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In the aftermath of World War II, 8-year-old Luellen Enright is orphaned and shipped to San Francisco and the care of a covetous aunt, over-friendly uncle, and adolescent male cousins.
Her only friend is a neighbor boy-the sickly and eccentric “Chickweed”, who writes in his “Book of Dreams” and makes home movies. Lulu suffers indignities and all manner of abuse, is finally accused of murder, and sent to juvenile detention.
Years later Lulu sets out to reclaim what was taken from her-a priceless Sung vase left by her missionary father, baldly stolen by her aunt.
One of four Jack Vance mystery novels which never found a mainstream publisher, The View from Chickweed’s Window tells in delicate detail the misery of a defenseless child in the hands of unpleasant adults, and cruel older children. In typical style Vance gives us a robust heroine who, rather than crushed by hardship-is instead motivated strongly to restore justice, with a focus on result over scruple!

The Collected Stories Volume 1: To Be Continued 1953 – 1958

Winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, Robert Silverberg is one of the all time greats of science fiction. A professional writer for more than half a century, his short story output has been prolific and exceptional in quality.

This series of nine volumes will collect all of the short stories and novella-length that SF Grand Master Silverberg wants to take their place on the permanent shelf.

Each volume will be roughly 150,000-200,000 words, with classics and lesser known gems alike. The author has also graced us with a lengthy introduction and extensive story notes for each tale.

Contents:
Gorgon Planet
The Road to Nightfall
Continued
Alaree
The Artifact Business
Collecting Team
A Man of Talent
One Way Journey
Sunrise on Mercury
World of a Thousand Colors
Warm Man
Blaze of Glory
Why?
The Outbreeders
The Man Who Never Forgot
There Was an Old Woman
The Iron Chancellor
Ozymandias
Counterpart
Delivery Guaranteed

George Sanford has a gift for guessing right the first time and very little else going for him. When Ahmed and his other friends graduate school and got jobs in The City, George finds himself left behind. He never wanted to sign his name, let alone fill out applications and reports.

Then George bumps into the Rescue Squad and is swept up in the excitement of a hunt for a trapped girl. It is George who finds her with his special talent for guessing right … and it is George who suddenly becomes the pride of the Rescue Squad. With a friend running interference for him with the bureaucracy, George lands a place for himself as a “consultant” – and the more he works, the more his strange talents grow.

With each success George begins to change. Using his special talents to rescue a computer technician from a gang of revolutionaries, he finds he has become a pawn in a mad iconoclastic game. A game where his own talents pose the greatest threat to The City – and the world!

A Christmas novella for fans of the hit drama series LONGMIRE now on Netflix and the New York Times-bestselling series.

On December 24, Sheriff Walt Longmire is reading A Christmas Carol when he’s interrupted by a young woman with a fine scar across her forehead and questions about Walt’s predecessor, Lucian Connally. Walt doesn’t recognize the mystery woman, but she knows him, and claims to have something she must return to Connally. Walt, at loose ends, agrees to help.

Lucian Connally swears he’s never seen the woman before. Disappointed, she begins a story that takes them back to Christmas Eve 1988, a terrible, fatal crash and a young girl who had the slimmest chance of survival.
Back to a whiskey-soaked World War II vet ready to fly a decommissioned plane and risk it all to save a life . . .

‘The characters talk straight from the hip and the Wyoming landscape is its own kind of eloquence’ New York Times

Dolores Foster was walking home from work when she noticed an oddly shaped glittering something at the edge of the pavement. She stooped, fascinated, and picked up a metallic brooch or badge of unusual lightness. The metal was engraved with peculiar semi-geometrical patterns and she thought it was vibrating as she held it…

Captivated by the unusual qualities of her find she wore it at a cocktail party that evening. Either the stranger who approached her and began asking incredible questions was drunk or reality as she knew it could never be the same again…

The finding of the brooch led her to the fringe of a terrifying organisation: a group known simply as “The Engineers”: men who played with the fabric of the three-dimensional world as if it were made of putty.

Dolores had to learn an entirely new set of survival data as she followed one of the Engineers into a new dimension and saw how human society was masterminded.

She had to decide whether to oppose the terrible truth she had discovered or join the strange beings who looked like men…yet ran the solar system as though it were a fairground!

When a desk clerk welcomes a group of tourists into his mysterious and crumbling hotel, the last thing he ever expected was that one girl on the tour might hold the power to unravel the hidden mystery that lies in its walls.

The Grand Hotel is a horror novel by esteemed author Scott Kenemore ( Zen of Zombie, Zombie, Ohio) that takes the reader on a thrilling ride that interconnects a series of stories narrated by the desk clerk of the Grand Hotel. While it is not known whether or not the desk clerk is actually the devil reincarnated, it is strange that many of the people who come for a tour of the hotel never leave.

As the narrator takes you deeper and deeper into the heart of the hotel, he starts wondering if all the secrets that have been hiding for so long may soon start to show themselves. While he is quite ready for this experience, the real question is if the rest of the world is.

Kenemore’s incredible style and originality carry The Grand Hotel to places most people only see in their nightmares. And while we don’t know what secrets lie in the Grand Hotel, all we know is that the person who holds the secret puts fear into the narrator himself-a thought which will terrify everyone.

THE BALANCE BETWEEN LAW AND CHAOS has long been maintained by the rulers of Béarn, but the death of the current king has enabled the elves to magically substitute one of their own on the throne. And, under the leadership of Dh’arlo’mé, the dark elves are preparing to claim their long-sought vengeance on mankind.
But when the small party which set out to find and bring back the last possible heir to the throne returns to Béarn, Dh’arlo’mé realizes that even magic and murder combined will not be enough to overturn the balance. Now his solution must hinge on Béarn’s burden and treasure: the Staffs of Law and Chaos. Within these plain-pieces of wood dwell the essences of Law and Chaos, each eternally seeking its Champion to destroy the other.
Lured into one Staff’s power, Dh’arlo’mé seeks to seduce the mortals into championing the other. And with all the worlds teetering on the brink of doom, it falls to Colbey Calistinsson – son of the god Thor and the greatest of Renshai warriors – to select that Champion. If he chooses wrongly, all life will come to an end. Yet even success will come at a high price. For the only way to insure that this danger can never arise again, is for both Champions and Staffs to be totally annihilated.

THE END OF HARRY POTTER is the perfect companion volume for all Harry Potter fans. Award-winning writer and Potter fan David Langford delves into the six Harry Potter books to explore J.K. Rowling’s universe and characters, and shows in detail how cleverly J.K. Rowling has woven her world.

This is the book for you if you are one of the gazillions of readers who find themselves wondering about horcruxes and Deatheaters and Dark Lords … Langford looks at questions like:

*What are the remaining horcruxes, the places He Who Shall Not Be Named has stashed his soul so he can never die?
*Does Harry himself bear a part of the Dark Lord’s soul in his scar?
*Is that why Harry understands Parseltongue – and if not, why does he speak the language of the serpentssss?
*What will happen when Harry is technically a grown-up, and no longer under the protection of his Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia?
*Is Albus Dumbledore really dead?
*Whose side is Severus Snape really on?
*Will Hogwarts survive the final, apocalyptic battle between Harry and You-Know-Who?

Don’t know the answers? Then read THE END OF HARRY POTTER!

The inhabitants of a planet called Iszm, a species known as the Iszic, have evolved the native giant trees into living homes, with all needs and various luxuries supplied by the trees’ own natural growth. The Iszic maintain a jealously-guarded monopoly, exporting only enough trees to keep prices high and make a great profit. The protagonist, Ailie Farr, is a human botanist who goes to Iszm (like many others before him, of many species) to steal a female tree, which might allow the propagation of the species off world and break the monopoly.

This volume includes two short novels, previously published separately – the title story, and Nopalgarth (published as The Brains of Earth). The collection is rounded out by two of his best shorter works – “The Gift of Gab” and “The Narrow Land”. “The Narrow Land” was the first of a proposed story sequence which was never completed.

Contents: The Houses of Iszm, The Gift of Gab, Nopalgarth (The Brains of Earth), The Narrow Land

All Jack Vance titles in the SFGateway use the author’s preferred texts, as restored for the Vance Integral Edition (VIE), an extensive project masterminded by an international online community of Vance’s admirers. In general, we also use the VIE titles, and have adopted the arrangement of short story collections to eliminate overlaps.

Xhea has no magic. Born without the power that everyone else takes for granted, Xhea is an outcast-no way to earn a living, buy food, or change the life that fate has dealt her. Yet she has a unique talent: the ability to see ghosts and the tethers that bind them to the living world, which she uses to scratch out a bare existence in the ruins beneath the City’s floating Towers.

When a rich City man comes to her with a young woman’s ghost tethered to his chest, Xhea has no idea that this ghost will change everything. The ghost, Shai, is a Radiant, a rare person who generates so much power that the Towers use it to fuel their magic, heedless of the pain such use causes. Shai’s home Tower is desperate to get the ghost back and force her into a body-any body-so that it can regain its position, while the Tower’s rivals seek the ghost to use her magic for their own ends. Caught between a multitude of enemies and desperate to save Shai, Xhea thinks herself powerless-until a strange magic wakes within her. Magic dark and slow, like rising smoke, like seeping oil. A magic whose very touch brings death.

With two extremely strong female protagonists, Radiant is a story of fighting for what you believe in and finding strength that you never thought you had.

Better to be a queen than a pawn…

Kate Mossland is an ordinary teenager in a strange and dangerous land. She has crossed the gordath, the portal between our world and Aeritan, and may never go home again. She has accepted her new life as foster daughter to Lord Terrick and is engaged to be married to his son Colar, a young noble whose life she saved and whom she loves.

But all is not easy in the House of Terrick. The servants distrust her, the men-at-arms disdain her, and learning how to be a great lady is harder than it looks. Every misstep brings her closer to ruin, and Kate must walk a fine line between independent teen and modest noblewoman.

When the youngest son of Lord Terrick is kidnapped by armed thugs, Kate and a mysterious young girl named Ossen make a daring rescue. But her unladylike courage only strengthens her enemies’ hatred.

Then in a single blow Kate learns that her life is truly not her own. As Aeritan teeters on the brink of war, and promises once made are so easily broken, Lord Terrick demands that Kate submit to a new role.

But Kate is not so easily managed. Together with Ossen and the girl’s rough and roguish brothers, she leaves the protection of the only House she has known in Aeritan to choose her own path and find her true home.

Once, Xhea’s wants were simple: enough to eat, safety in the underground, and the hit of bright payment to transform her gray-cast world into color. But in the aftermath of her rescue of the Radiant ghost Shai, she realizes the life she had known is gone forever.

In the two months since her fall from the City, Xhea has hidden in skyscraper Edren, sheltered and attempting to heal. But soon even she must face the troubling truth that she might never walk again. Shai, ever faithful, has stayed by her side-but the ghost’s very presence has sent untold fortunes into Edren’s coffers and dangerously unbalanced the Lower City’s political balance.

War is brewing. Beyond Edren’s walls, the other skyscrapers have heard tell of the Radiant ghost and the power she holds; rumors, too, speak of the girl who sees ghosts who might be the key to controlling that power. Soon, assassins stalk the skyscrapers’ darkened corridors while armies gather in the streets. But Shai’s magic is not the only prize-nor the only power that could change everything. At last, Xhea begins to learn of her strange dark magic, and why even whispers of its presence are enough to make the Lower City elite tremble in fear.

Together, Xhea and Shai may have the power to stop a war-or become a weapon great enough to bring the City to its knees. That is, if the magic doesn’t destroy them first.

In New York’s Long Island, in the unpredictable decade of the 1960s, a young boy laments the approaching close of summer and the advent of sixth grade. Growing up in a household with an overworked father whom he rarely sees, an alcoholic mother who paints wonderful canvases that are never displayed, an older brother who serves as both tormentor and protector, and a younger sister who inhabits her own secret world, the boy takes his amusements where he can find them. Some of his free time is spent in the basement of the family’s modest home, where he and his brother, Jim, have created Botch Town, a detailed cardboard replica of their community, complete with clay figurines representing friends and neighbors. And so the time passes with a not-always-reassuring sameness-until the night a prowler is reported stalking the neighborhood.

Appointing themselves ad hoc investigators, the brothers set out to aid the police-while their little sister, Mary, smokes cigarettes, speaks in other voices, inhabits alternate personas . . . and, unbeknownst to her older siblings, moves around the inanimate residents of Botch Town. But ensuing events add a shadowy cast to the boys’ night games: disappearances, deaths, and spectral sightings capped off by the arrival of a sinister man in a long white car trawling the neighborhood after dark. Strangest of all is the inescapable fact that every one of these troubling occurrences seems to correspond directly to the changes little Mary has made to the miniature town in the basement.

A cyber-dystopian thriller unlike any other.

In a near future Tokyo, every action-from blinking to sexual intercourse-is intellectual property owned by corporations that charge licensing fees. A BodyBank computer system implanted in each citizen records their movements from moment to moment, and connects them to the audio-visual overlay of the ImmaNet, so that every inch of this cyber-dystopian metropolis crawls with information and shifting cinematic promotainment.

Amon Kenzaki works as a Liquidator for the Global Action Transaction Authority. His job is to capture bankrupt citizens, remove their BodyBank, and banish them to BankDeath Camps where they are forever cut off from the action-transaction economy. Amon always plays by the rules and is steadily climbing the Liquidation Ministry ladder.

With his savings accumulating and another promotion coming, everything seems to be going well, until he is asked to cash crash a charismatic politician and model citizen, and soon after is charged for an incredibly expensive action called “jubilee” that he is sure he never performed. To restore balance to his account, Amon must unravel the secret of jubilee, but quickly finds himself asking dangerous questions about the system to which he’s devoted his life, and the costly investigation only drags him closer and closer to the pit of bankruptcy.

In book one of the Jubilee Cycle, Cash Crash Jubilee, debut novelist Eli K. P. William wields the incisive power of speculative fiction to show how, in a world of corporate finance run amok, one man will do everything for the sake of truth and justice.

Hidden away from the world by his mother, the powerful sorceress Heloise Oliver, Pierce has grown up working in her restaurant in Desolation Point. One day, unexpectedly, strangers pass through town on the way to the legendary capital city. Look for us, they tell Pierce, if you come to Severluna. You might find a place for yourself in King Arden s court.

Lured by a future far away from the bleak northern coast, Pierce makes his choice. Heloise, bereft and furious, tells her son the truth: about his father, a knight in King Arden s court; about an older brother he never knew existed; about his father s destructive love for King Arden s queen, and Heloise s decision to raise her younger son alone.

As Pierce journeys to Severluna, his path twists and turns through other lives and mysteries: an inn where ancient rites are celebrated, though no one will speak of them; a legendary local chef whose delicacies leave diners slowly withering from hunger; his mysterious wife, who steals Pierce s heart; a young woman whose need to escape is even greater than Pierce s; and finally, in Severluna, King Arden’s youngest son, who is urged by strange and lovely forces to sacrifice his father s kingdom.
Things are changing in that kingdom. Oldmagic is on the rise. The immensely powerful artifact of an ancient god has come to light, and the king is gathering his knights to quest for this profound mystery, which may restore the kingdom to its former glory or destroy it…”

These stories which have never been brought together before are taken from Joan Aiken’s earliest writing years in the 1950s and 1960s when she was working for the English short story magazine, Argosy where they were first published. They demonstrate her wide ranging stylistic ability, with subjects as diverse as a rented apartment that comes with a resident swan, a man who buys a girl in a crystal ball, an invisible man-eating tiger, or a psychiatric patient who can always, sometimes unfortunately, conjure up a 93 London bus.


All these ideas seem to pour out of an endless imagination, making bold use of eccentric and unexpected settings and characters, and at the same time demonstrating an evident delight in parodying a variety of literary styles from gothic to comedy, fantasy to folk tales selected from her incredible reading background. But Joan Aiken always repudiated the suggestion that she was “a born storyteller” she would always argue furiously that it was a craft, like oil painting or cabinet making that she had learned, practiced and developed over the years. She described this period of her life as a single-minded engagement with the writer’s craft; and her grasp of the short story form as the foundation of her literary career.

What is far from apparent from these wildly inventive and freewheeling tales, is that this was in fact a bitterly difficult period of Joan Aiken’s life, when not long after the end of the Second World War she was left widowed and homeless with two young children. Having made the brave decision to try and support herself and her family by writing, she applied for a job on this popular short story magazine. In many ways, as she often said subsequently, this period spent working at Argosy could not have been bettered, both as a wonderful distraction and consolation during a bad time, and as an unbeatable apprenticeship in the craft of writing.