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From the award-winning author of Majestrum, Template, and The Other, this collection of short stories ranges from the thoughtful to the whimsical. Most of them appeared first in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov’s. Others were written for the bespoke anthologies: Songs of the Dying Earth, Old Mars, and Welcome to the Greenhouse; one is published here for the first time.

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

Supernatural fusion of horror and police procedural set in Phoenix, Arizona. When Police Sergeant Alex Volchak discovers the true nature of a predator that has survived among us unnoticed for generations, he places himself and those around him in mortal danger. It’s older than the desert, a thing without a name, but as vicious, jealous and self-preserving a creature as ever walked the earth. And it hides in plain sight.

On the heels of Hell and Earth…

Kit Marley, playwright and spy in the service of Queen Elizabeth, has been murdered. His true gift to Her Majesty was his way with words, crafting plays infused with a subtle magic that maintained her rule. He performed this task on behalf of the Prometheus Club, a secret society of nobles engaged in battle against sorcerers determined to destroy England. Assuming Marley’s role is William Shakespeare-but he is unable to create the magic needed to hold the Queen’s enemies at bay.

Resurrected by enchantment in Faerie, Marley is England’s only hope. But before he can assist Will in the art of magic, he must uncover the traitor among the Prometheans responsible for his death . . .

The reigns of two Queens in two different worlds may come to an end. In the iron world, conspiracy and subterfuge within England’s royal courts threaten Elizabeth’s power. In the Faerie realm, Mab, bound by magic to her sister sovereign, finds herself weakened as well. Now, the fate of two worlds lies in the hands of two clever wordsmiths . . .

The country of Lescar was carved out of the collapse of the Old Tormalin Empire. Every generation has seen the land laid waste by rival dukes fighting for the High King’s empty crown. Tathrin’s parents sent him to the distant city of Vanam to escape the recurrent skirmishes. He meets Aremil, another Lescari, whose parents have their own reasons for sending him so far away. These two young men cannot forget their homeland. Can they persuade other exiles with Lescari blood to help relieve their kinfolk’s misery? If they can persuade Branca, the down-to-earth scholar, to share the ancient lore which she has studied, then this mismatched band of commoners, merchants and nobles can begin plotting a revolution.

The hugely powerful and pervasive presence of the Colossus supercomputer mechanically runs Earth and its myriad operations. Managed by its creator, Dr. Charles Forbin, it is incapable of lies and void of human emotion. It is not a robot and not human. As part of its brief to enhance the human race, it runs eerie emotion research centres, authorizing acts of savagery to measure resistance and feeling. Art and abstract creation are banned, and surveillance is constant. No one is free. The power of Colossus is spiralling out of control. The Sect worship it as a God, enforcing its word at every opportunity and seeking out traitors. The Fellowship secretly oppose it as a force of evil, and they risk their lives in a concentrated effort to destroy it and escape its domination. Meanwhile, as Forbin becomes increasingly disillusioned with what he has unleashed on the world, his wife, Cleo, becomes distant, with disastrous consequences.

The 22nd Century. Dr. Charles Forbin is Earth’s most powerful man. As mediator between Colossus, the Super Computer, and the rest of humanity, Forbin holds the key to Earth’s fate.
When Colossus, an awe-inspiring technological creation, suddenly became self-aware and took upon itself the task of righting humanity’s wrongs with no regard for humans themselves, Forbin intervened. He took the decision to turn off his great machine – but could not do it alone.
Forbin called upon invaders from Mars. The Martians did their fastidious work, shutting down Colossus. The Earth descended into chaos. Rival factions sparred for supremacy, with only Forbin to control the populace and maintain order.
But now, the Martians have returned. And they want compensation. Forbin is asked to design a super Collector in order to solidify the Earth’s supply of oxygen – or, a large proportion of it – to be handed over to the Martians. But to do so would condemn the lives of hundreds of millions of Earth’s inhabitants. There is only one entity on Earth with the power to stop the Martians…Colossus must return.

When experimental drilling on the pacific sea-bed breaks through the earth’s thin mantle, vast quantities of nitrogen, trapped for untold millions of years, are released into the atmosphere. As a result, the oxygen in the air becomes dangerously diluted. Whole areas of America are thrown into chaos as the inhabitants literally fight for breath. Two men and two girls put to sea in a yacht in a desperate effort to escape the terror, but terror, in a different and no less deadly form, pursues them relentlessly.

Alien horror becomes a living nightmare as the Xenos, meaning “strangers”, inflict mayhem on earth.

International distress alerts are sent out when planes first seem to disappear, disturbing concepts of space and time and leaving a trail of death and disillusionment. This bizarre series of “cosmic skyjackings” is shrouded in secrecy by a baffled and frightened military. Intense surveillance fails to reveal the cause of a seemingly hostile yet invisible enemy. Aircraft continue to disappear, plucked out of the sky without warning, only to reappear months later, thousands of miles off course.

National and global security is under threat and the ICARUS committee is formed to investigate. Military officials, the government and the FBI work alongside physician Mark Freedman and Soviet scientists to uncover the supernatural mystery that lies behind these unexplainable events. Earth has been found by a horde of creatures that not even the wildest imagination could invent – sinister parasitic creatures that took to their human hosts with deadly speed and bloodthirsty precision.

The terror that unfolds has terrifying consequences for all involved, and the invasion reveals something much more frightening and final than ever suspected.

At times literary, at other times surreal, this collection offers an eclectic group of stories that deal with real-life conflicts, human values, and coming-of-age experiences all placed within fantastical settings. One tale recounts the author’s search for a Kafka story that can only be found in an elusive and quite possibly cursed edition. Other stories feature humans dressing in full-body protective exoskins in the personas of old Hollywood movie stars to barter old Earth movies for an alien aphrodisiac and a young boy coming to terms with creation and moulding his own man out of detritus from a nearby forest. In the title story, a great fantasy writer loses touch with the world he has created and pleads with his young assistant to help him visualise the story’s end and enable him to complete his greatest novel ever.

Space Tug by Murray Leinster is an independent sequel to the author’s popular Space Platform.

Joe Kenmore heard the airlock close with a sickening wheeze and then a clank. In desperation he turned toward Haney. “My God, we’ve been locked out!”
Through the transparent domes of their space helmets, Joe could see a look of horror and disbelief pass across Haney’s face. But it was true! Joe and his crew were locked out of the Space Platform.
Four thousand miles below circled the Earth. Under Joe’s feet rested the solid steel hull of his home in outer space. But without tools there was no hope of getting back inside. Joe looked at his oxygen meter. It registered thirty minutes to live.

When Stellaris, the first human interstellar ship, unexpectedly hurtles off the earth, it takes the ship’s designer, Rob Cantrell, his girlfriend and a skeleton crew with it into the furthest reaches of space. If only that was their biggest problem! With no star maps, killer aliens on their tail and a ship that was only half finished, their journey home is going to be quite the challenge!

Tony Gregg was just an ordinary everyday American until the day he came into possession of an old Barkut coin. He knew it was more than just a collector’s curio because there was no such place on any map of Earth, past or present. He learned then that it could be used as a key – a key to a GATEWAY TO ELSEWHERE.

That was the beginning of one of the most fabulous and fantastic adventures that ever befell a young man looking for excitement. For Gregg plunged forthwith into a fourth-dimensional world of the Arabian Nights, where the djinns of Aladdin’s Lamp were rampaging realities, and a lovely princess was waiting to be rescued!

Life on the moon under anything less than optimal conditions had always been a nightmare, and as Joe Kenmore and his colleague, Moreau, drove back to the City On The Moon on that day the Earth shuttle was due to land, the nearby mountain supporting critical elements of the shuttle’s landing mechanisms crumbled causing an avalanche and resulting in chaos.

Optimal conditions were no where in sight that day and as Kenmore and Moreau’s investigations lead to their conclusion that explosions had been responsible for the avalanche. Now they realized that they were in a race against the clock to restore the landing beam before the shuttle had reached it’s point of no return prior to landing.

Kenmore had more than strictly humanitarian reasons for wanting to prevent a mishap aboard the shuttle that day, because on this particular mission, Arlene Gray was aboard. Kenmore had been anxiously awaiting her arrival, and now his love’s life might hang in the balance.

There was nothing on the island big enough to kill a man, yet each new day brought with it another bloody death, another mysterious disappearance.

The first hint of something wrong at the outpost was the plane. It crazily circled the little island, its cargo-bay doors open, its radio dead. It seemed to hang in the air for a moment and then it dived downward, levelled and dipped again. It made a belly landing on the runway with its wheels still retracted.

There was a singular, dead silence and then a shot rang out.

The crew of two and the seven passengers had vanished, the cargo was strewn about and the fuel tanks had been emptied. And the pilot, after landing, had blown his brains out…

The public abruptly ceased to be interested in news of the signals. Rather, it suddenly wanted to stop thinking about them. The public was scared. Throughout all human history, the most horrifying of all ideas has been the idea of something which was as intelligent as a man, but wasn’t human.

The first sounds came at midnight, a plaintive keening from an unknown voice in the vastness of uncharted space. Within hours the whole world had heard the strange, unearthly music–and the panic had begun.

Were the sounds a plea for help? From whom? From where? Or were they a command too terrible to think about? No one knew: And in billions of earth-bound minds the horror grew…

For how could man, who had not yet claimed the moon, defy a challenge from the stars?

And hours later, to the ears of a helpless world, the second message came. . .

And Earth’s days were numbered.

The radar-complex had picked up the strange object in space just as it neared the earth’s surface. It was described as “an object of considerable size.” The impact of its landing at Boulder Lake Park, Colorado, was felt on every seismograph in the world. Then the first reports began to trickle in: there were “creatures” on board? Creatures who soon left their ship and began exploring the area …

Where was the ship from, and what was the quest of the strange visitors? These visitors who were armed with a terrifying paralysis ray that blinded its victims, filling their nostrils with a reptilian odor of the jungle?

Only one man in the Boulder Lake Park area could hope to solve the mystery of the “Aliens” who had come to call on earth …

THE GREKS WERE PEOPLE-HATERS

They came to Earth in their space ship, bearing fabulous gifts – such as machines that did any day job automatically, and fertilizer that made plants shoot up overnight. But they presented their gifts with contempt, and with a look in their eyes that made people feel “creepy”.

Still, because of the brave new world they promised, they Greks could be forgiven anything – until they left and people discovered the machines were breaking down. Then their only choice was to beg the Greks to come back, on their own terms. And they knew the terms would be hard…

Roving through the uncharted vastness of deep space, Med Serviceman Calhoun of the Interplanetary Medical Service brings his mission of healing to isolated colonists far from Earth.

Alone in his starship with only his pet tormal for companionship, Calhoun plunges into an uncharted void without stars or nebulae…discovers a planet whose inhabitants starve to death amid a bounty of food…and dares a quarantined world ruled by galactic untouchables!

PLANET OF SAND: A world literally bald, completely covered by sand and devoid of life – or so the stranded spaceman thought until he saw the huge menacing girders whose origin and purpose he could not begin to fathom.

WHITE SPOT: A gold locket containing a picture of a girl, found in millennia-old ruins on a planet some hundreds of light-years from Earth, threatens the existence of the entire human race.

SECOND LANDING: A lost space team lands on a deserted planet, entirely unprepared for the strange world’s one citizen; a great white amoeboid monster, hiding in wait to wreak its fury on any intruders.

An instant cult classic upon first publication, Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue trilogy has earned wide critical acclaim, shocking and captivating a loyal readership among science fiction and women’s literature audiences alike.

Sequel to the enormously popular Native Tongue, The Judas Rosecontinues Elgin’s gripping vision of a frightening, male-dominated world where the women of Earth are virtually enslaved. Once again, this group of women-and the nonviolent yet transformative power of language-is called upon to challenge Earth’s violent, patriarchal order. Their revolutionary tool is Laadan-a secret women’s language created to free them from men’s control and make resistance possible for all women.

In The Judas Rose, the time has come to take Laadan from underground and spread its revolutionary power to women everywhere-in part, through a group of nuns inside the Roman Catholic Church. But when a handful of horrified priests uncover the women’s sabotage they move to stamp it out with an undercover female agent of their own.

In Earthsong, the Native Tongue trilogy’s long-awaited finale, the Aliens have abandoned Earth, taking their technologies with them and plunging the planet into economic and ecological disaster. Devastated, the women decide to take their failed Láadan project back underground, desperately seeking guidance from their long-dead foremothers. The women discover an ingenious solution to the problem of human violence and seek to spread their knowledge-but has their final solution come too late?

Vinny and Toby can make things happen just by using their minds. As Vinny stares at a box of ants, she feels as though she is plugging into a giant power socket. It is then that she hears a voice, letting her know that the ants plan to take over the Earth. Can Vinny stop it before it’s too late?

In the heart of the gordath, danger is waiting…

A year ago, Lynn Romano and Kate Mossland stumbled through the gordath, a portal between our world and the war-torn society called Aeritan. Now, a powerful Aeritan general has crossed through to Earth, and his obsession with Kate could tear both worlds apart.