Obsidian Worlds brings together his 11 best-selling sci-fi shorts into a mind-bending philosophical anthology.In Your Averaged Joe, a man’s headache is large enough to hold the multiverse. Q46F is an obsessive-compulsive android who finds love in a zombie-embroiled apocalypse. The end of the world isn’t all that bad – The Experience Machine will fulfil your every desire (and some you hadn’t considered). A sex bot dares to dream of freedom in Dinner with Flexi. But mind what you eat, because The Photons in the Cheese Are Lost. Don’t fret though: The Cryo Killer guarantees that your death will be painless, or your money back when you’re thawed. Unless, that is, you’re The Man with Two Legs.Plug into Obsidian Worlds for these and other immersive stories, including the hilarious Time-Traveling Chicken Sexer. Your brain will never be the same again.

    Instead, he finds himself drawn into a murder investigation when a high-profile LA sports agent turns up dead at the B&B where Vincent has found work. Teaming up with an ancient gun-slinging lawyer (whom everyone thought was dead), Vincent investigates the agent's pro athlete clients, all of whom share a strong motive: the agent had just lost millions of dollars of their money in a botched investment. As the case grows more complicated, Vincent discovers Santa Fe might just be the right place to get his mojo back. For fans of classic PI mysteries, where flawed men try their best to do good, and a colorful cast and unexpected twists keep you guessing right until the last page.

    She's far from it.Together, they’re Earth's last hope... they just don’t know it yet.Sinbad sh'en Singh had everything. A thriving smuggling career, his hologram on wanted posters on eleven planets, and plenty of women. Then she walked into his life.Andrea Talltrees, member of a backwards cult not believing in space travel or anything else invented after the Twentieth Century.She wants him to find her husband, a fugitive accused of being an Albegensian spy, the planet currently at war with Earth.He doesn’t want anything to do with an Earther, but a massive culture clash and a heavy dose of instant attraction get in the way, sending good sense flying out the viewport.They'll brave some very unsavory characters, maybe even prevent a second interplanetary war...if they can stop arguing.

    DESCRIPTIONCaptain Lana Fiveworlds has a hell of a lot of problems.She's sliding void in an ageing seven-hundred-year-old space ship, scrabbling around the edges of civilised space trying to find a cargo lucrative enough to pay her bills without proving so risky that it'll kill her. She's got an alien religious freak for a navigator, an untrustworthy android for a first mate, a disgraced lizard for a trade negotiator and a deserter from the fleet acting as her chief engineer.And that was well before an ex-crewman turns up wanting Lana to rescue a barbarian prince from a long-failed colony world. Unfortunately for Lana, the problems she doesn't know about are even more dangerous. In fact, they just might be enough to destroy Lana's rickety but much-loved vessel, the Gravity Rose, and jettison her and her crew into the void without a spacesuit.But there's one thing you can never tell an independent space trader. That's the odds...

    Years ago he was a popular athlete in the local school, then a successful mid-level executive, father, husband. Now Ben is a loner, content to spend his free time in the "reality" of the internet.Ben reluctantly snaps out of his seclusion when he tries to understand why an old friend and neighbor killed himself and realizes that this is no longer the same neighborhood he grew up in. It's as if someone used resources of social media, internet and surveillance to strip away a layer of civilization, exposing a nightmare of conflicts and betrayals. When Ben is threatened by the same forces, he has to re-discover his own strengths to fight back against a shadow opponent.

     Charlie7 is the progenitor of a mechanical race he built from the ashes of a dead world—Earth. He is a robot of leisure and idle political meddling—a retirement well-earned. Or he was, until a human girl named Eve was dropped in his lap. Geneticists have restored Earth’s biome and begun repopulation. But primate cloning is in its infancy; human cloning is banned. Far from a failed genetics experiment, Eve is brilliant, curious, and heartbreakingly naïve about her species’ history. But Eve’s creator wants her back and has a gruesome fate planned for her. There is only one robot qualified to protect her. For the first time in a thousand years, Charlie7 has a human race to protect. A.I. didn’t destroy humanity. It didn’t save us, either. The robots we built in our final days preserved human minds. They survived the end of life on Earth and embarked on the greatest single project in all recorded history. They rebuilt. The result of 1,000 years of genetic engineering, terraforming, and painstaking toxic cleanup has resulted in the ultimate achievement of the Post-Invasion Age: a healthy human. Her name is Eve14. Don’t ask about the 13 Eves before her. Or do, because that’s the reason why she’s in danger, and why one brave robot puts his millennium-long life on the line to save her. Welcome back to the Golden Age of science fiction, when scientists had planet-sized dreams and robots were robots. Grab your copy while there’s still an Earth left to read it on.

    Hiding behind the imposing walls of a medieval fortress, they struggle against all the odds to rebuild in a wasteland without electricity or government. Scraping a living, far away from the smoking ruins of the cities, they wait in hope, trying to make sense of what happened.Hurst Castle stands alone. Its seventy-four occupants united in a daily struggle, scavenging for food and supplies. The Millennial Virus is the least of their concerns. When the arrival of outsiders threatens to tip the balance of power, the people of Hurst are faced with a desperate choice: set aside their differences and join an alliance that promises new hope or unite against the newcomers and their plans for reconstruction. Who can be trusted? Only time will tell.The battle for Hurst has begun.

    Four Belgrade University students are enjoying the time of their lives. Fresh with a wad full of foreign currency and few worries, their innocence is suddenly shaken when Field Marshal Göring’s Luftwaffe bombers strike the city at daybreak in “Operation Punishment.” The four students, Josef Kostinic, Celeste Bowman, Dick Vojovoda, and Penelope Mitchell take refuge and flee the city, only to have their rescue hopes dashed as Axis aircraft strafe the Adriatic coastline, sealing off their exit and forcing them in different directions. Two years later, with the United States formally entered into the war, the four students are unknowingly reunited once again. This time, British and U.S. intelligence services combine forces and infiltrate a team into Yugoslavia to determine the true credibility of Chetnick resistance leader Draza Mihailovich, code named Credible Dagger. The young companions must not only survive the harsh conditions in the field, but also Partisan guerrilla attacks, Communist double agents, and the ruthless tactics of SS counter-intelligence chief Hans Flosberg, who is constantly on their trail. Despite all these challenges, the operatives uncover information so crucial that the Allies keep it a secret for almost sixty years. About the Author: Gregory M. Acuña was a former U.S. Air Force pilot. He grew up in San Diego and now lives in Northern California. This is his second novel and he is currently writing the sequel to The Balkan Network.

    What he recovers is more than a mere meteorite, and Zahn is swept up into an adventure to the galactic core, encountering a stunning pilot, 5th-density creatures of light, and an ancient chthonic evil, bent on consuming every star in the galaxy by tearing the fabric of spacetime itself. Only the Tulari, a stone that can heal these fissures, offers any hope. Unfortunately, it's been missing for aeons...

    He only studied planetology to satisfy his parents, two of humanity's most brilliant scientists. But when they open a wormhole to an alien planet—one emitting a signal that can only be a sign of intelligent life—he soon becomes caught up in the mission to explore it. His sole mission partner, Terra, doesn't care nearly as much about the science as he does, though. The child of a bitter divorce, she sees the mission as a chance to escape from the expectations of others. Before they can work out their differences, a mysterious alien ship begins to hunt them down. Alone, twenty light-years from the nearest human being, they must learn to open up and trust each other—but how can they do that when they can't even agree why they're there? As Michael struggles to keep the mission from falling apart, he is forced to reexamine his deepest, most unquestioned beliefs about the universe—and about what it means to be human. GENESIS EARTH is a 70,000 word (200-250 page) Young Adult Science Fiction novel.

    Today. This morning. What cash you have in your wallet is it. ATMs and bank systems are down. You can’t get gas, groceries… Commerce has essentially come to a halt. Such is the backdrop of THE BACK DOOR MAN. Our society is computercentric. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. We’re plugged in. Managing our finances online. Downloading apps for our iPhone. Reading the WSJ on our Kindle. There are things out there on the cutting edge we don’t even know we need to fear. THE BACK DOOR MAN takes us there. We see it through the eyes of James Kolinsky, a simple family man who works in information security. His day goes from bad to worse when he discovers that his greatest fear is his fault and what’s happened to him has happened to millions of others. He’s been set up. His family—make that the world—has been taken hostage. The next twenty-four hours we find out what James Kolinsky is really made of.

    Humanity had barely survived The Panic 70 years earlier and now the slow death brought on by the collapse of society seems unavoidable, especially as it seems the worst is still to come. Accompanied by a strange hound he rescued from the labs deep beneath the Fort, Alan sets out to aid the survivors who struggle to hold back mankind's final hour, joining up with a handful of soldiers desperately trying to fan the embers of mankind into life once more. But Alan has a secret he's desperate to hide and which threatens to be revealed with every action he takes. Can his fear of discovery be overcome so that mankind can stand a chance of surviving? Or will humanity topple over the brink as he stands by and watches? Following on from Project - 16, The Brink tells the story of a man who faces a destiny he neither wants nor is prepared for and starts Alan Harding on a path to legend.

    That's exactly the story a man she met on the street corner is trying to sell her, a man claiming to be a hunter from eight hundred years in the future. The bloodline of healers responsible for maintaining the Earth in his native time has vanished, leaving humanity on the brink of extinction as starvation threatens.Taking a leap of faith, Audrey finds herself in a future world that is oddly archaic. Struggling to maintain control of powers that are growing faster than she can manage, she finds a clue in the form of a worn book: the diary of the last leader of the bloodline. An innocent test of her new abilities reveals that not everyone in the compound is who they claim to be. With their trap closing quickly around her, Audrey has one burning question - what happened to the original bloodline?

    For years, she endures their tortures, experiments and games. Then one day, she manages to escape their ship with her life, and no memory of her time with them.Stranded on their world, Beta wanders the mountains, looking for a way home. She stumbles onto the Fost—the E’mani’s ancient enemy. Their war with the Imani is old and rooted in magic that the Fost once had and the Imani crave. Magic Beta soon discovers she’s developing along with strange tattoos and disturbing glimpses of her past. The Fost take her in and train her in their ways. As she spends more time with them, she falls in love with their culture and with Marin—he of the hot hands and slit eyes.But the E’mani took her for a reason and they want her back—dead or alive. If Beta doesn’t remember that reason soon, they’re all going to die.

    You die, or you Qualify. The year is 2047. An extinction-level asteroid is hurtling toward Earth, and the descendents of ancient Atlantis have returned from the stars in their silver ships to offer humanity help.But there’s a catch.They can only take a tiny percent of the Earth’s population back to the colony planet Atlantis. And in order to be chosen, you must be a teen, you must be bright, talented, and athletic, and you must Qualify.Sixteen-year-old Gwenevere Lark is determined not only to Qualify but to rescue her entire family.Because there’s a loophole.If you are good enough to Qualify, you are eligible to compete in the brutal games of the Atlantis Grail, which grants all winners the laurels, high tech luxuries, and full privileges of Atlantis Citizenship. And if you are in the Top Ten, then all your wildest wishes are granted… Such as curing your mother’s cancer.There is only one problem.Gwen Lark is known as a klutz and a nerd. While she’s a hotshot in classics, history, science, and languages, the closest she’s come to sports is a backyard pool and a skateboard.This time she is in over her head, and in for a fight of her life, against impossible odds and world-class competition—including Logan Sangre, the most amazing guy in her class, the one she’s been crushing on, and who doesn’t seem to know she exists.Because every other teen on Earth has the same idea. You Qualify or you die. * * *EXCERPT!Now you can read Chapter One in its entirety (click here)!* * *