can control. But it quickly becomes apparent that the Iron Assassin is more self-willed than Straker intended, and that the zombie's past life is far more sinister than Straker thought.
This new anthology compiles some of the best modern fairy-tale retellings and reinventions. Includes Tanith Lee, Gene Wolfe, Elizabeth Bear, Nalo Hopkinson, Cathrynne Valente, Caitlin Kiernan, Kelly Link, Karen Joy Fowler, Peter S. Beagle, Neal Gaiman, Peter Straub, Charles de Lint, Jane Yolen - and many more.
The land outside of the Old City was supposed to be green, lush, hopeful - a place where Alice could finally rest, no longer the plaything of the Rabbit, the pawn of Cheshire, or the prey of the Jabberwocky. But the verdant fields are nothing but ash - and hope is nowhere to be found. Still, Alice and Hatcher are on a mission to find his daughter, a quest they will not forsake even as it takes them deep into the clutches of the mad White Queen and her goblin or into the realm of the twisted and cruel Black King.
It's not easy to live in a world ruled by dragons. The taxes are high and their control is complete. But for one group of bold misfits, it's time to band together and steal back some of that wealth. No one said they were smart.
The locals called it the Loney - a strange nowhere between the Wyre and the Lune where Hanny and I went every Easter time with Mummer, Farther, Mr and Mrs Belderboss and Father Wilfred, the parish priest. It was impossible to truly know the place. It changed with each influx and retreat, and the neap tides would reveal the skeletons of those who thought they could escape its insidious currents. No one ever went near the water. No one apart from us, that is.I suppose I always knew that what happened there wouldn't stay hidden forever, no matter how much I wanted it to.
As the Mort army draws ever closer, Kelsea develops a mysterious connection to a time before the Crossing. She finds herself relying on a strange and possibly dangerous ally: a woman named Lily, fighting for her life in a world where being female can feel like a crime. The fate of the Tearling - and that of Kelsea's own soul - may rest with Lily and her story, but Kelsea may not have enough time to find out.
While investigating the disappearance of a young boy Stark meets a dying angel who gives him a vial of a mysterious dark liquid. When one of his closest friends is poisoned with the black liquid, Stark and Candy have to go to the only place where they might find a cure: Hell. But standing in their way are the damned souls who, even after death, still work for Wormwood.
Sequel to THE DROWNING GOD. A mysterious artifact is driving innocents in Southern Japan to flay their friends alive. Takuda struggles to lead his rag-tag team to find the artifact before it poisons the entire nation - but he is caught between the police, the bloodthirsty murderers, and forces conspiring to harness the artifact's horrible powers.
Evie Tanaka is the put-upon personal assistant to Aveda Jupiter, her childhood best friend and San Francisco's most beloved superheroine. But everything changes for her when she's forced to pose as her glamorous boss for one night, and her darkest secret comes out: she has powers, too. Now it's up to her to contend with murderous cupcakes, nosy gossip bloggers, and supernatural karaoke battles - all while juggling unexpected romance and Aveda's increasingly outrageous demands.
Arrant's skills as a Magoroth are dangerously inconsistent, and his father, Temellin, finds it difficult to communicate with him. Arrant's singular ability to communicate with his half-brother, Tarran - a part of the collective mind known as the Mirage Makers - leads them both towards the possibility of a tragic clash with the encroaching Ravage. As Arrant's enemies among the Magoroth plot to ruin his family and his future as heir, he begins to realize there is a greater mystery to solve if he is to prevail.
Clan Korval's Master Trader Shan yos'Galan, aboard the trade ship Dutiful Passage, is attempting to build new business associations. But Dutiful Passage finds itself denied docking, and blacklisted, while agents of the Department of the Interior mount armed attacks on others of Korval's traders, under the very eyes of port security systems. Shan's heir and apprentice, Padi yos'Galan, is aboard for this unpleasantness -- and is also keeping a secret so intense that her coming of age, and perhaps her very life, is threatened by it.
Dru uses crystals to see enchantments, and she can research practically anything in the library in the back of the little store where 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.
Ada, a friend of Alice mentioned briefly in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, is off to visit Alice but arrives a moment too late and tumbles down the rabbit-hole herself. Her journey to find Alice and see her safely home brings her to a conundrum suggested by the mad tea party: if Eurydice can ever be returned to the arms of Orpheus, or if Lazarus can be raised from the tomb, perhaps Alice can be returned to life. In any case, everything that happens next is After Alice.
Mick Oberon may look like just another private detective, but beneath the fedora and the overcoat, he's got pointy ears and he's packing a wand. A mobster's daughter was kidnapped sixteen years ago, replaced with a changeling, and Mick's been hired to find the real child. The trail's gone cold, but what there is leads Sideways, to the world of the Fae, where the Seelie Court rules. And Mick's not really welcome in the Seelie Court any more. He'll have to wade through Fae politics and mob power struggles to find the kidnapper - and of course it's the last person he expected.
Constance Verity has spent the past 28 years saving the world, and she's tired of it. All she wants is to work in an office and date a nice, normal guy. And she's figured a way out. The only problem is that saving the world is Constance's destiny. She's great at it, and there are forces at work to make sure she stays in the job. Then again, it's also her destiny to have a glorious death.
2135. Dangerous alien life-forms freed in the destruction of Saturn's moon Enceladus are making their way toward Earth. A task force spearheaded by Lieutenant Commander Shaila Jain is scrambling to beat them there while simultaneously trying to save crewmember Stephane Durand, who was infected during the mission to Saturn and is now controlled by a form of life intent on reopening a transdimensional rift and destroying the human race. But Jain doesn t realize that the possessed Stephane has bigger plans: beaming critical data to other conspirators suspiciously heading not for Earth, but for Venus...
Karyl Bogomirsky is a dinosaur-mounted knight who has chosen to rally those who seek a way back from the path of war and madness. But the Empire has announced a religious crusade against them, and they all are to be converted or destroyed. Worse, the dreaded Grey Angels, fabled ancient weapons of the Gods who created Paradise in the first place, come on the scene after almost a millennia. They have come to rid the world of sin...including all the humans who manifest those vices.
From the winner of the 2015 World Fantasy Award (for THE BONE CLOCKS). A cycle of linked ghost stories perfect for any dark and stormy night - five interlacing narratives that begin in 1979 and end in 2015. Five "guests", each separated by nine years, enter Slade House for a brief visit - only to vanish without trace from the outside world. Who draws them to the heart of Slade House, and why is the house missing from maps?
Two previously released science fiction adventures, each a full novel, in one volume: HAZE, and THE HAMMER OF DARKNESS.
Aros of Azteca and Neoloth-Pteor are the deadliest of enemies: Swordsman and Sorcerer, locked in mortal combat, who have tried to kill each other more times than either can count. But when the princess Neoloth loves is kidnapped, there is only one plan that offers any hope of rescue - and that requires passing off the barbarian Aros as a lost princeling and infiltrating the deadliest cabal of necromancers the world has ever seen.
Purgatory is the lawless moon colony of eccentric billionaire, Fletcher Brass: a mecca for war criminals, murderers, sex fiends, and adventurous tourists. But trouble is brewing in Brass's black-market heaven. When an exiled cop arrives in this wild new frontier, he immediately finds himself investigating a string of ruthless assassinations in which Brass himself and his equally ambitious daughter are the chief suspects.
2020. A magical cataclysm has shattered reality as we know it, and a wizard's cabal is running the East Coast of the US. They assign their most powerful agents, Edmund and Istvan - the former a nearly immortal 1940s-era mystery man, the latter, well, a ghost - to hunt down an arms smuggling ring that could blow up Massachusetts. The two discover a shadow war that's been waged since the world ended, and, even worse, they find out that their own friendship has always been more complicated than they thought.
Wielder Kara Tremain and ex-Dog Allan Garrett have led their small group of refugees to the Hollow, a safe haven in the hills on the edge of the Baronial plains. But the ley system is not healing itself. Their only option is to repair the distortion that engulfs the city of Erenthrall and fix the damaged ley lines themselves. To do that, they'll have to enter streets controlled by vicious bands of humans and non-humans alike, each intent on keeping what little they've managed to scavenge from anyone else's grasp.
Anea is the Silent Queen and she is struggling to bring change to the ancient society of Landfall. Vested interests and dark magics alike are determined to hold onto power and in a society where the loyalties of many are fluid and the true nature of the players is hidden the game of politics can be a lethal one even for those close to the throne.
Simon suffers horrific visions: a dark tunnel, pieces of bodies, disembodied heads of children pleading for help. A magician can live forever by devouring the lives of children. The magician who does this has hidden his name so no one can work a spell against him. He is the Child Eater. Terrified of his son's nightmares, Simon's father enlists the help of the mysterious Dr. Reina. Soon however Simon realizes Reina means him ill. Is this mysterious doctor really The Child Eater and Simon his next victim?
When a ship captain is stranded on a deserted island by his mutinous crew, he finds a baby dragon that just might be the key to his salvation and his revenge. He only wanted justice. Instead he got revenge.
In college, Tom Holbrook worshipped Shasta DiMaio from afar, but she married the arrogant John Atwater and Atwater eventually murdered her. Tom has devoted the rest of his life to finding Atwater and killing him - but when he finally finds him, Atwater is in a bag in the Los Angeles County morgue. How do you kill a man who has already died?
Though Touchstone, the magical theater troupe, continues to build audiences, Cayden is increasingly troubled by the uncontrolled moments that plunge him into visions of the possible futures. He fears that his Fae gift will forever taint his friendships; his friends fear that his increasing distance will destroy him. But Touchstone has been selected to travel to the Continent with a Royal Embassy to collect Prince Ashgar's new bride, the first theater artists to appear outside Albeyn for at least seventy years - for magic is suspect and forbidden elsewhere.
After 14 years of silence, a ritualistic serial killer the RCU once failed to catch has resurfaced. Last time, Pierce's superiors had insisted she hunt for a supernatural killer she knows doesn't exist. The media had a field day, and the Vampire Killer became the subject of a best-selling book. This time she's determined to find and stop the human culprit before it's too late.
En route to London from New York, Flight 305 suddenly loses power and crash-lands in the English countryside, plunging a group of strangers into a mysterious adventure that will have repercussions for all of humankind. Struggling to stay alive, the survivors soon realize that the world they've crashed in is very different from the one they left. And it slowly emerges that some on board are not entirely ignorant of what is going on.
It is 1958 and France's first nuclear submarine, Plongeur, makes her first dive and plummets out of control to a depth where the pressure will crush her hull, killing everyone on board, and beyond. But the dive continues miles beyond that, until the depth gauge is useless. And on board the crew succumb to madness, betrayal, religious mania and murder. Has the Plongeur left the limits of our world and gone elsewhere?
Sequel to THE WILDINGS. As the cats recover slowly from their terrible battle with the feral cats, they find their Delhi neighbourhood changing around them. Winter brings an army of predators - humans, vicious dogs, snakes, bandicoots - along with the cold and a scarcity of food...Unless Mara can help them find a safe haven, their small band will be wiped out forever.
A crack appears in the universe, letting in the destructive djinns of myth (as well as some graphic superheroes). Nothing less than the survival of our world is at stake. Only one, a djinn princess who centuries before had learned to love humankind, resolves to help us. In the face of dynastic intrigue, she raises an army composed of her semi-magical great-great - etc. - grandchildren - a motley crew of endearing characters who come together to save the world in a battle waged for 1,001 nights - or, to be precise, two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights.
The lines of drakes are weakening. If they fail, the elxir distilled from their blood for the blood-blessed will no longer be available - and war with a neighboring Corvantine Empire will follow swiftly. Claydon Torcreek is a petty thief and an unregistered blood-blessed, who finds himself pressed into service and sent to wild, uncharted territories in search of a creature he believes is little more than legend.
Hope is the lone survivor when her village is massacred by biomancers, mystical servants of the emperor. She is secretly trained by a master Vinchen warrior as an instrument of vengeance. Meanwhile, the boy Red becomes an orphan on the squalid streets of New Laven and is adopted by one of the most notorious women of the criminal underworld and trained as a thief and con artist. Their worlds come crashing together when a ganglord strikes a bargain with the biomancers to consolidate and rule all the slums of New Laven.
With resources dwindling, and a new, more terrifying form of alien hunting humans down, not all the biospheres will make it. But there is still hope. In Sophie's biosphere, her team has managed to create a magnetic weapon that just might give the human resistance a fighting chance if they can live long enough to use it. Meanwhile, the lone survivor of another failed biosphere treks across the California desert to the ocean and is rescued by an NTC submarine that has been tracking the movements of Sophie's team and the development of their magnetic weapon.
Emperor's daughter Mercedes is the first woman ever admitted to the High Ground, the elite training academy of the Solar League's Star Command, and she must graduate if she is to have any hope of taking the throne. Her classmate Tracy has more modest goals - to rise to the rank of captain, and win fame and honor. But a civil war is coming and the political machinations of those who yearn for power threatens the young cadets.
1838. Madame Magdala destroyed the Transference Engine that Lord Byron hoped to use to transfer his soul into a more perfect body and perpetuate his life eternally. Now Magdala and Byron's only legitimate child - Ada Lovelace - watch to make certain the cult of necromancy surrounding Lord Byron, the poet king who worshipped death, cannot bring him back to life. They believe someone is building a new Transference Engine. But is it to bring back the dead or destroy the living?
Stories set in futures wracked by the deluge, from some of the best writers in SF, including Kim Stanley Robinson, Ken Liu, Paul McAuley, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Charlie Jane Anders, Lavie Tidhar, Jeffrey Ford, and James Morrow.
An antique violin, an Erich Zann original, made of human white bone, was designed to produce music capable of slaughtering demons. Mo is the custodian of this unholy instrument. It invades her dreams and yearns for the blood of her colleagues - and her husband. And despite Mo's proficiency as a world class violinist, it cannot be controlled...
After stumbling upon the algorithm that turned him and his fellow merchant bankers into vampires, Alex Schwartz was drafted by The Laundry, Britain's secret counter-occult agency. Dispatched to Leeds to help assess the costs of renovating a 1950s Cold War bunker into The Laundry's new headquarters brings Alex fresh anxiety. Leeds is his hometown, and he dreads breaking the news to his parents that he's left banking for civil service, while hiding his undead condition.
First publication in English. The Doomed City is an experimental city whose sun gets switched on in the morning and switched off at night, bordered by an abyss on one side and an impossibly high wall on the other. Its sole inhabitants are people who were plucked from twentieth-century history at various times and places and left to govern themselves under increasingly nightmarish conditions.
John Tamberlain is The Tomahawk - the universe's most feared and famous food critic (though he prefers 'forensic gastronomer'). He's on the hunt for the galaxy's most secretive and exclusive establishment, Hotel Grand Skies: the Empyrean. It is a haven, where the rich and famous retreat to bask in perfect seclusion. Where the waiters know their fish knife from their butter knife, their carotid from their subclavian artery, and are trained to enforce the house rules with brutal efficiency.
Since time immemorial, humans have worshipped the gods they call Fhrey, truly a race apart: invincible in battle, masters of magic, and seemingly immortal. But when a god falls to a human blade, the balance of power between humans and those they thought were gods changes forever. Now only a few stand between humankind and annihilation: Raithe, reluctant to embrace his destiny as the God Killer; Suri, a young seer burdened by signs of impending doom; and Persephone, who must overcome personal tragedy to lead her people.
Max and company visit Victorian London in search of Jack the Ripper, witness the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, and discover that dodos make a grockling noise when eating cucumber sandwiches. But they must also confront an enemy intent on destroying St. Mary's, an enemy willing, if necessary, to destroy history itself to do it.
Vespa Nyx wants nothing more than to spend the rest of her life cataloging Unnatural creatures in her father's museum, but the requirement to become a lady and find a husband is looming large. Syrus Reed's Tinker family has always served and revered the Unnaturals from afar, but when his family is captured to be refinery slaves, he finds that his fate may be bound up with Vespa's and with the Unnaturals.
Four millenia ago Shiva was just a man - until he brought his people to Meluha and discovered he was the Neelkanth, a barbarian long prophesied to be Meluha's savior. But in his hour of victory fighting the Chandravanshis - Meluha's enemy - he discovered they had their own prophecy. Now he must fight to uncover the treachery within his inner circle, and unmask those who are about to destroy all that he has fought for.
Truman heeds General MacArthur's advice and launches a nuclear attack on Chinese targets in Manchuria. Almost instantly, Stalin strikes U.S. allies in Europe and Great Britain. And as the shock waves are settling, the two superpowers are caught in a horrifying face-off. Will they attack each other directly with nukes? And what countries will be caught in between? The fateful global drama plays out through the experiences of ordinary people - from a British barmaid to a Ukrainian war veteran to a desperate American soldier alone behind enemy lines in Korea.
The Cold War turns hot and the United States and the Soviet Union unleash their nuclear arsenals upon each other. Millions die. Millions more are displaced. But things are about to get worse. These staggering events unfold through the eyes of a sprawling cast of characters: a Holocaust survivor in a displaced persons camp in Washington; the wife of a bomber pilot and her five-year-old daughter starting a new existence; a savage Soviet fighter waging war by his own rules; a British pub owner falling in love with an American pilot.
A year ago, International Assembly delegate Suyana Sapaki barely survived an attempt on her life. Now she has everything she wants - but the secret that drives her can't stay hidden forever. When she quickly saves herself from a life-threatening political scandal, she gains a new enemy: the public eye. Daniel Park was hoping for the story of a lifetime. And he got her.
Spanning galaxies and millennia, this anthology showcases classic contributions from H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Octavia E. Butler, and Kurt Vonnegut, alongside a century of the eccentrics, rebels, and visionaries who have inspired generations of readers - including legendary tales from Isaac Asimov and Ursula K. Le Guin.
Mabily "Mab" Jones is just a twenty-something, over-educated, under-employed New Yorker trying to survive as a private eye's unpaid intern - or is she? Once a powerful fairy, but tricked by the Fairy Queen into human form, Mab is forced to face her changeling past when investigating a missing person case at a modern speakeasy. Obadiah Savage bootlegs fairy Elixir to human customers thirsting for a magical fix. But when Mab and Obadiah become joint suspects in a crime they didn't commit, the only way to prove their innocence is to travel back to the fairy realm.
The artificial lifeform, Kenstibec, must fight his way to the home of the man who created him and the other Ficials. The man who tipped the world into war and sealed humanity's fate. Can Kenstibec win a future back for man?
Sequel to THE JUST CITY and THE PHILOSOPHER KINGS. Convinced by Apollo to spare the Cities, Zeus instead moved everything on the island to the planet Plato, circling its own distant sun. Now, more than a generation has passed. The Cities are flourishing on Plato, and even trading with multiple alien species. Then, on the same day, two things happen. Pytheas dies as a human, returning immediately as Apollo in his full glory. And there's suddenly a human ship in orbit around Plato - a ship from Earth.
With only modest interstellar trade, no foreign contacts to speak of, a plague-ravaged economy to rebuild, and no enemies looming at the hyper limit, there are factions in Parliament who want nothing more than to scrap the Royal Manticoran Navy and shift its resources and manpower elsewhere. But those factions are mistaken. The universe is not a safe place. Travis Long, who enlisted in the Navy to put order and discipline in his life, is about to find that out.
Joel Sorrell has recovered from the injuries he sustained in his fight with The Four-Year-Old. A body has been found, sealed into the dead space behind a false wall in a flat in Muswell Hill. Beheaded and surrounded by bloodstained pages of typewritten text, it is the third such murder committed by a killer known as The Hack. And it may be linked to his daughter's disappearance.
Wydrin of Crosshaven has heard all the tall tales about the caverns beneath the Citadel, but she's spent long enough trawling caverns and taverns with her companion Sir Sebastian to learn that there's no money to be made in chasing rumours. But then a crippled nobleman with a dead man's name offers them a job: exploring the Citadel's darkest depths. It sounds like just another quest with gold and adventure...
Ten soldiers on convoy in Afghanistan suddenly find themselves lost in time. Somehow, they arrived in Earth's Paleolithic Asia. They discover groups of the similarly displaced: Imperial Romans, Neolithic Europeans, and a small cadre of East Indian peasants. Then two more time travelers arrive from a future far beyond the present. But if they have the means to get back, they aren't sharing it.
Medical examiner Laura Hanning has two charred corpses, both bearing a mysterious tattoo but exhibiting no known cause of death. The only connection is a string of puzzling miracle cures, and rumours of the fabled panacea - the substance that can cure all ills. Soon she finds herself unknowingly enmeshed in an ancient conflict between the secretive keepers of the panacea and the equally secretive and far more deadly group known only as 536, a brotherhood that fervently believes God intended for humanity to suffer, not be cured.
A gifted young black man calling himself Victor has struck a bargain with federal law enforcement, working as a bounty hunter for the US Marshall Service. He's got plenty of work. In this version of America, slavery continues in four states called "the Hard Four." On the trail of a runaway known as Jackdaw, Victor arrives in Indianapolis knowing that something isn't right - with the case file, with his work, and with the country itself.
When MI37 - the government department devoted to defending Britain from cosmic horrors and otherworldly threats - comes under attack, Arthur Wallace and his team begin a race from Area 51 to an Arctic town populated entirely by spore zombies to save the world and halt the destruction of humanity.
COBRA ALLIANCE, COBRA GUARDIAN and COBRA GAMBLE in one volume.
Struggling to stay afloat several years after the world's brutal economic collapse, married couple Stan and Charmaine hear about an experiment in cooperative living that appears to be the answer to their problems. There's just one drawback: once inside, you don't get out. Each citizen lives a double life, as a prisoner one month, and a guard or town functionary the next. When Charmaine becomes romantically involved with the man who shares her civilian house, her actions set off an unexpected chain of events that leave Stan running for his life.
Lieutenant Paen and Victor Company are ordered to the mining planet of Sheol to reinforce the planet and hold it at all costs. On the eve of their deployment, a friendly fire incident occurs, putting Paen's career in jeopardy and stripping her of her command. When the Lusitanians send mercenaries to raid Sheol and destabilize its mining operations, matters reach crisis levels. Promise is offered one shot to get back into her mechsuit. But she'll have to jump across the galaxy and possibly storm the gates of hell itself.
A twisted doctor bent on revenge is blackmailing Riley Hale with a deadly threat. If Riley's to survive, she must follow his orders, and break a dangerous prisoner out of jail. To save her own skin, Riley must go against all her beliefs, and break every law that she's just sworn to protect. Riley's mission will get even tougher when all sectors are thrown into lock-down. A lethal virus has begun to spread through Outer Earth, and it seems little can stop it.
Unless the human race acts to save itself, all life on Earth will be wiped out by a wave of radiation arriving from the centre of the galaxy. When Jordan Kell and his team return to Earth, many years after their departure, they find that their world has changed almost beyond recognition. Yet he must convince Earth's new rulers that the human race is in danger of extinction unless it acts to forestall the death wave coming from the galaxy's heart.
A generation after the events of THE STORMQUEEN, the son of the defeated Lord Scathfell plots revenge by marrying a girl with the storm gift lineage. When his betrothed bride is kidnapped and reported dead, he marries her younger sister. All seems well until she nearly dies in miscarriage. But the older sister is alive, rescued by Lord Aldaran himself. When Lord Scathfell learns that not only has the older sister survived, she is married to Lord Aldaran and has born him twin sons, he launches a pre-emptive attack.
Tyen is teaching mechanical magic at a school respected throughout the worlds. News arrives that the formidable ruler of all worlds, long believed to be dead, is back and enforcing his old laws - including the one forbidding schools of magic. As teachers and students flee, Tyen is left with no home and no purpose...except the promise he made to Vella, the sorcerer imprisoned in a book. Tyen must decide what he is willing to do to free her.
The first invasion of Earth was beaten back, but the single ship that wreaked such damage was merely a scout ship. There is a mothership out beyond the Solar System's Kuiper Belt, and it's heading into the system, unstoppable by any weapons that Earth can muster. Earth has been reorganized for defense, but there is an enemy within, an enemy as old as human warfare: ambition and politics. Greed and self-interest.
Three short works set in the same world as THE CLOCKWORK DAGGER and THE CLOCKWORK THRONE.
Sequel to THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM. Earth is reeling from the revelation of a coming alien invasion-in just four centuries' time. The presence of the sophons, the subatomic particles that allow Trisolaris instant access to all human information, means that Earth's defense plans are totally exposed to the enemy. Only the human mind remains a secret. This is the motivation for the Wallfacer Project, a daring plan that grants four men enormous resources to design secret strategies, hidden through deceit and misdirection from Earth and Trisolaris alike. Three of the Wallfacers are influential statesmen and scientists, but the fourth is a total unknown. Luo Ji, an unambitious Chinese astronomer and sociologist, is baffled by his new status. All he knows is that he's the one Wallfacer that Trisolaris wants dead.
[Canadian author]. Kane and Mallory are assigned to the research station that is developing the Dark Bomb, Terra's newest weapon, nicknamed "The Peacemaker." But the greatest threat won't come from outside of the solar system. For a Centauri agent has been planted on Earth, with a mission that will lead to widespread death and destruction.
When people, ships, and even places begin to disappear, Holden and the crew of the Rocinante have to face the fact that the thing they've been hauling through the depths of space only appears to be Detective Miller. The time when the protomolecule's agenda and humanity's overlapped has passed. As the protomolecule takes control of the ancient networks and relays, the final battle begins.
When Marine Private Oliver Chadwick Gardenier is killed in the Marine barrack bombing in Beirut, somebody who might be Saint Peter gives him a choice: Go to Heaven, which while nice might be a little boring, or return to Earth. Eventually, it appears that God's will is for Chad to join a group called "Monster Hunters International"and protect people from things that go bump in the night. From there, things trend downhill.
The Great Houses still vie for dominion over France's once grand capital. Once the most powerful and formidable, House Silverspires now lies in disarray. Its magic is ailing; its founder, Morningstar, has been missing for decades; and now something from the shadows stalks its people inside their very own walls. Within the House, three very different people must come together - a naive but powerful Fallen angel; an alchemist with a self-destructive addiction; and a resentful young man wielding spells of unknown origin. They may be Silverspires' salvation - or the architects of its last, irreversible fall.
16-year-old Randy Knox has dim memories of a time of electric lights, laptop computers, television screens and above all, plenty of food at every meal. But now he is in the military, fighting the alien Creepers. But just as the war reaches a turning point, he is asked to escort a secret representative from the Governor of New Hampshire to the nation's capital, to meet with the President. Randy learns that all of his skills in combating aliens may not be enough to survive the dark conspiracies of his fellow humans.
Jessamy is moving up the ranks of the Fives - the complex athletic contest favoured by her embattled kingdom - and now tours the countryside to face more competitors. But then a fatal attack on her traveling party puts her at the centre of a war that Lord Kalliarkos is waging against their country's allies.
The gargantuan Factory of Gleam is an ancient, hulking edifice of stone, metal and glass ruled over by chaste alchemists and astronomer priests. As millennia have passed, the population has decreased, and now only the central district is fully inhabited and operational; the outskirts have been left for the wilderness to reclaim. This decaying, lawless zone is the Discard; the home of Wild Alan. Clever, arrogant, and perpetually angry, Wild Alan is both loved and loathed by the Discard's misfits. He's convinced that the Gleam authorities were behind the disaster that killed his parents and his ambition is to prove it. But he's about to uncover more than he bargained for.
France, 1636. It has been twenty years since King Louis took Ana Maria Mauricia, daughter of Spain's King Philip III, as his wife, and their union has not yet produced an heir. Under the guidance of his chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, a plan is developed to remedy that situation. Once she is with child, Queen Anne goes into seclusion to guard her health and protect her from those who would prefer that the child is never born - France's foreign enemies as well as schemers such as Monsieur Gaston d'Orleans, the King's younger brother and heir. When the Crown's opponents make their move, factions inside and outside France must choose sides and help determine the future and fate of the Kingdom.
When impetuous aspiring model Sydney flies to Seoul at the behest of her boyfriend, Johnny Sandman, and meets Korean-American bioengineer Dr. Kim Da Mi, she doesn't know that the scientist is engaged in a secret power struggle with Johnny that will threaten her own life. Seduced by the visionary scientist, Sydney begins helping Kim Da Mi create a new breed of human beings to staff a revolutionary theme park: VirtuWorld.
Dreamwalker Jessica Drake is back with her family, but her childhood home has been destroyed, her mother's mind irreparably damaged, and the Gift of the Dreamwalkers is beginning to manifest in her in terrifying ways. When a stranger invades her dreams and creatures from her nightmares threaten to cross into the waking universe, Jessica knows she must return to the alternate Earth where she was born and seek allies... even if doing so means she must bargain with those she fears the most.
Captain Hal Stirling returns home after suffering injuries in a roadside bomb blast in Afghanistan. But on arriving at the gothic mansion which is his ancestral family seat, he discovers that his mother, a fanatical spiritualist, has died and been hastily buried. He finds himself at the mercy of his mother's two mysterious nurses. And as the December weather deteriorates and the horrific visions begin, he begins to wonder - Who, or what, is trying to frighten him to death?
A serial killer is stalking the elderly Fae of Seattle, draining their bank accounts before brutally murdering them. When Chase Johnson asks for their help, Alex and Shimmer discover that the sociopath is also a shifter - able to change shape to match his victim's deepest desires. Their friend and colleague Bette volunteers to act as bait, but the plan goes dangerously awry.
Tara Abernathy, the fire god's in-house Craftswoman, must defend the church against the world's fiercest necromantic firm - and against her old classmate, a rising star in the Craftwork world. As if that weren't enough, Cat and Raz are back too, fighting monster pirates.
The outbreak has spread, tearing apart the foundations of society, as implanted tapeworms have turned their human hosts into a seemingly mindless mob. Sal and her family are trapped between bad and worse, and must find a way to compromise between the two sides of their nature before the battle becomes large enough to destroy humanity, and everything that humanity has built...including the chimera. The broken doors are closing. Can Sal make it home?
The second volume of Prime Books annual anthology series collecting some of the year's best novella-length science fiction and fantasy.
Tyvian Reldamar, reduced to fencing moldy relics and wheedling favors from petty nobility, hears that his old nemesis, Myreon Alafarr, has been framed for a crime she didn't commit and turned to stone in a penitentiary garden. Tyvian must return to the city of his birth - right under the noses of the Defenders he's been dodging for so long. There he will learn that the person pulling all the strings is none other than the most powerful sorceress in the West: Lyrelle Reldamar. Tyvian's own mother.
While the armies of East and West clash in brutal conflict, emperors, inquisitors, souldrinkers, and assassins all have their attention turned elsewhere as they hunt the Scytale of Corineus. The immensely powerful artifact is the key to ultimate power, and it's in the hands of unlikely guardians: failed mage Alaron Mercer and market-girl Ramita Ankesharan, who carries the child of the world's greatest mage.
From their sacred Garden, the three Fates control all life and maintain balance in the world. But one of the Fates has been captured by the evil elf queen, placing the future of every being, including Death herself, in jeopardy. And only one hero can defeat the elf queen: Danr the half-troll. In order to rescue the missing Fate, Danr must first acquire the fabled Bone Sword.
As destiny weaves its tapestry, a compelling drama plays out against a background of wild forests, elegant castles, hidden temples, and savage battlefields.
Serving aboard the Ananke, an experimental military spacecraft launched by the ruthless organization that rules Earth and its solar system, computer scientist Althea has established an intense emotional bond - not with any of her crewmates, but with the ship's electronic systems, which speak more deeply to her analytical mind than human feelings do. But when a pair of fugitive terrorists gain access to the Ananke, Althea must draw upon her heart and soul for the strength to defend her beloved ship.
When Ananke decides to seek out Matthew Gale, the terrorist she regards as her father, Althea learns that some bonds are stronger than mortal minds can understand or control. Drawn back toward Earth by the quest, Althea and Ananke will find themselves in the thick of a violent revolution led by Matthew's sister, the charismatic leader Constance, who will stop at nothing to bring down a tyrannical surveillance state.
The Fool is near death, maimed by mysterious pale-skinned figures whose plans for world domination hinge upon the powers the Fool may share with Fitz's own daughter. Distracted by the Fool's perilous health, and swept up against his will in the intrigues of the royal court, Fitz lets down his guard - and in a horrible instant, his world is undone and his beloved daughter stolen away by those who would use her as they had once sought to use the Fool - as a weapon.
Where the Cape of the Winds juts into the endless sea, there is Castle Ocean, and therein dwells the royal family that has ruled it from time immemorial. But now the castle is besieged, its King dead and its Queen forced by treaty to re-marry. While she delays, her mute daughter Tirza returns by sea. But the ship is attacked by a shocking and powerful dragon, red as blood and big as the ship. Tirza is swept off with the dragon, and learns she can talk with the beast.
Against all odds, spaceship mechanic Zen Sienna finds herself in a fairytale palace, being courted by the ruler of vast lands. But when revolution erupts and heads start to roll, Zen finds that the life of a storybook princess is not all fancy balls and happy endings. Swept up in a whirlwind of fire and blood, Zen must earn her citizenship on Earth and find her place in a world on the brink of revolution.
16 year old Baxter Zevcenko is kingpin of a smut-peddling schoolyard syndicate, and a possible serial killer who suffers from weird historical dreams. He is unable to cope with the increasingly bizarre landscape of Cape Town's supernatural underworld. When his girlfriend, Esme, is kidnapped, Baxter turns to the only person drunk enough to help: bearded, booze-soaked, supernatural bounty hunter, Jackson "Jackie" Ronin.
Jacob Carneham rescued his son from slavery but he may have started a war - one in which he is hopelessly overmatched - and his wits and ruthlessness will only take him so far. Carter Carneham has gone from slave to revolutionary - but what will his ideas be worth when they come under fire? The Carnehams are about to find out...
After Nell Ingram escaped the cult in which she was raised, defending herself with magic, she met skinwalker Jane Yellowrock. This led to a Homeland Security agent showing up at her doorstep. Now Nell has a team - and a target: the vampire Blood Master of Nashville. But to find the Master's kidnapped vassal, Nell and her team will be forced to go deep into the heart of the very cult in which Nell was raised.
labaster Tenring - madman, world-crusher, savior - has returned with a mission: to train his successor, Essun, and thus seal the fate of the Stillness forever. It continues with a lost daughter, found by the enemy. It continues with the obelisks, and an ancient mystery converging on answers at last.The Stillness is the wall which stands against the flow of tradition, the spark of hope long buried under the thickening ashfall. And it will not be broken.
On highways across America, a tribe of people called the True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They are quasi-immortal, living off the "steam" that children with the "shining" produce when they are slowly tortured to death. Dan Torrance (from THE SHINING) has a job in a New Hampshire nursing home where his remnant "shining" power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying. Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes "Doctor Sleep." Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen, that reignites Dan's own demons and summons him to a battle for Abra's soul and survival.
Random kidnappings of women and girls proliferate throughout the land. Some people suddenly succumb to horrifically-virulent viruses while others become able to read minds. What is happening to the country - and the planet? Mysteriously summoned to confront these frightening questions, a LA cop, a Lakota Sioux, and a space scientist are thrown together on a bizarre cross-country quest.
London, World War I. American Ginger Stuyvesant is a medium for the Spirit Corps, a special Spiritualist force that captures the death of each soldier on the Front in order to pass instant information on troop movements to military intelligence. Ginger discovers the presence of a traitor but can't convince top brass. Even worse, it is clear that the Spirit Corps is now being directly targeted by the German war effort.
Joe Ledger and the Department of Military Sciences begin tearing down the veils of deception to uncover a vast and powerful secret society using weaponized versions of the Ten Plagues of Egypt to destabilize world economies and profit from the resulting chaos. Millions will die unless Joe meets this powerful new enemy on its own terms: fighting terror with terror.
Mick Oberon may look like just another 1930s private detective, but beneath the fedora and the overcoat, he's got pointy ears and he's packing a wand.
A tournament of ritualized combat has been called to fill the empty seat on the intergalactic empire's ruling council. The women of the empire will stop at nothing to secure political domination for their homeworlds. With the empire wracked by a rising nanovirus plague and stretched thin by an ill-advised planet-wide occupation of Ordoch in enemy territory, everything rests on the woman who rises to the top.
The race to explore and claim the North Dakota stargate quickly escalates, and those involved divide into opposing camps who view the teleportation technology either as an unprecedented opportunity for scientific research or a disastrous threat to national if not planetary security. In the middle of the maelstrom stands Sioux chairman James Walker. Travel through the stargate isn't necessarily only one way...
When Saffron Coulter stumbles through a hole in reality, she finds herself trapped in Kena, a magical realm on the brink of civil war. There, her fate becomes intertwined with that of three very different women: Zech, the fast-thinking acolyte of a cunning, powerful exile; Viya, the spoiled, runaway consort of the empire-building ruler, Vex Leoden; and Gwen, an Earth-born worldwalker whose greatest regret is putting Leoden on the throne. But Leoden has allies, too, chief among them the Vex'Mara Kadeja, a dangerous ex-priestess who shares his dreams of conquest.
The "U.S.S. Merrimack" space battleship was on the galaxy's edge, patrolling the Perseid arm rumoured to have become home to an underground subversive faction of the Roman Empire - the followers of Romulus. The United States was not an ally of Rome, favoring neither Caesar Numa nor the fallen Romulus, who had declared war on the U.S. two years ago and caused great devastation before his defeat. Then the "Merrimack" suffered an unprovoked attack by what seemed to be a Roman ship. Was it an unexpected move by Numa, or the opening salvo by the forces of Romulus?
Kid is trying to survive in a world gone mad. Hungry, thirsty and alone in a desert wasteland, she's picked up on the side of the road by Wolf, Dolly, Tank and Pretty Boy - outlaws with big rap sheets and even bigger guns. Together, Kid and her new crew are swept across a desolate, dangerous land - magnets for trouble, dodging the debts they owe, and leaving a bloody trail behind them.
1941. In the chaos of wartime Marseille, American engineer and occult disciple Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group, including Surrealist theorist Andre Breton. He unwittingly unleashes the power of dreams and nightmares, changing the war and the world forever. 1950. A lone Surrealist fighter, Thibaut, walks a new, hallucinogenic Paris, where Nazis and the Resistance are trapped in unending conflict, and the streets are stalked by living images and texts and by the forces of Hell.
20 of today's hottest urban fantasy writers pair together to write 10 original stories featuring their favorite series characters: Charlaine Harris and Christopher Golden; Carrie Vaughn and Diana Rowland; Jonathan Maberry and Larry Correia; Kelley Armstrong and Seanan Mcguire; Joseph Nassise and Sam Witt; Steven Savile and Craig Schaefer; David Wellington and Weston Ochse; Stephen Blackmoore and Jeff Somers; C. E. Murphy and Kat Richardson; Jaye Wells and Caitlin Kittredge.
Clariel dreams of living a simple life but discovers this is hard to achieve when a dangerous Free Magic creature is loose in the city. Her parents want to marry her off to a killer, and there is a plot brewing against the old and withdrawn King Orrikan. She is drawn into the efforts to find and capture the creature and finds hidden sorcery within herself - a magic that carries great dangers.
Phillip Theophrastus Gribbleflotz, the world's greatest alchemist, was a man history had forgotten. But when Grantsville turned up he got a second chance at fame and fortune. Applying his superb grasp of the principles of alchemy to the muddled and confused notions the Americans have concerning what they call chemistry, Gribbleflotz plays a central role in jump-starting the 17th century's new chemical and marital aids industries and pioneering such critical fields of human knowledge as pyramidology and aura imaging. These are his chronicles.
Taken from his family, Toby now lives in the Death House; an out-of-time existence far from the modern world, where he, and the others who live there, are studied by Matron and her team of nurses. They're looking for any sign of sickness. Any sign of their wards changing. Any sign that it's time to take them to the sanatorium. No one returns from the sanatorium. And then a new arrival in the house shatters the fragile peace, and everything changes.
Deep in the Chalk, something is stirring. The owls and the foxes can sense it, and Tiffany Aching feels it in her boots. An old enemy is gathering strength. This is a time of endings and beginnings, old friends and new, a blurring of edges and a shifting of power. Now Tiffany stands between the light and the dark, the good and the bad. As the fairy horde prepares for invasion, Tiffany must summon all the witches to stand with her. To protect the land. Her land. There will be a reckoning. The final Discworld novel.
2070-71. For Joshua Valiente, now in his late sixties, it is time to take one last solo journey into the High Meggers: an adventure that turns into a disaster. Alone and facing death, his only hope of salvation lies with a group of trolls. Meanwhile, the Long Earth receives a signal from the stars. The super-smart Next realize that the Message contains instructions on how to develop a computer the size of a continent - a device that will alter the Long Earth's place within the cosmos and reveal the ultimate, life-affirming goal of those who sent the Message.
A collection of twenty short stories, novellettes and novellas includes MINLA'S FLOWERS, SIGNAL TO NOISE, TROIKA, and seven previous uncollected stories, including TRAUMA POD, THE WATER THIEF and IN BABELSBERG.
In the remote mountains of Croatia, an archaeologist makes a strange discovery: a subterranean Catholic chapel, hidden for centuries, holds the bones of a Neanderthal woman. In the same cavern system, elaborate primitive paintings tell the story of an immense battle between tribes of Neanderthals and monstrous shadowy figures. Who is this mysterious enemy depicted in these ancient drawings and what do the paintings mean?
The unSeelie King has a grudge against Jeremiah, but that grudge will have to wait. For he needs Gallow's services for a very delicate mission - and the prize held out for success is Robin Ragged herself. Robin wants nothing to do with Gallow, but that isn't his problem. His problem is the Sluagh, the moonlit cavalcade of death all sidhe fear, that takes no master who is not strong enough to escape it.
Eveline Sparrow (formerly Duchen) hopes to put her past experiences as a thief and con-artist to more legitimate use; which is why some of the girls at her Sparrow School receive private lessons in burglary, fakery, and other such underhand practices. But business is not good, her friend Liu the half-fox-spirit is in some sort of trouble, and the rivalries of the Folk are in danger of overspilling into the mundane world and forcing the Empire into a bloody and horrifying war.
Rescued during a storm, Koko and Flynn are taken in by what amounts to a self-sufficient outlander cult. To save Flynn's life, Koko barters her warrior skills and assists the de-civ group in fending off their most imminent threat: a horde of genetic-mutant raiders. But being among the outlander de-civs doesn't sit well with Koko. In spite of the de-civ group's hospitality and Flynn's arguing that they have it pretty good, Koko suspects something is amiss.
With the alien armies growing stronger, Sophie's biosphere decides to join forces with the team from NTC's submarine. Using data from a surviving satellite, they discover strange, alien poles at each of the world's seven highest summits: alien technology that the survivors believe may hold the key to shutting down the alien ships once and for all. But before the two teams can launch an offensive, the biosphere must deal with sabotage from within and a strange nanotechnology that has infected several of the survivors.
A new collection of Swanwick's stories.
In order to mine an asteroid the goal is to bring it closer to Earth, but orbital mechanics are tricky and close to Earth proves to be far too close for comfort with looming destruction from space about to become a grim reality. Now astronauts, scientists, engineers, and people in all the burgeoning space businesses must team together to stop the asteroid before it is too late for humanity and the planet it calls home.
Rebellion is brewing in the far-off city of Scientia, and dark Elementals are plotting war in the ruins of New London. Before they know what's happening, Vespa, Syrus, and their friends are plunged into a new swamp of intrigue, deception, and magic and the cost of survival may be more than any of them are willing to pay.
Sam is a golem created from the substance of his own magic by the late Hierarch of Southern California. Daniel Blackland is determined to protect and teach him. But Daniel is injured trying to stop the building of a Pacific firedrake, a kind of ultimate weapon of mass magical destruction, in LA. Sam manages to get Daniel to the place run by the Emmas. As the Emmas work on healing Daniel, Sam decides to go back to LA and prevent the firedrake on his own.
Through terror and dark sorcery, Prince John wields the power of the throne. Lord and peasant alike meet violent ends as the Sheriff's arcane beasts spread fear and death. A small group of rebels oppose John, striking from Sherwood Forest...the one place his creatures cannot pursue them. Though their numbers grow, so do the forces of darkness. Unless Robin and Marian fulfill the ancient prophecy of the Two Torcs, the forest will be overrun, and England will fall.
Meet Hail: Captain. Gunrunner. Fugitive. Quick, sarcastic, and lethal, Hailimi Bristol doesn't suffer fools gladly. She has made a name for herself in the galaxy for everything except what she was born to do: rule the Indranan empire. That is, until two Trackers drag her back to her home planet to take her rightful place as the only remaining heir.
At the moment, there are powerful forces in the young Star Kingdom of Manticore's Parliament which don't think they need Lt. Travis Long. For that matter, they're pretty sure they don't need the Royal Manticoran Navy, either. After all, what does a sleepy little single-system star nation on the outer edge of the explored galaxy need with a "navy?" Unhappily for them, the edge of the explored galaxy can be a far more dangerous place than they think it is. They're about to find out why they need the Navy . . . and how very, very fortunate they are that Travis Long is in it.
Futurist Hannah Stander, a consultant for the FBI, is in an airport, waiting to board a flight home to see her family, when she receives a call from Agent Hollis Copper. I've got a cabin full of over a thousand dead bodies, he tells her. Whether those bodies are all human, he doesn't say. What Hannah finds is a horrifying murder that points to the impossible - someone weaponizing the natural world in a most unnatural way.
After their shattering defeats at the hands of brilliant General Janus bet Vhalnich, the opposing powers have called all sides to the negotiating table in hopes of securing an end to the war. Queen Raesinia of Vordan is anxious to see the return of peace, but Janus insists that any peace with the implacable Sworn Church of Elysium is doomed to fail. Soldiers Marcus d'Ivoire and Winter Ihernglass find themselves caught between their general and their queen.
Special operations officer Jason Thanou of the Temporal Regulatory Authority must once again plunge into Earth's blood-drenched past to combat the plots of the Transhumanist underground to subvert that past and create a secret history leading up to the fulfillment of their mad dream of transforming humanity into a race of gods and monsters.
When 18 year old Keiko's father dies unexpectedly, he leaves behind a one way ticket to Japan, an unintelligible death poem about powerful Japanese spirits and their gigantic, beast-like Guardians, and the cryptic words: Go to Japan in my place. Find the Gate. My camera will show you the way. Alone and afraid, Keiko travels to Tokyo, determined to fulfil her father's dying wish.
The editors have asked some of the best writers in the fantasy, horror, and thriller genres including Jonathan Maberry, Seanan McGuire, Christopher Golden, and Scott Sigler to create a monster story that included the line WTF is that?
Street thug Riko has some serious issues - memories wiped, reputation tanked, girlfriend turned into a tech-fueled zombie. And the only people who can help are the mercenaries who think she screwed them over. With corporate meatheads on her ass and a necro-tech blight between her and salvation, Riko is going to have to fight meaner, work smarter, and push harder than she's ever had to. And that's just to make it through the day.
After uncovering a mystical link to the ancient civilization of Galderkhaan, child psychologist Caitlin O'Hara can now heal her young patients with her mind and see things from other places and other times. But someone is watching her, perhaps hunting her - and using her son to do it. Meanwhile Mikel Jasso, a field agent for a mysterious research organization, is searching for Galderkhaani ruins in Antarctica. After falling down a crevasse, he discovers the entire city has been preserved under ice and that the mysterious stone artifacts he's been collecting are not as primitive as he thought.
The Shana Rei have infiltrated the transportal network, and desperate populations have to cut themselves off, shutting down their portals, often their only connection with the rest of the Spiral Arm. In desperation, humans and Ildirans turn to the most unlikely allies, the unpredictable faeros.
Kate and the former Beast Lord Curran Lennart are finally making their relationship official. But there are some steep obstacles standing in the way of their walk to the altar. Kate's father, Roland, has kidnapped the demigod Saiman and is slowly bleeding him dry in his never-ending bid for power. A Witch Oracle has predicted that if Kate marries the man she loves, Atlanta will burn and she will lose him forever. And the only person Kate can ask for help is long dead.
Jack Sparks died while writing this book.It was no secret that journalist Jack Sparks had been researching the occult for his new book. No stranger to controversy, he'd already triggered a furious Twitter storm by mocking an exorcism he witnessed. Then there was "that" video: forty seconds of chilling footage that Jack repeatedly claimed was not of his making, yet was posted from his own YouTube account. Nobody knew what happened to Jack in the days that followed - until now.
Amy Peterson is a self-replicating humanoid robot known as a von Neumann. For the past five years, she has been grown slowly as part of a mixed organic/synthetic family. She knows very little about her android mother's past, so when her grandmother arrives and attacks her mother, Amy wastes no time in eating her alive. Now she carries her malfunctioning granny as a partition on her memory drive, and she's learning that her failsafe has failed and she alone can kill humans...
It was a typically unpleasant Puget Sound winter before the arrival of Lioness Lazos. An enigmatic young waitress with strange abilities, when the lovely Lioness comes to Gardner Island even the weather takes notice. As an impossibly beautiful spring leads into a perfect summer, Lioness is drawn to a complicated family. She is taken in by two disenchanted lovers. With Lioness in their lives, they are suddenly compelled to explore their deepest dreams and desires. But lingering in Lioness's past is a dark secret and even summer days must pass.
Ceda is the youngest pit fighter in the history of the great desert city of Sharakhai. She has already made her name in the arena as the fearsome, undefeated White Wolf; none but her closest friends and allies know her true identity. Then she crosses the path of Rumayesh, an ehrekh, a sadistic ancient creature forged by the god of chaos. Rumayesh seeks to unmask the White Wolf and claim Ceda for her own, in a struggle that becomes a battle for Ceda's very soul.
Sequel to CONSPIRACY OF ANGELS. Zack Westland awakens on the shore of Lake Erie, his memory gone. Assaulted by powerful psychic fragments, he learns that he belongs to a tribe of angels - one of several living on Earth since the Blood Wars. Pursued by cacodaimons intent on killing him - again - he seeks to end war between the tribes.
A promise to a dying friend has Laytham Ballard on the trail of an escaped Serbian war criminal with friends in both high and low places - and a sinister history of blood sacrifices. Ballard is hell-bent on making Dusan Slorzack pay for his numerous atrocities, but to do that must follow a winding, treacherous path that stretches from Wall Street and Washington, D.C. to backwoods hollows and truckstops, while risking what's left of his very soul.
What Ben Garston can't let you know is that he was once known as Red Ben. That the world of myth and legend isn't just a fantasy, as we've been led to believe. And he certainly can't let you know the secret of what's hiding just beneath his skin... But not even Ben knows what kind of hell is about to break loose. A centuries-old rivalry has just resurfaced, and the delicate balance between his world and ours is about to be shattered.
An alien race attacks Earth with a universe-altering force known as thelemity, obliterating our civilization. But a few talented humans can also bend telemity to their will, and the struggle against the invaders has gone on for five centuries. But now the enemy's tactics are changing, and Earth's defenders are about to discover this centuries-old war is about to enter a new phase.
When Matt Johanssen, a young New York actor, auditions for "Chapel of Ease," an off-Broadway musical, he is instantly charmed by Ray Parrish, the show's writer and composer. They soon become friends. Matt learns that Ray's people call themselves the Tufa and that the musical is based on the history of his isolated home town. But there is one question in the show's script that Ray refuses to answer. What is buried in the ruins of the chapel of ease?
Responding to a signal from the supposedly unihabitable Earth, Riley Hale will soon find out if there could be a future for humanity there after all. She's stuck on a spaceship with the group of terrorists that is planning to brave the planet's atmosphere and crash-land on the surface. But when the re-entry goes wrong, Riley ends up hundreds of miles from her companions Prakesh and Carver, alone in a barren wilderness.
Nettie Lonesome dreams of a greater life than toiling as a slave in the sandy desert. But when a stranger attacks her, Nettie wins more than the fight. Now she's got friends, a good horse, and a better gun. But if she can't kill the thing haunting her nightmares and stealing children across the prairie, she'll lose it all - and never find out what happened to her real family.
Carey and Randall go to London to rescue Gus and fight more of the mysterious angel-like creatures, and stumble on a powerful and unexpected ally. Meanwhile, Kaitlyn discovers what the gear cult is really up to - trying to 'pin' the angels to Earth, focus their attention here, and get as much of humanity as possible "solved" - which, in their minds, is akin to being saved.
Luke Arnold is a successful stage comedian who, with his partner Sophie Drew, is about to have their first child. Then Luke's favourite uncle Terence - a man who enchanted (and frightened) him as a lad with tales of the "Other" (eldritch beings, hedge folks, and other fables of Celtic myth) dies in a freak accident. Luke suddenly begins to learn how little he really knew his uncle and soon he will have to confront forces that may be older than the world in order to save his unborn child.
The tale of the Mages of Westil who live in exile on Earth. Danny battled the Gate Thief and won. What he didn't know at the time was that the Gate Thief had a very good reason for closing the Great Gates and Danny has now fallen into the power of that great enemy of both Earth and Westil.
In an alternate 1906, the United States and Japan have forged a powerful confederation and have chosen vulnerable China as their first target. As hostilities escalate, assassins slay the the powerful geomancer wardens that protect San Francisco, leaving it exposed to earthquake. Headstrong secretary Ingrid Carmichael has a deep magical talent and it falls to her to defend the city against the masterminds determined to control Earth's energy for their own dark ends.
While hunting neodemons in her role as Warden of Ixos, Leandra obtains a prophetic spell that provides a glimpse one day into her future. Leandra's quest to unravel the mystery of the murder-she-will-commit becomes more urgent when her chronic disease flares up and the Ixonian Archipelago is plagued by natural disasters, demon worshiping cults, and fierce political infighting.
Raymond Electromatic, the world's last robot and Hollywood's best hit man, has a 24 hour memory. A familiar-looking woman has hired him to find a missing movie star. Plunged into the glittering world of fame, fortune, and secrecy, he uncovers a sinister plot that goes much deeper than the silver screen - and this robot is at the wrong place, at the wrong time.
From the dark, cold void comes an unknown force, its target a remote planet, the home for a group of people distancing themselves from mankind and pursuing a path of piety and peace. If that group is to have any chance for survival, a disparate group of pilots must come together to fight back any way they can. But the best these aces can do might not be good enough.
Working in an alternate version of Victorian London, Librarian-spy Irene has settled into a routine, collecting important fiction for the mysterious Library and blending in nicely with the local culture. But when her apprentice, Kai - a dragon of royal descent - is kidnapped by the Fae, her carefully crafted undercover operation begins to crumble.
Alternate history. Deep in the heart of Europe's Alps in the redoubt called Germanica, Nazi propaganda master Josef Goebbels and a battalion of Nazi zealots hold out against a frantic final Allied push to end World War II. Goebbels knows that if he can hold out just a bit longer, the war weary of the Western nations will back away from unconditional surrender for Germany, and the Third Reich can prepare to rise again.
Ashok Vadal has been chosen by a powerful ancient weapon to be its bearer. He is a Protector, the elite militant order of roving law enforcers. No one is more merciless in rooting out those who secretly practice the old ways. Everything is black or white, good or evil, until he discovers his entire life is a fraud. Ashok isn't who he thinks he is, and when he finds himself on the wrong side of the law, the consequences lead to rebellion, war - and destruction.
To save their alien world, the Om'ray left home, renamed themselves the Clan, and settled among humanity, hiding in plain sight. But they are no longer hidden. The Clan's reproduction is tied to individual power and their latest generation of females, Choosers, are too strong to safely mate. Sira di Sarc, their leader, joins with a human starship captain for answers. But as Sira's people are dying all around her, and with war about to consume the Trade pact, Sira will be left with only one choice. She must find the way back. And take the Clan home.
The Clan's starship, powered by the M'hir, follows a course set long ago, for Clan abilities came from an experiment their ancestors the Hoveny conducted on themselves. And they must endure more than cramped conditions and inner turmoil. Their dead are Calling. Sira must keep her people from answering, for if they do, they die. Morgan searches the ship for answers, afraid the Hoveny's tech is beyond his grasp. Their only hope? To reach their destination.
Anthology of Lovecraft-inspired stories. Featuring work by Richard Kadrey, Brian Hodge, A. C. Wise, Siobhan Carroll, Orrin Grey, and many more, with a stunning cover by "Hellboy" creator Mike Mignola.
Stories of things from space - mostly very, very bad things that want to harm humans and destroy Earth. Or take it for their own. From Robert Silverberg, David Drake, Sarah A. Hoyt, James H. Schmitz, Fritz Leiber, Robert Sheckley, Murray Leinster and John W. Campbell, as well as classic stories of extraterrestrial horrors by H.P. Lovecraft, George Allan England and more.
Two new, original novellas. In "The King's Justice", a stranger dressed in black arrives in the village of Settle's Crossways, following the scent of a terrible crime. The "Augur's Gambit" is a daring plan created by Mayhew Gordian, Hieronomer to the Queen of Indemnie, a plan to save his Queen and her island nation from the doom spelt out in the entrails of sacrifices.
A tribute to Poul Anderson, and a wonderful collection of stories by some of the genres top writers! Authors include Tad Williams, Terry Brooks, Greg Bear, Raymond Feist, Larry Niven, and Eric Flint.
The Queen alone has the magical power to prevent the land's malevolent spirits from destroying every man, woman, and child. Daleina, a seemingly quiet academy student, has been selected to train as heir to the Queen's magic. Ven, a disgraced champion, has spent his exile secretly fighting against the growing number of spirit attacks. Joining forces, these daring partners embark on a treacherous quest to find the source of the spirits' restlessness.
These are the voyages of the starship A.S.F. "Willful Child." Its ongoing mission: to seek out strange new worlds on which to plant the Terran flag, to subjugate and if necessary obliterate new life-forms, to boldly blow the... And so we join the not-terribly-bright but exceedingly cock-sure Captain Hadrian Sawback and his motley crew for a series of devil-may-care, near-calamitous and downright chaotic adventures through 'the infinite vastness of interstellar space.'
Gin Blanco accompanies her foster brother Finnegan Lane to Bullet Pointe, a fancy hotel resort complex plus Old West theme park that Finn now owns lock, stock, and barrel. At first, all the struttin cowboys and sassy saloon girls are just hokey fun. But add in some shady coincidences and Circle assassins lurking all around, and vacationing becomes wilder and deadlier than anyone expected.
Caitlin Kralik commands an exploration fleet looking for new allies against the murderous alien Ekhats. But after a long search, all the expedition has found are dead worlds and now-extinct intelligent species slaughtered by the genocidal Ekhat. Do they continue to search down the galactic arm in which Earth and the Jao worlds lie, or do they make an astounding leap in another direction?
Hollis lives in an area not too far from where he graduated from college. His friends do, too. They all sleep late, talk about jobs they might get, girls they might date, money their parents might send them. But Hollis has something to bolster him. Another reality is constantly running through his head, and it's one that leads him to the conclusion that maybe, just maybe, it's time to get serious.
For failed mage Alaron and his companion Ramita - widow to the mage who built the Leviathan Bridge - the unthinkable has happened. They have lost the Scytale of Corineus, the key to the Rite of Ascendancy, as well as one of Ramita's infant sons, to the hands of their deadliest enemies.
The climactic finale of the story line that tells of the origins of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood and its breeding program, the human-computer Mentats, and the Navigators (the Spacing Guild), as well as a crucial battle for the future of the human race, in which reason faces off against fanaticism.
Huge stone creatures have fallen from the sky, their bodies littering the countryside. Blood-hungry golems are used to fight a never-ending war for political power. Secret police crush insurgency wherever it's found. Investigator Vissarion Lom has been summoned to Mirrored to quell a new rebellion within the city limits. He's been called because he's an outsider. Because he isn't enmeshed in the city's politics. And because of the piece of stone embedded in his forehead.
To turn the tide of war and prevent annihilation, Caldan must learn to harness his fearsome and forbidden magic. But as he grows into his powers, the young sorcerer realizes that not all the monsters are on the other side. To save his life, his friends, and his world, Caldan must risk all to defeat a sorcerer of immense power. Failure will doom the world. Success will doom Caldan.
Heir of the dying gods of Nabban, Ghu is drawn back to the empire he fled as a boy, journeying east on the caravan road with the tormented assassin Ahjvar at his side. Ahjvar is ill in mind and body, a danger to those about him and to the man who loves him most of all. Innocent and madman, god and assassin - two men to seize an empire from the tyrannical descendants of the devil Yeh-Lin. But in war-torn Nabban, enemies of gods and humans stir in the shadows. Yeh-Lin herself meddles with the heir of her enemies and his soul-shattered companion, as the fate of the empire rests on their shoulders.
This annual speculative fiction anthology collects the best reprint short fiction and poetry from the current year, featuring a host of Canadian authors. It features an introduction by horror author Andrew Pyper.
The sky burns with a supernatural fire, demonic entities run amok in the streets, and in the north of England, sinister beings plot to claim a part of the Empire for their own. Young Apollo Lycea agent Lillian Hardwick, and her Majestic partner Sir Arthur Cecil, are sent to expose this plot. To complete their mission they must overcome foes both mundane and supernatural, uncover a Royal conspiracy, and unlock the secret of the Iscariot Sanction.
One by one, the demigods are meeting gory, violent ends. Now it's up to Theseus, comfortably ensconced in New York and making his living as a crime fiction writer, to investigate the deaths. His search for the culprit draws him back into the lives of his extended family of cousins and half-siblings, and into a world of tragedy and long-held grudges that he thought, and hoped, he'd put behind him.
Light magician and high-ranking member of the Night Watch, Anton Gorodetsky must deal with a reincarnated vampire that has been terrorizing Moscow. His daughter's school is ambushed by a bizarre chimera. And the Prophets have all reached the same chilling conclusion: the world will end in five days time.
If the residents of the once-idyllic village of Pine Deep think the death of serial killer Karl Ruger put an end to the carnage, they're dead wrong. Bodies mutilated beyond description, innocents driven to acts of vicious madness - a monstrous evil is preying on the living - and the dead - and turning the quiet little town into hell on earth. Their only hope is to find the source. But the secrets that lurk in the heart of Pine Deep are twisted into its very roots.
After the concluding events of LOWBALL, Officer Francis Black of Fort Freak, vigilante joker Marcus "The Infamous Black Tongue" Morgan, and ace thief Mollie "Tesseract" Steunenberg get stuck in Talas, Kyrgyzstan. There, the coldblooded Baba Yaga forces jokers into an illegal fighting ring, but her hidden agenda is much darker: her fighters' deaths serve to placate a vicious monster from another dimension.
A factory worker can heal the sick and injured. A schoolteacher bends emotions to her will. A car salesman alters matter with a simple touch. A former soldier speaks to the dying and gains their memories as they pass on. They are the Variants, controlled by a secret government program called MAJESTIC-12 to open a new front in the Cold War.
As the leader of the Moon's newest ruling corporation, Adriana Corta has wrested control of the Moon's Helium-3 industry from the Mackenzie Metal corporation and fought to earn her family's new status. Now, at the twilight of her life, Adriana finds her corporation, Corta Helio, surrounded by the many enemies she made during her meteoric rise. If the Corta family is to survive, Adriana's five children must defend their mother's empire from her many enemies... and each other.
The events October Toby Daye has unwittingly set in motion could change the balance of modern Faerie forever, and she has been ordered to appear before a historic convocation of monarchs, hosted by Queen Windermere in the Mists and overseen by the High King and Queen themselves. Naturally, things have barely gotten underway when the first dead body shows up. As the only changeling in attendance, Toby is already the target of suspicion and hostility.
A mysterious force is visiting Georgina's thoughts, trying to draw her into a dark, otherworldly realm. Sooner or later, Georgina knows she'll be too weak to resist. And when that happens, she'll discover who she can trust, who she can't - and that Hell is far from the worst place to spend eternity.
Psychology professor Alex Locke is an ex-convict, forced back into the criminal underworld when his daughter is threatened. After he agrees to steal a mysterious Obsidian Heart, Locke is pursued by unearthly assassins known as the 'Wolves of London'. Soon he discovers the heart can enable him to travel through time, and while it bestows him with his own dark powers, it also corrupts...
Midian Unmade tells the stories of the Nightbreed after the fall of their city, Midian. Driven from their homes, their friends and family members slain before their eyes, the monsters become a mostly-hidden diaspora. Some are hunted; others, hunters. Some seek refuge. Others want revenge. Contributors include: Karl Alexander, Amber Benson, Nancy Holder, Seanan McGuire, Weston Ochse, David J. Schow, Stephen Woodworth; and many more - 23 stories in all.
A strange and twisted magic has ripped through the North American Central Pack, and Merit's closest friends are caught in the crosshairs. Gabriel Keene, the pack Apex, looks to Merit and Ethan for help. But who or what could possibly be powerful enough to outmagic a shifter? Merit is about to go toe-to-toe, and cold steel to cold heart, to find out.
Chuck Dutton's Music City Salvage business is stripping historic properties and reselling their bones. Augusta Withrow offers him salvage rights to her mansion. The crew's problems start when they find a cemetery, about thirty fallen and overgrown graves dating to the early 1900s, which Augusta insists is just a fake, a Halloween prank. But when the bulldozer revs up, human remains turn up. That's when Augusta stops answering the phone. And that's when the trouble really starts on the estate.
Alesandro grows up in Glaud, a fascist state constantly at war with a faceless opponent. His brother is sent off to war; his family is destroyed by grief. Occasionally he catches glimpses of islands in the far distance from the shore, and they feed into the music he composes - music for which he is feted. His search from his brother brings him into contact with the military leadership and suddenly he is a fugitive on the run - he seeks refuge on the islands and his endless travels take him through places and time, bringing him answers where he could not have foreseen them.
The cryptic message originated seventy light-years away from the planet Crucible, where Ndege Akinya lives under permanent house arrest for her role in the catastrophe that killed 417,000 people. Could it be from her mother, Chiku, who vanished during a space expedition decades earlier? Ndege's daughter Goma, a biologist, joins the crew of the Travertine, dispatched to Gliese 163 to uncover the source behind the enigmatic message.
Super-intelligent hairy beach balls suddenly appear from another universe. It's pretty weird. That's what old codger Billy Morton thinks when "Louie" lands in his fishing boat and follows him home. His family come quickly to love this playful alien, but when Louie starts using their computer to hack into government and corporate accounts, learn all that the NSA knows, and steal millions from banks, they realize that Louie and his friends mean trouble.
An anthology of great sf stories by women authors. Includes stories by Leigh Brackett, Lois McMaster Bujold, Pat Cadigan, CJ Cherryh, Zenna Henderson, Nancy Kress, Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, C.L. Moore, Andre Norton, James Tiptree, Jr., and Connie Willis.
For someone who has died and come back as many times as Conrad Harris, the nickname Lazarus is well-deserved. His elite military teams are specialists in death - running suicide missions in simulant bodies to combat the alien race known as the Krell. But now the Krell Empire has wreaked such devastation that military command is desperate for a new strategy. And Harris and his team are being sent on a mission that could finally turn the tide of the war.
When Jonathan Frazer, the wealthy owner of a furniture and antiques shop in Los Angeles, buys the mirror at an auction, he believes he is getting the bargain of a lifetime. With its age and size, it is easily worth eight times what he paid for it. At this point, the mirror has sat dormant for years. But within days of Jonathan's purchase, the deaths begin again.
Fabian Socialists from Great Britian join forces with African-American missionaries to purchase land from the Belgian Congo's "owner," King Leopold II. This land, named Everfair, is set aside as a safe haven, an imaginary Utopia for native populations of the Congo as well as escaped slaves returning from America and other places where African natives were being mistreated. Nisi Shawl's speculative masterpiece manages to turn one of the worst human rights disasters on record into a marvelous and exciting exploration of the possibilities inherent in a turn of history.
60 years ago, Boompa Willet came face to face with the Jersey Devil - and lived to tell the tale. Now Boompa must return to the Barrens, not to prove the legend is real but to wipe it off the face of the earth. It will take four generations of the Willet clan, a lifetime of survivalist training, and all the firepower they can carry. But timing is critical. A summer music festival has attracted crowds of teenagers. The woods are filled with tender young prey. But this time, the Devil is not alone. The evil has grown into an unholy horde of mutant monstrosities. And hell has come home to New Jersey.
After the defeat of his legion outside the walls of the great city of Cahokia, Praetor Gaius Marcellinus is the only survivor. He comes to see the Cahokians as his kin. After successfully repelling an invasion by the fearsome Iroqua tribes, Marcellinus realizes that a weak and fractured North America won't stand a chance against the returning Roman army.
Wen Spencer's stories exploring the fascinating realm of Elfhome, a world where modern day Pittsburgh has collided with the kingdom of the Elves.
The Unimancers are brain-burned zombies. Former 'mancers, they have been tortured into becoming agents of the government's anti-'mancer squad, an unstoppable hive-mind. When Paul accidentally opens up the first unsealed dimensional broach on American soil, the Unimancers lead his family in a cat-and-mouse pursuit all the way to the demon-haunted ruins of Europe - where his daughter Aliyah is slowly corrupted by the siren call of the Unimancers.
As Orlaith and Reiko encounter danger and wonder, Orlaith's mother, Queen Matildha, believes her daughter's alliance and quest has endangered the entire realm. There are factions both within and without Montival whose loyalty died with the king, and whispers of treachery and war grow ever louder. And the Malevolence that underlies the enemy will bend all its forces to destroy them.
John Arminger Mackenzie's sister Princess Orlaith will deservedly inherit the throne of the High Kings, and it will only pass to him should she die. The opportunity to prove his mettle comes when John's ship, the Tarshish Queen, is caught in the fierce storm raised against the enemies of the alliance. When the clouds recede and the skies clear, John and his crew find themselves on the other side of the Pacific, in the island chains of the Ceram Sea, fighting to survive against vicious pirates and monstrous creatures of the deep, meeting new allies and mysterious enemies of this world and another.
In the distant future, Surplus arrives in China dressed as a Mongolian shaman, leading a yak which carries the corpse of his friend, Darger. Darger and Surplus, a human and a genetically engineered dog with human intelligence who walks upright, are a pair of con men who have invented a scam to become rich and powerful. Pretending to have limited super-powers, they aid an ambitious local warlord who dreams of conquest and once again reuniting China under one ruler. And, against all odds, it begins to work, but it seems as if there are other forces at work behind the scenes.
The team confronts a mirror-stealing Isaac Newton and later witnesses how the ancient and bizarre cheese-rolling ceremony in Gloucester can result in CBC: Concussion By Cheese. Finally, Max makes her long-awaited jump to Bronze Age Troy, only for it to end in personal catastrophe. And just when it seems things couldn't get any worse, it's back to the Cretaceous Period to confront an old enemy who has nothing to lose.
Paranormal investigator Lucinda de Salle, accompanied by Kayla, the ghost girl who has been her constant companion since she was born, is called in to investigate a spectral disturbance at the all-girls school she attended as a child. She discovers a malevolent demon has been released into this world. When the demon demands that Kayla be handed over to him, Lucky realizes her chatty, snarky spirit companion is not what she has always seemed to be.
Middle Earth for the the middle of the wall.
A dying boy on a dying planet plays a dangerous, sophisticated, and addictive game that could save his life - if it doesn't kill him first.
Merlyn Athrawes, cybernetic avatar of one of Earth's long-dead defenders, has intervened in the small Safeholdian realm of Charis, seeding it with ideas and innovations and helping it to rise to challenge the hegemony of the Church. Aided by a stream of inventions - breech-loading rifles, signal rockets, claymore mines, new approaches to manufacturing and supply, Charis finally seems to have gained the upper hand. Merlyn Athrawes has been everywhere, under multiple disguises and wielding hidden powers. But now a new player has arrived, one who knows many secrets-including Merlyn's own.
Kirit Densira cannot wait to pass her wingtest and begin flying as a trader by her mother's side, being in service to her beloved home tower and exploring the skies beyond. When Kirit inadvertently breaks Tower Law, the city's secretive governing body, the Singers, demand that she become one of them instead. In an attempt to save her family from greater censure, Kirit must give up her dreams to throw herself into the dangerous training at the Spire, the tallest, most forbidding tower, deep at the heart of the City.
Hidden aboard the Enterprise is a secret that has been passed from captain to captain, from Robert April to Christopher Pike to James T. Kirk. Now the return of the enigmatic woman once known as Number One has brought that secret to light, and Kirk and his crew must risk everything to finish a mission that began with April so many years ago.
When orders come down for the rebels to fall back in the face of superior opposition numbers and firepower, Twilight reluctantly complies. Then an unlikely ally radically changes the strategic equation and gives the Alliance's hardest-fighting warriors a crucial chance to turn retreat into resurgence. Orders or not, alone and outgunned but unbowed, Twilight Company locks, loads, and prepares to make its boldest maneuver trading down-and-dirty battle in the trenches for a game-changing strike at the ultimate target: the very heart of the Empire's military machine.
As the New Republic fights to restore a lasting peace to the galaxy, Han Solo attempts to settle his last outstanding debt, by helping Chewbacca liberate the Wookiee's homeworld of Kashyyyk. Meanwhile, Norra Wexley and her band of Imperial hunters pursue Grand Admiral Rae Sloane and the Empire's remaining leadership across the galaxy.
4 billion BCE: The Jagaroth, the most powerful, vicious, and visually unappealing race in the universe disappears from existence. Few are sad to see them go. 1505 CE: Leonardo da Vinci is rudely interrupted while gilding the lily by a most annoying military man by the name of Captain Tancredi. 1979 CE: Despite his best efforts not to end up in exactly the right place at exactly the wrong time, the Doctor, his companion Romana, and his cybernetic dog, K-9, arrive for a vacation in Paris only to discover that they have landed in a year in which the fabric of time has begun to crack.
The primordial Accord was destroyed when the Kothites, a race of near immortals, came to Urth and wreaked havoc. But there is a Sleeping King, a powerful elvish elemental trapped in a spell who could restore the Accord. Many seek this treasure: a mad, immortal Emperor who would destroy it to retain his race's power, an avaricious governor who seeks to enrich himself beyond measure, old powers seeking to recapture lost glory. And also a young girl who seeks to thwart prophecy, and a woodsman out to discover a lost past, who together hope to extinguish the Black Flame of Koth.
A gun-for-hire, literally haunted by his bloody past, comes to the struggling town of Paradise Falls, where he becomes embroiled in a deadly conflict between the besieged community and a diabolically brilliant alchemist who is building terrible new weapons of mass destruction - and an army of the living dead.
Jack Bauer is a fugitive hunted by the most powerful nations in the world. On a self-imposed crusade to destroy the criminal empire of international arms dealer Karl Rask, Jack has infiltrated the crew of one of Rask's freighters. But his mission is disrupted when the ship is hijacked by a band of suspiciously well-informed pirates off the coast of Somalia. As Jack fights to free the ship, he discovers a deadly secret hidden in its hold: a prize the pirates were hired to steal, and one that could be used to ignite a world war-unless Jack captures it first.
Captain Kirk and his crew seek the stolen Transfer Key that opens a door between universes, but their hunt is cut short by Ambassador Sarek's plea for help. The Enterprise crew soon becomes targets in a deadly crossfire, one whose outcome will decide the fate of two universes.
U.S intelligence officer Amanda Waller has determined only a secretly convened group of disparate, despicable individuals with next to nothing to lose will do for a mission to defeat an enigmatic, insuperable entity. However, once the villains realize they weren't picked to succeed but chosen for their patent culpability when they inevitably fail, will the Suicide Squad resolve to die trying, or decide it's every man for himself?
18 years ago, the Enterprise thwarted an alien invasion from another universe, and Captain Robert April took possession of the interdimensional transfer device that made it possible. Since then, each captain of the Enterprise has guarded this secret with his life. Now, Romulan agents have succeeded in stealing the device and using it to banish Ambassador Sarek and Councillor Gorkon to an unknown realm in the midst of their groundbreaking Federation-Klingon peace negotiations.
A collection of episodes from the first season of the podcast series.
Episodes from season two.
Fear is abroad in the Deadlands as a string of brutal killings and cattle mutilations trouble a frontier town in the Arizona Territory, nestled in the forbidding shadow of the rugged Thunder Mountains. A mule train is massacred, homes and ranches are attacked, and men and women are stalked and butchered by bestial killers who seem to be neither human nor animal. Meanwhile a ruthless land baron tries to buy up all the surrounding territory-and possibly bring about an apocalypse.
Awakening in the aftermath of a changed world, with gaps in his memories and suspicion on all sides, augmented ex-cop and former security operative Adam Jensen struggles to piece his life back together, in a new reality where 'Augs' have become the targets of hatred, fear and violent discrimination. But dark forces are gathering once again, reaching out to manipulate the course of global events through terror and intimidation.
These scattered stories span untold millennia, from the age of the ancient custodial race known as the Forerunners to the aftermath of the Covenant's bloody war against humanity and even the shocking events surrounding the resurrection of the mysterious Guardians. Tobias Buckell, Troy Denning, Matt Forbeck, Kelly Gay, Christie Golden, Kevin Grace, Morgan Lockhart, John Jackson Miller, Frank O'Connor, Brian Reed, Joseph Staten, James Swallow.