When the system begins to misfire under the workload, the ill-equipped representatives of God and the Devil tasked with managing the process are given an ultimatum. Fix The Afternet or go back to your previous afterlives. They begin an odyssey through the hordes of souls awaiting judgement and the oblivious living in search of a solution. Rich in comic detail and populated with characters real and imagined from throughout time, their quest is never going to be straightforward…

    In a profoundly strange country called Inner Horner, large enough for only one resident at a time, citizens waiting to enter the country fall under the rule of the power-hungry and tyrannical Phil, setting off a chain of injustice and mass hysteria.An Animal Farm for the 21st century, this is an incendiary political satire of unprecedented imagination, spiky humor, and cautionary appreciation for the hysteric in everyone.

    There is a long and honourable tradition of great detectives and Dirk Gently does not belong to it. Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Dirk Gently, however, does not like to eliminate the impossible.In Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency a simple search for a missing cat reveals two ghosts, a dodo, an Electric Monk, the devastating secret that lies behind the whole of human history and threatens to bring it to a premature close, and, finally, the utterly terrifying reason why Richard MacDuff has had a sofa stuck on his stairs for three weeks.As The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul opens a passenger check-in desk at Terminal Two, Heathrow Airport, shoots up through the roof engulfed in a ball of orange flame. The usual people try to claim responsibility. However, no rational cause can be found for the explosion - it was simply designated an act of God. But, thinks Dirk Gently, which God? And why? What God would be hanging around Terminal Two of Heathrow Airport trying to catch the 15.37 to Oslo?What do a dead cat, a computer whizz-kid, an electric monk, quantum mechanics, a chronologit over 200 years old, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and pizza have in common? Apparently not much, until Dirk Gently begins his investigation.

    In his singular universe, televisions talk (and sometimes sing), animals live in small apartments where their nephews visit from the sea, and men and women and boys and girls fall down wells and fly through space and find love on Ferris wheels. In a voice full of fable, myth, and dream, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day draws us into a world of delightfully wicked recognitions, and introduces us to a writer of uncommon talent and imagination.Contains 40 stories, including "The Duck," "The Man and the Moose," and "Death and the Fruits of the Tree," as heard on NPR's This American Life, "The Book," as heard on Selected Shorts, and "The TV," as found in The New Yorker.A selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program and the Starbucks Coffee Bookish Reading Club.Winner of the 2011 Nobbie Award for Best Book of the Year."This guy can write!" –Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451

     In Magical Mr. Goat, a young girl's imaginary friend yearns to become "more than friends." In Unprotected, an unused prophylactic recalls his years spent trapped inside a teen boy's wallet. The stories in Simon Rich's new book are bizarre, funny, and yet...relatable. Rich explores love's many complications-losing it, finding it, breaking it, and making it-and turns the ordinary into the absurd. With razor-sharp humor and illustrations, and just in time for Valentine's Day, Rich takes readers for an exhilarating, hilarious ride on the rollercoaster of love.

    Winters is back with an all-new collaborator, legendary Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, and the result is Android Karenina an enhanced edition of the classic love story set in a dystopian world of robots, cyborgs, and interstellar space travel.As in the original novel, our story follows two relationships: the tragic adulterous romance of Anna Karenina and Count Alexei Vronsky, and the much more hopeful marriage of Konstantin Levin and Kitty Shcherbatskaya.These four, yearning for true love, live in a steampunk-inspired 19th century of mechanical butlers, extraterrestrial-worshiping cults, and airborne debutante balls. Their passions alone would be enough to consume them-but when a secret cabal of radical scientific revolutionaries launches an attack on Russian high society's high-tech lifestyle, our heroes must fight back with all their courage, all their gadgets, and all the power of a sleek new cyborg model like nothing the world has ever seen."Filled with the same blend of romance, drama, and fantasy that made the first two Quirk Classics New York Times best sellers, Android Karenina brings this celebrated series into the exciting world of science fiction.

    The collection contains some of Ellison's best stories from earlier collections and is judged by some to be his most consistently high quality collection of short fiction. The theme of the collection can be loosely defined as God, or Gods. Sometimes they're dead or dying, some of them are as brand-new as today's technology. Unlike some of Ellison's collections, the introductory notes to each story can be as short as a phrase and rarely run more than a sentence or two. One story took a Locus Poll Award, the two final ones both garnered Hugo Awards and Locus Poll awards, and the final one also received a Jupiter Award from the Instructors of Science Fiction in Higher Education (discontinued in 1979). When the collection was published in Britain, it won the 1979 British Science Fiction Award for Short Fiction.His stories will rivet you to the floor and change your heartbeat...as unforgettable a chamber of horror, fantasy and reality as you'll ever experience.-Gallery "Brutally and flamboyantly shocking, frequently brilliant, and always irresistibly mesmerizing."-Richmond Times-Dispatch

    Clough FOR I AM A JEALOUS PEOPLE! by Lester del Rey LUVVER, by Mack Reynolds FROG LEVEL, by Bud Webster CAPTAINS CONSPIRING AT THEIR MUTINIES, by Jay Lake SHIFTING SEAS, by Stanley G. Weinbaum THROUGH TIME AND SPACE WITH FERDINAND FEGHOOT: 8, by Grendel Briarton ROCK GARDEN, by Kevin O'Donnell, Jr. THE GENOA PASSAGE, by George Zebrowski EIGHT O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING, by Ray Faraday Nelson I AM TOMORROW, by Lester del Rey WHEN THEY COME FROM SPACE, by Mark Clifton THE SEALED SKY, by Cynthia Ward METEOR STRIKE! by Donald E. Westlake WAITING FOR THE COIN TO DROP, by Dean Wesley Smith BEYOND THE DARKNESS, by S. J. Byrne THE SMALLEST GOD, by Lester del Rey THE SCIENCE FICTION ALPHABET, by Allen Glasser CANAL, by Carl Jacobi THE LOCH MOOSE MONSTER, by Janet Kagan MY FAIR PLANET, by Evelyn E. Smith BEFORE EDEN, by Arthur C. Clarke SEQUENCE, by Carl Jacobi PREFERRED RISK, by Frederik Pohl and Lester del Rey INTEVIEW: FREDERIK POHL, conducted by Darrell SchweitzerIf you enjoy this book, search your favorite ebook store for "Wildside Press Megapack" to see the more than 100 other entries in the series, covering science fiction, modern authors, mysteries, westerns, classics, adventure stories, and much, much more!

    In this series of perfectly rendered vignettes, written just as he was starting to find his comic voice, Kurt Vonnegut paints a warm, wise, and funny portrait of life in post—World War II America–a world where squabbling couples, high school geniuses, misfit office workers, and small-town lotharios struggle to adapt to changing technology, moral ambiguity, and unprecedented affluence. Here are tales both cautionary and hopeful, each brimming with Vonnegut's trademark humor and profound humanism. A family learns the downside of confiding their deepest secrets into a magical invention. A man finds himself in a Kafkaesque world of trouble after he runs afoul of the shady underworld boss who calls the shots in an upstate New York town. A quack psychiatrist turned "murder counselor" concocts a novel new outlet for his paranoid patients. While these stories reflect the anxieties of the postwar era that Vonnegut was so adept at capturing– and provide insight into the development of his early style–collectively, they have a timeless quality that makes them just as relevant today as when they were written. It's impossible to imagine any of these pieces flowing from the pen of another writer; each in its own way is unmistakably, quintessentially Vonnegut.Featuring a Foreword by author and longtime Vonnegut confidant Sidney Offit and illustrated with Vonnegut's characteristically insouciant line drawings, Look at the Birdie is an unexpected gift for readers who thought his unique voice had been stilled forever–and serves as a terrific introduction to his short fiction for anyone who has yet to experience his genius. Contents: Letter from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., to Walter J. Miller, 1951. Confido F U B A R Shout About It from the Housetops Ed Luby's Key Club A Song for Selma Hall of Mirrors The Nice Little People Hello, Red Little Drops of Water The Petrified Ants The Honor of a Newsboy Look at the Birdie King and Queen of the Universe The Good Explainer

    Arrogant and bombastic, he comes down the mountain expecting an easy conquest: the wealthy, spectacular city state of Kathmandu, ruled by the all-knowing, all-seeing tyrant AI Karma. To his surprise, he finds that Kathmandu is a cut-price paradise, where citizens want for nothing and even the dregs of society are distinctly unwilling to revolt.Everyone seems happy, except for the old Gurkha soldier Bhan Gurung. Knife saint, recidivist, and mass murderer, he is an exile from Kathmandu, pursuing a forty-year-old vendetta that leads to the very heart of Karma. Pushed and prodded by Gurung, Melek Ahmer finds himself in ever deeper conflicts, until they finally face off against Karma and her forces. In the upheaval that follows, old crimes will come to light and the city itself will be forced to change.

    Gary Handler has issues. His boss hates him, his mother hounds him, and his cat thinks he’s an idiot. But that’s okay because Gary’s got the perfect solution to all of life’s troubles: a porn site subscription and his right hand.Sadly, all habits grow old, even the fun ones. Gary soon finds himself at the doorstep of a creepy old pawn shop where he buys a used adult novelty toy to spice up his one-man sex life.Pity for him that it’s cursed by the angry spirits of all the “kids” he’s flushed down the toilet. Needless to say, hairy palms are about to become the least of his worries.----------Jack on, jack off ... with the Jacklight in book 2 of Shingles, the horror comedy series that’s not for those with faint hearts or weak bladders.

     Trapped in an online world, he lives his days on repeat, fighting the same killer NPCs and playing out the same story line again and again. Suddenly, Quantum receives a message from an actual human player named Frances Euphoria, his first message in two years, a message that sparks an adventure across multiple online fantasy worlds the likes of which he could have never imagined. Now he's taking on a murder guild known as the Reapers, riding dragons across floating continents, using steam-powered robots to battle enemies as tall as skyscrapers, and equally important -- talking smack and backing it up with his vast inventory list of ridiculous guns and clever movie weapons. But things aren’t as easy as they sound. The Reapers are killing people in the real world. They are imprisoning players, manipulating orphans to do their bidding, running an insurance scam on trapped gamers, bringing death, violence, and destruction everywhere they turn. The Reapers are hunting Quantum Hughes online and in the real world, but they’ll soon learn the hard way that Quantum won’t back down without a fight. LitRPG action, humor, sci-fi fantasy worlds, adventure, and digital mayhem all in a cyberpunk setting.

    Where I come from, the children sing a song:Oh, the motherfucking sharks; Oh, they're gonna come to town.Oh, they're gonna kill the babies; Oh, they're gonna make you drowned in your blood.Oh, the motherfucking sharks; Oh, they're gonna mince the flesh.They're gonna swim up and surround you; Don't you know you'll never pass the test, it's over.Oh, the motherfucking sharks; Oh, they don't care about the gods.And they don't care about the familiesAnd they don't care about the cries or tears they're killers.Motherfucking sharks.Motherfucking sharks.Motherfucking sharks.Motherfucking sharks.

    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?

    . . through quantum space–time.  Minor Universe 31 is a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction, where paradox fluctuates like the stock market, lonely sexbots beckon failed protagonists, and time travel is serious business. Every day, people get into time machines and try to do the one thing they should never do: change the past. That’s where Charles Yu, time travel technician—part counselor, part gadget repair man—steps in. He helps save people from themselves. Literally. When he’s not taking client calls or consoling his boss, Phil, who could really use an upgrade, Yu visits his mother (stuck in a one-hour cycle of time, she makes dinner over and over and over) and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. Accompanied by TAMMY, an operating system with low self-esteem, and Ed, a nonexistent but ontologically valid dog, Yu sets out, and back, and beyond, in order to find the one day where he and his father can meet in memory. He learns that the key may be found in a book he got from his future self. It’s called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and he’s the author. And somewhere inside it is the information that could help him—in fact it may even save his life.