Lieutenant Commander Torrance Black, career is already on shaky grounds, finds himself facing questions. Did they just contact sentient life in the Centauri system? Will humankind sacrifice an entire alien species in their quest for the stars? Starflight, the first book of Stealing the Sun, a space based Science Fiction series from frequent Analog contributor and bestselling Amazon Dark Fantasy author Ron Collins. “Ron Collins is one of our best hard science fiction writers—a novel from him is a major event. Enjoy!” Robert J. Sawyer Hugo Award-Winning Author of Quantum Night

    This landmark collection gathers four groundbreaking fantasy classics from the acclaimed author of Light.Set in the imagined city of Viriconium, here are the masterworks that revolutionized a genre and enthralled a generation of readers: The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, In Viriconium, and Viriconium Knights.Contents:The Pastel City, 1971 (novel)A Storm of Wings, 1980 (novel)In Viriconium, 1982 (novel)The Lamia & Lord Cromis, 1971 (short story)Viriconium Knights, 1981 (short story)The Luck in the Head, 1984 (novelette)Strange Great Sins, 1983 (short story)The Lords of Misrule, 1984 (short story)The Dancer from the Dance, 1985 (short story)A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium, 1985 (short story)

    Collected here are sixteen stories penned by authors from Thailand, the Philippines, China, Israel, Pakistan, Serbia, Croatia, Malaysia, and other countries across the globe. Each one tells a tale breathtakingly vast and varied, whether caught in the ghosts of the past or entangled in a postmodern age. Among the spirits, technology, and deep recesses of the human mind, stories abound. Kites sail to the stars, technology transcends physics, and wheels cry out in the night. Memories come and go like fading echoes and a train carries its passengers through more than simple space and time. Dark and bright, beautiful and haunting, the stories herein represent speculative fiction from a sampling of the finest authors from around the world. Table of Contents S.P. Somtow(Thailand)-"The Bird Catcher" Jetse de Vries(Netherlands)-"Transcendence Express" Guy Hasson (Israel)-"The Levantine Experiments" Han Song (China)-"The Wheel of Samsara" Kaaron Warren (Australia/Fiji)-"Ghost Jail" Yang Ping (China)-"Wizard World" Dean Francis Alfar (Philippines)-"L'Aquilone du Estrellas (The Kite of Stars)" Nir Yaniv (Israel)-"Cinderers" Jamil Nasir (Palestine)-"The Allah Stairs" Tunku Halim (Malaysia)-"Biggest Baddest Bomoh" Aliette de Bodard (France)-"The Lost Xuyan Bride" Kristin Mandigma (Philippines)-"Excerpt from a Letter by a Social-realist Aswang" Aleksandar iljak (Croatia)-"An Evening In The City Coffehouse, With Lydia On My Mind" Anil Menon (India)-"Into the Night" Melanie Fazi (France, translated by Christopher Priest)-"Elegy" Zoran ivkovic (Serbia, translated by Alice Copple-To ic)-"Compartments""

    The playground, like childhood itself, is a nightmare of torment and vulnerability; Charles fears his sensitive son will be destroyed there just as he almost was so many years ago.Underhill's sister Carol, who has moved in to help raise the young boy after his mother passed away, feels differently. The playground, she believes, is preparation for life, Jim will survive the experience, she feels, and he will be the better for it and more equipped to deal with the rigor and obligation of adult existence.Underhill is caught between his own fear and his sister's invocation of reason and feels paralyzed. A mysterious boy calls out to him from the playground, and seems to know all too well why Underhill is there and what the source of his agony really is. A mysterious Manager also lurks to whom the strange boy directs Underhill. An agreement can be made perhaps this is what the boy tells Underhill. Perhaps Jim can be spared the playground, but of course, a substitute must be found.

    Now, he’s sure he’ll be the first person to die there.After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive—and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive. Chances are, though, he won’t have time to starve to death. The damaged machinery, unforgiving environment, or plain-old “human error” are much more likely to kill him first. But Mark isn’t ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills — and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit — he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?

    It is a sweeping debut that illuminates the power that memories have not only on the heart, but on the world itself.One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man’s shadow disappears—an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories.Ory and his wife Max have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day Max’s shadow disappears too.Knowing that the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to Ory, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up the time they have left together. Desperate to find Max before her memory disappears completely, he follows her trail across a perilous, unrecognizable world, braving the threat of roaming bandits, the call to a new war being waged on the ruins of the capital, and the rise of a sinister cult that worships the shadowless.As they journey, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a new force growing in the south that may hold the cure.

    Except the people who tried to kill him. By 2081, privacy no longer exists. The Lattice enables anyone to re-live any moment of your life. People can experience past and present events—or see into the mind of anyone, living or dead. Most people love it. Some want to destroy it. Colonel Byron Shaw has just saved the Lattice from the most dangerous attack in its history. Now he must find those responsible. But there’s a question nobody’s asking: does the Lattice deserve to be saved? The answer may cost him his life.

    He can't even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.All he knows is that he's been asleep for a very, very long time. And he's just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, he realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it's up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he's got to do it all alone.Or does he?An irresistible interstellar adventure as only Andy Weir could imagine it, Project Hail Mary is a tale of discovery, speculation, and survival to rival The Martian—while taking us to places it never dreamed of going.

    One was a young woman with the ability to see spirits trapped in trees, and stone, anchored to the earth beyond their years. Her gift was to draw them, and then, to set them free. The other was a dark man, haunted by visions that brought his stories of sadness and pain, and trapped in a life between the powers he sensed all around him, and a mundane existence attended by failure. They were Eleanore MacReady, Lenore, to her friends, and a young poet named Edgar Allen Poe, who traveled with a crow that was his secret, and almost constant companion, a bird named Grimm for the talented brothers of fairy-tale fame.Their meeting drew them together in vision, and legend, and pitted their strange powers and quick minds against the depths of the Dismal Swamp itself, ancient legends, and time.Once, upon a shoreline dreary, there was a tree. This is her story.

    Helens wilderness is being haunted by a killer. Hikers, loggers, and local residents are dying in horrible, mysterious ways, and lawmen Bud O'Brien and Charlie Redtail are forced to think it just might be a monster ... maybe Bigfoot itself. Enter Cryptozoologist Dr. Ian McDermott, Ph.D., who struggles with his own personal demons as he uncovers the impossible and ugly truth behind it all - an evil more malevolent than anyone ever imagined. Loup-Garou is the first in the Ian McDermott, Paranormal Investigator series. Atmospheric, often beautiful, and always intensely scary investigations into what we were told as children were only myths and legends. The hunt is on.

    There once was a killer who knew the night, its secrets and rhythms. How to hide within its shadows. When to hunt. He roamed from town to town, city to city, choosing his prey for their beauty and innocence. His cruelties were infinite, his humanity long since forfeit. But still . . . he had not yet discovered how to make his special mark among monsters, how to come fully alive as Death. This is the story of how he learned those things, and of what we might do to ensure that he does not visit us.

    again.It is meant to be a celebration but it ends in tragedy. As fireworks explode overhead, Evelyn Hardcastle, the young and beautiful daughter of the house, is killed.But Evelyn will not die just once. Until Aiden – one of the guests summoned to Blackheath for the party – can solve her murder, the day will repeat itself, over and over again. Every time ending with the fateful pistol shot. The only way to break this cycle is to identify the killer. But each time the day begins again, Aiden wakes in the body of a different guest. And someone is determined to prevent him ever escaping Blackheath...

    With fame and fortune finally within reach, Kolchak is ready to cover the story, when he's confronted by a mysterious monk who warns him that "the seventy-two must always be."What this means is not explained. But, before he knows it, Kolchak’s dreams are invaded by unexplainable images that let him know every step he takes toward this story is bringing him closer to death.

    He finds an unlikely confidante in Rosie, an inquisitive young neighbor who, while chasing after Lytten's cat one day, stumbles through a doorway in his cellar and into a stunning and unfamiliar bucolic landscape—remarkably like the fantasy world Lytten is writing about. There she meets a young boy named Jay who is about to embark on a journey that will change both their lives. Elsewhere, in a distopian society where progress is controlled by a corrupt ruling elite, the brilliant scientist Angela Meerson has discovered the potential of a powerful new machine. When the authorities come knocking, she will make an important decision—one that will reverberate through all these different lives and worlds.

    He calls on his friend Tars Tarkas to help, but their journey to recover the princess is an eventful and sometimes dangerous one. Among other encounters, they have to face a city populated entirely by rats - not to mention, of course, the giant of Mars - who is no less than 130 feet tall!This juvenile story was penned by Burrough’s son John “Jack” Coleman Burroughs, and claimed to have been revised by Burroughs.