Now he offers us a superb quintet of novellas -- five dazzling masterworks of speculative fiction, including "Orphans of the Helix," his award-winning return to the Hyperion Universe -- that demonstrates the unique mastery, breathtaking invention, and flawless craftsmanship of one of contemporary fiction's true greats.Human colonists seeking something other than godhood encounter their long-lost "cousins"...and an ancient scourge.A devastated man in suicide's embrace is caught up in a bizarre cat-and-mouse game with a young woman possessing a world-ending power.The distant descendants of a once-oppressed people learn a chilling lesson about the persistence of the past.A terrifying ascent up the frigid, snow-swept slopes of K2 shatters preconceptions and reveals the true natures of four climbers, one of whom is not human.At the intersection of a grand past and a threadbare present, an aging American in Russia confronts his own mortality as he glimpses a wondrous future.

    Dunn, a literary artist of extraordinary vision and courage, comes a haunting exploration of life, death, responsibility, and the devastating power of choice--a gripping and provocative novel that shines a beacon of moral possibility into the darkest corners of the human soul.In the future--when the barriers of Time are barriers no longer--a woman of uncommon strength and character will be recruited to help preserve the integrity of past events; to keep the wheel of history turning so that what is to come remains uncompromised and uncorrupted. But Alma Levin will go renegade, vanishing somewhere into the most violent years of the mid-twentieth century. And it will be the responsibility of her mentor, Gasper James, to bring her back. For useless he can stop her, Alma Levin intends to change history--and the future--with a plan to prevent the slaughter of six million--a plan that is puling former teacher and protigi both into the most terrible place ever conceived by man: Auschwitz.