In the lands of the True Game, your lifelong identity will emerge as you play. Prince or Sorcerer, Armiger or Tragamor, Demon or Doyen... Which will it be?

Rheine urgently needs to speak with the queen, and she knows just how to get Her Majesty's attention...Great fun for kids of all ages, these two short stories are not traditional fairytales but like most fairytales, they offer lessons for life, with a little magic and darkness thrown in. The first story, 'Word Queen', tells the tale of a Panda who discovers the secret of words on a journey through a magical land. 'Black Eye' meanwhile, is a simple rites-of-passage story about a boy's quest to find the truth behind the bruise around his eye.If you or your children want to be entertained and educated by stories filled with magic and strangeness, and introduced to worlds of Pandas,Words, Black Eyes, Adventures, Quests and Travelling Fools, then you should read these 'Two New Fairytales' today.

The prequel to the popular Star Guild Saga book series. The problem with lies is that they are always uncovered...always. It's just a question of when. For humans living on a starbase and above a planet that they are hell bent on mining, a lie is about to be uncovered that will rock them to their very core. Who seeded them here, and why? Perhaps they truly aren't the only Beings in the universe.An Award Winning Novelist Presents Star Guild, an Action Packed Science Fiction. In 1849, British archaeologist, Austin Henry Layard, uncovered over 20,000 clay tablets in the Ancient Sumerian city of Nineveh, in an area now known as Iraq. The tablets told of an ancient race that had come before humans, arriving on Earth long ago and bringing with them untold technologies, and a mass genetic breeding program that the tablets claimed to have brought forth the creation of humankind. And then these Beings left, taking with them everything they had, except the human race. The problem is, they took some of us. And, those whom were taken have not returned, and have all but forgotten about their past and that these Beings ever existed. These humans are now thriving someplace else...alone.They are about to be in for a rude awakening. Star Guild is action packed and riveting. You'll be carried along, feeling as though you're a part of the journey and falling in love with the characters as you progress. Scroll up and grab a copy today!

We always try to have a variety of genres represented on our site, but this month represents the best collection yet of epic fantasy with a personal touch, far-reaching science fiction with a practical bent, truly haunting psychological horror, and a few more speculative stories that don't fit well into a certain category.Fiction Vortex, let’s see …A fiction vortex is a tornado of stories that pick you up and hurl you through a barn to find enlightenment on the other side. It’s a whirlpool of fascinating tales so compelling that they suck you in, drag you down to the bottom of your mind, and drown you with incessant waves of glorious imagery and believable characters.Nope.A fiction vortex is an online speculative fiction magazine focused on publishing great science fiction and fantasy, and is run by incredibly attractive and intelligent people with great taste in literature and formidable writing prowess.Not that either. But we’re getting closer.Founded in the 277th year of the Takolatchni Dynasty, Fiction Vortex set out to encourage people to write and publish great speculative fiction. It sprang fully formed from the elbow of TWOS, retaining none of TWOS’s form but most of its spirit. And the patron god of writers, the insecure, the depressed, and the mentally ill regarded Fiction Vortex in his magic mirror of self-loathing and declared it good, insofar as something that gives writer’s undue hope can be declared good. Thereafter, he charged the Rear Admiral of the Galactic 5th Fleet to defend Fiction Vortex down to the last robot warrior.Now we’re talking.Take your pick. We don’t care how you characterize us or the site.Fiction Vortex focuses on publishing speculative fiction. That means science fiction and fantasy (with a light smattering of horror and a few other subgenres), be it light, heavy, deep, flighty, spaceflighty, cerebral, visceral, epic, or mundane. But mundane in a my-local-gas-station-has-elf-mechanics-but-it’s-not-really-a-big-deal-around-here kind of way. Got it?Basically, we want imaginative stories that are well written, but not full of supercilious floridity.There’s a long-standing belief that science fiction and fantasy stories aren’t as good as purely literary fare. We want you to prove that mindset wrong (not just wrong, but a steaming pile of griffin dung wrong) with every story we publish. It’s almost like we’re saying, “I do not bite my thumb at you, literary snobs, but I do bite my thumb,” but in a completely polite and non-confrontational way.We've got more great stories online, with a new story twice a week. Visit our website FictionVortex.com, follow us on Twitter: @FictionVortex, and like us on Facebook: FictionVortex.

The Skull in the Photograph was Labelled *Neanderthal Man...* He is too excitable and too pushy. His wife drinks too much. He may be a man of principle, but Leo Runcible of Runcible Realty is an outsider in Carquinez, Marin County. When he gets into an argument with his neighbour Walt Dombrosio, the resulting ramifications follow a bizarre logic of cause and effect to lead in entirely unexpected directions... The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike is a dazzling novel by a writer famous for his power to surprise and delight. The greatest American novelist of the second half of the 20th century - Norman Spinrad One of the most original practitioners writing any kind of fiction, Philip K. Dick made most of the European avant-garde seem navel-gazers in a cul-de-sac. - Sunday Times Front cover illustration by Neil Breedon.

The Peripheral by William Gibson is a thrilling new novel about two intertwined futures, from the bestselling author of Neuromancer Flynne Fisher lives down a country road, in a rural near-future America where jobs are scarce, unless you count illegal drug manufacture, which she's keen to avoid. Her brother Burton lives, or tries to, on money from the Veterans Association, in compensation for neurological damage suffered in a Marines elite unit. Flynne earns what she can by assembling product at the local 3D printshop. She used to make more as a combat scout in an online game, playing for a rich man, but she's had to let the shooter games go. Wilf Netherton lives in London, seventy-some years later, on the far side of decades of slow-motion apocalypse. Things are pretty good now, for the haves, and there aren't many have-nots left. Wilf, a high-powered publicist and celebrity-minder, fancies himself as a romantic misfit in a society where reaching into the past is just another hobby. Burton's been moonlighting online, secretly working security in some game prototype, a virtual world that looks vaguely like London, but a lot weirder. He's got his sister taking over shifts, promised her the game's not a shooter. Still, the crime Flynne witnesses there is plenty bad. Flynne and Wilf are about to meet one another. Her world will be altered utterly, irrevocably, and Wilf's, for all its decadence and power, will learn that some of these third-world types from the past can be badass.

"Everything that had happened to Nina was real. She had real handcuffs on her wrists, real scars on her back, real fear flooding her mind. "'They're going to kill me,' Nina whispered, and it was almost a relief to finally, finally give up hope." In a society that allows no more than two children per family under penalty of death, third children are forced into hiding, or to live with false identity papers. In Among the Impostors, Nina Idi was arrested for treason for supposedly trying to trick the Population Police into arresting other students she said were illegal third children. Now she faces torture or death -- unless she agrees to betray three other imprisoned third children. Her dilemma intensifies when she meets the prisoners -- who are only ten, nine, and six. As she did so brilliantly in the Publishers Weekly best-selling Among the Hidden and in Among the Impostors, Margaret Peterson Haddix once again brings readers to a world in which nothing is as it seems -- a world in which an imprisonment leads to an adventure of mind, body, and spirit.

Life in the outer realm is a lawless, dirty, hard existence, and Solara Brooks is hungry for it. Just out of the orphanage, she needs a fresh start in a place where nobody cares about the engine grease beneath her fingernails or the felony tattoos across her knuckles. She's so desperate to reach the realm that she's willing to indenture herself to Doran Spaulding, the rich and popular quarterback who made her life miserable all through high school, in exchange for passage aboard the spaceliner Zenith. When a twist of fate lands them instead on the Banshee, a vessel of dubious repute, Doran learns he's been framed on Earth for conspiracy. As he pursues a set of mysterious coordinates rumored to hold the key to clearing his name, he and Solara must get past their enmity to work together and evade those out for their arrest. Life on the Banshee may be tumultuous, but as Solara and Doran are forced to question everything they once believed about their world—and each other—the ship becomes home, and the eccentric crew family. But what Solara and Doran discover on the mysterious Planet X has the power to not only alter their lives, but the existence of everyone in the universe...

Two centuries into the future, the Hundred Concerns, a group of powerful corporations that dominate galactic commerce, have pressured the Commonwealth of Humans into signing a pact with the Haluk, a conquering alien race with nefarious designs. Among the few people who recognize the malevolent intent of the aliens is hotheaded maverick Helly Frost. To prove that the Haluk have created demiclones--genetically engineered individuals who are perfect human replicas--Helly travels to the Sagittarius Whorl, a fearsome region of the galaxy hostile to every form of life. But he must find crucial pieces of evidence that will expose the Haluk plot. Instead, he discovers something far darker than he had ever imagined. . . .

An astonishing work of cutting-edge science and cultural history that radically reframes how we understand the vagina—and consequently, how we understand women—from one of our most respected cultural critics and thinkers, Naomi Wolf, author of the modern classic The Beauty Myth. When an unexpected medical crisis sends Naomi Wolf on a deeply personal journey to tease out the intersections between sexuality and creativity, she discovers, much to her own astonishment, an increasing body of scientific evidence that suggests that the vagina is not merely flesh, but an intrinsic component of the female brain—and thus has a fundamental connection to female consciousness itself. Utterly enthralling and totally fascinating, Vagina: A New Biography draws on this set of insights about "the mind-vagina connection" to reveal new information about what women really need, and considers what a sexual relationship—and a relationship to the self—transformed by these insights could look like. Exhilarating and groundbreaking, Vagina: A New Biography combines rigorous science, explained for lay readers, with cultural history and deeply personal considerations of the role of female desire in female identity, creativity, and confidence, from interviewees of all walks of life. Heralded by Publishers Weekly as one of the best science books of the year, it is a provocative and deeply engaging book that elucidates the ties between a woman's experience of her vagina and her sense of self; her impulses, dreams, and courage; and her role in love and in society in completely new and revelatory ways sure to provoke impassioned conversation. A brilliant and nuanced synthesis of physiology, history, and cultural criticism, Vagina: A New Biography explores the physical, political, and spiritual implications of this startling series of new scientific breakthroughs for women and for society as a whole, from a writer whose conviction and keen intelligence have propelled her works to the tops of bestseller lists, and firmly into the realms of modern classics.

#shortstory #Sci-fi #Futuristic #Romance This is the sensational story of Chico and Bunke in the Blue Moon Centuries.#shortstory #Sci-fi #Futuristic #Romance A pick from the Blue Moon Centuries. 31st Century in Ekwulobia. Chico tells his story about Bunke in the city of the future. An original African sci-fi and futuristic stage for romance. Please read and review.

RE:Inspiration; Titan is a four part sci-fi/fantasy short story series chronicling the events aboard a spaceship that rescues a distressed shuttle."Sunfall: Episode 1, Season 1 is short, but not without impact. Very-detailed, the descriptions will have you visualizing each scene, and cringing at most. Each character appears real, life-like from thoughts down to conversation and makes you hate their upcoming fate. Yet, it still leaves you craving more. Great writing style... Intriguing plot… I do believe these talented authors may have just created something epic. Anxiously awaiting episode two.” -- Natalie Carlisle, author of The Shifted and Finding Keith It came without warning... One Sunday afternoon, those who stood in the sun caught fire and turned to ash. Forced indoors, humanity must learn to live in the darkness. Unless, what waits in the darkness catches them, too... Forced inside a giant retail warehouse, a group of survivors must learn to live with the darkness and each other. A father aims to protect his children from a dangerous new world, whatever the cost. An ex-cop burdened by her shaky past puts her skills to the test when people start dying. A mysterious worshiper attempts to rally the community and seek alternative refuge. Sunfall is an episodic series that will be released in "episodes" and "seasons", much like a television show. Each "season" will consist of six episodes, and each episode will be anywhere from 12k-20k words. Recommended for adult audiences.

In the years following World War III, a new and powerful faith has arisen from a scorched and poisoned Earth, a faith that embraces the architect of world wide devastation. The Servants of Wrath have deified Carlton Lufteufel and re-christened him the Deus Irae. In the small community of Charlottesville, Utah, Tibor McMasters, born without arms or legs, has, through an array of prostheses, established a far-reaching reputation as an inspired painter. When the new church commissions a grand mural depicting the Deus Irae, it falls upon Tibor to make a treacherous journey to find the man, to find the god, and capture his terrible visage for posterity. From the Trade Paperback edition.

If you want an omnibus of short fiction by Arthur C. Clarke, a Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master, then you want The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke. If you're looking for a representative sample of Clarke's short stories, or for some examples of the creative and extrapolative abilities that established Clarke as one of science fiction's greatest and most important writers, then check out Tales from Planet Earth. Tales from Planet Earth ranges widely across time, but the stories are centered on our home world. Many SF writers confine their visions of earth to its flatlands, but Clarke is three-dimensional; his stories "Hate," "The Deep Range," and "The Man Who Ploughed the Sea" plunge into the ocean, while "The Cruel Sky" ascends the Himalayas. Some stories, like "The Other Tiger" and "'If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth...'," end on chilling twists. "The Road to the Sea" spans centuries and millennia to explore how humanity's exodus to the stars may affect the world left behind. "Hate" considers how transcendence of the Earth's atmosphere may affect ancient enmities. "The Parasite" demonstrates a scary nastiness not usually associated with Clarke. "The Wall of Darkness" is set on an alternate-universe earth so different from ours, and "The Lion of Comarre" is set in a future so far away, that both stories feel like fantasy; but both are rigorously extrapolated from scientific theory. Two lighthearted entertainments, "The Next Tenants" and "The Man Who Ploughed the Sea," are from Tales of the White Hart. All of the stories in Tales from Planet Earth are recommended. The iBooks 2001 Anniversary Edition of Tales from Planet Earth collects 14 SF stories first published between 1950 and 1987, including the satire "On Golden Seas," which has "never before [been] collected in any Clarke book." --Cynthia Ward

Deborah Blum, writing with the high style and skill for suspense that is characteristic of the very best mystery fiction, shares the untold story of how poison rocked Jazz Age New York City. In The Poisoner's Handbook Blum draws from highly original research to track the fascinating, perilous days when a pair of forensic scientists began their trailblazing chemical detective work, fighting to end an era when untraceable poisons offered an easy path to the perfect crime. Drama unfolds case by case as the heroes of The Poisoner's Handbook—chief medical examiner Charles Norris and toxicologist Alexander Gettler—investigate a family mysteriously stricken bald, Barnum and Bailey's Famous Blue Man, factory workers with crumbling bones, a diner serving poisoned pies, and many others. Each case presents a deadly new puzzle and Norris and Gettler work with a creativity that rivals that of the most imaginative murderer, creating revolutionary experiments to tease out even the wiliest compounds from human tissue. Yet in the tricky game of toxins, even science can't always be trusted, as proven when one of Gettler's experiments erroneously sets free a suburban housewife later nicknamed "America's Lucretia Borgia" to continue her nefarious work. From the vantage of Norris and Gettler's laboratory in the infamous Bellevue Hospital it becomes clear that killers aren't the only toxic threat to New Yorkers. Modern life has created a kind of poison playground, and danger lurks around every corner. Automobiles choke the city streets with carbon monoxide; potent compounds, such as morphine, can be found on store shelves in products ranging from pesticides to cosmetics. Prohibition incites a chemist's war between bootleggers and government chemists while in Gotham's crowded speakeasies each round of cocktails becomes a game of Russian roulette. Norris and Gettler triumph over seemingly unbeatable odds to become the pioneers of forensic chemistry and the gatekeepers of justice during a remarkably deadly time. A beguiling concoction that is equal parts true crime, twentieth-century history, and science thriller, The Poisoner's Handbook is a page-turning account of a forgotten New York.