Derma ads have replaced skin tattoos; the Nike Swoosh is projected onto the full moon, and digital sponsor logos run along the side of every police sedan. The city is under siege from a gang war, the streets flooded with Green Ice, a drug more powerful and deadly than fentanyl. And there’s a new plague; Alzheimer’s disease has spawned Alz-X, a virulent new strain that attacks children. No one knows why.

Eddie Piedmont, the youngest Homicide Special detective in lapd history, has a lot to prove. Growing up with an abusive green ice junkie for a father, Eddie is determined to show he is nothing like his old man who was kicked off the force years ago. Eddie takes on the case of a fatal overdose of a woman tied to a geneticist working on the cure for Alz-X.

When another suspicious death occurs, Eddie is drawn into the nefarious world of cutting-edge reproductive technology, only to discover terrible secrets at the heart of his identity and his family’s history that will pull him much closer to the murderer than he could ever have imagined.

Part noir science-fiction and part twisted new-take on Greek myth, Genesys X is a page-turning police procedural featuring an unforgettable haunted detective.

“A superb collection—full of wit and surprise and sparkle. Skaftun’s su-perpower is to reliably conjure from a variety of familiar elements some-thing unexpected and unsettling. There is magic in these stories. She might be a witch; she’s most definitely a writer. Hugely enjoyable and highly recommended.

Karen Joy Fowler, author of Wit's End

“Who can resist murderous garden gnomes on a sacrilegious crusade, or zombie tourism in L.A., or the troubled life of a sentient message? Not me! Emily Skaftun’s collection of stories is a delight, inspired zaniness with a knife hidden in the middle. Read it, and you will never view—as just one example—Teddy bears the same way again.”

Nancy Kress, author of The Eleventh Gate and Sea Change

“Each of the 18 disquieting pieces in Skaftun’s debut collection twist reality into absurdity and are united in their exploration of death and the afterlife. Skaftun’s stories set up everyday objects and events, and spin them into the realm of the surreal . . . thoughtful explorations of wildly unusual con-cepts will keep fans of literary chills hooked. Eerie, unsettling, and occa-sionally zany, this philosophically minded collection offers a delightful di-version.”

Publishers weekly

“Surreal dreaming on the fly. Killer garden gnomes, roller-derby, frozen heads, sex in the snow. Fresh, sinister, fey, punk. In a note on one literary, feelings-based story, Skaftun remarks, ‘It needed dinosaurs.’ She brings on the dinos and more. The most fun you’ll have this year.”

Rudy Rucker, author of The Ware Tetralogy

“These are lively, fun stories, full of vivid characters and brain- twisting ideas. Many of these pieces are very short, but they pack a punch bigger than their size. Skaftun is especially adept at combining genre tropes, as in the haunting last story, which translates a beloved folk tale into a dark cyberpunk future.”

Susan Palwick, author of All Worlds Are Real

“Emily C. Skaftun’s Living Forever & Other Terrible Ideas contains some pretty damn good ideas after all. Plus intriguing human characters, and some who are not so human . . . in stories that will make you smile and make you think and make you feel.”

John Kessel, author of Pride and Prometheus

Old Nathan is a backwoodsman in the Appalachia of an older era saturated with mysterious powers—of which he has quite a few himself.

He and his bull Spanish King put to rest a monster’s ghost for the sake of a youngster in love. That ghost is not the only one he has to deal with, for many ghosts are filled with greed.

Old Nathan has to deal with thieves and bullies and witches, too, as well as the enmity of a powerful clan. He’s not the only one with powers in the region, although he may be the most cunning.

He’ll give it all up, though, for a new chance at life—which may be coming his way.

Growing up in a small village, Evann is curious about everything, and drives everybody crazy with his endless questions. Eventually, he runs off, seeking answers wherever they might be found.

The first place he finds some of them is when he encounters the dragon Rufous, who is almost as curious as he is. One of the things he discovers is rather appalling—dragons can breathe fire, but only after they’ve consumed human blood. Fortunately, Rufous is not inclined in that direction.

As their friendship deepens, they find trouble together in the form of another dragon, Rufous’ enemy Moriach. At the Dragon Conclave where a new ruler of the dragons is to be selected, Moriach’s fire-breathing prowess makes him the leading candidate. But after Evann lets Rufous drink some of his blood, his dragon emerges from the contest as the winner and new Solon.

Moriach’s resentment leads him to ally with an evil wizard. So Evann and Rufous still have a fight on their hands—and one that will require the boy to develop magic powers to match those of the wizard. Which he thinks he can do, because he’s not just any boy. He’s the dragon’s boy.

The Ring of Fire that transported the town of Grantville from West Virginia in the year 2000 to the region of Thuringia in the middle of Europe in the year 1631 produced an enormous cascade of changes in world history. Some of those changes were big, others were huge—and some were more modest in scale. Modest, at the least, to the universe, if not necessarily to those immediately affected.

Count Ludwig Guenther of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt builds a Lutheran church on his own land, not far from Grantville, and calls in a Saxon pastor of a Phillipist bent to serve the Lutheran refugee population of the area. Shortly thereafter, in April 1634, the pastor's older daughter meets and elopes with a Catholic up-timer, which prompts Kastenmayer to get Lutheran girls to marry unchurched up-timers and thereby recruit them into the parish.

In the years that follow, Pastor Kastenmeyer copes with both existing ecclesio-political strands of down-time religion (from Stiefelite Lutheran heretics to Flacian Lutheran ultra-orthodox) and the strange new up-time world of shorts, blue jeans, and unknown religious denominations. His struggles and travails have a surprisingly revolutionary impact on seventeenth-century Lutheranism—perhaps to no one’s greater surprise than the pastor himself.

In early 2018, the writing team of Lee and Miller "threw away" the first 70,000 words of a Liaden novel. They weren't bad words; merely, they weren't the right words. The book that rose from the ashes of this failed draft, Accepting the Lance, was published by Baen Books. Some of the 70,000 words of failed draft found their way into that novel, but about 44,000--didn't. They were still perfectly good words; strung together, they presented an interesting story, and an amusing look at what not to do when writing a direct sequel in a long-running-series. Lee and Miller decided to make these words available to their readers.

The Wrong Lance, as the failed draft was titled, was originally posted at splinteruniverse.com and at Lee and Miller's Patreon page patreon/leeandmiller. The chapters have now been removed, and compiled into this volume.

The Wrong Lance is a non-canon Liaden story. This means that nothing that is reported in its pages actually happened in the Liaden Universe®. For an accurate report of what did happen at Surebleak during the TerraTrade Survey, please consult Accepting the Lance, by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. The Wrong Lance is exactly that, and is presented for your amusement only.

Sequel to The Seer

Book One, The Stranger Trilogy

Finally liberated from her captor, Amarta—The Seer of Arunkel—travels south to Perripur, her former hunter—and lover—at her side.

She needs all the help she can get, because more hunters are tracking her, close behind. As Amarta’s fame spreads across two countries, so does her need to understand herself, and to find others who can also see into the future.

Back in Arunkel, the man who once held Amarta's freedom—the queen's Lord Commander and Royal Consort—plays a deadly game with the aristocratic Houses. He must win if his queen and his child are to survive. He has not forgotten the Seer whom he once hunted, and held captive.

Amarta has not forgotten him, either.

Unmoored—the first book of The Stranger Trilogy—begins new adventures for Amarta, The Seer. Come explore this rich world, follow the court intrigue, and learn the truth about power.

Be sure to pick up the other books in the trilogy: Maelstrom and Landfall.

Follows Unmoored, the sequel to The Seer.

The hunted becomes the hunter as Amarta, The Seer, sets out across the land to find others like herself and to understand her own power. On the way to the most famous predictor of all—the Heart of Seuan—Amarta walks the greatest wonder of the world: The Island Road, a living land mass that forms unpredictably, producing tremendous wealth for a lucky few.

As she travels, Amarta learns to wield her power in ways that even she did not foresee, at a cost that she could not imagine.

Innel, the former Lord Commander, is sold into anonymous slavery. On his way to certain death, he is instead given to a wealthy Perripin merchant. Does the merchant know who he was before?

Though they walk separate paths, Amarta and Innel's questions are one and the same: Who am I now?

Maelstrom—the second book of The Stranger Trilogy—continues Amarta's and Innel's journeys through fantastic lands and powerful magic. Be sure to start with the first book in the trilogy, Unmoored, and to continue with the stunning conclusion in Landfall.

THRILLING SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURE FROM BEST-SELLING AUTHORS LARRY CORREIA AND JOHN BROWN

The Heart of a Warrior

Once, Jackson Rook was a war hero. Raised from boyhood to pilot an exosuit mech, he’d fought gallantly for the rebellion against the Collectivists. But that was a long time ago, on a world very far away.

Now, Jackson Rook is a criminal, a smuggler on board the Multipurpose Supply Vehicle Tar Heel. His latest mission: steal a top-of-the-line mech called the Citadel and deliver it to the far-flung planet Swindle, a world so hostile even the air will kill you. The client: a man known only as the Warlord. Rook has been in the smuggling business long enough to know that it’s best to take the money and not ask questions. But Rook cannot stand by and watch as the Warlord runs roughshod over the citizens of Swindle, the way the Collectivists did on his homeworld. For all his mercenary ways, Rook is not a pirate. And deep within the smuggler, the heart of a warrior still beats.

TIME TRAVEL ALTERNATE HISTORY FROM A MASTER. A new tale of time-displaced persons fighting for their lives in the ancient world, from 1632 and Boundary series creator Eric Flint.

It’s been more than a year since the cruise ship Queen of the Sea was transported in time and space to the ancient Mediterranean not long after the death of Alexander the Great.

Captain Lars Floden and the other “Ship People” are trying to plant the seeds of modern civilization. It’s not an easy task, to put it mildly, even if they have a tacit alliance with the co-regents of Alexander’s empire, his widow Roxane, and Eurydice, the wife of his half-brother.

For they have plenty of enemies, too. Cassander is using every foul means available to turn Macedonia and Greece into his own empire. The brutal general Antigonus One-Eye is doing the same in Mesopotamia. And Ptolemy, the cleverest of them all, is expanding his Egyptian realm to the Red Sea.

Things aren’t any easier in the colony that passengers from the cruise ship founded on the Caribbean island of Trinidad. President Allen Wiley is trying to build a twenty-first century democratic nation, but the people he has to work with aren’t the most suitable for the task: oldsters from the future, local tribesmen, and third-century BCE immigrants from Europe and Africa.

War, religious strife, assassinations, espionage, poisonings and other murders—and a fair amount of love, too—all mix together with the Ship People's knowledge from the twenty-first century to form a new weaving of the fates. Hopefully, that will lead to a bright new future. If it doesn't kill everyone first.

EVEN GHOSTS NEED HELP FROM A CUNNING MAN. A new novel in the Cunning Man series from Dragon Award-nominated author D.J. Butler and Aaron Michael Ritchey.

Hiram and his son Michael are dowsing a well in Eastern Utah when they hear a cry of help from the ghost of a small boy, torn to pieces by wild animals. Before they can even begin to look into that tragedy, however, a prosperous local rancher is murdered right before their eyes.

In an attempt to both help the ghost and find the killer, Hiram and Michael must navigate an eccentric cast of characters that includes failed bank robbers, a seductive fortune-teller, an inept sheriff, a crazy prospector, and a preacher with an apocalyptic grudge against the Roosevelt administration.

The mystery, however, isn’t just in the hearts of men. There’s an astrological puzzle that Michael, now his father’s apprentice, must solve. Meanwhile, the murderer is moving slowly against Hiram and Michael, forcing them into a trap from which there is no escape.

Book Three, The Stranger Trilogy, sequel to The Seer

In the final book of The Stranger Trilogy, Amarta reaches the city-state of Seuan, where the Heart—a man famous for his predictions—awaits her.

As Amarta struggles to understand this extraordinary land full of threats and treasures, she resolves to protect those who cannot protect themselves, even if that means from herself. Step by step, Amarta unwraps secrets within secrets, coming to understand the cost of getting what she wants.

Innel at last gains a chance at redemption for all he has done, but can he pay the price?

The Seer and The Lord Commander's paths come together again, but their paths have changed them. They meet as strangers.

Landfall—the third and final book of The Stranger Trilogy—brings Amarta’s and Innel’s journeys to a satisfying conclusion that will leave you breathless with wonder and wanting to start the journey all over again.

Be sure to pick up the first two books in The Stranger Trilogy: Unmoored and Maelstrom.

BUILD-A-BEAR WORKSHOP MEETS JURASSIC PARK WHEN A NEWLY GRADUATED GENETIC ENGINEER GOES TO WORK FOR A COMPANY THAT AIMS TO PRODUCE CUSTOM-MADE DRAGONS

Noah Parker, a newly minted Ph.D., is thrilled to land a dream job at Reptilian Corp., the hottest tech company in the American Southwest. He’s eager to put his genetic engineering expertise to use designing new lines of Reptilian’s feature product: living, breathing dragons.

Although highly specialized dragons have been used for industrial purposes for years, Reptilian is desperate to crack the general retail market. By creating a dragon that can be the perfect family pet, Reptilian hopes to put a dragon into every home.

While Noah’s research may help Reptilian create truly domesticated dragons, Noah has a secret goal. With his access to the company’s equipment and resources, Noah plans to slip changes into the dragons’ genetic code, bending the company’s products to another purpose entirely . . .

The Making War

by Brenda Cooper

Mr. Menace

by R. Michael Burns

The Wolf Leader

by Alexandre Dumas

EVEN GHOSTS NEED HELP FROM A CUNNING MAN. A new novel in the Cunning Man series from Dragon Award-nominated author D.J. Butler and Aaron Michael Ritchey.

Hiram and his son Michael are dowsing a well in Eastern Utah when they hear a cry for help from the ghost of a small boy, torn to pieces by wild animals. Before they can even begin to look into that tragedy, however, a prosperous local rancher is murdered right before their eyes.

In an attempt to both help the ghost and find the killer, Hiram and Michael must navigate an eccentric cast of characters that includes failed bank robbers, a seductive fortune-teller, an inept sheriff, a crazy prospector, and a preacher with an apocalyptic grudge against the Roosevelt administration.

The mystery, however, isn’t just in the hearts of men. There’s an astrological puzzle that Michael, now his father’s apprentice, must solve. Meanwhile, the murderer is moving slowly against Hiram and Michael, forcing them into a trap from which there is no escape.

Revenants Never Let Go . . . 

 . . .  yet Dylan, monster-hunter-turned-revenant, was finally accepting his wife Anna was gone, and a Jamaican vacation was supposed to help—getting him away from O'Reily's coffeehouse and secret halfway house for monsters, giving him a chance to face his past and, just maybe, accept it.

But a murdered European vampire, an ancient fae godslayer, and the demon who destroyed Dylan's mortal family turn his vacation into a race against time. Even with help from his friend Louis, the murdered man's fae wife Aphrodite, and sword-wielding enigma Jared Engelshand, Dylan may ultimately have to battle a living weapon that killed the gods themselves—in a body become suddenly mortal under a demon's highly ironic curse.

One of the first werewolf novels ever written!

A lost classic from the author of The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask.

What’s the next best thing to having a walking wolf grant your wishes? Would it be enough to take revenge on those who oppose you?

To Thibault the shoemaker, that pact is worth more than gold. Or at least more than the single, dark hairs on his handsome, youthful head. What could go wrong when one can simply wish their enemies out of the way? Alexandre Dumas brings us a story of envy so ravenous, it eats its own heart.

"A complex and nuanced novel that, upon repeated readings, yields more insight and entertainment even after more than one hundred and sixty years."—Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of The Wolfman

The Making War is the long-awaited final book in the award-winning series that began with The Silver Ship and the Sea. Six genetically engineered children fought to survive in a small town where everyone hated what they were, on a difficult planet full of out-sized predators with long teeth and sharp claws. Because they were stronger than the colonists, they found a way to live, and eventually a way to leave. But when they returned to their home planet, Silver’s Home, they were weaker and untrained. Powerful humans there could create microclimates and new species. They could—and had—created whole worlds. But while most of the six were no longer particularly powerful, Joseph discovered he had a uniquely strong version of the genetic traits that allow some people to travel the threads of data that define civilization. This also allowed him to pilot starships, which he is doing as The Making War begins, leaving the peaceful geoengineered moon Lopali to join a vast space battle.

Only five of the original six remain. The strongman, Bryan, was killed by winged humans. In spite of that, Alicia the risk-taker has abandoned the others to try the dangerous transformation that might give her wings on the planet Lopali. If she survives, she will be owned. She will lose her rights as a human. Even though she abandoned him, her best hope for freedom rests in Joseph. But he will be one young man in the fight between two powerful fleets with hundreds of warships on each side.

For help, Joseph has his pacifist sister, Chelo, and her two partners in marriage, Liam and Kayleen. They are headed to war to fight for the rights of the winged and others.

Joseph knows it is his destiny. He’s seen himself flying beautiful and deadly spaceships in battle. But the last time he fought, he killed people after he defeated them. The nagging fear he could again lose control and murder in blind rage weakens him. Kayleen, who has a little of the same power, has been driven to the edge of insanity even though she is nowhere near as strong as Joseph. Can he find his own strength and center, stay sane, keep Kayleen sane, avoid his enemies, and fight for Alicia all at once?

When a mysterious woman saunters into his office and begs him to help her find a missing person—herself—detective Frank Orpheus is intrigued on more than just a professional level.

The perplexing puzzle of his client’s lost memory is the most interesting case he’s gotten in years . . . and the fact that she’s rich and gorgeous doesn’t hurt his enthusiasm, either. Despite dire warnings from his devoted and prescient secretary Cass, Frank takes the job. But even as his fascination with the mysterious Lady in Gray flares into passion, Frank finds himself drawn into a shadowy underworld populated by devilish dilettantes and notorious criminals, all of them the puppets of the cryptic crime lord known only as Mr. Menace.

As Frank uncovers the clues that might lead him at last to the Lady in Gray’s lost identity, he learns that her world holds dangers far more diabolical and deadly than knife-wielding thugs and insidious criminal syndicates. His obsession with his strange client could get Frank and the people he cares about killed—or worse.

The closer Frank gets to finding the answers he’s determined to unearth, the more he suspects the truth might be too terrible to live with. Just who—and what—is this woman he’s fallen for . . . and how hard will the fall finally be?

TALES OF THE WAR THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

What if the United States had gone to war with the Soviet Union? What if these rival superpowers had fought on land, sea, air, and the astral plane? What if the Soviets and Americans had struggled for dominion across parallel dimensions or on the surface of the moon? How would the world have changed? What wonders would have been unveiled? What terrors would have haunted mankind from those dark and dismal dimensions? Come closer, peer through a glass darkly, and discover the horrifying alternative visions of World War III from some of today’s greatest minds in science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

Includes new stories by David Drake, Brad R. Torgersen, Mike Resnick, Sarah A. Hoyt, and many more!