She wakes to the sun breaking over Africa. She keeps watch over the experiments. She makes sure the station doesn't explode.And she's the only occupant of the space station when the world far below her comes apart in flame.

    Underwood, L. E. Modesitt, Jr., Nathan Archer, Jody Lynn Nye and many others, including a new urban fantasy by Sharon Lee! So come along and meet an orphan with a dream, a dockworker who believes in freedom, a maintenance worker with feelings and visit a soup kitchen with a secret.Contents:Voyeur / Eric Witchey --Digger don't take no requests / John Teehan --The gate between hope and glory / Holly Phillips --Riis run / eluki bes shahar --Bidding the walrus / Lawrence M. Schoen --The gift / Laura J. Underwood --The dock to heaven / L.E. Modesitt, Jr. --Find a pin / Ru Emerson --Sailing to the temple / Alan Smale --The pilgrim trade / Mark W. Tiedemann --More to glory / Patrice Sarath --Gonna boogie with Granny Time / Sharon Lee --Angel's kitchen / Chris Szego --Lair of the lesbian love goddess / Edward McKeown --Contraband / Nathan Archer --Spinacre's war / Lee Martindale --Bottom of the food chain / Jody Lynn Nye --Zappa for bardog / Joe Murphy --The times she went away / Paul E. Martens --Scream angel / Douglas Smith.

    The tales are organized chronologically to give readers a sense of how the genre's range, vitality, and literary quality have evolved over time. Each tale offers a unique vision, an altered reality, a universe all its own. Readers can sample H.G. Well's 1903 story The Land Ironclads (which predicted the stalemate of trench warfare and the invention of the tank), Jack Williamson's The Metal Man, a rarely anthologized gem written in 1928, Clifford D. Simak's 1940s classic, Desertion, set on "the howling maelstrom that was Jupiter", Frederik Pohl's 1955 The Tunnel Under the World (with its gripping first line, "On the morning of June 15th, Guy Burckhardt woke up screaming out of a dream"), right up to the current crop of writers, such as cyberpunk's Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, whose 1982 story Burning Chrome foreshadows the idea of virtual reality, and David Brin's Piecework, written in 1990. In addition, Shippey provides an informative introduction, examining the history of the genre, its major themes, and its literary techniques.

    He’s become a wealthy businessman and politician, with a beautiful wife and family, but the American Revolution looms on the horizon. When a prominent British leader mysteriously disappears, Ben Franklin summons Matt to London to help investigate the involvement of Patrick Ferguson, a man whose ambitions are to change the future. Unknown to them all, another time traveler, with separate motivations, will join them in a struggle across two continents to change the destiny of Western Civilization.

    With a bloodthirsty AI running his advanced spaceship, those who love evil should start looking over their shoulders. Life just got a lot more fun. Vigilante, Book 1 On the planet now known as High Tortuga, the mine workers are far too close to being slaves so the ruler of the planet shut them down. Except for the mine owned by Venfirdri Lan. He's taken his mine off the grid and decided to keep everything running. With no need to pay the workers, profits should be good. After all, who's going to stop him? Sentinal, Book 2 Someone sent three fully armed ships to High Tortuga to back the slave-owners running the mines, and Barnabas and Shinigami are determined to find out who. And take them down. As they look deeper, however, they’ll find traces of an organization that controls whole mercenary syndicates, industries, and even governments: the Yennai Corporation. …Some people never learn. Warden, Book 3 Barnabas has uncovered one of the biggest players in this sector, the Yennai Corporation. Now he’s in for a surprise - it turns out that the alien who’s been pulling the strings against him is none other than Uleq, the Torcellan who escaped Bethany Anne’s clutches. Barnabas isn’t taking any chances now. He’s going to find the Yennai Corporation’s main base and bring them down. Paladin, Book 4 Barnabas has traced the influence of the Yennai Corporation from High Tortuga to their secret base, which he has destroyed, killing both heirs to the company. Who hasn’t he killed? Koel Yennai, the patriarch and founder…who has sworn vengeance on Barnabas for killing his children and destroying his legacy.Now, Koel gathers what remains of the Yennai Corporation to hunt Barnabas across known space and kill him. And Barnabas is more than ready for the confrontation. Justiciar, Book 5 After taking down the Yennai Corporation, Barnabas has earned a little break. On the way back to High Tortuga, however, he stops to answer a distress call. How long could it take, after all? Barnabas is about to find out.

    It also raises questions about whether we understand time, and how we perceive it. Once we move outside the present day, can we ever return or do we move into an alternate world? What happens if our meddling with Nature leads to time flowing backwards, or slowing down or stopping all together? Or if we get trapped in a constant loop from which we can never escape. Is the past and future immutable or will we ever be able to escape the inevitable?These are just some of the questions that are raised in these challenging, exciting and sometimes amusing stories by Kage Baker, Simon Clark, Fritz Leiber, Christopher Priest, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Robert Silverberg, Michael Swanwick, John Varley and many others.

    1000+ pages of explosive, military space opera action, filled with characters that leap off the page. Carson Mach, a former war hero turned freelancer, is seeking to revive his fortunes. Heeding a call from a friend in the Commonwealth government, he's tasked with a series of missions that few would ever agree to, much less with eagerness. But Carson Mach is a special kind of risk-taker and is known for cleaning up the quadrant's dregs in his unique, chaotic way. With few resources and overwhelming odds, Mach must reunite some of his old buddies: tech specialists, military veterans, assassins, and puzzling AIs, and form them into an elite fighting force. If he fails, the threats to the Commonwealth may spell the end for millions of lives. This is his last chance. Should he fail, he'll either be dead or back in the gutter with no more favors to call in and few friends ready to lend a hand. From hunting down mythical ships and recovering powerful artifacts to preventing the Commonwealth's center of power from falling to the enemy, Carson Mach and his ragtag crew of the starship Intrepid must do the extraordinary if they're to succeed. That's if they don't tear each other apart first. Experience this complete Military Space Opera series from Amazon Bestseller A.C. Hadfield. It's perfect for fans of Jamie McFarlane, JN Chaney and Jay Allan. This boxset contains three full-length novels: Book 1: The Atlantis Ship Book 2: The Lost Voyager Book 3: The Terminal War

    Those two little words can mean so much. But how will things end...and will it hurt? That’s what we really want to know. Delve into the darkness and join us at the end of the world. From a blighted sky to an invasion from beyond, from untethered time to one person driven beyond the edge of sanity, from a child’s game to an unseen apocalypse...it’s all imagined here, and imagined darkly. Inside The Ways We End is a combination of new stories and previously published anthology tales, now re-imagined without word limits, including Cottage of Hunger, The Mergens, The Mountains of Five, The Bridge, Rock or Shell, and A Mother So Beautiful.

    Talk about the horse's mouth! This book is long overdue."- Peter Straub "Lovecraft opened the way for me, as he had done for others before me -- Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, and Ray Bradbury among them. The reader would do well to remember that it is his shadow, so long and gaunt, and his eyes, so dark and puritanical, which overlie almost all of the important horror fiction that has come since."- Stephen King "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear."- H.P. Lovecraft  In 1927, Howard Philips Lovecraft published a 30,000-word essay titled "Supernatural Horror in Literature." In it, the father of American horror writing  whose tales  presented one of the earliest scholarly studies of the supernatural in fiction, defined the horror story as one in which "a certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present." Those authors discussed in Lovecraft's seminal essay were used as the basis for the 1993 anthology H.P. Lovecraft's Book of Horror, edited by Dave Carson and Stephen Jones. With H.P. Lovecraft's Book of the Supernatural, Jones uses that same essay as inspiration for a new anthology of nineteen new selections, each preceded by an excerpt from Lovecraft. Included here are works from authors as varied as Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Louis Stevenson. While these stories maycarry a classical pedigree, their contents remain just as chilling and disturbing as anything cooked up by modern-day horror writers. The book also includes a short essay from Lovecraft himself, "Notes on Writing Weird Fiction," in which he lays out tips and rules for mastering the form.

    

    The gods were supposed to preside over Creation with unmatched wisdom and knowledge. Well, that was the idea. But what is Death – a god of terrible majesty and splendour – supposed to do when his daughter asks for a pony? Is he really supposed to just go out and get a mortal one? Like that’s going to work. It’ll keel over and die in a couple of decades. No, his daughter deserves something better, a pony truly worthy of her divine heritage, which means he’s going to have to get a little bit creative. And then there’s Bureaucracy. The Supreme Mother and Supreme Father might have given rise to Creation, but Bureaucracy is the one who has to keep everything running smoothly. But that’s easier said than done when there are hundreds of gods and countless mortals to consider – none of whom understand the importance of filing paperwork in triplicate. Luckily, not even gods can escape the awesome power of divine paperwork. And let’s not forget gods like Mayhem, Mischief, and Rabble. Their names speak for themselves. When the three of them take a holiday in the mortal world at the same time, trouble is right around the corner. Divine Assistance is a collection of fourteen short stories about the gods and their attempts to manage Creation. There are souls to claim, mortals to woo, and even the occasional city to smite. After all, what’s life without a little divine assistance?

    For hundreds of years, the danger of collision has been ignored as mere crackpot theories, until now, and now it's too late. Collision is a short story commissioned by Vanquish Motion Pictures for development in film and television, and is the first in a series of character-rich, mystery-driven science fiction grounded in science fact.

    Still, the merciless mental, physical, and psychological torture may be worth it for Lance Warder to have a chance to fight in space.The space that awaits isn’t for the faint of heart. He’ll have to shed his mental chains to prove his mettle. Because no one cares who your father is when you’re faced with unknown threats in a dark, infinite void.To help deal with the everyday grind of survival, evasion, resistance, and escape training, Lance will join a boxing league and even find himself in the middle of a mysterious AI takeover that may spell doom for mankind.

    Clarke is one of the greatest science fiction writers of the century, and surely the most celebrated science fiction author alive. He is -- with H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein -- one of the writers who define the genre. Now, at the dawn of the year 2001, Sir Arthur C. Clarke has cooperated in the preparation of a massive definitive edition of his collected shorter works, which will be made available on audio in four chronological volumes, followed by a 30 cassette gift set, the most ambitious science fiction audio project in history. Brief introductions place each story in the context of Clarke's career. Fantastic Audio has acquired exclusive audio rights to this collection. From early stories like "Rescue Party" and "The Lion of Comarre," to classics like "The Star," "Earthlight," "The Nine Billion Names of God," and "The Sentinel" (kernel of the later novel, and movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey), all the way to later works like "A Meeting With Medusa" and "The Hammer of God," this immense volume encapsulates one of the great SF careers of all time.

    Each story is accompanied by a ghastly illustration from the mind of Andy Sciazko... the kind of illustrations that will disturb you in the best way possible.