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Thursday began as an ordinary day as far as Estelle was concerned. Breakfast… Tube… Office… Lunch… And then the sane, sane, simple everyday world began to fade. One moment she was walking along the pleasant tree-lined familiarity of her home town… the next she was involved in a strange translucent sphere and life had turned into a nightmare.
Without warning and without explanation she found herself alone in a strange new environment. There were strange stars in the unknown sky above her and the flora and fauna of her new surroundings were disturbingly unfamiliar. Most minds would have yielded to the easy escape of insanity. But Estelle Wilde was made of sterner stuff. She fought back at the strangeness of her new setting and tried desperately to establish a new set of survival data before it was too late.
Piece by piece she collected her information and sat down to the mammoth task of answering the great questions. Where was she? How had she been brought there? And why?
Above all… was it possible to get home?

It is a new world, stunned by the horrors that linger in the aftermath of total war. The United States and Soviet Union are squaring off in a different kind of conflict, one that’s fought in the shadows, where there are whispers of strange and mysterious developments. . .

Normal people across the United States have inexplicably gained paranormal abilities. A factory worker can heal the sick and injured. A schoolteacher bends emotions to her will. A car salesman alters matter with a simple touch. A former soldier speaks to the dying and gains their memories as they pass on.

They are the Variants, controlled by a secret government program called MAJESTIC-12 to open a new front in the Cold War.

From the deserts of Nevada to the palaces of Istanbul, the halls of power in Washington to the dark, oppressive streets of Prague, the Variants are thrown into a deadly game of shifting alliances. Amidst the seedy underbelly of nations, these once-ordinary Americans dropped in extraordinary circumstances will struggle to come to terms with their abilities as they fight to carve out a place for themselves in a world that may ultimately turn against them.

And as the MAJESTIC-12 program will soon discover, there are others out there like them, some with far more malevolent goals. . .

Zerfall awakens in an alley, wounded and unable to remember her past. Chased by an assassin out into the endless wastes of the desert, she is caught, disfigured, and left for dead. Her scabbard is empty, but the need for answers-and the pull of her sword-will draw her back to the city-states.

When Jateko, a naïve youth, accidentally kills a member of his own tribe, he finds himself outcast and pursued across the desert for his crimes. Crazed from dehydration, dying of thirst and hunger, he stumbles across Zerfall.

Hunted by assassins and bound by mutual need, both Zerfall and Jateko will confront the Täuschung, an ancient and deranged religion ruled by a broken fragment of Zerfall’s mind. Swarm, the Täuschung hell, seethes with imprisoned souls, but where gods-real or imagined-meddle in the affairs of man, the cost is high.

In Swarm and Steel, the power of belief can manifest and shape reality, and for political and religious leaders, faith becomes a powerful tool. But the insane are capable of twisting reality with their delusions as well, turning increasingly dangerous as their sanity crumbles. It is here that a long prophesied evil will be born, an endless hunger. The All Consuming will rise.

Vitus Adamson has a second chance at life now that he’s no longer a zombie, but after killing his brother Jamie, Vitus lands in prison on murder charges. Jamie’s death exposes secret government projects so deep in the black they cannot be seen-without Vitus, that is.

Sprung from jail, the government hires Vitus to clean up Jamie’s mess, but tracking down his brother’s homemade monsters gone rogue is easier said than done. A convicted killer safely behind bars may not be so safe after all when it appears he is still committing murder through his victim’s dreams. High on Atroxipine (the drug that once kept him functioning among the living) and lapsing into addiction, Vitus’s grip on reality takes a nasty turn when his own dreams start slipping sideways.

His problems multiply as he deals with his failed friendship with wheelchair-bound officer Geoff Lafferty, his wrecked romance with the town mortician Niko, government agents working for his father, sinister figures lurking in the shadows, and least of all, the complications of learning how to be human again.

Robs Hayward is a loner, a nobody. But when she plays the piano, she shines.

Cool kids Maddy and Jef ask her to join their band and she is giddy. They’re cool! They’re two years older than her! It’s a dream come true! Except for the part where their rehearsal space gets turned into a car park. Determined not to lose the first chance at being cool she’s ever had, Robs suggests the mysterious, derelict industrial building. The one in the Wild Park.

The one she’s afraid is haunted.

But the Council have repurposed it, and they share the space with the slightly eccentric Artist in Residence, and actually, everything is fine! Except for Maddy becoming obsessed with the murder mystery linked to the building.

And a seance is suggested.

And the ghost of a child that Robs sees out of the corner of her eye promises something more supernatural at play . . .

The Powerhouse is another chilling teen ghost story by award-winning author Gwyneth Jones, writing as Ann Halam. You can find more information on the writing Gwyneth did as Ann Halam on her website:http://www.gwynethjones.uk/HALAM.htm

A terrible civil war was tearing apart the kingdom of Detina, a land which could no longer be half serf and half free. When the new ruler, King Avram, decided to liberate the blond serfs upon which the northern provinces depended, the north rebelled, taking Grand Duke Geoffrey as their King.


Neither side expected an easy victory. The south was larger and wealthier, but the north had better soldiers and more powerful wizards. Led by officers riding unicorns, supplied by flying carpets, both sides had clashed for three bloody years, as the tide slowly turned against the north.


But the war was far from over: The north had found a far more competent general, and he was determined to hold Peachtree Province. When the southrons attacked, they faced formidable obstacles both natural and manmade, as well as the deadly repeating crossbows of the northern rebels and the sorcerous storm and lightning wielded by the northern wizards.


Still, the very survival of Detina as one united realm was at stake, and King Avram’s forces had no choice but to attack, no matter what the odds, no matter how desperate the situation…

This collection of fact and fiction was inspired by the time science fiction writer Lucius Shepard spent with Missoula Mike, Madcat, and other members of a controversial brotherhood known as the Freight Train Riders of America. Shepard rode the rails throughout the western half of the United States with the disenfranchised, the homeless, the punks, the gangs, and the joy riders for the magazine article ‘The FTRA Story’. ‘Over Yonder’ and ‘Jailbait’. In ‘Over Yonder’, alcoholic Billy Long Gone finds himself on an unusual train. As Billy travels his health improves and his thinking clears, and he arrives in Yonder – an unlikely paradise where a few hundred hobos live in apparent peace and tranquillity. But every paradise has its price, and in Yonder, peace and tranquillity breed complacency and startling deaths. ‘Jailbait’ is a hardcore tale of deception, lust, revenge, and murder in the seedy underbelly of rail yards and train hopping. Madcat, who functions best in a whiskey-induced haze, must decide between solitude and companionship when he meets up with Grace, an underaged runaway. Grace, in turn, seeks the security of an older man and the life about which only young girls can dream.

Malevolent aliens, the Mordri Three decide to become so evil that God himself will have to stop them. They can alter flesh with a simple touch, literally turning people inside out or seeding them with cancer. The Three have already destroyed an entire solar system and most of their own race. Their next targets: mankind and Earth!

On Earth, Scott St. John is mourning his wife when he is struck by a golden arrow of light – a fragment of the soul of Harry Keogh, the original Necroscope – and gains powers he does not understand. A mysterious, beautiful woman appears, desperately trying to warn Scott about something . . . then vanishes midword. Scott dreams of a very unusual Wolf, who begs him – in human speech – for rescue.

A fledgling Necroscope, a telepathic Wolf, a beautiful woman from beyond the stars, the ghost of Harry Keogh, the best of E-Branch’s psychic fighting forces, and a dead girl who is not yet ready to seek her just reward must defeat three impossibly strong, psychically gifted monsters whose touch literally melts flesh from bone.

Servius had always been a faithful servant of the goddess Diana. As a gladiator he had given her thanks for his victories, as a Centurion he had prayed to her on the eve of every battle. When at last the tide of war turned against him he fled to her sanctuary on the shore of Lake Nemi. Here he killed the Priest in order to become the Priest and ever after he lived in fear of being killed himself by the next aspirant for the office. When the fatal battle was fought the dying Servius had a vision of Diana, who made him a strange promise. He would die, yet he would not die. He would live, yet he would not live. When he found himself he would be lost, and when he was lost he would be found.

Servius closed his eyes by the shorts of Lake Nemi and opened them in a strange, frightening world where chariots ran without horses and where men flew inside iron birds. His first problem was to survive. His second was to find his way home!

Set sixteen years after the events of The Exiled Earthborn, this explosive conclusion of the Earthborn trilogy tells the story of two brothers, the sons of Lucas and Asha, tasked with surviving the Xalan war to ensure the continued existence of the human race.

Noah, an orphan from Earth’s last days who, as a child, was smuggled to safety across the stars, is now nearly a man and a leader to the young enclave of Earthborn who reside on Sora. When the tranquility of their settlement is shattered by a shocking assassination attempt, Noah turns to his combative younger brother Erik, Lucas and Asha’s only child by blood, for aid. Their journey takes them to the remnants of a dead planet, an outlaw-infested space station, and back to Sora, whose inhabitants are bracing for a final showdown with the bloodthirsty Xalans.

They find themselves facing a new evil: the omnipotent Archon, who is somehow controlling the whole of the Xalan horde, and his bloodthirsty lieutenant, the Black Corsair, who has an unmatched taste for brutality. The Archon, so-called God of the Shadows, has unearthed knowledge that could wipe both Sorans and humans alike from the face of existence. The descendants of the Earthborn must uncover the true nature of the Archon and the Xalans before he burns everything they know and love to ashes.

An undead monster hunter must track down a killer, trailer-park-havoc-wreaking were-frog in this outrageous mash-up of Jim Butcher’s urban fantasy and George Romero’s zombie horror.

Before he died, Saelig Zilch was a chef. Now, posthumously recruited by a shadowy agency for reasons still unknown, tasked with keeping the public safe from things that go bump in the night, he hunts monsters.

Zilch scrabbles out of a North Carolina grave in someone else’s body. Someone recently dead. He only has a few days to find his bearings and carry out his latest mission, before the precious few nanobugs in his corpse shell are exhausted and he’s forced to start all over at the beginning. As he trudges down the main thoroughfare, he runs into Galavance. More accurately, she runs into him with her pink Chevy Cavalier.

A case of unfortunate timing? Maybe not. Turns out the critter Zilch has been dispatched to dispatch of-a murderous were-frog-squelches uncomfortably close to the trailer Galavance calls home. And come to think of it, Galavance’s boyfriend Jolby has been spending a lot of nights out lately . . .

THE TALES OF HENGHIS HAPTHORN

Henghis Hapthorn is the foremost penetrator of mysteries and uncoverer of secrets in a decadent, far-future Old Earth, one age before Jack Vance’s Dying Earth. A superb rationalist, he has long disdained the notion that the universe has an alternative organizing principle: magic. But now a new age is dawning, overturning the very foundations of Hapthorn’s existence, and he must struggle to survive in a world where all the rules are changing.

In MAJESTRUM, Hapthorn is on the trail of an unknown killer who collects body parts from his victims. The search leads him off-planet, into the Ten Thousand Worlds of The Spray, then turns in an unexpected direction as the freelance discriminator learns that an ancient and evil power is plotting to reassert its dominion over Old Earth.

Praise for Matthew Hughes:

“Matthew Hughes does Jack Vance better than anyone except Jack himself” – George R.R. Martin
“Heir apparent to Jack Vance” – Booklist
“Hughes’s boldness is admirable”- New York Review of Science Fiction
“Hughes effortlessly renders fantastic worlds and beings believable”- Publishers Weekly
“A towering talent”- Robert J. Sawyer
“A treasure” – David Gerrold

The death-stars had come, and they had kept on coming for hundreds of thousands of years, falling upon the Earth, swept upon it by a vagrant star that had passed through the outer reaches of the solar system. They brought with them a time of unending darkness and cold. It was an event that occured every twenty-six million years, and there was no turning it aside.

But all that was done with now. At last the death-stars had ceased to fall, the sky had cleared of dust and cinders, the sun’s warmth again was able to break through the clouds. The glaciers relinquished their hold on the land; the Long Winter ended; the New Springtime began. The world was born anew.

Now each year was warmer than the last. The fair seasons of spring and summer, long lost from the world, came again with increasing power. And the People, having survived the dark time in their sealed cocoons, were spreading rapidly across the fertile land. But others were already there. The hjjks, the somber cold-eyed insect-folk, had never retreated, even at the time of greatest chill. The world had fallen to them by default, and they had been its sole masters for seven hundred thousand years. They were not likely to share it gladly now . . .

Inspector Angel Cardenas has seen plenty of corpses like the one in the Quetzal inburb – just another Juan Doe robbed of his cash, cards, internal organs, and then dumped in a gutter. However Cardenas soon learns this murder is anything but ordinary…

First, the infallible DNA-ID database insists the cadaver is that of two people – local executive George Anderson and a mysterious Texas businessman. Then Anderson’s wife and daughter, Surtsey Mockerkin and Katla, turn up missing, their posh suburban home has been retrofitted into a huge time bomb… and at least three mob syndicates from as many continents are competing to capture or kill twelve-year-old-Katla.

Who is the dead man, and why is his daughter being hunted? Relying on his training as a nearly telepathic intuit, Inspector Cardenas embarks on a search that leads him from sex parlours and stimstick clubs of the Strip – where kids are deadly and even the music kills – to an undersea control room where computer crimes are committed by criminal by criminal computers.

Finding Katla Anderson is the key to unravelling the deadly mystery, but what Angel Cardenas doesn’t know is that the closer he gets to the girl, the closer the assassins are getting to them…

THE MINDSTONES were the only reason anyone lived on – or more accurately, in – the planet Styx. An unthinkable ice world, Styx only survived as an underground mining colony because of the discovery of the beautiful jewel called Cyrilite, a crystalline stone with unique mind-altering properties.
But to Kayla John Reed, Styx was all the home she’d ever knownuntil her parents were killed in a tragic mining accident. Claiming her father’s Guild seat, the extraordinarily gifted young empathy was forced to flee the planet when she tangled with the Kellers, the wealthiest and most important psi family in the colony.
On the run in a galaxy wary of anyone with mind powers and all too willing to turn her in for the bounty on her head, Kayla found an unexpected haven aboard Falstaff, a “merchant” spaceship that stretched the limits of legal shipping beyond the breaking point. But there were those among the crew with a far more treacherous agenda than simple privateering, and Kayla was soon caught in a planets-spanning struggle between two deadly forces ready to sacrifice anyone who got in their way and determined to use any weapon – even the power of Kayla’s mind – to secure total victory…

A sumptuous collection of epic fantasy heroes from the pen of Robert E. Howard, one of the true Masters of Fantasy

Robert E. Howard was a pulpwriter who turned his hand to everything from historical adventure and detective stories to Western and boxing fiction – and invented the genre now known as sword-and-sorcery: it is for these tales of heroic fantasy and horror that he is best remembered.

His mighty heroes – including an English Puritan adventurer sent on redressing grievous wrongs, the king of a mythical, antediluvian empire contemporary with Atlantis, a Pictish warrior-king – all these brothers of the sword and more bestrode the pages of WEIRD TALES and the other pulp magazines of the twenties and thirties.

This companion volume follows on from the success of the first Gollancz Big Black Book featuring Howard’s world-famous barbarian king, and contains all the stories featuring his brothers-in-arms, collected together in chronological order, as fresh and atmospheric today as when they were first published in the pulp magazines of more than eighty years ago.

Compiled by and with an Afterword by award-winning writer and editor Stephen Jones, and with cover image, frontispiece and internal pictures by the award-winning artist Les Edwards.

The Lyonesse sequence evokes the Elder Isles, is a baroque land of pre-Arthurian myth now lost beneath the Atlantic, where powerful sorcerers, aloof faeries, stalwart champions, and nobles eccentric, magnanimous, and cruel pursue intrigue among their separate worlds . . .

When Princess madouc discovers that she is actually a changeling left by fairies in place of a baby boy, she sets out, with her servant and companion Pymfyd, to find her true identity. Madouc locates her mother, the fairy Twisk, easily enough, but her paternity poses a problem: Twisk is not certain who fathered her child.

Meanwhile, her uncle, King Casmir, attempts to conquer the whole island of Hybras, on which Lyonesse is located, and thwart the prophesy of Persilian the Magic Mirror that his sister’s son would one day rule. He is foiled at every turn by King Aillas of Troicinet and his son Dhrun, who is actually the child of the prophesy, but is older than expected because of a youth spent in the fairy shee (home), where time runs differently. A sly mixture of satire and epic, Vance’s medieval tale is a delightful conclusion to an epic fantasy trilogy.

Winner of the World Fantasy Award for best novel, 1990

In the domed city of Atlanta, after the breakup of the United States, a young writer named Julian Cawthorn is in trouble. Because he insulted the daughter of a public official, Cawthorn is out of work, and virtually unemployable. He begs a temporary job on the city newspaper and finds himself assigned to cover the first public appearance of the aliens Cygnusians, travelers from outer space who have been living in seclusion in Atlanta while visiting Earth.

A Christian revivalist dictatorship rules Atlanta; church services are as much social as they are religious events. When one of the aliens chooses to appear at a church service, Julian watches as the first alien from space stands up and is “saved”. The alien’s voluntary salvation is taken as a sign that the state religion is indeed the one true religion, and minority groups, previously tolerated, are attacked by gangs, leaving Atlanta in turmoil.

The service is a turning point in Julian’s life. He is hired by Fiona Bitler, hostess to and protector of the aliens; at her invitation he goes to work in the secret alien enclave. In this environment Julian comes to know the fascinating aliens. He is mystified by the aliens’ interest in his personal life and cannot understand how they have acquired so many oddly human characteristics in their brief period on Earth.

It meant little to Robert Fairlie, a serious and dedicated young philologist, that the United States and Soviet Russia were at odds about the Moon. He had little interest in the first rocket landings or the bases that the two nations had established there. And he neither knew nor cared why the Americans would not agree to mutual inspections of these bases.

Yet the Americans had reason enough: and quite unexpectedly, because of his specialised knowledge of languages, he found himself sharing the burden of an incredible secret. For what the American base had yielded was astounding evidence that space had already been conquered many centuries before by a people who had once spanned the stars. There had been machines and destructive weapons beyond the comprehension of present-day scientists which, if knowledge of them fell into the wrong hands, could plunge the world into unutterable chaos.

Fairlie’s trip to the closely-guarded rocket base in New Mexico turned out to be only the first step on a fantastic journey amid the unexplored stars to the home-world of the space-conquerors of long ago.

It was a journey into the appalling reality of stellar space still haunted by the past cosmic struggle whose scale in space and time dwarfed the rivalries of tiny Earth’s quarreling nations.

On an artificial world created and seeded with ten thousand bloodlines by the long-vanished Preservers, young Yama’s ancestry is unique, for he appears to be the last remaining scion of the Builders, closest of all races to the worshipped architects of Confluence. And on a day near the end of the world, Yama must finally acknowledge the power he neither anticipated nor desires.
In the dust of many crumbling bureaucracies, Yama searches for an identity and a history – awed and fearful of his ever-growing capacity to awaken the terrible machines of destruction that his world’s absent gods left slumbering. To the common folk – the unshaped and aboriginal – he is the fulfillment of age-old prophecies. To the functionaries of the Department of Indigenous Affairs, he is a weapon to be molded and used in the bloody civil war raging at the planet’s midpoint – a seemingly endless battle that pits those who revere the Preservers’ laws against the dangerous Heretics who would obliterate all antiquated values and codes of conduct.
But there are still others who have taken notice of Yama as he pursues the hidden secrets of his past. Intelligent powers older than the Builders – as old, perhaps, as the Preservers themselves – are pursuing Yama in turn. And they will stop at nothing to control his present-and, as a result, the future of everything that lives-in anticipation of the ultimate triumph of the Ancients of Days.

These were the last weeks and days before the end of the world, before total destruction overwhelmed Earth and every living thing on the surface of the planet. No one knew exactly how long they had before the sun turned nova and destroyed not only Earth but all of the other planets in the Solar System. For mankind, the only excape lay in flight to the stars, to Alpha Centauri, more than four light years distant.

The hyperdrive, capable of carrying them there at close to the speed of light had been developed, but as yet had not been perfected. In a world without a future, the starships were the only salvation of mankind and they could save only a minute fraction of the population of Earth.

Panic is there, but temporarily forgotten by most, as the plans for a mass exodus are speeded up, as the long hours of mounting tension draw to a close and Judgement Day, when the world shall be destroyed by fire, is mo longer a hazy time in the far future, but something very close and very terrible. For those who remained behind, there could be no escape; death would come suddenly, eight minutes after the nova explosion. For those who fled the Solar System in the starships, untried and working on principles only partially understood, there was only the long, terrible journey through the endless night, not knowing what lay at the end of it.

All around us, under most of humanity’s very noses, lurks a dangerous alien race. The Nafikh inhabit human bodies while visiting Earth, and an underground system designed to disguise and protect them from being discovered allows them to indulge their wildest and often violent urges. The circumstances of these brutal visits require the sacrifice of servs.

Servs are aliens themselves, created by the Nafikh to attend to their every need. Physically indistinguishable from humans, they are destined to live in pain, their very livelihood regulated by the Source, a powerful force of energy inside each of them that burns like a white-hot fire under the stress of their servitude.

Lucy is a serv who arrived a baby, and by chance was adopted by humans. She’s an outcast among outcasts, dwelling in both worlds but belonging to neither. For years she has been walking a tightrope, balancing between the horrors of her serv existence and the ordinary human life she desperately longs to maintain, her family unaware of her darkest secrets.

But when the body of a serv child turns up and Lucy is implicated in the gruesome death, the worlds she’s tried so hard to keep separate collide. Hounded by the police, targeted in the dog-eat-dog world of servs, she’ll find herself fighting to protect her family and the life she’s made for herself. Skinner Luce is Lucy’s story.

It’s 2050, and LAPD Detective Terri Pastuzka has drawn the short straw with her first assignment of the new decade. Someone has executed one of the city’s countless immigrants, and no one (besides the usual besieged advocacy groups) seems to much care. Even Terri herself is already looking ahead to her next case before an unexpected development reveals there’s far more to this corpse than meets the eye.

And a lot already meets the eye. In a city immersed in augmented reality, the LAPD have their own superior network of high-tech eyewear-PanOpts, the ultimate panopticon-allowing Terri instant access to files and suspects and literal insertion into the crime scene using security footage captured from every angle the day the murder occurred. What started as a single homicide turns into a string of unsolved murders that tie together in frightening ways, leading Terri down a rabbit hole through Los Angeles’s conflicting realities-augmented and virtual, fantastically rumored and harrowingly true-towards an impossible conclusion.

Exploded View is the story of a city frozen in crisis, haunted by hardship and overwhelmed by refugees, where technology gives everyday citizens the power to digitally reshape news in real time, and where hard video evidence is impotent against the sheer, unrelenting power of belief. After all, when anyone can forge their own version of the truth, what use is any other reality?

In this thrilling second book of the Earthborn trilogy, Lucas and Asha have survived the decimation of Earth at the hands of the invading Xalans and seek safe haven with their enemy’s true foes, the Sorans. They find a lush planet inhabited by a civilization far more advanced than their own, waging a seemingly endless war against a constantly evolving enemy.

The Sorans call the pair of them the “Earthborn” and they’re welcomed as heroes, almost as gods. To an audience of billions, they swear an oath to avenge their fallen planet by aiding the Sorans in their war against Xala. But soon Lucas and Asha find Sora just as dangerous as apocalyptic Earth when they’re targeted by the Fourth Order, a rebel collective who decries them as false prophets and harbingers of further bloodshed.

Their friend and turncoat Xalan scientist Alpha believes he’s located someone who can help them turn the tide of the war for good, stranded on a conquered colony planet. But landing on the new world, Lucas and Asha find themselves hunted by a violent, mysterious beast, known only as the Desecrator, let loose by the Xalans.

Escaping Earth was only the beginning. As Lucas and Asha quickly learn, the universe has worlds and creatures far more dangerous than anything their home planet could have offered, and their continued survival hinges on gaining new allies they never could have imagined.