In it, a small band of warriors and mystics raise their swords to save Europe from a bloodthirsty Mongol invasion. Inspired by their leader (an elder of an order of warrior monks), they embark on a perilous journey and uncover the history of hidden knowledge and conflict among powerful secret societies that had been shaping world events for millennia.But the saga reaches the modern world via a circuitous route. In the late 19th century, Sir Richard F. Burton, an expert on exotic languages and historical swordsmanship, is approached by a mysterious group of English martial arts aficionados about translating a collection of long-lost manuscripts. Burton dies before his work is finished, and his efforts were thought lost until recently rediscovered by a team of amateur archaeologists in the ruins of a mansion in Trieste, Italy. From this collection of arcana, the incredible tale of The Mongoliad was recreated.Full of high adventure, unforgettable characters, and unflinching battle scenes, The Mongoliad ignites a dangerous quest where willpower and blades are tested and the scope of world-building is redefined.A note on this edition: The Mongoliad began as a social media experiment, combining serial story-telling with a unique level of interaction between authors and audience during the creative process. Since its original iteration, The Mongoliad has been restructured, edited, and rewritten under the supervision of its authors to create a more cohesive reading experience and will be published as a trilogy of novels. This edition is the definitive edition and is the authors' preferred text.Reviews:“This off-beat alternate history of Eurasia could be your new obsession.” –i09.com“This story is pure adventure, with much swordplay and swashbuckling.” –Kirkus Reviews“A terrifically engaging book that pulled me along at least as quickly as The Hunger Games. Think Lord of the Rings without all that pesky fantasy…Five frighteningly accurate historical sword fights out of five.” –Fanboy Comics

    The alleged mutineer is Captain Nicolau Aames, whose command of the massive Earth-Mars vessel Aldrin has come under fire. The vast System Initiative says he disobeyed orders, but his crew swears he’s in the right.En route to Mars, Park gathers testimony from the Aldrin’s diverse crew, painting a complex picture of Aames’s character: his heroism, his failures, even his personal passions. As the investigation unfolds, Park finds herself in the thrall of powerful interests, each pushing and pulling her in a fiery cosmic dance.Corruption, conflicting loyalties, and clashing accounts make it nearly impossible to see the truth in fifty million miles of darkness, and Park faces danger from every direction. All eyes are on her: one way or another, her findings will have astronomical implications for the Aldrin and the future of space travel.

    It is there that Dr. Patricia Killiam rushes to perfect the ultimate in virtual reality: a program to save the ravaged Earth from mankind's insatiable appetite for natural resources.  The Atopia Chronicles (Book 1 of the Atopia series) is the tale of mankind's dark slide across the apocalypse as humans and machines merge in a world teetering on the brink of ecological ruin.

    But instead she is thrown into danger unlike any other she has faced and finds herself isolated, unable to communicate with the outside world, commanding a motley group of unfamiliar troops, and struggling day by day to survive in a deadly environment with sabotaged gear. Only her undeniable talent for command can give her ragtag band a fighting chance.Yet even as Ky leads her team from one crisis to another, her family and friends refuse to give up hope, endeavoring to mount a rescue from halfway around the planet—a task that is complicated as Ky and her supporters find secrets others will kill to protect: a conspiracy infecting both government and military that threatens not only her own group’s survival but her entire home planet.

    It should be a time for celebration, but not for fighter pilot Captain Alisa Marchenko. After barely surviving a crash in the final battle for freedom, she's stranded on a dustball of a planet, billions of miles from her young daughter. She has no money or resources, and there are no transports heading to Perun, her former home and the last imperial stronghold.But she has a plan.Steal a dilapidated and malfunctioning freighter from a junkyard full of lawless savages. Slightly suicidal, but she believes she can do it. Her plan, however, does not account for the elite cyborg soldier squatting in the freighter, intending to use it for his own purposes. As an imperial soldier, he has no love for Alliance pilots. In fact, he's quite fond of killing them.Alisa has more problems than she can count, but she can't let cyborgs, savages, or ancient malfunctioning ships stand in her way. If she does, she’ll never see her daughter again.

    Surrounded by the wrong sort of trees, and animals never featured in any nature documentary, Cass is only sure of one thing: alone, she will be lucky to survive. The sprawl of abandoned blockish buildings Cass discovers offers her only more puzzles. Where are the people? What is the intoxicating mist which drifts off the buildings in the moonlight? And why does she feel like she's being watched? Increasingly unnerved, Cass is overjoyed at the arrival of the formidable Setari. Whisked to a world as technologically advanced as the first was primitive, where nanotech computers are grown inside people's skulls, and few have any interest in venturing outside the enormous whitestone cities, Cass finds herself processed as a 'stray', a refugee displaced by the gates torn between worlds. Struggling with an unfamiliar language and culture, she must adapt to virtual classrooms, friends who can teleport, and the ingrained attitude that strays are backward and slow. Can Cass ever find her way home? And after the people of her new world discover her unexpected value, will they be willing to let her leave?

    Now, for the first time ever - and only for a limited time - they can dive deeper with a limited edition boxed set.Included in this special collector's set is:* Dekker's highly anticipated new novel Green* New hardcover editions of Black, Red, and White - originally published in 2004 but long gone from shelves.* Specially commissioned collector's box to display this limited edition set

    But one uncertainty remains: Where do we go? Astrophysicist Reggie Straifer has an idea. He’s discovered an anomalous star that appears to defy the laws of physics, and proposes the creation of a deep-space mission to find out whether the star is a weird natural phenomenon, or something manufactured.The journey will take eons. In order to maintain the genetic talent of the original crew, humankind’s greatest ambition—to explore the furthest reaches of the galaxy—is undertaken by clones. But a clone is not a perfect copy, and each new generation has its own quirks, desires, and neuroses. As the centuries fly by, the society living aboard the nine ships (designated “Convoy Seven”) changes and evolves, but their mission remains the same: to reach Reggie’s mysterious star and explore its origins—and implications.A mosaic novel of discovery, Noumenon—in a series of vignettes—examines the dedication, adventure, growth, and fear of having your entire world consist of nine ships in the vacuum of space. The men and women, and even the AI, must learn to work and live together in harmony, as their original DNA is continuously replicated and they are born again and again into a thousand new lives. With the stars their home and the unknown their destination, they are on a voyage of many lifetimes—an odyssey to understand what lies beyond the limits of human knowledge and imagination.

    The vessel's dying crew set the AI on automatic to defend the smashed rubble of their planet. Legend has it the faithful ship continues to patrol the empty battlefield, obeying its last order throughout the lonely centuries. In the here and now, Earth needs a miracle. Out of the Beyond invade the New Men, stronger, faster and smarter than the old. Their superior warships and advanced technology destroy every fleet sent to stop them. Their spies have infiltrated the government and traitors plague Earth’s military. Captain Maddox of Star Watch Intelligence wonders if the ancient legend could be true. Would such an old starship be able to face the technology of the New Men? On the run from killers, Maddox searches for a group of talented misfits. He seeks Keith Maker, a drunken ex-strikefighter ace, Doctor Dana Rich the clone thief stuck on a prison planet and Lieutenant Valerie Noonan, the only person to have faced the New Men in battle and survived to tell about it. Maddox has to find a place hidden in the Beyond and bring back a ship no one can enter. If he fails, the New Men will replace the old. If he succeeds, humanity might just have a fighting chance…

    Willful Child. Its ongoing mission: to seek out strange new worlds on which to plant the Terran flag, to subjugate and if necessary obliterate new life life-forms, to boldly blow the...And so we join the not-terribly-bright but exceedingly cock-sure Captain Hadrian Sawback - a kind of James T Kirk crossed with 'American Dad' - and his motley crew on board the Starship Willful Child for a series of devil-may-care, near-calamitous and downright chaotic adventures through 'the infinite vastness of interstellar space'...The bestselling author of the acclaimed Malazan Book of the Fallen sequence has taken his life-long passion for 'Star Trek' and transformed it into a smart, inventive and hugely entertaining spoof on the whole mankind-exploring-space-for-the-good-of-all-species-but-trashing-stuff-with-a-lot-of-hi-tech-kit-along-the-way type over-blown adventure. The result is this smart. inventive, occasionally wildly OTT and often very funny novel that deftly parodies the genre while also paying fond homage to it.

    A thousand years later, mankind has recovered and ventured into space. There has been no sign of the aliens since. Humanity remains confined to the Solar System. All that is about to change. Mazzy Webber is a lowly janitor on a third-rate cargo ship. Deeply in debt, when his captain decides to turn pirate, he leaps at the chance. A modern Robin Hood—minus the part where he gives back to the poor—Webber lays down a few ground rules. No attacking manned ships, and no stealing from anyone who can't afford it. Within months, he and the crew are out of debt. Their next target will make them rich. But the attack goes all wrong. The target's cargo could be the death of them—or it could be the key to reaching the stars. ~ From the author of the bestselling BREAKERS novels, OUTLAW is the first book in a new series of piracy, conspiracy, and space's deadliest janitor.

    Changed by captivity and torture, hunted by the Reapers of Hellsbreach and wanted by the Fleet, Kin hides on a lost planet near an unstable wormhole. When a distant space battle propels a ravaged Earth Fleet Armada through the same wormhole, a Reaper follows, hunting for the man who burned his home world. Kin fights to save a mysterious native of Crashdown from the Reaper and learns there are worse things in the galaxy than his hunters. The end is coming and he is about to pay for a sin that will change the galaxy forever.

    That's what fifteen-year-old Aubrey VanHouten learns when he stumbles onto a post-apocalyptic paradise where the few remaining humans live on the run from deadly drones controlled by a mysterious Park Service. Torn between loyalty to his new best friend and trusting the girl of his dreams, Aubrey must learn to survive in a world he never dreamed existed while searching for answers to why everything he was taught is a lie. Beautifully written with challenging moral dilemmas and heart-melting friendships, The Park Service trilogy is an epic coming-of-age-story that will inspire and delight readers young and old.

    

    Now, after twenty-one annual collections, comes the ultimate in science fiction anthologies, The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction, in which legendary editor Gardner Dozois selects the very best short stories for this landmark collection. Contributors include: * Stephen Baxter * Greg Bear * William Gibson * Terry Bisson * Pat Cadigan * Ted Chiang * John Crowley * Tony Daniel * Greg Egan * Molly Gloss * Eileen Gunn * Joe Haldeman * James Patrick Kelly * John Kessel * Nancy Kress * Ursula K. Le Guin * Ian R. MacLeod * David Marusek * Paul McAuley * Ian McDonald * Maureen F. McHugh * Robert Reed * Mike Resnick * Geoff Ryman * William Sander * Lucius Shepard * Robert Silverberg * Brian Stableford * Bruce Sterling * Charles Stross * Michael Swanwick * Steven Utley * Howard Waldrop * Walter Jon Williams * Connie Willis * Gene WolfeWith work spanning two decades, The Best of the Best stands as one of the ultimate science fiction anthologies ever published.Contents xi • Foreword (The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction) • essay by Robert Silverbergxvii • Preface (The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction) • essay by Gardner Dozois1 • Blood Music • (1983) • novelette by Greg Bear19 • A Cabin on the Coast • (1984) • shortstory by Gene Wolfe28 • Salvador • (1984) • shortstory by Lucius Shepard42 • Trinity • (1984) • novella by Nancy Kress78 • Flying Saucer Rock and Roll • (1985) • novelette by Howard Waldrop (aka Flying Saucer Rock & Roll)93 • Dinner in Audoghast • (1985) • shortstory by Bruce Sterling103 • Roadside Rescue • (1985) • shortstory by Pat Cadigan109 • Snow • (1985) • shortstory by John Crowley121 • The Winter Market • (1985) • novelette by William Gibson137 • The Pure Product • (1986) • novelette by John Kessel152 • Stable Strategies for Middle Management • (1988) • shortstory by Eileen Gunn162 • Kirinyaga • [Kirinyaga • 2] • (1988) • novelette by Mike Resnick177 • Tales from the Venia Woods • [Roma Eterna] • (1989) • shortstory by Robert Silverberg191 • Bears Discover Fire • (1990) • shortstory by Terry Bisson199 • Even the Queen • (1992) • shortstory by Connie Willis213 • Guest of Honor • (1993) • novelette by Robert Reed238 • None So Blind • (1994) • shortstory by Joe Haldeman246 • Mortimer Gray's History of Death • (1995) • novella by Brian Stableford (aka Mortimer Gray's "History of Death")293 • The Lincoln Train • (1995) • shortstory by Maureen F. McHugh303 • Wang's Carpets • (1995) • novelette by Greg Egan328 • Coming of Age in Karhide • [Hainish] • (1995) • novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin342 • The Dead • (1996) • shortstory by Michael Swanwick352 • Recording Angel • (1996) • shortstory by Ian McDonald363 • A Dry, Quiet War • (1996) • novelette by Tony Daniel380 • The Undiscovered • (1997) • novelette by William Sanders400 • Second Skin • (1997) • shortstory by Paul J. McAuley418 • Story of Your Life • (1998) • novella by Ted Chiang454 • People Came from Earth • (1999) • shortstory by Stephen Baxter464 • The Wedding Album • [Cathy] • (1999) • novella by David Marusek502 • 10 to 16 to 1 • (1999) • novelette by James Patrick Kelly (aka 1016 to 1)520 • Daddy's World • (1999) • novelette by Walter Jon Williams541 • The Real World • [Silurian Tales] • (2000) • shortstory by Steven Utley561 • Have Not Have • (2001) • novelette by Geoff Ryman577 • Lobsters • [Macx Family] • (2001) • novelette by Charles Stross597 • Breathmoss • (2002) • novella by Ian R. MacLeod647 • Lambing Season • (2002) • shortstory by Molly Gloss