This collection, showcasing Bear’s unique imagination and singular voice, includes her Hugo- and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award-winning story “Tideline” and Hugo-winning novelette “Shoggoths in Bloom,” as well as an original, never-published story. Recipient of the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, the Locus Award, a World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Philip K. Dick nominee, Bear is one of speculative fiction’s most acclaimed, respected, and prolific authors.ContentTidelineSonny Liston Takes the FallSoundingThe Something-Dreaming GameThe Cold BlacksmithIn the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal BurnsOrm the BeautifulThe Inevitable Heat Death of the UniverseLove Among the TalusCryptic ColorationThe LadiesShoggoths in BloomThe Girl Who Sang Rose MadderDollyGods of the ForgeAnnie WebberThe Horrid Glory of Its WingsConfessorThe Leavings of the WolfThe Death of Terrestrial Radio

    But when Andrew started to develop special talents which exceeded the confines of his allotted positronic pathways, he abandoned his domestic duties in favour of more intellectual pursuits. As time passed, Andrew acquired knowledge, feelings and ambitions way beyond anything ever experienced by any other mechanical men. And he found himself launched on to a career which would bring him fame fortune — and danger. For a robot who wants to be human must also be prepared to die...In the Bicentennial Man, Isaac Asimov returns to his first and most enduring love — robotics. The result is a brilliant book of first-class entertainment and mind-spinning ideas which confirm Asimov's supreme status as Grand Master of science fiction.Content"Feminine Intuition" (1969)"Waterclap" (1970) "That Thou Art Mindful of Him" (1974)"Stranger in Paradise" (1974)"The Life and Times of Multivac" (1975)"The Winnowing" (1976)"The Bicentennial Man" (1976)"Marching In" (1976) "Old-Fashioned" (1976)"The Tercentenary Incident" (1976)"Birth of a Notion" (1976)Cover Illustration: Don Dixon

    How much time do we have left, and do we even understand what timescale to use? As a slow apocalypse blooms across the Earth, planets and plants, animals and microbes, all live and die and evolve at different scales. Is one human life long enough to unravel the mystery?Nine Last Days on Planet Earth is a Tor.com Original from the award-winning science fiction author Daryl Gregory.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    Buildings breathe, cars attack, angels patrol, and hyper-intelligent pets rebel.With unbridled invention and breakneck adventure, Hannu Rajaniemi is on the cutting-edge of science fiction. His post-apocalyptic, post-cyberpunk, and post-human tales are full of exhilarating energy and unpredictable optimism.How will human nature react when the only limit to desire is creativity? When the distinction between humans and gods is as small as nanomachines—or as large as the universe? Whether the next big step in technology is 3D printing, genetic alteration, or unlimited space travel, Rajaniemi writes about what happens after.

    In the original Tor.com story Any Way the Wind Blows, New York Times bestselling author Seanan McGuire presents a sweet tribute to Manhattan's iconic Flatiron building--celebrating the longtime home of Tor Books as the publisher bids farewell for new office space.Composed of travelers from nine different parallel dimensions, the Cartography Corps crew aboard the airship Stalwart Trumpet of Glory descends on the New York City in our universe to collect and preserve artifacts from the legendary turn-of-the-twentieth century landmark Flatiron building.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    In Venice an architecture student commits a crime of passion. A white southern airport loader tries to do a favor for a black northern child. The ordinary stuff of ordinary fiction--but with a difference! These tales take place twenty-five, fifty, a hundred-fifty years from now, when men and women have been given gills to labor under the sea. Huge repair stations patrol the cables carrying power to the ends of the earth. Telepathic and precocious children so passionately yearn to visit distant galaxies that they'll kill to go. Brilliantly crafted, beautifully written, these are Samuel Delany's award-winning stories, like no others before or since.

    Here’s the correct version, as published in Omni, 1990." -- Terry Bisson

    A story about an architect on Earth commissioned to create (via long distance) a masterwork with materials from the last abandoned Martian colony, a monument that will last thousands of years longer than Earth, which is dying.

    In 2047, a first manned mission to Mars ended in tragedy. Thirty years later, a second expedition is preparing to launch. As housekeeper of the hotel where two of the astronauts will give their final press statements, Emily finds the mission intruding upon her thoughts more and more. Emily's mother, Moolie, has a message to give her, but Moolie's memories are fading. As the astronauts' visit draws closer, the unearthing of a more personal history is about to alter Emily's world forever.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    She changes bodies and fights, again and again. But now the enemy has surrendered. There will be no further deployment. The war is over . . . but not for her.

    Abbey Mei Otis’s short stories are contemporary fiction at its strongest: taking apart the supposed equality that is clearly just not there, putting humans under an alien microscope, putting humans under government control, putting kids from the moon into a small beach town and then the putting the rest of the town under the microscope as they react in ways we hope they would, and then, of course, in ways we’d hope they don’t.Otis has long been fascinated in using strange situations to explore dynamics of power, oppression, and grief, and the twelve stories collected here are at once a striking indictment of the present and a powerful warning about the future.

    Le Guin is one of the greatest science fiction writers and many times the winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Her career as a novelist was launched by the three novels contained in Worlds Of Exile And Illusion. These novels, Rocannon's World, Planet Of Exile, and City Of Illusions, are set in the same universe as Le Guin's ground-breaking classic, The Left Hand Of Darkness.Tor is pleased to return these previously unavailable works to print in this attractive new edition.

    It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English. This process could follow the normal teaching of a child. Things would be pointed out and named, etc. Again I do not know what the right answer is, but I think both approaches should be tried."The first approach has been tried many times in both science fiction and reality. In this new novella, at over 30,000 words, his longest work to date, Ted Chiang offers a detailed imagining of how the second approach might work within the contemporary landscape of startup companies, massively-multiplayer online gaming, and open-source software. It's a story of two people and the artificial intelligences they helped create, following them for more than a decade as they deal with the upgrades and obsolescence that are inevitable in the world of software. At the same time, it's an examination of the difference between processing power and intelligence, and of what it means to have a real relationship with an artificial entity.

    Corey. Set two hundred years in the future, where man has colonized the outer asteroid belt, The Expanse follows the case of a missing girl that brings together a hardened detective and a rogue ship captain in a race across the solar system to expose the greatest conspiracy in human history. "Drive" highlights a key moment in The Expanse universe whose ramifications set the foundation for the show.The story is a prequel taking place approximately 150 years prior to the main series, concerning Solomon Epstein and his invention of the Epstein drive.

    With eight short stories and novellas--including three original to this collection--Galactic North imparts the centuries-spanning events that have produced the dark and turbulent world of Revelation Space.