Nothing lasts forever. Everything is ephemeral. Time slips by, people change, happiness is fleeting. Neil Williamson's collection of bittersweet tales features eighteen stories of impermanence: from the ends of love affairs and the brief sanity of wartime convalescence, to the fading away of old languages and the dying of humanity itself. An artist communicates solely through a bizarre mosaic, a father and his dying daughter seek hope in plague-ridden Scotland, a London pensioner's existence is inextricably bound to that of his pet canary, and in the jungles of Borneo a criminal searches for his missing son hoping for reconciliation before the end of the world. This edition includes four bonus stories, including one written specially for this collection, and each story has a newly-written afterword.
Available for the first time in a single volume: the Expatria duology.
Book one: The descendants of Expatria's first colonists from Earth have rejected technology. When Mathias Hanrahan, heir to the primacy of Newest Delhi, wants to reintroduce the old ways he is framed for his father's murder and forced to flee.
Recruited by a research team which is trying to relearn the ancient technologies, he goes to work for them, and against a background of impending war, Mathias discovers that strange messages are coming from space.
Book two: For Katya Tatin, a passionate believer in and employee of the Holy Corporation of GenGen, the opportunity to join the mission to the recently rediscovered colony of Expatria is much more than a chance to spread the gospel. For her, it represents a break with the past on Earth, with the Consumer Wars and the subversives who seek to undermine the standing of the Holy Corporation itself. It offers a chance to reconfirm her faith.
On Expatria itself, and on the ancient arkships that orbit it, the news of the impending arrival of a mission from Earth further complicates an already murderously complex web of religious and political intrigue. For some, it looks like salvation from a backward-looking, superstition-ridden society; for others, it looks suspiciously like an invasion.
What happens when every wish you make is immediately granted by God? If you could use the power of music to travel through time? If your body was the battleground for a strange, alien invasion?
In this, his debut collection in English, Israeli author Nir Yaniv shows his remarkable versatility, collecting stories from over a decade of writing and a wide range of the fantastic. In turns humorous, lyrical, profound - but always entertaining - these are the haunting tales of an author at the height of his power.
When a man named Lewis rents a vacation house on Long Island for a few days, he doesn't expect to end up on a crazy circus train ride to nowhere. His one night in the house, he burns it down. Then he meets charismatic Joseph Dillon, manager of the Circus of the Grand Design. Knowing he needs to leave the area in a hurry, Lewis agrees to join the circus as a publicist, despite Dillon's warning that he might not be able to return to the place he began. The circus's private train travels an infinite dream-loop to unknown lands, and Lewis becomes lost amongst crazy acrobats, sexy elephant riders, a magical mechanical horse, a giant woman and her savage, prehistoric rodent bears, an egotistical juggler, and...a fertility goddess who takes exceptional interest in him. The train, its residents, and the places they visit form a complex puzzle that Lewis feels compelled to solve.
In a universe that isn't ours, a hopelessly mismatched pair are thrown together in a potentially fatal encounter with incomprehensible technology left behind by an unknown transgalactic civilization. Back here on Earth, a hideous rape is even more hideously avenged by a child's dream. A middle-aged bourgeois husband recalls his life as drummer in a punk-rock group and the otherworldly strangeness of the singer he loved. A movie buff cannot explain why the offerings at his local fleapit seem to fly in the face of all reason. In a world comprising the residue left over after imagination has gone elsewhere, a Beast must embark on an endless quest to find his Beauty. And meanwhile there's another case to be solved outside time in the cozy-mystery village of Cadaver-in-the-Offing...
In the fifteen superbly literary stories of this, his first collection, Hugo- and World Fantasy Award-winning author John Grant goes to places other fantasy and SF writers have yet to find on the map.Take No Prisoners is a magnificent demonstration of why his imagination has been described as defying all genre categorization. As a special bonus, this new e-edition of Take No Prisoners includes two novelettes from the author's Leaving Fortusa cycle: "The Hard Stuff" and "Q"...
contents: Wooden Horse The Glad who Sang a Mermaid in from the Probability Sea A Lean and Hungry Look I Could Have a General Be / In the Bright King's Arr-umm-ee Snare The Dead Monkey Puzzle All the Best Curses Last for a Lifetime A Case of Four Fingers Sheep The Machine It Was That Cried Coma Mouse How I Slept with the Queen of China Imogen MeTopia
