Now Schoken Associates, one of the big players, has a new challenge for star copywriter Mitch Courtenay. Volunteers are needed to colonise Venus. It's a hellhole, and nobody who knew anything about it would dream of signing up. But by the time Mitch has finished, they will be queuing to get on board the spaceships.Biographical NotesPohl and Kornbluth started writing together as early as 1940, although both authors produced a wide variety of stories separately, under their own names and pseudonyms.Each wrote sections, starting where the other left off, and through long experience they developed an almost telepathic awareness of each other's intentions.

     The Hugo Award-winning author of such groundbreaking and innovative novels as "Accelerando, Halting State," and "Saturn's Children" delivers a rich selection of speculative fiction- including a novella original to this volume- brought together for the first time in one collection, showcasing the limitless imagination of one of the twenty-first century's most daring visionaries.

    Greed pulls the archaeologist Matt Carse into the forgotten tomb of the Martian god Rhiannon and plunges the unlikely hero into the Red Planet's fantastic past, when vast oceans covered the land and the legendary Sea-Kings ruled from terraced palaces of decadence and delight.

    Now humans must confront this deadly expansion. Tchicaya, aboard a starship trawling the border of the vacuum, has allied himself with the Yielders-- those determined to study the vacuum while allowing it to grow unchecked. But when his fiery first love, Mariama, reenters his life on the side of the Preservationists-- those working to halt and destroy the vacuum-- Tchicaya finds himself struggling with an inner turmoil he has known since childhood.However, in the center of the vacuum, something is developing that neither Tchicaya and the Yielders nor Mariama and the Preservationists could ever have imagined possible: life.

    The sombre story of a group of people in their fifties who face the fact that there is no younger generation coming to replace them; instead nature is rushing back to obliterate the disaster they have brought on themselves.

    Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Womack's fifth novel, is a thrilling, hysterical, and eerily disturbing piece ot work. Lola Hart is an ordinary twelve-year-old girl. She comes from a comfortable family, attends an exclusive private school, loves her friends Lori and Katherine, teases her sister Boob. But in the increasingly troubled city where she lives (a near-future Manhattan) she is a dying breed. Riots, fire, TB outbreaks, roaming gangs, increasing inflation, political and civil unrest all threaten her way of life, as well as the very fabric of New York City. In her diary, Lola chronicles the changes she and her family make as they attempt to adjust to a city, and a country, that is spinning out of control. Her mother is a teacher, but no one is hiring. Her father is a writer, but no one is buying his scripts. Hounded by creditors and forced to vacate their apartment and move to Harlem, her family, and her life, begins to dissolve. Increasingly estranged from her privileged school friends, Lola soon makes new ones: Iz, Jude, and Weezie - wise veterans of the street who know what must be done in order to survive and are more than willing to do it. And the metamorphosis of Lola Hart, who is surrounded by the new language and violence of the streets, begins. Simultaneously chilling and darkly hilarious, Random Acts of Senseless Violence takes the jittery urban fears we suppress, both in fiction and in daily life, and makes them explicit - and explicitly terrifying.--Publisher/Powells.com

    However, her escape turned into a trap, leaving her stuck in indentured servitude, living on a tiny rock in space. As she tries to dig herself out, she gains friends and finds adventure.

    And then…

    The Captain is given an impossible mission, find out what happened to the AMS StarFire, the Alliances' newest and deadliest, war ship. The AMS StarFire has a crew of over 3,000 men. Captain Lombard is given 50 men and sent on his mission. Find out why he is now facing a Board of Inquiry over his actions.

    "Doc" Smith's visionary Lensmen series of stories began in 1934 in the pages of Amazing Stories, and when it finished in 1948 it was universally recognized as the greatest space opera yet written. In telling the tale of a cosmos-spanning battle between good and evil, the Lensmen saga encompassed two entire galaxies in collision, each home to a primordial race of nearly limitless power. On one side were the Arisians, uplifting agents of wisdom who had taken it upon themselves to mentor the younger races and steer them towards the enlightenment they called Civilization. On the other were the Eddorians, embodiments of crushing efficiency and unthinking obedience who had woven together a vast web of tyrannies called the Boskone, through which they plotted the enslavement of all life. As their greatest weapon in the fight against the Boskone, the Arisians created the Lenses -- almost-living complexities of crystal that released and amplified their wearers' latent psychic powers. Those chosen for this honor were called Lensmen, and as the leaders of the Galactic Patrol they formed Civilization's spearhead against the Boskone. Within the Žlite ranks of the Lensmen was an even more rarified Žlite -- the four Second Stage Lensmen, one from each of the races which the Arisians had chosen as the most capable defenders of their galaxy. It is one of these Second Stage Lensmen -- the Velantian named Worsel -- that David A. Kyle chose to headline his first authorized sequel to Smith's Lensmen canon: The Dragon Lensman. As The Dragon Lensman opens, the Boskonian conspiracy seems to have been vanquished with its defeat at the great Battle of Klovia, and the victorious Galactic Patrol is busy re-orienting itself to face the new challenges of policing a galaxy instead of defending it against a ruthless invader. Among those adjusting to the new reality is Second Stage Lensman Worsel, the legendary warrior/scientist famed for his intelligence and dedication to the fight against ignorance and evil. Like all of his species, Worsel resembles the mythological dragons of old Tellus (Earth), with a sinewy, ten-meter-long body covered in scales and boasting great wings and terrifying claws and teeth. But Worsel's real strength is his mind and its unmatched psychic abilities, concentrated and focused by the Lens shining among his many eye-stalks. And it is the intuition bred of that power that now draws Worsel to the Velantians' incredible archive, the 18-mile-wide artificial moon known as the Planetoid of Knowledge, where he feels certain something important is waiting for him. He is right -- but what awaits him on POK is more than he bargained for, and before long Worsel and his fellow Lensmen are racing against time to confront a threat that almost no one had thought possible: machines becoming self-aware and battling against organic Civilization, their calcuating computer brains invisible to any kind of psychic detection! To counter this new menace, the Dragon Lensman finds himself hurtling through space to rendez-vous with the one Lensman who understands robots well enough to strategize against an inorganic uprising -- the mysterious Twenty-Four of Six, whose knowledge of machines turns out to be deeper and more hard-won than even Worsel could guess. Soon it becomes clear that Civilization will need every bit of that knowledge, and more besides, to face the enemies that are now revealing themselves. For behind the overt power there lurks a vastly more dangerous covert one, and to defeat it Worsel will not only have to challenge the worst fears of his race, but also discover the secret of the young Lensman with whom he must entrust his life -- a secret that will shake the very foundations of the Galactic Patrol!

    They called him Charlie. He had big eyes, abundant body hair and fairly long nostrils. His skeletal body was found clad in a bright red spacesuit, hidden in a rocky grave. They didn't know who he was, how he got there, or what had killed him. All they knew was that his corpse was 50,000 years old; and that meant that this man had somehow lived long before he ever could have existed!

    That single tragedy set off a whole series of events, resulting in the Spanish Armada's defeat of England and subsequent demise of Protestantism. Now it's the 20th century, and the Church of Rome reigns supreme. People live a pastoral existence of guilds and farming, with technology held back to the level of the steam locomotive and primitive radio. Still, science cannot be held back forever...a revolution is building.

    Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city & carefully removed in its wake. Rivers & mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city's engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther & farther behind the optimum & into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death. The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in creches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they're carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. Yet the city is in crisis. People are growing restive. The population is dwindling. The rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum. Helward Mann is a member of the city's elite. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the city's continued existence. But the world he's about to discover is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.

    You can call him the Songbird – but only once. He's after Santiago.Virtue Mackenzie: Freelance reporter. She never gives up. She wants an interview... with Santiago.The Swagman: He collects art – at gun point. He wants a few pieces currently in the hands of Santiago.Santiago: Bandit, murderer, known to all, seen by none... has he killed a thousand men? Has he saved a dozen worlds? His legend is as large as the Rim itself, his trail as elusive as a wisp of starlight in the empty realms of space. The reward for him is the largest in history.Santiago: Do you dare chase him?

    Told in the same fanciful, irreverent style as the Hitchhiker trilogy, with scraps of scripts, letters and comments from Adams, Don't Panic is the perfect companion to one of the most successful series in publishing history.