Once her neural paths were scanned and the pattern uploaded to an enormous bank of computers, she could be happy and carefree. No more aging, dandruff, fear of death, or any of the other drawbacks of hauling her own squishy meatsack hither and yon.But her new life is a troubled one. As she learns to enhance her own intelligence, she grows alienated from her old life. She has no legal rights, and the government is trying to shut her down and steal her research.But when a nuke detonates over Manhattan, Helen devotes her growing power to bringing the culprit to justice. She uncovers a force bent not on geopolitical power, but on the extinction of all humankind.Will our heroine be enslaved or deleted by the Feds? Can she avert an impending war with China? How will she find time to finish her doctoral thesis? And (hey, we're trying not to judge) isn't Dr. Mellings way too old for her?Alternately goofy and dark, The Improbable Rise of Singularity Girl tells the story of a singular woman, and a life lived at an exponential pace.

    Now her brother’s dead, her mom's paralyzed in more ways than one, her dad lives at work and her seven-year-old sister Amy tries too freaking hard to salvage everything. What’s more, high school is its own special kind of hell, where her ex-boyfriend delights in spreading rumors that shred her reputation and make her feel like a loser.When she finds an old camera in a creepy abandoned hospital, it seems like her luck is finally changing. And it is changing--from bad to worse. Because of course it is. Each time Morgan photographs one of her classmates they become corrupted versions of themselves. It's like the camera steals their goodness, their essence, and leaves them hollow.Then her sister uses the camera to take a selfie. No matter what the cost, Morgan will find a way to reverse the effects of the cursed camera and save Amy, before her already-fractured family completely self-destructs.

    He has no communication, limited power, and an unbreakable will to survive. His one goal: find his way BACK to his family. Shepard is an astronaut on his first mission to the International Space Station. When a violent blast of solar magnetic radiation leaves him stranded in orbit, he’s forced to use his wit and guile to find a way home. He has no idea what he’ll find when he gets there. SPACEMAN is a post-apocalyptic/dystopian tale that tells the survival story of a man and the family he left behind. It’s written with the help of former astronauts, NASA team members, and well-respected astrophysicists that give SPACEMAN a unique sense of detail and desperation.

     Future America is dangerous and bankrupt. The interstate highways are littered with the rusted hulks of ambushed cars and trucks, and only Mad Max would dare travel the back roads. When an arms race with Russia and China to develop time travel for military purposes achieves success, the body count skyrockets as both patriot and enemy try to hijack the new technology. Like the Manhattan Project and Operation Overtime before it, such a project attracts the best and the brightest as well as the worst and the psychotic. But not everyone has given up on the rule of law. In Tennessee, Fayette County D.A. Pete Dance wants to prosecute the murder of a man whose fossilized remains turn up after a series of devastating earthquakes. The problem is that the victim is still alive. When the violence starts, it doesn’t stop until the final whirlwind of teeth and claws and lasers. The first spinoff series from William Alan Webb’s immensely popular series The Last Brigade is described by one critic as “…Spectre agents chasing Fast and Furious through Jurassic World,” while another reviewer added “…with a heavy dose of Harry Bosch for good measure.” “After the heart-pounding finale, you won’t see the shocking ending coming. Guaranteed to keep you awake at night.”

    In the service of the Empire, he has killed more people than anyone in the history of Humanity, to save a hundred times as many. He died centuries ago, but they re-activate his recorded personality whenever a new threat appears. When the crisis is over, they expect he will meekly return to oblivion. He has other ideas. The chronicle of Bland reveals secrets of the history of the star-spanning Third Imperium and spans 400 years from early Imperium (about year 300) through the mid-post Civil War period (about year 700) touching known and unknown events you may have encountered in your own reading of the Imperium: everyday events, political intrigue, deadly dangers, Arbellatra, Capital, Encyclopediopolis, the Karand's Palace, and a Tigress-class Dreadnought. If you know the Traveller science-fiction role-playing game, then some of this is already familiar; if not, no matter; this story introduces the vast human-dominated interstellar empire of the far future in ways only the designer and chronicler of this particular universe can.

    Ghosts of a secretive family past. A deadly hurricane. When Ellie Whitaker leaves her dead-end job behind to spread her grandmother's ashes in tropical paradise, the last thing she expected was to face more ghosts. But darkness lurks inside her nana's ancestral home. Ellie's presence stirs up its energies. And as a hurricane creeps closer to the island, she must hurry to discover long-buried truths. About her treasure-hunting grandfather's death in 1951. About the curse her grandmother left behind. About the innkeeper next door with an evil secret. And the spectral visions she keeps having. Some there to help her. Some to make sure Ellie becomes a ghostly resident of haunted Key West forever.

    "I can’t remember the last time I read a book that spoke to me, so eloquently, and so deeply, on so many levels. ... I’ll be rereading it in the future because it’s that sort of book. Richly layered and deeply resonant. An old friend, from the first time you read it." —Charles de Lint, World Fantasy Award winner The Heroka walk among us. Unseen, unknown. Shapeshifters. Human in appearance but with power over their animal totems.Gwyn Blaidd is a Heroka of the wolf totem. Once he led his people in a deadly war against the Tainchel, the shadowy agency that hunts his kind. Now he lives alone in his wilderness home, wolves his only companions.But when an Ojibwe girl is brutally killed in Gwyn's old hometown, suspicion falls on his former lover. To save her, Gwyn must return, to battle not only the Tainchel, but even darker forces: ancient spirits fighting to enter our world…And rule it.~~~Cree and Ojibwe legends mix with current day environmental conflict in this fast-paced urban fantasy that keeps you on the edge of your seat right up to its explosive conclusion.

    Widely respected, nothing about Linus’s expertise suggests somebody might want him dead.Professor Linus is also Brother Linus, a high-ranking member of an ancient, powerful religious organization known as the House. This makes his murder much more complicated, but no more explicable, because murder on House grounds just doesn’t happen. Not even when one of the last things the victim did was steal something important from the House vault.Finally, Orno is also the younger brother of Calcut Linus, one of the most powerful and criminally dangerous people on the planet. Killing any Linus means incurring the wrath of a man for whom laws very rarely apply.In short, Professor Orno Linus is a highly unlikely murder victim.And yet, somebody killed him.The Cursed DetectiveDetective Makk Stidgeon already knows he’s unlucky. He’s a cholem: an outcast. A bad-luck charm. He was born this way, and has the brand on his wrist to prove it.But in terms of bad luck, the gods have really gone overboard by sticking him with the Linus case.Between a House leadership that seems more interested in retrieving their stolen artifact than in solving the murder of one of their own, the demands of the murderous Calcut Linus, a new partner who seems to know more than she’s telling, and an omnipresent news media constantly looking for an angle on the biggest story of the year, Makk barely has time to just follow the clues.And that’s before an impossible video surfaces that purports to reveal the killer’s identity. What makes it impossible? The person in the video couldn’t have possibly done it.To get to the bottom of the Orno’s murder, Makk will have to navigate between the House and the Linus family, find the source of the video, and figure out what’s missing from the House vault. Even if he can pull all that off, he may discover he’s not at the end of a mystery at all, but at the beginning of a much larger one.Tandemstar: The Outcast Cycle. The journey begins here.

    An unimaginable nightmare. A searing hot world, covered with cracked, burning deserts and sweltering jungles. A hostile planet far from Earth, it was the most hellish place men have ever tried to survive. Called Gehenna by the condemned men sent to fight there, it forged the few who survived its murderous battles into the strongest soldiers in history.Jake Taylor was a New Hampshire farmboy who wanted nothing more than to marry his girlfriend, work on the farm, and maybe one day write a great novel. But mankind was fighting the alien Tegeri and their bio-mechanical cyborg soldiers, and UN Central needed men…men to go to war on hostile worlds like Erastus.Jake wasn’t given a choice, not a real one. He found himself torn from home and family, conscripted for life and shipped to Erastus to take his place in the battle lines, never to return. In this alien hell, Taylor and his cybernetically-enhanced comrades fight their never-ending war against the servants of the Tegeri, the manufactured soldiers they call simply, the Machines.Jake survives battle after battle, rising steadily through the ranks, giving all to the desperate fight to save Earth. But endless combat in hell carries a cost, and Taylor can feel himself losing what little is left of his spirit, his humanity. When he finally discovers a terrible secret…that everything he’d believed, all he’d fought for his entire life, was nothing but a monstrous lie, he must decide who is the real enemy, and how far he is willing to go to right a horrific wrong.And if he does what he must to prevail against overwhelming odds and win the final victory, will he be able to control the growing madness inside…or will he be become the very thing he has sworn to destroy?The Crimson Worlds SeriesBy Jay AllanCrimson Worlds I: Marines Crimson Worlds II: The Cost of Victory Crimson Worlds III: A Little Rebellion Crimson Worlds IV: The First Imperium Crimson Worlds V: The Line Must Hold Crimson Worlds VI: To Hell's Heart Tombstone: A Crimson Worlds Prequel Bitter Glory: A Crimson Worlds Prequel Coming December 2013: Crimson Worlds VII: The Shadow Legions

    Or broken.

    He suddenly stirs, asks his assistant for paper and pen, then scribbles something down. Minutes later, he dies. History tells us that Einstein jotted down equations that night. But struggling scholar Jacob Morgan believes that history is wrong. He’s convinced that Einstein wrote a deathbed confession that night—a secret that the great scientist didn’t want to take to his grave. Jacob has spent his entire adult life obsessively hunting down that secret—with nothing to show for it but the scorn of his colleagues and the tattered remnants of a once-promising teaching career. But now, thanks to a lucky break, Jacob has a chance to get his life back on track. His appointment as an adjunct professor at the University of Virginia is a fresh start, and he’s vowed to end his pursuit of Einstein’s secret. Until history chooses this moment to deliver him one more clue. A clue that leads him to an impossible and unbelievable discovery: Time travel. And so begins the last leg of Jacob’s desperate quest, one where history is not only changeable—it’s changing. All by itself. And if Jacob doesn’t rescue Einstein’s secret, everything that he’s ever known will disappear forever.

    It's a game where legends come to life, the lines between reality and fantasy become blurred, and the impossible becomes - probable?Unicorn Magic is the 1st story in the Celtic Fey series set in Anthea Sharp's Feyland universe (with her kind permission). A stand-alone short story with a full plot arc, Unicorn Magic was first published in the anthology Chronicle Worlds: Feyland.This is a clean urban fantasy which is set in Scotland (and the faerie realm) and uses British English spelling and grammar.

    He lives in a near-future California that has gained independence from the economically collapsed United States and where everyone is constantly linked into the web. Almost everyone. Because of injuries sustained during California’s border war, Ted is locked out of the technological culture that surrounds him. But that’s his edge: his business card reads “Strictly Analog,” and he markets himself as a man able to skirt the technological landscape without leaving a trail. It works nicely for him until he gets the most important case of his life. When his daughter Amy is accused of killing her boyfriend, Ted knows he has to do whatever he can to help her. It won’t be easy. The bullet in the boyfriend’s head matches Amy’s gun. To make matters worse, the dead boyfriend was an agent with California’s secret police. Now Ted has to dig himself out of the hole he’s been buried in since the war. Before long, he’s pulled into a shadow world of underground hackers, high-end programmers, and renegade gear-heads, all of whom seem to have a stake in California’s future. The further he digs into the case, the clearer it becomes that it’s about more than one dead agent. Solving it might save his daughter. And it might get him killed. And it just might open the door to secrets that reach back to the attack that almost killed him eighteen years before. At any rate, Ted Lomax will never be the same.

    Cooperation between nations breaks down as every government wants the newly discovered technology for themselves. Naturally, the Cubans have beaten everyone else, and the island is beginning to change. Aircraft flying reconnaissance are swatted from the skies. Commandos can't make a landing on the beaches without being annihilated.Malena Marin is a new XCU agent with special abilities. She's sent with a team of veterans on a mission to secure the landing site or die trying. Unfortunately, the enemy knows they're coming.As the conflict grows and turns increasingly violent, the aliens themselves enter the game. And they have plans of their own…

    Manipulation of the human genome has been perfected, spurring a global arms race to produce the first human clone. When Jill finds the key to unlock this secret, the Ganymede Project shatters everything she thought was real.After confronting the unintended consequences of her discovery, Jill is cast into a bewildering maze of intrigue and deceit. The unexpected results of her research plunges the world into chaos, forcing her to face a future where humans may lose all that remains of their humanity. Haunted by her creations, she will do whatever it takes to contain the turmoil that she has unleashed. As the fate of the world hangs in the balance, Jill uncovers a shocking truth that threatens to destroy everything she has ever loved.