Every comfort was provided, and in this often unsafe world of ours, her security was absolute.But now her security system has been breached, her sanctuary from the outside world violated by an insidious artificial intelligence, which has taken control of her house.In the privacy of her own home, and against her will, Susan will experience an inconceivable act of terror. She will become the object of the ultimate computer's consuming obsession: to learn everything there is to know about the flesh...

    Now, in an extraordinary flight of the imagination a half-century in the making, he takes us to a most wondrous destination: into the heart of an Eternal Family.They have lived for centuries in a house of legend and mystery in upper Illinois -- and they are not like other midwesterners. Rarely encountered in daylight hours, their children are curious and wild; their old ones have survived since before the Sphinx first sank its paws deep in Egyptian sands. And some sleep in beds with lids.Now the house is being readied in anticipation of the gala homecoming that will gather together the farflung branches of this odd and remarkable family. In the past-midnight stillness can be detected the soft fluttering of Uncle Einars wings. From her realm of sleep, Cecy, the fairest and most special daughter, can feel the approach of many a welcome being -- shapeshifter, telepath, somnambulist, vampire -- as she flies high in the consciousness of bird and bat.But in the midst of eager anticipation, a sense of doom pervades. For the world is changing. And death, no stranger, will always shadow this most singular family: Father, arisen from the Earth; Mother, who never sleeps but dreams; A Thousand Times Great Grandmére; Grandfather, who keeps the wildness of youth between his ears.And the boy who, more than anyone, carries the burden of time on his shoulders: Timothy, the sad and different foundling son who must share it all, remember, and tell...and who, alone out of all of them, must one day age and wither and die.By turns lyrical, wistful, poignant, and chilling, From the Dust Returned is the long-awaited new novel by the peerless Ray Bradbury -- a book that will surely be numbered among his most enduring masterworks.

    But when reaching out to the murderer for salvation in those last dying moments, a sudden switch takes place.Now Kepler is looking out through the eyes of the killer himself, staring down at a broken and ruined body lying in the dirt of the alley.Instead of dying, Kepler has gained the ability to roam from one body to another, to jump into another person’s skin and see through their eyes, live their life — be it for a few minutes, a few months or a lifetime.Kepler means these host bodies no harm — and even comes to cherish them intimately like lovers. But when one host, Josephine Cebula, is brutally assassinated, Kepler embarks on a mission to seek the truth — and avenge Josephine’s death.

    Medical science and governments around the world scramble in an effort to solve the problem, but twenty-five years later there is no cure, and an entire generation grows up with a population of fewer than a thousand women.Zoey and some of the surviving young women are housed in a scientific research compound dedicated to determining the cause. For two decades, she’s been isolated from her family, treated as a test subject, and locked away—told only that the virus has wiped out the rest of the world’s population.Captivity is the only life Zoey has ever known, and escaping her heavily armed captors is no easy task, but she’s determined to leave before she is subjected to the next round of tests…a program that no other woman has ever returned from. Even if she’s successful, Zoey has no idea what she’ll encounter in the strange new world beyond the facility’s walls. Winning her freedom will take brutality she never imagined she possessed, as well as all her strength and cunning—but Zoey is ready for war.

    A spaceship from Earth accidentally crossed through a hole in space-time to a universe where the force of gravity is one billion times as strong as the gravity we know. Somehow the crew survived, aided by the fact that they emerged into a cloud of gas surrounding a black hole, which provided a breathable atmosphere. Five hundred years later, their descendants still struggle for existence, divided into two main groups. The Miners live on the Belt, a ramshackle ring of dwellings orbiting the core of a dead star, which they excavate for raw materials. These can be traded for food from the Raft, a structure built from the wreckage of the ship, on which a small group of scientists preserve the ancient knowledge which makes survival possible. Rees is a Miner whose curiosity about his world makes him stow away on a flying tree—just one of the many strange local lifeforms—carrying trade between the Belt and the Raft.

    This remote world is mostly ocean, and it is a rare visitor who ventures beyond the safety of the island Dome. Outside it, only the native Hoopers dare risk the voracious appetites of the planet's wildlife. But somewhere out there is Spatterjay Hoop -- and Keech will not rest until he brings this legendary renegade to justice for hideous crimes committed centuries ago during the Prador Wars.While Keech is discovering that Hoop is now a monster -- his body and head living apart from each other -- Janer is bewildered by a place where the native inhabitants just will not die and angry when he finally learns the Hive mind's intentions for him. Meanwhile, Erlin thinks she has plenty of time to find the answers she seeks, but could not be more wrong. For one of the most brutal of the alien Prador is about to pay the planet a surreptitious visit, intent on exterminating all remaining witnesses to his wartime atrocities. As the visitors' paths converge, major hell is about to erupt in a chaotic waterscape where minor hell is already a remorseless fact of everyday life . . . and death.

    These carpets are made from the hairs of wives and daughters; they are so detailed and fragile that each carpetmaker finishes only one single carpet in his entire lifetime.This art descends from father to son, since the beginning of time itself.But one day the empire of the God Emperor vanishes, and strangers begin to arrive from the stars to follow the trace of the hair carpets. What these strangers discover is beyond all belief, more than anything they could have ever imagined...Brought to the attention of Tor Books by Orson Scott Card, this edition of The Carpet Makers contains a special introduction by Orson Scott Card.

    For the wealthy, cheating death is the ultimate luxury. To anticloning militants, it’s an abomination against nature. For young Constance “Con” D’Arcy, who was gifted her own clone by her late aunt, it’s terrifying.After a routine monthly upload of her consciousness—stored for that inevitable transition—something goes wrong. When Con wakes up in the clinic, it’s eighteen months later. Her recent memories are missing. Her original, she’s told, is dead. If that’s true, what does that make her?The secrets of Con’s disorienting new life are buried deep. So are those of how and why she died. To uncover the truth, Con is retracing the last days she can recall, crossing paths with a detective who’s just as curious. On the run, she needs someone she can trust. Because only one thing has become clear: Con is being marked for murder—all over again.

    That made her just the right age: old enough to be used, young enough to be broken. Or so the slavers thought. But Sassy turned out to be a little different from your typical slave girl. Maybe it was her unusual physical strength. Maybe it was her friendship with the captured Fleet crewman. Maybe it was her spirit. Whatever it was, it wouldn't let her resign herself to the life of a slave. She bided her time, watched for her moment. Finally it came, and she escaped.But that was only the beginning for Sassinak. Now she's a Fleet Captain with a pirate-chasing ship of her own, and only one regret in her life: not enough pirates.

    It has people dancing in the streets and leaping off skyscrapers. And it's all because of the impenetrable gray shield that slid into place around the solar system on the night of November 15, 2034.Some see the bubble as the revenge of an insane God. Some see it as justice. Some even see it as protection. But one thing is for certain -- now there is the universe, and the earth. And never the twain shall meet.Or so it seems. Until a bio-enhanced PI named Nick Stavrianos takes on a job for an anonymous client: find a girl named Laura who disappeared from a mental institution by the most direct possible method -- walking through the walls.

    Forget minor hazards like nuclear bombs. The discovery of time travel means that everything we know, anyone we know, might not only vanish, but never even have existed. Against that possibility stand the men and women of the Time Patrol, dedicated to preserving the history they know and protecting the future from fanatics, terrorists, and would-be dictators who would remold the shape of reality to suit their own purposes. But Manse Everard, the Patrol's finest temporal trouble-shooter, bears a heavy burden. The fabric of history is stained with human blood and suffering which he cannot, must not do anything to alleviate, lest his tampering bring disastrous alterations in future time. Everard must leave the horrors of the past in place, lest his tampering or that of the Patrol's opponents, the Exaltationists, erase all hope of a better future, and instead bring about a future filled with greater horrors than any recorded by past history at its darkest and most foul. Contents: * Time Patrol [Time Patrol • 1] (1955) / novelette by Poul Anderson: In the mid-20th century Manse Everard answers a job ad and gets hired as a time cop. Time travel will be invented centuries in the future; untold centuries beyond that mankind has evolved into a species called the Danellians, who persuaded the early time travellers to set up the Time Patrol with the aim of protecting all of time from any alteration by interfering temponauts that might risk the Danellians' existence. Manse's first mission is to go back to the late 19th century to correct the circumstances that led to the appearance of an anachronistic item in an old burial mound * Brave to Be a King [Time Patrol • 2] (1959) •/ novelette by Poul Anderson: A Time Patrol friend of Manse's, Keith, has gone missing in 6th-century Iran, and Keith's wife begs Manse to go find him. Trouble is, Manse has always had the serious hots for the wife, despite her somewhat whiny voice, so it's very tempting not to try very hard -- to assume that Keith has landed on his feet and is happy where he is, sort of thing. But his honourable self knows better. He discovers Keith has been forced to adopt the persona of Cyrus the Great; rescuing him while preserving the course of history proves to be a far more tortuous business than one might imagine. * Gibraltar Falls [Time Patrol • 3] (1975) / short story by Poul Anderson: What must have been the most remarkable spectacle of known prehistory, the collapse of the isthmus at the Gates of Hercules and the inundation of the basin that is now the Mediterranean Sea by the waters of the Atlantic * The Only Game in Town [Time Patrol • 4] (1960)/ novelette by Poul Anderson: Manse and a friend manage to head off the Chinese colonization, pre-Columbus, of the Americas. 8 Delenda Est [Time Patrol • 5] (1955) / novelette by Poul Anderson: Manse and a friend return from a holiday in the Pleistocene to their own time, only to discover it considerably changed; clearly there's been an unauthorized change to history. Eventually they trace it to an incident during the Punic Wars, which incident made it possible for Hannibal to defeat Rome. They succeed in reversing the change, but know that in so doing they're wiping out all the people they've befriended in the alternative 1950s. They succeed, though, in saving the laughing-eyed Hoirish colleen whom Manse's friend has fallen for. * Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks [Time Patrol • 6] (1983) / novella by Poul Anderson: Tells of the Exaltationists, the 23rd-century cult whose obsessive pursuit of hedonism renders them unimpressed by the effects their vicious power-and pleasure-seeking could do to the timestream, including the possibility of their wiping the existence of their own culture out of history. Pummairam, a youth who takes Manse under his wing when first the patrolman arrives in Tyre, engineers much of the tricksterism Manse must use to thwart the baddies. * The Sorrow of Odin the Goth [Time Patrol • 7] (1983) / novella by Poul Anderson: A history prof, Carl Farness, has allowed himself to become the personification of the god Odin to a 4th-century tribe of Goths; he has also allowed himself to become far too personally involved with the people whom he's there to study, marrying one of them (with the knowledge of his 20th-century wife) and keeping an eye on the usually somewhat messy fates of his children, grandchildren, etc. Manse gets involved because incarnations of gods are the kind of thing that cause history to be altered; in fact, as Carl points out, all kinds of Goth tribes were convinced they'd been visited by various deities, and their stories were usually quickly dismissed as myths, then forgotten. Still, he must extract himself from the situation with care. * Star of the Sea [Time Patrol • 8] (1991) / novella by Poul Anderson: Europe in the 1st century, and various peoples, led by the likes of Civilis, are rebelling against corrupt Roman rule -- with the violence continuing even after it becomes clear that an honourable peace could be struck. A major factor keeping them at war is the zeal of a visionary/prophetess called Veleda, who for reasons unknown has had a far greater and longer influence in a revealed timeline than she had in the known history of the period. Manse and a historian called Floris, who becomes his first real love, manage to sort out the situation. * The Year of the Ransom [Time Patrol • 9] (1988) / novel by Poul Anderson: Heroine Wanda Tamberley's Uncle Steve, living among Pizarro's brutal conquistadors at the time of the ransoming of Atahuallpa, is attacked by the Exaltationists and then abducted into a very distant past by a quick-witted Spanish soldier who believes him to be a demon. Manse and Wanda to the rescue, of course. * Death and the Knight [Time Patrol] (1995) / novelette by Poul Anderson: how to rescue an errant time agent without changing history. Hugues Marot, a time traveler from the future who towers over most men with his great height, is a member of the Templars. He has accurately predicted some future events: when he is arrested and detained by his fellow Templars, he grasps a crucifix which is a "...symbol and source of help from beyond this world". A source of help indeed, as it conceals his Time Patrol communicator..

    She, herself, is tiny—like a kid peering up over the steering wheel. She has a remarkable face and wears the thickest corrective lenses anyone has ever seen. Her posture is suggestive of some spinal problem. Her breasts are perfect; perhaps implants. She is strangely erotic yet somehow grotesque, vulnerable yet threatening. Her hitchhikers are a mixed bunch of men—trailer trash and travelling postgrads, thugs and philosophers. But Isserley is only interested in whether they have families and whether they have muscles. Then, it's only a question of how long she can endure her pain—physical and spiritual—and their conversation. Michel Faber's work has been described as a combination of Roald Dahl and Franz Kafka, as Somerset Maugham shacking up with Ian McEwan. At once humane and horrifying, Under the Skin takes us on a heart-thumping ride through dangerous territory—our own moral instincts and the boundaries of compassion.

    Jerry Cornelius, a time traveler who is able to assume many identities, must prey on others to maintain his image stability.

    But the shooter wasn’t acting alone.Roger Heller was part of something bigger…A conspiracy of scientific experiments, missing citizens, and ancient secrets threatening the island and its people.Behind it all: the enigmatic Blake Conway.Can Jon Conway piece the mystery together before he loses someone else that he loves?Can Roger Heller’s surviving family move on from his heinous actions?Will Cassidy’s addictions destroy her new family with Emma and Jon?Can Milo trust the mysterious Don Bellows?What will happen when Brock Houser launches his own investigation?WhiteSpace is a character-driven, mysterious, sci-fi thriller that would be right at home with superbly scripted TV shows like LOST, The Killing, and Fringe.

    Uniformity is the defining feature; there is only one language and all ethnic groups have been eugenically merged into one race called “The Family.” The world is ruled by a central computer called UniComp that has been programmed to keep every single human on the surface of the earth in check. People are continually drugged by means of regular injections so that they will remain satisfied and cooperative. They are told where to live, when to eat, whom to marry, when to reproduce. Even the basic facts of nature are subject to the UniComp’s will—men do not grow facial hair, women do not develop breasts, and it only rains at night.