Steele - "Begone" by Daryl Gregory - "The Red Menace" by Lavie Tidhar - "Muse of Fire" by John Scalzi - "Writer’s Block" by Nancy Kress - "Highland Reel" by Jack Campbell - "Karin Coxswain" or "Death as She Is Truly Lived" by Paul Di Filippo - "The Lady Astronaut of Mars" by Mary Robinette Kowal - "Every Fuzzy Beast of the Earth, Every Pink Fowl of the Air" by Tad Williams - "Declaration" by James Patrick KellyAs a bonus, the authors introduce their stories, explaining what they ripped-off - and why.Rip-Off! was produced in partnership with SFWA - Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. Gardner Dozois served as project editor.

    On his first solo assignment, he encounters something that threatens to change everything he knows about the America of his generation.

    It was written in a hurry. It is riddled with inconsistencies. And it never quite arrives at whatever point it sought to make. But remember: The $25 you donated to charity in exchange for this steaming mess of prose will help our species shuffle along, and I hope you’ll feel warmed by your good deed as you read. Thank you for decreasing the overall worldwide level of suck, and as they say in my hometown: Don’t forget to be awesome.Best wishes!John Green* The book has been made available under creative commons license, so it can be acquired legally here: http://effyeahnerdfighters.com/post/2... :)

    The trouble starts when George Paxton ingenuously signs an admission of complicity in starting World War III.

     But Peter Miller, an analyst at the headquarters of the Office of Strategic Services in Washington D.C., learns of a secret Nazi weapons project that may pose a far greater threat: the Black Gate. Sent alone on a perilous mission into the heart of Germany in the guise of an SS officer, Peter discovers that Nazi scientists have recreated an ancient machine that opens a portal to another universe, a gate they believe literally leads to Hell. With the help of Mina Hass, a beautiful woman who is also the lover and confidant of the madman leading the project, Peter must find a way to close the gate forever before the Nazis unwittingly unleash Armageddon…

    Come and enter Samuel Delany’s tomorow, in this trilogy of high adventure, with acrobats and urchins, criminals and courtiers, fishermen and factory-workers, madmen and mind-readers, dwarves and ducheses, giants and geniuses, merchants and mathematicians, soldiers and scholars, pirates and poets, and a gallery of aliens who fly, crawl, burrow, or swim.

    Joseph Kavanagh, a new Defender, has one task: to protect his section of the Wall from the Others, the desperate souls who are trapped amid the rising seas outside and are a constant threat. Failure will result in death or a fate perhaps worse: being put to sea and made an Other himself. Beset by cold, loneliness, and fear, Kavanagh tries to fulfill his duties to his demanding Captain and Sergeant, even as he grows closer to his fellow Defenders. A dark part of him wonders whether it would be interesting if something did happen, if they came, if he had to fight for his life.

    Seeking to atone, she joins the House of Reclamation, an organisation dedicated to rescuing ships in distress.But, stripped of her weaponry and emptied of her officers, she struggles in the new role she’s chosen for herself. When a ship goes missing in a disputed system, Trouble Dog and her new crew of misfits and loners, captained by Sal Konstanz, an ex-captain of a medical frigate who once fought against Trouble Dog, are assigned to investigate and save whoever they can.Meanwhile, light years away, intelligence officer Ashton Childe is tasked with locating and saving the poet, Ona Sudak, who was aboard the missing ship, whatever the cost. In order to do this, he must reach out to the only person he considers a friend, even if he’s not sure she can be trusted. What Childe doesn’t know is that Sudak is not the person she appears to be.Quickly, what appears to be a straightforward rescue mission turns into something far more dangerous, as Trouble Dog, Konstanz and Childe, find themselves at the centre of a potential new conflict that could engulf not just mankind but the entire galaxy.If she is to survive and save her crew, Trouble Dog is going to have to remember how to fight.

    Howard Phillips Lovecraft may have been a writer for only a short time, but the creations he left behind after his death in 1937 have shaped modern horror more than any other author in the last two centuries: the shambling god Cthulhu, and the other deities of the Elder Things, the Outer Gods, and the Great Old Ones, and Herbert West, Reanimator, a doctor who unlocked the secrets of life and death at a terrible cost. In Lovecraft Unbound, more than twenty of today's most prominent writers of literature and dark fantasy tell stories set in or inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft. 9 • Introduction (Lovecraft Unbound) • essay by Ellen Datlow 11 • The Crevasse • short story by Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud 31 • The Office of Doom • [Dust Devil] • short story by Richard Bowes 43 • Sincerely, Petrified • short fiction by Anna Tambour 73 • The Din of Celestial Birds • (1997) • short story by Brian Evenson 85 • The Tenderness of Jackals • short fiction by Amanda Downum 99 • Sight Unseen • short fiction by Joel Lane 113 • Cold Water Survival • short story by Holly Phillips 139 • Come Lurk With Me and Be My Love • short fiction by William Browning Spencer 161 • Houses Under the Sea • (2006) • novelette by Caitlín R. Kiernan 195 • Machines of Concrete Light and Dark • short story by Michael Cisco 213 • Leng • short fiction by Marc Laidlaw 239 • In the Black Mill • (1997) • short story by Michael Chabon 267 • One Day, Soon • short fiction by Lavie Tidhar 277 • Commencement • (2001) • novelette by Joyce Carol Oates 305 • Vernon, Driving • short fiction by Simon Kurt Unsworth 315 • The Recruiter • short fiction by Michael Shea 331 • Marya Nox • short fiction by Gemma Files 347 • Mongoose • [Boojum] • novelette by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette 375 • Catch Hell • short fiction by Laird Barron 413 • That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable • short fiction by Nick Mamatas

    Following a cataclysmic battle, the enchantments of Eivar were lost–now a song is only words and music, and no more. But when a dark power threatens the land, poets who thought only to gain fame for their songs face a task much greater: to restore the lost enchantments to the world. And the road to the Otherworld, where the enchantments reside, will imperil their lives and test the deepest desires of their hearts.

    A woman who lives by scavenging corpses in the Japanese suicide forest is haunted by her dead lover. A man searches for the memory that will overwrite his childhood abuse. Helios is left at the altar. The world is made quiet by a series of apocalypses. From the riveting emotion and politics of 'The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen's Window' (Nebula winner) to the melancholy family saga of 'Eros, Philia, Agape' (Hugo and Theodore Sturgeon finalist), Rachel Swirsky's critically acclaimed stories have quickly made her one of the field's rising stars. Her work is, by turns, clever and engaging, unflinching and quietly devastating--often in the space of the same story. How the World Became Quiet: Myths of the Past, Present, and Future collects the body of Swirsky's short fiction to date for the first time. While these stories envision pasts, presents, and futures that never existed, they offer revealing examinations of humanity that readers will find undeniably true.Table of contents…The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s WindowMonstrous EmbraceThe Adventues of Captain Blackheart Wentworth: A Nautical TaleHeartstrungMarrying the SunA Monkey Will Never Be Rid of Its Black HandsThe Sea of TreesFields of GoldEros, Philia, AgapeThe Monster’s Million FacesAgain and Again and AgainDiving After the MoonScenes from a DystopiaThe Taste of PromisesWith Singleness of HeartDispersed by the Sun, Melting in the WindHow the World Became Quiet: A Post-Human Creation MythSpeech Strata

    Do you love the sound of a peg leg stomping across a quarterdeck? Or maybe you prefer a parrot on your arm, a strong wind at your back? Adventure, treasure, intrigue, humor, romance, danger — and, yes, plunder! Oh, the Devil does love a pirate — and so do readers everywhere! Swashbuckling from the past into the future and space itself, Fast Ships, Black Sails, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, presents an incredibly entertaining volume of original stories guaranteed to make you walk and talk like a pirate.Table of Content"Boojum" by Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette"Castor on Troubled Waters" by Rhys Hughes"I Begyn as I Mean To Go On" by Kage Baker"Avast, Abaft!" by Howard Waldrop"Elegy to Gabrielle, Patron Saint of Healers, Whores, And Righteous Thieves" by Kelly Barnhill"Skillet and Saber" by Justin Howe"The Nymph's Child" by Carrie Vaughn"68° 07' 15"N, 31° 36' 44"W" by Conrad Williams"Ironface" by Michael Moorcock"Pirates Solutions" by Katherine Sparrow"We Sleep on Thousand Waves beneath the Stars" by Brendan Connell"Voyage of the Iguana" by Steve Aylett"Pirates of the Saura Sea" by David Freer & Eric Flint"A Cold Day in Hell" By Paul Batteiger"The Adventures of Captain Black Heart Wentworth" by Rachel Swirsky"Araminta, or, The Wreck of the Amphidrake" by Naomi Novik"The Whale below" by Jayme Lynn Blaschke"Beyond the Seagate ff the Scholar-Pirate of Sarskoe" by Garth Nix-

    Transplanting his consciousness into an android body in order to escape death, Jake Sullivan falls in love with the android Karen, a situation that is further complicated when Jake's biological body takes hostages and demands its mind back.

    Now, under the guidance of Chairman Carlotta Madigan and her lover and Minister of Media, Royce Lindbold, it is the galaxy's supreme electronic democracy, a Utopian world where both sexes equally serve and are served by the Media.But there are those who would have it otherwise, who have come to Pacifica to turn its very freedom into an instrument of its bondage, who have launched a devastating media war on Pacifica to divide... and conquer.