Iain M. Banks' Culture meets Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy in this funny romp through the cosmos.Iain M. Banks' Culture meets Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy in this funny romp through the cosmos. An immovable object stands in the way of the Galactic Emperor Jarrl. He has waged siege against his arch-nemesis for a thousand years, but the barrier still stands. Now, he has come up with a plan to put the immovable object's name to the test, and lay waste to his enemies. Will his plan work? Will he manage to obliterate his foes? Will he press the big red button to destroy a galaxy?

Welcome to the Provinces. This anthology contains 6 flash-fiction stories set within an engaging steampunk sci-fi style world. You will meet key players in my upcoming novels, both heroes and villains, as they struggle through important moments in their lives. These backstory snapshots help lay the groundwork for things to come. This is an excellent introduction to my work. Enjoy the journey!Welcome to the Provinces. This anthology contains 6 flash-fiction stories set within an engaging steampunk sci-fi style world. You will meet key players in my upcoming novels, both heroes and villains, as they struggle through important moments in their lives. These are backstory snapshots that help lay the groundwork for things to come in the larger books.If you enjoy these shorts, then you will most definitely enjoy the books to come. I will do my best to fill my stories with adventure, danger, intrigue, love, and betrayal, putting my own personal twist on the themes of steampunk and science-fiction and develop engaging characters and storylines. This is an excellent introduction to my work. Enjoy the journey!

Let three complete books in one take you on a dazzling journey into science fiction's most famous future history: Known Space! WORLD OF PTAVVS Kzanol was a thrint from a distant galaxy. He had been trapped on Earth in a time-stasis field for two billion years. Now he was on the loose, and telepath Larry Greenberg knew everything he was thinking. Thrints lived to plunder and enslave lesser planets . . . and the planet Kzanol had in mind was Earth! A GIFT FROM EARTH Shrouded in lethal mists, the world named Mount Lookitthat was never meant for humans. Life existed only on one plateau, unreachable except from space. But still the planet had been colonized, and the settlers struggled to survive under a ruthless dictatorship on a rebellion-proof world . . . until fate dealt them a wild card named Matthew Keller, whose secret talent might just be their only hope! TALES OF KNOWN SPACE A classic collection of stories that traces humankind's expansion and colonization throughout the galaxy from the twentieth century to the thirty-first . . . AND MORE: Larry Niven's latest thoughts on the evolution--both creative and "historical"--of known space, as well as an updated Timeline of Known Space and a complete Niven bibliography! Contents: Introduction: My Universe and Welcome Back! The Coldest Place Becalmed in Hell Wait It Out Eye of an Octopus How the Heroes Die The Jigsaw Man World of Ptavvs At the Bottom of a Hole Intent to Deceive Cloak of Anarchy The Warriors Madness Has Its Place A Gift From Earth There Is a Tide Safe at Any Speed Afterthoughts Bibliography: The Worlds of Larry Niven

The first colonists from Earth named the planet Wunderland. Generations later, the felinoid alien invaders called Kzin came and turned it into a hell for humans. Touched on in other accounts of the Man-Kzin wars, here for the first time is the decades-long saga of Wunderland: how the Wunderlanders first learned of the Kzin attacks on Earth by slower-than-light communications, barely in time to prepare to fight back. How the valiant human defenders turned to guerilla warfare in the Wunderland jungles and caves after the feline warrior race had destroyed or seized the cities. How, after the war ended in an ignominous defeat for the Kzin, some humans and Kzin worked for good will between the two species-their work complicated by humans wanting revenge and Kzin who still saw humans as a somewhat annoying food source. And how a human-Kzin team was sent to investigate a mysterious asteroid and found a threat not only to both species, but to the entire galaxy. The humans wanted to destroy it, but the Kzin wanted to exploit it, and the only hope was a Kzin telepath raised by humans from a cub. Which side would he choose, monkey or warcat?

SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR, JOE HILL! A collection of four chilling novels, ingeniously wrought gems of terror from the brilliantly imaginative, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Fireman, Joe Hill. "One of America's finest horror writers" (Time magazine), Joe Hill has been hailed among legendary talents such as Peter Straub, Neil Gaiman, and Jonathan Latham. In Strange Weather, this "compelling chronicler of human nature's continual war between good and evil," (Providence Journal-Bulletin) who "pushes genre conventions to new extremes" (New York Times Book Review) deftly expose the darkness that lies just beneath the surface of everyday life. "Snapshot" is the disturbing story of a Silicon Valley adolescent who finds himself threatened by "The Phoenician," a tattooed thug who possesses a Polaroid Instant Camera that erases memories, snap by snap. A young man takes to the skies to experience his first parachute jump. . . and winds up a castaway on an impossibly solid cloud, a Prospero's island of roiling vapor that seems animated by a mind of its own in "Aloft." On a seemingly ordinary day in Boulder, Colorado, the clouds open up in a downpour of nails--splinters of bright crystal that shred the skin of anyone not safely under cover. "Rain" explores this escalating apocalyptic event, as the deluge of nails spreads out across the country and around the world. In "Loaded," a mall security guard in a coastal Florida town courageously stops a mass shooting and becomes a hero to the modern gun rights movement. But under the glare of the spotlights, his story begins to unravel, taking his sanity with it. When an out-of-control summer blaze approaches the town, he will reach for the gun again and embark on one last day of reckoning. Masterfully exploring classic literary themes through the prism of the supernatural, Strange Weather is a stellar collection from an artist who is "quite simply the best horror writer of our generation" (Michael Kortya).

Kindred Tales Sarah Michaels is running for her life! Abducted into a cult called The Brotherhood of Peace at age twelve, she has grown up in an abusive system. Now as an adult, she is desperate to get away before she must become a “Bride of the Prophet” and is forced to have sex with the leader, the lecherous Father Caleb. Sarah runs from the cult… and straight into the arms of a tall, dark, angry Kindred warrior... Commander Sazar is the ultimate diplomat but not a very good boss. In fact, he’s awful because he has the habit of biting his personal assistants. As a Pitch-Blood Kindred, he needs blood on a regular basis and since his beautiful wife is dead, he is forced to take it from the female who is closest to him. Five secretaries have quit because of his blood requirements and he’s desperate to find a new one before he goes on his latest diplomatic mission to Alquon Ultrea. Desperate enough to take on a girl with very little experience and no resume to speak of, because she’s willing to let him bite her and drink her blood! Desperation might have brought them together but Sazar and Sarah soon find they have much in common. It’s Christmas time and a deep mutual attraction draws them together. But when a misunderstanding tears them apart and Sarah is taken by the Brotherhood of Peace, can Sazar save her? And can Sarah help him by Healing the Brokenness inside?

The Stone Dogs is the third of four books of S.M. Stirling's alternate history series, The Domination. During the cold war between the Alliance and the Domination, Frederic and Marya work for the OSS as spies and assassins. During the Draka conquest of India, Marya Lefarge is taken prisoner. She becomes a serf to Yolande Ingolfsson, who after torturing her repeatedly with a neural weapon, forces her to become a "brooder" (i.e. a surrogate mother) for her offspring, Gwendolyn. Yolande also swears vengeance on Fred Lefarge after he kills her lover, Myfanwy Venders, during the Indian Incident. As both superpowers expand into space, they prepare different doomsday weapons. The Alliance's weapon is a computer virus ("comp plague") secretly planted in Draka military computers by spies; the Draka's is a biological virus called the Stone Dogs that causes infected personnel to go insane. Yolande discovers Marya, who has contacted the OSS, planting the comp-plague and allows her to escape with knowledge of the Stone Dogs. This forces her uncle, Archon Eric von Shrakenberg, to use the weapon prematurely. The Draka win the resulting conflict; however, their incomplete victory leads to Eric negotiating an arrangement whereupon the Alliance is allowed to launch its generation ship "The New America" and the remaining Alliance survivors in space are granted limited Draka citizenship.

The stories collected here, written between August of 1987 and May of 1990, demonstrate that I still believe in the classical unities. Of course, what seems to us a unity now might not have appeared that way when H.G. Wells was writing his wonderful stories in the nineteenth century. Wells might have argued that my 'To the Promised Land' is built around two speculative fantastic assumptions, one that the Biblical Exodus from Egypt never happened, the other that it is possible to send rocketships to other worlds. But in fact we've sent plenty of rocketships to other worlds by now, so only my story's alternative-world speculation remains fantasy today. Technically speaking the space-travel element of the plot has become part of the given; it's the other big assumption that forms the central matter of the story. --Robert Silverberg, from his Introduction Table of Contents Introduction The Dead Man's Eyes Enter A Soldier. Later: Enter Another To The Promised Land Chip Runner A Sleep And A Forgetting In Another Country The Asenion Solution We Are For The Dark Lion Time in Timbuctoo A Tip On A Turtle

Old Thaddeus McIlvaine discovered a dark star and took it for his own. Thus he inherited a dark destiny -- or did he?Old Thaddeus McIlvaine discovered a dark star and took it for his own. Thus he inherited a dark destiny -- or did he?

On Earth, everyone is a soldier. Like all humans Jadeth was trained from birth to kill. Humans are the best soldiers in the galaxy and they fight for whoever pays the most. With no family, no country, no tribe, their lives and their loyalty belong to High Command. But when Jadeth meets Ilyan, a man they call The Prophet, he learns he’s been lied to all his life.Brilliant intelligence analyst, Ilyan, is certain humanity and Earth itself is in imminent danger. High Command refuses to believe it, forcing Ilyan to go on the run, desperate to spread the truth. If he can’t make High Command believe in the threat, then he will take his message to the soldiers on the ground.Infantryman Jadeth is one of those soldiers. He doesn’t know if it’s accident or fate that has brought him to Ilyan, but he knows he has only one mission now. He must protect Ilyan and his small band of followers as they travel through hostile territory, spreading the truth. High Command has betrayed humanity, and Jadeth has nothing left to believe in—except The Prophet. Ilyan is determined to reach Earth’s mercenary army, scattered across the galaxy fighting other people’s wars. His new guardian Jadeth must keep him safe from agents of High Command determined to silence him. If Jadeth fails he will have nothing left. If that happens Earth will learn how far a man can go when everything he believed in is lost.

What's tasty, good for you, and only takes sixty seconds to make? Oatmeal. And it's making the Yeerks more than a little crazy. Now Rachel, the other Animorphs, and Ax have a new weapon against the Yeerks. Sounds good, right?

One man holds the fate of the human race in his hands, all he has to do is make the right choice.One man – alone. The human race is locked in a death struggle with Aliens possessing far superior technology. He has been captured while on a mission to ferret out the enemy’s weakness. Isolated in a small cell he is told by his captors that the future of his race depends on the choice that he will make in response to a single question. If he chooses correctly the human race will survive, if he chooses wrong the human race will be eradicated. A choice must be made; will it be the right one?

Gary has one chance - and one chance only - to ensure first contact with the humans goes as smoothly as ancient history records it to have occurred. Unfortunately, the fate of the future galactic alliance all rests on his very questionable ability to . . . boogie down.A collection of short stories, poems and 'other scribblings' by Sian Turner.Read 'Hot Under the Collar,' a tale of jealousy and its consequences, 'Poor Law,' the story of young Will Thompson's life in a 1903 Cottage Home (or workhouse for children) and what happens when he is unjustly accused of theft, 'Watching,' the story of Luke Peterson's ghostly encounter in the woods, plus other stories, poems and what the author describes as 'other scribblings.'

After the apocalypse, what would you fight to save?Decades after the apocalypse, a heretical group of intellectuals, hell-bent preserving civilization and fighting the advance of a new dark age, inadvertently spark a war with a country in the grips of famine, and encounter supernatural forces that may destroy what remains of the Old World forever.The End cost humanity six billion lives. Almost every person on Earth vanished when the lights went out, computers turned to dust, and planes fell from the sky. Only scattered survivors remained, surrounded by a world empty and quiet. Now, forty years on, civilisation is failing. The ways of the Old World have been forgotten, and those who knew its wonders are ageing. All that stands between the British Isles and a new Dark Age is the mission of New Canterbury, desperate to save books, art, and the knowledge needed to begin again. Famine has devastated the land and refugees wander in their thousands. Anger is growing against the city and the demands of its sacred mission. In the wild lands surrounding New Canterbury, dark secrets fester, supernatural forces have awoken, and somewhere an army is on the move, hell-bent on ending the Old World forever. The End was just the beginning.

If you had a convenient, undetectable way to smuggle anything at all, how would you use it? Charlie will tell you. It will be dangerous.Charlie - never call him "horse"- carried drugs, documents and other goods for a fee. Encouraged by his girl friend, Aroyal, Charlie takes on a big assignment. Charlie's new employers gave him a way to be the champion smuggler of all time - undetectable, secure, even convenient. What they wanted to smuggle would change the balance of power. So how come authorities were watching for him in Riyadh? Aah, but a smuggler must be clever. Charlie was clever. Too clever for his own good. Hard science fiction with a twist you will never see coming.